Celestial Navigation

4. Summer and Fall, 1961: Jeremy

These are some of the things that Jeremy Pauling dreaded: using the telephone, answering the doorbell, opening mail, leaving his house, making purchases. Also wearing new clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting the eyes of a stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning on electrical appliances. Some days he woke to find the weather sunny and his health adequate and his work progressing beautifully; yet there would be a nagging hole of uneasiness deep inside him, some flaw in the center of his well-being, steadily corroding around the edges and widening until he could not manage to lift his head from the pillow. Then he would have to go over every possibility. Was it something he had to do? Somewhere to go? Someone to see? Until the answer came: oh yes! today he had to call the gas company about the oven. A two-minute chore, nothing to worry about. He knew that. He knew. Yet he lay on his bed feeling flattened and defeated, and it seemed to him that life was a series of hurdles that he had been tripping over for decades, with the end nowhere in sight.

On the Fourth of July, in a magazine article about famous Americans, he read that a man could develop character by doing one thing he disliked every day of his life. Did that mean that all these hurdles might have some value? Jeremy copied the quotation on an index card and tacked it to the windowsill beside his bed. It was his hope that the card would remove half of every pain by pointing out its purpose, like a mother telling her child, “This is good for you. Believe me.” But in fact all it did was depress him, for it made him conscious of the number of times each day that he had to steel himself for something. Why, nine tenths of his life consisted of doing things he disliked! Even getting up in the morning! He had already overcome a dread before he was even dressed! If that quotation was right, shouldn’t he have the strongest character imaginable? Yet he didn’t. He had become aware lately that other people seemed to possess an inner core of hardness that they took for granted. They hardly seemed to notice it was there; they had come by it naturally. Jeremy had been born without it.

If he tried to conquer the very worst of his dreads — set out on a walk, for instance, ignoring the strings that stretched so painfully between home and the center of his back — his legs first became extremely heavy, so that every movement was a great aching effort, and then his heart started pounding and his breath grew shallow and he felt nauseated. If he succeeded, in spite of everything, in finishing what he had set out to do, he had no feeling of accomplishment but only a trembling weakness, like someone recently brushed by danger, and an echo of the nausea and a deep sense of despair. He took no steps forward. It was never easier the second time. Yet all through July, the hottest and most difficult month of the year, he kept attempting things he would not have considered a few weeks ago. He went at them like a blind man, smiling fixedly ahead of him, sweating and grim-faced, pretending not to notice that inwardly, nothing changed at all. He drew from wells of strength that he did not even own. And the reason, of course, was Mary Tell.

Did she know how much courage went into his daily good morning? How even to meet her eyes meant a suicidal leap into unknown waters? “Good, good morning, Mrs. Tell,” he said. Mary Tell smiled, serene and gracious, never guessing. He held tight to the doorframe and kept his knees locked so that she would not see how they trembled. Face to face with her, he felt that he was somehow growing smaller. He had to keep tilting his chin up. And why did he have this sensation of transparency? Mary Tell’s smile encompassed the room — the dusty furniture, the wax fruit on the sideboard, and Jeremy Pauling, all equally, none given precedence. Her eyes were very long and deep. The fact that there was no sparkle to them gave her a self-contained look. It was impossible that she would ever need anyone, especially not Jeremy.

Yet at night, as he lay in bed, he went over and over that moment when she had put her arms around him. She had needed him then, hadn’t she? Like an old-time heroine in one of the Victorian novels his mother used to read to him, she had come in desperation, with no one else to turn to — and out of shock he had responded only scantily and too late. He tied his top sheet into knots, wishing the moment back so that he could do the right things. He tried to recall the smallest details. He took apart each of her movements, each pressure of her fingers upon his ribcage, each stirring of breath against his throat. He turned over all possible meanings and sub-meanings. He wondered if he had made some magical gesture that caused her to think of him in a time of trouble, and what gesture was it? what trouble was it? What made women cry in modern times, in real life?

But most of all, he wondered if it might ever happen again.

Flat on his back in the dark, sleepless after his inactive days, he spent hours constructing reasons for her to turn to him. He imagined fires and floods. He invented a sudden fever for her little girl. Mary Tell would panic and come pound on his door, carrying an antique silver candlestick. He would be a rock of strength for her. He would go for the doctor without a thought, no matter how many blocks from home it took him. He would keep watch beside the sickbed, a straight line of confidence for her to lean against. Her hair would just brush his cheek. What color was her hair? What color were her eyes? Away from her, he never could remember. He saw her in black-and-white, like a steel engraving, with fine cross-hatching shading her face and some vague rich cloak tumbling from her shoulders. Her clearest feature was her forehead — a pale oval. In the novels his mother read to him, a wide ivory brow stood for purity and tranquillity.

Oh, if only he had a horse to carry her away on!

Mrs. Jarrett said, “That poor Mrs. Tell, she doesn’t get out much. Her friend hardly comes at all any more, have you noticed?”

Jeremy, watching television with the boarders, revived Mary Tell from a swoon and held a glass of brandy to her lips. He didn’t answer.

“I had been hoping he was more than a friend,” Mrs. Jarrett said.

“Who is this we’re speaking of?” asked Miss Vinton.

“The gentleman Mrs. Tell was seeing. Remember? Now he hardly comes at all. Have you noticed him lately, Mr. Pauling?”

Jeremy said, “Well …”

After a while they gave up waiting for the rest of his answer.

Nowadays his collages filled him with impatience. He became conscious of the way his eyes tightened and ached when he looked at them too long. He started wishing for more texture, things standing out for themselves. He had an urge to make something solid. Not a sculpture, exactly. He shied away from anything that loomed so. But maybe if he stacked his scraps, let them rise in layers until they formed a standing shape. He pictured irregular cones, their edges ridged like stone formations on canyon floors. He imagined the zipping sound a fingernail would make running down their sides. But when he tried stacking his scraps they turned into pads, mounded and sloping. He took them away again. He went to stand by the window, but his impatience grew and extended even to his physical position: his moon face gazing out from behind the tiny clouded panes, his hands limp by his sides, fingers curled, his feet so still and purposeless, pointing nowhere in particular.

How did people set about courtships? All he had to go on were those novels. When he thought of courting Mary Tell he imagined taking her for a drive in a shiny black carriage. Or dancing across a polished ballroom — and he didn’t even know which arm went around his partner’s waist. Yet it seemed as if some edginess were pushing him forward, compelling him to take steps he would never ordinarily think of. He pictured a high cliff he was running toward with his arms outflung, longing for the fall, not even braced to defend himself against the moment of impact. Then maybe the edginess would leave him, and he could relax again.

He returned to the collage. He slid colors ceaselessly across the paper, like a man consulting a Ouija board. Imaginary voices murmured in his ear. Scraps of conversation floated past. He was used to that when he was working. Some phrases had recurred for most of his life, although they had no significance for him. “At least he is a gentle man,” one voice was sure to say. He had no idea why. Of course he was a gentle man. Yet the voice had kept insisting, year after year. Now that he was trying to concentrate, pushing away the thought of courting Mary Tell in an opera box, he absently spoke the words in a whisper. “At least he is a—” Then he caught himself and straightened his shoulders. Other voices crowded in. “If in any case and notwithstanding the present circumstances—” “I don’t know how to, don’t know how to, don’t know how to—” “If in any case—”

Mary Tell sat beside him smelling of handmade lace and fine soap, lifting her mother-of-pearl opera glasses, but her dress was out of Jane Austen’s time and the opera she was watching had not been shown for a century.

Monday morning Jeremy got up early, dressed very carefully, and went to Mr. and Mrs. Dowd’s grocery store, where he bought a pound of chocolates. They were left over from Valentine’s Day — a heart-shaped box, a little dusty, but Mrs. Dowd wiped it off for him with a dishrag. “Somebody’s found himself a sweetheart,” she said. Jeremy was still knotted up from the ordeal of making a purchase, and he only gave a flicker of a smile and kept his eyes lowered. He returned home by way of the alley, so that he arrived in his backyard. There wild chicory flowers were waving among a tangle of sooty weeds, and he squatted and began gathering a bouquet. This was something he had thought out the night before. He had rehearsed it so thoroughly that now it seemed he was picking each flower for the second time. In a shady spot by the steps he found glossy leaves that he inserted between the chicory, making a pattern of blue and green. Then he rose, hugging the candy box to his chest, and went into the house. Through the kitchen, through the dining room, straight to Mary Tell’s bedroom, where he instantly knocked. If he gave himself time to think, he would fail. He would run away, scattering flowers and chocolates behind him.

When she opened the door she was wearing a bathrobe and she carried a hairbrush. He noticed that the hairbrush was a wooden one with natural bristles, which gave him a sense of satisfaction. How fitting it was! He could have said from the beginning that she would never be the type to use a nylon hairbrush. But this thought was chosen at random, to take his mind off his embarrassment. He had expected to find her dressed. He had chosen the day and the hour so carefully, knowing that she would be in now and the other boarders out or upstairs; and here she stood in her bathrobe — a pink one, seersucker. Though at least her hair was up. He hadn’t wakened her. The brush was apparently meant for Darcy, who sat crosslegged on the bed in a pair of striped pajamas. “Hi, Mr. Pauling!” she called out. Jeremy couldn’t manage a smile. “These are for, I brought these for the room,” he said. He thrust the bouquet under Mary Tell’s chin. It was terrible to see how his hands were shaking; all the flowers nodded and whispered. “I found them by the trashcans.”

“Oh! Thank you,” she said. She looked at them a moment and then took them. Too late, he thought of the vase. Last night he had decided on his mother’s pewter pitcher from the corner cupboard in the dining room, but this morning it had slipped his mind. “Wait,” he said, “I’ll get a—” but she said, “Don’t bother, I’m sure we have something here. My, what a beautiful shade of blue.”

They’re your blue, Mary-blue, he wanted to tell her. The blue from a madonna’s robe. He had thought of that last night, but he had known all along that he would never dare to say it. Instead he looked over at Darcy, whose eyes — more chicory flowers — surveyed him steadily. “How come you brought them to us?” she asked.

“Why, just, I thought—”

“Never mind, Mr. Pauling,” said Mary Tell. “I know why you’re here.”

Jeremy stood very still, breathing raggedly.

“You just have to understand,” she said. “Financially, things are a little difficult right now. Very soon I should be able to pay you, but—”

“Pay me?” he said. Did she think she had to buy the flowers?

“Pay you your money. I know that Saturday has come and gone but you see, with Darcy not in school yet I have to find work I can do at home. Till then I was hoping you wouldn’t care if the rent was a little—”

“The rent, oh,” Jeremy said. “Oh, that’s all right.”

“It is?”

“Why, of course.”

He kept his eyes on the flowers. It was important to see them safely into the water. And then what? Was he supposed to leave? Yes, almost certainly, in view of the fact that she was wearing a bathrobe. Yet that would make the visit so short, and he wanted to be sure he did everything he was supposed to. He raised his eyes to hers, hoping for a clue. The brilliance of her smile took him by surprise. “Mr. Pauling, I just don’t know how to thank you,” she said.

“Oh, why—”

“You’ve really been very kind.”

“Well, but I believe they should be put in water,” he said.

Then she looked down at the flowers and gave a little laugh, and he laughed too. He had not expected that things would go so well the very first time. He watched her fetch a glass of stale water from the nightstand and set the bouquet in without disarranging a single flower, without upsetting his design. When she was finished she turned and smiled at him, apparently waiting for something. He drew in a deep breath. “Now I wish,” he said, “that you would call me Jeremy.”

“Oh!” she said. “Well, all right.”

He shifted his weight to the other foot.

“And you can call me Mary,” she said after a minute.

“You can call me Darcy,” Darcy said from the bed.

That gave them something new to laugh about, only he laughed hardest and had trouble stopping. Mary by then had returned to her smile. It became a little strained and started fading at the corners, and from that he understood that it must be time for him to go. He was glad that he had managed to catch the signal. He held out his hand and said, “Well, goodbye for now, Mrs. — Mary,” and she said, “Goodbye, Jeremy,” Her hand was harder than his, and surprisingly broad across the knuckles. While he was still holding it he said, “Um, may I come back sometime?”—the final hurdle of the visit. “Well, of course,” she said, and smiled again as she closed the door.

Although he had not had breakfast yet he returned to his studio, because it would have been awkward to run into her again in the kitchen. He went up the stairs on the balls of his feet, feeling weightless with relief. Not even the discovery that he still carried the chocolates — a warped cardboard heart plastered to his chest — could spoil his day. He only blushed, and then smiled too widely and sat down on his bed. He could always take them to her on another visit, couldn’t he? There were going to be lots of other visits. But while he was planning them he absently opened the box, and he took first one chocolate and then another and then a whole handful. They had begun to melt, and they stuck to the paper doily that covered them and left imprints on his palm, but they tasted wonderful and the sweetness seeped into every corner of him and soothed his stretched, strained nerves.

He knew how these things worked. First you set up the courtship; he had just done that. Then there were certain requirements to be met — holding hands, a kiss — before he could propose. On television there were a lot of frills as well, people running through meadows together and pretending to be children at zoos and fairs and amusement parks, but he knew better than to try for anything like that. He wasn’t the type. She wasn’t the type. And after all, he had done very well so far, hadn’t he? He had completed the first step without any problems, and now he felt more confident about what was left.

Only it turned out not to be so easy. For the next morning, when he had made a pot of percolated coffee and knocked at her room, she opened the door only halfway and it seemed as if some veil fell immediately across her face. “Yes?” she said.

Today she was dressed. (He had deliberately waited fifteen minutes later than yesterday.) Even Darcy was dressed. Then why did she seem so unwelcoming? “I just made some coffee I wondered if you’d like some,” he said all in a rush.

“No, thank you, I don’t drink coffee.”

That possibility had not occurred to him. “Tea, then?” he said.

“No, thank you.”

“Well, maybe you’d just like to have a glass of milk with me.”

“I don’t think so. I have a lot to do today.”

He couldn’t leave. He had promised himself he would see this through. “Please,” he said, “I don’t understand. Have I done something to offend you?”

Mary sighed and looked over her shoulder at Darcy, who was peacefully stacking dominoes on the rug. Then she stepped out of her room and shut the door behind her. She said, “Come into the parlor a minute, Mr. Pauling.”

Yesterday she had called him Jeremy. He felt like someone deaf or blind, prevented by some handicap from picking up clues that were no doubt clear to everybody else. “Is it something I’ve said?” he asked, stumbling after her. “You see, I just have no inkling …”

She led him to the couch, where he sat down while she remained standing. Then he realized his mistake and jumped up again. “Oh, excuse me,” he said.

“Mr. Pauling,” said Mary, “I realize that I’m behind on my rent.”

“Oh. Well, I thought we—”

“We had a talk about that yesterday. You said you wouldn’t pressure me for it. But I never suspected that there were strings attached.”

“Strings?” said Jeremy.

“Isn’t that what this is all about?”

“I don’t understand.”

Mary looked at him. He had been trying to catch her eye, but now that he had it he seemed unable to face her. He was not used to dealing with angry women. He had never pictured Mary angry at all. He said, “This is so puzzling. I don’t see—”

“Yesterday,” said Mary, “as soon as it was clear I’d missed paying my rent, you came calling in my room and brought me flowers. Well, I didn’t think anything of it at the time but then later I — and today! You come knocking again! Do you feel that now you have some hold over me? Because all I owe you is money, Mr. Pauling, and I will be happy to borrow elsewhere and pay you this minute and be out of your house tomorrow. Is that clear?”

“Oh, my goodness,” Jeremy said. He lowered himself to the couch again. Horror curled over him like an icy film, followed by a rush of heat. He felt his face grow pink. “Oh, Mary. Mrs. Tell,” he said. “I never meant to — why, I was just—” Now a picture came to him of exactly how he had looked to Mary Tell the day before. He heard the tentative mumble of his knuckles on her door, he saw his sickly, hopeful smile, beseeching her for everything as he stuck his bouquet under her chin. This was something he was never going to be able to put out of his mind; he knew it. He was going to go over and over it on a thousand sleepless nights, all of them spent alone, for a woman like Mary Tell would never in a million years give a thought to a man like him. He should have guessed that. He felt himself beginning to tremble, the final indignity. “Mr. Pauling?” Mary said.

“But I’m a good man,” he said. “What I mean to say — why, I never even knew you owed me! I don’t keep track of that money, the others just put it in the cookie jar.”

“Cookie jar?”

If he spoke any more she would notice his voice was shaking.

“In the cookie jar, Mr. Pauling?”

“The cookie jar in the kitchen. Then I take it out to buy groceries whenever—” He gulped, a sound she must have heard three feet away. She came closer and bent over him, but he kept his head ducked. It was the worst moment he had ever lived through. He didn’t see how it could possibly go on for so long. Couldn’t she leave now? But no, he felt the sofa indenting as she settled down beside him. He saw the edge of her blue skirt, such a calm, soft blue that he felt a flood of pain for those few days when he had loved her and had some hope of her loving him back. “Jeremy,” she said. “I feel just terrible about this. Won’t you say you forgive me? I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m going through a bad time just now and I must have — Jeremy?” She leaned closer and took one of his hands. “Look at me a minute,” she said.

Why not? It didn’t mean a thing to him any more. He raised his eyes and found the perfect oval of her face level with his. The inner corners of her eyebrows were furrowed with concern. “Won’t you accept my apology?” she said. He had to nod. Then he even smiled, because it had finally dawned on him what was happening: They had been discussing an issue as old-fashioned as Mary Tell herself, and here they were side by side holding hands in this second stage of their courtship.

Mornings now he woke feeling hopeful, and getting up was easier. He started being careful of his appearance. He began wearing a pen-and-pencil set in his shirt pocket — a sign of competence, he thought. He practiced smiling with his mouth shut, hiding a dark turmoil of bad teeth. In the bathroom mirror the thought of Mary hung like a mist between himself and his reflection. Her long cool fingers reached into his chest. He carried her image downstairs with him, treading gently as if it might break up and scatter like snowflakes in a paperweight. When the other boarders greeted him he sometimes failed to answer, but that had happened before and none of them thought anything of it.

Then why did his vision of Mary Tell always turn out to be wrong? Oh, not wrong in any concrete way. He had got her nose right, and the set of her head and the shape of her mouth. But when she entered the kitchen, tying an apron around her waist and smiling at Darcy’s chatter, there was some slight difference in her which both disappointed and awed him. Her skin had a denser look and the planes of her face were flatter. Her manner of moving was more purposeful. In his mind she glided; in real life she stepped squarely on her heels. Every night he forgot that and every morning he had to learn it all over again.

In the beginning she used to make bacon and eggs for breakfast, but now their diet had changed. She and Darcy filled up on cold cereal. “We always have this,” Darcy said. “I know, honey,” said Mary, and then she told Jeremy, “Yesterday I heard of a job addressing envelopes. Do you think they’d let me do it at home? I’m going to see them today and ask, and if they say yes we’ll never eat cornflakes again.” But that job fell through, and so did the next one and the one after that, and they continued to eat cornflakes while Jeremy sat at the table with them trying to think up topics of conversation. He kept a glass of orange juice in front of him, although he never drank it. (It was impossible to swallow with Mary watching.) He rehearsed a hundred sentences offering help, what little he could manage: “Could I lend you some of the cookie jar money? Well, then, eggs? Just eggs?” But he never said any of them out loud. He was afraid to. Rinsing off their little stack of dishes Mary bustled so, as if she were daring him to feel sorry for her. Then she said, “All right, Miss Slowpoke, ready to go?” and she and Darcy would set off on their walk. Which was another change: in the beginning Mary waited for her friend to call before she went out. Now she went immediately after breakfast, and the few times the telephone rang it was never for her.

“Going on your walk?” Jeremy would say. “Well now. Have a good time.” They passed through the house calling goodbyes, singing out greetings to Mr. Somerset, letting two doors slam behind them, ringing the air like a bell, and then all of a sudden the house would fall silent and the rooms would seem vacant and dead. The only sound was the creak of an old dry beam somewhere. A distant auto horn. Mr. Somerset’s papery slippers shambling across the dining room floor.

Jeremy was like a man marooned on an island. Why had that taken him so many years to realize? He was surrounded on four sides by streets so flat and wide that he imagined he could drown in air just walking across them. Yet look, a four-year-old managed it without a thought! Oh, if it weren’t for this handicap he could invite Mary Tell to a movie and then bring her home and kiss her outside her door as he had seen done on TV, and that would be the end of all his planning and worrying. It would be so simple! Instead, here it was August now and he had not taken one step toward kissing her and it began to look as if he never would.

Then one morning the telephone rang and no one was in the hall to answer it but Jeremy. Even before he picked up the receiver a knot of anxiety had settled low in his stomach. “Hello? Hello?” he said, and was answered by a voice he had not heard in weeks, but he recognized it instantly. “Mary Tell, please,” said the cigarette-ad man.

“Oh! Well, I’ll see,” Jeremy said.

Then he went into the dining room and knocked on her door. “Someone wants you on the telephone,” he called.

She took a minute to appear. She was already dressed, carrying her apron in her hand, and she looked startled. “Someone wants me?” she said. “Who is it?”

“Why, I believe it’s your friend, the young man.”

From behind her Darcy said, “Can I talk? If it’s John can I talk?”

“No, you may not” Mary said. Jeremy had never heard her speak so sharply to Darcy. She said, “Keep her a minute, will you, Jeremy?” and walked off to the telephone. “Why can’t I talk?” Darcy asked Jeremy.

“Oh, well …” said Jeremy. The knot in his stomach had grown larger. He backed into the dining room and sat down on a chair, limply, with his hands on his knees. “How are you today, Darcy?” he asked. Even to himself, his voice sounded foolish. He made himself smile at her. “When are you coming to my studio again? You haven’t been all week.”

But he was listening, meanwhile, to Mary out in the hall. She said, “No, no, I understand. You don’t have to call ever, John. It’s not as if you’re obligated.”

“But she always let me talk to him before,” Darcy said.

“Maybe another day,” said Jeremy. He tried a different smile. Mary said, “Look. I’m fine. No I don’t need money.”

“Shall we cut out paper dolls?” Jeremy asked Darcy.

“Not right now, Jeremy.”

“You don’t owe me anything, I’m managing fine. I’m fine. I still have some of what you lent me,” Mary said. And then, “What’s it to you how much is left? It was a loan, you don’t have any business asking that. I’m planning to pay you back. I want to. As soon as I find a job I will.”

“If I go and shout into the phone John will talk to me,” Darcy said. “He likes me. I know he does.”

“No, no, Darcy—”

But she was off, skating on her stocking feet into the hallway with Jeremy at her heels. From this close they could hear Mary’s friend arguing or protesting or explaining, a thin violent squawk. “—for Darcy’s sake,” he said, and Darcy gave a little leap. “Hello John!” she shouted. “Hello John!” Mary held up the flat of her hand, but kept her face turned into the receiver. “All right,” she said. “You win.”

“Can you hear me, John?”

“Uh, Darcy,” Jeremy said.

“All right,” said Mary, “but it’s a loan, and I want you to know that. I don’t want any — Darcy! Look, John, it’s hard to talk right now—”

Darcy was tugging at her mother’s skirt, and Jeremy was stooped over trying to loosen her fingers. The squawk continued on the telephone, another form of tugging. Mary’s skirt had the same cool, grainy feeling that her hands had had, that time on the couch. Why, after all, she was only a collection of textures. Her muscles slanted over her bones exactly as in his anatomical drawing class; her lips were yet another texture, otherwise no different than her fingers had been or this clutch of skirt in Darcy’s scampering hands. “No, I mean this,” Mary said. “I want you to mail it. Don’t bring it. You are under no — John?”

She put the receiver down very slowly. “Oh, Mom, I wanted to talk,” Darcy said. Then Jeremy straightened and looked into Mary’s face. Her expression was cheerful and she was even smiling slightly, but tears were running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry—” she said. She started back toward the bedroom, with Jeremy and Darcy stumbling over each other trying to follow. “You must think I make a habit of this,” she said in her doorway. She turned, and Jeremy was so close behind her that before he thought, he had found the strength to lean forward on tiptoe and kiss the corner of her mouth. Then he took a step back, and she looked his way for a moment before her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Thank you, Jeremy,” she said. “You are a very sweet man.”

She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, giving a little laugh at herself as if they embarrassed her. She shook out her apron and said, “Come along, Miss Chatterbox, let’s get you some breakfast, shall we?” Then they went off toward the kitchen, leaving Jeremy smiling so hard that he could barely see. He thought he might just inflate and float away like a balloon at a birthday party.

In magazine cartoons, a suitor proposing marriage always knelt on the floor at his sweetheart’s feet. Now, was that an accurate reflection of the way things were done? He suspected not. Nevertheless he kept picturing himself looking up at Mary from a kneeling position, finding her even more frightening at this angle — her sandals the largest part of her, her waist at eye level, the never-before-seen underside of her bosom and the white triangle of skin beneath her jaw. “I don’t have much money,” he should tell her (the speech owed to her father, he believed, but he had no idea who her father was). “I wouldn’t be able to support you in very good style but at least it would be a little easier, I do have my pieces and a little from my mother and sometimes I win a contest and I always seem to have enough for groceries.” He prepared himself for the way the hem of her dress would loom, and for the difficulty of judging her expression from so far beneath it. Yet every night he went to bed with nothing resolved, feeling thin and strained as if this balloon of hope he had become had been kept too fully inflated for too long a time. He dreamed of losing things — unnamed objects in small boxes, the roof of his house, pieces of art that he would never be able to re-create. He woke feeling anxious, and over and over again read the index card tacked to the windowsill beside him.

In his imagination this proposal always took place outdoors somewhere, although of course that would be too public. Could he be thinking of a park? The nearest park was several blocks from home. He pushed away the outdoor images and in the mornings, while he sat with his orange juice and she poured cornflakes, he tried to think of some natural way to lead in to what was on his mind. He couldn’t. Mary talked about her daughter and the weather and library books, nothing more personal. “Now Darcy is shooting out of all her clothes. I’ve never seen a child grow the way she does. I thought as soon as I got a job I would buy some material and borrow Mrs. Jarrett’s sewing machine, but sewing has never been my strong point and I’m not at all sure that I—” How could he bring love into a conversation like that? She gave him no openings. He sometimes thought that she might be sending him some silent warning, telling him not to ask even the simplest things that occurred to him: Where do you come from? Why are you here? Who was your husband? What are your plans?

“At home Darcy used to beg for cornflakes,” Mary said once. “I’ve never seen a child so contrary.”

“Where was that?” Jeremy asked her.

“What?”

“Where was your home?”

“Oh, well — and now she wants bacon and eggs, wouldn’t you know? I believe she just thinks up these things to devil me.”

Jeremy didn’t press her. He contented himself with the surface that she presented to the world, and it was only inside him that the questions continued. What happened to your husband? Why did you cry with that man John? What is his significance?

Will you marry me?

Now each morning that he failed to propose he saw them to the door, tagging after them in the hope that somewhere along the way — in the dining room, the hall, the vestibule — he might gather his courage. He took to going out on the steps and waving after them. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Turning back afterward was worse than being left in the kitchen. He always felt oppressed by the sudden dark coolness as he stepped inside. He started accompanying them farther — to the second house, to the third. Maybe, given time, he could follow Mary all the way off his island. Gradually: wasn’t that the key? Oh, if there were any god he believed in, it was gradualness! If people would only let him go at things his own way, step by step, never requiring these sudden leaps that seem to happen in the outside world! But every day he was overtaken by some magnetic force that seemed to affect only him. It dragged him back with a tug at his spine; it caused him to slow and then to halt, damp with exhaustion. “Goodbye! Goodbye! Have a nice walk!” Mary and Darcy waved and grew smaller. They separated cheerfully at the approach of total strangers, they talked aloud without fear of being heard, they crossed the wide street against the light. Dogs with enormous grinning mouths sniffed at Mary’s skirt and she never even noticed. Oh, he had undertaken too much. He could never keep up with a woman like that. He turned and trudged homeward, stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk and muttering words of encouragement to himself, and before he started the day’s work he had to lie on the couch in his studio a while catching his breath and trying to still the twitching of his leg muscles.

It seemed to him that his sisters were always calling him on the telephone nowadays. “What are you doing, Jeremy, why haven’t we heard from you? Are you getting out more? Are you eating right?” They no longer phoned only on Sundays but occasionally on weekday evenings as well, on Saturdays and in the middle of lunch. Then one morning they called so early that he was still in the kitchen with Mary and Darcy. “Jeremy, honey, this is Laura,” he heard, and although he had always felt close to Laura he was conscious now of a sudden impatience tightening his fingers on the receiver. In the kitchen Darcy said something and Mary laughed. There was no telling what he was missing. “Is there something — what seems to be the matter?” he asked her.

“Matter? I was just worried about you, dear. You haven’t answered our last letter.”

“But I don’t believe I received any letter this week,” he told her. Then, too late, he remembered the flowered envelope that he had absently stuck in his shirt pocket on the way upstairs the other day. It was probably in the bathroom hamper. “He says he didn’t get any letter,” Laura told Amanda. To Jeremy she said, “Honestly, they can fly to Europe but they can’t get a simple note from Richmond to Baltimore. Well, I knew there was some explanation. Now here is Amanda to say a few words. Amanda?”

“How do you seem to be getting along, Jeremy,” Amanda’s voice said very close to his ear.

“Oh, fine, thank you.”

“I told Laura there was no need to call but she said she had a funny feeling, she gets them more and more these days. Any fool should know you can’t trust the U.S. mail.”

Jeremy stood up straighter. It always occurred to him, when talking on the telephone, that to people at the other end of the line he was invisible. Except for the thin thread of his voice he did not even exist. “Jeremy!” Amanda said sharply, and he said, “Yes, I’m here”—reassuring both himself and her.

“Labor Day is coming up, Jeremy.”

“Oh, yes, is it?”

“Maybe you could make the trip to see us.”

“Well, Amanda …”

“Now I don’t want to go over three minutes here but I’m sending you a train schedule. Let’s not hear any excuses, Jeremy. Why, you’ll just love travel, once you catch on to it. And you don’t want to spend your life just sitting home now, do you. Mother wouldn’t have approved of that at all, she would have wanted you to get out and enjoy yourself.”

He knew that his sisters were all that was left of the world he had grown up with, his only remaining connection with his parents, but sometimes when Amanda spoke of their mother it seemed she meant someone he didn’t even know in passing — someone stern and rigid, not his own sweet-faced mother with her soft, sad smile. “Well, you see,” he said, “I do try to—”

“I have to run, Jeremy. Do please answer our letters, you know how Laura worries.”

“All right, Amanda.”

He laid the receiver carefully in its cradle. There was a damp mark where his hand had been. He went back to the kitchen and found Mary just sponging Darcy’s face, with breakfast finished. He had missed everything. His chances were over until tomorrow. “I’m going to the grocery,” Mary told him. “Do you want anything?”

His despair was so enormous that it gave him courage. He said, “Oh, why, several things. Perhaps I should come along.”

Mary only nodded. She was frowning at a stain on Darcy’s collar. “Oh, Darcy, look at you, it’s your last clean dress,” she said.

“I don’t care about an old stain.”

“Well, I do. Come along then.”

Words kept rearranging themselves in Jeremy’s head. May I have the honor—? Could you possibly consider—? Is it asking too much for you to marry me? But once they were descending the front steps the only conversation he could think of was an exaggerated squint toward the sun, implying a remark about the weather. Mary didn’t look up. She was reading her grocery list. “I’m going to get a gumball,” Darcy said. “Am I going to get a gumball, Mom? I’m going to get a penny for the gumball machine.”

“I wasn’t aware they had a gumball machine,” said Jeremy.

“Oh yes,” Darcy said. “Perry’s does.”

Would you think me forward if I—?

Perry’s? Why, Perry’s was two blocks away; it was where his mother used to go for soupbones. And no sooner had it hit him than sure enough, they came to Dowd’s grocery and passed it by, with neither Mary nor Darcy giving it a glance. Jeremy did. He gazed longingly at the crates of oranges and peaches and pears slanted toward him behind the fly-specked plate glass window. The tissue paper they nestled in seemed a particularly beautiful shade of green. He thought with love of Mrs. Dowd’s gnarled old hands spreading the tissue just enough, rescuing a runaway peach and setting it back in place with a little grandmotherly pat. Mary and Darcy walked on. “Wait!” he said. “I mean — have you ever tried Dowd’s?”

“They’re more expensive,” Mary said. She went on studying her list. Darcy took Jeremy’s hand in both of hers and swung on it — a clamp on his index finger, another on his little finger. What could he do? He set one foot in front of the other, doggedly, barely managing each step. For Mary Tell’s sake he was slaying dragons, and yet to keep her respect it was necessary that she never even guess it. He wiped his face on his sleeve. They came to the end of the block, where a red light stopped them. Cars whizzed back and forth, but what he was most afraid of was the street itself. Then the light turned green. “Wait!” he said again. Mary looked up, in the act of putting her grocery list in her purse.

“Could we — I mean I don’t believe I—”

“Hurry,” Darcy said, “we’ll miss the light.”

He stepped off the curb. All the comfort he had was Darcy’s grip on his hand, but now Mary said, “Darcy, don’t swing on people. How often have I told you that?” One of Darcy’s hands fell away; only his index finger was secure. He reached out blindly and found Mary’s arm, the crook of her elbow, which he hung onto as he had seen men do on the late show. Did she notice that it was she supporting him and not the other way around? “I certainly wish the price of tomatoes would go down,” Mary said.

Then they had reached the other sidewalk. The air on this block was different. He could have told it with his eyes shut. It was hotter, more exposed, and old Mrs. Carraway’s wind chimes were not tinkling. What was that flat-faced cement building? He didn’t like the look of it. He noticed that the rowhouses ran only in twos and threes, which gave the block a broken-up look. A mean-eyed woman watched him from her front stoop. He saw a commercial printer’s whose black and gold sign must have been here years ago, when he was a boy walking to school. Its sudden emergence in his memory made him feel strange. He lowered his eyes again. Pretend this is only a corridor leading off from the vestibule. Pretend it is just an unusually long room. It will all be over in a while.

Then they reached Perry’s. “Here we are,” said Mary. He looked up to find a window full of dead things stacked in pyramids — tinned vegetables, Nabisco boxes, paper towels. No fruit. “I’ll wait outside,” he said.

“Outside?”

“I’ll just — I do my shopping at Dowd’s.”

Mary seemed about to ask him a question, but then Darcy said, “Can I have my penny now?”

“What penny?” Mary said.

“You said you would give me a penny for the gumball machine. You said you would. You said—”

“Oh, for mercy’s sake,” said Mary, opening her pocketbook. “Here.” Then she went in, and Jeremy chose a place outside the door. First he watched the street, but the unfamiliar buildings opposite made him feel worse. He looked behind him, toward the glass door, and saw Darcy just coming out with a gumball. “Look. Pink,” she said. “My favorite color.”

“Is that right?” said Jeremy. He was glad to see her. He turned outward again, so that he was facing the street. Darcy stood beside him. “They have charms and things too,” she said. “You can see them in the machine but they never come out. Do you think I might get one someday?”

“Perhaps so,” Jeremy said.

“Or are they just to fool people. You think that’s what it is? You think they’re just trying to get your pennies from you?

Jeremy had a terrible thought. He felt that he might become marooned beside Perry’s Grocery. How would he ever get home again? He imagined himself dipping the toe of one shoe into the street, then drawing it out and turning away, unable to cross. “I’m sorry, I just can’t,” he would have to say. He thought of the time he had climbed the crape myrtle tree in his back yard when he was three. He had climbed only to the first fork but then had found it impossible to get back down. Every time he tried, his hair stood on end and the soles of his feet started tingling. “Let him stay,” his father said. “He’ll come down.” Then at night, when he still hadn’t managed it, his father took three long strides to the tree and lifted him off roughly, one arm around his waist, causing Jeremy to scream in that single dizzying moment before his feet touched solid ground again. Now Mary would take him in hand, nudge him out, coax him into one step after another. “Come on, you can do it, you’ll see, when you get to the other side you’ll look back and laugh at how easy it was.” Only he wouldn’t. He would have to back away, and now he was too big to be carried bodily. He imagined spending the rest of his life on this new island, exposed for all the world to see, propped against the wall like a target. “Would you like half of my gumball, Jeremy?” Darcy asked him.

“No, thank you, Darcy,” he said.

“I don’t have a knife, but I could bite it in half.”

Dread rose in him like a flood in a basement, starting in his feet and rapidly filling his legs, his stomach, his chest, seeping out to his fingertips. Its cold flat surface lay level across the top of his throat. He swallowed and felt it tip and right itself. Nausea came swooping over him, and he buckled at the knees and slid downward until he was seated flat on the sidewalk with his feet sticking out in front of him. “Jeremy, you silly,” Darcy said, but when he couldn’t smile at her or even raise his eyes she said, “Jeremy? Jeremy?” She went screaming into the grocery store; her voice pierced all the cotton that seemed to be wrapped around his head. “Mom, come quick, Jeremy’s all squashed down on the sidewalk!” Then he was surrounded by anxious feet nosing in upon him — Darcy’s sneakers, Mary’s sandals, and a pair of stubby loafers almost covered by a long bloody apron. “It’s the heat,” the apron said. Mary said, “Jeremy? Are you ill?”

“Sick,” he whispered.

She set a rustling paper bag beside him, bent to lay a hand on his forehead and then straightened up. Her sandals were the largest thing about her. The hem of her skirt was so close he could see the stitches, he saw the underside of her bosom and the triangle below her jaw. “Will you marry me?” he asked her.

She laughed. “No, but I’ll see you home and into bed,” she said. “Can you stand? You need some air.” And she raised his head herself, and then propped him while he got to his feet. She said, “Walk a ways, now. It’ll clear your head. Here, take this.” From her grocery bag she brought out a navy blue box, and while he swayed against her she tore the wrapper off and handed him a cinnamon graham cracker. “Sometimes it helps to eat a little something,” she said.

“No, no.”

“Try it, Jeremy.”

He only clutched it in his hand. He felt that opening his mouth would cause his last remaining strength to pour out of him. Inch by inch he headed homeward, shaky but upright, leaning on Mary’s arm. The bloody apron receded behind them. Darcy danced ahead. They came closer to the street while Jeremy prayed continuously to the traffic light: oh, please turn red, turn red, let me at least have time to get my bearings. But it stayed an evil green, and Mary led him without a pause off the curb, across a desert of cement, up the other side. They were home. They were on his own block. He straightened and let out a long slow breath. Mary said, “You’re just like Darcy, whenever you don’t eat breakfast you get sick to your stomach. Isn’t that what happened?”

“I meant it seriously, I asked you to marry me,” Jeremy said.

“But you both say no, you couldn’t eat a thing, you don’t want a … ”

She stopped walking. She turned and stared at him across a silence that grew painful, while Jeremy waited with his head down. “Oh, Jeremy,” she said finally. “Why, thank you, Jeremy. But you see, I can’t get married.”

“You can’t?”

“My husband won’t give me a divorce.”

“Oh, I see,” Jeremy said.

“But it was sweet of you to ask, and I want you to know how flattered I am.”

“That’s all right,” Jeremy said.

He stood there a minute more, and then they both began walking again. Up ahead, Darcy leaped and skipped and twirled. Her hair made him think of something metallic falling through the air, catching the sunlight and ducking it and catching it once more. He fixed his eyes on it and stumbled along. When they were within sight of home he lifted his cracker without thinking and took a bite. Mary was right; it helped. His head cleared. His stomach righted itself. He felt cinnamon flowering out of his mouth, taking away the tinny taste, leaving his breath as pure as a child’s. Like a child he let himself be led home while all his attention was directed toward the cracker. Crunching sounds filled his head and tiny sharp crumbs sprinkled his shirt front. He felt limp and exhausted, and something like relief was turning his bones so watery that he could have lain down right there and gone to sleep on the sidewalk.

• • •

Now he no longer came downstairs while Mary was making breakfast. He lay in bed late and rose by degrees, often sitting against his pillow for as much as an hour and staring vacantly out his window. The index card lost its tack and fell behind his bed; he let it lie. He sat in a sagging position, smoothing his sheet over and over across his chest, and if he wanted a change of scenery he raised his eyes from the screened lower portion of the window, which was open, to the closed upper portion where two sets of cloudy panes dulled the morning sunlight. Maybe someday he would wash them. The floors had a frame of dirt spreading out from the baseboards, thinning only where his traffic pattern had worn the dust away. There were little chips of paper everywhere, some so old that they seemed to have become embedded in the wood. If the light was right he could look out toward his studio and find a long glinting red hair snagged on one of the floorboards. It had belonged to a student from two years ago, whose name he had forgotten. He neither swept the hair away nor made any special effort to keep it. It was just there, something he registered in the mornings without considering the possibility that there was anything he might do about it.

When he had finally struggled out of bed there was the bathroom to face — a chilly place even in summer, with all its fixtures crazed and rust-stained and the swinging naked lightbulb pointing out every pore of his skin in the watery mirror. He shaved for hours. He cut one small path across his cheek and then stood looking into his own eyes until it occurred to him to lift his razor again. Even before the mirror he did not bother rearranging his expression. His muscles sagged and the soft skin of his throat pouched outward. He noticed, and disliked what he saw, but only in the detached way that he might dislike a painting or some scene that he witnessed on the street. Then when he was tired of shaving he left, often without rinsing off the last traces of soap, so that his skin felt itchy and dry. He wrapped himself in a bathrobe and put on his crocheted slippers and shuffled into his studio, where he sat on a stool for a long time looking at his latest piece. Too many browns. Not enough distinctions. More and more now he was adding in actual objects — thumbtacks and washers and bits of string and wood, separating the blur of colored papers. Brian hadn’t seen these yet. Jeremy didn’t care whether he saw them or not. He pulled off a piece of twine that was in the wrong corner, leaving a worm of dried white paste behind. He dropped it to the floor and then noticed, beside one leg of his stool, the tin top off a box of cough lozenges, and by the time he had figured where to paste that he had forgotten about dressing. He snipped things apart and fitted things together. He rummaged through the clutter in a bureau drawer, meanwhile holding his bathrobe together by its frayed sash. Till Mrs. Jarrett’s clopping heels mounted laboriously to the second floor and she called up to the third, “Mr. Pauling? I don’t see your dishes here, have you not had breakfast? We’re getting worried about you. Please come.” If he were too absorbed he merely shuffled his feet on the floor, showing he hadn’t died in his sleep. Other times he sighed and laid his scissors down and went to his bedroom for clothes. Most of his clothes seemed to be falling apart nowadays. He kept having to throw away shirts with long rips and trousers with the zippers broken and shorts with the elastic gone, but he didn’t bother sending to Sears for more. He tossed them in the wastebasket almost gladly. Later he would listen with a sense of satisfaction while the garbage men came clanging trashcans and bore his belongings away with them. It felt good to be done with things. He thought of the New Year’s Eves he had sat up for — the relief that came from putting away another year and brushing off his hands and knowing that there were twelve months less to get through. Or of all his life — the hundreds of memories he had closed the files on, the years assigned to him that he had dutifully endured, waiting to reach the bottom of the pile.

His breakfast was other people’s lunch. Mrs. Jarrett ate in the dining room with everything just right, dishes set on one of his mother’s linen placemats and a matching napkin in her lap. Mr. Somerset wolfed a lacy fried egg straight from the skillet. Miss Vinton, home from the bookstore on her lunch hour, read publishers’ brochures while she ate health bread at the kitchen table. “There’s a new Klee in, Mr. Pauling,” she might say, without looking up. “I put it on the sideboard.”

“Oh, why, thank you, Miss Vinton.”

He ate whatever took the least trouble — a box of day-old doughnuts or a can of cold soup. After every mouthful he wiped his hands carefully on the knees of his trousers before turning a page of the Klee. It would have to go back with Miss Vinton, spic and span, before her boss noticed it was missing. The cover of the book was a glossy white, promising him something new and untouched and wonderful. At the beginning there was a long jumble of words, a résumé of Paul Klee’s life, which Jeremy skipped. What did he care about that? He plunged into the pictures; he drank them up, he felt how dry and porous he was, thirsty for things to look at. At every page he wanted to pause and spend hours, even when he had seen the pictures before in other books, but he felt a pull also to turn to the next one quickly so that he would be sure to finish in time. Sometimes he said, “Miss Vinton, I wonder if I might—?” “Oh, why surely, Mr. Pauling,” she said, refolding the bread wrapper. “I can always take it back tomorrow. Mr. Mack won’t notice.” She had never once hurried him or shown any concern over his handling of the books, although Jeremy knew that Mr. Mack was unreasonably strict about such things. And for all of August, when Jeremy’s life seemed duller and sadder than he had ever noticed before, she managed to bring a new book for him almost every day, as if she guessed that he needed comfort. Klee, a collection of impressionists, Miro, Renoir. A book of American primitives whose dollhouse landscapes and lack of perspective filled him with a kind of homesickness. If only he could just step inside them! If only he lived in a place where a man could go any distance and yet never grow smaller! Miss Vinton brought him Braque, a man he disliked. He sat through her lunch hour testing the anxiety that each picture called forth in him, the discomfort caused by some clumsiness in the shapes. Years before, when he was in high school, an art teacher explaining cubism had made Jeremy’s class copy one of Braque’s paintings line for line. Jeremy had felt sick all the while he was doing it. It seemed that he might melt away to nothing, letting himself get absorbed into another man’s picture that way. Now he found the picture again — a still life involving a musical instrument — and stared at it until he couldn’t stand it any more and had to turn the page. “Would you care to keep it till tomorrow?” asked Miss Vinton, rising to rinse her dishes. “You seem to like him.”

“What? No, no,” Jeremy said, “please, I don’t want it, take it back with you.” Then he was ashamed of his rudeness, and he blushed and looked up at her. In the summertime, stripped of her lavender cardigan, her bony freckled arms gave her a vulnerable look. White strings stood out along the inside of her wrist when she turned the faucet off. “But I’m grateful to you for bringing the book,” Jeremy said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, that’s all right, I never much liked him myself.”

She turned, cheerful as ever, to hang up her dishtowel and take her purse from the table. Meanwhile Mrs. Jarrett ate fruit cup in the dining room, the ladylike clink of her spoon sounding at perfectly spaced intervals. Mr. Somerset put his skillet down silently and gravely, making certain that it sat in the exact center of the circle of the burner, ready to be used at another meal. Was there anyone gentler than old people? Could he ever feel as much at rest as he did sitting in this triangle of muted gray voices?

Then here came the second shift, as if in answer — Darcy slamming the door and pounding down the hallway with a bucket full of dandelions, Mary laughing and calling out warnings and threats and promises, and maybe if it were a weekend Howard’s high-pitched whistle and the squeak of his sneakers. “Where’s the milk I left here?” “Who wants a dandelion?” “You’re going to bump into someone, Darcy!”—which Darcy would almost surely do, as if she had to depend on someone else to break her speed for her. Flunf! into Miss Vinton’s middle. “Oh, Darcy, say you’re sorry.” “No harm done,” said Miss Vinton, and Darcy spun on through the kitchen, ending up with her arms around Howard. “Howard, make me flapjacks, Howard.” “Let him be, Darcy.” “Oh now,” Howard said to Mary, “you’re just jealous because I won’t make you flapjacks.” Then the kitchen splintered into bits of laughter, and Miss Vinton smiled and left while Mr. Somerset turned slowly from the stove, dazed by the laughter, baffled by frivolity. “What?” he said. Mary folded Darcy into the circle of her arms and said, “Milk or apple juice, young lady?” “Both,” said Darcy. “Or wait. Is apple juice what I want?” She turned toward Jeremy as if she expected him to answer, but Jeremy was looking at Mary. He saw the curve of her cheek against Darcy’s tow hair; he noticed how her nearly unarched eyebrows calmed and rested him.

Why hadn’t he been granted the one thing in life he ever hoped for?

At the beginning of September, Darcy started kindergarten and Mary found a job. It was something she could do at home: making argyle socks on a knitting machine. In the morning while Darcy was at school Mary worked alone in her room, but Darcy returned at lunchtime and was in and out all the rest of the day, leaving the door open behind her, and the sock machine soon became part of the household. It consisted of a circle of vertical needles, which first had to be threaded one by one. Threading was the time-consuming part. Then Mary cranked a large handle a prescribed number of times, after which she paused to rethread in another color. Jeremy, passing her doorway, had a glimpse of her huddled in a C-shape and frowning at metal eyes that seemed far too close together. She reminded him of old photographs of life in a sweatshop. But when the threading was done she could straighten up and stand back, and the cranking was so easy that sometimes she let Darcy do it while she herself counted the strokes. Numbers rang out and floated through the house—“Thirty-six! Thirty-seven!” After the tense silence of the threading, her voice and the circular rattle of machinery seemed like an outburst of joy. Wherever he was, Jeremy would raise his head to listen, and he noticed that the whole house appeared to relax at those times and the other boarders grew suddenly talkative, as if they too had held tense during the threading.

At the end of her first week of work, Mary packed the completed socks in a cardboard carton. She left Darcy with Mrs. Jarrett and caught a bus to the factory, where she was supposed to deliver them. “Why can’t I come too?” Darcy asked. “Because it wouldn’t be any fun,” Mrs. Jarrett told her. “The place where Mommy is going is the factory section, all nasty and dirty.” Jeremy felt something shrink in him. As if her absence were one long threading period, he held himself rigid in a parlor chair, scarcely breathing, silently turning the pages of a book of old masters that his mother had given him. “Goodness, don’t you have anything to do?” Mrs. Jarrett asked once. “I thought Saturday your students came.” Jeremy looked up, still turning pages. He had lost his last student a month ago and no others had called yet, but before he could put all this into words his thoughts trailed off again and he forgot to answer.

Mary returned just before lunch, bringing a new carton of yarn. When Darcy heard she came running out of the kitchen with Mrs. Jarrett close behind, and Jeremy stood up holding his book to his stomach. He thought that now the shrunken feeling would leave him, but it didn’t. Mary’s face was gray and her shoulders sagged. “How’s our career woman?” Mrs. Jarrett asked, clapping her hands together.

“Oh well, I’m all right.”

“You seem a little tired.”

“I had to wait in line a while,” Mary said. “There are a lot of other people doing this work.”

“Is that right? And just think, I never even heard of it before. Did you meet anybody interesting?”

“Oh, trash mostly. Just, you know. Just trash.” She set her carton on the coffee table and sat down. “I didn’t make as much money as I thought I would,” she said.

“Now be sure they pay you what they owe, you hear?”

Jeremy, back in his armchair now, kept nodding his head to show that he agreed. He felt as tired and sad as Mary. He wanted to offer her something — a cup of coffee? She didn’t drink coffee. In his mother’s old books a rich gentleman would come now to rescue Mary from life in the sweatshop, but Jeremy was the only gentleman present and he wasn’t rich and he didn’t believe that Mary had even noticed he was in the room. She spoke solely to Mrs. Jarrett. She said, “Oh, they paid me what they owed. But I had made a few mistakes, and also I’m still slow. Some of these people just whip them out by the dozen, but I don’t. I don’t know why. I thought I was going so fast. I thought I could make up the rent and the grocery and Darcy’s school clothes, all in just a few hours a day.”

“Now, now,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Give yourself time.”

Jeremy went on nodding. He kept his eyes fixed on the label at the end of the yarn box — a rectangle of glaring yellow, a color he had always disliked. The brightness of it made his eyes ache. He imagined himself winning twenty-five thousand dollars from some soap company and offering it to her, watching her brow slowly smooth and lighten as she looked down and saw what he had put into her hands. “No, no,” he would tell her, “no strings. You don’t even have to be my friend, just please don’t thread those needles any more …” Yet if she had that much money, wouldn’t she leave him?

Well, but hadn’t she left him already? Had she ever really been there?

“Now can we have our ice cream?” Darcy said.

She had been promised a treat. Mary had told her she would come home rich. Mrs. Jarrett said, “Not yet, Darcy, let Mommy rest a while,” but Mary said, “No, I’m all right. Let’s go.” She picked up her pocketbook and they went out the front door. This time there were no slams, no voices calling back and forth outside. The house felt the same when they were out as when they were in, bleak and dark and tired. Mrs. Jarrett settled with a sigh onto the creaking springs of the couch. Jeremy turned a page and smoothed the edges of a Rubens. “It’s a shame, it’s just a shame,” Mrs. Jarrett said. “Do you think they’ll have to go on welfare?”

The word stabbed him. He looked up, open-mouthed.

“And she’s bright as a button. I don’t care what you say. A high school diploma isn’t everything.”

“Welfare?” Jeremy said.

But Mrs. Jarrett was talking to her needlework.

“I said, ‘What you want is a husband, my dear.’ ‘I do, don’t I,’ she said, and just laughed, didn’t take me seriously, but I meant what I said. Now I don’t know what happened there, widowed or divorced or what, but she is a young woman still and on top of that she has that child. Have you noticed how out of hand that child has gotten? She used to be a real little lady. She needs a father, and you can tell it by the number of times that she says a thing over again. Shows she isn’t listened to enough, her mother has worries on her mind and can’t pay attention. Not that I blame her, of course, I realize what a—”

Jeremy blinked down at the Rubens, a fat naked blond lady laughing. He felt that Mrs. Jarrett’s words were twining around him like vines, rooting in the sad darkness inside him. The fat lady reminded him of a student he had once had, a girl named Sally Ann something who had wanted to learn portrait painting. She weighed two hundred pounds; she had told him so herself. She seemed proud of it. Once she asked him, “Would you like a nude model? I could do it.” And then she had come very close and laid a hand on his arm, smiling at him but looking, for some reason, only at his mouth. “No, no,” he had said. He was unprepared. He backed off, shaking his head, and stumbled over a tin can full of brushes. “No, that’s all right, I don’t paint at all, really.” But afterwards he had lain awake regretting his answer, and Sally Ann, whom he had not liked, gained importance in his mind and he began to see that there could be something compelling about a person who was dimpled all over. Only the next time she came to the studio he found that he still disliked her, and he kept himself at a distance even though she never offered again to be his model. Then what happened? Did she stop coming? He couldn’t remember. He stared down at the Rubens, who laughed directly at him with her eyelids lowered, and he felt some sort of wasted feeling, as if he were a very old man realizing for the first time how little was left to him.

“… and then my very own sister was married four times,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Well, some claimed that was carrying things too far, but I don’t know. I don’t know that I blame her at all, to tell the truth. We do need someone to lean on. I imagine I’ll spend the rest of my life feeling naked on my street side every time I take a walk, and I am sixty-four now and been a widow longer than a wife.”

Jeremy sank lower in his chair, letting the book fall shut, and closed his eyes. He kept them closed for so long that Mrs. Jarrett thought he had gone to sleep. Anyway, she suspected he had not been listening.

In the middle of the night he woke with the feeling that he had just heard his name called, but he found it was a dream. He couldn’t get to sleep again. First he was cold, and he had to kneel in his bed and tug the window shut. Then he discovered he had a headache. He felt his way to the bathroom, found an aspirin tin, and washed two tablets down with a mouthful of lukewarm water from the faucet. In the mirror his silhouette was gilt-edged with moonlight. He studied how his shoulders sloped. He reminded himself of a low hill. There seemed to be no good reason to move any more, even to go back to bed. He stood rooted at the sink. Then far below him he heard a whirring sound, so faint he might have imagined it. He cocked his head, trying to place its source. With his hands stretched before him like a sleepwalker he guided himself out of the bathroom and into his studio, toward the open rear window, where the sound became louder. Even there he took a minute to identify it: the cranking of Mary’s sock machine. He placed both hands on the windowsill and lowered his head, forming a clear image of her in some long flowing flannel nightgown, a shawl around her shoulders, working away by the light of a smoky lantern. Then he turned and went back to his bedroom.

Still in the dark, he opened drawers and slid hangers down his closet rod and rummaged through his shoebag. He found the one dress shirt he possessed, easily recognizable in its crackling cellophane envelope from the laundry. It was limp and sleazy and the collar was frayed, but he thought it would do. He knotted a tie, fumbling a little, trying to remember the complicated set of motions learned from Mr. Somerset’s predecessor many years before. Then his suit — a three-piecer, ordered by mail back in the fifties but it still fit fairly well. Socks that might or might not match — he couldn’t tell for sure and it seemed important not to turn on the light. Pinchy black shoes, also mail-order. A handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket the way his mother had taught him. Then back in front of the bathroom mirror he combed his hair, puffing up the little moonlit cloud skimming his scalp. He set the comb down on the edge of the sink and walked very slowly out of the room and toward the stairs. Every step made him sicker, but he didn’t let himself feel it.

All the doors on the second floor were closed and dark. The only sound was a ragged snore from Mr. Somerset’s room. On the first floor, street lights shining in picked up the shapes of the furniture but not its colors. Everything was a different shade of velvety gray, like what he had imagined a color-blind man must see. Jeremy had often tried to picture color-blindness — the worst affliction he could imagine next to blindness itself — and now, as if this were the only reason he had dressed up and come downstairs, he stood for a while letting his eyes blur and swim. Then the whirring sound started up again. He straightened his shoulders and passed through the parlor and into the dining room, where a knife blade of light shone beneath Mary’s door. His first knock was not heard, but at the second knock the machine stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then, “Is someone there?” she asked.

It’s me, it’s Jeremy.

“Jeremy?”

“I’m sorry to bother you at this—”

The doorknob rattled, so loudly and so close to him that he started. Light flooded the dining room and screwed his eyes up, and Mary stood before him in her blue dress with her hair still knotted as if this were daytime. “Was I disturbing you?” she asked him. “I thought while Darcy was sleeping I might turn out a few extra pairs.”

“No, no.”

Darcy lay sprawled in the double bed, taking up more than her share of it. She was shielded from the light by a blue paper Woolworth’s bag that Mary had fitted over the lamp bulb. Now that Jeremy’s eyes were adjusting he saw that the room was actually dim. He couldn’t imagine how anyone would be able to thread a needle here. “I should have thought,” he said. “You don’t have to keep the machine in your bedroom, you can set it up anywhere. No one will mind. I didn’t guess that you would be doing this while Darcy was asleep, you see—”

He whispered, taking care not to wake Darcy, but Mary spoke in a normal tone. “Why, that’s very nice of you, Jeremy,” she said, “but I don’t believe it bothers her. She’s a very sound sleeper.” They both looked at Darcy, who seemed pale and waxy, with her eyes sealed and her arms and legs still for once. “Thank you for thinking of it, though,” Mary said, turning back and giving him a bright, social smile. She thought that was what he had come for — to offer her space. She expected him to go now. “Maybe I’ll quit for tonight anyway,” she said. “I do feel a little tired.”

“But nobody knows you’re still married,” Jeremy said suddenly.

She stopped smiling.

“They think you’re widowed, or divorced. They don’t know you’re not free to remarry.”

“Jeremy, really I—”

“Please listen. That’s all I’m asking, if you say no I won’t ever trouble you again. Listen. You see how well you fit in here. Sometimes we have had new boarders come in one day and leave the next, they just don’t seem to like it. But you didn’t do that. You’ve stayed a whole season with us.”

“Yes, but you see I really didn’t—”

“You fit in here. Everybody wants you to stay. And you know it has a lot of advantages, kitchen privileges and Mrs. Jarrett babysits. As far as money goes, why, I do make a little money from time to time, not very much I know but enough so that you could stop knitting argyles, and besides Darcy needs a father, they say she’s getting out of hand without one—”

“Who says that?” Mary asked, so loudly that Darcy stirred and murmured.

“Mrs. Jarrett does.”

“Well, I’m very surprised at her.”

“So this is what I was considering,” Jeremy said. “Couldn’t we just pretend to be married?”

Mary stared at him.

“Oh no, please don’t be angry,” he told her, stumbling to get the words out. “I know how it sounds. But you see, to me it would be marriage. It isn’t as if there were any other way we could do it. We could go out one morning all dressed up and then come in and tell the others we’d been married at City Hall. That’s all we’d have to do. Then we would be married in the eyes of everyone we know, and I would take care of you and you would start another life instead of going along on tag ends the way you are now, you could give all your time to Darcy and have more children if you wanted and never have to leave them to go out and work in sweatshops—”

“Jeremy, dear,” Mary said, “I’m sure you are saying all this with the best of intentions—”

“I am,” he said sadly. He understood now that she would refuse, but still he had to go on. “I am proposing, not propositioning. I mean only the deepest respect,” he told her, and he looked up to find her nearly smiling, no longer so severe but kind-faced and amused, gently shaking her head. “Besides,” he said, beginning to mumble, “I love you.”

“Thank you, Jeremy. I do appreciate it.”

“What hope do you have for a better life, if you keep on saying no to everything new?”

But he was speaking mainly to himself now, offering himself consolation, and he had already turned to go. He saw the dining room lit into color from Mary’s doorway, a clump of dusty strawflowers turning orange on the table. Then her face appeared in his mind as it had looked at the moment of his turning — the smile fading, the eyes suddenly darker and more thoughtful. He turned back again. Mary took a breath, and he knew from the sudden shock and panic flooding through him that she was about to say yes.