Fault Lines

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

FAULT LINES

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother,

KATHERINE KITCHENS RIVERS,

who goes with me on every journey,

and to PETER WARD, who lit the way for this one.

CONTENTS

ONE

On the day of my husband’s annual fund-raising gala…

TWO

Pom was obsessed with the rats. The first thing he…

THREE

Mommee thought my daughter, Glynn, was the angel of death.

FOUR

Laura met me at the Los Angeles airport at two…

FIVE

In the middle of my first night in California I…

SIX

I called him first thing the next morning, though. Somehow…

SEVEN

The production studio where the test would be done was…

EIGHT

There was a note on a Post-it stuck to the…

NINE

That woke me was a soft scratching noise at the…

TEN

If you have been married a long time to the…

ELEVEN

I was given a gift that night, one that you…

TWELVE

It was Glynn who led us out. Glynn and Curtis…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

BOOKS BY ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

COVER

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

1

On the day of my husband’s annual fund-raising gala, I was down by the river liberating rats.

There were two of them on this day, massive, stolid, blunt-snouted beasts who bore no more resemblance to common house mice than beavers, or the nutria from the bayous of my childhood. Rattus rattus they were, or, more familiarly, European black rats. I looked them up in Webster’s Unabridged when Pom first designated me their official executioner. I figured that if you’re going to drown something, the least you can do is know its proper name. That was a fatal mistake. Name something, the old folk saying goes, and you have made it your own. Rattus rattus became mine the instant I closed Webster’s, and after that I simply took the victims caught in Pom’s traps down to the river and, instead of drowning them, let them go. Who, after all, would know? Only the dogs went with me, and, being bird dogs, they were uninterested in anything without wings. The leaden-footed, trundling rats were as far from the winged denizens of God’s bestiary as it was possible to be. My hideous charges waddled to freedom unmolested.

There were two and three of them a day in those first steaming days of June. Pom was delighted with the humane traps. The poison put down by the exterminating company had worked even better, but the rats had all died in the walls and for almost a month before we tried the traps the house smelled like a charnel house, sick-sweet and a pestilential. We’d had to cancel several meetings and a dinner party. The exterminators had promised that the rats would all go outside to die, but none of them had, and Pom was furious with both man and beast.

“Why the hell aren’t they going outside?” he said over and over.

“Would you, if you could die in a nice warm pile of insulation?” I said. “Why on earth did either of us believe they’d go outside? Why would they? They probably start to feel the pain almost immediately. They’re not going to run a 10K with arsenic in their guts.”

I hated the poisoning. I hated the thought of the writhing and the squeaking and scrabbling and dying. I never actually heard it, but somehow that was even worse. My mind fashioned grand guignol dances of death nightly behind my Sheetrock. I took to leaving the radio on softly all night, in fear that I would hear. The only result of that was that I would come awake at dawn with my heart jolting when the morning deejay started his drive-time assault and would lie there blearily for long seconds, wondering if it had been the phone I heard, or Pom’s beeper, or Glynn calling, or some new banshee alarm from Mommee upstairs. Only when I had listened for a couple of minutes did it sink in that I was hearing Fred the Undead blasting Atlanta out of bed and onto the road.

As early as I wakened on those mornings, Pom was invariably up earlier and was almost always gone to the clinic by the time I padded into the kitchen in search of coffee. I would find his usual note propped up against the big white Braun coffeemaker: “Merritt: 3 more, 2, in lv. rm. and 1 in libr. Call A. about Fri, I think there’s something. Blue blazer in cleaners? Worm capsules, 2 @. Mommee restless last night, check and call me. Home late, big bucks in town. See you A.M. if not P.M. XXX, P.”

Translated, this meant there were three new captives in the rat traps, and I was to dispatch them in the river. Then I was to call his secretary, Amy Crittenden, who loved him with the fierce, chaste passion of the middle-aged office wife, and see what our plans were for Friday evening; Pom frequently made social arrangements for us and forgot to tell me, so Amy became a willing go-between. I liked and valued her and seldom chafed at her fussy peremptoriness, though I was not above a moment’s satisfaction when I was able to say, “Oh, Amy, he’s forgotten we have plans for Friday. You really need to check with me first.” Then I was to locate his blue blazer and fetch it from the cleaners if it was there, which meant that the Friday mystery evening was casual and funky, like a rib dinner down in the Southwest part of the city, to show the flag in the affluent black community there. Much of Pom’s clinic’s work was done in and for the black communities south of downtown, and he endured the socializing as coin that paid for the free clinical work that was his passion. Pom was as impatient with the River Club as he was with the rib dinner, but knew better than anyone the necessity for both. In the twenty years that the network of Fowler clinics had been in operation, he had become a consummate fund-raiser. He was an eloquent speaker, a tireless listener to fragile egos, and without vanity himself, a rare thing indeed in a physician. The day his board of directors and auxiliary discovered this was the day that he began to move, imperceptibly at first, out of the office and onto the hustings. Because he was unwilling to surrender even a moment of what he considered his real work, diagnosing and healing the poor, he solved the conflict by simply getting up earlier and earlier to get to the clinic and coming home later and later. Now, two decades later, I virtually never saw him by morning light and often not by lamplight, either. Of course he didn’t have time to get his blue blazer out of the cleaners; of course I would do it for him. It was in our contract, his and ours. He would care for the poor and the sick; I would care for him and our family. If this grew tedious at times, I had only to remind myself that Pom and I were in a partnership beyond moral reproach. Caretaking, any sort of caretaking, was my hot button. The smallest allegation of moral slipshoddiness was my Achilles’ heel.

Next, the note bade me give the two bird dogs who lived in the run down by the river their worm capsules, two each. Samson and Delilah were liver-spotted setters, rangy and lean and sleek, seeming always to vibrate with nerves and energy and readiness. Pom had grown up bird hunting with his father, the Judge, on a vast South Georgia timber plantation, and he thought to take the sport up again when we bought the house on the river five years before, so he kept a brace of hounds in the river run at all times. But he had yet to get back out into the autumn fields with them, even though he belonged to an exclusive hunting club over in South Carolina, on the Big Pee Dee River. He did not spend much time with the dogs, and did not want me to make pets of them. It spoiled them for hunting, he said, and it wasn’t as if they were neglected or abused. Their quarters were weatherproof and sumptuous, their runs enormous, and he ran them for a couple of hours on weekends, or had me do it, if he couldn’t. Besides, they were littermates, brother and sister, and they had each other for company. I will take them the pills in late afternoon when I decant the rats, I would think. Then I can spend some time with them and no one will be the wiser.

It had not yet struck me, at the beginning of that summer, how much of my time was spent doing things about which no one was the wiser.

Mommee restless: Nothing ambiguous about that. Glynnis Parsons Fowler spent her entire married life in her big house on the edge of the great plantation and ruled her husband, sons, and household help with an iron hand in the lace mitt of a perennial wiregrass debutante. As far as I know she was never called Glynnis in her life; her adoring Papa called her Punkin, her sons called her Mommee, and her husband Little Bit, but despite the cloying nicknames and her diminutive stature, she was a formidable presence always. Even now, ten years widowed and five years into Alzheimer’s, two of them spent under our roof, she ruled, only now with mania instead of will and wiles. A restless night meant muttering and shuffling around her room at all hours, which Pom, no matter how weary, never failed to hear and I, no matter how well rested, seldom did. The note meant that he had had to get up and calm her again, and I whose task this was, had not…again. I knew that Pom had no thought of shaming me about this. The shame I felt was born entirely within me. I should have heard her. I will spend the morning with her, I would think, and Ina can go for the groceries and dry cleaning.

Finally, the note told me that someone with the potential for major financial support for the clinic was in town, and Pom was wining and dining him, and might be taking him somewhere afterwards for a nightcap. Many of the clinic’s benefactors were from the smaller cities across the South, and liked to see what they thought of as the bright lights of the big city when they came to Atlanta. Not infrequently, that meant one of the glossier nude dancing clubs over on Cheshire Bridge Road. The first time Pom had come in very late from one of those evenings I whooped with helpless laughter.

“Oh, God, I can just see you with huge silicone boobs on each side of your face, hanging over your ears,” I choked. “Even better, I can see you with huge silicone boobs over your ears and half an inch of five o’clock shadow, glaring out from the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. ‘Prominent physician caught in raid on unlicensed nude dancing club.’ What would Amy say?”

Pom’s square face reddened, and his black hair flopped over his eyes as if he had spent the evening shimmying with a parade of danseuses, but he grinned, a reluctant white grin that split the aforementioned five o’clock shadow like a knife blade through dark plush. By the end of a long day Pom frequently looks like a pirate in a child’s book.

“She’d say it never hurt a real man to sow a few oats,” he said, leering showily at me and twirling an imaginary mustache. And I laughed again, because it was just what she would say, and because he looked, in the lamplight, so much like the much younger and far lighter-hearted man I had married eighteen years before. That man was intense and impulsive and endearingly clumsy, and somehow astonishingly innocent, though he was certainly no stranger to strip joints and bovine boobs. I had not seen that man in a long time. I held out my arms to him that night, and he came into them, and it was near dawn before we slept. That had not happened in a long time, either.

Pom has amazing eyes. They are so blue that you can see them from a distance; you notice them immediately in photographs, and the times I have seen him on television they dominate the screen as if they were fluorescent. It may be because they are fringed with dense, dark lashes and shadowed over by slashes of level black brows, and set into flesh that looks tenderly and perpetually bruised. His thick black hair is usually in his eyes. All of this darkness makes the whites extraordinarily white, and very often they seem so wide open that the white makes a slight ring around the irises. All that white should, I tell him, make him look demented, a mad Irish visionary, but it is the genesis of his apparent innocence, I think. Much of the time Pom seems wide-eyed with surprise at the world.

The rest of him is solid and muscular, and he moves lithely and fast on the balls of his feet, a tight package of coiled energy and strength. He has always reminded me, in his stature, of one of the great cinema dancers, Jimmy Cagney perhaps, or Gene Kelly. But Pom is an abysmal dancer. He is always in a hurry, and frequently stumbles and bumps into things. Oddly, he is an awesome tennis player, fast and savagely focused and powerful. He shows no mercy. I hate playing with him.

He is short, or at least not tall: five nine. My height almost exactly. He pads when he walks, like a tomcat or a street punk, and looks as disheveled as if he had been in a fist fight an hour after dressing, no matter how carefully his shirts are done by the specialty cleaners over in Vinings, or how perfectly Clifford at Ham Stockton’s fits his suits. The shirts and suits are my arsenal, my weapons against the sartorial entropy with which he flirts daily. Pom doesn’t care what he wears. He remembers the blue blazer because his father told him when he sent him off to Woodbury Forest that a man needed nothing else but a good dark suit and a tuxedo to dress like a gentleman. I think his heart leaped up when he discovered white medical coats. He would wear them everywhere if he could, not because he considers them becoming (they are), but because they are comfortable, correct, and there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of them both at home and at the office. Amy sends them home to be washed twice a week, tenderly folded in tissue paper. She would wash and iron them herself if she could, I am sure. Pom said he saw her polishing his stethoscope once.

Mommee has always insisted that the Fowlers are of old Saxon stock, but both Pom and his brother, Clay, have Celt written all over them, as did his father before him, and his oldest son Chip is the same small, powerful dark creature of the Cornish caves or the wild cliffs of Connaught. Mommee herself is small and birdlike, with a thin, high-bridged nose, pale hazel eyes, and the jaw of a mastiff. A little Teuton in the Tudor gene pool there, no doubt about it. I think Jeff, the younger boy, looks like her, but since Pom’s first wife, Lilly, is short and giltblond too I can’t be sure of that. But in Lilly’s case the smallness is of the small-town high school cheerleader variety, not the Blanche du Bois sort, as Mommee’s is, and runs now to thumping curves that strain at her Chanels and Bill Blasses. And even I, with no eye at all for such things, can tell that the polished hair comes weekly from Carter Barnes. English or Irish, the Fowler provenance matters not at all to anyone but Mommee. Atlanta, and indeed most of Georgia except the old Creole coast, is far too raw and new and self-involved to make much of a distinction, requiring only strong Caucasian chromosomes and good teeth.

I met Pom at a fund-raising party for the new outpatient diagnostic center at Buckhead Hospital, on a spring afternoon in 1978. It was an old-fashioned all-day barbecue on the enormous back lawn of an estate on Cherokee Road in Buckhead that had been built in the early twenties for a former governor of Georgia and had just been renovated by the New Jersey-born administrator of the hospital. There was a gruesome whole hog turning on a spit over a pit of banked coals, hams and pork shoulders on grills, huge iron pots of Brunswick stew, and great bowls of potato salad and coleslaw iced and waiting in the pantry off the cavernous kitchen. Sweating black men and women in starched white and chef’s hats stirred and carried and grinned, looking for all the world like devoted family retainers, but they were, I knew, the cream of the cafeteria staff from the hospital. Others, bearing trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres across the blue-shadowed green lawn, were waiters and bartenders from the Piedmont Driving Club, imported for the occasion not by the New Jersey administrator, who was not a member, but the silver-haired chief of Internal Medicine, who was. The miniature carousel and the aging clowns and the mulish Shetland pony and crisp young attendants minding the shrieking small children in the blue, oval pool at the far end of the lawn were from the city’s oldest and most favored party-planning establishment. The same sagging clowns had doubtless frightened many of the adults present and the same evil-tempered pony had certainly nipped them on their short, bare legs when its tender was not looking twenty years before.

I knew all this because I had planned the party, or at least had helped. My advertising and public relations agency had long had Buckhead Hospital for a client, and had long done the PR and printed materials for its various fund-raisers without billing anyone’s time. Most agencies had these gratis clients, whose work was handled solely for the prestige and worthiness of their causes. I had been at the agency for four years, long enough to work my way up to copy chief and be in line for associate creative director, and this was my fourth Buckhead Hospital fundraiser. We had had a Parisian Street circus, a Night at the Winter Palace ball, and an Arabian bazaar. This time the board wanted to include families, and so Christine Cross, my art director friend, and I had suggested the barbecue and modeled it partly on the barbecue at Twelve Oaks from Gone With the Wind.

“Hell, it won’t be any work at all,” Crisscross said, dumping the ashes from her Virginia Slim into my tepid coke. “The board’s got ten Twelve Oakses between ’em, and about a thousand slaves. We won’t have to lift a finger.”

And we hadn’t, hardly. When I walked around the side of the big white house and stood looking down from the veranda at the barbecue in progress, it seemed to be surging and swarming along under its own volition, with everyone knowing exactly what part they were to play, and doing it faultlessly. The lawn was a sea of pink linen tablecloths and green tents and seersucker suits and pastel cocktail dresses and butterfly pinafores and sunsuits. The only jarring note was a thick-shouldered, dark-faced young man with his hair in his eyes and a red-splotched white physician’s jacket, crouching on one knee at the bottom of the veranda steps and attempting to mop a veritable bath of red off the furious purple face and arms of a bellowing, struggling small boy. The red looked shockingly like blood but a vinegary tang in the still air told me it was barbecue sauce. Behind the man a slightly older boy was dancing up and down, stark naked and dripping, waving a tiny wet bathing suit in his hand and shrieking, “Dry me off! Dry me off! Jeff peed in the pool and it’s all over me!”

The man raised his face to me, and there was such a look of desperation and entreaty on it, such utter helplessness in eyes of a color I had literally never seen in a human face before, that I ran down the shallow stone steps and reached for the wet, naked child before I even thought.

“If you don’t stop right this minute you’re going to turn to stone, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life naked in this backyard, and pigeons will crap all over you,” I said, pinning the slick, small arms firmly. The child stopped dancing and looked at me. The smaller child stopped bellowing and looked, too.

“Oh, God, are you married?” the man said. “If not, will you marry me in fifteen minutes?”

“So tell me about his eyes again,” Crisscross said the next day at lunch. She had pleaded cramps and missed the party. Crisscross did not go to parties where no recreational drugs were offered. It was a matter of policy with her; I knew she did not indulge. She had gone to Bennington, and regarded the social doings of old Atlanta society, or what passed for it, as she might the ponderous frolicking of dinosaurs. Once was interesting, more was grotesque.

“I never saw eyes that color,” I said. “Such an intense blue they could burn you—”

“What kind of blue? Be specific.”

“The blue of…of…the blue of those lights on the top of police cars,” I said.

“Jesus,” Crisscross said. “How utterly charming. Is his last name Mengele, by any chance?”

“No. It’s Fowler. Pomeroy Fowler. Dr. Pomeroy Fowler. Pom to his friends.”

“Of which you are now one.”

“I guess I am.”

“So. Two kids, both brats. Cop car-blue eyes, five o’clock shadow, slept-in clothes. Wife at Sea Island, or Brawner’s?”

I glared at her. Sea Island is where much of old Atlanta goes to re-create itself. The Brawner Clinic is where it goes for its breakups, breakdowns, and substance addictions. The latter, Crisscross maintained, ran primarily to booze and Coca-Cola. The sixties never quite got to Atlanta, she said, much less the seventies.

“Why should it be either one?” I said.

“Because no Nawthside Atlanta matron goes anywhere else and leaves her chirrun behind, don’chall know? Especially during the Little Season.”

Crisscross had not been in the South long. Her southern accent, even in parody, was execrable.

“As a matter of fact, she’s on Hilton Head,” I said. “She ran off with the architect down the street when he decided to go live on an island and free himself of conventional restraints. Pom got the children without even going to court.”

“I’d give a lot to know how you free yourself from conventional restraints on Hilton Head,” Crisscross grinned. “What do you do, join the Young Democrats? Violate the landscape code?”

“He wanted to build experimental low-cost housing for the Gullahs,” I said, grinning back at her. “But none of them would move into the prototype. The one family that finally did tacked tin over the cedar shake roof and painted the door blue. That’s to ward off evil spirits. You still see it on the Gullah shacks down there.”

Crisscross folded her arms over her stomach and bent over laughing. I began to laugh, too.

“Maybe they’ll find out it wards off Republicans, too,” I gasped. Despite our seeming lack of anything at all in common, Crisscross and I became instant friends when she joined the agency, and we spent much of our billable time laughing. Of all my old advertising crowd, she is the only one I still see with any regularity. She has her own agency now. We still laugh.

“So after you shut his kids up what happened?” she said on the day after the barbecue.

“I took both of them into the house and bathed them and got clean clothes on them and we left and went back to his house. He made supper for them and I put them to bed and we had a drink. We had several, in fact. And then we ordered in pizza because all he had in the house was hot dogs and stale potato chips and strawberry Jell-O, and the kitchen looked like an army had been camping in it for weeks. The whole house did, for that matter. It’s a nice Cape Cod in Garden Hills, but his baby-sitter doesn’t clean, and he doesn’t get home until late from the clinic most nights, and he thinks it’s more important to spend what time he has with the boys, instead of cleaning. I sort of straightened things up for him; it looked a lot better. I’m going to see if Totsy Freeman’s housekeeper has a free day or two. I think she said she did. It could really be a pretty house.”

Crisscross looked at me silently for a time. Then she said, “Oh, Merritt. Merritt Mason. You did it again. There is absolutely no hope for you; you’re a goner.”

“Did what?”

But I knew what she was going to say.

She said it.

“Saw somebody in need of something and loped right in to fix things. Spied a creature in distress. I know you. ‘Oh, Lord, there’s something over there moving and breathing and looking like it might need help. Let me at it!’ What did you get out of it this time? A chance to go back next week and clean his basement?”

“I got asked out for dinner this weekend and one hell of a goodnight kiss,” I snapped.

“I’m glad about the dinner,” she said. “I hope the kiss was worth all the fussing and nurturing you’re going to do. For that he could at least have screwed you.”

“The kiss was terrific,” I said, reddening. “The other comes next week. I can tell.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” she said, and folded her hands as in prayer, and rolled her wicked brown eyes heavenward. She looked back at me, waiting.

I looked away from her sharp, expectant little fox’s face. I was not a virgin when I met Pom, but I had slept with very few men. I had not even been out with many, and in the Atlanta of that time, with singles’ apartments sprouting like weeds and young men pouring in to catch the city’s soaring comet’s tail, that was downright difficult to accomplish. Every woman I knew dated all the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attractive; I am not pretty, but I am tall and thin and wear clothes well, and I know that I have an appealing smile. One of my last boyfriends had told me, “You’re just a tall, skinny drink of water with exploding hair until you smile. Then there’s nobody else in the room.”

It was nice to hear, but it did not make me feel any more comfortable with the young man who said it, and gradually I stopped seeing him. It was what happened to most of my relationships. I had slept with one man at LSU, after a rock concert, where the pot smoke had drifted thick and sweet, and had lived in mute terror of pregnancy and other things until the next month. The next man I slept with, years later, was a rock-climbing, sports car-driving investment banker who told me flatly that there was absolutely nothing attractive about a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. By then I was on the pill, because you never knew when, et cetera, et cetera, but I might as well not have been, because I enjoyed the sex so little that after being shamed into bed by the investment banker I did not do it again, and he stopped calling. I was thirty when I met Pom. For the first time, I wanted, with no reservations, to go to bed with a man. I could hardly wait, in fact. If he did not initiate it on our next date, I was going to. When he had first kissed me my whole body ignited. When we finished it was near meltdown.

It was the first time in my life I had not heard, in my mind, my mother’s bled-out voice saying bitterly, “Go ahead and do it with the first boy that tries it, if you’re ready to die, because doing it will kill you. It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you.”

My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was thirteen and my sister Laura was three. She was terribly sick for a year before that. I used to pull the covers over my head at night so that I could not hear her crying. She died thinking that she had gotten the cancer from having sexual relations with my father, who, she said, wasn’t satisfied unless he was on her every night. By that time, he had moved into the downstairs guest room and they seldom spoke. Our maid, Felicia, took care of her and my sister during the daytime, and a succession of Felicia’s relatives from the bayou came in and cooked. I took care of mother after school and at night. I didn’t miss much of the progress of the cancer as it chewed its way through her vitals. Later, when I got close enough to someone to want sex, or had necked in the back of a car until it seemed inevitable, I always stopped things abruptly. I knew with the top part of my mind that whatever else I got from the dirty deed, it wasn’t going to be cancer, but the bottom part of it didn’t know that. Whenever a hand touched my bare breast, or found the warm dark between my legs, I heard her voice: It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you. None of my relationships overrode that voice.

Pom silenced it with one kiss. Or perhaps the sheer need I saw in him overrode it. I knew, somehow, that I would not hear the voice again. I would sleep with him. I would marry him if he asked me. I would make him ask me. I would make such fine love with him that he would ask me; I would make such a good and orderly world for him and his children that he would ask me. I knew just how to do that.

After my mother died I took care of my sister and my father. It pleased him that I wanted to. It pleased me that it pleased him. He was a lawyer, a remote man who lived among paper and dust, or so I thought. Later I would learn that he lived most fully in the company of attractive women; my mother had been right about his sexual appetite. But he was discreet about it, and only remarried after I started college. Perhaps he was remote only to me and my sister; to Laura, especially. I knew she had not been a planned baby because I overheard the hushed, hissing quarrel over my mother’s pregnancy. Laura sensed it, long before Mother died. She cried inconsolably for much of her babyhood, and only I could seem to soothe her. By the time she was walking Mother was past caring for her. The only real approbation I remember seeing in my father’s eyes was when I had ministered particularly well to his second, changeling child.

I soon learned to care for him as well, acting as a grave, correct young hostess for him when he required it, seeing that his house was orderly and polished and quiet at all times. He would compliment me and I would feel my entire face light up, would grin from ear to ear despite myself. He was the first to tell me I had a wonderful smile. It earned him years of comfort. It earned me years of what amounted to servitude to my sister and father and our big house in Baton Rouge. I didn’t mind. I thought that it would keep him with me forever. When he remarried and moved into the perfectly run home of a rich seafaring lady who lived in Pascagoula, I was stunned, lost. But I still took care of Laura, because by that time it was what I knew best, was most comfortable doing. Caring for. Tending. I brought her to live with me in Atlanta when I came here after college to try my wings in advertising, and when I met Pom she was still living with me and attending sporadic classes in theater arts at Georgia State University downtown. Up until that time I could not imagine a world in which I did not care for Laura.

Fragile, lovely, hungry Laura. Edge-dancer, wing-walker, windmill-tilter, limits-pusher. From babyhood she could stand no boundaries, tolerated none. In the airless world of a small Louisiana city, even in the volatile sixties, boundaries swarmed thicker than June bugs. Her entire life was a starved scrabble after two things: freedom and love. Since the two are mutually exclusive, she achieved neither, except minimally, but she never abandoned her hectic quest. Freedom of a sort she might have had if she had been a less difficult child; Felicia was too old to keep up with her, and my father simply did not seem to see her. I was a nurturer, but no real threat as a disciplinarian. She might have soared like a small butterfly in an empty blue sky except that her need for love was visceral and unending and dragged her down out of the air, time after time, to dog the footsteps of those who could not seem to give it to her. Ravenous for love, she pursued it shrieking; repulsed, love fled her.

“Hush up that yellin’, Laura. I ain’t studyin’ you,” Felicia would say over and over. “You looks like a little ol’ baby bird, with yo’ eyes squoze shut and yo’ mouth open a mile wide. Cain’t nobody fill you up. Go on and find yo’ sister and tell her what you want.”

“Laura, get down now and let Papa work,” I would hear my father say stiffly from his study. “You’re getting that jam all over my shirt. You’re far too big to sit in laps. You should see yourself; it’s really very unattractive. And don’t cry! You cry more than any little girl your age I ever saw. Your sister doesn’t cry. You should take a leaf from her book and try smiling every now and then. People would treat you a lot better, I can tell you. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Laura Louise! Merritt! Come in here and get your sister, will you please?”

And once again I would take my beautiful, fragmented little sister, dancing and sobbing her rage and hunger, up to her room and cuddle her and shush her and whisper silliness to her, and soon she would let me dry her tears and wash her face and brush out the tangled chestnut curls that were so like our mother’s, and in an hour she would be off again, flouting rules, testing limits, pushing, pushing, pushing.

“It’s not really fair to you,” my father said in the spring of my last year in high school, after I had come back downstairs to watch TV with him after settling a wailing Laura into bed. “You’re only seventeen. You don’t have much of a life of your own, do you? It’s mostly studying and Laura. But I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re the only one who can handle her. I admit she’s too much for me. I don’t know, maybe if her mother had lived…what in the world are we going to do next year when you go to school? Should I put her in boarding school?”

“Oh, Papa, she’ll only be eight then,” I said.

I was flattered at the adult tone of the conversation and felt mature and important to be consulted about the future of my little sister. I knew that for once I had his entire attention and that he would probably take my advice. I was the one, after all, who knew her best. I sensed suddenly what sort of relationship we might have had if I had been alone with him in the house, without the hovering, importunate Laura to define and absorb me and isolate him. I knew too that I could probably create that relationship if I told him to send her away.

But in my mind there was the white rush of wings beating at windowless walls and a thin silver wailing from an empty, dark place. I knew that boarding school would send Laura mad or kill her. My stomach literally turned over. My first taste of power frightened me badly.

“No, I don’t really think that would be good for her,” I said judiciously, hoping he could not hear the pounding of my heart. “Maybe we should get someone to come in and take care of her, a live-in housekeeper, or something. Somebody younger, closer to my age so she wouldn’t seem strange. Then Felicia and the others could go on and do their work. I could ask our guidance counselor at school about it. She knows about things like that. I could even interview people, if you wanted me to.”

“See? You always know just the right thing to do,” my father said in relief, and smiled at me, and I felt the tremor of my answering smile begin on my mouth. We turned back to John Chancellor with relief, like two old married people who had just settled, indulgently, the problem of a troublesome child.

I found a young black woman to come and stay with Laura after school and half-days on Saturday. Matilda was a lunch server at my high school cafeteria and had the same hours free that Laura did. She was only two years older than I, but she seemed far ahead of me, across a chasm of adulthood. She had cared for a half-dozen younger siblings and cousins, and she had a matter-of-fact, cheerful firmness about her that soothed me and seemed, for a while, to be just the anchor to earth that Laura needed. She stopped a good bit of the acting out at her elementary school and much of the needy fussing at home. During that time it was easy to love Laura; her awful emptiness seemingly filled, we saw more of her quicksilver charm and the vein of whimsy that lay deep inside her. Her imagination was lightning quick and her ability to mime and posture was funny and true. And, her face unbloated by tears and rage, she was beautiful enough to turn heads in crowds. She was all my mother, with pale, thick, magnolia-petal skin that she never allowed the sun to stain, and Mother’s slanted sherry-colored eyes and rich spill of chestnut satin hair. Laura’s hair was glorious. She wore it tied in a high ponytail, cascading down her back, or let it fly free in shining curtains around her face. She never let anyone cut it past shoulder length, and even that was an occasion to be feared, fraught with tears and temper. The first time she had it bleached, when she was a sophomore at Westminster, I cried.

“It’s not you anymore,” I said.

“Au contraire,” she said, trying out her appalling first-year French. “It’s exactly who I am. The other was somebody else.”

But when I went away to LSU she changed again, back to the frantic, hungry small bird we had known, and began the trapped-bird battering at everyone and everything once more. We could get no sensible explanation from her for the change, except that she didn’t feel safe.

“I feel like I’m walking way up high with nothing to hold on to,” she would cry over and over. “I feel like I’m going to fall forever and ever.”

“What would it take to make you feel safe?” I said desperately. Matilda was threatening to quit if Laura did not stop shrieking and plucking at her and dogging her every step. My father had the boarding school brochures out again.

“You! I want you! I want you to come back home,” Laura wept. She was shuddering with sobs and retching. There was no doubting her sincerity. At Christmas I moved back home and began attending day classes. My father’s gratitude and Laura’s subsequent blooming were enough, I thought, to make up for the dorm and campus life that I forswore. I made a number of new friends anyway. I dated a good bit. I joined a sorority. And my grades undoubtedly benefited. I made Phi Beta Kappa, and basked in the modest glow of a number of minor achievements and awards. At my graduation, my father’s proud smile and Laura’s shining eyes gave me a salt lump in my throat and a tickle in my nose.

My graduation picture shows a tall, arresting, stooped man with thick brown hair just beginning to go gray at the temples; a tall, slightly stooped young woman in a cap and gown who looks ridiculously like him, down to the unruly shock of curly ash-brown hair and the tilted nose and sharp cheekbones; and a young girl of such vivid, blinding beauty that you cannot look away from her. She might be a budding movie actress graciously posing with tourists. Her presence captures the camera and eclipses the other two. I noticed anew that spring Saturday how eyes followed her, in her new mini that showed a great deal of white leg at the bottom and a precocious swell of white breasts at the top.

I also noticed that she was aware on every inch of her of the eyes. I remember feeling a small frisson of dread. Despite the calming presence of Matilda, there had been enough transgressions, tears, conferences with teachers, trips to smooth things over in her principal’s office, promises. Always, Laura insisted that she had been wronged and misunderstood; always the contrition was heartfelt and her fear of reproach real. And always I was the one who went, who apologized, who smoothed, who promised. I did not need trouble of a sexual nature from her, but on that day I knew, as portentously as if I had read it in sheeps’ entrails, that I was going to get it.

That night, after he had taken us to dinner in a new, baroquely awful French restaurant to celebrate and Laura had gone, reluctantly, to bed, my father told me he was getting married again. I sat still and looked at him, feeling a sort of percussion against my face as if there had been a silent explosion in the room. My mind was empty and ringing with it.

“I didn’t know you knew anybody,” I said stupidly.

“A nice woman,” he said, looking away. “Her name is Andrea. I call her Andy. She’s a widow. She lives in Pascagoula and she has a great big sailboat. She and her husband used to go all over the world in it. You and Laura will have a good time on that boat.”

I was silent, staring at him. I could think of nothing to say. A boat? All of us, him and Laura and me, on a huge boat with a woman from Pascagoula called Andy? I had never known my father to call me by any sort of nickname, nor Laura, either. Not even Mother. I had never known him to evince the slightest interest in boats or the sea. When we vacationed, we usually went to Highlands, North Carolina, where he played golf and bridge with other lawyers. I could find no picture of us as a merry, seagoing family in my mind.

“But who will run it?” I said. “Can you? Have you learned to run a boat?”

He smiled. “She has a captain who looks after it and does the actual sailing and a crew to help him. We won’t have to do anything but lie back and get suntans and eat great food and sleep with the waves rocking us. Forget the world for weeks at a time. You could get used to that, couldn’t you?”

I felt my face redden at the thought of my father and this Andy woman, in a bed rocked by the waves. In my mind she was massive and blond, and very tanned, and walked in a rolling swagger.

“When did you…I mean, I never knew you even were…you know, seeing someone,” I said, feeling the sofa rock under me as if I were already riding waves.

“Well, for some time now,” he said. “She has a little place here and one in New Orleans, too. Say, you all will really like that. It’s in the Quarter. I guess I thought you knew. Laura does.”

“Laura does?”

Nothing seemed to connect, to fit together, to make any sense.

“I told her a while back,” he said a shade too casually. “I was sure she would have told you by now.”

“I wish you’d felt you could tell me, too,” I said thickly around the tears that were pooling in my throat. “I thought you told me everything—”

“I told her because I had to talk to her about something else, and I want to tell you about that now; see what you think,” he said. “You were in the middle of your thesis when it came up. I didn’t want to bother you then. This all depends on you, Merritt. If you’re uncomfortable with it in any way, at all, we’ll make other arrangements.”

“Uncomfortable with what? You mean you wouldn’t get married if I didn’t want you to? I’d never interfere in that, Papa, if it’s what you really want—”

“No, no. We’re definitely getting married. Too late to back out now.” He laughed, and then coughed and went on. “Here’s the thing. Andy has never had children of her own, and while she’s really looking forward to getting to know you two, she feels…we feel…that she needs a little time to get used to me and my strange ways before she takes on Laura. Laura isn’t the easiest…well, you know. We thought we might take a long honeymoon cruise, maybe down around South America, maybe even as far as the Galapagos. Take our time, just bum around…and I thought it might be fun for both of you if Laura came with you to Atlanta for a year or two. I’m prepared to pay her way, of course, and she’s already accepted at Westminster. It’s the best private school up there. I had a couple of friends in the Georgia Bar Association look into it; their kids go there, too. They pulled some strings. She’s already accepted, and I’ve made all the arrangements. She starts this summer because she needs to get up to speed with the rest of her class. I know it sounds like a big responsibility, but they’ve got a bus that picks students up and drops them off, and there’s a program for students who need to stay until six or so. I’ll give her a clothes and living allowance as well as her tuition, of course. All you need to do is keep an eye on her in the evening and on weekends. You know you can handle her; you always could. And of course she’ll make friends and be out of your hair a lot of the time, and she’s surely old enough to stay by herself occasionally when you want to go out. And you will, because you’re going to knock ’em dead in Atlanta. She isn’t going to be any trouble. I’ve already talked to her about it.”

“No trouble,” I whispered. “Papa, that’s all she knows how to be. In a new city, a big one, with all those new kids and…I don’t know, the drugs and the rock concerts, and the hippies and the war protests and civil rights…she’ll be like a bomb with the fuse lit. I can’t work and run around bailing Laura out all the time; it’s going to be different up there. I’ll be trying to get a career going—”

“And fighting off the guys. I know,” he said jocularly. But he would not look at me.

“She promised,” he said. “I told her all that, and she swore on her mother’s Bible that she would do everything her teachers and you told her to do, and not make any trouble at all. I believe her. She knows I’ll have her out of there and in Saint Ida’s before she can blink if she makes one misstep. And I will. That’s a promise. But of course, if you really think it’s too much—”

Saint Ida’s. A New Orleans convent school so thoroughly and murderously cloistered that not even fathers and brothers were allowed to go further in than the beautiful old courtyard. Academically first rate, socially beyond reproach, culturally luminous in matters pertaining to the late Renaissance and backward from that. The nuns of Saint Ida’s had no truck with Rousseau and his kindred romantic sauvages, nor with much that followed them. The sixth and seventh decades of the twentieth century simply did not exist. Little outside the thick, high walls did. I had known three girls at LSU who had gone there; two were said to be lovers and the other dropped out pregnant during her first year. Stories of suicides and breakdowns among its alumni made the rounds regularly. Laura would not last a month there.

“It’s not too much,” I said in a low voice, looking down at my new rope-soled wedgies. “I wouldn’t want her at Saint Ida’s.”

“Neither would I, really, but she’s as good as there the instant she causes you any trouble,” my father said.

“Private school must be awfully expensive in Atlanta,” I said, only then feeling the heat and anger. “Are you sure you can afford it?”

He flushed.

“I can handle it,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“I won’t, then,” I said, and thought with a small curl of malice that I knew just how he could afford it. Cap’n Andy, or whatever he called her, obviously had truly big bucks, and counted them well spent if they kept a troublesome adolescent out of her venue. I would, I thought, be harboring a remittance sister.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Laura later, when I had gone upstairs and found her crouching at the top of the stairs, listening.

“I didn’t want you to worry,” she said, looking up at me through her thick gold lashes.

“Bullshit,” I said, forgetting my resolution not to use sorority language in front of her. “That’s just what you want me to do. C’mon. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She was silent. The skin at the base of her nostrils whitened. Finally she said, “I was afraid if you had time to think about it you wouldn’t let me come to Atlanta with you, and I’d have to go live with him and her. I know she doesn’t want me, but I was afraid he’d have to take me if you didn’t, or put me in some boarding school. If I had to go to Saint Ida’s I’d jump out the highest window there. If I had to go on that stupid boat with her I’d drown myself. I really would, you know.”

I didn’t know, not really, but I did know that Laura had long been half in love with easeful death, a line she espoused after I read Ode to a Nightingale to her when she was six. I thought that the darkness of death called out to a corresponding darkness in her, without her understanding its import in the least. I have always been afraid that the part of Laura that dances with self-destruction might one day win. That, knowing nothing of halfway measures, she might well jump onto broken old paving stones or into the warm, deep Gulf.

“Well, you don’t have to jump because I said you could come, as you well know, since you’ve been listening,” I said. “What about it, Pie? Do you think you can hold it in the road so I can have a job and live like a grownup? I really will have to call Papa if you can’t. This is the real world now.”

“I can,” she said fervently. “I will. I’ll grow up fast. I’ll be so grownup and responsible you won’t believe it’s me. You can get to be president of the world and I’ll be a great actress. Westminster has a super drama department. They win stuff all the time. They’ll be auditioning in September for Li’l Abner. I’m going to be in that play, Merritt. The brochure says eighth grade and up is eligible.”

I had to smile at her, even though I did not for a moment believe she would be capable of keeping her promise about responsibility. But I did believe that she would try. And her ardor was infectious; it always was. And there was something else. Much later, a continent away, she would fling it at me: “It wasn’t all give! You got your kicks for years through me! You lived a life through me you never could have had on your own!” Her words stung, but even in my anger I had to admit there was truth in them. During the years with Laura I soared to heights and sank to depths that I would never have reached on my own. It was as powerful a glue as the protective instinct she called out in me, and my love for her when she was at her best. I’ve always thought that if we had been nearer in age I couldn’t have stayed close to her, but there was never any filial competitiveness between Laura and me. On my side it was all parent; on hers, all child.

“So who’re you going to be? Daisy Mae, no doubt,” I said, ruffling her silky hair.

“Uh-uh. Moonbeam McSwine. She gets to show off everything she’s got. And you’ve got to admit I’ve got plenty.”

She pulled her Peter Max T-shirt tight over her breasts and hips. She was right. In the last year she had bloomed physically into the woman she would be, and that woman lacked nothing. I felt again the unease I had felt when I looked at her earlier that day, at graduation. It wasn’t, after all, a child I would be tending in Atlanta.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “There’s not going to be any funny stuff about sex. The first time there is I’m calling Papa. I might put up with the other stuff more than once, but the first strike is out when it comes to sex. I’m going to have to be at work late a lot of the time, and I’ll be going out with my own friends, and you’re going to be on your honor. I need to know I can trust you not to go wild with boys.”

“Are you a virgin, Merritt?” she said sweetly, crinkling her eyes at me.

“What I am is twenty-two years old,” I said coldly, angry to the core of me. The backseat of the pot-smogged Chevrolet and the damp, hot hands of the man whose name I had nearly forgotten floated into my mind and were gone again. “It’s none of your business whether I am or not. I know how to handle myself. Nothing you’ve ever done has shown me you can do that.”

“Bet you’re on the pill,” she singsonged. “Bet you’re not taking any chances on getting PG. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to get some for me? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about me getting knocked up.”

I was up and halfway down the stairs toward the living room, where my father still sat in front of the TV, before I heard her first shriek of fright. It was so desperate that I stopped and turned around to look at her. She clung rigidly to the banister, and her face and knuckles and lips were bleached white.

“I won’t ever say anything like that again,” she whispered.

“You won’t if you’re coming with me,” I said grimly.

She dropped her head onto her chest and let the curtain of hair hide her eyes. But I saw the silver snail’s tracks of tears on her chin anyway. I reached over and wiped them away with the tips of my fingers.

“Why do you do that?” I said gently. “Why do you always push things with me?”

She flipped the hair off her face and looked squarely at me. There was nothing childish in the topaz eyes.

“I have to know I can’t run you off,” she said. “I have to know you’ll stay with me no matter what I do. I have to know you won’t leave me.”

“You must know that by now. The only exception is the sex business. I will send you away over that if I have to. But you must know that I’ll stay with you otherwise. Haven’t I always?”

After a silence she said, “Are you on the pill?”

“Laura—”

“I need to know,” she said fiercely. “I need to know you won’t get pregnant and have some awful baby you’ll have to take care of!”

“I’m not on the pill and I’m not going to get pregnant,” I said in annoyance. “But if I did, I wouldn’t stop taking care of you. You could help me take care of the baby—”

“No! No baby.”

“That’s what I just said,” I said, and led her back to bed and tucked her in. She was asleep before I closed her door. But it was dawn before I finally slept.

She was as good as her word, or almost. Through most of the sprawl and scrabble of the seventies, Laura lived with me in the pretty little carriage house I found behind a big brick Buckhead estate and managed, with more success than not, to stay out of harm’s way. She never did get into the creamy little clique of sorority girls at Westminster whose fathers were the cadet corps of the city’s leadership; she went to few of the house parties and debutante balls at the Piedmont Driving Club or the Cherokee Club, and she did no volunteer work for hospitals and hotlines. She wore no starched shirtwaists and wrap skirts and kilts, either, and her grades were just enough to keep her in school. But she grew fully into the voluptuous beauty that her preteens had portended, and she had many suitors from the big houses on Habersham and West Wesley Roads. She ignored them and became thick with a small clique of taciturn, bearded, bell-bottomed, pot-smoking renegades, the ones on art and theater and dance scholarships, the ones who hung out in the burgeoning Virginia-Highlands and Little Five Points sections after school, talking endlessly about creativity and their stake in it, about their art, about their work. I was never quite sure what most of them worked at, but work they did. Or at least, they did not seem to play. They were the most detached, uncommunicative group of young people I ever saw, except among themselves. They might have existed in any decade; in any decade they would have been the ones who painted the flats and fiddled with the lights and drowned themselves in booming, jittering music, their ears stoppered with plugs and their faces empty and inward. They acted and rehearsed and danced and plucked or tooted at instruments; they stayed late and alone in stark, white-lit painting and sculpture laboratories, on empty stages. In my time we would have called them beats, LSU being a good ten years behind the rest of the country in its argot. I think they called themselves freaks. The decade washed over them carrying the flotsam and jetsam of revolt: Kent State and terrorists and protests and pornography and drugs and gas shortages and streakers and Richard Nixon’s disgrace and fall and disco and Roots and NOW. And they scarcely noticed. They worked. I did not know whether to be glad or sorry.

Laura did indeed make the cast of L’il Abner, and everything else that Westminster mounted on its sleek new proscenium thrust stage. She was electric on a stage. She was beautiful and more than that; she was compelling far past her years. She had an eccentric, focused talent that would have been notable in one ten years older. She went about with the pack of darkling young who were her constant companions, her family, and, I suspected, her safety net. If she had a boyfriend I never knew it. If the group had sex, casual or otherwise, among themselves, I never knew that either. When Laura wasn’t in a play she was in rehearsals, writing scripts and screenplays, at the movies with the group, or talking about all of it in one coffee shop or basement rec room or black-painted, spotlit bedroom or another. I might have wished a more balanced life for her, better grades, more college and matrimonial prospects, but in truth, I was mainly relieved that she was happy in her amniotic bubble of obsession, and thankful that she felt safe there. I knew she did feel safe. Laura safe was Laura grooving on an even keel. I seldom went over to Westminster for anything but a conference on her grades or to see her perform.

“She should go on to a good drama school,” one of her advisors told me when she was a sophomore. “She has a real gift. I think she could be one of the ones who makes it on TV or Broadway. Maybe even movies. Providing she’s tough enough to stick out the lean times, of course, and that’s something neither I nor she can know yet. What’s your feeling about that?”

“I don’t know either,” I said. “I expect if she had some support, some help, somebody with her all the time, she could stick it.”

“This she’d have to do alone,” he said. “And she’d have to do it in New York or L.A. She can’t get what she needs here. She’s talking about the Actor’s Workshop in New York. I think she could get in. Could you and her father swing that, do you think?”

“We could swing the money,” I said slowly, thinking of the never-ceasing largesse of Cap’n Andy that kept Laura off her boat and out of her salt-blond hair. “I don’t know about her going away by herself, though. She’s never been alone—”

“Could you handle New York by yourself if you went to Actor’s Workshop?” I asked her toward the end of her junior year. “I mean, with just a roommate? You know I can’t pick up and leave the agency and go with you.”

“Sure I could,” she said. “I could come home whenever I wanted to. You could come up. Would you let me go, that’s the question.”

“You’ll be eighteen then,” I said. “It will be your decision, not mine. If you think you can handle it, it’s entirely your business.”

She frowned. “But I want you to tell me it’s all right to go.”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “You need to know that inside yourself.”

“No, you tell me,” she said stubbornly.

“I’m your sister, Laura, not your mother,” I said crisply. It seemed to me, suddenly, that we both needed to hear me say that.

“Well, I know that,” Laura said, and flung away trailing the fringes of her tattered blue jeans over her bare feet. But at the door she stopped and looked back at me. There were fine white rings around her eyes; I had not seen them there for a long time. I would, I knew, do a lot of thinking about New York. I hoped she would, too.

In the end, it was academic, because my father died the next winter. He had a heart attack somewhere at sea off Baja, California, and was dead by the time the rescue helicopter came scissoring in. I was shocked and stricken, but somehow dimly, as if he had existed on another plane than Laura and me, and perhaps by then he did. A death unseen, I have learned, is a death unrealized. I watched my mother die, touched her new coldness. It is not she who comes to trouble, tentatively, my dreams, to seek validation. It is, even now, my father.

Laura was cool and flip, whether protectively or not I could not tell.

“Yo, ho ho,” she said. “We’ll get enough money for Actor’s Workshop, won’t we?”

We didn’t. He left the Baton Rouge house and his meager estate to Cap’n Andy, and she promptly sold the house, withdrew her support to Laura, and bought a bigger boat. By the time her lawyers got around to telling us that we were essentially on our own, she was casting her net in the rich waters off Sardinia. I found it was hardly difficult at all to bury the pain of that, but Laura was frantic.

“What am I going to do?” she sobbed. “My grades aren’t good enough for a scholarship. Can you send me? Do you make enough?”

“I just can’t, Pie,” I said, in anguish at her pain, but somehow relieved, too. The thought of Laura in New York alone had been a stone in my heart for a long time. “I could probably send you to Georgia, or Georgia State, but I’m not making the kind of money for anything else. I don’t even know if I can swing the next two years at Westminster.”

“Then get another job,” she shouted, her face suddenly contorted with rage and grief. “Work nights! Borrow it! Or I’ll run away, I swear I will; I’ll go to New York or Hollywood on my own! Bootsie Cohn is going after graduation; I’ll go with her! I’ll be a hooker if I have to! I hate him! I hate her! I hate you!”

Her words were a knife in my heart, but I was angry with her, too. I loved her and the need to protect her ran deep, but I had had her in the fullest sense of the word since her babyhood, and I was suddenly weary of the roller coaster that was life with Laura.

“Then by all means hit the road,” I said coldly. “Maybe you could send me a buck or two along the way. You could probably pay me back for what I’ve spent on you in twenty or thirty years.”

She slammed out of the house, and did not come home for three days. After learning from Westminster that she had been in school all three days, and calling around until I reached the mother of the emaciated redhead to whose house she had gone, I did not try to contact her further. She’ll come home when her clothes get dirty, I thought. She’ll come home when she needs some money. I went to work, came home, cooked my dinners, and settled down with my checkbook and records to see how we were going to be able to live. I will at least have some peace and privacy for a little while, I thought. But I did not enjoy it. Her absence clamored in the house. Even gone, Laura pulled at me like the moon the tide. She still does.

She did come home, eventually, but that was the real beginning of her long, careening odyssey away from me. She was either sullen or rebellious, spent more and more time with her flock of gifted starlings, and began to get into trouble. She skipped school, flew into rages when she was there, smoked cigarettes in the restrooms and on the grounds, smelled of a sweeter, slyer smoke when she finally came in. The conferences concerning her behavior began. I was soon averaging one a week. Luckily, my boss was a laid-back ex-flower child who did not care when his staff got their work done, so long as they did. I did a lot of mine at home, at night, trying not to watch the clock as I waited for my sister to come home, trying to think that things would soon right themselves. I suppose I always knew that I was a timid disciplinarian, that I feared her pain more than her capacity for self-destruction. I had always been able to redeem Laura with love.

The night she came in frankly drunk, with magenta suck marks on her neck and shoulders and her now-blond hair in her eyes and her skirt conspicuously backward, I lowered the boom on her. My heart quailed, but I hardened it.

“Maybe I can’t pay for Saint Ida’s,” I said, “but I can manage one or two boarding schools you would like a whole lot less. There’s one in the mountains where you work in the kitchen and the pigsty to help pay your tuition. I don’t think it’s got a proscenium thrust to its name. Stop this crap or you’re up there, I promise you. I called them today. And if you don’t think I mean it, try me. I told you I wasn’t going to put up with any slutty stuff, and that includes drinking.”

I hoped she would mistake the tremor in my voice for anger.

“You can’t make me,” she slurred. “You’re not my fucking mother.”

“No? I fucking well thought I was, the way you’ve been behaving,” I threw back at her furiously. “Decide now, toots, I’m not going to tell you again.”

“How’re you gonna stop me?” she said truculently, but I thought I saw hesitation on her face. Even like this, slack-faced and with her mouth pulped and smeared, she was still one of the prettiest things I had ever seen. Fear and anger and love warred inside me.

“I’m going to stop paying your tuition at Westminster,” I said. “And you can kiss your allowance good-bye. I’m going to tell the mothers of all your little playmates not to let you in their houses. And I’m going to call the cops the first night you aren’t in this house. You’re underage, and they’ll pick you up within the hour. I don’t think you’d like juvie any more than you would Saint Ida’s or Lottie Brewster Academy.”

She stared at me for a long time, and then dropped her eyes and ran, stumbling, to her room and slammed her door. She did not do it again.

For a long time after that she seemed fairly content, if never quite the winged thing she had been. She finished Westminster with barely passing grades and a string of triumphs on the stage, and started at Georgia State, with resignation if little enthusiasm, in the fall of her eighteenth year. There was a good, if not remarkable, drama department there, and considerable lagniappe in the person of a charismatic young professor who eventually directed her in some truly luminous, innovative plays. Her awesome focus kicked back in and her strange, canted gift throve. She won raves in the local newspapers and more when the troupe toured around the South. She was invited to try out for several local professional productions and the cast of one national touring company, and garnered high praise there, too. She had, apparently, no time for anything but the theater; for that entire first year I do not think she went out with a young man. I praised her, went to all her performances, stayed up to have cocoa and cookies with her when she came late from rehearsals and performances. Often we would talk and laugh until nearly dawn. My own work did not seem to suffer, nor did hers. I was, after all, still only twenty-eight, and she was eighteen. The gap between us seemed far smaller than it had when she was a child. She had, as she had once promised, grown up fast. For the first time I felt that the bond between us was more that of best friends, of true sisters, than that of parent and child. My own star was rising steadily at my agency, with a creative directorship in view, and I had several pleasant, if not flammable, relationships with attractive young men. And I had my sustaining friendship with Crisscross. She had her theater and her future. Things were, for a time, really good between us. Looking back, I can see that it was the best time by far.

And then I met Pom Fowler, and it was as if the year of peace and affection had never been. From the beginning, she hated him. She had not liked most of my other men friends, but there had been none of the spitting animosity that Pom called out. More than that, he seemed somehow to actually frighten her.

“He looks like that stupid little asshole on the top of wedding cakes,” she said scornfully, her voice shaking. “He’s ugly and stupid and he smells like a hospital, and goes on and on about the poor people till you want to barf. Shit, why can’t he pay that kind of attention to you? To us? We’re poor, too! He doesn’t even act like I’m in the room. And those snotty-nosed little brats…how can you oooh and ahhh over them like that? They’re horrible children! They hate you, anybody could see that.”

I knew that she had grasped the seriousness of Pom’s and my relationship, even though I was careful to downplay it and he, having been warned, tried his best to do so, too. He succeeded only in seeming to ignore her; even I could see that. Only the two little boys made much over Laura, and they could not keep away from her. Something in her face and manner drew them like magnets. They were at her heels constantly when Pom brought them over. But she was so sharp with them that he did not do it often. We stayed mostly at his house, where she would not go. She did not tell me why until nearly a year after she met Pom.

“You think I get a big thrill out of watching those brats act like you’re going to poison them and waiting for you and him to go upstairs to hump and leave me with them?” she hissed then, on a day when I had asked her, once again, to spend Sunday with us and the boys at the house in Garden Hills.

“You’re being terribly unfair,” I said to her. “They’re just little boys who’ve lost their mother, and now they’re afraid they’re going to lose their father, too. They’re much better about me than they were. You can see that. It’s going to be fine eventually, I promise. Why can’t you see that Pom likes you and wants to be friends?”

“Wrong! He doesn’t want to be my friend, he wants me to be gone! He doesn’t give a shit about anything but getting you to take care of his precious little house apes so he can go make millions healing the fucking sick! But he’s too big a coward to tell me to butt out himself; he wants you to do it. You think I can’t tell, but I can.”

She was so upset that there was a choking whistling sound in her chest, and her white face was splotched with red welts. I put my arms around her and drew her down on the sofa beside me so I could look into her face.

“He doesn’t have a cowardly bone in his body,” I said. “He’s the bravest man I’ve ever known and the best. He’s been beaten and hosed in the civil rights marches; he was in Africa in the Peace Corps. He’s spent the last two years working eighteen hours a day in a clinic that treats people for free, down in the worst of the housing projects where all the rioting is, and the drugs and the crime and everything. He wants to spend his life doing that; he’s going to establish his own free clinic when he can. He doesn’t care anything about money; he’ll probably never have a dime to call his own. And he doesn’t want you to butt out. He wants you to butt in. He wants you to come and live with us for as long as you like…if we should get married, that is.”

She stared at me for a long time, and then she said, softly and bitterly, “If you do that you will never see me again. If you move in there and play wifey to that man and mother to those retarded kids, I’ll be gone before you’ve unpacked your suitcases. If you’d rather take care of another bitch’s little bastards than your own sister, go right ahead and see how long I hang around here.”

I looked at her in shock and incredulity. Her jealousy and terror were so complete and devouring that I could not seem to breathe the air in which they reverberated. I don’t know, now, why I was so utterly dumbfounded by her words, but I was.

Finally I whispered, “What has gotten into you? You’re nineteen years old! You’re a junior in college, with a wonderful career ahead of you; you’ve been planning to go to New York when you graduate for a long time now. You don’t need me to take care of you any longer. For goodness sake, Laura! You’re my sister, not my child. You don’t need me!”

“You promised,” she said, the tears beginning.

Pom and I were married in the little Mikell Chapel of Saint Philip’s Cathedral the following June, with only his parents and brother and sister-in-law and the boys and Crisscross present. Laura was not there. She had left a week before to go with the vulpine, redheaded Bootsie Cohn to California where, she said, Bootsie had been promised a part in a movie being shot in the Sonoma wine country. The second unit director, who was Bootsie’s boyfriend, had promised he could get Laura a job in the production company.

“Give my regards to Dr. Kildare and tell him to go fuck himself,” the note that I found on the kitchen table the next morning said. “Tell him not to worry, he won’t see me again. Neither will you. I’m taking your Mastercard. Maybe I’ll even pay you back one day, but don’t hold your breath.”

It was signed Laura Louise Mason.

And, except for a very few times when she came through town on some theater movie business or another, I did not touch the sweet white flesh of my sister Laura again for a long, long time, though I sometimes glimpsed a bit of it, briefly, on film.

There was never a day between that one and this that I have not missed her.

On the hot afternoon in the early summer of 1995, when I went down through the parched grass to the Chattahoochee River behind our house to set the latest Rattus ratti free, I still missed her as sharply as ever. I could almost see the child she had been skipping ahead of me on the path in the heat shimmer; I could almost see the angry, beautiful nineteen-year-old she had been when she left.

“I miss my girls,” I whispered to the big black rats I was bearing to freedom in the wire trap. “I miss Laura. I miss Glynn.”

My sister. My daughter. My sister, Laura, my daughter, Glynn, the thought of whom still, after sixteen years, gave me a small, fresh shock of joy and surprise. My daughter, my good, good girl…

The rats, who had been quiet, looked at me with their whiskered Chinese faces and black, glinting little eyes, and began again to scrabble and squeak in their prison.

“Chill out,” I said, shaking the cages slightly. “You’re almost home free.”

2

Pom was obsessed with the rats. The first thing he did when he got up in the morning and came home at night was to check for bodies. When the first poison failed to give satisfaction, the exterminators brought out different traps, matte black and high-tech, and placed them about, baited with poisoned birdseed. Birdseed was, they said knowingly, the rat chow of choice. Ours were not interested, but Mommee was: The first night the traps were set out we heard a muffled thump and a howl and found Mommee shrieking in the upstairs hall, her hand stuck in one of the traps. After that we set them out of sight, but the rats did not bite. Instead they gnawed electrical cords and burrowed through two inches of carpet and flooring to get into a closet where I had stored and forgotten a waxed wheel of cheddar from Vermont. We found their neat little oblong droppings in different places every morning. The few who did take the bait inevitably died, reeking, in the walls.

The rats came, the exterminators said, from the river and the grass and weeds around it. Another big development was going up just upstream from us, and when the trees were felled and the ground cleared the rats came downstream looking for more hospitable housing. Pom had suffered the squadrons of invading raccoons with fairly good grace, because they had not yet managed to get into the house, but the rats maddened him.

“Somebody damned well should have told us about that development before we closed on this house,” he raged. “But oh, no; everybody swore that all the rest of the river land belonged to a little old lady who would never sell. I wouldn’t have bought this house if I’d thought we were going to be covered up with subdivisions and rats.”

“Well, little old ladies will go and die,” I said, giving his untidy hair a ruffle. “Apparently her children didn’t share her ecological ideals.”

“We might as well have stayed in Garden Hills,” he grumbled.

I wish we had, I thought, but did not say.

Pom bought the house on the river five years before, when a fellow physician at Buckhead Hospital retired and moved to Captiva. He went with his friend out to see his house on the river and called the real estate agent that night. He drove me and the children out to see it the next day, as a surprise. The four of us stood in the pale lemon sunshine of a Georgia autumn and looked at the big stone pile fitted into the edge of the river forest and fronted with green winter rye as smooth as a goofy golf course. Behind it the hardwoods flamed and the river ran swift and silent between its overgrown banks. There were no other houses in sight. Plantings were lush and perfectly tended, chrysanthemums burned in the neatly mulched borders and in big Chinese urns on the terrace, and a small oblong attached to the Realtor’s sign said “heated pool.” The house was intimidating to me; it seemed enormous in the emptiness and the river silence. It was well designed, obviously the work of an architect and not a builder drunk on châteaux and faux Tudor; it fit its site nicely, and there was not a Palladian window in it. I thought it was handsome, and the boys and Glynn frankly gaped in awe. But it did not then and does not now look like home.

“Do you like it?” Pom grinned.

“For what? To live in?” said seventeen-year-old Jeff.

“Where are all the neighbors?” said eleven-year-old Glynn.

“There’s a pool! Cool! The guys will all want to come home with me,” said Chip, who was twenty and in his sophomore year at Wake Forest. His fraternity was so far the dominant institution in his life.

“Pom, I could never keep this thing clean,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. I had Ina three mornings a week now, and I knew that she had more time. In truth, I loved the shabby, bursting Cape Cod in Garden Hills where we had raised his sons and our daughter. I loved my neighbors and the aging, jointly owned pool and playground and the overwhelming sense of community that emanated from the neighborhood like sweet breath. I did not want to move. We had never even seriously talked about moving.

It was obvious that Pom loved the house. We needed the room, he said; the boys already needed a place to entertain their friends and Glynn soon would. Westminster was just over the hill; I wouldn’t spend hours car pooling anymore. There was luxury shopping and some good new restaurants over in nearby Vinings. He was sick of the fumes and clamor of the city; he wanted us to have the peace of the river and the woods while we were still young enough to enjoy them. He had always missed the unspoiled outdoors of his boyhood. He could have the hunting dogs he had long wanted; Glynn could have her pony at last. I could garden to my heart’s content. I could have a splendid custom office for the freelance writing I planned to do, now that the children were older. And it undeniably lent the clinics an air of respectability and substance to have their director living in a house like this. It would be good for business and even better for entertaining, and he was going to have to do increasingly more of that.

“It’s not going to hurt Glynn’s prospects to live here, either,” he said, smiling at her and then at me.

“Prospects for what?” Glynn and I said together.

“Oh…the Peachtree Debutante Club and the Junior League and all that stuff, an appropriate marriage,” he said, flipping the back of Glynn’s smooth, ash-blond Dorothy Hamill cut. “I know you don’t care about that stuff now, Punkin, but you will.”

“No, I won’t,” she said with her lips, but there was no sound behind it. I don’t think Pom noticed. I looked at him in amazement. I did not know he cared about that stuff, either. I didn’t know he used terms like “appropriate marriage.” I didn’t know he wanted a house like this. When had all this happened?

We closed on the house the following week and moved in just after Thanksgiving. Our first Christmas there looked like Lord and Taylor’s Fifth Avenue window. The tree that stood in the two-story foyer was fifteen feet tall. Anything else would have looked like a toy. The children and I crept about the huge new spaces, getting lost and looking involuntarily over our shoulders and out into the dark winter woods, where nothing or anything might be watching us. Pom worked as late and long as he ever had, but he never failed to take a turn around his castle when he got in at night. The rest of us came to appreciate much about it; Pom fell deeper and deeper in love. He hated the encroaching armies of shoddy, expensive subdivisions that swarmed around it as a cultivated Roman might hate the battering Visigoths, and I think the rats came to be a symbol of all that threatened his new kingdom. He would not rest until he ousted them.

For my part, I was glad to have the prospect of neighbors, even the kind who would live with Palladian windows and fake crenellations, and their vanguards, the rats, never appalled and disgusted me as they did Pom. I even began, secretly and with not a little shame, to root for them in the ongoing war that they could not win.

Finally Pom settled on a fleet of small wire humane traps baited with unpoisoned birdseed, that he scattered all over the house except in Mommee’s regular orbit. They worked well. We caught rats in droves. He fastened ropes to the traps and simply took them and their writhing cargo down to the river and lowered them. When the traps stopped bobbing and bucking, he hauled them up and dumped out his drowned victims and brought the traps back and set them out again that night. But these dawn executions cut into his working time, and he soon turned the task over to me. I protested, but he held firm.

“Come on, Merritt, surely you can lower a rat trap in the river,” he said. “It only takes a minute or two. Just dump ’em in the weeds afterwards. I don’t want to have to do it at midnight. You can take the dogs for a run while you’re at it. I really don’t ask you to do much of anything extra.”

He didn’t. Mommee was the only exception, and sanctioned time away from her was hardly an imposition. Shamed, I agreed to take rat duty. The very first day I did it the solution struck me. By now, I felt a special bond with the rats. I thought that the good souls who made up the Underground Railroad might have felt something of the same affection for the fleeing slaves who passed through their venues. It did occur to me, early on, that the rats I freed might be simply circling back into the house, but that did not bother me as much as the thought of more poison or neck-breaking traps. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have room for them.

On this day the dogs larruped ahead of me, running in crazy circles in the tall grass and broom sedge that bordered the path, their noses scouring the earth and their fringed tails waving. The sun bounced off their sleek coats. The drone of insects and the buzzing of cicadas and the soft purling of the river as it ran over the small rapids off our bank were the only sounds. Even the rats fell silent. It was very hot and still and seemed no time at all.

I reached the bank of the river and knelt and opened the traps. The two rats blinked and wriggled their snouts for a moment, but they did not move.

“Haul ass, bubbas,” I whispered, and shook the cages, and they streaked for freedom in the weeds, as fast in their clumsiness as small alligators. I looked after them until the underbrush had closed around them, and then I dumped the traps into the river and pulled them out so that they would be wet when I went back and stretched out on the bank in the shade and closed my eyes. I heard the dogs come bounding past me, heard the twin choonks as they went into the river, but I did not open my eyes. I lay still, listening to the cicadas. The heat pressed down on me like a fist. It struck me that I had never heard July flies at the beginning of June before.

It had been a strange winter and spring. Christmas Day had seen an afternoon temperature of seventy-eight, and by February first the daffodils and crocuses were in full bloom. By March everything was lush and green, and then a series of late ice storms blasted much of the green black. April, usually as wet and green as the bottom of a lake, was so dry that grass seared and new blooms withered. May, usually balmy and perfect, was cold again. And now, in early June, there had been a string of days so heat-stifled and stale that it might be late August. But no summer storms swept in from the west to relieve us.

Nationally things were no better. Everything seemed out of kilter. A spring and summer of record-breaking heat was forecast for the West, while in the East neither the National Weather Service nor the Farmers’ Almanac nor the weather wackos foresaw an end to the blistering drought. Some said it was El Niño, some the widening hole in the ozone layer, some a Muslim conspiracy to bring the industrial West to its knees. Everybody had a theory. A renegade climatologist in Mono Lake, California, was predicting catastrophic earthquakes all over the country before fall. Since he was a pupil of the gentleman who had predicted the disaster on the New Madrid fault years before, which had not occurred, the media did not give him much credibility, but accorded him endless ink nonetheless. Even those of us who had tired of the litany of doom the strange, unsettled weather called forth felt a slight, ceaseless visceral unease. The hairs on my arms and at the base of my scalp crawled often, for no reason at all.

“Don’t you feel it?” I had said to Pom at breakfast just the weekend before, holding up my goose-bumped arms for his inspection.

“Nope. But you’re a walking barometer. Why don’t you go swimming? You haven’t used the pool in ages.”

“Mommee always wants to go in when I do,” I said. “I’m afraid she’ll get in over her head and I won’t be able to get her out.”

“Let her swim with you, it might calm her,” he said, making notes on an edge of the newspaper. I saw that he was adding up a column of figures. “Take Ina in with you. You could surely handle her together.”

“Can you see Ina in a bathing suit, towing Mommee around our pool?” I said, beginning to laugh. Ina was built like an interior lineman, wore faultlessly tailored blazers and slacks and Doc Martens, and was active in NOW. She referred to herself as a personal household assistant. I didn’t care what she called herself as long as she stayed; she was worth every cent of the scalp-crawling salary we paid her. She could have tossed Mommee across the room if she had wanted to, but she did not like dealing with her. Mommee needed, she insisted, her own attendant, a practical nurse or some other substantial companion. I agreed with her, but Pom did not.

“I will not have a stranger changing my mother’s diapers,” he said, and that was that. Diaper duty fell to me. I didn’t really mind. Disposables were not difficult to deal with, and Mommee was usually docile with me. It was implicit in the contract, after all.

“You let Ina get away with murder,” he said, not looking up. “For what we pay her she ought to do a water ballet every afternoon, if you want her to.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. He kissed me on the top of my head and went off to the clinic, still staring at the figures on the scrap of newsprint.

Now I lay on my back with my arm over my eyes, seeing wheeling black spots against dark red and feeling sweat gather at my hairline and thinking about earthquakes. I thought about Laura, too. The familiar dull worry began, deep inside me; the old pain bloomed softly along its pathway of scar tissue. Irritation followed. It was just like Laura to locate herself squarely on top of the San Andreas fault.

Laura lived just outside Palm Springs now, in what looked to be a kind of latter-day Anasazi dwelling carved out of the base of the great jagged mountains that swept abruptly into the desert sky. It looked, in the photographs she had sent when she moved there, strange and ancient and enchanting. It was a condo, and was, she wrote, so expensive that she was sure Sonny shit whenever he wrote out her alimony check. Sonny was her ex-husband, a minor filmmaker and major coke addict. He was her third ex. The other two had been in “the industry,” as Laura called it, but in more major positions than Sonny.

Laura seemed to be marrying in the same descending order that her career followed. She was a photographer’s stylist now, and in her spare time made what she called earth adornments, jewelry made from desert stones and horn and shell, and wrote New Age poetry. In her photos she was still, at thirty-eight, as blindingly beautiful to me as she had been at eighteen, but it was the tragedy of her life that the camera did not find her so.

“The camera doesn’t love me,” she had written disconsolately after her first film, a slight thing about three Southern sorority girls during the civil rights era, bombed spectacularly. “I simply don’t photograph. I had a little surgery; David thought it might be something to do with my chin and nose, but that wasn’t it. It comes from the inside, David says. Whatever I have on the stage doesn’t get through the lens.”

David was her first husband, the director of the failed sorority movie. He was on a fast track then, young and promising and hip, and he left his second trophy wife to marry Laura. Both of them were hot, so the buzz went. The little movie’s failure did not even slow David’s trajectory; his is an awesome name in Hollywood now. But it shod Laura with lead. There had been a few other small movies, because she was obviously a gifted actress, and a good bit of television, but nothing stuck. She had done highly lauded stage work in L.A., and still did some, mainly with touring companies, and a few commercials, but there again the fickle camera refused to connect with her. Now, in addition to the stylist’s job and the jewelry and poetry, she did dinner theaters around the state, and a very occasional low-budget movie, and worked sometimes as script supervisor or makeup or wardrobe stylist, and was thinking of becoming an agent. After all, she wrote, she knew virtually everybody who was anybody in the industry, and David and Marcus, the middle-level studio executive who followed David, owed her. Her contacts were faultless.

“And you have to admit I can still hack it in the looks department,” she said in the latest of her letters. I did have to admit it. Despite the periodic dark times she went through, she looked stunning, vivid, and bursting with health and vitality. But I could not read her sherry eyes. They shone with such an opaque glitter that light seemed to bounce back from them.

“Coke,” Pom said matter-of-factly when I showed him the photo.

“No. She promised not,” I said.

“I know it when I see it, Merritt,” he said. “I see it all day.”

“I don’t believe it. She couldn’t hold down all the jobs she does if she was on coke.”

“Sure she could, for a good while. It’s a powerful stimulant. You can run on it twenty-four hours a day. If she’s just started back, she could go for months yet. We’ll know when the telegrams for money start coming, won’t we?”

Pom and I had bailed Laura out of two bad times, when she lost jobs and husbands and condos at the same time. He had always thought drugs were involved. I had put them down to her innate fragility and her inability still to handle being alone for long periods. She was self-destructive then, erratic and inconstant and somehow insatiable. But I had not believed she would turn to drugs or alcohol. She had always been so careful about what she ate and drank, had exercised so meticulously, had had a daunting regimen of self-care and anointing. And it had been years, literally, since the last telegram.

Now, though, I lay in the thick heat of Georgia and thought of my little sister in her magical cave, astride the place where two great tectonic plates met, self-destructing, if my husband was right, all over the high desert.

“I should go get her,” I said to Pom when we had that conversation about her. “Just go out there and snatch her back. She doesn’t do this when there’s somebody around to bolster her. I could steady her. She could make good money in local theater and television. She could help with Mommee, maybe, until she gets her own place. And you know Glynn adores her.”

It was true; the few times that Laura had visited us, flitting through town like a migrating butterfly, Glynn had been fascinated with her. And she had seemed to adore Glynn, spending endless hours with her, dressing up and showing my shy child her exotic case full of stage makeup, rearranging Glynn’s thick, tawny hair. Glynn’s first word had been ’Aura. She still called Laura that sometimes. Laura actually courted Glynn, almost flirting with her, watching me to see how I reacted. I didn’t care then. I was glad for the attraction between them. I still thought something might bring Laura home one day.

I still did not see the danger in her.

“Not on your life,” Pom said, when I spoke of bringing Laura back to Atlanta. “She made her bed. Or beds. Let her lie in them. I’m not having an addict in the house with Glynn.”

I did not think he really considered Laura an addict. He had always seemed to like her, to be fascinated with her even in the face of her rejection of him. He was impatient with her inability to order her life, but he had not demurred when the requests for money came in. He simply did not want his own orderly life disarrayed, I thought, especially with Mommee worsening. And he was, of course, accustomed to command. All doctors are.

Nevertheless, the remark about Laura’s being an addict stung.

“No addicts in the house with your daughter, nossir,” I muttered after he had left for work. “Just a madwoman.”

But I was not ready to say this to him. The intimation that his mother might be mad gave him real pain. Sooner or later, I thought, he would work through his denial, and then he himself would see what needed to be done. Action would follow swiftly. It always did when Pom saw the need for it.

The sun moved to the west and broke free of the shading trees. I drifted, sweating and flinching away from the hum of midges and gnats. Their sound, and that of the chuckling of the river, seemed to swell and fade in my ears like the tide. Finally it stopped. I dozed, and did not wake until a shower of droplets hit me. I sat up, blinking stupidly. The dogs were milling about me, shaking themselves. River water was flying everywhere. It felt wonderful, like liquid ice on my sweating skin. The powerful smell of wet dog ran up my nose almost like the scent of skunk, burning not unpleasantly.

All of a sudden I was so hot that I could not bear my clothes, could hardly bear my own skin. I stood up and shucked off my shorts and T-shirt and panties and bra, and hit the water in a flat, clumsy racing dive. I knew that it was deep here off this bank, dark and murky in its depths, undercutting the bank. I had lain here for hours at a time before, watching for the huge, lazy catfish that hung suspended there sometimes, seemingly trapped in the still, particulate layers of sunlit water before the thick darkness started. The river closed over me with a shock of coldness that stopped my breath for a moment. Our cold May still lived here, in the water.

I opened my eyes underwater. It was like looking through heavy scrim. The water tasted of mud and fish, an oddly clean taste. I could see the layers of sunlight above me, and in them, the steadily pumping legs of the dogs. They had joined me in the water.

I gave a lazy kick and my head broke the surface. The sun was warm on it and on my shoulders, though the cold still claimed the lower part of me. It was a wonderful feeling, both exhilarating and silkily indolent. I was a good swimmer, and my long bones seemed to float me effortlessly. I had won meets in high school, and been a lifeguard two years running at our community pool during my summer vacations from college. I loved the water. It is like a second element to me.

I turned over and did a fast, easy crawl out into the middle, where the current was stronger, and then turned over and churned back to the bank in a back stroke. The dogs were trailing along behind me, their sleek, wet skulls beautiful, their healthy teeth shining in their twin grins. But they were beginning to breathe heavily, and I did not want them to go far from shore. For a time the three of us paddled mindlessly in the pool of sunlight near the bank, lost in pure sensory pleasure. Once or twice I porpoise-dove down into the darkness and came up trailing bubbles, for the sheer joy of it.

“I’m forever blowing bubbles,” I sang to the dogs.

Samson looked over my shoulder and stiffened, treading water. He gave a low, breathy woof. I turned.

One of the rats was swimming toward us, his wet head barely breaking the surface. He swam steadily and strongly, looking directly at me with his glittering eyes. I trod water, too, watching him in disbelief. I had never heard that rats swam unless they had to. Certainly not straight toward people and dogs. Could he be rabid? A waterborne rabid rat. Under the spurt of alarm, I thought of President Jimmy Carter and the swimming rabbit that the press had made so much of. The banzai bunny, I thought they had called it.

“Shoo!” I shouted, splashing water at the rat. “Go on back!”

The dogs headed purposefully for the swimming rat, ears flattened, eyes intently focused.

“Get out of here before you get retrieved,” I shouted, and splashed again, and the rat turned and made smoothly for the bank. He scurried up it and torqued off into the undergrowth. The dogs, bored and tired, abandoned the chase and dropped down on the bank and regarded me alertly, panting. Still I did not come out of the water. It simply felt too good.

“We could start our own theme park, make some bucks,” I told Samson and Delilah around a mouthful of brown-tasting river water. “Forget the dolphins. Welcome to Rat World. Come swim with the rats.”

This struck me as so funny that I began to laugh aloud, and swallowed water, and floundered out and up the bank and flopped naked in the sun beside them, laughing and coughing. I don’t remember ever feeling quite the same kind of suspended well being as I did that afternoon. Only when the big bronze bell that we kept in the kitchen sounded did I remember where I was, and that we were going out to Pom’s fund-raiser in less than two hours and I had just ruined my hair. And that Mommee was in some sort of uproar again. That was what the bell meant. Ina rang it whenever Mommee had a spell and I was not at hand. Mommee would not calm down, these days, for anyone but Pom or me. Usually that meant me.

“Shit,” I said drearily, and climbed to my feet and dragged my dry clothes on over my wet body and started for the house. “This has got to stop.”

I had only recently come to feel this. Or rather, I suppose that I had felt it for some time and had not let the feeling form itself into a thought, much less one I would voice to Pom. But Mommee’s slide into senility had accelerated rapidly this summer, as if controlled somehow by the strange weather, and few days recently had gone by without alarms and tears and craziness, and such increasing disorientation that I dared not, now, leave her alone at all. Once she had wandered out onto the verandah while I was taking a shower and headed for the river, stumping along at a good clip in her flowered duster, her gilt-blond wig riding high and goofily on her head. Ina had caught her more than halfway to the water. Another time she had turned on all the stove burners and pulled out empty saucepans and set them on the burners. Finally the stink of burning metal brought me at a run; I had thought she was asleep in her room. She usually was, at that time of day. The very next day she had taken my gardening shears and gone out into the back garden and cut the heads off every single one of the antique roses I had coaxed lovingly into showy profusion there. I found her strewing the petals from my murdered Love, Honor, and Cherishes on the grass, humming and mumbling. When I cried out in horror she began to wail and made for the river again. I don’t think I was very gentle with her when I caught her and marched her back to her room.

Since then I was beginning to have distinctly mutinous thoughts about Mommee. I was beginning to frame eloquent arguments for live-in help with her or even a good nursing home; I went about muttering them under my breath often, tasting the validity of them. I did not know what it was going to take to sway Pom, but I knew, now, that I needed to try. Even when I cringed with guilt, even when I knew that it was not her fault, that she would not have chosen dementia, I knew it. No one in the house with Mommee had any sort of life. Glynn had taken to staying at school late to work on her painting or in her locked room reading and listening to music when she was at home. She had stopped having her friends over after school almost a year ago. She was as agreeable and industrious as ever, but there was something haunted and strained about her face this summer. It seemed thinner, finer-boned, sharp-edged, almost as if her lovely skull had shrunk. She no longer laughed.

This frightened me thoroughly. She had had such a near brush with anorexia when she was thirteen that I had taken her to our family doctor, and, on his advice, to a therapist who specialized in eating disorders. Because she was so young, and a gymnast to boot, he had been hesitant to say that she had clinical anorexia, but her thinness was truly alarming to me. After six months in therapy she began to eat more and gained some of the weight back, but her delicate exuberance did not really return, and she became a child of silence, secretive and obedient and as severely, chastely loving as an effigy on a medieval tomb.

I had told my fears about her to Pom only a week before, when her classes at Westminster were over and she had not yet left for summer camp. She would not do that until early July. She had spent a great deal of time since school ended with this friend or that, spending nights at their homes. And the new thinness, if it really was that, hurt my heart. It was hard to tell about the thinness. Glynn wore long cotton granny skirts and bulky, loose tops all that spring. But so did all her friends.

“If she’s started that again, I don’t know what we’ll do,” I said to Pom. “She’s sixteen. She’s too old for me to control her meals. She never eats them here anymore, anyway. Darling, it just can’t be good for her to have Mommee here. She never brings anybody home anymore. She never gets any of our attention. She doesn’t come up to talk to me before bed like she used to.”

“She’s growing up,” Pom said. “It’s natural that she’s spending time out with her friends. It’s natural for her to have secrets, to stay in her room by herself. It’s what teenagers do. Don’t you remember those years when we thought Chip and Jeff would never come out again? Besides, she doesn’t look thin to me. She’s tall and slender just like you. She’s beautiful. We’re lucky. Pretty soon it’ll be boys she’s out with, and not girls, and then you really will have something to worry about. And you know Mommee adores her, Merritt. Lighten up. She’s a good kid.”

“That’s what worries me,” I said. “She is a good kid. She’s the best kid I’ve ever seen. She’s too good. It’s the good-little-girl thing; it’s the classic pattern for anorexia. And Mommee may have adored her once, but she doesn’t even know who she is half the time now. She had a screaming fit when Glynn went into her room the other day. Pom, listen. We can’t go on like this. I’ve got to have some help with Mommee. It’s Glynn I’m worried about now. If you won’t consider a nursing home, at least let me get someone in—”

He was silent for a long time and then he looked at me, and there was real pain in his blue eyes.

“What’s changed?” he said. “Why is it that you could handle all this last year, or last month, and now you can’t? You have Ina three days a week, and you can have her full time any time you want her. The boys are long gone. Glynn will be at camp most of the summer, and she’s going to visit that friend of hers in Highlands for the rest of it. What do you want to do that you can’t do now? Mommee’s just a frail, sick little old lady. How much longer can she live? I just need you right now. It won’t be too long before she’s gone and you’ll have all the time in the world.”

I had no reply. Put that way he was right. It did not seem that Mommee could last much longer; the fury of the dementia seemed to be eating her alive. And it had been I who had suggested she come to us when she was unable to stay in her house any longer. His pain at the thought of a nursing home had been too much for me to bear. But she had not been so bad then, and Glynn had seemed so much better…

I answered him now, though, stamping along the path toward the house and the clamoring of the bell. I did not speak the words aloud, but they were full and whole in my mind.

What do I want to do? Who knows what I want to do? Maybe I want to go back to work and own my own agency and win Clios. Maybe I want to take off with Crisscross and go to Cancún. Maybe I want to raise Siamese cats, or buy a llama. Or go sit on a mountaintop in India and find myself. I want to take one quiet pee that Mommee doesn’t shriek for me. I want to come into the house with a load of groceries and not have Ina stalk around after me telling me what the old lady did wrong that day. I want to walk into my own guest bathroom and not smell shitty adult diapers. I want my daughter to come home after school and bring her friends like she used to do. I want her to stop drifting around like a ghost; I want her to stop studying and get into some adolescent mischief. I want to hear her laugh. Of course she’s a good, responsible child, but she’s also a lovely young woman and my best friend when she’s not under siege, and I want her back. I want you to come home and make love to me before dinner like you used to, without having Mommee scrabbling and kicking at the door. Do you even realize that you hardly ever eat dinner with us anymore? Do you think I just love these intimate, stimulating little dinners alone with Mommee? You try wiping stringbean purée off her chin after every bite. When you say, “We take care of our own,” you mean me, Bubba.

The bell accelerated its angry summons and stopped, and I broke into a lope and hit the searing-hot flagstones of the verandah and leaped like a gazelle over them into the dim, cool kitchen. It was empty, but I could hear voices from the living room, Mommee’s the high, thin wail of a scolded child, Ina’s the exaggerated crispness of an exasperated adult. The air of the empty kitchen still rang with the percussion of the bell.

Halfway into town, stuck in the malodorous traffic that seemed forever clotted on the old ferry roads around the river, Pom noticed my hair.

“What did you do to it?” he said, studying me through his wire-rimmed sunglasses. “You don’t look like yourself. It’s nice, though. Exotic.”

“Tondelayo, that’s me,” I said.

What I had done to it, after taking the scissors away from Mommee before she decimated the other drapes in her room and getting her into a bath and coaxing one of her tranquilizers down her and waiting until she nodded off, was to pull the wild tangle of air-dried frizz straight back behind my ears and slick it down with so much gel that it looked shellacked. Then I coiled it swiftly into a high bun and gelled that, too. I skinned into a white linen halter and long black wrap skirt with a slit in it, cinched a red patent belt around my waist, added red high-heeled sandals that I had worn once and vowed never to wear again, and slashed bloodred lipstick over my mouth. Hearing the crunch of Pom’s Cherokee on the driveway and the light, waspish tap of its horn, I grabbed long gold earrings and a massive gold bangle bracelet he had given me last Christmas and flew down the stairs without my bag, any makeup but the lipstick, or a wrap. On my way through the kitchen I grabbed his blue blazer, which was hanging from the pot rack still swathed in dry cleaner’s wrap, and the striped tie he had requested. On my teetering way down the verandah steps I impulsively snatched a huge red hibiscus blossom from the bush beside the walk and stuck it into my hair behind my ear. I knew the gel would hold it like superglue. Cookie, the pretty coffee-skinned nurse from the clinic whom Pom had inveigled into staying with Mommee because her regular sitter’s car wouldn’t start, grinned at me and said, “Uh-huh!” as we passed.

“Uh-huh yourself,” I grinned back. I liked the tough, flirtatious Cookie. “Call me if she gets out of hand. We’re at the Driving Club.”

“That’ll be the day, honey,” she said. “I took a knife away from a two-hundred-pound crackhead today. You mama-in-law gon’ look like Mother Teresa after that.”

“You wish. See you before midnight. Got your jammies?”

She held up a bulging tote and I laughed and got into the Cherokee and laid the blazer and tie on the backseat and Pom gunned out of the driveway, spurting gravel. As usual, he was late to his own party.

As we turned into the driveway of the Driving Club he looked over to study me again.

“I feel like I’ve run off with another woman,” he said.

“And how does that feel? Does it do things for you?”

“It could. It definitely could. You look Eurasian, or something. Like that woman in the William Holden movie. Is it true what they say about Oriental women?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, and leered.

Just before we stopped the car under the portico, I pulled down the sun visor mirror and looked at myself. I had hardly even glanced at my reflection before I left the house. A strange, carved face looked back at me. The gel had lacquered my streaked brown hair to a shining tortoise shell color, and without the softening bangs that I had always considered necessary for an angular face my sharp cheek and brow bones and tilted nose stood out as in bas relief. Without makeup the coppery freckles ran together over my cheeks and the bridge of my nose, making me look as though I had been long in the sun, or did indeed have the golden blood of the East in my veins. The red lipstick and the hibiscus blossom looked barbaric. I smiled theatrically. My teeth flashed stark white in my face.

When I got out of the car I felt the reckless blood of that alien half-caste warm my face and chest. For a moment I wanted to prowl, to stalk like a jungle cat, to growl low in my throat. I took an experimental prowling step and the high red heels wobbled so that I stumbled.

“You okay, Mrs. Fowler?” said Clem, who parked cars. He reached out to steady me.

“I thought you said you’d never wear those shoes again,” Pom said.

“I said a lot of things,” I sighed, abandoning Tondelayo and tripping cautiously into the Driving Club on Pom’s arm.

This was perhaps the ninth or tenth clinic gala we had attended. Both of us could predict the course of the evening down to the air kisses on the way in and the slightly tipsy mouth ones on the way out. Compared to some of the other fund-raisers in town, this one was simple, even modest. Pom did not think the huge flowered and gilded and costumed balls and galas that benefited most of the city’s good causes were seemly for a charity clinic, and he had the aging sixties’ radical’s contempt for privileged pleasure and play in the name of underprivileged pain. So he would allow seated dinners for perhaps a hundred couples at this club or that, or a private home, with simple floral centerpieces and candles and perhaps a combo for dancing afterward, but that was all. In the beginning he had not even allowed that, insisting that the fund-raiser be catered drinks and a few peanuts and pretzels at the clinic. I had finally disabused him of that.

“You’re asking some of the richest and most influential people in Atlanta and the South to part with a very considerable amount of money,” I said. “You’ve got to give them more than bad scotch and peanuts down in the projects. What’s next, pork rinds at Juvenile Hall? You can show them what the clinic is all about another way; have slides at the party or tours beforehand, or buses with drinks and hors d’oeuvres on board, or something. I don’t mean you’ve got to give the auxiliary free rein; I agree, you’d end up with a bacchanalia or worse if Betty Burton had her way. But at least a good club or a pretty home, and live music, and really good food.”

He had considered my words, and when the aforementioned Betty Burton, who was that year’s auxiliary president, told him in exasperation that several of last year’s attending wives had told her that they had been accosted by homeless persons on their way into the clinic and they would never go down into that part of town again, he capitulated.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. All those spoiled ex-debs ought to have to work down there, or better yet, spend a week or two in the shelters. But have at it. Just don’t let Betty and her merry band do anything silly. The first Night in the Seraglio or Gone With the Wind hoo haw will be the last.”

And because Pom was popular with his peers and considered something of an urban saint by the Atlanta news media, the clinic dinner parties were a great success. Only a hundred couples came, admittedly, but they were, as Betty burbled, the select hundred couples in the city. I have always thought that the clinic dinners were popular because the gilded hundred were weary in the extreme of Nights in the Seraglio, and grateful to sit down and listen to the music they had been young to, and chat with the friends they had grown up with, and drink good liquor and eat good food and go home early.

I don’t like balls and banquets, but I always enjoyed this one because so many of the doctors and their wives who came were old friends, and this was often the only time in the year that I saw them. There is a kind of emotional shorthand that binds doctor’s wives, and it is a sweet and easy thing to have friends with similar context. Many of the men had been close to Pom ever since internship and residency, and one, Phil Fredericks, had been his roommate at Hopkins. Phil was with him at the clinic now, and Jenny, his funny, volatile wife, was one of my few close friends. I did see Jenny, for tennis and auxiliary work and sometimes for what we called escape days, when we took off and spent afternoons at the movies or antiquing or hiking in the North Georgia hills an hour’s drive away. Or at least, I used to see Jenny.

I saw her now, waving from a round table half full of couples close to one of the tall windows that overlooked the twilight green of the Piedmont Park woods.

“I saved a place for y’ll,” she said. “Hey, Pom. Lord, Merritt, what have you done to yourself? Have you been to Canyon Ranch, or what? You look fabulous.”

“No Canyon Ranch. This is what’s called the last-resort look,” I said, hugging her lightly and smiling around the table. It was largely women now, most of whom I knew, two of whom I did not. The men had sucked Pom into their circle and swept him out onto the terrace, where a small knot of men I did not know stood holding drinks and munching hors d’oeuvres from the tray a waiter was passing. From the rapt attention that Pom’s group of doctors was according them, I knew they were visiting Big Bucks. I saw tall, skeletal Bill Ramsey talking, rocking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, and then there was a burst of laughter and I knew that Bill had told one of his scurrilous jokes in his exaggerated Savannah drawl. One of the Big Bucks said something and everyone laughed again, and Pom slapped him on the back. I stared. I could not remember ever in my life seeing Pom slap anyone on the back.

“Big bucks,” I muttered to Jenny.

“The biggest. Must be dead ripe, too. I don’t think I ever saw Pom whack anybody on the back before. What’s gotten into him?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “Sunspots or El Niño or something.”

“Well, anyway, what have you been doing? I’ve missed the tennis and the escape days. Is it Pom’s mother?”

“She’s not doing so well,” I said. “She’s a little addled these days. I’ve been staying pretty close to home.”

“What I hear is that she’s absolutely wacko and ought to be in a nursing home,” Jenny said. “And that you’ve been looking after her full-time. Lordy, wasn’t it enough that you raised those two boys after Lilly took off? And then with Glynn and all…Pom is a darling and a saint, but he’s just like all doctors, blind to what’s ailing his family. You ought to go on strike.”

I sighed. I knew that Phil would have told her; there was practically nothing about Pom that Phil did not know or could not intuit, and he told Jenny everything. And if Jenny knew about Mommee, every other doctor’s wife at the table knew. Miz Talking Fredericks, Pom called her. But perhaps I could head her off before the two women I did not know heard every last detail about the saga of Mommee.

“I don’t mean to say he’s not a saint; we all know he is,” Jenny said hurriedly, seeing that she had made me uncomfortable. “I just happen to think that you’re a saint, too.”

“Not me,” I said. “That’s Pom’s department. One saint to a family.”

“Pommy always was a saint,” one of the strange women said, and Jenny and I looked at her. I smiled inquiringly. Had I met her before? There was something about the dark eyes, and the tiny, pearly teeth. A child’s teeth…

“I’m sorry, I thought you knew Sweetie,” Jenny said. “Sweetie Cokesbury. You know, she’s Leonard’s wife. Or bride, I should say. They’re just back from St. Maarten; they honeymooned on that enormous boat of Leonard’s, or should I say ship?”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I’m sorry. We have met. I think it was a while ago, though—”

“It was,” said the woman. Her voice fluted like a tiny wind instrument. “It was way back when Pommy was still in private practice. I had just lost my darling husband, and Pommy took pity on me and asked me to a lovely party you all gave at the River Club. I always tell Pommy that he saved my life that night, because that’s where I first met Lennie, and one thing led to another, and…here I am. I don’t wonder you don’t remember. I was considerably slimmer then. I swear, after eating my way through the Caribbean, I’m the one that ought to go to Canyon Ranch. Lennie’s always trying to put meat on my bones, as he calls it. Can’t stand skinny women. I bet you can eat like a hog and not gain an ounce! Back when Pommy and I were growing up I was a little bitty thing, too.”

I remembered then. Sweetie Carroll she had been when we met, tiny and dark and so cloyingly flirtatious that I was amazed that the men at the party did not think her a caricature of a Southern belle as I did, but they had not seemed to. Most of them hung on Sweetie’s every honeyed word. Now she was as solid and round as a butterball and tanned to a deep bronze, and so blond that her pouffed hair seemed spun of gilt. She wore a black dress so low-cut that her ponderous, sun-speckled breasts seemed in danger of bobbing out of it, and her ears and throat and fingers flashed with diamonds and emeralds. Leonard Cokesbury was one of the richest men in the Southeast. He had inherited a fortune in Coca-Cola stock.

“I remember,” I said. “I’m sorry. I forgot my glasses along with everything else, we were running so late. You and Pom are from the same hometown, aren’t you?”

“Childhood sweethearts since we were three,” she said, laughing a tinkling laugh. I thought of crystal shattering. “Our daddies were in the timber business together. I was in and out of Mommee’s house so often she used to say I was her only daughter. I tell you, the trouble Pommy and I got into, you just wouldn’t believe. There wasn’t a day that passed, hardly, that we weren’t together. I could tell you some tales about that husband of yours that would curl that pretty hair of yours! He gave me my first little kiss, and took me to my first prom, and I used to go up to dances at Woodbury Forest. Mommee used to say she already had my weddin’ gown picked out. But then he went on up there to Baltimore and got involved in all that civil rights stuff, and he changed, he surely did. And now look at him. A real entrepreneur, as well as a saint. Who would have thought it? I’m so proud of Pommy, I surely am. And proud of you, too, Merritt. I hear what a saint you are in your own right. It’s so good for Pommy, after that Lilly person. I thought Mommee was going to die when he brought her home the first time.”

I simply stared at her. Her words were like mercury spilling out of a broken thermometer; there seemed no way of stopping them, of picking them up. Pommy? Mommee? I had never heard anyone call Pom’s mother that but Pom and then us, his family. This ridiculous woman seemed to know as much about my family, especially my husband, as I did. I smiled stiffly as the words tumbled and skittered on. Beside me I heard Jenny snicker softly.

“Well,” Sweetie went on, “I just wanted to tell you that all Pommy’s old friends were so happy for him when he found you, and proud, and all that. Taking those poor little boys to raise after that woman ran off, and giving up your own career, and your sister on your hands all your life and then her going off like that, and of course poor little Mommee, and then I understand your daughter hasn’t been at all well…”

She looked at me with eyes as avian and voracious as a starling’s. Her smile widened; the sharp little teeth gleamed.

“My daughter’s just fine,” I said, smiling back. My mouth felt stretched.

“I’m so glad! As I said, you are truly to be admired, you surely are. You all come see us real soon. I’m having a glorious time doing over that big old white elephant. Tell Pom I’ve put in an old-fashioned rock garden just like his grandmother Parsons used to have at Sea Island. He’s really just got to see it.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

She waggled her fingers at us and tottered off to join the circle of men on the veranda. I could see the peeling, brown, bald head of Leonard Cokesbury in the crowd. From behind she looked like a little black cube topped with cotton candy, but she had beautiful legs, tanned and shapely. Her skirt was very short.

We were silent for a moment and then tall, raw-boned Dot Crenshaw across the table said, “We’ll watch until she goes to the ladies’ room and then we’ll rush her. Jenny can tackle her, I’ll stick her head in the john, and you can flush it, Merritt. God, what an awful woman!”

“But rich,” Jenny and I and Pam Crocker next to Jenny said together, and we all laughed.

Later, after dinner, I went to the ladies’ room to see what I could do about my naked, sweating face. The heat on the terrace, where we had had coffee, was stifling, even at ten o’clock. I washed my face and was standing there dripping and blinded, groping for my towel, when the door whooshed open and I heard Sweetie Cokesbury’s piccolo voice again.

“Sweetie, hello,” she bubbled. “You have the right idea; it’s simply sweltering, isn’t it? Let me hand you that…”

She passed me the towel and I mopped my face and looked at her. She was gleaming and enameled; there was not a gilt hair out of place. I wondered what she had sprayed herself with to preserve her surface in the heat.

She dabbed at my skirt with a paper towel.

“Here, you’ve splattered,” she said. “Listen, I really meant what I said, you know. Not many women I know would have had the gumption to stick it out, to hold things together after everything else you’ve been through, when that silly business at the clinic came up. When was it? A long time. I remember Bush had just been elected…”

I looked at her in the mirror. She was smiling brilliantly at me.

“What business was that?” I said.

“Oh, that little nonsense about the Negro doctor. Or was she Indian? None of us were sure. And none of us believed it, of course. It was just that Pommy always did adore the Negroes—”

The door swished open again and Jenny came in.

“Pom’s looking for you,” she said, and stopped. I think now she must have seen something on my face, though at the time it felt perfectly still and blank.

“I have to run, too,” Sweetie said. “I just wanted you to know you have a real fan on Habersham Road.”

She bustled out, leaving a trail of Opium behind her.

“What was that all about?” Jenny said, looking after her.

“Did Pom ever have an affair with a black woman doctor?” I said.

“What? No! Of course not! Did that bitch tell you he did? She’s lying…”

Jenny’s voice rose in incredulity and anger. She caught herself and lowered it, and took my hands and looked into my face. Her hands felt scalding hot. Mine must be ice-cold, I thought stupidly.

“Do you know that he didn’t, Jenny?” I said.

“Of course I know it,” she said, almost hissing in her effort to keep her voice low. “Don’t you think Phil would know if he had? Even if nobody else on earth knew, Phil would, and he would tell me. He’s never said a word about any affair with any black doctor. God, I suppose she meant Bella Strong. She’s that Jamaican doctor they had on staff for a year or two, before she went to Africa, you remember. That’s just ludicrous. Bella had a fiancé on the faculty at Morehouse; she married him and they both went to Biafra or somewhere—”

“She didn’t mention a name,” I said. I felt as though I were speaking through a mouthful of Kleenex. My mouth was desperately dry.

“Somebody should throttle her,” Jenny spat. “She’s been after Pom for years, I thought you knew that. Phil said she used to follow him around like a puppy before he went off to prep school, and I think he did ask her to a dance or two up there, mainly because his mother made him. When he married what’s-her-name, in Baltimore, she practically went into mourning. To hear Phil tell it, the whole stupid little town did. When that broke up, her husband conveniently kicked off—I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t put rat poison in his juleps—and she high-tailed it up here to grab up ol’ Pom before somebody else did. But it was too late. He’d already met you. She hung around for several years trying to get into our crowd, but nobody invited her anywhere, and finally Lennie married her. Well, hell, Lennie’ll marry anybody. You can just imagine how much she thinks of you, can’t you? Of course she’s lying. Can’t you see what she’s trying to do to you? I’m going to tell Phil the minute we get in the car. I don’t care how much money Lennie Cokesbury has; the clinic ought not touch a penny of it. And they won’t, either, if Phil has anything to do with it. God, but Pom’s going to be furious—”

“Tell Phil not to mention it to Pom,” I said. I knew it would do no good to ask her not to tell Phil. “I mean that, Jen. It’s…I just can’t stand the thought of people talking about us that way. I’ve never once in twenty-six years thought of Pom and anybody else—”

“Well, that’s because there hasn’t been anybody else,” she said. “I’ll tell Phil not to tell Pom, but somebody ought to put the fear of God into that lying bitch. I’d love to do it myself.”

I turned to the mirror and began dabbing lipstick on my mouth. My hand was shaking so that the lipstick ran wildly up my cheek. I began to scrub at it with a tissue.

She reached over and put her hand on mine, and I stopped scrubbing and looked at her in the mirror, and let my hand drop. I felt hot and then cold, all gone inside; I ached all over as if I were getting the flu.

“You do believe me, don’t you?” Jenny said.

“Of course I do,” I croaked. I cleared my throat and said it again, more strongly: “Of course I do.”

“If you have any doubt at all, ask him. Ask him, Merritt. You know he won’t lie to you.”

“Maybe I will,” I said. She was right. Pom would not lie to me. He never had.

“Do it,” Jenny said.

But I did not think I would. Partly it was because I did not believe Sweetie Cokesbury’s words; Pom? An affair? Simply impossible. I would have known.

Partly it was because it did not matter. No matter what my mind believed, something deep inside me must forever look at Pom now as a man who had or had not had an extra-marital affair. There was an option, no matter how incredible, where none had existed. We were in new territory, a place with a different geography. It was as if I stood on a shore and saw, not the horizon that I had always seen, but a new shore-line, another country. I did not believe Sweetie, but still I could see that other shore. Possibility rejected still exists.

From that it was only a small step.

With anybody else, then? All those nights and weekends away at the clinic, all that time…if not this Jamaican Bella, then someone else?

I tossed away the Kleenex and followed Jenny out of the ladies’ room. I believed her with all my heart, but something in my guts hurt; my very womb ached.

Pom and Phil were waiting for us in the doorway of the dining room. Pom came up and put his arm around me and buried his nose in the wilted hibiscus.

“Tondelayo wait up for big man?” he said.

“Big man going out on toot?” I said, my heart sinking.

“Big man going to take Big Bucks bwanas out for—Oh, hell, you can guess where the Charlotte contingent wants to go. I’ll try to palm it off on Phil after a little while. You take the car and go on. I’ll get a ride. Don’t wait up; I was only kidding. We’ll probably be a while.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said, and he looked at me. I had never said it before.

“I have to, honey. These guys are almost sewed up. There’s nothing on the agenda for a long time after this. And Cookie’s there, so you should be able to sleep without having to check on Mommee.”

“I know,” I said. “I just miss you sometimes.”

“Me, too,” he said, tightening his grip on my shoulders. “I changed my mind: do wait up.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, smiling, and he smiled back and started across the dining room after Phil. Halfway across he looked back and then dropped to one knee and flung one arm out and laid the other hand across his heart.

“But soft,” he shouted, “what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Merritt is the sun!”

And I laughed, my heart turning over beneath the white halter. Just before we were married we went to see a rerun of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, that consummately beautiful film in which the luminous nakedness of the two young principals ignited such a controversy. I had been so moved by it that I had wept mutely when it was over, and was unable to speak for a time after we left the theater for the sobbing that kept bubbling up in my throat. Pom, trying uneasily to comfort me, stumbled in his haste and clumsiness and went down on one knee. Looking up at me, he laid his hand over his heart and said those words, and I stopped crying and laughed, and then wept again at the flood of love that welled up in me, to see him there on the asphalt of the parking lot, telling me in those ineffable old words that he loved me.

I had not thought of the incident for a long time until tonight. Now, the same tide of love surged through me. This time I laughed and did not cry.

“Have fun, you incredible fool,” I called back to him. When the Cherokee came round, I rolled down the window on my side, and found the late-night jazz program from Clark College. Don Shirley curled out into the warm night: Orpheus in the Underworld; I had had the album at school. I hardly thought of the ugly words Sweetie Cokesbury had spoken in the ladies’ room during the entire soft, mimosa-smelling drive home to the river.

Hardly.

3

Mommee thought my daughter, Glynn, was the angel of death. When she had first come to stay with us Mommee was still able to watch television, or at least, to sit fairly quietly and watch whatever it was that she saw on the screen. Only later did she become so agitated and distractible that she could not sit still, but got up to shuffle and roam and mutter after a few minutes before the set.

One winter evening about a month into her time with us we sat, Mommee and I, before the set in the downstairs library, watching an early movie. It was an old one called Devotion, with Paul Heinreid and Ida Lupino, about the Brontë family, and in it death was depicted as a sinister figure on horseback, wearing a dark, swirling cape. The caped rider came closer and closer to its victim on the misted moor until, at the end, it swept her up in the cape and vanished. I had seen it as a child and it had frightened me half to death, but I did not think Mommee would take in enough of it to alarm her, and indeed, she did not appear to, clapping her hands and crowing with laughter when the cape made its final, fatal swirl.

But an hour later Glynn came home from a swim meet in her long, black, red-lined cape, a pretty but troublesome fad that her crowd affected that year, with her wet hair streaming down her back, and burst into the library swirling her cape dramatically, and Mommee began to scream.

“Death! Death!” she shrilled, pointing at Glynn, and became so hysterical that I had to take her upstairs and give her a Xanax and brush her hair until she fell asleep. When I came back down Glynn was sitting at the kitchen table staring out at the dark winter woods, fiddling with a half a bagel. The cape lay across a chair.

“The caped crusader strikes again,” she said mildly, not moving her eyes from the darkness. But I saw that her fingernails were digging into the bagel, and I went over and dropped a kiss on top of her damp, chlorine-smelling head.

“Sorry, Tink,” I said, using her father’s old nickname for her. When she was a child she flitted about with such restless grace that he called her Tinkerbell, after the fairy in Peter Pan. She disliked it now, so we seldom used it, but I sometimes forgot.

“I never should have let her watch that thing. It was the cape; you know she isn’t afraid of you. She’ll have forgotten in the morning.”

“No, she won’t,” Glynn said matter-of-factly, and put the bagel down and went up to her room.

And Mommee hadn’t. Glynn put the cape away at the back of her closet, but often, after that, Mommee would look at her and begin to wail, “Death! Death!” Since she didn’t always do it, I concluded that the image simply flickered into her mind at random intervals when she saw Glynn, borne on God knows what faulty synapse. But Glynn thought she did it, sometimes, on purpose.

“She’ll look and look at me, and get that funny sort of sly look on her face, and then she’ll start yelling,” she said once, after a death-screaming spell. This time it was Pom who took his mother upstairs to calm her. When he came back down it was Glynn’s bedtime, too late for him to help her with her science project as he had promised. She was fourteen then, going on fifteen.

“That’s ridiculous,” Pom said sharply. “Mommee isn’t devious. She’s old and she has Alzheimer’s. We’ve explained that to you.”

Glynn said nothing, but went upstairs to her bedroom and closed the door.

“She may be right, you know,” I said, when the sporadic spells continued. “It does seem to happen most often when you’re home and we’re all together. Look at the payoff. Mommee gets you all to herself, or me, or both of us, and Glynn is left by herself feeling like a pariah, or worse. It isn’t her fault; she gave the cape to Jessica, even though she loved it, and I didn’t even suggest it. She did it on her own. But she’s the one who has to sit down here by herself while we hover over Mommee. Even if Mommee isn’t doing it deliberately, it must feel like punishment to Glynn. Between the clinic and Mommee and the howling about death, she hardly ever sees you anymore, and it was going so well.”

“I’ll talk to her,” he said, and perhaps he did. Glynn never spoke of it.

Ever since Glynn’s flirtation with anorexia, Pom had, at the therapist’s suggestion, been making a real effort to spend more time with her, and, after a year, Glynn was very gradually adding a layer of becoming flesh to her elegant, long bones, and regaining color on the cheekbones that were a medieval refinement of mine. But since Mommee’s arrival and the onset of the death business, she had begun to draw away from us again, and spent more and more time in her room with the door closed. Glynn did not act out or give us trouble overtly. She never had, from her serene babyhood on. She simply withdrew into silence. She began staying away from Mommee. The cape was, must have been, long forgotten, but her face had lodged in Mommee’s roiling mind as that of a death’s head, and thus it stayed.

When I got up the morning after Pom’s party it was later than usual, and Pom had long since gone to the clinic. A note beside the coffeemaker said, “BB Bwanas impressed with T&A but I’ve seen better right here. Be home early.” Mommee was still asleep, and the guest room where Cookie had slept was empty and tidy. Cookie’s note, taped to Mommee’s closed door, said, “I gave her a pill because she had a real fit last night when Glynn came in and it was 3 A.M. before I got her settled. She should sleep till midmorning.”

Glynn was home, then. I had not expected her to return from the house party at her friend Jessica’s family vacation home at Big Canoe until tomorrow afternoon, Sunday. I wondered if anything was wrong. I pushed open her closed door slightly and saw the slight mound of her sheeted body sleeping deeply in the gloom. “Morning, pretty,” I whispered. I closed her door and tiptoed into Mommee’s room and looked down at her. She, too, was sleeping soundly. Her breath came light and regularly from between slightly parted lips.

In the morning gloom she looked young and very pretty, almost like a child; she had lost weight since the onset of the illness and seemed actually to have shrunk in her bones. The diffused light gave her face a nacreous cast, like the inside of a wet seashell, and she slept with her fists curled under her chin, childlike. She wore a long white cotton nightgown with a ruffle around the neck. Cookie had brushed the thin gilt-white hair before she left, and it floated over her forehead like a newly shampooed toddler’s. Pity and affection squeezed my heart. This was not a Mommee anyone often saw, transmuted into the tenderly loved small girl she must have been long ago.

I brushed the hair off her forehead with one finger.

“You didn’t choose to be like this, did you? Sometimes we forget,” I whispered.

When I went back down the hall I heard the shower in Glynn’s bathroom running, and I went in and sat down on her bed.

“You’re home early,” I shouted into the bathroom.

“Be out in a minute,” she called back.

She came out wrapped in Pom’s huge, white terry robe, which she had appropriated. It hung down to her ankles and drooped over her slender hands. Her hair was wrapped in a white terry turban. Lord, but she was lovely; the oval face under the towel looked, scrubbed clean and almost translucent, like that of a very young novice in a fifteenth-century convent. Siena, I thought, or Assisi. I could almost see the delicately veined, pearly lids dropped over her eyes and the long fingers clasped in prayer. She had not yet acquired her light summer tan and looked, damp and shining with body lotion, like she had been carved out of alabaster. She had my height and coltish slenderness and tawny hair, though hers hung thick and smooth, and Pom’s blue eyes, mine and my father’s chiseled cheekbones and Mommee’s tender mouth. Her coloring, or lack of it, was entirely her own. Her paleness could be mistaken for plainness, until you looked at her features one by one. Then she was extraordinary. But she was without real impact yet; that, I thought, would come later, when everything had coalesced into maturity. I hoped that day was still a long way away.

“Hi. What’re you doing home early?” I said.

“Oh…nothing, really. We all left last night. It wasn’t just me.”

“Why, sweetie? What happened? Is something the matter?”

“I don’t guess so, really. It just seemed like a good thing to do. Mr. and Mrs. Constable sort of had a fight, and it upset Jess so much that we all decided to just come on back. Marcia took her to her house.”

Once, I knew, Jessica would have come home with Glynn for succor. Poor Jess. Poor Glynn.

“What was the fight about? Feel like talking about it?” I said casually. More and more often these days she did not bring her problems and hurts to me, but took them to Jessica. I knew, from Laura’s childhood, and later Chip and Jeff’s, that this was a normal stage of growing up and away from us, but it still hurt. This child was so vulnerable, so without armor.…But Jessica was across the river in the arms of another friend, and my daughter had come home to a house empty except for an old woman who howled of death. And there had been more trouble from that quarter. Who did she have left to talk with but me? I hoped desperately that she still felt that she could.

“I don’t think so,” she said noncommittally, and then she whirled to face me. Her face was miserable.

“Mr. and Mrs. Constable are getting a divorce,” she said, her voice treble and childish. I had not heard that voice in a long time; it was the voice of small Glynn, when she was frightened and angry.

“Oh, sweetie. How do you know?”

“Because they had this awful yelling match last night, after dinner, when they thought we were all asleep. I think they were both drunk. They drank an awful lot of wine with dinner, and after. You couldn’t help but hear what they were saying, and it was just awful, just gross. Poor Jess finally ran out there screaming for them to stop, and then her mother cried and Jess cried and everybody else cried, too, and her father slammed out of the house and went down to the boathouse. Her mother took off after him. And Jess just got hysterical. So we left. We took her mother’s Blazer. He’s been going around with some woman at his office. I think Mrs. Constable just found out last night, and I know Jess did. I hated it, Mom!”

“Oh, love I’m so sorry,” I said, putting my arms around her and drawing her close. She lay slackly against me for a moment, and then stiffened and pulled away.

“And when I came in—” she said.

“I know. Mommee. Cookie left a note. What was it, the death thing again?”

“Yeah. Mom, sometimes I think…I just wish she wasn’t here! I wish Daddy was home more! What’s the matter with everybody?”

It was a wail of pain and impotence. I felt tears sting my eyes.

“I think you’re just running head-on into adulthood,” I said, wishing she was still within arm’s reach. I wanted, suddenly, to march into Mommee’s room and shake her and shout, “You leave my little girl alone! You’ve had your life! You stay out of hers!”

“You come on home and stay home,” I wanted to yell at Pom.

“Well, then, adulthood sucks and I don’t want anything to do with it,” she said, her voice wobbling on the edge of tears.

“I don’t blame you. It ain’t what it’s cracked up to be,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “But I don’t think you’ve got a lot of choice in the matter. Don’t worry, baby. You don’t have to take on the whole world yet. That’s what we’re around for. By the time you do, you’ll be able to handle it. You’re a strong person and a very good and dear one. You’ll know the right thing to do and you’ll do it.”

“So are you, and so do you, but things aren’t all that red-hot good for you, are they?” she muttered, not looking at me. “I mean, you’ve still got Mommee on your neck. And Aunt Laura. And me and all my hang-ups, and you had the boys…I mean, what kind of life is it for you? It doesn’t look to me like being strong and good matters diddly-squat.”

“I have you, and that’s the shiningest thing in my life,” I said. “And I have your dad, and that’s the next shiningest. I have everything I want.” I hated it when the pain of the world bore in on my vulnerable child, though I knew very well that it must.

“Do you have Daddy, really? Do we really have him? Are you sure, do you promise? I know Jess thought she had her dad, too…”

So that was it. More than pain at her friend’s grief, more than the betraying craziness of her grandmother, she was feeling the cold wind of loss and emptiness herself, where none had ever existed before. Well, I knew about that, didn’t I? Thanks to Sweetie Cokesbury, I had felt, for a moment, the breath of that awful, empty wind.

I got up and went to her and put my arms around her.

“I’m sure of that. I promise that. Your daddy isn’t going to leave us, ever. Not of his own will. We’re at the very center of his heart, you and me. Don’t you ever doubt that.”

“Sometimes you can’t tell,” she whispered against my shoulder, but I could feel her body relax slightly. I could also feel her ribs, sharp and separate, even under the thick, swaddling terry cloth. I went very still, resisting the impulse to feel all over her body with my hands. It would, I knew, be a terrible violation.

“He won’t always have to work so hard,” I said. “Mommee won’t be with us much longer. She just can’t be. Things will get better. I’m heartbroken for Jess, but that’s not going to happen to your father and me.”

“I thought for a minute she was going to die,” Glynn whispered.

“Whatever happens, she won’t do that,” I said. “She’ll have you and all her other friends, and maybe what you heard wasn’t as bad as it sounded—”

“It was.”

I was silent. It probably had been. Then I said, “Tell you what. Since we’ve got a free Saturday, why don’t we go over to Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza and buy you a whole raft of new summer clothes and then treat ourselves to lunch somewhere fancy? Your choice. Spare no expense.”

After a moment she smiled reluctantly, and I felt a great stab of love at the way her face bloomed into life.

“Anywhere I want? The Brasserie? The Tavern?”

“You call it.”

“A black spandex miniskirt?”

“Oh, Lord, Glynn…we’ll see.”

“Yessss!” my daughter exulted and slapped me a high five, and disappeared into her walk-in closet, restored, for the moment, into childhood and safety.

“You know we have to talk about it. You know we do,” I said.

“I know,” Glynn said, staring into the banana split she’d ordered for dessert. She had managed the hamburger and some of the french fries, but I knew that the sweet mess pooling in the glass boat before her was making her physically sick.

“And you don’t have to eat that,” I said, smiling so that she would not catch the fear under my words. “I don’t insist that you eat stevedore’s meals. I just want you to eat something substantial consistently.”

“I know. I’m going to do better with it. I was going to start up at Big Canoe, and I did…I ate real well until we…you know, came home. After that I just couldn’t.”

“You know I’m not trying to bully you or spy on you, don’t you? I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I wasn’t peeking at you. I saw you in the mirror beside the door when I was leaving, when you were trying on the bikini. It scared me. Glynn, if you could really once see yourself with other eyes and not the eyes of this illness—”

“I know it must be pretty gross. Everybody up at Big Canoe said I looked like a skeleton when I put on my bathing suit. I thought I looked great. I know it’s like last time, and I know I promised I’d tell you if it started again. But you all have been so upset about Mommee, and I thought I could handle it this time. And I was, except for last night—”

“When did it start, baby?” I said.

She looked around the leather banquette. In the dimness of the Tavern, the shopping bags holding her new clothes gleamed with gilt letters and logos like the plunder of an emir, and she looked, in their midst, like a young princess with her smooth hair and her loose, silky, new ivory tunic. But I knew that under the tunic her young bones thrust like spears. I had indeed seen her nearly naked in the betraying dressing-room mirror and lost my breath in terror. In the unforgiving, greenish fluorescent wash she looked worse than she ever had, literally starved. Somehow bruised, maimed. How could I not have seen?

“I’m not sure,” she said, pushing aside the melting dessert. “It hasn’t been all that long. I really haven’t lost all that much weight. I’ve been overdoing the swimming, maybe—”

“Are you running again?”

During her first bout with anorexia she had run constantly, for miles along the river or on the track at school. Since it was winter then, she ran in sweatclothes, and we did not notice the increasing thinness. I did worry sometimes that she was overdoing it; she must have run five or six miles a day, and more on weekends. But Pom was pleased.

“She’s got a runner’s build, and it’s a good habit to get into,” he said. “She’ll be active all her life. I’m glad she’s not a couch potato. I can’t stand fat women.”

When the illness surfaced both her therapist and internist forbade the running and limited her to swimming, and she agreed. But I know that she missed it.

“Some,” she said, turning her head away. “A little, after swim practice. I know. I promised. I’ll stop that, too.”

I reached over and took both her hands and tugged them, and she looked back with tears standing in her eyes. They swam like liquid blue light in the gloom.

“You can’t stop by yourself, Glynn,” I said. “That’s what this is all about. You remember what Dr. Flint said, that anorexia is about control and the control gets to be such an obsession that it starts to control you? This is not a calamity; you remember Dr. Flint saying that it would probably crop up a few more times till you got a handle on it, and that the important thing was to catch it early. So I really do have to know how long it’s been going on. We can help you, but we have to know that.”

“Mama, not we, please! You, I’ll tell you, but please don’t let Daddy know yet—”

“Okay, all right,” I said. “Not yet. Tell me. I’m not going to fuss at you.”

“I guess maybe a year or so—”

“A year!”

“It didn’t get…it didn’t start to go so fast until lately.”

“Is it something at school? Is it us, your daddy and me? Or Mommee—”

Mommee. Of course it was Mommee. Mommee, demanding, deposing, dethroning, unstoppable. Uncontrollable. I should have seen that, too; Pom should have.

“It is Mommee, isn’t it? Oh, honey, you should have said something. We could have talked about it—”

“Yeah, but what could you have done about it?” Glynn said. “You can’t change her and she can’t help it and nobody can stop it. I know all that. I can’t blame her, but Mama, she sucks all the air out of the house! She takes up all the space in it! She gets every bit of everybody’s attention all the time! And I work and work and swim and swim and paint and paint and my grades get better and better and I get zero. Zip. Or a little pat on the head, and ‘Way to go, old Tink,’ and then Mommee hollers again.…And I feel so guilty because it bothers me and I know she can’t help it! I feel guilty all the time about the way I feel about Mommee.”

She whispered the last, and the tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks to her chin. She did not move her hands to wipe them away but finally her face contorted and she jerked her hand from mine and scrubbed her face with it and gave a great, rattling sniff.

“I didn’t mean to cry,” she gulped.

My own eyes filled. I found a Kleenex and handed it to her.

“I think you have every right to cry,” I said. “We haven’t been very considerate of you, have we? You must know that we are both prouder of you than of anything we’ve ever done ourselves, or ever will do. I think maybe it’s that you’ve been such a great kid that we take you for granted while we try to cope with Mommee. That’s going to stop, I promise you. The first thing we’re going to do in the morning is have a family conference about this the way we used to do. Daddy said he’d be home all day.”

“No!” Her head came up and her eyes widened. She clenched her teeth so hard that white ridges stood out in her jaws.

“I won’t talk to Daddy about it! You promised! I won’t! I can’t! I know you’re proud of me, but he’ll have an absolute shit fit about the weight thing! You know how he feels about that; you know he doesn’t like Dr. Flint! You know he thought the whole thing was silly and trivial last time, and that I ought to be doing some really important work rather than all that therapy and stuff about food—”

“Glynnie, where on earth did you get that idea? Daddy was terribly concerned about you! He was willing to do anything in the world to get you better; he will be again—”

“I heard him,” she said softly. “I heard him talking to you about it over and over again! There’s a place in the upstairs laundry room where the vent pipe or something acts like an echo chamber and you can hear whatever anybody is saying down in the den; I’ve known about it since I was little. I used to listen all the time. I heard him say that I was impossibly sheltered and naive, and that he treated eight-year-olds at the clinic who could take better care of themselves than I could, and that I ought to volunteer down there and do some real work and see some real misery and forget about starving myself to death.”

She fell silent and I simply stared at her. My poor, good, frightened child, crouched in the dark beside a clothes dryer, straining to hear how she measured up to Pom and me, to hear how her life was working out, to hear what catastrophe would be coming next, so she could begin to figure how she might control it.

“Daddy wasn’t criticizing you,” I said, not bothering to deny that Pom had said all those things, for he had. “He was just frustrated and frightened because nothing seemed to be working, and he didn’t know what to do next. It was during that time when you and Dr. Flint were trying to get used to each other, you remember, and nothing much was happening, and you were still losing weight.”

“I heard him say once that he hated fat women,” she whispered.

“Oh, honey! He didn’t mean little girls!”

Her silence spun out and then she said, “I’m being a real jerk, aren’t I?”

“Not for a second. You need to talk about what’s bothering you. We’ll get started back with Dr. Flint before you leave for camp, and I promise I won’t mention this to Daddy until you’ve seen her. Glynnie, he adores you. I wish I could convince you of that.”

“I wish he would,” she said in a low voice.

Then she laughed and looked up. “Maybe I should get a pet. A dog. I’d love a big old dog—”

“Well, there’s Samson and Delilah.”

“But they can’t come in the house. I wish I had a dog that would stay with me in my room. I always think about a big dog in my bed with me. But if we got one you’d end up having to take care of it when I went off to camp and then to college, along with everything and everybody else.”

“We could have a cat,” I said. “Maybe even a couple of kittens. They could keep each other company, and they aren’t nearly the trouble dogs are.”

She shook her head.

“Jess brought Muffin over here the last time she came. She’d just picked her up from the vet’s. Mommee screamed so she had to take Muffin home.”

And they hadn’t come back, Jess or Muffin either, Glynn did not say so.

“Well, we can easily keep a cat away from Mommee. It can live in your room, or they can. If you’ll see Dr. Flint and really, really try with the eating I promise we’ll go to the Humane Society and pick you out two wonderful kittens when you get back. And Mommee be blowed.”

She smiled, unwillingly at first, and then genuinely.

“Okay.”

“So. Better now?”

“Yeah.”

“I love you, Glynn.”

“Me too you, Mom,” my child said.

Pom wasn’t home that afternoon after all. When we got home, laden like panoplied elephants with Glynn’s booty, Ina told us that he had been called back to the clinic to see a child running a horrendous fever with what sounded, Pom had said, like meningitis. The young doctor on duty had called him to ascertain the diagnosis. He didn’t know when he would be done.

“Oh, Ina, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve stayed two hours past your time already, while we were gobbling our way through Phipps Plaza. Come on, I’ll run you home. I know the bus schedule is awful on weekends.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I think you ought to stay here. Miz Fowler’s awfully antsy today. Looks like she got some kind of motor goin’ cain’t nobody turn off. I wanted to give her one of them pills but Doc he say no, she had one last night. I don’t think Glynn ought to stay with her by herself.”

I sighed. “Well, then, Glynn will run you up to the bus stop. Thanks, Ina. I don’t say it enough, but I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

“Me neither,” she said, showing her gold tooth in a smile. “And you need two more of me.”

“Where is Mommee now?”

“She up there takin’ all her clothes out of her closet and pilin’ ’em on the floor,” Ina said. “I figure let her, it might take some of the starch out of her, and I can put ’em back Monday. Don’t you go botherin’ with that.”

“I won’t.”

When they had gone I went upstairs and into Mommee’s room. Ina was right; the floor and the chairs and her bed and her chaise and her writing desk were all piled with teetering stacks of clothes. She had even piled clothes in her bathtub. She scuttled busily among the stacks, counting them and petting them and bending over to sniff them as if they were beds of flowers. She hummed to herself and kept up the ceaseless flow of sotto voce conversation she had these days with God knew who.

“What are you doing?” I said, smiling at her from the doorway.

“Getting ready to go to Europe.”

“Really? What fun. Who else is going?”

“Papa and Teddy and Big Pom and Lolly and Jasmine,” she said in a playful singsong. “But not Mama. Mama has to stay home.”

Her adored Papa was, of course, long dead, as were her brother Teddy and her husband, Big Pom. Lolly and Jasmine had been favorite dolls.

“Well, you’re certainly taking a lot of clothes. Are you going to be gone long?”

“Till the end of time,” she said, and turned back to her task.

“You ready for your juice now?”

“No. I wouldn’t say no to an old-fashioned, though.”

She smiled slyly, and looked sideways at me.

“We’ll both have one before supper,” I said. To hell with Pom’s edict that liquor and her pills did not mix. She’d had no pills today, and the drink would make her sleepy.

“Pom too?”

“Pom’s at the clinic,” I said. “But maybe he’ll be home by then.”

“I want Pom.”

“Me, too,” I said, and closed her door softly and stood listening for a moment as the humming and murmuring began again. Then I put my head into Glynn’s room.

She was not there, but all the new clothes were laid carefully about her room, with the accessories that she planned to wear with them. I smiled. I felt somehow safe and soothed when Glynn showed interest in such normal teenage things as pretty new clothes. The careful groupings of clothes and shoes and bags and necklaces spoke of many good times ahead, lighthearted days and nights through which my lovely child would drift like a butterfly, float like a swan. I went downstairs with a lighter heart than I had had the entire day. She was in the kitchen drinking a cola and hanging up the telephone. It was not, I was happy to see, a Diet Coke.

“Is it okay if I go over to Vinings with Marcia and Jess?” she said. “There’s a movie we want to see. I’ll be home way before supper. Marcia’s driving.”

“Sure. Just call if you’re going to be late.”

“I will. Thanks, Mom. For the day and the clothes and everything.”

“It was entirely my pleasure,” I said.

She grabbed up her summer straw hobo bag and went out to wait for Marcia and the apparently restored Jessica by the mailbox. I got the portable intercom speaker that let me check on Mommee and went out onto the terrace by the still blue pool and stretched out on a chaise. I had a sheaf of bills with me, intending to go over them, but instead I laid them on the flagstones and put my head back and shaded my face with my arm and listened to the drone of the too early cicadas and the sulky wallow and slap of the river at its banks. The heat today was thick and wet and heavy, and unlike yesterday there was no wind. I meant to move into the shade of the umbrella table and tackle the bills, but instead I fell heavily asleep and dreamed a boring, long dream about taking a shower. It seemed endless, and did indeed last, I figured later, over two hours.

I heard the screams before I smelled the smoke.

I came floundering up out of my sweaty sleep, trying for a moment to work the screams into the dream of showering, but they would not fit, and even as I sat on the edge of the chaise shaking my head, I knew in a deeper part of me that they belonged outside me, upstairs in my house. I was halfway up the stairs before I realized that they were not Mommee’s screams, but Glynn’s. My heart dropped like a stone and I took a great gulp of air, and thick, sour smoke cut into my lungs. I could see it then, lying in white, roiling strata in the upstairs hallway, billowing from Glynn’s room. I stumbled, caught the banister, and hauled myself the rest of the way up, shouting my daughter’s name: “Glynn! Glynn!” At that moment the smoke detector came on.

“Mama!” came Glynn’s voice, muffled and high with fear. At the same time I heard the thin, henlike squawk that meant Mommee was alarmed, and she shot out of Glynn’s room and scuttled, head down, into her own room at the end of the hall. The door slammed shut behind her.

I followed the smoke and Glynn’s cries into and through her room and into her bathroom. It was so thick with smoke I could hardly see, but I made out her figure bending over the bathtub, flapping at the smoky white mess piled there with a towel. She had stopped screaming, but she was choking and coughing.

“Get out of here!” I screamed at her and began to cough, too. The thick smoke smelled and tasted of fabric.

I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her out of the bathroom and dashed back in and groped for her shower handle. I turned it and water sprayed down onto the burning cloth. It hissed and spat; the smoke turned gray and the smell became that of charred, wet cloth. I slammed the bathroom door and ran, eyes streaming, lungs bursting, out into the hallway. Glynn leaned against the wall, face in hands, sobbing.

“Go downstairs and wait on the patio,” I shouted. “And call the fire department from the kitchen on your way! I’ll get Mommee.”

“Let her burn,” my daughter shrilled in fury. “Let the old witch burn! Do you know what that is in there? That’s my new clothes! All of them! She put them in the bathtub and lit them with the fireplace starter! I came upstairs just as she was doing it!”

“Go!” I screamed, and she went.

It seemed to me that the smoke was already clearing, but I dashed to Mommee’s room. The door was locked. I pounded on it.

“Come out of there, Mommee,” I shouted. “The house is on fire! You’ve got to go downstairs!”

“I want Pom,” came the fretful wail. “I want Pom!”

“Well, he’s not here! Mommee, open this door now! You’ll burn to death if you don’t!”

“I’m going to tell Pom you yelled at me!”

“Get out here right now or there’ll be no more TV for a month!”

She opened the door a fraction and peeped around it, grinning.

“I made a big fire,” she said.

I grabbed her shoulders roughly and pulled her, whining and wriggling, down the stairs and outside onto the patio, where Glynn was talking urgently on the cellular phone.

“Watch her,” I said. “I think it’s going out, but I have to check. Are they on the way?”

“Yeah, they got the alarm before I called.”

I started into the house again and Mommee started for the river. Glynn sprang after her and jerked her back.

“You sit down and shut up,” she said coldly. “You’re lucky you aren’t ashes along with us and the whole house. I mean it. Don’t you move.”

Mommee began to wail. Glynn sat her smartly down on the chaise and stood behind her, holding her down by her shoulders. Glynn’s face was mottled white and red with out-rage, and tears still ran down her face.

The first fire truck came wailing in then.

The fire was out when they got upstairs, but they doused the bathroom and Glynn’s bedroom with water from their hoses anyway. The hoses were big as boa constrictors; the mess they left was incredible. The clothes were a sopping char, and the walls and mirrors of Glynn’s pretty bathroom were velvety with half-inch-thick soot. The bedroom was not too bad, smoke-wise, but the carpet and curtains and upholstered pieces were sodden. I thanked the firemen and they left and I stood in the doorway, mindless with relief and with anger at Mommee. Shock made my arms and legs weak.

Mommee streaked by me and into the bathroom, with Glynn in pounding pursuit. The old woman stumbled on a wet bath mat and I caught her just as she was about to tumble into the bathtub with her handiwork.

“Look at the fire! Look at the fire!” she crowed with glee, reaching down to pat the blackened mess. Wet soot came away and smeared her arms and hands and streaked her face and matted her hair. She peered sideways at me. She looked like a crazy toddler caught in its mischief—her eyes gleamed and her color was high—and she babbled and laughed and clapped her hands.

“I’m sorry, she got away from me,” Glynn gasped. Turning to Mommee, who was wriggling in my grasp, she shouted: “You like it? Is it fun? You like what you did to my new clothes?”

“Fun!” Mommee shrieked. “I had fun!”

“You old bitch! I hate you!” Glynn screamed into Mommee’s face and burst into tears again, then turned and ran downstairs.

Mommee began to cry too, grizzling and whining like a child. She looked up at me out of the corner of her eye, and dropped her lashes, and turned the crying up a notch. She could always get around Pom this way.

“Come on,” I said angrily. “You can damned well stay in your room while I try to clean this mess up. And you can cry till this time tomorrow, as far as I’m concerned. Pom isn’t here to soothe your butt now.”

I dragged her, kicking and yelling, out of Glynn’s bathroom and down the hall and locked her in her room. She began to kick the door and howl in earnest. I knew that she would go on doing both until hoarseness made her stop. I did not care. I went downstairs, found Glynn in the kitchen sobbing, and hugged her hard.

“We’ll replace the clothes, of course,” I said. “And I promise you we’ll do something about Mommee. This is way, way too much.”

“Daddy won’t let us,” she hiccuped.

“Don’t bet on it,” I said. “Why don’t you call Marcia or Jess and see if you can spend the night over there tonight? I’m going to have to dry your room out before I can clean it.”

“Can I? I don’t think I can go up there again right now.”

“Of course you can. Go on and call and I’ll take a swipe or two at the bathroom. It may not be as bad as it looks.”

“I could help.”

“You can help later. This time’s on me.”

I got some sponges and detergent and buckets and a mop and went back upstairs. Mommee howled on and on; the kicks showed no signs of abating. I ignored them and took a deep breath and went into Glynn’s bathroom.

It was as bad as it looked and worse. I knew that we would have to have professional cleaners, the sort that dealt with fire and water damage. The oily smoke and soot clung to everything, invaded every crevice in the tile. I mopped up a little of the standing water and wiped off a few surfaces, but managed only to smear myself with soot and my shorts and shirt with thick black goo. Wiping off the mirror, I looked in. I looked like an aborigine, black-faced and white-eyed, with wild coppery hair.

I was sitting mindlessly on the floor with my back against the bathtub when Pom came thudding up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

“God in heaven, what happened?” he shouted. “The alarm people called the clinic and said there was a fire; is anyone hurt? What’s the matter with Mommee? Are you all right? Was Glynn here?”

“A, there was indeed a fire,” I said. “Mommee put Glynn’s new clothes in the bathtub and lit them. B, what’s the matter with her is that I locked her in her room before she killed herself or set another fire. She’s fine, just pissed. C, yes. I’m okay. D, yes, Glynn was here. She found Mommee doing it. I think she’s out on the patio. I wish you’d go talk to her. She’s terribly upset.”

He stared at me for a moment and then went, not downstairs to Glynn, but down the hall to Mommee’s room. I heard him speaking softly and coaxingly at her door. The crying and kicking stopped. In a moment he was back in Glynn’s bathroom, saying, “Where did you put the key to her room? She’s scared to death.”

I looked at him in silence, and then said, “It’s on the marble-top table. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Going down there and petting that old woman after she destroyed all Glynn’s new clothes and bathroom and most of her bedroom and could have burned down this house and killed all three of us. I can’t believe that, Pom.”

“Well, you and Glynn are obviously all right and the fire’s out. She’s obviously not all right. I never heard her so agitated.”

He turned and went out of the bathroom. I laid my head on my forearm on the edge of the bathtub and closed my eyes. We had to deal with the matter of Mommee now, but the thought of the evening ahead tired me so that I wanted to go to sleep right there, my head on cold, filthy enamel, the sour smell of destruction in my nostrils.

He stayed in her room a long time. I had made up the downstairs guest room for Glynn and had a sandwich supper on the table when I heard Mommee’s door open. Glynn had decided to stay home; Jess’s house, she said, was still an emotional uproar, and Marcia’s grandparents were visiting. She had washed her face and combed her hair and changed her clothes and seemed restored to a sort of distant calm, though she said very little. When she heard Mommee’s shuffling steps on the stairs, and Pom’s low, soothing voice, she stiffened.

Pom came into the breakfast room, his mother clinging to his arm and shuffling like a frail, crippled centenarian. If I had not seen her streaking for the river like a wild thing that afternoon, I would have thought something had happened to her, a stroke, perhaps, or a bad fall. She looked up at Glynn and me under lowered lashes, and her lips trembled. So did the hand that clutched Pom’s arm. Glynn looked at me and rolled her eyes, and I felt a fresh spasm of anger at Mommee. Ordinarily her punished-child routine occasioned only amusement in me, but tonight it did not amuse me at all. There had to be some sort of accountability for what had happened; we must not let her think she could win approbation and cosseting with destruction.

“Mommee has told me that she’s sorry about what happened, and that she didn’t mean to do any harm to Glynn’s clothes,” Pom said. “She didn’t know what the fireplace starter was. Now I think it would be a good idea if you two told her you were sorry, and then we’ll all have some supper and watch TV and put the whole thing behind us. Maybe Glynn could run up and get us some Rain Forest Crunch for later.”

He stopped and looked at Glynn and me, waiting for our apologies. I simply stared at him. Glynn’s face began to redden across her cheekbones, as if she had been slapped.

“Sorry for what?” she burst out. “I’m not the one that set fire to those clothes! I’m not the one who almost burned the damned house down! I’m not about to apologize!”

Pom’s face reddened too.

“For screaming at your grandmother, for one thing,” he said. “For calling her names. She’s not too out of it to remember things like that. She was heartbroken. You know she didn’t know what she was doing! You know we never, never yell at Mommee! It would be like yelling at a baby!”

“I won’t apologize,” Glynn said tightly. “She damned well did know what she was doing. I’ve seen her playing with the fire starter before. I won’t apologize and I wish she was out of here! Then maybe the rest of us could have some kind of normal life—”

Mommee began to wail again. She turned her face into Pom’s shirt and pressed it there, clinging to him, sobbing.

“You will apologize or you will not go to camp or anywhere else this summer, young lady!” Pom shouted. “I will not allow abuse of someone helpless in my house! I don’t know what’s gotten into you; I don’t even know who you are!”

“You’re right, you don’t!” Glynn cried. “Here’s a news flash; I’m your daughter. Remember me? The kid who’s been hanging around your house for sixteen years waiting for you to—”

“Go to your room!” Pom roared. “We’ll talk about your behavior tomorrow! And don’t you come out until I say you can!”

“I don’t have a room! That old witch ruined it!” Glynn cried and turned and ran into the guest room and slammed the door. I heard it lock behind her.

My head buzzed with horror and anger and for a moment I could not speak. I tried to control my voice, but it came out ragged and without breath behind it.

“Have you lost your mind?” I whispered at Pom. “Can you hear yourself? Did you hear how you talked to your daughter? It wasn’t her fault, Pom. Maybe Mommee can’t help it, but neither can Glynn and neither can I, and this crap cannot go on any longer! Pom, your mother almost burned down our house! She almost killed your wife and daughter, along with herself! She almost killed your wife and daughter, along with herself! Something has got to be done about her!”

Mommee’s wails escalated, and she began to gasp for breath and choke and cough.

“Shut the hell up right now, Merritt!” Pom shouted. I did. I could not have spoken if my life had depended on it. Who was this dark, roaring man? What had happened to us?

“I will talk to you when I get her quiet,” he said tightly but in a lower voice. “Maybe by then you will have gotten control of yourself.”

He turned and helped his mother back up the stairs. She leaned heavily on him. Just as heavily I sat down at the table. I felt as if the whole world had exploded in my face, and the pieces were still falling to earth around me like lethal rain. I had to get up, I had to go and see to Glynn; I had to make him understand.…But I could not move.

I was still sitting there when he came back down, this time alone.

“I gave her a shot. She’s asleep,” he said. “I don’t understand what’s going on around here, Merritt. I don’t know why things are falling apart all of a sudden. Why can’t you cope with one sick little old lady anymore? Why has Glynn turned into such a spoiled, helpless brat?”

I knew that I would be terribly angry with him again later, but right then I was merely endlessly tired. I could not imagine where I was going to find the breath and strength to make him see.

But I knew that I must, so I inhaled deeply and said, as calmly as I could, “You aren’t here most of the time. You don’t see. You can’t possibly know. I’ve coped as long and well as I could; so has Glynn. She’s a very long way from being a spoiled, helpless brat, Pom. You should have seen her today, she was so funny and normal, and so proud of her new clothes—”

He leaned forward, as if to better understand me.

“Why shouldn’t she be normal, Merritt? She’s sixteen years old. She’s had everything on earth that could be given to her; she’s had the best life we could make for her. She never learned to abuse sick old people from us—”

I knew then that I would not remind him of the anorexia, nor tell him of its recurrence. In this mood it would surely become another weapon for him.

“She has never in her life abused Mommee, if you insist on calling it that. But she has a limit, and this business with Mommee has stretched her far thinner than you can possibly know. Even I didn’t realize—”

“Both of you should have to work in the clinic all day,” he said in exasperation. “It would make what you think you have to do look like a garden party. Why weren’t you watching Mommee? Where the hell did she get the fireplace lighter? Why wasn’t someone with her? Merritt, we made a deal a long time ago. It was your idea, as I recall. You were all for it. You’d look after the kids and the house so I could do this work. You said yourself that it was the most important thing you could imagine. You said you loved taking care of the kids and seeing that things ran smoothly for all of us. And you did it so well and you still had plenty of time to yourself, even when the boys were at their most troubled, even when Glynn was a baby and a toddler. You did almost anything you wanted to; you never had to stop your freelance work. What changed? Why can’t you look after the people who need you, all of a sudden?”

“The people who need me don’t need only me now,” I said, trying not to shout or weep at the words. They seemed so unfair that I could not imagine how he could even think them, much less say them. But I knew that he meant them. His face was wrinkled with the need, the desire, to understand.

“Your daughter needs you, too,” I said. “She’s played second fiddle to the halt and the lame at that clinic for a long time now. And then here comes Mommee. Every time Glynn expresses need of you you give her a lecture about people with real trouble, about doing real work. Pom, the reason we made the deal in the first place was so that your children, and later our child, would never have to live the way the people in the clinic live. That was the most important thing in the world to you then; that they have better lives than that. So that’s the way I raised them, and now you criticize Glynn precisely because she’s not like a them. She’s not spoiled and trivial; she’s as good and responsible a child as I know. But she needs you, too. And she doesn’t often get much of you. As for Mommee, she needs more than me or you now. If you were with her all day you’d see that she’s gone beyond anybody’s care but professional people’s. With the best will in the world, I can’t keep her safe now, or us safe from her. I cannot be with her every second out of the day, nor can Ina. Where was I? I fell asleep outside on the chaise while she was occupied up in her room and Glynn was out. With the intercom beside me. I couldn’t give her a pill because you said not to, and I had just had a long emergency session with Glynn. I was exhausted. I’m sorry. Where did she get the fireplace starter? I do not know. I’ve taken all the matches in the house away, and I thought I’d locked up all the fireplace starters. Glynn’s right, Mommee does know what they are. She’s started several small paper fires with them. Yesterday she cut up one of the drapes in her room with garden shears because I’d hidden all the other scissors, and that was with Ina in the house with her. The deal isn’t valid anymore, Pom, because things have just changed too much. Can’t you see that?”

“I’m trying. But it all boils down to the fact that Mommee is not responsible for what has happened to her, and I will not have her punished for helplessness.”

“So instead you’ll punish Glynn for it. And me.”

“I’ve never punished you.”

“Somehow what I need seems to have gotten left out of the equation,” I said.

“Well, then, what is it that you need, Merritt?” he said with the exaggerated calm that you would use with a child in mid-tantrum.

“I need…some air and light and some attention,” I said, surprising myself. “I need for you to think about what I need before I tell you. I need you to be with me, just me, every now and then. I need full-time, professional, live-in help with Mommee, a nurse or an attendant of some kind. Either that or she is going to have to go to a nursing home.”

“She’s not going to a nursing home. She’s not going to be left in the care of total strangers. We’ve discussed that. It’s not an option.”

“Pom, your mother is out of her mind. She is not who she used to be. She does not know what she is doing, maybe, but what she is doing is destructive in the extreme. You wouldn’t allow this sort of…drudgery…to fall on anybody in your clinic. Why are we so much less important to you?”

“People don’t treat their family members that way.”

“I didn’t think they made servants and captives of them, either.”

He got up and took a sandwich from the platter and went out of the kitchen. At the door he looked back.

“I’m going to catch up on some paperwork,” he said. “And I want you to try to calm down. We’ll talk again in the morning. Glynn can sit in on it, too. I’m willing to listen to what both of you have to say, but you’re going to have to say, but you’re going to have to respect my point of view, too. Meanwhile, we’re just spinning our wheels. I’ll probably be up late. You turn in. It’s been a hard day. Mommee will sleep through. We’ll get somebody in to clean up Monday.”

I did not reply, and then I called after him, “I’m going to tell Glynn she can come out of her room now. She hasn’t had any supper.”

“Yeah, all right,” he called back. “But I don’t want her going out anywhere. She’s still grounded until we talk this thing out.”

“Where would she go?” I said into the empty air of the kitchen. He did not, of course, hear me.

I went to the downstairs guest room door and knocked softly.

“Come out, the storm’s over,” I said. “I’ve got a sandwich and some milk for you. We’ll all talk this out in the morning. The fire just got your dad upset—”

“Thanks, Mama, but I really don’t want anything,” she called back. I could hear the TV going. “I’d like to watch TV for a while and then go to sleep. I’ll be fine in the morning.”

“Don’t just stay in there and brood. Come watch TV with me. Daddy’s going to be working till late. And Mommee’s out for the count.”

“I’m not brooding. I really am tired. And Dune is on again, and you know you hate that. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Night, then. Sleep tight.”

“Night, Mama.”

I fell asleep before Pom came to bed. When I woke, it was morning and he was sitting on the foot of the bed in shorts and a faded T-shirt, toweling his hair. I knew he had been out running along the river. He was drinking coffee and held out a cup to me.

“I’m sorry if I was a pompous ass last night,” he said. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper, but we had a bad thing at the clinic; I think we’re going to lose a kid. And then the fire—”

“I’m sorry about the child,” I said. “Is it the meningitis case?”

“Yeah. Listen, I think I’ll make some pancakes. I’ll take some in to Glynn. I should probably apologize to her, too. I guess I was pretty heavy with her last night—”

“Yeah, you were,” I said.

He went out of the room, and I heard him rooting around in the pots and pans drawer and knew he was looking for the skillet he liked to use for pancakes. Presently I heard the spatter and sizzle of the batter. I finished my coffee, and stretched, and got up to dress. I was just padding downstairs barefoot when I met him on the stairs coming up. His face was still and empty, and the white ring that I had not seen in a long time was around his blue eyes. My breath caught in my throat.

“What?”

He cleared his own throat, and then he said, “She’s run away. Glynn. I went to her room and there was no answer and I went in, and she was gone and the bed didn’t look slept in, and there was this note—”

I took it out of his hand. My own hand trembled so that the note fluttered crazily.

“Going out to Aunt Laura’s for a while,” it said in Glynn’s round backhand. “She said I could come. I can’t stay here anymore and things will be better for everybody without me. Don’t worry. I have my birthday money and Aunt Laura charged the ticket to her American Express card. I’d say I’m sorry but I’m not.”

I put my hand up to my mouth. I could not make any words come out. How had she done it? How did she know what to do? But in my mind I could see my child I could see my child dialing Palm Springs; hear the low, anguished conversation; watch her creep silently up the stairs to her ruined bedroom to get some clothes and her small stash of money; see the lights of the Buckhead cab as it waited up on the road.

“What in God’s name got into her?” Pom exploded. “How could she do such a stupid thing? Of all the irresponsible, childish—”

“Hush,” I said, and went into the kitchen and dialed Laura in Palm Springs.

The phone rang and rang, and then Laura picked up.

“I thought it would be you,” she said almost gaily. “Yeah, she’s coming. I’m picking her up at Ontario a little after ten. Don’t fuss, Merritt; I’m really looking forward to having her, and apparently you all have one too many children around the house at present. Cut her some slack. She’s old enough to visit her aunt if she wants to. We’re going to take off and just drive; I’ve got this incredible rebuilt Mustang convertible, a sixty-five, a classic, and we’re going to take it on an inaugural journey. I thought up the coast, to L.A. and Malibu and maybe even up to San Francisco. Top down, radio on. Sunshine all the way. I know people we can stay with along the way; she won’t need any money. And besides, I’ve got plenty now. My new barracuda of a lawyer just parted Sonny with a wad. This is going to be my victory tour—”

“Laura,” I interrupted, “You put her on a plane back home the minute you can get a reservation. I mean that. I can’t have her tearing up and down the California coast in a convertible—”

“With a loose woman?” she laughed. “Why is that worse than a crazy woman who sets her clothes on fire? Or someone who locks her in her room when she protests? Jesus, what a circus. Lighten up, Sis. Haven’t you ever heard of the age of consent?”

“Laura, for God’s sake—”

Pom tore the phone away from me and yelled into it: “Laura, don’t screw around with something you don’t understand. Get her back here. I’ll pay you back. But do it.”

Her low, liquid laugh spilled out into the room, like a little baroque quartet.

“Fuck you, Pom,” she said, and hung up.

He turned to me, his face near purple, the blue eyes burning like embers in a dying fire.

“I always knew she was going to do something dangerous, to herself or somebody else,” he said. “If I could get my hands on her I’d strangle her. She ought to be committed; she should have been put away years ago—”

“So what are you going to do?” I said through lips numb and stiff with shock and fear.

“Keep calling until Glynn gets there and tell her to get herself on back here or she’s going to be in the kind of trouble she never knew existed. For starters,” he said, “she’ll be lucky if I don’t slam her in a convent.”

I turned without a word and ran up the stairs.

“Where are you going?” he shouted after me.

“I’m going to go get her,” I said over my shoulder.

“Don’t be a goddamned fool, Merritt,” he yelled. “You can’t do that! Who’ll look after Mommee? I can’t take any time off from the clinic—”

“Fuck the clinic,” I said furiously, “and fuck you if you don’t like it.”

From behind her closed door Mommee began to howl dismally.

“Fuck you, too,” I said to her and slammed my door.

Three hours later I was on a plane west, feeling virtually nothing but the giddy, not unpleasant sensation that I had leaped off the very edge of the world and was falling free in clean, blue space.

4

Laura met me at the Los Angeles airport at two o’clock that afternoon. Glynn was not with her. Our meeting felt strange and disconnected from reality, like something you would see in a film. I knew that I was tired from the long trip and the near sleepless night before; in Atlanta it would be late afternoon now. And I had not managed to eat much of my plastic-encased airline lunch. But it was more than that; more, even, than the simple incredibility of what I had just done. It was Laura. She was the Laura I had always known, and yet she was not.

It had been six years since I had seen her, though we had talked a few times on the phone before this morning, and I wrote once in a while and received a scribbled reply now and then. It stood to reason that she would have changed. She had been through three hectic marriages and three hard-fought divorces, and I knew her career was not flourishing. If she had been a real success in films we would have known. I did not hear much about the plays she was in, and the TV commercials that were the bones of her income were apparently local and regional ones. And the stylist’s job, and the jewelry and poetry and talk of becoming an agent all spoke eloquently, though not of success. Of course she would not be the Laura who had breezed through Atlanta those six years past, on her way to the Caribbean to do a film starring Mel Gibson. “Susan Sarandon gets him, but I get the best sex scenes.” She was thirty-two then, at the very apogee of her looks and talent, fully bloomed and ripe, seeming to shine. She was still happily married to her third husband, whose carrier had not yet vanished up his nose, and her own career seemed poised at last to careen skyward.

She was thirty-eight now. The Mel Gibson movie had not, after all, gotten off the ground, and the marriage had crashed into it. I don’t know what I was expecting.

She was leaning against a pillar just beyond the arrival area, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and cowboy boots. For a moment I was not sure it was her, though the posture and the tilt of the head were all Laura. She was deeply tanned, something I had never seen before, and her hair was a yellowish platinum, sleeked straight back behind her ears. Her teeth flashed white in her dark face when she smiled at me, and for a moment she was purely a creature of celluloid, none of my own and nothing to me. But then the sherry eyes crinkled, and she moved toward me with the old hip-shot Laura prowl, and I knew her once again.

We hugged, and she gave me a little sucking air kiss on either side of my face. She smelled of Opium, as she always did, and of something else; was it whiskey? Had she been drinking? Laura had never drunk much after her last disastrous foray into alcohol and pills, and that was years ago. I did not think she used anything now, despite Pom’s words about cocaine. But I did not know what the smell might be. Medicine of some sort, maybe. When I pulled back from her, still holding her hands, to look at her, I saw that her face was much thinner, and sharper of cheekbone and brow, and there were delicate taupe shadows under the extraordinary eyes. She wore no makeup that I could see, and her lips were slightly chafed. Around her eyes was a faint webbing of tiny white lines. And she was definitely thinner. I could see sharp ridges of hipbones through the tight, white-faded blue jeans, and even the bones in her hands were sharper, more fragile.

“Wow,” I said. “Look at you. You are a bona fide glamour puss.”

“God, Met, glamour puss? Who’s writing your material? It’s for a film I just finished; I’m letting it grow out now. Well. You look good yourself. Not at all like a middle-aged lady who just ran away from home.”