George Mills

1

Messenger, running late, found the little street off Carondolet and parked. It was his second day on Judith Gazer’s route. When he took Mrs. Carey’s tray from the insulated box there were three left. He locked the door on the driver’s side, found the house and opened the gate of the little low fence, low as a fence in storybooks.

He had called first, phoning from Albert Reece’s apartment, the man’s permission grudgingly granted.

“That wasn’t long distance, was it?” Reece asked when Messenger had hung up. “If it was only across the river they’d charge me a toll.”

“It was in the city,” Messenger said.

“Could I see that paper?” Messenger showed him the number and Reece studied it for a moment. “All right then,” he said. “Call it a dime.” Cornell handed him the coin. “If this was Russia you could call for free. They got Socialized Telephone in Russia.”

“Long distance too?”

“Kids,” Reece said, “don’t ever talk about you. You get a free ride with kids. Kids don’t give a shit about your morals or your politics. I’m talking infants, toddlers, boys on tricycles. Kids just ain’t shockable. If a little golden fairy was to tip his cap to a kid in the street, the kid would just look at the fairy and tell him good morning. The only way to shock a kid is to hold his finger to the socket. The elderly is different. Old-timers love to correct you. They enjoy it that you’re a traitor or that you live in sin. They love that you sit with your legs apart or are on the take. It warms their hearts the parks ain’t safe and you’re going to hell.

“Don’t get me wrong, Professor. The old are just as hard to shock as any six-year-old. They not only seen it all, they done eighty-six percent of it. Christ, they’re as crazy about bad news as you are. Why shouldn’t things stink if you’re going to die soon? It’s just that we love to correct, show our disapproval like preserves we’ve put up. If we had the strength we’d throw stones. So just don’t underestimate us. Don’t be sly and don’t be disrespectful. Don’t ask an old-timer ‘Long distance too?’ when he’s trying to explain Socialized Telephone in the USSR to you.

“All I want to know is this. How’d a son of a bitch like you get into this line of work?”

“What do you want from me?” Messenger asked. “Tomorrow we have chunks of braised beef served with noodles in a rich broth, buttered Texas toast, French-style green beans and glazed pineapple tidbits. Or you could have breaded beef cutlet, Wisconsin whole-grain corn and red beet slices. What do you want from me?”

“Wise guy,” Reece said. “That’s all right. We love it you’re a wise guy. We think it’s terrific you’re a horse’s ass.”

Messenger, understanding that they didn’t like him, was untroubled. He only found it a little unfair. He brought their dinners, he did for them, even helping to feed those one or two of his clients who could not manage for themselves. He spent perhaps fifteen minutes with each of them, twice as much as Judith told him would be necessary. At some other time of his life he would have been bothered perhaps by their hostility, but now it was a matter of indifference to him, as things were a matter of indifference to him to which he had never thought he would become accommodated.

Messenger had had what he thought of as a curious life. He had published a collection of stories and three novels, all of which were out of print, none of which had ever come out in paperback. And though he was still occasionally invited to read from his work on various campuses, the fees were always small and the invitations invariably came from friends who themselves hoped to be invited to his school in return. (It was a point of pride with him that he never returned the favor.) There were seldom more than thirty or forty people in his audiences, half of whom were there because they had been asked to the party in his honor afterward. He was forty-five years old and accepted these offers not for the money and certainly not for the opportunity they gave him to see his old friends but because on one such trip, shortly after the publication of his second novel, he had met a really beautiful young graduate student who had driven him back to his motel after the party and spent the night with him in his room. She said she was nuts about his work, but when he ordered breakfast for them the next morning it turned out she had read only one of his stories. It was the single story he had published in The New Yorker, the title story of a collection he was to publish a year later, and the only thing he’d ever written to be optioned for the movies. The amiable madman who had purchased the option, Amos Ropeblatt, a hopeful fellow who had once had something to do with an Orson Welles film made back in the fifties, renewed it annually for five hundred dollars.

Messenger felt he was clearly second string, a man who had been granted tenure by his university when he was still in his mid-thirties, on the basis, it seems, of that same New Yorker story that had gotten him laid a dozen or so years before, the memory of which incident kept him returning to those campuses neither for his token fees nor for those sparse audiences to whom he read from what even he could not seriously think of as his “work,” and still less for his friends, but for those parties.

Then, at a time of his life when he no longer really needed it, he came into an inheritance, or an inheritance by default. An aunt, preceded in death by her maiden daughters, left him three hundred thousand dollars. On two occasions he had himself almost died, once from a heart attack and once from a bone stuck in his throat on which he had nearly choked. And he was troubled by his children.

And something else. He had grown tolerant of his own bad driving. Regularly he dinged cars in parking lots, gouging metal divots from his once smooth fenders and altering the face of his grille, the delicate crosshatching piecemeal collapsing as he sought to negotiate parking spaces at four and five and six miles an hour. There was one car, a black ’76 Gremlin, that, parked by the curb in the narrow faculty lot behind his building, seemed always to be in his way, the dark molding about its left rear wheel an obstacle he seldom missed as he attempted to move into his slot in the single cramped row of cars. Each accident, each small engagement, brought a brief anger, then a queer, righteous, irrational fulfillment. The car was never not there, always, it seemed to Messenger, in a favored position among the automobiles lined up like race horses at a starting gate. Messenger cursed its owner’s regularity, the long-suffering smugness of the scarred and battered Gremlin. He never left a note — when he left in the afternoon the car was still there — or sought to hide the evidence of his guilt, the injured auto’s black paint smeared like spoor across his cream-colored Pontiac. On each occasion he made the same speech to himself. “My hand-eye coordination’s. going. Fuck him. Why should I worry about a little scratched paint?” But he knew he would neither die nor ever hurt anybody in an accident, that he would simply drive over curbs as he turned corners, skin cars parked along side streets, dent the odd fender here and there along life’s highway.

He was forty-five years old, an old middle-aged man, and required marijuana whenever he left his home.

“Meals-on-Wheels,” Messenger called as he pushed open the unlocked door.

“That’s all right,” a voice called thinly.

The house looked like the inside of a stringed instrument, the wood unpainted, gray as kindling. Even the furniture was unfinished. Messenger, looking at the warped woodwork and canted floors and walls, had the sense that the rooms needed to be tuned.

“Is it still hot?”

“Should be,” Messenger said, raising his voice to the woman he had not yet seen. “I could warm it up on your stove if you like.”

“Yeah,” the woman said, “that’d be terrific. A hot free lunch would make all the difference in my life.” She came out of her room. She was pushing an aluminum walker. “I’m Mrs. Carey,” Mrs. Carey said.

“Cornell Messenger.”

“Yeah,” she said, “how do you do? I missed you yesterday. I was to the clinic for tests. I didn’t know I’d be gone so long or I’d have left a note. Cigarette?”

“No thanks.” He had already begun to reheat the chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes.

“It was the first time I was out in over a month,” she said. “It felt real good. They picked me up in one of those minibuses they send round for the handicapped. They got them equipped with special lifts for wheelchairs. Welfare gave me a wheelchair but I swear to you it’s easier to get around with my walker. I ain’t got the strength in my arms to roll it. A woman needs somebody to push her. I’ll tell you something,” Mrs. Carey said. “I think it looks common when a lady pushes her own wheelchair. That sound funny? That’s the way of it. I’m a heavy smoker but even when I was walking I never smoked in the street. That looks common, too. You think it’s foolish a woman with a Welfare wheelchair and a free walker that travels the town in the handicap bus and waits on the warmed-over charity lunch should say such things and have such notions? You put me down for pride I sit in the kitchen in my nightgown and robe while some strange guy heats my meal?”

“No, of course not.”

“Ain’t you nice,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something you’re so nice. I qualify for benefits from seventeen agencies of the United Way. Last year it was only six. Next year, if I live and nothing happens, it could be thirty.”

“You should look on the bright side,” Cornell said.

“Yeah? You think so?”

“I certainly do.”

“How about that? Say, let me ask you something. Are you important? You told me on the blower you’re making Mrs. Glazer’s deliveries, and she’s married to a big shot over at the university. Maybe you’re important too.”

“No,” Cornell said.

“Yeah, I’ll bet. What’s wrong with Mrs. Glazer anyway?”

“I guess she’s sick.”

“Mind my business, huh? Okay. Let me ask you something else. What did you do with that lunch you had left over yesterday?”

“I ate it.”

“No kidding? Yeah? Maybe you ain’t important.”

“Important people eat a different lunch?”

“They eat omelets. They eat salads. They eat cold soups and thin fish. Let me ask you a question. I don’t get out much anymore. Just to the clinic, just to the agencies. Mrs. Glazer used to tell me, but she ain’t been by in weeks now.”

“Mrs. Glazer has cancer,” Messenger said.

“Oh shit,” Mrs. Carey said.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Cornell said.

“No no, that’s all right. Can I call her up? Is she home?”

“Well she’s home,” Messenger said, “but she’s very tired. It might be better if you waited.”

“You know a lot about it.”

“She’s a friend of mine.”

“Geez, I almost put my foot in it, didn’t I? How about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Hey, forget it,” Mrs. Carey said. “I didn’t know you was that Messenger.”

“That Messenger? What do you mean? What were you going to ask me?”

An odd change seemed to have overtaken her. She became suddenly coy, teasing, returned quite mysteriously to a time when she had not been ill, the new quality somehow unseemly, as if she powered her own wheelchair perhaps, or smoked in the street. She wanted coaxing, Messenger saw, but he was annoyed. “Ha ha,” she laughed, almost singing. “Ha ha ha.” It was as if she remembered not flirtation exactly but flirtation’s poses and noises. He hoped she wasn’t going to hold her knees and sway in place. “Ha ha,” she chirped again.

“I seem to have been a regular tonic for you,” Cornell said. Was she rolling her eyes at him? Was she pursing her lips? What was this teenage pantomime all about?

“Are you holding? Have you got any mary jane on you?”

“What?”

“Are you high? Do you see visions? They jump the rates on your car insurance?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ha ha.”

“Look, lady, dinner is served.”

“Maybe you ought to give me a puff. I hear it does wonders for chicken-fried steak.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not an agency of the United Way.”

“Ooh, you’re angry.” Cornell had started to leave the kitchen. “What I’d like to know is how you find the time to come down here when there’s so much to be done at home?”

“Nice meeting you.”

“I’m a goddamn shut-in, Mister. You think it’s a disappointment to me they give a marathon in the park I can’t run in it? It ain’t the long distances that get to you, honey, it’s the yards and inches. Time and tide took the world away. You think you can buy me off with TV, radio call-in shows, fucking Action Line? My good friend got cancer and you lay down the house rules? She’s tired, it might be better if I waited? She ain’t taking calls from the lower classes just now? She’ll take mine though. Want to bet?”

“Hey, come on, what are you so excited about? Don’t get so excited.”

“How’s whoosis, Audrey? Does she still bust out crying when she reads the paper?”

“Look.”

“Can she get her own breakfast cereal yet? Or is she still too upset about the French Revolution? How’s her husband? Is he still going to commit her if she don’t shape up?”

“Judith had no right—”

“Oh, rights,” she said. “Rights ain’t in it, just needs. Like your pal, the one that’s in love. Losey. And what about his wife, the woman on whaddayoucallit, academic probation? How’s your kid?”

“What about my kid?”

“Well, we don’t know,” she said. “We ain’t sure.”

It was an exquisite situation and Messenger had to admire his dying pal and her still lively genius for humiliation. It was the wackiness, her locked-up years, all that time getting well when, denied the world and everything that was not therapy, everything not grist for her health, from Mrs. Carey’s omelets and cold soups — her digestion in those years (she’d been a long time loony, almost, she’d said, a lifer) a lesson in nutrition (he could imagine her sturdy, high-fibered boweling the consistency and color of Lincoln Logs) — to her family, the ordinary aunts and uncles (though by “ordinary” one did not mean anything bogtrot or rank-and-file: he had seen the men’s distinguished hair, their pewter sideburns, the women like seeded tennis players with their flat behinds and bellies and their hard, suntanned skin) and good-natured cousins — he’d seen them, too, and could not remember whether they were men or women: he supposed that what they had in common with each other and with Judith was not their character or sense of humor but only a frame of reference, the names of headmistresses and masters and coaches and ministers and cooks and servants, their generation itself, he guessed — and the brother almost old enough to be her father. Denied the parents themselves, those daughter-scorned victims who might, if they’d only been ministers or cooks, have gotten off, been dismissed as merely two more names in the lexicon. (And he’d seen them too, and come away impressed, even charmed, by that Chairman of the Board and his meticulously courteous wife, now dead, amazed and astonished as he always was by a wealth that seemed to have no immediate source or, what was even more astonishing, product, that did not burn gas or coal, or supply widgets, or grow food, or win or even just fight wars, or get rolled up and tossed onto your lawn each morning — that was simply, as far as Messenger could see, just pure wealth, pure money, withheld from the planet’s effects entirely, like the invisible original resources of a king or government.) Denied everything that could not induce health, hard news and strong books not permitted her, even, he’d heard, prime-time television, even make-up, even card or board games with the other patients in the common room. Allowed two things only: The first her psychiatrist (hers literally; they paid him seventy thousand dollars a year; he had no other patients), a stickler for every event of her mind who, if she had not already been mad, might have made her so with his endless inquiry — she was, it was said, his unpublished book—Judith: A Study of Causes—into her responses and reactions. And the other her lover, Sammy, the future husband and dean a simple graduate student in those days who may or may not also have been on retainer.

So that her talent for creative abuse, for industrial-strength practical jokes, must have dated from those days. Indeed, she had once said as much at a dinner party.

“When I was being fattened up back there on the farm, when they were getting me ready for the world, I wasn’t permitted drugs. I wasn’t even permitted sleeping pills. Hell, I wasn’t even permitted shock therapy. I can remember looking at the faces of some of the other patients on my wing when they came back from electric shock. They looked as if they had just been jabbed in the eyes with Novocaine. I envied them their dulled wits and hamstrung wills. A crazy is so helpless anyway. No one believes her. That’s the ultimate outrage anyway — that everyone’s always considering the source. I tell you if I had smelled smoke and yelled ‘Fire!’ not a nurse or orderly would have looked up. You had to do grand opera to get a response from those people. I wouldn’t do that. I became a sort of mad politician instead. I schemed constantly. We became pen pals.”

“Pen pals?”

“I wrote them letters. I reminded them of everything I knew about them, all I could think of that had just been jarred loose by the electric company, everything their doctors and the public utilities wanted burned out of them. It was one public service against another. They turned on the juice, I turned on the heat.”

“Did they ever answer?”

“You bet they did! Among all those get well cards and cheery letters from home, I venture to say mine was the only mail with any real news. They answered all right. They told me stuff about themselves their docs didn’t know.”

“Oh, Judy,” Sam said.

“Oh, Sam. What’s so terrible? We believed in trauma then, in dreams and childhood. In the raised voice at the vulnerable moment. It was a sort of astrology. The houses of Jupiter, the cusps of Mars. We believed in everything but character. — And I didn’t do anything with their letters. I didn’t use them for blackmail or flash them for gossip. I was interested in only one thing.”

“Judy, please.”

“Sam, please. — I was interested in only one thing. I was a kind of alchemist. All I cared about was the transubstantiation of dross into mischief.”

The cunt, Messenger thought, and knew something he hadn’t known he’d known. She’d made Sam dean. He didn’t know how, but he couldn’t recall either which were girl cousins, which boy, or where the money came from or if it even was money at the bottom of the family fortune. It could have been anything. It could have been God’s good will. Sam was Judy’s man. Judy was Sam’s friend downtown. He was her dean, her mischief.

And it was still an exquisite situation. Judy was dying, he couldn’t lay a glove on her. Judy was dying, she held all the cards. She was a hell of a foe. She was a hell of a foe with her scorched-earth policies and land mines and booby traps and all the rest of her devastating paraphernalia and time bomb vengeance.

That she had planned this he had no doubt. That she had known who her victims would be was another question. (Excepting the immediate family of course — Sam, the girls, possibly her father.) Was he meant to be a victim? Messenger thought so. “If there’s anything I can do,” he had said. It was what everyone said. Surely he had been saved for the Meals-on-Wheels route. But how could she have known his schedule that semester, that he was conveniently free just those two to two and a half hours she would need him? How could she have known Mrs. Carey would be so cooperative, blurt out the names and disgraces of his friends, accuse Cornell of his habit, and hint at inside information about his children? How, finally, could she have known she would get cancer?

But that was the point, wasn’t it? She couldn’t. Judith made mischief the way some people made money. Not to buy anything with it, just to have it ready to hand. If she was a vague irritant to them while she was alive, how much more of a pain in the ass would she be when she died and there was no stopping her? Who else in the city knew of the griefs in the west county? Messenger saw these now as Mrs. Carey must have seen them — distanced by soap opera, attenuated in a medium of insulate otherness, flattened by the fact that they were not shared in any real way. Judith’s achievement had been to trivialize what was most important to them, what kept them going and made them friends.

He would not eat the next leftover lunch. He would bring it to Judy.

2

No one has called him Captain in years. He’s Mr. Mead now. He would be Mr. Mead to anyone. To a president, to an enemy or friend, to the public health nurses who have the most intimate knowledge of what remains to Mr. Mead of Mr. Mead’s body. To God Himself perhaps. It seems strange to him, and a little impertinent — for great age alters relation as well as vocabulary — that Louise should call him Dad. He can be no one’s dad.

Because you outlive everything if you live long enough.

What changes he has seen!

And has outlived change too, the years, even the epochs of his own life, no longer discrete to him, or that things done one way were now done — if they were done — another, of the least importance. He is too old to be an old-timer, too old for that county courthouse ease where soul takes tea with soul or cronies swap cronies not viewpoint, opinion — they can’t hold their bowels, how can they hold opinions? — but simple, loquacious mood, up there, static, displayed as artifact, veteran’d whether or no they have ever been to war, even the benches on which they sit become a sort of reviewing stand. He is too old to be a grandfather, too old to fish, whittle, lie, too old even to be marked by a distinct disease. That those nurses know him so well, and know so well what can be expected of him, has nothing to do with his being Mr. Mead. (There is a chart at the foot of his bed even though he is home and not in a hospital. Nothing is written on it except his name — Mr. Mead — not his pulse or blood pressure reading or temperature, no note about diet or medications — possibly his age.) They know him so well because he’s a category, not a person. As an infant is a category. Finally, he is too old even to be Mr. Mead.

He tries to follow what his daughter and that fellow George, his son-in-law, are saying. It isn’t really difficult if he concentrates. He recognizes the names even without the elaborate reference points and documentation his daughter insists on supplying each time her narrative turns a corner or comes to one. He has been a sailor. It isn’t difficult to orient himself.

“You remember, Dad. He used to have that TV show on Sunday mornings where he healed people of their sicknesses. Well, he’s minister at Virginia Avenue Baptist now. That big old church that used to be Catholic? You remember. It was just over from Crown’s? You used to take us to Crown’s and treat us to ice cream when you came back from a trip. That time George got his Buick we went there. You, Mom, George and me — all of us. We had to park three blocks away because mass was still going on, and you told us about that river pilot who’d put into shore on Sunday mornings just to find a mass he could go to.”

“Channel 11,” Mr. Mead said.

“You hear that, George?” Louise said. “Dad still remembers all that river talk.”

“That was the TV station he was on — Channel 11.”

“What’s that, Dad? Oh. Well he’s the one who wants George to give the sermon.”

His son-in-law brings the young man into the bedroom with him. He has his dinner but doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He has never seen visitors in the house before. Perhaps he thinks that Louise and George are from the City, that they have come to sweet-talk him into going into a Home. Perhaps Louise thinks the young man is an official, that the City of St. Louis caters her father’s meals.

“Oh, look Dad, it’s your dinner. What did they bring you today? Ooh,” she says, “tuna noodle casserole. Hot Billy roll and butter. Peach slices served on romaine lettuce with creamy dressing.” She used to work in a school cafeteria. She actually recognizes this stuff.

As the young man feeds him — his daughter makes no move to take the tray from him — Louise rambles on. “Mr. Laglichio — you remember Mr. Laglichio, Dad; it was his truck George used when you got Mom that stove — has to hire a new driver. Lewis — you never met him, Dad; he came after you were already bedfast — won’t go into those neighborhoods anymore. Mr. Laglichio told him half the people in the city go into those neighborhoods. Cops, the people who deliver their mail and read the meters and fix the phones. All the delivery people. Even cab drivers. Social workers.” She looks in the young man’s direction and blushes. “Anyway it might be a good opportunity for some young fellow. And George can’t be expected to handle all the work himself. Maybe one of your mates knows someone looking for a job. I’ll write Mr. Laglichio’s number down and make a note what it’s all about so you don’t forget.”

“Write it on my chart.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Aren’t you going to eat your nice peach slices? You should eat fruit, Dad. That’s what makes BM’s. You don’t want the man to tell them at City Hall that you waste food.” She winks at the young man. “Dad knows better. He used to be a cook on the river. You cooked on the river five years, didn’t you, Dad?” This is not like her. She talks this way, Mr. Mead thinks, because she loves to fuss over him and he is so invalid she thinks he can no longer be embarrassed. She’s right, he can’t. “It’s all a damn bother anyway,” she says suddenly, feelingly. “You don’t have to eat fruit, and the last thing you need to worry about is whether Laglichio gets a replacement for Lewis. Lewis doesn’t have to be afraid of the jungle bunnies anyway. The cops could go down there without their guns and pull cats out of trees. The man who reads the meter could read it in the darkest cellar as if it were the best news in the paper. The delivery man is welcome as Santa Claus, and the postman safer than the guy who brings the Bumsteads’ mail.”

“Louise,” George says.

“Louise,” says Mr. Mead.

“Well it’s so,” Louise says. “Isn’t it so, George? You’re saved. I mean all you got to do is pray. All you got to do is pray for us. Just open your mouth and let her rip. ‘Make things swell, Lord. Do all the other folks like you done me. Make things grand altogether.’ Ain’t that about the size of it, honey?”

“That’s about the size of it,” George says.

“I have another delivery,” Messenger says.

“Hey, don’t run off,” Louise tells him. “Stick around while my husband changes the world through prayer.”

Mr. Mead laughs. Then George and Louise do. Cornell Messenger also starts to laugh.

“What?” Mr. Mead asks. “What?”

“I hate to come into this neighborhood,” Cornell manages.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” his daughter says. “You thought we forgot, didn’t you? Oh,” she says, “I bet you forgot yourself. I’m ashamed of you, Dad. That means you forgot Mom’s, too, because hers was yesterday. Did you forget that, Dad?”

“I did,” Mr. Mead says.

“Is today your birthday?”

“She says so.”

“Of course it is,” Louise says. “I made pumpkin pecan pie. I’m going to fix you a piece too, Mister. I hope you don’t mind using a napkin on your lap instead of a plate.”

“I pray he don’t mind,” George says quietly.

“I forgot my own birthday,” Mr. Mead says approvingly. “I was a sailor twenty years and lived by landmark and azimuth and time. I was a sailor twenty years, five of them cook. I was already old but even down there in the galley I always knew where I was, could tell which farms we’d passed from one seating to the next.”

“Tell about the time the boat was stuck in the ice, Dad. When you and Mom and the rest of the crew had to walk across the river to the Arkansas side.”

“No, no,” Mr. Mead says. He wonders why he said that about being a sailor. He is too old to make overtures, too old to give assurances that he had once been young or known a world wider than the room in which he now lies. Evidently he has not always been so reticent, though he has no memory of decorating his life with anecdote. Perhaps she heard the story from her mother, though it’s possible she had it from him. People had their own frequencies, were constantly sending messages of self, flashing bulletins of being, calling stop press, overriding, jamming the weaker signals of others.

George wonders about the Meals-on-Wheels man. He knows of course, as Louise must, despite what she’s said to the old man, that he doesn’t work for the city. He doesn’t have the look of a civil servant. He would look out of place at the Hall, even paying a traffic fine or property taxes. He can’t imagine him buying license plates or going to the clinic for a vaccination. He suddenly realizes that he’s been denied access to an entire class of people. He has never been in their homes or done business with them. He watches Cornell pick at his pie as if it were somehow extraordinary, something ethnic.

“How about another slice?” George asks.

“Me? No thanks. It’s really quite good.”

“Sure. It’s from a recipe.”

“You remember, Dad. I got the recipe in trade school that time I thought I’d bake for the school lunch program. You thought it was delicious but told me all those ingredients would have tied up the galley.” She turns to Cornell. “There wouldn’t have been anywhere to store the pumpkins.”

She is embarrassed that a stranger brings her father’s lunch. It looks bad.

Messenger believes they don’t know anything about him.

Mr. Mead, the old farmer, the old sailor and river cook, the ancient, if Louise is right, birthday boy — Mr. Mead, on this ordinary afternoon in St. Louis, has a moment of special clarity, brighter and more exciting than the routine orientation and simple daily legibility of his life. His body, which these past — How many years had he been an old man?

“Is it really my birthday?”

“Of course, Dad.” The woman nods almost imperceptibly in Cornell’s direction.

“Is it?” he asks the man who has brought his lunch.

What’s going on? Cornell wonders. Are they having the old-timer on? Didn’t he just have bakery in his mouth? How old he must be. Cornell raises his fork toward Mr. Mead. “Happy birthday,” he says.

Louise is a little irritated with her father. They’ve never been separated — the trips on the river were business — but they were not really close. His fault. He was independent always. Even old he is independent. People in a family shouldn’t have to woo each other. She’s always sent him cards, brought gifts, kept track of his anniversaries and celebrations, kept score on his life. Now he asks a stranger if it’s really his birthday. She’s not sore because he doesn’t trust her — he’s old, it’s easy for a person her father’s age to become confused — but because all his confidence has not been blasted. Some remains. He appeals to strangers, outside authority.

He remembers now. Not because Harve’s father has wished him happy birthday. He remembers.

He’s going to die. It isn’t a premonition. No Indian instinct commands him to cut himself from the herd. He is under no compulsion to be alone, to be anywhere but where he is. His knowledge of his death doesn’t even come from outside himself. And now he pinpoints the exciting clarity, the special orientation. It’s his body which has had the first inkling, his skin which cannot feel the bedclothes or register weight. His toenails which no longer slice back into his flesh, and his bones which no longer harbor pain, the gray blaze of years’ duration which has served as a sort of measuring device. (I am as tall as my pain.) His teeth which no longer have dimension, their honed edges and the bump of gums and the false-scale depth he has plumbed with his tongue. His stubble which he no longer feels when he draws his lower lip into his mouth. He is neutral as hair. And though residual movement remains — he can draw his lower lip into his mouth, he can open his eyes, shut them — and at least the minimal synapses which permit him his speech, he can no longer feel it resonate along its dental and aspirate contacts and stops, his voice as alien to him as if it came from a radio. (How can it even be heard?) His nervous system is shutting down, fleeing its old painful coordinates as if a warning had been given, like the blinking of lights, say, that signal people to leave a public building. He is dying.

And now he can’t speak either. Or close his eyes. And death has come to certain emotions. He means to be afraid, is certain he is afraid, yet he feels no fear, his mind and body not up to it, unable to accommodate it now that his resources are so depleted, as if on the occasion of final things, in emergency conditions, life entertained only that which was still essential to it, like a level-headed victim, like a clever refugee. Though he should be surprised, the nerves of astonishment have been cut.

Though he can no longer see or hear her — just now his ears have turned off — he knows that his daughter is beside him. Probably she is holding his hand. And he tries, helplessly, uselessly, to return the pressure. He could as easily fly. (Is he flying?) And now affection is deadened too, all the emotions tapped out as his skin. He knows what he should be feeling — and now italics leave him — as he had known seconds before that he should be afraid, that he wanted to be afraid, but it is all impossible. He may only — blinded, deafened, without italics — witness his death, less involved, finally, than the man, what’shisname, the lunch guy’s pal, who was going to have his wife committed if she didn’t cheer up. He’d be grateful if gratitude were any more available to him than fear or sight or the weight of his bedclothes.

Now he is almost used up. Denied physiology, he regards his Cheshire decline with what? With nothing. What should have been of interest, the most personal moment in his life, is now merely consciousness, knowledge, the mind’s disinterested attention. He is like someone neither participant nor fan who hears a ball score. Like a man in Nebraska told it’s raining in Paris. He watches death with his knowledge and no money riding on it.

He is alone in the map room, cannot perceive the quadrants of his being as his sectors succumb and are obliterated and do not, for all their pale, attenuate traces, seem even poignantly to flare in the face of their extinguishment. Typography and symbols fail him, all the niceties. He cannot read the signs and illuminations, the channel buoys, all the white lines in the road, all the lodestars and mileposts, vanes and windsocks and load-line marks that could show him boundaries or indicate how low he rides in the water. (And now even the circuits that make analogies have been discontinued.) He is almost history, narrative, gossip.

He knows he cannot see. Has he eyes? He knows he cannot hear. Has he ears? He knows he cannot feel. Has he flesh? Is his sphincter open? Has he still a body? Is it turned to bruise? Does it run with pus?

All that is left to him finally — and he could use his astonishment now if he were able — is what he will become when he no longer knows it. Nothing sacred is happening here, nothing very solemn, nothing important. There is almost certainly no God. He would tell George Mills not to bother about his salvation if he could, but it doesn’t make any difference that he can’t. What could he use now if it were still available to him? His amazement? No. His fear? Certainly not. His old capacity to care for them? Useless. Any of his feelings? No. Useless, useless.

He remembers — peculiarly, memory still flickers, and a certain ability, probably reflex, to muse, to consider; all this would be something to share if he could, to tell them that memory is the last thing left in the blood when you check out, that you die piecemeal, in sections, departments, and it’s memory goes down with the ship, though it might be different with different people; maybe it’s important sometimes, maybe it’s sacred once in a while, and God might come for some but not for others; Christ, he’s dying like someone stabbed in opera, stumbling around with a mouthful of arias (Jesus, is there hope? Where did the images and italics come from? He isn’t sure but certainly there is no hope. He does not hope.), and maybe that’s why death was so long-winded, why disease took as long as it did — to give the systems time to wind down, but that’d be different for different people too; maybe some went with a great flaming itch they couldn’t get to — his first large woman.

Well, woman. She was fourteen years old and weighed one hundred and seventy-four pounds. Lord, she was big. It wasn’t fat, circus lady fat, jinxed genes and a broken pituitary. What was merely chemical — he imagined cells in geometric replication, like a queer produce that laced some glandular broth — did not become human for him. It was never just weight which tickled his fancy, great boluses of flesh which draped their heavy arms and thighs like a sort of bunting. Great heavy asses so big their cracks seemed like surgical scars. Immense bolsters of breast that piled and rolled on their chests like tide. But some idea of heaviness, of mass and strength and density which sent out a kind of gravity.

It sure attracted me, he thinks, whose prick has just gone out, its nerve ends snuffed, doused as wick, and who recalls, with detachment, almost dead, too, not against his will but in dead will’s leaden absence, all sexual nostalgia gone, all bias—that stout girl. (Always one of the code words. Stately, plump, buxom, portly. Words whose meanings he knew but looked up in a dozen dictionaries just to see them written out.)

That stout girl. Her strapping, robust, sturdy sisters. Their heavy haunches, their meaty hams. Their thick hair and big hands. Their full busts and statuesque figures.

Because maybe we really are clay. Something in flesh which takes an imprint and strikes us off like medals, human change.

“You can’t,” she said, and hoped he could, that someone could.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to try.”

“Maybe in water.”

“Oh no. On land.” (And that moment has before him all his fantastic, dumb ideal. The woman who can’t be raised even in water, who drops on him like female anchor, sunk, unbuoyant treasure, against all the annulled, mediate influence of displacement, whelming him, his striving, kicking, bucking limbs. All I ever needed, he thinks, was to be drowned real good, and does not remember his actual wife who actually was.)

“You can try, but if I fall and hurt you it’s not my fault.”

She was not even teasing, he thinks now. Nor was I. I had such dialogues by heart. I put them through them like a cross-examiner with my ploys like so many idioms, leading them on, and my professed disbelief just one more idiom.

“No, that can’t be so. Your bathroom scale is off.”

“You think the doctor’s scale is off?”

“Oh, the doctor’s scale. You didn’t say it was the doctor’s scale.”

“Yeah, well it was.”

“Still, no scale’s always reliable. Unless you’re one of those people who looks lighter than she actually is. Let’s see,” he had said, “I know I can lift” and names a weight ten or fifteen pounds less than the one she has told him, fifteen or twenty more than he knows he can raise. “If I can’t pick you up, the scale’s probably right.” And he can’t, his knees already buckled in capitulate sexual deference to female mass, this body of body against whose volume he opposes his own, and not even he knows if he’s really trying, though he thinks he is, hopes he is, even as he fumbles, slips, goes down.

And if his tears had not already died he would be weeping now, and if his ability to sorrow were not gone he would be wretched.

And sees one last time their outsized dresses, their hundred relaxed postures — large women on benches, in bleachers, in stockinged feet along the slopes of shoe salesmen’s stools, sidesaddle on horses or climbing out of cars or down steep hills, sprawling in parks, on picnics, on beaches, floating in water or soaking in tubs, clumsy in changing rooms, bulging the sheets on examining tables, sitting on toilets or putting on shoes, reaching for dishes or passing the soup, turning in sleep, their nightgowns hiked up, or fetching a slipper from under a bed, stretching or bending or praying to God, sweating in summer and fanning themselves, looking behind them in mirrors for bruises, doing an exercise, letting out seams. In all disarray arrayed. Mead’s large ladies, Mead’s fat forms, his sprawled, spilled women tumbling his head like the points of a pinwheel.

He is already dead when God comes to collect him, already dead before Mills or his daughter or Messenger notices that he has closed his eyes.

He has died with Louise’s birthday pie in his mouth, with Cornell’s plastic Meals-on-Wheels fork in his teeth.

“Tell us about,” the brand new orphan demands of her parent, and asks for some event she herself has fleshed out into a story. “What is it, Dad? Are you asleep?”

The death is discovered and the irrational is suddenly loose in the room, all the gases of the unstable like heavy weather. The house is too small to contain its tricky, too fluid volumes. Even the dead man’s stolid constancy seems willful, some petulant obstinacy. George Mills’s mood ring flashes a bright yellow, cautionary as the back of a school bus. For all of them, mood is wayward, volatile, uncapped, at once murderously resolved and open as the tempers at gaming tables. They are not in shock but in shock’s agitate, high-strung otherness, their reckless affections jumpy with rampage.

“Well this is it,” Cornell says. “Who needs this? I don’t need this. Under the circumstances I said a perfectly normal, natural thing. The woman’s dying. All I said was is there anything I could do. Bam! She dumps her volunteer work on me! The horror, the horror! Now I see my mistake. I rushed things. In these situations you wait, you buy time and keep your own counsel. Afterward, if you want to be helpful, you say a word to the widower. You never ask the principal. Never. You ask the principal it’s like some deathbed pledge, high oaths. God knows what they’ll come up with. They could whisper the name of their killer in your ear. Then where are you? I’ll tell you what I learned from this. If it’s terminal you shake their hand if they’re a man and kiss them on the lips if they’re a woman.”

Mills’s wife says, “There wasn’t a thing wrong. Nothing. He was old is all. That’s no sickness. I won’t say I never saw him looking better. That would be hogwash. Sure I’ve seen him look better. He wasn’t always old. He used to be young. I’ve seen him when he could be downright playful. There was this great big gal the next farm over that whenever Dad saw her he’d say how she must have been dieting and that he knew he could lift her. And he’d try. Then and there. He’d try to pick her up. But she was so big, well of course he never could. Sure. I’ve seen him look better. But I’ve seen him look worse, too. He even laughed. He was laughing not ten minutes ago. You heard him, George. What? What are you making that face for?”

“I mean it never even occurred to me that it would be open-ended. Even after she told me I could take over her Meals-on-Wheels and I found out it fit my schedule, it never occurred to me it would turn into this ongoing thing. I don’t know what I was thinking of. I must have been stoned. I wasn’t, but I agreed. You’d have to be stoned or otherwise impaired to agree to such a nutty proposition. I’m needed at home, for God’s sake. I got a teenage kid doesn’t get the point of knock-knock jokes and one old enough to vote thinks he’s a fucking prince. Works part time, minimum wage, to get cash to see ball games, calls the movies eleven times to check when the show starts. I mean look what time it is, for Christ’s sake. When is lunch over? When some old fart dies? Oh.”

“What is it, George?”

“His bowels. Phew! It’s got to be his bowels.”

“Do they do that? I heard they do that, but I’ve never been sure. It’s like that thing you hear about hanged men, that they get, you know, a big one. Is that true, too? I shouldn’t be the one to have to clean him up. He was my father. That’s what I’d remember. That wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t. It isn’t right to expect a daughter to wipe up her father’s intimate dirt. What’s that, a way of dealing with grief? I guess if you have something practical and nasty to do you don’t feel so bad afterward because all you remember is how awful it was and you’re only glad he doesn’t have to die again. Oh, these arrangements. Everything supposed to come out even. What’s even about it? What’s so damned even about it? Dad and I didn’t have such an easy time together. No thank you! If the city wants him cleaned up, let the city do it!”

“Phew! I’m going to open the windows. He’d have had to be poisoned to stink like that.”

“He loved that pie,” Louise says. “That was his favorite pie.”

“How do I go to her? What am I supposed to say? ‘You, Judith! What do you think you’ve saddled me for, the duration? You’ve got pancreatic cancer trouble. You’re a goner, but you could last six months. Since when do saints subcontract? I never signed up for any war on poverty, you did. I’m clearing off for Canada.’ ”

“They’ve got to be smelling it in the streets. Like sewer smoke. He had to be poisoned. No peaceful gut stinks like that.”

“ ‘You want something reasonable, just ask. You want magazines? You want someone to fetch your prescriptions or drive your visitors home? Sure, I can do that.’ ”

“Poisoned? You really think so? Those peach slices on lettuce with creamy dressing. Where are you going?”

“This is terrible,” Cornell says. “I’m very sorry. I guess the only good thing about it is that he had his family with him. Look,” he says, obedient to his civilized life, “if there’s anything I can do—”

“Clean him up.”

“What?”

“You’re an agency, aren’t you?” Louise says. “Or if you ain’t an agency you work with them. Clean him up. Clean my father up!”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a food handler. I handle food!”

“Yes, and it was your food he was eating when he died!” Louise shouts.

“Like hell! He was eating that pie you made from the goddamn recipe!” snaps outraged Cornell.

“You had some too!” Louise yells at him. “I ate it, I’m all right!”

“I didn’t actually mean he was poisoned,” George says quietly.

“There was nothing wrong with him.”

“He was old,” Cornell says. “He was a very old man.”

“Sure, and that’s all the reason your kind needs, ain’t it? It isn’t enough a person may have pain, or outlived his family, or he’s got worries, or can’t stretch his benefits. All that ain’t enough. You fix it so he’s got to sleep with one eye open and be on the lookout for someone with a needle from the government who’s decided he ain’t productive no more or’s a drain on the taxpayer! When all that’s wrong is he’s some lonely old man who’s only got left what might have happened to him when he was young. Then it’s all ‘Oh, the poor dear, let’s put him out of his misery, let’s stick the needle in his arm or give him a pill or slip something in his food.’ Where are you going? Don’t you dare leave! George, stop him.”

“This is crazy,” Cornell says.

“Don’t call me names. I don’t need any murderers calling me names. George? George!”

Except for the fact that he misses his father-in-law and wishes he were here to enjoy this, George Mills is having a grand time. His enjoyment is his share of the irrational.

“Why do you think he ain’t in a Home? Why do you think the VA don’t have him? He wanted to steer clear of people like you. He wanted to decide when enough was enough and not some bureaucrat mercy killer. Who made you God? You ain’t God. When you came in, didn’t you see that he had folks, that he had a daughter who still made him birthdays, a son-in-law who took an hour off from work to share them with him? Couldn’t you have changed your mind? Would it have been too inconvenient to back out without giving him dinner? You had the tray with you. I know you can’t just dump your poison in the street because if a dog died, or somebody’s cat, and if there was an investigation the whole thing might just come apart. Or maybe whoever it is you work for already wrote him off and it would have taken too much explaining. Do you know what that makes you? Not even a mercy killer. You killed him for paperwork! Oh,” Louise says softly, “oh, oh.” And begins to cry, her lump of the insanity wearing off like a drug, pulling her passionate madness, which she will never be able to account for, no more than the others, when they are once again sane, will be able to account for theirs, George his glee, Cornell his blabbermouth anger.

“Oh,” she says again, stunned, her orphan’s grief not even in it, none of her precedent loyalties or bespoke associations with the corpse on the bed, knowing the deepest shame she has ever felt, humiliation so profound apology would be unseemly as its cause. If she could die herself she would do so, if she could will Messenger dead she would, or George — anyone witness to her outburst. Only Mr. Mead is dead, and she turns pragmatically to him, not for forgiveness, for relief. He’s the only one in the room who’s neither seen nor overheard her lapse, and she’s actually grateful to him because only he has nothing to forgive.

Carefully, she begins to clean her father.

But Cornell is not through yet, and because Cornell is still mad George still has someone to entertain him, so George is not through yet either.

“Jeez,” he says slyly, “she sure had some things to say about you.”

“They’re lies,” Cornell says, “they’re crazy lies. I’m from Meals-on-Wheels. Not even from Meals-on-Wheels. I’m filling in. This ain’t my corner. Ifyouwereonbettertermswithyourneighborsyou’dknowthat.”

“My neighbors?”

“Your neighbors. The shut-ins. That take from Judy Glazer when she isn’t dying from cancer and has more time for them. They know all about it. Judy keeps them posted from the deathbed.”

“What does she tell them?” George asks.

“What are you smiling about? You enjoy it you know our secrets?”

Mills shrugs.

“Big deal. Everybody suffers. If you want to know the truth I didn’t even know I had secrets until I found out that strangers knew them.”

“Don’t be ashamed,” Mills says with cheerful compassion.

“Wait a minute. Is this about the Lord or something?”

“The Lord?” says the saved man.

“You know what I mean. If Audrey Binder cringes in the corner when there’s a misprint in a book she’s reading or the line is busy, it isn’t because she guessed wrong about Jesus. Unhappiness is her dirty little secret. I can’t keep up with it.”

“No,” says Mills, all understanding.

“I mean we live this Top Secret, Eyes Only life. I don’t see the point of it. You know what I think? I think we make too much of things. We’re the crybabies of the Western world! Boy oh boy, do we carry on! Pain, real pain, stuff wrong with your joints, that’s something else altogether.” Messenger lowers his voice and begins to bad-mouth his west end pals. “I mean who gives a shit Sam Glazer might not be able to handle the deanship?” he asks. George shakes his head, and Cornell fills him in on all the juicy gossip he can think of about his closest friends. He tells him about Victor Binder’s troubles with the IRS, about Paul Losey’s malpractice premiums and how Paul, smitten as a teenager, has evidently fallen hopelessly in love. “Nora Pat’s guessed something’s up, but she hasn’t a clue really. She’d bust if she did. It’s supposed to be someone right here in town.”

George nods.

“Say,” Messenger asks, “you’re not a blackmailer, are you?”

“I evict poor people,” Mills tells him expansively.

“Nora thinks all she has to do is fix an exciting bedroom, but I’ll tell you something. Nora’s got a mouth on her like the iron jaw lady. What difference does it make? She can lick and suck and blow on his balls till the cows come home. The guy’s in love. What can she do? If some other chick gets him off, that marriage is curtains. That’s why she’s on academic probation. Architecture flies out the window when a femme fatale comes in at the door. Hell, what does it matter? As if problems could ever be solved. I mean, shit, that’s why they’re problems, right? I mean if anything’s wrong it’s wrong forever. You can only make things worse. That’s where I screwed up with Harve. That’s where I screwed up with my kids. They’re bad kids, so I had to go and be a worse father. The horror, the horror, eh?”

But George is suddenly embarrassed. It’s his sanity returning. Only Cornell still steams with madness. Waves of it seem to come off his head like distorted, illusory vapors in a road, like the transparent parts of flame. It is astonishing to Mills how all mood cancels itself, how satiety sours abandon and compromises everything. Is there anywhere an experience one can walk away from with a clear conscience? He understands practically nothing of Messenger’s complaints and confessions, though he knows enough to be troubled by their intimacy. He does not want Cornell for a friend. He does not want friends. It’s too late. He is the man to whom everything has happened that is going to happen. This is his grace.

“Could you help me turn him please, George?” Louise asks politely.

The old man is naked on the bed. The sheets and pillowslips, smeared with feces, are in a corner of the room with his soiled pajamas.

“Sure, Louise,” Mills says.

“Wait, I’ll help you,” Messenger says, and handles the man as if he were changing a tire.

“My husband and I can manage,” Louise says.

“What? Oh. Sure. I just thought I might be able to help. Say,” Cornell says, “did anyone think to make a phone call?”

“A phone call?”

“Well when something, you know, like this happens the authorities have to be notified. It’s just that they’re supposed to know. And I guess arrangements have to be made.”

“Oh. Right. Who do we call? You know who we call, Louise?”

“Dad was a member of the union, but I don’t know the number. He might have written it down somewhere.”

“I can look it up,” Cornell volunteers.

“It was the Barge and Shippers’ Union.”

“I can handle that. I can make that call.”

“It’s just that I’m upset. I don’t exactly feel like…”

“Well sure, of course not,” Cornell says. “You can’t be expected to. That’s why I suggested I do it myself. Of course you’re upset. Where does your father keep his phone book? Never mind, I see it.”

“This is very considerate,” Louise says.

“Hey,” Messenger says, “that’s why it’s important to have a neutral party around at a time like this.”

He dials. They wait silently as the phone rings at the other end.

“Hello? Hello, Judy? Cornell Messenger. Listen. That nice Mr. Mead died.”

3

“Where’s the deputy?” Laglichio asked in the inner city, in the ghetto, by the projects, in line of sight but out of earshot of twenty or so dangerous-looking blacks. “Did you call him?”

“Maybe he already went in to serve the papers.”

“You see a patrol car, George?”

“Hand them over. I’ll serve them myself.”

“Make a citizen’s arrest, will you, George? Going to serve Xeroxes on these people? Going to show them carbon copies, flat, smooth seals like a sketch of the sunrise? They don’t read, George, just rub the paper to feel if it’s embossed. They live by a Braille law in this neighborhood.

“I like my work,” Laglichio said. They were leaning against the truck’s front fender. Laglichio seemed a changed man this morning. Not, George thought, because of his high spirits or even his rusty patience. He seemed, Mills thought, interested, expansive. “Not all of us can be bombardiers,” Laglichio said, “or sit by the machine gun on the penitentiary watchtower. We can’t all be turnkeys, and the state ain’t juiced no one in donkey’s years. I like my work. I do. It’s only evicting folks, but it makes a difference. They remember you. Long after they’ve forgotten the landlord’s name, they still remember the guy who put them out on the fucking street. Where’s that deputy?”

“Let’s go in without the papers,” George Mills said. “Let’s kick the door down and throw everybody out.”

“Oh ho,” Laglichio said. “Without the papers. That’d be something. That’d be smooth sailing, wouldn’t it? Where’s that mother? They’re watching us. There must be a couple dozen dark-skinned people just watching our truck.”

A man in a dashiki came over. He wore a dull brass necklace and a tiger skin beret.

“How you doing, Chief?” Mills asked serenely from his state of grace.

“What’s this truck?” the man asked.

“This truck?” Mills said. “Supplies. You know — bandages, serums, shots for the kids, Bibles, some pamphlets on family planning for the women in your village. Just about what you’d expect.”

“I’m Bob,” the man said cheerfully. “I guess you ain’t feeling well. Healthy man don’t be talking to no ugly customer like this, show respect, know some cat in a beret jus’ got to be arm’. Well man feel in his bones a dude like me be holdin’ a bomb in the dashiki, a razor in the boot. Man got to have a hunch the blood is po-lit-ical. You got three seconds to the revolution, fuck!”

“I can’t lose,” Mills said mildly.

“You dig this clown?” Bob said to Laglichio. “Hold on, clown. I want the brothers to meet you.”

Mills showed him the eviction orders. “This man and I are establishment,” he explained. “These are official instruments of the United States of America. You can’t touch us.” Bob scanned them, tore the papers to bits.

“Boy, are you in Dutch!” Mills said.

“He that Laglichio?” Bob asked. “Say on that paper I rip Laglichio. No shit, he that Laglichio? For real now, you fellas the Laglichio boys?” Quietly the other observers had come up from their positions against the playground fence. “ ’Cause it don’t say nothin’ on the truck here. ’Cause the truck don’t say a word about what it do to the furnitures of my peoples.” He opened its rear doors. “Oh oh,” Bob moaned, “I look in here and I like to cry for the furnitures of my peoples. These drop cloths is filthy,” he said, and tore them to shreds. “And look these scrawny, itty bitty pads. Fuckin’ Kleenex. What kind of candy ass protection these give the furnitures of my peoples? Look all the sharp edges in here, man. It look like a open soup can.”

“Hey,” Laglichio said, “get down out of my truck.”

Bob was jumping up and down heavily in the empty truck. “They try to tell me, but I didn’ believe them. They say Mr. Laglichio’s shocks is shot. They say all he do he drive over the white line in the road and smash, there go the dishes of my peoples! He take a outright pothole an’ boom, my peoples’s paper plates be bust.”

“What’s going on, guys?” Laglichio asked amiably, and Bob sat down on the tailgate to tell him.

“We putting you to pasture, nipple drippings,” he said kindly. “The refugees got them a hot line now. Got them a Twenty-Four-Hour Self-Help Removal Service. Got a lovely Action Volunteer Cartage Platoon. Got a free, no rip-off, We-Hump-for-the-Brothers-and-Sisters Emergency Hauling Service. I’m official dispatcher for the revolution, and I’m tellin’ you, dick sweat, no authorization papers you be holdin’ now nor in future neither ain’t never gonna be serve.”

No one touched them. They dismantled Laglichio’s truck like soldiers breaking down a rifle, roustabouts pulling down a tent. It was at least as deliberate and controlled as Laglichio’s and Mills’s own scorched-earth procedures.

“What’d we do?” Mills mused aloud. “All we ever tried to do was help. Supplies. Vaccines and bandages, birth control, Bibles. See where it gets you? Our work here is finished,” he told Laglichio.

So it was that George Mills, in grace, out of harm’s way, beyond life’s reach, became unemployed.

He tried to reassure Louise.

“It’s not even October,” Mills said. “In a month or so we’ll have our first big snowfall. The caterpillars are fat and fuzzy. Trappers want their fur. Accu-Weather says it’s going to be the winter of the world. I can go on the plows. They can always use a guy like me on the salt trucks. When spring comes I can patch potholes. Don’t be downcast, Louise. Don’t be downcast, sweetheart. There’s a fortune to be made from other people’s bad weather.”

Louise demanded that he not speak so, that he be like other men. “You’re out of work,” she said. “We’ve got bills. The gas. The phone. The electric. I don’t have a nice dress. My coat’s too thin. I don’t think it will last the winter. What if one of us has to go into the hospital? What if we have to see dentists? What if there’s car trouble, if we need a new battery or a tire gives out? How will we pay for prescriptions? Suppose we decide to take the paper? What do we do if the TV breaks, the hot water heater? What would happen if something came up?”

“Nothing will,” Mills said.

“I can’t hide my head in the sand,” she said. “Things happen.”

“Nothing happens,” George said.

“It’s no joke. You’re over fifty.”

“I am,” Mills said.

“George, it’s scary.”

“Don’t take on, Louise. Please don’t.”

“Don’t take on? Don’t take on?”

“Your disasters give me the creeps, doll.”

“My disasters—”

“They wear me out, Louise. They get me down, babe.”

“They wear you out? They get you down?”

“Sure,” Mills said, “if my banks don’t fail, if no one’s after my companies. If the young Turks and wise guys can’t force me off the board of directors, or my country doesn’t give a damn if I defect, sure. Sure they do. You’re saying I’m a failure, Louise, that the worst thing that can happen is we can’t take the paper, that something could break, that we’ll wash in cold water and ride on the bus.”

The telephone rang and Louise went to answer it.

It was a Judith Glazer, Louise said. She had known Louise’s father and regretted she’d been unable to attend the funeral. She had called to offer her condolences. Mr. Mead had told her about them. She wanted George to come see her. She had a proposition for him.

4

From the address he’d expected a mansion, something grander than the ordinary brick home set back less than forty feet from the street where he’d parked his car, and at first — the houses beside it were larger — he thought Louise had gotten the directions wrong. It was the only house on the block without a garage. The only other car on the street, an old, pale green Chevrolet with modest tail fins and a partially deflated rear tire, was parked by the curb, obscuring the black street numbers that would have been painted there. The windows were up but George could see two people sitting inside. The woman in the back appeared to be napping. He could imagine precisely how it would feel and smell inside, almost tasting the car’s close quarters, its stuffy, hundred-thousand-mile, yellowing newspaper’d, overflowing ashtray and worn seat-cover’d essence. And feel the oxidation of apples in the stale stilled air, the sky-high temperatures where cantaloupes combust. He rapped on the driver’s window with his mood ring. The man looked at him but wouldn’t roll the window down. George checked the address with him through the glass.

A big girl in yellow lounging pajamas opened the door for him.

“Do you work for my daddy?” she asked.

“No,” George said.

She seemed disappointed but brightened at once. “Oh,” she said, “you’re the man from the boat club. Or are you here to see Mom?”

“Is that Mrs. Glazer?”

“I’ll see if she’s awake. Oh,” she said, recalling instructions, “you’re not a tradesman, are you? There’s tragedy in our house and we’re turning tradesmen away. I’m sorry.” She genuinely seemed so, and started to close the door when Mills told her his name and said that Mrs. Glazer had asked to see him. “Oh, then it’s all right,” she said. “I’m sorry Milly didn’t get the door. Milly’s my sister. I’m older but she’s more mature.”

“Who is it, Mary? Who’s out there with you? What does he want?” a woman asked from the living room.

“I forgot your name,” Mary said.

“Mills.”

“Mills,” Mary said. “I don’t know what he wants.”

As soon as he heard the woman’s voice something happened to George. It would not be extravagant to say that he was thrilled. It was quite inexplicable. He could not have told you anything about her from its sound, not what she looked like, not her age. Nothing. Unless it was something of his sudden anticipatory sense of his place in her life. It didn’t make sense. It was crazy. It was not love at first sight — he hadn’t seen her yet — it was not love at all. But something. Loyalty perhaps, some deep-pledged human patriotism.

“You’ll have to go in,” Mary said. “Mother’s not going to come out here.” And already, though he knew nothing about the child, he was preparing concessions, making allowances, giving dispensation to her absent, younger, more mature sister. His regard was loose, and he took impressions like a pilgrim, like a man at a reunion. He had spent much of his working life in other people’s rooms. He knew the handholds of sofas and box springs, all the secret toeholds of furniture, but knew them as increments of size and weight, without associations. Now he noticed the hallway’s umbrella stand, two tightly furled black umbrellas, and had a profound sense of the Glazers’ weather. He glimpsed their dining room out of the corner of his eye and guessed their appetite.

He walked into the living room.

The child preceded him and went to the head of her mother’s bed — Mrs. Glazer sat on the side of a rented hospital bed that took up much of the room — and fished a cookie from the rumpled sheets. She slouched against her mother with a type of sullen possessiveness. He might have been sympathetic to the girl’s fawning panic, but he’d already guessed the woman’s irritation and felt his precarious allegiance sway.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said, and turned to her daughter, stroking and chastising her. “Mary dear,” she said, “it isn’t convenient for you to hang on me. And if you’ve hidden any more cookies in my sheets I wish you’d dig them up. Why don’t you go play with your sister?”

“I’m on the door.”

“Mr. Mills can get the door while he’s here. I’ll call you when he leaves.”

“Can I make a milk shake?”

“Didn’t you already have one today?”

“So did Milly.”

“But Milly hasn’t asked for a second. And aren’t you supposed to be going out on your uncle’s boat this afternoon?”

“Has he called? Has he?”

“Oh, make the damn milk shake! Wait. I’m sorry, Mary. Of course you may have a milk shake. One scoop, remember. Perhaps Mills wants one too.”

“No ma’am. Thank you.”

When they heard the blender Mrs. Glazer finally greeted him.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend Mr. Mead’s funeral.”

“Oh that’s all right.”

“It’s not all right. He was a lovely man. We were good friends. I was about to say that I couldn’t attend your father-in-law’s funeral because I was arranging my own. My bishop, Mr. McKelvey, was here that morning with Mr. Crane, my funeral director. We were going over the music I’ve chosen. I also gave Roger the names of my pallbearers, and dictated the letters I had him send them. Most of these people are extremely busy men. There’s no guarantee any two of them will even be in town when the time comes, so I’ve put them on notice. I picked my casket out from photographs, and selected the clothes and shoes I’m to be buried in. Two costumes really, two pair of shoes. My nice tweed if it’s chilly, my linen if it’s mild. Well, I can’t be absolutely sure of the season, can I? I sent the garments with Mr. Crane to be dry-cleaned, and the shoes to the dago to be resoled.

“Well, I would have been unable to attend Mr. Mead’s funeral in any event. A woman in the position of making preparations for her own funeral may be excused certain obligations — though not, I trust, her sacred ones. You may tell Mrs. Mills that we prayed that morning for the repose of Mr. Mead’s soul. McKelvey is a splendid pray-er, even when he does not know the principal, as, I pride myself, I am. Crane didn’t know what to make of it all, but I put in sufficient allusions to Mr. Mead’s connections with water and shipping to make him think he had missed out on a handsome commission. God so loves a good joke, I think. The poor dear loves His laugh.

“Well,” she said, “you must think it strange for someone to take on so about the protocols of her own death, or arrange her funeral as if it were her debut.”

“No.”

“No? Good for you then. But you must forgive my misdoubts. People not themselves under the Lord’s protection frequently asperse the confidence of saints.”

“I’m saved too.”

“Well, maybe,” Mrs. Glazer said, “but do you really think that because you’ve had your five or six seconds down by the riverside, or that your heart keeps time with the tambourine, you know the elegant dismay of God? Or perhaps Jesus spoke to you during a hangover or warned you of a speed trap. Please, Mills, God made the sky blue but He is not flamboyant. If I choose the music for my service it isn’t because the Lord has a favorite tune but because I do. Anyway, organists play better when they know the dead are listening.

“Well. Let’s climb down from this. For all my brave talk about obsequies it turns out that it’s inconvenient for me to die just now. It isn’t that I object to death. Indeed, I’m for it rather. But you saw yourself. There was a cookie in the deathbed. There will be crumbs in the winding sheet. Mary has accidents. She pees her bed and has nightmares. She weeps during recess and suddenly claims not to be able to see blackboards. She says she’s forgotten the multiplication tables, and neither Sam nor I can get her to do her homework. Her periods started over a year ago but stopped when I became ill. In a girl her age her psychiatrist thinks it an hysterical pregnancy on a heroic scale. But there’s nothing heroic about it. She’s simply craven regarding the idea of my death. Nothing I or Sam or her relatives do to distract her distracts her. Several thousand dollars have already been spent on tutoring her pleasure, but how do you distract the distrait? Such grief would be flattering if it was not clearly so self-serving.

“But all that’s beside the point. The point is that I may not die with Mary in such a state. It isn’t that I’d have no peace or that my daughter’s uneasiness would in the least mitigate Heaven’s perfect terms, but that my death just now would destroy her. She could die herself. As she doesn’t yet have the character for Heaven I can’t let that happen.

“Do you see my situation? I need another year. It may even be that Mary is part of God’s plan to fight my cancer. — Did you say something?”

“Why wouldn’t I be spared the ticket?” Mills grumbled.

“What?”

“On that highway, that speed trap. I’m elect as the next guy.”

Mrs. Glazer looked at him a moment, then went on. “The doctors think I’m crazy,” she said, “but as neither Paul nor the oncologist believes he can do anything for me and has given me up, I have their blessing. Sammy was more difficult. He secretly believes it beneath the dignity of a dean to have his doomed wife go lusting after miracle cures or traffic with quacks. When he heard what I was thinking of he urged me to take the money and go to Lourdes instead. He is a Jew and at least believes in the efficacy of psychology. I am Christian and an ex-madwoman, and don’t give a fart for psychology. I already believe. How would it help to drag my piety to a shrine?

“It’s probably hopeless, but I mean to go to Mexico for Laetrile treatments and need someone to accompany me, to assist me. It is impossible that Sam come with me. He will have to stay with the children. This is what I will give you.”

She named a figure which George thought was probably fair, within pennies of what he supposed people in her circumstances paid people in his. Allowing for inflation, it was probably pretty close to what Guillalume had given the first George Mills. It was certainly fair. It may even have been generous, and he saw that grace was not without its opportunities. But he had misgivings. The woman wasn’t easy. Compared to her, Laglichio, who knocked down esteem as easily as George broke down a bed, was a thoughtful, magnanimous person. Whatever Laglichio did, Mills knew, was in the service of angles, bucks. There was nothing personal. She would stand on a thousand ceremonies. But what the hell? It might work out. It might even be pleasant to be at last under the touchy guns of the fastidious. He was in his fifties, and though he was not a bad man — wasn’t he saved? elect as the next guy? — he’d had practically nothing to do with morality. There was no call for it in his neighborhood, not much call for it generally. There were no lovely lives, Mills thought. The world was charming or it wasn’t. He, everyone, paid lip service to righteousness, but only good order quaked their hearts. In Mills’s experience no one shot first and asked questions afterward. First they asked questions.

And then he thought, get down, be low, be low.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Mrs. Glazer looked at him, surprised. “I have cancer,” she said. “I already told you.”

“I figured it must be something like that. My wife’s always examining herself for that stuff, but so far she come up empty-handed.”

Mrs. Glazer stared at him. “Are you a fool?”

“I’m different.”

“Indeed.”

“Look, lady, your proposition sounds like it could be a really sweet deal, but all you told me so far is about your high hopes and funeral arrangements.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m trying to get an idea how sick you are. My kind can be pretty long on loyalty, but there’s a foreign country involved here. That funeral you keep talking about is supposed to take place stateside, but what happens if you die down there? I don’t speak Mexican. Maybe them other applicants do. They look foreign enough.”

“Other applicants?”

“Parked outside. In that car.” He pointed past the living room window and indicated the Chevrolet.

“Oh,” she said, “Max and Ruth. They must have slept late. They’re brother and sister. They live in their car. They’re not applicants.”

“For real? In their car? You let them park there?”

“Whoever is dean,” Mrs. Glazer said. “They park in front of the dean’s house. They’re really quite harmless. They go to all the public lectures at the university. The concerts and poetry readings. They eat the cheese and crackers. They stuff cookies into their pockets and drink the wine. It’s how they live.”

Mills nodded. Squatters, he thought, poachers. The old planted immunities and small piecemeal favors. The poor’s special charters and manumissions, their little license and acquittals, all law’s exonerate laxity and stretched-point privilege. He had to make himself low.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “they look like ordinary thieves to me, my way of thinking. I could run them off for you. No charge.”

“You’re very boorish, aren’t you?”

“Nah,” Mills said, “no. I’m pointing out possibilities. I’m looking for the fly in the ointment. That’s how I operate. In a way I’m protecting you. You’d want someone tough, am I right? In this situation you’d need a guy who could set aside his delicate feelings, not someone who starts bleeding at the sight of puke. Lady, I eat puke! And not at no concerts, not at no poetry readings.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Glazer said, considering.

“Sure,” Mills said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Sure,” Mills said. “My God, Mrs, listen to the way I build your confidence. I think I’m your man.” It was exactly what he thought. It was what he thought when he’d first heard her voice, when he’d listened to her prattle. He wanted this job, needed it. He had to make himself low, reserve and brutal syntax in his jaws like chewing gum.

“You just better not die,” Mills warned.

“I don’t intend to.”

“I want to go too,” Mary said from where she’d been listening in the hall.

“Mary!”

“I want to go too,” she said, still concealed.

“Don’t be silly. What about school?”

“Kids can get off if it’s educational. There’s going to be a unit on Mexico. I’d get extra credit. I want to go too.”

“Mary, I’m going down there to get well. I’ll be taking treatments. All the people will be sick there. As sick as Mommy.”

“Let me talk to her, Mrs.” George Mills said, and promised he would bring back a wonderful present for her.

“Oh, presents,” she said disparagingly. “My grandfather buys me all the presents I want. My Uncle Harry does.”

Mills barely glanced at the woman for permission. “Gee, kid,” George Mills said, guarding his protector, “I meant your mommy.”

5

To the poor most places are foreign, all soil not the neighborhood extraterritorial and queer. They cling to an idea of edge, a sense of margin. It’s as if space, space itself, not climate or natural resources or the angle at which a town hangs from the meridian, dictates situation and size, even form, even vegetation. They believe, that is, in a horizon geography, a geology of scenic overlook, the visible locutions of surface like merchandise arranged in a store. For them, Nature, the customs she fosters, seem to exist within serially located parallel lines. Science and history are determined by latitude and longitude, little else. Savannas and rain forests, jungles, seashores, mountains and deserts — those were the real nations.

The people were not strange to him, only their white shirts. Only their artifacts, their basketstraw heritage and adobe being. So much silver — it gleamed everywhere, so accessory he suspected that even the policemen’s badges were made of it — made his soul reel. So much marquetry — even the benches in the public squares and gardens seemed a sort of crocheted wood — gave him a sense of an entire country artisan’d into existence. The sun seemed a feature of the landscape, and he was enough conscious of the tremor-settled streets to suspect the delicate arrangements of the earth he walked upon, and to sense it sensed his steps.

It was all as mysterious and significant as the skinned rabbits and shaved chickens that hung upside down from hooks in the butchers’ shop windows, red and naked as political example.

They had been in Mexico almost four days and Mrs. Glazer had still to receive her first treatment. They had rented a car in El Paso and crossed the Rio Grande to Juarez, Mrs. Glazer insisting they stop for the hitchhikers standing on the Mexican side of the bridge. George handled the money, the blue, red and yellow tissues of currency, soft as old clothes. He signed the insurance forms and answered the border guards’ questions. She gave him her tourist card to carry. He signed the register at their motel while she remained in the air-conditioned car. He settled her in her room and turned down her bed. She had him call Sam before he went to his own room. Standing, he relayed both ends of the conversation to and from the easy chair in which she sat. They had arrived safely, he said. He and the children already missed her, he said. The girls had to do all their homework before they went out. Mary couldn’t have a milk shake till after dinner. Milly wasn’t to make any arrangements for Wednesday afternoon. That’s when auditions for Nutcracker were scheduled, he said. The trip had tired her, he said, and she thought she’d put off her first visit to the clinic till morning.

A boy rose from a camp chair in which he’d been sitting, handed something to an old woman, and came up while George was still parking the car in the lot.

“Joo here for treatments?”

“Do you speak English?”

“Ain’t that English? Joo here for treatments?”

“Information.”

“What informations joo want? Si. Sure. It work. Cure up jore cancers. Fix joo up fine.”

Mills started past the boy.

“Hey,” called the boy. “Joo, Misters. Joo got to take number. I give joo.”

But Mills ignored him.

Two receptionists in nurse’s uniforms sat at registration desks at the back of the crowded room. George went outside to get a number.

“Joo need me to watch jore cars? I watch jore cars,” the boy called after George as he started back toward the clinic. “That ways nothing awfuls happen. Nobody break jore window or puncture jore tires or tear off jore antenna or pour sugars in jore gas tanks.”

George turned around.

“How much?”

The boy grinned at him. “Joo got a Joo.S. dollars on you?” George handed him a dollar.

“Crowded in there? Many peoples?” The boy wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead, pulled at his shirt, pretended to fan himself. “Joo want to rent my chair for a quarter? Sick peoples need to sit down.”

“What’s your number?” a very old man asked him, smiling, when he was again inside. He wore an old-fashioned taxi driver’s cap with a button that said “Official Guide” where the badge number would have been.

“Ninety-five,” Mills said.

The old man’s smile disappeared and his eyes filled with tears. “Ninety-five,” he said feelingly. “You come all this way, all this far from el Estados Unidos, and they give you ninety-five. Tch-tch.”

“It’s all right,” Mills said.

“No, señor! No all right! I jam shame for my people. I jam shame for those two whore daughters of whores who call themselves typists. So slow. Tch-tch. They call themselves train typists? They are train pussies! Customers have to spell out for them all everything. Ninety-five.” The old man spit on the floor. “You be here all week. I get you thirty-seven. Five pesos.”

“No thanks.”

“Five pesos. That isn’t even a quarter.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Sure,” the old man said, “wait. You in good shape. I can seen it for myself. Your tumor ain’t bad. You got all the time in the world.”

“I’m not sick,” Mills said, “it isn’t for me. I’m making arrangements for the lady I work for.”

“Verdad?” the old man said. He seemed relieved. “I’m happy for you, señor. I am happy but puzzle. If it isn’t for you, then why you waste your time in such a place? Plane to El Paso, verdad? Rented a car? First time in ol’ Mayheeho, si? Sure. Is beautiful day, si? Gift me seven pesos, I get the cunts to call out ninety-five, we go for a ride.”

Mills looked at the young women. Twenty-eight had been the last number called.

“Could you do that?” he asked.

“Caramba, señor,” the old man said, “thees girls is my sisters!”

“No,” Mills said. “I don’t think so.”

“Seven pesos. That’s thirty cents.”

“It’s thirty-five cents,” Mills said.

“Where do you change your money?”

“At the motel.”

The old man groaned. “No, señor,” he said patiently, “never change money at the motel. Always go to the Midas Muffler. Change it there.”

“Jesus, leave me be, will you?” Mills said. “Everybody has his hand out. I had to pay the kid in the parking lot to watch the car.”

The old man was horrified. “The kid? Not the old woman? The kid? How much you give him?”

“A buck.”

“Sure,” the old man muttered, “he’ll go to the Midas Muffler and get twenty-three point eight pesos for it. Here,” he said, “take thirty-seven. I jam shame for my people.” He put the number into George’s hand.

“What about the car? You think he’d do anything to the car?”

“No no,” the old man reassured him, “the machine will be fine. You bribed him good.”

Mills made Judith Glazer’s arrangements with the receptionist and returned to the car. The old man was with him, watching him as he unlocked the automobile. “I already gave you your five pesos,” George said. “What do you want now?”

The old fellow shook his head. “You could have done all this over the phone,” he said tragically.

“Is that what you do? Give advice?”

“I am a tout,” he said proudly. “I saved you two hours. It cost you less than a quarter.”

“Yeah, well, when I come back with the lady I work for don’t expect any more.”

“Don’t come back,” he said earnestly, touching George’s arm.

“What?”

“Don’t come back. This is not a good place. For rich gringos.”

Mills, who was only a delegated gringo, and for whom wealth and international travel and the perks of life, sleeping in motels and eating out, were merely assignments, was not so much offended as surprised by the old tout’s warning.

“You listen to him, Misters,” the boy said who had watched his car. “Father Merchant is the wisest tout in all Mexico.”

“He didn’t have such terrific things to say about joo,” George said.

“Father Merchant knowing my heart,” the boy said sadly.

Mills opened the car door. “Uhn uh, uhn uh,” Father Merchant said. “Always is it too hot. Crack the window of the side of the passenger three inches, and the window of the side of the driver two, to force the circulation of the air. Carry the towel with you to protect yourself when you touch metal surfaces.” Mills looked at the wisest tout in all Mexico. “Es verdad,” he said. Mills started the engine and began to back out of the space. The old man walked beside the car, trying to hand a card to him through the open window. Mills stepped on the brake and put the car in neutral.

“Please,” he said.

“Nightspot,” said Father Merchant, and gave George the card. “Institute de Cancer too sad. No cover, no minimum. Very refine. Intimate. No clip joint. Sophisticate. Tell them who sent you, they let you sit ringside, close enough to stick your finger up the pony’s asshole. Go, señor. Take the señora. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” Mills started to back out again. “Father Ixtlan Xalpa Teocaltiche hears confessions in English. Thursday before 6:00 A.M. mass. He’s been to Chicago. Church of the Conquistador Martyrs.” Mills was out of the space and pulled hard on the wheel to turn into the street. The old man called to him through cupped hands. “On Sundays, at the bullfights? Sol y sombre? Shady side is not always the best choice. You could freeze your nuts off if it’s a cool day.” Mills could see him now in the rear mirror. “Don’t drink the water!” the old tout shouted.

They sat by the small pool in deep lounges, idly watching children play Marco Polo. The kids had driven most of the grownups out of the water, making it impossible for anyone to swim with their excited thrashing and sudden, abandoned lunges that obliterated the pool’s invisible lanes whenever the child who was it moved away from the coping and plunged, eyes shut tight, toward the voices that answered “Polo” in response to his honor-blind “Marco.”

Mrs. Glazer seemed rested, looked better. Mills remarked on this. “It’s my sunburn,” she said. “It covers the jaundice. Oh, Mills,” she said, “I’ve been to the lobby. It’s more hospital here than motel. The guests bring their nurses. Some arrive in ambulances. I saw one with New Jersey plates. Have you looked at the room service menu? The salads and entrees have been approved by the clinic’s nutritionist. Monks openly solicit money to pray for the remission of your cancer. Urchins show you the candles they’ll light if you’ll give them some dinner.

“And everyone’s so hopeful, Mills! As if the decision to come here, break with their doctors, defy science and throw themselves into all the desperate optimisms of last resort were measures in the cure. I myself have not been unaffected. Why, we’ve not been here two days yet and already I’m feeling better than I have in weeks. A little, a little I am. Oh, Mills,” she said, “how are we to know what is so and what is just psychology?”

“From the blood tests,” Mills said, and his charge glanced at him.

“Yes,” she said. “Well, what do we do now?”

“Maybe you should rest.”

“No. No, I’m not tired.”

“Do you want to eat something?”

“I’m not hungry. I’m raring to go. What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what? What is it?”

“A Mex at the clinic gave me a card.”

“A card?”

“The address of some nightclub.”

“A nightclub? Oh, I don’t think I’m up for a nightclub. Oh,” she said, “a nightclub, a border town nightclub. Exhibitions, you mean. Burros and girls. Fetishists. Consenting adults. I don’t think so, but I’m feeling well enough to spare you. You go, Mills. Take the car.”

“No,” he said, ashamed he had spoken. “I don’t want to go.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “The motel has a caretaker service. All I have to do is notify the desk. Someone checks the room every fifteen minutes. Go on, go ahead. I don’t expect you to be always on duty. Go, you’ve the urge.”

“No. Honest,” Mills said, “I don’t have any urge. It was a joke. When you said you were raring to go. It was a joke.”

“Because I won’t think less well of you, you know. People are curious about what they think of as depravity. The act means nothing. The curiosity’s at least as depraved as anything the girl will do with the beast.”

“I never put it in any animal,” Mills said, hurt. “I ain’t never licked instep or spanked ass or sniffed panty. I never gave pain or asked for it. It never came up.”

“Well I have,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Nearly all those things. What difference does it make?”

“You have?”

“I was a madwoman eleven years.”

Which was when it came up. Welcome to Mexico, he thought. Bienvenidos to the border towns!

They drove, at the woman’s discretion, through Ciudad Juarez, Mrs. Glazer in the wide back seat murmuring the turns, calling their routes, demanding the sights. She pronounced herself dissatisfied with Twelfth of August Avenue, the long main street, all appliance stores and tire shops, and asked that Mills show her the clinic. Somehow he found his way back to the low stucco buildings of that morning, and drove into the parking lot. A watchman stopped them. “All close,” he said, “finito.”

“Should you give him a tip?”

The man poked his flashlight through the open window into the back of the car.

“Hey,” Mills said, “turn that off. You’re shining it in the lady’s eyes.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s his job, Mills.”

George turned to look, following the tight white beam that lay across his shoulder like a rifle. Judith Glazer sat prim as a confirmation girl, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes lowered. She looked like someone in a tumbril. Inexplicably, the guard crossed himself.

“Give him money,” Mrs. Glazer said. “He may be an old lover.”

“What for? Why’d he do that?”

“He saw my condition,” she said.

“Are you tired?” Mills asked. “Do you want me to take you back?”

“Not at all.”

They passed the church where the priest who had been to Chicago heard confessions in English. And stopped for a light on the corner where the nightclub was situated. It was on a narrow street with much traffic. A boy came up to the driver’s window and offered to watch their car.

“No,” Mills said. “We’re not parking.”

“No,” the boy said, “till the light changes.”

“Maybe we ought to start back,” Mills said when they were driving again. “It’s pretty late.”

“No,” she said, “I’m enjoying my joy ride.”

“You had a long trip yesterday. All the way from a different country.”

“If you’re tired I’ll drive.”

“No,” Mills said. “That’s all right.”

“Let me. I feel like driving.”

“You’d better not.”

“Pull over. If you’re afraid you can go back in a cab.”

“Please, Mrs.”

“I want to,” Mrs. Glazer said. “My pill is wearing off and I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable. It would distract me.” She was kneading her thighs and legs with her hands, taking her flesh and squeezing as if she would wring water from it. “If only I could get the knots out,” she said.

“I’m turning back,” Mills said.

“I told you no,” Mrs. Glazer said. “I don’t want to. If you insist on driving you may, but I won’t go back. I was crazy more than a decade, shut up when I could have been traveling. What’s the good of being rich anyway? I never got anything for my money but the best care. In the end I simply grew out of my madness anyway. Now I’m dying. That watchman saw it with a flashlight. I don’t want the best care. That’s why I came to this place. That’s why I chose you to bring me. Perhaps it will be like the last time. Perhaps I’ll grow out of my cancer too. Don’t you dare turn back.”

“You’re the doctor,” Mills said gloomily.

“I am,” she said, “yes. Don’t sulk, Mills. Look at the countryside.” They had left the city and entered the desert.

“It’s the idea of the pain,” Mills said when they had driven perhaps five more miles.

“Did you say something?”

“It’s the idea that somebody only three feet away has pain. It fills up the space. It’s all you can think about so it’s all I can think about too. I can’t stand it if I know my wife has a headache. I get mad at her for telling me.”

“I’ll take my pill,” she said.

“You took one before we left the motel. It isn’t four hours.”

“What do you think will happen? Do you think I’ll become addicted? Turn around,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”

In the city, children were sleeping on the sidewalks. They lay solitary, curled as dogs on the pavement. A small girl lay on her back, her arms thrown out behind her head. She looked like someone floating in a pool toy.

“God is good,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“Sure.”

“He really is. He’s a genius. He creates the poor and homeless and gives them a warm climate to sleep it off in. Shall we wake them? Shall we give them money?”

“They’re street kids. They’d have their knives in me as soon as I shook their shoulder.”

“I want you to go back,” she said. “Give them twenty pesos each.”

Mills left the motor running. He woke the children and put money in their hands while Mrs. Glazer sat in the back seat and looked on through the rolled and dusty windows.

It was how they spent their first days in Mexico. Mills gave Mrs. Glazer’s money away. Considerable sums. As much, he estimated, as the rental car would cost, or his motel room. Often as much as a hundred pesos to an individual beggar. They crossed themselves before their benefactress’s deputy with beggars’ gratitude, conferring the lavish, sinister blessings of the down-and-out. It was not his money. It was not their benediction. And he had a sense of proxy encounter, a delegate notion of agented exchange. At first he followed their responses in a dictionary, nervously had them repeat themselves when he did not understand, and scrupulously relayed their thanks in English equivalencies, rendering the tone and degree of already hyperbolized requital, hoping to suggest to the woman that the poor and homeless were on to her.

“The starving woman thanks you on behalf of her five starving children, and wishes you to know that every bite of their first meal in four days will be dedicated to the honor of your gracious self.”

“Hmph,” Judith Glazer said.

“The legless cripple is profoundly moved by your generosity, and says that he will direct the nephews who carry him to his post every morning and pick him up again in the evening to take him up the steps and into the church so that he may light candles for your continued health and good fortune.”

“Tell him,” Mrs. Glazer said evenly, “don’t try to thank me.”

“The impaired wino sends his and his Saviour’s compliments, and resolves to pledge himself to a new life in partial repayment for the three dollars.”

She had him take her into poorer and poorer sections of the city, abandoning the busy street corners and entrances to the fashionable shops and restaurants, the hotels and museums where beggars congregated to groan their appeals against the chipper discourse of the rich, driving with her into the narrow barrios, the blighted box board and charred, tar paper slums, places where the beggars had only each other to importune, raising the ante of their already stretched humility to outright, outraged fantasy.

And now she had him lower the car windows. And now she had him open the doors.

They looked on the big, late-model American car with as much astonishment and fear as if it had been a tank. Children backed against the jagged, chicken wire frames they used as doorways and called their adults to witness the strange new avatar, the queer incarnation, sudden in the roadless, streetless jumble of singed, mismatched shacks as a visitation of angels or government.

Seeing it was only a lone man, a lone woman, they lost their alarm and began to push forward.

“This is crazy,” Mills said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Sound the horn,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Let them know we’re here.”

“They already know we’re here.”

Mrs. Glazer raised herself from where she was slumped in the back seat and leaned forward. She reached over Mills’s shoulder and pressed the horn.

“Oh boy,” Mills said.

“Don’t get out. They can come forward and you can hand the money out to them.”

When Mills didn’t move she reached for her purse and undid the clasp. Hands and arms like the feelers of sea creatures groped toward her through the car’s opened doors. Mills, frightened, pulled out his pesos and started to cram them into the first hand he saw. “No,” she said, “just one note. Just one! Here,” she said, “give me.” She pulled the notes out of his fist and, selecting the smallest denomination, pushed it into one of the outstretched hands. Then, inspired, she smiled, dropped the rest of the money into her lap, and took some loose change from her purse. She held out a handful of coins to them, ten-centavo pieces, twenty. “For all of you,” she said. “Para todos. Para todos de usted.” She sat back in her seat, lightly tapping the thick pile of bills in her lap, her gold and diamond rings loosely spinning on her thin fingers. She looked on serenely while the Mexicans talked to each other in whispers. Then, with great effort, she moved out of the car toward them, holding out the last of her change, perhaps six or seven cents.

He thought they would both be killed, but the Mexicans only drew further away from the car, their mood nervous and apprehensive and lined with a sort of amusement. A woman indicated the two Americans and shook her head. Then they all did, making the high signs and hand signals of aloof contempt, the shrugs and semaphores of all touch-temple allowance. “Help me back into the car,” she said, disappointed.

Mills was determined that they wouldn’t try that again.

Meanwhile she continued to avoid the treatments.

George drove her to the clinic each morning and called for her again at noon. It was she who sent him away. “There aren’t enough chairs,” she’d explain. “These people are waiting to see the doctors. You’d only be taking up the seat of someone terminally ill.” But when he returned he would find her sitting where he’d left her, or rummaging through a table of Mexican magazines. “Oh, Mills,” she said, “waiting rooms are the same all over the world. Only the names of the film stars in the periodicals are different, or the wall hangings in the legislative chambers. These hemlines are shorter, but I believe I saw this salad in the Sunday pictures section of the Post-Dispatch.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Oh, I haven’t seen the doctor yet. I was about to but this little girl — she couldn’t have been more than six — arrived with her parents. I gave them my place.”

She’d had her tests, the blood profiles and X-rays and urine analyses she had first had done in St. Louis, as well as a cancer immunological test which was not performed in the United States. It was patented, the Mexicans told her.

“Of course, I don’t really buy any of it,” she told him in the car. “But I believe that dreams come true.”

She suggested they go out again that night on another alms spree.

“You’re tired,” Mills said.

“Yes,” she admitted, “I’m very weak.”

“Look,” he said, “if it’s all that important to you I’ll go myself.”

“No,” she said.

“Don’t you trust me? You think I’d keep the money?”

“I trust you dandy. It wouldn’t mean much unless I went. All right,” she said, “we won’t plan anything. We’ll wait and see how I feel this evening.”

She felt terrible that evening. She couldn’t even get out of bed. Mills knew she’d made a mistake to bring him. He had no touch with pain. He had fears and misgivings about everything he did for her. At the height of her pain and nausea he thought she should try to eat something, that food might confuse the beast in her gut. He wasn’t sure but he thought it was probably a good idea. He wanted to phone the clinic but officially she hadn’t been assigned a doctor yet. He couldn’t remake her bed properly, and thought he should call Housekeeping to have them send someone while he carried her to the room’s other bed, but she objected to having anyone else in the room.

He spoke to her, but it took so much effort for her to talk he cringed when she answered. He said nothing, and she thought he’d left her. The pain had affected her vision. “I’m here,” he said, “I haven’t gone anywhere. You mustn’t talk,” he said. “You’ve got to save your strength.” He watched her thrash in the bed, the sheets and covers and pillows in such disarray he could not straighten them without causing her pain. He moved her back into the other bed. He wondered if he should call St. Louis. It was after two in the morning. They’d be alarmed. He knew they’d blame him for everything that happened. He was no nurse. He recalled how peacefully Mr. Mead had died, the old sailor slipping beneath his death as casually as one enters tepid water. He decided she should be in a hospital and said so. Groaning, she shook her head. “They’re equipped for this stuff,” he said.

“No good,” she managed. She’d already explained why. She was afraid they wouldn’t give her her pain pills when she wanted them, that they’d withhold them. She wanted Mills to give her a double dose now, two large, oddly shaped blocks of morphine like tiny bricks. It would have been the strongest dose she’d had yet. He broke a tablet in two and fed the halves past her impaired vision. He called the front desk and got on their caretaker service, although the caretaker had already left on his 2:00 A.M. rounds.

“You have only one?”

“The guests are either sleeping or already in the hospital this time of night.”

“Get in touch with him. Send him by.”

Suddenly she was worried about the expense. There was an extra charge for this amenity. It was the middle of the night, they had you over a barrel. “Shh,” George said. She wanted him to cancel the order, she became quite hysterical about it. He hadn’t, he told her, made one.

“I heard you.”

They lost each other in explanations.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and he told her that was a good sign, but he didn’t think he should give her anything too heavy. “Feed a cold and starve a cancer,” she said lucidly.

The morphine was beginning to ease her. She dozed off. The caretaker waked her when he knocked on the door. It was the kid from the parking lot, the one he’d given a dollar to watch the car.

The boy glanced at Mrs. Glazer. “She fine, man.” he said. “See joo in fifteen minuteses.”

Strangely, the boy seemed to have reassured her. “Ask him,” she said, “if he thinks I should have something to eat.”

“Him?”

“He’s the caretaker. He sees dozens of patients. Ask.”

The boy was standing beside a door three rooms down. “Good,” George said, “I thought I’d missed you.”

“No, man. There’s this Mercedes SL 100 I watching out for on this side. Joo see it?”

“No.”

The boy shrugged. “Maybe they checked out.”

“He says room service is closed,” he told her.

“It’s just as well,” she said. “Everything is so expensive.” She questioned him closely about their expenses, recalling each traveler’s check she’d given him to cash, and demanding an account of how it had been spent.

“We don’t get a good rate of exchange,” she mourned.

They lived in waves, something peristaltic to their moods, reality pushing them to the wall one moment and surrendering not to joy so much as to a sort of deranged confidence the next. He understood that their burlesque hope had its source in her pain’s by now ludicrous remissions. In an odd way he had become dependent on Mrs. Glazer’s morphine, remotely hooked on the woman’s transitory well-being. He telephoned St. Louis only when she was without pain.

Also, he was still unaccustomed to himself in a foreign country. This was more difficult to figure, but it had to do with his horizon vision, his sense of a life lived within parallel lines. Ciudad Juarez was situated in the open end of a three-sided valley, a trough of drying world set down within the clipped, broken waves of the surrounding hills and mountains. These became landmarks and mileposts. More. They were the spectacle mien and proclamation of his distance, exotic and outrageous as a milliary column in a woods. Snakes oozed in the hills. Queer lizards turned their heads in strobic thrusts. He was where the mountains were who had lived on plains beneath unpunctuated skies. He came from there. He was here. He was here and not there. And lived with a notion of having doubled himself. It was not unlike what he had felt in Cassadaga when he was a boy.

She had started her treatments. After her terrible night there were no more delays. The curious dalliance was over. “It won’t work anyway,” she’d said the next morning. “Let’s get going.”

They wanted to keep her in the clinic annex for two days to administer calcium in an IV solution. The nurse touched Mrs. Glazer’s hair lightly. “It will help keep your hair that pretty yellow color.”

“My pretty yellow hair fell out. This is a wig.”

George went with her to a sort of orientation seminar in the clinic’s cafeteria. They sat with other patients in the Eleventh of May Cafeteria. Father Merchant, at a rear table, was picking from a cylinder of popcorn. A tall man in hospital whites leaned against a stack of trays and greeted them.

“Buen dia. I’m Dr. Jesus Gomeza. So,” he said, “I will answer all your questions about el grande C.

“You know, not so long ago, people like you would hear cancer and think, Oh boy, sure death. Certain curtains. Even now. I know. I know what happens. I interned in your country. These white duds are from a Sears Roebuck in Omaha. So I know what happens.

“The tests come back. The doctor breaks the news to a wife, or to some take-charge guy in from Portland with a good vocabulary. The patient is the last to know. Listen, I’ve been there. It’s this hush-hush, very top secret disease. The family cocks around with each other for weeks. Then this one tells that one, somebody else overhears someone on a telephone, but no one’s ever sure who knows what. Am I right? They’re not even sure if Pop knows what’s what, and he’s the poor bastard losing important pieces of himself on the operating table. They’re getting ready to bury him and the whispering campaign still ain’t over. ‘Did he know what he had? Does he know that he’s dead?’

“But you know, don’t you? You folks know what you have, so we don’t have to worry about that part. You’ve got cancer. Say it. Say ‘Cancer, I’ve got cancer!’

“I don’t hear you. Good golly, am I wrong? Have I made a mistake? Aren’t these the cancer people? Father Merchant, you rascal, have you played one of your tricks on me? Did you bring one of your tour buses by? Are you folks healthy? You don’t look healthy. Hell no, you look like you’ve got cancer. Why, I can see the tumors from over here. I can hear the brain tumors rolling around in your skulls like marbles. I see extra lumps in the bras. I can almost make out some of the more difficult stuff, the crapola tucked away in your organs like contraband. Hey, Mister, the guy in the green shirt — don’t turn around, you’re the one I’m talking to. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ve got a cancer,” a man said shyly.

“Sure you do,” Dr. Gomeza said cheerfully. “And the lady at the long table holding the flower, what have you got?”

“Cancer.”

“I want,” he said, “to see the hands of everyone who believes that the national medical associations have conspired to suppress our so-called unproven treatments, that vested establishment interests are afraid to risk a head-on confrontation with the proponents of Laetrile research. Let’s see those hands.

“So many? Tch-tch. The cancer’s spread that far, has it? It’s bitten that deep? No no, put your hands down. You’re too sick to be waving them about like that. Your disease has metastasized. It’s into your beliefs by now, it’s knocked the stuffing out of incredulity. Your gullibility glands are amok. Tch-tch.

“So that’s why you’ve come. Not to be cured but to stand up and be counted on the deathbed. What, you think this is a protest rally? You hate your doctors? You begrudge your oncologist because he made you nauseous? There’s no conspiracy. They’re good men. My God, folks, nine out of twelve of you came down here with their permission, with their blessing even. I’m going to tell you something. American doctors are the best diagnosticians in the world. Those guys know what’s wrong with you. And I’ll tell you something else. If it were in their power they’d even cure you!

“Say it,” he commanded. “Say ‘Cancer! I’ve got cancer!’ ”

“Cancer!” they called out cheerfully, “I’ve got cancer!”

“I’ve got something to tell you,” Dr. Gomeza said.

He told them about Laetrile, how it was found in the pits of peaches, apricots and bitter almonds, and gave them a chemistry lesson, explaining amygdalin and how hydrocyanic acid worked against the betaglucosidase in tumors, and even listed for them the drug’s pleasant side effects. He went over with them just what they must do, describing the regimen to them, a book of hours for their three daily injections, their course of special enzymes, the ritual of their vitamins, their diet.

“Look,” he said, “we’re going to lose some of you. People still die of appendicitis, too. And sometimes even a paper cut has been known to derange the system and the victim dies. So maybe you’re out of luck. It could even be you’re stuck with some fluke cancer which doesn’t respond to fruit. It’s possible. This is the world. Unexpected things happen. Go ask Sloan-Kettering. How many of their guys go down?”

He wished them luck.

And when he finished they applauded. Even Mrs. Glazer. Even George.

Father Merchant finished his popcorn and left.

Now he was her visitor as well as her employee. She sat in one chair by the side of her bed, and he in the other. Since coming back from the clinic she had somehow created the illusion for him, for them both, that when he arranged a pillow behind her head or poured her a drink of the clinic’s bottled water or brought her the El Paso newspaper or turned the channels on the TV set until they found a program acceptable to them both, it was as a guest, some loyal companion who might almost have been female, a bridge partner, say, someone who had served with her on committees.

“What are you having for dinner?” she might ask.

“I thought I’d go to that Mexican place again.”

“Oh, don’t say it. I’m fond of Mexican food, too, but my husband won’t touch it. We almost never go.”

“It’s time for your injection.”

“Could you do it? The nurse the clinic sends bruises me so. I’ve never really been a delicate woman. It’s cancer which softened my skin and made me petite. Just look at these legs and thighs. You’d never suspect that at one time I had the limbs of a six-day bicycle racer.”

At four in the afternoon they would watch a program on Mexican television, “Maria, Maria,” a soap opera set in the nineteenth century, about an illegitimate servant girl lusted after and badly treated by all the men in the benighted town in the obscure province in which she was indentured. It was the most popular program in Mexico, one of those shows that stops a country’s business for an hour or so and encourages people to believe that they are participants in an event of carefully resolved attention, their own lives temporarily forgotten in careless, throwaway sympathy. Mills and Mrs. Glazer had been watching for a week, and though neither understood the Spanish they knew the characters, and by reading the El Paso paper, which followed the plot with a daily summary like the synopsis in an opera program, they were able to understand the story.

“The president is watching this now in the capital,” Mrs. Glazer said. “He is suspicious of Maria’s new friend while the Minister of Internal Affairs plots against him with his most trusted generals.”

“The Minister of Internal Affairs? His generals?”

“Oh, Mills, they are no fans of that poor, troubled girl.”

One day when she was dejected she speculated that she might die before learning the fate of the characters. Mills tried to reassure her. “Then before I’ve lost interest,” she said. “I could die while I’m still curious about that new one. What is his name?”

“Arturo?”

“Arturo. I may not be around while I still have questions about Arturo.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re feeling better every day.”

“Am I? I believe,” she said, “in life everlasting. I believe in Heaven, yet there are no dramatics there. God would not permit His angels to be troubled.”

Mills was not at all certain he was correct in his assessment of her treatments. It was certain that she had not again had the kind of night that had so frightened them both, but her energies were low, and she was no longer up to the car rides she had at first been so intent on. He suggested that if she was still concerned about expenses he could return their rental car and take taxis whenever they went to the clinic. She told him she thought they should hold on to the car a bit longer. “I may feel stronger. We would need it to get around when I am well enough to give alms again.”

Now he was giving her all her injections, feeding juices from the pits of apricots into her bloodstream, daubing alcohol across her once maddened flanks and stirred despite himself at the sight of her yellow, degraded hips. He knew he must be hurting her but she was unwilling to let anyone else do it. He didn’t know why.

And now he was bathing her too, carrying her naked to the tub and lowering her into it like an offering in pageant. Her eyes were closed all the time he washed her, and she was the very type of humiliation, stoical, never wincing, patient degradation on her like a scar.

“I was nuts eleven years,” she said. “In a private hospital with a small staff for the elegance of the thing. They couldn’t watch you all the time. We did frightful things to each other. Soap my crotch please, Mills.” And as he lowered the cloth she opened her eyes and forced herself to stare at her oppressor.

Because she believed in martyrdom. She hadn’t told him this but it was the only thing that explained her actions. Because she believed in martyrdom. Saint Judith Glazer of Cancer. Because she needed holy bruises, some painful black-and-blue theology of confrontation. And that was when he realized she was dangerous.

“Those people we picked up on the bridge and gave rides to,” she said one evening.

“Yes?”

“They were wetbacks.”

“They were coming into the country, not leaving it.”

“They were illegals. They go over for the day to work. The maid who cleans the room told me.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I could drive to El Paso. I could dose up on morphine and take someone with me. He could use your tourist card.”

Mills excused himself and returned to his room.

Where he hid, where he tried to figure out what to do. He remembered the times they had driven through the city seeking out beggars, showing their funds, flashing their pesos like scalpers. And recalled the visit to the barrio, her lap filled with cash. She would be a saint and throw herself into all the trenches of virtue, poised as a zealot for the last-ditch stand with her ducks-in-a-barrel innocences and vulnerabilities. He was only beginning to understand the Turk role she had assigned him, the barbarian and Vandal and red Indian possibilities. Stuffing money in his pockets, putting needles and syringes in his hands, her jaundiced cunt, bald as a babe’s, making him privy to her weakness, her body’s worst-kept secrets, a seductress with nothing left but the final, awful charms of earth and the terrible with which to provoke him. Leading him right up to the distant cusps of extradition and dismay, the very borders of flight and exile.

“I want,” she said, “all the traveler’s checks cashed.”

“It’s entrapment, Judith.”

“I want them cashed,” she said. “I’ll need it in pesos.”

“Sure,” he told her, and brought the money to her, the heaps of paper with their spurious glaze of value, like stock certificates, like Eagle stamps, like lottery tickets and the come-on bonanzas brought in the mails. He didn’t even tell her to count it. “That’s twenty-five hundred dollars,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve called the desk. They’ve agreed to take a personal check. They called my bank. They sent someone to their bank. The money will be waiting for you at the cashier’s office. You’ll have to sign for it.”

“Sure,” he said. She made out a check for fifteen hundred dollars. He fetched her money. “That’s only four thousand dollars,” he said when he’d placed it beside the money from the traveler’s checks. “Do you really think I’d murder you for four thousand dollars?”

“Oh no,” she said, “there’s my rings and pearl necklace. There are things in my jewelry case.”

“Sure,” he said.

“There are my infuriating ways.”

“Get the maid to do it. Call room service. Ask the caretaker kid. Sit parked in the car. Everyone in town recognizes it by now.”

Because it was no secret anymore. And when she told him again she’d been crazy eleven years, he corrected her. “Twelve,” he said. “It used to be eleven.”

“No,” she said. “I know you won’t do it. You misjudged me, not I you. What’s so disruptive to your imagination,” she asked him, “about the idea of getting something for one’s death? Cancer gives you little enough return on your money. Not like bludgeoning. Not like street crime or poor Maria’s trusting betrayals. This is a Catholic country. No one here will harm me for my faith. Oh, Mills, they’re all Catholic countries now. They pray openly behind the Iron Curtain. My options are closed off. There are no more frontiers. When I die there will be no arrows in my breast. I won’t be torched like St. Joan or crucified on the bias like St. Francis. Beasts will never chew me. So where’s the harm in flaunting my pesos or flashing my jewelry? It’s only a farfetched possibility anyway, too oblique a contingency that I might ever be killed doing good deeds. It passes the time. And perhaps some bad man will take the bait, and God never notice that it was entrapment.”

“I noticed,” Mills said.

“We’ll leave the money lying around just in case.”

She did. When he came into the room now it was always there, at the foot of the bed or on the sink in the bathroom in the way of the housemaids or the man who came in to fix the air conditioning. Only Mills took money from the strewn cash. For expenses. For the serums renewed and paid for daily and kept in a refrigerator in the motel’s restaurant. For the El Paso newspaper, for Father Merchant, who had become a sort of dragoman, the sidekick’s sidekick.

It was Merchant who brought the medical supplies from the clinic, Merchant who sat with him sometimes while Mrs. Glazer dozed.

“Apricot pits,” he scoffed. “How could an extract of apricot pits cure a cancer?”

“Don’t talk so loud,” Mills said.

“She knows she’s dying. The señora is a realist. But apricot pits? Where is the realism in apricot pits?”

“I know,” Mills said. “You’re going to say it should have been peach pits.”

“Chemotherapy,” Father Merchant said. “Surgery. Maybe a nice hospice. But she should never have smoked. She should have watched her diet from the beginning.”

Mrs. Glazer opened her eyes.

“You shouldn’t leave your money lying around, señora.”

“Oh,” she said listlessly, “he knows about the money. He knows about my jewelry. Now I shall be murdered in my bed.”

But no one wanted her life, and their life together — for now he lived with the woman more intimately than ever he had with his wife — had become relentless.

He knew the shape of her appetite, the shade of her stools. It was extraordinary. He knew her past — as she knew his; he told her about the first George Mills, he described Cassadaga for her and the Mills who had intrigued with courts and empires, filling her in on how the family had bogged down in history, how it remained untouched by the waves of rising expectations that had signaled the rest of Western civilization out of its listlessness, giving her the gray details of a survival that was neither hardy nor valorous — but with her own governing, emergent lassitude, she had broken off her once ordered narrative. There were odd lacunae. She was nuts in one frame and securing a large dance band for her elder daughter’s confirmation party in the next. He learned about the struggle for Sam’s deanship, Milly’s progress in piano. But what had happened to Judith, any coherent feel for all that had predated their introduction to each other on the strange occasion of his going to collect her condolence call, all, that is, that was beyond his immediate observation, or not pertinent to either her needs or her demands, remained privileged information. He was interested of course. She was all he had to fill up his time. And, as she herself had insisted, she had no secrets. If she had stopped talking, if she had stopped listening, it was because all she had to fill up her time was herself. She was simply too busy now feeling her way along the murky routes and badly graded switchbacks of her decline and separation from the world to have much time for him.

Meanwhile, though he did everything, there was not much he could do for her. Occasionally, in the cool mornings, Mills still carried her outdoors and bundled her in one of the lounges where she could watch the children playing in the water, holding their breaths, racing, playing Marco Polo. But soon she lost interest in even this passive diversion and asked to be taken back to her room.

He fetched and carried from moment to moment and caught real glimpses of her only during the brief respite between the chores he performed in the name of her body. Which had gone into crisis, some emergency alert lived, or at least felt, at the pitch, the up-front prerogatives of her thirst or her weariness or even of the foul taste exploding in her mouth like the bomb of a terrorist.

Handling her nausea was a two-person affair, one to describe it, the other to chip the light dusting of salt from her soda crackers and feed them to her in pieces. She had lost impassivity only where her body was not concerned and guided him now through his massages, telling him where the flaccid muscles in her foot still pinched, warning him of a cramp developing in her neck, detailing discomfort as well as suffering, totally involved in getting off every last one of her body’s messages, in translating from further and further away the foreign language that was all around them, all the sense of her senses. He was an expert, reeling off for them, the nurses and doctors at the clinic, Judith’s infinite symptoms and impressions with an impressive and devastatingly authentic Siamese collaterality. (“This woman I live with…” he’d said to the pharmacist, scraping away the last conjugal implications of the phrase. He meant lived with.)

“I have,” she said, “a thickish wet in my groin.”

“I’ll get Kotex,” he said, for he somehow understood that she was describing not some new trial but the onset of her period, which, oddly, had not yet stopped.

Then, suddenly, she stopped even that crimped sharing. She lay in waiting, somewhere between the terror of calling it off and going back home and the terror of continuing in Mexico.

On the one hand she knew the Laetrile had failed, on the other that in Mexico she was out of the hands of the doctors, that in St. Louis they would start the chemotherapy again, baking and stewing her with their lasers, their cobalt, turning all the peaceful uses of atomic energy against her.

“I’ve been a fool, Mills. I could have died a martyr to cancer by letting them treat me. Tell about today’s episode.”

She was no longer well enough to watch “Maria, Maria,” and kept up by having Mills read her the synoptic squib in the El Paso paper.

Father Merchant came in one Friday evening but Mills gave him the key to his room and waved him off. He waited there until George called him. It was past nine.

“She’s had her bath,” George said softly. “She’s almost comfortable. The señora can hear you. Go ahead, please.”

“Madam,” said the old man, “this week Maria’s father is released from the jail and finds the patrone to who he have saled his daughter. Of course he does not recognize her because it has been nine years and she has flowered. The girl was hardly barely inside her puberty when he has sell her. He have a beard now and white hairs.”

“Mills has read me all that,” Mrs. Glazer said. “The courtship scene, please, Father. The dialogue and fine points.”

“Buen dia, señorita. ‘No, no, please don’t get up, por favor. Well well, I have not see such a lovely creature as yourself since, since…My my, it is the truth, there are none such pretty ladies in the country from which I have came.’

‘What is that country, señor?’

‘Its name is loneliness.’

‘Señor!’

‘The thousand pardons, señorita. The hand of my arm is a rough beast. The filthy scoundrel is forgot its manners.’

Por favor, señor!’

‘If you would but permit it to touch the face of your head.’

‘But—’

‘It is just that it cannot believe such a haunch is real.’

‘Oh. Ooh!’

‘Ai ai! It is the miracle.’

Por—ai ooh ooh ai! — favor, señor! This thing that you do is glorious but shameful. I must ask that you stop.’

‘But señorita—’

“I must ask that you stop,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Get my morphine, please, Mills.”

“She has pain? She wants her medication?” Merchant said. He examined the vial into which Mills had just plunged a hypodermic syringe. “Twelve milligrams of morphine? Twelve? Not fifteen? What have you done, señor? What have you allowed them to sell you?”

“You’d better leave now,” Mills said. “Her stomach hurts badly. Your voice grates her ears. There’s this indescribable itch in her left shoulder blade, and when she tries to ease it by rubbing it against the sheet a horrible pain shoots through her calves and jaw.”

And he knew, too, when the narcotic caught hold, when the nerves relaxed, aligned themselves and fit once more into their sockets. He did not feel these things himself but knew she felt them. And knew, at one that morning, the immanence and alarm she’d felt in her sleep — it was not a dream, no vision or prophecy, neither Shekinah nor rapture, but information, disclosure, some red message of the blood — that her body was done with its phases, that death was by.

He called St. Louis but at the last moment withheld his news.

“Who’s this — Mary? Hi, Mary. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m still mixed up about the time difference. It’s me, Mills. Is your daddy there? May I speak with him, please?” Rushing the words because all the time he was watching Mrs. Glazer. Who seemed momentarily to have quieted. “Who’s this? Isn’t this Mr. Glazer? Who? — Cornell Messenger? — What about your son? I don’t know your son. Where’s Mr. Glazer? Never mind. Listen, she’s waking up, I’ve got to go.”

“Marco,” she said.

He rushed to her side. She was feverish, so covered with sweat she seemed to lie under a thin layer of magnification. Her yellow wig had slipped off her head and her skull gleamed. The thin scuzz of gray fringe about her temples had turned dark with moisture. George bailed at the perspiration with towels that said Juarez Palace Motel. She was so thin she gave an impression of incredible flexibility.

“I’ve called the doctor,” he said, and watched the pains arc and register along all the fronts of her body as if pain were almost some repressed geological flaw, and her skin, joints, bones and orifices the weathered, levered, earthen flash points and levees of prepped vulnerability.

“Marco,” she whispered.

“I’m going to give you some morphine. An injection would hurt too much right now. You’ll have to take these by mouth.”

“Marco?”

He took her jaw in his fingers and pried it open. He tried to roll the morphine capsules they used now down her throat. Her mouth, for all the moisture on the surface of her body, was dry as fire. Some of the gelatin casing stuck to the inside of her cheek, and he had to tear it free, like cigarette paper caught on the surface of a lip.

“Marco,” she said.

He pulled the two halves of the capsule apart and powdered her mouth with morphine. Her pain was so great it had doused her sense of taste. The stuff lay in her mouth neutral as teeth.

“You’ve got to swallow,” Mills said. “Please swallow. I’m going to wet your mouth.” He dipped a teaspoon with some congealed dessert still on it into a water glass and tamped the water into the corners of her mouth, sprinkling it there as if he were ministering to a bird. The drug turned to paste. He took up the glass of water and began to pour it into her mouth a little at a time until some vestigial reflex took over and she gulped.

“Marco,” she said, her eyes wide, terrorized, the irises fleeing inside her head. “Marco!” she screamed. “Marco! Marco!”

“Polo,” Mills answered.

“Marco,” she called, lowering her lids.

“Polo.”

“Marco.”

“Polo.”

They called the challenge and response from the old game and it seemed to soothe her heart that, blind and maddened as she was, she was not alone in the water.

6

I told her, I don’t know the matter with me. I suppose I love the neighborhood. I’m no native son, I didn’t even grow up there, but I — most folks — recognize home when I see it. Something old shoe in the blood and bones, at ease with the brands of lunch meat in the freezers and white bread on the shelves. At one with the barber shops, the TV and appliance repair. The movie houses in my precincts still do double features. Those that don’t do evangelists, I mean, those that don’t sell discount shoes or ain’t political headquarters or furniture stores by now, the little marquees fanned out over the front of the buildings like a bill on a cap. We still have bakeries, and there are mechanics in the gas stations who can break down your engine in the dark. I root for our neighborhood banks, the local savings and loans, you know?

Stable, we’re a stable neighborhood. How many areas are there left in the city — the city? Missouri? the country? the world? — that still have a ballroom and live dance bands that play there three nights a week? And even the discos bleed an old romantic box step, the generations still doing the stable dances under the revolving crystal. We have a saying in South St. Louis—“We’re born out of Incarnate Word and buried out of Kriegshauser.” The stable comings and goings of hundreds of thousands of people.

They cross the river from Illinois and come from far away as west county to eat the immutable old ice creams and natural syrups at Crown’s, less flavor, finally, than the cold and viscid residuals of produce and sweetness themselves. A kind of Europe we are.

I knew all this back in ’47 when I first saw this section of town, recognizing at first glance that what the cop was walking was a beat, the grooved stations of vocation carved like erosion into the pavement, the big dusty shop windows with their brides and grooms and graduating seniors in their dark marzipan robes balanced on the topmost layer of the cake as if they were going to stand there forever. Something already nostalgic in the framed portraits in the photographic studio window, in the crush of the sun on the low two- and three-story commercial buildings up and down Gravois and Chippewa Avenues, something daguerreotype, a thousand years old, mint and lovely as a scene on money. I was nineteen but the Millses were a millennium. Here was somewhere I could hang my hat, here was a place I could bring our history.

I found three rooms in one of the blood brick apartment buildings on Utah, and there I began my life as a free man.

Where do we go wrong? How does joy decline? What rockets us from mood to mood like a commuter? So that, years later, in Mexico, that stable neighborhood of restlessness and revolution, I perfectly understood Mrs. Glazer’s valedictory. She could have been speaking for all of us.

She was in the hospital by then. Dr. Gomeza had withdrawn from the case. And she was no longer a patient, not in the sense that what she had was treatable, not in the sense that what she had had ever been treatable.

“I don’t live here anymore. I feel like something in a warehouse. Oh, Mills,” she said, “it’s not so bad to die.

“Weather. I’ve never liked weather. Too cold in the winter, in the summer too hot. Wood too damp to build a fire and the picnics rained out.

“The bad hands and heavy losses and clothes off the rack that never quite fit. Shoes pinch and the hairdo sags and the roast’s overdone. The news is bad in the paper and one’s children fail. I’m disappointed when the show isn’t good I’ve heard so much about, and hats never looked right on me.

“My cats are run over. Moving men chip my furniture and the help steals. You can never get four people to agree on a restaurant.

“Wrong numbers, mismanaged mail and wasted time. Car pools and jury duty. Pain, fallen expectations and the fear of death.

“Who would fardels bear, Mills? The proud man’s contumely?

“Mary is jealous of Milly’s skill at piano, Sam’s salary was too low years. No one loved me enough, and I never had all the shrimp I could eat.”

Mostly all I could do was sit on the side of the bed and hold her. Like people in a waiting room we looked, Mrs. Glazer swaddled as a sick kid. Worn out, embraced as infant, loomed over, dipped in a dark dance.

Because I was twenty-seven years old before I ever entered the Delgado Ballroom, my shirt size determined years, my waistline fixed and what length pants I wore. No youth but callow still, the city hick, a sort of pleasantry. (You will understand that I played softball with what I still called “the men” on Sunday mornings in the schoolyards and parks, everyone, me too, in a yellow T-shirt and baggy baseball trousers, beer on the sidelines and packages of cigarettes and the equipment in someone’s old army duffel.) We bloom late into our mildness, or some do, our character only a deference, a small courtesy to the world.

We played softball — slow pitch, the high and lazy arc of the big ball so casual the game seemed to go on over our heads. Softball is a pitcher’s medium, slow pitch especially. I thought the pitchers rich, or anyway leaders, privileged, gracious. They gave us our turn, permitted us to stand beneath the big, deceptive, graceful ball, shaking into our stance like dogs throwing off water, seeking purchase, hunching our shoulders, planting our feet, hovering in gravity as the softball hovered in air. Neutral gents, those pitchers neither smiled when they struck us out nor frowned when we connected. Good sports acknowledging nothing, neither the hoots of their opponents nor the pepper encouragements of their mates. Captains of cool benevolence, trimmer than the beefy Polacks and Krauts, all those swollen, sideburned others who were always talking.

In that league if you weren’t married you were engaged. Engagements seemed to generate themselves almost spontaneously. There wasn’t, except for myself, a fellow who wasn’t already, or who wouldn’t within the year become, a fiancé. Every girl on the bus wore a ring. Rings, or at least high school graduation pins, were an article of clothing, a piece of style, as much a part of ordinary human flourish as a cross on a chain. They were serious people, with their scouts’ eyes peeled for the sexual or domestic talent. It was a world of starter sets, registered taste, the future like a lay-away plan.

Those pitchers, I’m thinking of those pitchers, the men chosen to get the blessings. Maybe because I didn’t grow up there, maybe because when I came they were already doing their lives. Maybe it’s having to come from behind (who came from behind history itself; oh, Greatest Grandfather, why didn’t you rise up and smite Guillalume and the merchant? why didn’t you kill Mills’s horse when you had the chance?) which blights possibility and poisons will.

What I wanted to tell her about was the Delgado Ballroom — soft romance’s dark platform, that marble clearing, that courtyard of the imagination, that dance hall of love. No playground or rec room, no nightclub or fun house. Consecrate as confessional, the priests came there, marriages were performed, girls confirmed, classes graduated.

I saw it first in the daytime when it had that odd, off-season calm of deserted amusement parks, unoccupied classrooms, restaurants with the chairs bottom up on the tables, all the wound-down feel of an energy absent or gone off to catch different trains. Maybe I was moving a piano. (This was what I knew of the high life, my stage door connection to the extraordinary, who brought cargoes of sand to the carpeted shores of the country clubs and filled the deep ashtrays there. George Mills, high placed as a head waiter, situate as a man in an honor guard. George Mills, the Velvet Rope Kid.) Or buffing the dance floor. Or installing the Coke machine. It was darker in the morning than it would have been at night, the windowless room cool as a palace. The manager gave me two passes. “Here,” he said. “Bring your girl.”

I went the following Saturday, who not only had no girl but who had never danced, whose music — the tuner on my little Philco was busted, the dial stuck just off key of a station that broadcast the Browns games, so that the play-by-play seemed to occur in a shrill wind, the star-of-the-game interview overseas — was mostly whatever people happened to be whistling, the pop tunes reaching me downwind, degraded, in a sort of translation, the melodies flattened, the high notes clipped. But I was twenty-seven years old, my Sunday mornings squandered in playgrounds with “the men,” those imaginary big brothers of my heart. I didn’t even own a suit. (And what did I own? Not my furniture, not my knives and dishes, not my sheets and pillowslips. I think I had bought — let’s see — a shovel, a hammer, a tape measure and hand saw, my fielder’s mitt of course, my baggy baseball pants and spiked shoes, my cap and my T-shirt, a Louisville Slugger, a sixteen-inch softball. Even the Philco was furnished. I honestly can’t think of anything else. Yeah, the mismatched clothes in my drawers and closets.)

I went to Famous and Barr to be outfitted for my free passes, and when the salesman in Men’s Furnishings asked if he could help me I think I told him just that, that it was for the free passes I’d come, to be outfitted, done up like the box steppers in the Delgado Ballroom. I didn’t even understand about alterations, you see, and thought the trousers and jackets he had me try on cut for bigger, taller men. “I can’t buy this,” I told him, glancing at myself in the three-paneled mirror (and the first time, too, I had seen myself in profile, in holograph, maybe the first time I understood I had sides, a back). “I already told you it was for dancing. I’d trip on the whaddayacall’em, the cuffs.”

The tailor told me I could pick the suit up Thursday. (And that was something, I tell you, the dapper Italian with pins in his mouth, chalking my crotch. “Stand still,” he demanded. And the century’s squirming, woebegone hick replied, “I can’t, I can’t.”) “But I need it tonight. Tonight is the dance.”

“Tonight? Tonight is impossible. On Special Rush maybe late Wednesday morning. Wear something else.”

And I had to tell him I had nothing else, only my work clothes, only my work boots, only my softball gear, only my cleats. Only not entirely the hick. The hick is without my margin of peremptory foreboding, my self-serving ingenuousness. He does not throw himself so easily on the mercy of the court.

“It’s for tonight, you see. The dance at the Delgado. The manager invited me. He said to bring a girl. I could meet one. I don’t own the right clothes.”

“Hey, Albert,” the tailor said.

“Yeah, Sal?” said the salesman.

“Thirty-two years in the business and Cinderella here thinks I look like a fairy godmother.”

“You going to fix him up, Sal?”

“What the hell, Albert, I’m going to put it on Super Special Crash Rush and see to the alterations personally.”

“That’s wonderful, Sal. I know my customer appreciates that.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I want to thank you.”

I sat on the little bench in the tiny dressing room two hours, my curtain open to the weather of the other customers, men with wardrobes, with three and four and five suits in their closets, with dressy slacks and sports coats, with — I didn’t know this then — tropical-weight worsteds for the warm seasons, heavy tweeds for the cold, who examined themselves imperially in the glass and spoke without looking at them to the salesman at parade rest behind their backs, scrutinizing the mirror close as shavers or people examining blemishes in a good light. They talked knowledgeably about buttons, the slant of a pocket, the cut of lapels, and I, alien as a savage, listened greedily. I couldn’t have been more interested if they had been women.

“Hey,” Sal said, when he came down to check a customer’s measurements, “it’s going to be a while yet. You don’t have to hang around here. Walk around the store.”

“I’m all right. This is fine.”

“Buy your shoes,” Sal said. “Buy your shirt, buy your tie.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I forgot.” I stood up.

“Tell the shoe man a brown oxford.”

“A brown oxford. Yes.”

“Maybe a tan shirt with a thin stripe. A dark, solid-color tie, no pattern. If there’s a pattern it should be delicate, no heavier than the stripe on your shirt.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You got a decent leather belt? Something the color of new shoe soles, I think, but stay away from oxblood.”

“All right,” I said, “thank you.”

“Stockings,” he called after me. “Black. Knee length.”

It is perhaps the first time he has ever really examined himself in the glass. Looking for blemish, sorting rash, feature, the inventory of surface, the lay of the skull. He sees with wonder the topography of his hair, the evidence of his arms beneath his suit coat, the hinged and heavy wrists. He leans forward and splays his lips, stares at the long teeth, touches them. Before, if he has looked in the mirror, it has been with the shy, cursory glance of a customer into a barber’s glass, that automatic, that mechanical.

I was no virgin, you understand.

His sexual encounters had been in bars, low dives, his conquests drunk, mostly older, fumbling his cock in the alley, blowing him in cars, deeply, deeply, smothering his foreskin on their sore throats, scratching it on dentures. Hoarsely they had moaned, called out someone else’s name. Or come to them always in their beds, in cold rooms, in badly furnished apartments above beauty parlors. So that he believed, vaguely, that females had regulated intervals of abstinence, cycles of seasonal rut, their need encoded, driven by the calendar, the tides, the moon, by floundering glands, secret biological constants. (He stayed away from whores not because he believed their need was shammed but because he believed they had no need, that their natures had been torn from them, that their cunts were quite literally holes, hair and flesh covering nothing, like houses built on the edges of cliffs. He thought of them as amputees. He did not go with whores.)

[I did not go with anyone. When I wanted a woman I knew where to find her. Those bars. Maybe once a month I’d leave my neighborhood and take the bus north or south, get off somewhere in the city I had never been and find a tavern, and usually it was the only place with the lights still on, settled among the frame houses and dark apartment buildings — bowling alleys too, the lounges there, those Eleventh Frames, Lovers’ Lanes, Spare Rooms and Gutter Bowls near the pinball arcades and shoe rentals — so that I always had the impression I had come to the country. I didn’t waste time. I ordered my beer, showed them my money — I didn’t have a wallet; in those days I carried my cash in my pay envelope — and looked around, smiling not broadly so much as inconclusively. If I saw a woman put money in the jukebox I listened to hear what songs she’d picked and I played them too, leaning backward or forward when the music came on, waiting to catch her eye, raising my glass to her, toasting our taste. Almost always she smiled. I took my beer and moved down the bar toward her. If the stool next to hers was empty I sat down. I’d read the label on her beer and signal the bartender to bring us another round, talking all the time, not lying, you understand, but this wasn’t conversation either, telling my name and where I worked, the position I played, other things about me, all I could think of who didn’t know what my hair looked like or what were my strong points or the condition of my teeth, and never asked anything about her unless it was what she was drinking if it wasn’t beer or something I recognized, the difficulty being finding things to say after I’d told her my name, what I did for a living, where I was from, conversationed no better than a candidate, some pol at a gate when the shifts change, but talking anyway, having to, the distracting spiel of a magician, say, the cardsharp’s chatter, friendly, open, frank for a man in work shirts, boots, but steering clear, too, of questions and promptings and preemptive reference, not rude or aggrandizing but shy for her, modest for the lady, in charge only through consideration, a ricochet restraint, the billiard relationships and carom closures and retreats tricky as dance steps. Because I figured we both knew what was what, who, one of us at least, knew nothing. And assumed she assumed I would not mention it, her presence a matter of course, the body’s will, some compulsion of the skin, shame’s innings and lust’s licks, as if, were I to permit her the edgewise word that word would be a groan, a speech from heat, not conversation either, as if the both of us were mutes, but the driven diction of desire, I more than hinting she had gotten there as I had, on a bus, come in a car from some distant neighborhood, as much the stranger in those parts as myself. And where, I wonder, did those gestures come from, that silent toast, that almost knowledgeable little bow of deference and tribute, that polite, bar-length greeting, romantic, so close to civilized? How would I have learned these signs who had learned nothing? Not my profile, not my air. But deferential, always deferential, as deferential to her hormones as a gent to disfigurement or some grand-mannered guy to handicap, deferentially drilling her with my attentive small talk, clocking the parameters of her drunkenness all the way to its critical mass. Like a scientist, like a coach, like a doc at the ringside, gauging, appraising and contemplative, only then stepping in, cool as a cop: “That’s enough, don’t you think so? Look, you’re beginning to cry. Listen how shrill you’ve become. You don’t want to throw up, do you? You don’t want to pass out. Where are your car keys, where is your purse? Is that your coat? Did you come with a hat? Splash water on your face, go relieve yourself first. Beer, pee and estrogen. That’s a tricky combination. The beer’s in the pee. The pee floods the estrogen. Go on, go ahead, I’ll wait.” And damned if she didn’t. Do as I say. And grateful as well. As if I’d actually helped her. So that by the time I had her skirt up, her brassiere down, lowered her corset, raised her slip, sucked the garters, kissed the hose, and had the cups of her bra loose on her belly or awry at her side, she was actually watching, amazed as myself at her condition, convinced by her gamy, ribald chemistries, struck by what was neither rape nor love but only my simple, driven confidence, a kind of carnal transfusion, sexual first aid and the terrible blunt liberties of emergency, averting her eyes not even when she came, her moans and cries and whines and whimpers and skirls of orgasm a sort of breathless yodel, Baby Shameless beneath this fellow like some heavy lifter or love’s day laborer who did all the work and insinuated knees, fingers, hands, lips, mouth, tongue, teeth and cock too at last, not as weapons — as little seduction as rape — and not even as parts, members but as tools, the paramedical instrumentality of the available — as if I lived off the land, made do like a commando — so that only when I came did she avert her eyes, blink, as if only then I had exceeded my warrants, behaved less than professionally. But reassured the next moment by my withdrawal, suddenly thoughtful, charmed and sad. “Oh, say,” she’d say, “where’d you learn to do a girl like that? That was really something. Really something. You know I never…I didn’t frighten you, did I? When I made those sounds? Did I? Tell the truth, were you embarrassed? Honest, I never…It was like someone else’s voice. I swear it. It was like someone’s voice I’ve never heard. I never have heard it. I didn’t know I even knew those noises, words.” I all skeptical reassurance, muzzling my doubts as till the last minute I had muzzled my lust, as accomplished a dresser in the dark back seats of cars or on the damp sheets of those strange beds as undresser, saying: “Oh, hey, listen, that’s okay. That was only nature. You mustn’t mind what Mother Nature says. You’re not to blame — here’s your stocking — you couldn’t help it. Don’t you think I know that much? Sure. Anyway, it was your glands talking, only your guts’ opinions, just some tripe from the marrow. You think I pay that any mind? That I listen to endocrines? Women do that stuff when they get excited. They’re not in control. I know that much. It was just Nature and your ducts’ low notions. Hey now, cheer up. Do I look like the kind of guy who sets store in a fart? Here’s your earring. It must have slipped out when you were thrashing around like that.”]

As he believed, again vaguely, in virgins. Not — he was no prude — in their moral superiority. Not in some special quality they possessed which their fallen sisters — not even, particularly, in the fall of those sisters — lacked. Not in their fitness as brides or suitability as girl friends, not in their congenial apposition to grace and tone or in their conformity to a grand convention. Not, in fact, in anything petite or chaste or delicate, prudent, pure, virtuous, discreet or even modest. In virginity, in virginity itself, in its simple mechanical cause. He believed, that is, in the hymen. In the membrane, that, he took it, air-and watertight occlusive seal like cellophane on a pack of cigarettes or the metal cap on a soda bottle that somehow shored for as long as it was still in place all the juices of need, all the sexual solutions, that endocrinous drip drip and concupiscent leak which he so expertly stanched in cars and plugged in those furnished rooms.

And just as he shied away from the whores, he shied away from the virgins, and for much the same reason — that they had no needs. They were too much trouble. They would take seduction, courtship, the long, difficult ploy of friendship.

[What was the point? How could I deal with someone who did not mean to be dealt with? Did I have beer money and bus fare to burn on women and girls who had an existence aloof and outside the terms of my desires? If I did not think of them as incorruptible then I thought of them as indifferent, people outside my sphere of influence. I might as well have had conversations with ladies whose language was French, who could not understand my English, who may not even have heard it.]

Which explains why, at twenty-seven, George Mills, who’d had his ashes hauled as often as he’d felt the urgency, who’d been blown, whose flesh and buttocks had been chewed and clutched, whose back and backside raked in wanton, dissipate zest, why George Mills, bruised by delight and all the hijinks of high feeling, had never so much as kissed a maiden. It was that membrane, that cherry like some mythic grail or fortified fastness, which kept him off, not so much at bay as at home, like some frail, stiff, awkward peasant mowing in a field who sees the battlement, the walled, high, thick and ancient parapet and, behind the casement, the oppressor himself, say, taking the sun on the bulwark’s broad and open deck, defenseless, alone, who looks once, shrugs, and embraces the hay, the infested, heavy bales, to shove them about with his last declining energies.

[It was the two free passes.]

He wasn’t shy around these women, any more than one is shy around furniture — tables, chairs. He wasn’t overly modest or unassuming. (He had his assumptions.) It was that in their presence — the presence of virgins — he had some genuine gift for the revoked self, a redskin caution, an anonymity reasonable as a good alibi. It was only afterward that a teammate ever remembered that he had failed to introduce George to his girl’s friend, her roommate, a cousin in town on a visit. The roommate or cousin would not even have noted this much. On a streetcar or bus, in a private automobile going back to the neighborhood after a game in the park, he could sit thigh to thigh beside the strange girl without contact, his skin as nerveless as his clothing.

[I figured why bother, and made myself as indifferent as I supposed her to be. I looked out the window. I watched for my stop.]

He might have gone on this way forever.

[It was the two free passes, at two bucks apiece the sixteen bottles of beer they represented, which, if you figure the woman in that tavern was already on her second bottle by the time I put my coin in the jukebox to play her song, and when you remember that I nursed mine — someone had to drive, someone had to stay sober enough to take responsibility for my erection — often drinking only one to her three or, if I ordered a pitcher, maybe a glass and a half to her four, and if you add to the equation the fact that she rarely drank more than seven bottles, two of which she’d paid for herself, and usually not more than five or six, three or four of them on me, then the two passes stood for two to three women successfully courted, successfully wooed. I’m not mean. Money doesn’t move me. I’m talking about effort, all that waiting at bus stops, listening to songs played over again again that I hadn’t liked the first time, all those strained and jumpy monologues, the patient stints at their bodies, watched as boilers, supervised as machinery. So it was the two and a half months I was thinking of — I’m a working man, I punch time clocks, I’m paid by the hour — when I made the connection between the two free passes and the trio of women. It wasn’t the money. A fifth of my working year. It wasn’t the money. Didn’t I spring for new clothes? Didn’t I pop for accessories? And it wasn’t any investment I was seeking to protect when I bought them. The poor aren’t cheap, there’d been no investment. “Bring your girl,” the manager said and gave me free passes. So it wasn’t the money and I had no girl. Hell, maybe it was the manager’s investment I was protecting. Though I still think it was the effort, that I suddenly saw all the man-hours and elbow grease that just those beers and bus rides entailed.]

Stan David was the orchestra leader at the Delgado Ballroom. David’s was a regional band, almost a municipal one. They played at proms and weddings and, during the week, at the Delgado. They cut no records but had been often on the air. Theirs was the studio band for the local Mutual radio station, and they had been heard behind the victory celebrations in the ballrooms of many downtown hotels a few hours after the polls closed on election days.

David was a small man, prematurely gray and responsible-looking. He looked more like the orchestra’s business manager than its conductor and, when he sat down at the piano to lead his band, he somehow seemed someone from the audience, the father of the bride, say, or the high school’s principal being a good sport. Indeed, he’d joked with the man who’d hired him for the Delgado and who’d commented on the fact that Stan wasn’t dressed like the other players. “I know this town. It’s a conservative town. I’m as much a master of ceremonies as a musician. These people will take more from a gray-headed guy in a business suit than they would from some boob in a yellow show biz tux.”

On the Saturday night of George Mills’s free passes it was not yet an orchestra when Mills walked in. Unaugmented by strings or woodwinds, it was barely a band. They were still setting up.

George glanced at the small group, at their odd displacement on the commodious bandstand, at the gap, greater, Mills judged, than the distance between home plate and pitcher’s mound, between the trumpet and the drummer. He looked at the arrangement of the vacant, freestanding, streamlined music stands like big phonograph speakers, at the sequin flourish of their initials.

Gradually the band fleshed itself out, but the dance floor seemed as unoccupied as the bandstand had, the handful of couples dancing there as reluctant to move next to each other as the musicians. They swayed skittishly to the temperate brass, the long, queer beat of the piano.

George is aware of his new clothes, the creamy fabrics like an aura of haberdash, a particular pocket like a badge of fashion, the vaguely heraldic suggestion of his collar, his lapels like laurels, his cuffs like luck. He strolls across the dance floor and, absorbed in all the flying colors of his style, already it is like dancing. He moves in the paintbox atmospherics of the big glowing room, the polished cosmetics of light.

Chiefly he is aware of his shoes, his elegant socks, his smooth, lubricate soles like the texture of playing cards. Always before the earth has resisted, stymied his feet, and he has walked in gravity as in so much mud. There has always been this layer of friction, of grit. Now he moves across glass, ice, the hard, flawless surface of the dance floor packed as snow. He feels swell.

Stan David, his voice augmented by saxophones and clarinets, by drums and bass, calls the room to attention. He is neither seductive nor peremptory but matter-of-fact as someone returned from an errand. He breaks into their mood seamlessly. “The boys and I are awful glad to be playing for you folks tonight. It’s an important date for us because it’s the first time Mr. Lodt has asked us to do a Saturday night at the Delgado, so first off we want to thank those old friends who’ve so loyally supported our week-night appearances and who Mr. Lodt tells us have been requesting our engagement for the big one.”

Most of the people applaud Stan David’s announcement. George, on the strength of his good mood, applauds too.

“Well, thank you,” Stan David says, “thank you much. God bless you all.” He turns momentarily to the band and brings the song they’ve been playing to a conclusion. It is, George guesses, their theme song, though he does not recognize the melody. Immediately they begin another, softer, slower, as unfamiliar. “While we were jamming,” Stan says, turning back to them, “I noticed a few unfamiliar faces in the room, a few new friends, I hope, I hope.” There is additional, louder applause for David’s familiar tag line.

“You know, it’s funny, the lads and I have been doing gigs in this town since almost just after the war and, you have my word, I never forget a dancer. If a couple comes by the bandstand and I happen to spot them I have their style forever. I can recall all the different partners they dance with and know even the kinds of songs they sit out. That’s what our music’s about, you see — dancing. That’s our bread and butter, that’s what pays the rent. If just listening to music is what you prefer, better get yourself a high hat and a box at the opera. Buy records, a radio, tickets to concerts. Go with the highbrows when the symphony plays. That goes for the chaperones, that goes for the shy. Mr. Lodt thinks so too. He doesn’t want any wallflowers blocking his fire exits. We don’t get paid for our fancy solos and hotsy-totsy musicianship. It ain’t Juilliard here, it’s a dance hall. Now it’s a big floor…What’s that Mr. Lodt? Right. Square foot for square foot the biggest in the Midwest. So there’s no need to bump into anyone. We want you to enjoy yourselves but expect you to behave at all times according to the international rules of ballroom etiquette. If you’ve come to show off or act like a rowdy you might just as well leave right now, I hope, I hope.

“Okay? Okay. Now, you gals who are here for the first time, who came with your girl friends to see what it’s like, it’s a scientific fact, it takes forty-eight muscles to frown and only half a dozen to smile. You guys remember that, too. But everybody pay attention — we might just be playing your song when you fall in love!”

George has seen the bar, more like a soda fountain than a bar, more — though he has no firsthand experience of this — like the sinks and Coke cupboards in rec rooms, finished basements. He has a forlorn sense of other people’s families, of uncles and dads in sports shirts, of daughters who babysit one and two years after they have graduated high school, a notion of these girls in baby doll pajamas, rollers, furry slippers, of brothers called out for swim practice, track, even during vacation. They run punishment laps.

But it is the girls who choke his spirit, the peerless globes of their behinds full as geometry, their breasts scentless as health. He imagines their lingerie, the white cotton average as laundry. He knows there are virgins about, feels the concentrated weight of their incurious apathy, their inert, deadpan, ho-hum hearts. And is oppressed by obstacle, the insurmountability of things.

Yet he knows that it is only through some such girl — he hasn’t seen her yet, has merely glimpsed her type gossiping over a soft drink, or dancing with a young man or another girl, not heedless so much as inattentive, not wanton, even when her partner tentatively divides her thighs with his leg, so much as absolved, locked into a higher modesty — that he may begin his life, be freed from the peculiar celibacy that has marked it, his periodic, furious bachelor passions like seizures. But he has seen the beerless, liquorless bar who till now has only wooed with chemicals the chemically primed. There is no jukebox. How may he cope? He is ready to leave. And is actually walking toward the exit and past the gilt chairs that line the margins of the dance floor when Stan David speaks.

“Girls ask the boys to dance. Girls ask the boys to dance. Step up to some fellow, girls, and invite him to dance.”

“You want to dance?” Louise asks him.

“Me?”

“Stan says.”

“Sure. I guess. I’m not much of a dancer.”

“It’s a box step.”

“Oh, a box step.”

“You can do a box step, can’t you?”

“Is this a box step?”

“That’s right. You’ve got it.”

“Like this?”

“You’ve got it.”

“I’m dancing,” George says.

“Louise Mead,” Louise says.

“George Mills.”

“Mrs. Louise Mills. Mrs. George Mills. George and Louise Mills.”

“What?”

“Oh,” she laughs, “you’re not from around here. When a girl tells a boy her name and the boy tells his, the girl gets to say what her name would be if the girl and the boy were married.”

“I’m not really a boy.”

“What a thing to say!”

“I mean I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“An older man,” Louise says. “You’re an older man.”

“That depends,” he says, pleased with his response.

“I’m nineteen,” she says, and he has a sense that things are going well. He’s following the conversation and doing the box step. The song — Stan David and his orchestra are playing “Getting To Know You”—has been going on for almost seven minutes.

“Did you come with someone, George?”

“No. Did you?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Oh.”

“Do you think I did?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not very flattering. It’s Saturday night. I’m nineteen years old. Do you think I’d come to a place like this by myself?”

“I guess not,” George says.

“It’s still the same song,” Stan David says. “It’s still girls ask the boys, and it’s still the same song.”

“I love your togs,” Louise says.

“My togs?”

“Your clothes, silly.”

“They’re brand new. They’re brand new togs.”

“The boys and I just might play this song right to the end of the set. We might play it all evening. Does this tell you something about the human heart? Anybody can fall in love with anybody if they stand close enough long enough.”

“He always says that.”

“Did you know about this? Did you know there’d be girls ask the boys?”

“What if I did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to sit down, George?”

“If you do.”

“I’m by myself,” she says, and lays her head on his shoulder. “I came with my folks.”

The cat has his tongue. In a bowling alley, in a bar, she would have had the story of his life by now, the comfort of his theories, but like this, in the dim room, a virgin in his arms, their bodies’ curves and hollows adjusted by the dance, customized by music as by tailoring, he has no words, is adrift in a soup of contrary sensations. He is that self-conscious. He wants to kiss her. But knows that if he does — she is with her folks; where are they? — it would be a declaration helpless and humiliating as the raw need of those chemical-flooded ladies to whom he’s ministered, revealing as a stump. He feels his erection, which he manages to keep out of her way, and glances furtively at the pants of the other male dancers to see if he’s out of line. He is astonished. There are erections everywhere. It’s a logjam of hard-ons.

“Why’d you ask if I knew Mr. David was going to make the girls ask the boys?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it because you thought I’d been watching you? Is that the reason, Mr. Stuck-Up?”

“No.”

The lights in the room are turned up and George can hear laughter, whistles, catcalls, bursts of applause. It’s the people on the golden chairs. They are appraising the swollen crotches of the men. The ballroom has exploded with laughter. The drummer peppers the hall with rim shots, great percussive booms. “All right, all right,” Stan David says, “let’s have some order here,” and the music sweetens, the lights dim. “Hey,” he says when the dancers have reestablished themselves with the dance music, “you like this, don’t you? Sure. We do all the work, background your courting like music in a movie, and you get the glory. Bet you’d like us around always. Be there in the trunk of the car playing your song. Hanging just out of sight, crouched behind bushes while you’re kissing good night. Or strung out on rooftops lining your way when you walk your girl home. Some nerve. Some nerve I say. Change partners! Go on, change partners or we quit playing. — All right. I warned you. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Lads?”

The music seems snagged, caught on the baton David jabs into the midst of the orchestra. A clarinet breaks off, a saxophone. The drummer quits in mid-phrase. Stan David snaps his baton in two like a pencil. The bass man leans his instrument against the proscenium, takes a folded newspaper out of his back pocket and sits in a chair to read it. Piecemeal, they wind down, the music thins, is gone.

“Come on, will you!” a voice calls from the dance floor. “Strike up the band!”

The bandleader shuts the piano lid. He turns on his bench and folds his arms.

A few of the dancers begin to hoot. It’s as if the film has gone out of synch in a movie house and they are whistling the attention of the projectionist.

“Nope,” Stan David says, “nope.”

“Come on, Stan. Play, for chrissake.”

They start to clap.

Lodt has climbed up on the stage to confer with Stan David. The bandleader shakes his head. Lodt turns to the crowd and shrugs.

George grins at Louise. “It’s part of the show. Is it part of the show?” George asks the nineteen-year-old girl.

“He’s really angry,” Lodt tells the crowd.

“Make him play or give us our money back.”

“I asked him,” Lodt says. “You all saw me.”

“Make him play.”

“He’s the bandleader,” Lodt says. “He’s like the captain of a ship. He’s in charge. He could marry you legal.”

Louise squeezes George’s hand. She is the one who has taken it. As soon as the music stopped George had let go, had taken his arm from about her waist.

“Come on,” someone shouts, “what do you think this is? Don’t jerk us around. We’re veterans here.”

“You’re veterans?” Stan David calls back. “Veterans? Oh, if you’re veterans,” he says in mock conciliation, and produces a new baton and gives a downbeat. The band strikes up a march tune and the veterans groan.

“I think it’s part of the show,” George Mills says.

The march is concluded. The trumpet sounds retreat. Stan David plays the national anthem on the piano.

Many of the dancers have lost their partners, couples walk off the dance floor together, a few wallflowers drift off by themselves. George Mills tags along beside Louise. It’s as if he had come with her. She introduces him to her friends, to a girl named Carol, to another named Sue. He meets Bernadette and her husband Ray. He meets the Olivers, Charles and Ruth. Ellen Rose and Herb, her fiancé. And this is something new to him from ordinary life. He can’t recall when he’s met so many people at one time. Or himself been formally introduced. When he was a child perhaps. Vaguely he remembers comments about his growth or the similarities of certain of his features to those of his father. He half expects these people to offer a remark about his eyes or smile, and though he realizes he is no longer tall for his age he would be more comfortable if they took note of his height or remarked upon some other aspect of his physical appearance. It is something to which he could respond, as he must have done in the past, smiling shyly or agreeably nodding. As it is he has no repertoire, is actually uncertain how to reply when someone says “Pleased to meet you, George.” He answers “Pleased to meet you, too,” but it sounds flat to him, foolish. He is uneasy among all these virgins — Louise, her girl friends — uneasy with her pals, the young marrieds. With Ruth Oliver, visibly pregnant, with Bernadette, who does not yet show in her fourth month.

“Yes,” Charles Oliver tells him when they shake hands, “I saw you dancing with Lulu,” and George feels himself blush.

Meanwhile Stan David has begun to play for them again. From time to time George thinks he recognizes a song he has played on the jukeboxes in the bars, and again he feels himself blush. He’s mildly afraid Louise will notice his embarrassment but knows she could never guess its source. The men would understand of course, Charles and Herb and Ray, and though they are four and five years younger than he, there could have been times before they’d ever met their wives when they too had been at the mercy of glands, their willful and whimsical insides, their rude juices.

“My friends like you,” Louise whispers in his ear when they are on the dance floor again.

He wishes she wouldn’t do this. He wishes to be in control of his body. Breath in his ear does things to him. He knows how reckless he has become, his polite analyses forgotten, his calm science, when even slatterns in bars have brushed his ear with their lips.

“Change partners,” Stan David says ominously. The bandleader’s words are a kind of fatality, a soft force as threatening to mood as an announcement of war or a train conductor’s no-nonsense “All aboard.”

“Damn,” George says, and Louise smiles. Somehow she takes the measure of the music, absorbs its implications and impulses, the secret energies of the song, and takes them into her body, changing not partners but patterns, by some subtle shift of weight signaling George to follow, to come with her, and it’s as if they’re hiding in the melody, dancing counterclockwise, their gait disguised, their bodies subsumed within some more anonymous shape. Their form throws off detail, thickens to silhouette, and George feels invisible.

“You just won’t listen, will you?” Stan David says sadly.

But Mills would be content if the dancing were done with altogether. They have been with each other almost an hour. For almost half that time she’s been in his arms. They have spoken perhaps two dozen sentences to each other, and if she is friendly he knows it is just the good will of her optimism, the unmarked chemicals of innocence pure as fruit juice in her virgin’s blood. She cannot know that a smile is the leading edge of seduction, that the warmth of her body cannot be stored, that contact with a man releases it as energy, that the energy fragments and beads like moisture when it touches the surface of his skin, that the beads penetrate the follicles where the hairs grow on the backs of his hands and along his arms and the nape of his neck, and sink to the nerve endings to travel the synapses to his genitals and suffuse his body with what in other men is the patient will of courtship but which, in him, is degraded, only low lust. It is this lust which thickens his speech, which turns him clumsy during introductions and blunts the strategies of wooing — are his togs too tight? do his arms thrust from his sleeves? — and bewilders his bones and staggers his box step.

“Because you’re too young,” Stan David says while the band plays on. “Because you think you know it all, and you don’t know anything. My God,” he says, “just look at the slave bracelets and school rings and fraternity pins twinkling in here. You’d think it was the midsummer night’s sky, another solar system. Those are the fairy lights of crush and puppy love. You think you know what it leads to. You don’t. You’re in the dark about this stuff. Is it vine-covered cottage in your guts? It’s the projects. Is it moon and June? It’s a high of thirty, a low of twelve. It’s all glum drizzle and the engine won’t turn over in the street and the kid’s spitting up and there’s maybe two eggs in the house and a heel of stale bread. The zip’s gone out of the three ounces of open Coke standing in the fridge and your nose is running and your throat is sore.

“Sometimes I think maybe me and the guys are in the wrong business. We’re ruining lives here, confusing you with bad signals. Excuse me, Mr. L., but I’ve got to say what’s on my mind. It would trouble my conscience as a musician if I didn’t.

“Most bandleaders — Mr. Lodt can correct me if I’m wide of the mark — most bandleaders tell you you’re playing for keeps. Heck, it’s what the songs themselves say. That every love’s true, till the end of time guaranteed. You can keep track of it on the 18-karat gold watch, the 17-jewel movement. But figure it out. Stop to consider. How could it be? This is stuff you should have learned in the home. It ain’t something you should have to hear from a bandleader. You’re young. Get some experience under your belt. Don’t be so serious, play the field, there’s other fish in the sea. Have some fun, please.

“Change partners!

“—The theme from Moulin Rouge, ladies and gentlemen.”

George is the first to let go. He pushes off from Louise as if it were a maneuver in water. Louise reaches out for him. “It’s part of the show,” she says.

“No,” George says.

“If you cut in on anyone right now you’d be laughed right out of the Delgado. Or get punched if the fellow isn’t in on the joke. It’s part of the show, I tell you. He does that to instigate. It’s part of the show!”

“You don’t know, Louise.”

“Sure I know,” she says. “Sure I do.”

“I mean you don’t know what’s up. You don’t know what’s what.”

“He’s got his eye on you. Can’t you see that? He’s smirking at you, just waiting to see if you’re going to cut in on somebody.”

“I’m not going to cut in on anyone. I haven’t got the patience for this stuff, Louise. You’re a nice person but I haven’t got the patience for this stuff.” Suddenly he is trying to tell her why. They are dancing again. She has brought this about by falling forward on him. She is leaning on him with all her weight and he staggers into a kind of tango. He is trying to tell her why.

“Haven’t you ever been in a nightclub?” she asks forcefully. “Weren’t you ever in a nightclub and the comedian sees someone who has to go to the washroom and then he singles that person out and him and all the guys in the band and even the people in the audience sing ‘We know where you’re going, We know where you’re going’? Haven’t you ever been in a nightclub?”

“No,” George says, “never. I was never in a nightclub.”

“It’s part of the show. It’s all part of the show.”

Everything is part of the show, George thinks.

[Maybe everything was part of the show, I thought.]

[“Maybe we ought to sit down,” Louise says.]

[I was this musical comedy lout, an oaf of vaudeville, the hick from history. But was Louise any better? Virgins were a sort of lout, too, I thought. Oafs of the ovulate, hicks of hemorrhage. I should have told her, “No, sweetheart, I’ve never been to a nightclub, but I’ve been in a bar.” I should have told her, “No, lady, never in a nightclub. In the back seats of cars. I ain’t talking lovers’ lanes, some place the cops stake out with their flashlights and warnings. I’m not talking drive-ins or all the clubby, sanctioned green belts of love, fairways and parks and a view of the falls. I’m not talking cozy, I’m not talking snug. Where voices don’t carry, the moans muffled. Alleys, vacant lots, rooms the bed ain’t made days.” I should have told her, “No, sister, but I been where nothing’s part of the show, where the calls and rasps, the yelps and barks, the bleats and brays and blatter and whines and grunts, the neighs and howls and cackles and hisses ain’t even noise, they’re just vocabulary. How ladies talk when they’re in a hurry and trying to slip two or three of their fingers, and for all I know maybe the whole damn hand itself, in there with my tool!” I should have asked her outright, “Are you cherry, Louise?”]

Mills tries to explain again how he hasn’t the patience or craft, but somehow it seems he is saying how formidable she is. She interrupts him.

“Say, are you married?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I’m not Catholic or anything, but are you divorced?”

“No.”

Her friends join them. Ellen Rose and Herb think they should all go out afterward for pizza and want to know how the rest of them feel about it.

“I’m trying to watch my figure,” Louise says, glancing at Mills.

“Aw, come on, Louise,” Herb says, “George’ll watch it.”

The Olivers want ice cream. Ruth has a yen for a dish of maraschino cherries and whipped cream.

Ray knows the manager of this White Castle who’s on duty tonight. “You met him, Bern. Pete McGee.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bernadette says, narrowing her eyes, remembering. “That guy with the tattoo. He’d be kind of cute if it wasn’t for the tattoo. I don’t know why guys disfigure themselves like that. Oh. Me and my big mouth. I beg your pardon, sir,” she tells George. “You may be tattooed yourself.”

“I’m not tattooed.”

“Is he, Lulu?” Charles Oliver asks, winking.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” Now Louise is blushing. “No one’s asked George what he feels like. What do you feel like, George? Pizza or hamburgers or ice cream?”

“I don’t care.”

“He’s very polite,” Ruth Oliver says.

George listens as they make the arrangements. It is the committee work of friends and very complicated. He understands that Herb is to phone ahead and arrange the pizza which he and Ellen Rose will pick up. Ray and Bernadette will see Ray’s friend, Pete McGee, about the White Castles, and Ray will try to talk him into taking a break for an hour or so and joining them all at Crown’s Ice Cream Kitchen, but Sue will have to talk Carol into coming along as Pete’s date.

“What’s going to happen to Sue?” George asks, genuinely interested.

“Sue has her car,” Ellen Rose explains.

“Sue’s a good sport,” Louise says.

“Oh God, yes,” Ray and Bernadette agree.

“Would you and Louise go down to Crown’s and reserve a table for eleven?” Ruth Oliver asks George.

“I don’t have a car,” George says.

“Twenty-five minutes,” Herb says. “I ordered one large plain and one large pepperoni with mushroom. And one medium anchovy. I figured that way everyone would be happy. Did I do wrong?”

Ellen Rose tells him he did exactly right.

“I figured everybody’d be happy. This way, people who don’t like spicy can have plain. Is George getting us a table for eleven?”

“George doesn’t have a car,” Ray says gloomily. Two or three of the others look stymied, and it seems to Mills that everything is about to collapse because he has no car.

“How far is this place? Maybe I could walk,” he says.

“The pizza is going to be ready in twenty-five minutes,” Bernadette says, and though George doesn’t understand how this is an objection he knows that it is.

“I don’t think I better,” Carol says quietly. “Go without me.”

“I ordered all that pizza,” Herb says.

“You mean you gave them your real name?” Charles Oliver says.

“Hey, I thought it was all set,” Herb says defensively.

“Oh Carol, he’s the manager of the place for gosh sakes,” says Sue.

“Sure,” Carol says, “the night manager.”

“It’s when they do most of their business, Carol,” Charles Oliver tells her. “Isn’t that right, Ray?”

“What? Oh. Yeah, absolutely.”

“How can he get off then?” Carol asks. “If it’s when they do most of their business, how come he can get off for an hour?”

“Well he’s the manager. I already told you.”

“Gee,” Carol says, “I don’t know. Don’t tattoos itch?”

“Do they, George?” Charles asks.

“I’m not tattooed,” George Mills says.

“It’s just too creepy,” Carol says. “Go without me.”

“If you’re not going I’m not going,” Sue says resolutely.

“Herb’s ordered the pizza,” Ellen Rose says. “Two large and a medium in his own name.”

“A Sweetheart Dance,” Stan David announces. “I’m calling a Sweetheart Dance.”

Two thirds of the couples walk off the dance floor.

“It’s the Sweetheart Dance, Herb,” Ellen Rose says.

“We’ve got twenty minutes to get there.”

“We’ll dance two minutes and leave in the middle.”

“I’ll phone for a taxi,” George says.

“What for?” asks Ray.

“To take us to Crown’s to reserve a table for eleven.” He’s pleased to have thought of the idea of the cab and wants to make additional arrangements now that he begins to understand not the mechanics, and perhaps not even all the principles, but the theory itself who had entered this community cold, who for the seven years it took him to get from Cassadaga to St. Louis had entered all communities cold, like a beggar at the back door, presenting himself at foundling homes, orphanages, and, during the war years, sometimes actually passing himself off as a refugee, who had been born, it may be, with no ear for complication, with no gift for the baroque, but who has begun to see that youth — he himself is already twenty-seven — will try anything, say anything, in order to salvage its plans, which are never plans of course, never goals and their concomitant procedures, but the blatant articulation of whims, the accommodation of which involves the overriding and placation, if that was the order, of other, contrary whims. It is a kind of power, and he has never before felt its urgency, never before wheeled and dealed in the arbitrary.

“You been to Crown’s?” Ray asks.

“No.”

“It’s booths. It’s booths and stools at the soda fountain. They got a loose booth they let you move if nobody’s in it and you’re a party of ten. Pete McGee won’t come without Carol, and Sue won’t come unless Carol does.”

“But Sue’s a good sport,” George says petulantly.

“Carol said I should go without her. A good sport doesn’t do that.”

“Your folks!” George says. He is still planning, tuning solution. “Your folks, Louise. That would give us ten.”

“I told him I came with my folks,” Louise says.

“He’s not from around here,” Bernadette says.

“Until a girl knows what a fellow’s like, George, she tells him she’s with her folks,” Louise says.

“Louise’s folks,” Ruth Oliver says, and giggles.

“What’s so funny?” her husband asks. “They have a car.”

George Mills doesn’t understand any of this. He doesn’t understand why it’s necessary to get the roving booth at Crown’s, or why Pete McGee should join them, or why Carol thinks tattoos itch, or what makes Sue such a good sport. All he knows is that the pizzas are burning and that Ellen Rose and Herb, who have returned from the Sweetheart Dance, have made no move to leave. “The pizzas,” George says.

“Is everything settled then?” Herb asks.

“Nothing’s settled,” Ruth Oliver says bitterly. “Not a damn thing.”

“The pizzas?” George says again.

“Screw the pizzas,” Herb says. “You don’t think I gave them my real name, do you? A medium and two large? What’s the matter with you? You lost? Ain’t you from around here?”

“I don’t know if I’m from around here,” George Mills says miserably.

“Herb’s the only one with a car,” Louise tells him.

George looks up. “What about the Olivers?”

“In the shop,” Charles Oliver says.

“Ray?”

“Bernadette’s folks went out tonight,” Ray says.

He is beginning to understand. “Pete McGee has a car,” he says.

Ray nods, Bernadette does.

“Pete McGee has a car but he doesn’t like to lend it.”

“Pete’s okay. It isn’t broken in yet.”

“And he certainly wouldn’t let me drive it. A total stranger.”

“Probably not.”

“So I was going to drive Sue’s car?”

“Not exactly.”

“No,” George says, “that’s right. Not exactly.” It’s like being a little drunk, he thinks. There’s just that edge. Or no. It’s like having the one bottle to their three advantage, the glass-and-a-half to four ratio that accounted for his inspiration in the bars while he was pumping change into the jukebox and his science into their heads and all the while listening to what the song was saying about their lives. “Because you thought all along that I’d have one, a twenty-seven-year-old guy like me. But it was all right even when I didn’t. Because the more the merrier. There’d be six in one car and five in the other. That’s when I was going to drive Sue’s car. We were going to make the switch at Crown’s, and Sue would drive Pete McGee’s like a good sport. Crown’s was just the staging area. The only thing I don’t really understand is Sue. No. Wait. Sure I do. Sue’s spoken for, right? I mean she’s here tonight but she’s spoken for. The guy’s in the army or off somewhere making his fortune until he can send for her, and they’ve exchanged pledges, oaths.”

“He’s in Texas,” Sue says. “He’s stationed in Texas.”

“But just because you’re promised and can’t have a good time yourself, that doesn’t mean you can’t hang around those who can. It might even be good for you.”

“He’s with his buddies,” Sue says.

“Sure,” George Mills says, “sure he is. It was the cars,” he says. “It was the cars, it was the cramped quarters. It was the necking in the cars.” He stops and looks at them. “But you’re married,” he says helplessly. “Ruth’s pregnant. Louise tells me Bernadette’s in her fourth month. Herb is Ellen Rose’s fiancé. Why do you need this stuff? School’s out for you people. You graduated high school. Your diploma hangs on the wall with the prom bids, or’s shoved in the drawer with your underwear.”

The men look shamefaced. They stare at the buffed tops of their dancing shoes. Ellen Rose picks absently at her corsage. Bernadette and Ruth seem suddenly tired. Only Louise and Carol’s energies seem unimpaired, Sue the grass widow’s.

“Bernadette’s folks are out tonight. Oh,” George Mills says, “oh.”

Because only now, years after he’s moved into it, does he comprehend the stability of the neighborhood. He perceives with horror and the communicated shame of the wives and husbands what he’s gotten into here, the force fields of wired intimacy he has somehow penetrated. Discovering, he feels discovered. Like a child rolling Easter eggs on trespassed pitch. He’s not from around here, but it’s as if he’s never lived anywhere else. If he intuits their customs it is done joylessly, with no pride in his cleverness. He has the solution now, of course. To invite them home with him, to open his apartment to their terrible honed occasion, to fetch them pizzas, White Castles, imperial gallons of Crown’s ice cream, the syrups and sweet, auxiliary garnish of their ceremonial cravings.

He was right. He was always right. His logic is a Jacob’s ladder of successive vista, a nexus of predicative data. The foot bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone’s connected to the thigh bone, and so on up through all the bones and glands of need and time and loneliness.

Bernadette’s folks are out, they’ve taken the car. But their house has aunts in it, uncles, the busted survivors of their youth.

Because they’re only alone with their kind, he thinks. Charles’ and Ruth’s baby was conceived in an automobile, Bernadette’s and Ray’s was. I’m sure of it, he thinks. He thinks I’m positive. Sue was driving, he thinks, a godmother and good sport fiddling with her radio dial and hearing their tongues in each other’s heads in the back seat and thinking of Texas.

I haven’t the patience he thinks. It isn’t just time. It isn’t just effort. There are too many virgins to deal with.

But Louise is smiling at him. They damned near all are.

[Because I was twenty-seven years old before I ever entered the Delgado Ballroom.]

Stan David calls for a Relative Dance with cut-in privileges for anyone of any generation so long as he is blood or connected by marriage. Only George and Louise and a handful of others sit this one out, and soon the room is rocking as parents, sons, wives, sisters, cousins, husbands, in-laws, daughters and brothers seek each other out on the dark, crowded dance floor of the Delgado Ballroom.

He is twenty-seven years old, an age when many scientists have already done their best work. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, he can’t give it a name, but, in the spiraling life on the packed floor, George Mills has a vision, and can just make out the shape of a perfect DNA molecule.

7

One morning when George Mills entered Mrs. Glazer’s room in the small, private hospital in Juarez to which she had been admitted, the tout, Father Merchant, was already there.

Mrs. Glazer was asleep or unconscious in the hospital bed, her breathing so light it seemed a stage of rest different in kind from anything he had yet witnessed. It was so deep a state of relaxation that it appeared to Mills as if she had just received good news of the highest order. She might just have closed her eyes for a minute. She might have been meditating, or in a trance, or drowned.

George placed his package on the nightstand and sat down.

It was not really her apparent contentment that had caught George up, or the presence of the tout, or even the extraordinarily tidy, shipshape condition of her room. (Which he noticed. Mrs. Glazer had not been a particularly fastidious patient. She wadded Kleenex and dropped it on her bed, the carpet. Though she did not smoke, her ashtrays were always full — with pins, with sputum, with bits of string. And though she had not gotten dressed in a week, underwear caught in the chest of drawers, stockings lay over chairs, dresses were askew on hangers or visible in the open closet. Sections of the El Paso newspaper, though she barely glanced at it, were everywhere, under the bed, beside the toilet, on top of the television set. There were the peels of tangerines and oranges, fragments of lunch and — he had no idea where these came from — husks of dry chewing gum. The telephone cord was unaccountably tangled, the tuning knob on the radio twisted above or below the frequencies printed on the dial. The faucets dripped. Motel soap lay in the bottom of the basin or wrapped in damp washcloths on the surface of the writing desk or even in the peels of the fruit. It often took Mills the better part of an hour merely to straighten the mess and, by the time he was done, Mrs. Glazer, practically immobile in her wide double bed, had somehow begun the room’s piecemeal derangement. It was the same sloven story in the back seat of their rental car.) Today her hospital room seemed immaculate, almost alphabetically arranged.

But it wasn’t the condition of the room, or Father Merchant, or Mrs. Glazer’s strangely exalted sleep which had startled Mills. It was the current magazines, the box of candy, the potted plant and mint bestsellers on her nightstand.

“What’s happened?” Mills asked Father Merchant.

The tout shrugged.

“There’s something you don’t know?” Mills said. “There’s still some circumstance in this world of which you’re ignorant?”

“There’s nothin’ I don’ know.”

“Where’d she get that candy? What’s that stuff?”

“Gif’s,” the tout said. “Everywhere the ill are made offerin’s. Meals. Throughout the worl’ presents een sick rooms are an el grande part of the gross national produc’. Even disease ees good for business.”

“Do you know who brought them?”

“There’s nothin’ I don’ know.”

“Has her husband come?”

“Sam’s in San Louis,” Father Merchant said, “an’ won’ arrive till later. He have an meetin’ muy importante. The chairman of the philosophy departments have receive el offer fantastico from the Universidad de Alabama. Eef Walter leavin’ they don’ no good logician have. Blauer can’t thin’ straight. They are approach Gutstein een Hawaii. Mucho dinero tambien. Personal I feel he don’ come. Es verdad, cos’ of livin’ chipper in Midwes’ than the islan’s. Todos he do to sale his casa in Waikiki an replace eet on the mainland two as grande he ahead. Pero money’s no el problemo. Eet’s Grace. She have art’ritis. I don’ thin’ she lookin’ forward to no bad winter. There is nothing I do not know!”

“Hold it down, will you!” George hissed. “You’ll wake her. She needs the sleep.”

“She’s going to die,” Father Merchant replied. “She needs all the wakefulness she can get. You should go home, George. You should go back to your wife. Laglichio has work for you. You have been too much with this woman.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Glazer said, “it’s you, Mills. Did Father Merchant tell you? Mary’s come with my brother.”

“Mary?”

“I thought it would be best,” Father Merchant said.

“You did? You did?” George Mills said.

“Please, Mills,” Mrs. Glazer said, “they’ll be back soon. We don’t want a scene.”

And, before he could make one, a girl he recognized and a man he didn’t, appeared in the doorway. Mary was even larger than the big girl who had reluctantly admitted him to the house just over a month before. The man was in his mid-fifties and deeply tanned. He wore a tropical-weight suit of a light pearl gray with large, dark brown buttons on the jacket.

“You must be Mills,” the brother said. “I’m Harry Claunch. I want you to return my sister’s rental car this afternoon. You may borrow mine when you pick my brother-in-law up this evening.”

“Yes, sir,” Mills said.

“Did you rest, Judith?”

“I feel fine, Harry. Button your blouse please, Mary.”

“What’s in the bag?” Mary said.

“Oh,” George Mills said, “I’m sorry, that’s mine.”

“Pi-uuu, it stinks,” Mary said. “What is it anyway? Oh, it’s shrimp. Mommy, look, did you ever see so many shrimp?” She took one of the boiled, cleaned shrimps and bit into it as though it were a chocolate.

“You’re eating Mills’s lunch, Mary,” the brother said.

“There’s so many. Oh, is this your lunch?”

“That’s all right, Miss.”

“He calls me Miss.”

“There’s good protein in shrimp,” Father Merchant said.

Mary put the shrimp down and took up her mother’s TV remote control panel. She flipped rapidly from station to station.

“Mary, please,” her mother said, “people are trying to have a conversation.”

“Oh, it’s ‘Bugs Bunny’ in Spanish!” She turned to Father Merchant. “Do you get ‘The Flintstones’ in Spanish?”

“Three o’clock. Channel 2.”

“They get ‘The Flintstones’ in Spanish. Do you get Johnny Carson in Spanish? ‘Laverne and Shirley’?”

“Turn that off. Button your blouse.”

“Mom, it’s so hot.”

“Would you like to go for a swim?” her uncle asked. “Do you want Mills to drive you back to the hotel?”

“Could I Mom? Could I?”

“Oh, Mary,” Mrs. Glazer said mournfully, “you didn’t bring a bathing suit, did you? Did you bring a bathing suit to Mexico? You did, didn’t you?”

“You never opened my candy,” Mary said.

“Your mother doesn’t feel like any candy, honey,” her uncle said. “But you open it. Pass it around.”

“I’ll take one, Mary,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“Which? A caramel or a nut? Here’s a chocolate-covered cherry. Which do you want?”

“Have the chocolate straw, señora. No no, the dark chocolate.”

The child sat on the side of her mother’s bed and kissed her. She put her arms about Mrs. Glazer and hugged her roughly.

“Mary,” her Uncle Harry said, “let Mother rest for a bit.”

“I want my hair brushed,” Mary said. “I want Mom to brush my hair.”

“Mary!” her uncle said.

“That’s all right, Harry, I want to.”

“I shouldn’t have brought her,” Harry told Father Merchant.

“If you want me to brush your hair I wish you’d button your blouse.”

“Mommy thinks my boobs are too big.”

“You have a lovely figure,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“Milly’s periods have started,” Mary said. “She says they didn’t but they did. I saw her underwear. She says she has an infection. That child.”

“There,” her mother said weakly.

“A hundred strokes,” Mary said. “That wasn’t even fifteen even.”

“Mommy’s so tired, sweetheart,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“It didn’t even feel good,” Mary said.

“Mommy’s weak, sweetheart,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“It wasn’t even fourteen, it wasn’t even nine,” she said, and started to cry.

“Take her swimming,” Father Merchant said.

Mills looked at Mrs. Glazer’s brother.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Why don’t you?”

“You think I don’t know what’s going on,” Mary said.

“Of course you do, darling,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Of course you do, sweetheart.”

“I know what’s going on,” Mary said. “I read your chart, I know your temperature.”

The rule at Harry Claunch’s hotel was that guests were not allowed in the pool area unless they were in suitable bathing attire. Mills told them he was not a guest, only Harry Claunch’s servant, only Mary’s babysitter, but they would not waive their rule for him, so he had to buy a suit in one of the hotel shops. At Mary’s insistence he even agreed to let her pick it out for him. A yellow bikini.

“I can’t wear that.”

“Sure you can,” Mary said, “it’s the style.”

“I can’t,” Mills said. “I won’t.”

“Please, Mills,” she said. “Please. It’s such a pretty color. Please.”

“I’m over fifty years old,” he said.

“I want to go back to the hospital,” Mary said.

“Mrs. Glazer is tired. She needs to rest.”

“Take me back.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Now. Take me back now.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“I’ll go in a taxi.”

“Come on, Mary. Don’t be like that.”

“You call me Miss.”

“Don’t be like that, Miss.”

“Will you buy the yellow bathing suit?”

“Yeah, sure thing, Miss,” Mills said.

He changed in a stall in the men’s room. He loaded his genitals into the suit’s small pouch, crushed them against his crotch. They seemed more sizable than in street clothes, and he felt like a man in a codpiece, curiously badged, an agreeable power. He had felt this way before, in the locker rooms of plants, naked on his bed. Stripped on examining tables or dressed at close quarters on couches, his erection courting the girls, his shyness suddenly reversed, subsumed in waves, jolts of inexplicable swank.

He carried his underwear rolled in his pants and crossed the lobby. He still wore his shirt. White socks came up his shins and out of his black, unlaced shoes.

Mary treaded water at the deep end of the pool. She ducked her head down and squirted water at him through her braces, wetting his legs. “Ha ha, Miss,” George Mills said.

“I’ll race you,” she said.

“I’m not much of a racer,” Mills said. “I wouldn’t stand a chance against someone who takes lessons from a swim coach or who’s been to summer camp.”

“How do you know I have a coach? How do you know I go to camp?”

“Your mother told me.”

“Does she talk about me a lot?”

“All the time, Miss.”

“As much as my sister Milly?”

“She’s mentioned your sister.”

“Only mentioned her? Let’s race. Come on.”

“I don’t know if I could even swim in a pool. I probably wouldn’t stay in the lane.”

“I’ll spot you. You can have a head start. Come on, get wet.” She splashed him.

“Ooh. Oh.”

“Then get in the water. Get in or I’ll splash you.”

“It’s cold.”

“It’s lovely once you’re in.”

“It’s too cold.”

“Once you get used to it.”

“Well,” Mills said uncertainly.

“I’ll count to ten.”

“I’ll take my shoes and socks off.”

And George Mills, on a patio chair, crossed his legs, the gesture broad, difficult. He tugged at his unlaced shoes. He rolled his socks down his legs. Spreading his thighs, he leaned over and stuffed his socks into the front of his shoes. He felt a flap of testicle against his thigh and looked up. Mary was watching him.

“I’ve seen balls before,” she said.

“Have you?”

“Sure, lots of times. My daddy’s and uncle’s. I’m on the swim team. I’ve seen my coach’s. I think they’re ridiculous. Big old hairy prunes. Anyway, I go steady. Don’t they hurt when you sit on them?”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“No?”

“Mother Nature keeps them out of the way, Miss.”

“Boobs don’t hurt either. Well sometimes they do. Before my period they can get pretty sore.”

“Hmn,” George Mills said.

“Are you coming in or aren’t you? What did you mean you don’t know if you can swim in a pool?”

“The poor don’t know much about swimming pools. The schools didn’t have them when I was a boy.”

“Where did you swim?”

“Off piers. In ponds. In bodies of water where bait shops are found.”

“Didn’t you ever go to the beach?”

“We went there on Sundays, on Fourths of July. We sat on a blanket, we drank beer from a keg. We swam always in waters that were bad for our strokes.”

“Come in,” she said, “we don’t have to race.”

“I’ve a stroke like a nigger. I flounder, I thrash.”

“That’s mean, Mills. That’s wicked to say.”

“Black people are afraid of the water,” George Mills said. “Poor people are.”

“Wait,” she said, “I’ll come out.” She swam to the side of the pool where George Mills was sitting and placed her hands on the coping. Using only her arms, she hoisted herself out of the water easily. “Brr,” she said, “it is chilly. The air’s cooler than the water. Where’s my towel? Oh, there it is. Dry me off, Mills.”

“Here,” George said, “I’ll hand it to you.”

“You dry me,” the girl said. She laughed. “A hundred strokes.”

“I think you’d better do it yourself, Miss,” Mills said.

“I’ll let you call me Mary.”

“I don’t mind calling you Miss.” It was true. He didn’t.

“You’re just scared Uncle Harry will see.”

“See what, Miss?”

“Go in, get wet. I’ll dry you off.”

“I’m in a state of grace, Miss,” George Mills said so gently that the girl might have thought she was being scolded. But Mills felt no anger. Even the mild, queer authority of maleness he’d felt, the odd thrust of his exhibitionist swagger, had somehow resolved itself, declined, his horsepower manhood gone off. I’m her servant, thought Mills. It’s proper she should tease me. There was a compact between them, the ancient, below-stairs displacements and goings on of history’s and the world’s only two real classes. She was there for his character as, in a way, he was there for hers. And her mother didn’t want to die until this child was ready. He knew that if he didn’t do something with his loyalty he was lost. So he told her.

“Because,” he said, “women always fooled me. Because whatever I thought about women was never what I should have thought.

“I mean their natures. I had this idea about their natures, that there was such a thing as a virgin heart. To this day I’m astonished young ladies let fellows. I’m not talking the sense of the thing. I mean if it makes sense, or even if it’s right or wrong. I mean it seemed to me it couldn’t happen, not shouldn’t, couldn’t. That the body itself wouldn’t let it. That that’s what a body was, being’s buffer, a place to hide. Lord, Miss, the things I thought. That marriage wasn’t so much a way of two people finding each other as something they did to keep others from finding them, from ever having to do again with anyone else what their bodies weren’t strong enough to keep them from doing with each other. To give back sovereignty, you see, even if it was devalued now, like bad dollars or a fixed income. That courtship was impossible, that a fellow’s lies and urgencies had to get past the hymen first, that they listen in their cherry, see Miss?”

The child, wrapped in towels now from head to toe, watched from where she lay in the deck furniture. Mills had a vagrant image of her mother in her sheets in the hospital bed.

He tells about the Delgado Ballroom. He tells about bringing Louise and her friends back to his apartment.

“This is swell,” Louise says. “Isn’t this swell?”

“Have you got television?” Bernadette asks.

“What’s in the fridge?”

“I don’t know. Just some eggs. Some stuff for breakfast.”

“Who wants cocoa? Raise your hand.”

“I don’t think there’s cocoa,” George says. “There may be some chocolate syrup in the cabinet where I keep the soap powder.”

“Where’s your phone?” Charles says. “Never mind, I see it. This directory looks like it’s never been used.”

“If you had the fixings I could make chocolate chip cookies. If you had the chocolate chips.”

“There’s Saltines,” George says.

“At least there’s a radio,” Herb says. “I’ll get some music.”

“Somebody get the lights.”

“Man, are you corny!”

“Who’s horny?”

“Sometimes Ray acts very immature,” Bernadette says.

“Got a church key?”

“In the drawer with my tableware.”

“Okay, I’ve got it. Look at this, he’s got service for one.”

“Maybe he isn’t registered.”

“Hey you guys, be still a minute.…Is this Mr. Stuart Melbart of 2706 North Grand Boulevard?…It is? Congratulations, Mr. Melbart, this is Hy Nichols of KSD radio. If you can answer the following question you and Mrs. Melbart will be the lucky winners of an all-expense-paid vacation in Hot Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, as KSD’s guests at the luxurious Park Palace Hotel. Are you ready for your question?…Good. All right, sir, name two members in President Eisenhower’s cabinet.…Sherman Adams is correct. You’re halfway there.…I can’t hear you. John Foster who? Speak up, please.…Yes, yes, John Foster. We have to have that last name, sir. Can you speak up?…No sir, I can’t.…Yes sir, I can now. Go ahead, sir, take one more try.…John, yes.…Foster, yes.…What’s that?…It must be a bad connection, yes.”

“Charles, that’s cruel. The poor guy must be fit to bust.”

“Did you hear him? Did you hear him shouting? What a goon!”

“Beer, everybody. Have a beer, George?”

“That sounds funny. Can’t you get a different station?”

“This is the only one that works. George must be some Browns fan. They left town two years ago.”

“Haven’t you even got a phonograph?”

“No.”

“How big are your breasts?…I said how big are your breasts?…No, ma’am, I’m not being fresh. Isn’t this the take-out chicken place?”

“I’m expecting a call,” George says.

“Bern?”

“What?”

“Want to take a shower?”

“Oh, Ray. You’re the limit.”

“What the hell, Bern. We’re married.”

“I don’t have clean towels.”

“Why don’t you sit by me?”

“There, that’s better. Isn’t that better?”

“Hey, I can’t see to dial.”

“Why don’t you sit by me?”

“Where are they going? That’s my bedroom. Why’d they close the door?”

“George, they’re engaged.”

“Dibs on the couch.”

“Shove over you guys.”

“Okay. Quit your pushing.”

“All the good spots are taken,” Louise says.

“Did they just go into my bathroom together?”

“Maybe Bernadette had to go.”

“They’re running the shower.”

“I know, you don’t have clean towels. Maybe they could…” Louise giggles.

“What did you say?”

“Shh. Ruth and Charles.”

“We heard you, Lulu.”

“Well, mind your business then. You weren’t supposed to hear me. I was talking to George.”

“Don’t, Charles, you could hurt the baby!”

“Do you like that?” she whispers. “Does that feel good?”

“Yes,” George Mills says.

“Charlie, it could.”

“Hmnn. Hmmnn.”

“You’re shy, aren’t you? You don’t open your mouth when you kiss. Didn’t you ever french a girl, George?”

“I french.”

“Kch, kch. Take it easy, you want to cut off my air?”

Ruth, beside him on the sofa, touches his arm.

“What?”

“Shh. Listen.”

Louise giggles. “Ruth, that’s mean. They’re in love.”

“He’s not going to sit next to me in those sticky pants.”

“They’ve only been in there two minutes,” Charles says. “Boy, was he hot to trot!”

“He couldn’t help it,” Ruth says. “She’s been teasing him all evening.”

“Well he’s calmed down now all right, all right.”

“I swear,” Louise says, “wham bam. You men have no staying power.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t we have a contest?”

“A control contest,” Charles says.

“Everybody?” Louise asks.

“Sure. Tell those guys in there. Herb’s already out of it. Herb’s already lost.”

“Hey, you can’t go in there.”

“Bet?”

Charles gets up and walks to the bathroom door. He opens it. “We’re having a control contest. Herb’s out of it. On your mark, get set, go.” He leans his mouth against the bedroom door. “We’re having a control contest.”

“I thought Herb’s out of it. That he already lost.”

“Is Ellen Rose out of it?”

“Oh sure,” Ruth says. “With her fella already come? That’ll be the day, won’t it, Louise?”

“You should have seen it, George. She’s all lathered up. What a pair of tits on that Bernadette.”

“Charlie!”

“Well it’s true.”

“Nicer than mine?”

“No, not nicer than yours. Not nicer than yours at all. Just bigger,” Charles tells his wife.

“Only because she’s four months’ pregnant. It’s all milk.”

“You’re pregnant too. She doesn’t even show yet.”

“She shows in her titties.”

“Are we really having a control contest?” Ray shouts from the bathroom.

“Is it all right, George?”

“Why not? There’s no TV, I’m out of cocoa, I haven’t got a phonograph, and only one station on the radio works.”

“Sure,” Charles shouts back, laughing. “Come, I say come, as you are.” He turns to George. “Count ten to yourself and start moaning.”

“Charlie, that’s cheating.”

“No it’s not, it’s a joke. We’ll make monkeys out of them.” He moans, he purls. “Everybody,” he hisses.

“The water’s running. They can’t even hear us.”

“No fair you guys,” Charles calls. “Either turn off the shower or open the door. Hey,” he calls. “you guys in this or not? — Okay,” he whispers, “go.” In seconds he begins to moan again. He growls, he coos. He’s the very troubadour of sexual melody.

“How come you never sound this way in real life?” Ruth Oliver asks.

“Come on, come on,” Charles tells his wife. “Oh. Oh yeah,” he says less quietly. “I lose,” he cries. “I lose.”

“I guess we ought to humor him,” Ruth says. “Mnn,” she purrs, “mnn.”

Mary looked at him wide-eyed. “Is this true? Did this happen?”

“I’m in a state of grace,” George Mills said. “I don’t have to lie.”

Now Louise is chirping. Grace notes, diapasons, the aroused tropes of all dilate rapture.

“Louise?” the child said.

“All of them,” George Mills said. “Doting love solos, Miss. Arias of concupiscence. Choirs of asyncopatic, amatory, affricative, low-woodwind drone.”

“What a racket!” Mary said.

“Yelps, cries, askew pitch. All the strobic gutturals of heat.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Then, “This one’s finished,” Bernadette calls from the bathroom.

“Oh God,” Ellen Rose shrieks in George Mills’s bed, “me, me tooooo!”

“Go for it,” Charles urges.

And, in the dark, George Mills can just make out his leer, his wife Ruth’s. Louise is actually touching him now. His flies are in her fist. George’s left hand is under her dress, his fingers snagged in her garter belt, his palm hefting flesh, the hard little button at the top of the strap. “Don’t, you’ll tear it,” she says in his ear wetly. He introduces his fingers beneath the tough edges of her girdle. Where they are baffled by other textures. Elastic, the metal of fasteners, silk, hair, damp, curled as pica c’s. She squirms from his hand.

“Easy,” she says, “take it easy. Don’t hurt me.”

“It’s all this stuff,” he says, and tries to raise her dress, to pull it out from under her behind.

“No,” she says, “don’t,” and moves away from him. This is when he tries to pull her down, when his head falls into Ruth Oliver’s lap, thighs closed prim as pie. He feels a man’s hand at his ear. It’s Charles’. Mr. and Mrs. Oliver are holding hands across his face.

“Aw, he’s suffering,” Louise’s friend Ruth says. “Put him out of his misery, Lu.” And when Ruth’s friend Louise moves her body against him. When his nerves shiver, spasm, when he whimpers his release. Not trumpets, not brazen blares. No boomy bray of barking majesty, but whimper, whine, fret. An orgasm like a small complaint.

The door to Mills’s bathroom opens and Ray and Bernadette come into the living room. They are dressed. When Ray turns the light on in the hall George Mills can see that their hair isn’t even wet.

“Maybe we ought to go,” Charles says.

“What about the lovebirds?” Ray asks, indicating the closed door to Mills’s bedroom.

“Knock on it. Tell them maybe we ought to go.”

“Hey, break it up you guys,” Ray says into the woodwork. “Give it a rest.”

“How about that?” Herb says as he leads Ellen Rose into the living room. “It’s not even midnight. Want to play some strip poker? Where’s your cards, George?”

“Weren’t you mad?” Mary asked.

“What for? To be proved right? She was a virgin. She was only protecting herself. She was a virgin. She wasn’t in nature yet. None of them were.”

“Two of those girls were married. They were pregnant.”

“Yes,” George Mills said, “they were protecting the unborn. It was hygiene is all. Marriage like a sleepover, like a pajama party. If it helped the husbands for the wives to talk dirty, if it helped to be together, to make crank calls, if it helped to excite each other until they didn’t need excitement or protection either anymore, what harm did it do?”

“Ellen Rose wasn’t married. Ellen Rose was whoosis’s, Herb’s, fiancee.”

“His pants were stained.”

“What?”

“Herb. His pants were stained too.”

“You tell me the darndest things.”

“Intimacy.”

“Pardon?”

“Intimacy. Because that’s the real eye-opener. The knockabout slapstick of the heart. Open secret, public knowledge. Those thighs on the sofa, those folks in the bed. Intimacy. Even friendship. Even association. Jesus, Miss, I’d thought my ass was a secret, my pecker hush-hush.”

“I’m going to tell my mother how you talk.”

“Your mother is dying. She’s gorging herself on all the shrimp she can eat.”

“Don’t you say that.”

“You can’t evangelize grace. You can only talk about it. Ballpark figures.”

“You’re crazy. You’re a crazy man.”

“Because I was right. In a way I was right. You can’t seduce virgins. Louise and I were practically engaged from the moment she found out I didn’t have cocoa.”

“You shut up,” Mary said. “Take it back about my mother.”

“Your mother is dying,” Mills said calmly.

“Stop that,” Mary said. “I’m just a little girl.”

“Then behave like one. Practice the piano, be nice to your sister, bring up your math.”

“Leave me alone,” Mary cried. “Mind your business. Leave me alone.” She was crying uncontrollably now, her sobs like hiccups, her nose and chin smeared with thin icicles of snot.

“Wipe your eyes,” George Mills said. “Blow your nose. Use your beach towel.”

8

Later George Mills would tell Messenger that he had known, that he’d been certain, that either his experience in Cassadaga as a child or the state of grace, which he’d be the first to admit he’d had no hand in, which he’d caught like a cold, or maybe something in each of us but compounded in Mills, who had a thousand years of history at his command, or anyway disposal, a millennium of what Messenger would call racial memory, hunch all the while increasingly fine-tuned in his stock until by the time it came down to George it was no longer hunch or even conviction so much as pure biological adaptation, real as the equipment of birds or bears.

“You’re a fucking mutation? That it, Mills?” Messenger would ask. “The new man?”

“No no,” Mills would say, “your people are the new men. With your kids and clans, your distaff and branches, all your in-laws and country cousins and poor relations. In me boiled down, don’t you know? What do you call it? Distilled. Spit and polished back to immaculate, what do you call it, mass.”

“Who do you like in the fifth race, George?” Messenger would ask. “What’s to become of us?”

“No no,” Mills would say, realizing it had been a mistake to tell.

But he had known. Even as he sped the kid back to the hospital, risking the ticket in the foreign country, the cops’ dangerous Mexican banditry, telling her not to waste time dressing but to bring her clothes with her as they rushed to the deathbed in their bikinis. Even, really, as he’d known that the child could shower, take her time, all the time in the world, eat a leisurely lunch, that that might even be preferable in fact, keeping the kid out of the way while her uncle made all the complicated arrangements with the hospital and government officials. (Which was why, in a way, he’d been glad to see him that morning, felt relieved to have at least that bothersome responsibility taken away from him. If her brother hadn’t come, Father Merchant would have been all over him. And George would have listened, capitulating with genuine relief, grateful for the old tout’s tips and counsel. [He was no hand at red tape. Forms and documents scared him.] If Merchant had proposed, as ultimately he actually would to Harry, that the hospital be permitted to perform an autopsy on Mrs. Glazer’s body, Mills would almost certainly have agreed. She would have been returned to St. Louis without organs, all the metastasized Mexican cancer of her body cut away, scraped from her, koshered as a chicken in her casket — which Father Merchant would have picked out — like a Spanish treasure chest. The corpse would wait, the gruesome negotiations between Mary’s uncle and the staff taking up the better part of the afternoon, going on, quite literally, over Mrs. Glazer’s dead body, Father Merchant the go-between and arbiter to the peso’s very fraction of the exact amount of the pourboire, the tip — what went to the nurses to wash the body before it could be released to the undertakers, what to the doctor to make the appropriate — and true — remarks on the death certificate in order to forestall the routine investigation demanded by the municipal statutes in the instance of the death of a foreign national, what went by way of pure courtesy and ritual obligation to the company priest who was required by law to administer last rites, whether requested or not, to everyone who happened to die in the hospital, whether Catholic or not, what went to charity, what to the hospital bursar before the deceased could be discharged, what to the death teamsters who would cart the body away, what to the mortician’s assistants who would treat it either gently and respectfully or, as Father Merchant would warn, with secret, invisible desecrations if the family did not take care of them. Officiating impediment too, guiding them through all the intricate bureaucracy of death, advising them which licenses were essential and, of these, which had to be notarized — Merchant was a notary — which merely witnessed.)

Knowing. Knowing in advance. (But not, it turned out, as far in advance as Father Merchant had known. At least a day and a half behind Merchant, maybe more. Perhaps from the time Merchant had first laid eyes on her, on Mills’s ill charge, when they’d left the nightclub together — they’d gone after all — after the show, those terrible mixed doubles, and been tipped, that terrible time he’d seen first the ex-madwoman’s face, then her pocketbook, the sheaves of bank notes, the unsigned traveler’s checks.) (So maybe what he was going to tell Cornell was a boast, not prescience at all but ordinary induction and observed causality.) So that when he whisked the kid to the hospital and risked the speeding ticket it was not because he wanted to get her there in time, but because he knew that Mrs. Glazer was already dead, beyond embarrassment and concern forever, and would not see the brazen, floozy, bimbo kid in her gaudy bikini strips. Or Mills in the street clothes he had thrown on over his bathing suit when they had stopped for a light, the shirt and pants that still looked rolled, grass stains and the juices of crushed flowers about the knees and pockets where his shoe soles had touched them. Their rude parade a ruse, not deliberate at all, finally, but hidden, actually circumspect, broken out like hoard, trove, like the good champagne after the guest has gone, the best cigars and special chocolates.

Speeding not to the deathbed — that’s what Sam would be doing — but to Father Merchant, the usurper retainer himself, and hoping he might yet make it — because Merchant could be wrong for once, because Laglichio might not need him, because if he made it he might not need Laglichio — that he could come like the cavalry (after all the hard work had been done, the legal stuff, the quasi-customary bribes dispensed, the extraconventional tips), not too late to play some part in the scene. (Haste hard on a man in grace, unaccustomed to pressure, who hadn’t felt necessity more than two or three times in his entire life, whose family hadn’t felt it eighty or so in a thousand years. Who’d resisted it in his courtship and during all those years of his oddly tame wild oats when he’d shoved dimes in jukeboxes and quietly popped for beers, when he’d neutrally revealed their feelings and explained their climaxes to those distracted women in whose automobiles and bedrooms he’d neither to his wonder nor dismay found himself naked. [Feeling, to the extent that he felt at all, only the mildest curiosity when it came to these women, as he might have been curious about the taste of certain dishes which no one had ever prepared for him.] Who — women — had not much played a role in the Mills history. Sisters rare as birth defects, widows and stepmothers uncommon as distinction. Something to do, perhaps, with that sense of default adaptation which he would speak of to Cornell Messenger, maybe even the random prescience some spilled remnant of neglected intuition. But, whatever, the whole business of having to rush, of there being something at last at stake, disagreeable to someone whose pride it was — and who meant by grace — that nothing could ever happen to him, that he was past it — anticipation and interest and concern and disappointment and injury, and glory too.)

So what he found was what he should have expected to find — a Tuesday afternoon like a lesson in the usual, a child by the Coke machine, nurses on pay phones, a distant relation bored in the waiting room on a worn leather cushion, his behind on the smooth front cover of a newsmagazine, someone sucking on a cigarette he hardly knew was in his mouth, patting his pockets for a match for a stranger, getting the time in return.

Yet the woman was dead. Her uncle stepped from the room and came into the corridor to embrace Mary, his gravity and the soured aromatics of his cologne and wrinkled linen giving it away, the distant early warning signs of worry and death. (This is how the rich attend their dead, Mills thought. Trailing some spoor of the bedside. Come from a deathbed as from a battle in a boardroom. But how had his clothes been mussed? How had his beard grown so fast?) All over her with apologies and explanations, including Mills even.

“Oh,” Harry said, “Good. You got my message. I thought I’d missed you. I had you paged, but when you didn’t come to the phone I thought perhaps you’d taken Mary sightseeing. This is her first time in Mexico and she’s an alert little girl. We even checked with the rental car people to see if you’d returned the car. It crossed my mind that you’d gone to the pictures. I was going to go out looking for you myself, but Señor Merchant advised me to wait another half-hour. It’s fortunate he did. It would have been awful if you’d come back to the hospital and found Mother’s room empty.”

“A small precaution,” Father Merchant said.

“They never paged us,” Mills said. “There was no message. We were by the pool a couple of hours.”

“Two hours? The child could have been badly burned. This is the tropics. Don’t you know what our sun can do?” Father Merchant turned to the girl. “You expose yourself the first day fifteen minutes tops.”

“I was covered up with towels,” Mary said.

“Towels. Oh, that’s all right then. Towels. You showed good sense. I hope they were white towels. White towels reflect the sun.”

“Mama’s dead?”

“Well you knew Mother’s convictions, sweetheart. She was a very spiritual woman. I guess in a sense you could say she’s dead, but she’ll always be with us. She was tired, sweetheart. She was all worn out, dear. She was so glad she’d seen you. It’s all she was waiting for. You remember that, darling. You made it easier for her. Didn’t she, Father Merchant?”

“She was a tonic. That’s my opinion,” said the tout.

“See?” said her uncle. “Even he thinks so.”

“She didn’t see Milly,” Mary said. “She didn’t see Daddy.”

“That would have been too hard, honey. That would have been so hard. Seeing all the people she loved would have upset her too much. Would you have wanted her to pass away while she was so sad? She left messages for everyone. She was at peace when she left us.”

“I want to see my mother.”

“Well, sweetheart, that wouldn’t be best just now. The doctors have to do certain things, the nurses do. And we’ve got to get ready to meet that plane. It was a darn good idea for Father Merchant to make arrangements to keep the room an extra few hours. You can change in there. You can use Mother’s shower.”

The old man nodded. “The c’s for caliente. Caliente means hot. Just turn it lightly. You don’t want to scald.”

“Scald?”

“Mexico is an oil-rich country. Its hot water is its pride.”

“Have I got time to freshen up?” the uncle asked.

“It isn’t a question of time,” Father Merchant said. “Flight 272 doesn’t arrive till six. It will still be rush hour. I’d give you a special map I’ve drawn up, I’d tell you directions, shortcuts, which lane to be in when you’re stopped at the border. You could leave at five-thirty and still meet the plane. But it isn’t a question of time. It’s a question of signs, what you look like to Sam when he gets off the plane, the signals he picks up. Go as you are. That’s my advice.”

Which, of course, he followed, looking, George thought, more the traveler than Sam, sending soiled semaphore, bereavement in the hang of his suit, the limp, creased cotton, got up like an actor in his tropical grief, his etched stubble. Merchant was right. Harry didn’t have to say a word to Sam or the little girl, Mrs. Glazer’s fate perfectly legible to them in Harry’s solemn, lingering handshake, his wordless hugs. It was Mary who spoke.

“I haven’t taken it all in, Daddy. I may be in shock. Feel my head. You think I have temperature? I was out in the sun. Maybe I burned. It could be a fever. It could be shock fever. They made me shower in Mommy’s bathroom ’cause I was still in my bathing suit and we had to meet your plane. It was creepy, Daddy. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shower again. I’ll take baths and I’ll douche but I won’t ever shower.”

There was no need to return to the hospital and on the way back to Harry’s hotel Mills heard the brother-in-law tell Sam that they would all be flying back again in the morning, that Father Merchant, who’d been very useful, had made the arrangements, first class for Harry, Sam and the two girls, Mills in tourist. The old man had even returned Harry’s rental car, since they were getting a rate, Merchant explained, on Mrs. Glazer’s. He’d given the Mexican, Harry said, a hundred dollars. They probably wouldn’t be needing the car that night but he didn’t think they ought to be stuck in a third world country without one. The girls were tired, Milly had had a long day. They all had. Would George mind getting back to his motel on his own? Harry’d be happy to pay for the taxi.

Father Merchant was waiting for Mills outside his motel room.

“I could have been mugged waiting for that cab,” George Mills said.

“No no,” Father Merchant said, “everyone knows you’re under my protection. Nothin’ could have happen to you.” Mills opened the door and Merchant followed him inside. “Did anythin’ happened to you when you was flashin’ the lady’s money an’ she was tryin’ to get you both killed?”

“Was that you?” Mills asked without interest.

“I put in a word,” Father Merchant said modestly.

George started to undress. “Aren’t you tired?” George asked Merchant who was seated in the room’s single chair. “All that running around you did today?”

“Yellow,” Merchant said, “yellow? Yellow is for fairies. A man like you wants a dark blue bathing costume. Why should I be tired? I’m used to it. Anyway, I pace myself.”

“He gave you a hundred dollars,” Mills said.

“I left it up to him. Usually, when they come down, they come with family. It’s rare to see a servant. What could I do? You were already here. I left a lot of it up to you. I let you assist me. We didn’t get in each other’s way. It should have been more, I suppose, but he, that Harry, only came down last night. He didn’t know what to give. My other clients are more generous, but maybe Harry isn’t cheap. Maybe he don’t really know.”

“How come you didn’t tell him?”

The old man shrugged. “A tout’s pride,” he said.

“Listen,” George said, “I’m pretty tired. I’m supposed to be over at their hotel tomorrow morning at seven o’clock to get their bags and check out for them.”

“Of course,” Merchant said. “I’m gone in a minute. There’s some things I want to tell you. Go on, get in bed. I’ll let myself out.”

“Could you get the light?” George said sleepily.

“Sure,” Father Merchant said, and turned off the overhead light. He drew the night curtains and spoke to Mills in the dark.

“Maria is courted by all the eligible ranchers in that country,” he said. “But she loves only one, the patrone, who is her father. She don’ know he is her father, but he knows. He suspects. It makes no difference, by this time he can’ help himself. She reminds him of her madre. Only this one is even more beautiful, more desirable. He tries to seduce her but she has too great honor. If he mean to sleep wit’ her he mus’ marry her. He arrange a fake pries’, a young fellow from the south to do it. The real pries’ is killed. He does this, the patrone. He knows he is damn to murder a padre but his passion has made him loco. The fake pries’ is brought in an’ they are married. They go away. He is a wonderful lover. Maria is sick with love, with sex. She has never experience nothin’ like this. All he has to do is touch her, she is on fire. She can’t get enough. But he’s a old man, the patrone. All this love is killin’ him, an’ now she is pregnan’. She is no longer so beautiful to him. She knows this but makes demands. To stop her he tell her all about the fake pries’, about himself. Now she is like her father, insane with passion. She don’ care she is pregnan’, she don’ care she’s his daughter. Maria is depraved. The old man is fearful about what he have done. He make a confession, first to a pries’, then to officials. The pries’ tell him God have forgive him if he is truly peniten’. He go to Maria. He fear for her soul. He tell her to confess. ‘Why?’ she says. ‘I am sorry for nothing. Only that you love God more than your daughter. That, that is the filth.’ They come for him, for the patrone. They take him away. They don’t know she knows, her father don’ tell them. He is hanged. For killin’ the pries’. No one know. Only the pries’ who hear his confession. He can’t tell. He is waitin’ for Maria to seek absolution. That how it end. We wait for the worse woman in the worl’ to ask for forgiveness. That how it end.

“You’re going back. These programs haven’t been broadcast yet. No one knows this in Mexico. Only the planners of the program. Only me. Only you.”

“Why are you tell—”

“I told Mrs. Glazer,” Father Merchant said. “I whispered in her ear before she died.”

“What are you talk—”

“A hundred dollars,” Merchant said contemptuously. “I just see that rich gringo bastard and know I won’t get more.”

“What do you—”

“A hundred dollars,” Merchant repeated. “I saved him seventy on the rate of exchange, on red tape even more. A hundred dollars!”

“What do you want?” Mills shouted. “What do you want?” He snapped on the bed lamp.

“How much would you say?” Father Merchant whispered. “You were here for a mont’. I kep’ you both alive that first week. I didn’t know there’d be a servant. There’s not usual a servant.”

“Do you want me to give you money? Is that what you want?”

“You? You? A go-between’s go-between?”

“What do you want?”

“How could I know there would be someone to do the errands? Someone so indifferent he could bathe her, wipe her nose, her ass, take her for treatments, out for a ride? Death is what I do, the errands of cancer. The tips, the advice, all that’s just sideline.”

“What do you want?” Mills demanded.

“To give you your half,” Father Merchant said, “these fifty dollars,” and threw the money down on the bed.

9

In St. Louis, Louise still counted her breasts when she went to bed, taking inventory, too, since her husband’s employer had died, of her glands, pressing her stomach and kidneys, examining her cervix and rectum, obtaining skintight latex gloves which George frequently found on the rug when he stepped out of bed. She was purchasing as well home urinalysis kits, checking for diabetes, excessive leukocytes, early warning signs of a dozen diseases. She had bought a thermometer which registered temperature electronically, a gadget which noted blood pressure, a full-size doctor’s scale.

“Are we refurnishing?” George asked.

“Do you begrudge me a little security? It didn’t cost you a penny. All the money for this stuff came from what was left over from my father’s insurance policy. He even paid for the dress I bought for Mrs. Glazer’s funeral.”

They were going to the funeral, George as one of the pallbearers, Louise because she was a fan and because she had not forgotten the dying woman’s condolence phone call on the occasion of her father’s death.

Indeed, there was to be a small contingent from South St. Louis. Before she had left for Mexico, Mrs. Glazer had written to invite all the people on her Meals-on-Wheels route and had organized two limousines to pick up all those who were strong enough to attend and take them to the Church of St. Michael and St. George in west county and then on to Bellefontaine Cemetery. The limousines would return them to their homes in the city after a stop for lunch at Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn. All this had been detailed in Judith Glazer’s letters to the guests themselves, as well as to Crane, the funeral director.

Only George and Louise had not been invited, George learning he had been asked to be a pallbearer when Harry approached from behind the curtains of first class on the flight to St. Louis. “My sister,” he said, “wanted you to serve as one of the pallbearers. She asked me to give you this.” He handed him a sheet of folded hospital stationery. All it said was “Please, Mills,” and had been written and signed with great effort. He examined the note closely. The signature would have been illegible had George not recognized it from some of the last traveler’s checks she had signed.

“Yes, well I know it probably wouldn’t stand up in court,” the brother said, “but you have my word it’s what she wanted. What do you say? They don’t like passengers to stand in the aisles.”

Mills’s mood ring blazed.

The funeral had been much on her mind. George himself had written down the names of specific ushers she wanted, nephews and nieces and the children of friends who she had determined would replace the regular lay functionaries of the church. It seemed she wanted as many people involved as possible. Even after she had been taken to the hospital she had had George place a call to the organist at St. Michael and St. George. When he handed her the telephone, she burst into tears.

“Oh, Matthew,” she said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t remember how Bach’s ‘St. Anne Fugue’ goes. It keeps getting mixed up in my head with Mozart’s ‘Ave Verum.’ ” She had him hum them.

“Yes. Oh yes,” she said. “I remember.” And had gone on to discuss and approve the names of various trumpeters they could get for the Purcell anthem she had decided on only the night before.

“Do you really think so, Matthew? Fred Turner? Do you trust his embouchure? Ask Willy Emerson for me, would you? And call me back. Mills will give you the number.”

In the hospital, even in the motel, she barely glanced at the dozens of letters and get well cards sent by her friends, but had Mills read the acceptance letters of her designated pallbearers over and over to her, listening for tone, searching out reluctancies. She would take them from Mills and make him listen as if for sour notes in music. When she was satisfied that they meant what they said she dictated formal acknowledgments of their receipt, as if she had formed some binding legal accommodation with them.

She had spoken to Bishop McKelvey long distance. She knew, she said, there could be no eulogy as such, only the authorized prayers, but since they’d already agreed that certain special friends and relatives would be permitted to read the responses, she thought, wondered really, if she mightn’t be granted one teeny dispensation. It was awfully important to her. Though it was the bishop’s decision. She would submit no matter what he decided. Well then, she said, could they set aside some time toward the end of the service, for Breel, her psychiatrist, to address the mourners? No, not a eulogy. Nothing like a eulogy. A clinical report on the state of her head, her symptomatology when she had been mad.

George had seen RSVP’s from all six pallbearers.

One was flying in from Europe, another had postponed his trip till after the funeral. “Friends,” she’d told George, “loyal friends.”

Had she indicated, Mills had asked the brother, which one was to be bumped? “Come on, Mills, she was dying. These were practically her last words, just before she called that Merchant chap to the bedside. Did you expect her to think of everything? I suppose we can do some things for ourselves.”

“She thought of everything,” George muttered.

“How’s that? Speak up. I can’t hear you over the jets.”

This was on Tuesday. The funeral was Thursday. It was too late for Mills to shop for a new suit, too late even to get the suit he had cleaned and pressed. But everyone, he thought, no matter his station, had a decent suit. She thought of everything. She even thought of that. She knew me, knew even I’d have one. She probably knew where it would be, anticipating the very closet, the yellowing plastic garment bag in which it would hang, protected from dust, moths, the wear and tear of poor men’s air. She thought of everything. How could he be her brother and not know that?

So he looked for their white gloves. (Knowing they would not come from the cut-down carton in the church vestibule, just as he knew that the Bibles and hymnals they brought would be their own, as he knew that some of them would somehow have managed beforehand to obtain printed copies of the order of the service — just as he knew they’d be printed rather than mimeographed — as he knew they would have anticipated, and in perfect accord with Mrs. Glazer’s wishes, the precise order of the seating arrangements, only himself and the contingent from the south side guided by the otherwise strictly ceremonial ushers.

(And how did he know, this George Mills in rare and tandem connection to privilege, his alliance occasional and metered as astronomy? Where did he even get off knowing? How had he known of the tuxedos and jodhpurs, spats and top hats that would be in their wardrobes? How had he intuited their pallbearer’s customized gloves, the mother-of-pearl buttons like milk gems? What gave him his outsider’s inside information?)

So he looked for the white gloves — his own pair taken from the very carton he knew they would neither avoid nor wave off but were simply unaware of.

Then he was helpless. Having turned himself and Louise over to an usher, having followed the young fellow to a pew neither conspicuously close to nor far removed from the principal mourners, he relinquished himself to some principle of sheer minstrelsy, searching the laps of the men for white-gloved hands, looking over his shoulder, rubbernecking occasion and the congregation like some complacent proprietor of worship. He saw nothing. (Blinders on his intuition here, totally without knowledge of the tailor’s contrivances, the special spaces that could be built into space, the secret concealing depths of bespoke pockets, ignorant of the reinforced material that could clothe a wallet or hide car keys without revealing a bulge or wrinkle.)

Someone came up. It was Messenger, the Meals-on-Wheels man, and George turned to him. “Excuse me,” he said, “do you think you could point out the pallbearers?”

“Nice tan,” Messenger said, “ni-ii-ce tan.” He was stoned.

“The pallbearers,” George said again.

But Messenger was enjoying himself. He indicated women, kids, some of his clients from Meals-on-Wheels, several with canes, walkers. “She loved her mischief,” he said.

George mentioned names he recalled from the correspondence he’d seen in Mexico. “My God, man,” Messenger said, “one owns the damned newspaper, and another introduced branch banking into this state. What’shisname just bought a franchise in the NFL, though he’s probably never been to a game or even watched ‘Monday Night Football.’ Those other names I don’t even recognize. You’re here for the autographs, am I right? You want them to sign the psalms in your program.”

“George is a pallbearer,” Louise said.

“We all got our pall to bear,” Messenger said.

So he looked for their tans, the special signals they radiated of wealth and leadership, all the lights of influence and pulled-string, procurate agency. But he had forgotten the decent suit in everyone’s closet, appearance got up like a made bed, hospital corners. Why, even the Meals-on-Wheels group looked distinguished, their walking aids and wheelchairs lending them the look of pampered cranks. One old man in a lap robe might have been their line’s coddled, consanguinitic first cause.

So he looked for the stalwart, for stamina, recalling the beefy first and second mates and ordinary seamen who had been sent by the Barge and Shipper’s Union to carry his father-in-law’s casket. He looked for the powerhouse honor guard of the rich.

Sam approached him. He leaned across Louise and whispered in his ear. “Professor Messenger said you were uncertain about the other pallbearers, that you weren’t sure where to go.”

“Nobody told me. Nobody told whoever I’m supposed to replace I’m supposed to replace him. I didn’t know anything about any of this, Mr. Glazer. Mr. Harry sprung it on me on the plane.”

“If you’re uncomfortable,” Sam said quietly. “If you’re the least bit uncomfortable…”

“Well,” George said, “Mr. Harry said it was what Mrs. Glazer wanted.”

“All right,” he said softly, “talk to the gentlemen in this row. This is the pallbearers’ bench.”

He looked down the aisle. “Gee,” he said, “I never even gave my name. I wonder how the ushers knew.” (Thinking even as he said it that the nieces and nephews had his number, that Mr. Claunch — Harry — had given it to them. Like a psychological profile of hijackers and bombers which even the girls at the airport metal detectors knew, the maintenance men in the public toilets.)

“Well,” Sam whispered, “if you’re all squared away.” He started to leave, looking at the men and women on the aisles as he walked to the front of the church, accepting their handshakes, bending to receive the women’s hugs. He was at once solemn and oddly hospitable, a flexibly expansive man.

Mills excused himself to the lady on his right — they were seated boy-girl, boy-girl, as if it were a formal dinner party — and asked if he might say something to the gentleman. The man smiled at him. “Pardon, sir,” Mills said, producing his white gloves, “I took care of Mrs. Glazer down there in Mexico for a while and it seems she asked for me to replace one of the real pallbearers, but she didn’t specify which real pallbearer I was supposed to stand in for. If you’re…”

“Sure,” the man said, “Judy was the coach. The coach calls the shots.”

My God, Mills thought, it’s what’shisname, the guy with the franchise.

(Because he knew nothing about obsequy, understanding well enough from his yokel’s back bench condition the ins and outs of grief and loss — hadn’t Mr. Mead, his father-in-law, a man he both respected and liked, died within the season? hadn’t Mrs. Glazer? — reassured by the hang of his gut, the small, packed, sorrowful nausea there like a darning egg or some discrete, comfortable orthodoxy which fondled his sentiment and vouchsafed his heart. But nothing at all, not even curiosity, about the stately weights and measures of public ceremony — which may have explained the muddy color of the mood ring plugged to his mild, even-tempered boredom — the organ solos and responsive readings, the bishop’s ringing exhortation of Heaven, his official encouragement of the immediate family, and his feeling denial of death, Mills in a way not even present, a time server, a clock watcher, waiting for whatever signal he knew must come when his pallbearing colleagues would rise and arrange themselves at the big, silver-handled box — and in what order? would the funeral director line them up, drill-sergeanting precedence, their disparate seniorities? or had Mrs. Glazer, who, Mills knew, called the shots here, called this one too, choreographing the last detail of all, the procession to and from the back door of her hearse, Mills’s presence sheer habit by this time, as if the dead woman had become accustomed to his assisting her in and out of rental cars? — George ready to go it alone if there should be a hitch, prepared to throw his studied leverages into one final, mighty eviction.

(Listening again only when a chubby, acne’d, middle-aged man rose from where he had been sitting behind Sam and the two girls and took a position in the empty pulpit.)

The man waited for the anthem that had accompanied him (or that, rather, he had accompanied, his bearing gradually enhanced by the music) to finish. Then, glancing first at McKelvey and then at the Glazers, he started to speak in a voice that was almost conversational, almost offhand.

“Well,” he began, “the patient insisted that everything have meaning. That’s familiar enough, I guess. Once they’re into it I don’t suppose there’s been a dozen analysands in the history of analysis who haven’t brought their dreams and even the least encounters of their day to their analysts for examination. Believe me, I’ve seen them come like cats with birds in their jaws, like kids with swell report cards. That’s not what I’m talking about. Lots of people are like that. You don’t have to be neurotic. I guess not.

“I mean the patient demanded that everything have meaning. She had no tolerance for things that didn’t. ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons drove her up the wall and she couldn’t understand why ice cream came in so many flavors. Let’s see…Symptoms. She could be phobic about fillers in newspapers. As a matter of fact, during her worst years, she wouldn’t even read a paper. She couldn’t take in why the stories weren’t connected, and it terrified her that an article about a fire could appear next to a piece on the mayor. She was the same about television. She couldn’t follow a story once it was interrupted by a commercial. Variety shows, the connection between the acts. So that was one of her symptoms.

“Let’s see…

“For a while she was nervous about bedspreads. They gave her the creeps. So did tablecloths, folded napkins. She thought they might be hiding something that wasn’t supposed to be there. That whole business about bedspreads and tablecloths, though, that was a new one on me. Of course they’re all new ones. I mean there’s really no such thing as a classic symptom. If there were, madness would be easier to treat than it is. It’s hard to treat. Actually, in a way, the patient’s got to get tired of her disease. Well, that’s my theory anyway. A lot of psychiatrists disagree.

“The patient was institutionalized eleven years. That’s a long time. The saddest thing was this terrible fear. She was very intelligent, but because agoraphobia was another of her symptoms, she refused to go out and never quite grasped what was going on outside her window. She was afraid of weather. Autumn nearly killed her. When the leaves turned color. When they dropped off the trees, that gave her the heebie-jeebies altogether. Snow and rain, lightning and ice. You can imagine what spring did to her with its buds and green shoots and all the furry signals trees put out before they go to leaf.

“She couldn’t understand temperature swings, why her windows were open sometimes and shut at others. What am I saying? She couldn’t understand nighttime and daytime. So those were other symptoms.

“Look,” he said, “this is difficult for me. I’m not sure this is even ethical. Strictly speaking, it’s all privileged information. She asked me to tell these things. She arranged it with Bishop McKelvey. Well, they’re open secrets anyway. Most of you were her loved ones. You know this stuff. But it’s cat-out-of-the-bag, and it makes me nervous. Probably I seem ridiculous. Under the circumstances, even if I’d just been her orthopedist telling you about her broken leg or bad back, I’d still seem silly. It’s all time and place. She’s put me in a bad situation. I don’t know what she thought she was up to. I suppose that sounds dopey too. I mean I was her psychiatrist, I charted her head like the New World. I’m supposed to know. Anyway, I don’t.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

“A lot of you know I was retained by the family. That I was her very own bought-and-paid-for personal psychiatrist. Like some high-priced music coach or the princess’s astrologer. I lived in.

“I guess you know I wrote a book about her case. Or manuscript. It was never published. Well, that whole business was the patient’s idea. She saw herself as material, subject matter for a book. Maybe you could put that down as another symptom, but if it is, God knows it’s one the patient shared with nine out of ten people alive. I didn’t have to write it, I suppose. I was on retainer and the family paid top dollar. (This was just after I’d completed my residency. I couldn’t realistically have expected to make that much money for another five or six years at the inside.) The Claunches made it clear from the outset that I was, well, that I was the doctor. So I didn’t have to write it. I guess I went along because I didn’t have much else to do. Madness is a full-time occupation, but only for the madman. (That’s really how the cure works. My notion of it anyway, though most don’t agree with me. If the patient doesn’t do herself an injury and just lives long enough she’ll probably wear herself out.) Anyway, the patient was all the data I had. So I started to write her up about the middle of the third year.

“If you’re interested, I guess I’d have to say that the transference dates from just about this time frame.

“I had my notes. And all those tape recordings of our sessions that I’d play over and over, wearing them out practically. As if they were favorite tunes, the top of the charts, say. Or like those half-dozen old movies in the ship’s library they used to rotate and show us in the Pacific during the war. She really was all the data I had. Never mind my two lousy years’ residency at Cook County Hospital. Those folks were in a clinic, mad on the arm. (Which was how the family got me in the first place. Sure, if a psychiatrist already had a practice he couldn’t just pick up and leave people who were dependent on him. It had to be a kid.)

“My notes and hers. The tapes that we made. Her madwoman’s homework — the journals she kept, the bad dreams she wrote down.

“And access, too, to those letters she wrote other patients. Witty — wit was a symptom — funny and malicious, reminding people whose own bad dreams had just been burned out of them by shock therapy of everything they had forgotten, rubbing their noses in their past, bringing them down from the thin, comfortable air of their electric amnesia. Not making it up but piling it on, some ‘Hasty Pudding’ rendition of their loony doings. Which she never showed me, but which their psychiatrists did, outraged as schoolteachers intercepting passed notes. Of course I spoke to her about it. I asked why she wrote them. ‘Six years,’ she said, ‘I’ve been here six years. A bunch of these crazies are my best pals. I’ve made love to some of the men and a few of the women and spoken with the rest like Francis of Assisi making small talk with birds. What happens if they get well?’ ‘Don’t you want them to get well?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you want to get well?’ ‘Craziness ain’t much of a birthright.’ ‘I have to give back the letters.’ ‘Their shrinks will destroy them. Or lock them up in the poor bastards’ files.’ ‘I have to return them.’ ‘Make copies,’ she said. ‘They’re poison pen letters,’ she said, ‘as much a record of my nuttiness as theirs. Make copies. Put them in that manuscript you’re writing about me.’

“Because she said ‘manuscript’ now, not ‘book.’ Knowing that if the letters went in, it could never in either of our lifetimes be any published book, that even if I changed their names the facts would be there, that we’d be hung up in lawsuits the rest of our lives.

“But I did what she asked. The letters became part of the record too. I copied them into what only one of us still thought of even as the manuscript. Though the patient had never even seen it. Now she asked about it every day. ‘You’re some doctor,’ she’d say. ‘Eight years in private practice and you’ve yet to cure anyone. What’s with the manuscript? How’s that going at least?’ ‘There’s a lot of material,’ I’d tell her, ‘I’m up half the night transcribing tapes. Copying those letters you write. I’m losing sleep. When I finally get to bed I toss and turn for an hour.’ ‘What’s with the big deal opus manuscript? Do I get to see it soon or do you plan to take another seven years?’ I think this obsession with the manuscript was probably one of her last symptoms.

“So I started to show her pieces of it. The character of our sessions changed. Each morning I’d read the patient part of a chapter. She was fascinated. When the hour was up she was reluctant to leave. I would read her the rest of the chapter during our afternoon session. This went on for about a year. She was very calm, calmer than I’d ever seen her. Those earlier symptoms didn’t seem to obtain any longer. The fears, I mean. She was reading newspapers now, watching TV and switching from channel to channel in the middle of shows and going on to the next show and following it to the end even if she hadn’t seen the beginning. She was getting tolerant about meaninglessness. And put bright bedspreads on her bed, flowery prints, complicated patterns. We’d been taking walks around the grounds together since the middle of winter.

“When spring came she even wanted me to drive her to town. We were with each other constantly now, though the manuscript, which was finished now, was always along. And though we’d long since finished putting it together, I started to read to her from the worst parts of her life. In canoes I would read to her from her childhood. Her symptoms and traumas. We’d go to the park and while she was setting the tablecloth out on the picnic table I’d have her listen to those cruel letters she had written the other patients.

“ ‘Hey, come on,’ she said one day when we were driving back from a weekend visit to her home. She was driving. I had just taken the manuscript out of my suitcase. ‘Give us a break,’ she said. ‘I’m getting awfully tired of hearing about that lady. That was some bad news, sad-ass lady. Why don’t you do us both a favor and tear the damn thing up? Just throw it out the car window or deep-six it in the litter barrel when we stop to pee. I don’t want to hear about that crappy lady anymore.’

“ ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Judith.’

“ ‘Why not? I was a jerk.’

“ ‘You were an interesting woman.’

“ ‘I was a sickaroony.’

“ ‘You’re well now.’

“ ‘Eleven years. Hardly the nick of time, wouldn’t you say?’

“ ‘Eleven years. That’s how long we were together, Judith.’

“ ‘Should auld acquaintance,’ she said.

“ ‘You’re getting discharged next week. Then I guess you’ll get together with that graduate student who’s been visiting you. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

“ ‘You? Eleven years at seventy thousand dollars a year? That’s more than three quarters of a million dollars. Why, you’re almost a rich man, Doc.’

“ ‘It’s the transference,’ I said.

“ ‘Yeah, I know,’ Judy said. ‘It was a hell of a transference. Thanks, Doc.’

“She thanked me. For the transference. I think it’s what cured her. That I was the only man the patient knew who had loved the patient all those years.”

The recessional! Trumpets and organ music! A bright bang of reverberant bliss! Out of the psychiatrist’s, Breel’s, gawky silence, his bumpkin shuffle. The big breakthrough as foolish grin, lopside heart. While the Meals-on-Wheelers, no longer charity cases so much as a special-interest group, invited observers, say, from some neutral but not indifferent commission, took, under cover of the music, collective liberties with the doings of their hosts, disputing intent and motive and all the ways of doing business that were not their ways, feeling had, the more religious among them, deprived of some final settlement and solace, who had ceremoniously come to grieve for the strange woman who for years now, rain or shine, had fed them lunch. Chatty in her way too, of course, but like some cheery columnist of the wide world whose tales of the fabulous had been, or so they’d thought, mere bedtime stories, meant to entertain or distract, told neither to enlist nor support sympathies, but out of the goodness of an enraged and generous heart, and not, or so they’d thought, to be taken seriously. Postcard information and detail. That there might have been a picture of the death camps on the face of the card had not struck them as unusual since they never expected to see such places themselves.

Now they stood in their pews, their faces turned toward the center aisle as first the thurifer and then the crucifer went by, followed by the acolytes and clergy. It was only when the immediate family passed that they struggled to put names to faces, placing individuals in the context of Judith Glazer’s now heartfelt, retroactive gossip.

Dr. Breel had long since climbed down from the pulpit. Where he had seemed at once both faltering and certain. Now he was again hesitant, trying to decide whether to wait for those peripheral members of the family — cousins (he recognized them easily enough; he’d read the book), pals from childhood, the coaches, cooks, servants and tutors of Cornell Messenger’s speculations — or to plunge himself into mourning’s mainstream. He seemed ready to plunge, determined, deferential only to some graduated kinship principle of his own ordering. Wavering, he thrust himself behind Sam’s sister from California and in front of the dead woman’s first lover.

Last came the casket supported by the six pallbearers in paced and stately lockstep behind the ragged, difficult parade of the Meals-on-Wheels people.

Only Cornell Messenger still lingered in a row of pews. He waited for George Mills, whose right hand grasped and forearm supported half a yard of Judith Glazer’s casket handle, and who was concentrating all his will on the task. When Mills was almost abreast of him Messenger winked and leaned forward. “The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” he said.

[Later it was Louise who called Harry to apologize for the bill that the Meals-on-Wheels people had run up at Stouffer’s. “It was their idea of a wake,” she told him. “They didn’t mean harm,” she said. “They were a little upset by what that doctor said. They knew your sister for years. Maybe they thought he dishonored her memory.”

[Harry, who was not quite certain who Louise was but who had a vague memory of her having come back to the house after the burial, attempted to reassure her. “That was my sister’s favorite charity. I’m sure Judith would have been pleased that they enjoyed themselves.” She did not tell him that, from what she gathered, from what George had told her of what Cornell Messenger had told him, it had not been an entirely joyous occasion.

[Stouffer’s round, glassed-in restaurant, “The Top of the Towers,” offered a view of the city from twenty-eight floors up, its outer perimeter of tables revolving almost imperceptibly, 360 degrees in just under an hour. Those of Judith Glazer’s guests who had to excuse themselves to go the toilet could not find their tables when they returned. They were a little drunk. Some stumbled trying to cross from the restaurant’s fixed, stationary center to its revolving rim. Scenes were made. They reported purses missing, hats, entire complements of the handicapped. One old woman turned herself in to the hostess. “I’m lost,” she moaned. “Everything’s mixed up. There’s tall buildings where the river was and a river where there used to be a stadium. You’re the usher that seated me. Get me back.” And a tipsy lady who had filched a bouquet of flowers from among the floral decorations at St. Michael and St. George reported to the manager that her friends were missing. “They was a dead person’s flowers. I took them from the church because I was a good friend of the corpse. If they should fall into the wrong hands, if the wrong noses should smell them, that person could die, and no one could ever prove whether it was the flowers or your fancy food that took them off.” Two or three, feeling themselves genuinely abandoned, had wept. At the last minute one man refused to let the driver pay for his lunch and insisted on settling with the cashier himself. (“The decent clothes,” George had said. “What?” Messenger asked. “Those decent clothes,” Mills said. “He looked presentable even to himself. Of course he wasn’t going to let some chauffeur pay for his lunch in front of a woman who took cash at a register. These were your men-of-the-world poor. They didn’t grow up in beds with hospital sides. They hadn’t always pushed themselves around behind walkers.” “So?” “So she knew,” Mills said, who was a little tipsy himself. “Who? What did she know?” “She knew everything.” “The mischief maker? Judy?” “Call her however you like,” Mills said, “she knew everything.” “Sure,” Messenger said. “What?” Mills asked. “Sure,” Messenger said. “The revolving restaurant. It was her last giveaway, the ultimate Meals-on-Wheels lunch.”) “Almost three hundred dollars,” Louise said, “and I can almost hear their backbiting.” “Mnh,” George said. “They must have said plenty,” Louise said. “They don’t know anything, Louise.”]

Messenger drove with them to the Claunch home after the burial.

Invited to return to west county with the family afterward, Mills and Louise had hesitated. A delegation of women had come to them. Sisters-in-law, an aunt. Mills knew they had been put up to it by men, that Judith Glazer had been the only one of her sex to have any real power in the family, that someday — he didn’t know how he knew this; it wasn’t anything her mother had spoken of — Mary might have the same sort of authority.

“No, really,” a widowed sister-in-law had said. “You were with Judith all that terrible time in Mexico. It would be a comfort to know certain things.”

“Well,” Mills said.

“It would make Mary feel so much better,” the other sister-in-law said softly, almost whispering. “It would make all of us feel better.”

“Gee,” Mills said, “I don’t…”

“Perhaps Mr. Mills would have to miss work,” the aunt said. “It could cost him a day’s wages to come with us.”

“Oh that’s awful,” the first sister-in-law said. “Of course the family would…”

“No no,” Mills said, “I’m not, I wouldn’t be…”

“Oh splendid,” she said, “it’s settled then.”

Cornell rode with the Millses in the Buick Special. “No guts,” he told Louise. “Those folks are real moguls. The elect hoity-toity of earth. I recognized a couple of university trustees. The chancellor was there. That guy Sam was squiring around. God, he never let him out of his sight…If they saw me light up,” he said, taking a joint from a package of low tar cigarettes. “You do pot, Louise?” He offered the pack. “Thanks but no thanks, eh? Ri-ight. I do it to enhance the ride. It already enhanced the funeral. But no kidding, Louise. There are some great houses out here. The stately homes of Missouri. Keep your eyes open, kiddo. Enjoy, enjoy.”

But to Mills, who had never been in this part of the county, it had already begun to look familiar. It was not déjà vu. It was history. The hundred tales he’d heard. Their marked Marco Polo life. He seemed to recognize hedges, birds, the iron verticals of their rich men’s fencing, their curving driveways like the packed, treated surfaces of tennis courts, the trees that lined them, their rare rich wood. He sensed porters’ lodges, cunning, low-ceilinged space within thick stone gateways, and smelled, far off, stocked ponds, game, posted woods and sculpted rivers.

Magically, he seemed even to know the way. Instinct working in him now, not grace. His own instinct merged with that calculating one of whatever inceptive, raw, original Claunch it had been who had seen not just the tract’s possibilities but its already inplace, on-stream, on-line de facto advantages.

“My goodness but it’s a way,” Louise said.

“Maybe we ought to get back to a main drag and stop over at a motel,” Messenger said. “Would you like that, Louise?”

“We’re almost there,” Mills said. Who had noticed, miles back, that they had passed the last of the prettified Lanes, Drives, Roads, Courts and Places with their scrolled, artisan’d address. Squire country, he had thought dismissively over Cornell’s easy admiration.

As they were past address itself now, on privatest property, still located of course, but in some geography of extraordinary jurisdiction where armed gillies and deputized gamekeepers enforced not law but custom, usage, tradition, folklore. Here they could be murdered for poaching, trespass. And not even instinct now but — his mood ring glows like ember, it sizzles his finger like a paper cut — his goofy, loyal, Mills-primed imagination: slain for a plucked wildflower or wrongly chosen bait. And suspects that what is operative here cuts deeper than statute, goes beyond compact and the legislative, scraping some raw nerve of the established ecological, their presence intrusive, pushing against a nature as fitfully balanced as a zoo, within striking distance, as Millses always were, of their oppressors’ murderous pet peeves. And is somehow gloomily proud that such power, chipped at and chipped at, nickel-and-dimed by revolution and reform, still manages to hold on, hold out, continues to exist in such culs-de-sac as the one he drives past now at twenty and twenty-two miles an hour, watching for deer crossing, bridle paths, grazing stock. And is as certain that the Buick Special is observed, its position called out from walkie-talkie to walkie-talkie, as he is of the existence of the power itself. Who knows that he is this snob of history, this anachronistic partisan? Lancaster’s man, York’s? (He himself has forgotten which.) Louise, who has had his cock in her mouth, doesn’t. She thinks, if she thinks about it at all, that he is Laglichio’s man, or the late Mrs. Glazer’s, or her own.

“Another couple miles,” George said.

“Jesus!” Cornell Messenger said when they had entered the main gate and turned into the driveway. “There ought to be a drawbridge. It’s a fucking goddamn castle!”

“They’re not checking plates today,” George explained. “There’s often open house when someone dies.”

“I never expected anything like this,” Cornell said. “I’ll tell you something. I bet Sam himself ain’t ever been here.”

Messenger could have been right. It was the girls, Mary and Milly, who took them on a tour of the house — though George felt, so familiar was he with its Platonic floor plan that he might have been able to do it himself — Sam and a few others following them about like visitors shy at the White House say, told it’s their home, but knowing better of course, hanging well back of their minds’ velvet ropes, not smoking and taking no pictures, their normal speaking voices lowered decibels.

“Hey,” Messenger said, whose enjoyment of the house had been enhanced one last time before climbing out of Mills’s car, “you think there’s a gift shop?”

“Here’s where I take ballet and fencing,” Mary said. “Grandpa had the mirrors and warm-up bar put in when Mother was a little girl. It’s special wood. You can’t get splinters.” She ran to the practice bar, turned to them, and carelessly raised her leg. They could see over the tops of her stockings.

“I don’t think someone should dance after a funeral,” Milly said.

“Your sister’s right, sweetheart,” Sam said.

“Oh, Daddy,” Mary said.

“I have to speak to you,” Cornell whispered in George’s ear.

“You have a lovely home,” Louise was telling the two girls. “Really lovely. You must be so proud. I suppose in a house as big as this one each of you probably has her own room.”

“We have our own lady’s maids, too,” Mary said. “We have separate cooks and our own private gardeners. We even have our own special milkman. And a postman who does nothing but just deliver our mail. Isn’t that right, Milly?”

“Mary is teasing,” Milly said. “We don’t even live here. We come out sometimes on weekends.”

“The really amazing, astonishing, wonderful thing is that Milly isn’t even spoiled. I am, but old Milly is just like everyone else even if she does have just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in her own private savings account.”

“It’s in trust,” Milly said. “I can’t touch it till I’m twenty-one.”

“Mary,” Sam said more forcefully, “Milly. That’s enough now.”

“It’s pretty urgent,” Cornell Messenger said.

The psychiatrist, down from the catharsis in which he had taken refuge, frowned. “I’m crashing,” he said. “I’m actually crashing. I’m sorry. I had no idea I was going to say all that stuff. I made a damn fool of myself, a stupid ass.”

“Hey,” Cornell said, “hey come on. It’s what she would have wanted.”

“You shut up,” Sam said, “you just shut up.”

“We ought to start back now, Louise,” George said.

“You got it, Sammy,” Cornell said. “My lips are sealed, Dean.”

“Thank you, young ladies,” Louise said. “It was awful nice meeting you, Doctor. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. Glazer. She was very kind to my father when he was alive.” Louise turned to go.

“I’ve got to speak to you, Mills,” Cornell said, following him.

“I’m not in this,” George said sweetly. “I’m not in any of this.”

They were descending three abreast on a widely winding staircase that circumscribed a lavish keyhole of space. George had seen nothing like this house. Greatest Grandfather Mills hadn’t, nor had most Millses in between. “Listen,” he would have told his son, “I’ve been to Architecture the way some have been to France. In rooms measured as philosophy. The furniture like pieces settled in nature, unremarkably there as trees. And the fabrics, George, the fabrics! Fabric like foliage or high husbandry’s bumper crops. And woodwork like the sounding boards on stringed instruments. Paneling from panel mines, the oldest forests, all wilderness’s concentric rings like the tracery of nerves in vitals.”

Cornell saying “I’ve got to speak to you. I’ve really got to speak to you.”

And so, it turned out, did others. The aunt, the sisters-in-law, had been emissaries, actual agents. In the manor’s great drawing room with its brackets of wing and armchair and parentheses of sofa, its Oriental carpet deep and wide as infield tarpaulin, its armoires and marquetried escritoires checkered as gameboard, they were waiting for him.

“Did you enjoy your tour, Mrs. Mills?” the aunt asked. She sat in a large, curving wing chair of upholstered silk, her long, thin forearms and mottled, arthritic hands arranged over twin tracks of tight gold fringe, her large purse open and settled beside her like a queen’s. Her fine, crossed legs were clear, firm as a dancer’s, and her expression as she waited for Louise’s answer, layered, a cool palimpsest of serenity, indifference and concern. Like several of the senior members of the family George had noticed at the funeral, she did not wear mourning. Indeed, her light woolen coat dress, exactly the color of fleshtone in a black and white photograph, seemed more the clothing of the owner of an odds-on Derby favorite in her special box than it did of someone who had just buried a niece. Mills noticed her long, misshapen, ringless fingers and wondered whether she had ever been married or if she had had her jewelry cut from her painful, blistered joints.

“Oh yes,” Louise said, “oh yes, indeed. It may not be proper etiquette to say so, but this has been a very special and exciting day for us. I never expected to be invited to a house like this. Goodness, it’s like something in picture books. Or what I imagine palaces in the old country must look like. George knows more about these things but I can tell he’s as thrilled as I am. Aren’t you, George?”

He sweltered for Louise in her black mourning dress, for himself in his dark suit. “Yes,” he said.

“I know,” his wife said. “And we want to thank you for having us. And the children are darling. I only hope that it had to be on such a sad occasion. I mean…”

“Of course,” the aunt said, smiling. “But surely you needn’t go yet, Mrs. Mills. My nieces-in-law want to show you the miniature railroad that Judith’s father built for her to ride in when she was a child.”

“You mean like the little train that takes you around the zoo?”

“Quite like that, yes. I’ll tell Grant to organize a ride for you. My nieces will go with you.”

“Oh, George, did you hear? We’re going for a ride on a little train.”

“Well, Mrs. Mills, I thought you and the girls might make do on your own. This might be a good time for Mr. Mills to speak with Mr. Claunch.”

“Oh,” Louise said.

“I go with Lulu on the choo-choo?” Cornell said.

The aunt — George was not sure of her name, though he knew that the rich did not always give their names, that they lived unlisted lives — glared at Cornell. “Yes,” said the aunt, “of course. I should have thought to ask.”

Mr. Claunch, as it turned out, was not Harry, but Harry’s father.

The builder of the miniature railroad and the splinter-free ballet studio was waiting for him in a kind of trophy room. Plaques the shape of arrowheads hung next to framed oval photos of horses and riders, of dogs and handlers. There were mounted blue ribbons that fell away from inscribed rosettes big and round as clocks in schoolrooms, like pressed pants. Leather straps with tiny bronze horseshoes dangled from them, the sculpted heads of horses snugged into their curves. Silver bowls rested on bric-a-brac shelves next to porcelain animals, and everywhere, no larger than pocket watches, bas-relief medallions were pressed onto the walls like an equine coinage. Along another wall, high up, were prep school banners large as pillowcases, college pennants, the guidons of military academies like a felt heraldry. Beneath these were columns of framed team photographs — football, baseball, hockey, swimming, soccer, track — oddly like the Won and Lost listings in newspapers. Mary and Milly, in ice skating costumes, their arms spread, dipped toward the camera in clumsy arabesques. There were pictures of golfers and tennis players, and slalomers on skis kicking their bodies past gates like conga dancers. There were queer, high-altitude photographs of people on the summits of mountains. They seemed shy as foot shufflers, scuffers of shoes.

Claunch was seated beside a writing table with his legs crossed and his left hand resting lightly on the surface of the table. He wore a dark blazer and bright plaid trousers lustered as kilt. He had a large face, and thick black horn rims — dated as Mills’s mood ring — hung on his eyes like shiners. Though he was smoking, Mills saw no ashtray in the room. Here and there thin columns of smoke rose from the silver trophy bowls into which Claunch Sr. dropped unextinguished cigarettes.

“You’re here,” he said glumly. “All right, come in. Beat it please, Aunt.” Was she his aunt? George wondered. “I look,” he said gloomily when the woman had gone, “like a past president of an International Olympic Games Committee.”

“I’m Mills,” Mills said meekly, “and I just want to say how sorry I am about Mrs. Glazer.”

“All torn up, are you?”

“She was very nice,” George said. “She went through a lot.”

“I know what she went through,” Mrs. Glazer’s father said. “She went through all of us. She went through all of us like a high wind. Trailer courts arse over tip, dozens left homeless. I know what she went through.” He leaned suddenly forward, like Milly and Mary in their ice skating costumes. “Was I missed? At my daughter’s funeral, was I missed? What was the dark, black-ass buzz?”

“I didn’t hear anything, sir.”

Claunch closed his palms rapidly over his eyes, ears and mouth, and Mills shifted uneasily. “Oh come on, Mills,” Claunch said, “she called me from Mexico. She called collect like some kid off at college. The things she said to me.” He shook his head. “I tell you, George,” he went on, “at first I thought that pancreatic cancer was a blessing. Not a blessing in disguise, but the outright, up-front, stand-tall stuff itself. Some no-strings cancer, three to four months at the outside and the patient so stuffed with pain, medication and final things she wouldn’t have time for her dotty trouble campaigns. Even after she decided on her last-ditch stand, her hundred percent final effort, and went off for fruit therapy in old Mexico, I still thought blessing! Blessing, godsend, favorable balance of payments!

“It didn’t occur to me until after I stopped accepting her calls and began to hear from two or three of her hot-lunch clients that even if there’s no God the devil sure exists. And something else became clear, too. That the weight of those charges she continued to press even in extremis took on something of a deathbed power, that even a poor old bunch of poor old bastards in their own extremis would hear her out and make vows, pledges. Deathbed calling to deathbed in perseverant, unfaltering howl. The nerve of that woman! Intruding on their desuetude, enlisting the worn-out in her worn-out life.”

“Meals-on-Wheels people phoned? I never heard this. She must have called them when I wasn’t in the room.”

“She gave away all my unpublished numbers. She put it out on the highest authority — her word as somebody terminal — that I was their absentee landlord, the s.o.b. who wouldn’t pay for their crumbled plumbing or fix their faulty wiring, that I darkened their hallways and stairs and put governing devices on their water and electric. She told them that she became involved with Meals-on-Wheels when she discovered who owned those rat traps. She said it was to make moral restitution.”

“They called you up?”

“They’re poor, Mills. Do you know what poverty is? Real poverty? It’s not having any conception of how rich the rich really are. They don’t know doodly squat about us. Sure they called. I set them straight of course. Judith wasn’t crazy enough to believe her campaign would fly. But she did her damage. She got what she wanted.”

“What did she want?”

“What did she want? I’m an old man. It was those goddamn unpublished numbers. There must have been fifteen of them. It was to annoy me. All that trouble just to annoy me. Think! If I replaced them, tell me, how in hell could a man my age learn the new ones?”

Mills watched the old man, a rich old man who had the sturdy look of one who had had his children late in life, whose spiffy, offhand rich man’s style, his blazers and rakish, researched plaids (and dozens more just like them in hotel suites along prime beach front properties on selected coasts) would be familiar in boardrooms and the cockpits of private jets, at golf classics and aboard presidential yachts, to popes come calling and heads of state dropped in on, to mistresses (they would not be beautiful or even all that much younger than he), to society and the horsy and doggy sets in the capital cities (because surely he liked to get out once in a while, down to Brasilia to see the generals, off to Brussels for cabal and conspiracy with the good old boys of the Trilateral Commission), which were clothes and climate too, serviceable as an Arab’s burnoose. It was just possible, Mills thought, that Claunch alone had no decent suit, and he wondered how he came by his fervid imagination and privy fantasies. And just how rich the rich really are. Poor Mills, Mills thought. For all his serving-man’s history and butler’s genes, there had been no rich men in his life. These little litanies were a sort of crazy faith, the only one the saved, grace-stated man possessed. And was weary of his star-struck inventories which pulled against his nature in ways he did not even begin to understand.

He did not want to hear Claunch out, was suddenly ashamed of the services he’d already rendered. He told himself he listened out of courtesy, as a guest. For Lulu in the choo-choo for whom this day had been an outing. (And Messenger still to be heard out!)

“This,” Claunch said, waving his cigarette about the room, “was my daughter’s dollhouse.”

“Sir?”

“Well she made it up,” he said. “The team photographs were clipped out of yearbooks. The ribbons and trophies came from pawnshops, garage sales. Even the loving cups, the silver bowls.”

“But they’re inscribed,” George said.

“To strangers. To Whom It May Concern.’ “

“What for?”

Claunch shrugged. “She was nuts.”

Mills wasn’t interested. Not in Claunch’s money and power nor in his abrupt, summary ways. There was nothing for him here. He did not need to know anything or have anything. It was astonishing to him that he had ever gone to Mexico, that he had supervised deathbeds so unreluctantly. That his passions had been up. He was tired of all of them — of Breel, the Claunches, the Meals-on-Wheelers, Messenger, the Glazer girls, himself. Amazed he’d consented to be a pallbearer or given a moment’s thought to the character of his suit. Dumbstruck he’d taken any part at all. He had let everyone bully him, everyone. Father Merchant, all his lockstep, aspic’d ancestors. Now he would turn to go and Claunch Sr. would embrace him with one more confidence, one last devastating request. He knew what it might be, knew he would decline. That whatever the disparity in their wealth or power, it was Claunch who was subject to temptation, snarled in gravity and desire, Mills who was free.

So he turned to go. Disengaged as the dead, indifferent as wood.

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing,” Mills said.

“She wasn’t a quiet woman. She wasn’t shy, she wasn’t modest. Anything on her mind burned holes in her pockets. She spent confidence like a drunken sailor.”

“Nothing was on her mind.”

“You were with her for weeks. You saw her die, you watched her dress size come down.”

“Yes.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Your unpublished numbers.”

“Don’t tangle with me, Mills. What did she tell you?”

“Everything.”

“Horseshit.”

(And thought of Greatest Grandfather Mills.)

“Wait,” Claunch said, “don’t go. Please, Mills. Please, George.”

“Tell me what you want,” George Mills said. (Thinking: You can’t have it, there’s nothing left.) And didn’t wait for Claunch to reply, telling him instead what any of them — his forebears — would have told him, mollycoddling grief and concern, handling his anxiety like something armed, primed, talking him in off all his rich man’s window ledges — because much had been lost in the retelling, blurred in the father-to-son translations, distinction smudged as a ruin — seeing a thousand pairs of boots radiant in the hall, hearing even as he spoke them the rote and passionless lies, his ancient tribe’s ancient there-theres and now-nows, the primitive consolations — for bread, a nickel for a cup of coffee, a coin for a candy, a place to hide from the wind — worn-out as a witchdoctor’s gibberish. (And seeing for perhaps the first time in a thousand years something even more radiant and splendid than the cumulative shine on the cumulative boots. Glittering spectra beyond trust. Bright as belief. And thinking: Why, we could have destroyed them!)

“Was the pain ever more than she could handle?”

“Sometimes she’d take an extra aspirin.”

“Aspirin? Only aspirin?”

“Her belief comforted her.”

“Yes,” Claunch said, “there was that. She believed.”

(And Cornell to be mollified. Was something between them? Not his business. Nothing his business.)

“Tell me,” Claunch said softly, “did she curse me?”

“There was a kind of message.”

“Oh?” he said. “A message?”

“She didn’t want there to be hard feelings.”

“She told you she forgave me?” Claunch asked hopefully.

“No,” Mills said, and looked directly at the ambassadorlike man. “She told me she apologized.”

He passed a row of garages with their antique and classic automobiles. (He had noticed one or two at the church, three more at the cemetery. In the narrow roadway it had looked more like a rally than a burial.) And crossed past a middle-aged couple examining a restored 1933 Plymouth which Mills recognized as being exactly like Wickland’s old car in Florida, the one his father had driven to De Land on his errands. The man smiled and waved, and George nodded at him.

He did not have to be told where to go. Not instinct this time either, and certainly not grace and down from déjà vu and history. Not even imagination so much as a blueprint knowledge of its location, certain, sure as a housekeeper where things went. Knowing there’d be a toy station, population, elevation signs, a town’s given name high on the station nostalgic as a stand of trees or the iron horse itself. (It would bear the name of wood or game: Elmville. Deerfield.) Flowers would be planted around its platform, along its borders.

And started to climb a low knoll. And heard the train before he saw it. Not its comical whistle — certain of this, too: the outsize locomotive wail that would be hung about its neck like some apocalyptic joke — but its tinny chuff chuff as it pulled them along the banks and straightaways of its miniature routes. (Imagining Mrs. Glazer as a child, laughing hysterically, pissing her drawers, unable to help herself, seduced, ravished by motion.) Seeing it before he actually saw it (because despite reservation, protestation, all his low-grade weariness of their complicated, graceless lives, he had his Mills-given gift for the inventory of the rich, as intimate a knowledge of their safes, attics and basements as he had of his own clothes closet — precious treasure’s second sight).

At the top of the rise he spotted them in their luscious, bulldozed valley. Grant — who forebore to wear the engineer’s cap Mills saw stuffed in his pocket — sat behind a long locomotive on a sloping tender which served as a seat, his hands on controls which poked out of the rear of the engine like levers in a tavern game. Four topless passenger cars the dimensions of desks were pulled along at about fifteen miles an hour. The coaches’ only slightly scaled-down seats were plush, reversible, wide as rumble seat. George saw the heavy brass handles, tickets fluttering from them like bright feathers. Frames had been painted onto the wide safety glass that wrapped each car to give the illusion of windows. Milly sat primly alone in the last coach, his wife and Cornell facing each other in the second, their knees touching in the crowded quarters. Louise was the one who rode backward. Mary sat on a bench outside the station and glanced impatiently at her wrist watch and then up the line just as if she were waiting for a real train.

He started down the slope, his eyes on the single and sometimes double set of tracks which merged and seemed to cover each other like stripes on a barber pole. When he was halfway down the hill Louise spotted him and waved. She called to the engineer and Grant sounded the whistle, bass as a boat’s, and rang the bell, his face obscured in the plume of steam which feathered back from the stack.

George came to a siding next to some signals and switches and waited for the train to pass. He smiled — instinct again, or reflex — at Milly. Messenger grinned and shouted something to him which he couldn’t make out, and when the train had gone by he crossed the tracks and passed through the thin verisimilitude of tiny trees which masked the passengers’ vision from their toy environment, and walked directly across the carefully landscaped oval to the station.

He sat next to Mary, who seemed subdued now, all interest lost, if she’d ever had any, in the elaborate rig.

“That train ain’t going in your direction?”

“I never ride the day my mother is buried.”

“Oh,” Mills said.

“I bet they don’t stop,” she said. “Your wife and that Cornell character have been going round and round just forever. Not a thought for poor old Grant who has to catch all that steam in his face.”

“The steam is hot?”

“Well no, it isn’t hot exactly but it’s not very pleasant. It’s just especially horrible when you’ve just had your hair done, even if you’re sitting well back in the cars like Milly.”

“I see.”

She shifted about to face him. “But it’s all right at night if there’s interesting guests and we all get inside and Grant puts the roofs on the coaches. Then one can have air conditioning in summer or electric heaters in winter. Then it’s very cozy. Very especially if it’s a boy-girl party. There’s lots more track that runs through those woods yonder. Then it can be better than a sleigh or hayride. Then it’s just like the tunnel of love.”

The train came by without slowing and an enhanced Messenger stood up in the coach, his hands braced on top of the glass. “The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” He was laughing.

“If you want a ride you have to flag the train,” Mary said.

“That’s all right,” Mills said.

“There’s a toilet inside the station if you have to go. There’s a potbelly stove.”

“I know,” Mills said. “There’s a map of the line behind glass. There’s travel posters and old waiting room benches.”

Mary looked at him curiously. “Did Grandfather tell you?”

“No.”

“My mom?”

“Is Grant nice?”

“Very nice. He’s worked for the family years. We’re all very polite to Grant.”

“Is Grant his first name or his last name?”

“You’d have to ask Milly.”

“Where’s the flag?”

“Over there,” she said, “but you can use your handkerchief or raise your hand as if you were hailing a cab.”

“You do it,” Mills said.

“No,” she said, “it’s stupid.”

“Does Grant ever get to go for a ride?”

“He’s riding now.”

“I mean in the cars. I mean in the coaches.”

Messenger, grinning, helped Louise down from the train when it pulled in. It’s her big day, Mills thought.

“Can my husband have a ride?” Louise asked.

“I’m all right,” George said.

“Just once or twice around,” she said. “You can’t tell from here but there’s a tiny model city where the train makes its first turn. It’s very unique.”

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Cornell Messenger whispered.

“Miss Claunch said that maybe we could bring Daddy’s Meals-on-Wheels friends out for a ride someday,” Louise said. “It’s really amazing. You ought to try it, George.”

“There’s not much water in the boiler,” Grant said. “I’d have to fill it and fire it up again.”

“Oh yeah?” George said. “You’d have to go to all that trouble? For me? Oh yeah?”

And suddenly — Mills didn’t know how — the two of them were bristling about each other, hackled as rivals dithered and suspicious over pawed ground, cautious, their glands giving off signal, tooth-and-claw stuff.

Mills asked if Grant were Grant’s first name or last.

Grant wondered if George was the same George who’d taken Mrs. Glazer to Mexico to die.

“That’s right,” Mills said. “She asked for me.”

“Specifically asked for you?”

“Specifically. That’s right.”

“She was very ill.”

“Bereft,” Mills shot back. “Bereft of folks to count on.”

“Hey,” Messenger said. “Hey, come on.”

“Leave me alone,” George said.

Milly was crying. Mary, sedate on the bench, looked from her sister to the others. Louise announced that if they were driving back to the city she had better stop in at the station first. Grant walked to his tender and started to climb aboard. Mills followed him.

“It’s hot,” he said. “Those cars are air-conditioned. You didn’t turn it on for my wife.”

“I’d have had to put the roofs up.”

“You should have! She just had her hair done. Now it’s all unkempt from the steam.”

“It was unkempt when she got on board.”

“Don’t you talk about my wife that way.” But Grant had already started the train up. George backed away from the steam shooting out from the pistons. “I’m talking to you. Where are you going? Someone is talking to you!”

Grant turned around and smiled. “Who?”

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Messenger said behind him.

“What? What do you want?”

“Let’s go down a ways. I don’t want anyone to overhear.”

“I’ve got to get back to the city.”

“Hey fellow, come on, will you? I lit up again in the station. I’m so stoned you could make a citizen’s arrest. Why do I do this? Do I do this for fun? It’s the griefs, Mills. I owe it to my problems. It’s medicine for the griefs.”

“I don’t care about your problems.”

“Sure, if you did you’d get stoned too.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got my own troubles,” George said, turning away.

“What, a saved, tucked-in guy like you? All snuggy snug and living the lap robe, deck chair life?”

“Louise told you that on the train.”

“Who? Oh. Lulu? Nah. The mischief maker told me.”

“Mrs. Glazer?”

“Long distance. She was dying. She reached out and touched someone. Cancerous bitch.”

“Come if you’re coming. I’m going back.”

“Wait,” Cornell said, and his voice was unenhanced. “Does Mahesvaram mean anything to you?”

When George turned back to look at him Cornell was standing on the tracks, all the fingers of his left hand stuffed into his mouth. “It’s that word she gave you,” he said quietly, “it was her mantra.”

Messenger seemed as if he were going to collapse, and Mills rushed to support him.

“Watch out!” Grant shouted. “You’re standing on the third rail!”

The two men leaped away from each other, tripping over the outside track. Grant roared. “Geez, that’s the oldest one in the book,” the engineer wheezed. “I used to get Judith with that one. Same as I got her kids. A third rail on a steam engine?”

“What else?” Cornell hissed, recovering, grasping the sleeve of Mills’s suit coat. “Did she tell you about my kid?”

“Not now,” George said, and pulled away. “You go on. I have to talk to that guy.” He turned toward the engineer, already addressing him while he was still several yards away. “What’s your problem, Grant?”

“Oh, my problem.”

“This morning I was your dead mistress’s pallbearer. The family knows the use I’ve been to them. I mean the girls, I mean the sisters-in-law, I mean the aunt. I mean Mr. Glazer and the Claunches, Jr. and Sr. both. If I were to mention your rudeness to me, or the people in my party…”

Grant was laughing, applauding his speech. “Hear hear,” he said. “Har har.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Do you play cards?” Grant asked suddenly.

“What?”

“Cards. Card games. Do you know how to play card games?”

“Yes,” Mills said, “sure.”

“How many games?”

“What are you talking about?”

“How many card games do you know how to play? Gin? Do you know gin?”

“I play gin.”

“Call rummy? Michigan rummy?”

“Michigan rummy.”

“Pinochle? Bridge?”

“I never learned bridge.”

“You never learned.”

“So?”

“You never learned. You don’t know call rummy. Or a dozen games I could mention you’ve never heard of. The poker variations. Sure, you play cards. You never learned. You know who taught me bridge? Judith. Judith did. I was her bridge partner.”

“You’re crazy,” Mills said.

“What do you think my father did? For a living? How did he support us?”

“How would I know?”

“Guess.”

“I don’t know. He worked for the Claunches. He was in service. I don’t know. You’re the gardener’s boy.”

They were at the station.

“My father was a pharmacist. He owned a drugstore.”

“Guess what?” Louise said, coming out of the train station. She was laughing.

“My daughter programs computers and my son has three shoestores in Kansas City,” the servant said.

“That john’s no bigger than a child’s potty,” Louise said. “The toilet paper’s no wider than a reel of tape. It’s scale. Everything’s scale.”

He opened the door of his Buick Special and was about to get in — Louise was already in the back, Cornell in front — when someone called to him. “Hold on a moment would you?” It was the man who had waved to him, the one who’d been admiring the classic cars when Mills had passed the garages on his way to find Louise.

“Yes?” Mills said. “What?”

“Don’t mean to hold you up,” the man said, approaching the car. “Your Special?”

“Yes,” Mills said.

“Sixty-three?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so,” the man said. “Spotted it when you drove up to St. Michael and St. George this morning. Recognized the grille straight off. Dead giveaway. Had that lovely grille on her the year she was introduced and then they went to a different design the following year. Why’d they do that? Any idea?”

“No,” Mills said.

“Could be birds. Scooped in birds. Some aerodynamic thing. You think?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s mine. Over there. The Studebaker.”

“Very nice.”

“Thank you,” the man said. “Felt a bit odd about driving it to her funeral but if that’s what old Judy wanted, why, hell, what the hell, eh?”

“What the hell,” George said.

“Look,” the man said, “take my card, will you? I know it’s a long shot, but if you ever do want to sell, give me a call. If I’m not at the office call me at home. The number’s unlisted but I’ve jotted it down on the back.”

Mills told him he wasn’t thinking of selling his car.

“I know,” the man said. “I’d feel the same way if I were you. But call anyway. We’ll do lunch at the club.” He looked in the car window and tipped an imaginary hat.

“Sir,” he said. “Madam.”