Let Me Be Frank With You

Everything Could Be Worse

LAST TUESDAY I READ A PIECE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES about how it would feel to be tossed out into airless space. This was a small box on a left-hand inside page of the Tuesday Science section, items that rarely venture into the interesting, personal side of things — the stuff a short story by Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury would go deeply into with profound (albeit totally irrelevant) moral consequences. These Times stories are really just intended to supply lower-rung Schwab execs and apprentice Ernst & Young wage slaves with oddball topics to make themselves appear well-read to their competitor-colleagues during the first warm-up minutes in the office every morning; then possibly to provide the whole day with a theme. (“Careful now, Gosnold, or I’ll toss that whole market analysis right out into airless space and you along with it…” Eyebrows jinked, smirks all around.)

Nothing’s all that surprising about being tossed out into airless space. Most of us wouldn’t stay conscious longer than about fifteen seconds, so that other sensate and attitudinal considerations become fairly irrelevant. The Times writer, however, did note that the healthiest of us (astronauts, Fijian pearl divers) could actually stay alive and alert for as long as two minutes, unless you hold your breath (I wouldn’t), in which case your lungs explode — although, interestingly, not your skin. The data were imprecise about the quality of consciousness that persists — how you might be feeling or what you might be thinking in your last tender moments, the length of time I take to brush my teeth or (sometimes, it seems) to take a leak. It’s not hard, though, to imagine yourself mooning around in your bubble hat, trying to come to grips, not wanting to squander your last precious pressurized seconds by giving in to pointless panic. Likely you’d take an interest in whatever’s available — the stars, the planets, the green-and-blue wheel of distant Earth, the curious, near-yet-so-far aspect of the mother ship, white and steely, Old Glory painted on the cowling; the allure of the abyss itself. In other words, you’d try to live your last brief interval in a good way not previously anticipated. Though I can also imagine that those two minutes could seem like a mighty long time to be alive. (A great deal of what I read and see on TV anymore, I have to say, seems dedicated to getting me off the human stage as painlessly and expeditiously as possible — making the unknown not be such a bother. Even though the fact that things end is often the most interesting thing about them — inasmuch as most things seem not to end nearly fast enough.)

TEN DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AS I PULLED INTO MY driveway on Wilson Lane, I saw a woman I didn’t know standing on my front stoop. She was facing the door, having possibly just rung the bell and put herself into the poised posture (we’ve all done it) of someone who has every right to be where she is when a stranger opens the door — and if not every right, at least enough not to elicit full-blown hostility.

The woman was black and was wearing a bright red Yuletide winter coat, black, shiny boots, and carried a large black boat of a purse, appropriate to her age — which from the back seemed midfifties. She was also wearing a Christmas-y green-knit tam-o’-shanter pulled down like a cloche, something a young woman wouldn’t wear.

I immediately assumed she was a parishioner-solicitor collecting guilt donations for the AME Sunrise Tabernacle over on the still-holding-on black trace of Haddam, beyond the Boro cemetery. In later years, these tidy frame homes have been re-colonized by Nicaraguans and Hondurans who do the gardening, roof repair, and much of the breaking-and-entering chores out in Haddam Township, or else they run “Mexican” restaurants, where their kids study at poorly lit rear tables, boning up for Stanford and Columbia. These residences have recently faced whacker tax hikes their owners either can’t or are too wily to afford. So the houses have become available to a new wave of white young-marrieds who work two jobs, are never home, wouldn’t think of having children, and pride themselves on living in a “heritage” neighborhood instead of in a dreary townhouse where everything works but isn’t “historic.”

A few vestigial Negroes have managed to hold on — by their teeth. Since my wife, Sally, and I moved back to Haddam from The Shore, eight years ago, and into the amply treed President streets—“white housing,” roughly the same vintage and stock as the formerly all-black heritage quarter — we’ve ended up on “lists” identifying us as soft touches for Tanzanian Mission Outreach, or some such worthwhile endeavor. We’re likewise the kind of desirable white people who don’t show up grinning at their church on Sunday, pretending “we belong, since we’re all really the same under the skin.” Probably we’re not.

Snowflakes had begun sifting onto my driveway where I saw the black woman at my door, though a raw sun was trying to shine, and in an hour the sidewalk would have puddles. New Jersey’s famous for these not-north/not-south weather oddities, which render it a never-boring place to live — hurricanes notwithstanding.

Every week I read for the blind at WHAD, our community station, which was where I was just then driving home from. This fall, I’ve been reading Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (thirty minutes is all they or I can stand), and in many ways it’s a book made for hearing in the dark, in a chill and tenebrous season. Naipaul, despite apparently having a drastic and unlikable personality, is as adept as they get at throwing the gauntlet down and calling bullshit on the world. From all I know about the blind from the letters they send me, they’re pissed off about the same things he’s pissed off about — the wrong people getting everything, fools too-long suffered, the wrong ship coming into the wrong port. Despair misunderstood as serenity. It’s also better to listen to Naipaul and me alone at home than to join some dismal book club, where the members get drunk on pinot grigio and go at each other’s throats about whether this or that “anti-hero” reminds them of their ex-husband Herb. Many listeners say they hear my half hour, then go off to sleep feeling victorious.

Across the street, my neighbor Mack Bittick still had his NO SURRENDER ROMNEY-RYAN sign up, though the election’s long lost for his side. It sat beside his red-and-white FOR SALE BY OWNER, which he’d stationed there as if the two signs meant the same thing. He’s an engineer and former Navy SEAL whose job was eliminated by a company in Jamesburg that makes pipeline equipment. He’s got big credit card bills and is staring at foreclosure. Mack flies the Stars and Stripes on a pole, day and night, and is one of the brusque-robust, homeschooling, canned-goods-stock-piling, non-tipper, free-market types who’re averse to paying commissions on anything (“It’s a goddamn tax on what we oughta get for fuckin’ free by natural right…”) and don’t like immigrants. He’s also a personhood nutcase who wants the unborn to have a vote, hold driver’s licenses, and own handguns so they can rise up and protect him from the revolution when it comes. He’s always eager to pick my old-realtor brain, sounding me out about trends and price strategies, and ways to bump up his curb appeal on the cheap, so he can maximize equity and still pocket his homestead exemption. I do my utmost to pass along the worst possible realty advice: never ever negotiate; demand your price or fuck it; don’t waste a nickel on superficial niceties (your house should look “lived in”); don’t act friendly to potential buyers (they’ll grow distrustful); leave your Tea-Party reading material and gun paraphernalia out on the coffee table (most home buyers already agree with you). He, of course, knows I voted for Obama, who he feels should be in prison.

WHEN THE RED-COATED BLACK WOMAN AT MY FRONT door realized no one was answering, and that a car had crunched into the snowy driveway, she turned and issued a big welcoming smile down to whoever was arriving, and a demure wave to assure me all was well here — no one hiding in the bushes with burglar tools, about to put a padded brick through my back window. Black people bear a heavy burden trying to be normal. It’s no wonder they hate us. I’d hate us, too. I was sure Mack Bittick was watching her through the curtains.

For a moment I thought the woman might be Parlance Parker — grown-up daughter of my long-ago housekeeper, Pauline, from the days when I lived on Hoving Road, on Haddam’s west side, was married to my first wife, our children were little, and I was trying unsuccessfully to write a novel. Pauline ran our big Tudor house like a boot camp — mustering the children, working around Ann, berating me for not having a job, and sitting smoking on our back steps like a drill sergeant. Like me, she hailed from Mississippi and, because we were both now “up north,” could treat me with disdain, since I’d renounced all privileges to treat her like a subhuman. Pauline died of a brain tumor thirty years ago. But her daughter Parlance recognized me one Saturday morning in the Shop ’n Save and threw her arms around me like a lost relation. Since then she’s twice shown up at the door, wanting to “close the circle,” tell me how much her mother loved us all, hear stories about the children (whom she never knew), and generally re-affiliate with a lost part of life over which she believes I hold dominion.

I got out of my car, advertising my own welcoming “I know you’re probably not robbing me” smile. The woman was not Parlance. Something told me she was also not one of the AME Sunrise Tabernacle ladies either. But she was someone. That, I could see.

“Hi!” I sang out in my most amiable, Christmas-cheer voice. “You’re probably looking for Sally.” There was no reason to believe that. It was just the most natural-sounding thing I could think to say. Sally was actually in South Mantoloking, counseling grieving hurricane victims — something she’s been doing for weeks.

The woman came down onto the walk, still smiling. I was already cold, dressed only in cords, a double-knit polo, and a barracuda jacket — dressed for the blind, not for the winter.

“I’m Charlotte Pines, Mr. Bascombe,” the woman said, smiling brightly. “We don’t know each other.”

“Great,” I said, crossing my lawn, snow sifting flake by flake. The still-green grass had a meringue on top that had begun to melt. Temps were hovering above freezing.

Ms. Pines was medium sized but substantial, with a shiny, kewpie-doll pretty face and skin of such lustrous, variegated browns, blacks, and maroons that any man or woman would’ve wished they were black for at least part of every day. She was, anyone could see, well-to-do. Her red coat with a black fur collar I picked out as cashmere. Her black boots hadn’t come cheap either. When I came closer, still stupidly grinning, she took off one leather glove, extended her hand, took mine in a surprisingly rough grip, and gave it a firm I’m-in-charge squeezing. I felt like a schoolboy who meets his principal in Walmart and shakes hands with an adult for the first time.

“I’m making a terrible intrusion on you, Mr. Bascombe.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I like intrusions.” For some reason I was breathless. “I was just reading for the blind. Sally’s over in Mantoloking.” I had the Naipaul under my arm. Ms. Pines was a lady in her waning fifties. Snow was settling into the wide part of her beauty-parlor hair, the third not covered by her tam. She’d spoken very explicitly. Conceivably she had moments before gotten out of a sleek, liveried Lincoln now waiting discreetly down the block. I took a quick look down Wilson but saw nothing. I saw what I believed was a flicker in the Bitticks’ front curtains. Black people don’t visit in our neighborhood that often, except to read the meter or fix something. However, that Ms. Pines had simply appeared conferred upon me an intense feeling of well-being, as if she’d done me an unexpected favor.

“I haven’t met your wife,” Ms. Pines said. Somewhere back in the distant days she’d been a considerable and curvaceous handful. Even in her Barneys red coat, that was plain. She’d now evolved into dignified, imposing pan-African handsomeness.

“She’s great,” I said.

“I’m certain,” Ms. Pines said and then was on to her business. “I’m on a strange mission, Mr. Bascombe.” Ms. Pines seemed to rise to a more forthright set-of-shoulders, as if an expected moment had now arrived.

“Tell me,” I said. I nearly said I’m all ears, words I’d never said in my life.

“I grew up in your house, Mr. Bascombe.” Ms. Pines’ shoulders were firmly set. But then unexpectedly she seemed to lose spirit. She smiled, but a different smile, a smile summoning supplication and regret, as if she was one of the AME ladies, and I’d just uttered something slighting. She swiveled her head around and regarded the front door, as if it had finally opened to her ring. She had a short but still lustrous neck that made her operate her shoulders a bit stiffly. Everything about her had suddenly altered. “Of course it looks very different now.” She was going on trying to sound pleasant. “This was back in the sixties. It seems much smaller to me.” Her smile brightened, as she found me again. “It’s nicer. You’ve kept it nice.”

“Well, that’s great, too,” I said. I’d proclaimed greatness three times now, even though sentimental returns of the sort Ms. Pines was making could never be truly great. “Mightily affecting.” “Ambiguously affirming.” “Bittersweet and troubling.” “Heart-wrenching and sad.” All possible. But probably not great.

Only, I wanted her to know none of it was bad news. Not to me. It was good news, in that it gave us — the two of us, cold here together — a great new connection that didn’t need to go further than my front yard, but might. This was how things were always supposed to work out.

Previous-resident returns of this sort, in fact, happen all the time and have happened to me more than once. Possibly in nineteenth-century Haddam they didn’t. But in twenty-first-century Haddam they do — where people sell and buy houses like Jeep Cherokees, and where boom follows bust so relentlessly realtors often leave the FOR SALE sign in the garage; and where you’re likely to drive to the Rite Aid for a bottle of Maalox and come home with earnest money put down on that Dutch Colonial you’d had your eye on and just happened to see your friend Bert the realtor stepping out the front door with the listing papers in hand. No one wants to stay any place. There are species-level changes afoot. The place you used to live and brought your bride home to, taught your kid to ride his bike in the driveway, where your old mother came to live after your father died, then died herself, and where you first noticed the peculiar tingling movement in your left hand when you held the New York Review up near the light—that place may now just be two houses away from where you currently live (but wished you didn’t), though you never much think about having lived there, until one day you decide to have a look.

At least four prior owner/occupants have come to visit houses I’ve lived in over these years. I’ve always thrown the doors open, once it was clear they weren’t selling me burial insurance and I’d gotten my wallet off the hall table. I’ve just stood by like a docent and let them wander the rooms, grunting at this or that update, where a wall used to be, or recalling how the old bathroom smelled on Sunday mornings before church. On like that, until they can get it all straight in their minds and are ready to go. Usually it takes no longer than ten minutes — standard elapsed time for re-certifying sixty years of breathing existence. Generally it’s the over-fifties who show up. If you’re much younger, you’ve got it all recorded on your smartphone. And it’s little enough to do for other humans — help them get their narrative straight. It’s what we all long for, unless I’m mistaken.

“I don’t suppose, Mr. Bascombe…” Ms. Pines was taking another anxious peek around at my house, then back to me, smiling in her new defeated way. “… I don’t suppose I could step in the front door and have one quick look inside.” Kernels of dry snow were settling onto her cheeks, her coat shoulders and the onyx uppers of her boots. My hair had probably gone white. We were a fine couple. Though right at that second I experienced a sudden, ghostly whoosh of vertigo — something I’ve been being treated for, either along with or because of C-3 neck woes. The world’s azimuth just suddenly goes catty-wampus — and I could end up on my back. Though it can also, if I’m sitting down, be half agreeable — like a happy, late-summer, Saturday-evening zizz, when you’ve had a tumbler of cold Stoli and the Yanks are on TV. In my bed table I have pages of corrective exercise diagrams to redress these episodes. My “attack” on the lawn just whooshed in and whooshed out, like a bat flitting past a window at dusk. One knows these moments, of course, to be warnings.

“Okay. Sure. You bet you can,” I almost shouted this, trying to make myself not seem demented. Ms. Pines looked at me uncertainly, possibly stifling the urge to ask, “Are you okay?” (No more grievous words can be spoken in the modern world.) “Come with me,” I said, still too loud, and grappled her plump arm the way an octogenarian would. We lurched off toward my stoop steps, which were snow covered and perilous. “Watch your step here,” I said, as much to myself as to her.

“This is very kind of you,” Ms. Pines said almost inaudibly, coming along in my grip. “I hope it’s not an inconvenience…”

“It’s not an inconvenience,” I said. “It’s nothing at all. Su casa es mi casa…” I said the reverse of what I meant. It’s not that unusual anymore.

THE BIG LG, WHICH I’D LEFT ON IN THE LIVING room when I’d gone for my blind-reading, was in full ESPN cry when I opened the front door, the sound jacked way up. On the screen a beefy, barrel-shaped man in camo gear — face smudged with self-eliminating paint, and seated in a camo’d wheelchair — was just at that moment squeezing off, from an enormously-scoped, lethally-short-barreled black rifle propped on some kind of dousing stick, a terrible bullet aimed in the direction of a gigantic bull elk, possibly two thousand yards away across a pristine, echoing Valhalla-like mountainscape.

BOOM!

The entire mountain — plus my living room and the vaulted sky above it — quaked, then went deaf at the awful sound.

BOOM! Again the terrible report. The sun went dark, avalanches broke free, tiny sylvan creatures beside faraway alpine rills looked guardedly toward the heavens.

The elk — grazing, calm, thinking who-knows-what elk thoughts — suddenly went all weird and knee-wiggly, as if its parts had simultaneously resigned their roles. After which, in exactly one second, its head rose slightly as though it had heard something (it had), then it went right over like a candlepin into the dust-burst the bullet had kicked up, having passed straight through the creature as if it was butter.

“Wooo-hooo-hooo-hooo! Woooooo!” a man’s voice somewhere out of the picture began woo-hooing. “Ooooh man, oh man, oh man!”

“I am a deadly motherfucker,” the wheelchair marksman said (I could read his lips), his rifle across his unfeeling knees. He turned toward whoever was woo-hooing, a great crazed smile on his fat camo face. “It doesn’t get any better than this, does it, Arlo? Does it? Oh sweet Jesus…”

I quick ditched the Naipaul onto the couch, got my hands on the clicker, and doused the picture. I’d earlier been watching the NFL injury rundown, hoping to see if the Giants had a snowball’s chance against the Falcons on Sunday. They didn’t.

My house’s interior, absent the ear-warping TV clamor, became, then, intergalactically silent. And still. Like a room a security camera was guarding — a secret view for a stranger’s secret purposes. I often imagine myself as “a figure” in an elevator, being viewed through the grainy lens of just such a secreted camera. Mute. Unmindful. Generic — waiting for my floor, then the door opening, and (in my imagining) a hooded man stepping in before I can step out, and beginning to berate me or pummel me or shoot me at close range. (I watch too much television.) The head shrinkers at Mayo — where I get my prostate re-checks — would have a field day with my data set. There’s a side to this little drama that doesn’t make me look good, I realize — not someone you’d trust to run a day care or even a dog rescue.

Though shouldn’t our complex mental picture of ourselves at least partly include such a neutralized view? Not just the image that smiles wryly back from the shaving mirror; but the solitary trudger glimpsed in the shop window, shoulders slumped, hairline backing away, neck flesh lapping, bent as if by winds — shuffling down the street to buy the USA Today? Is that person not worth keeping in mind and paid a modicum? If not a round of huzzahs, at least a tip of the hat? A high five (or at least a low one)? I don’t share every view with Sally, who’d shout the rafters down with laughter if she knew all my innermost thoughts.

“My goodness,” Ms. Pines said from behind me, inside the tiny foyer now — my silent house’s primordial self suddenly all around her in a way anyone would find startling. It’s too bad we don’t let ourselves in for more unexpected moments. Life would be less flimsy, feel more worth preserving. The suburbs are supposedly where nothing happens, like Auden said about what poetry doesn’t do; an over-inhabited faux terrain dozing in inertia, occasionally disrupted by “a Columbine” or “an Oklahoma City” or a hurricane to remind us what’s really real. Though plenty happens in the suburbs — in the way that putting a drop of water under an electron microscope reveals civilizations with histories, destinies, and an overpowering experience of the present. “Well. Yes. My goodness, my goodness,” Ms. Pines kept saying in the front entry, the storm door sucking closed behind her, letting outside snow light in around her. “I don’t quite know what to say.” She was shaking her kewpie-doll head that either so much had changed or so little had. We’ve kept the “older-home” fussiness of small rooms, one-way-to-get-anywhere, an inset plaster phone nook, upstairs transoms, and all original fixtures except the kitchen. Sally hates the spiritless open-concept bleakness of the re-purposed. Do I really need a fucking greenhouse? is the way she put it.

“I don’t want to track in snow,” Ms. Pines said.

“The maid’ll clean it up,” I said. A joke.

“Okay,” she said, in wonderment still. “I…”

“How long since you were here?” I said, still in the TV-silent living room. Ms. P., in the foyer, inched toward the foot of the stairs. The narrow hallway past the basement door and on to the kitchen lay ahead — the same house is on thousands of streets, Muncie to Minot.

Her gaze for a moment carried up the stairs, her lips a tiny bit left apart. “I’m sorry?” she said. She’d heard me but didn’t understand.

“Have you visited before? Since you lived here?”

“Oh. No,” Ms. Pines said, registering. “Never. I walked out of this house — this door…” She turned toward the glass storm door behind her. “… in nineteen sixty-nine, when I was almost seventeen. I was a junior. At Haddam High. I walked to school.”

“My kids went there,” I said.

“I’m sure.” She looked at me strangely then, as if my presence was a surprise. From the warmth of her red coat, enforced by the warmth of my house, Ms. Pines had begun exuding a sweet floral aroma. Old Rose. A fragrance someone older might’ve worn. Possibly her mother had sniftered it on upstairs in front of the medicine-cabinet mirror, before an evening out with her husband. Where, I wondered, did Negroes go for fun in Haddam, pre-1969? Trenton?

“You’re absolutely welcome to look around,” I said, extra-obligingly.

“Oh, that’s very kind, Mr. Bascombe. I’m feeling a little light-headed.” She re-righted her shoulders and took a firmer grip on her big patent-leather purse. Snow had puddled on the area rug inside the doorway. She was transfixed.

“Let me get you a glass of orange juice,” I said, stepping off past her and down the hall toward the kitchen, where it smelled of Sally’s morning bacon and the Krups cooking breakfast coffee to licorice. I hauled out the Minute Maid carton, found a plastic glass, gushed it full, and came back as fast as I could. Why OJ seemed the proper antidote to being transfixed is anybody’s guess.

“That’s very nice. Thank you so much,” Ms. Pines said. She hadn’t budged. I put the glass into her un-gloved hand. She took a dainty sip, swallowed, cleared her throat softly, and smiled, touching her glove to her lips, then handed me back the glass, which had decals of leaping green porpoises, from our years on The Shore — gone now except for the glasses. The old-rose fragrance was dense around Ms. Pines, mingling with a faint tang of intimate perspiration.

“Let me take your coat.”

“Oh, no,” Ms. Pines said. “I’m not going to impose anymore.”

From the basement, the heat pump came smoothly to life. A distant murmur.

“You should just look around,” I said. “I don’t have to go with you. I’ll sit in the kitchen and read the paper or refill the bird feeder for the squirrels. I’m retired. I’m just waiting to die, or for my wife to come back from Mantoloking — whichever’s first.”

“Well,” Ms. Pines said, smiling frailly, letting her eyes follow up the stairs. “That’s very generous. If you really don’t mind, I’ll just look upstairs at my old room. Or your room.” She blinked at the prospect, then looked at me.

“Great!” I said for the fourth time. “Take your good sweet time. You know where the kitchen is. You won’t find things much changed.”

“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “We’ll have to see.”

“That’s why you’re here,” I said and went off down the hall to leave her to it.

FOR A TIME, I HEARD MS. PINES — MOUNTING THE stairs, the risers squeezing, the floor joists muttering as she stepped room to room. She emitted no personal sounds I could hear via the registers or the stairwell. I’d already read the Times. So, I sat contentedly at the breakfast table, meager snowfall cluttering the back-yard air, caking on the rhododendrons and the Green Egg smoker. On a legal pad, I’d begun jotting down some entries for the monthly feature I write for the We Salute You magazine, which we hand out free of charge in airports to our troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or wherever our country’s waging secret wars and committing global wrongs in freedom’s name — Syria, New Zealand, France. We Salute You contains helpful stateside info and easy how-to’s — in case a vet’s memory’s been erased — along with phone numbers and addresses and contact data that the troopers, swabbies, airmen, and marines might need during their first critical hours back in the world.

My column’s called “WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?” It contains oddball items I glean out of “the media” that don’t really approximate fresh thought — that in fact often violate the concept of thought by being plug-obvious, asinine, or both — but that still come across our breakfast tables every morning or flashed through our smartphones (I don’t own one) disguised as news. Veterans often come back after a year of dodging bullets, seeing their pals’ limbs blown off, enduring unendurable heat, eating sand, and learning to trust no one — even the people they want to trust — with a fairly well-established sense that no one back home, the people they’re fighting, dying, and wasting their lives for, knows dick about anything that really matters, and might just as well go back to the third grade or be shot to death drive-by style (which is why so many of our troops are eager to re-up). My column tries to take a bit of the edge off by letting soldiers know we’re not all as dumbass as newts back home, and in fact some of the idiotic stuff in the news can be actually hilarious, so that suicide can be postponed to a later date.

One item I’m including for January is a study up at Harvard that found a direct correlation between chronic pain and loss of sleep. If you hurt twenty-four hours a day, sleep’s hard to come by — the Harvard scientists detected. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS? These things aren’t difficult to find.

In November, I included one from a top-notch sports medicine think tank in Fort Collins, where kinesiologists noticed that running slowly and not very far was much better for you, over a ten-year period, than running forty minutes or farther than eight miles — which, it turns out, increases the likelihood you’ll die sooner rather than later. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?

And one I’d seen just the day before, and was noting at the breakfast table, was out of the Lancet in the UK and represented a conclusion drawn at the Duchess of Kent Clinic in Shropshire (the same person who hands over the Wimbledon trophy, though she always seems like someone who couldn’t care less about tennis or even understand it). The doctors in Shropshire noticed that in cases of repetitive thought patterning leading to psychic decline, lengthy institutionalization, and eventually suicide, the most common cause-agent seemed to be not trying hard enough to think about something pleasant. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?

My pen name — it seemed appropriate — is “HLM.” The magazine often forwards me letters from vets who say that these squibs — which I include without comment — have brightened their first hours back and taken their minds off what most anybody’s mind would likely run to, if twenty-four hours before you’d been pinned down by enemy fire in Waziristan, but now find yourself in the Department of Motor Vehicles, trying to get your driver’s license renewed, and are being told by a non — English speaker that you don’t have the six pieces of ID necessary, plus a major credit card with your name spelled exactly like your passport.

Mayhem. That’s what you’d be thinking hard about. And no one would blame you. Statistics, however, show that great cravings of almost any nature, including a wish to assassinate, can be overcome just by brief interludes of postponement — the very thing no one ever believes will work, but does. That IS news.

Ms. Pines had been up above for almost five minutes. I heard her begin stepping heavily, carefully down the stairs — as if she were descending sideways. “Umm-hmmm, umm-hmmm.” I heard her make this noise, one “umm-hmmm” per step, as if she was digesting something she’d just taken in. I swiveled around in my chair so I could see to the front door, wanting her to feel at home and recognized when she came back into view. Maybe she’d want to sit down in the living room and watch The Price Is Right while I finished up some chores. Later, I’d heat up last night’s lasagna, and we’d get to know each other in new and consequential ways.

Ms. Pines — small, red-coated figure, boatish purse, green tam, shiny boots — appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She did start to walk into the living room, then realized the hall was beside her and that “a presence” (me) was twenty feet away — watching her. “Oh,” she said and flashed her big, relieved, but also embarrassed smile. She set her shoulders as she’d done before. “I guess I entered a dream state for a while up there,” she said. “It’s silly. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not silly,” I said, arm bent over the chair back Our Town style — our conversation being carried down the short hallway as if we were communicating out of separate life realms, which possibly we were. “It’s too bad more people don’t do what you’re doing,” I said. “The world might be a better place.” Almost all conversations between myself and African Americans devolve into this phony, race-neutral natter about making the world a better place, which we assume we’re doing just by being alive. But it’s idiotic to think the world would be a better place if more people barged uninvited into strangers’ homes. I needed, though, to say something, and wanted it to be optimistic and wholesome and seem to carry substance — even if it didn’t.

“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “I don’t know.” She’d recovered, but didn’t appear to know what to do. She wasn’t tacking toward the front door, but wasn’t advancing toward me in the breakfast room/sunporch either. Poise had given way to perplexity. “Is that still the door to the cellar?” She was eyeing the basement door halfway down the shadowed hall between us. Her eyes seemed to fix on the glass knob, then switched up to me, as if the door might burst open and reveal who knew what.

“It is,” I said over my chair back. “It’s full of spooks down there.” Not ideal.

Ms. Pines pursed her lips, exhaled an audible breath. “I’m sure.”

“Want to take a gander?” Another phrase I’d never uttered in my life on earth — but wary not to say something to make the world an even less good place: “It’s black as coal down there… dingy as hell, too… venture down there, and the jig’ll be up.” Words were failing me more than usual. Better to use fewer of them.

“There’s probably some places one oughtn’t go,” Ms. Pines said.

“I feel that way about California,” I said over the chair back. “Colorado, too. And Texas.”

Ms. Pines cast a patient-impatient smile toward me. She seemed about to say something, then didn’t. And by refraining, she immediately took command not just of me and our moment, but somehow of my entire house. I didn’t really mind.

“How did your family come to live here?” I said. Would I ask a white person that? (“Dad moved us all out here from Peoria in ’58, and we had a heckuva time at first…”) For most questions there’s an answer.

“Oh, well,” Ms. Pines said from the foyer, “my father grew up in Haddam. On Clio Street.” She ventured a step nearer into the hall. “That’s the muse of history.”

“Come sit down,” I said and popped up, pushing a second wire-back café chair — Sally’s — away from the table for her to occupy.

She came toward me, looking left, then right, assessing what we’d done to the hall and the kitchen and the breakfast sunroom. New therma-panes where there’d been gunked patio doors. Green, replica Mexican tiles. A prior owner had “opened out the kitchen” twenty years ago, then moved away to Bernardsville.

“It’s all very nice,” Ms. Pines said, looking over-dressed now in her red Christmas coat and mistletoe topper. Her presence was like having a census taker visit and surprisingly become your friend.

“I’ve got some coffee made.”

Ms. Pines was still looking around the sunroom, her eyes stopping on my cherished, framed Block Island map. “Where’s that?” she said, furrowing a brow, as if the map was a problem.

“Block Island,” I said. “I went there years ago. It’s in Rhode Island, which most people don’t know.” Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.

“I see.” She set her big purse on the floor and seated herself primly in the café chair.

“Take off your coat,” I said. “It’s warm.” Sally, lifetime Chicagoan, is always cold.

“Thank you.” She unbuttoned her red coat to reveal a green, wool two-piece suit sporting good-sized gold buttons and a Peter Pan collar. Pricey but stylish, and right for a woman of her vintage. With her coat off, her left arm also revealed the blunt end of a cumbersome white-plaster cast above her black gloved hand. “I have this wound to contend with.” She frowned at the cast’s bulk.

“How’d you manage that?” I set a yellow mug of coffee down, the sugar bowl, milk caddy, and a spoon. Old Rose was in the air again, not all that agreeable with the coffee aroma. She removed her other glove and laid it on the table.

“I’m a hurricane victim,” she said, arranging both her hands, cast and all, on the glass table surface. She said hurricane to sound like “hair-a-cun,” then inhaled a considerable breath, which she let out slowly. I all at once sensed I was about to hear an appeal for the Mount Pisgah cemetery maintenance fund, or some Nationalist Chinese outreach. “My home is in Lavallette,” Ms. Pines said. “We took a pretty considerable beating. I’m lucky I only broke my arm.”

“I’m sorry you did,” I said brightly, wrong about the solicitation. “Is your house intact?”

“It was ruined.” Ms. Pines smiled ruefully at her coffee, deliberately spooning in sugar. “I had a nice condominium.” She made the same “umm-hmmm” sound she’d made on the stairs. The sugar spoon tinkled as she moved it.

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings. Ms. Pines seemed to understand what silence signified.

“I’m back over here because of that,” she said, and lifted her chin as she stirred her coffee, then regarded me in what looked like an unexpected sternness. “I have friends in Haddam. On Gulick Road. They’re putting me up until I can determine what to do.”

“I’m sure you had insurance,” I said, my second, or possibly third, idiotic remark in five minutes.

“Everyone had insurance.” Ms. Pines right-handedly brought her coffee to her lips. I’d forgotten a napkin and jumped up, snatched a paper one out of the kitchen holder, and set it beside her spoon. “We just don’t know,” she said, setting her mug onto the napkin. “Haddam CC 4-Ball” was printed on it — a memento of my former wife, Ann, from long, long ago.

“Do you have a family?” I said.

“I had a husband,” Ms. Pines said. “We separated in ’01. He passed on in ’04. I kept our apartment. He was a police sergeant.”

“I see.” I’m deeply sorry wouldn’t have worked any better than Oh, great, that’s perfect. He’s out of the way. And you’re still damn good looking. Words.

“I teach high school in Wall Township,” Ms. Pines said, dabbing her lips. “We shut school down after the storm. Which isn’t the worst thing that could happen to me under these circumstances.” She regarded her busted-arm cast. “Our students are in limbo, of course. We’ll have to make provisions for them after Christmas.” She smiled at me with grim Christmas-no-cheer and took another sip of coffee.

“What do you teach?” I said, across the table. Snow had ceased in my small back yard, leaving the air mealy gray. A pair of enormous, self-important crows had arrived to scrounge in the pachysandra below the suet feeder.

“History,” Ms. Pines said. “I’m a Barnard grad. From ’76. The bicentennial year.”

“That’s great,” I said. “My daughter almost went there.”

Another silence invoked itself. I could’ve told her I’d gone to Michigan, have two children, an ex-wife and a current one, that I’d sold real estate here and at The Shore for twenty years, once wrote a book, served in an undistinguished fashion in the marines, and was born in Mississippi — bangety, bangety, bangety, boop. Or I could let silence do its sovereign work, and see if something of more material import opened up. It would be a loss if some hopeful topic couldn’t now be broached, given all. Nothing intimate, sensitive, or soul-baring. Nothing about the world becoming a better place. But something any two citizens could talk about, any ole time, to mutual profit — our perplexing races notwithstanding.

“You said your father grew up here?” I smiled what must’ve been a loony smile, but a signal of where our conversation might veer if we let it.

“He did. Yes,” Ms. Pines said and cleared her throat formally. “He was the first of his family to attend college. He played football at Rutgers. In the ’50s. He did extremely well. Studied engineering. Took his doctorate. He became the first Negro to work at a high level at Bell Laboratories. He was an audio specialist. He was very smart.”

“Like Paul Robeson,” I blurted — in spite of every living cell urging me not to say “Like Paul Robeson.”

“Um-hm,” Ms. Pines said, uninterested in Paul Robeson. “Some people are better as ideas than as humans, Mr. Bascombe. My father was that sort of man. I think he thought of himself as an idea more than as a man. Our race suffers from that.”

“So does ours,” I said, glad to see Paul Robeson drift off downstream.

“We lived in this house,” Ms. Pines said, “from 1959 to 1969. My father insisted on living in a white neighborhood. Though it didn’t work out very well.”

“Did your mother not like it?” Why would I assume that?

“Yes. My mother was an opera singer. Or would’ve been. She was out of place wherever she was. She was Italian. She preferred New York — where she was from. I was the only one of us who truly liked it in Haddam. I loved going to school. My brother didn’t have an easy time.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Well.” Ms. Pines looked away out the sliding door, where the crows were standing atop the melting snow-crust gawking in at us through the window. “I considered calling you before I came.”

“Why?” I said, smiley, smiley, smiley.

“I was nervous. Because if you knew who I was — or am — possibly you wouldn’t have liked me to come.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m glad you came.”

“Well. That’s kind.”

“They sound like interesting people. I’m sorry I didn’t know them. Your parents.”

“Do you not know about them?” Ms. Pines eyed me appraisingly, her chin raised a guarded inch. She placed her un-injured hand on top of the one that had the cast and breathed audibly. “Hartwick Pines?” she intoned. “You don’t know about him?”

“No,” I said. “Was that his name?” A name reminiscent of a woodwinds camp in the Michigan forests. Or a Nuremberg judge. Or a signatory of Dumbarton Oaks.

“I’d have thought they were infamous.”

“What did they do?” I said.

“And you don’t know?” Ms. Pines said.

“Tell me.”

“I really didn’t mean to venture into this, Mr. Bascombe. I only felt required to come—after living not very far away for so long a time. I’m sorry.”

“I’m really glad you did,” I said. “I try to visit all the places I’ve lived at least once every ten years. It puts things in perspective. Everything’s smaller — like you said.”

“I imagine,” Ms. Pines said. As expected, we’d banged right into something with meat on its bones: being the first Negroes in a white suburban neighborhood with a boy-genius father and a high-strung temperamental operatic white mother. It had the precise mix of history and mystery the suburbs rarely get credit for — a story 60 Minutes or The NewsHour could run with; or ESPN, if the old man had been a standout for the Crimson Knights, gotten drafted by the Giants but chose the life of the mind instead. Even better if the mother had made it at least into the chorus at the Met, and the brother became a priest or a poet. There was even a possible as-told-to angle I could write. People tell me things. I also listen, and have a pleasant, absorptive, non-judgmental face, which made me a good living in the realty business (though doesn’t make me anything these days).

“Do you ever dream about yourself when you were young, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said, blinking at me. “Not that you’re old, of course.”

“Frank,” I said. “Yes, I do. I’m always twenty-eight in my dreams, and I have a mustache and smoke a pipe. I actually try not to remember my dreams. Forgetting’s better.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Ms. Pines said, staring at the yellow rim of her Haddam CC 4-Ball mug.

Just at that precise instant one of the cloudy little gut bubbles we all experience descended distressingly out of my stomach and down, in such a blazing hurry-up, I barely caught it and clamped the exit shut. One more second would’ve cast a bad atmosphere on everything and everyone. My son Paul Bascombe used to call this being “fartational.” Memps, our oncologist-neighbor’s wiggly, old red wiener dog from our days on Cleveland Lane, was forever wandering nosily into our house and cutting big stinkers, one after another. “Out! Memps,” Paul would loudly decree (with relish). “Memps is fartational! Out, bad Memps!” Poor Memps would scuttle out the door, as if he knew — though not without a couple more salvos.

I was disconcertingly “all-but-Memps”—though not detectably, thanks be to god. It must’ve shown, though, in my mouth’s rigorous set, because Ms. Pines’ sloe eyes rose to me, settled back to her coffee mug rim, then fastened on me again as if I might be “experiencing” something, another episode, like my vertigo whoosh twenty minutes ago that I thought she hadn’t seen, but that might require a 911 call this time around — like her husband. Lentil soup was the culprit.

“I feel like I’ll be dying at the right time,” I said — why, I didn’t know — as though that had been the thread we’d been following; not whether our dreams were worth remembering; or what it was like to be a Negro in apartheid Haddam and have high-strung, overachieving parents for whom nothing could be normal. A squiggle of lower bowel pain made me squirm, then went its way.

“Are you dying now?” Ms. Pines looked concerned, and impatient — in case I was.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I was thinking yesterday about all the animal species that were on the planet when I was born and that are still around. Pretty soon they won’t be. It’s probably a good time to be checking out.”

Ms. Pines seemed puzzled. Who wouldn’t be? We’d been on the brink of a revelation. Possibly dramatic. Clearly she wanted to get back to it. She was operating on strong imperative now. Unlike me. “I…” she started to say, then stopped and shook her head, on which was perched her Christmas tam, which she’d forgotten about and that made her look ever-so-slightly elfin, but still dignified.

“I have dream conversations with my son Ralph,” I said. “He died in ’79. He’s forty-three in my dreams and a stockbroker. He gives me investment advice. I enjoy thinking it could be true.”

Ms. Pines just began, without responding. “My father, when we lived here, Mr. Bascombe, became distrustful. And very insular. He’d advanced at Bell by honest effort and genius. But it didn’t, somehow, make him very happy. His parents lived over a few blocks on Clio. But we never saw them. He hardly ever went out in his yard. Which made my mother more restless and unhappy than she already was. She believed she belonged onstage at the Metropolitan, and marrying my father had been a serious miscalculation. Though I believe she loved him. She had my brother, Ellis, and me to bring up, though. So she was trapped here.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said. Though it didn’t sound like anything white people on every block in Haddam didn’t have a patent on. We’re always environed by ourselves.

“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “Ellis and I didn’t know how bad it had become. We were quite happy children. Ellis didn’t prosper in school, but had a lovely singing voice, which made our mother dote on him. I did very well in school, which pleased my father. In that way it wasn’t so unusual for any American family.”

“I was thinking that,” I said. “Sounds like a story in The New Yorker.”

Ms. Pines looked at me with incomprehension. I was suddenly one of the in-limbo underachievers in Wall Township, who’d just made an inappropriate joke about the Compromise of 1850 and needed to be ignored.

“I’m not sure you need to hear this, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said. “I don’t require to tell it. I’m happy just to leave. You’ve been more than kind. It’s not a happy story.”

“You’re alive to tell it,” I said. “You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.

“I’ve wanted to believe that,” Ms. Pines said. “It’s the history teacher’s bedrock. The preparation for bad times.”

History’s just somebody else’s War and Peace, is what I thought. Though there was no reason to argue it. I smiled at her encouragingly.

Diaphanous mist rose off the scabby snow outside the window, making my yard look derelict and un-pretty. The house gave a creaking noise of age and settlement. A spear of pure, rarefied mid-December sunlight illuminated a square on the hickory trunk in the neighbors’ yard across the bamboo fence behind the potting shed the hurricane had damaged — the D’Urbervilles, a joint-practice lawyer couple. It could’ve been April, with balmy summer in pursuit, instead of the achy, cold days of January approaching. The inspector crows had disappeared.

Ms. Pines sniffed out toward the yard. “Well,” she said crisply. “I’ll make it brief.” (Why did I say I wanted to hear it? Had I meant that? Had I even said it? Something was making me suffer second thoughts — the hopeful ray of sunlight, a signal to leave well enough alone.) “My mother, you understand, was very unhappy,” Ms. Pines said, “in this very house, where we’re sitting. Our father drove out to Bell Laboratories each day. He was working on important projects and being appreciated and admired. But then he was coming home and feeling alienated. Why, we’ll never know. But at some point in the fall of 1969, our mother inaugurated a relationship of a common kind with the choral music teacher at Haddam High, who’d been providing Ellis private voice instruction.” Ms. Pines cleared her throat, as if something had made her shudder. “Ellis and I knew nothing about the relationship. Not a clue. But after Thanksgiving, my father and mother began to argue. And we heard things that let us know some of the coarser details. Which were very upsetting.”

“Yep,” I said. Still… nothing new under these stars.

“Then shortly after, my father moved down into the basement and out of their room upstairs.” Ms. Pines paused and turned her gaze around toward the hallway and the basement door. “He went right down those steps — he was a large, well-built man.” With her un-injured arm she gestured toward there, as if she could see her father clumping his way down. (I, of course, pictured Paul Robeson.) “He’d converted the basement into his workshop. He brought his instruments and testing gauges and computer prototypes. He’d turned it into a private laboratory. I think he hoped to invent something he could patent, and become wealthy. My brother and I were often brought down for demonstrations. He was a very clever man.”

I realized for the first time this was how and when the basement came to be “finished”—a secondary value-consideration for resale; and also a bit of choice suburban archaeology, plus a good story for an as-told-to project — like the Underground Railroad stopping in your house.

“He’d put a cot down there,” Ms. Pines said, “where he’d occasionally take naps. So, when he moved there, following Thanksgiving, it wasn’t all that unusual. He was still in the house — though we ate with our mother and he, I think, ate his meals in town at a restaurant, and left in the mornings while my brother and I were getting up. School was out for Christmas by then. Things had become very strained.”

“This feels like it’s heading for a climax,” I said, almost, but not quite, eagerly. It wasn’t going to be a barrel o’ laughs climax, I guessed. Ms. Pines had said so already.

“Yes,” Ms. Pines said. “There is a climax.” She raised the orangish fingertips of her un-injured hand up to her shining, rounded cheeks and touched the skin there, as if her presence needed certifying. A gesture of dismay. I could smell the skin softener she used. “What do you hope for, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines looked directly at me, blinking her dark eyes to invoke seriousness. Things had worked their way around to me. Possibly I was about to be assigned accountability for something.

“Well, I try not to hope for too much,” I said. “It puts pressure on the future at my age. If you know what I mean. Sometimes a hope’ll slip in when I’m not paying attention.” I tried a conspiratorial smile. My best. “… That I’ll die before my wife does, for instance. Or something about my kids. It’s pretty indistinct.”

“I hoped that about my husband,” Ms. Pines said. “But then we divorced, and I wasn’t always sure. And then he died.”

“I’m divorced,” I agreed. “I know about that.”

“It’s not always clear when your heart’s broken, is it?”

“It’s a lot clearer when it’s not.”

Ms. Pines turned and unexpectedly looked both ways around her, as if she’d heard something — her name spoken, someone entering the room behind us. “I’ve over-worked your hospitality, Mr. Bascombe.” She looked at me fleetingly, then past, out the sliding-door windows at the misty snow. She frowned at nothing I could see. Her body seemed to be about to rise.

“You haven’t,” I said. “It’s only eleven thirty.” I consulted my watch, though I eerily always know what time it is — as if a clock was ticking inside me, which it may be. “You haven’t told me the climax. Unless you don’t want me to know.”

“I’m not sure you should,” Ms. Pines said, returning her gaze solemnly to rest on me. “It could alienate you from your house.”

“I sold real estate for twenty years,” I said. “Houses aren’t that sacred to me. I sold this one twice before I bought it myself.” (In arrears from the bank.) “Somebody else’ll own it someday and tear it down.” (And build a shitty condo.)

“We seem to need to know everything, don’t we?”

“You’re the history teacher,” I said. Though of course I was violating the belief-tenet on which I’ve staked much of my life: better not to know many things. Full disclosure is the myth of the fretting classes. Those who ignore history are no more likely to repeat it than anyone else but are more likely to feel better about many things. Though, so determined was I to engage in an inter-racial substance-exchange, I clean forgot. It wouldn’t have been racist, would it, to let Ms. Pines leave? President Obama would’ve understood.

“Well. Yes, I certainly am,” Ms. Pines said, composing herself again. “So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1969…” (neuropsychically, a spiritual dead zone, when suicides abound like meteor showers) “… something disrupting apparently took place between our parents. I possibly could have found out what. But I was young and simply didn’t. My brother and I didn’t talk about it. It could have been that our mother told our father she was leaving him and going away with the music teacher. Mr. Senlak. I don’t know. It could have been something else. My mother could be very dramatic. She could have said some wounding and irretrievable thing. Matters had gotten bad.”

For the first time since Ms. Pines had been in my house, I could feature the lot of them — all four Pines — breathing in these rooms, climbing the stairs, trading in and out the single humid bathroom, congregating in what was then the “dining room,” talking over school matters, eating PB&J’s, all of them satellites of one another in empty space, trying, trying, trying to portray a cohesive, prototype, mixed-race family unit, and not succeeding. It would do any of us good to contemplate the house we live in being peopled by imperfect predecessors. It would encourage empathy and offer — when there’s nothing left to want in life — perspective.

Somehow I knew, though, by the orderly, semireluctant way Ms. Pines was advancing to what she meant to tell, that I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear, but would then have to know forever. My brain right away began sprinting ahead, rehearsing it all to Sally, an agog-shocked look on her face — all before I even knew what it was! I wanted to wind it back to the point, only moments before, at which Ms. Pines looked all around her, as if she’d heard ghostly old Hartwick pounding up the stairs from the basement with bad intentions filling his capacious brain. I could lead her to the front door and down to the snowy street, busted wrist and all; let her go back to where she’d come from — Gulick Road. Lavallette. If in fact she wasn’t a figment—my personal-private phantasm for wrongs I’d committed, never atoned for, and now had to pay off. Am I the only human who occasionally thinks that he’s dreaming? I think it more and more.

I badly wanted to say something; slow the onward march of words; win some time to think. Though all I said was, “I hope he didn’t do something terrible.” Hope. There, I’d hoped something.

“He wasn’t a terrible man, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said meditatively. “He was exceptional. I have his coloring. And she was a perfectly good person in her own way, as well. Not as good or exceptional as he was. As I said, he was like a wonderful idea, but labored under that delusion. So. When life turned un-wonderful, he didn’t know what to do. That’s my view, anyway.”

“Maybe he didn’t tolerate ambiguity well.”

“His life was a losing war against ambiguity. He knew that about himself and hated it. The essence of all history is contingency, isn’t it? But it’s true of science, too.”

“So did they have a terrible fight and everything got ruined? And it all happened in these rooms?” (In other words the way white suburbanites work things out?)

“No,” Ms. Pines said calmly. “My father killed my mother. And he killed my brother, Ellis. Then he sat down in the living room and waited for me to come home from debate club practice — which we were having through the Christmas holidays. Debating the viability of the UN. He was waiting to kill me, too. But I was late getting home. He must’ve had time to think about what he’d done and how ghastly it all was. Being in this house with two dead loved ones. He took them down to the basement after they were dead. And either he became impatient or extremely despondent. I’ll never know. But at around six he went back down there and shot himself.”

“Did you come home and find them?” Hoping not, not, not. I was full of hope now.

“No,” Ms. Pines said. “I would never have survived that. I would’ve had to be committed. The neighbor next door heard the two earlier gun reports and almost called the police. But when he heard another report an hour on, he did call them. Someone came to the school for me. I never actually saw any of them. I wasn’t permitted to.”

“Who took care of you? How old were you?”

“About to turn seventeen,” Ms. Pines said. “I went to stay with the debate-club sponsor that night. And after that my father’s relatives came into the picture — though not for very long. They didn’t know me or what to do with me. The school, Haddam High School — the guidance counselors and the principal and two of my teachers — made a special plea on my behalf to be admitted midyear to the Cromwell-Aimes Academy in Maynooth, New Hampshire. A local donor was found. I was made a ward of our debate-club sponsor and lived with her family until I started Barnard. Which saved my life. These are the people I’m staying with. Their children.”

Ms. Pines lowered her soft chin and stared at her lap, where her un-injured hand held her injured one in its grasp. Her green tam held its perch. A thin aroma of Old Rose escaped from somewhere. I heard her breathe, then emit a sorrowing sigh. Her posture was of someone expecting a blow. (Where was I when all this mayhem transpired? Happy on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, as worry-free as a guppy, high on the town every night, in love-and-lust with a canny, big-boned, skeptical Michigan girl, and trying my hand at the “longer form” for which I had no talent. Living the life of the not-yet-wounded. Though why didn’t I finally hear about all this? I was a realtor. Towns keep secrets.)

“Does it seem beneficial to come back now?” I am muted, grief counselor-ish, skipping over twelve consolatory, contradictorily inadequate expressions of what? Empathy more complex than words can muster? Grief more dense than hearts can bear? I’ve never sought the services of a grief counselor. A dwindling group of us still holds out. Though from Sally I know what the basic mission entails: first — avoidance of the plumb-dumb obvious; second — the utterance of one intelligent statement per five-minute interval; third — simple patience. It’s not that difficult to counsel the grieving. I could’ve said, “Roosevelt was a far better choice than Willkie back in ’40.” Which would be as grief neutralizing as “What a friend we have in Jesus,” or “Mercy, I can’t tell you how bad I feel about your loss.”

But was it actual grief? The spectacle-grim-oddness of the whole bewilderment might require an entirely new emotion — a fresh phylum of feeling, matched by a new species of lingo.

“Yes, I think it is,” Ms. Pines said softly, relative to my house and being in it and its helping. “I was never allowed back as a girl. I left for debate club that day, then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don’t think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So, yes. It’s revealing to come here. Thank you.” Ms. Pines smiled at me almost grudgingly. This was the grainy, human, non-race-based contact our President has in mind for us. Too bad the collateral damage has to be so high.

I knew Ms. Pines was now searching for departing words. She was too savvy to deal off the “c” card — abominable closure. She was seeking she knew not what, and would know she’d found it, only afterward. If she could’ve framed a question for me, it would’ve been the age-old one: What should I now do? How should I go on with the rest of my life now that I’ve experienced all this? Natural disaster is adept at provoking that very question. Though why ask me? Of course she hadn’t.

“Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines was heard to “say,” having recovered from the brief séance she’d induced in herself, in my house, in me. She was ready to go — spryly up and out of her café chair, big patent purse swagged in her un-injured hand, a flattening-neatening pat given to secure her tam. She looked down to her green suit front, as if it might’ve been littered with something. I wasn’t at all ready for her to leave. There could be more to say, some of it never said before. How often does that happen? Still, I jumped up and grabbed her coat. She’d performed and received what she came for, relegated as much of her burden as possible to the house. And to me. Su casa es mi casa.

“Many times I thought of killing myself, Mr. Bascombe. Very many. I wasn’t brave enough. That’s how it felt.” She turned and let me help her coat on, careful with her hurricane-damaged wrist. I handed over her gloves. “Maybe I had something else yet to do.”

“You did,” I said. “You do.”

“Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines said.

Another zephyr of Old Rose passed my nostrils. I patted her cashmere shoulder the way you’d pat a pony. She acknowledged me with a confident look — the way a pony might. It’s a solid gain to experience significant life events for which no words or obvious gestures apply. Awkward silence can be perfect. The whisper of the gods, Emerson says.

“I read, Mr. Bascombe — I think it was in Time…” Ms. Pines was leading me toward my front door, past the murderous basement, as if she’d neutralized it. “It said there’s a rise in world corruption now. Everyone’s taking bribes. Narcissism’s on the increase. We’re twenty-third in happiness in America. Bhutan is first, apparently. Somebody said there’s been a systematic extermination of joy in the United States.” Her green-topped head was bobbing in front of me. I couldn’t see her pretty face. “Isn’t that something?”

“I read that.” I had. “It was some gloomy Eastern European in a smelly suit. Those guys don’t like anything.”

“Exactly.” Ms. Pines turned to me, restored to who she’d been, possibly better. She smiled — confident, self-aware — and extended her small, chestnut hand for me to shake. I gently did.

Out through my front door’s sidelights, where there was no longer snow falling, I glimpsed across Wilson Lane the Bitticks’ frosted front lawn. A short, round white woman in a quilted coat and quilted boots was hammering a GOOD BUY REALTY “FOR SALE — NEW PRICE” sign into the stiff grass — the equivalent of a buzzard landing in your yard. Fresh realities had dawned there, a grainier view of the situation (bank push-back, almost certainly). Mack had taken down his Romney-Ryan poster, just today, and struck his flag. New neighbors would be arriving (a Democrat, if I had a choice; married, no kids, earnest souls I’d be happy to wave to on my morning trip out for the paper, but not much more. I ask less of where I live than I used to).

“Do you find it hard to be here, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said as I opened the front door for her. The air space between the storm and the coffered oak door was still and chilly. “You lived in Haddam prior to now, I know. I know some things about you. I kept up with who subsequent owners were, after we left. It’s what I could do.”

The round woman driving the GOOD BUY sign into the Bitticks’ yard stopped and looked our way: two people, a man and a woman, talking about… what? A new job as a housekeeper? An FBI reference check on a neighbor in line for a government job? Not a family tragedy of epic proportion, requiring years to face, impossible to reconcile, with much left to accomplish and not much time to do it.

“No,” I said. “It’s been the easiest thing in the world. Most everyone I knew from before is gone or dead. I don’t make much of an impression on things now — which is satisfying. We just have so much chance to make an impression. It seems fair. It’s the new normal.” I smiled a smile I hoped would be one of mutual understanding — what I hadn’t had words for before, but believed we felt together.

“All right,” Ms. Pines said. “That’s a good way to put it. I like the way you say things, Mr. Bascombe.”

“Call me Frank,” I said, again.

“All right, Frank, I will.”

She smiled and let herself out the storm door, took her careful steps down the still-icy steps and was gone.