Letting Go

1

At daybreak it was always snowing, and very late in the night too. Inside, snow blows against her bedroom window; outside, snow falls on my bleary lids; as I make a stab at navigating my car through a black antarctica to Fifty-fifth Street, snow nearly sends me up trees and down sewers. At home it pings off my own window — time ticking, here comes dawn again—as in my underwear and socks I dive into the disheveled bed, gather about me my rumpled sheets, and go sailing off after sleep. How my body remembers that winter. It was always tired, poor soul, and outside — beyond what body can and cannot change, where body promises nothing, annihilates no one — it was always snowing.

The motor thumped under me, the heater whirred; I shot nose drops up to my sinuses (I saw the cavities of my head thick with a kind of London fog), but they only burned their way down to my raw throat. The body has no loyalty — bank it with pleasure and draw out disease. Parked across from the Hawaiian House, waiting for Martha to finish work, I was getting the common cold.

My watch showed one minute after one; then two after. I had a fevered fantasy of the hands on my watch advancing toward morning, and the temperature plummeting down and down, until by daybreak Chicago would simply have cracked in two, one half to tumble in the lake, the other to be blown westward, across endless prairies and mountains, until it dropped over into the Pacific and melted away to nothing. I was dying for spring, for warmth; the weather and my pleasures were out of joint.

Three after one. Still no Martha. Mr. Spicer, the manager of the Hawaiian House, appeared in his overcoat and hat, carrying his moneybags. The police, who waited each night to take him to the deposit box, opened the door to the squad car and Spicer stepped in. A chill ran over me; I sneezed once, and then again. My head rolled down and I half slept. Mrs. Silberman was knitting a gigantic sweater for me. A workman in overalls and tennis shoes was building a box with black windows; he was my father; the box was for me to sit in.

“Hey, open up.”

On the sidewalk was Martha, and someone else — a girl bundled in a coat and hat, whose face I couldn’t see. “Let us in,” Martha called. The air that rushed in with them penetrated my coat and moved right down to the bone.

Martha inclined her face toward me and we brushed cheeks. “Can you give Theresa a ride? Theresa, come on, this is Gabe. Can we drive her to the El, she’s not feeling too fit. Theresa, close the door.”

“Thank yuh.”

“Don’t worry about those books,” I said, turning to get a look at her, “just push everything aside.”

“I hardly need …” She blew her nose. Halfway to the El, she began to sob. Martha touched my leg, but she needn’t have, for I was in no mood anyway to ask questions.

When we got to the train, Martha turned on her knees and faced the back seat. “Everything will be all right. Just try to get some sleep.”

“I knew it,” the girl wept. “I just knew it.”

We waited until Theresa had walked up the stairway to the train and disappeared, and then I drove off.

“Poor dumb cluck,” Martha said.

“Martha, I’m going to take you home. I’m going home myself—” She wasn’t listening, however, and I didn’t feel I had the strength to repeat myself.

“The poor jerk got herself pregnant.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m going to collapse of exhaustion myself. I’m taking you home, then I’m going back to my place.”

“Oh yes?”

“I’m a dying man, sweetheart. Honestly, I’m dead.” She didn’t answer. “You come tomorrow,” I said, “to my place. Doesn’t Annie LaSmith come tomorrow?”

“I promised Markie I’d take him to buy a Christmas tree tomorrow.”

“Let Annie stay with him — you can come—”

“I promised him.”

“Okay. I’m just too dead tonight.”

In front of her building I did not even turn off the motor.

“All day I’ve been saying to myself: tonight I am going to have illicit relations with Gabriel Wallach.”

“That makes me very proud,” I said, “but my throat feels as though it’s been ripped open.”

“I had Abercrombie’s deliver a new set of whips and thumbscrews.”

“Martha, every night you roll over and go to sleep. Every night I have to go out into this weather and drive home and try to get a few hours sleep—”

She was whistling; nothing like eight hours of work to pep her up.

“I’ve got two classes to teach in the morning,” I said. “I just haven’t the strength.”

“I’m not asking you to lift weights, poor baby.”

I kissed her, and she said, “Come up for just an hour.”

“But my body fails me …”

She took my hand and touched it to her cheek. “Why don’t you just leave everything to me,” she said.

“Oh sweet Martha—”

“Why don’t you just come with me, all right?”

“You sound like a tart, baby.”

“See? Already you’re stimulating your imagination. Come.”

So I followed her up the stairs; before she placed the key in the lock, she turned and put her hand on me.

“Oh,” she said, “that’s so nice and sweet.”

“Martha, I’ve got to tell you that it’s got no more wind in it than a choir boy’s. It’s spiritless, it’s humbled and limp—”

“It’s sweet humbled and limp.”

I went into her bedroom and she continued down the hall to the children’s room, where she turned off the night lamp. I heard her close the door leading to Sissy’s room. Sitting on the blanket in the dark, the feel of the quilt and the sheets and the mattress under my hands filled me with awe. I waited, and then I was sinking, and then, I suppose, I was out.

When my eyes opened, it took me several minutes to see who was moving in the dark. Beneath me and above me I felt the clean white sheets I had so desired; someone had even been kind enough to remove my clothes. I raised my head a little and saw Martha by the window; she had one foot on a stool, and was bending forward, pulling down her stockings; the way in which her breasts hung from her body sent through my mind thoughts of flowers, mermaids, cows, things female. But I did not want to possess Martha or a nasturtium or a Guernsey; I wanted only sleep.

Martha’s hands were on the flesh of her hips; they ran down over her stomach and were touching her thighs. She was looking toward me in the bed, and it was as though I were waiting for some decision of hers. Even the furniture in the bedroom seemed altered, because between us something seemed to be being altered. Since Thanksgiving I had done the wooing, I had done the undressing, the caressing, and on the hard and serious work we had both pitched in. We had been dogged and conventional, we had proceeded step by step, until we had both clutched, and hung on, and then fallen away into sleep. To please one another we had had to do nothing at the expense of our own separate pleasures; we had been uncompromising and we had been lucky.

But now Martha stood by the window looking toward me for what seemed a very long time, pronouncing words I could not make out, and I was overcome with exhaustion; though I reached up to her, saying I would have to go, I don’t think my head ever left the bed. I dropped away, beyond hallucination or dream, and when I did rise up, it was never to regain power or lucidity; I was simply there, and Martha’s hair was down across my legs. I raised my head — such a feather, such a weight — and I saw her hands, saw her face, possessing me miles and miles away.

“Oh Gabe,” she said, “my Gabe—”

I left her there alone, just lips, just hands, and was consumed not in sensation, but in a limpness so total and blinding, that I was no more than a wire of consciousness stretched across a void. Martha’s hair came raking up over me; she moved over my chest, my face, and I saw her now, her jaw set, her eyes demanding, and beneath my numb exterior, I was tickled by something slatternly, some slovenliness in the heavy form that pinned me down. I reached out for it, to touch the slovenliness—

“Just lie still,” I heard her say, “don’t touch, just still—”

She showed neither mercy then, nor tenderness, nor softness, nothing she had ever shown before; and yet, dull as I was, cut off in my tent of fever and fatigue, I felt a strange and separate pleasure. I felt cared for, labored over; I felt used. Above, she was me now, and below I was her, and however I fell away from consciousness, or floated up toward light, always, beating on me, was Martha. Beating, beating, and then rising up and away, and wordlessly calling back of her delight.

Everything is right.

What I remember of that night are those three words. Out of proportion sometimes, sometimes not in sequence, but those three words bubbling through me; what I remember is my sense that a rhythm in my life was being realized, and a rhythm in Martha’s too. I remember — as night went on and morning came — a greed of hers that went beyond pleasure, and on my part what I remember is the abdication of all will. For a while perhaps she was me and I her, but at some point that morning all distinctions belonged to another world. We were sexless as any tree or rock, liquid and unencumbered as a stream or a spring — and yet so connected one to the other that when I pumped within her, plunging into a final dizzying exhaustion, I might have been some inner organ of her own. Man woman mother child — all distinction melted away.

Later a bell rang. When I opened my eyes, Martha was at the side of the bed, wrapping herself in a robe. Outside the darkness was just beginning to lift. I knew I had to leave, that it was time again; but it was Martha who left the room, and I let myself float backwards.

Martha was pushing at me. “Gabe, Gabe—”

But I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t pull myself up. Martha moved into bed beside me. “Gabe,” she said softly.

And then there was a knock at the bedroom door. Martha jumped up in bed, and the door opened. Limp as I was, I went even limper.

But the face in the doorway was not a child’s. It was the battered face of an old Negro woman, and she was moving into the room with a cup and a saucer. “Here’s your coffee, darlin’—” she began.

Then she saw me. “Oh,” she said. I had been edging the sheet up around my chin, and now I lowered it an inch and, infirmly, smiled. The woman took three big strides forward and placed the cup down on the night table. When she turned and left, I tried to push out of bed, but it was as though I’d been worked on by a carpenter during the night; hammers, chisels, planes, and screwdrivers all seemed to have had a go at my body.

“I’m sick as a dog,” I said.

She was sitting beside me; I couldn’t see her face, for it was resting in her hands. “Are you?” she asked drily.

I leaned up on one elbow. “I’ll go,” I volunteered, and then my body just gave out, and I was flat on my back. “I can’t seem to do it, Martha. I feel rotten. I can’t move.”

I listened to the snow hitting the window, and then someone knocked again on our door. “Cynthia—” Martha hissed; following a traditional impulse, I dove for the covers.

But it wasn’t Cynthia at all. Annie LaSmith was in the doorway again. She came directly into the room and set a second cup of coffee down on the table beside Martha’s. “Here,” she said. “For him.”

Martha chose not to reply; I was feigning sleep, and Annie slipped out, closing the door behind her.

“I think—” Martha began, as I crawled up from the sheet “—I really think—” but she couldn’t speak for laughing.

Nor could I; tears were running down my face as I said, “I — better — go—”

“No,” she said; she held my head between her hands and we looked one another right in the eye. “You’re burning up—”

“I better—”

“We have to please shhhh! We have to stop making — please, make me stop—laughing—”

“I — didn’t even thank her—” I said, and Martha pushed her face into my chest and kept it there until, at last, she seemed able to control herself.

“You can’t go,” she whispered. “You’re practically on fire.”

“Martha—”

“Please”—she began to giggle again—“go to sleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven — quarter to seven. Do you think Annie put something in your coffee? Oh, God, I can’t stop—just go to sleep—”

I wanted to ask some questions about Annie LaSmith — What the hell was she doing here in the middle of the night? — but I never had the chance. Martha was holding me and sporadically giggling, and then she was holding me and I was asleep.

Martha was gone when I awoke again, and so was her pillow. The clock said eight thirty-five — I had a class to teach in less than an hour. I made a move, but the bedroom door slowly opened, and I closed my eyes.

“He’s sleeping,” Markie said.

“Shhhh.”

“Is he going to stay all the time?” Mark asked.

“Just till he’s better.”

The next voice was that of Cynthia, the skeptic. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s sick. He was visiting, and he got very sick, so I let him stay here and sleep.”

“What’s he sick with?” the little girl asked.

“He’s sick,” Markie explained.

“I don’t know,” Martha said. “We’ll have to call the doctor.”

“He doesn’t look sick,” Cynthia said.

“But he is, sweetheart.”

“He doesn’t look it.”

“Does he have a temperature?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know, love-dove. We’ll have to call the doctor and find out.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t,” Cynthia said.

“I’ll bet he does,” said Martha. “You have to go to school, Cyn. Let’s go.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t have a temperature though.”

“Cynthia, what’s eating you? Go put your galoshes on.”

“It’s a waste of money to have the doctor if you don’t even have a temperature,” Cynthia said.

“He’ll pay for his own doctor. You don’t have to worry about money.”

“Well,” said Cynthia, “he doesn’t look like he has a temperature.”

“Don’t you believe he’s sick, Cynthia? Do you think I’m telling you a lie?”

No answer.

“Is he, Mommie?” Mark asked.

A moment followed in which I could not tell what was happening. To open my eyes, I felt, would have made Martha look like a liar. “Shhhh,” I heard Martha whisper; then I heard feet moving across the floor.

A small hand was on my forehead.

Then another, even smaller.

The footsteps retreated, and once again I slept.

The rest of that day is bits and pieces.

Dr. Slimmer hovers over me. Temperature of 103. He leers. He gives me a shot. Martha pays. “Here’s for your wife’s mink, here’s for your kids’ summer camp, here’s for gas for your Thunderbird—” “If you had a bad experience with doctors as a child, Martha, don’t take it out on me.” “—living off widows and children, you’re a living argument for socialized medicine, Dr. Slimmer.” “I have to run, I’m double-parked—”

Beyond my door, sometime during the afternoon: “You’re a woman of the world, Annie — you understand. Okay?” “What you and Mr. Reganhart do is your business, darlin’.” “That a girl, Annie.”

Later. “Sissy — lower that damn thing! Somebody’s sick!” Later. “No, honey, you can’t see him sleep. He has a communicable disease. You can see him tomorrow.” “What disease?” asks Markie. “A bad bad cold.” “Oh,” moans Cynthia, “is that all? A cold?” “It’s serious, Cynthia—” “Did Daddy call this morning?” “Cynthia, it was the plumber, the man to fix the washing machine. I swear to you it was the plumber! Daddy’s back in New Mexico, sweetheart, Arizona.” “He’s in New York.” “Oh Cynthia, why are you so obstinate! We haven’t seen your Daddy for years — what’s this Daddy business? Oh baby, don’t cry, oh sweet baby, I’m so sorry—” “And keep your dirty hands off my doll!” the child wails, running off.

Later. A small hand on my forehead.

“You better not get caught in here, Markie,” I say, opening my eyes. “I’ve got a communicable disease.”

“Who?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mark.”

“Okay.”

Later still.

“How do you feel?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s four-thirty. I’m going to work. Are you hungry?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Look, take these pills. Try to take them every four hours.”

“Martha, is everything all right? Is everything, you know, okay?”

“You’ve slept through one hell of a day.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been—”

“Shhhh. Be sorry when you get better.” She smoothed back my hair. “I just told my roomer to clear out. So I’m feeling a hundred percent better.”

“Martha …”

“It’s all right. It’s not just you. I’ve got claims on a private life. I’m twenty-six years old. I don’t like other people’s moldy old sausages stinking up my refrigerator. I don’t need anyone peeking over my shoulder, that’s all. Good night, sick baby.”

“Good night. Thank you.”

“Here’s a radio. Cynthia can make bouillon. I told her you might want some.”

“Good night.”

And then, when it was dark outside, Cynthia. One of the frilly shoulder straps on her yellow nightgown had slipped down, but she seemed unaware of it. She was staring at me, which led me to believe she had been in the doorway some time.

“Good evening,” I said. “It’s snowing again, isn’t it?”

“Do you need any bouillon? I’m going to sleep.”

“As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind some.”

She turned and left; in only a few seconds she was back. “I don’t know how I’m going to get it over there. I’m not supposed to come near you.”

“Tie a handkerchief around your mouth and hold your breath, and sort of slip it onto the night table, all right?”

Cynthia went off to the kitchen, and I sat up in bed. There was a murky cup of coffee on the night table; after testing it with a finger and finding it cold, I remembered how it had gotten there. I took one of my pills, and then stuck the thermometer in my mouth and settled back onto the pillows. From the bed I could look directly at the huge circus picture that Cynthia had drawn in school, and which Martha, only a week before, had had framed. It was a gay picture — although a little painstakingly crayoned — of clowns and cages and balloons and pink-faced children holding their fathers’ hands; every child was connected to every other child by a parent. It made me feel that I had just lived through a very happy day. All that had happened seemed to have followed inevitably from the night before. Our lovemaking and my illness, Martha’s passion and her calling the doctor — it all seemed like one event.

Cynthia appeared in the doorway; one of her mother’s fancy handkerchiefs was folded in a triangle and tied bandit-fashion around her face, an eighth of an inch below her eyes. To get the cup of bouillon from the doorway to the night table took a full minute of breathless balancing.

I removed the thermometer from my mouth. “Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” and she fled to the hallway.

“Cynthia?”

“Yes?” She turned just her head.

“Cynthia … Don’t you want to hear if I have a temperature or not?” It was not the child’s fault, of course, that she had had her juices set for her father just when I happened to come along. I had certainly been willing till now to let her take whatever attitude she chose toward me. But softened by my condition, feeling as kind as I felt weak, and suddenly lonely too, I wanted Cynthia’s suspiciousness to disappear. I wanted her to fit into the orderly world of my illness.

“Well,” I said, “it’s almost a hundred and two. It’s not good, but it’s better.”

Masked as she was, I couldn’t make out her expression. She put in an obedient thirty seconds, then cleared her throat and told me, “I once had a hundred five.”

“Yes?”

“Markie once had a hundred three.”

“Cynthia, let’s be friends, all right?”

“I’m friends,” she said, and, shrugging her shoulders, went off to bed.

I was still sipping bouillon when Sissy came home. She went past my door, and then came back and stuck her head in.

“Wha—?” she said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I thought you said something.” She leaned against the door, a trench coat covering her white hospital uniform. “I’m sorry, you know,” she said. “I wish you’d tell her I’m sorry.”

“What?” I said. The only opinions I had of the girl were those I had inherited from Martha.

“That I’m sorry.”

“Sissy, I don’t know what you’re sorry about. I really don’t.” Sissy’s appearance, my confrontation with Cynthia, and the effort of drinking the bouillon combined all at once to make me intensely fatigued. But Sissy seemed to have no idea that the reason I had been in bed all day was because I wasn’t feeling well. I suppose working in a hospital produces a certain amount of insensitivity to suffering.

“Look, I didn’t mean anything,” said Sissy, settling in, “It’s her place.”

“Sis, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m supposed to move,” Sissy announced, looking hurt that I hadn’t known right off. I managed to recall now what Martha had told me way back in the morning.

“Well,” I said vaguely, “I’m sorry.”

“Some stupid thing I said I suppose. Like I don’t even remember and still I’ve got to move.”

“It must have been pretty awful.”

“It was an argument. I don’t see what I have to move about!”

“Sissy, you better not stay too long. Apparently I’ve got a communicable disease. I’m really not up to all these moral issues.”

“I mean she doesn’t have to jump down my throat!” And she left the room, seeing that I was no help.

And finally Martha, in her blue Hawaiian House uniform, sitting on the edge of my bed.

“Better?”

“I was … I don’t know how I am now.” I had been awakened by her presence in the room.

“You feel warm again.”

“You better watch out — you’ll catch it.”

“I’m a mother. I’m immune by law.”

“Yesterday,” I said, after a moment, “was my birthday.”

“Really?”

I had just thought of it. “I’ve just remembered,” I said, “that it was.”

“Happy birthday. Are you pulling my leg?”

“No.”

She lay down beside me, on top of the covers. “Only for a minute,” she said. “I’m sleeping with the Christmas tree. We bought a Christmas tree, Markie and I. It’s a birthday tree for you, how’s that? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been in a fog for about a week.”

“How old does it make you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Splendid.”

“Your daughter brought me bouillon. We had a little talk.”

“She’ll calm down,” Martha said. “She’ll get used to you.”

“Oh, she was fine.”

“Maybe you ought to go back to sleep.”

“Do you want to sleep with me?”

She smiled. “I’m sore, and you’ll die, and we’ll both have to be buried by Dr. Slimmer. But that was nice, Gabe, so … Gabe, was I selfish and aggressive and thoughtless?”

“No, you weren’t.”

“It’s a pleasure, you know, your being sick.”

“This is how people decide to become invalids. Everybody just appears in doorways with soup and kisses, and the rest of the time you daydream and sleep. Except very early in the mornings — what’s your maid doing here at dawn? She scared me nearly to death.”

“She says she likes to travel at five because that’s the only time the streets aren’t dangerous. Maybe she’s right. She’s actually not much more misguided than anybody else I know. Gabe? Gabe, I reached some conclusions today.”

“Yes?”

“No conclusions really, just a few simple truths. Just your staying — it’s so nice and different. It changes us. Going to sleep with a man and not waking up with him is really pretty frightening. It stinks. I’m not a kid any more.”

“I don’t know how much more of that four A.M. business I could have taken anyway. I think this fever may be some psychosomatic form of surrender. When I get better, we’ll have to work out some new system. There’s no law that people have to make love at night—”

“There isn’t, except it might not have been too genteel starting right off with afternoons. Honey, I’ve got a little boy running around all day.”

“Then,” I said wearily, “we’ll have to work out something. I don’t know.”

“Go to sleep now,” she said. “Don’t worry about strategy. Take a pill.”

I leaned toward Martha, for I wanted just to touch her.

“No, no, go to sleep … Gabe — listen, last night I said the hell with it. I said I had rights. I said this to myself. You make me feel I have rights. I do care for you. I won’t be like that again.”

“It wasn’t bad, Martha.” Then I said, “It was only strange.”

“I scared myself.”

“Oh, not so much,” I said, smiling. “Not so much.”

“A certain amount, yes.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“I’ve got to watch myself. I’m a mother of two.”

“Four. There’s Sissy and there’s me.”

“Sissy’s going.”

“She wants to stay. She came in and told me.”

“Did she take her clothes off, the little nudist?”

“What happened?”

“I told you. I came to see some simple truths.”

“She said she’d said something.”

“No, she just made some smart remark to the effect that if you could stay over why couldn’t Blair stay over, too. I just don’t think she should hang around any more. It isn’t even her, finally. It’s a roomer. This is my home, you know? Did your family have roomers?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, mine didn’t either. On top of everything else, it leaves me feeling déclassée.”

“Martha, I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“You’ll leave when you’re well.”

“I owe you for the doctor.”

“Twelve bucks, that son of a bitch.” She leaned over and kissed me. “Happy birthday. Go to sleep.”

I was moved by her, almost to tears. “Martha, you’re a generous, competent, warm-blooded, splendid girl.”

“Now if I wasn’t déclassée I’d be perfect.”

“I hope you realize that this sickness is a tribute to you.”

“Oh yes,” she said, getting up and smoothing my blankets, “to me and our mutual loneliness—”

“That looks to be over.”

“We’ll see how wonderful everything is when your temperature goes down.”

“It’s never going down. I’m going to be fed bouillon by your daughter in her nightdress forever.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Come here, Martha dear, just one minute. Come on, dearie.”

“You’re going to die, you know. You’re going to keep this up and you’re going to die.”

However, I know I’m not going to die until I’m very old, and Martha trusted in my knowledge.

In the night the phone rang. I turned on the lamp beside the bed and looked out the window. It was four-thirty. There was not a sound in the apartment. Had I been dreaming? I dropped back into sleep, warm, protected, content.

But in the morning I knew who it was that I had been expecting to telephone. All the day before he had probably been ringing my apartment to wish me a happy birthday.

After Martha had brought me my breakfast, she plugged the phone in the bedroom, at my request. Then she started back into the kitchen, where Sissy, she told me, was crying for forgiveness. I could see she was on the verge of changing her mind about her boarder, and since I was myself preoccupied, we only touched hands, and then went about catching up on private business.

I asked the operator to give me the charges when the call was finished, and then waited to hear my father’s voice. We had not spoken with one another since Thanksgiving, and suddenly I had a premonition that he was sick, that in fact he was going to die.

Millie, our maid, answered.

“He’s gone away,” she told me.

“Where to, Millie? I didn’t know.”

“Grossinger’s,” she said, disapprovingly.

“He’s all right, isn’t he? He’s not sick, is he?”

“Oh, he’s all right.”

“What’s the matter, Millie?”

“Nothing.”

“Did Dr. Gruber go up with him?”

“Dr. Gruber, no.”

“Did she go with him, Millie?”

“I don’t know who went with him.”

“Okay, Millie. When will he be back? Christmas?”

“He told me not to expect them till after New Year’s.”

“I see … Okay, Millie. Look, you don’t have to stay around the apartment, you know. Get out, enjoy yourself. Go down to Macy’s, go look at all the windows. Fifth Avenue will be full of lights.”

“Hasn’t he sent you a card either?” she asked. “He used to go away, he used to send a picture post card. I suppose he has more important things on his mind.”

“I suppose so.”

After a moment she said, “It’s a damn shame.”

“All right, Millie, you just get out and enjoy yourself.”

“Happy birthday,” she said to me.

While I waited for the operator to ring back with the charges, the front door opened and I heard Sissy’s voice. “You can go to hell, Martha! You have no right!”

“I have every right and you watch your language.”

“You’re sexually immature—”

“Close the door, Sissy, you’re letting in a draft. Close it!”

“Who cares!” Sissy cried, and the door slammed after her.

The next thing, Cynthia was at the front door, sobbing.

“Come on, Cynthia, now stop it. You don’t want to go to school with red eyes, do you?”

“I don’t care. Where’s Sissy going?”

“She’s only moving, sweetheart. She’s going to go to a new apartment.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want her to move. I don’t want her to move away.”

“She has to … Now, come on—”

“Why?”

“Because it’s too crowded here.”

“Well then he’s going too, isn’t he?”

“Cynthia, when you’re a grown woman and there’s another grown woman around, and she’s single — Cynthia, it’s just the way it is. I’m a grown woman, my baby.”

“But I’m a child, though,” Cynthia said, weeping.

“Ohhhh, come on,” said Martha, gently, “you hardly know Sissy. You have other friends. You have Stephanie, you have Barbie, you have Markie, you have me—”

“I don’t want her moving away.”

“Cyn, you have to get ready now. You have to go to school. Come on, blow your nose.”

The child blew. “Will I ever see Blair again? Now where’s he going?”

“Of course you’ll see Blair again. You’ll see him in Hildreth’s.”

“He’ll go away, I know it!” For the second time that morning, the door slammed in Martha’s face.

Then it opened again. “Cynthia, be careful, there’s ice—”

“I know it,” the child called back.

It was a while before Martha came in to see me. I took a pill and drank the last of my coffee, and decided it was time to dress and drive myself home and be sick there. But when I started to get out of bed, my limbs just couldn’t do the job.

Martha appeared, wearing her coat, and I pretended not to notice the shape her eyes were in.

“I have to go shopping,” she said. “Do you want anything?”

“You know, I feel much better. I think perhaps at noon I’ll drive home.”

“Slimmer said stay in bed. You can’t go out in this weather; it’s snowing. It’s awful.”

“I can’t stay here forever.”

“Who’s talking about forever? You just can’t go out now.”

“Sissy doesn’t have to move, Martha, because I’m staying here.”

“Sissy has to move because I’m staying here. Please, don’t mind that scene. You shouldn’t be feeling guilty about anything,” she said, kissing my forehead. “I mean even the things you should be, you shouldn’t be. It’s a privilege of the shut-in.”

“But it has to do with me. I know it does.”

“You only precipitated what had to be. I should be thankful to you.”

“What about the rent?”

“What about it?”

“You told me Sissy helped with it.”

She made a gesture with her hands that I can only characterize as hopeless. “I’ll be all right.”

“Martha, I feel responsible,” I said. “I know I’m making Cynthia unhappy too.”

“You’re not making me unhappy! You’re not making little Markie unhappy. He’s out in the hall right now, just dying to take your temperature. Majority rules around here. Cynthia is going to have to start to learn the facts of life. Don’t worry about her — she’s going through a whining stage, that’s all. It’s only a battle of wills, and I can’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t be the winner. I’m twenty years older than she is, I earn the money around here, and I do the major part of the worrying, and she’ll be fine, just fine.”

“I don’t want you to feel obliged to me. I’m perfectly up to being sick alone.”

“You’re a liar too. Gabe, don’t we have some rights? It’s not killing anybody, is it, you being here? Dear heart, I’ve been a terribly, crushingly good girl. I’ve been a pain in the ass to half a dozen healthy, willing, attractive men. I’ve been so careful it’s coming out of my ears. And I was right to be, I’m not sorry a bit. But bringing Sissy in was a mistake — making love to you wasn’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“I feel my life is right side up again.” She let out a sigh then, which, in its way, thrilled me. “I’m really quite taken with you, old man.”

“I’m taken with you, Martha. But I don’t want you to start chucking people out, and so forth and so on, and becoming miserable …”

“I’m not miserable.”

“I’ll admit I’m not unhappy myself.”

“I didn’t think so,” she said, smiling.

“And now would you do me a favor, since I’ve set your life so straight? Would you stop by my apartment and see if there’s any mail?”

“Sure.”

“Take my car. The key is in my trousers. Why don’t you use the car? Otherwise the battery will go dead.”

It had been several years in the doing, but I had managed at last to pawn off that machine on someone.

After Martha left, Markie came in, carrying my thermometer as though it were a wand. I thanked him and he went into the living room where he said he was making Christmas cards.

I called Spigliano’s office and got the departmental secretary.

“They were wondering where you were,” she said accusingly.

“I’m sick, Mrs. Bamberger. I probably won’t be in until the end of the week. Is Mr. Spigliano in?”

“No. I’ll leave him the message.”

“Would you ask somebody to pick up the papers today from my nine-thirty class?”

“Mr. Herz is in the office — shall I ask him?” Without waiting for an answer, she left the phone.

Then she was back. “Mr. Herz says he’ll pick them up for you.”

“Thank you.”

“He says do you want him to drop them off at your apartment.”

“He can just leave them in my office.”

When I hung up — from a conversation that had struck me at first as only irritating — I felt strangely dependent upon Martha Reganhart. The strong attachment I had for her, I’d had almost from the very start; what was unsettling was that my needs seemed really to have begun to outdistance my feelings. And it occurred to me — a thought equally as unsettling — that she might herself be in a similar predicament. I wondered if our intimacy would have been so immediate, had it not been for the other circumstances of our lives. It seemed to me that we should try at least to slow things up a bit. I found myself hoping that when she returned she would be holding in her hand a picture post card of Grossinger’s indoor swimming pool, with the words Happy Birthday written across the back. But she returned with an armful of bundles for herself and only a bill from the phone company for me, and I had a morbid vision of my mother’s bones in the earth. Martha dumped all her gayly wrapped packages on the floor, and then because Markie was calling her, she flew out of the room to attend to his needs. And there in the bed, with no post card to read, I knew that both my father and I had been cut loose from the past.

“We going to have tuna?” Markie was asking.

“You had tuna yesterday,” Martha answered. “Didn’t Annie give you tuna?”

“I think eggs.”

“No, Mark. You had tuna yesterday. How about a grilled cheese?”

“I’m making something. Does he have a temperature?”

She came back into the room, unbuttoning her coat; her face was rosy from the winter air. “Markie wants to know if you have a temperature.”

“Only a degree and a half. How’s the weather?”

“It’s incredible. It’s ghastly. Your car has some kind of respiratory ailment. Bronchitis—”

“Wouldn’t it start?”

“Not willingly.”

“There was no other mail for me?”

“Uh-uh.” She began to pile her packages at the foot of the bed. “Presents,” she whispered. “I have to go down to the Loop this afternoon and finish up.”

“Look, why don’t you wait a few days? I’ll go with you.”

“I thought shopping bored men.”

“I might get something for Cynthia for Christmas.”

“She works in subtle ways, my daughter. Are you going to neglect poor sweet Markie? And me?”

“You and Markie ought to be comforted by having your way all the time.”

“Oh ought we?” She went over to the door. “I better close this. Mark?” she called. “Are you all right?”

“I’m making something,” he called back.

“Mommy’s right here.” She closed the door and came over to sit down on the edge of the bed. “Here,” she said, picking up one of the packages. “A nurse’s kit for Cynthia; she thinks Sissy is a nurse. And this is for Mark — clay. He has simple pleasures. And then these soldiers, and this little chicken.” She opened the lid of one of the unwrapped boxes. “Here, see? You spin this and the chicken comes out. Actually, I think I got it for myself. And then I got this book. For Cynthia.” She handed it to me. “What do you think? I want your honest opinion. She’s very old for her age.”

“What is it?”

“It’s kind of a beginner’s sex book.”

“Oh yes?”

“It’s supposed to explain everything. Well, take a look. It has little colored drawings of people’s insides, and of mother’s nursing little babies … Well, come on, Gabe, open it. Don’t kid around about this, please.”

It did indeed have little colored drawings of insides, and out-sides too. I flipped through, reading passages along the way.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Listen.” I read from page twenty-four a beginner’s description of the sex act.

“Well,” she said, “what do you think?”

“I don’t know. It may make her the most popular kid in school.”

“Does it strike you as too hot?”

I handed her the book. “Look.”

“What are they?”

“Testicles.”

“Hey, look, don’t you think it’s okay? Six different medical groups recommended it, thousands of psychiatrists — why can’t you think it’s okay? A few weeks ago she was walking around here talking about sexual organs. Yesterday in the co-op she began referring to these in a loud voice as my mammaries. Nice? She’s obviously getting information from somewhere.”

“Here. Look.”

She looked. “Oh Gabe, I don’t know. What should I do, store it away for five years? It’s recommended for kids from eight to eleven. Oh the hell with it.” She began wrapping it up again. “Even after she reads it she’ll get it all backwards anyway.”

“Actually, if you want to hear my personal preference—”

“Go ahead. What is it actually?”

“Actually I prefer kids referring to their po-pos rather than their outer labias. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.”

“You wouldn’t be so casual, jerk, if it was your little girl.”

“I wouldn’t be so nervous either.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You shouldn’t worry so much about her.”

“She’s so nutty about men—”

“She hasn’t shown herself to be particularly nutty over me.”

“She’s interested in you, don’t worry about that.”

“Martha, she’ll have a normal sex life, or abnormal, or subnormal, and this book and you—”

“I must be doing something to her. What does she think? Truly. Honestly.”

“She loves you.”

“You’re being evasive, please don’t.”

“Martha, she has a will like iron. You know that. And she’s intelligent and bright and pretty.”

“The combination sounds like death to me.”

“Well, if that’s so, what’s there to be done?”

“You really believe that, or are you being a polite lover?”

“You’re a good mother, Martha.”

“I’m a rotten crab. I lose my temper and I make them worry about money and, oh forget it — I don’t know. You think I’m all right, do you?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll be all right, all right, as soon as that Sissy gets out of here.”

I waited, and then I said, “And me.”

“I don’t want you to get out of here, Gabe, I really don’t.”

“I have to admit it, Martha — I don’t think I want to go.” I tried to say it playfully, but when she asked, “No?” I answered seriously, “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then stay sick, sweetheart. Run around the block and work up your fever. The thought of you lying here in bed, and me out shopping, it’s a real pleasure. I put the key in the door of your car and I felt like a big shot. I think to myself, if the phone rings, he’ll answer it. You know,” she said, “we crawled into bed too quickly, though. You know that, don’t you?”

“You do a lot of thinking while you shop.”

“You know it though?”

“I know it.”

“Okay,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what that establishes … but something. Look, I’m going to make Mark a grilled cheese sandwich. You too?”

“What are you going to do with this book?”

She turned at the door, and shrugged.

“It’s an imperfect world, Martha, but you didn’t make it.”

“But neither did Cynthia,” she said.

After lunch my temperature shot up, and Dr. Slimmer came to give me another shot of penicillin. We pushed him for a diagnosis of my case, but he took another twelve dollars, whispered some words about an X virus, and drove off in his Thunderbird.

“If he’d only say he didn’t know! Just once. Honest to God, I’m going to start packing for England.”

“Why don’t you get another doctor?”

“I can’t. I love that bastard. He makes me feel so right. You better go to sleep.”

“You too,” I said. “You look tired.”

“I’m tired, but I’m happy. I love feeding you, do you know that? I’d like really to fatten you up. You don’t happen to be losing your hair, do you?”

“Sorry.”

“Because that’s what I really go for, you know — nice bald old fat fellows with big sweet paunches and thick greasy beards.”

“It sounds to me,” I said, “as though you want to settle down.”

She gave me some fruit juice and I went to sleep; but just before I slipped off I had a vision of Markie napping in his crayoned bedroom, and Martha sleeping on the sofa beside the Christmas tree, and me in my own warm bed. What peace, under one roof.

Later in the afternoon Cynthia came home from school, drank her milk, and went off with Markie to the playground to build a snowman. I lay in bed, listening to the radio, and choosing from amongst those offered me only the most ancient of programs. I tuned in to the old ladies selling lumber yards, and to the young girls searching, with perfect enunciation, for the love of English lords, or, later in the day, brain surgeons with baritone voices and tweed coats. “Oh put on a smile, Mary — here comes that young Dr. Baxter in his tweed coat. Hi there, Doctor …” Yes, there harassing the air waves were those same luckless couples who had struggled through my childhood — for then too a radio had glowed beside my convalescent’s bed — and who turned out to be struggling still. And recovering from a minor ailment, I discovered — being waited upon with orange juice and aspirin, starting books and feeling no cultural obligation to finish them, reading in today’s newspaper what the temperature had been the day before in all the major cities of the world, pouring over the woman’s page and racing results with little foothold in either world — it was all as cocoonish and heartwarming on the south side of Chicago as it had been fifteen years before on the west side of New York.

At dusk, I smelled dinner being prepared in the kitchen. Martha stuck her head in to ask if I was all right, and she must have understood precisely the kind of pleasure I was lolling in. I heard the back door open and close and after five minutes had passed, I heard it swing open again. When she came into my room, she dumped a stack of glossy magazines at the foot of the bed.

“Go ahead,” she told me, “stuff yourself. Mrs. Fletcher says she’s through, I can keep them.”

“What is it?”

“Golden Screen, Movieland, Star World, everything.”

“God bless you, Mrs. Fletcher. How did she know?”

“I managed to convey the expression on your face. How is it up there in Pig Heaven?”

“I love it. Come here.”

“I’m making dinner.”

“Come here. Just for a minute.”

Recuperation! Convalescence! Long live minor ailments! Long live Pig Heaven!

When it was nearly dark outside, the children returned from the playground. My dinner was brought to me on a tray, and in the kitchen I could hear the others eating.

“Mother, he’s swallowing without chewing.”

“Chew first, Markie. You’ll get a pain.”

“I have a pain.”

“No he doesn’t, Mother.”

“Eat slowly, Cynthia. Where’s the fire?”

“What fire?”

“Markie, don’t talk. Eat.”

“When’s Santa Claus?”

“On Wednesday, honey.”

“Boy!” Markie exclaimed.

“There is no such person as Santa Claus.”

Markie sent up a howl.

“Cynthia, that’s silly. For Markie there is.”

“That’s right, Markie,” Cynthia said, “for you there is.”

“I know,” the little boy said.

A wind rattled the window panes back of the drawn shades, but it was of no consequence to me. In her coat and kerchief and snow boots, Martha appeared to take my tray away.

“Good night,” she said.

“Wake me when you come in.”

“You better sleep through. If you are awake—”

“Please wake me. And thank you for dinner, Martha. I appreciate you for being so perfect.”

She went off to work. I dozed for a while and read, while in the living room Markie and Cynthia watched television. At about eight, the front door opened.

Cynthia ran out into the hall to greet whoever had arrived. “Hi!” the child cried. “Hi, Blair!”

Mark joined in. “Blair! Blair! Tell a story!”

Sissy spoke. “Cut it out, kids. Please. We’re busy.”

“Are you moving away?” Cynthia asked.

Sissy started down the hall toward her room; I saw her flick by my own door.

“But where?” Cynthia demanded.

“You go back and watch TV, Cyn, please. Go ahead.”

“Hi, Blair,” Cynthia said, forlornly.

“How are you?” he asked. Then the door to Sissy’s room slammed, and Mark and Cynthia’s slippers padded back toward the living room.

Not much could be heard over the noise of the TV, but some fifteen minutes later there were footsteps down the corridor; then Cynthia again, running out into the hall.

“What are you doing with that, Blair?”

“Open the door, will you?”

“Where are you going?” Cynthia asked, but Blair passed down the stairs.

Cynthia walked to Sissy’s room, scraping her heels; she knocked at her door, and then I couldn’t hear anything.

Now Markie ran by my room; he was wearing his pajamas and his hair was slicked back from his bath. He looked in at me with half his face, then took off down the hall. I heard Sissy and Cynthia talking as they moved toward the front door.

“You can keep the phonograph here, Sis, if you want.”

“Watch it, Cynthia, it’s heavy. Please, honey, move—”

“You want to leave your records? I don’t think Mommy would mind if you left your records.”

“Mommy would mind, all right,” said Sissy, and she went down the stairs. She called back from a flight below, “Don’t close the door.”

There were half a dozen more trips up and down the hall. Finally Blair was saying, “Why don’t you burn all this crap?”

“Shhhhh.”

“I got only one closet, Sister,”

“Oh Blair, how can you be so selfish! I want to go with you! Where am I going to go?”

“You got Dave Brubeck and Jerry Mulligan, Sister — there won’t even be room for me.”

“Oh Blair,” she was weeping. “You’re disloyal …”

They went out the door again.

I heard Cynthia call, “Should I leave it open? Sissy, do you want it open? Are you gone?”

“I’ll be right up,” Sissy answered.

When Sissy returned, she was alone.

“Are you going now?” Cynthia asked.

“Uh-huh.” Sissy had stopped crying. “I just want to check the room.”

Cynthia followed her down the hall. “Where are you going? Where are you going to live? Are you going to go home?”

“I’m going to live on Kimbark.”

“Oh goodie, Stephanie lives on Kimbark!” Cynthia replied. “Are you going to live with Blair? Is he your husband?”

“Cynthia, you know he’s not my husband.”

“Are you going to sleep in bed with him?”

“Of course not!” Sissy shot back. “Look, Cynthia—” But that was all she said; she went into her old room.

Soon they were back on the landing.

“Goodbye, Sissy,” Cynthia said.

“Goodbye, Cynthia. Goodbye, Markie. I’ll see you in Hildreth’s.”

As Sissy started down the stairs, Cynthia called, in a last attempt if not to stop what was happening, at least to slow it down, “Sissy, what’s your real name? Do you have a real first name?”

Sissy stopped a moment. “Aline,” she said. “My first name is Aline.”

“Don’t you like it?” Cynthia asked. “Don’t you like people to call you that?”

“Oh, I don’t mind.” Outside Blair leaned on the horn of the car.

“Can I call you that?” Cynthia asked.

“Cynthia, I have to go now.”

“Do you like Cynthia for a name?”

“Sure — listen, I have to—”

“I think it’s horrible.” Cynthia said, and she was crying. “Don’t you want to stay here any more? You sure you don’t want to sleep here tonight?”

“Cyn, I have to go. I don’t think your mother wants me to live here any more.”

“Oh,” cried Cynthia, “rotten Mommy!”

The horn blew again — and Sissy was gone, having decided at the last, it seemed, to let Cynthia’s judgment of her mother stand. For all the girl’s hard luck and all her weakness of character, it still seemed to me a disgusting and unnecessary trick.

Soon Cynthia was bawling in the other room. Markie came to the door. “I think Cynthia’s sick,” he said.

I did not know what good it would do if I were the one to go in and try to comfort her. Nevertheless, I got out of bed and put on an old bathrobe of Martha’s — the pajamas that barely covered me were hers too — and started to the door. Markie, who had been watching me closely, said gravely, “You need a shave.” He led me into the living room, where his sister lay face down on the floor. The Christmas tree, which I had only seen in brief glances as I went to and fro between the toilet and the bed, was so tall that its pointed top bent against the ceiling. Markie went over to the TV set and put one hand on the volume knob, as though to anchor himself to the Western he’d been watching.

I sat down on the sofa. “I’m sorry you’re so upset, Cynthia. Would you like a handkerchief? Can I do anything for you?”

“You did it. You and Mommy.”

“Did what?”

“Made Sissy go!”

Markie sat down on the floor, and stood up, and sat down again. I tried to give him a reassuring smile.

“How did I make Sissy go?” I asked Cynthia.

“You did.”

“How?”

Cynthia wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and caught a glimpse of me from under her lashes.

“You just did.”

“You’ll have to tell me how I did.”

“You told Mommy to do it.”

“That’s not so, Cynthia. I didn’t tell Martha anything either way.”

“Mommy stinks.”

She waited for a reaction, which was not forthcoming. But it was her own grossness, rather than my silence, that made her stop crying. Some moments passed, and then in a voice a good deal less certain, she said, “She does.”

“Does she?”

“Why did she have to make Sissy go? Sissy’s fun. Sissy’s my friend. She had no right to make her move.”

“It’s her house. She can ask anybody to move out, or to stay, that she likes. Don’t you think adults have rights as well as children?”

“She doesn’t own it.”

“Yes, she does,” I said.

“Ha-ha. The agency owns the house.”

“She owns you, Cynthia. She owns Markie.”

I looked at Markie, who was sitting on the floor now, reflecting.

“My father owns me too,” Cynthia said cautiously.

I went on as best I could; though there was suspicion in her voice, there was a note of inquiry too. “Of course your father owns you too. However, right now you’re living with your mother. Your mother makes your meals, and buys your clothes, and she calls the doctor, and sees you get Christmas presents, and she supports you and protects you. Do you know that, Cynthia? Your mother works to support herself, and you, and Markie.”

“So does my father. He’s a famous artist.”

“He’s a famous artist, Cynthia,” I said, and then, hesitating only a moment, I added, “but he doesn’t support you.”

“Yes, he does.”

“No,” I answered, “he doesn’t.”

“Well, he sends presents.”

He didn’t; however, I said, “That’s very nice, but sending presents to people isn’t the same as supporting them. Supporting them is much harder. Presents are like cakes with icing, and supporting is like all the other food you eat every day. Which is more necessary, Cynthia? Which is more important?”

After a moment, in a superior tone, she said, “I don’t even like cake.”

“I like cake,” Mark said.

I smiled, and Cynthia said to me, “He doesn’t understand.”

It was by no means a friendly remark but it was the result, I thought, of some conscious decision to give up the fight — it was only depressing in that it made perfectly clear that what her brother didn’t understand, she did. It left me feeling that the child had much too small a back for all her burdens; I pitied her her intelligence.

Yet as a kind of tribute to her years, I said, “He’s just a small boy.”

“I’m her brother,” Mark said.

Cynthia stood now and feigned a yawn. “I think I’m going to sleep,” she said, quite formally. “I’m very tired.”

“Good night then,” I said.

She turned to face Mark. “I think you had better go to sleep too.” With her hands on her hips, she was, in both posture and tone, as much like Martha as she could manage to be. “Come on, Markie.”

Instantly Markie made known his objection.

Taking a quick look my way, she folded her arms, then glared at her brother. “That kid’s going to drive me crazy,” she said, and with that, made her exit.

Markie lay himself down on the floor, facing the TV set, and within minutes was asleep. I got up and turned off the television and the floor lamp, and covered him where he slept with an afghan from the sofa. Sitting back in a chair, I watched the boy’s small back rise and fall; I could barely hear his breathing. I was sure that in her bed Cynthia’s eyes were wide open; whatever straightening out I had attempted had to do with only the surface of her family life. How could a seven-year-old child be expected to understand her mother’s troubles? How could I begin to understand the child’s? I felt now that it would have been wiser of me had I remained in bed, and let her cry over whatever it was hers to cry over. I did not begin to know all that had happened over the last seven years, and it almost seemed a mistaken sense of duty — and also a decided uneasiness about my presence, where Cynthia was concerned — that had led me to defend Martha against her daughter. Yet all that had been said in the hallway between Sissy and Cynthia had seemed to me totally unjust; Martha was not rotten for a moment, and she did not stink, and I believed that I had fallen in love with her.

Having had my scene with Martha’s daughter, however, I was sure that I was not falling in love with Martha’s predicament. Her life was complicated in ways that would not uncomplicate themselves by a mere lapse of time. There were these two small children to consider; loving her, must I not love them too? Was I up to it? Did I really want to?

I looked blankly into the lights of the Christmas tree for a long while. Did I want to? I wondered what Markie and Markie’s older sister could ever be to me? Was this what I wanted for my life?

When I awoke, Markie was asleep in my lap, where he must have crawled some time during the night. Martha was standing over the two of us, her coat slung over one shoulder.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“After one. One fifteen.”

“You better lift him off. I hope I didn’t give him anything.”

But she did not take the child immediately; she stood where she was, looking down. Then she bent so close that I could feel the cold on her skin, and lifted Markie from me.

When she came back into the living room, she was still carrying her coat. “Hadn’t you better be going back to bed?” she asked.

“Not for a little while.”

She spread her coat over me and sat down at my feet with her arms around my legs. I began to take the pins from her hair.

“It’s been so nice,” she said. “So comfortable and nice. And I’m so tired.”

“Just rest.”

After a while she asked if Sissy had gone.

“She’s gone.”

“Was there any kind of scene?”

“Cynthia got a little upset. But she’s all right.”

“And she never really liked Sissy. Do you know? They never really got along.”

“Well then, she’ll probably mourn my passing too.”

“Me too,” Martha said.

“I think I’ll go tomorrow, Martha. I don’t have a fever any more.”

“You’re still weak.”

“I can be weak at home, I suppose.”

“Who’ll make your meals?”

“I will.”

She said nothing then, nor did I.

“Martha,” I said, some minutes later, “I can’t stay here. It would get terribly complicated.”

“I know.”

“You seem so tired. Maybe you should go to sleep.”

“Theresa Haug became hysterical in the kitchen. I had her station and mine.”

“Who’s Theresa Haug?”

“The girl we drove to the El.”

“That seems a year ago.”

“Two nights,” Martha said. “Just two nights.”

I remembered the girl now, sobbing into her handkerchief in the back seat of my car. “It’s too bad,” I said.

“It’s awful,” Martha said.

“Who’s her boy friend?”

“He’s become shy; he’s married, he won’t have anything to do with it.”

She said that, and because it was dark, and because I was tired, and because we were becoming blue — and doubtless for other reasons as well — I was reminded of the several people it seemed I had disappointed in my life.

Martha shrugged her shoulders and said, “Gabe.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing. I guess pleasure depresses me too. Do you know what we should do?”

“Go ahead, tell me.”

“Whatever we want. Simple as that.”

“And what’s that, Martha?”

“You should just keep staying here,” she said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s what I want … So can’t we do it?”

“I really don’t know,” I said.

“I think it’s about time,” she said. “I have rights in this world too, don’t I? The whole situation isn’t normal to begin with — being twenty-six and having these kids and working every night. That’s not normal, so how can I even pretend to have a normal love life? My life is cockeyed and different, and my daughter is just going to have to learn that. Is that asking way too much? I can’t keep going around and around with these two little psyches in my pocket. I had an alcoholic old man, and that’s the way it is — nobody can go around protecting you from everything. Oh Gabe, aren’t they on their own a little bit too? I’ll do my best, I promise, but can’t I have a lover like anybody else? Every goofy girl in the street has someone who can stay all night, but mine has to leave at three in the morning. Does that seem fair?” She turned on her knees then and took my face in her hands. “Gabe, just tell me, do I seem selfish and mean? There’s them, but then there’s still me, isn’t there?” she asked. “Is there?” She buried her head in my lap. “Please stay with me, Gabe. Stay and live with me.”

I closed my eyes a moment, hoping that what I ought to do and what I wanted to do would be one. When I opened them and looked down at Martha’s face, I believed they were.

In bed, where Martha came to be with me a while, she said, “It isn’t marriage, you know. You don’t have to think about that — nobody has to marry me. Do you understand? Nobody ever has to feel obliged to marry me. Please don’t worry about my babies, they’ll be all right. They’re nobody else’s worry but my own. Nobody has to take them off my hands, Gabe. I don’t need a husband, sweetheart — just a lover, Gabe, just someone to plain and simple love me.”

In the morning I lay in bed until I figured that everyone was through in the bathroom. Cynthia and Markie had already held some sort of relay race in the hallway, but it was silent now, and I assumed that breakfast had begun. I wanted to surprise Martha — and to lighten her load — and before she brought my tray to me, I thought I would appear at the table, shaved and groomed, showing myself to everyone in my recovered condition. That morning I understood what people mean when they talk about feeling like a bigger person. With the cheery disposition not only of a physical convalescent, but a moral one as well, I put my bare feet into my shoes and moved as quietly as I could across the hall and into the bathroom.

Martha’s bathroom walls were covered with travel posters, two to mask windows opening onto the outside stairwell, and another to hide a crack in the plaster, which ran from the ceiling down to the toilet. Visit Switzerland! Visit France! Visit Holland! Brushing my teeth, I felt magnanimous about all three countries, especially little Holland, whose porcelain-faced girls in traditional garb would forever be tending tulips within the direct line of vision of whoever was sitting on the can. I picked up a brush that was on the sink; no sooner did I run it through my hair than my forehead and ears were draped with Martha’s long blond strands. I didn’t even feel a ripple of annoyance. Why should I?

I looked for a razor and found one in the soap dish of the bathtub; the blade was dull and I set out looking for a new one, feeling, as one can while engaged in trivial works, at one with the world. Perhaps it was because my spirits were so high that they were able to tumble so low when I opened the medicine chest. Capless bottles, squeezed-out tubes, open jars, toothless combs, a cracked orange stick, three wilted old toothbrushes, hairpins, pills and capsules scattered everywhere. Perhaps there was a blade, but in that square foot of chaos, who could tell? Curiously, the sight of that mess was a knife sunk right down into the apple of my well-being. Nevertheless, I stuck my head into the hallway and called out, in an unexasperated voice, “Honey! Do you have a razor blade?”

The conversational mumblings in the kitchen continued.

“Martha! Have you got a new blade? I want to shave!”

No answer. I took another poke at the medicine cabinet. About the only thing one could get one’s hands on — without everything falling after — was a bottle on the bottom shelf with a skull-and-crossbones label. I put my feet back into my shoes, and started down the hall, one of Martha’s hairs floating down over my nose. Clutching her old misshapen bathrobe around me, I charged into the kitchen to behold Mark and Cynthia spooning Wheatena, and Martha talking to a man. At first he was only a tannish leather jacket and a big shock of red hair combed flat with water — and then, for an instant, an astonished toothy smile and a little courtly bow. He even stuck a hand out toward me, but I was in flight, my unlaced shoes dropping off my heels with each step, clopping my guilt and shame after me. There hadn’t been much dignity in my getaway, which was perfectly evident to me as I leaned against the poster of Holland, catching my breath.

And it had only been the janitor. The janitor! The fury I began to feel was first directed at those damn shoes, then at my legs, which seemed by themselves to have carried me away before I’d even had a chance to think. But finally I was furious with myself for having thought again that I could simplify life.

My search through Martha’s bathroom was now undertaken with the kind of single-mindedness one associates with the insane. I was no longer even thinking about shaving, only about the blade. I flung open the medicine chest to be confronted again by that skull and crossbones. Big as life it said: DANGER. But she didn’t seem to know there were children in the house! She apparently didn’t read in the papers about all the poisoned kids! A mess! An unexcusable mess!

Next to the bathtub was a closet with two narrow doors. Till then I’d had no occasion to look into Mrs. Reganhart’s closets — so there were things that I could not have known. The apartment itself had always appeared to me to be not so much chaotic as in a state of disarray, a condition I originally liked to think of as an extension of the lighter side of Martha’s nature. Magazines spilled over onto the rugs; tables and chairs were turned so as to accommodate upraised feet; apple cores browned in brimming ashtrays. But all this had only seemed the sign of a relaxed life; I took it for evidence of a deep humanitarianism. But what I looked into as I swung open the doors of the bathroom closet was evidence of madness — dirty bed sheets thrown in amongst clean towels, wet wash clothes draped over torn Modess boxes, five bottles of suntan lotion (all sticky and dribbling), a stack of National Geographics, a beach pail not entirely empty of the beach, dish towels, blankets, a length of garden hose, several coffee cups full of pencil shavings — why go on? I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, and my hand came to rest in the little aluminum tray that was attached to the wall; several old wet hairy slivers of soap were instantly brought to my attention.

There was a knock at the bathroom door.

“Come on in,” I said, and the door flew back.

“Haven’t you at least got a razor blade without a little crud on it?” I demanded.

“Haven’t you got a head with brains in it?”

“I was only looking for a razor. I didn’t know anybody was out there.”

“I thought you were sick. I thought you were too sick to get out of bed.”

“I wanted to shave — I thought it might give a little lift to the general appearance of the place.”

She was wearing a pair of tight red cotton slacks with some kind of abstract black and white design all over them. I wanted to ask if her husband had painted her pants for her, then I remembered he was her ex-husband, and then I remembered — with an unfortunate degree of vividness — all that we had attested to and promised the night before. Yet I hated her that instant for those circusy slacks, and hated her behind, which bloomed without mystery within, and I didn’t care too much for her sweater either. Lumpy, turtlenecked, immense, it made her body seem mountainous and her head a pin. A pinhead! A dreamer!

“It would please me no end,” she said, as I registered on my face precisely the amount of sympathy I felt for her outfit, “if you wouldn’t flounce around this place in your nightclothes!”

“What the hell do you expect me to flounce around in? I didn’t come prepared to stay.”

“Then don’t flounce around! You jerk!”

“Me? This place,” I said, getting off the tub and raising my arms as though to protest to the postered walls, “this place is a mess! Look,” I said, “look at this!” I flung open the medicine chest, which suddenly did not seem so hellish as it had two minutes earlier. If my sense wasn’t right, however, there was something right about the general direction in which I was charging. I presented to her the bottle that said DANGER. “IS this any way to keep drugs with kids in the house? Here, so even Markie can reach it?”

“I’ll worry about what Markie can reach, all right? You just worry about a little decorum.”

“And what am I supposed to do, hide? Is that what all that sweetness and light was about, is that what it means to be Mrs. Reganhart’s lover? Hole up in the latrine till the janitor leaves! What do you think I am? What the hell kind of nerve do you have telling me to be decorous anyway! Look at this place, look at it!” I turned and pulled back the closet door. A bottle of suntan lotion clinked obligingly out onto the tiles.

She did, I think, give a little gasp: found out at last.

“You could,” she said in a more respectful tone, “have waited until he left. Was that asking too much?”

“I didn’t know he was here. That’s the point, Martha. You want to wire the place, flash lights back and forth? What are you making of me?” I considered the closet again. “Look at that!”

“Oh shut up.” She pulled the cover down on the toilet and sat down. “Just shut up.”

But I didn’t want to, or intend to. I had moved well beyond the closet. I saw myself as having been weak and unimaginative the night before. Right at the start I should have had the sense, the courage, to go off and be ill by myself. I was old enough and wise enough. How could I live in a house where no strange man would ever live in peace?

I picked the lotion bottle up from the floor. “You ought to be ashamed,” I said. It was not quite to the point, but I couldn’t think of much else that was nasty to say. Bending over had made me woozy, and when the wooziness passed I still found it difficult to sustain my powers of concentration. What was it we were arguing about?

“Oh will you please …” she moaned.

“You don’t know what you want, do you know? You don’t know what in the world you want.”

She had been ruminating, her turtleneck pulled over her chin. Now she looked up. “Look, if you don’t want to stay here, nobody’s twisting your arm. You don’t have to precipitate some lousy argument to leave. Spare me that, will you? If you want to go”—she made a slow backhanded movement—“just go.”

“You know,” I said, leaning against the sink, “I’m beginning to have a little sympathy for your first husband, that poor bastard.”

“Oh, that poor bastard. We all ought to shed tears for you and him. He was another one who couldn’t walk out until we had a real rip-snorter that gave him the right. If you want to leave, Gabriel, just leave, all right?”

“What is it you want though? Can you tell me? Can you put it into a sentence or two? Tell me how you expect somebody who’s supposed to be living here not to ever show his face in the kitchen. How can you want one thing,” I said, slamming the sink, “and then not be willing to take what follows—”

She rose and stuck a fist under my nose. “I can take what follows, damn you! Don’t tell me about consequences, you!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, without any display of sorrow, “but you know what I’m talking about.”

Her eyes were suddenly full of tears. “You didn’t have to make a silly jerk out of me in front of him! Our kids play together — his daughter gives my daughter measles! Couldn’t you at least have shaved?” she cried. “Oh you looked like such a bum!”

“I was looking for a razor blade! I was trying to shave in this pigsty! Oh this is impossible — this is ridiculous! I don’t need this kind of agony, really!”

“Then go. Lower your voice, damn it, and go.”

“You don’t want me to be here anyway, that’s pretty clear to anybody.”

“Look, you don’t want to be here, so don’t pull that stuff.”

“Maybe that’s so—”

“If maybe that’s so, then maybe you ought to take your leftover pills and shove off.” She painted a smile on her face and inclined toward me. “If maybe that’s so, all right?”

“That’s fine. I don’t need this kind of crap, no sir.”

There was some rhythmic lapse in that last sentence, an absence of thunder, that left me feeling like something less than Winston Churchill on the floor of Parliament. I was dying to make some final crack about her slacks, but it wasn’t really necessary. Everything we had set out to accomplish, we had accomplished. Henceforth and forever after, last night did not exist.

In the bedroom I had to hunt through the dresser to find some of the clothes I had been wearing three days before. It was a pleasure for me to have to open all her drawers: evidence, piles and piles of evidence in every one. My jacket and trousers were hanging in the closet, there with tennis rackets, snowboots, back issues of Art News, rolled-up rugs, stockpiles of red bricks, and, of course, all of Martha’s clothes, which were hung from the rack, or piled on the floor, or shoved in on the overhead shelf. Naked, I stood there and allowed the sight to flood me with a deep sense of righteousness.

After I dressed, I looked at myself a moment in the mirror; my eyes were as expressive as two marbles, and my beard hid the angles of my face. It was a streaky orange color, as though tea had been strained through it. Looking at that face, it was difficult to think that I had been in the right. But I was glad I was leaving, I told myself, and before I left I wanted that fact registered upon the consciousness of this house.

This time I did not turn away from the threshold of the kitchen, but entered and stood firm. Markie had a milk mustache, and Cynthia, in her red jacket with the hood up and wearing her leggings, was ready for school — though the act was that she was casually lingering over her last drop of Ovaltine. She was about as casual, of course, as us two adults.

Martha was looking out the window, drinking coffee from a mug. On the back porch was a snowless gray ring where the garbage pail had stood; the sun was shining onto the white railing of the porch and the white window frames, and it lit up the walls of the kitchen with a fine, healthy glare.

“I think I’ll be going now,” I said.

She did not turn. Markie was leaning out toward me from his seat; Cynthia moved not a muscle.

“Okay,” Martha said.

Everything that had happened, including this final eloquent exchange, seemed all at once rather shabby. I felt, with a touch of desperation, the desire to leave on good terms. Slowly, so that neither Cynthia nor Markie would miss a word, I said, “Thank you for letting me stay while I was sick.” The little speech would not have fooled me, but then I was not a child; at least the sounds had been made, and they would live in the history of this family.

Martha turned; she made a movement with her mouth — wry, I suppose you would call it — which indicated to me that she found me incredibly predictable. I was disappointed that she did not at least understand what I had tried to do; but her understanding was only for her own troubles. I thought back to how she had made love on the night I had fallen ill, and I thought back on all she had said to me the evening before, and I did not care very much for her.

“So long, Cynthia,” I said. “Goodbye, Mark.” I started back down the hallway, feeling suddenly fevered and weak. But I was strong enough — I told myself — to make it down the stairs and into my car, and home.

When I was almost into the small dark foyer that led to the street, I heard the door of Martha’s apartment open above me. There was Cynthia, her head within her hood, stretched over the bannister. In her red jacket, with her blue eyes, she looked as innocent and pretty as I had ever seen her.

She extended a hand over the railing. “Here,” she said. “Mommy says these are the keys to your car.”

I would have asked that she simply drop them down to me had I not thought there was a certain forlorn quality in her voice. I went back up the stairs, but when I took the keys she merely looked away.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

I hurried back down, and when, from the first floor landing, I took a quick look up, the child was still there. Her face rested sideways on her wrists, which were flat on the bannister. She may have had her father’s dark hair, but the eyes were Martha’s — inquisitive, lively, and not at all sure what they were after.

“Goodbye, Cynthia,” I said.

“Goodbye.”

I went a step further, and she called, “Aren’t you coming back?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

She seemed, then, utterly confused. She raised her head from her hands, but then, flatly, she said, “Okay. Goodbye,” and turned and went back into her house.

I had two pieces of mail waiting for me at my apartment. One was an invitation from the Spiglianos for cocktails late on Christmas afternoon. I contemplated the affair: John’s Abruzzi dance, Pat’s Liverwurst Delight, dinner afterwards with some madman like Bill Lake … But I would be sick anyway, I thought; I would never be rid of this fever and so didn’t have to begin suffering over a Spigliano get-together.

There was also a picture post card in color from Grossinger’s. I went around the apartment letting shades fly up, and prying windows open to allow passage out for the musty unused odor that hung over the place. With my joints feeling heavier than the limbs they joined, I cautiously laid myself down on my unmade bed. “Hello! This is the life!” was written on the card in a large scrawl, and it was signed, “Fay and Dad.” A P.S. squeezed in at the bottom drifted over into the address. “We’re here thru N. Yrs. Day so you can stay in Chi have gd. time Dad.” That was it — no reference made to anything that had happened in his life, or mine, prior to the day before yesterday. I couldn’t believe he had forgotten, but apparently he had. It was a great day for separations.

2

Perhaps it is the watering-down of some racial guilt that causes the trouble, but Christmas has always been a day I don’t enjoy. As unpracticed in the faith of my fathers as I am — which is about as unpracticed as my own particular father is — I am nevertheless not at peace with the culture when most of my countrymen, in the warmth and privacy of their homes, are celebrating the birth of their Saviour. The radio stations are all bells and organ music, the streets are empty, the frames of my neighbors’ homes blink with colored light bulbs, and in snowy mangers on church lawns are assembled miniatures of figures in whose reality, or suprareality, I have never for a moment been able to believe. I realize the fun the Gentiles are having, and I wish them well, but for me it is as though all the long, shapeless Sundays of the year have fallen on one day, and I tap my fingers, a superfluous man, waiting for nightfall and December twenty-sixth, when I can come back into the world.

But nightfall seemed never to be coming — not even late afternoon. I marked dozens of freshman essays, and then I made myself a snack and carried it from the kitchen into the small living room. Sections of the Sunday Times that I had been intending to read for weeks were scattered around the apartment, whose furnishings seemed today to be exuding a special jumbo-sized portion of ugliness. The decor of the place might be designated as 1930s Modern; there was a chair of bent laminated wood that was upholstered in imitation alligator skin; several other chairs made of tubular steel, a chest of drawers of curved metal, and other icy-looking ornaments, none of them smacking much of hearth and home. It was a little like living in a supper club. The shades on the windows were still the blackout shades from the war.

I drank a little whiskey and ate my snack and lit the cigar that my colleagues Bill Lake and Mona Meyerling had given me when they had stopped by to visit a few days before. I settled down in earnest to smoke it — dragging on the wet end, then holding it off to look at as I exhaled. The good bachelor life. I tried to think of a girl I could invite over to share my dinner, but gave it up as a bad idea; I would end up overstimulated, undersatisfied, and a total alien from the day. Just relax, said I, and have a good time by yourself.

I went to the window. Since ten in the morning it had been looking like four in the afternoon, and it still did at half past two. I took a long gaze at myself in the mirror: old sweater, baggy trousers, hair uncombed, beard coming in orange again. To complete the picture, I jammed the cigar between my teeth and wondered about the future. It occurred to me that I would never marry; at about the same time I realized that I hated cigars.

The day crept on. Boredom soon began to teeter on the edge of something worse, and I put on my coat and went out to take a walk. When I returned, I tried to get back to marking papers, but at five I said the hell with it and went into the bathroom to shave. I changed my mind three times over, finished shaving, dressed, and walked over to John Spigliano’s.

The door to the Spigliano apartment opened, and in the entryway stood two red-headed children, each with a pink party dress, black patent-leather shoes, and a stern expression.

“Hello,” I said to the two of them.

Only their starched dresses creaked.

“Ooohh,” came a voice from around the corner — which was followed by a tray full of hors d’oeuvres and a vast contraption of green. Pat Spigliano stepped into the doorway, and her dress, with a quantity of stiff green netting encircling the green skirt, momentarily displaced the little girls.

“Gabe!” Saying my name somehow caused Pat to swing the hoop a little exuberantly — and out of sight went the children. “I thought you wouldn’t be coming. We heard you were sick. John will be so happy.”

“I’m feeling better, thanks,” I said. “I thought I’d come for—”

I was talking to myself. Pat was looking from one of her children to the other. “Stop hiding, girls — come on now, come on—”

The girls battled gamely against their mother’s dress, while Pat looked back to me. “And these are the twins,” she announced. “This is Michelle Spigliano and this is Stella Spigliano. And this is Doctor Wallach, girls, one of Daddy’s teachers.”

In loud hoarse voices, Michelle and Stella exclaimed: “Merry Christmas, Mr. Wallach!”

“Doctor,” their mother corrected them.

“That’s all right—”

But Stella erupted, as though one were needed in the house, “Doctor!” while her partner took the whole thing, as they say, from the top.

When they had both settled their heels back onto the floor, I said, “Merry Christmas to you, girls.”

Pat winked at me, then went back to the business of shaping destinies. “Now take Doctor Wallach’s things, young ladies—”

“No — it’s not—” But one child was dragging at my sleeves while the other jumped up toward my chest, after either my hat or my tie. With a sense of hopelessness about the whole afternoon, I gave up all the garments asked for and came into the apartment.

Pat immediately pushed her hors d’oeuvres my way, and waited for my comment.

“They’re very well-behaved,” I said.

“We think so,” she replied. “They’re going to Radcliffe.”

I refrained from asking whether they were just home now on vacation. As we came into the living room, Pat said, “Have some pâté?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Well then, have a good time — have fun—” she instructed me.

“It was liverwurst before he rose into the hierarchy, and it’ll be liverwurst till he dies, the symbol-hunting son of a bitch.” It was Bill Lake who spoke, his wiry carcass twined around the back and arms of a chair in which Mona Meyerling was stiffly seated.

“Or becomes president,” I said.

“Or bats fourth for the White Sox — who knows? The nice, frank, beastly opportunism in those two absolutely compels admiration,” said Bill, neither raising nor lowering his voice, despite Mona’s attempts to make him pipe down. “Which I don’t want confused with affection,” Bill added. “You ought to stop feeling sorry for yourself, Wallach. How would you like to be Associate Professor Spigliano and have to perform coitus on the hostess?”

“What makes you think I’m sorry for myself, Willie?”

“Mona,” he said, lapsing into his W. C. Fields voice, “get the boy a drink. The boy needs a drink. Have you noticed Charleen’s boy friend, with the liquidy eyes — over there, with the damp lips? Also, Wallach, self-concerned. A big dumb beautiful girl like Charleen, married to an introspective dermatologist—”

Mona was standing now; she was dressed up, and because I like her so much I’d rather not describe her outfit. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “Better?”

“I think I’m fine,” I said.

“—all the ills and perversions of the world,” Lake was saying, “sloth, usura—”

“What do you want?” Mona asked. “A bourbon?”

“Look, I’ll get it.”

“—sodomy, pseudohermaphroditism — my God, the olisbos itself was no mystery to the Greeks—”

“Sit down,” Mona said, “and keep him quiet.”

She took the distance between the chair and the liquor table in six graceless shambles. Bill Lake babbled on, “—and what about the French? In 1750 two lowly little pederasts burned in the Place de Grève—” and I looked over the Spigliano’s new apartment, which, surprisingly, turned out to be quite charming. On the top floor of an old red brick house on Woodlawn, it had white walls, slanting ceilings, leaded windows, and lots of room. Fifty or sixty people were standing in little knots around the Christmas tree and the fireplace and the liquor supply. Mixing one of his elaborate cocktails for Walker Friedland and his wife was the master of the place, John Spigliano. With his round dark face and shiny eyes, and a big smile to honor one of Walker’s stories, he looked like an amiable, friendly, harmless, helpful little man — and yet I knew that, like his mate, he could not speak that you did not see a knife slipping between the shoulders of someone you liked — of someone you had thought John liked. Of course it is a mistake to expect academics to behave better than other people; but whether it is that I am a snob or a romantic or a naïf, or whether I was too idolatrous of the people who educated me, I always expect that John is going to walk over to me one day and say that he has made up his mind and wants to join up with the human members of our race. Though I like to think of Spigliano emotions and Spigliano aspirations and rewards as having little to do with myself or anybody I care about, it is true nevertheless that he is a grand source of irritation to many of us who must work alongside him. Perhaps it’s that we envy him the simple decision he has made to be a bastard.

Standing alongside John and facing Walker was Walker’s wife, a stunning blonde with long legs, a high hairdo, A-plus posture, and a somewhat mannered approach to a cigarette that toppled her chic over into self-consciousness and produced in Bill Lake (so he said, tapping my shoulder) a desire to go over and offer her a laxative. She was, of course, only a sophomore in the College and was doing the best she could; if she had only known how Cyril Houghton — who was ostensibly talking to Swanson, the Swede — was casting glances at her rear end, she might have been able to relax a little. She had certainly as much influence as any of us, and more than most.

Mona was marching back with my drink in her hand, when directly beside me I heard Peggy Moberly speaking.

“She’s absolutely marvelous,” Peggy was saying to someone. “She’s just the most charming person. We’re going to have lunch together on Wednesday.”

“Fine,” a man answered.

“Really, she’s lovely—”

“Thank you.”

“And so gay. I’m simply crazy about her.”

“Yes”—I now recognized the male voice—“she’s a very sweet girl.”

Suddenly Peggy had turned and put her hand on my hair. “I thought you were sitting there. What are you being a wallflower about? How are you feeling? I called your place — I was going to come over and make you a decent meal — and you didn’t even answer. I thought, oh God, poor Gabe is dying—”

I stood up. “I just wasn’t answering the phone, Peg. Hello, Paul.”

Paul was wearing the nipped-in double-breasted sharkskin suit he’d worn the day of his arrival in Chicago. He looked severe and lean, and he held himself erect not so much to get the edge on the rest of the party, as to be removed from it — not haughty, just separate. “How are you feeling?” he asked me.

“I’m much better,” I said. “Just some virus, I suppose.”

It was our first exchange since the night in Libby’s office three weeks before. We had managed to see each other only at staff meetings, and there even to find seats out of each other’s line of vision. It was a hard task at a round table.

“This man’s wife,” Peggy said, and without the aid of her glasses she squinted across the room, “is the loveliest-looking person. The most spirited girl—”

“We’re old friends,” I said.

“Oh yes, of course. Gabe brought Paul!” she announced, girlishly, to herself. “Oh Peggy, what are you saying,” this also to herself. I took her hand and squeezed it. Peggy Moberly was one of those people who expect everything of a party; and if everything doesn’t show up soon enough, they start dragging it in by the heels. She seemed now nearly worn out with good intentions: the curl was gone from her hair, the straps of her slip were visible, and her ankles looked to be giving out too. In the end she reached into her purse for her glasses and put them on — the final capitulation to reality. Resigned about herself, she raised both our hands toward the other side of the room and said, “She’s quite the hit, that girl.”

I saw no girl, however, only a huddle of men — Frank Tozier, Larry Morgan, Victor Honingfeld, and now Cyril Houghton and Swanson. Frank was moving his head — laughing — and then when his chin flicked back I caught sight of Libby within the center of the circle. Her cheeks were on fire, and with one long white hand she was tapping her forehead; then the hand shot above her head in a kind of Gallic explosion — her lips moved, hesitated, moved, and the men leaned back and laughed again. All at once she turned in upon herself, hung her head and became shy. But the next moment she was tilting an ear toward Cyril, who was stroking his mustache and doubtless constructing some double-entendre for Libby’s pleasure. Her throat and neck were bare, and her nose in profile was a stately appendage — its elaborate bony edge, touched by light from the Christmas tree, called out for a finger to be drawn down along it. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled back off her forehead, and her dress was of red satin. I was sure I had seen it before, but couldn’t remember the occasion. Later in the afternoon I recalled that she had written about it in a letter.

“She looks fine,” I said to Paul, while Peggy leaned backwards to counter some remark of Bill Lake’s. “She looks very well.”

“She’s feeling fine,” Paul said. Peggy leaned forward to rejoin us, and it was as though Paul and I had exchanged a message in code, the meaning of which I hadn’t quite understood.

Across the room Frank Tozier was demonstrating a Latin-American dance step. He whipped his butt around with professional agility, and his feet went patter-patter-wheee on the Spigliano rug. Libby’s hands were clasped together before her chest and her eyes were on Frank’s speedy Italian shoes. When he went into a variation of the step, she moved to the side, tried the original little step by herself, failed, and with a hopeless shrug, abandoned a career on the stage. Almost at once Victor Honingfeld was alongside her, and, taking her elbow, he began his nervous and excited chatter. Libby suddenly looked as though bad news had just come her way. Victor made a circular motion with one hand, and then, the noise of the party dipping for a moment, Libby’s voice, pleading, exasperated, came across the room:

“He’s not a homosexual writer! How can you say that!”

Peggy tugged my hand. “Oh listen to him. All that has to happen is Tom Sawyer shakes Huck Finn’s hand, and Mark Twain is a queer!”

I said to Paul, “Victor’s psychoanalysis may reshape the whole nineteenth century—”

“It makes me so damn angry,” Peggy said, and she was moving across the room to join the debate.

Paul and I stood sipping our drinks, looking not at each other but around the room. Given the shape and size of the party, our silence would not have seemed unusual at all, I suppose, had we been either strangers or friends. But since it seemed that our fate was to be something in between, the silence eventually became more than I could bear. I did not see that matters might be improved, however, by my walking off. “You know,” I said, “I’m sorry about that outburst. I was going to telephone—”

There was no way of sounding casual. Paul looked at me attentively enough, but he had his amazing faculty for taciturnity to fall back on, and he seemed never to be beyond using it. I waited nevertheless, expecting that he might have some generous and forgiving word to say; I was willing again to be the one who had to be forgiven. It was a condition I seemed repeatedly to find myself in, and not only with the Herzes; I seemed to have to be forgiven even when I myself felt somehow wronged.

“I didn’t know about Libby’s condition,” I said, seeing that he wasn’t going to help me in what I had begun. “I didn’t realize that her kidney disorder meant she couldn’t …”

For a moment it seemed as though Paul would not finish my sentence for me. Then he said, “She can bear a child; the doctors”—the doctors again—“feel it wouldn’t be safe for her, however, if she did.” Then, significantly, he added, “That’s all.”

“I don’t mean to interfere,” I replied, “in what isn’t my business.”

“I understand,” Paul said; while from across the room, I heard Libby saying, “But I don’t care about his life — it’s his work, Victor.”

And Paul was trying to smile at me. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ve decided anyway, you see, to adopt a baby.”

“Yes?”

“So it’s really all right,” he said, but there his smile failed him.

“Fine.” I was peculiarly bewildered by what Paul had announced. “That’s wonderful.”

“You won’t say anything. I’d appreciate that.”

“Of course not.”

Silence followed. “I mean,” Paul said, and now he looked very fatigued with me, as though it was we two who had been living together for years, “to Libby.”

“You’ll have to excuse me for whatever mistakes—”

“We all make mistakes,” he said, sharply.

“I suppose,” I said, “that’s what helps us to be generous to one another. That all of us make them.” I had to leave the room then, for I was full of emotion, and I did not know how it might express itself. It was good news I had heard — what anyone would have wanted for the Herzes — and yet it was not to good news that I seemed to be reacting. I went out into the Spigliano hallway, unable to say to Paul the very last thought that had crossed my mind: I hope this can make Libby happy.

“This is Michelle Spigliano, and this is Stella Spigliano, and this is Doctor McDougall, girls, one of Daddy’s teachers.”

“Merry Christmas, Doctor McDougall!”

From down the hall I heard Sam say, “Well, isn’t that something, isn’t that nice.” A moment later he was slapping me on the back. “How are you, boy? I called you last week and you didn’t answer. I thought, poor fella, must be sick as a dog. You need anything now? You feeling all right?”

“I’m much better, Sam.”

“We old bachelors have to stick together, huh? Okay, Patricia, where’s the cider—” and he and Pat went off to the living room. The Spigliano girls took their seats again, one on either side of the door. I was about to ask them to bring my coat and hat out of hiding when Libby came in from the living room.

I went up to her, and though I did not take her in my arms, my heart was beating as though I had. She looked up at me with her flushed face; I knew that she had watched me leave the room and had followed in order that we could be alone. My heart was beating so because I thought there was something very crucial she was going to say to me, or I was going to say to her.

But I told her simply that she was looking very well.

She answered, “Thank you. I hope you’re better. No one ever really thinks of Gabe as being sick.”

I let the remark remain unanswered. “I want to be straight with you, Libby,” I said, “I’ve never meant to tease—”

“That? Oh, it was nothing.” She wouldn’t look at me.

“You should know I went to see Paul’s parents in Brooklyn.”

She was startled for no more than half a second; flatly she said, “Thank you very much. That was kind of you.” She smiled then, as though I were Sam McDougall, or one of the Spigliano children. “Excuse me, will you?”

She went off to wherever she had been intending to go in the first place.

I behaved badly — with even less wisdom — from then on. I drank too much, and my voice carried, and finally I was putting my arm around Peggy Moberly, which one hasn’t the right to do unless one intends afterwards to lift her up and carry her over a threshold.

“Why don’t you ever call me?” Peggy asked. “Why do I give the impression that I’m only interested in books?”

“You don’t give that impression at all, Peg.”

“You’re a cruel man,” she said, but she took off her glasses anyway. “Don’t you ever want to take me to the movies?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to take me to dinner tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Where will we go?”

Bill Lake was performing a Cossack dance in the center of the room. Squatting, arms crossed, head up, he snapped his long legs in and out while the circle that had gathered around him clapped in time. “Hey! Ha! Hey! Ha!” The little Spigliano girls giggled in the doorway. In the corner, Charleen Carlisle and her fiancé were arguing … I should have married Charleen. I should have married Peggy.

“I should marry you, Peg.”

“Oh don’t be cruel with me, will you, Gabe?”

“I’m not being cruel. I’m being nice. Can’t anybody tell the difference?”

“You know, if you haven’t been feeling well, you shouldn’t drink too much.”

To that I shook my head. “Not so.”

“Maybe we should go to have dinner now.”

“Maybe we should get married.”

“Gabe, you’re being awful! What’s the matter with you!” She shook a fist at me — spectacles poked out at either end — and left.

Of course, there was no excuse. We all put in a few good reprehensible days in life — exclusive, that is, of the long-range cruelties — and this I suppose was one of mine. Later on, the party had thinned out — John had performed his folk dance, and we were out of liverwurst and down to plain rye rounds — and I was dancing with Peggy. I kissed her neck, a sheer piece of son-of-a-bitchery.

“Gabe,” she said, “don’t you be mean to me. Be good to me, Gabe.”

I held her tight, crushing what little she had against me, and we spun past Pat Spigliano, who was saying to her partner, Larry Morgan—

“Women are much more sexually excitable over thirty-five, of course—”

We danced on, two close bodies, two distant spirits. I shall catalogue no further my various indecencies, except to add that after a while I began to sing the particularly weighty lines of certain popular songs into Peggy’s lonely ear.

We settled finally in a chair near the Christmas tree. Peggy was saying, “I’ve always been interested in Judaism, even in the seventh grade—”

As Peggy spoke, I saw my few adult years as a series of miscalculations, insincerities, and postures; either that, or I was unforgivably innocent.

“Oh where,” I sang, “are all the nice Gentile boys.”

“Gabe, shhhh — what are you talking about? Stop narrowing your eyes like that.”

“You’re after our men.”

“Oh Gabe, please cut it out. Please …” For Peggy’s purposes, I had to be either romantic or intelligent.

“I should have married Doris Horvitz,” I said.

“Now I’m not kidding—”

I slid into a grumpy silence — Peggy, damn sweet fool, took my hand and stroked it — and listened to snatches of conversation from back of the Christmas tree. Could you believe it? He was talking about structure.

“But,” answered Paul Herz, “the point is, John, that the student goes around thinking writing is like tapestry-weaving; a kind of construction work. As far as he can make out, it doesn’t have anything to do with life, with being human—”

“I don’t”—John was chuckling—“know if it’s our duty to be teaching them, as you like to put it, to be human. I know it’s nice to be engagé—” he said facetiously, and I lost the rest in the crash of a glass on the far side of the room.

Paul was saying, “—talk about form is an evasion—”

“—as a critical method has a long history, I suppose, but for myself—”

“—not talking about impressionism at all, for God’s sake!”

“What else then?” John asked. “One has to do more than come into class and tell the student, Oh isn’t this wonderful, oh isn’t your heart all aquiver. I suppose to be a creative writer—”

“Could you do me a favor and stop calling him that?” It was Libby speaking now.

“I’m sorry. I thought he identified himself—”

“Do you call Melville ‘a creative writer’?” she demanded. “Is that what you call Dostoevsky?”

“I meant only to differentiate between those of us who are engaged in criticism—”

“Well, the difference is obvious!” Libby said. “You don’t have to bother.”

“Let’s go, Gabe,” Peggy was saying. “You need some food in your stomach. I’m going to get our coats.”

“You take care of me, old Peg, my coat’s a—”

“I know which is yours,” she said, smiling.

I remained in my chair a moment, then rose and stretched and tried to clear my head. Back of the Christmas tree, through the branches and the tinsel and the lights, I saw Paul and Libby in profile.

She was saying, “Paul, don’t fight with him.”

“Let’s go home. Let’s get out of this fucking place.”

“But I was having such a good time—”

His hand went up and smoothed her cheek; then it passed down, still touching her. I saw his fingers move inside the neckline of her red dress. “Let’s go home, Libby.”

I turned away. Scanning the room for a friend, I waved at Mona Meyerling, who saluted. Behind me, I heard Libby speak. “Yes yes — oh Paul—” Then she was racing right by me, one hand up to her fiery cheek, a very excited girl.

And I was in the clutches of Pat Spigliano.

“—yes, I have to,” I was saying.

“And we didn’t even get a chance to talk.”

“We’ll all get together soon,” I said.

“We must. I keep telling John we have to get together with Gabe — we must have him over for a meal one night. Ahh, did you ever get together with that sweet Mrs.… you know, John’s older student. The waitress.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get together again. She seemed like a very nice person. A very fine person. How is she doing?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “Thanks for the party, Pat. It was a regular Spigliano party.”

“We love giving them, Gabe,” she said, as John came over to us and Peggy appeared with our coats. Behind her was Libby, already in her familiar polo coat and kerchief. She was carrying Paul’s coat on her arm.

“Goodbye,” Libby said from the doorway, where Paul now joined her. “Thank you, Mrs. Spigliano.”

“Goodbye,” we all said, and the Herzes went out the door.

Peggy couldn’t be discouraged from helping me into my coat. I had the feeling that all the people around me were winking at one another. John said, “Feeling sharp enough to drive?”

“I’m going to leave that to the taxi driver,” I said. Everyone laughed heartily.

“We love having you, Gabe,” Pat said. “We have to see more of Gabe,” she said to her husband, “and more of Peggy too.”

“Absolutely,” I said. There was no need to go on, but I did. “I have to see more of Peggy myself.”

Everyone smiled, and for the first time, because I was being allowed all the prerogatives of a drunk, I felt like one.

“And we loved your friends,” Pat said. “The creative writer and his wife. They seem like a very nice bohemian couple. I think it’s beneficial for all of us to have a young couple like that around. Though she’s a very bohemian-looking girl, isn’t she? I said to John when he hired them, I’ll bet they’re beatniks, and well,” she said, raising a finger, “I wasn’t far from wrong. I wish they hadn’t felt so out of place.”

“I guess they didn’t know everybody,” said Peggy, confused.

“He’s a very off-beat fellow,” John said.

“I suppose so,” I said, when everyone turned to me.

“However,” Pat put in, “they seemed very nice.” We all agreed to that, and said our thank yous again. At the door the Spigliano little girls sped us on our way with a choral good night.

Between the two high holly bushes that flanked the downstairs door, I slipped on the snow. My hat fell over my eyes and Peggy began to laugh. While she helped me to my feet, I saw Paul and Libby again. They were standing in front of the house next door; Paul was stopped in his tracks, and Libby was in front of him, but turned around and facing him. His hands were down in his pockets and his head inclined toward the walk.

The night was cold and empty, and their voices carried. “What is it?” Libby was saying. “What is it? I thought—”

“I do,” he said. “I do.”

“What is it then?”

“I’m all right.” He started walking.

“Oh, your moods,” Libby said. Then, each with hands in pockets, they moved down the street and out of sight.

Peggy and I had dinner at a little restaurant on the Near North Side, where there were shaded lamps on every table and the young man at the piano drank Shweppes water and played very softly songs like “Imagination” and “Long Ago and Far Away.” I continued drinking and Peggy’s eyes glistened just from intimacy alone. When the wine came, I caused a disproportionate amount of trouble over its temperature, which launched Peggy into apologizing for me to the waiter, the cigarette girl, and the people at the next table. Later we took a taxi back to the South Side. She held her glasses in her gloves all the way down the Outer Drive, and on the front porch of her rooming house I pushed into her lips with painless, moribund abandon.

“Oh Gabe,” she moaned into my cold ear, “let’s not go too fast. Don’t make me fall for you too fast.”

“Okay,” I said, and stumbled home.

I waited as long as I could bear to, and then sometime after one o’clock I called.

“Martha, it’s me. Martha, I’ve missed the hell out of you. I made a damn weak, silly error. I let everyone down, myself included. I’m not flying in the face of my instincts any more, Martha. I’m not turning off my fires any more. I’ll follow what I have to follow — I’m stopping being anxious, Martha — we make the laws, we do. I can’t keep being what I’ve been. I want to be happy, Martha. I want to be with you.”

I stopped, and heard what I thought for a moment was something as noncommittal as a cough. But it was the beginning of tears. She said, “Oh, you’re drunk, baby — but come, come anyway.”

“What about Daddy?” Cynthia asked.

“Daddy has decided to live in Arizona. He decided that a long time ago. I don’t think that Daddy is a consideration here. He doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m saying, Cynthia.”

“Is Gabe our new Daddy?” Markie asked.

“He’s mother’s dearest dearest friend. He’s your dearest friend.”

“Yes,” Markie said.

“Okay?”

“Will he sleep in bed with you?” Cynthia asked.

In the kitchen I sat at the uncleared table, drinking my coffee; in the children’s room I heard Martha say that I would.

“Where’s Arizona again?” Mark asked.

“In the southwest of the United States. I showed you on the map.”

Cynthia spoke next, her words a surprise. I did not expect that she would choose so quickly to be distracted. “What’s the capital?” she asked.

“Tucson. Phoenix,” Martha said. “I’m not sure.”

“What’s the capital of Illinois?” Cynthia asked.

“Springfield.”

“Why don’t they make it Chicago?” asked Cynthia.

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

“Gabe knows,” Markie said.

“He probably does,” Martha said.

“I’ll bet he doesn’t,” Cynthia said.

“Well, it’s not important.”

But it was; I pushed my chair away from the kitchen table and went into the children’s room, where the little lamp between the beds illuminated the wall upon which Martha’s kids had poured out all their talent and aspirations. In a dim light, the crayoned stick figures, the stick houses, and round radiant suns and gloomy moons had about them a charm and gaiety that at this particular moment had no effect upon the seriousness of my mood or mission. Cynthia was sitting up in bed, wearing over her pajamas one of her Christmas presents — a red Angora sweater; she was surrounded by her nurse’s kit, her Spanish doll, and the Monopoly set, upon which the first game had been played that afternoon by Martha, me, Cynthia, and Cynthia’s friend Stephanie. Mark’s head was on his pillow and his hands were tucked under his crisp sheets. He was looking very happy about being in bed. A wad of clay sat on the pillow beside his head, there because he had “made” it in the morning, and had bawled loud and long throughout the day whenever separation had been suggested. It had fallen into his soup at dinner, but now that was all forgotten.

Martha stood by the window, hefty in a pair of faded dungarees, with her hair pulled into one long dramatic braid down her back. She was rocking on the outer edges of her blue sneakers, and her body was arranged in what I had come to think of as her posture: right hand on the chin, left hand just below the hip, fingers spread down and out over the can. Though she had earlier requested that I not be present for this scene — and though I had willingly agreed — she looked in my direction with a face upon which worry turned to relief, relief to hope. She smiled, a what-do-we-do-next smile, and sighed.

“Do I or don’t I know what?” I asked.

Cynthia said, “Why isn’t Chicago the capital?”

“Of America?”

“Of Illinois.”

“That’s a tough question.” I looked over to where Markie lay in his neat little bed. “Probably,” I said, “because it gets too cold for a capital here. Capitals are where the big shots live; I suppose they like it warm. What do you think, Mark? Does it look warm outside to you?”

He propped himself up on his elbows. “I can’t see. Mommy’s by the window.”

Martha moved to the side; she looked at me as though I had announced I would now pull a rabbit from a hat, without even having a hat, let alone the rabbit.

Snowflakes were tapping against the pane. “Does it?” I asked.

“No,” Markie said, though he looked up at me willing to be corrected.

“Does it to you?” I asked Cynthia.

With a lofty sophistication, she said, “It’s snowing.” But for a flicker of a second she had almost smiled.

“All right,” I said. “Who in his right mind would make this place a capital?”

After a moment Cynthia spoke again. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“With Martha,” I said.

“Maybe,” said Martha, moving now between their beds, “you should close your eyes, sweethearts. You had a very tiring day. Come on, Cyn, take off your sweater.”

“I think I want to wear it.”

“Honey, it’s brand new. You can wear it tomorrow.”

“I want to wear it now!”

Martha took my hand. “Wear it, Cynthia,” she said. “And go to sleep.” She leaned over and kissed each child. “Good night.”

“Can Gabe kiss us?” Markie asked.

“Sure,” his mother said.

I leaned down and kissed Markie, who stuck his lips directly into mine. I put my lips to the cheek that Cynthia had turned toward me.

“Good night, Cynthia,” I said. “You’ll have fuzzy dreams in that sweater.”

“I’ll be all right,” Cynthia said; and Martha turned off the light.

3

“I loaned her a hundred,” Martha said.

“And so is that what all this irritation with me is about?”

“I’m not irritated with you.”

“Because we can call them up, Martha. We can tell them not to come.”

“What’s that have to do with anything? The roast is in the oven. We invited them. Let’s leave it that way.”

“Then what is it, Martha?”

“Nothing.”

“What is she going to do with the money? Are you going to get that money back?”

“I suppose so.”

“Martha, sit down and forget those potatoes a minute.”

“Your friends will be coming—”

“And what’s this ‘my friends’ business? We discussed whom we would have. You went through all your friends, and you said you didn’t want any of them.”

“Divorced women depress me. Please,” she said, “I have to finish here.”

“What’s eating you? Sit down. What is it?”

At last she looked directly at me. “Oh hell — I don’t have any money for the January rent.”

“Sit down. You gave what’s-her-name, Theresa, the rent money?”

She moved into a chair opposite me at the kitchen table, holding a spatula in her hand.

“Most of it,” she answered.

“Including what I gave you?”

“Are you going to cause a fuss about that?”

“I’m not causing a fuss over anything.”

“Well, you only gave me forty bucks,” she said, “so obviously the other sixty was mine. And the rent’s a hundred and thirty, so I mean forty bucks doesn’t get me very far.”

“We’ve been through all this. Didn’t Sissy give you forty a month?”

“I didn’t ask you to give me that money. You don’t have to give me a penny.”

“Who said you asked me?”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“All right, fine. I told you I’d pay Sissy’s share.”

“Thanks,” she said, and got up and went over to the sink. “Sissy only lived in one room,” she informed me.

“Then I’ll pay half the rent. If that’s what you want me to do, why don’t you say so?”

She turned and faced me. “You’ve still got your other apartment.”

“Don’t worry about my other apartment. If I want to be a hot shot and have one and a half apartments, that’s my business.”

“Why do you have to keep the other one?” she asked. “Isn’t it silly, isn’t it a waste?”

“It’s eighty-five bucks a month — I do it for the sake of my colleagues. He that filches from me my good name, and so on. Please, if I don’t mind the eighty-five … Please, don’t fret, Martha. If you’re upset, if you don’t want people for dinner—”

“Who said I didn’t want people? Who mentioned people?”

“—because it’s not too late. I can call them and cancel the whole thing. We can eat the roast ourselves.”

“They’re as good as anybody else,” she mumbled, and plowed into the breakfast and lunch dishes that were still stacked in the sink.

“What kind of attitude is that? Turn that damn water off, please. I thought you were enthusiastic about having somebody for dinner. I thought you thought it would be a great pleasure for us, very domestic.”

“Everything’s domestic enough, thank you.”

“Look, it was your idea to have somebody for dinner. What are you being so bitchy about? You said it would be a pleasure.”

“It probably will be.”

“Martha, I’m going to make out a check. We’ll split the rent.”

“You don’t have to pay anything, really. You don’t even have to pay Sissy’s forty.”

“I want to.”

“Her moving had nothing to do with you. I told you that.”

“I’ll split the rent. I’ll give you a check for twenty-five dollars more, is that agreeable to you?”

“… I suppose so.”

“Well, what’s the matter now? Do you want me to pay the whole rent?”

“Oh forget it.”

“Excuse me if I’m being obtuse. What is it you want to say to me?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“Well”—she raised her hands, as though she had done everything possible to spare me—“honestly, Gabe, all this dividing in half is pretty damn silly. I mean we divide the grocery bill, and you’ve got an appetite like a horse.”

“What?”

“Last night you ate all the green beans, you ate two-thirds of the tuna yesterday afternoon—”

“What’s going on here? Cynthia ate all the ice cream, every last drop, just this afternoon, and did I start shouting about dividing the bills? What’s the matter with you?”

“Why don’t you just leave Cynthia out of it? There’s no need to be so hard on that poor kid. At least she can have some vanilla ice cream out of this deal, for God’s sake.”

“I haven’t been so hard on Cynthia, let’s get that straightened out. Nobody’s been hard on Cynthia, and least of all me. The truth of it — since we’re going to speak truths — is that I’m paying half the groceries and feeding one mouth, and you’re paying half and feeding three mouths. So I’m entitled to a few God damned green beans, all right?”

“Well, you’re living here for practically nothing.”

“I paid you forty bucks.”

“Half of a hundred and thirty ain’t forty.”

“I’ll pay sixty-five. I said I’d pay sixty-five.”

“What about the other apartment?”

“Let me worry about my other apartment, will you?”

“I mean if you’ve moved in here, you might as well move all the way in.”

“I have moved all the way in.”

“Not with another apartment, you haven’t.”

“I’ve explained to you, Martha. It’s simply a matter of the University, my position, a matter of appearances and dignity—”

“It’s not dignified enough, is it, living with me?”

“Oh the hell with it. You’re just being contrary, so the hell with it.”

I went into the living room, where the table that Martha and I had pulled onto the middle of the rug was being set by Cynthia. With a painstaking concern for symmetry, the child was aligning and realigning the dinner plates between their appropriately squadroned knives, forks, and spoons. She might just as well have been defusing a bomb, for the expression on her face. As she circled the table, she smoothed out the tiniest wrinkles in the white cloth.

Markie was not around, having gone off to the playground with Stephanie and her grandmother; Cynthia had begged that she be allowed to stay at home and help with the preparations. Already she had vacuumed rugs and gone around emptying ash trays, and for one optimistic moment I believed that since she knew it was friends of mine who were coming to dine, that with these labors she was making a bid for an end to hostilities between us. Not that she hadn’t been deferential to me for the two weeks I had been in her house, but it was Cynthia’s kind of deference. At dinnertime, for example, she would shove the bread my way before I had even asked. She had not made the smallest offer of lips or face — neither a kiss or a smile — nor did she now. Watching her labor over the table, I concluded that all her dogged helpfulness was actually designed to ally herself with her mother against me. Martha and I had been sniping at each other for two days now, and Cynthia, a worldly and attentive baby, probably wanted only to make clear whose side she would be on, in the event of a full-scale war.

I left her posing in aesthetic contemplation over an arrangement of serving dishes she had made in the center of the tablecloth. In the kitchen I sat down at the table, pushed aside a coffee cup, and wrote out a check.

“This is for you,” I said.

“I don’t need any checks.”

“You’ve got to pay the rent, so don’t be silly.”

“I’ll explain that I’m broke. I’ll pay double next month.”

“Here’s a hundred and twenty-five dollars. Stop being an ass. Twenty-five I owe you, the hundred is a loan. When your friend Theresa pays you back, you pay me back.” I went up to where she stood, leaning against the sink, and put the check in the pocket of her apron. “What did she need the hundred for?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t inquire. A down payment on an abortion is probably a damn good guess. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been being nervous about the rent.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me? If you feel rushed and upset, if you want me to — if you’re feeling harried — I’ll just call and say you’re not feeling well.”

“Listen, if you want to call because you don’t want them, then go right ahead. Don’t try to slough it all off on me. I made dinner, and I’m ready, so it’s fine with me. I thought they were your friends. I thought you thought we’d all enjoy ourselves.”

“I thought you might like them, yes. I thought they would like to meet you.”

“Then let’s stop calling on the phone and telling them I’m sick. I’m not sick.”

“Martha, please don’t worry about that hundred dollars. If that girl just takes off, if she’s going to buy a ticket for a train somewhere, you just forget it.”

“I didn’t bring you here to support me.”

“I didn’t come here to support you! All I’m saying is, don’t worry about the hundred. What the hell are we arguing about? All right? Just say all right, all right?”

“All right.”

When the roast was nearly finished and Martha was dressing in the bathroom, the phone rang. She ran to it and spoke for some ten minutes, standing in her slip and bare feet.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“It’s not important.”

“That Theresa girl,” I said. “How did you get so involved with her? Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“She needs more money, doesn’t she?”

“Well, I don’t have any more!” Martha shouted, and went back into the bathroom.

Certainly there were others we could have invited. Anyone at all, really, could have sat down with us, eaten our food, sipped our coffee, and then gone off to carry into the streets the news of our unabashed, forthright, and impractical union. We needed only one couple — married preferably — to stand for the world and its opinions, one pair of outsiders to whom we could display our fundamental decency and good intentions, to whose judgment we could submit evidence of an ordered carnality and a restrained domestic life. Just one couple to give us society’s approval, if not the rubber stamp … For it must have been all of this that we were after when one sunny morning a week after I had moved in, Martha woke up and said, “Let’s have somebody for dinner!” and I said, “What a splendid idea!”

That the couple we chose — I chose — was Libby and Paul was not really as thoughtless and unimaginative as it may seem. If anything, it was too imaginative, too thoughtful — or too thought out. Only a moment after our evening together began, I knew how it was going to end. I still maintain, however, that for every reason one can think of why all these people would never have liked one another, there was a perfectly good one why they should have. Paul Herz could be a witty man, certainly a pensive and attentive man. Libby could be lively and gay. Martha could always laugh. And as for me, I was more than willing to be any sort of middleman in order to bring to an unbloody conclusion a painful chapter in my life. But certain chapters and pains are best left unconcluded. They can’t be concluded — all one needs is to know that at the time.

The first disappointment was Martha; she wore the wrong clothes. I had thought she had been planning to don her purple wool suit, toward which I had both a sentimental and aesthetic attachment, or at least the skirt to the suit and her white silk blouse. But when she rushed past me to answer the knock at the front door, it was not a woman that moved by but a circus — a burst of color and a clattering of ornaments. She had managed to tart herself up in a full orange skirt, an off-the-shoulder blouse with a ruffled neck, strands of multicolored beads, and on her feet what I shall refer to in the language of the streets (the streets around the University) as her Humanities II sandals. So that none of us would miss the point, she had neither braided her hair nor put it up. It was combed straight out, and when she tossed her head, the heavy blond mane draped down her back and almost brushed her bottom. Somehow her outfit managed to call into question the very thing we wished (or I wished) to impress upon Libby and upon Paul — the seriousness of our relationship. That the Herzes’ lives were often more threatened than my own had led me on occasion to believe that their lives were also more serious than my own; whatever the mixture of insight and bafflement that had produced in me such an idea, it contributed also to the quality of my affections and anxieties where these two needy people were concerned.

The visitors peered out of the stairway; they were Paul and Libby Herz, they said, but was this Mrs. Reganhart’s apartment? Apparently Martha looked to them as though she could not be a Mrs. anything, which may indeed have been what was in her head as she had dressed herself before her bedroom mirror. Perhaps what she had wanted to look precisely like was a free spirit, someone un-worried and without cares — for a change, nobody’s mother. But what she resembled finally — what I was sure the Herzes thought she looked like — was some tootsie with whom I had decided to pass my frivolous days. Through the early stages of their visit I felt some circumstantial link between myself and a gigolo or pimp. Despite several energetic attempts to govern my unconscious, I began during dinner to make a series of disconnected remarks all of which turned out to have a decidedly smutty air. “So I laid it on the line to the Chancellor’s secretary—” “Remember Charlotte Foster from Iowa City? Well, she turned up in Chicago and blew me to a meal—” And so on, through the pimento and anchovies and into the roast itself. All I had to do really was shut up; we would then have been bathed in a silence that could probably have been no more destructive of pleasure than was my banal chatter.

To make matters worse — to make my Martha brassier — Libby that day was the child saint about to be lifted onto the cross. There was even in her very flat-chestedness something that lent her an ethereal and martyred air. She was buttoned up to her white throat in a pale green cardigan sweater whose sleeves reached nearly into the palms of her hands; and her hands were just small half-closed fists in her lap. Every time a serving dish was passed to Paul he would lean over to ask Libby if she would have some. If she shook her head, he urged half a spoonful on her anyway, whispering words I couldn’t hear into those ears of hers, which stuck poignantly out just where the hair was pulled back above them. If she parted her unpainted lips and consented to be fed, he would croon fine, good and arrange a portion of food for her on her plate. His behavior engaged Martha instantly, and the attention she showed him was almost embarrassing in its openness. After a while she looked to me not so much disgusted — though there was that in it all right — as offended by this demonstration of nutritional billing and cooing.

I had never seen Paul so solicitous toward his wife, and it would have made me uneasy too, had I not my own private source of uneasiness sitting directly in the center of the table — the roast. When it appeared and I had sunk my knife down into its pink center, a new wave of silence, deeper and more significant, went around the table (granted, this may have been my imagination again). It was as though a particularly gross display of wealth had been flaunted; we were about to dine on some mysterious incarnation of rubies and gold. Then I opened a bottle of Gevrey Chambertin (1951) and with the classy thhhppp of the cork, we were all reminded once again of the superfluity that characterized my particular sojourn on this earth. In short, I felt that Paul and Libby — in different degrees, for different reasons — resented me for Martha’s gaudy voluptuousness and for the meal as well. I told myself that they would never understand my life, and that I shouldn’t allow them to upset me. But then I thought that if all their suspicion and resentment was merely of my own imagining, it was perhaps I myself who would never understand it.

When the children came in to be appreciated in their clean pajamas, they were introduced to the guests.

“And this is Cynthia,” I said, “and this is Mark.”

Markie immediately went for Martha; Cynthia said, “How do you do?”

“How do you do?” Paul said.

Libby looked up from her food — in which she had all of a sudden taken an interest — but only for a second. She had already returned to separating something on her plate when she commented, “Aren’t they nice.”

Martha ignored the remark, though not the person who had made it; she glared at Libby, then, taking a hand of each of her children, said, “Good night, dears.”

“You going to come kiss us good night?” Mark asked.

“As soon as dinner is over,” Martha said. “You go off to bed now.”

“You going to come?” Markie asked me.

They left, Cynthia turning at the door to say that it had been a pleasure to meet the Herzes; she skipped off, her behind like a little piece of fruit, and nobody at the table seemed charmed. We ate in silence until at last Paul asked Martha how old they were, and she didn’t answer.

“Cynthia is seven,” I said, “and Mark is — how old, Martha? Four?”

I passed the information on to Paul. “Four,” I said. “Look, would anyone care for more meat?”

“No, thank you,” Paul said.

“How about some wine, Libby?” I asked.

She shook her head. Paul said, “She can’t drink too much alcohol.”

Some few minutes later, Paul said, “We’ve had a very tiring day. You’ll have to excuse us.”

I thought for a moment they were going to get up and leave without even finishing. He was only apologizing, however, for his wife’s silence. I suppose he never felt a need to apologize for his own.

“That’s all right,” Martha said. “I’m tired myself.”

“Do you know?” I rushed in. “It’s very interesting about this wine. Now 1951 was supposedly a good year, so I procured—” Procured? Bought, damn it, bought! I babbled on, explaining how I had come to purchase the wine, while Martha began making offerings of food to Libby, calling her Mrs. Herz. Paul sat listening so silently to what I said that I went on and on and on, waiting as it were for some signal from him that I had spoken enough and could stop. But it was like sending one’s voice down a well.

When we had finally finished the one bottle of wine — which everyone had been sipping parsimoniously — I ran off to the kitchen to get the other. I returned to the living room to find that the Herzes had retired to the sofa and Martha had begun to clear the table.

“We’ll have coffee over there,” she said, carrying the dishes away.

I sat down in a sling chair opposite the Herzes. Libby had picked up a book from the sofa.

“It’s a very funny book,” I said. “Martha reads the children a little every night, and they laugh …”

Libby set it down. “That must be nice.”

“Yes,” I said. And I thought, Then why did you come? Why did you accept my invitation? Why won’t you let this be ended!

Why won’t I?

The three of us sat facing one another, and the gloom came rolling in. I said, “Excuse me, I better go say good night to the children.”

In the kitchen Martha was standing over the stove, fiddling with her beads and waiting for the coffee to be ready.

“Come on,” I whispered. “It’s like a wake in there.”

“I’ll be in in a minute.”

I put my hands on her bare arms, and she moved away. “Hurry up, will you?” I said. “Nobody’s willing to say anything. Everyone’s a little stiff.”

“Oh, just a little.”

“Why did you have to rush them away from the table?”

“They weren’t eating anything, what was the difference?”

“I was going to open another bottle of wine.”

“They weren’t drinking either.”

“Well, I’m going to bring in the Armagnac,” I said, “the hell with it.”

“What!”

“The Armagnac. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me nothing — what’s the matter now?”

“That Armagnac happens to date from before I saw your smiling face.”

“Martha, we’ll all die out there.”

“So we’ll die. That bottle costs seven bucks. If you wanted some why didn’t you think to buy it this afternoon?”

“Because you’ve hardly started the bottle that’s here. What’s gotten into you?”

“Don’t people drink beer any more?”

“Look, I’ll give you a check for seven dollars! Be quiet!”

“You and your checks.” She turned back to the coffee. “I saved nickles and dimes, and bought that as a special gift for myself, but the hell with it, just take the stuff and pour—”

“This is some party! This is marvelous! Are you coming back in there tonight or aren’t you?”

“I’ll be in,” she mumbled. “Just go ahead.”

“Well, I’m taking the Armagnac.” And I went back into the living room, choking the bottle around the neck. I poured four glasses of brandy without asking whether anybody wanted some. I sat back with my glass, sipped from it, and said — innocently, absolutely innocently, just in order to say something—“How’s the adoption going?”

Paul turned immediately to Libby, who turned to him. He said, “I mentioned it to Gabe, you know.” He looked back to me, and I felt no need to apologize; since the beginning of the evening surely it was I who had been the most burdened member of our party. We stared, Paul and I, wordlessly at one another while Libby said, “Oh did you?”

“I thought he would like to know,” he said.

Libby looked down into her lap.

I said, “I think it’s a fine idea, Libby.”

“What is?” The question came from Martha, who had entered the room with a trayful of coffee cups. Apparently she had decided to make an effort to be gracious; it was simply the wrong moment to have chosen.

“Nothing,” I said, leaning back.

“I’m sorry I interrupted.”

I saw her face harden, and Paul must have seen it too. “Libby and I are adopting a baby,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Oh yes?” She looked at Libby, and for the first time since the Herzes’ arrival, she smiled. “A boy or a girl?”

The question had an astonishing effect upon Libby at first; she seemed frightened, then insulted.

Paul said, “We don’t know yet. We’re still in the inquiring stage.”

Martha set down the tray and poured the coffee. Libby looked over to me. “We have to adopt a Jewish baby anyway,” she said.

“Yes? I didn’t know.”

“The Catholic orphanages are crawling with kids,” explained Libby in an emotionless voice, “but that doesn’t help us. With the Jewish agencies there’s over a three-year waiting list. Then we’re a mixed marriage as far as anybody’s concerned.”

“But you converted—” I said.

Sullenly she said, “So what?”

I did not press for more information; Martha sat down and the four of us drank our coffee. Paul said, “You see, today we called long distance to New York. Thinking we could work something out with an agency there.” He stopped explaining, and what was left unsaid was clear enough from the look on his face.

Martha said to him, “That’s too bad.”

“It’ll work out,” he assured her.

“Oh sure,” Libby said.

Some moments later, Libby spoke again. When her mouth opened the words that came out were connected to none that had previously been spoken in the room. Her body was lifeless and her voice vacant, and it seemed that she might say just about anything. This girl had aroused numerous emotions in me in the past, but never before had she made me feel as I did now — afraid. Looking at me again, she said, “Paul was called in to see the Dean today.”

“Libby—” her husband said.

“That Spigliano,” she said, “is really going to try to get him fired.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” Paul inclined his head toward his cup after he had spoken, so that his face was in shadows. “I ran into the Dean,” he said softly, “I wasn’t called in anywhere, Libby. I just ran into him.”

“You said he as much as told you they weren’t happy with you.”

“Libby’s exaggerating,” Paul said.

“Mommy!”

We all looked toward the doorway, where Cynthia stood, rubbing her eyes.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Martha said, getting up.

Cynthia’s eyes landed on each of us in turn. “You’re all talking too loud. I can’t sleep.”

Martha set down her cup. “We’re hardly talking at all,” she said, and chaperoned Cynthia back to her room.

Libby extended her neck its full length. “Maybe we had better go. I don’t want to wake up anybody who’s trying to sleep.”

“Libby, Paul — please stay. Let’s not run off. Why don’t we all relax,” I suggested, and went off to the kitchen. The door to the back porch was ajar, and Martha stood in the opening leaning against the wall and looking outside.

“Martha,” I said, coming up to her and feeling the cold from outside, “what the hell is going on here? I invited them over, you invited them over. Let’s not throw them out. I feel as though I’m in the middle of an earthquake. Let’s all at least try to be civil. Let’s get through this thing like human beings.”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Don’t mind Libby. If it’s any solace to you, she’s really quite miserable.”

“If it’s any solace to her, so am I. So we’re even.”

“So am I, damn it! Just control yourself. Turn around, Martha. Tell me what the trouble is.”

“Married people depress me,” she said, not turning.

“I thought it was divorced people.”

“Why don’t you go back into the living room and entertain your friends?”

And I went, but before I had even sat down again, Libby said to me, “I’ve been saying something ought to be done about that John Spigliano. Somebody should hit him in the jaw.”

“He’s a pain in the ass, Libby,” I said, making a hopeless gesture, “nobody will argue that. There’s really nobody who can stand him. But you’ve really only got to ignore him.”

“Suppose,” she said, “you have principles.”

I smiled. “Still ignore him.”

“Well,” she said, “maybe you can …”

I tried now to ignore her. I looked over at her husband, who was leaning back against the sofa, his face marked slightly by a frown. “It isn’t a matter of me, Libby,” I said, “it’s simply the most sensible thing to do.”

Paul leaned forward. “Oh but, Jesus, the circular symbols in Tom Sawyer.” He looked to Libby, who nodded in agreement. “What incredible horseshit,” said Paul.

“Of course,” I told him. “I know.”

“Then,” said Libby, no longer in a flat voice, “why don’t you say something?”

I was puzzled for a moment, until I imagined again all the conversations that this couple — my old Libby — must have had about me. “Look, Libby, I was through all this last year. I shared your feelings exactly. But the best thing is to ignore Spigliano and do your job.”

“We certainly didn’t have anybody like him at Reading,” she said.

“So?” I answered. “That doesn’t prove anything here or there.”

“It proves something,” she said.

“Oh hell, Libby, you didn’t have to come here if you didn’t want to. I was led to believe it was so awful in Reading.”

“Nobody’s blaming you,” Paul said now.

“Well,” I replied, “isn’t that nice.”

“Actually, we were probably better off in Reading,” Libby said, “where there weren’t all these phoney and ambitious people.”

“Well, you could have chosen to stay there.”

Paul was standing. “Libby’s not feeling well, Gabe—”

“Oh balls,” I said, standing now myself, “Libby’s never feeling well.”

“I don’t think there’s any need for that kind of remark,” he said, growing fierce.

“There’s no need for anything,” I said. “You’ve got some appreciation of generosity—”

“I told you Libby’s not feeling well—”

“Well, I’m talking to both of you.”

Suddenly Martha was in the room. “Could all of you stop shouting! Could my kids get some sleep, please!”

Libby stood up and faced her. “We’re going, Mrs. Reganhart.”

“Yes,” Paul said, taking his wife’s elbow. “I think we’d better.”

I took a walk that night, by myself. I pulled up my collar and went all the way down to the lake, where the waters were behaving like an ocean, breaking onto the dark rock barrier, then rushing out with the sound of violent tugging. I could not distinguish where the black water ended and where the black sky began. What I saw — actually, what I could not see — frightened me, but I hung on as long as I could, looking straight out into it, as though fear might run through me like a cathartic, and leave me a less cautious man. Finally I broke away and dashed across the deserted park and onto the lighted streets. Walking back to Martha’s apartment very slowly, I did not do a great deal of thinking because I could not figure out what to think about.

The table had been cleared and pushed back to the wall; the coffee cups, brandy glasses, and bottle had all been put away. I turned off the hall light and in the bedroom got into my pajamas, while Martha lay there with her eyes open, smoking. The bedside lamp was on, but her gaze was focused only on the smoke that rose above her head.

I sat down by the window, pushed back a corner of the shade, and peered outside. I said, “What a night.”

Martha only pushed herself up a little, as though my remark had caused her some postural discomfort. Her hair was still down over her shoulders, and from time to time her eyes twittered from the smoke; that was all that moved.

“It was stupid of me to have chosen to invite those people,” I said. “I should surely have realized what was going to happen beforehand.” She said nothing. “I don’t know why I felt the necessity to extend something that is really quite over. I should never—”

“Gabe,” she said, “we have to do something about the money situation.”

I rose, and I paced until I could contain myself.

“I told you,” I said, “that I’ll pay for that bottle. If you want, I’ll make out a check right now. Or give you cash, if you object so strenuously to my checks.”

“What about the groceries?”

“Oh hell!”

She went on smoking in that contemplative, bitchy, distracted way.

“What’s come over you?” I asked. “What did I say? We’ve been through all this, over and over it, as a matter of fact. Okay, money is a problem, and I’m willing to work it out. But what is it you want me to do, Martha, pay for everything? Is that what you think will work better? Are you sure about that?”

“Well, I prepare the food,” she said. “You don’t pay for that. The gas I cook with I happen to pay for. The same goes for the electric lights in the kitchen. Be reasonable, please.”

I leaned toward her over the foot of the bed. “You’re kidding me or something, aren’t you? Look at me — aren’t you? What do you want me to do — hire you as a cook?”

“You treat me like one, why not?”

“Do I? Look at me, damn it! Do I? Do you think,” I demanded, “I’d hire a cook with two kids?”

She pushed her cigarette into the ash tray beside the bed. “I don’t know if this is working out.”

I tried deep breathing — a metaphoric way, I suppose, of pumping up the will. “Martha, if you’re willing, we ought to wait until tomorrow. We’ll both feel more ourselves in the morning. This has been a bad day from the start. The money mix-up, and Theresa, and the Herzes. Paul Herz is a strange fellow, impossible to get to, and Libby — Libby’s very tough to figure out.”

“Not so tough.”

“Maybe not. I suppose she got very screwed up seeing your kids. Two handsome children getting ready for bed, Cynthia’s book … It probably upset her.”

“Those two handsome children seem to have the remarkable ability of upsetting everybody.”

“I can’t be responsible for her, Martha.” I went back to the window and found myself staring into the drawn shade.

“That’s your type though, isn’t it?” Martha said. “The svelte, skinny Mediterranean ones.”

“Christ, why don’t you go to sleep and take your rotten temper with you.”

“What — did you have an affair with her? Is that what she was up to with all that pecking away at you? Why didn’t she look at me, I’d like to know? Can’t anybody talk directly to me? Am I just the new lay — do you do this often, old man, so everybody’s in on it except the dumb blowsy mistress herself?”

“I’m going to turn the light off. You’re not jealous, which you know, and you’re not making sense. I don’t go for these midnight accusations.”

“You don’t really dig us big fat Nordic slobs, though, do you?”

I looked at her. “I’m crazy about fat Nordic slobs, as a matter of fact.” I went over and switched off the bedside light, but then I could not bring myself to get into the bed beside her. I sat on the edge.

“This just isn’t working out,” she said.

“What isn’t working out?”

“Cynthia is very upset.”

“Cynthia was upset before I got here.”

“Not the same way.”

“All right then,” I said, rising. “Then I’ll move out. We’ll break it off. This is ridiculous, Martha. What is it you want anyway?”

“I don’t want you to move out!” she said.

“Then what do you want?”

Suddenly she had flipped on the light and was squatting on the blanket. Her nightgown was hiked up to her knees upon which were planted her fists. “Stop raising your voice!” she demanded. “Everybody just hates for those kids to get some sleep! What do you mean you’ll move out? What do you think this is, a hotel? You’ll move in one week and out the next? I’ve got kids to think about. This is no flophouse, you!”

“Why didn’t you think about your kids when I moved in?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I did,” I said. “I thought about it plenty!”

“Well then, keep thinking about them, buddy. Don’t be so fast to pack your bags.” Her hair had fallen over her face, and she shook it back, showing a face puffy with rage. She stood up, violently grabbed a cigarette from the night table, and lit it. She began to tramp around the room, all her pounds and inches coming down through her bare feet onto the floor. She puffed at the cigarette, giving no thought to the flutter of ashes onto her nightgown.

I said nothing for several minutes. Then calmly: “You were the one who said it wasn’t working out, Martha. Not me. I came back here tonight prepared to forget that stupid Armagnac fuss, dedicated to barreling through this miserable night, and starting in again tomorrow. You suggested I leave.”

“The hell I did,” she said. “Can’t you remember from one minute to the next? Nobody told you to leave — you volunteered to pack your bags.”

“And what do you expect somebody to do if you tell them a hundred times that it isn’t working out? Don’t you think tonight’s been a mess and a trial for me too? Do you think you can just go around telling people it isn’t working out and that they’re going to stand there? What a night! What a day! You, that lousy Armagnac, Theresa whatever the hell her name is—

“Haug. And that’s my affair, not yours.”

“That’s fine with me. Frankly I’m sick of other people’s troubles. Libby Herz, sitting there with those brooding sullen eyes, and why? Because I didn’t steal her away from Paul back in Iowa? Well, don’t look at me as though I’m nuts — I don’t know either. I’m really finding it difficult to keep up with what certain people want of me. As a matter of fact I didn’t sleep with her, Martha, and I didn’t have an affair, though one night about three or four years ago, I don’t even remember any more, I kissed her. I admit to the crime: I kissed the girl. But I never got her down in bed — though you might want to know it crossed my mind. I don’t have a pure and rarefied soul, and I’m not without base instincts — but I’ll also tell you that I didn’t do it, and that’s a fact. But you see, now apparently she wanted me to. I was supposed to come along and rescue her!”

Martha looked immeasurably skeptical. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because she was married to her husband, Martha. To that big skinny silent prick, Paul.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see anything. For some reason that makes me a beast in your eyes, and a coward. I’ve been going around for years thinking I acted honorably, and now it’s my fault I didn’t put it to her.”

“Nobody said that.”

“Well, I’m no social worker. I’m tired of meddling in people’s lives!”

“It isn’t meddling, I shouldn’t think, when people are in trouble.”

“What is it you want me to come out for, adultery?”

“Don’t sound moralistic, please. Not you. The minute you see a stray female you take her to the hardware store to have duplicate keys made to her apartment.”

“That’s right. I have no feelings. It was heartless of me to have you cook a roast for dinner, because it made the Herzes feel shame and dismay. I shouldn’t have talked about the wine, because that made Herz unhappy too. I can assure you he’s home now hating my guts for that damn roast beef.”

“He ought to hate me too,” she said, “I paid half!”

“We should have had smelts then! Smelts and stale bread and, I don’t know — orange pop! And you shouldn’t have worn those jazzy gypsy clothes either — you should have worn something gray and washed-out, something with a rip in it.”

“I’ve got plenty of washed-out numbers with rips in them, thank you.”

“Ah, don’t start in on me with the poverty business, Martha, because I’m not in a charitable mood.”

“Poverty hell. I’m only asking you to pay your way.”

“Well, what is it — do you want me to leave a ten-dollar bill on the dresser every morning? Is that what’s going on here?”

She turned and walked away at last, her head back, dragging on her cigarette. “Watch yourself, Gabe. Please watch yourself. I’m not a stone wall.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just not a stone wall myself.”

“Nobody is — let’s assume that!”

“And maybe you ought to stop raising your voice too. Mark gets up and peeks in the door enough as it is.”

“What can I do about that?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either. The child’s interested. He has a natural curiosity. He never had so many doors closed in his face before. We ought to at least have given him a little breaking-in period.”

“Come on, Martha, will you — you choose to close the door as much as I do. Suddenly even sex looks one-sided to you. Please don’t start switching it around so that I’m responsible for any confusions your kids might have. I haven’t been here long enough. I’m not Dick Reganhart. I didn’t do it. Just as it’s my fault Libby’s kidneys went bad on her, as though I have something to do with the fact that there are no Jewish babies. Did you see that that was addressed to me? Jewish girls don’t get knocked up as often — what are we all supposed to do about that!”

Martha blew out a mouthful of smoke before she’d even had a chance to inhale it. “And what’s that supposed to mean, Stonewall?”

“What supposed to mean?”

“You think it was easy quitting school, do you? You think it was easy marrying him? When that prissy little minister pronounced us abstract expressionist and wife I saw the whole black future, and kept my mouth shut. I got knocked up all right, but I acted like a woman about it. I’m glad I had Cynthia. She’s a fine child, a fine lovely bright child, even if it takes her a year to warm up to you. Ten years! What do you think she is, a chameleon? She’s loyal to her father — which happens to be admirable. She happens to be an admirable child, and don’t you forget it.”

“I didn’t mean anything about you and Dick, Martha, and I’m sorry if you misunderstood.”

“Well, you sure as hell go out of your way not to mean anything. I don’t have such a lousy record, you know. I had that child, I didn’t have it scraped down some drain somewhere, back in some dark alley. And then I woke up one morning and that son of a bitch was on top of me again, and I didn’t have an abortion then either. These are lives, for God’s sake. I love those kids. I’m glad I’ve got them, overwhelmingly glad. I work nights and I hate it — you don’t know how I hate it. But I’m glad I’ve got those kids. They’re something, damn it. At least they don’t go packing their bags all the time. Men are a great big pain in the ass. Somebody ought to take all their luggage away and burn it. Then where would they be! I’ll tell you something about feelings, my friend — nobody’s got any any more. All they’ve got is suitcases! And stay the hell away from me with your big tit-holding hands — I have a right to cry. Don’t soothe me, damn it!” She sat down in the chair by the window, and without covering her face, she wept.

“Martha, hang on. Try to hang on. Somehow Theresa Haug, the Herzes—”

“Oh Gabe,” she wept, “the hell with Theresa Haug. The hell with all that Armagnac. I want you to marry me or give me up. I’m too old to screw around like this.”

4

The first knowledge she had that day was that their room was swelling with a gleaming gray January light, but she kept her eyes closed to it and she waited. Eyes closed there was no crippled chest of drawers across the way, no half-painted dresser, no smelly rug rolled up in the corner, no curled paint petals flaking off the ceiling onto the pillow; there was only the knowledge that it was morning, a new day, and with it all the possibilities. Some mornings he touched her. Most mornings she touched him and then he touched her. This morning she was willing to wait. She would wait. She made a hmmm sound to let him know she was awake. But she sensed nothing new against her skin, nothing but sheets and blanket and the frail sun. She rolled over, making another sound, a slow moan of lust and comfort, a request for a simple pleasure. She continued to keep her eyes closed. Then she thought (after a decent interval): There are compromises to be made in life. One can’t expect everything. He is a faithful, hard-working, dear, terribly talented, intelligent, hard-luck man. It isn’t his fault … She moved her head an inch closer to his pillow, and then her whole body, but casually, as though she were only being tossed toward him by the oceanic process of awakening. The sun caught her full in the face. Good. She had to go all the way to the Near North Side and at least it wouldn’t be miserably cold. If, however, he touched her, if his mouth slid over her breasts, if his body pressed her down, then she would not have to go at all. She didn’t want to really, even if it was sunny. He need only reach out … But the compromises — she must compromise a little. One must begin to, certainly, at twenty-five. One couldn’t go through life whining and demanding, day in and day out. She knew certain things about herself that she did not like: she cried too much; she was envious, she was always sick — she was a hopeless hypochondriac, in fact. She knew she had the wrong values. She thought about money all the time. She thought about nice clothes. She thought about nice furniture. She had always imagined that when she was married she would have a dinner service for twelve of Spode china. Spode. The word, like sun on the skin, warmed her, had a dreamy happy glow about it — she would be married, and her husband would be tall (as he was), and he would be kind and soft-spoken and strong and full of integrity (as he was), and dark (as he was), and there would be a long dinner table with a white cloth and candles, and the Spode, and weekend guests to whom she would call out, “Extra bath towels are in the linen closet just outside your room,” and beyond the kitchen would be a garden of her own, with chrysanthemums and nasturtiums and petunias and fresh herbs, which she would cut with scissors for their salad. In the early evenings, when her husband had turned off the lamp in his study (and he did have a study, and in it he was writing a book), she would take him out through the kitchen door into the garden, and in the blending of the earth’s dusk and their contentment, they would hold hands and smell her flowers … But at the age of twenty-five one had to begin to understand about compromise. Though she was not proud of herself for very many things (she would have to admit that too when she went downtown: that she was not proud of herself, which made her feel terrible) still she might have reason to become proud were she able to learn to compromise, and to like it. Yes, the second half as well, for surely if one didn’t like it, if one couldn’t stand it … But one must stand it. And it was simple. She had only to take it upon herself to move an inch and another inch and then — her eyes still closed — another inch and one more, and now reach out with her fingers, and now lay her hand, softly, lovingly … He was not there. She opened her eyes. No Paul. Only his pajamas lying on the floor. She heard him making breakfast in the kitchen. Make me! Make love to me! I’ll make breakfast!

To the sun, filtering through the grimy windows, she said, “Why can’t he just kiss me on the lips?”

She got out of bed, thinking: I want everything.

Over her nightgown she put on a robe, the same blue flannel one her parents had given her when she’d gone off to Cornell ages ago. In the kitchen he was standing over the stove, waiting for the coffee; he was already dressed in his suit and tie, and his briefcase was on a chair. The table was set neatly for two, knife on the right, fork on the left. This morning he had cut her orange in quarters and there were two pills beside her bread plate. Dutiful man, he had even folded the paper napkins in half. She did not know of any other husband who so served his wife. He had always worked so hard — at first, before their marriage, for himself, to make money for school, to get good grades; then after their marriage for the two of them. But from the back she saw that his shoulders were still unbent. She came up behind him on her toes and put her arms around his spindly body, her face in the faintly odorous material of his jacket. For some reason their closets smelled the way closets might in which very old maids kept their belongings. And there was nothing to be done about it; she had already tried air-wick and cologne and moth spray, but apparently it was something in the very plaster of the house.

Paul jumped. “Oh Jesus — you scared me.”

“I’m sorry. Good morning. It’s me — sunshine.” She intended her merry words to be at once winning and self-critical, a reference to the night before.

“Honey, please put on slippers,” Paul said. “The floors are cold.”

That simple remark of his almost drove her mad. “Good morning, though … first.”

“Good morning, Libby.”

She looked up into his eyes and found nothing there to make her doubt that he was a generous man. And she loved him! He was so much more adult and genuine, more in contact with life’s realities, than she could ever hope to be.

“Please,” he said, kissing her above the eye, when she lingered beside him, “go put on slippers. I’ve got a class in half an hour.”

“Yes,” she said; she fled toward the hall on her toes, and then she turned, and with her face lifted, with her heart beating, she said, “Paul, isn’t it a wonderful day? It’s sunny for a change. It seems like a very significant day—” That was as much as she could manage to tell him.

She went into their bedroom and from beneath the dresser kicked out her slippers. While she was there she thought she would quickly make the bed. It will please him to see me peppy and active; it will make this dreary room orderly, if not beautiful. But the whole day was before her, no job to go to any longer, no night classes to prepare for, nothing she really had to read, so it might even be a good thing to save the bed for a little later in the morning. She could begin painting those chairs in the kitchen — then she remembered she hadn’t the whole day after all. She had to go downtown. She ran into the kitchen then to be near her husband. If anything significant was going to happen today, it was going to have to happen between them, and in less than thirty minutes. There was no time to waste making beds or worrying over painting chairs. Paint wouldn’t make them look any better anyway. There was no way of cheering this place up. Only Paul.

But back in the kitchen she could not think what he could really do or say that she should allow to dissuade her from what she had planned. Her decision had come much too hard — it had been a week of dialing the number one minute and hanging up the next. She would not permit herself to be tricked by a pleasant breakfast; she wouldn’t let him get away with that. It wasn’t as though all their troubles had begun yesterday.

She remembered yesterday — specifically, the dinner of the night before. Paul had said nothing all the way home, though she knew he had disapproved of her behavior. Wherever they went lately she wound up arguing with people. But it was not her fault! Everyone else had been awful — that son of a bitch Gabe, that woman … But what had they done? What had they said to her? Why did she hate people? She would have to admit that too when she went downtown — that she couldn’t control her responses, that out of the clear blue sky she began to hate people.

“I think I’m going to go out this afternoon,” Libby said, picking at her orange.

“Just dress warmly.”

“Don’t you want to know where I’m going?”

“Out. For a walk …” he said. “I thought you said you were going out.”

“If you’re not interested …”

“Libby, don’t be petulant first thing in the morning.”

“Well, don’t be angry at me for last night.”

“Who said anything about last night?”

“That’s the whole thing — you won’t even bring it up. Well, I didn’t behave so badly, and don’t think I did.”

“That’s over and done with. You were provoked. That’s all right. That’s finished.”

She did not then ask him who had provoked her; she just began cloudily to accept that she had been.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“When?” Now she was petulant, perhaps because she no longer considered it necessary for her to feel guilty about last night.

She saw Paul losing patience. “This afternoon. You said you were going out, and then I didn’t ask you where, you remember … so now where is it you’re going?”

“Just out. For a walk.”

Paul closed his eyes, and touched his palms together, as though he were praying. “Look”—his eyes opened—“you can’t allow yourself to get too upset. We’re doing all we can.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“That adoption business is what I’m talking about. It seems confused now and a little hopeless. But it won’t be. Things will get sorted out. We’ve only just begun — you can’t allow it to get to you so soon.”

“I wasn’t even talking about that,” she said, thinking: I wasn’t even talking about that!

“No,” Paul said, “but anyway, try to relax. I’m going to call that Greek orphan place today.”

“Paul, I don’t mean to be hopeless, but that particular setup sounds so—”

“We’ll just look into it,” he said sharply.

Adopting a baby had been her idea in the first place, hadn’t it? She could no longer keep perfectly straight in her mind who had said and done what. “Okay,” she said.

“And the Jewish agency is going to send somebody next week.”

“What good will that do?”

“Libby, it’s an interview. It’s part of adopting a baby.”

“Other people just get pregnant—”

“Forget other people!”

“Don’t shout at me.”

“I don’t shout at you.”

“Not outside you don’t,” she said bitterly. “If I made you angry last night, why didn’t you shout at me there? Why do you only quarrel with me at home?”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Well …” she said, trying to think of something sensible to say, some simple fact. “Well, that Jewish agency, I don’t see what good it is anyway. They have a three-year waiting list. Who can wait three years? I could have had a baby a long time ago—”

“That’s enough.”

“Well, I could have.”

“So you could have,” he said, raising his hands, then dropping them.

And how bald he had become, she thought, since that time I could have had my baby. How old. She felt suddenly as though they had been married a hundred years. A harsh laugh rang in her ears, and it was only herself laughing to think that it had not even been the abortion that had knocked out her reproductive powers — just her own two kidneys. How much easier for her if it had been something Paul had put his hands to, or that doctor, or her parents. Anyone. But it was only what had always lived inside her. How can he bear me? she thought. I deserve sick kidneys. Why doesn’t he just leave me?

But he, unlike her, had no illusions; she knew him to be too good and too patient. She was the nut in the family, and he was the one with his hands full. She let that serve as an accurate description of their life.

“Paul, I won’t be falsely pessimistic if you won’t be falsely optimistic.”

“It’s not being falsely optimistic to say that we’ll work something out. Besides, the waiting list is only two years.”

“No,” she said, nodding, “that’s not falsely optimistic. People adopt babies …”

“Why don’t you go downtown, Libby? Why don’t you go to the Art Institute today? It’s a beautiful day. Get out. Just put on that little tan hat—”

“It’s a beautiful day, I don’t need a hat.”

He set down his coffee cup as though suddenly it weighed too much. “I only thought you looked pretty in that hat.” He left it at that.

She was crushed for having crushed him, especially when he had only been suggesting that she was pretty. Still, if he found her so damned attractive … Everything between them was hopelessly confused.

“I thought I would go downtown.”

He rose. “Fine.”

“So I probably won’t be here when you get back.”

He only leaned down and finished the last of his coffee.

“Don’t you want to talk about last night?” she said.

“I don’t think so.”

What she wanted to ask him was who had provoked her. Often when she tried to puzzle out the circumstances of her life, her mind was a blank. Last night seemed beyond understanding, and yet it was probably so simple. “I behaved rudely—” she began.

“Everybody behaved badly. Shouldn’t we leave it at that?”

“I guess so.”

After Paul left she put the breakfast dishes in the sink, on top of the lunch dishes from the day before. In the bedroom she decided once again to save the bedmaking until later. Her appointment was not until one, so there was plenty of time.

She sat down gingerly upon the sofa in the living room. She still had trouble easing her head back onto the pillows, though she had brushed and brushed them with a whisk broom and been over them many times with a damp sponge. The trouble with their furniture was that it had all been bought one afternoon at Catholic Salvage, a place she could not forget. How Paul had discovered it she still did not know, but one day after they had found the apartment, a bleak but moderately priced four rooms on Drexel, they had taken a bus, and then changed to another bus, to the brick warehouse on South Michigan. They had been the only two white people there — except in the first floor clothing section, where two spinsters, with skin the color and texture of pie crust, stood around a table full of secondhand underwear, fingering and discarding numerous foundation garments. They had already started up the metal stairs to the furniture section when Paul had turned and gone back down to a pipe rack he had spotted in men’s wear; it was then Libby had seen the two pathetic old ladies holding up faded corset after faded corset, and then dropping them from crippled fingers back onto the heap. She turned away from them, tears already in her eyes, to see Paul picking out a blue pin-striped suit from amongst a half dozen limp garments strung along the rack. When she saw that the jacket fitted — with a little give and take here and there — she drew in her breath. Though she knew it didn’t matter, that it was what a person was and not what he wore that counted, she nevertheless had begun to pray: “Mary, Mother of God, please don’t let him buy that thing.” And her prayer had been answered. He came clanging up the stairs in his Army-Navy Store shoes to tell her that the two suits he already had were plenty.

They then proceeded up one more flight and around the vast cement floor, where they picked out a kitchen table, four chairs, a desk, a sofa, a bedstead, springs, a mattress, a chest of drawers, a dresser, a mirror, three lamps, and a rug. Marching up another flight, they chose their dishes and pots and pans. And Paul walked right up and touched everything. In his coat and shoes he had stretched out on half a dozen second-hand mattresses until he had found one with enough life left in it.

“Watch out you don’t fall asleep now, son,” said a Negro man who walked by carrying an old console-model radio.

Paul looked up and smiled; Libby smiled too. She was full of admiration for her husband, not to mention wonder: How can he put his head down there? Ever since grade school she had defended the rights of all men, regardless of race; she had willingly (deliberately?) married a Jew; she had always spoken up for the underprivileged (and this even before she had become one herself). Yet she stood looking down at her husband and thinking: These mattresses have belonged to colored people. I don’t want any … She had only sympathy and tenderness for the sick (and this, too, dating from before she had joined the ranks), but she thought: They have been slept upon by sick people, dying people—I DON’T WANT ANY! To her husband, however, she said nothing; all the while that Paul went around rapping, knocking, testing, she kept her hands in the pockets of her raincoat. She managed to get away without having had to touch anything.

“What do you think?” Paul had asked. “Do we need something else?”

There were blankets and sheets, but she did not choose to mention either until they were home. “That seems like everything to me,” she said.

“Whatever else we need then, we can pick up along the way.”

“Yes — if anything turns up …”

All together what they bought had cost $103, including the rug, which they never unrolled. “I just don’t like the pattern,” Libby said.

“Then why didn’t you say so when we were there?”

“Maybe later I’ll get used to it. Can’t we keep it rolled up a little longer? I don’t mind the floors, really, if you don’t.”

He had let her have her way, though she did not forget that the rug had cost them eight dollars — two of her visits to a doctor.

So with all of this behind her (the knowledge she had of her weaknesses, the decision to overcome the weaknesses), she took the bull by the horns and put her head all the way back onto the sofa. One could come to grips with life if only one used a little reason and a little will power. That was what she admired in Paul: his will.

In her blue flannel robe, with her head held rigidly back (she was not going to give in to her worst side), she watched the sun on the bare floor. What to do until one o’clock? She could, of course, decide the hell with one o’clock and then go ahead and do anything. But she could go ahead and do anything anyway. She could paint the kitchen chairs. However, still unfinished was the dresser, which she had begun to paint a bright yellow some six weeks ago. It seemed now to have been a mistaken bit of economy to have bought such cheap paint, for instead of being bright and gay — brightness and gaiety was what she had told Paul the apartment lacked when she had pleaded with him for money for the paint — the piece was coming out a mean, mustardy color because of the stain beneath. Well, she could go ahead and make the bed then … No, she would save their bed for last. And not out of laziness; she suddenly had a motive: she wanted those sheets and blankets firmly in her mind when she went downtown. What could she do now?

She could read. But the trouble with her reading was that it was too casual; it did not satisfy. She had already decided that to remedy the situation she would have to try to read the works of one writer straight through, in chronological order. Then all of another writer, and so on. She planned to start with Faulkner but she did not have the books yet. So this was no morning then to begin that project — and to start another book would not make sense, since that would delay her entry into Faulkner when she did get a chance to go over to the library. She could do something practical then. She could make out the grocery list; she could—

She could write a poem.

The idea pleased her. She would write a poem. Why not? If she could write a poem about the night before—

She grabbed a yellow pad that was on the floor beside the books and ran off with it to the kitchen; she sat down so excited with her project, that she simply swept her hand across the table, brushing away the breakfast crumbs. She would attend to them later — they were unimportant. She had never written a poem before (though sick and in bed in Reading she had tried a story), but the idea of poetry had always stirred her. Toward certain poems she had particularly tender feelings. She liked “To His Coy Mistress” and she loved “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Melancholy,” too. She liked all of Keats, in fact; at least the ones that were anthologized.

She wrote on the pad:

Already with thee! Tender is the night

She liked Tender Is the Night, which, of course, wasn’t a poem. She identified with Nicole; in college she had identified with Rosemary. She would have to read it over again. After Faulkner she would read all of Fitzgerald, even the books she had read before. But poetry … What other poems did she like?

She wrote:

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove.

Then directly below:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action — and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous …

She could not remember the rest. Those few lines had always filled her with a headlong passion, even though she had to admit never having come precisely to grips with the meaning. Still, the sound …

She wrote, with recollections of her three years of college, with her heart heaving and sighing appropriately.

Sabrina fair

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy wave—

And I am black but o my soul is white

How sweetly flows

The liquefaction of her clothes

At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue

Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

I am! Yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost,

I am the self-consumer of my woes.

And who had written those last lines? Keats again? What was the difference who had written them? She hadn’t.

If she could sculpt, if she could paint, if she could write something! Anything—

The door bell rang.

A friend! She ran to the door, pulling her belt tight around her. All I need is a friend to take my mind off myself and tell me how silly I’m being. A girl friend with whom I can go shopping and have coffee, in whom I can confide. Why didn’t Gabe take up with someone I could befriend? Why did he choose her!

She opened the door. It was not a friend; she had had little opportunity, what with her job, her night classes, and generally watching out for herself, to make any friends since coming to Chicago. In the doorway was a pleasant-looking fellow of thirty or thirty-five — and simply from the thinness of his hair, the fragile swelling of his brown eyes, the narrowness of his body, the neatness of his clothes, she knew he would have a kind and modest manner. One was supposed to be leery of opening the door all the way in this neighborhood; Paul cautioned her to peer out over the latch first, but she was not sorry now that she had forgotten. You just couldn’t distrust everybody and remain human.

His hat in one hand, a briefcase in the other, the fellow asked, “Are you Mrs. Herz?”

“Yes.” All at once she was feeling solid and necessary; perhaps it was simply his having called her “Mrs. Herz.” She had, of course, a great talent for spiritual resurrection; when her fortunes finally changed, she knew they would change overnight. She did not really believe in unhappiness and privation and never would; it was an opinion, unfortunately, that did not make life any easier for her.

“I’m Marty Rosen,” the young man said. “I wonder if I can come in. I’m from the Jewish Children’s League.”

Her moods came and went in flashes; now elation faded. Rosen smiled in what seemed to Libby both an easygoing and powerful way; clearly he was not on his first mission for a nonprofit organization. Intimidated, she stepped back and let him in, thinking: One should look over the latch first. Not only was she in her bathrobe (which hadn’t been dry-cleaned for two years), but she was barefoot. “We didn’t think you were coming,” Libby said, “until next week. My husband isn’t here. I’m sorry — didn’t we get the date right? We’ve been busy, I didn’t check the calendar—”

“That’s all right,” Rosen said. He looked down a moment, and there was nowhere she could possibly stick her feet. Oh they should at least have laid the rug. So what if it was somebody else’s! Now the floor stretched, bare and cold, clear to the walls. “I will be coming around again next week,” Rosen said. “I thought I’d drop in this morning for a few minutes, just to say hello.”

“If you’d have called, my husband might have been able to be here.”

“If we can work it out,” Rosen was saying, “we do like to have sort of an informal session anyway, before the formal scheduled meeting—”

“Oh yes,” said Libby, and her thoughts turned to her bedroom.

“—see the prospective parents”—he smiled—“in their natural habitat.”

“Definitely, yes.” The whole world was in conspiracy, even against her pettiest plans. “Let’s sit down. Here.” She pointed to the sofa. “Let me take your things.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said.

“God, no,” she said, realizing it was almost ten. “I’ve been up for hours.” After these words were out, they didn’t seem right either.

With his coat over her arm, she went off to the bedroom by way of the sofa, where she slid into her slippers as glidingly as she could manage. She walked down the hall, shut the bedroom door, and then, having flung Mr. Rosen’s stuff across a chair, she frantically set about whipping the sheets and blankets into some kind of shape. The clock on the half-painted dresser said not ten o’clock but quarter to eleven. Up for hours! Still in her nightclothes! She yanked the sheets, hoisted the mattress (which seemed to outweigh her), and caught her fingernail in the springs. She ran to the other side, tugged on the blankets, but alas, too hard — they came slithering over at her and landed on the floor. Oh Christ! She threw them back on the bed and raced around again — but five whole minutes had elapsed. At the dresser she pulled a comb through her hair and came back into the living room, having slammed shut the bedroom door behind her. Mr. Rosen was standing before the Utrillo print; beside him their books were piled on the floor. “We’re getting some bricks and boards for the books.” He did not answer. “That’s Utrillo,” she said.

He did not answer again.

Of course it was Utrillo. Everybody knew Utrillo — that was the trouble. “It’s corny, I suppose,” said Libby. “My husband doesn’t like the impressionists that much either — but we’ve had it, I’ve had it, since college — and we carry it around and I guess we hang it whenever we move — not that we move that much, but, you know.”

Turning, he said, “I suppose you like it, well, for sentimental reasons.” He seemed terribly interested to hear her reply.

“Well … I just like it. Yes, sentiment — but aesthetics, of course, too.”

She did not know what more to say. They both were smiling. He seemed like a perfectly agreeable man, and there was no reason for her to be giving him so frozen an expression. But apparently the smile she wore she was going to have to live with for a while longer; the muscles of her face were working on their own.

“Yes,” she said. “And, and this is our apartment. Please, sit down. I’ll make some coffee.”

“It’s a very big apartment,” he said, coming back to the sofa. “Spacious.”

What did he mean — they didn’t have enough furniture? “Well, yes … no,” replied Libby. “There’s this room and then down the hall is the kitchen. And my husband’s study—”

Rosen, having already taken his trouser creases in hand, now rose and asked pleasantly, “May I look around?”

She did not believe that the idea had simply popped into his head. But he was so smooth-faced and soft-spoken and well-groomed that she was not yet prepared to believe him a sneak. He inclined slightly toward her whenever she spoke and, though it unnerved her, she preferred to think of it as a kind of sympathetic lean.

“Oh do,” Libby said. “You’ll have to excuse us, though; we were out to dinner last night. Not that we go out to dinner that much — however we were out to dinner”—they proceeded down the hall and were in the kitchen—“and,” she confessed, “I didn’t get around to the dishes … But,” she said, cognizant of the sympathetic lean, though doing her best to avoid the sympathetic eyes, “this is the kitchen.”

“Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”

There were the breakfast crumbs on the floor around the table. All she could think to say was, “It needs a paint job, of course.”

“Very nice.”

He sounded genuine enough. She went on. “We have plenty of hot water, of course, and everything.”

“Does the owner live on the premises?”

“Pardon?”

“Does the owner of the building live on the premises?” he asked.

“It’s an agency that manages the place,” she said nervously.

“I was only wondering.” He walked to the rear of the kitchen, crunching toast particles. Out the back window through which he paused to look, there was, of course, no green yard. “There was just”—he lifted a hand to indicate that it was nothing—“a light bulb out in the hallway, coming up. I wondered if the owner …”

He dwindled off, and again she didn’t know what to say. The bulb had been out since their arrival; she had never even questioned it; it came with the house. “You see,” Libby said, “there are two Negro families in the building and—” And what! I don’t have anything against Negroes! But the agency does — the agency — Why do I keep bringing up Negroes all the time! “And,” she said, blindly, “the bulb went out last night, you see. My husband’s going to pick one up today. Right now he’s teaching. We don’t like to bother the agency for little things. You know …” But she could not tell whether he knew or not; he was leaning her way, but what of it? He turned and started back down the hall. Libby shut her eyes. I must stop lying. I must not lie again. He will be able to tell when I lie. They don’t want liars for mothers, and they’re perfectly right. Tell the truth. You have nothing to be ashamed of.

“My husband is a writer, aside from being a teacher,” she said, running down the hall and slithering by Rosen, “and this”—she turned the knob to Paul’s room, praying—“is his study.”

Thank God. It was orderly; though there was not much that could be disordered. In the entire room, whose two tall winter-stained windows were set no further than ten feet from the apartment building next door, there was only a desk and a desk lamp, a chair and a typewriter, and a wastepaper basket. But the window shades were even and all the papers on the desk were piled neatly. God bless Paul.

“My husband works in here.” She flipped on the overhead light, but the room seemed to get no brighter; if anything, it was dingier. But it wasn’t their fault that the sun couldn’t get around that way. They hadn’t constructed the building next door. “He’s writing a novel.”

Rosen took quite an interest in that, too. “Oh yes? That must be some undertaking.”

“Well, it’s not finished yet. It is an undertaking, all right. But he’s working on it. He works very hard. However this,” she said quickly, “this, of course, would be the baby’s room. Will be the baby’s room.” She blushed. “Well, when we have a baby, this will be—” Even while she spoke she was oppressed by the barren feebleness of the room. Where would a baby sleep? From what window would the lovely, healthy, natural light fall onto a baby’s cheek? Where would they get the baby’s crib, Catholic Salvage?

“Where will your husband work on his novel then?”

“I”—she wouldn’t lie—“I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. This has all happened very quickly. Our decision to have a baby.”

“Of course.”

“Not that we haven’t thought about it — you see, it’s not a problem. He can work anywhere. The bedroom. Anywhere. I’ll discuss it with him tonight, if you like.”

Rosen was quite taken aback; he made a self-effacing gesture with his hands. “Oh, look, I don’t care. That’s all up to you folks.” Even if there was something professional about his gentleness, she liked him for trying to put her at her ease. (Though that meant he knew about her nervousness; later he would mull over motives and behavior.) She had no real reason to be uneasy or overexcited or ashamed. Marty Rosen wouldn’t kill her, wouldn’t insult her, he wasn’t even that much older than she — but what right, damn it, did he have to come unannounced! That was the trouble! What kind of business was this natural habitat business! They have no right to trick people, she was thinking, and then she was opening the door to their own bedroom, and there was the bed, and the disheveled linens, and the half-painted dresser, and there were Paul’s pajamas on the floor. There, in fact, was Rosen’s coat, half on the floor. She closed the door and they went back into the living room.

“Actually,” she said, addressing the back of his neat little suit as they moved toward the sofa, “I was trying to write a poem …”

“Really? A poem?” He sat down, and then instantly was leaning forward, his arms on his legs and his hands clasped, smiling. It was as though nothing he had seen up until now meant a thing; as though there was an entirely different set of rules called into play when the prospective mother turned out to be a poet. “You write, too, do you?”

“Well,” said Libby, “no.” Then she did not so much sit down into their one easy chair as capitulate into it. Why had she told Rosen about the poem? What did that explain to anybody — did writing poetry excuse crumbs on the floor? It was the truth, but that was all it was. They may want poets for mothers, she thought, but they sure as hell don’t want slobs.

“Well,” said Rosen cheerily, “it’s a nice-sized apartment.” It seemed impossible to disappoint him. “How long have you been here, would you say?”

“Not long,” the girl answered. “A few months. Since October.”

Rosen was opening his briefcase. “Do you mind if I take down a few things?”

“Oh no, go right ahead.” But her heart sank. “We’re going to paint, of course, as soon as … soon.” Stop saying of course! “When everything’s settled. When I get some time, I’ll begin.” The remark did not serve to make her any less conscious of her bathrobe and slippers. “You see,” she went on, for Rosen had a way of listening even when no one was speaking, “I was working. I worked at the University. However I wasn’t feeling well. Paul said I had better quit.”

“That’s too bad. Are you better now?”

“I’m fine. I feel fine—” she assured him. “I’m not pale, or sick, I just have very white skin.” Even as she spoke the white skin turned red.

Rosen smiled his smile. “I hope it wasn’t serious.”

“It wasn’t anything really. I might have gotten quite sick—” Why isn’t Paul home? What good is he if he isn’t here now? “I had a kidney condition,” she explained, starting in again. “It’s why the doctors say I shouldn’t have a baby. It would be too strong a risk. You see, I’m the one who can’t have a baby. Not my husband.”

“Well, there are many many couples that can’t have babies, believe me.”

His remark was probably intended to brace her, but tears came to her eyes when she said, “Isn’t that too bad …”

He took a long sheet of paper from his briefcase and pushed out the tip of a ball point pen. The click sounded to Libby very official. She pulled herself up straight in her chair and waited for the questions. But Rosen only jotted some words on the paper. She waited. Finally he glanced up. “Just the number of rooms and so forth,” he said.

“Certainly. Go right ahead. I’ve just been having”—she yawned—“my lazy morning, you know—” She tried to stretch but stifled the impulse halfway. She certainly did not want for a moment to appear in any way loose or provocative. “Not making the bed or anything, just taking the day off, just doing nothing. With a baby, of course, it would be different.”

“Oh yes.” His brow furrowed, even as he wrote. “Children are a responsibility.”

“There’s no doubt about that.” And she could not help it — she did not care if that was so much simple ass-kissing. At least, at last, she’d said the right thing. All she had to do was to keep saying the right thing and get him out of here, and the next time Paul would be home. There were so many Jewish families wanting babies, and so few Jewish babies, and so what if she was obsequious. As long as: one, she didn’t lie; and two, she said the right thing. “They are a responsibility,” she said. “We certainly know that.”

“Your husband’s an instructor then, isn’t that right, in the College?”

“He teaches English and he teaches Humanities.”

“And he’s got a Ph.D?”

He seemed to take it so for granted — was he writing it down already? — that she suffered a moment of temptation. “An M.A. He’s working on his Ph.D. Actually, he’s just finishing up on it. He’ll have it very soon, of course. Don’t worry about that. Excuse me — I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound so instructive. I suppose I’m a little nervous.” She smiled, sweetly and spontaneously. A second later she thought that she must have charmed him; at least if he were someone else, if he were Gabe say, he would have been charmed. But this fellow seemed only to become more attentive. “I only meant,” Libby said, “that I think Paul has a splendid career before him. Even if I am his wife.” And didn’t that have the ring of truth about it? Hadn’t her words conveyed all the respect and admiration she had for Paul, and all the love she still felt for him, and would feel forever? It had been a nice wifely remark uttered in a nice wifely way — why then wasn’t Rosen moved by it? Didn’t he see what a dedicated, doting, loving mother she would be?

“I’m sure he has,” Rosen said, and he might just as well have been attesting to a belief in the process of evolution.

But one had to remember that he was here in an official capacity; you couldn’t expect him to gush and sigh. He must see dozens of families every day and hear dozens of wives attest to their love for their husbands. He could probably even distinguish those who meant it from those who didn’t, from those who were no longer quite so sure. She tried to stifle her disappointment, though it was clear to her she probably would not be able to get off so solid a remark again.

Rosen had set his paper down now. “And so you just — well, live here,” he said, tossing the remark out with a little roll of the hands, “and see your friends, and your husband teaches and writes, and you keep house—”

“As I said, today is just my lazy day—”

“—and have a normal young people’s life. That’s about it then, would you say?”

“Well—” He seemed to have left something out, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Yes. I suppose that’s it.”

He nodded. “And you go to the movies,” he said, “and see an occasional play, and have dinner out once in a while, I suppose, and take walks”—his hands went round with each activity mentioned—“and try to put a few dollars in the bank, and have little spats, I suppose—”

She couldn’t stand it, she was ready to scream. “We read, of course.” Though that wasn’t precisely what she felt had been omitted, it was something.

He didn’t seem to mind at all having been interrupted. “Are you interested in reading?”

“Well, yes. We read.”

He considered further what she had said; or perhaps he was only waiting for her to go on. He said finally, “What kind of books do you like best? Do you like fiction, do you like nonfiction, do you like biography of famous persons, do you like how-to-do-it books, do you like who-done-its? What kind of books would you say you liked to read?”

“Books.” She became flustered. “All kinds.”

He leaned back now. “What books have you read recently?” To the question, he gave nothing more or less than it had ever had before in the history of human conversation and its impasses.

It was her turn now to wave hands at the air. “God, I can’t remember. It really slips my mind.” She felt the color of her face changing again. “We’re always reading something though — and, well, Faulkner. Of course I read The Sound and the Fury in college, and Light in August, but I’ve been planning to read all of Faulkner, you know, chronologically. To get a sense of development. I thought I’d read all of him, right in a row …”

His reply was slow in coming; he might have been waiting for her to break down and give the name of one thin little volume that she had read in the last year. “That sounds like a wonderful project, like a very worth-while project.”

In a shabby way she felt relieved.

“And your poetry,” he asked, “what kind of poetry do you write?”

“What?”

“Do you write nature poems, do you write, oh I don’t know, rhymes, do you write little jingles? What kind of poetry would you say you write?”

Her eyes widened. “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t write poetry,” she said, as though he had stumbled into the wrong house.

“Oh I’m sorry,” he said, leaning forward to apologize. “I misunderstood.”

“Ohhhh,” Libby cried. “Oh, just this morning you mean.”

Even Rosen seemed relieved; it was the first indication she had that the interview was wearing him down too. “Yes,” he said, “this morning. Was that a nature poem, or, I don’t know, philosophical? You know, your thoughts and so forth. I don’t mean to be a nuisance, Mrs. Herz,” he said, spreading his fingers over his tie. “I thought we might talk about your interests. I don’t want to pry, and if you—”

“Oh yes, surely. Poetry, well, certainly,” she said in a light voice.

“And the poem this morning, for instance—”

“Oh that. I didn’t know you meant that. That was — mostly my thoughts. I guess just a poem,” she said, hating him, “about my thoughts.”

“That sounds interesting.” He looked down at the floor. “It’s very interesting meeting somebody who writes poetry. Speaking for myself, I think, as a matter of fact, that there’s entirely too much television and violence these days, that somebody who writes poetry would be an awfully good influence on a child.”

“Thank you,” Libby said softly. Of course she didn’t hate him. She closed her eyes — though not the two shiny dark ones that Rosen could see. She closed her eyes, and she was back in that garden, and it was dusk, and her husband was with her, and in her arms was a child to whom she would later, by the crib, recite some of her poetry. “I think so too,” she said.

“—what makes poetry a fascinating subject,” she heard Rosen saying, “is that people express all kinds of things in it.”

“Oh yes, it is fascinating. I’m very fond of poetry. I like Keats very much,” and she spoke almost passionately now (as though her vibrancy while discussing verse would make up for the books she couldn’t remember having read recently). “And I like John Donne a great deal too, though I know he’s the vogue, but still, I do. And I like Yeats. I don’t know a lot of Yeats, that’s true, but I like some of him, what I know. I suppose they’re mostly anthologized ones,” she confessed, “but they’re awfully good. The worst are full of passionate intensity, the best lack all conviction.’ ” A second later she said, “I’m afraid I’ve gotten that backwards, or wrong, but I do like that poem, when I have it in front of me.”

“Hmmmm,” Rosen said, listening even after she had finished. “You seem to really be able to commit them to memory. That must be a satisfaction.”

“It is.”

“And how about your own poems? I mean — would you say they’re, oh I don’t know, happy poems or unhappy poems? You know, people write all kinds of poems, happy poems, unhappy poems — what do you consider yours to be?”

“Happy poems,” said Libby. “Very happy poems.”

At the front door, while Mr. Rosen went round in a tiny circle wiggling into his little coat, he said, “I suppose you know Rabbi Kuvin.”

“Rabbi who?”

He was facing her, fastening buttons. “Bernie Kuvin. He’s the rabbi over in the new synagogue. Down by the lake.”

She urged up into her face what she hoped was an untroubled look. “No. We don’t.”

Rosen put on his hat. “I thought you might know him.” He looked down and over himself, as though he had something more important on his mind anyway, like whether he was wearing his shoes or not.

She understood. “No, no, we don’t go around here to the synagogue. We’re New Yorkers, originally that is — we go when we’re in New York. We have a rabbi in New York. Rabbi Lichtman. You’re right, though,” she said, her voice beginning to reflect the quantity and quality of her hopelessness. “You’re perfectly right”—her eyes were teary now—“religion is very important—”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s up to the individual couple—”

“Oh no, oh no,” Libby said, and now she was practically pushing the door shut in his face, and she was weeping. “Oh no, you’re perfectly right, you’re a hundred percent right, religion is very important to a child. But”—she shook and shook her tired head—“but my husband and I don’t believe a God damn bit of it!”

And the door was closed, only by inches failing to chop off Rosen’s coattails. She did not move away. She merely slid down, right in the draft, right on the cold floor, and oh the hell with it. She sat there with her legs outstretched and her head in her hands. She was crying again. What had she done? Why? How could she possibly tell Paul? Why did she cry all the time? It was all wrong—she was all wrong. If only the bed had been made, if only it hadn’t been for that stupid poetry-writing— She had really ruined things now.

As far as she could see there was only one thing left to do.

Rushing up Michigan Boulevard in the unseasonable sunlight — unseasonable for this frostbound city — she realized that she was going to be late. She had gone into Saks with no intention of buying anything; she had with her only her ten-dollar bill (accumulated with pennies and nickels and hidden away for just such a crisis), and besides she knew better. She had simply not wanted to arrive at the office with fifteen minutes to spare. She did not intend to sit there, perspiring and flushing, her body’s victim. If you show up so very early, it’s probably not too unfair of them to assume that you are weak and needy and pathetically anxious. And she happened to know she wasn’t. She had been coping with her problems for some time now, and would, if she had to, continue to cope with them in the future, until they just resolved themselves. She was by no means the most unhappy person in the world.

As a result, she had taken her time looking at sweaters. She had spent several minutes holding up in a mirror a lovely white cashmere with a little tie at the neck. She had even taken off her coat so as to have her waist measured by a salesgirl in Skirts. She had left the store (stopping for only half a minute to look at a pair of black velveteen slacks) with the clock showing that it still wasn’t one o’clock. And even if it had been, she would prefer not to arrive precisely on the hour. Then they would assume you were a compulsive — which was another thing no one was simply going to assume about her.

But it was twelve minutes past the hour now, and even if she wasn’t a compulsive, she was experiencing some of the more characteristic emotions of one. She clutched at her hat — which she had worn not to be warm, but attractive — and raced up the street. Having seriously misjudged the distance, she was still some fifty numbers south of her destination. And it was no good to be this late, no good at all; in a way it was so aggressive of her (or defensive?) and God, she wasn’t either! She was … what?

She passed a jewelry store; a clock in the window said fourteen after. She would miss her appointment. Where would she ever find the courage to make another? Oh she was pathetically anxious — why hadn’t she just gone ahead and been it! Why shopping? Clothes! Life was falling apart and she had to worry about velveteen slacks — and without even the money to buy them! She would miss her appointment. Then what? She could leave Paul. It was a mistake to think that he would ever take it upon himself to leave her. It must be she who says goodbye to him. Go away. To where?

She ran as fast as she could.

The only beard in the room was on a picture of Freud that hung on the wall beside the doctor’s desk. Dr. Lumin was clean-shaven and accentless. What he had were steamrolled Midwestern vowels, hefty south-Chicago consonants, and a decidedly urban thickness in his speech; nothing, however, that was European. Not that she had hung all her hopes on something as inconsequential as a bushy beard or a foreign intonation; nevertheless neither would have shaken her confidence in his wisdom. If anything at all could have made her comfortable it might have been a little bit of an accent.

Dr. Lumin leaned across his desk and took her hand. He was a short wide man with oversized head and hands. She had imagined before she met him that he would be tall; though momentarily disappointed, she was no less intimidated. He could have been a pygmy, and her hand when it touched his would have been no warmer. He gave her a nice meaty handshake and she thought he looked like a butcher. Under his slicked-down brownish hair, his complexion was frost-bitten red, as though he spent most of the day lugging sides of beef in and out of refrigerated compartments. She knew he wouldn’t take any nonsense.

“I’m sorry I’m late.” There were so many explanations that she didn’t give any.

“That’s all right.” He settled back into his chair. “I have someone coming in at two, so we won’t have a full hour. Why don’t you sit down?”

There was a straight-backed red leather chair facing his desk and a brownish leather couch along the wall. She did not know whether she was supposed to know enough to just go over and lie down on the couch and start right in telling him her problems … Who had problems anyway? She could not think of one — except, if she lay down on the couch, should she step out of her shoes first.

Her shoulders drooped. “Where?” she asked finally.

“Wherever you like,” he said.

“You won’t mind,” she said in a thin voice, “if I just sit for today.”

He extended one of his hands and said with a mild kind of force, “Why don’t you sit.” Oh, he was nice. A little crabby, but nice. She kept her shoes on and sat down in the straight chair.

And then her heart took up a very sturdy, martial rhythm. She looked directly across the desk into a pair of gray and inpenetrable eyes. She had had no intention of becoming evasive in his presence; not when she had suffered so in making the appointment. But the room was a good deal brighter than she had thought it would be, and on top of her fear there settled a thin icing of shyness. She was alarmed at having all her preconceptions disappointed; and she was alarmed to think she had had so many preconceptions. She could not remember having actually thought about Dr. Lumin’s height, or the decor of his office; nevertheless there was a series of small shocks for her in his white walls, his built-in bookshelves, his gold-colored carpet, and particularly in the wide window behind his desk, through which one could see past the boulevard and down to the lake. She had not been expecting to find him with his shade raised. The room was virtually ablaze with light. But of course — it was only one o’clock. One-twenty.

“I stopped off at Saks on the way up. I didn’t mean to keep you.”

With one of those meat-cutter’s hands, he waved her apology aside. “I’m interested — look, how did you get my name? For the record.” It was the second time that day that she found herself settled down across from a perfect stranger who felt it necessary to be casual with her. Dr. Lumin leaned back in his swivel chair, so that for a moment it looked as though he’d just keep on going, and fall backwards, sailing clear through the window. Go ahead, she thought, fall. There goes Lumin … “How did you find out about me?” he asked.

With no lessening of her heartbeat, she blushed. It was like living with an idiot whose behavior was unpredictable from one moment to the next: what would this body of hers do ten seconds from now? “I heard your name at a party,” she said. “You see, we’ve just come to Chicago. A few months ago. So I didn’t know anyone. I heard it at a party at the University of Chicago.” She thought the last would make it all more dignified, less accidental. Otherwise he might take her coming to him so arbitrarily as an insult. “My husband teaches at the University of Chicago,” she said.

“It says here”—the doctor was looking at a card—“Victor Honingfeld.” His eyes were two nailheads. Would he turn out to be stupid? Did he read those books on the wall or were they just for public relations? She wished she could get up and go.

“Your secretary asked on the phone,” she explained, “and I gave Victor’s name. He’s a colleague of my husband’s. I — he mentioned your name in passing, and I remembered it, and when I thought I might like to — try something, I only knew you, so I called. I didn’t mean to say that Victor had recommended you. It was just that I heard it—”

Why go on? Why bother? Now she had insulted him professionally, she was sure. He would start off disliking her.

“I think,” she said quickly, “I’m becoming very selfish.”

Swinging back in his chair, his head framed in the silver light, he didn’t answer. “That’s really my only big problem, I suppose,” said Libby. “Perhaps it’s not even a problem. I suppose you could call it a foible or something along that line. But I thought, if I am too selfish, I’d like to talk to somebody. If I’m not, if it turns out it is just some sort of passing thing, circumstances you know, not me, well then I won’t worry about it any more. Do you see?”

“Sure,” he said, fluttering his eyelashes. He tugged undaintily at one of his fleshy ears and looked down in his lap, waiting. All day people had been waiting on her words. She wished she had been born self-reliant.

“It’s been very confusing,” she told him. “I suppose moving, a new environment … It’s probably a matter of getting used to things. And I’m just being impatient—” Her voiced stopped, though not the rhythmic thudding in her breast. She didn’t believe she had Lumin’s attention. She was boring him; he seemed more interested in his necktie then in her. “Do you want me to lie down?” she asked, her voice quivering with surrender.

His big raw face — the sharp bony wedge of nose, the purplish overdefined lips, those ears, the whole huge impressive red thing — tilted up in a patient, skeptical smile. “Look, come on, stop worrying about me. Worry about yourself,” he said, almost harshly. “So how long have you been in Chicago, you two?”

She was no longer simply nervous; she was frightened. You two. If Paul were to know what she was doing, it would be his final disappointment. “October we came.”

“And your husband’s a teacher?”

“He teaches English at the University. He also writes.”

“What? Books, articles, plays?”

“He’s writing a novel now. He’s still only a young man.”

“And you, what about yourself?”

“I don’t write,” she said firmly. She was not going to pull her punches this second time. “I don’t do anything.”

He did not seem astonished. How could he, with that unexpressive butcher’s face? He was dumb. Of course — it was always a mistake to take your troubles outside your house. You had to figure things out for yourself. How? “I was working,” she said, “I was secretary to the Dean, and I was going to school, taking some courses at night downtown. But I’ve had a serious kidney condition.”

“Which kind?”

“Nephritis.” She spoke next as a historian, not a sympathy-monger; she did not want his sympathy. “I almost died,” she said.

Lumin moved his head as though he were a clock ticking; sympathy, whether she wanted it or not. “Oh nasty, a nasty thing …”

“Yes,” she said. “I think it weakened my condition. Because I get colds, and every stray virus, and since it is really dangerous once you’ve had a kidney infection, Paul said I should quit my job. And the doctor, the medical doctor”—she regretted instantly having made such a distinction—“said perhaps I shouldn’t take classes downtown at night, because of the winter. I suppose I started thinking about myself when I started being sick all the time. I was in bed, and I began to think of myself. Of course, I’m sure everyone thinks of himself eighty percent of the time. But truly, I was up to about eighty-five.”

She looked to see if he had smiled. Wasn’t anybody going to be charmed today? Were people simply going to listen? She wondered if he found her dull — not only dull, but stupid. They tried to mask their responses, one expected that; but perhaps she was no longer the delightful, bubbly girl she knew she once had been. Well, that’s partly why she was here: to somehow get back to what she was. She wanted now to tell him only the truth. “I did become self-concerned, I think,” she said. “Was I happy? was I this? was I that? and so forth, until I was totally self-absorbed. And it’s hung on, in a way. Though I suppose what I need is an interest really, something to take my mind off myself. You simply can’t go around all day saying I just had an orange, did that make me happy; I just typed a stencil, did that make me happy; because you only make yourself miserable.”

The doctor rocked in his chair; he placed his hands on his belly, where it disappeared into his trousers like half a tent. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “What, what does your husband think about all this?”

Her glands and pores worked faster even than her mind; in a moment her body was encased in perspiration. “I don’t understand.”

“About your going around all day eating oranges and asking yourself if they make you happy.”

“I eat,” she said, smiling, lying, “the oranges privately.”

“Ah-hah.” He nodded.

She found herself laughing, just a little. “Yes.”

“So — go ahead. How privately? What privately?” He seemed suddenly to be having a good time.

“It’s very involved,” Libby said. “Complicated.”

“I would imagine,” Lumin said, a pleasant light in his eye. “You’ve got all those pits to worry about.” Then he was shooting toward her — he nearly sprang from his chair. Their faces might as well have been touching, his voice some string she herself had plucked. “Come on, Libby,” Lumin said, “what’s the trouble?”

For the second time that day, the fiftieth that week, she was at the mercy of her tears. “Everything,” she cried. “Every rotten thing. Every rotten despicable thing. Paul’s the trouble — he’s just a terrible terrible trouble to me.”

She covered her face and for a full five minutes her forehead shook in the palms of her hands. Secretly she was waiting, but she did not hear Lumin’s gruff voice nor feel upon her shoulders anyone’s hands. When she finally looked up he was still there, a thick fleshy reality, nothing to be charmed, wheedled, begged, tempted, or flirted with. Not Gabe; not Paul; not an extension of herself.

She pleaded, “Please just psychoanalyze me and straighten me out. I cry so much.”

He nodded and he said, “What about Paul?”

She almost rose from her seat. “He never makes love to me! I get laid once a month!” Some muscle in her — it was her heart — suddenly relaxed. Though by no means restored to health, she felt somehow unsprung.

“Well,” said Lumin, with authority, “everybody’s entitled to get laid more than that. Is this light in your eyes?” He raised an arm and tapped his nail on the bright pane of glass behind him.

“No, no,” she said, and for no apparent reason what she was to say next made her sob. “You can see the lake.” She tried, however, to put some real effort into pulling herself together. She wanted to stop crying and make sense, but it was the crying that seemed finally to be more to the point than the explanations she began to offer him in the best of faith. “You see, I think I’ve been in love with somebody else for a very long time. And it isn’t Paul’s fault. Don’t think that. It couldn’t be. He’s the most honest man, Paul — he’s always been terribly good to me. I was a silly college girl, self-concerned and frivolous and unimportant, and brutally typical, and he was the first person I ever wanted to listen to. I used to go on dates, years ago this is, and never listen — just talk. But Paul gave me books to read and he told me thousands of things, and he was — well, he saved me really from being like all those other girls. And he’s had the toughest life. His parents have been bastards, perfect bastards. That’s true—miserable cruel bastards!” Though her eyes seemed hardly able to deliver up any more tears, they somehow managed. “Oh honestly,” she said, “my eyeballs are going to fall out of my skull, just roll right on out. Between this and being sick … I never imagined everything was going to be like this, believe me …”

After a while she wiped her face with her fingers. “Is it time?” she asked. “Is it two?”

Lumin seemed not to hear. “What else?”

“I don’t know.” She sniffed to clear her nose. “Paul—” Medical degrees and other official papers hung on either side of Freud’s picture. Lumin’s first name was Arnold. That little bit of information made her not want to go on. But he was waiting. “I’m not really in love with this old friend,” she told him. “He’s an old friend, we’ve known him since graduate school. And he’s — he’s very nice, he’s carefree, he’s full of sympathy—”

“Isn’t Paul?”

“Oh yes,” she said, in what came out like a whine. “Oh so sympathetic. Dr. Lumin, I don’t know what I want. I don’t love Gabe. I really can’t stand him if you want to know the truth. He’s not for me, he’s not Paul — he never could be. Now he’s living with some woman and her two kids. Two of the most charming little children you ever saw, and those two are living together, right in front of them. She’s so vulgar, I don’t know what’s gotten into him. We had dinner there — nobody said anything, and there was Gabe with that bitch.”

“Why is she such a bitch?”

“Oh”—Libby wilted—“she’s not that either. Do you want to know the bitch? Me. I was. But I knew it would be awful even before we got there. So, God, that didn’t make it any easier.”

He did not even have to bother; the next question she asked herself. “I don’t know why. I just thought, why shouldn’t we? We never go out to dinner, we hardly have been able to go out anywhere — and that’s because of me too, and my health. Why shouldn’t we? Do you see? And besides, I wanted to,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. I mean isn’t that still simple — to want to? But then I went ahead and behaved worse than anybody, I know I did. Oh, Gabe was all right — even she was all right, in a way. I understand all that. She’s not a bitch probably. She’s probably just a sexpot, good in bed or something, and why shouldn’t Gabe live with her anyway? He’s single, he can do whatever he wants to do. I’m the one who started the argument. All I do lately is argue with people. And cry. I mean that keeps me pretty busy, you can imagine.”

Lumin remained Lumin; he didn’t smile. In fact he frowned. “What do you argue about? Who are you arguing with?”

She raised two hands to the ceiling. “Everybody,” she said. “Everything.”

“Not Paul?”

“Not Paul — that’s right, not Paul. For Paul,” she announced. “Everybody’s just frustrating the hell out of him, and it makes me so angry. It makes me so furious! That John Spigliano! Gabe … Oh I haven’t even begun to tell you what’s happened.”

“Well, go on.”

“What?” she said helplessly. “Where?”

“Paul. Why is this Paul so frustrated?”

She leaned forward, and her two fists came hammering down on his desk. “If he wasn’t, Doctor, oh if they would just leave him alone!” She fell back, breathless. “Isn’t it two?”

At last he gave her a smile. “Almost.”

“It must be. I’m so tired. I have such lousy resistance …”

“It’s a very tiring thing, this kind of talking,” Lumin said. “Everybody gets tired.”

“Doctor,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

“What’s the matter with me?”

“What do you think’s the matter?”

“Please, Dr. Lumin, please don’t pull that stuff. Really, that’ll drive me nuts.”

He shook a finger at her. “C’mon, Libby, don’t threaten me.” The finger dropped, and she thought she saw through his smile. “It’s not my habit to drive people nuts.”

She backed away. “I’m nuts already anyway.”

For an answer he clasped and unclasped his hands.

“Well, I am,” she said. “I’m cracked as the day is long.”

He groaned. “What are you talking about? Huh? I’m not saying you should make light of these problems. These are real problems. Absolutely. Certainly. You’ve got every reason to be upset and want to talk to somebody. But”—he made a sour face—“what’s this cracked business? How far does it get us? It doesn’t tell us a hell of a lot, would you agree?”

She had, of course, heard of transference, and she wondered if it could be beginning so soon. She was beaming at him; her first friend in Chicago.

“So …” he said peacefully.

“Really I haven’t begun to tell you things.”

“Sure, sure.”

“When should I come again? I mean,” she said more softly, with less bravado, “should I come again?”

“If you want to, of course.” He looked at the appointment book on his desk. “How’s the day after tomorrow? Same time.”

“That’s fine. I think that would be perfect. Except—” Her heart, which had stopped its pounding earlier, started up again, like a band leaving the field. “How much will it be then?”

“Same as today—”

“I only brought,” she rushed to explain, “ten dollars.”

“We’ll send a bill then. Don’t worry about that.”

“It’s more than ten, for today?”

“The usual fee is twenty-five dollars.”

“An hour?”

“An hour.”

She had never in her life passed out, and that she didn’t this time probably indicated that she never would. She lost her breath, voice, vision, all sense of feeling, but she managed to stay upright in her chair. “I — don’t send a bill to the house.”

“I’d rather you wouldn’t,” Lumin began, a kind of gaseous expression crossing his face, “worry about the money. We can talk about that too.”

Libby had stood up; now she sat down. “I think I have to talk about it.”

“All right. We’ll talk.”

“It’s after two, I think.”

“That’s all right.”

But what she meant was, would he charge for overtime? Twenty-five dollars an hour — that must be nearly fifty cents a minute. “I can’t pay twenty-five dollars.” She tried to cry, but couldn’t. She felt very dry, very tired.

“Perhaps we can work it out at twenty.”

“I can’t pay twenty. I can’t pay fifteen. I can’t pay anything.”

“Of course,” said Lumin firmly, “you didn’t expect it would be for nothing.”

“I suppose I did. I don’t know …” She got up to go.

“Please sit down. Sit.”

She almost crept back into the chair as though it were a lap. “Don’t you see, it’s all my doctor’s bills in the first place. Don’t you see that?”

He nodded.

“Well, I can’t pay!” But she couldn’t cry either. “I can’t pay!”

“Look, Libby, look here. I’m giving you an address. You go home, you give it some thought. It’s right here on Michigan Avenue — the Institute. They have excellent people, the fee is less. You’ll have an interview—”

“I married Paul,” she said, dazed, “not Gabe — this is ridiculous — you’re being ridiculous — excuse me, but you’re being—”

He was writing something.

She shouted, “I don’t want any Institute!”

“It’s the Institute for Psychoanalysis—”

“Why can’t I have you!”

He offered her the paper. “You can be interviewed at the Institute,” he said, “and see if they’ll be able to work you in right away. Come on now,” he said, roughly, “why don’t you think about which you might prefer, which might better suit your circumstances.”

She stood up. “You don’t even know they’ll take me.”

“It’s research and training, so of course, yes, it depends—”

“I came to you, damn it!” She reached for the paper he had written on, and threw it to the floor. “I came to you and I told you all this. You listened. You just sat there, listening. And now I have to go tell somebody else all over again. Everything. I came to you—I want you!”

He stood up, showing his burly form, and that alone seemed to strip her of her force, though not her anger. “Of course,” he said, “one can’t always have everything one wants—”

“I don’t want everything! I want something!”

He did not move, and she would not be intimidated: she had had enough for one day. Quite enough. “I want you,” she said.

“Libby—”

“I’ll jump out the window.” She pointed over his shoulder. “I swear it.”

He remained where he was, blocking her path. And Libby, run down, unwound, empty-minded suddenly, turned and went out his door. He provoked me, she thought in the elevator. He provoked me. He and that son of a bitch Gabe. They lead me on.

Ten minutes later, in Saks, she bought a sweater; not the white cashmere, but a pale blue lamb’s-wool cardigan that was on sale. It was the first time in years she had spent ten dollars on herself. She left the store, walked a block south toward the I.C. train, and then turned and ran all the way back to Saks.

Because the sweater had been on sale she had to plead with two floor managers and a buyer before they would give her back her money.

At home later she tried several different ways of committing suicide, but the problem was that she didn’t want to die. The problem was that she wanted to live. When she turned on the gas, she very soon turned it off, fearing an explosion. She went into the bedroom where she stretched out on the unmade bed and put a pillowcase over her head. But it was hot and uncomfortable, and every few minutes she kept releasing the opening around her neck to let air in. She remained on the bed for nearly an hour — what she began to want was for Paul to come home and catch her in the act. Sometimes she would pull the pillowcase off entirely, but as soon as she heard a footstep on the stairs, or even the least little noise in the building, she would jerk it back over her, clamp tight the bottom, and wait. She wondered at various times (there was nothing much else to do but think) if she should write a note and take off her clothes and die — be caught dying — naked. Maybe he would come in, find her unclothed, and ravish her. And she would keep the pillowcase over her head all the while he devoured her body. But by four-thirty he was not home. She slipped the case, which was warm and damp from her breathing, back onto the pillow, and made the bed.

She paced the apartment, looking — for what she did not really know. In the living room she sat down on the floor and began to sort through their books. When she came up with a gayly jacketed book in her hands, she thought that perhaps unconsciously it was this book she had been searching for. That day she believed strongly in the guiding light of the unconscious self; what with the conscious self doing such a rotten job, she had to. The book she held in her hand was not Faulkner, Fitzgerald, nor a book of verse; it was the volume the rabbi in Ann Arbor had given her as a present after she had been dunked in the pool at the Y, and converted. The Wonder of Life it was called, and subtitled, “Suggestions for the Jewish Homemaker.” Her eye moved eagerly over the blurb on the inside flap. “… creative, contemporary home life … traditions and ceremonies … how to build a Jewish record library … chapters on family fun, painting, music, literature, the community, household finances … the place of the woman in a beautiful tradition … basic recipes … special holiday menus … how to plan a wedding, how to name a baby …”

When everything had ended with Paul’s family, when they had slammed down the receiver at the news of Libby’s conversion, this book, she remembered, had been tossed aside; it had — remembering more clearly — been kicked aside. But never thrown out. Books were really all they owned, and wherever they moved, from Ann Arbor to Detroit to Iowa City to Reading to Chicago, from poverty to sickness to humiliation, every single book was carried with them. Some were read, and others unread but coveted, and others just came along for the ride. That she had not even opened this one in all those years was understandable, since she was not religious or pious by nature. She was no worse a Jew, however, than she had been a Catholic — religion had always seemed to her “extra.” And perhaps thinking that was her mistake. Perhaps (listen, she told herself, is this my unconscious at last making itself heard?), perhaps the adoption agencies know what they are talking about; maybe Marty Rosen’s question about the rabbi had not been improper after all. Not that one could force oneself to believe — no, something else. The family … the home. What she had always taken for granted about Jewish life was the warm family environment. And what an irony! Look at Paul’s parents; Paul himself. In the most Protestant household in America there could be no more coldness than had surrounded her first five years of marriage. But perhaps the fault was partly hers. Perhaps there was one final way out of all this mess that was not psychoanalysis, or money in the bank, or carnality, or self-pity, or madness: Religion. Not all that Christ and Mary hocus-pocus; not even a belief in God necessarily — though who could tell, maybe God Himself would come in time. But first something basic and sustaining, something to make them truly ready for, deserving of, a baby; something warm, sacred, worth while: traditions and ceremonies, holy days and holidays and customs …

Thirty minutes later she was in the kitchen. The Wonder of Life was spread open before her. Egg shells, peelings, onion skin and flour were all over the table and the book; there was flour on the bridge of her nose, and on her forehead where she had touched her perspiring brow. She had been grating for ten minutes, but unfortunately she had tiny wrists and was still on her first potato. Grating and grating, and oh it was so idiotic. It was insane really, the end of a disastrous day, and still she grated. And because she was Libby and she had suffered; because the more she suffered the further dignity and usefulness seemed to flee; because her right hand was pulsating, aching, with the effort to bring a little religion into her house; because finally she no longer believed in the restorative powers of anything or anyone, these latkes included, while she grated, she shed a few tears. Where the body found the reservoir to hold them, she could no longer imagine.

But life is full of surprises, or thought of another way, is one long one. She heard a creak in the hallway. It was not the first creak she had heard that afternoon — and she turned, not the first time for that either. There stood Gabe Wallach. He has come for me, she thought. And now I’d better go. Nothing else is left.

Then Paul was there, coming down the hallway behind Gabe, dark and shambling. Was she dreaming? Her two men. They have come for me, the two of them. All day they have followed me around and seen every stupid and selfish move. Gabe and Paul. Paul and Gabe. They are going to do something to me … But I am sweet and good. I deserve as much as anybody—

“I brought Gabe Wallach home,” Paul said, moving past his silent companion into the kitchen. She recognized his shoes, and the expression on his face. Too clearly. She was not dreaming. “What are you doing? What’s on your forehead?”

“Flour, nothing—”

“Libby, what are you up to?”

“Nothing! I’m just making dinner!” She tried to push everything together on the table. She shouldn’t have raised her voice. But what she was doing was nobody’s business but her own; at least not with Gabe so icy and hostile in the doorway. Curtly she acknowledged his presence. “How do you do?”

He gave no acknowledgment back; he waited. And for what? Paul’s fired! Why else would that son of a bitch be here? He can smell bad news! He hates us and we hate him and that’s it. Just last night … But the world had spun so in one day that she wondered if she might not be mixed up about the night before. Hadn’t they all separated forever?

“He has—” Paul was saying, his hands way down in his coat pockets, ruining his posture, “he has some news for us. I want you to hear it.”

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

Paul removed a hand from his pocket and started bouncing an invisible ball with it. “All right, all right, calm down, please.”

In front of Gabe, why must he treat her like a child! Who was on her side? Who was left?

To Gabe, Paul said, “You had better come in.”

He only moved forward one grudging step. Paul sat down and motioned for Libby to sit too.

Wallach took a deep breath. “Look, I spoke to Paul this afternoon about a baby.”

Libby listened for more, but no more was immediately forthcoming. She had a sudden sense of having been violated — shame, shock, fear attacked her. The deepest chamber of her heart had been forced open, and a secret stolen — a secret she had not even known she’d had. The two men whom she had turned against each other had come together and pooled their knowledge. They had made a decision for her about her life. She was going to have to bear a baby even if the two of them had to hold her down to do it. Oh no! Yes! She had ovaries and tubes, didn’t she, all the necessary equipment? So what if it was a little risk — everybody had risks to take for everybody else. Hadn’t Paul taken plenty for her? But that very patient doctor in Reading had carefully explained to them that childbirth might kill her. You see, Mr. Herz, she needs care, this frail girl of yours; she’s hardly more than a child herself. How can she carry a foetus, bear a baby — she needs care and love, this one. Well, stop laughing — I do! What’s wrong with that? I can’t have a baby! I have bad kidneys! You can’t make me have a baby, either of you! I might die!

When Gabe failed to go on, Paul said to her, “He knows of a baby. He thought we should be told about it.”

“What?” Libby said. “What baby?”

Gabe remained in the doorway. “A private adoption.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” Paul said to him. “Would you, please?” He suggested the chair next to his wife. “I want you to hear this,” he said then to Libby. “I want you to understand it all.”

Gabe came as far as the chair, but chose not to sit down. His coat had a velvet collar. The dandy! The fairy! He probably couldn’t even do it himself, the cold-hearted rich bastard!

“There’s nothing to hear,” Gabe said. “I told you everything there is to tell. It’s up to you. You can tell it to her easier than I.”

Paul said, “I’d like Libby to hear it from you. Please. I don’t want her to get confused.”

Why was he making her out to be such a handful? I protect him — why can’t he protect me! “I do not get confused,” she said.

“Please, Libby, only listen. I want you to listen and decide. I asked him to come here,” Paul said, “so all the terms of the thing would be straight in your mind.”

“What about you …?” she began, but her husband quieted her, this time with only a glance, with only the pain in his eyes.

“Somebody’s pregnant,” Gabe said, closing his eyes for a moment. “She doesn’t want the baby. You can adopt it—” He turned to Paul and threw up his arms. “Look, that’s what I told you. It’s still the same. You can do with this whatever you want.”

Slowly, his elbows moving through several of the ingredients on the table, Paul turned to face his wife. “You see,” he explained, “it wouldn’t be through an agency. I want you to understand this. It would be private. That’s a little more involved; however—”

“Are they married?” she asked.

“The girl doesn’t want the baby,” Paul said. “She’s not married.”

Libby looked up at Gabe. “Who is she?”

“A girl,” came the answer.

“Well, I mean, who is she? For you to say a girl—”

“Libby,” Paul said, “she’s a student, all right?”

“It’s just a question,” she said. “How am I supposed to know?”

“She’s a student,” Paul repeated.

“Where? Here?” Again she was asking Gabe.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“Well, you’re the one who’s supposed to know her—”

“I didn’t say I knew her,” Gabe cut in.

“At the Art Institute,” Paul said, hitting the table. “Does that answer the question, Libby?”

She knew then that she was being lied to. Instead of making her even angrier, the discovery soothed and comforted; it seemed to give her an advantage.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Who’s the father? What is he? Who is he? Why doesn’t he marry her? Is it her boy friend?”

“I don’t know anything about the father,” Gabe answered flatly. He looked over to Paul. “I gave you the girl’s name. You can get in touch with her and work it out from there, if you want to. Doesn’t that make sense?”

Paul didn’t answer. “All right, Lib?” he asked. “What do you think? How does it seem to you?”

“We don’t know anything about the father, for one thing.” She had made it sound as though Gabe was responsible. “We don’t even begin to know anything—”

“And I said I don’t know anything about the father either,” Gabe told her.

Libby looked up at his steely face. “You don’t have to be rude!”

He focused on her a mean, bored expression, while Paul said, “Let’s just conduct this business—”

“Well, I am,” said Libby. “You can’t expect me to jump in. We don’t even know anything about the father.”

“He’s probably a student,” Paul said.

“Oh sure, he’s probably a faculty member,” Gabe said, as though to himself.

Oh the cruel bastard! He had no respect for what she had been through. “Well,” she said to him, “it’s just a matter of establishing something, if you don’t mind.”

“Through an agency,” Gabe said, “you wouldn’t know any more.”

“As a matter of fact we certainly would. They try to match you up, the parents and the infant — coloring, eyes, general—” But she drifted off, for he was not listening.

“Look,” he was saying to Paul, “you do with this whatever you want. May I go now?”

Paul didn’t even look at him; apparently he couldn’t. He shrugged, and it seemed as though he were straw, not flesh, under his coat. “You’ll have to do whatever you think best,” he said.

“Fine,” Gabe said; he started out of the kitchen.

“Well, we have a right to know,” Libby shouted after him. “It’s our lives. You don’t have to be so huffy about it.”

He turned and leaned in the doorway, one hand on either wall. “Can I go?”

“Well”—she was swallowed up by panic—“we don’t even know anything about her—”

“Paul knows.”

“Oh — yes?” And now she did not want to hear another word. The mother was a call girl, a dope addict — the mother was Martha Reganhart!

“May I leave now?” Gabe asked.

“Oh go!” Libby shot back. “If you’re so impatient, go, get out of here — we don’t want to keep you.” She found that her husband was openly staring at her. His eyes, his kind eyes … Oh yes, she had been found out.

“Libby,” Gabe said, “why don’t you use your head—”

“Don’t start insulting us,” she demanded, and now she quickly turned her head and met Paul’s eyes. Why didn’t he protect her? Oh cruel men — cruel heartless self-absorbed bastards!

“Libby,” Gabe said, softening, “I got this information and I thought you might be interested in it. And — and that’s it, that’s all there is to it.”

“Well, isn’t that nice. We’ve just been going through perfect hell trying to adopt a baby, so you needn’t think it terribly generous of you to imagine we might be interested.”

“Oh screw it,” he said, and started down the hall.

Libby rose out of her chair, crying after him, “But we don’t know anything!”

“We know, we know,” Paul reached across with his hand.

“But what do we do?” she cried. She looked at Paul. Would he know what to do? Poor Paul? Poor trampled-on Paul? “Gabe, what do we do?”

She heard him call, “You get in touch with her. You better see her …”

She ran to the hallway; at the end of the apartment she saw just the paleness of his face and his hand on the knob. “No—” she said, “I won’t — I can’t—”

The hand on the knob turned; his feet, thank God, stayed put. “Then Paul sees her,” he said. “When you get everything settled you can get a lawyer, and he’ll take it from there. Maybe it would be best to get a lawyer in right at the beginning. Look, Libby, he knows all this—”

She turned back to her husband. “A lawyer,” she moaned.

Paul was moving toward her with his arms extended; she could no longer read the expression on his face. “It’s all right — we’ll talk about it—”

“We don’t know any lawyers. Lawyers cost a fortune—”

“I’ll take care of it,” Paul said. He took hold of her arms. “We’ll take care of it. We still have the agency. They’ll send somebody soon. Relax, honey, we can wait. If you prefer, if it will make you feel safer, then we’ll wait and work through the agency. I thought you didn’t want to wait, that’s all.”

“Oh no,” she said, “oh no no no,” but she could not tell him anything, not now, not today. “Oh it’s ugly and sordid, and everything’s always the same.”

“Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying! Do you see me crying? I’m just making a statement. Everything’s ugly and sordid! Can’t I say that?”

“Sure.” His hands dropped from her arms.

“Oh Paul—”

“I’m going.” It was Gabe’s voice, faint, almost gone. “I’ll be going now.”

“Go! Just go!” she cried. “That’s it — close the door and go!” But she came charging down upon him. “You just go, damn it. And thank you. Oh yes, don’t think we don’t appreciate everything either. We appreciate every tiny single thing you’ve ever done, Gabe. Oh we kiss your high and mighty ass, Gabe, don’t you forget that. Thank you, thank you for this helpful hint, we thank you a million times. Kind Gabe—” she said, shaking her fist, “so kind he probably went out and impregnated a little eighteen-year-old student, especially for us—”

“Why don’t you watch what you’re saying, Libby.”

“Why? Can’t you stand a little horror in your life? I can. Paul can.” And she thought: I can’t. Paul can’t. Too much already. Now more. Paul will meet the mother, take her to doctors, pay her bills, listen to her sad story, watch her weep. He will remember her face and carry it with him through life. She will be the mother — I’ll be the stepmother. He’ll see her face, her eyes, her hair, her tears—then who will I have!

“—don’t want your appreciation,” Gabe was saying, “so don’t kid yourself about that—”

“Oh but we appreciate so much,” she said. “Don’t you know everybody loves Gabe, all his charm and benevolence? How can any of us help ourselves? All the world loves Gabe, but who does Gabe love? We’re all waiting to hear—who? Oh you’re something, Gabriel, you really are—”

His hands were fists; that big chin of his was leaning out at her. “What is it you want, Libby? What is it you’re after now?”

“Oh, I don’t want anything from you!” She felt Paul’s hands come down on her shoulders.

“Cut it out, Libby, control yourself—” Paul was saying.

But she was flailing her arms, to be free. “Nothing. You do what you want. People don’t tell you what to do—”

“People tell me plenty,” Gabe said. “Too God damn much!”

“Oh do they?”

“Yes!”

“Then let me tell you—” and suddenly her voice had dropped, and it was harsh, deep, pleading. “Let me tell you—don’t make Paul do it! Don’t make Paul see her! Gabe, please, the last thing—”

“I should never have come here, Libby—”

“It’ll kill us. It’s our baby, not hers. Ours! Please!”

“Libby” … “Libby—” Both men were calling her name, and in the dim hallway they swooped down around her and lifted her off the floor, where, on her hands and knees, she was begging.

5

Although Theresa Haug’s pale blue uniform — the same washed-out color as her eyes — swam around her hunched shoulders and permitted a good two inches of air to circulate about her frail upper arm, it had nevertheless already begun to hug her belly. She had been seduced in November; perhaps October — this was yet to be established.

I watched her clear a table and then try to take an order from one booth while she dealt with a complaint about an underdone steak from another across the way. Her helpless confusion was not a pleasant sight, but given my mood and the turnings of my mind, it was almost preferable to having to watch Mark Reganhart inhale his French fried potatoes, the last of which lay on his plate, a squad of broken-backed, tortured soldiers oozing ketchup at every fork wound. All of Markie’s infantile habits, toward which I had felt kind or neutral at other times, had begun to exasperate me in the last few days. I was about to snap at him when I remembered, I am not his father, he is not my son, and turned away.

Again I looked at Theresa Haug, who stood a few booths from where we sat. To customers, she was mute and obliging, and efficient to the point of hysteria (or perhaps it was hysteria to the point of efficiency, it looked the same to me). In any encounter with the hostess, Mrs. Crowther — an egregious woman who was always sliding people into their seats with a melodic, “There you are”—Theresa’s deference stopped just this side of a salute. Not that Mrs. Crowther, or anybody else, paid Theresa very much attention; there wasn’t very much to attend to. All of her, form and features, seemed to have been designed and constructed by a committee of Baptist ministers’ wives. Her stockings hung from her underdeveloped calves in a particularly heartbreaking way, her skin held no mysteries, and her mouth was just a faint-hearted dash across the blankness of her expression. Yet someone had taken the trouble to undress her and lay her down and climb on top. A seed had been dropped, and it was about its fruition that I had come to see her.

For Martha (not myself) I had spoken to Paul Herz; for Paul I had spoken to Libby; for Libby I would speak to Theresa Haug. What other way could it have been?

“Cut your potatoes,” Cynthia told her brother. “Stop stuffing yourself. Stop jamming them in whole, Markie. Uh-oh for you. Here comes Mother.”

Martha, who was waitress to us as well as mother and mistress, set down two glasses of chocolate milk and a cup of coffee. “How is everyone?” she asked.

“Markie’s not using any manners,” Cynthia said. “I don’t think he should be allowed to sleep at Stephanie’s.”

“I want to!” Mark howled.

“Cynthia,” Martha said, “don’t tease him. Markie, stop whining.”

“You were the one who said if he wasn’t going to use manners—” began Cynthia.

Weary, quite weary of this little family group and their aggravations and struggles (my family? mine?), I asked Martha, “When does she get off?”

“Seven—”

“Mother—”

“I’m talking to Gabe.”

I turned on Cynthia. “She’s talking to me, Cynthia — how about it?”

“When’s Stephanie’s grandma coming?” asked Markie.

“Soon, honey.”

To show that my rebuke meant nothing to her Cynthia raised her eyebrows and clicked her tongue at the violence her brother was practicing with his fork. And a feeling came over me, a rootless kind of feeling, that control over my affairs was no longer in my own hands. Something like resignation — most likely disgust, and perhaps fear too — must have shown on my face.

“You don’t have to wait for Stephanie’s grandmother,” Martha said to me. “If it bothers you so … The kids can wait by themselves.”

“I’m not waiting for Stephanie’s grandmother. I’m waiting for your friend.”

“She’ll be through at seven.”

“It’s after seven.”

“Then she’ll be through soon. Look, Gabe—” A waitress came hurtling by our booth then, her tray tipping toward a disaster which might or might not overtake her before she reached the kitchen.

“There she is,” I said.

Martha reached out to touch Theresa’s arm. “It’s seven,” she said.

“Oh, look — this here — maybe some other — too rare he says,” and with a droopy-eyed look she showed Martha a steak on her tray.

“I’ll take your station,” Martha said.

“But Mrs. Crowther—”

“Theresa, get dressed. I’ll take your station. He’s waiting.”

“Yes—” She ran off down the aisle, leaving me exhausted. Martha kissed each child on the top of the head and went off toward the kitchen with Theresa’s steak. “Miss …” someone called after her, but she was her own woman, guardian of her rights and dignity, and she just kept going.

With a newsiness altogether uncharacteristic of her, Cynthia said, “We’re not sleeping at home tonight.”

“That should be fun,” I said. “Do you like to sleep at other people’s houses?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you?” Markie asked me.

I took a napkin from the dispenser on the table and reached across and wiped the ketchup off his mouth. “You try to concentrate on eating,” I said.

Cynthia pointed to where I had wiped her brother’s mouth. “I think my mother wants him to learn to do that himself.”

“I suppose she does.”

“He should be able to teach himself to grow up a little,” she said.

“He should,” I agreed, “but he doesn’t, and the rest of us have to look at it.”

“I think my mother would prefer if you let him do that himself,” she said beautifully.

“I didn’t steal his mouth from him, Cynthia — I only wiped it.”

Markie’s dark eyes now turned up to me, his chin grazing the remains on the plate. “Are you going to marry our Mommy?”

Now I smiled. “He certainly is full of questions.”

“He’s only a child,” Cynthia said, which in a variety of ways was a favorite line of hers.

“For a child those are pretty adult questions.”

Cynthia was nonplused; finally she admitted, “Well … he talks to me.”

My daughter. My stepdaughter. My stepson. Sitting there I continued to be visited with what ifs, and supposes.

Theresa Haug appeared in a big black-and-white checkerboard coat with saucer-sized buttons that shone. She stood beside the booth, speechless. Cynthia shrugged her shoulders, as though to indicate to me — and to the lady herself — that our visitor might be coo-coo.

“It’s okay,” I said, getting up from my seat, “she’s a friend of your mother’s.”

“I don’t care,” answered Cynthia in a tinkly voice.

Markie had picked up the ketchup bottle, turned it on its side, and was allowing its contents to run out onto his plate. He asked, “Is that his wife?” but I don’t think Theresa Haug heard.

“Ready, Miss Haug?” I asked, but got no reply. I took her arm and started to steer her toward the door.

“Bye, Gabe,” I heard Markie call.

I didn’t turn back; I was trying to focus all my attention on my charge and on her hardship. Nevertheless I could not really displace my own problem with hers. Martha’s teary ultimatum of two short nights before still burned in my mind. As for Martha herself, it was clear that she too had not forgotten those words she had addressed to me from her bed. Surely saving Theresa Haug was not, in anything other than a metaphoric way, saving herself.

Outside the Hawaiian House, Theresa stopped. Like a poor dumb beast. I said, “I’m parked a little way off. By Dorchester …” I tugged at her arm, then guided her along like one blind. She kept her gaze on her coat buttons.

“It’s a beautiful night for a change,” I said. There was indeed a sky overhead that was purple and practically glowing. “It’s getting a little warmer,” I added. “That should be a help …”

At last we made it to the car; I unlocked the door and helped her in. The overhead light spread like some watery dime-store paint over her plain, dull face. I closed the door for her and then walked around to the other side, in a kind of stupor too, for I was wondering if it made life more sensible, or less, to think that it was toward the alleviation of this girl’s suffering that all the rest of us had been struggling — Paul, Libby, Martha, myself — these many months and years.

I took Theresa Haug to a restaurant on the lake shore where, to offset the sugary Muzak piped into the dining room, the walls were hung with lurid paintings of the Chicago fire. The combination of music and art impressed me as ghoulish and antisocial, but the place was quiet and close by, and it had soft lighting and a view of the lake. Theresa could have dinner and we two could accomplish our business, all by candlelight.

I had been hoping that the shadowy atmosphere might loosen her up without unhinging her, but once there she still refused to look my way. At the check room I lived through a desperate moment trying to help her out of her coat. Evidently she thought I had lost my mind and was trying to wrestle her down onto the carpet, for she uttered a forlorn hopeless little cry (her first sound) and nearly fell backwards onto me, waving her arms. “Please, please … your coat,” I pleaded, and then she either caught on or gave herself up to still another assault, and I got what I was after, plus her limp body.

Through this confusion, the hat-check girl stood at my side tapping her lacquered nails on the metal checking tokens. She was a crooked-mouthed bitch in a black crepe dress, sporting the packed-in, boxcar variety of voluptuousness; I gave her a dirty look, and then the gaudy coat, and taking Theresa by the arm once again, led her into the dining room. Within the gentle throbbing light, underexercised, overfed merchants were enjoying dinner with their families. The specialty of the house was spareribs, and around the dim room I could see men, women, and children eating daintily with their hands, manipulating their food like Muzak’s violinists their instruments. While Theresa occupied herself with a minute scrutiny of her shoes and mine, I began to believe I had made a small error of tact and taste, and out of a small and petty fearfulness. We should have gone to a drive-in hamburger joint, I thought, and sat in the car, and said what had to be said, and thereby recognized the real and unpretty dimensions of our meeting. There was an unrelentingly sedate good-natured carniverousness in the air here and it somehow led me to reflect upon the cautionary nature of all prosperous people everywhere, myself included. I had convinced myself I would be doing the girl a service by bringing her to a muted middle-class rendezvous, carpeted and melodic, when actually the only person I had set out to spare was the same old person one usually sets out to spare, no matter how complex the strategy.

Theresa carried a long plastic purse with her, about the size and shape of a loaf of bread; its insides were visible to the naked eye. Walking into the dining room, I felt it rhythmically whacking my side, and though I decided to show nothing, at one point the girl herself nearly looked up at me to apologize. But she wasn’t quite able to pull it off; she merely hugged the purse to her and sank back into her pool of shame. Finally — nothing in life being endless — our crossing was over and we sat at a small corner table.

“Miss Haug …” I said. She was searching through her purse and, oblivious to the fact that my mouth was open, continued to search until she came up with an orange Lifesaver which she slipped secretively between her lips. I decided I had to allow her still more time to calm down, to look up. And I realized that Libby — for all I resented and suspected her manner (at the same time I responded to it), for all I had begun to hate both Herzes for the crazed and wild sparing of one another that they engaged in at the expense of others — had perhaps been prophetic in pleading that Paul be spared the job of interviewing the pregnant young woman. Not that I was myself in possession of a calm reasonableness, or even a plan of action; simply, my disappointment in seeing what Theresa was, was not the disappointment of a prospective father. Surely it is possible that Paul Herz might have wept or become angry or gotten up and walked out. I did not see any of these choices open to me. I would let her finish her Lifesaver, order a little dinner, and then begin to extract from her the information and promises necessary, and give her whatever advice she would be needing.

In twenty-four hours I had become a kind of authority on adoption. Leaving the Herzes’ apartment I had not driven back to Martha’s directly, but to the campus, where I had made my way to the law library and settled down angrily with the appropriate texts. That morning I had learned more through a telephone call Martha had made to her lawyer friend, Sid Jaffe. Jaffe had been exceedingly thorough and informative, and after she hung up, Martha told me he had even said that he would try to help her two young friends with the papers and legal work when the time came. “Free,” she added. It had been generous of Jaffe, but facile I thought, and though I could not actually resent the offer, given what it would mean to Paul and Libby, I would have liked to make it clear to Martha what I believed to be her old boy friend’s motive. Instead I found myself displaying a sizable amount of approval (isn’t that wonderful, isn’t that swell) while Martha made several statements almost punishable in the grossness of their nostalgia — statements about Sid’s sweetness and reliability. Though the matter was shortly dropped, my conviction grew that I had been unfairly tested and unfairly judged. That Jaffe was sweet and reliable was perfectly all right with me, but after all, he had not been through with the Herzes what I had been. Anyway, if Jaffe was so sweet and reliable, why hadn’t she taken her two kids and married him?

Of course I said nothing of the sort — though the night before, it happened that I had said something of the sort.

It should be made clear that it had been Martha and not I who had suggested that the same Libby Herz who had given us all such a monstrous evening, should become the mother of Theresa Haug’s bastard child. Some time around four in the morning — this was in bed, after the Herzes’ departure — Martha had no scruple about awakening me to tell me her idea. I sat up a moment, and then in a groggy fury got out of bed and came down upon the floor. I stormed around that room, round and round it; with no consideration for anyone or anything, I raised my voice, feeling in me all the ferocity of someone in a dream getting his sweet revenge. The hell with them! Fuck them — the two of them! I’ve had enough! Too damn much! Let them take care of themselves! Then I got back into bed. Through it all Martha watched me in what must have seemed a moment of pure insanity. Or maybe not; maybe it looked very sane indeed, and practical. For it occurred to me — and why not to her? — that it was not only my involvement with the Herzes that had caused me to erupt as I had. Afterwards there was silence in the bedroom, darkness and winter, and the knowledge that beside me Martha was thinking her thoughts. And I was thinking mine: My life, what is it? My life, where has it gone? One moment I knew myself to be justified and the next vindictive; one moment sensible and the next ignorant and cruel. The battle raged all night, and through it my bruised sense of righteousness, flying a big red flag reading I AM, kept rushing forward — my patriot! my defender! my own self! It cried out that I had every right to be cruel, every right to be through with the Herzes. With everybody. It raised a question that is by no means new to the species: How much, from me?

At long last morning came. Light. In the day the self does not dare fly the banners it gets away with at night. In the day there are Martha’s eyes; there is Mark, visible; there is Cynthia, a brown-haired child three feet nine inches tall. There was a glimpse of Paul Herz’s head as he closed the door to his Humanities class. When he has just had a haircut, the back of a man’s head is where he looks most vulnerable. I am. He is. We are. What will be?

It was not willingly that I went sliding back into what I wanted to slide out of. But back I slid.

Theresa Haug sat up, chancing a small glance — through her small eyes — over at me.

“Miss Haug,” I said once again, and without even a fight she surrendered to her gracelessness and immediately twisted one of the buttons off her blouse. The next problem seemed so large as to be facing all the diners in the room: what to do with the button? I thought, She wants me to call her Mrs. Haug — is that it? and the girl sat there dangling the button by its broken thread, spellbound by the sheer, unrelenting sweep of her misfortune. Finally I found myself extending my hand. She dropped the button into my palm and I deposited it into my coat pocket.

Her hands dove out of sight, and a strange rattling arose. I realized after a moment that its source was her skirt, a gold, luminous, bespangled garment that apparently dispatched noises upon making contact with a foreign object. Under the skirt a half-dozen crinolines were supposed to add joie de vivre, but the buoyant air imparted only heightened her unromantic proportions. I began feeling less and less hopeful about the chance of our exchanging two complete sentences; then my mind took a giddy turn and I could hear someone disrobing Theresa Haug: freeing her from her orchestral skirt, flicking open her remaining buttons, unsnapping all that seemed to hold in a piece her upper half. There was some chilling fragility about her which suggested that the elaborate network of straps and frills beneath her sheer blouse was there for unfortunate orthopedic reasons. I looked at her only with sympathy and noticed the silver cross that met the rise of her slip; the metal touching flesh made me conscious of the actuality under the clothes. It was incredible; under those layers of shiny cloth lived a woman with sexual parts. It was only a short step to wondering about the man who had seduced her. Seduction? What could the fellow have wanted? Found?

The waitress was now beside us. “How about something to eat?” I asked.

She barely opened her mouth, but nevertheless managed to say no.

I tried to slide a menu under her eyes. “Not even a sandwich? I wouldn’t be hurt if you settled for a sandwich.”

I smiled. She didn’t. The waitress, a wall-eyed blonde in no great rapport with the world’s sorrows, coughed.

“Coffee?” I asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“I’m going to have coffee and a piece of apple pie. How does that sound to you?” I waited only a second more, then spoke directly into the waitress’s boredom. “Would you bring us coffee and pie?”

“Two or one?”

“Two.”

Theresa signaled neither pleasure nor its opposite; if you ordered her pie, she’d eat pie.

And so it turned out. When the waitress lowered our dishes onto the tablecloth, whose soft white glow we had both been wordlessly facing for three minutes, Theresa picked up her fork, dislodged a tiny square of crust, halved it, halved the half, then pressed the back of the fork into the crumbs, a few of which attached themselves to the prongs. She carried them to her lips and finally ate in a little birdy way that I gradually realized was her conception of manners. Who had seduced her, I wondered, catching sight of her tongue? Who had wanted to?

It was an endless time before she had swallowed the few flakes of crust. “Would you like a glass of water?” I asked. “She’s forgotten our water … Excuse me, but would you like an Alka-Seltzer?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You’re all right?”

She closed her eyes, then batted the lashes. “They … have … nice … pie,” she finally articulated. “Home baked.”

“Yes, it’s awfully good, isn’t it? Do they have home-baked pie in the Hawaiian House?”

She proceeded to deliver a series of shrugs and head-bobs to indicate yes, no, and finally that she wasn’t sure. She returned to her plate, separating into pieces a crumb of pie that in itself was almost invisible.

“You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to,” I said.

“… It’s nice and tasty.”

“But don’t force yourself,” I said, unnerved. “If you’ve already had dinner …”

“Is there a powder room for ladies?”

“I think so. Don’t you feel well? Would you like some help?”

“I want to comb my hair.” She was standing, and I wondered if she were going to pass out. In a rush, my napkin sliding to the floor, I rose and took a step toward her; the girl’s face registered its first emotion: panic.

“What is it?” I asked.

Her pale face had, incredibly, paled. “Where you goin’?” she demanded.

“Nowhere.”

“I thought you were goin’.”

The people at the table beside ours looked up over their spare ribs like harmonica players. “You were going,” I said softly.

“Uh-huh. I was goin’ to wash up.”

“I was just standing,” I said, feeling my own color change.

“Yes?”

“Why don’t you just go ahead?”

She walked off, holding her purse in one hand and her table napkin in the other.

I sat down — sank down in my chair. Muzak swathed me in cotton batting and the gentle flickerings of the candles erased the flaws in the faces of the other diners. Everyone looked younger than he was, and my memory went reeling back to those first few evenings (or were they Saturday afternoons?) I had ever taken out a girl, back to all those Chinese restaurants on the upper West Side, where with a squared-off handkerchief in my breast pocket and a scented lacquer of my mother’s holding fast my recalcitrant hair, I waited for my sixteen-year-old companions to return from the powder room so that we could get on with the egg roll. Later I came to interpret all those toilet trips of my first dinner partners as a sort of coquetry on a very primal level — the mysteries of the body’s lower half for the anxious, throbbing adolescent boy to ponder — and it occurred to me it might be something like that for Theresa Haug as well. So far our evening had certainly been like some wearisome blind date: the boy trying bravely to live up to parental expectations of gallantry; the girl staking her all on an imbecilic shyness, which was at bottom only a misguided and sullen sort of flirtation. All that abysmal helplessness … all the fastening of my mind upon the word seduction. I reached into my pocket for a handkerchief and came up instead with the button off Theresa’s blouse.

When she returned to the table I did not stand and so we managed to get by without incident. I noticed reddish blotches directly beneath her eyes, and then on her arms too.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked.

“Better,” she said.

“You’re not”—I went ahead, feeling guilty now for having shoved the pie upon her—“you don’t happen to be allergic to apple?”

Of all things, she became coy; her hands began to flutter all over. I realized now that Theresa Haug had an age. She was no more than nineteen.

“What is it, Theresa?”

Her mouth flickered at either end; I was present at the birth of a smile. “Yes?” I said.

“Oh — I just try to bring up some color — in my face?” She ended on a high, questioning note. “In the winter I go so white …”

“Are you from the South?”

“Uh-huh.” The emphasis I took for regional pride. “You ain’t,” she said.

“I’m from New York.”

“Mister?”

“Yes—”

“Are you the doctor? Aren’t you goin’ to examine me—where?”

“Well, look … I’m not the doctor. I should have made it clear.”

“I thought you was the doctor.”

“Well, no. I’m a friend of the people—”

“I’m supposed to see the doctor,” she moaned.

“You will,” I said. “Please don’t worry. That’s all going to be taken care of. I’m a friend of the people who are interested in adopting your baby. The baby. Martha said you were interested in giving up the child for adoption.”

“Martha Lee said you was the doctor—”

“No, I don’t think she did. There must have been a little confusion. She must have said that I’d tell you about a doctor.”

Her mouth became so thin a line that I could hardly see it. “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend,” I repeated, “of the people who are interested in the adoption. Look, you don’t have to worry about a thing. I’m just an intermediary, a go-between, you see. I’ll answer any questions you have, and so forth. Is that okay? Really now, you don’t have to worry about a thing.”

“I’m not worried,” she said, pathetically.

“That’s fine.”

“I thought you was the doctor. See, I just have to get to a doctor.”

“Of course …”

“ ’Cause I’m from Shelby County — Kentucky?” she said. “And I know, you see, all this snowin’ and the bad weather and all—?”

“Yes?”

“I know it’s just”—she flushed—“affected my monthlies. A few warm days and I’ll be myself again.”

“Miss Haug, haven’t you been to a doctor yet? Didn’t a doctor tell you you were pregnant?”

“He weren’t no specialist. Just a plain old doctor.”

“Well, these people,” I said, “are quite willing for you to see an obstetrician as soon as you like.”

She seemed angry. “What people?”

“The people who want to adopt your baby.”

“What am I supposed to do about that?”

I made believe I hadn’t heard. “They’re very decent people, I assure you. They’re very anxious to give this baby a home. I’m sure they’ll give it a good home, and all that it needs.”

I could see that everything I had been saying was entirely beside the point as far as she was concerned. Nevertheless I went on. “The father—”

Here she came alive. “Oh he don’t care!”

“He does,” I said.

“Look, he ain’t got nothin’ to do with it!” It was her first display of passion and I realized that we were talking about two different people.

“Is this person in Chicago?” I asked.

“If you don’t mind?” she said. “I’m not interested in talking about this person.”

“You don’t think he’s interested in the child then?”

“I don’t know—” she said, “I hardly know him.”

I tried to accept that, blank-faced.

“You see,” she said, leaning forward so as to whisper, “I keep, well, throwin’ up — and well, now I’m really wonderin’ if it couldn’t be some kind of appendix condition. In the stomach?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think it would be appendix.”

“You’re no doctor,” she said.

“That’s right. But neither are you.”

“That don’t mean nothin’. I had an aunt — my aunt? and she lived in our house, and she had an appendix, real bad? And all she was doin’ was throwin’ up left and right.”

“That may be. How old was she?”

“She’s my aunt—” Aunt had two syllables. “Seventy.”

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty, next month.”

“Well,” I said, “there are a lot of physical conditions that can make a person nausequs. Appendicitis is certainly one, so is food poisoning—”

“I don’t think I got that,” she said, shaking her head.

“Pregnant women often become nauseous too, you know.”

After a moment, in a small voice, she asked, “You think I’m goin’ to have a baby?”

“I’m no doctor, Theresa, but I think so.”

“Oh boy …” She rested her forehead in her hands.

“But you knew that, didn’t you?”

She blurted out, “Well, what about me? What about when I quit work? What happens to me?”

“What do you mean, what happens?”

“I have to live, I have to rest. Gee whiz, mister—money.”

“Theresa, calm down. You have to understand that I’m only an acquaintance of the family. So I can’t tell you much about money. They’ll … look, I’m going to give you the name of a lawyer, Mr. Jaffe—”

“I can’t pay no lawyer. Oh boy,” she cried. “I need a doctor. Now Martha Lee told me—”

“You’ve got to calm yourself. You don’t have to pay anybody anything.”

“I paid somebody a hundred dollars already. And I don’t know where he is at all.”

“Who?”

“He was goin’ to get me a doctor …”

“You can’t find him now?”

She shook her head.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

She widened her eyes. “That’s awful.”

“Look now, you don’t have to worry about anything like that. You won’t pay anything. The lawyer arranges the necessary papers so that it’s all legal. You simply have to grant permission to the couple so that they can adopt your baby. The baby. The lawyer will speak to you about the arrangements. His name is Sidney Jaffe. He’s right here in Chicago, so there’s no trouble or expense—”

“He’s a Jew?” she asked, a twang in the last word.

“I think he is.”

“Uh-oh.”

“What’s the matter?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just makes me sort a nervous.”

“Well, don’t be.”

“Mister?”

“My name is Wallach. Gabriel Wallach.”

“I want to go to a Catholic hospital, mister. With the sisters. I ain’t goin’ by no Jewish hospital, you better tell that to that lawyer.”

“I will.”

“I want to go by the sisters, you understand now? There was a boy, back home? And he got hit by a car, and he was just alayin’ there in the road? And then they take him in the ambulance to the Jewish hospital — and they set all his bones and everything, and they gave him ether and all stuff like that, so he was knocked out good, and then counta he was a boy, they made a Jew out of him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know,” she said, “what they do to ’em.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Oh mister …” she cried, and she put her head right down on the table and let the giggles sweep in and conquer her. It took awhile, but finally she sat up and told me, “That’s what they say anyway. He was a nigger, so must be. You ever been to Shelby County?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s my home.”

“Theresa, are you a Catholic?”

“I gotta right to be anythin’ I want,” she said sharply. “This here is a free country.”

“I was only curious. I didn’t think there were many Catholics in Kentucky.”

“Well, you’re wrong!” she shot back. “You must be thinkin’ of Republicans.”

I said I supposed I was.

“At least you’re a Catholic, somebody takes care of you, I’ll tell you. I want to go by the sisters. Now you got to tell that lawyer — I don’t want no Jewish hospital!”

“I’ll tell him. I don’t think there’ll be any difficulty. Now Theresa”—I took a breath—“could I ask you when—”

Suddenly she was blowing out air, as though she’d just finished a race. “I don’t think I feel too good. I think maybe, maybe I ought to go right on home.”

“Well, if you’re not well, sure—”

“I’m just a little tired out.”

“Of course.”

“Do you know where the train is?”

“You don’t have to take the train. I’ll—”

“I think maybe—” But then she wasn’t thinking anything; she ran off to the lady’s room.

As I was driving her to Gary, Theresa said to me, “I think I need some gum.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any.”

“Can’t we stop?”

“I suppose so.”

“See that diner up there? Could we stop there?”

I pulled off the road and onto the gravel parking area around the diner. I wondered if the girl was going to be sick again and quickly got out of the car and came around to open her door. Inside I saw Theresa running a comb through her orange hair and twisting the rear-view mirror to get a look at herself.

There was a glow in the sky, a dusty red light thrown up from the mills in Gary; directly above our heads a neon sign gave off a steady buzzing. All it said was EAT. I held the door of the diner open for her and the only verb to describe her movement then is sashay. She sashayed on through.

Inside, the counterman said, “Look who’s here,” but did not unfold his hairy arms. He was leaning against the sandwich counter, a fellow with a brow like a bumper. “If it ain’t Miss Dixie Belle,” he said.

“How are you, Fluke?” Her tone astonished me; she’d become patronizing.

“We heard you was dead,” he answered.

“Well I ain’t.”

“No kiddin’,” Fluke said.

“No — no kiddin’!” She tossed her head, then let it whirl all the way around so that she was looking over at me, where I hung back by the door. I smiled. Theresa smiled back. It was like seeing a balloon deflated — and then the next moment seeing it full of air.

Fluke, however, did not seem to expect anything else from Theresa but this display of verve and wit. He did not appear to be too crazy about her, but exhibited the deference, at any rate, that one gives to people who are always on their toes. With a less benign look in his undersized eyes, he looked at me. It was obvious that he took a particular dislike to my clothes.

“What can we do for you, Tessie?”

“I’d like some Blackjack,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Oh I don’t mind.”

“Don’t you?”

“You’re sump’n, Dixie,” Fluke said, and with a groan — the groan of a man who totes around more thick dull tissue than the rest of us — Fluke raised himself off the sandwich bar and went toward the cash register.

“Five cents,” he said when he came back with the gum.

Theresa took the pack and turned to me.

“Oh yes,” I said, coming forward. I could not find any change in my pockets and had to give Fluke a dollar from my billfold. He didn’t like the billfold any more than the coat and hat. He put my change on the counter, mostly nickels.

“Here,” Theresa said to me, and handed me a stick of gum.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s your nickel,” she said, significantly. Then to Fluke, “You don’t look like you’re workin’ too hard.”

“There’s a recession startin’. Don’t you read the papers?”

“I read plenty of papers,” she retorted.

“Oh yeah?” said Fluke, and looked my way again as though I had introduced her to the pernicious habit.

“I read the Tribune,” Theresa said. “I read the Sun-Times, and I read the Chicago Maroon, which you probably ain’t even heard of down here.” The last named was the University student newspaper.

“You’re a big reader,” Fluke said.

We stood knee-deep in the wake of that exchange for several minutes. Theresa unpeeled her stick of gum, and we all paid undue attention to the operation.

Fluke said, “Where you workin’?”

It was the question she’d been waiting for. “No diner, I’ll tell you that.”

“Yeah?” said Fluke, shutting his eyes. “Where you workin’? You workin’ even?”

“In Chicago,” said Theresa. “The Hawaiian House.”

“Big deal,” Fluke said.

“At least the customers wash their hands,” Theresa informed him, “after they come out of the john.”

She must have had him there, for it took him a while to regroup his troops. “You’re workin’ up by that school,” he said, “you better watch out or the Comm-uh-nists’ll get you.”

“So what am I supposed to do about that?” She tossed her shoulders and her coat fell open.

Fluke whistled. “Still the fashion horse, huh?”

“I do all right.”

“It’s gonna cost some guy a fortune just keepin’ you in underwear.”

“That’s not funny — that’s plain dirt.” She turned away, and I put my hat back on.

“At least, at least”—Fluke couldn’t keep a straight face for this one—“at least I didn’t say ‘panties,’ did I?”

“That’s not funny any more, Fluke,” she said. “You don’t know where to stop, that’s your trouble.” She came over and took my arm.

“Yeah?” Fluke said. “I oughta wash my mouth out with Mr. Clean.”

I opened the door — Theresa was waiting for me to. Fluke called, “Watch out for those Reds, Dixie, before they kidnap you back to Russia.”

She turned just her head, and that with disdain. “It so happens that people up there ain’t people down here.”

“You got it, kid, you got it,” said Fluke mysteriously. “Take it easy, Tessie. Take it easy, sport.”

Sport was me; Theresa had already swept out when I looked back to discover that Fluke had become a well-wisher; he raised a hand, and made a circle with his thumb and index-finger. Then he winked.

As I stepped out under the EAT sign, Theresa barged back across my path. She shouted in through the open doorway, “You can tell Dewey he can go straight to hell!”

When we were back in the car, driving south, Theresa offered me a nickel.

“That’s all right,” I said, and she put the nickel away.

She asked, “Can we turn the radio on?”

“Yes.”

“Are you mad?” she asked.

“No.”

“He’s just got a dirty mind. Fluke ain’t even his real name. He’s just a Polock.”

“I understand.”

She turned on the radio. “Which you like better?” She mentioned the names of two Chicago disc jockeys.

“Whichever you want,” I said.

She tuned her station in with care and patience, fiddling with the tone as well as the volume. Then, with the music pounding, she said, “See — I used to work there.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not very nice down there,” she told me.

We drove on toward the outskirts of Gary where Theresa lived. As we approached, the red in the sky grew more intense, and we could see two pilot flames burning stiff above their towers.

Theresa was singing along with the record.

“Earth angel, earth angel,

Will you be mi-ine?

Earth angel, earth angel,

Will you be mi-ine?

“You better give me directions from here on,” I said, interrupting.

“Down by the next light you turn right.” She went back to her singing. The disc jockey was shortly telling all us guys and gals driving home in our cars, or sitting in our living rooms, or just moping around the house missing that special someone, where to buy a used car. Then he put on a new record, the words of which were equally familiar to my companion.

“I take it you feel better,” I said.

Her head was back on the seat. “I appreciate all you’re doin’, Mr. Wallace. Are you Martha Lee’s steady?”

To save wear and tear, I said, “No, just a friend.”

“Look—” she said, “you — you’re not the fella who’s goin’ to adopt my baby?”

“I’m not. If I was I would have told you.”

She considered what I had said a moment. “You better turn left now,” she mumbled.

Making the turn, I said, “I told you, I’m the intermediary.”

“Well, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it!”

“I didn’t think you’d meant anything by it.”

“You’re not mad, are you?”

“Look, I’m not ‘mad’ about anything.”

“Turn left and down the block,” she said, in a voice suddenly full of disappointment.

The street — endless tiny front yards and high brick stoops — must have looked no less bleak in the daylight than at night. Trains often pass through miles of just such streets and houses upon entering and leaving our great cities. In the gutter were five or six Christmas trees still waiting for the garbage man.

“There,” Theresa said, and I pulled up near the end of the block. The house she pointed to still had screens on its windows.

The radio was playing rock and roll, and Theresa asked if she could stay until the record ended. Her head moved with the beat, and when I looked over at her, I saw that her nose tugged up on her lip so that in profile you could see her two front teeth. She did not look as though she could add two and two.

“Who do you like?” she asked. “Frankie Avalon or Fabian?”

“I’m not sure which is which.”

“Well, you were listenin’ to Fabian.”

I said that it seemed to me that he could carry a tune. We sat in the radio’s glow for a moment, and then when the record was over, Theresa began to cry. I turned off the motor.

“Certain songs make you think of certain people,” she said.

“I guess so.”

She blew her nose. “Mr. Wallace?”

“What is it?”

“You been so nice. And kind.”

“Everything will be all right soon,” I said.

“You’re the most polite man I ever met. All that standin’ up and sittin’ down.”

“You’re in an unfortunate predicament.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” she whimpered. “Can you walk me to my door? I think I’m feelin’ funny again.”

She waited this time until I came around to her side and opened the door; it had all become a meaningless parody of decency. At the top of the stoop, she took out her keys and let us in. The hallway had the tomby smell of an unvacuumed place; at the rear we came to another door, which she unlocked. Inside I could see the foot of a bed and, on the linoleum floor, a pair of snappy imitation-leopard slippers.

I said, “Theresa, the next thing will be for Mr. Jaffe—”

But she had turned and was sniffling again, her frame dropped against my own.

I put my hands on her arms. “It’ll be all right. Try to keep control. Mr. Jaffe—”

“Do I see you again?”

“It’s best for you to see the lawyer—”

“Don’t I see you again?”

“If it’s necessary,” I said.

Meekly: “Could you come in and talk to me, Mr. Wallace? I just feel awful.” She stepped inside and pulled a string; the bulb lit up four flowered walls, the bed, a cardboard closet — a hulking thing that reminded me of Fluke — a stained little sink, and a table jammed with soaps and powders. Photographs torn from magazines, all of pudding-faced boys in open-necked shirts, were pinned to the walls.

“What’ll happen about the doctor?” Theresa asked.

“I told you. It’ll all be taken care of.”

Her coat dropped off her, though I had not seen her undo the dollar-sized buttons. She left it where it lay on the floor, and dropped, sighing, onto the bed. The springs sang, and I could not believe in the blind willfulness of my body’s parts. Theresa hit the bed — and my blood responded, as though she were some other woman; as though she were a woman.

“What is it you want to talk about?” I asked.

“I thought there was more you wanted to talk about back in the restaurant.”

“For instance?”

She couldn’t think of anything; not right off. “Suppose it’s twins.”

“That’s nothing to worry about.”

“What d’yuh mean? People have ’em. Ain’t you never seen twins? Twin boys or somethin’?”

“Twins, triplets, or whatever, you have nothing to worry about.”

“Suppose it’s a moron.”

“It’s not going to be a moron,” I said. She seemed to take this as a compliment. “Is there anything more?”

“Well,” she said, “I just thought there was more you wanted to talk about.”

“I don’t think there is.”

“You been a regular gentleman, Mr. Wallace. You don’t see much of that in the North, you know.” Then her eyes filled up again. “You been so polite and nice …?”

“Goodnight, Theresa.”

“Mr. Wallace?”

“What?”

“I ain’t never been this way before. I don’t know if I can do it alone.”

“I’m sure it won’t be as difficult as you imagine.”

“What happens when it starts hurtin’? I’m all alone.”

“But you’re not alone, you see.” “I sure am.”

“I meant to say we’re all trying to help.”

“I’m still alone,” she said. “It ain’t easy for a girl. I’m always hearin’ people turnin’ my doorknob and all kinds of funny things. There’s always somebody behind me, you know? I don’t like it alone.”

“What is it you’re asking me, Theresa?”

“I don’t know …”

“Are you asking that I stay with you?”

She looked away from me. “I don’t understand.” But then she shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know, don’t provoke.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said in a mean, Southern drawl.

“I said don’t invite trouble!”

“I don’t understand what you’re shoutin’ for! Who said you got a right to shout at me!”

I took her blouse button out of my pocket and set it on the foot of the bed. “They’ll get in touch with you,” I said, and holding the door open only for myself, I left, unable to believe in my body’s pulsing, unable to believe in my own temptation.

6

The apartment I returned to was not Martha’s but my own — cold, musty, and unlived-in. I did not even bother to turn on the lights. The shades were drawn, making it black and to my purposes; I sat down in my bent-laminated-wood chair and tried to find sense in the lust that had so recently visited me, in the desire I had not willed, wanted, or satisfied. I contemplated the desire as though it were the act itself … For if in the eyes of the law there is a no man’s land of innocence between the itch and the scratching of it, in the eyes of the citizen himself, who has his own problems, the one may render him just about as culpable as the other. I looked for sense; I looked for cause. I did not remain alone there in my hat and coat trying to be especially hard on myself — hardness or softness had little to do with it. I was, I think, in a state of dread. At bottom I did not feel certain about what I would say or do to the next human being I made contact with. I cannot say for sure whether, in the bedroom of that unfortunate girl, something had been hooked up inside me or disconnected, but what I knew, what I felt rather, was that within that maze of wiring that unites a man’s mind, heart, and genitals, some passage of energies, some movement, vital to my being, had taken place. There are those synapses in us between sense and muscle, between blood and feeling, and at times, without understanding why, one is aware that a connection that has occurred in oneself — or that has failed to occur — has been a pure expression of one’s character. And it is that which can bring on the dread.

Later, my phone rang. It was Martha and she asked me if I wanted to come home.

She said, opening the door, “I’m sorry I had to get you out.”

“I was taking a breather, Martha.”

“You were coming back?”

“I think so.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know for sure.”

“If I’d realized that, I wouldn’t have called.”

“You realized,” I told her, “and you called anyway.”

“You might as well come all the way in,” she said, and left me alone at the door; a moment followed in which I might have gone back down the stairs and away. I considered it, and then moved into the apartment. It was as though I had been drawn in by that faint Hawaiian House odor that clung to Martha’s uniform; it was not that I liked the odor particularly, only that I had grown used to it. In the living room she said, “You can even take your coat off.” She sat down beside an ash tray thick with butts. “What were you going to do about all those classy suits?”

“I was going to leave them for the next guy.”

“Who were you going to move in with now?”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I began to understand hermits.”

“You mean you were going to try moving in with the fellas?”

“You’re thinking of monks, Martha. I was realizing that I have some fouled-up connections, some mistaken ideas. That I’m not in tune with myself. I was understanding why ascetism was once a basic Western value.”

“The old light-hearted historian,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry if I were you. You seem eminently in tune with yourself.”

“If I am what you’re trying to say I am, you ought to consider yourself lucky without me.”

“I can’t say I’m sure what you are.”

“Then why did you want me back?”

“I think you want somebody to beat you up tonight, Gabe. I think maybe you’d better go home after all.”

My coat was on my lap and my hat on my head, but I didn’t move. I saw only one alternative to running away. “Why don’t we get married, Martha?”

“Oh this is too romantic to bear.”

“Why don’t you stop crapping around?”

“Why don’t you!”

“I asked you if we shouldn’t get married. You want to give an answer?”

“You’re the answer, you shmuck.”

“Am I? I remember getting a long set of instructions when I moved in here not to propose to you.”

“It’s curious,” she said, “what parts of the law you choose to obey and what parts you don’t.”

“The law isn’t so uncomplicated.”

“Don’t be a college teacher, I couldn’t stand it.”

“Why don’t you want to get married, Martha?”

“Is this obligation, or impulse, or what?”

“It’s both, if you want to know. All three.”

“You don’t want to bring up love or anything, is that it?”

“You’re too full of principles, Mrs. Reganhart. You’re too high-minded.”

“Wowee,” she said.

“Why don’t you face the facts?”

“Why don’t you! You don’t want to marry me. Isn’t that a pertinent fact?”

“Wanting isn’t the right word.”

“Oh hell then, what is? Loving isn’t the right word and wanting isn’t either. Look, buddy, don’t feel obligated. Oh you’ve got a nice fat trouble, my friend.”

“Why don’t you go sit in the window, Martha, and wait for Mr. Right to come along in his big shoulders and his red convertible?”

“You’re damn right I’m going to wait!”

“It’s great you’re five nine, Martha, it’s perfect you’re hefty. The bigger they are the better they can enjoy the fall.”

“Shut up.”

“Your untrammeled, unselfish nobility is about one of the most disgustingly selfish exhibitions I’ve ever seen.”

“Please don’t you be the one to bring up words like selfish around here, all right? God might send down thunder on this whole house. Have it understood, nobody’s marrying me out of a sense of loyalty. Someday somebody’s going to marry me because they want to. They’re going to choose little me.”

“I’m choosing you. I’m making the choice.”

“There must be some kind of noose around your neck. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there.”

“You’ve got circumstances,” I said. “I’ve got them too. Don’t be an ass.”

“Your circumstance is plain and simple. That isn’t what I meant was invisible.”

“Go ahead, Martha, you might as well go all the way.”

“You don’t need anybody,” she said. “If you did, you wouldn’t feel so obliged all the time.”

“You don’t know what I need — you don’t begin to know!”

“Nor you, me,” she said flatly.

“Then maybe that’s why I was giving some thought to coming back or not. Maybe that deserves some thought.”

“For instance,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken, “ten minutes you’re here and you haven’t even asked why I called.”

“I didn’t think there was a specific reason.”

“There is. I’m not you. I don’t make phone calls out of wistful nostalgia.” Her voice lost a bit of its edge. “Dick Reganhart’s back in town.”

For a moment the words meant nothing; all I could think was that it was the name of some third child of Martha’s.

“My first love,” she said. “He wants his kids. I thought you might have a suggestion,” she added; whereupon she left the room.

When I found her in the kitchen she had already poured herself a cup of coffee and was drinking it standing up, looking out the back window.

“What do you mean he wants his children?”

“He wants his children. Simple as that. They’re half his.” She turned; in the little time it had taken to get from the living room to the kitchen her face had become pouchy with fatigue. She leaned against the window sill. “He’s a great success. New York’s latest fad. You can get yourself a Reganhart by plunking down a thousand bucks. He’s chic, my former husband. He’s grown a mustache. He’s getting married to a millionairess. His new father-in-law was once Ambassador to China. How’s that? A wife who can use chopsticks. All good things come to him who waits for it.”

“The only trouble is he’s got no rights.”

“He’s got rights,” she said. “He’s got you. You’re evidence that I’m an immoral woman. He’s going to take me to court and hold up your underwear as evidence.”

“He knows about me?”

“There are still creeps around this neighborhood who consider it a pleasure to have smoked pot with my ex-husband. They turned me in. I’m ah immoral character.”

“Which isn’t so.”

“Which is. That’s one more fact, since we’re counting facts.”

“You saw him then.”

“I served him his dinner. He’s still got the old instinct for comedy,” she said. “Tomorrow he’s going to come over and see his kids.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” I tried to engage her eyes but she looked right past me; except for the rapidity and brittleness with which she spoke, she gave no sign of falling to pieces. I asked, for lack of anything else to say, “What do you think?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.” She came over and sat down at the table.

“Well, I think it’s ridiculous.” I sat down across from her. “As for my being evidence of your bad character, that’s one of those things that’s got to be proved. What the locals say, they say — it hasn’t the ring of proof. It’s assertion.”

She did not answer; I realized that the first thing I had tried to explain was how I was not implicated.

“Well,” I said, “what about his character? What about all those years of support payments unpaid? What about the divorce itself? You can’t not be a father for six years, five years, whatever it was, and then suddenly decide you’re ready. No judge is going to listen to him, Martha. You’ve got Jaffe still, haven’t you? You’ve got — hell, Martha, it’s an empty threat.” She continued to look unconvinced. “You’re not immoral,” I said. “The power you’ve got is the fact that you know it isn’t so.”

“But it is,” she told me when she saw that I was through. Only her jaw moved as outward evidence that she was not immune to feelings. “Because I want him to take the kids, Gabe. That’s the next fact.”

To which I had no ready answer. I got up and poured myself a cup of coffee. Under the sink the garbage pail was overflowing; I set down my cup and took the pail out and emptied it into the can on the back porch. When I came back in, Martha had left the kitchen and I found her in the empty children’s room on Markie’s bed.

“Surprised?” she said, looking up at me.

“No.”

“Shocked? Disgusted? Overcome? None of the above?”

“None.”

“That’s what she wants, isn’t it?” Martha said, throwing a hopeless hand toward Cynthia’s bed. “To live with her father awhile? Isn’t that it, or something like it? I can’t tell, I’m punch-drunk and fed up. I don’t want to worry about what she wants any more. Does that make me a witch?”

“I don’t think it does.”

“Well, you’re standing up there very big and judging,” she said.

“I’ll sit down,” and I did, at the end of Cynthia’s bed, across from Martha’s feet.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t care. Let him come. Let him open the closets and pull out the drawers and let him find all the God damn underwear he wants. Who can care any more? All I want is to go out in the afternoon and get a cup of coffee and not have to run back and make anybody’s supper. I used to wheel Markie around the campus all the time, I used to wait for the hour to be up and watch the kids changing classes. That’s how I used to spend the afternoons. Right out there in front of Cobb, rocking my baby carriage. Then I got ashamed and picked myself up and went off to the playground where I belonged. But I don’t have too much love for that playground, I’ve got to admit it. If I have to push one more swing one more time … This is punky of me.”

“No.”

“I should keep them. I should tell him to take his new life and his new wife and shove them both. Just pay up, I should say. Shouldn’t I?”

“What is it, Martha? What is it you want?”

“Oh, please come here,” she moaned, rolling toward me. “Please, just lie down next to me. Please, and turn off the light.”

Beside her, after five minutes of silence, I asked, “How will you feel without those kids?”

“How will you?” she said.

“I’ll marry you either way.”

“Don’t say that, will you?”

“Then I don’t know what to say.”

“Say I’m not immoral, all right?”

“You’re not. You’re not, sweetheart.”

“Everything gets telescoped,” she said, touching my face. “I haven’t even known you two months, baby.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You don’t have to marry me is the difference. Why does everybody have to step up and marry me? I’m a drag on men. A strain on everybody. Oh Gabe, do you think making love would help matters? Hold me tighter, okay? Is that my whole damn downfall — hot pants? Oh let’s just do it, with the doors open and all the grunts and groans and nobody tiptoeing by and nobody’s neuroses blooming down the hall — nobody, nothing but our two selves.”

Very early in the morning I awoke to find that Martha was no longer beside me in Markie’s bed. I supposed she had gone back to her own room, but I found her barefooted in the hallway, bending over the large cedar chest in which the kids’ old toys were stored. The toys, however, had been taken out and were strewn around in the hall; in their place Martha was packing away my belongings — shirts, suits, coats, underwear, ties — and hiding them out of sight.

The next morning Mrs. Baker ushered us into her kitchen (hers until her daughter came out of Billings’ psycho ward) and in a cheery, we’ve-all-been-up-here-for-hours voice heralded our arrival. “Look who’s come! It’s Markie and Cindy’s mommy, and Mr. Wallach.”

The three Parrino offspring, sullen children with downy faces, took our appearance in their stride; hardly a face rose out of its cereal bowl despite their grandmother’s exuberance. Cynthia, however, never without resources for drama, jumped up from the table and leaped half the length of the kitchen. She threw her arms around Martha. “Daddy’s here!” she cried.

“How do you know, baby?”

“Isn’t he?” she demanded. “Did he go, already?”

“No, no — he’s here. I just didn’t know you knew.”

“He called me,” she said. “Ask Mrs. Baker. Didn’t my daddy call me here?”

A white-haired woman with pale hands and active fingers, who always moved around the house in full dress — weighty oxfords, fur jacket, and pink pillbox hat, veil up — Mrs. Baker gave a small birdlike reply, as though she were cracking a seed in her teeth. “That’s right, dear. Last night at eleven-thirty.”

“Well, I didn’t know that, sweetie.” Martha managed to maintain her composure in the face of Dick Regenhart’s surprises and energies. “I’ll bet you were excited. Does Mark know?”

“He gets confused, Mother.”

Martha went to the table and smoothed back the boy’s cowlick. “How are you, young man? Did you have fun sleeping over? Did you talk to Daddy?”

He looked confused all right. “I was sleeping,” he said.

“You finish your breakfast now,” Martha said. “Then you’re going to visit with Daddy.”

“Oh terrific,” Cynthia said. Mark and the Parrino children said nothing.

“Hello, Stephanie,” I said. “How are you?”

Mrs. Baker said, “Stephanie’s daddy and Tony’s daddy and Stevie’s daddy is going to visit with them next month, isn’t that right, honey?” She had made it sound like three people.

Stephanie nodded, and Cynthia, on the edge of her seat, said, “Do we go now?”

“Don’t be impolite. You finish your breakfast,” Martha said, “and we’ll wait in the other room.”

Mrs. Baker followed us, and when Martha and I had settled onto the sofa, she said, “Mr. Reganhart wanted to come over last night”—she had been looking only at Martha, but I now got a significant glance as well—“and I thought it over and weighed all sides and then I thought, well, it’s just going to overexcite those two children. Now I hope I didn’t do wrong, honey. I didn’t know how you felt about it. I didn’t want to call you and wake you up too. I know when Billy comes, I just think it overexcites the children.” She had a very excited, anticipatory air about herself, as though there was always the possibility that she might be strung up for her last statement. She seemed to sense some acute division between herself and the general drift of life.

“Thank you,” Martha said. “I think you were right.”

“You don’t want to disrupt their sleep,” the older woman said, this time only to me. “I don’t know how you folks feel, but personally eleven-thirty doesn’t seem to me an hour for telephoning all around town.”

“I suppose he was anxious to talk to them,” Martha said.

“You’re perfectly right, Martha,” said Mrs. Baker. “I didn’t mean that, you know. Billy certainly loves his children one hundred percent too. I didn’t mean they didn’t love their little ones. What kind of men would they be then?” Again the question was for me. “Billy’s certainly been very good while Bev’s been recuperating, I don’t mean that. It’s just that they’re not women and you can’t expect that they’re going to understand a child the way a woman can. You men are our wage-earners and our husbands,” Mrs. Baker told me, “but there’s nobody like a mother.”

I agreed. She squared the edge of a pile of magazines on top of the TV set. “These are mine, you know — for Bev.” She held up a magazine before her, as a child will hold up something for the entire class to see, facing each of us in turn. “These are my genealogical journals of Illinois, Mr. Wallach. My daughter has gotten very interested in her family history, and we think that’s a very hopeful sign. You know, Martha, Beverly never much cared about DAR matters. But I suppose now she’s had all that time to think and so forth, and to appreciate, and well, we think it’s a good sign. I had to go all the way out to Highland Park the other day to bring in all my books and magazines, but I’d make a hundred trips back and forth a week if we can have our girl back the way she was. She even asked about you, Martha Lee.”

“Did she?” Martha said. “That’s very sweet.”

“Oh she talks about her daddy and her brothers, and her old old friends — little children all grown up by now — and about you, Martha Lee, and about Richard too — that’s Mr. Reganhart,” Mrs. Baker informed me. “In fact, she’s suggested — and it was all her suggestion, mind you — that I try to get hold of a genealogy from Oregon. She wants to work out your family for you, Martha Lee. Now isn’t that something? I’ve already written off to see what we can do. Wouldn’t you call that reason to be cheered up?”

“She sounds like she’s coming along,” Martha said.

“Well, the doctors are encouraged, and the children are managing beautifully, and I don’t mean to say that Billy hasn’t been a help. We have nothing against Billy,” she said, “per se. If a marriage doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, I suppose. Perhaps we’ll find out later that this was all for the best.”

Neither Martha nor I responded.

“Mr. Wallach,” Mrs. Baker said, “I was myself married to two of the finest men who ever drew breath. And I lost them both, that was God’s will.” She filled up instantly with tears. “But I went right ahead, and Beverly is going to go right on, and Martha Lee has gone right on, and that’s the nature of a woman. To go right on, and raise her children to be strong and good, and not to be ashamed, and to respect their elders and love their country. I had two fine husbands, both of them Masons, not strong lodge men, I’ll admit that, but men’s men, who had the respect of their neighbors and knew their duty to their wife. After all, the husband chooses the wife, he gets down on bended knee — at least he used to — and then he’s got the duty to stand by her. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know what’s happened to the world, Mr. Wallach. If you’ll pardon me, I don’t mean this personally, but I don’t know what’s happened to our American men. I don’t understand this discontentment business and I can’t say that I ever have. I don’t know what men want any more. If this embarrasses Martha Lee, I’m just sorry, but heaven knows they don’t make them any smarter or any prettier than you, honey. And my own Bev, they didn’t make them any sweeter, you can attest to that, Martha Lee. The sweetest, kindest girl, loved animals, loved the seasons and her schoolwork, Queen of the Prom, I remember that, and a pretty girl too — and it’s just not imaginable what this world has turned around and given them. Now I don’t know Mr. Richard Reganhart except by name, and Billy has been very courteous through this whole ordeal, but I don’t think they either of them would know a good thing if they tripped over it. If they fell over it and broke their neck, as Mr. Baker used to say.”

Cynthia’s voice came lancelike down the hall from the kitchen: Markie and Stevie were throwing Farina.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Baker, and she flustered and fidgeted until Martha rose and went off to the kitchen to put down the riot. Still standing by her genealogical journals, Mrs. Baker leaned in the direction of the disturbance; when the situation seemed under control, she came over and sat down next to me, where Martha had been.

“They’re two fine children,” she said. “That Cindy is smart as a whip.”

“She’s very good at looking after Markie,” I said.

“They could make a man a very nice little family,” Mrs. Baker said, “believe me.”

Again I nodded my head, agreeing.

“I don’t know if you’re a Mason or not, Mr. Wallach, and I don’t want to pry.”

“I’m not.”

“Well,” she said, “I would certainly give it some thought. I’m not going to say much more, because if a man wants to become a Mason that’s up to him. You know you won’t even be invited, you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, you won’t, so don’t sit around waiting. They don’t believe in that. If a man decides he wants to be a Mason, then he’s got to step forward. Now I wouldn’t try to convince you of anything, Mr. Wallach. I’m only saying I think you might give it some thought. You know what they say: ‘Once a Mason, always a Mason.’ I was married to two men, both Masons, and both fine men, Mr. Wallach, respected in the community and in the home as well. They were stern men, and maybe they didn’t wipe the dishes like some husbands do, but they knew right from wrong. You just ask over at the University — you teach, isn’t that it, over at the University?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you just ask around there. You talk to the top professors and you see if they’re not Masons — the top professors, and deans, and so on.”

“I will,” I said.

At the door later, with Cynthia and Mark in their coats and the three Parrino children — hot cereal having cut through their gloom — running up and down the hallway, Mrs. Baker took my hand and whispered to me, “They’d make a man a nice fine little family, don’t think they wouldn’t.”

In the back seat Martha sat beside her daughter; Mark and the little suitcase full of pajamas and comic books that the children had taken with them to the Parrinos were in front with me. After a momentary crisis on the street — Mrs. Baker all the while waving at us from upstairs — we had all submitted to Markie’s seating arrangement.

“He’s traveled all the way from New York to see you,” Martha was saying now, “and he wants to have a good time with you, okay?”

Uncooperatively, Cynthia mumbled that she would cooperate.

Martha leaned forward, so that her hand was on my coat. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Markie answered.

On Fifty-seventh Street we had to stop for the light. Martha said, “To help him have a good time, babies, I don’t think he wants to hear about some things. I think he wants to hear about school, and the playground, and about your Christmas presents, and about Markie’s cold that he had, and Cynthia’s ballet lessons—”

“What doesn’t he want to hear about?” Cynthia asked.

“I don’t think, for instance, he wants to hear about Sid Jaffe, you know — or about Gabe,” she said. “I don’t think that’s important to Daddy on such a short visit.”

No one asked a question, not Mark, Cynthia, or me.

“Do you understand, Markie?”

“Okay,” he said, shrugging.

“I don’t think Daddy’s interested that Gabe stays with us overnight. You see? If Daddy asks about Gabe you say he visits with Mother. Okay, honey?”

Mark leaned over my way. “A secret from Daddy,” he whispered.

“Oh but just a small secret, that’s all,” Martha said. “You’ll have plenty to talk about without worrying about such a little secret. Agreed, Cyn?”

We waited, and then that small guardian of truth swung her great lantern over us all. “Gabe does sleep over. Gabe’s clothes are home.”

“But for the time being, Gabe’s clothes are put away. Cyn, Gabe sleeps over, but I think that’s our private life. Your father has his private life, and we have ours. Isn’t that so?”

“Okay.”

“Look, Cynthia — you have a perfect right to disapprove. You go ahead and think whatever you want. Even if you want to be angry, then you be angry. You have a private life too. I’m only asking you to please do what I tell you, because I think it’ll make us all happier. Baby-love, I’m sure you’re not against any of us being happy, are you?”

“I’m not angry,” the child said.

“That’s good, Cynthia — that’s a terrific girl. And this afternoon I’m going to have a talk with Daddy, and Gabe’s going to take you to the Museum.”

“The Aquarium,” Mark demanded.

“The Museum of Science and Industry, honey,” Martha said. “You can go down in the coal mine.”

“We’ve been down in that coal mine,” Cynthia said, “about a hundred times.”

“I want the fish,” Mark said.

“Oh hell, Markie, don’t whine—not today—” began Martha, and then, making my first statement of the morning to the assembled Reganharts, I said sharply, “If he wants to go the Aquarium, we’ll go to the Aquarium. What’s so hard about that?”

To the consternation of all of us, Mark grabbed my arm and kissed it. I almost drove up on the sidewalk; and in the back seat, even Cynthia, champion of unconditional surrender, broke down and said, “Thank you.” She said it softly, and when I turned my head to tell her she was welcome, I found the child, miraculously, giving me a sympathetic, almost a pitying, look.

After driving Martha and the children home, I drove to my office, where I spent the rest of the morning marking freshman essays. Just before I went off to lunch — and from there to pick up Martha’s kids — I dialed the Herzes.

“Is she terribly upset?” asked Libby.

“I think everything’s under control,” I said.

“Do you have any message for Paul?”

“Whatever I tell you I would tell Paul.”

“We’re very appreciative,” she said, “about Mr. Jaffe.”

“That’s fine.”

“Is she young?” she asked. Then: “Is she attractive? I don’t necessarily mean beautiful—”

“She’s attractive, Libby. She’s nineteen.”

“What about the husband?”

“What?”

“The father. Is he a student?”

“No,” I said.

“I thought he was a student too.”

“He’s an architect,” I said.

She said, “And he’s not going to get in the way?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So we can just sit back now?”

“That’s right.”

“Well … it sounds very good. I didn’t realize he was an architect.”

“It’s all perfect,” I said.

After a moment, she said, “I want to say I’m sorry for my outburst.”

“That’s neither here nor there, Libby.”

“And how is Mrs. Reganhart?”

“She’s fine.”

“Do you want Paul to call you about anything?”

“Jaffe will call him.”

“Of course,” Libby said, “we’re very appreciative.”

“Of course,” I said, and hung up.

It was like being under water, though perhaps that was some illusion I brought to the place, something to do with my sense that day of power and circumstance. At any rate, the corridors arched over, containing our movements, and the oblongs of light which gave a shape, an edge, to the darkness could have been glass-bottomed boats looking in on us; not even the noises were above-ground sounds. Everything — footfalls, laughter, parental reprimands — seemed to pulsate toward one vertically and then break under and over. Mark kept leaning across the railing and rapping on the windows of the tanks to get the attention of the fish. A guard finally told him to cut it out. “You get an angel fish excited,” the guard advised me, since it was I who would have to fork over the cash, “he’ll knock his head against the wall and kill himself.” “I’m sorry,” I said, and we walked on, up one side, past the long metallic fish of the Great Lakes, and down the other, past their rainbowed cousins of the Amazon and Nile. Long-legged Cynthia, a little Egyptian herself in an orange chemise dress and a purple pullover, seemed to pick up grace from watching the patient flutterings of the fins and the rippling gills of the baby shark, as he slid one way and then the other in his green cage.

“They eat people,” Cynthia informed her brother, and then she did something on her toes that she had learned in her ballet class, and coasted on.

It was a simple enough sentence she had uttered, but I don’t think the remark sank in. Mark ran off across the marble floor and disappeared around the corner; we came on him later in front of the sea horse, which he thought was a toy. I was the most permissive of adults, and followed where they led; and though other families arrived and departed, we stayed, for the mother and the father of my companions — the two unruly children, screaming and skipping up and down the echoing halls — were home having a long talk, the outcome of which none of us yet knew. Finally, tired out, I sat down on a bench in front of the hawksbill turtle, a bundle of coats and hats and scarves in my lap. The hawknose dipped and the ancient repulsive skin of the turtle’s neck flashed by, and then the armored bottom went sailing past the window. He receded into the murky waters at the far reaches of the tank, and Markie settled down beside me and promptly fell asleep, his head on my arm. Cynthia approached and asked, so politely, if she could take off her shoes.

“They’re very nice shoes,” I said.

“They’re Indian girls’ shoes from Arizona,” she said.

“Are they too tight?”

“No, they’re perfect.” Nevertheless, one beaded shoe dangled from either hand.

“Why don’t you sit down and rest?” I asked. “The floor is a little cold.”

“Thank you.” She seated herself not beside Markie, but me.

“They are a little tight,” she admitted. “That’s the way the Indian children like them.”

“They’re very colorful and pretty,” I said.

“My father brought them.”

“Did he bring you the dress too?”

“And the sweater. They’re from June.”

“I see.”

“Do you know who June is?” she asked.

“I suppose she’s his new wife, who he’s going to marry.”

“She’s very pretty,” Cynthia said.

“Did you see a picture?”

“In an evening gown.”

“Did Mark?” I asked.

“Mark doesn’t understand everything,” she said. “I think we might get to live in New York,” she told me.

“Your daddy said so?”

“He asked me if I wanted to.”

“I see,” I said.

Cynthia pulled one foot up on the bench and began to knead her big toe. “I suppose my parents are having a talk about us,” she said.

“I suppose they are.”

“I’m not sure Markie wants to go live in New York.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think he knows my father very well. My father has a new mustache.”

“Doesn’t Mark like the mustache?”

“I don’t think he’s used to it.”

“I’ll bet if you lived with him he’d probably get used to it.”

She considered that. “He didn’t used to have one.”

“Well,” I said after a moment, “people change and I guess we finally do get used to it.”

“But he wouldn’t be home with us, you see,” Cynthia said. “He works.”

“All fathers work,” I said. “Most, anyway. My father works.”

Her next question had a fervent, open inquisitiveness about it, and it connected in my mind with that nearly tender glance she had given me in the car, and the fact that she had chosen now to sit down beside me. On this of all days I had stopped being only her mother’s property. “Is he a painter?” she asked me.

“He’s a dentist.”

“Ucch,” said Cynthia.

“He doesn’t hurt though,” I said. “He’s a painless dentist.”

For the first time in our short and disheartening acquaintanceship she tried to please me. “Boy, I’d like him to be my dentist.”

“He lives in New York too.”

What she said then might at first appear to have emerged more appropriately from the mouth of her brother; but the words belonged to Cynthia really, for she was the metaphysical one. “Is he any relation to me?” she asked.

I told her that he wasn’t. We took our eyes off one another then and turned them upon that giant turtle, whose spinnings, past our gaze and back, over and over and over (endlessly, even after closing time, when no one was there), seemed nature’s inspiration for the self’s most urgent dreams. Chasing nothing, pursued by nothing, powerless to discontinue his own frantic rounds. The sight of him produced in me the kind of nervousness that makes some people want to scream and others get up and walk away as fast as they can.

Cynthia said, “Are you?”

“What?”

“Related to me.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m your friend.”

“I don’t think I like my father’s mustache,” she told me, and stood up and walked in her white anklets over to the turtle’s tank. When she came back, I asked her to mind Mark, and I walked down the long corridor and found a phone booth by the tropical fish.

All Martha said was, “You can all come home now,” and so we three left the Aquarium and came out, above water, into the silver light of that February afternoon, with downtown Chicago, the skyline to our right, looking as eternal as a city can.

In her purple suit — worn, I began to feel, only for historic occasions — and with her hair coiled up on her head, and sporting very high-heeled shoes, Martha looked solid and monumental, the type of girl who occasionally wins a beauty contest by sheer physical intimidation of the judges. Her face was lined again, as it was not in the morning but had been the night before. At the sight of the three of us, however, her manner was cheery and untrammeled. “Hi. How were the fish? Did anybody fall in?”

“Where is he?” Mark asked.

“Who?”

The boy shrugged. “Him.”

“He went back to his hotel,” Martha told him.

“I want milk and chocolate grahams,” Mark said.

“It’s in the kitchen for you, all ready. Don’t spill it on your nice suit, Markie. Hi, Cynthia, you want some milk?”

In the car, driving back from the Aquarium, I had been afraid I might say the wrong words to Cynthia and turn her back into herself. But she had managed the turning on her own. “I don’t want those lousy chocolate grahams, I’ll tell you that. Why can’t we ever have regular grahams?”

“Chocolate grahams,” I said, “are supposed to be extra special.” But the magic clearly had gone out of me, and I was left with only the stickiness of the remark and the vision of Cynthia, swishing her coat back over one shoulder and moving off into the kitchen with an unambiguous display of feeling. From the other room we could already hear her brother exhaling over his milk.

“How were the fish?” asked Martha, turning her back on the latest installment in The Plight of Cynthia Reganhart.

“I think they liked it.”

Martha sat down on the couch and crossed her legs, so that what light filtered in through the windows caught the sheen along the meaty side of her stockings. After carefully lighting a cigarette she removed a speck of tobacco from her tongue, a gesture dense, it turned out, with sexuality. She seemed to have worked up a decided air about herself. Perhaps it was only that I had grown so used to seeing her in uniforms, slacks, slips, and nightgowns, that I was confusing the elegance of her costume with some heightened emotional condition; yet cross-legged, expelling smoke, sipping brandy from one of the two glasses that had been set on the floor, she seemed to be wilfully charging the place with protestations of her womanliness.

Even when she spoke, it was like one who has decided to give expression to a part of his character to which others, he feels, have not attended sufficiently in the past. The tone was artificial and vaguely defiant. “Would you like some brandy?” she asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Do you mind if I …?”

“Of course not.”

But then Cynthia and Mark were at it in the kitchen.

“Grahams!”

“Chocolate grahams!”

“Grahams!”

“Stop it!” Martha shouted, and the bubble in which she had been trying to sit and sip her brandy instantly burst. “Please stop it,” she cried, “the two of you! Can’t you treat each other like a brother and sister!”

“He stinks,” Cynthia shouted back, and the door slammed to her bedroom. In the silence that followed, I realized that the radio that was usually in the kitchen was behind me somewhere in the living room, and that it was softly playing. It was Saturday; in New York they were performing The Magic Flute. Dick Reganhart and his former wife — so as to lay the ground rules of their meeting, give it the dignity of their years — had been drinking brandy and listening to the opera.

During all those years that Martha had been living her life in Oregon, I had been in New York living mine … This observation was pedestrian enough, but the emotion that accompanied had considerable force. So did the recollection of the long-gone Saturdays in my life, of my mother lying on the sofa, listening to the music, and of me stretched out on the rug doing my schoolwork, and at the window, his hair the color of the sunless eastern sky, my father looking down at Central Park, which was locked in the ferocity of one New York season, or turning blade by blade into another. We had had what Mrs. Baker would call a nice fine little family, and whatever my parents’ aches and pains, there had nevertheless been a comforting net about the three of us, and the permanence of its disappearance suddenly set loose in me a longing that rose and rose, until my hand, as though afloat on the floodlike emotion, moved up and onto Martha’s breast. But the fact that at this moment it was I who was seeking support in her flesh, was surely nothing I could expect her to appreciate.

The arc of her throat was all I saw move. “He’s taking them,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Then let’s get out.” She crushed her cigarette in the ash tray; she jumped up; she smoothed her skirt; she was trying to grin; perhaps without even being aware of it, she was clapping her palms together. “Well, let’s get out. Let’s go. Fresh air. I’ll get my coat.”

She went out of the room to the telephone. “You kids go down to Barbie’s,” I heard her say after hanging up. “Just go right down the back stairs. We’ll be home in a little while.”

“Where you going?”

“Cynthia, you hold Markie’s hand going down the stairs. Come on, Barbie’s waiting for you.”

“Mother—”

“Cynthia, let’s talk later. Gabe’s going to take your mother for a walk.”

We walked in the only direction one can walk for the sake of pleasure or diversion or speculation in Chicago — toward the lake. The wind came straight into our faces, and the four-o’clock sun could barely illuminate the circle of sky around it, let alone make itself felt against our backs. We passed under the I.C. tracks and walked beyond the hotels and tennis courts and through the underpass beneath the drive. Then, still arm in arm and silent, we saw the water, which before our eyes went a color just this side of black, as though a heavy tarpaulin had been dropped over it. Private and alone, in the midst of the elements, we watched the gyrating gulls.

“There’s a ship out there,” Martha said.

“Where?”

“Way out — over by Michigan.”

“Yes,” I said, not seeing it.

“I suppose,” she said, “I could go to Europe now, or stay out all night.”

“If you wanted to.”

“He’s supposed to be changed, Gabe. He’s got this big Italian mustache.”

“So Cynthia said.”

“How does she like it?”

“I think she likes it,” I said.

“Oh sure, he’s a regular image for a growing child. That’s the pitch. That he’s not the same old Dick. That’s supposed somehow to make me heartbroken and nostalgic for all the times I got slugged.”

I did not ask, and Martha did not say, whether the pitch was simply a pitch.

“I don’t think I’ll tell the kids for a few days. All right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Maybe I can lead into it. Maybe we can lead into it.”

What could I do? Offer to marry her again? For Martha, had that ever been the issue? “I’ll do whatever I can,” I said.

“What he had the gall to say was that it would be a favor to all of us to get the kids out of this environment. I don’t know whether he meant me or the paint flaking off the ceiling. He’s gotten very fancy. You know, he came in sort of shooting his cuffs, flashing the links, and so on. And the girl looks very upper-class Bryn Mawr and horsey. Rich. Wallet-sized photos by Bachrach. He suggested that money was good for children.”

“He said that?”

“He’s a very straightforward fellow. I was going to ask if he’d always known it or if his friends had been keeping it a secret from him for four years.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t that kind of meeting. I even thought he was going to try to kiss me once or maybe feel me up.”

“He didn’t.”

“He didn’t.”

“Did you want him to?”

“He made me very nervous. I was haughty and scared him.”

“So it wasn’t a mess?”

“Quite clean. He doesn’t even curse any more.”

“No fighting, then? No threats?”

She closed her eyes, making her admission. “What was there to fight about?”

At bedtime, Mark offered his lips as usual, and Cynthia as usual turned her cheek, but when my mouth came down to it she whispered some words that I could not understand. Because Martha was only a foot behind me, I did not ask the child to repeat whatever it was she had said. Later we went to bed ourselves, and while we each waited patiently for sleep to put an end to the day, Martha finally asked me how it had gone with Theresa Haug.

7

In the middle of March they left us. It had been possible during the week before to arouse Markie’s interest and keep it pumped up with exotica about the Empire State Building and Coney Island, plus occasional tales from me entitled “A Manhattan Boyhood.” “Gabe was a little boy in New York,” says Martha, and “Oh yes,” I say, “we went on the subway and we went—”

Cynthia was not so easy to manipulate, being an ace practitioner of the art herself. She began to tease. “I’ll bet there aren’t as many colored kids in my class,” she said. In a letter on blue vellum her new stepmother had informed her that she had been accepted as a student at a private school on West Eleventh Street. She would not even lose a term. “Private school is better anyway,” Cynthia said.

“Private schools are very good,” Martha said.

“Which kind did you go to?”

It was not the first time that we heard the question. Martha did not even look up from the bed upon which she was separating those items of Markie’s wardrobe that were in need of repair. “I couldn’t afford to go to school. I delivered newspapers.”

Cynthia tilted her nose and left the room; she was back minutes later, however, and addressed a statement to the woman who bore her as though that lady were Zephyr himself. “I’ll bet it’s not so damn windy in New York,” she said.

“I’ll bet it’s not,” Martha said. “Don’t say damn.”

“You do.”

“I’m an adult—”

“I’m an adult, you’re a child,” Cynthia mimicked, and moved off with a swift swooping grace, a submarine speeding home for more torpedoes.

Martha tossed a pair of holey socks into the wastebasket at her feet. “Isn’t she the brainy little saboteur,” she said, a judgment, not a question, and another pair of socks followed the first.

“What’s private school?” asked Mark, one eye on the diminishing pile of clothes.

“Private school is what you pay for — oh, Markie, come here, why do you wear this stuff when it’s ripped? Why do you put on this underwear if it’s ripped in the back?”

“Who?”

“You. Your underpants are ripped. Why didn’t you say something? Do you want to show up at your father’s with ripped underwear?”

The child, bewildered, slid his hand down the back of his trousers.

“And take your hand out of there,” said Martha, bone weary.

Markie began to bawl. “Oh baby, it’s Mommy’s fault,” Martha said, dropping a handful of shorts, “it’s my fault, I’m a slob and oh Markie—” She smothered him with kisses while he beat on her face with his hands. “Oh it’s not your fault it’s ripped, baby, it’s mine oh hell—”

Day after day tempers were short, tears frequent, and apologies effusive and misdirected. But finally we were driving to the airport.

“I sit in front with Mommy and Gabe,” Mark said.

“I sit in front,” Cynthia said — an afterthought.

“Me,” the boy said.

“Look, I don’t like three in front,” I said. Martha said nothing at all; she had already slid in beside the driver’s seat.

“I’d get to sit in front anyway,” Cynthia said, “because I’m older.”

“I’m older,” Mark said.

“You’re stupid,” his sister told him.

“Stop it, will you?” I said. “Calm down, both of you.”

We proceeded down Fifty-fifth Street in silence, until overhead we could hear the planes circling to land.

“We’re almost there and I never sat in front yet,” Cynthia said. “Just little stinky Markie.”

Martha only looked at the license plate of the car in front of us. “Please, Cynthia,” I said. “Let’s try to be generous to each other.”

“Oh sure,” she said.

Martha swung around to the back, pointing a finger. “We can’t all sit in front, can we? Just stop it.”

The only comment was Markie’s. “Ha ha,” he said.

At the airport parking lot, I carried three of the suitcases; Martha, hanging a few steps behind, carried the fourth.

Inside the terminal, Cynthia displayed a considerable interest in the departure proceedings. She watched the scales to see how much each piece of luggage weighed, and she made sure that the proper tags were tied to the handles. As the suitcases joggled down the moving platform, she followed them with her eyes until they were out of sight. Then she inquired of the ticket girl if there were toilets and ice water on the plane.

“Is there someone there to pick them up?” asked the girl behind the counter.

“My father,” Cynthia said.

The girl behind the counter smiled her girl-behind-the-counter smile. “All right then,” she said, and told us which gate the plane would leave from.

In the time that remained I took Mark to the terminal bathroom, where, turning to ask me, “Hey, who owns us?” he managed to pee all over my cuff. When we came out Martha and Cynthia were standing at the newspaper stand, flipping through magazines. The angle of their heads, the way they supported themselves on their legs and moved their arms, would have indicated to anybody that they were mother and daughter. Neither of them was reading or even looking at the pictures. As I approached, Cynthia reached into her little red purse and asked the newsdealer for a copy of Life. She paid for it with a handful of pennies of her own, and it was then that I saw Martha’s composure weaken.

“I have to sit over the wing,” Cynthia told me as we started down the corridor to the departure gate. “I get sick any place else.”

“I thought you never flew before.”

“I know I’ll get sick any place else,” she said, and she ran ahead of us, catching up to her brother, who was skipping down to the gate, handsome in his new hat, coat, and suit sent from Lord & Taylor’s in New York.

On the plane I had to ask several people if they would move so that Cynthia would have a place over the wing. Markie slid in beside her and immediately grabbed all the paraphernalia in the pocket before him; most of it fell to the floor. He waved the paper bag up toward Martha.

“A bag,” he said.

Cynthia took it from his hand and returned it to the slot. A blond stewardess — running, it appeared, for number-one charmer of the airways — gave us a look at all her teeth. “Everything hunky-dory up here?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“I’m afraid you folks will have to be going now,” she said.

But at this point Martha pushed past her — she had been standing aside till then, letting me do what had to be done. When she bent down across the children the jacket of her suit hiked up, showing where her slip was weakening at the seam. She had put on six or seven pounds in the last month; she was big, and not very pretty. “Goodbye, babies. Now, you write letters, hear? You’ve got the stamps in your suitcase and all the envelopes are addressed. You just write the letters, all right? And take care of your brother, Cyn. You listen to Cynthia, Mark. Be nice to each other, all right?”

“We’re nice to each other,” Cynthia insisted.

“I know,” Martha said, kissing them both. She turned, and without even a glance at me, left the plane.

I leaned down one last time, and Cynthia asked if I was going to marry Martha.

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’m glad we two became friends, Cynthia.”

She toughened instantly. “I’m always friends.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye, Mark. Be a good boy. Send me a card from the Statue of Liberty.”

Some connection was made. “Coney Island!” Markie shouted, and I started down the aisle of the plane. The blond stewardess said to me, “We’ll take extra good care of them, you bet.”

Minutes later we watched the plane taxi up the field, and then it was aloft, without incident. Martha said that she would just as soon not go right back to the apartment, and so we took a long ride that afternoon, all the way out to Evanston to look at the big trees and the pretty houses. Finally it was dark and we had to go home.