Mary and O’Neil

LAST OF THE LEAVES

November 1979

ARTHUR IN DARKNESS -drifting, drifting-the planet spinning toward dawn: he awakens in gray November daybreak to the sounds of running water and a great arm brushing the side of his house. The wind, he thinks, the wind; the end of autumn, the last of the leaves pulled away. The running water, he understands, was never real. He lies in the dark of the bedroom he shares with his wife, waiting for the dream to fade-a dream in which, together, they sail over a cliff into blackness. What else? A sense of water below, a lake or stream, Miriam’s hand in his, of everything loosed from the earth; a feeling like accomplishment, shapes fitting together with mathematical precision, all the equations of the heavens ringing. A dream of final happiness, in which they, Arthur and Miriam, together, at the last, die.

Arthur rises, takes a wool sweater from the chair by his bed, pushes his feet into the warm pockets of his slippers. He draws the sweater over his head, his twisted pajama top; he puts on his glasses and pauses, letting his eyes, cakey with sleep, adjust. In the feeble, trembling light (The moon? A streetlamp? The day is hours off), he discerns the form of his wife, a crescent-shaped ridge beneath the blankets, and knows her face and body are turned away from him, toward the window, open two inches to admit a trail of cold night air. How is it possible he knows he is going to die? And that the thought does not grieve him? But the feeling, he believes, is just a tattered remnant of his dream, still near to him in the dark and cold of the predawn room, Arthur still, after all, in his pajamas; by breakfast it will recede, by lunchtime it will vanish altogether, dissolving into the day like a drop of iodine in water. Is it possible he is still asleep? And Arthur realizes this is probably true; he is fast asleep, standing in the icy bedroom, knees locked, his chin lolled forward into the downy fan of hair on his chest; he is, in fact, about to snore.

… To snore! And with this his head snaps to attention, his eyes fly open; he is, at last and truly, awake, dropped as if from a great height to land, perfectly uninjured, here. The living, breathing Arthur. But to be fifty-six years old, and dream of death, and not be afraid; this thought has somehow survived the journey into Arthur’s encroaching day, hardening to a kernel of certainty in his heart. He shakes his head at the oddness of this fact, then at the coldness of the room, Christ Almighty; even in the dark Arthur can see his breath billowing before him like a cloud of crystals. Below the blue bulk of their bedding his wife adjusts herself, pulling the blankets tighter, as if to meet his thought; a hump disengages itself from the small of her back, travels the width of the mattress to Arthur’s side, and vanishes with the sound of four paws striking the wide-plank floor. A flash of blond tail: the cat, Nestor, awakened from its spot between them, darts through the bedskirts and is gone. Enough, Arthur thinks; onward. He closes the window-a sudden silence, the wind sealed away from him-and departs the bedroom, shutting the door with a muffled snap. Behind it his wife will sleep for hours.

Downstairs, his mind on nothing, Arthur fills a carafe with water from the kitchen sink, pours it into the coffeemaker, scoops the fragrant dirt of ground beans into the paper filter, and turns on the machine; he sits at the table and waits. Dear God, he thinks, thank you for this day, this cup of coffee (not long now; the machine, sighing good-naturedly to life, exhales a plume of steam and releases a ricocheting stream into the pot), and while we’re at it, God, thank you for the beauty of this time of year, the leaves on the trees by the river where I walked yesterday, thank you for the sky and earth, which you, I guess, in your wisdom, will have to cover with snow for a while, so we don’t forget who’s boss. I like the winter fine, but it would be nice if it wasn’t a bad one. This is just a suggestion. Amen.

Arthur opens his eyes; a pale light has begun to gather outside, deepening his view of the sloping yard and the tangle of woods beyond. He pours the coffee, spoons in sugar, softens its color with a dollop of milk; he stands at the counter and drinks. Not a bad one, please.

Today is the day they will drive six hours north to see their son, a sophomore in college, lately and totally (or so he says, his voice on the phone as bright as a cork shot from a bottle: totally, Pop) in love. Arthur doesn’t doubt this is the case, and why should he? What the hell? Why not be in love? He sits at the kitchen table, dawn creeping up to his house; he thinks of the long day and the drive through mountains ahead of him, the pleasure he will feel when, his back and eyes sore from hours on the road, he pulls into the dormitory lot and his boy, long legged and smiling and smart, bounds down the stairs to greet them. In the foyer with its bulletin boards and scuffed linoleum and pay phone, the young lady watches them through the dirty glass. Susan? Suzie? Arthur reviews the details. Parents from Boston, JV field hockey first string (again the memory of his son’s voice, brightly laughing: But her ankles aren’t thick, the way they get, you know, Pop?); an English class they took together, Shakespeare or Shelley or Pope, and the way she read a certain poem in class, the thrilling confidence in her voice cementing the erotic bargain between them. (I mean, she looked right at me, Pop, the whole time, I think she had the thing memorized; you should have seen it, the whole class knew!) And Arthur knows what his son is saying to him: Here I am. Look. And Arthur does: Susan or Suzie (Sarah?), fresh from her triumphs of love and smarts in the marbled halls of academe, banging the hard rubber ball downfield on the bluest blue New Hampshire autumn day.

Sounds above: Arthur hears the bedroom door open, his wife’s slippered trudge down the carpeted hall, the mellow groan of the pipes as she fills the basin with water to wash. Arthur pours himself a second cup of coffee and fills a mug for Miriam-extra sugar, no milk-positioning it on the table by the back kitchen stairs. Outside the sky has turned a washed-out gray, like old plastic; a disappointment. For a while Arthur sits at the table and watches the sky, asking it to do better.

Miriam enters, wrapped in her pale-blue robe, and takes the coffee almost without looking, a seamless transaction that always pleases him. She sips, pauses, and sniffs at the mug.

“This is sort of old.”

“I’ve been up awhile,” Arthur says. “I’ll make a fresh pot if you want.”

“No, I’ll do it.” But she doesn’t; she takes a place at the table across from him. Her face is scrubbed, her combed hair pulled back from her face; she does not dye it, allowing the gray to come on without fuss, nor perm it, the way so many women they know have done. Arthur lets his eyes rest there, in the whiteness of the part of her hair, thinking of his dream, a vague disturbance that no longer creates in him any particular emotion, as the widest rings on pond water will lap the shore without effect. (Something about a lake? He no longer recalls.) She holds the cup of old coffee with both hands, like a hot stone to warm them, resting there on the table.

“What time is it?” She yawns. “Is it six-thirty?”

Arthur nods. “I thought we should get an early start. We can stop for lunch at that place in Northampton.”

“Not there.” She shakes her head. “Do you remember the last time? Please. Let’s stop someplace else.”

Arthur shrugs; he doesn’t remember what was wrong with the restaurant. “I thought it was all right,” he says. “We can try that place across the street. Or we can pack a lunch.”

Miriam rises, dumps her mug of coffee down the sink, and begins to make the pot she has promised herself. Arthur watches his wife, full of a great, sad love for her; he knows this day will be hard. Not the drive, which they have made many times; not seeing O’Neil, their son. Arthur understands it is the girl she dreads. She tries to like the girls he likes, but it is always difficult for her.

“We have to be nice, you know.”

Miriam stops rinsing the pot. “Quit reading my mind.”

“Okay. But we do.” Arthur rises and goes to where she is standing, her hands resting on the edge of the sink. He wraps his arms around her slender waist and smells the beginnings of her tears-a sweet, phosphorescent odor, like melting beeswax.

“It’s stupid, I know.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid at all. Why is it stupid?”

“I feel like someone in a play,” she says. “You know, the mother? That old bitch, can’t let go, nobody’s good enough for her boy.”

“And you’re right. Nobody is. And you’re not like that at all.”

A heavy sigh. Still, Arthur holds on.

“She’s just somebody he met in class. We’ve been through this-how many times?”

“They’re probably sleeping together.”

Arthur nods. “Probably.”

“God, listen to me.” She shakes her head and resumes cleaning the pot. “You probably think it’s just great.”

Arthur doesn’t answer. The cat comes nosing into the kitchen and coils first around Arthur’s feet and then around Miriam’s, asking to be let out.

“That goddamned cat,” Arthur says. He kisses Miriam’s neck, still warm with sleep and the sheets of their bed. “You know, I had the strangest dream,” he says suddenly.

Still facing away, Miriam tips her head against his. “I think I did too. So. Tell me about yours.”

Arthur lets his eyes fall closed; in this interior darkness, his wife’s body pressed against his, her hips and his hips meeting-always the old rhythm implied, the metronome of marriage-he imagines he is asleep and tries to return to his dream, following it down a long hallway, a trick he has used before.

“I’m not sure,” he says after a moment. “I’ve already forgotten.”

“Was it a bad dream?” She is stroking his hair. “I heard you muttering.”

“I don’t know.” Arthur draws air into his chest. “Some of it.”

“What else?”

Arthur thinks. It is her voice he is following now; below him, without warning, he suddenly feels the tug of blackness, a yawning chasm as vast as a stadium. And something else: the smell of baking bread. He has never had a dream like this before, of this he is certain. The memory of it makes him feel strangely happy. He opens his eyes.

“I think you were in it.” He shrugs at nothing; already the information is gone, as is his memory that she, too, has dreamt, and meant to tell him what. “I think you saved me from something, as usual. So it was a good dream.”

She turns to face him then; her eyes still moist, she kisses him quickly and smiles. Up close he sees that her face is tired, and newly thin: his fault. Regret slices through him, and then, filling its wake, a pale and luminous awe. How many times has she performed this duty? He searches her gray eyes with his own. How many times has she been awakened from a sound slumber by a distant cry and made her fumbling way down a darkened hall, to wrap herself around a son or daughter whose arms flailed at nothing, saying, No, no, there’s nothing to fear, none of it was real? He asks this, and for an instant he imagines that the children are asleep upstairs; but of course this is an illusion, a trick of time, like the pea that darts from shell to shell unseen, and so is in both places at once and also neither. No: it is morning in their kitchen, the children are grown and gone, O’Neil at college waiting for their visit, his sister, Kay-moody, mysterious Kay-married now and living her life in New Haven. The passage of years is amazing, a thing of wonder. He stands before it as, in the past, he stood outside the children’s doors, listening to Miriam deliver the comforts he could not: a glass of water, a fresh blanket, Miriam holding the child’s hand in hers to say, squeezing, See? This is real. How many times? A thousand? A thousand thousand? Count the stars in the heavens, Arthur thinks, and you will know that number.

“You’re welcome,” she tells him.

And their day begins.

Each of them has a secret. Here is Arthur’s:

His secret is a letter, which he has delayed writing until this morning, at the office where he works-a letter he will never send. It is a letter to a woman not his wife.

Dear Dora, he writes.

How did it come about? Even Arthur doesn’t know; could not say, precisely, how it is that on this morning in November he, Arthur, age fifty-six, a devoted married man for twenty-nine years, has fallen in love (is he? in love?) with Dora Auclaire. But he has; he does. Confusingly, he loves his wife no less because of it; he dares to think, knowing it to be a kind of arrogance-something terribly, destructively male-that he loves her even more. To think of Miriam is to think of himself, the span of his life and his children’s lives, and to know what is meant by a common destiny. He is human, and therefore weak, but his weakness is for Miriam. He cannot look at her and not feel love, or the fear that comes with love: that someday one of them will be alone.

But Dora Auclaire: he has known her-how long? Ten years? Fifteen? Did they know one another when their children were small? Arthur allows himself the pleasure of thinking of her, and what she might be doing now, at ten-thirty in the morning on a Friday in fall at the busy clinic where she sees her patients: the young girls in trouble, the old men wheezing from years of smoking, the tiny babies who have cried, mysteriously, through the night. He sees her, moving from room to room-neither gliding nor marching, her stride merely purposeful-wearing her clean white coat with jeans and a sweater beneath (not much jewelry; earrings, perhaps, to complement her heart-shaped face, and a single silver chain), touching, advising, jotting notes on a chart in her fine, square print, before excusing herself to telephone the hospital in Cooperstown to reserve a bed for the teenage boy in the examining room whose two-day stomachache is almost certainly not caused by drugs, as his mother claims, but acute appendicitis. Arthur, at his desk four blocks away, sees it all. (And before he knows it, there is Miriam too: plunking a due-date card into the stamper at the checkout desk, refiling spools of shiny microfilm, pushing a cart of books, heavy with facticity, through the quiet, dusty aisles.) She is a lonely, spirited woman in her mid-forties, a physician and a widow with two young sons-a woman who could chop a cord of wood one minute and swab a toddler’s throat the next-and Arthur loves her. He loves her strong, thin hands, and her gleaming stethoscope, and her sadness, which she does not wear around her like a shawl-some garment of mourning-but inside, in a deep place he cannot see but feels: the same grief that he would carry if Miriam were gone. Her husband, Sam, was a carpenter who restored old houses, and it was an old house that killed him; six years ago, on a bright morning in May (Arthur remembers reading of it in the papers), he stepped from the window of a fourth-story cupola of a falling-down Queen Anne on Devereaux Street, placed his weight on a ledge that turned out to be rotten with moisture, and down he went in a rattling rain of tools and equipment, forty feet to the packed-dirt yard.

The town of Glenn’s Mills, New York-small, nondescript, economically marginal except for the retired cardiologists and downstate corporate attorneys who buy up and rehab the old houses-rests at the bend of a river once so polluted with tannery acids it was given the name Vinegar Creek. This is the town where Arthur has made his whole life. His law firm, a one-man outfit on the town’s ten-block main street-trusts, wills, real estate, the occasional divorce-was his father’s before it was his, and though in school Arthur had thought first that he’d like to be an engineer, and then an architect, and finally a big-city lawyer, he has no regrets about living a life that was, in the end, simply handed to him: The spring of Arthur’s last year at NYU law his father, a two-pack-a-day Lucky Strike smoker, entered his office, removed his hat and coat and scarf, lit his first cigarette of the morning at his desk, rubbed his rheumatic hip once in the ice-cold room, and suffered a stroke of such lethal power that it succeeded in rearranging all the details of his son’s world in one painless instant. By the end of the week twenty-six-year-old Arthur was meeting with his father’s clients and scraping the mud from their boots off the carpet and finding that he liked it, all of it; the thousand choices of his life suddenly included the choice not to choose, and within a month he had canceled his plans to clerk for a federal circuit judge in Manhattan and was studying like mad for the bar. He telephoned the girl he’d been dating in New York-Miriam, finishing up her master’s in library science at NYU-and invited her north for a visit from which she would return for only one semester to complete her degree; she found a job in the county library, shelving books and reading to children; within a year they married. If asked, Arthur would say he didn’t so much begin his life as find it, like a wallet or a ring of keys he’d merely mislaid.

Now, for the first time in thirty years in this quiet town of trees and houses and shops-“Glenn’s Mills, New York, Gateway to the Hudson-Mohawk Valley Region”; a town where the theft of garden tools from an unlocked shed makes the papers; where the same man who cuts your hair on Tuesday will run on Wednesday to extinguish the flames of your burning house; where the shopkeeper who catches your child pocketing a package of baseball cards will close up the store and drive the boy home (O’Neil, ten years old, claimed to have done it on a dare)-Arthur has felt this life, this pattern of meaning with its exchanges of goods and services and affections, disturbed, even endangered-all because he has fallen in love with Dora Auclaire. For it is her loneliness he loves, above everything else about her; when he sees her on the street or at a party, or he finds himself, on the second Tuesday of each month, sitting across from her in the small classroom at the high school where their novel-reading group meets, and listens to her voice-calm, precise, ironic-advancing some opinion, inevitably superior to his own, about The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Crime and Punishment or A Confederacy of Dunces (and Arthur must confess: he almost never finishes these books, which tire and oppress him; he keeps going only to see her), it is her loneliness that he hears, and it is her loneliness that moves him to love her. If he found her simply pretty or clever or sexy or generous to children, Arthur would know what to do: nothing. Do nothing, and let the sensation fade over time, like the buoyant happiness that lifts his heart after certain movies, or the delicious nostalgia he feels each November when the first snow falls, evening comes on, and he walks home through early darkness and a world drenched in the dreamy half-reality of new snow. (And wasn’t there a dream he had this morning, something about flying, flying over water?) But he can’t do nothing. The core of her life is loss-a forty-foot plunge on a damp morning in May-and somehow Arthur has zeroed in on that core, and trapped himself there.

The office is quiet; above the door to the waiting room-a dim, shabby space with battered file cabinets, an old plaid sofa, a coffee table dressed with stacks of wrinkled magazines, and the desk where his secretary sits when he hasn’t given her the day off, as he has today-the clock reads ten forty-eight. He has canceled his appointments, meaning to use this wedge of time between finishing his work and leaving for New Hampshire (already he is running late; he should be out the door at eleven, to pick up their suitcases and feed the cat and hustle to the library to get Miriam, all before noon) to solve the problem of Dora Auclaire. But what is the problem, exactly? Isn’t it true that he, Arthur, has made no serious mistakes, committed no unpardonable sins against his marriage? He looks at the page, the words he has written: Dear Dora. It is written on a yellow legal pad; its length seems suddenly absurd. How will he fill such a thing? He means to record what he feels, to give it shape, to make sense of it by setting it in words. Instead, he rips the paper from the pad, wads it in his fist, tosses it in the wastebasket behind his desk (a moment’s worry-should he leave it there? But it says nothing, only a name…), and begins again:

Dear Dora.

The problem is that there is nothing to say, no story to tell and therefore finish; that nothing has, in fact, happened between them at all. And yet: like every secret Arthur’s has a history, an arc of events. Pressed, he would trace this awkward, silent moment at his desk to an afternoon a little over eight months ago, when Dora came to see him in his office. He had done some work for the clinic before-a zoning variance for an addition, permits to build it, the odd dispute with a patient over billing-so when she entered, shaking her umbrella, and told him the matter at hand was personal, he was surprised, and interested; he wondered what it could be. There was some money, she explained, that she’d inherited from an aunt-not much, just $60,000-that she wanted to put away for the boys. Could he draw up some kind of… well. What did one call it? A trust? She said the word as if she’d only just learned it, though of course she knew just what she was asking. There were beads of rain in her hair, which she wore short, in neat layers, making a dark frame around her face. She liked the sound of it, she said, smiling at him: a trust.

He offered her a seat and set to work. And how was she? And the boys? (He remembered two: Josh, the younger but a strong kid like his father; his older brother, Leo, the more delicate, a boy who liked to read and taught swimming at the Y.) He drew up the papers at his desk. It was easy work, pure boilerplate, though just the kind of work he liked-putting money aside for children. Dora named her brother, a surgeon in San Francisco, as one trustee, herself as the other; she had already visited her broker and invested the money in a sensible mixture of zero-coupon bonds and blue-chip stocks. Her will was up to date, she thought, she’d taken care of that right after Sam had died-she said this last phrase quickly, almost as one word-though if it was not too much trouble would Arthur mind having a look at it? A thick envelope, full of folded paper: she had brought it in her bag.

And so on, through that afternoon and part of another, when the papers were ready to sign. He would call her, he said, when the documents came back from the brother in California; he could mail her a copy, or else she could come to pick it up, and of course he would keep one in his office, on file, her file. Fine, she said. Fine.

They looked at one another. Their time together was through. It’s funny, she said then, buttoning her coat-and was she blushing? And was he?-it’s funny how you can enjoy doing something like this, something so mundane, with someone whom you like. Did he know that sometimes-well, once or twice-she had thought that the two of them should have lunch? She liked what he’d said in reading group about that book-Mrs. Dalloway, that was it-about how every character in the story was alone, and either succeeded at it or failed. She’d thought it right then; the two of them could be friends, real friends who did things together. But how could he have known? She’d only just told him, of course.

Which was how it happened, though not then. He showed her to the office door-for a moment it had seemed possible they would kiss right there, an image so compelling, so completely disorienting, that Arthur quickly drove it from his mind-and a week later he telephoned her to tell her that the signed copies had been returned, and they agreed to meet for the lunch she had promised him, so that he could give them to her. The week of rain had become a week of snow, temperatures falling back into the teens though it was nearly April, and Arthur hurried the six blocks to the restaurant, wondering what he was doing. Was he doing anything at all? But when he arrived and saw Dora sitting at a booth in back, not at one of the open tables in the middle of the room, he knew. Without breaking his stride he stepped to the booth and slid himself into the narrow space across from her; he saw she was drinking tea. Her overcoat, heavy green wool with shawl lapels, lay over her shoulders. Her smile was almost a laugh. Was he late? he asked. No, no, she said, shaking her head. The window by their table was a wall of steam; someone, a child perhaps, had written something in the steam, fat letters now faded. She blew over her tea. The snow had kept her patients away for the day, she said. He wasn’t late at all.

The restaurant was shrouded in a heavy white light, and nearly empty. They sat together an hour, talking and eating their lunch of sandwiches and soft drinks while the waitresses, two old women Arthur knew by sight but not by name, sorted steaming silverware and smoked long brown cigarettes at the counter. Arthur knew what was said about small towns, but as a lawyer, he’d found the opposite was true: everyone had something to hide. It was possible in such a place to live a kind of secret life, and if anyone asked, he could always say that he’d done some work for her. He’d been a lawyer long enough to believe that there was nothing simple about the truth, that it came in any number of forms, and this was one. They talked about people they knew, about the patients at her clinic and their sad stories, and about their children, as any two people their age, meeting for a meal, might do. She did not talk about Sam, though in a way she did; so many years, she remarked, looking around, since she had set foot in this place; she was glad to see it had not changed. With her practice and the boys besides, she said, it was all she could do to grab a quick bite at her desk. She gave a little laugh. Time moved quickly, did it not? And yet it sometimes seemed she had been doing things this way forever, pulling her life and her children’s lives like a cart.

Then as the hour drew late, on the verge of their good-byes, Dora reached across the table, found his hand with hers, and gently held it. Just that: Dora held his hand. Arthur felt himself raked, like the surface of a pond. Twenty-nine years, and he hadn’t once done this, held another woman’s hand; and yet people did it all the time, he knew; did it as if it were nothing. Arthur saw that she wore a watch with three gold hearts on either side of the face: one for each boy, and one for Sam. A gift: he knew this without asking. Mother’s Day? An anniversary? It was the kind of thing he might have bought for Miriam; it was merely an accident that he had not. Her hand was warm, and a little damp. She brushed the back of his hand with her thumb, once, and then she let it go.

And yet the moment felt frozen, as if neither of them could leave it, like a room without doors. She pulled her coat around herself a little; her eyes darted to the counter, where the women were smoking and talking (Arthur’s eyes followed; no, they had not seen), and then found Arthur’s again, squinting. “Well.” She tipped one shoulder and smiled uneasily. He realized only then that she hadn’t worn her glasses. It made her eyes seem very large. “Was that, you know, all right?”

He didn’t know, and also did. His mind had filled with a white emptiness, like a field of whirling snow-like forty feet of air. He heard himself say, “Yes.”

When was this? March, a year ago. Arthur, in his office, sips his coffee, now gone cold. At eleven-thirty he will pick Miriam up at the library, and together they will leave for New Hampshire. Through the spring and summer he and Dora continued to meet, at his office or hers, or for lunch, always in plain view and broad daylight, and always under the pretense of work she needed done: a quarrel with the town over parking at the clinic, an old tax matter of amazing density and frivolousness, a meaningless dispute with a neighbor over a drainage easement. How did I get on so long without a lawyer, she said, how did I ever manage without you? One matter would be settled and before the ink was dry she handed him a fresh folder of papers, bringing the two of them together in a continuous flow of trivial tasks like a chain of silk handkerchiefs pulled from a magician’s sleeve. Her pleased face said: See what I’ve come up with? Before this is over, she joked, I’m going to be your best client.

But what was this? And-the real question-why wasn’t he, Arthur-happily married Arthur-troubled by it, or troubled more? In the past he had imagined himself having an affair-everyone did, you couldn’t not think about it-but never like this, this affair that wasn’t, quite. They held hands, not even really holding; she would rub his shoulder when he said he was tired, or touch his cheek with one finger, quickly, when another person might have stopped her hand in the air before his face. Each time they were together it happened, this touching, but only once, and never anything more. Yet it was also true that he had come, in some way, to rely on it; it did something for him that nothing else did. It made him happy, there was that, to be touched by another for no reason. But something else: it was as if, in those instants, he ceased to be who he was. His whole life became a memory, and not even of his own. Whose, then? He had met Sam Auclaire once, he believed, at the high school maybe-a play? parents’ night?-or else merely seen him, striding out of the hardware store with a sack of nails in his hand, or driving his pickup, ladders lashed to a frame over the bed, through the streets of town. Arthur remembered a tall man, muscular, with curly blond hair gone an early, peppery gray. So that was his answer. Dora touched him, and the happiness he felt was not his own but Sam’s, at being so terribly missed.

It went on like this into the fall. He never set foot in her house, nor she in his, and if anyone suspected (suspected what?), Arthur heard nothing about it. He told no one, because who was there to tell? His clients? The old women at the Coffee Stop? The man at the service station who changed the oil in his car? He wished for a brother, as he had many times in his life, but hadn’t one; he worked alone, and had few friends that Miriam did not share. His life was like a small, comfortable room, every piece in its place. Only by being with Dora did he step outside of this room, though only for an hour or two, and never so completely that at the end of their time together he could not return to it, and to the life he understood. He wondered how long it could go on.

Then, two weeks ago, Arthur found himself driving with Dora out of town, to see a parcel of land she said she wanted to buy. The town had begun to feel close to her-that was the word she used, close; she had always dreamed of building a house and raising her boys in the country. She said she wanted to get his opinion, but her meaning was clear: things had reached a certain point between them. The afternoon was cold and bright, and they drove the fifteen miles south with barely a word between them. For the first time since she had come into his office eight months before, dripping with rain, Arthur felt truly afraid. In Domingo they found the unmarked dirt road that led to the property, which was marked with a large For Sale sign pocked with bullet holes. Arthur recognized the phone number on the sign; it was the number of the county clerk’s office, in Harbersburg. On the phone Dora had told him that before the land had been taken over by the county for nonpayment of taxes, it had been a dairy farm.

In the parked car they changed into sneakers and then set out on foot. The land was level and moist-Arthur could hear running water somewhere-and they moved slowly through the shrubs and shabby trees, all of it tangled by brawny grapevine. It took him a moment to realize that the overgrown path they were following was the driveway, but once he saw this, other details emerged: rusted farm implements poking from the ground, gullies lining the pathway that had once been drainage ditches, a shape in the trees that he recognized as the cab of an old Willys Jeep, melting into the leaves and mossy earth. The scene disturbed and interested him. How long, he wondered, had it taken for nature to reclaim this place? Twenty years? Thirty? How much time was required? Then they emerged into a clearing-the trees opened above them like a hatchway, revealing a sky of radiant, shimmering blue-and found themselves standing at the edge of an immense pit. Of course: the house’s foundation. The hole was some forty feet across, roughly square, and some ten feet deep. Its floor was irregular, long buried beneath a sea of leaves and debris. Again, Arthur’s eyes adjusted. An old-fashioned nail-keg lay on its side, beside a rusted saw blade and a monkey wrench and the head of a hammer, half peeking from the dirt. The scene leapt into view. More saws, hammers, wrenches, an iron sledge, a workbench with a vise, all of it bathed in the brilliant sunlight. The basement was full of tools.

It was then, standing at the edge of the farmhouse’s foundation, that Arthur felt it: a terrible fear, like falling, and then, in its wake, a deep and melancholy calm.

He looked up. Dora was standing beside him, gazing into the hole. He said, “This is something the two of you wanted.”

She answered without raising her head. “What do you mean?”

“To build a house. Out here, somewhere.” He took her gloved hand. “You and Sam.”

Dora said nothing, but her face, paling, gave the answer. She had looked at this very place before, when Sam was still alive. They had stood right where the two of them were standing now. He imagined what that had been like, the hopeful feeling of it, and the sounds of their two boys tearing around the woods, somewhere nearby. It would have been when Leo and Josh were small.

“I really am sorry,” Arthur said.

“Well, you’re right. We did come out here.” She shrugged, and gave him a distant and painful smile. “It was a long time ago, Art.”

“No, I mean I’m sorry that I can’t”-he stopped. He had approached the edge of something, and then he crossed it-“do this.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Wind moved in the trees, and the branches swayed.

“Oh, it’s all right.” Gently, Dora freed her hand from his-as gently as the first time she had taken it, across the table in the restaurant, months before. She folded her arms over her chest.

“I truly am,” Arthur said.

She laughed, almost bitterly, though Arthur knew that, like him, what she felt was more like sadness. “What you are is relieved, Art. Still, it would have been nice, at least for me.” She sighed then, deeply, and Arthur saw that her eyes were glazed with tears. With a long finger she brushed one away. “Forgive me, but I really liked being a wife. I was good at it, and I miss it. Maybe all I’m doing is remembering.”

And that was the end of it. They drove back to town, and by the time they returned they were friends again, with things to do: Dora to fetch the boys at Scouts, and Arthur to phone Miriam (not here, they told him; she’d only just stepped out) and then drive out to the Price Chopper in Vermillion to do the shopping he’d promised her he’d do. He pushed his cart through the bright, busy aisles, the air smelling of the cold from the open freezer cases, and knew that he was saved. The thought filled him with an almost manic energy-for he also knew, now, that he would never be caught, nor would have to confess-and standing in the checkout line, jammed into the final gauntlet of movie magazines and candy displays, he found himself talking, almost babbling, to a woman one aisle over, a neighbor who had once baby-sat his children. Was his mother well? And the kids? Yes, fine, though of course the nursing home did things, certain things he didn’t care for; they wouldn’t for instance let her out for walks when it was raining, which she had always loved, and his children, well, Kay was settling into married life, the usual bumps in the road but nothing serious, her husband, Jack, was still finishing his dissertation, Arthur couldn’t even understand what the hell it was about, trying to teach, she knew how that went, and O’Neil was still enjoying school, running cross-country and thinking about maybe medicine, though he’d have to decide soon, however he and Miriam managed to pay for it, well, that was another subject entirely; they were driving up to see him in a couple of weeks, to meet his new girlfriend, from Boston… It poured forth from him. It disgorged, like the contents of his cart-flank steak, spaghetti sauce with pork and mushrooms, ice-slickened canisters of frozen juice, and all the rest, a hundred bucks’ worth (for he had overshopped)-onto the cheerfully humming rubber conveyor belt. He wanted to talk, to tell his story; to sing it if necessary, like a hymn, or the tale of a traveler come home at last.

Now, two weeks later, Arthur sits in his office (ten fifty-two and counting; he really has to go), composing his farewell to Dora Auclaire. Since that day in the woods they have not spoken, though they have seen each other once, in passing. Tuesday last, three days ago: Arthur, hustling back from Lawson’s Stationery with a package of pencils he didn’t really need, his head down against a gritty wind, heard the toot of a horn, and knew it was for him. He raised his head in time to see the sticker-covered tailgate of Dora’s old VW squareback as she passed (ERA NOW, No Nukes, Carter-Mondale ’76), and over the seat, a wave. A greeting? A good-bye? He froze, thinking she might stop; when he saw she wouldn’t, he raised his hand to return the wave, but she was already gone.

What he wants now, at his desk, the blank paper before him, is to acknowledge her, to finish the wave; he wants to put into words the happiness he feels, that he loves her but will never be with her, and that this love will therefore harm no one. His office is empty; the answering machine is on, the sound turned low. Behind him, beyond the windows of his office, cars pass in an almost continuous flow, washed pale by gray November; the last leaves tremble on their stalks; above his head hovers the yellow stain of his father’s cigarettes, a ghostly halo that no coat of paint seems to cover for long. For some time Arthur simply sits there, his mind a perfect blank. Without realizing it he has nudged his consciousness to the edge of deepest memory, and his dream of 5:00 A.M. with its sounds of distant water and feeling of final flight. At last he takes a clean sheet of white paper-the legal pad was a mistake, of course-from the tray on his desk, selects a fresh pen, fat-tipped and forgiving, and begins again. Dear Dora, he writes.

The letter is one sentence long; he signs it, love, Art. His eyes rise to the old schoolroom clock above the waiting room door: 11:38. So, after all that, there is no time to mail it. He puts the folded letter in an envelope, writes Dora’s name on it, places the envelope in his pencil drawer, and pushes it shut. Late, he thinks, late. Miriam will be waiting for him in the library foyer, clutching her books and papers and all her nervousness to her chest. The car needs gas, he will have to cash a check on the way out of town; they will arrive at the college in darkness, and there will be confusion about whether to eat dinner first, or check into the hotel, and then the question about restaurants, and if the girl will come with them, and her parents, if they are visiting too-a chain of uncertainties and potential disappointments all shouldered into motion because he, Arthur, is running late. (Not Suzie or Sarah: Sandra. He says the name aloud, to etch it in memory: “Sandra.”) He wraps his neck with a woolen scarf, douses the lamps in his office and waiting room, slides into his trench coat-a gift from Kay at Christmas-and steps outside.

And this is when he stops-pauses and turns, his keys in one hand and his briefcase in the other, at the open office door. His back to the street, Arthur scans the waiting room, its blond oak paneling and sagging sofa and coffee table with magazines, everything perfectly still and frosted with dust; beyond, through the inner office door, his eye finds the mahogany desk where his father died, and his chair, cocked back on its springs where it came to rest when he, Arthur, stood at last to go. The image seems somehow apart from him, at once frozen and containing movement, like a photograph: the ghost of Arthur, rising. For an instant he imagines he sees this-sees himself-and a dark chill twists through him. What in the world…? But it is nothing, just a trick of the light, of the time of day and his own need to hurry. He shakes his head once to dislodge this vision, steps onto the sidewalk and is gone.

Miriam Patricia Burke, née Braverman, age fifty-four-wife to Arthur, mother to Kaitlin and O’Neil; empty-nester, librarian, caffeine addict; attendee of conferences and symposia; taker of classes (ornithology, ballroom dancing, vegetarian cooking); registered Democract, former Jew, sometime jogger (you might see her, a lone figure humping her way along a country lane in her purple sweatshirt and pants); holder of degrees in literature (Barnard) and library science (NYU); daughter of the late Daniel Chaim Braverman and his beloved Alicia; sister and trusted counsel to siblings Monica (fifty) and Abraham (fifty-seven); a woman lately described by a man she met at a party as “a gal who did good and still looked it”-Miriam Patricia, Mimi to her friends, stands in the foyer of the Vinegar County Library and wonders if she is dying.

Two weeks ago: she discovered the lump in her left breast, by rolling over in bed. She turned, half sleeping, and a dark presence met her and then took shape, a mass the size and solidity of an acorn, pressed between the mattress and her rib cage. The awareness of it hurled her into consciousness, and a series of swift calculations to firm the moment into fact. She was in bed; it was seven o’clock; Arthur was away for the day, something about an abandoned farm, and had left for his office early, before she was even awake. She lay in bed, her brain spinning with terror-Not this! Not this!-daring herself to touch the place beneath her nightgown where the thickness was. So large! It met the tips of her fingers with something like an electric current. One in nine women; that’s what they said. But what happened to them, those one in nine? It was more than panic she felt; it was death, making its way to her door.

And yet, as she began her day-the first day of her dying-a strange orderliness filled her, an almost fatalistic calm. She rose, washed, dressed. She sat down at the table (her cold coffee mug, by the stairs, was waiting, and a note: Price Chopper? Anything? Call, signed with the little sketch of a bear he always left for her), rose again, and treated herself to a breakfast of sausage and French toast, glazed with syrup and stamps of yellow butter. She expected not to want it once it was made, but found the opposite was true: she was unaccountably ravenous, and for the time it took her to eat her breakfast, that was all she did and thought about-sliced the toast into squares, the sausage into cylinders bursting with watery fat, forked it all onto her waiting tongue. She chewed, swallowed, reloaded; if she had been capable of it, she would have licked the plate. Then when she was finished she rinsed her plate and called her doctor and told him what she knew; by two o’clock he had his hand there, and told her not to be afraid. “Concerned,” he said, scribbling, not really looking at her. He was a plump man, bald and flatfooted, a doctor who actually still made house calls. She had known him for years, and now he wasn’t looking at her. “I’d be concerned, for now.”

There were other doctors then, and more appointments-the ultrasound and mammogram, and the visit to the radiologist in Cooperstown to read the films, then back to Dr. Bardin and the consensus that the surgeon was the next person to see. Serious medicine, she discovered, was a kind of maze, a series of hallways down which one traveled; at the end of each was a door which one opened, hoping to find it locked; but as long as they opened, one was forced to go on. And yet, somehow, through two terrified weeks, she has told Arthur nothing. On Tuesday next-four days from this moment in the foyer, waiting for Arthur to appear so they can drive to New Hampshire -the surgeon will evaluate her; the mass will be aspirated, and then there will be a surgical biopsy, and decisions to be made. Her story will come out. Why hasn’t she told him? Her lies are not elaborate; it has proved simple enough to explain why she will be away for an afternoon, to let slip over breakfast or watching television in the evening some vague announcement about a meeting with the State Library Association in Ithaca or a booksellers’ convention in Binghamton (Arthur, glancing up from his paper or the program, his eyes distracted, saying, Well, okay, thanks for letting me know, why are you even telling me?), all to account for the three or four hours it takes to drive to a new doctor and back, and of course the mileage on her car. She is saving him, of course, from her bad news, waiting until she knows something one way or the other; she is letting him live his life for now because she loves him. But the truth is-and she has to admit it-that the longer she remains alone with the knowledge of what is happening to her, the longer she herself is saved. Under the flat institutional light of the doctor’s office there was “a mass” and a “cause for concern,” there were “treatments” and “courses of therapy,” the problem was confined to “the affected breast,” which in turn was the property of “a white female, married, 54, no family history.” (She had peeked at the radiologist’s chart.) Nowhere, at no time, has she uttered the word cancer, nor heard it used. The breast was “affected.” The mass was “palpable.” The patient was “married.” She, Miriam Burke, was something-somewhere-else.

But where? Outside, beyond the smoked glass of the library foyer, the sky is so white it seems to tremble, poised on the very edge of snow. Leaves whirl in the parking lot, nearly empty now of cars, a temporary oasis of calm tucked between toddler story-hour and the full-blown hurricane of the after-school rush. Miriam looks at her watch and sees that it is noon, on the button. Where is Arthur? She is already wearing her coat-she had expected to find him, waiting at the curb, twenty minutes ago-and the dry heat of the foyer has begun to close in on her, dampening her frame with perspiration. Should she go back in and call? And if no one answers-if he is neither home nor at the office-what then? For a brief moment she fears that something has happened-Arthur is not the best driver; he has seemed, of late, even more distracted, more airy, than usual-but then she realizes it is herself she is thinking of. Arthur is fine; Arthur is late. Sighing to hear herself sigh, she removes her coat, her hat, her gloves; finding then that her arms are too full, she puts the coat back on, leaving it unbuttoned, and checks her watch again. Beneath her coat and her white turtleneck sweater and her brassiere’s gleaming apparatus of wire and lace, in the folds of skin where her left breast meets her rib cage, a bright point of cancer glows.

She is thinking, then, of her children, Kay and O’Neil, and of her daughter’s wedding, fourteen months ago. A bright day in September: all the trees had just begun to turn, beneath a sky so vastly blue-blue like neon, so blue it seemed to buzz-it was impossible not to remark on it. (Such perfect weather! they all said. And the sky!) After the ceremony everyone drove back to the house, where a tent had been erected in the yard. The memory visits her in a series of pictures: Kay in her wedding dress, a full gown studded with small white stones; her husband, Jack, whom Miriam wishes to like but can’t, handsomely serious in his gray morning coat; his hard-drinking relatives from St. Louis-nearly all of them were bankers or the wives of bankers, it seemed-smoking cigarettes and talking up a storm as the waiters in their black pants and pressed white shirts passed trays of cheese and crab puffs and tiny things on sticks; Arthur’s mother, just recovered from gall bladder surgery, rising, somehow, against the tidal pull of age, to shuffle through a dance. From the sidelines she watched the tiny floor fill up-Jack and Kay, Arthur and his mother, the bankers and their wives-turned, then, to find O’Neil beside her, smiling, then taking her elbow in his hand. C’mon, he said. The band was playing something, she guessed, you could lindy to. I won’t tell my shrink if you don’t. You do dance, right, Ma?

She looked at him, pleasure filling her like water pouring into a vase: her grown son just back from his first two weeks of college, all smooth white teeth and rangy limbs, his eyes glowing with champagne. How had it happened? Why did she miss him so, when he was standing right there? She hadn’t cried during the wedding but now it seemed she was about to; it was possible she would begin to cry and never stop, so she let him take her to the dance floor, place his hand at the small of her back, and steer her into and through the music-when had he learned to do this?-then spin her out to the ends of his fingers, catching her before she flew away. She saw herself, as if from the corner of her eye: a blur of blue dress, arcing like a comet’s tail away from the sun’s bright heat and light; the boy in his gray suit, taller by far than she, hurling her outward and reeling her in again. As the song’s last bars approached he folded his arms over her somehow, catching her weight as he tipped her back on one foot; her other foot rose, and before she knew what had happened her full weight was in his arms. Her hair skimmed the floor, blood filling her skull in a dizzying rush; O’Neil, her boy, had his mama in a full dip. As he returned her to a standing position she detected, around her, a smattering of jokey applause.

As the next song began he tipped his head across the floor toward his sister and Jack, who was wiping the lenses of his heavy eyeglasses on a handkerchief.

“Aw, he’s not so bad, Ma,” O’Neil said. He handed her a glass of ice water; she hadn’t even seen him get it. “You know? So it’d be okay to lighten up a little. At least for Kay.”

The remark startled her. Had she been so obvious? And it was true, about Jack: he seemed rigid and fusty to her, not at all like the boys Kay had dated in high school and then college-clever, flirtatious, quick with a joke-and not at all like O’Neil or his friends, whom Miriam adored. She drank the water O’Neil had handed her, surprised to find how much she wanted it. No, she couldn’t quite bring herself to like him, much as she’d tried. From the first day Kay had brought him home to visit, she had thought it; his life was a train he expected her to board. She saw it all: the old station wagon strewn with toys and the sacks of groceries in back, the dry dinners with deans and visiting economists, the burrowing claws of life on the margins of some small college town. (And wasn’t it also true that she, Miriam, had never really gotten along with Kay? That love was one thing but getting along was something else, and there had been, well, certain difficulties, certain unnameable tensions, between them? That this gap was the very one Kay had chosen to fill with Jack? Making it, in the end, Miriam’s fault?) So, no. She didn’t like him, not one bit. But more than this, she had forgotten-actually forgotten, if for a moment-that the party was her daughter’s, not O’Neil’s. The yellow stripes of the tent, the band’s silly music, the crispness of the autumn air, and the calming presence of the waiters and waitresses gliding through the company with trays in their hands-she had forgotten that all of this has been called into being by her daughter’s decision to marry Jack.

“Mom? Come in, Mom.”

She looked up to find O’Neil, grinning and wagging his eyebrows. A waiter moved past, and she placed the empty water glass on his tray, trading it for a full one of champagne.

“Ammunition,” she said then, and drank; she smiled back at O’Neil, who was drinking too. She thought about telling him to go easy on the champagne, but decided quickly not to. Beyond the walls of the tent it had begun to grow dark, blue afternoon bruising to black. One of the caterers was firing up the propane heaters that hung on poles in each of the tent’s four corners.

“All right, hon.” She put down the empty champagne glass. “The mother of the bride will go ask her son-in-law to dance.”

“Now you’re talking.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m sure that will be, you know, interesting. Jack is an interesting guy.”

“Very,” she agreed, and touched his sleeve. “But I’m not doing it to make you laugh. For Kay, like you said.”

And so she danced with Jack (O’Neil, solving a problem, appeared at that moment to take Kay by the arm and whisk her off across the floor); she danced with him not once but twice, and though he talked her ears off-all nonsense about his dissertation and his theories of wage and price controls, and which uncle was a partner in which St. Louis investment firm, as if she might someday have some serious money to spend in St. Louis-she found herself, for that time, liking him, almost, just as O’Neil had hoped. He was just a nervous boy, not really a man at all, uncertain how to dance with a grown woman or where to place his gaze and what to say to her while he did so (nothing; Say nothing, she thought). He was doing his very best, in other words, and what else was there to wish for? When it was over, he made a little bow, awkwardly hugged her; looking over her shoulder, he might have actually called her Mom.

The sound of a car horn: Arthur, idling at the curb, is waving to her from the wheel of the mud-spattered Peugeot. Miriam buttons her coat again and heads outside to meet him. Their suitcases are in the backseat, as promised, and a surprise: beside them she sees their old wicker picnic basket, with a wool blanket folded neatly on top. Greasy diesel fumes huff out the tailpipe and are whisked away into the autumn air.

“Sorry.” He makes a flustered gesture with his hands. “I decided to pack a lunch. And I couldn’t find the goddamn cat again.”

“You and Nestor need to work some things out.” She arranges herself in the front seat. “Anyway. You did find him? And left him some food? We’re not abandoning him to the foxes, in other words?”

“He was under your dresser.”

“Ah.” She nods. “I see. My dresser. Sounds like a conspiracy.”

“Mimi, I just got held up.” His voice, though apologetic, is impatient too. He has been late for nearly everything his entire life; his voice says she should be used to it by now. “I said I was sorry. I had some work to do.”

“So you did.” She hears herself sigh; the urge to fight has passed. “Oh, it’s all right, Art. I should be, but I’m not really mad at all.” She leans over the gearbox and-why not?-kisses her husband’s cheek. She knows this will surprise him, and it does; as she pulls away, Arthur reaches with his hand to the place on his face where she has kissed him.

“Now,” she says, slapping her knees to tell him it’s over and to get the car in gear, “let’s go rescue our boy.”

Arthur and Miriam, on the road; an hour of winding country lanes-woods and towns and gas stations floating by, everything denuded and bathed by a thin autumnal light-and then they join the interstate, a pulsing artery of commerce headed east into New England. In Albany they change places in the parking lot of a McDonald’s-it is just after two o’clock-continue into Massachusetts and the Berkshires, and stop at a state park near Great Barrington to eat the sandwiches and drink the soup that Arthur has packed.

They arrive at the college after six, its great buildings ablaze with light. Despite the cold, students are everywhere. Doors and windows are open; music pours forth across the little town. They check into their hotel on the edge of campus and then telephone O’Neil in his dorm room. In the background Arthur can hear something like a party going on-loud voices, doors slamming, a girl laughing over the sound of a horn section and twanging guitars.

“Sorry,” Arthur says, “we got a bit of a late start.”

“What?” O’Neil says. “Will you guys shut the hell up? Hang on, Pop.” There is a muffling silence as his son smothers the receiver to yell something over the music. When his voice comes back on the line, the music is gone. “We’re all just cramming for midterms here. Very intense stuff.”

“I could tell. Sorry we’re late.”

“Sounds like a story.” O’Neil laughs at something Arthur can’t see. “Mom there?”

“In the shower. Have you had your fill of fun already, or do you still want to eat?”

“When didn’t I? The stuff they serve here is like army rations. Want to know what they gave us last night? Salmon loaf and pea-cheese sauce. We thought it was a joke, like Eat this, and that’s what you’ll do: you’ll pee cheese-sauce.”

“Lovely,” Arthur says, laughing. “Bring Sandra, if you want. We’re all pretty excited to meet her.”

“Sandra who?” His son lets the question-a joke, Arthur realizes-hang for a moment. “Kidding. But she’s got a rehearsal. It’ll be just me, I’m afraid.”

Thirty minutes later they go downstairs to find O’Neil in the lobby, sitting on the sofa and reading from a stack of alumni magazines on the coffee table. He has dressed up a little, wearing pressed khakis and a navy wool blazer with a slender black necktie hanging loose around his throat. But what Arthur notices first is the haircut. O’Neil has always worn his hair long, in loose curls that hang over his ears. All of that is gone, replaced by a spiky crewcut. Their boy rises, smiling at the sight of them, and catches them both in a long-armed hug.

“Honey,” Miriam says mournfully. “Oh, God, I know I shouldn’t say anything. Your hair?”

O’Neil grins self-consciously and runs a hand over his scalp. “It was funny, but I just woke up one day and thought: I have to get rid of all this hair. I actually skipped a class just to go to a barbershop.”

Miriam reaches out to touch his hair but stops herself, stroking the air just inches from his head. “Well, it can always grow back,” Miriam says.

“All the guys on the team are getting it cut like this now,” O’Neil says. “Some of the girls too.”

“I think it looks great,” Arthur chimes in. “Very 1962. I think I had one just like it.”

O’Neil smiles. “See, Mom? That’s the idea.”

The steakhouse where they usually go will be too packed by now with the parents’ weekend crowd, so they agree to eat at the hotel, taking seats in the bar while they wait for a table. Miriam, pleading exhaustion, orders a club soda, and Arthur his usual Dewars and water; when the waitress asks O’Neil what he wants, he thinks a moment, and then asks for a club soda too.

“You know, the hardest thing for most of the guys on the team is not drinking,” he says, chewing a mouthful of peanuts from a bowl on the bar. “They catch you, you’re off, no question.” He reaches into the inside pocket of his blazer and produces a photograph. “That’s Sandra.”

The girl in the photo is younger looking than Arthur expected, and a good deal prettier. The photo is of the two of them, standing arm-in-arm before a brick building that Arthur recognizes as O’Neil’s dormitory. Her hair isn’t brown, as he imagined, but a bright shade of blond that verges on red, a red that reminds Arthur of certain autumn leaves-though the picture, he realizes, was taken months ago, before the summer had gone. The grass at their feet is lushly green, and they are both dressed for warm weather and sunshine, O’Neil in his nylon running clothes, Sandra in white tennis shorts and a T-shirt. On her head, covering most of her hair and dimming her eyes and brow into shadow, she wears a baseball cap-navy blue, with a red B for the Boston Red Sox. The way the shadows fall makes Arthur think that the photograph was taken just before sunset, and the two of them are on their way to dinner, or to change for dinner. Sandra is small, the top of her head rising only to O’Neil’s shoulders, and a bright splash of freckles dresses her cheeks and nose, which is button shaped and turned slightly upward as she looks into the photographer’s lens. Arthur knows he should say something about how pretty she is, and when he does, his son smiles with happy relief.

“Sox fan, I see,” Arthur adds.

O’Neil shrugs. “I guess. Really, she just likes hats. She’s what you would call a hat person.”

“She’s in a play?” Arthur asks.

O’Neil frowns in confusion. “No. Well, she has been, but she isn’t now. What gave you that idea?”

“You said she had a rehearsal.”

“Oh. I did, didn’t I.” O’Neil nods. “Actually, it’s a jazz band. She plays the trombone, if you can believe it. You’ll hear her tomorrow night.”

Arthur laughs at his son’s embarrassment, though he also knows that this is exactly the kind of thing he likes about her. What does anyone like? Freckles, the curve of hair where she tucks it behind an ear, the sound of her voice when she tells a joke, her great, gleaming trombone in its velvet case. O’Neil has had girlfriends before, but this, Arthur knows, is different; he is entering the web, the matrix of a thousand details that make another person real, not just an object to be wanted. Beside him Miriam, looking at the photo, hasn’t said anything.

“Hey,” Arthur says, “the trombone can be very sexy.”

“I don’t know how she does it all,” O’Neil says. “There’s field hockey and band. She’s starting this year, so next year she’ll probably be varsity, and she’s on the lacrosse team too. Then, she’s, like, a straight-A student, doubling in bio and English, with all her premed courses on top of it.” He shakes his head, amazed. “Some days it’s all I can do just to get out of bed and go to class.”

“Seems like she’s a good influence,” Arthur says. “Don’t you think, Mimi?”

Miriam manages a smile and passes the photo back to Arthur, who hands it to O’Neil. “She sounds like a lovely girl,” Miriam says.

“It’s true,” O’Neil says, and laughs at himself. “God knows what she sees in me.”

They each have two drinks before they are seated at a table and order dinner. The hour is just nine, but already O’Neil is yawning. Every time this happens he apologizes and makes a joke about how they’re not really boring him, it’s just the running, all the workouts this past week for tomorrow’s race.

“You don’t really have to come,” he says, smearing a piece of bread with cheese from a crock on the middle of the table. “We’re going to get hammered, anyway. We’re completely overtrained. You should go to the field hockey game instead. Sandra’s just JV, but those girls are really good.”

The food is so bad it’s actually funny-everything overcooked and drenched with heavy sauce-and in the end, O’Neil eats most of what’s on his parents’ plates in addition to his own. An amazing performance: he caps off the meal with a slab of chocolate pie while Arthur and Miriam share a pot of watery tea. They offer to drive him back to his dormitory, but in the lobby he changes his mind; the walk will do him good, he says, to help him digest all of it before the race, which is at one o’clock the next afternoon. Arthur goes up to their room and returns with a hat and scarf, to keep him warm on the walk home.

“I meant what I said,” O’Neil reminds them, winding the scarf around his throat. “You really don’t have to come. There’s not much to see even if we do okay. You’ll be pretty much just waiting around to watch me drag up the rear.”

“We’re here to be with you,” Miriam says. She steps up and hugs him, quickly. “There’s no way we’re missing it.”

From the doorway they watch him trot down the walk, head hunched down against the cold, not looking back.

“He’s probably going to see her,” Miriam says.

“Wouldn’t anybody?” Arthur asks. “You saw that picture.” He gives a little admiring whistle. “Holy moly.”

A silence falls over them. Miriam hugs herself against the cold air moving through the open door. It is certainly cold enough to snow; under the lights of the hotel Arthur can see shimmering puddles of ice just beginning to form on the flagstone walkway. Finally she says, “I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“This morning.” She shrugs. “In the car. All of it. I’m not being a good sport, am I?”

“You’re the mom. You love your kids. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

Upstairs, Arthur showers and puts on his pajamas, then sits in darkness on the edge of their bed. He feels a slight movement under the covers and turns to see that Miriam is laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

It takes her a moment to speak. “Your face,” she manages. “When you looked at that picture. You should have seen yourself.” She rises on the pillows and touches his arm to reassure him. “I’m sorry, Art. It was just so funny.”

Arthur climbs under the covers beside her. “She is pretty,” Arthur says. “You know, I think she reminded me of you.”

“No, she didn’t,” Miriam says. She turns and puts her arms around him. “You’re very sweet, but you don’t have to say that.”

“Nothing sweet about it,” Arthur says. He kisses her, and feels sleep coming. “It’s true.”

Arthur and Miriam, out of town: they awaken late, eat a breakfast of coffee and sweet rolls in the hotel lobby, then set out on foot to the campus to find O’Neil. It is nearly eleven; the day is bright and icy cold. Overnight, a mass of clear arctic air has moved in, and the effect is vaguely kaleidoscopic, all the colors and shapes of the town and campus at once less than real and somehow more. Above the college’s stone entranceway a banner says, Welcome Parents, and beneath the bare trees and blue, blue sky, the wide lawn of the college’s main quadrangle floats like a plate of ice.

They arrive at O’Neil’s dormitory, hoping to surprise him with a bag of muffins filched from the hotel breakfast buffet, but no one answers the door when they knock. A moment of confusion: Didn’t they arrange to meet him here? Then, as they’re leaving, they run into his roommate, Stephen, on his way back from the shower. They have known him for years; O’Neil and Stephen went to high school together, and though the college did not let them share a room freshman year, now they are together again. Stephen, who is tall and fair with a long nose and a hairline that’s already receding, is wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe and carrying a plastic basket of toiletries under his arm. Behind one ear is a dab of shaving cream. He seems startled to see them, but after an awkward moment he hugs Miriam and shakes Arthur’s hand.

“He left, like, an hour ago,” Stephen explains. The door across from Stephen and O’Neil’s room opens, washing the hallway with the smell of cigarettes and the sound of Steely Dan. Miriam recognizes the record-it is one that O’Neil played all through high school. A young woman Miriam doesn’t know steps from the room in a silk dressing gown, says hello to Stephen, and heads down the hall to the showers, humming the song as she goes. Miriam tries not to look but does; her hair is a thick, glistening black, like a curtain of velvet, and the way she walks, her bare feet silently striking the hallway’s green carpet, suggests that, beneath the gown, she isn’t wearing anything at all. The smoke from her cigarette follows her like a laugh.

“I wasn’t even awake yet, really, but I heard the door,” Stephen says, yawning. Miriam wonders if Stephen is lying, to cover for O’Neil-did he even spend the night there?-but decides not to say anything about this. “You can probably catch him over by the grandstands. I think he thought you were meeting him there.”

They leave the muffins with Stephen, who is biting into one even as he’s saying good-bye, and head back out into the bright day. By the grandstands, a five-minute walk away, they find O’Neil in his sweats, milling around with the other members of the cross-country team. A few students and parents are already sitting in the aluminum bleachers, chatting and hugging themselves in the cold. O’Neil explains the course: five miles down trails through the woods that abut the playing fields, then up the hill into the middle of town, and back to the starting line. He hasn’t shaved, and his hair, despite its length, seems disheveled, as if he had only awakened moments ago. On the other side of the field a fancy motorcoach is parked, and Miriam can see the other team stretching out in their shimmering violet sweatsuits. The race is thirty minutes away.

“God, why did you let me eat all that?” O’Neil is on the grass, sitting Indian style, though the bottoms of his running shoes are somehow together. He bends forward at the waist, his forehead dropping to his knees in a single liquid motion. “Never mind. My fault, right? The chocolate pie was definitely a mistake, though. I was up moaning half the night.”

“Is Sandra going to be here?” Arthur asks.

“You know, I thought she would be, by now.” He rises nimbly and does half a dozen quick hops on his toes. Miriam can practically feel the energy coiled in him, a spring about to release, chocolate pie or no. O’Neil scans the scene, looking for Sandra, and shrugs when he fails to find her. “I’m sure she’ll show up. I told her you were coming, and if that doesn’t get her here, nothing will.”

“I’m beginning to think you invented her,” Miriam says.

“Trust me, Mom.” O’Neil smiles confidently. “I couldn’t have made her up if I tried.” Still standing, he spreads his legs wide, pivots on the balls of his feet, and drops one knee to the grass. “God, I feel just awful. At least it’s cold,” he says. “I’m better when it’s cold.”

O’Neil introduces them to some of his teammates and then to his coach-a surprisingly young man, not much older than the runners themselves, with a woolly beard and long black hair-and then shoos them to the grandstands, to wait for the race to begin. By the starting line O’Neil and his teammates have stripped to their shorts and tank tops and gathered in a tight circle around their coach, their bodies making constant small movements even as they listen to what he’s telling them. They break apart then, each finding someplace nearby to go. Some jog in place, or stretch; others merely stand quietly, waiting.

“What are they doing?” Arthur asks.

Miriam watches. O’Neil is one of the quiet ones. Apart from the others, he has selected a spot fifty feet from the starting line, near a line of parked cars. His hands dangle limply at his sides, and his head is slightly bowed; even at this distance, she can see him breathe, and knows by the rhythm of his rising chest that his eyes, turned down, are closed.

“He’s being alone with it,” she says.

A hush has fallen over the crowd; everyone, parents and friends, has been led into this moment of silence, like a prayer before mass. The runners gather at the starting line.

“This is it,” Arthur says.

Miriam looks to O’Neil, who has taken a spot in the middle of the line, between two runners from the opposing team. She knows at once that he will do well, better than he has ever dared imagine, that this day will be his. Her confidence is absolute; she knows this fact as certainly as she knows his name. She says it then-“O’Neil”-and as she does, the runners crouch, the gun appears from nowhere, and with a single report, they’re off.

She rises to her feet. “Go!” she cries, and the two teams burst away. “Go! Go! Go!”

Arthur in the bleachers, thinking of Dora Auclaire: his son is running-the two teams are gone; in seconds they have flown over the field and disappeared into the woods-and yet his mind has drifted away from all of this, crossing two state lines and traveling half the width of New York State to alight in his office, where the letter waits in his desk. Unsent but sealed, it is, like his wave on the street a week ago, one more thing half finished. When he mails it, he knows, these many months of secrecy will all be over, and he can rejoin his life. And yet he has not done this. He was already so late another delay would hardly have mattered; he could have dropped it off at the clinic (no: he would have seen her, stopped to talk) or paused at the post office on his way home to feed the cat and pick up their bags. He could have, but didn’t, and so here he is, thinking of her.

“Did you see that?” Miriam says. She is pointing across the field. “That kid tripped him. He almost went down.”

“Where? What kid?”

Her tone is sharp; she lifts her eyebrows with impatience, and all at once he returns to her. Miriam. The race. A bright cold day in fall.

“The tall one, Art. At the starting line.” She frowns incredulously. “How could you have missed it?”

He smiles; she knows he has no idea what she’s talking about. “Well, no harm done. Or was there?”

“Sometimes, it’s like your head is a big empty dance-hall, Art.” She squeezes his arm. “No. No harm done.”

As O’Neil predicted, for the next twenty-five minutes, until the runners return, they have nothing to do. To keep warm they walk around the infield, where students and other parents, about thirty of them, have gathered in little groups to talk and pass the time sipping hot cider from foam cups. For a while they fall into conversation with a man and his wife, parents of one of O’Neil’s teammates, up from New York City for the weekend. Arthur wonders about Sandra, if she has arrived yet, but supposes she hasn’t; O’Neil would have said so, even just to tease them, to make them guess. He is thinking about this and looking over the crowd to try to pick her out when a cry goes up.

Impossibly-so little time seems to have passed-the first runner has appeared at the edge of the woods. Like the point of a wedge he leads the other runners in a long arc around the field, a jostling mass of gold and violet. Arthur looks for O’Neil, doesn’t find him, then does, about midway through the first pack, five or six runners off the leader. Everyone scrambles toward the finish line, where both coaches are counting out the seconds on their stopwatches.

“Where is he?” Miriam is saying. She bounces on her toes, looking over the heads of the crowd. “Where is he?”

“There.” Arthur points, and then it happens, as it always does: all the memories he carries inside him of track meets and soccer games and piano recitals and class plays-twenty years of watching his son from the sidelines of playing fields and the back of dark auditoriums-suddenly organize themselves, like the plot of a novel or movie, leading to this moment. Excitement wells up inside him, a huge and desperate desire to see his son do well, a feeling so intense he would step out of his body if he could. He hears his voice, and Miriam’s, the two of them yelling:

“Go, go, go!”

For the final moments of the race everything seems to slow. As the runners take the last turn around the field, O’Neil makes his move; he has kept something for the kick and in a burst he uses it, passing one runner and then another, his arms and legs moving in perfect headlong syncopation. Even so far away Arthur believes he can see his son’s face, and the pain that is etched across it.

“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”

The first runner crosses the line, the pack just steps behind. Arthur can hear his voice, yelling his son’s name, and he is yelling still when O’Neil crosses the finish, a split second off third place. He expects his boy to collapse on the ground, utterly spent, but this doesn’t happen. O’Neil slows to a stop, grinning, his chest heaving, his hands riding his slender hips, and then looks upward toward the bleachers, his eyes narrowed in a squint. Arthur, at the finish line, is about to call out O’Neil’s name to show him where they are, but then O’Neil finds who he is looking for-not Arthur and Miriam, but a girl whom Arthur knows is Sandra. Somehow he has missed her; or perhaps she has arrived late, after Arthur had stopped looking. She bounds down the aluminum bleachers and at once is beside him.

Arthur hears Miriam whisper, “God.”

“Steady,” Arthur says, and takes her elbow. “Let’s go see.”

O’Neil is almost too euphoric to notice them. “Can you believe it? Fourth place.” He shakes his head in utter amazement. “I’ve never done that well. Not even close. It was the last turn when I knew I could do it. I saw myself passing those guys, and then I just did.”

He introduces Sandra, who shakes first Miriam’s hand and then Arthur’s, meeting his grip with a firmness that is at once surprising and completely natural. The last runners are crossing the line, and in the confusion Arthur has the chance to look at his son’s new girlfriend-to examine her without seeming to. She is prettier, even, than in the photograph-her eyes are somehow brighter, bluer, her hair a truer shade of gold-but her beauty, Arthur decides, is not the kind that everyone would necessarily notice, nor something she herself is aware of, as some pretty girls are. She is wearing jeans and a wool cap, like a beret, and a puffy nylon ski jacket, navy blue and zipped to the collar against the cold; Arthur can see, peeking through the neckline, a pink oxford shirt with a threadbare collar that he recognizes as his son’s-a shirt, in fact, that used to be Arthur’s. He can tell she is as surprised as Arthur is that O’Neil has done so well, and that her surprise is part of his son’s happiness; it is an unexpected gift he has given both of them.

When the last runners have crossed, the coach steps up and claps O’Neil on the back. “See what I’m saying? About the kick?” He puts his bearded face close to O’Neil’s and thumps the middle of his chest with the butt of his fist. “You have to go in.” He turns to Arthur and Miriam and shakes their hands again, as if meeting them for the first time.

“Your son ran quite a race,” he says. “I don’t know what you fed him last night, but do it again sometime.”

Despite O’Neil’s surprising finish the team as a whole hasn’t done that well. Most have finished in the second pack, well behind the leaders. Their strongest runner, whom they were counting on to place in the top three, twisted an ankle out on the course and was forced to drop out. O’Neil points him out, an ordinary-looking boy hobbling around the infield with a sack of ice in his hand.

“I guess he didn’t go in,” O’Neil says. “To tell the truth, I can’t stand that guy. He’s a good runner, but that’s not everything.”

Arthur looks away from the boy and returns his gaze to O’Neil, who is putting his sweats back on and sucking a wedge of orange that someone has handed him. The pleasure he feels in his son, he knows, is something new. He is watching his son step into himself, into life. Suddenly Arthur knows that, from this day, the love that he feels for O’Neil will be a different kind of love. His son’s transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.

“Let’s celebrate,” Arthur says. He turns to Miriam, realizing suddenly that he has almost forgotten she is there; he has forgotten Sandra, too, walking beside his son with their arms wrapped around one another’s waists, like any couple.

At the edge of the field O’Neil stops. “Great,” he says. “Well, actually, I should go back for a while.” He tips his head over his shoulder toward the bleachers, where the two teams are still gathered. “It’s the last meet of the season. Sandra has a game to get ready for too.”

“That’s right.” Arthur gives her his best smile, though he is disappointed; he would like to have O’Neil to himself for a while. “Field hockey, right?”

She shrugs modestly. “It’s just JV.”

“JV nothing,” Arthur says. “I hear you girls really kick some ass.”

Sandra laughs at this, knowing, as she must, that she is hearing O’Neil’s words played back by his father. They agree to meet instead for dinner, after her game, and that Arthur and Miriam will spend the day shopping in town. The question of Sandra’s parents turns out to be no question at all; they are out of the country, she explains, sailing in the Caribbean.

“Did you notice the shirt?” Arthur asks later. They have returned to their room to change for lunch; they are planning to eat someplace nice, to make up for last night’s bad meal at the hotel. Miriam is sitting on the bed, wriggling out of her jeans and into a pair of warm wool slacks. Arthur, at the mirror, slides the knot of his necktie to his throat.

“What are you talking about?”

“Sandra’s.” He can’t say why he’s brought the subject up; he wonders if he’s being mean. “It’s not important, I guess. Under her coat? A pink oxford, frayed at the collar.” He shrugs, and resumes tying his tie. “I thought maybe it was one you gave me once.”

Miriam flops back on the mattress to pull her slacks on the rest of the way. “I’ve never given you a pink shirt in my life,” she says.

Miriam sleeping, dreaming of birds: a silly and disturbing dream, in which all the birds-ravens, parrots, sparrows, canaries-are wearing hats. Why are you wearing hats? she wants to ask. Do birds wear hats now? Was it always this way? She is in an empty room, she is at the hospital-not the one in Cooperstown, but a hospital from years ago-she is alone in a field of purple heather and can’t find her children; the birds are responsible, the birds have taken them away. Arthur is beside her now. See? he is saying. It is all so simple. The children are gone; they have flown away from you. She turns then but it is no longer Arthur beside her; her father is there now, wearing a white shirt and suspenders to hold up his gray trousers. She breathes him in, a smell like the color blue. Pure happiness fills her, as if she has stepped into a beam of light. Daddy, she says, Daddy, I thought you’d died. Oh, baby girl, he says, and touches her wet cheek; oh, baby girl, I’m sorry, I did.

She awakens then in the half-dark room, a room she doesn’t remember at all. Her mind is adrift, unfixed; she feels almost afloat. Across from her she sees a bureau with a porcelain washbasin and pitcher, and on the nightstand, a telephone, with instructions taped to the dial. The hotel, she remembers. She is at the hotel, in New Hampshire. It is Saturday. O’Neil has run his race-a sudden pleasure fills her, not only for his victory but the fact that she knew, in advance, that it would occur-and she and Arthur had lunch together after, and wine besides, and returned to their room for a nap. The clock on the table says that it is just past four; at six they will meet O’Neil and Sandra for dinner. Beside her Arthur softly snores.

What is wrong with me? she thinks. Why can’t I like this girl? She reviews, in order, O’Neil’s girlfriends of the past: sweet little Ellen, whom he used to buy Cokes for at school dances; the vaguely Asiatic, exotically named Ione, almost certainly his first kiss (she had caught them, or nearly, standing too close and blushing at the bottom of the basement stairs); the girl who she has always thought of as “ninth-grade Nancy,” plump and funny and without question the smartest of them all (at MIT now, she’s heard, and thin); the blur of Betsys and Danielles and Sarahs and Elizabeths in the last two years of high school, when there was always some new voice in the kitchen on Saturday evenings and O’Neil, in so many ways, had begun to hit his stride. Why can’t I?

She finds herself thinking, then, not of Sandra but of Kay, realizing that she hasn’t spoken to her in at least two-three?-weeks. (Though if Kay wanted to talk, she could have called herself. And isn’t silence, in its way, a good sign? That everything is well, that the ship is still steaming safely away from shore?) Disapproving, moody Kay. How like Kay to make Miriam feel so awful, suddenly, about everything, by doing nothing, by simply existing at the far end of a telephone line running from this hotel room to the apartment in New Haven that she shares with her husband, Jack-dreary, low ceilinged, and filled with obscure, unreadable books and rickety graduate-student furniture. What has Kay ever wanted except to be left alone? Even when she imagines Kay now, when she goes to the past to think of her child, she sees her at a distance; this little girl with curly brown hair, frowning at her dull and meaningless toys, waiting only for the moment when she could leave them all behind. It was as if Kay was born with a secret she was determined not to share, the secret of who she was. Of all the difficulties Miriam had imagined, this was the one she had never anticipated: that her child should seem not to love her, to acknowledge her as important and real. Other parents complained about their teenagers, how these sweet, cuddly children who had doled out love in generous heaps had, almost overnight, been reborn as intense and gloomy strangers who shrank from their very touch; how their bad hair, bad skin, bad moods, and bad friends were a symptom of some deeper, but one had to believe temporary, badness. On paper Kay was the daughter any mother would be proud of, a trouble-free honors student who spent her weekends reading fat Victorian novels and won a full ride early to Yale, tidy and polite, with a nugget of loyal friends whom Miriam knew less about than the inhabitants of a distant sun. It would have been a relief, almost, if Kay had run into some trouble: if she had missed curfew once or twice, come home in a daze smelling of beer or pot, or been caught smoking cigarettes behind the metal shop at high school; something, anything, to prove that she was angry and give her anger shape, a place at the table. But there was nothing. She lived in their house like a dowager boarder. There was no badness to complain about; there was just no Kay.

“Don’t you like any of us?” Miriam had asked once, in despair. The insult was slight; Kay had declined, with her customary cool politeness, to go on a family picnic. She was fifteen, and had chosen to forgo a few hours of togetherness in healthy summer sunshine to finish a novel she was reading. (Not even one assigned for class; her homework, she confessed, was long done.) The car was packed. O’Neil and Arthur were waiting in the drive; Miriam had returned to the house half hoping to find Kay doing something wrong but had found her, instead, sitting at the kitchen table intently reading precisely the book she had professed a desire to read. The room was silent; not even the radio was playing. She had poured herself a glass of milk. At the sound of Miriam’s voice Kay’s eyes rose from the page, wearing an expression of bored concern that was, Miriam realized, completely parental. What are you talking about? her eyes said. What on earth are you doing? I’m trying to read a book.

“Don’t take it personally. Of course I like you.”

Miriam opened her mouth to speak, but what more was there to say? The disarming literalness of Kay’s answer made anything else, any deeper probing, impossible.

“It’s all right,” Kay insisted. Her eyes returned to her book before she had even finished talking; she gave a little wave. “For goodness sakes, go have fun.”

Now, ten years later, Miriam feels the humiliation of the moment afresh, how her fury and need had been twisted in on themselves, and turned into silence. She remembers almost nothing of the picnic itself; she remembers only this moment in the kitchen, and the one that followed, when she stepped from the house into the sunshine and surrendered to it, its blinding light and promise. Fine. Fun. Read in the dreary kitchen if you must. On the bed Miriam lets one hand rise to where the lump is; at the end of her fingertips she feels its firm, insistent shape, and allows her touch to linger there. (It could still, of course, be nothing; though wouldn’t someone have said so, if it could be nothing? Whatever it is, it is not nothing.) Beside her, on the little bedside table, the telephone rests, unused.

She rises then, careful not to wake Arthur, pulls on a sweater and shoes and her coat, and leaves the hotel. Evening has fallen; the air is dry and very still, and lights are coming on. She walks alone to the center of town, toward the restaurant where she and Arthur had lunch, though that is not her destination. Horace Bullfinch, Glassworks: the sign hangs on iron hooks over the front door, its lettering crisply ornate, like the sign on an old-time apothecary shop. It is a large brick structure, half hanging over the dammed river, with a wheel that turns in the water beneath it. By the door, a wide glass window is fogged with steam.

She steps inside and finds herself in a large room with tables and chairs scattered about, and a counter for coffee and sweets. On the far side she sees a wall of windows, looking out over the millpond, and beyond it a patio, with tables and chairs covered for the season. The room is empty except for a lone woman standing at the pastry counter, reading in the heat. Her eyes rise as Miriam enters; she nods, smiling emptily, and then returns to her magazine.

Stairs lead down to the basement. Miriam finds herself once again in a large room, though the space has been divided in half: a gift shop on one side, and on the other, behind a wall of thick Plexiglas, a demonstration area, where a man and a woman are working. Miriam sheds her coat and joins the small group of people who have gathered to watch. At either end of the space are two stone kilns, like bank safes, their interiors glowing with a churning heat; between, laid across long work tables, rest half-a-dozen long metal tubes. The process is a blur of detail. In the tiny work area the man and the woman move with a graceful and liquid surety, like a couple dancing, though they are dressed cumbersomely, for hard labor: heavy aprons and thick safety glasses, rubber gloves that reach to their elbows, denim jeans and shirts despite the heat that Miriam knows must be searing. Somehow they manage to maneuver their long poles in and out of the heat, from table to kiln and back again, never colliding with anything or with each other, but never speaking either. They are young, in their thirties; Miriam imagines-then is certain-that they are married. (No, she decides, not dancing; cooking. It is as if she is watching a couple cooking in a kitchen.) The woman wears her dark hair in a long, swinging braid, wonderfully thick, and has a strong, narrow face. Behind her goggles her eyes are calm, and shine with the reflected light of the kilns. In and out of the fire she guides her rods, a half dozen at her command, spinning them with quick intensity as they cool. As Miriam studies her, she holds one to her lips, puffs out her cheeks, and expels a steady exhalation of breath. At the other end of the tube a bubble appears; Miriam finds herself exhaling, too, a breath that she realizes she has been holding in anticipation. The bubble expands to the size of a Ping-Pong ball, then a tennis ball; its surface gleams with the wet translucence of a baby’s fingernails. It seems perfect to Miriam, and yet the woman is not satisfied. Examining it, she frowns, then worries it quickly with a knife before reinserting it into the fire.

It is then that Miriam notices the small display table in front of the Plexiglas wall, and on it a solitary glass pitcher, no more than four inches tall, with a wide curling lip. The walls of the pitcher are voluptuously thick, like the cream that the pitcher itself is intended to hold. A tented slip of paper beside it bears the price: $50.00. Fifty dollars for a cream pitcher. She knows why she has come; she will buy the pitcher, as a present for Kay.

But in the gift shop the saleswoman tells her that they’re sold out; the last cream pitcher is the one on the table, and not for sale. She offers to take an order for her-she can have the pitcher in just a week or two, the woman explains, certainly in time for the holidays-but Miriam shakes her head, no. The point is to have it now, to feel the pure pleasure of coveting something and receiving it immediately, in one smooth transaction of discovery; waiting even a week or two, she knows, would break the chain. She has resigned herself to leaving the shop empty handed-she has put on her coat and scarf-when something else catches her eye. On a shelf above the sales counter she sees a display of glass musical instruments, the size of Christmas ornaments. A guitar, a saxophone, a tiny, jeweled flute: each is miraculously detailed, made of a brittle, paper-thin glass like the skin of ice on a puddle just frozen. In all her life Miriam has never seen anything like them. She dares herself to peek at one of the dangling tags: $140.00. Astounding, she thinks. But it could be a thousand. In her heart she has already bought one. Who is it for? For O’Neil? For Kay? For herself? Miriam finds the one she wants and lifts it gingerly from the shelf. She is surprised, and not surprised, to find that it weighs nearly nothing. The saleswoman stands silently beside her, wearing an expression of pleasurable expectancy that Miriam knows must be a mirror of her own. In her open palm she holds out the glass trombone for the woman to see.

“A gift,” she says.

The evening’s guest list expands: A phone call to O’Neil’s room to tell them they’re on their way, and now his roommate, Stephen, will be joining them, and his new girlfriend, Eliza-the girl from across the hall, with the black hair and silk robe and morning cigarette.

“None of their folks came up for the weekend,” he explains to Miriam. “They’re like little orphans.”

In the background Miriam can hear laughter, and then Stephen’s clear voice, reciting a line from Oliver Twist: “Please, sir, I want some more.” In his hammy cockney accent the words come out as “Ple-suh, I want sum-moa.”

“They’re a sad sight,” O’Neil says. “Besides,” he whispers, “I sort of already made the offer.”

“Did Sandra win her game?”

“That’s the spirit, Mom. Yeah, a real blowout. She scored twice, and took a good one in the shins. I’ll let her tell you all about it.”

At O’Neil’s dormitory everybody piles into the big Peugeot, the girls in the back seat, O’Neil and Stephen stretched out like oversized children in the wagon’s cargo compartment with the jumper cables and bags of sand. The mood of the group is exuberant; Miriam wonders if the four of them have been drinking, and then wonders why she is wondering; it’s a party, it’s fine if they have. Turned in her seat, she chats with the girls about the hockey game-Eliza is on the team too-and listens to their gossip about other people she doesn’t know, their coaches and teachers and classmates. Eliza, it turns out, is also from Boston; in the dark car her teeth shine very white-the white of china-and she laughs easily, more easily than Sandra, who seems, beside her, a figure of almost mysterious calm.

“I always knew O’Neil would have cool parents,” Eliza says.

“You hear that, folks?” O’Neil calls from the back. “You passed.”

Eliza lights a cigarette she has taken from her purse and opens her window to exhale a trail of smoke.

“Hey, you’re freezing us back here!” O’Neil says. “Pee-ew!”

Eliza turns to Sandra. “Did you hear something?” She passes the cigarette back to Stephen, who takes a drag and hands it back, over his shoulder.

“What part of Boston are you from?” Miriam asks Eliza. Then, to Sandra, “Did you know each other before?”

The two women look at each other, and then, puzzlingly, burst into laughter.

“We’re cousins,” Sandra explains.

At the restaurant Miriam waits with O’Neil and his friends in the bar, while Arthur goes to find out about their table. When the two girls leave for a minute to go to the ladies’ room, and Stephen is ordering drinks for everyone at the bar, she takes O’Neil’s elbow.

“I wanted you to know,” she says, “I think Sandra is just great.”

“Well, she likes you too.” He smiles and rocks back on his heels. “It’s no big deal, Ma.”

She wants to tell him about Sandra’s present, stashed in her purse, but decides to let it be a surprise. She hasn’t even told Arthur about it. With his friends along it will probably have to wait, anyway.

“Of course it’s a big deal. If she’s the one you like.”

O’Neil shrugs, embarrassed. Stephen returns from the bar and hands each of them a drink: club soda for Miriam, a beer for O’Neil. The season is over.

“I know you don’t like the haircut,” O’Neil says. “I didn’t tell you, but it was Sandra’s idea. She’s kind of nuts about short hair.”

“And hats,” Miriam says. For the evening Sandra has traded in her wool beret for a flapper’s doeskin cap, pea-green, the front brim folded up and away from her forehead.

O’Neil laughs and holds up a finger. “Right. Don’t forget hats.”

By the time they get to the table, it is after eight. Sandra is due back at the college at nine-thirty, to help the other band members set up for the dance in the ballroom, so they all order their steaks and eat quickly, everyone talking and drinking and eating at once in the crowded restaurant. Miriam was disappointed, at first, when she learned that Eliza and Stephen would come along-that her time with O’Neil would be diluted in this way-but now she thinks better of this; it is good to see him with his friends, a part of something entirely his own. The four talk easily, finishing one another’s sentences and laughing at jokes before they’ve ended, and though Sandra is the quietest one, Miriam can tell that she is, in some ways, the center, the planet around which they turn. When the conversation drifts too far into their college lives, it is always Sandra who leads it back to Arthur and Miriam, asking them questions about O’Neil or their stay in town, and always at a moment when this will seem natural. Stephen is the comedian, O’Neil the straight man who lets him shine; Eliza is the gay one, in love with her own beauty and the power it possesses. She flirts openly with O’Neil and even Arthur, but always offers something small-a sparkling glance, a touch of the hand-to Stephen, to remind him she’s with him. Miriam knows that this is what her son has wished for: to show her and Arthur the new family he has made.

The last of the wine is being served when Miriam looks up to find Sandra’s gaze upon her. A slightly too-long moment passes; then Sandra smiles.

“Let’s thank our hosts,” she says to everyone. Expressions of gratitude float over the table as goblets are raised. Miriam feels her face grow warm: how lovely to be thanked. But her pleasure goes deeper than this. These aren’t children talking, but grown-ups. Their thanks are genuine, something they’ve chosen to offer.

“Let’s not forget about your race,” Arthur adds.

O’Neil laughs and lifts his glass. “Fourth place. The highlight of my career.”

When they’re done, Miriam whispers to Arthur to flag down their waitress so they can pay the bill, but it turns out he’s already done this. Somehow he has slipped his credit card to the waitress and signed the bill without Miriam-or anyone-even noticing. As they’re getting ready to leave, Miriam pulls Arthur aside in the vestibule. “Eliza was right about you,” she says.

Arthur looks at her. “How’s that?”

She takes his arm and winks. “Very cool.”

Back at the college Sandra excuses herself to run ahead to the ballroom, and by the time the group arrives, they see her up on the stage with the other members of the jazz band, getting ready to play. Tables are spread out across the room where students and their parents are gathered; already a line has formed by the beer keg. The room is decorated with crepe paper and streamers and, over the stage, a large blue-and-gold banner, identical to the one at the college’s front entrance, that reads, Welcome Parents. A mirrored ball hangs from the center of the ceiling, spangling the floor and walls with a confetti of colored light.

“You’ll see, Mom,” O’Neil says happily. He loosens his tie and nods at the stage, where Sandra is talking to other members of the brass section. She is easy to pick out, even in the darkened room, because of her hat. As Miriam is watching her, she brings her trombone to her lips, pumps the slide three or four times, and releases a single, crisp note. “They’re really very good.”

The room fills up with parents and students. Onstage the band readies itself to play, testing their instruments with random notes that tense the crowd with anticipation. Then there is a pause, the bandleader raises his arms, and the music begins. After just a few phrases Miriam knows what she’s hearing: “In the Mood.”

She pulls Arthur close to speak over the music. “My God.” She laughs. “Just how old do they think we are?” But the band, as O’Neil predicted, is very good; already she can feel their precise rhythms moving through her. Why did she not think of this? A night of music: it’s what she needs.

“Come on.” Arthur steers her with a hand at her spine. “Let’s dance.”

She dances with Arthur, then O’Neil, then Stephen. A wonderful energy fills her. Song after song-“Satin Doll,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “Chain of Fools”-the dancing continues without rest. When the band finally breaks at ten-thirty, Sandra appears to drink a soda and dance with O’Neil-a DJ spins records to keep the party going-and then the band takes the stage again, kicking off their second set with a tart blast from the horn section and the theme from Hawaii Five-0. A wonderful, surprising, joke; whole tables rise to their feet and take the floor again.

The evening roars onward, a party so unexpectedly marvelous it cannot be refused. All through the second set Miriam dances; she cannot recall an evening when she danced so much, not for years and years. Arthur to O’Neil to Stephen and back again; when the band pauses between songs, she gets herself a cup of beer-just awful, thin and warm as dishwater, but somehow perfect-and stands off to one side to catch her breath and watch.

Then O’Neil is at her side. His face is flushed with pleasure, his brow glazed with sweat. He takes her by the hand. “Ready?”

“No, really. I’m exhausted.”

He laughs incredulously, and gives a little pull. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

“I just need a little breather, sweetie.”

“I don’t believe it.” He frowns, though not seriously. “Well. The next one, okay? With Sandra up onstage we’re one girl short.”

She nods. She cannot help herself; how marvelous, she thinks, to be called a girl. “The next one.”

She watches O’Neil head back into the crowd; she realizes that for the first time that evening, she is alone. And yet she does not feel alone. The wonderful music, the spinning lights, all O’Neil’s friends there (for more have arrived; he seems to know everyone); she has the uncanny sense of stepping into his life, and all the promise it contains. With her eyes she searches the open floor again and finds O’Neil dancing with a dark-haired girl she does not recognize; she sees Arthur dancing with Eliza, and Stephen, a solitary figure at the base of the stage, swaying his hips and pumping his fist, a beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other; she sees Sandra swinging her trombone back and forth in time to the music’s joyful rhythms. She knows that O’Neil has left her, that his life has begun, but the thought does not grieve her. It is as if time has thrown off its moorings, revealing all-that she, Miriam, has disappeared. She thinks of her father, gone twelve years, and her mother, too, sleeping her way into death not long after, as if it were not possible for her to remain in the world without him. A hole had opened; she had only to step through. After the funeral, the second in a year, Miriam walked alone through the Brooklyn apartment, not so much missing them as marveling at their absence. The places they had been, had sat and stood and walked and slept and eaten: fifty years of life in this place, and now they were gone. And yet their presence was vivid, palpable-a thing not seen but felt, like a parting of air. It was as if she were walking through the rooms of memory. She is remembering this, and watching too; the music stops-not the end of a song, merely a break in the action-the dancers stop in their tracks, and she sees O’Neil, the dark-haired girl swung out to the very tips of his fingers, throw back his head and laugh. The words, half remembered, form in her head. See? It is all so simple. The children are gone; they have flown away from you.

And this is when she feels it-the first pain. What she has experienced until now has been more of a presence, a sense of something there. It was this awareness that brought her fingers to her breast to find the lump two weeks ago. But now, at this moment watching her son and his friends dancing, her mind adrift in the past, a tiny ball of fire ignites within her. It rockets through her body with a nauseating rush, leaving her hands and feet tingling, her brow glazed, her throat constricted with bile. The room lurches below her; she reaches one hand outward to brace herself, but finds nothing to hold, to stop her fall. The wall, she thinks. The wall will save her. Three more steps and she is there.

Then someone has taken her by the elbow: it is Sandra, standing beside her. Wasn’t she just onstage?

“Mrs. Burke?”

But Miriam cannot speak; she knows if she doesn’t leave the room immediately she will be sick, or faint. The gymnasium seems like an enormous fishbowl, colors and shapes bending in the crooked, swirling light. At some impossible distance she sees Arthur and Eliza dancing, like two figures swimming on the far side of a lake.

“I’m ill,” she manages.

“I know. I’ll help you.”

A pair of metal safety doors, then the sudden white light of the hallway: guiding her by the elbow, Sandra leads her away, though Miriam is barely aware of any of this. All she knows is that the music is gone, sealed away behind her. Another door opens and she finds herself in a small room full of instruments; she is backstage, where the band keeps its supplies. Relief overwhelms her, like oxygen to the lungs. She realizes that she is sitting on a bench of some kind, and that Sandra has gone, but the moment she discovers this she looks up and sees that Sandra has returned, carrying her purse. She holds a paper cup of water before Miriam’s face.

“Drink this,” she says, and guides her hand around the cup.

Miriam lifts the water to her lips. It is cool but not cold, and she sips at it, thinking only of the water’s taste, and her own pounding heart. The pain is gone, but in its wake it has deposited a kind of tingling numbness, scattered throughout her body like a luminous dust. So this is what it will be like, she thinks.

A few moments pass. She finishes the water, and Sandra takes the cup. “Do you need the bathroom?” Sandra has pulled a chair up, and is sitting directly in front of her.

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you want me to get Mr. Burke?”

Miriam shakes her head. “You’ve done more than enough. I just need to rest here a minute.”

Sandra’s eyes search her face. They are very blue-the blue of sapphires.

“He doesn’t know,” Sandra says then.

But before Miriam can say anything, Sandra goes on. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. You haven’t told Arthur, have you? Or O’Neil.”

Miriam shakes her head. “No.”

“And it’s cancer? A kind of cancer.”

Miriam nods, amazed beyond words. “Yes. I think so. I have a tumor in my breast. How did you-”

“It’s all right.” Sandra takes her hand. “I just do.”

For a while they just sit there, their hands together. And Miriam is glad she has said it. Finally, she has used the words.

“I’ll tell you how,” Sandra says gently. “I don’t know if it’s the real reason, but I’ve always thought so. I was six years old, and I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Do you know what that is?”

“I think so.”

“Most people don’t. I spent most of two years in the hospital. Little kids who get it nearly always die, but I didn’t know that at the time. My parents sure weren’t going to tell me. But I found it out, later. Chemo, radiation, things they’d never tried on anyone before. I had it all. And when it was over, I could always tell when someone was sick, even if they didn’t know it yet. I guess I’d been around cancer patients so long, I could just read the signs.”

“When did you know about me?”

“Well, when we first met, at the race, I thought it.” Sandra tips one shoulder and frowns; Miriam can tell she has returned to the moment, to feel what it was like. “At dinner too. It was just an inkling. You’ll probably laugh. Sometimes it’s lights, or a sort of ringing sound. Sometimes it’s just a feeling, like I’m remembering what it was like to be sick myself. I wasn’t certain until I saw you just now, outside.”

The understanding hits her all at once. “The hats,” Miriam says.

“You’ve discovered my secret.” Sandra smiles warmly, shrugging. “I just don’t feel dressed without one.”

The door opens then, washing the room with music and noise, and a heavyset boy steps inside. Like the other band members he is wearing a navy suit and a gold necktie, and his face is flushed with the exertion of playing. He stops when he sees the two of them.

“Christ, Sandy. Where have you been? We had to shuffle the playlist twice already. You were supposed to be off break ten minutes ago.”

Sandra barely takes her eyes off Miriam. “Just a minute in here, all right, Joe? I’ll be done soon. You can get along without me.”

His face falls. “You don’t have to be such a crank about it. We need charts for the third set, anyway.” He kneels and rustles through a cardboard carton to find it, then leaves the two of them alone.

“We should probably get back,” Miriam says.

“When you feel up to it.” Sandra gestures toward the stage door. “They can fake it for a while.”

A question occurs to her. “Does O’Neil know about you?”

“About the cancer?” Sandra shakes her head. “I think he knows I was sick, but not the details. I’ll tell him sooner or later. He thinks I’m just some kind of superachiever, and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to spoil the illusion yet.”

Her purse is at her feet; she remembers Sandra returning to get it. Miriam asks Sandra to bring her some more water, and Sandra leaves with the cup, reappearing almost at once. Miriam drinks it down-she hadn’t realized she was so thirsty-and opens her purse to remove the small package with the glass trombone inside. She places it in Sandra’s hands.

“It’s just something small. I saw it today, and thought of you. But open it later. I don’t want O’Neil to know just yet.”

Sandra looks at the package in her palm. It is wrapped in thin white tissue paper, with a crinkly green bow. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you, Mrs. Burke.”

“You’re welcome. And it’s Mimi, okay?”

Sandra smiles. “Mimi, then.”

They have risen to go when Miriam stops. “Sandra, this thing you can do.” Miriam pauses, wondering what words to choose. “Can you tell if someone’s going to be all right?”

Sandra doesn’t answer. For a long moment she looks at Miriam, studying her, though her expression is nothing Miriam can read. Then she removes her hat, a dome of green felt, and places it on Miriam’s head. The band is warm, and a little damp against her forehead.

“I’d say you will be,” she declares, “if you go to the doctor.”

Hours later, beneath the floodlights of the dormitory parking lot, they say their good-byes; Arthur and Miriam will be leaving in the morning, and won’t see O’Neil and Sandra again. Miriam hugs each in turn, and watches as Arthur, awkwardly, does the same. As they are turning to go, Sandra hugs Miriam again, and whispers quickly in her ear, “I really believe it. Just remember what I said.” O’Neil and Sandra are still standing in the parking lot when Miriam and Arthur drive away.

In the morning they awaken late to rumors of snow. They eat their breakfast and pack the car, and while Arthur is paying the bill, Miriam waits outside. The sky is gray, a northern gray; the air is very still. Around her the town and the campus are quiet, as if everyone is still asleep.

Arthur steps from the hotel. “I called O’Neil. I thought we might change plans and buy the two of them lunch.”

“And?”

Arthur rubs his bare hands together in the cold. “He wasn’t there. Or he wasn’t answering. I left a message.”

“It’s just as well,” Miriam says. In the pocket of her coat she carries Sandra’s hat, folded, like a letter. “It’s a long drive ahead. And they have things to do.” She takes Arthur’s hand. “It’s time for Mom and Dad to let the kids be alone. Us too.”

His face is incredulous. “You’re okay with this, then?”

A new mood has filled her, a sense of lightness. “I think I was always okay,” she says.

They drive away. Woods, houses, the limbs of the bare trees: Miriam watches the scenery from the passenger window, letting it all flow past, like pictures in an empty museum. Beside her in the quiet car Arthur drives with both hands on the wheel; with deft precision he negotiates each curve, each dip in the road ahead. She will tell him, she decides. She will tell him today, or else tomorrow, and he will be with her when she visits the surgeon on Tuesday, and then whatever happens, happens; but they will do it together, this last thing they have never done before, worrying together that one of them is finally dying.

They have driven just twenty miles when they see, up ahead, the low, barracks-like shape of a roadside motel, set against woods on a small rise above the highway. The sign hangs on a chain: Glade View Motor Court. Cable TV. Welcome Skiers! A dozen dismal rooms; they have passed it many times before, and each time she has imagined their interiors: the narrow, caved-in beds, the frayed shag carpeting reeking of old smoke, the floor-standing lamp that is also an ashtray. The idea arrives in her consciousness so fully formed it is like a memory of something that has already happened.

“Turn here,” she says.

Arthur taps the brake. As the car coasts to the shoulder, he turns to her and raises an eyebrow in happy surprise.

“I’m not arguing. But, really?”

It is a little past noon. “Oh, just turn, love,” she says.

November 12, 1979, Sunday afternoon. In room 106 of the Glade View Motor Court, Arthur and Miriam make love. They make love to one another in the icy room-the decor is just as bad as Miriam imagined-piling all the blankets they can find on top of themselves for warmth, and when it is over, they sleep-the happy, dreamless sleep of lovers.

It is after four when they awake. Dusk has fallen; through the paper-thin wall above their heads they hear the murmur of a television, and a man’s voice saying, “Honey, watch this-you can see where the makeup stops on his neck. If that’s a real gorilla, then I’m president of the United States.” But they hear no reply; Miriam wonders if the occupant of the next room, whoever he is, is talking to himself. For a while they lie awake and listen, side by side but holding hands, though they hear nothing more from the other side of the wall; eventually the television goes off, and they hear the door of the next room open and close again. Outside in the parking lot a car engine roars to life.

Arthur rises to shower. Alone in the room, Miriam listens to hear if the man in the next room will return; when he doesn’t, she flicks on the television, looking for the program he was watching, but can’t find it. She watches a few minutes of a soccer game and then switches to a local station, where a woman in a canary-yellow pantsuit is giving the weather report, making broad, approximate gestures at a map of New England. Arthur is still showering; a slice of steam puffs under the bathroom door. She turns off the TV, settles back into the saggy bed, and then picks up the telephone from the nightstand. Kay answers on the second ring.

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Mama?”

“It’s me. We’re in New Hampshire. We came up to visit your brother.”

“I see. So, just how is the little squirt?”

“Not so little. He won his race. Well, not won. But he came in fourth. He’s got a new girlfriend.”

“So I’ve heard.” Kay pauses. “Mama, where are you?”

“Where am I?”

“Your voice sounds… I don’t know. Strange. Far away, maybe.”

“Everything is fine, sweetheart. We stopped on the way home. I was just thinking about you, is all. How’s Jack?”

“Jack, Jack. Let me see. Jack’s at the library tonight, just like every other night. Jack is Jack, in other words. It looks like he may actually get that grant he applied for, by the way.”

“The grant.” Miriam searches her memory, coming up empty. She is suddenly so sleepy that at first she thinks her daughter is talking about somebody named Grant. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not important, Mama. He applied for a university fellowship is all, so he doesn’t have to teach while he finishes his dissertation. We talked about it a while ago, but I can see why you wouldn’t remember.” Then, “Do you really want to talk about Jack?”

“We could. He’s your husband.”

“So he is. This doesn’t necessarily make him something to discuss, however. Mama? Is something going on there?”

Miriam touches her cheeks, and when her fingers come away glistening with moisture, she realizes she is crying.

“I think I’m just in a sad kind of mood. A winter mood. It’s snowing here, I think. Or it’s about to snow. I was just thinking about you.”

“Well I was thinking about you, too, Mama. And you don’t have to worry about me and Jack. He’s really not so bad.”

“Does he make you happy?” She is sorry the instant she has said it. “Forgive me. It’s really none of my business.”

“Of course it’s your business, Mama. Why would you think that wasn’t your business? And to answer your question, I guess I’d have to say that, on the whole, he has the ability to make me happy. I know a lot of women who don’t get even that.”

From the bathroom Miriam hears the groan of the pipes as Arthur shuts the shower off. “I think that’s so. I was lucky with your father.”

“Was?”

“Was what, honey?”

Kay hesitates. “You said ‘was lucky.’ Like you weren’t lucky anymore.”

“Did I? Well, that’s wrong. Am, I mean.” She nods her head against the pillow. “Am lucky.”

A momentary silence falls, though not, to Miriam, an uncomfortable one. She listens to her daughter’s breathing, even and clean, and her own, slower but somehow the same, mingling over the wires. In the glow of the lights from the parking lot outside, she imagines Kay in her cramped kitchen, sitting on a stool with the phone pressed to her ear, waiting to hear what she, Miriam, will next say.

“You know, I was thinking that I’d like to get Jack something special for Christmas this year. Can you let me know if there’s something he’d like?”

“I will, Mama. That’s sweet of you. I really will give it some thought.”

“And not a book, though I know that’s probably what he wants. Something more… I don’t know. Personal.”

“Okay, Mama.”

“And for you, too, of course. If there’s anything.”

“There won’t be, but thanks. Mama?”

“Yes, sweetie?” Her eyes are half closed.

“Is there something you’re not telling me? Because the problem is, I have to go now. I really, really do. I have to pick up Jack at the library, and then we’re meeting some friends for dinner. I was on my way out when you called.”

“Oh.” Miriam hears the disappointment in her voice. “Well, that’s fine. We can talk later.”

“If it was something I could change, I would. We haven’t spoken in a while, and I’m really glad you called. But Jack’s going to be waiting for me.”

“It’s really all right. You go get Jack.”

“And everything’s fine with you and Daddy?”

“Everything’s fine, sweetheart.”

“And the boyo’s okay?”

She thinks of O’Neil standing in the dormitory parking lot, his arm around Sandra, as she and Arthur drove away. But the memory, she realizes, is not accurate. At the end they had stood together without touching.

“O’Neil’s fine too. Don’t you worry. You go get Jack, okay? He’ll be waiting for you. Everything’s all right. I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too, Mama.”

And they hang up without saying good-bye.

Dusk in November, the last of the leaves pulled away; it is a little after five, and in the cities and towns of northern New England-in Rutland and Manchester, in Montpelier and Burlington, in Concord and St. Johnsbury and White River Junction and all the rest-the weathermen and air-traffic controllers see, on their radar screens, the same thing: the arrival of the first snowstorm of the season, a widening wedge of lights poking eastward from upstate New York and the Great Lakes. Their faith in their technology is absolute, a religion of professional habit, but they cannot help themselves; the eyes long to see what the mind already knows, and what science has predicted. They see the weather on the screen (there is something Christmassy about it, this expanding cone of light), and lift their gaze to the window, and the snow.

At a long wooden table in the college library, O’Neil takes no notice of the arriving storm; he has pushed his books and papers aside to place his head in the hollow of his folded arms, and is fast asleep, and dreaming. It is a simple, happy dream-a dream of springtime and a golden field in mountains-and O’Neil is both everywhere and nowhere in it. He is the mind of the dreamer and the dream itself, the sunshine and the dreamer of the sunshine, and his pleasure is intensified by a sense of recognition: though he does not know this and never will, it’s a dream he’s had for years. Beside him rest the leavings of his enterprise-his opened calculus text, a pad of paper on which he has scrawled the first equations of a problem set, his pitiless calculator, its batteries draining away-while all around in the high-ceilinged room, students are earnestly working, their minds trained like archers’ arrows on tasks of great complexity. But nothing of this reaches him: not the scratch of their pens or the dry turning of their pages, not the buzz of the fluorescent lights or the muffled coughs and whispered conversations of a Sunday evening in a college library at midterm. Asleep, he soars alone through the vast interior space his mind has made-it seems not made of matter but light itself, to exist outside of time-and when at last he awakens, his dream of happiness exhausted, he raises his head from the table to the window to find his reflection looking back at him, and knows without seeing that beyond the darkened glass the sky has begun to issue snow.

Arthur, stepping from the motel room into autumn dusk, experiences the weather first as a kind of optical illusion; expecting neither snow nor darkness-the hour has escaped his attention-and disoriented from an afternoon in an unfamiliar place where he never planned to be, he sees stars instead, mixed with the cloud of his breath, and all the stars are falling. So persuasive is this vision that for a moment he is held captive by it, in mute awe of it. But then a lone car passes on the highway, traveling with an almost delicate slowness, and in the twin beams of its headlights Arthur sees the snow for what it is: the first, dry flakes of an approaching storm. He hears the soft sound of the car’s tires on the road, and the metronomic rhythm of its wipers; as the car vanishes around the bend beyond the motel lot, he extends a single gloved hand past the edge of the concrete overhang and feels the barely detectable tap of crystals in his leathered palm, like a series of disembodied kisses. It is a strange and satisfying sensation-it seems both to encode this instance with a bright physicality, while also possessing all the familiar qualities of deep childhood recollection, so that the moment is at once remembered and about to be remembered-and he knows what the next gesture would be, if he were a slightly different man; he would step beyond the overhang, tip his head backward, close his eyes, and taste the snow on his tongue.

“Art? What’s it doing out?”

Miriam’s voice, coming from inside the room-the door is just ajar-nudges him from his reverie. Before answering he steps into the lot. On its packed gravel surface, and on the Peugeot’s hood and windshield, a white dusting has taken hold. He tests for traction, shifting his weight without moving, and feels the soles of his loafers slide a little. It’s hard to know how bad the driving will be. Probably not very bad to start, though they are headed west, into the heart of the storm.

“I think we’ll be okay.”

She joins him outside, wearing a sweater but no coat; her hair is wet from the shower. “The TV says six inches. More in New York.” Her voice is noncommittal; she is merely presenting the evidence.

“We could stay the night here,” he offers.

Miriam looks at the car, then back at Arthur. As always, when she doesn’t know quite what she feels, or is presented with a choice that leads her no direction in particular, she pulls her eyes into a squint. “Is that what you want to do?”

The question hangs. And there is an answer, Arthur knows-something correct and patient that he should now say, that Miriam is waiting to hear and that it is his job to provide. To attempt this drive is foolishness. They already have a room. The Peugeot, an expensive disappointment, is not all it could be when the roads are slick. But he has already fallen in love with the idea, driving home through the snowy dark. He loves it because he can imagine it: the slow progress of the car, the sleepy stroke of the wipers, the whirl of flakes before the windshield, like water pushed from the prow, and the lights of the other cars on the highway, refracted in the snowy air; the dry wind of the heater and the hours of silence ahead. He imagines his wife asleep beside him, her body half turned in her seat and wrapped with the old blanket they keep in the car, a sweater or coat used to prop her head against the chilly window; he imagines arriving home in darkness, first into town, its streets quiet under all that new snow with no one about, not even the plows yet, and then the house itself. It is midnight, it is one, it is after two-who knows how long the drive will take? He will wait until the car is stopped and the engine is extinguished before he awakens her, to give her the present of their safe arrival. She stirs, rubbing her eyes. Are we…? she asks. And, How long was I…?

In front of their motel room he puts his arm around her waist and gives it a squeeze. “Come on,” he says.

Their bags are already in the Peugeot; the only thing left to do is return the key. Arthur takes it to the office, where he finds the manager sitting behind the counter, smoking and watching a hockey game on a black-and-white television with aluminum foil crimped to the antenna. The picture is so bad, Arthur thinks, that watching it must be like listening to the radio. He places the key on the counter.

“We’ve decided to take off early,” Arthur says, feeling that he should say something. “To get ahead of the weather.”

The manager rises and accepts the key without comment, depositing it into a drawer under the counter. The carelessness of the gesture suggests to Arthur that it doesn’t matter which key is which; perhaps they are all the same.

“I guess we’ll be off now.”

The manager, already back in his chair-green vinyl, with cigarette burns cut into its wooden arms-looks up, as if truly noticing Arthur for the first time.

“Right.” He takes a long, distracted drag off his cigarette and taps it into a beanbag ashtray on the table beside him. “They say it could get bad.”

“I was thinking that if we left right now, we could beat it.”

The manager gives a thoughtful nod, then returns his gaze to the TV screen. “There’s a theory,” he says.

Leaving the lot for the highway, Arthur finds that the driving is surprisingly good. Already an inch has fallen, but the snow is dry, and the road lightly traveled; there has been no chance yet for the snow to melt and then refreeze as ice. He is mindful of the speedometer, keeping the car at just over forty miles per hour, but when he looks at it a moment later, he finds their speed has drifted upward to fifty. He taps the brakes; the wheels bite soundly.

“How is it?” Miriam asks with a yawn.

“Not awful.” Arthur reaches over and touches her hand. “You want to sleep?”

She is halfway there. “For a while, maybe.”

The highway from the motel heads due south, forming a lazy curve that traces the eastern foothills of the Green Mountains. Trees press close to the road; from time to time the forest opens on one side of the highway or the other, but it is too dark for Arthur to see anything, too slippery for him to permit himself anything more than a hasty sidelong glance. In the beams of his headlights the snow has thickened to a dense, whirling mass. A single car passes them in the oncoming lane, then another, then a third, all traveling with a conscientious slowness that neither suggests nor contains panic; it is not a night, yet, that makes people afraid. Arthur thinks about these other cars, where they have come from and where they may be headed; he thinks about Miriam, dozing now beside him, and his son and daughter, elsewhere, busy with their lives, and about the days when each of them was born; he thinks about Dora Auclaire, though as he does he realizes that he does not love her at all. He will never send his letter. He will destroy it, as soon as he can, and when next he sees her-on line at the grocery story, or at the clinic dropping off some papers-he will smile, perhaps say a harmless, genial word or two of greeting, and then go about his business in such a way that she knows, instantly, that all of it is over: the lunches, the looks, the promise, unfulfilled, of something more. He will never hold her hand again, nor imagine what it would be like to be alone with her. All of this he knows, but when he comes to a fork in the highway-the lone decision he must make between the college and the Massachusetts border-he completely fails to notice it, as he also fails to notice when he veers right instead of left. He doesn’t notice the change in the highway number, the road’s sudden, suggestive rise into the hills, or the sign that says, Scenic Route Ahead, its top edge dressed with a two-inch blade of snow. None of these. He will wash Dora Auclaire from his memory, as even now the silence of the car and the whirling cones of snow before him seem to wash away the very world, everything that has ever happened to him and everything that ever will-a dream of dreaming.

They have traveled just ten miles from the motel, but their journey is nearly done. The road veers sharply upward, descends into a hollow smothered by snowy trees, then rises again, ascending toward some unknown apex; at the top, as the car crests-the beams of his headlights vault into space-Arthur can see the sky again, a starless mass of stone, and then below him, the highway curving along a steep embankment. The dropoff is vast, a plunge into nothing; far below he detects an icy glint of river.

Perhaps he sees this. Perhaps, sleeping, he sees nothing at all.

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident-in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come-he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands-as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear. Silence, and his parents, and the snow: he inhabits this moment as if it were not imagined but remembered, with a vividness that seems to lodge in his bones, just as he feels, with his body, the moment when the car lifts on the ice and begins its long, languid arc toward the embankment. There is no guardrail, nothing for the car’s front end to strike, to impede its progress or in any way change the nature of the scene, its dreamlike silence. The total, parabolic energy of their vehicle-thirty-five hundred pounds of diesel-powered French station wagon, traveling at or about the legal speed limit of fifty miles per hour-is suddenly, amazingly, tractionless. It is unbounded, set loose from the earth, and though jealous gravity will soon assert itself, whisking his parents to the valley floor at a velocity sufficient to snap the chassis in two, for this moment they are free; they are as free as ghosts, as comets, they are streaking across the heavens; Arthur and Miriam, together at last.

He was nineteen years old, happy. He did not know yet that it was possible for his life to change, and that once it changed, it would never change back. An hour would pass before his parents were found, and that is the hour O’Neil returns to, every day: the car in the river, the river in the valley, the valley gone under the snow.