Morgan's Passing

There used to be an Easter Fair at the Presbyterian church every year. Early Saturday morning the long, gentle hill out front would be taken over by tents, painted booths, mechanical rides on lease from the Happy Days Amusement Company, and large wooden carts slowly filling up their windows with buttered popcorn. A white rabbit, six feet tall, would bow in a dignified way as he passed out jellybeans from a basket. In the afternoon there would be an egg hunt behind the Sunday School building, and the winner was given a chocolate chicken. Music floated everywhere, strung-out wisps of one song weaving into another. The air always smelled like cotton candy.

But the Baltimore climate was unpredictable. Sometimes it was really too cold for a fair. One year, when Easter fell in March, so little was growing yet that the egg hunt was a joke. The eggs lay exposed and foolish on the bald brown lawn, and children pounced on them with mittened hands. The grownups stood hunched in sweaters and scarves. They seemed to have strayed in from the wrong season. It would have been a better fair with no human beings at all-just the striped tents flapping their spring-colored scallops, the carousel playing "After the Ball," and the plaster horses prancing around riderless.

At the puppet show, in a green and white tent lit by a chilly greenish glow, Cinderella wore a strapless evening gown that made her audience shiver. She was a glove puppet with a large, round head and braids of yellow yarn. At the moment she was dancing with the Prince, who had a Dutch Boy haircut. They held each other so fondly, it was hard to remember they were really just two hands clasping each other. "You have a beautiful palace," she told him. "The floors are like mirrors! I wonder who scrubs them?' Her voice was wry and throaty, not at all puppet-like. You almost expected to see the vapor rising from her painted mouth.

The Prince said, "I have no idea, Miss… what was that name?" Instead of answering, she looked down at her feet. The pause grew too long. The children shifted in their folding chairs. It became apparent that the ballroom was not a ballroom at all, but a gigantic cardboard carton with the front cut away and a gauze curtain at the rear. A child in the audience said, "I have to go to the bathroom,"

"Ssh."

"Your name," said the Prince.

Why didn't she speak?

Really, the children saw, she was only a puppet. They sat back. Something had snapped. Even the parents looked, confused.

Then Cinderella flopped onto her face in a very unnatural way, and a human hand emerged from her skirts and withdrew behind the scrim. The children stared. On the stage lay her dead and empty shell, with her arms flung back as if broken. "Is it over?" a child asked his mother.

"Hush. Sit still. You know that's not how it ends."

"Well, where's the rest, then? Can we go?"

"Wait. Here comes someone." It was a grownup, but just barely. He felt his way through the bedsheet that hung at one side of the stage: a dark, thin boy in khakis and a rust-colored corduroy jacket, with a white shirt so old and well washed that all the life had gone out of it. There was something fierce about him-maybe the twist of his mouth, or the defiant way he kept his chin raised. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, running a hand through his hair. "Boys and girls…"

"It's the Prince," said a child.

"Boys and girls, there's been… an illness. The play is over. You can get your money at the ticket booth." He turned away, not even waiting to see how this would be taken, and fumbled at the sheet. But then be seemed struck by another thought, and he turned back to the audience. "Excuse me," he said. He ran a hand through his hair again. (No wonder it was so mussed and ropy.) "Is there a doctor in the house?" he asked.

They looked at each other-children, mostly, and most of them under five. Apparently there was no doctor. The boy gave a sudden, sharp sigh and lifted a corner of the sheet. Then someone at the rear of the tent stood up.

"I am a doctor," he said.

He was a lank, tall, bearded man in a shaggy brown suit that might have been cut from blankets, and on his head he wore a red ski cap-the pointy kind, with a pom-pom at the tip. Masses of black curls burst out from under it, His beard was so wild and black and bushy that it was hard to tell how old he was. Maybe forty? Forty-five? At any rate, older than you'd expect to see at a puppet show, and no child sat next to him to explain his being there. But he craned his head forward, smiling kindly, leading with his long, pinched nose and waiting to hear how he could help. The boy looked relieved; his face lost some of its tension.

'Come with me," he said. He lifted the sheet higher.

Stumbling over people's feet, sliding past the children who were already swarming toward the exit, the doctor made his way to the boy. He wiped his palms on his thighs and stooped under the sheet. "What seems to be the trouble here?" he asked.

"It's her," said the boy.

He meant the blond girl resting on a heap of muslin bags. She was small-boned and frail, but enormously pregnant, and she sat cradling her stomach-guarding it, looking up at the doctor out of level gray eyes. Her lips were so colorless, they were almost invisible.

"I see," said the doctor.

He dropped down beside her, hitching up his trousers at the knees, and leaned forward to set a hand on her abdomen. There was a pause. He frowned at the tent wall, weighing something in his mind. "Yes," he said finally. He sat back and studied the girl's face. "How far apart are the pains?" he asked.

"All the time," she said, in Cinderella's wry voice.

"Constantly? When did they begin?"

"About. an hour ago, Leon? When we were setting up for this performance." The doctor raised his eyebrows-two black thickets. "It would be exceedingly strange," be said, "if they were so close together this soon."

"Well, they are," the girl said matter-of-factly.

The doctor stood up, grunting a little, and dusted off his knees. "Oh, well," he said, "just to 'be on the safe side, I suppose you ought to check into the hospital. Where's your car parked?"

"We don't have one," the boy said.

"No car?" The doctor looked around him, as if wondering how all their equipment had arrived-the bulky stage, the heap of little costumes, the liquor carton in the corner with a different puppet's head poking out of each cardboard compartment.

"Mr. Kenny brought us," said the boy, "in his panel truck. He's chairman of the Fund-Raising 'Committee."

"You'd better come with me, then," the doctor said.

"I'll drive you over." He seemed fairly cheerful about it. He said, "What about the puppets? 'Shall we take them along?"

"No," said the boy. "What do I care about the puppets? Let's just get her to the hospital."

"Suit yourself," the doctor told him, but he cast another glance around, as if regretting a lost opportunity, before he bent to help the boy raise the girl to her feet. "What are they made of?" he asked.

"Huh?" said 'the boy. "Oh, just.. things." He handed the girl her purse. "Emily makes them," he added.

"Emily?"

"This is Emily, my wife. I'm Leon Meredith."

"How do you do?" the doctor said.

"They're made of rubber balls," said Emily. Standing, she turned out to be even slighter than she'd first appeared. She walked gracefully, leading the men out through the front of the tent, smiling at the few stray children who remained. Her draggled black skirt hung unevenly around her shins. Her thin white cardigan, dotted with specks of black lint, didn't begin to close over the bulge of her stomach.

"I take an ordinary, dimestore rubber ball," she said, "and cut a neck hole with my knife. Then I cover the ball with a nylon stocking, and I sew on eyes and a nose, paint a mouth, make hair of some kind…" Her voice grew strained. The doctor glanced over at her, sharply.

"The cheapest kind of stockings are the best," she said. "They're pinker. From a distance, they look mores like skin."

"Is this going to be a long walk?" Leon asked. "No, no," said the doctor. "My car's in the main parking lot."

"Maybe we should call an ambulance."

"Really, that won't be necessary," the doctor said. 'But what if the baby comes before we get to the hospital?"

"Believe me," said the doctor, "if I thought there was the faintest chance of that, I wouldn't be doing this.

I have no desire whatever to deliver a baby in a Pontiac."

"Lord, no," Leon said, and he east a sideways look at the doctor's hands, which didn't seem quite clean. "But Emily claims it's arriving any minute."

"It is," Emily said calmly. She was walking along between them now, climbing the slope to the parking lot unassisted. She supported the weight of her baby as if it were already separate from her. Her battered leather pocketbook swung from her shoulder. In the sunlight her hair, which was bound on her head in two silvery 'braids, sprang up in. little corkscrewed wisps like metal filings flying toward a magnet, and her skin looked chilled and thin and pale. But her eyes remained level. She didn't appear to be frightened. She met the doctor's gaze squarely. "I can feel it," she told him.

"Is this your first?"

"Yes."

"Ah, then," be said, "you see, it can't possibly come so soon. It'll be late tonight at the earliest-maybe even tomorrow. Why, you haven't been in labor more than an hour!"

"Maybe, and maybe not," said Emily.

Then she gave a sudden, surprising toss of her head; she threw the doctor a tilted look. "After all," she said, "I've had a backache since two' o'clock this morning. Maybe I just didn't know it was labor." Leon turned to the doctor, who seemed to hesitate a moment. "Doctor?" Leon said.

"All my patients say their babies are coming immediately," the doctor told him. "It never happens." They had reached the flinty white gravel of the parking lot. Various people passed-some just arriving, holding down their coats against the wind; others leaving with balloons and crying children and cardboard flats of shivering tomato seedlings.

"Are you warm enough?' Leon asked Emily "Do you want my jacket?"

"I'm fine," Emily said, although beneath her cardigan she wore only a skimpy black T-shirt, and her legs were bare and her shoes were ballet slippers, thin as paper.

"You must be freezing," Leon said. "I'm all right, Leon."

"It's the adrenalin," the doctor said absently. He came to a stop and gazed off across the parking lot, stroking his beard. "I seem to have lost my car," he said.

Leon said, "Oh, God."

"No, there it is. Never mind." His car was clearly a family man's-snub-nosed, outdated, with a frayed red hair ribbon flying from the antenna and 'WASH This!' written in the dust on one fender. Inside, there were schoolbooks and dirty socks and gym 'bloomers and nicked-up movie magazines. The doctor knelt on the front seat and swatted at the clutter in the rear until most of it had landed on the floor. Then he said, "There you go. You two sit in back; you'll be more comfortable." He settled himself in front and started the engine, which had a whining, circular sound. Emily and Leon slid into the rear. Emily found a track shoe under her right knee, and she placed it on her lap, cupping the heel and toe in her fingers. "Now," said 'the doctor. "Which hospital?" Emily and Leon looked at each other.

"City? University? Hopkins?"

"Whatever's closest," Leon said.

"But which have you reserved? Where's your doctor?"

"We haven't reserved anyplace," Emily said, "and we don't have a doctor."

"I see."

"Anywhere," said Leon. "Just get her there."

"Very well." The doctor maneuvered his car out of the parking space. He shifted gears with a grinding sound. Leon said, "I guess we should have attended to this earlier."

"Yes, actually," said the doctor. He braked and looked in both directions. Then he nosed the car into the stream of traffic on Farley Street. They were traveling through a new, raw section barely within the city limits-ranch houses, treeless lawns, another church, a shopping mall. "But I suppose you lead a footloose sort of life," the doctor said.

"Footloose?"

"Carefree. Unattached," be said. He patted all his pockets with one hand until he'd found a pack of Camels. He shook a cigarette free and lit it, which involved so much fumbling and cursing and clutching at dropped objects that it was a wonder the other drivers managed to stay clear of him. When he'd finally flicked his match out, he exhaled a great cloud of smoke and started coughing. The Pontiac wandered from lane to lane. He thumped his chest and said, "I suppose you just follow the fairs, am I correct? Just follow the festivities, stop wherever, you find yourselves. "

"No, what happened was-"

"But I wish we could have brought along the puppets," the doctor said. He turned onto. a wider street. He was forced to slow down now, inching past furniture shops and carpet warehouses, trailing a mammoth May-flower van that blocked all view of what lay ahead. "Are we coming to a traffic light?" he asked. "Is it red or green? I can't see a thing. And what about their noses, the puppets' noses? How'd you make the stepmother's nose? Was it a carrot?"

"Excuse me?" Emily said. "Nose?" She didn't seem to be concentrating. "I'm sorry," she said. "There's some kind of water all over everything." The doctor braked and looked in the rear-view mirror. His eyes met Leon's. "Can't you hurry?" Leon asked him.

"I am hurrying," the doctor said.

He took another puff of his cigarette, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. The air in the car grew blue and layered. Up ahead, the Mayflower van was trying to make a left turn. It would take all day, at this rate. "Honk," Leon said. The doctor honked. Then he 'clamped his cigarette in his teeth and swung out into the right-hand lane, where a car coming up fast behind nearly slammed into them. Now horns were blowing everywhere. The doctor started humming. He pulled back into the left lane, set his left-turn signal blinking, and sped toward the next traffic light, which hung beside a swinging sign that read NO LEFT TURN. His cigarette had a long, trembly tube of ashes hanging from it. He tapped the ashes onto the floor, the steering wheel, his lap. "After the ball is o-ver," he sang. He careened to the right again and cut across the apron of a Citgo station, took a sharp left, and emerged on the street be wanted. "After the break of morn…" Leon gripped the back of the front seat with one hand and held on to Emily with the other. Emily gazed out the side window.

"I always go to fairs, any fair in town," the doctor, said. "School fairs, church fairs, Italian fairs, Ukrainian… I like the food. I also like the rides; I like to watch the people who run them. What would it be like, working for such an outfit? I used to take my daughters, but they're too old now, they say. 'How can that be?' I ask them. 'I'm not too old' how come you are?' My youngest is barely ten. How can she be too old?"

"The baby's here," Emily said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The baby. I feel it." The doctor looked in the mirror again. His eyes were more aged than the rest of him-a mournful brown, bloodshot and pouched, the skin beneath them the tarnished color of a bruise inside a banana. He opened his mouth, or appeared to. At any rate, his beard lengthened. Then it shortened again.

"Stop the car," Leon told him.

"Well… ah, yes, maybe so," the doctor said.

He parked 'beside a hydrant, in front of a tiny pizza parlor called Maria's Home-Style. Leon was 'chafing Emily's wrists. The doctor climbed out, scratching the curls beneath Ms ski cap and looking puzzled. "Excuse me," he said to Leon. Leon got out of the car. The doctor leaned in and asked, "You say you feel it?"

"I feel the bead."

"Of course this is all a mistake," the doctor told Leon. "You know how long it takes the average first parent to deliver? Between ten and twelve hours. Oh, at least. And with a great deal more carrying on, believe me. There's not a chance in this world that 'baby could be here yet." But as he spoke, he was sliding Emily into a horizontal position on the seat, methodically folding back her damp skirt in a series of tidy pleats. He said, "What in the name of-?" It appeared that her T-shirt was some sort of leotard; it had a crotch. He grimaced and ripped the center seam. Then he said, "She's right."

"Well, do something," Leon said. "What are you going to do?"

"Go buy some newspapers," the doctor told him. "Anything will be fine-News American, Sun… but fresh ones, you understand? Don't just accept what someone hands you in a diner, saying he's finished reading it…"

"Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don't have change," Leon said.

The doctor started rummaging through his pockets. He pulled out his mangled pack of Camels, two lint-covered jellybeans, and a cylinder of Rolaids. "Emily," he said, "would you happen to have change for a dollar?" Emily said something that sounded like yes, and turned her head from side to side. "Try her purse," the doctor said. They felt along the floor, among the gym clothes and soda straws. Leon brought up the purse by its strap. He plowed through it till he found a billfold, and then he raced off down the street, muttering, "Newspapers. Newspapers." It was a cheerful, jumbled street with littered sidewalks and a row of thy shops- eating places, dry cleaners, florists. In front of one of the cafés were various newspapers in locked, windowed boxes.

The doctor stepped on his cigarette and ground it into the pavement. Then he took off his suit jacket. He rolled up his sleeves, and tucked his shirt more firmly into his trousers.. He bent inside the car and laid a palm on Emily's abdomen. "Breathe high in your chest," he told her. He gazed dreamily 'past her, humming under his breath, watching the trucks and buses rumble by through the opposite window. The cold air caused the dark hairs to bristle on his forearms.

A woman in high heels clopped down the sidewalk; she never even noticed what was going on. Then two teenaged girls approached, sharing fudge from a white paper sack. Their footsteps slowed, and the doctor heard and tuned around. "You two!" he said. "Go call an ambulance. Tell them we've got a delivery on our hands." They stared at him. Identical cubes of fudge were poised halfway to their mouths.

"Well?" he said. "Go on." When they had rushed into Maria's Home-Style, the doctor turned back to Emily. "How're you doing?" he asked her..

She groaned.

Leon returned, out of breath, with a stack of newspapers. The doctor opened them out and started spreading them under Emily and all around her. "Now, these," he said conversationally, "will grant us some measure of antisepsis." Leon didn't seem to be listening. The doctor wrapped two newspapers around Emily's thighs. She began to blend in with the car. He hung a sports section down the back of the seat and anchored it td the window ledge with the track shoe she'd been holding all this time. "Next," he said, "I'll need two strips of cloth, two inches wide and six inches long. Tear off your shirttail, Leon."

"I want to quit," Emily said. "Quit?"

"I've changed my mind." The cook came out of Maria's Home-Style. He was a large man in an apron stained with tomato sauce. For a moment he watched Leon, who was standing by the car in nothing but his jeans, shakily tugging at his shirttail. (Leon's ribs showed 'and his shoulder blades were as sharp as chicken wings. He was much too young for all this.) The cook reached over and took the shirt, and ripped it for him. "Thanks," said Leon.

"But what's the use of it?" the cook asked.

"He wants two strips of cloth," said Leon, "two inches wide and six inches long. I don't know why." The cook tore again, following instructions. He gave the shirt to Leon and passed the strips to the doctor, who hung them carefully on the inner door handle. Then the cook propped a wide, meaty hand on the car roof and bent in to nod at Emily. "Afternoon," he said.

"Hello," said Emily politely.

"How you doing?"

"Oh, just fine."

"Seems like be wants to come on and get born," the cook said, "and then he wants to go back in a ways."

"Will you get out of here?" Leon said.

The cook let this pass. "Those two girls you sent are calling the ambulance," he told the doctor. "They're using my free phone."

"Good," the doctor said. He cupped the baby's head in his hands-a dark, wet, shining bulge. "Now, Emily, 'bear down," he said. "Maria, press flat on her belly, just a steady, slow pressure, please."

"Soo now, soo now," the cook said, pressing. Leon crouched on the curb, gnawing a knuckle, his shirt back on but not buttoned. Behind them, a little crowd had gathered. The teenaged girls stood hushed, forgetting to dip into their fudge sack. A man was asking everyone if an ambulance had been called. An old woman was telling a younger one all about someone named Dexter, who had been a breech birth with multiple complications.

"Bear down," said the doctor.

There was a silence. Even the traffic noises seemed to have stopped.

Then the doctor stepped back, holding up a slippery, bleak lump. Something moved. There was a small, caught sound from someplace unexpected. So fast it seemed that everyone had been looking away when it happened, the lump turned into a wailing, writhing, frantic, indignant snarl of red arms and legs and spiraled telephone cord. "Oh," the crowd said, breathing again.

"It's a girl," said the doctor. He passed her to the cook. "Was a girl what you wanted?"

"Anything! Anything!" the cook said. "So long as she's healthy. Soo, baby."

"I was talking to Emily," the doctor said mildly. He had to raise his voice above the baby's, which was surprisingly loud. He bent over Emily, pressing her abdomen now with both palms: "Emily? Are you all right? Bear down again, please." While he pressed, she couldn't get air to speak, but the instant he let up she said, "I'm fine, and I'd like my daughter." The cook seemed reluctant to hand her over. He rocked the baby against his apron, thought a moment, and sighed. Then he gave her to the doctor. The doctor checked her breathing passages-the mashed-looking nose, the squalling cavern of a mouth. "With such a racket, how could she not be fine?" he asked, and he leaned in to lay her in Emily's arms. Emily nestled the baby's head against her shoulder, but the wailing went on, thin and passionate, with a hiccup at the end of each breath. "What'd you do with those cloths?" the doctor asked Leon.

Leon was standing up now, so as to get a glimpse of the baby. Something kept tugging his lips into a smile that he kept trying to bat down again. "Cloths?" he said.

"Those cloths you tore, damn it. We're nowhere near done here yet."

"You hung them on the door handle," someone in the crowd said.

"Oh, yes," said the doctor.

He took one cloth, leaned in, and tied it around the baby's cord. For all the blunt, clumsy look of his fingers, he did seem to know what he was doing. "After the ball is over," he sang in his beard-blurred voice. While he was knotting the second cloth, a faraway cry started up. It sounded like an extension of the baby's cry-equally thin, watery-sounding in the wind. Then it separated and grew more piercing. "The ambulance!" Leon said. "I hear the ambulance, Emily."

"Send it back," Emily said.

"They're going to take you to the hospital, honey. You're going to be all right now."

"But it's over! Do I have to go?" she asked the doctor.

"Certainly," he said. He stepped back to admire his knots, which looked something like the little cloth bows on a kite tail. "Actually," he said, "they're coming in the nick of time. I have nothing to cut the cord with."

"You could use my Swiss Army officer's knife," she told him. "It's in my purse. It's the Woodsman style with a scissors blade."

"Remarkable," said the doctor, and he rocked on his heels, beaming down at her. His teeth seemed very large and yellow behind the tangled beard.

The siren drew closer. A spinning red light wove through the traffic, and the ambulance screeched to a halt beside the doctor's car. Two men in white leaped out. "Where is she?" one asked.

"Here we are," the doctor called.

The men flung open the back doors of the ambulance and brought a stretcher crashing to the street-a wheeled bed, too long and narrow, like a coffin, with too much chrome. Emily struggled to a sitting position. The baby stopped in mid-cry, as if shocked. "Do I have to do this?" Emily asked the doctor. And while the attendants were helping her out of the car (chairing her onto the stretcher, newspapers and all), she kept her face turned toward the doctor and waited to be rescued. "Doctor? I can't stand hospitals! Do I have to go?"

"Of course," the doctor told her. He stooped for her purse and laid it on the stretcher.

"Is Leon coming too?"

"Certainly he's coming."

"Are you?"

"Me? Oh."

"Best if you would, Doc," the driver told him, unfolding a sheet over Emily.

"Well, if you like," the doctor said.

He closed his car door and followed the stretcher into the ambulance. There was another stretcher, empty, next to Emily's. He and Leon sat on it-both of them gingerly, just on the edge, with their knees jutting out. "Pretty fancy," the doctor said to Leon. He meant, presumably, the interior of the ambulance: the deeply carpeted floor, the gleaming tanks and gauges. When the men slammed the doors shut, there was a sudden, luxurious silence. The street noises faded, and through the tinted windows the people on the sidewalk seemed as soundless and slow-moving as creatures on the ocean floor. They slid away. A café and a pawnshop glided past. Even the siren was muffled, like something on an old-fashioned radio.

"How're you feeling?" the doctor asked Emily.

"Fine," she said. She lay still, in a tangle of loosened braids. The baby stared severely at the ceiling.

"We really appreciate all you've done," Leon told the doctor.

"It was nothing," said the doctor, turning down the corners of his mouth, He seemed displeased.

"If Emily didn't have this thing about hospitals, we'd have made our arrangements sooner, I guess. But the baby, wasn't due for another couple of weeks. We just kept putting it off."

"And I suppose you were on the move so much," the doctor said.

"No, no-"

"But the style of your lives! I don't imagine you can plan very far ahead."

"You have the wrong idea about us," Emily said.

Flattened on the stretcher, with 'the crisp sheet covering the newspapers and her sodden skirt, entirely seemed untouched, somehow-pristine and remote, with her gaze turned inward. "You think we're some kind of transients," she said, "but we're not. We're legally married and we live in a regular apartment with furniture. This baby was fully planned for. We're even going to have a diaper service. I've already called to set it up, and they said to let them know when she came and they'd start delivery promptly."

"I see," said the doctor, nodding. He appeared to be enjoying this. The disorderly beard' flew up: and down, and the pom-pom on his ski cap bobbed.

"We've planned out every detail," Emily said. "We didn't buy a crib because cribs are extraneous. We're using a cardboard box for now, with padding on the insides."

"Oh, wonderful," said the doctor, looking delighted. "When she gets too big for' the box, well order this aluminum youth-bed rail we happened to see in a catalog. You can fit it onto any mattress. What's the point in all that equipment-cribs and strollers and Bathinettes? Besides, the youth-bed rail will even work in hotels and other people's apartments. It travels well."

"Travels, yes," the doctor echoed, and he clamped his hands between his knees, leaning with the ambulance as it sped around a curve.

"But we're not… I mean, it's only that we travel to give shows sometimes. There'll be someone wanting 'Snow White' or 'Cinderella' somewhere outside the city.

But we're almost always home by night. We're never shiftless. You have the wrong idea?' "Did I say you were shiftless?" the doctor asked. He looked over at Leon. "Did I?" Leon shrugged. "We've thought of everything," Emily said.

"Yes, I see you have," the doctor said gently., Leon cleared his throat. "By the way," he said, "we haven't discussed your fee."

"Fee?"

"For your services."

"Oh, emergency services aren't charged for," the doctor said. "Don't you know — that?"

"No," said Leon.

He and the doctor seemed to be trying to stare each other — down. Leon lifted his chin even higher. The light caught his cheekbones. He was one of those people who appear to be continually ready to take offense-jaw fixed, shoulders tight. "I'm not accepting this for free," he said.

"Who says it's free?" the doctor asked. "I expect you to name your baby for me." He laughed-a wheeze that ruffled his beard.

"What's your name?" Emily asked him. "Morgan," said the doctor. There was a silence.

"Gower Morgan," he said.

Emily said, "Maybe we could use the initials."

"I was only joking," the doctor told her. "Didn't you know I was joking?" He fumbled for his Camels and shook one out of the pack. "It was meant to be a joke-," he said.

"About the fee," said Leon.

The doctor took his cigarette from his mouth and peered at the sign on the oxygen tank. "The fact is," he said, replacing the cigarette in its pack, "I had nothing better to do today. My wife and daughters have gone to a wedding; my wife's brother is getting married again?' He clutched Leon's shoulder as they turned a corner. The ambulance was rolling up a driveway now. They passed a sign reading EMERGENCY ONLY.

"My daughters are growing up," the doctor said, "doing womanly things- with their mother, leaving their father out in the cold. Each one when she was born seemed so new; I had such hopes; I was so sure we'd make no- mistakes. Enjoy this- one while you can," he told Leon. The baby started and clutched two bits of air.

"I had sort of thought she would be a boy," Leon said. "Oh, Leon!" said Emily, drawing the baby closer.

"Boys, well," the doctor said. "We tried for a boy for years, ourselves. But you can always hope for next time."

"We can only afford the one-," said Leon.

"One? One child," the doctor said. He fell into thought. 'Yes, well, why not? There's a certain compactness to it. Very streamlined. Very basic," he said.

"It's a matter of money," Leon said.

The ambulance bounced to a stop. The attendants flew out their front doors and around to the back, letting in the din of a gigantic, sooty machine just outside the emergency room, and the smell of hot laundry water and auto exhausts and wilted cafeteria food. They grabbed Emily's stretcher and rushed away with it, wheels shrieking. Leon and the doctor clambered to the pavement and trotted after it. "Do you have dimes?" the doctor shouted. "Time for what?"

"Dimes! Money!"

"No, I'm sorry," Leon said. "Could you use a dollar bill?"

"For you, I meant!" the doctor shouted. They passed through a set of swinging doors. He lowered his' voice. "Not for me; for you. For the phone! You'll want to call about the baby."

"Who would I call?" Leon asked, spreading his arms.

The doctor stopped short. "Who would he call!" he repeated to himself. He wore the — open, delighted expression he'd worn in the ambulance when he'd been told about the youth-bed rail.

Then a nurse lifted Emily's sheet, clucked at the blood-soaked newspapers, and ran alongside the stretcher as it rolled down a corridor. Another nurse took Leon's elbow and led him toward a typist in a glass compartment. Everything spun into action- polished, efficient, briskly clacketing. The doctor was left behind.

In fact, he was forgotten, for the moment. When Leon and Emily next thought of him, he was nowhere to be found. He'd just melted away. Had he left any word? Leon asked Emily's nurse. The nurse had no idea whom he was talking about. Another doctor had been called in, a resident in obstetrics. He said it was a fine delivery, healthy baby. All things considered, he said, Emily should be thankful. "Yes, and Dr. Morgan is the one we should thank," Leon told him. "Besides, we hadn't settled the fee." But the resident had never heard of Dr. Morgan. And he wasn't in the phone book, either. It seemed he didn't exist.

Later on (just a few weeks later, when their daughter's birth had faded and they felt she had always been with them), they almost wondered if they had imagined the man-just conjured him up in a time of need. His hat, Emily said, had made her think of a gnome. He really could have been someone from a fairytale, she said: the baby elf, the troll, the goblin who finds children under cabbage leaves and lays them in theft mothers' arms and disappears.

1968

You could say he was a man who had gone to pieces, or maybe he'd always been in pieces; maybe he'd arrived unassembled. Various parts of him seemed poorly joined together. His lean, hairy limbs were connected by exaggerated knobs of bone; his black-bearded jaw was as clumsily hinged as a nutcracker. Parts of his life, too, lay separate from other parts. His wife knew almost none of his friends. His children had never seen where he worked; it wasn't in a safe part of town, theft mother said. Last month's hobby-the restringing of a damaged pawnshop banjo, with an eye to becoming suddenly musical at the age of forty-two-bore no resemblance to this month's hobby, which was the writing of a science-fiction novel that would make him rich and famous. He was writing about the death of Earth. All these recent flying saucers, he proposed, belonged to beings who knew for a fact that our sun would burn out within a year and a half. They weren't just buzzing Earth for the hell of it; they were ascertaining what equipment would be needed to transfers us all to another planet in a stable; far more orderly solar system.

He had written chapter one, but was having trouble with the opening sentence of chapter two.

Or look at his house: a tall brick Colonial house in north Baltimore. Even this early on a January morning, when the sun was no more than a pinkish tinge in an opaque white sky, it was clear there was something fragmented about Morgan's house. Its marble stoop was worn soft at the edges like an old bar of soap, and heavy lace curtains, glimmered in the downstairs windows; but on the second floor, where his daughters slept, the curtains were made from sections of the American flag, and on the third floor, where his mother slept, they were lace again, misting the tangle of ferns that hung behind them. And if you could see inside, through the slowly thinning gray of the hallway, you would find the particles of related people's unrelated worlds: his daughters' book stacks tumbling across the hall radiator, which also served as mail rack, sweater shelf, and message bureau; his wife's League of Women Voters leaflets rubber-banded into a tower on the living room coffee table; and his mother's ancient, snuffling dog dreaming of rabbits and twitching her paws as she slept on the cold brick hearth. There was a cribbage board under the sofa. (No one knew this. It had been lost for weeks.) There was a jigsaw puzzle, half completed, that Morgan's sister, Brindle, filled her long, morose, spinsterish days with: a view of an Alpine village in the springtime. The church steeple was assembled and so were the straightedged border and the whole range of mountains with their purple and lavender shadows, but she would never get to the sky, surely.

'She would never manage all that blank, unchanging blue that joined everything else together.

In the glass-fronted bookcase by the dining-room door, rows of books slumped sideways or lay flat: Morgan's discarded manuals reflecting various spells of enthusiasm (how to restore old paintings and refinish secondhand furniture; how to cure illness with herbs; how to raise bees in his attic). Beneath them sat his wife Bonny's college yearbooks, where Bonny appeared as a freckled, exuberant girl in several different team uniforms; and under those were his daughters' tattered picture books and grade-school textbooks and Nancy Drews, and his mother's tiny, plump autograph book, whose gilded title had been eaten away by worms or mildew or maybe just plain time, so that all that remained was a faintly shining trail of baldness as if a snail had crossed the crimson velvet in a tortuous script that coincidentally spelled out Autographs. (And on the first, yellowed page, in a hand so steely and elegant that you'd only see it now on a wedding invitation: Louisa dearest, Uncle Charlie is not a poet so wilt 'only write his name hereunder, Charles Brindle, Christmas Day, 1911-that awkward little shrug of inadequacy descending through the years so clearly, though the man had been dead a quarter-century, or more and even Louisa might have had trouble recollecting him.) The bottom shelf held a varnished plaque of Girl Scout knots, a nearly perfect conch shell, and a brown cardboard photo album pasted with photographs so widely spaced in time that whole generations seemed to be dashing past, impatient to get it over with. Here was Morgan's father, Samuel, a boy in knickers; and next to him stood Samuel full-grown, marrying Louisa with her bobbed hair and shiny stockings. Here was little Morgan in a badly knitted pram set; and Morgan at eleven holding his infant sister, Brindle, as if he might have preferred to drop her (and look! was that the same pram set? Only slightly more puckered and with some new stain or shadow down the front). And then suddenly Morgan at twenty-four, shorter-haired than he would ever be again, raw-necked, self-conscious, beside his plump, smiling wife with their first baby in his arms. (No telling where their wedding photo had got to, or that famous pram set either, for all Amy wore was a sagging diaper.) Now they stopped for breath for a moment. Here were fifteen solid pages of the infant Amy, every photo snapped by Morgan in the first proud flush of fatherhood. Amy, sleeping, nursing, yawning, bathing, exam-bring her fist. Amy learning to sit. Amy learning to crawl. Amy learning to walk. She was a sturdy child with her mother's sensible expression, and she appeared to be more real than anyone else in the album. Maybe it was the slowness with which she plodded, page by page, through the early stages of her life. She took on extra meaning, like the frame at which a movie is halted. (The experts lean forward; someone points to something with a long, official pointer…) Then the photos speeded up again. Here was the infant Jean, then the twins in their miniature spectacles, then Liz on her first day of nursery school. The film changed to Kodachrome, 'brighter than nature, and the setting was always the beach now-always Bethany Beach, Delaware, for where else could a man with seven daughters find the time for his camera? To look, at the album, you would imagine that these people enjoyed an endless stream of vacations. Bonny was eternally sunburned, bulging gently above and below her one-piece Lastex swimsuit. The girls were eternally coconut-oiled and gleaming in their slender strips of bikinis, holding back handfuls of wind-tossed hair and laughing. Always laughing. Where were the tears and quarrels, and the elbowing for excessive amounts of love and space and attention? What about all those colds and tonsillectomies? Where was Molly's stammer? Or Susan's chronic nightmares? Not here. They sat laughing without a care in the world. At the edges of their bikinis, paler flesh showed, the faintest line of it, the only reminder of other seasons. And, oh yes, Morgan. One picture a year, taken aslant and out of focus by some amateurish daughter: Morgan in wrinkled trunks that flared around his thighs, whiskered all over, untouched by the sun, showing 'off his biceps and probably grinning, 'but how could you tell for sure? For on his head he wore an Allagash jungle hat from L. L. Bean, and mosquito netting in sweeps and folds veiled his face completely.

Now the light had reached the stairwell and sent a gleam along the banister, but the carpeted steps were still in darkness and the cat slinking up them was only a shadow, her stripes invisible, her pointed face a single spear of white. She crossed the hall floorboards without a sound. She strode to the north rear bedroom and paused in the doorway and then advanced, so purposeful that you could see bow every joint in her body' was strung. Next to Bonny's side of the bed, she rose up on her hind legs to test the electric blanket-pat-pat along the edge of the mattress with one experienced paw, and then around to Morgan's side and pat-pat again. Morgan's side was warmer. She braced herself, tensed, and sprang onto his chest, and Morgan grunted and opened his eyes. It was' just that moment of dawn when the air seems visible: flocked, like felt, gathering itself together to take on color at any second. The sheets were a shattered, craggy landscape; the upper reaches of the room were lit by a grayish haze, like the smoke that rises from bombed buildings. Morgan covered his face. "Go away," he told the cat, but the cat only purred and sent a stilted stare elsewhere, pretending not to hear. Morgan sat up. He spilled the cat onto Bonny (a nest of tangled brown hair, a bare, speckled shoulder) and hauled himself out of bed.

In the winter he slept in thermal underwear. He thought of clothes-all clothes-as costumes, and it pleased him to stagger off to the bathroom hitching up his long johns and rummaging through his beard like some character from the Klondike. He returned with his face set in a brighter, more hopeful expression, having glimpsed himself in the bathroom mirror: there were decisions to be made. He snapped on the closet light and stood deciding who to be today. Next to Bonny's wrinkled skirts and blouses the tumult of his clothes hung, tightly packed together-sailor outfits, soldier outfits, riverboat-gambler outfits. They appeared to have been salvaged from some traveling operetta. Above them were his hats, stacked six deep on the shelf. He reached for one, a navy knit skullcap, and pulled it on and looked in the full-length mirror: harpooner on a whaling ship. He took it off and tried next a gigantic, broad-brimmed leather hat that engulfed his head and shaded his eyes. Ah, back to the Klondike. He tugged a pair of crumpled brown work pants over his long underwear, and added striped suspenders to hook his thumbs through. He studied his reflection awhile. Then he went to the bureau and plowed through the bottom drawer. "Bonny?" he said.

"Where are my Ragg socks?"

"Your what?"

"Those scratchy, woolly socks, for hiking." She didn't answer. He had to pad barefoot down the stairs, grumbling to himself. "Fool socks. Fool house. Nothing where it ought to be. Nothing where you want it." He opened the back door to let 'the dog out. A cold wind blew in. The tiles on the kitchen floor felt icy beneath his feet. "Fool house," he said again. He stood at the counter with an unlit cigarette clamped between 'his teeth and spooned coffee into the percolator.

The cabinets in this kitchen reached clear to the high ivory ceiling. They were stuffed with tarnished silver tea services and dusty stemware that no one ever used.

Jammed in front of them were ketchup bottles and cereal boxes and scummy plastic salt-and-pepper sets with rice grains in the salt from last summer when everything had stuck to itself. Fool house! Something had gone wrong with it, somehow. It was so large and formal and gracious a wedding present from Bonny's father, who bad been a wealthy man. Bonny had inherited a portion of his money. When the children stepped through the attic floor, it was Bonny who dialed the plasterers, and she was always having 'the broken windowpanes replaced, the shutters rehung when they sagged off their hinges, the masonry put back in chinks where the English ivy had clawed it away; hut underneath, Morgan never lost the feeling that something here was slipping, If they could just clear it out and start over, he sometimes thought. Or sell it! 'Sell it and have done with it, buy a plainer, more straightforward place. But Bonny wouldn't hear of it-some-thing to do with capital gains; he didn't 'know. It just never was the proper time, any time he brought it up.

The three smaller bedrooms, intended for a tasteful number of children, barely contained Morgan's daughters, and Brindle and Louisa shared an edgy, cramped existence on the third floor. The lawn was littered with rusty bicycles and raveling wicker furniture where Bonny's father had surely imagined civilized games of croquet. And nowadays apartment buildings were sprouting all around them, and the other houses were splitting into units and filling up with various unsortable collections of young people, and traffic was getting fierce. They seemed to be deep in the city. Well, all right. Morgan himself had been reared in the city, and had nothing against it whatsoever. Still, he kept wondering how this could have happened. As near as he could recall, he bad planned on something different. He had married his wife for her money, to be frank, which was not to say he didn't love her; it was just that he'd been impressed, as well, by the definiteness 'that" money had seemed to give her. It had hovered somewhere behind her left shoulder, cloaking her with an air of toughness and capability. She was so' clear about who she was. Courting her, Morgan had specifically bought a yachting cap with an eagle on the front, and white duck trousers and a brass-buttoned blazer to wear while visiting at her family's summer cottage. He had sat outside on the terrace, securely defined at last, toying with the goblet of tropical punch that Bonny's father had insisted on mixing for him- although in fact Morgan didn't drink, couldn't drink, had never been able to. Drinking made him talk too much. 'It made him spill the beans, he felt. He was trying to stay in character.

Staying in character, he had asked her father for Bonny's hand: Her father gave his approval; Morgan had wondered why. He was only a penniless graduate student with no foreseeable future. And be knew that he was nothing much to look at. (In those days he wore no beard, and there was something monkeyish and clumsy about his face.) When he took Bonny out somewhere, to one of her girlfriends' parties, he felt be was traveling under' false pretenses. He felt he had entered someone else's life. Only Bonny 'belonged there-an easygoing, pleasant girl, two or three years older than Morgan, with curly brown hair worn low on her neck in a sort of ball-shaped ponytail. Later, Morgan figured out that her father must have miscalculated. When you're rich enough, he must have thought, then it 'doesn't matter who you marry; you'll go on the same as ever. So 'he had nodded his blessing and given them this house, and expected that nothing would change. Luckily for him, he died soon after the wedding. Ho never saw the mysterious way the house started slipping downward, or sideways, or 'whatever it was that it was doing. He didn't have to watch as Bonny's dirndl skirts (once so breezy, so understated) began dipping at the hems, and her blouses somehow shortened and flopped bunchily out of her waistbands.

"Your father would have sold this house long ago," Morgan often told her. "Capital gains or no capital gains, he'd say, you should get a new one." But Bonny would say, "Why? What for?" She would ask, "What's' wrong with this one? Everything's been kept up.' I just 'had the roofers in. The painters came last May."

"Yes, but-"

"What is it that bothers you? Can you name one' thing that's in 'disrepair? Name it and I'll fix it. Every inch is in perfect shape,' and the Davey tree men just fertilized the trees." 'yes, but.' He went out front for the paper. Under his bare feet the spikes of frosty grass crunched and stabbed. Everything glittered. A single rubber flip-flop skated on the ice in the birdbath. He dashed back in, hissing, and slammed the door behind him. Upstairs an alarm clock rant, as if set off by the crash. They would be swarming everywhere soon. Morgan removed the news section and the comics section laid them on a kitchen chaff, and sat on, them. Then: he lit his cigarette and opened to the classified ads.

LOST. White wedding dress size 10. No questions.

He grinned around his cigarette.

Now here came Bonny, slumping in, still buttoning her housecoat, trying to keep her slippers on her feet. Her hair was uncombed and 'there was a crease down one side of her face "Did it freeze9" she asked bun "Is there frost 'on the ground? I meant to cover the box-woods." She lifted a curtain to peer out the window. "Oh, Lord, it froze"

"'Mm?" She opened a cupboard door and clattered something. A blackened silver ashtray arrived inside the partition of Morgan's newspaper He tapped Ins cigarette on it Listen to this," he told her "FOUND Article of jewelry, in Druid Hill Park. Caller must identify. I would' call and say it was a diamond ring."

"How come?" Bonny asked She took a carton of eggs from the refrigerator."

"Well, chances are no one wears real pearls to the zoo, or platinum bracelets, but plenty of people wear engagement rings, right? And besides, you can be so general about a ring. Yes, I would say a ring. Absolutely."

"LOST Upper denture Great sentimental value" Morgan read out Bonny snorted He said, "I made it up about the sentimental value."

"I guessed." Bonny told him.

Re could bear bare feet pounding upstairs, water running, hairdryers humming. The smell of percolating coffee filled the kitchen, along, with the crisp, sharp smoke from his Camel. Oh, he, was hitting his stride, all right. He had managed it, broken into another day. He spread his paper wider. "I love the classifieds," he said. "They're so full of private lives. "

"Are you going to: get those shoes fixed this morning?"

"Hmm? Listen to this: M. G. All is not forgiven and never will be." Bonny set a cup of coffee in front of him.

"What if that's me?" Morgan asked.

"Did you do something unforgivable?"

"You can't help wondering," Morgan said, "seeing a thing like that you can't help "Oh, Morgan," Bonny said "Why do you always take the papers so personally?"

"Because I'm reading the personals," he told her. He turned the "WANTED," he read, "Geotechnical lab." (For the past nineteen years he bad supposedly been looking for a better job. Not that he expected to find it.) "Ha." He was employed by Bonny's family, managing one of their hardware stores. He was a puttering, hardware sort of a man. Back in graduate school, his advisor had once complained because Morgan had spent a whole conference period squatting in the, corner, talking over his shoulder while he worked on a leaky radiator pipe WANTED. Barmaid, dog groomer, forklift operator. What he liked were those ads with character. (Driver to chauffeur elderly man. Knowledge of Homer desirable) Occasionally he would even answer one. He would even take a. job for a couple of days, vanishing from the hardware store and leaving his clerk in charge Then Bonny's Uncle Ollie would find out and come storming to Bonny, and Bonny would sigh and laugh and ask Morgan what he thought be was doing. He would say this for Bonny: she didn't get too wrought up about things. She just sloped along with him, more or less. He reached out for her; now, as she passed with a pitcher of orange juice. He crooked an arm around her hips, or tried to; she had her mind on some-thing else. "Where's Brindle? Where's your mother?" she asked him. "I thought I heard your mother hours ago." He laid the classified ads aside and tugged another, section from beneath him: the news. But there was nothing worth reading. Plane crashes, train: crashes, tenement fires… He flipped to the obituaries. "Mrs. Grimm. Opera Enthusiast," he read aloud. "Tilly Abbott, Thimble Collector. Ah, Lord." His daughters had begun to seep downstairs. They were quarreling in the hall and' dropping books, and their transistor radios seemed to be playing several different songs at once. A, deep, rocky drumbeat thudded beneath electric guitars. 'Peter Jacobs at 44' Morgan read "Forty-four! What kind of age is that to die?"

"Girls!' "Bonny called. "Your eggs are getting cold."

"I hate it when they won't say what did them in," Morgan told her. Even a long illness'-I mean, a lengthy illness would be better than nothing. But all they have here is 'passed on unexpectedly' He hunched forward to let someone sidle behind him. "Forty-four years old! Of course it was unexpected. You think it was a heart attack? Or what"

"Morgan, I wish you wouldn't put such stock in obituaries," Bonny said… She had to raise her voice the girls bad taken over the kitchen by now. All of them were talking 'at once about history quizzes, boys and more boys, motorcycles, basketball games, who had borrowed whose record album and never given it back. A singer was rumored to be dead. (Someone said she would die herself if that was true.) Amy was doing something to the toaster. The twins were mixing their health-food drink in the blender. A 'French book flew out of nowhere and hit Liz in the small of the back. "I can't go on living here any more," Liz sajd. "I don't get a moment's peace. Everybody picks on me. I'm leaving." But all she did was pour herself a cup of coffee and sit down next to Morgan. "For heaven's sake," she said to Bonny, "what's that he got on his head?"

"Feel free to address me directly," Morgan told her.

"I have the answer, as it happens. Don't be shy."

"Does he have to wear those hats of his? Even in the house he wears them. Does he have to look so peculiar?" This was his thirteen-year-old. Once he might have been offended, but he was used to it by now. Along about age eleven or twelve, it' seeme4 "they totally changed. He had loved them when they were little. They bad started out so small and plain, chubby and curly and even-tempered, toddling devotedly after Morgan, and then all at once they went on crash diets, grew thin and irritable, and shot up taller than their mother They ironed their hair till it hung like veils They traded their dresses for faded jeans and skimpy little T-shirts.

And their taste in boyfriends was atrocious lust atrocious. He couldn't believe some of the creatures they brought home with them. On top of all that, they stopped thinking Morgan was so wonderful. They claimed he was an embarrassment. Couldn't he shave his beard off? Cut his hair? Act his age? Dress like other fathers? Why did he smoke those unfiltered cigarettes and pluck those tobacco shreds from his tongue? Did be realize that be bummed incessantly underneath his breath, even at the dinner table, even now while they were asking him these questions?' He tried to stop humming. He briefly switched to a pipe, but the mouthpiece cracked in two when he bit it And once he got the shorter haircut than usual and trimmed Ms beard so it was square and hugged the shape of his jaw. It looked, artificial, they told him. It looked like a wooden beard, they said.

He felt he was riding something choppy and violent, fighting to' keep 'his balance, smiling beatifically and trying not to blink.

"See? See that? He's barefoot," Liz said.

"Hush and pour that coffee back," Bonny told her. "You know you're not allowed to drink coffee yet." The youngest, Kate, came in with a stack of schoolbooks. She was not quite eleven and still had Bonny's full-cheeked, cheery face. As she passed behind Morgan's chair, she plucked his hat off, kissed the back of his head, and replaced the hat.

"Sugar-pie," Morgan said.

Maybe they ought to have another baby.

With everyone settled around this table, you couldn't even bend your elbows. Morgan decided to retreat. He rose and ducked out of the room backward, like someone leaving the presence of royalty, so they wouldn't see the comics section he was hiding behind him. He padded into the living room. One of the radios was playing "Plastic Fantastic Lover" and he paused to do a little dance, barefoot on the rug. His mother watched him sternly from the couch. She was a small, hunched old lady with hair that wasp still jet black; it was held fiat with tortoise-shell combs from which it crinkled and bucked like something powerful. She sat with her splotched, veined hands folded in her lap; she wore a drapy dress that seemed several sizes too large for her.

"Why aren't you at breakfast?" Morgan asked.

"Oh, I'll just wait till all this has died down."

"But then Bonny'll be in the kitchen half the morning."

"When you get to be my age," Louisa said, "why, food is near about everything there is, and I don't intend to rush it. I want a nice, hot English muffin, split with a fork, not a knife, with butter melting amongst the crumbs, and a steaming cup of, coffee laced with whipping cream. And I want it in peace. I want it in quiet."

"Bonny's going to have a fit," be said.

"Don't be silly. Bonny doesn't mind such things." She was probably right. (Bonny was infinitely expansible, taking everything as it came. It was Morgan who felt oppressed by his mother's living here.) He sighed and settled next to her on the couch. He opened out his paper. "Isn't this a weekday?" she asked him.

"Yes," he mumbled.' She crooked a finger over the top of his paper and pulled it down so she could see his face. "Aren't you going to work?"

"By and by."

"By and by? It's seven-thirty, Morgan and you don't even have your shoes on. Do you know what I've done so far today? Made my bed, watered my ferns, polished the chrome in my bathroom; and meanwhile here you sit reading the comics, and your sister's sleeping like the dead upstairs. What is this with my children? Where do they get this? By and by you say!" He gave up. He folded the paper and said, "All right, Mother."

"Have a nice day," she told him serenely.

When he left the room, she was sitting with her hands in her lap again, trustful as a child, waiting for her English muffin.

2 Wearing a pair of argyle socks that didn't go at all with his Klondike costume, and crusty leather boots to cover them up, and his olive-drab parka from Sunny's Surplus, Morgan loped along the sidewalk. His hardware store was deep in the city, too far to travel on foot, and unfortunately his car was spread all over the floor of his garage and he hadn't quite finished putting it back together. He would have to take the bus. He headed toward the transit stop, puffing on a cigarette that he held between thumb and forefinger, sending out a cloud of smoke from 'beneath the brim of his hat. He passed a row of houses, an apartment building, then a little stream of drugstores and newsstands and dentists' offices. Under one arm he carried a brown paper bag with his moccasins inside. They went with his Daniel Boone outfit. He'd worn them so often that the soft leather soles had broken through at the ball of the foot. When he reached the corner, he swerved in at Fresco's Shoe Repair to leave them off. He liked the smell of Fresco's: leather and machine oil. Maybe he should have been a cobbler.

But when be entered, jingling the cowbell above the door, be found no one there-just the counter with its clutter of awls and pencils and receipt forms, the pigeonholes behind it crammed with shoes, and a cup of coffee cooling beside the skeletal black sewing machine. "Fresco?" he called.

"Yo," Fresco said from the rear.

Morgan laid his package down and went behind the counter. He pulled out a copper-toed work boot. Where would one buy such things? They really would be useful, be felt; really very practical. The cowbell jingled again. A fat woman in a fur cape came in, no doubt from one of those new apartment buildings. All down the edge of her cape, small animals' heads hung, gnashing their teeth on theft own spindly tails. She set a spike-heeled evening sandal firmly on the counter. "I'd like to know what you're going to do about this," she said.

"Do?" said Morgan.

"You can see the heel has broken again. It broke right off while I was walking into the club, and you were the people who'd repaired it. I looked like an utter fool, a clod. "

"Well, what can I say?" Morgan asked her. "This shoe is Italian. "

"So?"

"It has hollow heels. "

"It does?" They both looked at the heel. It wasn't hollow. at all.

"Oh, we see a lot of this," Morgan told her. He stamped out his cigarette and picked up the sandal. "These shoes from Italy, they come with hollow heels so drugs can be smuggled in. So naturally they're weakened. The smugglers pry the heels off, take no care whatsoever; they don't have the slightest feeling for their work. They slam the heels back any old how, sell the shoes to some unsuspecting sbop… but of course they'll never be the same. Oh, the stories I could tell you!" He shook his head. She looked at him narrowly; faint, scratchy lines deepened around her eyes. "Ah, well," be said, sighing. "Friday morning, then. Name?"

"Well… Peterson," she said.

He scrawled it on the back of a receipt, and set it with the sandal in a cubbyhole.

After she was gone, be wrote out instructions for his moccasins: Gower. Fix! Can't live without them. He put the moccasins next to the sandal, with the instructions roiled inside. Then he trotted on out of the shop, busily lighting another cigarette beneath the shelter of his hat.

On the sidewalk his mother's dog was, waiting for him. She had a cocked, hopeful face and two perked cars like tepees. Morgan stopped dead. "Go home," be told her. She wagged her tail. "Go home. What do you want of me? What have I done?" Morgan Let off toward the bus stop. The dog followed, whining, but Morgan pretended not to hear. He speeded up. The whining continued. He wheeled around and stamped one foot. A man in an over-coat halted and then circled Morgan at a distance. The dog, however, merely cowered, panting and looking expectant. "Why must you drag after me like this?" Morgan asked. He made a rush at her, but she stood her ground. Of course be should lead her home himself, but he couldn't face it. He couldn't backtrack all that way, having started out so speedy and chipper. Instead be turned and took off at a run, holding on to his hat, pounding down the sidewalk with the dog not far behind. The dog began to lose heart. Morgan felt her lose it, though he didn't dare turn to look. He let her falter and then stop, gazing after him and spasmodically wagging her tail. Morgan clutched his aching chest and stumbled up onto a bus. Puffing and sweating, he rummaged through his pockets for change. The other passengers darted sidelong glances and then looked away again.

They passed more stores and office buildings. They whizzed through a corner of Morgan's old neighborhood, with most of the windows boarded up and trees swing out of caved-in roofs. (It had not done well without him.) Here were the Arbeiter Mattress Factory and Madam Sheba, All Questions Answered and All Problems Cheerfully Solved. Rowhouses slid by, each more decayed than the one before. Morgan hunkered in his seat, clutching the metal bar in front of him, gazing at the Ace of Spades. Sandwich Shop and Fat Boy's Shoeshine. Now he was farther downtown than he' bad ever lived. He relaxed his grip on the metal bar. He sank into the lives of the scattered people sitting on their stoops: the woman in her nightgown and vinyl jacket nursing a Rolling Rock beer and breathing frost; the two then nudging each other and laughing; the small boy in a grownup's sneakers hugging a soiled white cat. A soothing kind of emptiness began to spread through him. He felt stripped and free, like the vacant windows, frameless, glassless, on the upper floors of Syrenia's Hot Pig Bar-B-Q.

3 The downtown branch of Cullen Hardware was so old and dark and filthy, so thick with smells, so narrow and creaking, that Morgan often felt he was not so much entering it as plunging in, head first, leaving just his bootsoles visible on the rim. There was a raised platform at the rear, underneath the rafters, for his office: a scarred oak desk, files, a maroon plush settee, and a steep black Woodstock typewriter whose ribbons be had to wind by band. This used to be Bonny's grandfather's office. This store was. Grandfather Cullen's very first establishment. Now there were branches everywhere, of course. Nearly every shopping mall within a fifty-mile radius bad a Cullen Hardware. But they were all slick and modern; this was the only real one. Sometimes Bonny's Uncle Ollie would come in and threaten to close it down. "Call this a store?" he would say. "Call this a paying proposition?" He would glare around him at the bulky wooden shelves, where the Black & Decker power tools looked foolish beside the old-fashioned bins of nails. He would scowl at the rusty window grilles, which had been twisted out of shape by several different burglars. Morgan would just smile, anxiously tugging his beard, for he knew that he tended to irk Uncle Ollie and be was better off saying nothing at all. Then Uncle Ollie would storm out again and Morgan would go back to his office, relieved, 'humming beneath his breath. Not that closing this branch down would have left him unemployed; for Bonny's sake, the Cullens would feel bound to find him something else. But here he had more scope. He had half a dozen projects under way in his office-lumber stacked against the stairs, a ball-peen hammer in his OUT basket. He knew of a good place to eat not far off. He had friends just 'a few blocks over. His one clerk, Butkins, did nearly all the work, even if be wasn't so interesting to talk to.

Once, a few years back, Morgan had had a girl clerk named Marie. She was a very young, round-faced redhead who always wore a loose gray smock to protect her clothes from the dust. Morgan started pretending she wasp his wife. It wasn't that he found her' all that appealing; but he slowly built this scene in his mind where she and he were the owners of a small-town Ma-and-Pa hardware store. They'd been childhood sweethearts, maybe. Mentally, be aged her. He would have liked her to have white hair. He started wearing a wrinkled gray jacket and gray work trousers; he thought of himself as "Pa Hardware." The funny thing was, sometimes be could be looking right at her but daydreaming her from scratch, as if she weren't there. Then one afternoon be was standing on the ladder putting some shelves in order and she was banding him boxes of extension cords, and he happened to lean down and kiss her on the cheek. He said, "You look tired, Ma. Maybe you ought to take a little nap." The girl bad gasped but said nothing. The next day she didn't show up for work, and she never came again. Her gray smock still hung in the stockroom. Occasionally, when be passed it, Morgan felt sad all over again for the days when be bad been Pa Hardware. But now he had this. Butkins, this efficient, colorless young fellow already setting out a new display of Rubbermaid products in the — window. "Morning."' Morgan told him. He went on up to his office. He took off his parka, hung it on the coat tree, and sat down in the cracked leather swivel chair behind his desk. Supposedly, be would be dealing with the paperwork now-typing up orders, filing invoices. Instead be opened the center drawer and pulled out his bird-feeder plans. He was building the feeder for Bonny. Next Tuesday was their anniversary. They had been married for nineteen' years; good God. He unrolled the plans and studied them, running a nicotine-stained finger across the angles of various levels and compartments. The feeder hung by a post in which be would drill four suet boles-or peanut-butter holes, for Bonny claimed that suet caused cholesterol problems. Morgan smiled to himself. Bonny was a little crazy on the subject of birds, he thought. He, weighted the plans fiat with a stapler and a pack of drill bits, and went to find a good plank to begin on.

For most of the morning be sawed and sanded and hummed, occasionally pausing to push back his hat and wipe his face on his sleeve. His office stairs made a fine sawhorse. At the front of the store a trickle of' shoppers chose their single purchases: a mousetrap, a furnace filter, a can of roach spray. Morgan hummed the "W. P. A. Blues" and chiseled a new point on his pencil.

Then Butkins went to an early lunch, leaving Morgan in charge. Morgan had to rise and dust off his knees, regretfully, and wait on a man in coveralls who wanted to buy a Hide-a-Key. "What for?" Morgan asked. "Why spend good money on a little tin box? Do you see the price on this thing?"

"Well, but last week I locked the keys inside my car, don't you know, and I was thinking how maybe I could hide an extra key beneath the-"

"Look," said Morgan. "All you do is take a piece of dental floss, waxed. Surely you have dental floss. Thread your extra key on it, double it for strength, tie it to your radiator grille and let the key hang down inside. Simple! Costs you nothing."

"Well, but this here Hide-a-Key-"

"Are you not standing in the' presence of a man 'whose wife perpetually mislays his car keys for him?" Morgan asked.

The man glanced around him.

"Me, I mean. She loses all I own," Morgan said, "and I've never bad a Hide-a-Key in my life."

"Well, still," the man said doggedly, "I think I'll just go on ahead with this here."

"What is it?" Morgan asked. "You don't have dental floss? Never mind! I tell you what I'll do: you come back this same time tomorrow, I'll have a piece for you from home. Free, no charge. A gift. All right? I'll bring you in a yard or two."

"For Christ's sake," said the man, "will you let me buy one cruddy Hide-a-Key?" Morgan flung his bands up. "Of course!" be said. "Be my guest! Waste your money! Fill your life with junk!" He stabbed the cash-register keys. "A dollar twenty-nine," he said.

"It's my dollar twenty-nine, I'll waste it however I like," said the man, pressing the money into Morgan's palm. "Maniac."

"Junkie!" The man rushed off, clutching his Hide-a-Key. Morgan muttered to himself and slammed 'the cash register shut.

When Butkins came back, Morgan was free to go to lunch. He went to the No Jive Café; be liked their pickles. All the other customers were black, though, and they wouldn't talk to him. They seemed to spend their mealtimes passing tiny wads of money to the counterman, and then mumbling and looking off sideways under lowered lids. Meanwhile Morgan slouched over his plate and chewed happily on a pickle. It really was a wonderful pickle. The garlic was so strong it almost fizzed. But you only got one to a plate, alongside your sandwich. He'd asked time and time again for an extra, but they always said no; he'd have to order another hamburger that he didn't even want.

After he finished eating, he thought he'd take a walk. He had a regular pattern of places be liked to visit. He zipped his parka and set off. The day bad not warmed up much; the passers-by had pinched, teary faces. Morgan was glad of his beard. He tuned up his collar and held it close and proceeded almost at a run, squinting against the wind.

'First to Potter, the used-instrument dealer, but Potter had someone with him-a gawky, plain young woman 'trying out a violin. "Father Morgan!" Potter cried. "Miss Miller, meet Father Morgan, the street priest of Baltimore. How's it going? How're your addicts? Come in and 'have some tea!" But customers here were rare, and Morgan didn't want to interrupt. "No, no," be said, holding up a band. "I must be on my way. Blessings!" and he backed 'out the' door.

He cut through an alley and came out on Marianna Street. An exotic woman with a tOrrent of black hair stood beside a hot-dog cart. Her make-up was stupendous-a coppery glaze on her skin, a flaring red slash of a mouth, and mascara so heavily applied that each eyelash seemed strung with black beads. 'Now that it was winter, she was wrapped in old coats and sweaters, but Morgan knew from warmer seasons that underneath she wore a red lace dress and an armload of chipped, flaking, gold-tone bracelets. "Zosem pas!" he called out to her, "Well, hey!" she said. She spoke extra brightly, exaggerating her lip movements. "How you today? Get a letter from home?" Morgan smiled humbly and looked perplexed.

"Letter!" she shouted. She wrote on her palm with an imaginary pencil. "You get a letter?"

"Ah!" said Morgan, suddenly realizing. He shook his head. "Pok," he said sadly. "Kun salomen baso." The corners of his mouth turned down; be scuffed a boot against the wheel of her cart.

"You poor man," she said. "Well, maybe tomorrow, huh?"

"Brankuso," he told her. "Zosem pas!" and he waved and grinned and walked on.

At the corner of Marianna Street and Croswell he hesitated. What be would really like was to turn down Croswell-just ahead in that general direction. What harm could it do? He hadn't been in several weeks. He'd resisted temptation admirably. He shoved both bands in his pockets and set out.

CRAFTS UNLIMITED, the sign in — the middle of the block said. It was an elderly building, four stories tall. The first-floor bay window was full of patchwork quilts, cornbusk dolls, samplers, woven goods, and puppets.. The windows above it were narrower, dark and uncurtained. It was the third-floor windows that Morgan watched, from the shadow of a laundromat doorway-Emily and Leon Meredith's windows. He had learned their address with no trouble at all, just looked it up' in the- telephone book. He'd learned that along about now (just before the baby's nap, he supposed) one or the other of the Merediths would float, up behind the window on the left and tug it open. A band would trail out-Emily's pale hand or Leon's' darker one- and there would be a still, considering moment while they pondered how to dress the baby for her outing. Morgan enjoyed that. (Bonny, with the last few children, bad simply thrown whatever was closest into the stroller-a blanket, or some older child's jacket; anything would do). He imagined that the Merediths would also sprinkle a few drops of milk on theft wrists before giving their daughter a bottle, and would test the water with the tip of an elbow before lowering her into her bath-whatever was instructed, be liked to believe. Whatever the proper method was. He waited, smiling upward, with both bands buried deep in his pockets. Had be missed them? No, here they came, out the glass door beside the CRAFTS UNLIMITED sign. Leon carried the baby over his shoulder, (Naturally they would not have bought a carriage.) She must be nine or ten months did by now-a fat, apple-checked child in a thick snowsuit. Emily walked next to Leon, with her hand tucked through his arm and her face "lifted and bright, talking to the baby and tripping along in her shabby trenchcoat and little black slippers. Morgan loved the way the Merediths dressed. It seemed they bad decided, long ago, what clothes would be their trademark, and they never swerved from it. Leon always wore clean khaki trousers and a white shirt. Below the sleeves of his rust-colored corduroy jacket, a half-inch of immaculate white cuff emerged. And Emily wore one of three scoop-necked leotards- brown, plum, or (most often) black-with a matching wrap skirt of some limp material that flowed to mid-calf length. He had noticed such outfits in modern-dance productions on TV, and admired theft fluidity. Now he saw that, worn on the street, they made fashion seem beside the point. In fact, the hemline was wrong for this year or even for this decade, he suspected, and 'who ever heard of such a young girl in such drab colors? But these costumes seemed to carry their own authority. She didn't look outdated at all. She' looked stark, pared down. She had done away with the extras.

He enjoyed imagining, their eat-in kitchen, with just two plates and two sets of silver and an earthenware bowl for the baby. He liked to think that their bathroom contained a bar of Ivory soap and three hotel towels. Well, and Leon's shaving things, of course. But nothing else. No bath oil, talcum tins, acne creams, hairdryers, children's orthodontic appliances, mingled bottles of perfume swearing at each other, dangling bras and nylons and laceedged shower caps. He gazed longingly after the Merediths. Their two oval faces swung away, private and impenetrable. Their daughter's face was round as a coin, and stayed visible long after her parents had turned their backs on him, but she was no easier to read.

Of course, what he should have done was gallop across and catch up with them. "Remember me? Dr. Morgan. Remember? What a coincidence! I just chanced to be in the neighborhood, you see.." It wouldn't be difficult. He could take the baby's, pulse, inquire about 'her DPT shots. Doctoring was so easy-a matter of mere common sense. It was almost too easy. He'd have more trouble sustaining the role of electrician, or one of those men who blow insulating material between the walls of houses.

Nevertheless, something stopped him. He felt awed by the Merediths-by their austerity, their certitude, their mapped and charted lives. He let them float away untouched, like people in a bubble.

Afternoon drifted over the store, and twilight sank into the corners. Butkins swallowed a yawn and mused at the window. Morgan invented an elaborate sort of paddlewheel device to tip squirrels off the bird feeder. He sanded each paddle carefully and fitted it into place. He felt comforted and steadied by this kind of work. It made him think of 'his father, a methodical man who might have been much happier as a carpenter than as an ineffectual high-school English teacher. "One thing our family has always believed in," his father used to say, "is the very best quality tools. You buy the best tools for the job: drop-forged steel, hardwood handles. And then you take good care of them. Everything in its place. Lots of naval jelly." It was the only philosophy he had ever stated outright, and Morgan clung to it now like something carved in stone. His father had killed himself during Morgan's last year of 'high school'. Without a hint of despair or ill health (though he'd always seemed somewhat muted), he had taken a room at The Winken Blinken Motor Hotel one starry April evening and slit both wrists with a razor blade. Morgan bad spent a large part of his life trying to figure out why. All he wanted was a reason-bad debts, cancer, black-mail, an illicit love affair; nothing would have dismayed him. Anything would have been preferable to- this nebulous, ambiguous trailing off. Had his father, perhaps, been wretched in his marriage? Fallen under the power of racketeers? Committed murder? He rifled his father's correspondence, stole his desk key and his cardboard file box. He mercilessly cross-examined his mother, but she seemed no wiser than Morgan, or maybe she just didn't want to talk about it. She went around silent and exhausted; she'd taken a job at Hutzler's selling gloves. Gradually, Morgan stopped asking. The possibility had begun to- settle on him, lately, as imperceptibly as dust, that perhaps there'd been no reason after all. Maybe a man's interest in life could just thin to a trickle and dry up; was' that it? He hated to believe it. He pushed the thought away, any time it came to him. And even now he often pored over the file box he had stolen, but he never found more than he'd found at the start: alphabetized instruction sheets for assembling bicycles, cleaning lawnmowers, and installing vacuum-cleaner belts. Repairing, replacing, maintaining. One step follows another, and if you have completed step two- then step three will surely come to you.

He sanded the paddlewheel, nodding gently. He hummed without any tune.

Butkins came up the stairs to say, "I'm going now, if that's all you need. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Eh?" said Morgan. "Is it time?" He straightene4 and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Well, yes, surely, Butkins," he said. "So long, then." The store fell silent and grew fuzzy with darkness. Passers-by hurried home to supper without even glancing in. Morgan got to his feet, put on his parka, and made his way up the aisle. He switched off the lights and locked the three massive, burglar-proof locks. From outside, the place looked like an antique photograph: lifeless, blurred, the knobs and bulges in its window a mystery forever. Maybe Grandfather Cullen's ghost came here, nights, and roamed the aisles in a daze, ruminating over the rechargeable hedge clippers'. Morgan turned his collar up and ran to catch the bus.

At supper the grownups sat bunched at one end of the table as — if taking refuge from the children-Morgan in 'his hat, Bonny and Louisa, and Morgan's sister, Brindle, wearing a lavender bathrobe. Brindle had her mother's sallow, eagle face and hunched posture, but not her vitality. She sat idly buttering pieces of French bread, which she placed in a circle on the rim of her plate, while Louisa recounted, word for word, a cooking program she'd been watching on TV. "First he put the veal' shanks endwise in a pot. Then he poured over them a sauce made of tomato paste, lemon zest, bits of celery… but everything was cut up ahead of time! Naturally it looks easy if you don't have to witness all the' peeling and chopping." Morgan reached across her for the salt.

"There's not enough real life on television," Louisa said.

"That's the whole point," Brindle told her.

"I'd like to see him try scraping the tomato paste out of that little tiny Hunt's can, too."

"Mother, you — went through all this last week," Brindle said. "That's a re-run you were watching, and you made all the same objections too."

"I did not! I knew nothing about such programs last week."

"You told us every bit of it: the lemon zest, the celery…"

"Are you accusing me of a faulty memory?" Louisa asked.

"Ladies. Please," said Morgan. It was, true there seemed to be some problem lately with his mother's memory. She had spells when she was doggedly repetitive; her mind, like — an old record, appeared to stick in certain grooves. But it only made her nervous to have it brought to her attention. He scowled at Brindle, who shrugged and buttered another slice of bread.

Meanwhile his daughters ate in a separate flurry of gossip and quarrels and giggles-seven slim, blue-jeaned girls and then someone else, a little white-haired waif with rhinestone ear studs, some friend of Kate's. She sat between Kate and Amy and stared at Morgan narrowly, as if she disapproved of him. It made him nervous. He was never truly happy if he felt that even the most random passing stranger found him unlikable. He'd begun the meal in a fine mood, twirling his spaghetti theatrically on his fork and speaking in a broad Italian accent, but gradually he lost his enthusiasm. "What do you keep looking at?" he asked now. "Have we met before?"

"Sir?"

"This is Coquette," Kate told him.

"Ah. Coquette."

"Me and her are in the same class at school. We like the same boy." Morgan frowned. "Same what?" he said.

"This boy named Jackson Eps."

"But you're, only in fifth grade!"

"We liked him in fourth grade too."

"This is ridiculous," Morgan told Bonny. Bonny smiled at him; she never knew when to start worrying. "What are things coming to?" he asked his sister.

"Where are we headed, here? It's all these Barbie dolls, Ken dolls, Tinkerbell make-up sets."

"I liked a boy in fifth grade," Brindle said.

"You did?"

"Robert Roberts."

"Oh, Lord, Brindle, not Robert Roberts again."

"Robert Roberts was in fifth grade?" Kate asked. She nudged Coquette. "Robert Roberts was Brindle's childhood sweetheart," she said.

"He was not only in fifth grade," said Brindle, "he was also' in fourth, third, second… We used to have to share our reading-skills workbook; he was always losing' his. In kindergarten we went shopping once at Bargain Billy's and be stuck a label on my cheek reading SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT. He also took me to my first school dance and my first car-date and my senior class, picnic." Morgan sighed and tipped his chair back. Bonny helped herself to more salad.

"Then in college I broke it off, " Brindle told Coquette. "I gave him back his high-school ring with the candle wax still in it to make it fit my finger-half a candle's worth, it looked like. I'd probably have drowned if I ever wore it swimming."

"Why'd you break it off?" Coquette asked her. "I got married to someone else."

"But why'd you break it off? I mean, why marry someone else?" Brindle pushed her plate away and set her elbows on the table. She said, "Well, I don't know if… When I talk about him, it sounds so simple, doesn't it? But see, even back in kindergarten he would sometimes act silly and sometimes bore me, and yet other times I was crazy about him, and when we grew up it got worse. Sometimes I liked him and sometimes I didn't like him, and sometimes I didn't even think of him. And sometimes he didn't like me, I knew it; we knew each other so well. It never occurred to me it would be that way with anyone. I mean, he was my only' experience. You understand what I'm trying to say?" Plainly, Coquette didn't — Understand a word. She was growing restless, glancing toward the plate of Oreos on the sideboard. But Brindle didn't see that. "What I did, " she said, "was marry an older man. Man who lived next door to Mother's old house, downtown. It was a terrible mistake. 'He was the jealous type, possessive, always fearing I would leave him. He never gave me any money, only charge accounts and then this teeny bit of cash for the groceries every week. For seven years I charged our food at the gourmet sections of department stores-tiny cans of ham and pure-white asparagus spears and artichoke bottoms and hearts of palm, all so I could save back some of the grocery money. I would charge a dozen skeins of yarn and then return them one by one to the Knitter's Refund counter for cash. I subscribed, to every cents-off, money-back offer that came along. At the end of seven years I said, 'All right, Horace, I've saved up five thousand dollars of my own. I'm leaving.' And I left."

"She bad to save five thousand dollars," Morgan told the ceiling, "to catch a city bus from her house to my house. Three and a half miles-four at the most."

"I felt I'd been challenged," Brindlesaid.

"And it's not as if I hadn't offered to help her out, all along."

"I felt I wanted to show him, 'See there? You can't overcome me, so easily; I've got more spirit than you think,'" Brindle said.

Morgan wondered if supplies of spirit were rationed. Did each person only get so' much, which couldn't be replenished once it was used up? For in the four years since leaving her husband she'd stayed plopped on Morgan's third floor, seldom dressing in anything but her faded lavender bathrobe. To this day, she'd never mentioned finding a job or an apartment of her own.

And when her husband died of a stroke, not six months after she'd left; she hardly seemed to care one way or the other. "Oh, well," was all she'd said, "I suppose this saves me a trip to Nero."

"Don't you mean Reno?" Morgan had asked.

"Whatever," she said.

The only time she showed any spirit, in fact, was when she was telling this story. Her eyes grew triangular; her skin had a stretched look. "I haven't had an easy time of it, you see," she said. "It all worked out so badly. And Robert Roberts, well, I hear he went and married a Gaithersburg girl. I just turn my back on him for a second and off he goes and gets married. Isn't that something? Not that I hold him to blame. I know I did-it to myself. I've ruined my life, all on my own, and it's far too late to change it. I just set all the switches and did all the steering and headed straight toward ruin." Ruin echoed off the high, sculptured ceiling. Bonny brought the cookies from the sideboard; the girls took two and three apiece as the plate went past. Morgan let his chair tip suddenly forward. He studied 'Brindle with a curious, alert expression on his face, but she didn't seem to notice.

Now he and Bonny were returning from a movie. They slogged down the glassy black pavement toward the bus stop. It was a misty, damp night, warmer than it had been all day. Neon signs blurred into rainbows, and the taillights of cars, sliding off into — the fog, seemed to contract and then vanish. Bonny had her arm linked through Morgan's. She wore a wrinkled raincoat she had owned since he first met her, and crepe-soled shoes that made a luff-luffing sound. "Maybe tomorrow," she said, "you could get the car put back together."

"Yes, maybe," said Morgan absently. "We've been riding buses all week." Morgan was thinking about the movie. It hadn't seemed very believable to him. Everyone bad been so sure of what everyone else was going to do. The hero, who was some kind of double agent, had laid all these elaborate plans that depended on some other, unknowing person appearing in a certain place or making a certain decision, and the other person always obliged. Sentries looked away at crucial moments. High officials — went to dinner just when they usually went to dinner. Didn't B ever happen instead of A, in these people's lives? Morgan plodded steadily, frowning at his feet. From out of nowhere the memory came to him of the hero's manicured, well-tended hands expertly assembling a rifle from random parts smuggled through in a leather briefcase.

They reached the bus stop; they halted and peered down, the street. "Watch it take all night," Bonny said good-naturedly. She removed her pleated plastic rain-scarf and shook the droplets from it.

"Bonny," Morgan said, "why don't I own a corduroy jacket?"

"You do," she told him. "I do?"

"You have that black one with the suede lapels."

"Oh, that," he said.

"What's wrong with it?"

"I'd prefer to have rust," he said. She looked over at him. She seemed about to speak, but then she must have changed her mind.

A bus lumbered into view, its windows lit with golden lights-an entire civilization, Morgan imagined, cruising through space. It stopped with a wheeze and let them climb on. For such a late hour, it seemed unusually crowded. There were no double seats left.

Bonny settled beside a woman in a nurse's uniform, and instead of finding someplace else Morgan stood rocking above her in the aisle. "I'd like a red rust jacket with the elbows worn," he told her.

"Well," she said dryly, "you'd have to wear down your own elbows, I expect."

"I don't know; I might find something in a secondhand store."

"Morgan, can't you stay out of secondhand stores? Some of those people have died, the owners of those things you buy."

"That's no reason to let a perfectly good piece of clothing go to waste." Bonny wiped the rain off her face with a balled-up Kleenex from her pocket.

"Also," Morgan said; "I'd like a pair of khaki trousers and a really old, soft, clean white shirt" She replaced the Kleenex in her pocket. She jolted along with the bus in silence for a moment, looking straight ahead of her. Then she said, "Who is it this time?"

"Who is what?"

"Who is it, that wears those clothes?"

"No one!" he said. "What do you mean?"

"You think I'm blind? You think I haven't been through this a hundred times before?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Bonny shrugged and turned her gaze out the window. They were near their own neighborhood now. Lamps glowed over the entranceways of brick houses and apartment buildings. A man in a hat was walking his beagle. A boy cupped a match and lit a girl's cigarette. In the seat behind Bonny, two women in fur coats were having a conversation. "I guess you heard the news by now," one of them told the other. "Angie's husband died."

"Died?" asked the other. "Just up and died."

"How'd it happen?"

"Well, he finished shaving and he put on a little aftershave and he came back into the bedroom and went to sit on the bed-"

"But what was it? His heart?" 'Well, I'm telling you, Libby.." Morgan began to have an uncomfortable thought. He became convinced that his band, which gripped the seat in plain- view of these two women, was so repulsive to them that they were babbling utter nonsense just to keep from thinking about it. He imagined that he could see through their eyes; he saw exactly how his band appeared to them-its knuckly fingers, wiry black hairs, sawdust ingrained around the nails.

He saw his whole person, in fact. What a toad be was! A hat and a beard, on legs. His eyes felt huge and hot and heavy, set in a 'baroque arrangement of dark pouches. "He reached for his socks," the first woman said desperately, "and commenced to unroll them. One sock was rolled inside the other, don't you know…" She was looking away from Morgan; she was avoiding the sight of his band. He let go of the seat and buried both fists in his armpits. For the rest of the trip he rode unsupported, 'lurching violently whenever the bus stopped.

And when they reached home, where the girls were doing their lessons on the dining-room table and Brindle was laying out her Tarot cards in the kitchen, Morgan went straight up the stairs to bed. "I thought you'd like some coffee," Bonny said. She' called after him, "Morgan? Don't you want a cup of coffee?"

"No, I guess not tonight," be said. "Thank you, dear," and he continued up the stairs. He went to his room, undressed to his thermal underwear, and lit a cigarette from the pack o-n the bureau. For the first time all day, he was bare-headed. In the mirror his forehead looked lined and vulnerable. He noticed a strand of white in his beard. White hair! "Christ," he said. Then he bent forward and looked more closely.

Maybe, he thought, he could pass himself off as one of those miracles front the Soviet Union-a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty, still scaling mountains with his herd of goats. He brightened. He could cross the country on a lecture tour. At every whistle stop he'd take off his shirt and show his black-pelted chest.

Reporters would ask him his secret. "Yogurt and cigarettes, comrades," be cackled to the mirror. He took a couple of prancing steps, showing off. "Never another sing but yogurt und Rossian cigarettes." Feeling more cheerful, he went to the closet for his cardboard box, which be placed on the — bed. He drew intently on his Camel as he padded around, getting arranged: turning on the electric blanket, propping up his pillow, finding an ashtray. He climbed into bed and set the ashtray in his lap. There was a little coughing fit to be seen through first. He scattered ashes down his undershirt. He pinched a speck of tobacco from his tongue. "Ah, comrades," be wheezed.

He opened the box, took out the first sheet of paper, and settled back to read it.

1. Familiarize yourself with all steps before beginning.

2. Have on hand the following: pliers, Phillips screw-driver…

He lowered the sheet of paper and gazed at the black windowpanes. Miles away from here, he imagined, the windows on Croswell Street were blinking out, first the left one, then the right one. The baby would stir in her sleep. Leon's hand would drop from the light switch and be would cross the cold floor to their pallet. Then all daytime sounds would stop; there would only be the sifting breaths of sleepers, motionless and dreamless on their threadbare sheets. Morgan turned his light off too, and settled down for the night.

1969

What was it that he wanted of them? He was everywhere, it seemed-an oddly shaped, persistent shadow trailing far behind when they went for a walk, lurking in various, doorways, flattening himself around the corner of a building. What they ought to do was simply wheel and confront him. "Why, Dr. Morgan!" — smiling, surprised-"how nice to run into you!" But the situation hadn't lent itself to that, somehow. The first time they'd seen him (or felt his presence, really), back when Gina was a baby, they hadn't realized who he was. Coming home from a shopping trip at twilight, they'd been chilled by a kind of liquid darkness flowing in and out of alleyways behind them. Emily had been frightened. Leon had been angry, but with Emily next to him and Gina in his arms he hadn't wanted to force anything. They had merely walked a little faster, and spoken to each other in a loud, casual tone without once mentioning what was happening. The second time, Emily had been alone. She'd left the baby with Leon and gone to buy felt for the puppets. Directly opposite their apartment building, in an arched granite doorway, a figure fell suddenly backward into the gloom of the laundromat. She hardly saw; she was calculating the yardage she would need. But that evening, as she was making a pointed hat for Rumpelstiltskin, the memory came swimming in again. She saw the figure fall once more out of sight-though he hadn't been wearing a pointed hat at all but something flat, a beret, perhaps. Still, where had she seen him before? She said, "Oh!" and laid her scissors down. "Guess who I think I saw today?" she said to Leon. "That doctor. That Dr. Morgan."

"Did you ask him why he never sent a bill?"

"No, he wasn't really… It wasn't a meeting, exactly. I mean, he didn't see me. Well, he saw me, but it seemed he… Probably," she said, "it wasn't Dr. Morgan at all. I'm sure he would have spoken." A month or so later he followed her along Beacon Avenue. She stopped to look in the window of an infants'-wear shop and she felt someone else stop too. She turned and found a man some distance away, his back to her, gazing off down the street at nothing in particular. He might have stepped out of a jungle movie, she thought, with his safari shut and shorts, his knee-high socks, ankle boots, and huge pith helmet, Extraneous buckles and D-rings glittered all over him — on Ms shoulders, his sleeves, his rear pockets. It was nobody dangerous. It was only one of those eccentric people you often see on city streets, acting out some elaborate inner vision of themselves. She walked on. At the next red light she glanced back again and here he came, hurrying toward her with a swaggering, soldierly gait to match the uniform, his eyes obscured by the helmet but his abundant beard in full view. Oh, you couldn't mistake that beard. Dr. Morgan! She took a step toward him. He looked up at her, clapped a hand on his helmet, and darted through a door reading LU-RAE'S FINE COIFFURES.

Emily felt absurd. She felt how open and glad she must look, preparing to call his name. But what had she done wrong? Why didn't he like her any, more?

He had seemed so taken with the two of them, back when Gina was born.

She didn't tell Leon. It would make him angry, maybe; you never knew. She decided that, anyhow, it had only been one of those unexplainable things- meaningless, not worth troubling Leon about.

So it got offon the wrong foot, you might say. There was a moment when they could have dealt with it straightforwardly, but the moment slipped past them. After several of these incidents (spaced across weeks or even months) in which one thing or another prevented them from going up to the man and greeting him naturally, it began to seem that the situation had taken a turn of its own. There was no way they could gracefully set it right now. It became apparent that he must be crazy-or, at least, obsessed in some unaccountable way. (Emily shivered to think of Gina's delivery at his hands.) Yet, as Leon pointed out, he did no harm. He never threatened them or even came within speaking distance of them; there was nothing to complain of. Really, Emily was taking this too fancifully, Leon said. The man was only something to be adjusted to, as a matter of course. He was part of the furniture of their lives, like the rowhouses looming down Croswell Street, the dusty, spindly trees dying of exhaust fumes, and the puppets hanging in their muslin shrouds from the hooks in the back-bedroom closet.

Now that it was winter, business had slacked off. There had been a little burst around Christmas (holiday bazaars, parties for rich people's children), but none of the open-air fairs and circuses that kept them so busy in the summer. Emily used the time to build a new stage- a wooden one, hinged and folded for portability. She repaired the puppets and sewed more costumes for them. A few she replaced completely, which led to the usual question of what to do with the old ones. They were like dead bodies; you couldn't just dump them in the trashcan. "Use them for spare parts," Leon always said. "Save the eyes. Save that good nose." Put Red Riding Hood's grandmother's pockmarked cork-ball nose on any other puppet? It wouldn't work. It wouldn't be right. Anyway, how could she tear that face apart? She laid the grandmother in a carton alongside a worn-out Beauty from "Beauty and the Beast"-the very first puppet she'd ever made. They were on their third Beauty at the moment, a much more sophisticated version with a seamed cloth face. It wasn't the plays that wore the puppets out; it was the children coming up afterward, patting the puppets' wigs and stroking their cheeks. Beauty's skin was gray with fingerprints. Her yellow hair had a tattered, frantic look.

This whole room belonged to the puppets: the hollow back bedroom, with peeling silvery pipes shooting to the ceiling and a yellow rain stain ballooning down one wall. The window was painted shut, its panes so sooty that the sun set up an opaque white film in the afternoons. The wooden floor put splinters in Gina's knees and turned her overalls black. The china doorknob was hazy with cracks. The door hung crooked. Emily worked late in the glow of one goose-necked lamp, the hall light that shone beneath the door was not a rod but a wedge, like a very long piece of pie.

She sat up late and repaired the witch, the all-purpose stepmother-witch that was used in so many different plays. No wonder she kept wearing out! One black button eye dangled precariously. Emily perched upon the stepladder that was the room's only furniture and tied a knot in a long tail of thread.

The puppets most in use were kept in an Almade'n chablis box in the corner. They poked their heads out of the cardboard compartments: two young girls (one blonde, one brunette), a prince, a green felt frog, a dwarf The others stayed in muslin bags in the closet, with name tags attached to the drawstrings: Rip Van W. Fool Horse. King. She liked to change them around from time to time, assign them roles they were not accustomed to. Rip Van Winkle, minus his removable beard, made a fine Third Son in any of those stories where the foolish, kind-hearted Third Son ends up with the princess and half the kingdom. He fitted right in. Only Emily knew he didn't belong, and it gave a kind of edge to his performance, she felt. She ran him through his lines herself. (Leon played the older two sons.) She put an extra, salty twang in his voice. The real Third Son, meanwhile- more handsome, with less character- lay face-up backstage, grinning vacantly, Emily had never actually planned to be a puppeteer, and even now both she and Leon thought of it as temporary work. She had entered college as a mathematics major, on full scholarship — the only girl her age in Taney, Virginia, who was not either getting married the day after graduation or taking a job at Taney Paper Products. Her father had been killed in an auto accident when Emily was a baby; then, early hi Emily's freshman year at college, her mother died of a heart ailment. She was going to have to manage on her own, therefore, She hoped to teach junior high. She liked the cool and systematic process that would turn a tangle of disarranged numbers into a single number at the end-the redistributing and simplifying of equations that was the basis of junior-high-school mathematics. But she hadn't even finished the fall semester when she met Leon, who was a junior involved in acting. He couldn't major in acting (it wasn't offered), so he was majoring in English, and barely scraping by in all his subjects while he appeared in every play on campus. For the first time Emily understood why they called actors "stars." There really was something dazzling about him whenever he walked onstage. Seen close up, he was a stringy, long-faced, gloomy boy with eyes that drooped at the outer corners and a mouth already beginning to be parenthesized by two crescent-shaped lines. He had a bitter look that made people uneasy. But onstage, all this came across as a sort of power and intensity. He was so concentrated. His characters were so sharply focused that all the others seemed wooden by comparison. His voice (in real life a bit low and glum) seemed to penetrate farther than the other voices. He hung on to words lovingly and rolled them out after the briefest pause, as if teasing the audience. It appeared that his lines were invented, not memorized.

Emily thought he was wonderful. She had never met anyone like him. Her own family had been so1 ordinary. and pale; her childhood had been so unexceptional. (His had been terrible.) They began spending all their time together-nursing a single Pepsi through an afternoon in the canteen, studying in the library with their feet intertwined beneath the table. Emily was too shy to appear in any plays with him, but she was good with lier hands and she signed on as a set-builder. She hammered platforms and stairsteps and balconies. She painted leafy woods on canvas flats, and then for the next play she transformed the woods into flowered wallpaper and mahogany-colored wainscoting. Meanwhile, it seemed that even this slim connection with the theatre was making her life more dramatic. There were scenes with his parents, at which she was an embarrassed observer-long tirades from his father, a Richmond banker, while his mother wiped her eyes and smiled politely, into space. Evidently, the universityhad informed them that Leon's grades were even lower than usual. If they didn't improve, he was going to flunk out. Almost every Sunday his parents would drive all the way from Richmond just to sit in Leon's overstaffed, faded dormitory parlor asking what kind of profession he could hope for with ahigh F average. Emily would rather have skipped these meetings, but Leon wanted her there. At first his parents were cordial to her. Then they grew less friendly. It couldn't have been anything she'd done. Maybe it was what she hadn't done. She was always reserved arid quiet with them. She came from old Quaker stock and tended, she'd been told, to feel a little too comfortable in the face of long silences. Sometimes she thought things were going beautifully when in fact everybody else was casting about in desperation for something to talk about. So she tried harder to be sociable. She wore lipstick and stockings when she knew they were coming, and she thought up neutral subjects ahead of time. While Leon and his father were storming at each other, she'd be running through a mental card file searching for a topic to divert them. "Our class is reading Tolstoy now," she told Leon's mother one Sunday in April. "Do you like Tolstoy?"

"Oh, yes, we have it in leather," said Mrs. Meredith, dabbing her nose with a handkerchief, "Maybe Leon ought to take Russian literature," Emily said. "We read plays too, you know."

"Let him pass something in his own damn language first," his father said.

"Oh, well, this is in English."

"How would that help?" Mr. Meredith asked. "I believe his native tongue is Outer Mongolian." Meanwhile Leon was standing at the, window with his back to them. Emily felt touched by his tousled hair and his despairing posture, but at the same time she couldn't help wondering how he'd got them into this. His parents weren't really the type to make scenes. Mr, Meredith was a solid, business-like man; Mrs. Meredith was so stately and self-controlled that it was remarkable she'd foreseen the need to bring a handkerchief. Yet every week something went wrong. Leon had this way o£ plunging into battle unexpectedly. He was quicker to go to battle than anyone she knew. It seemed he'd make a mental leap that Emily couldn't follow, landing smack in the middle of rage when just one second before he'd been perfectly level and reasonable. He flung his parents' words back at them. He pounded his fist into his palm. It was all too high-keyed, Emily thought. She turned to Mrs. Meredith again. "Right now we're on Anna Karenina" she said.

"All that stuff is Communist anyhow," said Mr. Meredith.

"Is… what?"

"Sure, this tractor-farming, workers-unite bit, killing off the Tsar and Anastasia…"

"Well, I'm not… I believe that came a little later."

"What is it, you're one of these college leftists?"

"No, but I don't think Tolstoy lived that long."

"Of course he did," Mr. Meredith said. "Where do you think your friend Lenin would be if he didn't have Tolstoy?"

"Lenin?"

"Do you deny it? Look, my girl," Mr. Meredith said. He leaned earnestly toward her, lacing his fingers together. (He must sit this way at the bank, Emily thought, explaining to some farmer why he couldn't have a loan on his tobacco crop.) "The minute Lenin got his foot in the door, first person he called on was Tolstoy. Tolstoy this, Tolstoy that… Any time they wanted any propaganda written, 'Ask Tolstoy,' he'd say. 'Ask Leo.' Why, sure! They didn't tell you that in school?"

"But… I thought Tolstoy died in nineteen…"

"Forty," said Mr. Meredith.

"Forty?" I was in my senior year in college."

"Oh."

"And Stalin!" said Mr. Meredith. "Listen, there was a combination. Tolstoy and Stalin." Leon turned suddenly from the window and left the room/They heard him going up the stairs to the sleeping quarters. Emily and Mrs. Meredith looked at each other.

"If you want my personal opinion," Mr. Meredith said, "Tolstoy was a bit of a thorn in Stalin's side. See, he couldn't unseat Tolstoy, the guy was sort of well. known by then, but at the same time he was too old-line. You knew he was pretty well off, of course. Owned a large piece of land."

"That's true, he did," Emily said. "You can see it must have been a little awkward."

"Well, yes…"

" 'The fact is,' Stalin says to his henchmen, 'he's an old guy. I mean, he's just a doddering old guy with a large piece of land.'" Emily nodded, her mouth slightly open.

Leon came pounding down the stairs. He entered the parlor with a dictionary open in his hands. "Tolstoy, Lev," he read out, "1828–1910," There was a silence.

"Born in eighteen twenty-eight, died in nineteen-"

"All right" said Mr. Meredith. "But where is this getting us? Don't try to change the subject, Leon. We were talking about your grades. Your sloppy grades and this damn-fool acting business."

"I'm serious about my acting," Leon said.

"Serious! About play-acting?"

"You can't make me give it up; I'm twenty-one years old. I know my rights."

"Don't tell me what I can or cannot do," said Mr. Meredith, "If you refuse, I warn you, Leon: I'm with-drawing you from school, I'm not paying next year's tuition."

"Oh, Burt!" Mrs. Meredith said. "You wouldn't do that! He'd be drafted!"

"Army's the best thing that could happen to that boy," Mr. Meredith said.

"You can't!"

"Oh, can't I?" He turned to Leon. "I'm driving home with you today," he said, "unless I have your signed and notarized statement that you will drop all extracurricular activities-plays, girlfriends…" He flapped a pink, tight-skinned hand in Emily's direction.

"Not a chance," said Leon.

"Start packing, then."

"Burt!" Mrs. Meredith cried.

But Leon said, "Gladly. I'll be gone by nightfall. Not home, though-not now or ever again."

"See what you've done?" Mrs. Meredith asked her husband, Leon walked out of the room. Through the parlor's front windows (small-paned, with rippling glass) Emily saw his angular figure repeatedly dislocating itself, jarring apart and drawing back together as he strode across the quadrangle. She was left with Leon's parents, who seemed slapped into silence. She had the feeling that she was one of them, that she would spend the rest of her days in heavily draped parlors-a little dry stick of a person. "Excuse me," she said, rising. She crossed the room, stepped out the door, and closed it gently behind her. Then she started running after Leon.

She found him at tiie fountain in front of the library, idly throwing pebbles into the water. When she came up beside him, out of breath, and touched Ms arm, he wouldn't even glance at her. In the sunlight Ms face had a warm olive glow that she found beautiful. His eyes, which were long and heavy-lidded, seemed full of plots. She believed she would never again know anyone so decisive. Even his physical outline seemed to stand MORGAN'S PASSING 71 out more sharply than other people's. "Leon?" she said. "What will you do?" *T11 go to New York," he said, as if he'd been planning this for months.

She had always dreamed of seeing New York. She tightened her hand on his arm. But he didn't invite her along.

To escape his parents, in case they came hunting him, they walked to a dark little Italian restaurant near the campus. Leon went on talking about New York: he might get something in summer stock, he said, or, with luck, a bit part Off-Broadway. Always he said "I," not "we." She began to despair. She wished she could find some flaw in his face, which seemed to give off a light of its own in the gloom of the restaurant. "Do me a favor," he told her. "Go to my room and pack my things, just a few necessities. I'm worried Mom and Dad will be waiting for me there."

"All right," she said.

"And bring my checkbook from the top dresser drawer. I'm going to need that money."

"Leon, I have eighty-seven dollars."

"Keep it."

"It's left over from the spending money Aunt Mercer gave me. I won't have any use for it."

"Will you please stop fussing?" Then he said, "Sorry."

"That's all right." They walked back to campus, and while he waited beside the fountain, she went to his dorm. His parents weren't in the parlor. The two armchairs they had sat in were empty; the upholstery sighed as it rose by degrees, erasing the dents they had left.

She climbed the stairs to the sleeping quarters, where she'd rarely been before. Girls were allowed here, but they didn't often come; there was something uncouth about the place. A couple of boys were tossing a soft-ball in the corridor. They paused grudgingly as she edged by, and the instant she had passed, she heard the slap of the ball again just behind her. She knocked at the door of 241. Leon's roommate said, "Yeah."

"It's Emily Cathcart. Can I come in and get some things for Leon?"

"Sure." He was seated at his desk, tilted "back, apparently 'doing nothing but shooting paper clips with a rubber band. (How would she ever love another boy after Leon left?) The paper clips kept hitting a bulletin board and then pinging into the metal wastebasket underneath it. "I'll need to find his suitcase," Emily said.

"Under that bed." She dragged it out. It was covered with dust.

"Meredith leaving us?" he asked.

"He's going to New York. Don't tell his parents."

"New York, eh?" said the roommate, without much interest.

From the closet by Leon's bed Emily started taking the clothes she'd seen him wear most often-white shirts, khaki trousers, a corduroy packet she knew he was fond of. Everything smelled of him, starchy and clean. She was pleased by the length of his trousers, in which she herself would be lost.

"You going with him?" the roommate said.

"I don't think he wants me to Another paper clip snapped-against the bulletin board.

"I would if he asked me, but he hasn't," Emily said.

"Oh, well, you've got exams coming up. Got to get your A's and A-pluses." *Td go without a thought," she said.

"The man wants to travel light, I guess."

"Is this his bureau?" He nodded and let his chair thud forward. '

'You don't think your picture'd be on my bureau," he said. "No offense, of course." She glanced at the picture-her Christmas present to Leon. It stood behind an alarm clock, still in the deckleedged cardboard folder supplied by the studio. The person it showed only faintly resembled her, she hoped. Emily hated being made to feel conscious of her physical appearance. She walked around most of the time peering out of the eye holes of her body without giving it much thought, and she found it an unpleasant shock to be pressed onto a piano bench with her head held at an unnatural angle, forced to reflect upon her too light skin and her pale lashes that had a way of disappearing in photographs. "Smile," the photographer had told her. "This is not a firing squad, you know." She had given a quick, nervous smile and felt how artificially her lips stretched across her teeth. When the man ducked behind his camera, she'd wiped the smile off instantly. Her face emerged sober and peering, netted by worry, the mouth slightly pursed like her spinster aunt's.

She didn't pack the photo. And when she got back to Leon at the fountain, she was lugging not only his suitcase but hers as well.

"I don't care what you say," she told him. She started calling this at some distance from him, sh& was so anxious to get it said. She was puffing and tottering between the two suitcases. "I'm coming with you. You can't leave me here!"

"Emily?"

"I think we ought to get married. Living in sin would be inconvenient," she said, "but if that's what you prefer, then I'd do that too. And if you tell me not to come, I'll come anyway. You don't own New York! So save your breath. Til ride on the bus one seat behind you. I'll tell the taxi driver, 'Follow that cab!' I'll tell the hotel clerk, 'Give me the room next to his room,' please.'" Leon laughed. She saw she'd won him. She set down the suitcases and stood facing him, not smiling herself. In fact, what she'd won him with was a deliberate, calculated spunkiness that she really did not possess, and she was alarmed to find him so easily taken in. Or maybe he wasn't taken in at all, but knew that this was what the audience expected: that when some girl chases you down with her suitcase and behaves outrageously, you're to laugh and throw your hands up and surrender. Laughter was not his best expression. She had never seen him look so disjointed, so uneven. There was something asymmetrical about his face. "Emily," he said, "what am I going to do with you?"

"I don't know," she told him.

Already she was beginning to worry about that herself.

By evening they were on a Greyhound bus to New York City. By the next afternoon they were settled (it felt more like camping out) in a furnished room with a sink in one corner and a toilet down the haU. They were married Thursday, which was as soon as the law permitted. She'd seen more ceremony, Emily thought, when she got her driver's license. Marriage didn't cause as much of a jolt in her life as she'd expected.

Emily found a job as a waitress hi a Polish restaurant. Leon-just for the moment-cleaned a theatre after shows. In the early evenings he hung out at various coffee-houses listening to actors and poets give readings. He took Emily along, whenever she didn't have to work. "Aren't they terrible?" he would ask her. "I can do better than that." Emily thought so too. Once they heard a monologue that was so inept that she and Leon got up and walked out, and the actor stopped halfway through a line to say, "Hey, you! Don't forget to leave some money in the cup." Emily would have done it- she'd do anything to avoid a scene-but Leon got angry. She felt him draw in his breath; he seemed to grow bigger. By now she knew how far his anger could take him. She lifted her hand to form the shape of his elbow, but she didn't actually touch him. You should never touch Leon when Ms temper was up. Then he let go of his breath again and allowed her to lead him away, with the actor still shouting after them.

It turned into a very hot summer, full of rainstorms and muggy black clouds. The heat in their room was like something alive. And they were continually on the brink of having no money whatsoever. Emily had never realized how much money mattered. She felt she had to breathe shallowly, conserve her energy, walk in a held-in, unobtrusive way as she sidled between people who were richer. She and Leon began to fight about how to spend what they did have. He was more extravagant-wasteful, she said. He said she was stingy.

In July, Emily had a scare and thought she might be pregnant. She felt trapped and horrified; she didn't dare tell Leon. So when she found she wasn't pregnant after all, she couldn't share her relief with him, either. She kept that experience in her mind. She kept examining it, trying to make sense of it. What land of marriage was it if you couldn't tell your husband a thing like that? But he would have flown into a rage, and then sunk in on himself like over-risen bread. It was her idea, marrying, he'd say; and she was the one always harping on what they couldn't afford. She pictured the scene so clearly that she almost believed it had happened. She held it against him. Her eyes filled with tears sometimes as she recalled how badly he'd behaved. But he hadn't! He had never been given a chance! (he would say). She went on blaming him anyhow. She visited a family-planning clinic and she told them that her husband would kill her if she ever got pregnant. Of course she meant it figuratively, but she could tell from the way the social worker looked at her that in this neighborhood you couldn't always be sure of that. The social worker glanced at Emily's arms and asked her if she had any other problems. Emily wanted to talk about her separateness, about how she'd kept her pregnancy scare a secret from her own husband, but she knew that wasn't a serious enough problem. In this neighborhood, women were getting murdered. (She felt how frivolous she must seem to the social worker; she was wearing her leotard and wrap skirt from Modem Dance I.) Women were getting mugged in this neighborhood, or beaten up by their husbands. Emily's husband would never lay a finger on her. She was certain of that. She rested in a circle of immunity, she felt.

She herself was not an. angry kind of person. The most she could manage was a little spark of delayed resentment, every now and then, when something had happened earlier that she really should have objected to if he'd only realized. Maybe if she'd had a temper herself, she would have known what string would pull Leon back down into calm. As it was, she just had to stand by. She had to remind herself: "He might hurt other people, but he's never laid a finger on me." This gave her a little flicker of pleasure. "He's crazy sometimes," she told the social worker, "but he's never harmed a hair of my head." Then she smoothed her skirt and looked down at her white, bloodless hands.

In August, Leon met up with four actors who were forming an improvisational group called OS the Cuff. One of them had a van; they were planning to travel down the eastern seaboard. ("New York is too hard to break into," the girl named Paula said.) Leon joined them. From the start he was their very best member, Emily thought-otherwise they might not have let him in, with his deadwood wife who froze in public and would only take up space in the van. "I can build sets, at least," Emily told them, but it seemed they never used sets. They acted on a bare stage. They planned to get up in front of a nightclub audience and request ideas that they could extemporize upon. The very thought terrified Emily, but Leon said it was the finest training he could hope to have. He practiced with them at the apartment of Barry May, the boy who owned the van. There was no way they could truly rehearse, of course, but at least they could practice working together, sending signals, feeding each other lines that propelled them toward some sort of ending. They-were planning on comedy; you could not, they said, hope for much else in a nightclub. They built their comedy upon situations that made Emily anxious-lost luggage, a dentist gone berserk-and while she watched she wore a small, quirked frown that never really left her, even when she laughed. In fact it was terrible to lose your luggage. (She'd once had it actually happen. She'd lain awake all one night before it was recovered.) And it was much too easy to imagine your dentist going berserk. She chewed on a knuckle, observing how Leon took over the stage with his wide, crisp gestures, his swinging stride that came from the hip. In one skit he was Paula's husband. In another he was her fiancé. He kissed her on the lips. It was only acting, but who knows: sometimes you act like a certain person long enough, you become that person. Wasn't it possible?

They started on tour in September. They left New York in the van with all their worldly goods piled on top, including Emily's and Leon's two fat suitcases and the fluted silver coffeepot that Aunt Mercer had sent for a wedding gift. They went first to Philadelphia, where Barry knew a boy whose uncle owned a bar. For three nights they played out their skits in front of an audience that did not stop talking once, and they had to cull then: ideas from Emily, whom they'd fed a few suggestions and planted on a barstool just in case. Then they moved on to Haightsville, south of Philadelphia. They thought they had a connection there, but that fell through, and they ended up in a tavern called the Bridle Club that was decorated to look like a stable. Emily had the impression that most of the customer^ were married to other people waiting at home. It was a middle-aged crowd-squat men in business suits, women with sprayed and gilded hair and dresses that looked one size too small. These people, too, talked among themselves throughout the skits, but they did offer a few ideas. A man wanted a scene in which a teenager announced to her parents that she was quitting school to become an exotic dancer. A woman proposed that a couple have a quarrel about the wife's attempts to introduce a few gourmet foods to her husband. Both of these suggestions, when they were made, caused a little ripple of amusement through the room, and the group turned them into fairly funny skits; but Emily kept imagining that they might be true. The man did have the seedy, desolate look of a failed father; the woman was so frantically gay that she could very well have just escaped from a stodgy husband. What the audience was doing was handing over its pain, Emily felt. Even the laughter seemed painful, issuing from these men with their red, bunchy faces and the women bearing up bravely beneath their towering burdens of hair. For the third skit, a man sitting with three other men proposed the following: a wife develops the notion that her husband, a purely social drinker who can take it or leave it and quit whenever he wants to, supposing he ever did want to, is in fact an alcoholic, "Pretend like this woman gets more and more out of line," he said. "Pretend like she goes around watering the Jack Daniels, calling up the doctor and the AA people. When he asks for a drink, she brings him ginger ale with a spoonful of McCormick's brandy extract stirred in, When he wants to go out for a friendly night with his buddies, she says-"

"Please!" said Barry, holding up a hand. "Leave something for us!" Then everyone laughed, except Emily.

They were appearing at the Bridle Club for three nights, but the second night Emily didn't go. She walked around town instead, until almost ten o'clock, looking into the darkened windows of Kresge and Lynne's Dress Shoppe and Knitter's World. Periodically, carloads of teenagers shot by, hooting at her, but Emily ignored them. She felt so much older than they were, she was surprised she wasn't invisible to them.

In the drugstore, which was the only place still open, she bought a zippered cosmetic kit for traveling, completely fitted with plastic jars arid bottles and a tiny tube of Pepsodent. She and Leon were almost penniless at this point. They were having to sleep apart-Emily and the two other women at the Y, the men in the van. The last thing they could afford was a $4.98 cosmetic kit. Emily rushed back to her room, feeling guilty and pleased. She started rearranging her belongings- carefully pouring hand lotion into one of the bottles, fitting her silver hairbrush into a vinyl loop. But she really didn't wear much make-up; the zippered bag took more room than her few cosmetics had taken on their own. It was a mistake. She couldn't even get her money back; she'd used the bottles. She began to feel sick. She went through her suitcase throwing things out-her white school blouses, her jeans, every bit of underwear. (If she wore only leotards, she wouldn't need underwear.) When she was done, all that remained in her suitcase were two extra wrap skirts, two extra leotards, a nightgown, and the cosmetic bag. The small cardboard wastebasket next to her bed was overflowing with filmy, crumpled, shoddy nonessentials.

Their third appearance at the Bridle Club was canceled in favor of the owner's cousin's girlfriend, a torch singer. "I didn't know there still were such things," Leon told Emily. He looked depressed. He said he wasn't sure this experience was as valuable as he'd once believed. But Barry May, who was more or less the leader of the group, refused to give up. He wanted to try Baltimore, which was full of bars, he said. Besides, one of the other members, Victor Apple, had a mother living in Baltimore, and they ougftt to be able to get a free place to stay.

Emily knew as soon as they arrived that Baltimore would not work out. Although they drove miles and miles of it (Victor managed to get them lost), the city continued to strike her as narrow and confining: all those gloomy rowhouses, some no wider than a single room; those alleys choked with discarded tires and bottles and bedsprings; those useless-looking, hopeless men slumped on their stoops. But she took to Victor's mother immediately. Mrs. Apple was a tall, cheerful, striding woman with clipped gray hair and a leathery face. She owned a shop called Crafts Unlimited, as well as the building that housed it, and various craftsmen filled her apartments, some paying only token rent until they could get on their feet. She gave the acting group a third-floor apartment, unfurnished and shabby but clean. It was split by a dark hall, with a living room and a bedroom on one side and a kitchen and a second bedroom on the other side. At the end of the hall was an antique bathroom, against whose window, long ago, the adjoining building had been constructed. You could stand at that window and see nothing but a sheet of old, spongy bricks. For some reason Emily found this comforting. It was the only view she had felt sure of lately.

It seemed to her now that adjusting to new places used up pieces of a person. Large chunks of her had been broken off and left behind in New York, in Philadelphia, in Haightsville-anyplace she had painstakingly set out her mother's silver-backed comb and brush on someone else's peeling bureau and contrived a pretense of familiarity with someone else's flaking walls and high, cracked ceiling. She followed Mrs. Apple everywhere; she couldn't help herself. She dusted the carvings and the handmade furniture down in the shop and she learned how to work the cash register. She waited on customers during busy periods-not for pay, but for the sunny smell of new wood and freshly woven fabrics, and the brisk, offhand friendliness of Mrs. Apple.

Emily and Leon slept in the front bedroom, in two sleeping bags. Victor spread his tangle of blankets in a corner of the living room. Barry and Paula and Janice slept in the back bedroom, three across. (Emily had given up trying to figure that out.) In the daytime Barry went looking for jobs while the others stayed home and played cards. They no longer practiced their skits or even mentioned them; but sometimes, watching them, play poker, Emily had the feeling that to these people everything was a skit. When they lost, they groaned and tore their hair. When they won, they leaped up, flinging their cards to the ceiling, and trumpeted, "Ta-taa!" and took a bow, Their vowels were broader than most people's, and they italicized so much. You had to talk like that yourself sometimes, just to be heard above the din. Emily found herself changing. She heard herself coming down hard on her words, drawing them out. She caught sight of hersef in a mirror once, unexpectedly-her small, dry face as wan as a ghost's, but one arm flung out grandly as if she were standing cloaked and hatted in the center of some stage. She stopped in mid-sentence and folded up again.

The bars in Baltimore were not the kind to want plays going on. They were drinking bars, Barry said, and this was a drinking city. At one place he would have had to step over a flatout body, either unconscious or dead, in the doorway; but he hadn't seen much point, he said, in applying there. A week passed, and then two weeks. They were living on a cheap brand of water-packed tuna, and Mrs. Apple had stopped inviting them so frequently to supper. Their greasepaint box somehow fell apart. Tubes of ghastly pink flesh-tone, like fat sticks of chalk, rolled into corners and stayed there, sending out their flowery old-lady smell. Janice and Paula stopped speaking to each other, and Janice moved her sleeping bag to the kitchen.

Then Barry found a job, but only for himself. A friend of a friend was putting on his own play. Emily wasn't there when he announced it. She'd been helping out at Crafts Unlimited. All she knew was that when she got back, there was Barry packing his knapsack. A swelling was rising on his lower lip, and Leon was gone. The others sat on the floor, watching Barry roll up Ms jeans with shaky hands. "That husband of yours is insane," he told Emily. Even his voice shook.

Emily said, "What happened?" and the others all started talking at once. It wasn't Barry's fault, they said; you have to watch out for number one in this world; what did Leon expect? Emily never did sort out the particulars, but she grasped the main idea. She was surprised at how little it bothered her. There was something satisfying about the damage done to Barry's lip. The skin had split where the swelling was highest; she was reminded of an overripe plum. "Oh, well," she said, "I suppose it's for the best."

"Mark my words," Barry told her, "you're living with a dangerous man. I don't know why you're not scared of him."

"Oh, he would never harm me," Emily said. She couldn't think why Barry was taking this so seriously. Didn't it often happen in these people's lives-drama, extravagant gestures? She removed some hairpins from her hair and pinned her braids higher on her head. The others watched her. She felt graceful and light-hearted.

Janice and Paula went back to New York; Janice planned to accept an old marriage proposal. "I just hope the offer's still open," she said. Emily had no idea what Paula was going to do, and she didn't care, either. She was tired of living in a group. She got on fine with them, right to the end, and she said goodbye to them politely enough, but underneath she felt chafed by every word they uttered.

That left Victor. Victor wasn't so bad. He was only seventeen, and he seemed even younger. He was a slight, stooped, timid boy with a frail tickle of a mustache that Emily longed to shave off. Once the others were gone, he moved his blankets to the rear bedroom. He showed up for meals looking shy and hopeful. It was a little like having a son, Emily thought.

By now they were completely out of money, so Emily started work as a paid assistant at Crafts Unlimited. Leon found a part-time job at Texaco, pumping gas. Victor just borrowed from Mrs. Apple. Mrs. Apple lent him the money, but gave out lectures with it She wanted him to go back to school, or at least take the high-school-equivalency test. She threatened to send him to live with his father, whom Emily had always assumed to be dead. After these lectures Victor would slink around the apartment kicking baseboards. Emily commiserated with him, but she did think Mrs. Apple had a point. She couldn't understand how things had gone this far, even; everyone seemed to be living lives without shape, without backbone. "When you think of it," she told Victor, "it's amazing your mother ever let you go to New York in the first place. Really, she's a very… surprising woman."

"Sure, to you," said Victor. "Other people's mothers always look so nice. Up close, they're strict and grabby and they don't have a sense of humor." Then Mrs. Apple came to Emily with an idea. (She probably felt that if she came to Victor, he'd turn it down automatically.) If they were so set on acting, she said, why not act at children's birthday parties? They could put an ad in the paper, get a telephone, borrow her Singer sewing machine to stitch a few costumes together. Mothers could call and order "Red Riding Hood" or "Rapunzel." (Emily would make a lovely Rapunzel, with her long blond hair.) They would gladly pay a good fee, she was certain, since birthday parties were such a trial.

Emily passed the idea on because it sounded like something she could manage. She would not, at least, freeze up onstage in front of a few small children. Victor was immediately willing, but Leon looked doubtful. "Just the three of us?" he asked.

"We could change costumes a lot. And there are always people around here, if we're really stuck for more characters."

"We could use my mother for a witch," Victor said.

"Well, I don't know," Leon said. "I wouldn't even call that acting, if you want to know the truth."

"Oh, Leon." She dropped the subject for the next few days. She watched him weighing it in his mind. He came back from the Texaco station with his hands black, smearing black on the doorknobs and the switchplates. Even after he washed, black stayed in the creases of his skin and rimmed his fingernails. Sitting on the kitchen counter waiting for his tuna, he spread his hands on his knees and studied them, and then he turned them over and studied them again. Finally he said, "These children's plays, I suppose they'd do for a stopgap." Emily said nothing.

He said, "It wouldn't hurt to give it a try, just so we don't get stuck in it." Now, all this time Emily and Victor had been laying their plans, they'd been so sure he would change his mind. They'd already ordered a phone for the kitchen. It arrived the day after Leon gave in. They placed an ad in the papers and they made a large yellow poster to hang in Crafts Unlimited. Rapunzel, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, the poster read. Or… you name it. ("Just so it doesn't take a cast of thousands," Leon said.) Then they sat back and waited. Nothing happened.

On the sixth day a woman phoned to ask if they gave puppet shows, "I don't need a play; I need a puppet show," she said. "My daughter's just wild about puppets. She doesn't like plays at all."

"Well, I'm sorry-" Emily said.

"Last year I had Peter's Puppets come and she loved them, and all they charged was thirty-two dollars, but now I hear they've moved to-"

"Thirty-two dollars?" Emily asked.

"Four dollars a child, for seven guests and Melissa. I felt that was reasonable; don't you?"

"It's more than reasonable," Emily said. "For a puppet show we get five per child."

"Goodness," the woman said. "Well, I suppose we could uninvite the Macintosh children." In the two weeks before the party Emily borrowed Mrs. Apple's sewing machine and put together a Beauty, two sisters, a father, and a Beast, who was really just a fake fur mitten with eyes. She chose "Beauty and the Beast" because it was her favorite fairytale. Victor said he liked it too. Leon didn't seem to care. Plainly, as far as he was concerned, this was just another version of the Texaco job. He hardly noticed when Emily came prancing up to him with her hand transformed into Beauty.

She cut a stage from a cardboard box, and bought gauzy black cloth for the scrim. She and Victor clowned together, putting on doll-like voices to match the puppets' round faces. They had the two sisters sing duets and waltz on the kitchen windowsill. Leon just looked grim. He had figured out that most of their fee had already been spent on materials. "This is not going to make us rich," he said.

"But think of next tune," Emily said, "when we'll already be equipped."

"'Oh, Emily, let's not have a next time." On the day of the party-a rainy winter afternoon- they loaded everything into Victor's mother's car and drove north to Mrs. Tibbett's stucco house in Homeland. Mrs. Tibbett led them through the living room to a large, cold clubroom, where Leon and Victor arranged the cardboard stage on a Ping-Pong table. Meanwhile Emily unpacked the puppets. Then she and Victor set the two sister puppets to whispering and snickering, trying to get Leon to join in. He was supposed to work the Beast, which he'd never even fitted on his hand; and he'd had to be told the plot during the drive over. He claimed the only fairytale he knew was "Cinderella." Now he ignored the puppets and paced restlessly up and down, sometimes pausing to lift a curtain and peer out into the garden. It was because of his parents, Emily thought. This house resembled his parents' house, which Emily had once visited during semester break. The living room had that same stiff, icy quality, with the pale rugs that no one seemed to have walked on and the empty vases, the ticking silence, the satin striped chairs, where obviously no children were ever allowed to sit. Mrs. Tibbett, even, was a little like Mrs. Meredith-so gracious and honeyed, her hair streaked, her mouth tight, with something unhappy beneath her voice if Leon would only hear it. Emily reached out to pat his arm, but then stopped herself and curled her fingers in.

The doorbell rang-a whole melody. "It's a goddamned cathedral," Leon muttered. The first guests arrived, and Melissa Tibbett, a thin-faced, homely child in blue velvet, went to greet them. These children were all five years old or just turning six, Mrs. Tibbett had said. They were young enough to come too early, with their party clothes already sliding toward ruin, but old enough, at least, not to cling tearfully to the birthday presents they'd brought. Emily supervised the opening of the presents. Mrs. Tibbett had vanished, and the two men seemed to think that dealing with the children was Emily's job. She learned the names that mattered- the troublemaker (Lisa) and the shy one who hid in corners (Jennifer). Then she settled them in front of the puppet show.

Victor was the father. Emily was each of the daughters in turn. Concealed behind the scrim, she didn't feel much stage fright. "What do you want me to bring you, daughter?" Victor squeaked.

"Bring me a casket of pearls, Father," Emily piped in a tiny voice.

Leon rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

"What do you want me to bring you, Beauty?"

"Only a rose, Father. One perfect rose." She could see the outlines of the children through the scrim. They were listening, but they were fidgety underneath, she thought. It made her nervous. She felt things were on the verge of falling into pieces. During the father's long scene alone in the palace, she saw Mrs. Tibbett's fluttery silhouette enter and stand watching. What a shame; she'd come during the dull part.

"Oh. A table has been laid for me, with lovely foods," the father said. "And look: a fine gold bed with satin sheets. I wonder to whom this belongs." Mrs. Tibbett shifted her weight to the other foot.

Then the Beast arrived. Emily expected him to roar, but instead he spoke in a deep, chortling growl that took her by surprise. "Who's gobbled up all my food?" he asked plaintively. "Who's been sleeping in my bed?" (Oh, Lord, she hoped he hadn't confused this with "Goldilocks.") "My lovely bed, with the satin sheets to keep my hairdo smooth!" he groaned.

The children laughed.

An audience. She saw him realize. She saw the Beast raise his shaggy head and look toward the children. Their outlines were still now and their faces were craned forward. "Do you know who?" he asked them.

"Him!" they cried, pointing.

"What's that you say?"

"The father! Him!" The Beast turned slowly. "Oho!" he said, and the father puppet shrank back, as if blown by the Beast's hot breath.

After the show the maid passed cake and punch around, but most of the children were too busy with the puppets to eat. Emily taught them how to work the Beast's mouth, and she had Beauty sing "Happy Birthday" to Melissa. Mrs. Tibbett said, "Oh, this was so much better than last year's 'Punch and Judy.'"

"We never do 'Punch and Judy,' " Leon said gravely. "It's too grotesque. We stick to fairytales."

"Just one thing puzzles me," said Mrs. Tibbett.

"What's that?"

"Well, the Beast. He never changed to a prince." Leon glanced over at Emily.

"Prince?" Emily said.

"You had her living happily ever after with the Beast. But that's not how it is; he changes; she says she loves him and he changes to a prince."

"Oh," Emily said. It all came back to her now. She couldn't think how she'd forgotten. "Well…" she said.

"But I guess that would take too many puppets."

"No," Emily said, "it's just that we use a more authentic version."

"Oh, I see," Mrs. Tibbett said.

By spring they were putting on puppet shows once or twice a week, first for friends of Mrs. Tibbett's and then for friends of those friends. (In Baltimore, apparently, word of mouth was what counted most.) They made enough money so they could start paying Mrs. Apple rent, and Leon quit his Texaco job. Emily went on working at Crafts Unlimited just because she enjoyed it, but she earned almost as much now from the extra puppets that she sold there. And gradually they began to be invited to school fairs and church fund-raisers. Emily had to sit up all one night, hastily sewing little Biblical costumes. A private school invited them to give a show on dental hygiene. "Dental hygiene?" Emily asked Leon. "What is there to say?" But Leon invented a character named Murky Mouth, a wicked little soul who stuffed on sweets, ran water over his toothbrush to deceive his mother, and played jump-rope with his dental floss. Eventually, of course, he came to a bad end, but the children loved him. Two more schools sent invitations the following week, and a fashionable pedo-dontist gave them fifty dollars to put on a Saturday-morning show for twenty backsliding patients and their mothers, who (Emily heard later) had to pay twenty-five dollars per couple to attend.

It was mostly Leon's doing, their success. He still grumbled any time they had a show, but the fact was that from the start he knew exactly what was needed: dignified, eccentric little characters (no more squeaky voices) and plenty of audience participation. His heroes were always dropping things and wondering where they were, so that the children went wild trying to tell them; always overlooking the obvious and having to have it explained. Emily, on the other hand, cared more for the puppets themselves. She liked the designing and the sewing and the scrabbling for stray parts. She loved the moment when a puppet seemed to come to life-usually just after she'd sewed the eyes on. Once made, a puppet had Ms own distinct personality, she found. It couldn't be altered or submerged, and it couldn't be duplicated. If he was irreparably damaged-or stolen, which sometimes happened-she could only make a new one to fill his role; she couldn't make the same one over again.

That was ridiculous, Leon said.

She imagined the world split in two: makers and doers. She was a maker and Leon was a doer. She sat home and put together puppets and Leon sprang onstage with them, all flair and action. It was only a matter of circumstance that she also had to be the voices for the heroines.

Victor was neither maker nor doer, or he was both, or somewhere in between, or… What was the matter with Victor? First he grew so quiet, and paused before answering anything she said, as if having to reel Ms mind in from more important matters. He moped around the apartment; he stared at Emily sadly while he stroked his wisp of a mustache. When Emily asked him what Ms trouble was, he told her he'd been born in the wrong year. "How can that be?" she asked him. She supposed he'd taken up some kind of astrology. "What difference does the year make?"

"It doesn't bother you?"

"Why should it bother me?" He nodded, swallowing.

That night at supper he put down his plate of baked beans and stood up and said, "There's something I have to say." They still had no furniture, and he'd been eating on the windowsill. He stood in front of the window, framed by an orange sunset so they had to squint at him from their places on the floor. He laced his fingers together and bent them back so the knuckles cracked. "I have never been a sneaky person," he said, "Leon, I'd like to announce that I'm in love with Emily." Leon said, "Huh?"

"I won't beat around the bush: I think you're wrong for her. You're such a grouch. You're always so angry and she's so… un-angry. You think her puppets are nothing, a chore, something forced on you till you get to your real thing, acting. But if you're an actor, why don't you act? You think there's no theatre groups in this city? I know why: you had a fight with that guy Bronson, Branson, what's-his-name, when you went to try out. You've had a fight with everyone around. You can't try out for the Chekhov play because Barry May's in that and he'll tell all the others what you're like. But still you say you're an actor and you're so disadvantaged, so held back, wasting your talents here when there's other things you could be doing. What other things?" Leon had stopped chewing. Emily felt her chest tightening up. Victor was smaller than Leon, and so young and meek he would never hit back. She imagined him cowering against the window, shielding his head with his arms, but she didn't know how to step in and stop this.

"I realize I'm not as old as Emily," Victor said, "but I could take much better care of her. I would treat her better; I'd appreciate her; I'd sit admiring her all day long, if you want to know. We'd live a real life, not like this, with her ducked over her sewing machine and you off brooding in some corner, paying her no attention, holding some grudge that no one can guess at… Well, I'll say it right out: I want to take Emily away with me." Leon turned and looked at Emily. She saw that he wasn't angry at all. He was relaxed and amused, smiling a tolerant, kindly smile. "Well, Emily?" he said. "Do you want to go away with Victor?" She felt suddenly flattened.

'Thank you, Victor," she said, pressing her palms together. "It's nice of you, but I'm fine as I am, thank you."

"Oh," said Victor.

"I appreciate the thought."

"Well," Victor said, "I didn't want to sneak around about it." Then he sat back down on the windowsill and picked up his plate of beans.

The next morning he was gone-Victor and his tangle of blankets and his canvas backpack and his cardboard carton of LP records. He hadn't even said goodbye to Mrs. Apple. Well, it was a relief, in a way. How could they act natural after that? And she and Leon did need to be on their own. They were a married couple; it began to seem that they really were married. She was starting to think about a baby. Leon didn't want one, but in time he would come around. They could use Victor's room for a workshop now, and then for the baby later on. It was lucky Victor had left, in fact. But she hated how his woodsy, brown boy-smell hung in the empty room for days after he had gone.

Several times in Emily's life, similar things had happened. Men had seemed to affix themselves to her- but not to her personally, she thought. What they liked was their idea of her. She remembered a boy in her logic class who used to write her notes asking if she would take down her hair for him. Her hair: a bunch of dead cells that had nothing to do with her. "Think of it as longer, thinner fingernails," she had written back coolly. She disliked being seen from outside that way- as someone with blond hair, someone with an old-fashioned face. Once, in New York, a man had started eating every day at the restaurant where she worked, and any time she so much as passed his table he would tell her about his ex-wife, who had also worn braids on top of her head. It was a continuing story: Emily would bring his rolls and he would say, "On our second date we went to the zoo." She'd refill his coffee cup and he would say, "I'm pretty certain she loved me to begin with." After a couple of weeks he went away, but Emily couldn't forget the ex-wife. She was Emily's other self; they would have understood each other, but she had slipped off and left Emily to take the blame. Now, with Victor, Emily wondered who he'd had in mind. Not Emily, she was sure-poking around in her linty old clothes, hunting up noses for her puppets. It must have been someone else who looked like Emily but had the capacity for a greater number of people in her life. Poor Victor! It was a pity, Emily thought. She was surprised at how much she missed him. She could not imagine loving anyone but Leon, but when she'd put a puppet together and longed for someone to try him out on, she thought of Victor and their squeaky-voiced duets. She remembered Beauty's sisters clowning around at that first birthday party while Leon paced the floor. It wasn't so easy to clown around with Leon.

She dressed Gina in a T-shirt, pink corduroy overalls, and a snowsuit. She budded her little red shoes on her feet. Gina was impatient to get going. "Can we swing on the swings?" she asked.

"Not today, honey."

"But I want to swing on the swings."

"Maybe tomorrow."

"Why can't we swing on the swings?" She was almost two now. Terrible Two's: they had minds all their own. But that could be said of Gina at any age. Somehow, this one small child kept both of her parents continually occupied and teetering on the edge of exhaustion. They must be doing something wrong. It didn't look so hard for other people.

Emily put a coat on and tied a scarf over her hair. It was February, a damp, cold day. Even the apartment was cold. She poked her head into the kitchen to say goodbye to Leon. He was sitting at the chipped enamel table they'd bought from Goodwill, reading the Village Voice. "Leon?" she said. "I'm taking Gina for a walk."

"You want me to come along?"

"Oh, no, I'll be back soon." He nodded and returned to his paper. Emily led Gina out the door. They went down the creaking stairway, past the side entrance of Crafts Unlimited, through the glass door at the front of the building. She checked the laundromat across the street. No one was there. She hoisted Gina into her arms and set off toward Beacon Avenue. Gina kept struggling to get down; she liked to go places under her own steam. (It took her all day.) By now she was so heavy that it was difficult to hold on to her. Emily went faster than she'd intended to, pulled forward by Gina's tilted weight. Her slippers made a rustling, patting sound.

They arrived at the E-Z Cafeteria five minutes early, but Leon's mother was already waiting, seated alertly at the foremost table with her hands crossed over her purse. When she saw Emily (when she saw Gina, really), she seemed to open like a flower. Her face lifted, her hands uncrossed themselves, and the feathers on her hat stirred. "Ah!" she cried. She rose and brushed her cheek against Emily's. "I wasn't sure you'd come," she told Emily. "I didn't know if you'd want to bring her out in this weather."

"Oh, she's out in any weather," Emily said. Mrs. Meredith settled Gina in the high chair she'd already wheeled up. "Was she cold?" she crooned. "Did her little face get frozen?" She unwrapped her like a package, and pitted Gina's thick, dark hair. "Oh, exactly like Leorl^s hair," she said. (She always did.) "Will you look at how she's grown? Just in this one month she's grown so that I never would have known her. Though of course I'd know her anywhere," she said, contradicting herself. Gina gazed at her reflectively. She was always quieter in her grandmother's presence.

The E-Z Cafeteria was not Mrs. Meredith's style, but it was one place they could manage Gina. They could wheel her down the food line instead of waiting for their order to arrive, and they could leave without delay any time she got restless. It had taken them a while to figure this out. They'd started off at the Elmwood- Mrs. Meredith^ suggestion, a place near Towson, to which Emily had had to travel by bus. It was the only Baltimore restaurant Mrs. Meredith knew of. And, to be fair, she'd had no idea she was inviting a baby to lunch as well.

What had happened was, when Emily got married she had naturally informed her Great-Aunt Mercer, back in Taney. Aunt Mercer had not been very pleased, but she'd made the best of it. On her thick, silver-rimmed stationery, which smelled as if she'd kept it in her basement for the last ten years, she wrote to ask Emily who this young Meredith might be. What's his daddy's name? Would I be likely to know any of his people? He isn't one of those Nashville Merediths, is he? And once she had her answers, of course she felt duty-bound to write his parents a get-acquainted note. Next Leon received a letter from his mother, sent direct to his New York address: Mr. Leon Meredith. No mention of Emily. He threw it away unopened. "Oh, Leon!" Emily said. It was true she wasn't comfortable with his parents, but you couldn't just discard your only relatives. Leon said, "I told you that was a mistake, writing your aunt. I said it would be." And the letter stayed in the wastebasket.

They moved to Baltimore, but the letters followed, for all his mother had to do was ask Aunt Mercer for his new address. And Leon went on throwing the letters away. Maybe eventually he'd have opened one (this couldn't last forever, could it?), but then the Merediths did something unforgivable. They gave his forwarding address to his draft board.

It wasn't malicious, Emily was certain, but Leon thought it was. "That's my parents for you," he said. "They'd rather have me dead in the jungle than alive and happy without them." He went on cursing them even after he failed the physical. One leg was found to be an inch and a half shorter than the other, the result of a broken thighbone in his childhood. No one had ever noticed it before. He returned with a painful limp and said, "I'm free, but I won't forget what they tried to do to me." And he continued throwing their letters away.

If Emily's name had been on the envelopes too, she'd have-opened them. She was pregnant by then and wishing for her mother. Aunt Mercer was no use-with her dim, steely handwriting: The crocuses are late this year and the rodents have been at my galanthus bulbs-and Mrs. Apple was sympathetic but had no recollection of childbirth. ("Perhaps I was put to sleep," she said. "Do they give anesthesia for such things? I may have been asleep the whole nine months, in fact.") Emily dreamed that Mrs. Meredith would suddenly arrive in person, miraculously plumper and more motherly, and she'd fold Emily into her lap and let her be a daughter again. But she never did.

Then, three months after Gina's birth, there it was: Mrs. Leon Meredith. Emily marveled at how long it had taken. She smuggled the letter into the bathroom and locked the door behind her to read it. I know it must be you who's keeping our boy from us. I saw from the start you were a cold little person. But he is our only child. Think how we must feel.

Emily was stunned. She couldn't believe that anyone would be so unfair. Her eyes blurred and the sheets of bricks shimmered in the window.

Why are you saying these things? she wrote back. I have nothing to do with any of this and I don't understand it. It's between you and Leon.

His mother said, It seems you must have taken offense at something. Please, could we start over? Could we meet at the Elmwood this Wednesday at noon?

Emily didn't want to meet her. She felt like ripping the letter to shreds. She looked at Gina, who lay crowing in her cardboard box, and she tried to imagine anything Gina could do-marrying, mismarrying, committing murder-that would sever her from Emily's life as Leon had severed himself from his parents'. There was nothing. She just wouldn't allow it. Gina was the whole point; even what Emily felt for Leon seemed pallid by comparison. She smoothed the letter on her lap and saw Mrs. Meredith's tense, powdery face, with the eyebrows plucked as thin as two arched wires and the lids beneath them always a little puffed, as if she were on the edge of tears.

There were certain rules, Emily had been taught. She would have to go just this once.

Mrs. Meredith came by taxi, all the way from Richmond. Evidently, she didn't drive, and had simply hired a cab for the day. The driver sat at the next table, spreading pate" on a cracker and reading Male magazine. Mrs. Meredith waited behind a foggy martini glass. Her back was very straight. Then Emily entered with Gina riding the way she liked to in those days-hanging over Emily's forearm, with her bottom propped against Emily's hip, frowning darkly at her own bare toes. "Oh!" Mrs. Meredith cried out, and one hand flew to her throat, knocking the martini glass into her lap.

Now that she thought back, Emily felt she really should have prepared Mrs. Meredith. It was too theatrical-bursting in with an unannounced grandchild. It was more like something Leon would have done. She seemed to have caught some of Leon's qualities. He seemed to have caught some of hers. (He seldom spoke of moving on any more.) She was reminded of those parking-lot accidents where one car's fender grazes another's. It had always puzzled her that on each fender, some of the other car's paint appeared. You'd think the paint would only be on one car, not both. It was as if they had traded colors.

She tried to tell Leon about the lunch, once it had taken place. She led into it gradually. "Your mother's been writing me now, you know," she said.

But Leon said, "Emily, I don't want to hear about it and I don't want you to have anything to do with it. Is that clear?"

"All right, Leon," Emily said.

And, oddly enough, even Mrs. Meredith seemed content to let things be. It seemed she only wanted the connection; just who made the connection didn't matter so much. She liked to hear from Emily what Leon was up to. Did he help to care for Gina? "He walks her at night, and he baby-sits while I'm working in the shop," Emily told her, "but he can't yet bring himself to change a diaper. "

"Exactly like Burt was," Mrs. Meredith said. "Oh, exactly!" But she never tried to press any closer than that. Maybe she. found things easier as they were. She often retreated into stories about Leon's childhood, when he had been someone she could understand. "He was a beautiful baby," she said. "All the nurses told me so. Prettiest baby they'd ever seen! They couldn't believe their eyes!" Somehow, everything she said had a way of slipping out of her control. "Even the doctors stopped by to take a look. This one man, a heart surgeon, he came straight from an operation just to get a glimpse of him. 'Mrs. Meredith,' he said, 'I never saw a baby so beautiful in my life. Yes, sir, we're going to hear more of that young man. He's going to amount to something someday!' He called his wife on the telephone; I heard him in the hall. 'You ought to see this baby we've got here! Ought to see this baby!' " Next, Emily thought, there'd be a star beaming over the delivery room. She began to understand why Leon got so edgy around his mother. Mrs. Meredith's rouged face, gazing brightly at a boy no one else could see, seemed deliberately shuttered and obstinate.

In fact, she made Emily feel edgy as well, and Emily never enjoyed these lunches, or came any closer to liking Mrs. Meredith. Telling her a piece of news-or even speaking to Gina in Mrs. Meredith's presence- Emily heard her own voice take on a fulsome tone that wasn't hers at all. She felt that nothing she could say would ever live up to Mrs. Meredith's expectations. But what could she do? The very day after their lunch at the Elmwood, Mrs. Meredith started driving lessons. In a month she had her license and a brand-new Buick, and she drove the entire distance from Richmond to Baltimore although, she said, she was scared to death of multi-lane highways and disliked going over thirty miles per hour. When she telephoned Emily from a corner booth, breathlessly announcing, "I did it! I'm here to take you to lunch," could Emily just say, "No, thank you," and hang up?

They settled into a schedule: the first Wednesday of every month. Emily never told Leon about it. She knew that, eventually, Gina would tell. Now that Gina could talk, it was only a matter of time. "When me and Grandma was eating…" she'd say, and Leon would say, "You and — who?" and then all hell would break loose. Till then, Emily went dutifully to lunch, frowning slightly with concentration.

One time Mr. Meredith came too. He seemed baffled by the baby. He let his wife do all the talking, while he stared around at the dingy old men slurping soup in the E-Z Cafeteria. "So where's this son of mine?" he asked finally.

"He's… very busy at home," Emily said.

"Would you believe he was once the size of this little tyke?" he asked, jutting his chin at Gina. "I could carry him in the palm of my hand. Now we're not on speaking terms."

"Butt," said Mrs. Meredith.

"He was always quick to throw things away." _.

Later, when it was time to go, he asked Emily if she had all her equipment.

"Equipment?" Emily said.

"Equipment. You know." Maybe he was asking if she were sane, marrying his son.

But then he said, "Crib, playpen, high chair, carriage…"

"Oh. We don't need all that," Emily said. "She sleeps in a cardboard box. It's perfectly comfortable."

"I'll send her a crib," Mr. Meredith said.

"No, Mr. Meredith, please don't do that."

"I'll send her one tomorrow. Imagine! A cardboard box!" he said, and he went away shaking his head and looking pleased, as if his expectations, at least, had every one been fulfilled.

The crib arrived: white, spooled, with an eyelet canopy. She'd never heard of such nonsense. Two delivery men came puffing up the stairs with it and leaned it, unassembled, against the wall in the hallway. She reached a finger inside a plastic bag and touched an eyelet ruffle. Then Leon walked in, tossing from hand to hand the cabbage she'd asked him to get at the market. "What's all this?" he asked.

"Your parents sent it," she said.

He took a step backward from the crib.

"Leon," she said. "While we're on the subject, I ought to tell you something." He said, "I don't want to hear, I don't want to know, and I want this monstrosity gone by the time I get back." Then he turned and left, still carrying the cabbage.

Emily thought it over. She mashed a banana for Gina's supper and fed it to her, absently taking a few bites herself. She looked out the kitchen doorway'and into the hall, where the crib stood slanting elegantly. At that time Gina was six months old, and outgrowing her cardboard box. She slept more often with her parents, still munching drowsily on Emily's breast. It would be nice to have a safe container to keep her in, Emily thought. She scraped banana off Gina's chin and stuffed it back into her mouth. She looked at the crib again.

When Leon came back, the crib was still there, but he didn't mention it. Maybe he'd been doing some thinking himself. The following day Emily started assembling it. She would join two pieces and then leave it a while, as if it were only something to fiddle with- a crossword puzzle, a hoop of needlework. Then she'd come back and tighten a bolt; then she'd leaf through the paper. In a few days she had a completed crib. It seemed silly to leave it obstructing the hall, so she wheeled it into their bedroom. The effect was dazzling. All that white made the rest of the room seem drab. Their mattress on the floor had a lumpy, beaten look.

She went back to the hall for Gina and carried her into the bedroom and set her in the crib. Gina stared all around her at the eyelet ruffles, the decals, the bars. What a shock, she seemed to be saying. How did this imprisonment come about?

It came about inch by inch. These things just wear you down.

This child had changed their lives past recognition, more than they had dreamed possible. You would think that someone so small could simply be fitted into a few spare crannies and the world could go on as usual, but it wasn't like that at all. From the start, she seemed to consume them. Even as a tiny infant she was aggressively sociable and noisy and enthusiastic, an insomniac who seldom took naps and struggled continually toward a vertical position. They would lay her down on her stomach for the night and instantly her head would bob up again, weaving and unsteady, her eyes so wide that her forehead seemed corrugated. She loved to be talked to, sung to, tossed in the air. As she grew older, she fell in love with Red Riding Hood's wolf and they had to give him up to her. If she slept at all, she slept with the wolf against her cheek and she dreamily twisted his red felt tongue. Periodically the tongue fell off and then she would go to pieces-crying and clinging to Emily till Emily sewed it back on. And she hated to be left. Hannah Miles, across the hall, was glad to babysit, but any time Emily and Leon went out, Gina wept as if her heart would break and Emily would have to stay. Or Leon would make her leave anyway, really insist, and she would go, but her thoughts remained with Gina, and all through the movie or whatever she would fidget, buttoning and unbuttoning her coat, not hearing a word. Then Leon would be angry with her and they'd have a fight and the outing would be wasted, but later when they returned, Gina would be wide awake and smiling, at eleven or twelve at night, reading books with Hannah and hardly noticing they were back.

They never asked, of course, whether she was worth it. They centered their lives on her. They could marvel forever at the small, chilly point of her nose, or her fat-ringed fingers or precisely cut mouth. When finally she fell asleep, the absence of all that fierce energy made the apartment feel desolate. Emily would drift through the rooms not knowing what to do next, though she'd wanted to do so much all day and never had a chance to begin. She wondered how they'd managed to produce such a child. She herself had always been so subdued and so anxious to please; Leon had Gina's fire but none of her joyous good nature. Where did she get that? She was a changeling. She had arrived with someone else's qualities. She was the gnome's baby, not theirs.

He stood in the laundromat doorway with his hat pulled low and he sank back into the darkness as they passed. Sometimes the hat was pointed, sometimes flat, sometimes broad-brimmed. Sometimes it seemed he had aged, was slackening, falling apart as certain people suddenly do; he was seen in gold-rimmed spectacles and Ms beard was cut to such a stubble that he might merely have neglected shaving himself. Then later he would reappear miraculously young again, the spectacles gone, the beard in full bloom. On occasion he was not gnomish at all but just a rather beakish, distinguished gentleman in suits so tidy you had the impression someone else had dressed him. On other occasions he could have stepped into a puppet show and not been out of place. He had a gait they would know anywhere, that seemed to belong to someone much younger-a reckless, bent-kneed, lunging gait, half running, landing on the balls of his feet. But once he was seen plodding out of a secondhand-clothing store with the resigned deliberation of a middle-aged man, and he had let his hair grow unsuitably long so it straggled in an unkempt and pathetic way over the back of his collar. At Christmas, Leon thought he saw him at a puppet show all the way over near Washington; but maybe it was just someone like him, he said. Then later he told Emily he'd been stupid-not for thinking it was he (the man was everywhere, after all), but for imagining there could be anyone else, anyplace, at any tune, the faintest bit like Morgan.

1971

1

Morgan's oldest daughter was getting married. It seemed he had to find this out by degrees; nobody actually told him. All he knew was that over a period of months one young man began visiting more and more often, till soon a place was set for him automatically at supper-time and he was consulted along with the rest of the family when Bonny wanted to know what color to paint the dining room. His name was Jim. He had the flat, beige face of a department-store mannequin, and he seemed overly fond of crew-necked sweaters. And Morgan couldn't think of a thing to say to him. All he had to do was look at this fellow and a peculiar kind of lassitude would seep through him. Suddenly he would be struck by how very little there was in this world that was worth the effort of speech, the entanglements of grammar and pronunciation and sufficient volume of voice.

Then Amy started beginning every sentence with "we." We think this and we hope that. And finally: when we're earning a little more money; when we find a good apartment; when we have children of our own. This just crept in, so to speak. No announcements were made. One Sunday afternoon Bonny asked Morgan if he thought the back yard was too small for the reception. "Reception?" Morgan said.

"And it's not just the size; if it's the weather," Bonny said. "What if it rains? You know how the weather can be in April."

"But this is already March" Morgan said.

We'll all sit down this evening," said Bonny, "and come to some decision." So Morgan went to his closet and chose an appropriate costume: a pinstriped suit he'd laid claim to after Bonny's father died. It stood out too far at the shoulders, maybe, but he thought it might have been what Mr. Cullen was wearing when Morgan asked him for permission to marry Bonny. And certainly he'd been wearing his onyx cufflinks. Morgan found the cufflinks in the back of a drawer, and he spent some time struggling to slip them through the slick, starched cuffs of his only French-cuffed shirt.

But when the four of them sat down for their discussion, no one consulted Morgan in any way whatsoever. All they talked about was food. Was it worthwhile calling in a caterer, or should they prepare the food themselves? Amy thought a caterer would be simplest. Jim, however, preferred that things be homemade. Morgan wondered how he could say that, having eaten so many suppers here. Bonny wasn't much of a cook. She leaned heavily on sherry-several glugs of it in any dish that she felt needed more zip. Everything they ate, almost, tasted like New York State cocktail sherry.

Morgan sat in the rocking chair and plucked out his beard, strand by strand. If he got up right now and left, he told himself, they might not even notice. He reflected on a long-standing grievance: there was one of Bonny's pregnancies that she'd forgotten to inform him about. It was the time she'd been expecting Liz, or maybe Molly. Bonny always said he was mistaken; of course she'd told him, she recalled it clearly. But Morgan knew better. He suspected, even, that she'd neglected to tell him on purpose: he tended to get annoyed by her slapdash attitude toward various birth-control methods. To his certain knowledge, the very first inkling he'd had of that pregnancy was when Bonny arrived in the kitchen one morning wearing the baggy blue chambray shirt she habitually used as a maternity smock. He was positive he would have remembered if she'd mentioned it to him.

"Amy will start down the stairs," Bonny said. Evidently, they were planning the actual ceremony now. "Her father will meet her at the bottom and walk her to the center of the living room."

"Daddy, promise me you won't wear one of your hats," Amy said.

Morgan rocked in his chair and plucked on, thinking of the tall black fatherof-the-bride top hat he would purchase for the occasion. He knew just where he could find one: Tuxedo Tom's Discount Formal Wear. He began to feel slightly happier.

But later, when Jim and Amy had gone out, he sank into a spell of sadness. He thought of what a sunny child Amy had been when she was small. She'd had large, exaggerated curls swooping upward at each ear, so that she seemed to be wearing a Dutch cap. That Dutch-capped child, he thought, was whom he really mourned-not the present Amy, twenty-one years old, efficient secretary for a life-insurance company. He recalled how he had once worried over her safety. He'd been a much more anxious parent than Bonny. "You know," he told Bonny, "I used to be so certain that one of the children would die. Or all of them, even-I could picture that. I was so afraid they'd be hit by cars, or kidnapped, or stricken with polio. I'd warn them to look both ways, not to run with scissors, never to play with ropes or knives or sharp sticks. 'Relax,' you'd say. Remember? But now look: it's as if they died after all. Those funny little roly-poly toddlers, Amy in her OshKosh overalls-they're dead, aren't they? They did die. I was right all along. It's just that it happened more slowly than I'd foreseen."

"Now, dear, this is just an ordinary life development," Bonny told him.

He looked at her. She was seated at the kitchen table, working on the guest list for the wedding. On the wall above her was something like a hat rack-a row of short wooden arms. When you pressed a pearl pushbutton anywhere in this house, there was a clunk from the kitchen gong and one of the wooden arms would fly up, alerting a non-existent servant. Beneath each arm a yellowed label identified the room that had rung-or (in the case of bedrooms) the person. Mr. Armand. Mrs. Armand. Miss Caroline. Master Keith. Studying these labels, Morgan had the feeling that a younger, finer family lived alongside his, gliding through the hallways, calling for tea and hot-water bottles. Evenings, the mother sat by the fire in a white peignoir and read to her children, one on either side of her. A boy, a girl; how tidy. At dinner they discussed great books, and on Sunday they dressed up and went to church. They never quarreled. They never lost things or forgot things. They rang and waited serenely. They gazed beyond the Gowers with the placid, rapt expressions of theatre goers ignoring some petty disturbance in the row ahead.

"I'd like to invite Aunt Polly," Bonny said, "but that means Uncle Darwin, too, and he's so deaf and difficult." She was peering through black-framed, no-nonsense glasses, which she'd just started wearing for reading. Morgan said, "So did you die,' when you think of it."

"Me?"

"Where's that girl I used to take out walking? I used to hold on to your arm, high up, and you would look off elsewhere and get pink, but you wouldn't pull away." Bonny added a name to her list. She said, "Walking I don't remember that. I thought we always drove." He slid his fingers down the inside of her upper arm, where the skin was silkiest. The back of Ms hand brushed the weight of one breast. She didn't seem to notice. She said, "Luckily, Jim doesn't have many relatives."

"She must be marrying him out of desperation." Then she did look up. She said, "Couldn't you still love the girls anyhow? You don't stop loving people just because they change size."

"Of course I love them."

"Not the same way," she said. "It seems you get fixed on this one appearance of a person; I mean, this single idea you have," She clicked her ballpoint pen. "And anyway, why leap ahead so? They haven't all grown up. Molly and Kate are still in high school."

"No, no, they're gone, for all intents and purposes," Morgan said. "Out every evening, off somewhere, up to something… they're gone, all right." He brightened. "Aha!" he said. "Alone at last, my dollink!" But it called for too much effort. He drifted over to the stove, depressed, and lit a cigarette on a burner. "House feels so damn big, we needed a ride-'em vacuum cleaner."

"You always did want more closet space," Bonny told him.

"They've dumped their hamsters on us and gone away."

"Morgan. There were nine of us at dinner tonight, counting your mother and Brindle. When I was a little girl, any time there were nine at table we had to send downtown for Mattie Ida to come help serve."

"What we ought to do is move," Morgan said. "We could get a house in the country, maybe live off the land." He pictured himself in sabots and a rough blue peasant smock. The house would be a one-room cabin with a huge stone fireplace, a braided rug, and a daybed covered in some hand-woven fabric. Unbidden, Amy in her Dutch-cap curls bounced in the center of the day-bed. He winced. "I'll take an early retirement," he said. "Forty-five feels older than I'd thought it would. I'll retire and well have some time to ourselves. Won't that be nice?"

"Now, don't go off on one of your crazy schemes," Bonny told him, "You'd die of boredom, retiring. You'd feel useless."

"Useless?" Morgan said. He frowned.

But Bonny was on the track of something new, thoughtfully tapping her pen against her teeth. She said, "Morgan, in this day and age, do you believe the bride's mother would still give the bride a little talk?"

"Hmm?"

"What I want to know is, am I expected to give Amy a talk about sex or am I not?"

"Bonny, do you have to call it sex?"

"What else would I call it?"

"Well…"

"I mean, sex is what it is, isn't it?"

"Yes, but, I don't know…"

"I mean, what would you say? Is it sex, or isn't it?"

"Bonny, will you just stop hammering at me?"

"Anyhow," she said, returning to her list, "in this day and age, I bet she'd laugh in my face." Morgan rubbed his forehead with two fingers. Really, it occurred to him, if Bonny had been more serious, more responsible, none of this upheaval would be happening. Or at least it wouldn't be happening quite so soon. It seemed to him that she had let the children slip through her fingers in some sort of sloppy, casual, cheerful style that was uniquely hers. He recalled that once, while chaperoning Kate's sixth-grade class on a field trip to Washington, she'd lost all eight of her charges in the Smithsonian Institution. They'd been found among showcases full of savages, copying down the recipe for shrunken heads. At the school's annual mother-daughter picnic, where everyone else brought potato salad and lemonade, Bonny brought a sack of Big Macs and a thermos of chablis. Yes, and she had such a disastrous effect upon machinery; she had only to settle behind the steering wheel and instantly the car fell apart. Warning lights would blink, steam would issue from the radiator, the muffler would drop off, and hubcaps would roll in every direction and clang along the gutters and slither down storm drains. She'd make one simple right turn and the turn signal would never work again. No wonder he spent half his weekends on his back in the garage! And she'd passed all this on to the girls too. The first driving lesson he gave Amy, the left front window had slid down inside the door and could not be retrieved. For that he'd had to go to the dealer.

And then there was his sister, who hadn't been out of that bathrobe of hers since Christmas. It hung on her like old orchid petals, wilted, striated, heavy-smelling. And his mother's memory was failing more than ever now, though she flew into a fury if anyone hinted as much. At supper, proving her sharpness, she'd recite whole portions of "Hiawatha" or the Rubaiyat. "Come, fill the Cup…!" she'd start up out of nowhere, slamming a fork against her glass, and Brindle would say, "Oh, Jesus, not again," and all the others would groan and fall into their separate, disorderly factions around the table.

Useless? Living this life of his was such hard work that even if he retired tomorrow, he had no hope of feeling useless.

Amy stood at the top of the stairs, wearing white and carrying roses. The hall window behind her lit her long, filmy skirt. At the bottom of the stairs Morgan waited with his hand on the newel post. He wore his new top hat and a pure-black suit from Second Chance. (There'd been a little fuss about the hat, "but he'd held his ground.) He had trimmed his beard. Gold-rimmed spectacles (window glass) perched on his nose. He felt like Abraham Lincoln.

One of Morgan's failings was that formal, official proceedings-weddings, funerals-never truly affected him. They just didn't seem to penetrate. He'd lain awake half of last night mourning his daughter, but the fact was that now, with the ceremony about to begin, all that was on his mind was Amy's roses. He had distinctly heard the wedding-dress lady tell her to carry them low, at arm's length-too low, even, she said, because if Amy were nervous at all she'd tend to lift them higher. And now, before the music had even started, Amy had her bouquet at breast level. This didn't trouble Morgan (he couldn't see that it made the slightest difference), but he wondered why nervousness should cause people to raise their arms. Was it something to do with protecting the heart? Morgan experimented. He clasped his hands first low, then high. He didn't find the one any more comforting than the other. With his hands folded just beneath his beard, he tried a dipping rhythmic processional, humming to himself as he sashayed across the hall. Daddy" Amy hissed. Morgan dropped Ms hands and hurried back to the newel post, Kate set the needle on the record. The wedding march began in mid-note. In the living room the guests grew suddenly still; all Morgan heard was the creaking of their rented chairs. He smiled steadily up at Amy, his spectacles catching the light and flashing two white circles across her face. With her hand trailing down the banister, weightless as a leaf, Amy set a pointed satin slipper in the center of each step. Her skirt caused a clinking sound among the brass rods that anchored the Persian carpet. Yesterday morning Bonny had taken a red Magic Marker and colored in the bare spots in the carpet. Then she'd used a brown Magic Marker for the rips in the leather armchair. (Sometimes Morgan felt he was living in one of those crayoned paper houses that the twins used to make.) Amy reached the hallway and took his arm. She was trembling slightly. He guided her into the living room and down the makeshift aisle.

On this same stringy rug he had walked her for hours when she was just newborn. He had nestled her head on his shoulder and paced the length of the rug and back, growling lullabies. The memory didn't stir him. It was just there, just another, lower layer in this room that was full of layers. He led her up to Bonny's minister, a man he disliked. (He disliked all ministers.) Amy dropped his arm and took a place next to what's-his-name, Jim. Morgan stepped back and stood with his feet planted apart, his hands joined behind him. He rocked a little to the lullaby in his head.

"Who gives this woman to be married?" the minister said. From the way the question rang in the silence, Morgan suspected it might have been asked once before without his noticing. He seemed to have missed part of the service. "Her mother and I do," he said. It would have been more accurate to say, "Her mother does." He turned and found his seat next to Bonny, who was looking beautiful and calm in a blue dress with a wide scoop neckline that kept slipping off one or the other of her shoulders. She laid a hand on top of his. Morgan noticed a gray thread of cobweb dangling from the ceiling.

Jim put a ring on Amy's finger. Amy put a ring on Jim's finger. They kissed. Morgan thought of a plan: he would go live with them in their new apartment. They didn't know a thing, not a thing. No doubt they'd have broken all their kitchen machines within a week and their household accounts would be a shambles, and then along would come Morgan to repair and advise. He would go as an old man, one of those really bereft old men with no teeth, no job, no wife, no family. In some small area he would act helpless, so that Amy would feel a need to care for him. He would arrive, perhaps, without buttons on Ms shirt, and would ask her to sew them on for him. He had no idea how to do it himself, he would tell her. Actually, Morgan was very good at sewing on buttons. Actually, he not only sewed on his own buttons but also Bonny's, and the girls', and patched their jeans and altered their hemlines, since Bonny wasn't much of a seamstress. Actually, Amy was aware of this. She was also aware that he was not a toothless old man and that he did have a wife and family. The trouble with fathering children was, they got to know you so well. You couldn't make the faintest little realignment of the facts around them. They kept staring levelly into your eyes, eternally watchful and critical, forever prepared to pass judgment. They could point to so many places where you had gone permanently, irretrievably wrong.

There'd been a compromise on the food. Bonny had ordered several trays from the deli, and then Morgan had picked up some cheese and some crackers which the girls had put together this morning. He'd been upset to discover that there was apparently no discount outlet for gourmet cheeses. "Do you know what these things cost?" he asked the groom's father, who had a hand poised over a cracker spread with something blue-veined. Then he wandered across the yard to check on the Camembert. It was surrounded by three young children-possibly Jim's nephews. "This one smells like a stable," the smallest was saying.

"It smells like a gerbil cage."

"It smells like the… elephant house at the zoo!" The weather had turned out fine, after all. It was a warm, yellow-green day, and daffodils were blooming near the garage. A smiling brown maid, on loan from Uncle Ollie, bore a tray of drinks through the crowd, picking her way carefully around the muddy patches where the spring reseeding had not yet taken hold. The bride stood sipping champagne and listening to an elderly gentleman whom Morgan had never seen before. His other daughters-oddly plain in their dress-up clothes-passed around sandwiches and little things on toothpicks, and his mother was telling the groom's mother why she lived on the third floor. "I started out on the second floor," she said, "but moved on account of the goat."

"I see," said Mrs. Murphy, patting her pearls.

"This goat was housebroken, naturally, but the drawback was that I am the only person in this family who reads Time magazine. In fact, I have a subscription. And as coincidence would have it, the goat had only been trained on Time magazine. I mean, he would only… I mean, if the necessity arose, the only place he was willing to… was on a Time magazine spread on the floor. He recognized that red border, I suppose. And so you see if I were to lay my magazine aside even for a second, why, along this animal would come and just… would up and… would…"

"He'd pee all over it," Morgan said. "Tough luck if she wasn't through reading it."

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Murphy said. She took a sip from her glass.

At Morgan's elbow, in a splintered wicker chair, an unknown man sat facing in the other direction. Maybe he was from the groom's side. He had a bald spot at the back of his head; fragile wisps of hair were drawn across it. He raised a drink to his lips. Morgan saw his weighty signet ring. "Billy?" Morgan said. He went around to the front of the chair. Good God, it was Billy, Sonny's brother.

"Nice wedding, Morgan," Billy said. "I've been to a lot, you know-mostly my own. I'm an expert on weddings." He laughed. His voice was matter-of-fact, but to Morgan it was the misplaced, eerie matter-of-fact ness sometimes encountered in dreams. How could this be Billy? What had happened here? Morgan had last seen Billy not a month ago. He said, "Billy, from the back of your head I didn't know you."

"Really?" Billy said, unperturbed. "Well, how about from the front?" From the front he was the same as ever-boyish-looking, with a high, round forehead and dazzling blue eyes. But no, if you met him on the street somewhere, wouldn't he be just another half-bald businessman? Only someone who'd known him as long as Morgan had could find the bones in his slackening face. Morgan stood blinking at him. Billy seemed first middle-aged and anonymous; then he was Bonny's high-living baby brother; then he was middle-aged again-like one of those trick pictures that alter back and forth as you shift your position. "Well?" Billy said.

"Have some champagne, why don't you?" Morgan asked him.

"No, thanks, I'll stick to scotch."

"Have some cheese, then. It's very expensive."

"Good old Morgan," Billy said, toasting him. "Good old, cheap old Morgan, right?" Morgan wandered away again. He looked for someone else to talk to, but none of the guests seemed his type. They were all so genteel and well modulated, sipping their champagne, the ladies placing their high heels carefully to avoid sinking through the sod. In fact, who here was a friend of Morgan's? He stopped and looked around him. Nobody was. They were Bonny's friends, or Amy's, or the groom's. A twin flew by-Susan, in chiffon. Her flushed, earnest face and steamy spectacles reminded him that his daughters, at least, bore some connection to him. "Sue!" he cried. But she flung back, "I'm not Sue, I'm Carol." Of course she was. He hadn't made that mistake in years. He walked on, shaking his head. Under the dogwood tree, three uncles in gray suits were holding what appeared to be a committee meeting. "No, I've been letting my cellar go, these days," one of them was saying. "Been drinking what I have on hand. To put it bluntly, I'm seventy-four years old. This June I'll be seventy-five. A while back I was pricing a case of wine and they recommended that I age it eight years. 'Good enough,' I started to say. Then I thought, 'Well, no.' It was the strangest feeling. It was the oddest moment. I said, 'No, I suppose it's not for me. Thanks anyway.'" At a gap in the hedge, Morgan slipped through. He found himself on the sidewalk, next to the brisk, noisy street, on a normal Saturday afternoon. His car was parked alongside the curb. He opened the door and climbed in. For a while he just sat there, rubbing his damp palms on the knees of his trousers. But the sun through the glass was baking him, and finally he rolled down a window, dug through his pockets for the keys, and started the engine.