Morgan's Passing

These were his closest friends: Potter the musical-instrument man, the hot-dog lady, the Greek tavern-keeper on Broadway, and Kazari the rug merchant. None of them would do. For one reason or another, there wasn't a single person he could tell, "My oldest daughter's getting married. Could I sit here with you and smoke" a cigarette?" He floated farther and farther downtown, as if descending through darkening levels of water. All's Fair Pawnshop, Billiards, Waterbeds, Beer, First House of Jesus, SOUL BROTHER DO NOT BURN. Flowers were blooming in unlikely places-around a city trashcan and in the tiny, parched weed-patch beneath a row-house window. He turned a corner where a man sat on the curb flicking out the blade of his knife, slamming it shut with the heel of his hand, and flicking it out again. He traveled on. He passed Meller Street, then Merger Street. He turned down Crosswell. He parked and switched the engine off and sat looking at Crafts Unlimited.

It was months since he'd been here. The shop window was filled with Easter items now-hand-decorated eggs and stuffed rabbits, a patchwork quilt like an early spring garden. The Merediths' windows were empty, as always; you couldn't tell a thing from them. Maybe they'd moved. (They could move in a taxi, with one suitcase, after ten minutes' preparation.) He slid out of the car and walked toward the shop. He climbed the steps, pushed through the glass door, and gazed up the narrow staircase. But he didn't have what it took to continue. (What would he say? How would he explain himself?) Instead, he turned left, through a second glass door and into the crafts shop. It smelled of raw wood. A gray-haired, square-boned woman in a calico smock was arranging hand-carved animals on a table. "Hello," she said, and then she glanced up and gave him a startled look. It was the top hat, he supposed. He wished he'd worn something more appropriate. And why were there no other customers? He was all alone, conspicuous, in a roomful of quilted silence. Then he saw the puppets. "Ah, sol" he said. "Ze poppets!" Surprisingly, he seemed to have developed an accent-from what country, he couldn't say. "Zese poppets are for buying?" he asked.

"Why, yes," the woman said.

They lay on a center table: Pinocchio, a princess, a dwarf, an old lady, all far more intricate than the first ones he'd seen. Their heads were no longer round, simple, rubber-ball heads but were constructed of some padded cloth, with tiny stitches making wrinkles and bulges. The old-lady puppet, in particular, had a face so furrowed that he couldn't help running his finger across it. "Wonderful!" he said, still in his accent.

"They're sewn by a girl named Emily Meredith," the woman told him. "A remarkable craftsman, really." Morgan nodded. He felt a mixture of jealousy and happiness. "Yes, yes," he wanted to say, "don't I know her very well? Don't I know both of them? Who are you, to speak of them?" But also he wanted to hear how this woman saw them, what the rest of the world had to say about them. He waited, still holding the puppet. The woman turned back to her animals. "Perhaps I see her workroom," he said. "Pardon?"

"She leeve nearby, yes?"

"Why, yes, she lives just upstairs, but I'm not sure she-"

"Zis means a great deal to me," Morgan said. Across from him, on the other side of the table, stood a blond wooden cabinet filled with weaving. Its doors were wavery glass, and they reflected a shortened and distorted view of Morgan-a squat, bearded man in a top hat. Toulouse-Lautrec. Of course! He adjusted the hat, smiling. Everything black turned transparent, in the glass. He wore a column of rainbow-colored weaving on his head and a spade of weaving on his chin. "You see, I also am artiste," he told the woman. Definitely, his accent was a French one. She said, "Oh?"

"I am solitary man. I know no other artistes,"

"But I don't think you understand," she said. "Emily and her husband, they just give puppet shows to children, mainly. They only sell puppets when they have a few extras. They're not exactly-"

"Steel," he said, "I like to meet zem. I like you to introduce me. You know so many people! I see zat. A friend to ze artistes. What your name is, please?"

"Well… Mrs. Apple," she said. She thought a moment. "Oh, all right. I don't suppose they would mind." She called to someone at the rear, "Hannah, will you watch for customers?" Then she turned to lead Morgan out the side door.

He followed her up the staircase. There was a smell of fried onions and disinfectant. Mrs. Apple's hips looked very broad from this angle. She became, by extension, someone fascinating: she must speak to the Merediths every day, know intimately their schedules and their habits, water their plants when they went on tour. He restrained the urge to set a friendly palm on her backside. She glanced at him over her shoulder, and he gave her a reassuring smile.

At the top of the stairs she turned to the right and knocked on a tall oak door. "Emily?" she called.

But when the door opened, it was Leon who stood there. He was holding a newspaper. When he saw Morgan, he drew the paper sharply to his chest. "Dr, Morgan!" he said.

Mrs. Apple said, "Doctor?" She looked at Morgan and then at Leon. "Why," she said, "is this the doctor you told me about? The one, who delivered Gina?" Leon nodded.

"But I thought you were an artist!" Mrs. Apple said. "You said you were an artist!" Morgan hung his head. He shuffled his feet. "I was embarrassed about my hat," he said. "I've just recently come from a wedding; I know I look ridiculous. I said I was an artist so you wouldn't laugh at me."

"Oh, you poor man," Mrs. Apple said. Then she did laugh. "You and your 'zis and zat.' Your 'zese and zose.'" He risked a glance at Leon. Leon wasn't laughing. He was glaring at Morgan, and he kept the newspaper clamped to his chest as if guarding secrets.

"I do want to see your workroom," Morgan told him. "I may buy a large number of puppets."

"We don't have a large number," Leon said.

"Oh, come on, Leon," Mrs. Apple said. "Why not show him? What's the harm?" She nudged Morgan in the side. "You and your 'artistes.' Your 'poppets.'" She started laughing again. Her eyes grew rays of wrinkles at the corners.

Leon stood scowling at Mrs. Apple. Then, "Well," he said ungraciously, and he stepped back and turned to lead them down the hall.

Morgan peered swiftly into the room on his right-a flash of sunken sofa and a half-empty bookcase. On his left was the kitchen; he had an impression of cold, gleaming whiteness. The next door on the left led to the workroom. There was no real furniture at all-just a sewing machine beneath the window, and a stubby aluminum stepladder on which Emily sat snipping paper. Her black skirt drooped around her, nearly obscuring the ladder. The braids on top of her head picked up light from somewhere and glinted like flying sparks. "Emily," Leon said.

She looked up. Then she jumped off the stepladder and hid whatever she was doing behind her back. "What do you want?" she asked Morgan.

"Why, Emily. Goodness," Mrs. Apple said. "This is Dr. Morgan. Don't you recognize him? He's come to buy some puppets. A large number of puppets, Emily."

"Buy them downstairs," said Emily, white-faced.

You would think she had something against him.

Morgan tried not to feel hurt. He smiled at her. He said, "I like to see the process of things. Actually."

"There's no process going on here." He stroked his beard.

Mrs. Apple said, "But… Emily? Show him the shadow puppets." She told Morgan, "She's trying something new, Doctor: shadow puppets, out of paper. See?" She crossed to the sewing machine and took something from one of its drawers. It was the silhouette of a knight in armor, attached to a slender rod. "You notice he's hinged at the joints," she said. "You work him behind a screen. He casts a shadow on the screen. Isn't that clever?"

"Yes, certainly," said Morgan. He looked around the room. He wondered what Emily sat on while she worked at the sewing machine. The stepladder, maybe? Even in his fondest fantasies he had not imagined such starkness. He was fascinated. "And will you be using shadow puppets in your shows now?" he asked Emily.

"Yes," she said shortly.

"No," Leon said.

There was a pause. Mrs. Apple gave a little laugh.

"With shadow puppets," Leon said, "it's all how they're hinged, nothing more. How Emily caused their joints to swing when she made them."

"So?" Emily said.

"You just scoot them along the ledge behind the screen, and their joints fall into place. There's nothing to do, even less to do than there is with the old kind of puppets."

"So?" They stared at each other.

Morgan cleared his throat.

"Is that your child I'm hearing?" he asked.

Of course it was. She was singing something in a small, cracked voice, off in some other room. But nobody answered him. He poked his head out into the hall. Then he crossed the hall and went into the bedroom. There was a mattress in one corner and a bureau in another, and a narrow cot along one wall. A child sat on the cot, fitting Tinker Toys together. She sang, "… how to get to Sesame Street…" When she saw Morgan, she stopped.

Morgan said, "Hello there." She looked at him doubtfully.

He heard the Merediths coming, and he said quickly, "Would you like my hat?" He tore his hat from his head and set it on hers, tilting it back so it wouldn't engulf her completely.

From the doorway, Emily said, "Gina! Take that off. You never try another person's hat on."

"It's my hat," Gina said. "He gave it to me."

"Take it off," Leon said.

"No." She had a round face and a pointed chin; she had to keep her chin raised so the hat wouldn't slide down over her eyes. This made her look proud and challenging. In fact, she resembled Leon, Morgan thought.

When Emily tried to lift the hat from her head, Gina fought her hands away. "It's my hat. It's mine." Morgan said, "Surely. It's a gift." Emily stopped struggling, but she continued to stand between Morgan and the child, shielding her. Her eyes were pale and cold. She had her arms folded tightly, and Leon stood firm beside her.

Mrs. Apple said, "Dr. Morgan?" She arrived breathless, and handed him another shadow puppet. This one was a king. He might have stepped out of a stained-glass window; red and blue transparent paper covered the pierced design in his robe. Lit behind a screen, he would cast jewel-like colored shadows. "Isn't he marvelous?" Mrs. Apple said. "It's art! You could hang it on the wall."

"That's true, I could," Morgan said. He stroked the colored paper with a thumb. Something about the precision of the design made him feel sad and deprived. His gaze slid off the king and away, landing finally on the bureau. Its top was nearly bare. There were no bottles or safety pins or ticket stubs; just a single framed photo of Leon and Emily holding hands in front of this building. Gina rode on Leon's shoulders. Her plump little calves bracketed his neck. All three of them were smiling squintily into the sunlight. Morgan stepped closer and bent over the photo, pinching his lower lip between his thumb and index finger. The king hung forgotten in his left hand. Bemused, he peered into a drawer that was partway open. Then he opened it further and studied its contents: three white shirts and a box of Kleenex. "Dr. Morgan!" Emily said sharply.

"Yes, yes," He followed the others out of the room, laying a hand on Gina's head as he passed. Her hair was so soft, it seemed to cling to his fingers for several seconds afterward.

Back in the workroom, he said, "What do you do with Gina while you're giving your puppet shows?" Emily turned away, refusing to answer, but Leon said, "We take her along."

"And? Does she help with the productions?"

"Oh, no. She's just barely turned four."

"She knows the ropes, though," Morgan suggested. "She was raised backstage, after all. She knows to stay quiet while a play is going on."

"Gina?" Leon said. He laughed. "Gina's never been quiet a full minute in her life. We have to keep hushing her all through the show, and if it's a birthday party, it's worse. She cries when someone else gets to blow out the candles. She hates it when Emily pays attention to other children."

"Oh, you ought to see one of their shows," said Mrs. Apple. She slid the king out of Morgan's hand. Without noticing, he'd rucked up one corner of the colored paper. "They're getting so well known! They've been all the way to Washington. And a man who runs an entertainment company wanted to just take them over, make them part of his troupe, like professionals. What did you ever tell that man, Leon? Did you ever answer his letter?"

"I threw it away," Leon said.

"Threw it away!"

"It was some kind of Bible group. Gospel singers and things."

"But-threw it away! You could at least have answered it."

"And off in some poky town," Leon said. "Tinville, Tindale…"

"I doubt you ever answer letters," Morgan said. He felt suddenly pleased and excited.

Leon said, "Oh, well…"

"Really, what's the point? Why complicate your lives? You go downstairs to clear out the mailbox every now and then, and you glance at what's there and toss it all in the wastebasket and come back empty-handed."

"Well, sometimes," Leon said.

"When?" Emily asked him. Then she turned to Morgan and said, "We're not who you believe we are."

"Eh?"

"We're not who you imagine."

"Come look at Rip Van Winkle," Mrs. Apple said.

"We live like anyone else. We manage fine. We like to be left alone," said Emily. "Let me show you to the door."

"Oh, but Emily!" Mrs. Apple said. "He hasn't seen all the puppets!"

"He's seen enough."

"He wanted to buy a large number!"

"No, no, that's all right… I really must be going," Morgan said. "Thank you anyhow." Emily spun through the door, a swirl of black skirt, and he followed her. They went down the hallway single-file-Emily, Morgan, Leon, Mrs. Apple stayed behind, no doubt looking around at the puppets in bewilderment. "Maybe some other time?" she called after him.

"Yes, maybe so…" He skidded on a Tinker Toy and said, "Oh, excuse me," and lurched against the wall. He clapped a hand to his head. "I'd better go home and change," he said.

"Change?" Leon asked.

"Yes, I… need another hat." His voice was echoing now; they'd reached the stairs. But instead of starting down, he looked at the door across the landing. "Who lives there?" he asked.

"Joe and Hannah Miles," said Leon, but Emily said, "No one."

"Miles? Are they craftsmen also?"

"We'll see you to the street," Emily told him. She pushed forward, edging him toward the stairs, and when he took his first step down, she followed so closely that he felt hounded. "I don't understand you," she said. (He should have known. She would not veil anything; she was as uncurtained as her windows.) "What do you want of us? What are you after? Why did you trail us all those months and lurk in doorways and peer around corners?"

"Oh? You noticed?" Morgan said. He staggered with embarrassment and grabbed the banister.

"You could have come straight up and said hello, like ordinary people."

"Yes, but I was so… I'd built up this idea of you. I almost preferred watching, don't you see. My own household is impossible. Very confusing, very tedious," he said. He stopped, halfway down the last flight of stairs. "Oh, you think it's all so romantic, I suppose," he said. "Big-city doctor! Saving lives. But mostly it's a treadmill. I work too far downtown; I attract a low class of patient. Twice I've had my office robbed by addicts looking for drugs, and one of those times I was present. They tied my secretary to her chair with a raincoat belt and they made me go through all my desk drawers. It was unnerving. There I was, tumbling out sample packs of decongestants, sinus tablets, pediatric nosedrops… I'm not a brave man. I gave them all I had. I tell you this to show you what sort of existence I lead, Emily, Leon…" He was out of breath. He felt a white space inside his head, as if he were standing at an unaccustomed altitude. "Just hear what happened last summer," he said. "I had this patient who'd been stabbed. Stabbed in front of a Fells Point bar, something to do with a woman. They brought him in and woke me in the dead of night. That's the kind of practice I have-such fine patients. And no answering service, no condominium in Ocean City where I can vanish over the weekend… Anyhow. He had a long, shallow cut all down the left side, from the ribcage to the hipbone, fortunately clear of the heart. I laid him on the table in my office and stitched him up right then and there. Took me an hour and a quarter-a tiresome job, as you might imagine. Then just as I'm knotting the last stitch, wham! The door bursts open. In comes the man who stabbed him. Pulls out a knife and rips him down the right side, ribcage to hipbone. Back to the needle and thread. Another hour and a quarter." Leon gave a sudden snort of laughter, but Emily just nudged Morgan forward. Morgan resumed his descent, leaning heavily on the banister like someone old and rheumatic. He said, "They come to me with headaches, colds, black eyes… self-healing things. A man who does sedentary work-a taxi driver, say- will spend the weekend moving furniture and then can me out of bed on a Sunday night. 'Doc, I got the most terrible backache. Do you think it could be a disk? A fusion? Will I need an operation?' For this I went to medical school!"

"Here," said Emily. They had reached the front door. She pushed it open for him and held out her hand, "Goodbye," she told him. Leon grinned anxiously behind her, as if trying to ease the insult. Morgan took her hand and was startled by its lightness and its dryness.

"You don't want to be friends at all, do you?" he said.

"No," Emily told him.

"Ah," he said. "And why — would that be?"

"I don't like how you try to get into our lives. I hate it! I don't like being pried into."

"Emily," Leon said.

"No, no," Morgan told him. "It's quite all right. I understand." He looked away, toward his dusty, sagging car. He had no feelings whatsoever. It seemed he'd been emptied, "Maybe you could meet my wife," he said with an effort. "Would you like to meet Bonny? Have I told you about her? Or you might like my children. I have very nice children, very normal, very ordinary; they seem determined to be ordinary… Two are in high school. One's grown, really, a secretary; and four others are in college, here and there. Most of the year, they're gone. We hardly hear from them. But that's the way it is, right? Every parent says that. You can see that I'm a family man. Does that help? No, I guess it doesn't." It seemed he was still holding Emily's hand. He dropped it. "The oldest girl's getting married," he said. "I'm not a doctor. I work in a hardware store." Emily said, "What?"

"I manage Cullen Hardware."

"But… you delivered our baby!" she said.

"Ah, well," he told her, "I haven't witnessed three of my daughters* births for nothing." He patted all his pockets, hunting cigarettes, but when he found a pack, he just stood holding it and looking into their stunned faces. "That stabbing business, well, I read it in the paper," he said. "I presented myself untruthfully. I do that often, in fact. I often find myself giving a false impression. It's not something I intend, you understand. It almost seems that other people conspire with me, push me into it. That day you called for a doctor in the house: no one else came forward. There was this long, long silence. And it seemed like such a simple thing-offer some reassurance, drive you to the hospital. I had no inkling I'd actually have to deliver a baby. Events just… rolled me forward, so to speak." He wished they would say something. All they did was stare at him. Meanwhile a girl in an old-fashioned dress climbed the front steps and said, "Hello, Emily, Leon," but they didn't even glance at her, or move aside when she slipped past them and through the open door.

"Please. It's not entirely my fault," he said. "Why are people so willing to believe me? Just tell me that. And this is what's depressing: they'll believe me all the quicker if I tell them something disillusioning. I might say, for instance, that being a movie star is not what it's cracked up to be. I'll say the lights are so hot that my make-up runs, and there's forever this pinkish-gray stain around the inside of my collar that my wife despairs of Clorox has no effect on it; not even Wisk does, though she's partially solved the problem by prevention. What she does, you see, is rub my collar with a bar of white bath soap "before I put a shirt on. Yes, that seems to work out fairly well, I'll say."

"This is crazy," Leon told him.

"Yes," said Morgan.

"You must be crazy!" But Emily said, "Well, I don't know. I see what he means, in a way." Both men turned to stare at her. Leon said, "You do?"

"He just… has to get out of his life, sometimes," she said.

Then Morgan gave a long, shaky sigh and sank down on the stoop. "My oldest daughter's getting married," he said. "Could I sit here with you and smoke a cigarette?" 1973 The newspaper said, Crafts Revival in Baltimore? Festival Begins June 2. There was a picture of Henry Prescott, ankle-deep in wood chips, carving one of his decoys. There was a picture of Leon Meredith holding up a puppet, with his wife beside him and his daughter at his feet. He was a grim, handsome, angular man, and his mouth was sharply creviced at the corners. He was not a young boy any more. It took a photo to make Emily see that. She placed the paper on the kitchen table, pushing away several breakfast dishes, and leaned over it on both elbows to study it more closely. The porous texture of the newsprint gave Leon a dramatic look-all hollows and steel planes. Next to him, Emily seemed almost featureless. Even Gina failed to show how special she was.

"The whole idea," Leon was quoted as saying, "is improvisation. We take it moment by moment. We adapt as we go along. I'm talking about the plays, you understand-not the puppets. The puppets are my wife's doing. She makes them according to a fixed pattern. They're not improvised." This was true, in a way, and yet it wasn't. Emily did have a homemade brown-paper pattern for the puppets' outlines, but the outlines were the least of it. What was important was the faces, the dips and hills of their expressions, which tended to develop unexpected twists of their own no matter how closely she guided the fabric through the sewing machine. Yes, definitely, the puppets were improvised too. She wished she'd spoken up when that reporter was interviewing them-said something to defend herself.

"The heads are padded," Leon said, "and stiffened with some kind of sizing. My wife mixes the sizing. She has her own recipe, her own way of doing things. allowed to help with the props sometimes, but my wife insists on making the puppets totally by herself." Emily folded the paper and laid it aside. She went down the hall to the back room. It was Gina's room now. The sewing machine and the muslin bags had been moved to the room Leon and Emily shared; Gina's belongings had multiplied too far to be contained in one small corner. Her unmade bed was laden with stuffed animals, books, and clothes. In the rocking chair by the window sat a Snoopy dog bigger than Gina. Grandma and Grandpa Meredith had brought it for her sixth birthday. Emily felt it was ridiculous to give a child something that size-not to mention the cost. What could they have been thinking of? "Oh, well," Leon had told her, "that's just how they are, I guess. You know how they are." Gina was under the bed. She emerged, frowsy-haired, with a sneaker in her hand. "Aren't you ready yet?" Emily asked her. "It's time to go."

"I was looking for my shoe." Emily took the sneaker from her and loosened a knot in the lace. "Now, Gina, listen," she said. "We've got a play to give out in the county today, and we're leaving before you get back. When kindergarten's over, you walk home with the Berger girls and wait in the shop till we come. Mrs. Apple says she'll keep an eye on you."

"Why can't I stay home and go with you?"

"Summer will be here soon enough," Emily told her, "You'll be home all the time, come summer." She slipped the sneaker on Gina's foot and tied it. Gina's socks were already creased and soiled and falling down her ankles. Her blouse had egg on the front. Emily had known children like Gina when she was a child herself. They had a kind of extravagant squalor; there was something lush about the tumbled appearance of their clothing. She had always assumed their mothers were to blame, but now she knew better. Not half an hour ago Gina had been neat as a pin; Emily had made certain of it. She plucked a dust ball from Gina's hair, which was rich and thick-stranded like Leon's. "Come along," she told her. "You'll be late." She slung her purse on her shoulder and they left the apartment, clicking the latch very gently because Leon was still asleep. They walked down the stairs, where everyone's breakfast smells hung in the air- bacon, burned butter, the Conways' kippered herrings. They passed the door of the shop, which was- still dark, and stepped out into the street. It was a warm, sunny morning. The city looked freshly washed, with gold-lit buildings rising through a haze in the distance, women in spring dresses sweeping their stoops, green ivy flooding through the windows of an abandoned rowhouse. Gina hung on to Emily's hand and skipped and sang: Miss Lucy had a baby, She called it Tiny Tim, She put it in the bathtub To see if it could swim…

Emily said good morning to Mrs. Ellery, who was shaking out her dust mop, and to the ancient blind man whose daughter, or granddaughter it must have been, set him on his stoop every fair day with a grayish quilt wrapped around his legs. "Nice weather," Emily called, and the old man nodded, turning his sealed-looking eyelids toward the sun like a plant in the window. She stopped on the second corner to wait for the Berger girls. Helena Berger shooed them out the door-two little freckled redheads in plaid dresses. They ran ahead with Gina, and at the next intersection Emily had to call, "Stop! Wait!" She hurried up, out of breath, while they lurched and teetered on the edge of the curb. She held out her hands, and the younger Berger girl took one and Gina took the other. The Berger child was all bones; Emily felt a rush of love for Gina's warm, chubby fingers, which were slightly sticky in the creases. She waded across the street, embroiled in children, and turned them loose on the other side. They scattered ahead again, skipping disjointedly.

Miss Lucy called the doctor, Miss Lucy called the nurse, " Miss Lucy called the lady With the alligator purse…

Emily sensed a presence nearby, the shape of some one familiar, and she turned and found Morgan Gower loping along beside her. He tipped his battered green Army helmet and smiled. "Morgan," she said. "How come you're out so early?"

"I couldn't sleep past five o'clock this morning," he said. "There's too much excitement at the house." At Morgan's house there was always too much excitement. She'd never been there, but she pictured a bulging, seething box of a place-the roof straining off, the side seams splitting. "What is it this time?" she asked him.

"It's Brindle. My sister. Her sweetheart came back." Emily hadn't known his sister had a sweetheart. She shaded her eyes and called, "Children! Wait for me!" Then she said, "Did Kate get out of her leg cast yet?"

"Who?" he asked. "Oh, yes. Yes, that's all… but see, at seven or so last night, just at the end of supper, the doorbell rang and Bonny said, 'Brindle, go see who that is, will you?' since Brindle was nearest the door, so Brindle went and then…" They'd reached the intersection. Emily held out her hands and the children swarmed around her, knocking Morgan backward a pace. When she'd crossed to the other side and turned to look for him, he was picking up Ms helmet from the gutter, He polished it with his sleeve, sadly, and set it OB his head, It matched his splotchy camouflage jacket and his crumpled olive-drab jungle pants. He was always dressing for catastrophes that were unlikely to occur, she thought. "These are guaranteed, certified, snake-proof boots," he said now. He stopped to hold up one green foot. "I bought them at Sunny's Surplus."

"They're very nice," she said. "Children! Slow down, please."

"How come you have those other two girls?" Morgan asked. "I don't remember seeing them before."

"I'm trading off with their mother. She's walking Gina home today so that I can do a show."

"Well, it all seems so disorganized," Morgan said. "I come to you people for peace and quiet and I find this disorganization. Look at Gina: she hasn't even said hello to me."

"Oh, she will; you know she loves to see you. It's only that she's with friends."

"I prefer it when you both come and Gina walks between you, just the one of her. Where's Leon? Why isn't he here?"

"He's sleeping. He was out late last night, trying for a part in a play."

"It's too disorganized," Morgan said glumly. He stopped and peered down the front of his jacket. Then he reached inside and brought up a pack of cigarettes, "So Brindle goes to the door," he said, "and nothing more happens. There's nothing but silence. Well, we thought she might have faded off somewhere. Forgot where she was headed. Lost her way or something. You know Brindle. Or at least, you know about her: always in that bathrobe, moping. 'How was your day?' you ask, and she says, 'Day?' She acts surprised to hear there's been one. 'Go see where she's got to,' Bonny tells me. 'She's your sister; see what she's up to.' So I push away from the table and go to find her and there she is in the entrance hall being kissed by a total stranger. It's one of those long, deep, wrap-around kisses, like in the movies. I was uncertain what to do about it. It seemed rude to interrupt, but if I turned and left they'd no doubt hear the floorboards creak, so I just stood there flossing my teeth and the two of them went on kissing. Heavy-set man with slicked-down hair. Brindle in her bathrobe. Finally I ask, 'Was there something you, wanted?' Then they pulled apart and Brindle said, 'Ifs Robert Roberts, my childhood sweetheart. Don't you know him?'"

"Children!" Emily called. They'd reached another intersection. She ran ahead to take their hands. Morgan followed, muttering something. "'Known him all his life^ of course" was what it sounded like. "Knew him when he was a bit of a thing, corning to play roll-a-bat with Brindle in the alley. Called her 'Idiot. Dumbhead. Moron,' in that fond, insulting way that childhood sweethearts have…" The school loomed up, a gloomy building surrounded by cracked concrete, teeming with shabby children. Emily bent to kiss Gina goodbye. "Have a good day, honey," she said, and Morgan said, "How about old Morgan? No kiss for Uncle Morgan?" He bent over, and Gina threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. "Come by after school and help me again with my yo-yo," she said.

"All right, sugar-pie."

"You promise?"

"Absolutely. Have I ever let you down?" When she ran off, he stood watching after her, smiling and tapping cigarette ashes across the toes of his boots. "Ah, yes. Ah, yes," he said. "What a darling, eh? I wish she'd stay this size forever."

"I hate that school," Emily said.

"Why! What could be wrong with it?"

"It's so crowded; classes are so big, and I doubt I'll ever feel safe letting her walk here alone. I'd like to send her someplace private. Leon's parents have offered to pay, but I don't know. I'd have to think how to bring it up with Leon."

"No, no, leave her here. Don't forsake your principles," Morgan said. He took her elbow and turned her toward home. "I never thought you'd send your daughter to a private school."

"Why not? What principles?" Emily asked. "You sent yours to private school."

"That was Bonny's doing," Morgan told her. "She has this money. We never see it, never buy anything inspiring with it, but it's there, all right, for things that don't show-new slate roof tiles and the children's education. Her money is so well behaved! I would have preferred a public school, myself. Why, surely. You don't want to cart her off to some faraway place, all these complicated carpools-"

"Dad Meredith happened to mention it while Leon was out of the room," Emily said. "On purpose, I guess. He must be hoping I'll wear Leon down, so when the subject comes up again Leon will be used to it. But I haven't said a word, because Leon's so proud about money. And you know what a temper he has."

"Temper?" Morgan said.

"He might just explode."

"Oh, I can't picture that."' "He's always had this angry streak."

"I can't picture that at all," Morgan said.

He stopped and looked around him. "I would offer to take you for a drive," he said, "just to celebrate the return of Robert Roberts, don't you know. I'm much too keyed up to work today. But, unfortunately, my car's been stolen."

"Oh, that's terrible," Emily said. "When did it happen?"

"Just now," he told her.

"Now? This morning?"

"This instant," he said. He pointed to an empty place at the curb beside a mailbox. "I parked it here, where I thought you might be passing. Now it's disappeared." Emily's mouth dropped open.

"There, there, I'm not upset," he said. "As you would say: what's a car, after all?" He spread his arms, smiling. "It's only an encumbrance. Only another burden. Right? I'm better off without it." Emily didn't know how he could talk that way. A car was very important. She and Leon had been saving for one for years, "You ought to call the police immediately," she told him. "Come back with me and use our telephone. Time really matters."

"There'd be no point," he said. "I've never had much faith in policemen." He took her elbow again to lead her on. The grip of his tense, warm fingers reminded her of Gina. "Last summer," he said, '"while we were driving to the beach, a state trooper flagged us down and asked us for a lift. He said his patrol car had been stolen. Can you imagine? He got in the rear with Molly and Kate and my mother… those big, shiny boots, gun in a holster… he leaned over the front seat and saw Bonny, saw her eating an apple core. 'You want to watch it with those seeds,' he told her. He said, 'My cousin Donna used to love appleseeds, Best part of the apple, she claimed. One year me and my brother saved up all our seeds in a Baby Ben alarm-clock box and gave them to her for Christmas, She was thrilled. She ate them every one, and by evening she was dead. Here's where I get off,' he said; so I stopped the car and out he climbed and that was the last we saw of him. It seemed he'd only popped in to bring us this message, you know? And then departed. I said to Bonny, I told her, '"Think of it, the lives of ordinary citizens in the hands of a man like that. Walking around with a gun,' I said. 'No doubt loaded, no doubt cocked, or whatever it is you do with a gun.' "

"Yes, but…" Emily said.

She was about to tell him that surely the next policeman wouldn't be so peculiar. But then she wondered. Some people, it appeared, attract the peculiar all their lives. "Well, anyway," she said, "it wouldn't hurt just to give the police a phone call."

"Maybe not, maybe not," Morgan said. He was reading a chipped and peeling sign: EUNOLA'S RESTAUBANT. "Is this place any good?" he asked.

"Ive never tried it."

"Lived right here in the neighborhood and never tried Eunola's?"

"It's a matter of money."

"Let's go in and have some coffee," Morgan said.

"I thought you had to open your store."

"Oh, Butkins will do that. He's happier without me, to tell the truth. I get in the way." He pulled open the door and shepherded Emily in ahead of him. There were four small tables and a counter where a row of men in hard hats sat drinking their coffee under a veil of cigarette smoke. "Sit," Morgan said, guiding her to a table. He settled opposite her. "Do you know what this means, this Robert Roberts business? Do you see the implications? Why, it's wonderful! First the years go by and Brindle stays in her bathrobe, moping, scuffing about in her slippers, wondering when the next meal is, 'Fix it yourself, if you're hungry,' I've told her, but she says, 'Well,' she says, 'I don't know where anything's kept, the food and utensils and such.' Understand, this is a house she's been living in since nineteen… was it sixty-four? Or maybe sixty-five, she moved in. Kate was already in school, I remember. Sue had started her piccolo lessons… Then here comes Robert Roberts! Here he comes, out of the blue. He says his wife is dead now. And anyhow, he says, his heart was always with Brindle. I can't imagine why. She's very plain to look at and she's not at all good-natured. But his heart was always with her, he says, and he was the very person she's been telling us about at the dinner table, every night of our lives. Why, our children knew Robert Roberta's name before they knew their own! They knew all Ms favorite board games and his batting average. And here he comes, with an armload of roses, the most colossal heap of roses; the whole entrance hall took on that rainy, dressed-up smell that roses have… and asking her to marry him! Isn't life… symmetrical? I'd really underestimated it." A waitress stood over them, tapping her pencil. Emily cleared her throat and said, 'I'll have coffee, please."

"Me too," said Morgan. "Yes, it was quite a night. The two of them sat up till dawn, discussing their plans. I kept them company. They want to get married in June, they say."

"You certainly have a lot of weddings in your family," Emily told him.

"Oh, not really," he said. He reached across the table for her purse, opened it, and peered inside. "There was Amy's, of course, and then Jean's, but I don't count Carol's; she got divorced before she'd finished writing her thank-you notes." He turned the purse upside down and shook it. Emily's wallet fell out, followed by a key ring. He shook the purse again, but it was empty. "Look at that!" he said. "You're so orderly." Emily retrieved her belongings and put them back in her purse. Morgan watched, with his head cocked. "I too am orderly," he told her.

"You are?"

"Well, at least I have an interest in order. I mean, order has always intrigued me. When I was a child, I thought order might come when my voice changed. Then I thought, no, maybe when I'm educated. At one point I thought I would be orderly if I could just once sleep with a woman." He took a napkin from the dispenser and unfolded it and smoothed it across his knees.

Emily said, "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Did sleeping with a woman make you orderly?"

"How can you ask?" he said. He sighed.

Their coffee arrived, and he seized the sugarbowl and started spooning out sugar. Four teaspoons, five… he stirred after each spoonful, and dripped coffee on the tabletop and into the howl. Caramel-colored beads grew up across the surface of the sugar. Emily looked at them and then at Morgan. Morgan bared his teeth at her encouragingly. She looked away again.

Why put up with him? He was really so strange that sometimes, out in public, she felt an urge to walk several paces ahead so that no one would guess they were acquainted. Or when the three of them, were together, she'd make a point of taking Leon's arm. But it was funny how he grew on a person. He added something; she couldn't say just what. He made things look more interesting than they really were. Sometimes he accompanied the Merediths when they went to put on a puppet show, and from the squirrel-like attention he gave to all they did she would understand, suddenly, how very exotic this occupation was-itinerant puppeteers! Well, not itinerant, exactly, but still… and she'd look at Leon and realize what a flair he had, with his deep, dark eyes and swift movements. She herself would feel not quite so colorless; she would notice that Gina, who sometimes struck her as a little blowzy, was just like one of those cherubic children on a nineteenth-century chocolate box.

"Leon's picture was in the paper," she told Morgan now.

"Eh?" She leaned forward. She saw that this must be why she'd agreed to stop for coffee. "There was an article," she said, "in the morning paper, all about our puppets."

"Oh, I missed it," he said. "I left the house too early."

"They had a picture of the three of us, but really it was Leon's article," she said.

Morgan lit a cigarette and tipped his chair back, studying her, "He talked about the puppets, how they're… oh, not improvised. How they're cut from a pattern," She folded her hands and examined her knuckles. "He meant something by that. It's hard to explain. If I tell you what it meant, you'll think I'm imagining things."

"You probably are," Morgan said.

"And last night, this play he went to try for… what he used to do in the old days was, he'd memorize a part for tryouts. He wouldn't just go and read it, like other people. He had this very quick memory. It always made an impression. So yesterday afternoon he started to learn the part he wanted, and it turned out he couldn't do it. He'd memorize one line and go on to the next, but when he put the two together he found he'd forgotten the first one and he'd have to begin all over again. It kept happening. It was eerie.7 knew the lines, finally, just from hearing them; but he still didn't. And he blamed me for it. He didn't say so outright, but he did. I know."

"You're imagining things," Morgan said.

"It's true that he's changed since he met me,' Emily said.

Morgan rocked on his chair legs, smoking and frowning. He said, "Did I ever tell you I was married once before?"

"What? No, I don't think so. And now he's so friendly with his parents. Well, of course he can say that's all my doing; I used to be the only one who spoke to them. But now it seems… well, truthfully, they visit a little too much. He gets on with them a little too well."

"I married during my senior year in college," Morgan said. "Her name was Letitia. We eloped and never told a soul. But as soon as we got married, we lost interest in each other. It was the funniest thing. We took up with different crowds; Letitia became involved in an antique-music group and went off to New York over Christmas vacation… we drifted apart, as they say. We went our separate ways." Emily couldn't see why he was telling her this. She made an effort and sat straighter in her chair. "Is that right?" she said. "So you got a divorce?"

"Well, no."

"What happened, then?"

"Nothing happened," Morgan said. "We just went our ways. No one knew about the elopement, after all." Emily thought back over what he'd told her. She said, "But then you'd be a bigamist."

"Technically speaking, I suppose I am," Morgan said cheerfully.

"But that's illegal!"

"Well, yes, I guess it is, in a way." She stared at him.

"But it's really very natural," he told her. "It's quite fitting, when you stop to consider. Aren't we all sitting on stacks of past events? And not every level is neatly finished off, right? Sometimes a lower level bleeds into an upper level. Isn't that so?"

"Honestly," Emily said. "What has this got to do with anything?" She reached for her purse and stood up. Morgan stood too and came lunging around to pull her chair back, but she was too quick for him. She didn't even wait for him to pay the cashier. She walked on out the door and left him at the register, and he had to run to catch up with her.

"Emily?" he said.

"I have to be getting home now."

"But I seem to have strayed from my point. All your talk of bigamy, legalities, you made me forget what I wanted to say."

"Half the time, Morgan," Emily said, "I believe you're telling out-and-out lies. I believe you just told me one. You did, didn't you? Did you? Or not?"

"See, Emily," Morgan said, "of course he's changed. Everybody does; everyone goes bobbing along, in and out of inlets, snagging on pilings, skating down rapids… Well, I mustn't get carried away. But, Emily, you're still close. You haven't parted directions. You're still very much alike."

"Alike!" said Emily. She stopped in front of a newsstand. "How can you say that? We're totally different. We come from totally different backgrounds. Even our religions are different."

"Really?" said Morgan. "What religion is Leon?"

"Oh, Presbyterian, Methodist…" She started walking again. "We're nothing at all alike."

"To me you are," Morgan said. "And you get along so well."

"Ha," said Emily bitterly.

"You have the happiest marriage I know of, Emily. I love your marriage!"

"Well, I can't think why," Emily said.

But she let herself fall into step with him.

They passed a woman painting her front door a bright green. "Apple green, my favorite color!" Morgan called, and the woman laughed and bowed like someone on a stage. They passed an open window where Fats Domino sang "I'm Walkin'," and Morgan spread his arms and started dancing. The fact that he had a cigarette clamped in his teeth made it look difficult and precarious; he reminded Emily of those Russians who dance with a glass of vodka on their heads. She stood to one side, awkwardly swinging her purse and smiling. Then Morgan stopped and took his cigarette from his mouth, "Why, look at that," he said. He was staring at something just behind her. She turned, but it was nothing-a car parked next to a mailbox.

"My car!" he said.

"Your what?"

"It's my car!"

"Are you sure?" But that was a silly question; even Emily was sure. (And why would he claim such a ruined object, otherwise?) Morgan rushed around it, breathing rapid puffs of smoke. "See?" he said. "There's Lizzie's tennis racket, my turban, my sailor suit that I was bringing home from… See that Nehi bottle? It's been rolling up and down the back window ledge for the past six months. Or," he said, pausing, "is it possible that someone else might have a car just like this?"

"Really, Morgan," Emily said. "Of course it's yours. Go call the police,"

"What for? Why not just steal it back?"

"Well, you want the thief arrested, don't you?"

"Yes," he said, "but meanwhile it's parked in a No Parking zone and I might be given a ticket."

"When it wasn't you that parked it there?"

"You can never tell, in this world," he said. "I promised Bonny I wouldn't run up more traffic fines." He was trying all the doors, but they were locked. He walked around to the front of the car and settled on his haunches before the grille. "I don't suppose you have your Swiss Army knife with you," he said.

"My what? No." He plucked at a string that was looped through the grille. Then he set his face close and started gnawing at the string. The woman who'd been painting lowered her brush and turned to watch. "I don't understand what you're after," Emily said.

"The key," Morgan said. Something clinked to the ground. He groped beneath the car for it. "Over to your right," Emily told him. "Closer to the wheel." Morgan stretched out on his stomach, with his legs trailing behind him. (The soles of his snake-proof boots were as deeply ridged as snow tires.) He reached farther under the car. "Got it," he said. A little three-wheeled mail truck the size of a golf cart bounced up and stopped. "Help!" Morgan shouted, and he raised his head. She heard his helmet clang against the underside of the bumper. "I'm hit!" he said.

"Morgan?"

"I'm run over! It's my leg!" A mailman descended from the truck, whistling, and started toward the mailbox. Emily grabbed his sleeve and said, "Move."

"Huh?"

"Move the track! You've run a man over."

"Sheesh," said the mailman. "Don't he see the No Parking sign?"

"Move that truck this instant, I tell you!"

"All right, all right," the mailman said. He turned back to his truck, glancing down at Morgan on the way. Morgan showed him. a face that seemed all teeth.

"Hurry," said Emily, wringing a handful of skirt.

Meanwhile the woman with the paintbrush arrived, dripping apple green. "Oh, that poor, poor man," she said. Emily knelt next to Morgan. She had a sick weight on the floor of her stomach. But at least there was no blood. Morgan's leg, pinned at the shin beneath the toy tire, looked flattened but still in one piece. He was breathing raggedly. Emily laid a hand on his back. "Are you in pain?" she asked him.

"Not as much as you might expect."

"He's going to move the truck,"

"Of all the damn-fool, ridiculous-"

"Never mind, it could happen to anyone," Emily said, patting his back.

"I was talking about the mailman."

"Oh." The mailman released his brake. The truck gave a grinding sound and inched backward. "Oof!" said Morgan. He rolled free. He sat up and inspected his leg. A dusty, wedge-shaped mark ran down the green fabric.

"Is it broken?" Emily asked him.

"I don't know."

"Rip his pants," the woman with the paintbrush suggested.

"Not the pants!" said Morgan. "They're World War Two." Emily started folding up the cuff, working gingerly, tensed for what she might have to see. By now, two old ladies with shopping bags had joined them and the mailman was telling them, "I could report him for illegal parking, if I was that bad of a guy."

"There's nothing here," Emily said. She was inspecting Morgan's pale, hairy shin. "Can you wiggle your toes?"

"Yes."

"Can you stand?" He attempted it, with an arm around Emily for support. He was heavier than he looked, hard-muscled, warm, and he gave off the harsh gray smell of someone who'd been smoking for a very long time. "Yes," he said, "I can stand."

"Maybe he just ran over your trousers." He drew back from her. "That's not true at all," he said.

"But there's no blood, the bone's not broken. . ** "I felt it. I felt the pressure, a pinch, so to speak, at one side of my calf. You think I don't know when I'm hit? Not all hurts show up from outside. You can't just stand outside and pass judgment on whether I've been injured or not. You think I don't know when a U. S. Government mail truck pins me flat to the pavement?"

"Jesus," said the mailman.

The two old ladies went on their way, and the woman returned to her painting. The mailman unlocked the mailbox. Morgan held up a hand; something glittered. "But at least I've got the key," he told Emily.

"Oh, yes. The key," He opened the door on the passenger side. "Quick. Jump in," he said.

"Me?"

"Jump in the car. What if the thief comes? All this racket, this hullabaloo…" He waited till she'd climbed in, and then he closed the door and came around to the driver's side. "I've had too much excitement lately," he told her. "I don't know why things can't go a little more smoothly." He settled himself with a grunt and leaned forward to fit the key in the ignition. "Now look," he said. "Another difficulty." The key wouldn't go. A second key was already there, and a dangling leather case. "What are these?" he asked Emily.

"They must have been locked in the car," she said, "I'm always amazed," Morgan said, "by how incompetent your average criminal is."

"But maybe the car wasn't stolen at all," Emily told him.

"How could that be?"

"Maybe you just thought you parked in that other block."

"No, no," he said impatiently. "That would be ridiculous." He started the motor, veered out around the mail truck, and headed up the street. It sounded as if he were in the wrong gear. "Come back with me and meet Bonny," he said.

"Oh, Leon will be wondering where I am. And anyway, don't you have to go to work?"

"I can't work today; I only had an hour of sleep last night. It was Brindle, this business with Brindle. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Robert Roberts, after all these years!" Emily hoped he wouldn't start on Robert Roberts again. She felt exhausted. It seemed to her that those few blocks from Gina's school had taken hours, days; she'd expended years' worth of energy on them. The sight of Morgan beside her (humming "I'm Walkin' " and tapping the steering wheel, fresh as a daisy, without a care in the world) made her head ache.

But then her apartment building approached. Crafts Unlimited was just opening, and its fluorescent lights were fluttering on and off as if unable to gather strength. The windows above it were dark. You could imagine that the building was nothing but an empty shell. Morgan sailed past, still humming. Emily didn't try to stop him.

Emily and Leon had given a good deal of thought to Morgan's wife-to what she must be like, considering the amount of time he spent away from her. He was always dropping in on the Merediths for a visit, mentioning other places he'd just come from and still others where he was heading afterward. Was he ever home at all, in fact? Even weekends? For on Saturdays he engaged in his own unique style of shopping. He would travel to the depths of Baltimore and return with unlikely items: dented canned goods, or knobby packages wrapped in brown paper and tied all around with string in a dozen clumsy knots. (You would think they hadn't heard of bagging yet, where Morgan shopped.) Sundays he went to fairs and festivals. At events where Emily and Leon took their puppets, they might even run into him purely by chance. They'd look through the scrim at the seated audience-no more than a long, low hillock-and find him standing at the rear, this sudden jutting peak topped by some outlandish hat, always alone, always brooding over something and puffing on a cigarette. (But when they came out afterward to take their bows, he'd be beaming mightily and clapping like a proud parent.) Winters, when the fairs died down, he'd go to church bazaars and grade-school fundraisers. No occasion was too small for him. He was never too busy to stop and contemplate the appliquéd felt Christmas-tree skirts or the Styrofoam snowmen with sequin eyes. So who was this Bonny, whom he was so eager to leave? Maybe she nagged him, Leon said. Maybe she was one of those tight, crimped ladies holding court alone in her careful living room, among the polished figurines that Morgan mustn't touch and the crystal ashtrays he mustn't flick his ashes into. But Emily didn't think so. Putting together all that Morgan said (his rush of accidents and disasters, his admiration of the Merediths' stripped apartment), she imagined Bonny as a slattern, in a zip-front housedress and a headful of pincurls. She wasn't surprised when Morgan parked his car in front of a well-kept brick Colonial house-after all, she'd known there was money, — and slate tiles for the roof-but she blinked when she stepped out and found a brown-haired woman in a neat skirt and blouse weeding petunias along the front walk. Well, maybe it was the sister. But Morgan said, "Bonny?" Bonny straightened and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. There were a few faint smile lines around her eyes. Her lipstick was a chipped, cracked, glossless red. She looked cheerful but noncommittal; she seemed to be waiting for Morgan to explain himself.

"Bonny, this is Emily Meredith," Morgan said.

Bonny went on waiting.

"Emily and her husband run a puppet show," Morgan said.

"Oh, really?" It hadn't occurred to Emily that Bonny wouldn't have heard of her. (She had heard of Bonny, after all.) She felt a little hurt. She held out her hand and said, "How do you do, Mrs. Gower." Bonny shook her hand. She said, "Well, are… you here to see Morgan? Or what?"

"She's here to see you" Morgan told her.

"Me?" Morgan said, "What happened was, my car was stolen, but then I stole it back, by and by, but still there was so much excitement, what with Robert Roberts and all…"

"You mean, you asked her to come inside the house?"

"Oh!" Emily said. "Well, of course I don't want to interrupt your work."

"It's all right," Bonny said. "Why don't you roll down your pants leg, Morgan?" She turned to lead them up the walk.

"But, Mrs. Gower-"

"Stay, stay," Morgan urged, from a bent position. He flattened his cuff around his ankle. "She's just surprised. You've come this far; stay!" Emily followed Bonny up the steps. She felt she had no choice, although she would rather have been anywhere else. They passed a clay pot in which herbs were growing-chives and maybe marjoram or thyme. Emily looked at them wistfully. Under other conditions, she thought, Bonny might very well have been someone she was fond of, but they'd got started wrong. It was Morgan's fault. He was so thoughtless and abrupt She felt irritated by his dishpan-shaped helmet, bounding along beside her. "Notice Bonny's roses," he said. It could have been a hint-a clue to Sonny's soft spot-but Bonny said, without turning. "How can she? They're not blooming yet." The three of them entered the hall. On the radiator were a stack of library books with scummy plastic covers, a watering can, and a box of Triscuits. Emily had to watch her step through a little turmoil of shoes and sneakers, and by then they'd reached the living room. "Look!" Morgan said, pouncing on a vase. "This is what Amy made at camp, the summer she was ten."

"It's very pretty," Emily said. It was lopsided, and a crack ran down from the rim, "I wish you could meet her, but she lives in Roland Park now. You can meet Mother and Brindle, though."

"Brindle's out shopping for a wedding ring," Bonny said.

"A ring! Yes, I've told Emily all about that. And see, here's Molly's picture on the mantel. Isn't she beautiful? It's from her school play; they say she has a talent for acting. I can't imagine where she got it. There's never been an actor in our family. What do you think of her? Bonny, don't we still have Jeannie's wedding album?" There was something feverish, about him, Emily thought. He darted around the room, rummaging through various overloaded shelves. Emily and Bonny stood in the doorway watching him. Once they happened to glance at each other; but when Emily saw Bonny's expression-oddly hooded-she looked away again. "Please," she told Morgan, "I ought to be going. I'll just catch a bus and go, please."

"But you haven't met my mother!" he said, stopping short. "And I wanted Bonny to get to know you; I wanted you two to… Bonny, Emily was in the paper today."

"Was she?"' Bonny said.

"Where's the paper? Did you throw it out?"

"I think it's in the kitchen."

"Come to the kitchen. Let's all go! Let's all have some coffee," he said. He raced away. Bonny straightened from the door frame to follow him, and Emily trailed behind. She wished she could just vanish. She thought of ducking out soundlessly, slipping away before they noticed. She dodged a mobile of homemade paper sailing ships and stepped into the kitchen.

The counters in the kitchen were stacked with dirty dishes, and several animals* feeding bowls cluttered the floor. One wall was shingled with yellow cartoons and news clippings and hockey schedules, recipes, calendars, photographs, telephone numbers on torn corners of paper, dental appointment cards, invitations — even someone's high-school diploma. Emily felt surrounded, flooded. Over by the back door Morgan was plowing through a stack of newspapers. "Where is it? Where is it? Did it come?" he asked. "Aha!" He held up a paper. He laid it flat on the floor, licked his thumb, and started turning pages. "News… editorials… crafts revival in Baltimore!" Peering over his shoulder, Emily saw Leon's sober face. He seemed to be staring at her out of another world. "Bonny, here's Leon. Emily's husband," Morgan said. "And here's her daughter, Gina. See?"

"Very nice," said Bonny, setting out coffee cups.

"You know," Morgan said thoughtfully, "I once looked a little like Leon." Bonny glanced at the photo. "Like that man there? Never," she said. "You're two totally different types."

"Well, yes," he said, "but there's something about the eyes, maybe; I don't know. Or something around the mouth. Or maybe it's the forehead. I don't know." He stood up, abandoning the paper, and pulled out a chair from the table. "Sit down, sit down," he told Emily. He took a seat opposite, as if demonstrating, and fixed her with an urgent, focused look till she sat too. She felt trapped. The dishes on the counters towered so far above her that she imagined they might teeter and topple, swamping her. A typewriter stood in a puddle of orange juice on the table, with a sheet of paper in the carriage… resolution was passed by a show of hands, she read, and Matilda Grayson requested that… Bonny placed a carton of cream in front of her and a crumpled sack of Pantry Pride sugar.

"Were you working on something special?" asked Emily, motioning toward the typewriter.

"Yes," Bonny said. She handed Emily a cup of coffee and sat down next to her.

"Um… what do you do for a living, Mrs. Gower?"

"I'm Morgan's wife for a living."

"Oh, I see."

"Yes," Bonny said, "but do you see that it's a full-time job? It keeps me busy every minute, I tell you. Oh, from outside he seems so comic and light-hearted, such a character, so quaint, but imagine dealing with him. I mean, the details of it, the coping, stuck at home while he's off somewhere, wondering who he thinks he is now. Do you suppose we couldn't all act like that? Go swooping around in a velvet cape with a red satin lining and a feathered hat? That part's the easy part. Imagine being his wife, finding a cleaner who does ostrich plumes. Keeping his dinner warm. Imagine waiting dinner while he's out with one of his cronies that I have never met-Salvation Army bums or astrologists or whatever other awestruck, smitten people he digs up." Emily set her cup down.

"You think 1 don't appreciate him. You "wonder why he married me," Bonny said.

"No, no," said Emily. She looked across at Morgan, who seemed unperturbed. He was tipping contentedly in his chair, like a child who is confident he's the center of attention, and puffing on a cigarette. Twisted ropes of smoke hung around his head.

"Emily," Bonny said.

Emily turned to her.

"Emily, Morgan is the manager of a hardware store." Emily waited but that was the end of it. Bonny seemed to be expecting her to speak. "Yes," Emily said, after a minute.

"Cullen Hardware," Bonny said.

"She knows that, Bonny," Morgan said.

"She does?" Bonny stared at him. Then she asked Emily, "You don't think he's a… rabbi or a Greek shipping magnate?"

"No," Emily said.

She decided not to mention how they'd met.

Bonny pressed her fingers to her lips. There were freckles, Emily saw, dusting the back of her hand. After all, she was a pleasant woman; she gave a little laugh. "You must think I've lost my mind," she said. "Crazy Bonny, right? Morgan's crazy wife, Bonny."

"Oh, no."

"It's just that I worried you might have been… misled. Morgan's such a, well, prankster, in a way."

"Yes, I know about that."

"You do?" Bonny said.

She glanced over at Morgan. Morgan smiled seraphically and blew out a whoosh of smoke.

"But I think he's trying to give it up," said Emily.

"Oh, I hope so!" Bonny said. "Why! It takes so much ingenuity to manage some of that foolishness… think what he could accomplish if he used that brain for sensible things! If he straightened out. If he decided to go straight,"

"Not much," said Morgan cheerfully.

"What, dear?"

"There's not much I could accomplish. What do you imagine I'd be doing instead?"

"Oh, why… just attending to things. I mean, attending to where you belong." She turned to Emily. "There's nothing wrong with a hardware store. Is there? My family's always done well in hardware; it's nothing to be sneezed at. But Uncle Ollie says Morgan's heart's not in it. What's the good of a store, he says, where you have to positively wrest the merchandise from the manager? Assuming you can find the manager. I tell Uncle Ollie, 'Oh, leave him alone. Cullen Hardware is not the be-all and end-all,' I tell him, but it's true that Morgan could get more narrowed in. He doesn't know how to say no. He never refuses to be swept along."

"Mostly it's muscles," Morgan said.

This must have been something he'd told her before; Bonny rolled her eyes at Emily, Morgan turned to Emily and repeated it. "It's a matter of muscles," he said.

"I don't understand."

"A matter of following where they lead me. Have you ever gone out to the kitchen, say, and then forgotten what for? You stand in the kitchen and try to remember. Then your wrist makes a little twisting motion. Oh, yes! you say. That twist is what you'd do to turn a faucet on. You must have come for water! I just trust my muscles, you see, to tell me what I'm here for. To drop me into my true activity one day. I let them lead me."

"He lets them lead him into saying he's a glass-blower," Bonny said, "and a tugboat captain for the Curtis Bay Towing Company, and a Mohawk Indian high-rise worker. And that's just what I happen to hear; heaven knows what more there is." Her lips twitched, as if she were hiding some amusement. "You're walking down the street with him and this total stranger asks him when the International Brotherhood of Magicians is meeting next. You're listening to a politician's speech and suddenly you notice Morgan on the platform, sitting beside a senator's wife with a carnation in his buttonhole. You're waiting for your crabs at Lexington Market and who's behind the counter but Morgan in a rubber apron, telling the other customers where he caught such fine oysters. It seems he has this boat that was handed down from an uncle on his mother's side, a little bateau with no engine-"

"Engines disturb the beds," said Morgan, "And I don't like mechanical tonging rigs, either. What was good enough for my uncle on my mother's side is good enough for me, I say." Bonny smiled at him and shook her head. "You step out for two minutes to buy milk, leaving him safe home in his pajamas, and coming back you pass him on the corner in a satin cap and purple satin shirt, telling four little boys the secret that made him the only undefeated jockey in the history of Pimlico. A jockey, six feet tall! Why do they all believe him? He " never used a crop, you see, but only whispered in the horse's ear. He whispered something that sounded like a crop, what was the word?"

"Scintillate," Morgan said.

"Oh, yes," said Bonny. She laughed.

Morgan trotted in his chair, holding imaginary reins. "Scintillate, scintillate," he whispered, and Bonny laughed harder and wiped her eyes.

"He's impossible," she told Emily. "He's just… impossible to predict, you see."

"I can imagine he must be," Emily said politely.

She was beginning to like Bonny (her pink, merry face, and the helpless way she sank back in her chair), but she thought less of Morgan. It had never occurred to her that he knew exactly how people saw him, and that he enjoyed their astonishment and perhaps even courted it. She frowned at him. Morgan pulled his nose reflectively.

"She's right," he said. "I make things difficult. But I plan to change. Hear that, Bonny?"

"Oh, do you, now?" Bonny said. She stood up to raise the kitchen window. "I don't know what to make of my garden," she said, looking out at the yard. "I was certain I'd planted vegetables someplace, but it seems to be coming up all flowers."

"I mean it," Morgan said. He told Emily, "She doesn't believe me. Bonny, don't you see what's here in front of you? Here's Emily Meredith; I brought her home. I brought her to our house. I told her and Leon, both, exactly who I was. I told about you and the girls. They know about Amy's new baby and the time Kate smashed the car."

"Is that right?" Bonny asked Emily.

Emily nodded.

"Well, I can't think what for," Bonny said. "I can't think why he bored you with all that."

"I'm combining my worlds!" Morgan said, and he raised his coffee cup to Bonny.

But Bonny said, "There's a catch to it somewhere. There's something missing. I don't understand what he wants." Emily didn't understand either. She shook her head; Bonny shook hers. In fact, it seemed that Bonny and Emily were the old friends and Morgan was the newcomer. He sat slightly apart, perched under his helmet like an elf under a mushroom, turning his face from one to the other while the women watched, narrow-eyed, to see what he was up to.

1975

Even when Morgan fell asleep, he didn't truly lose consciousness. Part of him slept while the rest of him stayed alert and jittery, counting things-thumbtacks, mattress buttons, flowers on a daughter's dress, holes in a pegboard display of electrical fittings. A plumber came in and ordered some pipes: six elbows and a dozen nipples. "Certainly," said Morgan, but he couldn't help laughing. Then he was competing in a singing contest. He was singing a song from the fifties called "Moments to Remember." He knew the words, but was unable to pronounce them properly. The ballroom prize we almost won came out the barroom brawl we almost won. His partner was not a good dancer anyway, and in fact they were nowhere close to winning. Why! His partner was Laura Lee Keller, the very first girl he had ever loved-someone he had lost track of long, long before the days of "Moments to Remember." After the prom, he and Laura Lee had driven to the beach with half the senior class and lain kissing on a blanket by the ocean. Still, even now, even after all these years, the sound of the ocean reminded him of possibilities unfolding: everything and untried yet, just around the corner. He opened his eyes and heard the ocean just a few blocks distant, the very same ocean he'd lain beside with Laura Lee, but he himself was middle-aged and irritable and so was Laura Lee, he supposed, wherever she was; and his mouth had a scorched taste from smoking too much the night before.

It was six o'clock in the morning in Bethany Beach, Delaware, in the buckling tarpaper cottage they rented from Uncle Ollie every July. Tongue-and groove walls, painted a dingy blue too long ago, rose high above the swaybacked bed. A tattered yellow shade rustled in the window. (Where else but near the ocean would you see this kind of window-the cheap aluminum frame stippled by salt air, the bellying screen as soft and sleazy as some synthetic fabric? Where else would the screen doors and porches have those diagonal wooden insets at the corners, so that no right angles appeared to exist within earshot of the Atlantic?) The room was full of castoffs: a looming wardrobe faced with a flecked, metallic mirror; a bow-fronted bureau topped with a mended dresser scarf (every one of the drawers stuck, and several of the cut-glass knobs were missing); a pink shag rug as thin and wrinkled as a bathmat; and a piecrust table beside the bed with a cracked brown plastic clock radio on the doily at its center. Morgan sat up and switched on the radio. He had just missed the Six O'clock Sermonette; Guy and Ralna were singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." Next to him, Bonny stirred and said, "Morgan? What on earth…?" He lowered the volume a little. He inched out of bed, took a sombrero from the wardrobe, and put it on without looking in the mirror. Barefoot, in his underpants, he slogged down the hall to the kitchen. Already the air was so warm and heavy that he felt used up.

The cottage had four bedrooms, but only three were occupied. His mother slept in the second and Kate, their last remaining child, in the third. It used to be that the place was overflowing. The girls would share beds and couches; Brindle roomed with Louisa; various daughters' boyfriends lined up in sleeping bags out on the porch. Morgan had complained of the confusion at the time, but now he missed it. He wondered what point there was in coming any more. Kate was hardly present-she was eighteen years old now, busy with her own affairs, forever off visiting friends in the ugly new condominium south of town. As for Louisa, the trip seemed to shake her memory loose; she was even more dislocated than usual. Only Bonny appeared to enjoy herself. She padded along the shoreline with " a bucket, hunting shells. The bridge of her nose developed a permanent pink, peeling patch. Sometimes she sat at the edge of the breakers and dabbled like a child, with her legs in a V-a rash of red on top, pale underneath. Then Morgan would pace the sand just behind her with his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trunks, braving the sun and the sticky spray, for he was never comfortable when a member of his family was in the water. He considered swimming (like sailing, like skiing) to be unnatural, a rich person's contrivance to fill up empty hours. Although he could swim himself (a taut, silent breast stroke, with his mouth tightly closed, not wetting so much as the tip of his beard), he would never swim just for pleasure. And he would surely never swim in the ocean. His distrust of the ocean was logical and intelligent, he felt. He kept sensibly away from the edge, wearing stout shoes and woolen socks at all times. He only listened to the breakers, and plummeted into a deep, slow trance where once again he lay with Laura Lee Keller on a blanket beneath the stars.

It was too hot for coffee, but he'd get a headache if he tried to do without it. He made instant, using water straight from the tap. Beneath the taste of Maxwell House and sugar he caught the thick, dark taste of beach water, but he drank it anyway, from a jelly-glass painted with clowns. Then he rinsed the glass.

Then he took Bonny's purse from the kitchen table and put it in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. (Another folly of rich people was their belief that in resort towns, crime does not exist. Morgan knew better. He sensed danger all around, and would have felt more secure in the heart of Baltimore.) He went back to the bedroom and found Bonny sitting against her pillow. "What are you up so early for?" she asked him. "And why was the radio on?"

"I wanted to hear the news," he said.

It wasn't true; he never felt the news had anything to do with him. What he'd wanted was to drown out the sound of the ocean. This was Tuesday. They'd been here three days. There were eleven days remaining. He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. "I'll bring breakfast from the bakery," he told Bonny. "Anything you want while I'm in town?"

"The bakery's not open yet."

"I'll go and wait. I'll buy a paper. It's too quiet here."

"Well, bring some of those bow-tie things with cherries, then…" She yawned and ruffled her hair. A pillow mark ran down her left cheek. "Lucky you," she said. "You fell asleep right away, last night."

"I had a terrible sleep."

"You fell asleep instantly."

"But the whole night long I dreamed," Morgan sard, "and woke, and checked the clock. I can't remember now what I dreamed. A man in a tailcoat stepped out of the wardrobe. I think this house is haunted, Bonny."

"You say that every year," Bonny told him.

"Well, it's haunted every year." He pulled a striped T-shirt over his head. When he emerged, he said, "All these wakeful nights, peculiar thoughts… the most I hope for, from a vacation, is a chance to rest up once it's over."

"Today's the day my brother comes," Bonny said, climbing out of bed. Morgan zipped his hiking shorts, which were new and full of pockets and flaps that tie hadn't yet explored. Attached to one pocket was a metal clasp. It was probably meant for a compass. "I don't suppose you brought along a compass," he told Bonny.

"Compass?" He glanced at her. She was standing before the wardrobe in a short, plain nightgown that he happened to be fond of. He was even fond of the grapy veins in her calves, and her rumpled knees. He considered slipping up to kiss the pulse in her throat, but then he felt laden by the heat and the waves and the tongue-and-groove walls. "Ah, God. I have to do something about this life of mine," he said.

"What about it?" she asked, sliding a blouse off a hanger.

"It's come to nothing. It's come to nothing." She looked over at him, and parted her lips as if about to ask a question. But then he said, "Bow-tie pastries, right? With cherries." He was gone before she could ask whatever it was she had planned.

With one hand under his mother's elbow, he steered her along the boardwalk. It was nearly noon, and she wore a great black cartwheel of a hat to guard against sunburn. Her striped terry beach robe was long-sleeved and ankle-length, and it concealed not a bathing suit but an ordinary street dress, for she could no more swim than fly, she always said. Her face was pale and pursed, even in this heat, and her fingertips were cold when she touched his arm. She touched his arm to tell him to stop for a second. She wanted to look at a house that was fonder construction. "What an unusual shape," she said, "It's called an A-frame," Morgan said.

"Why, it's practically all garret." Morgan summoned his thoughts together. At moments like this, when Louisa seemed fully in touch with her surroundings, he always made an effort to have a real conversation with her. "The cost," he said, "is considerably lower than for other houses, I believe."

"Yes, I should think so," she said. She patted his arm again, and they walked on. She said, "Let's see now. How long have we been here?"

"Three days, Mother."

"Eleven more to go," she said. "Yes." She said, "Heavens."

"Maybe our family wasn't cut out for vacations," Morgan said.

"Maybe not."

"It must be the work ethic," he said.

"Well, I don't know what that is. It's more like we vacation all year round on our own."

"How can you say that?" Morgan asked. "What about my hardware store?" She didn't answer.

"We're city people," Morgan said. "We have our city patterns, things to keep us busy… It's dangerous, lolling around like this. It's never good just to loll around and think. Why, you and Father never vacationed in your lives. Did you?"

"I don't recall," she said.

She would not remember anything about his father, ever. Sometimes Morgan wondered if her failing memory for recent events might stem from her failing memory of her husband; selective forgetfulness was an impossibility, maybe. Having chosen to forget in one area, she had to forget in all others as well. He felt a sudden urge to jolt her. He wanted to ask: am I aging in the same direction my father did? Have I journeyed too far from him? Am I too near? What do I have to go on, here? I'm traveling blind; I'm older now than my own father ever lived to be. Instead, he asked, "Didn't you and he go to Ocean City once?"

"I really wouldn't know," she said primly.

"Jesus! You're so stubborn!" he shouted, slapping his thigh. His mother remained unmoved, but two girls walking ahead in bikinis looked over their shoulders at him. "Do you ever think how I must feel?" he asked his mother. "Sometimes I feel I've just been plunked here. I have no one from the old days; I'm just a foreigner on my own. You can't count Brindle; she's so much younger, and anyway so wrapped up in that husband of hers…"

"But there's always me," his mother said, picking her way around a toddler with a bucket.

"Yes," he said, "but often you sort of… vacate, Mother; you're not really there at all." He had hurt her feelings. He was glad of it only for an instant; then he felt deeply remorseful. His mother raised her head high and looked off toward someone's A-frame cottage, where beach towels flapped on the balcony railing. "Why!" she said. "Wasn't that speedy."

"What was, Mother dear?"

"They've finished construction on the A-frame," she said. "It seems like no time at all." And she jutted her chin* at him with a triumphant, bitter glare.

"So it does, dear heart," he said.

3 Morgan went out to get a pizza for their supper and returned to find that Bonny's brother had arrived. He'd brought his new wife, Priscilla, a pretty girl with short, straight blond hair caught back in a silver barrette. They had been married only a few weeks. They wore similar crisp, new-looking white slacks and pastel shirts, like honeymooners. Morgan hadn't even met Priscilla up till now-or people seemed to assume he hadn't, for Billy introduced her and she shook Morgan's hand formally. Bonny said, "Priscilla went to Roland Park Country School with the Semple-Pearce girls, Morgan."

"Oh, yes," Morgan said, but the truth of the matter was, he could have sworn that Billy had been married to Priscilla once before. He seemed to remember her. He thought she might even have visited this cottage. But she acted as if everything were new to her. "What a sweet place," she said. "What a lot of… character," and she walked around the living room fingering the seashell ashtrays like a stranger, and peering at the photograph of Uncle Ollie's 1934 lacrosse team, and reading all the titles on the Reader's Digest book condensations. Morgan was cagy; he went along with it. Then as soon as possible he cornered Bonny, who had taken the pizza out to the kitchen.

"Bonny," he whispered, "isn't that girl an ex-wife of his?"

"No, dear, she's his present wife."

"But didn't Billy marry her another time, earlier?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I know he did," he said. "He married her and brought her here; it was the same time of year." Bonny straightened up from the oven. She looked hot; the hair around her temples was damp. She said, "Morgan, I am not in the mood for any of your jabs at my brother."

"Jabs? What jabs?"

"Just because he may have a fondness for one particular type of girl-" Bonny said.

"I'm not talking types, Bonny. I mean this. He brought her here several years ago and she had that little dog Kelty, Kilty…. why deny it? There's nothing wrong with marrying her twice. Lots of people go back, retrace, try to get it right the second time around. Why cover it up?" She only sighed and returned to the living room. Morgan followed her. He found Billy and Priscilla on the wicker couch, talking with Morgan's mother. Billy looked old and foolish in his vivid clothes, with his bald pink skull, his pale hair straggling behind his ears. He had hold of one of Priscilla's hands and was stroking it, like something trapped, in his lap. Priscilla was pretending the hand did not belong to her. She leaned forward earnestly, listening to Louisa discuss the drive to Bethany. "I took along a thermos of Lipton tea," Louisa said, "and two nice, juicy nectarines, and a box of arrowroot biscuits that Bonny sometimes buys for my digestion." Priscilla nodded, her face alight with interest and enthusiasm. She was very young. She couldn't possibly have been married several years ago; several years ago she would still have been a schoolgirl in a royal-blue Roland Park Country School jumper, Morgan felt confused. He sat down in a rocking chair.

Louisa said, "Traffic was held up on the Bridge, so we stopped and I got out and sat in the grass by the side of the road. There was a little boy there, just a tot, and I shared one of my nectarines with him and he gave me a nice speckle pear."

"Seckel pear," Morgan murmured. He could not bear to have her laughed at.

"A speckle pear, this one was. I finished half of it and put the other half in a Baggie. Then we got back in the car and drove across the Bridge, but in Delaware we stopped again where the Kiwanis Club was barbecuing chickens and I had half a chicken, a Tab, and a sack of potato chips. They were out of bread-and-butter pickles. At Farmer John's Vegetable Stand…" Priscilla's purse was one of those button-on things with a wooden handle, Bermuda bags, he believed they were called. You could button on an infinity of different covers to match different outfits. He would bet that her suitcase was full of covers-seersucker pink, yachting blue… he lost Ms train of thought. He wondered what had possessed him to leave Ms camera at home, hanging by its leather strap in the downstairs closet. For the first time in twenty years he would not have pictures of their vacation. On the other hand, what was the use of such pictures? They were only the same, year after year. Same waves, same sunburns, same determined smiles…

"After we reached Bethany, I started feeling a little peckish, so I walked to the market with Kate and picked out a watermelon. It was a wonderful melon, really fat and thumpy-sounding, and once we got it back to the cottage all we had to do was touch a knife point to it and it crackled all the way open. But it had no taste. Can you believe it? Had no taste whatsoever. Such a lovely color and not a scrap of taste. I just don't understand that," Morgan's mother said.

Morgan suddenly remembered another of last night's dreams. He'd been standing on a lawn beside a beautiful, graceful woman he'd never seen before. She led Mm toward a child's swing hanging from a tree limb. They settled on it-the woman sitting, Morgan standing, enclosing her with his feet. They started swinging over a cliff. Tiny yellow flowers dotted a field far below them. Morgan knew that when they were swinging high they would leap. He would die. He wasn't upset about It Then the woman tipped her head back against him, and he felt the length of her between his legs-the curve of her ribcage, the satiny coolness of her clothing. He was like a boy again, trembling. He saw that as long as he felt this way, he wanted to go on living, and all at once he was afraid of the leap. He woke abruptly, with his heart beating so hard that his whole body seemed to vibrate.

In the past few years Morgan had become a letter-writer. He couldn't have said exactly why. It just seemed, sometimes, that he grew restless and ill-contained; he couldn't sit still; there was something he wanted to tell someone, but he couldn't think what it was and he had no particular person in mind. Then he would sit down and write letters-although even that was not quite it; it was only second beet. At work, he used his Woodstock typewriter, which produced an uneven, sooty print that danced all over the page. He plodded away with two index fingers, stopping after every word or so to pry up the A key, which wouldn't spring back on its own. At home, he wrote with a leaky fountain pen whose cartridge he refilled with a plastic hypodermic needle. (He'd salvaged the needle from an emergency-room wastebasket during one of the children's accidents. Buying cartridges already filled was an extravagance, he felt.) He wrote all his daughters, even those still living in Baltimore. He wrote the traveling salesmen who came to the store, and his friends Kazan and the Greek tavern-keeper. Because he did not often have anything to say, he gave advice, as a rule. It has come to my attention that your company's plant-sprayer bottles work exceedingly well for dousing fireplace logs at bedtime. Simply fill the bottle with water, adjust the nozzle to setting 4…

Or: Dear Amy, I notice that you appear to be experiencing some difficulty with household clutter.

Understand that I'm not blaming you for this, your mother has the same problem. But as I've been telling her for years, there is a solution.

Simply take a cardboard box, carry it through the rooms, load into it everyone's toys and dirty clothes and such, and hide it all in a closet. If people ask for some missing object, you'll be able to tell them where it is. If they don't ask (now, here is the important part), if a week goes by and they don't notice the object is gone, then you can be sure it's nonessential, and you throw it away. You would be surprised at how many things are nonessential. Throw everything away, all of it! Simplify! Don't hesitate! All my love, sweetheart, Daddy That night, after the others had gone to bed, Morgan sat at the kitchen table and wrote a postcard to Potter, the musical-instrument man…. weather has been fair and warmt a high in the 80's all three days… must thank the good Lord for in Rehoboth I hear they had 13/4 inches of rainfall in 47 minutes… Yours in Christ, Gower Morgan, SJ. He wrote Todd, his three-year-old grandson, a fine, masculine letter: The new pickup is doing well and the baggage space comes in handy, believe me. Was able to take our entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica to the beach. Now have 15,010 miles on the odometer with the fuel cost per mile being 2.1$ and total operating cost? per mile being 4.76$. If you assume a 30 % depreciation each year…

He addressed the letter to Todd and laid it on top of Potter's postcard. He sat there blankly for a moment. Then he reached for another sheet of paper. Dear Emily, Leon, and Gina, he wrote. Have been having pleasant weather and temperatures in the 80's…

But it never helped to write the same things over. He crossed the sentence out and wrote, Why not come Friday for the weekend? Simply take the Bay Bridge and continue to Wye Mills, switching there to Highway 404 and then to Highway 18…

Late Thursday morning Brindle showed up. No one had expected her. Morgan was on the front porch, slouching in a painted rocker and leafing through a volume of the encyclopedia. He happened to glance toward the street and there, just coming to a halt, was the little red sports car that Robert Roberts had given Brindle on their wedding day. Brindle yanked the emergency brake and got out, streaming tears. Her head was swathed in the white chiffon scarf she always slept in to calm her hair down, and she wore some kind of oversized, ankle-length white coat. In fact, she reminded Morgan of an early automobile driver. "Oh, I like that very much," he told her as she climbed the porch steps. "The veil, the duster…"

"It's not a duster, it's a bathrobe," Brindle said. She blew her nose in a soggy-looking Kleenex. Crying had turned her soft and full, almost pretty. Her eyelids were shiny and her sallow skin had a faint pink glow. She sank into the chair next to Morgan's and folded her Kleenex to a dry spot. "I got it last week at Stewart's," she said. "Sixteen forty-nine, marked down from thirty-two ninety-eight."

"Half-price; not bad at all," said Morgan. "Here, dear, have a cigarette."

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

"Have one, sweetheart. It'll do you good." He extended the pack and shook it invitingly, but she only blotted her eyes. "I can't stand it any more," she said. "1 must have been out of my mind, marrying that… tree, that boulder; all he does is sit there mourning. I can't stand it."

"Have a Rolaid. Have a coughdrop. Have some Wrigley's spearmint gum," Morgan said. He tore through his pockets.

"He keeps my graduation photo on the television set. Half the time that he pretends he's watching TV, he's really watching my photo. I see him clicking his eyes back in focus when I walk into the room. When he thinks I'm busy with something else, he'll go over to the photo and pick it up and study it. Then he'll shake his head and set it down again." Her face fell apart and she started sobbing. Morgan gazed off toward the street. He wasn't exactly humming, but he went, "Mm-mm, mm-mm," from time to tune, and drummed his fingers on his open book. A little boy rode by on a bicycle, tinkling a bell. Two ladies in skirted swimsuits carried a basketful of laundry between them.

"Of course, every situation has its difficult moments," Morgan said. He cleared his throat.

Then Bonny came out on the porch. "Brindle!" she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Bonny, I just can't stand it any more," Brindle said.

She reached out her arms, and Bonny came over to hug her and tell her, "There now, Brindle, never mind." (She always knew better than Morgan what to say.) "Never you mind, now, Brindle."

"It's getting so I'm jealous of my own self," Brindle said, muffled. "I'm jealous of my photograph, and the silver-plated ID bracelet I gave him when I was thirteen. He never takes that bracelet off. He sleeps with it; he bathes with it. 'Let it go' I feel like saying. 'Can't you ever forget her?' He sits in that TV room staring at my photo… there's times I've even seen tears in his eyes. I say, 'Robert, talk to me, please,' and he says, 'Yes, yes, in a minute.' " Bonny smoothed a lashing of Brindle's hair back under the white scarf. Morgan said, "Oh, but surely this will pass."

"It will never pass," said Brindle, sitting up and glaring at him. "If it hasn't passed in two years, how can you think it ever will? I tell you, there's nothing worse than two people with the same daydream getting together, finally. This morning I woke up and found he hadn't come to bed. I went down to the TV room and there he was, sound asleep with my photo in the crook of his arm. So I picked up my keys from the counter and left. I didn't even bother dressing. Oh, I was like someone half-crazy, demented. I drove all the way to your house and parked and got out before I remembered you were in Bethany. Do you know that idiot paper-boy is still delivering your papers? They were everywhere, clear across the lawn. Sunday's was so old and yellow, you'd think it was urine-stained- and maybe it was. Listen, Morgan, if you're burglarized while you're gone, you have every right to sue that paper-boy. You remember what I said. It's an open invitation to any passing criminal."

"But things started off so well," Morgan said. "I had so much hope when Robert Roberts first came calling. Ringing the doorbell, bringing you roses-"

"What roses? He never brought roses."

"Of course he did."

"No, he didn't."

"I remember he did."

"Morgan, please," said Bonny. "Can't you let this be?"

"Oh, very well. But sweeping you into his arms… remember?"

"It was all an act," said Brindle.

"An act?"

"If he'd been halfway truthful," she said, "he'd have swept my graduation photo into his arms. And kissed it on the lips. And given it a sports car." Her chin crumpled in again, and she pressed the damp knot of Kleenex to her mouth. Bonny gazed over Brindle's head at Morgan, as if expecting him to take some action. But what action would that be? He had never felt very close to Brindle; he had never understood her, although of course he loved her. They were so far apart in age that they were hardly brother and sister. At the time of her birth he already had his school life, and his street life, and his friends. And their father's death had not drawn them together but had merely shown how separate they were. They had mourned in such different ways, Brindle clinging fiercely to her mother while Morgan trudged, withdrawn and stubborn, through the outside world. You could almost say that they had mourned entirely different people.

He sat forward slowly, and scratched the crown of his sombrero. "You know," he said, "I was certain he brought roses."

"He never brought roses," Brindle sard.

"I could swear he did: red ones. Armloads."

"You made those roses up," said Brindle. She tucked the Kleenex info her bathrobe pocket.

"What a pity," Morgan said sadly. "That was the part I liked best of all." For lunch he made spaghetti, which was Brindle's favorite dish. He put on his short-order-cook's clothes-a dirty white apron and a sailor cap-and took over the kitchen, while Bonny and Brindle sat at the table drinking coffee. "Spaghetti a la Morgan!" he said, brandishing a sheaf of noodles. The women merely stared at him, blank-faced, with their minds on something else. "I had hints from the very beginning," said Brindle, "but I wouldn't let myself see them. You know how it is. Almost the first thing he said to me, that first day he showed up, was… he pulled back from me and took both my hands and stared at me and, 'I can't understand it,' he said. 'I don't know why I've kept thinking of you. It's not as if you're a beauty, or ever were,' he said. 'Also I'm getting older,' I told him, 'and my dentist says my teeth are growing more crooked every year.' Oh, I never held anything back from him. I never tried to be what I wasn't." Bonny clicked her tongue. "He doesn't properly appreciate you," she said. "He's one of those people who's got to see from a distance before he knows how to feel about it-from the past or out of other people's eyes or in a frame kind of thing like a book or a photo. You did right to leave him, Brindle." Morgan felt a little itch of anxiety starting in his temples. "But she didn't leave him; she's just taking a little holiday from him," he told Bonny.

Bonny and Brindle gazed into space. Probably they hadn't even heard what he said.

Last spring Bonny's old college roommate had divorced* her husband of twenty-seven years. And of course there were those wives of Billy's (every one of whom had left him, some without so much as a note) and Morgan's own daughter Carol, who just one week after her wedding had returned, in very good spirits, to settle back into the apartment she'd been sharing with her twin sister. Also, Morgan knew for a fact that two of Bonny's closest friends were considering separations, and one had actually spoken with a lawyer. He worried that it was contagious. He feared that Bonny might catch the illness; or it was more like catching a piece of news, catching on; she would come to her senses and leave him. She would take with her… what? Something specific hung just at the edge of his mind. She would take with her the combination to a lock, it felt like-a secret he needed to know that Bonny knew all along without trying. When Bonny came back from lunch with a friend, Morgan was always quick to point out the friend's faults and ulterior motives. "She's discontented by nature; any fool can see that. How that poor lunk of a husband ever fell for her… Don't believe a word she tells you," he would say. Oh, it was women friends you had to watch out for, not men at all but women.

He rattled a spatula on a frying pan, trying to claim Bonny's attention. He did a little short-order-cook's dance. "Cackles on a raft for Number Four!" he called. "BLT, hold the mayo!" Bonny and Brindle gave him identical flat, bemused stares, unblinking, like cats.

"Bonny, I don't see any garlic cloves," he said, switching tactics.

"Use dehydrated."

"Dehydrated! Dried-out garlic chips? Unthinkable."

"No one will know the difference."

"I wish you'd learn to make grocery lists," he said. "You want to get organized, Bonny. Keep a list on the door of the fridge and write down whatever item you finish off." Bonny ran her fingers through her hair. She made it look like some kind of weaving-searching out a strand, lacing it into other strands behind her ear.

"Here's what we'll do," he told her. "Next week, when we get back to Baltimore, I'm going to take a pad of paper to the supermarket. I'm going to map out all the aisles. Aisle one: olives, pickles, mustard. Aisle two: coffee, tea… nothing will be omitted. Then you can get it Xeroxed two hundred and sixty tunes." Her fingers paused. "How many?"

"Five times fifty-two. Five years' worth." She looked into his face.

"After five years I'll make you a new one," Morgan said. "Things may have changed in the store by then."

"Yes, they very well may have," Bonny said.

She threw Brindle a quick, tucked glance, and they smiled at each other. It was a smile so sunny and bland, and so obviously collusive, that all of Morgan's uneasiness returned. It occurred to him that often they must discuss him behind his back. "Oh, you know Morgan," they must say, rolling their eyes. "You know how he is."

"Well, anyway," he said, "all I intended was… See, if we check items off on this list, shopping would be so simple. Everything would go the way it ought to. Don't you agree?"

"Yes, yes."

"Should I be the one to get it Xeroxed?"

"No, dear, I'll do it," Bonny said. Then she sighed and laughed, in that way she had, and drank the last of her coffee. "For now," she told Brindle, "let's you and me go into town and buy the garlic."

"Never mind; I'll use dehydrated," Morgan said hastily.

But she said, "Oh, the walk will do us good. We'll take your mother, too." She rose and looked under a stack of magazines. Then she looked in the oven, and finally in the refrigerator. She took out her purse and kissed Morgan. "Anything else you want?" she asked him.

"You could get cream."

"We have cream."

"Yes, but with more people coming tomorrow, and they might be as early as breakfast time-"

"Who might?"

"The Merediths."

"Merediths?"

"At least, I think they might," he said. "I just dropped them this note, you see, because Brindle wasn't here and I hadn't known Billy was staying through the weekend. I'd thought there'd be enough room. And there will be. Why, of course there will be! Where'd we put those sleeping bags?"

"Morgan, I wish you would check with me before you do these things," Bonny said.

"But you like them! You always say you like them."

"Like who?" Brindle asked. "Who're we talking about, here?" Bonny said, "Oh, the… you remember them, Brindle: the Merediths. You've seen them at the house, several times. Leon and Emily Meredith. Well, certainly I like them. I'm very fond of both of them, you know that, but still-"

"I found them a little dry, personally," Brindle said. "Her, at least. No, I don't think she'd be a barrel of fun at the beach."

"Oh, Emily's not dry at all, just-"

"And anyhow," Morgan told Brindle, "I don't remember asking what you thought. For that matter, I don't remember asking you to Bethany, so you're in a fine position to criticize my guest list."

"Now, Morgan," Bonny said.

"Oh, well," said Brindle, "they won't come. Don't worry, Bonny. Emily won't like sand. She won't like mess. She won't want to go into that messy, sticky ocean. I know the type; they can't come to the banquet," she said.

Then she set out with Bonny, so cheered by her own perceptiveness that her face looked peaky and alight with pleasure, and Robert Roberts might never have existed.

But they did come. They arrived the next day in mid-morning, driving the little black VW that Leon had picked up secondhand. Morgan was not quite adjusted yet to the thought of their owning a car. (Though if it had to happen, he supposed that this tiny, bell-shaped machine was the most appropriate. And black; that was a nice touch. Yes, and, after all, what was wrong with itinerants possessing some form of transportation? Maybe they should buy a trailer, as well.) Morgan stood in the yard, rocking from heel to toe, watching as they parked. Emily got out first, and pulled the front seat forward for Gina. Emily had the wrong kind of shoes on-Docksiders. Morgan could hardly believe his eyes. With her black leotard and her flowing black skirt, there was something almost shocking about those cloddy, stiff brown loafers with the white rubber soles. And Gina, when she emerged, wore the squinty, grudging expression of someone yanked from sleep. Leon's face had a clenched look and there was a shaving cut in the cleft of his chin, plastered with a tiny square of toilet paper. No, they were definitely not at their best. It seemed Morgan had only to leave town and they fell apart, rushed ahead without him, tossed aside all their old charm, and invested in unsuitable clothing. (Leon's new polo shirt was electric blue, almost painful to the sight.) Still, Morgan stepped forward, putting on a smile of welcome. "Why! How nice to see you," he said, and he kissed Emily's cheek. Then he hugged Gina and shook hands with Leon. "Have a good trip? Much traffic? Bad on the Bridge?" he asked. Leon muttered something about senior-citizen drivers and jerked the trunk lid open.

"It was an easy trip, but I don't know what the scenery was like because Leon drove so fast it blurred together," Emily said.

"Emily thinks I'm speeding if she can't read all the small print on every billboard," Leon said, "every road sign and circus poster. If she can't count all the fruit in all the fruit stands."

"Well, I didn't notice that patrolman disagreeing with me."

"The fellow's speedometer was way off base," Leon said, "and I'm going to tell them so when it comes to court." He took out a small suitcase and slammed the trunk lid shut. "These people just have a quota to fill. They'll pick up anyone, if they haven't passed out enough tickets that day."

"Ah, well," Morgan said soothingly. "You got here safely; that's what's important." He took the suitcase from Leon. It weighed more than he'd expected. "Come on in the house," he said. "Bonny! The Merediths are here!" He led them up the front steps and into the living room. The house's smell-mildew and kerosene-struck him for the first time as unfriendly. He noticed that the cushions in the rattan chairs were flat as pancakes, soggy-looking, and the rattan itself was coming loose in spirals from the arms. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea. Emily and Leon stared around uncertainly. Gina slouched near the door and peeled a thumbnail. This was her summer to thin out, it seemed. Her halter top sagged pathetically around her flat little chest. Morgan felt he was suddenly viewing everyone, himself in eluded, in terms of geometry: an ill-assorted collection of knobs and bulges parked in meaningless locations. Then Emily said, "I brought a camera."

"Eh?" said Morgan. "Oh, a camera!"

"Just a Kodak."

"But that's wonderful!" he said. "I left mine at home this year. Oh, it's wonderful that you thought of it(" And just then Bonny emerged from the kitchen, smiling, wiping her palms on her skirt. He saw that things would be fine after all. (Life was full of these damp little moments of gloom that came and went; they meant nothing.) He beamed and watched as Bonny hugged everyone. Behind her came his mother, also smiling. "Mother," he said, "you remember the Merediths."

"Of course," she said. She held out a hand, first to Leon and then to Emily. "You brought me that fruitcake last Christmas," she told Emily.

"Oh, yes."

"It had the most marvelous glaze on the top."

"Why, thank you," Emily said.

"And did your husband ever recover from his stroke?"

"Excuse me?" Morgan saw in a flash what must have happened. His mother had Emily confused with Natalie Czernov, a next-door neighbor from Morgan's childhood. Mrs. Czernov had also made fruitcake at Christmas. He was so fascinated by this slippage in time (as if the fruitcake were a kind of key that opened several doors at once, from several levels of history) that he forgot to come" to Emily's rescue. Emily said, "This is my husband right here, Mrs. Gower."

"Oh, good, he's better, then," Louisa said.

Emily looked at Morgan.

"Maybe I should show you where you're staying," he said.

He picked up their suitcase again and led them down the hall to Kate's room. The bed had been freshly made and there was a sleeping bag on the floor for Gina. "The bathroom is next door," he said. "There, are towels above the sink. If you need anything else…"

"I'm sure we'll be fine," Emily said. She opened the suitcase. Morgan glimpsed several new-looking squares of folded clothing. Leon, meanwhile, crossed the room abruptly and looked out the window. (All he would see was a row of dented trashcans.) Then he moved on to the picture that hung over the bed: a dim blue sea, flat as glass, on which rode a boat made of real shells. "We shouldn't have come," he said, peering at a clamshell sail.

"Oh, Leon, we need a rest," Emily told him.

"We have to give a puppet show on Monday morning. That means either we fight the Sunday traffic on the Bridge, or we go back at crack of dawn on Monday, driving like hell to meet the schedule, and Lord help us if we have a flat or any little tie-up on the way. "

"It's nice to get out of the city," Emily told Morgan. She removed a camera from the suitcase and closed the lid again. "Leon thought we couldn't take the time, but I said, 'Leon, I'm tired. I want to go. I'm tired of puppets. '"

"She's tired of puppets," Leon said. "Whose idea were they, I'd like to know? Whose were they in. the first place? I'm only doing what you said to, Emily. You're the one who started this."

"Well, there's no good reason we can't leave them for a weekend, Leon."

"She thinks we can just leave whenever we like," Leon told Morgan.

Morgan passed a hand across his forehead. He said, "Please. I'm sure this will all work out. Don't you want to come see the ocean now?" Neither Leon nor Emily answered him. They stood facing each other across the bed, their backs very straight, as if braced for something serious. They didn't even seem to notice when Morgan left the room.

No, it hadn't been such a good idea to ask them here. The weekend passed so slowly, it didn't so much pass as chafe along. It ground to a stop and started up again. It rasped on Morgan's nerves. Actually, this was not entirely the Merediths' fault. It was more the fault of Brindle, who faded into tears a dozen times a day; or Bonny, who overdid her sunbathing and developed a fever and chills; or Kate, who was arrested in Ocean City on charges of possessing half an ounce of marijuana. But Morgan blamed the Merediths anyhow. He couldn't help but feel that Leon's sulkiness had cast some kind of evil spell, and he was irritated by the way Emily hung around Bonny all the time. (Who had befriended Emily first, after all? Who had first discovered her?) She had changed; just wearing different shoes on her feet had somehow altered her. He began to avoid her. He devoted himself to Gina-a sad, sprouty child at an awkward age, just the age to tear at his heart. He made her a kite from a Hefty bag, and she thanked him earnestly, but when he looked into her face he saw that she was really watching her parents, who were arguing in low voices at the other end of the porch.

He began reflecting on Joshua Bennett, a new neighbor back in Baltimore. This Bennett was an antique dealer. (Now, there was an occupation.) He looked like Henry the Eighth and he lived a gentlemanly life- eating small, expensive suppers, then reading leather-bound history books while twirling a snifter of brandy. Early last spring, when Bennett first moved in. Morgan had paid a call on him and found him in a maroon velvet smoking jacket with quilted satin lapels. (Where would one go to buy a smoking jacket?) Bennett had somehow received the impression that Morgan had descended from an ancient Baltimore shipping family and owned an atticful of antique bronzes, and he had been most cordial-offering Morgan some of his brandy and an ivory-tipped cigar. Morgan wondered if Bennett would have accepted an invitation to the beach. He began plotting his return to Baltimore: the friendship he would strike up, the conversations they would have. He could hardly wait to get back.

Meanwhile the weekend dragged on.

Kate had disgraced the family, Bonny said. Now she was on the police files, marked for life. Bonny seemed to take this very seriously. (Her sunburn gave her a hectic, intense look.) Because the cottage had no telephone, the Ocean City police had had to call the Bethany police and have them notify the Gowers. Naturally, therefore, the news would be everywhere now. Saturday, at breakfast, Bonny laid a blazing hand on Louisa's arm and asked Kate, "How do you think your grandma feels? Her late husband's name, which up till now has been unbesmirched." Morgan had never heard her use the word "unbesmirched" before, and he wasn't even sure that it existed. He took some time thinking it over. Louisa, meanwhile, went on calmly spooning grapefruit. "What do you say, Mother?" Bonny asked her.

Louisa peered out of her sunken eyes and said, "Well, I don't know what all the fuss is about. We used to give little babies marijuana any old time. It soothed their teething."

"No, no, Mother, that was belladonna," Bonny said.

Kate merely looked bored. Brindle blew her nose. The Merediths sat in a row and watched, like members of a jury.

And on the beach-where the ocean curled and flattened beneath a deep blue bowl of sky, and gulls floated overhead as slow as sails-this group was a motley scramble of blankets, thermoses, sandy towels, an umbrella that bared half its spokes every time the wind flapped past, a squawking radio, and scattered leaves of newspaper. Kate, who had been grounded for the rest of her vacation, flipped angrily through Seventeen. Bonny sweated and shivered in layers of protective garments. The white zinc oxide on her nose and lower lip, along with her huge black sunglasses, gave her the look of some insect creature from a science-fiction movie. Gina dug a hole in the sand and climbed into it. Billy and Priscilla made a spectacle of themselves, lying too close together on their blanket.

And Emily, in an unbecoming pale blue swimsuit that exposed her thin, limp legs, took pictures that were going to turn out poorly, but she would not yield her camera to Morgan. She worried that he would snap her, she said. Morgan swore he wouldn't. (She was already pasted ID his mind as he would like her to be forever- wearing her liquid black skirt and ballet slippers. He would surely not choose to record this other self she had become.) "All I want to do," he told her, "is photograph some groups. Some action, don't you see." He couldn't bear her finicky delays, the stylized poses she insisted on. Morgan himself was a photographer of great speed and dash; he caught people in clumps, in mid-motion, mid-laugh. Emily picked her way across the sand to one person at a time, stopping every step or so to shake her white feet fastidiously, and then she would take an eternity getting things just right, squinting through the camera, squinting at the sky-as if there were anything that could be done, any adjustments at all to aid a Kodak Instamatic, "Be still, now," she would tell her subject, but then she'd wait so long that whoever it was grew strained and artificial-looking, and more than once Morgan cried, "Just take it, dammit!" Then Emily lowered her camera and turned, eyes widening, lips parting, and had to begin all over again.

Sunday afternoon the Merediths had a quarrel about when they were going home. Emily wanted to wait till Monday, but Leon wanted to leave that evening. "Lord, yes," Morgan longed to say. "Go!" — not only to the Merediths but to everyone. They could abandon him on the beach Fall would come and he'd be buried under drifting threads of sand and a few brown leaves blown seaward. He pictured how calm he would grow, at last. The breakers would act for him, tumbling about while he lay still. He would finally have a chance to son himself out. It was people who disarranged his life-Louisa in her striped beach robe like a hawk-nosed Bedouin, Brindle in an old stretched swimsuit of Bonny's that fell in vacant folds around her hunched body. He sat beneath the umbrella in his sombrero and trunks and his shoes with woolen socks. His bare chest felt itchy and sticky. He chewed a match and listened to the Merediths quarrel, Leon said that if they left Monday, they might very well miss their show. Emily said it was only a puppet show. Leon asked how she could say only. Wasn't it what she'd set her heart on, dragged him into, held his nose to-damn puppets with their silly grins-alt these years? She said she had never held his nose to anything and, anyway, it was Leon's business what he did with his life. She had certainly not forced him into this, she said. Then Leon jumped to his feet and went striding southward, toward town. Morgan watched after him, idly observing that Leon had developed a roll of padded flesh above the waistband of his trunks. He was a solid, weighty man now, and came down hard on his heels. Flocks of slender girls parted to let him pass. He pushed on through them, not giving them a glance.

Possibly, Billy and Priscilla were quarreling too, for they sat apart from each other and Billy drew deep circles in the sand between his feet. The women melted closer together; the men remained on the outskirts, each alone, stiff-necked. The women's soft voices wove in with the rush of the ocean. "Look at the birds," Emily told Gina. "Look how they circle. Look how they're hunting for fish."

"Or maybe they're just cooling off their underwings," Louisa said.

Bonny, gazing at the horizon from behind her dark glasses, spoke in a tranquil, faraway voice. "It was here on this beach," she said, "that I first knew I was a grownup. I had thought of myself as a girl for so long- years after I was married. I was twenty-nine, pregnant with the twins. I'd brought Amy and Jeannie to the beach to play. I saw the lifeguard look over at me and then at some spot beyond me, and I realized he hadn't really seen me at all. His mind told him, 'Lady. Children. Sand toys,' and he passed on. Oh, it's not as if I were ever the kind that boys would whistle at. It's not as if I were used to hordes of men admiring me, even back when I was in my teens. But at least, you see, I had once been up for consideration, and now I wasn't. I was reclassified. I felt so sad. I felt I'd had something taken away from me that I was so certain of, I hadn't even noticed I had it. I didn't know it would happen to me too, just to anyone else." Morgan noticed someone walking toward them: a man in a business suit that was made of some dull gray hammered-metal fabric. Everyone he passed stared after him for a moment. He ruffled their faces like a wind, and then they turned away again. It was Robert Roberts. Morgan said, "Brindle." Brindle seemed to comprehend everything, just from the sound of her name. She hunched tighter on her blanket and hugged her knees and frowned, not looking. It was up to Morgan. He rose and spat his match out. "Why, Robert Roberts!" he said, and offered his hand, too soon. Robert had some distance to travel yet. He came lurching up the slope a little untidily, in order not to keep Morgan waiting. His palm was damp. His face glistened. He was a man without visible edges or angles, and his thin brown hair was parted close to the center and plastered down. It appeared that he was sinking into the sand. There was sand across the creases of his shoes, and more sand filling his trouser cuffs. He gripped Morgan's hand like a drowning man and stared fixedly into his eyes-but that was his salesman's training, no doubt. "It's Bob," he said, panting.

"Beg pardon?"

"I'm Bob. You always call me Robert Roberts, like a joke."

"I do?"

"I came for Brindle." Morgan turned to Brindle. She hugged her knees harder and rocked, staring out to sea.

"It's the same thing all over, isn't it?" Robert said to Morgan. "It's the same old story. Once again she leaves me."

"Ah, well… have a seat, Robert, Bob. Don't be such a stranger." Robert ignored him. "Brindle," he said, "I woke up Thursday morning and you were gone. I thought maybe you were just miffed about something, but it's been four days now and you never came back. Brindle, are we going round and round like this all our lives? We're together, you leave me, we're together, you leave me?"

"You do still have my photograph," Brindle told the ocean.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Brindle got to her feet. She brushed sand off the seat of her bathing suit; she adjusted a strap. Then she went up to Robert Roberts and set her face so close to his that he drew back. "Look," she said, tapping her yellow cheekbone. "This is me. I am Brindle Gower Teague Roberts, All that string of names."

"Yes, Brindle, of course," Robert said.

"You say that so easily! But since you and I were children, I've been married and widowed. I married old Horace Teague next door and moved into his row-house; I bought little cans of ham in the gourmet sections of department stores-"

"You've told me all that, Brindle."

"I am not the girl in the photograph." She was not. The skin below her eyes was the same damaged color as Morgan's. The dimple in one cheek had become a dry crack-something Morgan had never noticed. She was thirty-eight years old. Morgan stroked his beard.

"Brindle, what is it you're saying?" Robert Roberts asked. "Are you saying you don't love me any more?" In the little group of women (all gazing politely in other directions) there was the softest rustle, like a laugh or a sigh. Robert looked over at them. Then he turned to Morgan. "What is she saying?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Morgan.

Louisa said, "If they marry, I hope I won't be sent to live with them."

"They are married, Mother dear," Morgan told her.

"You have no idea how hard it is," Louisa said, "not knowing where you'll be shipped to next,"

"Mother, have we ever shipped you anywhere? Ever in all your life?"

"Haven't you?" she asked. She considered, retreating into the hood of her beach robe. "Well, somehow it feels like you have, at least," she said. "No, I prefer to stay on with you. Bonny, you won't let Mm send me off to Brindle's, will you? Morgan's difficult to live with but… eventful, I suppose you'd say,"

"Oh, yes," said Bonny dryly.

"Promise?"

"Mother," said Morgan. "They're married. They're already married, and no one's shipped you anywhere. Tell her, Brindle. Tell her, Robert, Bob…" But Robert faced the sea, not listening. His hair blew up stiffly, in spikes, which made him look desperate. While the others watched, he bent to dust the sand from his trousers. He pulled his shirtcuffs a proper length below the sleeves of his coat. Then he started walking toward the water.

He circled a child with a shovel and he stepped over a moat and a crenellated wall. But his powers of observation seemed to weaken as he drew nearer the sea, and he stumbled into a shallow basin that three little boys were digging. He climbed out again, ignoring their cries. Now his trouser legs were dark and sugary-looking. He accidentally crushed a paper cup beneath his heel. He reached the surf and kept going. A young man, lifting a screaming girl in the air and preparing to dunk her, suddenly set her down and stood gaping, Robert was knee-deep in seething white water. He was waist-deep. When the breakers curled back for a new assault, he was seen to be clothed in heavy, dragging vestments that looked almost Biblical.

Up until now, no one had moved. They might have been little specks of bathers on a postcard. But then Brindle screamed, "Stop him!" and all the women clambered to their feet. The lifeguard stood on his high wooden chair, with a whistle raised halfway to his mouth. Billy barreled past. Morgan hadn't even heard him get up. Morgan threw his sombrero into Bonny's lap and followed, but the lifeguard was faster than both of them. By the time Billy and Morgan hit the water, the lifeguard was in to waist level, heaving his orange torpedo at Robert. Robert brushed it away and plunged on.

A breaker crashed around Morgan's knees, colder than he had expected. He hated the feeling of wet woolen socks. However, he kept going. What he had in mind was not so much rescuing Robert as defeating him. No, Robert would never get away with this; he couldn't escape so easily; it must not be allowed. Morgan swarmed in the water, his limbs wandering off in several directions. A surprised-looking woman lifted both flaps of her bathing cap and stared. The lifeguard took a stranglehold on Robert from behind, and Robert (who so far had not even got his hair wet) flailed and fell backward. He was engulfed by a wave and came up coughing, still in the lifeguard's grasp. The lifeguard hauled him in. Morgan followed with his arms out level, his head lunging forward intently. The lifeguard dragged Robert up on the sand and dumped him there, like a bundle of wet laundry. He prodded Robert with one long, bronzed foot. "Oh, me," Morgan said wearily, and he sat down beside Robert and looked at his ruined shoes. Billy sank next to him, out of breath. Robert went on coughing and shrugging off the people who crowded around. "Stand back, stand back," the lifeguard said. He asked Morgan, "What was he, drunk?"

"I wouldn't have the faintest idea," Morgan said.

"Well, I got to make a report on this."

"Really, that won't be necessary," Morgan said, rising. "I'm from the Bureau."

"The what?"

"Parks and Safety," Morgan said. "What's your name, son? Of course I plan to mention this to the board."

"Well, Hendrix," the lifeguard said. "Danny Hendrix, with an x."

"Good work, Hendrix," Morgan said. He briskly shook the lifeguard's hand. The lifeguard stood around a minute, scratching his head, and then he went down to the water to watch his orange torpedo float out to sea.

They propped Robert up and draped him across their shoulders-one arm circling Morgan's neck, one arm circling Billy's. Robert seemed uninjured, but he was heavy and lethargic and his shoes dragged behind him. "Come on, fellow," Billy said cheerfully. He looked pleased; perhaps he was reminded of his fraternity days, which he'd once told Morgan were the happiest of his life. Morgan himself stayed silent. He wished he had a cigarette.

They hauled Robert past the blanket, where the women were packing their belongings. Brindle was smoothing out towels and folding them. She would not look at Robert. Morgan felt proud of her. Let Robert see whom he was dealing with here! Let him see how they could handle it-all of them together. For this was no mere marital quarrel, no romantic tiff. No, plainly what had happened was a comment upon their whole family-on the disarray of their family life. Robert had been standing right beside this blanket, had he not, listening to Louisa forget where she was in time, Morgan arguing with her, all the others grouping into battle squads… and then he'd made his break, escaped. The scoundrel. He'd insulted every one of them, each and every one. Morgan felt a flash of anger. Pretending to be concerned about Hendrix, he stopped without warning and ducked away from Robert's arm and turned toward the ocean. Robert tilted and nearly fell. Morgan shaded his eyes. Hendrix was sending signals to the lifeguard on the next beach. Morgan could not read signal flags, but he could easily imagine the conversation that was taking place. WHAT WAS PROBLEM, the neighbor would ask, and Hendrix would answer, MIXUP CHAOS MUDDLE…

Kate was watching too. (No doubt she found Hendrix handsome.) Morgan said, "Can you tell what he's saying?" She shrugged. "It's just the clear sign," she said.

"The what?"

"You know-all clear, everything in order."

"Little does he know," Morgan said.

Bonny told Morgan they were running out of beds. Were the Merediths leaving tonight or tomorrow morning? she asked him. This conversation took place in the kitchen, late in the afternoon, while Bonny was emptying ice-cube trays into a pitcher. Above the crackle and clink of ice, she whispered that it would certainly solve a great deal if the Merediths left before bedtime. Then she could put Brindle and Robert in their room. But Morgan didn't think Brindle would want to share a room with Robert anyhow. "Let it be, Bonny," he said. "Send Robert out on the porch with a sleeping bag."

"But, Morgan, they're married."

"The man's a lunatic. She's better off without him."

"You're the one who was against her leaving him," Bonny said. "Now, just because he walks into the surf a ways-"

"With all his clothes on. With his suit on. Making us look like some kind of institutional outing, a laughing stock…"

"Nobody laughed," Bonny said.

"It's a mark of how badly this vacation is going," Morgan said, "that, lately, I've been wondering how the hardware store is doing."

"He was just showing her he cared," said Bonny.

"I've half a mind to call Butkins in the morning and see if he's restocked those leaf bags yet. With fall coming on-"

"What are you talking about? It's July." Morgan pulled at his nose.

"Go ask Emily what they've decided," Bonny said.

"You want me to tell them to leave?"

"No, no, just ask. If they're staying on, we'll work out something else."

"Maybe we could leave," he said hopefully. "The others could stay and we could go." Bonny gave him a look.

He wandered into the living room, where his mother and Priscilla were playing Scrabble. Kate was painting her fingernails at a little rattan table. The smell of nail polish filled the room-a piercing, city smell that-Morgan liked. He would have preferred to settle here, but he said, "Anyone seen Emily?"

"She's out front," Priscilla told him.

He went to the porch, letting the rickety screen door slam shut behind him. Emily was taking pictures again. She photographed Gina, who was lining up a row of oyster shells on the railing. She photographed Robert, who sat stiff and humiliated in a rocker, wearing borrowed clothes-Billy's wedding-white slacks and candy-striped shirt. Then she photographed Morgan. Morgan had to stand still for a long, long moment while Emily squinted through the camera at him. He did his best not to show his irritation. At least, he was glad to see, Emily had got out of that swimsuit. She wore her black outfit and no shoes at all. She was her old, graceful, fairy-dancer self. As soon as Morgan heard the shutter click, he said, "Now I'll snap one of you, since you're looking so fine and pretty." He came down the front steps and took the camera from her hands. She put up no resistance, for once. She seemed tired. Even when he drew away and aimed the camera at her, she didn't smooth her hair or lighten her expression.

He snapped the picture and handed the camera back to her. "Ah… Bonny was just wondering," he said. "Should we count on having you three for the night?"

"I don't know," she said. She rolled the film forward with a little zipping sound. "I'll have to talk to Leon," she said finally, "Oh? Where is Leon?"

"He never came back from his walk. I was planning to go into town and look for him."

"I'll come with you," Morgan said. "Gina? You want to take a walk?"

"I'm busy," Gina said, laying out another row of shells.

"Robert?"

"I'm waiting for Brindle." Morgan and Emily started down the street. It was narrow and patchily surfaced; they could walk in the center of it without much fear of traffic. They passed a woman hanging out beach towels and a little girl blowing soap bubbles on her steps. The houses were so close together that it almost seemed the two of them were proceeding through a series of rooms-hearing Neil Diamond on the radio and then an oboe concerto, catching a whiff of coffee and frying crabcakes, watching a man and a boy sort out their fishing tackle on a green porch glider. Emily said, "He'll have a mighty long wait."

"Who will?" Morgan asked.

"Robert Roberts. Brindle's gone back to Baltimore."

"She has?"

"Billy drove her to the bus in Ocean City."

"But her car's parked right out front!"

"She doesn't want it any more, she said."

"Oh," said Morgan. He thought that over. "So it's my house she's gone to, is it?"

"I didn't ask," Emily said.

"It serves him right," said Morgan. "Yes, I was on his side till now, the way he rang our doorbell, bringing roses… but, oh, this ocean business. No. People imagine they can hold you with such things. They cause themselves some damage and assume that we'll accept responsibility. But they underestimate us. They fail to realize. No, Brindle will never forgive him for that." Emily said nothing. He glanced down at her and found her drawn and pale, walking alongside him with her camera held tight in one bluish hand. How had she managed to avoid a sunburn? She'd been out on the beach as long as the others. He wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. "Well," he said, "I suppose you must find us very tiring. Right?"

"I've had a wonderful time," she told him.

"Eh?"

"I've had a wonderful time."

"Yes, well, that's sweet of you, but… never mind, I know this wasn't what you're used to. There's no economy to our life. Don't think I haven't noticed that."

"It was wonderful. It was a real vacation," Emily said. "As soon as we got your letter, I was so excited- I went out and bought us all new clothes. It's been years since I've been to the beach. Not since high school."

"Ah, yes, high school." Morgan said, sighing.

"He never thinks we can spare the time. He'd rather stay at home. We either give our shows or stay home. Sometimes I think he's doing it for spite-he's saying, 'You wanted to marry and settle, didn't you? Well, here we are, and we're never going anywhere again.' It's funny: I hoped I'd grow more like him-more, oh, active-but it seems instead he's more like me. We just sit home. I sit in that room with that sewing machine; I feel like someone in a story, some drudge. I feel like the miller's daughter, left to spin gold out of straw. Visiting here was just what we needed-so much going on, so many things happening-"

"Oh, dear, oh, dear," Morgan said. He felt very uncomfortable, and had forgotten to bring his cigarettes. They passed a man — smoking on his front steps and Morgan drew a chestful of sharp gray air from him. "Doesn't the sun set differently here," he said, "so long and level; the light's so flat, somehow-" He walked faster. Emily kept up. They turned east and passed the first of a string of shops.

"He puts me in such a position," she said. "He always makes it seem that everything was my idea, that I'm the one who organized our lives this way, but I'm not. I mean, if he just sat, what was I to do? Tell me that!" Morgan said, "I honestly don't believe I can last another day in the place."

"In Bethany?" Emily asked. She looked around her. "But it's beautiful," she said.

"It smells of dead fish."

"Why, Morgan." They passed a gift-shop window hung with yellow nets and filled with spiky, varnished conch shells from Florida and pewter sand dollars, seahorses locked in Lucite paperweights, racks of pierced earrings shaped like starfish and dolphins. They climbed a set of weathered wooden stairs, and on the way up the ramp to the boardwalk Morgan glanced into the dark plate glass of the Holiday House restaurant. "Oh! My God," he said.

Emily turned to him.

"Look!" he said, feeling his cheeks, peering into the glass. "I'm so old! I'm so ruined! I seem to have… fallen apart." She laughed.

"Well, I don't see anything funny," he told her.

"Morgan, don't worry. You're fine. It's always like that, if you haven't braced your face first."

"Yes, but now my face is braced," he said. "And look! Still!" She stopped laughing and put on a sympathetic expression. But, of course, he couldn't expect her to understand. Her skin seemed filmed with gold; the metal filings of her hair glinted in the sunlight. She started walking again and after a moment he followed, still testing different parts of his face with his fingertips.

"I thought he'd be right around here somewhere," Emily said, gazing up and down the boardwalk.

"Maybe he stopped at a cafe."

"Oh, he'd never do that on his own." This interested him. "Why not?" he asked. "What would he have against it?" She didn't answer. She set her hands on the boardwalk railing and looked out at the ocean. It was five o'clock at least, maybe later, and only one or two swimmers remained. A single white Styrofoam raft "skated away on the surf. Couples strolled along the edge, dressed in clean, dry clothing that gave them the lovingly tended look of small children awakened from naps. There were flattened squares of sand where families had been camped on blankets, and abandoned drip-castles and bucket-shaped towers. But no Leon. "Maybe he's back at the cottage," Morgan said. "Emily?" She was crying. Tears rolled singly down her cheeks while she faced straight ahead, wide-eyed. "Why, Emily," Morgan said. He wished Bonny were here. He put an arm around Emily, clumsily, and said what he supposed Bonny might say, "There, now. Never mind," he told her, and when she turned toward him, he folded her in to him and said, "Never you mind, Emily." Her hair smelled like fresh linen that had hung to dry in the sun all day. The camera, which she clutched to her chest, made a boxy shape between them, but elsewhere she was soft and boneless, surprisingly slight; there was nothing to her. He was startled by a sudden ache that made him tighten his arms and pull her hard against him. His head grew light. She made some sound, a kind of gasp, and tore away. "Emily, wait!" he said. It was difficult to get his breath. He said, "Emily, let me explain," but she had already backed off, and Morgan was left reeling and hot-faced with shame, and before he could straighten out this new catastrophe, he looked down and saw Leon passing below them, absorbed in the everting paper.

They lost their good weather on Monday and didn't see the sun again till Thursday, and by then it was too late; everyone remaining in the cottage was annoyed with everyone else. Billy and Priscilla left early, in a huff-Priscilla driving Brindle's car. Louisa quarreled with Kate about some blueberry muffins, and Bonny told Morgan that he'd have to take Louisa in the pickup, going home. She certainly couldn't travel with the two of them together. But Morgan didn't want to take her. He looked forward to making the trip alone, with an extra-early start and no stops along the way. Then as soon as he reached home, he figured, he would pay a call on Joshua Bennett, the antique dealer. And maybe afterward he'd wander on downtown, just to see what he'd missed. No, there wasn't any room for Louisa in his plans. So Saturday morning, while the others were still packing, he threw his encyclopedia into the truck-bed. "Goodbye, everybody," he said, and he left. Traveling down their little street, before he turned onto the highway, he could look in the rear-view mirror and see Kate chasing after him, and Bonny descending the porch steps calling something, and Louisa, shading her eyes in the door. In this family, you could never have a simple leavetaking. There were always threads and tangles trailing.

He drove slightly over the speed limit, once even swerving to the shoulder of the road to bypass a line of cars. He had only a few minutes' wait at the Kent Narrows and none at all on the Bridge. Skimming across the Bridge, he felt he was soaring. He reached the city limits at eleven, and was home by eleven-twenty-long before Bonny and the others.

The yard was overgrown, littered with rolled newspapers. The house was cool and musty-smelling behind its drawn shades, and there was a mountain of mail in the hall beneath the mail slot. In the dining room Brindle sat playing solitaire. Coffee stains yellowed the front of her bathrobe. She trilled her fingers absently when he walked in, and then she laid a jack of diamonds on a queen of spades. "Pardon my not bringing in the papers," she said, "but I didn't want to go outside because Robert Roberts was parked in front of the house for most of the week."

"Persisting, is he?" Morgan said. He sat down next to her to sort the mail.

"I couldn't even go for milk, or to buy a loaf of bread, so I managed on what was here. Sardines and corned-beef hash, mainly. I feel like someone on a submarine; I have this craving for lettuce. But it wasn't so bad. I didn't really mind. It made me think of back when we were kids, when we were poor. Morgan," she said, pausing with a ten of clubs in mid-air, "weren't we happier, in some ways, when we were up against it?"

"As far as I'm concerned, we're still up against it," Morgan said.

There was a dainty blue envelope from Priscilla that must contain a thank-you note. It made him tired to think of it. He passed on to a thicker one that looked more promising, and ripped it open. Inside was a sheaf of photographs, wrapped in a letter. He checked the signature: Emily. Now what? Dear Morgan and Bonny, she wrote, in a neat, italic hand that struck him as stunted. Thank you again for a lovely vacation. I hope we did not put you to too much trouble. Toward the end we were so rushed, getting off in time to beat the dark, that I didn't feel we properly said goodbye. But it was so nice of you to have us and we all had such a…

Morgan grimaced and turned to the photos. He flipped through them idly. Then he sat straighter and went through them again. He laid one on the dining-room — table and another one beside it, and another. Bonny, Robert, Brindle, Kate…

Each person sat alone, suspended in an amber light that surely did not exist in Bethany Beach, Delaware. Bonny folded her arms across her stomach and smiled a radiant smile. Robert Roberts shone like a honey-mooner in his borrowed shirt, and Brindle's skin, had the mellow glow of a priceless painting. Kate with her stubborn pout was as sultry and mysterious as a piece of exotic fruit. Morgan's sombrero, pushed back, was a halo, and the white streaks in his beard gave him the depth and texture of something carved. Well, it was only the film. It was cut-rate film, or out of date, or underexposed.

But each person gazed, out so steadily, with such trust, such concentration, Emily herself, marble-pale in folds of black, met his scrutiny with eyes so clear that he imagined he could see through them and behind them; he could see what she must see, how his world most look to her. A buoyant little bubble of hope began to rise in him. Over and over, he sorted through the pictures rearranging them, aligning them, dropping them, smiling widely and sighing and laughing, ignoring his sister's astonished stare: a man in love.

1976

When spring came, Emily started walking. She walked all spring and summer, down alleyways, across tattered rags of parks, through stores that smelled of pickles and garlic. She went in the front doors an£ out the back, emerging on some unknown street full of delivery trucks, stacked wooden crates, construction workers with pneumatic drills tearing up the pavement. Her ballet slippers, nearly soundless, tripped along in time to the music in her head. She liked songs about leaving, about women who packed up and left, and men who woke to find their beds unexpectedly empty. If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone… She slipped between two children sharing popcorn from a bag. One on these mornings, it won't be long, you'll call my name and I'll be gone… She brushed against an old lady with a shopping bag full of bottles, did not apologize, kept going. I know you, rider, going to miss me when I'm… Gone, gone, gone: her slippers thumped it out. She had a spiky step to begin with, but every day, all over again, she softened; she would slow down bit by bit, and wilt, and grow calm. She would think of how Leon's jacket hung across that broad, subtle curve between his shoulder blades. How complete his words sounded-more certain than other people's, spoken in an even voice that carried some special weight. How he always kept his mouth closed, not tightly clamped but relaxed and gentle, giving her, for some reason, an impression of secrets working within him.

She sighed and turned home, after all.

Often, on these walks, she was followed by Morgan Gower-a wide leather hat and a tumult of beard, loping along behind her. If she paused till he caught up, he'd make a nuisance of himself. He had entered some new stage, developed a new fixation. It was harmless, really, but annoying. He might declare himself to her anywhere-fling out his arms in the middle of the Broadway Fish Market, beam down at her, full of joy. "Last night I dreamed you went to bed with me." She would click her tongue and walk away. She would march on out and down the block, cut through an alley past a grinding garbage truck, and he would follow, but he kept his distance. His hat rounded corners like a flying saucer, level and spinning, the rest of him sauntering beneath. Glancing back, she had to laugh. Then she turned away again, but he'd already noticed; she heard him laugh too. Didn't he realize she had problems on her mind? She was overhung by thoughts of Leon, like someone traveling under a cloud. First marching, then drifting, she paced out the knots and snarls of life with Leon. Love was not a comedy. But here came Morgan, laughing. She gave in and stopped once more and waited. He arrived beside her and pointed at the neon sign that swung above their heads. "Look! La-Trella's Rooms. Weekly! Daily! Let's just nip upstairs."

"Really, Morgan." And even in front of Leon-what did Morgan imagine he was doing? In front of glowering, dark Leon, he said, "Emily, fetch your toothbrush. We're eloping." When there was music, anywhere-a car radio passing on the street-he would seize her by the waist and dance. He danced continually, nowadays. It seemed his feet could not keep quiet. She had never known him to act so silly.

Fortunately, Leon didn't take him seriously.

"You'd be getting more than you bargained for," he said to Morgan.

Still, she said, "Morgan, I wish you wouldn't joke like that in front of Leon. What must he think?'* "What should he think? I'm stealing you away," Morgan said, and he circled the kitchen, where Emily happened to be washing dishes, and threw open all the cupboards. "Which things are you bringing with you? These plates? This bowl? This ^two-quart vinyl orange-juice pitcher?" She rested her soapy hands on the sink and watched him. "Morgan," she said. "Don't you ever get self-conscious?"

"Well," he said.

He closed a cupboard door. He stroked his beard.

"That's a very interesting question," he said. "I'm glad you asked me that. The fact is… ah, yes, I do. " She blinked. "You do?"

"The fact is," he said, "with you: well, yes, I do. " He stood before her, smiling. There was something clumsy about him that made her see, suddenly, what he must have been like as a boy-one of those bumbling boys who can't think what to talk about with girls; or who talk too much, perhaps, out of nervousness-compulsively relating the entire plots of movies or explaining how the internal-combustion engine works. It was a shock; she had never pictured him that way. And anyhow, she was probably wrong, for an instant later he was back to the Morgan she had always known: a gray-streaked, twinkling clown of a man, swinging into a soft-shoe dance across her kitchen floor. At least he could make her laugh. She walked through summer- and into fall. She did other things too, of course-gave puppet shows, sewed costumes, cooked, helped Gina with her homework. But at night, when she closed her eyes, she saw a maze of streets and traffic, the way compulsive chess-players see chessboards in their dreams. She was revisited by the smallest details of her walks-by the clank of a foot on a manhole cover, the spark of mica in concrete, and the Bicentennial fire hydrants sticking out their stunted arms like so many defective babies. She opened her eyes, sat up, rearranged her pillow. "What's the trouble?" Leon would ask.

There were any number of answers she could give, all true. She said, sometimes, that she thought their marriage had something badly wrong with it, something out of step, she couldn't say just what. Maybe so, said Leon, but what did she want him to do about it? He did not believe, he said, that there was anything in the world that would make her really happy. Unless, perhaps, she could bring the whole solar system into line exactly her way, not a planet disobeying. What was it that she expected of him? He would ask. She was silent.

Or sometimes she said that she worried about Gina. It didn't seem right for a nine-year-old to act so serious, she said. It broke her heart to see her so unswervingly alert to their moods, watching from a distance, smoothing over quarrels. But Leon said Gina was growing up, that was all. Naturally, he said. Let her be, he said, Also, Emily said, their puppet shows never went well any more. Running through every play was some kind of dislocation-characters stepping on each other's speeches, unsynchronized, ragged, or missing cues and gawking stupidly. Fairytales fell into fragments, every line a splinter. When Cinderella danced with the Prince, their cloth bodies clung together, but the hands inside them shrank away. Emily believed that the audience could guess this. She was certain of it. Leon said that was ridiculous. They were making more money than they ever had before; they had to turn down invitations. Things were going wonderfully, Leon said.

In her sleep, she dreamed she walked a revolving pavement like a merry-go-round, and she was still tired when she woke.

Often, when she had some work that could be done by hand, she'd spend her mornings down in Crafts Unlimited. She'd perch on a stool behind the counter and listen to Mrs. Apple while she sewed. Mrs. Apple knew hundreds of craftsmen, all then* irregular, colorful lives, and she could talk on and on about them in her cheery way, stringing together people Emily had never heard of. Emily relaxed, expanded, watched well-dressed grandmothers buying her puppets. Once Mrs. Apple's son Victor came to visit. He was living in D. C. now and had driven over unannounced. He'd gained a good deal of weight and shaved off his mustache. His wife, a pretty woman with flossy blond hair, carried their small son in her arms. "Well, well, well," Victor said to Emily, and he hooked his thumbs into the tiny pockets of his vest. "I see you're still making puppets." She felt she had to defend herself. "Yes," she said, "but they're much different now. They're a whole different process." Getting off her stool, though, going to a table to show him a king with a gnarled face, she was conscious of how dreary she must seem to him-still in the same building, the same occupation, wearing the same kind of clothes. Her braids, she felt suddenly, might as well have solidified on her head. She wished she had not let Morgan Gower persuade her to go back to ballet slippers. She wished she had Gina here-all the change that anyone could ask for. Victor bounced slightly on the balls of his feet, examining the king. Melissa, Emily thought suddenly. Melissa Tibbett-that was the name of the birthday child at their very first show, when Victor had been the doll-voiced father wondering what to bring back from his travels. Melissa must be in her teens by now-sixteen years old, at least; long past puppets. Emily set the king back on the table and smoothed his velvet robe.

"How about Leon?" Victor asked. "Is he doing any acting?"

"Oh, well, not so very much. No, not so much at the moment," she said.

He nodded. She hated the understanding way he looked into her eyes.

That afternoon she pulled a cardboard box from the closet and unpacked her marionettes. She'd been experimenting with marionettes for several years. She liked the challenge: they were harder to work. She had figured out her own arrangement of strings, suspended from a single cross of Popsicle sticks. There were two strings for the hands, two more for the knees, and one each for the head and the lower back. (At fairs she'd seen double and triple crosses, like biplanes, and half a dozen additional strings, but none of it seemed essential.) She took a Red Riding Hood, her most successful effort, and went into the living room. Leon was on the couch, reading the afternoon paper. Gina was writing a book report. "Look," Emily said.

Leon glanced up. Then he said, "Oh, Emily, not those marionettes again."

"But look: see how easy?" She pranced Red Riding Hood across the floor, up the couch, into Gina's lap. Gina giggled. Then Red Riding Hood skipped away, swinging a small yellow basket that snapped cleverly over her arm. "What do you think?" Emily asked Leon.

"Very nice, but not for us," Leon said. "Emily, our old puppets can do that, and more besides. They can set the basket down and pick it up again. They don't have all those strings in the way."

"Oh, it's just like with my shadow puppets. You won't try anything new," she said. "I'm tired of the old ones."

"So?" he asked her. "You can't just switch the universe around, any time you're tired of it," She packed the marionettes in their box. She went for a walk, though she ought to be starting supper. At the corner of Crosswell and Hartley she paused for a traffic light and Morgan Gower came up beside her. He was wearing a tall black suit, a high-collared shirt, and a bowler hat so ancient it looked rusty. He bowed and tipped his hat. She laughed. A grin spread behind his beard, but he seemed to guess her mood and he didn't speak. In fact, when the light turned green he dropped back again, though she was conscious of his presence- keeping a measured distance behind, humming a little tune and watching over her.

In October, Emily's second cousin Claire called to say that her great-aunt had died in her sleep. She'd donated her remains to the cause of medical science, Claire said (just like Aunt Mercer; she would put it in just those words), but still there'd be a service at the Meetinghouse. Emily thought she ought to attend it. She hadn't seen Aunt Mercer in twelve years-not since before her marriage. They had only exchanged Christmas cards, with polite, fond notes beneath the signatures. Going now, of course, was pointless; but even so, Emily canceled a puppet show and left Gina with Leon and took the Volkswagen south.

She was nervous about making the four-hour trip alone, but as soon as she'd merged on the interstate she felt wonderful. It seemed that the air here was thinner and lighter. She was even pleased by all the traffic she encountered-so many people skimming along! No doubt they were out here day and night, endlessly circling the planet, and now at last she had joined them. She smiled at every driver she passed. She was fascinated by the private, cluttered worlds she glimpsed — maps and stuffed annuals on window ledges; a passenger sleeping, open-mouthed; a pair of children combing out their dog.

She turned off the interstate and traveled smaller and smaller roads, winding through rich farm country and then poor country, passing unpainted shacks bristling with TV antennas, their yards full of trucks on blocks and the hulls of cars, then speeding through coppery woodlands laced with underbrush and discarded furniture. She reached Taney in the early afternoon. The town was still so small that several of the men hunkering before the Shell station were familiar to her-not even any older, it seemed; just painted there, dreamily holding their hand-rolled cigarettes. (Their names swam back to her: Shufords and Grindstaffs and Haithcocks. She'd had them stored in her memory all these years without knowing it.) Autumn leaves scuttled down Main Street. She turned up Erin Street and parked in front of the squat little house that she and her mother had shared with Aunt Mercer.

The yard was shadowed by great old trees. No real grass grew there-just patchy bits of plantain in the caked orange dirt, weeds trailing out of a concrete urn, and a leaf-littered boxwood hedge giving off its dusky, pungent smell. Where were Aunt Mercer's flowerbeds? She would generally have something blooming, even this late in the year, Emily climbed the front-porch steps and paused, uncertain whether to knock or to walk on in. Then the door swung open and Claire said, "Emily, honey!" She hadn't changed. She was plump and kind-faced, with little gray curls in a pom-pom over her forehead and another pom-pom at the back of her neck. She wore a stiff, wide, navy-blue dress that barely bent to accommodate her, and heavy black shoes with open toes. "Honey, don't just stand there. Where's your little family?"

"I left them home," Emily said.

"Left them! Came all this way by yourself? Oh, and we were counting on seeing your sweet daughter…" Emily couldn't imagine Gina in this house. It wouldn't work; the two wouldn't meet in her mind. She followed Claire through the hall, with its smell of old newspapers, and into the parlor. The furniture was dark and ungainly. It so completely filled the room that Emily almost failed to notice the two people sitting on the puny brown sofa-Claire's husband, Claude, and Aunt Junie, Claire's mother, the mountainous old woman who also lived here. Neither one was a blood relation, but Emily bent to kiss their cheeks. She'd last seen them when she came home after her mother's death, and they'd been sitting on this very sofa. They might have remained here ever since-abandoned, sagging, like large cloth dolls. When Claude reached up to pat her shoulder, the rest of him stayed sunk in the cushions; his arm seemed disproportionately long and distant from his body. Aunt Junie said, "Oh, Emily, look at you, so grown up…" Emily sat on the sofa between them. Claire settled in a rocker. "Did you eat?" she asked Emily. "You want to wash up? Have a Coke? Some buttermilk?"

"I'm fine," Emily said. She felt sinfully fine, larger and stronger and less needy than all three of them put together. She folded her hands across her purse. There was a silence. "It's good to be back," she said.

"Wouldn't Aunt Mercer be pleased?" asked Claire.

There was a little bustle of motion; they'd found their subject. "Oh, wouldn't she just love to see you sitting here," Aunt Junie said.

"I wish she could have known," said Claire. "I wish you could have come before she passed."

"But it was painless," Claude said.

"Oh, yes. It's the way she'd have wanted to go."

"If she had to go, well, that's the way." Claire said, "All those troubles with her joints, Emily; you never saw. Arthritis swelled her up so, she got extra knobs and knuckles. Times she had a job just fixing her meals, but you know how she was: she wouldn't give in. Times she couldn't button her buttons or dial on the telephone, and Mama with that elbow of hers… I would say, 'Aunt Mercer, let me come over and stay a while, but she said, 'No,' said, 'I can do it.' She just had to do it her way. She always liked to feed that cat of hers herself, said it wouldn't eat from anyone else, which was only what she liked to believe; and she was bound and determined to write her own letters. At Christmas-remember, Emily? How she always wrote you, longhand? And sent a little something for the baby. And Easter, why, that was her day to have us all over, and do every bit herself. Polished the silver, set the table… but she had to see to it some time ahead, in case the arthritis, you know… I stopped by on Good Friday and there was the cloth on the table and the very best china laid out. I said, 'Aunt Mercer, what's all this in aid of?'

'I just want to be sure it's ready,' she said, "for your mama can't manage a thing with that elbow and I do like to get organized." See, she would never even mention her arthritis. Doctor had to tell us what was what; said, 'She is in more pain than she lets on.' She hated to put us out, never cared to lean on others. In some ways, it was best that she was taken when she was."

"Oh, it was all for the best," Aunt Junie said.

Claude said, "It was a mercy."

"I should have come before," Emily said. "I never knew. She never mentioned it in her letters."

"Yes, well, that was how she was."

"But she'd be proud that you came now," Aunt Junie said.

"And you'll want to go through her things, surely- so many of her nice things that I know she would want you to keep," Claire said.

"I don't have room in the car," said Emily. But suddenly she felt she would like this whole house-the wallpaper patterned with wasp-waisted baskets of flowers, the carpet always rubbed the wrong way, the china high-heeled slipper filled with chalky china roses. She imagined moving in. She pictured resuming her life where she'd left off, drinking her morning cocoa from the celery-green glass mug she'd found in a cereal box when she was eight. And when Claire said, "But her jade bar phi, Emily, that wouldn't need any space," she instantly pictured the bar pin, streaked with a kind of wood grain and twined at one end with blackened gold leaves. She was amazed at how much was still lodged in her mind. Like the Shufords, the Grindstaffs, and the Haithcocks, Aunt Mercer's house lived on in Emily, every warped shingle and small-paned window, whether she took it out to examine it or not. She would let the bar pin go to Aunt Junie, who wore such things, but in a sense she would continue, owning it forever, and she might catch an accidental glimpse of it, barely noticed, some moment while waking or failing asleep fifty years from now.

"I don't have room even for that," she said, Then she spread her hands and looked down at them-the parched white backs of them, the gold wedding ring as thin as wire.

At four o'clock they got to their feet and prepared to' walk over to the Meetinghouse. Everyone seemed to have a great many coats and scarves, although it was a warm day. They helped each other, like handicapped people. Claire smoothed Claude's collar for him and straightened his lapels. "Don't you have a wrap, dear?" Aunt Junie asked Emily. "Your… what is that skirt and top; it's so thin. Won't you borrow a sweater?

You don't want to take a chill." But Emily shook her head.

Walking up Erin Street, they did meet a few young people, wearing boot-cut jeans and those velvet blazers that were popular in Baltimore too. This town was not so isolated as Emily had imagined, But the Meetinghouse-the only Friends Meeting in Taney County- was as small and poor as ever, a gray frame cubicle huddled in the back yard of the Savior Baptist Church; and everyone approaching it was old. They mumbled and clung to each other's arms, climbing the front steps. Emily hoped to see the friends she'd gone to First Day School with-never more than three or four of them in the best of times-but they must have moved away. There was no one under fifty. She took her seat on a straight-backed bench, between Aunt Junie and Claude. She looked around the little room and counted fourteen people. The fifteenth entered and closed the door behind him. A hush fell like the hush on a boat when the engine is cut off and the sails are raised.

In this quiet Emily had grown up-not a total silence but a ticking, breathing quiet, with the occasional sound of cloth rubbing cloth, little stirrings, throats cleared, people rustling coughdrop packets or fumbling through their purses. She expected nothing from it. (She had never been religious.) She wondered, for the hundredth time, what that dusty red glass was on the ledge above the east window. It was nearly overflowing with something that looked like wax. Maybe it was a candle. She always came to that conclusion. (But first she thought of something brewing-a culture, yogurt, dough, something concocting itself out of nothing.) She tried to name all the states in the Union. There were four beginning with A, two with C… but the M's were hard; there were so many: Montana, Missouri, Mississippi…

An old man with cottony hair rose and stood leaning on his cane. "Mercer Dulaney," he said, "once walked two and one-half miles in rheumatism weather to feed my dogs while I was off visiting my sister in Fairfax County. I reckon now I'll take that cat of hers and tend it, if it don't get on too bad with my dogs." He sat down, groped for a handkerchief, and wiped his lips. "Ah, ah" he said. It made her think of Morgan Gower; he sometimes said that. She was surprised to remember her other life-its speed, its modernness, the great rush of noisy people she knew She thought of Morgan hurtling down the street behind her; her daughter (daughter!) hailing a city bus; Leon tossing coins on the bureau before he undressed. She remembered the first time she ever saw Leon. He had walked in the door of the library reading room, wearing that corduroy jacket of his. He had stood there looking around him, hunting someone, and had not found whoever it was and turned to go; but in turning, he caught sight of Emily and paused and looked at her again, and then frowned and went on out. She had not actually been introduced to him for another week. But now it seemed to her that at his entrance-swinging through the library door, carrying a single book in his hand (his fingers fine-textured and brown, his shirtcuffs so perfectly white)-her life had suddenly been set in motion. Everything had started up, as if complicated wheels and gears had finally connected, and had raced along in a blur from then on. It was only now, in this slowed-down room, that she had a chance to examine what had happened. Why! Her mother had died! Her mother, and she'd never truly mourned her. She thought of the last time they'd spoken, on the long-distance phone in the dormitory lobby. ("It's raining here," her mother had said. "But 1 don't want to waste our three minutes on the weather. Did you get that skirt I mailed you? But I don't want to waste this time on clothes, my goodness…") She thought about her dormitory room with its two narrow iron bedsteads and the stuffed white unicorn on her pillow. She had once collected unicorns; she'd loved them. What had happened to her unicorn collection? Her roommate must have got it, or Goodwill had come, or it had simply been discarded. And think what else was gone: her favorite books she'd brought with her to college, her diary, her locket with her only picture of her father in it-a young man, laughing. She ached for all of them. She felt they had just this minute been ripped away from her. She thought of Aunt Mercer with her long-chinned, sharp, witty face, her pale, etched mouth always fighting back a smile. It was such a loss; she was so lost without Aunt Mercer.

"When she and I were girls," Aunt Junie said, dragging herself to her feet, plunking. her purse in Emily's lap, "we used to walk to school together. We were the only two girls from the Meeting and we kept to ourselves. Little did I guess I would be marrying her "brother, in those days! I thought he was just a pest. We had these plans for leaving here, getting clean away. We were going to join the gypsies. In those days there were gypsies everywhere. Mercer sent off for a book on how to read the cards, but we couldn't make head nor tail of it. Oh, but I still have the cards someplace, and the string puppets from when we planned to put on shows in a painted wagon, and the elocution book from when we wanted to take up acting… and of course we had thoughts of becoming reporters. Lady news reporters. But it never came to anything. What if we'd known then how it would turn out? What if someone had told us what we'd really do-grow old in Taney, Virginia, and die?" She sat down then, and retrieved her purse from Emily, and closed her eyes and went back to wailing.

That evening they had supper at Claire's-casseroles brought over by other members of the Meeting, fruit pies with people's last names adhesive-taped to the tins. No one ate much. Claude chewed a toothpick and watched a small TV on the kitchen counter. He was an educated man, a dentist, but there was something raw-boned and countrified about him, Emily thought, when he gave his startled barks of laughter at a re-run of "The Brady Bunch." Claire toyed with a piece of pie. Aunt Junie studied her plate and chewed the inside of her lip. Later, when the dishes were done, they moved to the larger TV in the living room. At nine o'clock Aunt Junie said she was tired, and Emily helped her next door to Aunt Mercer's, where both of them planned to sleep.

"I suppose we'll have to sell this place," Aunt Junie said, moving laboriously along the sidewalk. "There isn't much point in keeping up two houses now."

"But where will you live, Aunt Junie?"

"Oh, I'd move in with Claire and Claude," she said.

Emily thought of something dark, like an eye, contracting and getting darker. There once had been three houses, long ago when Emily's father was still alive.

Aunt Junie shuffled ahead of Emily through the front door. A lamp glowed in the hall, casting a circle of yellow light. "You ought to pick out what you want here," Aunt Junie said. "Why, some of it's antiques. Pick out what you'd like to take home." She leaned on Emily's arm, and they made their way to the living room. Emily turned a light on. Furniture sprang into view, each piece with its sharp shadow-a drop-leaf table with its rear leaf raised against the wall; a wing chair; a desk with slender, curved legs that used to remind Emily of a skinny lady in high-heeled shoes. She could have taken all of this, heaven knows. Offered, in general terms, a desk or a sofa, she would have said, "Oh, thank you. Our apartment does seem bare." A little itch of greed might have started up, in fact. But when she stood in this room and saw the actual objects, she didn't want them. They were too solid, too thickly coated by past events, maybe; she couldn't explain it. She said, "Aunt Junie, sell it. You could surely find some use for the money."

"Take something small, at least," Aunt Junie said. "Emily, honey, you're our only young person. You and your little daughter: you're all we've got to pass things on to." Emily pictured Gina reading in the wing chair, twining a curl at her temple the way she always did when she was absorbed, (Was she in bed yet? Had she brushed her teeth? Did Leon know she still liked a nightlight even if she wouldn't say so?) She missed Gina's watchful eyes and her delicate, colorless, chipped-1ooking mouth-Aunt Mercers mouth. Emily had never realized. She stopped dead, struck by the thought.

Meanwhile, Aunt Junie traveled around the room, holding her crippled arm with her good hand. "This china slipper, maybe. Or these little brass monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil…

"Aunt Junie, really, we don't lead that kind of life," Emily told her.

"What kind of life? What kind of life must it take just to put a few brass monkeys on your coffee table?"

"We don't have a coffee table," Emily said, smiling.

"Take Mercer's, then."

"No. Please."

"Or jewelry, a watch, a brooch. Pin her bar pin on your collar."

"I don't have a collar, either," Emily said. "I only wear these leotards, and they're made of something knit; they can't be pinned." Aunt Junie turned and looked at her. She said, "Oh, Emily, your mother sent you off so nice. She read up in Mademoiselle and made you all those clothes for college. She was worried you'd be dressed wrong. No one else in your class went away to school, none of those Baptists, those Haithcocks and Biddixes. She wanted you to go off nice and show them all, come back educated, settle down, marry someone good to you like my Claire did; see my Claire? And she fixed you that sweet paisley dress with the little white collar and cuffs. Now, that you could pin a brooch on. She said you could wear it to Meeting. You said, 'Mama, I do not intend to go to Meeting there and all I want is blue jeans. I'm getting out,' you said, Tm going to join, get to be part of some big group, not going to be different ever again.' What a funny little thing you were! But of course she paid you no mind, and rightly so, as you can see; quite rightly so. Now, I don't know what you call this: leotard? Is that it? Well, I'm sure it's all very stylish in Baltimore, but Emily, honey, it "can't hold a candle to that paisley dress your mother made."

"That paisley dress is gone," Emily said. "It's twelve years old. It's cleaning windows now." Aunt Junie turned her face away. She looked stony and blind with hurt. She groped through the furniture- chair, desk, another chair-and reached the sofa and lowered herself into it.

"But of course I wore it," Emily said, lying.

She pictured it still hanging in her dormitory closet, a ghost passed on to each new freshman class. ("This dress belonged to Miss Emily Cathcart, who vanished one Sunday in April and was never seen again. College authorities are still dragging Sophomore Pond. Her spirit is said to haunt the fountain in front of the library.") She sat down beside Aunt Junie. She touched her arm and said, "I'm sorry."

"Oh, what for?" Aunt Junie asked brightly. "If you like, I'll take the bar pin. Or something little, anything, or-I know what: the marionettes."

"The-?"

"String puppets is what you called them. Didn't you say you'd kept them?"

"Yes," said Aunt Junie, without interest. "Someplace or other, I guess."

"Ill take one home with me."

"Yes, I recollect now you said you give some kind of children's parties," Aunt Junie said. She adjusted her paralyzed arm beneath the shelf of her bosom. "It's been a tiring day," she said.

"You want me to help you to bed?"

"No, no, you run along. I can manage." Emily kissed her on the cheek. Aunt Junie didn't seem to notice.

In the room that Emily and her mother had once shared-such an intertwined, unprivate life that even now she didn't feel truly alone here-she untied her skirt and stepped out of her shoes. Her own younger face, formless, smiled from a silver frame on the bureau. She switched off the light, folded back the spread, and climbed into bed. The sheets were so cold they felt damp. She hugged herself and clenched her chattering teeth and watched the same old squares of moonlight on the floor. Aunt Junie, meanwhile, seemed to be moving around in some other part of the house. Drawers slid open, latches clicked. Emily thought she heard the rafters creak in the attic. Oh, this leaden, lumbering world of old people! She slid away into a patchwork kind of sleep. Her mother seemed to be rearranging-the bedroom. "Let's see, now, if the chair were here, the table here, if we were to put the bed beneath the window…" Emily sat up once to pull the spread back over her shoulders for warmth. An owl was hooting in the trees. This time when she slept, it was like plummeting into someplace bottomless.

She woke and found the room filled with a pearly gray, pre-dawn light. She got up, staggering slightly, and reached for her skirt and tied it around her. She put on her shoes and went out to the hall, which was darker. From Aunt Junie's room a snoring noise came. Oh, Lord, they would probably all sleep for hours yet. She felt her way to the living room to find her purse, where she'd stashed a comb and toothbrush. It was on the coffee table. Something knobby poked from it. She turned the lamp on, blinked, and lifted out an ancient female marionette in a calico dress.

The head and hands were plaster, crudely colored. She had a large, faded mouth and two dim circles of rouge. Her black thread hair was in braids. Her tangled strings were tied to a single-cross control bar, just like the one that Emily had invented. Or maybe (it began to seem) she had not invented it after all, but had remembered it from her childhood. Though she couldn't recall ever having been shown this little creature. Maybe it was something that was passed in the dark through the generations-the very thought of giving puppet shows, even. And here she imagined she'd come so far, lived such a different existence! She saw her Red Riding Hood scene in a whole new light now, as something crippled. She held the marionette by its snarl of strings. The blue eyes stared at her flatly. The plaster hands-one finger chipped-were suspended in a gracious, stiff position.

Out in the kitchen a clock ticked with a muffled sound, as if buried. There was barely enough room to walk between chairs and occasional tables. Everything was so stuffed and smothering. She set the marionette on the sofa and picked up her purse and left the room. Fresh air, she thought, might clear her head. She opened the door and stepped out on the porch, where instantly the cold pierced all she wore. But still the stuffy feeling didn't leave her. She descended the steps. She went out to the street and stood shivering and looking at the car-Leon's car, compact and gleaming. After a moment she opened the door and slid inside and took a deep breath of its leathery smell. Then she found her keys in her purse. Then she switched the engine on, but not the headlights, and slipped away.

In Baltimore it was a crowded, clamorous morning in the middle of the week, with the sun flashing off a sea of metal and everyone honking and darting in and out of lanes. Emily turned down Crosswell Street and parked somewhere, anywhere, she didn't know. She flew from the car and ran inside the building and up the stairs, and then couldn't find the proper key and was jingling her way through a ring of them when Leon opened the door. He stood there looking down at her, holding a book in one hand, and threw her arms around him and pressed her face to his chest. "Emily, love," he said. "Emily, is something wrong?" She only shook her head, and hung on tight.

Almost daily she had letters from Morgan, whether or not he came in person. Dear Emily, Am enclosing this Sears ad, you really need a pipe — wrench and Sears are better than any Cullen Hardware sells… For he had taken over the care of their apartment, moving in on the disrepair that lurked in all its corners; he clanked blithely among the mysteries beneath the kitchen sink. Dear Emily, Came across a hint last night that just might solve that trouble with your toaster. Simply cut a piece of heavy paper, say a matchbook cover, 1" x 1"…

He was the Merediths' own personal consumer advocate, composing disgusted notes to Radio Shack on his tinny, old-fashioned typewriter, storming into auto-repair shops-solving whatever little discontent Emily mentioned in passing. She began to rely on him. Sometimes she said, "Oh, I really shouldn't ask you to do this-" but he would say, "Why not? Who would you rather ask instead? Ah, don't hurt my feelings, Emily." Once she had a problem with her tape recorder, the portable recorder she'd bought to use in their shows. Morgan didn't happen to be around, and while Emily fiddled with the buttons she caught herself wondering, irritably, where was he? How could he leave her alone like this, to cope without him when he'd led her to depend on him? She grabbed up the recorder and ran the several blocks to Cullen Hardware. She arrived breathless; she slapped the recorder on the counter between Morgan and a customer. "Listen," she said, jabbing a button. In blew the trumpet for "The Bremen-town Musicians"-but blurred and bleary, with some kind of vibration in the speaker. The customer stepped back, looking startled. Morgan sat on his high wooden stool and nodded thoughtfully. "It's driving me crazy!" Emily told him, switching it off. "And if you think it sounds bad now, you ought to hear it when the volume's up, in the middle of a show. You can't tell if it's a trumpet or a foghorn." Morgan went to a revolving rack for a paintbrush, and he came back and took the recorder onto his lap and slowly, tenderly, brushed the plastic grooves that encased the speaker. Grams of something white flew out. "Sugar, perhaps. Or sand," he said. "Hmm." He pressed the button and listened again. The trumpet sound was clear and pure. He gave the machine back to Emily and returned to adding up the customer's purchases.

Like a household elf, he left behind him miraculously mended electrical cords, smooth-gliding windows, drip-less faucets, and toilet tanks hung with clever arrangements of coat-hanger wire to keep the water from running. "It must be wonderful," Emily told Bonny, "to have him with you all the time, fixing things," but Bonny just looked blank and said, "Who, Morgan?" Well, Bonny had her mind on other matters. She was helping one of her daughters through a difficult pregnancy. The baby was due in February but kept threatening to arrive now, in early November; the daughter had come home to lie flat on her back for the next three months. It was all Bonny could talk about. "When she sits up just a little, to straighten a pillow," she said, "I have this picture of the baby falling, just tumbling out of her like a penny out of a piggy-bank, you know? I say, 'Lizzie, honey, lie down this instant, please.' It's turning around my view of things. I used to think of pregnancy as getting something ready, growing something to finish it; now all I think of is holding something back that is going to come regardless. And Morgan! Well, you know Morgan. Always off somewhere, he really has no comprehension… At night he comes home and reads her stories from the operas. He's taken up an interest in the opera, has he told you? Such a crazy man… 'Don Giovanni encounters a statue and invites it home to supper,' he reads. 'Sounds like something you would do,* I tell him. He reads on, I believe he thinks that Liz is still a child, in need of bedtime stories; or maybe he just likes an excuse to read them himself-but for day-to-day things' For bringing trays to her and emptying bedpans!" Emily nodded gravely. She sympathized with Bonny: he must be exasperating to live with. But, after all, it wasn't Emily who had to live with him.

She recalled how odd he'd seemed when they first knew him-his hats and costumes, his pedantic, elderly style of speech. Now he seemed… not ordinary, exactly, but understandable. She was beginning to want to believe his assumption that events don't necessarily have a reason behind them. Last month she and Leon were sitting with him in Eunola's Restaurant when Morgan glanced out the window and said, "How funny, there's Lament. I thought he was dead." He didn't act very surprised. "That happens more and more often," he said cheerfully. "I often think I see, for instance, my mother's father, Grandfather Brindle, walking down the street, and he's been dead for forty years. I tell myself he might not really have died at all-just got tired of his old existence and left to start a new one without us. Who's to say it couldn't happen? Someplace there may be a whole little settlement-even a town, perhaps- full of people who supposedly died but really didn't. Have you thought of that?" Then Leon gave a tired hiss, the way he did when Emily said something silly. Well, why shouldn't there be such a town? What was so impossible about it? Emily sat straighter, and looked guiltily into her lap. "The world is a peculiar place," Morgan said. "Tottery old ladies, people you wouldn't trust to navigate a grocery cart, are heading two-ton cars in your direction at speeds of seventy miles per hour. Our lives depend on total strangers. So much lacks logic, or a proper sequence."

"Jesus," said Leon.

But Emily felt encouraged; everything looked brighter. (This was shortly after she'd come back from Taney. Morgan's kind of spaciousness sounded wonderful to her.) She smiled at him. He smiled back. He was wearing a furry Russian hat, now that the weather had turned. It sat on his head like a bear cub. He leaned across the table to Leon and told him, "Often I fall into despair. You may find that funny. I seem to be one of those people whose gloominess is comical. But to me it's very serious. I think, in ten thousand years, what will all this amount to? Our planet will have vanished by then. What's the point? I think, and I board the wrong bus. But when I'm happy, it's for no clearer reason. I imagine that I'm being very witty, I have everyone on my side, but probably that's not the case at all." Leon let out his breath and watched the waitress refilling their cups.

"Oh, I'm annoying you," Morgan said.

"No, you're not," Emily told him.

"Somehow, it appears I am. Leon? Am I annoying you?"

"Not at all," Leon said grimly.

"I tend to think," Morgan said, "that nothing real has ever happened to me, but when I look back I see that I'm wrong. My father died, I married, my wife and I raised seven human beings. My daughters had the usual number of accidents and tragedies; they grew up and married and gave birth, and some divorced. My sister has undergone two divorces, or terminations of marriage, at least, and my mother is aging and her memory isn't what it ought to be… but somehow it's as if this were all a story, just something that happened to somebody else. It's as if I'm watching from outside, mildly curious, thinking, So this is what kind of life it is, eh? You would suppose it wasn't really mine. You would suppose I'd planned on having other chances- second and third tries, the best two out of three. I can't seem to take it all seriously."

"Well, I for one have work to do," Leon said, rising.

But Emily told Morgan, "I know what you mean." I — wish I knew, was what she should have said, His manners were atrocious (she often thought); he smoked too much and suffered from a chronic cough that would surely be the death of him, ate too many sweets (and exposed a garble of black fillings whenever he opened his mouth), scattered ashes down his front, chewed his cuticles, picked his teeth, meddled with his beard, fidgeted, paced, scratched his stomach, hummed distractingly whenever it was someone else's turn to speak; he was not a temperate person. He wore rich men's hand-me-downs, stained and crumpled and poorly kept, and over them an olive-drab, bunchy nylon parka, its hood trimmed with something matted that might be monkey fur. He smelled permanently of stale tobacco. When he wore glasses, they were so fingerprinted and greasy you couldn't read his eyes. He was excitable and unpredictable, sometimes nearly manic, and while it was kind of him to manage their affairs the fact was that he could often become… well, presumptuous was the word-pushy, managerial, bending the Merediths to his conception of them, which was not remotely rooted in reality, taking too much for granted, assuming what he should not have assumed. He talked too much and too erratically, or grew stuffy and bored them with lengthy accounts of human-interest items from the paper, grandchildren's clever remarks, and Consumer Reports ratings; while at moments when he should have been sociable-when the Merediths had other guests, at their Halloween party, for instance- he would as likely as not clam up completely and stand around in some corner with his hands jammed deep in his pockets and a glum expression on his face. And his parties! Well, the less said, the better. Combining garbage men with philosophy professors, seating small children next to priests with hearing aids…

But once, passing a bookstore, Emily happened to notice a blown-up photo of the first successful powered flight, and the sight of Wilbur Wright poised on the sand at Kitty Hawk-capped and suited, strangely stylish, suspended forever in that tense, elated, ready position-reminded her for some reason of Morgan, and she suddenly felt that she had never given him full credit. And another time, when she switched on a cassette tape to see if it were the music for "Hansel and Gretel," she found that Morgan must have been playing with it, for Ms gruff, bearded voice leaped forth, disguised in a German accent. "Nu? Vhere is de button?" he said, and then she heard a Japanese "Ah sol" and two clicks, where he must have pressed the button off and on again. "Turn, te-tum," he said, singing tunelessly, rustling cellophane. There was the sound of a match being struck. He blew a long puff of air. "Naughty boy, Pinocchio!" he said in a chirping voice. "I see you've been untruthful again. Your nose has grown seven inches!" Then he gave his smoker's laugh, breathy and wheezing, "Heh, heh," descending into a cough. But Emily didn't laugh with him. She listened intently, with her forehead creased. She bent very close to the machine, unsmiling, trying to figure him out.

She and Leon were invited to the Percy School's Thanksgiving Festival, where they'd never been before. She wasn't sure what show they should put on. "Rapunzel"? "Thumbelina"? Late one afternoon, just a few days before the Festival, she took Rapunzel from her muslin bag and propped her on the kitchen table. Rapunzel had not been used for a while and had an unkempt, neglected look. Her long, long braids had grown frazzled. "I suppose I should make her another wig," Emily told Gina. Gina was doing her homework; all she said was, "Mmm." But then Leon came in and said, "Rapunzel? What's she doing here?"

"I thought we'd take her to the Festival."

"Last night you said we'd do 'Sleeping Beauty.' "

"I did?"

"I suggested 'Sleeping Beauty' and you said that would be fine."

"How could I have?" Emily asked. "We can't give 'Sleeping Beauty.' There are thirteen fairies. Not even counting the king, the queen, the princess…"

"I said, 'Emily, why not let's do something different for a change?' and you said, 'All right, Leon-' "

"But never 'Sleeping Beauty,' " Emily said.

"I said, 'How about "Sleeping Beauty"?' and you said, 'All right, Leon.' " He was making it up. Except that Leon never made things up. There was no way Emily could have held that conversation, not even half asleep. Why, if you counted the old woman at the spinning wheel, Prince Charming… It was out of the question. They couldn't begin to handle a cast of that size. She considered the possibility that he had discussed the subject with someone else, mistakenly. They always seemed to miss connections these days. They started every morning so courteous, so hopeful, but deteriorated rapidly and ended up, at night, sleeping with their backs to each other on the outermost edges of the bed.

She noticed that two vertical grooves had started to appear in Leon's cheeks. They were not so much lines as hollows, such as you would see in a man who habitually kept his jaw set too far forward.

Then he said, "How about taking Gina? She could work some of the fairies,"

"But it's on Wednesday afternoon," Emily said. "Gina would still be in school."

"Oh, I don't mind missing school," Gina said.

Emily suspected she was only trying to keep peace. Gina loved school, "Well, I mind," Emily told her.

"Oh, Mama."

"And thirteen fairies! Even if we owned that many, how would just one more pair of hands help run them all?"

"We could bring them on a few at a time, maybe," Leon said.

Emily started pacing around the table. 'Gina and Leon watched her. Gina chewed a pencil and swung her feet, but Leon stayed motionless. Then Emily wheeled on him and said, "Are you doing this on purpose?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I mean, is this supposed to prove something, Leon? Are you just trying to show me I'm… oh, set in my ways? You want me to say I refuse to give a play with eighteen puppets in it, and my daughter playing hooky, and that will mean I'm rigid, narrow-minded?"

"All I know is, I said, 'How about "Sleeping Beauty," Emily-' "

"You never did." Leon closed his mouth, shrugged, and walked out of the room. Emily looked over at Gina, who was watching, but Gina abruptly stopped chewing her pencil and buried herself in her homework.

Then Emily took her coat from the hook 'hi the hall and left the apartment, jabbing her arms into her sleeves as she stalked down the stairs. It was late enough so the smell of different suppers had begun to fill the stairwell: cabbage, green peppers, oil-stifling smells. Crafts Unlimited was already dark and dead-looking. She slammed out into the street. Twilight had drained the color from the buildings. An old woman paused on the corner to set down all her bundles and rearrange them. Emily swerved around her, keeping her fists knotted in her coat pockets. She crossed against a red light and walked very fast.

He was impossible. There was no hope for either of them. She had locked herself in permanently with someone she couldn't bear.

She passed a boy and girl who were standing in the center of the sidewalk, holding hands, the girl pivoting on her heels and giving the boy a shy smile. It was heartbreaking. She would have stopped to set them straight, but of course they wouldn't believe her; they imagined they were going to do everything differently. She met a child, some friend of Gina's. "Hello, Mrs. Meredith."

"Hello, urn, Polly," she said-motherly, matronly, indistinguishable from any other woman.

Sometimes she thought the trouble was, she and Leon were too well acquainted. The most innocent remark could call up such a string of associations, so many past slights and insults never quite settled or forgotten, merely smoothed over. They could no longer have a single uncomplicated feeling about each other.

Then she heard footsteps behind her. They kept coming. She slowed, and the corners of her mouth started turning up without her say-so, but when she looked back it was no one she knew-a man on his way to someplace in a hurry. He kept his face buried in his collar. She let him pass her. Then she looked back again. But no matter how long she stood watching, the sidewalk was empty.

She took a right on Meller Street and walked with more purpose. She crossed another street and turned left. Now there was a-stream of people bundled up, intent, rushing home to supper. It occurred to her that Cullen Hardware might be closed by now. She slowed, frowning. But no, its windows were still lit with that faded light that always seemed filmed by dust. She pushed through the door. Butkins was bent over a sheet of paper at the counter, "Has Morgan gone home?" she asked him.

Butkins straightened and passed a hand across his high forehead, "Oh. Mrs. Meredith," he said. (He was so determinedly formal, though she'd known him for years.) "No, he's up in his office," he said, She headed down an aisle of snow shovels and sidewalk salt, and climbed the steps at the rear. Every board whined beneath her feet. On the landing, Morgan's office seemed unusually still-no sawing, hammering, drilling, no flurry of wood chips. Morgan was lying on the maroon plush sofa. He was hatless, for once, and wore a satin-lapeled smoking jacket that very nearly matched the sofa. His hair looked flat and thin. His face was a pale glimmer in the dusk. "Morgan? Are you sick?" Emily asked. "I have a cold," he said.