Morgan's Passing

' "Oh, just a cold," she said, relieved. She took off her coat and laid it on the desk.

"Just a cold! How can you say that?" he asked her. His energy seemed to be returning. He sat up, indignant. "Do. you have any idea how I feel? My head is like a beachball. This morning I had a temperature of ninety-nine point nine, and last night it was a hundred and one. I lay awake all night, and had fever dreams."

"You can't do both," Emily said. "Lie awake, and dream as well."

"Why not?" he asked her.

He always had to throw his whole self into things — even into illness. His office looked like a hospital room. A Merck Manual lay open on the filing cabinet, and his desk was a jumble of medicines and cloudy drinking glasses. On the floor beside the couch were a bottle of cough syrup, a sticky teaspoon, and a cardboard box spilling papers. She bent to pick up one of the papers. It was a photograph of the oldest, homeliest washing machine she'd ever laid eyes on, the kind with a wringer attached. Model 504A, she read, can easily be connected to any existing… She replaced the paper and sat down in the swivel chair at the desk. Morgan sneezed.

"Maybe you ought to be home in bed," she told him.

"I can't rest at home. It's a madhouse there. Liz is still fiat on her back trying to hang on to that baby. She gets the wicker breakfast tray; I end up with the tin meat platter. And people have already started arriving for Thanksgiving." Butkins called something. Morgan said, "Eh?"

"I'll be going now, Mr. Gower."

"He ought to know I can't hear a thing with this cold," Morgan told Emily.

"He says he's going," Emily said. "Do you want me to help lock up?"

"Oh, thank you. It's true that I'm not myself." But he went on sitting there, blotting his nose with a handkerchief. Emily heard the front door shutting behind Butkins.

"When Butkins leaves the store," Morgan said, "I sometimes wonder if he dematerializes. Ever thought of that?" She smiled. He watched her soberly, not smiling himself. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"What? Nothing," Emily said.

"The tip of your nose is white."

"It's nothing."

"Don't lie to me," he said. "I've known you nine years. When the tip of your nose is white, something's wrong. It's Leon, I suppose."

"He thinks I'm narrow-minded," Emily said.

Morgan sneezed again.

"He thinks I'm rigid, but he's the one. He never tries out for plays now, and that gospel-troupe man is still after us but Leon won't even talk to him. I'm getting claustrophobic. I can't drive after dark any more because the space is too small-you know, the lighted space the car travels in. I think I must be going crazy from irritation, just from little petty nameless irritations. Then he says that I'm the one who's narrow." Morgan shook a cigarette from an unfamiliar green pack. "See? We'd better elope," he said.

"Do you think you ought to be smoking?"

"Oh, these are all right. They're menthol." He lit up and started coughing. He stumbled to his feet, as if reaching for more air, and wandered around the office, coughing and thumping his chest. Between gasps, he said, "Emily, you know I'm always here for you."

"You want some Robitussin, Morgan?" He shook his head, gave a final cough, and settled on his desktop. Medicine bottles clinked all around him. Emily wheeled her chair back slightly to allow him more room. His socks, she saw, were translucent black silk, and he wore pointy black patent-leather slippers that reminded her of Fred Astaire. He was sitting on her coat, rumpling it, but she decided not to point that out.

"I know you must find me laughable," he told her.

"Oh, well, I wouldn't say laughable, really-"

"But I'm serious," he said. "Let's stop fooling, Emily. I love you." He slid off his desk, disentangling himself with difficulty from her coat, which had somehow twisted itself around one of his legs. Emily stood up, (What did he have in mind?) He was, after all, a grown man, real, lean-bodied. The hunger with which he drew on his cigarette caused her to step behind her chair. But he went on past her. He was only pacing. He walked to the railing, looked over the darkened store below him, and walked back.

"Of course," he said, "I don't intend any harm to your marriage. I admire your marriage very much. I mean, in a sense, I love Leon as well, and Gina; the unit as a whole, in fact… Who is it I love? But you, Emily He flicked his ashes onto the floor. "I am fifty-one years old," he said. "You're what, twenty-nine or thirty. I could easily be your father. What a joke, eh? I must look ridiculous." Instead he looked sad and kind, and also exhausted. Emily took a step in his direction. He circled her, musing. "I think of you as an illness," he said. "Something recurrent, like malaria. I push the thought of you down, you see. Whole weeks go by… I imagine that I'm somehow deeper when I manage to overcome it. I feel stronger and wiser. I take some pleasure, then, in doing what I'm supposed to do. I carry the garbage out; I arrive at work on time…" She touched his arm. He dodged her and went on pacing, head lowered, puffing clouds of smoke.

"I persuade myself," he said, "that there is some virtue in the trivial, the commonplace. Ha! What a notion. I think of those things on TV, those man-in-the-street things where the ordinary triumphs. They stop some ordinary person and ask if he can sing a song, recite a poem… they stop a motorcycle gang. I've seen this! Black-leather motorcycle gang and ask, 'Can you sing all the words to "Some Enchanted Evening"?' And up these fellows start, dead serious, trying hard-I mean, fellows you would never expect had heard of 'Some Enchanted Evening.' They stand there with their arms around each other, switchblades poking out of their pockets, brass knuckles in their blue jeans, earnestly, sweetly singing…" He'd forgotten all about her. He was off on this track of his own, tearing back and forth across his office. Emily sat down on the couch and looked around her. There was a bulletin board on the wall above the filing cabinet, and it was covered with clippings and miscellaneous objects. An Adlai Stevenson button, a frowsy red feather, a snapshot of a bride, a blue silk rose… She imagined Morgan rushing in with them, the spoils of some mysterious, private war, and tacking them up, and chortling, and rushing out again. She was struck, all at once, by his separateness. He was absolutely unrelated to her. She would never really understand the smallest part of him.

"They stop this fat old lady," he was saying. "A mess! A disaster. Gray and puffy like some failed pastry, and layers of clothes that seem to have melted together. 'Can you sing "June Is Bustin' Out All Over"?' they ask, and she says, 'Certainly,' and starts right up, so obliging, with this shiny grin, and ends with her arms spread and this little stamp-stamp finish-" He bit down on his cigarette and stopped his pacing long enough to demonstrate-both hands outlining, one foot poised to stamp. "Just… because… it's JUNE!" he sang, and he stamped his foot."

"I love you too," she told him.

"JUNE!" he sang.

He paused. He took the cigarette from his mouth.

"Eh?" he said.

She smiled up at him.

He tugged his beard. He shot her a sidelong glance from under his eyebrows, and then, he dropped his cigarette and slowly, meditatively ground it out with his heel. When he sat on the edge of the couch, he still seemed to be thinking something over. When he bent to kiss her, he gave off a kind of shaggy warmth, like some furred animal, and he smelled of ashes and Mentholatum.

1977

1

Morgan's daughter Liz finally, finally had her baby, on the coldest night in the coldest February anyone could remember. It was Morgan who had to get up and drive her to the hospital. Then of course her husband, Chester, arrived from Tennessee, and when Liz was released from the hospital, she and Chester and the baby stayed on in her old room a few days till Liz was strong enough to travel. Meanwhile the house filled further, like something flooding upward from the basement. Amy and Jean kept stopping by with their children, and the twins drifted in from Charlottesville, and Molly and her family from New York, and by the time Kate arrived with her boyfriend, there was nowhere to put the boyfriend but the storeroom on the third floor, underneath the eaves. This was on a weekend. They'd be gone by Monday, Morgan reminded himself. He loved them all, he was crazy about them, but life was becoming a little difficult. The daughters who hadn't got along in the past didn't get along any better now. The new baby appeared to be the colicky type. And there was never any time to see Emily. "If we feed the children in the kitchen," Bonny said, counting on her fingers, "that makes sixteen grownups in the dining room, or fifteen if Lizzie wants a tray in bed, but then the mothers would have to keep running out to check on them, so maybe we should — feed the children early. But then the children would be tearing around like wild things while we were trying to eat, and I just remembered, Liz said her old college roommate was coming at seven-thirty, so we can't eat too late, or maybe she meant she was coining for supper; do you think so? And in that case we'd be seventeen at table, assuming Liz does not want a tray in bed, and naturally she wouldn't if her roommate's eating downstairs, but we only have service for sixteen; so we'll have to divide it up, say you and me and Brindle and your mother in the first shift and then the girls and their husbands and… oh, dear, David is Jewish, I think. Is it all right I'm serving ham?"

"Who's David?" Morgan asked.

"Katie's boyfriend, Morgan. Pay attention. This is really very simple." Then after supper one of the grandsons either broke a toe or didn't break a toe, no one could be sure, though everyone agreed that broken toes required no splints anyhow, so there wasn't much point in troubling a doctor outside office hours. Actually, Morgan would not have minded-driving the boy to the hospital, which by now he could have found in his sleep. He needed air. The living room was a sea of bodies-people reading, knitting, wrestling, quarreling, playing board games, poking the fire, lolling around, yawning, discussing politics. The shades had not been drawn, and the darkness pressing in made the house seem even murkier. Louisa's black Labrador, Harry, had chewed a Jiffy bag into little gray flecks all over the carpet.

Morgan went upstairs to his bedroom, but two toddler girls were standing at the bureau trying on Bonny's lipstick. "Out! Out!" he shouted. They lifted their smeared faces to him like tiny, elderly drunks, but they didn't obey. He left, slamming the door behind him. In the hall he was hit by the lingering smell of ham, which made him feel fat. He heard the baby fussing in an edgy voice that clawed at the small of his back. "It's too much," he told this what's-his-name, this David, a thin, studious young man who was just descending the third-floor stairs with a paperback book in his hand. David was too polite to say anything, but there was something about the way he fell in with Morgan, going down the next flight of stairs, that made Morgan feel he sympathized.

Bonny was walking the baby hi the entrance hall, which seemed to be the only space left. "Could you take Pammy for a while?" she asked.

"Pammy. Ah. The baby." He didn't want her, but Bonny looked stretched and gray with fatigue. He accepted the baby in a small, warm, wilted clump. No doubt she would spit all over the shoulder of his pinstriped, head-of-the-family suit that he always wore for these occasions. "Bonny, I think we may have carried things too far, this visit," he said.

"Now, Morgan, you always tell me that. Then the next day after they leave you wander through the house like a dog that's lost its puppies."

"Yes, but every visit there are more, you see," he said, "and they seem to hang around for a longer spell of time." Molly came through from the kitchen, carrying a bucket. "Christopher's thrown up," she said.

"How does the world strike you so far?" Morgan asked the baby.

The doorbell rang. Bonny said, "Who can that be?"

"It must be Liz's roommate."

"Morgan, honestly. Liz's roommate is sitting in the living room."

"She is?"

"She just had supper with us, Morgan." Morgan opened the door, one-handed, Emily stood waiting. She landed in his vision like a pale, starry flash of light He felt everything around him lift and brighten. "Oh," he told her. She smiled at him. She was holding a package tied with pink yarn, (In some illogical way, it seemed the gift was for him. It seemed she was the gift.) Then Bonny said, "Emily!" and stepped forward to kiss her. Emily looked at Morgan over Bonny's shoulder. Grave as a child, she drew away and turned to him and patted the baby's bare foot.

"She's beautiful," she said. She was gazing into his eyes.

The baby had been cranking up to cry again, but gave a sudden hiccup and fell silent-taken aback, maybe, by the icy wind from the door, or by the touch of Emily's cold hand. "Come on inside," Bonny told Emily. "You must be frozen! Did you drive? Have you ever seen such weather?" She led Emily into the living room. Morgan followed. He felt that Emily was the single point of stillness. Everyone milled around her while she stood upright at the center. There was something wonderfully prim about the way she offered her package to Liz, as if she weren't sure it would be accepted. But Liz was already exclaiming as she took it. (Motherhood had enlarged her, fuzzed her edges; she was a flurry of bathrobe and milky smells.) And of course she loved the lamb puppet inside. Everyone had to pass it around and try to work it. The lamb's quilted face was nuzzled to the baby's cheek. The baby started and batted the air with both fists. "Offer Emily a drink, will you?" Bonny told Morgan.

Morgan stooped to lay the baby in Louisa's lap. Louisa took her uncertainly, one gnarled hand still clutching a glass of port. "What is this?" she asked.

"It's a baby, Mother."

"Is it mine?" He reconsidered, took the baby back, and gave her to Brindle. Brindle was reading a mail-order catalog and passed her on to a twin. Throughout all this the baby looked better entertained than she had the whole day.

"She's the image of Liz," Emily said. "Isn't she? She's just like her. But with Chester's eyes."

"Emily, honey, where's Leon?" Bonny asked. "And where's Gina? Didn't she want to see the baby?"

"She has a science report due Monday. She's been working on it all weekend," Morgan imagined the hush in their apartment: the bare, clean living room, Gina concentrating on a single book.

"But Leon, at least," Bonny said. "You could have brought Leon."

"He wanted to watch this program on TV. If I waited till it was finished, the baby would have gone to bed, I figured." Two years ago the Merediths had bought a small television set. Morgan tended to forget that. Every time Emily referred to it, he mentally blinked; he felt himself having to make some disruptive inner adjustment. He went to the sideboard and poured her a glass of sherry-the only drink she'd ever been known to ask for. When he handed it to her, she was just slipping out of her coat. "Let me hang that up," he told her.

"Oh, I'll keep it. I can only stay a minute." She sat on the couch, talking to Bonny and Liz, and Morgan harumphed his way around the living room. He stepped over a Monopoly game, threw another log on the fire. He wound the clock on the mantel. He squatted, grunting, and picked up the discarded paper from Emily's gift and folded it carefully for future use. She must have decorated the paper herself, or bought it from Crafts Unlimited, It was patterned with a block print of little bells. He loved her old-time, small-town manners-her prompt gifts and cards and thank-you notes, her Christmas fruitcake, her unfailing observance of every official occasion. She was the most proper person he had ever met. (A while back, she had angled a night away from home-their one whole night together. They were so tired of snatched moments. She'd told Leon she was going to Virginia. She'd met Morgan at the Patrician Hotel and insisted on signing her true name in the register-her name and address and telephone number, all written with the pen held perpendicular to the page in a stiff, quaint manner that delighted him. He'd asked later, why not a false name? It wouldn't be right, she had said.) "I parked the car at the corner/' she was telling Bonny, "and just as I got out I saw this little family.

A man, a woman, two children. One of the children had fallen, he was crying, and I slowed down to check on him; you know how it is when you hear a child cry. Well, it was only a scrape or something, a scabby knee. But evidently the father was blind. He didn't seem to know what had happened. He just kept saying, 'What is it, Dorothy? Dorothy, what is it? Dorothy, what's gone wrong?" and Dorothy wouldn't answer.

She picked up the child that was crying and then she got the older one, really much too big a child to carry, hoisted on her other hip, and she was so swaddled around with winter coats and scarves and also she had a big purse and some huge kind of tote bag, I don'tr know, groceries or things; it was hard to tell by the streetlight. She was staggering, just tottering along. And he was still asking, 'What is it?' and feeling all around him, frantic. She said, 'Look, you wait here, I've got to go bring the car. Nicholas can't walk.* He said, 'Why can't he walk? For God's sake, what's happened?' and she got all exasperated and said, 'Just wait, I tell you; keep calm. Stay right here and I'll be back. Jason, you weigh a ton. Hang on to Mommy, Nicholas…' I wanted to tell the man, 'It's a scrape. It's nothing.' I wanted to tell the woman, 'Why bring the car? Why are you doing this? Or if you do have to bring the car, why not leave the children with him, and the bags and things? He can manage those. Why wade off like that, why? Why make things, oh, so ingrown, so twisted?'"

"Oh, when you see how other people have such handicaps," Bonny said, "you have to thank your stars our own lives are so easy. Don't you?" She'd missed the point. So had everyone else, Morgan supposed. They went on rattling their dice, clicking their needles. A log fell in the fire, sending out a shower of sparks. The dog stirred and half-heartedly thumped his tail. Brindle turned the pages of her catalog, with its garish, blurred illustrations. Amazing Soap Cradle! Morgan read. Remarkable Perma-Tweezers! Astounding Hair Trap Saves Costly Repair Bills! He lifted his eyes and met Emily's. She looked beautifully remote to him, so distinct from everyone else that she seemed smaller even than the children.

Then when she had to go, it was Bonny who told Morgan to walk her to the car, Operating on her own misguided version of events, Bonny said, "Now, make sure she locks her doors, Morgan. You heard what peculiar people are running around loose." Emily "let Morgan help her into her coat, and she waved good night to the others and kissed Bonny on the cheek. "Come back on a weekday," Bonny said. "Have lunch with me one day while Gina's at school. It's been so long since we've had lunch! What's become of you?" Emily didn't answer that.

She and Morgan went down the front steps, out to the street. It was such a cold night that there was something flinty about the air, and Morgan's heels rang as if on metal. He was bundled into his parka, with the hood up; but Emily's coat didn't look warm and, although she wore black tights, her papery little shoes were probably no protection at all. He took her hand. She had tiny, precise knuckles and a cluster of chilly fingers. "Tomorrow's Sunday," he said. "I guess you can't get away."

"No, I guess not."

"Maybe Monday."

"Maybe."

"Come out at suppertime, to buy milk or something. I'll stay on late at the store."

"But I've done that so often."

"He hasn't said anything, has he?"

"No." They dropped hands, separated by that "he"-a word that pointed out their furtiveness. In private, they no longer mentioned Leon. Morgan could not picture him without an inner twinge of sorrow and remorse. It seemed he liked Leon even better than before, and appreciated more fully the sober dignity of his high-cheekboned face, which was-come to think of it- admirably stoical, like an American Indian's. (Leon had a way of looking at Morgan, lately, with his long black eyes expressionless, lusterless, impassive.) But with Bonny, strangely enough, Morgan felt no guilt at all. He had sealed her off in another compartment. Coming home to her, he would be as pleased as ever by her easy chuckle and her heavy breasts and the absent-minded hugs she gave him as she slid past him in the choked and crowded corridors of their house.

He and Emily reached her car. She started into the street, to the driver's side, but he stopped her and drew her in to him. She smelled clear and fresh, like snow, and there was sherry on her breath. He kissed the curve of her jaw, just below one earlobe. "Morgan," she whispered, "someone will see." (She had an exaggerated fear of rumor; she imagined that people were more observant than they really were.) He felt he was trying to fill up on her. He kissed her mouth-a dry, sharp, wrinkled mouth, oddly touching-and unbuttoned her coat to slip his hands inside and circle her. Her body was so thin and pliant that it always seemed he was missing something, leaving part of it behind. "Stay longer," he said in her ear.

"I can't," she said, but she held on for a moment, and then she pulled away and ran to climb into her car. The headlights lit up. The engine coughed and started. Morgan stood watching after her, pinching his lower lip between his fingers and thinking of what he should have said: Come even if it's Sunday. Promise you'll come Monday. Why don't you wear gloves? Mornings, now, when I wake up, I have this springy, hopeful feeling, and I see that everything is worth it, after all.

As soon as the weather thawed, Emily started jogging. It was a strange thing for her to do, Morgan thought-not really her type of activity. She bought a pair of clumsy yellow running shoes and a pedometer that she strapped to her waist with an old leather belt of Leon's. Several times, when Morgan was on his way to see her, he caught sight of her approaching at the other end of the block, wearing her unrunner-like skirt from which her legs flew out like sticks. Her yellow feet seemed the biggest part of her. She always looked as if site just happened to be running-as if she had a bus to catch or had suddenly remembered a pot left boiling on the stove. Maybe it was her tripping gait, which lacked seriousness. Maybe it was the nip and swing of her skirt. As she drew near, she would call out, not breaking stride, "Be with you hi a minute! Once more around the block!" But when she stopped, finally, her pedometer would surprise him: four miles. Four and a half miles. Five. Always pressing her limits.

Once Morgan asked what she was running for, "I just am," she told him.

"I mean, your heart? Your figure? Your circulation? Are you training for a marathon?" Tin just running," she said.

"But why push yourself?"

"I'm not pushing myself." She was, though. After a run, there was something intense about her. She'd be glossy with sweat, strung up, a bundle of wiry muscles, vibrating. Her hair, loosened, flew out in an electric spray, each strand as crinkled as her amber-colored, crinkly hairpins. She was so different from other women that Morgan didn't know quite how to go about her. He was baffled and moved and fascinated, and he loved to slide his fingers down the two new, tight cords behind each of her knees. He couldn't imagine what it felt like to be Emily.

In the hardware store one afternoon he closed his eyes and said, "Tell me what you see. Be my seeing eye." She said, "A desk. A filing cabinet. A couch." Then she seemed to give up. He opened his eyes and found her looking helpless, wondering what he wanted of her. But that was all he wanted: her pure, plain view of things. Not that he would ever really possess it.

Morgan himself wasn't so fond of exercise. He hated exercise, to tell the truth. (Oh, to tell the truth, he was a much, much older man, and not in such very good condition.) And Leon had no interest in it either. Leon was one of those people who seem permanently athletic without effort. He was in fine shape, heavy and solid, sleekly muscled. He watched Emily's jogging distantly, with a tolerant expression on his face. "She's going about it all wrong," he told Morgan. "She's driving herself too hard."

"Ah! Didn't I say the same thing?"

"She has to be in charge so. Has to win." They were sitting on the front stoop of the apartment building on a sunny day in March. The weather felt tentative. After this bitter, shocking winter, people seemed to view spring as a trick. They went on wearing woolen clothes, and removed them piece by piece each day as they grew warmer. Bonny still had her boxwoods shrouded in burlap. She mourned for her camellia buds, which had been fooled into emerging and would surely drop off with the next freeze. But spring continued. The camellia buds opened out triumphantly, a vivid pink with full, bloused petals. Morgan and Leon sat in their shirtsleeves, almost warm enough, too lazy to go in for their jackets, and around the corner came Emily a little black butterfly of a person with yellow feet, far away. There was something about her running that seemed eternal. She was like the braided peasant girl hi a weatherhouse, traveling forever on her appointed path, rain or shine, endearingly steadfast. Morgan fell himself grow weightless with happiness, and he expanded in the sunlight and beamed at everything with equal love: at Leon and the spindly, striving trees and Emily jogging up and away and the seagull wheeling overhead, floating through the chimneys in a languid search for the harbor.

Leon's father had a heart attack, and Leon drove to Richmond to see him. Morgan visited Emily that evening. In the kitchen Gina was mixing a cake for her school's bake sale. She kept coming into the living room and asking where the vanilla was, or the sifter, or prancing around Morgan and checking all his pockets for the coughdrops she was fond of. Morgan was patient with her. He held his arms out passively while she searched him. Then when she returned to the kitchen, he and Emily made casual, artificial conversation. He might have lounged on the couch beside her in the old days, not giving it a thought, but now he was careful to sit some distance from her on a straight-backed chair. He cleared his throat and said, "Bonny told me to ask if you wanted to borrow her car."

"Oh, that's very nice of her. No, thank you."

"What if he's gone a long time? You might need it."

"No."

"What if he's gone through the weekend and it interferes with a puppet show?"

"I'll cancel it"

"Or I could come in Ms place. Why not? I'll come as Leon."

"I'll just cancel." They looked at each other. Emily seemed paler than usual. She kept smoothing her skirt, but when she saw him watching she stopped abruptly and folded her hands in her lap. The strain was affecting her, he supposed. She was not accustomed to deceit. Neither was he, really-not to this kind. He wished they could just tell everyone and have done with it. Leon would say, "I understand," and Morgan could move in and the four of them would be happy as larks, complete at last; they would laugh at how secretive they had been at first, how possessive, how selfish.

There was a blue tinge around Emily's eyes that gave her a raccoon look.

He stood up and said, "I have to go. Will you see me out?"

"Yes, certainly," Emily said, and she stood too, smoothing her skirt again with a nervous gesture that wasn't like her.

They went down the hall, passing the kitchen, where Emily poked her head in and said, "Gina, I'll be right back."

"Oh. Okay," Gina said. She was covered with flour and she looked harassed and distracted.

Morgan took Emily by the hand and led her out the door. But halfway down the stairs they heard footsteps coming up and he let go of her. It was Mrs. Apple in a bushy Peruvian poncho, briskly jingling her keys. "Oh! Emily. Dr. Morgan," she said. "I was just stopping in to ask about Leon's father. Is he going to be all right? Have you had any news?"

"Not so far," Emily said. "Leon said he'd: phone me tonight."

"Well, I know how anxious you must be." Morgan leaned against the banister, exasperated, waiting for this to end.

"Oh, but with modern medicine," Mrs. Apple said, "these things are nothing. A heart attack's so simple. Everything's replaceable; they'll give him a Teflon tube or a battery or something and he'll go on for years yet. Tell Leon he'll go on forever. Right, Dr. Morgan?"

"Right," said Morgan, staring at the ceiling.

If he inched his hand up the banister, he could just touch the back of Emily's skirt-a slink of cool, slippery cloth with a hint of warmth beneath it. His fingertips rested there, barely in contact. Mrs. Apple didn't notice. "If he's not home by tomorrow night," she was telling Emily, "you and Gina come for supper. Nothing fancy; you know I'm a vegetarian now…" When she finally let them go, Morgan strode rudely down the stairs and out the door without saying goodbye. Emily had to run to catch up with him. "I can't abide that woman," he said.

"I thought you liked her."

"She repeats herself." They walked fast, crossing the street and heading up the block toward Morgan's pickup. It was a cool, windy night with a white sky overhead. A few people were GUI' on the sidewalk-teenagers hanging around a lamppost, some women on their stoops. When Morgan reached the pickup, he took hold of the door handle and said, "Let's go someplace."

"I can't."

"Just a short way. Just to be alone."

"Gina will start wondering." He sagged against the door.

"I don't know what to do," she said.

"Do?" He looked at her. She stood with her arms folded, gazing at some fixed point across the street. "I'm thinking of leaving," she said. "Getting out." It must be Leon again. Morgan thought she'd stopped being bothered by all that, by whatever it was… he had never quite understood, although he'd tried. It seemed he kept missing some clue. Were they talking about the same marriage? Emily, what is your problem, exactly? He sometimes wanted to ask, but he didn't. He leaned against the pickup door and listened carefully, tilting his Panama hat forward over his eyes.

"I'm even packed," she said, "or half-packed. I've been packed for years. This morning I woke up and thought, 'Why don't I just leave, then? Wouldn't it be simpler?' These clothes are so foldable and non-crushable. They take up a single drawer and they'd fit with no trouble at all in the — suitcase in the closet. I still have this cosmetic kit that I bought when I was first married. I'm set! It seems 1 always knew that I might have to be. I've worked it so I could grab my bag up any time and go." Morgan was interested. "Yes, yes," he said, nodding to himself. "I see what you mean." Emily rattled on, like somebody clacking away in a fever. "When I jog, you know what I imagine? I imagine I'm in training for some emergency-a forced flight, a national disaster. It's comforting to know that I'm capable of running several miles, Nights, sometimes, I wake with a jolt, scared to death, heart just racing. Then I tell myself, 'Now, Emily, you can manage. You are very good at surviving. You can run five miles at a stretch, if you have to, and your suitcase can be ready in thirty seconds flat-"

"What you need is a backpack," Morgan said. "An Army surplus backpack to leave your hands free." Emily said, "I am seventeen days overdue."

"Seventeen days!" Morgan said.

He thought at first she was referring to some new jogging record. Then even after he understood, he seemed to have trouble absorbing it. (It was years since he and Bonny had had to concern themselves with such things.) "Think of that!" he said, stalling for time, nodding more rapidly.

"Of course, it could be a false alarm."

"Oh, yes, a false alarm."

"Will you please stop echoing?" It hit him all at once. He straightened and yanked the truck's handle, and the door swung out, flooding Emily's face with light. She looked sleepy and creased; her eyes had adjusted to the dark. But she met his gaze firmly. "Emily," he said, "what are you telling me?"

"What do you think I'm telling you?" He noticed that her face was pinched, as if from fear. He saw this suddenly from her viewpoint-seventeen days of waiting, not telling a soul. He shut the door again and laid an arm around her, heavily. "You should have mentioned this earlier," he said.

"I'm scared of what Leon will say."

"Yes, well…" He coughed. "Ah… will he realize? That is, will he realize that, ah, this is not his doing?"

"Of course he will," Emily said. "He does know how to count." Morgan thought this over-all that it revealed. He patted her shoulder and said, "Well, don't worry, Emily."

"Maybe it's nerves," Emily said.

"Oh, yes. Nerves." He saw that he was echoing again and he quickly covered it up. "These things are vicious circles. What's the word I want? Self-perpetuating. The greater the delay, "the more nervous you become, of course, and so the delay is even greater and you he-come even more-"

"I do believe in abortion," Emily said, "but I don't believe in it for me."

"Oh?" he said, He frowned.

"For who, then?" he asked.

"I mean, I don't think I could go through with the actual process, Morgan."

"Oh, yes. Well-"

"I just couldn't do it. I couldn't."

"Oh. Well, naturally. Of course not," he said. "No, naturally not." He noticed that he was still patting her-an automatic gesture that was beginning to make his palm feel numb. "We shouldn't stay out here, Emily," he said. "You'd better go in now."

"I thought I was so careful," she told him. "I don't understand it." Bonny used to say that-long, long ago in a younger, sunnier world. He had been through it all before. He was a grandfather several times over. He steered Emily back to her building at a halting, elderly pace. "Yes, well, yes, well/' he said, filling the silence. On her front steps he thought to say, "But we could always ask a doctor. Get some tests."

"You know I can't stand doctors. I hate to just… hand myself over," Emily said.

"Now, now, don't upset yourself. Why, tomorrow you may find this was all a mistake-nerves or a miscalculation. You'll see." He kissed her good night, and held the door while she slipped inside, and smiled at her through the glass. He was calm as a rock. And why shouldn't he be?

None of this was happening.

Now every day that passed meant another blank on the calendar, another whispered conversation on the phone or in Cullen Hardware. Leon was back from Richmond; they couldn't talk in the apartment. But Emily's sheeted eyes, when Morgan stopped in for a visit, told him all he cared to know.

A week went by, and then two weeks. "What's the matter with Emily?" Bonny asked. "Have you seen her? She never comes around any more." Morgan thought of answering her. Just simply answering her. "Well," Bonny might say, "these things happen, I suppose." Or maybe, airily, "Oh, yes, I guessed as much." (She was his oldest friend. She had known him over thirty years.) But he said nothing-or something offhand, inconsequential; nothing that mattered.

Once he met Emily by accident in the Quick-Save Grocery. She was choosing a can of soup. Instantly, without even a greeting, they fell upon her signs and symptoms. ("I'm not the slightest bit morning-sick. And I would be, don't you think? I was terribly sick with Gina.") In the middle of the aisle Morgan set his fingertips precisely within the neckline of her leotard and gave a clinical frown into space, but her breasts were as small and tight as ever. He dismayed himself by longing, suddenly, to take her away to his faded office couch again. But he didn't suggest it. No, if this turned out to be a false alarm, he promised, they would become the brightest,^ gayest, most aboveboard of companions-he and Emily and Leon, racketing along hi a merry threesome, and he and Emily would not so much as hold hands except to… what, to help each other out of boats, through, the windows of burning buildings.

He turned these thoughts over continually, plowing them under, digging them up again, but the odd part was that he still felt sublimely, serenely distant. He seemed to have grown removed from everything. Even his own house, his family, he suddenly saw from outside. Often he paused in a doorway, say the door to his room, and looked in as if he were judging someone else's life. It was not a bad place: the window open, curtains fluttering. He observed how lovely Bonny was when she fell into helpless laughter, which she was always doing. He noticed that when the house was full of women, there was a sound like water flowing in and out of the upstairs rooms. His mother and his sister spoke their chosen lines, which were as polished as the chorus of a poem. "This is the time when the artichokes begin, those spiky little leaves with a lemon-butter sauce…"

"If Robert Roberts had not taken all my energy, all the care I ever had to give…" One of the twins- Susan, who had never married-was home recovering from a bout of hepatitis, and she lay peacefully hi her old spool bed, knitting Morgan a beautiful long stocking cap from every color of scrap wool in the house. As for his other daughters-why, it began to seem he'd finally found a place in their eyes, basking among their clamorous children. What had been embarrassing in a father, it appeared, was lovably eccentric in a grandfather. Yes, and on second thought, even his work was not so terrible-his hardware store smelling of wood and machine oils, and Butkins perched on a stool behind the counter. Butkins! He was a skeletal, hay-colored man, with a nose so pointed that it seemed a clear drop hung perpetually at its tip. He had once been young-twenty-three when Uncle Ollie hired him. In Morgan's mind he'd stuck at that age forever after, but now Morgan took a closer look and found him nearing forty, bowed by his wife's ill health and the death of his only child. He seemed collapsed at the center, cavernous. His eyes were the palest, milkiest blue that Morgan had ever seen, celestially mild and accepting. Morgan felt he had wasted so much time, had nearly let this man slip through his fingers unnoticed. He took to hunkering on his office steps and bemusedly smoking cigarettes while he studied Butkins at work, till Butkins grew flustered and spilled coins all over the counter as he was making change.

Emily phoned him at the hardware store. "I'm calling from home," she said. "Leon's gone out."

"How are you?" Morgan asked her.

"Oh, well."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, but my back is starting to ache."

"Backache. Well, good! Yes, that's a good sign, I'm certain of it."

"Or else not," Emily said. "And anyhow, I may be just imagining things."

"No, no, how can you imagine a backache?"

"It's possible. There's nothing so strange about that."

"Well, what are you feeling, exactly?"

"I don't know, it may be all in my mind."

"Just tell me what you're feeling, please, Emily."

"Morgan, don't snap at me."

"Sweetheart, I wasn't snapping. Just tell me."

"You always get this… older tone of voice." He lit a cigarette. "Emily," he said.

"Well, I have a dragginess in my back, you see, a really tired dragged-outness. Do you think that's hopeful? I tried to jog this morning and I couldn't do more than a block. Right now I have to go to Gina's gymnastics meet, and I was thinking, 'I'll never make it, I know I'll never make it. All I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep.' Oh, but that's a terrible sign, sleepiness. I just remembered. It's the worst sign I could have."

"Nonsense," Morgan told her. "You're feeling the strain, that's all. Why, naturally. You ought to get some rest, Emily."

"Well, maybe after Gina's meet."

"What time is that? I'll go in your place."

"Oh… in half an hour. But she's expecting me."

"I'll tell her you weren't feeling well and she'll have to take me instead."

"But I'm always letting her down, these days-"

"Emily, go to bed," he said. He hung up. He told Butkins he would be out for a while. Butkins nodded and went on alphabetizing packets of flower seeds. When all this was over, Morgan decided, he was really going to devote himself to the hardware store. He'd start bringing a sandwich and staying here through lunch hour, even. He set his beret at a steeper angle and went to find his pickup.

Gina's school was in the northern part of town- St. Andrew's, a girls' school that Leon's parents had selected for her. They were paying her tuition and had the right to choose, Morgan supposed. Still, he didn't think much of St. Andrew's. He'd have preferred her to stay on at public school. He thought Leon's parents were a bad influence: last Christmas they'd bought Emily an electric mixer. If Emily didn't watch out, that apartment would be as overstuffed as anyone's. These things could creep up on you, Morgan told her.

He turned down the shady driveway of St. Andrew's and parked beside a school bus. The gym must be the building straight ahead. He recognized the hollow sound that voices take on in a gymnasium. He crossed the playground, tucking in his workshirt and combing his beard with his fingers, hoping he made a good showing. (Gina was ten years old now-the age when you had to start watching your step. Any little thing could mortify her.) Evidently, he was late; the meet had already begun. In acres of echoing hardwood that smelled of varnish, little girls were teetering on a high chrome frame. Morgan crossed to the bleachers and settled himself on the lowest level, alongside a scattering of mothers. All the mothers wore blazers and blond, pageboy haircuts. He tried to picture Emily sitting here with them. He hunched forward in his seat and looked around for Gina. It took a moment (there were swarms of little girls in blue leotards and swarms in lavender, and he didn't even know which color was St. Andrew's), but he spotted her, finally. She was the one hi blue with the cloud of curls. Her face was still round and opulent-he would know those heavy-lidded eyes anywhere, and that pale, delicate mouth-but her body had become a stick, the narrow hips pathetically high above legs so long and thin that he could see the workings of her kneecaps when she walked. She came over to him., her bare toes gripping the floor. Ordinarily she would hug him, but hi front of friends she never did. "Where's Mama?" she asked him.

"She doesn't feel well."

"She never comes to anything any more," Gina said, but without much concern; her attention had already wandered elsewhere. She turned to study the girls on the other team. Then, "Morgan!" she screeched, turning on him, "You can't smoke in here!" She must have eyes in the back of her head. Morgan muttered, "Sorry," and replaced his cigarette in the pack.

"I could die of embarrassment," she said.

"Sorry, sweetheart."

"Are you giving me a ride home afterward?"

"I will if you like."

"That red-haired girl is Kitty Potts. I hate and despise her," Gina said. She ran off.

Morgan watched a series of girls perform, slow and trembling labors on a balance beam. Periodically, one would fall off and have to climb back on. Gina, when it was her turn, fell off twice. By the time she'd finished, Morgan's muscles ached; he'd been holding his breath. He remembered that his daughter Kate had also liked gymnastics, a few years back. She'd won several ribbons. In fact, he didn't believe he'd ever seen her fall or make an error, not once in any meet that he'd attended. He might have just forgotten, of course. But he was sure that her scores had been better. Gina's was a 4.3, read off by a bored-looking woman at a microphone. Coming here today was an unnatural act, Morgan decided. He really had nothing to do with any of this-the unfamiliar gym, the blazered mothers, someone else's daughter in a leotard. He wished he could get up and go back to the hardware store.

They'd finished with the balance beam and moved in the horse for vaulting. Morgan thought vaulting was a monotonous event to watch. He tucked his boot in off the floor so the girls could run past him, one by one, for two leaps each. Their arms and legs looked stretched with concentration, and their faces were comically intense. Gina raced by with her eyes tightly focused. She sprang up and cleared the horse, but then she did something wrong. Instead of landing upright, she fell in a twisted heap on the mat.

The mothers went rigid; one laid her needlepoint aside. Morgan leaped to his feet. He was certain Gina'd broken her neck. But no, she was all right, or nearly all right-in tears, but not seriously injured. She rose holding on to one wrist. A young woman in shorts, with a whistle dangling from her neck, bent over her to ask her questions. Gina answered inaudibly, blotting her tears on her sleeve.

The woman led her up the floor again for her second try, though Gina was shaking her head and sobbing. The woman was saying something in a coaxing, reasoning voice. She smoothed Gina's hair, speaking urgently. It was barbaric. Morgan hated sports. He sat down and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth with a trembling hand.

Gina shrugged the woman away, drew herself up, and narrowed her eyes at the horse. There was still a little catch in her breath. It was the loudest sound in the gym. Everyone leaned forward. Gina set her jaw and started running. By the time she passed Morgan she was a steely, pounding blur. She cleared the horse magnificently and landed in perfect form, with her arms raised high.

Morgan jumped up and flung away his cigarette. He galloped in her footsteps all the way to the horse, and veered around it to hug her. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. "Sweetheart, you were wonderful," he said. She said, "Oh, Morgan," and giggled. (She was unscathed; she had forgotten everything.) She slipped away from him to join her teammates. Morgan returned to his seat, beaming and wiping his eyes. "Wasn't she wonderful," he told the mothers. He blew his nose in his handkerchief. He felt suddenly joyous and expansive. What could he not accomplish? He was a wide, deep, powerful man, and it was time he took some action.

"How was the meet?" Emily asked Gina.

"It was all right"

"I'm sorry I couldn't be there. Morgan, do you want to come in?"

"Yes, thank you," Morgan said. Emily's appearance shocked him. Four days ago-the last time he'd seen her-she'd been a little drawn, yes, but now her skin had the yellow, cracked look of aged chinaware. "Emily, dear," he said. Emily slid her eyes sideways, reminding him of Gina, but he ignored her. He didn't even glance around for Leon, who might very well have returned by now. "I've come to take you to a doctor," he said.

"Is Mama really sick?" Gina asked.

"She needs a check-up. You stay here, Gina. We won't be long," He started hunting through the closet for a sweater or a jacket, something light, but all he found was Emily's winter coat. He took it off the hanger and helped her into it. She stood docilely while he buttoned the buttons.

"It's not that cold," Gina told him.

"We have to take good care of her." He led Emily out the door, closing it behind him. Halfway down the stairs, he heard the door swing open again. Gina hung over the banister. "Can I have that last banana?" she asked her mother.

Morgan said, "Yes. For God's sake. Anything you like." Emily was silent. Like someone truly ill, she made her way falteringly down the stairs.

In the truck she said, "Do we have an appointment?"

"We'll make one when we get there."

"Morgan, it takes weeks."

"Not today it won't," he said, pulling out of the parking space.

He drove to St. Paul Street, to Bonny's old obstetrician. He couldn't remember the number, but recalled very clearly the upholsterer's establishment next to it, and when he found a display window full of dusty velvet furniture, he stopped immediately, blocking an alley, and assisted Emily from the truck.

"How do you know this person?" Emily asked, looking around her at the gaunt, grimy buildings.

"He delivered all my daughters."

"Morgan!"

"What?"

"We can't go in there."

"Why not?" he asked.

"He knows you! I mean, we have to find someone else. We have to assume an. alias or something." Morgan took her elbow and guided her up the front steps, through the brass-trimmed door, and into a carpeted lobby. "Never mind all that," he told her, punching a button for the elevator. "This is no tune to play around, Emily." The elevator door slid open. A very old black man in a purple and gold uniform was sitting on a stool in the corner. Morgan hadn't realized that elevator men still existed. "Three," he said. He stepped in beside Emily. The silence in which they rode was dense and charged. Emily kept twisting her top button.

In the waiting room Morgan told the receptionist, "Morgan Gower. Emergency." The receptionist looked at Emily.

"We have to see Dr. Fogarty right away," Morgan said.

"Doctor is booked solid. Would you care to make an appointment?"

"It's an emergency, I tell you."

"What seems to be the trouble?"

"I'll discuss the trouble when I see Fogarty."

"Dr. Fogarty is very busy, sir. Perhaps if you leave a number where he can call when he's through with his patients-" Morgan stepped past her, around her desk, and through the oak door behind her. Often, biding his time in various waiting rooms, he had imagined doing this, but he had always assumed it would be necessary to wrestle the receptionist to the floor first. In fact the receptionist was a tiny, mousy girl with limp hair, and she didn't even stand up when he came through. He barreled down a short white corridor, into a room full of instruments, out again, and into another room. There an older, grayer Dr. Fogarty was seated behind a kidney-shaped desk, placing his fingertips neatly together, holding a discussion with a very young couple. The couple looked bashful and pleased. The girl was leaning forward, about to ask some earnest question. Rushed though he was, Morgan had time for a little spasm of pity. How shallow they seemed! Probably they thought this was the most significant moment in history. "Pardon me,*' Morgan told them. "I hate to interrupt this way."

"Mr. Gower," the doctor said, unsurprised.

"Ah! You remember me."

"How could one forget?"

"This is an emergency," Morgan said.

Dr. Fogarty let his chair rock forward at last, and parted his fingertips. "Is something wrong with Bonny?" he asked.

"No, no, it's Emily, someone else. This is Emily." He should have brought her in with him. What could he have been thinking of? He grabbed a hank of his hair. "It's terribly important. She's going to pieces, believes she's pregnant… Fogarty, if she's right, we need to know it now, this instant, not at two-fifteen next Tuesday or Wednesday or Friday."

"Mr. Gower, honestly," the doctor said. He sighed. "Why you have to take every stage of your life so much more to heart than ordinary people-" Immediately, Morgan felt reassured. So this was merely a stage, then! He turned to the couple and said, "I beg your pardon. Have I told you that? I'm sorry to seem so rude." The couple stared at him with blank, unformed faces.

"Show her into the room next door," the doctor said. *T11 be with you in a minute."

"Oh, thank you, Fogarty," Morgan said.

He felt a rush of affection for the man-his benign expression and his puffy gray mustache. It must be wonderful to view events so matter-of-factly. Maybe Morgan ought to shave his beard off and wear only a mustache. He stumbled out of the office, tentatively fingering his whiskers. He went back to the waiting room, where Emily was sitting alert, ready to fly, on a loveseat next to a pear-shaped woman in a smock. The receptionist didn't even glance at him. (Maybe this happened every day.) He beckoned to Emily, and she rose and came toward him. He led her to the room beside the doctor's office, the one that was full of equipment, and he helped her take her coat off. There was no place to hang it. He folded it into a wrinkled, oval bundle and set it on an enameled cabinet. "Didn't I tell you?" he asked Emily. "Everything will be all right. I'll take care of you, sweetheart." Emily stood looking at him.

"Sit down," he told her. He steered her toward the examining table. She sat gingerly on the foot of it, smoothing her skirt around her.

Then Morgan started circling the room. All the instruments struck him as gruesome-tongs and pincers. What a world of innards women lived in! He shook his head. In one corner he found a hospital scale. The last person to stand on it had weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds. "Mercy," he said disapprovingly. He slid the weights to the left. They felt solid and authoritative. "Ahem, young lady," he told Emily, "if you'll just hop on our scales, please…"

"I should have called a clinic. Family Planning or something," Emily said, as if to herself. "I meant to, every day, but I don't know, lately it seems I've got locked in place, frozen."

"Would you like a johnny coat?" Morgan asked, rooting through the cabinet. "Look here, they're pink. Just slip into our Schiaparelli johnny coat, Miss…" Emily didn't respond. She was holding herself tense, with her hands clasped tightly in her lap.

Morgan went over and touched her arm. "Emily. Don't worry," he said, "This will all work out. Emily? Am I getting on your nerves? Do you want me to leave? Yes, I'll go outside and wait for you, that's a good idea… Emily, don't feel bad." She still didn't answer.

He left and went to sit in the waiting room. He chose a chair in the corner, as far as possible from the pear-shaped woman. Even so, she seemed to be pressing in on him. She gave off a swelling, insistent warmth, although she pretended not to and seemed immersed in a Baby Talk magazine. Morgan let his head drop and covered his eyes with his fingers. Everything was a bluff. He knew the truth by now, however long it might take Fogarty to prove it scientifically. This was it. This was it.

He was done for.

The woman flipped the pages of her magazine, and car horns honked in the distance, and the telephone rang with a muted, purring sound. Morgan raised his head and stared at the oak door. He began to see the situation from another angle. An assignment had been given Mm. Someone's life, a small set of lives, had been placed in the palm of his hand. Maybe he would never have any more purpose than this: to accept the assignment gracefully, lovingly, and do the best he could with it.

On Wednesday morning, after Emily heard from the doctor, Morgan came home from work to tell Bonny. Bonny had launched one of her spring-cleaning attacks that always made the house seem untidier than before. Morgan could smell the dust flying the minute he walked in. She was in the dining room, wearing a kerchief over her hair, washing down her ancestors' portraits with Spic and Span. Various scowling gentlemen in nineteenth-century frockcoats leaned against the chairs, Bonny was not intimidated. She scrubbed their faces with the same brisk energy she had once shown in scrubbing her children. Morgan stood in the doorway watching.

She wrung out a sponge, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, and then looked over at him. "Morgan? What is it?" she asked.

He said, "Emily's pregnant." In the second it took her to absorb it, he saw he had worded it wrong. She could easily misunderstand. She might say, "Why, isn't that nice! They must be thrilled." But no, she understood, all right. Her mouth dropped open. She took on a white, opaque look. She reared back and threw the sponge at him. It skimmed his cheekbone, wet and warm and rough like something alive. Partly, he was impressed. (What a woman! Direct as some kind of electrical charge-undiffused.) But he had never been able to tolerate being hit in the face. He felt bitterly, gloriously angry, and free. He turned and walked out of the house.

At the hardware store he pushed past Butkins and went to use the phone. "Emily? Can you talk?" he asked.

"Yes. Leon's loading the car."

"Well, I told her," he said.

"What'd she say?"

"Nothing, in fact."

"Was she very angry?"

"No. Yes. I don't know," he said. "Emily, have you talked to Leon?"

"No. I'm going to."

"When?"

"Soon," she said. "Right now we've got a show at the library. I have to wait till after it's done."

"Well, I don't know why," Morgan said.

"Maybe I could tell him tonight."

"Tonight? Sweetheart, you'd better get this over with," he said.

"It's just… you know, just a matter of finding the proper moment." After he had hung up, Morgan had a sudden fear that she would never tell Leon. He pictured having to sleep on the couch in his office forever-a man unkempt, un-cared for. Like someone who had fallen between two stepping stones in a river, he'd let go of Bonny without yet being certain of Emily. He could not imagine life as a bachelor.

He sat a while drumming his fingers on his desk. He had an urge to write letters. But whom would he write to? He wondered how he could get hold of his cardboard file box, Surely Bonny wouldn't do anything rash with it, would she? — burn it? set it out for the trashmen? She knew how much it meant to him.

Finally he rose and went downstairs. Butkins was outdoors, helping a customer. In the spring they put some of their merchandise on the sidewalk-flats of seedlings, giant bags of mulch and fertilizer. Morgan peered through the window and saw Butkins tenderly fitting a marigold plant into a brown paper bag. He turned away and went into the stockroom. There were cartons of garden tools here, waiting to be unpacked. He opened one and pulled out trowels, dozens of them, which he heaped on the floor. He opened others and pulled out hedge trimmers, then cultivators, then shiny-toothed wheels for edging lawns. The stockroom became a tangle of chrome blades and painted wooden handles.

Butkins came in and said, "Um…" Morgan surveyed all he had unpacked. Then he pried up another flap and reached for a pair of grass shears in a cardboard sheath.

Butkins said, "Mr. Gower, there's some things of yours on the sidewalk:"

"Things?"

"It looks like… belongings. Clothing. Also a dog."

"How'd they get there?"

"Mrs. Gower, ah, dumped them there."

" Morgan straightened up and followed Butkins through the store and out onto the sidewalk, which was a sea of hats and clothes. An elderly woman with a cane was trying on a pith helmet. Harry, who had never been much of a watchdog, was smiling at her with his tongue hanging out. He was sitting on Morgan's red-and-white-striped, 'twas-the-night-before-Christmas nightshirt. "I'm sorry, Mr. Gower, I didn't know what to do," Butkins said. "It happened so fast. She threw them, like. Knocked over half the seedlings."

"Yes, but why the dog?" Morgan asked.

"Pardon me?"

"The dog, the dog. It's not my dog; it's my mother's.

I never even liked him. He dribbles. Why did she send me the dog?"

"Well, and there's some articles of clothing here too, you see."

"It isn't fair. I don't want a dog."

"There's hats and nightwear."

"Come back here!" Morgan told the old lady. She was making off with his pith helmet. She wore it tipped too far forward-had no idea of the proper angle. "Come back with my helmet!" he cried. She walked faster and faster, as if on little wheels. Considering her age and her cane, Morgan had to marvel.

"Shall I go after her?" Butkins asked.

"No, help me bring in the rest of the things. People will be all over them," Morgan said. Butkins stooped for an armload of clothing, but stopped when Morgan told him, "She won't even know to dampen it, I'll bet."

"Pardon?"

"You dampen the helmet in hot weather. It cools your head by the process of evaporation."

"Shall I go after her, then?"

"No, no."

"Are these boots yours too?"

"Everything," said Morgan. He scooped up an armload of hats and followed Butkins inside. "Actually, I don't think she brought nearly my whole wardrobe, though. Where's my gnome hat? Where's my sombrero?"

"Are you and Mrs. Gower experiencing some difficulty?" Butkins said.

"Not at all. Why do you ask?" said Morgan. He went outside for another armload, chasing away two small boys who were interested in a sheepskin vest. "Come in, Harry," he told the dog. "Butkins, we'll need those cartons from the stockroom." They made a total of six trips. Bonny had not, in fact, forgotten anything. Morgan found his file box under a cloak. He found his gnome hat and sombrero, and also a Napoleonic tricorne he'd forgotten all about.

He blew the dust off and tried it on. He checked his reflection in the nickel surface of the cash register. Under the cocked brim his bearded face peered out hollowly. He was sickened. What a farce! How ridiculous! He had always, even in infancy, been a fool for hats. As a child, he'd worn firemen's helmets and Indian headdresses to bed at night. This was no better. He tore the tricorne off and flung it on the floor.

"Oh!" said Butkins. "It's an antique."

"I hate it."

"You don't want to get it dusty," Butkins said, picking it up.

"It's already dusty. You can have it." Butkins did not seem to want it, however. He gave the hat a doubtful, troubled look, and placed it cautiously on the counter beside a flashlight display.

At lunchtime, when Morgan was alone hi the store, he dialed the Merediths' number again. Nobody answered. They must not have returned from their puppet show. He let the phone ring on and on. Harry lay at his feet, his nose between his paws, rolling his eyes at Morgan.

When Butkins came "back, Morgan decided not to go to lunch himself. He wasn't hungry. And he didn't climb the stairs to his office, but stayed close to Butkins, drawing some kind of comfort from him, mutely watching the dull, homely transactions that took place: the purchasing of paint, nails, a screen-door hook, the return of a defective light switch. He noticed that when Butkins had no customers, he fell into a kind of trance; he gazed into space, sighing, and absently fingered an earlobe. Perhaps he was thinking of his-wife. She had some slow, creeping illness; Morgan couldn't think of the name. Something to do with her muscles. She was no longer able to walk. And the child who died had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. Morgan remembered the funeral. He wondered how Butkins endured it, where he found the strength to open his eyes every morning and dress himself and force down a little food and set out for the hardware store. He must feel nothing but contempt for Morgan. But when Butkins came out of his trance and found Morgan's eyes on him, he only gave his gentle smile. "Why don't you leave?" Morgan asked. "Take the afternoon off."

"But it's not my day; it's Wednesday."

"Leave anyhow."

"Oh, I might as well stay." It was lucky he did, as it happened. Around three o'clock Jim showed up-Amy's husband. From the focused way he strode in the door, wearing his slim gray lawyer suit, carrying his calfskin briefcase, Morgan guessed that he'd been sent by Bonny. Plainly, he knew everything. His face was pulled downward by long, severe lines, "Where can we talk?" he asked Morgan.

"Why, my office, I suppose."

"Let's go there." Jim led the way himself. Morgan followed. He didn't so much walk as drift, dimly touching T-squares and hammers as he passed down the aisle. He wondered, idly, how Jim would handle this. What had ever prepared him for such a discussion? He trailed Jim up the stairs. Jim took a seat in Morgan's swivel chair. Morgan had to sit on the couch, like an applicant for something. (They must teach you this strategy in law school.) Morgan prinked the creases of his trousers and smiled at Jim, showing all his teeth, Jim didn't smile back.

"Well, I heard the news," he told Morgan. "Yes, I figured you had."

"It's not clear to anyone what you plan to do next, Morgan."

"Do?"

"What steps you plan to take."

"Ah." Jim waited. Morgan went on smiling at him.

"Morgan?"

"Well, for the moment I may have to sleep on this couch," Morgan said. "It's not the best of beds, as you see-damn buttons, tufting, whatever you want to call it-"

"I'm not inquiring about your mattress, Morgan. I'm asking what arrangements you contemplate."

"Arrangements?"

"Have you told this other woman you're assuming responsibility?"

"She's not 'this other woman,' Jim. She's Emily. You've met Emily. And of course I'm assuming responsibility."

"Morgan, I don't like to be tactless-"

"Then don't be," Morgan said.

Jim sat back in the swivel chair, studying him. He had his briefcase set across his knees like a desk. Although he had long ago traded his crew-neck sweaters for suits, he had never lost his mannequin look. Even now that he was graying, Morgan saw, he was doing it in a mannequin's style-handsome silvery wings " above his ears. Jim tapped his briefcase thoughtfully. "You realize," he told Morgan, "that you're not the first man this has happened to."

"Oh? I'm not?"

"Well, I fail to see what's so humorous, Morgan."

"No, no… What I mean to say is, I am the first man it's happened to in quite this way. Or rather, it's the first time it's happened to me, and to her. There's no point trying to fit us on a graph." Jim sighed. "Let's start all over," he said.

"Certainly."

"You know, Morgan, that Bonny was pretty upset this morning when she heard the news. But it's not the end of the world, I told her. It's not what you'd break up a marriage for. Is it? Get a hold of yourself, I told her. Oh, sure, she'll take a while forgiving you. It's a shock to everybody-Amy, Jean… they might be hard on you at the moment…" Morgan nodded, trying to look reasonable. Of course, he should have realized the girls would be involved. They were loyal to Bonny, naturally, and it must look terrible, what he'd done. Oh, lie didn't blame them at all. But still he felt a little hurt, picturing Bonny surrounded by clucking daughters. How they rushed to scenes of tragedy and melodrama! He was reminded of Susan, their most difficult child, who had spent a tiresome, extended adolescence bickering with Bonny. She would drive home from college for weekends and he'd barely have unloaded the laundry from her car when she'd be storming out again. "I'll never come back here, never." I was an idiot to try."

"But what happened?" he would ask, astonished. She would yank her laundry bag from his hands and flounce into her car and grind the engine. "And how did it happen so fast?" he would call after her departing taillights. Spontaneous combustion! Flint rocks, miraculously magnetized! They rushed to battle with such enthusiasm.

It was just as well he was done with all that. In his mind Emily shone as clear and still as a pool.

"I plan to ask Bonny for a divorce," he told Jim, "Morgan. Christ, Morgan. Look, man…"

"I don't suppose you give discounts to family members, do you?"

"I don't handle divorces."

"Oh."

"And anyhow… Christ, Morgan, what's got into you? You're throwing everything away!"

"I've already told Emily," Morgan said, "that I'll take care of her and Gina and the baby. She could never just stay with her husband; she's said that And she has nobody else to rely on. See, I realize I'm behaving badly, Jim, but this is one of those times when, whatever you do, it's bad from one angle and good from another. I mean, I can't be virtuous on every front in this situation. Can I?"

"Listen," Jim said. He hunched forward over his briefcase, as if about to pass on a secret. "Life is not always X-rated, Morgan."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I mean, generally it's more like… oh, a low R, I'd say: part bed, part grocery-shopping. You don't want to ruin everything for the sake of, ah…" Morgan fished for his cigarettes. What did Jim imagine? Life with Bonny, after all, was not exactly rated G. He decided not to say that out loud. He offered Jim a cigarette. Jim, who didn't smoke, took one and waited for Morgan to strike a match. "See, what I'm getting at-" he said.

"I know what you're getting at," said Morgan, "but you miss the point. I've already made my mind up, Jim. I'm not going to change it, I have this feeling of… swerving, like seizing my boat and wrenching it around, steering it off course and onto a whole new, unlikely one. It's not bad! It's not a bad feeling! You aren't going to make me give it up!" And as he spoke, he felt drunk with his own decisiveness. He could hardly wait for Jim to leave, so that he could go find Emily and settle this forever.

He had trouble coaxing the dog into the pickup. Harry didn't like traveling. He had to be dragged across the sidewalk with his nails scritching. But Morgan couldn't leave him behind, because Butkins had begun to sneeze. He heaved Harry into the truck, tucked his tail in, and closed the door. Then he went back to the store to tell Butkins, "Pm not sure how long I'll be. If I'm still away by closing time, lock up, will you? And don't let anyone bother my clothes." It was the time of afternoon when children were coming home from school-neat little grade-schoolers with satchels, junior-high boys in baggy Army jackets and girls with plastic combs sticking out of their jeans pockets. Teenagers milled at intersections, making driving difficult.

On Crosswell Street the mothers were waiting on their stoops. They shaded their eyes and discussed the weather, the Orioles, what they planned to serve for supper. A fat woman in a dress like a petticoat had opened a can of beer and was passing it around. Burnished lavender pigeons clustered at a sack of spilled popcorn.

Morgan pushed through the door of the Crafts Unlimited building and pulled Harry after him. Harry hung back, whining, but Morgan hauled him up the stairs with a length of rope he'd borrowed from the store. He knocked on the Merediths' door. Emily opened it. "Good, you're back," he said. He walked in.

"Morgan? What are you doing here?"

"I've come to get this settled." He paused in the hall and glanced around for Leon. "Where is he?"

"He's picking up Gina. It's our turn for the carpool."

"Have you told him yet?"

"No." He turned to look at her. She was twisting her hands. "I can't," she said. "I'm scared. You don't know what a temper he has."

"Emily… Sit, Harry, Sit, dammit. Emily, what are you saying?" he asked. It cost him some effort, but he said, "Would you rather not do this at all? Rather go on the way you were, work it out somehow-the two of you? You should say so now, Emily, if that's true. Just tell me what you want of me."

"I want to be with you," she said. "I wish we could just run away."

"Ah," he said. He was immediately taken with the idea. "Yes! Run away. No luggage, no fixed destination… Will Gina come willingly, do you think?"

"I don't know," she said. She swallowed. "It's telling him face to face I mind. Maybe I could go to a pay phone and call him up, tell him from a distance."

"Well, that's a thought."

"Or you could tell him."

"Me?"

"You could… get behind a table or something where he couldn't hit you and then break the news to him."

"I preferred the running-away plan," Morgan said.

"But taking Gina: I couldn't do that to Leon. And I'd never leave her behind."

"All right," Morgan said. "I'll tell him myself." He assumed it was all arranged then, and went into the kitchen to sit down and wait for Leon. But Emily floated after him, still twisting her hands, and said, "Oh, no, what am I thinking of? I don't know why I'm such a coward. Of course I have to be the one to do it. Go away and come back later, Morgan."

"That's impossible," he said. "I'm lugging this dog around."

"I feel sick," she said.

"Dear heart. This is really very simple," he told her. "We're all adults. We're reasonable beings. What do you imagine will happen? Could I have some water for Harry, please?" She took a bowl from the cupboard and filled it at the sink. She set the water in front of Harry, who started slurping it up. Then she shifted her purse from a chair and sat next to Morgan. "If we ran away, I would have to find some other kind of work," she said. "Something I couldn't be traced by. It's so easy to track down a puppet show, at any fair or church bazaar."

"Well, then. You can't run away," he said. "What would you do without your puppets?"

"I could manage fine without my puppets," she said.

"No, no…"

"I never planned to stick with them, forever."

"Oh, of course you'll stick with them, Emily, dear." She slumped in her chair, massaging her temples with her fingertips. Harry raised his head and shook water all over the kitchen floor. "Mind your manners," Morgan told him. He reached across the table for Emily's purse. It had an interesting weight to it. Most days, all it contained was keys and her billfold, but whenever she had a puppet show she loaded it with carefully selected equipment. You could live in the wilderness for a month off that purse, Morgan thought. He rummaged through it and came up with a ball of string, a roll of Scotch tape, her Swiss Army knife, a pair of needle-nosed pliers.. "What's this for? And this?" he kept asking.

"I think I'm going to throw up," she said.

"What's this little Baggie full of Cheerios?"

"They're the doughnuts for Red Riding Hood's basket."

"Oh, yes. Oh, excellent." He began to feel very happy. He piled everything back in the purse and started humming, patting his knees, looking around for something new. "How's your burner doing?" he asked.

"It's fine."

"See? I told you all it needed was unclogging." He hummed a few more bars. Then he said, "Don't you want to know why I have this dog with me?" She didn't seem to. He continued anyway. "Bonny brought him. Threw everything out on the sidewalk: hats, clothes, vacuum-cleaner instructions… and Harry. But Harry belongs to Mother. Mother's always owned a dog. This must be her tenth or twentieth. Who did she have when you first met us-Elmer? Lucille? She pays them no mind at all, never looks at them, it's me who walks them… but she's always had one, so she always will. That's the way they work things, back home. The extras! The stacks of unnecessary extras! This Harry, you see, is Sonny's revenge. Oh, she knew what she was doing, all right. Cluttering up my leaving, even. I'm surprised she didn't bring the cat as well."

"I always did want a dog." Emily said unexpectedly, "Eh?"

"But I couldn't because my mother was allergic."

"Yes, that's Butkins' trouble, too. Allergic."

"Butkins?" They heard the front door open. Emily sat up straighter. "Mama," said Gina, bouncing in, "guess what I got on my science test. Hello, Morgan, what's Harry doing here?"

"I brought him in for a drink. Well, Miss Gina," Morgan said. "What'd you get on your science test?"

"A-plus," she said. She twined an arm around him and looked down at Harry, who was scratching fleas. Leon walked in.

"Hello, Morgan," he said.

"Leon."

"Taking the afternoon off?"

"Yes, well, there's something I want to discuss with you."

"What's that?" asked Leon.

Morgan glanced over at Gina. She had dropped her arm but continued to stand there, so close that he could smell her salty, summery smell of fresh sweat and chewing gum. He scratched his head. "Leon/' he said, "would you like to… come walk the dog with me?"

"Do what?"

"Walk the dog." Leon looked at the dog, who grinned.

"Don't if you don't want to," Morgan said. "Do you want to?"

"All right, Morgan," Leon said calmly.

Morgan stood up, tucking in his shirt, adjusting his Panama hat. They went out of the apartment together. Just as Leon was closing the door, Gina called, "Wait!"

"What's the matter?"

"You forgot the dog."

"Oh," Morgan said. He shuffled back to the door and took Harry's rope from her.

They went down the stairs and outside. The rush-hour traffic was just beginning. Trucks rumbled past, and cars with single, determined drivers, and taxis carrying ladies submerged hi packages. It took a while to cross the street. Then they started north. Leon led, with both hands loose at his sides in an easy, unquestioning way that gave Morgan a sudden pang.

"Well," Morgan said.

He waited for Harry to sniff out the proper spot in the grass. Leon straightened a sign that had pivoted on its post, "I find myself in a little difficulty," Morgan said.

"Say it, Morgan."

"It's Emily." They walked on. Morgan thought of the old women in the neighborhood where he had grown up-how they never announced a death straightforwardly but prepared the bereaved first, " planting tiny seeds of news and allowing them to sprout on their own, no faster than the bereaved could handle. Emily's name, he hoped, might be such a seed all by itself. Certainly Leon seemed to be turning it over in his mind. They stopped and waited for a light to change, although no cars were coming.

"Emily and I…" Morgan said.

They crossed the street. They avoided a shattered whiskey flask.

"She's expecting a child," Morgan said.

Leon didn't slow down. Morgan cast a sideways glance at him and found his face unmoved. "You knew all along," Morgan said.

"No," said Leon. "Not about the child."

"But the rest of it, you knew."

"Yes."

"Well… how?"

"Osmosis, maybe," Leon said. "Something or other."

"You have to believe me," Morgan said. "I never intended any harm. I really can't explain… I mean, day by day, you see, it didn't seem so terrible. But I know how it must appear from outside."

"What are your plans?" Leon asked politely.

They paused, facing each other, with Harry on his haunches between them. If Leon was going to get violent, now was the time. But he didn't, of course. Morgan had never understood why Emily thought he would. She must have been mistaken, suffered one of those funny blind spots married people often have. Or maybe she was talking about an earlier Leon; that possibility occurred to him. Morgan gazed off, seeing the last of someone he'd been hearing about for years. He sighed and pulled his nose.

"Well," he said, "if you're willing, I suppose I'll move her and Gina to some other town. I don't know."

"Do you want the apartment?"

"Your apartment?"

"Do you want the puppets, the equipment, the job? Want me to be the one to go?"

"Oh, well, no, I couldn't ask-"

"Really, what do I need with all that? Take it," Leon said.

"Oh."

"Take it."

"Well, if you're sure," said Morgan.

Then Leon said, "Aah, God, Morgan." He spoke wearily, disgustedly, but not with any sharpness.

Even so, Morgan flinched.

When they resumed walking, it was in the other direction, homeward. They passed Eunola's Restaurant, where the three of them had so often stopped for coffee, Then they came to the laundromat where Morgan had stood, countless times, watching Leon and Emily setting out with their baby. Perhaps, he thought, this was not so much a' love story as a friendship story, and he felt saddened by Leon's patient, trudging figure beside him. (Where was that thin, olive-skinned boy parting the curtains to call for a doctor? Would Emily ever again, in the future, wear that tilted look she had first tossed Morgan?) They crossed the street and entered the building. When Morgan saw the long stairway, he believed, for a moment, that he might not make it. He was exhausted, and his chest ached. But a strange thing happened. As he climbed, it seemed his spirits climbed too. He speeded up, leaving Leon behind, taking steps two at a time. He wanted to get on with this. He wanted to begin his new life.

1978

Cinderella was dancing with the Prince, nestled in his brown felt arms, gliding across the walnut desk in somebody's father's study. Over her head, blue satin swoops hung from the folding wooden stage. There was a scrim at the rear that didn't entirely conceal the puppeteers, but the audience was too entranced to notice. It was a very young audience-mostly four-year-olds. The birthday child wore a gilt paper crown that resembled the Prince's.

"Mercy," Cinderella said, "it must be getting late. I'm sure it's nearly midnight."

"Midnight? So what?" the Prince asked in his gruff, rasping voice. "We'll dance till dawn. We'll dance all the next day!"

"Um, well, but you see, Your Majesty…" They were stalling for time. Where was the clock? "The clock!" Emily whispered. Gina was off in a trance again, holding the cassette recorder just beyond Emily's reach and gazing dreamily at the audience. Joshua, who was supposed to be in Gina's care, was creeping under the desk. He gurgled to himself and dribbled on a nest of extension cords.

"Ding, ding!" Emily called in desperation. "Ding, ding, ding…" Somewhere in there she lost count, but she trusted that the audience wouldn't catch it. She could hardly wait to whisk Cinderella off the stage so she could rescue the baby. The instant the curtain was lowered, she snatched him up. He wore only a grayish diaper. His solid little trunk, barrel-shaped, was faintly sticky, and he trailed a silvery, cool thread of spit down the back of Emily's hand.

"Gina, honey," Emily said, "I thought you were going to watch him for me. 'Oh, I can manage both' you told me, 'mind Josh and do the props too…'" Morgan, meanwhile, was digging through a pile of objects on the floor. "Fireplace, fireplace," he muttered. "What's happened to the fireplace?"

"Gina had it last." But Gina was busy with thoughts of her own. Eleven years old, tall and secretive, languorous from half a summer of lolling about in the heat, she sat on a leather chair with her knees cocked and hummed the waltz that Cinderella had been dancing to. "Here we are/' Morgan said. He straightened, puffing, and held up the cardboard fireplace. Joshua reached for it, but Morgan was too quick for him. He set the fireplace in one corner of the stage. "Now, where's the stepmother?" he asked Emily. "Where are the sisters?"

"Gina? Take Josh for me, will you?" Gina unfolded herself with a sigh and accepted the baby. He grabbed at her shiny hair clasp. He grabbed at Morgan's sailor cap, hi passing, but was borne away to the leather chair. "Tra la la," Gina sang, rocking him too hard.

Out front, the audience grew hushed and expectant. Emily slipped off Cinderella's ballgown, exposing her burlap rags. She held her up, ready to go, and smiled at Morgan. He nodded and raised the curtain."You know that Kate's home," Bonny said, "Oh, really?" said Emily. "I hadn't heard." She switched the receiver to her other ear. She was trying to stir a stew and talk on the phone simultaneously. "Has something happened?" she asked.

Instead of answering, Bonny let out a long, thin breath. All of a sudden, this late in her life, Bonny had taken up smoking. She didn't smoke very competently and always seemed to be inhaling or exhaling at exactly the wrong moment, leaving her listeners suspended. She had also developed other new habits. She continually joined strange philosophical societies and women's groups, began unpromising jobs and then resigned almost at once, and telephoned Emily at any hour she pleased. Although she never mentioned Morgan without biting his name off, she seemed not to blame Emily at all. This was a relief, of course, but it was also a little insulting. (It implied that Emily was powerless, without a will of her own.) When Bonny paused for one of her cigarette breaths, Emily pictured the humming wires that linked them. Bonny was knotted into her line, knotted into her whole existence. Even if Emily were to hang up, Benny's phone would still connect hers because Bonny was the one who'd placed the call.

"She has this back," Bonny said. "This sprained or twisted back, or something. The way it came about was, she and her husband were involved in a head-on collision. David walked away from it without a scratch, but Kate did something to her back."

"What happened to the other driver?" Emily asked.

"What other driver?"

"The driver of the other car."

"David was the driver of the other car."

"You mean she collided with her husband?"

"Yes, and got this injured back, this sprained or twisted back; I'm telling you," Bonny said. "Oh, now I see."

"Well, I wanted her to come home because I can nurse her better than David could. Heaven knows I've had the practice. And besides that, I've been attending these lectures on a whole different kind of nutrition, a diet that heals any sort of ailment. It works on physical problems, mental problems, depressions, infections, tumors… You may not remember this, but last winter, when Molly was mugged in Buffalo while she was taking her son to the emergency room…" Salting the stew, tasting it, listening with half an ear, Emily considered the Gowers' accidents: their wrecks, falls, and fires, all those events through which they slid so blithely. To Emily, who had no accidents whatsoever, their lives sounded catastrophic; but to Bonny, sheer custom must have leveled everything out. Emily tried to imagine reaching such a stage. She couldn't begin to.

Even now that Morgan's household had moved to hers, she thought-his mother and sister and dog, his hats and suits-she herself didn't seem to have been transformed in any way at all.

Emily took Gina shopping. Gina was going to Camp Hopalong in Virginia for the month of August, at Leon's parents' expense. It was time she learned to live away from home, they said. Emily was uneasy about it. She didn't like doing without Gina for so long, and also she was afraid that in Virginia, near Leon and his parents, Gina would somehow he stolen from her- turned against her. They would point out that Emily was immoral or deceitful or irresponsible, oh, any number of things, she just knew it; and Emily would not be there to explain herself. But she didn't tell Gina that. Instead, she said, "You're so young, you might get lonesome. Remember how Morgan had to bring you back from Randallstown? You couldn't make it through a simple slumber party."

"Oh, Mama. That was at Kitty Potts's house and she had that group of girls that didn't like me."

"Still," Emily said.

"Everybody goes to camp. I'm not a baby any more." Emily hoisted Joshua on her hip and walked Gina down Crosswell Street to Merger Street, to Poor John's Basement. Holding Camp Hopalong's checklist in her free hand, she informed the salesgirl that they needed six pairs of white shorts. Six pairs! It was lucky Leon's parents were paying for the clothes as well. Gina took a stack of shorts into a curtained booth, while Emily waited outside. (Recently, Gina'd turned modest.) The salesgirl, awkward on her platform sandals as some frail, hoofed animal, hung in the background, clutching one elbow. Joshua started fussing and leaning out of Emily's arms, but she couldn't put him down because the floor was filthy-blackened boards permanently stamped with scraps of foil and gray disks of chewing gum. Joshua grew heavier and heavier. Emily called, "Gina? Honey, hurry, please. It's nearly lunchtime." There was no answer. She knocked on the wall near the booth and then drew the curtain aside. Gina was standing before a full-length mirror, wearing a stained T-shirt and a pair of blinding white shorts with cardboard tags dangling from a belt loop. Tears rolled down her face. She seemed to be watching them in the mirror. "Honey!" Emily said. "What's wrong?"

"I look like a freak," Gina said.

"Oh, Gina."

"I'm fat."

"Fat! You're skin and bones."

"Look: great bobbles of fat. Obese! And my knees don't match."

"That's ridiculous," Emily said. She looked to the salesgirl for help. "Isn't that ridiculous?'* The salesgirl blew a perfect pink bubble.

"I wish I were dead," Gina said.

"Honey, would you rather not go to camp?" Gina sniffed and said, "No, I'll go,"

"You don't have to, you know."

"I want to."

"They can't force you."

"I want to," Gina said. "I want to get out of here! And never come back. I'm sick of everything always so messy, babies and diapers and those two old ladies taking up my bedroom. You just let them move right in on me. You acted glad to have them. Nobody else at St. Andrew's sleeps on a fold-out bed. And that dog that snores, and Morgan's stupid tools and things anyplace I want to sit. I'm fed up with him! Does he have to wear those hats all the time? Does he have to make such a show of himself?"

"Why, Gina!" Emily said.

But later, when they'd walked home, it was to Morgan that Gina acted friendliest. At lunch she kept giggling with him, and then flashing some kind of challenge at Emily with her flat, black, unreadable eyes.

"I'm much more free than I used to be," Bonny said. "I mean, he used to color my world so. You know how that is?" There was something wrong with the telephone. Other lines seemed to be spilling into it. Emily heard faint laughter and a burble of distant voices. "No," she said, worming a screwdriver out of Joshua's grasp. "No, not exactly."

"Oh, he was so tiring! Everything had to be larger than life, extravagant, grandiloquent. Take my brother, Billy. You've met Billy. He hasn't been lucky in marriage. He's had three wives. But three is not an impossible number. I mean, the way Morgan always spoke of him, you'd think Billy'd been married dozens of times, *Now, who is his wife at the moment?' he'd ask. 'Do I know her name?' And somehow we all fell in with it. Even Billy, it seemed, came to believe that he'd had this great, long train of wives. He made jokes about it, acted like a drop-in guest at his own weddings. There! See? I'm talking as if he had a wedding every week." Something was boiling over on the stove. At the kitchen table Brindle slouched in her long, white, dingy bathrobe, laying out her Tarot cards, and when she heard the hiss of steam she looked up, but she did nothing about it, Emily stepped over the dog, stretched to the end of her cord, and took the pan off the stove and set it in the sink. "Bonny, I'm cooking supper now," she said.

"He only feels he's real when he's in other people's eyes," Bonny told her, "Things have to be viewed. All alone in the bathroom, he's no one. That's why his family doesn't count. They tend not to see him; you know how families are. So he has to go out and find himself in someone else's line of vision. Oh, how wearing he was. I blame it on his mother. She expected so much of himespecially after his father died. "You can be anything,' she told him. He must have misunderstood. He thought she said, 'You can be everything.'"

"He's wonderful with Gina," Emily said.

"I feel sorry for you," Bonny said.

Trunks and dress forms, a rusty birdcage, barrels containing a gigantic cup-and-saucer collection muffled in straw, stacks of National Geographies, Brindle's catalogs, Louisa's autograph book, a samovar, a carton of records, a lady's bicycle, a wicker elephant. And this was only what lined the hall, which had once been as empty as a tunnel. In the living room: two sets of encyclopedias (one general, one medical), a spread-out jigsaw puzzle, Louisa's platform rocker with several yards of knitting coiled in the seat, and half a dozen runny watercolors of peaches, pears, and grapes-products of an art course Brindle had taken twenty years ago, back when she was married to her first husband. The husband himself (pink-faced, with a windowpane of white painted on his bald skull like the shine on an apple) hung in a curly gold frame above a bookcase full of manuals.

In Gina's room there was almost NO floor-just a field of bureaus and unmade beds. In Morgan's and Emily's room were more bureaus (two and a half for Morgan alone), the bed, the sewing machine, Gina's old, yellowed crib with the tattered eyelet canopy they'd brought up from the basement for Joshua, and puppets dangling from the picture rails, since there wasn't space in the closet. The closet held Morgan's clothing. There, also, no floor was evident-no air, even. Step inside and you'd be impacted in a solid, felty darkness, faintly smelling of mothballs.

Emily loved it all.

She began to understand why Morgan's daughters kept coming home when they had to convalesce from something. You could draw vitality from mere objects, evidently-from the seething souvenirs of dozens of lives raced through at full throttle. Morgan's mother and sister (both, in their ways, annoying, demanding, querulous women) troubled her not a bit, because they weren't hers. They were too foreign to be hers. Foreign: that was the word. All she touched, dusted, and edged around was part of a foreign country, mysterious and exotic. She drew in deep breaths, as if trying to taste the difference in the air. She was fascinated by her son, who did not seem really, truly her own, though she loved him immeasurably. At meals, she tended to keep silent and to watch everybody with a small, pleased smile. At night in bed, she never lost her surprise at finding herself alongside this bearded man, this completely other person. She felt drawn to him by something far outside herself-by strings that pulled her, by ropes. Waking in the dark, she rolled toward him with a kind of stunned sensation. She was conscious of their two surfaces meeting noticeably: oil and water.

But Morgan said they had to move to some place bigger-a place with more bathrooms, at least. He was sorry, he said, to be putting her through this. He knew she had never bargained on having his female relatives dumped at her door like stray cats. (Actually, they had climbed the stairs themselves, wearing gloves, but it was true that Bonny'd just dropped them off in front of the building,) He would like, he said, a house in the country-a large, bare farmhouse. However, there was the matter of money. Even keeping this apartment was difficult, nowadays. Mrs. Apple had raised the rent. She was not as friendly as she'd once been, Emily thought. And Morgan had lost his job. Emily felt that this was spitefulness on Bonny's part. Why should Morgan's private arrangements affect his work at Cullen Hardware? But Morgan said that was Uncle Ollie's doing, not Bonny's. In fact, he said, Uncle Ollie had seemed to leap at the opportunity-had rushed to the store as soon as he heard the news and flung Morgan's wardrobe onto the sidewalk, the selfsame wardrobe Bonny had flung there earlier. (People were so eager to get rid of his clothes, Morgan mourned.) It so happened that Morgan was out, at the time. He returned to find Uncle Ollie planted in front of the store, rising from a billow of hats. "Is it true what they tell me?"

"Yes."

"Then you're fired." If he had said, "No," Morgan claimed, Uncle Ollie would no doubt have been disappointed. He must have been waiting all along for such a chance.

Now Morgan had no steady employment, although a couple of times a week he clerked at the plumbing-supply store down the street. Emily tried to make more and more puppets, faster and faster, working late at night while Josh was asleep. Whenever Morgan saw her bent over her sewing machine, he apologized. He said, "You look like someone in an ad for unions." What he didn't understand was that Emily felt happier now than she'd ever felt before. She rattled inside this new life like… well, like Morgan in one of his hats, she supposed. But he went on apologizing. He couldn't believe she didn't mind.

When the time arrived for Leon to drive to Baltimore and pick up Gina, Emily cleaned the apartment so he wouldn't imagine she had let things go. But she didn't try to straighten the clutter, or get Brindle out of her bathrobe. And she didn't hide Morgan's collection of outdated Esso maps or his latest woodworking project — a formless bundle of two-by-fours leaning in a corner of the bathroom.

It was a Saturday he was coming. Saturday morning she got up early, not that she had any choice: Joshua woke her. She took him out to the kitchen and fed him, balancing his warm, damp weight in her lap. He waved his fists and pedaled with his feet as soon as he saw his cereal. His four lower teeth, as crisp as grains of rice, clicked against the spoon. He was a beautiful baby-dark and creamy-skinned, like Gina, but easier than she had been. Leon had never met him.

Gina came in, wearing her new white shorts and a Camp Hopalong T-shirt. "How come you're up so early?" Emily asked her.

"Brindle's snoring."

"Don't you want to save your new clothes till later in the day? You'll get them dirty before Daddy sees them."

"He said he was starting out at crack of dawn."

"Oh." Emily looked at the kitchen clock. She wiped Joshua's mouth with a corner of his bib, scooped him up, and carried him off to his bath.

When she brought him back to the bedroom, dripping wet, Morgan was standing in front of a bureau threading a belt through his jeans. He was humming a polka. Then he stopped. Emily looked up from toweling the baby and found Morgan watching her in the mirror, his eyes darkened and sobered by a black felt cowboy hat. "What's wrong?" she asked Mm.

"Should I go?"

"Go where?"

"When he comes, I mean. Do you want me to leave you two alone?"

"No. Please. I need you to stay," she said.

Morgan saw Bonny all the time. Any dull moment Bonny had, it seemed, she would come unload something new on them-some belonginng of Brindle's or Louisa's, some piece of furniture she'd suddenly decided was really more Morgan's than hers. But Emily hadn't seen Leon since the day he moved out. Even at Christmas she'd just put Gina on a Greyhound bus.

Morgan came over to stand opposite her. Lately, he had started wearing rimless, octagonal spectacles-real ones, not mere window glass. They gave him an expression of kindness and patience. He said, "I'll do whatever you want, Emily."

"I have to have you here. I can't go through it without you."

"All right." His calm unnerved her.

"Not that this means anything to me," she said. "His coming: I don't care."

"No."

"It couldn't matter less."

"I understand." He went back to the bureau and slipped his cigarettes into his pocket. On the bed Joshua flapped his arms and suddenly crowed.

Louisa and Brindle were having breakfast in the kitchen while Emily did the dishes. Louisa chewed her toast in a mincing way. Brindle sat with her chin in her fist and stirred her coffee aimlessly. "Last night I dreamed of Horace," she told Emily. Horace was her first husband. "He said, 'Brindle, what'd you do with my socks?' I felt terrible. It seems I'd thrown them out. I said, 'Oh, why, Horace, they're right where they belong. Just use your eyes,' I said. Then, while he was looking again, I went running to the garbage cans and dug through everything, hunting."

"I dreamed of chili," Louisa said. "My, Morgan used to love chili. He was one of those boys that, you know, likes to hang over pots in the kitchen. Always took an interest in what I cooked. Many's the time he asked me exactly what I'd put in something. 'Why do you brown the onions first?' Or, 'Which is better in spaghetti-tomato sauce or tomato paste?'

'Neither one,' I'd tell him, 'you cook down your own tomatoes, from scratch.' Well, that's another story. Chili is what he loved best. But nowadays, I don't know, I make this extra-special effort to talk about food with him the way he used to enjoy so much and it seems he doesn't take the same interest. Hardly bothers to answer. Hardly even listens, it sometimes seems to me. But of course I may be wrong." The doorbell rang. Emily turned from the sink and looked at Brindle.

"Who could that be?" Brindle asked her.

"I don't know."

"Maybe it's Leon."

"But this is so early," Emily said.

"Well, for heaven's sake, go see. You always act so wooden" Brindle said.

Emily wiped her hands and went to the door. Leon stood there in a new gray suit. He looked more polished than she'd remembered-his hair cut very close to his head, his skin dark and sleek-and he'd grown an oversized, droopy mustache. Emily had seen so many of those mustaches, exactly the same shape, on young men with briefcases, lawyers, executives. She could almost believe it was a borrowed mustache, pasted on. "Leon?" she said.

"Hello, Emily." She took a step back. (She hadn't had time to get into her shoes yet.) "Is Gina ready?" he asked her, "Yes, I think so."' Then Morgan appeared, swinging Joshua in the air, saying, "Ups-a-daisy…" He stopped and said, "Why, Leon,"

"Hello, Morgan."

"Won't you come in?"

"I can't stay," Leon said, but he stepped inside. Emily shut the door behind him. After a moment's hesitation, Leon followed Morgan down the hall to the living room.

Emily wished Morgan would take his spectacles off. Wearing them, he looked humble and domesticated. He held the baby slung over his shoulder and padded around the room, arranging seats. "Here, I'll just move these, find someplace for this knitting… Well, ah, shall I call Gina?"

"If you will, please." Morgan gave Emily a look she couldn't read and left, still carrying Josh.

"So!" Leon said. "How are you, Leon?" Emily asked him.

"I'm fine."

"You look well."

"You do too." There was a pause.

"You know I'm taking courses at the college," Leon said.

"Oh, really?"

"Yes, when I get my degree, I'm enrolling in this training program at Dad's bank. It's interesting work, when you see it up close. You'd think it would be dull, but it's really very interesting."

"That's nice," Emily said.

"So I'd like to keep Gina year-round."

"You what?"

"Now, Emily, don't be hasty. Think this over. I've got a good apartment, stable life, schools nearby. I promise she could visit you any time she liked; I swear it. Emily, you have your son now. You have another child."

"Gina stays with me," Emily said. Her teeth were chattering.

"What kind of set-up is this for her?"

"It's a fine set-up." Louisa appeared in the door, navigating the floorboards as if they lay under a foot of water. She made her way to Leon and said, "You're sitting in my chair."

"Oh, sorry," Leon said.

He stood up. Emily said, "Um, do you remember Leon, Mother Gower?"

"Yes, perfectly," she said, Leon moved to the sofa next to Emily. He smelled of aftershave-not his own smell at all. Louisa arranged herself in her rocker and spread her skirt all around her.

Then Brindle entered with a large, cracked mug of coffee. She sat on the end of the sofa nearest Leon. "So what have you been up to?" she asked him.

"I'm planning to enroll in this training program at the bank."

"Oh, yes. Training program. Well, things have been in a fine pickle here, I can tell you."

"Brindle-" Emily said.

But Louisa suddenly interrupted. "And where's your pretty wife?" she asked Leon.

"Excuse me?"

"Where's that girl that used to bring me fruitcake?" Leon looked at Emily.

"I'll go check on Gina," Emily said.

Even the flow of her skirt, as she walked out, seemed strained.

She found Gina and Morgan standing together among the unmade beds, fiddling with Gina's camp flashlight. "Naturally it doesn't work," Morgan was saying. He tipped the batteries into the palm of his hand. "You've filled it wrong."

"How could I have filled it wrong? I used what they said to use, D size."

"Yes, but the poles are not reversed, Gina."

"What poles?"

"You know that batteries are polarized," he said.

Gina said, "No… but I have to leave now, Morgan." She was jittery and restless, twisting a piece of hair, glancing toward the hall. Joshua had worked his way to a bureau and was tugging a satin strap from a drawer. Morgan noticed none of this. He was busy with the flashlight.

"Observe," he said, holding up a battery. "A plus sign on the positive end. A minus sign on the negative end." Emily felt wrenched by his elderly, instructive tone of voice. She came over to him and kissed his cheek.

"Never mind that," she said to him. Gina, run say hello to Daddy. "We're making Leon wait. We'll fix your flashlight." Gina left-released, like something snapped from a rubber band. Morgan shook his head and dropped the batteries in place. "Eleven years old and doesn't know batteries are polarized," he said. "How will she manage in the modern world?"

"Morgan," she said, just above a whisper. "Leon wants to keep her."

"Keep her? Hand me that cap, please."

"You don't think he can make us give her up or anything, do you? In some court of law?"

"Nonsense," Morgan said, screwing the flashlight shut.

"Morgan, I don't understand how he and I switched sides here," Emily said. "He used to claim I tied him down. Now all at once he's going to work in a bank, and I lead an unstable life, he says."

"How can you have a more stable life than ours?" Morgan asked her. He dropped the flashlight into Gina's trunk, closed the lid, and snapped the locks down.

But in the living room it seemed that everyone was conspiring to seem as unstable as possible. Gina was sitting on Leon's knee, which she had not done in years. She looked awkward and precarious. Louisa was knitting her eternal scarf. The dog was asking to go out: he paced up and down in front of Leon, his toenails clicking on the floor. And Brindle had somehow worked around to her favorite subject: Horace. "I never thought we had much in common because he was a gardening man, always messing in his garden.

He owned the rowhouse next to ours when I was just a girl. We only had a little puddle of a yard, but he had a coiner lot, with roses and azaleas out back and some of those tiny fruit trees that you flatten to a wall-tortured, I always said. I never liked that kind of tree. And a real little fountain with a statue of a goddess. Well, not real; just plaster or something, but still. He came out every morning and watered his flowers, pruned his shrubs if the merest sprig was out of place. I laughed at him for that. Then he brought me fresh-picked roses with the dew and the aphids still on them and I would say, 'Oh, thanks,' hardly caring, but if he didn't come I started noticing. What doesn't leave an empty space, if you're used to it and it goes? I think he was lonesome. He said 1 put him in mind of his plaster goddess, but that just made me laugh more. One of her bosoms was hanging out and she didn't have a nipple. And he was an old fellow, really, or seemed old then, these knotted white legs in gardening shorts…. but when he came calling he wore trousers, and a white shirt with one of those collars that spread wide, like wings. Oh, I sincerely miss him still," she said, "and I suppose I always will. Now it's me that's bringing roses, when I go to visit his grave."

"Everything's packed," Emily told Leon.

"Good." He set Gina aside and stood up.

"What's funniest," said Brindle, rising also, "is I'm older now than Horace was when he started courting me. Can you believe it?" Leon gave Emily a long, stem look. It was plain what he was saying: Call this a fit life for a child? As if she understood, Louisa lifted her chin and fixed him with a glare.

"Usually," she told him, "I would be in a much more elegant place, I want you to know." Then Brindle wheeled on her and said, "Oh, Mother, hush. Wouldn't every one of us? Be quiet." Still Emily wouldn't answer what Leon was asking her.

Leon and Morgan together carried everything out to the hall. Harry led the way, in a Joyful rush, and Gina followed with her sleeping bag. Emily had Joshua astride her hip. Already, so soon after his bath, he had a used look. Emily pressed her cheek to him and drew in his smell of milk and urine and baby powder. She trailed the others down the stairs, "I brought my father's Buick because I knew we'd need the luggage space," Leon was telling Morgan. "But maybe still I'll have to get a rope from somewhere. I'm not so sure the lid will close."

"You want to keep a rope in your car at all times,'* Morgan said. "Or better yet, one of those nylon-coated cords with hooks at either end. Simply go to any discount camping store, you see…" Leon set down his end of the trunk and rummaged through his pockets for the keys. The sun gave his hair a hard blue shine, like bits of coal. Emily studied him from the doorway. The odd thing was that although she no longer loved him, she had the feeling this was only another step in their marriage: his opening his father's Buick, Morgan helping him load the trunk in, Gina tossing her sleeping bag alongside. They were linked, in some ways, forever. He turned back to her and held out a hand. It was probably the first time in her life that she had shaken hands with him. "Emily" he said, "think about my suggestion."

"I can't," she said. She lifted the baby's weight. Barefoot, with one hip slung out, she felt countrified and disadvantaged.

"Just think about if. Promise." Instead of answering, she went over to the car and bent to kiss Gina through the window. "Honey, be careful," she said. "Have a good time. Call me if you're homesick; please call."

"I will."

"Come back," she said.

"I will, Mama." Emily stepped away from the car, and stood in the crook of Morgan's arm, smiling hard and holding Josh very close.

"I've decided to become a writer," Bonny said. "I've always had a bent in that direction. I'm writing a short story composed entirely of thirty years' worth of check stubs and budget-book entries."

"What kind of story would that make?" Emily wondered. She sat down in the nearest kitchen chair, holding the receiver to her ear.

"You'd be surprised at how a plot emerges. I mean, checks to the diaper service, then to the nursery schools, then to the grade schools… but it's sad to see things were so cheap once. It seems pathetic that I spent ten dollars and sixteen cents on groceries for the second week of August nineteen fifty-one. Did Morgan see my personal?"

"What personal?" Emily asked.

(Of course he'd seen it.) "My personal in the classified section. Don't tell me he doesn't read the papers any more."

"Oh, did you put a personal in?"

"It said, MORGAN G.: All is known. Didn't he see it?"

"Morgan can't be bothered reading every notice in the paper."

"I thought that would really get him," Bonny said. "How he would hate for all to be known!" She was right. He'd hated it. He'd said, "What does this mean? Of course I realize it must be Bonny's doing, but… do you think it might be someone else? No, of course it's Bonny. What does she mean, all is known? What's known? What is she talking about?"

"He likes to think he's going through life as a stranger," Bonny said.

Emily said, "I believe I hear the baby crying."

"Sometimes," Bonny said, "I wonder if there's even any point in blaming him. It's the way he is, right? It's in his genes, or… None of his family has ever seemed quite normal to me. I didn't know his father, of course, but what kind of man must he have been? Killing himself for no good reason. And his grandfather… and his great-great-uncle! Has he told you the story of his great-great-uncle? Uncle Owen, the black sheep. What would it take to be the black sheep of that family? You wonder. No one ever says, if they know. This was when the family was still m Wales. Uncle Owen was such an embarrassment, they sent him off to America. Sort of a… remittance man, is that what they call them?"

"I'd better hang up," Emily said.

"When they sailed into New York Harbor, Uncle Owen was so excited he started dancing all over the deck," Bonny said. "The sight of the Statue of Liberty drove him wild. He started jumping up and down too close to the railing. Then he fell overboard and drowned." She started laughing. "Do you believe it? This is a documented fact! It really happened!"

"Bonny, I have to go now."

"Drowned!" said Bonny. "What a man!" And she went on laughing and laughing, no doubt shaking her head and wiping her eyes, for as long as Emily Stood listening.

One night in August the doorbell rang with a stutter- two quick burrs before it fell silent. Morgan had gone out shopping. Emily thought he might be the one at the door, maybe too burdened to manage his key. But when she answered, she found a young, pale, fat boy, sweating heavily, teetering on dainty feet and holding a bouquet of red carnations. He said, "Mrs. Meredith?"

"Yes."

"Will the dog bite?" She didn't want to say he wouldn't, though it should have been obvious. Harry sat beside her, no more interested than was polite, slapping his tail against the floor with a rubbery sound.

"Well, fella. Down, fella," the boy said, advancing. Emily stepped back. "You don't know me," he told her. "My name is Durwood Linthicum from Tindell, Maryland." The shine on his forehead gave him a desperate, determined look. She thought he couldn't be more than eighteen. She wondered if the flowers were for her. But then he said, "I brought these to give your husband."

"My husband?"

"Mr. Meredith," he said, pressing farther inward. She took another step back and bumped into a china barrel. "My father was Reverend R. Jonas Linthicum," he said. "He's passed now. Passed in June."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," she said. "Mr. Linthicum, my husband isn't here just now-"

"I see the name don't strike a chord," he said, "Um…"

"Never mind, your husband will know it."

"Well, but, um…"

"My father and Mr. Meredith used to correspond. Or at least, my father corresponded. My father ran the Holy Word Entertainment Troupe."

"Oh, yes," Emily said.

"You've heard of it."

"I remember your father wanted us to come… give Bible shows, wasn't it?"

"Now you got it."

"Well, you see, Mr. Linthicum-"

"Durwood."

"See, Durwood…" Behind him, the door opened wider and Morgan stepped in, carrying a twenty-five-pound keg of powdered skim milk with a water stain at one edge. "Mr. Meredith!" said Durwood. "These are for you."

"Eh?" said Morgan, He set down the keg and took the carnations." He was wearing his tropical outfit- white Panama hat and white suit. Next to all that white, the carnations were startling, too bright to be real, like a liquor ad in an expensive magazine. Morgan buried his beard in them and took a long, thoughtful sniff.

"I been wanting to meet you since I was thirteen, fourteen years of age," Durwood said. "Any time we came near Baltimore, I begged and pestered my father to let me see one of your shows. Durwood Linthicum," he said, producing the name with a flair. He held out a large, soft hand. Emerald and ruby (or colored glass) rings were embedded in his ringers. "I know you know me, all those letters you received."

"Ah. Linthicum," said Morgan. He shook the hand, looking past Durwood to Emily.

"Holy Word Entertainment Troupe," Emily said.

"Oh, yes."

"Not to speak ill of the dead," said Durwood, "but my father didn't always have such very good business sense. Like, he saw one of your shows and thought right much of it, saw those articles about you in the papers, but all he thought was, That fellow could put on some fine, fine Bible stories. Daniel in the lions' den and Ruth and Naomi.' Right? Why, I knew that you would say no! You do other things besides, you do 'Red Riding Hood' and 'Beauty and the Beast.' I'm aware of that!" Morgan stroked his beard.

"Could we maybe take a seat?" Durwood asked. "I got something to lay out before you."

"Why, surely," said Morgan, He went down the hall to the living room, and Durwood followed. Emily came last, unwillingly. Some moment had slipped past her, here. She'd intended to clear all this up, but now it seemed too late.

In the living room Louisa was rocking and knitting. She glanced at Durwood and cast her yarn busily over her needle. "Mother," Morgan said, "this is Durwood Linthicum."

"It's a pleasure," said Durwood. He sat down on the couch and leaned toward her, lacing his fingers in front of him. "Ma'am, I guess you know what kind of son you got here." Louisa looked over at Morgan, her shaggy black eyebrows like two sharp roofs.

"I been telling my father for years," Durwood said. "'Daddy, you take that fellow however you can obtain him. We want to branch out, anyhow; nobody cares for this Bible stuff these days. With all our connections- schools, clubs, churches-we got a sure thing!' I said. 'We got everything we need!' There's this other group I like too-the Glass Accordion. I'm just crazy for their music. But he said no, we're only booking gospel music here. Wouldn't give them the time of day. Wouldn't even come hear them. Well, that's another story, I plan to pay them a visit right after I leave you folks. But it's you I feel this special interest in, Mr. Meredith, sir, you are near about my idol! I been following all the news of you. I think you're wonderful!"

"Why, thank you," said Morgan, smelling his carnations.

"Only, it's funny: you don't much look like your photos,"

"I grew a beard, you see."

"Yes, a beard will do it, I guess." Durwood looked over at Emily. He said, "But I hope it don't mean you've… gone hippie, or some such,"

"No, no," Morgan said.

"Well, good! Well, good! Because, now, maybe me and my father didn't always see eye to eye on every little thing, but, you know, I still want a Christian outfit, still want a fine, upstanding group we wouldn't be ashamed to take to a school auditorium…" He trailed off, suddenly frowning. He said, "I surely hope those Glass Accordion folks are not on drugs. Do you think?"

"Oh, no, no, I shouldn't imagine they are," Morgan said soothingly.

"You're going to like it in Tindell, Mr. Meredith."

"Tindell?"

"Well, you wouldn't want to keep on living in Baltimore, would you? We got connections all over the state of Maryland, and clear through southern Pennsylvania." Louisa said, "I've been to Tindell."

"Well, there now!" said Durwood.

"Hated the place."

"Hated Tindell?" ' "Didn't seem truly populated."

"Well, I don't know how you can say that."

"Empty as a graveyard. Stores all closed."

"You must have gone on a Sunday."

"It was a Sunday," she said. "Sunday, March sixth, nineteen twenty-one. Morgan had not been born yet,"

"Who's Morgan?"

"Him," she said, jabbing her chin at Morgan.

"It's a family nickname," Morgan said. "A sign of affection. Emily, could you show Mother off to bed now?"

"Bed?" said his mother. "It's not even nine o'clock yet."

"Well, you've had a hard day. Emily?" Emily rose and went over to his mother. She set a hand under her wiry arm and helped her gently to her feet "What's got into him?" Louisa said. "Don't forget my knitting, Emily."

"I have it." She led the old woman down the hall and into her room. Brindle was already there, writing in her diary. She looked up and said, "Bedtime already?"

"Morgan has a guest." Louisa said, "I wish we were back at Bonny's house. A person had breathing room at Bonny's house. Here I'm shunted around like an extra piece of furniture."

"I'm sorry, Mother Gower," Emily said. She went to the closet for Louisa's nightgown, which hung on a hook. Brindle's and Louisa's silky dresses packed the rod. At the far end were Gina's things: two school jumpers, two white blouses, and a blue quilted bathrobe. It made Emily sad to see them. She removed the nightgown from its hook and closed the door. "Can you help her with her buttons?" she asked Brindle. "I'd better get back to the living room," But when she left, she didn't go to the living room after all. She stood in the hall a moment, listening to Durwood's breathy voice-Mr. Meredith this, Mr. Meredith that. "Used to be I didn't even like a puppet show, never liked that Punch-and-Judy stuff, but your puppets, Mr.^Meredith, they're another matter altogether.*' She crossed the hall and went into her own room. First she closed the door partway, so that only a thin crack of light showed, and then she changed into her nightgown and slipped between the sheets. Across from her, Joshua stirred in his crib and gave a snuffling sigh. The window was open and she heard all the sounds of summer-a police siren, someone whistling "Clementine," music from a passing radio. Durwood said, "Think how it'd free you! Think on it, Mr. Meredith.

We do the booking; we do the billing, let you attend to more essential things. Why, we even got Master Charge. Got BankAmericard. Got NAC, I tell you." There was something about a sound heard from a lying-down position: it was smaller, but clearer. She even heard Morgan's match strike when he lit a cigarette. She smelted his sharp smoke. She was reminded of houses she had visited as a child-the rough, ragged smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes and the smells of fried fatback and kerosene in the Shufords' and Biddixes' kitchens, where she had been ill at ease, an outsider. Shrinking inwardly, as her family would have expected her to, she had waited barely within the door for some schoolmate to snatch up a spelling book and a couple of cold biscuits for lunch. But she had longed, all those years, to step farther into those kitchens, and to have them open up to her. She smiled now, in the dark, and fell asleep listening to Morgan's rumbling answers.

Then the apartment was suddenly still and Morgan was in the bedroom. He stood in the light from the hall, gazing into the mirror above one bureau. His Panama hat was still on his head. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He emptied his pockets of change, a crackling pack of Camels, and something that rolled a short distance and fell to the floor. He stooped for it, grunting. She said, "Morgan?"

"Yes, sweetie."

"Has he gone?"

"Yes."

"All this 'Mr. Meredith' business," she said. "Why didn't you tell him?"

"Oh, well, if it makes him happy…" He came to sit on the edge of the bed. He bent over to kiss her (still in Ms hat, which seemed about to topple onto her), but just then, slow, unsteady footsteps started across the hall. He straightened up. There was a tiny knock.

In the lighted doorway Louisa stood silhouetted. Her long white nightgown outlined two stick legs. "Morgan?" she said.

"Yes, Mother."

"I fear I may have trouble sleeping."

"Jesus, Mother, you've barely got to bed yet."

"Morgan, what was the name of the man we used to see so much of?"

"What man, Mother?"

"He was always around. He lived in our house. Morgan, what was his name?"

"Mother! Christ! Go to bed! Get out of here!"

"Oh, excuse me," she said.

She wandered away again. They heard her in the living room-first in one part, then in another, as if she were walking without purpose. The springs in the sofa creaked, directly behind their heads.

"You shouldn't be so rude to her," Emily told Morgan.

"No," he said. He sighed, "Shouting like that! What's wrong with you?"

"I can't help it. She never sleeps. She's down to three hours a night."

"But that's the way old people are, Morgan."

"We don't have any chance to be alone," he said. "Mother, Brindle, the baby… it's like a transplant. I transplanted all the mess from home. It's like some crazy practical joke. Isn't it? Why, I even have a teenaged daughter again! Or near teenaged; nowadays they're adolescents earlier, it seems to me…"

"I don't mind it," Emily said, "I kind of enjoy it."

"That's easy for you to say," he told her. "It's not your problem, really. You stay unencumbered no matter what, like those people who can eat and eat and not gain weight. You're still in your same wrap skirt. Same leotard." Little did he know how many replacement leotards she had had to buy over the years. Evidently, he imagined they lasted forever. She smoothed his hair off his forehead. "You'll feel better when we move," she told Mm. "Naturally It's difficult, six people in two bedrooms."

"Ah! And what will we use for money, for this move?"

"I'll find some other places to sell my puppets. I don't think Mrs. Apple pays me enough. And I'll start making more of them. And Brindle-why can't Brindle work?"

"What doing? Pumping gas?"

"There must be something."

"Emily, hasn't it occurred to you that Brindle's not all that well balanced?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say-"

"We're living in a house of lunatics." She was silent. It was as if he'd twisted some screw on a telescope. "Anyway," he said, more gently, "she has to help out with Mother. She may be a total loss other ways, but at least she saves you some of that-Mother's little mental lapses and her meals and pills." He nudged her over on the bed and lay down next to her, fully dressed, with his head propped against the wall. "What we want to do," he said, "is desert."

"Do what?"

"Just ditch them all," he said, "and go. We want a place that's smaller, not bigger."

"Oh, Morgan, talk sense," she said.

"Sweetheart, you know that Gina would be better off with Leon." She sat up sharply. "That's not true!" she said.

"What kind of life is this for her? Strange ladies in her bedroom… You mark my words. After that luxury camp, after she's visited Leon a couple of days and gone out sailing with Grandpa Meredith and shopping for clothes with Grandma, she's going to call and ask to stay. You want to bet? She's at that age now; she disapproves of irregularity. She'll like Leon's apartment swimming pool and tennis courts and whatever else. He may even have a sauna bath! Ever thought of that?"

"I can't do without Gina, Morgan."

"And the others," he said. "Mother and Brindle. You think Bonny wouldn't take them back? If we walked out of here and left them, Brindle would be on the phone to Bonny before we hit the pavement. 'Bonny, dear, they've left us!'" Morgan said in a high, gleeful voice. " 'Goody, now we can get back to color TV and civilization!' And Bonny would say, 'Oh, God, I suppose it's up to me now,' and here she'd come, rolling her eyes and clucking, but secretly, you know that she'd be pleased. She likes a lot of tumult. A lot of feathers flying in her nest. I'd ask her for a divorce again and this time she'd agree to it. No, I can't do that, I don't want her knowing where we are. I don't want her driving after us with hats and dogs and relatives. I'll bring one suit, one hat, and you and Josh. We'll just clear out-pull up our tent and go."

"Yes? Where to?" Emily asked. She was lying flat again, with her eyes closed. There was no point taking him seriously.

"Tindell, Maryland," he told her. "Join up with that fellow Durwood."

"It was Leon he was asking for."

"I am Leon, for all he knows."

"Oh, Morgan, really." He was silent. He seemed to be thinking. Finally he said, "Isn't it funny? I've never changed my name. The most I've done is reverse it. My name has been the one last thing I've hung on to." She opened her eyes. She said, "I mean this, Morgan, I do not intend to leave Gina."

"Oh, all right, all right."

"I absolutely mean that."

"I was only talking," he said.

Then he rose and went to the closet, and she heard his Panama hat settle among the other hats with a dim, soft, whiskery sound.

"It's all very easy for you," Bonny said, "because Morgan's in a position of certainty by now. You know what I mean? He's… solidified. You inherited him when he was old and certain. You have never got lost in a car together and yelled at each other over a map; he will always seem in charge, to you." Emily stood in pitch dark, lifting first one foot and then the other from the cool, slick kitchen floor. She said, "Bonny, why do you keep calling?"

"Hmm?"

"This is just not natural. Why are we always on the phone this way?" Bonny let out a whoosh of smoke. She said, "Well, I'm worried about his eyes."

"His eyes?"

"I'm reading this book. This book by some Japanese expert. Everything's in the eyes, it says. If you can see a rim of white below someone's iris, you can be sure that person's in trouble. Physically, emotionally… and you know Morgan's eyes. That's not just a rim of white, it's an ocean! His lower lids sag like hammocks. I don't think he's eating right. He needs more vegetables." 'T feed him plenty of vegetables."

"You know he has a sweet tooth. And he drinks so much coffee, chock-full of sugar. Deadly! Refined white sugar, processed sugar. It's a wonder he's lasted as long as he has. Oh, Emily! He should be eating alfalfa sprouts and fresh strawberries, organically grown."

"There's nothing wrong with Morgan's diet."

"He should cut down on red meats and saturated fats'"

"I have to hang up now, Bonny."

"If he were properly fed," said Bonny, "don't you think he'd act different? I mean, basically he's a good man, Emily. Basically he's warm-hearted and open. Openness is his problem, in fact. Oh, Emily, if I had him back, don't you think I would feed him better now?" Emily felt her way down the dark hall, stubbing her toe against the wicker elephant. She arrived in the bedroom and found Morgan wide awake, propped against the wall, silently smoking a cigarette. He didn't say anything. She got into bed beside him, smoothed her pillow, and lay down. The telephone rang in the kitchen.

"Don't answer," Morgan said.

"What if it's someone else?"

"It's not."

"What if it's Gina? An emergency?"

"It won't be. Let it ring."

"You can't say that for sure."

"I'm almost sure." At this hour, in this mood, "almost" seemed good enough. She took the chance. She didn't get up. There was something restful about simply giving in, finally- abdicating, allowing someone else to lead her. The phone rang on and on, first insistent, then resigned, faint and forlorn, rhyming with itself, like the chorus of a song.

1979

He was standing in Larrabee's Drugstore, waiting for his change. He'd bought a pack of Camels, a box of coughdrops, and a Tindell Weekly Gazette. The saleslady rang up his purchases, but then fell into conversation with another customer. It surely was cold, she agreed. It was much too cold to be March, Her cat wouldn't leave the stove and her dog was having to wear his little red plaid coat. She kept Morgan's change in her cupped hand, jingling it absently. Morgan stood waiting-an anonymous, bearded, bespectacled man of no interest to her. Finally he gave up and opened out his paper. He liked the Gazette very much, although it didn't carry Ann Landers. He scanned the personals. Z will not be responsible, I will not be responsible…

In the Lost and Found he learned that someone had lost a rubber plant. The things that some people mislaid! The carelessness of their lives! A complete set of Revereware cooking pots had been found in the middle of North Deale Road. A charm bracelet in the high-school parking lot.

Now for the obituaries. Mary Lucas, Long-Time Tindell Resident. Also Pearl Joe Pascal, and Morgan Cower, and…

MORGAN GOWER, HAIIDWARE STORE MANAGER

Morgan Gower, 53, who maintained a home at the Tindell Acres Trailer Park, died yesterday after a lengthy illness.

Mr. Gower had served as manager of the downtown branch of Cullen Hardware, in Baltimore.

He is survived by…

He raised his head and looked around him. The drugstore was of old, dark wood, its shelves sparsely stocked. In some spots there was only one of an item- one box of Sweet 'n Low packets, its corners dented; one tube of Prell shampoo with a sticky green cap. It was definitely a real place. It smelled of damp cardboard. The saleslady was ancient, her skin so wrinkled that it seemed quilted, and her glasses hung on a chain around her neck.

… is survived by his wife, the former Bonny Jean Cullen; seven daughters, Amy G. Murphy, of Baltimore; Jean G. Hanley, also of Baltimore; Susan Gower, of Charlottesville, Virginia…

"Sir," the saleslady said, holding out his change.

He closed the newspaper and pocketed the money.

Outside, a cold, damp wind hit him. It was Sunday morning. The streets were empty and the sidewalks seemed wider and whiter than usual. All the other stores were closed-the little dimestore, the grocery store, the barbershop. He walked past them slowly. His pickup was parked in front of the Hollywood Stars Beautician. The red plywood box constructed over its truckbed (MEREDITH PUPPET co. arching across each side) creaked in the wind. Morgan climbed into the cab. He opened his pack of cigarettes and lit one. Coughing his habitual, hacking cough, he spread out the paper again.

… Carol G. Haines, also of Charlottesville; Elizabeth G. Wing, of Nashville, Tennessee… He set it down and started the engine.

Fool paper; fool backwoods editors. Even they, you'd think, would have the common sense, the decency, to check a thing like that before, they printed it. Where were their standards? You call that journalism?

He drove up Main Street, puffing rapidly on his cigarette. At Main and Howell the traffic light was red. He braked, and glanced sideways at the paper.

… Molly G. Abbott, of Buffalo, New York; Kathleen G. Brustein, of Chicago…

Someone behind him honked, and he started off again. He veered from Howell into an alley, a moonscape of bleached, stubbled clay with a few empty beer bottles tossed in the weeds, and from there to the state highway. Up ahead lay the trailer park. A flaking metal sign spelled out TINDELL ACRES MONTHLY RATES J. PHOUTT PROPRIETOR. He turned left on the gravel road and passed the office-a streamlined aluminum trailer whose cinderblock steps and flowerboxes attempted to give it a rooted look. Also his mother, Louisa Brindle Gower, a persistent voice continued in his mind; a sister, Brindle G. T. Roberts, and eleven grandchildren. Behind the office, a dozen smaller trailers sat at haphazard angles to one another. They might have been tossed there by a fractious child, along with the items of scrap all around them-discarded butane tanks, a rust-stained mattress, a collapsed sofa with a sapling growing up between two of its cushions. Morgan drove past an old woman in a man's tweed overcoat. He parked in front of a small green trailer and got out. The woman turned to look after him, brushing wisps of gray hair from her eyes. It was obvious she planned to start a conversation. Morgan would not admit she was there. He rushed toward the trailer, keeping his head ducked. His mouth felt too large. He had, he observed detachedly, all the physical symptoms of… shame; yes, that was it. How peculiar. He felt insufficiently shielded by his cap, which was trim, narrowly visored, of no particular character. He turned up the collar of his jacket before he fumbled at the door.

"Cold enough for you?" the woman called in a thin, carrying voice.

He bowed lower over the lock. "Yoo-hoo! Mr. Meredith!" Services will be private.

Emily was cooking breakfast. He smelled bacon, a special Sunday treat. Josh was toddling through the living room in a pair of sodden corduroy overalls with one strap trailing. Morgan scooped him into his arms and Josh chuckled.

"Did you get the paper?" Emily asked. He set Joshua down again. "No," he said. He had left it in the truck. He would dispose of it later on.

There was no reason to feel so embarrassed. Bonny was the one who ought to feel embarrassed. (For it was Bonny who had done it, he assumed. Of course it was. Wasn't it?) What a silly reaction to have! He considered himself with a remote, bemused curiosity. Even his posture seemed furtive-the way he walked the length of the trailer with as little noise as possible, stooped, head ducked, as if trying not to disturb the air. He went from the living room (one couch beneath a small, louvered window) through the narrow aisle between a table and the counter that was their kitchen. Sidling past Emily, he kissed the back of her neck. She had a ripple of bones down her nape that reminded him of the scalloped spines of some seashells.

He continued into the bedroom, with its single built-in bureau and bed, A Port-a-Crib took all the remaining space. To reach the little curtained closet in one corner, he had to clamber across the bed. He took his cap off and set it on the shelf next to Emily's suitcase. He took his jacket off and hung it on a hanger. He had bought the jacket last November at a place called Frugal Fred's. Having left his extra clothes behind when he fled Baltimore, he had found himself with nothing warm enough to get him through the winter, and he'd paid five dollars for this heavy blue jacket that must once have been part of an Air Force uniform, although it was bland and dull now, undecorated. All the insignia seemed to have been removed, leaving empty stitches on the sleeves and across one pocket. He supposed that was some sort of regulation. They wouldn't want anyone impersonating an officer, naturally. Yes, it was only sensible. But sometimes he liked to imagine that the insignia had been ripped away. He pictured a scene in a field-the ranks of men standing at attention, the bugle call, the drums, Morgan stepping smartly forward, his commanding officer stripping him of his stripes in a single dramatic gesture. Whenever he thought of this, he walked straighter in his jacket and took on an impassive expression: the look of a man who had willfully, recklessly directed his life on a collision course toward ruin. However, he knew it was a jacket that no one would glance at twice. And his cap was what they called a Greek sailor cap, but not really Greek-looking, not seaworthy-looking; everybody wore them nowadays, even teenaged girls at the local high school, tilting the visors over their jumbles of curls.

He washed his hands in the tiny bathroom and returned to the kitchen. Emily was dishing out breakfast. He sat down at the table and watched her lay two strips of bacon on his plate. "Come eat, Josh," she called.

Josh was running a tin trolley car along the edge of the couch. He brought the trolley to the table with him, swaggering along in his rocking-horse gait, studiously silent. (He was the quietest, most accepting child Morgan had ever known.) In his layers of shirts and sweaters he seemed to be having trouble bending his chunky arms. Emily picked him up and set him in his chair. "What's that?" he asked, pointing to his cup. "It's orange juice, Josh." Josh took a bite from a strip of bacon, fed another bite to the front window of his trolley car.

"Did you mail my letter?" Emily asked Morgan, sitting down across from him. "What letter?"

"My letter to Gina, Morgan."

"Oh, yes," Morgan said. "I took it to that box in front of the Post Office."

"It'll reach Richmond by Tuesday, then," Emily said.

"Well, or Wednesday."

"If she writes me back the same day, I might get a letter on Friday."

"Mm."

"She hardly ever writes the same day, though,"

"No."

"I wish she were a better letter-writer." He said nothing. She looked up at him. "Is something wrong?" she asked. "Wrong?"

"You seem different."

"I'm fine," he said.

She went back to buttering her toast. Her hands were white with cold, the nails bluish. The curve of her lashes cast faint shadows' on her cheeks. It struck him how unchanged she was. Year after year, while everyone around her grew older, Emily kept her young, pale, unlined face, and her light-colored eyes gave her a look of perpetual innocence. She wore the same clothes. Her hair was the same style, piled in braids on top of her head with a few stray tendrils corkscrewing at her neck to give her a hint of some secret looseness always possible, never realized-that could stir him still.

Well, he would go to the editors. Of course he would. He'd go storming in with the paper. "See here, what's the meaning of this? Don't you people ever check your facts? Morgan Gower, Hardware Store Manager! Where's your sense of responsibility? I am Morgan Gower. Here I stand before you." But they would say, "Aren't you that fellow Meredith? One that works for young Durwood?" In fact, he had no case.

Emily zipped Josh into his jacket for a walk, but Morgan decided not to go with them. "Don't you feel well?" she asked him.

"I'm fine, I tell you."

"Did you pick up those coughdrops?"

"Yes, yes, somewhere here…" He slapped his pockets and beamed at her, intending reassurance. She went on frowning. "Don't forget we have that show tonight," she told him.

"No, I haven't forgotten." After they left, he watched them through the living-room window-Emily a fragile little thread of a person, Josh in his fat red jacket trudging along beside her. They were heading north, across a field, toward the scrubby pine woods that ran along the highway. The field was so lumpy and rutted that sometimes Joshua stumbled, but Emily had hold of his hand. Morgan could imagine her tight, steady grip-the steely cords in her wrist, like piano wire.

He turned away from the window a fraction of a second before the phone rang, as if he'd been expecting it. Maybe he just wouldn't answer. It was sure to be someone pushing in, someone who'd found Mm out: "So! I hear you died." But, of course, no one had any way of knowing. He made himself go into the bedroom, where the phone sat on the bureau. It rang six times before he reached it. He lifted the receiver, took a breath, and said, "Hello."

"Is that you, Sam?" a man asked.

"Yes."

"It is?"

"Yes."

"You don't sound like yourself."

"I've got a cold," Morgan said.

Morgan grinned into the mirror.

"Well, I guess you heard what happened to Lady." Then a strange thing happened. It felt as if the floor just skated a few feet away from him. Not that he lost his balance; he stood as firm as ever, and his head was perfectly clear. But there was some optical illusion. His surroundings appeared to glide past him. He might have been riding one of these conveyor belts that carry passengers into airport terminals. Come to think of it, he had felt this way once before in an airport near Los Angeles. He'd gone to fetch Susan-it must have been four or five years ago; she'd had some kind of crack-up over a broken love affair-and after flying all one day he'd landed but gone on flying, it felt like. Or everything had flown around him, as if he'd been traveling so long, such a distance, that a sudden stop was impossible. He blinked, and reached out for the bureau.

"Sam?" the man asked.

"I'm not Sam. Please. You have the wrong number." He hung up. He looked around the trailer, and found it stable again.

Then he took his cap and jacket from the closet and put them on, and he wrote a note to Emily: Gone on an errand. Back soon. He let himself out the door and crossed the yard to his truck and climbed in.

It was a forty-five-minute drive to Baltimore, and all through it he talked steadily underneath his breath. "Silly damn Bonny," he muttered, "damn meddler; stupid, interfering meddler, thinks she's so-" He glanced in the rearview mirror and swung out to pass a van. "Sitting there rubbing her hands together, laughing at me; thinks she got to me somehow. Ha, that's how much she knows, yes…" He wondered how she'd found out what town he lived in. He had never told her. He considered the possibility that she had put the item in every paper in the state of Maryland-every paper in the country, even. Lord, all across the continent, for anyone to see. He pictured her telephoning hundreds and thousands of editors, rushing into their offices, trailing balls of Kleenex and rough drafts on the backs of cash-register tapes-a woman with her accelerator stuck. She had always lived a headlong kind of life. Any mental image he had of her (he thought, honking at a wandering sports car) showed her breathless, with her hair in her eyes and her blouse untucked. Look how she'd thrown his clothes out, and his mother and his sister and the dog! Cursing to himself, slamming on his brakes, he forgot that she had thrown them out at different times. He imagined that she'd dumped them all at once. He seemed to remember Brindle and Louisa, deposited in front of the hardware store, waiting on little camp stools till he could collect them. Or, why camp stools, even? Lying on their backs, like overturned beetles, in an ocean of discarded costumes. He recalled that Bonny often seemed to be held together by safety pins. Safety pins connected a slip strap to her slip, a buttonhole to the thready place where a button should have been, and her watch to its black ribbon band. And the watch was almost never wound. And the gaps in her hems were repaired with Scotch tape that rustled when she walked; no, when she ran; no, when she galloped by. She had never been known to just walk.

This used to be all farmland, but now each town was linked to the others by a frayed strand of filling stations and shopping malls. Morgan sped along. The superstructure on his trackbed moaned. The padlock on its rear door clanked whenever he slowed down.

"Thinks she's so clever, thinks I care. Thinks it matters what fool thing she does to me." He entered the outskirts of Baltimore. They'd put up more apartment buildings. You couldn't turn your back, it seemed. At a traffic light a boy braked beside him in a long, finned Dodge that must have been twenty years old. All the windows were closed, but the music on his radio was so loud that it sailed out anyhow- the "Steadily Depressing, Low-Down, Mind-Messing, Working at the Carwash Blues." In spite of himself, Morgan beat time on the steering wheel.

At least there was a little sun here-a pale, weak, late-winter sun lighting white steeples and empty sidewalks. He drove north on Charles, passing a stream of small shops and then the University, deserted-looking, its buildings clean and precisely placed like something built of toy blocks. He turned into a corridor of large houses, cafes, apartment buildings, and parked on Bonny's street but some distance from her house, so she wouldn't easily see the truck from her windows. Then he got out and lit a cigarette and started waiting.

It was cold, even in the sunlight. He raised his collar around his ears. He saw the newspaper on Bonny's front walk. Ten-something in the morning and she hadn't brought it in yet; typical. A cardinal was sitting in the dogwood tree, a drop of red in a net of black branches. Morgan wondered if it could be one of those who'd hatched in that net in the mock-orange bush a few years back. He felt some proprietary interest. All one summer he'd chased the cat away; the parent birds would alert him, fluttering and giving their anxious chirps that sounded like the clink of loose change in a pocket. But didn't cardinals migrate? His cigarette tasted like burning trash. He ground it out.

Then here came Billy's wife, Priscilla, tapping up the walk in her spiffy white coat, carrying her basket-shaped purse that was sure to have a whale carved on its lid. She disappeared into the house. (She had to step right over the paper.) She was extraneous, no one he ever gave much thought to; he dismissed her instantly. He leaned forward and watched the door open again. Out popped a boy. His grandson? Todd? If so, he'd grown. He was carrying a yellow skateboard, and when he reached the street he just skated away-here one second, gone the next, for Morgan didn't watch after him. He was centered on that door still.

A long time went by. He leaned against the hood of the truck and listened to the engine ticking as it cooled.

The door first darkened, drawing inward, and then vanished altogether. Bonny stepped out on the stoop. Beneath her matted brown cardigan she wore something peasantish, unbecoming-a gauzy, full blouse, and a gathered skirt that made her look fat. Morgan assumed she was heading for the paper, but she ignored it as the others had and continued down the walk. Morgan slid around behind the truck. She didn't even look in his direction. She turned west, bustling along. He saw something flash in her hand-her red billfold, no doubt overstaffed as always with credit cards, outdated photos, and wrinkled little wads of money.

For a while he followed, keeping well back. He knew where she was going, of course. On a Sunday morning, with Priscilla there, and Todd, and who knew how many other people, she'd be off to the bakery for cinnamon rolls. But he followed anyway, and fixed his eyes on her. She'd let her hair grow, he noticed-a mistake. The puffy little clump at the back of her neck had turned into a sort of oval, with tattered ends.

What was going on in that head?

This was why he'd come: to find out. He'd driven here without wondering what for, and was confronted with it now so abruptly that he stopped short. All he wanted to ask was, why had she done it?

Was some meaning implied?

Did she imagine…?

No, surely not.

Did she imagine he really had passed away?

"Passed away" was all he was up to just now. "Died" would stick in his throat. No, he couldn't ask that.

He continued to stand there while Bonny went on racing toward the bakery.

Then he turned and went back to the house. He circled around it. (The front door opened to the center hall, where anyone might see him enter.) He walked to the side, toward the screen porch, reached through a rip in the screen and raised the rusty hook and let himself in. The moldy smell of the wicker furniture-like mice, like cheap magazines-reminded him of summer. He tried the knob of the glass-paned door that led to the living room. It was unlocked. (He'd warned them a thousand times.) Soundlessly, he slipped in.

The room was empty. Last night's Parcheesi game lay scrambled in front of the cold gray fireplace. A cup was making a ring on the coffee table. He crossed to the hall. From the kitchen Priscilla called, "Bonny? Back so soon?" He darted toward the stairs, keeping to carpets, where his footsteps would be softest. He mounted the stairs so swiftly that he scared himself-the blurred speed of his climb was too hushed, too spooky. In the upstairs hall his heel clicked once on the floorboards by accident. He ducked into the bedroom and clapped a palm to his pounding chest.

No one came.

Her bed was unmade and her nightgown was a spill of soiled ivory nylon across the rug. All the bureau drawers were open. So was the closet. He tiptoed to the closet. How unlike itself it seemed: so much space. You couldn't say it was bare, exactly (those clothes of hers she never would give up, skirts with the hemlines altered a dozen different times, Ship 'n Shore blouses from the fifties with their dinky Peter Pan collars), but certainly it was emptier than it used to be. The shelf where he'd kept his hats now held a typewriter case, a hairdryer, and a shoebox. He opened the shoebox and found a pair of shoes, the chunky kind so out of date they were coming back into fashion.

He opened the drawer in her nightstand and found a tube of hand cream and a book of Emily Dickinson's poems.

He opened the drawer in his nightstand (once upon a time) and found a coupon for instant coffee, a light-up ballpoint pen, and a tiny leather notebook with Night Thoughts written in gilt across the cover. Aha! But the only night thoughts she'd had were: Woolite Roland Park Florist Todd's birthday?

Something clamped his wrist-a claw. He dropped the book. "Sir," said Louisa.

"Mother?"

"I've forgotten the number for the police."

"Mother," he said, "I've only come to… pick up a few belongings."

"Is it 222-3333? Or 333-2222." She still had hold of his wrist. He couldn't believe how strong she was. When he tried to squirm away, she tightened her fingers. He could have struggled harder, but he was afraid of hurting her. There was something brittle and crackling about the feel of her. He said, "Mother dear, please let go."

"Don't call me Mother, you scruffy-looking, hairy person."

"Oh," he said. "You really don't know me."

"Would I be likely to?" she asked him.

She wore her Sunday black, although she never attended church-a draped and fluted black dress with a cameo at the throat. On her feet were blue terrycloth scuffs from which her curved, opaque toenails emerged — more claws. She encaged his wrist in a ring of bone.

"I said to the lady downstairs," she said, " 'There's burglars on the second floor.' She said, 'It's only those squirrels again.' I told her, 'This time it's burglars.' "

"Look. Ask Brindle if you don't believe me," said Morgan.

"Brindle?" She considered. "Brindle," she said.

"Your daughter. My sister."

"She told me it was squirrels," Louisa said. "At night she asks, 'What's that skittering? What's that scuttling? Is it burglars?' I say, 'It's squirrels.' Now I say, 'Hear that burglar on the second floor?' She says, 'It's only squirrels, Mother. Didn't you always tell me that? They're hiding their acorns in the rafters in the attic.'"

"Oh? You have rodents?" Morgan asked.

"No, squirrels. Or something up there, snickering around…"

"You want to be careful," Morgan told her. "It could very well be bats. The last thing you need is a rabid bat. What you ought to do, you see, simply take a piece of screening-" His mother said, "Morgan?"

"Yes."

"Is that you?"

"Yes," he said.

"Oh, hello, dear," she said serenely. She let go of his wrist, and kissed him.

"It's good to see you, Mother," he said.

Then Bonny said, from the doorway, "Get out."

"Why, Bonny!" said Morgan.

"Out." She was carrying her sack from the bakery, and gave off the mingled smells of cinnamon and fresh air. Her eyes had darkened alarmingly. Yes, she meant business, all right. He knew the signs. He edged away from his mother. (But there was only one door, and Bonny blocked it.) "I was just leaving, Bonny," he said. "I only came to ask you something."

"I won't answer," she said. "Now go."

"Bonny-"

"Go, Morgan."

"Bonny, why'd you put that piece in the paper?"

"What piece?"

"That… item. What you call… obituary."

"Oh," she said. There was a sudden little twist to her mouth that he remembered well-a wry look, something between amusement and regret. "Oh, that" she said.

"What made you do it?" She thought it over.

His mother said, 'I'm certain it's not bats, because I hear their little feet."

"To tell the truth," Bonny said, "I'd forgotten all about it. Oh, dear. I really should have canceled it; I meant to all along; it was only one of those impulses that just hit sometimes-"

"I can't figure out how you knew where I lived," Morgan said.

"I called Leon in Richmond and asked," she said. "I guessed you'd tell Leon at least, because of Gina."

"But what was the point, Bonny? An obituary, for God's sake."

"Or do bats have feet too?" said his mother.

"It was meant to be an announcement," Bonny said.

"What kind of announcement?" She colored slightly. She touched the dent at the base of her throat. "Well, I'm seeing someone else now," she said. "Another man."

"Ah," he said.

"A history professor."

"That explains printing my obituary?"

"Yes." Well, yes.

He took pity on her then-her pink cheeks, and the clumsy, prideful, downward look she wore. "All right," he said. "That's all I had to ask. I'll be going now." She drew back to let him pass. Already she'd collected herself-lifted and straightened. He stepped into the hall. Then he said, "But, ah, God, Bonny, you don't know how it felt! Really, such an… embarrassment, an item like that in a public place, all on account of some whim you get, some halfcocked notion!" The twist in her mouth returned, and deepened. No doubt she found this hilarious.

"It's probably not even legal," he said.

He started coughing. He searched his pockets for his handkerchief.

"Do you want a Kleenex?" she asked. "What's the matter with you, Morgan? You don't look well."

"I could probably have you arrested," he told her. He found his handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth.

"Let's not talk about what we could arrest each other for," Bonny said.

So he went down the stairs at last, not even saying goodbye to his mother or giving her a final glance. Bonny followed. He heard the rustle of her bakery sack close behind his ear-an irritating sound. An irritating woman. And this banister was sticky to the touch, downright dirty. And you could break your neck on the rug in the entrance hall.

At the door, when his thoughts were flowing toward the pickup truck (get gas, check tires) and the journey home, Bonny suddenly seemed to have all the time in the world. She brushed a piece of hair off her forehead and said, "His name is Arthur Amherst."

"Eh?"

"This man I'm seeing. Arthur Amherst."

"Good, Bonny, good."

"He's very steady and solid."

"I'm glad to hear it;" he said, jingling his keys in his pocket.

"You think that means he's dull, I suppose."

"I know it doesn't mean that," he said.

He pulled out his keys then, and turned to leave, hut was struck by something and turned back. "Listen," he said. "Those really may be bats, you know."

"What?"

"Those creatures Mother's hearing in the attic."

"Oh, well, they're not harming anybody."

"How can you be sure of that? You ought to do something about it. Don't put it off; they could chew through the wiring."

"Bats?" she asked.

"Or whatever," he said.

He hesitated, and then touched his cap hi a salute and left.

Now there was church traffic, old men hi felt hats driving carloads of tinkly old ladies, sidewalks ringing with the clop of high heels. He traveled downtown in a suspended state of mind, shaking off the annoyances of the morning. He traveled farther and farther, not out of the city but deeper into it. It wouldn't hurt to take a look at Cullen Hardware. There was always the possibility that Butkins would be there, even on a Sunday, maybe sorting stock or just standing idly, dimly, at the window as he sometimes did.

But the hardware store was gone. There was only a blank space between the rug store and Jimaldi Brothers Realty-not even a hole, just a vacant lot. Weeds grew on it, even. The wastepaper crumpled in its hillocks had already begun to yellow and dissolve. A billboard on the rear of the lot read: AT THIS LOCATION, NIFF DEVELOPMENT CORP. WILL BE CONSTRUCTING A…

He considered a minute, settled his glasses higher on his nose, and drove on. But what about Butkins? Where was Butkins? He turned left. He cut over to Crosswell Street. Crafts Unlimited was still there, closed for Sunday but thriving, obviously. The ranks of pottery jars in its window gave it an archeological look. The third-floor windows above it were as dark and plain as ever. He half believed that if he were to climb the stairs, he'd find Emily and Leon Meredith still leading their pure, vagabond lives, like two children in a fairytale.

"I'm certain I can fit into it," the second stepsister said. "It's only that I've been shopping all day and my feet are a little swollen."

"Madam, Please," the Prince said in his exhausted voice.

"Well, maybe I could cut off my toes."

"What about you, young lady?" asked the Prince. He was looking at Cinderella, who peeked out from the rear of the stage. Dressed in burlap, shy and fragile, she inched forward and approached the Prince. He knelt at her feet with the little glass slipper, or it may have been a shimmer of cellophane. All at once her burlap dress was mysteriously cloaked hi a billow of icy blue satin. "Sweetheart," the Prince cried, and the children drew their breaths in. They were young enough still.

Their expressions were dazzled and blissful, and even after the house lights came on they continued sitting in their chairs and gazing at the stage, open-mouthed.

It was at the Emancipation Baptist Church's Building Fund Weekend. There'd been two puppet shows on Saturday, and this evening's was the last one. Then Morgan and Emily could pack up their props and leave the church's Sunday School hall, which had the biting, minty smell of kindergarten paste. They could say goodbye, at least temporarily, to the Glass Accordion and the Six Singing Sunonsons and Boffo the Magician. Emily set the puppets one by one in their liquor carton. Joshua staggered down the aisle with one of Boffo's great brass rings. Morgan folded the wooden stage, lifted it onto his shoulder with a grunt, and carried it out the side entrance, It was a pale, misty night. The sidewalk gleamed under the streetlights. Morgan loaded the stage into the back of the pickup and slammed the door shut. Then he stood looking around him, breathing in the soft, damp air. A family passed-cranky children, kept awake past their bedtime, wheedling at their mother's edges. A boy and girl were kissing near a bus stop. On the corner was a mailbox, which reminded Morgan of his letter to Bonny. He'd carried it with him all evening; he might as well get it sent off. He took it from the pocket of his Air Force jacket and started across the street… simply strew a handful of mothballs, the letter whispered, a. along the attic floor beams; b. in the closets beneath the eaves…

His boots made a gritty sound that he liked. Cars hissed past him, their headlights haloed. He flattened the envelope, whose corners had started curling. But if it's bats… he should have said. He'd forgotten to mention bats. You don't want to close all the openings till you're certain the bats are… and he also should have said, Remember that Mother's vitamins are tax-deductible, and Don't rush into anything with this professor fellow, and Just loving him is not all it takes, you know. He should have added, I used to think it was enough that I was loving; yes, I used to think, at least I am a sweet and loving man, but now I see that it matters also who you love, and what your reasons are. Oh, Bonny, you can go so wrong…

He stood at the mailbox, shaking his head, stunned. It took an auto horn to bring him to his senses, and he had the feeling that this wasn't the first time it had honked. A woman leaned out of a Chevrolet, her hair a bobbled mass of curlers. "Well? Will they or won't they?" she asked him.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Will my letters get there by Tuesday, I said, or will they drag their feet and loiter like the last ones did? You folks are always saying next-day-delivery-this, next-day-delivery-that; then it's me that gets stuck with the finance charges when you drag into BankAmericard with my credit payment two, three, four days late.. " She was waving a pack of letters out the window. Morgan tipped his visored cap and took them from her. "Absolutely," he said. "It was Robinson who was doing all that and now they've let him go. From here on out, you can trust the U. S. Mail, ma'am."

"I bet," she said.

She rolled up her window and screeched off.

Morgan dropped Bonny's letter in the slot Then he went through what he'd been handed by the woman. Patti Jo's Dress Shop, LeBolt Appliances… he dropped them in too. Clarion Power and Light. He dropped that in. The rest were personal, addressed in a lacy, slanted script to a woman in Essex, a woman in Anneslie, and a married couple in Madison, Wisconsin. He would mail them too, but first he might just take a little glance inside. He started walking back toward the church, coughing dryly, tapping the envelopes against the palm of his hand. They were crisp and thick, weighted with secrets. They whispered spent Monday letting that dress out some and labor pains so bad she like to died and least you could have done is have the decency to tell me. Up ahead, Emily stood at the curb beside a cardboard carton. Josh rode astride her hip. For some reason, Morgan felt suddenly light-hearted. He started walking faster. He started smiling. By the time he reached Emily, he was humming. Everything he looked at seemed luminous and beautiful, and rich with possibilities.

The End