Saint Maybe

1. The Airmail Bowling Ball

On Waverly Street, everybody knew everybody else. It was only one short block, after all — a narrow strip of patched and repatched pavement, bracketed between a high stone cemetery wall at one end and the commercial clutter of Govans Road at the other. The trees were elderly maples with lumpy, bulbous trunks. The squat clapboard houses seemed mostly front porch.

And each house had its own particular role to play. Number Nine, for instance, was foreign. A constantly shifting assortment of Middle Eastern graduate students came and went, attending classes at Johns Hopkins, and the scent of exotic spices drifted from their kitchen every evening at suppertime. Number Six was referred to as the newlyweds’, although the Crains had been married two years now and were beginning to look a bit worn around the edges. And Number Eight was the Bedloe family. They were never just the Bedloes, but the Bedloe family, Waverly Street’s version of the ideal, apple-pie household: two amiable parents, three good-looking children, a dog, a cat, a scattering of goldfish.

In fact, the oldest of those children had long ago married and left — moved out to Baltimore County and started a family of her own — and the second-born was nearing thirty. But somehow the Bedloes were stuck in people’s minds at a stage from a dozen years back, when Claudia was a college girl in bobby socks and Danny was captain of his high-school football team and Ian, the baby (his parents’ big surprise), was still tearing down the sidewalk on his tricycle with a miniature license plate from a cereal box wired to the handlebar.

Now Ian was seventeen and, like the rest of his family, large-boned and handsome and easygoing, quick to make friends, fond of a good time. He had the Bedloe golden-brown hair, golden skin, and sleepy-looking brown eyes, although his mouth was his mother’s, a pale beige mouth quirking upward at the corners. He liked to wear ragged jeans and plaid shirts — cotton broadcloth in summer, flannel in winter — unbuttoned all the way to expose a stretched-out T-shirt underneath. His shoes were high-top sneakers held together with electrical tape. This was in 1965, when Poe High School still maintained at least a vestige of a dress code, and his teachers were forever sending him home to put on something more presentable. (But his mother was likely to greet him in baggy, lint-covered slacks and one of his own shirts, her fading blond curls pinned scrappily back with a granddaughter’s pink plastic hairbow. She would not have passed the dress code either.) Also, there were complaints about the quality of Ian’s school-work. He was bright, his teachers said, but lazy. Content to slide through with low B’s or even C’s. It was the spring of his junior year and if he didn’t soon mend his ways, no self-respecting college would have him.

Ian listened to all this with a tolerant, bemused expression. Things would turn out fine, he felt. Hadn’t they always? (None of the Bedloes was a worrier.) Crowds of loyal friends had surrounded him since kindergarten. His sweetheart, Cicely Brown, was the prettiest girl in the junior class. His mother doted on him and his father — Poe’s combination algebra teacher and baseball coach — let him pitch in nearly every game, and not just because they were related, either. His father claimed Ian had talent. In fact sometimes Ian daydreamed about pitching for the Orioles, but he knew he didn’t have that much talent. He was a medium kind of guy, all in all.

Even so, there were moments when he believed that someday, somehow, he was going to end up famous. Famous for what, he couldn’t quite say; but he’d be walking up the back steps or something and all at once he would imagine a camera zooming in on him, filming his life story. He imagined the level, cultured voice of his biographer saying, “Ian climbed the steps. He opened the door. He entered the kitchen.”

“Have a good day, hon?” his mother asked, passing through with a laundry basket.

“Oh,” he said, “the usual run of scholastic triumphs and athletic glories.” And he set his books on the table.

His biographer said, “He set his books on the table.”

That was the spring that Ian’s brother fell in love. Up till then Danny had had his share of girlfriends — various decorative Peggies or Debbies to hang upon his arm — but somehow nothing had come of them. He was always getting dumped, it seemed, or sadly disillusioned. His mother had started fretting that he’d passed the point of no return and would wind up a seedy bachelor type. Now here was Lucy, slender and pretty and dressed in red, standing in the Bedloes’ front hall with her back so straight, her purse held so firmly in both hands, that she seemed even smaller than she was. She seemed childlike, in fact, although Danny described her as a “woman” when he introduced her. “Mom, Dad, Ian, I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life.” Then Danny turned to Mrs. Jordan, who had chosen this inopportune moment to step across the street and borrow the pinking shears. “Mrs. Jordan: Lucy Dean.”

His mother, skipping several stages of acquaintanceship, swept Lucy into a hug. (Clearly more was called for than a handshake.) His father said, “Well, now! What do you know!” The dog gave Lucy’s crotch a friendly sniff, while Mrs. Jordan — an older lady, the soul of tact — hastily murmured something or other and backed out the door. And Ian clamped his palms in his armpits and grinned at no one in particular.

They moved to the living room, Ian bringing up the rear. Lucy perched in an easy chair and Danny settled on its arm, with one hand resting protectively behind her loose knot of black hair. To Ian, Lucy resembled some brightly feathered bird held captive by his brown plaid family. Her face was very small, a cameo face. Her dress was scoop-necked and slim-waisted and full-skirted. She wore extremely red lipstick that seemed not gaudy, for some reason, but brave. Ian was entranced.

“Tell us everything,” Bee Bedloe ordered. “Where you met, how you got to know each other — everything.”

She and Ian’s father had seated themselves on the sofa. (Ian’s father, who had a baseball player’s mild, sloping build, was pulling in his stomach.) Ian himself remained slouched against the door frame.

“We met at the post office,” Danny said. He beamed down at Lucy, who smiled back at him trustfully.

Bee said, “Oh? You two work together?”

“No, no,” Lucy said, in a surprisingly croaky little drawl. “I went in to mail a package and Danny was the one who waited on me.”

Danny told them, “She was mailing a package to Cheyenne, Wyoming, by air. I told her it would cost twenty dollars and twenty-seven cents. You could see it was more than she’d planned on—”

“I said, ‘Twenty twenty-seven! Great God Almighty!’ ” Lucy squawked, startling everyone.

“So I told her, ‘It’s cheaper by parcel post, you know. That would be four sixty-three.’ ‘Let me think,’ she says, and moves on out of the way. Gives up her place at the counter. Stands a few feet down from me, frowning at the wall.”

“I had to take a minute to decide,” Lucy explained.

“Frowns at the wall for the longest time. Three customers go ahead of her. Finally I say, ‘Miss? You ready?’ But she just goes on frowning.”

“I was mailing some odds and ends to my ex-husband and I wanted to be shed of them as fast as possible,” Lucy said.

A little jolt passed through the room.

Bee said, “Ex-husband?”

“Half of me wanted him to get that box tomorrow, even yesterday if it could be arranged, but the other half was counting pennies. ‘That’s fifteen-and-some dollars’ difference,’ this other half was saying. ‘Think of all the groceries fifteen dollars could buy. Or shoes and stuff for the children.’ ”

“Children?”

“What got to me,” Danny said, “was how she wouldn’t be hurried. How it didn’t bother her what other people made of her. I mean she just stood there pondering, little bit of a person. Then finally she said, ‘Well,’ and straightened her shoulders and chose to spring for airmail.”

“It mattered just enough, I decided,” Lucy said. “It was worth it just for the satisfaction.”

“If she had said parcel post I might have let her go,” Danny said. “But airmail! I admired that. I asked if she’d like to have dinner.”

“He was the best-looking thing I’d seen in ages,” Lucy told the Bedloes. “I said I’d be thrilled to have dinner.”

Bee and Doug Bedloe sat side by side, smiling extra hard as if someone had just informed them that they were being photographed.

There was this about the Bedloes: They believed that every part of their lives was absolutely wonderful. It wasn’t just an act, either. They really did believe it. Or at least Ian’s mother did, and she was the one who set the tone. Her marriage was a great joy to her, her house made her happy every time she walked into it, and her children were attractive and kind and universally liked. When bad things happened — the usual accidents, illnesses, jogs in the established pattern — Bee treated them with eye-rolling good humor, as if they were the stuff of situation comedy. They would form new chapters in the lighthearted ongoing saga she entertained the neighbors with: How Claudia Totaled the Car. How Ian Got Suspended from First Grade.

As for Ian, he believed it too but only after a kind of hitch, a moment of hesitation. For instance, from time to time he had the feeling that his father was something of a joke at Poe High — ineffectual at discipline, and muddled in his explanation of the more complicated algebraic functions. But Bee said he was the most popular teacher Poe had ever employed, and in fact that was true. Yes, certainly it was true. Ian knew she was right.

Or look at Claudia. The family’s one scholar, she had dropped out of college her senior year to get married, and then the babies started coming so thick and so fast that they had to be named alphabetically: Abbie, Barney, Cindy, Davey … Where would it all end? some cynical voice inquired from the depths of Ian’s mind. Xavier? Zelda? But his mother said she hoped they would progress to double letters — Aaron Abel and Bonnie Belinda — like items on a crowded catalog page. Then Ian saw Claudia’s children as a tumbling hodgepodge heaped in a basket, and he was forced to smile.

Or Danny. Wasn’t it sort of a comedown that Danny had gone to work at the post office straight out of high school, when both sides of the family as far back as anyone could remember had been teachers? (“Educators,” Bee called them.) But Bee pointed out how lucky he was, knowing so early in life what he wanted and settling in so contentedly. Then Ian readjusted; he shifted gears or something and whir! he was rolling along with the others, impressed by Danny’s good fortune.

He had always assumed he was the only one who experienced that hitch in his thoughts. He assumed it until the day Lucy arrived, when he felt his parents’ hidden start at the word “ex-husband.” Wait. The girl of Danny’s dreams had chosen someone else before him? And was saddling him with someone else’s children besides? His father looked confused. His mother’s broad face developed a brittle, tight surface, like something easily broken.

Ian himself absorbed the notion with no trouble. Of course, he wanted only the best for Danny. He had worshiped Danny since infancy — the family’s all-round athlete, talented in every known sport but not the least stuck up about it, unfailingly sunny-natured and patient with his little brother. But as Ian saw it, Lucy was the best. The ex-husband was only a minor drawback; same for the children. What mattered was that pile of black hair and those long black lashes. None of Danny’s previous girls could begin to compare with this one.

But he saw how steadily his parents smiled — stony, glazed smiles as they murmured chitchat. His mother said it certainly was an unusual way for a couple to meet. His father said he’d have opted for parcel post, himself; so he would never have been asked to dinner, would he, heh-heh. His mother said that speaking of dinner, Lucy must stay for spaghetti. Danny said she couldn’t; he was taking her to Haussner’s Restaurant to celebrate their engagement. The word “engagement” sent another shock through the room; for now it was plain that, yes, Danny really was set on this. Bee said maybe later in the week, then. Lucy thanked her in her foggy, fascinating voice. They all stood up. Ian stepped away from the door frame and received his first direct glance from Lucy. She had pure gray eyes, almost silver, and up close her little nose revealed a sprinkling of freckles.

After Danny and Lucy had left, his parents returned to the living room and sat back down on the couch. Supper was more than ready, but no one mentioned eating. Ian wandered over to the upright piano in the corner. Dozens of family photos, framed in dull brass or varnished wood, stood on an ivory lace runner. Other, larger photos hung behind, nearly obscuring the flowered wallpaper that had darkened over the years to the color of a manila envelope. He studied those: his grandmother standing grimly erect beside his seated grandfather, his Great-Aunt Bess trying to master a Hula Hoop, Danny in a satin track uniform with a first-place ribbon hung around his neck. Whenever Danny did something he enjoyed, his face would shine with a fine sweat. Even eating made him sweat, or listening to music. And in this photograph — where he’d recently been sprinting under hot sunshine, after all, and then had the pleasure of winning besides — he gleamed; he seemed metallic. You could imagine he was a statue. Ian lightly touched the frame. (Dust felted his finger. For all her great clattery housecleaning, Bee tended to let the little things slide.) Behind him, his mother said, “Well, we’ve been wishing for years he’d get married.”

“That’s true, we have,” his father said.

“And now that the draft’s stepping up …”

“Oh, yes, the draft,” his father said faintly.

“Did she mention how many children she had?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“If she has lots,” Bee told him, “we can mix them in with Claudia’s and form our own baseball team.”

She laughed. Ian turned to look at her, but he was too late. Already she had passed smoothly over to unquestioning delight, and he had missed his chance to see how she did it.

Lucy did not have lots of children after all; just two. A girl aged six and a boy aged three. She lived a couple of miles away, Danny said, in a rented apartment above a Hampden pharmacy; and she left the children with the pharmacist’s wife when she went to work every day. He told Ian this later that night, when he stopped by Ian’s room on his way to bed. He said she worked as a waitress at the Fill ’Er Up Café—the only job she could find that allowed her to arrange her hours around her children’s. But he would soon put an end to that, Danny said. No working wife for Danny.

He said she had mailed that package at the request of her ex-husband. Her ex-husband was getting remarried and he wanted her to send him his things. Lucy had packed up every trace of him: the geisha girl figurine he’d won tossing darts at the fair, for instance, and the bowling ball in the red-and-white canvas bag that matched her own. Danny listed these objects in a detailed and lingering way, as if even they had fallen within the circle of his love. The bowling ball, he said, had accounted for much of the package’s weight (a total of twenty-eight pounds). Lucy had also mentioned a trophy cup, which couldn’t have been so very light either.

Ian tried to imagine Lucy bowling. Illogically, he pictured her in the shoes she had worn to the house — little red pumps with red cloth roses at the toes. The high heels would make tiny dimples in the glossy wood of the runway.

“She’s a wonderful cook,” Danny said. “Whenever I come to dinner she fixes a special meal for me and she lights new candles. Lucy feels people should always eat by candlelight. And sometimes she makes her own holders; last night it was two red apples. Wasn’t that smart? She has the smartest ideas. She’s good with napkins, too; she folds them into these different shapes, accordions or butterflies or wigwams, because Lucy says …”

Lucy says, Lucy feels, Lucy believes. She seemed almost present in the room with them. Danny lounged in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, his eyes slanting slightly the way they did when something fired him up. The knot of his tie hung loose on his chest, which made him look tipsy even though he wasn’t.

How did their evenings end? Ian wanted to ask. Did the two of them make out on her couch? Or maybe even go all the way?

Danny spoke of Lucy’s knack for interior decorating, her concern for her children, her difficult past life. “Both her parents died in a car crash when she was still in her teens,” he said, “and that husband of hers must not have been much, considering how far he’s fallen behind on the child support. Not that she complains. She never says a word against anyone; that’s not her style. I tell you, Ian, I’ve been looking for a woman like Lucy all my life, but I’d started to think I’d never find her. I almost thought there was something wrong with me. I’d meet these girls who seemed so pretty and so nice and then it would turn out I’d been hoodwinked; they were flirts or users or constitutional liars and everyone knew it but me. Shouldn’t there be some sort of training course in how to judge a woman? How are guys supposed to figure these things out? Well, some just do; it’s some kind of gift, I guess. But I was starting to worry I was jinxed. Then along comes Lucy. Two weeks ago she was a total stranger, can you believe it? And yet I’m certain she’s the one. She makes her own curtains and she cuts her children’s hair herself. She can plant a snipped-off twig in a pot and it will turn green and start growing. When I circle her waist with my hands, my fingertips almost meet.”

Ian somehow knew exactly how that would feel: her body narrowing between his palms like a slender, graceful vase.

Danny and Lucy were married a week later, in the Presbyterian church on Dober Street that the Bedloes sporadically attended. Lucy wore a rose-colored suit and a white pillbox hat with a bow. She stood in front of the minister with her arm linked through Danny’s, and her feet were placed primly together so that Ian’s eyes were riveted to the seams on the backs of her stockings. He had never seen seams on stockings before, if you didn’t count old black-and-white movies. He wondered how she got them so straight. They looked like two fountain-pen lines drawn with the aid of a ruler.

Pathetically few guests dotted the bride’s side of the church. The first pew held a couple of waitresses from the Fill ’Er Up Café, both wearing cone-shaped hairdos that made them seem the tallest people present. Behind them sat the pharmacist and his wife, with Lucy’s two children huddled against the wife. Ian had met the children at a family dinner the night before, and he hadn’t thought much of them. Agatha was as cloddish as her name — plain and thick, pasty-faced. Thomas was thin and dark and nimble but no more responsive to grownups. During the wedding they both gazed elsewhere — up at the vaulted ceiling, around at the pebbly pink windows — till Mrs. Myrdal leaned over and whispered sharply. Agatha was the kind of child who breathed through her mouth.

But the groom’s side! First came the parents, Doug Bedloe belted in and slicked down in an unfamiliar way and Bee wearing a new striped dress from Hutzler’s. Then in the second pew, a row of Daleys — Claudia and her husband, Macy, and all five of their rustling, fidgeting children, even little Ellen, although a sitter had been hired to lurk at the rear of the church just in case. Ian sat in the third pew with Cicely, holding hands. And if he turned around, he could see Danny’s friends from high school and his co-workers from the post office and just about the whole neighborhood as well: the Cahns, the Crains, the Mercers, Cicely’s parents and her brother Stevie, Mrs. Jordan in her bald fur stole even on this warm May day, and every last one of the foreigners — a row of tan young men wearing identical shiny black suits. The foreigners never missed a chance to attend a celebration.

The minister spoke at some length about the institution of marriage. Danny shifted his weight a few times but Lucy stayed dutifully motionless. Ian wondered why a hat like hers was called a pillbox. It looked more like a pill than a box, he thought — a big white aspirin.

Cicely squeezed his hand and Ian squeezed back, but not as hard. (She was wearing his class ring, bulky as a brass knuckle.) Distantly, he registered the bridal couple’s “I do’s”—Danny’s so emphatic that the younger Daleys giggled, Lucy’s throaty and endearing. Then Dr. Prescott pronounced them man and wife, and they kissed. It wasn’t one of those show-off kisses you sometimes see at weddings. Lucy just turned and looked up into Danny’s eyes, and Danny set both hands on her shoulders and bent to press his lips against hers very gently. After that they stepped back and smiled at the guests, and everyone rose and came forward to offer congratulations.

The reception was held at the Bedloes’, with fancy little cakes that Bee and Claudia had been baking for days, and Doug’s famous spiked punch in a plastic garbage can reserved only for that purpose, and bottled soft drinks for the children. There were more than enough children. Claudia’s brood chased each other through a forest of grownups’ legs. Rafe Hamnett’s sexy twin ten-year-old daughters stood over by the piano, each slinging out a hip and brandishing a paper straw like a cigarette. Only Lucy’s two seemed not to be enjoying themselves. They sat on a windowsill, almost hidden by the curtains on either side. At one point Cicely dragged Ian over to try and make friends with them — she was known at school for being “considerate”—but it wasn’t a success. Thomas shrank against his sister and picked at a Band-Aid wrapped around his thumb. Agatha kept her arms folded and stared past them at her mother, who was offering a small hand to each guest as Danny introduced her. (“Honey, this is Melvin Cahn, who lives next door. Melvin, like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life.”)

Cicely asked Agatha, “Isn’t it nice that you have a new uncle? Think of it: Uncle Ian.”

Agatha shifted her gaze to Cicely as if it took real effort.

“Isn’t that nice?” Cicely said.

Agatha finally nodded.

“She’s overcome with joy,” Ian told Cicely.

Cicely made a face at him. She was a pert, sweet, round-eyed girl with a bubbly head of blond curls. Today she wore a yellow shirt that turned her breasts into two little upturned teacups. Ian laced his fingers through hers and said, “Let’s go to your place.”

“Go? I haven’t said hello to your folks yet.”

But she let him lead her away, past Doug Bedloe with his punch dipper poised, past her little brother with his six-gun, past the foreigners practicing their English on the front porch. “Is it not fine day,” one of them said — Joe or Jim or Jack; they all had these super-American names shortened from who-knows-what. They stood back respectfully and followed Cicely with their eyes (how they admired blondes!) as Ian guided her down the steps.

Next to the curb, Danny’s blue Chevy stood waiting. The bride and groom were driving to Williamsburg for their honeymoon — just a three-day trip because that was the longest Lucy felt comfortable leaving the children. Some of the neighborhood teenagers had tied tin cans to the rear bumper and chalked JUST MARRIED across the trunk. Married! Ian thought, and he realized, all at once, that Danny really had gone through with it. He was a husband now and would never again stop by Ian’s bedroom door at night, his suit coat hooked over his thumb, to talk about the Baltimore Colts. Ian felt a rush of sorrow. But Cicely’s parents wouldn’t stay at the reception forever, so he said, “Let’s go,” and they started walking toward her house.

That summer, Ian got a job with Sid ’n’ Ed’s A-l Movers — a very local sort of company consisting of a single van. Each morning he reported to a garage on Greenmount, and then he and two lean, black, jokey men drove to some shabby house where they heaved liquor cartons and furniture into the van for a couple of hours. Then they drove to some other house, often even shabbier, and heaved it all out again. Ian managed to enjoy the work because he thought of it as weight lifting. He had always been very conscious of muscles. As a small boy, admiring Danny and his friends at sports, he had focused upon their forearms — the braiding beneath the skin as they swung a bat or punched a volleyball. There, he thought, was the telling difference, more than whiskers or deep voices. And he had examined his own reedy arms and wondered if they would ever change. But when it happened he must have been asleep, for all at once two summers ago he had noticed as he was mowing the lawn — why, look at that! The ropy muscles from wrist to elbow, the distinct blue cords of his veins. He had flexed a fist and gazed down, hypnotized, till his mother hallooed from the porch and asked how long he planned to stand there.

Well, like a lot of other things, muscles had turned out to be no big deal after all. (Now he thought it might be sleeping with a girl that made the difference.) But even so, he continued to work at building himself up. He deliberately chose the heaviest pieces of furniture, pushing ahead of Lou and LeDon, who were happy to lag behind with the bric-a-brac. Then in the evenings he came home hot and sweaty and swaggery, and his mother would say, “Phew! Go take a shower before you do another thing.” He stood under the shower till the water ran cold, after which he dressed in fresh jeans and a T-shirt and went off to eat dinner at Cicely’s. His mother hardly cooked at all that summer. Claudia was sick as a dog with her latest pregnancy, so often as not Bee would have spent the day baby-sitting. Sometimes she said, “What, you’re eating at the Browns’ again?” But he could tell she was just as glad. She and his father would have a sandwich in front of the TV, or they’d walk over to Lipton’s. She said, “Mind you don’t wear out your welcome, now.” Then she forgot about him.

He and Cicely twined their feet together under the table while her mother served him double portions of everything. Cicely slid a hand secretly up his thigh, and Ian rearranged his napkin and swallowed and told Mrs. Brown how much he liked her cooking. Mr. Brown was usually absent, out selling insurance to homeowners who could be reached only in the evenings, but Cicely’s little brother was there — a pest and a nuisance. He would tag along after dinner, boring Ian to death with baseball questions. He hung around the two of them on the screened back porch. “Stee-vie!” Cicely would say, and Stevie would ask, “What? What am I doing?”

“Don’t you have any friends of your own?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Ma, Stevie’s being a brat again.”

“Stevie, come along inside, now,” Mrs. Brown would call.

Then Stevie would leave, kicking the glider as he passed and lowering his prickly, white-blond head so no one could see his face.

Ian and Cicely had been going together since ninth grade. They were planning to get married after college, although sometimes Cicely teased him and said she’d have to see who else asked her, first. “Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and not for better,” she said. But then she would move over into Ian’s lap and wrap her arms around his neck. She smelled of baby powder, warm and pink. She wore pink underwear, too — a slippery pink bra with lace edges. Sometimes when they had been kissing a while she would let him unfasten the hook at the back, but he had to be careful not to tickle. She was the most ticklish person he had ever met. Things would just be getting interesting when all at once she would pull away and fall into peals of helpless laughter. Ian felt like a fool when that happened. “Oh, great. Just great,” he would say, and she would say, “It’s not my fault if your hands are cold.”

“Cold? It’s ninety-eight degrees out.”

“That’s not my fault.”

Did other girls behave like this? He would bet they didn’t. He wished she were, oh, more womanly, sometimes. More experienced. He said, “This is supposed to be a moment of romantic passion, must I remind you.” He said, “We’re not in kindergarten, here.” Once he said, “Have you ever considered wearing stockings that have seams?” But when Cicely started laughing she just couldn’t seem to stop, and all she did was shake her head and wipe the tears from her eyes.

One August afternoon, he came home from work to find a note on the hall table: Claudia in hospital, Dad and I staying with kids. At first he didn’t think much about this. Claudia was nearly always in the hospital, it seemed to him, giving birth to one baby or another. He dropped the note in the wastebasket and climbed the stairs, with the dog panting hopefully behind him. But then while he was showering, it occurred to him that Claudia couldn’t be having her baby yet. She didn’t even look very pregnant yet. He’d better call his mother and find out what was wrong.

As soon as he was dressed, he bounded back downstairs to use the phone. But on the next-to-last step he heard somebody crossing the dining room. Beastie, following close on his heels, uttered a low growl. Then Lucy appeared in the doorway. “Ian?” she said.

“Oh,” he said.

She wore a big white shirt of Danny’s and a pair of red pedal pushers, and her hair was tied back in a red bandanna. She looked about twelve years old. “Have you talked with your mom yet?” she asked him.

“No, but she left a note. What’s the matter with Claudia?”

“Oh, nothing all that serious. Just, you know, a little bleeding …”

Ian began studying an area slightly above her head.

“So anyway,” she said, “I thought I’d fix you some supper. Ordinarily I’d invite you to our place, but we’re going out so I brought something over. There’s potato salad, and ham, and I’ve put some peas on the stove to warm up.”

He didn’t tell her he usually ate at Cicely’s. All summer the family had tactfully left her and Danny alone, allowing them to get past the honeymoon stage, so they met only on special occasions like Bee’s birthday and the Fourth of July. Lucy must not have any notion about their day-to-day lives.

He followed her through the dining room to the kitchen, where he found Thomas and Agatha sitting in two straight-backed chairs. There was something eerie about children who kept so quiet you didn’t realize they were in the house. Thomas held a large, naked doll with a matted wig. Agatha’s hands were folded tidily on the table in front of her. They looked at Ian with no more expression than the doll wore. Ian said, “Well, hi, gang,” but neither of them answered.

He leaned against the sink and watched Lucy flitting around the kitchen. Her hair billowed halfway down her back, longer than he would have expected. She wore white sandals and her toenails were painted fire-engine red. None of the girls at school painted their nails anymore. Everyone was striving for the natural look, which all at once struck Ian as homely.

He realized she must have spoken to him. She was facing him with her head cocked. “Pardon?” he asked.

“Do you want your ham cold, or heated up?”

“Oh, um, cold is fine.”

“It won’t be real fancy,” she said, opening the refrigerator. “Tomorrow if your mom’s still busy we’ll ask you to dinner. Why, you haven’t been over since I painted the living room!”

“No, I guess not,” Ian said.

She and Danny were renting a one-story house just north of Cold Spring Lane. So far they had hardly any furniture, but everything they did have was modern, modern, modern — black plastic and aluminum and glass. Bee claimed it would take some getting used to, but Ian loved it.

“Next week I start on the children’s room,” Lucy said. “I found this magazine with the best ideas! Sit down, why don’t you.”

He pulled out a chair and sat across from the children. A place had already been laid for him with the company silver and his mother’s best china. Two candlesticks from the dining room flanked a bowl of pansies. He began to feel ridiculous, like one of those rich people in cartoons who banquet all alone while a butler stands at the ready. He asked Thomas and Agatha, “Am I the only one eating?”

They gazed at him. Their eyes were a mournful shade of brown.

“How about you?” he asked Thomas’s doll. “Won’t you join me in a little collation?”

He caught Thomas’s lips twitching — a victory. A chink of a giggle escaped him. But Agatha remained unamused. “Her name is Dulcimer,” she said reprovingly.

“Dulcimer?”

“Ian doesn’t care about all that,” Lucy told them.

“She used to have clothes,” Agatha said, “but Thomas went and ruined them.”

“I did not!” Thomas shouted.

Lucy said, “Ssh,” and lit the candles.

“She used to have a dress with two pockets, but he put it in the washer and it came out bits and pieces.”

“That was the washer did that, not me!”

“Now she has to go bare, because his other dolls’ clothes are too little.”

Ian forked up a slice of ham and looked again at Dulcimer. Her body was cloth, soiled to dark gray. Her head was pink vinyl and so were her arms and her legs, which had a wide-set, spraddled appearance. “Maybe she could wear real baby clothes,” he suggested.

“Mama won’t—”

“That’s what I say, too!” Thomas burst out.

“Mama won’t let her,” Agatha continued stubbornly. There was something unswerving about her. She reminded Ian of certain grade-school teachers he had known. “Mama’s got all these baby clothes she buys at Hochschild’s, nightgowns and diapers and stuff Dulcimer would love, but Mama won’t lend them out.”

“Have some peas,” Lucy told Ian.

“Oh, thanks, I’ll just—”

“Today she bought a teeny-weeny baby hat with blue ribbons but she says if Thomas plays with it he’ll get it dirty,” Agatha said.

Ian looked over at Lucy, and Lucy looked back at him ruefully. She said, “Don’t tell the others, will you?”

“Okay.”

“I want to wait till Claudia gets out of the hospital.”

“My lips are sealed,” he said.

It was a pleasurable moment, sharing a secret with Lucy. The secret itself, though, he wasn’t so sure of. He thought of Danny circling her waist with his hands, his fingertips nearly meeting. Couldn’t he have let her stay as she was? Did everything have to keep marching forward all the time?

She said, “We ought to get going, kids.”

“Well, thanks for the food,” Ian told her.

“You’re very welcome.”

After they left he could have stopped eating — he was already late for supper at Cicely’s — but he worried Lucy would find out somehow and feel hurt. So he made his way through everything, sweating in the candlelight, which was, to tell the truth, sort of uncomfortable for August. She had laid out the ham slices in a careful, scalloped design that reminded him of the patterns etched alongside the ocean. And although it would have saddened him to let the ham go to waste, it saddened him too to finish it and end up with just the empty plate.

Claudia did manage to keep her baby. In fact, she went way past her due date. Her doctor had predicted the first week in December, but things dragged on so long that Ian started betting the baby would arrive on his birthday, January 2. “Oh, please,” Claudia said. “Let’s hope to God you’re wrong.” She was big as a house and her ankles were swollen and she’d had to have her rings cut off with a hacksaw. At Christmas she was still lumbering around, and Christmas dinner was a spectacle, with Claudia and Lucy sitting elbow to elbow in their ballooning maternity smocks. Lucy turned out to be the type who carried her baby a great distance in front of her (something to do with her small frame, perhaps), so that even though she had two months to go, she looked nearly as pregnant as Claudia. She was officially a member of the family now — the honeymoon joyfully over and done with, in the Bedloes’ eyes, the moment she announced her good news. Now they felt free to stop by her house more often and to invite her and Danny for potluck. Ian had almost reached the point where he could take her for granted. Although still when she turned her silvery gaze upon him he had an arrested feeling, a sense of a skipped beat in the atmosphere of the room.

One of the Bedloe traditions was that important dinners, on holidays and such, were not the usual boring assortment of meats and vegetables. Instead, Bee served their favorite course: hors d’oeuvres. Oh, there’d be a turkey at Thanksgiving, cakes for birthdays, but those were just a nod to convention. What mattered were the stuffed mushrooms, the runny cheeses, the spreads and dips and pâtés and shrimps on toothpicks. The family was secretly proud of this practice; they enjoyed watching guests’ reactions. Nothing humdrum about the Bedloes! That Christmas they had oysters on the half shell, and the look of horror on Lucy’s children’s faces made everybody laugh. “Never mind,” Danny told them. “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to.”

Danny was exuberant these days. He had researched pregnancy and childbirth as if he expected to deliver the baby himself, and he kept a long scroll of possible names scrunched in his pocket. For some strange reason, he seemed very fond of Thomas and Agatha. Well, Thomas was all right, Ian supposed. He looked kind of cute in his dapper little sailor outfit. But Agatha! Really there was only so much you could do with such a child. Her frilly pink dress made her face appear all the more wooden, and her hair stood out at her jaw in a monolithic wedge. Sometimes Ian caught her giving him one of her flat stares, reminding him of that doll that Thomas was so attached to. Dulcimer. Same numb, blank face, same unseeing eyes.

They moved to the living room and settled themselves, groaning. The cat threw up an oyster behind the couch. Barney fed cracker crumbs to the goldfish, Abbie played “The First Noel” on the piano with a rhythm as ponderous as army boots, and Doug brought out his Polaroid Land camera and took pictures of them all — each photo after the first one showing somebody holding a previous photo, admiring it or grimacing or industriously coating it with fixative. Then little Cindy, who had fallen asleep in front of the fire, woke up cranky, and the dog accidentally stepped on her and made her cry. Claudia said, “That’s our cue! Time to go!” and she heaved herself to her feet. They all departed at once — Claudia’s family and Danny’s — leaving behind a litter of torn gift wrap and mismatched mittens and oyster shells. “This was our best Christmas ever, wasn’t it?” Bee asked Doug. But she always said that.

Claudia’s baby came two days later — a girl. Frances, they named her. Ian said, “Well, I was almost right. It’s almost my birthday.”

“Cheer up,” Bee told him. “There’s always the next one.”

“Next one! Good grief.”

The next one of Claudia’s, they both meant. It never occurred to them that Lucy’s baby might arrive on his birthday. But that was what happened.

He had spent the evening at Cicely’s, where she and his friends threw him a party. When he got home he found his mother waiting up for him. “Guess what!” she said. “Lucy had her baby.”

“What, so soon?”

“A little girl: Daphne. She’s small but healthy, breathing on her own … Danny called about an hour ago and he was so excited he could hardly talk.”

“After this he won’t be fit to live with,” Ian said gloomily.

“And Lucy’s doing fine. Oh, won’t the neighbors tease us? They’ll be counting on their fingers, except in this case it’s obvious that … you want to go with me to the hospital tomorrow?”

“I have school tomorrow,” Ian said.

Besides, he had never been much interested in infants.

He didn’t see the new baby for a week, in fact, what with one thing and another. Neither did Claudia, who was stuck at home with her own baby. So on Sunday, when everyone gathered at the Bedloes’ for dinner, Danny made a big production of introducing his daughter. “Ta-da!” he trumpeted, and he entered the house bearing her high in both hands — a tiny cluster of crochet work. “Here she is, folks! Miss Daphne Bedloe.” Lucy looked paler than usual, but she laughed as she bent to unbutton Thomas’s jacket.

“Let’s see her,” Claudia commanded from the couch. She had constructed a kind of nest there and was nursing Franny. Ian had retreated to the other side of the room as soon as he saw Claudia fumbling under her blouse, and he made no move now to come closer. All newborns looked more or less alike, he figured. And this one might still be sort of … fetus-shaped. He hung back and dug his hands in his pockets and traced an arc in the rug with one sneaker.

But Danny said, “Don’t you want to see too, Ian?” and he sounded so hurt that Ian had to say, “Huh? Oh. Sure.” He took his hands from his pockets and approached.

Danny set her on the couch next to Claudia and started peeling off layers. First the crocheted blanket, then an inner blanket, then a bonnet. His fingers seemed too thick for the task, but finally he said, “There!” and straightened up, grinning.

What was that fairy tale? “Sleeping Beauty,” maybe, or “Snow White.” Skin as white as snow and hair as black as coal and lips as red as roses. So she was prettier than most other babies, yes, but still not all that interesting. Until she opened her eyes.

She opened her eyes and fixed Ian with a thoughtful, considering stare, and Ian felt a sudden loosening in his chest. It seemed she had reached out and pulled a string from somewhere deep inside him. It seemed she knew him. He blinked.

“Your birthday-mate,” Danny was saying. “Or birthmate, or whatever they call it. Isn’t she something?”

To regain his distance, Ian let his eyes slide over to Claudia. He found her looking directly into his face, meaningfully, narrowly. He couldn’t think what she wanted to convey; he didn’t understand her intensity. Then it came to him, as clearly as if she had spoken.

This is not a premature baby.

He was so astonished that he let his eyes slide back again, forgetting why he had glanced away in the first place. And it was true: she might be small but her cheeks were round, and her little fists were dimpled. She looked nothing like those “Life Before Birth” photos in Life magazine.

“Isn’t she a love?” Bee asked. “Two loves,” she added, blowing a kiss toward Franny. And Claudia said, “She’s a beauty, Lucy.”

Ian turned to study Claudia. She was smiling now. Her face — a younger, smoother version of Bee’s — seemed relaxed and peaceful. The hitch had been smoothed over. Not a trace of it remained. Here was their newest member, born early but in perfect health, thank God, and everything in the Bedloe family was as wonderful as always.

Well, hold on (Ian told himself). Don’t be too hasty. Daphne was no longer brand-new, after all. She’d had six whole days to catch up before he laid eyes on her. Best to put the subject right out of his mind.

But over the next few weeks it kept sidling back, somehow.

If Danny and Lucy had been going together forever, why, a seven-months baby (quote, unquote) would have been something to wink at. But they hadn’t been going together forever. Nine months ago they hadn’t even known each other. Lucy had not yet walked into the post office to plunk her famous package on Danny’s counter. She might have been dating someone else entirely.

In school last year a senior had had to get married to a girl he swore he hardly knew. Or rather, he swore everybody knew her. It was Ian’s first intimation of the fix a man could find himself in. Women were the ones who held the reins, it emerged. Women were up close to things. Men stood off at one remove and were forced to accept women’s reading of whatever happened. Probably this was what Ian’s father had been trying to tell him in that talk they’d had a few years ago, but Ian hadn’t fully understood it at the time.

One night he asked Cicely, “What do you think of Lucy?”

“Oh, I just love her,” Cicely said.

“Yes, but—”

“She’s always so easy to talk to; she always asks me these questions that show she’s been listening. Real questions, I mean. Not those who-cares questions most other grownups ask.”

“Yes …” Ian said, because he had noticed the same thing himself. Lucy had a grave, focused manner of looking at him. He could imagine she had been reflecting upon him seriously ever since their last meeting.

“I just think Danny is lucky to have her,” Cicely said, and Ian said, “Well, yes, he is. Yes, he is lucky.”

Ian had quit his job with Sid ’n’ Ed’s when school reopened; his mother made him. This was his senior year and she wanted him to concentrate on getting into a halfway decent college. The last thing he needed was to waste his time hauling other people’s mattresses, she said.

But what she didn’t seem to realize was that a person his age had to have a social life, and a social life took money. By February, he was broke. So when Lucy called and asked if he would baby-sit — a job he hated, and one he was ill equipped for besides, as youngest in his family — he didn’t immediately refuse. “Well,” he said, stalling, “but I don’t even know how to change a diaper.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” Lucy told him. “I would change her just before I left. And most likely she’d be sleeping; this would be afternoons.”

“Oh. Afternoons.”

“Just a couple of hours after school now and then. Please, Ian? I’m about to lose my mind cooped up all day. And I can’t keep imposing on your mother, and Mrs. Myrdal won’t come anymore and Cicely’s got cheerleading practice. I just want to get out on my own a while — go shopping or take a walk with nobody hanging onto me. I’d pay you a dollar an hour.”

“You would?” he said.

On the rare occasions Claudia had talked him into sitting, the pay had been fifty cents.

“And Thomas and Agatha have taken such a shine to you. They’re the ones who suggested you.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” Ian said. “If it’s a matter of popular demand …”

So he started walking over from school one or two afternoons a week and staying till dusk. It wasn’t a job that required much work, but somehow he found it far more tiring than Sid ’n’ Ed’s. No wonder Lucy wanted a break! This was the coldest, grayest time of year, and the stark modern furniture that had seemed so elegant in the summer had a bleak feel in the winter. Toys and picture books covered the white vinyl couch. Sheaves of Agatha’s pulpy first-grade papers lay scattered across the rug. Thomas and Agatha had the used, slightly tarnished look that even the best-tended children take on late in the day, and they pressed in upon him too closely, drilling him with questions. Was Ian ever going to play in the World Series? Did he know how to drive a car? A motorcycle? An airplane? Did he and Cicely go to many balls? (This last from Agatha, who had a big crush on Cicely.) Gradually he forgot that they had once been tongue-tied in his presence.

They clung to the belief that Ian felt a special affection for Dulcimer, and they always made a point of displaying what she was wearing that day — one or another infant outfit handed down from Daphne. “Why, Miss Dulcimer!” Ian would say. “I do believe fuzzy pink flannel is your most becoming fabric.” They thought it was hilarious when he spoke to her directly. Then they might play Parcheesi — Ian’s idea; all the Bedloes loved any kind of game — or he read to them, his throat aching tightly with held-back yawns as he imitated various squeaky animals.

Daphne was usually an invisible, slumbering presence, but if Lucy stayed out too long Ian might hear a tentative cry from the children’s room. He would find her lying in her crib, sucking her fist and watching the door so his first impression was always that considering stare. She was the only person he knew of with navy blue eyes. He would lift her awkwardly, in a bunch, pretending not to notice the dampness seeping around the legs of her terry-cloth pajamas. He would carry her to the kitchen and set a bottle in the electric warmer. Waiting for it to heat, he breathed her smell of warm urine and something vanilla-ish — maybe just her skin. Thomas tugged at one of her terry-cloth feet. “Hey there, Daffy. Daffy-doo.” Daphne squirmed and murmured into the curve of Ian’s neck.

When Lucy returned, she brought a burst of cold air through the door with her. The cold seemed to lie on her surface in a sparkling film. And she was always lit up and laughing, excited by her expedition. She would hold out her arms to the children. “Were you good?” she would ask. “Did you miss me?” and she’d take the baby from Ian and nuzzle her face, nose to nose. “Guess what: I felt a couple of snowflakes. I bet we’re going to have snow tonight.” Balancing Daphne on her hip, she would fish in her big shoulder bag for Ian’s pay — generously rounding off to the nearest dollar, sometimes even adding a tip and telling him to take Cicely someplace nice. Ian knew that she and Danny weren’t rich, and he would protest but she always insisted. “Well, thanks,” he’d say lamely, and she would say, “Thank you! You don’t know how you saved my life.” Her money smelled of her cologne, a tingly scent that clung to the bills for hours afterward and hung in his room when he emptied his pockets at bedtime.

One afternoon when she returned there was something distracted about her. She greeted the children absently and failed to inquire after Daphne, who was still asleep. “Ian,” she said right away, “can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Can I ask what you think of this dress?”

She slipped her coat off, revealing a different dress from the one she had left the house in. Holding her arms out at her sides, she spun like a fashion model. Thomas and Agatha gazed at her raptly. So did Ian.

It was the most beautiful piece of clothing he had ever seen in his life. The material was a luminous ivory knit, very soft and drapey, but over her breasts and her hips it was perfectly smooth. What would you call such material? He could imagine its silkiness against his fingertips.

“Do you think Danny will mind?” Lucy asked. “I don’t want him to feel I’m a spendthrift. Do you think I should take it back?”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t,” Ian said. “Now that you’ve gone to the bother of lugging it home.”

She looked down at it, doubtfully.

He told her, “That, um, what-do-you-call …”

That V neckline, he wanted to say, plunging so low in the middle. And that skirt that whisks around your legs and makes that shimmery sound.

But what he said was, “That cloth is not bad at all.”

“But would you think it cost a lot?”

“Oh, only about a million,” he said. “Give or take a few thousand.”

“No, don’t say that! That’s what I was afraid of. But it didn’t cost hardly anything, I promise. You want to know what it cost? Nineteen ninety-five. Can you believe it? Can you believe that’s all it cost?”

Well, she did want his answer, after all. So he reached out to touch the fabric at her waist. It was so fine-spun it made his fingers feel as rough as rope. He curved his palm to cup her rib cage and he felt the warmth of her skin underneath. Then Lucy took a sharp step backward and he dropped his hand to his side.

“Oh, ah, nineteen ninety-five sounds … very reasonable,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming from somewhere else. There was a moment of silence. All he heard was Agatha’s snuffling breath.

“But anyhow!” Lucy said, and she laughed too gaily, artificially, and lifted her bag from the table. “Thanks for your opinion!” she said. Was she being sarcastic? She owed him two dollars but she paid him five. A hundred-and-fifty-percent tip. He said, “I’ll bring your change next time I see you,” and she said, “No, keep it. Really.”

He felt mortified by that.

Walking home through the twilight, he kicked at clumps of old snow and muttered to himself. Once or twice he groaned out loud. When he entered the front hall Bee said, “Hi, hon! How was our little Daffodil?” But Ian merely brushed past her and climbed the stairs to his room.

Over the next few days — a Friday and a weekend — he didn’t baby-sit; nor would he have ordinarily. He and Cicely went to a movie; he and his two best friends, Pig and Andrew, went bowling. Striding toward the foul line with the bowling ball suspended from his fingers, he thought of Lucy mailing that package to Wyoming. What kind of woman owns her own bowling ball? Not to mention the geisha girl figurine.

Really there was a great deal about Lucy that was, oh, a little bit tacky, when you came right down to it. (What a relief, to discover she wasn’t flawless!) Now he recalled the grammatical slips, It won’t be real fancy and It didn’t cost hardly anything; the way she sometimes wore her hair down even with high heels; the fact that she had no people. He knew it wasn’t her fault her parents had died, but still you’d expect a few family connections — brothers and sisters, aunts, at least cousins. And how about friends? He didn’t count those two waitresses; they were just workmates. No, Lucy kept to herself, and when she went out in the afternoons she went alone and she returned alone. He envisioned her rushing in from one of her shopping trips, her cheeks flushed pink with excitement.

Funny how she never brought any parcels back.

Why, even last Thursday she’d brought no parcel, the day she came home with that dress.

She hadn’t bought that dress at all. Someone had given it to her.

She wasn’t out shopping. She was meeting someone.

She had asked if the dress looked expensive. Not Do you think I paid too much? but Could I get away with saying I paid next to nothing? “Can you believe it?” she had asked. (Insistently, it seemed to him now.) What she’d meant was, Will DANNY believe it, if I tell him I bought it myself?

He watched the bowling ball crash into the pins with a hollow, splintery sound, and a thrill of malicious satisfaction zinged through him like an electrical current.

When she phoned Monday night to ask if he could babysit the following afternoon, he felt confused by the realness of her. He had somehow forgotten the confiding effect of that gravelly little voice. But he was busy, he told her. He had to study for a test. She said, “Then how about Wednesday?”

He said he couldn’t come Wednesday either. “Besides,” he said, “baseball practice is starting soon, so I guess after this I won’t be free anymore.”

Lucy said, “Oh.”

“Pressing athletic obligations, and all that,” he said.

There was a pause. He forced himself not to speak. Instead he conjured up a picture of Danny, for whose sake he was doing this. His only brother! His dearest relative, who trusted everyone completely and believed whatever you told him.

“Well, thanks anyway,” Lucy said sadly, and then she said goodbye. Ian was suddenly not so certain. He wondered if he had misjudged her. He stood gripping the receiver and he noticed how his heart ached, as if it were he, not Lucy, who had been wounded.

* * *

For Doug’s birthday, Bee made his favorite hors d’oeuvres — smoked oyster log and spinach balls and Chesapeake crab spread. Claudia made a coconut cake that looked like a white shag bath mat. She and her family were the first to arrive. She had Ian come out to the kitchen with her to help put on the candles — fifty-nine of them, this year. Ian wasn’t in a very good mood, but Claudia kept joshing him so finally he had to smile. You couldn’t stay glum around Claudia for long; she was so funny and slapdash and comfortable, in her boxy tan plaid shirt the same color as her skin and the maternity slacks she was wearing till she got her figure back. They ran out of birthday candles and started using other kinds — three tall white tapers and several of those stubby votive lights their mother kept for power failures. By now they had the giggles. It was almost like the old days, when Claudia wasn’t married yet and still belonged completely to the family.

So Ian said, “Hey, Claude.”

“Hmm?”

“You know Lucy.”

“What about her?” she asked, still teary with laughter.

“You don’t think she had that baby early. Do you?” Her smile faded.

“Do you?” he persisted.

“Oh, Ian, who am I to say?”

“I’m wondering if somebody ought to tell Danny,” he said.

“Tell him?” she said. “No, wait. You mean, talk about it? You can’t do that!”

“But he looks like a dummy, Claude. He looks so … fooled!”

He was louder than he’d meant to be. Claudia glanced toward the door. Then she set a hand on his arm and spoke hurriedly, in an undertone. “Ian,” she said.

“Lots of times, people have, oh, understandings, you might say, that outsiders can’t even guess at.”

“Understandings! What kind of understandings? And then also—”

But he was too late. The swinging door burst open and the children rushed in, crying, “Mom!” and “Danny and them are here, Mom.” Claudia said, “What do you think of our cake?” She held it up, all spiky and falling apart. She was laughing again. Ian pushed past her and left the kitchen.

In the dining room, Lucy bounced the baby on her shoulder while she talked with Bee. She still had her coat on; she looked fresh and happy, and she smiled at Ian without a trace of guilt. His mother said, “Ian, hon, could you fetch the booster seats?” She was laying a notched silver fish knife next to each plate. The Bedloes owned the most specialized utensils — sugar shells and butter-pat spears and a toothy, comblike instrument for slicing angel food cake. Ian marveled that people could consider such things important. “Also we’ll need those bibs in the linen drawer,” his mother said, but he passed on through without speaking. From the living room he heard the TV set blaring a basketball game. “Notice that young fellow on the right,” his father was saying. “What’s-his-name. Total concentration. What’s that fellow’s name?”

Ian climbed the stairs while his family’s voices filled the house below him like water — just that murmury and chuckly, gliding through the rooms to form one single, level surface.

On Saturday Cicely’s parents were taking a trip to Cumberland, leaving Cicely in charge of her little brother. They were planning to be gone overnight. This meant that after her brother went to bed, Cicely and Ian would be just like married people, all alone downstairs or maybe even upstairs in her bedroom with the door locked. They didn’t discuss the possibilities in so many words, but Ian got the feeling that Cicely was aware of them. She said maybe he’d like to come over about eight thirty or so. (Stevie’s bedtime was eight.) She wanted to cook him a really elegant dinner, she said. They would have candles, just like Lucy. Maybe Ian could dress up a little. Maybe get hold of a bottle of wine.

He preferred the taste of beer himself, but he would certainly bring wine, and also flowers. He wasn’t so keen on dressing up but he would do that too, if she wanted. Anything. Anything. Would she let him stay the whole night? It didn’t seem the right moment to ask. They were sitting in the school cafeteria with accordion-pleated drinking-straw wrappers whizzing around their heads.

Saturday morning he slept till noon, and as soon as he woke he phoned Cicely to see what color wine she wanted. “What color?” she said, sounding hurried. “Any color; I don’t care.”

“But aren’t you supposed to—?”

“I have to go,” she said. “Something’s boiling over.”

After he’d hung up he realized he should have asked about the flowers, too — what color flowers. Or was it only with corsages that the color mattered? This was a meal, not a prom dress. Oh, everything was all so new to him, all on a larger scale than he was used to. He worried he wouldn’t know precisely what to do with her. He wished Danny were around. The only person in the house was his mother, and she was in one of her cleaning frenzies. She didn’t even offer him lunch. He had to make his own — three peanut butter sandwiches and a quart of milk, which he drank directly from the carton when his mother wasn’t looking.

In the afternoon he and Andrew went over to Pig Benson’s house and played Ping-Pong. Tick-tock, tick-tock, the ball went, while Ian considered dropping a hint about tonight. Or would that be bragging? Danny had once told him that girls hate boys who kiss and tell. Also, it was possible that Pig and Andrew might do something juvenile like shine flashlights in Cicely’s windows or lean on the doorbell and then run. It was very possible. Look at them: scuffling around the Ping-Pong table all gawky and unkempt and wild, acting years and years younger than Ian.

Although at the same time, there was something enviable about them.

When he reached home, his mother was standing in front of the hall mirror in her best dress, screwing on her earrings. “Oh! Ian!” she said. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“What’s up?”

“You’re supposed to head over to Lucy’s right away. She needs you to baby-sit.”

“Baby-sit? I can’t baby-sit! I’ve got a date.”

“Well, I’m sure she won’t be long; she’s just meeting a friend for a drink, she says. Danny’s at a stag party. Goodness, look at the time, and your father’s not even—”

“Mom,” Ian said, following her into the living room, “you had no business volunteering me to baby-sit. I’ve got plans of my own, and besides I think I might spend the night at Pig’s. You have way, way overstepped, Mom. And another thing. This Lucy, calling up the minute Danny’s back is turned—”

“Back is turned! What are you talking about? It’s Bucky Hargrove’s stag party; Bucky’s getting married next week.”

She was plumping cushions and collecting sections of the evening paper. Her high heels gave her an unaccustomed, stalking gait, and Ian could tell she was wearing her girdle; she inhabited her dress in such a condensed manner. She stooped stiffly for a dog bone and said, “Not that I approve of such things: bunch of grown men telling dirty jokes together. So that’s why I said to Lucy, ‘Why, of course you should get out! Ian would be glad to sit!’ I said. And don’t you let on you feel otherwise, young man, or you’ll be grounded for life and I mean it.”

The front door opened and she spun around. “Doug?” she called.

“Here, sweetheart.”

“Well, thank the Lord! You’ve got fifteen minutes to dress. Did you forget we were invited to the Finches’?”

When Ian passed through the hall on his way out, he sent his father a commiserating look.

It was near the end of March, that period when spring approaches jerkily and then backs off a bit. The light was hanging on longer than it had a week ago, but a raw, damp wind was moving in from the north. Ian zipped his jacket and turned up the collar. He circled a group of Waverly Street children playing hopscotch — bulkily wrapped little girls planting their feet in a no-nonsense, authoritative way down a ladder of chalked squares. He performed a polite minuet with one of the foreigners, dodging right, then dodging left, till the foreigner said, “Please to excuse me,” and laughed and stepped aside. Ian nodded but he didn’t stop to talk. Talking with the foreigners could tie up half the evening, what with that habit they had of meticulously inquiring after every possible relative.

By the time he reached Jeffers Street, dusk had fallen. The windows of Danny’s house glowed mistily, veiled by sheer white curtains. Ian rang the doorbell and then knocked, to show he was a man in a hurry. The sooner Lucy got going the sooner she would be back, he figured.

He had expected her to look shamefaced at the sight of him. (Surely she knew she hadn’t played straight, going behind his back to his mother.) But when she opened the door, she just said, “Oh, Ian! Come in. I really do appreciate this.” Then Thomas and Agatha hurtled toward him from the living room, both wearing footed pajamas. “Ian!” they shouted. “Did you bring Cicely? Where’s Cicely? Mama said maybe—”

“Let him catch his breath,” Lucy told them. She was putting on her coat. She wore a red turtleneck and long, loose woolen pants that gave the effect of a skirt. It seemed unjust that she should be so pretty. “My friend Dot phoned at the very last minute,” she said. “I know it’s a Saturday night, but I thought maybe if you invited Cicely over—”

“She has to stay with her brother,” Ian said bluntly. He stood in front of her with his fists in his jacket pockets. “I’m supposed to go to her house. I promised I’d be there at eight-thirty.”

“Oh, well, that’s no problem. Right now it’s—” She slid back a sleeve and checked her watch. “Six-forty. I’ll tell Dot I have to be in early. Remember Dot? From the Fill ’Er Up Café?”

“Yeah, sure,” Ian said heavily.

But she didn’t seem to catch it. She was looking for something. “Now, where …” she said. “Has anyone seen my keys? Well, never mind. You be good, kids, hear? And you can stay up till I get back.” Then she left, shutting the door behind her so neatly that Ian didn’t even hear the latch click.

In the living room, Daphne sat propped in her infant seat in front of the TV. “Hey there, Daph,” Ian said, shucking off his jacket. The sound of his voice sent her little terry-cloth arms and legs into unsynchronized wheeling motions. She craned around till she was looking up into his face and she gave him a lopsided smile. It was sort of flattering, really. Ian squatted to pick her up. He felt as surprised as ever by the fight in her — the wiry combativeness of such a small body. Even through the terry cloth, the heat from her tiny armpits warmed his fingers.

“Ian,” Thomas said, “why don’t you come over anymore?”

“Now we got no one,” Agatha said, “and Mama called Mrs. Myrdal and begged and pleaded but Mrs. Myrdal hung up on her.”

“Are you mad on account of I beat you at Parcheesi last time?” Thomas asked.

“Beat me!” Ian said. “That was just a fluke. The merest coincidence. Bring on the board and I’ll prove it, you young upstart.”

Thomas tittered and went off for the Parcheesi board.

While the two children were setting up the game on the rug, Ian phoned Cicely. “Hello?” she said, out of breath.

“Hi,” he said. He shifted Daphne to his hip.

“Oh, Ian. Hi.”

“I’m over baby-sitting at Lucy’s. Just thought I’d let you know, in case you find yourself desperate for the sound of my voice or something.”

“Baby-sitting! When will you be done?”

“It shouldn’t take long. Lucy promised—”

“I have to go,” Cicely broke in. “I’m following this recipe that says Simmer covered, stirring constantly. Can you figure that out? I mean, am I supposed to keep popping the cover off and popping it back on, or what? Do you suppose—”

She hung up, perhaps still talking. Ian sat down on the rug and settled Daphne on his knee.

It was true he liked all games, but Thomas and Agatha were not very challenging opponents. They employed a strategy of avoidance, fearfully clinging to the safety squares and deliberating whole minutes before venturing into open territory. Also, Thomas couldn’t add. Each toss of the dice remained two separate numbers, laboriously counted out one by one. “A two and a four. One, two. One, two, three—”

“Six,” Ian said impatiently. He scooped up the dice and flung them so they skittered across the board. “Eight,” he said. “Ha!” Eight was what he needed to capture Agatha’s man.

“No fair,” she told him. “One douse went on the carpet.”

“Die,” he said.

Her jaw dropped.

“One die went on the carpet,” he said. He picked up his own man.

“No fair if they don’t land on the board!” she said. “You have to take your turn over.”

“I should worry, I should care, only babies cry no fair,” Ian singsonged. He pounded his man down the board triumphantly. “Five, six, seven—”

The phone rang.

“—eight,” he said, nudging aside Agatha’s man. He hoisted Daphne to his shoulder and reached up for the phone on the plastic cube table. “Hello?”

“Ian?”

“Hi, Cicely.”

“On your way over, could you pick up some butter? My white sauce didn’t thicken and I had to throw it out and start again, and now I don’t have enough butter for the rolls.”

“Sure thing,” Ian said. “So how’s our friend Stevie?”

“Stevie?”

“Is he getting ready for bed yet?”

“Not now, it’s a quarter past seven.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Oops!” she said.

She hung up.

Ian hoped she wasn’t losing sight of the important issues here. White sauce, rolls, what did he care? He just wanted to get that brother of hers out of the picture.

Daphne breathed damply into his left ear. He boosted her higher on his shoulder and turned back to the game.

They finished Parcheesi and started Old Maid. Old Maid was sort of pointless, though, because Thomas couldn’t bluff. He had that sallow kind of skin that reveals every emotion; whenever he grew anxious, bruiselike shadows deepened beneath his eyes.

The game went on forever and Daphne started fussing. “She wants her bottle,” Agatha said, not lifting her gaze from her cards. Ian went out to the kitchen to take her bottle from the refrigerator, and while he waited for it to warm he jounced Daphne up and down. It didn’t do any good, though; he seemed to have lost his charm. All she did was fuss harder and climb higher on his shoulder, working her nosy, sharp little toes irritatingly between his ribs.

When he returned to the living room, the other two had abandoned the card game and were watching TV. He sat between them on the couch and fed Daphne while a barefoot woman sang a folk song about hammering in railroad ties. Thomas sucked his thumb. Agatha wound a strand of hair around her index finger. Daphne fell asleep halfway through her bottle and Ian rose cautiously and carried her to her crib.

At 8:15, he started getting angry. How was he supposed to make it to Cicely’s by 8:30? Also he had to stop off at home beforehand — change clothes, filch some wine from the pantry. Damn, he should have seen to all that before he came here. He jiggled a foot across his knee and watched a housewife in high heels explaining that bacteria cause odors.

At 8:35, the phone rang. He sprang for it, already preparing his response. (No, you can’t stay out longer.) “Ian?” Cicely asked. “When you come, could you bring some gravy mix?”

“Gravy mix.”

“I just can’t understand where I went wrong.”

Ian said, “Did Stevie get to bed all right?”

“I’m going to see to that in a minute, but first this gravy! I pick up the spoon and everything in the pan comes with it, all in a clump.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” Ian told her. “I’ll bring the mix. Meanwhile, you get Stevie into bed.”

“Well …” Cicely said, trailing off.

“Dad’s old rocker dull and gray?” two girls sang on TV. “Stain it, wax it, the Wood-Witch way!”

After he’d hung up, Ian turned to the children and asked, “Did your mother say where she was going?”

“No,” Agatha said.

“Was it someplace she could walk to?”

“I don’t know.”

He rose and went to the front window. Beyond the gauzy curtains he saw street lamps glinting faintly and squares of soft yellow light from the neighboring houses.

There was a wet, uncorking sound behind him — Thomas’s thumb popping out of his mouth. “She went in a car,” Thomas said distinctly.

Ian turned.

“She went in a car with Dot,” Thomas told him. “Dot lives down the block a ways and Mama went over to her house and got herself a ride.” He replaced his thumb.

A wail floated from the children’s room. Ian glanced at Agatha. A second wail, more assured.

“You didn’t burp her,” Agatha said serenely.

Thomas merely sent him the drugged, veiled gaze of a dedicated thumb-sucker.

From 8:40 to 9:15 Ian walked Daphne around and around the living room. Thomas and Agatha quarreled over the afghan. Thomas kicked Agatha in the shin and she started crying — unconvincingly, it seemed to Ian. She rolled her knee sock down to her thick white ankle and pointed out, “See? See there what he did?”

Ian patted the baby more rapidly and revised his plans. He would not go home first after all; they would do without the wine and butter and whatever. He would simply explain to Cicely when he got there. “I don’t care about dinner,” he would say, drawing her into his arms. “I care about you.” And they would climb the stairs together, tiptoeing past her brother’s door and into—

Oh-oh.

The one thing he could not do without — the three things, in their linked foil packets — lay in the toe of his left gym shoe at the very back of his closet. There was no way he could avoid going by his house.

The phone rang again and Ian picked up the receiver and barked, “What!”

Cicely said, “Ian, where are you?”

“This goddamn Lucy,” he said, not caring if the children heard. “I’ve a good mind to just walk on out of here.”

Agatha looked up from her shin and said, “You wouldn’t!”

“Everything’s stone cold,” Cicely said.

“Well, don’t worry. The dinner’s not important—”

“Not important! I’ve been slaving all day over this dinner! We’re having flank steak stuffed with mushrooms, and baked potatoes stuffed with cheese, and green peppers stuffed with—”

“But how about Stevie? Did Stevie get to bed all right?”

“He got to bed hours ago.” Ian groaned.

“Is that all you care about?” Cicely asked. “Don’t you care about my cooking?”

“Oh! Yes! Your cooking,” Ian said. “I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”

“No, don’t say that! I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.”

“Cicely,” Ian said. “Listen. I’ll be over soon no matter what. Just wait for me.”

He hung up to find Thomas and Agatha eyeing him reproachfully. “What’re you going to do? Leave us on our own?” Thomas asked.

“You’re not babies anymore,” Ian said. “You can take care of yourselves.”

“Mama never lets us. She worries we’d get into the matches.”

“Well, would you?” Ian asked him.

Thomas considered awhile. Finally he said, “We might.”

Ian sighed and went back to walking Daphne.

For the next half hour or so, they played I Spy. That was the most Ian could manage with Daphne fretting in his arms. Agatha said, “I spy, with my little eye …” and her gaze roamed the room. Ian was conscious all at once of the mess that had grown up around them — the playing cards, the twisted afghan, the strewn Parcheesi pieces.

“… with my little eye, as clear as the sky …” Agatha said, drawing it out.

“Will you just for God’s sake get on with it?” Ian snapped.

“Well, I’m trying, Ian, if you wouldn’t keep interrupting.”

Then she had to start over again. “I spy, with my little eye …”

Ian thought of Lucy’s gray eyes and her perfect, lipsticked mouth. The red of her lipstick was a bitter red, with something burnt in it. She had had things her own way every minute of her life, he suspected. Women who looked like that never needed to consider other people.

Daphne finally unknotted and fell asleep, and Ian carried her to the children’s room. He lowered her into the crib by inches and then waited, holding his breath. At that moment he heard the front door open.

His first concern was that the noise would disturb Daphne. That was how thoroughly he’d been sidetracked. Then he realized he was free to go, and he headed out to tell Lucy what he thought of her.

But it wasn’t Lucy; it was Danny, standing just inside the living room door and screwing up his face against the light. Ian could tell he’d had a couple of beers. He wore a loose, goofy smile that was familiar from past occasions. “Ian, fellow!” he said. “What’re you doing here?”

“I’m going out of my mind,” Ian told him.

“Ah.”

“Your wife was due back ages ago, and anyhow I didn’t want to come in the first place.”

“Thomas!” Danny said fervently, peering toward the couch. “And Agatha!” He seemed surprised to see them, too. He told Ian, “You sure did miss a great party. Good old Bucky Hargrove!”

“Look,” Ian said. “I am running late as hell and I need you to give me a lift to Cicely’s house.”

“Huh? Oh. Why, sure,” Danny said. “Sure, Ian. Except—” He pondered. “Except how about the kids?” he asked finally.

“How about them?”

“We can’t just leave them.”

“Take them along, then,” Ian said, exasperated. “Let’s just go.”

“Take Daphne, too? Where’s Daphne?”

Ian gritted his teeth. The Kent cigarette song sailed out from the TV, mindless and jaunty. He turned to Agatha and said, “Agatha, you and Thomas will have to stay here and baby-sit.”

She stared at him.

“Seven minutes, tops,” Ian said. “Don’t open the front door no matter who knocks, and don’t answer the phone. Understand?”

She nodded. Thomas’s eyes were ringed like a raccoon’s.

“Let’s go,” Ian told Danny.

Danny was swaying slightly on his feet and watching Ian with mild, detached interest. “Well …” he said.

“Come on, Danny!”

Ian snatched up his jacket and gave Danny a push in the right direction. As they walked out he felt a weight slipping blessedly from his shoulders. He wondered how people endured children on a long-term basis — the monotony and irritation and confinement of them.

Outside it was much colder than before, and wonderfully quiet.

Danny bumped his head getting into the car, and he had some trouble determining which key to use. After that, though, he started the engine easily, checked sensibly for traffic, and pulled into the street. “So!” he said. “Cicely lives on Lang Avenue, right?”

“Right,” Ian said. “Stop by home first, though.”

“Stop by home first,” Danny repeated meekly.

Ian tapped a foot against the floorboards. He felt commanding and energetic, charged up by righteous anger.

Dimly lit houses slid past them, and a dog chased the car a block or so before giving up. Danny started whistling a tune, something sort of jazzy and hootchy-kootchy. Probably they’d had a stripper at Bucky Hargrove’s party, and waitresses in fishnet stockings and girls popping out of cakes and such. And Ian, meanwhile, had been warming baby bottles. He swung toward Danny sharply and said, “I might as well inform you right now that you have lost your favorite sitter for all eternity.”

“Huh? What say?” Danny asked.

“I had a huge, important engagement at eight-thirty. I’m talking crucial. Lucy knew that. She swore on a stack of Bibles she’d be back in time.”

“Where is she, anyhow?” Danny asked, flicking his turn signal.

“Drinking with a girlfriend. So she says.”

“I didn’t even know she was planning to go out.”

“Her waitress friend, Dot. Is what she claims.”

“Dot from the Fill ’Er Up Café,” Danny agreed.

“Goddamnit, Danny, are you blind?” Ian shouted.

Danny’s eyes widened and he looked frantically in all directions. “Blind?” he asked. “What?”

“She’s out more often than she’s in! Don’t you ever wonder who she’s with?”

“Why, no, I …”

“And how about that baby?”

“Baby?”

“Premature baby? Get serious. Premature baby with dimples?”

Danny opened his mouth.

“Two months early and breathing on her own, no incubator, no problems?”

“She was—”

“She was somebody else’s,” Ian said.

“Come again?”

“I just want to know how long you intend to be a fall guy,” Ian said.

Danny turned onto Waverly and drew up in front of the house. He cut the engine and looked over at Ian. He seemed entirely sober now. He said, “What are you trying to tell me, Ian?”

“She’s out all afternoon any time she can get a sitter,” Ian said. “She comes back perfumed and laughing and wearing clothes she can’t afford. That white knit dress. Haven’t you ever seen her white dress? Where’d she get it? How’d she pay for it? How come she married you quick as a flash and then had a baby just seven months later?”

“You’re talking about that dress with the kind of like crisscrossed middle,” Danny said.

“That’s the one.”

Danny started rubbing his right temple with his fingertips. When it didn’t seem he meant to say anything further, Ian got out of the car.

Inside the house, only the hall lamp was lit. His parents must still be at the Finches’. Beastie rose from the rug, yawning, and followed him up the stairs, which he climbed two steps at a time. He went directly to his room, fell to his knees in front of the closet, and rooted through the clutter for his gym shoes. Once he’d located the foil strip, he slid it into his rear pocket and stood up. Then he ducked into the bathroom. The biggest night of his life and he couldn’t even stop to shower. He wet his fingers at the sink and ran them through his hair. He bared his teeth to the mirror and debated whether to brush them.

In the street below, an engine roared up. What on earth? He drew aside the curtain and peered out. It was Danny’s Chevy, all right. The headlights were two yellow ribbons swinging away from the curb. The car took off abruptly, peeling rubber. Ian dropped the curtain. He turned to confront his own stunned face in the mirror.

Near the stone wall at the end of the block the brakes should have squealed, but instead the roaring sound grew louder. It grew until something had to happen, and then there was a gigantic, explosive, complicated crash and then a delicate tinkle and then silence. Ian went on staring into his own eyes. He couldn’t seem to look away. He couldn’t even blink, couldn’t move, because once he moved then time would start rolling forward again, and he already knew that nothing in his life would ever be the same.