Saint Maybe

3. The Man Who Forgot How to Fly

In his ninth-grade biology class, Ian had watched through a microscope while an amoeba shaped like a splash approached a dot of food and gradually surrounded it. Then it had moved on, wider now and blunter, distorted to accommodate the dot of food within.

As Ian accommodated, over and over, absorbing the fact of Danny’s death.

He would see it looming in his path — something dark and stony that got in the way of every happy moment. He’d be splitting a pizza with Pig and Andrew or listening to records with Cicely and all at once it would rise up in front of him: Danny is dead. He died. Died.

And then a thought that was even worse: He died on purpose. He killed himself.

And finally the most horrible thought of all: Because of what I told him.

He learned to deal with these thoughts in order, first things first. All right, he’s dead. I will never see him again. He’s in Pleasant Memory Cemetery underneath a lilac bush. He won’t be helping me with my fast ball. He hasn’t heard I got accepted at Sumner College. Trees that were bare when he last saw them have bloomed and leafed without him.

It felt like swallowing, to take in such a hard set of truths all at one time.

And then he would tackle the next thought. But that was more of a struggle. Maybe it was an accident, he always argued.

He smashes headlong into a wall by ACCIDENT? A wall he knew perfectly well was there, a wall that’s stood at the end of that street since before he was born?

Well, he’d been drinking.

He wasn’t drunk, though.

Yes, but, you know how it is …

Face it. He really did kill himself.

And then finally the last thought.

No, never the last thought.

Sometimes he tried to believe that everyone on earth walked around with at least one unbearable guilty secret hidden away inside. Maybe it was part of growing up. Maybe if he went and confessed to his mother she would say, “Why, sweetheart! Is that all that’s bothering you? Listen, every last one of us has caused somebody’s suicide.”

Well, no.

But if he told her anyway, and let her get as angry as she liked. If he said, “Mom, you decide what to do with me. Kick me out of the house, if you want. Or disown me. Or call the police.”

In fact, he wished she would call the police. He wished it were something he could go to prison for.

But if he told his mother she would learn it was a suicide, and everyone assumed it was an accident. Driving under the influence. Too much stag party. That was the trouble with confessing: it would make him feel better, all right, but it would make the others feel worse. And if his mother felt any worse than she did already, he thought it would kill her. His father too, probably. This whole summer, all his father had done was sit in his recliner chair.

Once his mother asked, “Ian, you don’t suppose Danny was depressed or anything, do you?”

“Depressed?”

“Oh, but what am I saying? He had a new baby! And a lovely new wife, and a whole new ready-made family!”

“Right,” Ian said.

“Of course, there could have been little problems. Some minor snag at work, maybe, or a rocky patch in his marriage. But nothing out of the ordinary, don’t you agree?”

“Well, sure,” Ian told her.

Was that all it had been? A rocky patch? Had Ian overreacted?

He saw how young he was, how inexperienced, what a shallow, ignorant boy he was. He really had no idea what would be considered out of the ordinary in a marriage.

On Sundays when the family gathered, he sent Lucy sidelong glances. He noticed she was growing steadily paler, like one of his father’s old Polaroid photos. He wanted to believe Danny’s death hadn’t touched her, but there she sat with something still and stricken in her face. Her children quarreled shrilly with Claudia’s children, but Lucy just sat straight-backed, not appearing to hear, and smoothed her skirt over and over across her lap.

Privately Bee told the others, “I wish she had someone to go to. Relatives, I mean. Of course we’d miss her but … if she had someone to tend the children so she could get a job, for instance! I know I ought to offer—”

Doug said, “Don’t even consider it.”

“Well, I’m their grandma! Or one of them’s grandma. But lately I’ve been so tired and my knees are acting up and I don’t see how I could handle it. I know I ought to, though.”

“Don’t give it a moment’s consideration.”

Did Lucy ever think, If only I hadn’t gone out with Dot that night? Did she think, If only Dot’s car hadn’t broken down?

For it was Dot she’d gone out with. And the car had broken down, someplace on Ritchie Highway. That much emerged at the funeral, which Dot had attended all weepy and disbelieving.

Did Lucy ever think, If only I had been a faithful wife?

No, probably not, for Ian couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was the one she blamed. (At the very least, he’d made Danny drive him home that night.) He was almost positive that she slid her eyes reproachfully in his direction as she smoothed her skirt across her lap. But Ian looked elsewhere. He made a point of looking elsewhere.

Only Cicely knew the whole story. He had told her after the first time they ever made love. Lying next to her in her bed (her parents had gone to a Memorial Day picnic, taking her little brother with them), he had thought, Danny will never know I’ve finally slept with a girl. His eyes had blurred with tears and he had turned abruptly and pressed his hot, wet face into Cicely’s neck. “I’m the one who caused Danny’s accident,” he blurted out. But the thing was, she wouldn’t accept it. It was like some physical object that she kept batting away. “Oh, no,” she kept saying. “No, that’s silly. You didn’t do anything. Lucy didn’t do anything. Lucy was a perfect wife. Danny knew you didn’t mean it.”

He should have said, “Listen. You have to believe this.” But her skin was so soft, and her neck smelled of baby powder, and instead of speaking he had started making love again. He had felt ashamed even then at how easily he was diverted.

Or here was something more shameful than that: In the emergency room that awful night, when the doctors said there was no hope, Ian had thought, At least now Cicely can’t stay mad at me for missing our dinner date.

Despicable. Despicable. He ground his teeth together any time he recalled it.

That summer he worked again for Sid ’n’ Ed’s A-l Movers. Lou had been fired for bleeding all over some lady’s sofa after he sat on his own whiskey flask; but LeDon was still there, along with a new man named Brewster, a rough-and-tough, prune-colored type who didn’t have two words to say from one day to the next. That was fine with Ian. He felt grateful just for someplace to escape to, some hard labor to throw himself into.

One move he helped with was obviously upward, from a tiny house in Govans to a much nicer one in Cedarcroft. Workers were swarming around the new place, patching the roof and resodding the lawn and measuring for window screens. In the kitchen he found a man installing wooden cabinets, and he stood watching as one was fitted precisely into place. The man plucked nails out of nowhere. (Maybe he had a mouthful, like Bee with her sewing pins. His back was turned so Ian couldn’t tell.) He hammered them in with quick rat-a-tats. And he didn’t act the least self-conscious, not even when Ian said, “Looks good.” In fact, he didn’t bother answering. Or maybe he hadn’t heard. Ian said, loudly, “Nice piece of work.”

Then he understood that the man was deaf. It was something about his head — the way he held it so steady, not troubling to keep alert for any sounds. Ian stepped forward and the man glanced over at him. He had a square-jawed, deeply lined face and a bristly gray crew-cut. “Looks good,” Ian repeated, and the man nodded briefly and returned to his hammering.

Ian felt a twist of envy. It wasn’t just the work he envied, although that was part of it — the all-consuming task that left no room for extraneous thoughts. It was the notion of a sealed-off world. A world where no one traded speech, and where even dreams, he supposed, were soundless.

He dreamed Danny stood in the doorway jingling a pocketful of change. “I nearly forgot,” he told Ian. “I owe you.”

Ian caught his breath. He said, “Owe me?”

“I never paid you for baby-sitting that evening. What was it — three dollars? Five?”

Ian said, “No, please,” and backed away, holding up his palms. He woke to hear his own voice saying, “No. No. Please.”

His parents drove him to school on a hot day in September. Cicely had already left for her own school, near Philadelphia, but since that was just an hour from Sumner College there had not been any big farewell scene. In fact, they were planning on meeting that weekend. And Andrew was close by too, at Temple. But none of Ian’s friends were attending Sumner, and he was glad. He liked the idea of making a new beginning. His mother said, “Oh, I hope you won’t be lonesome!” but Ian almost hoped he would be. He saw himself striding unaccompanied across the campus, a mysterious figure dressed all in black. “Who is that person?” girls would ask. Although he didn’t actually own anything black, come to think of it. Still, he had his plans.

They dropped his belongings at the freshman dorm, where the only sign of his roommate was a khaki duffel bag and a canvas butterfly chair printed to resemble a gigantic hand. (At least Ian assumed the chair was his roommate’s. All the other furniture was blond oak.) Then they walked over to the Parents’ Reception. Ian was in favor of skipping the reception and so was his father, but his mother insisted.

At the college president’s house they were given three paper cups of 7-Up with orange sherbet floating foamily on top, and they stood in a clump by a blond oak table trying to make conversation with each other. “Quite a crowd,” his father said, and his mother said, “Yes, isn’t it!” Ian started eating spice cookies from a plate on the table. He ate one after the other, frowning and chewing intently as if he could have made many interesting comments if only his mouth weren’t full. “Are these all parents of freshmen, do you suppose?” his father asked. “Well, maybe some are transfers’ parents,” his mother said.

She stood among these ruffly people in her ordinary navy dress, and her shoes were plain flat pumps because of her knees. Without high heels she seemed downtrodden, Ian noticed, like somebody’s maid. And his father’s suit was rucked up around his calves with static cling or something. He had the crazy appearance of a formally attired man standing shin-deep in ocean breakers. Ian swallowed a sharp piece of cookie and felt it hurting all the way down his throat, all the way to his chest where it lodged and wouldn’t go away. He wanted to say, “Take me back to Baltimore! I’ll never complain again, I promise.” But instead he joined in the small talk, and he noticed that his voice had the same determined upward slant as his mother’s.

They left the reception without having spoken to another soul, and they walked together to the parking lot. The family car looked dusty and humble. Ian opened the door for his mother, but she was used to opening her own door and so she got in his way and he stepped on her foot. “Sorry,” he said. “Well …”She kissed his cheek and slid hurriedly inside, not looking at him. His father gave him a wave across the roof of the car. “Take care of yourself, son.”

“Sure thing,” Ian said.

He stood with his palms clamped in his armpits and watched them drive off.

His roommate was a zany, hooting, clownish boy named Winston Mills. Not only was the hand-shaped chair his, but also a bedspread made from an American flag, and a beer stein that tinkled out “How Dry I Am” when you lifted it, and a poster for a movie called Teenage Robots. The other boys thought he was weird, but Ian liked him. He liked the fact that Winston never had a serious discussion or asked a serious question. Instead he told the entire plots of movies Ian had never heard of — werewolf movies and Japanese westerns and monster movies where the zippers showed clearly between the scales — or he read aloud in a falsetto voice from a collection of syrupy “love comics” he’d found at a garage sale, meanwhile lolling in his butterfly chair with the huge pink fingers curving up behind him.

Ian dreamed Danny drove onto the quad in his Chevy, which didn’t have so much as a dented fender. He leaned out his window and asked Ian, “Don’t you think I knew? Don’t you think I knew all along?” And Ian woke and thought maybe Danny had known. Sometimes people just chose not to admit a thing, not even to themselves. But then he realized that was immaterial. So what if he’d known? It wasn’t till he’d been told point-blank that he’d felt the need to take action.

As far as Ian could see, college was not much different from high school. Same old roots of Western civilization, same old single-cell organisms. He squinted through a microscope and watched an amoeba turn thin and branchy, curve two branches around a black dot, thicken to a blob and drift on. His lab partner was a girl and he could tell she liked him, but she seemed too foreign. She came from someplace rural and said “ditten” instead of “didn’t.” Also “cooten”. “I cooten find my notebook anywhere.” He lived for the weekends, when Cicely rode out to Sumner on a tiny, rattling train and they hung around his dorm in the hope that Winston might leave for one of his movies at some point. Supposedly Cicely was bunking with the older sister of a girl she knew from home, but in fact she shared Ian’s narrow bed where late at night — silently, almost motionlessly, all but holding their breaths — they made love over and over again across the room from Winston’s snoring shape.

He called home collect every weekend; that was easier than his parents’ trying to call him. But the Wednesday before Halloween his mother phoned, reaching him purely by chance as he was passing through the dorm between classes. “I hate to bother you,” she said, “but I thought you’d want to know. Honey, it’s Lucy.”

“Lucy?”

“She died.”

He noticed that a sort of whirring silence seemed to be traveling down the corridor. He said, “She what?”

“We think it was pills.”

He swallowed.

“Ian?”

Oh, God, he thought, how long will I have to pay for just a handful of tossed-off words?

“Are you all right, Ian?”

“Sure,” he said.

“We got a call from Agatha last night. She told us, ‘Mama keeps sleeping and won’t wake up.’ Well, you know that could have meant anything. Of course I made plans to get right over there but I did say, ‘Oh, sweetie, I bet she’s just tuckered out,’ and that’s when Agatha said, ‘She wouldn’t even wake for breakfast.’ I said, ‘Breakfast?’ I said, ‘This morning?’ Ian, would you believe it, those children had been on their own since the night before when she put them to bed. Then she went to bed herself and just, I don’t know, I mean there’s no sign she did it on purpose but when we walked in she was flat on her back and breathing so slowly, just a breath here and another breath there, and this pill bottle sat on her nightstand totally empty. There wasn’t any letter though or anything like that. So it couldn’t have been on purpose, right? But why would she take even one of those pills? Our family’s never held with sleeping pills. I always say, get up and scrub the floors if you can’t sleep! Do some reading! Improve your mind! Anyhow, we called the ambulance and they took her to Union Memorial. She had gone on too long, though. If they’d got to her right away, well, maybe; but she’d been lying there a whole night and a day and there wasn’t much they could do. She died this noon without ever regaining consciousness.”

Can’t we just back up and start over? Couldn’t I have one more chance?

“Ian?” his mother was saying. “Listen, don’t breathe a word to the children.”

He found his voice from somewhere. He said, “They don’t know yet?”

“No, and we’re not ever going to tell them.”

Maybe the shock had sent her around the bend. He said, “They’re going to have to find out sometime. How will you explain it when she doesn’t come home from the hospital?”

Or when she fails to show up for Thomas’s high-school graduation or Agatha’s wedding, he thought wildly, and he almost laughed.

“I mean we’re not going to tell them they might have saved her,” his mother said. “If they’d phoned earlier, I mean. They’d feel so guilty.”

He leaned against the wall and briefly closed his eyes.

“So we’ve set the funeral for Friday,” his mother said, “assuming her people agree to it. Did she ever happen to tell you who her people were?”

“She didn’t have any. You know that.”

“Well, distant relatives, though. Isn’t it odd? I don’t believe she once mentioned her maiden name.”

“Lucy … Dean,” Ian said. “Dean was her name.”

“No, Dean would have been her first husband’s name.”

“Oh.”

“There must be cousins or something, but the children couldn’t think who. We said where could we reach their daddy, then? They didn’t have the slightest idea.”

“He lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming,” Ian said. As clearly as if he’d been present, he saw Lucy heaving her package onto the post office counter. She looked up into Danny’s face and asked in her little cracked voice how much it would cost to airmail a bowling ball to Wyoming.

“Your father has already called every Dean in the Cheyenne directory,” his mother said, “but he came up empty. Now all we have to rely on is someone maybe seeing the obituary.”

Two boys were walking down the corridor. Ian turned so he was facing the other way.

“Ian? Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“I told your father I wasn’t going to phone you. I said, why interrupt your studies? But he thought maybe you could come on account of the children. Well, goodness, I can handle the children but they’re so … the baby hasn’t slept since she got here. And Thomas just sits around hugging that doll of his, and Agatha’s being, oh, Agatha; you know how she is. Somehow I just never have felt like those two’s grandma. Isn’t that awful? They can’t help it! But somehow … and your sister’s all tied up with Davey’s measles …”

Ian could guess what this was leading to. He felt suddenly burdened.

“So your father said maybe you could come help out a few days.”

“I’ll catch the next Greyhound,” he said.

He rode to Baltimore that evening on a nearly empty bus, staring at his own reflection in the window. His eyes were deep black hollows and he appeared to have sharper cheekbones than he really did. He looked stark and angular, bitterly experienced. He wondered if there was any event, any at all, so tragic that it could jolt him out of this odious habit of observing his own reaction to it.

His father met him at the terminal. Neither of them knew yet how they were supposed to greet each other after long separations. Hug? Shake hands? His father settled for clapping him on the arm. “How was the trip?” he asked.

“Pretty good.”

Ian hoisted his knapsack higher on his shoulder and they walked through the crowd, dodging people who seemed to have set up housekeeping there. They threaded between stuffed laundry bags and take-out food cartons; they stepped over the legs of a soldier asleep on the floor. Outside, Howard Street looked very bustling and citified after Sumner.

“So,” his father said, once they were seated in the car. “I guess you heard the news.”

“Right.”

“Terrible thing. Terrible.”

“How’re the kids?” Ian asked him.

“Oh, they’re okay. Kind of quiet, though.”

They entered the stream of traffic and drove north. The evening was still warm enough for car windows to be open, and scraps of songs sailed past—“Monday, Monday” and “Winchester Cathedral” and “Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On.” Ian’s father said, “Your mom put me to work this afternoon hunting Lucy’s relatives. I don’t know if she told you.”

“She told me you tried calling Cheyenne.”

“Yes, well. No luck. And I stopped by the Fill ’Er Up Café—remember the Fill ’Er Up? Where Lucy used to work? I was hoping to find those two waitresses from the wedding. But the owner said one had walked out on him and the other moved south a couple of months ago. So then I went through Lucy’s drawers, thinking there’d be, oh, an address book, say, or some letters. Didn’t find a thing. Hard to figure, isn’t it? This is what we’ve come to, now that people phone instead of writing.”

“Maybe there just aren’t any relatives,” Ian told him.

“Well, in that case, what’ll we do with the children?”

“Children.”

“The older two have their father, of course. Soon as we track him down. But I suppose it’s expecting too much that he would raise the little one as well.”

“Well, naturally,” Ian said. “She isn’t even kin!”

“No, I guess not,” his father said. He sighed.

“He doesn’t even keep in touch with the two that are!”

“No.”

“Couldn’t you and Mom, maybe …”

“We’re too old,” his father said. He turned up Charles Street.

“You’re not old!”

“We’ve just reached that time in our lives, Ian, when I think we deserve a rest. And your mother’s not getting around so good lately; I don’t know if you’ve noticed. Doc Plumm says this thing in her knees is arthritis. Can’t exactly picture her chasing after a toddler.”

“Yes, but—”

“Never mind, I’m sure we’ll come up with someone or other,” his father said, “once we find that ex-husband.”

Then he went back to deploring how no one wrote letters these days. Pretty soon, he said, this country’s mail service would be canceled for lack of interest. Turn all the post offices into planters, he said, and his lips twisted into one of his wry smiles before he recollected himself and grew serious again.

At home, Beastie nosed Ian’s palm joyfully and lumbered after him into the living room, where his mother was walking Daphne up and down. She kissed him hello and then handed him the baby, who was too near sleep to do more than murmur. “Oh, my legs!” Bee said, sinking onto the couch. “That child has kept me on my feet all evening.”

Thomas sat at the other end of the couch with his doll clutched to his chest, her yellow wig flaring beneath his chin like a bedraggled sunflower. Agatha sat in an armchair. She surveyed Ian levelly and then returned to her picture book. Both of them wore pajamas. They had the moist, pale, chastened look of children fresh from their baths.

“Have you eaten yet?” Ian’s mother asked him. “I fed the children early because I didn’t know.”

“I can find something.”

“Oh. Well, all right.”

Daphne had gained weight, or maybe it was her sleepiness that made her feel so heavy. She drooped over Ian’s shoulder, giving off a strong smell of apple juice.

“Your father’s been through … various drawers,” his mother said. She glanced toward Agatha. Evidently Lucy’s name was not supposed to be spoken. “He didn’t find a thing.”

“Yes, he told me.”

Agatha turned a page of her book. Ian’s father crossed to the barometer on the wall and tapped the glass.

“Ian, dear,” his mother said, “would you mind very much if I toddled off to bed?”

“No, go ahead,” Ian said, although he did feel a bit hurt. After all, this was his first visit home.

“It’s been such a long day, I’m just beat. The older two are sleeping in Danny’s room, and I’ve set up the Port-a-Crib in your room. I hope Daphne won’t disturb you.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“He looks downright domestic, in fact,” his father said, and he gave a snort of laughter. Doug belonged to an era when the sight of a man holding a baby was considered humorous. He liked to say he’d changed a diaper only once in all his life, back when Bee had the flu and Claudia was an infant. The experience had made him throw up. Everyone always chuckled when he told this story, but now Ian wondered why. He felt irked to see his father drift behind Bee toward the stairs, although his knees were not arthritic and he might easily have stayed to help. “Night, son,” he said, lifting an arm.

“Good night,” Ian said shortly.

He sat on the couch next to Thomas. Daphne instantly made a chipped sound of protest, and he stood up and started walking again.

“Ian,” Agatha said, “will you read us a story?”

“I can’t right now. Daphne won’t let me sit down.”

“She will if you sit in a rocking chair,” Agatha said.

He tried it. Daphne stirred, but as soon as he began rocking she went limp again. He wondered why his mother hadn’t thought of this — or why Agatha hadn’t informed her.

Agatha was pulling up a footstool so she could sit next to him. Her eyes were lowered and her plain white disk of a face seemed complete in itself, ungiving. “Get a chair, Thomas,” she ordered. Thomas slid off the couch and dragged over the miniature rocker from the hearth. It took him awhile because he never let go of Dulcimer.

The book Agatha placed on Ian’s lap dated from his childhood. The Sad Little Bunny, it was called. It told about a rabbit who got lost on a picnic and couldn’t find his mother. Ian wondered about reading this story under these particular circumstances, but both children listened stolidly — Thomas sucking his thumb, Agatha turning the pages without comment. First the rabbit went home with a friendly robin and tried to live in a tree, but he got dizzy. Then he went home with a beaver and tried to live in a dam, but he got wet. Ian had never realized what a repetitive book this was. He swallowed a yawn. Tears of boredom filled his eyes. The effort of reading while rocking made him slightly motion-sick.

On the last page, the little rabbit said, “Oh, Mama, I’m so glad to be back in my own home!” The picture showed him in a cozy, chintz-lined burrow, hugging an aproned mother rabbit. Reading out the words, Ian noticed how loud they sounded — like something tactless dropped into a shocked silence. But Agatha said, “Again.”

“It’s bedtime.”

“No, it’s not! What time is it?”

“Tell you what,” he said. “You get into your beds, and then I’ll read it once more.”

“Twice,” Agatha said.

“Once.”

What did this remind him of? The boredom, the yawns … It was the evening of Danny’s death, revisited. He felt he was traveling a treadmill, stuck with these querulous children night after night after night.

In the morning the minister came to discuss the funeral service. He was an elderly, stiff, formal man, and Bee seemed flustered when Ian led him into the kitchen. “Oh, don’t look at all this mess!” she said, untying her apron. “Let’s go into the living room. Ian can feed the children.”

But Dr. Prescott said, “Nonsense,” and sat down in a kitchen chair. “Where’s Mr. Bedloe?” he asked.

Bee said, “Well, I know it sounds heartless, but he had to take the day off yesterday and of course tomorrow’s the funeral so … he went to work.”

“Is that good?” Dr. Prescott asked Daphne. She was squirting a piece of banana between her fingers and then smearing it across her high-chair tray.

“It’s not that he doesn’t mourn her. Really, he feels just dreadful,” Bee said. “Ian, could you fetch a cloth, please? But substitute teachers are so hard to get hold of—”

“Yes, life must go on,” Dr. Prescott said. “Isn’t that right, young Abigail.”

“Agatha,” Bee corrected him. “It’s Claudia’s girl who’s named Abigail.”

“And will the children be attending the service?”

“Oh, no.”

“Sometimes it’s valuable, I’ve learned.”

“We think they’ll have a fine time staying here with Mrs. Myrdal,” Bee said. “Mrs. Myrdal used to sit with them when they lived above the drugstore and she knows all their favorite storybooks.”

She beamed across the table at Agatha. Agatha gazed back at her without a trace of a smile.

Dr. Prescott said, “Agatha, Thomas, I realize all that’s happened must be difficult to understand. Perhaps you’d like to ask me some questions.”

Agatha remained expressionless. Thomas shook his head.

Ian thought, I would! I would! But it wasn’t Ian Dr. Prescott had been addressing.

He’d remembered to bring his suit but he had forgotten a tie, so he had to borrow one of his father’s for the funeral. Standing in front of his mirror, he slid the knot into place and smoothed his collar. When the doorbell rang, he waited for someone to answer. It rang again and Beastie gave a worried yap. “Coming!” Ian called. He crossed the hall and sprinted downstairs.

Mrs. Myrdal had already opened the front door a few inches and poked her head in. Her hat looked like a gray felt potty turned upside down. Ian said, “Hi. Come on in.”

“I worried I was late.”

“No, we’re just getting ready.”

He showed her into the living room, where she settled on the sofa. She was one of those women who grow quilted in old age — her face a collection of pouches, her body a series of squashed mounds. “My, it’s finally getting to be fall,” she said, removing her sweater. “Real nip in the air today.”

“Is that so,” Ian said. He was hanging about in the doorway, wondering whether it was rude to leave.

“And how are those poor children bearing up?” she asked him.

“They’re okay.”

“I couldn’t get over it when your mother called and told me. Those poor little tots! And I understand your parents won’t be keeping them.”

“No, we’re trying to find some relatives,” Ian said.

“Well, it’s a shame,” Mrs. Myrdal said.

“I don’t guess you know of any relatives.”

“No, dear, your mother already asked me. I told her, I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t have an inkling.’ Although just between you and me, I’m pretty near positive that Lucy was, well, not from Baltimore.”

“Ah.”

“You could sort of tell, you know,” she said. “I always sensed it, even before we had our falling out. You heard we’d fallen out, I suppose.”

“Not in so many words,” Ian said.

“Well!” Mrs. Myrdal said. She folded her sweater caressingly. “One time we went downtown together and I caught her shoplifting.”

“Shoplifting?”

“Bold as you please. Swiped a pure silk blouse off a rack and tucked it into the stroller where her innocent baby girl lay sleeping. I was so astounded I just didn’t do a thing. I thought I must have misunderstood; I thought there must be some explanation. I followed along behind her thinking, ‘Now, Ruby, don’t go jumping to conclusions.’ On we march, past the scarf counter. Whisk! Red-and-tan Italian scarf scampers into her bag. I know I should have spoken but I was too amazed. My heart was racing so I thought it had riz up in my throat some way, and I worried we’d be arrested. We could have been, you know! We could have been hauled off to jail like common criminals. Well, luckily we weren’t. But next time she phoned I said, ‘Lucy, I’m busy.’ She said, ‘I just wanted to ask if you could baby-sit.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe I care to, thank you.’ She knew why, too. She didn’t let on but she had to know. Couple of times she asked again, and each time I turned her down.”

Ian ducked his head and busied himself patting Beastie.

“Not that I wished her ill, understand. I was sorry as the next person to hear about her passing.”

From the stairs came the sound of footsteps and his mother’s voice saying, “… juice in that round glass pitcher and—” She arrived in the doorway with the baby propped on her hip. Thomas and Agatha were shadowing her. “Oh! Mrs. Myrdal,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Mrs. Myrdal rose and reached out in that fumble-fingered, greedy manner that old ladies take on around babies. “Would you look at how this child has grown!” she said. “Remember Mrs. Moo-doe, darlin’?” She accepted Daphne in a rumpled bunch and cocked her head at the other two. “Thomas and Agatha, I’d never have known you!”

“Now, we shouldn’t be long,” Bee told her. “It’s going to be a very simple … Ian, where’s your father got to?”

Ian said, “Um …”

“Isn’t this just like him! Check the basement, will you? Mrs. Myrdal, the tea bags are in the …”

Ian went out to the kitchen. He thought, She was only shoplifting. He crossed the pantry and started down the basement steps. She wasn’t meeting some man, she was shoplifting. He called, “Dad?”

“Down here.”

That dress was not a present from her lover after all.

His father was tinkering at his workbench. Wearing his good dark suit, his hair still showing the comb lines, he bent over the lamp from the attic bedroom. “Are we set to go?” he asked without turning.

Why, even I have been known to shoplift. Me and Pig and Andrew, back in fifth grade. It’s nothing. Or next to nothing.

“Ian?”

He looked at his father.

“Are we set to go?”

“Yes,” Ian said after a moment.

“Well, then.”

His father switched off the light above the bench. He started toward the stairs. He halted next to Ian and said, “Coming?”

“Yes.”

They climbed the stairs.

Oh, God, this is the one last little dark dot I can’t possibly absorb.

In the hall, his mother was putting on her hat. “Why is it,” she asked his father, “that the minute everyone’s ready, you choose to disappear?”

“I was just looking at that lamp, sweetheart.”

The three of them left the house and walked to the car. Ian felt bruised all down the front of his body, as if he’d been kicked.

The last time he’d been in this church was for Danny’s funeral — and before that, for Danny’s wedding. When he stood on the sidewalk looking up at Dober Street Presbyterian, all his thoughts were gathered toward his brother. He could almost believe that Danny had been left behind here, in this peaked stone building with the louvered steeple.

Inside, his parents stopped to greet Mrs. Jordan while Ian continued down the aisle. He passed Aunt Bev and her husband, and Cousin Amy, and a couple of the foreigners from the neighborhood. He caught sight of Cicely’s blond curls gleaming like fresh pine shavings, and he slid in next to her and took hold of her hand, which turned out to contain a knob of damp Kleenex. Her lashes and her cheeks were damp too, he saw when she smiled at him. She had told him when he telephoned that she wouldn’t think of not coming to this, even though it meant a two-hour train ride. She just needed to say goodbye, she told him. She had always thought Lucy was special.

The organ started playing softly, and Dr. Prescott entered through a side door and took a seat behind the pulpit. Below the pulpit lay the casket, pearly gray, decorated with a spray of white flowers. The sight of it made Ian feel cold. Something like a cold blade entered his chest and he looked away.

Now the others were filing down the aisle — his father solemn and sheepish, his mother wearing an expression that seemed less grief-stricken than disappointed. “I’m not angry; just disappointed,” she used to tell Ian when he misbehaved. (What would she say now, if she knew what he had done?) Behind came Claudia and Macy with Abbie, who was evidently considered old enough now for funerals. She had on her first high heels and wobbled slightly as she followed the others into a pew. This wasn’t the front pew but the one just behind. Maybe the front pew was reserved for Lucy’s blood relations, if any showed up.

But none did. The organ music dwindled away, Dr. Prescott rose and announced a prayer, and still no one arrived to fill that empty pew.

The prayer was for the living. “We know Thy daughter Lucy is safely by Thy side,” Dr. Prescott intoned, “but we ask Thee to console those left behind. Comfort them, we pray, and ease their pain. Let Thy mercy pour like a healing balm upon their hearts.” Like a healing balm. Ian pictured something white and semiliquid — the bottle of lotion his mother kept by the kitchen sink, say — pleasantly scented with almonds. Could the balm soothe not just grief but guilt? Not just guilt but racking anguish over something impulsively done that could not be undone?

Ordinarily indifferent to prayers (or to anything else even vaguely religious), Ian listened to this one yearningly. He leaned forward in his seat as if he could ride the words all the way to heaven. He kept his eyes tightly shut. He thought, Please. Please. Please.

In the pews around him he heard a rustling and a creaking, and he opened his eyes and found the congregation rising. Struggling to his feet, he peered at the hymnbook Cicely held in front of him. “… with me,” he joined in belatedly, “fast falls the eventide …” His voice was a creak. He fell silent and listened to the others — to Cicely’s clear soprano, Mrs. Jordan’s plain, true alto, Dr. Prescott’s rich bass. “The darkness deepens,” they sang, “Lord, with me abide!” The voices ceased to be separate. They plaited themselves into a multistranded chord, and now it seemed the congregation was a single person — someone of great kindness and compassion, someone gentle and wise and forgiving. “In life, in death, O Lord,” they finished, “abide with me.” And then came the long, sighed “Amen.” They sat down. Ian sat too. His knees were trembling. He felt that everything had been drained away from him, all the grief and self-blame. He was limp and pure and pliant as an infant. He was, in fact, born again.

Through the burial in Pleasant Memory Cemetery and the car trip home, through the flurry of reclaiming the children, setting up the coffeepot, and greeting the guests who stopped by afterward, Ian wandered in a dreamlike state of mind. He traveled around the living room with a plate of butterscotch brownies, failing to notice it was empty till his brother-in-law pointed it out. “Earth to Ian,” Macy said, guffawing, and then Mrs. Jordan relieved Ian of the plate. Cicely came up from behind and slipped a hand into his. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Yes, fine,” he said.

Her fingertips were soft little nubbins because she bit her nails. Her breath gave off the metallic scent of Coca-Cola. Mrs. Jordan’s craggy face had a hinged and plated look, like an armadillo hide. Everything seemed very distinct, but also far away.

“It’s been too much,” Mrs. Jordan told Cicely. “Just too much to take in all at once. First Danny, and now Lucy!” She turned to draw one of the foreigners into the conversation; he was hovering hopefully nearby. “Why, I remember the day they announced their engagement!” she said. “Remember, Jim?”

“Jack,” the foreigner said.

“Jack, I was there when he brought her home. I’d come over to borrow the pinking shears and in they walked. Well, I knew right away what was what. Pretty little thing like that, who wouldn’t want to marry her?”

“Woe betide you,” Jack told Ian.

“Um …”

“O lud lud! Please to accept my lamentations.”

This must be the foreigner who was so devoted to Roget’s Thesaurus. Bee was always quoting choice remarks. Mrs. Jordan gave him a speculative stare. “I suppose in your culture, Lucy wouldn’t have lasted even this long,” she said. “Don’t they throw themselves on their husband’s pyre or something?”

“Pyre?”

“And now I reckon Doug and Bee will have to take on those poor children,” she told Ian.

Ian said, “Well, actually—”

“Just look at that little one. Did you ever see anything so precious?”

Ian followed her gaze. In the doorway to the hall, Daphne stood rocking unsteadily. Her dazzling white shoes — hard-soled and ankle-high — no doubt helped to keep her upright; but still, standing alone at ten months was quite an accomplishment, Ian suspected. Was this the first time she’d tried it? He thought of all the fuss that would have been made ordinarily — the applause and the calls for a camera. But Daphne went unnoticed, a frail, wispy waif in an oversized dress, looking anxiously from face to face.

Then she spotted Ian. Her eyes widened. She grinned. She dropped to the floor and scuttled toward him, expertly weaving between the grownups’ legs and pausing every now and then to wrench herself free from the hem of her dress. She arrived at his feet, took hold of his trousers and hauled herself to a standing position. When she beamed up at him, she had to tip her head so far back she nearly fell over.

Ian bent and lifted her into his arms. She nestled against his shoulder. “Oh, the darling,” Mrs. Jordan said. “Why, she’s crazy about you! Isn’t she, Ian? Isn’t she? Ian?”

He couldn’t explain why the radiance left over from church fell away so suddenly. The air in the room seemed dull and brownish. Mrs. Jordan’s voice sounded hollow. This child was far too heavy.

Back in school, he kept trying to recapture that feeling he’d had at the funeral. He hummed “Abide with Me” under his breath. He closed his eyes in hopes of summoning up the congregation’s single, melting voice, the soft light from the pebbled windows, the sense of mercy and forgiveness. But nothing came. The bland brick atmosphere of Sumner College prevailed. Biology 101 progressed from nematodes to frogs, and King John repudiated the Magna Carta, and Ian’s roommate dragged him to see Devil-Women from Outer Space.

At night, Danny stood at the blackboard in front of Ian’s English class. “This is a dream,” he announced. “The word ‘dream’ comes from the Latin word dorimus, meaning ‘game of chance.’ ” Ian awoke convinced that there had been some message in this, but the harder he worked to decipher it, the farther away it drifted.

He phoned home Saturday afternoon and learned that Mrs. Jordan, of all people, had cleverly uncovered the name of Lucy’s ex-husband. “What she did,” Bee told Ian, “was sit Agatha down beside her and run through a lot of everyday, wife-ish remarks. She said, ‘Don’t forget the garbage,’ and, ‘Suppertime!’ and, ‘You’re late.’ Her theory was, the name would sort of swim into Agatha’s memory. She thought Thomas was too young to try it on. But all at once Thomas pipes up, ‘You’re late with the check again, Tom!’ he said. Just out of nowhere!”

“Well, that would make sense,” Ian said. “So Thomas must be Tom Junior.”

“I said to Jessie Jordan, I said, ‘Jessie,’ I said, ‘you’re amazing.’ Really I don’t know what I’d have done without her, these past few days. Or any of the neighbors. They’ve all been so helpful, running errands for me and taking the children when my legs are bad …”

What she was saying, it seemed to Ian, was, “See what you’ve gone and done? See how you’ve ruined our lives?” Although of course she didn’t mean that at all. She went on to say the Cahns, next door, had lent her their sitter, and the foreigners had brought over a pot of noodle soup with an aftertaste resembling throw-up. “People have been just lovely,” she said, “and Cicely’s mother called to say—”

“But what about Thomas Senior?” Ian broke in.

“What about him?”

“Did you look for him in the Cheyenne phone book?”

“Oh, we’d already called all the Deans in Cheyenne, but now we have a name to give the officials. They ought to be able to track something down — driver’s license, marriage license … I remember Lucy said once he’d remarried.”

That night Ian dreamed that Lucy sat in her living room among bushel baskets of mail — letters and fliers and magazines. Then Danny walked in and said, “Lucy? What is this?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just can’t open them anymore. Since you died it seems I haven’t had the heart.”

“But this is terrible!” he cried. “Your bulks and your flats I could understand, but first-class, Lucy! First-class envelopes lying untouched!”

“Then talk to Ian,” she said in a wiry, tight voice.

“Ian?”

“Ian says I’m not a bit first-class,” she said, and her mouth turned down at the corners, petulant and spiteful looking.

Ian awoke and blinked at the crack of light beneath the door. Winston was snoring. Someone’s radio was playing. He heard the scrape of a chair down the hall and carefree, unthinking laughter.

Sunday morning he rode into town on the college’s little blue church bus. Most of the passengers were students he’d never laid eyes on before, although he did recognize his lab partner, dressed in a hard-surfaced, voluminous gray coat. He pretended not to see her and proceeded toward the long seat at the rear, where he settled between two boys with haircuts so short and suits so tidy that they might have stepped out of the 1950s. Really this was a sort of losers’ bus, he realized, and he had an impulse to jump off while he still could. But then the senior class secretary boarded — a poised, attractive girl — and he felt reassured. He rode through the stubbled farmlands with his eyes fixed straight ahead, while the boy on his left fingered a rosary and the boy on his right whispered over a Bible.

At the courthouse square in Sumner, the bus stopped and everyone disembarked. Ian chose to follow the largest group of students, which included the senior class secretary and also a relatively normal-looking freshman named Eddie something whom he’d seen around the dorm. He and Eddie fell into step together, and Eddie said, “You on your way to Leeds Memorial?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so.”

Eddie nodded. “It’s not too bad,” he said. “I go every week on account of my grandmother’s paying me.”

“Paying you?”

“If I don’t miss a Sunday all year I get a check for a hundred bucks.”

“Gosh,” Ian said.

Leeds Memorial was a stately brick building with a white interior and dark, varnished pews. The choir sounded professional, and they sang the opening hymn on their own while the congregation stayed seated. Maybe that was why Ian didn’t have much feeling about it. It was only music, that was all — something unfamiliar, classical-sounding, flawlessly performed. Maybe the whole church had to be singing along.

The theme of the day was harvest, because they were drawing close to Thanksgiving. The Bible reading referred to the reaping of grain, and the sermon had to do with resting after one’s labors. The pastor — a slouching, easygoing, just-one-of-the-guys type with a sweater vest showing beneath his suit coat — counseled his listeners to be kind to themselves, to take time for themselves in the midst of the hurly-burly. Ian felt enormous yawns hollowing the back of his throat. Finally the organist began thrumming out a series of chords, and the sermon came to an end and everyone rose. The hymn was “Bringing in the Sheaves.” It was a simpleminded, seesawing sort of tune, Ian felt, and the collective voice of the congregation had a note of fluty gentility, as if dominated by the dressed-up old ladies lining the pews.

Walking back to the bus, Eddie asked if he’d be coming every Sunday.

Ian said he doubted it.

His Thanksgiving vacation was fractious and disorganized; Lucy’s children had still not been claimed. By now they had moved in upon the household in full force. Their toys littered the living room, their boats and ducks crowded the bathroom, and Daphne’s real crib — much larger than the Port-a-Crib — cramped his bedroom. He was alarmed at how haggard his mother looked, and how heavy and big-bellied. The waistband of her slacks was extended with one of those oversized safety pins women once decorated their kilts with. And the holiday dinner she served was halfhearted — no hors d’oeuvres, not even beforehand, and the turkey unstuffed and the pies store-bought. Even the company seemed lacking. Claudia snapped at her children, Macy kept drifting away from the table to watch a football game on TV, and the foreigners had to leave before dessert in order to meet the plane of a new arrival. All in all, it was a relief to have the meal over with.

He tried to help with the children as much as possible. He played endless games of Parcheesi; he read and reread The Sad Little Bunny. And he rose at least once each night to rock Daphne back to sleep, sometimes nodding off himself in the process. Often he had the feeling that she was rocking him. He would wake to find her coolly studying his face in the dark, or even prying up one of his lids with her chubby, sticky fingers.

Ironically, it was during this vacation that Cicely told him she might be pregnant. In the middle of a movie called Georgy Girl, which concerned a young woman who was tiresomely, tediously fond of infants, she clutched a handful of his sleeve and whispered that she was two weeks late. “Late for what?” he asked, which for some reason made her start crying. Then he understood.

They walked out on the movie and drove around the city. Ian kept inventing other possibilities. She was tense about her exams, maybe, or it was all that traveling back and forth on the train, or—“I don’t know! How would I know? Some damn reason!” he said, and she said, “You don’t have to shout! It was your fault as much as it was mine! Or more, even; way more. You’re the one who talked me into it.”

This wasn’t entirely accurate. Still, on some deeper level it seemed he deserved every word she hurled at him. He saw himself as a plotter and a predator, sex-obsessed; Lord, there were days when thoughts of sex with anyone — it didn’t have to be Cicely — never left his mind for a moment. And now look: here was his rightful penance, marriage at eighteen and a job bagging groceries in the A&P. He drew a breath. He said, “Don’t worry, Ciss. I’ll take care of you.”

They were supposed to stop by Andrew’s after the movie, but instead he drove her home. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, and then he went on to his own house and climbed the stairs to his room, where he found Daphne sitting upright and holding out her arms.

By the time he returned to school on Sunday evening, he had almost persuaded Cicely to see a doctor. What he hoped for (although he didn’t say it) was a doctor who could offer her a magic pill or something. There must be such a pill. Surely there was. Maybe it was some common cold remedy or headache tablet, available on open shelves, with NOT TO BE TAKEN DURING PREGNANCY imprinted on the label — a message in code for those who needed it. But if he mentioned this to Cicely she might think he didn’t want to marry her or something, when of course he did want to and had always planned to. Just not yet, please, God. Not when he’d never even slept with a dark-haired girl yet.

He flinched at the wickedness of this thought, which had glided so smoothly into his mind that it might have been there all along.

In Biology 101 on Tuesday, his lab partner said she’d noticed him on the church bus. She wondered if he’d like to attend the Wednesday Night Youth Group at her place of worship. “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t,” he said instantly. “I’ve got a paper due.”

“Well, maybe another time, then,” she said. “We always have such fun! Usually they show a movie, something nice and clean with no language.”

“It does sound like fun,” he said.

He meant that sincerely. He ached, all at once, for a blameless life. He decided that if Cicely turned out not to be pregnant, they would start living like that. Their outings would become as wholesome as those pictures in the cigarette ads: healthy young people laughing toothily in large, impersonal groups, popping popcorn, taking sleigh rides.

But on Thursday, when Cicely phoned to tell him she’d got her period, what did he do? He said, “Listen. You have to go on the pill now. You know that.” And she said, “Yes, I’ve already made an appointment.” And that weekend they picked up where they had left off, although Cicely still had her period and really it was sort of complicated. He had to rinse all the bedclothes the following morning, and as he stood barefoot in the dormitory bathroom watching the basin fill with pink water, he felt weary and jaded and disgusted with himself, a hopeless sinner.

* * *

Christmas fell on a Sunday that year. Ian didn’t get home till Friday evening; so Saturday was a hectic rush of shopping for gifts. Only on Christmas Eve did he have a chance to look around and realize the state of the household. He saw that although a good-sized tree had been erected in the living room, no one had trimmed it; the box of decorations sat unopened on the piano. The swags of evergreen were missing from the banister, the front door bore no wreath, and the house had a general air of neglect. It wasn’t just relaxed, or folksy, or happy-go-lucky; it was dirty. The kitchen smelled of garbage and cat box. The last two remaining goldfish floated dead in their scummy bowl. None of the gifts had been wrapped yet, and when the children asked to hang their stockings it emerged that all the socks were in the laundry.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Bee said, “but one person or another has been sick the last two weeks running and I just haven’t had a minute. So I’m sorry. Hang something else, instead. Hang grocery bags. Hang pillowcases.”

“Pillowcases!” Thomas said dolefully.

“Don’t worry,” Ian told him. “I’ll do a wash tonight. You go on to bed and I’ll hang your stockings later.”

So that evening was spent in the basement, more or less. Ian found the hampers so overstuffed and moldy that he guessed the laundry had not been seen to in some time, and he decided to take care of the whole lot. Also he put himself in charge of gift wrapping. While his mother sat at the dining room table sipping the sherry he’d poured her, he swaddled everything ineptly in plain tissue. (She had not thought to buy Christmas paper.) He wrapped even the gifts meant for him — a couple of shirts, a ski jacket — pretending to pay them no heed. Periodically he left his work to run downstairs to the basement and start another load of laundry. The scent of detergent and fresh linens gradually filled the house. It wasn’t such a bad Christmas Eve after all.

“Remember Christmas in the old days?” his mother asked. “When we got everything ready so far ahead? Presents sat under the tree for weeks! Homemade, most of them. Lord, you children made enough clay ashtrays to cover every surface, and none of us even smokes. But this year I just couldn’t get up the spirit. Seems like ever since this happened with your brother I’ve been so … unenthusiastic.”

Ian didn’t know what to say to that. He made a big business of tying a bow on a package.

“And remember all the hors d’oeuvres at Christmas dinner?” she asked. “This year I’ll be doing well to throw a piece of meat in the oven.”

“Maybe we should go to a restaurant,” Ian said.

“A restaurant!”

“Why not?”

“Let’s hope we haven’t come to that,” his mother said.

In the living room they heard a sharp grunt — his father, asleep in his recliner chair.

But as it turned out, Christmas Day was not so different that year from any other. Mrs. Jordan came, along with the foreigners. The children contributed their share of excitement (Claudia’s six and Lucy’s three, combined), and Doug’s Polaroid Land camera flashed, and the cat made choking sounds behind the couch. It was disconcerting, in a way. Last Christmas Daphne hadn’t been born yet; nor had Franny. Now here sat Daphne chewing a wad of blue tissue while Franny stirred her fists through Agatha’s jigsaw puzzle. They both seemed so accustomed to being here. And Danny and Lucy had completely vanished. Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.

The day after Christmas, Sid at the movers’ phoned to see if Ian could help out over vacation. Their man Brewster had left them in the lurch, he said. Ian told him he’d be glad to help. School would not reopen till mid-January and he could use the extra cash. So Tuesday morning, he reported to the garage on Greenmount.

LeDon was delighted to see him. That Brewster fellow, he said, had just up and walked away in the middle of a job. “He say, ‘See you round, LeDon.’ I say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t ditching me.’ He say, ‘All day long I’m ditching you,’ and off he go. Well, he weren’t never what you call real friendly.”

They were moving an old lady from a house to an apartment — lots of old-lady belongings, bowlegged furniture and mothballed dresses and more than enough china to stock a good-sized restaurant. Her son, who was overseeing the move, had some kind of fixation about the china. “Careful, now! That’s Spode,” he would say as they lifted a crate. And, “Watch out for the Haviland!” LeDon rolled his eyes at Ian.

Then at the new place, they found out the kitchen was being remodeled and they had to set the china crates in the living room. “What the hell?” the son said. “This was supposed to be finished three days ago.” He was talking to the cabinetmaker — the deaf man Ian had come across last summer, as it happened. “How much longer?” the son asked him. Any fool could see it would be way longer; the kitchen was nothing but a shell. The cabinetmaker, not looking around, measured the depth of a counter with a steel measuring tape. The son laid a hand on the man’s forearm. The man turned slowly, gazed a moment at the son’s hand, and then lifted his eyes to his face. “HOW … LONG!” the son shouted, exaggerating his lip movements.

The cabinetmaker considered, and then he said, “Two weeks.”

“Two weeks!” the son said. He dropped his hand. “What are you building here, Noah’s ark? All we need is a few lousy cupboards!”

The cabinetmaker went on about his business, measuring the counter’s length now and the height of the empty space above it. Surely he must have known the son was speaking to him, but he seemed totally absorbed in what he was doing. Once again, Ian envied the man his insular, impervious life.

On New Year’s Eve Pig Benson threw a big, rowdy party, but Ian didn’t go. Cicely was baby-sitting her brother and it was her last night home. (Her college worked on a different schedule from Ian’s.) So they set all the clocks an hour ahead and tricked Stevie into going to bed early, and then they snuck upstairs to her room, where Ian unintentionally dozed off. He was awakened by church bells ringing in the New Year, which meant her parents could be expected at any moment. As soon as he’d dressed, he slipped downstairs and into the frosty, bitter night. He walked home half asleep while bells pealed and firecrackers popped and rockets lit the sky. What optimism! he found himself thinking. Why did people have such high hopes for every New Year?

He practiced saying the date aloud: “Nineteen sixty-seven. January first, nineteen sixty-seven.” Monday was his birthday; he’d be nineteen years old. Daphne would be one. He shivered and pulled his collar up.

That night he dreamed Danny came driving down Waverly Street in Sumner College’s blue church bus. He stopped in front of home and told Ian, “They’ve given me a new route and now I get to go anywhere I like.”

“Can I ride along?” Ian asked from the sidewalk.

“You can ride along after you learn Chinese,” Danny told him.

“Oh,” Ian said. Then he said, “Chinese?”

“Well, I like to call it Chinese.”

“Call what Chinese?”

“You understand, Chinese is not what I really mean.”

“Then what do you mean?” Ian asked.

“Why, I’m talking about … let us say … Chinese,” Danny said, and he winked at Ian and laughed and drove away.

When Ian woke, Daphne was crying, and the room seemed moist as a greenhouse from her tears.

Agatha’s school reopened Tuesday, and Thomas’s nursery school Wednesday. This should have lightened Bee’s load, but still she looked exhausted every evening. She said she must have a touch of the flu. “Ordinarily I’m strong as a horse!” she said. “This is only temporary, I’m positive.”

Ian asked, “What’s the word on Tom Dean, Senior? Any sign of him?”

“Oh,” his mother said, “I guess we’ll have to give up on Tom Dean. It doesn’t seem he exists.”

“Then what’ll you do with the children?”

“Well, your father has some ideas. He’s pretty sure from something Lucy once mentioned that she came from Pennsylvania. Maybe her first marriage was recorded there, he says, in which case—”

“You’re stuck with them, aren’t you,” Ian said.

“Pardon?”

“You’re stuck with those children for good.”

“Oh, no,” she told him. “I’m certain we’ll find somebody sooner or later. We’ll just have to. We’ll have to!”

“But what if you don’t?” Ian asked her.

Her face took on a flown-apart, panicked look.

Two of the children weren’t even Bedloes, and he wondered if it occurred to his parents that those two could simply be made wards of the state, or whatever — popped into some kind of foster home or orphanage. But he suspected that with Daphne, they wouldn’t feel free to do that. Daphne was their dead son’s child, and an infant besides. She wasn’t already formed, as the other two were. She hadn’t yet reached the knobby-kneed, scabby stage that only a mother could love; she was still full of dimples, still tiny and beguiling.

Thomas, on the other hand, could cause a serious puncture wound if he accidentally poked you with his elbow. Holding him on your lap was like holding a bunch of coat hangers. Which didn’t prevent his trying to climb up there, heaven knows. He had the nuzzling, desperate manner of a small dog starved for attention, which unfortunately lessened his appeal; while Agatha, who managed to act both sullen and ingratiating, came across as sly. Ian had seen how grownups (even his mother, even his earth-mother sister) turned narrow-eyed in Agatha’s presence. It seemed that only Ian knew how these children felt: how scary they found every waking minute.

Why, being a child at all was scary! Wasn’t that what grownups’ nightmares so often reflected — the nightmare of running but getting nowhere, the nightmare of the test you hadn’t studied for or the play you hadn’t rehearsed? Powerlessness, outsiderness. Murmurs over your head about something everyone knows but you.

• • •

He finished moving a family into a row house on York Road and went home from there on foot, passing a series of shabby stores. The job had run unusually late. It was after seven on a dismal January evening, and most places had closed. One window, though, glowed yellow — a wide expanse of plate glass with CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE arching across it in block letters. Ian couldn’t see inside because the paper shade was lowered. He walked on by. Behind him a hymn began. “Something something something lead us …” He missed most of the words, but the voices were strong and joyful, overlaid by a single tenor that rose above the rest.

He paused at the intersection, the arches of his sneakers teetering on the curb. He peered at the DON’T WALK sign for a moment. Then he turned and headed back to the church.

A shopkeeper’s bell jingled when he opened the door. The singers looked around — some fifteen or twenty people, standing in rows with their backs to him — and smiled before they looked away again. They were facing a tall, black-haired man in a tieless white shirt and black trousers. The pulpit was an ordinary store counter. The floor was green linoleum. The lights overhead were long fluorescent tubes and one tube flickered rapidly, giving Ian the impression that he had a twitch in his eyelid.

“Blessed Jesus! Blessed Jesus!” the congregation sang. It was a tender, affectionate cry that sounded personally welcoming. Ian found his way to an empty spot beside a woman in a white uniform, a nurse or a waitress. Although she didn’t look at him, she moved closer and angled her hymnal so he could follow the words. The hymnal was one of those pocket-sized pamphlets handed out free at public sing-alongs. There wasn’t any accompaniment, not even a piano. And the pews — as Ian realized when the hymn came to an end and everyone sat down — were plain gray metal folding chairs, the kind you’d see at a bridge game.

“Friends,” the minister said, in a sensible, almost conversational tone. “And guests,” he added, nodding at Ian. All over again, the others turned and smiled. Ian smiled back, maybe a little too broadly. He had the feeling he was their first and only visitor.

“We have reached that point in the service,” the minister said, “when any person here is invited to step forward and ask for our prayers. No request is too great, no request is trivial in the eyes of God our Father.”

Ian thought of the plasterer who’d repaired his parents’ bathroom ceiling, NO JOB TOO LARGE OR TOO SMALL, his panel truck had read. He brushed the thought away. He watched a very fat young woman heave herself to her feet just in front of him. The width of her sprigged, summer-weight skirt, when she finally reached a standing position, completely blocked his view of the minister. “Well, Clarice as you may have heard is down real bad with her blood,” she said breathily. “We had thought that was all behind her but now it’s come on back, and I asked what I could do for her and she says, ‘Lynn,’ says, ‘take it to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, Lynn, and ask them for their prayers.’ So that’s just what I’m doing.”

There was a silence, during which she sat down. As soon as she left Ian’s line of vision, he realized the silence was part of the program. The minister stood with both palms raised, his face tipped skyward and his eyelids closed and gleaming. In his shirtsleeves, he seemed amateurish. His cuffs had slipped down his forearms, and his collar, Ian saw, was buttoned all the way to the neck, in the fashion of those misfits who used to walk around high school with slide rules dangling from their belts. He wasn’t so very old, either. His frame was lanky as a marionette’s and his wrist bones boyishly knobby.

Ian was the only one sitting erect. He bowed his head and squinted at the billow of sprigged skirt puffing out the back of the fat woman’s chair.

“For our sister Clarice,” the minister said finally.

“Amen,” the congregation murmured, and they straightened.

“Any other prayers, any other prayers,” the minister said. “No request is beyond Him.”

On the other side of Ian’s neighbor, a gray-haired woman rose and placed her purse on her seat. Then she faced forward, gripping the chair in front of her. “You all know my son Chuckie was fighting in Vietnam,” she said.

There were nods, and several people turned to look at her.

“Well, now they tell me he’s been killed,” she said.

Soft sounds of dismay traveled down the rows.

“Tell me he got killed jumping out of a plane,” she said. “You know he was a paratrooper.”

More nods.

“Monday night these two soldiers came, all dressed up.”

“Ah, no,” they said.

“I told them I had thought he’d be safe. I said he’d been jumping so long now, looked to me like he’d learned how to stay alive up there. Soldier says, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says. ‘These things happen,’ he says. Says Chuckie was a, what do you call, fluke accident. Forgot to put his parachute on.”

Ian blinked.

“Forgot!” his neighbor marveled in a voice like a dove.

“ ‘Forgot!’ I said. ‘How could that be?’ This soldier tells me, it’s the army’s considered opinion that Chuckie had just jumped so often, he’d stopped thinking about it. So up he comes to that whatever, that door where they jump out of, the whole time making smart remarks so everybody’s laughing — you remember what a card he was — and gives a little kind of like salute and steps into empty air. It’s not till then the fellow behind him says, ‘Wait!’ Says, ‘Wait, you forgot your—’ ”

“Parachute,” Ian’s neighbor finished sadly.

“So I don’t ask your prayers for Chuckie after this; I ask for me,” the woman said. For the first time, her voice was unsteady. “I’m just about sick with grief, I tell you. Pray for me to find some deliverance.”

She sat down, fumbling behind her for her purse. The minister lifted his palms and the room fell silent.

Could you really forget your parachute?

Well, maybe so. Ian could see how it might have come about. A man to whom jumping was habit might imagine that floating in space was all his own doing, like flying. Maybe it had slipped his mind he couldn’t fly, so in the first startled instant of his descent he supposed he had simply forgotten how. He may have felt insulted, betrayed by all he’d taken for granted. What’s the big idea here? he must have asked.

Ian pictured one of those animated films where a character strolls off a cliff without noticing and continues strolling in midair, perfectly safe until he happens to look down and then his legs start wheeling madly and he plummets.

He gave a short bark of laughter.

The congregation swiveled and stared at him.

He bowed his head, cheeks burning. The minister said, “For our sister Lula.”

“Amen,” the others said, mercifully facing forward again.

“Any other prayers, any other prayers …”

Ian studied the sprigged skirt while shame slammed into him in waves. He had said and done heedless things before but this was something new: to laugh out loud at a mother’s bereavement. He wished he could disappear. He wanted to perform some violent and decisive act, like leaping into space himself.

“No prayer is unworthy in the eyes of our Creator.”

He stood up.

Heads swiveled once again.

“I used to be—” he said.

Frog in his throat. He gave a dry, fake-sounding cough.

“I used to be good,” he said. “Or I used to be not bad, at least. Not evil. I just assumed I wasn’t evil, but lately, I don’t know what’s happened. Everything I touch goes wrong. I didn’t mean to laugh just now. I’m sorry I laughed, Mrs.…”

He looked over at the woman. Her face was lowered and she seemed unaware of him. But the others were watching closely. He had the sense they were weighing his words; they were taking him seriously.

“Pray for me to be good again,” he told them. “Pray for me to be forgiven.”

He sat down.

The minister raised his palms.

The silence that followed was so deep that Ian felt bathed in it. He unfolded in it; he gave in to it. He floated on a fluid rush of prayers, and all the prayers were for his pardon. How could God not listen, then?

When Ian was three or four years old, his mother had read him a Bible story for children. The illustration had showed a Roman soldier in full armor accosting a bearded old man. “Is that God?” Ian had asked, pointing to the soldier; for he associated God with power. But his mother had said, “No, no,” and continued reading. What Ian had gathered from this was that God was the other figure, therefore — the bearded old man. Even after he knew better, he couldn’t shake that notion, and now he imagined the congregation’s prayers streaming toward someone with long gray hair and a floor-length, Swedish-blue robe and sturdy bare feet in leather sandals. He felt a flood of gratitude to this man, as if God were, in literal truth, his father.

“For our guest,” the minister said.

“Amen.”

It was over too suddenly. It hadn’t lasted long enough. Already the minister was saying, “Any other prayers, any other prayers …”

There weren’t any.

“Hymn sixteen, then,” the minister said, and everyone stirred and rustled pages and stood up. They were so matter-of-fact; they were smoothing skirts, patting hairdos. Ian’s neighbor, a stocky, round-faced woman, beamed at him and tilted her hymnal in his direction. The hymn was “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” The minister started it off in his soaring tenor:

“What a fellowship, what a joy divine,

Leaning on the everlasting arms …”

This time Ian sang too, although really it was more of a drone.

When the hymn was finished, the minister raised his palms again and recited a benediction. “Go ye now into the world and bear witness to His teachings,” he said. “In Jesus’ name, amen.”

“Amen,” the others echoed.

Was that if?

They started collecting coats and purses, buttoning buttons, winding scarves. “Welcome!” Ian’s neighbor told him. “How did you find out about us?”

“Oh, I was just walking by …”

“So many young people nowadays don’t give half enough thought to their spiritual salvation.”

“No, I guess not,” Ian said.

All at once he felt he was traveling under false pretense. Spiritual salvation! The language these places used made him itch with embarrassment. (Blood of the Lamb, Died for Your Sins …) He looked yearningly behind him, where the first people to leave were already sending a slap of cold air into the room. But his neighbor was waving to the minister. “Yoo-hoo! Reverend Emmett! Come and meet our young person!”

The minister, already choosing a path between the knots of worshipers, seemed disconcertingly jubilant. His smile was so wide that his teeth looked too big for his mouth. He arrived in front of Ian and shook his hand over and over. “Wonderful to have you!” he said. (His long, bony fingers felt like dried beanpods.) “I’m Reverend Emmett. This is Sister Nell, have you introduced yourselves?”

“How do you do,” Ian said, and the other two waited so expectantly that he had to add, “I’m Ian Bedloe.”

“We use only first names in our place of worship,” Reverend Emmett told him. “Last names remind us of the superficial — the world of wealth and connections and who came over on the Mayflower.”

“Really,” Ian said. “Ah. Okay.”

His neighbor laid a hand on his arm and said, “Reverend Emmett will tell you all about it. Nice meeting you, Brother Ian. Good night, Reverend Emmett.”

“Night,” Reverend Emmett said. He watched as she swirled a navy cape around her shoulders (so she was, after all, a nurse) and sidled out the other end of the row. Then he turned back to Ian and said, “I hope your prayer was answered this evening.”

“Thanks,” Ian said. “It was a really … interesting service.”

Reverend Emmett studied him. (His skin was an unhealthy shade of white, although that could have been the fluorescent lighting.) “But your prayer,” he said finally. “Was there any response?”

“Response?”

“Did you get a reply?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“I see,” Reverend Emmett said. He watched an aged couple assist each other through the door — the very last to leave. Then he said, “What was it that you needed forgiven?”

Ian couldn’t believe his ears. Was this even legal, inquiring into a person’s private prayers? He ought to spin on his heel and walk out. But instead his heart began hammering as if he were about to do something brave. In a voice not quite his own, he said, “I caused my brother to, um, kill himself.”

Reverend Emmett gazed at him thoughtfully.

“I told him his wife was cheating on him,” Ian said in a rush, “and now I’m not even sure she was. I mean I’m pretty sure she did in the past, I know I wasn’t totally wrong, but … So he drove into a wall. And then his wife died of sleeping pills and I guess you could say I caused that too, more or less …”

He paused, because Reverend Emmett might want to disagree here. (Really Lucy’s death was just indirectly caused by Ian, and maybe not even that. It might have been accidental.) But Reverend Emmett only rocked from heel to toe.

“So it looks as if my parents are going to have to raise the children,” Ian said. Had he mentioned there were children? “Everything’s been dumped on my mom and I don’t think she’s up to it — her or my dad, either one. I don’t think they’ll ever be the same, after this. And my sister’s busy with her own kids and I’m away at college most of the time …”

In the light of Reverend Emmett’s blue eyes — which had the clean transparency of those marbles that Ian used to call ginger-ales — he began to relax. “So anyhow,” he said, “that’s why I asked for that prayer. And I honestly believe it might have worked. Oh, it’s not like I got an answer in plain English, of course, but … don’t you think? Don’t you think I’m forgiven?”

“Goodness, no,” Reverend Emmett said briskly.

Ian’s mouth fell open. He wondered if he’d misunderstood. He said, “I’m not forgiven?”

“Oh, no.”

“But … I thought that was kind of the point,” Ian said. “I thought God forgives everything.”

“He does,” Reverend Emmett said. “But you can’t just say, ‘I’m sorry, God.’ Why, anyone could do that much! You have to offer reparation — concrete, practical reparation, according to the rules of our church.”

“But what if there isn’t any reparation? What if it’s something nothing will fix?”

“Well, that’s where Jesus comes in, of course.”

Another itchy word: Jesus. Ian averted his eyes.

“Jesus remembers how difficult life on earth can be,” Reverend Emmett told him. “He helps with what you can’t undo. But only after you’ve tried to undo it.”

“Tried? Tried how?” Ian asked. “What would it take?”

Reverend Emmett started collecting hymnals from the chair seats. Apparently he was so certain of the answer, he didn’t even have to think about it. “Well, first you’ll need to see to those children,” he said.

“Okay. But … see to them in what way, exactly?”

“Why, raise them, I suppose.”

“Huh?” Ian said. “But I’m only a freshman!”

Reverend Emmett turned to face him, hugging the stack of hymnals against his concave shirt front.

“I’m away in Pennsylvania most of the time!” Ian told him.

“Then maybe you should drop out.”

“Drop out?”

“Right.”

“Drop out of college?”

“Right.”

Ian stared at him.

“This is some kind of test, isn’t it?” he said finally.

Reverend Emmett nodded, smiling. Ian sagged with relief.

“It’s God’s test,” Reverend Emmett told him.

“So …”

“God wants to know how far you’ll go to undo the harm you’ve done.”

“But He wouldn’t really make me follow through with it,” Ian said.

“How else would He know, then?”

“Wait,” Ian said. “You’re saying God would want me to give up my education. Change all my parents’ plans for me and give up my education.”

“Yes, if that’s what’s required,” Reverend Emmett said.

“But that’s crazy! I’d have to be crazy!”

“ ‘Let us not love in word, neither in tongue,’ ” Reverend Emmett said, “ ‘but in deed and in truth.’ First John three, eighteen.”

“I can’t take on a bunch of kids! Who do you think I am? I’m nineteen years old!” Ian said. “What kind of a cockeyed religion is this?”

“It’s the religion of atonement and complete forgiveness,” Reverend Emmett said. “It’s the religion of the Second Chance.”

Then he set the hymnals on the counter and turned to offer Ian a beatific smile. Ian thought he had never seen anyone so absolutely at peace.

“I don’t understand,” his mother said.

“What’s to understand? It’s simple,” Ian told her. “What you mean is, you don’t approve.”

“Well, of course she doesn’t approve,” his father said. “Neither one of us approves. No one in his right mind would approve. Here you are, attending a perfectly decent college which you barely got into by the skin of your teeth, incidentally; you’ve had no complaints about the place that your mother or I are aware of; you’re due back this Sunday evening to begin your second semester and what do you up and tell us? You’re dropping out.”

“I’m taking a leave of absence,” Ian said.

They were sitting in the dining room late Friday night — much too late to have only then finished supper, but Daphne had developed an earache and what with one thing and another it had somehow got to be nine P.M. before they’d put the children in bed. Now Bee, having risen to clear the table, sank back into her chair. Doug shoved his plate away and leaned his elbows on the table. “Just tell me this,” he said to Ian. “How long do you expect this leave of absence to last?”

“Oh, maybe till Daphne’s in first grade. Or kindergarten, at least,” Ian said.

“Daphne? What’s Daphne got to do with it?”

“The reason I’m taking a leave is to help Mom raise the kids.”

“Me?” his mother cried. “I’m not raising those children! We’re looking for a guardian! First we’ll find Lucy’s people and then I know there’ll be someone, some young couple maybe who would just love to—”

“Mom,” Ian said. “You know the chances of that are getting slimmer all the time.”

“I know nothing of the sort! Or an aunt, maybe, or—”

Doug said, “Well, he’s got a point, Bee. You’ve been running yourself ragged with those kids.”

Contrarily, Ian felt a pinch of alarm. Would his father really let him go through with this?

His mother said, “And anyway, how about the draft? You’ll be drafted the minute you leave school.”

“If I am, I am,” Ian told her, “but I don’t think I will be. I think God will take care of that.”

“Who?”

“And I do plan to pay my own way,” he said. “I’ve already found a job.”

“Doing what?” his father asked. “Moving poor folks’ furniture?”

“Building furniture.”

They peered at him.

“I’ve made arrangements with this cabinetmaker,” Ian said. “I’ve seen him at work and I asked if I could be his apprentice.”

Student, was the way he’d finally put it. Having sought out the cabinetmaker in that apartment full of china crates and mothballs, he had plunged into the subject of apprenticeship only to be met with a baffled stare. The man had sat back on his heels and studied Ian’s lips. “Apprentice,” Ian had repeated, enunciating carefully. “Pupil.”

“People?” the man had asked. Two furrows stitched themselves across his leathery forehead.

“I already have some experience,” Ian said. “I used to help my father in the basement. I know I could build a kitchen cabinet.”

“I dislike kitchens,” the man said harshly.

For a moment, Ian thought he still hadn’t made himself clear. But the man went on: “They’re junk. See this hinge.” He pointed to it — an ornately curlicued piece of black metal, dimpled all over with artificial hammer marks. “My real work is furniture,” he said.

“Fine,” Ian told him. What did he care? Kitchen cabinets, furniture, it was all the same to him: inanimate objects. Something he could deal with that he couldn’t mess up. Or if he did mess up, it was possible to repair the damage.

“I have a workshop. I make things I like,” the man said. He spoke like anyone else except for a certain insistence of tone, a thickness in the consonants, as if he had a cold. “These kitchens, they’re just for the money.”

“That’s okay! That’s fine! And as for money,” Ian said, “you could pay me minimum wage. Or lower, to start with, because I’m just an apprentice. Student,” he added, for he saw now that it was the uncommon word “apprentice” that had given him trouble. “And any time you have to do a kitchen, you could send me instead.”

He knew he had a hope, then. He could tell by the wistful, visionary look that slowly dawned in the man’s gray eyes.

But were his parents impressed with Ian’s initiative? No. They just sat there blankly. “It’s not brute labor, after all,” he told them. “It’s a craft! It’s like an art.”

“Ian,” his father said, “if you’re busy learning this … art, how will you help with the kids?”

“I’ll work out a schedule with my boss,” Ian said. “Also there’s this church that’s going to pitch in.”

“This what?”

“Church.”

They tilted their heads.

“There’s this … it’s kind of hard to explain,” he said. “This church sort of place on York Road, see, that believes you have to really do something practical to atone for your, shall we call them, sins. And if you agree to that, they’ll pitch in. You can sign up on a bulletin board — the hours you need help, the hours you’ve got free to help others—”

“What in the name of God …?” Bee asked.

“Well, that’s just it,” Ian said. “I mean, I don’t want to sound corny or anything but it is in the name of God. ‘Let us not love in—’ what—‘in just words or in tongue, but in—’ ”

“Ian, have you fallen into the hands of some sect?” his father asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Ian said. “I have merely discovered a church that makes sense to me, the same as Dober Street Presbyterian makes sense to you and Mom.”

“Dober Street didn’t ask us to abandon our educations,” his mother told him. “Of course we have nothing against religion; we raised all of you children to be Christians. But our church never asked us to abandon our entire way of life.”

“Well, maybe it should have,” Ian said.

His parents looked at each other.

His mother said, “I don’t believe this. I do not believe it. No matter how long I’ve been a mother, it seems my children can still come up with something new and unexpected to do to me.”

“I’m not doing this to you! Why does everything have to relate to you all the time? It’s for me, can’t you get that into your head? It’s something I have to do for myself, to be forgiven.”

“Forgiven what, Ian?” his father asked.

Ian swallowed.

“You’re nineteen years old, son. You’re a fine, considerate, upstanding human being. What sin could you possibly be guilty of that would require you to uproot your whole existence?”

Reverend Emmett had said Ian would have to tell them. He’d said that was the only way. Ian had tried to explain how much it would hurt them, but Reverend Emmett had held firm. Sometimes a wound must be scraped out before it can heal, he had said.

Ian said, “I’m the one who caused Danny to die. He drove into that wall on purpose.”

Nobody spoke. His mother’s face was white, almost flinty.

“I told him Lucy was, um, not faithful,” he said.

He had thought there would be questions. He had assumed they would ask for details, pull the single strand he’d handed them till the whole ugly story came tumbling out. But they just sat silent, staring at him.

“I’m sorry!” he cried. “I’m really sorry!”

His mother moved her lips, which seemed unusually wrinkled. No sound emerged.

After a while, he rose awkwardly and left the table. He paused in the dining room doorway, just in case they wanted to call him back. But they didn’t. He crossed the hall and started up the stairs.

For the first time it occurred to him that there was something steely and inhuman to this religion business, Had Reverend Emmett taken fully into account the lonely thud of his sneakers on the steps, the shattered, splintered air he left behind him?

The little lamp on his desk gave off just enough light so it wouldn’t wake Daphne. He leaned over the crib to check on her. She had a feverish smell that reminded him of a sour dishcloth. He straightened her blanket, and then he crossed to the bureau and looked in the mirror that hung above it. Back-lit, he was nothing but a silhouette. He saw himself suddenly as the figure he had feared in his childhood, the intruder who lurked beneath his bed so he had to take a running leap from the doorway every night. He turned aside sharply and picked up the mail his mother had set out for him: a Playboy magazine, an advertisement for a record club, a postcard from his roommate. The magazine and the ad he dropped into the wastebasket. The postcard showed a wild-haired woman barely covered by a white fur dress that hung in strategic zigzags around her thighs. (SHE-WOLVES OF ANTARCTICA! In Vivi-Color! the legend read.) Dear Ian, How do you like my Christmas card? Better late than never. Kind of boring here at home, no Ian and Cicely across the room oh-so-silently hanky-pankying … He winced and dropped the card on top of the magazine. It made a whiskery sound as it landed.

He saw that he was beginning from scratch, from the very ground level, as low as he could get. It was a satisfaction, really.

That night he dreamed he was carrying a cardboard moving carton for Sid ’n’ Ed. It held books or something; it weighed a ton. “Here,” Danny said, “let me help you,” and he took one end and started backing down the steps with it. And all the while he and Ian smiled into each other’s eyes.

It was the last such dream Ian would ever have of Danny, although of course he didn’t know that at the time. At the time he woke clenched and anxious, and all he could think of for comfort was the hymn they had sung in the Church of the Second Chance. “Leaning,” they sang, “leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms …” Gradually he drifted loose, giving himself over to God. He rested all his weight on God, trustfully, serenely, the way his roommate used to rest in his chair that resembled the palm of a hand.