The Clock Winder

12

The first thing Elizabeth did with Mrs. Emerson was teach her how to play chess. It wasn’t Mrs. Emerson’s game at all — too slow, too inward-turned — but it would give her an excuse to sit silent for long periods of time without feeling self-conscious about it. “This is the knight, he moves in an L-shape,” Elizabeth said, and she flicked the knight into all possible squares although she knew that Mrs. Emerson watched in a trance, her mind on something else, the kind of woman who would forever call a knight a horse and try to move it diagonally.

She set up game after game and won them all, even giving Mrs. Emerson every advantage, but at least they passed the time. Mrs. Emerson cultivated the chess expert’s frown, with her chin in her hands. “Hmmm,” she said — perhaps copying some memory of Timothy — but she said it while watching her hands or the clock, just tossing Elizabeth a bone in order to give herself more empty minutes. Elizabeth never hurried her. Mary, passing through the room once, said, “Hit a tough spot?” And then, after a glance at the game, “Why, the board’s wide open! All that’s out is one little pawn.” “She doesn’t like standard first moves,” Elizabeth explained. Although eventually, when Mrs. Emerson had collected herself, all she did was set her own king pawn out.

Every time Elizabeth looked up, Mary was somewhere in the background watching her. Margaret was standing in the doorway hitching her baby higher on her hip. Well, Margaret she had always liked, but still, she kept having the feeling that she was being checked out. Were they afraid she would make some new mistake? Under their gaze she felt inept and self-conscious. She plumped Mrs. Emerson’s pillow too heartily, spoke to her too loudly and cheerfully. All of Thursday passed, long and slow and tedious. No one mentioned going home.

For them — for Margaret, who had sounded desperate and offered double pay and a six-week limit and a promise of no strings attached — she had taken a leave of absence from her job with only ten minutes’ notice and flown to Baltimore when she had never planned on seeing it again. She had minded leaving her job. She was a crafts teacher in a girls’ reform school, which was work that she loved and did well. The only mistake she had made there was this one: that she had left so suddenly, and lied about the reason. Told them her mother was sick. Oh, even the briefest contact with the Emersons, even a long distance phone call, was enough to make things start going wrong. She should have kept on saying no. She should be back in Virginia, doing what felt right to her. Instead here she was pretending to play chess, and all because she liked to picture herself coming to people’s rescue.

She moved out pawns, lazily, making designs with them, sustaining over several turns the image of some fanciful pattern that she wanted them to form. No need to watch out for attacks. Mrs. Emerson would never attack; all she did was buckle, at the end, when she found her king accidentally surrounded by half a dozen men for whom Elizabeth had forgotten to say, “Check.”

“Could I bring you two some tea?” Mary asked, hovering. “Does anyone want the television on?” Margaret said, “If you’d like a breath of air, Elizabeth, I can stay with Mother. Feel free to go to the library, or draw up lesson plans.” They thought she was a teacher in a regular school. Elizabeth hadn’t set them straight. She kept meaning to, but something felt wrong about it — as if maybe the Emersons would imagine her students’ crimes clinging to her like lint, once they knew. She wondered if the school smell — damp concrete and Pine-Sol disinfectant — was still permeating her clothes. While Mrs. Emerson struggled for a word Elizabeth’s mind was on the paper towel roll on the nightstand: two more towels and the roll would be empty, and she could hoard it in her suitcase for an art project she had planned for her students. “I want—” Mrs. Emerson said, and Elizabeth’s thoughts returned to her, but only partially. Piecemeal. Neither here nor there. She felt suddenly four years younger, confused and disorganized and uncertain about what she could expect of herself.

Mrs. Emerson said, “Gillespie. Gillespie.” Elizabeth jumped and said, “Oh,” She wasn’t used to this new name yet. She wondered how it felt to have Mrs. Emerson’s trouble. Did the words start out correctly in her head, and then emerge jumbled? Did she hear her mistakes? She didn’t seem to; she appeared content with “Gillespie.” “I’m—” she said. “I’m—” Her tongue made precise T sounds far forward in her mouth. Elizabeth waited. “Tired,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“I’ll put the board away.”

“I want—”

“I’ll lay your pillow flat and leave you alone a while.”

“No!” said Mrs. Emerson.

Elizabeth thought a minute. “Do you want to sleep?” she asked.

Mrs. Emerson nodded.

“But you’d rather I stayed here.”

“Yes.”

Elizabeth put the chess pieces in their box, tipped her chair back, and looked out the window. She kept her hands still in her lap. From her months with Mr. Cunningham she had learned to lull people to sleep by being motionless and faceless, like one of those cardboard silhouettes set up to scare burglars away. Even when Mrs. Emerson tossed among the sheets, Elizabeth didn’t look at her. If she did, more words would struggle out. She imagined that coming back would have been much harder if Mrs. Emerson could speak the way she used to. Think of what she might have felt compelled to say: rehashing Timothy, explaining those years of silence, asking personal questions. She shot Mrs. Emerson a sideways glance, trying to read in her eyes what bottled-up words might be waiting there. But all she saw were the white, papery lids. Mrs. Emerson slept, nothing but a small, worn-out old lady trying to gather up her lost strength. Her hair was growing out gray at the roots. The front of her bathrobe was spotted with tea-stains — a sight so sad and surprising that for a moment Elizabeth forgot all about those students that she was missing. She rocked forward in her chair and stood up, but she watched Mrs. Emerson a moment longer before she left the room.

Matthew was in the kitchen, eating what was probably his breakfast. He had shaved and dressed. He no longer had that uncared-for look that he had worn asleep in the armchair, but his face was older than she remembered and a piece of adhesive tape was wrapped around one earpiece of his glasses. “Can I pour you some coffee?” he asked her.

“No, thank you.”

“How’s Mother?”

“She’s asleep.”

“How does she seem to you?” he asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know. Older.” She wandered around the kitchen with her arms folded, avoiding his eyes. She didn’t feel comfortable with him anymore. She had thought it would be easy — just act cheerful, matter-of-fact — but she hadn’t counted on his watching her so steadily. “Why are you staring?” she asked him.

“I’m not staring, you are.”

“Oh,” Elizabeth said. She stopped pacing. “Well, the house seems terrible to me,” she said. “Much worse off than your mother. How did it get so rundown? Look. Look at that.” She waved to a strip of wallpaper that was curling and buckling over the stove. “And the porch rail. And the lawn. And the roof gutters have whole branches in them, I’m going to have to see to those.”

“You’re not the handyman here anymore,” Matthew said.

She thought for a moment that he had meant to hurt her feelings, but then she looked up and found him smiling. “You have your hands full as it is,” he told her.

“When she’s napping, though. Or has visitors.”

“I’ve been trying to do things during the weekends. I mow the grass, rake leaves. But it’s a full-time job, I never quite catch up.” He looked down at his plate, where an egg lay nearly untouched. “Before she got sick I’d just finished cleaning out the basement,” he said “Shoveling it out. All that junk. Remember our wine?”

“Yes.”

“I found it in the basement six months after you left. White scum on the top and the worst smell you can imagine.”

“I wondered what you’d done with it,” Elizabeth said.

A younger, shinier Matthew flashed through her mind. “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic,” he had said. “I’ll bring a chicken, you bring a …” As if that picnic had actually come about, she seemed to remember the sunlight on a riverbank and the flattened grass they sat on and the feel of Matthew’s shirt, rough and warm behind her as she leaned back to drink from a stoneware jug.

“What would it have tasted like, I wonder,” Matthew said.

She knew she should never have come back here.

The first time she realized that Andrew was home was at supper. They ate in the dining room — Elizabeth, the two sisters, Matthew, and Susan. Elizabeth kept hearing clinking sounds coming from the kitchen, separated by long intervals of silence. “What’s that?” she asked, and Mary said, “Oh, Andrew.”

“Andrew? I didn’t even know he was here.”

“He’s going back on Sunday.”

Nobody pretended to find it odd that he should be eating in the kitchen.

That night, from the army cot that had been set up for her on the sunporch, she heard Andrew cruising the house in the dark. He slammed the refrigerator door, creaked across floorboards, scraped back a dining room chair. He carried some kind of radio with him that poured out music from the fifties — late-night, slow-dance, crooning songs swelling and fading as he passed through rooms, like a bell on a cat’s collar. In the morning when she went upstairs his door was tightly shut, sealed-looking. When she returned from the library with a stack of historical romances for Mrs. Emerson she found florists’ roses by the bed — nothing any of the others would have thought of buying — and the smell of an unfamiliar aftershave in the air. He ate his lunch in the kitchen. That weighty, surreptitious clinking cast a gloom over the dining room, but no one mentioned it. “We seem to be missing the butter,” Elizabeth said, and Mary rose at once, letting a fork clatter to her plate, as if she feared that Elizabeth would go out to the kitchen herself. “Sit still, I’ll get it,” she said. But Elizabeth hadn’t even thought of going. She avoided Andrew as much as he did her. Otherwise, even in a house so large, they would have had to bump into each other sometime. She kept an ear tuned for the sound of his approach, and circled rooms where he might be. Why should she bother him, she asked herself, if he didn’t want her around? But she knew there was more to it than that: she didn’t want him around, either. He had passed judgment on her. Once or twice, during the afternoon, she caught glimpses of him as he crossed the living room — a flash of his faded blue shirt, a color she associated with institutions — and she averted her face and hunched lower in her chair beside Mrs. Emerson. She should have gone right out to him, of course. “Look here,” she should have said. “Here I am. Elizabeth. You know I’m in the house with you. I feel so silly pretending I’m not. Why are you doing this? Or why not just go back to New York, if you can’t bear to see me?” But she already knew why. He had summed her up. He was afraid to leave his family in her hands. He alone, of all the Emersons, knew that she was the kind of person who went through life causing clatter and spills and permanent damage.

A man from an orthopedic supply house delivered an aluminum walker. It sat by Mrs. Emerson’s bed most of Friday afternoon, but she made no move to use it. “Try, just try it,” Mary said. Mrs. Emerson only sent it slit-eyed glances full of distrust. She felt strongly enough about it to frame a very complicated sentence about walkers reminding her of fat old ladies in side-laced shoes, which made Elizabeth laugh. “You’re right, come to think of it,” she said. Mary frowned at her. When they were alone she said, “Elizabeth, I hope you’ll encourage Mother a little. The doctor says she’ll be back to normal in no time if she’ll just take things step by step.” “Oh, she’ll be all right,” Elizabeth said. And she was. With no one watching, with Elizabeth’s back deliberately turned, Mrs. Emerson looked at the walker more closely and finally reached out to test its weight with one hand. Within a few hours, she had allowed herself to be lifted to a standing position. She clomped around the sunporch, leaning heavily on the walker and puffing. Elizabeth read a magazine. “I think—” Mrs. Emerson said.

“You should probably get some rest,” Elizabeth said. She had figured out by now how to carry on their conversations. As soon as she got the gist of a sentence she interrupted, which sounded rude but spared Mrs. Emerson the humiliation of long delays or having words supplied for her. It seemed to work. Mrs. Emerson released the walker, and Elizabeth closed her magazine, helped Mrs. Emerson back to bed, and took her slippers off. “Before supper we’ll try it again,” she said.

“But I—”

“Yes, but the more you practice the sooner you’ll be free of the walker.”

Mrs. Emerson closed her mouth and nodded.

Matthew and his mother and Elizabeth went over Mrs. Emerson’s checkbook together. Mrs. Emerson wanted Elizabeth to pay bills and keep her records; she had had Elizabeth’s signature cleared at the bank. “But why?” Elizabeth asked her. “You can write that much. Why me?” She felt herself sinking into some kind of trap, the trap she had been afraid of when she first said no to coming back. “I’ll only be here six weeks, remember,” she said.

“Oh well,” said Matthew, “I suppose it’s tiring for her, dealing with all this.”

But Elizabeth was still watching Mrs. Emerson. “Six weeks is all the leave I have,” she said. “That’s understood. Margaret told me so.”

Mrs. Emerson merely aligned a stack of envelopes. She moved her lips, forming no words, pretending it was the stroke that kept her from speaking.

Matthew smoothed open the pages of the budget book and explained how it was kept — a page for every month, an entry for every expense, however small. Matches, stamps, cleaning fluid. Her children thought of the book as a joke. Matthew showed Elizabeth the first page, started two years ago: “This book, 69¢; envelope for this book, 2¢.” He pointed it out silently, smiling. Elizabeth barely glanced at it. “Why couldn’t you do this?” she asked him. “You’re here all the time.”

“But I won’t be after Sunday.” “Why? Where are you going?”

“Well, I have to get back to work. I can only stop by in the evenings.”

She looked up and found him watching her. His glasses had slipped down his nose again. His shoulder just brushed hers. He smelled like bread baking, and always had, but until now she had forgotten that. Caught off guard, she smiled back at him. Then Mrs. Emerson cleared her throat, and Elizabeth moved over to sit on the foot of the bed.

All Friday evening she worked on the bills, staying close by Mrs. Emerson in case questions arose. “Who is this Mr. Robbins? Why the two dollars? Where is this bill they say you’ve overlooked?” She decided that budget books were more revealing than diaries. Mrs. Emerson, who had been born rich, worried more about money than Elizabeth ever had. Her business correspondence was full of suspicion and penny-counting, quibbling over labor hours, threatening to take her business elsewhere, reminding everyone of contracts and estimates and guarantees. Her bills were from discount stores and cut-rate drug companies, some of them clear across the country, and to their trifling amounts interest rates and penalties had been tacked on month after month while Mrs. Emerson hesitated over paying them. Her checks were from an inconvenient bank at the other end of town — lower service charges, Matthew said. Yet Elizabeth found a seventy-dollar receipt from a health food store, and a sixty-dollar bill for a bathrobe. She whistled. Mrs. Emerson said, “What, what—”

“Your spending is all cock-eyed,” Elizabeth told her.

“I worry—”

“I would, too. What kind of bathrobe costs sixty dollars? Health food! You can live in perfect health on forty-nine cents a day, did you know that? For breakfast you have an envelope of plain gelatin in a glass of Tang, that’s protein and vitamin C, only you have to drink it fast before the gelatin sets. For lunch—”

“But stone-ground—”

“Fiddle,” said Elizabeth. “And forty-watt lightbulbs, so you’ll ruin your eyes and need to buy new glasses. I’ll have to change all the bulbs in this house, now. And five cents postage to save four cents on aspirin.”

“I worry—”

“But what for? You never used to.”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Emerson said clearly. Then she slumped against the pillow and started plucking at her sheet. Worry radiated from her in zig-zags that Elizabeth could almost see. Crotchety lines were digging in across her forehead — just what Mr. Emerson had set up all these trust funds to keep her from, never dreaming that they would be no comfort. “Oh, well,” said Elizabeth, sighing. She tapped Mrs. Emerson’s hand lightly and then went back to the bills. She wrote out neat columns of numbers, as if by her careful printing alone she could salvage all Mrs. Emerson’s hours of fretting and hand-twisting and helplessness.

By Saturday morning, Mrs. Emerson had grown more adept with the walker. She had turned it into an extension of herself, like her little gold pen or her tortoise-shell reading glasses — lifting it delicately, with her fingertips, setting it down almost soundlessly. “Now we can go out,” Elizabeth told her. She flung open the double doors off the sunporch and then went ahead, without looking back at Mrs. Emerson. “I think—” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Aren’t you planting any annuals this year?”

Mrs. Emerson moved out into the yard. Elizabeth heard the barely perceptible clink of screws against aluminum, but still she didn’t look around. She walked on ahead, sauntering in an aimless way so that it wouldn’t seem she was deliberately slowing down. “We could pick up some marigolds,” she called back.

“I fool so — so—”

Unseen, Mrs. Emerson’s struggle for words seemed more difficult. Elizabeth winced and held herself rigid, staring at a flowerbed.

“Gillespie. I fool so—”

“Take your time,” Elizabeth told her. “I’m not in any hurry.”

“I fool so clumsy,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh, well. That’ll pass.”

She ambled toward a trellis, poking stray weeds with the toe of her moccasin. “Plantain is taking your yard over,” she said. “Something’s wrong with your grass. Don’t you ever feed it anymore?”

She turned and found Mrs. Emerson smiling at her, with the pale yellow sunlight softening her face.

While Mrs. Emerson napped, Elizabeth wound all the clocks. She nailed up a kitchen spice rack that was dangling crazily by one corner. She dragged the aluminum ladder out from under the veranda and stood on it to clean the gutters, until Matthew found her there. “I thought I told you not to do that,” he said. He held onto the ladder, steadying it, while she took swipes at damp black leaves that had rotted into solid clumps. “This isn’t your job any more,” he said. “And it isn’t safe. Will you let me take over, now?” The force he put into his words traveled through his hands and shook the rungs, so that she felt she was standing on something alive. When she descended with an armload of twigs it was he who moved the ladder to a new position and climbed it, and Elizabeth who held it steady. “You were supposed to be mowing the grass,” she called up to him.

“Never mind, I’ll get to it later.”

They were at the back of the house, above the steepest part of the lawn, and when she looked down the hill and then up at Matthew he seemed dizzyingly high. How old was this ladder, anyway? Did it have to shake so? What was that flimsy twanging sound? She leaned forward until she was braced full length along its slant, with her arms woven through the rungs and her head hanging down to study her feet. When Matthew shifted his weight, a tremor ran through the metal like a pulse.

For supper that night, Mrs. Emerson came into the dining room. They lit candles to celebrate. She sat in her old chair at the head of the table, her back beautifully straight, her right hand folded in her lap while she managed her fork with her left. If she was surprised to see Andrew’s place empty, she didn’t show it. When Matthew offered her more meat she said, “No. Ask — ask—” and waved her hand toward the kitchen. Mary went out and there were low murmurs; then she came back in. “No, thank you,” she told Matthew. She threw a quick, embarrassed look at Elizabeth, who hardly noticed. Now that she had spent the afternoon repairing things, Elizabeth was thinking like a handyman again. She was making a mental note of the knobs on the corner cupboard, both of which had come off. They were sure to be in the silver candy bowl on the top shelf. How many times had she fished them out of that bowl and fitted them back on? She knew exactly how they would feel in her hand, the chipped, rounded edges pressing into her thumb and the way the left one always went on crooked unless she was very careful. She seemed to have memorized this house without knowing it. Between the main course and dessert she slipped out of her chair and stood on tiptoe to feel in the candy bowl, and sure enough, there they were. A little dirtier, a little more chipped. She squatted by the lower door and screwed the first one on. “Elizabeth?” Mary said. “Would you care for coffee?” Elizabeth turned and said, “Oh. No, thanks.” Mary’s face was puzzled and courteous. “If you have things to do,” she said, “maybe you want to be excused.” But Matthew was smiling at Elizabeth as if she’d done exactly what he’d always known she would.

In the night Mrs. Emerson kept calling for things. She wanted food brought in, or errands run, or the sound of someone’s voice in the dark. “Gillespie. Gillespie,” she said. Elizabeth, on her cot, slept on, incorporating Mrs. Emerson’s voice into her dreams. “Gillespie.” Then she opened her eyes, and struggled up among a tangle of sheets.

“What,” she said.

“Water.”

She lifted the pitcher on the nightstand, found it empty, and padded off to the kitchen. While she was waiting for the water to run cold she nearly went to sleep on her feet. The name Gillespie rang in her ears — the new person Mrs. Emerson was changing her into, someone effective and managerial who was summoned by her last name, like a WAC. Now Mary had started calling her Gillespie too. It was contagious. She jerked awake, filled the pitcher, and brought it to the sunporch. “Here,” she said, and dropped into bed again.

“Gillespie.”

“What.”

“A blanket.”

The third call was for pills. “Pills?” Elizabeth said blurrily. “Sleeping pills? You’ve had them.”

“I can’t—”

“The doctor said no more than two. Remember?”

“But I can’t—”

Elizabeth sighed and climbed out of her cot. “How about warm milk,” she said.

“No.”

“Would you like a glass of wine?”

“No.”

“What, then.”

“Talk,” said Mrs. Emerson.

Elizabeth sat down on the foot of the bed, and for a minute she only frowned at the moonlit squares on the floor. Soft night air, as warm as bath water, drifted in the open windows. Her pajamas smelled of Ivory soap and clean sheets, a dreamy, comforting smell. But Mrs. Emerson said, “Talk,” and sat straighter, waiting.

“When you called, I was asleep,” Elizabeth said.

“Sorry,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“I dreamed that your voice was a little gold wire. I was chasing a butterfly with my fourth-grade science class. My fingers would just brush the butterfly; then the wire pulled it away again. There was gold in the butterfly, too. Threads of it, across the wings.”

She pulled her feet off the cold slate floor and tucked them under her. “You may be scared of the dark,” she said.

“No.”

“Why not? What would be so strange about that? Look at all the dark corners there are, and the moonlight makes them look darker. I used to think that skinny ladies in bathrobes were waiting in corners to get me. I don’t know why. My father had a lady like that in his church — sick for years, about to die, always wore a pink chenille bathrobe. Whenever my mother said ‘they’—meaning other people, just anyone — that’s who I pictured. ‘They’ve put a stop sign on Burdette Road,’ she’d say, and I would picture a whole flock of ladies in pink bathrobes, all ghostly and sure of themselves, hammering down a stop sign in the dead of night. Funny thing to be scared of. They weren’t only in corners, they were in the backs of closets, and under beds, and in the slanty space below the stairs. Now I’m grown up and don’t think of them so much, but if something is worrying me, dark corners can still make me wonder what’s in them. Possibilities, maybe. All the bad things that can happen to people. Or if I’m worried enough, ladies in pink bathrobes all over again.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Emerson. But she didn’t seem to be dropping off to sleep yet.

“When you’re independent again it won’t be so bad,” Elizabeth told her. “It’s feeling helpless that scares you.”

“But I won’t—”

Elizabeth waited.

“I won’t be—”

“Of course you will. Wait and see. By the time I leave you’ll be running this house again.”

“Gillespie.”

Elizabeth stiffened.

“Can’t you—”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I have a job now. One I like.”

“You never used to—”

“Now I do, though,” Elizabeth said. “I stay with things more. I don’t go flitting off wherever I’m asked nowadays.”

But she hadn’t guessed the words correctly. “Never used to like, like children,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh. Well, not as a group, no. I still don’t. But these I like.”

She passed a hand across her eyes, which felt dry and hot. She was going to be exhausted by morning. “Are you sleepy?” she asked.

“Talk,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“I have talked. What more is there to say?” She wound a loose thread around her index finger. “Well,” she said finally, “I’ll tell you how I happened to start working at the school. I was leaning out the window of this crafts shop where I used to sell things, watching a parade go by. There were people crammed on both sidewalks, mothers with babies and little children, fathers with children on their shoulders. And suddenly I was so surprised by them. Isn’t it amazing how hard people work to raise their children? Human beings are born so helpless, and stay helpless so long. For every grownup you see, you know there must have been at least one person who had the patience to lug them around, and feed them, and walk them nights and keep them out of danger for years and years, without a break. Teaching them how to fit into civilization and how to talk back and forth with other people, taking them to zoos and parades and educational events, telling them all those nursery rhymes and word-of-mouth fairy tales. Isn’t that surprising? People you wouldn’t trust your purse with five minutes, maybe, but still they put in years and years of time tending their children along and they don’t even make a fuss about it. Even if it’s a criminal they turn out, or some other kind of failure — still, he managed to get grown, didn’t he? Isn’t that something?”

Mrs. Emerson didn’t answer.

“Well, there I was hanging out the window,” Elizabeth said, “thinking all this over. Then I thought, ‘What am I doing up here, anyway? Up in this shop where I’m bored stiff? And never moving on into something else, for fear of some harm I might cause? You’d think I was some kind of special case,’ I thought, ‘but I’m not! I’m like all the people I’m sitting here gawking at, and I might just as well stumble on out and join them!’ So right that day I quit my job, and started casting about for new work. And found it — teaching crafts in a reform school. Well, you might not think the girls there would be all that great, but I like them. Wasn’t that something? Just from one little old parade?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Emerson. Then she was silent.

“Mrs. Emerson?”

But all Elizabeth heard was her soft, steady breathing. She slid off the bed and found her way back to the cot. She stretched out and pulled the cool sheets over her, but then she couldn’t sleep. She stayed wide awake and thoughtful. She was awake when Andrew’s shadow crossed a moonbeam, heading all alone to the gazebo. When she propped herself on an elbow to look at him, he had stopped close beside the sunporch. A thin silvery line traced the top of his head and slid down the slope of his shoulders, stopping at the white shirt whose collar was pressed open in a flat, old-fashioned style. Although he was looking toward the windows, he couldn’t see her. His face was a blank oval, pale and accusing. After a moment he turned and wandered off behind the tangled rosebushes.

“Look,” Matthew said. “From here you would think the house was on fire.”

Elizabeth followed the line of his arm. They were in the gazebo, balanced precariously on a rotten railing, and from where they sat they could look up and see the house reflecting the sunset from every window. Not as if it were on fire, Elizabeth thought, so much as empty. The windows were glaring orange rectangles, giving no sign of the life behind them. The scene had a flat, painted look. “I wonder why she keeps the place,” Matthew said.

“Maybe for her children to come home to.”

“We never come all at once anymore.”

He picked up her hand and turned it over. Elizabeth wasn’t surprised. At this time of day, in this stillness, it seemed as if she had never been away; his hardened palm was as familiar as if she had last held it minutes ago. She rested lightly against his side, which felt warm on her bare arm. Matthew was in a suit. He was dressed to take Andrew to the bus station and the girls to the airport. Elizabeth wore only jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. When she shivered he said, “Do you want my jacket?”

“No, thanks. It’s time for you to be going.”

But Matthew didn’t move. “My father bought this house when they were married,” he said. “Before they even had children. They moved in with nothing more than Grandmother Carter’s parlor furniture, in all this space. He said they were going to live here till they died. He expected to have a long life, I guess. They were going to celebrate their golden anniversary here, all white-haired and settled with the third floor closed off except when children and grandchildren came to spend their summer vacations.”

“Vacations in Baltimore?”

“If you were to marry me,” Matthew said, “we could stay in this house, if you liked.”

Which surprised her no more than his hand had. Why should it? Life seemed to be a constant collision and recollision of bodies on the move in the universe; everything recurred. She would keep running into Emersons until the day she died; and she and Matthew would keep falling in love and out again. If it snowed, wouldn’t Timothy be waiting for her to shovel him a path? Wouldn’t he emerge from those bushes if she took it in her head to walk another turkey?

“When I picture our golden anniversary,” Matthew said, “I think of us in a supermarket. One of those cozy old couples you see telling each other what food they like. ‘Here’s some nice plums, Mother,’ I’d say, and you’d say, ‘Now, Pa, you know what plums do to your digestion. Remember back in ’82,’ you’d say, ‘I fixed stewed plums for supper and you never got a wink of sleep. Remember?’ ” He made his voice old and crotchety, but Elizabeth didn’t laugh.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I picture us with your family tangled up in everything you do, and me brought in to watch. Your mother living with us, and long distance phone calls from sisters divorcing and brothers having breakdowns, and quarrels among the lot of you every evening over the supper table. And me on the outside, wondering what next. Putting on the Band-Aids. Someone to impress.”

“Is that how you see yourself?” Matthew asked. “On the outside?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then what are you doing here now?”

“Putting on the Band-Aids,” Elizabeth said.

“But who asked you to do it? Mother. She didn’t want anyone else. She thinks of you as family. They all do.”

“Mighty strange family,” Elizabeth said. “She didn’t write for four years, I never once got one of those little letters of hers all rehearsed on the dictaphone. What do you say to that? I used to think of them as family too, I always did want a little more sinful family than the one I’ve got. But then I caused all that trouble with Timothy, and your mother didn’t write and we all went our separate ways. Now I’m back for six weeks. Period.”

“You and I don’t see things the same,” Matthew said. “Do you think you’re just standing off aloof from us?”

“Well, I’m surely not collecting guns,” Elizabeth said, “or eloping, or having spells of insanity or shouting quarrels.”

“We’re having a shouting quarrel right now,” said Matthew.

“Matthew, will you go? Your sisters are going to miss their planes.”

“There’s plenty of time.” But even as he spoke, the back door slammed and Mary called, “Matthew? Are you coming?”

“Go on, Matthew,” Elizabeth said.

“In a minute. We haven’t—”

“Matthew!” Mary called.

“Oh, all right,” he said. He slid off the rail and stood there a minute, scratching his head. “Tomorrow I go back to work,” he told Elizabeth.

“All right.”

“I can only come here in the evenings. Will you be here?”

“Where else?” Elizabeth said.

She watched his loose-boned figure shambling up the hill toward Mary, with his awkward suit that looked too short and his hair shaggy and ruffled. Then Margaret came out of the house, carrying Susan, and Mary started speaking. Whatever it was she said — scolding Matthew, or asking where Andrew was, or worrying about plane schedules — Elizabeth couldn’t catch, but she heard her thin, sharp voice and Susan’s irritable fussing. The scraps of their quarrel and the fluttering of Mary’s skirt in the breeze made them seem remote, like little figures under glass. They stood with their backs to Elizabeth. In a minute Andrew would come out and they would leave, confident that Elizabeth would keep things going somehow while they were away. Elizabeth slid off the railing and wandered through the grass, feeling cold and tired. She ought to say goodbye. Instead she moved in a wide slow circle around the gazebo, picking up twigs and fallen branches out of habit although she had nowhere to put them.

One long branch refused to be lifted, and when she tugged at it, it broke off in her hands. It was weighted at the other end by a pair of shoes, slim and elegant but scuffed across the toes; above them, a gray suit, and a faded blue shirt pressed open at the collar.

She straightened, holding the branches close to her chest, and looked squarely into Andrew’s long, sad face. “Well,” she said.

Andrew said nothing. He held a little steel pistol whose eye was pointed at her heart.

Now, why should that make her want to laugh? The blue of the steel was lethal-looking, and she was holding the branches so tightly that her muscles were trembling. And above all, she had been through this before; she knew now that it was something to take seriously. Laughter tended to set explosions off. “Why is everything you say so inconsequential?” Timothy had asked, but now the most inconsequential remark of all came into her head, and she said it in spite of herself.

“Where did you get that gun, I wonder,” she said.

Andrew winced, as if he knew what a mistake she had made.

“Plucked it off a tree? Found it in your mother’s sewing box?”

“It was left with me by a friend,” said Andrew. “He went to Europe.”

“Funny friend,” Elizabeth said.

“Things always come to you somehow, if you want them badly enough.”

She had never heard his voice before, except above the noise of the bus station. It was light and frail, breakable-sounding. There was a pulse ticking in his forehead. The hand that held the pistol was shaking, which gave her some hope that his aim might be poor. “Andrew,” she said, “give me the gun now.”

“I can’t. I didn’t want to do this. I warned you and warned you, I wrote you letters. Nothing stops you. I know what you were up to in the gazebo.”

“Really? What was I up to?” Elizabeth asked.

“You’d better take this seriously. I mean it.”

“I am. I know you do,” said Elizabeth. And she did. It was beginning to seem possible that this was the way she would die — in a numb, unreal situation in the orange half-light of a Sunday evening. How could she have guessed, when she woke up this morning and brushed her teeth and chose what shirt to wear? She didn’t even know what date it was. “What’s today’s date?” she asked.

“June seventh,” said Andrew.

She thought it over. June seventh had never had any significance before. She pushed her mind back to Timothy, who had died one day in April because of mistakes that she had made and had rehashed again and again since then, but she had never been sure what she should have done instead. Started crying? Run away? Said she would take him south with her after all?

She made up her mind. She said, “Well, I can see how you feel. Shall I leave Baltimore and not come back?”

Then she spun away from him to start toward the house. She had completed the turn already (she saw Matthew with a suitcase, his back to her, his sisters straggling behind him) and she was just wondering what to do with these dead branches when the gun went off.

The sound had nothing to do with her. It was as distant as the diminished figure of Matthew, who pivoted in mid-step without a pause and dropped the suitcase and started running toward her. The others were a motionless, horror-struck audience; then they came running too. But the first to reach her was Andrew himself. He knocked away the branches she held and picked up her arm. Blood was soaking through the cuff of her sleeve. She felt a hot stab like a bee-sting, exactly where her smallpox vaccination would be.

“Oh, Elizabeth,” Andrew said. “Did I hurt you?”

When Matthew reached her she was laughing. He thought she was having hysterics.

. . .

They took her to old Dr. Felson, who wouldn’t make trouble. He had a dusty, cluttered office opening off his wife’s kitchen. It smelled of leather and rubbing alcohol. And Dr. Felson, as he hunted for gauze, talked like someone out of a western. “A graze,” he said. “A flesh wound. Would you happen to be sitting on my scissors? I’ve seen you here before, I believe.”

“You sewed up a cut for me,” Elizabeth said. “A knife wound on my wrist.”

“Came with young Timothy, didn’t you?” He straightened up from a desk drawer and scowled at Matthew, who was holding tight to Elizabeth’s bleeding arm. “Don’t go getting germs on that,” he said. “Well, Lord. Who was it cut your wrist now? I forget.”

“I cut my wrist,” Elizabeth said.

“You Emersons could support me single-handed.”

“I’m not an—”

“Mind if your blouse is torn?”

“No.”

He slit her sleeve and put something on her arm that burned. Elizabeth hardly noticed. She felt silly and lightheaded, and the pain in her arm was getting mixed up with the stab of light that cut through her brain: Now we are even, no Emersons will look at me ever again as if I owe them something; now I know nothing I can do will change a bullet in its course. “This’ll throb a little tonight,” the doctor said, but Elizabeth only smiled at him. Anyone would have thought Matthew was the one in pain. He held her wrist too tightly, and his face was white. “Don’t worry,” Elizabeth told him. “It looks a lot worse than it feels.”

“Of course it does,” said Dr. Felson. He was wrapping her arm in gauze, which felt warm and tight. “But how about next time? You may not be so lucky.”

“Next time!” Elizabeth said.

“What does Andrew have to say about this? I’ve looked the other way quite a few times in my life, but that boy’s beginning to bother me.”

“Oh, well, he’s apologized,” Elizabeth said.

Dr. Felson snorted and stood up. “If it gets to hurting, take aspirin,” he told her.

“Okay.”

She let Matthew lead her out again, across the wooden porch and into the street. He guided her steps as if she were an old lady. “I’m all right. Really I am,” she said, but he only tightened his arm around her shoulders. His car was waiting beside the curb, packed with people who had missed their travel connections all on account of her. Mary in the front seat, Margaret and Susan and Andrew in the back — peering out of the dusk, their faces pale and anxious, waiting to hear the outcome. “What’s he say?” said Andrew. “Is she all right? Will you be all right?” He loomed out through the window to take a better look, and at the sight of him bubbles of laughter started rising up again in her chest. “Of course I will,” she said, and laughed out loud, and opened the door to pile in among a tangle of other Emersons.