The Clock Winder

5

It was all up to Matthew. It was Matthew who made the funeral arrangements, brought his mother endless cups of tea that he had brewed himself, met his brother and sisters at the airport and carted them home, answering their questions as he drove. “But why—?” “How could he—?” “I really don’t know,” Matthew said. “I’ll tell you what little I’ve pieced together, that’s all I can do.”

Peter came from college, looking young and scared with his hair slicked back too neatly. Mary flew out from Dayton with her little boy; Margaret came from Chicago and Melissa from New York. Andrew had not been told. He would arrive on Saturday, as he had planned before all this happened. Then they could sit him down and lay comforting hands on his shoulders and tell him gradually, face to face. The funeral would be over by then, but just barely, which made Matthew picture his family burying Timothy in haste. They didn’t really, of course. There was the usual waiting period, with the usual tears and boredom and the sense that time was just creeping until they could get this business finished. They wore out the subject of Timothy; they began to feel bruised and battered at the sound of his name. People kept paying formal calls, requiring them to make hushed and grateful conversation that did not sound real even though it was. No one ate regular meals. No one went to bed at regular hours. Any room Matthew went into, at any time of day, he might find several members of his family sitting in a silent knot with coffeecups on their knees. Sometimes a piece of laughter broke out, or an accidental burst of enthusiasm as they veered to other subjects. Then they caught themselves, checked the laughter, dwindled off in mid-sentence, returning to a silence that swelled with inappropriate thoughts.

It used to be Elizabeth who managed this family. Matthew had never realized that till now. She was the one they had leaned on — he and his mother and Timothy, and the house itself, whose rooms had taken on her clear sunny calmness and her smell of fresh wood chips. Only now, when she was needed most, Elizabeth had changed. With the others present she looked bewildered and out of place, like any ordinary stranger who had stumbled into the midst of a family in mourning. Mrs. Emerson called on her continually, but she answered with her mind on something else. Her care-taking had descended to the most literal kind: errand-running, lawn-sprinkling, lugging down more toys for Mary’s Billy. At twelve o’clock one night Matthew found her on a stepladder in the pantry, changing lightbulbs. She wandered through crowded rooms winding clocks or carrying table-leaves, her face set and distant, and while Father Lewis was in the parlor offering his condolences she stayed on the sunporch, yanking weather-stripping from all the windows.

“Why are you working so hard?” Matthew asked her.

“This is my job,” she said, and dumped tangles of cracked stripping into a garbage can that she had brought in from outside.

“So that’s Mother’s famous handyman,” said Mary. “Is she always so grim?”

“No, not ever,” Matthew said.

Then he removed his glasses and rubbed the inner corners of his eyes. Mary looked at him a moment but said nothing more.

Late Friday afternoon, Elizabeth came into the kitchen while Matthew was making a sandwich. She was in her oldest jeans, carrying a curved pruning saw that she set on a counter. “I thought you would be the one to tell,” she said. “After the funeral I’m going home for good.”

Matthew spread jam over peanut butter and patted another slice of bread down on top of it. Then he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you left.”

“I think I’d better.”

“Is it because of the trouble with the police?” “No.”

“Mother’s going to rely on you to keep her going, these next few months.”

“I don’t want to be relied on,” Elizabeth said.

Matthew laid the sandwich carefully on a plate and offered it to her. She shook her head. He set the plate on the drainboard. “If you would just give it a little more thought,” he said.

“I have.”

“Or if you held off till things here were settled. Then I could come with you. I’m still planning on it.” “No,” she said.

“Well, all right. Not now. But as soon as you want me to.”

She said nothing. He laid a hand over hers, over cool rough knuckles, and she kept still until he removed it. Then she picked up her saw and left.

“Where is Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said. “Why don’t I see her around any more?”

“She’s out cutting that hanging branch, Mother.”

“That’s not what I need her for.”

“Shall I call her?”

“No, no, never mind.”

He set a tray on her nightstand, tea and a perfectly sectioned orange, and then straightened to watch his mother pace between the bed and the window. There was nothing broken about her, even now. She continued to wear her matched skirts and sweaters and her string of pearls, her high-heeled shoes, her bracelet with the names of all her children dangling on gold discs. She spoke when spoken to, in her thin, bright voice, and she kept in touch with the arrivals and the sympathy cards and the funeral arrangements. It was true that she spent more time alone in her room, and there were sometimes traces of tears when she came downstairs, but she was one of those women who look younger after crying. The tears puffed her eyes slightly, erasing lines and shadows. Her skin was flushed and shining. She moved with the proud, deliberate dignity she had had when her husband died. Once, months ago, Matthew had asked Elizabeth if she found his mother hard to put up with. “No, I like her,” she said. “Think what a small life she has, but she still dresses up every day and holds her stomach in. Isn’t that something?” Now that Elizabeth seemed so removed, Matthew tried to take over for her. He shielded his mother from visitors, and answered her telephone, and brought her food that she never ate. When she paced the room he watched with his hands slightly flexed, as if he were preparing to leap forward any minute and catch her if she stumbled, or prevent her from ricocheting from wall to wall.

He was the one who broke the news to her. Elizabeth had called him from the police station and asked who should do it: he or she. “I should,” he told her. “I couldn’t decide,” she said. “I thought, you’re her son after all, she might prefer it. Then I thought no, it’s something I should do”—as if she saw herself as a culprit, duty-bound to face in person someone whose dish she had broken or whose message she had forgotten to deliver. He couldn’t understand that. Everyone knew she was not to blame. He had called for her at the police station, searching her out through long flaky corridors and finding her, finally, pale and stony-faced in a roomful of officials. “Wait in the hall,” they told him, but instead he crossed to stand behind her chair, one hand on the back of it. He had waited through the endless questions, the short, stark answers, the final re-reading of her statement. The policeman who read it stumbled woodenly over her words, so that it sounded as if she herself had stumbled although she hadn’t. His voice was bored and dismal; he was like someone reciting lists. Even her useless repetitions had been conscientiously recorded—“I don’t know. I don’t know,” which she must have said before Matthew came in, and surely not in such a despairing drone. She would have been quick with it, flicking it off her tongue like a dismissal, the way she always did when she felt cornered. The thought made Matthew want to move his hand from the chair to her shoulder, but he kept still.

On the telephone he had not even asked her the cause of death, but when it came out at the police station he wasn’t surprised. He had assumed it was suicide from the start. Now he wondered why. He had never known that he expected such a thing of Timothy. Why not a car accident? He was a short-tempered driver. Why not a hold-up man, a hit-and-run, one of those senseless pieces of violence that happened in this city every day? He couldn’t answer. When he fixed an image of his brother in his mind, trying to understand, he found that Timothy had already grown flat and unreal. “He had a round face,” he told himself. “He had short blond hair, sticking out in tufts.” The round face and blond hair materialized, but without the spark that made them Timothy.

He had driven Elizabeth home and left her outside, sitting on the porch steps facing the street, while he went into the house. He found his mother writing letters in the bedroom. The little beige dictaphone was playing her voice back, as tinny and sharp as a talking doll’s: “Mary. Is Billy old enough for tricycles? Not the pedal kind, I know, but—”

“I have bad news,” Matthew said.

She spun around in her chair with her face already shocked. “It’s Andrew,” she said instantly.

“No, Timothy.”

“Timothy? It’s Timothy?” She had dropped the pen and was kneading her hands, which looked cold and white and shaky. “He’s dead,” she said.

“I’m afraid he is.”

“I thought it would be Andrew.”

Behind her the mechanical voice played on. “Does he have a wagon? A scooter? Ask Peter about his plans for the summer.”

“How did it happen?” she asked.

“He, it was—”

“How did it happen?”

Timothy should have to be doing this; not Matthew. It was all Timothy’s fault, wasn’t it? Anger made him blunter than he had meant to be. “He shot himself,” he said — flatly, like a child tattling on some dreadful piece of mischief that he himself had had no part in.

“Oh, no, that’s so unfair!” his mother said.

“Unfair?”

He paused. Nothing he had planned covered this turn in the conversation. Mrs. Emerson felt her face with her hands, sending off icy trembling sparkles from her rings. “Mother,” Matthew said, “I wish there was something I—”

“Did he suffer any pain?”

“No.”

“But how did it come about?” she said. “What was the cause? Where did he find a gun?”

“I’m not too sure. Elizabeth said—”

“Elizabeth!” Her face had the stunned, grainy quality of a movie close-up, although she was across the room from him. She felt behind her on the desk and brought forth an inkbottle. Without looking at it she heaved it, overhand, in a swift, vicious arc — the last thing he had expected. He winced, but stood his ground. The inkbottle thudded against the curtain on the door, splashing it blue-black and cracking one of the panes behind it. In the silence that followed, the dictaphone said, “Would Margaret like Mr. Hughes to print her up more of those address labels?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Emerson said.

She flicked the dictaphone off, and then bent to pick up a sheet of stationery that had floated to the floor. “There was no excuse for that,” she said.

“It’s all right.”

“What were you saying?”

“Well—” He hesitated to mention Elizabeth’s name again, but his mother prompted him.

“Elizabeth said?”

“She said she went to eat lunch with him. She was just walking down the hall to his apartment when she heard the shot.”

“Oh, I see,” his mother said.

She never gave any explanation for throwing the inkbottle. She had Elizabeth replace the pane immediately, and Alvareen washed the stain from the curtain. And in restless moments, pacing the bedroom or waiting out some silence among her family, she still said, “Where is Elizabeth? Why isn’t she here with us?” Matthew watched closely, less concerned for his mother than for Elizabeth herself, but if anything she seemed closer to Elizabeth now than before. He saw her waiting at the kitchen window for Elizabeth to come in from staking roses; he saw her reach once for Elizabeth’s hand when they met in the hallway, and hold onto it tightly for a second before she gave a little laugh at herself and let it go. The inkbottle settled out of sight in the back of Matthew’s mind, joining all the other unexplainable things that women seemed to do from time to time.

He didn’t believe what Elizabeth had told the police. Too many parts of it failed to make sense. It came out very soon that she and Timothy must have driven downtown together, and then a neighbor of Timothy’s said she had heard people quarreling, and the police discovered a long distance call that had been made to Elizabeth’s family. “I was with him but left, and then came back,” Elizabeth said. Well, that was possible. If they had had an argument she might have stormed out and then changed her mind later and returned. But what would they argue about, she and Timothy? And when had she been known to leave in a huff? And if she did leave, was she the type to come back?

One of the things he had long ago accepted about Elizabeth was that she didn’t always tell the truth. She seemed to view truth as a quality constantly shifting, continually reshaping itself the way a slant of light might during the course of a day. Her contradictions were tossed off gaily, as if she were laughing at her stories’ habit of altering without help from her. With the police, now, she confined herself to a single version, remodeled only once when they discovered her earlier visit. Yet there were points at which she simply shut up and refused to answer. “You apparently don’t realize that you could be in serious trouble over this,” the policemen said. But that was where they were wrong. She must have realized, to have stopped so short rather than spin whatever haphazard tale came to mind.

“Where did he get the gun?” they asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It just came out of nowhere? What were you two arguing about?” “Arguing?”

“Why were you shouting?”

“Shouting?”

“Miss.”

Elizabeth looked at them, her face expressionless.

“Why did you call home?”

“To say hello.”

“Was that during the earlier visit?”

“Of course.”

“Did the argument arise from that phone call in some way?”

“Argument?”

They gave up. There was no doubt it was a suicide — they had the powder burns, the fingerprints, the statement of his professor providing motivation. Elizabeth was only the last little untied thread, and although they would have liked her to finish wrapping things up they had never thought of her as crucial. They layered death over with extraneous interviews and coroners’ reports and legal processes until Timothy himself was all but forgotten. Then, almost as an afterthought, they declared the case closed. The deceased could be buried, they said. That was the end of it.

“Mother,” Matthew said, “come drink this tea.”

“In a minute.”

She was standing by the window, moving a plant into a pool of sunlight.

“I’ve been talking with Elizabeth,” Matthew told her.

“Oh?”

“She wants to leave her job.”

Mrs. Emerson’s hands dropped from the flowerpot. She straightened her back, so that her sharp shoulderblades suddenly flattened.

“She’s going to wait till after the funeral, though,” he said.

“But leaving! Why? What did she say about me?”

“Well, nothing about you.”

“Did she say I was the cause?” “Of course not.”

“She must have given you a reason, though.”

“No. Not really,” Matthew said.

His mother turned. Her eyes, when she was disturbed, never could rest on one place; they darted back and forth, as if she were hoping to read her surroundings like a letter. “And why tell you?” she said. “I am her employer.”

“I guess she thought it was a bad time to bother you.”

“No, she blames me for something. But now! To leave now! Why, I’ve been thinking of her as one of the family. I took her right in.”

“Maybe you could talk to her,” Matthew said.

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

“If she knew how you felt about it—”

“If she wants to leave, let her go,” said his mother. “I’m not going to beg her to stay.”

Then she settled herself in a flowered armchair, arranging her skirt beneath her, and pushed her bracelet back on her wrist and leaned forward with perfect posture to pour herself a cup of tea.

Matthew went downstairs and into the kitchen, where he found Peter eating the sandwich that had been on the drainboard. “Oh, sorry,” Peter said. “Was this yours?”

“I didn’t want it.”

“Just got to needing a little snack,” Peter said. He gulped down one more bite and then set the rest of the sandwich aside, as if he felt embarrassed at being hungry. He was forever embarrassed by something, or maybe that was just his age — nineteen, still unformed-looking, clomping around in enormous loafers bumping into people and saying the wrong things. He had come at the tail end of the family, five years after Melissa. The others had no more than a year between them and some of them less; they were a bustling foreign tribe, disappearing and reappearing without explanation, while Peter sat on the floor beside his rubber blocks and watched with surprised, considering eyes. Then the oldest ones were given quarters on the third floor, into which they vanished for all of their last years at home. They read in bed undisturbed, visited back and forth in the dead of night, formed pacts against the grownups. Peter stayed in the nursery, next door to his parents. No one ever thought to change the pink-and-yellow wallpaper. He grew up while their backs were turned, completely on his own, long after the third floor was emptied and echoing. Now when he came home on visits he bumped into doors and failed to listen when he was spoken to, as if he had given up all attempts at belonging here.

“Mother’s upset because Elizabeth is leaving,” Matthew said, trying to draw him into the family.

“Gee, that’s too bad. Who’s Elizabeth?” “Elizabeth. The handyman.”

“Oh. I guess she must think we’re a bunch of kooks after all that’s happened.”

“No, she—”

“Is that Elizabeth? I thought her name was Alvareen.”

“No — what? Whose name? Oh, never mind.”

Matthew left, bypassing the living room. He was tired of talk. He went out through the sunporch, a quiet place lit with diagonals of dusty orange light. Alvareen stood ironing a table cloth while tears rolled down her cheeks. (She had shown up two days in a row, on time, impressed by tragedy.) Margaret was curled on the windowseat reading a book and chewing on tight little cylinders that she had made from the page corners. Neither of them looked up as he passed.

“Elizabeth,” he said, standing under the poplar tree.

“Here I am.”

She sat on a branch above the one she had just cut off, leaning sideways against the trunk.

“Shall I help you down?”

“I like it here.”

“I’m going home now. I’m not coming back until the funeral.”

“Oh. All right.”

“Could you come down? I’d like to talk some things over with you.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, would you rather I stayed here? What do you want to do?”

“I want to sit in this poplar tree,” Elizabeth said.

He nodded, and stood around for a while with his hands in his pockets. Then he left.

Matthew’s house was out in the country, part of a rundown old farm that his father had somehow come into possession of. His family called it a shack, but it was more than that. It was a tiny two-story house, the front a peeling white, the other three sides unpainted and as gray as the rick-rack fence that separated it from the woods behind. To get there he had to leave the highway and drive down a rutted road that rattled the bones of his old car. At the end of the road he parked and walked through new, leafy woods up to the front yard, which was a floor of packed earth. A rotting tire hung from an apple tree. A Studebaker rusted on concrete blocks out back. His mother had come here only once and, “Oh, Matthew,” she had said, looking at the porch with its buckling slat railings, “I can’t go in there. It would make me too sad.” But she had, of course. She had perched uneasily on a squat rocking chair and accepted Oreos and lemonade. Her hair and the glass lemonade pitcher had been two discs of gold beneath the high smoked ceilings. Then forever after that she begged him to find some place nicer. “I’ll pay for it myself, don’t think about the money,” she said. “I’ll fix it up for you. I’ll shop for what it needs.” When he refused she settled for buying what she called “touches”—an Indian rug, homespun curtains, cushions from Peru. She comforted herself by imagining that the house was meant to be Bohemian, one of those places with pottery on the windowsills and serapes draped over the chairs. Matthew didn’t mind. He had chosen to live here because it was comfortable and made no demands on him, and all the cushions in Peru couldn’t change that. His father had been happy to give his permission. (He liked to see every last thing put to use.) Then at his death he had willed Matthew the house outright. The others got money; Matthew got the house, which was what he really wanted.

He walked through the front room, where each board creaked separately beneath his feet. He went into the kitchen and took a roll of liverwurst from the yellowed refrigerator. Leaning against the sink, paring off slices with a rusty knife, he ate liverwurst until he stopped feeling hungry and then put it away again. That was his supper. There was a table, of course, and two chairs, and a whole set of dishes in the cupboard (his mother’s gift, brown earthenware), but he rarely used them. Most meals he ate standing at the stove, spooning large mouthfuls directly from the pot to save dishwashing. Once when Elizabeth came for supper he had started to do that — dipped a fork absentmindedly into the stew pot, before he caught himself — and all Elizabeth did was reach for the potato skillet and find herself another fork. Halfway through the meal they traded pans. If he narrowed his eyes he could see her still, slouched against a counter munching happily and cradling the skillet in a frayed old undershirt that he used for a pot-holder.

Then sometimes, when living alone depressed him, he set the table meticulously with knife, fork and spoon and a folded napkin, plate and salad plate, salt and pepper shakers. He served into serving dishes, and from them to his plate, as if he were two people performing two separate tasks. He settled himself in his chair and smoothed the napkin across his knees; then he sat motionless, forgetting the canned hash and olive-drab beans that steamed before him, stunned by the dismalness of this elaborate table set for one. What was he doing here, twenty-eight years old and all alone? Why was he living like an elderly widower in this house without children, set in his ways, pottering from stove to table to sink? The carefully positioned salad plate and the salt and pepper shakers, side by side in their handwoven basket, looked strained and pathetic. He went back to eating at the stove, with salt from a Morton’s box and pepper from an Ann Page pepper tin.

In the living room he picked up old Newsweeks and placed them in a wooden rack. He straightened a rug. He aligned the corners of the slipcover on the daybed. Then, since it was growing dark, he lit a table lamp and sat down with that morning’s paper. Words jerked before his vision in scattered clusters. He felt like a man in a waiting room before a dreaded appointment, reading sentences that skipped along heartlessly in spite of the sick feeling in his stomach. He raised his eyes and looked at the walls instead — tongue-and-groove, shiny green, with an oval photograph of someone long dead leaning over the fireplace. The fireplace itself was black and cold, in spite of the chill in the air. A brown oil burner fed its pipe into one side of the chimney, and clanked periodically as if its metal were still contracting after all the winter months it had tried to heat this room.

“Aren’t you freezing?” his mother had asked. And Elizabeth had said, “You want to go hunt firewood?” His father, rocking in that chair with a glass of warm bourbon, had said, “When I was a boy, rooms were always this cold. We were healthier, too.” His father had come visiting often, mumbling something about business carrying him in this direction. He had supplied the bourbon himself, and occasionally fresh vegetables or a slab of bacon — country things, which he had purchased in the city to bring out here. He liked to have the fire lit. He liked to rock in silence for hours. “Now, this is the way to live,” he said. “At heart, I’m a simple man,” but there had been nothing simple about him. Every quality he had was struggling with another its exact opposite. If he rocked so contentedly here, in the city he was a whirlwind. Always selling, pushing, buying, bargaining, sometimes bending the law. “Remember this,” he kept telling his children. “If you want to rise in the world, smile with your eyes. Not just your mouth. It gets them every time.” His children cringed. Momentarily, they hated him. (Yet every one of them, blond and dark both, had his pure blue eyes that curled like cashew nuts whenever they smiled.) He mourned for weeks when Mary refused to be a debutante, and he joined the country club on his own and played golf every Sunday although he hated it. “What do I go there for?” he asked. “What do I want with those snobs?” He was made up of layers you could peel off like onion skins, each of them equally present and real. The innermost layer (garage mechanic’s son, dreaming of a purple Cadillac) could pop up at any time: when he watched TV in his undershirt, when he said “like I said” and “between you and I,” when he brought home an old tire to whitewash and plant with geraniums. “Oh, Billy,” his wife said of the tire, “people just don’t — oh, how can I explain it?” He was hurt, which made him brisker and more businesslike, and he stayed late at the office for weeks at a time. Then he bought her a ruby ring too big to wear under gloves. Then he took all his sons hunting although none of them could shoot. “I like the natural life,” he told them. “I’m a simple man, at heart.”

Matthew’s father was clearer in this room than Timothy; his death seemed more recent, more easily mourned. He had gone unwillingly, after all — taken unawares, in his sleep, probably looking forward to tomorrow’s wheelings and dealings. But how could you mourn a suicide? Complications arose every time Matthew tried. On top of the oil burner was a sheaf of photographs he had been puzzling over the night before: Timothy in his mother’s yard, last summer when Matthew was trying out his new camera. He had not yet learned how to use it. The focus was blurred, and in every print Timothy’s laughing face had extra outlines around it, as if he had been moving, lunging toward the lens, as if laughter were some new form of attack. However Matthew tried to imagine him sober-faced, he couldn’t. He pulled up images in his mind, one by one: Timothy laughing with that girl he had brought to dinner once, his arm around her shoulders; Timothy laughing with his mother, with Melissa, with his father at his college graduation. Then a new picture slid in, clicking up from the back of his head: Timothy quarreling with Elizabeth. Only what was it about? Had she broken a date? Refused one? Shown up late for something? All he remembered was that it had happened on the sunporch, over the noise of a TV western. “If you persist,” Timothy said, “in seeing life as some kind of gimmicky guided tour where everyone signs up for a surprise destination—” and Elizabeth said, “What? Seeing what?” “Life,” said Timothy, and Elizabeth said, “Oh, life,” and smiled as fondly and happily as if he had mentioned her favorite acquaintance. Timothy stopped speaking, and his face took on a puzzled look. Wispy lines crossed his forehead. And Matthew, listening from across the room, had thought: It isn’t Timothy she loves, then. He hadn’t bothered wondering how he reached that conclusion. He sat before the television watching Marshall Dillon, holding his happiness close to his chest and forgetting, for once, all the qualities in Timothy that were hard to take (his carelessness with people, his sharp quick tongue, his succession of waifish girls hastily dressed and combing their hair when Matthew came visiting unannounced). He forgot them again now, and with them the picture of Timothy triumphantly cocking his pistol and laughing in his family’s face. All he saw was that puckered, defeated forehead. He adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. He felt burdened by new sorrows that he regretted having invited.

. . .

That night he dreamed that Elizabeth had gone away. She was long gone, she had been gone for years, she left behind her a dark blue, funnel-shaped hollow that caused his chest to ache. Then his mother died. She lay on a table with her head slightly propped and he stood beside her reading a newspaper. All the headlines contained numerals. “783 SUNK; 19 SURVIVORS; 45 BURIED IN MINE DISASTER,” he read, but he understood that this was her will leaving everything to Elizabeth. It made sense; on the table his mother had changed into a frail, lavender-dressed old lady, the kind who would make eccentric wills in favor of pets and paid companions. He began searching for Elizabeth, combing through long grasses with his fingers and coming up with nothing. She never appeared. Her absence caused an echoing sound, like wind in the tops of very tall pines. “What shall I do about the money?” he asked the old lady on the table. “If you fail to find the beneficiary it must be buried with me,” she said. “You’ll never get it.” He let the money float into the coffin. He was crying, but it wasn’t because of what she had said; it was the wastefulness, the uselessness, the lost look of all that fragile green paper waiting forever for Elizabeth to come home.

At the funeral the immediate family filled one pew — Mrs. Emerson, her three daughters, two of her sons, and her sister Dorothy, who was barely on speaking terms but always showed up for disasters. In the pew behind sat Mrs. Emerson’s two cousins, Mr. Emerson’s strange brother, and Elizabeth. Matthew felt uncomfortable so close to the front. He had entered with his eyes lowered, guiding his mother by the elbow, and because it was his first time here since his father died he was uncertain of anything that lay behind his own pew. He disliked sitting in places that he had not taken measure of first. Once he turned partway around, but his sister Mary jabbed him in the side. She was staring straight ahead, with her plump, pretty face set in stern lines. Little pockets of irritation shadowed the corners of her mouth.

Irritation was the mood of this whole funeral, for some reason. All down Matthew’s pew, exasperated jerks traveled like ripples. Margaret tore triangles off the pages of her hymn-book, until Melissa slammed it shut. Aunt Dorothy tapped Peter for cracking his knuckles. Matthew shoved his glasses higher for the dozenth time and received another jab in the side. His mother, listening to the generalities of the service, twisted restlessly in her seat, as if she wanted to jump up and make additions or revisions. Even Father Lewis seemed annoyed about something. He was deprived of most of the phrases he liked to use — fruitful lives and tasks well done, happy deaths and God’s design — and when he had finished the few vague sentences left to him he briskly aligned two sheets of paper on his pulpit, heaved a sharp sigh, and frowned at someone’s cough. Before him lay the pearly gray casket, hovering, weighing down the silence, waiting for something more that never came.

By the time they returned from the cemetery it was nearly one o’clock. Three limousines left them at the door. People alighted in straggling lines, and unbuttoned their gloves and removed their hats and commented and argued and agreed all the way up the walk. “He never liked that hymn, he would have poked fun at us for singing it,” Melissa said. Mrs. Emerson’s two cousins climbed into their car, murmuring soft sounds that might not even have been words. It looked as if only the immediate family and Aunt Dorothy were staying to dinner. “You’ll stay, Uncle Henry,” Mary told Mr. Emerson’s strange brother, but Uncle Henry (who was strange because he never talked, not ever, but merely bobbed his Adam’s apple when confronted with direct questions) waved one red, bony hand and went off stiff-legged to his pickup truck. “We’d better tell Alvareen,” Mary said. “Eight for dinner, if she hasn’t yet fed Billy.”

“But how about Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Elizabeth, oh. Does she eat with us?”

“I’ll get something later,” Elizabeth said. She was zigzagging across the front lawn, gathering the debris left by last night’s rainstorm. In church, in her beige linen dress, she had looked like anyone else, but there was nothing ordinary about her now when her arms were full of branches and rivulets of barky water were running down the wrinkles in her skirt.

“Is that girl all right?” Mary said. “You’d think she’d change clothes first.”

Billy was waiting on the top porch step, guiding his mother back with his intense, unswerving stare. Alvareen stood behind him in a shiny black party dress. “Dinner’s set,” she called. “Come on in, you poor souls, I got everything you’d wish for right on the table.” When Mrs. Emerson came near enough Alvareen patted her arm. “Now, now, it’s finished now,” she said. Mrs. Emerson said, “I’m quite all right, Emmeline.”

“Shows you’re not,” said Alvareen. “I’m Alvareen, not Emmeline, but don’t you mind. Come on in, folks.”

Then she led the way into the house, shaking her head and moving her lips, no doubt preparing what she would say to her family when she got home: “Poor thing was so tore up she didn’t know me. Didn’t know who I was. Called me Emmeline. Didn’t know me.” Behind her, Melissa stumbled against a step and laid one hand on Matthew’s arm, but so lightly that the stumbling seemed artificial. Margaret followed, swinging a weed that she had yanked from the roadside. Mary bent to scoop up Billy, and at the end of the line came Aunt Dorothy, talking steadily to Peter although he didn’t appear to be listening. “Now what I want to know is, who made the arrangements? Don’t you people believe in the old-fashioned way of doing things? First no wake, no one at the funeral home, just the remains waiting all alone. Then that scrappy little service with hymns I surely never heard of, and the casket closed so that I couldn’t pay my — why was the casket closed?”

“I asked it to be,” Matthew said. “I thought it would be easier.”

“Easier!” She paused in the doorway, her mouth open, a wrinkled, scrawny caricature of Mrs. Emerson. “Easier, you say! My dear Matthew, death is never going to be easy. We accept, we endure. We used to put them in the parlor. Now you’re telling me — or was he, um, I hope the bullet didn’t—”

Nobody rescued her. She closed her mouth and entered the house, leaving Peter horror-struck behind her. “Did it?” he whispered, and Matthew said, “No, of course not. Go on in.” (And pictured, clearer than Peter there before him, Timothy’s dead, toneless face, so solemn that it had to be a mockery — much worse than blood or signs of pain, although he never could have explained that to Peter.)

Alvareen stood scolding in the dining room. Nobody was coming straight to the table. They were milling in the hallway, or heading for bathrooms, or going off to put away hats and gloves. “You’re breaking my heart,” Alvareen said. “Here, little Billy, you’ll pay me mind.” She hoisted him into a chair with a dictionary on it and tied a napkin around his neck. He ducked his round yellow head to examine the tablecloth fringe. There was always something he was checking up on — as if he considered himself the advance scout for the grandchildren yet to be born. He peered at people suspiciously, drew back to study Mrs. Emerson when she kissed him, cautiously surveyed all offerings from his aunts and uncles. Sometimes he repeated whole conversations between his relatives, word for word, out of context, as exact as a spy’s tape recording. “ ‘Where you going, Melissa?’ ‘Out for a walk, can’t stand it here.’ ‘When’ll you be back?’ ‘ ’Spect me when you see me.’ ”

“ ‘Why don’t I ever hear from you, Peter?’ ” he said now, and then frowned at his silverware, as if turning the question over for all possible implications.

When they were finally seated, their elbows touched. No one would have guessed how many people were missing. Alvareen had chosen her own menu: ham and roast beef, three kinds of vegetables, mashed potatoes and baked potatoes and sweet potatoes. “Oh, my,” Mrs. Emerson said, and she sighed and refolded her napkin and sat back without taking a bite. Only Margaret had any appetite. She ate silently and steadily — a lanky-haired, pudgy, flat-faced girl. Beside her, Billy whacked his fork rhythmically against the table edge. “In a bottom drawer, under the tea-towels,” he chanted. “In a bottom—” “Cut that out, mister,” Mary said. She buttered a roll and laid it on his plate. “Eat up and hush.”

“In a bottom—”

“It was nice of Father Lewis to do the services,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Nice?” said Mary.

“Well, he could have refused. He had the right, in a case of … case like this.”

“I’d like to see him try,” Mary said. She had changed since the days when she lived at home. She looked calmer, softer around the edges, especially now when she was expecting another baby. Her face, with its lipsticked mouth and pale eyes, was settling along the jawline, and she wore her dark hair medium-length, average-styled, marked with crimp-lines from metal curlers. Yet while her looks had softened, her opinions had hardened. She passed judgment on everything, in her mother’s sharp, definite voice. She was forever ready to turn belligerent. Motherhood had affected her in the way it did she-bears, but not only in matters relating to her child. “You know what I’d have said if he refused,” she said. “I’d have marched straight up to him. Oh, he’d be sorry he ever mentioned it. Quit that, Billy. Give it to Mother. ‘Father Lewis,’ I’d say, I’d say straight to his face—”

“But he didn’t,” Margaret said.

“What?”

“What’s the point?”

“Oh, Margaret, where are you, off in a daze some place? We were talking about—”

“I know what you were talking about. What’s the point? He didn’t refuse, he never said a word about it. He went right ahead and performed the services.”

“Well, I was only—”

“Funerals are for the living,” said Mrs. Emerson. “That’s what all the morticians’ ads say.”

“Of course, Mother,” Mary said. “No one denies it.”

“Well, Father Lewis was very kind to me. Very thoughtful, very considerate. I don’t want to disappoint you children in any way, but the fact is that I have never felt all that religious. I just didn’t have the knack, I suppose. Now, Father Lewis knows that well but did it stop him? No. He came and spent time, he offered his sympathy, he never even mentioned the manner of Timothy’s going. He was no help at all, of course, but you can’t say he didn’t try.”

“No, of course not,” Mary said.

“The trouble with ministers,” said Mrs. Emerson, “is that they’re not women. There he was talking about young life carried off in its prime. What do I care about the prime? I’m thinking about the morning sickness, labor pains, colic, mumps — all for nothing. All come to nothing. You have no idea what a trouble twins are to raise.”

“Can’t we get off this subject?” Melissa said.

“Well, it is on my mind, Melissa.”

“I don’t care, you’re making me nervous. All this talk about Timothy, who has just played a terrible trick on us and left us holding the bag. Hymns. Sermons. Religion. Why do we bother?”

“Melissa!”

“What. There’s nothing wrong with what he did, it was his own life to take. But we don’t have to sit around discussing it forever, do we?”

“That’s quite enough,” said Mrs. Emerson, and then she set her glass down and turned to Alvareen, who was just coming in with more rolls. “Everything is delicious, Alvareen.”

“How can you tell? You ain’t eat a bite.”

“Well, it looks delicious.”

“It is,” said Mary, taking over. “You must give me the recipe for the gravy, Alvareen. Is it onion? Is this something you get from your people?”

“All I done was—”

“Matthew,” Mrs. Emerson said, “I have to know. Was death instantaneous?”

Everyone froze. Instantaneous death, which sounded like something that happened only around police lieutenants and ambulance drivers, seemed undesirable; and before Matthew had thought her question out he said, “No, of course not.” Then when their eyes widened he realized his mistake. “Oh,” he said. “No, it was instantaneous. I didn’t—”

“Which is it? Are you keeping something from me?”

“Oh no, I just, you see—”

“Elizabeth? Where’s Elizabeth?”

“Here we go again,” Mary said.

“Here we go where again?”

“You’d think you could get along five minutes without Elizabeth.”

“Mary, for heaven’s sake,” Margaret said.

“She was on the scene,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“Ha,” Mary said.

“Just what does that mean?”

There was a silence. Alvareen, who was propped against the wall with her arms folded as if she never planned to leave, suddenly spoke up. “All I done with the gravy,” she said, “was throw in a pack of onion soup mix. Lady I used to work for taught me that. You might like to write it down.”

“Oh, is that what it was,” said Mary. “Thank you very much.”

The silence continued. Forks clinked on plates. Billy’s head slid slowly sideways and his eyes rolled, half-shuttered, fighting sleep.

“I do a lot of extries,” said Alvareen. “Sometimes I cater for parties, I mention that in case you’re interested. I spread cream cheese over Ritz crackers, I dye it however they want. Green, like, to match the carpet. Pink or blue, to go in with the decor. Little things is what makes them happy.”

She went out through the swinging door, hands under her apron, probably telling herself she had done all that could be expected to liven this funeral party. Mary said, “I believe Alvareen is even stranger than Emmeline.”

“There was nothing wrong with Emmeline,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“What’d you fire her for, then?”

“What I mind about Elizabeth—” said Melissa.

Margaret said, “Oh, can’t we get off Elizabeth?”

“She’s creepy,” Melissa said. “Never says anything. I distrust people who don’t take care of their appearance.”

“Wake up, Billy,” said Mary. “Eat your beans. Well, I’ll say this about her and then we’ll drop it: I hate to see people taking advantage. It seems to me, Mother, that girl knows a good thing when she stumbles on it — settled down to live off a rich old lady forever, she thinks, and you should make it plain to her that you have children of your own to rely on. Plenty of your own without—”

“Well, I like her,” Margaret said.

“What do you know about it?”

“I’ve had to share a room with her, haven’t I? She talks to me.”

Melissa said, “I don’t hear Matthew speaking up.”

“What about?” said Matthew, pretending not to know.

“Aren’t you always hanging around Elizabeth?”

She smiled at him from across the table — a cat face, sharp and bony, with that thin, painful-looking skin that some blondes have. Who could have foretold that modeling agencies would consider her a beauty? Matthew decided suddenly that he disliked her, and the thought made him blink and duck his head. “Anyway, she’s going,” he said.

“Aren’t you going to mope around, or follow after her or something?”

“Stop it,” Mrs. Emerson said.

They looked up at her, all with the same stunned, pale eyes.

“Oh, what makes you act like this?” she said. “They say it’s the parents to blame, but what did we do? I’m asking you, I really want to know. What did we do?”

No one answered. Billy slumped against Margaret, his lids glued shut, exhausted from having so much to watch out for. Peter speared beans with all his concentration, and Aunt Dorothy began examining her charm bracelet.

“Just loved you and raised you, the best we knew how,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Made mistakes, but none of them on purpose. What else did you want? I go over and over it all, in my mind. Was it something I did? Something I didn’t do? Nights when you were in bed, clean from your baths, I felt such — oh, remorse. Regret. I thought back over every cross word. Now it’s all like one long night, regret for anything I might have done but no fresh faces to start in new upon in the morning. Here I am alone, just aching for you, and still I don’t know what it was I did. Was it me, really? Was it?”

“Mother, of course not,” Mary said.

“Then sometimes I think you were all in a turmoil from birth, nothing I did could have helped. Can you deny it?”

“Mother—”

“What about Andrew? What about Timothy? I was such a gentle person. Where did they get that from?”

Her face was blurring, crumpling, dissolving. And all the movements made toward her were bluffs. Some cleared their throats and some leaned suddenly in her direction, but nobody did anything. In the end, it was Matthew who stood up and said, “I guess you’d like to rest now, Mother.”

“Rest!” she said, with her mouth pressed to a napkin. But she allowed herself to be led away. The others scraped their chairs back and stood up. Alvareen, bearing a hot apple pie, stopped short in the doorway. “We won’t be needing dessert,” Mary told her. “Now, aren’t you an optimist. Have you ever known this family to make it through to the end of a meal?”

“Your mama and Elizabeth always did,” Alvareen said.

The others were filing out of the dining room. Mary bore a sagging, boneless Billy toward a rocking chair by the fireplace. Mrs. Emerson, composed again, mounted the stairs with Matthew close behind. “I’ll just turn down the spread for you,” he told her. “You’ll feel better when you’re not so tired.”

“It’s true I haven’t slept much,” said Mrs. Emerson.

But instead of going straight to bed, she stopped at the doorway of Margaret’s room. Elizabeth was wrapping pieces of wood in tissue paper and stuffing them into a knapsack. “Elizabeth,” Mrs. Emerson said, “was death instantaneous?”

Elizabeth didn’t even look up. “Oh, yes,” she said, without surprise, and she folded down the flap of the knapsack and buckled the canvas straps.

“Then he didn’t have any, say any last—”

“No.”

“Well, thank you. All I wanted was a clear cut answer.”

“You’re welcome,” said Elizabeth.

Matthew took his mother’s arm, thinking she would go now, but she didn’t. “You’re packing,” she said. “I never thought you would actually go through with this.”

“Well, there’s a lot I need to get done. I have to reapply at the college.”

“Can’t you do that by mail?”

“I believe it’d be better just going down there,” Elizabeth said.

She still hadn’t looked up. She had started folding shirts into squares and laying them in a suitcase. For once, there was nothing that could sidetrack or delay her. His mother must have seen that too. “Why, Elizabeth?” she said. “Do you blame me?”

“Blame you for what?”

“Oh, well — could you really just leave me like this? Are you going to let me live through these next few months all alone? The last time you didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said.

Mrs. Emerson raised a hand and let it fall, giving up. She allowed herself to be led across the hall to her bedroom.

“I never did wholly trust that girl,” she said.

Then she lay down, and shielded her eyes with her forearm. Matthew drew the curtains and left her there.

When he crossed the hall again, Elizabeth’s door was closed. It was a message; it seemed meant for him alone. He stood there for a minute, slouched and empty-handed. When she didn’t come out he went on downstairs.

Melissa and Peter were playing poker. “He’s very successful,” Melissa was saying. “He owns his own company. But he nags at me, we fight a lot. You know? Sometimes when he invites me out he makes me change what I’m wearing, just to suit him. He goes charging into my closet and pushes all my dresses down the rod, figuring what he’d like better. What can you do with a person like that?” Peter frowned at his cards. He wasn’t even pretending to listen.

Margaret was talking about a man too, but in her own toneless way. She lay on a couch with her feet up, twining a limp lock of hair around her finger and telling Mary about someone named Brady. “I was planning to bring him home, before this happened,” she said.

“Oh, don’t,” said Mary, rocking Billy serenely. “Everything goes wrong in this house.”

“But he keeps asking me to marry him. Mother would have a fit if she didn’t meet him first.”

“Well, coming from someone who eloped—”

“Mother met him first.”

“Only if you count when he brought in the groceries,” Mary said. “She’s not much for heart-to-heart talks with stray delivery boys.”

“You don’t have to be so snide about it.”

“I’m not. Can’t we have a normal conversation? I don’t know why you want to get married anyway — you’re not the type.” She arranged Billy more comfortably, checking his sleep with her mouth tucked in and competent-looking. “Too disorganized. Any man would be climbing the walls. You must still think marriage is floating around in a white dress. Well, it isn’t.”

“I know that, I read the ladies’ magazines.”

“They expect you to take care of them, it’s not the other way around. Always asking you to pick up, put away, find things for them. Look at Morris — every morning I tell him the butter’s kept in the butter bin. He never listens. He opens the refrigerator and panics. ‘The butter, where’s the butter, we’ve run out of butter again.’ ‘It’s in the butter bin, dear.’ Oh, you’d never last through that. I often think of chucking it all myself.”

The telephone rang. Matthew crossed to the armchair and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said.

“Oh, Matthew,” said Andrew.

“Hello, Andrew.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Why?”

“You aren’t glad to hear from me.”

“Of course I am,” said Matthew.

“I can tell from your voice.”

“Don’t be silly,” Matthew said. “Were you calling about anything in particular?”

There was a chipping sound at the other end of the line — Andrew doing something nervous with the phone. His hands were always busy, twisting or fidgeting or kneading his thumbs, while the rest of him was limp and motionless. Like a rag doll, he tended to remain where he was left — New York, in this case, after a try at college there. It took vast amounts of other people’s energy to change his life in any way, and lately no one had felt up to it. What was the use? In New York he lived in a pattern as unvarying as the tracks of a toy train — from rooming house to library to rooming house, lunch every Wednesday with Melissa in the only restaurant he approved of (the only one he had been in; someone had once taken him there) and home three or four times a year, shattered and white over the change in his schedule. He distrusted planes (a family trait) and panicked at the swaying of trains, and had never learned to drive. All he had left were buses. Buses, Matthew thought, and started. “Holy Moses,” he said. “You’re in Baltimore.”

“You forgot,” said Andrew.

“Oh no, I just—”

“You forgot I was coming. Would you rather I just went back again?”

“No, Andrew.”

“There are plenty of buses out of here.”

“I knew you were coming. I just never heard what time,” Matthew said. “I’ll be right down.”

“Oh, well—” “Wait there.”

“Well, if you’re sure you’re expecting me,” said Andrew.

“We are. Stay there, now. Bye.”

He hung up and started out of the room immediately. “I have to get Andrew,” he said.

“Oh, Lord,” said Melissa. “This is too much at once.”

“I’ll be back in a while.”

“Tell him in the car, Matthew. Get it over with.”

“Are you crazy?” Mary asked. “Why did we keep it from him, if we’re just going to dump it on him now? Don’t you say a word, Matthew. Bring him on home. Maybe we’ll wait till tomorrow.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Melissa said. “I have a nervous stomach.”

Matthew left. In the hallway he met Elizabeth, who was just coming down the stairs with her suitcase and knapsack. Her burdens made her look lopsided. She still wore her church dress, with pieces of damp bark down the front. When she saw him, she stopped on the bottom step. He had an urge to trap her there, under glass, complete with her baggage and her peeling handbag and her falling-down hairdo, until life was sorted out again and he could collect what he wanted to say to her. “Can’t you wait?” he asked. “Don’t go yet. Won’t you just wait till I get back from the bus station?”

“Oh, the bus station,” Elizabeth said. “That’s where I’m going.”

“What for?”

“Well, I’m catching a bus. You could give me a lift.”

“Oh, I thought — I had pictured you getting a ride.”

“Not at such short notice,” Elizabeth said.

She handed him the suitcase. Of all the sad things going on today, it seemed to him that the saddest was that single motion — Elizabeth flashing the luminous inner side of her wrist, with its bulky leather watchstrap, as she passed him her suitcase. Where were her bulletin board drivers, those laughable old cars full of Hopkins students that used to draw up at the door? Where were her blue jeans, and her moccasins with the chewed-looking tassels, and her impatient, brushing-away motion when he tried to help her with loads that looked too heavy?

“Are you waiting for something?” Elizabeth said.

“No.”

“Let’s go, then.”

“But — so fast? You haven’t said goodbye yet. Mother’s still in her room.”

“I’ll write her a bread-and-butter letter.”

“Well, if that’s the way you want to do it,” Matthew said.

They hurried down the sidewalk, with Elizabeth’s turned-up pumps making clopping sounds and her knapsack swinging over one shoulder. “Hop in,” Matthew said. “We have to get to Andrew before he takes the next bus out again.”

“Oh, Andrew,” said Elizabeth, but her voice was dull and tired. It sounded as if she had had enough of Emersons.

All the way downtown, Matthew kept choosing words and then discarding them, choosing more, trying to make some contact with Elizabeth’s cold, still profile. He drove absentmindedly, and had to be honked into motion at several traffic lights. “You won’t get to see how those new shrubs make out,” he told her once. Then, later, “Will August be a good time for me to visit you?” She didn’t answer. “I get my vacation then,” he said. Elizabeth only drew a billfold from her handbag and started counting money. “Do you have enough?” he asked her.

“Sure.”

“Did Mother ever pay you for this past week?”

“Pay me?”

When Elizabeth answered questions with questions, it was no use trying to talk to her.

They passed dark narrow buildings that had suddenly brightened in the spring sunlight, old ladies sitting on crumbling front stoops taking the air, children roller-skating. In the heart of the city, in a tangle of taverns and pawnshops and cut-rate jewelers, black-jacketed men stood on the sidewalks selling paper cones of daffodils. Matthew drew up in front of the bus station, where he parked illegally because he was afraid of losing both of them, Andrew and Elizabeth, if he took more time. “Don’t get away from me,” he told Elizabeth. “Wait till I find Andrew. Don’t leave.”

“How could I? You’re carrying my suitcase.”

“Oh.”

They went through the doors and toward the ticket counter. Only two people were waiting in line there, and the first was Andrew. “Andrew!” Matthew called. He ran, but he had sense enough to keep hold of Elizabeth’s suitcase. Andrew turned, still offering a sheaf of bills to the man behind the counter. He was nearly as tall as Matthew, but blond and pale and fragile-looking. His suit hung from him in loose folds. His face was long and pinched. “I’m arranging to go back,” he said.

“You can’t do that.”

“I can if I want to.”

“This is all a misunderstanding,” Matthew said. He took hold of Andrew’s sleeve, and the ticket agent folded his arms on the counter and settled down to watch. “They’re waiting for you at home,” Matthew said. “They expect you any time now.” Then, to the ticket agent, “He won’t be going.” He pulled Andrew out of the line, and the fat lady behind him moved up to the counter with a huffy twitch of her shoulders.

“Now you’ve lost my place,” Andrew said.

“You know yourself you’re acting like a fool.”

“Oh, am I?” Andrew said. “Why didn’t she think to tell you, then? Did she forget I was coming? Or did she remember and you forgot. Did you decide just not to bother?”

His eyes seemed deeper in their sockets than usual, and closer together. His arm, still in Matthew’s grasp, was struggling away, and he was moving by fractions of inches back to the counter. Yet if he had really wanted to, he could have shaken Matthew off entirely. Returning to New York was another of his passing impulses, already deserting him, leaving him to fumble on in his course out of sheer inability to back down. All he needed now was some dignified alternative. “Look,” Matthew said, but Andrew’s arm, which was bare and skinny beneath his coat sleeve, seemed to infect him with some of Andrew’s shaky tension. He couldn’t get his words out. “You could, could—”

And to make it worse, the fat lady at the counter moved away and the person behind her stepped up: Elizabeth. Composed and distant, she unsnapped the clasp of her billfold. “Ellington, North Carolina,” she said.

“Elizabeth!”

But she wasn’t so easily pulled from the line. She went on counting out bills, and the ticket agent gave Matthew a peculiar look from under his eyebrows.

“Elizabeth, too much is going on right now,” Matthew said. “Will you wait? Will you come back with me, and take a later bus? There are things I want to get settled with you.”

“May I have my ticket, please?” Elizabeth said. The agent shrugged his shoulders and moved off to the ticket rack. Elizabeth spread her money in a fan on the counter. “I’m in luck, there’s a bus leaving right away,” she said. “I want to get on it.”

“I know you do. I don’t blame you at all, but I can’t let you go yet. I haven’t said anything to you.”

“There’s nothing to say,” Elizabeth said.

There was, but it was difficult with Andrew there. He was standing between them, teetering on his heels and looking curiously from one to the other. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” he said.

“Elizabeth,” Matthew said, “I love you. I think we should get married.”

“Married?” said Andrew.

“I’m not interested,” Elizabeth said.

“Why not?”

“I just want to get out of here. I’m sick of Emersons. Thank you,” she told the agent, and stuffed the ticket into her bag.

Andrew said, “How do you know the Emersons aren’t sick of you too, whoever you are?”

“Andrew, keep out of this,” Matthew told him.

Andrew turned on his heel and went up to the counter.

“Andrew!” Matthew said. “Will you come back here?”

“See what I mean?” said Elizabeth.

“Look, you can’t refuse to marry me just because I’ve got a crazy brother. Andrew! Elizabeth, listen to me.”

“It isn’t only Andrew that’s crazy,” Elizabeth said. “It’s all of you. Oh, I knew I should have left before. How could I make so many mistakes? Give me my suitcase, please.”

“No,” said Matthew. He held onto it. “Elizabeth—”

She turned and left, walking fast and swinging her knapsack. She was heading out toward the buses, but he couldn’t believe she would really go. He still had the suitcase, after all. He was holding it tightly. When Andrew reappeared, waving a ticket, Matthew said, “Here, take this suitcase. Don’t let it go. I’ll be back in a minute.” Then he pushed through a crowd of ladies in hats, past a girl with a French horn case and a tiny old black woman with a caged parakeet. He thought he saw Elizabeth, but he was mistaken; the beige he had his eyes fixed on was a soldier’s uniform. He pushed through the doors and outside, where rows of buses were revving their motors and men were rushing by with baggage carts. One bus, already backing out, had stopped to unfold its doors to Elizabeth. “Wait!” he called. “I have your suitcase!” If she heard, she didn’t care. She scrambled up the bus steps, hoisting her knapsack higher on her shoulder. The last he saw of her was one upturned shoe sole with a wad of pink bubble gum stuck to the toe. Then the doors folded shut again.

When he returned to the terminal, Andrew was waiting meekly beside the suitcase. He touched Matthew’s shoulder. “Let’s go home, Matthew,” he said, and his voice was as gentle as a child’s after a scolding. “I wouldn’t let it bother me,” he said. “She looked kind of strange, anyway. Nobody we would have much to do with.”