Werewolves in Their Youth

Mrs. Box

THE FARNHAM BUILDING STOOD on a hillside in the northwest corner of Portland, overlooking the Nob Hill district and the Willamette River, from 1938 until late last year, when an elderly electric blanket belonging to one of the building’s many elderly residents started a fire that killed six people and left the Farnham a whistling black skeleton in the center of a ring of rubble and ash. Fifteen stories tall, painted throughout the course of its existence a somber and unwavering shade of wintergreen, bearing more than a passing resemblance to a hospital tower, the Farnham never aspired to a landmark brand of beauty — it was just imposing enough to pass for stately, just Moderne enough to qualify as hip — but it had been home to a number of decrepit, rich widows and fashionable restaurateurs and interior designers, its lines and fenestration had a certain Bauhaus gravity, and its unusual color and prominent site lent it, in the esteem of Portlanders, some of the authority of a brilliant cathedral or a domed capitol. It was visible from all over town and from as far away as Vancouver, Washington, where one summer afternoon it was spotted by Eddie Zwang, a bankrupt optometrist in a Volvo station wagon who was at that moment crossing from Washington to Oregon on the I-5, headed for someplace like Mexico or Queen Maud Land, the hatch of his car filled with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stolen optical equipment. His cheeks, as he drove, were already wet with tears, and a heavy muscle of sorrow pounded in his chest, and when he saw the cool, green Farnham rising from its lush hillside, he made a sudden, sentimental, and, under the circumstances, unwise decision to stop and say hello to Mrs. Horace Box, his ex-wife’s grandmother, who lived on its ninth floor, in Apartment G.

Eddie left the clamor of the freeway and plunged into the calm, alphabetical streets of Northwest, then headed west on Burnside, toward Willamette Heights. Although he had spent most of his adult life amid the vast, amorphous, pale cities of the West Coast, cities built in rain forests and bone deserts and on the shoulders of terrible mountains, he had been raised in the corroded redbrick river towns of the old Midwest — nine years in Pittsburgh, eight in Cleveland, college at Cincinnati — and he had always found great comfort in the modest hills, narrow streets, and rusty brown riverscape of Portland. He thought of it as a city in which painted advertisements for five-cent cigars faded from the sides of empty brick warehouses. He drove past the ballpark where he and Dolores had taken Oriole Box to watch her beloved Beavers lose baseball games, and past Midler’s, her favorite restaurant, and then, heart beating as in anticipation of a wild tryst, he turned into the street that led up the hill to the Farnham.

After Eddie nosed the Volvo into one of the visitors’ parking spaces, he got out and watched the street for any sign of the black LTD that had been following him, on and off, for the past two days. Its driver — Eddie had gotten a good look at him this morning on the ferry dock back at Southworth, on the Olympic Peninsula, where Eddie had made an unsuccessful attempt, in a deserted high school parking lot outside Sequim, to sell off some of the fancy Bausch & Lomb hardware he was carrying to a skittish medical-equipment fence with the improbable name of Seymour Lenz — was a florid man in a Sikh turban and a gray seersucker jacket, with sleepy eyes and a sharp black beard that jutted out from his face at a furious angle. The Sikh had been following him in the hope, Eddie imagined, of repossessing Eddie’s Volvo, although there were certainly a number of alternative explanations, upon which Eddie, who had suffered all his life from a debilitating tendency to hope for the best, didn’t care to dwell.

At this moment, however, there was nothing in the steep Portland street but the turbulence of light and air rising from the hot blacktop, and a pinch-faced young woman, dressed in a grimy parka and a red-and-black Trail Blazers ski cap, pushing uphill a broken baby stroller that she had filled with empty bottles and cola cans. Eddie was running away from so many disasters and errors of judgment, had left behind him so many injured parties, angry creditors, and broken hearts, that for an instant it occurred to him — a parka and a ski hat! in this heat! — to suspect the young woman of being somebody’s agent or repo man or spy. But of course she was only a crazy girl pushing and singing a lullaby to a stroller full of garbage; and Eddie felt sorry for her, and ashamed of himself for suspecting her. He had become paranoid — a thought that made him feel sorry, now, for himself. Then he bolted his steering wheel with a red Club lock and armed the Volvo’s alarm.

He entered the Farnham through the basement and rode up alone in the elevator, carrying in his left hand the neat leather briefcase, a birthday present from Dolores’s parents, that contained all the grim documents and bitter receipts of his financial and marital dismantlement, the importunities of the creditors of his failed practice, the sheet that divorced him from Dolores, as well as an expensive satellite-uplink telephone pager that had not uttered a beep for several months, a well-thumbed copy of the April issue of Cheri, and the remains of a three-day-old Deluxe hamburger from Dick’s, wrapped in a letter from the bankruptcy law firm of Yost, Daffler & Traut. He would have liked just to throw away the briefcase, but he had loved his former in-laws and he felt obliged to carry their last present to him everywhere he went, as if to make up for having managed to lose the other, more precious gift they had given him. Eddie sighed. It was hot in the moaning old elevator, and there was the smell of benzoin, rotten flowers, old women. His hair was slick with perspiration and his white oxford shirt clung to the small of his back. He was sorry he would not be looking his best for Oriole (she was particular about such things), but he had left his pastel neckties and fine madras blazers and white duck trousers behind him in Seattle, along with his wife and his livelihood and his optometrist’s faith in the ultimate correctability—Now, which is clearer: this? or this? — of everything. He hoped that the old woman would recognize him. It had been more than a year.

“Yes?” said Oriole, when she opened her door, peering at him through the narrow gap that the chain permitted. He could make out her thick eyeglasses and the little white cloud of her hair.

“It’s me, Gam,” said Eddie. “It’s Eddie.”

She stared at him, mouth open, eyes looking huge and crooked behind her half-inch lenses. She had on her blue summer housecoat and slippers. Her makeup, normally thickly applied, and her hair, normally arranged into a nice, round old-lady ’do, were uneven and haphazard. Neither Oriole nor he was looking too sharp, then, on this hot summer day. She surveyed him carefully, from his high forehead to his worn-heeled shoes, finally settling, it seemed, on the trim calfskin briefcase in his hand as the key to the mystery of his identity.

“I’m sorry, young man,” she said, her voice pleasant but cool and slightly wheezy, as though it were being produced by a ripped concertina. “I mustn’t talk to salesmen. My husband doesn’t approve of it one bit.”

“Gam, it’s Eddie.” Eddie set down the briefcase. He swallowed. “Dolores’s Eddie.”

“Oh, my.” Oriole looked worried. She knew that she ought to recognize him. She stroked the soft white down on her chin and gave it another try. “Did you call me?” she said.

“No, I’m sorry, Gam, I didn’t. I’m just passing through Portland and I thought I’d stop by.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding her heavy head, her eyebrows knit, her watery blue eyes studying his face. “Well, isn’t this a nice surprise!” She closed the door to undo the chain, then opened it wide to him. “Won’t you come in?” He could see she still had no idea who he was. “And to think that I was just thinking of you, too! How do you like that?”

“Hi, Gam,” said Eddie, putting his arms around the old woman and kissing her cheek. Raised by her German parents on a farm outside Davenport at the beginning of the century, Oriole was a big, broad-backed woman, ample and plain and quadrangular as the state of Iowa itself. Hugging her, Eddie felt comforted, as by the charitable gaze of a cow. He picked up the briefcase and followed her into the apartment, a suite of four rooms with two baths, a tiny kitchen, and a view from two sides of roofs and bridges, the dull, shining band of the river, and, on this hot, clear summer afternoon, the distant white ghost of Mt. Hood. Oriole passed most of her time in the small, bright room just off the entryway, sitting in a green chintz chair, with her feet propped up on a green chintz hassock, reading large-print editions of the novels of Barbara Cartland, whom she somewhat resembled, solving word-search puzzles, and spying on the next-door neighbors through a pair of Zeiss binoculars nearly as old as she was — Eddie thought she must be ninety — brought back from the Great War by Dolores’s grandfather, Horace. The Farnham was built on the plan of a Greek cross, and Oriole, whose apartment was in the eastern arm, had only to gaze along an angle reaching some twenty feet to the northwest to see into the windows of 9-F. There was never much to see — the occupants were a Persian cat and a couple of maiden sisters named Stark who kept their blinds drawn most of the time and whose chief occupations seemed to be drinking tea and reading religious magazines — but Oriole never stopped hoping, and once she had been fortunate enough to witness a brief foray by the housebound cat out onto the narrow window ledge, and the sisterly panic that ensued. It was a momentous event that Oriole rarely neglected to renarrate to visitors.

“Why don’t you put your darling little suitcase in the guest room?” she said to Eddie now, patting at the wispy cloud of her hair, tugging at the collar of her housecoat. “I’m just going to get dressed.” She chuckled. “You must think I’m awfully lazy! I guess I just lost track of the time this morning. What time is it?”

Eddie blushed for her sake and pretended to look at his watch. “It’s still early,” he said. “But, Gam, I’m afraid I’m not staying. I only—”

“I’ll bring you some clean towels,” said Oriole, steering herself into her bedroom. “I know we’ll have such a nice time.”

Eddie shrugged, set down his burden, and sank onto a cheap vinyl-and-chrome kitchen chair, beside a scarred old walnut table whose matching chairs and sideboard had long since disappeared. Besides the well-worn armchair and hassock, the only other furniture in this room, which served as Oriole’s parlor, study, and dining room, was an overlarge piece of Empire cabinetry that held her romance novels, Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses, and a heartbreakingly beautiful photograph of a homely sixteen-year-old debutante Dolores, with a snaggled smile, being devoured by a vast pink chiffon ball gown. There was a formal living room, in which a few other relics of Oriole’s life — a scrollworked Victorian chesterfield, a gilt mirror, some chairs with feet carved into lions’ heads — had been set on display, but she rarely used it, preferring to entertain guests from the lumbar comfort of her green chintz armchair. All the rest of her furniture — and, according to the dentally sound but no less heartbreaking woman who’d emerged from the clutches of that vast pink dress, there had been rooms and rooms of it — had been sold, along with the big house on Alameda Street which Eddie had never seen, or dispersed among Oriole’s eventual heirs, or, as Oriole always claimed, stolen, by the gang of crooked servants, nurses, and kleptomaniacal beings by whom the old lady imagined herself to be plagued. “There!” said Oriole, emerging from her bedroom in a loose sleeveless dress, belted at the waist and patterned with pink daisies, purple irises, red carnations, and gold fleurs-de-lis against a background of green lattice. Eddie wondered if such dresses were, for old ladies, the fashion equivalent of large-print books and shouted conversations. “That’s much better. It’s awfully warm today.”

“It is hot,” said Eddie. It was stuffy, as well, and there was a faint sweet tang from the kitchen trash. Despite the heat of the afternoon, none of the windows were open, and the apartment felt even more close and airless than the elevator. “You look very nice.”

“Thank you.” She made her way over to her green chair and lowered herself slowly and with an air of deep satisfaction into it. She and Eddie looked at each other, smiling across the gap of years and nonblood relationship and a fundamental lack of acquaintance. It occurred to Eddie, for the first time, that he and Mrs. Box were nothing to each other. Eddie mopped his forehead. Oriole tapped her knobby fingers on the arm of her chair and studied him, eyes screwed, head cocked to one side.

“Do I know you from Davenport?” she said at last.

“No, Gam,” said Eddie. “I’ve never been to Davenport. You know me from here in Portland. From your granddaughter. Dolores?”

“Of course,” said Oriole. She nodded. “I like her.”

“So do I,” said Eddie.

“Did you know my husband?”

“No, I didn’t, Gam. But I know what a nice man he was.” In point of fact, old Horace Box, an executive with the Great Northern Railroad who died when Dolores was a little girl, had always been described to Eddie as a formidable person — a strikebuster, a perfectionist. His photograph looked out from the wall above Oriole’s head — square jaw, rimless spectacles, brilliantined hair, an expression of unsurprised disappointment.

“Oh, he was a wonderful man,” said Oriole. “I miss him to this day.”

“I know you do.”

“You know,” she said, lowering her voice as though about to impart a confidence. She fingered a gold chain that hung amid the satiny pleats of her throat — an ornate, inch-thick, and not particularly attractive piece of jewelry, a sort of gnarled golden tree branch across which crawled beetle-size diamonds surrounded by swarms of emerald-chip aphids. “This beautiful necklace he gave me never leaves my body.”

“Wow,” said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentary scale model of her vanished life. But this time, as he watched her run her swollen fingers along the twisted branch that Horace Box had presented her with on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, Eddie was moved, and somehow disturbed, by the enduring habit of her grief. For twenty-two years the necklace had not left her withered throat except on two calamitous and oft-narrated occasions, when the clasp had given way — once on the beach at Gearhart, and once as she bent to draw a bath.

“I sleep with it on, you know,” she said. “Though at times it lies quite heavy on my windpipe.”

“Seventy-two years,” said Eddie, enviously, too softly for Oriole to hear. He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs. Eddie had known for a long time — since his wedding day — that it was not a strong marriage, but now, for the first time, it occurred to him that this was because he and Dolores were not strong people; they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.

The principal reason for his divorce, Eddie believed, was that throughout their marriage he had foolishly devoted most of his time to the development of an ill-starred device called the Stylevision. This was to be a combination of video camera, liquid-crystal screen, keyboard, hard-wired image-manipulating software, and a six-thousand-entry fashion-eyewear database that would enable the optical consumer to “try on” six thousand different pairs of eyeglasses without moving a muscle. “A face processor,” Dolores had half derisively called it. He had sunk tens of thousands of dollars, not primarily his own, into the device, only to see his plans founder on the unfortunate tendency of the Stylevision’s screen to display, in addition to the face and prospective spectacles of the horrified client, the shadows of his nasal cavity and eye sockets, the naked grin of his teeth, all the delicate architecture of his skull. The device emitted neither radiation nor sonographic waves; the X-ray trick was simply an intermittent and unpredictable side effect — Geoff Eisner, Eddie’s wirehead partner, had called it “an artifact”—of the program which enabled it to manipulate images of the human face, so that every fifteenth or sixteenth trial, the machine produced not a fashionably bespectacled client in a range of attractive and affordable frames but a grinning death’s-head. Eddie’s investors withdrew their support and sued him for a return on their investment, while Dolores also viewed the failure of the Stylevision, after so many months of marital neglect, as a kind of broken agreement, and a perplexed Geoff Eisner — that bastard — who had done most of the soldering and software development and who had been the all-too-willing recipient of that extramarital kiss, vanished back into the cannabinaceous wastes of Oregon. In the end Eddie lost his patents and his wife through the inexorable efforts of attorneys, and found himself the prey and plaything of collection agencies and subpoena artists.

“I believe it’s quite valuable,” Oriole was saying. “Though I’ve never had it — oh, thingamajiggy.” Sadly she shook her head. “I don’t know what’s becoming of my memory! What do you call it when they take a look at your jewelry and — you know—”

“An appraisal,” said Eddie.

She snapped her fingers. “That’s it. I’ve never had it appraised. But I believe it’s quite valuable.”

“I believe,” said Eddie, as a thrilling and unwelcome idea entered his brain, “that you’re probably right.”

It was a kind of fantasy, at first — another foolhardy Eddie Zwang scheme. Stiff-necked old Mr. Box had been burdened by a romantic soul and over the years had given his wife all manner of baubles and gems, and although none of them alone was worth as much as the necklace, one ought, Eddie imagined, to be able to pawn her things for enough to install himself in Mexico in the miserable style to which he planned to grow accustomed. If they dined at Muller’s, say, where it was always Oriole’s habit to drink two cocktails, a thief would be able to lift her earrings and bracelets and watches while she slept, without fear of waking her. The kindness Oriole had always shown him, the affection that had drawn him from the freeway this afternoon into this misbegotten visit to the Farnham, the outrage and meanness of his contemplated crime — all of these he dismissed as the qualms of a man who had the luxury of having faith in himself. Nothing he did surprised him anymore. He would leave her the ugly gold necklace that lay so heavy on her windpipe. He told himself it was the only thing she really had.

“That certainly isn’t a very big suitcase,” said Oriole, pointing to the calfskin satchel at his feet.

“Well, I can’t stay very long,” said Eddie. The muscles of his face clenched into a hard knot, and as he smiled at Oriole his heart was filled with low enthusiasm. “But I think I will stay the night.”

They took a taxicab to Muller’s. The fare was $2.75, which Oriole insisted on paying, tipping the driver with the change from three one-dollar bills. Eddie was embarrassed. (He and Dolores had once tried to determine at what point her grandmother’s mind had ceased to notice increases in the cost of living, presidential-election results, the disappearance of unkind racial and ethnic generalizations from polite conversation. They’d figured the date of her last glance down at the instrument panel of life to be sometime in the early 1970s; that was when her husband had died, struck down in the middle of Tenth Avenue by a truck full of crawfish on ice, bound for Jake’s Famous.) The taxi driver made no effort to conceal his disgust at the proffered gratuity, and Oriole no effort to remark it. Eddie searched his pockets for change but found only a ten-dollar bill and the 1943 zinc penny that he carried for luck. He held on to his last ten dollars and his luckless lucky charm and slunk into the darkness of Muller’s cocktail lounge, which Oriole for some reason favored over the dining room. It was a morose and shadowy lounge — red Naugahyde, soft Muzak, favored by a certain type of quiet, middle-aged alcoholic — but Oriole seemed oblivious of its unsavory air and had a table she liked in the corner, under a chiefly orange but somewhat brown painting of a lighthouse. They ordered from the large, cholesterol-rich menu. They each drank a pair of vodka tonics, and the old woman told him, for what Eddie reckoned to be the fifteenth or sixteenth time and with steadily increasing divagation, about her mother’s summer kitchen in the backyard of the house in Davenport, about her trip West as a newlywed in 1920 on her husband’s railroad and her disappointment at not seeing any wild Red Indians along the way, and about her sisters — Robin and Linnet — both of them now passed on. They ate their tan-and-beige meals of gravy and crust. While Oriole’s attention was focused on her dessert, Eddie contrived to order a third drink for each of them. Then Oriole paid the bill, stiffing the waitress, and they made their hazy way back to the Farnham.

Although Eddie and Oriole went to bed at eight-thirty, the drinks he had poured into her appeared to have the unexpected effect of making her wakeful, and Eddie lay for what seemed like hours waiting for her to stop humming and commenting to herself in the next room and finally fall asleep. He was miserable. The fried food and all those ounces of cheap well vodka had begun to give rise to monsoon winds and tsunamis in his gut. There was still a narrow band of blue on the horizon, and he felt tormented by this last faint banner of daylight wavering at the limits of his vision. Although he had cranked open the windows, it was a warm evening, and the small guest bedroom was stifling. The weak breeze off the river did little to cool the room and carried with it a rich and bitter odor of hops from the Blitz brewery downtown. This was an unwelcome and nostalgic smell that seemed to intensify the weight of the summer night upon him. Every once in a while he thought he caught the cheering of the crowd and the flat patter of the announcer, wafted from the distant ballpark like the summertime smell of beer. He lay fully dressed upon the still-made bed, already regretting the crime that he was about to commit, forcing himself to concentrate on his own fitness for such a reprehensible act and on the bacon-and-flowers smell of a woman he had known for an evening in Juárez, many years ago.

At last silence descended over the apartment, tentative and provisional at first, then all-encompassing. Eddie got up from the bed and tiptoed down the hall to Oriole’s bedroom. Her drapes were drawn, and it was impossible to see. The old woman’s alcohol-slowed breathing was so shallow that Eddie couldn’t even hear it, and the unexpected blackness and quiet of the room almost turned him back. He took a long, deep breath and tried to visualize the layout of the room. Many times in the past he had watched Dolores help the old woman dress, and it seemed to him that Oriole kept her jewelry box in the upper-left-hand drawer of her Empire dresser, which ought to be immediately behind him and about three feet to his left. Reaching back with the fingers of one hand outstretched, he felt his way along the wall to her dresser, which he did not so much discover as collide with, producing a loud report that fortunately did not seem to awaken Oriole. He pulled open the top left drawer, and immediately his hand brushed against a smooth, firm surface that his fingers told him must be the green morocco lid of the jewelry box.

His heart leaping, he tucked the box under his arm, slid the drawer softly back in, and crept out of the room. He stepped into the relatively dazzling light of the hallway, and stood for a moment, breathing, his forehead against the cool plaster wall. There was no doubt in his mind that he had just broken something that could never be repaired. His old life lay on the other side of a jagged tear in the earth. He would never see Dolores again, although all at once he knew that seeing her again was the only thing he wanted to do. He remembered the photograph of her, on the Empire shelf in the sitting room, and went to look at it, indulging a brief and hopeless fantasy of returning the box to its drawer, getting in his car, driving back to Seattle, waking Dolores, pleading with her to take him back.

As he came into the darkened living room, he saw something that nearly caused him to drop the box of jewelry. Oriole was sitting in the green chair, her old Zeiss binoculars trained on some place away to the north.

“Gam?” said Eddie, after he recovered from the shock of finding her awake and in her chair, dressed in only a short, sleeveless white nightgown — more naked than he had seen her, or any old lady, for that matter, ever before. “Can’t you sleep?”

She seemed not to hear him. She sat still and ghostly in the reflected light of the city below, in her transparent nightgown; her cheeks, her bare arms and shoulders and thighs were streaked with veins and fissures, mysterious and mottled as the face of the moon. He found it an oddly beautiful sight. She was staring out at a point across the river, on the heights of the opposite bank of the Willamette, scanning slowly back and forth across a line high above the horizon. She was looking, he guessed, for the house on Alameda Street.

“I wonder if these goggles need a cleaning,” said Oriole. Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Do you know anyone who might be able to do the job?”

“Are you looking for your old house?” Discreetly he set down the jewelry box on the dining table and went over to stand beside her.

She nodded. “But I don’t seem to be able to make it out.”

“I think it’s too dark, Gam. It’s awfully far away, too. I’m not even sure you’d be able to pick it out in the daytime.”

“Oh, there it is,” she said. “It has a pair of stone lions on the lawn.”

“I know it does,” said Eddie. “You can see it from here?”

Again she nodded her stolid head, without lowering the binoculars.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “You can see it perfectly well. The azaleas have been lovely this year. Have a look.”

She handed him the heavy old pair of 10x binoculars, through which, Dr. Zwang felt reasonably certain, it would be impossible to distinguish the old brown house, tucked into the shade of its fir trees, five miles away. He closed his eyes, and fit the field glasses to the sockets of his skull.

“Lovely,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly shut. “I see the lions, too,” he added.

“They’re colored, the people who live there now,” said Oriole. “But very nice.”

He turned his head and trained the glasses on the luminous cup of the ballpark, at those far-off happy men dressed in suits of brilliant white.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. He handed her the binoculars, picked up the box of jewels, and walked brazenly into her bedroom, where, as though she had asked him to, he replaced the box in the drawer. Perhaps it was no extravagance, after all, to have faith in oneself, or perhaps he was not quite down to his last dime in that regard. He closed the drawer with a feeling of renewed hopefulness. As he did so, however, he heard Oriole moaning, out in the living room — a long, slow, devastated sound, as of someone faced with the ruin of a dream. Eddie thought she might have fallen. He hurried back out to the living room to find the old woman standing, pointing at him with one outstretched arm that trembled from fingertip to shoulder, and he saw the real reason she had looked so oddly naked to him a moment earlier.

“You!” she cried. “You’ve stolen my beautiful necklace!” She clawed with one hand at the emptiness at her throat.

“What?” Eddie took a step backward. Was he that drunk? Had he stolen the necklace without knowing it? “No,” he said. “Gam, I didn’t! It — it must have fallen off.”

“It isn’t here! You’ve stolen it!”

Eddie held out his hands, palms upward, and took a step toward the old woman, but she drew back, and covered her face with her shaking arm.

“No, no, no, no! Don’t you come near me!”

As quickly as that, placid old Oriole Box became hysterical, and started to shriek. Eddie had heard such shrieking issuing only from the worst and most desperate corners of the world — from the back room of a police station in downtown Los Angeles at four o’clock in the morning, on the shoulder of a highway in the wake of a bloody accident that had killed a young husband, from some distant corridor of the Swedish Hospital emergency room as he sat beside Dolores through the evening of her miscarriage.

“Gam,” said Eddie helplessly. “Please. Calm down.” He switched on a lamp, and the sudden efflorescence of light seemed to take the old woman by surprise. Abruptly she fell silent. Again Eddie started toward her, but as he did so he tripped on something and fell forward. The old woman reached out as if to catch him, and although Eddie knew she had only meant to ward him off, he lay happy in her arms, and for an instant she bore the weight of him. Then she shook herself free, and he sank to his knees before her, and something glittering caught his eye. It was Oriole’s necklace, lying in a crooked coil on the carpet underneath the green hassock.

“There it is,” he sang out, with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel. “I found it.”

Eddie crawled over to the hassock on his hands and knees. He reached under it and fished out the necklace, then handed it up to Oriole. He had made a narrow escape, for the second time that evening. What if Oriole had awakened the neighbors with her screaming? What if she had summoned the police? How it would have confirmed all of Dolores’s worst opinions of him to learn that he had been arrested for robbing her grandmother! He looked around for the thing that had tripped him up, and saw that the fine calfskin briefcase, heavy with the authentications and certificates of his defeat, was lying flat on the floor behind him.

“Oh,” said Oriole. “Oh, thank heavens.” Her hands and fingers were still trembling badly, and he had to help her fasten the necklace around her soft old throat once more.

“You just sit down for a minute in this chair,” he said.

“My necklace,” said Oriole, running her fingers along the heavy gold branch, her voice coming breathless and faint. “It never leaves my body, you know.”

“I know,” said Eddie. Perhaps he had not escaped quite as cleanly as all that. It was proving very difficult for him to look Oriole in the eye. He bowed his head. Pretty soon, if he kept on this way, there would be no one left in the world with whom he would be able to make eye contact.

“What time is it?” said Oriole.

“Almost nine-thirty.” He wondered if it wouldn’t be better for him just to get back into his loaded-down Volvo and be on his way. If he drove straight through he could be in Rosario by this time tomorrow.

The telephone rang. Oriole lifted the receiver to her ear.

“Yes? Oh, hello.” She patted at her hair, and drew upon all her ninety-odd years’ practice at the dissimulation of happiness and the repression of despair. “Yes, I know it is. And to think that I was just thinking of you!”

Eddie went to the window and looked north across the city, to the river and the lights and the distant black ribbon of his old life.

“You did?” Oriole was saying. “Well, and I’m sure you got a good price for it. It’s such a darling house.”

Dolores; their house in Juanita had been on the market for months. She hadn’t wanted to sell it, but Eddie needed the cash, and on her gym teacher’s salary she’d had no way of buying him out. A part of him was anxious to find out how much Dolores had gotten for the house, but just now that part seemed a small one, with a weak and ineffectual voice in the council of his heart.

Just as he understood that he really did belong in the morass of debt and hopelessness in which he had become mired, he looked down, into the Farnham’s parking lot, and saw that the familiar black LTD, gleaming orange in the halogen light of the parking lot, had pulled up alongside his Volvo station wagon. Eddie reached for the Zeiss binoculars and watched, with a bleak fascination, as the man in the turban climbed out of the passenger side of the long black car, accompanied by the woman in the red-and-black ski hat. The Sikh went around to force the lock on the Volvo’s door, and if the alarm went off, Eddie couldn’t hear it. In another moment the man with the angry beard had disengaged the Club lock (Eddie had heard you could freeze them brittle with a squirt of Freon, then shatter them with a gentle tap), hot-wired the engine, and driven off in Eddie’s car, taking with him all of Eddie’s stolen equipment — his slit lamp, Phoroptor, tonometer, ophthalmoscope — and his clothing and legal documents, his Al Hibbler records, his photographs of Dolores.

Eddie didn’t move. He felt as though he himself had been blasted with a paralyzing dose of some cold, cold gas.

“Now tell me,” said Oriole, to the abandoned woman on the other end of the line. “How’s that darling husband of yours?”