The Hills At Home
by
Nancy Clark


Copyright (c) 2003 by Nancy Clark

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions.

Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House, Inc."  New

York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House,
Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Nancy, 1952The

Hills at home / Nancy Clark.

.

ISBN O-375-422O3-X

i. Family reunions-Fiction.  2. New England-Fiction.  3.
Recessions-Fiction.

I. Title.

PS36O3-L368H55 2003

813'.6-dc2i 2002072314

www.pantheonbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

For my father and my mother

"I should have called it Something you somehow haven't to deserve."

ROBERT FROST,

"The Death of the Hired Man "

Contents

Chapter One The Hills Come Home 3

Chapter Two The Hills in View 72

Chapter Three The Hills and History 119

Chapter Four A Hill Holiday 205

Chapter Five The Hills and Love 286

Chapter Six The Hills Take Wing 406

chapter One The Hills Come Home

OUTSIDE, THE NIGHT blew perfectly foul and all of the Hills had stayed
home.  Rain flung itself by the fistful against the clapboards, rain
spangled the windowpanes, and the rain bore down so hard against the
roof that shots bounced up from the slates and rained down again in
shattery shards and splinters.  The wind wheeled round and the startled
rain skidded sideways.  The rain sought, the rain battered, the rain
invaded.  This was an extravagant rain, as if somewhere, somehow,
someone, miserly and profligate in turn, had been amassing rain until
he possessed enough to hurl down fiercely and decisively upon the
helplessly spinning earth.

The house stood alone out in the relative countryside of what used to
be known as an old Yankee town, no longer situated so very far to the
north of Boston.  The house, whose rows of windows were goldenly,
blurrily alight against the ragings of the night, could only be half
seen, through the tattered last of the October leaves, from a high
point on the River Road which was, at present, mildly flooding along
its low point.  Drivers-by, the few drivers-by taking the windy route
easy over the shimmery beech-leaf litter lying like slippery minnows
across the pavement, thought the house resembled nothing so much as an
ocean liner caught in elegant passage gliding toward a farther horizon.
To enhance the passers'-by fancies, a sea-salt and sea-creature whiff
of mud flats was conveyed upon the east wind as it soughed through an
opened dashboard vent, conversational fog having whitened the
windshield of a dark sedan nosing up the road.

"I understand Lily has her hands full," said its driver, a woman who
knew a little of the Hills' situation, "with that crew she's got there
with her these days."

"Oh?  " asked her companions, encouragingly.

But if this was not a night to be out, this was not necessarily a night
to be in.  As the rain hardened, basins and pots were fetched from the
closets where they were stored between storms and positioned beneath
the usual roof leaks.  The telephones kept ringing themselves, blurting
or bewailingly pealing, and the electricity flickered off and on to add
another element to everyone's measure of unease.  There had been a
single day bright bolt of lightning and one warning growl of thunder
earlier and no one in the house quite yet dared to run the risk of
making toast.

THEY, THAT CREW, Lily's family, had all come for visits the summer past
and none of them had gone away again in the fall.  The weekend
stretched into a week, the week became weeks, the weeks accumulated
into a month, the months made up a season, and then the season changed.
Oh, Lily ought to have been warier.  Their suitcases ought to have
struck her as having been very thoroughly packed as she bumped their
luggage up the stairs and hefted the ornery, strapped-shut grips onto
the foots of their freshly made-up beds.  She ought to have let their
bags languish in the front hall wherever they had dropped them, however
underfoot their effects might have remained, there where they were,
crumpling the carpet pattern and nicking the shaky old legs of the
deacon's bench and tripping up the careless returnees who would be too
excitedly chattering and ranging about all at once on sorties of
rediscovery and reclamation to mind their ways.

Surely, Lily should have made them bide their time on the terrace
flagstones and finish the tall glasses of iced tea she had carried
outside on an overburdened tole-ware tray.  They ought to have been
required to give good accounts of themselves and to stand close
questions concerning the glossed-over parts of their narratives.  At
the very least, Lily should have let them ask which rooms were to be
theirs.  She ought to have leaned back on a terrace chaise and obliged
them to campaign obliquely or openly, according to temperament, for
assignment to the bedroom remembered as a favorite one-with a view of
the river; with the framed print rendering of a nearly nude Squanto
welcoming Miles Standish, overdressed in his flimsy jeweler's-art
armor, to a rather too tropically fruited and plumed New World; or,
best, the big square front facing chamber containing the electrified
invalid's bed, which, shuddering and creaking at the really determined
press of a handheld button, closed up like a clamshell.  They'd been
sorry to learn the invalid's bed had been rented and returned after the
last wave of old people's illnesses and deaths back in the
mid-seventies.  Sorry to hear, and surprised as well by Lily's owning
to the fact of a rented deathbed in a house where, as Alden said, even
the fused clump of peppermint drops kept in the domed dish on the big
parlor mantelpiece was, surely, the original fused clump.

Yes, there was a footing Lily ought to have established at the outset
but that had never been the family's way, for all of the Hills had been
raised to regard the old house in Towne as home whether they had been
reared there or in some other place.  The Hills lived, if not in exile,
then as self-perceived expatriates in midwestern suburbs and at New
York addresses where they could be tiresome on the subject of Towne.
No one else quite understood the unswerving attraction, even after
they'd been shown photos of the graceful Towne green and the view from
the River Road bridge, and been told about the deep-voiced frogs who
lived in the swamps, and who, the Hills said, said, Mud, mud, mud.
Some salmon urge to return must have been encoded in their DNA,
non-Hills privately decided, but Lily, even as she grumbled to herself,
even as she paid the property taxes year after year and continued to
worry about the roof and ran her vacuum cleaner once a week back and
forth over the floorboards and carpets and stair treads, might have
answered back to the mutters of outsiders, No, not salmon urge but
soul, were she less reluctant to speak the word outside of Morning
Prayer at All Saints'a word which, of late, Lily had been less
frequently speaking in that venue, having lapsed in her regular
attendance.  She liked the new rector.  He spoke the General Confession
like someone with a clear but not complacent conscience.  He did not
need watching.

And so Lily had, according to custom, arranged welcoming vases of
narcissi, and then iris, and later, roses, to set upon their bureau
tops on the days of their arrivals.  She had greeted them at the door
or the top of the driveway, smilingly enough.  She hoped on their be
halves for fair weather.  She pepped up the first-night supper menus
with piccalilli and cottage cheese spread on Ritz crackers for before,
and she baked batches of Congo Bars for after, a lavishing of
hospitality, really, which must have given them all the idea that Lily
delighted to have them, a sentiment to which, in the long run, they
were bound to hold her.

Her brother Harvey had been the first to return, on a cold day in
May.

"Lily?"  Harvey was abrupt on the telephone.  "Be there Thursday," he
had said and then dropped the receiver as if from a height.  He had
been living on his own for a while now and Lily guessed he had already
held a conversation with her in his head during which he had gone into
the pertinent details.

On that Thursday, Harvey had barged through the front door without
knocking, and he planted himself on the threshold of the big parlor
inhaling its still, chilly air as if he meant to acclimatize himself
before taking on the high-rising staircase.  Lily had followed behind
as he made a beeline for his boyhood bedroom which, like Thebes, was
much altered but remained a place on his mind's map.  The brand-new
wallpaper, at long last made necessary by a pipe-burst the previous
January, was not very nice, its pattern a drift of lavender daisies and
skimming butterflies with elderly faces and horns on their heads, and
Lily heard herself apologizing for the new paper but Harvey said he had
never much cared for the old stuff which had been a marshy scene of
ducks who looked too fat to fly and knickerbockered hunters standing
elegantly about and nipping from their flasks of whiskey.  Poor
Marjorie had had to improvise an eye shade, he said, last time, on
their last visit, last year.  There had been something malign about
those ducks, Marjorie had felt.

"Think she must have been spoiling for something even then," Harvey
said.

He leaned against his boyhood window, one knee levered onto the wide
sill, his nose bent and blowing smoke upon a pane of glass.  Slim
saplings had turned into sturdy trees and a loose line of faux-colonial
homes and lawn-service green lawns had advanced beyond the village
limits, and even a bit of Boston showed now, or, at any rate, evidence
of the city, a brow ny-yellow smudging of the southern sky, which may
have been just as well; the way Boston was going he'd need to keep an
eye on the place.

"You've let everything go," he told Lily, as if the shaggy trees and
the march of houses had been her doing, as if, somehow, she had failed
to resist, the lone figure pushing back the raised blade of a
bulldozer.  He would have heard, had Lily made the effort.  She would
have been in the papers as a matter of human interest.

He turned from Lily as she frowned at him and he fiddled at his bureau
top, strewing a shoehorn, spare change, a pocketknife plucked from his
pocket across the drawn-thread bureau scarf.  Lily wouldn't have given
him such a nice one had she known he'd become such a clutterer.

He unfolded the standing triptych frame of his wives' photos, the late
Amy, and later Naomi, and his latest, Marjorie, as he referred to them
when, occasionally, he recalled one or another's ability to perform
some necessary task-sewing on a last-minute replacement button while he
remained inside his shirt (Amy) or speaking French to the French people
in France (Marjorie).  Naomi, the middle wife, like a middle child had
been the least remarkable but quite the nicest (Naomi could bake), Lily
thought as she studied the three similarly sweet and palely pretty
faces.  Amy, the prototype, seeming to age in portraiture as she had
failed to age in life.

Then Lily, extra bath towels folded over her arm, watched Harvey as he
tested the bed by kicking a post and lifting up an edge of the quilt
investigatively.  Lily had made a lumpy job of putting Harvey's bed
together.  As she thumped the old mattress, perhaps with some idea of
tenderizing it, she had conducted her own half of the terse telephone
call-What time shall I expect you?  Will you require lunch?  How long
will you stay?  Must I buy a tub of special margarine?  Saltless salt?
Shall I call someone in to install Stedi-Bars above the bathtub?  Can
you manage the stairs?  These intimations of infirmities would have
acted upon Harvey as a stick prodding the ribs of a bear curled round
his rumbling slumber.  Unwise, such questions would have been, yet
resented, of course-a failure to anticipate his needs.  Lily had split
a too-small pillowcase stuffing it with a king-size pillow, and she had
snatched a twin-size top sheet from the linen cupboard which she had
used anyway as she argued at Harvey, in absentia.

"Short-sheeted my bed?  Because I warn you, I'll break my hip and then
you'll be sorry," Harvey told Lily.

Lily wondered whether Harvey wasn't becoming childish.  He was a
rosy-skinned and fluffy-headed old man, with a teary glint in his eye
some temporary duct trouble.  She hadn't attended as he told her all
about it, his mystified and impressed doctors, the useless prescription
drops he was using, instead, on his hangnails.  His trousers stopped
too short of his ankles, as if once again he was outgrowing his
clothes.  His walk was springy; his new Air Jordans had been a
successful impulse buy.  And he seemed excessively cheerful for someone
who had lost as much as he had.  Amy, at the last, had clutched her
head, and Naomi her heart, and Marjorie clung to the steering wheel of
a careering car.  (Lily could not stop thinking about them.  She had
been startled by the sudden unfolding of the triptych frame, for she
had expected to view happy and similarly sweet grandchildren's faces.)
That none of Harvey's wives had, at the last, reached for Harvey was at
once an indictment and an acquittal, perhaps.  None had chosen to take
any essential part of Harvey with her, and Lily supposed that was how
Harvey had managed to carry on-and how Harvey carried on, Lily
reflected privately.

"Lily, you've let the old place go shockingly," Harvey stated.  The
crystal knob of his closet door spun off in his hand as he wrenched it
open to check whether Lily had supplied him with the wooden clothes
hangers he knew Lily knew he required.  She had given him a sound
dozen, all filched from good hotels in the days before even good hotels
welded their hangers to the closet rods.  Nevertheless, the hangers
were no more than he was due, if Lily was expecting thanks.  He shot
her a look from the cover of the closet door, but she was only trying
to push a sprung-loose thread back into the warp of one of the bath
towels.  She wet her fingertip and prodded.

"There can be such an old lady look to a house," Harvey told Lily.  "I
can always tell just driving by a place and I could tell driving up
here.  The window shades are all unevenly drawn because you can't
remember from one room to the next whether the shades go halfway down
or three-quarters of the way up, and you've let the shrubs run so wild
and swooping across the doors that you can't get in or out and you'll
have to call the Fire Department and they'll come roaring up in their
truck and you'll be very embarrassed.  And the paint, no matter what
color it was originally supposed to be, looks like you went to the
store and asked for a gallon of, a gallon of bilge-water grey."

" The shades are drawn in reference to house plants and certain
upholstery fabrics I do not wish to fade," Lily said.  "To fade
further," she amended, lest Harvey take it in mind to collect specimen
cushions to demonstrate that the damage had already been done.

Harvey scraped bureau drawers open and shut.  He removed a wizened
pomander from the bottom drawer, an apple stuck and studded with cloves
and looped with red ribbon secured to a flimsy stem.  Uttering oaths,
he reached deeper and extracted a dozen or more shrunken and rather
evilly dead-appearing objects, no, not heads as first he feared but
only Seckel pears.  Lily had left them in the drawer last fall to ripen
undisturbed in the dark and she'd forgotten them, at least until she
remembered last February and couldn't face what she knew she'd find.
The pomander had masked the sequence of odors emanating from the tall
old chest of drawers, such a fortunate set of circumstances, Lily had
thought at the time.

"I suppose she keeps her hankies in the vegetable bin," Harvey
addressed the air.

As he shoved the drawer shut, the triptych frame of wives' pictures
fell flat onto the bureau scarf.  Lily set them upright again, and were
she feeling fonder of Harvey at the moment, she would not have
positioned the faces so that their six similarly gazing eyes would meet
Harvey's own as he awoke in the morning, yawning and scrubbing away the
accumulated salt of his automatic tears.

"But what are you looking for?"  she had asked, as Harvey ruffled
through a stack of Woman's Day magazines Lily was keeping in a neat
pile beside the radiator for their fresh-sounding recipes and clever
craft ideas should a particular need arise to produce a Bizzy-Daze
Peanut Butter Supreme Torte or create Muppet-character sock puppets for
disadvantaged children, even as she recalled the days when the children
of the poor had required only the socks themselves to wear on their
feet.

"What am I looking for?"  Harvey asked.  "I am looking for my pair of
paint pants that I left behind here, and I'm counting on having those
paint pants because it came to me as I observed your flaking trim and
io The Hills at Home your peeling clap boarding that the reason I've
come home is to paint the house.  I'm going to start in on the
shudders."

Lily was caught between self-defense and self-justification.

"Harvey," she said, "you left home fifty years ago and on subsequent
visits you haven't lifted a finger to help except that one time, I do
recall, when you took a hammer to a cellar step because you trod upon a
risen nail and you resented having a tetanus shot."

"Didn't want to get lockjaw," Harvey said.

"Well, no one wanted you to get lockjaw," Lily agreed.  How he would
have kept them hopping with the jaw-locked and angry issuance of
memoranda, at the worst specifying his funeral hymns and coffin wood,
followed by a long, crankily conversational convalescence.

" "Course not, would have been very serious," Harvey allowed,
mollified.

"And you won't fit into those old work pants without a crowbar."

Nevertheless, Lily had been collecting estimates from painters for the
past few years and when she got around to calling on the least alarming
figure, she had learned there was a statute of limitations on
estimates.  State law, Miss Hill, she'd been told by a former student
who seemed to relish knowing better than she.  She had had no further
will to interview a second round of paint contractors, those whose
advertising cards on the True Value notice board she had passed over
the first time because of hard-to-read handwriting and the speckled and
untidy appearance of having been pinned there too long and too
unavailingly appealing for work.

"Very well, you may paint the shutters," Lily told Harvey.  "But you
may not choose the color."  The shutter color was always the same,
anyway, that deep shade of true green which surprises you when you
prise open the can's lid by not smelling of a northern pine forest but
only and oilily of paint.

"Hope you have a high enough latter," Harvey warned.  "Otherwise I'm
driving straight down to the True Value and I'll charge a fifty-footer
to your account."

"There's a tall ladder in the barn," Lily said.  "I think it still
works."

"Still works?  What aspect of a latter can there possibly be that works
or not?  " he wanted to know, a point he and Lily had discussed off and
on throughout the late afternoon and the pepped up first-night supper,
a ruffly bubble pancake with cherry jam, and the martinis that had been
Harvey's idea.  They had discussed ladders further during an otherwise
quiet evening spent in the little parlor in front of the television set
there, watching the nothing (they were united on this point) that was
on.

LILY'S NIECE AND GRAND NIECE arrived one night toward the end of June:
Ginger Hill Lowe Tuckerman and her daughter, Betsy.  The local taxi, a
long station wagon with rocket-age fins and writing on its side,
dropped off Ginger and Betsy and their gypsyish and disheveled bundles
and satchels in a confusion of lamplight and opening doors and asking
and answering voices.  Somehow, as Ginger, her hands burdened, leaned
into and rattled the bell pull with her shoulder blade and whirled into
the front hall, and Betsy flew like a wraith behind, pleading with
Ginger not to cry, not to cry now, it had been left to Lily to pay the
driver and to calculate a tip to compensate for the bundles and the
inconvenience, and as well, for the really very unnecessary display of
weeping on Ginger's part, springing from her eager, tired eyes as she
caught her first glimpse by the rake of the taxi-wagon headlights of
someplace she remembered well, the roadside shack where they used to
walk to buy apples, where an apple-cheeked old-timer had always been so
kind to the young and happy, then, Ginger, singling her out every time
to hand her a peach from a newspaper-covered basket beside the old tin
cash box.

Doris, the Towne Taxi Service night driver, didn't think any of this
was worth crying over, peaches instead of apples.  Peaches were better
than apples in Doris's experience of their relative merits.  She had
eaten far fewer fine peaches than apples in her lifetime, and she said
as much to Lily who had no idea what Doris was going on about, but she
agreed, "Yes, I like peaches," as she and Doris tugged and pulled
Ginger and Betsy's many bundles from the back of the taxi wagon.
Eleven, Lily counted under her breath, an amount she factored into the
figuring of Doris's tip.

"Because I've had my own troubles too, Miss Hill," Doris said, in blame
or in sympathy.  Even Doris wasn't sure where she stood.  She only knew
she too had tasted tears.

"Yes.  Yes, I know you have, Doris," Lily said.

Unusually decisive that night, Lily had sent the emotional Ginger
upstairs to bed at once, and presently she carried up a tray set with
tea steeped in a tiny china pot and poured into a porcelain cup, and a
square of Angel Gingerbread centered on one of the special dessert
plates shaped and painted like an ivy leaf.  Ginger, who, if consulted,
would have said she was in the mood for Thai take-out and a robust
Burgundy, recalled that this presentation of tea (of hot water tinted
with tea) and the morsel of something not too sweet was exquisitely
typical of her maiden Aunt Lily, and she decided to cherish this
delicate handling of herself and her situation.

"We'll speak tomorrow," Lily had said, edging all the while toward the
door.  "If you feel up to talking," she added sagely, for she was in no
particular hurry to hear what Ginger had to say for herself.  (Husband
trouble, Doris had predicted to Lily at the last.)

Ginger slid between cool, rose geranium-scented sheets and she picked
up a small, brown-covered bedside volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(so very thoughtfully provided) and was not unconsoled by the sonnets
to which she turned, so familiar to her she did not read them but only
recalled certain lines she loved and which she might have written
herself, they so applied.  Besides, she had lost track of her reading
glasses' whereabouts among her suitcases and she needed her reading
glasses to read now.

She was refreshed by the tea and cake, swiftly consumed, crumbs daubed
from the darling (and she remembered it now) ivy leaf plate and she
found herself, frankly, not a little bored, for it was not yet ten and
she had been put to bed for the night.  Lily had told her not to come
popping back downstairs, which, stated that way, sounded too
undignified an action to take, and so Ginger was stuck.  She slid off
the bedsheets which had been polished smooth by wear and washing, and
she snooped through her bedroom's closet.  Several well-stuffed garment
bags with rusted-shut zippers did not yield to her first impetuous tugs
that night and she resolved to tackle the problem with pliers in the
morning.  Still restless, she pushed up her window shade and gazed upon
the un moonlit terrace below, at the further end of which she
momentarily mistook a tall, leaning ladder for a man she had once
known.  Man and ladder were of a height, it seemed to her, and she had
been thinking of him.  He had lingered on the edge of her thoughts for
years, never insistently but always reliably there.  Had she summoned
him to her side, had her powerful wish to see him again drawn him here,
he knew not why, to tarry until her voice called to him from a high
window and reminded him?  Ginger would not have denied she could be a
bit of a mystic, even if her vision had fizzled when she narrowed her
treacherously failing eyes (her far sight, her near sight, going, gone)
for a confirming, more focused look.

But I'm working on him, Ginger told herself as she settled back among
her pillows and lay dozily awake.  Dear Lily, she had placed Ginger in
the perfect bedroom.  Lily had known without being told that the
heartsick and love worn Ginger required this lace- and chintz-rich,
uncommonly easeful room with its skirted dressing table and silly tuft
of dressing-table chair tucked into the voluminous skirt, and the rows
of pretty silver boxes set across the mirrored top to contain her
cotton puffs and her eyebrow pencils and her many, many shades of
rouge, which blushed from the least to the deepest of reds.  Yes, yes,
this room, Ginger sighed, and picked up her bedside Barrett Browning
and she mused, then, along other lines ... "If I leave all for thee,
wilt thou exchange and be all to me?  "... as sleep stole slowly upon
her.

That first night, Lily had sat up late in the little parlor with young
Betsy (so this was Betsy).  They shared a larger pot of tea and
finished off the gingerbread batch, dol loped with
vanilla-extract-spiked and not quite-whipped-enough cream, while Betsy
talked and talked.  In shock, Lily diagnosed, spooning extra sugar into
Betsy's teacup.  The girl was thin as thread and shivery on such a
summer night, whereas Ginger, vivid Ginger, would become stout if she
didn't take care, for her long loose linen traveling jacket had not fit
her as loosely as Ginger chose to believe.  Lily had noted the strained
buttonholes as she retrieved the tossed-off jacket from the deacon's
bench and drooped it from a spindle of the coatrack.

So this was Great-Aunt Lily, Betsy had thought that night.  Her
grandmother, called Olive, had been Lily's sister.  Betsy wondered what
it would be like to have a sister.  She wondered what it would be like
to have a sister who died.

"You need not call me Great," Lily said, and Betsy didn't think Aunt
Lily meant to be funny.  Betsy hoped not, because she had not smiled,
but earnestly agreed "All right" to this, the first mandate issued
here.  This was Aunt Lily, who had always sent them a Christmas card
back home in Kansas which had always been the first card to arrive, as
if the distant aunt caught Christmas spirit a week or two too early
back there in the mysterious East where she lived and where, at the
precipitate start of each Christmas season, reminded and recalled by
the cards (Chickadees, holly; a fir tree, a fawn), Ginger told Betsy
that she must always remember she too had come from.  The East is our
Oz, she used to say, that green and spired land.

No, Betsy had thought back, I do not come from that place, but, she had
known the house as the bumpy old taxi wagon quit the road that had
taken them this far and labored up the worse surface of a long,
wandering drive.  The un lopped boughs of guardian trees clumped
against the windshield, scrawled scrapily along the car top, and
snatched at them through the open windows.  How very dark, this domain
beneath the trees.  She battled a branch, she tore at leaves.  She and
Ginger shrank from their separate, invaded windows and met in the
middle of the backseat.

Ginger clung and Betsy allowed her.  Doris stopped at a spot.  Oh, they
must be there, and the darker against the dark shapes of a large
dwelling, outbuildings, assembled as they tried to make out-there, but
where?  A single carriage light switched on in expectation drew them in
a straight line toward itself.  They blundered down a lavender border
snapping old growth when just to the left lay the path.  The front door
blinked abruptly alight at the sounds of them, and Betsy had known that
door in the flash for she had seen it again and again, featured (nearly
the feature) in photographs her grandmother had kept and which her
mother now possessed of all the family brides on their long ago and not
so long ago wedding days.  Every bride had stood before that beautiful
broad and raised panel door, with tall side lights and an overarching
fanlight above, and the single, great, natural stone step sitting as
solid as the earth itself underfoot, the transition from the past into
a future perhaps not deemed official, or, at least, not real, until the
white slipper or white pump or white sandal glided over the very
threshold.  Betsy half believed, then, that her lost grandmother had
arranged for the familiar door to receive her, since she herself could
not be there to meet Betsy, to say simply (for there was nothing else
to say, nothing that could help), Oh, Betsy, honey... By then, as she
sat in the little parlor, a teacup atremble on one knee, a plate just
balanced on the other, Betsy was beginning to flag.  Nevertheless, she
resisted the idea of again climbing the curving staircase and
undressing and brushing her teeth and occupying one of the humped and
shadowy beds she had glimpsed through ajar doors in this familiar
stranger's house where family feelings flickered on and off
disconcertingly.

Betsy was afraid these family feelings might flare up and consume her
while her T-shirt was pulled over her head or her eyes were shut
against the lather of her complexion soap or she was entangled in an
ancient quilt, every finicking stitch of which had been sewn by someone
who held a counterclaim to her loyalties and affections.  She had been
shown to the room which was to be hers, and as she had unzipped a
carryall bag containing the present for Aunt Lily, an already used copy
of Northbridge Rectory (unobtainable except used, Ginger had said),
Betsy had been routed by the smell of burning.  Emanations rose from
the old and never used lightbulb of her switched-on desk lamp as the
element heated and charred the dead dust and insect corpses coating the
bulb-a distinct odor of cooking protein, of roasting meat, of scorching
flesh which Betsy had fled.

So, postponingly, Betsy told Lily the complete tale of their travels to
Towne as Lily sat with her excellent posture in her Boston rocker,
noticing now the wearing patch on the old Afghani carpet just where
Harvey had taken to sitting every evening, overreacting to the six
o'clock news.  (Harvey himself happened to be out for the night.
Several local widows had fallen into the habit of calling him with an
extra Music Theater ticket to give away or with circumstantial tales
about having a spare lobster on their hands, as Lily pictured a grim
pincer gripping a manicured widowed fingertip.

("Ought to stay home and greet the gals," Harvey had said, consulting

Lily before he accepted a just-tendered invitation, holding the
telephone receiver to his rumbly chest.  "Lily, Lily," he had boomed
for her " .^ until she came to tell him to stop booming, but he knew
had he called to

|^Hk her in normal voice she would have stayed where she was at the
dining room table critically consulting a major delphinium article in
the Gardener 's Monthly.

("Go, go," Lily had urged him with a shooing motion he didn't much care
for.  "I suspect Ginger and Betsy will be a bit worked up when they get
here."

("Ah," said Harvey.  "Worked up?"  He had decided not to stick around
for that.)

Mummy said one has to undertake such a long, sad journey on a long,
slow train, Betsy explained to Lily.  Otherwise, she and her mother
might just as well have driven across country from Kansas, and then
Betsy would have been able to fit her twenty-one-speed bike in the
trunk of the car.  They could have visited the Smithsonian en route to
look at the moon rocks and the first ladies' Inaugural Ball gowns, as
well as stop at certain excellent outlet malls in Pennsylvania she had
clipped an article about.  There might even have been a Benetton
outlet.  Did Aunt Lily think they'd have a Benetton outlet in
Pennsylvania?  Lily wasn't sure.  Perhaps, she said.  She hoped so, if
Betsy wanted to find one there.

But her mother, Betsy continued, had, with deliberate ceremony,
requiring Betsy as wide-eyed witness, lowered her car keys and her
credit cards and her wedding ring into the Pawnee basket on the
telephone table in the front hall for Betsy's father to discover when
he came home from work.  Every night, he flung his own car keys into
the basket and called out, How are my girls?"  to which Betsy, if she
was home, always answered, Fine, while Ginger, if she was home, and she
often had not been home lately, always bristled and haughtily refrained
from saying.

On that last day in Wichita, as Ginger was rampaging through rooms
streamering clothes into and out of suitcases and attempting to cram in
her bonnet hair dryer, her interdental-plaque-removal system, her
personal air ionizer, and the rainfall showerhead removed from the
master bathroom shower, Betsy had taken the cordless phone out to the
pool house and called her father at his office to tell him what was
about to happen.

"She's taking me with her," Betsy said.  "She said I have to go too. Do
I have to go too?  "

"You must look after your mother," her father had said after a very
long pause as other voices ghosted indistinctly along their airwaves,
other people who were able to say what needed to be said to one
another.

"Daddy?  "she asked.

"Try to enjoy your trip," he said.

"Betrayer," Ginger had accused Betsy.  Then she had asked, "What did he
say?"

"Daddy said to enjoy our trip."

That had resonated.

Betsy had boarded the train wearing her plain and everyday striped
cotton boxer shorts, her T-shirt with the sunflowers stenciled on the
front and back, her Roman espadrilles laced up to her knees, and a
knapsack slung over her back, its canvas sides strained by her Dante
and Beatrice bookends, her alabaster horse, and her treasure box, plus
a stone she had grubbed from the foundation landscaping as her mother
was hustling her out to the taxi waiting at the curb in front of their
house.

"Oh, is this what we're wearing?"  asked Ginger who had made a major
effort with a new suit, scarf, earrings, stockings, heels, Ivoire,
clouds of Ivoire.

Betsy had become separated from her shoes in the club car where she had
retreated with her book, Wuthering Heights-which was not turning out to
be what she had expected based upon the artwork on the cover.  She
curled up in a club chair, barefoot.  She had had to move twice, once
when a man with a smoldering cigar sat across from her and studied the
cover of her book and asked her what she was reading even though
Wuthering Heights was clearly spelled out above the tousle- and
tumble-haired heads of the passionately embracing couple depicted
there, and Betsy had changed places again when the two women beside her
began to discuss their problematic ovaries.

"Oh dear," said Lily, when Betsy spoke the word.

And then a young man stood for a while swaying in the doorway,
surveying.

He had taken a shine to her, Betsy could always tell.  He stared at
her.  She glanced up at him from behind lowered lashes.  She had been
relieved when he disappeared but he had returned and approached her
carrying two tall shiny plastic tumblers of beer.  Help, help, he had
appealed to her, indicating an urgent need to scratch his nose, and
Betsy had been obliged to relieve him of one of the tumblers, and, at
his bid ding, to sip politely even though she was underage no matter
how progressive a state they were currently rolling across-Missouri by
then, or maybe Illinois.  After every bitter taste, her plastic cup
only seemed fuller but that must have been due to the frothy head
melting down, Betsy had finally figured out.  The young man had swung
into the swivel seat beside her.  His name was Stefan.  He was a Dutch
exchange student.  He loved rodeos.  He loved seeing cows on their
backs with their legs tied.  He prised Betsy's story from her with
careful English questioning, although Betsy would have said in
expertise in a language should lead to vagueness and in exactitudes but
Stefan had, with his direct and un nuanced questions, interrogated her
thoroughly.

"Finish up the whipped cream left in the bowl with your spoon, don't
let it go to waste," Lily told Betsy.

Well, Stefan had become very foolish.  He had fetched Betsy's
espadrilles from beneath the first of the club car seats she had been
forced to abandon and he knelt before her and fitted them onto her
feet, handling and caressing her ankles and insteps.  She could not bat
him away.  She was holding his and her own beer cups and had she leaned
forward to set them down upon the floor, she would have fallen into
Stefan's arms.  He wound the lacings up to her knees, and above her
knees even as she told him not to, and he had cinched the ends too
tightly round her thighs and tied them in impossible knots.  He
declared she was his Cinderella.  He seemed keen to carry their
acquaintance to the next level.  Betsy would have quit the club car
then and there, only she was keeping an eye on her mother, for Ginger
had found her way into the club car and sat with the ovary ladies,
contributing to their by then very technical conversation with close
details of a troubling case which, enjoying excellent health herself,
fortunately was not her own.  Stefan rose from his knees and took back
his beer-actually, Betsy gave him her beer cup, which was fuller.

The train lurched and shuddered across the darkened plains.  Betsy
leaned into the arms of her chair at every switch and swerve.  They had
just finished a unit in junior year Social Studies on "Our Crumbling
National Infrastructure" and she wished again her mother had opted to
drive instead of trusting the hurtling, unstoppable train bearing down
along its single undermined track carrying her farther and farther away
from everyone and everything she knew and loved and counted on.  She
pictured her parents reunited after the derailment beside her hospital
bed as life-support sounds eeked and pat-pattered on her behalf and she
heard her mother's voice speak bravely of pulling the plug.

At last, Ginger had risen and declared the time had come to retire to
their luggage-heaped roomette, for the night was well advanced and the
roomette had been an expensive option which they ought to enjoy-and
their upper and lower bed-ettes and the sink-ette supplied for the
dainty dipping of one's fingertips, Ginger's commentary had run on and
on.  Enjoying our trip?  she had asked Betsy as Betsy pulled a
pillow-ette over her ear.  The pillow-ette, tough as a Chiclet, only
covered an ear.

Stefan had seized Betsy's hand to kiss as she said good night and,
meaningfully, good-bye to him.  Good night?"  Good-bye?"  his face
objected tragically and he had bent over and twisted her wrist and
licked her palm secretly as Ginger watched, unsteady on her feet,
flushed and exclaiming how continental the young man's manners were.
Betsy pulled, Stefan held on to her hand.  Betsy whispered, I shall
scream.  Stefan said, regretfully, No, you won't, and his sport
concluded, he released her.

"And now Mummy says she's going to write a book, Aunt Lily.  That's her
big new plan, she says she's come here to write a book," Betsy said.
"And it's going to be all about her life experiences and what she's
learned in life and what she thinks about, I don't know, life and
everything else that occurs to her.  She's brought a stack of notebooks
and file cards and a package of Roller-Rite pens and a drifty kimono to
wrap herself in while she's writing.  Still, I don't think we have to
worry because I'm sure nobody will ever want to read a book like hers,
only then she'll be so disappointed and unhappy again.  You cannot
imagine how upset she 'll be."

"But there's nothing we can do about that tonight," Lily said sensibly,
and she refrained from telling Betsy that, indeed, she had a very good
idea of the intensity and reach of Ginger's borne griefs and
disappointments.

She had, in her time, been treated to a performance or two.

LILY'S NEPHEW AND GINGER'S BROTHER Alden Hill Lowe and his family came
to Towne later in July.  They drove up from New York in their boxy old
green Volvo station wagon.  The back compartment was packed solid with
suitcases and sealed cartons, weighing the chassis down low over the
rear wheels.  The dragging tailpipe struck sparks along unimproved
patches of the Connecticut Turnpike and they had been honked out of the
way by salesman types, young men in company subcompacts who were
beginning to feel the pinch themselves, Alden said.  The last pinch had
occurred before their time, but something in their bones told them they
didn't like the looks of the Lowe family car beating its retreat from
the city and, evidently, going down in flames.

There was a faded card taped to the inside of the windshield.  NO
RADIO, it read.

"You know, Alden," Alden's wife, Becky, had said, reaching up and
smoothing a curled edge of the faded card, "someone smart should
manufacture NO RADIO signs using a picture of a radio with one of those
international NO symbols superimposed over it, that red circle with the
crossbar, for all the thieves who don't read English.  It would be more
considerate for everyone.  And for the people who still have radios, I
suppose there could be plates with trompe O.Neil pictures of empty
recesses that you could fit over your dashboard.  Somehow."

Becky enjoyed thinking up businesses.  She had never really had to
work, apart from an early, undemanding cultural kind of job when her
slight salary had been consumed by taxes and taxis.  Alden had given up
reminding her that a mere idea was the least of launching a business,
but now he asked her, "How would you hide car phones?"  for the trip
had been too silent so far.  They missed the missing radio and even
Becky had not been inclined to chatter on as she usually did at the
start of a family trip, anticipating what she would do first when they
got to wherever they were going-swim in the pool, order a room service
rum punch, stroll down to the shops, stake their claim to a spot on the
beach, call on local acquaintances, arrange theater tickets for the
week (in London), or maybe just sleep until dinnertime.  So many
choices, the exercise seemed almost onerous, settling on just one.

"I suppose I'd hide car phones with mirrors, the way that high haired
magician fellow made the Statue of Liberty disappear that time," Becky
said.

"Harvey said it should have stayed disappeared," Alden remembered.  "He
thinks that chiseled verse about the huddled masses and the tired and
the poor always spoke to the wrong sort."

"Oh dear, oh well, Harvey.  Still, those poor people were all just
yearning to be free, so how can one criticize?  " she answered,
vaguely.  She was gazing upon the tinted windows of a passing
limousine, too blackened to see through.  She wondered how the driver
managed to see out.

" That's only a rental," Alden said.  "See, there's a fleet number on
the bumper."

"Oh," said Becky, no longer very interested in who might be inside,
although if they were newlyweds on their big day she was, of course,
happy for them.

She reached up, then, and peeled the NO RADIO sign from the windshield
and folded it into the litter bag, for it had just struck her as a
rather peevish declaration, and Towne, she decided, was the sort of
place where an anonymous well-wisher might very well leave a new car
radio in a basket upon one's fender.  One would not know whom to thank
and ever after be burdened with a sense of obligation to nearly
everyone, on the off chance.

"But you know," Becky mentioned after another while, "if I were a
magnate riding around in my limousine, I think I'd trade it in for a
Winnebago.  Then you could get up and stretch and make a pot of coffee
and iron your sat-upon trousers before important meetings.  There's a
business idea for someone, converting executive Winnebagos.  I'd paint
them dark grey with pinstripes on the outside and the interiors could
be wood-paneled and clublike with oriental carpets, leather chairs, and
of course all the office accoutrements, a desk, a fax, an assistant.
People would think the first few they saw were peculiar, but then,
everyone would want one after an article appeared in the Sunday Style
section, say.  I'd offer a sophisticated Gucci model, and a sportier
Arnold Palmer version."

"You'd need a very large capital investment to start up a business like
that," Alden said.

"Oh?  " asked Becky.  She questioned his profile.  "How much?  A lot?
"

"A whole lot," Alden assured her.

"Well," Becky supposed, "all right.  But I'd like one for myself if I
were ever in a position to need chauffeuring about."  She interrupted
herself.  "Please stop squirming, Little Becky.  The car is crowded for
all of us."

"No, it's more crowded for me," Little Becky answered back.  This was
her usual complaint.  She always had to sit between her parents on
these long car trips, and her psychical space was invaded, she
explained loudly.

"What's psychical space?"  asked Alden.

"My mind.  I can't think.  I'm so boxed in," Little Becky complained.
"You won't even let me think."

"When you think, you fidget," Alden said.  "Why is that?  "

"I don't.  I don't know."

"Encourage her to think, Alden.  Don't tease her," Becky said.  "We
encourage you to think, dear.  Think all you want," she said
generously, "and use words like psychical, only try to use them
correctly."

"I used psychical correctly.  I said what I meant," Little Becky
insisted.

"We can look up its meaning.  Lily will have a dictionary," Alden said.
"She 'll be happy to let you borrow it.  Remember, the P is silent."

"I know," shouted Little Becky, and then she subsided.  These sessions
with her parents wearied her.

The three boys inhabited the backseat.  Brooks and Rollins had wisely
brought books, hard-worn paperbacks, and when Brooks abruptly came to
the end of his tale, he blinked at the blank endpaper and tossed the
volume to the floor.  He kicked Rollins's shin.

"What?"  Rollins asked, his eyes fixed on his page.  He was at a good
part.

Brooks displayed his empty hands, held hinged like the leaves of a
book, and Rollins tore his own paperback down the middle, another
slab-thick something by Stephen King, and flipped his brother the front
half.

"They're wrecking books," Little Becky reported.  She reached and
tilted the rearview mirror so she could spy down into the backseat upon
her brothers.  Becky glimpsed, as well, the two collapsed and lolling
younger boys, and Glover, the eldest, erect but leaning into the
window, such large boys, such solid boys, such unanimated boys, and she
thought, suddenly, of the colossi of Easter Island, another of
Creation's mysteries.

"But they're wrecking books," Little Becky insisted.  "Was that my
book?  " she demanded as an awful thought occurred to her.

"Never mind if it is.  I'm sure Aunt Lily will have Scotch tape," Becky
said.

"Absolutely, Lily will have tape," Alden said.  "She'll have a
dictionary,

Scotch tape, and aspirin."

"Headache?"  asked Becky.  "Shall I drive?"

" No, don't have the headache," Alden answered.

Glover had been out late the night before, his last night in the city,
effecting farewells at his various haunts.  He had not returned until
morning, until the not so early hour named for departure.  Alden had
spotted him as he was loading the car, Glover, the dissolute figure on
the corner, hesitating, and then forming an eventual decision to
approach, or, more likely, realizing he had no other place to go but
away with his family.

Glover was sleeping through the trip, retreating to an aloof and
dignified slumber, sitting upright, his chin tucked into his chest.  A
hand loosely gripped each knee.  He resembled some cryogenic pioneer
holding out in a frosty limbo until a better era dawned, one in which a
cure had been found for whatever it was that had been killing him in
his own day.  Alden couldn't identify the nature of his eldest son's
hangover, but he was convinced Glover wasn't suffering enough from
whatever it was he had indulged in the previous evening.  Alcohol, of
course-they had thrashed out that subject in his freshman year at the
Stoddardt School when Glover had carried home a pamphlet called "How to
Talk to Your Parents About Alcohol" and he had told them what they
could expect of him.  He would not drink and drive, he swore.  But you
don't drive, Alden had reminded him.  When I drive, I won't drink and
drive, Glover had promised virtuously and Becky had hugged him as Alden
reread the shifty little pamphlet to determine what, in fact, had been
agreed to.  But they had all signed some sort of sham pledge on the
back cover and, as Becky said at the time, felt better.  Alden also
guessed at drug use in moderation, though electronic amusements seemed
to provide all of his sons with their oblivion of choice and, at any
rate, Glover only parried on weekends and designated school holidays
which, in Alden's opinion, was best a lesson learned early, this
partitioning of one's priorities.

Besides, Glover's grades were not nearly as bad as they might have
been, and he scored off the charts on the standardized tests although
Glover, reluctant to be corralled into ever more advanced studies,
protested the standard tests were pitched unfairly easy.

"Hi," said Alden.  "Brooks or Rollins, nudge your brother awake.
Glover, look to your right at that spire, those towers.  That's a
college.  Your mother and I want you to consider applying there."

"Huh?  Spires?  Yuh, right.  Sure," Glover said.

"Seriously," said Alden.  "Tell him, Becky, tell him seriously."

"Seriously, what?"  asked Becky, who had been thinking her own thoughts
about designing Winnebagos for women executives, but all of her ideas
so far seemed more suited for the traveling buses of country and
western singers-bright colors, large lighted makeup mirrors, closet
rods set high enough to hang a floor-length evening gown for the days
when work slid into play and maybe a rugged bus driver with stubble on
his chin and a way about him who would turn up as the you ("You stole
my Visa card, you broke my heart") in one of those sadder-but wiser
ballads no one ever seemed to learn from.

"Why did she have to call them the wretched huddled masses in that
poem?"  Alden spoke into the silence.  "I mean to say, frankly, if I'd
shown up on Ellis Island with my bunched belongings and hope in my
heart, I'd have been so offended to be called that I'd have turned
around and gone home."

"Well, darling, no one was expressing official U.S. policy."

Lily heard the car chugging up the driveway.  She set aside her jar of
soapy water.  She had been killing Japanese beetles by tapping them,
engorged and sluggish, from her rosebushes into an agitated froth in
which they were trapped and then drowned with each fresh sudsing shake
of her old mayonnaise jar.  Such fun, as Ginger said.  She had
requested and been given her own death jar.

Lily walked across the lawn to greet the arrivals.  Alden, who had the
sun in his eyes, steered over the grass toward his aunt, and he parked
where their paths converged at the edge of the remains of an orchard
beneath the low-boughed apple trees.  Lily regarded the Aldens-her
sister's boy, his Becky, and his brood-through a fringe of green leaves
and the tough green beginnings of apples.  Alden grinned at Lily
through his cranked-down window and Becky leaned across Little Becky
and assured Lily, and perhaps herself as well, "Here we all are, safe
and sound."

They had been riding steadily, not even getting out of the car for a
lunch break.  (Becky had packed chopped ham sandwiches, warmish Cokes,
and Pecan Sandies, distributed over her shoulder to the boys.  She held
Alden's Coke, handing him the bottle for swigs as Little Becky
complained of being reached over.) It took a moment before it occurred
to any of them that a family reunion, unlike toll plazas and gas
stations, could not be negotiated through a cranked-down window.  But
they were, just then, thoroughly enervated by the cessation of forward
motion and they had to muster themselves before committing fresh effort
to the incidents of arrival.  Becky folded the map into the glove
compartment, reluctant to part with its, thus far, direct and reliable
information, and Alden patted his shirt pocket for his sunglasses case.
Little Becky gazed up at her Aunt Lily, fallen too shy to work on the
first impression she had planned to make, a sort of Sarah Bernhardt and
Sara Crewe pastiche, standing injured yet indomitable in the face of
adversity.  Although she had yet to identify the precise nature of the
woes that awaited her here, she was confident that they would manifest
themselves soon enough and she would, of course, be on the alert
lookout for those pending offenses.

The boys only gradually became aware that the car had stopped.  Brooks
perceived the monotonous highway iteration of weedy verges and dusty,
wind-shimmying trees was no longer un scrolling itself beyond the
margins of his book.  He punched Rollins who punched him back, then
understood as Brooks pointed outside.  They glanced at the dormant

Glover who thought he was so superior.  Stealthily, Brooks unlatched
the door handle and he and Rollins executed paratrooper drops onto the
spiky grass.  They scrambled to their feet and confronted the summer
rich woods, the rounded rise of the meadow, a red barn, and a very
large house.  They headed there, stopped short of entering through a
side door, and disappeared around the back, drawn by the thwacks and
thuds of a hammer pounding so irregularly it sounded to them as if
someone was chasing a moving target.

" Boys," Alden called after them.  "Say hello to your Aunt Lily
first."

Lily said there would be time enough to get to know one another again.
Again, she said, for Alden and Becky and the boys had last visited some
years ago when the boys were very small and Little Becky had just not
yet been born.  Becky had not felt well at the time.  Rollins had
swallowed the lump of beeswax Lily kept in her sewing box for
stiffening thread.  Brooks had stuck a steak knife deep into an
undefended electrical socket.  These several highlights of their
previous trip here were resummoned by Lily's again, though she had
spoken the word quite naturally, if not very warmly.

Alden and the Beckys climbed out of the car, ducking beneath the apple
branches and plucking at the seats of their cotton trousers which stuck
to their skin after all their sitting down.  All at once describing
their journey here, they followed Lily, who had retreated to a corner
of the flagstone terrace.  She had noticed a pretty striped snake
essing through the grass and Little Becky looked like a screecher at
snakes.  Lily pointed to an ordinary goldfinch fluttering at the
echinacea as a further diversion.

"Those boys are in their own little worlds," Becky said, and as she
heard her own voice apply the old formula to their current
circumstances, she realized she was long overdue to amend her
traditional excuse.

Glover, roused at last by the silence, or by the birdcalls and cricket
chirps and hammer falls which composed a country silence, recalled,
after a blank, blurred minute, who and where and why he was.  He
wandered over to the terrace edge.  He retained some rudimentary
manners; Alden and Becky had started out with such high child-rearing
ideals.

"Aunt Lily," he informed Lily, and Lily accepted his extended, written
upon (with last-call names and addresses of friends) hand which had a
feverish feel.  Glover endured the sensation of touching Lily's osseous
old saint's relic fingers.  But his parents were pleased with him and
Lily had only said, "How nice to see you, Glover," simply and un
fussily and left it at that.  Glover stood there and found he
remembered, in a tumbling rush of images, having once been trundled in
a wooden wheelbarrow very fast across a rollicking field.  He
remembered the jouncing he took.  He remembered catching splinters.  He
remembered resolving not to cry.  He remembered being amazed to
discover that he didn't have to cry if he really would rather not.  So.
He had learned that here.

"You know Harvey is with me," Lily said as raised voices reached them.
Brooks and Rollins had discovered Harvey behind the house where he was
wresting off the first-floor shutters as the slats clattered and
collapsed when certain vital balances and tensions were disturbed.
Harvey was beginning to wish he'd never started in on the damn
things.

"Yes, poor Harvey," Becky said.  "And poor, poor Marjorie.  You know we
missed the funeral last winter.  We were out West skiing and we didn't
even hear until two days later.  We were so sorry.  We sent a note and
we sent him flowers.  I ought to go give him a big hug, I really ought
to."

"He'll enjoy that," said Lily.

"And I ought to propitiate my sister dear," Alden said.  "Where's
Ginger hiding herself?  Where's she hiding Betsy?  I understand she's
brought Betsy with her, poor kid.  Well, we can all be poor
together."

(But Ginger had absented herself for the day.  She had driven Lily's
car, with Lily's not very happily granted permission, up to Ogunquit,
where she ate a fried haddock platter beside the ocean and bought a box
of saltwater taffy intended as a gift of welcome for her brother and
his family and of which she consumed more than a few pieces, the
wintergreen ones, and the molasses, and the rum-flavored ones, as she
sat swinging her legs over the side of a cliff face and staring off
across the swelling, glinting waters.  The sea was calm all the way to
Spain.  Ginger heard a maritime report on a tinny portable radio
playing on the counter at the roadside stand in York where she stopped
for a pistachio ice cream cone.

(And Betsy had spent the morning vacuuming the house from top to
bottom.  Her uncle and aunt and cousins were going to take over the
attic, which was partitioned into rooms-such interesting rooms had been
fitted beneath the roof.  The dividing walls were single widths of wide
pine boards standing upright and once painted creamy white and pocked
with spy holes where knots had long since dried and popped.  The wide
board floors had once been painted red and were covered with
coming-apart sisal rugs which Lily hadn't realized were so shabby until
she pictured the Aldens treading on them.  Lily had rolled the rugs
loosely and fed them through an open attic window, the rugs unfurling
and skimming impressively to earth.  A defenestration, Harvey came up
with the word for it, and he and Betsy and Lily had taken turns
launching rugs and standing below to watch rugs float and fall.

"Who's going to go in which room?"  Betsy had asked Lily.  Lily had put
Betsy in charge of bureau-top bouquets and Betsy did not think her boy
cousins would care for big arrangements of Miss Lingard phlox and
gladioli and baby's breath although they might not notice a few Shasta
daisies in a jam jar enough to be bothered by them.

"Where do you think?"  Lily asked.  She sat upon the reliable lid of an
old army footlocker, reflecting upon bath towels and pillowcases and
water carafes and coat hangers and extension cords-she understood the
boys were bringing some sort of computer with them.

"I don't know.  I don't think I know them well enough to say.  There
was only that one week we all went to Bermuda together, but Little
Becky was too young to be anybody yet, she was just three, wow, that
was ten years ago.  And the boys never came out of the ocean.  They
were just heads bobbing in the water.  Since then, it's been pretty
much just phone calls and pictures between us.  I know Glover's my age,
we have that in common.  Brooks and Rollins aren't really twins, are
they?  They look so alike, only I know Mummy has to send them birthday
presents on different birthdays.  She's always late and it's always
video games."

"The younger boys are a year apart but Rollins received a double
promotion after the third grade so they're together in school," Lily
said.

"Rollins is smart?"  Betsy and the daisy in her hand snapped upright.

"I recall everyone was very excited when he made a battery out of
vinegar and zinc and paperclips and powered a lightbulb.  A
psychologist weighed in as well when they assessed him."

"Rollins made it past a psychologist?  ")

Then, at two o'clock, Betsy had borrowed a three-speed bike from the
tangle of bikes left behind in the barn by a hundred years of Hills who
had always meant to send for them, and she coasted off down the
driveway to a babysitting job in one of the new houses in the planned
community which had arisen a mile or so down the road.

"You're going to have a houseful with all of us here," Alden said to
Lily.  He placed his hand on Little Becky's head as if he would
condense her if only he could.

"We'll be fine," Lily assured him, because Alden had been such a decent
little boy.  He had, on his successive summer holidays here, neatly put
his dirty laundry in the hamper, and he had always given in to his
younger sister when she howled for the last cupcake or the first ride
on the rope swing.  And years later, Alden's intended, Becky, had come
downstairs with her hair in curlers and a mud mask on her face and
washed and put away the breakfast dishes on the morning she married
Alden, from her husband-to-He's grandparents' house, Becky's own
parents having died so sadly, so early, of separate illnesses.  Very
little in the way of thoughtfulness and good behavior earned one a
great deal of subsequent goodwill and obligation.  At least, things
worked that way with Lily.  She sighed and went so far as to pat the
elder Becky's sturdy shoulder.

"But just smell the air here," Alden declared.  "I tell you, I'm going
to work in the garden.  I'm going to plow the field.  I'm going to walk
in the woods every day.  I'm going to split wood.  I'm going to tap the
maples.  I'd like to learn smithying, or maybe I'll try my hand at
stone masonry."  New England had so many spare rocks left lying about,
he'd always noticed that.

Glover stared at his altered father and he sniffed tentatively-was this
loco air?  he wondered.  A cluster of intensely sweet climbing roses
hung beside his ear.  He'd been backed into the prickly bushes by his
mother who had been trying to tuck his T-shirt into his jeans to
conceal at least a part of its message, Roses are red, Violets are
blue, You're attractive, Let's which she hadn't noticed back in New
York even as she ironed the thing, at the time being more mindful not
to crease the sleeves-for Glover had strong feelings about creased
sleeves-than to critique the coarse doggerel.

"Don't tell Glover the air is good for him," she said.  "He'll wear a
clothespin on his nose."

"Ha," Little Becky yipped, but Glover only allowed, "I might just have
to."  He was not sure.  He remembered, as well, having once been read a
falling-apart book here about naughty creatures called Goops.

(Are you a Coop?  he 'd been asked.  No!  he had piped back.) For now,
he was going to proceed slowly.  He was going to stay cool.

"Shall we move inside?"  Lily suggested.  "The mosquitoes seem to have
found us."  She brushed her own pale face at the spot where Little
Becky's scarlet cheek was being fed upon.

They all carried mosquitoes into the little parlor, attached to their
skin and caught in the folds of their clothing.  Harvey, shedding paint
chips over Betsy's careful vacuuming, had hustled inside to make
certain none of them tried to move into his bedroom (he had not
listened as Lily described the arrangements) and to explain his evening
news-watching schedule, which was sacrosanct because somebody had to
stay on top of the world's vagaries and in particular, CBS's weird
skew.  Brooks and Rollins entered on Harvey's heels, mocking his gait,
his when, his shallow, dry cough.  They began to swat at the pestering
mosquitoes, chasing them down and crushing them against lampshades,
sofa cushions, Lily's nice walls, smearing and flecking blood all
over.

"No, no."  Harvey was disgusted with them.  "Not like that.  Hold out
your arm and let the mosquito come to you and then tense the muscle
just as she bites.  You trap her by her burrowed snoot and grind her
firmly out with your thumb."  He demonstrated.  The boys, whom he
seemed to have fascinated temporarily, sat at his feet, staring at
their raised, bared forearms, cooing coaxingly.

Lily led Becky up the grand, curving staircase and a second lesser,
twisting flight of stairs to the attic.  Oven air roiled over them as
Lily suggested Becky look around and decide whom to fit where in the
jumble of rooms.  The attic was cooler at night, the upper windows
caught what breezes there were, Lily said, and Becky had moved to a
window to wait for the first faint stir of relief to finger the gauzy
stuff of the curtains.

Little Becky, trailing her mother's and her great-aunt's voices, had
become lost.  There were doors and doors and doors in this house.  She
entered, after opening every door twice, Ginger's room, where such an
interesting disorder dominated, and instinct told Little Becky her own
encroachment would not be detected until too long after the event for
any blame to fall.  She lay upon the bed just to see how soft-for the
bed looked very soft, pillows and pillows were piled-and she remained
there reading extremely high fashion magazines lifted from a heap on
the nightstand.

Alden surprised himself and fell deeply asleep out on the lawn where he
had sat beneath the greatest of the ancient maples, clasped between the
prongs of its risen roots, until Harvey found and fetched him in for
supper, which, planned by Lily with pleasing the young people in mind,
turned out to be individual English muffin cheese pizzas, baked French
fries, and raspberry Zarex and lime sherbet floats, plus a grated
carrot and raisin saladViobody touched.

LAST OF ALL, that^t summer, Harvey's grandson had arrived one night
when the aurora borealis arced and bowed, lambent and eerie, high
overhead across the deep indigo northern sky.  The family was sitting
outside on the terrace, marveling at and entranced by the phenomenon.
They stubbed out mosquitoes and fanned away the powdery wingbeats of
moths and sipped from ice-filled glasses and held the cold, sweating
glasses against their faces and breastbones and stomachs.  They spoke
aloud at intervals, Oh, look, lest any member of the group fail to
look, or look away and miss the show.  They were still, in those early
days, making efforts.  Ginger had just asked, brightly, generally,
"Gin?  Tonic?  Anyone?"  before finishing the bottles, and Harvey
helpfully inquired, "Ice?"  as he rattled the last cubes from the tray
during the after-supper pre-aurora scramble for the dash of something
that would hit the spot.

When particles of headlights quizzed between the trees and, swinging
round the driveway curve, consolidated and homed in on the terrace
sitters, heads swiveled toward the breakaway beam, the falling star,
what was it?  Dazzled, the Hills gazed.  They set their glasses down
upon the terrace stones and rose from their chaise longues, the
swinging settee, the hammock hitched between posts, and approached.
(And had this been a real thunderbolt headed their way, they would all
have been killed, as Alden remarked later.)

"Why, it's young Arthur," Harvey said.  "Young Arthur," he hailed the
lanky figure angling out of an open-sided Jeep.  "What are you doing
here?"  he asked.  He did not embrace his grandson.  Nevertheless, he
stood close enough to him to catch him and hold him, or, alter
natively, shake him.  Arthur hesitated, then briefly leaned against the
old man.

"There's been a change of plans," Arthur said.  "And anyhow, meet
Phoebe first," he added.  "Phoebe?"  he said, and a young woman emerged
not very gracefully from the driver's side of the Jeep, her attention
incompletely called away from some other situation within the
vehicle.

"Hey," spoke Phoebe, with some sort of accent.  "Hey," she spoke more
sharply, her hand raised and pointed toward the Jeep's interior,
holding on to, invisible in the gloom, a string.  Her hand slid down
the invisible string and vanished through the Jeep's side.  She
struggled, then lifted out a striped kitten.  She swiftly set it down.
The kitten rared and hissed and leaped on wire legs behind a mud-caked
Jeep wheel.  The Hills, except for Harvey, Lily, Ginger, and Glover,
knelt and clucked and chuckled at the kitten who could flee no further,
held by the length of twine looped around its waist.

"Change of plans?  " Harvey asked Arthur coldly.

"Listen, toiling at the Huff and Sparks Agency was never my idea,"
Arthur said.

"Damn right, that was my idea, since somebody had to have an idea,"
Harvey said.

"I don't care about advertising.  I don't want to name after-dinner
mints.  It took a team of us two months to come up with The Admiral's
Assortment, which frankly, sounds more like Victorian pornography to
me," Arthur said.  "So I've given them their shot-"

" No, no, you've got that backward, sonny.  They were giving you the
shot," Harvey said.

"Okay, so it was a duel at twenty paces and, bang, everybody missed,"
Arthur said.  "No harm done."

"Well," said Harvey.  "Well.  And now you've taken on, you've taken on"
He waved at the little cat.

"We only just found the kitten," said Phoebe.  She had moved to
Arthur's side.  They had rehearsed this interview with Arthur's
grandfather.

She had advised against the Victorian pornography remark, but Arthur
had said his people were nothing like her own Baptist kin, and Arthur
had worked in the dueling metaphor beautifully, in her opinion, like a
speech in a play.  The kitten was just a plus.  "We heard mewing under
a mess of leaves and Dixie Cups and all that at a rest stop on the New
Jersey Turnpike, that's where we were," Phoebe explained.  "All its
little litter mates were gone."

"Gone?  Gone where?"  Little Becky wanted to know.  Perhaps the other
kittens were friendlier ones who didn't flex their common-pin claws and
bare their icicle-chip fangs.

"Arthur's friend means they were gone gone," Alden said.  "To
heaven."

"God, that's sad," said Ginger, and she sent Betsy back to the terrace
to fetch her drink.

"Anyway, that's a girl cat, Phoebe sexed it," Arthur said.

"I'm from West Virginia," Phoebe explained as the family regarded her
consideringly.

"Does she have a name, the little mite?  " asked Becky.

"Not yet."

"Arthur's all named out."

They were arguing over names for the kitten when Lily slipped away to
the kitchen where she poured milk into a saucepan.  She did not care
for cats.  They killed birds and they had such an un doglike way of
switching their tails while counting the ways in which one had
displeased them, but Lily had to feel sorry for this one, for the dead
siblings, for the Dixie Cups, for the girdle of string tightening
around its scrawny torso.  Lily dipped a knuckle into the warming milk
and she opened a can of white tuna packed in spring water and spooned
half, and then the other half, into a saucer, and she tipped the
warm-enough milk into a bowl.  The kitten could have the saucer and the
bowl to keep for its own.  Lily also slipped a pair of scissors into
her skirt pocket.  She planned to quietly confiscate the string.

When Lily returned to the terrace bearing the cat snack on a toleware
tray, with Diet Sprite and peanut butter on celery sticks and vanilla
creme-filled wafers for young Arthur and his-for Phoebe, Harvey had
already pronounced that the young couple could stay in the barn even
though Lily had decided, as she pulled fibers from the rather too tough
celery stalks, that Phoebe would have to take the small green-on
green-striped wallpaper bedroom across the hall from Betsy's room,

and Arthur could double up with Glover on a trundle bed in the off
kitchen chamber Glover had moved into after a hornet stung him up in
his attic bedroom and his throat swelled shut, which Glover had very
much minded.

" In the barn?  " Lily asked, which meant she did not think much of the
barn scheme.  She lofted the tray.  The creme-filled wafers were not
intended for Ginger whose hand reached up from a chaise and sought.

"In the barn," Harvey stated.  "In that little flat under the barn.
Hired man used to live there.  There's a pipe for running water and a
thunder box and some old electricity.  Woodstove 's chucked its
chimbley, still, 's summer yet, you don't need the woodstove."  For
Arthur wasn't going to be let off entirely easily for having forsaken
Huff and Sparks, although in Harvey's private opinion, they were a
la-di-dah outfit.  Nevertheless, he 'd been told young Arthur was
creative.  Though all this making up of things was not, in Harvey's
further opinion, particularly a man's job of work.  Indeed, Harvey was
glad to see Arthur had a girlfriend even if she wasn't a very pretty
one.  Girls tended not to be these days, or if girls were still pretty,
then Harvey was no longer any judge.

"All right, the barn it'll be," said Arthur after allowing a pause long
enough to permit an alternative offer to be thought of and presented,
but Lily understood that her plan would not be an improvement.  "I'll
just fetch our stuff," Arthur said.

"Sounds tremendous fun," Ginger drawled at Phoebe from her comfortable
chaise.  "You'll look back, as one finds one does and you'll see these
romantic adventures resonate a lifetime.  They have to," she added
darkly.

"You can drive that jalopy of yours up to but not into the barn
because

Lily has let the floor joists go so badly," said Harvey.

"Wait," said Becky.  "Before you start up the engine, where's the
kitten?"

"I have her," Lily said.  "And I think she'll be better off in the
house.  At her size, one of the barn owls could snatch her or that fox
who's been hanging around, or even a coyote, although I didn't believe
that horror story about a coyote grabbing a toddler in Byfield.  And I
think that was just a roving pack of feral dogs who savaged the sheep
over on the Lawrence Road last week."

"That was people from Lawrence, I heard," Harvey said.  "Diabolists or
dope fiends or carnival workers or some such.  Senior Village got the
word.  Of course, it's all been hushed up to avert widespread panic."

"Cool," said Brooks, or Rollins.

"My goodness, how awful," said Becky.

"Nonsense," said Lily even as she cradled the kitten in her two hands
and peered uneasily toward the woods.  "Still, the barn won't be a very
nice place for the kitten," she said.

"Darling kitten, don't be eaten," Little Becky cried.

"Well, the Senior Village version, I'm not sure I'd put much credence
in what all those folks with hearing aids imagine they hear," Alden
told Arthur and Phoebe.

"You missed supper," Harvey mentioned to his grandson.  "We had green
beans and fish sticks."

THEIR CHANGE OF STATUS from guests to residents could be charted
through the cessation of Lily's services.  By the end of August, she
had stopped changing their bedsheets for them.  She drove down to the
village without conveying their dry cleaning or their dry cleaning
tickets, even when shirts and silk summer dresses were left in soft
heaps on the seat of the deacon's bench and dated receipts were slipped
beneath her morning cup of coffee, marked with additional notes-Make
sure that the butter stain on the sleeve is really gone this time. Lily
no longer called their attention to the early-evening pheasant strut
past the French doors.  She did not encourage them to watch exceptional
sunsets from the west facing viewing spot along the upper ridge.  She
began to begrudge them their armfuls of cut hollyhocks for their
bureau-top bouquets as they depleted her gardens.  She mentioned it
when one of them broke the door of her toaster oven, and she also
remarked upon the melted cheddar cheese seared to orange leather around
the perimeter of her broiler pan, which even Ajax and an overnight
soaking could not budge.

She no longer provided individual bars of specific and premium bath
soaps, nor water-softening bath salts, fresh gourd loo fahs tartar
control toothpastes, minted mouthwashes, waxed dental floss, whitening
and brightening laundry detergents, fabric softener, spray starch,
Woolite

Gentle Wash, loo-watt lightbulbs, A A batteries, out-of-town
newspapers,

People magazine issues featuring junior members of the royal House of
Windsor on the cover, the TV Guide, postage stamps, business size
envelopes, safety pins, sewing needles, ant cups, OFF Spray, Calamine
lotion, Vaseline, Bag Balm ointment, ear swabs, cotton balls, Bufferin,
Anacin, Tylenol, Alka-Seltzer, Contac, nose drops, Immodium capsules,
Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C, Kleenex, Tampax, cream sherry, single
malt Scotch, Tanqueray gin, dry vermouth, micro brewed beers, certain
very specific wines spelled out phonetically on slips of paper clipped,
with borrowed paper clips, to Lily's shopping list so she wouldn't be
misunderstood when she inquired at Towne Line Spirits.  Recently Lily
had taken to rereading her shopping lists and crossing off addenda
items-Froot Loops, her bed Boursin, Evian water, Oreos not Hydrox,
cocktail onions, lamb chops, those good crackers that come in the blue
box from Sweden.  One of the family had become adept at forging her
handwriting so Lily had to read her list very carefully lest she be
duped into buying a box of Funny-Bones.  Harvey was her chief suspect
in the handwriting caper because he and she were products of the same
elementary school, but it seemed unlikely that Harvey hankered after
Funny-Bones.  So Lily guessed at a conspiracy.

Their mail began to arrive readdressed to the River Road.  They had
their own house keys turned, down at the True Value.  Transcripts were
transferred and Betsy, Glover, Brooks, Rollins, and Little Becky were
registered for fall enrollment at the Towne High School in twelfth,
eleventh, and ninth grades.  Phoebe found a job in the admissions
department at the Towne Community Hospital and Arthur began to make the
rounds.  Betsy was so in demand for babysitting that she was seldom
home.  Alden oiled and sharpened an ax he found out in the barn heaved
into a beam and he bought a gas-run chain saw down at the Co-Op, and
ropes and pulleys and cleats to fit over the soles of his new
steel-toed work boots.

Harvey, on his own initiative, erected a TV antenna that resembled a
young airplane skidded to a stop against the central chimney pile on
the rooftop.  He propped his tallest ladder against the back of the
house.  He climbed, his feet executing sudden dance steps as the rungs
spun.  He tramped across the roof slates and fed a whipping wire over
the precipitous edge and drilled a hole through a window sash to snake
the wire through to the little-parlor television set, and after all
that effort, reception still wasn't too good.  He had to watch his Red
Sox games with the television's volume turned down and a radio tuned to
the play-by-play broadcast as shadow figures leaped on a shifting field
and he thought of other rosters and other years.

Ginger fell in with some old friends joyously recalled from long-ago
summers.  She hauled them home for coffee.  She used the Sevres service
which had been placed out of harm's way on the highest shelf of the
china cupboard, but she stood on a tapestry chair cover in her muddy
huaraches (she and her guests had first toured the plundered gardens)
to lift it down.  Dust, long settled at the bottoms of the seldom-used
cups, floated to the surface of the coffee, but Ginger had been too
vividly transported to the past to notice this rather regrettable
presentation, and her old acquaintances made a great point of not
noticing even as they sieved their coffee through their gritted front
teeth.  They were never, however, to be available for a follow-up
picnic on the river using an historic Hill hamper outfitted with clever
collapsible cups and a pie compartment, all the while adrift in an
ancient Hill canoe Ginger had discovered in the barn beneath a pile of
old window screens and which, she said, would be sure to float once the
water swelled the gaps in the seams.

Becky, who hoped she wasn't hurting Lily's feelings, asked if she might
prepare dinner from time to time.  There were certain favorites the
children missed-her crispy-skin duckling, her cold veal roast with
homemade tarragon mayonnaise.  Lily told Becky to pick all the tarragon
she needed from the herb patch which at that time of year burgeoned
with wasteful plenty.  The younger boys found a favorite place to swim
in cold deep pools in the river scooped by the current below the
stanchions of the old railroad bridge and they were happily away for
the remainder of the summer's days.  Glover met a girl (down at the IGA
magazine rack, he revealed under questioning), although there may have
been two girls involved, no one was sure, for she, or they, looked
same-ish but never quite the same when glimpsed, in Glover's company
never introduced, of course, as she waited in her car while Glover
charged into the house to grab a flashlight, a blanket, the OFF Spray.
Has anyone noticed if it's the same car?  Harvey asked sensibly.

Lily made a vet appointment for the kitten's checkup and shots.  Lily
had no cat carrier so, on the day of the visit, she placed the kitten
in the big oven roaster pan and fastened the lid with a bungee cord so
she could prop the lid open an inch or two to admit fresh air.  Little
Becky, at loose ends as usual, tagged along and afterward wished she
hadn't.

"We got looks," Little Becky reported back to the several
late-afternoon sitters she tracked down in the little parlor.  "We
waited in the waiting room and everybody looked at the roasting pan and
whispered."

Ginger set down the crooked piece of cross-stitch she was playing at
working and remarked, " "They wait to hang the cobwebs of their gossip
out and catch a fly."  "

"Huh?"  asked Little Becky.  "What?"  She was in no mood for Aunt
Gingerisms.

"You heard me," Ginger said.

The family agreed, Lily's specific services had, all along, been
imperfectly performed.  She was a dreamy one, was Lily, drifting into
their rooms carrying clean towels and then forgetting why she had
knocked on their doors in the first place, after she swept a handful of
spent blossoms from a bureau scarf and collected a scraped-clean cake
plate from a bedside table and placed scrap-paper bookmarks in
splayed-open library books, wandering off with the towels still creased
over her arm.  The family was forced, soaking wet after their baths, to
clasp their damp-marked dressing gowns around themselves and embark on
towel hunts, finding them draped over the balustrade, folded on a
window ledge, or shoved inside the blanket chest at the top of the
landing.  However had Lily managed all on her own, living alone and
looking after that great big ark of a house, the family wondered, when
even the simple distribution of bath towels was beyond her?  Harvey
mentioned, as well, having discovered decayed fruit in his sock drawer,
and Little Becky recalled then that on the same humiliating vet visit
Aunt Lily had not even known what the cat's name was when the
receptionist asked.

"I thought it was Puff," said Alden.

"Smoky," said Becky.

"No, she's Agnes," said Betsy, for the kitten was a grey.

"Well, you'd better tell Aunt Lily that," said Little Becky.

BY OCTOBER, by that rain-wrecked night two-thirds of the way into
October, the Hills had retreated to their separate precincts.  Supper
had been gotten over with early in deference to their various announced
plans for the Saturday night which the sudden storm had caused to be
canceled or postponed or independently judged just not worth the effort
of digging in the back hall closet for the same size rubber boots and a
functioning umbrella and a hooded slicker with a zipper that would ride
down as willingly as it rode up.  They had not, after all, departed for
the movies, a mall crawl, bridge night at Senior Village, babysitting,
the Divorce Dynamics Workshop in the Unitarian Meeting Hall, a date.
They were peckish again, the simple supper long since bolted and
regarded in retrospect as a very late afternoon snack composed of
uninspiring elements not of their own choosing-tuna wiggle, cucumber
slices in vinegar, and brownies, a Becky effort.  (She had swiftly
lowered her sights, catering for a dozen.) They thought of toast and
hot cocoa and the little Revere ware bowl of pale pineapple rings
macerating in sugar and their own juices.

They poked and stirred their wood fires, those who were lucky enough to
possess fireplaces in their bedrooms, averting their faces from the
oily, ashy surges of smoke the surly wind chased back down the chimney
stacks.  They all wished Lily would switch on the furnace but she had
explained it was too early in the season to take that step.  She doled
out extra blankets.  She asked, reasonably, haven't you a sweater?" and
then she asked, impassively, haven't you a heavier sweater?  as they
made shows of pulling on pullovers and shivering, regardless.  But
sincere shivering was involuntary and their versions seemed willed, in
Lily's opinion.  Haven't you a scarf?  Lily asked.  Haven't you a pair
of house gloves?  she asked, which unlikely item of inner ware they all
suspected

Lily had just invented but they did not challenge her for Lily may well
have presented them with clumsy knit mitts which they would have been
bound to wear.

Alden speculated that Lily was obliged to wait for some late autumnal
sunset to align itself exactly with the rusty croquet hoops atilt in
the side yard before she could touch the thermostat.  Towne was a very
ancient and tradition-plagued enclave, he said.  On the Fourth of July,
half the householders raised thirteen-star flags by their front doors
and the Ben Franklin Store still sold penny candy for a penny, though
only as a loss leader to draw in the new people and the few
knowledgeable tourists who came for the architecture-there was a
late-Elizabethan domestic remnant tucked away behind the town tennis
courts, which had been written about in books.

"Eat green Jell-O, Dad," Glover had said, which must have been very
rude.  Brooks and Rollins laughed so hard they had to lie down, rolling
and overlapping, on the little-parlor sofa.

But on this particular stormy October night, deprived of other
diversions, the Hills, for all their differences, were similarly
occupied.  They were writing.  They wrote because they had a great deal
to say for themselves and they had wearied of saying it to one another.
Their old friends and former associates lived far away now.  The eight
pages of the latest NYNEX bill had been taped sequentially across the
refrigerator door.  They had rung a dozen states and chatted over three
time zones.  Harvey and Ginger had repeatedly called a 900 number to
cancel one another's vote as they registered their contrary says in a
nationwide poll, Should the U.S. Congress Bail Out the Failed S.&L."s?
It took the pleasure out of visiting the refrigerator, facing those
eight pages of toll calls taped across the door.  Initials had been
inked beside charges, all claimed and accounted for except the solid,
shameful tattletale block of Teen Talk Line tariffs occupying three of
the NYNEX bill's pages.  Becky, after a sad and disappointed appraisal
of her eye-evading, foot shuffling brood called upon the Missoni carpet
in Becky and Alden's attic sitting room, said she was going to write a
letter of protest to the FCC complaining of the exploitation of witless
children, and it may have been this assertion of Becky's that put the
idea in everyone else's heads, this option of taking up the pen.

HARVEY HAD COMMANDEERED the dining room with its broad polished
cherry-wood table and proximity to the sherry decanter.  He lifted up a
table leaf, secured the leg, and pushed aside the drawn thread work
runner and the cut-glass bowl full of dried poppy heads, not raised in
display but clumped face downward in the bowl.  He dug his slippered
heels into the sculpted pattern of the red Chinese rug and he buttoned
his woolly cardigan up and over his chin.  His posture telegraphed
belligerence or he may have just been hunched against the cold.  He had
a mingy fire banked in a corner of the dining room's-originally
kitchen's-great maw of a fireplace.  Lily had told him not to get
carried away.  She was drying bristly bunches of rosemary suspended
from the great old iron arm from which a great old iron pot used to
swing back in the days when the Hills were cannibals, Hill children
were always told.

The chandelier, the wall sconces, the lamp on the sideboard, were all
alight, but Harvey cast his own darkening shadow across his writing
paper.  His trifocal glasses slipped down the bone of his very straight
nose and stopped at the knob on the end as he peered through the
uppermost portion of the lenses.  All surfaces, the grain of the
table's wood, the bond of the paper, the brown freckles and silver
hairs on the back of his hand, blinked into sharp focus but were imbued
with a floating quality which he didn't mind, actually.  He was, he
concluded, coming to the disembodied stage which he did not doubt
offered its own possibilities and pleasures to explore.  Indeed, he had
noticed he had to drink less now, which was a boon, considering the
quality of Lily's cidery and oddly particled sherry.  Besides, the
scientists had just come out alleging the lead in leaded glass
decanters seeped into any long-sitting liquor, although Harvey chose
not to worry overmuch, the harm having long since been done in his
case, he didn't wonder.  Harvey chose to make the most of any
predicament in which he found himself.  He maintained a healthy rooting
interest in his own happiness and well-being and even now, even at his
age, he was keen to get on with whatever was going to occur to him
next.

He flattened and reread a brief, typed letter.  Receiving it earlier in
the week, he had acted upon his immediate impulse to consign the letter
to the wastepaper basket but second thoughts had told him it might
provide better sport to answer the thing.  Besides, he seemed to recall
he was under some kind of contractual obligation to respond.

He picked up his pen after attempting, first, to scrabble up a pen
shaped bar of shadow that lay upon the tabletop.  He'd torn a piece of
lined paper from a school notebook left lying on the kitchen counter,
never minding the algebraic equation homework written on the back of
the scavenged page except to register a general impression that the
solution surely was not correct.  Lily had failed to respond to his
request for a sheet or two of the best household stationery, which she
had hidden away from him, otherwise he 'd have fetched a hunk of it
himself.  He had yet to ascertain whether she had a hearing or merely a
listening problem.  Someday he 'd have to slide up behind her in his
house slippers and shrill into his London Bobby souvenir whistle, just
as an experiment.

He wrote in a rush.

Listen, Archie, tell your "buyers" where they can get off.  Never in my
life have I been so insulted.  The "Offer" is unacceptable.  It is a
Bay of Pigs of an offer.  I suggest your "buyers" will be happier
living in a cardboard box beneath an 1-86 underpass.  They seem that
sort of people.  I AM NOT SUGGESTING 750"OOO DOLLARS FOR MY HOUSE, I

AM DEMANDING.  I can out wait any "regional recession."  Just look at
the plumbing, every inch of it copper, for God's sake, parquet floors,
stained-glass casement windows, those beams in the Great Room came from
Shakespeare's friend's birthplace before Parliament put its foot down
on that sort of thing.  I am beginning to wonder whether you could sell
a paper poke to a one-armed man carrying three oranges and may be
obliged to take my business elsewhere.  Very cordially yours, HRH. P.S.
You are aware the rose garden does not convey?  My sister is a devout
rosarian and I have promised her first pick.

GINGER LANGUISHED in her bedroom behind a firmly shut door.  She lay
like a Henry Moore lady upon her sloping sleigh bed, lolling against
the half-dozen pillows whose support she required behind her neck,
beneath her elbows, propping her knees.  She had covered herself with a
rose-pink shirred-satin bed puff she had come across folded in its
original tissue, all the tags, except the price, attached, some
ancestress having determined decades before that such a bed puff was
far too nice ever to be used.  Oh, Ginger could just picture the stern
Hill aunt presiding at her sixtieth birthday dinner, only eventually
consenting to unwrap her special gift, un knotting ribbons and peeling
back tape so she could reuse the ribbon and the wrapping paper and, if
at all possible, the tape.  She reacted, when at last the gift was
revealed, with the Hill Aunt variation.  One was disappointed not by
receiving too little, but displeased at having been handed so much. But
you shouldn't have, had been spoken by the aunt, as if you had
strangled one of the barn cats and worn the carcass wound around your
bloodied hands like a tiger-striped muff.

Ginger mused upon her ancestresses who had left behind, in bureau
drawers and standing chests, bars of petrified gardenia soap and
cylinders of solid bath crystals and long-necked carafes of bath oils,
their contents separated like salad dressing but which could yet be
shaken and poured.  Their kid leather clutch bags stuffed with crumpled
1955 newsprint, and their morocco-leather-covered diaries with
gold-leafed, onionskin pages, remained unopened, un confided in-well,
they had had nothing to confide, for their emotional lives had been as
stinted of the luxuries of passion and personal dramas as their cool
and shallow bathwater had been bereft of emollients and scents.  Ginger
would have responded to the pathos of it all-such self-denying, un
actualized essentially lost women-were she not so distracted by seeking
out and availing herself of the buried acorns they had squirreled away
in all the corners of the house, indeed, craftily concealed, Ginger
could not help but suspect, from someone very like herself whom they
had anticipated with their sharp if squandered intelligences.  The bed
puff had been hidden in a box hand-labeled Useful Clean Jars, which had
not rattled when Ginger aimed a kick against the nagging detail,
Useful.

That the rose pink of the bedspread flattered her skin tones, Ginger
was aware.  She'd recently read an article reminding women that their
bedclothes should be as sensitively selected as their makeup and
daytime attire.  Yellow sal lowed green could be ghastly, and pure
white was not entirely kind to more mature skin tones.  She did not
care to be reminded that her skin was, perhaps, less youthful than it
once had been.  Oh, where was her hand mirror?  She didn't like to
look, but she had to.

There, the mirror had slithered down the satin smoothness of her bed
puff, landing lightly atop a tangle of discarded underwear, lying just
out of her reach for, arranged in bed, Ginger had no wish to upset her
arrangements.

Proper pillow positioning was such an art.

Ginger sighed heavily.  She could see her breath hanging briefly in the
air.  How could that be?  Her room was one of the warmer ones.  A wood
fire flared away in her fireplace.  The silk flowers of her mantelpiece
bouquet were beginning to curl and ruddy cinders launched themselves
over the screen and dropped onto the hearth bricks as aglow nuggets.
Ginger was keeping an eye on that situation.  She huffed in further
demonstration and wondered whether it was possible to blow a human
smoke ring.  She pursed her lips and puffed.  Apparently not.  She felt
her brow.  She wondered if she was running the opposite of a fever.
Whatever ailment did that signify?  She would not mind contracting a
mil dish illness requiring trays in bed and the little-parlor TV
wrestled up the stairs and set upon her bedside table.

She wore a pair of her husband's plaid flannel pajamas snatched as her
own (speaking of inattention to boudoir fashions) the day she had
packed and left home.  She was further wrapped in her grandfather's
plaid-a different plaid-wool bathrobe.  She had been sliding around in
Alden's warmest pair of Ragg wool socks until he had spotted them on
her feet and requested their return.  His wife and his children might
raid his sock drawer, Alden had said, but he drew the line at his
grownup, divorcing sister, which was not very brotherly of him.  Ginger
could only suppose Becky had gotten to him at some point over the past
twenty-odd years of their marriage.

Which observation led to another insight for her book.  She seized a
3X5 card.  They were tucked everywhere, in her bathrobe pockets,
between her layered pillows, beneath her wineglass.  Her wine.  She
reached and sipped and plucked a pencil, speared into her hair helping
to secure her knotted hair, and she began to write rapidly-Adult
siblings-marriage of???-L.  L. Bean sleepwear, footwear, etc.
outlasting life, love, loyalties???!!!-concluding etc."  etc.????  to
remind herself she'd have far more to say on the subject as further
examples occurred to her, for occur to her they would.  Her mind was
well seeded with these incipient pearls developing cool and smooth and
glowing against her brain.

But enough of scholarship.  She tossed the file card toward the old
shortbread tin that contained a clutter of other cards, and she plunged
the pencil again into her uncoiling hair.  She burrowed down deeper
among her bedclothes.  She drained her wine and poured herself half a
glass more, tipping the bottle empty.  She tilted back the fringed
shade of her porcelain shepherdess in a panniered skirt holding a crook
and a lam biking lamp to shed more light upon her lapboard, extracted
from Lily's very complete invalid's supply cupboard and leaning now
against her pillow-bolstered knees.  She had come across her
grandfather's old Waterman fountain pen in his secretary desk's secret
drawer, and one day while Lily was busy in the garden dispatching
Japanese beetles by that amusing method she employed, Ginger had helped
herself to a stack of his writing paper as well, a very heavy bond and
creamy with age which was seldom used lest it be used up, a practice
for which Ginger was grateful even as she was bound not to observe it
herself.

She centered a sheet of the paper upon her writing board.  She pointed
her pen.  It scratched effectlessly, and she shook the pen down in hard
strokes as if it were a near-empty tube of moisturizer.  My darling,
she wrote then, in large, looping letters.  The pen, subtly cracked
along its agate barrel, seeped black ink onto her fingers.  She flicked
them clean against the dark lapel of her robe and poised her pen again.
How far had she gotten?  My darling, she read approvingly.  Oscar, she
added thoughtfully.

A ruddy cinder launched itself over the fire screen.  Ginger was
keeping an eye on that situation.

BETSY WROTE TO her father once a week.  She had set aside a certain
hour several months ago when she and her mother first arrived here in
Towne.  Betsy had, in the beginning, approached the hour eagerly, she
had so much to tell him and of course she very much missed him.  But
lately, the letter writing had become a chore to which she sat down
dutifully.

She possessed a picture of her father, kept in her desk drawer beneath
a box of colored pencils (for her Advanced Biology homework,
diagramming realistic hearts and such).  Her mother would have had
dramatics had she spotted a picture of Louis on Betsy's bureau top, but
Ginger would have run even wilder had she happened upon Louis concealed
in a drawer.  Betsy had slid the photo under the lining of her suitcase
that last, very terrible day at home in Kansas.  It was the official
portrait he had affixed to his campaign literature when he had stood,
sadly not very successfully, for the Kansas state legislature.

(When Betsy and Ginger had accompanied Louis on the stump, Ginger sat
on the edge of Grange Hall st agings swinging her attractive legs and
shredding the red, white, and blue bunting with her three-inch heels,
all the while complaining of the rigors of political wifehood and
wondering whether she was going to end up with her own ritzy rehab
clinic someday, just like Betty Ford.)

Betsy recovered the photograph from the bottom of her drawer and
propped it against the base of her wobbly old tole desk lamp.  She had
long since dusted off the bulb with Pledge and now, when switched on,
it threw off a scent of singed, synthetic sweetness, an effect she had
come to like.  She replenished the Pledge coating at intervals.  She
guessed in years to come (and she yearned for the years to come) the
same scent would carry her back to this time and place, though who
besides herself would ever think to polish a lightbulb with Pledge
Betsy couldn't imagine so she guessed she would not live in danger of
suffering intense bouts of retrospection as long as she refrained from
the practice.

As she met her father's photographed eyes, she realized how remote he
had become.  She had not anticipated that the fierce and raw missing of
someone could fade into a mild pain when reminded of it and this not
always convenient tug to her desk to compose that week's letter.  And
she was afraid her father, who must at first have minded very much and
then had come to mind less, had perhaps by now learned to count on
returning home every night to a dark and peaceful house instead of
stepping into the full, accusing spotlight glare as Ginger sat,
slightly atilt at the kitchen alcove table, presiding tragically over a
baked-away casserole, sipping vermouth and twisting her rings.  This
was another picture Betsy had carried with her from home.

Betsy was glad she had packed her Wintersilks last summer.
Massachusetts had sounded like a cold place, or, at any rate, the first
mention of Massachusetts had made the hairs stand on the back of her
neck.  At present she was comfortable enough dressed in her Wintersilks
and corduroy jeans, a heavy jersey, boiled-wool slippers, and a felt
beret pulled down over her ears, although an irritating persistence of
draft curled around that susceptible nape of her neck.  She endured the
cold breaths of air for she had learned to be an excessively tolerant
girl and she believed the wind had a right to whistle where it would.
It was not the wind's fault someone had built a house in its path
although Uncle Alden had told her the main part of the house had been
built well over two hundred years ago so perhaps one might reasonably
expect the wind to have made other arrangements by now.  Nevertheless,
Betsy felt sympathy for the draft which was probably just coming inside
out of the rain to get warm, although if warmth was what the wind was
after, it had come to the wrong house.  Betsy's thoughts rambled,
disengaged.  Perhaps moving her desk to a different corner of her room
would help.

She leaned back and regarded the small chamber she had been given, the
last bedroom on the right where they must have had floor left over when
they finished putting up interior walls in the new (1830, Uncle Alden
said) three-story kitchen ell.  Betsy inhabited a wedge of space.  She
used a wedge of closet.  Her skirts and dresses hung hunched and
sideways as if furtively loitering behind the closed door.  The
wallpaper was a clothy feeling coffee-with-cream-colored gingham print.
The curtains were made of papery-feeling gingham of the same coffee-and
cream color, but there the effort had ended.  The bedspread was white
chenille.  She had to remember not to sit down when she wore a dark
skirt.  Betsy could not describe the furniture with her eyes closed, so
ordinary it was.  And her small desk, really meant for a child, had
been fitted into the only corner that could take it, Betsy decided, as,
in her mind's eye, she shifted the desk from wall to wall.  Hopeless.

She stood, then, and scuffed in her slipper socks toward the window,
her feet entangling with the oval of scatter rug placed in the middle
of the floor to indicate, if not to serve as, floor covering.  The
inadequate rug, which was brown, reminded Betsy of the small brownie on
the large plate she had been served for dessert earlier in the evening,
crumbs of chocolate adhering to shards of walnut.  Betsy was not being
critical of the brownie.  She was not a great eater at the best of
times, but she was struck by the way in which life at Aunt Lily's house
had been pared down to mere essences, like the four inches of warmish
bathwater, the forty-watt lightbulbs, the good-night kisses addressed
to the air and not to her cheek.

The wind may have had something to do with this, historically
shuddering through the house, picking the Hills' existences clean to
the very bone.  Enough was enough, Betsy concluded.  She hardened her
heart and she thrust a rolled-up bandana between the windowsill and the
sash.

She sat again at her desk and picked up her pen.  She tapped the end of
her nose which was so chilled that the tap stung the delicately molded
cartilage.  She had noticed since summer's end that a stubbed toe, a
jammed ringer, hurt worse when one was very cold.  She wondered why
that was.  She thought the cold was supposed to numb the senses.  She
had read that freezing to death was an easy end, although who, she
wondered, now, had ever truly died of the cold and then come back to
report on the experience?  She tapped her pen across her desktop.  The
problem was, she had less to say to her father when she didn't see him
every day.  She would have thought the opposite to be true, but
whatever or whomever she mentioned in her letters had to be situated
and described and explained, and none of it could possibly interest
him.  The commonplace details of her days here hardly interested her.

Dear Daddy [Betsy began], Thank you very much for the check.  I
deposited it in the bank they have down in the village.  You have to
call it the village, not downtown, not downtown Towne, I think they'd
get confused.  Anyway, the usual teller knows me now and always says
hello.  She says to say hello to Aunt Lily, too.  I don't have to show
I.D. anymore, though I don't know why they had to know me for putting
in money.  Anyway, I paid Aunt Lily for Mum's and my fair share of the
groceries this month, telephone, and electricity.  The water is free
from a well.  It tastes funny, that is, it has a taste but Aunt Lily
says it's been tested.  Plus, I gave Mum $200 just to have.  I put it
in her wallet without saying.  I think she should have her own spending
money, she's so used to finding money in her purse.  She must know it
comes from you, but I know not to say and she can pretend it's from the
same $800 she ran away with, although that was used up I don't know
when, our train tickets and all that, only I think she charged those
over the telephone.  We picked them up at the station.  At first they
couldn't find them.  I wish they hadn't found them.

I've made $145 babysitting so far this month.  Actually, sometimes it's
not really babysitting.  Mrs.  Snowdon, my exclusive client now, is
often quite tired and she has to rest in her bedroom while I play
quietly with the children until Mr.  Snowdon comes home from work.  I
like the hushed ness of their house, only I hope Mrs.  Snowdon isn't
ill, but I don't think I'm meant to ask.

ALDEN AND BECKY SAT up in their own high-mattressed bed.  They had
retired to the largest of the several attic bedrooms.  The low,
slanting ceiling made them uncommonly aware of the roof over their
heads.  They agreed, the sound of the rain on the roof was pleasant,
the regular thrumming so lulling and familiar, although they couldn't
say where the sense of familiarity had come from.  They had never
before dwelt in an actual garret.  Even their very first apartment had
been a suite of rooms on the ground floor of a Victorian manse almost
in Chestnut Hill where they had enjoyed the use of an orangery.  Alden
said perhaps the sound carried one back to one's time in the womb which
was not the sort of remark he usually made.  Becky only answered, Huh,
in a tone pitched neither to encourage nor to quell him.  Poor fellow,
she found herself thinking of her own husband.

Their New York furniture had arrived just that week.  Lily's house had
been hard for the movers to find.  A thicket of ornamental bamboo had
overgrown the sign for the River Road and Lily would not display a name
or a number on her pitted and oxidized mailbox.  Everyone who needed to
know knew where to find her, or, if not, should possess the sense to
arrive at the unmarked mailbox on the unspecified road by a process of
elimination.  Lily, the former teacher, seemed not to be able to help
herself as she set this test.

The movers, after driving past the same dog on the same lawn three
times, stopped and asked directions of a jogger.  Harvey, late for a
luncheon appointment and stepping briskly, greeted the movers on Alden
and Becky's behalf, for they had driven off to search for the overdue
van.  Harvey hustled the movers inside and marched them up the two
flights of stairs to the attic, which rose particularly steeply and
sharply turned three treads down from the top, although there was an
accommodating sheared-off angle of plaster wall worn smooth by two
centuries of shoulders rubbing past.

"That's an authentic colonial coffin corner," spoke up Ginger, who knew
everything and who had emerged from her room at the trampling of
footsteps.  She was very curious about the New York furniture.  She
stood by her conviction that they, the muttering movers, could
perfectly well ease her brother's fat Chesterfield sofa from New York
around the coffin corner.  Smitty, the veteran mover, thought not.
Becky and Alden, whose business it actually was, had by then returned
and were stationed by the front door intercepting certain cartons that
didn't look familiar and rummaging through their contents and failing
to recognize lamps that had been wrapped in sheets of the New York Post
instead of the Wall Street Journal, which would have been enough to
dispose them against the alien lamps even had they not proved to be
highly colored examples of amateur ceramics.  So Ginger, unchecked on
the attic stairs, had her compelling way and the sofa jammed just where
Smitty had expertly predicted it would.  Russ and Stevie sat on the
atilt sofa and smoked several inspirational cigarettes and remarked
several times, for they'd grown fond of the remark, that they weren't
surprised people had died up there in that attic, and then they
heave-hoed the sofa decisively as wood snapped and leather cracked and
plaster sifted and it slid through the door.  Success.

There was a mix-up concerning the Aldens' dining room table and chairs
and sideboard which made it up to the second-floor landing before Lily,
though she had vowed to stay out of the fray, advised the men the
dining room furniture was meant to be stored in a dry corner of the
barn set upon and beneath fresh tarpaulins which she would supply.

The attic was such a repository, Lily explained.  She feared for the
floor joists even if the dining room furniture could find room up
there.

Well it's quite a cozy attic, Smitty allowed.

Still, the day ended well enough for all the wrong boxes turned out to
be surplus boxes and the Aldens could say they had come out ahead.
Lily suggested they donate the ugly lamps to All Saints' next White
Elephant table with a note stressing the complete mystery of their
provenance and explaining how they had been foisted upon the Hills.
Lily had some idea that the lamps would appeal to the new people in
Towne even though she had never set foot inside a new person's house so
she really wasn't in a position to say but she had her doubts.

"Lily knows of a man who can possibly repair the sofa on site," Becky
mentioned now to Alden as they lay on their own comfortable bed beneath
the low, strummed-upon roof.

"Have to be on site," Alden said.  "That sofa's never going anywhere
again.  In a hundred years, people will wonder how the sofa ever came
to be up here, just like Mike Mulligan's steam shovel down in its
cellar."  He had spent the afternoon browsing through a box of the
children's old books and he had been reminded of a tiny universe of
tidy accommodations and solutions.

"I'm just glad we're settled.  I like looking at our own pictures,"
Becky said.

"I like that picture," Alden said.

"Lily doesn't."

"Well, no, not square blue apples such as are not to be found in
nature."

"She didn't actually say she didn't like it.  She looked and she didn't
say anything at all."

"Lily often doesn't say.  She observes in silence and you're glad of
her silences."

"Is that bucket going to overflow onto the rug?  "

"Not yet.  I'm keeping an eye on."

The blue rug that had long been the rug underfoot in their bedroom lay
upon the attic floor.  Pond-sized, Alden said, as it lapped up and
against the walls.  Becky had studied the effect and decided if she
were an interior designer she'd specialize in downsizing.  She'd move
her clients' original overstuffed furniture from the big place they'd
had to give up into the little place they had retreated to and call the
result Styletwelve-foot-long drapes puddling at the bottoms of windows,
sofas stranded like whales in a swimming pool, home entertainment
centers rising like the Hawaiian Islands.  As one's horizons shrank,
psychologically one would still feel mighty, Becky theorized.  You
think?  asked Alden.

The heated bricks of a chimney stack rose through the floorboards and
bled some warmth into the room.  Their heaviest down comforter was
billowed over them.  Their excellent angle-poise reading lamps craned
from their bedside tables, aimed at the clipboards and sheets of
writing paper leaning against their knees.  Becky thawed her fingertips
on her lightbulb and picked up her pen.  Alden, conscious of Becky as
another source of warmth, shifted closer to her and leaned back among
the pillows.  His pen, slowly tracing across a sheet of paper, scrawled
to a stop and he read over Becky's cashmere sleeve as she wrote, Dear
William.

Becky, whose elbow he had jarred as he repositioned himself,
disregarded

Alden and she wrote steadily and calmly on, which was her way.  Alden,
who had been struggling, resolved to plunge in at the deep end and get
his letter over with as well.

Dear Dexter, You've heard of last winter's showdown when heads rolled,
including your's truly.

Or would that be yours truly's?  He wrote that down and neither version
looked quite right the more he stared at them.

"Which is correct?  " he asked Becky.  "Or neither?  "

Becky considered.  The Fowlers was still thoroughly packed since Alden
had frittered away the afternoon reading Make Way for Ducklings and The
Little Engine That Could after she had asked him to organize their
books.  She had thought he would enjoy deciding about their books.

"Say, among them my own.  Heads rolled, among them my own," she
suggested.  "If that's what you really choose to say about yourself,
representing yourself to Dexter as somehow having lost your head over
all that business, last winter."

"I'm trying to strike the right casual note, but you have a point,"
Alden said.  "Particularly as I'm going to him hat in hand.  Yes, yes,
let's x out that mental image."  Alden sketched hash marks over what
he'd written.  "I mean to say, I'd look like a Halloween prank."

Dear William [Becky continued], I am writing to let you know how the
Big Move has gone.  We cleared out everything, every nook and cranny,
which took some doing but all has been left in good order.

The professional cleaners are scheduled.  I interviewed prospects the
two days I was back in NYC packing-such talk of Q-Tips and toothpicks
probing.  I detected an obsession with unclogging the crosshairs in the
heads of Phillip's screws and I hired a nut but he'll be going nuts for
us with his Q-Tip so that's all right.  As we have said, please feel
free to rent the apartment before the end of the quarter if you wish.
We were always happy there and hope you were happy with us!  I'll miss
the butler's pantry, I confess!  But best of luck with any new tenants,
unless you plan to move in yourself?  After so many years abroad, I
don't know, can you go home again?  A question for many of us, these
days.  At any rate, I hope we weren't preventing you.  You have always
been so thoughtful, William.

Yes, William had always been so thoughtful, whereas Alden had always
been so full of ideas.  Becky permitted herself to consider the
difference between the two men for a moment.  After all these years,
she was still coming up with Alden this and William that constructions,
which wasn't fair to Alden and wasn't fair to herself but was, however,
always very fair to William.

Dear Dexter [Alden began again], Sorry not to find you at the reunion.
I found myself not far away and so looked in.  It so happened that I
found myself not far away having come back to the family homestead this
past summer.  We have gone native.  In the evenings, we swing in the
hammock and wait for the first firefly to arise.

Which didn't strike the proper note, either, settling himself too
contentedly and immovably out to pasture in the country with a blade of
hay clamped between his teeth.  Besides, the firefly watch had lasted a
week.  Alden wasn't keen on fireflies.  They shimmered into the house
and sparked off and on above his head just as he was trying to fall
asleep and impressed swirls of bacteria-shaped motes across his
shuttered eyelids.

-so thoughtful.  [Becky's pen glided across one of her last hoarded
sheets of good stationery.  Alden had already spoiled two pieces.] We
are now here with Alden's Aunt Lily who has always been good to us, to
me, but I still worry whether we aren't a handful, and it happens we
aren't the only ones here.  Alden's sister Ginger, painfully divorce
bound, is here with her lovely girl, and Lily's brother Harvey, the
widower (thrice, poor man) has come for a stay.  And there's Harvey's
grandson as well, with his girlfriend, another very nice girl,
different, but I like her.  Arthur is trying to become a professional
comedian.  Well, he's an amusing young man so why not seek an
interesting career?  Lily's a good scout, but we must all be a handful.
But of course, you've met Lily, twenty years ago-can it be that
long?-at our wedding.  Lily's much the same but older, as indeed, we
all are.  I may have to get reading glasses, I have just been told,
either that or grow longer arms, as the old joke goes.  Perhaps Arthur
can use that in his act.  Alden's future plans are still pending.  We
both agree, he must be selective.  Of course, he has so many irons in
the fire but I think his heart may really lie in doing something with
the land.  The land here hasn't been seriously farmed since the Civil
War when, they say, one of the forebears got grumpy over the price of
cotton and planted his own.  Oh, I can picture that scene!  Alden is
contemplating berries strawberries raspberries, high bush
blueberries-in a pick-your own operation, and eventually we could
expand into jams and pies, I have so many good recipes and so many
people are succeeding these days, Ben and Jerry, those two, why not us?
From micro to macro economics, which is all the trend, Alden says.
Cross your fingers and hope General Mills comes along and eats you up.
Well, until that happy day, we'll be well away from the epicenter when
the Crash comes which Alden says is coming.  Really, that's what was
behind his dismissal last winter.  He said some things no one wanted to
hear, just like Cassandra Becky was fairly certain Cassandra was whom
she meant.  The Collins Dictionary was also lost in some box and she
didn't want William to catch her in an error, because even now, even
after all these years, she wanted William to think well of her.  She
admitted that much to herself.  She needn't deny it, now that she was
severing her last tie to him, one,

perhaps, which she ought never to have allowed to continue, so many
years ago agreeing to sublet, not really very legally, his large,
prewar, park side rent-controlled apartment when William was first sent
overseas.

Why not?  Alden and everyone else had asked at the time as she
hesitated to accept William's offer.  Why ever not, Becky?

A thump and a bump and a crash and a shudder broke into her thoughts.

"Remind the boys," she nudged Alden.  "They won't listen to me."
"Boys," thundered Alden, glaring over the top of his clipboard as if he
could see them through the wall.  Well, he almost could-those popped
knotholes.

Dear Dexter, What's the situation out there on the Left Coast?

"I wonder what fell," Becky said.

"Shall I go look?"

"No, no, the damage is done.  Finish your letter and I'll finish mine,
though, oh dear, I've come to the awkward part," Becky said.

"Which part?"

"First we broke our lease with William and now I have to tell him his
sister's boy can't come here," Becky said.

"Oh, that.  Don't feel bad.  They just wanted a place to stash him for
the winter.  They're just being opportunistic, having heard of the
setup here.  The nephew sounds like the classic aging problem child,"
Alden said.

"Oh dear," said Becky.

Oh dear, [she wrote] after all your considerateness toward us, I'm
afraid it's not the best of ideas for your nephew to come here to work
on his thesis.  I'm afraid I don't quite understand, his study subject
is to be a family, an old, established sort of family?  Really, we are
not all that interesting.  Why doesn't he look to the Cabots or Lodges,
with all sorts of archival material available?  Not that I can speak as
a Hill or even as a Lowe, but when I married into the family, I recall
how relieved I was by their ordinariness, in the nicest, most
reassuring, and special sense, of course.  Frankly, I didn't even ask
Lily about your nephew.  As I've indicated, we are so full up here.
But, at any rate, I trust Andy has fallen back on alternative plans
when you didn't hear from me.  Your last letter was so long in
coming-ten weeks.  All that upset and Revolution in your part of the
world!  The Post Offices must be overwhelmed.  Alden says they'll have
to rename all the streets.  He suggests Lennon (John) for all the Lenin
Roads, and the People's Squares and People's Palaces can accept
corporate sponsorships, i.e., IBM Square.  Well, I'm just being silly.
Nevertheless, I am responding promptly, please believe me, and please,
please, forgive me, dear William.

Dear Dexter, I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ear to the ground,
out there where you are.

LITTLE BECKY ROLLED onto her stomach and hung over the side of her very
own canopied bed which had come from New York at last.  (Aunt Lily's
lumpy old beds had all been shoved under the eaves.  Good.) There had
been a real question, a cliffhanger, whether they would have to shorten
the posts to make her bed slide under the low ceiling of the attic.
Well, they hadn't had to.  The movers had figured a way to angle the
bed into the room, and Aunt Lily had given her a night-light so she
wouldn't bump her shins if she had to get up in the dark, for all of
Little Becky's furniture had had to be angled to fit, and when Aunt
Lily climbed up the attic steps to see for herself how nice Little
Becky's new bedroom was, she had had to shut her eyes, the effect was
so unsettling to her.

Moving was unsettling.  So many items, long lost, had turned up as
closets and drawers were turned out, items long lost on purpose-old
report cards, sweaters she hated, books dropped into the bath.  The
other day as her mother was searching for some music (Becky sang) she
had come across the clothbound Little Becky Book.

"Little B."  come here, look at this," her mother had called her.  "
When you were tiny and you first noticed shadows, do you know what you
said?  You said, "The sun is a good drawer," when you saw the exactly
etched lines of a wrought-iron cafe table cast across a sidewalk."

"I did?"  asked Little Becky.  Was she to be blamed for this or had her
observation been held to be precious?

" Yes, and we wrote it down in this book we bought especially to note
all your little sayings," Becky said.  Yes, they had for months
afterward waited for more gems, the book, a pencil kept at the ready. A
friend in publishing had rather thought there might be something
there-a slender volume, exquisitely illustrated.  (The friend in
publishing had anticipated the trend in hurried children.)

"And what else did I say?  " Little Becky asked.

"Well," Becky ruffled through the book.  "That's what you said, the sun
is a good drawer.  So insightful, so sweet, so dear.  And I do recall,
although we didn't put it in the book, how you used to sing "Twinkle,
twinkle, little star," at the first streetlight you saw every night.
So cutely," Becky assured her.  " What if I give you the book and you
can jot down all your current thoughts?  "

"My current thoughts?  " Little Becky asked.  She hefted the book.  So
many empty pages.  Her current thoughts?  She thought Aunt Lily should
turn on the heat.  She could only wear two sweaters at a time before
her arms stopped bending at the elbows.

Little Becky dropped the book, a pen, upon her bedroom floor.  She
would not have said that an empty book could speak of so much, for what
the blankness told her, what the white pages expressed, was a tale of
disappointment from the first.  Even as a three-year-old she had failed
to measure up.  Well, she had not asked to be a disappointment, just as
she had not asked to be disappointed.

A few nights before she had been watching the evening news over Uncle
Harvey's shoulder until he told her to stop hovering and to sit down.
Life, the news reader had announced, may have been discovered on a moon
of Saturn.  And how she had wanted to go there at once, to that round
circle of moon just to the left of Saturn on the big TV news space map.
She wanted to fly there immediately and meet a planetful of beings who
wouldn't have opinions about the way she looked, the way she talked,
the way she thought or failed to have thoughts.  These beings, having
no better prior information, would conclude that she was perfectly all
right, that she was perfectly normal, that she was perfectly nice.  She
might have a chance if only she could get to Saturn's moon first.  And,
oh, she had been so very let down, she had felt so very stupid, when
she understood that the Life being spoken of was no more than a
wriggling molecule.  She had gotten all excited planning how she was
going to race to Saturn's moon first to impress a wriggling molecule.
She ought to write all that down in her Little Becky Book.

Her hand swept under her bed (Just, already--dust was sloughed-off
skin, Glover said-okay, okay, she wanted to lose weight).  She pulled
up her Walkman by its headphones and she jammed the headphones over her
ears.  Her fingers spun the volume knob up, up, and pure sound flowed
into her ears and met in the middle of her head and whirled and danced
down into her throat and moved all through her body to her fingertips,
to her toes.  The New Kids were singing "Step by Step" to her and when
they were through, she stabbed the rewind button and they sang it to
her again.  Then, Little Becky flipped open the cloth-covered book and
tore a page from the middle-less noticeable there-upon which she began
to write in violent, no, violet ink, Dear Jordan, I love you, so much,
you are my favorite one.

"RAIN BUCKET'S FULL," Brooks said to Rollins.  "It's sloshing."

They stared for a while as displaced drops scaled slowly down the
silvery metal sides.  The situation was not urgent.

"Open the window and pour it all out," was Rollins's advice.

"What?"  asked Brooks after another while.  "What?  You said?"

"Open the window and pour out the bucket."

"Okay," Brooks said.  The window scraped up, then thumped down.

" Now my sleeve's wet," Brooks announced.  The flung water had not
flown forward but fallen backward into the room-that's the way the
house tilted.

Brooks and Rollins shared a narrow chamber with a single window set
just knee-high overlooking the treetops and an irregularly red blinking
radio tower to the north.  Their beds were pushed headboard to
headboard so they could talk quietly at night and toss a Nerf ball back
and forth between them in the dark to develop their sonar capabilities.
Brooks had lately advanced a theory that modern man had lost his
nighttime sonar capability since the discovery of fire and the
subsequent illumination of the night, or at least, Brooks supposed,
something of the sort might very well have happened back at the
beginning of time.

"Why do you think Uncle Harvey told us if we ever flew from New Delhi
to Kathmandu to sit on the left-hand side of the plane so we can see
the mountains?  " Rollins asked his brother.

"I think he had this mental picture of us sitting on the wrong side of
the plane," Brooks said, "and it made him mad."

"Cool," said Rollins.  How effortlessly they could rile Uncle Harvey.
"When we go there, even if we sit on the left side, we'll tell him we
were on the right.  Remember to send him a postcard.  "Dear Uncle
Harvey,

We sat on the right side and we looked at..."  What would we be looking
at, on the wrong side?  "

" I don't know.  The flat part?  We 'll just write, we looked at the
flat part."

They lay on their backs and listened to the sighs of the wind and the
rattlings of the rain and the animated scrabblings of the mice in the
walls.

" Where's that cat?  " asked Brooks.  "She eats mice.  I saw her with
one."

"Agnes doesn't like us, she avoids us," said Rollins.  "I don't know
why, I think something in her previous life ill-disposed her toward
us."

"Hey," said Brooks.  "Go find that ad, you know, that ad.  We can fill
it out now when we 're not busy."

"Where is it?"

"Oh, you know.  I can't look.  My sleeve's all wet."

So Rollins slid from his bed and swung open the door of their closet
and rummaged through a slipping, sliding heap of magazines they kept
semi secretly on the floor beneath a jumble of cast-off clothing.  On
laundry days when their mother told them to fetch whatever needed to be
washed, they withheld the Oxford cloth tab-collar shirts they had
brought to Towne from their previous lives at their old prep school.
They went to a public school now where they would be frowned at for
wearing those shirts with crests woven into the breast pockets.  They
had learned this the hard way.

"It's near the back," Brooks said.  He could hear Rollins rustling
through the front of a magazine.

" But in which one?  " Rollins asked.

"The Azerbaijani rebels one, the Stinger missiles one, the guy who had
his face blown off, the face guy one," Brooks recalled.  They read
Soldier of Fortune because their father had told them he wished they
wouldn't, besides, it was an interesting magazine in its own right.

"Here it is, okay, here it is," Rollins said.  He rapidly turned pages
and then tore.

"Okay," Brooks said.  "Read it.  No, read it out loud."

"Okay, it says, "Enroll now in the Royal Peking Kung Fu Club.  At no
expense, Lesson Number One, Mastering the Art, will be sent for your
delighted approval.  If not fully satisfied, return to the Royal Kung
Fu Club of Peking.  But we believe you will be one hundred per cent
satisfied, and every month an additional Martial Arts tape will be sent
to you for just $29.95 until you attain supreme and ultimate mastery
of-'"

"Yeah, yeah, that part," Brooks dismissed it.

"Right, this part," Rollins agreed.

"So, we 've got our VCR here now and we have Aunt Lily's, and we 'll
just copy the tape they send us and then send it back and tell them it
sucked," Brooks reviewed the plan, even though it had been half
Rollins's idea.  "We don't need to know any more.  Mastering the Art,
that should serve us, it's not like we're still in New York.  Plus,
plus, I just had this other idea, it's brilliant, plus, we can make
more copies of the tape and then we can sell them around."

"Okay, here I am," Rollins said.  "I'm filling in the order form.  I'm
putting my name."

"Your name?"

"My pen."

"My idea."

"Our both's idea."

They wrestled for the pen.  Brooks sprang from his bed and lunged at
Rollins.  He struck at and scrambled for Rollins's wrist.  He squeezed
until Rollins's hand flared open and the pen launched across the room.
Brooks rolled off Rollins and bumped him away with his hip and
scrambled over the floorboards and dived under the bed where the flying
pen had skidded.  Rollins, panting and tasting blood on his tongue,
threw himself onto Brooks's kicking feet and pulled.  Brooks clutched a
leg of the bed.  He and the bed began to scrape over the floor.

"Boys," their father's voice warned them through the wall.  "Put both
names down," Rollins said.  "Put R. & B. R. & B. sounds cool."

"Pen's bent.  But it works.  All right, all right, I'm putting R. &

B."

DOWNSTAIRS, IN HIS ROOM off the kitchen, Glover slouched at his desk.
He cradled his head in his arms and a moan escaped him.  Glover
listened as the moan resonated off the cooking pots hanging from a
kitchen wall.  He had left his door open.  The stove had expelled
welcome heat while his mother was cooking supper.  Glover decided he
liked the sound of his hollowly echoing moans, so he moaned again.
Uncle Harvey, hunkered down in the dining room, barked at him to button
up.  Glover's boot shot out and he kicked his door shut.

He turned on his radio.  Very loud.  The stamp of a slippered foot
addressed him through the ceiling.  That was Betsy, notifying him, but
she had stamped more remindingly than blamingly.  Glover plugged in his
earphones and straddled them over his ears and he began to sing along.
He supplied low harmonies.  He moaned.

After twenty minutes or so, as a bank of commercials for Diet Pepsi,
the Mass.  State Lottery, and Stridex Medicated Pads intruded, he slid
open his desk drawer and searched among matchbooks, gum foils, drifts
of homework red-slashed and returned to him for emendation.  There was
a girl in New York to whom he did not write because she could not read,
otherwise, on that long, lost, drear, drizzling non-night of a night,
he might have had something to say to her.  He thought about her, he
thought about her fully half the time, and just thinking seemed to help
and so, Glover figured, there might have been an extra charge in
writing her a big, long, roundabout, philosophical, and sexy letter.
But then, he wouldn't be able to sit back and think of her reading it
and thinking big, roundabout, philosophical, and sexy thoughts back at
him, let alone write him a letter in return.  Too bad.  He wouldn't
have minded receiving a note from her (because even if she could write,
she would most likely be brief), a testimonial to his abilities to
carry around in his back pocket.  He'd have to have it plasticined,
eventually.

L.

He had planned to go out that night to take his chances with Meredith,
a strawberry-smelling and -tasting and -looking local girl, but she had
called to warn him her parents were going to stay home after all.
Meredith had known better than to suggest Glover come over to watch the
video her parents had rented, Harry and The Hendersons, with an eye to
entertaining the young people.

And the televisions here in the house were all airing the Snow Show, as
his father called the rainy-night non reception on their sets featuring
the Snow Show Chorus singing Sssssss and the Snow Show Players
performing in Sssssss, and that was how Glover had come, on a Saturday
night, to search for his assignment book in his desk drawer and prepare
to pick away at a history essay about Abraham Lincoln and The Military
Strategy Behind His Issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1864
After the Bloody Battle of Antietam (Glover read on his Am.  His.
syllabus).  He thumped through the Life of Lincoln book Aunt Lily had
let him borrow from her bookshelves when she heard he was studying the
old killed guy, and after a while, after he looked up Lincoln, Death
of, in the index and read the pages and pages detailing his end, such
slow old bullets, poor old guy, Glover settled down and he began to
make a fairly creditable job of his essay after all, after his interest
and imagination and energy, stimulated in one area (Cosima, Meredith)
translated into an extra measure of engagement in another.

ARTHUR AND PHOEBE SAT cross-legged at opposite ends of their
mattress.

A candle twisted upright into the earthen floor threw unsteady light
onto a writing tablet that lay beside Phoebe's knee.  She tip-tapped,
then forced herself to cease tapping, a sharpened yellow pencil against
her protuberant front teeth.  A second glowing candle was stuck,
jutting at an angle, from a crevice in the granite ledge just behind
Arthur's head, looking, Phoebe decided, as though Wile E. Coyote had
stuck a sizzling stick of dynamite into Arthur's cup-shaped ear.  They
had a small electric heater running, and they stayed comfortable enough
within the cone shape of its fanned-forth warmth.  But they would not
be able to stick it out much longer in the barn when the real cold
began.  Arthur had recently said they could move into the house
whenever they wanted.

Phoebe had been astounded.  You mean we didn't have to live like this
in a virtual cave?  she had asked.  No, not after a week or so, Arthur
said, Gramps was only making a point.  Becky says there's a nice room
free in the attic, but I thought you liked the barn, I was staying in
the barn for you

Phoebe smoothed her heavy dark bangs across her forehead, a habitual
gesture, for her hair waved in the direction of her swipe.  Arthur
massaged a plug of warm candle wax between his thumb and forefinger.
Lost in his thoughts, Phoebe could only wish as she watched his vacant
face, lost, but perhaps even now in the process of finding himself. The
ancient rocks, the dancing candlelight, a howling, troubled night
surely they ought to amount to something significant.  Why couldn't
tonight be the night for Arthur to thrash matters out, to delve into
his psyche and emerge reformed at last in the guise of his long-sought
and elusive comic persona?

Arthur had courted laughter in many forms these last few months and he
had been met with automatic laughter, polite laughter, nervous,
scattered, and derisive laughter, and by the mocking laughter of
naysayers who were more amusing than Arthur, so that the restless
audience pivoted in their chairs and attended the alternative
performance.  Phoebe had endured dark, late nights stuck at an unsteady
round of table at the far end of a murky-aired room in venues called
HaHa and Risibility, located in tough, third-string cities.  Most of
the clubs had lately failed as discos, and occasionally the wrong,
retired switch was flicked and odd exclamations of multicolored,
swirly, swim my lighting effects bathed the trembly, temporary squares
of stage and the mottle-spotted, delighted audience.  "Elvis has left
the planet," Arthur informed the ether whenever this occurred.  Phoebe
slowly sipped her limit, one Grasshopper, and tried to appear un
implicated when Arthur began to tell his crazy girlfriend stories.

On the long rides home after those raucous, or silent, evenings, Arthur
would tick off what had not worked.  " Nobody laughed when I said, "If
the Arabs can kill Salman Rushdie for writing that book, why can't we
do something about Shirley MacLaine?"  What do you think, Phoebe, would
"Why can't we shoot Shirley MacLaine?"  be funnier?  "

Arthur's failures seemed to exhilarate him, going head to head with
humor and losing, for some nights he lost less badly and one night he
figured out that if he stepped away from the microphone and lifted one
uneven eyebrow and stared back at the audience until they were
chastened yet intrigued-Arthur was not pleased with them, they were not
getting it-he could control his audience until the end of his set if he
went real fast and finished before the effect of the Look wore off.

Now, Arthur spoke in his real voice, not his brash and baiting
performance voice.  He said, "Okay, here Phoebe, take this one down.
I've just thought of this time from my childhood.  It's true, which
doesn't seem right, I mean, I'm supposed to make this stuff up, right?
"

"Not necessarily.  I think your childhood is a rich seam," Phoebe said.
Oh, his childhood stories were heartbreaking to her because she loved
him so much, but, really, it would not be good for Arthur's career were
all eyes turned to him in tenderness and charity and trust.

"Because," Arthur said, "I was thinking about the time my mother lost
her yardstick and she used me to measure for curtains because she knew
I was exactly five feet tall, only her problem was, how was she going
to work out the inches?  "

Phoebe held her pencil above the writing tablet.  Overhead, the wind
prodded and tried every loose board and shingle and shutter and door of
the barn.  Her several good new work suits hanging from an iron pipe
running between two worm-riddled beams swayed and swelled with the
crisscrossing drafts as if another aspect of herself, the responsible,
workaday Phoebe, was standing by.  In one dim corner, water trickled
down the rough stone wall and seeped through the iron-covered drain
around which last summer's toads had dwelt, those abiding, alive lumps.
The zigzag of lightning, that discharge of thunder earlier, had
encouraged

Phoebe in her hope that Arthur might undergo his metamorphosis that
very night.  All the elements seemed to have aligned to assist and
effect a transformation.

She smiled encouragingly at him.  Her pencil sketched a Roman numeral I
at the top of the tablet.  She knew shorthand, but at Arthur's pace of
dictation, a monk in his medieval cell could have turned out a verbatim
transcript illuminated with gargoyles and grotesques-that would be a
record of very old jokes, of course, Phoebe told herself.

Sometimes she was glad her thoughts were her own and did not bubble up
in cartoon captions above the top of her head.

LILY HAD AN excellent fruity fire crackling in her bedroom fireplace,
apple wood, and the smoke smelled sweet.  She had stacked the apple
wood separately after Hurricane Gloria, on her last legs, had huffed
and puffed through the orchard, also on its last legs.  She had waited
four years.

The kitten had entered an unattractive adolescent phase, a contagious
state in her house these days, Lily reflected.  It was sparring with
her slippered foot, raking the Indian beading from her soft old
moccasin.  That the kitten had specifically sought her company, Lily
didn't flatter herself.  Agnes had gravitated to the warmest corner.
She was a sliding creature, shadowy, and in and out of sight, forever
finding herself on the wrong side of a closed door where she mewed
rather too childlike until she was released.  Then she darted off into
more difficulties.

"Stop, you," Lily said and toed away the kitten.  She had worked her
tensile claws through the leather of the moccasin and Lily's cotton
sock down to the skin and now Lily's skin seemed to present the next
challenge.

The kitten flounced off and began to battle the fringe of a Turkish
rug, the tangled fringes of several thicknesses of woven and patterned
rugs.  Lately, Lily had rolled and carried some of the more fragile
carpets up to her room for safer keeping, laying one atop the other.
Alden's boys walked around on such tremendous, clumping feet.  Lily
could only picture andirons strapped to the ends of their legs, and
their previous existence in the paved-over world of New York's asphalt
and concrete chasms-where even the grass in the parks surely had to sit
as perdurable as cement upon the earth-had not made the boys sensitive
to the undesirable ness of muck tracked into a house.  And because Lily
had been passing so much more time now in her room, out of the
hullabaloo, she had asked the Aldens' moving men if they would kindly
mind shifting one or two items of furniture up to her room-a wing chair
from the big parlor, and the square hassock, and a small worktable to
hold her projects, and the lamp that sat upon the table, and a club
chair marooned in a corner when the table and lamp were removed, and a
cabinet containing board games and jigsaw puzzles, and the framed print
that had always hung on the staircase landing and which careless and
hurried elbows and shoulders had been knocking too often askew, as well
as the extremely old Chinese dragon vase into which someone had started
to pitch his spare pennies, chipping the rim.

"No," Lily said.  The kitten had hopped into a basket of unironed
laundry where she kneaded a tatted border to bits along the hem of a
hankie.  "I shall send you outside in the rain," Lily threatened (no,
she wouldn't) and she chucked a skein of embroidery thread at Agnes,
who slunk under the standing wardrobe to sulk and to worry the skein of
thread into a useless clot.

Perhaps she was worked up enough to begin her letter, Lily decided.  A
vein was throbbing beneath her parchment-colored temple and she had
just noticed a new damp patch widening in the shape of a pair of
spectacles across her ceiling.  Her writing board had vanished from the
invalid's supply cupboard and Lily had to rest her writing paper upon
the back of The Big Book of the World's Greatest Gardens, which was
another source of irritation for the book lay too heavily upon her lap.
Her agitated pen seemed to assume a life of its own as its point wrote
in firm strokes, Mr.  Avalon.

Lily could not bring herself to address Mr.  Avalon as Dear.  She could
not imagine anyone ever holding him dear.

Please cease sending me brochures concerning She stopped and retrieved
the prospectus she had pushed out of sight beneath the cushion of the
wing chair.  Restport, she read, An Adult Living/Rest/Care Facility.

The prospectus featured more pictures than text, photographs of a
chandelier in a foyer, of a tap dance company entertaining in the
Recreation

Center, a sea of white heads attending, some of the heads bent too far
to one side, surely more a matter for medical concern than an
indication of engrossed attendance to the performance.  There was a
shot of a Common Room with its windows heavily curtained against a view
of a highway breakdown lane but one had to be local to know that.  The
dimensions of a representative Resident's Room were distorted by a
fisheye lens.  The colors in the photographs were intense, too orange,
too blue, too deeply shadowed, and calculated to appeal to dulled and
dimming eyes-Lily was aroused enough to form this insight into canny
marketing practices.  And the stampeding tap dancers would rattle that
ersatz foyer chandelier which looked like it came from Sears, in Lily's
opinion.  The crystal prisms wouldn't ping, they would plunk.  For
which the old people would be expected to be happy and grateful,
grateful for their suppers of stewed tomatoes.  The very paper of the
brochure gave off a whiff of stewed tomatoes.  Lily didn't doubt that
at Restport one would come to feel taken in, in every sense.

-your establishment.  You most incorrectly assume I have, or shall ever
have, any interest whatsoever in residing at your "Adult Community."

I ask to be removed from your files, or whatever it is you keep on
elderly people.

Ought she to threaten him with a lawyer?  Lily was used to consulting a
friend, a lawyer's widow, but May seemed lately to have retired from
giving emphatic advice, and Lily didn't wish to approach her real
attorney down in the village who handled her few interests and who had
for some years been reminding her she had promised to think about
making her will.  Harris could be rather a pest on the subject.

Besides, the likes of Mr.  Avalon, with his illegible signature signing
off on his covering letter at which he might peer and indignantly
disown in court, most likely retained an officeful of sharks.  He would
have to, wouldn't he, being one of those people who wouldn't take no
for an answer.  Mr.  Avalon had been sending Lily a prospectus once a
month for the past year and a half.  He was proving to be as patient
with Lily as Lily had been with her hurricane apple wood, and this
worried her.  Patience was Lily's coin, but could Mr.  Avalon outspend
her?

She became aware of a light rapping against her door, a fan of knuckles
ruffling across the wood which did not sound like Harvey's full fisted
pound, nor was it Ginger's peremptory tattoo, so Lily decided to risk a
response.

"Yes," she said.

Alden's head appeared around the door.  His eyes swept the room.  So
this was where Lily had hidden the framed print of the wreck of the
White Star steamer Atlantic off Nova Scotia recently gone missing from
the front hall, never a comfortable picture but an oddly reassuring
one, for the few survivors had been clinging to the hull of an
overturned life raft for as long as Alden could remember, and if their
plight had not improved, neither had their peril worsened.

He spied Lily and he made his way through the crowd of furnishings.
The several layers of rug cushioned his tread, and he felt like he was
walking on clouds, which must make Lily God, he supposed.

"Would you care for some tea?"  he asked.  "Or cocoa?  "

Lily shook her head.  She wasn't about to go into the reasons why she
didn't drink liquid just before bedtime.

"How about toast?  Cinnamon toast?  We think the thunder's long enough
gone now so we 're running the risk.  No?  Toasty in here, anyway,"

Alden said.  He sank into the club chair and swiveled to prop his
slippers on the plump, tapestry-covered hassock (so this was where the
hassock and the chairs and the table and lamp and cabinet had
disappeared to from the big parlor-he was not the most noticing of men
but he had just caught himself, the other evening, before he threw
himself down where the chair no longer was as his hand simultaneously
reached to switch on the vanished lamp).  "Are you certain you can't be
tempted by French toast?  I'm thinking of rising to French toast if I
can stimulate enough interest."

"Thank you, Alden, no.  I have a letter to write."  She indicated
dismally with her pen.

"A difficult letter," Alden said understandingly.  "May I help?"

"Oh, no.  Well, no.  It's just that I don't like receiving these," Lily
said, tossing him the brochure.  "They come rather often, as if they're
planning to wear me down eventually.  As if the one time I don't read
their appeal and send back a refusal, somehow they'll hold me to some
implicit yes."

"Yes.  I see what you mean.  Events can overwhelm a person," Alden
agreed.  He read aloud, " "Restport."  It's always a name like that,
Restport or Havenholm, or some such.  Although do you remember what

Grandfather Hill called the old folks' home in Cambridge where he used
to visit his pals?  Remember?  Mt.  Auburn Prep?  "

Good, he'd made Lily laugh.

"Listen, write down what I say," Alden said.  "Start a new letter."  He
crumpled and flung Lily's initial effort over the fireplace screen. The
wad of paper bounced off bricks and dropped among the embers where its
quick flare and abrupt consumption struck Lily as being rather
marvelous.

"Write what I say, Lily," Alden urged.  "Here goes-Dear Mr.  Havenport,
Thank you for sending me your splendid brochure.  How I would adore to
live at your Home, if only I could afford to, if only I could afford to
join your happy company-"

"I can't say that," Lily protested.

"No, no, believe me," Alden said.

" Well, go slowly then," Lily advised against her better judgment, but
Alden was so happily energized at the moment when he had been sloping
around the house so dispiritedly for weeks even as he acted at keeping
busy making plans and rummaging in the barn for agrarian implements to
polish and sharpen and balance, that Lily could not bring herself to
discourage him now.

Alden grinned and continued, "... if only I could join your happy
company but, alas, my home has been mortgaged to the rafters to pay off
the complainants in the class-action suit after the incident.  (Make
that a capital-I Incident, Lily.)"

"What incident?  " Lily wondered.  "There was no incident."

"I know there wasn't but we'll let Mr.  Restholm's imagination invent
the details which will be worse than anything we could come up with,"
Alden said.

"Oh dear," Lily said.  She frowned and shook her hand.  Her hasty
writing slanted across the sheet of paper in as mad a scrawl as a very
hopeless-case student's science essay on "Nickel Is My Favorite
Element

Because I Can Buy Gum With It" had once so memorably deviated across
its page.

Alden continued, "I am, as well, bound to pay the fines and penalties
levied by the unconscionable and illegitimate usurpers of liberty who
dwell in occupied Washington currently holding the American people
hostage to the IMF and Gy and CIA.  I am skint.  I am stony broke.  I
am impounded."

"Really, Alden," Lily murmured as she scribbled.

"New paragraph.  But, exclamation mark, I have just had a brainstorm.
(Illustrate with lightning bolts.) Perhaps your Home would be willing
to provide a scholarship opportunity for the particularly deserving
elderly candidate.  I, for my part, am willing and able to educate and
instruct my fellow inmates in areas of my expertise, to wit,
marksmanship, survival ism techniques, and my set lecture subject "Are
We the Dreamers or Merely the Dreamed Of, and In Either Case What Does
It Matter If We Pee in the Sink?"  Hoping to hear from you soon, Sic
Semper

Tyrannis, Yours Most Sincerely... Got all that?  "

"Yes, barely, but..."  Lily scanned the letter.  She had not written
pee.  Her scrambling pen had automatically substituted cer and Lily
found it interesting and not a small consolation to know that even were
she to lose her mind entirely someday she would still remain proper
down, it seemed, to her fingertips.

"The claim of poverty will scare them off more than the fanaticism.  We
just put that in for fun," Alden said.  "Here, I'll stick a stamp on
the envelope and set it on the pie crust table with the rest of our
letters."

And so Lily allowed the letter to be sent as it was rather than waste
the twenty-five cent stamp, although were she less weary (and were the
night less rainy and her joints rubbing less stiffly against one
another in their sockets) she might have worked off the stuck-on stamp
with careful prying to affix with a finger-skimmed clot of glue to a
different envelope containing a more usual and a more sensible letter.
Besides, her bottle of Elmer's Glue had recently gone missing from the
kitchen drawer where it was always supposed to be kept and Lily seemed
to recall Becky had mentioned that one of the alien lamps required a
small repair before being fobbed off on All Saints'.  An ear had
detached from a ceramic rabbit and Lily guessed that the delicate
reconnecting of such disparate planes, the sliver of ear rejoined to
the rounded skull, the meeting edges of both pieces roughened and
chipped after their recent rattlings round a moving carton, would
devolve into a lengthy and not guaranteedly successful operation.  If
necessary, Lily would lend Becky her small and veteran tube of the
infinitely more grasping and tenacious substance called Miracle Glue,
which she stored for safekeeping wrapped in a cotton rag and placed in
an old shortbread tin stashed at the back of the spare mitten shelf of
the out-of-season coat closet, a precaution taken because, from time to
time, one heard of accidental and undesired adhesions involving
heedless mis applications of the clearly and sternly labeled stuff.
Take great care in the use and conservation of, the manufacturers
sagely counseled, and Lily believed them.

*^}

chapter TWO V The Hills in View f r\

ALL THAT FALL the leaves drifted down.  They swirled un swept along the
walks and ranged with restless, tattered trespass across the lawns.
Leaves clogged the twisting systems of low, branching shrubbery and
choked the frost-gotten garden plots which were brownly mounded over,
dead now, and buried.  Leaves lapped up the foundation of the house
and, rising individually in the snatches of suddenly spun winds, seemed
to be seeking impossible reattachments to the surrendering trees.
Bright golden, scarlet, bitter orange, nothing so became them as their
leaving.

Lily only glanced at the brilliantly assembling day as she tugged up
the shade of her bedroom window, the day as yet muted by mists and un
buffed by the touch of the sun which was itself just akindle in the
eastern sky.  She crossed the room and tugged up the shade of the
opposing window and she regarded the warm disk suspended above the
pointed tops of the pines.  A wedge of Canadian geese flew across its
pale face, spelling out V for their vanishing.  The sun seemed a very
local occurrence these early mornings even though they said (on an
episode of Nova, an emphatic scientist from England surely maintaining)
that the Universe was expanding.  Lately, however, this had not been
Lily's experience.

Look, now, how her universe was filling up with dead leaves.  It was,
Lily thought, a plain nuisance that people in Towne were no longer
permitted to burn them.  The old and now officiously outlawed method
had been to start a dozen or more fires scattered across the lawns and
lining the driveway and edging the woods, the leaves raked into long
and spreading heaps.  A slosh of accelerant, lawn mower gasoline from a
battered can, was spilled over each pile and a wooden kitchen match
scratched alight was tossed among the leaves.  After several seconds
the air hissed and caught its breath and shuddered and flashed into
flames erupting unpredictably underfoot or spiraling upward along
gasoline fumes to strike at a face or a hand, but lashing out
harmlessly, for the fire was so suddenly there and as suddenly not
there.  Somebody's hair, the hair on their heads or the down along
their arms, might be singed and stink like kippers for a while, but no
real damage had ever been done.  The Hills had been fireproof in those
days and, evidently, they still were.

For, just a few nights ago at supper, Ginger had been talking about her
fire walking seminar, one of those exercises she put herself through
when she was still trying to save that marriage of hers-or had it, in
the end, given her the impetus to leave Louis?  Lily, listening
carefully for once because it all sounded so unlikely, hadn't caught
her point as Ginger seemed to claim that her personal fire walk across
a glowing pit dug behind a Ramada Inn on the outskirts of Wichita had
led her both toward and yet away from poor Louis.  He had become poor
Louis in Lily's mind, although not for having lost Ginger-rather,
frankly, for having won her in the first place.

"So all this fire walking enabled you to face Louis before you turned
your back on him?"  Alden had asked Ginger.  As to whether he was
politely or wickedly inquiring, opinion was divided around the dining
room table, although in either instance his impulse could only be
sighed at, for now, one way or another, they would be told.

"Swami Nehru said ..."  Ginger began to explain in that aggrieved
National Public Radio hostess voice she employed when she was obliged,
yet again, to set them all straight on still another nuanced and
intricate aspect of the case she was constructing.

"A Nehru, was he?  That's a good old Indian name, at least," Harvey
spoke up.  He kept track of the good old names of every major country
and culture.  He could, he said, travel most anywhere with every
confidence.

"Swami Nehru said that Louis was my pit of hot coals and our marriage
vows were my asbestos shoes," Ginger said, firmly steering the topic
back to herself.

A piece of lasagna slipped the wrong way down Arthur's windpipe.  His
coat hanger shoulders heaved, his face flushed terra-cotta fusing his
freckles.  Phoebe thumped his back and held a glass of reconstituted
grape juice to his sputtering lips.  The rest of the Hills gravely
observed the couple, their forks raised or lowered in the contrary
direction from an original intent as they wondered, What next?

"A crusty bit," Arthur explained when he could speak again although
Ginger regarded him darkly, suspecting she had fed him a line and if
so, she was glad he 'd choked on it.

"Oh, that oven," Becky apologized.  "I never know."

They glanced at Lily whose oven it was and Lily shrugged, indicating
her own long history of mystification concerning the heating element.

Nevertheless, this had been one of Becky's better suppers.  They had
had lasagna and broiled grapefruit halves and two squash pies were
cooling in the serving hatch.  Becky was putting to use her big
recipes, as Ginger characterized them.  "Serves eight to twelve," she
had read aloud, flipping through Becky's file box searching for
something elegant to try for a change.  "Serves eight to twelve, that
sounds like a prison sentence," she observed, and she had wondered,
then, whether she might not have happened upon another chapter for her
book, a correlation of the commonly held vocabularies of housewifery
and incarceration.

She had yet to come up with many more examples to note upon her 3X5
cards.  Might one also cite servitude in a "Big House"?  Yes, one very
well might.

"I can only hope, Ginger, that someone responsible was standing by with
a hose when you took your fire walk Lily said.

"No, no, cold water would have been the worst thing," Harvey said.
"She'd have been steamed to death like a clam."

"Oh, Mummy, I said it was dangerous, didn't I?  " Betsy cried as Ginger
shot her a wince of boredom.

"Can we have her pie?  " Brooks and Rollins asked.  They had learned to
identify the moment when Betsy lost her appetite entirely.

Then Lily had braced herself for Little Becky's shriek of objection but
Little Becky had sat serenely unconcerned at her crumb-strewn end of
the long table.  Her hectic face was disfigured by a shadowy grape
juice mustache and her purple tongue greedily flicked away at the
residual flavor.  Little Becky had recently worked out that when Betsy
refused dessert, her mother would slice slightly bigger pieces all
around and not leave an extra portion for everybody to call dibs on.
Simple.

BUT LILY DIDN'T HAVE all morning to waste at her window thinking about
the family.  It was just after six o'clock and she had forced herself
out of bed in order to claim the bathroom first before the mirror
steamed and the towels sagged wetly and sour-smelling from their racks
and the Dial soap turned to lemon marmalade in its china dish which was
not a real soap dish with drainage holes but only a pretty orphan
saucer so one had to be mindful and swipe the soap dish dry with a
tissue.

The odd hairs and mite-like whiskers collecting in the sink (Lily's
further thoughts propelled her down the hushed corridor with its closed
doors and fraying islands of bright old carpets), the stained twists of
tissues flung at but not into the wastebasket, the hamper lid ajar
above an overload of castoff nightwear, someone's long-toed,
high-arched naked footprint, not unlike that of a fleeing ape,
preserved in the drift of talcum powder spilled beside the reluctantly
draining bathtub, the window curtain blindly snatched and used as a
towel with the guilty face print nearly identifiable in damp relief,
the tumbler cloudy with toothpaste and lip prints and replicating
bacteria were all so unlovely to behold, first thing.

Lily tapped upon then pushed through the bathroom door and she caught
at the string of the overhead fluorescent bar light which performed its
lightning imitation, flashing on and off and on before settling into
its customary glare, revealing a pedestal sink with stiffly turning
china faucets, a deep-sided freestanding bathtub resting on the clawed
feet of some giant, mythical bird, and an oak-seated chain-pull commode
sitting by itself in the corner.  This was known, rather famously in
some circles, as the oldest bathroom in Towne, but Lily had never been
convinced that aged ness was an asset in the arena of plumbing.  Very
early pearly grey linoleum curling up around its edges covered the
aslope floor.  Dropped tubes of lipstick inevitably rolled beneath the
bathtub and then one sank to one's knees and reached on faith and felt
around and roused red-eyed spiders.  The plaster walls and ceiling were
painted a denser grey.  A blue, floc ky rug hung over the side of the
bathtub and a rack of polished looking blue towels were rather too
precisely aligned to encourage their casual use.  The muslin curtains
breathed in and out.  The same thoughtful someone who had tidied the
bathroom had left the window open a hygienic inch overnight.  The air
was clean and sharp and cold, an old-fashioned climate for an
oldfashioned bathroom.

Back in her own room Lily dressed quickly.  She put on a navy blue
cotton divided skirt, a blue-and-white-checked cotton blouse and a pair
of flesh-colored over-the-knee cotton stockings.  The manufacturer
stamped Flesh-Colored on the box but Lily didn't know whose flesh they
were thinking of.  Becky and Ginger had been filling out an "Is Your
Foundation Right For You?"  questionnaire in one of Ginger's magazines
and they had concluded Lily's underlying skin tone was blue which
wasn't one of the options acknowledged by the article's author, who had
a Ph.D. (though in what discipline, they wondered).  Becky had worried
that Lily might be suffering from a medical rather than a fashion
difficulty and Lily had admitted that her ankles tended to swell up by
evening, though that may have been because the elastic tops of her
over-the-knee stockings fit a bit tight-she strengthened the elastics
on each newly opened pair so that she wouldn't be seen fumbling beneath
the hem of her divided skirt all the time hitching and adjusting
against the downward creep.  Her ankles paid the price, Lily guessed;
nevertheless, in life one faced one's choices and made them.

The stairs were solidly built and didn't betray her early-morning prowl
by creaking beneath her feet as she descended.  She lifted her barn
jacket from among the many other garments adhering now to the coatrack,
which had grown bulky over the past weeks of colder weather, assuming
an utterly different personality as it stood in the front hallway,
turning into someone whom she didn't like as well as she had in the
days when it was sparer of shape and steadier on its feet, dressed in
the shapeless hats and dim-colored woolens and tweeds of her own
wardrobe.  Lily wrapped a scarf around her neck for good measure, one
of Harvey's, who made such a fetish of bundling up.  It was hand knit
in red, white, and royal blue stripes, and ruthlessly well executed in
Lily's opinion, the stitches as tight as the kernels in an early ear of
sweet corn.

The scarf had been a gift from one of Harvey's admiring widow ladies.
Lily, despite all her knitting projects, did not knit at all well.  She
was always being detained by wrought-iron palings and doorknobs when
she wore her own loosely put together sweaters.  A woman who could knit
as competently as Harvey's new lady friend might, if very determined,
just as skillfully entangle Harvey in the threads of her own life, Lily
decided.

The loud, dousing rain of the night before had sluiced the clouds from
the sky which, at present as morning had truly dawned, arched overhead
tinted so brightly azure that Lily was reminded of the old color
photographs in the National Geographic, the very earliest issues, when
color itself seemed so shiny and new.  The wide puddle that had formed
with last night's rain across the dip in the driveway held a shimmering
and ideal version of the surrounding scene within its clear waters,
enhancing the beauty of the New England autumn to more effect than Lily
felt capable of responding to as it struck her that this could be a
too-showing-off world.  For hers was a long driveway and by the time
Lily reached the road and her scarred, oxidized mailbox strapped with
fortified tape to a leaning post entwined with bittersweet and poison
ivy vines blazing at their brightest this time of year, she felt her
perceptions had been lifted quite high enough by the insistent display,
and one final sycamore bush burning beside a telephone pole was not a
revelation to her but just another contribution to the hot air that
surrounded her these days.  She extracted the wedged-in bulk of the
Sunday

Globe from the mailbox and glanced at the headlines, more news about
freedom breaking out in Eastern Europe as the Soviets could only avert
their eyes.

Lily let herself back inside the sleeping house and made her way to the
kitchen.  A calendar swung against the back of the door and slid to the
floor as she pushed through.  Lily knelt and searched for the
thumbtack

Little Becky had failed to jab firmly enough into the wood, for this
was Little Becky's calendar, devoted to some singing group she adored.
Significant days in the life histories of the group's members were
outlined in red as if the birthday of someone named Donny were a
national holiday.  Once or twice when consulting the calendar, Lily had
been caught short, imagining she had forgotten some occasion for which
she ought to have sent out greeting cards or roasted a Butterball or
displayed the Flag.  There, the thumbtack had tumbled under the
radiator where Lily would let it remain.  Her only concern was for
damage to bare feet-not her own, of course, but Ginger padded around
the house like a South Sea Islander on vacation at the beach.  As for
the calendar, Lily propped that against Becky's looming microwave oven
from New York.  Boiling water in ninety seconds, Becky claimed on her
oven's behalf but when they had a race, Lily's old electric kettle won,
which Lily had been sorry about for Becky had been so sure and then
been so let down.

The kitchen had been painted egg-yolk yellow, a free-range hen's fresh
egg-yolk yellow, back in the days when everyone painted their kitchens
yellow, although as Ginger informed her (Ginger seemed always to be
informing Lily about something) colorologists had discovered that
yellow was a highly unsettling color.  Prisoners in yellow-painted
cells rioted more often than those held in pink-walled cells, she said.
"And what does pink make the prisoners do?"  asked Harvey, as the boys
snorted, which only encouraged him.  There was more of the early pearly
grey linoleum covering the kitchen floor, worn through to the original
boards in front of the sink and refrigerator and counter.  The boards
were wide pine cut from trees that must have been growing when the
Pilgrims landed, Alden had estimated after he pried up a corner of the
linoleum to determine what lay underneath, and he wanted to pull off
all of the linoleum and rennish the original wood with linseed oil and
beeswax and take a picture of the results to send to the Letters column
in Old House Journal.

We'll see, Lily said.

A long table occupied the center of the kitchen.  A variety of styles
of chairs, the age and distinction of several hiding below a dozen
layers of slapped-on paint, sat around the table.  A lazy Susan stood
in the middle of the table, so crowded now with jars and bottles and
cruets and sifters containing all their particular fads in condiments
and seasonings that the twirling platform stalled out mid-circuit
beneath the burden it bore.  Lily was convinced Ginger's encrusted
little pot of Ja Chai pickles was present only because Ginger liked the
idea of liking Ja Chai pickles.

Lily filled the electric kettle and plugged the cord into a booster out
let.  She dropped three tea bags into the brown teapot and shook two
slices of bread from the loaf and inserted them in the toaster's slots.
She remembered before it was too late to reset the dial from the
highest setting to a medium one.  Harvey doted on charred toast and she
had told him, "You can always toast your toast more.  I cannot toast
mine less."  Harvey had wandered off, so intrigued by the concept of
reverse toasting he overlooked her primary point.  Lily hoped some of
the apricot jam remained.  She rummaged through the refrigerator and
could only find the st emmy wild blueberry preserves Becky had made as
an adventure last summer.

The kettle steamed, then whistled.  Lily snatched the cord from the
socket before the spout could wail.  She glanced at Glover's door.  She
didn't want to rouse him and be obliged to offer to make him toast or
share the newspaper with him.  She would surrender Sports if she had
to-the Red Sox weren't in the Series-but she supposed Glover would
really prefer the Sex section, if one was to be had.

GINGER FLUNG HARVEY'S soft-sided old Aquascutum raincoat selected from
the front-hall coatrack over Louis's plaid flannel pajamas, the legs of
which had to be rolled over several times above her ankles so she could
walk about.  She had scuffed on the pair of her grandfather's cloud
stepping shearling slippers she had come across stuffed in a paper bag
and forgotten behind an accordion folder file containing an assortment
of somebody's long-solved crossword puzzles confidently worked in ink.
She had to clutch the flapping cuffs of her pajama sleeves as she
thrust her arms down the raincoat sleeves and the material now hung
below her fingertips, so she turned the excess flannel back up and over
the coat cuffs and secured it there, tucked and strapped beneath the
complication of tabs and buckles that lurk around the apertures of
superior Englishmade rain gear

"Betsy?"  Ginger inquired up Lily's elegant staircase which curved back
on itself as it rose like a section of chambered nautilus shell broken
open and beautifully revealed.  Ginger pitched her voice low lest she
awaken the others whom she found hard to take first thing in the
morning, the speaking to and stepping aside for and sharing of her
coffee with.  Nevertheless, her summons resonated along the
mother-daughter frequency to which Betsy's porcelain-shard ears must
surely be attuned after seventeen years of finding out how little
Ginger liked to be kept waiting.  Cold air bled down the staircase,
buffeting Ginger's upturned face in tumbling drafts redolent of un
quarried stone and dead, dead chrysanthemums.  God, this crypt of a
house.

She distracted herself for a moment, riffling through the stack of
letters waiting on the pie crust table for someone to become organized
and drive down to the village to post them.  Restport, read Ginger,
pausing.  Whatever did Lily imagine she was up to, communicating with
that red brick and stucco establishment over on the Boston Road where,
Ginger had heard, the old folks whooped it up at crowded and rancorous
seances, everyone present heatedly insisting that a spectral "Eleanor"
had come through specifically to advise them that "Mother" was "all
right" and happy "here" with the "others."  No, no, Lily had family
enough surrounding her these days.  She didn't need to seek out
shades.

The Royal Kung Fu Club of Peking?  Oh, those moronic boys-and they'd
better not thump and crash in martial violence over her head and crack
her ceiling plaster into ever more spider casts which would scuttle
across the corners of her eyes as dusk fell and she grew weary over her
manuscript.  And what was Becky doing, writing so thickly (Ginger
hefted the missive) to her great friend William Baskett who had been so
long immured in one or another of those murky little potato-fed,
crease-of-the-map crossroads of horrific history countries and doing
his diplomatic best on America's behalf, whatever that
entailed-arranging for fireworks on the Fourth and the reading aloud of
"Concord Hymn" by a voice-y, out-of-luck-actor type?-Ginger, immured in
Towne, could only suppose.  She examined a scrawled-upon cerise-pink
envelope containing Little Becky's pestering appeal to a film star or
teen idol or whoever it was.  Ginger no longer kept very close track of
the popular scene.  When Fleetwood Mac first dissolved in disarray,
that had spelled the end of all true caring for her.  She tossed aside
yet another approach by Alden to still another former classmate,
throwing his net wider and wider, all the way to California this time,
that languid land of poolside negotiations where, indeed, he might be
slotted in nicely, for he had revealed, of late, his own aptitude for
doing nothing.  She dismissed

Harvey's further happy and energetic harassment of his Connecticut
realtor, whom he really ought not to have addressed as the Land Pirate
of Old Saybrook, and she slipped her own letter to Oscar into the
center of the pile, concealed from prying eyes.  It was nobody's
business to inspect the outgoing mail.  (Betsy, for her part, knew
better than to leave out a letter to her father, and when she received
a letter from Kansas, Lily, who always fetched the mail, left it in
Betsy's desk drawer, indicated and weighted by a condoling Mystic Mint
cookie laid on top.)

"Betsy," Ginger called again.  "Betsy," she spoke too forbearingly.
Ginger had raised herself from the haven of her warm bed on this
wretched Sunday morning solely on Betsy's behalf.  She had been
dreaming when her shrill alarm rioted and dispersed the dream, but
shreds of significance had clung.  In her dream, Ginger was being
admired, although for what she wasn't quite sure and she had been keen
to find out.

She turned on her soft heel and caught sight of herself in the glass of
the front-hall secretary desk, her own much considered face floating
across the silver sides of the vases, pitchers, bowls, and candlesticks
crammed inside.  I would make a terribly interesting photograph, Ginger
thought.  Such a pity there was no one to photograph her, yet another
opportunity to chronicle the work in progress that was herself, lost.
"Lost," she spoke aloud in her drowned voice and she peered harder into
her own, accidental image to memorize how very sad she looked and to
determine how she had achieved such a telling manifestation of her
great inner grief.  Her hand strayed toward her hair.  Other women her
age would have tried to subdue its electric excesses but she encouraged
her hair's exuberances, pulling long strands out higher and wider, the
chestnut strands, the silver-white strands which shot through the dark
hair wirier and more springingly uplifting than ever as if even at this
veteran stage her always interesting hair had worked out a way to defy
time's sly compact with gravity.  (As Alden said, one would not care to
sit behind Ginger at the theater.  "Spect she'd hiss warnings to the
villain that the authorities were on to him, added Harvey, wandering
off subject but staying on target nonetheless.)

Ginger sank to the bottom tread of the stairway, her plaid knee jammed
under the point of her chin.  Morning sun filtered through the fanlight
in apportioned patches.  Ginger shifted, seeking her warmer share, and
she subsided into reverie, trying to slip back into that delightful
dream.

"Mummy?  I've been waiting for you," Betsy was speaking to her.  "I was
outside, waiting."  She knelt beside Ginger and she sniffed
delicately-for alcohol or for some more animal reason?

"Outside?"  queried Ginger as if she'd never heard of such a place.
She tried to rise.  Betsy held out an automatically helping hand which
Ginger spurned.  She was only having difficulties rising because she
was stepping on the spreading hem of Harvey's long-skirted raincoat,
not as the result of some incapacity as Betsy seemed so quick and so
keen to assume.

"It's nice outside," Betsy stated wistfully.

" But I've been in here," Ginger said.

"Yes," Betsy allowed.

Oh, but how could one scold one's child merely for agreeing with one?
Maddening, maddening Betsy.

Ginger fumbled under her coat and hitched up the waistband of her
pajama bottoms and she swept past Betsy and strode out the door.  A
djinn-like dance of leaves swirled inside in her wake and scattered
across the rugs.  Betsy chased and stamped after them for they seemed
alive and when the leaves lay crushed and senseless on the floor, she
lingered, pitying them.

"Come on, Betsy."

"Yes, Mummy."

Betsy closed the front door after herself, quietly, because the
household lay asleep, but firmly as well for there was so much within
that burglars would find well worth their while to steal.  She didn't
want to return to discover all the family tied to kitchen chairs with
silk neckties and electrical extension cords coldly discussing back and
forth whom to blame for the outrage as their white-tipped fingers
twitched and tried at their bonds.  She would, of course, be obliged to
confess her responsibility for the ill-closed door which they would
probably have figured out for themselves eventually and Ginger
certainly would have shopped Betsy while strenuously exonerating
herself.  Betsy would be sorry were thieves to carry off Aunt Lily's
chest of sterling flatware.  She had come to like the feel of the
smooth round bowl shape of one of the big old soup spoons sliding
between her lips and clicking against her teeth-the rich spoon itself
seemed sustenance enough.  She almost looked forward to another one of
Aunt Becky's simple soup suppers.

"Betsy, are you serious about-"

Betsy chased the purposefully striding Ginger across the lawn.  The
heels of her pumps kept planting themselves in the spongy earth and she
had to pull them up with every step so that she looked like a much
younger girl much less successfully playing at lady.  She was wearing a
short-brimmed fedora hat she had found in an Empire Store box and which
Lily recognized as having been her own.  Betsy had rewired the hat's
drooping plume so that it arced forward and up and down, just not
brushing her cheek.  She had also come across a very stiff pair of very
white gloves in a bureau drawer (Lily couldn't think whose they might
have been) which smelled of the drawer's interior, of translucent face
powder and a secret store of cinnamon drops.  Betsy's dress was her
own, indigo-colored, corduroy, with a sash that tied in a bow in the
front or the back, depending.  She wore a locket round her neck.  The
locket opened into two hinged halves and there was space inside for two
tiny pictures of the people who, she supposed conventionally, she most
loved.  She had snipped apart her parents' last passport proofs, the
unchosen poses.  Two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose apiece were all that
remained after she trimmed them down to size.  At the click of the
clasp her parents were locked within the golden disc.  She wanted to
imagine the interior was golden and not black inside, and that her
parents gazed into one another's eyes in an eternity of calm communion
but she more truly believed that they were bitterly arguing there where
they lay just above her heart, even though she had not included their
mouths.

"Betsy, I swear-"

Betsy broke into a slow run, pulling her embedded heels out of the sod
and kicking up clods.  Her hair, which was secretly as thick and as
long and as ungovernable as her mother's, hung in its usual tight, pale
yellow mono-braid that lashed her back as she ran.  She caught up with
Ginger at the top of the driveway bowl beside the swaybacked barn.  The
cars were parked huddled at one edge of the driveway sweep as if
keeping clear of the barn should it collapse, although as Alden pointed
out, if the barn hadn't collapsed by now, it was never going to, much
like the Brazilian economy, he said.

Ginger fished in the deep pockets of Harvey's raincoat.  She withdrew a
linen handkerchief, a tape measure, some twopenny nails twisted in a
paper bag, a white chiffon scarf smudged with dark orange makeup, and
last, the keys to his car.

"I hope he's left us enough gas," Ginger said as she switched on the
engine and readjusted the mirrors.

"We can stop at the Mill Road Texaco, we go right by.  I have money,"
Betsy said.  "Look, the arrow is on E."

"Harvey can buy his own gas.  We 'll coast along on fumes.  But I
wonder, whose scarf is this?  Can you picture anyone whose skin is that
peculiar shade of orange?  I don't know, Wilma Flintstone, do you
think?  How d'you suppose that would work?  How would they interact, I
mean to say, personally?  "

"don't know, Mummy.  I don't wish to know."

Ginger glanced at Betsy's stern profile.

" But what if you run out of gas?  " Betsy asked.  She wished her
mother would fasten her seat belt because if there was an accident what
an uproar a wounded Ginger would raise as she shouted and shouted for a
plastic surgeon.

"Like a dog with a bone," Ginger remarked.

"What if you have to walk a long way for gas in just your slippers and
your, you know, just pajamas and all?  " Betsy asked.

"Oh, you're embarrassed by my ensemble?  Is that it?  " Ginger asked.
"I'll tell you what, I'll hide in the woods until dark or I'll swim
underwater through the swamps with a reed up my nose, that's what I'll
do if I run out of gas.  Huh?  How's that?  " She had warmed to the
notion of herself as a swift and secretive suburban guerrilla, lean,
brown, sinewy, strong.  One would become, necessarily, terribly fit
living on the run, wouldn't one?  Or one could, less radically, join
the local little steamy windowed ivy-covered Y. She wondered if Becky
would go halvsies on a family membership.

"No, Mummy.  That's not what I-I meant, if you have to walk a long way
in slippers, you'll hurt your feet."  Those same feet that had not
burned on a pit of flaming coals.

"Or perhaps," Ginger said, "you don't want me to embarrass myself."

Oh, is there a distinction where my embarrassment ends and yours
begins?  Betsy wondered but did not ask aloud.

As they came to the outskirts of the village, Ginger watched for faces
she knew or had known years ago and whom she might fill in on the
subsequent story of her life over cappuccino and a croissant at
Peddocks' General Store, but there were few people abroad on a
shuttered Sunday morning for Ginger to spot and swerve toward and honk
at and hail by an ancient nickname.  Betsy had guessed her mother
wasn't seeking just anyone.  No, she was on the alert for a specific
someone, so instantly uninterested was Ginger in the few candidates
they passed, a woman, a paperboy, an elderly gentleman walking his
collie dog.  None was the specific someone Ginger sought, which was
probably just as well, Betsy decided.  She knew her mother was up to
something.  The signs were there.  Why, for instance, had Ginger
allowed herself to be persuaded to act as chauffeur this early
morning?

They arrived at All Saints'.  Ginger nosed across two curbside parking
spaces as she read aloud the bumper sticker of a passing minivan.
"Visualize Whirled Peas?  Visualize Whirled Peas?  " she repeated,
mystified.

"I don't want to visualize ..."  She twisted in her seat, delving once
again in Harvey's raincoat pockets.  She required money for a New York
Times and a cappuccino and a croissant at dear old Peddocks' Store
which hadn't changed a whit since she was a girl except in all good
ways such as the Times and cappuccino and croissants now being
available.

"If you were your Uncle Harvey, where would you keep your emergency
twenty-dollar bill?  Look in the glove compartment.  Pick up the
owner's manual and shake out the pages.  Harvey's subtle," Ginger
said.

"No, remember, you borrowed his emergency twenty last week from his
golf jacket's inner zipper pocket," Betsy said.

"He should have replaced it by now."

"Maybe he hasn't noticed yet because he hasn't had an emergency.
Because I'm pretty sure he would have mentioned an emergency and no
emergency twenty."

"You have a point," Ginger conceded.

Betsy, who had laid her morocco-covered Book of Common Prayer and her
own and Aunt Lily's sealed-shut offertory envelopes neatly on her
corduroy lap, gathered them in one gloved hand.  Ginger eyed the
envelopes but even she could not suggest and Betsy had no intention of
volunteering.

"You mentioned you had money for gas?"  Ginger recalled, then.

"Oh, right.  I forgot," Betsy said.  She had only been intent on
preserving the Lord's mite.  She tipped her purse so Ginger couldn't
twig the unlikely place where she concealed her own emergency funds
inside an old codeine vial (prescribed for the terrible pain of her
wisdom teeth extraction last winter) but Ginger guessed, for future
foragings, that Betsy's cache had to be someplace like a vial for the
two ten-dollar bills Betsy handed her were curled in cylinder shapes.

"Oh my God," Ginger declared un prayerfully

"What, Mummy?"  Betsy asked.  "Isn't that enough?"

Ginger crouched behind the steering wheel staring through the
windshield.

The lowered sun visor threw a bar of shadow across her unsentimental
eyes which were screwed into a fiercely focusing squint.  She leaned
into the horn.  She rolled down her window and reached out and up and
slapped the roof of the car.

"I'm late," Betsy said.  "I think I hear the processional starting."
She opened her door and slid out.

Ginger threw herself across the seat and rolled down the passenger side
window (all this very necessary rolling down of windows-she grunted)
and called after Betsy, "No, no, wait up.  Meet Goody, Mr.  Palmer, my
very dearest, oldest friend in Towne."

Betsy, who supposed it would be undignified to flee as her mother
squalled after her, stood obediently if unenthusiastically beside the
car.  Mr.  Palmer, startled by the blat of a horn church side on a
Sunday morning, peered alertly to discern any situation requiring his
assistance.  A Mrs.  Palmer trailed a few steps behind her husband. She
had paused to compose a note to the driver of a car parked with a rear
tire rolled over the edge of the brick sidewalk.  Babe Palmer didn't
think cars should be parked with their rear tires rolled over the edges
of the frangible brick sidewalks which were such a lovely feature of
the village.  She walked along making a further note of the offending
vehicle's license plate number for her files, and, intent upon her
notebook page, checking to see whether this car was a repeat offender,
she bumped flat into Goody who had been stopped in his tracks.

"My word," Goody was saying.  "My word," he turned and informed

Babe.

"Your word what?  " snapped Babe.  She adjusted her hat, an open
velveteen circlet clogged with stiff net veiling, which had been spun
askew by the collision with her husband.  "Your word this young girl?"
she asked, indicating Betsy.  Babe stared at Betsy's hat about which
Betsy herself was having second thoughts.  After all, she was wearing
one of Lily's discarded hats and one could hardly enjoy supreme
confidence in a hat which at some point had failed even to live up to
Aunt Lily's standards.

Betsy had heard that Aunt Lily had been known to button a cardigan over
her storm coat.

The so cleverly accomplished resurrection of the elderly plume had not
lasted the not long journey.  The golden locket that lay so heavily
against her breast, the prayer book and offerings on her knee, the
borrowed hat atop her fair head, young Betsy herself had been severely
jounced as Ginger over steered Harvey's over engineered American mid
luxury car around the worst curve on Winding Road.  Whoops, said Ginger
who, weighing in rather heavier these days, had absorbed the jolt like
a dashboard Buddha.  Now, the fallen feather scraped Betsy's jawbone
but it was a question of character not to scrub the spot even as her
too-thin skin pinkened and prickled and Mrs.  Palmer's sharp eyes
exacerbated the itch.

"No, Babe.  No, look.  It's Ginger Hill Lowe of all people," Goody
said.  He ducked down to grin through the car window.  Ginger sprawled
across the seat.  She stretched and hooked her fingers around Goody's
starched shirt collar and drew him down to place a generous kiss of
hello upon his mouth.

"Yes, it's me," cried Ginger, releasing him as he began to pull away
from her, pretty sure she had meant to kiss his cheek and that their
awkward angles of approach had caused the excessive contact he had not
wished to call undue attention to by jumping back from Ginger's embrace
as if scalded.  Besides, he had not felt particularly scalded.  Indeed,
he had for a second or two quite entirely failed to mind what was
happening to him.

"I've come home," Ginger said.  "I was going to call you but then I
decided no.  No, I must wait for kismet to cause our paths to converge
because, frankly, I'm very interested to find out what fate has in
store for me and thus far, fate has counseled be patient, which wisdom
I have accepted."

"Oh, but I knew all along that you were up at Miss Hill's place."  Babe
crimped her knees.  Not at all tall, she made herself smaller and she
addressed Ginger through the car window.  "Because Doris broadcast the
fact all over Towne as soon as she deposited you that night."  Babe
spoke of "that night" as if she had heard of details not to Ginger's
credit-of her noisy tears, of her bundled belongings, of Lily's having
to pay the fare from the train stop in Hamilton out of her retirement
fixed-income personal funds.

"Well, I had no idea, no clue at all," Goody confessed as if a happy
plot to surprise him had been carried off successfully by the women's
coordinated efforts.

"Fata obs tant " murmured Ginger as she leveled a look at Babe who knew
enough English to work out what Ginger was driving at with her
smattering of Latin.

"So, you're visiting," said Goody.  "Are you here for the foliage?  "
he asked as a churchyard maple stirred and released a bright flight of
radiant leaves.

"Now is not the time to go into Ginger's situation," Babe advised Goody
in an aside.

"Yes, I'll tell you all about it later," Ginger promised smoothly, and
then because Babe seemed to be trying to work out what Ginger had worn
downtown beneath her raincoat on this sunny Sunday morning, Ginger
mentioned, "My daughter, Betsy."

"Your daughter?  Imagine," marveled Goody.  "You're very like your
mother, very like," he told Betsy, smilingly.

"Oh.  Am I?"  uttered Betsy.

"Are you?  " asked Babe meaningfully.

"Isn't she," stated Ginger.

"Mummy, that really is the processional I hear now," Betsy said.  She
didn't like to trail into church, as she so often had to for she so
often arrived late, behind the crucifix and the choir and the acolytes
and the curate and the Rector, as if the march of music and the
episcopal banners and the be robed personages were conducting her to
the forward pew she favored beside the square of stained-glass window
which could be pushed out and propped open so that the dour St.  Jerome
depicted there seemed to be kicking up his heels.  All Saints' could be
stuffy.  On Communion Sundays, you could almost count on one of the
fasters to faint, slumping like an unstrung marionette onto a kneeler
during the General Thanksgiving as if an awful recollection crushed
her.

"Then scoot," directed Ginger.  "Remember me in your prayers," she
added irresistibly.  She might even have joined them but for her
attire, although, really, this proxy arrangement suited her better for
there was the very real risk that one or another of the Lessons would
hit a nerve (or more accurately, strike the side of the barn where her
misdeeds were posted on multicolored hoardings) and she would have to
sit there in the sepia-tinted gloom, fixed as an unfavorable photograph
of herself, and then be obliged to endorse her own chastisement by
speaking at intervals, Amen.

ALDEN HAD DUG a seasoned crewneck sweater and a pair of very old
corduroy trousers out from one of the as yet to be unpacked boxes
pushed beneath their bed.  His resurrected clothes smelled strongly of
moth crystals and were creased where they had been so long folded
across the chest and elbows and at the thighs and ankles and knees.  As
he stepped outside squinting, nearly blinded by the hard and dazzling
sun of autumn, he rather looked as if he himself had been retrieved
from long storage.  It was a usual remark about Alden that they had
broken the mold after they made him although whether Alden was being
considered a special limited edition or a flawed and discontinued
specimen depended upon the remarker's usual experience of him.  This
morning Alden had stepped down from whichever shelf he had been
consigned to feeling stiff in every joint after the previous night's
dank incursions into his bones' very marrows.  He had winced through
the business of kneeling and reaching and dragging forth boxes
searching for the one marked OUTER-ALDEN to which Becky had directed
him.  He had not thought to ask her where she had stowed the inner
alden.

But he loved the fall.  He had declared his enthusiasm at breakfast
although he had not won any reciprocal confessions from his wary
confidants, his several sons who were slumped over their cereal bowls
excising the edible inches from browning bananas.

"I love this time of year, boys," Alden said as he slapped a pair of
leather gloves down onto the table beside his mug of coffee.  He began
to stoke himself with a great mound of Corn Flakes.

For the boys sensed work was in the offing.  The leather of the gloves
was stiff and scarred and Alden was eating like a lumberjack.  He
nudged the lazy Susan round and helped himself from the canister of
maple sugar one of his Senior Village widows had given Harvey for his
waffles.  Harvey would mind Alden's theft, but Harvey wasn't there.

"Any juice?  " asked Alden.

The boys shrugged and shook their heads.  Out of juice.

"Pity," said Alden.  "But what an inspiring day this is," he stated
leadingly.

Inspiring, Dad?

Glover slouched, his chin so sunk onto his chest he had to breathe out
to allow his mouth to sag open to receive a nugget of pared banana.
Brooks hopped to rinse his bowl and his spoon at the sink.  Rollins
rose as well and jammed a banana peel into the wastebasket, and he and
Brooks slipped away through the back-hall door not wishing to be
recruited into Alden's work corps or to be forced to invent an
extricating excuse.  An expressed alternative intention to walk down to
the river to see how high the water had risen with last night's rain
would commit them to spending an inconvenient half hour doing exactly
that.  Alden would be sure to ask for a report.  Were the arches of the
stone bridge clogged with debris?  he would want to know.  They could,
of course, invent-Yes, clogged, very clogged-but they would be
sandbagged by further interrogation.  Had any of the claw-footed bank
side willows finally toppled in the storm?  Yes, would say Rollins as
Brooks volunteered,

No.  The two saw eye to eye, but sometimes they saw as in a mirror.

Glover, to whom Alden turned expectantly, had signaled his intention to
observe a quiet Sabbath by picking up and reading the small print on
the side of a box of Grape Nuts.

Now, Alden kicked through the leaves with his hands in his pockets.
His cheeks, rounded by a big uncomplicated smile, took on color.  The
scratch of his wool sweater and whiffs of naphthalene energized him.
The wales of his cords scraped to the swings of his strides.  He forgot
his earlier aches as he strolled across the lawns estimating all the
while how many leaves had fallen, for he could measure and apportion
and run large figures in his head.  All problems are quantifiable and
the very large number he arrived at, the formidable leaf count,
presented him with a welcome challenge for the day.  He needed to keep
busy and he preferred to know how busy, for when his task was completed
he would be able to tally what had been accomplished.  Somewhere, a
great recording ledger lay open atop a rat-gnawed ambo beside a
guttering tallow candle.  Alden's mind's eye had not upgraded the
information-integrating system but he supposed the conscience's basic
furnishings had not been much altered over the aeons, aside from a few
pictures of various beauties and those brave heroes once and then no
longer held ideal, nailed up in display and eventually turned to face
the wall.

Alden entered the barn through the pulled-apart doors that had been
leaning open all summer after they'd fallen off their runners.  Lily
had called out Careful!  too late as the boys, told by Harvey there
might be a motorcycle, had rushed the barn and battered the doors.  It
was going to be a project to remount the two wide-board constructions
before winter blew in.  Alden foresaw all the stinging splinters and
crushed toes and resentful boys surging left when he ordered them to
move to their rights.  He did not think he would be able to manage the
job on his own although he would at first make the futile attempt. Then
Harvey would come upon him pinned beneath a fallen door or brooding
over a shattered finger and Harvey would bellow for the boys to come at
once.  The boys did not quite dare not answer Harvey's summonses.
Harvey had been known to charge up the attic stairs and seize the
disobedient boys from their lazy beds when he required them, a direct
tactic that had never occurred to their parents to employ, and the boys
were bound not to let them learn by their elder's tough example.  As it
was, Alden and Becky were rather touched by their sons' respectful
attendance upon their old uncle and they chose to view this most proper
behavior as a validation of their child-rearing methods insofar as
method had ever applied.

Leaves scuttled into the barn around Alden's duck boots and a dozen
sparrows left abruptly but temporarily.  They alit reproachfully in the
forsythia bushes clamped to the too thin branches that bowed beneath
their very slight and impatient weights.  He was going to have to
organize the door-repairing party soon or this really could spell the
beginning of the end of the barn.  Nature was keen to push back the
line.  Lily's woods, so lush in the canopy, so tangled on the floor,
were crossed and crossed again by stone walls almost unseeable, almost
lost, until one started to spot and to find them everywhere.  Why who
would squish a wall in here?"  Little Becky had wanted to know last
summer as she slip sloppily balanced along roily rocks and squeezed
between the trunks of two high-reaching and rough-ribbed tamaracks
grown up on either side of a boulder.  No way, she had said when Alden
explained that the walls had described the open agricultural fields of
only a century or two ago.  So, what happened to the poor farmers?
Little Becky had wanted to know.  I guess they turned into us, Alden
had suddenly understood.

Alden didn't know where they would pitch a bale of hay these days
should the need arise nor where they would fit the cow who would
necessitate the hay.  The barn's first stall held a rugged, rusted
snowplow blade, angled in to fit, that had broken through brittle slats
into the second stall which contained the Aldens' dining room
furniture, the table, the chairs tucked under the table, and the
upended sideboard, all covered with sheets and tarps tied on tightly
with twine.  The tabletop was strewn with dried brown hollyhock stalks,
the puckered purses of flower heads spilling their seeds like careless
coins across the rough cloth.  Ancient to modern Mass, license plates
ran up and down a central wooden support post.  Primitive shelving put
up anyhow and anywhere supported paper bags bristling with nails and
rinsed-out pickle jars full of nuts and bolts and screws and washers
and casters and hinges and springs.  Oily ropes looped over beams and
lopped the unwary in the temple with knotted ends.  Tennis and
badminton rackets and snowshoes sagged from hooks.  Wooden skis and
poles leaned.  Lawn mowers lay in pieces.  There were bicycles and
bicycles and Harvey had remembered right about the motorcycle even
though it was only the Vespa an anything-Italian-mad cousin had
acquired after he saw Roman Holiday.  The boys had tried to coax a kick
from its sewing machine motor.  They had rubbed the spark plugs with
rags and they had polished the chrome, so far to no effect.  Apply some
sewing machine oil, had been Becky's suggestion for such an un serious
motor.  Lily, drawn into the discussion, wondered if tapping out the
dent in the scooter's tiny, tinny fender would be of any help.  The
dent was her fault, she confessed.  She had dropped a clay flowerpot on
it when she 'd been startled by a strange bat, that is, a bat who had
not been one of the regular bats who roosted in the loft and knew not
to swoop at her when her hands were full of flowerpots and she was
thinking where to put them.

Piece of junk, Alden dismissed the Vespa.  He ought to load it onto the
back of the station wagon and drive down to the dump but he didn't
doubt he 'd be made to drive back to the dump to retrieve it, recovered
in a sorrier state than ever after a day or two left lying upside down
in a great snarl of cast-off machinery, for the Towne Dump featured
thematic disposal stations-plastic, paper, aluminum leavings.  But much
of the barn's contents would be unclassifiable.  There would have to be
conferences bin side with the assembled refuse engineers, the guys who
hung out at the dump, prodding much-altered objects and pronouncing
them formerly animal, vegetable, or mineral.  Perhaps it was just as
well that the Hills found it so impossible to throw anything
away-except lately their marriages and careers, Alden reflected.

He tested rakes lifted from the museum of rake history, crammed in a
cob webby corner and representing four or five generations of the
family's tastes in rakes-short- and long-lined versions, bamboo- and
steel-toothed, wooden- or steel-handled, heads wider or narrower.  He
gripped hafts and swiped the floor and selected two examples that felt
good, a broad bamboo fan of long, flexible teeth for clearing the lawns
and a short, sturdy metal-tusked model for routing round beneath the
shrubbery.

HARVEY, CARRYING a coffee mug and holding the Sunday-morning cigar he
was allowed (by his own edict and in his own scheme of things),

strolled toward the driveway.  He conveyed his mug and his cigar
delicately lest he spill coffee or ash.  He sipped and puffed.  His
coffee had been poured hot and his cigar had been rolled strong. Smooth
smoke scented his general vicinity.  If dispatched to fetch Harvey one
would locate him easily and in the process perhaps come to appreciate
how a hound holds his nose to the air and gets his man. Alden, becoming
aware of a rich aroma (Cuban, he would not put it past Harvey to have
secured a source), retreated back into the barn preferring not to be
hounded himself by Harvey, who would be sure to ask him, indicating the
double-barreled rakes Alden was bearing, Signed on as a lawn boy, have
you?  Good fellow, make yourself useful.  The boys quit tossing a
deflated football in a three-sided game of Gotcha. They sniffed alertly
and stepped behind the giant sugar maple, which rendered them invisible
like some enchanted tree in a magic tale.

Harvey's feelings would not have been hurt had he noticed how his
kinsmen scattered at his approach.  He preferred a clear shot at the
day, the fine Sunday morning which was very likely the last fine Sunday
morning of the year.  He paused and drained rainwater from the pot of
yellow porn-porn chrysanthemums Lily had carted home from somewhere and
plunked down on a bench.  He snatched a sluggish hornet as it veered at
him and cracked it to death between his fingernails.  He plotted a
zigzag course down the driveway stepping on as much of its surface as
he could, testing it for weak spots.  He groomed bits of gravel from
here to there with the side of his shoe.  He kicked a footful of gravel
into the wide puddle that had collected overnight in the dip and he
resolved to kick gravel into the dip on a regular basis and eventually
fill in the depression, another project that required his attention.
Throw a little paint on the shutters, kick a little gravel at the
driveway dip.  He would pace himself.  Wise to.

Some woman waved at him as she sailed past out on the River Road.
Harvey lifted his coffee mug and fluttered his cigar and smiled his
crowded-cocktail-party smile at her.  Who was she?  Lily should know, a
woman, in a blue car, heading toward Topsfield, waving, at him,
friendlily.  He clamped his cigar between his teeth and set his mug
down on top of one of the concrete posts that were holding up the
mailbox these days and with two hands he tugged at the ill-fitting
mailbox flap, wrenching it open.  The paper, where was his newspaper?
Extracted, stolen, gone.  He glared up and down the too quiet road on
the off chance the thief lingered in the woods reading and approving
the Globes editorial pages at some illicit and contaminated gypsy
encampment.

As Harvey turned to pace back up the long driveway another car flew at
him, rocketing from out of nowhere and frantically tooting.  He leaped,
landing knee-deep in the weedy verge, as the car swept up the drive in
an unholy rush.  It was his own car.  Harvey recognized the vehicle
racing crazy-wild away from him in a seemingly driverless condition,
for at the instant of tooting and turning and, mistakenly, accelerating
(her slippered foot had slipped on the gas pedal) Ginger had knocked
her Styrofoam cup full of Peddocks' good mocha blend from the dashboard
onto her stack of fresh magazines and the bulk of the Times.  She had
lunged and grabbed for the cup-luckily the lid held.  Oh, that was
Harvey who'd been standing there in her way by the side of the road.
She observed him in the rearview mirror.  She honked again and waved
her thanks for the use of his car.  But ought Uncle Harvey run?  Ought
he run and smoke?  Studying him not without concern, she hit the sudden
driveway dip fast and hard.  Silvery marlin fins of froth and spray
washed up and along and over the fenders, and the hood latch popped
itself ajar.  Ought Harvey to run and smoke and shout?

"HARVEY, IT'S KIND of you to want to help but why don't you rake over
there while I work right here," Alden suggested.  Harvey, in a fume,
had presented himself with a steel-shafted, sharp steel-toothed rake
grasped in his fist.  He had attached himself to Alden, matching
Alden's every steady stroke with a slashing one.  Harvey did not speak
of his fury.  He vibrated with it.  Alden began to breathe in concert
with Harvey's growls and gusts and he felt as if he had been assigned
his own doppelganger, one whose weird mission on earth was to deposit a
new flurry of leaves onto every patch Alden had cleared.  Ginger had,
just before, hustled past Alden, huddled inside a flowing raincoat and
scuffing in and out of a pair of flapping slippers.  She had informed
him,

"You haven't seen me."  She was playing at phantom.  Alden decided he'd
be the man who minded his own business until the natural law and order
was reinstated.

He knelt and began to winnow leaves by hand from Lily's tangled
lavender border.  Lily tapped on her bedroom window.  She was well
pleased Alden was being so careful although it required some minutes of
tiresome charades, Alden squinting up into the glary glass of Lily's
sunnyside window, to establish that this had been a rap of approbation.
Harvey helped to interpret, which took his mind off his recent upset as
the satisfaction of solving Lily's mimery fell to him.

"She approves.  She appreciates.  She says carry on, she says," Harvey
reported.

"Ah.  Good.  I'm glad."  Alden signaled a simple okay to Lily.

Harvey sat upon the front stone-slab step, his legs elegantly crossed
at the ankles, his feet, in effect, deactivated.  He had dropped his
rake somewhere

The leaves had swallowed it up.  Clever of the leaves not to want to be
confiscated or whatever young Alden had in mind for effecting their
ultimate dispatch.

"Hi.  Alden," Harvey spoke up.  "What's to be the plan for today?  For
all this."  He motioned widely.

"The plan is to draw all the leaves out into the driveway in rows and
to load them onto the wheelbarrow and cart them further out into the
woods and throw them into the swamp," Alden said.

"Oh no," said Harvey.  " No, no, no.  Cart them?  In that wobbly wheel
barrel

No, no.  You have to burn the leaves.  We 've always burned the leaves.
They'll give you a permit down at the police place.  Ask them.  Tell
them who you are."

" The permits are only for burning brush.  No one's allowed to burn
leaves these days," Alden said.  "What they really want for us to do is
to stuff them into biodegradable bags which they'll accept them at the
dump on the first and third Saturdays in November."

"Absurd," uttered Harvey.  "That's fine for the tract-house dwellers
who only have a weedy poplar and an ornamental cherry growing up inside
a white-painted tire to worry about."

" Nevertheless," Alden said.  He pulled off a work glove and pried at a
fresh blister doming and stinging across his palm.  The glove had given
him the blister, that unlined, horn-hard, metamorphosing, barn-found
discard glove.

"Nonsense," stated Harvey.  "Rubbish."

"If I get a permit from the police?  " Alden asked.

"Run, fetch one just for a smoke screen and we 'll take it from there,"
Harvey recommended.  "Because I can only blame the so-called ecologists
and their gassing on about carbon dioxides and whatnot, because has it
never occurred to anyone else except me that this may just be part of
the Great Plan for humankind to have evolved to the point where we can
spray fluorocarbonated air fresheners hither and yon to offset the next
scheduled Ice Age?  I believe it's up to God and science now, like a
joint NASA-Lockheed project to get us up to Mars someday.  We'll just
be subcontracting our own small contribution.  Not on the Mars thing, I
mean on the warming-earth-up end of the equation."  Harvey's cheeks had
flushed a slapped-looking pink.  He leaned and scooped up a loose
handful of the planet and let soil and pebbles sift through his fingers
proprietarily but not un lovingly

"Well, I've got this blister coming on," Alden admitted.

"Then go run fetch the say-so," advised Harvey.

ALL SAINTS' WAS STONE-BUILT and English-looking.  The set-in
cornerstone was chiseled A.D. 1916 but the church seemed to Betsy to be
an even more ancient structure.  Random corners jutted while taking un
modern inefficient detours around interior second thoughts like the
vestry robing closet and the kindergartners' two-thirds-scale bathroom
which, if one had to use it, made one feel as awkward as Alice in an
altered state.

All Saints' embraced a courtyard.  A serpentine brick walk and a shade
garden of fleshy, falling-over perennials were contained within the
walls where a statue of Jesus himself was featured.  The statue was a
modern work cast in dull bronze going streaky in the climate.  He was
not, in the opinion of some, a very nice Jesus, but he was generally
held, as a piece of sculpture, to be a very good one.  A wanderer's
rough cloak fell from his sharp, starved shoulders and his skin and
hair and beard were ridged by deep, gouging pulls of
the-acclaimed-artist's thumbs.  What the angles and edges, assembled
with such art, expressed depended upon the quality of the light and the
viewer's susceptibilities.  At the moment, Betsy decided, Jesus was
withholding his usual tough judgment.  A shadow struck off the rise of
the cloister roof eclipsed his face and head and, anyway, church and
church matters were finished for the week.

Betsy sat upon a carved stone courtyard bench to wait as she waited
every Sunday for someone to remember to come for her.  The figure of
Betsy had become a fixture among the tent-folding details of the post
service stir-the coffee urn being wrestled from the Hall and down the
cloister and through a storeroom door; the stanchions and chains and
sign marking off NO PARKING DURING WORSHIP dragged from the driveway
and stuck behind a juniper bush; the lower limbs of St.  Jerome on the
stained-glass window wrenched downright by an impatient hand; the altar
flowers, wrapped in paper, borne away to be delivered to the hospital
sick.  Betsy listened for the gush of water to fall from an exterior
wall spout directly connected to the drain of the sink in the Altar
Guild's cupboard.  Water, tipped from the vases of the altar flowers,
seeped as it had seeped every Sunday since 1916 into the roots of a
house-high rhododendron.  Aunt Lily said there was something different
about the altar flower water and she would like a bucketful for her
roses but, apparently, there was a Rule against such secular usage.
Betsy wasn't convinced that any kind of water so faithfully applied on
a regular basis would not have worked just as well on the sturdy
rhododendron, and as for Aunt Lily's roses, they already bloomed so
beautiful it almost passed human understanding.

In truth, Betsy did not pay all that much attention during the service.
So much of what was professed seemed so very unlikely, although Mr.
Penworthy had been doing his best with an educational series of sermons
tracking back what the words had really said in the Aramaic or the
ancient Greek before an opinionated Victorian injected a nuance.  That
morning he spoke of a Cambodian refugee family new to the area and
seeking work, any work, but Betsy could not help them.  Her eyelids
drooped as the Rector offered prayers softly, almost privately reciting
them, and as the lay readers rendered the Lessons too swiftly or too
slowly but always marble-mouthedly.  The congregation muttered the
responses.  The choir dirged on about heaven and hosts.  The air, even
the air circulating through Betsy's pushed-open window, wafted an
infectious lassitude one breathed into one's lungs with every floating
mote of dust.

But occasionally she could be engaged by a seemingly direct address to
herself from the Bible as grimoire.  Today, as Mr.  Penworthy read the
Psalter for the 22nd Sunday after Trinity, he had stated," "The hills
stand about Jerusalem," " and Betsy had blinked herself awake again.
Oh, she could picture that scene-the Hills and nee Hills lagging far
behind an exasperated Tour Guide in the sun-fried Old Town, yes, all of
the Hills standing about Jerusalem in their fashions-Uncle Alden mildly
contemplating a sad ruin, Aunt Becky frowning back and forth between
her Baedeker page and the discrepancies between those things described
and those things not seen.  Her cousins scattered stones at feral cats
and then slouched off to buy T-shirts imprinted with rude hieroglyphics
at a junky tourist shop.  She guessed Arthur and Phoebe had elected to
stay behind by the hotel's swimming pool where Uncle Harvey remained as
well, updating the names in his address book.  But her mother, her
mother at large in Jerusalem, confronted the Muslim ladies tilting like
laundry baskets under their chadors, demanding of them, "Aren't you
hot?  " and complaining at them how it made her hot just to gaze upon
them in all their swathed ness until Aunt Lily led Ginger off to help
tap flyaway seeds from the wildflowers spearing up through the cracked
eternal pavement into labeled glassine envelopes.  For Aunt Lily had
once mentioned that the Crusaders had propagated the ancient species of
the Holy Land throughout Europe, returning home with husks and grains
suspended in the mud clodded to the hems of their garments.  If she had
been a Crusader, Aunt Lily would have enacted a more systematic and
deliberate dissemination and here now would be her great chance.

Just why she had been vouchsafed such a vision, Betsy could not say.
Perhaps she had been shown what clearsightedness she possessed about
her family and their situation.  She was quite sure she had their
numbers and, by having their numbers, would know how to deal with them
in the months to come.  (Betsy no longer pretended there would not be
months to come here.) Then again, another thought struck her hard.  She
may just have been sent an object lesson on the folly and the danger of
falling into hubris, for she had not described herself to herself as
she too stood about the city, as she trekked down into every damp,
disputed tomb, pausing to pray before every tatty icon with
un-Protestant emotionality, these willed acts of devotion all
performed, of course, to reproach and to burden and to madden her
mother who only longed to retreat to the hotel and the air-conditioning
and the drink that awaited her at the bar.

"Betsy!  Dear!  All on your lonesome own some Mrs.  Nicholls popped
herself down on the bench beside Betsy as she searched in her woven
Kenyan bag for her car keys.  "Listen, I'm so glad I caught you, honey,
I wanted to ask you-" Mrs.  Nicholls paused as she saw she would have
to empty her bag.  She always had to empty her bag to get to her keys
which sunk like wacke to the cluttered depths.  She really should keep
her keys clipped and jangling remindingly to a belt, but she never wore
belts-one might as well cinch a belt around a sack of flour.
Therefore, she endured this nonsense.  She extracted and lay upon the
bench between them the whistle swinging from a plaited gimp cord which
she roped round her neck the one night a week she volunteered at the
Inter-Faith Elder Abuse Hotline located in a rehabbed mill building
over in Lawrence.  For afterward, brooding on the tales she'd been
told, she had to walk alone across a wasteland an hour past midnight to
get to her car.  On those nights, of course, she had her keys well in
hand, her longest and spikiest key to the front door of her Senior
Village condo held pointed outward between her middle and index
fingers, poised to strike at the throat or the temple or the eyes of a
rapist.  Then, as he lay sprawled and writhing on the waste ground she
would summon aid with her whistle, blowing in pips short and long the
internationally recognized signal of distress.  If only all elders were
as well defended as she.

A Nile-green leotard was tossed onto the bench, an individual
serving-size packet of salted oyster crackers, her large, stuffed
wallet, a coupon file, unfiled coupons, curtain fabric swatches, a
Kleenex blotted with very orange makeup matching the shade on the
stained chiffon scarf discovered in Uncle Harvey's raincoat pocket,
which gave the not very interesting answer to a not very interesting
mystery.

"... to ask you, please," resumed Mrs.  Nicholls, whose mind was as
fully occupied but much better ordered than her satchel, "to remind
your Uncle Harvey I expect him with bells on for supper Tuesday night
at 5:30 in my unit before we go to the Senior Fun-Tasia Bazaar."

"Yes, I'll tell him," Betsy said as she wondered whether she was
obliged to mention the part about Uncle Harvey having his bells on. She
supposed she would have to repeat the message verbatim but she would
recite it expressionlessly.  She had come, in her last months at home,
not to like having to convey coded information in all innocence, which
may or may not-oh, probably not-be the case here.  She wished Mrs.
Nicholls wouldn't peer at her so alertly.

"How's Mother?  " Mrs.  Nicholls asked brightly.

"Well... "Betsy began.

"Oh, good," said Mrs.  Nicholls.  "Here they are," she announced.  She
was referring to her keys at last retrieved and tossed into the air and
captured; however, the approaching Palmers, whom Babe had routed round
the serpentine courtyard path in order to keep the adamantine Jesus
between themselves and Betsy, mistook Mrs.  Nicholls's exclamation for
a summons.

Goody, smiling on his own and on Babe's behalf, stepped over a bed of
flattened host as and said hello.  He had not particularly wished to
cut the young girl, or that decent soul Penny Nicholls, who was Babe's
mother's cousin, although Babe must have her reasons for whatever
avoidance measures she undertook and doubtless in all good time he
would be told them.  Babe trailed after Goody carrying the folded altar
cloths which she had been washing and ironing at home ever since the
big argument at Briter-Ways Cleansers in 1977.

"Have you been waiting all this time?  Do you need a ride home?  "
Goody asked Betsy.  He had noticed that a tendril of ground cover ivy
clung, now, curled round her thin ankle.

"We came on foot this morning," Babe reminded him.

"I'll get the car and come back."

"Oh, no, really," said Betsy.

"No," said Babe.

"My mother is coming and if I'm not here she'll..."

"Worry about you dreadfully," Mrs.  Nicholls clucked approvingly at
Ginger's natural concern, whatever else people had to say about
Ginger.

Rampage, Betsy had been about to say but she had long since trained
herself not to blurt.

"Yes, she'll wonder," confirmed Betsy.

"If you're sure," Goody said.

"She's sure.  Don't upset best-laid plans.  You don't want Ginger
coming after you, do you?  Do you?  " Babe required an answer.  |

"No," supposed Goody.  |

"I must fly myself," said Mrs.  Nicholls.  "It's Cambodian can-drive I
day down at the Village and I'm chairperson."  |

"Cans?  Cans of what?  What kinds of cans of what?"  Babe asked if

Ui Penny as they moved on.  " Because what do those people eat? Because
I heard they can't eat wheat, they can't digest..."  |1

By then, Betsy knew her mother would not be coming.  Distracted by |
the curbside meeting with those Palmer people, Betsy had not at the
last |1 impressed upon Ginger that she would need a ride home from
church as ;| well.  A promise to reappear had not been exacted.  Betsy,
Ginger would argue, had simply assumed.  Betsy had taken for granted.
Ginger was not J a chauffeur.  She was not a doormat.  Betsy was being
taught a lesson.  j

She glanced apologetically at the stern Jesus.  She imagined he 'd like
5 to have the garden to himself again.  Perhaps he would even sit down
on ."  the edge of his plinth and read some small devotional volume he
kept tucked up his sleeve.  It occurred to her that the All Saints'
Jesus was going to look very cold in the snow.

Betsy felt conspicuous in her dress and gloves and heels and hat once
she left the leafy brick sidewalks of the village.  The high-flung,
winter turning sun cast off heat, and surviving, or mistimedly hatched,
midges swarmed in atomized clouds and settled, sipping, in the corners
of her eyes.  Every widely spaced yard contained a dog and every dog
charged at her yapping and circling, tail wagging or slashing.  They
yelped as they blundered into the force fields of invisible fencing and
withdrew until next time as someone sent from the house to see what now
looked and saw Betsy.  A match of pure white geese dashed on stiff
mechanical legs from a graveled driveway and followed her, very
stupidly, up the road.  Betsy spun and waved her white gloved hands
like a policewoman and ordered them, "Home."  They fell back, knocking
against | one another, impressed, and continued to pace after her when
her back ;

was turned.  One of them honked, irresistibly.  Betsy spun and waved
and ordered, "Home."  They glinted at her, wholly enchanted.  They were
highly unintelligent creatures but somebody must have thought they
loved them for they wore green gingham bows tied around their long
white S-pipe throats.  Foolish.  Half a dozen times more resisting
Betsy's spin, her wave, her order, "Home," they pursued her as far as
the River Road and the bent arm of the river.  There, they tumbled over
a vertical embankment and launched themselves into the water,
unsteadily paddling out into the smoother cord of faster current, where
they capsized.

HARVEY HAD RAISED the junior troops while Alden was away, with the
promise of fireworks to come.  Lily and Becky had more responsibly
presented themselves, rakes in hand, and as Alden pulled up to the top
of the driveway bowl, he found his wife and children and uncle and aunt
outside in bright wool sweaters, each engaged in a kind of formal dance
of approach and retreat, guiding and gliding their stick-thin,
flare-skirted partners by the shoulder and waist.  Alden would not have
put it past Harvey to have assigned plats.  The boys seemed to have
been spaced and sited out of mutual antagonism and roughhousing range.
Little Becky, combing the lower lawn, could not quite see whose pile of
leaves was growing higher than hers, whose grass plot was clearer than
her own.  Arthur and Phoebe had taken on the meadow where they were
twisting and lifting sheaves of brown vegetable tangles, flinging them
into a heap.

"Got the permit?  " Harvey yollered from the terrace.

Alden held up a slip of paper and Harvey trotted off to the barn.

"What's all this?"  Alden asked Becky and Lily, who were working from
opposite ends of the front garden intending to meet in the middle,
although Becky, by extra exertion, planned to clear more than her fair
share of the leaves and so spare Lily at least a little effort without
alerting

Lily that this courtesy was being accomplished.

" The boys are looking forward to the fires.  Anything destructive,"
Becky explained.  "But I'm not so sure."

"We'll keep an eye on," Alden promised.

Harvey emerged from the barn carrying two mislabeled cans of old lawn
mower gasoline and he had last Tuesday's Globe wedged and flapping
between his upper chest and arm.  He visited each boy and Little Becky.
He motioned them away, so magisterially gesturing they obeyed him with
only token truculence.  He dispensed liquid from a can.  He rolled a
peeled-off sheet of newsprint into a taper, ignited an end with a
kitchen match, and held his torch aloft to catch in the breeze.  Then
he plunged each disintegrating wand into the leaves.  Flames reared
skyward in a pillar, subsided, and the leaf piles blustered smoke.
Harvey sprinkled on more gasoline, watchful as a chef flam being table
side

"Oh my," said Becky every time.

Lily's rake had dislodged a rich strand of earthworm.  She knelt and
replanted him and sent him on his way with a firm but encouraging
nudge.  Rising on Alden's offered arm, she remembered that they had
always kept a sputtering relay of all the garden hoses, connected and
spraying prismy mists at the joints, ready to douse any rogue licks of
fire that might escape underground and run for the woods, igniting tiny
pines like sparklers and scorching the moss carpets and attacking the
oaks at their risen roots.  In the event, one must be alert to a change
in the smell of the smoke, Lily advised.

"You mean less cannabis-y?"  asked Alden, sniffing a sweetish undertone
in the developing haze.  No wonder the kids were so keen to
cooperate.

Presently, Ginger emerged from the house.  She had mused over her
magazines and eaten three raised doughnuts and lolled about in a hot,
deep, scented bath and then dressed for what remained of the day in her
navy-blue palazzo pants and a creamy silk sailor blouse and the
Egyptian beads that clicked like knucklebones as she walked.  She
dragged a soft lambs wool shawl to shrug on and off, she ran so cold
and hot.  She carried a notebook into which she meant to enter her
Sunday thoughts.  Several pencils secured her hair.

She stepped outside.  Well, she was glad they were seeing to the yard.
She'd been wondering when they'd realize that it was rather too casual
to have so many leaves left lying about.  The sight of them, massing
and matting outside every window only oppressed certain already lowered
sensibilities.  She spoke aloud to the sky above, " "What time that
yellow

If leaf was green, My days were gladder."  " She may have been putting
the

I universe on notice.

She wandered round to the cleared terrace where one could once

I again locate one's particular favored chaise released from its
rustling shroud of tattery tree litter.  She settled back among musty
and not entirely dry cushions and she fanned away smoke with her
notebook.  A little red-hearted volcano puffed at terrace edge which
she wished had not been placed quite there.  Why oh why was nothing
ever right?  She sighed and tented her shawl above her head.

"Betsy," Becky's voice accused her.  "Shouldn't Betsy have been picked
up from church?  "

Ginger's sherry-colored eyes snapped open and she stirred, just
displacing her back from its points of perfect alignment against the
cushion

IE bumps.

!! "And now no one can get down the driveway to go for her because
there's a line of fire blazing away across it," Becky said.  The wall
of fire had been Harvey's big brainstorm to repel any Nosy Parkering
inspectors sent from town.

"Then I guess I can't get down the driveway to fetch her because of the
fire, I guess," Ginger replied.

Becky sat on a tipsy aluminum tubing and mesh webbing chair, tiresomely
prepared to discuss the matter with earnest and futile concern.  "But
what will Betsy do then?  " Becky wanted to know.

"The sensible thing," Ginger predicted, because the obvious course for
Betsy was to ask that nice Mr.  Palmer, now met as an approved friend
of the family, for a ride home.  And Goody would just have to battle a
way through the flames to arrive at her side.  His ordeal-his tires
melted into taffy twists, the gas cap catapulted into eternity-would
become one of those memories to laugh at later when they were in a
laughing mood and at quieter times they would more solemnly marvel at
all they had passed through, together and apart.

BETSY STOOD ABOVE the riverbank watching the geese as they spun and
flustered out of view around the bend.  The current was carrying them
back to the riverfront gentleman's farm where she had first met them
and she guessed she had provided their midday's amusement, or perhaps
she had just hindered them in their pursuit of their daily stroll.

She decided to carry her hat.  She placed her prayer book inside the
hat.  Her shoes pinched and the left heel wobbled.  She thought it
might be nice to wade in the shallows, but the embankment was steep
along this stretch of the river and it was pocked with burrow holes
smooth sided from use.  The local otters seemed charming creatures when
at frolic but she wasn't sure you could trust them not to turn nasty if
you got in their way.

She heard the car before she saw it.  She had time to move from the
crown of the road onto which she had strayed-rather a satisfying
feeling to take an entire road for herself.  She paused on the sandy
verge and followed the progress of a VW Beetle as it rounded the curve.
She nearly waved, for Towne was a wave-y place.  Well, I saw you only
you didn't wave, people went out of their way to mention.  But Betsy
stayed her hand because she saw that the driver was male and young and
good-looking, at least as far as she could tell from where she stood.
To wave at the likes of him would be something her mother would do.
Betsy walked on.  The car passed her, slowed as if musing over
something, stopped, and backed up alongside her.

"Can you help me?  I'm looking for an address along River Road," the
young man leaned across the passenger seat and asked through the
cranked-down window.  "If this is River Road?  I have every hope it
might be, being next to the river, but I haven't seen a sign."

Betsy nodded.  "There is a sign that's overgrown, and anyway,
somebody's taped a YARD SALE TODAY sign atop it, only I believe the
yard sale was yesterday.  My mother and my aunt went to it."

"So that explains.  And now I'm looking for some people called Lowe
although they live with someone called Hill.  I've no number to go by
and I haven't seen either name on a mailbox.  There's been no one else
to ask except some horseback riders but they just stared through me as
if they were centaurs and I was an Aeolian peasant.  You don't know
them, those people, the Lowe-Hills, do you?  " he asked.

"Yes, actually, I live there too, I'm on my way ..."

"Do you?  I'm in luck.  So, are you the one called Little Becky?  There
are two Beckys and one is called Little Becky, I gather."

"No, no, no, I'm not," Betsy set him straight.  "I'm Betsy Tuckerman?
"

"Betsy," he confirmed.  (How did a Betsy fit into the household?) "And
you must have guessed I'm Andy Happening," he said after a beat, after
she failed to name him.  "I expect you've all been expecting me?"  he
prompted.

"No, I don't think so.  But I don't know.  I am seldom confided in,"
Betsy allowed.

"Why don't I drive you and you can show me the way," Andy Happening
said.  "I'll have to make room, first," he said, as he opened the
passenger door and shifted a carton, a tweed jacket, a tumble of heavy,
un jacketed books from the front seat to the carton- and garment- and
book-filled backseat.  Betsy knew at once she didn't like the looks of
his obviously earthly possessions all in transit.  She did not wish to
understand what had occasioned the cataclysm that had thrown up crammed
cartons like boulders to weigh down his put-puttering car.  Still, she
had never ridden in one of those old VW Beetles.  She sat in the
cleared front seat.  The pavement, as they drove off, flew up at her
suddenly beyond the snub snout of the hood.  She let the sensation
dazzle her.

"Turn here," she spoke up.  She herself had nearly overlooked the
narrow gap between the trees.  They started up the rutted track which
looped back on itself as it climbed.

"I would never have found this," Andy said.

Betsy smelled the smoke before it enveloped the car.  She pressed
gloved fingertips to her nose as Andy hit the yellow and acrid cloud
and braked abruptly.  He swerved into bushes.  He reversed.  His rear
chassis rose up and over a stump.  He crept forward and halted before a
wall of fire.  He reversed.  He stalled out in a deep puddle.

"This is unusual," Betsy informed Andy as she slipped off her pumps.

"BUT NO ONE told me not to come.  My Uncle William assured me he would
arrange everything.  That he had arranged everything," Andy said.

He and Betsy had walked the rest of the way through the fumy woods.
Betsy had blindly borne off in a direction.  She skimmed over the hulks
of logs and rushed at impossible coverts and rematerialized on the
other sides of thick spruces or so it seemed to Andy, who kept her,
just, in sight.  She was acting a bit will-o'-the-wisp for his tastes;
then again, if the rest of them proved as oddball as she, he was going
to find himself standing knee-deep in research clover once he cleared
this aftermath of a Mohawk massacre brew of ash and burn and as soon as
he presented his credentials here.  He had brought a great globed jar
of marron glaces for Mrs.  Lowe which remained in his stranded Bug and
he dared not turn back for them.  His coughed-out calls to please slow
down, to please stop, failed to reach Betsy.

They broke free of the woods and crossed a sloping lawn, skirting
smoldering barrows of leaves, and approached a very large, very old,
very white, and very wooden house.  They swerved past a front door he
was not invited to enter and they tramped down a pathway and came, at
last, upon the Hills as they stood about a side terrace.  They were
consuming black and blistered hot dogs slipped between folded-over
slices of mustard-spread oatmeal bread and drinking paper cups of pale
ginger ale, empty bottles of which were impaled on the branches of a
spirea as if being made examples of for being empty.  The people were
soot-streaked and scarlet-faced beneath the soot, one, two, three,
eleven of them arranged across chaises, sitting on overturned stone
planters, propped against a low retaining wall, all regarding Andy with
their remarkably alike eyes, alike, at any rate, in their wary and
wondering expressions.  Now that he, whoever he was, had returned
Betsy, he should go away.  Why was he not going away?  Did he require a
hotdog?  They were surprisingly good hot dogs, stuck on sticks and
charred over the fires.  Harvey had buried a dozen foil-wrapped baking
potatoes in the coals although he could not locate them at present.
Alden said Harvey's potatoes must have burst but Harvey said potatoes
had never used to burst.

"How did you get up the driveway?  " Alden asked Betsy.

"We didn't."

"I expected to be expected," Andy was saying.

"Oh, dear, yes, but William's letter about you didn't even arrive until
this very week.  That Revolution, you know, Andy, one of the ones in
the news, must have interfered with the mail.  Of course we 're all
delighted for those poor people over there, or we shall be once things
have calmed down," Mrs.  Lowe, the primary Becky, tried to tell him. An
excellent interviewee, Andy anticipated.  She was an over explainer "
But, I must confess, we assumed you had made other plans, because,
because, isn't it late in the semester to begin?"  This was diffidently
asked.  Becky was not a scholar herself.

"My Dean is very enthusiastic about this project," Andy announced.  The
Dean would protest had he heard himself so described, for Andy had felt
himself tumbled here and landed in a heap on the downdraft of the
Dean's deep sighs for the decline of his Department.

"And one never likes to disappoint a Dean," a chaise-longuing woman
cried gaily.  So she was on his side, Andy guessed, but that would not
necessarily advance his cause with the rest of them.  Those alike eyes
flickered over her, narrowly dismissive.  An elderly woman detached
herself from the rest and moved to the edge of the terrace to confer
with an as elderly gentleman who was prodding purposefully among a pile
of cinders with the wrong end of a rake.  The old lady removed the rake
from his grasp, and she held the darkened end over the misting spray of
a sputtering hose connection.

"Do you mean he's still in school?  " asked Brooks.  He and Rollins
sincerely sought information.  Based upon this fresh datum, they might
have to amend their academic exit strategy.

"Yes, yes, you can languish in school for..."  Alden began.

"And how is William?"  Becky asked.  "You saw him, I gather, last
summer?  "

"Donkey's years," concluded Alden.

"I've met your Uncle William," Ginger spoke up from her chaise.  "Tell
me, does he still have that marvelous higher-life-form wrinkle crinkled
brow?  "

The Hills pictured versions, real and imagined, of Andy's uncle and
Andy seemed to rise in their estimations for his linkage to such a
personage.

"Kindly crinkling," Ginger entirely invented.  Betsy hovered behind her
mother's chaise as if she meant to intercept any further remarks by
sweeping them into her church hat and smothering them with the prayer
book

"Yes," Andy answered Becky.  "I saw William last August, but he was on
such a fleeting visit he said he wasn't really home at all."  Which had
made the occasion seem all the more unreal in retrospect.  Andy and
William had had lunch at a Chichi's, Andy's not at all successful
choice, although he had only been following William's orders.  Andy was
to pick him up at his hotel and drive him to the airport, stopping for
lunch en route at a convenient restaurant that served speedy but not
fast food and which was not a fish place because the oceans were
sewers, William knew, he had been to an international conference.
Nevertheless, Andy had noticed that William's plummy accent had
relocated itself somewhere in the vicinity of the mid-Atlantic.
Syou-ahs, he had denounced seventy percent of the earth's surface.

But it had long been Andy's wish to cultivate this always absent uncle,
for William was known to possess contacts and to wield a degree of
influence.  Indeed, he possessed a sizable stock of influence, he had
been so seldom persuaded to part with any.  The extended
BaskettHappening clan charged that William had not been inconvenienced
enough by family concerns, choosing, as he had, to remain wifeless and
childless and abroad for so much of his life.  They surged around him
in airport arrivals lounges, unfurling documentary evidence of tax
audits and divorce decrees and car-leasing contracts.  Then, falsely
consulting his pockets, which his tailor forbade him ever to fill,
William would regretfully reveal he had left his reading glasses behind
in some Old World corner.  Wear mine, his grown-crafty family offered,
passing over their own spectacles.  But William claimed his presbyopia
was of a special order, not easily compensated for.

Still, William had called Andy one day last summer and proposed they
meet to talk about that future of Andy's from which William had
theretofore been content to hold himself aloof.  Andy, upon receiving
his summons, had felt himself chosen, not unlike one of the ancient
kings of Calicut who had their throats cut after enjoying a brief,
prescribed term of reign, although here Andy, as a student of the human
condition, posited too darkly what William may or may not have had in
mind.

"Sociology," William had spoken across the restaurant table at Andy,
denying the discipline one of its syllables-sosology.  He ordered chi
mi chang as with a shrug, hurting the feelings of the very young
waitress who was new that day and keen.

"I've heard you're floundering," William observed, dredging a bowl of
greenish and flecked dip with a bright blue corn chip.  He sniffed
warily and held the corn chip at knee level as if he hoped a voracious
mongrel or hungry urchin would swoop and snatch the regretted savory.
But he was not in Mexico for all the scrapes and sombreros flung
casually about the banquettes as if by local patrons.

"I argued-your mother was my informant, by the way-I argued on your
behalf that I could not believe you were in over your head with
Sociology, those un deeps William said, and then paused to regard with
disbelief the neighboring table where a birthday was being
celebrated.

"Gag gifts," uttered William, and Andy had explained that the giant
pair of sunglasses just torn from its wrappings was in fact a useful
and serious item.  Parked-car windshields wore them to keep the hot sun
off front seats which were a torment to sit upon particularly if one
was wearing shorts.

"Good God, America, America," William said, sipping at a cloudy
margarita poured into a too-wide glass in which he wet the tip of his
nose.  He signaled to the forlorn waitress to bring two more drinks and
he pointed to his watch and pantomime-scribbled, Check, please, and he
indicated his spoon was not clean by scrabbling at dried Mexican gravy
with his thumbnail and he revealed his plan to redeem Andy's fortunes.
He had the solution to Andy's thesis dilemma.  Yes, even he had been
apprised of Andy's problem a quarter turn of the world away.  The
family cries had penetrated the sound- and surveillance- and
bomb-proofed chamber locked with a secret key and guarded by upright
Marines where William spent his days working at what he was not at
liberty to say.

" I know just the people for you to study and write about and so
produce whatever it is you're supposed to produce.  At any rate, you
will live among them and probe and observe and theorize and at last, to
everyone's great relief, finish your formal education once and for all,
after all, you are almost thirty ..."

"I'm twenty-six," clarified Andy.

"... you're already in your late twenties (all this hairsplitting, you
won't split hairs when they're grey).  As I was about to say, these
people are in crisis to boot, so everything will rise to the surface.
They'll be recalling and reviewing and regretting every corner and turn
of their lives.  You will live among them, move among them, find out
what you can find out about them.

"Sensible fellow," William added almost fondly, for Andy must have
agreed to his proposition.  He had accepted and pocketed the square of
envelope William slid across the table surface, containing particulars
and an address.  " Wise of you not to want to thrash around some jungle
eating hallucinogenic grubs and being ritually tattooed on your what
sis to gain your subjects' confidence."

"You're confusing me with an ..."

"Mind you," William warned, "these people will expect you to play
contract bridge and listen to Mantovani recordings and subscribe to
certain revisionist accounts of the Nixon years and to be in bed by ten
with the windows flung open after you've performed two hundred standing
jumping jacks.  I am describing him, the husband, of course.  And a
word to the wise about the children who are, I'm sorry to say, modern
children."

William had promised to see to the arrangements.  Andy was told to
stand by for further instructions and he returned to his off-campus
apartment furnished with a double futon, stacks of books, and his
girlfriend's pottery dishes.  Renata had said William's scheme sounded
more than a little peculiar to her.  Andy disagreed, but disagreements
rose automatically between them by then.  "What do you suppose modern
children are?  " he had asked her, and Renata expressed, instead, an
opinion of modern men.

"It's September," she had said significantly as the new month began.
"October," she announced more ominously, and Andy came home one day
after assuring his Dean, once again, of all that he intended, to
discover

Renata had uncoupled the individually owned components of their
conjoined stereo systems.  A modern woman, she possessed and could
employ a set of utility tools.  Laura Nyro, not heard from lately at
Andy's request, was singing less richly from diminished-capacity
speakers, but the weakened cries of a woman's wroth nevertheless more
truly communicated just how one felt, Renata told Andy.  They effected
an awkward parting.  They had never, expressedly, been in love and with
the cessation of this un characterized affair they were left with mere
disaffection to demonstrate.  To linger would be-it had
been-undignified.  Andy drove away as if he knew where he was headed
and then, suddenly, he had known.

"WILLIAM is the same as ever," Andy told Becky.

"Oh, I'm glad to hear," Becky said as Andy glanced at her and saw she
was sincere.

The wind switched and a charge of smoke scattered them all from the
terrace.  They bore their hot dogs and paper cups and rakes onto the
lawn where the muttering and seething mounds of ash had a geothermal
look about them, as if they provided a link between this and the
infernal world, Andy thought, but the others no more shared this
apprehension with him than they had shared their lunch.  His pants leg
was soaked by a hissing hose as he slowly registered the sensation,
disliked it, and hopped clear of the mist.  The several boys laughed. A
large girl (Little Becky?) stared at him and walked backward and
blundered into the wandy branches of a mock orange.  Ginger, a step
behind the other shaving had to enact a more encumbered retreat, her
shawl having snagged on the arm of her chaise-clutched a crammed
notebook to her breast.  She shed file cards which the breezes snatched
and wheeled inevitably into the muttering mounds.  She tottered after
several aflight and erratic cards, stepping out of her step-in mules.

"Rescue them, rescue them, rescue them," she shrieked.

"Rescue what?  What?  " asked Harvey, annoyed.  "What am I supposed to
rescue now?  If I'm going to gad about rescuing something, first I have
to know what it is."  He sat upon the granite outcropping toward which
he'd been heading.  "Alden, attend to your sister," he ordered.

"Not I," answered Alden.

Betsy slipped on a glove and lifted aflame cards by their non burning
ends and placed them on the grass where she stepped them out, and then,
kneeling down, gently brushed away scorch marks and tried to read the
writing that remained.  A less thoughtful daughter might have burned
her fingers lightly just to show Ginger.  Betsy, however, had
considered and been unable to determine, show Ginger what, precisely?

"Careful, careful, careful," Ginger exhorted her.  "Careful."

"You've caught us at a moment," Becky told Andy.

"Well," said Andy.

Wasn't anyone going to assist Ginger, Betsy?  Ginger berated, Betsy
forbore.  And 3X5 cards were incinerated.

"They can hear you in Chelsea," Lily approached Ginger and informed
her.

Andy decided it would not violate his mandate not to interfere if he
collected a card lodged in the yoke of a tree trunk.  He swiped off
sticky pitch against his wet pants leg and swiftly read, A

CONFESSION:

WHEN

MY DAUGHTER WAS FOUR YEARS OLD I SCOOPED UP ANY OLD ALPHABET

SOUP LETTERS WITH A SPOON AND TOLD HER THEY SPELLED

B-E-T-S-Y.  He passed the card to Ginger who thanked him
extravagantly.

"Glover, go see to that," Alden directed his eldest son to deal with a
line of flames making a run for the woods.  Glover loped off and beat
the fire to death with a flat-headed shovel.

"So," said Andy, detaching his arm from Ginger's confiding arm.

Harvey motioned to Andy to come sit beside him on the ledge and he
explained that the ledge formed a long, rising throne upon which to sit
and gaze off into the meadow and think one's meadow-inspired thoughts.
He liked to think about being a bee, for example.

"Yes," said Andy.

"But isn't it late in the semester to start a project?"  Alden asked
the question again.  The family had reclustered around Andy.  These
people gathered like pouty pigeons, jostling to the front of the flock
as the flock kept switching direction.

"I had preliminary research to complete," Andy said.

"On us?  Are we on file somewhere?"  worried Becky.  "The boys aren't,
are they?"  Because certain documents were supposed to have been
sealed.

"How fascinating.  I must read your notes sometime, because as you can
see, I'm something of a researcher-writer myself," Ginger said.

"It was just, you know, general background, procedural, demo graphical
methodological information I was compiling," Andy said.

"Yes, we have a lot of, you know, background," Harvey said.

"And just what do you mean to accomplish, Mr.  Happening?  " Lily asked
sensibly.  She brushed aside a clutter of acorn shells a squirrel had
cracked open and she sat on the stone outcropping to await his reply.
The cluster of family nodded and fell quiet because they hoped they
were about to be enlightened about themselves.

And Andy explained that while he had not discovered the Middle Class,
he would, like Columbus, return with word of the great, theretofore
unexploited mass he had encountered.  He would, with their cooperation,
reconstruct their history and their ethos from the un extraordinary
siftings of their unexceptional lives, from their letters, from their
living memories, from their photo albums, check stubs, Bible entries,
school records... "Hey," objected Brooks or Rollins.

Andy meant to trace the straight and steady lines across the charts of
the lives of utterly ordinary people who came home from World Wars
without a scratch on them to marry the daughters of bankers and enjoy
long, fruitful unions and peaceful deaths at an advanced old age.

"That wasn't one of us," Harvey said.  "Sounds like a Bartlett.  Think
you may want to see the Bartletts.  Tell you how to find their
place."

"The exalted have been done and the unfortunates as well, those peaks
and valleys.  I believe I want to explore the Hills," Andy said.  The
Hills acknowledged his graceful remark.  "It is very seldom that anyone
has ventured from the Grove of Academe into the surrounding suburbs,"

Andy resumed.  "I shall provide a map.  This could well prove to be as
important as Margaret Mead's field work in Samoa."

Lily had never cared for Dr.  Mead.  In her opinion, a lady, even a
lady en armored in scholarship, ought at times to have averted her
eyes.

"Or Oscar Lewis and The Children of Sdnche^," Andy added.

"Oh dear, those poor people," Becky said.

"Upper-middle class, surely we're upper-middle class," protested
Ginger.

"It's very middle class to want to be upper-middle class," Alden told
her.

"I don't know, it all makes sense to me, having a resident sociologist
around here," Arthur said.

"Rather have a cook," Harvey said, "and a groundskeeper and one of
those all-around handyman old-time jiggery tinkerers."

"Well, I think it's perfectly marvelous of Andy to take such an
interest,"

Ginger exclaimed.

Becky spoke softly to Alden.  "I wrote to William as soon as I could,
but what can we do, here he is landed right in our laps?  He doesn't
look very robust.  Where else can he go?  How can he go, through the
fire?  How did he even get here?  "

"I don't know, but is any of that our responsibility?  " asked Alden.

"Yes, I rather think it is now," Becky said.

"So," said Andy.  They were an obstinate bunch.  They leaned on their
rakes and threw their paper cups onto pyres and watched the wax
coatings melt into strange configurations more interesting to consider
than Andy's proposal.  Nevertheless, Andy had hardened himself to pose
pressing questions and they had made him walk through fire to get here.
"So," said Andy, "my boxes and bags are in the Bug, if I can just
organize my rooms?  "

"Room," Lily corrected him quickly, and thus she committed herself to
letting him have one.

"I say," Alden remarked.  The cunning of the construction-he stepped
between the confident young man and his aged, outflanked aunt.

"Hi, Glover," Alden said then.  "Run fetch this fellow's car for him
since he funked driving through the fire.  You do it for him."

Eventually, after more quadraphonic chatter by the clustering family,
restating all that had just been expressed and confirming what had just
been decided, and after Andy had been informed, as well, about Harvey's
plans to paint the shutters that very green shade of green, and of
Alden's idea of growing an agricultural crop of some sort in the
meadow, and of Ginger's slowly going but very exciting work in
progress, and after Becky apologized because William's letter had been
so long and so late in coming, and Arthur told a newly minted joke
about the California earthquake which was pretty funny even though
sixty people had just been killed so suddenly and so violently on a
warm autumn evening, eventually, then, Andy was conducted inside.
Brooks and Rollins toted his effects inside like sulky native porters.
An unsmiling

Lily led Andy up the floating staircase and he followed her down a long
hallway stepping from fraying rug to fraying rug.  Standing aside, her
arm barred against an opened door, Lily bade him enter a dim and
airless chamber covered with green-on-green-striped wallpaper and
containing too many large pieces of dark, carved furniture.  Andy
sidled to the window and peremptorily yanked apart the curtains.  Cool
October sunlight washed through the room which now looked less sinister
but very much sadder.  Andy asked, without thinking, "Did someone die
in here, or what?  "

Downstairs in the kitchen, Alden was prudently and persistently
calling

Andy's university, and the Dean, disturbed at home on a Sunday,
pronounced Andy bona fide.  Becky collected her letter to William from
the stack of letters on the pie crust table (two trips to the village
today and no one had thought to mail them) and she sat down to write
again to William to inform him of his nephew's safe and welcome
arrival.

Andy crouched before his boxes which the complaint-speaking boys had
tumbled onto the floor just inside the door.  Lily lingered just inside
the door as well-such edginess here-and Andy was very conscious of the
hem of her blue cotton culotte skirt hanging too near to his face.  He
breathed shallowly, not wishing to breathe upon her which would be
construed as rude, he was certain.  He forgot what he had been seeking
among his belongings, rummaging for reassurance among his books and
folded sweaters.  He stood and began to clear dusty and
contaminated-looking prescription bottles from the desktop where he
wished to plunk down and plug in his Apple as soon as possible so that
he might sit resolutely before its familiar screen.  He glanced at the
bottles as he ousted the insomniac, heartsick, deeply in pain invalid
who had preceded him here.  He filled an emptied shoe box.

Meanwhile, hovering with hops of agitation, Harvey had pounced upon
Alden and detained him in the attic stairwell which was adjacent to
Andy's room.

"That Andy fellow doesn't look like to you he could be up to very much,
do you think?"  Harvey's unmodulated old man's voice bore through the
wall.  "Not robbin' us?  Not killin' us?  "

Alden's voice murmured back with better information.

"What?  You called that school of his?  What school?  Not a top
school."

Lily slipped from the doorway and Andy listened frankly through the
plaster to a lively session of whispers and hushes and the rumble of
ascending footsteps.  He became aware of a cat sniffing among his
boxes.  It sneezed fastidiously and minced off with its tail raised.
Andy shrugged and searched along the baseboard, head thrust under the
bed, the desk, the bureau, for an electrical outlet.  He found none and
he became certain that if there was an outlet, it was hidden behind a
massive wardrobe.  Reluctantly, he put his shoulder to a sharp corner
and shoved as effectlessly as if he were trying to push a mountain up
another mountain.

Lily reappeared in the doorway, pinker-skinned and with brighter eyes
after settling Harvey.  She supposed Andy had heard himself being
speculated upon, and she felt obliged to say something pleasant to him
even though the young man seemed to have dedicated himself to
dismantling the room he had tricked her into giving him.  She scooped
up the shoe box, a-rattle with medicine vials, incidentally wondering
if any of it might do her any good.  She cleared her throat, almost
wishing that what ailed her these days could be done away with by
taking a simple pill, although these pills must be ten years old now
and probably pure poison.  Harvey had picked up a cautionary brochure
on the dangers of aged prescription medicine at the Senior Village
Health Fair.

Andy responded to Lily with an uncertain but politely prompting throat
clearing of his own, which reminded Lily that the intrusive young man
was still there and she had yet to be nice to him.

"Yes," she told Andy, "somebody did die in here but I have, of course,
since changed the sheets."

l";

chapter Three ^ The Hills and History

THAT MORNING HAD NOT gotten off to a very good start.  Becky stood in a
corner of the kitchen trying to iron her challis skirt and a wool-blend
lace-collared blouse recovered from a box wedged beneath their bed.
Choral practice began at nine o'clock down at the Congregational Church
basement and she thought she'd contrive to look smart for a change if
only to hearten herself when she glimpsed her passing reflection
captured in chrome plating or advancing, hand outstretched to greet
herself from every polished glass door surface.  For Becky had awakened
reluctantly, more tired than when she'd dropped into bed and read a
page of her library book and switched off the light, brushing her
bedside box of Kleenex, her reading glasses, and her tube of
Replenishment Formula Eye Creme, which slid down and wedged between her
night table and the wall, the fact of their not quite having fallen
making it seem not worth the effort to lean on her elbow and reach over
to retrieve them.  Nevertheless, her sleep had not been unaffected.
She believed she may have dreamed of an avalanche, which had not been
restful, muffled voices implored her to "do something" and as she
shivered helplessly, feeling a great weight pressing down on her from
above.  Now she was sipping determinedly from a tumbler of honey and
lemon juice, attempting to fend off the head cold that had been making
the rounds.  The children had suffered from, or perhaps enjoyed, their
recent bouts lying aswoon in their rooms, missing a day or two of
school and inhaling lime sherbet floats, all they claimed they were
able to swallow, through flexible straws.  And Ginger had taken to her
bed for the better part of a week reading the decidedly un improving
Dancing in the Light and dragooning passers-by into running downstairs
for her to fetch fresh orange juice and ice cubes.  Ginger's remedy of
choice was to chip away at her head cold with strong screwdrivers.

Becky pressed the green paisley pleats of her skirt and she swigged a
shot of honey and lemon.  A deep cough welled and she sputtered honey
and lemon droplets over the ironing board.  Her racing iron seared
honey and lemon into the challis which didn't seem to show on the busy
pattern and which, indeed, smelled rather pleasant even to her becoming
congested nose, not unlike the first breath of a heated Greek isle as
one stepped off the steamer although a sharper note of thyme or
tarragon was lacking.  She studied the spice rack nailed to the end of
an upper cupboard as it occurred to her to wonder whether there
mightn't be a niche in the fashion world for pre scented clothing.  One
wouldn't search the shops for a red dress, but instead close one's eyes
and sniff for just the right warm tone of cinnamon or cayenne.  Someday
she really ought to write down her ideas, Becky decided, when no one
was around to explain to her very patiently why a mere notion was the
very least of any successful new business undertaking.

"Have you seen the car keys?  " Alden came into the kitchen to ask her
although she knew no more than he where the keys could be were they not
where they should be.  She was moved to make suggestions, however, as
he hopelessly searched in the clean apron drawer, in the shortbread
tin, beneath the frying pan lid, down along the dusty mop boards He
scraped open the clean apron drawer again and turned out apron pockets
and sighed.

"Not hanging from the hook?"  Becky asked.  "Not tossed on the pie
crust table?  Not left in the ignition?  Then I can't say, unless,
didn't Ginger have to drive herself to her divorce support group last
night?  I know her usual ride called to say she had unexpectedly
reconciled with her husband, although Ginger was trying to talk her out
of it.  She advised her to remember the bad times, which she was going
into graphically, chapter and verse.  They must be encouraged not to
leave out a single detail down at that group.  I can only imagine they
vie to provide the awful est account," Becky added, not un intrigued by
the dynamics of such a gathering.

Ginger, who happened to be up and about uncommonly early that morning,
overheard herself being accused as she stood darkening the kitchen
doorway.  She rummaged haughtily in a capacious satchel resting on her
jutting hip and she flung a rattling bunch of keys toward

Alden.  They glanced off the top of Harvey's head as, uninvolved in the
key quest, he sat at the kitchen table stooped over his coffee cup and
glaring down upon his Connecticut realtor's latest letter, conveying
nagging news about tile slippage in the master bathroom shower, which,
in Harvey's opinion only showed what came of cavalierly power-scrubbing
away the very necessary grout mold as the realtor had mandated.  Harvey
daubed at his watery eyes with the still warm linen handkerchief Becky
had kindly pressed for him.  She had ironed two handkerchiefs, one for
mopping himself with and the other for producing in a gallant and
timely manner for any of his several lady friends, who were an
unusually weepy lot.  Any small courtesy could set them off and at this
point he was laying on treats like traps just to test the waters, so to
speak.  They cried at the presentation of a spare carrot and coconut
and raisin muffin left over from his second-stage breakfast at the
Do-Nut Hole preserved in a paper napkin, and even Penny Nicholls had
turned on the waterworks when he saved a cautionary clipping from the
Towne Crier concerning a locally operating burglary ring that kept
their unsuspecting elderly victims occupied at the front door answering
a presidential preference poll (to which the only correct answer was, I
prefer the one we have) while accomplices slipped in through the back
door and looted the sterling flatware chest and the liquor cupboard.

At any rate, Becky seemed to understand how necessary a fresh supply of
presentable hankies was to Harvey without his having to go into details
about the carrot muffins and the burglars and the Niagara fall of
gratified tears.  Becky was a good egg, unlike that other one, his
niece by blood, Ginger, whom he was not at all accustomed to
encountering before he effected his getaway, scheduled early enough on
a normal morning to escape her premier performance of the day.  At
present, Harvey reckoned, Ginger was up for something and more than
likely up to something.

"Whoa," he barked at her and touched the top of his head carefully as
if probing a sticky wound.  Ginger peered and informed him he was
fine.

"Boys.  Little Becky.  You'll miss the bus," Alden called up the back
stairs.  "It's not convenient to drive you to school today.  I have
plans of it my own."  This he stated with satisfaction.  He met Becky's
eye and she smiled at him encouragingly.

"Betsy?"  Ginger generally inquired as well.  She emptied the coffeepot
into her personal mug which sat in its own spot on its own shelf, the
other mugs huddled out of its way.  She failed to start another pot
which was the general practice, though Ginger would argue in her own
defense that her version of coffee was so criticized-bitter, she said
they said, bitterly-she could only default.  She slid the coffeepot out
of sight, barricaded behind a box of Cheerios and the milk carton, and
she sat across the table from Harvey, bravely or belligerently staring
him down.  He swiveled, displaying his late Roman emperor profile,
motionless as on a coin and as hard-edged.  Ginger twirled the lazy
Susan, snatching three packets of Equal sweetener and a long-handled
spoon plucked from the spoon jar in transit, and she squinted at the
heat activated message as letters materialized on the side of her mug.
BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY, she read.  She lifted soulful eyes toward the
ceiling and she communed with the hovering Mother Ship, receiving her
orders for the day.  This morning the command came down as the single
whispered word, Persist.

Harvey spun the lazy Susan back around so that his bottle of buffered
aspirin and flask of rhubarb syrup and earthenware pot of Tasmanian
honey were facing him, even though he had already swallowed and dosed
and sweetened, because, because, that's how the lazy Susan "went."

Becky set down her iron so she could give her full attention to a
coughing fit.  She ruffed the collar of her bathrobe around her throat
as Lily, who had been outside feeding the nuthatches, admitted a funnel
of frigid air.  She had come in to refill her seed scoop from the
fifty-pound bag of Northeast Songbird Mixture left leaning against the
pantry wall, slumping and much bumped into and spilling out seeds,
which only encouraged some mice to whom Lily referred as a nice little
family whenever Ginger overreacted to the sudden sight of a tiny tuft
of creature skimming across the vastness of the pantry floor.  Now
Lily, locked into a more mouse-tolerating attitude than even she would
normally have held, toed a scattering of unmistakably mouse droppings
down through the gap between the linoleum and a rising radiator pipe so
that Ginger could not point to them and exclaim further.

Phoebe clipped down the back stairs then.  She and Arthur had moved
into the available attic chamber Glover had vacated, back when the
hornet stung him, before any other Andys could arrive and claim the
space, and after many thousands of glossy brown beetles had
lethargically winged into the barn one evening.  They had crawled into
every crevice and deposited pale powdery strands of eggs and then they
had died or gone to sleep, riveted to stone, to beams, crackling and
cracking under touch.  Even Arthur had minded, for the bugs had gotten
into his files and obeyed various biological imperatives across the
pages of his screenplay, which Phoebe had had to retype during her
lunch hour at work.  But everybody at work, everybody at the Towne
Community Hospital offices, had said they would go see Arthur's movie
if it ever became a movie, so that was positive.

She bade a pleasant good morning to Arthur's people.  She lifted her
jar of Taster's Choice from the lazy Susan and made a mug of coffee
using hot water direct from the faucet.  She stirred vigorously,
crushing afloat coffee crystals against the side of her mug.  The Hills
braced themselves as Phoebe took her first sip and did not instantly
die of it.

"Did you call me, Mummy?  " Betsy asked, having taken her own time to
answer Ginger's earlier summons which had not sounded urgent.  Then
again, with her mother everything turned urgent eventually.  Betsy had
been in the little parlor updating her babysitting appointment book.
She was expected at the Snowdons' that afternoon after school.  She was
going to help Mrs.  Snowdon dress the children in rational little
outfits, in bright, happy colors that matched, no stripes disagreeing
with plaids, no unsanctioned dress-up boas and diamond tiaras and
space-gear stun guns strapped to pipe-cleaner hips.  Betsy was going to
drive with the Snowdons to Therapists' Row behind the Freedomway Mall,
making sure none of the children fell from the back hatch of the
station wagon en route.  There, the three small children disappeared
through three tall doors and Betsy and Mrs.  Snowdon retired to the
Food Court in the Mall for ice waters and nervous cigarettes on Mrs.
Snowdon's part as she talked to Betsy as if Betsy were yet another
therapist, defending the undisputed rational ness of the children's
outfits (the girls dressed as girls, the boy as a boy) and pointing out
that at least they had all arrived at their therapists' in one piece
which surely must count in her favor.

Betsy received four dollars an hour for this.  She wished she had held
out for five at the initial interview.

"What, Betsy?"  asked Ginger.  "What is it?  Why are you looking at me?
What do you want?  "

"You called me," Betsy reminded her.

"Oh, yes.  Don't you miss the school bus, I wanted to tell you," Ginger
said.

"I haven't missed it yet.  I mean I haven't missed it today and I
haven't missed it so far this year," Betsy answered.

"Well, fine, only don't start today because I can't deal with your
little problems today.  I've got my own business to see to," Ginger
declared.  "So run along with you," she advised as Betsy leaned against
the refrigerator door, the back of her neck and the knot there,
manipulated by the thubdub of the cranking motor.  For now that Ginger
herself had admitted to having plans, Betsy hoped she might ask a
further question concerning them without being accused by Ginger of
interrogating her like a secret policeman.  Oh, why didn't they just
implant a tracking device in her rib cage?  Ginger had been quite
fierce in forcing this point of her non accessibility and her
nonaccountability during her late dalliance, and Betsy had long since
learned the lesson that, on the whole, she would rather not know just
where her mother went when she went out.  Betsy had noted, however,
this early morning, that Ginger had saturated her hair with Jazzi-Jel
and slicked the thick curls up and back, tightly twisting and pinning
them in place so that a stiff shock sprouted and wilted on the top of
her head very noticeably.  She had on a black silk-and-cashmere knit
turtleneck, her big colliding pieces of turquoise jewelry, and a pair
of pleated and cuffed grey flannel trousers she could still zip and
button on.  She had discovered her grandmother's Autumn Haze mink coat
left behind inside the garment bag at the back of her bedroom closet,
and had been trailing about in it at every opportunity since the
weather had worsened, the shawl collar turned up to frame her face, the
drooping hem kicked forward by her striding steps and sweeping the
pavement behind her.  Grandmama Hill had been a tall old girl, thank
goodness.  Ginger didn't have to hunch beneath some shrunken munch king
fur that didn't reach her wrists, her knees.  Ginger swan ned inside
the coat even now at the breakfast table, quite content within its
soft, wide embrace as she clicked apart a tube of Red Surrender and
accurately thickened the color on her lips without consulting the shiny
side of the toaster, impressing Becky and Phoebe, who appreciated how
unsuccessful such blind repairs could be.

But Betsy only knew she had cause for concern when her mother made such
an effort.  Ginger had been inspired to glue on faux fingernails and to
paint them rose-violet and, presumably, sensibly, before she had fitted
on the fingernails she had feathered on her false eyelashes which Betsy
really didn't think you were supposed to wear during the daylight hours
but doubtless Ginger had risen and commenced dressing before dawn broke
so she would argue she had discovered the exemption should anyone,
should Betsy, raise an objection.

" What are you doing today, Mummy?  " Betsy asked as she half turned
and began to move about refrigerator magnets so that she would seem
rather more interested in aligning the smiley face and the plasticined
twist of real pretzel and the tester magnet handed out at the dump to
check whether recyclable cans went in the tin or aluminum bin, than in
pinning Ginger down to a particular statement of her intentions.

"I'm taking a well-deserved day off," Ginger announced.  She wished
Betsy wouldn't fidget.  She wished Betsy would listen.

"A day off from what?  " wondered Harvey.  "A day off from lying about
like Queen Cleopatra?  "

"I'm going to Boston for a day of shopping, museums, lunch, and
lawyers," Ginger continued.  She wished Harvey wouldn't share his
picturesque opinions about her activities.  "Because, Alden, because
Alden," she addressed her brother severely, "because that local shyster
Lily put me onto is utterly hopeless, the exquisite Harris Desmaris.
He'd have had me in the public stocks with a great scarlet letter
safety pinned onto my smock, I declare, so your fellow, Alden, your
candidate, this great old legal-brained chum of yours, had better be up
to snuff."  She sniffed.

"Oh, is it today you're seeing Ron?  " Alden asked.  "Just listen to
what he tells you.  Don't you try to tell him.  It's a tremendous favor
he's seeing you at all and only then in an advisory capacity.  He's not
a divorce attorney.  For one thing, his taste in suits is too sober."

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, I'll listen to him," Ginger impatiently waved away
the very idea that she would not.  "But first I have to get in to
Boston.  Where are you headed, anyway?  Not Boston, I daresay, you're
dressed like Paul Bunyan.  Are you going in to Cambridge?  That'll do
just as well.  I'll start off at the Fogg.  I adore the Fogg."

"No, sorry, I'm not going anywhere near there," Alden said, not
sounding at all sorry.

"Well, at least you can drive me down to Peddocks' and I'll find
someone to take me in.  Towne has turned into such a bedroom suburb.
I'll hitch a ride.  I'll hold up a sign like one of those pale parolee
hitchhikers along the Interstate," Ginger said as she batted her way
through the contents of her satchel searching for her notebook and a
marking pen.  The checkbook for the joint local account she held with
Betsy flipped out and fell to the floor.  Ginger bent and retrieved the
Luxe Leatherette folder swiftly and glanced up to glower back at
Betsy's inevitable look of reproach, for they were set on a sensible
budget of Betsy's reckoning, to which Ginger had only grudgingly
assented and with absolutely no intention of abiding by.  Nevertheless,
the designated figure served as a posted speed limit to the hurtling
vehicle of Ginger's overspending, a limit to exceed, of course, but
only by so much and no further without exacting a stiffish penalty, for
Betsy had promised to take away her mother's "privileges" should she
offend too grievously.  Betsy, however, had slipped away when Ginger
first mentioned lawyers.  Betsy had no wish to hear of attorneys and
stratagems.  She had not been able to decide whether she was honor
bound to inform her father of legal developments or to keep Ginger's
counsel and so she tried not to know anything at all.

"Boys, Little Becky," Becky set down her iron and called up the back
stairs.  She turned to Alden, who was hovering by the stove watching
over two frying eggs.  "Rap on Glover's door, dear.  He's awake.  I can
hear him prowling around in there."

Harvey, who by now required more coffee, rose and slid the pot from
Ginger's hiding place and started, fussily and in a martyred manner, to
measure and grind beans and run clear, cold water through the faucet
and filch a paper filter from the stuck-together stack.

Arthur clattered down the back stairs.  "Sorry to delay you, Phoebe,"
he said.  "I just had this idea, this memory.  It must have come to me
in a dream or something and I had to write it down right off.  About
the Halloween

I went out as a chicken pot pie.  Mama wrapped me all up in silver foil
and she stuck feathers in my hair and hung a carrot and a celery from
my ears and she wrote "Heat at three thousand degrees for twelve hours'
across my forehead.  You know, I'm real lucky I didn't run into one of
those psychopaths because I think he would have had a defense, don't
you know."

"That's great, honey, only it's elective-surgery day today and I really
can't be late.  I've got to admit a crowd and those procedures are
scheduled to the minute."  She had found an unclaimed toasted English
muffin lying on the drain board and she held it up to him
inquiringly.

Arthur shook his head.  "Are these Rice Krispies?  " he asked, picking
up the Rice Krispies box.

"Yes, but the milk is iffy," Becky warned him.

Ginger set her mug down sharply on the table, sloshing coffee onto her
sign and dissolving the ink into streaks so it now appeared she
required a ride to some hick town in Hunan province.

"Boo-tang?  " Harvey questioned in a squeaky-pitched Chinese secret
policeman interrogator voice.

Arthur unpeeled a banana and rolled it in a bowl of dry cereal.  "Any
caramel sauce?"  he asked.  "If I dunked a banana in caramel sauce and
rolled it in cereal, I'd really have something.  No?  No caramel sauce?
" He sat and helped himself to the Tasmanian honey, hunching his
shoulders so Harvey couldn't see what he was up to.

Phoebe nibbled at the English muffin which was cold and tough and even,
perhaps, dish soap-soaked from its time on the drain board and she
answered Ginger and Becky's questions about the most popular elective
surgeries.

"You're up and at it early for a showbiz type," Alden observed to
Arthur.  "Boys, Little Becky," he called up the stairs.  He threw a
rolle dup pair of socks from the clean laundry basket at Glover's door.
Glover thumped back from the other side.

"I'm driving to work with Phoebe," Arthur explained.  "She got me this
gig cheerying up the sick kids.  Well, I'm glad to do it."  He
shrugged.  "Only I don't think my stuff on how to tell who's gonna die
first in a Freddy Krueger movie will work with sick kids, and I've got
twenty minutes on stuff about how Adler isn't a real good name for a
psychoanalyst which is kind of medical but over their heads, probably,
so I'm thinking I'll give them clown stuff, you know.  Kids, clowns.
That'll be, what's the word Aunt Lily likes so much, that'll be more
appropriate."

"How lovely to entertain those poor children," Becky said.  "Phoebe, I
should talk to you about Women's Chorus arranging a Christmas concert
for them."

"Actually, we're booked through St.  Patrick's Day with programs for
the kids," Phoebe said.

"Oh?"

"I've always despised clowns," Ginger said.  "I don't know why, but I
just do.  I particularly don't like sad clowns, and I really can't
stand those foreign art clowns and I hate female clowns with the single
wilted daisy in their hats-"

"Yes, well, clowning is just a sideline," Arthur said.

"Didn't know you had a front line," Harvey muttered.

"Aunt Lily, do you like clowns?  " Ginger asked.

Lily had gone out and come in again.  Her loose cheeks and long nose
were mottled yellow and scarlet from the cold.  She fished a Kleenex
from her coat pocket and blew into it.  "If I feel like laughing," she
said.  "I need my suet now," Lily added, pulling open the refrigerator
door.

"Look behind the six-pack of Pepsi," Becky said.  She carried a map of
the refrigerator in her mind.

"And the bird peanut butter?  " Lily asked.

"Bird peanut butter?  " Ginger asked.  "Have I been eating bird peanut
butter and raspberry jam sandwiches?"

"In the butter hatch," Becky said.

The coffee perked and Lily departed and Alden threw a second pair of
socks at Glover's door.

"Amazing events happening in East Germany at the moment," Alden said,
leaning over the counter and working the dials of the radio searching
for a weather report.  He had an outdoor day planned.

"You think so?"  asked Harvey.

"Well, I think it's perfectly marvelous, throwing off the yoke of
tyranny.  One so empathizes," Ginger cried, flexing her furry back.

*!

"The kids have missed the bus," Becky announced, consulting the clock
on the stove.

"Betsy?"  Ginger asked.  "Betsy?"  she called.  When Betsy didn't
answer she assumed Betsy had made her own way, somehow.

The kitchen wall phone rang just then.  Alden answered it, said, Hold
on, and tossed the receiver to Becky which she caught one-handedly.
She set down her iron.

"Yes?"  she spoke into the mouthpiece.  She listened.  "What?"  she
asked.  "Well, I really have no idea.  Guess?  Yes, all right, I'll
guess.  I'll just say Vincent Van Gogh.  Yes, the sunflower guy, as you
say.  No?  Not Van Gogh?  Oh dear.  Well, that's perfectly all right.
Good morning to you too, and thank you."

Above their heads, Little Becky began to scream, No, no!  The sound,
emanating from the attic, began as an eerily thin wail, fading and
strengthening, the sound picking its way down two flights of stairs and
seeking out the conduits of water and radiator pipes.  Little Becky
thundered down the attic steps and her howling loudened.  She pitched
herself off the last tread of the back stairs and slammed into the
kitchen, incoherently shouting.

"Always strive to be dainty, darling," Becky reminded her, lifting the
hot iron out of her daughter's way as Little Becky fell upon her, but
not to seek the solace of a motherly embrace as Becky anticipated.
Rather, Little Becky meant to strike.

"Steady on," Alden said, pulling her away.  Little Becky, energetically
enraged, flailed at the kitchen air.

Glover's door shot open and he tottered cockily across the linoleum.
"Ah-ha," he jeered at his sister.

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"  she shrieked and she kicked out hard at
his shin but he was wearing the pair of tough-skinned riding boots he'd
found in the barn and imbued with saddle soap and vaseline and canola
oil over the past weeks until today they were-almost-wearable.  Her
foot connected, then skidded sideways and she clipped Harvey's arm with
her heel.

He flinched out of harm's way.  "You know, I believe this constitutes
elder abuse," he said.  "Penny Nicholls has a brochure, I shall consult
it."  He kneaded his elbow.  He unbuttoned his shirt cuff and rolled up
his sleeve to display an existing callus which, nevertheless, presented
as a fresh welt.  Phoebe, inured to such demonstrations down at the
hospital, looked and tsked.

Brooks and Rollins spilled from the stairwell laughing in shrill
whoops.

"Ma, that was so cool," Brooks said.

"Wicked excellent," Rollins said.

"Real smooth, Ma, you on the radio pretending to be Little Becky,"
Brooks said.

Little Becky, her fury spent and not unremorseful that she 'd injured
Uncle Harvey even though it wasn't her fault, it was Glover's, resolved
to weep and to weep copiously now, and she turned with a roil of misery
to permit her mother to comfort her after all.  She jammed her head
against Becky's shoulder and Becky set down her iron and unplugged the
cord just to be on the safe side.  She folded Little Becky in her
arms.

" The radio wanted to talk to me.  I sent in the postcard and they
called me," she sobbed into Becky's flannel bathrobe which absorbed the
hot tears.  Becky shifted.  She was half dressed beneath her robe and
she didn't want her slip straps to lay damp against her skin all day.

"Well, I'm mystified," Alden admitted.

"Ma, didn't you know you were on the radio, on WROC 99.99 FM and they
asked you for the artist of the day and you said that guy, you know,
Vango, only the artist of the day was White Snake," Glover explained.

"White Snake," Little Becky moaned.  "I knew it, I knew it.  I always
listen.  I always know.  It isn't fair.  It's never fair.  Why can't
you all just be fair?  To me."

"Actually, who ever calls you on the telephone, Little B.?"  Ginger
asked.  "I can't recall a single time, so why should one think to
inquire, Which Becky?"

"We meant to find you a nickname," Alden recalled, "but nothing ever
really suggested itself.  Still, a nickname for you was definitely the
original plan."

Everyone considered, then, and even the boys couldn't come up with
suitably derisive recommendations so early in the day, besides, Alden
indicated he would not tolerate unkindness as he gripped Brooks's and

Rollins's shoulders and dug in sharp fingers.  They writhed away from
him and lolled, loggishly, on the back-stair treads.

"I know you must be disappointed, sweet pea, honey bunch muffin tin.
I'm sorry for the mix-up," Becky said, detaching Little Becky from her
side.  She picked up the dish sponge and swabbed at Little Becky's
cheek where misapplied mascara seeped down in dark streams.  "So, what
would you have won?  " she asked.  "A nice sweatshirt?  A nice CD?  "

The boys snickered and Little Becky resumed weeping and she
sputtered,

"Just before he called me, the Super Siren blew and Manfred in the
Morning said he was feeling real generous on of account of the
Berlind

Wall and all, so he was going to give away nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine Big Deal Dollars this morning on the Super Cash
Call."

"Oh dear," said Becky, and she meant it.  "Still, your name is going to
be placed in the consolation bin.  They mentioned something about a
consolation bin.  Is that good?  "

"For a Ford Escort," Brooks said.

"For a sucky Ford Escort," Rollins said.

"I can't drive," Little Becky hollered.

"First dibs on the car then," Ginger spoke up.

"Yeah, I've heard that Manfred guy," Arthur said.  "He moves the
decimal point around.  Usually, you'd just have won ninety-nine dollars
and ninety-nine cents.  Really tough break, Little Becky."

"Van Gogh," Ginger uttered better-knowingly.  She would have guessed
Frida Kahlo just to expand the tired old male-centric, Eurocentric,
beauty-centric aesthetics of the listening public."

"Vango?  Vango?  That's not a group.  Everybody at school will think I
don't know a group, everybody will think I'm such a loser," Little
Becky fretted.  She had whirled away from her mother's scrubbing
motions and she was rooting beneath the sink behind a box of Brillo
pads where the previous evening she had stashed the last packet of
Swiss Miss Cocoa Mix.

"That's no problem, everybody already thinks you're-" Glover started to
say but Alden yanked at his recently attempted pigtail sprouting from
the back of his head.  Glover was wearing his EAT ME T-shirt today.
Alden wondered why they permitted Glover to go to school dressed like
that.  He wondered why the school permitted it.  Perhaps he and the
school could get together and object in concert.

He observed, "All your little pals will have been on the school bus
where you should have been as well.  So technically, Little Becky, you
weren't even home to take the Cash Call, so let's not dwell on it.
Tough luck, too bad, just drop it.  And now I'm going to have to drive
you all to school and I have an appointment of my own so let's get
cracking.  Stir your stumps.  No, no breakfasts for any of you, you
missed it.  You'll know better next time to get up when you're
called."

"Dad's just mega-bummed because Ma lost us ten thousand dollars,"
Glover said.

"My money.  I wrote the postcard," Little Becky said.  She had slipped
the opened envelope of Swiss Miss in her jeans pocket.  Secretly, she
licked her forefinger and dredged it through the chocolate powder and
stuck the finger in her mouth.

"But Dad really should have asked which Becky they wanted," Brooks
said.

"Yeah, I have to blame Dad," Rollins said.  "Definitely, this is all
Dad's fault."

They surged into the front hall and grabbed their parkas from the
coatrack and jostling and complaining at one another they arrayed
themselves for the out-of-doors, slinging knapsacks over their backs,
jamming gloves onto their hands, winding and knotting scarves.  Brooks
tipped on his Yankees cap which was routinely snatched from his head
and flung onto the field house girders.  The visor was strapped on with
duct tape.  The logo was fraying.  The janitor was tired of snagging
the thing down with a twenty-foot drunkenly wobbling bamboo pole.

"Nest of vipers you've got there," Harvey remarked to Becky.  "We
should all have been listening to the news from Europe.  It's history
happening all over again in front of our eyes."

"Yes, how wonderful," Becky responded vaguely.

"Don't forget me," Ginger called, rising.  She hoisted up her satchel
and hunkered down into her coat.  She swept off.  A drooping sleeve
clouted the upstanding sugar spoon.  Sugar crystals flashed from the
bowl and sparked across the tabletop.

"Well, it never ceases to astound me, the variety of ways a day can go
awry," Alden said, kissing Becky dryly good-bye.

"Oh, I don't know, it makes me feel quite splendidly extravagant to
have squandered ten thousand dollars before eight a.m.," she told him
as she re plugged her iron and sawed the reheating press up and down
the sleeve of her lace-collared blouse forming a sharp crease which she
believed lent a slimming effect.  Still, she could not help asking
herself why Glover hadn't bolted from his room and seized the telephone
receiver and shouted, White Snake, White Snake, White Snake, at the
chit-chattering DJ.  But to rise to such exertion, to display such
enthusiasm, doubtless lay beneath his dignity, or his vision of his
dignity.  Alden should have a serious talk with the boy.  Then again,
she wasn't certain Alden was the best one to plead the case for the
sometimes necessary sacrifice of dignity to a merely (merely!) economic
imperative.  No, Alden was not the person to plead that particular case
at the moment.

LILY SAT UPON a flat-topped rock hidden from sight by a stand of shaggy
spruces but with her own viewing line to the back of the house worked
out through the branches.  Her table knife scraped the side of the jar
as she spread peanut butter upon pine cones which she had been finding
on the ground all fall and collecting in bushel baskets.  She rolled
the coated cones in Northeast Songbird Mixture and laid them end to end
upon an old cookie sheet to cure a bit before she hung them avail ably
from the privet hedge and the clothesline with Christmas ornament
hooks.  The scavenging squirrels were too heavy to climb and sit upon
the privet-they swayed, they swooped-but they had learned to cling to
and inch along the clothesline, perilously upside down yet agile as
French Riviera diamond thieves, to attain the prize.

The cat had followed Lily outside and she weaved herself, now, between
her shins, but this adoration was a calculated effect.  Agnes meant to
turn Lily and herself into a predatory team.  She glanced at Lily
knowingly and gleamed her serrate teeth but Lily wasn't buying.  She
had already steeled herself not to strew millet across the terrace
bricks for the mourning doves who had come to expect to be fed in the
winter.  Lily could only hope that the disappointed birds who plumply
paced and ill-temperedly peered through the French doors (and pecked
sharply on the glass, Ginger claimed) would wander off elsewhere.
Perhaps some of the new people in one of the new houses understood
about strewing millet.

Lily shooed the cat away.  She withdrew stiff-backed, flicking her
skinny bandicoot tail, and shimmered out of sight between barn boards

The exodus from the house commenced then.  Alden herded the boys and
Little Becky who was bleating about her latest tragedy.  Broken
syllables expressive of misery traveled toward Lily-the wind gusted
this way and that, this morning.  Ginger lagged behind, luxuriating in
her appropriated fur.  Alden detoured to the barn.  Making several
journeys, he piled two new and bright chain saws, a safety can of
gasoline, a coil of rope, into the back of the station wagon as Ginger
and Little Becky sparred for the front seat.  Ginger, impatient with
the nattering, suddenly hip-checked Little Becky out of contention.
Little Becky shook off the bump and flung herself into the backseat and
fell heavily over the front, feigning unconsciousness, which was her
special talent, an ability to collapse as completely as a meringue.
Ginger, weighed and breathed upon, balanced on the edge of the seat,
hugging her satchel, her neck crooked, persisting.  The boys tumbled
through the back hatch and tossed the saws and gasoline can and ropes
into the backseat beside their sister, who would have yelped were she
not so committed to maintaining her swoon.

Then Arthur and Phoebe hurried into view and jumped into the Jeep,
which tinnily turned on and jounced down the drive.  A pause, and
Harvey appeared rebuttoning his overcoat and honking into his
handkerchief.

He also visited the barn.  He emerged, hefting a hammer in either hand.
He determined he preferred one and pitched the other through the barn
door.  It landed hard and skidded.  The cat streaked from the barn as
if set alight.

Harvey eased himself into his car and waited as the motor quietly idled
and his heater kicked in.  He glared through the windshield in search
of Lily whom he only wished to ask if she needed an errand run down in
the village, although he would have greeted any request she made of him
with amazed challenge-African violet food?  African violet food?  So
onerous, so absurd, Lily's commissions.  Still, poor old Lily,
deficient old bat, things can't have been easy.

Becky left the house last, clutching a stack of sheet music which she
attempted to organize as she bustled along.  She had asked last night
if she could borrow Lily's car and Lily had said, Yes, at once (as
Ginger drew a sharp breath because whenever she asked, Lily only ever
told her, Yes, eventually).  Becky stopped and waved in several
directions endeavoring to say good-bye to Lily, wherever Lily was
hiding.  Becky was aware that Lily sometimes hid and she was sorry that
Lily felt the need to hide.  Then Becky was gone, too, carefully
steering down the driveway taking the hump and the subsequent dip as
cautiously as Lily herself would have.

She was alone.  Lily savored the sensation.  She would be unobserved
and un required for the next few hours.  If she wished, she could watch
the Learn to Paint show on Channel 2 which was really quite
interesting.  The bearded and energetic host demonstrated how to paint
pine trees and the setting sun and ocean waves according to a foolproof
method he had worked out.  One need not possess any artistic ability at
all in order to produce a perfectly adequate landscape or seascape or
sunset, and Lily was tempted to try her hand at a sunset.  Then again,
suppose her painting revealed what she sometimes felt after watching a
particularly violent sunset all the way through to its final fingerings
of that red that contained so much black smudging the sky, when she
asked herself, Is this it, is this the end?  No, her morning would be
more usefully spent in washing windows while no one was around to pry
the bottle of ammonia from her hand and order her off the step stool,
saying they'd wash the windows when they got around to it, around the
turn of the century, Lily reckoned.  In the meanwhile, they were all
very hard on her windows.

They gazed through them excessively, watching for what or for whom to
come up the drive.  They huffed upon the panes, leaning their noses and
cheeks and chins against the cool glass and laying down their
handprints where they remained, long-fingered and beseeching
tracings.

Her sister, Olive, had been like that, always at the window, back when
Frank Lowe had first wandered into the picture and Olive had so swiftly
made up her mind.  She had dragged a chair and an ottoman into an attic
dormer.  In those days the trees weren't so tall and you could see all
the way down to the road and the river.  She had supplied herself with
Lorna Doones and the new McCall's to see her through her vigil.  Why
had Olive been so set on Frank Lowe?  She had been very clear in her
mind.  She must have had a very clear picture of what she wanted out of
life and whom she wanted to be there beside her, but it must have been
rather a paint-by-number picture if Frank was anything to go by, Lily
decided.  Nothing about Frank had ever been very inspiring.

As Lily so critically regarded her windows, an upper one was flung
open.  Andy, whom she 'd not forgotten, such an insinuating young man.
She had, however, shuttered that agitated corner of her mind where he
probed so assiduously.

Andy stood at the window, wrapped in his woolen Black Watch plaid robe,
a perfectly sober garment, yet he wore it in such a negligent manner,
loosely tied at the waist with his bare chest exposed.  Lily had to
wonder what his pajama situation could be.  Sunlight dazzled off his
polished glasses lenses as he hauled up the string bag suspended from a
nail driven without her permission into the sill.  He kept his milk,
butter, cheeses, and navel oranges outside in the cold.  Several times
over the two and a half weeks that Andy had been in residence, Becky
had sent Little Becky to borrow his milk-Little Becky had gleefully
spurted up the stairs to knock, thrillingly, upon Andy's personal
door.

Andy seemed to be searching as he lingered holding his window wide
open.  Lily could see the heat pouring out in that liquid swirliness of
the atmosphere where domestic air met the wilder stuff, and she lodged
a mental note to inform him what heating oil was costing her these days
since he was so curious about her finances.  Percentages of her budget,
that was Andy's hobbyhorse-What percentage of your budget do you expend
on leisure-time activities, Miss Hill, bingo, movies, pottery class?

Lily shrank into the prickly softness of the surrounding fir trees
knowing herself to be invisible, protectively colored in the grey-and
brown landscape, just another craggy feature of the woods.  Lily had
always been overlook able which once she had minded but not for many
years now.  Andy, however, keen sighted and elevated, zeroed in on her
position like a hungry hawk.  He hailed her and raised the wrist which
would bear his watch, reminding her that the hour of her promised
interview approached.

GINGER, IN HER bulky animal coat, sat on a swivel stool at the soda
fountain counter in Peddocks'.  She sipped a cup of coffee and nibbled
a raspberry-jam-filled croissant, too hot from a minute in the
microwave, as she slowly turned round and round on the stool
alternately carrying the coffee for one circuit and the croissant for
the next, all the while inspecting everyone who entered the premises.
Females were given short shrift, working women with wash-and-wear
haircuts and boringly tailored suits with rigid shoulder pads jutting
out shelf like to signify their willingness to bear the weight of the
corporate world upon their backs.  It occurred to Ginger that this was
what was wrong with the corporate world, because why didn't Brooks
Brothers sew breast pads into the fronts of their button-down-collar
men's shirts to demonstrate a compensatory male solidarity with the
female virtues of nurturing and compassion?  Another insight for her
book which she must write down at once before she forgot.  Her mind
felt such a fragile vessel this cold, early, weekday morning.  She spun
around to the counter and plucked a pencil from her hair and grabbed a
paper napkin from the metal dispenser.  She scrawled, then scratched
several question marks another trail to investigate even though she was
taking the day off from scholarship.  She stuffed the napkin into her
satchel and picked up her croissant and rotated again and she spotted
Goody Palmer, who had entered while her back was turned and was on his
way out, the newspaper he 'd come in to buy tucked under his arm like a
rudder.  He was in a rush.  He jostled the Rev.  Penworthy who
automatically cried "Oopsadaisy."

The Rev.  was the father of four under five.  Busy Rev."  Ginger
thought.

She snatched her satchel and her coffee cup and she pursued Goody.  He
had slammed his car door but couldn't back out of his parking slot
having been cut off by a double-parked Jeep Wagoneer.  Ginger tapped on
his passenger-side window until Goody could not pretend he didn't hear
her.  He released the lock and she slipped in beside him exclaiming a
triumphant syllable.  "I was watching for you," she said.  She exuded
strong perfume, a stronger fur scent.  She loomed close to Goody,
tilting to fumble for the seat belt, strapping herself in as if
preparing for take off.  She settled back in an intimate, long-distance
way, reclining her seat and fiddling with the heat vents, training them
toward her feet which were shod in tight, shiny, high-heeled boots
which had made treacherous her run across the almost icy pavement to
reach him.

"I didn't see you," Goody too instantly denied.

"Then it's very lucky I saw you because I desperately need a ride into
Boston.  Let me out anywhere as nearish to Newbury Street as possible.
Otherwise ..."  She began to mention other corners where she might be
left.  She mentioned some unlikely corners.

The Wagoneer's owner returned, ducking down to shoot Goody a wince of
apology, and Goody found himself on the road with Ginger.  Ginger waved
widely at Anna Webster who was standing at the end of her driveway
Dust-Bustering her mailbox.  Anna stared, unable to determine who was
with Goody whose car, of course, she knew.  She 'd have to call Babe to
ask so she could apologize to whomever she had inadvertently snubbed,
some wild-headed woman swathed in fur.

"Anna Webster just cold-shouldered me," Ginger announced.  She seemed
grimly pleased for Anna Webster was famously softhearted.  She had even
appeared in court as a character witness for her burglar who had not,
after all, urinated on her carpets or killed her big, barky Eskimo
dog.

"Oh no, I hardly think Anna meant-" Goody began to protest but he
wasn't going to be tricked into defending Ginger's mysterious
midwestern sins against small-minded locals' righteous or not
demonstrations against her.  He switched on the radio and tuned into a
traffic report.  His mind darted down alternate routes as the familiar
ride in turned labyrinthine.

Ginger swigged the last of her coffee and planted the lipstick-stained
cup in the glove compartment tucked out of casual sight behind an
unfolding road map of the Canadian Maritimes annotated with yellow
highlighting pen.

"Do you remember-" Ginger started to ask.

Goody automatically asserted his memory wasn't what it used to be.
Indeed, Babe was going to try him on a vitamin supplement.

"Then I shall remind you of that summer," Ginger said.

"Summer?  " Goody denied all knowledge and experience of summer.

He smashed hollyhocks, drained swimming pools, and dimmed the wattage
of the sun.

"Our summer," Ginger spoke of it softly.  She smoothed out the green
folds and fragrant hours of summer gently, although one had to suspect
she had removed summer's lawns and balms from the drawer and examined
them often, so often that her thumbprints lay everywhere upon them
now.

"Right, that summer," Goody said.  If it was unbecoming of Ginger to
have recalled the time, it would be caddish of him to repudiate the
memory.

" When you said, when you said to me, remember how you said to me that
you didn't think it would matter if we didn't make love but that it
would be terribly important if we did," Ginger said.

Goody wasn't even sure what that was supposed to mean and he very
sincerely had to doubt he had ever pressed such a point.  Surely, he
would never have spoken so complex a sentence and certainly not one
which was as slipperily allusive, so deftly placing the ball in her
court, if he understood the construction.  For, primarily in Goody's
recollection, 1969 had been his tennis summer.  The Websters had risen
to the expense and upkeep of a clay court in an effort to launch a
dowdy daughter.

"We were important, weren't we?  " Ginger murmured.

No, that was not at all the sort of proposition Goody would have posed.
For in that situation, he had not attempted any argument at all.  He
had not really had to.  Women, the few women before Babe, had been the
instigators, silkily sliding across sofa cushions, placing a hand upon
his arm, and very solemnly regarding him before lifting a kiss from his
lips.  They excused themselves.  He sat in fragrant chambers, picking
up and putting down magazines.  The women returned wearing loose, light
robes and their diaphragms.  His sentimental history, such as it was,
had been a mild one involving treaties, not battles, and until the
present moment there had never been a flare-up from any long quiescent
quarter.

He had not been untruthful when he told Ginger he did not remember,
but, more accurately, as unexercised feelings began to stretch and push
behind his rib cage, he realized how very thoroughly his memories of
Ginger had been suppressed.  Babe, whom he had married the winter after
Ginger went away to Chicago at summer's end, had scoured Ginger from
every corner of his life, banishing the six declarative letters Ginger
had sent, her glamorous photograph framed in silver, and the beach
sarong found kicked beneath a car seat and which had to have been hers
for who but Ginger would have possessed a beach sarong and one so
strongly colored crimson?

"OH, MR.  SPENCER, we all think the world of Dr.  Dunlop," Phoebe
reassured a nervous admit tee although she was not supposed to dispense
medical opinions.  But Harvey had heard Senior Village thought highly
of Phoebe.  She flew through the Medicare forms and kept her voice
discreetly low when she was obliged to mention what ailment it was that
had brought the patient to the hospital, which was often some not very
pleasant condition.  She had her nice Southern sayings for symptoms.
Are you backed up?  Are you coming up?  she'd ask softly.  Have you
slowed down?  Did you just come over all queer-like?  She had revived a
little vogue in suffering from palpitations among the more susceptible
ladies, just a finicky sensation of fluttering that could be fanned
away with an Osteoporosis Information brochure, and which kept the
ladies' minds off their other pangs and panics about cancer.

Phoebe tapped out Mr.  Spencer's data on her keyboard, his answers to
her gentle questions dealt with as he fished for a flavor he liked in
her lollipop jar.  He was forbidden sweets, of course, but he was going
to save the lollipop for later when his grandson came to visit, that
is, if Grandpa survived the day.

And up in the bright and cheerful children's ward decorated with Mylar
balloons and a ceiling mural depicting delighted children swinging
between crutches and flying up and down ramps in wheelchairs, Arthur
pulled a shiny quarter from the bandaged head of one wan little boy who
had mistaken Arthur, dressed in scrubs and wearing a false mustache,
for yet another doctor who had found another something alarming to
extract from his skull.  The nurses, the other sick kids (though none
so sick as he) had clustered round to observe the impromptu operation
and to laugh as the tall skinny new doctor held up the quarter, flipped
it between his fingers, and made it vanish.  The warm little boy
supposed his condition was becoming ridiculous, nevertheless he was
quite sure he would not have laughed at any of them, were they in his
shoes.

ALDEN HAD NOTICED a need as he drove around Towne and he had set about
supplying a service.  He ran an ad in the Towne Crier on the back page
below the Citizens' Forum column, MY SAY, where Babe Palmer was that
week's Guest Voice questioning the need for handicapped parking spaces
in package store parking lots because she didn't think crippled people
should drink and become even more unsteady on their feet.  Alden had
been so astonished by Babe's assertions, he had nearly overlooked his
own advertisement printed in italic type contained within a black-lined
box.

Some boy been bending your birches?  Has time ocr-topped your mighty
oak?  Painless tree extraction and prompt, expert timber removal by an
MBA.... hewn down and cast into the fire.  Call for a quote.

This appeal had set him back seventy-five cents a word, still, Alden
had enjoyed the act of composition and he had received not a few calls.
The ad had generated confessions concerning giant problem pines that
dropped their needles onto the surfaces of reflecting pools and loomed
over rooftops shading the new solar panels, or which had taken to
swaying distressingly loose at the roots when the north wind rose.
There were diseased trees, leafless and gaunt and sprouting
contagious-looking boles on their trunks, and there were the
unsanctioned scrub oaks the landscape architect had disparaged, and
pear trees whose fruit progressed from unripe on the limb to rotten on
the ground in a single night and then harbored wasps in the holes in
their seepy, sticky sides.  Desirable and expensively acquired views
were blocked, branches rapped at windows like escapees from asylums on
stormy nights, and buckling roots rippled pavements, crumpling and
creasing imported tile and kiln fired patio bricks.  Trees, as Alden
had surmised, were becoming just another variety of enormous weed to be
removed as humans hacked suburbia out of the countryside.

This early November morning Alden had contracted a biggish job at the
young Fairweathers who lived in a Tudor split level on an inner cul
de-sac in the executive neighborhood that had grown up down the road at
the edge of Lily's property-or the former executive neighborhood, as
Towneites had started to call the area after a long bad summer for
corporate downsizing and selling real estate.  Alden drove past the FOR
SALE signs still pitched on the front lawns of the French chateau, the
saltbox with diamond-paned windows, the stucco Southwestern ranch, the
modern place all jutting angles and plate glass.  A traditional
garrison

Colonial wasn't for sale but the powerboat was, trucked home from the
Marina and parked in the drive with a sign slung over the gunwale.
Becky and Ginger had gone down to these people's yard sale a few weeks
earlier and reported they wanted $25,000 for their dining room set, not
an antique but one so recently acquired that the white linen seat pads
showed pristinely clean in the brilliant autumn sunshine when set out
on the ill-tended lawn (for they had quite obviously canceled the
service).

"Not to my taste," Becky had said as if, otherwise, she might have been
interested, as if her own much nicer dining room furniture were not
stacked in the barn bundled beneath tarpaulins.  Ginger had stalked the
sale muttering, M.M.T.T."  which was her code for More Money Than
Taste, a charge so manifest that Becky had been convinced everyone
within earshot had cracked the cypher for themselves.  Because Ginger
had been so indiscreet, Becky had bought a set of chrome and
cylindrical Old-Fashioned glasses for which she paid the asking price
and expressed far more liking than she felt, spending M.M.T.T.W.W."
More Money Than They Were Worth, her sister-in-law had whispered in her
ear.

Alden had pulled up in front of 117 King Arthur's Court for the initial
interview with the Fairweathers.  He had suppressed a smile as he
mounted their marble steps and located the doorbell button concealed in
the finial of a fleur de lys.  He had read the book featured on their
coffee table, the solid block of Foucault's Pendulum.  "The next big
effort," Alden had said, tolerantly.  He wore a clan scarf with an air
of entitlement.  Somehow, in the course of their preliminary chitchat
(he had spotted the brochure) the subject of Cancel Bay had come up and
Alden allowed he and his family had enjoyed their first five visits,
but not the sixth, irrationally so, he admitted, holding the management
responsible for some very foul weather.  They had vacationed next in
the Seychelles but the children had not cared for the spicy food and
the great circling sharks in the Indian Ocean who were keen to devour
the spicy people.

Alison Fairweather's eyes had met Glen's.  They had had such bad luck
with an ex-hippie carpenter and again with an ex-priest marriage
counselor that they had vowed not to hire anyone else who had an ax to
grind as the result of a mid life crisis and collapse, although in the
case of a prospective lumberjack ax-grinding was not necessarily a
negative quality (Alison had made a private joke).

Adjourning outside, they had tramped around the grounds.  Glen revealed
his anxieties, pointing out, if felled incorrectly, his trees (see the
doomed one pre-tied around with red ribbons) would crash onto the
gazebo roof or slice through power lines or crush the new struggling
plantings of the Home Grow-A-Maze kit (a second-wedding present to the
Fairweathers).  Alden had jotted with a yellow pencil stub on the back
of the forwarded envelope in which his latest Platinum Card statement
had arrived.  The Fairweathers had stamped their feet and blown into
their hands in the chilling shade their trees cast across the earth but
would not cast much longer, evidently, for Alden's estimate seemed
reasonable even though he was going to have to hire another man, as
Alden had heard himself explaining.

Now, this morning, they both had early meetings but the Fairweathers
waited for Alden and his assistant to show up.  Alden's proposed
eightish ETA.  proved to be eight twenty-one.  Someone-the Fairweathers
didn't know about Ginger-had written FREE JEAN HARRIS in the dust of
Alden's station wagon's rear window.  Alden introduced Gee Weeden, his
helper.  Gee, a tongue-tied bachelor in his forties, tugged the bill of
his Patriot Rebuilt Motors cap and commenced hauling the ropes and saws
out of the car as Alden and Glen cleared up a misunderstanding
concerning stumps, stump removal being another matter altogether from
tree cutting.

"I'll leave low stumps," Alden said.

"And then what?  Then what am I supposed to do?  " Glen could suddenly
turn combative.  The ex-priest marriage counselor had been no help at
all, advising him to picture his anger heaped upon a raft floating away
down a mountain river and out of his life forever, but Glen's raft
always capsized in the rapids and his anger, wet and sputtering, washed
back to shore.

"You can bore holes in the stumps and fill them with buttermilk," Alden
said, "and they rot right away from a fungus.  After a while."

Glen said that sounded highly unlikely but Alden knew he'd read or
heard of the method somewhere and they argued the point rather
tentatively.

Alison startled Gee by speaking to him, asking him if he had been
following the remarkable news from Berlin.  (She always had to be the
pleasant one.) Gee dropped a handsaw which struck a boulder and emitted
a cautionary and distressed two-tonal ping which was to resonate in
Alden's mind as the day's cautionary leitmotif.  For he was beginning
to wonder whether some of the red ribbons hadn't been retied around
around taller and bulkier and more treacherously sited trees.
Furthermore,

Glen didn't seem to remember having agreed to leave cash in the mailbox
for Alden to pick up on his way home.  Glen now required an itemized
bill for his accountant.  Alden was beginning to understand why Gee
looked so old for his age and why he started when spoken to and
answered back warily, keeping his seamed face expressionless.  Gee, who
was wifeless and childless and who spent his days out-of-doors handily
repairing, painting, and puttering around, or sitting snugly by the
woodstove in the Co-Op's back storeroom usefully recalling where the
spare box of ice scrapers had been stashed the previous May-Gee was on
his second pacemaker.  He 'd worn out the first one from the beating it
took.

ANDY SHUT HIS WINDOW after Lily, choosing to believe herself invisible,
failed to return his wave.  The window escaped his grip and slammed
itself down.  The casing was missing its ropes and weights and had to
be propped open in warmer weather with a notched stick.  Shortly after
he moved in, Miss Hill had confiscated the stick.  He trusted it would
be returned in the spring and he had almost resolved to perch here
until spring, if only to test this thesis.

The Hills were not warm and openhearted people, he had decided.  They
had not filled in his preliminary questionnaires in the natural course
of rising to a usual standard of a willingness to please.  He had not,
in the past few weeks, been made welcome among the Hills so much as
become lost in the crowd.  Harvey Hill, the antic old uncle, kept
calling him by the names of the resident boys although Andy did not in
the least resemble any of that crew with their wide, dough-colored
faces in which too small features had settled too close together in the
middles of their half-baked heads while cooling.  They had such an un
risen look, dull raisin eyes, pinched plugs of dough for their noses,
rounded plugs of dough for their assertive chins.  It had been a while
since he himself had been a boy or had been among boys, but he was not
yet far enough removed from the experience to remain unaffected by the
cracks in their voices and the tight longings that distracted and
distorted them.

Andy wished he could shake the contents of their brains into a burlap
bag to sort through at his leisure with gloves on.

However, he further recalled as he sat on a needlepoint cushion, a Skye
terrier depicted in fraying stiches, raising him up on his short legged
desk chair, he was supposed to leave personal descriptions out of his
work.  He riffled through a stack of 3 X 5 cards bearing blackly inked
notes in his private shorthand-no vowels, verbs, or connectives.  At
first glance, his notes resembled personal ads in an alternative weekly
which only those compelled by loneliness or lust could bother to
decipher.

When the family was more used to him, perhaps he would ask to measure
their noses and the distances between their eyes and the lengths and
angles of their jaws and thus objectively chart and account for that
phenomenon known as a family resemblance.  But then he would have to go
out and graph a selection of random faces to demonstrate variant
general population characteristics because, he supposed, all he would
prove would be the existence of ordinary, not remarkable (except in the
case of Betsy and Ginger, and Ginger was fading) looks all around which
was not the sort of discovery the examination committee expected its
candidates to bring before them.  Professor Janacek's standing order
was, "Frighten me, my students."  He leaned back in his endowed swivel
chair and commanded, "Knock me out."  It had been a temptation not to
shoot out a foot and tip him over.

For Andy had, in his extended academic past, been labeled a Romantic.

He had been warned against employing too novelistic an approach.
Reality was not shapely.  Data did not develop along the lines of
character, theme, plot, conflict, and resolution.  His various mentors
called for more statistics, most of them in the Eastern European
accents of refugees who had been cast adrift from their own anecdotal
pasts and so begrudged him his familiarity with his own native culture,
or so Andy believed.  Perhaps now, if the morning's news on his radio
was anything to go by, they could all go back to their soon-to-be-free
history-trampled little homelands, although he doubted they would
return except, perhaps, for big emotional visits, their expandable
luggage stuffed with bottles of Kentucky bourbon rolled in Banana
Republic T-shirts and stone washed denim jackets.

Andy had been accused of inserting too much of himself into his
research.  He had given money to a colony of street people he was
studying.  He had bought them sandwiches, found them winter coats, and
got them into shelters, those who agreed to go.  He had signed on one
of the more mentally able derelicts at a computer training school. Andy
was about to be failed for the semester when the local news heard about
his efforts.  (Renata, who had been on his side then, had made a few
calls.) Andy was featured in a "Special Report: Making a Difference,
Everyday Heroes" segment on the local Channel 6. Whereupon Andy had
asked for an extension and turned his senior-term project into a study
of The Further Effects of Media Attention upon an Average Citizen's

Life (his own).  His colony of street people had accused him of
exploiting them and demanded money, their fair share of the money they
assumed he had earned for being famous.  The Mayor had sent Andy a
congratulatory letter which Andy had deconstructed to prove that the
Mayor resented Andy for calling attention to the problems on the
Mayor's streets.

After this incident, Professor Janacek had suggested Andy remove the
letter I from his word processor keyboard.

"Sir?"  asked Andy, mentally spellingsr.  "What do you mean?"

"This will rechannel your emphasis."

"Rechannel, you say?  "

"In my country, all typewriting and information reproducing machines
must be registered with the authorities."  One of Professor Janacek's
wandering observations.

"Sir?  Well, power to the people."  Andy believed that was what they
used to say back in the olden days.

Now, Andy switched on his desk lamp.  He had bought his own loo-watt
long-life soft-light G.E. bulb which, nevertheless, flickered and
stuttered and strained in the socket of the rickety old tole lamp that
had been provided him.  He was leery of the lamp, which dealt out
sporadic shocks.  And he had learned not to touch the lamp and his
computer at the same time for electric impulses shot from hand to hand
tracing a route across his shoulder blades causing the computer screen
to blurt out ancient data like the draft of one last conciliatory
letter to Renata he thought he had dumped.  The shock activity seemed
only to happen when he was barefoot and there may have been more causes
but he was not keen to explore them, and as a result of those early
jolts he approached his desk, when he approached his desk, warily.

The plane of the desktop struck his ribs as Andy leaned over his work.
He needed to rise upon another cushion.  The chair legs had lost their
casters although he doubted the casters were truly lost.  He would bet
they had been preserved somewhere, in some corner he had yet to
discover down in the cluttered cellar or out in the crowded barn or
under the attic's overstressed eaves, or at the bottom of a rattling
tin receptacle shoved to the back of a stuck-shut drawer.  Then again,
were he to refit the casters to the legs of his chair (rods slotted
into drilled holes-he had upended the chair to see how) he might be
inconvenienced by instability.  His floorboards sloped noticeably
northward and he pictured himself rolling slowly backward until he was
caught by the opposite wall.

He reviewed the notes of the conversation he had held last night with
Harvey outside the bathroom door, which Andy was finding a useful venue
for striking up the odd conversation.  If he lingered, a towel over his
arm and his soap dish in hand, the Hills tended to chat diver tingly at
him as they edged themselves between him and the bolted bathroom door.
They favored him with a passing observation or a small recollection and
then, as the bathroom fell free, they swiftly seized it first, breaking
off mid-sentence, shortly informing him over their shoulders, Shan't be
half a mo'.  This was considered fair trade by all.

Last night, Glover had been locked in the bathroom, endlessly
showering.

It may have been the plash and gurgle of vigorously running water, it
may have been his own remark that young Glover was going to grow gills,
that caused Harvey suddenly to think of the frogs in the swamps who
said, Mud, mud, mud.  We learned the word from them, Harvey had
informed Andy, way back in the shadowy mists of time.  Frogs have
always spoken English?  Andy had asked.  This was pre Babel

Harvey informed him.  Ah, said Andy.

In the spring, Andy determined, once his notched stick was returned to
him, he would prop open his window and listen out toward the swamps to
hear for himself these unlikely creatures calling.

HARVEY MADE the rounds of Senior Village enjoying another breakfast and
midmorning coffee and an early lunch on the strength of his shelf
hanging abilities and his report of that morning's Cash Call fiasco and
further revelations concerning the latest Pearl Harbor of an offer on
his house in Connecticut.  Everyone at Senior Village was a veteran of
the house wars, when they had all been told they should bite the bullet
and allow some nice young family, whose turn it was now, to buy their
house for a song.  That was Communism right here and now in America,
talk about the Berlin Wall falling down.

"I mean to keep the chandelier," Harvey said.  "After all, it's mine
and I want it.  Venetian, you know, Venetian glass.  Here?  " He was
holding a nail against Penny Nicholls's buff-colored wall.

"Now, you have to be reasonable," Penny said.  "Where would you put it?
Lower."  She meant the nail should be placed lower on the wall.  "
Because," she went on, "from your description, your chandelier would be
far too grand and big to hang just anywhere.  In an ordinary house
everyone'd be bumping their heads.  They'd get up in the middle of the
night with other matters in mind, and thump.  And let me tell you from
personal experience it's very freeing to get rid of your old junk.
Just make them pay you a fair market price and walk away with your head
held high."

"I can keep the chandelier in a box, if it comes to that.  But if I
sell it, I'll want top dollar.  Tip top dollar," he declared as he
struck the nail for emphasis.  The nail bent into a U and the hammer
bounced from his hand landing on a sofa cushion and jouncing onto the
carpet just missing the kidney-shaped mahogany coffee table with the
glass top that covered a gallery of grandchildren pictures from first
grade through law and business school, the same faces losing their
chubbiness and gaining wisdom.  It made Penny so blue to look at them
that she kept them covered most of the time with Pops albums and her
current to-do list.  She wouldn't have minded had a randomly flying
hammer shattered her own wedding portrait, however, as it sat propped
on an end table, not that her marriage hadn't been exceptionally happy
but she had not been a pretty bride and she had never cared for the
picture of record.  She'd been a much better bargain than she seemed in
the photograph.

"I'm pure brick beneath the plaster here," she told Harvey,
recommending her construction.  Senior Village occupied the old Towne
Elementary School building, which had been replaced by a modern
structure with a natatorium and an atrium and a Snapple dispenser in
the cafeteria.

"Ah," Harvey regarded the wall.  "You know, I think I went to the
second grade in this apartment.  I used to sit in your kitchenette, as
it wasn't at the time.  I was set in the back because I was tall, and
up front in your dinette area was a row of the nearsighted ones,
squinting, and Ben Elliott who was deaf as a pike, he could have sat on
the teacher's lap and he wouldn't have heard anything.  Weren't we
primitive?  But happy," he stated stoutly.

"Life is but a dream," Penny remarked as she always remarked whenever

Harvey reminded her of days past.  She knew, she knew.  Sometimes when
she was alone late at night she heard children's voices.  She heard
laughter and recitations which was lovely but nothing she was prepared
to tell anyone about.  They would explain it away or put her away, she
told herself tartly.

"So this wall shouldn't give me trouble, bearing in mind our
longstanding relationship."  Harvey hammered again at a nail selected
as sturdier.  The tip penetrated a quarter inch, then that spike fell
to the floor into the loopy wall-to-wall carpet.

"Rat crap," Harvey said and he and Penny lowered themselves stiffly to
their knees and searched, clapping their fingertips across the floor.
Penny didn't want to vacuum up a nail by mistake and puncture her
vacuum cleaner hose because they had long since discontinued her model
and subsequently its parts and she was devoted to her original
Electrolux.  Harvey, for his part, wished to find the nail so he could
bash at it again with more science.

"Because," Penny said (like all women she could not let a subject just
drop), "when you listed your house with the Land Pirate, did you say
whether the chandelier would convey or not?  "

"Convey or not?  " Harvey mocked.  "Convey or not?  "

"Otherwise, your chandelier has to go with the house, anything that's
actually attached remains with the house," Penny said.

"You mean all my paintings and the hunting prints in the library and
the Coca-Cola bottle cap opener screwed to the end of the kitchen
counter and even the plaster plaque thing young Arthur made me at
summer camp when he was seven, displaying all his saved baby teeth
arranged in a grin?  I'm not sure I could trust eventual buyers to be
fastidious about young Arthur's old teeth," Harvey said.

"No, no, decorative objects are different from actual fixtures," Penny
said.

"I was an actual fixture in my leather lounger chair in the den, if
that's the definition," Harvey told her.  "I'll go with the house,
shall I?  That's what I really need, live-in help, somebody to be there
should I step on soap in the bathtub or go rigid listening to the
evening news or walk off and forget the teakettle's on.  Found it," he
added, and brandished the nail.  He scrambled to his feet and offered
assistance to Penny who still knelt, at a loss.

"Bum knee from all those power lunges at Joy of Movement," Penny
explained.

"Bum knee," Harvey barked.  "Now that's a physical impossibility."

DOWN IN THE DEEP BASEMENT of the First Congregational Church, Becky sat
a bit apart from the others on a numbered (18) folding chair enjoying
the luxury of thinking her own thoughts.  She came to Women's Chorus to
sing, not to socialize, and she had no wish to add her oar to the topic
currently under discussion, deciding the final content of their
Christmas program.  There were factions forming roughly along the lines
of traditionalists versus sophisticates.  The sophisticates smiled
encouragingly at Becky who had admitted to having had vocal training in
the past (she'd been forced to, her ability had been too in evidence on
the a capella numbers: she could always find her note).  From time to
time over the last weeks she'd been coming to chorus Becky had seemed
to be on the verge of suggesting some embellishment or adventurous
touch before recalling she was no longer in New York.  Besides, she
truly didn't care whether they sang the "Hallelujah Chorus" or merely
"Joy to the World."  She just went with the flow.

"What about trying "Do They Know It's Christmas?," the starving
Ethiopian song all the rock stars cooperated together and recorded?"
asked Cindy Peck, who was very young.

"Of course they don't know it's Christmas.  They're all Muslims over
there in that part of Africa," Rosalie Chubb said.  "Really, it's a
very ignorant song and intellectually imperialistic to boot."

" No, no, I see that, but the sentiment is to share our happy spirit of
generosity with them," Cindy said.

"Well, you don't see them coming over here offering to share Ramadan
with us or whatever their big do is," Rosalie said.

"I shouldn't care for Ramadan.  That's the one where you don't eat for
a month, isn't it?  " asked Anna Webster.

"Well, then, if not eating is such a virtue with them, I don't know
what the problem is," Rosalie said.  "Just call all hunger spells
Ramadan.  Make it a movable feast like Easter, or in their case, a
movable fast.  Ha."

The ladies stirred because Rosalie, while being so ungenerous was,
nevertheless, almost making sense.  But then, Rosalie was a real old
Yankee, even for Towne.  She was so practical she rinsed and reused her
tinfoil until it caught fire in the oven and disflavored the
re-reheated casseroles it covered.  This was known.

There was a faded Civil Defense Fallout Shelter poster thumbtacked to
the pale, paneled wall and child-drawn pictures of sunlit Christian
days where houses, people, birds, and flowers were all of an equal
size.  A Sunday School attendance chart was posted for all the world to
see.  One distressingly blank week someone explained parenthetically in
red ink--flu bug rampant.  If it were the Middle Ages they would have
written the message upside down so God could look down from His cloud
and read it, Becky reflected, remembering her Art History.  She hoped
she wasn't coming down with the flu.  When she was feverish, her mind
raced and she remembered schooly facts.  The honey and lemon hadn't
helped.  It never did, except for the seconds the mixture took to pass
through her clogged throat affording a moment of clarity which seemed
to make the re clogging worse.

She harrumphed testingly.  There was a full feeling and a scratchy
roughness down there, and a sense of discomfort was forging a passage
toward her ears.

"Yes, Mrs.  Lowe?  You have a suggestion?  " Trinka Benson asked.

She had, thus far, failed to become Becky here which was how she wished
matters to remain.  As Mrs.  Lowe, she could be less easily asked to
Xerox sheet music or chauffeur stranded members, or bake cakes for
Sales or sew concert robes or create nametags or centerpieces or
otherwise be volunteered to perform those time-consuming and innately
female tasks which prettified or cushioned or diverted, which perhaps
might even be said to civilize, but really, these days it hardly seemed
important to her to spend several evenings making fifty holiday ribbon
nametag rosettes to hand out to the audience at the Restport Nursing
Home concert.  How very nice nice women strove to be.  And then the
Restport residents would be left with some crumpled clutter of ribbon
which they themselves were too nice to throw away even though they had
no space to spare in their tiny assigned rooms.  The rosettes would be
discovered crammed among their effects after they had died and, at
last, be discarded by a niece or daughter steeled to be unsentimental.
Then the niece or daughter would drive home swiping her eyes.

"I'm sorry," Becky said.  "I was clearing my throat."  Becky harrumphed
again in demonstration and felt as if she had swallowed an angry
hornet.

Viv Harricott said, "I think we should demonstrate by song our support
of German reunification."

"Not necessarily," Naomi Liebenthal spoke up, and everyone murmured at
her strong assertion.

Yes, her ears were going to be involved.  It was as if she were
listening through damp cotton balls and Becky prodded her temple where
the faint crease of a headache was setting in behind her eyes.  What
she really needed was to lie upon a tropical beach and bake out her
head cold.  Rum punches wouldn't hurt, and a stack of best-sellers to
pick up and put down between naps and treks to the buffet table.  The
children could be signed up for sailing lessons, daylong sailing
lessons, overnight sailing lessons that involved trips to uninhabited
islands where they would be left for three days with an iron pot and a
book of matches and a jug of fresh water and be told to find their own
ways home.  Alden could go snorkeling or something.  He could visit the
local Institute of Seashells and return enthusiastic about seashells.

It occurred to Becky that, had she answered that morning's WROC Cash
Call correctly, she could have afforded to fly off to a sun-stunned
island.  But first, had she $10,000 to throw around, she'd buy the kids
five pairs of Levi's apiece which would take a bite of $400 or so, and
then she'd have that jangly situation underneath the car's carriage
dealt with which Alden said the mechanic said sounded like $1,200 to
him, and then they'd siphoned $3,000 from Little Becky's college trust
to pay an unexpected tax bill, vowing to replace the money as soon as
possible, and besides, a big quarterly medical insurance bill was
looming.

Anna Webster whispered at Becky, "I want to apologize to your
sister-in-law for not waving to her just a while ago as she drove past
my house.  I couldn't imagine who that could be with Goody Palmer so I
called Babe and we worked it out after I described the woman's hair
which is what I best caught a glimpse of.  Babe knew her right away
from my description of her hair and her general, oh, you know, aura."

Oh dear, thought Becky.  Ginger has an aura now.

Cindy Peck spoke up.  "I still feel we should sing about something to
acknowledge our appreciation of these exciting times."

"The times don't need the likes of us to acknowledge they may be
exciting," Rosalie Chubb said.  "I vote we leave well enough alone."

"Oh, all right, we'll have a vote," Trinka Benson said.  Women's Chorus
was a highly democratic institution.  "Shall we acknowledge these
exciting times or leave well enough alone is the question on the
table," Trinka said.

"MEET YOU HERE at five-thirty, so I can fill you in on all the
details," Ginger had told Goody as he let her off on Devonshire Street.
"Thank you, thank you for all your assistance.  I'd have been utterly
lost without you.  I'm so terribly encourged now that you've taken up
my cause."  She bumped the door shut, mis latched and was gone. Traffic
lurched as she stepped in front of fenders and Goody was unable to
protest why he could not possibly pick her up at 5:30, that he did not
require her thanks; moreover, he sincerely doubted she would be lost,
utterly, without him, and indeed, he had not taken up her cause, he was
not at all sure what her cause might be.  An alerting buzz trilled at
him from the dashboard.  Goody stretched across the seat and yanked the
door handle, secured.  He drove on.  But of course there could be no
question that, having brought her here, Ginger must continue to be his
responsibility.  If he did not collect her at day's end she would be
stranded in the darkening, emptying city creating and encountering
uniquely, peculiarly Gingerish travails in the rain.  He knew there
would be rain, a drear drizzle heavily dripping down from the black
cloud which she would claim had settled, inevitably, over her poor,
bowed, humbled head for good, nay, that it had settled there for ill,
Ginger would claim.

All that day, dire images of Ginger were to float across Goody's
activated mind's eye-his imagination had been powerfully,
unprecedentedly stimulated by her presence, and her imminence.  His
left thumb twitched vainly at the channel-changing button of a ghost
remote.  He was not accustomed to witnessing such dramatic goings-on in
real life or, for that matter, as entertainment.  Babe always brought
Ealing Studio comedies home from Video 2000, except on his literacy
volunteer night at the high school when she treated herself to
something black and white and tragic.  Then she sat by herself in the
den with the shades pulled down talking back to the screen, always
knowing better than the straying, sinning, beautiful actor-people what
they ought to have done, or, as was more often to the point, those
things they ought not to have done.

THE MECHANISM OF a crystal-encased clock on the big-parlor mantelpiece
prepared to strike.  The apparatus hitched, ratcheted, whirred, a small
brass hammer soundlessly tilted like a tomahawk.  Andy had come to the
parlor fifteen minutes beforehand to dwell unchallenged in its
atmosphere of aged ness and unaired graces, for he had not been
encouraged to frequent this room.  A pair of tall raised-panel doors
between the parlor and the front hall were always pulled closed and
were one door or the other to be found to have been left ajar, Lily or
Harvey or Alden or even Ginger would seek out any intruder among the
formidable ranks of armchairs and the pale and slightly a-bobble
lampshades.

Andy wondered whether they were all caught under the sway of some long
gone but powerful personality, perhaps the very one who had caused
antimacassar to be piled upon antimacassar.  For there were three
doilies placed on either arm of the wing chair upon which he had sat to
declare his right to sit there.  He plucked at the dainty heap beneath
his elbow and to his inexpert eye it appeared that the finest piece of
crocheting was sandwiched between two lesser examples of the art.  Andy
wasn't sure what to make of this, but not too much, he cautioned
himself.  Perhaps the practice was simply a common and a "good" one.
There was so much he did not yet know about these people.

He balanced his notebook on the jut of his knee and he wrote swiftly,
"Every surface is barnacled with belongings."  He picked up and
examined and catalogued the items present upon an adjacent tabletop-a
porcelain plate, 12" round, fluted edge, floral pattern, Bristol
imprint; an embossed silver box containing safety pins and a button;
the china figurine of a dapple-backed fawn; a small, stopped carriage
clock; a tall wooden Beefeater nutcracker perpetually choking on a
well-stuck Brazil nut; a length of maroon cording detached from the hem
of a window curtain coiled inside an art pottery bowl.  None of these
objects had been very recently dusted, but they were not not ever
dusted, Andy estimated.

The small brass hammer fell and the clock struck a single, purely
pretty note.  Lily drifted into the big parlor on the fading resonance
of the chime.  She stuck her hand into the Delft basin full of dried
lavender florettes sitting on the radiator cover and she churned them
briefly.  Motes huffed along a shaft of sunlight and flyaway specks of
petal sifted down onto the several squares and oblongs of patterned
carpets.  Lily swiped her hand against her navy-blue wool-blend flank.
Lavender debris was caught beneath her short fingernails and she didn't
know why she had reached into the basin unless the act represented some
deep-rooted impulse to clear the air of Andy, for she knew the action
had been aimed against him.  But Andy was not daunted.  He remarked,
"Very fragrant."

"Well, not really," Lily said.  She ought to have added a few drops of
lavender oil to the dried florettes last July but she'd been so
distracted by the press of family events that spiking the potpourri had
not been uppermost in her mind.

"Are we going to remain in here?  " she asked, lifting her eyebrows, to
suggest that Andy also rise.

"We'll be undisturbed in here," Andy said firmly.

They sat, at Lily's alternate invitation, at the large round table
pushed into the bulge of a bay window.  Lily tugged at the chain of a
lamp to no avail and she tilted back the shade-bul bless Andy was
peered at responsible-for the thin line of light that burned around his
doorjamb and sill late at night shone suspiciously bright.  Lily
reached and tugged apart heavy lined curtains exposing the
light-diffusing sheers beneath, with the husk of some summer's
dragonfly pinned between the folds.  The table was clothed in maroon
velvet edged with dull bullion fringe and topped by a lace runner made
lacier by moths.  The table supported a gallery of photographs in
picture frames propped or standing in any order.  Faces filled the
frames, faces that staringly resented the picture-taking process, faces
smiling at an off-camera individual, faces looking forward to the
future, faces gazing backward toward the past.  There were as well
views of snow-covered mountainsides being conquered by tiny splinters
of skiers, and of misty lakes upon which floated tiny, leaf-like
canoes.  A mustached man sat upon a biplane as delicate as the
dragonfly.  An aproned woman stood beside the back door with a crow at
her feet.

Lily followed Andy's eye.

"Occasionally," she explained, "you come across a friendly crow."

"Who are they all?  " Andy asked.

"Oh," Lily looked.  "Us.  You know."  She puzzled at a skier. "Possibly
Harvey," she identified him.

"Ah," said Andy.

Lily scraped her fingernails across the horsehair underside of the
unsteady little side chair on which she sat.  The rough fabric served
as an emery board and scoured the lavender grit caught beneath her
nails.  A satisfied exhalation escaped her and Andy took heart.

"The Eskimos have over three hundred words in their vocabulary to
describe snow, Miss Hill.  Tell me, how many words do you have for
vase?"  he asked.

A flush of alarm crossed her face when Andy mentioned Eskimos.  Lily
would have read up on them in the family Britannica had she known they
were going to be a subject for discussion.  But she felt herself to be
on firmer ground when Andy mentioned vase although he spoke the word in
that curious out-of-state accent of his.  Vaze, he'd said, rather
oilily.

"Just vase," Lily supposed.  "Vaze," she tried to say for Andy's
benefit.

"Unless, do you mean, cut glass or pressed glass or Depression glass or
Sandwich glass or cranberry glass vases?  Are you interested in bud
vases?  There's a piece of my grandmother's Meissen, or that lusterware
amphora.  But then, I often throw flowers into drinking glasses or the
lemonade pitcher when it's not being used for lemonade, just because
they're at hand.  But that Wedgwood ewer on the mantel is lovely except
it has an invisible crack so I can't use it, it seeps.  Then there's
all that Hull Art pottery, not my favorite thing but people gave it to
teachers at one time.  I confess, I can be confused by the shapes and
what's called what.  My sister, Olive, was up on all that but then she
collected.  Delft.  All the Delft you see was hers."  And which would
have, should have gone to Ginger but Ginger had once made a face and
uttered, "Not more Delft, Mother?  " as another posset pot was lifted
from tissue wrappings.  Ginger had refused to apologize to Olive, so
that was that.

Lily indicated the basin full of dried lavender.  This was going quite
well.  Andy hadn't asked her anything impertinent or upsetting, and she
decided she would also be prepared to discuss silverware patterns and
he might even wish to hear about her garden and her efforts to locate
authentic plants.

Andy, writing rapidly, said, Whoa, and Lily subsided, easily quietened,
because she didn't after all trust this talking business, chattering on
and on about her own concerns.  But she could see how one could come to
make a habit of monologizing.  One's own thoughts were not
uninteresting to oneself and one did not necessarily even know what was
occupying one's mind until a view was given voice.  Nearly everyone she
knew had long since fallen into the practice; everybody talked.  Nobody
listened at Eastern Star meetings; Patsy Parker had to flicker the
lights for silence so they could induct new members and even then
inductions degenerated into free-for-alls of private conversations.
Lily blamed television.  Her own family kept up a discourse during
every program-Is that a wig?  Well, I hope his hair isn't real, a wig
can be returned, a wig can be complained of.  Is he married?  Still? To
her?  Hush, he's about to unmask the true murderer.  Yes, yes, I know
the landlord did it.  The concert pianist was his illegitimate son and
he was avenging the hand accident.

"Well, just vase," Lily supposed again, and she scrubbed her
fingernails across her navy-blue wool-blend-covered knee.  She had
exchanged the lavender grit beneath her nails for horsehair fiber
shreds.  She flicked her thumb against her index finger and then, aware
she was fidgeting, she willed herself to bear all in stillness just as
she had been taught as a girl.

Andy had caught up with her, his pen tapping out his private
shorthand.

"And Delft?"  he prodded, but Lily only nodded and noticed a curl of
loose wallpaper lifting up from the wall behind Andy's left ear.  The
paper was maroon and printed with gold medallions which began to swim
as she stared into them, recalling the circumstances of the paper's
selection-in stock at Towne Decorating, ordered by someone else who had
unfurled a bolt and experienced second thoughts.  Well, it wasn't a
very remarkable wall covering but Lily had gotten such a good buy on
it-eleven years later she remembered the seventy-two dollars she had
saved below list price.  Besides, she'd gone into Towne Decorating that
day with her mind made up to special-order the Roman Holiday Stripes in
peacock green and carousel yellow with a Tropical Fruit and Nesting
Birds Swag border because she had thought she wanted a change from the
eternal beige-on-beige rosettes she was replacing.  A

lucky escape, even though Ginger claimed the small gold medallions
reminded her of trilobites and made her think of her own mortality,
which was only an added attribute of the wall covering in Lily's
opinion.

This is like wildlife photography, Andy decided.  The antelopes are all
lined up at the water hole and they scatter at the click of the
shutter.  He decided the time was right to admire something else in the
room and he sought a likely object.

"Great table," he said.  There were eleven of them distributed about
the chamber, he quickly counted.

"Thank you," Lily said, not to be drawn out.  She did not ask if he
meant the drum table, the pie crust table, the old gate leg table, the
carved mahogany marble-topped table, or the Queen Anne end tables
positioned at either end of the camelback sofa.  She nearly called his
attention to the small Sheraton-style sewing table very like the one
she had seen in the sitting room at Ash Lawn when she visited there but
Lily was overcome by an awful insight that perhaps she liked her things
too much and was recommending them too highly, for she ought to have
mentioned her grandmother's vase just might be Meissen.

"They are only objects," Lily reminded herself.

"Indeed, only objects," agreed Andy and he ruffled to another notebook
page.  He had not hoped to draw out Miss Hill on a big wandering
concept at this initial interview but as she had declared herself to be
above the merely material, he decided to ask, "Do you find yourself
becoming more and more adrift as the nineteenth century floats further
and further away from you, Miss Hill?  "

"How old do you think I am?  " Lily asked in genuinely amazed challenge
and as Andy had estimated she stood somewhere between seventy five and
the end, he bent his head over his notebook page.

"Can you complete this sentence for me, Miss Hill?  "The highest good
that man can attain is-' " he read.

Lily noticed that the antimacassars on the arm of the wing chair in
which Andy had been sitting when she entered the big parlor had been
picked up and put down.

"Fill in the blank," Andy prompted.

"Yes, I understand," Lily said.  "Do you want me to say something along
the lines of saving a life, or killing an evil tyrant, or painting a
masterpiece, or planting enough wheat in Africa, or curing diseases, or
nursing the dying?  " That was all she could come up with off the top
of her head.

"don't want you to say anything in particular.  Say what^ow think,"
Andy said.

"And did you mean the highest good a man can attain, or mankind which
would include women, who I personally believe possess many different
abilities from men, in which case I might have to answer that raising
decent and successful children is a very great good," Lily said.

"Let's say humankind," Andy suggested.

"Humankind," Lily repeated and she frowned for in her mind's eye all of
humankind suddenly appeared en masse whom she saw as naked yet
genderless, and milling about on a grassy plain very early on in the
history of the world, at considerable risk from the gathering elements
and perhaps from one another as they began to notice and then to heft
rocks and sticks in a meaningful manner.  She wished Andy hadn't
mentioned humankind.  She had had no idea she felt this way about
humankind.

"There is no right answer," Andy said.

"But your statement is posed as if there were," Lily said.  "Besides, I
think there must be a correct answer, and I wouldn't be surprised if
the correct answer turned out to be something simple and surprisingly
practical like maintaining the money supply and the free market and
encouraging capitalism, though perhaps that concept is just in the air
today."  She gestured in the general direction of Germany.  "But Harvey
could explain better than I and expand upon the reasons."

"Indeed," said Andy.  "Still, why don't you tell me the answer that is
right for you."

" Then I think I may be leaning toward the wheat," Lily allowed, "in
East Africa, that is, if the climate and soil are suitable for
wheat."

Andy didn't know.  "Wheat, potatoes, manioc," he shrugged.

"But I'm also very much in favor of children being successfully
launched as well," Lily added.  "No, let's stick with the wheat.  You
can't learn much if you're hungry," she said as Andy sagged over his
notebook, erasing her answer.  His alert interviewer's expression had
momentarily slipped sideways.  He reminded Lily of several of her
acquaintances who had lately suffered strokes and were not doing
well.

"We'll ask Harvey later about the highest good because in his working
life he sometimes had a role in things that actually mattered, you
know," advised Andy almost kindly.  She saw now she was going to have
to be kind to Andy.  She wished he would go away, but she gathered he
had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but inflict himself upon
near strangers who were in no position to help anyone for they could
not even help themselves at the moment; nevertheless, Andy was counting
on them all to make his thesis possible and thus, she supposed, the
rest of his life.  Some old teacher's instinct had kicked in.  Youth
must be served, she concluded with a sigh.

"I'll tell you one thing I have always found to be true," Lily said.
"I've never had a rug taken up that I haven't found a penny underneath,
slid far beneath the rug and the pad."

" Indeed?  " asked Andy, and he wrote upon a fresh notebook page and
highlighted what he had written by inscribing a box around the words
and starring it with an anemone-like asterisk.

They both relaxed.  Lily touched her snowy cloud of hair and resettled
her hands in her lap and Andy asked a string of harmless questions then
which did not tax and sometimes tickled her.

GINGER HAD PLANNED a busy day for herself in Boston.  Shopping came
first.  She squirmed in and out of cocktail dresses at Bonwit's fancy
frocks department and then she had a long consultation at the Chanel
counter, gravely discussing her options and ultimately agreeing to give
their foundation one more chance, but in a darker shade.  She decided
she couldn't say no to a pair of kid gloves she spied on her way out
the door.  She examined bracelets at Shreve, Crump, and Lowe and said
she would have to think about the emerald one but she purchased a
sterling silver key chain curled in the shape of a question mark
because she had left her old key case back in Kansas dropped into the
Pawnee basket on the Pembroke table in the front hall and she'd been
making do with the one Lily had given her to hold her single house key,
an orange plastic disk, bearing the message, COMPLIMENTS OF NOR CO
FUEL, SNUGGLE UP WITH us THIS WINTER.  She bought a paisley shawl at
Burberry's after trying on their raincoats and a walking suit that,
frankly, looked

^

like something the second Mrs.  de Winter would have worn, Ginger
declared to all within hearing.  She rummaged through their handbags
and sprayed their perfumes on her wrist and found nothing to tempt her
on the condiments shelf.  Nor did she care for the specially advertised
holiday dresses at Lord & Taylor, too fussy and froufrou, she
complained, although the very young salesgirl answered back that they
were gala dresses, young and gala dresses.  At Laura Ashley, after
flipping through a basket of ruffly-edged place mats, Ginger announced,
in her carrying voice, she was afraid she just wasn't the Laura Ashley
type, she was not afflicted by a deep nostalgia for all the pale chintz
cushions and Blue Willowware china and manicured cricket lawns that had
never been in the first place.  She marched back to Burberry's and
returned the paisley shawl she had just bought there, suddenly going
off English goods, she told them as her reason, because Burberry's had
rather insisted on being told one before giving her her refund.  She
thoughtfully leafed through the travel books at Rizzoli's and she
bought a Blue Guide to France.  The clerk assumed she was about to
embark on a lovely trip to Paris and he told Ginger he envied her.
Ginger didn't set him straight.  She regarded him as if she were
already far away.  Then she headed for Filene's Basement where she
recognized all the silk and cashmere sweaters with the labels sliced
out as having come from last year's Anne Klein collection and she
bought herself a cardigan in every color, plus a terribly sweet
needlepoint cushion that read "If you have nothing nice to say, come
sit by me" which had been misplaced among the sweaters, otherwise she
would not have come across it.  She also bought a pair of knee-high
cashmere socks for Alden.  They were only ninety-five cents but there
didn't seem to be anything very wrong with them, at least as far as she
could tell when she held them together, heels to toes.

Ginger had been keeping up a brisk pace, and she searched for and AM
rediscovered a Brigham's, where she ordered a strawberry sundae.  She
All sat at the counter with her shopping bags clenched between her feet
so JM she wouldn't forget them when she left.  A tear touched her eye
as she M thought of her mother (a sweet thought, for once, about her
mother) who always sought out a Brigham's after a buying spree.  They
had jjM always tried to order something different, convincing
themselves that |H this time they were really going to order something
else up to the instant they heard their own voices asking for a
strawberry sundae, after all, and coffee ice cream with marshmallow
sauce and chopped walnuts, and a single glass of ice water to share
between them since her mother had seemed to think ice water was such an
"extra."

Ginger was heartened to recall what decent stock she had sprung from
and how aspects of that native goodness had infused her when she had
lived and moved among her kinfolks.  She had been simple, then,
susceptible, sweet.  She must make a mantra of her positive qualities
to fortify herself for her upcoming consultation.  She was worthy,
deserving, beloved.  She must remember that she was someone who could
not possibly be the villainess in a heated divorce action.  She looked
at her watch.  She would have to dash if she was going to be not too
late for her afternoon appointment at Rowe's Wharf where she had a
meeting scheduled with that attorney friend of Alden's, an old school
connection to whom, Alden had told her, he had once given valuable
investment advice of a negative nature.  "I'd steer clear of those
particular boys were it my hard-earned dollar I was risking," Alden had
said, which was really more than he should have said at the time.

Ginger had not met Ron Revenaux at Alden's wedding.  This was an
ancient grudge because Ginger had been unmarried and Ron had been
available and one's brother's wedding was supposed to be an occasion
for encountering very possible prospects.  That was written in stone,
or, possibly, blood.  But Ron, in an early-on career coup, had been too
busy prosecuting some ungrammatical but noteworthy Mafiosi at the time
to meet friend's sisters, however lovely they were promised to be.  Ron
had, however, been one of those people whom Ginger had filed away for
one purpose or another and lately she had pressured Alden for this
belated introduction, letting him know that if her future happiness and
security were compromised by inadequate legal representation the bitter
blame would be heaped on his head.

"If you can find any room left up there, my head is yours to saber
dance on," Alden had told her; nevertheless he called Ron on Ginger's
behalf and incidentally mentioned his own situation which seemed a more
graceful way of getting the word out in that particular quarter, just
as an afterthought, nothing urgent about Alden's circumstances, but
about his sister, his admittedly rather headstrong sister... Ron
Revenaux, who had been such a tantalizing mystery for so many years
proved after all not to be her type, Ginger saw at once as she was
wafted into his office by a fragrant assistant wearing an ultrasuede
ensemble.  (Saks had been swelling with ultrasuede and Ginger had to
admit it looked well on.) Ron wore a dark blue suit with a just too
wide and wide apart chalky stripe which struck her as rather
gangsterish, a bit of bravado left over from his crime-busting days. He
was a little man (Alden ought to have mentioned that back in 1969 and
saved her years of fretting over Ron).  He sat behind a desk the
dimensions of a billiard table.  Its broad polished surface seemed to
billow, a trick of the light.  He compensated with the costume and the
desk, Ginger adjudged him automatically as she shrugged her fur coat
from her shoulders and arranged her shopping bags around her slender
crossed ankles.  It occurred to her that her shopping paraphernalia
with the expensive logos on display (she had hung on to the Burberry
bag) cast her in a less forlorn role than she had meant to act out that
day, but as she gazed upon burnished tropical hardwood paneling-which
winked back-and listened to the low, expensive humming of some remote
apparatus that provided perfect air at a perfect degree and which
fluttered almost alive across one's cheek, she realized that the
prevailing sympathies hereabouts would lie with someone who did not
deny herself.  And was that not a small Hockney on the wall, a swimming
pool scene?  Hockney was always swimming pools, wasn't he?  Ginger
regretted she hadn't indulged herself after all at Shreve's, where she
had very much desired a silver-barreled Mont Blanc pen for book-writing
purposes.

A light pulsed on the beautiful face of his sleek telephone system.
Forgive him.  Ron had to take this call.

Oh, why hadn't Louis become this kind of attorney?  Ginger thought of
Louis in his shirtsleeves with his half glasses sliding down his nose
answering his own noisy telephone as he sat beneath a blown-up
photograph he had taken himself of a domestic sunset.  Ginger eyed the
Bachrach portrait of Ron's eventually acquired family, a tall, blond
wife with a pretty but insipid face, two dainty fair daughters, a tall
dark son... Ginger, not openly listening to Ron, who had swiveled round
in his deep leather chair, nevertheless overheard words that at once
soothed and excited her.  "... go easy on deutsche marks ... must
reposition ourselves now ... what's the last word from Geneva?  "

"Forgive me," Ron said, swinging round again to face her with, Ginger
noted, a reassumed expression of compassionate patience; when a minute
before, upon seizing the telephone receiver, his look had sharpened and
grinned into one of wolfish animation.  But this was, Ginger thought,
precisely the range of emotion one should wish for in one's attorney.

"I don't know what Alden has told you about my situation," Ginger said.
She was sure wicked Alden had offered a version, and an opinion, and a
caveat.

"Why don't you tell me in your own words," Ron offered.

So Ginger explained and expressed herself articulately and compellingly
as was her way.  Ron tented his hands and balanced his chin upon the
ridgepole.

"So you see.  So you do see," Ginger concluded, smilingly inviting him
to-see, and to inform her precisely what sort of picture she had
limned.  Besides, one rather needed to be told how one was viewed.
Then, necessary adjustments could be tweaked and twitched.

Ron's face slipped behind his tented hands.  He pinched the bridge of
his nose between his thumbs and he passed his hands back and forth as
if dispersing a cloud, these choreographed tics signaling his sincere
concentration upon the facts of the case at hand, Ginger decided.  Oh,
she was such a student of men she found her knowledge distracting.

Ron pointed out, "You resided in Kansas for the majority of your
marriage.  Have you come to Massachusetts for a no-fault divorce?
Don't you have no-fault in Kansas?  This is not, as Alden must have
told you, my area of expertise."

"But it's not a no-fault divorce I'm after.  I want Louis to-" Ginger
stopped herself before she uttered the word pay, or she may have been
about to blurt (most irretrievably) suffer.  She might even have meant
to say, I just want Louis to sit up and take notice.  Ginger herself
wasn't sure why she had stalled on the very brink, it seemed, of a
revelation, but, best to let Ron tell her what she ought to want, what
she should realistically want.

"And as I understand you, there was fault and the fault lay on your
side," Ron observed, across his broad desk.

"Ah, but you see, if we examine the roots of the estrangement, you'll
realize that Louis's neglect and indifference and absences,
particularly during that disastrous political campaign of his, all of
that drove me to do what I did," Ginger explained.  "Possibly as a cry
for help."

"Yes, well," Ron said, "to be perfectly frank and I'm not doing you any
favors by not being perfectly frank, that's not the best argument for
you to make, that that devil Louis made you do it."

"It's an excellent argument," Ginger declared, "because I know it's the
truth and I always face up to the truth regardless and soldier on
bravely from there."

"Yes, you certainly strike me as a self-sufficient woman, exceedingly
able and strong and independent, who knows her own mind and is in
charge of her own destiny," Ron said.

"Yes, I am.  I am in charge of my own ..."  Ginger began eagerly to
agree before she stumbled smack into his trap.  What a pitiless cross
examiner

Ron must be.  Somebody remind her not to run numbers for the mob,
should she ever sink so low.

Ron suppressed a smile behind re tented hands.  He said, "I think, in a
case like yours, when a woman, particularly a woman past her first
youth, is contemplating leaving her marriage, she ought to ask herself
this question-what shall I be doing a year from now?  "

"What shall I be doing a year from now?"  Ginger repeated.  Well, she'd
be a published authoress frantically busy on a book tour, having lost
twenty-five pounds.  She would be living in some charming old brick
Back Bay building with a roof terrace where she sincerely hoped there
would be someone waiting to greet her with a glass of wine and
exclamations of delight.  Perhaps he was someone she had yet to meet.
Yes, this was going to be a busy year and she was keen to get
started.

"At any rate, bearing in mind your ideal image of a year hence, let me
tell you off the top of my head what you can expect by way of a
settlement here in the Commonwealth in your general situation," Ron
said.

It was all very well and good for Ron, fiddling now with a valuable old
green-and-white-cane Clichy globe paperweight (symbolically holding her
world and her fate in his hands, Ginger understood) to lecture her
about the need to down scale her lifestyle (Ginger rustled shopping
bags) and to recommend petitioning for additional funds to retrain her
for a suitable occupation (a computer course, he suggested, just off
the top of that legal-brained head of his), although significant
employment opportunities were not abundant for women her age.
Furthermore, she would have to plan for her retirement years which were
not, if one did the math, so incalculably far off.

Ginger, who was not hearing what she had come to hear, ceased
listening.  She studied Ron's daily view of the harbor through his
several vast windows-lead-grey wintry waves bumping and jostling as if
there weren't enough room for them all in all the Atlantic Ocean, gulls
skidding backwards, caught on drafts.  Planes landed and took off from
Logan, climbing and coming down so low over a water-route flight path
one could almost make out faces at the windows.  A tanker so large and
so long that it seemed not to be moving at all was pointed toward the
open sea.  Only by tracking the tanker's central superstructure's
position relative to a building on a harbor island could she tell any
headway was being made.

"... and child support," Ron was saying, "will be in effect for a few
months more since the child in question will soon turn eighteen,
although should she remain in school, the period will be extended."

"She's school mad, that one," Ginger spoke up.

"And there needn't be a custody question," Ron concluded.  "At least, I
should hope not," he warned.

"My good friend Bonnie in Kansas who was married to an utter fiend got
the house in town and the time-share in Telluride, the stock portfolio,
a clothing allowance, and alimony and a restraining order," Ginger
roused herself to inform him.

"Perhaps there was a prenuptial agreement in that case," Ron
suggested.

"Not in our day, there wasn't.  We didn't know what they were, we were
so naive," Ginger remembered.

"And is there a time-share in Telluride among your assets?  "

"No, not actually."

"Then we needn't concern ourselves ..."

"Oh, needn't we?  " Ginger asked, with acid on her tongue.

SINCE HIS ARRIVAL, since his begrudged yet strangely unopposed and
perhaps even more weird, his scarcely acknowledged admittance to the
house, Andy had embarked upon a conscientious campaign of
ingratiation.

He paid particular attention to Mrs.  Lowe, whom he had spotted from
the first as a likely source to cultivate-a middle-aged, middleclass
woman burdened with a distracted husband and truculent children, and
stranded high and dry in the under equipped kitchen of an aunt by
marriage as a bleak Northeastern winter lowered beyond every smudged
and draft-flowing window where dispirited curtains sullenly flipped.
Becky's loneliness, her thwarted sociability, and her natural niceness
as well wanted an outlet and, Andy figured, he and Mrs.  Lowe could
only be of assistance to one another in the months to come.

He had shifted unpacked boxes for Becky up in her overstuffed attic
without questioning why the shifting had been necessary.  He had helped
Becky find her madeleine pans, lost at the bottom of the last box he
looked in.  He had assisted, holding apart the flaps of a carton, when
Becky decided to put away Alden and the boys' summer seersucker suits.
When she needed to lay her hands on her annotated Schubert
Schwanengesang for Women's Chorus, Andy had slapped through bundled
stacks of music as Becky told him how, when she was singing at her
best, her voice took on an amethyst-colored presence that enveloped her
listeners and herself.  Andy, crouched beside a carton, thought, How
much these cartons contain.

He routinely carried Becky's grocery bags in from the back of the
station wagon.  He had asked if he might track how often she had to
replace laundry detergent, mayonnaise, grape jelly, mustard.  He
calculated the ratio of fresh to prepared food that Becky brought home,
and they discussed how to categorize fresh-frozen vegetables.  They
counted as prepared food, Becky thought, for she bought frozen broccoli
spears for their convenience.  But Andy maintained that nutritionally,
fresh and fresh-frozen must be almost the same and Becky had conceded
the point for, of course, she hoped the statistical balance would tip
in favor of freshness even though none of this was a contest, Andy had
assured her.

After the satisfactory conclusion of his session with Lily-at the end
she had offered him a peppermint from a domed dish on the mantelpiece
and he had taken three (he had had to, they were fused)-Andy had
listened for the sound of the Buick nosing up the driveway as Becky
returned from choral practice and a run of errands.  He met her by the
barn and carried in her grocery bag, dry cleaning, library books, and
the six empty beer cans she had noticed tossed out around the base of
the mailbox for which she hoped her boys were not responsible.  She
didn't think the boys would drink Miller Lite by their druthers but she
planned to set the cans conspicuously upon the lid of the aluminum
recycling bin in the pantry and keep a weather eye out for any
unnatural reactions, for, say, a striking avowal (though never an act)
endorsing some universal and uncontroversial virtue, pronounced in the
vicinity of the reproachful cans.

"I bought a gallon of two percent milk, bread, hamburger, and Granny
Smith apples for two pies, one pie really isn't enough for all of us,"
Becky reported as she shed her coat and put on the kettle.  "I have a
Molly Keane from the library, I like her, plus How to Build Your Own
Stone House Using the Easy Slipform Method which Alden requested, why I
can't imagine.  And the cleaners couldn't get the pine pitch from the
front of Alden's jacket and his best tweed pants.  I wish he'd pay more
attention when he's out fooling with trees, he's ruined more good
clothes.  Oh, I forgot to put away the ironing board!  You know, my
cold suddenly felt better at the library, I suppose because my mind was
better occupied, but I was croaking at Chorus.  Has anyone called?  Did
you hear about the Cash Call this morning?  The more I've thought about
that, the more I'm inclined to agree that Alden really ought to have
asked which Becky did they want?  Oh, I'm sorry Andy, did you have a
question?  "

"Do you mind if I weigh all the grocery bags before you unpack them
from here on?  I've decided to document the accumulated tonnage of the
average family's haul home from the supermarket," Andy said.

"Of course," Becky said.  "Look, there's Ginger's scale right next to
the refrigerator.  It's digital and accurate.  It's driving her crazy
because she can't shade where an arrow is pointing."  Becky considered.
"But will that be useful to know, the accumulated weight of our
groceries?  "

"Oh yes," said Andy.  "I need to know for my own records and then there
may be other applications, for instance, as collateral data in a
kinesiological study of the lifelong expenditure of muscular effort by
the average American woman.  Ben Gay might like to know."

"Huh," said Becky.  "But are we an average family?"  she asked, in
hope, it seemed.

"It's this sort of inquiry that establishes a norm," Andy said.

"Can norms be a norm?  Shouldn't they be the norm?  " Becky asked.

" The norm is more and more becoming a-normal," Andy said.

"Oh dear," Becky said.  "Still, hamburger, apple pie, Wonder Bread,
milk," she repeated, reassured as Andy lowered the bag of groceries to
the scale.

"Eight pounds," Andy said.

"Glover weighed eight pounds when he was born," Becky remembered.

"Ah," said Andy as he wrote in his notebook, Mlly Kn, Stn Hs Sip Fm? Pn
Ptch, Csh Cll.

"And your William sent roses," Becky said.  She piled apples in a
wooden bowl, the prettiest, least marked, placed on top.

"What?  William?  Roses?  " Andy asked, setting down his pen.

"When Glover was born, William sent red roses, such masses of them, I'd
never seen so many outside of the Kentucky Derby," Becky said.  She
opened and closed cupboard doors and she began to consolidate the
contents of several nearly empty cereal boxes into one-Rice Chex,
Cheerios, and Raisin Bran poured into the Cap'n Crunch box to trick
Little Becky into eating them because there was a strict rule, no one
could un pour cereal no matter what slid into one's bowl.

"William always sent me savings bonds for my boyhood birthdays and
Mother still receives baskets of crumpets and strawberry jam from some
outfit in the Midwest.  I think he placed a standing order twenty years
ago."

"So thoughtful," Becky sighed.

Andy didn't agree.  The standing order absolved William of all further
thought, but he played the William card carefully around Becky.

"Yes, William's all right," Andy said.

"If only he'd settle down," Becky said, as she had said before, and
Andy replied, as he had replied before, "Mother thinks he's carrying a
torch."  He used his mother's archaic term for what must be a rather
old flame by now.

"Oh dear, isn't that a shame," Becky said as she always said in what
had become a ritual exchange with Andy, when she invoked William and
alluded to his mysterious romantic past and concluded on this
comfortable note of regret.  Andy privately theorized Becky had played
some peripheral part in the long-ago drama.  Perhaps she had lent
William's true love an important pair of pearl earrings on the evening
a declaration was made.  Andy could picture Becky being generous with
her jewelry and happy to help.

Becky handed Andy the register tape (he collected them) which was
grisly with streaks of blood although Becky referred to the smears as
hamburger juice.  Andy made a note of that usage as well for his Hill
lexicon.

He was compiling a word list in which such niceties of idiom figured.

He asked Becky why she was disinclined to speak the word blood and to
acknowledge that butchered and processed livestock continued to bleed
into the polystyrene and plastic wrap of its commercial packaging
material.

"Oh my," said Becky.  "I don't know.  Why am I reluctant to say the
word?  "

Which was not for Andy to say in his strictly adhered-to role of
observer and recorder, and he wandered back to his room to order his
notes.  Becky remained in the kitchen to roll out pie crusts and to
think her own thoughts about unstanchable wounds ceaselessly seeping
and weeping.

LAST-PERIOD CLASSES had been canceled and the school population
trampled into the field house and swarmed the pull-out bleachers,
rumbling and speculating on the reason for the unscheduled assembly.
But it was too late in the afternoon of the dying school day for the
airing and exercising of thought, and the student body shrugged and
slumped as one large resistless organism.  The heat was tropical under
the bright, switched-on lights, the atmosphere was thick with paste wax
and expended efforts, and everyone knew it was about to rain boredom in
metal buckets.

Brooks and Rollins peeled off their MegaDeath and Slayer (respectively)
sweatshirts down to their Iron Maiden and Question Authority T-shirts.
They had chased their great desire to sit on the top row of the
bleachers up to the top row and now they rocked and swayed the tiered
benches from high above.  They heaved their backs against the cement
block wall and kicked at the bleacher seats as, below them, clambering
students stumbled and lurched with every shudder of the apparatus.

Little Becky was bounced off her feet as the bleachers pitched, and she
sat abruptly in the front row.  She was jabbed in the lower back by the
sharp and careless knees belonging to a popular Senior girl who drove
her own car, so Little Becky couldn't say anything to her.  But || what
if, Little Becky thought, what if she had won the $10,000 that |;
morning.  She could have bought her own red Ford Mustang, the very J
same car and color as Missy DeStefano's which she would park in the |
student lot right next to Missy's own and Missy would see how much ?|
they had in common, a red Mustang with an i BRAKE FOR UNICORNS If
bumper sticker.  If only she had won $10,000.  If only her father had
V'.f asked, which Becky?  If only she could drive.  |

Betsy appeared in front of Little Becky as a blur of blond hair and :|
teal mohair and the scent of the Lily of the Valley powder she kept f
on the bathroom shelf and which Little Becky routinely sneaked after J
one of her shallow and cool and hurried-along-by-a-thump-on-thef
bathroom-door baths.  Little Becky sniffed.  Lily of the Valley smelled
;;; different on Betsy which was just as well.  Otherwise, Betsy would
suspect.  ,|

"Is anyone sitting next to you?"  Betsy asked, when it was perfectly jl
;| obvious that people would balance on hot stove tops rather than sit
| % beside Little Becky.  Taking no answer for a no, Betsy gracefully
settled | '{ beside her cousin and arranged her dainty effects.  Her
textbooks were | i covered in Gordon Eraser wrapping-paper patterns and
her pencil case | } was a needlepoint sheath covered with a scene
inspired by the Bayeux I 'i tapestry which, Betsy had to explain, she
had designed and worked her] self when the local girls asked her where
she had bought her pencil case <

and which, somehow, did not seem to be the right answer.  But where can
I buy one?  the local girls still wanted to know.

Little Becky could only gloom at Betsy.  Then she shrugged and began to
paint her fingernails blue with her nylon tip pen.  Her pen skidded and
she winced extravagantly as Missy, gesturing energetically to friends,
again bore her pointy knees into Little Becky's back.  Betsy,
observing, casually dropped her shoulder bag onto Missy's foot.

"Oh.  God.  So sorry, Betsy," Missy said.

"That's okay," Betsy said.  "Do you know my cousin Becky?"  She dropped
the little, which in Betsy's opinion only seemed to call attention to
how not little Little Becky was.

Little Becky swiveled round with a terrible grin stretched across her
hectic face.

"Really?  She's your cousin, Betsy?  You're, like, related?  Really?"
Missy asked, prepared to ally with Betsy against such an unfortunate
connection.  Missy's pert features creased into a comp licit smile.

But Betsy informed Missy, "Becky's from New York City, you know.  She's
lived there all her life," and even Little Becky appreciated that this
arresting information stumped the oh-so-certain Missy, for what if,
what if Little Becky were to prove to be secretly, subtly cool in some
utterly avant garde and unsuspected New York City way which would only
become known in stuck-in-a-rut Towne months after the trend had fallen
fatally dead and over everywhere else and Missy, flashing and enjoying
her shiny new nail transfers (say) in all pathetic innocence unaware,
turned out to be the tragically incorrect one?

" New York?  So, do you know any Ramones then?  " Missy asked Little

Becky warily.

"Yes, she does," Betsy answered before Little Becky could blunder in.
"They all worked out at the same fashionable health club," Betsy
smoothly invented as Little Becky stared at her paragon cousin whom she
was always, always being told to be more like and she filed away the
fascinating fact that Betsy was a fluent and spontaneous and big liar,
though no one would believe her if she said so about Betsy.

"Really?  " asked Missy.  "Really.  So they exercise.  You exercise?  "
she questioned Little Becky.  "But what are they really like?  Come on,
you can tell me."  She switched her sharp knees sideways as a
gesture.

"Nice?"  Little Becky ventured.  "Really nice?"  she added, as Betsy
lifted fair eyebrows to express, Good answer.

"Yes, I could see they might be nice," Missy said.  "Like
underneath."

"Like, I mean, so way nice," Little Becky expanded, fain to prolong
such an interesting conversation with such an estimable individual from
the Senior class.

"Uh huh," Missy said then.

Glover, late, last, swung into the field house.  He'd been routed from
the third-floor custodians' closet where there was a collapsing
armchair and an ashtray.  His long arms were slung over the shoulders
of two sophomore girls who notably dogged him and whom he appeared to
be using now as a set of crutches, for his reconstituted riding boots,
pointed as a pair of peg legs, were killing him.  His long, lax hands
dropped slackly, brushing over the tops of their breasts which the
girls permitted by pretending not to know where his hands lay and his
fingers felt until, as if suddenly cured, Glover threw them off (the
girls scuttled to the bleachers) and he rambled over the field house
floor grinding his boot heels into the Towne Fightin' Titan logo
stenciled on the center line of the basketball court-a highly suspect
depiction, Glover happened to think, of an overdeveloped giant guy
wrapped in a loincloth grasping a puny opponent around his scrawny
waist.  Glover traversed the field house, his back turned to the
bleachers, and he came to rest on the top of a stack of tumbling mats,
reclining there like a potentate, propped on an elbow.  He waved
generally-all eyes had followed his progress.  Benevolently, he
indicated, Very well, I'm here, let's begin.  Missy sighed.  Little
Becky felt breath on the back of her neck.

And then the theme music from that old-timey space-voyage,
homicidal-computer, vast floating cosmic-embryo movie everyone's
parents thought was so great spouted over the PA.  system.  The student
body tensed, guarded and alert.  The program was going to be
Inspirational.

Damn.  They were going to be exhorted to get high on life instead of
drugs and alcohol and video games.  They were going to be given
sunflower seeds to plant in barren corners of the earth.  They were
going to be assigned old people.

A banner, unfurled by the release of a rope from the beam high above
the climbing ropes, was read with difficulty.  As-yet-wet lettering
(this was a very suddenly called assembly) had imprinted itself like
batik during the furling.  "THE DEFEAT OF COMMUNISM THE TRIUMPH

OF THE WEST A CELEBRATION OF U.S."  was made out eventually, but no one
knew quite what to make of the assertion.  The school waited for a
second banner to fall, one more fair mindedly pointing out Defeated
Communism's view of the matter.  Perhaps they were going to be assigned
Russians to make it all up to, somehow.

Ginevra Platt-Willey, the school actress, effected a quiet entrance
from a side door.  She wore a grey sweater that hung down to her knees,
a grey skirt that drooped to her ankles, and a grey scarf knotted
behind her head.  Nevertheless, the outfit worked.  Missy tapped
Betsy's arm and they conferred.  Betsy said the Look would have been
all off had Ginevra tied the scarf under her chin.  Missy said Ginevra
was wearing a Vassarette body shaper.  She 'd seen it hanging in her
locker and who did Ginevra think she was fooling?  Betsy said Vogue
said grey was the new black this winter.  Missy said she could wear
grey if she wore something pink between the grey and her face but she
generously allowed that Betsy could carry off grey next to her face
because Betsy herself was pink.  So pink, Missy had to say.

Ginevra, locating herself in the vicinity of the Titan and his victim,
indicated through evocative miming that she was standing in a line and
had been standing in a line and would continue to stand in a line to
obtain, after an eternity of standing in line, a shriveled potato.
During that eternity, as Ginevra frowned at her sluggish Soviet
wrisrwatch and tapped her shabbily shod foot on the broken pavement and
seized and berated a queue-jumper, Brooks and Rollins became restive.
They understood all of this had something to do with Russians whom, of
course, they conventionally disliked, and long-nurtured instincts
caused them to mutter automatic gunfire noises back and forth which
rapidly escalated into a carpet-bombing run above the Kremlin.  Dr.
James, the assistant principal, clambered up three steps of the trembly
bleachers and hissed at them to report to his office at once.

"Who?  Him?"

"No.  You."

"Huh?"

"You."

"Us?"

Brooks and Rollins disruptively descended, maintaining an air of
insouciance which would have been admired were they, indeed, downed
American pilots appearing in gritty documentary footage of the show
trial and they were quietly cheered because Dr.  James was very much
disliked.  He coached the Math-A-Letes and encouraged known
favorites.

Ginevra, jealous of her audience, won back the house by singing a
traditional folk tune softly to herself in a lost and dreamy voice as
she walked along carrying her precious potato now, down Old World
streets.  She passed over a graceful arched bridge and turned down a
grand avenue which, after a long mile, debouched into a blighted
hinterland of People's Housing and overheating nuclear power plants.
She climbed to her apartment on the twenty-ninth floor of a
disintegrating high-rise with laundry flapping from every condemned
balcony.  She opened her stiff, stuck door with a dungeon key and after
throwing a shabby shoe at a scampering rat, she set the potato to boil
in a tin cup held over a red cellophane flame.  She gazed into the cup,
so intent upon her one-potato dinner to come that everyone leaned
forward intrigued, willing the water to boil.  Ginevra, or her Russian
character, must know some really good way to fix a potato.

Then, in staging borrowed from the cemetery scene in Our Town (which
was produced in quadrennial rotation with The Sound of Music, The
Crucible, and Pippin) the rest of the Drama Club assembled bearing
highly desirable examples of portable electronic items-a small
television, a CD player, speakers, a cell phone, a food processor. They
carried, as well, in-line skates, a leather coat, a motorcycle helmet,
a sixpack of Classic Coke.  They sat on folding chairs and pronounced
their lines in carrying voices, painting a pastiche of highlights from
American history and culture-the Pilgrims, Cowboys, the Moon Landing*
no one was listening.  They were all watching Ginevra as she heard !
snatches of the faraway voices and their long-ago stories reaching her
] through the thin apartment walls, above the tinny hubbub of stalled ;
Moscow traffic, across the European continent, over the cold, wide ;
ocean.  She was intrigued yet not convinced, attracted yet uncertain of
the tale being told her.  At last, bravely choosing, she set down her
tin cup with a relinquishing motion and Harold Post, wearing his
Eagle

Scout uniform, rose and took Ginevra gently by the hand and led her to
the seated panel of American high consumers, and in a solemn ceremony,
she was presented with a toaster oven and a frozen Tostino pizza,
although everyone was still thinking about her potato.  Dylan Grant was
so overcome by the moment that he handed Ginevra the portable CD player
he was holding, which was too much for Ginevra to carry so she had to
set it down upon the floor.

Betsy didn't think the toaster oven was a very practical gift because
they had different electricity in foreign countries which would cause
the toaster oven to explode, an indication that perhaps we were still
at odds with the Russians in many unacknowledged and unanticipated
areas.  Nor was Betsy certain that it might not be better to be
sincerely thrilled with just a potato than to enter into all the
complications of creating and operating a state-of-the-art sound system
because you were never through replacing parts made obsolete by the
next technological breakthrough.  Otherwise, you began to feel
deprived.  And could you even buy CDs in the Soviet Union?  What if the
poor Russian girl only possessed one CD which she was forced to play
over and over again?  And Betsy had heard Soviet pop music on a PBS
special which had been very terrible music, worse even than the French
version, which was sinking pretty low.

Little Becky only knew that it wasn't fair that even Communist girls
were going to be happier than she was and get more stuff and have more
fun and friends and everything else.  She could not bring herself to
clap for Ginevra and company as they took their bows and the school
stomped and hooted at them and Ginevra and company stomped and hooted
right back.

Dr.  James waded into their midst and thanked everyone for their fine
efforts and he was about to bid the assemblage to rise and sing Our
National Anthem while Visual Arts recorded the heart-filling moment on
their camcorder, which he planned to present as irrefutable evidence of
what a tight ship he was running the next time the School Committee
started making noises about declining SAT.  scores.  But Glover had had
enough.  He slithered from his high pile of tumbling mats and he tipped
on his sharp-toed boots across the field house floor, nodding at Dr.
James in passing, signaling to all with negligent wave of his hand,
Dismissed.

"Listen, tell Ma I'm going to be late tonight, okay?"  Glover stood
over Little Becky, rising on his stalk-like dusty black clad legs.  He
smelled, in a heated way, of pepper and cinnamon.

"Why?  " Little Becky asked.  "Why are you going to be late?  "

"None of your business why.  Just tell her, late, okay?  "

" Well, Ma'll ask me why."

"Is he her brother?"  Missy tapped Betsy on the arm and asked.  "Is he
your brother?"  she asked Little Becky.  "He doesn't look like your
brother.  Are you adopted?  I think you may be adopted, they don't
always tell you.  So he's your brother.  I'll drive you home and you
can show me where you live and you can tell me about your brother."

"so HOW LARGE is a cord of wood, technically?  I suppose I ought to
know," Alden asked Gee.

The big trees had come tearing and toppling down.  They lay at broken
angles.  Gee un nimbly walked their lengths, kicking at the rubbish of
ancient squirrels' nests, whacking at jutting branches with a sturdy
ax.  Alden, standing amidst the woodsy litter rubbing gummy pitch into
his blackening fingertips, experienced a twinge of regret.  He knelt
and counted the rings of the round est fallen trunk and he came up with
seventy-five years which was not nearly as great an age as he had
imagined.

This tree had not been standing since the Revolution.  It was not even
a contemporary of Lincoln-rather, of Wilson.  Men were already driving
cars and flying planes and talking on the telephone and playing ragtime
on the parlor piano by the time the seed of this tree had split and
sprouted and shouldered its way up in the woods.  Alden supposed this
tree should consider itself fortunate that it had survived as long as
it had the exigencies of the twentieth century and, indeed, all of the
trees seemed not un content to lay themselves down at long last,
stretching thirty feet or more across the Earth, measuring themselves
against their own shadows.

Well, this must lead to philosophical considerations, this spending the
day out-of-doors in the bracing air revising the landscape because some
up-and-coming couple had been inconvenienced by the tap of a twig
against their roof, Alden decided, and he resolved to keep his thoughts
to himself.  Otherwise, people would learn to cross the road when they
spotted him approaching with a lively step and a glitter in his eye,
denoting the formulation of still another wizard concept culled from
yet another bout of contemplating the obvious.

"A cord of wood.  How big is it?"  he again asked Gee.  Gee had a good
ear and a bad ear and he wore a wax plug in his good ear to save his
hearing for Bible Church on Sunday and nightly reruns of Sanford and
Son.

"Hey?  They'll be four by four by eight to fix a cord," Gee said.

"In feet?  Really?  That much?"  Alden asked.  He had pictured
something that could be tied with twine and toted away like a weekend
brunch order for twelve from Dean and DeLuca's.

"Gotta get this pile of wood all busted up," Gee reminded him as Alden
just stood there tugging at a loosening cuff button.

They passed the next several hours slicing the trunks into movable
parts which they stacked by the side of the road but they were left
with a sprawling mess of branches and boughs strewn across the lawn.
Alden didn't bother to hope that Glen Fairweather would be willing to
overlook this by-product of the day's activity.  Perhaps he and Gee
could drag the detritus deeper into the woods and fling it naturalistic
ally about.  Whatever did one do under the circumstances?  Surely he
was not the first to experience this problem.

For in his previous life, Alden had delegated the clearing up of these
incidental details.  Research filled in the blanks, legal looked at the
small print, marketing got the word out, accounting cut the checks.
Alden had presided.  Now, he sat upon a stump (he was sure he'd been
right about the buttermilk-fungus stump-eradication method) and as he
unwrapped a Mars bar saved from lunch he contemplated the view from his
new rung on the food chain.  He was, he declared to himself, the sort
of visionary who had overlooked the forest for the trees, apparently.
He uttered, Shoot, dismally and realized he'd never been so tired.  How
did workingmen get up every morning after the day before and pull
themselves through their paces all over again?  Alden hoped he would
never drive past another highway construction crew and remark how many
of the men were just leaning on their shovels.

Gee, plucking the plug from his better ear, eased himself down onto
another stump and smoked a menthol cigarette and mentioned, "The
chipper should be here any time.

" Ya wanted one, didn't ya?  " Gee asked as Alden puzzled at him.

"To clear up this here brush and all that," Gee said.  "A wood chipper
The guys from Tiptop Tree Service are in the area today and they said
they'd stop by on the way home.  Half hour, it'll take them, tops.  I
told them you were good for fifty bucks.  Don't let them gyp you for
more.  It's their boss's rig and they'll sell the mulch on the side.
Probably turn around and sell it to these people."

"Great," Alden said.  "Great.  Thank you, Gee."

Later, near dark, Gee's nephew Spaz came by with his Loadstar to cart
away the logs.  Gee had requested his pay in wood, which he claimed to
trust more than money.

"Money don't come by the truckload," as Spaz observed, although Alden
could remember the days when it had, when some of the guys at First
Manhattan had worked out how large a heap a billion dollars in
one-hundred-dollar bills would make.  (They'd been attempting to
recapture a sense of just how much a billion dollars was-they'd become
too cavalier about risking immense sums, a personnel consultant had
warned them, hence the exercise.)

"This guy pay ya?"  Spaz asked, pointing his long, local nose at the
Fairweathers' front door.

"Well, he was supposed to up front, but he decided he needs an itemized
bill first," Alden confessed.

Spaz and Gee communicated with a look, and Gee spat thoughtfully onto a
pile of sawdust and massaged a mass with his boot toe into a kind of
puck which he kicked back into dust.

"That's why come they all have so much money at this end of town.
Seldom known to part with any," Gee said.

"Not to the likes of us anyways," Spaz muttered.

RON HAD NOT SUGGESTED meeting for a friendly drink at the Ritz Carlton
after their chat as Ginger had rather counted on, Ron turning relaxed
and confidential and coming round to her side.  She knew there was
always the real story behind the official story and she refused to be
told she couldn't procure an advantageous divorce settlement if only
she knew the secret handshake or the magic words.  But it struck her
that lawyers would look out for one another and she was beginning to
despair of finding anyone who would take on Louis unless she hired
herself a feminist attorney who would possess a very different set of
loyalties.  But then, a feminist attorney might not support Ginger's
desire to leave the marriage with as many of the family assets as she
could carry away in an interstate moving van.

And then she considered that child, that callow associate with
curiously yellow fingernails (as if he 'd been carving pumpkins) whom
Ron had attempted to fob off on her, pleading pressures of time and his
own lack of knowledge on the subject, to handle her divorce.  Quaking
in his loafers when Ron called him into his corner office-anticipating
a reprimand?  expecting to receive the heave-ho?-his was not a demeanor
to inspire confidence, that of this young Simon (his name was) who
found himself in the unhappy position of having to be happy to take
what was given him.

Unless-Ginger was by now hurriedly walking down State Street in her
furry coat, embracing her day's shopping, caught up and carried along
by the grey crush of homeward-headed office workers among whom she knew
herself to be a vivid and separate creature, a woman who, within the
year, would be relishing that entirely new life she had just thought of
and having thought of had as good as achieved-unless Simon, who had,
she could not help noticing, regarded her admiringly and flushed when
she turned the full wattage of her best smile on him just on the off
chance she would require his assistance-unless Simon came to take a
special, zealous interest in her case and made up with diligence what
he lacked in spark as he labored on her behalf.  But it further
occurred to Ginger that whenever she wished to cite her personal legal
authority she would have to preface her remarks with the phrase, "Simon
says," and she would be obliged to wait for the inevitable smile to
smooth from a face before she could proceed to make her point.

No, she'd have to keep looking, but truly, how hard could it be to
break away from Louis?  She refused to be discouraged, for freedom
frolicked in the very air today of all days.  The oppressed peoples of
the planet were crawling out from under the dark and heavy sways of
every startled brute and tyrant.  Ginger looked to the sky as if
searching for an answer generally spelled out for all to understand.

And then Goody's car miraculously pulled up to the curb beside her.
"Perfect timing!"  she exclaimed as she slid in beside him, filling the
enclosed space with fur and crackling paper bags spilling tissue
wrappings and scents.  Goody didn't attempt to tell her he'd been
circling the area for the past forty-five minutes, uselessly arguing
with himself all the while.  Yet, he had to concede, after completing
three (in forty-five minutes) snarled tight circuits, caught in the
near-solid blockage of traffic which bumped along like platelets moving
through a vein in magnified film footage of a heart attack under way-he
had spied Ginger suddenly standing out among the sidewalk crowd, the
taller, more attractive, more glidingly moving woman whom he sought
among all the rest, and his annoyance had vanished.  Success, he had
thought.  At last, he spoke aloud, leaning forward and darting toward
the curb.

ANDY TURNED TO A PAGE of his Hill lexicon.  Vase, he wrote, varieties
of.... Mud (mud, mud), he entered.  Hamburger juice, he noted.  He
returned the notebook to its place in a stack of other bound and
labeled volumes and he slid William's recent letter from beneath his
blotter pad.  He thought it might help to order his thoughts and
impressions to date as he constructed a likely account of his progress
for William's particular consumption.  For any approach to William
worked a tonic effect on Andy, and now that he had become William's
protege (after all, William sponsored him here) Andy must undertake to
rise even higher in an estimation he had, frankly, not been conscious
was being made.  Heretofore, if Andy had stood unaware as a
candidate-his previous efforts, such as they were, had only been
pitched to cause his difficult Uncle William not to dislike him
excessively-now that he had gotten the job (so to speak) he was
constrained to provide William with more of the same.  Whatever that
same had been.

Dear Uncle William [Andy wrote], Here I am, in situ, and grateful for
your advice to "head for the Hills" where, to answer the first of
several questions you put to me in your last letter let me assure you

am taking pains not to "overburden the family with my hovering
presence."

I observe the field-work techniques sanctioned by my discipline, i.e."
I do not eat with the family.  I sit in the kitchen on a high stool
topped with a small round of braided rug and eat cheese and granola and
fruit and observe the family at table in the dining room through the
open serving hatch.  I have concluded that food does not represent love
to the Hills; food affords them an opportunity to bite and chew
consideringly while thinking up a sharp comeback to a previous pointed
remark.  I have never come across this phenomenon in the literature.
This may be significant.

To answer your next question, Mr.  and Mrs.  Lowe seem to be adjusting
to their new circumstances, although their relationship, their "famous
marriage" as you term it, is not without strain as is to be expected
during a transitional time.  Mrs.  Lowe seems to focus on the damage
done to Mr.  Lowe's expensive sportswear in the pursuit of his bucolic
schemes, his stained jackets, torn shirts, ruined shoes.  How swiftly
even the most civilized among us (and Mrs.  Lowe is very most
civilized) revert to taking out their unacknowledged and dangerous
impulses on an effigy as it were.

But events are far more stirring in your part of the globe.  Such a
triumph for you.  We, that is, the family and I shall watch events
unfold tonight across the television screen as has swiftly become the
custom in this linked and shrinkening world, to cluster round the
cathode-ray tube.  But this will give me an opportunity to assess
attitudes-political, social, historical-for I believe that in some
cases the family talk a wider view than they vote.  Their votes are, I
daresay, cast in stone though not stones, their Revolution having
happened so long ago although it is still remembered hereabouts with
great satisfaction and often with the proprietary We.

THIS WAS BETSY'S NIGHT to wash the supper dishes.  Lily didn't believe
in automatic dishwashers.  She had noticed how they left mysterious
encrustations between the tines of her dishwasher-owning friends'
forks, although Ginger argued those were just the pioneer models such
as her circle of biddies would possess, heaving and regurgitating
antiques.

Still, Lily could not be persuaded to invest in a Silent-Flo Dishmaster
System with an onboard computer that detected fork encrustations and
aimed powerful expunging water jets at them.  Ginger had collected the
literature from Towne Line Appliances and left the brochure and a
favorable rating index from Consumer Reports in Lily's knitting bag to
no avail.

Betsy didn't mind washing the dishes.  At least she knew they would be
properly soaped and rinsed when it was her turn which she couldn't be
sure of on Brooks's and Rollins's attempts, or with her mother's
resented efforts, and Little Becky's concept of a clean plate left much
to be desired.  And they all replaced the salad bowls on the cupboard
shelf where the dessert saucers were supposed to be and seldom-used
implements like the melon bailer and the nutmeg grater would be very
illogically stowed underneath the sink or in the clean apron drawer,
tucked between clean aprons as if someone had panicked over them. Uncle
Harvey was a surprisingly good dishwasher.  Every surface had to pass
his squeaky thumb test but the bathwater tended to flow rather tepid
after his stints for he emptied and refilled the sink separately for
glasses, cutlery, plates, and pots and pans, in that order.  He frothed
Ivory Soap suds with an old hand-turned eggbeater (Lily's well water
was very hard) as he sang songs from Oklahoma and South Pacific and Pal
Joey and he encouraged family participation as he played the eggbeater,
faster, slower, higher, lower, among the soapsuds.  It sounded like a
very hoarse ukelele.  Harvey's dishwashing duties ran on well into the
evening snack runs and he washed the snack dishes as well if they were
slipped onto the sideboard to mingle with the yet to be dealt with
supper dishes, although he noticed when a tumbler, a cocoa mug, a cake
knife, appeared out of order and was puzzled.

Tonight, Andy lingered in the kitchen with Betsy.  He was musing upon
the spoons rising from the spoon jar set upon the laden lazy Susan.
The variety, yet the essential sameness of the spoons, reminded him of
all the thin and tapering and luminous women he had known or wished to
have known, yes, just like those smooth and oval faces in which he had
sometimes seen his own soul reflected and answered back, or so he
always thought at the time.

He sat upon his high stool beside the serving hatch consuming Con cord
grapes, slicing them in half with his sharp front teeth and flicking
out the seeds with his index finger onto the lid of a pot of yogurt he
had just finished.  He blinked away from his contemplation of the
lovely spoon maidens (that reverie was getting him nowhere) and he
began to read aloud from Little Becky's new cork notice board crookedly
slung from a hook specially hammered into the wall beside the
telephone.  She had worked on this project all afternoon in response to
the morning's Cash Call disaster.  The board was festooned with
thumbtacked 3X5 cards laboriously printed on-For Thursday, Nov.  9,
1989, The Magic Word on MROC is THRILLER.  The Mystery Amount in the
QHIT Cash Jar is $86.  NOTICE TO EVERYBODY PLEASE!!!  Whenever you
answer the phone between 2, and 6 in the afternoon always say

BARRY B. PLAYS THE HITS FOR ME, FROM COAST TO

COAST I LOVE HIM MOST.  This is for to win a trip to DISNEY WORLD

And remember, remember, remember, always ask which Becky they want.
Remember!!!

Andy said, "I can't quite see Ms.  Hill answering the telephone with
Barry B. plays the hits for me."

Betsy smiled.  Andy watched her expression caught in the night-filled
window above the sink, her expression softened and saddened by a haze
of steam.  She had tucked her braid out of the way down the back of her
sweater, the teal tunic she had been wearing all day.  She had been
almost late for supper and had not had time to change.  Babysitting at
the Snowdons' had run on long.  Mr.  Snowdon was staying at his office
even later these days and Mrs.  Snowdon didn't like Betsy to leave
until he came home.  Betsy wondered who she was supposed to be looking
after, who it was at the Snowdon household who could not be left alone
with the sharp steak knives and the harsh cleaning compounds stored
under the kitchen sink.  Mr.  Snowdon had told Betsy he relied on her,
and so far he was the only husband who had not pulled to a stop
alongside the River Road on the late ride back to Aunt Lily's and,
leaning close on a pretext-to recover an envelope from the glove
compartment, to adjust the whistling seal between her window and the
window frame attempted to kiss her by chance, on the off chance she
would not mind.  Mr.  Snowdon had not tried that.  He drove his
expensive car in a straight shot across Towne as Mrs.  Snowdon waited
at home, alone.  But, while the other husbands practiced silence and
sidelong looks in which Betsy, having to do all the work (after all,
she had been hired for the evening) was expected to find the meaning,
Mr.  Snowdon talked to Betsy.  He remembered his long-ago days, a time
he pronounced as his "carefree youth" with Uncle Aldenish articulation.
The presence of Betsy in the front seat seemed to set him off, to spin
him back to that pre-Mrs.  Snowdon past where Betsy was invited to
wander with him, through Williamstown as it had once been, through
certain corners of London which were all changed now and not for the
better.  Very little had not turned for the worse since ... Mr. Snowdon
never said since when.  He didn't really have to.

"Not that Barry B. will ever call," Andy was saying.

"I don't know.  Maybe he will.  She sends in all those postcards,"
Betsy said.  "She has stacks of tropical vacation postcards she must
never have sent to her friends."

Betsy reached down and scoured the bottom of the big frying pan.  Aunt
Becky tended to burn the onions (they'd had hamburgers with onions and
green beans and fruit cup and pie for supper) because she was cutting
back on oil-she'd read an article about cutting back on oil-and she was
always being called away from the stove at critical moments to hunt
down a lost glove or to dictate, meaninglessly, that no one could watch
TV if the boys and Little Becky could not agree on a program.  Andy's
intelligent fox's face floated against the black and steam of the
window glass and as she leaned back and forth scrubbing the seared-on
crust of carbonized onion, Andy's reflection and Betsy's merged and
parted rather like a movie special effect, as if they were dreaming of
one another or one of them was dead or one of them was missing in
action but trying to get a message through.  The plot would determine
the particulars of their apparitions' raison d'etre, Betsy supposed,
although the reason would be a romantic one, of course.  She sifted
more Ajax powder down into the frying pan.  Aunt Lily always bought the
Ajax brand because, she said, she had liked him in the Iliad.  So even
Aunt Lily must have a romantic streak in her somewhere, which rendered
this business of romantic streaks surely quite harmless, Betsy
concluded.

" Like a grape?  " Andy was asking her.

"No thank you.  My hands are sudsy," Betsy said.

"They're quite good.  They're very sweet.  They're just beginning to
ferment in their skins," Andy said.

"Ferment in their skins?  " Betsy asked.

Andy slipped from his high chair and came to her side.  "Here," he
said, holding a grape to her lips.  Betsy's mouth opened to a startled
O and Andy deposited the grape.  So this was the taste Andy experienced
as sweetness.  Betsy, for her part, bit down upon a strong flavor, and
she swallowed an even more bitter after-grit of crushed seeds which
Andy had not removed with an incision of tooth and a flick of thumb. He
had acted impulsively and imperfectly.

"Going to watch the big news on the tube tonight?  " he asked her.

"In a bit," Betsy said.  They had been assigned to watch the Berlin
Wall coming down in Current Events class, except for Ginevra
PlattWilley whose family did not believe in television.  Mr.  Patrick
had said she could monitor local German coverage on her shortwave
radio.  Perhaps,

Mr.  Patrick said, Ginevra would hear what the Germans didn't want the
rest of us to hear, at the prospect of which third-period C.E. had not
felt privileged but oppressed.  Was there going to be a test, not of
the multiple choice and essay variety, but some greater challenge to
their hopes and their futures?

Andy left her, mentioning some notes that needed ordering, and Betsy
decided to let the big frying pan soak although usually she didn't
approve of leaving any dish undone.  Tonight that could not be avoided.
She had to inspect her mother's day-in-Boston-worth of shopping before
Ginger could conceal or alter or destroy the sales slips.  Betsy wanted
to be able to balance the checkbook without tears, disavowals, and
deceit.

She ran, not lightly but noiselessly, up the back stairs and she tapped
on her mother's bedroom door.  There was no response, no too peevish,
no too alert, no too studiedly exhausted answering, Yes?  Betsy put her
ear to the jamb and she detected no interior rustling of paper bags and
tissue, no clink of glass against bottle and of a bottom bureau drawer
opening and closing, nor did she hear any sequence of breaths raggedly
withheld and expelled in shuddering sighs.  Glancing over her shoulder,
Betsy sidled through the smallest possible wedge of opened door.  She
crept over boots, the fur coat, a tumble of shiny clothing and
accessory catalogues, a rucked-up needlepoint rug.  She skirted a
tottery pillar of books with dark covers and long, explanatory titles
and she was careful not to tread on that morning's range of rejected
outfits lying in several color-coordinated heaps just where Ginger had
stepped into and out of them.  Betsy half feared that the outfits,
which all so looked like her mother with the air let out, would rise up
and carry on like an army of her mothers if provoked.

The bed had been hastily made up.  The beautiful shirred pink satin
spread Ginger had discovered in its secret box and which was now marked
with a spilled coffee stain shaped like an eighth continent, had been
flung sideways rather than lengthwise atop the bed, covering a cache of
shopping bags.  Her mother's methods never varied.  Ginger thought if
she made the effort to conceal, seekers should play the game and make
the effort not to find.  But then, her mother lived life on a very
emblematic plane.

Betsy twitched back the bedspread.  The clutter of fine shopping bags
piled upon the mattress was not as formidable as she had feared.  She
winnowed aside scented tissues and extracted sales slips, adding
figures loosely in her head.  Ginger had not spent two hundred dollars,
a very modest total after she had spent (so often literally spent) a
day alone and unhappy in a big city.  Betsy ruffled through the Blue
Guide to France.  She hoped her mother wasn't pinning her hopes on a
big trip to Europe.  Had she gone so far as to purchase an airline
ticket, piling on options as she went-oh, why not the Concorde, well,
why not the George V, yes, why not a suite?  Betsy could just hear her
mother being knowledgeable and expansive in a travel agent's office as
coffee was poured and totted up from a nip-sized bottle of inflight
(already!) brandy.  Betsy had to locate the checkbook.  She spied her
mother's satchel hanging inertly from the closet doorknob and even
though to delve into someone else's handbag was very impolite, she
reached inside and carefully not looking but feeling identified by
touch the simulated-leather folder of the checkbook.  She scanned the
stubs.  No, her mother had not written an additional exorbitant check,
yet.  Betsy pocketed the checkbook and she replaced the bedspread as
negligently as she was able--her neatness genie militated against such
slatternliness.  She resisted a great wish to hang up the poor fur coat
which looked so recently deceased sprawled across the floor,
outstretched arms imploring life to return to its embrace.

Betsy slipped from her mother's room.  She glanced up and down the
hallway.  Downstairs, a discussion and the television were holding and
distracting the family and she was free to act.  Using her pocketknife
(she had planned for and supplied this part of her expedition) she
pried up the screwdriver attachment of the knife and quickly unfastened
a tole-ware plaque (black background, pink Chinese peonies design)
which covered over a decommissioned heating duct opening.  She balanced
the checkbook upon a narrow slice of ledge made by interior wall and
pipe, and she reattached the plaque.  She needed the checkbook to
remain thoroughly lost at least until the latest deposit cleared.
Surely, her mother wouldn't think of searching inside the walls unless
this Berlin situation gave Ginger ideas about seizing and swinging some
emblematic sledgehammer.

ALDEN DECLARED THIS a most shameful business, two of his sons getting
themselves conspicuously expelled from a school assembly celebrating
the defeat of Communism and the evident triumph of the West.  Alden
read, he read aloud from Dr.  James's passionately scrawled note home
of complaint and indictment.  Celebrate appeared more like calibrate as
Alden tried to make out the emotional script but he cottoned to the
gist several paragraphs on as Dr.  James warmed to his theme.  Alden
wondered whether this James fellow possessed the appropriate
temperament to work with exuberant young people year in and year out.

"What does the school want this time?"  Becky asked.  "Have the boys
been suspended?  Do we have to escort them back and fall to our knees
to beg forgiveness?  Shall we have to pay for damages?  What is it this
time?"  She held out her hand and snapped her fingers for the letter.
Startled, Alden relinquished page one.

Brooks and Rollins regarded their mother warily.  She was being
uncommonly impatient with their father while she had yet to turn upon
them to demand to know their version of events although, of late, she
had not allowed them to express more than a token protest of their
outraged innocence before she shook her head in sorrow and retreated to
the attic with a library book and a mug of coffee.  On these several
recent occasions, dinner had been uncharacteristically late.  The
family gathered hopefully in the dining room.  They sat at their unset
places.  Against all evidence they reached for their napkins,
scrabbling at the shiny tabletop.  They listened through the open
serving hatch to pots and pans just beginning to rattle and scrape.
Ginger, who was boldest and hungriest, ran a swift cheese and cracker
raid on the pantry, returning short of breath and clutching provisions
enough to tide them over until Becky, whom no one blamed, could become
organized.

So Brooks and Rollins had withheld the note from school until after
dinner, not wishing to spoil dinner they protested virtuously, as the
square of envelope was lifted from Rollins's back pocket and handed
round across a sweep of crumbs and the fallen-over saltshaker.

"You decided to ruin our after-dinner, then?"  Alden unreasonably asked
as he rolled up his sleeve.  For a heartbeat, the boys asked themselves
if their father was thinking of beating them, not that he ever had but
they were aware they had not, theretofore, sinned against such a moment
of consequence.  This had been their first opportunity, really, for
they had been born into such unremarkable times.

But Alden was only seeking relief from the scratch of his plaid wool
shirt against a long gash laid down along his forearm, the wound
rendered even more vivid by the slash of an iodine paint job.

"What happened, Dad?  " Brooks asked.

"Don't change the subject," Alden said.

"No, Dad, really what happened?"  Brooks asked.

"Dad, really," Rollins echoed.

"A tree fell on your father today," Becky looked up from the letter to
speak, sounding more displeased with Alden than with the tree.

"No.  fell on the tree," Alden said-at the end, in the dark, when he
and Gee and the crew from Tiptop were flying, flinging branches into
the maw of the chipper.  The crew chief had been in a rush.  He had
tango lessons at the Y that evening.

"Stupid tree," said Brooks.

"Stupid," muttered Rollins.

"It's not the tree that's ..."  Becky allowed herself to observe so
far, and no further.

An atmosphere had developed, a cloud of grey and lowering feelings that
followed them as the discussion continued, amidst the rub of chair feet
across carpet and a sharp whiff of snuffed-out candle smoke.  They
rambled from the dining room into the hallway where Alden halted and
rummaged in a drawer of the Governor Winthrop desk for the household
address embosser, an elegant object that left an elegant impression.
He collected writing paper, an ink pen, a bottle of India ink and a
ruler, as well, from the desk's several other drawers and cubicles and
niches.

"Everything is all entirely my fault," Alden conceded wearily as he
carried his utensils into the little parlor, and a not very great
weight was lifted from Brooks's and Rollins's backs.  Their father's
announcement obviously took the heat off them and their mother only
said, "No more sound effects, all right?  Brooks?  Rollins?  All right?
Because no one is interested.  You are very tiresome boys."  They
accepted the rebuke.  Of course they were tiresome.  The wearing down
of authority was the linchpin of their strategy.

Becky sighed and sank down onto a corner of the sofa beside Little
Becky who had hustled into the little parlor to establish the evening's
rights to the sofa's center cushion where the springs were still sound
and did not uncoil disconcertingly underneath one.  She had had a
wretched day.  Bagging the center cushion was the sole bright spot.
Missy DeStefano had suddenly not been able to drive her home from
school as she had offered to, having rapidly hatched the far better
plan of driving Glover himself where he wanted to go, and the pair of
them had driven off together on Glover's unstated errand.  And Little
Becky was pretty sure her mother had just become an alcoholic because
there had been six empty beer cans lined up on top of the aluminum
recycling bin which Little Becky had pitched into the bin so no one
else would guess but then her mother had gone around asking, Who threw
away those cans?"  very vexedly asking-perhaps she'd been desperate to
swallow the dribbly dregs.

Little Becky wrapped herself in the scrap yarn afghan and stuck her
legs out over the big round ottoman, jamming her heels into the plush
top.  The television channel changer was concealed on her person,
pushed up a droopy sweater sleeve, and she was sitting upon a private
Hershey bar which she hoped she would be able to eat secretly if she
draped the afghan over her head.  She could still watch TV (currently a
MASH rerun through the afghan's loose stitches.  Her mother, even
though she had plunked herself down right beside Little Becky, was all
snuffly with her head cold so she couldn't smell chocolate tonight.

Becky shivered and drew an edge of the afghan across her knees as
Little Becky sounded an affronted squeally note of protest and hauled
back at the blanket and re shrouded her head.

Harvey entered bearing an armload of oak logs which he arranged in the
fireplace grate and stuffed in the wood basket and he stoked a fire
quickly and without fuss using the pine cones he had soaked in rubbing
alcohol and kerosene and dried last summer in the barn rafters.  The
glass eyes of ornamental owl andirons glowed a fierce flickering orange
as the wood caught.  Ginger had seen not nearly as nice a pair of
andirons on sale for $375 at Lydia Spofford Antiques, down in the
village.

Oh, that place, Lily had said when informed of this and she refused to
allow Marilyn Rathbone, the proprietress, into the house to give an
opinion on the value of her glimmer-eyed owls.  The woman had
previously exercised mind control over several of Lily's acquaintances,
walking off with a Derby dessert service, a Lowestoft teapot, two
precious samplers, and a mahogany stick barometer after she had invited
herself over on the pretext of a little chat about a question of local
provenance concerning a stoneware jug which may or may not have come
from the shop of a rum importer who had once lived in Towne.  But even
the oldest residents weren't old enough to remember the eighteenth
century however hard they tried at Marilyn's urging.  No, Lily wasn't
about to fall into that trap, while she was off time-traveling through
a lost century and being robbed blind in this one, as she signed
binding legal documents in a trance.

Harvey dealt the fire a last sparky jab with the iron poker and he
pointed a sooty finger at Rollins who knew better than to sit in
Harvey's reclining lounger.  Rollins rolled off and settled next to
Brooks upon the central motif of the Indian rug.  The Kung Fu tape had
come in yesterday's mail and they had passed the previous evening
mastering the Basic Survival Kick.  Their leg muscles, or where they
hoped to have leg muscles someday, felt unsolid and disconnected, they
noticed now.  They sprawled and laughed at something Radar said.  They
laughed automatically, prompted by the laugh track.  Ginger had to step
over the two great outstretched boys.  She dragged a Hudson Bay blanket
behind her, trailing like down crest plumage and she had brought her
new pillow to stuff behind her back after making sure everyone had read
it.  She gazed significantly at the owl andirons and narrowed her eyes
at Harvey who had supported Lily in her assertion that Marilyn Rathbone
was a real Salem witch, and Ginger mistakenly trod upon the back of
Brooks's knee, suffering as she did so the nasty sensation of having a
large, strenuous lizard writhing underfoot.  Ginger yelped.  Brooks
hollered.  Becky told him, "Hush.  No one is interested."

Ginger toppled onto the sofa on the other side of Little Becky.  She
hooked the ottoman with strong toes and drew it toward herself as
Little Becky clamped down her heels and exclaimed, "Hey."

"Oh, all right, we'll share," Ginger allowed ungraciously, billowing
her blanket up to her chin.

Little Becky didn't want to share with Ginger.  Auntie Ginger wasn't a
sharer, she was a hogger.  And it really wasn't fair because Ginger
could sniff out a chocolate stash like she worked for the FBI or
something, for the Chocolate BI.  Oh misery.  Little Becky collapsed.
Her head plunged into her mother's lap.  Jolted, Becky, who had been
trying not to, sneezed and hacked and gargled the phlegm in her throat.
Little Becky sat up and retreated beneath the lofted afghan.  "Ma-ha,"
she objected.

"Cold sufferers are at their most contagious before they're
symptomatic,"

Harvey said, but he held his handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

"Are you taking anything?  " inquired Ginger.

"I thought there was some Contac in the medicine cupboard," Becky
said.

"I took "em," Harvey said.  "Felt stuffly, one day.  Knocked the cold
right out.  Knocked me right out.  Best thing, just go dormant like a
carp under ice when you're feeling low."

"Could you have sinuses?"  Ginger asked.  "Because I suffer so from
sinuses."

"No, this is just a cold," Becky said.  She wasn't about to be lured
into a discussion of comparative ailments.  She never won and tonight
she rather thought she deserved to prevail.

"Because I have some Vitamin B-complex tablets if they'd help although
vita-therapy is preventative and not really curative," Ginger said.

"Oh, thank you, that's all right," Becky said resignedly, reflecting
that Ginger's vitamins wowA/be complex.

"I'll drive down to the Rexall and get you something," Alden spoke up
from the kneehole desk in the corner where he had settled to prepare a
bill, an ironic mockery of a bill, composed, calligraphic, embossed,
for Glen Fairweather's "records."  He had spread out paper, the
embosser, pen, ink, ruler, pocket calculator, and several replacement
Band-Aids for his fingers which were rasped raw along the knuckles by
the rough scrape of bark and which bled as he flexed his joints.  Alden
considered allowing a bit of his life's blood to streak across his
effort, but everyone was being so odd about blood these days so he
wrapped his handkerchief around his hand.

"No, you just finish what you're doing," Becky ordered Alden.

Ginger did not bother to conceal her grin.  She glanced between Alden
and Becky, taking her own experienced measure of the two of them.  She
observed their body language, of which she was a keen interpreter.

Alden twisted round in his chair, his shoulders hunched against further
suggestions.  Becky lifted mending from a basket, a white cotton
undershirt fraying beneath the arm.  Her needle struck and stabbed as
she rewove the fabric.

"Oh, are we all watching MASH?"  Ginger asked.  She meant she did not
wish to watch MASH.  "Lily!"  Ginger greeted her.  "Doyou want to
watch

MASH?"

Lily was making her way across the lolling boys whom she viewed through
an awkward spot in her bifocal lenses.  They were bifurcated boys over
whom she stepped with exaggerated care, nevertheless, her shoe came
down upon Brooks's hand.  He hollered.  Becky said, "I've told you and
I've told you to hush."

"Ought to rise for your old Aunt," Harvey said, straightening his
recliner and lowering the foot rest to allow Lily clear passage.  He
operated his chair skillfully, punching the correct sequence of
cloth-covered buttons concealed in an arm.

Lily sat in her Boston rocker.  She leaned back and gazed toward the
window instead of at the television screen.  She could see the
television screen in the glass, however, several sets of images
reflected in several panes, and additional colors and movements were
more ghostily sketched upon the outer storm window.  Lily preferred
this method of viewing.  She was, she would have explained, less
assailed by what she saw there.

"Because," Ginger said, "there are far more important things on tonight
than a silly MASH rerun

Glover hovered in the doorway.  He had just swallowed a red which he
trusted would ease him through this enforced evening with the family.
In fact, he had been asked over to Missy's house-after she'd run him on
his not so mysterious errand in her Mustang (scoring reds in a
McDonald's parking lot-Missy had acted all scared they'd be arrested
and she had required comforting).  He would have gone-Missy said they
had a fifty-four-inch screen and Surround Sound-but then Missy had gone
and mentioned she had a little sister at home and that the little
sister had a new baby which, according to Missy, was so far proving to
be loads of fun to dress and decorate.  Well, Glover wasn't falling for
any of that, but it depressed him that he'd had another offer for
tonight and not a better one because his current standard for better
offers was such a pitifully low one.

"Glover, you're blocking my light standing there," Alden said.  "Either
sit down or go away, why don't you?  " He seemed to favor that second
option.

"Where?  "Glover asked.

"What?  "Alden asked.

"Go, sit, where?  " Glover asked.

"Oh, anywhere," Alden said.

"Here?  "Glover asked.

"don't care," Alden said.

Glover wedged himself between the wall and the end of the sofa, his
stiff leather boots crackling and popping as he folded and receded into
his recess.  Becky reached and dropped snipped-off threads onto his
head.  She was used to having a wastepaper basket beside the sofa but
Lily had brought it up to her room, the Victorian papier-mache
wastepaper basket into which someone had taken to tossing apple cores
and plum stones, and which had begun to disintegrate from the inside
out.

"Hey," said Glover.  "I have to watch the, you know.  Where's the like,
clicker thing?  I really have to watch the wall, the wall thing, for,
you know, school."

The family, un alert ignored him.

" Where's the thing?  " Glover persisted.

"It's never to be found," Ginger complained helpfully.

" Where's the clicker?  " Glover clarified.

"Get up and change the channel manually," Alden said.

"Huh?  "Glover asked.

"Get up and change the channel manually," Alden said.

"Huh?"

"My God, you kids.  Brooks, you're closest.  Reach up and put on
Channel Four or Five.  Not Seven, though, that's CBS," Alden said.

"Not Seven, no, not Seven," Harvey said.  "Don't even speed past Seven.
Go round it other ways lest I be unwittingly influenced by a subliminal
image."  He closed his eyes against this possibility.

Brooks fumbled and twisted a knob and Tom Brokaw's face briefly
materialized before the picture reverted to aMASHsurgical tent.

"Well, someone of us has the channel changer," Harvey deduced.

Little Becky squealed, squealing on herself.

"Give the changer to me," Becky said.  "Now."

"No," said Little Becky.  "I'm in charge.  I was here first."

"So were the Injuns," Harvey said.  "And do you see any Injuns?  "

One of Ginger's ring-covered hands crawled out from beneath her Hudson
Bay blanket and sought and slid beneath the afghan.  Excited as a
spider, the hand probed and investigated along Little Becky's leg.
"Don't," Little Becky objected and she relinquished the channel changer
to her mother's custody.  She slapped away Ginger's hand which seemed
to sense the presence of candy and began to scrabble against Little
Becky's thigh.

Tom Brokaw's frat boy face bounced off a satellite circling high in the
sky and tumbled down into the little parlor.  He was advantageously
placed above Berlin with an alight and important building standing
behind his shoulder where it seemed to be whispering semi officially
into his ear.  For he recited, fluently and certainly, the names of
apparatchiks, the dates and details of wars and treaties, and the
particulars of the political machinations which had brought events to
the boil, and anchor people were all hired for their looks, Harvey
said.  Brokaw uttered on in his easy manner as live footage of
celebrators filled the little parlor TV screen.  People jostled,
shouting and waving in paroxysms of sheer happiness.  They ran, they
danced, they surged irresistibly from one crowded corner to another as
if everyone had suddenly been struck by the same conviction that that
other corner was an even more giddily blessed spot on which to stand
and cheer.

"They've been drinking there tonight," Harvey said.

"Did you catch her?"  Ginger asked as the camera darted and picked out
a woman with hair spiked into horns and eyes lined with the blackest
kohl who was beating upon a section of wall with a serpentine boa as
others flailed away with picks and hammers.  "She's like something out
of Cabaret," Ginger said, and she began to hum, "What good is sitting
alone in your room?  " as Becky may have forgotten herself so far as to
mutter, No hope of that.

"What have we missed?"  Arthur and Phoebe wanted to know.  They had
dragged their beanbag chair down from the attic and they plumped it on
the floor just in front of the hearth.  They subsided into the chair
and settled into one another's contours.  The occasional launched ember
landed and melted through the beanbag's malleable plastic covering,
through to the Styrofoam pellet innards which spilled onto the rug
where they would resist being vacuumed up.  Instead, the pellets would
bounce and hop in front of her old beater head, Lily knew, but she
didn't mention this because her difficulty seemed trivial when one
considered the cleanup job they were going to face in Berlin as the
next day dawned.

"You haven't missed anything.  This seems to be an ongoing
spectacle,"

Ginger told Arthur and Phoebe.

"But I don't know how that MASH turned out," Little Becky protested as
a bank of commercials began to run: Kentucky Fried Chicken, Ford
Trucks, which were built to last, and a Public Service spot endorsing
the benefits of reading aloud to one's children.

"Everybody dies," Rollins said.

"That time the Communists won and they killed everyone," Brooks said.

"No sir," said Little Becky.

"Yes sir, that was the very \astMASH," Brooks said.

"It wasn't, it wasn't.  Make them say it wasn't, Ma," Little Becky
cried.

"Hush," said Becky.  "Hush, hush, hush."

"Wasn't," Little Becky breathed.

"You know, most East Germans have never in their lives seen a fresh
orange," Harvey declared.

"Whoa," marveled Brooks and Rollins.

"Oh, come on," Becky said.  "You swoon when I suggest you eat an
orange."

"We 'd eat them if there weren't any," Rollins allowed, injured.  Their
mother was being such a bear while everybody else in the world was
being pleasant for a change.

"And Glover, you should be taking notes for your class," Becky said.

"Huh?  "Glover asked.

"Write something down," Becky told him.

"No pen," Glover said.

"Alden, give him a pen," Becky said.

"But dear, I'm using my pen," Alden said.

" I have an extra pencil," Andy offered.

"Paper," Glover said.

"Paper too?  " Becky asked.

Need.  Glover said.

"Paper?  "Andy offered.

Andy had been quietly sitting on the far side of the little parlor
beside the radiator cover on a side chair he'd carried in from the
dining room.  When Betsy entered and uncertainly stood blinking at the
television which was, at the moment, aroar with live actual sounds from
Berlin, Andy bade her take his chair and he fetched another for himself
from the dining room which he set down beside her.  There was no other
place.  Side by side they sat.  They opened notebooks across their
knees.  Their elbows collided as they wrote-Andy was left-handed, one
of those awkward anomalies, but interesting about him.  Betsy worried
when Andy recorded an observation and she did not as his elbow jogged
hers to write as well, if, in fact, they were studying the same
scene.

Andy reported Harvey's assertion that Mikhail Gorbachev was actually
one of ours, a Western agent planted ultra deep way back in the fifties
which had been the brilliant and patient ploy of then Vice President

Nixon, done with Ike's full and enthusiastic support, of course.

Betsy uncertainly spelled Volkskammer, the People's Chamber (oh, Volks
like the car) which was the single-chamber Parliament the Easterners
had while the other Germany was governed by a Bundestag and a
Bundesrat, or two chambers.  Betsy wasn't sure what Bundes was supposed
to mean.  She would have to find out.  Tom Brokaw just assumed everyone
knew, or maybe he didn't know either, but he was good at acting as if
he did.

Arthur, who had been stretching his brain to come up with humorous
insights on the news, for he was sometimes billed as a Top Topical
Comic (these placards were pre written ventured this thought, "After a
few days of pricing BMWs and Leica cameras, the East Germans will wall
themselves back in again."

"Do you think so?"  Harvey asked.  "Can't see that happening.  Just not
human nature."

Phoebe, her head at rest on Arthur's skinny chest, smiled up at him and
committed the line to memory although she wondered whether the joke
might not be funnier if Arthur said the East Germans had priced
lederhosen and cuckoo clocks and gone home.  Such tourist fodder was
easier to laugh at than expensive cars and cameras which were viewed by
most people as objects of desire rather than ridicule.

Alden looked up from his desk and said that happy, singing, and massing
Germans were not necessarily a heartwarming sight.  "I hope the Soviets
stay strong enough to breathe down their necks for a while, at least,"
he said.

"Well, they aren't strong enough, otherwise they'd be churning up
Poland with their tanks," Harvey said.  "In fact, try another channel,
Becky-the Huskies may be attacking on ABC."

"Oh, but don't you think Russia is just starting to see how much nicer
it is to be a popular country?  " Betsy asked.

Glover thought he must be hallucinating and reds didn't normally make
him hallucinate; they just helped keep him agreeably down.  He leaned
forward, leather boots crunching, so he could stare in amazed challenge
at Betsy until she noticed he was staring at her in amazed challenge
and would spare them any more of her comments.  But Betsy was intent,
now, upon the television screen where a background piece on the
Marshall Plan was airing.  She was unsure whether she was supposed to
know about this because obviously the Marshall Plan was History and not
a Current Event-the news footage ran in black and white.  Nevertheless,
she paid attention.  One could want to know about a subject just for
the sake of knowing as Andy had pointed out to her when he interviewed
her rather extensively one recent afternoon about local dating and
inter gender interpersonal relations and she had reminded him that she
was as much a stranger to the mores of the place as he.  Still, it
seemed, Andy had to ask.

"That section of the Wall is going to fall down on top of somebody,"
Ginger remarked with a lack of alarm as live coverage resumed.  After
all, she was thousands of miles distant from the action.  Betsy said,
"Oh my," and Brooks and Rollins roused from their dreamy contemplation
of the bitten-off threads accumulating on Glover's head (when would
thread-head Glover figure it out?).  They rolled onto their sides and
watched the TV with every hope of becoming eyewitnesses.  Little Becky
took advantage of another outburst of cheering (as that section of wall
fell) to open her Hershey Bar with tiny mouse snips of her fingernail
along the outer wrappings.

"I remember when that Wall went up," said Lily, rather severely.

"Well, it wasn't so tremendously long ago," Harvey said.  "I have tweed
jackets that are older.  British tailoring.  Though," he added thought
fully, "I'm sure the East Germans also wear jackets just as old, and
pants, and ties, still, they wouldn't have boughten theirs on Bond
Street."

Commercials interrupted again, for Mazda, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Your
Friends at the First National Bank of Boston, and a promo for a future
episode of the wordy weekly melodrama thirty something Becky pressed
the mute button.

Alden said, "Betsy, you don't think the United States is popular, do
you?  You don't think the rest of the world likes us?  Haven't you ever
been to, to France?  "

"The main problem with us is, we're so set on being liked," Harvey
said.  " That's our error.  We should be instilling healthy respect and
fear.  I tell you, the minute the Russians started to worry about
having smiles on their faces on the six o'clock news, I said to myself,
the Party's over.  (Ha, there's a line for you, Arthur.) But no, being
nice doesn't work for nation-states."

"That's only because you men run all the countries," Ginger said, "and
everything else that catches your fancy in between."

"But my dear, the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the
world," Harvey allowed gallantly.

"So some snarky man alleged," Ginger replied.  "But tonight I'm not
going to argue with you.  Tonight I'm on all of person kind side.  I'm
even happy for that man there lassoed around a lamppost who looks
exactly like Jerry Falwell's fatter and even more unpleasantly inclined
brother."

Everyone peered at the television but no one would give Ginger the
satisfaction of agreeing she was right about the resemblance.  She
would only be encouraged to make more of these disadvantageous
comparisons possibly involving one's own appearance and some other
villain in the news.

Alden completed the Fairweathers' bill.  He nipped the several pages
with the embosser and he moved before the fire.  He leaned over the
screen and browned and age-spotted the sheets of paper against the heat
of the flames.  He displayed his effort to Becky who skewered her
needle through the lapel of her blouse and tugged off her silver
thimble and said, "Now that that's out of your system, make out a
sensible account, although, frankly I just wish you'd have nothing more
to do with those awful people.  They're not worth your bothering
about."  And Alden understood then that Becky hadn't been angry at him
all evening long.  She had been angry on his behalf.  Alden crumpled
his handiwork and pitched it into the fire.  The owls' eyes glowed a
warmer yellow as the paper caught and was consumed.  "Yes, forget
them," Alden agreed.  "Who needs the young Fairweathers?  Let's write
off the likes of the young Fairweathers," he said, and Becky cocked a
slight smile in his direction.  So, they were united again against a
common foe.

"I think I'll start the cocoa," Betsy said eventually as the clock on
the big-parlor mantelpiece faintly tolled half past an hour which she
guessed must be a late one here and everywhere else on earth.  The
Germans were sagging, their cheers were flagging, and the blows of
their pickaxes were skidding and slipping.  The newsmen kept talking.
Becky switched to a local weather report.  If tomorrow was going to be
a fine day, she would wash everyone's duvet covers and line-dry them.

One by one, the family joined Betsy in the kitchen with second thoughts
and recommendations concerning the cocoa-she should add
mini-marshmallows, a drop of peppermint extract, a shot of creme de
menthe.  Little Becky had to prevent anyone else from putting their
mouth on her new New Kids mug.  Becky tapped three aspirin from the
community bottle kept on the countertop and she conscientiously sipped
from a cup of grapefruit juice.  Andy only wanted a glass of water.  He
sat on his high stool beside the serving hatch, his notebook pushed out
of sight behind a square box of Pilot Crackers.  After filling their
electric kettle at the faucet, Arthur and Phoebe said good night and
disappeared up the stairs to brew mung tea which according to the
instructions printed on the side of the bag would leach toxins from
their systems as they slept, although Arthur's fading voice was heard
objecting that he wasn't sure he didn't rather require disturbing
impurities to run quiet riot through his dormant brain for professional
comedic purposes.

Harvey reminded Betsy that the recipe on the cocoa tin called for a
dash of salt.  Betsy didn't think salt was necessary and Uncle Harvey
always got carried away.  He seized the shaker when her back was turned
and the chocolate tasted briny.  Glover clumped past the stove where
Betsy stood her ground against Harvey's contribution, whisking the
mixture to a froth, which went further that way, into all the lined up
mugs she had to fill.  She took the cocoa's temperature by sticking a
finger into the pot.

"Cocoa, Glover?"  she offered.

"No," he said.  He turned in a tight pivot and stalked across the
kitchen floor with rigid precision.  He snapped his bedroom door shut
behind him, an action as unpleasantly meant but not as blamably rude as
a slam.

"His feet are killing him," Becky said.  "And I'm not certain he won't
need help getting those boots off, or else I'm sure he would already
have removed them."

"Brooks, Rollins," Alden said.  "Why don't you help your brother."

No, they thought not.  They sidled in front of the cork board,
mockingly at first and then more seriously mulling over Little Becky's
information and instructions.

"Of course," Harvey was saying, "they won't enjoy many more of those
big Olympic wins, the East Germans.  They'll have to shut down those
factories in the Erzgebirge Mountains where they bred sprinters with
marathoners to achieve speed and endurance, which can backfire when you
get a slow one who blows up after fifty feet.  Those were the ones they
sent to Afghanistan.  They sent armies of those to Afghanistan, poor
buggers."

"We should ask Lily if she wants anything," Becky said, after a
pause.

"No, Aunt Lily never wants," Betsy knew.

"Didn't that creme de menthe suggestion register, speaking of things
one does want?  " Ginger asked as she sniffed the mug Betsy had handed
her.

"Hey," Brooks spoke up.  "Win a trip to Disney World."

"Disney World sucks," said Rollins.

"Oh.  Right," said Brooks.

"Still.  Disney World," Rollins allowed.

Little Becky realized then that had she won $10,000, she might have
bought an airline ticket and flown off to Berlin where she could have
laughed and yelled and jumped around and rejoiced and stayed out way
late, so way late that the day got early again-she'd never done that
before.  Except, of course, her mother would never have let her go out
and run around and rejoice beneath the Wall.  Her mother would send her
up to bed in her hotel room at the usual absurd hour with wax plugs
stuck in her ears so she wouldn't be kept awake by all the noisy
rejoicing.  This realization lent some perspective to losing all that
money.  And $10,000 was not really so very much, Little Becky decided.
Not even $10,000 would have been enough to solve the very least of her
problems no matter how hard she tried to spend it on a car she couldn't
drive or on a stupid trip she would not be allowed to enjoy.  No, if
Manfred in the Morning thought he was so great, he should have kept on
moving the decimal point and adding zeroes to his Big Deal Dollar
total.  Little Becky was still willing to believe that $100,000 might
do the trick, at least in her own situation.

"Red Letter Day, anyway," Harvey said, raising his cocoa mug toward the
wall calendar.  "Ought to circle the date and next year we'll fly the
flag."

"In Women's Chorus after quite a lively discussion we voted to observe
the events of the moment in our own private and quiet and respectful
ways," Becky remarked to Lily who had come into the kitchen to remove a
package of suet from the freezer to thaw overnight on the drain board
for the next morning's bird-feeding chores.

"I suspect Women's Chorus is wise to be thoughtful about the collapse
of the Soviet Bloc," Lily said, for if her own family was any guide to
go by, unfettered liberty and a world of choices presented a not
unmixed basket of blessings to those to whom the prize had fallen by
design or desire or default.  This dogged pursuit of happiness, Lily
reflected, could lead one on such a merry chase.

!#;

chapter Four w A Hill Holiday

LILY'S SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Christmas cactus broke out in blossoms
early that December as it had not bloomed for the past twenty years,
and Lily wasn't sure she was entirely happy about the unusual profusion
of the lush and showing-off flowers so brightly and tropically
outshining and crowding out the Boston Fern and a spotty leafed
philodendron on the big-parlor windowsill.  Some evenings she had to
draw the curtains early against this further evidence of yet another
change in the very ecology of her house.

The family had come to hear all about the plant's remarkable
reawakening from Penny Nicholls, who knew its history, the afternoon
she dropped by to remind Harvey of the Senior Village Youth Gift Grab
Wrap-A-Ree party and to tell him he had to provide a present for a ten
year-old boy who liked dinosaurs, for she had taken the liberty of
drawing a particularly pitiful case history from Mack MacNally's tartan
cap at the Organizing Committee Meeting.

"There now, you see, even the Christmas cactus is happy that your house
has come alive again," Penny told Lily.

"Oh?"  asked Lily distantly.  Penny had charged into the big parlor on
her own, ignoring Lily's automatic and symbolic indication of the way
to the kitchen which Penny knew perfectly well for herself.  Penny had
flung off the toreador's broad cape she fancied herself in nowadays,
which soared and settled like a great bat upon the coatrack, and she
revealed herself decked out in a lime-green sweatshirt with the message
WORLD'S #i GRANDMA spelled out in glitter glue across the front.  This
sweatshirt bloused over what Ginger later explained to Lily were
leggings and not a pair of badly shrunk long Johns as Lily had feared
they must be, poor Penny, blithely prancing off to committee meetings
and unscheduled social calls half-dressed in her regrettably grey
underpinnings.

Lily drifted toward the windowsill and snapped the dry and papery spent
blossoms from the Christmas cactus and she pulled off several more
blooms that weren't entirely dry and papery and spent.

"It's blooming from all our breathing and talking so much and raising
the nitrogen content in the air," Harvey happily argued back.  He and
Penny were a sparring and contradicting old pair.  "There's nothing
heartwarming here, it's science," he contended.

"Nonsense," Penny insisted.  "Plants know.  Mother Nature is very
wonderful."  She impulsively linked arms with Ginger who had wandered
downstairs and effected an entrance, alerted by the sound of tires
crunching over the driveway gravel.  Ginger had sprayed Nuits de
Printemps in her hair and thrown a cashmere shawl over her crumpled
sweats before descending-solely, it turned out, for Mrs.  Nicholls's
benefit.  How it continued to pain Ginger that her bedroom failed to
overlook the driveway.  She wondered if she could rig some sort of
bull'seye mirror device so she could see around the corner of the
house.  They had those mirrors installed all along the Amalfi Drive.
Still, she and Louis had witnessed the aftermaths of some awful crashes
when they were last there, a few years back so perhaps they really
weren't that much help.

"And your poor Aunt Lily won't be left on her lonesome own some wearing
a red paper hat and eating a warmed-up bowl of cream of potato
Soup-For-One this Christmas," Penny told Ginger.

"Soup-For-One, oh no," Ginger virtuously agreed.  "We won't let Lily go
through that sad sort of Christmas again.  We'll make it an absolutely
marvelous day for her."  Evidently Ginger had forgotten she had vowed
to boycott the holidays altogether this year.  The day after
Thanksgiving, reacting to the slab like bulk of the Boston Globe as it
sat upon the kitchen table massive with advertisements for luxury furs
and luxury household appliances and luxury holiday tours, Ginger had,
as she waited for the coffee to re perk delivered a scathing speech
against compulsory joy and phony familial ness Alden had challenged her
to say phony familial ness five times fast, Lily recalled, and
surprisingly,

Brooks and Rollins, who happened to be present, possessed the nimblest
tongues.

"Of course, Meals on Wheels comes round with a hot turkey dinner on the
twenty-fourth," Penny was explaining, "but that just isn't the same as
having it on the big day itself, unless you stick the plate in the
fridge and microwave it on the twenty-fifth bearing in mind to remove
the cranberry sauce first, you don't want that hot.  And a lot of them
don't even have microwaves."

"Absolutely not," Ginger said.  "Charity shouldn't be personally
convenient for the giver, should it?  I mean to say, it doesn't really
count as charity if you're not awfully bothered and put out by your
efforts."  She smiled at Lily and held out her hand lovingly.  Lily
deposited the crumpled remains of spent blossoms in her palm and
Ginger's smile wavered as she stared at the slight debris, working out
what it must be.

Lily thought but did not say that Penny could only have come up with
details like the red paper hat and the cream of potato soup from some
solitary Christmas Day of her own.  Penny had never been known to look
very far beyond the end of her own nose, although her nose, to give her
her due, was a nice long one.  But Lily hoped for Penny's sake her
holidays would be livelier now that she was the belle of Senior Village
and had snared Harvey, of all people, as her beau.

"Becky has found a recipe for wassail punch in one of her women's
magazines," Ginger said.

"Has she?  I don't think wassail cup is wassail cup unless you wassail
for it," Penny said.  "It's wassail only in context."

"Really?  I'll have to mention that to Becky," Ginger replied.  "She
ought to know.  She's the musical one."

"How about whining for wine?  " Harvey offered, indicating, if one knew
the house, the vicinity of the dining room liquor cupboard.

"Please, please, please," Penny grinned, and whimpered.

"Actually, I mean Scotch," Harvey said.

"Well, don't scotch on the Scotch, neither," Penny said pertly.

Lily found herself wondering whether the mystery of the never blooming
plant had its solution somewhere in Becky's habit of watering the roots
up to a point and then placing the pot in a dark closet and
subsequently returning it to the windowsill in a carefully timed
transfer ascertained by consulting The Complete Guide to Household
Plants, which, as far as Lily was concerned, was not playing entirely
fair to encourage the windowsill plants to behave in unusual ways which
might be interpreted by some people as being propitious.

"So," Penny said, settling back for a good long visit.  "Half a tot,
Harvey, I'm driving the Senior Van to Shop "Til You Drop at the
Freedomway

Mall, twenty percent off selected items for all over-sixty-fives,
Lily."

"I don't know that I care to shop until I drop, Penny," Lily said.

"Well, a lot of them do," Penny said.  "But tell me, what are your
plans for the holidays so we can coordinate our doings," she added.

"You're as bad as that young Andy fellow," Harvey said.  "All his
questions.  I told him I was going to paint myself green and climb the
Congo's steeple for my Christmas.  He didn't buy it, but he wrote
something down anyway.  "Spect even fresh answers mean a lot in his
socalled discipline."

ALDEN AND BECKY LABORED outside by the barn beneath an unsolid
coffee-junket-colored sky.  It was trying to snow.  Big, messy sample
batch flakes spattered against the barn boards adhering and dissolving
and deepening the stain of the bleached red paint.  Alden raked away
the mat of wet and blackened leaves rising and pressing against the
bottom tiers of his woodpile.  Becky tugged at the wiry, curlicuing
stalk of a vine that had coiled itself around and about the logs as she
meditated upon the practical uses of such a vine.  There was so much of
it and it resisted her tugs so determinedly.  This is a very well made
vine, Becky thought proprietarily.

For Alden had quite unexpectedly taken her up on one of her business
ideas.  That morning over their breakfast of split and broiled
cranberry nut muffins she had mentioned, quite out of the blue, "What
if we tied up pretty and portable bundles of attractive, specially
selected logs with plaid ribbons and bows and sold them in New York at
exquisite little shops to the Christmas crowds?  Think of logical
linkages one associates with an evening by the fire-reading,
needlework, after-dinner drinks and cigars.  We could ask our old wine
merchant to take some.

rAnd we could call it, oh, boutique firewood.  We would have fallen for
boutique firewood."

"Of course, all this wood will be too green actually to burn," Alden
allowed now as he surveyed his woodpile.  He scraped away a last layer
of leaves.  From the corner of his eye he saw a fringed and rippling
shape detach itself from a shard of bark and scuttle away.  He peered
and prodded with a tine of his rake and satisfied himself that a shard
of bark had not come spontaneously alive.

"If we charge enough, no one will want to burn their wood," Becky
assured him.  "They'll keep their bundles for show arranged on their
polished brass andirons or in their polished copper buckets, the same
way no one ever uses their best guest bathroom soap, not even the
guests do."

"Well, all right.  There's the woodpile.  You choose what you think the
assortment should be.  You have the eye for design," Alden said.

Becky considered.  " We 'll want pine, of course, for the scent, and
oak because the bark is so textural, and that nice white paper birch
because it's so New Englandy.  And you didn't chop down anything really
rare, did you?  People would like it if they could point to, oh, say, a
piece of old Yankee shipbuilder's mahogany in their copper buckets."

Alden said he didn't think mahogany was very New Englandy, being a
tropical hardwood, but he had taken down a dead, leaning hawthorn from
the end of Lily's terrace.

"Hawthorn?  That's very New Englandy sounding," said Becky.

"Dickens would be more Christmassy," Alden remarked.

"Now you're making fun," said Becky.

"If you save that vine you've been tangling with," Alden said, "we can
bind up the bundles with lengths of that.  The tartan ribbon will only
serve for show."  He wore a wide smear of leaf mold across his cheek,
he had caught a splinter in his thumb, and he faced hard hours of
chopping the logs down to a more portable size; nevertheless, this was
better than sitting around all day and thinking too much and tasting
old tooth fillings with the tip of his tongue.

"I only wish this were grapevine," Becky said, pulling and
straightening and neatening a springing, curling heap.  "Grapevine is
the really more desirable vine."

"We'll just call it country vine," Alden said.  "Anything country has
cachet in the city."

"Yes, we always fell for the country label," Becky remembered.  "
Though there's country and there's country.  I have to say Proven9al
country has the edge at the moment, but that can't be helped.  Then
again, Proven9al country tends to evoke summertime and lavender and
briny olives and natural stone swimming pools, doesn't it?  " She heard
the yearning in her voice and she fell silent.

"It's only that logs have such a rolling-about quality," Alden said.
"We're going to need tartan ribbon and vine both to contain the
bundles."

The rolling-about quality became evident as Alden upset some critical
balance with a prod of his rake and the pile collapsed.  Loosed logs
chased Alden and Becky as they back stepped out of harm's way.

"Look, there's all the pretty white paper birch at the bottom of the
stack.  Getting dirty," Becky said.

"Yes, I guess the birch would be on the bottom," Alden recalled.  "My
first project was cleaning up Lily's birch grove after our moving van
mowed into it."

Becky crouched and flicked at a log with her glove.  The pale bark was
bruised.  "It's too bad we didn't think of this sooner.  I'll go get
the whisk broom and try to give them a good brush," she said.

"I'll shift some wood into the barn for you," Alden called after her.
"It's only getting wetter out here."

For a better snow was falling.  The field, with its stubble of frost
shorn grasses and weeds was whitening patchily in a pattern of
filled-in low spots and uncovered risen knolls.  There was a picture
wherever you looked, Alden thought, and he was well satisfied with his
surroundings and with his project, believing that some aspect of the
immemorial Tightness of the scene, the swirling snow and old red barn
boards and whitening field and darker fringe of the barrier forest,
would communicate itself through their Country Boutique Salon Log
Selection, as if the special genius of the place might yet be immured
in the wood.

A few days later Alden and Becky, and Ginger as well, sat around the
kitchen table, squares of paper set before them.  They were stacks of
thick, grey, rough-textured, handmade paper Becky had found at

Towne Artisans, a new shop in the old Oddfellows Building, offering for
sale pottery shapes and wool-knitted shapes and shapes executed across
canvases in acrylics, watercolors, and oils.  Becky had wandered the
shop's several aisles puzzling over all the shapes, not liking to ask,
What is this?  The artisans themselves staffed the premises and one
never knew about art isanic sensibilities.  But she had found the sort
of paper she wanted there, several boxes of a rustic, honest, naive,
and expensive paper which conveyed just the air she was after for the
handlettered labels they planned to affix to every parcel of Select
North Country Hearth Warmers.  (They had changed the name.  The family
had voted by a show of hands at supper, market research, Alden said.
Andy scribbled a note in the serving hatch but they'd all become used
to the rush of his pen across 3X5 cards-Ginger had long since hardened
them to the scrape of a pen across 33X5 card.)

Now, Ginger's pen skidded over a lump in her square of paper where she
had encountered a shred of calico, recognizable as calico (this was
handmade rag paper).  Hand sawn, she wrote, by Tim Burr.  Oh, the
second r resembled an n. That bump of calico.

"Tim Burr," she pronounced firmly at the lettering.  She creased the
paper in half and reached and spun the lazy Susan and plucked the
lobster pick from between the saltshaker and the pepper mill and she
punctured the upper left corner of the folded label.  She spun the lazy
Susan again and helped herself to a ball of bristly twine and the
pinking shears.  She snipped a bit of twine from the ball, an awkward
endeavor.  The twine fell between the shear's loosely enmeshing teeth.
Ginger had to pull the twine back and forth across the scissors' blade.
Then, she threaded the piece of twine through the lobster-picked hole,
another task not easily accomplished-the hole was small, the end of the
twine thick and fraying.  She expelled a satisfied breath and added the
label to her pile.  She had completed seventeen.

"How many did you say that you needed, of the tags?  " she asked.

"Two hundred," said Alden.

"So many?  " Ginger complained even though she had offered to help when
Becky mentioned she and Alden were going to have to be creative and
invent a cast of woodcutters to populate their mythical North

Country timberland-like Saul Onion, Alden had said, only not exactly
like Saul Onion.  Saul Onion wasn't a very good example, it was only an
example.

Hand sawn, Becky wrote, by North Wood.  She rotated the lazy Susan.
Bottles, jars, the spoon jar, cruets, clinked and rattled past.  They
clinked and rattled past her twice.

"The paper picker?  " Becky asked.  "The lobster thing paper puncher
picker?  " She was tired.

"Oh.  Sorry," said Ginger and tossed it to her.

Hand sawn, Ginger wrote, by Hew Asher.

"Hew Asher," she said aloud.  "His mother was Acadian, I think."

"Was she," said Becky.

"What if I put, Sawn by Coney Pines?"  Alden asked.  He flicked shreds
of paper pulp from the point of his pen nib.

"Oh no, he sounds like someone's accountant," Ginger said.

"Yes, I'm afraid I can picture your Coney Pines," Becky agreed.  "I
think he 'd saw one log halfway through and then have to sit down."

"/ can picture Hew Asher," Ginger said, "with his Acadian blood.  He's
tall as an oak and as strong as an elk and his black hair flares back
along his beautiful head in a wave.  He keeps slicking back his black
hair with his long, pitchy fingers, for his long hair falls into his
ice-blue eyes as he bends to lift precious wild morels from the forest
floor which he then sautes with secret herbs and essences known only to
him and the wild wolves."  She subsided into her thoughts.  All of her
labels would read, Hand Sawn by Hew Asher.

And Becky could picture North Wood, who, she knew, was a far finer man
than Ginger's Hew.  North's hair, his height, his heritage did not
concern her.  Her North was a man of qualities.  North was a stalwart.
One could turn to North, one could run to North, one could cling to
North, and one would always know where one stood, oh, true North.

"I hope they're all as susceptible as Ginger in New York," Alden spoke
to Becky.  He nodded toward his dreaming sister and raised amused
eyebrows.

"Don't make fun," said Becky.  "You are in no position to make fun of
anyone, frankly, Alden."

AT FOUR-THIRTY the following morning, Spaz eased his Loadstar up to the
barn door, and he and Gee commenced heaving log bundles into the truck
bed.  They were halfway down the heap by the time Alden ventured
outside, rubbing his eyes and pulling on his work gloves.  Spaz's truck
was rigged with a battery of day bright lights fixed above the cab.
Spaz kept his own hours.

Alden protested the heaving-tartan bows were untying, tartan ribbons
were straggling.  He more carefully carried and arranged individual

Olde North Country Holiday Hearth Warmers (a further improvement on
appellation-Becky said they'd hit every buzzword, except buzz) as Gee
and Spaz energetically out paced him and Alden was obliged to match
their efforts.  He was paying Gee and Spaz for the day, he was paying
for gas, he was thinking of where on earth to take the pair for lunch,
but local honor required him to work harder than his crew.  He had
hired them so he was better than them, the figuring ran, although Alden
guessed this was just a wily ploy on local labor's part.  Still, Alden
knew, if the need were to arise during the day for one of them to fall
upon a live grenade, it would have to be he who made the supreme
sacrifice.

His bewildered Becky would only be offered a tongue-tied account of the
tragedy by the abashed Weedens but then, Becky might not prove as
inconsolable as he would wish her to be.  She had been short with him
again last night, and she had slept resolutely through his pre-dawn
break departure.  He had been considerate, of course.  Nevertheless,
the sound of a considerately pulled open sock drawer, while not loud,
is lengthy.  Becky ought, Alden thought, to have lifted her head from
her pillow and mentioned, Good Luck.

"Z'it?  " Gee was at his elbow, asking.

"What?  "Alden asked.

"Z'it?"

Oh, is this it?

"Yes," Alden said.

They climbed into the truck.  Spaz had left the motor rumbling and the
heater churning.  The cab's interior sweltered like Calcutta.  Some
how, Alden was maneuvered into the middle position as he had meant not
to be.  He sat on a hump.  Gee leaned into him, unselfconscious as a
hound dog, and fell asleep, his nose and chin buried in the collars of
his several plaid shirts, flannel, wool on top.  A clutch of plaid
ribbons spilled from his uppermost breast pocket which Gee had scooped
from the barn floor and assumed had sprung loose from his ensemble like
foliage.  Spaz may have slumbered as well.  His head lolled above his
scarf (Princeton's colors, but surely not) and on the far side of
Worcester he tried to downshift the knob of Alden's knee.  But the
truck held the road and was pointed the right way.  Alden watched the
road.  Spaz perked up and followed Alden's direction as city traffic
and city signs and the city itself appeared through breaks in the
clouds.  Spaz was not very familiar with New York, never having been
there before in his life, he explained.  He had promised his mother he
would never go there and he would have to be mindful to remember not to
tell her what he'd been up to today.

The local linkages had been established.  They were to make deliveries
at the Aldens' former wine merchant, a tobacconist (fine cigars,
humidors, packs of the wide world's cigarettes, those Italian wax
matches called fiammiferi), at the floral designer they had liked and
who remembered them and who had wondered what had become of the Lowes,
and at Artefacts, Inc."  a fine arts and antiques establishment where
Alden and Becky were also known and had often browsed in the past.  All
of the shop owners had agreed to handle the Hearth Warmers after Becky
had explained her idea so persuasively over the telephone.  Indeed,
they were all looking forward' The street where we lived," Alden told
Gee and Spaz as he fell back along old routes through the old
neighborhood.  There were wreaths on doors and trees in lobbies and
strings of lights switched on and bright against the grey day.  Their
old building had a new doorman out front who looked shifty-his hair was
combed to cover a spreading bald spot.  But Alden's perspective had
altered, sitting high above the curve of a strong truck fender.  He
felt not unlike a conqueror returning in a captured tank.  Pedestrians
thought twice, other traffic wasn't so sure at the approach of the
juddering, mud-splattered Loadstar.  Spaz had clapped on a leather
helmet hat when he spotted his first business sign not written in God's
Own English.  Gee gawped out the window, staring and staring through
his lash less eyes.  Alden hadn't noticed, back in Towne, the unguarded
lashlessness of Gee's eyes.

"Park along here, Spaz," Alden said.  "Any old where will do."

Alden chatted his way through the slight paperwork he and Becky had
generated, businesslike, as Gee and Spaz toted bundles.  Shop
assistants retied bows, twitched the labels round, read them, and
begrudged a smile.  They stacked, just inside doorways, attractive
displays.  One could almost sniff the pine, or a pine-ish savor which
would turn pinier in the steam heat.  Alden was told how well he
looked, how relaxed, how unencumbered by whatever it was that had
formerly encumbered him.  He was handed cash at which he glanced only
briefly.  It seemed too complicated to sort and count cash which looked
so unlikely, anyway, and which stretched the slim lines of his billfold
when inserted.  He bought two interesting cases of odd-lot bottles at
the wine merchant, and a box of cigars for Harvey for Christmas at the
tobacconist.  At the floral designer, he tendered the baby present for
the Incan orphan who had just arrived from Peru-Becky had searched
everywhere for a stuffed alpaca Alpaca with a beautiful face.  Alden
admired Artefacts' lately acquired Pennsylvania Chippendale chest, very
like the one Lily had had carted up to her bedroom although Lily's
piece retained its original hardware.  Alden glanced out Artefacts'
door.  Gee and Spaz squatted by the curb smoking the Turkish cigarettes
they had bought at the tobacconist, pooling their funds.  He could tell
Gee and Spaz thought the cigarettes tasted strange-they held the tips a
half-inch from their puckered lips as they pulled the blue smoke into
their lungs.  They hated Turkish cigarettes.  This proved it.

"Lunch?"  Alden offered when they were settled again in the truck.  "I
feel we've earned our lunch.  There's a Cajun place not too far from
here," he ventured, where, perhaps, his companions would be taken for
the men who had delivered the gator steaks and lingered on to dine and
thus inspire only interested and even respectful comment from the other
patrons.

But Gee and Spaz had brought tuna and onion sandwiches and a six pack.
Alden ducked into a deli.  They ate in the truck.  Alden offered garlic
dill pickles which were accepted.  They didn't sit too well on Gee's
unaccustomed stomach.

"Anything you fellows care to see in the city before we head back to
the sticks?  " Alden asked.  This was the men's first visit, after all,
and Alden was in no particular hurry to return to Towne.  Indeed, a
short stop at his old office was not unimaginable-if not this time,
then next time he might drop in.  This time, he 'd drive by and test
how much he minded, just driving by.

"We can see the decorations on Fifth Avenue.  Or I have my membership
card to the Metropolitan on me," Alden said.  "I think I can still get
you onto the floor of the Stock Exchange, that's an experience not open
to all.  Or there's always a U.N. tour."

Gee nudged Spaz.  Spaz elbowed Gee.  They were sitting side by side.
Alden had won the window seat when he returned from his deli run.  Gee
had attempted to switch, but Alden wouldn't hear of Gee dislodging
himself.

"We'd like to see," said Spaz, "the place where King Kong died."

"All right," said Alden.  He considered.  "Turn left here," he said.

And, as Alden told Becky later (who was speaking to him and fascinated
by his account of the day and pleased because she had found two bottles
of a favorite Beaujolais in one of the odd-lot cartons), when they got
to 34th Street, Alden's best guess where impact had occurred, and as
Alden pointed to a spot on the sidewalk and pronounced, Here, Gee and
Spaz had leaned forward and peered upward through the windshield as if
they believed the great beast was yet to be viewed mid-fall, mid flight
mid-destiny, caught at the last instant before the sky lost its hold
and the outlines of earth grew huge.  Alden told Becky he had been
touched by this beyond any reasonable explanation for it.

ANDY TOOK OFF for Florida in the middle of the month.  He was used to
observing an academic calendar and he had not visited his mother for
more than a year.  Last Christmas he'd spent with Renata which his
mother had minded, some girl preferred to her.  This year she would
continue to resent his neglect of the previous year and begin to blame
him in advance for his absence the following year, predicting he would
forsake her once again.  If Andy could be counted on for anything, it
was that he could not be counted on.  His mother was going to have a
splendid holiday.

Betsy returned from babysitting late.  Mrs.  Snowdon had taken the
wrong exit on her way home from the Mall, where she had hopelessly
roamed the stores with her long, amended list and her Visa card.  Betsy
had noticed right away the Alaska-shaped oil slick at the top of the
driveway bowl where Andy's car was always parked at that hour of the
evening.  It was suppertime and Andy was supposed to be stationed at
the serving hatch charting the dynamics of the family's dinner
conversation in his marble-boarded notebook.  The oil slick stretched,
blackly glistening, signaling some stock-footage message of a hasty
decampment by the light of the carriage lamp that had been switched on
against her late return by Phoebe who kept an eye out for Betsy.  No
one else seemed to think of her, these clouded nights when darkness
fell so early and Phoebe could not help but remember the opportunistic
haunts and ghoulies she had so deeply believed in all through her rural
and solitary mountain girlhood.  She had known a girl who disappeared
forever, just going out to the shed.

"Aunt Lily?  Aunt Lily?"  Betsy asked before she dropped her coat and
her bookbag at the foot of the back stairs.  "Where's Andy's car?
Where's Andy?"

"Delaware?  By now," Lily supposed, which was not the information Betsy
sought but Lily was contributing her own expert knowledge.  Lily
herself had twice driven down to Florida with maps cluttering the
passenger seat and a compass affixed to the dashboard, its needle
unreassuringly fidgeting beneath a clear plastic dome.  Nevertheless,
she had discovered Florida easily enough.  One went southwest and then
traveled south some more through all the Civil War states.  Lily had
rather enjoyed the drive, and staying at Quality Inns and eating
continental breakfasts while reading the foreign news from Georgia. She
had not enjoyed herself at Olive and Frank's tangerine-orange-painted
bungalow that sat at the edge of the flat and pallid and not very
oceany smelling Gulf of Mexico.  She had grown weary of having to
agree, yes, it was very remarkable to be able to sit outside on a
February afternoon wearing nothing but a cotton sweater, which,
apparently, had sounded indecent to no one but herself, wearing nothing
but a cotton sweater.  Florida, Lily felt, had a coarsening effect upon
displaced northern old people.  She would never forget the object Olive
had made in her Neighborhood

Association crafts class-a billed cap devised from flattened and
pierced Budweiser beer cans, perforated along the edges and cobbled
together with thick orange-yarn crochet stitches.  Olive had given this
hat to Lily to wear outside in the worst of the sun but her head was
too round to carry it, thank goodness, for politeness would otherwise
have mandated a public appearance somewhere in the beer can hat had it
fit.

"I mean, Aunt Lily," Betsy was standing before her patiently waiting
for Lily to snap out of her reverie, "where has Andy gone?  "

"Home to Florida, he said," Lily told Betsy.

"He has a home?  In Florida?  " Betsy asked.

"He has a mother there, evidently," Lily said.

"He does?  A mother?  We haven't asked him very much about himself,
have we?"  Betsy said.  "I mean, we're so busy talking about ourselves
all the time, we haven't been very thoughtful about him.  I can't even
begin to picture what Andy's mother could be like, can you?  "

Based upon her Florida experiences, Lily said, she probably could.

"Oh yes," Lily added, "Andy would like someone to catalogue the
Christmas cards that come.  He's made a list of attributes to look
for."  She fished a sheet of paper from her sweater pocket and handed
it to Betsy.

"Overtly religious," Betsy read, "nonreligious, New Age religious Mummy
gets those-Santa-centered, nature-centered, nostalgia-centered.  List
symbols, images, yes, okay, I see what he's after.  It's interesting,
because I've already noticed that Uncle Harvey receives cards that all
say they're remembering his sad loss at this happy time of year, and
Uncle Alden's say, our positive thoughts are with you at this happy
time of year, and Mummy's are all, our concerned thoughts are with you.
I think Andy will be interested in all the commiserating cards, don't
you, Aunt Lily?"

"They are certainly a phenomenon," Lily agreed.

AND ANDY DROVE down to Florida in a day and a half with his radio
switched on loud.  After Maryland, he turned to his tape collection
because of the high Country and Christian content crowding the
airwaves.

Big Confederate-flagged trucks bore down upon his VW which shuddered in
their back draft The earth reddened where ruts had been cut by plow or
Caterpillar, and the air softened.  The cold and damp no longer bit
but, rather, insinuated itself through the flannel of his shirt.  He
had pulled off his gloves and struggled from his confining parka when
he spotted his first goblet-silhouetted magnolia tree, a tradition from
other trips south.  The girls behind the counters of the off
interstate

Hardee's became more cordial very late at night and very early in the
morning as they filled his silver thermos with coffee and asked him
where he 'd come from and how far he was going, growing thoughtful when
he told them he was headed from Boston to Palm Beach which seemed to
describe to those homegrown and grounded girls the farthest limits of
an unknown world.

Andy shot down Rte.  95 to the turnoff to Jupiter, actually, where his
mother had bought a subsiding little house within sound of the ocean
and sight of the water's reflected glimmers and projected moods playing
off her salmon-pink-painted patio walls.  His mother was out reading to
the blind as she had warned him she might be when he had called from
Jacksonville to let her know he had made it to Jacksonville.  Andy had
had to wrest the duplicate front door key from Mrs.  Lloyd who lived
next door to his mother behind the Spanish hacienda-style portcullis.
The warder-like Mrs.  Lloyd had made Andy prove who he was before
surrendering the key to him.  She had never met Andy for he had not
come home even once during the sixteen months Mrs.  Lloyd had lived
beside his dear mother, she reminded him.

"Aren't there any pictures of me on a table?  " Andy asked. "Graduation
pictures?  I'm always graduating from somewhere.  Don't you recognize
me from a picture?  "

Mrs.  Lloyd countered he may have disguised himself as the son of the
house, who had struck her, from his pictures, as more of a type than an
individual, a point Andy had to concede; he was such a product of his
environments.

So Andy answered sharp questions about family names and birthdates, and
it seemed that his own and his mother's account of her birth year did
not tally.  This marked a victory for Mrs.  Lloyd, bettering a bad son
on her own, fortified doorstep.  When Andy mentioned his road weariness
as the reason for his error-that of failing to remember his mother's
preferred year of birth-Mrs.  Lloyd told him he should have Planned
Better than to arrive unequal to a test.  Andy decided he approved of
the Hill method of keeping the spare key beneath an overturned geranium
pot on the back porch, if, indeed, the door had been locked in the
first place.  Miss Hill had a cryptic saying, One need not lock for
everything, and Andy had yet to unlock the meaning of that.

TODAY is SATURDAY, Dec.  16, 1989 (a notice board hanging beside the
elevator door in the foyer read)

You reside at Havenhurst Adult Care Facility, Rte.  63, Towne, .^
Mass."  USA Our President is Mr.  George Herbert Walker Bush.  ')

Happy Birthdays This Month To: Dec.  3 Bessy Wesson 89 years young

Dec.  16 Sarah Angell 78 years young

Dec.  26 Nana Doucette 100 years young Welcome to the Century Club
Nana!

Field Trip Sign-Up: Monday, Dec.  18,1989.  We are all invited to Towne
Senior Village for a Pancake Supper and Christmas Card Swap.  If your
wheelchair bound and planning to attend, contact Mrs.  Russo.

Our Next Holiday: Christmas, Monday, Dec.  25,1989

Today's Weather Will Be: Cold and Windy!  Bundle up if you plan to go
outside!

Today's Lunch Menu: Individual Chicken Pot Pies, Creamedy

Mashed potatoes, Baked Winter squash,

Individual Custard Fruit Cups, or Individual

Diet Tray.

Today's Activity: Towne Women's Chorus will perform their "Holidays Are
Made of Memories Like These" musical program in the Residents'

Lounge at 2:30 P.M.

The residents and their visitors had assembled on folding chairs in the
Residents' Lounge.  They faced a shallow stage erected at the drafty
northern end of the overlong room.  The stage was empty, as yet, but
the general feeling prevailed that the space ought to be watched.  An
upright piano had been rolled to the foot of the stage and someone,
carried away with her bedecking and adorning, had wired a holly garland
along the length of the keyboard.  Rosalie Chubb, however, said she
would be able to play once she became used to the sensation of plunging
her hands into a thicket.  There had been rival decorating gangs at
work at Havenhurst,

Becky concluded as she stood at the back of the room, sizing up the
house.  Two trees, a real specimen and a silvery, shimmery fake, were
set in opposite corners and several window ledges supported several
styles of manger scenes-plastic, papier-mache, porcelain baby Jesuses
lay upon hay and burlap and satin cushions in their separate cradles,
lying there prematurely, Becky noted, for in Hill households, the baby
Jesus did not make his appearance until Christmas Day.  He waited in a
designated Heaven set upon a high bookshelf until the morning of the 2
^th when he was ceremoniously floated down to earth after one of the
children remembered to ask, Hey, where' sAndy had quizzed Becky about
family rituals before he took off for Florida and she had neglected to
mention that one.  Brooks and Rollins always supplied dive bombing
fighter jet sound effects to accompany the Messiah's descent (after
someone recalled on which high bookshelf he was languishing).  Then,
hushed and forbidden, they produced the sounds silently as Little Becky
shrieked and pelted them with foam packing peanuts.  She sulked after
she was scolded for defending the Lord and she began to rewrap her
presents to return to her evil brothers and her horrible parents.  This
was also a tradition, Becky remembered as she made her careful way
through the audience of white heads and bags of knitting set upon the
floor-the folding chairs had been arranged without reference to a
central aisle-and she could only think, we are all such veterans of
Christmas.

The members of Women's Chorus had to step over an abundance of potted
poinsettias to achieve the stage above which white pine swags were
suspended only as high as elderly and afflicted arms could stretch.
The swags and paper chains and reindeer cutouts drooped and tangled
with women choristers' earrings and hairstyles.  Cynthia Peck, who was
young and susceptible, swatted and giggled.

It is nice to hear young laughter, several Havenhurst ladies remarked.
Old laughter could be so wheezy and cut off abruptly.

Anna Webster huffed into a pitch pipe and Rosalie Chubb searched for
and sounded an approximate note on the piano.  Becky, from her vantage
point on the raised stage, gazed round rather curiously for this was
the establishment that was trying so hard to recruit Lily, although
Lily had said she hadn't heard from them lately.  Surely this was no
place for Lily, with its hectoring message board and evidence of
factions and hard-held opinions over Christmas trees and creches, and
Becky spied oxygen tanks stacked in a corner next to a fire
extinguisher, unwisely so, she thought, for the wrong cylinder could
easily be snatched for the wrong emergency.

"When Christ was born of Mary free, In Bethlehem, that fair citie,
Angels sang there with mirth and glee "In excel sis gloria," " Becky
sang.

The residents of Havenhurst sang along as best they could and their
visitors tried not to mind the waveriness and inaccuracies of the old
voices trilling at their sides, for the visitors were quite sure a
Sing-Along wasn't intended; Women's Chorus had not asked them to feel
free to join in.  But the residents had been subjected to so much in
the way of participatory entertainment-to mass jazzercising, to an
experiment in past life regression when they counted backward from 100
and then glanced quickly down at their feet which, for a fleeting
instant, were sup posed to appear to them shod in the style of a
previous life, in Egyptian sandals, Pictish leather wraps, Edwardian
buttoned boots, or, dismayingly, as brutishly bare and mud-scoured with
long yellow toenails that they, the residents, jumped in before they
could be singled out and compelled to come forward to verify, for
example, that the magician's assistant had truly disappeared from the
Chinese cabinet into which she had just been jammed for, of course, one
could not be sure what other tricks a magician might have up his
sleeve.

Women's Chorus, unused to being sung back at, sang forth a little
louder.

"The foxes found rest, and the birds had their nest, In the shade of
the forest tree; But thy couch was the sod, O thou son of God, In the
desert of Galilee.  Oh come to my heart, Lord Jesus!  There is room in
my heart for thee, " Becky sang.

She had become aware of a man in the audience who was trying mightily
not to smile.  His smile, the smile he was fighting, flashed off and on
with the glee of the wicked, Becky decided.  It was not a smile
signaling tender memories and sweet sorrows recalled as his old mother
or granny or whoever she was, atilt beside his elbow, wandered in song
along a theretofore unexplored route toward and roundabout but never
quite attaining "O Little Town of Bethlehem."  The man, who wore a
short leather jacket with a mouton collar, an old jacket-the leather
was jointed with cracked white lines-was not the sort of man Becky
approved of.  Motorcycles, she thought repressively.  Nevertheless, she
detected dash there.

The man murmured into the old woman's ear.  She cupped her ear.  He
whispered again and removed himself to the far end of the lounge where
a closed door bore a sign, SMOKERS' ROOM.  He nudged the door ajar and
lit a cigarette and held the cigarette in his right hand behind the
door.  He ducked his head inside the room to inhale, then he
straightened and forgetfully exhaled above the audience.  An attentive
niece coughed warningly on behalf of a cherished aunt too frail to
cough for herself.

But in fact, Becky was prepared to be grateful for the presence of the
so easily amused man for, most unexpectedly, Arthur was slated to
appear next.  Naomi Liebenthal, Women's Chorus Outreach Chairperson,
had caught his comedy act one night at the Imperial Wok, and maybe it
was all the umbrella drinks she'd consumed, but Arthur had tickled her
funny bone and she had asked him to help plump out the program after
the Brazen Bellringers, popular local favorites, had a scheduling
conflict.

"And idol forms shall perish,

And error shall decay,

And Christ shall wield his scepter, Our Lord and God for aye, " Becky
sang and bowed.

Women's Chorus departed the stage and members sat where they could find
space among the folding chairs for they had been invited to stay on
after the performance to chat and mingle and they were going to be
served little cakes or something.

Arthur ambled onstage as if he'd come in to sweep up.  His lanky,
oversized extinct bird looks were arresting.  Rough red plumage
sprouted wildly from his head.  His legs were long stalks with
articulated knees visible through the holes in his deplorable jeans. He
observed the audience with a glittering eye turned sideways, a rapidly
blinking and uncomprehending eye which seemed to signal Arthur's
worldview-he was a distracted being, always out of his element,
striving to make sense with what brain he possessed, a brain he had to
jump-start manually upon occasion as he chopped the back of his head
with the heel of his hand.  He began to describe a childhood Christmas
when his parents told him they had bought him a puppy, but the puppy,
it turned out, was a very special dog who worked undercover for the FBI
and was, at present, living incognito with an organized crime family.
But, Arthur said, he had been allowed to meet the puppy in the park
encountered on walks, in his various guises-as an Irish setter named
Troy, as a Welsh corgi named Missie, as a sheltie named Scoop.  They
were all Arthur's puppy, who had stolen away from his spying and
reporting duties at the crime family's compound, to frolic for a few
happy minutes with his real little boy.

"Oh, my dear," the softhearted Anna Webster breathed at Becky.

Becky was only grateful Arthur wasn't making spirited public fun of her
or Alden or the children.  She raised her eyebrows and shrugged at
Anna.

The residents were grateful Arthur wasn't telling jokes about dentures
or elder sex and they emitted little sighing syllables at intervals.
The visitors, who by then were trying not to glance at their watches,
tended to applaud Arthur's punch lines as an alternative to laughing at
them for laughter was difficult to come up with convincingly.  The man
who had been smoking and upon whom Becky was counting to enjoy Arthur
heartily and, she hoped, infectiously, had wandered forward.  He sat on
the piano bench, an arm settled, with a discordant plunk, among the
holly leaves, and he studied Arthur, soberly, silently.  Becky hoped
Arthur hadn't noticed the leather-jacketed man's near scowl of
concentration as Arthur soldiered on, observing that all the bank
robbers and bunco artists and murderesses who had been put away for
thirty years at the conclusions of old Dragnet episodes must all have
been released from prison by now.  They were all out, they were all out
and old, Arthur charged as he stared accusingly at the straggling rows
of white heads.  "Is Mayhem Mary here?"  he wanted to know.

"We have a Mary MayAew," someone spoke up and was shushed.

ON THE DAY BEFORE Christmas, Alden dragged back to the house the
eight-foot-high ideally conical and densely branched tree he had hunted
down out in the woods and felled with a sharp ax and bundled in burlap
for the rough haul home.  He had wandered widely through Lily's woods.
Nature unaided did not produce very presentable fir trees and he may
even have strayed off Lily's property during his long search.  He
discovered his perfect tree up on a ridge which he would have sworn was
still Lily's land but for some bright yellow surveyor's tape and neon
slashes of paint marking a boundary.  He took the tree anyway for,
obviously, someone was planning to build up there.  He didn't mention
the surveying activity to Lily, in part because he forgot, in part
because he knew she would mind this encroachment along her border. Lily
could make the North Koreans look casual about missteps over a line.

Becky sought Lily in her bedroom where Lily was wrapping presents.

The wrapping was proceeding slowly because Lily hadn't been able to
locate her Scotch tape dispenser which had thoroughly disappeared.

Lily had her suspicions the dispenser was mixed up somehow in the
muddle on Ginger's unmade bed, Ginger's gala Christmas headquarters,
all shiny catalogues and splitting shopping bags and trailing
paper-Ginger was doing her best on the budget Betsy was holding her to.
But the mere idea of requiring Ginger to search among her scattered
effects made the blue vein beneath Lily's parchment-thin forehead skin
throb.  So, at present, Lily was using her Elmer's Glue (which the
reliable

Becky had dependably returned after making her lamp repairs) to secure
her wrapping.  This was proving to be time-consuming for she had to
press a firm thumb back and forth along the seams until they stuck. She
sat on the edge of her bed running her thumb over the end of a box of
Rose Geranium Soap.  She lifted the package to her nose and sniffed. An
earthy, sweet smell emanated through the wrappings and Betsy would
guess what she was getting but that couldn't be helped.  Then again,
Betsy ought not to be rummaging among her gifts and, to be fair, it was
unlikely she would.  Betsy was being rather wan about the holidays.

Lily had not picked up gift tags.  It was complicated enough to have to
buy a special bolt of wrapping paper featuring Santa's round and red
and puffy heart-patient's face, selected for the children's sake.  She
wrote directly on the package with a felt-tip marker-To Betsy from her
Aunt Lily.  Merry Christmas, she added as an afterthought.  She used
old yarn for ribbon.  Lily did not want for old yarn.

"Oh, excuse me," Becky said, opening Lily's door a crack for Lily had
answered Yes to her knock although it may have been a Yes?  requiring
further explanation through the door before she was granted admittance
but, really, she had only come to ask a simple question and she didn't
see the need for having to ask Lily twice, to ask whether she might
ask.  On rare occasions, Becky rebelled.

"Am I interrupting?  " she asked, coming into the room.  She stepped
upon layers of rugs and sat-she had her choice of chairs-on the nearer
wing chair.  Such a cozy lair.  Her elbow bumped the library book on an
adjacent table, which Lily would rather have been reading than getting
on with her present-wrapping.  Becky averted her eyes from the
yet-to-be-wrapped gifts piled upon Lily's bed, nevertheless she had
seen enough to satisfy her curiosity.  They had not exchanged presents
with Lily in the past-they had exchanged cards and Becky had always
included the latest family lineup picture from their most recent
vacation.

But this year was different, and Becky hoped they would all do neither
too much nor too little.  Belatedly, Lily drew an afghan up and over
two Random House Dictionaries, several bottles of Vita Bath Oil, a
buffalo plaid scarf snaking out of a narrow box from Jordan Marsh.
Nothing to be concerned about there, Becky thought, most items under
twenty-five dollars but not too far under.

"I'm afraid we need a tree stand," Becky explained, "because ours is
too small.  We only ever had those spindly little tubercular trees you
get in the city but Alden has gone out in the woods and found a real
giant for us this year, so I don't suppose we could borrow your tree
stand?  "

But Lily said she had long since donated her stand to the All Saints'
White Elephant Table when she had given up her holiday decorating
except for the front door wreath, to which she was beholdened by the
Animal Rescue League.  She was indelibly on their delivery list.  They
continued to assume year after year that she still required a i4-inch
balsam round with a red bow and a bayberry spray, which wreath would
remain affixed to her front door through the rest of the winter until
it blew off of its own accord in a stiff March wind, and shreds of the
once red ribbon would reappear entwined among the twigs and grasses of
the robins' nests in May, so Lily really didn't mind being stuck on the
Animal Rescue League's list.

"I hope you don't care if we're a bit festive," Becky said.  "We're a
cheerful bunch, deep down under," she supposed.

"And Harvey can be awfully happy too," Lily agreed.  Last night in the
kitchen he'd seized her and waltzed her round the table as he sang, "Be
jubilant my feet."  He'd steered her into the handle of the cellar door
and overnight she had formed a great purple bruise which sat too high
on her hip for remonstration purposes.

Becky next routed Glover from his off-kitchen bedroom where he 'd been
sleeping the afternoon away although he was not aware he'd been asleep.
He thought he'd been reading Alone, filched from Lily's bookshelves,
but for the past hour he'd been dreaming his own version of an
Antarctic marooning.  The hatch to his burrowed hutch had clanged shut
while he was out feeding the penguins and there he stood in his
stocking feet and a turtleneck pullover, banging unvailingly at the
door as the six-month night descended.

"You were having a bad dream," his mother informed him coolly and he
was too shaken to argue.

"Anyway, get up.  I need you to run some errands," Becky said.  She
handed him a piece of paper upon which she had roughly traced round the
bottom of the tree trunk as Alden held the tree erect.  TREE STAND TO
FIT THIS TREE REQUIRED, she had written.

"Try the Ben Franklin Store," she told Glover.  "Do you know which
store that is?  It says Ben Franklin on the sign.  And here's a list of
a few things I need at the IGA, spelled I-G-A on the sign."  She held
the car keys over her head as she extracted a promise from Glover that
he would drive responsibly and come right home.  Glover thought of
reminding his mother how old he was and how tall and that he wasn't
completely stupid but he didn't want to supply her with an opening to
start nagging him about his college applications.  (Next fall, there
you'll be, left outside in the cold and knocking at the gates, his
father kept saying.)

Brooks and Rollins flung themselves into the backseat of the old Volvo
as Glover was about to drive off and he suffered their presences
because he was still recovering from the effect of having been so very
alone.

Then, even though her mother had told her not to, Little Becky again
disturbed Lily in her room.  Lily answered, "Just a minute," to the
loose knuckled knocking at her door and Little Becky waited for what
she took to be a minute.  She spoke directly into the doorjamb.  "Aunt
Lily, please, please, please," she tediously, strenuously begged.

"Just a minute," Lily repeated, but now Little Becky's red-hot ear
pressed against the door detected interesting rustles and crackles of
shopping bags and packages being hidden away in bureau drawers they
scraped open and shut-and inside the blanket chest-the lid thumped.

The door opened at last and Little Becky slumped like a rag doll into
the room, her greedy button eyes darting everywhere, but Lily had been
thorough in her desire not to satisfy the importunate child's
curiosity, hardly a Christmassy sentiment on Lily's part, but there it
was.

"We need mornaments," Little Becky blurted.  "Because the tree Dad got
is so way huge."

"You need what?  I don't know what you mean," said Lily.

"More ornaments," Little Becky pronounced.  "Please, please, please."
The scratchy needle of Little Becky's voice was caught in the groove of
her neediness.

"But you must have your own ornaments," Lily said.  "They must have
come from your own home along with that stand that didn't fit your
father's tree.  I'm sure you have very pretty things from New York."
Lily supposed she meant they had sophisticated decorations and not
pretty ones, since they'd originated in New York where it sounded to
Lily nothing had ever been simple.

"Please.  No we don't have nice ornaments.  I'm sick of them.  Every
Christmas, and there aren't enough and I want to see yours, please."

"I don't like to enter Andy's room," Lily temporized, but she knew she
had lost when she stopped saying no and began giving reasons why not.

"They're in Andy's room?  But he's not here so we can go look,"
Little

Becky insisted.  "You can go into someone's room in an emergency when
they're not there."

"Emergency?  " Lily questioned.

Betsy sat on her bedroom's skimpy rag rug critically reading Sonnets
from the Portuguese in a small brown book with yellowed, brittle pages
she had found on top of the bathroom hamper.  She was mentally amending
all the "thee's and "thou's to "you's and "your's because thee and thou
sounded so antique and insincere.  Did Elizabeth address Robert as
"thee" in daily life?  Betsy thought not, although who could say for
sure about those two?  She meticulously consumed an apple, starting at
the upper left corner and biting in sequence all around and down as she
read, "Go from me.  Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in
your

^ [.

shadow," and, as she read, she became aware of voices and footfalls
emanating from Andy's room across the hall, toward which her awareness
seemed to maintain an address.  She marked her place in her book with
the yanked-off apple stem and, setting her apple and her book upon her
desk, she prepared to interfere on the absent Andy's behalf.

Little Becky was jouncing on the bedspread, a natural-colored coverlet
in a pattern called Abigail Adams which had lost half its fringe in the
clothes dryer and would cost a fortune now from a catalogue, so the
fringe situation was a real pity.  The blue-wool-clad flank of Aunt
Lily extended from the closet, the deep dark closet angled beneath the
rise of the attic stairs, a cavelike space piled with cardboard boxes
shoved far back into the recess.  Colder air seeped into the room.  All
of Lily's closets provided cold storage.  Her interior walls were
unusually thick, Andy said.  He'd made interior and exterior
measurements of the house and could chart the discrepancies.

"Aunt Lily?"  Betsy asked concernedly.  Aunt Lily shouldn't be down on
her hands and knees like that, and Little Becky shouldn't jump on the
mattress.  "Stop that, you'll break Andy's bed," she instructed Little
Becky in an impatient aside.

"Aunt Lily," Little Becky objected, jumping more strenuously in protest
so that a strained inner slat of dry old wood snapped in two.  Little

Becky suddenly stood up to her thick ankles in sunken bedding.

"Now look what you've done," said Betsy.

"I didn't," Little Becky protested.  "Mean to," she clarified.  She
hopped to the floor and sagged against Andy's bureau.  "Aunt Lily," she
complained in general injury.

"Is that Betsy I hear out there?"  Lily asked.  "Can you help me with
this, Betsy?  "

"Yes, of course," Betsy said.  She peered inside the closet.

"Can you catch ahold of the bottom box marked Newer Old Curtains while
I lift up the top one?  " Lily asked.

"Curtains?"  Betsy asked, easing in beside Lily.  The arm of one of
Andy's jackets, the greeny-brown Harris tweed jacket with leather
buttons and leather arm patches he had worn all fall on his daily
constitutional walks in the woods, brushed against her cheek rubbing
extra scratchily from the burrs Andy had picked up on his
travels-Lily's woods, Andy had noted, were unimproved.  So Andy had
left behind clothes.  Betsy had not known until that moment how
uncertain she had been that he was coming back.  She could, of course,
have scouted his room and his closet on her own but it was better this
way, to let providence inform her at a well-chosen interval, as a gift
in this season of gifts.

"Gently," Lily cautioned as Betsy seized the box with a surge of
energy.

"They're ornaments," Little Becky spoke up repressively.

"Well, the box says curtains," Betsy answered, pulling the square
carton into the center of the room, fucking up Andy's rag rug and
straightening it with her foot.

"Aunt Lily is getting me ornaments," Little Becky said.

"Yes.  I understand that now," Betsy said.

"I took down the newer curtains and rehung the old old curtains which I
realized looked nice again," Lily remembered.  "There.  See.  I wrote
ornaments on the other side of the box.  I'm sure I must have thought
at the time the curtains would cushion the ornaments, that's what I
must have been thinking."  She gripped the edge of Andy's bureau top
and hauled herself up, shutting the closet door behind her with a push
of her heel.  Her hip twinged and she wished she hadn't seen, among the
other piled, stowed-away boxes, the one labeled Olive (Dresses).
Through a gap in the top flap she had glimpsed stripes, the intense
mauve and shiny almond stripes of Olive's last best dress worn to
Olive's last best occasion, a dinner out that she hadn't been able to
eat.  The horizontal stripes of the dress were meant to make her appear
wider, Olive's word.  I don't want anyone to guess, she had said.  She
had always relished secrets, no matter, it seemed, what the secret was.
That had been Olive's last year, the last year which she had lived out
at Lily's looked after by Lily and the Visiting Nurse, and the last
year Lily had bothered with Christmas, and the year Lily had taken
against her new curtains because every succeeding morning she had drawn
them back to gaze upon sadder and sadder days.  The tale of that whole
long terrible year was told in the juxtaposition of boxes pushed to the
back of the cold-aired closet where they were meant to stay forever un
referred to.  Although were Andy present, he might have scribbled a
note querying the significance of the particularities of the box
constructions, and even have asked Lily what her thoughts were upon the
subject.

THE BOYS RETURNED from the village where they had completed their
Christmas shopping at the Ben Franklin Store, the True Value, the
Rexall, and Lydia Spofford Antiques.  Marilyn Rathbone, who lived above
her shop, opened to the boys' knocks and pleas and found them several
very nice pieces of Sandwich glass for their mother.  Marilyn said to
especially wish their Aunt Lily a very Merry Christmas.  The boys
promised and promptly forgot their promise.  Last, at the IGA in the
Gourmet Aisle, they came across flat cans of smoked clams and smoked
herring in horseradish sauce which seemed to have Uncle Harvey's name
on them.

"But didn't you remember my brown sugar?"  Becky asked as the boys
descended upon her in the kitchen, shedding coats, prying off boots,
and glancing inside and exchanging a clutch of paper bags rather worse
for wear.  A very large tree stand slid from one bag and wheeled across
the sloping kitchen floor.

Becky slid a sheet of gingerbread men from the oven-Hot, she warned the
boys as they snatched-and she fumbled raisins from a big, sticky-sided
box and pressed them into the soft torsos for buttons.  She was not
clever and she did not rise to gingerbread men's faces.  An early
private effort had produced a colony of staring, despairing accident
victims whom she had straightaway thrown to the grackles.

"Brown sugar?"  the boys asked, mystified, and duly got Becky's goat.
They bleated laughter as she pulled off her apron and grabbed her purse
and prepared to set out with flour on her face.  Glover plunked a
carton of brown sugar down on the counter, dark brown, and she'd asked
specifically for light.  Well, even Julia Child didn't seem to think
there was much difference but Glover wouldn't know that.

Alden had caught their voices and he came and hustled the boys into the
big parlor where the tall fir tree was leaning against the wall, one
long straying branch lifting up the skirt of the camelback sofa, which
gave the tree a raffish personality and instantly disposed the boys in
its favor.

"Hey," said Brooks, or Rollins.  "Cool tree."

Alden told the boys to remove the heavy table from the window recess.
Brooks stepped on the bullion fringe of the skirt as Rollins lifted.
The cloth slid and all the family portraits fell flat on their faces as
if they'd been mown down by machine-gun fire.

"Cool," said Glover.

"Where'll we put the table, Dad?"  asked Rollins.

"What?  "asked Alden.

" Where 'll we put the table, Dad?  " asked Brooks.

"What?"  asked Alden.  He stepped one way, then the other, determining
where he could drive nails least visibly into the crown molding to
secure his guy wires.  The boys lugged the table this way and that,
stepping back and forth with him until they grew weary and set the
table down before the glass-fronted bookcase so that no one would be
able to get to the Francis Parkman or Washington Irving or J. Fenimore
Cooper for the next week or two should the need arise.

Alden told Rollins to crouch on the floor and hold the new tree stand
steady and he and Brooks lifted the tree and lowered it into the
stand's clamping mechanism.  Glover lay on the sofa and watched them.

"Are we straight?  " Alden asked Glover.

"Huh?  "Glover asked.

" Is the tree straight?  "

"Straight?"

"The tree?"

"The tree?"

BALANCING A TRICKY TRAY on her hip, supporting a platter of gingerbread
men, chocolate and vanilla pinwheels, cinnamon macaroons, Nero's ears,
pecan wreaths, van ille batons, and florentines, an unsteady pitcher of
eggnog, and Lily's best cut-glass punch cups from the back of the china
cupboard, Becky paused by the door of the little parlor where the boys
were sprawled before the TV watching a basketball game.

"Snacks.  A lovely holiday cookie assortment," she said.  "For everyone
who helps to decorate the tree."

"Ma-ha," they objected, because that didn't sound fair, the part about
having to help.

Little Becky happily, fussily affixed bisque angels and crystal
snowdrops to the branches of the tree.  Wearing Lily's old felt and
applique tree skirt as a cape-Cold, she complained, although she looked
overheated and scarlet-Little Becky massively flitted between the tree
and the picture-frame table where she had stacked the pictures in a
heap Mt.

Greylock, Alden called the mound-and where she had set up a Christmas
Village of miniature houses and shops and a church and a mirror pond
overlooked by Mt.  Greylock topped now by cotton tuft snowdrifts.  Aunt
Lily had said the components of the Christmas Village could be Little
Becky's own to keep, forever and ever.  At any rate, Aunt Lily had
said, Have it, then, when Little Becky yanked the first of the darling
little cottages up by its chimney from the bottom of the ornament box,
exclaiming with an eye watching her Great Aunt, I wish, how I wish,
this could be mine.

"Aunt Lily?  " Little Becky asked.  "Does the church go beside the
mirror pond or does the little red schoolhouse go there?  "

"Whichever you decide," Lily said.  She sat in the big parlor with her
library book maintaining a presence because she couldn't always remove
herself to the quiet and calm of her own room.  But she was not
participating, because then she might seem to be interfering in the
family's preparations.

"I'll put the pond in between them so they can share," Little Becky
announced magnanimously.  She was going to be nice to everyone as she
had resolved always to be should the day ever come when she was put in
charge.

Betsy sat cross-legged by the fire, patiently attaching hanging hooks
to the ornaments that had lost theirs or needed tangled thread loops to
be replaced as Little Becky bowled the unsatisfactory ornaments to her
across the carpet.  It seemed treacherous to Betsy to do very much more
to decorate a house that wasn't really home but she hoped that
contributing in a behind-the-scenes capacity allowed her to pull her
own weight without betraying her father, who had called last week to
tell her he had made plans to go skiing in Utah with old and reliable
friends who never spoke of Ginger and who never forgot to exclude her
from their drink orders ("Three white wines, please.").  Betsy knew it
would be unpleasant for the rest of the family not to seem to be
enjoying herself,

while it would feel wrong in her heart to enjoy herself truly.  This
was not a difficult trick to pull off, and she need not even pull the
trick off very well, for no one in the household paid enough attention
to her to notice the difference between a perfunctory performance and a
sincere one.  But if this were a real Christmas Eve at home, Betsy
would wear red tights and weave a silver ribbon through her braid.  She
would have sprayed all the household mirrors with borders of fake
frost, and recorded a few lines of "Joy to the World" on the telephone
answering machine.

She picked up a spun-glass candy cane which sounded broken inside when
she shook it.  Little Becky hovered above her, staring down at the
perfect part in her perfect cousin's perfect hair.  She thumped onto
her knees.  Her Christmas cape shed sequins and beads and cotton
batting shreds of snow.  She thrust a demanding hand in Betsy's face
and wriggled fingers which smelled of cookie chocolate and old ornament
dust.  Betsy was letting her down badly in the ornament hook
reattachment department, she wanted Betsy to know.

Alden sidestepped through the French door.  He had hooked it open with
his finger and closed it with his chin as he carried an armful of
firewood.

He stuffed the basket beside the hearth with split logs and he wondered
how the North Country Boutique Hearthwarmers were faring in the
bedecked drawing rooms of Manhattan.  His imagination lingered over a
tray of cocktails and he made his selections from a levitating
assortment of hors d'oeuvres and he heard himself utter a telling
remark as well-coiffed heads bent nearer to catch his every
pronouncement.

He sighed and helped himself to a stack of gingerbread men and tried a
little cup of the eggnog, the Golden kind from Hood's, which he thought
he and Becky had agreed was almost too rich.  He told Little Becky the
tree was shaping up very nicely although he wasn't looking at the tree,
but staring so intently into the fire he had made that the bright
flames burned a black hole into the center of his sight.  Little Becky
girdled the tree with a length of maroon cording she had found in a
bowl, lacing the cord from branch to branch.

"Look," she said.  "Look."

Ginger sat at the top of the stairs listening to them, then she sat on
the landing halfway down the stairs watching them below.  She waited
for someone to remember her and come in search of her to coax her to
lend her expertise and her gaiety to the scene, then, she descended, at
last, on her own.  She wore an ancestral pair of flannel pajamas and a
down vest and slipper socks.  She entered the big parlor and
shivered.

" Big ornaments on the lower branches and little ones on the top," she
remarked generally.

"What?  " asked Little Becky spinning round.  Her cape flared.

Ginger lowered herself onto the sofa, stretched out long, and propped
herself on an elbow and shook out the latest New Yorker she had carried
downstairs scrolled under her arm.  She coiled a hand up and behind her
head, having sought a soft pillow to no avail, her languid hand delving
beneath the sofa where she seemed to believe pillows were being kept
from her.

" What?  " asked Little Becky again.  The cape gave her courage.

"Nothing, darling," Becky said.  These little flare-ups were
exacerbated by the holidays when everyone expected to feel happy all
the time but somehow didn't, so they contrived to make themselves even
more wretched just to show whomever it was they blamed.  Becky had read
an article in Family Circle on family flare-ups.

"Oh, you're here, Lily," Ginger said, just noticing her aunt.  Lily
turned a page of her library book in reply.

"Fetch me one of those eggnogs, would you Betsy," Ginger said.  "Is
that nutmeg grated all over the top?  Well, try to get me some from
underneath."

"Yes, Mummy."  Betsy rose and approached the pitcher of eggnog
consideringly.

Arthur strode in, flashing his usual big expectant grin.  Phoebe, a
step behind, wore ornament earrings showing two Currier and Ives
scenes, Sleighing to Grandmother's House and Carving the Goose, which
everyone at the hospital had admired excessively.  They appreciated a
little effort, down at the hospital at this time of year.

"Do please have some goodies," Becky said, steering them toward the
cookie platter.  The sweets weren't moving very fast since she had
forbidden the boys and cut off Little Becky who had been overdoing.

Phoebe admired a florentine and Arthur, examining a pinwheel cookie,
remarked that chocolate wasn't the opposite of vanilla.  The true
opposite of chocolate was strawberry, and the real opposite of vanilla
was vinegar.

"That so?"  asked Alden.  "Is there a chart like one of those color
wheels at the paint store?  "

"Hey?  No, it's like, you know, the opposite of turkey is cotton
candy," Arthur clarified.

"Ah, I see," said Alden.  He glanced significantly at Little Becky who
thought he was making a face at her and she rushed to her Christmas
Village and prayed to become Thumbelina so she could live all by
herself in the Holly Cottage beside the Wishing Well within convenient
wishing distance.  She petitioned fiercely that she might shrink and
the townspeople figures spring to life and that she and they and the
village all be transported far far away from the picture-frame table
for otherwise her parents would just pluck her tiny protesting form
from the skating pond and place her in a rinsed-out instant-coffee jar
and race her to a doctor or, more likely in this case, to a
scientist.

"Surely the opposite of cotton candy is roast beef," Ginger spoke up.

"Do you think so?  " asked Phoebe.  "I think the opposite of roast beef
is tossed salad."

Lily turned another page in her library book and Harvey, who had
announced at breakfast that he was setting off on a major shopping
expedition (though no one had become too worked up over his statement)
returned, unencumbered by bundles other than a brown paper bag bulging
with something he was pleased to consult at intervals.  He sang, "The
heck with the halls and the boughs of holly" as he unwound his scarf
and drew off his suede gloves finger by finger, carefully, for the
cashmere lining was detaching.  He swerved into the big parlor, called
by the colored lights and chattering voices.  He hugged his brown paper
bag and he jogged Betsy's elbow as she poured eggnog, drop by inspected
drop, into a cut-glass cup.

"I don't know what all this holiday anguish is about.  I finished my
shopping in five minutes in one stop," he boasted.  "And none of you
will guess what I've bought all of you.  Well, I'll tell you all one
thing, one hint.  You're all receiving the same thing."

"Guess," Harvey commanded after a moment during which Arthur further
mentioned that the opposite of butterscotch had to be deviled ham.

"Oh, we want to be surprised," Becky said.  "Have a treat.  Join the
tree-trimming party."  She neatened the ranks of the van ille batons
and passed the platter of cookies beneath his nose.

"No thank you, dear," Harvey said.  "I can't eat another bite.  I've
just had panettone at Betty Florio's and an almond-filled coffee cake
at Mary Swenson's, and Penny Nicholls made one of those
looks-like-aChristmas-tree-shape-with-green-frosting cakes, and I have
Sue Pace's Napoleon secretly in my pocket because I was uncomfortable
by the time I reached her unit, she's on the second floor, and I didn't
want to mention Betty or Mary or Penny to her, though they'll compare
notes later on in the Game Room-they can't miss their bridge, not even
on Christmas Eve."  Harvey had lately taken to thinking out loud.  "I'm
offering the Napoleon now."  He reached for his cardigan pocket.

"Oh dear," said Becky.  "I'm not having much luck with my baking."

"Boys," Alden called.  "Come try some of your mother's delicious
baking."

"Can't," Brooks, or Rollins, bellowed back.  "Ma said we can't eat if
we don't help."

"Yes, I did say that actually," Becky admitted.

"Hark at them," Harvey said.  "They'd rather go hungry than make an
effort."

"They have graham crackers and salsa under the afghan," Little Becky
reported.

"Just come and apply a little tinsel, boys.  Or at least hang up your
personal baby name silver ornaments.  Make a symbolic effort," Alden
called.

"Ma-ha, it's my tree.  They'll wreck it, Aunt Lily," Little Becky
appealed.

Lily shut her library book and closed her eyes, feigning sleep,
watching them through her eyelashes.  At her age, it could not be
construed as unforgivably rude to drift off within the family circle.
Indeed, in her youth, the children would have been hushed and
instructed to tiptoe away and finish the decorating after the old
people had their rest.  Holiday celebrations had often been suspended
for elderly naps as baseball games are suspended for rain.  People were
disappointed but they understood.

"It's a family tree, so to speak," Becky said.  "Everyone who wants to
can take part pleasantly."

"Betsy, my sweet," Ginger said, glooming into the cup of eggnog Betsy
had just handed her.  "I'm afraid I must not have made myself clear
about my nutmeg issue."

When the front doorbell jangled they all stared at one another and
wondered who could be calling because no one was expecting a visitor.
They speculated who it could not possibly be-not Arthur's parents who
surely weren't mad enough to forsake Fiji (where they had last been
heard from) for Towne in winter, and Harvey had covered all his widows
on his cake-and-coffee crawl through Senior Village.  Becky's brother
and his wife, who lived outside of Boulder, had already sent a card and
a big Swiss Colony Fruit and Cheese and Salami Pyramid so their duty
was done.  "A girl for Glover?"  Alden asked.  "Nah," said Glover, he
'd taken care of all the girls.  Lily opened her eyes and said her
friends knew better than to intrude upon a family evening.

"Shall I go see?"  Betsy asked reasonably, and she picked a zigzag
route, avoiding displaced furniture and the reclining figures of Arthur
and Phoebe laughing all out of proportion as they bit the heads off
gingerbread men, and she sidestepped the boys who had tumbled into the
big parlor and were now pelting one another with angel hair, attempting
to stick angel hair on one another's heads so they could point and
squeal You 're an angel in high-pitched voices.

In the front hall, it occurred to Betsy that, of course, her father had
canceled his Utah ski trip and flown, instead, to Boston to be with her
and Ginger.  He must have realized how very wrong it was to permit the
estrangement to drag on for one day longer, and, finding himself at the
airport, he simply took one plane rather than another.  He'd have his
downhill skis with him, and he'd be wearing his peaked Tibetan cap with
the hangdog leather earflaps that Ginger so disliked and said made
Louis look like Deputy Dawg.  Betsy would have to snatch the cap from
her father's head before her mother spotted it and said something she
didn't really mean.  This critical reunion was going to have to be
carried off flawlessly.  Her parents were going to have to realize they
loved one another all over again in a heartbeat before each had time to
seize and defend another fixed position.  And Betsy, who had convinced
herself that her father stood on the other side of the front door and
that if she handled the next few minutes properly by the end of the
week she would be back in Kansas calling all her friends and saying,
"Hi, it's me.  I'm back, yes, really," threw open the wide door and
beamed her greatest smile upon Mr.  Oscarsson who was just raising a
fist to knock because, thus far, tugging on the dead-looking doorbell
pull had not roused anyone.

"Betsy," Oscar uttered accusingly, for as he had envisioned this scene
Ginger was supposed to come to the door and melt into his arms and they
would wander off together to a private dinner because Ginger doted on
dinners at little recherche hideaways.  Oscar had not thought the word
recherche in his imaginings but that was what he intended for Ginger's
sake.

Betsy was so shocked she forgot to stop smiling.

"Is your mother to home?"  Oscar asked and he stepped into the hallway,
for the early evening pressed rawly cold and the gunmetal-grey sky had
been spitting projectiles at him and he didn't think Betsy was going to
remember her manners anytime soon and invite him inside.  He flopped
his overfull garment bag on the deacon's bench as faux-brass buckles
scraped across polished wood.  He looked around with open curiosity,
not at the moment searching for Ginger (Betsy's presence assured hers)
but taking in the rise of the staircase and the rich variety of the
scattered carpets upon which, to give him credit, he did not step but
stepped around in his big wet traveling overshoes.

Betsy retreated a backward lurch to each of Oscar's forward steps, and
then she turned and ran up the stairs clinging to the banister and
leaning into the curve of the staircase so that she seemed to spiral up
and up through the ceiling as if being borne away by a cyclone.  Oscar
thought that Betsy was being awfully hard on such an old house.  Such
clap boarding as he had been able to see by the light of a carriage
lamp struck him as blistering and warping and here inside his nose
detected the smell of dry rot as a musty note below the interesting
aroma of spicy-buttery baking.

He had been left to discover Ginger on his own.  He followed the sound
of variously droning, complaining, and murmuring voices into the big
parlor.  Ginger spied him first for she too had thought of Louis and
been on guard.  She sat up as if stung, tipping her undrinkable eggnog
onto her down vest and into her lap.

"Oscar," she gasped, and she daubed at the eggnog with her New Yorker,
the pages of which were too glossy to be absorbent.

Becky threw Ginger a tangle of angel hair to mop herself with and she
told Little Becky to go to her room and advised the boys to return to
their televised basketball game.

"Game sucks," Brooks said.

"Game's over," Rollins said.  "By now."

"Why do I have to go to my room?"  Little Becky demanded.  She
passionately grasped a cardboard-and-glitter reindeer silhouette.

"Just for a while, go upstairs.  It's nothing^ oK done," Becky said.

Ginger decided now was not the time to work herself up to an outburst
over Becky's unnecessarily dire emphasis-nothingyow 've done for more
urgently, she had to invent a graceful introduction to explain Oscar.

"Alden?"  Becky asked helplessly, but Alden was staring at Oscar
attempting to construct a banishing speech for his sister's seducer
who, in the flesh, seemed only ruddy and genial and very, very
ordinary.  Alden quelled a sense of disappointment in the still
attractive and undeniably worldly and quite intelligent when she wasn't
being foolish Ginger, who, once having made up her mind to do wrong
surely could have done better for herself.

"Hey," Arthur spoke up pleasantly.

"Hey," echoed Phoebe less certainly.  She had paid more attention than
Arthur had to the household gossip, being sensitive to the local line
on paramours, which was a fluctuating one.

Harvey seemed to think Oscar was the UPS man working overtime and he
pulled out his wallet and counted several singles to tip him with, all
the while remarking what an excellent outfit UPS was.  He had been an
early fan and investor.

"Aunt Lily," Ginger announced firmly, leading Oscar to Lily's chair
side

"This is Oscar Oscarsson, a friend of ours from Kansas."  A friend of
the family, Oscar was-Ginger could think on her feet.

Lily opened her eyes and asked, "Is Louis parking the car, then?"  for
in her experience of Ginger's husband, he had always been off parking
car or running out to pick up an out-of-town newspaper or fetch a
gallon of ice cream after determining a consensus as to the flavor
though once he'd asked them all to vote secretly on folded scraps of
paper which he collected and then bought a pint of every flavor
requested, quite a breathtaking gesture, Lily had thought at the time,
and she had enjoyed her Frozen Pudding which never was the winning
flavor in a dessert democracy.  Then again, Louis might be viewed as
having tried too hard.  Perhaps that had been the problem with Louis.

"Louis?  " Oscar muttered at Ginger, who hushed him.

"No, no, Aunt Lily, Louis wasn't able to come out.  Oscar happened to
find himself in the area," Ginger said airily now.

"Is his wife parking the car, then?  " Lily asked.

"No, Oscar doesn't have a wife, Auntie," Ginger explained.  "He is a
lonely bachelor."

"I say," Alden spoke up, as Becky prodded him.  "I mean to say."

"I see," sighed Lily with nothing more to ask for she had become inured
to people showing up and moving into her house for no good reason even
when they clogged her ears with their reasons.  " I don't suppose

Andy will mind if we put Mr."  Mr."  your guest, in his room for a day
or two at most?  " Lily craftily mentioned a time frame.  "Do you think
Andy would mind?  Betsy?  " Lily asked, for Betsy seemed to be the
person to consult for a reading on Andy's likely thoughts since she was
doing that Christmas card assessment work for him, but the girl had
vanished.  She must already be putting fresh sheets on Andy's bed, Lily
decided.

"Perfect Auntie," Ginger said sweetly, although Oscar didn't feel he
was too keen on having to share with this Andy fellow, whoever he was.
This doubling up of the bedroom facilities was going to interfere with
certain plans he had formulated for later that night, certain daring
plans, Oscar realized now that he had seen what a houseful of Hills he
would have to contend with.

"Oscar, you must want to freshen up," Ginger added.  "I'll show you the
way."

Oscar, who seemed not to know where to put his big calloused hands
although they kept gravitating to the vicinity of Ginger's waist, said
yes, he could do with some freshening up, and Ginger took him away
before he could begin to describe how very un fresh he felt after his
long day's exertions just getting here.

"So that was Ginger's fancy man," declared Harvey, snapping his fingers
a beat behind.

"He doesn't look very fancy to me," Little Becky argued back.

AFTER A SIMPLE SUPPER (tomato soup, tuna sandwiches, celery sticks, and
the Swiss Colony Pyramid opened and on offer to pep up the menu) Oscar
had volunteered to put the dishes in the dishwasher.  He heard himself
offering to buy Miss Hill a dishwasher when she told him she did not
possess one.

Miss Hill had said, "No, thank you.  That won't be necessary," and
Oscar was relieved for by then he had become carried away trying to
make himself agreeable.  He had brought a clattering stack of soup
plates into the kitchen.  Receiving them, Miss Hill had winced-at the
stacking and at the clattering, for they were using the Spode that
evening.

Ginger had quietly come down the back stairs and reset the table, Becky
having only rated the occasion as one worthy of the ovenproof
Pfaltzgraff although her choice was a reflection of the meal already
planned and not a judgment of Oscar.  Still, if the matter were ever to
be argued, Ginger might well ask why Becky hadn't rated Oscar worthy of
an emergency boeuf bourguignon from the freezer chest, and she could
have thrown together one of her Caesar salads and hurried a batch of
popovers into the oven and then set the table with the Spode instead of
the Pfaltzgraff, to which Becky's reply would have been, I didn't want
to confuse the poor man with extra forks and the ringer bowls.  As it
was, tomato soup and tuna on Spode had confused the Hills.

Not necessary?  Oscar wondered what the old woman had meant when she
told him his impulsively offered gift was not necessary?  Not necessary
because the family was prepared to like him for himself, or not
necessary because nothing he could do would ever make him acceptable to
them?  Or was not necessary just a favorite formula hereabouts, for he
noticed the kitchen also lacked a garbage disposal, an automatic ice
maker in the refrigerator door, and a trash compactor, which were not
particularly necessary but were handy to have, nevertheless.  It
occurred to Oscar that a high road was being taken all around and about
him.  When Miss Hill turned her back to him, rinsing dishes by hand at
her kitchen sink, he read the cork notice board hanging on the wall as
if searching for further clues-REMEMBER!  Today's KROC Christmas

Winning Word is JOLLY HOLLY ... BARK LIKE A REINDEER when MUS-98 calls
between one and three p.m."  it is for to win a NEW SNOWMOBILE!  Oscar
pictured the entire Hill family hightailing their way up and over the
high road in an absurdly overloaded snowmobile.

Throughout supper, Oscar had felt their narrowed and similar eyes
watching him, then flickering away as he turned to attempt a pleasant
word.  He had plucked a fine red pomegranate from the epergne-they
called the towering fruit-piled contraption in the center of the table
an epergne-and he had caused all of the plums and apples and tangerines
and sprigs of fir to slump and slide onto the tablecloth.  The family,
with their narrowed and similar eyes, had watched the pomegranates roll
to a stop against the feet of their water glasses and the tangerines
thud into the celery dish and the apples drop over the edge of the
table, and they had just nudged the pomegranates away as they picked up
their water glasses and reached beneath the tangerines for celery
sticks with a lack of reaction which Oscar suspected was less polite
than resigned-his feelings were not being spared, rather, they were not
being incited any further.  And then he had managed to alienate
Ginger's brother by referring to Alden's projected raspberry plantation
as a kitchen garden, and he had dismissed soft fruits as being too
temperamental a crop to be seriously considered by anyone rooted in
rural reality.  Then, when Alden had asked, "What about specializing in
designer greens-escarole, and endive, and varietal lettuces?"  Oscar
had asked, "What are those when they're at home?"  After which,
responding to Mr.  Harvey Hill's establishment air, to the way he had
snorted at the news contained in his evening paper and wore a tie and
jacket at home, at ease in his lounger chair, Oscar had asked Ginger's
distinguished uncle whether he was privileged to know any Kennedys and
whether he could recommend any likely watering holes where Oscar could
view them respectfully from a distance during his time in
Massachusetts.  Oscar pried his sandwich apart and picked out the
chopped gherkins as Harvey sputtered and thrashed a wand of celery.

"Hold your breath and count to ten, sir," Oscar advised, but even
Little

Becky appreciated that Oscar's assumption of hiccups was a grave
misdiagnosis.  Uncle Harvey wasn't hiccuping.  He was going mental with
fury.

Ginger had been no help to him although at first she seemed to have
decided to rise to the challenge of launching Oscar.  She had changed
into her long black velvet skirt and an ice-blue quilted satin jacket
and her crystal jewelry with the tricky clasps-dressed to preside and
persuade.

Yes, her initial impulse had been to apply every effort but as she was
making her entrance into the dining room (delayed by an encounter with
Betsy outside the bathroom door that had left her quivering at the
girl's intransigence) she had noticed how Oscar's brown-shirted back
spread wider than the back of Lily's William and Mary style dining room
side chair in which he was already sitting and musing, as if his
decision mattered, over foil-wrapped gift pyramid selection wedges of
Muenster and Colby and Cheddar cheeses.  Stuffed crescents of Oscar's
brown shirt obtruded between and beyond the vertical rails and turned
supports of the chair and Ginger, when she consulted her feelings about
this, experienced no stab of compassion for the large awkward man
perched on the too fragile chair so very far from his prairie home on
Christmas Eve.  The thought came to Ginger then, that Oscar might not
do, that he might not do after all.

"Does Betsy know dinner is served?  " Lily had asked her.

"Oh, yes, Betsy," Ginger recalled.  "She's going to babysit at the
Snowdons'."

"Tonight?  But that's a shame, having to go out tonight of all nights,"
Becky said.

"She says they want her to stay over and help out during the day
tomorrow as well," Ginger announced calmly.

"But that's not right," Becky said.

"Apparently Martha Stewart suggested some such hiring-a-helper scheme
in one of her books.  Betsy says she's going to fold discarded wrapping
paper and untangle ribbons and help out with a new pet turtle and
prepare their breakfasts while the Snowdon family enjoys being a family
together," Ginger explained.

"Smart gal, that Martha Stewart," Harvey said.  "Pretty gal, too.  Know
people who know her, in Westport.  No flies on her.  Well, there
wouldn't be, would there, in Westport.  They spray.  They spray
something that interferes with the flies' reproductive cycles, though I
think I'd rather be killed outright if I had to make a choice."  "Gal
with some funny ideas about hired help, anyway," Alden said.  "How can
you let Betsy go out to work on Christmas Eve, Ginger?  "

"Oh, but Betsy's heart is set," Ginger said.

BETSY LEFT HER SAMSONITE overnight case at the top of the stairs.  Mr.
Snowdon would be coming for her on his way back from the
International

Pet Village where they had been holding the turtle Mrs.  Snowdon had
reserved.  Mr.  Snowdon hoped the turtle would come with operating
instructions-turtles lived in such a variety of habitats, in deserts,
in swamps, in Borneo, and he had no idea which sort of turtle his wife
had liked the looks of in the tank.  Mr.  Snowdon had mentioned all
this when Betsy called to say she thought she could come over to help
out after all.  He had not asked Betsy why she had changed her mind. He
had asked Betsy whether she knew what turtles ate.  Ought he to pick up
hamburger, acanthus leaves, slugs?

Betsy listened down the stairwell for the family's whereabouts.  They
had mustered in the dining room.  Their chairs scraped, their cutlery
clipped, their voices spoke back and forth, Oscar's inquiring tones
followed by variously quelling replies and silences until Oscar
inquired again about something else.  They would keep at that game for
hours, Betsy knew, dishing it out and dining on indefinitely.

She walked softly, swiftly, across the upper hall and entered Andy's
room.  Oscar had left the bedside lamp burning-how thoughtless of Aunt
Lily's expensive and delicate electricity-and he had dumped his garment
bag across Andy's floor, the zipper yanked apart, a tangle of shirt
arms punching their way out into the air.  Betsy sniffed Oscar's
alcoholic aftershave.  She knew its synthetic musk undertones well-she
had detected the scent before on late afternoons at home when her
mother was nowhere to be found and then, suddenly, the musk note, a
heavy sigh, the click of a bottle against a glass signaled her mother
was present again.

Betsy had to steel herself to begin to search among Oscar's terrible
belongings.  She knelt reluctantly on the floor beside his aspr awl
garment bag.  She stood abruptly.  Oscar wouldn't have packed a
photograph of himself, would he?

She wondered hopelessly whether some other emblem of Oscar would serve
as well, a strand of his hair, perhaps?  She moved to the bureau top.
She passed over his ticking wristwatch, his return American Airlines
ticket envelope, a stub of breath gum, a furl of Kleenex lifted from
the box in the bathroom, his ancient bent toothbrush, an open
penknife.

Oscar's hairbrush lay among the folds of the mussed bureau scarf.
Impaled on its bristles were clumps of his rust-colored hair.  Betsy
spotted his wallet as well.  Of course-she snatched it and fumbled
through its private contents, dismissing his blood donor's card, a
plastic-covered 23rd Psalm, his Visa, Shell, and Discover cards.
There-she came upon a square of over lit face, his blunt chin thrust
forward, his rusty hair tufted behind his ears in a last-ditch effort
to smarten up.

But Betsy's hand hesitated.  Could she bring herself to take his
driver's license, which seemed to her to mark an impropitious affront
to the issuing state of Kansas?  She must remain on excellent and
honorable terms with Kansas.  Nothing must sully her eventual,
longed-for return there.

What else was there that might be of use?  She flurried the Kleenex,
she shook the American Airlines envelope, and a snapshot of her mother
slid onto the bureau top.  Ginger stood beside the butterfly bush
outside the dining room window at home.  Ginger was shading her eyes
and pointing at the buddleia, which was the true subject of the photo.
Ginger's right leg was a blur, already on its way out of the picture.

Betsy's heart hardened.  She stared at the photograph, which was such a
very wrong family photograph for Oscar to possess, for Oscar to have
borne across the country and carried over the threshold of the faraway
house to which Ginger had fled, and for Oscar to be holding in abeyance
as documentary evidence to produce while asserting his rights should
the need arise.  Unforgivable, was Betsy's verdict.

So a charged Betsy lifted Oscar's license from his wallet and because
she meant business, she helped herself to a clump of his rusty hair
even if a hair specimen were to tip the balance and worsen the spell.
She didn't care.

Spell, the article said, and not a curse, according to the two-inch
square of filler item she had clipped from the Midwest Shoppers' News
and Job Mart that had been tucked under the wiper blades of her
mother's car in a parking lot one autumn day two years ago.  The brief
article described an obeah rite performed to make someone disappear
forever from one's life.  Two years ago, when Oscar had not even been a
storm cloud on the horizon, Betsy had clipped and saved the small
square of newsprint at the bottom of the old Mozart chocolate box that
contained other intriguing oddments-found feathers, a silver dollar
from the year she was born, Apache arrowheads.  The clipping had rubbed
and rustled among the oddments and its last lines had crumbled away to
dust and grit.  Betsy could not recall what the last lines cautioned or
counseled but she responded to the very mysteriousness of the
appearance-and incipient disappearance-of the message, which could only
have been ordained.

She flew lightly down the back stairs, skipping the next-but-one step
from the bottom that twanged underfoot when stepped upon.  The kitchen
was clear.  They were still engaged in the dining room.  At the moment
(she heard through the serving hatch) they were trying to decide
whether the gift-box salami had turned funny in transit, which should
keep them occupied, particularly if the salami really was funny.  They
would have to work out how funny and then compose a suitable thank you
note to Hap and Rosemary out in Colorado without letting on how
disappointing the Gift Pyramid had been.  Harvey thought they should be
told the truth.  Becky said no, she would rather not know if she were
them.  Oscar, whose business it was not, said he would report directly
to the Swiss Colony and complain and maybe get a free replacement
assortment in apology.  Oh no, that wouldn't be right, said Harvey.

Betsy opened the cupboard above the stove and reached high for the
large red box of kosher salt that was always kept there because no one
had had any use for kosher salt for years.  She rapidly descended the
cellar stairs.  She twisted on the hanging lightbulb otherwise left
loose in its socket, the light fixture suspended just where anyone
coming down the stairs into the black cellar would walk right into it
and so locate it.  Betsy rubbed her forehead, not hurt but alerted by
the thwack and rebounding thwack.  The cellar, dimly alight now, was
full of the large rumbling furnace and elephant-grey furnace pipes
seeping warmth and condensation.

Some window screens were stacked, empty paint cans were piled, and a
washer and dryer sat on a platform in the driest corner.  The cellar
was a two-hundred-year-old hole in the ground.

There was a lower-ceilinged chamber leading off the cellar proper,
dirt-floored and entered through an opening covered by a canvas flap.
Here they swept the water that overflowed from the washing machine and
it was not a place where anyone was inclined to linger.  Indeed, the
cellar annex was the only corner of the house where one might leave
some private piece of hocus-pocus undisturbed, as prescribed.

If all this weren't so unpleasant, the rite probably wouldn't work,
Betsy was still enough of a Protestant to remind herself as she
crouched and duck walked under the flap.  (She had to protect her pale
corduroy knees from the dirt and damp.) Earlier in the evening, she had
made some preparations, stashing a candle and a book of matches behind
the flap.  She lit the candle.  The article hadn't called for
candlelight but it seemed appropriately occult and atmospheric;
besides, there was no other source of light.  She had also stowed the
long cardboard tube in which the calendar she had bought her mother had
come (Chateaux of the Loire 1990) and which was resealable at either
end with plastic inserts.  She dropped Oscar's license into the tube
and shook down the strands of his hair and she pried up the pouring
spout of the box of salt and tilted it over the tube.  She shook the
salt box.  She rapped its bottom.

Nothing emerged.  She hit the box harder and hurt her hand.  The
ancient salt had fused into a brick.  She raised her candle and cast
about for a cudgel.  She spied a discarded awl, its wooden handle
cracked and splintering.  She ripped the cardboard covering from the
block of salt and began to strike and strike with the awl.  Chunks flew
off the block.  She gathered and stuffed the pieces and bits down the
tube until the tube was filled to the top.  She slammed on the plastic
insert and then, as the rite dictated, she had to set the salt-covered
photograph of Oscar in a place where it would never, ever, be
disturbed.

She had already decided upon the spot where she would stow her fetish.
The stone foundation wall met the joists of the floor above, forming a
shelf unseeable in the dark and barely visible by the shadowy leaps and
falls of uneasy candlelight.  As she set the tube upon the ledge, it
seemed to leap of its own accord from her hand into a space behind the
wall where it wedged, unreachable and presumably secure forever.  If
she ever had second thoughts, she could never now retrieve the charm.

So, the deed was irrevocable, as if the spell were already working,
taking itself out of her hands snatched by unseen hands.  And Betsy was
having second thoughts about the hair which, for all she knew, upped
the ante curse-wise (no, not curse, she'd cast a spell}.  She supposed
she ought to make her wishes entirely clear, that she only wanted Mr.
Oscarsson to disappear from their lives absolutely and for all time
although of course she didn't mean any harm, any real harm, to come to
him.  He wasn't supposed to die.  In fact, she hoped he wouldn't die
for the next year or two at least.  Otherwise, she would have to feel
responsible.

Knowing herself, Betsy would feel obliged to confess and to atone which
would interfere with her plans for her further education if she had to
drop out of school and join some sort of youth service brigade and live
in the inner city and scrape gang graffiti from municipal walls until
her own slate was declared relatively clean again.

Perhaps, Betsy thought, she should pray, or petition, for the specific
result she desired from the spell.  She knelt upon pieces of the
torn-off salt box.  Cold damp seeped through to her pale, corduroy
knees.  She didn't want the odd little obeah god, whom she assumed she
had summoned, rattling around in her thoughts, some alien demi-devilish
imp prying and suggesting inappropriately in her inner ear, so she
spoke aloud, "I would appreciate it if you could arrange for this man,
for Mr.  Oscarsson, to leave us alone.  To just go off and live his own
life and let us be, just as if he'd never been.  Thank you very much.
And with thy spirit, Amen," she added like the good Episcopalian that
she was.

BETSY, PINKER IN THE FACE than usual, was sitting on the deacon's bench
in the front hall alert and erect, her ankles crossed beside her neat
little overnight bag, much like a young governess fresh out of the
orphanage in an English novel waiting, just waiting, for the next
chapter to begin, when Mr.  Snowdon came to the door.  No one else
heard him arrive for he had left his noisy sports car halfway down the
driveway because of the ruts and rocks and icy patches he didn't dare
take on with his low undercarriage.  He was in a hurry, however.  He
wasn't sure how long the turtle would last in the cold for it seemed a
particularly luckless turtle to him.  It carried the aura of the last
turtle left in the tank after all the more desirable turtles, the
glamour turtles, had been selected by pet seekers with more on the ball
than his wife.

The front door swung open at his knock in a silently gliding manner
that struck him as being rather enchanted.  He sighed inwardly and
yearned toward the Hills' dining room where voices were rising and
falling.  He smelled spicy baking and fresh-cut fir boughs and hardwood
fires.  He wondered if Miss Hill would be offended if he made an offer
on the amazing famille rose punch bowl sitting, at considerable risk
from passing elbows, on a tipsy bamboo table and, at that moment, he
suffered an insight into his own great thirst for antiques.  He could
stuff his reproduction Federalist-style house on Governor Bradford
Circle with all of Miss Hill's vases and bowls and tables and lowboys
and his house would never smell of spicy baking and his dining room
would never resound with a vigorous and far-reaching discussion
swinging he listened-from the pyramids to the Swiss.

Betsy lifted on her parka and knotted a challis scarf over her head and
around her shoulders.

"Are you really sure you want to leave all this?  " Mr.  Snowdon asked.
He gestured toward the holly and ivy twined with silvery ribbons
threaded through the balustrade all the way up to the staircase
landing.

"Yes," said Betsy shortly.

"Well, bye," she called, not very loudly, but her mother must have been
listening all the while on the mother/daughter frequency.

"Bye darling," she called back.  "Have a wonderful time."

"Yes.  I will," Betsy answered bleakly.  She glanced worriedly at the
floor.  She peered as if she were seeing through the floor before
shaking off a thought.

"She'll have a wonderful time," Ginger had informed everyone around the
table.  "She has such independent urges these days, I can only be
mindful not to clip her wings."

So that's how it's going to be, thought Lily, thought Harvey, thought
Becky, thought Alden.  We're going to pretend that everything is just
fine.  Nevertheless, nothing could be decided and resolved and made
right tonight, and Ginger's version of events was one they were willing
to accept.  " " "Spect Santy Claus will find Betsy anywhere," Harvey
said lightly.

OSCAR REMAINED ON his best behavior, as did Ginger.  She scarcely knew
him or herself, for that matter, as they met once again beneath Lily's
complicated roof where, in their variant guises, they were not really
taking to one another to be perfectly frank.

For Ginger did not shy from frankness.  Her frankness was one of the
traits she admired about herself, her willingness to face inconvenient
truths, preferably about other people, of course; still, it could be
invigorating to be hoist on one's own petard.  (Ginger mistakenly took
this to be a nautical term involving sails and rigging and she pictured
herself bravely breasting the azure ocean waves like a magnificent
carved figurehead.) So, with a surge of honest energy, she almost
eagerly admitted to herself that she had never cared for Oscar's
clothes, his double knit

Sansabelt slacks, his Ban-Ion shirts banded with wide and bright
horizontal stripes.  He possessed a sports jacket with shoulder pads so
thrusting and shelf-like he could keep potted cyclamens on them, she
had always privately thought; she may even have mentioned this
possibility to Oscar playfully.  Perhaps Oscar's regrettable dress
sense was why she had always been in such a hurry to remove his
clothes, Ginger mused, enlightened.

Oh, how human she was proving to be after all, so fallibly, funnily
human.

Ginger hid her smile behind her hand.  The evening had become one of
those awkward evenings when they all sat with nothing much to say and
were reduced to asking, Why are you smiling?  What, was I smiling?
Well, I can't really say.  Oh, I thought perhaps something was funny.
I'd like to hear if it's something funny that we can all appreciate.

Ginger tucked her legs beneath an afghan as she lay upon the sofa in
the big parlor where they had adjourned at Lily's suggestion after the
supper dishes had been put away.  Lily had supposed they should make a
point of enjoying the Christmas decorations since they had gone to the
bother of putting them up and they had all, Ginger and Alden, the boys,
the Beckys, Arthur, Phoebe, Lily, Harvey, and Oscar, drifted in and
sat, arranged on chairs and the rugs, consciously watching the tree as
if they expected it to perform for them.  Little Becky gloomed above
her Christmas

Village, which was now failing to beguile her.  She had half hoped
interesting developments would occur on their own up and down the
pebble-grey linoleum strip lane of the village's Main Street, but the
inhabitants lolled where she had set them down in tableaux which failed
to evolve.

Oscar, for his part, was slowly coming to the conclusion that he had
never really cared for Ginger's exacting and pronouncing conversation.
For Ginger was, at present, whimsically yet obstinately instructing
Little

Becky to rehang certain ornaments, declaring that the reindeer didn't
like being next to the Three Bears-he was afraid they would eat him and
the Sugarplum Fairy didn't care to share a branch with a Santa's Elf
because elves were antagonistic to fairies.

"How do you know?  " Little Becky demanded warily as if she was afraid
her aunt really might possess some highly unlikely inside
information.

"Oh, that's common knowledge in pixie circles," Ginger said.

It suddenly became clear to Oscar why he had always been in such a rush
to silence Ginger's questions and avowals with deep and serious and
otherwise-expressing kisses.  It was a pity he could not indulge in
preemptive lovemaking at the moment but he was buoyed by this useful
insight into his Ginger strategy.  Theretofore, he had just been
winging his responses instinctively but now he was in possession of a
sound and comprehensible reason.  He was reminded how correct he had
been to plant winter rye a season before the Department of Agriculture
issued an advisory advocating that very rotation.  He had been guided
by the same sensibility then, by men's intuition, he had men's
intuition, that's what he had.

Alden, sitting back in the doily-draped wing chair, remarked that pixie
circles sounded like a breakfast cereal, and Becky speculated what
they'd be like-pink and white and round, of course, but how could one
reproduce the essence of the flavor of dew?

"You just make them real sweet and tell people that's how dew tastes,"
Glover said roughly.  If anyone put up with a stupider family, he
didn't want to hear about it.  He snorted when his father remarked what
a shrewd observation he had made about the gullibility of consumers.
Sure I'm shrewd, Glover thought.  Who wouldn't be shrewd, in this
crowd?

LATER, AFTER ALDEN and Becky and Little Becky and Phoebe and Lily
returned from the midnight service at All Saints' and Lily nudged down
the thermostat and they splashed through their quick wash-ups in the
bathroom and called back and forth, Good night and Merry Christmas (for
by now it was Christmas), and padded down the hall or up the attic
stairs to bed, Ginger completed her own eventful, creaking, crooked
walk across the wide, dark hallway.  She cracked open Oscar's bedroom
door as the hinges lamented, inch by inch.  She entered and traversed
the room, stumbling against Oscar's flung-down garment bag.  Really, he
ought to have made sure her way was clear but he was hopeless.  She had
to think of everything.  But she put that thought aside for she wasn't
really thinking at the moment.  She lifted an edge of woolen blanket
and slid into bed beside Oscar.  He rolled over in his massive,
grumbling sleepiness and awoke at once.

"Rotten mattress," he muttered thickly.  "Won't do my back any good.
I'll have to wear the brace again after tonight.  Honey."

"I have only come to talk to you," Ginger said, "in quiet private."

"Of course you have," Oscar said.  "Quiet private."  He leaned
contentedly into the idea of quiet private.

They lay entwined, recalling all the other times they had lain entwined
like this upon the flatter beds they had known in Kansas.  Ginger had
kept count of their afternoons together.  Oscar had kept the
complimentary coffee packets their hotel chain of choice provided.
Ginger could not have brought a packet home without having to tell the
tale of how she had come by it and to remember her tale, which she
would have spun in too much detail as she kept talking to keep Louis
from getting a word in.

"Why did you come here?"  Ginger asked, prepared even now, despite
herself, to be convinced by a striking reply.

"Well, you know, I figured it out that you'd run away so's I'd run
along after you," Oscar told her.

"No," said Ginger, slowly.  "I don't think that's what I wanted."  For
she had not run away.  Every step of the way here had been a struggle
onward.  Every instinct she possessed pressed to drag her back.  A
word, the merest word might have stopped her.

"Still, I guess you needed time to yourself, and now you've had six
months to think on things," Oscar allowed.

"Yes, it has been six months.  So why did you take six months to come
after me if you thought you were supposed to come running?  " Ginger
asked.

"I had to figure out what you wanted," Oscar said.  "You are not very
easy to read.  You're like a mystery, or a thriller, or a romantic
book."

"Now you're just concocting justifications, first for not coming and
then for coming," Ginger charged.  "You have no idea why you're
here."

"There wasn't any concocting," Oscar said.  "I'm not some clever
concoct or No, my course of action just came to me.  I realized what I
was meant to do.  My course was there to be realized once I wised up
enough to see it."

"Like the discovery of gravity?"  Ginger suggested.  "Which was really
only a recognition of a fact, not a discovery."

"What?  Yes, like gravity, just like gravity, so don't fight gravity,"
Oscar spoke through her tumbled hair, across her shuttered eyes, into
her tender mouth.

"But my entire life has become a crusade against gravity," Ginger
protested, not very coherently.  Nevertheless, she ticked a mental note
to remember her avowal for her book.  She would write a chapter
protesting all this falling, all this falling for and falling into and
falling from, for where did that ever leave one but finally, fallen
down?

"Honey?  " Oscar asked eventually.  "When will your divorce be final?
Because we've got to stop meeting like this."  He chuckled and his big
chest rumbled and the bedsprings rasped un rhythmically beneath his
heaving weight.  "We have got to make plans," Oscar said.

Ginger's eyes flew apart and snapped shut again.  He felt the rapid up
and down scratch of her lashes against his sheltering arm.  She feigned
sleep although not convincingly.  Her breaths were spaced raggedly and
she lay rigid within his embrace, so unlike her usual uncoiled and
unguarded languor when, it seemed to Oscar, Ginger melted and melded
into the mattress and metamorphosed into a kind of upholstered bolster
of a woman against whom he reposed in perfect peace.  Now, as she
seemed poised to spring from his side, he held her all the harder and
Ginger fell limp and still as a trapped thing, not quiet but latent.
Oscar had always thought of this luxuriating stretch of time lying
beside Ginger as afterward, the calm spell that followed the near clash
of their coming together, and before the rumpled rush of their parting
when Ginger cried, No, no, no, at the time told on Oscar's watch face
and she cursed the evil, evil man who had invented pantyhose.

Afterward, the word itself had become so strongly and particularly
identified with lying beside Ginger in this not unhappy yet not un
shadowed dream state that Oscar had found himself burning turkey-wattle
red and stammering his reply when a buddy, spying him at the Farmers'
Federation Annual Meeting, had hollered across the conference room,
Let's us get together for a beer, afterwards.  Then, the simple act of
having a beer had turned treacherous.  The presence of a pale skin-pink
curving sofa in the hotel lobby had flustered Oscar.  He had not been
able to speak of threatened wheat subsidy cuts intelligently.  He had
stared into the grain of the wood of the bar counter and flinched when
a pretty voice placed an order for a Pink Lady and a ginger ale.  No,
Oscar was no good at all at suppressing an inconvenient conscience and
evidently the universe, or at least the local universe in the vicinity
of Kansas City, had been informed of his sins and was not about to let
him forget, even for the duration of a casual Red Rock and a fistful of
the kind of corn chips he liked, that he was indeed a fallen
individual.

But when she had first approached him-and she had approached him-Ginger
had spoken fluently, promising him that nothing of what they
contemplated would be wrong if neither of them believed they were doing
wrong, a construction he had accepted without poking and prodding the
foundation for weak points.  He would not have bought a portable silo
with less soul-searching.  They were caught in the final throes of
Ginger's husband's failing campaign for the State Senate.  Oscar, a
party workhorse, dispatched volunteers and canvassers down at the
dispirited headquarters, volunteers and canvassers who, at that late,
lost hour seldom showed up to be sent out on hopeless forays among the
unsympathetic electorate.  Oscar had had time on his hands.  Ginger sat
on the edge of his desk and launched i LIKE LOUIS buttons into the air
like tiddlywinks.  She wore an off-the-shoulder scarlet gown.  She and
Louis had attended a Meet the Candidate Night at the Elks' Lodge.
Ginger had been ill-advised in her choice of costume, for the event
featured a pig roast and a square dance.  (But she'd known that, of
course she 'd known.)

As she had sat on Oscar's desk, her scarlet lips had moved
convincingly, speaking round words of persuasion, her sparkly-lidded
eyes had locked his eyes in a soul-to-soul searching stare, and they
had agreed upon an hour and a place to meet again.  Louis, who was
being interviewed for a weekly paper handed out free at grocery stores,
waved at Ginger from across the room.  Louis had winked and shrugged
and tapped his watch and subsequently been labeled as unresponsive and
arrogant and bored and cold in the ensuing article written by an
obvious admirer of his opponent.

Ginger had read aloud from this unflattering profile of Louis on the
occasion of her second rendezvous with Oscar.  She had read him a
rather lengthy excerpt from The Second Sex during their initial tryst,
and Oscar had observed that Ginger was using up disproportionate blocks
of their un abundant time together on all this reading.  Ginger had
flared at that.  Oscar explained himself further, "But I only want to
be with you, honey.  All these other folks make us seem like such a
crowd."  The folksiness of his folks.  Ginger marveled at what an
authentic specimen she had landed for herself and she flexed as Oscar
worked to mollify her.  She had declared herself placated, after a
while, and she left her self-reference books at home where she took out
her reading-aloud impulses on Louis.  She quizzed him on the contents
of selected passages and she was able to accuse him of never listening,
of being unresponsive and arrogant and bored and cold, as he failed her
set tests.

As Oscar rehearsed the story of their affair, he admitted his
involvement with Ginger marked quite the most alarming event of his
life.  But, he allowed, it was not necessarily a bad thing to be
alarmed.  He had been known to plunk down his five dollars for a movie
that looked like a roller coaster ride in the previews.  He maintained
that a flush of fear 4 scoured dangerous plaque from his heart valves.
(His own dad had I

dropped dead at fifty of a stroke.) Ginger had taken him out of him- I
self.  He used to fritter away his after-hours, feet up on the couch, a
bowl of Corn Chex balanced on his stomach, tilted toward his chin.  He
consulted the TV between catnaps.  The shape of his evenings did not
change with the advent of Ginger.  He distractedly consulted the TV
between catnaps (and sometimes dreamed confusedly, incompletely, that
the blond one of Cagney and Lacey was his girlfriend) but he waited now
for Ginger to call him.  She had promised to call every night, even if
she was only able to whisper, Can't talk.  "Night.  Indeed, so brief
were her messages that he found his chief consolation was the ringing,
at last, of the telephone at the wolf or the witching hour.  He had
taken to dropping his pencil into his pants cuff or his sandwich onto
his Week-AtA-Glance

Planner page when his business telephone jangled, although neither of
the girls in his office ever guessed he was waging an illicit and
energetic romance.  They decided between themselves his trouble must be
gambling debts because his only acknowledged susceptibility was for the
football pools.  Well, Mr.  Oscarsson could well afford a little hobby,
A his office girls agreed.

And now he had gone so far as to ask Ginger to marry him for, Oscar
supposed, that was what had just happened here.  Logically, to inquire
after the progress of her divorce and to allude to the irregularity of
their present position and to insist that they had plans to
consider-the human mind would naturally move along marriage lines, and
Ginger's mind had never been known not to leap onto any outgoing train
of j thought and ride it hard until the track ran out on the great salt
plains.  I; Mention the price per pound he was getting for his milk-fed
veal, and ; i Ginger would arrive at the sore subject of her own
weight.  Oscar could :

not have begun to trace the route she took to get there.  Nevertheless,
he jj only knew no allusion was ever lost on her and so he knew his
question U had been recognized for what it was and Ginger, being
Ginger, had thoroughly considered his offer and handed him his answer
which he, less natively astute than she but intensively tutored over
the past months, knew he would discover if he applied himself to the
problem she had posed him as her reply.

Besides, he had not asked her very elegantly.  He had not tendered the
sort of written-out-in-advance and practiced-before-the-mirror proposal
a woman could share-probe, parse-with her woman friends.  The defining
moment could not be reenacted in remembrance at anniversary dinners
without causing public scandal.  No, he would have to try her again. He
knew he could do better.  Come to think of it, he had put the critical
question with far more grace in the past, three times before kneeling
at the feet of two different women, neither of whom, however, had been
able to grant him the supreme compliment of ceding him her hand in
marriage.  Nevertheless, they had assured him how lovely it had been to
be asked the way he had asked.

LILY HAD GIVEN Alden the warm scarf and Becky a pair of sharp, well
balanced scissors.

"Just what we needed," Alden said, lying on the big parlor sofa, his
hands folded over his uncomfortably full stomach, taking time out in
the lull of midafternoon Christmas Day, to marvel anew at a world in
which one widowed lady had baked a Devil's Food cake for Harvey while a
second lady had risen to Angel Food.  Alden had just partaken of a
slice of each with a glass of milk, almost reverently sampling as if he
were reinventing Holy Communion, but nothing very sublime had come of
his experiment except a new taste for the cakes in conjunction.

"Lily gave us things we were always borrowing from her," Becky said,
glancing up from the cookbook Ginger had chosen for her, Chicken
Again?-How to Make the Old Stand-By Stand Out.1."  and which she had
inscribed, Hopefully these ideas will be helpful.  Helpfully these
ideas will be hopeful, Becky had amended the message.

"Then we should have borrowed better stuff," Brooks or Rollins said.
They had received dictionaries in which they had looked up jackanapes,
one of Uncle Harvey's usual words for them which had turned out to mean
more or less what they thought it did.

Brooks and Rollins, rather pleased with themselves, had given everyone
videos which they had reproduced from rental tapes using the
household's two VCRs.  They had selected, with much thought and
discussion, appropriate titles-The Longest Day for Uncle Harvey, Little
Women for Little Becky, Bananas for Arthur and Phoebe-and they had
composed and printed very professionally on their desktop publishing
system slick and descriptive labels.  Alden said his bootleg copy of
Network looked uncannily professionally done which he'd meant nicely if
not a bit worriedly.

Oscar had given Ginger a DeLuxe Heating Pad.  The box it came in was of
a size and shape suitable for a silk blouse or a cashmere sweater.
Ginger, sitting cross-legged beside the tree, delving and taking it
upon herself to distribute all the gifts, had exclaimed when she saw
her own name inscribed upon the tag.  There were so many gifts for
Alden's children, and Lily was also doing very well for herself, while
Ginger had been quietly sliding Betsy's presents beneath the bullion
fringe of the picture frame table's long skirt.

"What can this be for me?"  Ginger had asked, fingers crossed for
cashmere, as she pulled off the pretty, professionally tied ribbons and
wrapping.  "From Oscar," she announced.

"Oh," she uttered on a falling note.

All eyes veered from Ginger and regarded Oscar.

"Well, you wrote me how cold your bed seemed these days," Oscar
explained, proud of himself for having taken her hint.

Becky had been obliged to speak suddenly into the silence.  "Who's for
French toast?  " she asked, rising and heading for the kitchen before
she had opened her big present from Alden-jewels in a small box.  She
had an idea they would be sapphires.  The other day Alden had mentioned
how the waters of Cancel Bay had been a particularly sapphire-y blue.
Becky thought not.  She would have said they were aquamarine but she
didn't disagree with him for Alden was laying the groundwork for
sapphires and not aquamarines.  Becky understood that.

Now, dull and dulled by midafternoon ennui, Brooks and Rollins lay on
their stomachs in front of a snapping and flaring fire.  They propped
themselves on their elbows and listlessly reached up and into the
famille rose punch bowl brought into the big parlor and set upon a low
ottoman.

They withdrew small, printed-on squares of cardboard and, employing the
blunt edges of some sterling butter knives they had pocketed at
Christmas dinner for this purpose, scraped a flat metallic coating from
the surfaces of the cardboard squares.  Metallic shreds adhered to
their palms, their shirt cuffs, and fell onto the scuffed Kirman
carpet.

"No," said Brooks.

"No good," said Rollins.

They grunted and tossed the cardboard squares over the top of the fire
screen where a small heap of scrapped squares had settled on the hearth
bricks.

For Harvey had given the family two old shoeboxes full of
Massachusetts

State Lottery Scratch Tickets.  Alden said Harvey must have bought five
hundred dollars worth at the package store on the Salem Road.  Becky
had been horrified as the boys and Little Becky snatched handsful of
the things and understood at once how to play, but Alden had predicted
the children would learn a valuable lesson on the nonwinnability of
lotteries and other games of chance.

Brooks and Rollins rolled onto their backs, very disenchanted.  The
cat, curved against the contours of the wood basket's interior, ignored
them as they beckoned her, guessing correctly that the bored boys
wanted to initiate a session of corner the cat.

"Hand hurts," Brooks complained.

"Hurt my hand," Rollins confirmed.  "All that-"

"Scratching," Brooks agreed.

"You see," Alden told Becky.

"What?"  Becky asked, not looking up from a recipe for Chicken Piquant,
an apricot-and-chili-sauced entree.  She was wondering if she could
sneak some frozen broccoli florettes into the sauce.  "See what?  "

"See, the boys are going off gambling," Alden said.

"But Little Becky has won fifty dollars so far.  I've had to ban her,"
Becky said.  "That's quite enough for her to have won."

"Huh," said Alden.  "Fifty dollars for Little B.?  How annoying."

Ginger wandered into the big parlor.  (Oscar had been napping since
he'd limped away from the dinner table and groaned his way up the
stairs to his room where one could only imagine him lying near death
atop his bedspread with his shoes on and his belt unbuckled.) Ginger
frowned at Alden and Becky, so smugly together, and she stepped over
Brooks and Rollins.  She selected a scratch ticket from the bowl.  She
seemed to believe she was picking a good one.  The first few she
touched did not feel "right."  She rasped away the metallic coating
with her sharp thumbnail.

"I've got two leprechaun faces showing," she said.  "Do I win?  What do
I win?  Nothing?  Why is this supposed to be fun?  I'm not having fun,
I only have these scratchy granules stuck under my thumbnail."

The telephone rang then.  Ginger bustled into the hall and was about to
pick up when a thought occurred to her-Louis might very well be calling
Betsy and Ginger did not want to have to explain why Betsy was not
there.  The telephone rang on and Lily reluctantly appeared at the
dining room doorway.  She had been separating the sky pieces from the
masonry pieces of her new Great Wall of China jigsaw puzzle at the
dining room table, assisted by Little Becky who was specializing in the
Wall's sightseers, all of whom seemed to have black hair and to wear
dark blue pajama suits and were as undifferentiated as the sky itself,
the reconstruction of which Little Becky had craftily, she thought,
eschewed.

Lily reached past Ginger who was pinned in place beneath the weight of
her heavy conscience.

"Well?  " Lily spoke severely into the receiver.

"One moment," she said, and she asked at large, "Glover?"

"Glover?  " A cry was taken up.

Glover stumbled from the little parlor.  He was following the siege of
the Vatican Mission in Panama City on TV, where that dire-looking
General Noriega had been holed up since the invasion of a few days
earlier.

The army, our army, was blasting the Mission from all sides with
pounding loud rock music to drive out Noriega who Uncle Harvey said was
a dedicated opera buff and whose ears must be bleeding by now.  Cool,
Glover had said, it was real cool of the army to, like, bother the
enemy.  Glover could get behind that kind of strategy.  And since he
seemed so interested in military matters, Uncle Harvey had told him a
few interesting official secrets left over from D-Day-the secret
password had been a phrase no German tongue could pronounce.  Very
cool.

"Yeah?"  Glover spoke into the phone.  "Missy?  Yeah?  Merry....
Right."

He listened to a gabbling voice.  He sighed.  Lily withdrew.

"Your present?"  Glover asked.  "Look, I already gave you what you
wanted."

He listened.  He chuckled.

"No, I already gave you what you wanted," he repeated.

He listened.  He preened.  He leaned into the wall.

"So, I gotta give it to you all over again?  "

"God," Ginger remarked, and she shuddered and drifted back to the big
parlor.  She dropped into a wing chair and began to read through the
household's Christmas cards, all collected in a red painted basket
labeled Santa's Mailbag.  Harvey had received dozens of big stiff
printed cards from corporations, politicians, foundations, and
charities.  She wondered how Betsy, in her cataloguing of the cards for
Andy, had characterized those.  Andy had sent a postcard from Florida-a
fat retired Santa in a Speedo-asking them to calculate, as well, the
ratio of religious to secular decorations in the house, if they'd be so
kind, although so many of the decorations were ambiguously
borderline-candles, angel-cat ornaments, holly, which was sacred to
Druids.

"We didn't receive a card from William this year," Alden observed as
Ginger pushed away the card basket.  "I hope he isn't being peevish."

"Yes, we did, one came.  I put it-somewhere," Becky said.

William's card this year had been an exquisite stand-up affair that
opened into an intricately precise Notre Dame Cathedral with flying
buttresses, the Rose Window, all of the gargoyles.  But the envelope
had been addressed to Becky alone and on the blank space, on the place
in front of the cathedral, William had written in his exquisite hand,
If you let me, I will lay all of Paris at your feet.  Becky had thrust
the thing in her handkerchief drawer at once and having in effect
hidden it, she was stuck with that course.  To produce the card now
would seem revelatory, if only of her first impulse not to share
William's joke, his foolish joke.  Surely, William had meant the
message as a joke, and she didn't feel like sharing William's joke.

William's card-put somewhere?  Ginger was momentarily alert to the
hesitation in Becky's answer, but then her shoulders sagged.  This was
merely Becky, after all, who had misplaced a piece of correspondence in
the midst of this correspondence-flooded season.

Becky stood and stretched.  Her new sapphire tennis bracelet slid up
her arm and she said she really ought to pre-spot the damask tablecloth
and the vast damask dinner napkins with Shout and throw them in the
washing machine before the squash and cranberry and coffee stains could
set in permanently.

"Let me do that.  You rest," Alden offered from the sofa.

Becky waited a minute.  Alden reached down and cast about the floor for
his new moccasin slippers.  He encountered, instead, his new book, A
Bright Shining Lie, which he lifted and opened and began to read. Becky
left him to it.

So the day droned on and sank to its lowest ebb.  The boys were
watching It's a Wonderful Life on the little-parlor TV, too enervated
to jeer, too torpid to channel hop among the frequent commercials
running on more pointlessly than ever, offering objects already
purchased and found under the tree.  The others were reading on their
beds or asleep in chairs.  Ginger had visited the turkey carcass in the
refrigerator and left a legbone sitting in a saucer atop the mirror
pond in Little Becky's Christmas Village to make it look as if the
villagers had lately killed and eaten a mastodon.  Little Becky had
hovered so pesteringly in the vicinity of her village and had accused
Ginger, whenever Ginger passed by, of walking too heavily and causing
the tiny pine trees to topple and the tinier people to fall flat over
backwards.  Ginger had pointed out that all the tiny people toppled
backwards because they wore such weighty knapsacks.  They were, Ginger
supposed, Norwegians.  No, insisted Little Becky, her village was in
Vermont.

A CAR NOSED UP the driveway, cresting the frozen waves of the driveway
ruts.  Babe Palmer, riding shotgun, said, "It ought not to be
allowed."

Goody said, Oh well, and almost hit a fence post, but Penny Nicholls
spoke up from the backseat, asking, "Allowed by whom?  Because as far
as I'm aware, Lily doesn't have to answer to a Towne Driveway Over
sight Committee, at least not yet, but give them time to think of it
down at Town Hall."

Penny had put in a long day at the Palmer house ever since Goody had
collected her at 9 a.m. from Senior Village, after Babe, who had
dutifully called her second cousin Bell in Connecticut to wish them all
the benefits of the season, learned that Penny had not gone down to
spend the holidays with the Connecticut branch of the family after all,
although Penny had quoted the Amtrak schedule to Babe, even inventing a
change of trains in Providence where one might pick up a cup of quahog
chowder at the station canteen.  Babe ought to have questioned that
station canteen detail-they didn't have station canteens these days.

But Bell's attitude was so ha rum-sc arum and Babe's ministrations were
so chilly, and Penny had hoped she had outmaneuvered all those who felt
it was their duty to keep her spirits up over the holidays.  They were
going to dine on two crown roasts of pork in the Senior Village Common
Room, and potluck yams and oyster stew and champagne punch and
ambrosia-half the residents had schemed not to have to visit family-and
even though Penny had firmly told Babe no, no thank you, really dear,
you're too kind but no, Babe had sent Goody over to collect her.  Penny
had appreciated that Goody's life would be a confirmed hell were he to
return alone.  Goody had realized that as well but he had manfully not
alluded to his coming martyrdom even in a spirit of half-jest and
half-appeal, and so, suddenly liking him for that, Penny had
capitulated.  She foil-wrapped six cider doughnuts as a hostess present
for Babe and left the other eighteen with Mack MacNally to contribute
when the time came for the Senior Feast.

Babe had prepared a canned ham with canned pineapple rings and a rice
with raisins pudding which they ate at quarter past twelve, and if
Penny's husband, Buster Nicholls, hadn't died five years earlier they
would have been able to play bridge until midnight.  Now, all there
seemed for them to do was, regretfully, not play bridge.  Penny, who
had grabbed her knitting bag as she was being escorted out her door by
Goody, withdrew into industry and finished the mittens, an Aran Island
pattern worked in a natural, waxy wool, she had not had time to
complete for Harvey's present.  He knew he was getting them.  She had
shown him the wool and the pattern when he dropped by with her gift,
Scotch that came in such an interesting triangular-shaped bottle she
looked forward to having the use of after Harvey had drained the Scotch
out on his frequent social calls.  Harvey had been understanding. "Now,
now," he said, "I know you have far better ways to occupy your time
than to knit exclusively for me, so I'm very touched and grateful, my
dear, or shall be when you've got them done."  What a charming man.

It seemed only fair to deliver Harvey's gift on Christmas Day since
he'd been such a brick.  Displaying the mittens, Penny said, "Let's
drop in on the Hills right now, why don't we?  "

"Oh, but it's so pleasant here," Babe said, and she stuck a silk pillow
behind her back in demonstration of the comfort and fine appointments
of her residence.

"We 'll swing by on the way home then," Penny said as she consulted the
clock on the mantelpiece.  "My word, is that the time?  I've taken up
far too much of your delightful hospitality.  Goody, you won't mind a
little side trip before dropping me off?"

"No.  Not at all," Goody said, glancing at Babe.

"But it's a family day," Babe pointed out repressively.

"Oh, families," Penny remarked feelingly.

To which Babe had felt like answering, Yes, families, right back at her
even more feelingly but she couldn't without conceding the point, nor
could she stay home to sulk because that would leave Penny and Goody
free to visit the Hills for as long as they liked, or at least until
Babe called to inquire whether her husband and her late mother's cousin
had met with a fatal accident en route, or were they just being
discourteously delinquent?  She announced she would ride along for the
fresh air, but she remained in the car when they arrived.  She kept her
seat belt fastened and shook her head when Goody opened her door.  He
shut the door, and in his care not to be accused of slamming, he left
the door loosely ajar.  He kept the key in the ignition so Babe
couldn't say later that she hadn't been able to turn on the heater or
listen to the radio, for she was convinced World War III most likely
would begin on a National Holiday when the Army and Navy were drunk,
and now the key caused a warning wail to commence, notifying that the
door was ill-latched.  Babe endured the electronic doo-wop of monition
as Goody took Penny's elbow and guided her across the Hills' choppy
brown lawn, both stepping in a happy hurry.  Penny clutched Harvey's
mittens in her mittened hand.  Neither she nor Goody had assured Babe
they wouldn't be long.  Indeed, Penny's parting words had been, "Suit
yourself," cheerfully stated by one who intended to suit herself.

Babe tugged the door securely shut and twisted sideways in the car
seat.  Goody had parked so that she was aimed at a view of wintry
meadow and she required a view of the house, which had lately lost half
its shutters.  The wreath on the front door hung askew with its ribbon
untying.  Babe almost expected to see the roof and walls bulge upward
and outward, there was such a crowd in residence and the Hills were not
small or quiet people.  Babe's imagination could be engaged by such
grotesqueries.  She sometimes saw the faces of the damned among the
crumpled coffee filters and orange peels when she glanced down into her
kitchen wastebasket.  Which reminded her, she'd been meaning to have
her eyes checked.  She peered, she squinted through the windshield as a
weird figure approached, swathed in a dark cloak, wearing a mask,
wielding long, thin sticks, and making a halting, lurching progress.
Babe rolled down her window and hallo oed

Little Becky slithered to a stop beside the car.

"Couldn't you wait for snow?"  Babe asked.  "Is it good for skis to
walk on frozen ground?  "

Little Becky, who suspected she was being criticized, blurted
defensively,

"My Dad said I could.  He told me to.  Go out.  Anyway, there was snow.
Before.  It melted."

"Alden said," Babe nodded as if that confirmed some opinion she held of
Alden.  "So, you're the daughter.  You were pointed out to me one day
at the IGA.  You were eating potato chips from a bag I very much doubt
you had yet to purchase."

"Huh?"  Little Becky asked.  She stood still and leaned on her poles,
then she skidded and thudded against the side of the Palmer car as the
long tips of her skis slid beneath the undercarriage.  Babe stared at
toggle buttons and a heaving chest flattened against the window glass.
She eased herself out the driver's side door and dealt with the
situation.

As they were sitting on the stone wall catching their breaths, it
occurred to Babe to ask the child what she had wanted to know all
along.  "Has your Uncle Louis come for the holidays?  " she inquired.

"What?"  Little Becky asked, shifting uneasily.  Such coldness seeped
from the stones.  She drooped.  The entire day had been so
no-Christmas, inside and out.  She couldn't believe it.  In New York
she would have been at her second showing of the opening day of a big
new blockbuster movie.  She would have stood in an unraveling,
roistering line for an hour, and then another hour.  Fun.

"Your Aunt Ginger's husband, your Uncle Louis, was he able to join you
all for a few days?  " Babe clarified.

"No.  But Mr.  Oscarsson came," Little Becky said.

"Mr.  Oscarsson?  Who's Mr.  Oscarsson?  " Babe asked.

"He's, I think he's Aunt Ginger's ..."  Little Becky stopped and gazed
in rapt puzzlement at the distant toes of her new skis.  If this were
an episode of Knott's Landing she could have rattled on indefinitely
about intrigues and infidelities, but she could not quite connect the
dots of TV drama with that slow, rumbling Mr.  Oscarsson in his wide
shirts and her caustic aunt who went through a roll of Turns every two
days.

"Aunt Ginger's what?"  Babe asked.  "Oh, I see," she said as Little
Becky stood abruptly and trudged off on her skis, tilting and tipping
over frozen tuffets, jamming the points of her poles against the iron
earth, insisting over her shoulder, "don't know."

"Well, I certainly can't miss this."  Babe spoke aloud to herself, a
practice she routinely deplored in others.

None of the Hills had realized Babe was waiting outside in the car.  No
one missed her at all, except Lily who had looked, perhaps
preventively, to ascertain that Babe was not lurking on the front step
un knotting her scarf and prying off her storm boots before springing
herself on them all.  Oscar, having rambled downstairs after his long,
disorienting nap, attempted too aggressively to remove Penny's flaring
toreador's cape and confiscate her spare pair of mittens.  He had yet
to locate the appropriate pitch for his friendly overtures in this
house.  As Oscar advanced, Penny hunched into her cape and scooted into
the big parlor where she sat upon the sofa as if the sofa were Safe in
a rough-and tumble game of tag.

"Who was that?  " she asked Lily.

"These?  " asked Lily.  "Try one, they're very good," she said,
offering Penny a box of Mint Melt-Aways that had come in someone's
stocking.

Alden asked Goody what he'd like to drink and Goody couldn't say, so
Alden suggested the Merlot he'd found in the odd lot case of wine he 'd
bought in New York, and he and Goody sat back and discussed the
circumstances of Alden's field trip back to the city.

Becky headed for the kitchen and warmed the plum pudding and hard sauce
in the microwave.  She set the old Coalport plates and dessert forks
and teaspoons on the tray of the tea wagon.  She doused the plum
pudding with brandy and, turning the sliced and eaten side toward
herself, she pushed the laden tea wagon across the dining room and,
pausing at the big-parlor doorsill, she ignited the pudding with a
wooden match.  The boys raised the volume of the little-parlor TV, for
Penny's exclamations at the appearance of the flaming pudding had such
a carrying-on, whooping quality.  Harvey had received his present and
he'd immediately slipped the mittens onto his hands declaring he'd keep
them on until spring.  He kept them on as Becky passed around plates of
pudding and Penny bade him to sit beside her as she balanced their
plates upon her knees and fed him dainty forkfuls as he clasped his
mittened hands.

Ginger had crouched at the top of the stairs listening to the initial
greetings being exchanged below.  Then she had flown to her bedroom and
slipped off her crumpled slacks and jersey.  She pulled on her green
satin hostess knickerbockers and a white-and-silver-shot angora tunic
which made her look, in her treacherous full-length mirror, like a
dandelion clock about to scatter to the winds.  She scanned her closet,
and chair backs and floor, and she struggled into an old standby
navy-blue wool sheath and stuck on, sticking herself, a gold circle
pin, which dim ensemble made her appear even more maiden-auntly than
Lily (who, most unexpectedly, was wearing the sweatshirt Arthur and
Phoebe had given her, apple green and appliqued with poinsettia leaves
by a coworker of Phoebe's and offered for sale at the back of the
hospital cafeteria from mid-November on).  Oh, you are so fat, Ginger
accused the swollen image in her mirror.  She rattled through her
closet again and pulled out a cocktail dress, a black number with
chiffon sleeves and a lace overlay.  The jeweled sash wouldn't meet
around her waist, so she tied it twice round her forehead, lifting her
hair like a cloud above her face.  Not fat, but bosomy, she told
herself as she once again consulted her mirror and rather liked what
she saw there now.  Bosomy was good.

Ginger and Babe almost collided in the front hall beneath the Italian
papier-mache angel hanging by the string Little Becky had lassoed up
and over the etched-glass hanging light fixture.  Babe had quietly let
herself in after she had knocked, not very loudly because she was bound
to catch them all unaware, enjoying themselves in candid congregation,
but Ginger's yelp of "Babe!"  as their back-to-back collision was just
averted, lost Babe her planned advantage of surprise.

Ginger recovered her composure, gratifyingly aware of how very much
more attractive she was than Babe with her sparse haircut and grey
skirt and grey twin set and grey teeth and grey skin.  Ginger linked
arms with Babe and drew her across the doorway of the big parlor where
she halted to allow everyone time to notice them properly.  Heads had
already been turned by Ginger's warning (it seemed) utterance, and eyes
blinked the apparition in the doorway into focus.  As Alden said later,
the sight of the two women standing side by side had the unnerving
effect upon one of watching two movies at once, one filmed in vivid
Technicolor and the other captured in shades of black and white.

"Aren't you cold?"  Lily asked Ginger, noting her niece's expanse of
plump and pinkening skin.  "Haven't you a sweater?  " she asked.

"Oh, come look at the tree," Ginger offered expansively, pulling Babe
across the room.  Ginger's extravagantly high heels gored floorboards
and pocked carpet pile.  Babe's crepe soles thumped alongside.

"Yes, just look at that tree," Babe said with practiced toneless ness

Ginger unhooked her arm from Babe's as she reached to wind the spring
of a trilling mechanical bird sitting upon a branch.  Ginger felt the
need for music-madder music and stronger wine, she was about to cry
for.  She had spotted the opened bottle and she was keen to catch up
with the others.

"A nuthatch with a robin's song," Lily told Penny as the tin bird
whirrily chirped.  The error had always bothered her.  She always had
to explain that the ornament manufacturers had installed the wrong
mechanism.

"A nuthatch with a robin's song," Lily said to Oscar, who did not at
all understand what she was going on about.

"So are you bragging or complaining, honey?  " he asked Lily jollily.

BETSY RETURNED CHRISTMAS night.  Mr.  Snowdon drove her as far up the
driveway as the ice and ruts allowed, and she assured him she could
safely walk the rest of the way on her own across Lily's sloping lawns.
The house was well in view, a lamp burning behind every frost-traced
window, and Mr.  Snowdon had the restless children with him in the car
for Mrs.  Snowdon had not wished to be left alone with them in their
overstimulated states after too much sugar and too much holiday.  Mrs.
Snowdon had regarded Betsy's abrupt request to be driven back to the
River Road as an abandonment of her duties before the children had
splashed through their Betsy-supervised baths and been persuaded into
their pajamas and then climbed into their beds at Betsy's special
request to be read their current story, Charlotte's Web, by Betsy, who
rose to character voices and permitted close study of the illustrations
and patiently answered questions about the bathing habits of spiders
because, the little Snowdons said, there were often spiders to be found
in their bathtubs.

Mr.  Snowdon had promised the children he 'd drive them home past the
house on Conant Street where a spotlit Santa stood on the rooftop
waving and emitting recorded greetings.  He hoped the newly formed
Conant Street Neighborhood Association had not yet succeeded in pulling
the plug on the display.

Jennica, Alexianna, and Jonathan-Michael, huddled in the backseat,
would not say good-bye and thank you to Betsy.

"Okay, then," Betsy said, for she had long ago learned to be immune to
most manifestations of temperament and she much preferred the cold
shoulder to the hot confrontation.  At home, she had always been able
to finish her homework in peace and watch what she liked on television
when her mother silently and distantly brooded over how she'd been
wronged.

Mr.  Snowdon passed her a check at which she did not look before
folding it into her parka pocket.  They had all behaved as if Betsy
were just helping out from the goodness of her heart as an auxiliary
member of the family who could also be sent to the kitchen to make the
pancakes and be asked to vacuum packing material and pine needles from
the rugs.  Betsy had also kept the turtle with her in the guest room
for the children had been frightened by the turtle's reptilian head
questing from its shell and they had been even more disturbed by the
head's withdrawal within the otherwise dead-looking carapace, knowing
that the snaky face was just inside.

Betsy turned and walked away quickly without waiting to watch Mr.
Snowdon safely back down the dangerous driveway and to call out a
helpful "Be careful" should he start to fishtail and slither into the
swamp which never quite froze because decomposing marshmallows and
skunk cabbage heated the water.  Aunt Becky said there could be an
alternative energy business there if one could only harness the weeds,
but Betsy didn't suppose Mr.  Snowdon would want to hear about Aunt
Becky's science project when he was up to his knees in brown water and
the kids were screaming.

Betsy's Samsonite bag bumped against the back of her leg with every
step.  She jumped in and out of the glare of the widely swinging beams
of the Snowdon car's headlights for she wished her return to the house
to be unheralded-and now that she was nearly there, deferred.  Betsy
thumped down her suitcase and sat upon its flat top, hugging her thin,
frozen knees with her down-fattened arms and breathing into the
upturned collar of her jacket, which warmed her.  Her breath smelled
sharply of the candy cane shards she had tucked under her tongue.  Her
hot, sharp, steady breath-my Life Force, Betsy suddenly, unaccountably
thought.  She had not realized someone of her age and in her situation
could independently possess such a power within.  She wasn't sure she
wanted any part of a Life Force.

For she was free now to think about her obeah experiment.  How
satisfying as it had been to perform the rite, when, for the first time
in her utterly orderly and standard-issue existence she had experienced
the pull of the primitive.  It had been so very convenient not to
consider Mr.  Oscarsson's wishes and feelings.  It had been so very
freeing not to have to care what became of him, when the responsibility
had been taken from her hands, when the spell had fallen, or been
pushed or snatched, irretrievably behind the stone foundation, when she
had opened a door and invited an accommodating devil inside.  But she
had been naive to think a devil would be hers to command.  She did not
suppose any summoned demon would go away quietly, would perform only as
requested and then wash his hands and screw the cap back on the Ron
Rico Rum bottle and turn off the lights.  No, once on the premises, he
would want to stick around and take advantage, just like one of the
family.

Betsy envisioned him, the wiry little imp with a wide, white smile,
dressed in an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt and wrinkled clam-diggers and
an unraveling straw hat.  Uncle Harvey would look up and start to give
him thunder, but, Betsy knew, the angry imp would strike Uncle Harvey
dumb and bind him round and round with the curtain pulls and cinch him
tightly in his armchair in the little parlor facing the TV turned
perpetually to the CBS Evening News.  And as for the rest of them,
excepting Aunts Lily and Becky who would avert their eyes and retire to
their rooms with, respectively, a library book and the mending, at the
first hint of an unearthly presence, Betsy feared that the rest of them
would smilingly welcome the stranger.  What a delightful accent... what
a persuasive argument spoken by that lilting, engaging voice.... They
would nod agreeably along with his insinuating cadences just as readily
as they tapped their toes to Evening at Pops.  Betsy could see them
cheerfully, willingly, being led one by one back through that newly
opened door, forsaking the 4o-watt lightbulbs and muted shades of Aunt
Lily's house for the bright lights and utter blackness of the
Otherworld.

She had brought ruin upon her family on Christmas Day and evermore they
would be as cursed as one of those ancient Greek families, one of those
closed, misery-muddled Greek families locked together throughout
eternity on the side of a vase, fated always to stare balefully at one
another across the dinner table set with bitter herbs and brackish
water, with nothing nice ever served to pep up the supper menu.

Yes, and that was all she needed, Betsy leaned into her knees and
sighed, to be doomed to remain forever at Aunt Lily's house, trapped by
her guilt and her conscience, condemned always to mop up the mess she
'd made as the result of one small and inexpert and not very deeply
meant bit of Voodoo business.  It didn't seem fair that, just at the
moment she had discovered her Life Force, circumstances were gathering
to quash it.

Betsy heaved herself to her feet and trailed around to the back door
and entered, her heart absurdly apace.  New skis, she noted dully,
stacked on the glass-enclosed porch.  She wondered if she had gotten
anything good-she'd been left out of the present opening at the
Snowdons'.

"Oh, there you are," Alden said, mildly smiling at her as he stirred
the two-quart copper-bottomed pot on the stovetop.  "Join the party.
I'm mulling cider.  Can I include you in a cup?  We missed you today,
it wasn't so bad," he added.

"What?  Oh, no," Betsy said.  "Thank you."

She dropped her suitcase in the middle of the linoleum and shrugged off
her parka and draped it over a chair back from which it slid.  Alden
did not comment and picked up after her as she passed into the
hallway.

She stood outside the big-parlor door and watched them.

Her mother and Mr.  Palmer relaxed in front of the Christmas tree, as
at ease with one another as the older couple in a Lifestyle Supplement
advertisement for anniversary diamonds.  Ginger toed a pile of unopened
gifts further beneath the picture frame table's fringed cloth covering,
and she said she wanted to show Goody the presents she had received.
She leaned over in the lowest-cut dress she had brought from home to
search among her little stash of treasures.  "Here," she said,
straightening, taking hold of Goody's instantly offered arm.

"Do you like this?  " she asked.  She uncapped a small crystal bottle
and depressed a nozzle with a red-tipped finger.  "Ombre Rose," she
pronounced at him.

They leaned into the mist she had sprayed between them, eyes closed and
lashed shut as they breathed in unison drafts of the same scented
air.

"Yes," said Goody, "I do like that."

"But then," said Ginger, again leaning over and rustling among her
gifts, "there's also my new Passion."

Mr.  Oscarsson sat at the less atilt end of the long, big-parlor sofa
with Mrs.  Palmer at his side, and they were having quite a
conversation.  Babe asked intense and interested questions and Oscar,
who believed he had found a friend here at last (for he counted Ginger
as someone other than a friend to him), was delighted to discuss at
length everything he could think of worth mentioning about himself.  He
had no idea, of course, just what he was laying bare before Babe in all
candor, if not innocence.  Nor would Babe appreciate just what she had
learned until she carried the information home as she would carry home
her portion of plum pudding twisted in a napkin to enjoy tomorrow when,
she said, she would have found her appetite again.  She would reheat
the plum pudding in a bubbling double boiler and spoon on the hard
sauce and she would rehash her talk with Oscar.  Then, bearing in mind
the difficulty she faced and the end she sought, she would sample the
pudding in small, considering bites and say to herself, Too much
ginger, there is far too much Ginger in all of this.

Ginger conducted Goody across the room as he began to sneeze in the
scented air.  Babe waved a white hankie at him from the sofa, though
not as a sign of some surrender-rather, she was semaphoring that she
had brought a blister pack of his Dristan tablets along in her purse.

Ginger and Goody stood, now, the anniversary and diamond couple, before
the fire which had been burning all day.  The mantelpiece swag of
laurel and holly was browning and curling, holly berries detached and
dropped.  Ginger leaned over the rose famille bowl and her red-tipped
fingers felt among the tickets until they touched one and then another
that felt "right."  She extracted a try for her and a try for Goody.
Babe and Oscar could not be tempted when Ginger remembered to offer.

"You folks?  " she asked, over a chiffon shoulder.

"How?"  asked Goody, holding out his square of pasteboard, unsure how
to play, but Ginger was expert by now.  She scratched away at the
metallic coating with the point of her high heel.  As she leaned to
remove and to refit her shoe, Goody instantly offered his arm.

"You've won," Ginger cried.  "You've won a free ticket.  Look,
everyone,

Goody's won a free ticket.  You have a free ticket to win another
ticket, another chance.  You see, you have another chance," she
informed Goody.

Betsy turned away from them all then and she started up the winding
stairs.  She almost had to smile, although she bit back the smile, for
the scene she had just witnessed, quite a performance, to be sure, but
only the usual and the practiced one, had struck her tonight as a mere
divertissement which could only be regarded with relief and not a
little gratitude that there had been nothing worse going on.

THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, Oscar was gone.  He might as well have been
swept up and bundled away with the crushed boxes and tangled packing
material as, on Tuesday morning he was noticed not to be underfoot at
breakfast requiring something hot and hearty to tide him over until his
hot and hearty lunch.  Becky had already heated his Grape Nuts in the
heavy iron frying pan, intermittently seizing the pan by the handle and
giving the Grape Nuts a rattle so they wouldn't burn black across the
bottom, when Ginger, she-bearish in a new plush bathrobe, her present
from Lily, padded into the kitchen.  She shot her usual flinch of
grudging greeting at the family presences propped around the table or
standing with their backs against the countertops and cupboards,
raising or lowering cereal spoons and coffee cups and wedges of toast
on which jam glistened, to or from their smudged and un replying
mouths.

"Just coffee," Ginger said faintly, bravely, and she heaved herself
into the chair next to Harvey who, being rather an expert on women in
the morning, shifted, anticipating expansive gestures.  He preventively
slid his bowl of canned mandarin orange segments in juice out of the
range of her elbow, and he raised a barrier of newsprint between
them.

The boys smirked and Little Becky flushed scarlet and Betsy suffered
inside as they waited for Oscar to enter the kitchen, trailing Ginger
by the three discreet minutes they had scheduled to elapse as the
decent interval between their carefully separate appearances. Yesterday
morning, Oscar had timed the three decorous minutes on his big blunt
base-metal watch face.  He strode through the door, his lips silently
prompting, Three ... two ... one ... So, where was he? Rollins poked
Brooks who snorted and swallowed the wrong way.  A gout of milk spewed
from his nose.

"Ma-ha," Little Becky yelped.  "Brooks got nose milk on my doughnut."

"Don't be disgusting," Becky told Brooks, or Little Becky.  She shook
the pan of Grape Nuts and plucked a Kleenex from her sweater sleeve for
Brooks and she cracked and began to remove the shell from the top of
Alden's soft-boiled egg which was sitting cradled atop a ceramic egg
cup, a yellow, big-eyed chick that was older than Alden.  Becky sheared
off the top of the exposed white and set the egg cap upon a saucer.

" Thanks," said Alden.  He prodded a knob of soft butter into the
center of his perfectly timed egg with his spoon tip and lightly tapped
on salt, pepper, and a bit more salt.  He refit the cap of white and
sat back, reading the rear wall of Harvey's newspaper barricade, as he
waited for the butter to melt and meld into the yolk.

Becky lifted a spatula and, catching Ginger's eye, pointed inquiringly
to the frying pan.  Ginger shook her head.  Really?  Becky's expression
asked.  Ginger nodded.  Becky switched off the burner beneath the
frying pan and poured a tall glass of orange juice back into the carton
and rehooked a new coffee mug to the new coffee mug tree.  She glanced
again at Ginger who was managing to look frail and flushed and
belligerent at once, as if she had just taken it upon herself to clean
the entire house from bottom to top.

Lily came into the kitchen last, greeting the family briskly.  She
correctly corrected Brooks, "Hush, please, Brooks," as he singsonged
Nose milk, nose milk, into Little Becky's crimson ear.  Lily was sharp
that morning, telling Brooks apart from Rollins.  Always an early
awakener if not, these days, an early riser, Lily had overheard through
her bedroom door and overlooked from her bedroom window (forsaking her
warm bed to do so) the particulars of Oscar's leave-taking from
Ginger.

"Have you got everything?  " Ginger's voice had asked.

"I'll call if I left anything," Oscar answered.

"No, no, be sure now," Ginger's voice insisted, and then Ginger's eager
footsteps and Oscar's slower ones, weighed by his garment bag and
carry-on clutch, retreated and moved outside.

Lily observed the brief study of an unfurled road map; Ginger's
impatient finger traced the direct est route to the highway.  She
leaned into Oscar and bestowed a quick kiss.  Oscar's arm detained her
and they shared a less quick kiss.  Ginger pulled away.  Oscar hauled
her back.  Ginger broke free and to soften her action-she had pushed
him away ungently-she pointed to the sky and playfully motioned, Fly,
fly, he mustn't miss his plane.  No, he had time.  Oscar dismissed the
overreaching sky with a wave.  Ginger, outside in just her robe,
shivered.  Cold, she indicated, and she submitted to a long, last
embrace as Oscar said whatever it was he needed to say to her and she
let him kiss her again because she felt so sorry for him, of course.
Oscar quit her, at last, with a grin and assurances.  Ginger would have
to sit down and write him one final, difficult, explanatory letter
which would catch him by surprise, or not.

Lily had slipped into Andy's room and removed all signs of Oscar's
habitation, the several National Geographies (May, June, July 1962) he
had asked to borrow from the stack in the back hall, and the water
glass he required by his bedside for he had said he often awoke in the
middle of the night coughing and he needed to sip; Lily sniffed,
bourbon.  She found nothing sensational slipped behind the headboard or
forgotten in the night table drawer for which she was thankful, because
if Ginger thought Lily hadn't known what she and Oscar were up to, if
Ginger thought she was the only Hill who had brought a lover here and
sat blandly across from him at the dinner table maintaining he was a
colleague from work or a friend of the family or just someone very keen
upon attending the Towne Apple or Strawberry or Snowflake Festival,
then, Lily supposed, I have successfully averted my eyes and closed my
ears and held my tongue.

She unmade the bed.  She did not want the chore to fall to Betsy; that
would not be appropriate.  She freed the four corners of the bottom
sheet and bundled the sheets, blankets, bedspread, and pillows,
mistakenly, and crammed the lot inside the bathroom hamper.  She spent
several minutes trying to close the lid, succeeding at last by catching
an edge of the lid beneath the curving lip of the old bathtub.  Someone
else would bump the hamper lid free and ajar again, but then that would
be their problem.

Now, Lily looked almost fondly upon Ginger, for Oscar, who had been her
guest, had demonstrated rare good grace to limit the duration of his
visit to thirty-nine hours, Lily calculated.  She moved around the
kitchen table and lightly tapped Ginger's hunched shoulder and she said
with satisfaction, "That's that," as if she assumed Ginger was as
satisfied as she to have just seen the last of Oscar.

"That's that," Ginger calmly agreed.

Alden lifted amazed, inquiring eyebrows at Becky who, standing over the
big shiny toaster poised to rescue Alden's English muffin from the maw
of the veteran apparatus at the critical instant it allowed between
golden brown ness and charred black, was no less amazed by Ginger's
composure in the face of Lily's remark.

Lily lifted her personal cup and saucer (very old, Limoges, a flowered
pattern) from the high cupboard above the stove, heretofore concealed
behind a box of Kosher salt which had just lately vanished and kept
safe and separate from all the other clustering, chipping, casually
rinsed cups and saucers and mugs, and she poured herself coffee,
draining the pot.  She selected a plain doughnut from the box on the
countertop.  Becky offered to dredge the doughnut through cinnamon
sugar and pop it in the microwave for twenty seconds which sounded fine
to Lily.  She sat at the end of the table catty-cornered from Glover
who was separating the raisins from the bran flakes in his cereal bowl
and arranging them on opposing sides as if he meant for them to wage a
naval war for supremacy of the Milky White Sea.

Ginger stood then, vitally and woundedly rising to her swaying height,
and clutched her robe and several shawls of paisley challis and fringed
wool about herself as if they alone loved her now.  Lily had swan ned
in and stolen the last of the coffee to which she had already laid
verbal claim and was about to do something about once she had gathered
her forces and pulled herself together after enacting that harrowing
farewell scene.  And why hadn't Becky poured her a cup of coffee
instead of whisking away Oscar's intended orange juice as if the sight
of the forlorn glass would make Ginger weep?  Really, though, it was
too bad of Lily.  That warm cinnamon doughnut looked good, but Lily's
was probably the last of those as well.

Ginger snatched the empty pot from the stove and knocked the grounds
into the sink as Becky had asked her not to do so often she had given
up asking.  Splashing water and spilling coffee beans which rolled and
scattered, she crushed beans in the little electric grinder that was a
new gift from the young Aldens, and she reassembled the components of
the pot, jamming them together as they resisted re assemblage It was an
ancient, tarnished pot with a dented basket.  The young Aldens ought to
have given Lily one of those Mr.  Coffee machines for Christmas, Ginger
thought as she slammed the pot onto the back burner and, frowning at a
spot on the far wall, she grimly waited for the first coffee smelling
burble to rise in the glass bulb on the lid top.

So that's it.  Alden quirked understanding eyebrows at Becky.  Ginger
was going to be high-minded about the exit of Oscar and take the low
road concerning coffee.

Betsy alone continued to think of Oscar.  She kept track of his
estimated whereabouts throughout the day, telling herself now he's on
the plane, he's in the air, he's eating his snack and hoping there's
seconds, he's holding his breath-they're landing, he's collecting his
bags, he's found his car in the long-term parking lot, he's driving
down the highway, now he's passing the Mall, he's stopping at the long
light and he's pondering the time and temperature and prime lending
rate digitally flashing on the sign of the First Deposit Bank on the
corner, he's driving across town beneath the lampposts decorated for
Christmas, he's passing the courthouse and going round the traffic
circle, he's driving out of town into the countryside, and now he's
slowing down at the end of the street where we used to live before he
came along and spoiled everything.  He's glancing down the street out
of habit to see whether Daddy's car is sitting in the driveway, whether
Mummy's car is there, whether he can stop and visit Mummy only, of
course, nobody at all is home now.  It occurred to Betsy then, as she
thought of the uninhabited house, of the rooms where no one sat, of the
emptied closets, idled kitchen, neglected gardens, and the lamps on
timer switches pretending to themselves their services were still
necessary, that it was Mr.  Oscarsson who had unloosed the far stronger
and more devastating charm against them all long before she had
attempted to work her own feeble and belated conjuration on him.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, as Little Becky lurked in the little parlor
within range of the kitchen where there were such interesting and
diminishing leftovers upon which she essayed frequent, secret raids,
the kitchen wall phone rang.

"I'll get, I'll get it," Little Becky cried against the trill of the
tele phone and she dashed on her lead feet skidding along the rugs and
chattering the sherry glasses set out that hospitable time of year on
the sideboard in the dining room.  "I've got it," she yelled as she
snatched the receiver before the third ring erupted which was against
Aunt Lily's rules, or if not rules, for Lily didn't have rules as such,
but she did express preferences and one of her preferences was that the
telephone be allowed to ring several times-six, seven, eight, nine, or
ten times before being answered, lest one seem too eager.  But Little
Becky had never really known an un eager waking moment.

" W-I-L-D plays the hits for me, Alf in the Afternoon makes my day,
Arf, arf, arf, KWOW gets my seal of approval," Little Becky rattled off
the day's winning responses.  She also knew that KROC's Artist of the
Day was Poison and Magic Martin's Cash Pot currently held fifty-seven
Big Deal dollars, although the amount was subject to change at any
moment when he spun the Winning Wheel.  She monitored that situation,
twenty minutes past every hour when Magic Martin had to say.

"Huh?  What?  Oh."  Little Becky's shoulders sagged.  "Yes, I'll get
him."  She held the receiver against her chest.  The telephone cord was
a very long one and stretched as Little Becky wandered over to the back
stairs.  Her new Christmas jeans scraped, inner thigh upon inner thigh,
and they had stained her skin purple just above her knee where she had
slopped a cranberry juice cocktail.  The stiff new material creaked as
she scaled several steps, as far as the cord allowed.

"Arthur," she called.  "Arthur-er.  For you."

She acknowledged his faint answer and trailed the telephone cord across
the room.  She tangled with a tall kitchen chair back yanked the cord
free, and flung open the refrigerator door.  She scrabbled turkey
shreds from the keel of the carcass and swigged the last half-inch of
eggnog (sourish, so she swallowed fast) from the carton and scooped up
a quivery handful of Cherry Jell-O and pineapple salad which she held
up to the light before swallowing down.  Arthur took the sticky
receiver from her and absentmindedly raked gummy fingers through his
hair as he listened far more than he spoke, which didn't suit Little
Becky who stared at him inquiringly and impatiently over the rim of a
can of Pepsi Free.

"Give Arthur space, sweet pea," Becky reminded Little Becky as she

[

came into the kitchen to wonder about supper, turkey noodly soup from
scratch, she thought, if she started now.  She had an onion, she had a
carrot, she had noodles.  Would anyone mind encountering escarole in
turkey soup?  She had all that escarole.  But Becky paused and she
stared at Arthur whose face was signaling every joyful feeling known to
man.  Arthur's awry and wayward features formed a readable sequence of
reactions to the speaker at the other end of the line-Am I hearing
right?-of daring to believe, of astonishment at the import of what he
was daring to believe, and at last, a suffusion of calm and radiant
jubilation marked him and he briefly became as beautiful as one of
Leonardo's angels in his exaltation.  Believe it or not, Becky would
say later, as she retold the tale, he looked like the angel in the
Madonna of the Rocks with his high forehead and invisible eyebrows and
the golden red fluff of his pageboy.  That's what being handed heaven
can do for you, Becky supposed.

"Pen, pen, pen," Arthur was whispering urgently and Little Becky
grabbed a Sharpwriter from the spoon mug which was turning into a
general catch-all, spoons, pens, chopsticks, interesting twigs.

Arthur scribbled across Lily's yellow kitchen wall, unapologetically,
exuberantly scrawling, Continental Airlines, 8.30 a.m."  Wednesday
a.m."  LIMO will meet ME.

"Hey," Little Becky objected, "he's writing on ..."

"Hush," Becky snapped.  "What is it?"  she asked Arthur as Arthur rang
off, but Arthur was summoning Phoebe, calling, "Phoebe, Phoebe,
Phoebe," up the back stairs as she hurried down still clutching her new
counted cross-stitch project, which she had just begun on the day off
she had been given because she had agreed to work at the hospital on
New Year's Day.

"They want me in L.A.," Arthur announced.  "I have to go there."

"Want you?  But what have you done?  " Phoebe asked worriedly even as
she resolved-one could see her mentally bracing and composing
herself-to stand by him, regardless.

"What have I done?"  Arthur asked.  "What have I done is to land myself
a featured role in a sure to be picked up weekly comedy series on,
Jesus, what did the guy say, which network was it?  Anyway, it was one
I'd heard of.  Well, I'll fill in all that when I get there.  Who am I
to have an opinion on which network, at this point?  But the guy said,
the guy said, they're topnotch all the way.  They're sending a limo. To
the airport.  To meet me."  He tapped the wall where the word LIMO was
written which made everything real and true.

"Who's this guy?  " asked Phoebe.

"Yes, who is this person?  " asked Becky.

"The guy on the phone," Little Becky explained, sidling over to
Arthur's side.  TV, after all.

" I didn't entirely catch his name.  Edward something or maybe
something

Edwards, but you know where he's from, you know where he saw me
perform?  Here.  He caught my act at that gig I did at the old people's
home two weeks ago which just goes to show you, exposure is everything
because you never know where somebody important's going to be," Arthur
told them.

"Oh, for goodness sake," Becky declared.  "I was there too, with
Women's Chorus.  Oh dear, no one discovered me."

"Right, with the Chorus ladies, you were there.  So you know how great
I was that day," Arthur said.  "And Edward Something, or Something

Edwards, was the guy in a leather jacket visiting his old aunt, he's
all she has left in this world, he said, otherwise he wouldn't have
been caught dead there."

"He sounds kind," Phoebe said.

"He was the man who smoked," Becky recalled.  "Yes, he was very
interested in you, Arthur.  I could tell from the way he studied
you."

"I'll say he was interested," Arthur brayed.

"Well, what rare good luck," Becky added.

"You make your own luck in this world," Arthur informed her gravely,
and Becky hoped that Arthur, after a full thirty seconds in the
limelight, wasn't becoming sententious as so many entertainment types
seemed to be these days on talk shows, endorsing political candidates
and naggingly promoting trash recycling, as if any of them ever carried
out the rubbish unless they were enrolled in some sort of court-ordered
program.

"How long will you be gone?  " Phoebe asked.

"Forever, I hope," Arthur brayed again.

"Ma-ha," Little Becky protested, because it wasn't fair for Arthur to
go away forever just when he was no longer going to be an embarrassing
connection, somebody to pretend not to know when he said Hi to her in
passing at the Freedomway Mall as he did one time when she was having
an accidental but actual conversation with Missy DeStefano about the
outfits in the Empire Store's windows and what kind of dresses Glover
liked-on girls, that is, not to wear himself.

"I'm so happy for you," Phoebe said feelingly but ambiguously, for she
may, to susceptible ears, have spoken you with the faintest, plaintive
emphasis.  Arthur's ears, his protuberant, inherently comedic ears,
picked up on the softly sounded note of doubt.

"You know I'll send for you, Phoebe," he promised.  "As soon as I'm
set."

"Oh yes, not until you're set," Phoebe agreed.  "And in the meanwhile,
it's only sensible for me to keep on working and all, otherwise ... Do
you think I can stay on here?  Will Miss Hill mind?  "

"Of course you'll stay here with us, we wouldn't have it any other
way," Becky said.  She tugged at Little Becky's sweatshirt sleeve.
"Come, let's give Arthur and Phoebe privacy to discuss their wonderful
news."

"What wonderful news?  " Ginger wanted to know.  "I could use some
wonderful news for a change," she observed as she rummaged through the
cookie tin, thoughts of which had drawn her to the kitchen, although
she possessed, as well, an instinct for the epicenter.

"It's a hoax.  It has to be a hoax," she informed Arthur after he
explained.  "Those horrible boys disguising their voices were having
him on," she spoke confidentially to Becky as Little Becky took
advantage and palmed from the open cookie tin the last five van ille
batons Ginger had had her eye on before she was sidetracked by having
to set everybody straight.

A SECOND CALL followed that day, for Alden from Roger Arsenault, his
New York wine merchant who had accepted a consignment of Olde North
Country Hearth Warmers (or whatever they'd ended up calling the
things).  Roger was as angry with Alden as the boutique firewood
customers had been with him, customers who had sat up late and awakened
early so keen were they to describe the complete nonsuccess of their
Yuletide Hearth Warmer experience to Roger.

"Calm down," Alden counseled Roger.

Little Becky, folded over a chair back and anxious for her father to
get off the line because Television might need to talk to Arthur again,
listened impatiently, thumping and rocking the chair legs.

"Vermin?  " Alden asked.  "What manner of vermin?

"Ah," Alden understood.  "Those little creatures sound like
centipedes.

And I'm familiar with the glossy, hard-backed beetles.  They woke up,
did they?

"Though no," Alden said, "that hasn't been our experience, but of
course we burn our wood.  We bring it in from outside and burn' Yes
well," Alden supposed, "they must have been hibernating under the bark
and then been reactivated by the warmth of indoors.  Nature is very
wise, but she can be snookered.

"I don't think they'll survive long," Alden told Roger.  "I'm sure
there's nothing for them to eat and besides, they'll come tentacle to
tentacle with the resident roaches' Cavalier

" Alden asked.  " Look, if a few stray insects is all it takes to ruin
a family's Christmas then I wouldn't care to be any of them should a
real problem ever crop up.

"That's my last word?  That's my last word," Alden laughed.  "Sue me?
Sue me."  He pulled out his empty pants pocket lining and winked at
Little Becky.

"Back to the old drawing board," he remarked to her, as he clicked down
the receiver.  "Don't mention this to your mother.  The Hearth Warmers
were her idea and she's never understood that just having an idea is
the least of starting any new undertaking."

"Don't tell Ma?"  asked Little Becky.  "You mean, don't tell Ma?"  she
questioned.  She had had no idea that they did not always have to tell
her mother everything.

"^ chapter Five V?  The Hills and Love

W CAUGHT COLDS all winter long, or perhaps it was the same old we never
quite shed.  We were always stuffy," Lily told Andy.  "The colds seemed
to regroup between periods of relative dormancy and we were always
giving one another handkerchiefs as gifts, I remember.  We matched our
hankies to our outfits on dressy occasions.  White hankies, they'd be,
but the border lace or embroidery could match, or contrast.  My sister,
Olive, was, at one time, a great believer in contrasts.  Red and blue,
yellow and blue, orange and blue, whereas I preferred blue and blue,
though I might have tinkered with the shade."

"Ah," Andy answered as Lily broke off to give him time to record her
observations, as he had taught her to do over the course of their
interviews these past several months.  Andy looked down at his empty
notebook page.  He blew upon his chill-stiffened fingers, which
evidence of discomfort Lily failed to notice or chose not to see.  They
sat at opposite ends of the hard-cushioned big-parlor sofa, Lily
upright with her usual excellent posture, the invisible steel rod
rising an imaginary inch behind her backbone.  Andy, skewed, faced her,
one knee drawn up onto the cushion, one arm slung along the sofa's
curving camelback.  His notebook skidded from his aslant knee and
splattered 3X5 cards onto the rug.  He hesitated for the several
seconds he needed to remember that Lily wouldn't dive to retrieve his
notebook and cards to spare him the strain and effort and inconvenience
of reaching for them himself.  He had yet to recover fully from his
visit home.

Andy, you're so drawn and tired and you can't deceive me, if you hadn't
sat outside so foolishly yesterday and turned neon in the sun, you'd
still be pale as cream, his mother had accused him.  She had run to
serial accusations as she sectioned his morning grapefruit and banished
the early-rising parakeets racketing in the hibiscus bush outside the
kitchenette window.

Andy had been relieved to quit Florida but it was not necessarily an
unalloyed joy to be back among the Hills.  For Andy had had time to
think, driving a thousand miles of event less interstate highway back
to Towne.  He didn't know how scholars of the past had been able to
come up with their ideas, their insights, their inspirations, without
the benefit of the transporting, freeing, revelatory rhythms of a solo
cross-country drive with the radio tuned loud and unheard.  However, on
this latest trip north, the unrolling ribbon of excellent road surface
had unaccountably failed to carry his thoughts along.  As he passed
from state to state, from shabby old Georgia to swamped South Carolina
on toward New Jersey traffic, he remained stuck.  What, ultimately, was
he to make of the Hills?  His thesis was going absolutely nowhere.  He
decided he must best blame William who had sent him to them with every
treacherous reassurance that these people would be the making of him.
Why had he believed William?  Why hadn't he asked more critical
questions at that off-kilter Mexican lunch?  Now Andy recalled, his
several weak queries had been brushed aside as briskly as William might
flick lint from his sleeve because, Andy realized in a flash of
clarity, William had had something hidden up that sleeve from which he
had successfully diverted Andy's attention by snapping his fingers and
making Andy blink away from his own reasonable wish to see more clearly
what was to come.

Colds, Andy wrote in his retrieved notebook.  Frequent white hankies,
atavistic significance of?  Colds, he knew, were not caught from being
cold but from viruses.  Still, did the Hills, believing otherwise,
contrive to catch peculiarly original, psycho genic
foul-weather-generated, winter-woe begotten colds?  Could he ask them
to sneeze onto sterile slide plates?  Professor Janacek doted on hard
datum.

The front door banged shut and Andy started.  ("Ginger's home from that
new lawyer she's trying," Lily said.) His notebook shot from his knee
to the floor and a sheet of notepaper was ejected from its pages.  He
sprang to retrieve his half-written, biweekly letter to William before
Lily could see what he had had to say, so far.

Dear Uncle William fit read], I've been back in Towne for two days,
having left Florida on New Year's Day.  I went to bed on the Eve
itself, early and alone.  What does that bode for the nineties?

I missed the great scandal over Christmas when Mrs.  Tuckerman's lonely
lover showed up and was summarily routed.  I wish I'd been here
although I have the feeling I would have watched events from behind
raised fingers as at one of those movies reviewers refer to as being
too intense for some young viewers.  Mrs.  Lowe was my informant on
this episode.  My first night back we sat up late together over an
excellent Cabernet she said Alden wouldn't appreciate (and I did my
best to!).  He had just snored her loose from her slumbers and then the
smell of the pine pitch indelibly lodged in his hair prevented her
return to the arms of Morpheus.  The "interview" turned confidential
under the influence of the hour and the wine and Becky expressed more
sympathy and understanding of her sister-in-law's unhappiness than I
would have expected from such an estimable wife and mother.

IN THE MIDDLE OF February an airmail envelope as blue and unsubstantial
as a swatch of foreign sky and addressed to Rebecca Lowe had arrived
and been set down by an incurious Lily upon the pie crust table along
with the rest of the day's post.  There were the usual bills, some
personal correspondence, and an assortment of catalogues and flyers and
appeals, for the Hills were regarded as likely prospects or at least
had declared an interest when rilling in postcards and sending away for
additional information on paddle-wheel steamer trips down the Amazon
and John Deere tractors and Vita-Life Vitamin Therapy and how to Be All
You Can Be in the Army.  This last brochure had been sent to Glover and
must have represented someone's idea of a joke, although as Alden was
to point out when he happened upon and studied the Army's pitch, the
military's handsomely photographed promise of foreign travel and access
to shiny and expensive machinery and life affirming ten-mile morning
health sprints silhouetted against a golden sunrise might well be
viewed as attractive by those who yearned after the Amazon, a tractor,
the vigor of Youth.

"Nothing for you," Lily had answered Ginger (the Vita-Life price list
was for Harvey) when Ginger called down from the top of the stairs to
ask, and to let Lily know that an eye was being kept upon her Ginger
had once come upon her aunt stoking a fire with the crumpled pages of a
brand new Tiffany catalogue, Lily having taken it upon herself to
assume Ginger had no means to buy herself jewels and so no reason to
look only to regret.

Becky, who had popped her head through the little-parlor door and
quirked an inquiring eyebrow, gathered that Lily was informing her,
Nothing for you.  However, Lily's view of the little-parlor door was
blocked by the overcrowded coatrack and she had not noticed Becky.
Becky, trying not to feel too unfairly snapped at (for Lily had been
firm with Ginger), returned to her task of correcting all the
misprinted lyrics in the Women's Chorus Valentine Program Songbook-/
love you turly, You 've lost that loving reeling, Sweet creams be
yours, dear.  Well, Becky had sniffed pot smoke in the air at the
printer's shop when she stopped by to pick up the order-somehow, she 'd
been put in charge of the Songbooks-although she hadn't selected the
printer, who was Anna Webster's nephew and always got the job because
no one had the heart to tell Anna what her nephew was famous for.

It was Little Becky who spotted the blue airmail envelope later that
afternoon when she came home from school and, as was her habit,
wandered through the ground-floor rooms.  She rooted round the kitchen.
She flicked the little-parlor TV on and off.  She patted chair
cushions.  She picked up and examined magazines.  She stared into the
pictures on the walls.  She always made certain that the details hadn't
shifted or changed during the day while she was off at school, for
nothing had seemed real to her since she 'd been whisked away to Towne,
to Aunt Lily's cold, old house, and been told, This is home now.

Little Becky gurgled down a Diet Pepsi.  She scattered Oreo crumbs and
she thought her sparse thoughts.  She couldn't decide whether to pull
the thread that dangled from the end of her pullover jersey sleeve
because what if the entire cuff came free and swirled around her wrist
like a cloth bracelet?  This had happened to her before.

The square of sky-blue envelope caught her eye.  How pretty-Little
Becky reached for the letter and, amazingly, beheld her own name
written across its front.  The thin paper rustled beneath her fingertip
as she traced R ... EE ... B.... Airmail, she noticed, which meant her
letter had come from away.  Who did she know who was far away?  Were
the New Kids touring the World?  How faithless of her not to know but
the un fanned flame had been flickering of late.  They had not written
back, unless they had written back now.

But who else might she know from-Little Becky peered at the postmark
against which a snowflake, an icicle drip, a rain plop had splattered,
blurring and slurring away the foreign-inked words, stupid, no-good,
disappearing foreign ink.  Oh, don't let the whole mysterious message
dissolve and fade away like skywriting in the wind above a professional
baseball game, Little Becky silently, hectoringly prayed.

She carried off the letter, ducking into the chilly and unfrequented
big parlor.  She flung herself upon the hard and slippery sofa and
automatically reached above her head and helped herself to a fused
clump of peppermint drops from the domed jar that sat upon the Sheraton
sewing table.  She carefully lifted and resettled the jar top,
silently, silently, because somebody was always listening and
criticizing, although her father said no, it wasn't that they listened,
it was just that they were always having to hear.

Little Becky crunched the candy pieces.  An old metal filling twinged
and a droplet of minted drool trickled from the corner of her mouth
which she swiped away as she worried open the envelope.  She attacked
the flap, scrabbled, tore, and extracted the single, closely written
page.  She eagerly sought the closing.

lam, believe me, ever your devoted, William.

Oh, well, look, if Mr.  Baskett meant to write to her mother, he should
have put Mrs.  Alden Lowe on the envelope.  That was the true etiquette
of the situation because a married lady was her husband's name even
when her husband was dead.  Aunt Lily had said so when she was writing
her Christmas cards to all her widow friends and the custom was
respectful, not creepy, Aunt Lily had said.  Actually, Aunt Lily had
only sternly answered back, Respectful, when Little Becky yelped,
Creepy.  Aunt Lily didn't use many ordinary words.

Nor, apparently, did Mr.  Baskett.  Little Becky could not easily read
his affectedly Cyrillic hand.  Her lazy eyes wallowed across the spate
of curlicuing words.

Carissima Rebecca, the salutation murmured, but romance languages or
any romantic language at all remained a cipher to Little Becky.  She
did not linger over Mr.  Baskett's roundabout construction, "... and
so, if I am not to come for you, write and tell me no.  But since it
has always been impossible for you ever to tell me yes, except for one
time, except for one time, I shall make this easy for you.  I have
always heard the secret assent in your silences.  Say nothing and I
shall come for you, at last."

The peppermints had melted into a craggy lunar scape shape which Little
Becky's tongue explored, urgently seeking some commodious sheltering
cavern there, as she began to realize that her mother would not be
pleased at having her private letter ripped into and read, or, at any
rate, sort of read.  Little Becky considered a few more of the
elaborately written words and it had occurred to her, then, that this
was not exactly an appropriate (to use one of Aunt Lily's peculiar
words) letter for her mother to receive, for a married lady wasn't
supposed to be called, Little Becky peered,... my most beloved paragon.
Surely that was very wrong for Mr.  Baskett to to have written and for
her mother to be told.  Her father certainly would mind.  No one was
supposed to love a married lady.

The last of the sharp candy shards had dissolved, filling the cavities
in Little Becky's head with icy, decisive air, the cool minted
astringency causing her to think very clearly for once.  She acted in a
flash, shoving the letter and the envelope beneath the sofa cushion,
jamming the pieces further, deeper into the crease of the sofa frame
where they would never, ever be found.

THE PILGRIM FATHERS HAD initially contemplated advancing the Gospel of
the Kingdom of Christ along Guiana's gentle, sunny shore but ultimately
they had rejected that option, and for all the other reasons they
professed for not voyaging there, Ginger read between the lines and
determined they had feared the fortunate climate and nature's easy
bounty would prove too pleasant and corrupting and distracting from
their Higher Purposes.  Ginger sat at her desk delving into The
Bradford History.  She had wanted to discover who had washed the dishes
after the first Thanksgiving but William Bradford remained mute on that
point.

He was, however, very good at describing the diseases and plagues that
beset the colonists and the poor, susceptible Indeans, and it seemed
that certain settlers had begun behaving badly right off the bat which
she found reassuring.  Lily was always implying that standards had been
markedly higher once upon a time.

Ginger leaned on her elbows and gazed beyond her ice-flecked window
with its rattling sash and cracked lower pane which would never be
replaced because the glass was original glass-wavy and bubbled and
green-tinted.  Outside it had been and would be endlessly winter.  Oh,
she deplored the Pilgrims for having been so pigheadedly puritanical as
she viewed a frozen earth with crusts of shattery ice tracing over all
the ruts and sunken footprints.  A sour lemon sun was pendent in the
low, taupe sky.  A ragged grackle shivered on a bare, buoyant branch
and then, abruptly, launched itself as, below, the back door banged
twice and bumped shut.  Becky, with Alden's parka slung over her
shoulders, dashed across the dooryard and snatched the solid bedsheets
pegged to the clothesline.  She hurried inside with the stiff and
awkward shapes of the sheets flapping like wings beneath her arms.  The
grackle swooped back onto its branch and re perched with an aggrieved
yet respectful glimmer in its flat, glossy eye, focused now upon the
eruptive back door.

It has fallen in love with her, Ginger snorted to herself.  She knew
that look.

Ginger turned her head away from the window.  She studied her
reflection in the scarf- and bead-draped mirror that hung above her
cluttered bureau top.  She looked flattened, she decided, as if she'd
been rolled over by events too oppressive for even the bravest heart to
bear.  She shuddered and she reached about in her wild hair with pale
fingertips, piling, rearranging, reconstructing her crowning glory. She
would be Carly Simon, she would be Charlotte Corday, she would be the
Flavian

Woman such as she had seen her in the Capitoline Museum.  This last
representation required careful crimping and most of her concentration,
as she built up the crest of curls to an impressive height above her
noble brow, but with the small portion of her mind that was uninvolved
with her hair Ginger thought about the evening to come, taking her
speculations about events to come in tiny sips like bitter coffee, or
nibbling at them as at scorched macaroons, or paring away, cell by
cell, as at the very old corn on her biggest toe.

Well.

Babe Palmer had called one day last week out of the sheer and deep
royal blue and she had asked Ginger to come to dinner to meet her
unmarried cousin Earl.  Babe had been that bald about her plan.  He was
a single man, an unattached bachelor, that is, he was an only Earl.
Ginger had meant to say No, of course.  She had intended to say No, of
course not, but astonishingly what she had uttered aloud was a Yes.
Hearing her own familiar voice betray her, Ginger had stared down upon
the receiver, as appalled as when she had dropped her large,
loose-fitting topaz ring down a whirling garbage disposal, as
irrevocably, as carelessly let slip as that Yes.

Nevertheless, Ginger truly believed there were no accidents.  She
prided herself on her strict intellectual honesty in holding on to that
tenet even when to do so was personally inconvenient to herself.  She
supposed, now, she had said yes because in fact she wanted to go to
Babe's dinner party.  She wanted to experience the inside of Babe's
house, which she was sure smelled of Glade air freshener in the least
selling scent.  Ginger did not doubt that all of Babe's chairs stood
with their backs to the walls.

She lowered her arms and waggled her needle-and-pin-stuck hands until
the blood flowed back into them, plumping the veins.  After all, the
Flavian Woman would have had Greek slaves to dress her hair.  Ginger
thought she would have been happier, she would have fared far better
had she been born into ancient Flavia, wherever that had been.  Yes,
she would have flourished in Flavia.  She would have looked well in a
tunic or chiton or whatever flowing garment they had worn.  Her
shoulders were still good, good shoulders lasted.  Ginger resentfully
imagined her own good shoulders had been lasting since Flavian times,
whenever those had been.

She couldn't decide whether Babe had meant anything by the timing of
this dinner party of hers, "We'll expect you on Friday, the
sixteenth."

February i6th, two days after Valentine's Day, when the candy hearts
were being sold at a discount and the hothouse roses were turning brown
in all the hot houses.

After a while, after again consulting her mirror, Ginger wondered
whether she might not have piled her hair too high, because Earl might
not be a particularly tall man.  Babe, the compact Babe, could pass
without stooping beneath the set of former schoolyard monkey bars per
durably cemented to the grounds of the Senior Village complex.  Ginger
had observed this one day while she was sitting stuck in Lily's car
waiting for a Nor Co Fuel oil truck to negotiate a narrow downtown
corner.  Babe, in her perpetual busy hurry, strode across the Seniors'
open space on her stumpy marching legs, taking the shortcut through to
the broken-iced round of pond behind the police station where the fat
and foolish Canadian geese were wintering over.  Babe toted a basket of
bread crusts which she denied to some darting sparrows.  She struck out
at one-the tiny bird staggered in the air.  Ginger had noticed all this
as the Norco Fuel oil truck backed down an eighteenth-century lane
holding up twentieth-century traffic.

Small-town life.  One came across everyone eventually.  One observed
them and one was observed in turn.  Ginger was sure Babe had heard all
about those several times Ginger and Goody had met since Christmas down
at the YMCA where Goody ran his laps around the indoor track during the
winter months, and where Ginger had taken to showing up for the
Meditation Hour which convened in a darkened chamber with pallets on
the floor and a poster of Rabindranath Tagore thumbtacked to the wall.
An aerobics class thumped overhead and the stinging odor of chlorine
drifted in from the swimming pool as the water was roiled by amateur
divers.  Lana Arnetti, the reed-thin and otherworldly instructress,
advised her Meditators to learn to lean into stress instead of fighting
against it, which worked for Ginger until the radio in the crafts class
down in the basement began to broadcast that song, "You Are the Wind
Beneath My Wings," the radio tuned up extra loud because this was
everyone's favorite song of the moment.  It was, however, a song Ginger
had come particularly to despise and she hated it even more since she
had identified it on a 3 X 5 card as the rallying ballad of all the
passive aggressive females who had discovered their very own anthem,
one which they needn't sing for themselves but compelled their victims
to sing to them as they simpered and bravely denied themselves
fulfilling careers and necessary dental procedures and the uncollapsed
portion of a favorite dessert.  Sometimes, Ginger simply couldn't stand
women even though she herself was one.

Then, as the song chafed along, Ginger did not meditate, sitting
cross-legged on her padded pallet.  Rather, she concentrated her
separate thoughts darkly, because if anyone was expecting her to become
the wind beneath their wings, they could jolly well look ahead to a
fiery crash, no survivors.  Nevertheless, she emerged from the dim
chamber in a cooler and calmer state than the discharged aerobicizers
who milled, sweating like sliced and salted raw eggplants.  Ginger
sailed serenely through them toward the Veri-Fine Fruit Juice machine
where Goody was bound to be bumped into, post-jog.  He would be
searching his running shorts' several small pockets for the quarters he
was sure he hadn't forgotten to bring.  Ginger never pointed out to him
that his quarters had jounced from his shallow pockets and fallen onto
the running track and been snatched by the small boys, truant from
Gym-Boree!"  who routinely patrolled the track for lost change. Because
then Babe would stitch Velcro tabs across Goody's pocket openings and
so deprive Ginger of her opportunity to produce her own quarters,
eventually, from the bottom of her capacious satchel.  She fished for
quarters (so disorganized, she helplessly explained) as Goody, a bit
muzzy from dehydration, for his running seemed to make him ill rather
than healthy, automatically accepted the pale silky scarf, the
Passion-scented lace edged hankie, her current paperback reading (Women
Who Love Too Much, etc.), which Ginger handed over to him in a wifely,
burdening manner.

Directly across from the drinks machine was an old leather sofa into
which one could subside.  Ginger sank onto a cushion.  Today, she was
wearing her dream togs, a powder-blue leotard, Fair Isle leg-warmers,
an Incan poncho, a kind of romantically mystic Celtic-pre-Columbian
look intended and achieved.  Goody slotted three quarters, and three
quarters more, into the Veri-Fine coin box and collected an Apple Juice
for himself and a Cran-Apple for Ginger which, he remembered from week
to week, was her tipple.

"Sit here next to me," Ginger commanded and Goody instantly obeyed,
falling into the sofa's springless depths.

He drank deeply, at the mercy of his thirst.  Ginger sprawled
confidently beside him, her foot positioned to hook his ankle, a hand
poised to clutch his arm should he make a run for it-after all, he was
a runner.  She sipped sparingly and began to chat ongoingly as if Goody
knew all about her daily concerns, the common thread of all that linked
them easily taken up.

She confided that meditation lowered her blood pressure even as her
search for a righteous divorce lawyer kept raising her numbers.  She
recalled the day he had driven her to Boston to interview yet another
dud lawyer, but how kind Goody was to assist her in her quest.  She
spoke of her afternoon spent wrestling with her book's "Sexual Imagery
in Housecleaning Products" chapter.  A mop's significance was obvious
to all, but what about a Handi-Wipe?  Iconographically, what was that
all about?  Goody said he was afraid he could not say, as Ginger
shushed him.  Listen, she ordered.  The crafts class radio, the wailing
radio, was broadcasting "Tie a Yellow Ribbon "Round the Old Oak Tree."
She despised that song, Ginger said.  You wouldn't catch her tying any
stupid yellow ribbons around anything.  She'd get a restraining order
and nail a mammoth KEEP OUT, GO AWAY sign to a tree so there wouldn't
be any question.  The man in the song had been in prison, for God's
sake.  Oh, but who was she to condemn another woman?  A woman could be
very foolish about a man, she promised Goody.

Goody had made his move as Ginger gestured expansively, shaking her
fist and motioning a kick with her foot.  He heaved himself from the
deep sofa's grip.  Warm leather released reluctantly and lover-like
along the backs of his bare legs.

"The time," he stated generally.  He deposited his empty juice bottle
into the clear-glass recycling bin and stepped into his buckle-up
galoshes and pulled on his overcoat.  Covered, except for a glimpse of
red knees, he turned to catch Ginger's last remark.

"I'll be seeing you," she said.  "Soon," she smiled.

"Oh yes, soon," Goody said honorably for he owed her seventy-five cents
for his apple juice and several more seventy-five cents from the times
before.  "Soon," he stressed, conscious of the debt.

" "Til then, then," Ginger added for the benefit of assorted over
hearers in line at the Veri-Fine machine who were only too willing to
believe they had witnessed one rendezvous and dared to hope they
possessed secret knowledge that there was going to be yet another
tryst.  Still, as Ginger told herself tolerantly, those other women had
evil minds and if Babe, duly reported to with a word picture painted in
red and purple hues, chose to think the worst of her husband then that
only reflected rather poorly upon their marriage, did it not?  Besides,
when she and Louis had started to have their problems, when the
whispering had sizzled and hissed all around and about them, there had
been good reason, had there not?

If Goody would not jump, he might have to be pushed.

Nevertheless, if Ginger had meant for Babe to worry, she had not
intended that she act.  But here they were, she 'd goaded Babe into
action, although hers seemed a very elementary response, a very direct
and unsubtle tactic launched to steer Ginger away from Goody and on
toward Earl.  Unless Babe was being very clever, though how and in what
manner her guile might manifest itself Ginger had yet to fathom.  She
examined the proposed dinner party from every angle and sharp
refracting point which her own abilities as a deviser recommended to
her.  There had to be a jagged rock, unseen but now not to be
unexpected, against which Babe meant for all of Ginger's hopes to be
dashed.

HARVEY PARKED PENNY NiCHOLLS in the big parlor to wait while he packed
his overnight bag.  He tracked Becky down in the kitchen, interrupting
her at the ironing board to ask if Penny might be kept occupied by a
cup of tea and perhaps some delicious treat which Becky could always be
counted upon to produce so graciously and so spontaneously.  Becky said
yes, and tried not to smile at the transparency of Harvey's charm
offensive, and Harvey, knowing he 'd been found out, tried not to smile
back.

As the kettle came to the boil, Becky set a pretty old decoupage tray
with china cups and saucers, silver spoons from the spoon jar, and the
Wedgwood sugar and creamer.  There was a box of Mystic Mints in the
freezer and Becky arranged a dozen on a pretty painted fruit plate,
formerly one of a set and now the only one remaining.  Poor thing,
Becky thought, dwelling sadly upon the plate's aloneness rather than
celebrating its survival.

Presently, Ginger wandered into the kitchen to rummage through the
refrigerator, having decided after the spell in front of her mirror to
give herself a last-minute yogurt and avocado facial before her evening
out.  Trying to be helpful, Becky told her they only had pineapple
cottage cheese and broccoli, which Ginger didn't think would do the
trick.

"My skin gets so murky looking at this time of year," she complained.

"I need the sun.  I'm one of those sun-deprived people.  It's a
syndrome, you know.  I need brightness and radiance to surround me so
that I too can shine as I'm meant to shine."

"Uh huh," Becky said.  She was ironing some small linen napkins to
place on Penny's tray because they were so much nicer than paper
ones.

" Who's here?  " Ginger asked as she noticed the properly set tray. Old
chipped mugs and the milk carton would do for a mere family snack. She
helped herself to a Mystic Mint.  It had been her idea to freeze them;
they were best that way.

"This is for Penny Nicholls.  She and Harvey are driving down to
Connecticut to his house to dismantle his chandelier because he doesn't
want to sell it with the house, not that he's about to sell that house
anytime soon in this economy Alden says, but Harvey's got some sort of
fixation about his chandelier, although it's a magnificent piece.  We
saw one very like it at Winterthur, actually," Becky said.  "Harvey's
is finer, Alden and I thought."

"You say Penny Nicholls's here?  I'll carry in the tray.  I want a word
with her, and I'll have a cup of tea too," Ginger said and she drifted
from the kitchen without the tray which was so typical that Becky could
only sigh and replenish the plate of Mystic Mints.

Left to amuse herself, Penny prowled round the chilly parlor.  She was
reminded of her own lost parlor as she shut her eyes and breathed in
deeply of the well-managed mustiness that marked the air of long-live
ding dwellings.  Indeed, she felt herself back in her own lost house
when she opened her eyes to the gloomy and sinuous pattern of the paper
on the wall, and the shaggy Boston fern and small tree of a jade plant
resident on the windowsill, and the heavily hanging curtains from which
one might raise flurrying cloudlets of dust and spores if one flicked
against the fabric with a fingernail.  There would be a set of the
works of Francis Parkman taking up a shelf of the glass-front
bookcase-yes,

there it was, just as it should be.  Penny loved her life at Senior
Village, but sometimes she wished she could go home, if only for the
weekend.

Lily's antiques were as unfashionable as Penny's own, at least Penny
had been told they were unfashionable by the dealers who had invited
themselves over to make grudging offers on her mahogany sideboard and
filigreed dictionary stand and a drum table almost identical to the one
in the big parlor's corner, although Lily's table was not marred by the
moisture rings of too many glasses set down on the wood during the
cocktail hours the Nichollses had always enjoyed.  Not that Lily's
table's better condition would count in her favor.

"What do you take me for?"  Penny had asked, spurning all offers, and
she had made arrangements to place everything that didn't fit into her
new condo's reduced-size rooms into storage at a superior sort of
climate-controlled warehouse place reassuringly visible to her whenever
she drove past it on Rte.  128.  She planned to point out the facility
to Harvey if they went that way.  Perhaps she'd invite him to stop and
they could gain admittance to the warehouse and lounge on her Duncan
Phyfe sofa, angled into a 12' X 18' cubicle, and pretend to watch the
Sid Caesar Show on her old black-and-white Magnavox TV.  Perhaps she'd
find a forgotten bottle of sherry in the sideboard and they could set
their drinks down on the faux tole-ware TV trays she'd won with Green
Stamps back when Green Stamps had been earnestly collected and pasted
into booklets.

But they probably wouldn't drive past her furniture.  Harvey had
boasted of knowing some speedy and secret passage to Hartford when he
invited her to come along on his chandelier-dismantling expedition,
saying he needed her expertise and good advice and they would be gone
overnight.  Penny could not imagine what his secret route might be. Not
very logically, she wondered if he 'd solved the space-time continuum
when he worked for Aetna-he 'd had a very big job there, she knew.

Still, life had not ceased to be interesting, Penny reflected, and she
credited her own get-up-and-go for keeping it so.  After all, she 'd
been campaigning vigorously on her own behalf as a veteran of the
moving wars for months now to win this invitation to the splendid
mansion in Connecticut.  She had packed two boutique boxes of Kleenex
for the individual wrapping of each chandelier prism which she would
produce at the necessary moment, and also brown paper and a red Magic
Marker because you really couldn't count on your old brain to remember
what every misshapen package contained even as you told yourself you
would.  Harvey would say, Bless you, old girl, which would be very
gratifying.  Tape, she had brought tape as well.

Ginger invaded Penny's pleasant musings.  She exclaimed at Penny and
professed to be happy to see her, although Penny couldn't imagine why.
Strictly speaking, Ginger had never been someone whom she had known all
that well, but she was someone of whom she had heard rather a great
deal.  Indeed, Ginger had been very much mentioned over the years.
Olive, at the end, lingering upstairs in Lily's quietest bedroom, had
more or less predicted the failure of her difficult daughter's
marriage, and if she 'd been off by seventeen years or so, Olive would
have said that Ginger was the stubbornest girl who had ever drawn
breath.  Olive would have said that Ginger had stayed married just to
thwart her mother's doomy pres agings Still, Penny had always rather
wondered whether Ginger hadn't had her reasons for being the way she,
reportedly, was, for Olive had never been Penny's favorite person. Even
as a girl, Olive had minded other people's business for them. Penny
could well imagine Olive bristling and chewing the insides of her lips,
and the tip of her nose alternately pinching and flaring at the
prospect of Penny's overnight trip away with Harvey and so, for the
time being, Penny decided she was on Ginger's side.  And what an
exotic-looking woman she'd grown up to be.  What fascinating,
elaborately arranged hair she had which sprouted from her head like
some sort of complicated botanical root system illustration in an
ancient herbal encyclopedia temporarily on display at the library
opened to a special page.

By the time Becky backed through the big-parlor door carrying an
overloaded tray, china cups clinking and the teapot dribbling down its
spout as it would always do, Ginger and Penny were sitting side by side
on the sofa and Penny was catching and patting Ginger's gesturing hands
as Ginger expressed herself at length.

"And then when I told Louis I didn't think I loved him anymore, he
said, well, just so long as I didn't love him any less that was all
right with him," Ginger was saying.  "What do you do with such a
man?"

"He's an attorney, dear, isn't he?  " Penny asked.  "They often tend to
retreat into semantics when they're emotionally moved.  They're trained
that way so they can plead for mass murderers without thinking too hard
about what they're actually doing."

"Yes, but Louis is a tax attorney," Ginger said.

"Taxes you say?  But taxes are very visceral.  Taxes cut one to the
quick.  Death and taxes, for heaven's sake," Penny said.  "Besides,
what did you say to Louis?  You said you said to him you didn't think
you loved him anymore.  Because if you said you didn't think you loved
him, you were making allowances for second thoughts.  You weren't
really sure, were you?  And even if you didn't say so at the time to
Louis, you said so just now to me so at some point the possibility of
having second thoughts has occurred to you," Penny concluded.  She
enjoyed fixing broken things.  She enjoyed rubbing up against a nub.

"I don't know.  I don't know what I said," Ginger replied.  "Isn't that
fascinating?  My last confrontation with Louis really is rather a blank
to me."  She subsided into thought.

Becky let the teacups rattle on their saucers as she put down the tray
and began to pour.  She had set a cup for herself, and Harvey's
capacious Souvenir of Capri mug and several more cups for anyone else
who might show up to sip and chat.  The clip of china on china tended
to draw out the family as a shallow pool of beer left outside overnight
in a jar top will attract slugs in the garden, although the point of
that exercise is to drown the pests.

Penny said, How lovely, dear, to Becky, and Ginger murmured, Yes,
lovely, how perfectly lovely.  She wished Becky would go away because
Becky had already heard the story of the final days of Ginger's
marriage and Becky had a way of withholding comment which was very
marked.

"Of course I buried my own late husband relatively early," Penny said,
to which Becky and Ginger responded with more murmurs although

Becky's were heartfelt while Ginger, for a second or two, not very
sensibly wondered if by citing his relatively early burial, Penny had
meant she had had Buster interred before he had entirely passed on.

"Yes, he was taken by surprise," Penny said.  "I didn't have a chance
to anticipate and work out how I was going to feel.  I was numb, I was
wild, I was-everything," she recalled.

"Death is definitely neater than divorce, emotionally speaking," Ginger
agreed.  "When they die, oh, you're terrifically grief-stricken but at
least death isn't ambiguous and inconclusive and, oh, you know, like
you left your oldest pair of slippers in some hotel room and even
though they're not worth pursuing, you do wonder about them sometimes.
Is the chambermaid wearing them and enjoying them?  You know where they
are when someone dies.  You don't ask yourself, where are their
slippered feet idling tonight?  "

"Well, as I said, you do have to bury them," Penny said.  "Although the
gang at Senior Village is more and more opting for cremation now in
their pre arrangements which strikes me as being too strong a response.
I don't want to rise up as just a puff of smoke on Judgment Day.  That
would be very limiting, I should think, to come back as just a puff of
smoke and a handful of gritty ash."

"Do you wish Louis were dead?  " Becky challenged Ginger.

"I didn't say that.  I'd be very sad.  I suppose I'd be shattered"

"It's never a very easy time," Penny remarked soothingly and she asked
for another cup of delicious tea which Becky poured with a consciously
steadied hand, explaining it wasn't any special sort of tea, really,
just the IGA's own brand but which one might well think was Earl Grey
if one didn't know.

Penny, who had believed she 'd been served a special company brew and
had wondered whether Harvey hadn't stayed Becky's hand as she reached
for the everyday tea and revealed that this was going to be a momentous
day for Penny and himself, was let down, but she didn't let on.

"Well," Ginger began again, brightly.  "I'll be dining with some of
your family this evening, Penny.  Babe asked me, and Goody of course,
and her cousin Earl will be there.  Do you know about Earl?  "

"Of course I know about Earl.  They don't keep him hidden under a rock.
He's my cousin Janet's boy.  He'd be Babe's second cousin, or some
degree of cousin removed-ness.  They're not particularly close but
they're of an age."  Penny seemed to think that sufficiently
explained

Earl.

Ginger, however, sought more specific information.  She needed to
prepare.  The evening ahead required a fine strategy of her own. Should
she dress up or dress down for Earl, or immerse herself in golfing st
atis

The Hills and Love 303

tics to fabricate a common interest?  Had he fallen serially in love
with a

I long strand of women, all of whom, or none of whom, conformed to a

1 pattern which she, Ginger, should contrive to emulate or to break?
She

I meant to sparkle at this Earl tonight, if only for the pleasure of
seeing

I her brilliance reflected in Goody's admiring eye as grey little Babe
squinted at them all from her corner.

" Babe didn't mention, what does Earl do?  " Ginger was forced to ask.
"What is Earl doing nowadays?  " Penny wondered, in turn.  "He was an
air-traffic controller originally, but he got caught up in all that
strike business.  Well, he knew better.  I told him so at the time that
President Reagan meant what he said.  Then Earl was very keen to go to
Seminary.  Remorse, I thought, and nothing came of that although he's
still very involved in the Congregational Youth Fellowship-they're the
Congregational branch of the family.  Now he's trying his hand at a
franchise he's bought into.  He goes out to people's houses and
assesses their security situation and then he installs an alarm system
for them.  He's notified when there's an intruder.  I know he wears a
beeper on him because it beeped last Thanksgiving when I was there with
them and Babe nearly dropped her squash-and-peanut casserole hot out of
the oven, and I wished she had dropped it, frankly, squash and peanuts
don't work.  I'm not sure the recipe didn't say pecans.  Of course,
Babe is wound too tight.  But exactly what Earl thinks he can do once
he's been beeped about a burglar, I'm not sure, other than memorize an
intruder's features for the Ident-A-Kit technician.  I suppose Earl is
capable of that much, noticing misspelled tattoos or whether or not
someone has a beard.  Although if I were a burglar, I'd wear a false
beard when I was b|<' working.  Ask him tonight, ask Earl, what if it's
a false beard?  Are there II methods of detecting false beards by how
it's hooked over the ears?  There's some conversation for you, Ginger,
if the talk slows down.  Ask him, do the hairs of a false beard melt
and frazzle like rayon if you hold a match to them?  But how do you get
a burglar to let you hold a match to his face?  Offer him a cigarette?
Not that anyone smokes these days very I' much, but I sense the
burglary class smokes if anyone does."

I Becky smiled privately into her teacup but Ginger spotted the
crinkles encasing her eyes and the plumping of her cheeks and the
pinkening of her skin and a slight convulsion of her shoulders.

"He sounds extremely enterprising," Ginger said, bound to take Earl's
side but all the while aware of how absurd one had to make oneself over
the men in one's life, even over the men only potentially in one's
life.  But she quashed that thought at once; otherwise, one could
hardly carry on and she was determined to carry on.  What else could
one do, but carry on?

"I don't know, Earl's always seemed more of a lost soul to me," Penny
said.  "And speaking of lost souls, where's Harvey?  We should be on
our way before dark.  It'll be dark before you know it."  She stood and
ambled into the hall and yoo-ho oed up the stairs, "Harvey Hill, you're
keeping a lady waiting."

BETSY LEFT SCHOOL late that afternoon after staying behind for a
scheduled hour of computer time.  The machine responded to the gentle
pressure of her finger taps, or so Mr.  Prentice, watching over her
shoulder, told her.  Betsy very much doubted an insensible machine
could be said to like her particularly and she hoped Mr.  Prentice was
not going to become a complete problem before she finished her
extra-credit statistics project in which she was developing a program
to tell Aunt Lily on which day of the week her birthday was going to
fall up to the year 2100.  Ginger had said that any idiot savant could
figure out as much by counting on his fingers and nose.  Ginger was
peeved Betsy hadn't chosen her birthday but Betsy knew better than to
inform her mother she was going to turn fifty on a Tuesday because her
mother would find a way to blame Betsy not only for the Tuesday but for
the fifty as well.  Mr.  Prentice had told Betsy that carrying her
program as far as the year 2100 was overkill, or, possibly, underkill.
Betsy hadn't laughed for she knew better than to encourage Mr. Prentice
by laughing at his jokes.  Besides, she had grown rather fond of her
great-aunt and she hadn't wanted to set any very logical limit to
Lily's reasonable life expectancy.  Were she being reasonable,

Betsy need only consult Uncle Alden's ten-year desk planner calendar.

The whole idea, which was admittedly not much of an idea, had come of
browsing through her Book of Common Prayer which listed three centuries
of Easter Sunday dates.  In 2011, Easter would fall as late as it
possibly could, on April 24, when Betsy would be thirty-eight years

!

old and she hoped in a position to afford a really nice spring outfit
although she supposed there would be no point in deciding upon the
outfit now because styles would be different then and perhaps she too
would no longer be the same and so set upon buying everything in
blue.

Besides, Betsy only wished to keep busy, too busy to receive other
unwelcome thoughts which, nevertheless, clustered and pressed behind
her eyes demanding admittance to the well-defended fastness that was
her mind.  But Betsy had continued to view a hundred versions of Mr.
Oscarsson's accursed death in fluid and sliding images which got in
somehow, because-Betsy shook her head and touched the Delete key
because after all, she had invited them.  So she had suffered visions
of Mr.  Oscarsson dead, suddenly in his sleep, suddenly by traffic
accident, suddenly of a storm that surged off the plains raging only
over him, tossing him, tearing him, perforating him with lightning
strikes.  Though now, it seemed, Mr.  Oscarsson had up and married one
of his office girls.  A friend from Kansas had just sent Betsy a
newspaper clipping annotated with the comforting comment, Too weird,
huh?"  and a sharp arrow indicating the photo of the bride (big hair,
tiny face, glasses).  Betsy was buoyed by this news.  Married, she was
quite certain, Mr.  Oscarsson would be a much harder target to hit.
The clinging body of his newly beloved would keep any demi-divine
projectile from getting too clear a shot at Oscar.  Betsy had not told
her mother.  Someone else could bravely, or brazenly, inform Ginger,
and by the quality of Ginger's silence on the subject, Betsy would know
when this occurred.

Well-wrapped in her great-grandmother's Persian lamb coat and a jersey
felt turban from which she had removed a glittering jewel, Betsy stood
above the broad and shallow steps that terraced down to the rank of
late buses rumbling and fuming at curbside and spottily filling with
students who had run to catch a bus which seemed about to depart
without them.  Betsy, who had noticed her idling bus was driverless,
chose to stand in the open air, kept very warm within her Hill
inheritance of sturdy and oversized outerwear.

She tilted her face toward a silvery disk set low in the sky.  Was that
the last of the sun or an early moon?  She remained in place,
entertaining a few not very original thoughts about how one could not
be sure about much of anything on, or apparently, off this earth until,
through the thick pelt and heavy satin lining of her sleeve she became
aware of pressure upon her upper arm and of a voice, not from around
Towne, speaking her name.

"Bes-ty.  Bes-ty."

She shrugged away the touch as she turned toward the voice.  The
components of a face wavily assembled-Betsy's eyes were blurred from
gazing into the sun, or moon.  She saw a round, bristle-topped head,
the creased arcs of eyes, ruddy mounds of grin-stretched cheeks, all
balanced atop the inverted triangle of a Vandyke-style beard.  The
beard struck her as rather wispily recent and, mentally, she removed
it.  Of course.

"I am Stefan from last summer on the train trip eastward ho!," he
announced fluently, as if he was used to inserting an explanation like
a surname into the blank stares that so often greeted him.  I am Stefan
who you must have known would be persistent when you met me on that
long sad train ride across the American continent.

"But what are you doing here?  " Betsy could only ask.

Stefan had been to a denim store sometime during the past months.
Perhaps he fancied he had assimilated but he stood out like a stoat in
the Arctic snow.  Betsy wished some great winged predator would swoop
from the sky and carry him off.  Wafers of faces were witnessing their
encounter from every other school bus window.

"Are you not amazed?"  Stefan demanded to know.  "Because you neglected
to give me your address, we neither none of us had writing pencils or
papers at the last, that day, I remember.  Still, your most pleasant
mother revealed your final destination to me as I asked again, But
where may I find you?  Towne, she said, the town of Towne, population
1900, my later research revealed.  Why, I told to myself, so small a
place.  I had only to travel there and ask of you around."

"You asked about me?  Where?  Who?  " Betsy asked.

"Yes, I asked of you at the little everything store, at the coffee and
doughnut and cheese-smelted sandwich counter.  Try the school, they all
said, and instructed me to here, this place.  School," Stefan said.

The buses were rolling off.  Betsy watched them go, helpless as she
nodded along with the tale of Stefan's efforts to find her.  Stefan,
after all, was a guest in her country.  She supposed she was obliged to
be courteous although she could not forget how he had licked her hand
last summer.  She could still summon the flick of his snakey tongue
across her palm and even now she sometimes found herself locked in the
bathroom scrubbing the spot with an old wooden nailbrush.  On this
wintry day, however, Betsy was wearing the heavy, fur-lined leather
gloves her father had sent her for Christmas which she had marked, as
per his instructions, in the Saks catalogue as a pair she liked.

"But why aren't you in Rhode Island?  Aren't you supposed to be in
Rhode Island?"  Betsy asked.

"Yes, but my host family handed me a spare car and a road map and three
hundred dollars for my expensives and compelled me to seize the
opportunity of my vacation week to seek more of America.  Go, go, they
said, and don't return to us until ten P.M. Sunday night after the
Masterpiece Theatre presentation is over," Stefan said.

"That was very thoughtful of them," Betsy said.

Stefan aimed a look at her and saw she was sincere.

"But three hundred dollars and one week does not take me far in this
vast land, I discovered, so I came up to Boston only and have immersed
in its history and sights while staying with acquaintances on the floor
at B.U. Today, I scheduled to drive to the north.  At Marblehead
Harbor, for example, I stood and surveyed the area of ocean surface
where during the War of 1812 the mortally wounded Captain Lawrence,
commander of the American frigate Chesapeake, spoke his final words,
"Don't give up the ship."  And as I need not to tell you, the ship was
then boarded and taken by the British enemy, so the famous American
phrase of defiance is an ironic motto which I did not appreciate before
my vacation travels and extensive guidebook consultations."

"Oh my," said Betsy.  "Yes.  Of course.  The Chesapeake."

They were walking, skittering across a patch of ice.  Stefan clasped
the vicinity of Betsy's fur-clad elbow as they stepped over low
snowbanks set like a series of hurdles across the nearly empty parking
lot.  They made their way toward Stefan's car, a boxy Gremlin with a
plastic daisy wired to its antenna by a former au pair of Stefan's host
family who had never been able to remember where she 'd left the car
when she went to the Mall.

"Where shall we go first?  " Stefan asked, opening the passenger
door.

Betsy slid inside and Stefan carefully tucked the folds of her long,
generous coat around her legs.  These were his continental manners.
"For I am the tourist and you are my tour guide," he said.

"It will be dark soon," Betsy said, "and we won't be able to see.
Besides, there's nothing to see."

" There is always something of interest to admire.  A proud new Post
Office, the house where the murder was," Stefan suggested.

"What murder?"  asked Betsy, alarmed.

"There is always a murder house in small-town America," Stefan assured
her.

Betsy supposed this was almost true but she wasn't about to admit as
much to Stefan.  Instead, she proposed, "We'll drive up to the top of
Prospect Street where you can see nearly to the ocean.  Harriet Beecher
Stowe recommended the view once.  She said, "Oh, what a pleasant
prospect."  There's an historical marker telling all about why Prospect
Street is called Prospect Street."

"An historical marker!"  Stefan marveled.

As they drove along, Betsy pointed out Senior Village, and the giant
chestnut tree, impressive even without its leaves, presiding over the
green which, no, was not green now, Betsy had to concede, but was a
green nonetheless.  Betsy showed Stefan the house that had burned and
the old house with the high cupola where a strobe-lit witch's
silhouette had flown round and round and round last Halloween night.
Stefan peered and veered and Betsy refrained from further travelogue
after Stefan drove over an edge of Anna Webster's lawn when Betsy said,
"Mrs.  Webster lives there, she's nice."

They did not linger on the crest of Prospect Street.  The Scenic
Overlook hadn't been plowed out which was just as well for the Overlook
was a spot where couples went to be alone, Betsy suddenly recalled
having heard and she wondered whether Stefan had any way of knowing
that as well for he seemed to possess an extraordinarily informational
guidebook.

" If it weren't getting dark and cloudy and if the trees hadn't grown
so tall, then you could almost see the ocean.  Of course, the land was
all in fields when Harriet Beecher Stowe visited, Aunt Lily said,"
Betsy mentioned on the un viewable view's behalf.

"Who is Aunt Lily?"  Stefan asked.

"Where I live now, with Aunt Lily," Betsy said.

" But Aunt Lily will wonder where we are.  We must go to her at once.
I look forward to meeting Aunt Lily and your charming mother again
also," Stefan said.

Betsy had intended to ask, to insist if need be, that Stefan drop her
off in the village where she could find a ride home with someone who
lived out the River Road way.  She would provide Stefan with clearly
written instructions back to the highway, and remember to slide her
glove back on quickly (which she would have had to remove to write the
directions on a torn-off notebook page) before he could bow over her
hand and secretly lick her palm good-bye as all the late-afternoon
coffee drinkers, who would have been watching strange Stefan, bearded
and denimed and declaiming in the long mirror behind the microwave and
the frappe machine, marveled at witnessing such an Old World
leave-taking.  Betsy, for her part, would say good-bye and farewell
firmly and finally.  But all of that seemed too complicated even to
envision and far too complicated to carry off and so Betsy told Stefan,
"Oh, all right, we'll go home.  Drive over the bridge and hang a
right."  The remainder of the journey was spent in tiresome discussion
of the meaning and the origin and the application of the idiom she had
just employed.

BECKY RETURNED TO the kitchen to brew a second pot of tea and she found
Harvey in there, pressing a pair of pajamas at her ironing board, a
burgundy taller sal-plaid cotton Brooks Brothers pair, new and
evidently saved for an occasion and just unwrapped and unpinned and
shaken out.  He was making a fair job of the ironing so Becky didn't
offer to take over.  Besides, a certain delicacy prevented her as she
experienced an unbidden vision of Harvey and Penny, dressed in their
sensible nightclothes, heading off to bed happily hand in hand, puffing
a bit as they ascended the grand staircase of Harvey's Connecticut
house for they'd be in rather a hurry.

Harvey steamed a stiff crease down the front of his pajama legs.  He
was an exceptionally well-groomed old gentleman.  He pulled more common
pins from the pajamas' folds and stuck them into the ironing board's
padded cover, thriftily saving them.

"Are you gals entertaining Penny?  " Harvey asked.  "I heard her
yelping now.  Don't tease her too hard and tire her out for me."

Harvey had put together a bag of groceries for his trip, packing a loaf
of rye bread, a half carton of brown eggs, six Delicious apples, and a
jar of instant coffee.  He had placed a hammer and a pair of pliers for
chandelier dismantling purposes on top of the egg carton.  Becky
reorganized the bag, putting the hammer and pliers on the bottom.

Camping out in a shuttered, echoing, empty house, would seem like an
adventure, dare she think it would be a romantic one, with the right
person beside you, of course.  For a heartbeat, the right person
remained an un identifiably shadowy presence in her imaginings of such
a scene.  Becky shook off the thought.

"Will you be all right for food?"  she asked Harvey, reverting to her
usual practicality.

"The sideboard is full of Chinese menus," Harvey said, "and there's a
cabinet full of liquor unless the caretaker's been tippling but he
probably won't have gone for the Laphroiag, it's an acquired taste.
Then again, he may have been keen to establish one.  Anyway, there's
cans in the pantry-soup."

"I'll give you a few tea bags too, Penny likes our brand, and take the
rest of the Mystic Mints and a tub of your yogurt margarine, no one
else likes it, just you, and this nice plum jam.  I'm putting some
dishwashing liquid in an old pickle jar and twenty aspirins tied in a
clean hankie.  You shouldn't need any more than twenty aspirins.  You
shouldn't take more in just two days," Becky told him.

"Thank you," Harvey said.  Becky was an inveterate arranger and it was
always his policy to let women be efficient on his behalf.

The back door bumped open and shut.  Icy air fluttered the curtains and
set the wall calendar as way and Phoebe came in, home from the
hospital.  She was wrapped in her plaid greatcoat and a fun fur bonnet
with grosgrain ribbons that tied under her chin.  She had slipped off
her wet storm boots in the back hall and she padded along on her long
stockinged feet until she recovered her fun fur slippers which she 'd
left to bake all day beneath the kitchen radiator.  She scuffed into
them and unbuttoned her coat.

"Any calls come for me?  " she asked as she always asked.  She checked
the cork message board, reading the spate of messages, most executed in
Little Becky's sprawling, excitable hand.

The QKC Super Jackpot is $300.  The MLX secret word for today is
Rockabilly.  If WEBI calls guess Door Number 12.  Glover-call Missy.
Alden-Gee Weeden called in re a used truck-what's this about a used
truck?  Remember, Always answer "What's love got to do with it?"  for
the WPOP Ansa-Thon Prize!  Pleeze!  Glover-call Missy twice.

"Maybe Arthur will call later.  He knows your hours," Becky pointed
out.  "Why don't you have a cup of tea?  Penny Nicholls and Ginger are
in the big parlor," she added.  This may or may not have been stated as
a caution, but Phoebe took it as such.

She was tired of fielding questions about Arthur and his progress in
California.  Hollywood, everyone enthused, but it wasn't Hollywood
where Arthur was-it was some sort of bungalowed, strip-mailed suburb,

Arthur said, quite unenchanted.  The view from his hotel room window
was of a commercial laundry and a freeway off-ramp.

Phoebe had not heard from Arthur in four days, and so her news of him
was the same old news.  They, the producers, were going to perm
Arthur's hair to even wilder curls and tangles, and they were going to
redden the red.  They want me to glow in the dark, Phoebe, Arthur had
told her.  Phoebe couldn't picture that.  Would she be able to tell him
in a crowd were they suddenly thrown into a crowd, together yet
apart?

Arthur had only five lines to speak in the first episode of the sitcom
but he had been given pages of physical comedy to perform including a
full four-minute sequence when, for reasons integral to the plot, he
was to be dangled upside down outside a skyscraper window as "Mavis"
and "Brock," the series' battling lovers, argued back and forth about a
vital and misdirected postcard which, in fact, had found its way into
"R.T."  's back pocket and which was to be produced by him at the very
last moment as he was being hauled in through a skyscraper window only
to be snatched from his fingers by the wind and last seen soaring and
cart wheeling above the rooftops of the "City."  They, the producers,
had not yet decided where the city was to be located.  They were
leaning toward the Pacific Northwest because the Pacific Northwest was
the opposite of the popular but perhaps overdue to wane in popularity
Northeast.  But Chicago was testing well too, Arthur said, and they
were going to have to make a decision soon so they, the producers,
could shade subsequent episodes with local color.

All of this was rather a lot for Phoebe to have to explain to the too
frequent questions put to her when she only knew that she missed Arthur
more than reason should allow.  She wondered what he was doing, hour
after hour.  She tracked his days as each hour occurred for him three
hours after they had occurred for her.  She ate lunch while he was
having breakfast.  When she had survived another morning without him,
he had yet to face his own early hours alone, although perhaps he did
not feel as alone as she, as he greeted hours that Phoebe had already
met.

"I gather the boy is kept busy," Harvey said.  He was lining up his
pajama sleeves to press a crisp crease along their length.  He ironed
like a man, slowly, fussily, singeing the tips of his fingers with jets
of steam, and always expelling a surprised syllable when this
happened.

"Yes, yes he is," Phoebe said.  "Last time he called he told me that
every night they make him go out to clubs and parties and such because
he has to meet people and make himself known.  He's creating an
interest."

Harvey might have said something about that but he refrained.

"Of course Arthur has to make the rounds," Becky said.  "He's embarking
on a very difficult career.  And I'm sure Arthur will call now that he
knows you're home.  He's probably tried to call and not gotten through
because the phone has been so busy."  She motioned toward the message
board.

"I have call-waiting at the hospital," Phoebe said.

"We're not call-waiting people," Harvey said.  "
Call-hold-onwhileI-answer-my-other-call because they might be more
important than you, I call it."

"Well, anyway," Phoebe said, lingering by the back stairs.  "I've
brought home the next to the newest Ruth Rendell from the library to
read.  I won't be wanting any supper, I don't think.  I'll just nibble
if I feel like anything later.  I think I'm coming down with a bug.  I
think a bug must explain for how I feel."  Her rabbity look was more
pronounced that evening, with her pinkening nose and quivering lips
that didn't quite cover her large, square teeth.

Caught in the headlights, Becky thought.

"I'll have to brain that boy," Harvey said before Phoebe had quite
climbed the stairs.

Becky hushed him, touching a finger to her lips.

"Why shush at me?  " Harvey asked.  "I'm on that girl's side.  The boy
brought her here and then abandoned her.  I'm surprised her people
haven't hunted him down and horsewhipped him.  I understand they're
country folk They should own a horsewhip or a shotgun or a hulk of a
brother with ham fists who administers down-home justice."

"Surely Phoebe hasn't been abandoned," Becky protested.

"You're right.  You have to marry them first before you can abandon
them," Harvey said.  "What we have here is more a case of having been
mislaid."

WILLIAM BASKETT WORE a long loden coat and a cashmere scarf so soft and
fine that its silky length could be drawn through any wedding ring
volunteered for demonstration purposes.  He wore a homburg hat whose
stiff shape did not quite conform to the contours of his impressive
skull.  The hat sat precariously, although it looked secure enough to
admiring observers, which contrariety William took as an admonitory
echo of several larger concerns he bore, and he wore the hat as it was
so he would never cease to be aware, whenever he ventured from his flat
or office or local coffeehouse or concert hall or art cinema or
intriguing new picture gallery, that life itself must be approached as
a balancing act.  For, otherwise, he would have returned to his
haberdasher as often as need be to have the matter of the hat put
right, the uniqueness of his cranium honored, and accommodated, just as
the jut of his stomach and the slope of his shoulders had been so
satisfactorily tailored to over the years.

It would have been a revelation to walk a mile in William's bespoke
shoes although he would never have permitted that.  Nor did anyone ever
borrow his fountain pen lest they bend its i8K gold nib to their will.
His Nib's nib, ran the mutter round the outer office where there was so
often a scurry for a sharpened pencil or a working ballpoint pen, for
William ran a very tight ship.  He was sometimes observed in the
evenings ruffling blame fully through the embassy wastebaskets
gathering carelessly tossed paper for the recycling bins whose
appearance had been his brainchild although no one had theretofore
taken William for a particular friend of the earth.

William was someone whom it was, no doubt, very pleasant to be and a
life's work to be with, or so Becky had come to believe over the years
during his infrequent trips to New York.  Then, bracing for his visit,
she had turned the apartment over to a team of professional cleaners
while she checked into Elizabeth Arden for the day, and phoned through
her slim file of music circle friends to scare up tickets to something
tremendous.

She harried a caterer, she nagged Alden about the wines, she sent the
children out to the movies and urged them not to hurry home.  And Becky
often thought of William when sorry domestic lapses occurred, when
recipes collapsed, or her last pair of stockings laddered, or her
camera shutter jammed, when the children bleated, when Alden was
terminated,

I'm so glad William isn't here to witness this, Becky would think.  At
least he has been spared this, whatever else she had been unable to
spare him.

I'm so glad William isn't here, Becky was thinking at that very moment
as she picked up the refilled teapot by its Duco Cement-repaired handle
which elected that inning to detach from the pot proper.

William, rattling along in his discount rental car, recalled the way to
Towne from the terrible journey twenty years earlier.  The memory was
seared into his soul, the occasion of his formative tragedy.  He
swerved off the highway and beetled on through the self-consciously
quaint village which seemed to have receded even further into the
eighteenth century as the twentieth rolled cynically on.  They had
buried the power lines and enacted statutes to keep the sign age all
crooked and bygone and illegible.  He raced toward the road that curved
to the bank of the narrow river flowing blackly beneath a crust of ice.
Houses, never there before, flashed past his eyes as just so many
vulgar holiday pavilions erected across a sacred battleground.  He saw
a tall (taller, now) stand of hemlocks, and the rusted (near rusted
through, now) vault of a mailbox.  He slowed and approached.  He knew
the place.  This was the place.  He had homed here like Odysseus, that
other long wanderer.

William had traveled across the Northern Hemisphere in the dead of
winter, been delayed fifteen hours in Frankfurt am Main, endured
standby status from London immured in Coach, and missed the first
available flight from New York after mishearing a squawking PA.
announcement pitched in no language known to man.

This had been such an unlikely setting for the great drama of his life,
William reflected, as he slithered up the sloping, S-curve driveway in
his nonperformance car.  Twenty years earlier this had been a
sun-splashed fastness of arbors and blossoms and fragrant and mockingly
lonely walks.  Indeed, he had been serenaded by a mockingbird whose
rolling call had been identified by Miss Hill, the maiden aunt, whom he
had encountered also wandering alone through a further field.  Now, he
fancied the grounds had been sunk in drear wintriness since his last
departure, waiting, bleak and blasted, for him to return to reclaim his
beloved and to right the great wrong that had occurred in the orchard
beneath a canopy of apple-heavy boughs as a hundred evil and implicated
guests watched and smiled and approved.

As he parked, William spied Andy's shabby car which he remembered from
the ride to the airport last summer after his highly satisfactory
interview with the young man, who had, after all, come through as hoped
and desired these past months with a sequence of reports on Becky's
state, her state of affairs, her state of mind, and dare one say, her
state of grace.  Andy was a fan of the excellent Mrs.  Lowe and for
that good opinion William was almost inclined to forgive his nephew's
habit of interlarding his long letters abroad with copious copy about
himself.

William struggled to break free of his rental car capsule, neglecting
to unhitch his seat belt which he was unaccustomed to but had been
sworn to use lest his-extortionary-rental car insurance be invalidated
by noncompliance.  Mother Hen America, William had spoken through
gritted teeth and his resentment reared anew as, tethered to a Chevy,
he lost his forward momentum.  Still, it wouldn't hurt to hang fire, he
told himself, before commencing the storming of this particular castle,
to cling to the last illusionary minutes before the reality of action
intruded.  William stretched and breathed deeply of the local air, a
cold and characterless draft.  Bandit-eyed chickadees fidgeted above a
feeder of seed, a snow shovel leaned against a tree trunk, a field
stone pathway was domed with clear ice.  The house was missing half its
shutters and the clapboards needed paint.  Sand had been flung at the
granite front step.  William knew he would remember every detail down
to the day of his death-the chickadees' immaculate feathering, the bent
haft of the shovel, the pockmarks in the ice, the blistered paint, the
crunch of sand underfoot, the deep interior silences of the house which
only darkened as he pressed the effect less bell with a pigskin
thumb.

HALFWAY UP THE STAIRS, Lily had to turn around and pad back down again,
all the while firmly holding on to her eyeglasses which had been the
object of her search through the lower rooms.  Her aim had been to find
her glasses and to avoid the visitor who showed no sign of quitting the
big parlor anytime soon, not that Lily held anything against Penny
Nicholls to whom she was prepared to be most cordial were she to take
Harvey off her hands.  Nevertheless, Penny was not to be encouraged to
think of Lily as a fellow sister and to feel free to move into the
house with her excessively slip-covered Nicholls family furniture and
begin to divvy up the pantry shelves, mentally or otherwise, so there
would be room for labeled and expiration-dated jars of the Nicholls
family recipe cauliflower florets and ridged coins of carrots preserved
in dilly brine.

Luckily, Lily's spectacles had not been forgotten, after all, in the
big parlor where Penny had been left to languish.  Lily had only half
formulated an unlikely plan to extricate them from beneath Penny's
thrusting nose by means of the telescoping fruit-picker arm fetched
from the barn, aided, perhaps, by a diversionary setting-off of the
kitchen oven timer.  Not necessary.  Lily had left her eyeglasses in
the little parlor beneath her overturned library book, both summarily
abandoned when she beat her retreat at the sounds of Harvey's and
Penny's voices cheerfully arguing the relative merits of salting or
sanding the front step.  Harvey and Penny both supported salt.  They
argued at Lily in absentia,

for Lily was the big sand apologist, Harvey said.  Lily, he said,
thought she was some kind of ecologist, and Harvey and Penny knew where
they stood in relation to that breed-although if Lily fancied herself
such an advocate for the Green Revolution, she had let herself be
persuaded away from her principles easily enough last fall, seduced by
the easy lure of forbidden leaf-burning to facilitate the clearing of
her lawns.

"Seduced!  Lily!"  the lively Penny had blurted.

"Ha," barked Harvey.

Small wonder Lily had forgotten her eyeglasses.

And now someone was determinedly knocking upon the front door and
apparently no one in the household but Lily, halfway up the stairs, was
capable of answering a knock upon a door.  Not that anyone ever comes
to see me, Lily thought, not without satisfaction.  The few people she
cared to know would never take it upon themselves to "feel free."  The
kettle shrilled from the kitchen and Ginger was broadcasting one of her
aggrieved speeches from the big parlor and Penny chimed in with her two
cents worth.  All this visiting, Lily thought, as she often thought
these days.

The front door, slumped out of true on fatigued and ancient hinges,
wouldn't budge.  Lily, needing her two hands to twist the knob and
jiggle the latch, slid her glasses into her cardigan pocket (impressing
on her memory, glasses in cardigan pocket) and she hauled the door
open.  She frowned at the jamb.  She fumbled in her cardigan pocket for
her glasses and slipped them onto her nose.  She peered at the mortise
and reamed it with her fingertip as if it were a waxy ear canal and
then she raised her eyes and regarded William as if he too struck her
as being not quite all that he should be.

William, fist raised to pound the door, stepped back.

"Yes?"  asked Lily repressively.  Her lenses fogged over white and
opaque in the variant airs.

William, unaccountably startled by this quite natural effect, could not
find his voice.

A circling and searching influx of chilly draft drew Becky from the
kitchen.  She tutted, as she came, at someone's carelessness.  Could no
one else in the household but she shut a door?  Someone ought to in

3i8 The Hills at Home vent a domestic electric eye system for doors in
houses full of impossible adolescents and distracted pre-divorcees,
another excellent business opportunity just begging for the right
entrepreneurial spirit to come along and exploit it.  Why can't Alden?
she thought.

William advanced as Becky approached.  She was wearing lime-green
wide-wale corduroy trousers, a red-and-white-heart-printed turtleneck
jersey, an oversized Black Watch plaid flannel shirt, a pair of Alden's
slipper socks, and a yellow gingham check apron with a ripe tomato
applique stitched to its pocket.  She'd just gone in for a short,
practical haircut from Doris the night driver's niece, who had just
started Beauty School.  Becky's nose and forehead shone from the effort
of mopping up after the mishap with the teapot and she had a Band-Aid
plastered on her chin after a recent tumble on the ice.  She had
wrenched her neck in the fall and she held her head awry. Nevertheless,
her smile of welcome was brilliant and William's answering smile was
triumphant.  Lily heard Becky's identifying cry of William.

William.  Lily had been led to believe that he lived far away from
Towne deep in Eastern Europe where he was so necessary and important
that the grateful locals had named a tongue-and-rhubarb sandwich after
him-unless that had just been one of Alden's sayings, she grasped
now.

"Only a flying visit," William was saying.  "I'm not really here.
Events press, but I was in the vicinity."  He had prepared this speech
to deliver at once before a witness to establish that none of this had
been devised.

"What a surprise," Becky exclaimed.  "Oh Lily, I'm so surprised.
Imagine, William here.  Andy will be surprised.  Well, I confess myself
very surprised, William."

William felt it was perhaps unsubtle of Becky to feign surprise by
continuing to insist how surprised she was; however, their audience of
Lily, the spinster-ornithologist, probably needed to be beaten over the
head.  And Becky was wise to establish that William must have come to
visit Andy.  He had, William congratulated himself, played the Andy
card perfectly.

"Yes, a word with Andy," William said.  "Has he been behaving
himself?"

"Yes," Lily spoke up.  "Yes, he has."

"Splendid," said William, gazing at Becky.

"You'll stay for dinner?"  Becky asked.  "You can stay for dinner?
Lily, won't it be lovely if William can stay for dinner?  "

"For dinner," Lily said.

"Yes, I shall look forward to dining with you this evening," William
said.  "Just let me settle myself.  I noticed something called the
By-Way Motor Hotel just beside the Interstate.  A large neon-lit sign
welcoming

Big Rig Truckers had just been switched on, it caught my eye.  I may be
wise to arrange accommodations now, before the big riggers converge."

"Very wise," Lily said.

"Don't be silly, William," Becky told him.  "You can't stay at that
place.  They just had a murder there."

"They only had a shooting," Lily said.  "The man hasn't actually
died."

"Not died, no," Becky said.  "But he's still in the hospital.  Phoebe
said Dr.  Dunlop said he hasn't seen a stomach wound like that since
Vietnam."

"At any rate, the man brought his troubles on himself.  He and some
married woman from Swampscott were having an inappropriate meeting."

Lily's voice dropped to a whisper.  She would say no more in front of
the fastidious Mr.  Baskett.

"Well, a love nest is the last place for William to be found," Becky
declared.

"Pray don't let me be any trouble to you," William said, smarting a bit
at Becky's assertion.  But what did it matter where he perched for the
trice he intended to be in town, for he and Becky would so soon be
going away.  He required only a convenient springboard, a hot bath, a
stiff drink, and time alone with Becky to make plans.

"William really can't stay there," Becky appealed to Lily.  "What will
he think of us?  "

And Lily supposed since Harvey's room would be empty for the night,
there was nothing to do but place William in there.  Lily brightened at
the thought of Harvey's resentment of a stranger's head cradled upon
his personal eiderdown pillows and of a stranger's alien wardrobe
suspended from his jealously guarded wooden coat hangers, and she
looked forward almost with enjoyment to the prospect of Harvey's rout
of a too tarrisome William, should William tarry.  With a slight nod
and a brief glance up the stairway, Lily indicated to Becky that she
might invite William to stay with them.

William accepted at once.  A well-packed and theretofore undeclared
grip was carried in from the front step, and Lily received William's
topcoat after he had removed it with some difficulty.  He was a bulky
man wearing a heavy suit and his arms moved like the unarticulated
limbs of a presentation doll.  There were no spindles free, so Lily
buttoned the coat in place around the mass of everyone else's outerwear
already adhering to the coatrack, and she swung his scarf around the
collar and balanced his beautiful hat upon the coatrack's finial, all
in a quite innocent attempt to keep William's accoutrements of such
obvious quality from slithering and sliding to the floor as had been
known to happen with the lesser garments of, dare she say, lesser
guests, for this William seemed such a finger-snapping rajah.  There
was, she intuited, a side to him she would rather not be shown,
although her plumped and jaunty William-totem was held by successive
and startled passers-by to be revelation enough of his true nature.

HARVEY AND PENNY took off in a happy commotion of false starts.  They
effected a quick return to search for Harvey's cholesterol-lowering
prescription among the clutter of bottles and cruets on the lazy Susan
and they received a peppering of last-minute advice which had belatedly
occurred to Lily after they had taken off the first time.  She regarded
their reappearance as an opportunity.

"Mind you don't go falling off any stepladders when you're bothering
your chandelier," Lily warned Harvey.  She didn't care to have Harvey
carried back to Towne on a stretcher to live out his life motionless
except for his tongue in her best front bedroom.

She followed Harvey and Penny out to the car.

"Run back inside," Penny said.  "You're shivering in just your
sweater."

"Don't stand on the top step of the stepladder."  Lily ignored Penny,
expanding on her theme.

"Why'd they put a step there, then?"  asked Harvey provocatively.  He
slammed the trunk shut and had to open it again because the shoulder
strap of Penny's overnight bag was dragging outside over the bumper.

"You ought to hire a lad," advised Lily, "to climb ladders."

"A likely lad," trilled Penny from the broad front seat of Harvey's
mid-luxury car.  She shed her storm coat and un zippered her storm
boots and slipped a Sinatra cassette into the dashboard stereo player.
She placed an opened but un sampled Whitman's Sampler on the console
and she reached over and competently adjusted the lumbar support on the
driver's seat side.

Lily saw that Harvey had placed himself in highly capable hands.  Penny
would know what to do in the event of a ladder accident or electrical
mishap or unlucky tread upon the shower soap to minimize the damage to
Harvey's creaky old frame.  She would stabilize his back upon a plank
and dial 911.

"I just rated a smile from Lily," marveled Penny to Harvey as they
again drove off, gliding around the driveway bend, and taking the big
bump slowly.

"Don't bet on it," Harvey said.  "I suspect she just had gas."

AS HE AND BETSY ROUNDED the driveway curve and the house rose before
them, Stefan began to look forward to his tour.  It had been his
experience that Americans longed to lead visitors round their dwelling
places to display their treasures, to recount remodeling dramas, and to
bid them to guess what the yearly heating bill amounted to.  Stefan
always hazarded, Twenty thousand dollars?"  which he had learned was a
jaw-dropping estimate.  Twenty thousand dollars!  Well no, not quite.

Betsy had spotted at once the strange car parked beside Andy's Bug.  An
Avis rental sticker blinked in and out of focus as Stefan's headlights
swooped.

"Stop," she commanded Stefan and she leaped from the car and bolted up
the walk and disappeared into the house.

"Dad?  " she called up the front stairs, into the big parlor, down the
hallway.  "Daddy?"

"No, dear," Becky's voice answered from the big parlor.  "It's our
friend Mr.  Baskett who's here.  Come say hello."

Stefan had trailed after Betsy, collecting her bookbag, her turban, her
scarf, which she had dropped as she ran.  He meant to display them if
anyone challenged him at the front door, but Betsy herself met him
there and weakly let him pass.  She steered him past the big parlor
from which voices carried and she deposited him in the little parlor.

"I'll make you a sandwich for the road," she said.  "That is, a
sandwich for you to eat in your car on your way back to Boston," she
clarified.

"Not a sandwich to feed to the road or anything," she said, to cut off
Stefan's next question.

"Yes, make it one for my baby and one more for the road," Stefan said.
"Hiccup," he embellished.  "American drinking songs are so different
from the robust drinking songs of my country.  Yours are so regretting.
I wrote a term paper on the subject."

"Is bologna okay?  A bologna sandwich?"  Betsy asked.  "With German
mustard?  "

"What terrible reception," Stefan remarked, as he lowered himself into
Harvey's lounge chair and clicked on the television with the remote.

"Which is CNN?  I am a junkie for up-to-the-minute information.  The
world is unraveling and I must keep abreast.  Besides, I am Dutch not
German mustard, remember, and I have decided I shall dine you out
tonight after coming all this way.  No, no, it is my pleasure, my
insistence.

But first, may I see the house tour?  As soon as this episode of Lost
in Space is over.  It is new to me, this episode, this new peril the
Robinsons find themselves in on a distant, unknown planet."

"No, we can't do that," Betsy said.

" No we can't do what?  " asked Stefan.

"A house tour isn't possible.  This is a home, not some attraction."

"After our delicious dinner, we'll see," said Stefan.  "And I must pay
my regards to your lovely mother."

"No.  My mother is going out for the evening.  She mustn't be disturbed
while she's getting ready."

"Then I must impress myself upon your aunt, just after this exciting
episode is concluded."

"Aunt Lily really doesn't meet people."

"Oh, is she an ere mite then?  "

"I, I don't think so."

William had briefly called upon Andy in his room.  He had ruffled 3X5
cards, deprecated Andy's computer software, inquired in the most
general way after the progress of his thesis, and had been quite
unmoved by Andy's confession, not easily pled, that his work was not
going well.  William gave his best, which was not, perhaps, quite good
enough, to Andy's mother who worshiped William and which William
permitted.  Andy listened helplessly through his door to William's
retreating footfalls, and, suddenly needing fresher air and stronger
diversions, he wandered downstairs.  Instinct, he believed, drew him
toward the little parlor and to Betsy.

"If your aunt is an ere mite-" came the accented accusation.

"Please stop saying that," replied Betsy wearily.  "Aunt Lily isn't-"

"You don't know what an ere mite is.  You think it is sexual
perversity," said Stefan, delighted.  "Americans always think
three-syllable words they don't understand is sexual perversity."

"Have you seen my Testermann on Civitas?"  Andy interrupted,
entering.

"Your Testermann on civitas?  " Stefan was enchanted.

"It's a book," Andy informed him quellingly.  "About the evolution of
the nation-state."

"Oh, Andy," Betsy said.  "This is Stefan from the train last summer
when Mummy and I came here last summer.  He's tracked me down.  And
Stefan, this is Andy, who is our, who is a-" she explained in a rush
and then stumbled.

"Researcher," supplied Andy.  "I'm the researcher in residence."

"My Rhode Island host family employs a physical trainer.  He arrives in
a specially equipped van," Stefan said, "and requires three
forty-five-minute all-aerobic workouts a week.  He wears Spandex, even
in the snow."

"Well, Miss Hill would never stand for a personal trainer," Andy
said.

"She wouldn't hop, skip, or jump for a personal trainer," added
Betsy.

Andy stared at her and then he laughed and Betsy, who had never been
known before to giggle, giggled.

"It wasn't really funny," Betsy said.

" No, but it was funny for you," Andy pointed out.

"You know, I often think of things to say but I never get the chance,
somehow," Betsy told him.

Andy nodded.  He had charted the flow of family conversation, and the
two most junior status females, i.e."  Betsy and Little Becky, were
next to the least verbal after Glover, although his silences were not
situational, they were willed.

"Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh," said Stefan impatiently.  "But we were just
deciding what we were going to eat and where we are going to eat it.
Betsy and I are going out together," he notified Andy.  "Tonight.  Out.
I and Betsy."

"What do you say if I come too?  I'm at loose ends tonight," Andy said.
"If that's all right with you, Betsy?  "

"Please.  Come.  Please come," said Betsy.

Stefan, muttering his thoughts in his native tongue, levered himself
out of Harvey's lounger and ungraciously inquired of Andy, "Can you
snap on it, then.  I am in starvation.  Since breakfast I have had
nothing, which was only dry Weetabix smuggled from the B.U. cafeteria
in a pixie cup."

"Let's ask Phoebe too," Betsy suggested.  "She's been stuck at home
lately."

"Good idea, but let's shake a leg before Stefan here perishes," Andy
said.

The mention of the shaking of a leg mollified Stefan, who did not want
to ask but who began to hope there might be mixed dancing later.

BABE PALMER WAS neither a natural nor an easy hostess and she would not
have proposed this evening or this guest list on the mere premise of
promoting a pleasant time among friends.  Oh, sometimes she would
marshal her forces when hospitality was owed, when certain social debts
had accrued, and then she could measure her reciprocal efforts against
what must be repaid-a pie for a pie, her basic calculations ran.

All afternoon as she marched through her preparations, Babe had spoken
aloud to the onions she was chopping, to the dust mop she was pushing,
to the wax candles whose bases she was whittling away at until they fit
into her old oak barley-twist holders.

If they're expecting hot skewered appetisers, they've come to the wrong
house, if they're working up a thirst for fine French wine they can
just stop at a bar on their way home, if Ginger Hill Lowe
Whatever-She-Calls-Herself Now expects me to hand over my husband
without a murmur and gratify all those so-called friends of mine who
called to warn me of tender moments observed at the Y... Babe seized a
pair of poultry shears and bustled outside to snip an upright branch of
juniper from the foundation plantings.  She jammed the branch into a
water-filled tumbler and she clipped on a dozen or more orphan
earrings, rhinestone, plastic cameos, fake pearls, which she had
gathered from her jewelry box.  She owned more single earrings than
pairs.  Her earlobes were near-vestigial tucks and she lost her
earrings routinely.  They slid from her little lobes and fell down her
neckline and worked their ways to the floor and tram ply feet
unnoticed-or if not unnoticed and not unfelt, then not decently
retrievable en intimate route.

Babe placed the tumbler on a raffia mat set upon the center of the
dining room table between the candlesticks-her centerpiece.  What an
economical effect, what an economical effect from every angle of the
dining room.  She decided to submit her idea, her Evergreen Everlost
Earring Table Topper, to the Ask Heloise column in care of the Towne
Crier, where the feature appeared, and win the cash prize for the Hint
of the Week, not to mention achieving the glory.

Anything in trousers, Ginger will go for, because that man I met at
Christmas at Lily's was nothing to write home about or to leave home
over.  I do believe Ginger will chase any stick that's thrown across
her path and I will throw Earl her way.  Earl will do for Ginger and if
Earl is smitten (he never meets women, he is primed to be smitten) he
is big enough and insistent enough at least to hinder Ginger in her
dead set at Goody.  I shall throw Earl and Ginger at each other.

This, Babe reckoned, could be accomplished any number of ways, perhaps
by a sharp tug of one end of the Welcome mat as the pair of them
mounted her steep front steps.

ALDEN HAD ADMITTED Earl to the house.  Earl offered a hand to Alden and
then turned to the William totem arranged on the coatrack.  Earl
blinked and stepped back and back until he bumped the deacon's bench
and he sat heavily at the further, more shadowed end, hunched inside
his duffle coat.

"Ginger is.  Ginger is," Alden told Earl, deciding not to say Ginger
was, as yet, arraying herself and might still be a while.  No doubt
Ginger would resent Alden's letting slip that Ginger did not arise from
her bed every morning already primed for the day, much as Athena had
stepped full-blown in her womanly wisdom and beauty from the brow of
Zeus.  Ginger had once favorably mentioned this emergence of Athena,
and Alden had received her remark as self-referential.

He offered the not entirely at ease Earl a drink.  "What's your
pleasure?  " he asked.

"A beer?  " Earl guessed, as one of Lily's students might always have
asked, George Washington?  in answer to every question on an ill
prepared-for

American history quiz.

Alden had already suffered a previous awkward encounter with William
whom he'd run into outside the bathroom door as William emerged
pink-tinted and sweet-smelling after sluicing away the dust of his
international travels.  Alden, a striped towel slung over his shoulder,
had yet to curry the wood chips from his hair and swipe the dirt from
his face-he 'd been out all day cutting up a wide old maple that had
fallen across a driveway down on Lancelot Lane during a wind squall.
The weather was strange that winter, everyone was saying.  "Good for
business,"

Alden heard himself maintaining.

Actually, all William had said to Alden was, "Hard luck, all that
business last year."  William was redolent of lavender soap and Hungary
Water, and in a hurry to retreat to his room for he was dripping onto
the shabby oblong of the upper-hall Bokhara carpet.  William had been
handed one of Lily's oldest and least absorbent towels-this was the day
before laundry day and the better towels were swelling the hamper
lid-and Alden hadn't been given the chance to reply to the challenge of
William's condolences that he had not merely experienced hard luck.

Rather, he had been swept up and cast aside by a tidal wave of politics
and policy and events roaring down Wall Street at one cataclysmic
moment in time.  The weather had been weird all over, Alden would have
said, and very bad for business.

Every bathroom surface was glazed with condensation and there was no
hot water left in the tank and William had left a drift of crescent
shaped shards of pared-off horn-hard yellowed toenails across the
bathtub bottom.  Alden had shuddered through a cold splash and,
buttoning on a clean plaid flannel shirt, had thumped down the stairs
to admit Ginger's newest potential suitor who, according to unwritten
family law, Alden now had to keep an eye on lest he wander off-limits
or run away-Alden wasn't sure what long-ago offense had occasioned the
law.  Perhaps the family had just come to believe that a courting male
might suddenly turn feral, and so bore watching.

When Ginger at last materialized at the curve of the stairway, she
looked very splendid indeed, as if she were about to depart for some
televised arts and entertainment awards show with every expectation of
carrying home a glittering orb.

"Why, you look beautiful," Alden told Ginger, because Earl could only
stare.  Alden watched Ginger decide whether to berate him for seeming
surprised that she could easily become extremely beautiful when she
felt like it, or whether to laugh delightedly and to tolerantly remark,
"Oh, Alden."

She chose the latter course, and thus far on this rare evening out,
Earl was not able to believe his luck.

BECKY AND WILLIAM WERE in the big parlor sipping gritty and sourish
sherry from the very old balustroid wineglasses with air tears in the
knops.  William was so taken with his glass he hardly minded the sherry
as he held the glass up to the lamplight and ran his finger round the
rim and traced down the curve of the stem.  Nor did he realize that it
was just Cheez Whiz that Becky had spread across a small Limoges
plateful of Saltines.  He nibbled and speculated, "Some local cheese
maker version of a vivid yellow Camembert?  "

Becky, experiencing an odd and old surge of self-possession, did not
explain about Cheez Whiz, and how this wasn't even real Cheez Whiz but
Value Masters' lesser store-brand substance, Cheez Whip.  Instead, she
smiled and asked, "Isn't it an interesting attempt?  "

William was such an innocent, really, despite, or perhaps because of
all his years abroad.  Oh, but she was fond of him.  What beautiful
socks he wore.  They were soft and intricate Argyles.

"What time did Gee call about the truck?"  Alden eventually joined them
in the big parlor, wanting to know.  After seeing Ginger so
successfully off, he had checked the kitchen message board.

"That was around noon.  Gee said he'd be home anytime after six and
just to swing by if you're interested and he 'll take you to his cousin
who is in actual possession of the vehicle," Becky said.  "But don't
call him.  There's some complicated reason why he's unreachable by
phone after six.  I think it upsets his hens and then they don't lay,
and my question is, are his hens resident in Gee's house or is Gee
resident in the hens' house?  But how was your day, by the way?  Mine
has turned out delightfully.

William, here, imagine."  She reached for Alden's arm.  "And I didn't
know we were in the market for a truck, actually."

"Gee said all that to you?"  Alden asked.  He leaned over the back of
her chair and he kissed the top of her head.  She felt overheated to
him through her chopped-off hair.

"I'm not sure how I elicited so much information from his mumblings.

It was almost a telepathic process," Becky said.  "Gee is part of our
local color," she told William.  "He's a Yankee bachelor man.  Lily
taught him in school.  He brought mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch and
he had to sit in the front row because he had a lazy eye.  Well, Lily
made sure he learned to read and write, all right, and Gee has
certainly been a friend to Alden."

William glanced at Alden, and Alden, aware of the glance, became
knowledgeable about trucks.  He mentioned tonnage and haulage and was
prepared to become specific about gears.

"Boys," Becky interrupted him to call out.  She heard the hisses of
their snapped-open pop-top cans of Pepsi and the clump of their boots
as they returned from wherever they had loitered and lurked away the
late winter afternoon.

" The A- Team?"  on," Brooks, or Rollins, hollered back.

"Come here, please.  I want you to say hello to someone," Becky
answered.

"Hello," they bellowed back.  "Hello.  Hello."

"Alden," Becky said.

" Boys," Alden commanded sharply.

"But The A-Team's on," Brooks bleated.  "Except someone else's here
watching sucky Lost in Space.  We don't watch Lost in Space.  It's
sucky.  Who is this guy?  Hey, who are you, guy?  "

" The A-Team's on in six minutes," Rollins warned the interloper, and
he and Brooks and Glover trailed into the big parlor and arranged
themselves in a slouching row.  They slugged from their cans of Pepsi,
heads tilted back, pouring the drink down in a way they had developed
to bypass the effort and delay of having to swallow.  Evidently they
were running a race which Glover won.  He slammed his empty can down
upon the picture frame table.  Several ancestresses fell flat on their
by now permanently affronted faces as Becky, Alden, and William stared,
disconcerted yet impressed.  Alden wasn't sure the boys couldn't drown
themselves, pouring liquids down their gullets like that as had several
prominent rock band drummers in the late sixties.  He recalled having
been saddened and appalled at the time.

"You remember Mr.  Baskett," Becky said.

William conventionally remarked that the boys had grown since he 'd
last seen them.  They seemed now to form a wall of boys, a wall of boys
who had stood between Becky and him for far too long.  But she could no
longer hide behind them.  Surely, she could no longer regard them as
children who required her hands to wipe their snotty noses and peel the
pith from their orange segments or whatever services maternal women
hankered to provide their broods.  But these boys, who were falling
upon the plate of Camembert and biscuits (like locusts, he thought
informedly; he had viewed UNESCO film of a recent plague on the African
subcontinent), these boys were of the age where they ought to be
striking out for the wilderness or going off to hunt and gather among
the local virgin population for mates, or, most properly, striving
archetypally and representation ally to kill their father and assume
his lost position in the tribe.  William would like to see that.  He'd
like to foster that.  But Becky needn't linger for the last act.

William thought of asking the boys what they intended to do with their
lives, which was what one asked one's friends' children.  They would
answer lawyer or arbitrageur, or glassblower if they attended a very
progressive school.  But Alden, who sensed that William was about to
ask something of the sort and who didn't want to give his boys any
further opening to grieve their mother (for their usual answer to the
usual question was that they aspired to be roadies for the Boss only
their sucky parents wouldn't sign the papers) spoke up.

" There's a truck available, boys, an old Loadstar, not a pickup but a
real truck, one of the big ones," Alden said.

"Cool, Dad," said Glover unexpectedly.

"Cool," echoed Brooks and Rollins.

"Do you think so?  " Alden asked.  "Are you really interested?  Then
come with me to have a look at it.  I'd value your input."

A wary look overcast Glover's face until he realized his father was
goofing on Mr.  Baskett, bothery Mr.  Baskett sitting there tipping and
tilting his sherry glass so that it twinkled and sparked which seemed
to enchant Mr.  Baskett, the twinkling and the sparking.  Mr.  Baskett
wouldn't know a Loadstar truck if one hit him, and picturing this event
cheered Glover.  All of his life, at least all of his life that he
could remember since he had discovered his hands and feet and,
spontaneously, Newton's Third Law, he had been told not to damage Mr.
Baskett's paint and not to swing from his lintel posts, whatever they
were.  If Glover had known what they were he would have bounced off
them like a tetherball.  His parents seemed to have believed Mr.
Baskett was a God, watching over every fleck of paint that fell,
instead of a fat old guy who had lucked onto a real sweet rent-control
deal and then struck a shady pact with his parents and it was people
like them, like his parents and Mr.  Baskett, thought Glover
virtuously, who caused homelessness in America.

"But not tonight?  You're not going to look at this truck contraption
thing tonight?  Because I'd hoped we'd all go out to dinner and
thoroughly enjoy having William here with us," Becky said.

"Sure, Dad," Glover said.  "I want to come with you."

"Us too," said Rollins.  "We're going with Dad."

"With Dad," affirmed Brooks.

"All right, all the menfolk go with me.  The Hill menfolk inspect a
truck," Alden said, as if such an unlikely picture required an
explanatory caption.

" But does this have to be tonight?  " asked Becky.

"This is a sought-after truck," Alden said.  "Gee's got me first crack.
If I can get there first, I'm first."

"What does that mean?  And have we discussed a truck?"  asked Becky.

"We're discussing the truck right now," Alden pointed out.

"This is not really discussing.  This is-springing," Becky said.

"I shall take the ladies out to dinner," William stepped in to offer.
Privately, he blessed the rustic Gee and his nitwit arrangements.

"Do that," Alden said to William.  "You can squire the ladies.  Have
yourselves a ball.  The boys and I'll just grab a bite to eat on the
road.  At a truck stop," he added, inspired.

ANDY, BETSY, PHOEBE, and Stefan drove down to the Casa di Napoli in the
overloaded Bug.  They grabbed the last booth beside the beverage
cooler, near the kitchen door.  Betsy sat beside Andy and across the
table from Phoebe and from Stefan who had been finessed out of Betsy
range.  They had sent him off bearing the bundle of their coats to hang
from the curved hooks that resembled a row of crones' noses and chins
lining the drafty outer doorway, a task he had performed in a
conscientious manner, gratified he'd been handed the opportunity to
touch and to trace the rich whorls and coils of Betsy's old fur coat's
pelt.

But now Stefan leaned sulkily against the high wooden back of the booth
and fidgeted with the macrame tassel of a plant hanger suspended too
low over the table.  Brown philodendron leaves dropped into the sugar
bowl, rustling among the blue and pink packets of sugar substitutes.

Phoebe brushed his hand and said, "Don't."

Arthur had been so funny here one night, she recalled.  He had stood on
a makeshift stage in the agl are light of a temporary spot in front of
the panoramic fresco of the crumbling Parthenon in its prime, a
depiction which seemed to suggest the temple had been built as a
romantic ruin to attract the ancient and sentimental tourist trade.
Arthur had ragged on fast food that night.  He had maintained that the
consumption of fast food led to a faster metabolism resulting in
premature aging and the shriveling and shrinking away of flesh and form
until you turned into one of the scrabbling cockroaches forever damned
to haunt fastfood joints.  That's who cockroaches were, former
fast-food freaks, Arthur had said, as he stomped his heavy boot on the
floor.  The audience had flinched, then tittered, then warily regarded
a cold french fry, a cal zone their date for the evening.

Phoebe was finding it hard to remain in serious mourning for her life
with Arthur, not that every memory was a funny one, though there was a
high foolishness quotient which colored every recollection.  As she hid
in her attic room night after night curled around her pillow and braced
against every fresh wave of sorrow accompanying each succeeding thought
of Arthur, she was not consoled by a further understanding that much of
the foolishness had been her own.

Andy flirted gently with Calliope, the heavily pregnant waitress and
daughter-in-law of the hardworking family who owned the Casa di Napoli.
Calliope, whose aproned-over stomach jutted, professed herself
surprised that Andy had shown up tonight with so many friends that he
required a booth instead of his usual single swivel stool at the end of
the counter.  Andy asked, mock hopefully, if Calliope was jealous.
Yes, she admitted, yes, of course.

"You'll want the ziti," Calliope told Andy.  "And a salad.  There's Sam
Adams on tap tonight."

"I also.  For me the same," Stefan swiftly bid.

"Betsy?  "Andy asked.

"I'd like a slice of plain cheese pizza and a diet Coke, please."

"Have more than that," Calliope advised, smiling down at Andy.  "She
needs more than that.  She's a thin one."

"Okay, two slices, please," Betsy said.

Calliope was already acting motherly and she was scarcely beyond
girlhood herself, Betsy observed.  Calliope must just recently have
come from her stony, Old World village, having left behind her own
hovering, black-shaw led ululating crone of a mother who ripped out the
stitches of Calliope's trousseau linens and made Calliope sew them all
over again until they were perfect.  Betsy had been reading too many
romance novels at the Snowdons' which was all they had on their
bookshelves except for Mr.  Snowdon's hundreds of Civil War books, and
Betsy had come to appreciate that marriage and motherhood was the
time-tested and traditional method for fleeing a place and a parent,
according to all the expert authoresses who could never not see their
ways clear to a thoroughly happy ending.

"This one," Stefan spoke up, jabbing Phoebe in her side, "is the real
pole bean."

"Beanpole," Betsy and Andy corrected him.

"I mean, the word is beanpole," Betsy amended.  "Not that Phoebe is
one.  I don't mean you are, Phoebe."

"That's all right," Phoebe said.  "I've always been skinny.  Arthur
never minded.  I'll have a salad, house dressing on the side, and
garlic bread.  Why not garlic bread?  A big basket of very garlicky
bread, please," she told Calliope.

Calliope swayed slightly.  "All set then?  " she asked faintly, and
wandered off toward the kitchen, rubbing the small of her back.

"She ought to be lying down," Phoebe said.  "I'll bet I'll be admitting
her to the hospital before the week is out.  I'll keep 12-A open for
her.  It's the best room.  It's got a view of the woods and it's right
across from the nursery so she'll get her baby first and keep it 'till
last at feeding time."

"She and George are in the middle of buying a house," Andy said.  "It's
a race whether the baby will be here before they can pass papers and
paint the smallest bedroom blue.  Their game plan is very tight."

"Their game plan," Phoebe marveled, rather sadly.  "Other people do
have them, don't they?  "

"My host American father played football for the Yankees," Stefan
announced impressively.

LILY STOOD AT the kitchen sink washing teacups and listening to the
wall phone ring.  It had rung seven times and nobody else could be
bothered to answer.  Lily had almost decided to break down and buy an
answering machine but she knew she would not be able to abide the sound
of her own voice advising callers to leave their brief messages after
the beep, although perhaps she could substitute the word tone for beep,
would she mind less the sound of her own voice advising callers to wait
for the tone?  The wall phone emitted an eighth trill, a ninth.
Whoever they were, they were determined to have their say which did not
endear them to Lily.

"Hello," she said.

"Who?  "she asked.

She listened.  She licked her thumb and massaged a smudge from the
refrigerator door.

"Very well," she said.  "You want me to know there has been a strange
man in a strange car sighted on the block.  Although I don't live on a
block.  I live on a road.  Besides, I'm not a member of your
Neighborhood

Watch, you said?  "

She listened.  She gazed at the ceiling and wondered how it too had
become so smudged.  Cook smoke?  She would have to fetch a ladder when
no one was about to order her off ladders and give all the paint a good
scrub with lemon ammonia and soda water shaken in a jar.

"Very well," she said.  "If I see the car which I shan't since I can't
see the road from my house I'm to-what?  Watch the car, is that your
mandate?

No?  I'm to call you?  But I don't call people after dark in the
evening.

It alarms them needlessly."

"Anything important?  " Becky asked, gliding into the kitchen as Lily
rang off.  Becky held a locket to her throat, the ends of a gold chain
draped over her black silk shoulders.  She turned and bent her knees
she was wearing her highest heels tonight-as Lily tried to latch the
clasp.  She fumbled.  This was one of her bad hand days.

" That was a Neighborhood Watch captain, I believe she characterized
herself.  She lives in the Bermudian pink house on Galahad Avenue
behind all that zebra grass.  I must remember, zebra grass, so I never
let anyone give me some at a plant swap, I suspect it starts small.  We
got into the Bermudian pink and the zebra grass to identify herself
further, because I'd never heard of her or her organization."

"I'm afraid I joined the Watch one afternoon.  Some woman came to the
door with her little pamphlet and it's difficult to say no to looking
out for one's neighbor when a specimen neighbor is standing right there
in front of you with supporting literature on offer," Becky
explained.

Lily thought then of Miss Maude Fido, an old-timer of some renown who
had lived alone over on the Mill End Road.  Maude had let the house
across the field from her burn to the ground even though she had spied
the first devil licks of flame spiking up through the eaves.  She had
had to up herself and all her bits and pieces and resettle, bent over
her bits of sewing, in her back room so she would not be obliged to
know further.  She had not, Maude plainly owned to the out-of-town
insurance adjuster, wished to interfere.  Even the Smithsons,
scratching a borrowed rake through the warm grey ashes of their home
and recovering two fused christening mugs and a dutch oven roaster pan,
had acknowledged that they had always known Miss Fido to make a
religion of keeping herself to herself.  Maude had been cracked, to be
sure, but not perhaps unimaginably cracked for those days, whereas
these days all notions of discretion and reserve had lurched to the
opposite extreme.  Lily bristled at the earful of information just
relayed to her over the telephone and evidently required of her to act
upon.  But Andy might be able to make sense of the sea change in the
response reflexes of one's too-noticing, or not-noticing-enough
neighbors, Lily thought.

"Never mind about the locket," Becky said.  "Here's William.  William,
can you try?"  She turned and held the two ends of the clasp behind her
head.

"Of course."

William stepped behind her.  He lifted a few short strands of hair and
caressed her hands as he took up the ends of the chain.  He leaned and
breathed deeply of her nape, inhaling and holding on to his precious
breaths to savor the pure scent of her neck, a clear scent, he
determined, and sharpish, and sunny, which made him dream, just there
on his feet, of his Becky dressed in her summer cottons and at rest in
his arms at his fond and stern bidding after exerting herself in some
lovingly unnecessary activity on his behalf.  He did not know the scent
he cherished was that of an enzymatic spot-removal product with which
Becky had preemptively scrubbed a tea-tray napkin smudged by Ginger's
dark shade of lipstick, and which substance had residually coated her
fingers (for not washing easily away was the substance's great quality)
as Becky reached up and absently rubbed her wrenched neck muscles.  But
had he

33<S The Hills at Home known, William might, at some very low moment to
come, have struck out and endeavored to buy a bottle of the stuff.

"There," said William as the clasp finally clicked and the slight
weight of her locket slid across her silken dress front.  "Linked at
last," he murmured.

Becky edged away from him and busied herself selectively transferring
contents of her everyday satchel bag into her small beaded evening
clutch which she would carry tonight as an emblem of occasion.  Little
Becky, who had just trampled down the back stairs, draped herself over
a chair back to demonstrate how terribly terribly taxed she was by all
this going-out activity.

Just now, Little Becky hadn't been able to close the back zipper of her
only surviving best dinner dress, a blue wool princess line with long
white cuffed sleeves and a white pique Pilgrim collar and no pockets.
Awful.

"We'll sew you in," her mother had said ruthlessly, when Little Becky,
spinning and spinning in her bedroom, pulling at the prevented zipper,
had wailed for aid.  Her mother had charged into her room wearing her
black lace slip, her breasts and her stomach rounded plumply against
the thin material.

"You'll just have to wear your old school blazer over the stitches.  It
still fits, doesn't it?  "

Yes, it had been bought to see her through.

"But what if there's an emergency and I'm stuck in my dress and I can't
get out?  " Little Becky thought to ask as her mother plied an
impatient needle and thread.

"Just what sort of emergency do you foresee that you'll have to hurry
out of your dress?  " Becky asked her back, sounding amused and not at
all like her usual concerned and worried self who was supposed to be
engaged by discussions of possible problematic ifs.

And now her mother was stuffing a compact and a lipstick and keys into
that beady shiny way-too-small little bag and there wouldn't be room
for Little Becky's book, a dog-eared paperback copy of Cujo, for this
outing promised to be so wall-kickingly boring Little Becky had planned
ahead.  She jammed the book into her blazer pocket and she heard
stitches tearing, which stitches she didn't know but figured she'd find
out and it wouldn't be good.  She ducked into the back hall and
privately lifted up her dress skirt and jammed her paperback book under
the too tight waistband of her half slip.  The book seemed secure
enough there.  She jumped up and down experimentally and the book
didn't budge but a jar of the last mustard picalilli her
great-grandmother ever made hopped from its place of honor on the
home-canning shelf and landed softly on the pile of used newspapers, so
that was all right.

"Is there a Neighborhood Watch alert, Lily?"  Becky asked.  "Why don't
you come with us.  You'll be all on your own otherwise if there's a
prowler or someone about."

"It's just some overreaction to a strange car.  Cars have a right to be
on a road," Lily said open-mindedly.  "Even if the driver is black."

"Oh dear, was it because of the driver that they're watching?  Perhaps
you misheard, perhaps the car is black," Becky said.

" Both.  Both are black which I understand only enhanced their
concern,"

Lily said.

"Well, we'll quietly resign from the Watch tomorrow," Becky said.

William had donned his loden coat, retrieved from its odd presentation
on the coatrack (not to think about, he told himself ). He had drawn on
his pigskin gloves and knotted his scarf and he was tapping the brim of
his lovely hat so that Becky would take the hint, but she dithered. She
opened the refrigerator door.

"Here's the rest of the rice pilaf and there's leftover fried chicken
in a bowl for your supper, Lily.  You can microwave them, hit power
eight, three minutes, then see.  Oh, who put the milk carton back in
empty?  It's so annoying, I never know when we're out.  Has everyone
made a note of the missing child before I toss it?"  She held up the
carton.  "Erika Martinez, age five, missing from Monterey, California
since 1985.  Those poor people."

What a wonderful woman, thought William.  She cares for everyone and he
wanted her to care only for him.  This was exquisitely, endlessly, his
sorrow.  He was a starving man banished from the banquet, a traveler
expiring of thirst and denied the way to the oasis.  He wondered how
long he would have to live on the sweetness of the scent of the nape of
Becky's neck and he prayed he wouldn't have to find out.  Then, as he
lingered in Miss Hill's overheated and over bright kitchen, he realized
he was being given a rare glimpse of a laboratory for life.  He saw
brown eggs in a bowl.  He smelled sour yeast.  A stockpot bur bled on
the stove top.  There was fruit in a bowl.  Here, where Becky presided
and prevailed, nourishment at last seemed achievable.  He resolved to
speak before the night was over, and henceforth she would preside and
prevail solely for him.

"But my good coat won't fit over my blazer and dress and everything,"

Little Becky complained.  "And it's cold out and I'll freeze to death.
I shouldn't have to freeze to death.  I'll just stay home with Aunt
Lily."

"There's a muskrat coat upstairs in my closet you can have," Lily
unexpectedly offered.  Any further delay of the departure of the dining
out party would overlap the peremptory returns of earlier
leave-takers.

"I'm sure the coat will fit you."

"Muskrat?  Fur?  Really?  For me?  To have have?  For forever and
forever to keep?  " Little Becky asked to make sure for certain.  Her
button eyes gleamed.

"Yes," Lily said.  "Yes, yes."

"Let's think about this," Becky said as Little Becky pounded up the
back stairs.

"But how very mature you look," William had told Little Becky as she
bounded back into the kitchen enveloped by the coat, triumphantly
twirling and hugging herself with her sleeves.  "Why, you look entirely
grown up," William had said.  "You look like a young lady ready to take
on the world all on her own."

IF SHE WERE WORTH her salt she'd fetch the stepladder from the barn and
scrub that kitchen ceiling, Lily told herself, but just the thought of
venturing out into the bitter night air and disentangling the six-foot
ladder from the clutches of leaf rakes and paint tarps and cracked
flowerpots containing powder-dry dirt and dead geranium stalks wearied
her.  Instead, she brewed tea in the pot she liked less-the pot she
liked more required mending again.  She spread the last of the Cheez
Whip on saltines and she quartered an unpeeled apple for nutritional
balance and she carried a tray into the little parlor.  She turned off
the television left prattling witlessly on to itself and she sat in
Harvey's marvelous (although she 'd never admit as much to him) chair,
her tray balanced on her lap, her feet and calves levered up to a
revelatory level of comfort and repose.  She stirred her tea rather
noisily because she was alone.  Silent stirring was the rule, of
course, when others were about.  One dipped one's spoon and limply
swished, never satisfactorily dissolving the sugar which settled as
sediment at the bottom of the cup.  Only when one was alone could one
stir away to one's complete satisfaction, when the sound of spoon
bumping against china offended no one's sensibilities but one's own,
and then the click, click had sounded like the ring of freedom to
Lily's ears.  Tea sipped in solitude not only tasted sweeter, in fact
it was, she told herself, taking an appreciative sip as she ruffled
through pieces of the morning paper she had not yet had a chance to
look at.

Harvey, whose paper this was, had drawn devil horns and serpent fangs
on President Gorbachev's face, just as he had formerly drawn devil
horns and serpent fangs and ragged scars and elf's ears and crossed
eyes on the faces of Cordell Hull and William O. Douglas and Eleanor
Roosevelt when he came upon their pictures in the newspapers of the
past.  Some habits never changed.  Poor Naomi had once confided how
embarrassed she was to donate twine-tied bundles of the Hartford
Courant to the Boy Scouts' paper drives with photos of Abe Ribicoff and
Lowell Weicker and Judge Sirica recast as pirates and dunces.  But,
Lily thought, Penny Nicholls wouldn't care what the Boy Scouts thought.
Penny would keep Harvey supplied with sharpened crayons and tape his
best efforts to the refrigerator door.

Penny Nicholls certainly knew what men wanted, Lily decided, and Lily
wondered, now, what her sister Olive would have made of Penny going off
with Harvey to spend the night alone with him in his big empty house.
No better than she should be, Olive would have said, which would have
been saying a lot, the way Olive expressed herself.  She had searingly
whispered when she discussed improprieties, and improprieties had
seemed to obsess, or perhaps, sustain her at the end.  She had slowly
turned her head one way and the other, prying the bedroom shadows as if
some listening stranger had filtered in through the half inch of open
window.  Olive was momentarily expecting Death himself and she wished
to appear as a worthy old soul to him.  Of course she was bucking for
heaven.  Lily had had to bend down to hear, nearly laying her own cheek
upon the hot and flattened pillow to catch Olive's condemnatory
remarks.  Lily had been breathed upon with shallow medicine-tainted
huffs.  Olive had had nothing good to say about the mysterious things
men and women got up to together.  And yet, Lily thought, and yet How
rare it was to sit in such solitude and think her own thoughts.  Lily
drank her tea and crunched crackers ignoring the crumbs that settled on
her lap.  She set her cup down upon the drop leaf table at her elbow
without a saucer underneath it and it occurred to her that her natural
state must be one of slothfulness.  Then again, if being careless of
cracker crumbs on the night before vacuuming day and forgetting the
saucer was her idea of kicking over the traces, she must be a
remarkably un dissolute old person and at the moment she was feeling an
uncommonly unsophisticated one as well.

Carryings-on had been another of Olive's muffled and sibilant
accusations, although Lily had always unaccountably thought of
carousels when Olive made the charge.  Carryings-on on a
carousel-Lily's mind's eye, averting itself from Olive's dolors, had
supplied the unlikely picture where one couldn't carry on with very
much before toppling off the prancing, gold-plumed, silver-white horse.
It was fortunate Olive had never been any sort of a mind reader.  She
would have wondered about Lily of whom she had always been so sure.

Nevertheless, Lily didn't doubt that carryings-on of the Olivecensured
variety had been occurring beneath her roof for some time now, and
today there had been particular flare-ups in several quarters Harvey
virtual elopement with the no-better-than-she-should-be-but
very-good-for-Harvey

Penny Nicholls, that foreign boy turning up in obvious pursuit of
Betsy, Ginger's transformation into a glamorous creature who could not
possibly have emerged from such a messy bedroom all for the sake of
dinner with Babe Palmer's spare cousin although Ginger's dress-up
efforts were for Goody Palmer's sake even

Lily appreciated that.  And not that it was any of Lily's business, but
William Baskett's behavior toward Becky in the kitchen just now had not
been at all appropriate.

Lily had watched him clearly reflected in the deep black and mirrorlike
door of the microwave oven as he nuzzled and caressed the back of
Becky's neck.  Lily had not meant to watch, but as flickeringly
captured in the square of oven door, the scene had taken on such a
televised air that she had viewed it irresistibly as if it were a
performance being enacted for her to observe-William's lingering hands,
the yearning of his body length bent over Becky like a Frenchman
sheltering his baguette from the rain as Lily had thought at the time,
for William seemed so hungry.  But it was Becky's face that Lily had
most noticed.  Becky had been startled, at first, and then an
unreadable languor stole over her and she accepted William's
attentions.  They stayed as they were, worshipper and object, until
Little Becky blundered into the kitchen arguing to the air against
having to go out with the grown-ups and only then had Becky broken away
from William and become flustered and as usual and herself again.

Well, at least Lily had made sure the girl accompanied her mother and
Mr.  Baskett although a very major piece of bribery had been necessary
to achieve that end.  Lily could not imagine a more discouraging
presence than that of the large and unhappy girl seated between Becky
and William at the table, scowling over her menu and snuffing out the
candles with exaggerated gusting sighs and bolting down her expensive
dinner in her zeal to be reunited with the coat of her dreams.  If Lily
knew anything at all, she knew what it took to dishearten a suitor, for
all of her experiences had run that way; being unaware of lipstick on
one's teeth, too earnestly botanizing on strolls a deux through a
spring meadow, appearing too tall in high heels and too stolid in low
ones, wearing dresses the colors of stains on a tablecloth-cranberry or
mustard or grape.  Were you a hit tonight, Lily, or do you remain a
Miss?  Ardor was dampened easily, or had been in her case, where the
attractions were so slight to begin with, and she had given up trying
altogether one Saturday evening, one long-ago winter.

They had all had colds of course, as she had tried to describe to Andy
how less than well they had often been.  Her parents were sealed in
their bedroom sharing the vaporizer steam.  Olive had a sick cold but
she was going out for the evening despite a low, persistent fever.  She
had gargled with salt water and was slowly preparing herself, powdering
her red nose, rouging her pale cheeks, masking the sharp smell of
Vick's with Arpege.  Olive could not not go out on Saturday night.  If
word ever got round that she had stayed home on a Saturday night she
would be finished, she said, though Lily never saw how word would get
round if one stayed quietly in one's room and did not show oneself,
alone and unaccompanied, in some public place.  One could always stay
home with a good book and to that end, Lily had gone down to the big
parlor to find herself a book, a heavy, dusty, worthwhile volume of the
Francis Parkman (A Half Century of Conflict had come first to her
fingertips).  Because even then, even as her few chances had been
reluctantly reclassified as missed chances, Lily could still not quite
not believe that somehow,

Someone might still seek her out even in the very heart of her remote
and well-defended home and she did not want to be discovered reading a
work of mere fiction.

She had selected her book and switched off the floor lamp because the
Hills never left lamps burning in unoccupied rooms but she lingered on
in the gloom.  Her own cold was on the wane.  She was draining and, at
the moment, working up to a sneeze.  Her inner nose pricked, pressure
was building.  She snatched her handkerchief from her cardigan sleeve
and stationed it below her chin.  A sneeze ought not to be suppressed
but should be contained.

She had turned her back to the empty room in automatic deference to the
possibility of Someone standing there.  She stood still and expectant
as the sneeze welled.  She sniffed cautiously, encouragingly, and she
didn't hear the crick of the opening parlor door hinges, nor was she
aware of the swift tap and pad of footsteps hurrying toward her across
the floor and rug and floor and rug.

Harvey had answered the front doorbell.  "I heard her coughing in the
parlor," he must have said motioning the caller on his way.  Harvey's
younger-brother mind was fixated on the box kite he was constructing in
an attic workshop he had contrived.

So Lily had been seized and kissed in the big parlor.  A confident hand
had gripped her shoulder and an insinuating hand circled her waist and
a dark round of face bore down upon her face searching expertly for her
mouth and Lily had responded.  "And here you are," she had thought.
Then, as abruptly, the face flinched apart from hers, the hands pushed
away her waist, her shoulder, and a voice spoke, amused and unfazed,
declaring, "But you're the wrong one."  And Lily had felt the wrong one
ever since.  Everyone professed to remember their first kiss.  Lily
never volunteered that she had known for certain when she 'd been given
her last one.

Olive had only ever gone out with that man twice.  Lily remembered his
name and who he was and what he did and what had become of him, all
quite unremarkable.  He'd been no one, really, nobody in fact.  Olive,
in order never to stay home on a Saturday night, had handed herself
over to some very ordinary young men and last summer, fifty years on,
Olive's only daughter had shown herself all around Towne wearing a
raggedy-hemmed and fading-away T-shirt printed with the words YOU

HAVE TO KISS A LOT OF FROGS BEFORE YOU FIND YOUR PRINCE.

HANNAH'S OCCUPIED AN ANCIENT Federalist house set on the edge of a
dormant mixed-fruit tree orchard located in a far corner of Towne.  The
restaurant had earned a starred entry in The Undiscovered New England
Guide: Back Roads and Byways Off the Beaten Path.  "Savor Old-Timey
surroundings flavored with up-to-the-minute presentations of the
freshest local ingredients."  The Guide further suggested a walk
through the West Towne Village Cemetery where some Revolutionary War
dead lay beneath lichened and leaning headstones oddly carved with
leering angels and horned lambs-a gently penitent option that often
appealed to the too-well-fed who faced a longish drive home.

Becky described all this to William who absently allowed, "Oh, yes?  "
for now that he had Becky by his side, wrested from that donjon where
he had found her, he could not chat banally.  He could only treasure
each shared breath of air he took.  He could only grieve for the
Band-Aid on her chin and the rigidity in her neck from her terrible
tumble on an icy step.  He wished only to remain encapsulated within
the heated and smoothly running Alden family station wagon and drive
through the long winter night to the very edge of all they knew of
earth where they could launch themselves into the unknown, sans Little
Becky who sat in the backseat breathing loudly through her nose.

Becky was driving because she was familiar with the way.

" Is anyone coming at us from the left?  " Becky asked Little Becky at
a dark crossroads.  "I can't turn my head to look."

"Huh?"  asked Little Becky.  "What?  your left or my left?"

"They're the same lefts," Becky said.

"No, I'm facing sidewise with my feet on the seat because Dad's big saw
is all on the floor so your left is my backwards, and anyways, nobody's
ever coming all this way out here," Little Becky answered.  She had
privately declared a moratorium on any further cooperation that night,
especially now that she had her coat.

Becky supposed she was all right to proceed.  She inched into the
crossroad and tooted on her horn and flashed her blinkers.  William,
roused from his reveries, rather fervently offered to be her eyes, if
only she would allow him, but Becky briskly but not unkindly informed
him she only needed a reliable lookout until the spasm in her neck
relaxed its grip.

Then, Little Becky who knew she was being unfairly condemned (not
reliable) because she had explained about the big saw and how left was
backwards, indignantly yelped, "Look out!"  giving her mother and Mr.
Baskett both temporary heart attacks.  Her mother braked severely and
Mr.  Baskett, who had not fastened his seat belt, lurched toward the
windshield hitting his eyebrows on the lowered visor.  Good.

But they arrived in one piece, as Becky said, and were shown to the
table she had requested in the niche beside the breakfront crammed with
Flow Blueware because if she were ever going to collect anything
seriously that's what she'd collect, Becky also said.  Little Becky
might have mentioned conversationally but did not that she had recently
begun to collect the silvery inner wrappings of stick gum because she
had seen in a magazine where you flatten them out and pound them
together and cover the headboard of your bed all over and it looked
like outer space if you painted your walls black-and that was going to
be a battle, black paint, they'd never let her get away with black
paint.

Becky glanced at the menu and she smiled at William in her wholehearted
way.  She had known what she wanted at once, lobster quenelles in a
Pernod sauce.  Her eye had gone right to them.  She set down her menu.
A perfect choice, William agreed, and lay his menu tenderly atop hers.
Becky's smile swerved a bit.

"Darling?  " Becky asked.

Oh.  She was speaking to Little Becky.

"Huh?  " Little Becky asked.

"What do you feel like?"

"What?"

"What do you want to order?  To eat?  "

"To order to eat?"

William was knowledgeable about wine for several minutes as the waiter
waited.  William posed a few sharp questions and settled for something.
Becky smiled her assent at the vineyard and the year William
pronounced, and she smiled at the waiter as well.

Then, twisting and straining, Little Becky reached up and under the
snowy tablecloth and her skirt and she extracted her paperback.  She
rose, a bookworm place marker dropped to the floor which the waiter
retrieved and returned to her as she wandered off to read her horror
book by the wide and welcoming and fully involved fire in the main
dining room.  She perched out of the way upon a very sturdy fender.

"Let her stay there," William said as Becky wondered how to fetch
Little Becky back without causing a scene and, in fact, some of their
fellow diners-out were regarding the deeply reading girl as if she were
one of the charming features of the place along with the dried
artemeisia hanging from the ceiling beams and the soft New Age music
welling up from behind pots of forced narcissi.

"Alden says if this place was any quainter all the waiters would have
catarrh, and small pox scars, just like in the good old days."

But William hadn't flown across seven time zones (he yawned
irresistibly) to hear what else Alden had said.  Becky's letters had
been reporting what Alden had to say for the past twenty years.  After
several pages of Becky's account of the latest event or situation or
disaster with the children or the car or the plumbing, the figure of
Alden always waded in.  Sometimes, he literally waded in, as the time
during a Key West winter vacation when the boys had secretly
constructed a raft from chaise longues and empty Evian bottles so they
could defect to Cuba where, they had heard, the beaches were better and
everyone there was too busy being poor to hog all the tennis courts. On
that occasion, standing up to his knees in the Straits of Florida,
frowning upon the flotilla of bedraggled boys returning under escort,
Alden had delivered one of his deft summing-up pronouncements which
was, as usual so apropos, so very neat ("Even Castro doesn't deserve
you"), that Alden had then strolled away as if the case were closed,
and it was Becky who had to propitiate the Coast Guard and the resort
management and the appalled bystanders.  Becky's role in these dramas
was always parenthetically described-I found some buckets, I spoke to
the police, I searched high and low and located some fabric that almost
matched.

What a remarkable woman.

"Who?"  asked Becky, gazing around the dining room.  "Who's remarkable?
" she wanted to know.  She was prepared to admire anyone who was
noteworthy and perhaps learn something useful about a dress sense or an
eyebrow arch.

"Did I speak aloud?"  William asked, astonished.  "I thought I was
musing to myself.  No, I think I have always thought that you are a
remarkable woman, Rebecca."

"Well, thank you, William, but actually I'm not at all remarkable.  I'm
really not very much of anything except, perhaps, capable.  I think
I've turned out pretty capable.  Lately, I've surprised myself, how I
can manage to manage."

"No, no, no," William corrected her almost irritably.  "You are
remarkable.  You are magnificent.  You are the paragon of all women,
your voice, your smile, your spirit, your soul.  It has always been and
always will be you as far as I'm concerned."

"Oh no.  Oh dear.  It can't be me.  And I thought you'd gotten over all
that, that time when I forgot myself."  Becky dropped her voice.  He
had made her conscious of her voice.

"I shall never get over all that, as you call it," William said.
"Because it was all to me, it was everything."

Becky shifted uneasily.  "Oh dear," she could only say again.

"But, as you said at the time, if only the flowers hadn't been
arranged,"

William almost accused her.

"No, I believe I said, if only the hors d'oeuvres hadn't been ordered,
that's what I said.  But it's more romantic for you to remember I said
the flowers had been picked and not that the chicken salad had been
made, and the rector was booked, and people were flying in from
Denver.

You've cast everything in a very falsely romantic light because you
never had time to grow tired of me.  Had we limped along to some sorry
conclusion, you would have been quite relieved and then you would have
moved gratefully on.  You're not still pining, you just think you are.
Oh, I'm so vexed with you, William.  You're using me as an excuse not
to marry some perfectly lovely woman somewhere out there in the wide
world who is searching and alone because there really aren't enough
good men to go around.  No one should have two men to herself, I won't
have it," Becky said, and she suddenly thought well of Harvey who kept,
filling his vacancies.

"So, you've come to know all about limping toward a sorry conclusion,
have you?  " William asked.  He had listened selectively.

The first courses were wafted onto the table.  Little Becky returned
and devoured savory bundles of spinach-wrapped, herb-spiked wild
mushrooms poached in cider and napped with a reduction cream sauce.
Then she wandered off to play with the owners' (Hannah herself, who
cooked, and David who saw to everything else) agreeable little baby
whose nightly appearance on an Afghani tribal folk art rug beside the
bar was another feature of the place.

"That looked good," Becky said, swiping up some of the sauce from
Little Becky's plate with a crust of Hannah's excellent bread.  "Oh,
have some," she offered for she felt she had to offer William
something.

William and Becky's quenelles had been very successful as well but he
had consumed them perfunctorily while endeavoring to exchange
significant looks with Becky over Little Becky's head.  Now, waving
away the bread plate, he told Becky, " I remember everything exactly as
it happened.  You agreed to meet me in Castine.  Wherever I am,
wherever

I go in the world, I find myself on the map relative to one tiny and
tremendous point in Maine.  I know the miles from anywhere on earth.
Test me, ask me, from Warsaw, Kinshasa, Mexico City."

"I thought you had invited me there to take my mind off the wedding
frenzy, which was all getting to be a bit much.  Ginger's bridesmaid
dress didn't fit, we 'd just found out, and Alden's mother, who was not
a warm woman, only made me miss my own mother more.  But that's no
excuse.  I knew better than to agree to meet you, but they all urged me
to go.  I remember I thought at the time, how they trust me.  And then
I thought,

oh, they just want me out of the way so they can talk about me.  And
after a while, after I imagined what they were saying, I made up my
mind to prove all their assumptions were wrong.  And that's why I was
so reckless.  If the drive up had been less long I'd have arrived in a
far more sensible state of mind."

"You were so lovely with recklessness.  You are so lovely," William
said simply.  "And if you hadn't wanted me to come, if you hadn't
wanted to see me this time, you should have told me so."

"But I had no idea..."

"I sent a letter.  I explained."

"A letter?  I received no letter."

"No?  No letter?  Damn the postal service.  I had to use regular
channels."

Their entrees were served.  Little Becky thumped back to her place and
tore through winter squash raviolis with a sharp cheddar and port wine
sauce nested on a bed of braised winter greens.  Becky concentrated
very hard on her pheasant with Calvados and apples.  She supposed

Lily would be sorry to hear she had eaten pheasant.

"Stay and chat politely," Becky told her as Little Becky scraped back
her chair.

"No.  I have to," Little Becky insisted.  "I have to go," she whispered
urgently and she escaped to the ladies' room where she perched upon a
padded stool before a mirrored recess.  She sniffed at and sampled the
countertop offerings of hand lotions and essential oils, deciding to
discover which was her best one.  She scented her fingertips, the backs
of her hands, her palms, her wrists, her forearms, and her knees until
she ran out of patches of skin to anoint and she decreed moss rose her
very favorite.  She moved the moss rose bottle to the front of the
clutter of containers.  First.  After which, the mirrored alcove
afforded her a variety of novel views of herself all at once, the
front, the sides, the back, and the top of her head.  Every angle
smiled and nodded and attended only to her and she knew she was among
friends.  How wonderful it would be, to be among friends, she
thought.

"You must choose," William sternly prompted Becky for she was not
saying all that he had imagined she would say when he had planned this
moment.

"Choose?  " Becky asked.  "But I have chosen, not that there ever was a
question.  Or, if there was, briefly, a question you must believe me
that the answer just wasn't you."

"Yes, yes, I humbly acceded to your wishes then.  But now I know you
have come to regret your decision," William said.

"Have I?  Have I?  Wherever did you get that impression?"  Becky
asked.

"I have had eyes in your house, and ears.  I know what's been
happening.

I know that Alden has fallen by the wayside and he's dragging you down
with him and that you are near the end of your rope," William said.

"Eyes in the house?  Ears?  Do you mean Andy?  Andy has been reporting
to you?  But I liked Andy," Becky protested.  "I have confided in Andy.
How could Andy?  "

"Andy didn't fully appreciate all that he was telling me.  But a naive
informant is the truest one, I have found," William said.  "So, now
that you know what I know, I am asking you to freely choose.  Choose
now.  Choose again.  Choose differently."

"Now?  Choose now?  Why must I choose now?  I really don't think you're
quite yourself at the moment, and you will thank me later when you
understand how very hard I'm trying not to let you say what you seem to
want to insist upon saying.  Oh, I blame myself for living in your
apartment all these years, but how could I have told Alden why we
couldn't possibly accept such favorable terms?  It's just too unkind of
you too, William.  You've been pulling my strings for twenty years. But
I won't let you upset our friendship at this point," Becky said. "Let's
just say it's a lovely surprise to see you, I can't imagine what
happened to your letter, and I suppose if I were foolish enough to
believe you, I would be flattered, but I'm totally unconvinced.  And
now I'm going to enjoy the rest of the evening."

"I'm enjoying the evening," she informed the waiter who approached with
another bottle of wine.

"Madam," he said.

"If we saw more of you," Becky told William, "things would be on a much
more even keel."

" Well, you won't be seeing any more of me at all," William said with
bitter satisfaction.  " Not unless you come away with me, and come away
with me now.  I shall never again return to the United States."

"Don't be like that, so dramatic.  You'll be retiring before too long.
Your apartment is empty and waiting for you.  Alden and I always talked
about the time you'd come home for good and run for Congress, or
governor.  You have the resume and the manner.  In fact, we're going to
help.  Alden already has some slogans planned."  She paused.  She
recalled they had not been very serious slogans.  "And you'll be
surprised at life in the States these days.  Even the little Towne IGA
bakes its own croissants.  They're a bit doughy, but..."

William hushed her.  "Listen to me," he said.  "Don't try to persuade
me of anything.  Let me talk.  Let me explain.  Something has happened.
It was a risk for me to come here at all but I knew you wouldn't come
to me.  Not again, not as you agreed to come once before."

"Are you ill?"  Becky asked.  "You aren't ill, are you?  If you're ill,
if there's anything I can do, that we can all do, if you're ill?  "

"It's not an illness.  Not that, no.  It's something that's happened.
It's something I've done," William said.

"But whatever can you have done?"  Becky asked.  "I can't begin to
guess.  You must be mistaken."

William seized her hand.  She dropped her fork into the sugar bowl.
William cleared his throat.  He could not quite meet her eye.  "Recent
events," he began, "recent events abroad have made my position in
certain circles rather equivocal in that there is a whole new ball
game, as they say, out there."

"Whatever are you talking about?  " Becky wondered.  "Recent events
have been wonderful, although they weren't very attractive to the Ceau
escus last Christmas.  I don't think it's ever all right to line people
up against walls and shoot them no matter what they've done.  They
looked so crumpled lying there, especially on Christmas.  Alden said
they should at least have waited till Boxing Day to clean up details
like that."

"And they may be very unattractive to me," William said, wincing at
what Alden had had to say for himself yet again.

"Don't be absurd.  You're an American diplomat.  You have all those
tall strong Marines at your beck and call," Becky said.

"No, I may have all those tall strong Marines at my door, Rebecca.  I
may have all those tall strong Marines at my throat."

"Oh, I see," said Becky.  "I'm afraid I do see.  But whatever can you
have done?  " She had learned, over the years, to ask this question
quite calmly of her boys.  They were lulled into giving her more honest
accounts of themselves.

"I backed the loser, as they say."

" But the losers were-oh, William, I should have thought you had more
sense.  Those people were so grey, they were so dour, and forgive me
for pointing this out, but quite a few of them were actually quite
evil.  I mean to say, I list a bit to the left myself, although please
don't tell Alden I said so, but really, William."

"This is not easily explained," William said.  "I can explain to you,
but you must be instructed as gradually as I myself came to see the
true facts and assimilated them and, yes, acted upon them.  And that's
why I've come so suddenly and so necessarily to beg you, if I must, to
go away with me.  Come now, and come on faith."

"Go where?"  Becky asked, unwisely, she knew, but she had always loved
travel.  She missed traveling most of all the privileges of her former
life just lately lost.  And Alden, she realized now, wore best when she
could regard him in the context of a fresh view.  He was an excellent
husband when waving happily from a point on a jetty while making
particular arrangements with the locals.

"Your passport is current?  You can use your own passport for the time
being.  And you'll need warm clothes.  That is, warm weather clothes,
just enough to start.  We'll buy what you need once we're settled. I'll
buy you new white dresses.  I always see you in white."

"Oh no.  I can never wear white.  I look so pale in white."

"Then whatever shade dresses you wish.  Lemon-y yellow, shell-y pink."
He strove to guess the color that would convince her.  "May sky blue.
The beginning of green green of Japanese tea splashed upon a damask
cloth."

Becky seemed, for a moment, to will him to discover the shade that
tinged the shadows of her most hidden dreams.  But he would have to
name the color for her to know it.

"Red?  " William blundered on.

"No," Becky said.  "I'm not going anywhere with you.  And I suggest you
turn yourself in and take your medicine.  We'll stand by you.  We can't
approve, but we 'll be there, Alden and I. Harvey won't be sympathetic,
of course, and I'm not sure you'd really want Ginger in your corner,
holding press conferences-though I doubt any of this is as serious as
you pretend.  Perhaps you're not quite as important as you think you
are," she suggested gently.  How Alden had minded learning that lesson
rather too late in his life to bounce back very effectively from the
shock of having been dropped.

"Don't decide now.  I realize it's too much to take in.  I'm not going
away until tomorrow, though it will have to be tomorrow, because I've
misdirected my potential pursuers but not indefinitely," William said.
"Yes, what is it?  " he asked.

The waiter wished to recite the dessert menu.  Becky only wanted coffee
because she was going to lie awake all night anyway but William, whose
appetite had returned after he unburdened himself, regretted having
underappreciated his previous courses and he allowed himself to be
tempted by a dacquoise.

"Where's Little B.?"  Becky asked.  Little Becky liked dacquoise and
she never had them nowadays.  "Have we lost Little B.?  "

Hannah had fetched Little Becky from the powder room and invited her
into the winding-down kitchen (for the hour was late) where Little
Becky test-tasted a contemplated dessert offering, a pr aline ice cream
ball dusted with crushed Almond Roca, doused with Frangelico, and set
alight.  Little Becky expertly rolled flavors on her tongue.  She
didn't want to be rude to Hannah who hadn't yelled at her for hogging
the ladies' room and knocking over the bottle of Sandalwood essence
("Mmmm," Hannah had breathed in and only smiled).  Nevertheless, the
ice cream invention needed a counter taste to undercut the sweetness.

"Creme fraiche?  " Little Becky asked tentatively.  "You know, like in
a plop on the plate?  "

"Yes, exactly right," agreed Hannah.  "A sophisticated choice," she
added as she prepared a revised portion to keep Little Becky busy in
the kitchen as the girl's mother continued in her obviously
consequential talk with the not unattractive man (he was heavyset, but
as an owner chef Hannah warmed to the established appetite) who was
certainly not the plaid-shirted and mildly smiling and rather distrait
husband.  The Lowes had been in the restaurant a few times and they
were the sort of discerning and delighted patrons who left a pleasant
aftertaste.  But even amiable people had their complications and Hannah
was convinced there was a story being told at the table in the alcove
which the mother did, and the daughter did not, need to hear.

"Would you like to work here this summer?"  Hannah asked Little Becky,
then.  "Mainly I'd want you as junior wait staff rilling water glasses
and busing, but I'll need you in the kitchen sometimes.  You can peel
vegetables to start and pick up a few tricks along the way."

"Can I?"  cried Little Becky.  "Yes, yes, I want to work here.  This
summer."

LILY PICKED UP the kitchen wall phone on the eleventh ring and warily
she asked, "Yes?"

"I want Phoebe, Aunt Lily," Arthur's voice, all the way from
California, insisted.

"But Phoebe isn't here," Lily said.

"Not there?  Has she gone away?  She said she wouldn't go away,"
Arthur's voice cried across the country.

"She's out for the evening, Arthur.  She's out for the evening with a
party of young people," Lily told him.

"A party of young people?  " Arthur mulled over that one.  A cinematic
scene unreeled in his mind of laughing girls and laughing boys, of
Phoebe, laughing.  They were decked out in long, home-knit scarves and
great pompoms of mittens and striped stocking caps erect on their
heads, and they motored through the countryside in a wood-paneled
station wagon convertible beneath an orange and spherical and rather
too low-hanging moon.  How odd that the moon was so orange, for the
rest of Arthur's mind movie played in a black-and-white world of rich
shadows and bright clarity.  Sure, if anyone deserved a good time, it
was Phoebe.

"Well, listen, Aunt Lily," Arthur said.  "Will you please tell Phoebe
to call me when she comes in.  It's real important, it's of paramount
importance that she does.  Anytime she gets in, tell her.  Here's the
number where I am, write it down, where I am.  Please."

"I have it," Lily said.  "Phoebe will get your message."

"Urgently.  Tell her to call urgently," Arthur said.

"But Arthur," Lily offered.  "If there's a problem, can I be of help?
"

"No, it's not really a problem, or it is a problem, actually, that
Phoebe isn't there, or here.  That's what I want.  I want Phoebe to be
there so I can tell her she's got to come here.  Do you see why it's so
urgent, Aunt Lily?  " Arthur asked.

Yes, Lily said she saw.

"YOU ARE STARTING to look good to me," Stefan accused Phoebe, and
Phoebe capably avoided his threatened kiss.  She shifted slightly and
he pitched sideways and lay flat along the Casa di Napoli booth's bench
seat unsure as a bowled-over beetle which way was up.  He awaited
assistance and when none came, he began to nestle against the sticky
plasticized

Casa di Napoli menu that Phoebe had placed between Stefan and her
leg.

"Either Stefan doesn't have much of a head or he's had a head start,"
Andy observed.

" I thought that wine-y smell was some sort of awful European
aftershave he was wearing," Betsy said.

"But he's bearded," Phoebe pointed out.

"Then he must have been drinking all day," Betsy said.  "And he
shouldn't have been drinking at all.  He must be underage.  He's in
America for high school.  I don't think Calliope should have served
him, actually."

"Probably not," Andy said.  "But the Henry Kissinger diction and the
Leon Trotsky goatee make him come across as wisenheimerish beyond his
years.  Oh, just belt him if he's bothering you, Phoebe," Andy
advised.

"We really ought to be going, anyway," Phoebe said, glancing at her
watch.  The time was half past seven on the West Coast where they were
dismantling the day and just beginning to imagine night.  Arthur might,
she thought unavailingly, Arthur might Stefan scrabbled at the menu.
"Phooby," he muttered thickly.  "Phooby?  Are you there?  Knock, knock,
who's there?  Phooby?  "

"We can't just leave him here," Betsy said.  "I mean, we can't, can we?
Calliope will get in trouble.  But he's not very manageable under the
best of circumstances.  What shall we do with him?  "

"Arthur says that when people get like this when he's performing, he
just agrees with everything they say very firmly," Phoebe recalled.

ANDY AND PHOEBE STEERED Stefan along the icy walk and maneuvered him
into the house.  He seemed to know where he was and he veered toward
the dining room and the cluster of heavy, semi filled decanters
gleaming on the sideboard.  But Andy and Phoebe hauled him toward the
stairs and hoisted him up step by step, clumping and bumping him along
to Andy's room as imperfectly smothered outbursts of oaths and
exclamations escaped from them all.  Betsy had been charged with
locating and distracting Lily whom she found in the little parlor
dozing on Harvey's extended recliner with a library book on her lap and
Agnes coiled at her feet.  A 4o-watt bulb cast an Old Masterish light.
The fire sputtered.  The owls' eyes were dimmed but remained alive.

"Aunt Lily?"  Betsy asked.  "Are you asleep?  Don't wake up," she
advised, belatedly whispering.

But, rousing now, Lily straightened the chair, toed away the cat, and
opened her book.

"Betsy?  "she asked.

"Only me," Betsy said, "telling you we're, you know, all home now."

"All right.  No, wait," Lily said slowly recalling.  There was a reason
she had sat up.  She had something to tell someone.  "I need a word
with..."  she paused.

"Oh, I know.  I'm so sorry about the noise," Betsy launched into an
explanation.  "Dinner disagreed with Stefan at the pizza place.
He'ssick, but we'll simmer down.  He'll have to spend the night.  He
can't drive because he's so-sick."

"Fetch him a basin, then," Lily said, changing tack momentarily.

"A basin.  I will," Betsy said and bolted for the door, grateful that
Lily chose to respond practically and had not asked to be told the
details.

"No, wait," Lily said.  "First tell Phoebe that Arthur called and she
is to call him back tonight no matter the time.  I wrote the number
down in the kitchen.  She's to call him, he's waiting for her to call.
Tell her to call."

"Really?  Arthur called?  What did he want?  Did he say?  I hope it's
good news," Betsy said.  "Did it sound good?  Do you think it's good
news, Aunt Lily?  I'll tell her right away."

"Yes, I think it's very good news for Phoebe," Lily said.  "But first
fetch the basin."

"Right.  First I'll fetch the basin," Betsy said.

STEFAN LAY HEAVILY ASLEEP upon Andy's bed and he was likely to remain
so until morning.  A chipped porcelain bowl sat on the pillow beside
his head and Andy had flung a blanket over him to blot out the sight of
so much indulgence in denim, in alcohol, in abuse of hospitality.

Andy did not draw the window shade, thinking ahead to the dazzling
spike of earliest sunlight that would seek out and irradiate Stefan at
dawn, and he pitched Stefan's not easily removed cowboy boots
(snakeskin, stiletto-heeled, sour-sock-smelling) onto the floor between
the bed and the window where, Andy hoped, Stefan would stumble over
them as he blindly and madly dashed to yank the shade down.  Andy eyed
the shade.  He snapped it fully up and wound the pull cord twice around
the curtain rod as he felt himself becoming the star player in a future
Hill family instructional anecdote on the perils of being self invited
foreign, drunk, and a chaser of young Hill women.

Carrying his robe and pajama bottoms and the first book that came to
hand (Philology and Function, Third Edition) he wandered down into the
kitchen where Betsy enthused, more demonstrably happy than Phoebe,
about Arthur's sudden call.  For Phoebe had phoned Arthur.  She had
been calm, even solemn, as she listened to his plans for her.  She had
suffered greatly for weeks now and she carried herself carefully as if
she were just emerging from a serious illness.  But, better than
most,

Phoebe knew how little time the modern world allowed for recovery from
even the most perilous procedure and she did not doubt she would arise
quite restored in the morning prepared to pack her belongings, resign
from her position at the hospital, catch a plane.  Still, she didn't
feel up to sitting in the kitchen until all hours to talk and talk
about the rest of her life as Betsy had been prepared to do.  "Oh,
Phoebe," Betsy said.  "Oh, Phoebe."  Carrying a mug of Mung tea so she
would not dream, Phoebe disappeared up the back stairs and it was then
that Betsy turned to Andy and declared herself to be in love with
love.

MUCH LATER AS Earl was driving Ginger home, a vivid light on the
dashboard blinked and a two-way radio chattered an address.  Earl
cranked down his window and, reaching with his long arm, affixed a
magnetized, cone-shaped glowing and whirling object to the roof of his
car.  NORTHEAST SECURITY EMERGENCY ... NORTHEAST SECURITY

EMERGENCY highlighted lettering insisted as he flew over the back
roads.  Snowbank tumuli, shuttered residences, the thick trunks and
twisting arms of trees, the loaf shapes of mailboxes, were
interestingly, urgently streaked with alarm-alarm orange illumination.
Earl monitored a police scanner, all the while communicating with his
own headquarters in a number-larded language that defeated Ginger's
perfectly natural desire to listen in on the details of the unfolding
upset.

Her presence in the passenger seat "interfered" as a charged Earl had
irritably observed, and Ginger was required to press one foot against
the radio console and to place one hand on the ceiling light fixture to
clear the static of which she very much doubted she was the cause.  Her
personal aura was remarkably light.  She knew.  She had had her aura
charted and it was pure silver, a Gifted One had told her.
Nevertheless, she awkwardly perched as she had been bidden, acting as a
kind of twisted metal coat hanger antenna and she withheld comment
although she permitted several long sighs to seethe through her clamped
teeth.  The windshield began to cloud.  Earl swiped a see-through swath
with an impatient palm.

Of course the evening had not gone well.  There was no point dwelling
on the evening.  At the very beginning, stowing her into his car, Earl
had closed the door on the sweeping skirt of her grandmother's
beautiful golden-hued mink coat.  The hem had dragged through the slush
and grime and motor oil all the way from the River Road to Main Street
where the Palmers lived in Babe's parents' old place and about which
Ginger had been frankly curious-some lovely old millwork was visible
through the uncurtained and alight windows late at night as one
happened to drive by and chanced to glance that way, raised panels,
dentil molding, a bow fronted corner cupboard-Ginger had not had a very
good view-also, a pilastered mantel, a Queen Anne gilt wood wall
mirror, age spotted but still serviceable, and a long case clock that
ran fast.

The worst of the damage to her coat had been revealed in the Palmers'
foyer as outer garments were surrendered.  Ginger had been obliged to
be perfectly charming about the damage, about the frazzled and
tar-blackened and shredding golden pelt and satin lining as Babe stood
by the door twisting Ginger's faux Hermes scarf like a garotte and
smiling a malign and expectant little smile.

Earl started in on blaming the deep darkness at the top of Miss Hill's
driveway, otherwise he would have seen the overspill of coat-besides,
personal security concerns dictated a hundred-foot zone of
incandescence around the perimeters of all residential abodes, so Miss
Hill was in dangerous error if not actual default-there wasn't a law,
yet.  Babe was of the opinion that Ginger herself should have kept
better track of the nether ward billowings of her exuberant garment.
Goody, who had received the coat and had sympathetically draped it over
the banister rail, knelt and examined the harm done and wondered
whether Spot Off would help.  Babe had stiffened.  She was beginning to
ask herself whether women's hems weren't one of those areas men ought
not to have opinions about.  A hem, she thought wildly, could be
construed as a gateway.  Ginger would have been extremely interested in
this insight had Babe spoken of it aloud, but Babe was bound by then to
herd everyone into the dining room.  The long case clock seemed to
think it was five after six and the odor of overcooking drifted from
the kitchen quarters, of tired onions, of a too-brown crust.

"Get up, Goody," Babe said, and Goody got up from his knees.

"I'm not sure about the Spot Off," Ginger said.  "But I do seem to
recall a lovely old Armenian gentleman in Peabody who always saw to
furs.  Oh, wait, was he rugs?  "

Then Babe recounted her big fight with Briter-Ways Cleaners over the
All Saints' surplices as she seated everyone.  The dining room air was
chilly.  Ginger wished she had her coat.  Oh, her coat.

Goody allowed he wasn't at all knowledgeable about such subjects, but
couldn't Ginger cut off the damaged part and shorten her coat?

Babe told Goody to say grace.  He repeated a standard one.  They all
uttered Amen.

Ginger asked Babe if she had bought her unusual centerpiece at the
Citizens with Special Needs Sheltered Workshop Shop which was enjoying
a small vogue with the recent emergence of outsider art as a
collectible commodity.

"What's outsider art?  " asked Earl.  "Lawn ornaments?  "

Ginger explained.

"No," said Babe.  "I didn't buy the centerpiece there."

"Did you take the skin off my piece of chicken?  " Goody asked Babe,
which revived the sore question of the coat, this further mention of
skins.

"Yes, you may eat that piece of chicken as I have given it to you,"
Babe said.

"I mean to say, minks get mussy in their real life," Earl spoke up.
"The little critters swim, don't they, they frolic in the muck, that is
before they're stunned and electrocuted."

"I think mine is the equivalent of roadkill mink," Ginger said.

"Is Kraft's Pepper Ranch Salad Dressing Lite the salad dressing I can
eat?  " Goody asked.

"Yes," Babe said.

"Is it the salad dressing that I like?  " Goody inquired.

("Don't move," Earl's voice broke into Ginger's thoughts, for Ginger
had been agitatedly twitching and Earl's radio emitted frizzles and
blurts.)

Then Ginger had told Goody, in answer to his question, she really
couldn't say what her cholesterol count was.  Goody said she really
ought to know and Ginger said, oh, she liked to be surprised.

" What, by the first heart attack?  " suggested Babe.

"Oh, my heart," answered Ginger, as if that organ was always giving her
trouble of some sort.

Earl was inspired to describe the finer points of a timely home
security checkup and outlined his prescriptive solution to the average
home owner's average home's risks and liabilities, but he could not be
drawn out on the details of a recent burglary and house trashing in
Towne.

"I heard they poured a box of Tide in the Jacuzzi and left the motor
running and the water on," Ginger had probed.  "Come on, you can tell
us.  It's not as if you're a real policeman who swore an oath."

Earl had delivered a speech on the coming privatization of all public
services.  Someday we will select and contract our own firefighters,
for example, with a choice of water or foam extinguishings, or even, he
explained, a giant vacuumizing unit which would suck the air itself out
from under a fire, effectively smothering it.

"I can't picture that at all.  Where would one plug such a unit in?  I
mean to say, one always has to plug in the vacuum first which is not
always easy to do at Lily's house," Ginger said, not that she'd done
much vacuuming lately but she had observed Betsy on her hands and knees
searching along the baseboards behind heavy furniture for any available
outlet.

"Babe," Goody asked, sotto voce, "may I have a second dinner roll if I
only have three-quarters of a dessert?  "

That she had ever failed to see Goody clearly, Ginger understood then.
She had been very mistaken.  Time played such variations on memory.
Time took its toll on youth and promise.  Time trivialized, time
tarnished, time tampered.  Nevertheless, Ginger reminded herself, time
could also temper and improve and enrich some others among us.  Ginger
flexed on her own behalf.  Time, she concluded, ultimately told the
truth.

"Tell me, do you still recite the "Desiderata'?  " Ginger asked
Goody.

"Yes," Babe spoke up defiantly.  "He certainly does."

"Oh dear," Ginger murmured tolerantly.

No, no version of Goody was going to ride to her rescue, not unless
Babe ordered him to go forth, and re knotted his tie and reminded him
to carry his umbrella before he departed-and then she would
peremptorily summon him back because he 'd forgotten to place a
good-bye peck upon her dry, freckled cheek.  The Palmers conducted that
sort of marriage.

Babe's wedding portrait still hung on the living room wall, an
unstylish artifact from the early seventies.  Babe had not been a
pretty bride but she had been a resolute one.  The band of her princess
veil sat low and straight across her brow.

("Ess, two, one, six, over," Earl replied to his headquarters.  "Ess,
two, one, six, over, damn it," he barked, which fierceness, Ginger was
sure, was only an act on his part.  He was not attempting to impress
her by this point in the evening, however.  He was just trying to show
her.)

They had played cards after dinner.  No one had told Ginger there would
be bridge.  She thought one was supposed to be warned in advance if
there was going to be bridge.  She would have to write to Miss Manners
for the last word, and she composed her letter in her mind, Dear
Maitresse, Is not the considerate hostess obliged to issue a minatory
statement?

They sat around a too-small card table.  Their knees milled and brushed
and bumped.  Ginger took no joy in the contact.  She drew in her elbows
and locked her knees.  Earl picked up Ginger's coffee cup and drank
from it.

"Too sweet," he sputtered, clipping cup against saucer.

Ginger arched an eyebrow.  "Surely not," she said.

The Palmers, partnered, spatted, and Earl was impatient with Ginger who
could only vaguely play.  She consulted a scrawled-upon crib sheet
which she amended as fresh situations arose during the course of
play.

"Are we playing for money?"  Ginger asked.  "No.  Ah, we're playing for
glory."

Glory.  The Palmers and Earl arranged their hands uneasily.

Ginger wondered why she hadn't stayed home tonight of all nights and
concentrated on charming William.  She could have played another
contest with him, far more successfully-And have you read?"  And have
you been to?"  And do you know?"  And don't you think?  She would have
made certain that any little game advanced with William ended in a big,
satisfactory tie.  Dear William, he must know so few people in the
States, these days.  Such a pity he had to make do with Becky as his
dinner companion.  One could not imagine such an un bracing evening.
One would have liked to have been the flower in the vase upon their
table, a tall, stately, sympathetically nodding purple iris, she
thought, whose lovely petals William touched with a tender ringer.

Hurry, Ginger thought now.  Hurry, she thought as Earl drove doggedly
on.  Perhaps there would be time to sit up with William and chat and
get to know him-whom, in truth, she didn't really know at all but
seemed to know all about, Becky so frequently mentioned his likes.  How
handy to know a man's likes for plainsong and Siena and naval histories
told from the non victors perspectives.

Then Earl pulled to an abrupt and maddening stop alongside a Towne
police cruiser parked at the end of a driveway off Modred Lane.

"Stay here," he ordered Ginger as he got out to confer with an officer
who was only, after all, Eddie Eddy.  Ginger used to know his sister.
She peered through the windshield and waved.  Betty was the sister's
name, inevitably, pronounced Beddy.  Earl waved back at Ginger to stop
waving.

When Earl returned to the car, he removed the wobbling and exclaiming

Northeast Security Emergency cone and tossed it into the backseat.

"So?"  Ginger asked.  "What is it?  What did Eddie say?  What's going
on?  "

"False alarm," Earl said.  He reached across her ankle and snapped off
his scanner.  "Nothing's going on.  There is no emergency here
tonight."  He failed to meet her unconvinced stare.

"Then why is Eddie standing there?"  Ginger asked.  "Why is he standing
in the middle of the road in the middle of the night?  What were you
two talking about if there was nothing to talk about?  I can't believe
you.  Clearly, there's not nothing going on."

"Well, I told you."

"Well, I don't believe you."

"Well then."

ALDEN AND THE BOYS rose early the next morning and shuffled to their
attic bedroom windows to gaze down upon the driveway bowl.  They had
all dreamed about the truck in rushes of rumble and motion and surreal
and rolling-about cargoes of faces from the past (Alden) and shipments
of bootleg videos (the boys).  They thumped down to the kitchen and
Alden plugged in the coffeepot and they moved outside to picnic on hot
coffee and jelly sticks.  Glover and Alden sat high in the truck cab on
sprung seats of tough and tobacco-smelling leather.  Brooks and Rollins
lounged in the capacious bed upon rearrangements of the several massive
studded spare tires that did not fit the Loadstar but which might be
bartered for some that could be used.  There was a communicating window
at the rear of the cab which slid open and shut and they passed the
doughnut box back and forth among themselves.  The bed of the truck was
open to the elements but could be enclosed by erecting iron arches and
tying on a tarp.  Very Okie, Alden had said.

They warmed their hands around their coffee mugs and were quiet
together in the manner of cowboys or miners or some such species of
hollow-eyed workingmen who bore honest grime under their fingernails
and knuckles.  And they had "passed," as Alden put it, last night at
the Towne Line Diner, where they stopped for dinner.  They had sat at
the counter hunched in their parkas.  They ordered chili and burgers
all the way after they overheard them being ordered by the regular
patrons and which turned out to be burgers with every option piled on.
They carried on a conversation with the waitress whose boyfriend drove
a real big rig too, she told them.  She had noticed as they pulled into
the lot in the Loadstar.  Her ears perked right up at the grumbly purr
of a real big engine braking and winding down.

"And yet all powered by such a little key," Alden had marveled,
displaying the key newly attached to his key ring.  Well, they had
"passed" up until that point.

Admittedly, the truck was less lovely by daylight, for they had only
viewed it by moonlight and the darting passes of a failing flashlight
beam.  The truck's surface showed, now, abraded and dented and no
longer milk white but white-ish, a kind of neglected tooth color.
Still, the look was less a used than a veteran one as Alden
optimistically said.  It was too bad they couldn't go out on the road
again until the paperwork could be completed at the Registry on Monday
morning.  The drive home last night from Gee's cousin Gum Chew's used
car and what-have-you lot had not been entirely legal.  Gum, who was
keen to complete the sale, had wired a loose license plate to the rear
bumper, an expired vanity plate that spelled out KIKKBUT which Alden
had supposed was somebody's name (it looked Finnish?) until the boys
began to pronounce it.

Lily had been up and about since dawn filling the bird feeders and
breaking the ice that had glassed over the terrace flagstones.  She
didn't want any broken necks to add to her burdens, an adamant invalid
supine on a sofa and requiring hourly snack trays and fresh magazines
and physical therapy.  She chipped away with a garden edger and kept
her back turned to the driveway where she had noted something very like
a truck was parked and she had sensibly decided not to know anything
more about it.

But here was Alden at her elbow, bidding her to admire the object.

"So very large," she remarked after they had walked around the truck
twice.  "So large one would almost think such a vehicle ought to be
immobile."  Alden and the boys received her comment as an eccentric yet
an interested one.

Alden sent Brooks and Rollins inside to fetch a mug of coffee for Lily
and before she knew what she was about, Alden was hoisting her up into
the cab which put her in mind of boarding an elephant.  She had always
rather wanted to ride an elephant, floating serenely, regally high in a
canopied howdah.  Nor would she have minded riding atop a camel in the
shade of the Great Pyramids, she reflected, and she realized she could
almost understand Alden's enthusiasm for alternative transportation.

"And what are your plans for this?  " Lily asked.

"Aside from my own uses, lugging wood for the wood business when the
wood business gets going," Alden said, "I'm going to hire myself out as
a general carrier.  When you think of the times you've said to
yourself, if only I had a truck.  Well, here's the truck for toting
lumber home from the lumberyard or, say, from an auction where you
can't bid on a really terrific armoire because there's no good way of
getting it home.  I can linger on the outskirts of estate sales, avail
ably I'm going to target the small-load, short-distance market.  That's
what you have to do these days.  You have to identify and target a
niche.  Then, who knows, maybe I'll build up to a fleet of trucks.
First, though, we 'll have to come up with a name for the company."

"A La Cart?"  Lily suggested.

"Yes," said Alden, delighted.  "A La Cart, ad hoc, apres-auction
haulage a specialty.  Although it will hurt Becky's feelings that we've
come up with a company name and motto and an entire business without
her input.  Still, she'll have some ideas we haven't even thought of,
I'm sure, and we'll let her decide our corporate color scheme because
I'm thinking now, we ought to paint the truck eye-catchingly."

BETSY AND ANDY AWOKE early as well.  Betsy's narrow bed could scarcely
contain them.  They noticed this now as they had not noticed last
night.  They lay, at present unfolding and coming to, aware of sharp
knees and angled elbows jutting, no longer silken skinned entwining
limbs simply, intricately, inevitably fitting together.  When they
found their voices and thought to speak (last night all language had
been banished) they agreed they did not wish to be discovered in
Betsy's room.  Although, Betsy said, the sky wouldn't fall if they
were, but it would be an unkindness to saddle the family with yet
another subject not to be discussed at the breakfast table.  Breakfasts
were already such Quaker meetings.

Nevertheless, Andy was reluctant to leave her side.  The bed made such
a warm burrow.  Huffs of a draft nudged the suspended ceiling light and
rustled the pages of a letter scattered across the bureau top.  Icy air
touched his ventured and retracted foot.  He returned to Betsy and
murmured into her shoulder.  His larynx thrummed against her upper arm.
He was saying something about being so happy here, here he was happy.
Betsy, gratified, curled against him.  No, she could not quite curl
against him.  She unlaced her captive hands from Andy's grasp and she
reached and fumbled above her head.  She could not raise her head.  A
lock of her secretly wild hair, eagerly unbound by Andy, had wound
round a headboard spindle sometime during the night.  She tried to
recall how that had happened.

"Just cut me loose," Betsy said.  "There's scissors at my desk.  In the
drawer."

"I won't cut off your hair," Andy said.  "Never.  Never your lovely
hair.  I'll free you."

"All right, all right," Betsy said.  "But hurry.  They're all getting
up.  I hear footsteps clomping.  I hear water in the pipes."

Andy was painstaking.  Betsy didn't flash in anger.  They knew a
significant challenge was being met and matched as Andy pulled at and
uncoiled a hundred pale, polished strands.  Betsy bore each tug and
pinch of her scalp in silence.  Threads of hair, not quite hopelessly
entangled, released and spiraled free.  Not long, Andy promised, not
long, he promised again.  There.

He massaged and kissed her poor, wrenched neck and Betsy swiftly
braided her hair out of further harm's way.  A plait rose upright from
her nape, as soft and as way as an aigrette.

"You are exquisite.  You are perfect," Andy said, charmed by all her
graceful motions.

"Perfect," Betsy uttered faintly.

How daunting to be told she was perfect.  How perilous to be valued for
her perfection.  Would Andy never overlook an error on her part?  For
she was, she knew, far less good than she appeared to be.  Every step
she took these days was one calculated to make her mother's course show
even worse.  Betsy shone for the blackest of reasons against the
darkest of designs.  She wished she could tell Andy, of all people, how
her worthy acts stood tall only in opposition, but she would never
respect him if he said he understood.

Besides, she supposed Andy was not citing her inner worth, such as it
was.  He was responding to her physical beauty, for which she could
claim even less credit.  One simply was, or was not, beautiful, and she
could not quite work out how not to be so.  Could she wear glasses,
grow fat, convince a surgeon to sever some crucial nerve and freeze her
face into a glowering mask?  But what if she changed her mind?  She
very well might, for she had observed how very much the favored ones
cared when they began to lose their looks-how they haunted all mirrors,
at first, not quite sure, and then hunted down less clear and more
forgiving mirrors, and, at last, shrouded every mirrored surface with
scarves and lingerie.  No, good looks mattered even if you pretended
not to notice how smiles and chairs and advantages were especially
offered to you when you came into a room.  Betsy saw, then, that her
life might be very pleasant indeed, if she just let nature take its
course.  Cloaks would be spread across puddles, the gates to secret
gardens would swing open at her approach, and as she entered, ripe
plums would drop into her lap.  And I shall let them, she resolved
now.

Andy felt Betsy fall limp, resistless.  Her slight weight became a dead
weight in his arms, disconcertingly so, and he wondered whether he had
taken on more than he intended, although, admittedly, his intentions
had been well-defined last night, but not definitive.  He had not meant
anything so concrete as this.  He slowly slid his arms from beneath
her.

"I must be brave," he stated.  He flung back blankets and stood and
shrugged on his robe.  He listened at the door-voices called, a radio
sang, water and heat shuddered through pipes-and after sketching a sort
of blessing in the icy air, he left her.

Betsy settled back among re plumped pillows.  She stretched her legs
and sought the hollow where the mattress was still warm from Andy.  She
touched her lips reminiscently and decided that her favorite place of
all was a bed after a lover had departed.  Although that might change
in the future when she had access to bigger beds, so it was nothing to
worry about, this strong yen to be by herself again.  Her mother, Betsy
supposed, would have taken ten years at the psychiatrist to figure out
that one, ten years of twice a week coming home with red-rimmed eyes
and restorative jars and sample vials from the Elizabeth Arden counter.
But those would be such enjoyable years for Ginger, being able to talk
about herself, being able to talk about sex and herself, and rounding
off her big emotional day with shopping.  Oh, her mother... Betsy
listened through her wall toward the bathroom.  It was occupied.

She reached, there was always a book within reach in her little room,
and she scooped a small brown volume with yellow brittle pages from her
windowsill.  She would sample EBB.  as fatidic commentator on her
situation.  Betsy opened at random and read where her eye happened
first.  "I never gave a lock of hair away To a man, dearest, except
this to you-" Which was too spooky for words.

THE EVENTS OF the previous evening had left William not un hopeful
After twenty years of hanging fire, it was only to be expected that the
match was, necessarily, a dampened one.  The affair required sustained
and gentle warmth and insistently whispering breaths to coax a spark,
for just a spark was all he knew he needed after twenty years of such
drought, after twenty years' accumulation of crumpled letters and
desiccated floral tributes, after twenty arid years during which he had
burned and Becky had been bled nearly dry by her ridiculous family's
incessant claims and demands.

William sat on the edge of Harvey's high and firm and wide widower's
bed and he returned the gazes of Harvey's three lost wives as he pulled
up his socks, a calf-high, camel-colored lamb's-wool pair.  He was not
un encouraged He would not be discouraged.  He felt as if he had just
passed seven mitigating hours, dreaming usefully, in a shrine to robust
matrimonial prospects.  Harvey's handkerchief drawer, where William had
routinely routed, held a cache of sentimental artifacts theater
programs, swizzle sticks from happy hours, several snowy and lacy lawn
hankies far daintier than Harvey's own well-ironed linen square,
monogrammed with three vertical lines intersected by a horizontal bar.
Were these seized or tendered tokens, William wondered.  Such prizes,
the few prizes, had been seized, in his experience.  He himself
possessed a golden button that had fallen from the cuff of Becky's
blazer during a New York visit in 1974, a No.  2 Pentech pencil she had
clenched between her teeth as she worried over an International Herald
Tribune crossword puzzle in 1986, and the paper doily that bore the
cream scone she had enjoyed when he coaxed her off to Newport, two
summers ago.  He kept his treasures in an accordion-fold compartment of
his briefcase.  He seldom consulted them but he knew they were there,
which had almost been enough until now.

Let me succeed.  William paused before the triptych frame and made a
formal request of the Three Graces as he called the wives, for he
couldn't remember their names, if he had ever learned them.  But they
smiled upon him, the old girls as Harvey himself called them, as they
could always be counted upon to smile sweetly no matter what scheme was
being laid before them, for they had been posed and photographed and
retouched to a high standard of female complicity.  They regarded
William understandingly as he slid open Harvey's handkerchief drawer
and slipped a swizzle stick molded like the Venus de Milo at its non
business end into his jacket pocket.  For luck, he told the gallery of
kind lost ladies.

William firmed his shoulders-his shape was such that they did not
square--as he ventured from Harvey's room, taking his first steps
forward into his uncertain future, and he tangled with a bundle of
unfolded laundry misplaced on the upper hall floor, one of Alden's
flannel shirtsleeves snagging round his ankle.

Becky was waiting for him in Lily's yellow-walled and cinnamon smelling
kitchen.  She was alone as William had meant to find her and as Becky
had contrived to be found for there was so much not to be said and she
was determined to demonstrate to William that the non-saying was going
to begin now.

She had guarded a final jelly stick for William.  She had refused Alden
a third cup of coffee to carry out to the truck to place on the broad
dashboard as he labored to repair the broken latch of the glove
compartment hatch.  William mistook Becky's efforts to ensure him his
breakfast as a solicitous one.  In fact, Becky was bound not to coddle
eggs or butter crust less toast angles or press juice from fresh
grapefruits for William.  Nor was she prepared to brew him a new pot of
Hawaiian Kona coffee of which a few hoarded ounces of beans remained.
She did not explain all this to William as he thanked her for the last
doughnut, slightly crushed and lightly weeping sap onto a dusted-off
Delft plate (her sole concession to his sensibilities).  She hardened
her heart.  She did not reach for a sprouting shallot and the omelet
pan.

"I'll keep you company with a cup of tea," she said as she sat across
the table from him, for as well as being secretly firm with him, she
had resolved to behave openly and naturally in William's company to
persuade him that she had utterly forgotten how he had forgotten
himself the night before.  But she was finding that when the time came
to play Becky as usual, she gave a shaky performance.  She could think
of nothing noncommittal to say-the personal, world politics, foreign
travel, last night's dinner entree choices, where William would find
himself tomorrow, were all too fraught with meaning to mention, and
yet, those were the subjects that loomed.  How long have you loved me?"
have you always loved me?"  why do you love me?"  what will it take to
make you cease to love me?"  were the questions she had pondered as she
lay awake beneath the blanketing blackness hunched away from the slowly
breathing weight of Alden.  Where would we go?"  how would we live?"
have you faith enough for both of us to take on the wrath of the
decrying world?"  she had importuned the darkness that William had
summoned and which he inhabited, his image impressed against the lid of
Becky's clenched-shut eye.  By faint first light she had begun to
glimpse as well the tentative outlines of a picture of herself.  She
was walking freely across a sunny public space.  A piazza?  A park?  A
loosely woven basket swung from her arm.  She could not quite see what
the basket carried.  Fruit, she guessed because of the basket's shape,
some sweet and fragrant fruit native to the land of the piazza or the
sunny park, and just gathered that day at the cusp of its goodness.

Betsy could only smile at William across the kitchen table because, she
seemed to recall, she often smiled.  She was a pleasant woman.
Everybody said so.

William rotated the lazy Susan with a prodding finger.  A long-necked
bottle of tarragon vinegar, a stout and sticky jug of un sulphured
molasses, a cylindrical jar of seedless raspberry jam, all clinking and
trembling together, impeded his view and when her face was revealed, so
clearly, so dearly smiling upon him, his hand flew to his heart and he
cried out, "Oh Becky.  Oh my love.  Oh my darling dear one."

It occurred to Becky that human beings often sounded least sincere when
they were being most fervent.  Poor William, on the wrong side of
forty, fat as a friar, and unaware of the slick of lemony jelly plopped
onto his chin, was behaving like a swam of twenty, and yet she believed
him.  There had been the ring of truth in his resonating cry.  She had
felt its reverberative roll just as on a long-ago vacation in Italy she
had felt the pulse of proclaiming cathedral bells through the soles of
her feet and irresistibly been drawn inside to kneel at the side altar
of a church of the wrong denomination.

Out in the driveway bowl, Alden's absurd truck roared, briefly alive.
The very house shuddered, the oval-faced spoons in the spoon jar
chattered back and forth, and diesel fumes whiffed through the un
solidly fitting window above the sink.  The wide old floorboards and
patchy linoleum trembled now through the soles of Becky's shoes, those
susceptible soles, and in the roar and the shudder and the smell of
fuel, she could only imagine a jumbo jet taking off and that she
herself was aboard being lifted up and borne away.  She braced herself.
She had never been a brave airline passenger.  To tell the truth, she
carried a Valium and Vermouth cocktail in a pocket flask, but she had
always enjoyed wherever she went once she got there, once she recovered
from her imposed fogginess and her ankles un swelled Oh yes, she was
ready to take off, but not in Alden's impossible truck.  She was not
going anywhere, locked inside its battered cab.

"I forgot your cream," Becky said, jumping up and unlocking her gaze
from William's.  "Although actually, it's not cream, it's only Pream,
and it's not even real Pream, it's a Pream substitute.  Alden says it's
sort of a Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton progression,
speaking coffee-creamer-wise," she explained as she transferred a few
powdery spoonsful from the big jar into a little pottery bowl.  "Or
would that be the opposite of a progression?  A regression, Alden must
have meant, or a devolving, or backsliding, or losing of ground ..."
her voice trailed off.

As she set the bowl upon the table before him, William reached and
seized her arm and turned her hand over and kissed the pale, tender
underside where her skin stretched softest and her veins fluttered blue
and close to the surface beneath his murmury rain of kisses.  How
clever of William to discover, no, how clever of William to rediscover
the back of her wrist after all these years.

"You mustn't," she said, dreamily.

"Yes.  I must," he insisted.

"But someone is coming," she said, suddenly alert.

"What?  Who's there?"  William called.  Recklessly, he looked for
Alden, he hoped for Alden, an Alden who would be incensed, although far
more likely, Alden, encountering his wife and his friend linked in
mid-romantic gesture, would lean against a kitchen counter, cross his
arms, and deliver one of his remarks.  William would have to create
passions enough for all of them.

"Show yourself," William demanded.  He rose, his chest impressively
puffed, his chin out thrust

A face peered, then, round the doorpost.  The face was not known to
Becky or to William, a pale and bearded and young yet oddly aged face
suffering from something.  Greyed, pebbly eyes blinked at them in slow
painful motion and a red and swollen mouth worked itself uselessly
before words formed and emerged, a slurred string of foreignly muttered
words uttered in the cadence of a challenge.

William released Becky's wrist and he fell back into his chair.  His
hand flailed, knocking against his coffee mug.  A wave of coffee welled
and spilled.  He exclaimed aloud, a general oath.

"You there," the stranger rasped thickly.  "Be ... you ... silent."

William flushed.  His cheeks mottled the colors of the remnants of a
deep, old bruise and he gasped after unrecoverable breaths.

William wouldn't be used to rude international teenagers, Becky
supposed, although obviously this particular sorry specimen was less
ill mannered than very, very hungover which was not, of course, any
excuse for him.  Rather, Becky considered this a deeper indictment.

" Who are you?  " she asked sternly.  " What are you doing here?  "

"Besty," Stefan mewled, after he recovered a thought.

"Betsy," Becky set him straight.

"Yes.  Betsy," Stefan clarified.  "I want... Betsy," he stated.

"Well, she isn't here," Becky informed him.

"Is not here?  " Stefan slowly echoed, unconvinced.  He peered toward
an ajar cabinet door as if Betsy might be crouched within, concealed
from him.  He regarded suspiciously the wastebasket and having fixed
his point, in his shaky opinion, he retreated through the dining room
door.

"What an unpleasant boy.  I'm surprised at Betsy for encouraging him,"
Becky said.  "Although to be fair, Betsy really doesn't have to
encourage anyone.  Boys just follow her home.  Men are foolish too.
Some of those babysitting-job fathers, driving her home.  I've
sometimes worried But William, are you all right?  " she asked.
"William?"

For William had not recovered from his shock.  His respiration ran
ragged and once again his hand struggled above his heart.  Becky sat
beside him and sopped at the coffee he had sloshed onto the table
surface with the several Kleenexes plucked from her sweater sleeve.

"There," she said decisively.  "No harm done."

They sat side by side as William's panic subsided and Becky retreated
into thoughts of her own.  She had, for almost a minute, almost made up
her mind to go away with William as he had asked.  For a moment their
elopement had seemed possible; to run away had become her profound est
desire, indeed, her very departure already seemed a fait accompli.  For
even though she had not known where they were to flee, she had felt
herself to be there already, ensconced in whatever warm patch of
faraway refuge where he and she would yet be welcomed.  An impending
life had flashed before her eyes.  She would be well looked after.  She
would be appreciated, and appreciative, dining out, enjoying
conversations, having the insides of her wrists kissed while sitting by
the sea sipping a local wine, she and William enisled together,
untouchable as long as they remained out of touch.  Yes, she had told
herself, yes, she had made a choice, but she had not been able to tell
William above the rumble and roar of Alden's insupportable truck in
which Alden, she wryly supposed now, had idled to her rescue.

"I thought he'd come for me," William said when he could speak.  "From
Bonn or Warsaw, that they'd found me.  I didn't think they'd find me.
So soon."

"Yes, I gathered all that," Becky said.  "It must not be very
comfortable being you at present," she observed.  "Being panicked by a
foreign exchange student."

"As I told you, I shouldn't be here.  It's only because of you that I
risked..."

" No one asked you to come."

"And there's no time for games ..."

"I am not engaging in games."

"They are frankly becoming tiresome, your professions of scruples."

"Yes, I'm afraid scruples are very tiresome," Becky agreed.  She could
go so far as to agree with him on that.

AWAY DOWN IN the village, the bells in the Congregational steeple
tolled the noon hour, twelve thin and trailing notes seeking out the
Hills and the Hill visitors, who consulted their watches and the
household clocks, which confirmed within a minute or two how the day
had half gone while they had accomplished very little and had much
still to do.  Reminded, then, they made their moves.

Becky emerged from her attic bedroom stepping briskly and with
naturally high color spotting her cheeks.  She marched bravely down the
attic steps and passed by William's hopelessly ajar door.  She
descended the main stairs, her head held high, and turned toward the
kitchen where she seized her grocery shopping list and expandable
coupon portfolio from the kitchen desk drawer.

Little Becky waylaid her mother in the pantry, crowding her against the
leaning twenty-pound bag of Maine potatoes kept, and going a bit
punkish, in a corner.

"Can I come?"  Little Becky asked.  "I want to come to the grocery
store.  I'm coming."  She dogged her mother as Becky opened a cupboard
door and rattled a box of cornflakes and hefted a carton of dates and
shook a cylinder of cornmeal.  She did not amend her list.  She would
rely on her memory, which she preferred, at present, to stock with
incidentals.

"Because I really want to come," Little Becky nattered.  "I have to
come."

The new issue of Tiger Beat with a big, promised Bon Jovi article and
pictures was due out that very day, and if it wasn't on the magazine
rack at the IGA, she was going to ask, because that only meant they
hadn't restocked the magazine rack.  And if not, she was going to seek
out whoever was in charge of the IGA and make them.  Oh, she hoped she
would be fierce enough to fight for Bon Jovi when the time came.

She jammed her hand through the detaching sleeve lining of her amazing
new muskrat coat, the wearing of which her mother seemed about to
mention but didn't.  Heels incompletely inserted into her snow boots,
one fuzzy red mitten lost and not found, Little Becky pursued her
mother, continuing to plead.

"Oh, all right, come," Becky said absently.  "I don't care."

Good, it was always good when her mother said she didn't care, because
she didn't approve of Tiger Beat (too teen-y) and Bon Jovi (too
pretty).  It was excellent her mother didn't care because Little Becky
had long since figured out that with her parents caring about always
meant caring against.

PHOEBE HAD ALREADY CALLED her supervisor at the hospital and resigned
her position with far too many apologies.  Mrs.  Ludwig, whom

Phoebe appreciated she could now allow herself to dislike, had managed
to convey at once that Phoebe was letting the side down badly,
nevertheless, Mrs.  Ludwig informed Phoebe, she could easily be
replaced.  The weekend admissions clerk had been asking for more hours.
She had a new horse to support.  She was horse mad, that one.  She
would marry a horse if she could.

"So, that's all right then," Phoebe said, after a pause.

"All right for some," Mrs.  Ludwig answered back.

Now Phoebe had to decide what to pack and what to leave behind.  A
suitcase lay open across her mattress and a row of cartons salvaged
from the Lowes' moving day last fall stood against the board wall of
her small attic chamber.  She clattered her work suits from the closet
and shook them free of their hangers, her pink-and-black Chanel-look
hounds tooth check, her turquoise peplum style that she wore on Monday
mornings because it was a cheerful color, her camel-hair outfit with
chocolate braid running around a raised collar and flared cuffs which
she knew was noticeably stylish for Towne but which might not be quite
the thing in California.

Phoebe pitched the hangers into a box labeled, in Becky's hand,
BATTERED WORTHLESS TIN CANDLESTICKS, to mislead the New York thieves
who she knew would have been tempted by her sterling candelabrum had
they but known.  Phoebe folded her suits into her case.  She wished she
had sheets of rustling tissue paper to tuck between her garments for
she had read that tissue-paper layering was the mark of truly superior
packing and she very much wanted to report to her new life in Los
Angeles as a person who would not be embarrassed, indeed, as someone
who would be gratified, were the locks of her suitcase to spring open
and its contents scattered and offered across the Arrivals concourse
of

LAX.

Oh, how she wanted her life to begin.

Arthur had told her to bring his bristling Jokes and Ideas files.  She
lifted them from their box and fitted them inside a carry-on bag.
("Don't check them through," Arthur had said.  "People are
interested.") She placed their yogurt-making machine inside the
just-emptied Jokes and Ideas files box and pushed the box into a corner
and then she sat down upon the mattress, her head in her hands.

"We're going places, Phoebe," Arthur had crowed over the telephone last
night, but did it really feel that way to her?  She hoped all this
activity would not turn out to be mere displacement, because she had
liked her job at the hospital.  She liked this quiet corner of the
world.  She had been keeping an eye on the apartment-for-rent ads in
the Towne Crier, lately.  She even liked Arthur's people; they were
coming round, she thought.  Miss Hill had sat up till all hours last
night to make sure she got her message to go to California, and Phoebe
knew in her heart that hadn't been because Miss Lily was keen to see
the last of her.

But if she and Arthur were going to end up, in a few months' time, back
where they had started out, if they were going to come slinking back to
Towne with their tails between their legs, forever after bound to rail,
boringly indignant, against the excesses and insufficiencies and evils
of California, Phoebe would just as soon not put herself through all
these unsettling, in-between motions.  Perhaps she and Arthur ought to
have allowed their life to begin here, now, wherever they found
themselves.

Still, it was very wrong of her to permit such doubts to accompany her
packing, for those darkening doubts would secret themselves in the
folds of her poly-silk blouses and slip among the knife-edge creases of
her skirts and when she arrived in California she would shake those
doubts loose and free to fly away and flourish in the spiritually
unstable air of the place and make mischief all around and about
Arthur.  They would crouch down, one atop the other, and trip and
tumble him from whatever fragile foothold he had found there.

Oh, don't think, Phoebe thought firmly.

Arthur told her to leave the cat behind.  He seemed to feel his Aunt
Lily had taken to the creature, and he had instructed Phoebe to sell
the Jeep.  Alden had offered to handle that detail for he fancied
himself an automotive deal maker.  He said he'd speak to Gum.  (Who?)
And she really had to get down to the hospital to clean out her desk
and post a farewell message on the interoffice net and reserve the
corner room on the Neonatal floor for Calliope which she might as well
do now for the day was slipping away-noon, the bells tolled.  She would
finish her packing at the last minute when there wouldn't be time to
linger too long over her doubts and decisions-these shoes?"  this
scarf?"  was

Arthur really good enough?  Besides, Arthur had told her not to bring
anything except his files and her toothbrush and her retainer.  He
meant for her to buy everything new.  The women in L.A. dressed
different, he'd said.  Her flight was booked for Sunday evening.

Phoebe ran down the attic stairs, the back stairs, the cellar stairs.
The washing machine, which Phoebe had started earlier with her week's
washing, churned and clumped and expelled the usual soapy wash of water
through its flapping lid as it spun madly through the rinse cycle.
Phoebe picked up the push broom and swished the little flood through
the low doorway into the dirt-floored ell which was a mess of mud now,
so much soapy water had been spilled of late.  Miss Hill said there
must be something wrong with the washing machine but she was keeping an
eye on the situation.  Miss Hill tended to believe that household
appliances were sometimes capable of recovering on their own from
whatever ailed them if no one made a fuss.

LILY COLLECTED HER library books from her bedroom nightstand, from the
little-parlor trestle table, from a kitchen windowsill, and she made an
attempt in Harvey's bedroom, for Harvey was light-fingered where her
library books were concerned.  She pushed open the door without
knocking-it stood ajar-and she was startled by the presence of William,
to whom, if she had not forgotten, she had not given any thought.
William was not aware of Lily's brief intrusion as he leaned before
Harvey's bureau, his hands grasping the bureau top's marble edge.  He
was facing the photographs of Harvey's lost wives, with his eyes shut
and his lips moving (the mirror revealed him).  The book Lily sought,
an early Miss Read from Lily's reread list, lay splayed across the
bureau top.  Mr.  Baskett quite obviously ought not to be disturbed.
Indeed, in kindness, he ought not to be spied upon, such a funny pear
shaped man wearing wide-bottomed trousers and hardworking suspenders,
seen at unfair disadvantage when not quite fully dressed for William
was ever careful to present a particular view of himself to the world,
and this was a distinctly private, even a prayerful moment for him.
Perhaps, Lily speculated, he had contracted some fierce strain of
religion in one of those Brueghel-canvas countries he frequented,

where, she imagined, Sundays would pass slowly for a man without the
clamor of a family or gutters to clean.  Well, whatever strong notion
gripped him, at least he had not made a nuisance of himself.  And his
travel bag was packed and set by the door, so that was all right.

Lily withdrew.  The library would fine her three cents a day until Miss
Read was returned, but that couldn't be helped, even though the late
return would mark a blot on her record.  She always brought her books
back on time unless a blizzard interfered, in which case a reasonable
period of amnesty was announced in the paper.

Ginger's bat's ears detected the zippering-up of Lily's storm coat.
She flew down the stairway and encountered Lily by the coatrack, where
Lily had been slowed by her search for her crocheted beret that had
somehow slid down the sleeve of Harvey's old ulster overcoat, which he
never wore but wouldn't donate to Goodwill.  It was still too good for
the likes of them.

"Lily, Lily, I need a ride to the village," Ginger pressed.

"I shan't be long," Lily said warily.

"Nor shall I," Ginger said airily, as she folded herself into Betsy's
Persian lamb coat since her own coat, forlornly drooping from a
spindle, was so damaged.  She lowered a fuchsia triangle of chiffon
scarf over her head and tied the ends loosely under her chin.  She slid
on a pair of very large and very dark glasses and plumped a cashmere
scarf up and over the lower half of her face and swirled a chenille
shawl around her shoulders, achieving, a glance in the glass of the
front hall secretary desk assured her, her invisible-woman look.

"I'm not going to linger," Lily said.

"Nor am I," Ginger said, but she chose to be mysterious about her
errand because it was such an inglorious one.  She only meant to pick
up some senna seeds at the Rexall.

BETSY AND ANDY COULD FIND no corner of the house in which to be fully
alone.  They were assailed by noise and buffeted by personalities.
They felt tender to the touch.  They needed to talk, endlessly and
urgently.

They wanted only to remain silent and together.  Kisses welled.  Their
arms tended and withdrew.

They agreed to attempt to read.  Andy had to get through The Myth of
Culture and Community.  Betsy had been assigned Twelfth Night.  They
sat, arranged at opposite ends of the big-parlor sofa.  Betsy gazed at
Andy and Andy underlined passages at random.  A bar of sunlight found
its way through a gap in the heavy, ill-drawn curtain and lay flat
across the sofa cushions, linking them-Andy's denim knee and Betsy's
corduroy lap.  The sun bar burned between them like a fuse alight all
its length.

One of Uncle Harvey's show tunes, one of the show tunes he sang on his
night to wash the supper dishes, kept running through Betsy's head ...
"Sweetheart, they're suspecting things, people will say we're in ..."
No, Betsy didn't care to be happened upon exchanging show tunes or the
like with Andy.  She couldn't bear to have her private life endlessly
commented upon by the family chorus.

"Let's get out of here," she said.

"All right," said Andy.  "Where to?"

"I don't know.  Anywhere at all."

"All right, we can go there."

STEFAN, WHO HAD GONE to ground on the little-parlor sofa, tentatively
raised his pounding head as the noon bells cruelly struck.  When he did
not swoon dead away, he attempted to sit upright, and having sat up,
carefully but not unsuccessfully, he endeavored to stand.  He tottered
as he gained his feet, but that was the very early American pine
flooring of the room gone atilt, not he.  The ceiling plane swooped,
but that also was an architectural effect.

There's nothing more for me here, Stefan thought practically.  Betsy
was not a jolly girl, or if she was a jolly girl, she was being jolly
with that other fellow from last night who, nevertheless, was such a
sourputz to meet.  Stefan shook his head, cautiously.  This Towne was a
confusing place.

THE DAY WAS RAW and gusts of snow sputtered down from the greyness
above.  Alden and the boys crowded into the truck cab.  They had
dragged the old plow blade from its barn stall and they had spent the
last hour battering and banging the blade onto a mechanism attached to
the front of the truck.  Interior levers, stiffly manipulable after
they oiled them, raised or lowered the blade and they were pretty sure
there had to be some way to steer the blade to the left or the right,
for otherwise they would only keep plowing themselves smack into snow
mounds of their own making.  Alden predicted they would figure it out
as they went along.

Everyone quit the house at once.  Car doors thudded, engines drummed
on, exhaust fumes smoked and mixed, and they moved off down the
driveway in a procession.  At the bottom of the hill, Lily and Ginger
turned right on the River Road, headed for the village.  Stefan went
right as specified by Betsy's explicit directions back to the highway,
and Andy and Betsy took the left to get away from Stefan.  Phoebe
veered left, on her way to the hospital, and Becky and Little Becky
were just behind her on their way to a cash machine.  William
desolately bore right, compelled to pass through Towne Village one
final time for one fixing and memorial look.  Alden and the boys, last
in line, swerved suddenly into the woods where the remains of a
loggers' ancient road angled back up through the trees.  They lowered
the plow blade and cut through the dense, compacted snow.  So far so
good.  The disturbed snow did not mound but flew to either side.

The aerial surveillance plane observed the truck as it unexpectedly
took off cross country and the spotter radioed for one of the pursuit
cars to return to Alpha Base (Lily's place).  Alden and the boys were
easily overtaken.  The plow had struck a great gnarled stump they had
forgotten had been dragged into the middle of the old track to
discourage the occasional incursions of off-road vehicles.

Alden had slammed into the steering wheel when the truck crashed and he
was wondering if this was what it felt like to break one's sternum.

"All right boys?  " he asked between breaths.  "Everyone okay?  "

The top of Glover's head had thudded off the unpadded roof of the
truck's cab.  "No," he said.  "I'm not all right."

Brooks bled from his mouth into the palm of his glove.  "Rollins," he
said.  "Rollins, look at my tongue.  I think it's been bit off."

But Rollins, who was sitting wedged in the well behind the driver's
seat, had wrenched his back and he couldn't twist round to see.
Instead, he observed that if Brooks had lost his tongue, he wouldn't be
able to talk, like the guy in Fists of Flame who had been de-tongued by
Ninjas and thereafter communicated by mental telepathy and a voiceover
narration of his deepest thoughts.

"Huh?  Ninjas?  " asked Glover, drifting in and out through hazy pain.
"Oh Jesus," he said, "where?"

The pursuit truck, bucking over the ruts, pulled up behind them and two
agents displaying drawn guns emerged and approached the stalled truck.
They yanked open the doors, shouting so excitedly and inarticulately
that Alden and the boys couldn't comprehend the precise nature of how
they had offended, but they had come recently enough from New York that
they did not demand or even wish to know further.  They tumbled from
the truck, demonstrations of their various injuries deferred for the
moment except for Brooks's unstanchable bleeding.  The gun waving
strangers lined them up alongside the truck bed and, slipping on rubber
gloves, searched Alden and the boys who all carried in their back
pockets Swiss Army knives which were confiscated.  The four identical
knives, the Mountaineer Edition, each engraved in flowing script with a
name and a date, commemorated the day three years earlier when Alden
and his boys had climbed Mt.  Evans.  They were going to want to get
those knives back.

"Who are you people?"  Alden asked.  The detail of the protective
gloves pulled on had clued him that this might be an official inquiry.
"Procedurally, aren't you required to identify yourselves?  Boys, make
a note.  We were ambushed by gun-bearing individuals on our own
property who did not clearly and reassuringly identify themselves to
us.  Not, of course, that we don't wish to cooperate freely and openly
to get to the bottom of this misunderstanding.  But afterward, we'll
review and assess this incident calmly."  Alden asked himself, as he
spoke, what the boys had done now.

"Yeah," said the boys.  "Yeah, Dad, we will."

"You there," said one of the agents, not unkindly pointing to Brooks.
"Pick up some snow and put it on your lip.  But do it slow."

"S'not by slip.  S'tongue," Brooks said.

"It's not his lip, it's his tongue," Rollins said.

"This isn't about our temporary and admittedly irregular truck
registration?  " Alden suddenly thought to mention.

TEARS, UNSTOPPABLE TEARS, blurred William's eyes.  As he blinked and
swiped them from his cheeks where they slipped and stung, he misread a
rustic road sign and turned down Galahad Lane which presently ended in
the bulb of a cul-de-sac.  Uncertainly, hoping for a road, he nosed
down the Larkins' wide, hot-topped driveway which curled through woods
and ended before their hidden house.  The Larkins were away in Florida,
for they could never abide Towne in February.  Had they been in
residence, their beagle mix Jojo would have flown from his watching
post on the breezeway and bitten William's tires and held him at bay in
his car until Phil or Phyllis distracted Jojo with a Milkbone biscuit
tossed onto the garden shed roof.

Although William knew nothing of the Larkins or their habits, he
understood at once that the premises were deserted.  A weather-battered
brown-paper-wrapped and twine-tied parcel sat on the front doorstep
where a delivery must have left it some days before when the regular
UPS driver, who never lingered long because of Jojo's violence, had
just flung the package and fled.

Careless of someone, thought William as he so often had had reason to
think and to be grateful for.  He parked beside a three-car garage,
backing in beneath a canopy of romantically overhanging cone-laden
larch boughs that put him in mind of his late holiday haunts in the
Harz Mountains.  He intended to pull himself together before going any
further.

He would chew a Diazepam and consult a local map and put Becky out of
his mind, not of course forever, but for the next few weeks when he
would have to keep his wits about him.  One compartmentalized, one
prioritized.

Slowly, a racket loudened, a mechanical rumble and rat-a-tat whirring
filled his ears.  He peered upward through his windshield and watched a
low-flying helicopter with military markings skim over the treetops.
The chopper was obviously searching, methodically, thoroughly, and he
did not doubt it was searching for him.  Villains would not run that
thick and fast on the ground hereabouts.

Well, they couldn't see him.  He might as well be sitting tight in some
shadowy glade in Europe, although soon enough the authorities would
search reported-to-be-empty residences.  A known threat could be
rendered a non-threat however, William reminded himself.

William let himself out of his car.  He tried a garage door.  It
lifted.  Good, there was no need for tiresome and telltale breaking and
entering.

A large and reliable Buick sat in the garage's middle bay.  Its door
was unlocked as well, but it was too much to expect the key to be in
the ignition.  Never mind.  William searched a nearby tool bench where
he found a hammer and a pair of rubber-handled pliers.  He returned to
the Buick and fitted himself in behind the wheel and cracked a portion
of the steering column with the hammer and, reaching down, grinning and
holding his breath, he scraped two plastic-covered wires down to the
metal and twisted them together with the pliers.  He had done this
before, in theory.  He heard a sputter.  Oh, yes.  His foot sought and
depressed a gas pedal and he eased the car out into the driveway
leaving it to run.  He started his rental car and backed it neatly over
the oil patch that had pooled beneath the long-parked Buick.  He
retrieved his grip from the trunk and wrenching the license plate from
the back bumper, he tossed it into the trunk.  He moved from tire to
tire and twisted open the valves.  Air escaped with expiring sighs and
the tires sagged.  Last, he unlatched and lifted the hood and
convincingly, he thought, he laid an oily rag and a screwdriver fetched
from the workbench left hopelessly on top of the radiator.

As he more calmly drove through Towne Village, circling twice round the
snow-shrouded green, William decided to make his way to Newark Airport,
fly to Seattle, and follow an out-of-season tourist-y trail to Victoria
and beyond.

STEFAN GOT AWAY as well.  He drove fast as a rabbit.  He failed to
observe stop signs.  He passed slower traffic on double yellow lines.
He popped in an ancient Blind Faith cassette and turned the player on
so loud his car trembled and thudded as he bore down upon and overtook
sedately traveling family sedans.  Stefan was honked at, shouted after,
and his bad example was brought up that night round several supper
tables.  Even so, the official car chasing him might have caught him
had the decision not been made to recover the overflowing litter bag
Stefan suddenly flung out through his cranked-down window when an old
banana peel began to smell.

But everyone else had been stopped and driven back to the house by
uncommunicative operatives.  They were met at their own front door and
escorted into the little parlor.  They were not permitted to remove
their coats and boots and scarves and hats.  Ice and snow flecks melted
from their outer garments onto the floorboards and carpets and
upholstery in coins of shine and dark.  Had the room been warmer, they
might have steamed.  They were refused a fire, however, lest they make
a pyre of incriminating documents.

"I believe they want to preserve our persons as possible crime scenes,"
Alden supposed aloud.  He had had a not uncordial chat with the man in
charge.  "This is all merely procedural."

"But it's not you, it's not us they want, surely," Andy said.  "Any of
us," he stressed.  Andy was sure he would have known of some
outstanding

Hill family crime.

"No, not us.  I've divined as much as that they want William," Alden
said.  "William, of all people, has done something.  Evidently, he's
been spying for the other side all the while he was wearing his
American diplomat's hat."

"William," Ginger exclaimed.  "Where is William?"  she asked Becky.

Becky shook her head.

"They seem to think we may have orchestrated his escape," Alden said.

"We couldn't orchestrate "Happy Birthday," " Ginger said sourly.

Glover snorted, then clutched his brow.  He swayed and tipped onto the
sofa.

"My arresting officer said I was being detained for my own safety and
convenience," Phoebe said.  "He's from Tennessee.  I asked him.  I
could just place his voice."

"Oh, you had a nice one," Betsy said.  "Ours, Andy's and mine, was like
a robot."

"Ma's and mine's looked like Bill Cosby," Little Becky said.  "But he
wasn't funny at all."

"Hush," Becky said.  "They may be monitoring our conversation."

"Cool," said Brooks, or Rollins.

"We need a lawyer," Ginger said.  "What a shame Louis isn't here.  What
a shame Daddy isn't here," she said to Betsy.  "How I wish Daddy were
here."

"No, we're in some lawyer less limbo.  I inquired first thing.  We've
fallen through a crack," Alden said.

Lily stood in the doorway and watched the comings and goings of the
strangers in her house between the shoulders of two junior appearing
agents installed as guards just outside the little-parlor door.  Hot
steel had entered Lily's soul.  The white wire whorls of her hair
crackled with electricity when she pulled off her crocheted hat and
jammed it in her storm coat pocket.  She turned.  Her angry eyes
flashed and met Alden's own, which fell before her stare.  She said,
"If Harvey were here, he would annihilate these people."

"Harvey!"  exclaimed Ginger.  "I only hope Dan Rather doesn't get ahold
of this story.  Harvey would die, either that or he 'd kill someone.
He 'd probably prefer to kill somebody."

"Perhaps we should give Harvey a call," Alden allowed.  "I don't doubt
he could make a few calls of his own and straighten this out."

"Can't you call someone, Alden?"  Becky asked.  "Can'tyou make a few
calls of your own?"

"I don't know.  Shoot.  The name that leaps to mind is William," Alden
said.  "I've always thought he 'd be our point man, should the roof
ever cave in."

"No outside calls at all permitted at present, sir," said one of the
agents stationed outside the door.

"If you break that vase," Lily's voice carried across the set of broad,
blocking shoulders, "if you break that vase, I'll write to President
Bush.  I assume he's your superior-oh, it's that Mr.  Sessions, I shall
write to him then.  You, yes, you there, I'm talking to you.  There's
nothing inside that vase you're holding upside down.  I don't hide
things inside vases.  Oh, right, very well, yes, I hide dead insects
inside vases.  I can't watch this."

"Maybe they'll let me call Captain Raven if I ask them," Glover spoke
up.

"Yeah, we'll activate the bat signal," Rollins sniggered.  Brooks
punched him.

"No, I mean Captain Raven.  He's in the Army.  He's a real Army guy.
He's my recruiting officer," Glover said.  He rolled onto his elbow.

"Your what?"  asked Becky.

"What I just said," Glover informed her.  "And I'll tell you this, if
Mr.  Baskett screws my chances with the Army, I'm gonna be
mega-pissed."

"Alden," Becky appealed helplessly.

"You're not joining any Army," Alden said.  "Just get on the waiting
list at a half-decent college and I'll make a few calls.  That'll be
the time to make a few calls."

"Yes, I am too joining the Army.  I'm eighteen in six weeks," Glover
said.

" Yes, well, when we 're all released from federal custody I'll have a
word with this Captain Raven," Alden said.  "Have you signed anything?
"

"Captain Raven?"  asked Ginger.  "That can't be his name.  Whose army
is it?  Las Vegas's?  "

"Now is not the time to spring bombshells," Becky said.  "Another
bombshell," she amended.  "And no arguments.  No more arguments."

" It's all educational now, in the Army.  I put down for computers and
airborne and I tested high for languages," Glover muttered.  Brooks and
Rollins, who didn't know what to think, sat on the rug and played
listless gin rummy with sticky old Bicycle cards.  Brooks's mouth began
to bleed again.  He swiped his tongue on his sleeve, and picked off
lint.

Andy wondered if he were not swimming in particularly deep waters,
since William was his uncle.  He tried to quantify the degree of
consanguinity-a second marriage complicated his calculations yet
halved, he felt, his liability, William's and his common grume diluted.
He supposed he should be taking notes on the Hills' reactions to this
invasion of their home.  The prevailing instinct seemed to be to call
someone, which was not unreasonable.  Andy himself wanted to place an
urgent call, to his university, to his department head.  Then again, he
could just hear Professor Janacek's heavy voice, full sigh, inquiring,
What now, Mr.  Happening?  What next?  Smoke signals, semaphores,
church bells, tocsins, jungle drums, proclaimers on horseback-humankind
had long since made arrangements to express, loudly, their alarm.  He
and the Hills only reflected that tradition, Andy supposed.

Oh, but his heart yearned toward Betsy.  He did not want to end up aged
and loveless and alone and under indictment like his uncle.  They had
contrived to sit side by side upon the bench ottoman and Ginger had
lowered herself onto the bench, as well, crowding Betsy and Andy
together.  Betsy leaned lightly into Andy.  He allowed his arm to wrap
as lightly around her shoulders.  Ginger didn't notice as she chattered
on, "I knew something was afoot last night.  Earl and I were stopped by
the police (well, just Eddie Eddy) and Earl must have learned what was
going on, in his semiofficial capacity.  No wonder he looked at me so
strangely.  No wonder the evening ended so abruptly.  He won't call
again, I'll tell you that."

Brooks and Rollins conferred quietly over the configurations of their
card game.  "They're looking everywhere in the house, these guys, the
Feds," Rollins said to Brooks.  "They'll be looking in our closet."

"Do you think they're gonna notice?  "

"Oh yeah, they're gonna notice."

They were summoned individually for their private interviews in the big
parlor.  Becky was asked for first.

"Oh my," she said, rising, smoothing her coat skirt, re zipping her
storm boots.  She kissed Alden formally upon his offered cheek.

"Ma," bleated Little Becky who was beginning to think this was sort of
like the French Revolution, which she had heard about in school last
fall because Mrs.  Roseby her history teacher said this was the French
Revolution's birthday and the events in Paris and Versailles of 1789
carried

Special Meaning Today which all of us must heed in 1989, although
Little Becky had not particularly barkened to this Meaning as outlined
in class.  Now, of course, she wished she had.

Cadmus Stewart, the man in charge, with whom Alden believed he had
formed a slight rapport earlier, could not have been more reassuring.

He bade Becky remove her bulky outer garments as he apologized for the
zealous strictures imposed by several of his younger associates.  He
invited Becky to regret yet to understand their youthful zealotry along
with him.  Becky's coat and boots and purse were whisked away, to be
examined.  She asked, for her feet were cold and her unshod state
struck her as undignified and thus disadvantageous, "My shoes?"  A
comfortable pair, described by her, was fetched from the large
collection of family shoes left in the front hall during boot season.

But Becky was not persuaded that Mr.  Stewart was entirely on her side,
for by then Becky had realized that she occupied a side of her own
unsuspected by all.  She had been thinking of what she would say, and
not say, to defend her hidden position.

"My husband's aunt," she said austerely, "is an elderly lady.  My
husband has bruised his sternum, my eldest son has bumped his head, and
my youngest boy has bitten his tongue."

Mr.  Stewart said he quite understood and asked her to call him
Cadmus.

The picture frame table had been cleared.  The pictures were arranged
in a staring, glaring gallery along the top of the glass-fronted
bookcase.  A psychological tactic, Becky thought warily, making her sit
eye to eye across from Great-Aunt Julia, who had been a famously good
American.

She had always sat with her back to the ocean because some among the
ocean's waves may have washed upon foreign shores.  Aunt Julia had
possessed and studied large, un scrolling oceanographic charts from
which she had made her calculations.  If Becky had to confess to
anything, perhaps she would confess to Aunt Julia, who was only a
relation by marriage.  The picture frame table now bore folders,
plastic envelopes, piles of papers.  How swiftly, how dauntingly, the
small army of searchers had assembled documents.  Cadmus and Becky sat
at the table.  He tossed a gold-tone automatic pencil onto the maroon
cloth covering as if surrendering his recording role.  A dust puff
mushroomed.  He indicated the spot on his chin that corresponded to the
Band-Aided patch on Becky's own.

"Has someone, did someone?"  he asked gently.

"Did someone, has someone what?  " Becky asked.

"Do that?  To you?"

"Of course not, what a suggestion.  Is that how your mind has been
trained to work?"  she asked interestedly.  "No, I fell on the ice.  We
had a slight thaw the other day which glazed everything over after the
refreeze."

Cadmus bowed his head and he lifted the tabs securing a manila paper
envelope.  He shook out a sky-blue envelope and several shapes of
golden and fluttering foil.  He slid the sky-blue envelope across the
table to Becky.  She saw that the letter was addressed to her and she
withdrew the single sheet of paper within and began to read as Cadmus
smoothed the table's cloth top which had ruched beneath his fingertip
as he propelled the envelope.

"Oh dear," Becky said, tenting her hands above the single sheet of
paper.  Irresistibly, she glanced down and reread words between her
loosely laced fingers.  " But I never saw this.  How did you come by
it?  "

"It was found stuffed under a sofa cushion."

"Under a sofa cushion alongside those candy wrappers?  I see."  A
plausible sequence of events occurred to her.

"So, you do apprehend why I might have not unreasonably posited.  ?"
Cadmus indicated the spot on his chin that corresponded to the
Band-Aided patch on Becky's own.

"Well," Becky said.  She hoped Cadmus would continue to speak in this
manner.  The effort of decoding took most of the sting from the
message.  "I was unaware of any letter."

" But it's been opened.  Was it misdirected?  "

"Oh, my daughter who is also called Rebecca must have opened it in
error and then thought I would mind.  Such an unexceptional letter from
an old family friend," Becky heard her own voice asserting.

Cadmus's eyebrows thought not.

"For example," Becky felt compelled to explain, "his use of 'carissima'
is apun.  My maiden name was Carlisle."  She hoped she didn't look too
pleased with herself as she came up with that construction, and Cadmus
seemed to credit her ingenuity if not her attribution.

" Besides, has it lately become a crime to receive such a silly letter?
" Becky asked reasonably.  Indeed, for one of the not so very many
improper letters of her life to have been impounded by the federal
authorities seemed harsh.

"No, no, of course not," Cadmus assured her.  "But it is our belief,
based upon the evidence of the letter, that you are someone in whom Mr.
Baskett may have confided."

"Confided?"

"No?"

"And what exactly is there for William to confide?  " Becky asked
cautiously.

"What has he-what do you imagine he's involved with?  "

Cadmus told her more or less what William had told her last night.

"Oh, do you think?"  Becky asked.  "Really, I mean, do you think?"
Becky decided that as the tired mother of four adolescents, she had
learned very well how to emit meandering and vaporous pronouncements.

"And if we only knew how to find William, he would have the opportunity
to explain himself," Cadmus said.

"But he was here.  He's been here since yesterday afternoon.  You
should have talked to him then.  I know you had agents in the area. The
Neighborhood Watch reported seeing the man who detained my daughter and
me.  And how is it that you managed to round up the rest of us and not
William, the very one you sought?  I must say, I'm not terribly
impressed."

"So, you've no idea where Mr.  Baskett was headed from here?"  Cadmus
asked.

"No, William didn't say.  Honestly not," she added, which she realized
was an error-to highlight when she was being forthcoming.  Besides, she
supposed she could point Cadmus in a direction if she wanted to.  A
warm place, William had told her, they were to flee to a warm place, he
and she together.  Hot, or cold, Becky could have advised Cadmus as his
hand hovered over a map of the world.  But she had the feeling that
once she started to confess to William's declaration of his enduring
love and revealed his ambition to run away with her for forever after,
she would find herself insisting and arguing and defending the extreme
unlikeliness of such an avowal and such a desire on William's part.

Becky was released into the kitchen, which had been searched and
cleared, Cadmus said.  Someone, Becky saw, had pried the sifter top
from the can of Ajax and combed through the contents with a silver
dessert fork.  She wondered what they thought they were looking for and
just how they figured the mystery object could have been secreted
inside a sealed cylinder.  It occurred to her, then, that some among
the swarming agents were not necessarily masterminds.  Well, they
didn't

!

need to be rocket scientists to dismantle suspects' sink traps, did
they?  William would mind very much if he ever learned that the Varsity
team had not been sent on the chase.  She could picture him whiling
away the watches of his exile penning edgy letters of complaint to
those whom it ought to have concerned.

Mr.  Cadmus Stewart had no idea who he was dealing with.

Perhaps poor Cadmus would like a cup of tea.  Becky put the kettle on.
She hoped he didn't take lemon because she was out of lemons, though
whose fault was it that she 'd been intercepted en route to the IGA
intending to pick up six lemons for eighty-nine cents?  Witness her
shopping list, which they had confiscated.  And what about supper
tonight?  She propped up the lid of the freezer.  Its contents had been
wrenched free of the ice shield that habitually gripped them and been
prodded and replaced.  Oh, all that lasagna from last fall, she'd
forgotten.

She didn't like to break into the freezer stores, but then again, if
today didn't count as a freezer-stores emergency situation, whatever
would?  And was she obliged to offer the search party a meal?  How
could she manage?  Even Lily didn't have chairs enough to seat a
second-string swarm.  A buffet might work, she decided, if they'd allow
her into the dining room to iron a tablecloth and count out plates. She
would have to see where the household stood in the liquor department.
Most of the young men, and the young women too, looked like beer
drinkers.  Out-of-Towne Spirits delivered in Towne if one paid by
credit card over the telephone.  The town of Towne was dry (Hannah's
had jumped through hoops to win a variance to serve liquor) so one had
to maneuver around that not very convenient fact.  Becky sighed, and
she would not have been able to say whether she was relieved or not to
find her unusual day so swiftly reverted to form.

THE FAMILY READILY TOOK to being questioned closely about their recent
activities.  Andy and his percontatorial ways had inured them to
answering unusual questions, and these official queries were very much
more to the point than Andy's most recent request to name their five
most favorite nineteenth-century political novels in reverse order of
preference.  The family grasped that they stood accused, but knowing
themselves to be entirely innocent, it seemed to them in their
innocence that there could be no wrong answer, whatever the question
might be.  They were, in fact, keen to give their accounts, and no one
would look at them askance for having no particular thoughts on the
works of the late Lord Beaconsfield.

Ginger liked the looks of Cadmus Stewart.  She knew at once that she
could believe in him, for this was going to be her new touchstone,
belief in a man.  She had just settled on this tenet as she languished
in the little parlor and reviewed how very close she had come to
captivating

William and entwining her fate so direly with his.  This Cadmus had
been sent from the State Department.  Ginger had overheard two female
agents as they discussed him, each attempting to claim the greater
acquaintance with him, although neither knew him very well, Ginger
could tell from the way they vamped.  So, he had been sent from State,
which was quite her favorite Department, Ginger maintained to herself
now, its offices furnished with antique treasures and rugs and
portraits pinched from the Smithsonian's collections and staffed by
alternately donnish and dashing personnel.  For one met the world at
large with one's most gracious face turned outward.  Ginger appreciated
how that worked, as nations nodded each to each.

Cadmus was one of those dark-headed and keen-featured and hooded-eyed
American men who seem to carry a drop of golden eagle blood in their
veins, Ginger fancied.  He had loosened his tie and shed his jacket. He
did not wear a wedding ring, nor, for that matter, did Ginger.  She
guessed his hair was grown just long enough to wear scooped in a spikey
tail on the weekends when he played some energetic and not to be
readily guessed-at sport-archery, snooker, hurling-Ginger wasn't sure
which diversion she would wish upon him, whichever enjoyed the best
apres atmosphere and surroundings, she decided.

She surrendered her fur coat to a functionary who was not prepared to
receive such a weight.  The coat spun and fainted onto the floorboards
and Cadmus and Ginger both exclaimed.

"La," said Ginger, which was to be her new, all-purpose interjectory
syllable, she instantly resolved.  It struck such a Collette-ish
note.

"La."  Cadmus tasted the word that had just been on her tongue, it
seemed to Ginger.  They sat across from one another at the cleared-off
picture frame table.

"How," Ginger asked sincerely, "can I help?  Because I'm very anxious
to help."

"Just a few odds and ends," Cadmus said.  He shook an item from an
envelope onto the tabletop.  "They found this," he said.

"My checkbook?  Where?  Where was it?"  Ginger wanted to know.  "I can
never lay my hands on ..."

" The checkbook was discovered wedged on a ledge behind a metal plaque
screwed into a wall in the upper hallway, which struck its discoverer
as a strange and not accidental place for it to be concealed," Cadmus
said.  "Can you think of a reason?  "

"Oh yes, my daughter hides the checkbook from me from time to time.
She's so budget-minded."  Ginger waved away budgets and reached for the
checkbook.

"And we have noted regular deposits of three thousand dollars on the
first of every month.  We wondered, what is the source of those regular
payments?  "

"What?  " Ginger asked.  "What regular payments?  To me?  By whom?  "

"If you could just explain so we can rule out..."

"Well," Ginger reflected.  "My husband, my daughter's father, must have
been sending money all along and they didn't tell me because they knew
I'd rip up anything that came from him and send the shreds back to him
by registered mail.  Mark you, this is a tactic on his part.  He means
to establish a stipend, a pitiful stipend and argue that my unwitting
acceptance constitutes an agreement I'll be forced to live with."

"I see," said Cadmus, not unsympathetically.  "All of that is easily
verifiable.  But then, there was the further question of your
disguise."

"My disguise?  " Ginger asked, utterly confused.  She craned and
consulted the bull's-eye mirror hanging from the far wall.  Her
forefinger irresistibly tugged the pad of flesh beneath her jaw.

"Your appearance when your vehicle was stopped and you were detained
was remarked upon.  How wrapped and concealed you were beneath a hat,
scarves, very dark glasses," Cadmus said.

"That is my style.  La, what do you think, that William pays me three
thousand dollars a month to drive through Towne incognito?  " Ginger
inquired.  "To what end.  I mean, what could personally do to undermine
the system on my little own?  " she asked, as if genuinely seeking
information.

"The theory strains credulity," Cadmus agreed, "but I'm bound to rule
out all impossibilities and absurdities as presented."

"We'll be here all night, with this family," Ginger promised, smoothly
she thought.

"Nearly through," Cadmus promised back.  He opened a small notebook and
turned to a marked page.  "Certain writings were found in your bedroom,
a quantity of pages, which drew attention ..."

"My book?"  Ginger asked.  "You have been reading my book, the book I'm
writing?  " she asked alertly.

"Ah, it's a book, then?"  Cadmus penciled a clarification upon the
notebook page.  "At any rate, the bulk of the manuscript has been speed
read and, let's see, are there further questions?"  He consulted the
notebook.

"No, it says here the contents are of no interest.  Whatsoever."

"Of no interest whatsoever?"  Ginger asked him faintly and leaned back
in her chair.  "Oh," she spoke.  "Oh," she repeated.  She said it
again, "Oh."

Then Cadmus routinely asked, "Have you overheard any significant
telephone calls, been asked to deliver a package and if so, where is
the package and to whom is it addressed?  Did you observe Mr.  Baskett
in the act of shredding, burning, flushing, or concealing documents?
Have you yourself been contacted by a representative of a foreign power
or subversive organization on Mr.  Baskett's behalf?  Can you think of
anything to say, any information however slight or peripheral which may
exist in support of or refutation of any issue under discussion here?
"

"No," said Ginger, "and may I have my checkbook?  "

"Not at present, no," said Cadmus.

LITTLE BECKY CRIED too hard at the flourishing of the sky-blue envelope
for Cadmus to make any sense of her answers.  Becky rushed in from the
kitchen wiping floury hands on her apron front and she accused him,
"How could you make her cry?  "

Little Becky gulped back a sob.  "I didn't, I didn't-" she said.

" I know, I know, of course not," soothed her mother.

"Mean to," finished Little Becky.

CADMUS LISTENED COURTEOUSLY as Andy traced his precise consanguineous
linkage to William.  Whatever the relationship was, a second marriage
had halved the cognate connection, Andy wished to make clear.  But
Cadmus happened to know, having read the transcripts of the
surveillance tapes, that Baskett did not think very highly of his young
relative's abilities and would never have trusted or relied upon him in
the matter at hand.

BETSY WELCOMED the opportunity to discuss Stefan with an official
representative of the U.S. government.  Stefan, whose last name had
never been offered, which was in itself highly suspicious, had harassed
her on the train from Kansas and then he had hunted her down here and
bothered her all over again.  Wasn't there some sort of law restricting
interstate alien hounding of citizens?"  Betsy asked.

"Because I'm going to register to vote this June 14," Betsy said.
"Which is my eighteenth birthday as well as Flag Day.  I guess I'll
have to go down to the Towne Town Hall, but I wish I could register at
home, in Kansas.  Towne still uses those paper ballots.  Uncle Harvey
says all the Democrat vote counters are issued secret eraser rings by
the DNC.  The stones are not sardonyx, they're Rubber-Rites ..."

Cadmus brought her back to the subject of William.

"Well, you know, I heard Mr.  Baskett's voice, but I never actually set
eyes on him.  This is, you will find, a house of doors and missed
opportunities..."

Cadmus slid the checkbook across the tabletop.

"Oh darn.  Has my mother been shown that checkbook?  What did she say?
Did she go all pale and quiet and disappointed?  I have to hide it,

otherwise she'll run out and buy a whole new wardrobe to fit her when
she loses forty pounds, or she 'll send a big flashy check to the Red
Cross whenever she sees a picture of a dog stranded on a flooded
rooftop.  I suppose you had to tell her about my father's deposits?  I
wish you'd consulted me first.  I wish you hadn't found my hiding
place.  You must be better than Mummy because, believe me, she's
looked.  But I know what your clue was.  The crosshairs of the screws
that keep the plaque on have gone shiny from being worked so often by
the screwdriver.  I'd noticed that myself and I was going to try to
dull en them again with soap or something.  Now I'll have to find
another spot she can't find.  But that was the best hiding place in the
entire house," Betsy assured Cadmus.

Cadmus was rather overwhelmed by the pretty and emphatic girl who had
preferred not to sit but stood in slight silhouette before the French
door's fading light.  She posed in first position, her neat head
tilting toward him.  As she veered from topic to topic, sent off on
such expressive tangents by his least query, she changed her position.
She stood on pointe, she sketched a constrained pas glisse, and Cadmus
missed the brief flit of concern that darkened her face as, straining
on her toes, she obliquely viewed the collection of artifacts spread
across the picture frame table searching for a second item extracted
from another place of concealment, less concerned by the necessity of
owning to her small experiment in the grey arts than by the prospect of
any redounding unmaking of her mischief.

"So," said Betsy, suddenly sunnier, "I'm sure you'll catch up with Mr.
Basket!  very soon.  I can see nothing gets past you," she assured
Cadmus.

"THEN HE WANTED to know where I slept last night since we dumped Stefan
on my bed, where I'd found to sleep," Andy told Betsy.  They sat on the
first landing of the main stairway, a spot that seemed to commit them
to being neither here nor there in the midst of the fray.  They fell
silent and drew up their legs as paired agents plodded up and down the
stairs.

"He asked you that?  And what did you tell him?  " Betsy asked.

"I said I slept on the sofa there in the big parlor.  I said that
because I was staring right at it, finding it difficult to meet
Cadmus's candid gaze at that moment," Andy said.

"But that sofa's so uncomfortable.  It's like sitting on someone's
skinny lap when you were little," Betsy objected.

"That's more or less what Cadmus pointed out and then I must have
looked shifty because he suddenly wanted to know if I'd heard William
prowling around downstairs last night, why I don't know, hiding
something, maybe.  I didn't answer very well.  I said I slept through
that part, when William wandered, which I don't know that he did, if he
did, I was so profoundly asleep at the time," Andy said.

"With your head on that itchy blue roses needlepoint pillow?  Under
that moth bally afghan?"  Betsy asked.  "With the mantel clock locking
and bonging?  "

"I know, I know, I'm not any good at dissembling," Andy admitted.  "But
didn't Cadmus ask you about your whereabouts last night?  "

"No, no, I deflected his attention utterly elsewhere," Betsy said.  "I
did not give him the chance."

PHOEBE DID NOT DISAGREE with Cadmus that it might indeed appear rather
odd to the preternaturally suspicious-minded that on today of all days
she had quit her job on a moment's notice and commenced to pack her
bags and abruptly announced she was taking off for California.  But,
Phoebe explained, Arthur had called, he had called for her to come, he
had called for her to come at once.  And furthermore, Phoebe said, in
her

" experience when events happened, they tended to happen all at once.

Didn't Cadmus believe in synchronicity?  Because here they had all been
trundling along for months now, dreary as dirt, and waiting, just
waiting for the next big thing to begin.

"One year at home," Phoebe remembered, "everyone grew purple cleo mes
by their mailboxes, right out of the blue.  One year, cleo mes nowhere
and the next everywhere.  We marveled at the fact."

"Perhaps your local nurseryman had stocked cleo mes Cadmus asked.

"No, there wasn't such a person thereabouts," Phoebe said.

It

"Seeds blown in on the wind?  " Cadmus suggested.  "A recommendation by
an admired local gardener?  Free samples?  A rural route beautification
project sponsored by the Post Office?  "

"You see how hard you want to understand?"  Phoebe asked.  "And I'm
here to tell you, there's nothing to explain, there's only your own
good sense to recognize what's been handed you and to take it."

GLOVER FOUND HIMSELF strangely serene over the prospect of a thorough
search of the house by a swarm of law enforcement professionals.  He
had, just lately, crushed his last dozen reds down to grit and dust
beneath the bowl of a silver soup spoon, and he had fed the powder to
the big plants on the big-parlor windowsill, digging it into their soil
with the silver spoon.  He had performed this ceremony on the day he
decided the Army was for him, when he had sworn an oath to himself that
he would, from that day forward, repudiate all dangerous living, even
if it meant taking his family straight up and cold.

Cadmus had said he did not think Glover's future career in the military
would be compromised by his parents' friend's activities, and he wished
Glover well and he gave him his card which bore a splendid seal.

THEN BROOKS AND ROLLINS were read the riot act concerning the illegal
reproduction and sale of copyrighted video material (Vide the FBI
warning).  Brooks nudged Rollins who was on the verge of protesting the
confiscation of all their current stock.  Their present inventory was
low.  This raid upon their enterprise could have been worse.  They hung
their heads in the accepted manifestation of shame too heavy to bear.

"Sir," said Rollins.

"Sir," said Brooks.

"Yes?  "asked Cadmus.

Rollins and Brooks rocked from foot to foot.  "Sir?"  they asked,
startled into unison.

Cadmus smiled.  "Nothing sir," he said, "just sir, sir?"

Nevertheless, Cadmus advised them, the fine quality of their technical
work had been admired and of particular note was the high standard

The Hills and Lave 399

they had achieved in their packaging-the well-selected stills extracted
from film footage, the evocative typography, the pithy capsule reviews
produced on a desktop publishing system they had modified for their
needs.  The cross-referenced client list that helped them target their
marketing efforts-they knew their Horror fans, their Action devotees
also reflected an advanced aptitude for commerce.

"If only," Cadmus said, "you two could try to apply your many gifts
less illicitly.  By that I mean technology is changing and advancing so
rapidly there are untold areas which are not yet regulated.  If I were
a pirate, if I were a pirate, which I'm not, I'd steer toward those
fresh waters, that's what I'd do."

"Cool," said Brooks, or Rollins.

CADMUS AND ALDEN WALKED back and forth outside across the terrace
stones.  Cadmus smoked a pipe.  A premium-tobacco haze swirled sweetly
from a briar bowl.  The day was greying down toward a night which
promised to be a dark one.  The local moon, the faraway stars, had
failed to appear, Alden noticed as he looked for them between the
tangled ramifications of the treetops.

The search of the house was winding down as well.  Lights were winking
out in successive windows marking the course of a last, considering
walk-through from the third floor, to the second, to the first.  Square
incident cases that earlier had been carried into the house were now
being carried out and hefted into the backs of several panel trucks.
The agents, distinctly off-duty, removed their FBI team jackets and
assumed their own, equally uniform, parkas.  They all handled
cigarettes.

They produced them, offered them, flared matches, and lit them out in
the open air.  No one whom Alden knew smoked any longer.  His circle
had been scared clean by early-morning coughing jags and unsettling
incidents of breathlessness on the squash court.  Now, Alden had to
wonder if these federal employees enjoyed access to some hush-hush
government method of circumventing the awful printed warning on the
side of the pack.  For he had never, until that very day, truly
apprehended the Centimanian reach and grasp and gathered fist of the
U.S. government.  Theretofore, he had believed that all those processed
and graded functionaries laboring inside all those photogenic
Washington buildings lining the parade routes toiled there to serve
him.  Some of them had, from time to time, written and enacted and
implemented certain banking and securities legislation about which he
had had reason to feel strongly.  He rather enjoyed the quadrennial
spectacle of electioneering.

On the sole occasion the IRS tried to pick a bone with him, his cubic
led auditor had slid a copy of his resume across the desk to Alden
beneath the cover of the Lowes' disputed 1981 federal tax return and
Alden had made sure that the resume found its way into the proper hands
at his firm.  The ex-IRS man had done very well there: indeed he had
outlasted Alden's own tenure.  Perhaps Alden could write a screenplay
about him.  All About Steve, he'd call it.  Perhaps he'd pitch the idea
to young Arthur out there in Hollywood.

Yes, the universe had lurched out of true.  Tonight the moon, the
stars, shone above other domains.  The smallest of worms had turned.
Strangers, not his divorcing adult sister, were ransacking his sock
drawer.  He was not free to go.  If he were to walk-slithering, sliding
in his haste-down the icy driveway ruts, he would be ordered to come
back, and Alden was struck by how very strong was his impulse to walk
away from all this, nearly as strong as had been his compulsion last
year to make his swift and total getaway from the accumulating miseries
of New York.

He traveled back and forth across the terrace stones twice to Cadmus's
single passage.  All this running away, Alden thought.  He stopped in
his tracks and Cadmus, unmindful in a swirl of smoke, head down, walked
into him.  They strolled on, in tandem.

"What doesn't make sense to me," Alden spoke, "is why William ever came
here if you people were so hot on his heels.  Of course, he may not
have known you were so near.  It would be very like William to
overestimate his position.  But now, here's a thought, had William long
ago stashed necessary documents, say, a false passport or visas, in the
New York apartment on one of his visits, inside a sofa cushion or taped
to the bottom of a guest room bureau drawer?  Which we moved quite
unknowingly from New York to Towne, forcing him to come here.  There's
a theory.  He came to retrieve, not to leave something."

"That's one theory," Cadmus agreed.

"And Becky would not have told you, but William has always been sweet
on her.  Although I can't see William jeopardizing his own wellbeing on
the strength of staging some sentimental farewell.  At any rate, she
got an excellent dinner from him.  He threw caution to the wind where
the wine was concerned, Becky said.  She was a little flushed herself
when she came home," Alden said.  " Becky has a palate."

"Nobody is looking for Mr.  Baskett at the local diner," Cadmus
agreed.

"And as it's William you want, I can't fathom how he managed to get
away.  I would never have called him an action figure.  I've seen him
stymied by a door latch," Alden said.

"The Williams of the world tend to have that kind of luck.  I think
it's their general experience of the regular rules being suspended for
them which tips the balance in cases like this in the first place.  If
you always seem to win, you're more apt to play the game," Cadmus
said.

"Until you lose," Alden remarked.

"I do have to clear up one question with you," Cadmus said.  "A number
of bankbooks, stock certificates, bonds, and statements were discovered
hidden in a desk drawer up in the attic.  The combined balance was very
large."

"I wouldn't characterize those items as having been hidden.  Kept
private, certainly, but not hidden," Alden objected.

"Additional assets were found rolled inside an empty presentation
Glenfiddich tin, and, for example, a not un sizable dividend check from
Coca-Cola fell from between the pages of a bedside book on forestry
management," Cadmus said.

"Marking my place.  Look, I can't be bothered running to the bank with
every little check.  I let them accumulate," Alden said.

"I have to ask.  Can you account for the origin of such-resources?  "
Cadmus asked.

" The terms of my severance from my late employer were favorable,"
Alden said.

"But the general impression, locally, has been that you were quite hard
up," Cadmus said.

"Was that the impression?  Have you been wandering around gathering
impressions?  Perhaps I meant to give that impression.  I don't know.

I've been in such a state," Alden said.  "Becky has been a brick," he
declared.

"You know, my brother went through a similar experience," Cadmus said.
"He was with Merrill Lynch and then, rather suddenly, he wasn't."

"What was his name?  " asked Alden.  "Did I know him?  "

"Paisley Stewart.  Paz?"  said Cadmus.

"Of course, Paz.  That was very wrong, what happened to him.  What's he
up to nowadays?  "

"At first he retreated to his lodge in Montana.  He was divorced by
then.  Well, that was part of his trouble.  He tried to set himself up
as a professional fly tier which absorbed him for a while.  Then he
started writing poetry about the river.  That's when I went to see him
and we agreed, he was ready to take up his place in the world again. In
the meantime, an excellent opportunity had arisen in Bangkok through a
combination of private enterprise and U.S. aid, an airline servicing
some new tourist areas, and it's really taken off, as they say.  As
they also say, there was Paz one day tying flies and the next,
he's..."

Alden smiled.  "Bangkok," he repeated, consideringly.  Lately, he
realized, he had rather overlooked the rest of the great world.

"He's remarried, a brilliant woman from Myanmar.  She's an
economist,"

Cadmus mentioned.

"Good for Paz," said Alden.

"I can't offer you Asia," Cadmus said.  "Actually, I'm not offering you
anything, at the moment, but I can suggest, I can recommend, I'm in a
position to notice and to suggest and to recommend."

Alden nodded in the dark, and uttered a note of assent.

"We have to think about the future," Cadmus said.  "We have to take up
the slack.  There seems to be more future now than there formerly was.
We have to decide what we 're going to do about all those places and
people who previously didn't figure, as far as we were concerned."

"We do have our work cut out for us," Alden agreed.

LILY MARKED HER PLACE in the library book she had been reading with a
brown leaf twitched from the philodendron plant on the windowsill and
stiffly, for she had been tensely sitting for hours now, she made her
way from the little parlor.  No one prevented her.  The unpleasant
young sentries had decamped on their own volition.  They had observed
Lily, alone, and left her to herself.

Lily frowned at the state of the front hall.  The old Kazak runner had
been taken up and put down again but in reversed position.  The fraying
edge was supposed to lie beneath the deacon's bench out of further
harm's way, which any thoughtful person ought to have noticed and
respected.  The wide front door had been left flapping open, and from
down in the cellar Lily could hear the furnace tremendously thumping,
straining to heat half of North America.  She would have to call the
oil company to come out a week early to fill the tank and it was going
to be inconvenient to pay them within ten days to qualify for her 2
percent early bird discount, a valued customer perquisite, because she
had intended, that very afternoon, to write her big half-yearly
household insurance check.  Lily did not really have any money worries
but she did have certain money arrangements which she did not believe
she had to explain to anyone.

Family voices chattered from the kitchen, a precinct to be avoided, and
there was activity in the dining room.  She caught the snowy flourish
of an unfurling tablecloth through the ajar door.  Lily turned and no
one prevented her from climbing the staircase.  Betsy and Andy, met on
the first landing, knew better than to attempt to say anything
consoling, and Lily set her hand atop the round of Betsy's head as she
passed, though not as if she had mistaken Betsy's head for a newel post
finial.  Lily was consoling Betsy.

In her bedroom, Lily's yoyo afghan had been refolded over the back of
the wrong chair.  On her bureau top, her silver-backed mirror lay with
the reflecting side facing the ceiling which was, of course, bad luck.
Agnes, who was not allowed on her bed, lay across the spread shedding
the silvery needles of fur which spiked into the weave of its pattern
and at which Lily plucked, some nights, as compulsively as an
Alzheimer's patient worrying a coverlet.  When she sat down heavily in
her rocking chair, the cushion hit the small of her back at just the
wrong spot.  She practiced, then, what she was going to say when she
had her say.  Someone had handled all the Hydrox cookies she kept for
her own consumption inside an old shortbread tin.  She would not care
for them now.

"Yes," she answered the eventual knock at her door.

Cadmus hesitated, and entered, announcing himself.

A single light burned dimly on the bedside table.  The room seemed a
shadowy warehouse, rug lapping over rug, stuffed chairs standing arm to
arm, pictures (he peered) hanging from pictures.  A more solid shadow
arose and stalked across the bedclothes.  The shadow leaped at him and
thudded down an insolent inch from the tips of his shoes.

Miss Hill's pale hand floated out of the gloom and indicated a low
hassock opposite her own rocking chair.  Cadmus sat, more or less at
Miss Hill's knee.  He had been told she had taught grade school and he
guessed she had not lost her touch.

He balanced his briefcase across his own knee.  He asked, "May I?"  and
reached up and switched on a floor lamp.  He unlatched his case and
withdrew papers and arranged them.  Miss Hill possessed the gift of
stillness.  Lamp glare glinted from her glasses lenses so he could not
look her in the eye, not that he wished to.  Miss Hill was not going to
like what he had to tell her.

"I have," he said, "one or two matters to discuss with you."

Lily's white head inclined once, and she retrieved her current knitting
exercise from the project bag slung from the arm of her chair.
Positioned, her needles clicked along a beige sleeve, as it appeared to
be, a not very well knit beige sleeve at which Lily did not look as she
tweaked at yarn and gently waved the wands of her needles.

"There was a reason," Cadmus began, "that bells went off when Mr.
Baskett wrote to your address and proposed his visit here, Miss Hill.
Miss Hill, are you aware that you have an FBI file?  "

"I?  " asked Lily.  "Certainly not."  She was a Republican, even though
she got awfully mad at them sometimes.  She smiled thinly at Cadmus as
if she meant to be as polite as possible, under the circumstances,
about his attempted joke, but, truly, this had been a very long day for
everyone.

"Did you once write to a Mr.  Avalon at the Restport Retirement Home?
Did you mention you owned weapons and subscribed to certain reactionary
political theories and did you threaten him with a view to impressing
those opinions upon him and the people in his care?  " Cadmus asked, as
he consulted a sheet of paper.

"For heaven's sake," Lily said.

" This Mr.  Avalon, who is responsible for the safety and well-being of
a number of elderly people residing at his facility was alarmed enough
by the import of your letter to forward it to the Massachusetts
Department of Social Services who, as a matter of policy, redirected
the letter to the FBI and their domestic terrorism division, which
processed the information.  Your name was new to them.  Local inquiries
turned up nothing very irregular, nor could any links be forged between
you and any known organization.  But your case was noted and placed on
a tertiary watch status and, in their view, this vigilance paid off
when another subject under a more pressing course of surveillance, the
suspect William

Baskett, established contact with your address and that is, as I said,
when the bells went off," Cadmus explained.

Lily had dropped her knitting.  A hand had sought her running heart, a
hand had caught the first rise of the sharp cry that broke across her
lips as Cadmus revealed local inquiries had been made.  Who had been
approached by official strangers in Towne alluding
mysteriouslymaladroitly to the not-to-be-specified offense about which
the consulted and intrigued mind could only posit crime after crime?
Whose glance must Lily not care to meet from now on?  To whom must she
express off-putting un enlightenment should anyone be so unkind as to
mention, and would she have to maintain 33X5 card file to keep track of
the stories she'd spun?  Must she evermore turn, as old acquaintances
hailed her a shade too eagerly on Front Street, and enact fascination
with the overpriced mechanical banks and nested teacups ranged in Lydia
Spofford's bow window?  Then, would Marilyn Rathbone inveigle her onto
the premises and "get" to the wounded Lily at last?  Oh, what would
people think, official inquiries being made in the village, and Hill
family heirlooms going un quietly on sale for all to see as they
stepped from the Post Office to Peddocks'?

"It is my opinion," Cadmus told Lily, "that you were not responsible
for the contents of the letter.  Having spent time with your family"

"Well, my family," Lily forgot herself so far as to let fall then.

"&> chapter six W The Hills Take Wing

M:ss HILL?  Are you there?"  Lily was sitting at the kitchen table
scoring the sides of nasturtium seeds with the point of a lobster pick.
She gathered and dropped the nicked seeds into a pedestal-footed
cut-glass dessert bowl half full of warm water spiked with a quarter
teaspoon of her homemade plant food mixture which was known in her
gardening circle as Stand Back!  Stand Back!  or you'd be knocked flat
as your rose mallow and catmint and white dittany leaped from the earth
and unloosed their leaves like boxers throwing punches, Lily's
gardening circle said.  Or a formula for a bomb, the FBI had tried to
allege when they discovered her recipe, containing ammonia and Epsom
salts and saltpeter, written for the sake of permanence in black paint
across a board nailed above her potting bench.  That charge had
surfaced in the official report of the not-entire Incident for several
interviews had had to be censored and, anyway, in the end, the Boston
Bureau of the FBI had preferred to keep news of their botched raid
quiet.  The version that filtered out onto Main Street had sounded so
unlikely people couldn't believe it however much some of them would
have liked to, and based upon what they'd heard, there were even those
who went out of their way not to wave at Eddie Eddy the next time they
drove past him out on traffic detail.

Egged on by Penny Nicholls, who had returned from the chandelier
dismantling expedition full of pep and feeling empowered, Harvey, who
was mad he 'd missed all the uproar, traveled down to Washington and
demanded to read the official record.  Afterward, he met a Congressman
pal for martinis at the Watergate (still a fris son at the mention,
Watergate) and his pal had offered to ask a question on the House
floor, to wit, why should an elderly and keenly patriotic veteran of
the Second World War receive an utterly gratuitous documentary rebuke
by a bureaucratic so-and-so laboring in his airless cubicle for the
simple act of sketching a mustachio and fez and snarl of ragged chest
hairs upon a newspaper photograph of Lloyd M. Bentsen, motivated to do
so by the near-medical necessity of letting off steam?  Not to speak of
the complete non-necessity for that same hive-headed bureaucrat to
insert further fresh remarks about the Hill family's apparent addiction
to gambling after the litter of many hundreds of last Christmas's
losing lottery scratch tickets had been uncovered stuffed inside an old
shortbread tin for want of a better disposition of the things.

"And then they made a lot of other fresh remarks about young Arthur's
comedy files but I informed them it was his patriotic duty in 1988 to
come up with Dukakis jokes and even they had to concede that point."

"Oh Harvey, can't you just let it drop?"  Lily asked him, but Harvey
told her he had returned from Washington all fired up to research and
to write his own report on the report.

"And do you have to keep your chandelier in that tremendous box in the
middle of the dining room?  I'm going to throw a sheet over it and use
it as a sideboard," Lily had said.

"Miss Hill?  Are you there?"

Lily heard Andy's call, his second call, but she did not reply because
answering voices carried around corners and echoed off ceilings and
seekers-after could become as misdirected as scientific maze mice by a
not very helpfully offered, "I'm here."  It did not occur to Lily to
let Andy know, "I'm in the kitchen."  One did not carry on
conversations from room to room.

Lily slit the top of a third packet of nasturtium seeds and spilled the
contents onto the tabletop.  Seeds scattered.  Deftly, she chased and
corraled them with a licked fingertip.

"Miss Hill?"  the voice more faintly inquired.  Andy's search had moved
upstairs.

Lily was not often to be found in the kitchen.  The kitchen had long
since become Becky's province, but Becky was now so busy elsewhere that
Ginger had prepared dinner twice in the past week.  First she had
produced a tremendously effortful Thai banquet flavored with Nam Poc
and lemongrass which she had gone out of her way to procure some where,
and then she had created an ambitious coulibiac of salmon so
substantial she had to convey it to the table on the dusted-off
Thanksgiving turkey platter with branches of parsley obscuring the
holiday motif.  At the moment, Ginger had a flock of frozen quail
thawing on the countertop, a sight-their drooping heads, their lifeless
eyes staring through huge, translucent lids-that struck Lily as sad but
interesting.  Ginger claimed to know a way of preparing quail that was
simple but devastating and, Lily had to admit to herself, she was
looking forward to supper.

"Ah, Miss Hill, there you are."  Andy had come down the back stairs.
He bore a bouquet twisted in florists' wrapping in one hand and a
square brown box tied with red-and-white-striped bakery string dangling
from the other.  The box held twenty-four mocha cakes packed in two
tiers, one atop the other.  He had been concerned about the bottom
layer losing its jam dollops to the underside of the upper layer.  He
had asked for two separate boxes and been refused but reassured that
this was how mocha cakes were always packed and no one else had ever
raised the issue.  But little cakes and bright flowers were not usual
purchases for Andy.  He had asked the florist how long the flowers
would survive, in transit, out of water.

"Survive?"  the florist had questioned him back.  "It's no longer a
matter of them surviving."

"Here you are, Miss Hill," Andy said.  He held out the wrapped
bundle.

"These aren't your jonquils," he added.

Lily's reaching hand stopped short.

"I mean, I didn't pick these flowers from your yard"-where jonquils
nodded by the hundreds across the field and which he had not noticed
before, for his mind had been trained on other matters.  Indeed, only
this morning had he risen from his desk and driven down to the village
to the Stationery Stop to buy a binder to hold his completed thesis,
and on happy impulse he had visited Blossom Thyme and Sweet Surrender
and finally, spontaneously, Lydia Spofford Antiques as well.  Downtown
Towne ran, these days, to shoppes, and the meandering brick sidewalks
tilted passers-by toward and then slid them on through the charming,
renovated door fronts.  Andy knew he would not miss

Towne when he went away, but he would never cease to marvel at the
place.

"These jonquils came from a shop.  I saw them in the window and I
wanted to say thank you to you and to celebrate," Andy said.

"Yes, I appreciated at once these are a different kind," Lily said.  "I
don't really have kinds of jonquils.  Mine are just the plain ones."
She received the flowers.  She tore free the paper and plunged the
bunch upside down and then snapped them erect.  This seemed to startle
and revive the petals.  "I'll find them a vase," said Lily.

Andy set his cake box on the countertop a distance away from some
sparrows lying on their narrow backs in a sad puddle of their own melt.
Sparrow juice they'll call it, he thought as he trailed Lily into the
dining room.  Had Miss Hill heard what he'd just said?  Why are you
thanking me?"  she ought to have asked.  What are we celebrating?"  she
ought to have wanted to know.

Lily had lowered herself to her knees to rummage through the crowded
shelf of the cupboard underneath the china closet.  She pulled out a
pale yellow pitcher with daffodils molded in relief upon its side which
had been pushed away to the back of the shelf since its last appearance
last spring.  Andy crouched beside Lily.

"This has always been the jonquil vase," Lily said, "but I can see this
vase is too tall for your flowers, still, that can't be helped.  You
can't make stems longer.  Well, actually you can.  There's a heavy,
clear glass disk punched with holes which you place in the bottom of a
vase or bowl, they fit better in bowls, and you angle individual stems
into individual holes and it boosts the flowers and holds them in
place.  They're called frogs, those glass disks, I suppose because they
sit in the water so stilly, just as frogs do."

She paused to allow Andy to jot a note on a card outlining her
etymological theorizing, but Andy seemed not to have appreciated her
effort.

"This lusterware jug will do," Lily said.  "There," she said, working
the rounded base free and up and over a cluster of milk-glass bud
vases, just cheap things bought in bulk for the guests' tables at
someone's wedding reception years ago and, of course, held on to.

Lily was short of breath from reaching and talking all at once.  Andy
helped her to her feet, a hand cupping each elbow.

"Oh, I left the vase I wanted on the rug."  Lily gazed down at the
distant floor and Andy stooped and recovered it for her.

They returned to the kitchen.  Andy sat at the table and spun the lazy
Susan and wondered what on earth Lily was doing to those peculiar seeds
which looked like shrunken walnuts.  He sorted loose seeds according to
size as Lily filled the vase with water and dropped in an aspirin
tablet from the large aspirin bottle kept so avail ably on the
countertop.  She slit the ends of each jonquil stem with a steak knife
so the stalks could more deeply drink.

"I bought mocha cakes as well," Andy said.  "A Hill family favorite."

"Supper will be an occasion.  Ginger is preparing quail."

"Is that what those are?"  Andy asked.  He supposed Harvey would have
the family calling all the limp little birds Dan by the time they were
nibbling at the slender drumsticks.

" But you said you meant to celebrate," Lily recalled.  "Have we
overlooked your birthday?  "

"No, that was back in January."

"Then we did forget.  I wish you'd told us.  We would have ..."  But
Lily didn't suppose it mattered, going into what they might have done
for Andy on his day.

"I've finished my thesis, Miss Hill," Andy said.  "I've just been out
buying a binder."

"A binder," Lily repeated, for so many pages they required a
containment system.  She believed him.

"And so you see, here we are.  I shall always be grateful for your
cooperation and your kindness.  I have to return to campus for a few
days, and I have strong hopes of being given a fellowship and a
teaching post."  Andy had rehearsed a kind of summing-up speech in the
car driving back to the house after performing his several significant
errands.  But he had been distracted from his work of mental
composition as his car rounded the driveway curve and he beheld the
bright and abobble heads of the jonquils which he wasn't convinced
hadn't rared up and charged into aggressive bloom during the hour he
was away.  Thus, his valedictory remarks were not as polished as he had
intended them to be.  He had wished to make a gift of acknowledging
Lily's gift to him.

Lily attended to Andy's description of his newly minted future as she

The Hills Take Wing 41 j bent over the flowers which, indeed, were
arranging themselves.  Jonquils are naturally upright and dignified
entities; each just turned away from each.  The effect was pleasing
from every angle.  Lily would be able to place the pitcher, cushioned
upon a circlet of doily, at the center of a round table, on the dining
room table, she thought, and she would say to all at supper tonight,
These came from Andy, in celebration.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Lily walked down to the road to collect the mail
from the box.  The day was warm and she left her cardigan hanging from
the hammock hook pounded into the trunk of the most massive of the
copper beeches.  This spring was unexceptional.  A typically late, wet
snow at which everyone nevertheless professed to be amazed had felled
tree limbs and caused power outages.  The river rose with the thaw and
lapped over the River Road.  Harvey's car had stalled out in a flooded
low point and he stood like a radiant ornament upon his hood until a
D.P. W. truck came along making waves and saved him, or saved his new
Birkenstock sandals.  If not for concern for them, he would have waded
out on his own.  But he had enjoyed the rescue episode and the
impromptu tow and he gave the D.P.W. crew the bottle of Bombay gin
which had been rolling around in his trunk thudding against his golf
clubs every time he made a U-turn.

Lily's first purple crocus had pushed through the lawn on St. Patrick's
Day.  Birds, weaving their nests, availed themselves of her Christmas
wreath ribbon and the yarn scraps and dryer lint clumps Lily spiked
onto branches of privet hedge.  The Larkins returned from the South and
discovered their car had been exchanged for a lesser model so all that
William Baskett business was briefly resurrected and hushed up again.
On the nineteenth of April, as she did every year, Lily pulled on her
rubber boots and tramped through the woods to the further swamp to find
the first polliwogs, which were never not there, on the nineteenth,
freshly hatched into the bell-clear water.  They were so very small
Lily had to crouch down upon the wet leaf mold resting her knees upon
her opened hands.  She looked and looked until she saw them, as black
and as definite as commas on a contract.

The Ben Franklin store started stocking flats of seedlings out front on
a board bench a month too early but Lily always fell for a few
six-packs, not able to resist the petunia colors and the pansies'
expressions.  Then, overnight, her field was adrift with nodding
daffodils.  The lilacs would flower next, and then it would be the
irises' turn.  Lily had begun to work in her garden, kneeling on a
square of newspaper and digging with a trowel in her perennial bed,
turning up the seeds of weeds that needed only five seconds of sunlight
to germinate, she had read.  It was foolish of her, Lily knew, but now
and then she allowed a trowelful of earth to sit in the sun as she
slowly counted to five.

The trees were leafing out on schedule.  Lily walked down her driveway
beneath the fresh pale shade they were beginning to cast.  Blackflies
swirled around her head and sipped from the corners of her eyes.  She
skirted the deep driveway puddle which carried shards of sky and
brightness and shades of green on its breeze-brushed surface.  She
walked through tender underbrush and startled a striped snake which
unwound itself and rippled away.  Try as she might, Lily could never
wholly love a snake.

As she gained the road, a loaded flatbed truck from the lumberyard
thundered past her, followed by a rig of churning cement.  Lily fell
back against her mailbox post buffeted by the after draft as she was
put in mind of an invading army.  And the big trucks always drove too
fast for the River Road.  Turtles were often crossing the pavement at
this time of year, "calling" upon one another, as Lily had explained to
Little Becky, who was, of course, old enough to be told the facts and,
anyway, had immediately apprehended them on her own.  The child had
improved since Becky and Alden allowed her to work on Friday nights and
Saturdays at Hannah's peeling Jerusalem artichokes and filling water
carafes.

Lily wrenched open her rusted mailbox flap.  She winnowed away a cloud
of blackflies with her handful of catalogues and envelopes.  Perhaps,
thinking of improvements, she would buy a new mailbox.  Hers had lost
its red flag to the plow last winter and now, if she wished to leave a
letter out for Linda the mailman to pick up as Linda was happy to do,
Lily had to loop a notifying red rag around the latch.  This could turn
into a production should she forget the rag and have to return to the
house to fetch it.

So many catalogues.  Lily tucked them under her arm.  She shuffled
through letters-the Army for Glover, his university for Andy, her
father for Betsy, foreign stamps for Alden.  Oh good, the property tax
bill had come at last.  The town was so late with them this year that
Lily had stopped by the Towne Offices to ask if her notice had been
lost.  Necessary paperwork had been known to fall into a well formed
between the Treasurer's table and the Assessor's file cabinet.  The
Towne School Budget had gone missing for a week once, in 1962, and the
teachers had chipped in and bought Rollie French who was Head of
Selectmen then a millefleurs paperweight.  But he took it with him when
he retired from public life and so the Towne Town Hall paperwork was
vulnerable once again to an open window or a heedless elbow.  Lily had
explained all this to Doreen Wilder, the Town Clerk, whom Lily had
taught in second grade, a pleasant child.  Doreen had apologized for
Lily's having to come in and ask for her property tax bill.  Doreen had
been as nervous as if she were owning to a tardy homework assignment.

"Yes, your notice will be late.  I'm so sorry, Miss Hill," Doreen said.
"I'm very very sorry."

"I'm in no hurry to pay taxes," Lily said, smiling and rising to a
little joke which Doreen had failed to appreciate but then, her former
students could never quite accept that Lily might be human.  Lily was
used to grown adults with children of their own stopping short and
standing up straighter and becoming mindful of their manners when she
encountered them again out in the world at large.  And yet, Lily always
made a point of mentioning a positive memory of them-penmanship,
musicality, a dodge-em game won, but to some it seemed she was holding
them up against their former selves and finding them wanting because
they had not written books in their perfect penmanship, they had not
played their clarinet in a symphony orchestra.

Which was not necessarily a bad state of affairs, Lily told herself as
she strolled up the driveway, sliding a finger against the sealed Towne
envelope flap (she was curious as to the exact amount due) because,
frankly, she no longer wished to be bothered and she had been so very
much bothered of late.  But all that might be about to change.  The
family seemed to have noticed it was spring again.  They had looked up
from their books and their reveries and viewed the greening countryside
and flowering fields.  They remembered that flowers had been arranged
in a vase placed upon their bureau tops the evening they arrived,
asking Lily if she would mind if they stayed for a while.  Now, they
were murmuring among themselves, Why, this is where we came in.  They
were looking for their coats and their purses.  They were sliding about
their feet, searching for their shoes.

Lily skirted the deep puddle and rounded the driveway curve and looked
almost fondly upon her house.  She would definitely hire a young man
this summer to paint the shutters and the trim and possibly the barn,
which was the sort of structure commonly said to be held together
solely by its paint.  She sat, then, upon the flat-topped granite
boulder the glacier had thoughtfully dropped in a corner of the lawn at
the end of the last Ice Age, and she extracted an oblong of thin paper
from the envelope she had worried open.

Lily snatched off her eyeglasses and put them back on.  She gazed up at
the sky.  Her eyes blurred and teared at the blank blue brightness,
and, unseeingly, she stared at the slip of paper she clutched in her
hand.  Numbers swirled, forming and un forming writhing and unreeling
in mythical amounts pried from some dark and haunted book of worst
reckonings and mystic numbers discovered and abandoned by Druids.

"Bad news?  " Harvey's voice asked.  "Had yourself a shock?  "

Lily's color concerned him.  She was pale as a poison mushroom cap and
her posture had failed her-she was all hunched over in her misery as
Harvey later told Penny, who said she really couldn't picture that.

Harvey set down his hedge clippers and he had to pull the empty
envelope from Lily's constricted fingers.  He peered inside.  Empty.
Bah, he crumpled the envelope and threw it to the ground.  He tugged at
the thin paper slip Lily clung to.  It tore in two.  Harvey scowled at
his half and he slowly eased the other half free.  He fit the two
pieces together and uttered a sound, a bitter laughing bark of fury and
revelation.  Oh, he knew what those brigands down in the village were
up to.

"Lily," he brushed back a white cotton curl and spoke into her ear.
"Lily, we won't let them get away with this.  But you can't sit on a
rock until the sun's gone down.  Your bottom will get neuralgia from
the cold."

And Lily pulled herself together for, otherwise, Harvey's comments
would grow louder and ruder and he would draw a crowd.  He would call
on his new pocket telephone and summon a crowd just as he had summoned
the D.P.W. to pluck him from his flooded car that day.

"What happened?"  Lily asked Harvey.  "When was the property reassessed
at two and a half million dollars?  It was three hundred and two
thousand which was excessive enough, I thought."

"Well," said Harvey, frowning at some very small print.  "They've put
you down as having nineteen house lots-"

" But I don't," Lily waved her hand.  "Do you see nineteen house lots,
Harvey?"

"Something must have changed.  Before, you were assessed as
agricultural land, now, out of the blue, you're nineteen potential
house lots.  I thought we were landlocked here.  I thought you weren't
buildable anywhere.  There's the railroad right-of-way on the north
border, and you abut the state forest to the east, and the county owns
the strip all along the River Road in case they need to widen it."

"Which they never will now since they put the highway exit ramp
someplace else," Lily recalled.

"And Bing Fassner owns that little piece between you and the new
development."  Harvey snapped his fingers.  "That's what happened.
They must of whacked a road to Bing's land and written him up big for
house lots.  He must have been forced to sell.  He never had beans to
make soup with."

"He should have told me, he should have warned me," Lily said.

"Suspect he felt too bad about it," Harvey said.  "But we'll have to
find out who they are, who the developer is."

"Why?  What does it matter?  " Lily asked.

"Least we can do is cold shoulder them in the village," Harvey said.
"Cross Front Street and look like we've smelled something should our
paths threaten to cross."

"Small comfort, that.  Then you'd be on the wrong side of Front
Street," Lily said.  "I mean, you're usually on your way to Peddocks'
for coffee."

"That wasn't my point.  My point was, they, whoever they are, must have
shot a road through Bing's land straight to the edge of yours.

Because you're the big fish they're really after.  They'll come to you,
Lily.  You're going to be courted," Harvey said.  "Lily, you're going
to receive an offer."

"But I don't want an offer," Lily said.  "I want to be as I was.  I
managed, just well enough, as I was, but I can't manage that."  She
indicated the halves of the bill in Harvey's hand.  "Not two and a half
million dollars at the current tax rate, or at any rate."

"I probably can ..."  Harvey started to say.

Lily silenced him with a look.

"But I shouldn't have to," Harvey began again, "I can try to think of a
way out of this."

"Do that, Harvey," Lily said.  "Do that."

BETSY TOUCHED THE CHAIN around her neck and smiled across the dining
room table at Andy.  Alden and Becky, wearing pinstripe suits and
polished shoes, slipped into their chairs and said they were sorry they
were late but the traffic on Rte.  i had been awful.

"How lovely," Becky said to mollify Ginger who, costumed as cook, her
sleeves rolled up, a bandanna covering her excessively coiling and
springing hair, bore down upon the dining room table leveling a
sloshing platter at them all.

"What are those?  " Brooks asked.

"They have heads," Rollins observed, not unfavorably.

"Do we get to eat the heads?  " Glover asked.

"I know those.  We serve those all the time at the restaurant," Little
Becky said.  "We saute them, wrapped in grape leaves with grapes and
shallots and port.  They're excellent," she assured Ginger.  "Caille,
we call them," she informed her brothers, coming up with the name.

Andy, who had consented to join the family tonight because he no longer
functioned as observer here, blinked several times when Little Becky
named the main course.

"Always a treat," Penny Nicholls remarked generally.  Penny was often
at the house now.  She and Harvey were refinishing the upright piano
they had acquired on impulse at Gum Chew's place as part of the

II

deal they'd struck when they returned Alden's hardly used used truck
(Alden suddenly being too busy to negotiate on his own behalf).  They
had run the piano back to the house in the first and last run of the
Loadstar and the strong boys had been enlisted to heft the piano from
the truck bed to the barn where, as Harvey now remarked, he and Penny
were about to commence having lessons with a pretty gal from Wenham
who'd come to the house.

"Out in the barn," Harvey said, "where we won't bother anybody but the
owls.  Their nestlings are big enough to fend for themselves.  I just
saw one strangling a mouse ling in its talons."

"Did you know baby horned owls are hatched a month ahead of other baby
birds and small mammals so they'll be just big enough to prey upon the
newer babies as they emerge later in the spring, Aunt Lily says," Betsy
spoke up.  She shook her head sorrowfully as the platter of quail
floated by.

"Is this true, Lily?  " Penny asked almost accusingly.

"What excellent parents," Ginger declared on behalf of the owls for
Ginger knew herself to be an excellent parent as well.  Betsy had heard
in the affirmative from Wellesley College although Wellesley no longer
seemed to be Betsy's heart's desire.  She had been slow about filling
in forms.  She'd been not very interested in the roommate match-up
questionnaire-musical preferences, carnivore or vegetarian, early bird
or vampire?  You answer the questions, Betsy told Ginger, you can like
my roommate for me.  "Because," Ginger said, "you have to give your
child the best possible start in life."

"Yes, Mummy," Betsy was compelled to say before Ginger would unlock her
eyes from Betsy's.

"Do we eat the quail's legs, Ma?"  Brooks asked.  "Right down to the
feet?"

"Eat what's edible, boys," Becky said.

" There's a man in Japan who eats bicycles," Rollins said.

Alden judged the time had come to speak up on his own behalf.  "We're
official," he said.  "We're signed and sealed and it's a done deal.
Becky and I and Little Becky, as well, are headed for Czechoslovakia.

We had our final meeting with the representatives from the World

Bank.  I'm going to head a fledgling Bond department..."  Cadmus had
put the word out in appropriate channels.  "And Becky has talked
herself into her own position developing a prototype small business
loan and development program aimed at the distaff side.  She impressed
them with her vision.  Actually, I think they're only taking me on to
get Becky."

"Why, Becky," Penny exclaimed.  "Alden, too," she marveled.  "But
Becky," she exclaimed again.

"Czechoslovakia?"  Little Becky asked.  "I don't want to go there," she
automatically objected.

" But we 're going to live in a castle, dear," Becky said.  " We've
signed a lease."

"What about us?  " Brooks asked.  "We're not going to sucky
Czechoslovakia.

We'd rather go to ..."

"The moon," Rollins supplied extravagantly.

"No, Czechoslovakia won't have you," Alden said.  "You two are being
sent to Uncle Hap in Colorado.  During the week you'll be resident at
the Range School, and Hap and Rosemary will take you on at the ranch on
weekends.  He needs a couple of extra hands."

"Isn't that a military school, Dad?  Do we have to wear uniforms?"
Brooks asked.

"Yes, we made certain.  Stiff, starchy, itchy, proper uniforms."

"And then we have to do ranch stuff on Saturdays?  " Brooks asked.

"Yes, and Uncle Hap will take you orienteering on Sundays," Alden said.
"That's his new hobby, getting lost in the woods on Sundays."

"Cool," Glover said.

"What kind of castle?"  Little Becky asked.

"I've seen a picture.  It's stone and grey and there's a great front
door studded with nailheads and we 'll be in the city but on our own
parkland with neighboring castles.  Perhaps we'll have a neighboring
prince, imagine, your very own age.  Oh, you'll think you've stepped
into a My Bookhouse illustration," Becky said.

"And nobody will know me," Little Becky said.

"They'll get to know you, dear," Becky said.

"Will they?  Will they have to?"  Little Becky asked.

"And there will be ample room for all of you to visit," Becky
offered.

\ \

"We'll be there," Penny assured her.  "Harvey and I plan to travel.

I [; We have a touch of the old wanderlust."

it

"I might sign on with your outfit myself," Harvey said to Alden.  "I

don't want to live in a castle, though.  I may have just gotten rid of
a drafty old pile.  The Land Pirate says the real estate slump is over.
Cross your fingers the inspection goes full steam ahead.  But I can be
your ear to the ground at this end.  But no, you couldn't make me live
in a castle again."  "You know, I think you're onto something, Harvey,"
Alden said.  "In fact there are people you ought to see before they
return to Prague.  I'll set up a meeting."  "So, it sounds like it will
be just you and me from now on, Lily," Ginger observed forlornly.  Lily
counted the heads around the table.  She placed going-away hats on them
all-cowboy hats on Brooks and Rollins, caps and gowns on Betsy and
Andy.  Glover wore a smart General MacArthur cap, and Alden and the
Beckys received Tyrolean hats, the closest Lily could come to a style
from the part of the world they were bound for.  Penny and Harvey
sported travelers' to pees Ginger, who Lily suspected would ; also
think of somewhere else to go, would find herself something stylish.

Only Lily remained bareheaded.  She could not come up with an
emblematic hat for herself-her knit beret, her plastic rain hood, the
felt cloche she maintained for church.  For where was she to end up
after her house was sold out from under her?  She would not move to
Florida where they wore billed caps composed of flattened Budweiser
cans perforated and stitched into shape with orange yarn half-hitch
loops.

"Lily?"  Alden was asking her.  "Lily, why the long face?  You're not
going to be sorry to see us go?  Surely, you'll breathe a sigh of
relief when you've got your own life back again?  "

And then, although she had thought the matter was going to remain
private between them, Harvey explained about the shocking
reassessment.

Penny, his prior confidante, whooped her analysis of the situation.
"But how absurd," Becky said.  She stood and walked to Lily's place and
hugged her.

Brooks and Rollins thought it was way cool Aunt Lily was so thumping
rich until Glover enlightened them-not rich but owing.

"But I like it here," Little Becky said.  "Even if I can't be here, I
want here to be here."

"Yes, well we all feel like that, but other people have other ideas,"
Alden said.

"If only Louis were here," Ginger said.  "Because taxes are his
passion.

He could get to the bottom of all this in an instant, I'm sure, the way
his mind seizes on a tax problem.  What a pity we can't consult Louis.
If only he were here."

"But Daddy is going to come," Betsy spoke up.  "Daddy has promised to
come and he can help Aunt Lily while he's here, because-we weren't
going to say yet, but Andy, can I tell them?  Yes?  Andy and I are
going to be married.  Look, I have a ring."  She pulled a chain up from
her T-shirt front.  She unlatched the chain's clasp and slid free a
ring.  She slid it round her ringer.  "Look, an amethyst, an old old
amethyst from Lydia Spofford's in a Tiffany box."

The ring was important.  Andy hadn't known he and Betsy were meant to
be married until the stone in its old gold setting glimmered at him
from a bowfront display window on Front Street.  He had placed his
bouquet of jonquils and his carton of cakes and the bag containing his
binder upon the wicker settee put out for sale on the sidewalk.  He had
been steered inside the shoppe as if by an unseen hand gently urging
him on, perhaps the very ghost hand on which the ring had once been
worn, which was why, Andy said, Betsy had to say yes.

" For a young lady?  " Marilyn had asked Andy as he held the stone up
to the light.

"For the young lady," Andy had said.

All eyes, the alike family eyes, moved from the very sweet ring to
Ginger.

"Splendid," remarked Ginger.  She sounded as if she had just been
unhooked from an acid drip.  Her mind cast backward for clues-how they
had left the house apart and returned together, how often they had been
come upon in the big parlor earnestly conferring, Betsy's recent
cooling toward Wellesley, hushed footfalls heard late at night.  Ginger
added two and two together and she came up with those two.  She pushed
her chair back from the table as if she needed space to think.  She
hoisted her sleeves and straightened her bandanna, pulling it lower
across her brow, searching all the while for the emotion she truly
felt.  Because what she felt was going to be her boon companion with
whom she would be in constant consultation at least until all this
getting married nonsense blew over.

"You're very young, dear," Becky reminded Betsy.  "You're really very,
very young.  Even older people don't always know their own minds."

Ginger gazed at Becky.  "Well, you know, the last U.S. census I read
included a statistic for widows under the age of fifteen which,
naturally, presumes even earlier marriages."

"Mummy," Betsy cried, starting on a hopeful and concluding on a
hopeless note.  "Andy is not going to die.  I mean, not not ever but
not soon, he isn't going to die."

"Oh, I've no doubt he's fit enough," Ginger drawled.

"Get up, Rollins," Harvey said.  "You there, Andy boy, sit next to the
girl."

"Huh?  "Rollins asked.

"Sir?  "Andy asked.

"Move."

The exchange was accomplished.  Rollins rose and carried his dinner
plate and milk glass and cutlery around to Andy's chair.  Andy forgot
his place setting, which was handed round to him.  He slung his arm
around Betsy's slight shoulders and he kissed her ring finger.

"That's nice," Penny said.  She was relishing her supper although she
really couldn't eat her quail because it still seemed to have a
personality.  She had hidden her portion beneath her potatoes dauphine
which was a pity-she could have done justice to the potatoes dauphine.
No, the aspect of supper Penny was relishing was all the news, except
for Lily's problem, of course.

Becky spoke again.  "I know it's none of my business, but Betsy, you
must consider very carefully, and it's not solely a question of your
youth."

Little Becky emitted a squeak, a pinched and escaping utterance of the
general shrieking despair her mother's bore some interference
engendered, for a newborn ambition had begun to form deep within Little
Becky.  This ambition had begun to burn as vitally as some strange and
self-generating organ fired into existence in a theretofore unoccupied
cavity below her last rib.  Little Becky truly and only desired to
become Betsy's bridesmaid.  And then, when Little Becky met all the new
people in Czechoslovakia, she would do so as a girl who had been a
bridesmaid.

Ginger addressed Becky.  " But as you very well know, the mean age for
the onset of the human female's menses has dropped ... for heaven's
sake," Ginger interrupted herself.  She leaned forward, her voice
confidentially lowered, "Darling Betsy, if it's a baby, that happens
all the time.  It's appalling how easily it happens, but you don't have
to go through with, with this marriage charade.  You don't want to be a
plump little bride holding an enormous, cascading bouquet of
stephanotis in front of your stomach.  Those bouquets might as well be
casket sprays, to mourn the death of all of life's other possibilities
you are forsaking."

"Perhaps we should all excuse ourselves," Alden said.

"No, stay.  Andy bought a special dessert, especially," Betsy said.
"And there isn't any baby," she hissed at Ginger.

" I swear not," said Andy.

"Oh, good," said Ginger.  "I was prepared to be magnificent.  I'd even
have offered to raise the child as my own, but what would Daddy have
said?  What will Daddy say?  "

"Daddy says fine.  He says, go ahead.  We called him."

"You called Daddy?  First?  Before coming to me?  He blames me.  Did he
say he blames me?  " Ginger asked.

"No, Daddy said fine, and who was he to tell me what to do with my life
and I reminded him, you're my father, that's who you are," Betsy
said.

"He's bitter," Ginger said.

"No, he's happy.  He's very surprised but he's happy if I'm happy and
I'm happy, Mummy, at last," Betsy said.

"When?  " Lily asked.  "When will the wedding be?  "

"Soon?  " guessed Betsy.  "Later in June, early in July?  "

"In summer," said Lily.  Later in June or early in July there would be
old roses for the altar and for the tables and she had dessert plates
and

I punch cups enough for sixty guests if they wanted tea sandwiches
and

|i bowls of strawberries.  Oh, but the cake lady Lily had always relied
on

I had died.  Who could make the cake?  And late in June or early in
July they could be outside.  They could pitch a marquee in the field
against the threat of rain although a marquee would be damp and dark in
the rain and dim and roasting with all those trapped hornets bumping
and batting against the roof if the day turned up sunny.  Lily was not
a fan of

| marquees.  She 'd rather trust in the weather but she knew the final
decision was up to Betsy and Andy.  However, if they wanted her advice,
she could provide worthwhile counsel, having been through this sort
of

| thing so very often, not as a direct participant, of course, but as a
worker

|, bee, so to speak.  Notions of a particularly nice present for that
nice girl

!" Betsy were beginning to occur to Lily, assembling in a crystalline
form

| belling like a goblet yet lit from within, a lamp, perhaps.  Betsy
ought to

|. cherish something old and something Hill.  And this very well might
be

;5; our last occasion here, Lily thought.  It would have to serve.  '
p. "Aunt Lily," Little Becky's voice loudly entreated, breaking off
Lily's further thoughts.  "Aunt Lily, say they can, say Betsy and Andy
can."  | " It's what we want," Betsy also appealed to Lily.

"Then get on with your plans," Harvey said.  "Is there any coffee?"

I he asked Becky.  He hadn't quite cottoned onto the change in the
catering situation.

I " There's French Roast from the Coffee Bazaar.  I've ground my own

| beans and filtered them with spring water," said Ginger, rising.
"Coffee

I all around?  " she asked the table at large.  " With top cream and
raw sugar

| cubes."

I " Spring water?  We have our own private well water.  What's she
need

1 to run out to buy commercial spring water for?  For the pretty label?
"

| Alden wondered.  " We have wonderful water here."  V "I know, honey,"
Penny said.  "I can't get enough of the stuff."

"Lily," Becky said.  "Please promise you'll come visit us in Prague.
What about for Christmas?  Think about next Christmas."

Lily smiled and did not say she had not yet finished thinking about
last Christmas.

"I'm going to quiz your father on taxes myself," Harvey was saying to
Betsy.  "Because I'm going to have a capital gains issue when my house
sells and my tax man has lost his acumen.  Oh, he clings to his form
like an old circus lion will roar at a whip but I ask you, where are
his teeth?  In a glass on the nightstand."

"Daddy will," Betsy promised vaguely.  "Be happy to."

"And have you told your mother, Andy?  " Becky asked.

"Oh yes.  We called her as well, after we called Mr.  Tuckerman, and
she's wondering whether to send Uncle William an invitation since he
obviously can't come, as if she even knew where to send it, so that's
hardly an issue at the moment," Andy said.

"Perhaps you can send an announcement later," Becky suggested, and she
realized that here, now, was a new link to William just forged.  She
would speak of him, from time to time, as her niece's by marriage uncle
by marriage.

"But when are we going to Czechoslovakia because I have to tell Hannah,
she really counts on me, she said so," Little Becky asked Alden who
told her they would be leaving soon-they would just stay for the
wedding and then they too must be off.

Brooks and Rollins were reminding themselves that Uncle Hap in Colorado
was really kind of cool.  He had his own ranch and his own cattle
brand, which, admittedly, was only an H and a smiley face, but still,
the brand sizzled when it hit the cow's flank.

"You're going to get away with it," Glover remarked across the table to
Betsy.

"That's what I was thinking," Betsy answered, because Uncle Harvey had
wanted his coffee and her mother had jumped up to show what a superior
hostess she was to Aunt Becky and the subject had changed and the date
of the big Czechoslovakia decampment was now pending on the wedding
date and Uncle Harvey was counting on her father to come and straighten
out his tax problem, and Aunt Lily too would need her father's help
although Mrs.  Nicholls was assuring Aunt Lily they would all get to
the bottom of the outrageous tax reassessment because half of Senior
Village had been forced to sell their homes and it was time to make a
stand.  And even Little Becky was smiling and looking forward to being
the center of positive attention as a member of the wedding party.  She
would get to wear a new long dress and serious makeup and a veil.

ANDY HAD TO RETURN to campus for a spell to tie up loose ends and to
ride the wave of the splash he had made for as far as it would take him
from the place that had launched him.  Betsy saw him off.  She walked
alongside the Bug as Andy chugged down the driveway lane, her arm
lightly laid upon the sill of Andy's cranked-down window.  Everything
seemed to remind her of marching down an aisle.  Even now, she
practiced her sedate pacing, measuring her steps against the turn of
the tires which demonstrated the fluidity to which she aspired.  She
was not going to be one of those brides who lolloped, whose veil
jounced and flapped, who arrived at the altar rail six bars ahead of
the concluding note of the organ voluntary.  Such an awkward pause
ensued, and the last days had made one long awkward pause between her
announcement and the event which was still some weeks away.

"Good luck, Andy," Betsy said, on the verge of the River Road.

"I'll call you tonight."

"Okay."

They were not an excitable couple.  The family did not have to forsake
comfortable chairs and prime TV programs to give the young couple
privacy.  The pair had gotten over the swim my and swoony stage of the
initial enchantment rather swiftly.  Having made sure of one another,
they turned to making sure of the details.

"I have your lunch," Betsy added, her practical last word as she passed
a paper bag through his open window.  She had given him a white
American cheese sandwich and red grapes as Andy found out beyond
Sturbridge when he recognized he was hungry.  A mayonnaise-coated
lettuce leaf dropped from his loosely constructed sandwich onto his
pants leg, and when he turned his brown paper lunch bag upside down to
shake out a napkin, a single silver-wrapped Hershey's kiss fell into
his lap.

Betsy, he reminded himself, was very, very young.

When he arrived later that afternoon, Andy knew he no longer fit on
campus.  As he strolled across the shaded and shadowed quadrangles,
leafy branches of the surviving campus elms brushed the top of his head
and the rise of his cheek (he was smiling).  They had not done so,
ever, in the past but now even the trees were telling him he had
outgrown the place, gracefully and fondly expressing farewell with
their cool and textured touch.

Andy did not run into anyone he knew.  Faces were familiar but only as
types-as if the campus had been recast while he was away, Andy
thought.

He found Professor Janacek by chance in his tower office.  The
professor greeted Andy warmly and denied (although Andy had not
accused) that he had been caught napping.  Indeed, the professor said,
he had been leaning back in his-endowed-swivel chair, eyes closed and
hands clasped over his stomach recalling the salient features of Andy's
most admirable thesis.

"Yes, I was thinking about you and "The Penny Under the Rug," "
Professor Janacek said.  "I think I shall let you get away with that
title.  I shall allow you to be evocative just this once and for the
last time because I am pleased with you.  Your work," he drew a breath
and pronounced, "your work is the kind of work careers are based upon.
That is, the kind of career I expect you expect to have.  Mind you, you
don't have a book yet, but you have an article, Andy.  I have made
calls on your behalf.  You are being mentioned.  I am seeing to it that
you are being mentioned."

"Sir," Andy said, bowing his head as if for a knighting, and his eyes
gazed up at the little Braque swirl suspended behind Professor
Janacek's head.  The Braque, which had always been there, had since
been joined by a small Brancusi object.  Andy didn't know what one was
supposed to call these tiny, but precious, efforts, nevertheless, Andy
rather thought he'd like to invest in Art for his own eventual office.
He wondered how one got in on the ground floor of acquiring the next
generation of Braque or Brancusi, something affordable and not large,
something easily portable as he made his own way up from the ground
floor.  That is, as he and Betsy made their way.  For a moment the
thought flickered across his consciousness that Betsy was yet another
prize acquired early and perspicaciously.  He had intended to draw out
old Janacek on the subject of Art, but, Andy decided, perhaps he would
trust to his own eye and instinct.  Then again, the Professor would
enjoy being asked.

"Sir," Andy said.  "I'm thinking of buying a small picture, as a
wedding present to myself."

"AND THEN PROFESSOR JANACEK and Andy went out to eat, actually, I think
they went out to drink.  Professor Janacek is very excited about "The
Penny Under the Rug' which is all about the aftereflects of an FBI raid
on an enclosed community, meaning us.  Because Andy said Professor

Janacek said that as one totalitarian society dies another one may be
rising.  That's us, I mean, that's America, which may be changing.
Because with our external enemies all gone now, we, as members of the
human species will create internal enemies, because societies need
adversaries to help to define what their society is, or as is more
often the case, to define what their society is not all about."

Betsy had just gotten off the kitchen telephone with Andy.  Harvey had
been listening in on her half of the conversation while he stood over a
saucepan of cocoa warming on the stove top.  Now, Betsy was filling him
in on Andy's portion of their talk which somehow only seemed polite.
Harvey listened and flicked the salt shaker over the saucepan before
Betsy could prevent him.

"Janacek?  " Harvey asked.  " What is it with this family and Czechs?
"

"And Andy is going to speak at a seminar on closed circuit TV, to a
gathering of five hundred students located in three different states.
Professor Janacek says Andy has carved out a niche, and besides being a
teacher, Andy might possibly also have a sideline in consulting or
being an expert witness at trials and such, you know, like when the
government shoots innocent citizens when they are only exercising their
constitutional rights or even when the government shoots not so
innocent citizens when they're violating somebody else's constitutional
rights.  Because you can't go around killing people, even unpleasant
people, at least not without a trial, even if you are the government,"
Betsy said.

"Especially if you're the U.S. government.  Noblesse oblige and all
that.  We lead the world by our fine example," Harvey agreed.  He
dipped a fingertip into the saucepan and winced.  Too hot.  He added a
splash of milk and a pinch of cocoa and poured his drink into his Foxy
Grampa mug, a gag gift from Penny.  "And just what did Andy conclude
are the aftereflects of an FBI raid on an enclosed community such as
ours?"  Harvey asked.  "I am curious, what are our symptoms?  "

"Well, the potential symptoms are insomnia," Betsy said.  "And anger,
depression, loss of self-esteem, a feeling of powerlessness, a need for
solitude, a need for companionship, and also very interestingly in
certain cases there is identification with and capitulation to the
intervening authority figure."

"Sorry I missed it," Harvey said tartly.  "With that list, Andy'll be
in on the kill at the civil trial when they're assessing the damages to
a pack of mud-matted, high-smelling militiamen routed from their
boondocks stronghold.  Remind me to tell Andy where to start buying his
suits.  He 'll want to come across as a corporate and not an academic
hired gun.  Juries won't pay out nearly so much on the say-so of
leather elbow patches and tweeds you could scour this pot with."
Harvey held up the scorched saucepan.

"Andy says he's applying for a grant to study a rural Christian
survivalist community whose leader is in prison, and he'll have to buy
a camouflage suit and a feed store cap to blend in, he said," Betsy
said.

" Well, your Uncle Alden won't be needing his Towne Co-Op cap very much
longer," Harvey pointed out.  "Andy can wear that if he really thinks
he wants to spend his time with the likes of wilderness Christians. But
when's the lad coming home?  "

"He'll be back next week."

"WE ARE DROWNING in tulle," Ginger reported over the telephone.  She
had been burning up the wires between Towne and Kansas.  The latest
telephone bill, Scotch-taped to the refrigerator door, showed rows of
Area Code 316 calls-ninety-seven minutes, one hundred and eighteen
minutes, two hundred minutes-which Lily said she was going to
question.

The telephone company's adding machine must have overheated and began
chattering out zeroes by the time it arrived at page five of the

Hills' formidable May ATT bill.  This June's bill was going to be an
eyeful.

Ginger had established her gala wedding headquarters in the front hall.
She shoved a kneehole desk beneath the stair rise and she wrestled a
sturdy-armed captain's chair from the dining room.  She presided there
by the hour, working the telephone and consulting her stack of Bride's
Magazine and Modern Bride and Traditional Bride and Young Bride and
Metropolitan Bride and the World of Brides.  She scrawled notes to
herself-There is a man in Reading who rents a horse-drawn and
delightful carriage for the ride to and from the church.  He bought the
Cinderella Pumpkin

Coach from Story land's bankruptcy sale.  Ask if the pumpkin is still
orange and if so, can it be painted a mid-ripening gourd green instead
to match our color scheme???  Becky picked up one such note and read
it.  Darker writing bled through from the other side.  She turned over
the sheet of paper and read, Men base all of their assumptions about
women upon one woman, whereas women don't base all of their assumptions
about men upon one man.

Oh, Ginger was recycling manuscript pages.

Ginger pushed pins into Lily's soft old plaster walls securing fabric
swatches alongside pictures torn from magazines of table settings and
honeymoon situations and samples of engraved invitations (which were
not under any circumstances to be printed by Anna Webster's nephew,
hadn't anyone heard about that young man and his habits?).  The
coatrack bore several mother-of-the-bride hats Ginger needed to study
and to think about.  She was creating her ensemble from the top down.
My hat, as she explained to anyone who would still listen, will
matter.

But it was not possible not to overhear Ginger's verbalizations.  Her
carrying voice sounded in every corner of the house.  Her words welled
up the stairs, resonated in the kitchen, and visited the parlors as she
put tough questions about layer slippage and marzipan digestibility to
cake designers.  She la-la-turn med the music she meant to have for the
agents of string quartets.  She reacted to caterers' proposals with
cries and happy little moans as she collected menus and estimates. "And
now I must consult with my daughter," Ginger always explained before
she rang off.  But Betsy seemed to have ideas of her own which,
nevertheli less, she failed to impart to her mother.  Ginger's aim now,
was to hit upon Betsy's wishes by this scattershot method.

Ginger was at her very best when on the line with her old Kansas
friends.  She dialed.  She identified herself.  She held the exclaiming
receiver extra inches from her ear.  She waited until an eager and
expectant silence fell into which she dropped her bombshell.

"Yes, my little Betsy.  Though of course she's no longer so little."

Ginger ignored any tentative attempts to question her concerning the
tiresome old business that had caused her to go away the previous
summer.

Instead, she delivered a happy and constructive speech.

She presented herself as a Henry James-style mother who had led a
lovely daughter East, to the Old World, and guided her toward a
brilliant marriage to a distinguished scholar of the human condition.
Her real friends let her get away with that.  Her other friends
reminded her that the Gilded Age was over and said they were pretty
sure there weren't many happy endings to be found in Henry James
although, admittedly, it could be hard to get through to the end with
him but you felt you knew what was coming.

And Ginger had been told half a dozen times that Oscar had up and
married one of his office girls, which she had known all along, she
said.  She had practically ordered him to settle down with someone
uncontroversial and get on with his life.

"You must come to the wedding," Ginger would say after the pause.  "We
're counting on your coming.  Don't say no just yet.  You must come."

It would have made so much more sense to hold the wedding in Kansas,
but Betsy was indifferent now and Ginger was adamant.  Kansas was
coming to her, Ginger said.  Lily hoped Ginger understood there wasn't
room for half of Kansas to stay at the house, however, she had heard
that the By-Way Motor Hotel had quieted down since they lost their
liquor license after last winter's near-fatal shooting.  The Eastern
Star was going to hold their annual meeting in the hotel's Heritage

Room now that the Congo basement was off-limits because they'd just
found out they had asbestos ceiling tiles, so that was a positive
endorsement.

Betsy let Ginger know the wedding date, which proved to mark to the
year and a day their flight from home.  Ginger suspected Betsy had
rigged that fairy-tale timing but in truth, Betsy had jumped at the
first available Saturday on Mr.  Penworthy's July calendar.  Marriage
came into season as surely as the lilacs and the apple blossoms, Mr.
Penworthy had said, studying the entries in his datebook, his fingers
tapping his private opinion of the inked-in matches-to-be.  His remark
had worried Betsy.  Did he think she and Andy were just being
susceptible to some sweetness in the air?  She and Andy were required
to meet with him in the rectory study for serious talks about marriage.
Andy and Mr.  Penworthy argued theoretically and happily over the
origins of the leviratic law one week, and the decline of hetaerism
among the ancient Hellenes the next.  For her part, Betsy was quite
certain she knew what she was getting herself into.  Mrs.  Penworthy,
who said hello when Betsy and Andy entered and good-bye when they left,
seemed tired but content although one day she took Betsy aside and told
her that when she was eighteen she had wanted to marry Lindsey
Buckingham.

Somehow, it was decided the reception was to be held outside in the
field, which would have to be mown.  Gee Weeden knew a man who would
oblige for the hay.  Lily said there would be roses, masses of
Constance

Spry tumbling along the wall on the far side of the meadow (and which
might a year hence be torn up by their roots to make way for a
hangar-sized house with a five-car garage).  Mrs.  Snowdon unexpectedly
offered to write the invitations.  She revealed that she used to create
beautiful calligraphy menus and cartes de place for official affairs
when she and Mr.  Snowdon lived in Philadelphia and were first making
their way in the world.  Hannah offered to cook for the reception.  She
had started out as a caterer and she liked to keep her hand in, she
said.

One afternoon Betsy slipped away on her own and bought a dress at the
vintage clothing shop where Ginevra Platt-Willey had said she always
shopped for costumes.  Betsy found a white lawn shirt dress with a
tucked and pleated bodice and a long, bell-shaped skirt.  Betsy brought
the dress home in an authentic Balenciaga box.  Ginger loved the box
and she hated the dress.

"Darling, it's so draggly.  And there's that rust stain on the skirt.
Oh, God, if it is rust," she said.

" They said at the shop I could pin a sprig of ferns and a flower or
two over the spot.  It's only a little spot.  You have to be looking to
criticize to even find it," said Betsy.  "Maybe I'll pin ferns and
flowers all over the dress."

"You'll look like some sort of retro hippie wanna-be," Ginger said.
"And please don't tell me you're planning to wear a circlet of flowers
in your hair with ribbon streamers flowing down your back.  Oh, Betsy,
don't.  I have a line on some precious and old Alengon lace if you're
really after a vintage look.  And at least let me hem that dress.
You'll step out the bottom, it's so long.  You'll fall flat on your
face and you'll crush your bouquet and then I won't be able to have it
dried and saved for you to keep forever in a presentation case.  I have
a brochure.  The effect is charming."

"No, Mummy," Betsy said.  "I won't let you hem my dress.  You'll do
something on purpose to ruin it and then you'll try to tell me your
hand went into an uncontrollable spasm and your scissors ran amok..."

"If you're trying to hurt my feelings, you're succeeding splendidly,"
Ginger told her.

"I'm not trying to hurt your feelings.  I'm just not trying not to
anymore, and if you have noticed a difference lately, Mummy, that's
what you've noticed," Betsy said.

Alden, who happened to overhear the exchange, told Becky he was
beginning to wonder if Andy knew what he was letting himself in for.
Perhaps the apple didn't fall very far from the tree, after all.

IN THE MIDST OF these other considerations, Lily heard one day from a
representative of TowneVest Corporation and she agreed to receive a
Miss Tina Angler the following afternoon for a little chat, as the
representative characterized the proposed meeting.

"A very little chat," Lily restated firmly.

Harvey, when consulted, advised that the brief interview take place
outside on the terrace.  Otherwise, this Miss Angler would craftily ask
to use the lavatory and take advantage of Lily's old ears and naively
trusting nature to prowl and poke in every corner of the house on her
way to and from the facilities, ferreting for information to use
against Lily in any entirely mythical negotiations to come.  For
instance, Miss Angler would find the mineral-encrusted buckets
stationed at the ready beneath the usual roof leaks, which buckets of
course might be gathered and hidden in anticipation of such a
presumptuous house crawl, but then they'd have to hustle and realign
the pails within the ringed ridges they'd made in the rugs before the
next downpour threatened and likely they'd forget.  They all had so
much else on their minds at the moment which was why the buckets had
been left out in the first place after the last storm.

"But she can still ask to visit the lav, even when she's outside, and
I'd be obliged to let her in," Lily had said.  "It would be unpleasant
not to."

"No.  Give her nothing to drink, if Miss Angler is so disposed to
piddle like a puppy," Harvey said.  "Keep her strictly outside with
nothing on offer even though it's the sherry hour you've committed us
to seeing her.  Oh yes, I'll be there.  You want me there, don't you?
"

Lily said she believed she did.

When Miss Angler arrived and approached Harvey and Lily who stuck to
the terrace stones as if to a beachhead, she handed Lily a business
card at which Lily glanced.  Oh dear, Tina was a Teena, which Lily
would rather not have known, although Miss Angler's parents were the
ones to blame.  The last year she taught school, Lily had had a Hidey
in class.  Lily had known then, the time had come for her to retreat
into private life.

"Are you with us, Lily?  " Harvey had to ask her.

There were twenty-eight chairs scattered across the terrace.  All of
the wicker, wrought iron, Adirondack, metal tubing, and plastic-mesh
webbing chaises and chairs had been dragged from the barn and were
being hosed down and air-cured and patched up, after a fashion,
anticipating the crowd that would drop by after the wedding service.

"You folks must like to sit a lot," observed Miss Angler when told to
sit anywhere.  She opted for something high-backed in rattan.

Neither Lily nor Harvey explained there was to be a celebration, and
they remained standing.  Harvey paced, and Lily plucked spent blossoms
from the petunias planted in one of the terrace urns.

"Such a big old place," Miss Angler said, rearing back her head and
staring up at the side facade of the house.  "You must just rattle
around in there."

"Such an odd phrase, rattling around," Harvey said, considering it.

"Why is the term usually applied to old people living in large houses?
Are you referencing our old bones, Miss Angler?  Are you anticipating
the not too distant future when I and my sister will be naught but
skeleton and skull?  "

"Like seeds in a husk," Lily spoke up.  "We're not really old
skeletons.

Miss Angler thinks we're like dried-up seeds in a husk."

" There, now we 've rattled Miss Angler," Harvey warned Lily.  " Nice
pink plump Miss Angler."

After a pause, and after a question put by Harvey, Miss Angler would
not name the persons operating behind TowneVest Corp.  They wished to
remain in the background.  In any event, Miss Angler said, you will not
know them.

" I have a wide acquaintance," Harvey said.

"What are, what would their plans be?"  Lily asked, if only to confirm
whether she had pictured the worst.

" We intend to establish a community of luxury homes, each nestled on
its own manageable-sized section of grounds because these overly large
properties," Miss Angler waved toward the horizon, "are so impractical
in these busy times, fooling with gardens and suchlike."

Lily frowned.

"People desire estate-lettes nowadays?"  Harvey suggested.

"Yes, yes they do," Miss Angler agreed.  "And this planned, gated
community of luxury estate-lettes," Harvey was awarded a little smile
of acknowledgment, "will be called, in your family's honor, Hillcrest
Farms."

Which Lily didn't think sounded quite right.  " Isn't that the name of
a breakfast sausage company?  " she asked.

"You're thinking of Hillshire Farms, Lily," Harvey came up with the
name after a moment during which they all considered.

"That's it, Hillshire.  But the names are uncomfortably close," Lily
said.

"Yes, it summons up a miasma of greasy fat frying hanging over the
place.  I mean, there would be an odor.  The man will ask you where to
deliver your mulch and you won't like to say," Harvey said.  "No, your
idea sounds unacceptable," he told Miss Angler.  "We can't let folks
new to Towne come to the awful realization after the fact what they've
bough ten themselves in for."

Miss Angler, who had only been cozying up to the old folks-she had yet
to mention the proposed Lily Lane, though no doubt the old woman would
object that that sounded too much like one of Superman's girlfriends if
given the chance-decided the time had come to get to the point.

"But surely you'll want to hear the range of a possible offer," she
said.  " I am authorized today, not to offer, but to begin to raise the
range of a possibly forthcoming offer."

"Oh, I don't think that sounds very meaningful to us, do you, Lily?  "
Harvey said.  "If you're not really authorized, and our old ears might
mishear you.  We could all end up in court."

Lily said she'd just as soon avoid a big trial.

"Pretty enough gal," Harvey remarked before Miss Angler was quite out
of range, "only it makes you suspect their big guns must be pretty
small caliber if she's their opening salvo."

But Lily didn't think there would need to be all that much of a battle
to defeat her, in the end.

"JUST WAIT UNTIL Daddy gets here," had become Ginger's dire promise to
Betsy for the last weeks even as Betsy held her ground and Ginger
retreated.  No, said Betsy, to the videographer-cum-director who would
"stage" the wedding, "act" by precious "act," and, Yes, said Betsy,
Ginevra Platt-Willey was too going to sing "You Are the Wind Beneath My
Wings" before the vows, and Ginger could wear her mother-of pearl
mother-of-the-bride commemorative earplugs if she did not wish to
hear.

Louis, hurried along at the very end by a suddenly clear notion of a
practical tack he could at last take, had caught an earlier and more
direct flight from Wichita and he arrived ahead of schedule at Logan.
His rental vehicle was waiting for him at the curb.  He had requested a
van, for he was sure he would be required to fetch and to carry in the
coming days and, indeed, he had decided it would be best under the
circumstances to be able to absent himself from the house on useful,
wedding-generated errands.  There would be cases of wine and masses of
flowers and Andy Happening's flying-in-from-Florida mother to be
collected.  Louis, thus far unconsulted on the details, could only
imagine the most basic components of the celebration to come but he did
not doubt Ginger would greet him at the door waving an annotated and
important To-Do list, one which he would pretend to read while Ginger
affected to point out the most drastically imperative errands for him
to attend to first.  Their shoulders would bump, their hands would
touch across a scrawled word or two of wedding bother, he would lace a
mutually steadying arm around her waist, for they would both be
uncertain.  Louis could only imagine the most basic components of a
reconciliation.

Pretty countryside, he thought as he turned off the highway, variously
green, hilly, rocky, cultivated, quaint.  Sitting uncommonly high in
the van's boosted driver's seat, he enjoyed an expanded view.  The
local rocks had been arranged into walls, gardens bloomed in soft,
coordinating colors, specimen trees timed to flower in sequence were
flowering in sequence.  Within the village limits, he remembered having
been told, the utility lines had been buried so that movie companies
might set up and film historical dramas among Towne's historical roads
and residences, as dirt was dumped and raked over pavement and
satellite dishes were wreathed in foliage.  No film company had come as
yet to take advantage, but Louis guessed Towne entertained dramas
enough of its own in the meanwhile.  He himself was on his way to take
up his part in what he hoped would be the final scene or two of his
wife's latest, and he hoped last, theatrics.

Louis had not been back to Towne since he attended the funeral of his
mother-in-law.  On that occasion, he recalled, he had been sent to meet
a train to collect some cousins, and later he had been asked to run out
to fetch ice cream.  He had jumped at those opportunities to absent
himself from the house on that visit as well.  Hills in mourning had
been snappish and brusque with one another.  They had quarreled over
the time the cousins' train was due in at Hamilton station, and they
could not agree upon the precise year in which some pointlessly
significant badminton tournament had occurred.  No one mentioned the
dead, departed one.  It was as if Olive had somehow discredited herself
and embarrassed the rest of them by dying just a bit too sadly and too
soon upstairs in one of Lily's bedrooms while the fiction had been
maintained all along that she was just there visiting while her place
in Florida was being painted.  Too sadly and too soon, not unlike his
daughter's precipitous marriage, Louis thought.

Landmarks Betsy had mentioned when reminding him of the route through
Towne were appearing-the flat, greeny-black meandering river, a mailbox
painted like the original American flag, the pine tree that tilted and
dropped needles over the road that collected like a rough carpet there.
Betsy had said she would tie a balloon to Lily's forsaken looking
mailbox and there one was, a silver bright Mylar globe plumped with
helium, tethered and revolving in the slight breeze rising off the
river.  WELCOME, it read.  WELCOME, it read.

But he had arrived before the time he told them to expect him and there
was no one about to receive him.  He called several names, Ginger?

Betsy?  Miss Lily?  Ginger?"  and he let himself in through the front
door.  He set his two snapped-shut suitcases down at the foot of the
gracefully ascending staircase and he wandered through the lower rooms,
which, though not very familiar to him, nevertheless struck him as not
being in their usual states.  Preparations were in evidence
everywhere.

Piles of net fabric, a cluster of white bud vases, rolls of ribbons,
pieces of fabric were left lying about in arrangements which obviously
ought not to be disturbed.  In the larger of the sitting rooms a
tabletop was beginning to be heaped with opened and unopened wedding
gifts.  Louis leaned and looked at tags-the table wobbled beneath his
weight, one shorter leg imperfectly propped by a little brown bound
volume too slight to be anything but poetry.

LILY WAS OUT in the barn sanding ancient bird droppings from the top of
the old cedar picnic table that was going to hold the best cut-crystal
bowl and punch cups at the reception.  The table would, of course, be
covered with a cloth-with linen or damask or perhaps with fresh young
pink-and-white gingham check if they bought the fabric and cut and
hemmed it in time-but it wouldn't be very nice to know what lay just
underneath the covering.  And what if the wind flapped up a corner of
the tablecloth and revealed the bird spots and spatters beneath?  At an
everyday picnic, Lily would anchor the four corners of a tablecloth
with rocks but that was too casual a solution for a wedding.  Still,
they could collect the rocks beforehand and wrap them in pink gingham
check (if they were going to go with the gingham check) and tie them
with pink grosgrain ribbon.  Only then, the guests might mistake the
scattered parcels for favors, and open them with every expectation of
finding

Jordan Almonds and Buttermints and a matchbook embossed with the day's
date and the entwining initials A&B.  (The effect was charming,

Ginger said.)

Lily was using an electric sander.  She held on tight as the shuddering
apparatus skidded over the board planks kicking up the cedar scent long
dormant in the wood, which pleased her.  At that moment, she began to
feel less anxious about the wedding.  If the preparations brought about
such a residual benefit, perhaps Betsy would be all right in her choice
and her decision.  Lily switched off her screeching sander and bent and
placed her nose against a friction-heated and fragrant board.  Louis,
who had been standing behind her for several minutes waiting for the
noise to abate, stepped forward.

"Louis," Lily exclaimed.  "Louis is here," she called to someone.

Ginger's Uncle Harvey stood up from behind what appeared to be a
battered old piano centered on a square of tarp placed in a shadowy
apse of the barn.

"Well, Louis," Harvey said, setting down a polishing cloth and a can of
paste wax.  "Just the man I want to see."

"Ginger," Lily spoke up, not without alarm.  "Ginger is having a
fitting for her wedding-day dress.  She isn't here."

"And Betsy?  " Louis asked.

"Betsy?  Betsy was going to be here.  And I suppose you'll be wanting
to meet Andy.  But they aren't here.  You're early, aren't you?  " Lily
said.

"Yes."

" Because I was planning to give you all lunch, you and Ginger and
Betsy and Andy, out on the terrace," Lily said.  She had made a tuna
salad.  She had washed a lettuce.  She had hidden strawberries beneath
an overturned colander so with luck no one had found and eaten them.
She had asked Harvey's advice on wine, not for something that went with
tuna salad and strawberries, but for a wine that had placating
qualities; she required a wine of well-being.  She understood that
certain vintages had high opinions of their good effects upon the
persons who consumed them.  Harvey had recommended not a particular
label but had counseled providing a copious amount.

"You can still feed the troops, Lily," Harvey said.  "But first, since
you're here early and at loose ends, Louis, I want to pick your brain.
Are you wearing shoes?  " he asked.

Louis glanced down at his feet.  "Yes?  " he said.

"Because Lily and I had best take you out into the woods to see for
yourself," Harvey said.

So Louis found himself trailing Lily and Harvey across the field and
into the early-summer woods.  He was not averse to stretching his legs
after his day spent in the air and on the road.  And, he supposed, as
he kept pace behind the swiftly moving old people, avoiding the slaps
of overgrowing branches and squelching along the edge of a Lost World
swamp of slime and leaping life, he would have been rather disappointed
had the family eccentricity not manifested itself.  The Hills, and nee
Hills, could behave quite plausibly, even graciously, to outsiders, and
he had not been certain whether he would be met again as a stranger or
a friend.  This easy abduction of himself and the forced march seemed
an endorsement.

The bugs were fierce.  Filmy flies sipped from his tearing eyes.
Mosquitoes drilled for his life's blood.  His back twitched with
crawling sensations-sweat, he assured himself as he swiped his
forehead.  The old ones were spry, however, and they had grabbed
protective mesh hoods from a hook before starting out.  (They had
looked, not very sincerely, for a spare hood for Louis.) Harvey trotted
and Lily tramped stoutly as they squabbled back and forth-something
about angles and offers.  Louis could not hear them well.  He had
fallen behind on the barely discernible path they were following which
put him in mind of a sinister sketch across the landscape laid down by
smugglers or partisan guerrillas preparing for a final assault upon a
provincial capital.

"Louis?"

He heard his name called and he battered through a last thicket of
tightly branched little fir trees which impeded his passage as
determinedly as reporters at a society arraignment (in Louis's
real-life experience).

"We've lost Louis," Harvey was saying, not without a smack of
satisfaction at having out paced the younger but heavier man.  " No,
no, no, here he is, he's come the wrong way round."

"He's been badly scratched," Lily remarked worriedly.  She was thinking
of some formal picture sittings Ginger had scheduled.  Ginger would
mind if Louis had to be turned this way and that to find a presentable
side, particularly if that side did not align with the perfect pose of
herself Ginger had discovered in the front hall mirror and around which
she meant to organize the wedding party when the time came to sort
themselves out before the camera.

"I'm all right, Miss Lily," Louis assured her, mistaking the reason for
her concern.  "Some astringent pitch has settled in the wounds," he
said, indicating his cheek.  "Probably an old Indian cure, pitch in a
wound," he hazarded, looking toward Harvey as if for confirmation.
Harvey harrumphed in protest.  Who was Louis calling an old Indian?

Then Lily and Harvey rolled up their mesh hoods and took off their
eyeglasses and rubbed the lenses unimprovingly with untucked corners of
their shirttails, all the while expectantly regarding Louis who
returned their diminished gazes and attempted to divine what they
required of him.

"Well?"  demanded Harvey.  "And what do you make of this?"  he wanted
to know.  He swept his eyeglasses panoramically as if even they had to
have a look.

"Oh, is someone building up here on the ridge?"  Louis asked, noticing
now that trees had been toppled and the forest floor gouged and scored
by the tracks of an earthmover.  "Nice spot for a house," Louis said.
"I suspect if you cut down those tall hemlocks in the way you'd have a
grand view back down to the village."

ALDEN AND BECKY RETURNED from their Czech lessons in Cambridge with an
emigre and retired vocal coach who now taught the spoken word to select
students who came recommended by sources who had also come recommended.
They were learning how to order in restaurants and how to buy concert
tickets and which seats to request and which to refuse with contempt at
Smetana Hall.  They made efforts to pronounce the names of everyday
household objects-chair, door,

lamp, book, fireplace poker, piano bench, metronome.  Madame Um (the
effort to pronounce her name had ended) assured them that most of the
up-and-coming Czechs they would encounter would speak English, and the
old ones gargled on in German (Alden said) but it was well taken when
foreigners made an attempt.  It occurred to Alden and Becky that Madame
Um, ensconced in her Bohemian lair on Craigie Circle, failed to
understand-the Czechs were going to be the foreigners in Czechoslovakia
in the days to come when even the most monoglot of Americans would know
themselves to be at home in almost any corner of the world, and welcome
to it.

They had come upon the younger boys hopping and mincing their way
barefoot up the driveway.  They had been swimming in the river.  They
carried wrung-out T-shirts which they snapped at one another.  Their
hair snaked across their faces in skinny queues.

"Louis is here?"  Alden asked them, tossing his not very dogeared Czech
grammar down upon the pie crust table and indicating the suitcases set
at the foot of the stairway.

" We don't know," Brooks said.

"Carry your Uncle Louis's bags up to, up to where?  Where should they
put Louis's bags?  " Alden asked Becky.

"I have no idea," Becky said, "and we ought not to interfere.  Let
Louis and Ginger work out where he's going to sleep.  Boys, put the
bags down.  Leave them.  Yes, I know Dad said to help but some help
isn't helping."

Brooks and Rollins dropped the bags and stalked off.  They were heard
laughing excessively behind the little-parlor door.

LATER, LOUIS QUIETLY CARRIED his own suitcases up to Ginger's room,
which she had gone so far as to tidy.  She had piled her reference
books in a neat pillar in one corner and collected manuscript pages in
a cardboard box and undraped beads and scarves from the mirror and
gathered all the wine bottles and glasses and cake plates and apple
cores and sandwich crusts from her mantel.  She had folded almost all
of her clothes away in the bureau and hung them up in the closet.  She
had left a drawer empty and three wooden hangers clear for Louis. There
were the last of the peonies in a vase on the mantel.  She had changed
the sheets and found a foam rubber pillow in the blanket chest-down and
feathers provided insufficient support for Louis's large, thoughtful
head.  She had even vacuumed.  She had clogged Lily's Hoover with dust
clumps and paper clips and cotton puffs.  She had nearly lost her
temper and Lily had come upon her muttering and ramming a curtain rod
up the hose.  Lily had shown Ginger how to reverse the vacuum's motor
and aim the hose out an open window to shoot the blockage material into
the air-which soared most satisfyingly like a shot across the bows.

"I think the main culprit was one of Alden's socks," Ginger had said.
"I can see it there snagged on a lilac."

That first evening, Ginger and Louis drove off to dine alone at
Hannah's where Little Becky waited on them even though the best table
in the quiet niche beside the beehive oven wasn't her usual station.
She brought them extra bread in their basket, and herb butter.  She
explained the evening's specials very thoroughly.  She fetched Hannah
herself whenever their wineglasses needed to be refilled.  She drizzled
generous citrus sauce on their scallops ceviche.  She lingered and told
Uncle Louis how nice Andy Happening was, and how nice Aunt Lily was,
and how cousin Arthur was going to be on television, in a comedy show.
Phoebe was nice too.  It was too bad Uncle Louis hadn't been able to
come to visit when Phoebe and Arthur were still living at the house.
And did Uncle Louis want to know who else was nice?  Well, Mrs.
Nicholls was turning out to be pretty nice too.

Then Hannah called Little Becky into the kitchen to scoop tea flavored
sorbet onto minted shortbread disks, but Little Becky had watched when
the swinging door swung open into the dining room, and she got to see
Uncle Louis giving Aunt Ginger diamond earrings in a box.  Ginger had
put them on and gauged the effect in Uncle Louis's eyes and then taken
them off and put them back in the box.  Maybe she was saving them for
the wedding, so everyone should act big surprised when Aunt Ginger
showed up wearing her huge new diamond earrings, that was Little
Becky's advice.  Yes, Aunt Ginger had liked her new earrings so much
she had cried, good crying, not like the other kind, Little Becky
said.

Louis and Betsy drove off to lunch at Hannah's the following day.

Little Becky wasn't scheduled to work, so no impressionistic account of
glimpses and snatches of their attitudes and conversation was
available, not that anyone imagined there would be fireworks or
waterworks.  Father and daughter shared a balanced temperament.
Louis's when was judicious and Betsy, having observed parent and parent
from her cradle onward had long ago chosen equanimity as her own
measure too, which was a large part of Ginger's problem, in Alden's
opinion. With his sister's born talent for harrowing and faction, her
little family in its grey unrufflability must have retreated to its
dovecote below the shadow fall of her circling hawk all those years
they lived together on the brink of the featureless prairie where the
doves held every advantage.  They could always see a hawk coming from a
very long way off.

"Daddy still says all right to my marrying you even after he's met
you," Betsy told Andy after her return.  She had brought home half of
her wild mushroom duxelle en croute with sauce bearnaise wrapped in a
twist of tinfoil.  She had found Andy outside reposing on a terrace
chaise longue reading Hawaii, which he'd un ambitiously extracted from
Lily's bookshelves.  He had sampled a page or two, then closed his eyes
and reflected, not un complacently how well arranged this wedding
business was.  All that was required of the groom was to stand by avail
ably or even just to lie about with a book, enough at hand to allow the
various women called in to assist with the preparations to be able to
get a good look at him.  Why, he's quite handsome, the women had
whispered at Betsy, as if that were important or, even, true.  Perhaps
it did matter, because Betsy was so beautiful and he was not yet
powerful or wealthy, so that left only his looks to justify her
decision.  The women, Andy told himself, didn't want to send a rising
star player to a minor league team.

"Daddy still says?  " Andy opened his eyes and smiled at Betsy.  The
sun lifted a halo from her golden hair and a marvelous butterfly had
alighted upon her shoulder and was flexing its meticulously drawn and
colored-in wings.  Betsy was a Disney Botticelli, Andy decided.  Yes,
she was going to be perfect in California where he had just landed a
teaching post.

"And what if Daddy still hadn't said all right even after he'd met me?
" Andy asked, dropping his book and accepting the foil-wrapped packet
and a coin silver spoon with a deep, round bowl.  He had not had lunch.
He had rather counted on Betsy's appetite being unequal to her
portion.

"Well," Betsy considered.  She sat on the edge of his chaise and swiped
a lock of hair from his brow (he was under orders from Ginger to have a
haircut forty-eight hours before the ceremony so he would be at his
best), "I would never have selected someone who wouldn't be all right
so it was perfectly safe to let Daddy have his say.  Isn't that
mushroom thing delicious?  We 're having them at the reception in
finger size with dipping sauce instead of a sauced sauce."

And later that afternoon, Louis and Andy returned to Hannah's for a
drink.  The three stools along the short length of the old barn board
bar top were taken up by two tourist couples-the less prosperous
husband who wore the lesser wristwatch and was not the one driving the
Lexus stood and reached between the wives, who were obviously sisters,
to pick up and put down his glass.  The visitors enthused over the
local stone walls which they seemed to believe were a naturally
occurring phenomenon.  The barman, who knew Louis by now and who was
going to tend bar at the reception, suggested Louis and Andy retreat to
the garden where they could talk in quiet.  Andy wondered how the
barman knew Louis intended to talk to him although he himself did not
doubt he was about to receive a major talking-to.  Perhaps their
relative bearings had suggested as much, even to the chattering
tourists whose eyes followed Louis's and Andy's slow retreat through
the side door and down the scented geranium-edged path to the private,
tended corner.

As it was, Louis listened rather more than he spoke.  Andy had been
shaken into fluency.  But when Louis did have his say, whatever he had
had to say had resonated with Andy.  As Harvey observed, drinks with
Louis had sobered young Andy.  Alden revealed that Andy had
subsequently come to him and asked for advice on long-range financial
planning.

He sought a name on the West Coast to consult as soon as he and Betsy
were settled.  Alden recommended an old school friend, Dexter, his name
was.

"And Ginger vacuumed her bedroom," Becky said.  "I am beginning to look
upon Louis as a White Knight."

"Louis?  " asked Harvey.  "Don't think you'd find armor to fit him."

"I don't know.  Louis might as well be wearing a suit of armor a foot
thick," Alden said, thinking of Ginger.  "Or he's got a rhinoceros hide
for skin."

"Oh no.  Louis is tremendously sensitive.  He must be a man of great
understanding," Becky said.  "And just because he's a tad overweight
doesn't mean he can't be very deep and full of sincere feelings for
Ginger despite everything, and, and be very romantic and unrealistic
about her, for that matter."

"Can't see it myself," Harvey said.  "Of course," he nodded politely to
Becky who had become very pale and was striking matches off a matchbook
embossed with a July date and the entwining initials A and B, as she
set alight dandelion clocks-they were having this conversation as they
stood about on the lawn-"of course," Harvey said, "I'm not a gal so I
never know why all you gals consent to take us fellows on."  He winked
at Alden who was wondering why Becky so vehemently defended the
sensibilities of fat men.  Alden patted his own stomach to see whether
he had put on weight that Becky had noticed and he had not.

Presently, as well, Louis asked Lily if she would mind if he found a
team to paint the house trim and put the shutters back up before the
wedding day.  Yes, Lily agreed, the house would show up shabbily in the
wedding photos if immediate steps weren't taken-and Harvey seemed to
have forgotten that he had come home to Towne with the declared
intention of painting the shutters.  For the house could look rather
fine when in good repair, and Lily showed Louis how well the house had
taken a picture in past wedding photos, a stack of old photo albums
having been dug out from under the far eaves as the family had become
testily reminiscent recalling (and comparing and contrasting) past
celebrations.  Hadn't the outfit that Olive had worn when Harvey
married Amy made her look like a hunchback gargoyle?  At any rate,
Olive had always turned to Paris for inspiration so she could be said
to have succeeded in her long-ago ambition on that long-ago day.

Louis sat upon the big-parlor sofa, albums splayed across his lap.  He
turned over leaves and remarked how the shrubbery had grown.  The
photos had been mounted on pages of black, semi-corrugated paper that
gouged off in particles beneath his fingernails no matter how careful
he tried to be.  Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, Lily quietly pointed out his
wife at every age, always, for the camera, smiling.

Well, Louis had continued, after a pause, if Lily didn't mind he had
already hired the painters.  The Rector of All Saints', whom Louis had
made a point of meeting and speaking to, had recommended a family of
hardworking Cambodians the local church community was sponsoring.

There would be seven Samrins coming over from Lawrence in the morning.
They wouldn't need transportation.  They had recently bought their own
truck, but if Lily could provide the drop cloths and the rags, that
would be appreciated.  The Rev.  Penworthy had indicated the Samrins
could not be persuaded to convert even their most ragged clothing into
rags.

"And Penworthy warned me, don't touch any of them on the head," Louis
said.  "Their heads are sacred to them, apparently, but aside from that
we should just be natural."

"We'd better tell Harvey," Lily supposed.  "If he's really pleased with
the job they're doing he might try to pet one."

so THE PAINTING GOT under way at once and the Hills awoke to the
mingled chirrups of birdsong and Khmer outside their bedroom windows as
the Samrins began work at six-thirty.  They worked so long and so hard
that Lily had to slow them down with cold drinks and molasses cookies
carried out to the terrace during the heat of the day.  She motioned
them down off ladders, she insisted they finish all the molasses
cookies.  And as Becky packed boxes bound for Czechoslovakia and crates
destined for a storage facility off Rte.  128 that Penny Nicholls had
recommended, she set aside shirts and jackets and a set of Corian
cookware and a not too wobbly floor lamp and a stack of old Golden
Books for the little ones, which the Samrins were happy to receive and
not embarrassed as Becky had hoped they would not be.  Harvey said
Samrin was a good old Cambodian name and he learned the family had been
manufacturers of bicycle parts with a factory outside Phnom Penh.  He
offered all the broken bicycles in the barn to Mr.  Samrin,

Sr."  who said he could get them in good working order again and sell
them.  He said he would split the profits fifty-fifty with Mr.  Hill.
He and Harvey shook hands on the deal.

The Samrins, for their part, were touched by the closeness and the
unity of the extended Hill clan, who seemed to survive by farming they
possessed a few fruit trees and a vegetable patch and a field of grain
which was, at the moment, being harvested.  After a technician came and
tuned and toned an old piano being stored in the barn, the Samrins
speculated that the Hills supplemented their small holding with a
sideline in festival entertainment as Harvey and Penny practiced scales
and chords and sang show tunes out in the open air.  It was evident, as
well, that the Hills were preparing for a feast day.  The young girls
were being fitted for traditional costumes.  The older women assembled
dishes and draperies and flowers.  Gift offerings, more of which
arrived daily, were being displayed on a long table in the principal
room of the large dwelling as a measure of the regard in which the
family was held.

And, evidently, the oldest son was about to be conscripted into the
American military.  An officer wearing crisp summer khakis met with the
young man and his parents in an attic sitting room (as Hun Samrin
scraped and caulked an attic window ledge during the course of the
interview).

The captain spoke at length, the son uttered syllables of assent, the
father asked stern questions, the mother daubed her eyes with a white
handkerchief, but in the end, papers were fanned across a desktop and
signed.  Mrs.  Lowe endured a consoling embrace from the American
captain.  Feelings were high and not uncomplicated.  The father chucked
the son's shoulder and he shook hands with the captain.  Later, a date
of departure was circled on the heavily marked July calendar page
thumbtacked to the back of a kitchen door.  Someone highlighted the
designated day with a flourish of red and blue stars.  The same hand
had drawn bells and ribbons around the square of another notable day to
come.

"MUNG SAM RING CAN WEAR all of Great-Aunt Sarah's lovely old calfskin
pumps, they have the same tiny feet," Ginger told Louis.  "And Mung
fits Aunt Sarah's tiny karakul coat and her tiny karakul hat which
perches like a beanie on my head, but it falls down over Mung's little
ears so she'll be warm next winter.  Last winter she only had a
raincoat to wear.  Those poor people, imagine, having to flee your home
by the dark of the moon with nothing but the clothes on your back and a
bundle in your hands.  I could weep for them, I could honestly weep."

Louis did not remind Ginger that she too had fled her home with only an
impulsively and incompletely packed suitcase.  The events did not
compare.  Nevertheless, he cast an anxious eye.  Had the parallel
occurred to Ginger?  But no, she lay quietly, unconcernedly beside him.
He was reminded of something else as well.

"Miss Lily's tax assessment problem," he mentioned.  "I've looked into
it."

"Oh good," Ginger said.  "I know Lily's been so worried but she hasn't
wanted to press you about it."

"I'm going to advise her to retain an attorney.  She needs someone from
Massachusetts.  It's involved, there's a lot going on there," Louis
said.

"But Lily doesn't believe in lawyers," Ginger said.

Louis did not remind Ginger that attorneys were not chimeras to be
believed in or not.  At present, however, he would not risk any
disagreement with Ginger.  Even a disagreement by proxy, challenging
Lily's quaint prejudice, would be as unwise as exposing an invalid to
an open window.

"Because you see, darling, Lily is not asking you as a lawyer.  She is
asking you as someone she knows who knows about the law," Ginger
explained.

They were lying side by side on Ginger's pillow-heaped bed.  Ginger sat
semi-upright.  She was folding starch-stiffened napkins into decorative
shapes following the instructions in the Bride's Magazine propped
against her knee and opened to the article on setting a Magical
Memorable

Table to Marvel At.  She had made the fan shape.  She was attempting
the swan shape.  Louis, who had brought work from Kansas, set aside a
folder of papers which slithered off the slippery pink coverlet and
scattered its contents across the rug.  Such a soft mattress, so many
piled pillows.

He tried to raise himself on his elbow and subsided up to his chin
among silky sheets and softly spun summerweight blankets.

"Does this look like a swan to you?  " Ginger asked.  She held up the
napkin, narrowed at both ends and puffed and pulled in the middle.

"Yes," Louis said.

" It does, doesn't it?  The wing-y part is cleverly done, but I think I
prefer the fan.  Which do you think you prefer?  " Ginger asked.

"The fan."

"But don't you like the swan?  Doesn't it look like a swan?  Aren't
swans bridal?  Wagnerian and bridal?  "

"Yes."

" But you prefer the fan?  "

"I prefer the fan."

"So do I," said Ginger.  "They're simpler to make and anyway, I can
just picture the family mistaking the swans for ducks and then the
reception will degenerate into an ornithological discussion.  They'll
drag out the Roger Tory Peterson and poor Betsy will be ceremoniously
cutting the cake and they'll all be bent over the waterfowl chapter.
No, I'll make fans.  They can't mistake a fan."

"Then we agree," Louis said.

"Yes we do, don't we, we do agree," Ginger said.  "I'm so glad we
agree."  She regarded him, rather sharply, but Louis had received her
assertion calmly.  He rolled onto his side and groped over the edge of
the bed, scrabbling for his scattered papers.  He reordered them on the
mound of his stomach and began to read, instantly immersed in a drone
of words and figures.  Ginger resisted her great desire to prod him
with a pointed fingertip to demonstrate (to whom?"  to the invisible
watching presence perched on her shoulder?) that Louis was insensible
to feelings, insensible to her.  But the watching presence did not goad
her now into confrontation with Louis.  Rather, it counseled acceptance
of Louis and the way he was.

Ginger shook out the swan shape and attempted a second fan which was
not as successful as the first because the starch had been folded from
the fabric when she creased and molded the swan.  Recognizing this,
Ginger did not lose her temper.  She cast aside the crumpled napkin and
ruffled through her Brides Magazine to the pictorial essay on Mother of
the Bride Beauty Makeovers where she discovered there was nothing to
instruct her and much to deplore, which cheered her.

"Whose footsteps do I hear?  " Ginger asked, because Betsy and Andy had
gone out for the afternoon and evening-a picnic on the beach, a

^,

walk on the moonlit beach-and she was listening for their return so she
could see for herself whether Andy had reported for his haircut.
Armande, the Towne Barber, never made appointments, customers just
caught him when his pole was spinning, but Ginger had made him write
down Andy's name and a time on a business card which she conveyed to
Andy.  Then all of this out-of-the-blue romp-on-the-beach business had
arisen so Ginger's arrangements were threatened.

"Betsy?"  Ginger called.  "Andy?"

The footsteps faltered, then resumed.  Ancient floorboards creaked,
beneath the lightest and most reluctant of treads.

"Come here, I want a word," Ginger ordered.

Lily did not like being summoned in this way.  She was relieved, of
course, that Ginger's life's upsets seemed to be righting themselves,
nevertheless, Lily should think such a last-minute rescue (Ginger had
always required saving from herself) ought to have made Ginger humble,
not high-handed.  And Louis had come on like a mandarin for the past
week, conferring his blessings over expensive dinners and arranging to
have her house painted behind her back and now the paint was flying on
so fast she was sure it wouldn't stick.  Perhaps the two, Ginger and
Louis, could only suit one another after all.

Lily shoved her bottle of Mylanta and her spoon into her quilted summer
bathrobe's deep pocket and she unlatched Ginger's bedroom door.  Nor
did Lily particularly wish to visit, so late at night, a bedroom where,
as she tried not to imagine, a marital reconciliation had been taking
place.  But Kings and Queens of old had received guests in their
bedchambers.  Ginger may have been proceeding along those lines, for
they would all be served up the fruits of Ginger's past months of
reading and research for years to come and, Lily recalled, Ginger had
spoken admiringly of what she had learned about court etiquette.

Ginger was sitting austerely and judgment ally against her headboard.
She had swept her pillows to the floor.  Louis was sunk among blankets
and more pillows but he heaved himself upright with a great effort (a
lower back problem there, Lily diagnosed, caused by the weight he
carried and exacerbated by Ginger's marshmallow mattress).

"Lily!"  Ginger said.  "I thought you were, never mind, I want to talk
to you too, or at any rate, Louis does.  Louis, tell her, tell Lily
what well, you haven't told me either, tell us both what you think.
There won't be time after tomorrow.  Andy's family is descending on us
tomorrow."

Which made sense to hear Louis out now, so Lily sat on a straight
backed chair just inside the door.

"If it were up to me," Louis began, "which it isn't, I've told Ginger
you have to retain a more local attorney, but were I working on your
behalf, I would challenge the reassessment on the grounds that the new
road joining Sir Galahad Lane to your property is not yet paved.  There
are no utilities brought in and planning permission has not been
applied for.  I checked.  And I happen to know there were perk tests on
the adjoining land to yours and they didn't pass and they, whoever they
are behind TowneVest, are praying for a dry summer so they can test
again and possibly squeak by.  But your land perked."

"How do you know that?  " Lily asked.

"Because the Samrins were hired last fall to dig the holes and haul the
buckets of water up to the test sites and they were told to keep the
whole matter under their hats.  I was discussing American idioms with
old Mr.  Samrin and he asked about that particular expression."  Louis
looked pleased with himself.  "We were chatting in French."

"Isn't Louis brilliant?"  Ginger marveled.  "Louis, you're brilliant,"
she marveled again.

"And I suddenly found myself becoming very interested in what Samrin
had to say.  He doesn't know who hired them for the work, but Penworthy
set up the job."

"In all innocence," Lily supposed.  "Harvey ought to hear this too.  He
was just down in the kitchen peeling himself an orange.  Harvey?  " she
called.  "Come here.  Bring your orange with you."

Harvey was brought up to speed as he sat at the end of the bed propped
against the foot board eating sliced and sugared orange rounds from a
bowl.  He thoughtfully flicked seeds back into the bowl as he
listened.

"Tell me," Ginger said, "wasn't Louis brilliant to discover all that.
You can't keep anything from Louis," she enthused, as Louis thought but
did not say that Ginger had not always been so pleased with his talent
for finding things out.

"Good man," Harvey agreed.  "So, you think Lily's new assessment was,
at the very least, precipitous.  Obviously it was an effort to force
Lily to sell.  Old maiden lady, not very sharp, scared into a panic, on
a fixed income, running around waving her hands in the air, carrying
on, moaning and groaning woe is me, woe is me.  Because the land those
pirates have already bought has proved worthless to them.  Lily is the
ultimate target."

"All right, Louis," Lily said.  "I'll consult my lawyer."

"Is he here in Towne?"  Louis asked.  "Because I think I'd go out of
town for this because you can't know who's in whose pocket."

"Oh, intrigue," exclaimed Ginger.

"Alden knows a lawyer," Lily said.  "There's someone clever in Boston,
isn't there, Ginger?  Didn't you once ..."

"I can't recall," Ginger said levelly.  "You'll have to ask Alden."

"But eventually, if Towne Vest is determined, they'll make the
improvements and you probably will be liable for that assessment.  In
which case, if I were you, I'd look to see if you could get away with
selling just one building lot to block further encroachment along the
new road," Louis said.  "You'll gain yourself a little nest egg.  You
can take a trip or buy a new car or remodel the bathroom and install a
new water heater.  You'd have to be sure of your buyer though.  You'd
have to know they weren't going to turn around and resell to Towne
Vest.  And you'll have to look at the plot plans and anticipate every
way Towne Vest can get at you with an access road and gerrymander the
lot you sell to guard against that."

"You see, Louis has thought of everything," Ginger said warmly.  "Why
don't we buy the land, Louis?  We could build a getaway weekend
cottage.  Betsy and Andy would adore it too."

"But we're in Wichita and they'll be in Santa Barbara," Louis pointed
out.  "Weekends would be impractical."

"No, I'll build the house," Harvey spoke up.  "Been meaning to set
myself up some other place around about.  Can't sponge on Lily forever.
Too many stairs here, anyway.  And I won't even wait for their road.
I'll turn my back on their road.  I'll plant a hedge between me and
their road.  Lily, what's that thorny fast-growing hedge with the deep
red berries that squash flat and in tandem with the thorn scratches
indelibly tattoo interlopers with proof positive of their trespass?
I'll get some of those, and I'll knock my own driveway off of Lily's
driveway and we 'll visit back and forth through the woods on golf
carts.  I'll buy us a couple of golf carts, you can have one of your
own, Lily.  You'll have to deed me a right-of-way."

"Yes, I could do that," Lily allowed.

"And I have to confess up front that I won't be living there alone.
Penny will be there too, I'm planning to marry her," Harvey said. "I've
always found it better to marry than to ..."

"Does Penny know about this?"  Ginger cried.  "Because 7 didn't know.
Have you even asked her?  "

"No, not yet, so don't you go mentioning it.  I want to tell her first.
I want to see the expression on her face when she finds out.  In fact,
what time is it?  Maybe I'll go see her now."  He tilted his bowl and
drank off the sweetened orange juice, sieving discarded seeds between
his teeth.

"No, Harvey," Ginger said.  "You can't show up out of the blue at this
hour.  She'll have curlers in her hair and night creme on her face, not
expressions of joy or shock or stunned disbelief.  Won't she, Lily? "

Privately, Lily didn't think Penny would be cocooned in nightly
restoratives.  Penny wore a short crop haircut and her skin was ridged
and rutted beneath the bright makeup she always had slapped on down to
her chin but no further.  Even Lily had noticed the contrast with the
pale skin on Penny's neck.  But perhaps Penny intended to signal that
she was still making an effort.

"And you certainly can't go driving excitedly around Towne in just your
pajamas and robe and slippers, Harvey," Ginger said.  "You'll wind up
in the Criers Police Notes column.  No, do as I say, Harvey.  Take
Penny out to Hannah's tomorrow night and give her a beautiful ring.  I
don't care how old she is, she'll want a diamond, won't she, Louis?"

But Louis was drafting a few notes for his River Road/TowneVest file,
for it was clear to him that he was going to end up maintaining a file
on Miss Lily and her future activities.

"ARE WE REALLY GOING to go through with this wedding?"  Betsy asked
Andy.

"Yes.  I've been counting the days until," Andy said, "and I'm counting
on all the days after."

They were almost alone on the long sweep of ocean beach.  The sun had
quietly disappeared several hours past, not picturesquely flaring, then
dropping, doused, into the water as occurred off the edge of California
where the sunsets were arranged better, Andy said.  Betsy, whose point
of reference would always be centered in Kansas, did not particularly
root for either coast, but Andy was already an advocate of the western
one.

They sat beneath a blanket and dug their feet into the warmish sand and
shared a last bottle of warmish wine cooler.  Betsy shrugged the
scratchy plaid stadium blanket from her shoulders where a sunburn was
just newly akindle.  Andy had warned her the sun was even stronger in
California.  Betsy guessed she would have to be more careful there. She
would wear a hat and sunglasses and white cotton mitts and scarves and
wraps and only emerge into the out-of-doors covered like a High Islam
lady in Arabia, she supposed.  And indeed, she regarded her safe and
fond marriage to come as purdah of a sort.  Assured of love, she would
not be distracted by the search or by the other searchers.  This
afternoon, lying next to Andy on their shared blanket, she had observed
some classmates-or classmates until their graduation a few weeks before
at serious play on the sand, having noisy fun of a sort chasing one
another and allowing, or not, a soft-landing tackle and capture.  I am
well out of that, Betsy thought.

"One might even say California is essentially an emerging nation," Andy
said.  He spoke toward what he hoped were not Betsy's second thoughts.
He had, he wished to remind her, offered her his entire world and she
had wholeheartedly accepted.

"Maybe we'll see Arthur and Phoebe sometime, and some of their new
friends," Betsy said.  "Just think who their new friends might be."

"I imagine we'll be hobnobbing," Andy agreed.

Betsy tilted forward and rummaged inside her beach satchel for a tube
of aloe lotion.  Her fingers bumped the clamshell she had found lying
half in, half out of the water, half buried in the sand.  The lower
part of a shell, bleached and washed brilliantly white, a full four
inches across, had caught her eye as it lay imperfectly concealed.  She
had plans for the shell.  She was going to paint, in pale watercolors,
Andy's name and her own and the day's date inside the shell, along with
blue double u's for waves and the silvery grey V of a faraway gull
wheeling out of view, and then she would keep the shell forever, set
down upon successive bureau tops in succeeding houses (they were going
to do very well for themselves, Andy promised) to hold her hairpins and
elastics and found buttons and the rings tugged from her fingers before
she worked in her garden or kneaded sticky bread dough.

First, though, her immediate aim was to race through her B.A. in
two-and-a-half years and then charge straight into law school (she
could do all of that at the university where Andy was going to teach),
and she was not certain when the gardening and baking would fit into
her schedule for the next five years or so.  But she had been exposed
daily to issues of bridal magazines left bristling with annotated
markers upon the foot of her bed all of which contained an article or
two detailing how one was supposed to set about housekeeping, and she
had just been given an electric pizzelle maker by Andy's mother's
Bridge Club so she was not surprised these conventional and homely
ideals floated to the surface of her thoughts.

"My mother and that lot are coming tomorrow," Andy mentioned.  "If it's
not tomorrow already.  It feels like tomorrow."

Of course, Betsy was thinking of nothing but the future.  She moved
through the present days as one who had already been through them.
Even her sunburn, even as it flashed hot, discoloring and marking her
knees, her nose, her ears, was just the sunburn she had had on her
wedding day, the one that had made her so pink and freckled and peeling
for the wedding pictures, the sunburn that had caused her mother, in
her last act as the mother of an unmarried daughter still at home, to
cry out and carry on because Betsy had sat out in the sun too long
solely to sabotage the work of the sensitive and expensive photographer
whom Ginger had convinced to consent to practice his art at their
modest affair.  Betsy scarcely felt the burn and when the tube of aloe
failed to come immediately to hand, she gave up searching among her
paperback and Andy's thick book, her flip-flops, Andy's car keys,
Andy's wallet, their crumpled wax-paper sandwich wrappers.  She
swaddled, instead, the clamshell in smoothed-out wax paper for safer
keeping, for she meant the painted and shellacked shell to contain for
all time her resolve and her reasons and her hopes of the day.

"I hope your mother likes me," Betsy said.  "Not to excess or
anything.

I don't expect that, but enough so we can talk on the phone without
creepiness until you pick up the extension."

"That's not unreasonable," Andy said.  He would recommend this standard
to his mother, as well.  He would represent it as his own idea, and he
would mention the desired avoidance of awkwardness between his mother
and his wife.

"We'll screen calls anyway," Betsy said.  "They'll all expect us to be
out in the good weather and all.  Because I'm going to predict my
mother will be calling us a lot."

LOUIS AND ANDY DROVE the rental van in to Logan to meet Lee Happening
and the members of her party, her sister Antonia, and Antonia's
daughter Pet, and Pet's husband Patrick.  Mrs.  Happening embraced
Andy, then released and peered at him intently for he had squirmed like
an impostor within her arms.  She dispatched him to retrieve her two
large new Ventura tapestry-patterned suitcases, readily identifiable by
the black ribbon rosettes knotted to their handles.  Pet sent Patrick
after him.  Mrs.  Happening sought and leaned upon her sister's tensed
and offered arm, and the pair made their way toward a sliding exit door
and the fully described and easily spotted and illegally parked van for
which Antonia, who seemed less wan than her sister, had been handed the
only key.  As the sisters walked slowly away, Mrs.  Happening's ankles
crossed as if she were balanced on ill-fitting ice skates, and Louis
wondered if the woman drank.  He resolved, then, never to trust her
alone with the someday grandchildren.  He and Ginger would have to
trump any proposed Florida winter school vacation with a far more
dazzling Caribbean one, which would make waves in the extended family,
of course, but somehow Louis didn't forecast clear sailing in the Lee
Happening zone even though they had not yet even been adequately
introduced.

Each had only more or less deduced who the other must be among all the
others milling on the crowded airport concourse.  Their wary looks
might be said to have met first.  But it further occurred to

Louis that he and Ginger might very well wrest enjoyment of a sort from
their dealings with Lee over the years to come, those same years which
lately had yawned rather darkly before him, however assuredly, however
single-mindedly, his reclamation of Ginger and the resumption of their
lives together had seemed to have been accomplished.  The annual
necessity of devising ever more dazzling getaways with the eventual
grandchildren, Ginger would rise to that, concocting great fun for the
little ones and thinking up great fun against Lee Happening.

Louis had reserved all of the rooms at the Olde Towne Academy Bed and
Breakfast Inn to accommodate the out-of-town guests.  Andy only pointed
to the complicated roofline of Lily's house just rising above the
summer-lush treetops as they drove on past along the River Road.  The
Samrins were making a final push to complete the exterior painting and
a professional cleaning crew was at work inside scrubbing and polishing
their way from room to room.  Gee had shown up in a borrowed bulldozer
to commence busting a road through to Harvey and Penny's building site,
for Harvey and Penny (who had been asked and who had said yes) were
that keen to get cracking on their project.  They were forgoing the
fussy formalities of land surveys and plot plans and blueprints.

The Pilgrim Fathers hadn't waited for a Planning Committee to pronounce
permission granted, Harvey said, and where would the Pilgrim

Fathers have been had they waited for a planning committee to
pronounce, he wanted to know.

"Cohasset?"  suggested Ginger, which everyone knew was a much better
address than Plymouth.

Lily had spoken up above the swell of contending family voices and the
chatter of Samrins from window to window and the hums and thumps of the
cleaners and the growl of the laboring dozer as Louis and Andy were
leaving for the airport.  She had advised waiting for a calmer moment
for the Hills and the Happenings to come face to face lest Andy's
family receive an impression.  She did not characterize the impression
they would receive as being the wrong one.  She only hoped to schedule
an optimum time for the encounter, in the foyer of All Saints',
perhaps, as they were all being hushed and hurried along by the ushers
who had just been given the high sign from the altar.

"But give your mother our best regards," Lily called over her shoulder
as she set off across the field to ask Gee if he was sure he knew what
he was supposed to be doing.

"Ma'll understand," Andy assured Lily, and of course, as the van took
the curves of the River Road and drove on through a field of young corn
which was just beginning to look like corn, Mrs.  Happening could not
help but feel farmed out.

"i THOUGHT THAT went well, considering," Alden said to Lily as they
drove from the church ahead of the lingering pack, back to the house
where there was nothing much left to be done but in Lily's experience,
arrangements had a way of becoming undone.  The tables, set with cloths
and crockery and flowers out in the orchard, could be tipped over by a
nosing-about deer.  Hannah, who was cooking on site, might short a fuse
when she plugged her powerful and professional crepe maker into the
overloaded kitchen outlet and start a smoldering fire down in the
corner of the cellar where empty and half-empty paint cans had been
stacked out of sight until the next Toxic Disposal Day at the dump.
The house itself might be wreathed with flames at that very moment,
although the fire whistle hadn't blared during the service.  Lily had
been listening with only one ear tuned to the familiar prayers and
music and promises.

"One wedding ceremony down," Alden expanded, "and sixty years of wedded
bliss to go.  Perhaps they're being wise to give themselves so much
time together."

"So far so good," Lily agreed.

Alden glanced at Lily.  She had bought a new navy-blue suit for the
wedding which Becky said actually looked rather smart on her, and Lily
had even consented to have the hem raised two inches which had made all
the difference.  Lily's new hat, a pale blue swan's-down Queen Motherly
toque, floated serenely on her head.  Her gloves presented immaculately
white even though she'd indulged herself in some weeding of the
churchyard's shade garden while waiting for Betsy and Louis to arrive.
Lily had steadied herself with a hand placed on the bronze Jesus'
jutting hip and energetically pulled long strands of bindweed out from
among the host as growing round his plinth as she remarked to Lee
Happening that had it been up to her Jesus wouldn't be standing around
up to his knees in greenery.  Jesus had wandered through the desert and
Lily had suggested at the time that cactus be planted instead but she
had been overruled.  Lee, who liked to think she was a gardener and who
liked to think she knew her Bible, had seemed to like Lily.  Alden
decided he felt confident he and Becky could leave for Czechoslovakia
with easy consciences.

Lily seemed equal to the task of looking after herself when she was on
her own again.  Perhaps the past year had served as a sort of rest cure
for her as the family shouldered her various burdens and now she was
ready to take them up again on her own.

"I was going to shut Agnes in my bedroom so she wouldn't leap onto the
cake," Lily said.  "I hope she hasn't leaped onto the cake."

For somebody had to think of everything while the rest of the family
bumped from the windowpanes to the walls like moths whose eyes were
turned to brighter lights.  That very morning, Lily had been obliged to
drive down to the Do-Nut Hole to fetch Danish pastries and blueberry
muffins for breakfast.  They had all bounded down to the kitchen in
their bathrobes, having just showered or while waiting for the shower
to fall free, expecting on that day of all days for an extra effort to
have been made.  Glover said he 'd like a mushroom omelette and hash
browns and Harvey told him he 'd have to wait until he was in the Army
to be pampered like that.  Little Becky had only wanted an apple.  She
needed to lose a final pound before ten o'clock to achieve her ideal
bridesmaid weight goal which she had written in red grease pencil on
the side of the refrigerator above her Aunt Ginger's scale.

"Is that Andy's car by the side of the road?"  Alden asked, slowing.
"Is that them standing above the river?  "

"Yes," said Lily.  "But drive on, let them be."  They obviously wanted
to be on their own.  They seemed to be throwing stem after stem pulled
from Betsy's bouquet into the water.  Ginger was going to mind when she
found out about that.

"I thought they were in a big hurry to get home for their party," Alden
said.

For after the ceremony, Betsy and Andy had flown down the aisle,

Betsy's veil buoyant and aswirl and catching Andy's back and wrapping
them together in a departing blur.  The organ blurted.  Ginevra
PlattWilley's beautiful voice began to sing.  Mr.  Pen-worthy stood
startled at the altar rail.  He had planned to speak a few parting
words of his own after the Blessing.  He was fond of this young
couple.

Professor Janacek, Andy's best man, who had driven down from Maine
(Vacationland) for the day, had taken up the chase.  Jennica and
Alexianna Snowdon, the overdressed and overwhelmed flower girls,
circlets of Queen of Denmark roses slipping over their eyes, trotted
after him.  He had scooped them up and carried them, and Little Becky,
laughing with relief because she hadn't dropped Betsy's bouquet or
stepped on her hem, raced to catch up with the rest of the wedding
party.  Alden and Lily slipped out the side door as the congregation
sat quietly on listening to Ginevra, the Hill side smiling and nodding
at the Happening side now that they were all vaguely related.  The
Happening side rustled through their strange hymnals to satisfy
themselves just how many more verses of "The voice that breathed o'er
Eden" there were to go, which was a song they had always heard of but
never heard sung.

"And now we know why," Pat whispered to Pet.

"THERE is NO POINT in organizing a reception line.  We might as well
attempt to herd cats," Ginger said to Louis.

"They all seem to be enjoying themselves in their own ways," Louis said
tolerantly.  They linked arms.  Ginger's cartwheel hat silkily brushed
his cheek.

The wedding guests had scattered-across the terrace, the lawns, the
upper field-and Harvey and Penny were leading a happy band into the
woods to admire the future home of the future Mr.  and Mrs.  Harvey
Hill.  Among the band were several intrigued Kansans; some of Harvey's
very amused grandchildren; Louis's brother, who looked like Louis; Mr.
and, surprisingly, Mrs.  Snowdon, not heretofore recognized as being
very much of a walker; and the Rev.  Penworthy who liked Nature and who
was thinking up a sermon based upon the Evening

Prayer Psalter for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity, "The earth is the
Lord's and all that therein is."  He twisted his ankle in a root
hole.

Green gingham cloth-covered tables were placed between the rows of
low-boughed apple trees and distributed around a white fluted column
bearing an enormous arrangement of twelve dozen white roses and white
stock and lady's mantle and trailing ivy.  Hannah's servers moved among
the tables carrying trays.  Six rose-and-ivy-entwined arbors described
a grassy circle meant to contain further ceremony the cake cutting, the
bouquet flinging, the last speech Louis had been assigned to deliver
from his heart-if, indeed, Betsy and Andy could be located at the
critical moment.  They had pelted off after the expedition slogging up
to the building site, although at least Ginger didn't have to fret that
mud and brambles would ruin Betsy's dress.  Betsy had won the dress
argument which had flickered until the previous afternoon when the
seamstress whom Ginger had kept standing by declared that time was up
for even the most basic of alterations to be made to any other dress.

"We ought not just to stand here," Ginger said, steering Louis away
from the long board bar set up inside the barn door where Hannah's
barman was arranging bottles.  "People will think we're keeping an eye
on."

"Well, I am keeping an eye on but only to make sure that everyone gets
what they want," Louis said.

They strolled down to thank Brooks and Rollins who had been parking
cars on the lower lawn and who lingered by the cars as if to make
certain they stayed parked.  The boys wore navy-blue blazers, pink
shirts, red ties, khaki trousers, and loafers, which was how they had
once dressed every day for school and which reassumed and respectable
appearance, they realized, would provide better cover when, after Louis
and Ginger stopped checking up on them, they took off in Louis's
brother's Jaguar, driven all the way from Chicago and about to be
driven by Brooks and Rollins just as far as the River Road bridge and
possibly around and about the rolling corners of the Camelot Estates
subdivision and maybe on down to the village, where they entertained
hopes of being observed by the local weird kids as they wheeled past
the weird kids' Towne Common hangout on the beaten-down grass between
the Civil War cannon and the bandstand, hooting and tooting for several
crowning circuits.

"We really ought to seek out Lee Happening and be lovely to her,"
Ginger said.

"I believe I noticed Becky being lovely to her in the herb garden,"
Louis said.

"Then we can be lovely later."

"LAVENDER, HYSSOP, ASSORTED BASILS, mint, rosemary in the clay pots,
garlic, sweet marjoram, rose geranium, lemon geranium, cinnamon
geranium; that's all pennyroyal, which as you can see, spreads."

Becky and Lee Happening and Antonia moved among spikes and clumps and
masses of leafage and flowerings, making their ways over flat stones
set down in the ground without particular reference to the human tread.
Becky indicated and named the plants she knew.  Antonia crouched and
pinched and sniffed and Lee stood in a patch of sun heated southernwood
which wanted to make her sneeze.  Her teeth sawed back and forth and
her hands flapped off-fendingly.

The sisters had engineered this stroll with Becky, for Andy had told
them it was Becky with whom William had seemed to have enjoyed a deep
and old and unusual friendship.

They had a rapport, Andy had said.  You'd almost think there was
something between them, he'd added, if you didn't know better, because,
bottom line, Becky's a saint although not in an odious way.  She's
completely unaware she's a saint.

Lee and Antonia had resolved to have a close chat with this
inspirational and informational person, although talking over the
events of the day later that evening, gratefully lounging back at the
Olde Towne Academy Inn, they dismissed Andy's absurd attraction theory;
foolish Andy was seeing stars everywhere.

For they had known right away that Becky was simply a very nice woman.
They had taken to Becky as they had not taken to Betsy's breezy and un
penitent mother who had finally called on them at the inn the previous
evening and promptly purchased the Mission-style reading

!

lamp on Pet and Pat's bedroom night table (many of Academy House's
antiques were discreetly for sale at prices that looked as if they were
being quoted in lire on small folded-over cards tucked inside the
drawers of highboys and between the fretwork of folding screens),
leaving poor Pat, who was a forensic psychiatrist, unable to review a
pressing case file.

"Shallots, calendula, thyme, God bless you.  I have a hankie here,
somewhere, up my sleeve," Becky said.

"Oh no, it's far too pretty.  Well, thank you," Lee said.

Then, speaking at once, Lee and Antonia began to describe to Becky the
William they had known, who was nothing at all like the William he had
become.  They projected and soul-searched and wept a little, sharing
the hankie between them.  They apologized on William's behalf for all
the trouble and heartache and inconvenience he had caused.  They wished
to apologize to the world, but the excellent Becky seemed the next best
thing.

Becky played with a sprig of lemon geranium and murmured soothingly
indistinct syllables.  Her instinct, when William's half-sisters (as
they had identified themselves to her) approached her so purposefully,
had been to retreat to Lily's herbs to avail them all of the plants'
palliative, curative, and even Lethean qualities.  She held a wand of
lavender toward the sisters and felt an utter fraud, but safely so. She
would credit William with this-if he had known which official secrets
to spill, he had also known which private ones to keep.

She let Lee and Antonia say all that they had to say twice over, for in
Becky's experience, emotional people needed to state and then to
restate their troubles, and then she reminded them, "But if not for
William, Betsy and Andy would never have met."

"Well, there is that," Lee supposed she was obliged to concede.

"Andy's earthly happiness assured," Antonia added rather wildly, "and
yet William can't even know.  We can't tell him.  We have no idea where
he is."

"We worry so," said Lee.  "If we only knew."

"Perhaps it's better not to know," suggested Becky.  For what good was
it for them to know about William's view of the Khalij Surf through the
louvered windows of his honey-colored villa and of his daily drive to
the Souk for the English papers which came a week late, and of how he
dreamed only of the day when Becky would join him?  His servants,
necessarily cautious of strangers, had been taught her image should
William be out when she came to him at last.  William had been writing
Becky long, petitioning letters, sent to her through an intermediary.

"If we were only sure he's at least all right," Lee said.  "If he's
even alive."

"Oh yes, he's alive all right or our phones wouldn't still be tapped,"
Antonia said.  "Of course our phones are tapped.  Don't you hear those
hollow pop pop pops every time when you first pick up?  "

"I think that's Alden waving at me from the field," Becky said.  "I'd
better go see what he wants now."

"NOT WAVING BUT swatting," Alden explained to Professor Janacek.  The
upper field was alive with filmy green flies.

"Ah," said Professor Janacek, who did not catch the reference, although
Ginevra Platt-Willey had laughed and Ginger, of course, and Mrs.
Penworthy, and Pet and Pat, and Lana Arnetti from the Y, as well.  It
occurred to Alden that he was going to miss being surrounded by
congenial people who caught his meanings.  He doubted his remarks would
ever be appreciated in Czech.  Madame Um had struck him on the head
with a scrolled libretto (Prodana Nevesta) as they took their last
leave of her.

Alden hoped they weren't all such sticklers in Prague, but he didn't
mind this Janacek fellow, who had driven down from Maine in his
seersucker suit with a tall red-headed young American girlfriend beside
him in the front seat.  She wore her resort wear-a halter top, sarong
skirt, and a floppy straw hat-to the wedding, but she was so
good-looking no one noticed, or if they noticed, they only felt
themselves to be frumps.  As Becky had pointed out, everyone else was
dressed as if Talbots had exploded.

Janacek was a well of information about Prague, or at least, the Prague
he had known and had left in 1968.  He scrawled names and addresses in
the margins of his wedding leaflet as he cited people whom Alden and
Becky would come to love, of shops they would soon adore,

of cafes and bakeries and hidden squares and the very corners where the
bounteous and brutal history of his native land had happened.  He spoke
of museums and architecture and the quality of the light in the late
afternoons as one stood upon the Charles Bridge and dreamed of better
days to come.

"Or as is the case now, you can stand there and hum a few bars of
"Happy Days Are Here Again'," said Alden.

"You will love my country," promised the Professor who, after all, as
the sponsor of Andy's thesis knew he was in a strong position to make
authoritative statements about Hill partialities and private
assumptions about Hill susceptibilities.

He asked Alden, then, if he would mind delivering a Sony Trinitron VCR
to his elderly aunt who lived in Marianske Lazne, a charming
destination in its own right-there was a spa, walking, golf-which Alden
and his family would enjoy.  The Professor had brought the VCR with him
in the trunk of his car, still sealed in its box.  It was to be an
eightieth-birthday present for his aunt, an unmarried lady, a former
schoolteacher and the heart of the scattered Janacek clan.  She spoke
better English than the English and she would be enchanted to have the
Lowes stay with her indefinitely, the Professor enthused.  And since
Alden would be staying a while in Marianske Lazne, would Alden mind
picking up a few regional delicacies to send back to America?  Janacek
produced a list.  He yearned for a very specific flavor of fruit syrup,
for a certain cough pastille, and shaving soap, tinned traditional
biscuits, a bottle of the very fountain-pen ink with which he had
written his first, youthful tract.  Janacek handed Alden a check, as
well, drawn on his bank in Prague where certain funds languished,
useless to him in the West and hostage to Byzantine and restrictive
regulations which, it was his hope, Alden would be in a position to
sort out and do away with in his soon to be assumed position as the
savior of the Czech banking and investment system.

Alden said he 'd see what he could do and he intercepted Becky beside
the privet hedge.  He attempted to pass the list and the check on to
her.

"Oh, Alden," she said.  "It's easy enough to tell a person no.  You
just have to be firm."

She walked up to the Professor to inquire whether the outlet plugs in
his native land were standard or variable, and did he recommend any
particular universal adapter, which she would really rather purchase in
the States because, well, frankly, because she did not doubt they would
be much more reliable.

GEORGE AND CALLIOPE, taking the afternoon off from the Casa di Napoli,
had brought their baby in a soft woven basket with carrying handles.
They set the basket down beneath the shade of the big maple and
arranged lawn chairs in a drift around the sleeping child.  The baby
was a good baby, everyone said.  It awoke and smiled and raised its
stellate hands to the faces that peered over the side of the basket.
Nearly everyone came for a look at the nearly new baby.  The young
Snowdons and the young Penworthys loitered and teased to play Mothers
and Husbands and House with the real baby-the youngest Penworthy had
grown too big to heft and lug and shut in a salvaged Produit de
Bordeaux box-until Lily sent them off to the barn to fetch the old
badminton set.  She said they had better play with that, instead, out
in the just-mown field.

Glover wanted to talk to George, who had been in the service.  His
company colors hung behind the cash register at the Casa di Napoli.
George had enjoyed his stint, and he enjoyed talking to Glover whom he
advised, if he wished to advance in the Army, never to hesitate to
display his initiative while being ever mindful not to step out of
line.

Glover considered George's words.  He applied them to his just recently
acquired apprehension that time could take its time unwinding the
tangled messages he received and failed, frustratingly, to understand
at the very moment.  Glover guessed George's advice would make good and
eventual sense when he was in uniform and under orders.  In the past,
Glover had resisted, he had resented, being told what he didn't already
know, and he recognized now the great flaw inherent in that
construction.  Soon, he would be called upon to take apart and put
together again an M-16 with his eyes blindfolded.  Captain Raven had
cited this as an instance of what Glover could expect during his first
weeks at Basic, and Glover meant to pay attention when that
demonstration was going on lest he slide the firing clip on backwards
and shoot himself in the eye on his very first go at target practice.
Yes, he could see for himself that he had no idea.

"Hey baby, listen to your parents," Glover told the sleeping child who
awoke and blew a froth of sour, milky bubbles.

"Oh, you," said Calliope, swiping away the froth with a cloth.

They discussed the situation in Kuwait, guessing what would happen and
what ought to happen until Ginevra approached, carrying a bottle of
wine and four goblets held elegantly upside down, her fingers laced
around their stems.  She announced she did not believe in war but
Glover told her today's Army was an Army of Peacekeepers.  Ginevra
declared she would write to Glover at his Army address to make sure he
kept his word.

"All right," Glover allowed.  He wrote the particulars on the slip of
paper supplied by Calliope with George's automatic pencil.

Ginevra sat back in an Adirondack chair and lifted her wineglass toward
a beam of sun-the wine and all that had only been accessories.  She was
going to be attending Berklee in the fall and then she was going to
connect with a roistering bar band and become a righteous girl singer,
at least for a while.  She thought what a pity it was that Glover would
be leaving Towne in just three days.  He was such a challenge.  She
wished, at once, to save him and to serve him, such an unexpected
warrior.  She wondered why Missy De Stefano hadn't been invited to the
wedding because she'd run into Missy at the Freedomway Mall and Missy
had been bragging about the dress she'd bought for the big day.

Glover, who was racing George to the bottom of the bottle Ginevra had
brought, reflected how lucky it was he wasn't due at Camp until Tuesday
afternoon now that he knew Ginevra so well.

"Write even when I don't write back," he told her.

"Should I let him get away with that?  " Ginevra asked Calliope.

"Yes," said Calliope.  "His letters won't be all so interesting anyway,
but you will be amazed at what you have to say for yourself."

GINGER HAD TO FABRICATE a dinner gong.  Hannah's helpers had said, We
're ready, but the guests and the wedding party had all vanished into
the Childe Hassam summer landscape-oh, they had drawn a perfect day.

Ginger had been certain there was a household dinner gong.  Her mind's
ear echoed with the mellow summonings of years' past.  But Lily, hunted
down and quizzed as to the dinner gong's whereabouts, impatiently told
her no, one summer there had just been a child's xylophone struck with
the three signature notes of the NBC peacock call until the joke wore
thin.  Lily was short with Ginger, for she had been interrupted in the
middle of negotiations with Hannah who, impressed by Lily's green thumb
and extensive gardens and sunny prospects, had asked her if she would
consider supplying her restaurant with some very specific herbs and
produce which Hannah required.  Hannah would provide seeds from
Provence and Hunan province and Oaxaca state which Lily could plant in
the quantities Hannah needed.  And indeed, Lily might wish to sell any
surplus by the side of the road, down at the end of her driveway,
Hannah suggested.  Yes, Lily said, perhaps she might.  Perhaps she
would speak to Harvey's contractor about building a little stand in the
clearing beside the mailbox.  She wondered what she would dare to
charge for a bunch of tarragon.

Ginger found a sheet of tin left over from an old attempt to mend the
gutters and she selected the black croquet mallet from the croquet
cart.  She directed Louis to hold the sheet of tin loosely and away
from himself and she two-handedly swung the mallet.  Her silky sleeves
fluttered and flew with effort.  She was happily unaware she had caught
a smudge of green shutter paint on one pale sleeve.

"Herding cats would be easier," she complained.  "I'd just call them to
their saucers by whirring the electric can opener."  But it was Louis's
belief that Ginger was energized and not enraged by her grievance.

"There.  At last, I'm getting their attention," Ginger declared,
entirely satisfied.

Professor Janacek's beautiful girlfriend, who was a Theater Arts major,
turned her porcelain figurine head toward the peals and booms and
rumbles Ginger was raising and she spoke, " "If by your art, my dearest
father, you have put the wild waters in this roar, allay them," " and
she was prepared to go on but the Professor hushed her, for now was not
the time to resurrect her Miranda although, certainly, they had both
basked in her triumph in the part.

And the expedition of discovery was now trailing back from the
inspection of the building site, its members scrawled upon by barbed
branches, welted and bloodied by bug bites.  Ripped stockings clung to
mud-smeared legs.  Pants legs were stained and ringed to the level of
misstep in the swamp, hats were wilted and damaged, neckties tossed
loose round collars.  Several Kansans had picked lolling and expiring
bunches of Lily's lady's slippers as they really ought not to have
done, but everyone chattered excitedly at once about Harvey and Penny's
wonderful house-to-be which was going to have windows for walls and one
central and enormous bedroom should they decide to become invalids
someday and vacuum-sealed drawers and cupboards in the kitchen so their
cornflakes and saltines would not go soft during the worst of the
August weather.  Harvey and Penny were thinking of everything.

"Daddy?  " The young Penworthys, who were losing badly at badminton to
the young Snowdons, flung their rackets at the Snowdons' leaping-about
knees and swarmed their father, which marked the correct reception of
the hero of the expedition.  For the Reverend had been able to recall
without consulting his daybook who had hired the Samrins to dig holes
and carry water along Lily's ridge last fall: Royall Beswick, the Towne
Assessor himself.  Penny had whooped and demonstrated at the news.
First thing Monday morning, she vowed, she was going to initiate the
next American Revolution down at the Towne Town Hall.  Harvey had to
prevent Penny from hieing off back to Senior Village to thrash out a
press release and to begin to paint protest signs at the common room's
community easel.

"Ginger's organized some sort of la-di-dah bean feed and she'll come
whacking at us with that mallet if we don't tie on the feed sack he
said.  "Anyway, that cooker gal from the place we like's dishing it
out."

"BETSY AND ANDY are leaving."  "So soon?"

"Look at them, so young."

"She's so terribly young."

"Is that her going-away outfit?  Boxer shorts and that faded sunflower
T-shirt.  Andy looks nice, though, very serious."

"Well, she's so young."

"How I wish his father could have been ... I even wish William ..."

"They're hoping to make it to Stockbridge by dark."

"Whose car is that?"

"Oh, Louis bought them ... he took one look at the VW."

"Stockbridge?  I assume they're staying at the Red Lion?  They'll enjoy
that.  We always do."

"But what's the name of that wonderful inn in Lenox?  "

"They're not going to Lenox, they're going to Stockbridge."

" Is that the new bigger Civic?  "

"Why does it matter if they get to Stockbridge after dark?  "

"I suspect that's just their excuse."

"You want to do something tonight, Ginevra?  "

"All right, Glover."

"Okay."

"And then Betsy and Andy are driving across country to California.
They're going to stop at Williamsburg, New Orleans, the Grand Canyon,
Mt.  Rushmore, and Yosemite."

"The Grand Canyon!"

"Can't picture their route.  Sounds roundabout.  Hey kids, are you
certain about your route?  I say, hey kids, did you ask Triple A about
a Trip-Tik?"

"Damn, we forgot to spray "Just Married' across their back window.  And
who was in charge of collecting old shoes?  "

" Betsy swore us not to."

"Where's your brother?  If he's stowed away in their trunk..."

"I'm here, Dad.  I didn't."

"Well, don't."

"There's no room in their trunk.  It's all stuffed with stuff."

"They do have a lot of stuff."

"They're driving to California to live, you know."

"Come on, Ginevra.  This is all over here."

"No wait, I want to see."

"Wave.  Wave good-bye to Betsy and her husband.  Yes, I know you'll
miss Betsy.  I'm going to miss Betsy too.  I don't know what I'll do
without my Betsy," Mrs.  Snowdon said to the young Snowdons.

Betsy and Andy nearly forgot to acknowledge the farewells, so intent
were they upon unfolding a road map with a mind to remembering the
trick of refolding it neatly between referrals, but Little Becky, in
her last act as bridesmaid, approached their idling car to prompt the
pair.

"You guys," she said, and indicated with a stern sweep of her eyes
toward the well-wishers assembled at the top of the driveway and ranged
across the lawns.

The wedding guests had parted around the figure of Ginger, maintaining
a respectful buffer against any final manifestation of high feelings on
her part.  Even Louis had withdrawn from his station by her elbow,
electing to watch carefully the left rear tire of the new Civic which
looked a little low to him.  But Ginger remained remarkably calm as her
only daughter and-Ginger would have to get used to calling him-her
son-in-law prepared to drive away, to drive straight on through to
their futures, to drive all the way to the end of the known map where
they would discover that their new continent stretched on for a hundred
million more uncharted miles beyond.  If Betsy and Andy believed their
crisply stowed map was going to guide them past all the wrong turns and
missed exits and deeply regretted bypasses, they were very much
mistaken.  A small smile crimped Ginger's lips and a farseeing haze
softened her eyes.  Becky, who knew someone really ought to stand in
support of Ginger at this critical moment, accepted that it must fall
to her to do the decent thing, and she moved to Ginger's side.

"Everything went splendidly," Becky declared in her most positive
voice.

"Do you think so?  " murmured Ginger.

For Ginger was reviewing the day's small disasters-that outrageous dash
down the aisle, Betsy's lost bouquet for which Ginger had searched
everywhere, the septuagenarian couple's usurpation of the young couple
's thunder.  Half the champagne toasts had been raised to Harvey and
Penny and their ridiculous house.  And then Betsy had failed to put on
the proper traveling costume Ginger had lovingly, as a last act, laid
out upon her bed, the sky-blue linen suit and a lace camisole blouse
which now would never be worn unless Little Becky could possibly
wriggle into them if she stuck to her diet.  Ginger was also convinced
that every official photograph would depict a blur, a back, a blank.
Betsy and Andy had been too distracted to pose.  The expensive
artist-photographer had complained of them.

But Ginger was not convinced there wouldn't be another occasion,
someday, the one which she would then regard as the real wedding.  She
had learned a great deal from this initial outing which could be put to
good use for the next one.  She would insist upon being given more time
to plan, and of course she would be back on her own turf, in Kansas, at
home, and she would know exactly whom to call.

Ginger stood, removed from the gathering, thinking her own thoughts.
She glanced at the unreservedly happy faces of all the others as Lily
moved from guest to guest shedding feathers from her hat and hugging a
ten-pound bag of Northeast Songbird Mixture to her chest and bidding
everyone to scoop up handsful of flax and millet and sunflower seeds to
throw after Betsy and Andy.  What a grand idea, they were all saying,
far better to throw seed than to toss rice or confetti or stones, for
one of the Happening side claimed to have been to a wedding where
colored aquarium pebbles had been cast at the newly weds.  ("What were
they, adulterers?  " Alden asked Louis and then wished he hadn't.)
Becky reached down into the sack of seed and only perfunctorily
discharged her portion as Ginger palmed and flicked away a small amount
which fell upon her open-toed Joan and David mother-of-the-very-young
bride shoes.

Something about the quality of Becky's farewell wave struck Ginger as
well.  Becky's upraised hand moved deliberately up and down in a
vaguely window-washing motion as if she too were trying to see her way
clear and beyond a clouded pane to a happy enough ending for the
just-married couple, and perhaps for all the married couples.

"They haven't a clue what they're in for," Ginger suddenly confided to
Becky.

"No, they don't," Becky agreed wholeheartedly.  Ginger braced for
Becky's further conventional comment of cozy sympathy and easy
optimism, but Becky, instead, plucked at her sleeve for the hankie
which was not to be found there.  Ginger offered her own which she had
not needed, and she stopped thinking about herself and Louis, she
stopped thinking about Betsy and Andy, and she wondered, finally and
for the first time, about Becky and Alden.  She and Becky might have
been better friends that past year, she realized.  They might have
helped one another.  They might have trusted one another.  They might
have talked.  But all that might-have-been would remain unresolved in
the past.  Everything was, so surprisingly, turning out for the best
all around and Ginger no longer needed to run the risk of attempting
such an alliance.

LILY PASSED THROUGH the front hall, cleared at last of the boxes and
crates around which she had for the past few weeks been obliged to pick
her way, banging her better hip against sharp corners and, once,
becoming turned around entirely in the dark on her way to the kitchen
late at night when she was sure she had left the oven on, for she had
awakened and smelled a mist of electricity.  The little parlor had been
completely cut off for several days by a tower of trunks.  They had all
had to scramble over the little-parlor windowsill the night Arthur's
television show was aired-a sneak summer preview, his network announced
in the spirit, it seemed, of their unusual means of ingress to watch
Arthur's carryings-on.  They were quite fascinated by his performance.
They had not been entirely certain what it was Arthur did-what talent,
in fact, he possessed and for which he was being paid ten thousand
dollars per episode as Harvey had made it his business to find out.
They all wondered where it could have come from, Arthur's flair, for he
had made them laugh.  He was quite the best feature of Barry's World!"
even though Arthur only received fourth billing.  They all wondered if
the more famous Barry minded being left in the dust by Arthur's
brilliant star quality.  The family had sat on in the little parlor
after the closing credits rolled, recalling past examples of Hill
theatricality and wit, remembering a cousin who could dance on her
toes, an aunt who could be persuaded to recite "Annabel Lee," and Alden
demonstrated a gift for mimicry.  He could do the time Uncle Harvey had
instructed the boys on how to kill mosquitoes.  Which had not been the
worst way to pass one of their final evenings together, Lily decided,
pleasantly enough.

Just yesterday, the last of the parcels had been called for and carted
off by the international movers who, after all, had turned out to be
Americans hired by the State Department and not louche, cheroot puffing
vase-shattering Frenchmen as Lily had feared they might be.  She had
had her Larousse dictionary standing by, splayed open to all the words
for Careful.  Soon, the Lowes' Calphalon pots and pans and their
angle-poise reading lamps and twelve-packs of Scott tissue would be
crossing the choppy Atlantic.  Just as the Empire desk and the Windsor
chairs and the gilt rosewood mirror Ginger had always loved and which
Lily had said might as well be hers now, had been carried off a week
before by another band of movers and were rolling west in the back of a
fast pantechnicon van, on toward the prairie.  The Sevres service had
flown back to Wichita on Ginger's lap.  She had even been allowed to
hold on to the box during takeoff and landing after the flight
attendant had been shown just what the box held.

The people were gone as well.  They had departed in fits and starts, in
mishaps of fogbound flights and broken landing gears that held them up,
or down, hindered by spuming radiators and traffic jams on the
interstate, panicked by eleventh-hour losses of tickets and passports
and vital addresses written on lost scraps of paper in disappearing
ink.  Glover had been forgotten entirely by the Army van bound for
Basic Training.  He had sat on his suitcase by the side of the River
Road for an hour and a half, brushing away green flies and the offers
of rides at least as far as the village, for word had gotten round that
one of the Lowe boys was off to join the Army, although just how the
Army planned to keep itself and its soldiers occupied in this brave new
world of peace and concord, opinion was divided.  At last, it made
sense for Glover to drive himself down to New Jersey in the family
Volvo which, otherwise, was just going to be left sitting at the top of
Lily's driveway.

Even Harvey and Penny had taken off on a tour of their children's
summer places.  A strike at the cement mixers' local was holding up
work on the foundation of their house and rather than fret beside the
excavation hole as it filled with cinquefoil and maple sprouts, they
visited Osterville, Squam Lake, and Vinalhaven.  They wanted everyone
to get to know one another before the projected autumn, or autumnish,
wedding date, and familiarization came about rather quickly in close
sum mer quarters over the succession of cloudy late-summer days they
seemed to have brought with them.

"We were having a beautiful summer until you came," several
daughters-in-law spoke before they thought, and Penny whooped and
Harvey hark-harked as the daughters-in-law tripped over their tongues
attempting to restate their welcomes.  Penny and Harvey were not
comfortable old people, nor had they ever been congenial middle-aged
people, and from what their children could surmise, they were just as
glad they hadn't had to deal with their parents in their youths.

Now, Lily wandered out to the terrace where she had her choice among
the collection of chaise longues which were not set down as randomly as
first appeared across the terrace stones.  The chairs had been pulled
by their last occupants into or out of a shadow or the sun, away from
or closer to an ongoing conversation according to a preference.
Nevertheless, the effect of such a tangle of chairs was that of the
aftermath of a smashup, as if the terrace had run hard against the
rocks.  Lily's chosen chaise, the one she could manage to get out of
once she had gotten into it, placed her feet in the midday sun and left
her head well within the shade cast by the kitchen ell, and she also
commanded a clear view down the driveway as far as the jog it took to
skirt the swamp, for she had found she still could not not keep a wary
eye trained upon that avenue of approach.  She hoped quiet time on her
own would restore her capacity to sit and to be unable to say precisely
what she had been contemplating if challenged to do so.  She hoped not
to be challenged to do so.

But at the moment, Lily had letters to write, for the family had all
very promptly written to her once they'd arrived in their new
situations.  Well, they were demonstrating their excellent Hill
manners, even the boys, of whom she would not have guessed such a
civilized streak.  Perhaps

Glover was under orders in the Army, and Brooks and Rollins at the
Range School as well, to practice their penmanship.  Lily settled back,
positioning the writing board she had fetched from the invalid's supply
cupboard.  (For Ginger had returned the writing board at the last, and
the thermometer and the eye cup and the ice bag Lily fished the fat
packet of correspondence from the pocket of her divided skirt-they all
seemed to have had a great deal to say for themselves.  They described
strange new landscapes (Brooks, on his dormitory cubicle), and deep
culture shocks (Betsy, in California), and odd items found on the
dinner menu (Glover, on the enlisted men's mess), and how warm and
welcoming the natives were (Ginger, back in Kansas), and how very much
at home they felt (Becky, in Czechoslovakia).  Becky and Alden and
Little

Becky had quickly become accustomed to castle life, once they had
learned bowls of soup cooled to insipidity on the journey from the
kitchen quarters to the banquet hall, so they switched to a covered
tureen.  They had found they could keep the wall tapestries from
flapping in the interior breezes by weighting their hems with ancient
shot borrowed from coffers in the armaments chamber.

Lily pulled a sheet of Durable Bond into place and she clicked down the
point of her pen and she began to write.

She asked Becky if they had made sure that the ancient shot wasn't live
lest it spark against ancient stone walls and detonate during a dinner
party, for she guessed the local people would still be jumpy after
their Revolution even though it had been such a civilized one.  Lily
told Ginger she had no idea whether there was a readership clamoring
for a roman a clef about a town like Towne, for she, Lily, did not read
current fiction because of the Language.  Lily agreed with Betsy that
California sounded a very odd place, but Betsy herself would be odd if
she didn't think California was odd, so that was all right.  Lily
complimented Arthur on his recent television performance because it
only seemed correct to acknowledge such a conspicuous event in a
great-nephew's life; besides, it was a Hill tenet to say nothing at all
if one had nothing nice to say, and therefore her silence could well be
so construed by young Arthur.  She wrote a brief note to Glover telling
him to tuck into the shoebox of stacked and Saran-wrapped Congo Bars
she had baked for him, and she wrote a second note to Brooks and
Rollins to say she hoped they enjoyed the shoebox of stacked and
Saran-wrapped Congo Bars she had baked for them with second thoughts in
the event they discovered she had baked for their older brother and not
for them, should, in this flurry of letter writing, Congo Bars ever be
mentioned.

Lily addressed envelopes with the strange new addresses Ginger had
copied in all their precise, fussing detail on 3 X 5 cards one very
organized afternoon and left upon their bureau tops.  Though the
family

\\

would not, of course, keep up with all this keeping in touch.  Lily's
own letters to them also included an account of the resurfacing of the
Salem Road with an application of hot tar and sand which had caused a
traffic tie-up when the second shift of the furniture-polish factory
let out and a woman driver had fainted from the mix of tar fumes and
car fumes and the heavy banana-oil odor that was vented twice a day
from the factory's air ducts, which news would probably not invite or
inspire swift responses, for the stricken woman was no one they knew,
although they would all have been interested and gratified had the
victim, instead, been Babe Palmer.  Still, this failure to engage her
correspondents was not accomplished by design.  Lily rather enjoyed
receiving a letter among her usual bills and circulars.  She certainly
preferred a letter to a mistimed telephone call, for the family, when
far away as they were all far away now, were not at all adept at
calculating the difference in hours between their time zones and her
own-even when earlier, holding and rotating apples plucked from the
epergne, they attempted to work out which way it was the globe turned
and whether they should add or subtract a three or a six or a twelve
from the local time told on their wristwatch faces.  Lily wondered why
this was so.  They ought to have had a clearer idea of where they
stood, these people who were so convinced the world revolved around
them.  They had all been expensively educated.

She had been shown the canceled checks.

But Harvey, who still had his wits about him regardless, had taken to
calling Lily promptly every morning at nine-thirty for the past week he
had been away to inquire after the status of the cementers' work
stoppage.

Lily, for her part, was under instructions to call the Local's Strike
Update Hotline number Harvey had pinned to the kitchen message board.
Every morning at nine, Lily listened to the latest recorded report on
the status of negotiations, and then she was told a little-known fact
from This Day in Labor History.  Lily guessed the Communications
Officer possessed a special-interest calendar.  She planned to buy
herself the Gardener's Year Illustrated calendar next January when
Little Becky's paean to her last, most favorite pop group swaying on
the back of the cellar door finally expired.  Lily was looking forward
to 1991Harvey had been chatty that morning.  He and Penny were
currently up at Squam Lake where the weather was grey and their
mattresses were musty and he complained he had yet to see hide nor hair
of one of the vaunted loons, for, apparently, some movie had been
filmed at the lake featuring the loons.  Lily didn't know.  She wasn't
a moviegoer because of the Language.  She reminded Harvey he had never
been much of a bird-watcher.  Harvey agreed, he had never been a lawn
ornament.

"But," Lily asked, "haven't you heard a loon?  Hearing them is the
point."

"No," Harvey said.  "They're all Nichollses here.  It's all cannonballs
and Geronimo yells off the end of the dock."

"Oh," said Lily.

"And Bucky Nicholls came right out with it last night, no beating
around the bush.  He asked how Penny and I were, how'd he put it, how
were we going to arrange our assets, and I could read on his face he
was trying to figure out which of us, Penny or me, was going to be the
longest laster.  Because at that moment Penny was choking on a rancid
cashew from a can she'd found under the boathouse.  I'm setting the
scene here.  There was his old mother gasping and clutching her throat
and Bucky suddenly wanted to know about her portfolio instead of
getting her a glass of ice water."

"I'm sure you and Penny are being sensible," Lily said.

"Yes.  We're telling both sides there will be no need to take sides,"
Harvey said.

"Well," said Lily.  "Good.  The funerals will be pleasant occasions
then."

"Not that either of us is going anywhere soon," Harvey said sharply.
"We've switched to Butter Buds and we've been walking a mile a day out
to the main road to buy corn and tomatoes and a couple of cider
doughnuts.  So that's our plan; after we've built the house, we're not
going anywhere except to Anguilla next February since we've paid a
deposit down."

Lily had said she would have to look up Anguilla in the atlas.

She squared the short stack of envelopes she had addressed and slid
them into the pocket of her divided skirt.  She would run down to the
P.O. later, and stop by Harris Desmaris's office on the off-chance he
was in and wasn't too busy on a winding-down late-summer afternoon for
a chat about her investments and her insurance and the state of
Harvey's clear title to his building site and to mention some ideas
about her will.

Not that she was about to go anywhere, either.  Secretly, and therefore
advantageously, Lily would vie with Harvey.  She would walk two miles a
day and not eat cider doughnuts while she was about it.  Nevertheless,
Lily could foresee a day in twenty years' time or so when she would
finally wear out and die, after a week or two in bed, from nothing very
specific but something very final.  She might even linger for a month
if she was waiting for the outcome of a particularly interesting court
trial or if she was wrapped up in the imminent landing of the first
Americans on Mars.  She'd like to see that.  She had questions about
Mars-she was sure they had water there.  But Harris had been after her
for a long time about making out a will.  He had told her horror tales
of the mischief wrought by intestate individuals to which Lily had
listened, properly deploring the inconvenience to the living even as
she privately decided her real rooting interest lay with the
recalcitrant dead, who had also probably not planned on going
anywhere.

In the meanwhile, Lily had trusted that the right decision about the
disposition of her earthly share would be arrived at in its own way and
in its own time.  How this was to come about, she did not know and
would not speculate.  She had told herself that she must just leave a
"door" open and the solution would drift in like a dragonfly.  For in
Lily's experience, dragonflies so seldom ventured into a dwelling that
the apparition of one surely would mean something.

And then that morning on the telephone with Harvey, she had at last
seen her dragonfly.  Harvey had been rattling on as usual about his
various fads and affairs and Lily had nodded along as she gazed through
the kitchen doorway into the shadowy and blessedly emptied front hall,
liking the way the slant of the sun through the pier-glass windows
squared off and apportioned bright passages of rug and the grained wood
of floorboards, and refracted up the wall highlighting the spidering
cracks in the original plaster, which in Lily's opinion appeared as
elegantly etched as if by frost on a window pane.  Her gaze had
settled, then, upon the coatrack, which had regained its original spare
outline.  Her own white cotton summer sweater drooped from a peg next
to the belled collar she had bought for Agnes and which Agnes did not
care to wear.  And left behind on another spindle was the straw hat
Betsy had been wearing out in the sun.  The hat had once belonged to
Lily and Harvey's

Uncle Harvey but Betsy had made it her own by knotting a leaf patterned
scarf around the brim and sticking a cameo pin in the crown.  Alongside
the hat hung the jacket Little Becky had forgotten, at the very end, to
pack, her shiny sateen jacket vividly appliqued with the New Kids' 1988
World Tour logo across the back, and which she had taken to wearing
turned inside out after she realized she no longer loved the New Kids
quite so much as she used to.  But the jacket's lining proved to be a
pretty paisley print in its own right so that was all right.  The hat
and the jacket were waiting on the coatrack as if the girls were about
to sweep into the hall and snatch their things and scatter outside into
the garden, into the woods, down the driveway, away on an errand, off
to see friends.  That was when Lily knew.

In twenty years or so, the girls would be the right ages.  Women in
their thirties were energetic.  They would climb high ladders and knock
hornets' nests from the eaves.  They would be keen to scrub the
bathroom tiles and reorganize the linen cupboard.  They would work out
between them what to do about the house.  Little Becky would be
sentimental and Betsy very practical and the right choices would be
made.  Little Becky would always be eager to please and Betsy always
reluctant to take advantage.

Alden and Becky would be touched for Little Becky's sake that she had
been so favored, and Ginger would be furious at having been slighted
herself, but she would carry on as if the house were somehow her own,
and Betsy would let her, up to a point.  Oh, Lily could see them all as
they thronged round the driveway curve.  She even saw the ones who did
not yet exist, Little Becky's someday husband and their children,

Betsy's yellow-haired daughter-and the boys' pleasant wives and
attractive families, as well.  The young cousins would play inexpert
croquet outside on the lawn as the adults met in the big parlor to
discuss serious matters, keeping their voices soft, forgetting Lily was
no longer lying ill upstairs.  And their voices would remain soft when
they remembered

Lily was no longer lying ill upstairs.

No, Lily did not doubt they would return, just as they had all gone
away before, as time and time again she had stood on the terrace
dressed in her best and waved and wished them well as they married
well.  She had said good-bye to her brother and her sister and her
nephews and nieces as they flew from the house in their two by twos,
striding hand in hand, side by side, two by two, as if issuing from the
Ark itself.

And then the tale had been turned around.  How like me to get things
all backward, Lily thought as she lay half in the sun and half in the
shade, too content to stir.  Her pen dropped from her flexing fingers
onto the terrace stones and rolled out of reach.

No, Lily reconsidered.  How very like the family to skew events around
into their usual muddles and dramas as they came rolling back home.
They arrived alone now, or in numbers, shrugging off their coats,
peeling off their boots, requiring a single freshly made-up bed or half
a dozen beds in the attic, wanting to know, Is my room just as I left
it?  Saying, Remember I was working on that thousand-piece pule, it was
the Birth of Venus.  I'd finished her feet and the clamshell and two of
those tender

Renaissance trees.  You say it's been dismantled?  By whom?  You needed
the dining room table?  What time is supper then?  What are we having
for supper?  Oh.

Daily life on the Ark, however had the Noahs borne it, that yearlong
drift in searching circles afloat above their ruined world as the lambs
and goats and she-bears and tigers and workhorses and owls and swans
and geese among them contended for the best cabin and a preeminent
chair upon the deck, all the while scanning the lowering skies, bent
against the gales, complaining of the rain, glossed by lightning snaps,
watching the far horizon for the first hint of land, for the greening
crest of the highest hilltop to appear which they recognized at once
and reclaimed as their own.  Then they packed up their bags and
shrugged on their coats and uttered their thanks and were gone.

About the Author

Nancy Clark is a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Trinity
College.  She is currently writing a second novel about the Hill
family, A Way from Home.  She lives in New Hampshire.

A Note on the Type

This book was set in Fournier, a typeface named for Pierre Simon
Fournier^/i (1712-1768), a celebrated French type designer.  Coming
from a family of type founders Fournier was an extraordinarily prolific
designer of typefaces and of typographic ornaments.  He was also the
author of the important Manuel typographique (1764-1766), in which he
attempted to work out a system standardizing type measurement in
points, a system that is still in use internationally.  Fournier's type
is considered transitional in that it drew its inspiration from the old
style, yet was ingeniously innovatio nal providing for an elegant,
legible appearance.  In 1925 his type was revived by the Monotype
Corporation of London.

Composed by Creative Graphics, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics, Berryville, Virginia

DesignedlyM.  Kristen Bearse