Ghost Story

"You saw him in the dark?" Sears asked in a bored voice. "Were your yard lights on?"

"Mr. Lawyer, you gotta be kidding, with electric bills the way they are. No, but I saw him and I knew he was big."

"Now, how did you know that, Elmer?" asked Hardesty. Mrs. Scales was coming down the uncarpeted stairs-thump thump thump, hard shoes hitting the wooden risers. Ricky sneezed. A child began to whistle, and abruptly ceased as the footsteps paused.

"Because I saw his eyes! Didn't I? Just starin' out at me! About six feet above the ground."

"You just saw his eyes?" asked Hardesty, incredulous.

"What the hell did this guy's eyes do, Elmer, shine in the dark?"

"You said it," Elmer replied.

Ricky jerked his head to look at Elmer, who regarded them all with evident satisfaction, and then without meaning to, looked across the table at Sears. He had gone tense and immobile at Hardesty's last question, trying to let nothing show on his face, and on Sears's round face he saw the same intention. Sears too. It means something to him too.

"Now I expect you to get him, Walt, and you two lawyers of mine to sue his ass from here to summer," Elmer said conclusively. "Excuse my language, honey." His wife was coming into the little kitchen again, and she nodded at his apology, acknowledging its rectitude by tapping it with her chin as it went by, before taking the percolator off the burner.

"Did you see anything last night, Mrs. Scales?" Hardesty asked.

Ricky saw a similar recognition in Sears's eyes and knew that he had given himself away.

"All I saw was a scared husband," she said. "I suppose that's the part he left out."

Elmer cleared his throat; his Adam's apple bobbed. "Well. It looked funny."

"Yes," Sears said. "I think we know all we need to know. Now if you'll excuse us, Mr. Hawthorne and I must be getting back to town."

"You'll drink your coffee first, Mr. James," said Mrs. Scales, putting a steaming plastic cup down before him on the tabletop. "If you're going to sue some monster's ass from here to summer you'll need your strength."

Ricky forced himself to smile, but Walt Hardesty guffawed.

Outside, Hardesty, back in the protective coloration of his Texas Ranger outfit, bent over to speak softly through the three-inch crack Sears had opened in the window. "Are you two going back into town? Could we meet somewhere to have a word or two?"

"Is it important?"

"Might be, might not. I'd like to talk to you, though."

"Right We'll go straight to your office."

Hardesty's gloved hand went to his chin and caressed it. "I'd rather not talk about this in front of the other boys."

Ricky sat with his hands on the wheel, his alert face turned to Hardesty, but his mind held only one thought: Its starting. Its starting and we don't even know what it is.

"What do you suggest, Walt?" asked Sears.

"I suggest a sub rosa stop someplace where we can have a quiet talk. Ah, do you know Humphrey's Place, just inside the town limits on the Seven Mile Road?"

"I believe I've seen it."

"I sorta use their back room as an office when I've got confidential business. What say we meet there?"

"If you insist," Sears said, not bothering to consult Ricky.

They followed Hardesty's car back to town, going a little faster than they had on the way out. The recognition between them-that each knew the frightening thing Elmer Scales had seen-made speech impossible. When Sears finally spoke, it was on an apparently neutral topic. "Hardesty's an incompetent fool. 'Confidential business.' His only confidential business is with a bottle of Jim Beam."

"Well, now we know what he does in the afternoons." Ricky turned off the highway onto the Seven Mile Road. The tavern, the only building in sight, was a gray collection of angles and points two hundred yards down on the right.

"Indeed. He blots up free liquor in Humphrey Stalladge's back room. He'd be better off in a shoe factory in Endicott."

"What do you think this conversation will be about?"

"We'll know all too soon. Here's our rendezvous."

Hardesty was already standing beside his car in the big, now nearly empty parking lot. Humphrey's Place, in fact no more than an ordinary roadside tavern, had a long peaked and gabled facade with two large black windows: in one of these neon spelled out its name; in the other Utica Club flashed on and off. Ricky pulled in beside the sheriff's car, and the two lawyers got out into the cold wind.

"Just follow me," Hardesty said on a rising curve of intonation, his voice inflated with false bonhomie. After looking at one another with shared discomfort, they went up the concrete steps after him. Ricky sneezed twice, hard, the moment he was inside the tavern.

Omar Norris, one of the town's small population of full-time drinkers, was seated on a stool at the bar, looking at them in amazement; plump Humphrey Stalladge moved between the booths, dusting ashtrays. "Walt!" he called, and then nodded at Ricky and Sears. Hardesty's bearing had changed: within the bar, he was taller, more seigniorial, and his physical attitude to the two older men behind him somehow suggested that they had come to the place for his advice. Then Stalladge glanced more closely at Ricky and said, "Mr. Hawthorne, isn't it?" and smiled and said, "Well," and Ricky knew that Stella had been in here at one time or another.

"Back room okay?" Hardesty asked.

"Always is, for you." Stalladge waved toward a door marked Private, tucked in a corner beside the long bar, and watched the three men across the dusty floor. Omar Norris, still astonished, watched them, Hardesty striding like a G-man, Ricky conspicuous only in his sober neatness, Sears an imposing presence similar to (it only now came to Ricky) Orson Welles. "You're in good company today, Walt," Stalladge called behind their backs, and Sears made one of his disgusted noises deep in his throat-as much at that as at the negligent wave of his gloved hand with which Hardesty acknowledged the remark. Hardesty, princely, opened the door.

But once inside, after indicating that they should go down the dim hallway to the dark room at its end, his shoulders slumped again, his face relaxed, and he said, "Can I get you anything?" Both men shook their heads.

"I'm a little thirsty, myself," Hardesty said, grimaced, and went back through the door.

Wordlessly the two lawyers went down the hall and into the dingy back room. A table, scarred by a thousand generations of cigarettes, stood in the center; six camp chairs circled it. Ricky found the light switch and flicked it down. Between the unseen light bulbs and the table stood cases of beer stacked nearly to the ceiling. The entire room smelled of smoke and stale beer; even with the light on, the front portion of the room was nearly as dark as it had been before.

"What are we doing here?" Ricky asked.

Sears sat heavily in one of the camp chairs, sighed, removed his hat and put it carefully on the table. "If you mean what will come of this fantastic excursion, nothing, Ricky, nothing."

"Sears," Ricky began, "I think we ought to talk about what Elmer saw out there."

"Not in front of Hardesty."

"I agree. Now."

"Not now. Please."

"My feet are still cold," Ricky said, and Sears gave him a rare smile.

They heard the door at the end of the hall sliding open. Hardesty came in, a full glass of beer in one hand and a half-empty bottle of Labatt's and his Stetson in the other. His complexion had become slightly reddened, as if by a rough plains wind. "Beer's the best thing for a dry throat," he said. Beneath the camouflaging mist of beer which floated out with his words was the sharper, darker tang of sour-mash whiskey. "Really wets the pipes." Ricky calculated that Hardesty had managed to swallow one shot of whiskey and half a bottle of beer in the few moments he had been in the bar. "Have you two ever been here before?"

"No," Sears said.

"Well, this is a good place. It's real private, Humphrey makes sure you're not disturbed if you got something private you want to say, and it's kind of out of the way, so nobody is likely to see the sheriff and the two most distinguished lawyers in town sneakin' into a tavern."

"Nobody except Omar Norris."

"Right, and he's not likely to remember." Hardesty swung a leg over a chair as if it were a large dog he intended to ride, lowered himself into it and simultaneously tossed his hat onto the table, where it bumped into Sears's. Then the Labatt's bottle went onto the table; Sears moved his own hat a few inches nearer his belly as the sheriff took a long swallow from his glass.

"If I may repeat a question my partner just asked, what are we doing here?"

"Mr. James, I want to tell you something." The gunfighter eyes had a drunk's shining sincerity. "You'll understand why we had to get away from Elmer. We're never gonna find who or what killed those sheep." He swallowed again; stifled a burp with the back of his hand.

"No?" At least Hardesty's awful performance was taking Sears's mind off his own troubles; he was miming surprise and interest.

"No. No way, no how. This ain't the first time something like this happened."

"It isn't?" Ricky brought out. He too sat down, wondering how much livestock had been slaughtered around Milburn without his hearing of it.

"Not by a long shot. Not here, see, but in other parts of the country."

"Oh," Ricky leaned back against the rickety chair.

"You remember a few years back I went to a national police convention in Kansas City. Flew out, stayed there a week. Real good trip." Ricky could remember this, because after Hardesty's return the sheriff had spoken to the Lion's Club, the Kiwanis, the Rotary, the Jaycees and the Elks, the National Rifle Association, the Masons and the John Birch Society, the VFW and the Companions of the Forest of America-the organizations which had paid for his trip, and to a third of which Ricky by obligation belonged. His topic was the need for "a modern and fully equipped force for law and order in the small American community."

"Well," Hardesty said, gripping the beer bottle in one hand like a hot dog, "one night back at the motel, I got talking to a bunch of local sheriffs. These guys were from Kansas and Missouri and Minnesota. You know. They were talking about just this kind of setup -funny kinds of unsolved crimes. Now my point is this. At least two or three of these guys ran into exactly the same thing we saw today. Bunch of animals lying dead in a field-wham, bam, dead overnight. No cause until you look at 'em and find-you know. Real neat wounds, like a surgeon would do. And no blood. Exsanguinated, they call that. One of these guys said there was a whole wave of this in the Ohio River valley in the late sixties. Horses, dogs, cows-we probably got the first sheep. But, Mr. Hawthorne, you brought it all back to me when you said that about the no blood. That's right, that reminded me. You'd figure those sheep would bleed like crazy. And in Kansas City, the same thing happened just a year back before the conference, around Christmas."

"Nonsense," said Sears. "I'm not going to listen to any more of this rubbish."

"Excuse me, Mr. James. It's not nonsense. It all happened. You could look it up in the Kansas City Times. December 1973. Buncha dead cattle, no footprints, no blood-and that was on fresh snow too, just like today." He looked across at Ricky, winked, drained his beer.

"Nobody was ever arrested?" Ricky asked.

"Never. In all of those places, they never found anybody. Just like somethin' bad came to town, put on its show and took off again. My idea is that things like this are somethin's idea of a joke."

"What?" Sears said explosively. "Vampires? Demons? Crazy."

"No, I'm not sayin' that. Hell, I know there's no vampires, just like I know that damned monster in that lake in Scotland isn't there." Hardesty tipped back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. "But nobody ever found anything, and we ain't gonna either. There isn't even any sense in looking. I figure just to keep Elmer happy by telling him how I'm workin' on it."

"Is that really all you intend to do?" asked incredulous Ricky Hawthorne.

"Oh, I might have a man walk around some of the local farms, ask if they saw anything funny last night, but that's about all."

"And you actually brought us here to tell us that?" Sears asked.

"I actually did."

"Let's go, Ricky." Sears pushed his chair back and reached for his hat.

"And actually I thought the two most distinguished lawyers in town might be able to tell me something."

"I could, but I doubt that you'd listen."

"A little less high and mighty, Mr. James. We're both on the same side, aren't we?"

Ricky said, over the inevitable phht of expelled air from Sears, "What did you think we could tell you?"

"Why you think you know something about what Elmer saw last night." He fingered a groove in his forehead, smiling. "You two old boys went into deep freeze when Elmer was talking about that. So you know something or heard something or saw something you didn't want to tell Elmer Scales. Well, suppose you support your local sheriff and speak up."

Sears pushed himself up from the chair. "I saw four dead sheep. I know nothing. And that, Walter, is that." He snatched his hat from the table. "Ricky, let's go do something useful."

"He's right, isn't he?" They were turning the corner at Wheat Row. The vast gray body of St. Michael's Cathedral hung in the air to their right; the grotesque and saintly figures above the door and beside the windows wore caps and shirts of fresh snow, as if they had been frozen in place.

"About?" Sears waved toward their office building.

"Miracle of miracles. A parking space right in front of the door."

"About what Elmer saw."

"If it is obvious to Walt Hardesty, then it is obvious indeed. Yes."

"Did you actually see anything?"

"I saw something not there. I hallucinated. I can only assume that I was overtired and somehow emotionally affected by the story I told."

Ricky carefully backed the car into the space before the tall wooden facade of the office building.

Sears coughed, placed his hand on the door latch, did not move; to Ricky, he looked as though he already regretted what he was going to say. "I take it you saw more or less the same thing that Our Vergil did."

"Yes, I did." He paused. "No. I felt it, but I knew what it was."

"Well." He coughed again, and Ricky grew tense with waiting. "What I saw was Fenny Bate."

"The boy in your story?" Ricky was astonished.

"The boy I tried to teach. The boy I suppose I killed -helped to kill."

Sears took his hand from the door and let his weight fall back on the car seat. Now, at last, he wanted to talk.

Ricky tried to take it in. "I wasn't sure that-" He stopped in midsentence, aware that he was breaking one of the Chowder Society's rules.

"That it was a true story? Oh, it was true enough, Ricky. True enough. There was a real Fenny Bate, and he died."

Ricky remembered the sight of Sears's lighted window. "Were you looking out of the library windows when you saw him?"

Sears shook his head. "I was going upstairs. It was very late, probably about two o'clock. I had fallen asleep in a chair after doing the dishes. I didn't feel very good, I'm afraid-I would have felt worse if I'd known that Elmer Scales was going to wake me up at seven o'clock this morning. Well, I turned off the lights in the library, closed the door, and began to go up the stairs. And then I saw him sitting there, sitting on the stairs. He appeared to be asleep. He was dressed in the rags I remembered him wearing, and his feet were bare."

"What did you do?"

"I was too frightened to do anything at all. I'm no longer a strong young man of twenty. Ricky, I just stood there for-I don't know how long. I thought I might collapse. I steadied myself by putting my hand on the banister, and then he woke up." Sears was clasping his hands together before him, and Ricky could tell that he was gripping hard. "He didn't have eyes. He just had holes. The rest of his face was smiling." Sears's hands went to his face and folded in beneath the wide hat-brim. "Christ, Ricky. He wanted to play."

"He wanted to play?"

"That's what went through my mind. I was in such shock I couldn't think straight. When the-hallucination-stood up, I ran back down the stairs and locked myself in the library. I went to bed on the couch. I had the feeling that it was gone, but I couldn't make myself go back out on the staircase. Eventually I fell asleep and had the dream we were discussing. In the morning of course I recognized what had happened. I was 'seeing things,' in the vulgar parlance. And I did not think, nor do I think now, that such things are exactly in the province of Walt Hardesty. Or Our Vergil, for that matter."

"My God, Sears," Ricky said.

"Forget about it, Ricky. Just forget I ever told you. At least until this young Wanderley arrives."

Jesus she moved she can't she's dead spoke in his mind again, and he turned his eyes from the dashboard where they had been resting while Sears told him to do the impossible, and looked straight into the pale face of his law partner.

"No more," Sears said. "Whatever it is, no more. I've had enough."

… no put her feet in first.

"Sears."

"I can't, Ricky," Sears said, and levered himself out of the car.

Hawthorne got out on his side, and looked across the top of the car at Sears, an imposing man dressed in black, and for a moment he saw on the face of his old friend the waxy features his dream had given him. Behind him, around him, all of the town floated in wintry air, as if it too had secretly died. "But I'll tell you one thing," Sears said. "I wish Edward were still alive. I often wish that."

"So do I," Ricky whispered, but Sears had already turned from him and was beginning to go up the steps to the front door. A rising wind bit at Ricky's face and hands, and he quickly followed, sneezing again.

John Jaffrey

1

The doctor, whose party it had been, woke out of a troubled sleep just at the time when Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James were beginning their walk across a field in the direction of what appeared to be several piles of dirty laundry. Moaning, Jaffrey looked around the bedroom. Everything appeared to be subtly altered, subtly wrong. Even the bare shoulder of Milly Sheehan, who slept on beside him, was somehow wrong-Milly's round shoulder looked insubstantial, like pink smoke floating in the air. This was true of the bedroom as a whole. The fading wallpaper (blue stripes and bluer roses), the table bearing neat piles of coins, a library book (The Making of a Surgeon) and a lamp, the doors and handles of the tall white cupboard opposite, his yesterday's gray striped suit and last evening's dinner jacket draped carelessly over a chair: it all seemed drained of several shades of color, wispy as the interior of a cloud. In this room, at once familiar and unreal, he could not stay.

Jesus she moved, his own words, coiled and died in the washed-out air as if he had just spoken them. Pursued by them, he quickly got out of bed.

Jesus she moved, and this time he heard it spoken. The voice was level, without shading or vibrato, not his own. He had to get out of the house. Of his dreams, he could remember only the last startling image: before that there had been the usual business of lying paralyzed in a bare bedroom, no bedroom he'd ever seen in his life, and the coming of a threatening beast which resolved into dead Sears and dead Lewis: he had assumed they'd all been having this dream. But the image which propelled him across the room was this: the face, streaked with blood and distorted with bruises, of a young woman-a woman as dead as Sears and Lewis in the familiar dream-staring at him with glowing eyes and grinning mouth. It was more real than anything about him, more real than himself. (Jesus she moved she can't she's dead)

But she moved, all right. She sat up and grinned.

It was coming to an end for him at last, as it had for Edward, and with part of his mind he knew it and was grateful. A little surprised that his hands did not melt through the brass handles of the dresser drawer, Jaffrey pulled, out socks and underwear. Unearthly rose light pervaded the bedroom. He quickly dressed in random articles of clothing, selecting them blindly, and left the bedroom to go down the stairs to the ground floor. There, obeying an impulse stamped into him by ten years' habit, he let himself into a small rear office, opened a cabinet and took out two vials and two disposable hypodermics. He sat on a revolving typing chair, rolled up his left sleeve, took the syringes from their wrappers and put one on the metal-topped table beside him.

The girl sat up on the blood-smeared car seat and grinned at him through the window. She said, Hurry up, John. He pushed the first needle through the rubber cap over the insulin compound, pulled back the barrel and socked the needle into his arm. When the hypodermic was empty, he retracted it and tossed it into the wastebasket beneath the table; then he put the other syringe into the second vial, which contained a compound of morphine; this went into the same arm.

Hurry up, John.

None of his friends knew he was a diabetic, and had been since his early sixties; neither did they know of the morphine addiction which had gained on him since the same period, when he had begun administering the drug to himself: they had only seen the effects of the doctor's morning ritual gradually eating into him.

With both syringes at the bottom of the wastebasket, Dr. Jaffrey came out into his entrance hall and waiting room. Empty chairs stood in rows against the walls; on one of these appeared a girl in torn clothing, red smears across her face, redness leaking from her mouth when she said Hurry up, John.

He reached into a closet for his overcoat and was surprised that his hand, extended there at the end of his arm, was such a whole, functioning thing. Someone behind him seemed to be helping him get his arms through the sleeves of the coat. Blindly he grabbed a hat from the shelf above the coathooks. He stumbled through his front door.

2

The face was smiling down at him from an upstairs window in Eva Galli's old house. Get along, now. Moving a little oddly, as if drunk, he went down the walk, his feet in carpet slippers not registering the cold, and turned in the direction of town. Until he reached the corner, he could feel that house across the street as a presence behind him; when he managed to get as far as the corner, his open coat flapping about the trousers to the gray suit and the dinner jacket, he suddenly saw in his mind that the house was blazing, all of it blanketed in a transparent flame that was even now warming his back. But when he turned around to look it was not burning, there were no transparent flames, nothing had happened.

Thus, when Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James were seated with Walt Hardesty in a farm kitchen drinking coffee, Dr. Jaffrey, a thin figure in a fishing hat, an unbuttoned coat, the trousers to one suit, the jacket to another and carpet slippers, was moving past the front of the Archer Hotel. He was as little aware of it as he was of the wind which whipped his coat back and snapped it behind him. Eleanor Hardie, vacuuming the carpet in the hotel's lobby, saw him go by, holding down his fishing hat, and thought: poor Dr. Jaffrey, he has to go out to see a patient in this weather. The bottom of the window excluded the carpet slippers from her view of the doctor. She would have been confused to see him hesitate at the corner and turn down the left side of the square-in effect going back the way he had come.

When he passed the big windows of the Village Pump restaurant, William Webb, the young waiter Stella Hawthorne had intimidated, was setting out napkins and silverware, working his way toward the back of the restaurant where he could take a break and have a cup of coffee. Because he was nearer to Dr. Jaffrey than Eleanor Hardie had been, he took in the details of the doctor's pale, confused face beneath the fishing hat, the coat unbuttoned to reveal the doctor's bare neck, the tuxedo jacket over the pajama top. What went through his mind was: the old fool's got amnesia. On the half-dozen occasions Bill Webb had seen Dr. Jaffrey in the restaurant, the doctor had read a book straight through his meal and left a minute tip. Because Jaffrey had begun to hurry, though the expression on his face suggested that he had no proper idea of where he was going, Webb dropped a handful of silverware on the table and rushed out of the restaurant.

Dr. Jaffrey had begun to flap down the sidewalk. Webb ran after him and caught up with him at the traffic lights a block away: the doctor, running, was an angular bird. Webb touched the sleeve of the black coat. "Dr. Jaffrey, can I help you?"

Dr. Jaffrey.

In front of Webb, about to run across the street without bothering to check the traffic-which, in any case, was nonexistent-Jaffrey turned around, having heard a toneless command. Bill Webb then was given one of the most unsettling experiences of his life. A man with whom he was acquainted, a man who had never looked at him with even polite curiosity, now regarded him with utter terror stamped into his features. Webb, who dropped his hand, had no idea that the doctor saw, instead of his ordinary, slightly froggy face, that of a dead girl grinning redly at him.

"I'm going," the doctor said, his face still registering horror. "I'm going now."

"Uh, sure," said Webb.

The doctor turned and fled, and reached the other side of the street without mishap. He continued his birdlike run down the left side of Main Street, elbows hitching, coat twisting out behind him, and Webb was sufficiently unsettled by the look the doctor had given him to stand staring at him open-mouthed until he realized that he was coatless and a block from the restaurant.

3

In Dr. Jaffrey's mind a perfect image had formed, far clearer than the buildings past which he fled. This was of the two-lane steel bridge over the little river into which Sears James had once thrown a blouse wrapped about a large stone. The fishing hat lifted from his head in a buffeting wind, and for a moment that was clear too, sailing handsomely through gray air.

"I'm going now," he said.

Though on any normal day John Jaffrey could have gone straight to the bridge without even thinking about which streets would take him there, this morning he wandered about Milburn in a growing panic, unable to find it. He could picture the bridge perfectly-he saw even the rivets with their rounded heads, the flat dull face of the metal-but when he tried to picture its location, he saw only fuzz. Buildings? He turned into Market Street, almost expecting to see the bridge lifting up between Burger King and the A&P. Seeing only the bridge, he had forgotten the river.

Trees? A park? The picture the words evoked was so strong that he was surprised, leaving Market Street, to see about him only empty streets, snow heaped at the curbside. Move on, doctor. He stumbled forward, righted himself by leaning against a barber pole, went on.

Trees? Some trees, scattered in a landscape? No. Nor these floating buildings.

As the doctor wandered half-blindly through streets he should have known, tacking from the square to Washington Street on the south, then over to Milgrim Lane and down declining Milgrim Lane past three-room wooden houses set between carwashes and drugstores into the Hollow and real poverty where he would be as close to unknown as he could be and still be in Milburn (here he might have been in trouble if it hadn't been so cold and if trouble hadn't become a meaningless concept to apply to him), several people saw him go. The Hollow people who saw him go thought he was just another crazy, doomed and oddly dressed. When he accidentally turned back in the right direction and crossed back into quiet streets where bare trees stood at the ends of long lawns, those who saw him assumed that the doctor's car was nearby, because he had begun to move in a slow trot and was hatless. A mailman who grabbed his arm and said, "Man, do you need help?" was shocked into helplessness by the same wide-open gaze of terror that had stopped Bill Webb. Eventually Dr. Jaffrey wound back into the business district.

When he had twice circled Benjamin Harrison Oval, both times going right past Bridge Approach Lane, a patient voice in his mind said Go around once more and take the second right turn, doctor.

"Thank you," he whispered, having heard amusement as well as patience in the voice he'd once heard as inhumanly toneless.

So once more, exhausted and half-frozen, John Jaffrey forced himself to move painfully past the tire-repair outfits and muffler centers of Benjamin Harrison Oval, and lifting his knees like a wornout milkhorse, at last made the turn into Bridge Approach Lane.

"Of course," he sobbed, seeing it at last, the gray arch of the bridge over the sluggish river. He could trot no further; by now in fact he could barely walk. One of the slippers had fallen off, and the foot it had covered was entirely without sensation. He had a flaming stitch in his left side, his heart thudded, his lungs were one vast ache. The bridge was an answered prayer. He trudged toward it. This was where the bridge belonged, here in this windy area where the old brick buildings gave way to weedy marshland, here where the wind felt like a hand holding him back.

Now, doctor.

He nodded, and as he drew nearer he saw where he could stand. Four big scallops of metal, themselves cross-hatched by girders, formed an undulating line on either side of the bridge. In the middle of the bridge, between the second and third metal curves, a thick steel girder protruded upward.

Jaffrey could not feel the change from the concrete of the road to the steel of the bridge, but he could feel the bridge move beneath him, lifting a little with each particularly strong gust. When he reached the superstructure, he pulled himself along on the rail. After reaching the central girder, he gripped one of the rungs, put his frozen feet on the bottom rung, and tried to climb up to the flat rail.

He could not do it.

For a moment he stood there, hands on one rung and feet on another, like an old man hanging from a rope, breathing so heavily it sounded like sobbing. He managed to lift his slippered foot and put it on the next rung. Then by using what he felt was surely the last of his strength, he pulled his body up onto it. Some flesh from his bare foot adhered to the lower rung. Panting, he stood on the second rung, and saw that he had two more rungs to go before he would be high enough to stand on the flat rail.

One at a time, he transferred his hands to the next highest rung. Then he moved the slippered foot; and with what felt like heroic effort, moved the other.

Pain seared his entire leg, and he clung to the supports, the bare foot lifted into cold wind. For a moment, his foot blazing, he feared that shock would tumble him back down onto the bridge. Once down, he would never be able to climb up again.

Delicately he put the toes of his still-flaming foot on the rung. It was enough to hold him. Again he transferred his numb arms. The slippered foot went up a rung-by itself it seemed. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms merely trembled. It felt as though the muscles in his shoulders were separating. Finally he threw himself up, assisted he thought by a hand pushing upward in the small of his back, his fingers luckily caught the rung, and he was nearly there.

For the first time he noticed his bare foot, bleeding onto the metal. The pain had increased; now his entire left leg seemed to be in flames. He put the foot down onto the flat rail, and held tightly with both exhausted arms while he moved his right foot beside it.

The water glistened feebly beneath him. Wind buffeted his hair, his coat.

Standing before him on a platform of gray wind, dressed in tweed jacket and bow tie, was Ricky Hawthorne. Ricky's hands were clasped, in a characteristic gesture, before his belt buckle. "Good work, John," he said in his dry kind voice. The best of them all, the sweetest, cuckolded little Ricky Hawthorne.

"You take too much guff from Sears," John Jaffrey said, his voice weak and whispery. "You always did."

"I know." Ricky smiled. "I'm a natural subaltern. Sears was always a natural general."

"Wrong," Jaffrey tried to say. "He's not, he's…" The thought died.

"It doesn't matter," came the light dry voice. "Just step forward off the bridge, John."

Dr. Jaffrey was looking down at the gray water. "No, I can't. I had something different in mind. I was going…" Confusion took it away.

When he looked up again, he gasped. Edward Wanderley, who had been closer to him than any of the others, was standing on the wind instead of Ricky. As on the night of the party, he wore black shoes, a gray flannel suit, a flowered shirt. Black-rimmed spectacles were joined at the bows by a silvery cord. Handsome in his theatrical gray hair and expensive clothes, Edward smiled at him with compassion, concern, warmth. "It's been a little while," he said.

Dr. Jaffrey began to weep.

"It's time to stop messing around," Edward told him. "All it takes is one step. It's simple as hell, John."

Dr. Jaffrey nodded.

"So take the step, John. You're too tired to do anything else."

Dr. Jaffrey stepped off the bridge.

Below him, at the level of the water but protected from the wind by a thick steel plate, Omar Norris saw him hit the water. The doctor's body went under, surfaced a moment later and spun halfway around, face down, before it began to drift downriver with the current. "Shit," he said: he'd come to the one place he could think of where he could finish off a pint of bourbon without being cornered by lawyers, the sheriff, his wife or someone telling him to get on the snowplow and start clearing the streets. He tilted more bourbon into his mouth, closed his eyes. When he opened them it was still there, lower in the water because the heavy coat had begun to weight the body down. "Shit." He capped the bottle, stood up and went back out into the wind to see if he could find someone who would know what to do.

II - Jaffrey's Party

Give place, you ladies, and begone!

Boast not yourselves at all!

For here at hand approacheth one

whose face will stain you all.

"A Praise of His Lady"

-Tottel's Miscellany, 1557

1

The following events occurred a year and a day earlier, in the evening of the last day of the golden age. None of them knew it was their golden age, nor that it was coming to an end: in fact they would have seen their lives, in the usual fashion of people with comfortable existences, a sufficiency of friends and the certainty of food on the table, as a process of gradual and even imperceptible improvement. Having survived the crises of youth and the middle years, they thought they had wisdom enough to meet the coming crises of age; having seen wars, adulteries, compromise and change, they thought they had seen most everything they would see -they'd make no larger claim.

Yet there were things they had not seen, and which they would see in time.

It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age's defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living. If none in the Chowder Society but Ricky Hawthorne truly appreciated this, in time they would all know it.

2

"I suppose we have to go."

"What? You always like parties, Stella."

"I have a funny feeling about this one."

"Don't you want to meet that actress?"

"My interest in meeting little beauties of nineteen was always limited."

"Edward seems to have become rather taken with her."

"Oh, Edward." Stella, seated before her mirror and brushing her hair, smiled at Ricky's reflection. "I suppose it'll be worth going just to see Lewis Benedikt's reaction to Edward's find." Then the smile changed key as the fine muscles beside her mouth moved, became more edged. "At least it's something to be invited to a Chowder Society evening."

"It's not, it's a party," Ricky vainly pointed out.

"I've always thought that women should be allowed during those famous evenings of yours."

"I know that," Ricky said.

"And that's why I want to go."

"It's not the Chowder Society. It's just a party."

"Then who had John invited, besides you and Edward's little actress?"

"Everybody, I think," Ricky answered truthfully. "What's the feeling you said you had?"

Stella cocked her head, touched her lipstick with her little finger, looked into her summery eyes and said, "Goose over my grave."

3

Sitting beside Ricky as he drove her car the short distance to Montgomery Street, Stella, who had been unusually silent since they'd left the house, said, "Well, if everybody really is going to be there, maybe there'll be a few new faces."

As she had meant him to, Ricky felt a mocking blade of jealousy pierce him.

"It's extraordinary, isn't it?" Stella's voice was light, musical, confidential, as if she had intended nothing that was not superficial.

"What is?"

"That one of you is having a party. The only people we know who have parties are us, and we have about two a year. I can't get over it-John Jeffrey! I'm amazed Milly Sheehan let him get away with it."

"The glamour of the theater world, I imagine," Ricky said.

"Milly doesn't think anything is glamorous except John Jaffrey," Stella replied, and laughed at the image of their friend she could find in every glance of his housekeeper. Stella, who in certain practical matters was wiser than any of the men about her, sometimes titillated herself with the notion that Dr. Jaffrey took some sort of dope; and she was convinced that Milly and her employer did not occupy separate beds.

Considering his own remark, Ricky had missed his wife's insight. "The glamour of the theater world," as remote and unlikely as any such thing seemed in Milburn, did seem to have gripped Jeffrey's imagination- he, whose greatest enthusiasm had been for a neatly hooked trout, had become increasingly obsessed with Edward Wanderley's young guest during the previous three weeks. Edward himself had been very secretive about the girl. She was new, she was very young, she was for the moment a "star," whatever that really meant, and such people provided Edward's livelihood: so it was not exceptional that Edward had persuaded her to be the latest subject of his ghosted autobiographies. The typical procedure was that Edward had his subjects talk into a tape recorder for as many weeks as their interest held; then, with a great deal of skill, he worked these memories into a book. The rest of the research was done through the mails and over the telephone with anybody who knew or had once known his subject-genealogical research too was a part of Edward's method. Edward was proud of his genealogies. The recording was done whenever possible at his house; his study walls were lined with tapes-tapes on which, it was understood, many juicy and unpublishable indiscretions were recorded. Ricky himself had only the most notional interest in the personalities and sex lives of actors, and so he thought did the rest of his friends. But when Everybody Saw the Sun Shine underwent a month's change of cast which Ann-Veronica Moore spent in Milburn, John Jaffrey had increasingly had one goal-to have this girl come to his house. An even greater mystery was that his hints and schemes had succeeded, and the girl had consented to attend a party in her honor.

"Good Lord," Stella said, seeing the number of cars lined at the curb before Jaffrey's house.

"It's John's coming-out party," Ricky said. "He wants to show off his accomplishment."

They parked down the block and slipped through cold air to the front door. Voices, music pulsed at them.

"I'll be damned," Ricky said. "He's using his offices too."

Which was the truth. A young man pressed up against the door by the crowd let them in. Ricky recognized him as the latest occupant of the Galli house. He accepted Ricky's thanks with a deferential grin, and then smiled at Stella. "Mrs. Hawthorne, isn't it? I've seen you around town, but we've never been introduced." Before Ricky could remember the man's name, he had offered Stella his hand and said, "Freddy Robinson, I live across the street."

"A pleasure, Mr. Robinson."

"This is some party."

"I'm sure it is," said Stella, the faintest of smiles tipping the edges of her mouth.

"Coats in the consulting room here, drinks upstairs. I'd be happy to get you one while you and your husband take care of your coats."

Stella looked at his blazer, his plaid trousers, his floppy velvet bow tie, his absurdly eager face. "That won't be necessary, I'm sure, Mr. Robinson."

She and Ricky dodged into the consulting room, where coats were flung everywhere.

"Good God," said Stella. "What does that young man do for a living?"

"I think he sells insurance."

"I should have known. Take me upstairs, Ricky."

Holding her cool hand, Ricky led her out of the consulting room and through the lower fringe of the party to the stairs. A record player on a table thumped out disco music; young people strutted, wriggled before it. "John's had a brainstorm," Ricky muttered. "If not sunstroke," Stella said behind him.

"Hiya, Mr. Hawthorne." This was from a tall boy in his late teens, a client's son.

"Hello, Peter. It's too noisy for us down here. I'm looking for the Glenn Miller wing."

Peter Barnes's clear blue eyes regarded him expressionlessly. Did he seem that foreign to young people? "Hey, what do you know about Cornell? I think that's where I want to go to college. I might be able to get early admission. Hiya, Mrs. Hawthorne."

"It's a good school. I hope you make it," said Ricky. Stella poked him smartly in the back.

"No sweat. I know I'll get in. I got seven-hundreds on my trial boards. Dad's upstairs. Do you know what?"

"No." Stella prodded him again. "What?"

"All of us were invited because we're about the same age as Ann-Veronica Moore, but they just took her upstairs as soon as she and Mr. Wanderley got here. We never even got to talk to her." He gestured around at the couples doing the hustle in, the small downstairs room. "Jim Hardie kissed her hand, though. He's always doing things like that. He really grosses everybody out."

Ricky saw Eleanor Hardie's son doing a series of ritualistic dance steps with a girl whose black hair flowed down to the small of her back-it was Penny Draeger, the daughter of a druggist who was a client. She twitched away, spun, lifted a foot, and then placed her behind squarely on Hardie's crotch. "He sounds like a promising boy," Stella purred. "Peter, would you do me a favor?"

"Uh, sure," the boy gulped. "What?"

"Clear a space so that my husband and I can go upstairs."

"Sure, yeah. But you know what? We were just invited to meet Ann-Veronica Moore, and then we were supposed to go home. Mrs. Sheehan said we can't even go upstairs. I guess they thought she'd like to dance with us or something, but they didn't even give her a chance. And at ten o'clock, Mrs. Sheehan said she was going to throw us all out. Except for him, I suppose." He nodded at Freddy Robinson, who had one arm around the shoulders of a giggling high-school girl.

"Terribly unfair," Stella said. "Now be a good boy and carve away through the undergrowth."

"Oh yeah." He took them across the crowded room to the staircase as if he were reluctantly leading an outing from the local asylum. When they were safely on the stairs and Stella had already begun to go regally up, he bent forward and whispered in Ricky's ear. "Will you do something for me, Mr. Hawthorne?" Ricky nodded. "Say hello to her for me, will you? She's a real piece."

Ricky laughed aloud, causing Stella to turn her head and look at him quizzically. "Nothing, darling," he said, and went up the stairs to the quieter regions of the house.

They saw John Jaffrey standing in the hallway, rubbing his hands together. Soft piano music drifted from the living rooms. "Stella! Ricky! Isn't this wonderful?" He gestured expansively toward the rooms. They were as crowded as those downstairs, but with middle-aged men and women-the parents of the teenagers, Jaffrey's neighbors and acquaintances. Ricky saw two or three of the prosperous farmers from outside town, Rollo Draeger, the druggist, Louis Price, a commodity broker who had given him one or two good ideas, Harlan Bautz, his dentist, who already seem tipsy, some men he didn't know but who he thought were probably from the university-Milly Sheehan had a nephew who taught there, he remembered-Clark Mulligan, who ran the town's movie theater, Walter Barnes and Edward Venuti from the bank, each in a snowy turtleneck, Ned Rowles who edited the local paper. Eleanor Hardie, both hands on a tall glass held at the level of her breasts, was tilting her high-browed face toward Lewis Benedikt. Sears was leaning against a bookcase, looking out of sorts. Then the crowd parted, and Ricky saw why. Irmengard Draeger, the druggist's wife, was blathering in his ear, and Ricky knew what she was saying. I went to Skidmore, well I had three years before I met Rollo, don't you think I deserve something better than this one-horse town? Honestly, if it wasn't for Penny, I'd pack up and leave this minute. It was the melody, if not exactly the lyric, and Irmengard had set the past ten years of her life to it.

"I don't know why I never did it before," John said, his face gleaming. "I feel younger tonight than I have in a decade."

"How wonderful, John," Stella said, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. "What does Milly think of it?"

"Not much." He looked bemused. "She couldn't figure out why I wanted to have a party in the first place.

She couldn't understand why I wanted to have Miss Moore here at all."

Milly herself came into view at that moment, holding a tray of canapes before Barnes and Venuti, the two bankers, and from the determined look on Milly's plump face, Ricky saw that she had opposed the idea from the first. "Why did you want to?"

"Excuse me, John, I'm going to mill," said Stella. "Don't worry about getting me a drink, Ricky, I'll take one from someone who isn't using his." She went through the doorway in the direction of Ned Rowles. Lou Price, gangsterish in a double-breasted pinstriped suit, took her hand and pecked her on the cheek.

"She's a wonderful gal," John Jaffrey said, and the two men watched Stella deflect Lou Price with a phrase and continue toward Ned Rowles. "I wish there were a million like her." Rowles was turning around to watch Stella approach him, his face lighting up with pleasure. In his corduroy jacket, with his sandy hair and earnest face, Ned Rowles resembled a journalism student more than an editor. He too kissed Stella, but on the mouth, and held both her hands as he did so. "Why did I want to?" John cocked his head, and four deep wrinkles divided the side of his neck. "I don't know, exactly. Edward's so entranced with this girl that I wanted to meet her."

"Is he? Entranced?"

"Oh, absolutely. You wait. You'll see. And then, you know, I only ever see my patients and Milly and the Chowder Society. I thought it was time to bust out a little. Have a little fun before I dropped dead."

This was very giddy for John Jaffrey, and Ricky glanced at his friend, taking his eyes from his wife, who was still holding hands with Ned Rowles.

"And do you know what I can't get over? One of the most famous actresses in America is upstairs in my house, right this minute."

"Is Edward with her?"

"He said she had to take a few minutes before she joined us. I guess he's helping her with her coat or something." Jaffrey's ravaged face simply gleamed with pride.

"I don't think she's quite yet one of the most famous actresses in America, John." Stella had moved on, and Ned Rowles was saying something vehement to Ed Venuti.

"Well, she will be. Edward thinks so, and he's always right about things like that Ricky!" Jaffrey gripped his upper arms. "Did you see the kids dancing downstairs? Isn't that fantastic? Kids having a good time in my house? I thought they'd enjoy meeting her. It's a fantastic honor, you know. She can only be here a few more days. Edward's got the taping nearly done, and she has to get back to New York to rejoin the play. And here she is, in my house! By God, Ricky."

Ricky felt almost as though he should press a cold cloth to Jaffrey's forehead.

"Did you know that she just came out of nowhere? That she was the most promising student in her drama class, and the next week she got her part in Everybody Saw the Sun Shine?"

"No, John."

"Just now I had a wonderful idea. It was about having her here in the house. I was standing here, listening to the kids' disco music from downstairs, and hearing bits and pieces of the George Shearing record from in there, and I thought-downstairs is the raw, animal life, kids jumping around to that beat, on this floor we've got the mental life, doctors and lawyers, all middle-class respectability, and upstairs is grace, talent, beauty-the spirit. You see? It's like evolution. She's the most ethereal thing you've ever seen. And she's only eighteen."

Never in his life had Ricky heard John Jaffrey express such a fanciful concept. He was beginning to worry about the doctor's blood pressure. Then both men heard a door close up on the next landing, followed by Edward's deep voice saying something that had the sly intonation of a joke.

"I thought Stella said she was nineteen," Ricky said.

"Shhh."

A beautiful little girl was coming toward them down the stairs. Her dress was simple and green, her hair was a cloud. After a second Ricky saw that her eyes matched the dress. Moving with a kind of rhythmic idle precision, she gave them the tiniest of smiles- still it was brilliant-and went by, patting Dr. Jaffrey's chest with her fingertips as she passed them. Ricky watched her go, amused and touched. He had seen nothing like it since Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box.

Then he looked at Edward Wanderley and saw at once that John Jaffrey was right. Edward's feathers were shining. He had obviously been stirred up by the girl, and it was equally obvious that it was difficult for him to leave her alone long enough to greet his friends. All three men began to move into the crowded living room. "Ricky, you look great," Edward told him, putting an arm easily around Ricky's shoulders. Edward was half a foot taller, and when Edward began to propel him into the room, Ricky could smell an expensive cologne. "Just great. But isn't it time you stopped wearing bow ties? The Arthur Schlesinger era is dead and gone."

"That was the era right after mine," Ricky said.

"No, listen, nobody's older than he feels. I stopped wearing neckties altogether. In ten years, eighty per cent of the men in this country will wear ties only to weddings and funerals. Barnes and Venuti over there will be wearing that getup to the bank." He scanned the room. "Where the hell did she go?" Ricky, in whom new ties evoked a desire to wear them even to bed, looked at Edward's unfettered neck as his friend surveyed the crowded room, saw that it was even more corded than John Jaffrey's, and decided not to change his habits. "I've spent three weeks with that girl, and she's the most fantastic subject I ever had. Even if she makes the stuff up, and maybe she does, it'll be the best book I'll ever do. She's had a horrible life, horrible. It makes you weep just to hear it-I sit there and cry. I tell you, she's wasted in that piece of Broadway fluff, wasted. She'll be a great tragic actress. Once she's out of her teens." Red-faced, Edward guffawed at his own preposterousness. Like John, he too was in flight. "You two seem to have caught that girl like a virus," Ricky said.

John giggled, and Edward said, "The whole world will, Ricky. She's really got that gift."

"Oh," Ricky said, remembering something. "Your nephew Donald seems to be having a great success with his new book. Congratulations."

"It's nice to know I'm not the only talented bastard in the family. And it should help him get over his brother's death. That was an odd story, a very odd story-they both seem to have been engaged to the same woman. But we don't want to think about anything macabre tonight. We're going to have fun."

John Jaffrey nodded in happy agreement.

4

"I saw your son downstairs, Walt," Ricky said to Walter Barnes, the older of the two bankers. "He told me his decision. I hope he makes it."

"Yeah, Pete's decided on Cornell. I always hoped he'd at least apply to Yale-my old school. I still think he'd make it." A heavy-set man with a stubborn face like his son's, Barnes was disinclined to accept Ricky's congratulations. "The kid isn't even interested anymore. He says Cornell's good enough for him. 'Good enough.' His generation's even more conservative than mine. Cornell's the kind of rinky-dink place where they still have food fights. Nine or ten years ago, I used to be worried that Pete would grow up to be a radical with a beard and a bomb-now I'm afraid he'll settle for less than he could get."

Ricky made vague noises of sympathy.

"How are your kids doing? They both still out on the West Coast?"

"Yes. Robert's teaching English in a high school. Jane's husband just got a vice-presidency."

"Vice-president in charge of what?"

"Safety."

"Oh, well." They both sipped at their drinks, refraining from trying to invent comment on what a promotion to vice-president in charge of safety might mean in an insurance company. "They planning to get back here for Christmas?"

"I don't think so. They both have pretty active lives." In fact, neither of their children had written to Ricky and Stella for several months. They had been happy infants, sullen adolescents, and now, both of them nearly forty, were unsatisfied adults-in many ways, still adolescent. Robert's few letters were barely concealed pleas for money; Jane's were superficially bright, but Ricky read desperation in them. ("I'm really getting to like myself now": a statement which to Ricky meant its opposite. Its glibness made him wince.) Ricky's children, the former darlings of his heart, were now like distant planets. Their letters were painful; seeing them was worse. "No," he said, "I don't think they'll be able to make it this time."

"Jane's a pretty girl," Walter Barnes said.

"Her mother's daughter."

Ricky automatically began to look around the room to catch a glimpse of Stella, and saw Milly Sheehan introducing his wife to a tall man with stooping shoulders and thick lips. The academic nephew.

Barnes asked, "Have you seen Edward's actress?"

"She's here somewhere. I saw her come down."

"John Jaffrey seems very excited about her."

"She is really sort of unnervingly pretty," Ricky said, and laughed. "Edward's been unnerved too."

"Pete read in a magazine that she's only seventeen years old."

"In that case, she's a public menace."

When Ricky left Barnes to join his wife and Milly Sheehan, he caught sight of the little actress. She was dancing with Freddy Robinson to a Count Basie record, and she moved like a delicate bit of machine tooling, her eyes shining greenly; his arms about her, Freddy Robinson looked stupefied with happiness. Yes, the girl's eyes were shining, Ricky saw, but was it with pleasure or mockery? The girl turned her head, her eyes sent a current of emotion across the room to him, and Ricky saw in her the person his daughter Jane, now overweight and discontented, had always wanted to be. As he watched her dance with foolish Freddy Robinson, he understood that there before him was a person who would never have cause to utter the damning phrase that she was really getting to like herself: she was a little flag of self-possession.

"Hello, Milly," he said. "You're working hard."

"Oh poof, when I'm too old to work I'll lay down and die. Did you have anything to eat?"

"Not yet. This must be your nephew."

"Oh, please forgive me. You haven't met." She touched the arm of the tall man beside her. "This is the brainy one in my family, Harold Sims. He's a professor at the college and we've just been having a nice talk with your wife. Harold, this is Frederick Hawthorne, one of the doctor's closest friends." Sims smiled down at him. "Mr. Hawthorne's a charter member of the Chowder Society," Milly concluded.

"I was just hearing about the Chowder Society," Harold Sims said. His voice was very deep. "It sounds interesting."

"I'm afraid it's anything but."

"I'm speaking from the anthropological point of view. I've been studying the behavior of male chronologically-related interaction groups. The ritual content is always very strong. Do you, uh, members of the Chowder Society actually wear dinner jackets when you meet?"

"Yes, I'm afraid we do." Ricky looked to Stella for help, but she had mentally abstracted herself, and was gazing coolly at both men.

"Why is that, exactly?"

Ricky felt that the man was about to pull a notebook from his pocket. "It seemed like a good idea a hundred years ago. Milly, why did John invite half the town if he's going to let Freddy Robinson monopolize Miss Moore?"

Before Milly could answer, Sims asked, "Are you familiar with the work of Lionel Tiger?"

"I'm afraid I'm abysmally ignorant," Ricky said.

"I'd be interested in observing one of your meetings. I suppose that could be arranged?"

Stella laughed at last, and gave him a look which meant, get out of that.

"I suppose differently," Ricky said, "but I could probably get you into the next Kiwanis meeting."

Sims reared back, and Ricky saw that he was too unsure of his dignity to take jokes well. "We're just five old coots who enjoy getting together," he quickly said. "Anthropologically, we're a washout. We're of no interest to anyone."

"You're of interest to me," said Stella. "Why don't you invite Mr. Sims and your wife to the next meeting?"

"Yeah!" Sims began to show an alarming quantity of enthusiasm. "I'd like to record for a start, and then the video element-"

"Do you see that man over there?" Ricky nodded in the direction of Sears James, who more than ever resembled a stormcloud in human form. It looked like Freddy Robinson, now separated from Miss Moore, was trying to sell him insurance. "The big one? He'd slit my throat if I did any such thing."

Milly looked shocked; Stella lifted her chin and said, "Very nice meeting you, Mr. Sims," and left them.

Harold Sims said, "Anthropologically, that's a very interesting statement." He regarded Ricky with an interest even more professional. "The Chowder Society must be highly important to you."

"Of course it is," Ricky said simply.

"From what you just said, I'd assume that the man you just pointed out is the dominant figure in the group-as it were, the honcho."

"Very astute of you," Ricky said. "Now if you'll forgive me, I see someone I must have a word with."

When he had turned his back and gone away only a few steps, he heard Sims ask Milly, "Are those two really married?"

5

Ricky stationed himself in a corner, deciding he'd wait things out. He had a good mostly unobstructed view of the party: he'd be quite happy just watching things until it was time to go home. The record having come to an end, John Jaffrey appeared beside the portable stereo and put another one on the turntable. Lewis Benedikt, drifting up beside him, seemed amused, and when the sound began to issue from the speakers, Ricky heard why. It was a record by Aretha Franklin, a singer Ricky knew only from the radio. Where on earth would John Jaffrey have obtained such a record, and how long ago had he done it? He must have bought it specifically for the party. This was a fascinating concept, but Ricky's deliberations on it were interrupted by a succession of people who joined him, one by one, in his corner.

The first person who found him was Clark Mulligan, the owner of the Rialto, Milburn's only movie theater. His Hush Puppies were unaccustomedly clean, his trousers pressed, his belly successfully contained by his jacket button-Clark had spruced himself up for the evening. Presumably he knew that he had been invited for his relation to show business. Ricky thought it must have been the first time John had had Clark Mulligan in his home. He was glad to see him; he was always glad to see him. Mulligan was the only person in town who shared his love of old movies. Hollywood gossip bored Ricky, but he loved the films of its golden days.

"Who does she remind you of?" he asked Mulligan.

Mulligan squinted across the room. The actress was standing demurely across the room, listening to something said by Ed Venuti. "Mary Miles Minter?"

"She reminded me of Louise Brooks. Though I don't suppose Louise Brooks's eyes were green."

"Who knows? She's supposed to be a damn fine little actress, though. Cropped up just out of nowhere. Nobody knows anything about her."

"Edward does."

"Oh, he's doing one of his books, isn't he?"

The interviewing is nearly done. It's always difficult for Edward to say good-bye to his subjects, but this time it will be especially traumatic. I think he fell in love with her." And indeed, Edward had jealously joined Ed Venuti, and managed to interpose himself between the banker and the little actress.

"I'd fall in love with her too," Mulligan said. "Once they get their faces up on the screen, I fall in love with all of them. Have you seen Marthe Keller?" His eyes rolled.

"Not yet, but from the photos I've seen she looks a lot like a modern Constance Talmadge."

"Are you kidding? How about Paulette Goddard?" And from there they went happily on to speak of Chaplin, of Monsieur Verdoux, of Norma Shearer and John Ford, Eugene Pallette and Harry Carey, Jr., Stagecoach and The Thin Man, Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, John Gilbert and Rex Bell, Jean Harlow, Charlie Farrell, Janet Gaynor, Nosferatu and Mae West, actors and films Ricky had seen as a younger man and had never ceased youthfully to cherish, and the fresh memory of them helped to dampen the recollection of what a young man had said about himself and his wife.

"Wasn't that Clark Mulligan?" His second visitor was Sonny Venuti, Edward's wife. "He looks terrible." Sonny herself had changed over the past few years from a slender, pretty woman with a lovely smile to a bony stranger with an uneasy, dazed expression permanently fixed in her eyes. A casualty of marriage. Three months before she had come into Ricky's office and asked what she had to do to get a divorce: "I'm not sure yet, but I'm definitely thinking about it. I have to find out where I am." Yes, there was another man, but she would not name him. "I'll tell you this, though, he's good-looking and intelligent and he's as close to sophisticated as you can get in this town." She had left no doubt that the man was Lewis. Such women always reminded Ricky Hawthorne of his daughter, and he had led her through all of her options gently, outlining all the steps, explaining everything carefully and succinctly, though he knew she would never return.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?"

"Oh, entirely."

"I talked to her for a second."

"Yes?"

"She wasn't interested. She's only interested in men. She'd love you."

At the moment, the actress was talking to Stella, not ten feet away, which seemed to undercut Sonny Venuti's statement. Ricky watched the two women conversing without hearing their words; Sonny went on at some length to explain why the actress would love him. The subject of these remarks was listening to Stella, she responded, both women were lovely, cool, amused. Then Miss Moore said something that visibly confounded Stella: Ricky's wife blinked, opened her mouth, snapped it shut, patted her hair-if she had been a man, she'd have scratched her head. Ann-Veronica Moore, trailed by Edward Wanderley, went off.

"So I'd watch myself," Sonny Venuti was saying. "She might look like a little angel, but that kind of woman loves to turn men into hash."

"Pandora's Box," said Ricky, reminded of his first impression of the actress.

"What? Oh, never mind, I know, it's an old movie. When I came to you that time you mentioned Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy twice."

"How are things now, Sonny?"

"I'm trying again, Jesus, how I'm trying. Who can get a divorce in Milburn? But I still want to find out who I am."

Ricky thought of his daughter, and his heart twisted.

Then Sears James joined Ricky in his corner. "Privacy at last," he said, putting his drink on a table and leaning against the bookshelves.

"I wouldn't count on it."

"An appalling young man tried to sell me insurance. He lives across the street."

"I know him."

Since they were in total agreement on the subject of Freddy Robinson, there was nothing more to say. Eventually Sears broke the silence. "Lewis might need help getting home. He's been a bit bibulous."

"Well, after all, it's not one of our meetings."

"Hmm. I suppose he might pick up a girl who could drive him home."

Ricky glanced at him to see if he meant this personally, but Sears was merely surveying the party blandly, obviously bored. "Did you talk to the guest of honor?"

"I haven't even seen her."

"She's highly visible. I think she's over-" He lifted his drink in the direction he had seen her, but the actress was no longer there. Edward was talking to John, presumably about her, but Ann-Veronica Moore was no longer in the room. "Keep an eye on Edward. He'll find her."

"Isn't that Walter Barnes's son standing by the bar?"

Though it was now long past ten, Peter Barnes and a young girl were indeed by the bar, and the waiter who had relieved Milly of her duties was mixing drinks for them. Doctor Jaffrey's housekeeper had clearly not had the heart to send away the teenagers downstairs, and the bolder ones had invaded the upstairs party. The piano music which had replaced Aretha Franklin abruptly ceased, and Ricky saw Jim Hardie juggling several record albums, trying to decide which was least out of date. "Uh, oh," he said to Sears, "we have a new disc jockey."

"That's it," Sears said. "I'm tired and I'm going home. Noisy music makes me want to bite someone."

He moved massively away. Milly Sheehan stopped his progress and spoke agitatedly to him. Ricky guessed that she was in a tizzy over the sodden appearance of the teenagers. Sears shrugged-it was not his problem.

Ricky wanted to go home then, but Stella had begun to dance with Ned Rowles, and soon several of the wives had enticed their husbands to that part of the room nearest the record player. The teenagers danced energetically, sometimes almost elegantly; the adults looked foolishly imitative beside them. Ricky groaned; it was going to be a long night. All had begun to speak louder, the barman mixed a half dozen drinks at a time, moving an upended bottle over a row of ice-filled glasses. Sears reached the door and disappeared.

Christina Barnes, a tall blonde with an avid face, appeared by Ricky. "Since my son has managed to take over this party, how about dancing with me, Ricky?"

Ricky smiled. "I'm afraid I can't be a gentleman, Christina. I haven't danced in forty years."

"You must do something pretty well to hang on to Stella all these years."

She'd had about three drinks too many. "Yes," he said. "You know what it was? I never lost my sense of humor."

"Ricky, you're wonderful. I'd love to give you a backrub one of these days and see if I could find out what you're made of."

"Old pencil stubs and out-of-date law books."

Clumsily she kissed him, hitting the edge of his jaw. "Did Sonny Venuti see you a couple of months ago? I want to talk to you about it."

"Then come to my office," he said, knowing she would not.

"Excuse me, Ricky, Christina," said Edward Wanderley, who had come up on Ricky's other side.

"I'll leave you men to your private business." Christina went off in search of a dancing partner.

"Have you seen her? Do you know where she is?" Edward's broad face was boyish, anxious.

"Miss Moore? Not for a little while. Have you lost her?"

"Damn. She just vanished."

"She's probably in the bathroom."

"For twenty-five minutes?" Edward rubbed his forehead.

"Don't worry about her, Edward."

"I'm not worried, I just want to find her." He stood on tiptoe and began to look over the heads of the dancers, still grinding his fist into his forehead. "You don't suppose she went off with one of those awful kids?"

"Couldn't say." Edward slapped his shoulder and went rapidly out into the room.

Christina Barnes and Ned Rowles appeared in the vacuum Edward left at the edge of the carpet, and Ricky went around them to look for Stella. After a moment he saw her with Jim Hardie, obviously declining an invitation to learn the Bump. She looked over at him with some relief, and separated from the boy.

The music was so loud they had to speak directly into one another's ears. "That's the most forward boy I've ever met."

"What did he say?"

"He said I looked like Anne Bancroft."

The music abruptly stopped, and Ricky's reply carried over the entire party. "No one under thirty should be allowed to enter a movie theater."

Everyone but Edward Wanderley, who was quizzing a hostile Peter Barnes, turned to look at Ricky and Stella. Then the ever-hopeful Freddy Robinson took the hand of Jim Hardie's girlfriend, another record fell onto the turntable, and people went back to the business of being at a party. Edward had been speaking softly, insistently, but Peter Barnes's aggrieved voice floated out a moment before the music began: "Jesus, man, maybe she went upstairs."

"Can we go?" he asked Stella. "Sears left a while ago."

"Oh, let's stay a while. We haven't done anything like this in ages. I'm having fun, Ricky." When she saw his crestfallen face, she said, "Dance with me, Ricky. Just this once."

"I don't dance," he said, making himself heard over the din of the music. "Enjoy yourself. But let's go in about half an hour, all right?"

She winked at him, turned away, and was immediately captured by gangsterish Lou Price, to whom this time she succumbed.

Edward, seeing nothing, rushed by.

Ricky walked around the edges of the party for a time, refusing drinks from the barman. He spoke to Milly Sheehan, who was sitting exhausted on the couch. "I didn't know it would turn out like this," Milly said. "It'll take hours to clean up."

"Make John help you."

"He always helps," Milly said, radiance touching her plain round face. "He's wonderful that way."

Ricky wandered on, at last arriving at the top of the stairs. Silence from upstairs and down. Was Edward's actress up there with one of the boys? He smiled, and went downstairs for the quiet.

The doctor's offices were deserted. Lights burned, cigarettes had been stamped out on the floor, half-filled cups stood on every surface. The rooms smelled of sweat, beer, smoke. The little portable record player in the front room spun on, the needle clicking in the empty grooves. Ricky lifted the tone arm, put it on its support and turned the machine off. Milly would have a lot of work down here the next morning. He looked at his watch. Twelve-thirty. Through the ceiling came the thumping of a bass, a tinny echo of music.

Ricky sat in one of the stiff waiting-room chairs, lit a cigarette, sighed and relaxed. He wondered if he might help Milly by beginning to straighten up these downstairs rooms, then realized that he'd need a broom. He was too tired to go scouting for a broom.

A few minutes later footsteps woke him out of a light doze. He straightened up in his chair, listening to someone opening a door at the bottom of the stairs. "Hello?" he called out, not wanting to embarrass an illicit couple.

"Who's that? Ricky?" John Jaffrey came into the front waiting room. "What are you doing here? Have you seen Edward?"

"I came down for the quiet. Edward was rushing around trying to find Miss Moore. Maybe he went upstairs."

"I'm worried about him," Jaffrey said. "He looked so-so taut. Ann-Veronica's dancing with Ned Rowles. Couldn't he see her?"

"She vanished a while back. That's why he was anxious."

"Oh, poor Edward. He doesn't have to worry about that girl. She's good as gold. You should see her. She's absolutely lovely. She looks better than she has all night."

"Well." He pushed himself out of the stiff chair. "Do you want help finding Edward?"

"No, no, no. You just carry on. I'll find him. I'll try the bedrooms. Though what he'd be doing there-"

"Still looking, I expect."

John wheeled around, muttering that he couldn't help but worry, and went back through the consulting rooms. Ricky slowly followed.

Harold Sims was dancing with Stella, holding her tightly and keeping up a steady stream of talk into her ear. The music was so loud that Ricky wanted to scream. Nobody but Sears had left, and the young people, many of them now drunk, whirled about, hair and arms flying. The little actress cavorted with the editor, Lewis was talking to Christina Barnes on the couch. Both were oblivious to the presence of sleeping Milly Sheehan, not eight inches away. Ricky wished profoundly that he were in his bed. The noise gave him a headache. His old friends, Sears excepted, seemed to have lost their minds. Lewis had his hand on Christina Barnes's knee, and his eyes were unfocused. Was he really trying to seduce his banker's wife? In the presence of her husband and son?

Upstairs, something heavy fell over, and only Ricky heard it. He went back out onto the landing and saw John Jaffrey standing at the top of the stairs.

"Ricky."

"What's wrong, John?"

"Edward. It's Edward."

"Did he knock something over?"

"Come up here, Ricky."

Ricky went up, growing a little more worried with each step. John Jaffrey seemed very shaken.

"Did he knock something over? Did he hurt himself?"

Jaffrey's mouth opened. Finally sounds emerged. "I knocked a chair over. I don't know what to do."

Ricky reached the landing and looked into Jaffrey's ruined face. "Where is he?"

"The second bedroom."

Since Jaffrey did not move, Ricky went across the hall to the second door. He looked back; Jaffrey nodded, swallowed and finally came toward him. "In there."

Ricky's mouth was dry. Wishing that he were anywhere else, doing anything but what he was doing, he put a hand on the doorknob and turned it. The door swung open.

The bedroom was cold, and almost bare. Two coats, Edward's and the girl's, were lain across an exposed mattress. But Ricky saw only Edward Wanderley. Edward was on the floor, both hands clutched to his chest and his knees drawn up. His face was terrible.

Ricky stepped back and nearly fell over the chair that John Jaffrey had overturned. There was no question that Edward was still alive-he did not know how he knew it, but he knew-yet he asked, "Did you try to feel his pulse?"

"He doesn't have a pulse. He's gone."

John was trembling just inside the door. Music, voices came up the stairwell.

Ricky forced himself to kneel by Edward's side. He touched one of the hands gripping Edward's green shirt He worked his fingers around to the underside of the wrist. He felt nothing, but he was no doctor. "What do you think happened?" He still could not look again at Edward's distorted face.

John came further into the room. "Heart attack?"

"Do you think that's what it was?"

"I don't know. Yes, probably. Too much excitement But-"

Ricky stared up at Jaffrey and took his hand from Edward's still warm hand. "But what?"

"I don't know. I can't say. But, Ricky, look at his face."

He looked: rigid muscles, mouth drawn open as if to yell, empty eyes. It was the face of a man being tortured, flayed alive. "Ricky," John said, "it's not a very medical thing to say, but he looks as if he was scared to death."

Ricky nodded and stood. That was just how Edward looked. "We can't let anyone come up here. I'll go down and phone for an ambulance."

6

And that was the ending of Jaffrey's party: Ricky Hawthorne telephoned for an ambulance, switched off the record player and said that Edward Wanderley had "had an accident" and was beyond help, and sent thirty people home. He permitted no one to go upstairs. He looked for Ann-Veronica Moore, but she had already left.

Half an hour later, Edward's body was on its way to hospital or morgue. Ricky drove Stella home. "You didn't see her leave?" he asked.

"One minute she was dancing with Ned Rowles, the next minute she was out the door. I thought she was going to the bathroom. Ricky, how horrible."

"Yes. It was horrible."

"Poor Edward. I don't think I really believe it."

"I don't think I do either." Tears filled his eyes, and for some seconds he drove blindly, seeing only a streaky blur. To try to take the image of Edward's face from his mind, he asked, "What did she say to you that surprised you so much?"

"What? When? I barely spoke to her."

"In the middle of the party. I saw her talking to you, and I thought she said something that startled you."

"Oh." Stella's voice rose. "She asked me if I was married. I said, 'I'm Mrs. Hawthorne.' And then she said, 'Oh, yes, I've just seen your husband. He looks like he'd be a good enemy.' "

"You couldn't have heard her correctly."

"I did."

"It doesn't make sense."

"That's what she said."

And a week later, after Ricky had telephoned the theater where the girl was working, trying to return her coat, he heard that she had returned to New York the day after the party, abruptly quit the play and left town. Nobody knew where she was. She had vanished for good-she was too young, too new, and she left behind not even enough reputation for a legend. That night, at what looked like being the final meeting of the Chowder Society, he had, inspired, turned to a morose John Jaffrey and asked, "What's the worst thing you've ever done?" And John saved them all by answering, "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me," and told them a ghost story.

Part Two: Dr Rabbitfoot's Revenge

Follow a shadow, it still flies you;

Seem to fly it, it will pursue.

-Ben Jonson

I - Just Another Field, but What

They Planted There

From the journals of Don Wanderley

1

The old idea of Dr. Rabbitfoot… the idea for another book, the story of the destruction of a small town by Dr. Rabbitfoot, an itinerant showman who pitches camp on its outskirts, sells elixirs and potions and nostrums (a black man?), and who has a little sideshow-jazz music, dancing girls, trombones, etc. Fans and bubbles. If I ever saw a perfect setting for this story, Milburn is it.

First about the town, then about the good doctor. My uncle's town, Milburn, is one of those places that seems to create its own limbo and then to nest down in it. Neither proper city nor proper country-too small for one, too cramped for the other, and too self-conscious about its status. (The local paper is called The Urbanite. Milburn even seems proud of its minuscule slum, the few streets called the Hollow, seems to point at it and say: See, we've got places where you want to be careful after dark, the age hasn't left us high and dry and innocent. This is almost comedy. If trouble ever comes to Milburn, it won't start in the Hollow.) Three-fourths of the men work somewhere else, in Binghamton mainly-the town depends on the freeway for its life. A feeling of being oddly settled, unmoving, heavy, and at the same time nervous. (I bet they gossip about one another endlessly.) Nervous because they'd feel that they were forever missing something-that the age after all has left them high and dry. Probably I feel this because of the contrast between here and California-this is a worry they don't have, there. It does seem a particularly Northeast kind of anxiety, peculiar to these little towns. Good places for Dr. Rabbitfoot.

(Speaking of anxiety, those three old men I met today-my uncle's friends-have it bad. Obviously has to do with whatever made them write to me, not knowing that I was getting so sick of California I'd have gone anywhere I thought I might be able to work.)

Physically, of course, it's pretty-all these places are. Even the Hollow has a kind of sepia thirties prettiness. There's the regulation town square, the regulation trees-maples, tamarack pines, oaks, the woods full of mossy deadfalls-a sense that the woods around the town are stronger, deeper than the little grid of streets people put in their midst. And when I came in I saw the big houses, some of them big enough to be called mansions.

But still… it is wonderful, a heaven-sent setting for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel.

He's black, definitely. He dresses gaudily, with old-fashioned pizzazz: spats, big rings, a cane, a flashy waistcoat. He's chirpy, showbizzy, a marathon talker, slightly ominous-he's the bogeyman. He'll own you if you don't watch out. He'll get you seven ways to Sunday. He's got a killer smile.

You only see him at night, when you pass a piece of land normally deserted and there he is, standing on a platform outside his tent, twirling a cane while the jazz band plays. Lively music surrounds him, it whistles through his tight black hair, a saxophone curls his lips. He's looking straight at you. He invites you in to have a look at his show, to buy a bottle of his elixir for a dollar. He says he is the celebrated Dr. Rabbitfoot, and he's got just what your soul needs.

And what if what your soul needs is a bomb? A knife? A slow death?

Dr. Rabbitfoot gives you a big wink. You're on, man. Just pull a dollar out of your jeans.

Now to state what is obvious: Behind this figure I've been carting around in my head for years is Alma Mobley. It also suited her to give you what you wanted.

All the time, the capering smile, the floating hands, the eyes of bleached and dazzling white… his sinister gaiety. An' what about that little Alma Mobley, boy? Suppose you see her when you close your eyes, then what? Is she there, hee hee? Has you ever touched a ghost? Has you ever put your hand on a ghosts white skin? And yo' brutha's peaceful eyes-was they watchin' you?

2

I went to the office of the lawyer who wrote to me, Sears James, as soon as I got into town-a severe white building on Wheat Row, just alongside the town square. The day, gray in the morning, was cold and bright, and before I saw his receptionist I thought, maybe this is the start of a new cycle for you, but the receptionist told him that both Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne were at a funeral. That new secretary they hired went too, but it looked a little pushy to her, because she didn't know Dr. Jaffrey at all, did she? Oh, they should be at the cemetery by now. And are you the Mr. Wanderley they've been expecting? I don't suppose you knew Dr.

Jaffrey, either? Oh, he was a dear, dear man, he must have been doctoring here in Milburn for forty years, he was the kindest man you ever saw, not sugary-sweet, you know, but when he put his hands on you, you just felt the kindness flowing out, she rattled on, looking me over, inspecting me, trying to figure out just what the devil her boss wanted me for, and then this old woman sitting at her switchboard locked him with an angry smile and slapped the trump card on the table, she said of course you don't know, but he killed himself five days ago. He jumped off the bridge-can you imagine that? It was just tragic. Mr. James and Ricky Hawthorne were so upset. They still haven't gotten over it. Now that Anna girl is making them do twice as much work, and we've got that crazy Elmer Scales calling up every day, yelling at them about those four sheep of his… what would make a nice man like Dr. Jaffrey do a thing like that, do you imagine?

(He listened to Dr. Rabbitfoot, lady.)

Oh, you'd like to go out to the cemetery?

3

He did. It was on a road called Pleasant Hill, just out of town on one of the state roads (she gave him good directions), long fields dying under snow that came too early, and every now and then the wind picking up a flat sheet of loose snow, making it stand up and wave its arms. Funny how lost this country seems, though people have been walking back and forth over it for hundreds of years. It looks bruised and regretful, its soul gone or withdrawn, waiting for something to happen that will wake it up again.

The sign, Pleasant Hill Cemetery, was a length of stamped gray metal on one side of a black ironwork gate; if it had not been for the big gates standing at what looked like the entrance to just another hilly field, Don would have missed it. He looked at the gates as they came nearer, wondering what kind of farmer would be grandiose enough to stick up a baronial gate at his tractor path, slowed down, glanced up at the rising narrow road-more than a tractor path-and saw half a dozen cars parked at the top of the hill. Then he saw the little plate. Just another field, but heavens what they planted there. He swung his car through the gates.

Don left his car apart from the others, halfway up the hill, and walked to the top: nearest him was the oldest section of the cemetery, tilted slabs with pitted markings, stone angels lifting arms weighted with snow. Granite young women shielded their eyes with forearms hung with drapery. Thin skeletons of weeds mounted up the leaning slabs. The narrow road bisected the old section and led into a larger region of neat small headstones. Purple, gray and white, these were dwarfed by the expanse of land rolling out from them: after a moment, a hundred yards away, Don saw the fences surrounding the cemetery. A hearse was drawn up at the land's lowest point. The black-hatted driver cupped a cigarette so that it would not be seen by the little knot of people clustered around the newest grave. One woman shapeless in a pale blue coat clung to another, taller woman; the other mourners stood as straight and motionless as fenceposts. When I saw the two old men standing together at the base of the grave, I knew they had to be the two lawyers-if they weren't lawyers they were from Central Casting. I started to come toward them down the slope of the narrow road. Then I thought, if the dead man was a doctor, why aren't there more people-where are his patients? A silver-haired man beside the two lawyers saw him first and prodded the massive one who wore a black fur-collared coat with his elbow. The big one glanced up at him, and then the little man beside him, the one who looked as if he had a cold, also took his eyes from the minister and looked curiously at Don. Even the minister stopped talking for a moment, stuck one frozen hand in the pocket of his overcoat, and gaped at Don with rubber-faced confusion.

Then, finally, a sign of welcome, a contrast to this guarded examination: one of the beauties, the younger one (a daughter?), wafted toward him a small genuine smile.

The man with silver-white hair who looked to Don as though he should have been in the movies left the other two and sauntered toward Don. "Are you a friend of John's?" he whispered.

"My name is Don Wanderley," he whispered back. "I got a letter from a man named Sears James, and the receptionist in his office said I could find him out here."

"Hell, you even look a little like Edward." Lewis grabbed his bicep and squeezed. "Look, kid, we're having a rough time here, just hang in there and don't say anything until it's all over. You got a place to stay tonight?"

So I joined them, half-meeting, half-avoiding their glances. The woman in the pale blue coat sagged against the challenging-looking woman holding her up: her face worked and she wailed oh no oh no oh no. Crumpled colored tissues lay at her feet, lifting and scampering in the wind that cut into the hollow. Every now and then one of them shot away like a small pastel pheasant and caught in the mesh of the fence. By the time we left there were dozens of them there, flattened out against the wire.

Frederick Hawthorne

4

Ricky had been pleased with Stella. While the three remaining members of the Society had been trying to adjust to the shock of John's death, only Stella had thought of the plight of Milly Sheehan. Sears and Lewis, he supposed, had thought as he had-that Milly would simply live on in John's house. Or that, if the house was too empty for her, she would put up at the Archer Hotel until she decided where to go and what to do. He and Sears knew that she had no financial troubles; they had drawn up the will which left Milly John Jaffrey's house and the contents of his bank accounts. If you added it all together, she had been willed assets of somewhere around two hundred thousand dollars: and if she chose to stay in Milburn, there was more than enough in the bank to pay the real estate taxes and give her a comfortable living. We're lawyers, he said to himself, we think like that. We can't help it; we put the pettifogging first and the people second.

Of course they were thinking of John Jaffrey. The news had come near noon of the day following that in which Ricky's premonitions had reached their height: he had known that something dreadful had happened the moment he recognized the shaky voice on the other end of the line as Milly Sheehan's. "It's, it's," she said, her voice trembling and cloudy. "Mr. Hawthorne…?"

"Yes, it's me, Milly," he said. "What's happened?" He pushed the buzzer that communicated to Sears's office and told him to switch on the telephone speaker for his extension. "What is it, Milly?" he asked, knowing that his voice would be much too loud for Sears, but momentarily unable to speak softly-the speakers, while reproducing the client's voice at a normal volume, tripled the noise made by anyone at the other office extension. "You're breaking my eardrums," Sears complained over the line.

"Sorry," Ricky said. "Milly, are you there? It's Milly, Sears."

"So I gathered. Milly, can we help you?"

"Oooo," she wailed and the back of his neck went cold.

The phone went dead. "Milly?"

"Pipe down," Sears commanded.

"Are you there, Milly?"

Ricky heard the telephone clattering against some hard surface.

The next voice was Walt Hardesty's. "Hey, this is the sheriff. Is this Mr. Hawthorne?"

"Yes. Mr. James is on the other line. What's going on, Walt? Is Milly all right?"

"She's standin' lookin' out the window. What is she anyhow, his wife? I thought she was his wife."

Sears burst in impatiently, his voice loud as a cannon in Ricky's office. "She is his housekeeper. Now tell us what is happening out there."

"Well, she's fallin' apart like a wife. You two are Dr. Jaffrey's lawyers?"

"Yes," Ricky said.

"Do you know about him yet?"

Both partners were silent. If Sears felt the way Ricky did, his throat was too tight for speech.

"Well, he was a leaper," Hardesty said. "Hey, hang on, lady. Sit down or something."

"HE WAS A WHAT?" Sears bellowed, his voice booming through Ricky's office.

"Well, he took a dive off the bridge this morning. He was a leaper. Lady, calm down and let me talk."

"The lady's name is Mrs. Sheehan," Sears said in a more normal voice. "She might respond better if you called her that. Now since Mrs. Sheehan evidently wished to communicate with us and is unable to do so, please tell us what happened to John Jaffrey."

"He took a dive off…"

"Be careful. He fell off the bridge? Which bridge?"

"Hell, the bridge over the river, what do you think?"

"What's his condition?"

"Dead as a doornail. What do you think it would be? Say, who's gonna take care of the arrangements and all that? This lady's in no shape…"

"We will," Ricky said.

"And we might take care of more than that," Sears uttered furiously. "Your manner is disgraceful. Your diction is shameful. You are a ninny, Hardesty."

"Just wait a damned-"

"AND! If you are assuming that Dr. Jaffrey committed suicide, then you are on shaky ground indeed, my friend, and you'd be well advised to keep that assumption to yourself."

"Omar Norris saw the whole thing," Hardesty said. "We need ID before we can get set for the autopsy, so why don't you get over here so we can get off the phone?"

Five seconds after Ricky put down his phone Sears appeared in the doorway, already thrusting his arms into his coat. "It's not true," Sears said, pulling on the coat. "It's some mistake, but let's get over there anyway."

The telephone buzzed again. "Don't answer it," Sears said, but Ricky picked it up. "Yes?"

"There's a young woman in reception who wants to see you and Mr. James," said the receptionist.

"Tell her to come back tomorrow, Mrs. Quast. Dr. Jaffrey died this morning, and Mr. James and I are going to his home to meet Walt Hardesty."

"Why…" Mrs. Quast, who had been on the verge of indiscretion, changed subjects. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Hawthorne. Do you want me to call Mrs. Hawthorne?"

"Yes, and say I'll be in touch as soon as I can." By now, Sears was in a rage of impatience, and when Ricky moved around his desk, his partner was already in the hallway, twirling his hat. Ricky grabbed his coat and hurried to catch up.

Together they went down the paneled hall. "That ponderous, unthinkable oaf," Sears rumbled. "As if you could believe Omar Norris on any subject except bourbon and snowplows."

Ricky stopped short and put his hand on Sears's arm. "We have to think about this, Sears. John might actually have killed himself." It still hadn't sunk into him, and he could see that Sears was determined not to let it sink into him. "He'd never have any reason to go walking on the bridge, and especially not in this weather."

Sears's face suffused with blood. "If you think that, you're a ninny too. I don't care if John was birdwatching, he was doing something." His eyes avoided Ricky's. "I don't know and can't imagine what, but something. Did he seem suicidal to you last night?"

"No, but…"

"Therefore, let's not wrangle. Let's get over to his house." He sped down the hall ahead of Ricky and banged open the reception room door with his shoulders. Ricky Hawthorne, hurrying after, came out into the reception room and was mildly surprised to see him confronting a tall girl with dark hair, an oval face and small, chiseled features.

"Sears, we don't have time now, and I told this young woman to drop in tomorrow."

"She says-" Sears took off his hat. He looked as if he'd been hit on the head with a plank. "Tell him what you told me," he said to the girl.

She said, "Eva Galli was my aunt, and I'm looking for a job."

(Mrs. Quast turned away from the girl, who had merely smiled at her, and blushed as she dialed the Hawthorne number. The girl moved away to examine the Kitaj graphics with which Stella, two or three years ago, had replaced Ricky's old Audubon prints. Incomprehensible and new, was Mrs. Quast's judgment on both the graphics and the girl. No, Stella Hawthorne exhaled when she had heard the hews about Dr. Jaffrey. Oh, poor Milly. Poor everybody, I'm sure, but I'll have to do something about Milly. When she pulls the jack from the switchboard, Mrs. Quast thinks, my goodness it's very bright in here and then thinks, no golly it's dark, dark as sin, the lights must have blazed up and gone out, but the next instant everything is normal, the lamp on her desk looks just as it always does, and she robs her eyes and shakes her gray head-Milly Sheehan had a soft cushy life right along, about time she went out and did a real job of work-and is astonished to hear Mr. James telling that snip of a girl that if she comes back tomorrow they'll talk about giving her some secretarial work. I mean, just what the dickens is going on around here?)

And Ricky, looking at Sears, wondered too-secretarial work? They had a half-time secretary, Mavis Hodge, who did most of their typing: to find enough work for another girl they'd have to start answering their junk mail. But of course it wasn't the need for more hands on deck that made Sears treat the girl the way he did, it was that name, Eva Galli, pronounced in a voice that would taste like port wine if you could drink it… Sears suddenly looked very tired, the sleeplessness and the nightmares and the vision of Fenny Bate and Elmer Scales and his damned sheep and how John's death (he was a leaper) had all gathered to unstring him if only for a moment. Ricky saw his partner's fear and exhaustion and saw that even Sears could come unglued. "Yes, come back tomorrow," he said to the girl, noticed that the oval face and regular features were more than just attractive, and knew that if there was one thing Sears didn't need reminding of at that moment, it was Eva Galli. Mrs. Quast was staring at him, so he told her to deal with all incoming calls during the afternoon, just to be saying something.

"I gather that a good friend of yours has just died," the girl said to Ricky. "I'm sorry to be coming at such an awkward time," and ruefully smiled with what looked like genuine concern. "Please don't let me delay you."

He glanced once more at her foxlike features before turning to Sears and the door-Sears reflectively buttoning up his coat, white faced-and it seemed to him that maybe Sears's instincts were right, maybe this girl's coming was a part of the puzzle, nothing seemed accidental anymore: as if there were some kind of plan and if they could only get all the pieces together they'd see what it was.

"It's probably not even John," Sears said in the car. "Hardesty is such an incompetent that I wouldn't be surprised if he took Omar Norris's word…" His voice died out; both partners knew this was only fancy. "Too cold," Sears said, his lips puckering out childishly. "Too damn cold," Ricky agreed, and finally thought of another thing to say. "At least Milly won't starve." Sears sighed, almost amused. "Good thing too, she'd never get another job with eavesdropping privileges." Then there was silence again as they recognized that they were agreeing that John Jaffrey probably had stepped off the Milburn bridge and drowned in the freezing river.

After they had picked up Hardesty and driven to the tiny jail where the body was being kept until the arrival of the morgue truck, they found that Omar Norris had not been mistaken. The dead man was John-he looked even more wasted than he had in life. His sparse hair adhered to his scalp, his lips drew back over blue gums-his whole being was vacant, as in Ricky Hawthorne's nightmare. "Jesus," Ricky said. Walt Hardesty grinned and said, "That ain't the name we got, Mr. Lawyer."

"Give us the forms, Hardesty," Sears said quietly, and then, being Sears, added, "We'll take his effects too, unless you managed to lose them along with his dentures."

They thought they might find a clue to Jaffrey's death in the few things contained in the manila envelope Hardesty gave them. But in the collection taken from John Jaffrey's pockets they could read nothing at all. A comb, six studs and matching cufflinks, a copy of The Making of a Surgeon, a ballpoint pen, a bundle of keys in a worn leather pouch, three quarters and a dime-Sears spread it over his lap in the front seat of Ricky's old Buick. "A note was too much to hope for," Sears said, and then leaned gigantically back and rubbed his eyes. "I'm beginning to feel like a member of an endangered species." He straightened up again and looked at the mute assortment of objects. "Do you want to keep any of this yourself, or should we just give it to Milly?"

"Maybe Lewis would like the studs and cufflinks."

"Let's give them to him. Oh. Lewis. We'll have to tell him. Do you want to go back to the office?"

They sat numbly on the warm cushions of Ricky's old car. Sears removed a long cigar from his case, snipped off the tip, and without bothering to go through the usual rituals of sniffing and looking, applied his cigar lighter to it. Ricky wound his window down uncomplaining: He knew that Sears was smoking out of reflex, that he was unconscious of the cigar.

"Do you know, Ricky," he said around it, "John is dead and we've been talking about his cufflinks?"

Ricky started his car. "Let's get back to Melrose Avenue and have a drink."

Sears put the pathetic collection back into the manila envelope, folded it in half and slid it into one of the pockets of his coat. "Watch where you're driving. Has it escaped your attention that it's snowing again?"

"No, it has not," Ricky said. "If it starts this early and if it gets much worse, we could find ourselves snowed in before the end of winter. Maybe we should lay in some canned food, just to be on the safe side." Ricky flicked on his headlights, knowing that Sears would soon begin to issue commands about this. The gray sky which had hung over the town for weeks had darkened nearly to black, broken by clouds like combers.

"Humph," Sears snorted. "The last time that happened-"

"I was back from Europe. Nineteen-forty-seven. Terrible winter."

"And the time before that was in the twenties."

"Nineteen-twenty-six. The snow almost covered the houses."

"People died. A neighbor of mine died in that snow."

"Who was that?" Ricky asked.

"Her name was Viola Frederickson. She was caught in her buggy. She just froze to death. The Fredericksons had John's house, in fact." Sears sighed again, wearily, as Ricky turned into the square and went past the hotel. Snowflakes like balls of cotton streaked past the dark windows of the hotel. "For God's sake, Ricky, your window's open. Do you want to freeze us both?" He raised his hands to lift the fur collar nearer his chin, and saw the cigar protruding from between his fingers. "Oh. Sorry. Habit" He lowered his own window and dropped the cigar through it. "What a waste."

Ricky thought of John Jaffrey's body lying on a stretcher in a cell; of breaking the news to Lewis; of the bluish skin stretched over John's skull.

Sears coughed. "I can't understand why we haven't heard from Edward's nephew."

"He'll probably just turn up." The snow slackened off. "That's better." Then thought, well, maybe not: the air had a peculiar midday darkness which seemed unaffected by his headlights. These were no more than a glow nearly invisible at the front of the car. It was the objects and oddments of the town which instead seemed to glow, not with the yellow glow of headlights but whitely, with the white of the clouds still boiling and foaming overhead-here a picket fence, there a door and molding shone. Here a scattering of stones in a wall, there naked poplars on a lawn. Their bloodless color reminded Ricky eerily of John Jaffrey's face. Above these random shining things the sky beyond the boiling clouds was even blacker.

"Well, what do you flunk happened?" Sears demanded.

Ricky turned into Melrose Avenue. "Do you want to stop off at your house for anything first?"

"No. Do you have an opinion or don't you?"

"I wish I knew what happened to Elmer Scales's sheep."

Now they were pulling up in front of Ricky's house and Sears was showing obvious signs of impatience. "I don't give a gold-plated damn for Our Vergil's sheep," he said; he wanted to get out of the car, he wanted to end the discussion, he would have growled like a bear if Ricky had mentioned the apparition of barefooted, boneheaded Fenny Bate on his staircase-Ricky saw all this, but after he and Sears had left the car and were walking up the path to the door he said, "About that girl this morning."

"What about her?"

Ricky put his key in the slot. "If you want to pretend that we need a secretary, fine, but…"

Stella opened the door from within, already talking. "I'm so glad both of you are here. I was so afraid you'd go back to stuffy Wheat Row and pretend that nothing had happened. Pretend to work and keep me in the dark! Sears, please, come in out of the cold, we don't want to heat all outdoors. Come in!" They shuffled into the hall and moving like two tired carthorses, took off their coats. "You both look just awful. There's no question of mistaken identity then, it was John?"

"It was John," Ricky said. "We can't really tell you any more, Stella. It looks like he jumped from the bridge."

"Dear me," Stella said, all her momentary brightness gone. "The poor Chowder Society."

"Amen," Sears said.

After late lunch Stella said that she'd make up a tray for Milly. "Maybe she'll want to nibble something."

"Milly?" Ricky asked, startled.

"Milly Sheehan, need I remind you? I couldn't just let her rattle around in that big house of John's. I picked her up and drove her back here. She's absolutely wrecked, the poor darling, so I put her to bed. She woke up this morning and couldn't find John, and she fretted in that house for hours until horrible Walter Hardesty came by."

"Fine," Ricky said.

"Fine, he says. If you and Sears hadn't been so wrapped up in yourselves, you might have spared a thought for her."

Attacked, Sears raised his head and blinked. "Milly has no worries. She's been left John's house and a disproportionate amount of money."

"Disproportionate, Sears? Why don't you take her tray up and tell her how grateful she should be. Do you think that would cheer her up? That John Jaffrey left her a few thousand dollars?"

"Scarcely a few thousand, Stella," said Ricky. "John willed almost everything he owned to Milly."

"Well, that's as it should be," Stella declared, and stamped off to the kitchen, leaving them both mystified.

Sears asked, "You ever have any trouble deciphering what she's talking about?"

"Now and then," Ricky answered. "There used to be a code book, but I think she threw it out shortly after our wedding. Shall we call Lewis and tell him? We've put it off too long already."

"Give me the phone," Sears said.

Lewis Benedikt

5

Not hungry, Lewis made lunch for himself from habit: cottage cheese, Croghan baloney with horseradish and a thick chunk of Otto Gruebe's cheddar, made by old Otto himself in his little cheese factory a couple of miles outside Afton. Feeling a little upset by his experiences of the morning, Lewis enjoyed thinking of old Otto now. Otto Gruebe was an uncomplicated person, built a little like Sears James, but stooped from a lifetime of bending over vats; he had a rubbery clown's face and enormous shoulders and hands. Otto had made this comment on his wife's death: "You hat a liddle trouble over there in Spain, yeah? They told me in town. It's such a pidy, Lewis." After everyone else's tact, this had moved Lewis immeasurably. Otto with his curd-white complexion from spending ten hours a day in his factory, Otto with his pack of coon dogs- he'd never been spooked a day in his life. Chewing his way through lunch, Lewis thought he would drive up to see Otto someday soon; he'd take his gun and go out looking for coon with Otto and his dogs, if the snow held off. Otto's Germanic hardheadedness would do him good.

But it was snowing again now; the dogs would be barking in their kennels and old Otto would be skimming off whey, cursing the early winter.

A pity. Yes: a pity was what it was, and more than that: a mystery. Like Edward.

He stood up abruptly and dumped his dishes in the sink; then he looked at his watch and groaned. Eleven-thirty and lunch already over; the rest of the day loomed over him like an Alp. He did not even have an evening of bubbleheaded conversation with a girl to look forward to; nor, because he was trying to wind things down, could he anticipate an evening of deeper pleasure with Christina Barnes.

Lewis Benedikt had successfully managed what in a town the size of Milburn is generally considered an impossibility: from the first month of his return from Spain, he had constructed a secret life that stayed secret. He pursued college girls, young teachers at the high school, beauticians, the brittle girls who sold cosmetics at Young Brothers department store-any girl pretty enough to be ornamental. He used his good looks, his natural charm and humor and his money to establish himself in the town's mythology as a dependably comic character: the aging playboy, the Suave Old Bird. Boyish, wonderfully unselfconscious, Lewis took his girls to the best restaurants for forty miles around, ordered them the best food and wine, kept them in stitches. He took to bed, or was taken to bed by, perhaps a fifth of these girls-the ones who showed him by their laughter that they could never take him seriously. When a couple-a couple, say, like Walter and Christina Barnes-walked into The Old Mill near Kirkwood or Christo's between Belden and Harpursville, they might half expect to see Lewis's steel-gray head bending toward the amused face of a pretty girl a third his age. "Look at that old rascal," Walter Barnes might say, "at it again." His wife would smile, but it would be difficult to tell what the smile meant.

For Lewis used his comic reputation as a rake to camouflage the seriousness of his heart, and he used his public romances with girls to conceal his deeper, truer relationships with women. He spent evenings or nights with his girls; the women he loved he saw once or twice a week, in the afternoons while their husbands were at work. The first of these had been Stella Hawthorne, and in some ways the least satisfactory of his loves, she had set the pattern for the rest. Stella had been too offhand and witty, too casual with him. She was enjoying herself, and simple enjoyment was what the young high-school teachers and beauticians gave him. He wanted feeling. He wanted emotion-he needed it. Stella was the only Milburn wife who, tested, had evaded that need. She had given his playboy image back to him-consciously. He loved her briefly and wholly, but their needs were badly mismatched. Stella did not want Sturm und Drang; Lewis, at the center of his demanding heart, knew that he wanted to recapture the emotions Linda had given him. Frivolous Lewis was Lewis only skin deep. Sadly, he had to let Stella go: she had taken up none of his hints, his offered emotion had simply rolled off her. He knew that she thought he'd simply gone on to an empty series of affairs with girls.

But he had instead gone on, eight years ago, to Leota Mulligan, the wife of Clark Mulligan. And after Leota, to Sonny Venuti, then to Laura Bautz, the wife of the dentist Harlan Bautz, and finally, a year ago, to Christina Barnes. He had cherished each of these women. He loved in them their solidity, their attachments to their husbands, their hungers, their humor. He loved talking to them. They had understood him, and each of them had known exactly what he was offering: more a hidden pseudo-marriage than an affair.

When the emotion began to go stale and rehearsed, then it was over. Lewis still loved each of them; he still loved Christina Barnes, but-

The but was that the wall was before him. The wall was what Lewis called the moment when he began to think that his deep relationships were as trivial as his romances. Then it was time to draw in. Often, in times of withdrawal, he found that he was thinking of Stella Hawthorne.

Well, he certainly could not look forward to an evening with Stella Hawthorne. To fantasize about that would be to confirm his foolishness to himself.

What was more foolish than that ridiculous scene this morning? Lewis left the sink to look out the window toward the path into the woods, remembering how he had raced down it, panting, his heart leaping with terror-now there was real asininity. The fluffy snow fell, the familiar wood raised white arms, the return path trailed harmlessly, charmingly off at a screwball angle, going nowhere.

"When you fall off a horse, you get back on," Lewis told himself. "You get right back on that mother." What had happened? He had heard-voices? No; he had heard himself thinking. He had spooked himself by remembering too exactly Linda's last night alive. That and the nightmare-Sears and John advancing toward him-had bamboozled his emotions so that he behaved like someone in a Chowder Society story. No evil stranger had stood behind him on the path back home; you could not walk through the woods without being heard. Everything was explicable.

Lewis went upstairs to his bedroom, kicked off his loafers and pushed his feet into a pair of Dingos, pulled on a sweater and a ski parka and went back down and out the kitchen door.

His morning footprints were already filling with new snow. The air felt delicious, crisp as a winesap apple; light snow continued to come down. If he could not go coon hunting with Otto Gruebe, he might be able to get in some skiing before long. Lewis walked across his brick patio and stepped onto the path. Above him the sky was dark and scattered with shining clouds, but clear gray light filled the day. Snow on the pine branches gleamed, particular and white as moonlight.

He deliberately set off on what was normally his return path. His own fear surprised him, tingling in his mouth and belly like anticipation.

"Well, I'm here, come and get me," he said, and smiled.

He felt the presence of nothing but the day and the woods, his house at his back; he realized after a moment that even his fear had vanished.

And now, walking over new snow toward his woods, Lewis had a fresh perception. It may have come because he was seeing the woods from an unfamiliar angle, going at them backward, and it may have been because he was just walking through them for the first time in weeks, not jogging. Whatever the reason, the woods looked like an illustration in a book-not like a real woods, but a drawing on a page. It was a fairytale woods, looking too perfect, too composed-drawn in black ink-to be real. Even the path, winding off in a pretty indirection, was a fairytale path.

It was the clarity which gave it mystery. Each bare and spiky branch, each tangle of wiry stalks, stood out separately, shining with its own life. Some wry magic hovered just out of sight. As Lewis went deeper into the woods, where the new snow had not penetrated, he saw his morning's footprints, and they too seemed haunting and illustrative and part of the fairytale, these prints in snow coming toward him.

Lewis was too restless to stay inside after his walk. The emptiness of the house proclaimed that the house held no woman; for some time, there would be no woman, unless Christina Barnes came out for one last scene. A few jobs around the house had been waiting for weeks-he had to check the sump, the dining room table was badly in need of polish, as was most of the silver-but these jobs could wait a while longer. Still wearing the sweater and parka, Lewis prowled his house, going from one floor to another, never settling in one room.

He went into his dining room. The big mahogany table reproached him; its surface was dull, lightly scratched here and there from times he'd put Spanish earthenware down on it without using a mat. The spray of flowers in a jug on the center of the table had wilted; a few petals lay like dead bees on the wood. Did you really expect to see someone out there? he asked himself. Are you disappointed that you didn't?

Turning out of the dining room with the jug of wasted flowers in his hands, he saw again the fairytale tangle of the woods. Branches glistened, thorns shone like thumbtacks, implying some narrative on which he'd already closed the book.

Well. He shook his head and took the dead flowers into the kitchen and dumped them into the waste bin. Whom did you want to meet? Yourself?

Unexpectedly, Lewis blushed.

He set down the empty jug on a counter and went back outside, crossing the patio to the old stable some previous owner had converted into a garage and tool shed. The Morgan was parked beside a toolbench covered with screwdrivers, pliers and paintbrushes in cans. Lewis bent his head, unlocked the door and cramped himself in behind the wheel.

He reversed out of the garage, left the car and heaved the door shut, then got in and swung the car around on the bricks and drove down the tree-lined lane to the highway. He immediately felt more like himself: the canvas top of the Morgan bucked in the wind, cold breeze parted his hair in the middle. The tank was almost full.

In fifteen minutes he was surrounded by hills and open country marked off at intervals by stands of trees. He took the little roads, opening the car up to seventy, sometimes eighty when he saw a nice stretch of straight road before him. He skirted the Chenango Valley, followed the line of the Tioughnioga River as far as Whitney Point, and then cut off west toward Richford and Caroline, deep in the Cayuga Valley. Sometimes on curves the little car's back end skittered around, but Lewis corrected the skid expertly, not even thinking about it. Lewis instinctively drove well.

Finally he realized that he was traveling the same route, and in the same way, as when he'd been a student returning to Cornell. The only difference was that exhilarating speed then had been thirty miles an hour.

After nearly two hours of driving, taking little roads past farms and state parks just to see where they'd go, his face was numb with cold. He was in Tompkins County, close to Ithaca, and the country here was more lyrical than around Binghamton-when he reached the tops of hills, he could see the black road arrowing through vales and over tree-lined rises. The sky had darkened, though it was only midafternoon: Lewis thought he'd see more snow before nightfall. Then ahead of him, just far enough away to build up the right amount of speed, was a wide place in the road where he knew he could make the Morgan spin completely around. But he reminded himself that he was sixty-five years old-too old to do stunts in cars. He used the wide place in the road to turn around toward home.

Going more slowly, he drove across the valley toward Harford, cutting back east. On the straight ways he opened the car up a little, but was careful to keep under seventy. Still, there was pleasure in it, in the speed and the cold breeze on his face and the dainty handling of the little car. All this nearly made him feel that he was a Tau Kappa Epsilon boy again, skimming over the roads toward home. A few heavy snowflakes drifted down.

Near the airfield outside Glen Aubrey he passed a stand of denuded maples and saw in them the gleaming clarity of his own woods. They seemed suffused with magic, with some concealed meaning that was part of a complex story-hero foxes that were princes suffering a witch's curse. He saw the footprints racing toward him.

… suppose you went out for a walk and saw yourself running toward you, your hair flying, your face distorted with fear…

His viscera went cold as his face. Ahead of him, standing in the middle of the road, was a woman. He had time to notice only the alarm in her posture, the hair which billowed around her shoulders. He twisted the wheel, wondering where in hell she'd come from-Jesus she just jumped out at me-at the same time as he realized that he was bound to hit her. The car was going to slew around.

The rear end of the Morgan drifted slowly toward the girl. Then the entire car was traveling sideways and he lost sight of her. Panicked, Lewis cramped the wheel the other way. Time whittled down to a solid capsule encasing him as he sat helpless in a flying car. Then the texture of the moment changed, time broke and began to flow, and he knew, as passive as he'd ever been in his life, that the car had left the road: everything was happening with unbelievable slowness, almost lazily, and the Morgan was floating.

It was over in a moment. The car stopped with a boneshaking jolt in a field, its nose pointed toward the road. The woman he might have struck was nowhere in sight. The taste of blood filled Lewis's mouth; locked on the wheel, his hands were trembling. Maybe he had hit the woman and thrown her body off into a ditch. He fought the door, opened it and got out. His legs were trembling too. He saw at once that the Morgan was stuck: its rear tires were bolted to the field. He'd need a towtruck. "Hey!" he shouted. "Are you okay?" He forced his legs to move. "Are you all right?"

Lewis went unsteadily toward the road. He saw the crazy streaks his car had made. His hips ached. He felt very old. "Hey! Lady!" He couldn't see the girl anywhere. Heart pounding, he waddled across the road, afraid of what he might see lying in the ditch, limbs splayed out, head thrown back… but the ditch cradled only a mound of unblemished snow. He looked up and down the road: no woman anywhere in sight.

Lewis eventually gave up. Somehow the woman had gone away as suddenly as she'd come; or he had just imagined that he'd seen her. He rubbed his eyes. His hips still ached; bones seemed to be rubbing together. He went creakily down the road, hoping to see a farmhouse from which he could call the AAA. When he finally found one, a man with a thick black mattress of a beard and animal eyes let him use his telephone but made him wait outside on an open porch until the truck came.

He did not get home until after seven. Hungry, Lewis was still irritable. The girl had been there only a moment, like a deer jumping out before him, and when he had gone into the skid he had lost sight of her. But on that long straight road, where could she have run to, after he had landed in the field? So maybe she actually was lying dead in a ditch; but even a dog would leave a huge dent in the Morgan's body, and the car was undamaged.

"Hell," he said out loud. The car was still in the drive; he had been in the house only long enough to get warm. The midday restlessness, the feeling that if he did not move some bad thing would happen-that something worse than the accident was aimed at him like a gun-was back. Lewis went up to his bedroom, removed the sweater and parka and put on a clean shirt, a rep tie and double-breasted blazer. He'd go to Humphrey's Place and have a hamburger and a few beers. That was the ticket.

The lot was nearly full, and Lewis had to park in a space close to the road. The light snow had ceased during the early evening, but the air was cold and so sharp it felt as if you could break pieces off it with your bare hands. Beer signs flashed from the windows of the long gray building; country music from the four-piece band came to Lewis across the spaces of the lot. Wabash Cannonball.

A keening note on the fiddle stitched into his brain as soon as he was inside, and Lewis frowned at the musician sawing away on the bandstand, hair down to his shoulders, left hip and right foot jigging in time, but the boy's eyes were closed and he never noticed. Then an instant later the music was just music again, but his headache remained. The bar was crowded and so warm that Lewis began to perspire almost immediately. Big shapeless Humphrey Stalladge, an apron over his white shirt, moved back and forth behind the bar. All the tables nearest the band seemed to be filled with kids drinking beer from pitchers. When he looked at the backs of their heads, Lewis honestly couldn't tell the boys from the girls.

What if you saw yourself running toward you, running toward the headlights of your car, your hair flying and your face twisted with fear…

"Get you anything, Lewis?" Humphrey asked.

"Two aspirin and a beer. I've got a rotten headache. And a hamburger, Humphrey. Thanks."

Down at the other end of the bar, as far from the bandstand as he could get, looking both damp and filthy, Omar Norris was entertaining a group of men. As he talked his eyes bulged, his hands made swooping motions, and Lewis knew that if you were close enough to him you'd eventually see Omar's spittle shining on your lapels. When he had been younger, Omar's stories of getting out from under his wife's heel and of W. C. Fields-like stratagems for avoiding all work but running the town snowplow and working as the department store Santa had been amusing enough, but Lewis was mildly surprised that he could get anyone to listen to him now. People were even buying him drinks. Stalladge came back with his aspirin tablets and set a glass of beer beside them. "Burger's on the way," he said.

Lewis put the aspirins on his tongue and washed them down. The band had stopped playing Wabash Cannonball and was doing something else, a song he didn't recognize. One of the young women at the tables in front of the band had turned around and was staring at him. Lewis nodded to her.

He finished his beer and looked over the rest of the crowd. There were only a few empty booths by the front wall, so he caught Humphrey's eye and pointed to his glass, and when it was filled he started to go across the room to one of them. If he didn't get one early enough, he'd be pinned to the bar all night. Halfway across the room he nodded to Rollo Draeger, the druggist-come out to get away from Irmengard's endless complaints-and belatedly recognized the boy seated beside the girl who had stared at him: Jim Hardie, Eleanor's son, usually seen these days with Draeger's daughter. He glanced back at the couple, and found them both staring at him now. Jim Hardie was a suspect kid, Lewis thought: he was broad and blond and strong, but he looked like he had a streak of wildness as wide as the county. He was always grinning: Lewis had heard from Walt Hardesty that Jim Hardie was probably the one who had burned down the deserted old Pugh barn and set a field on fire. He could see the boy grinning as he did that. The girl with him tonight was older than Penny Draeger; better-looking, too.

Lewis remembered a time, years ago, when everything had been simple, and it would have been he sitting beside a girl listening to a band, Noble Sissle or Benny Goodman-Lewis with his heart on fire. The memory made him automatically look around the room for Stella Hawthorne's commanding face, but he knew that the moment he'd entered he had half-consciously recorded that she was not in the room.

Humphrey appeared with his hamburger, looked at his glass and said, "If you're gonna drink that fast, maybe you want a pitcher?"

Lewis had not even noticed that his second beer was finished. "Good idea."

"You don't look so hot," Humphrey said.

The band, which had been discussing something, noisily went back to work and spared Lewis the necessity of replying. Humphrey's two relief barmaids, Anni and Annie, came in, releasing a wave of cold into the room. They were just enough reason to stick around. Anni was gypsyish, with curly black hair fluffing out around a sensual face; Annie looked like a Viking and had strong well-shaped legs and beautiful teeth. Both of them were in their mid-thirties and talked like college professors. They lived with men off in the country and were childless. Lewis liked both of them enormously, and sometimes took one or the other out for a meal. Anni saw him and waved, he waved back, and the guitarist, backed by a seesawing fiddle, yelled

You lost your hot, I lost mine

so (feedback) we find

a spare garden to seed our dreams?

Humphrey moved away to give the women instructions. Lewis bit into his hamburger.

When he looked up Ned Rowles was standing beside him. Lewis raised his eyebrows and, still chewing, half-stood and motioned for Rowles to enter the booth. He liked Ned Rowles too; Ned had made The Urbanite an interesting newspaper, not just the usual smalltown list of firemen's picnics and advertisements for sales at the grocery stores. "Help me drink this," he said, and poured beer from the pitcher into Ned's nearly empty glass.

"How about me?" said a deeper, dryer voice over his shoulder, and, startled, Lewis turned his head to see Walt Hardesty glinting down at him. That explained why Lewis had not seen Ned at first; he and Hardesty had been back in the room where Humphrey stacked his surplus beer. Lewis knew that Hardesty, who was year by year surrendering himself to the bottle as surely as Omar Norris, sometimes spent all afternoon in the back room-he would not drink in front of his deputies.

"Of course, Walt," he said, "I didn't see you before. Please join me." Ned Rowles was looking at him oddly. Lewis was sure that the editor found Hardesty as tiresome as he did himself and had no desire for more of his company, but did he expect him to send the sheriff away? Whatever the look meant, Rowles slid over on his side of the booth to make room for Hardesty. The sheriff was still wearing his outer jacket; that back room was probably cold. Like the college student he resembled, Ned went as long as possible with only a tweed jacket for protection against winter.

Then Lewis saw that both men were looking at him oddly, and his heart jumped-had he hit the girl after all? Had someone written down his license number? He'd be guilty of bit and run! "Well, Walt," he said, "is this about anything special, or do you just want a beer?" He filled Hardesty's glass as he spoke.

"Right now, I'll settle for the beer, Mr. Benedikt," Hardesty said, "Quite a day, right?"

"Yes," Lewis said simply.

"A terrible day," said Ned Rowles, and he passed a hand through the hair falling over his forehead. He grimaced at Lewis. "You don't look so good, pal. Maybe you ought to go home and get some rest."

Lewis was even more puzzled than before by this remark. If he had struck the girl and if they knew about it, the sheriff would not just let him go home. "Oh," he said, "I get restless at home. I'd feel a lot better if people stopped telling me I looked terrible."

"Well, it's a miserable business," Rowles said. "I guess we'd all agree to that."

"Hell, yes," Hardesty said, finishing off his beer and pouring another. Ned's face was set in a painful expression of-what? It looked like sympathy. Lewis splashed more beer into his glass. The fiddler had switched to guitar, and now the music had become so loud that the three men had to bend over to be heard. Lewis could hear fragments of lyrics, phrases bawled into the microphones.

wrong way out, baby… wrong way out

"I was just thinking of the times when I was a kid and used to go see Benny Goodman," he said. Ned Rowles snapped his head back, looking confused.

"Benny Goodman?" Hardesty snorted. "Myself, I like country. Real country, Hank Williams, not the junk these kids play. That's not country. Take your Jim Reeves. That's what I like." Lewis could smell the sheriff's breath-half beer and half some terrible foulness, as if he'd been eating garbage.

"Well, you're younger than I am," he said, pulling back.

"I just wanted to say how sorry I was," Ned interjected, and Lewis looked at him sharply, trying to figure out just how much trouble he was in. Hardesty was signaling to Annie, the Viking, for another pitcher. It came within minutes, slopping over when Annie set it on the table. When she walked away she winked at Lewis.

Sometime during the morning, Lewis remembered, and sometime during his drive… bare maples… he had been aware of an odd, dreamy clarity, a sharpness of vision that was like looking at an etching-a haunted wood, a castle surrounded by spiky trees-

wrong way out baby, you're on the wrong

-but now he felt muzzy and confused, everything was strange and Annie's wink was like something in a surreal movie-

you're on the wrong

Hardesty bent forward again and opened his mouth. Lewis saw a spot of blood in Hardesty's left eye, hovering below the blue iris like a fertilized egg. "I'll tell you something," Hardesty shouted at him. "We got these four dead sheep, see? Throats cut. No blood and no footprints either. What do you make of that?"

"You're the law, what do you make of it?" Lewis said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the band.

"I say it's a damn funny world-gettin' to be a damn funny world," Hardesty shouted at him, and gave Lewis one of his Texas hard-guy looks. "Real damn funny. I'd say that your two old lawyer buddies know something about it, too."

"That's unlikely," Ned understated. "But I ought to see if one of them wants to write something about Dr. John Jaffrey for the paper. Unless you'd like to, Lewis."

"Write about John for The Urbanite?" Lewis asked.

"Well, you know, about a hundred words, maybe two hundred, anything you can think of to say about him."

"But why?"

"Jesus wept, because you don't want Omar Norris to be the only one-" Hardesty stopped, mouth open. He looked stupefied. Lewis craned his neck to see Omar Norris across the crowded room, still waving his arms and babbling. On the bar before him sat a row of drinks. The feeling of something bad nearby which had dogged him all day intensified. An out-of-tune fiddle chord went through him like an arrow: this is it, this is it-

Ned Rowles reached across the table and touched Lewis's hand. "Ah, Lewis," he said. "I was sure you knew."

"I was out all day," he said. "I was-what happened?" A day after Edward's anniversary, he thought, and knew that John Jaffrey was dead. Then he realized that Edward's heart attack had come after midnight, and that this was the anniversary of his death.

"He was a leaper," Hardesty said, and Lewis saw that he'd read the word somewhere and thought it was the kind of word he should use. The sheriff took a swallow of beer and grimaced at Lewis, full of self-conscious menace. "He went off the bridge before noon today. Probably dead as a mackerel before he hit the water. Omar Norris there saw the whole thing."

"He went off the bridge," Lewis repeated softly. For some reason, he wished that he had hit a girl with his car-it was only a moment's wish, but it would have meant that John was safe. "My God," he said.

"We thought Sears or Ricky would have told you," Ned Rowles informed him. "They agreed to take care of the funeral arrangements."

"Jesus, John is going to be buried," Lewis said, and surprised tears came up in his eyes. He stood up and clumsily began to edge out of the booth.

"Don't suppose you could tell me anything useful," Hardesty said.

"No. No. I have to get over there. I don't know anything. I've got to see the others."

"Tell me if I can help at all," Ned shouted over the noise.

Not really looking where he was going, Lewis brushed into Jim Hardie, who had stationed himself unseen just outside the booth. "Sorry, Jim," Lewis said and would have gone by Jim and the girl, but Hardie closed his fist around Lewis's arm.

"This lady wanted to meet you," Hardie said, grinning unpleasantly. "So I'm making the introductions. She's stopping at our hotel."

"I just don't have the time, I have to leave," Lewis said, Hardie's hand still clamping forcefully on his forearm.

"Hang on. I'm doing what she asked me to do. Mr. Benedikt, this is Anna Mostyn." For the first time since he'd met her glance at the bar, Lewis looked at the girl. She was not a girl, he discovered; she was about thirty, perhaps a year or two on either side. She was anything but a typical Jim Hardie date. "Anna, this is Mr. Lewis Benedikt. I guess he's about the handsomest old coot in five or six counties, maybe the whole damn state, and he knows it too." The girl grew more startling the more you looked at her. She reminded him of someone, and he supposed it must have been Stella Hawthorne. It crossed his mind that he'd forgotten what Stella Hawthorne had looked like when she was thirty.

A ravaged figure from a low-life painting, Omar Norris was pointing at him from the bar. Still grinning ferociously, Jim Hardie let go of his arm. The boy with the fiddle swung his hair back girlishly and counted off another number.

"I know you have to leave," the woman said. Her voice was low, but it slid through the noise. "I heard about your friend from Jim, and I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was."

"I just heard myself," Lewis said, sick with the need to leave the bar. "Nice to meet you, Miss-"

"Mostyn," she said in her effortlessly audible voice.

"I hope we'll be seeing each other again. I'm going to work for your lawyer friends."

"Oh? Well…" The meaning of what she had said reached him. "Sears and Ricky gave you a job?"

"Yes. I gather they knew my aunt. Perhaps you did too? Her name was Eva Galli."

"Oh, Jesus," Lewis said, and startled Jim Hardie into dropping his arm. Lewis plunged off into the interior of the bar before changing direction and rushing toward the door.

"Glamour boy musta got the shits or something," Jim said. "Oh. Sorry, lady. I mean, Miss Mostyn."

The Chowder Society Accused

6

The Morgan's canvas top creaking, cold billowing in, Lewis drove to John's house as fast as he could. He did not know what he expected to find there: maybe some ultimate Chowder Society Meeting, Ricky and Sears speaking with eerie rationality over an open coffin. Or maybe Ricky and Sears themselves magically dead and wrapped in the black robes of his dream, three bodies lying in an upper bedroom…

Not yet, his mind said.

He pulled up beside the house on Montgomery Street and got out of the car. The wind pulled the blazer away from his body, yanked at his necktie: he realized that like Ned Rowles he was coatless. Lewis looked despairingly at the unlighted windows, and thought that at least Milly Sheehan would be in. He trotted up the path and pushed the bell. Far away and dim, it rang. Immediately below it was the office bell for John's patients, and he pushed that one too and heard an impatient clamor go off just on the other side of the door. Lewis, standing as if naked in the cold, began to shake.

Cold water lay on his face. At first he thought it was snow, then realized that he was crying again.

Lewis pounded on the door futilely, turned away, the tears like ice on his face, and looked across the street and saw Eva Galli's old house.

His breath froze. He almost thought he saw her again, the enchantress of their youth, moving across a downstairs window.

For a moment everything had the hard clarity of the morning and his stomach froze too, and then the door opened and he saw that the figure coming out was a man. Lewis wiped his brow with his hands. The man obviously wanted to speak with him. As he approached, Lewis recognized him as Freddy Robinson, the insurance salesman. He too was a regular at Humphrey's Place.

"Lewis?" he called. "Lewis Benedikt? Hey, good to see you, man!"

Lewis began to feel as he had in the bar-he wanted to get away. "Yes, it's me," he said.

"Gee, what a pity about old Dr. Jaffrey, hey? I heard about it this afternoon. He was a real buddy of yours, wasn't he?" Robinson was by now close enough to shake hands, and Lewis was unable to avoid grasping the salesman's cold fingers. "Hell of a note, hey? Goddamned tragedy, I call it. Boy." He was shaking his head sagely. "I'll tell you something. Old Dr. Jaffrey pretty much kept to himself, but I loved that old guy. Honest. When he invited me over to that party he had for the actress, you could have knocked me down with a feather. And man, what a party! Really, I had the time of my life. Great party." He must have seen Lewis stiffen, for he added, "Until the end, of course."

Lewis was looking at the ground, not bothering to reply to these horrible remarks, and Freddy Robinson rushed into the silence to add, "Hey, you look kind of crapped out. You don't want to stand here in the cold. Why don't you come over to my place, have a good stiff drink? I'd like to hear about your experiences, chew the fat a little bit, check out your insurance situation, just for the record-there's nobody at home here anyhow-" Like Jim Hardie, he grabbed Lewis's arm, and Lewis, harassed and miserable as he was, sensed desperation and hunger in the man. If Robinson could have handcuffed Lewis and dragged him across the street, he would have. Lewis knew that Robinson, for whatever private reasons, would fasten on him like a barnacle if he allowed him to.

"I'm afraid I can't," he said, more polite than if he had not felt the enormity of Robinson's need. "I have to see some people."

"You mean Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I guess," Robinson said, defeated already. He released Lewis's arm. "Gosh, what you guys do is so great, I mean I really admire you, with that club you have and everything."

"Christ, don't admire us," Lewis said, already moving toward his car. "Someone's picking us off like flies."

It was uttered almost casually, a merely dismissive remark, and within five minutes Lewis had forgotten he'd said it.

He drove the eight blocks to Ricky's house because it was unthinkable that Sears would have taken Milly Sheehan to his place, and when he got there he saw that he'd been correct. Ricky's old Buick was still in the drive.

"Oh, so you've heard," Ricky said when he opened the door. "I'm glad you came." His nose was red, with crying Lewis thought, and then saw that he had a bad cold.

"Yes, I saw Hardesty and Ned Rowles and they told me. How did you hear?"

"Hardesty called us at the office." The two men entered the living room, and Lewis saw Sears James, seated in an easy chair, scowl when the sheriff was named.

Stella came in from the dining room, gasped, and ran across the room to embrace him. "I'm so sorry, Lewis," she said. "It's such a damn shame."

"It's impossible," said Lewis.

"That may be so, but it certainly was John who was taken to the county morgue this noon," Sears said in a thick voice. "Who's to say what is impossible? We've all been under a strain. I may go off the bridge tomorrow." Stella gave Lewis an extra squeeze and went to sit beside Ricky on the Hawthorne's couch. The Italian coffee table in front of them looked the size of an ice rink.

"You need coffee," Stella said, scrutinizing Lewis more carefully, and got up again to go into the kitchen.

"You'd think it impossible," Sears went on, unruffled by the interruption, "that three adult men like ourselves would have to huddle together for warmth, but here we are."

Stella returned with coffee for all of them, and the desultory conversation ceased for a moment.

"We tried to reach you," Ricky said.

"I was out for a drive."

"It was John who wanted us to write to young Wanderley," Ricky said after a moment.

"Write to whom?" Stella asked, not understanding. Sears and Ricky explained. "Well, that's the craziest thing I ever heard," she finally said. "It's just like the three of you, to get all worked up and then ask someone else to solve your problems. I wouldn't have expected it from John."

"He's supposed to be an expert, Stella," Sears said in exasperation. "As far as I'm concerned, John's suicide proves that we need him more than ever."

"Well, when's he coming?"

"Don't know," Sears admitted. He looked rumpled, a fat old turkey at the end of winter.

"If you ask me, what you ought to do is stop those Chowder Society meetings," Stella told him. "They're destructive. Ricky woke up screaming this morning- all three of you look like you've seen ghosts."

Sears remained cool. "Two of us saw John's body. That should be reason enough for looking a little out of sorts."

"How did-" Lewis began, and then stopped. How did he look? was a singularly stupid question.

"How did what?" demanded Sears.

"How did you happen to hire Eva Galli's niece as a secretary?"

"She asked for a job," Sears said. "We had some extra work."

"Eva Galli?" asked Stella. "Wasn't she that rich woman who came here, oh, a long time ago? I didn't know her very well; she was much older than I. Wasn't she going to marry someone? Then she just upped and left town."

"She was going to marry Stringer Dedham," Sears said impatiently.

"Oh yes, Stringer Dedham," Stella remembered. "My goodness, he was a handsome man. There was that awful accident-something at a farm."

"He lost both arms in. a threshing machine," Ricky said.

"Ugh. What a conversation. This must be like one of your meetings."

All three men had been thinking the same thing.

"Who told you about Miss Mostyn?" asked Sears. "Mrs. Quast must gossip overtime."

"No, I met her. She was at Humphrey's Place with Jim Hardie. She introduced herself to me."

The feeble conversation died again.

Sears asked Stella if there was any brandy in the house, and Stella said she'd get some for everybody and disappeared again into the kitchen.

Sears yanked savagely at his jacket, trying to make himself comfortable in the leather and metal chair. "You took John home last night. Did he seem unusual in any way?"

Lewis shook his head. "We didn't talk much. He said your story was good."

"He didn't say any more than that?"

"He said he was cold."

"Humph."

Stella returned with a bottle of Remy Martin and three glasses on a tray. "You should see yourselves. You look like three owls."

They did not so much as nod.

"Gentlemen, I'll leave you with the brandy. I'm sure you have things you want to talk about." Stella looked them over, autocratic and benign as a primary teacher, and then moved quickly out of the room without saying good-bye. Her disapproval stayed with them.

"She's upset," Ricky said apologetically. "Well, we all are. But Stella's more affected by this than she wants to show." As if to make amends for his wife, Ricky leaned forward over the glass icerink table and poured a generous amount of cognac into each glass. "I need this too. Lewis, I just don't understand what would make him do it. Why would John Jaffrey want to kill himself?"

"I don't know why," said Lewis, taking one of the glasses. "Maybe I'm glad I don't."

"Talk sense for a change," Sears growled. "We're men, Lewis, not animals. We're not supposed to stay cowering in the darkness." He too accepted a glass and sipped. "As a species, we hunger for knowledge. For enlightenment." His pale eyes angrily fixed on Lewis. "Or perhaps I misunderstood you, and you did not actually intend to defend ignorance."

"Overkill, Sears," Ricky said.

"Less jargon, Ricky," Sears retorted. " 'Overkill,' indeed. That might impress Elmer Scales and his sheep, but it does not impress me."

There was something about sheep-but Lewis had forgotten it. He said, "I don't mean to defend ignorance, Sears. I just meant that-hell, I don't know anymore. I guess I meant that it might be too much to take." What he did not articulate but was half aware of was the notion that he feared to peer too closely into the last moments of any suicide's life, be it friend or wife.

"Yes," breathed Ricky.

"Twaddle," said Sears. "I'd be relieved to learn that John was merely despairing. It's the other explanations that frighten me."

Lewis said, "I have the feeling that I'm sort of missing something," and proved to Ricky for the thousandth time that he was not the dullard of Sears's imagination.

"Last night," Ricky said, holding his glass with both hands and smiling fatalistically, "after the other three of us had gone, Sears saw Fenny Bate on his staircase."

"Christ."

"That's enough," Sears warned. "Ricky, I forbid you to go into this. What our friend means, Lewis, is that I thought I saw him. I was badly frightened. It was an hallucination-a ha'nt, as they used to say in these parts."

"Now you're arguing both ways," Ricky pointed out. "For my part, I'd be happy to think you're right. I don't want to see young Wanderley here. I think we might all be sorry, just about the time it's too late."

"You misread me. I want him to come and say: give it up. My Uncle Edward died of smoking and excitement, John Jaffrey was unstable. That's the reason I agreed to John's suggestion. I say, let him come, and the sooner the better."

Lewis said, "If you feel that, I agree with you."

"Is that fair to John?" Ricky asked.

"John's past being fair to," Sears said. He finished the cognac in his glass and leaned forward to pour more from the bottle.

Sudden footsteps on the stairs made all three swivel their heads toward the entrance from the hall.

Turned that way in his chair, Lewis could see Ricky's front window, and he noticed with surprise that it had begun to snow again. Hundreds of big flakes hammered the black window.

Milly Sheehan came in, her hair all flattened on one side and all frowsy on the other. She was sausaged into one of Stella's old dressing gowns. "I heard that, Sears James," she said in a voice like the wail of an ambulance. "You'll bully John even when he's dead."

"Milly, I meant no disrespect," Sears said. "Shouldn't you-"

"No. You won't get rid of me now. I won't give you coffee now and bow and scrape. I have something to say to you. John didn't commit suicide. Lewis Benedikt, you listen too. He didn't. He wouldn't have. John was murdered."

"Milly," Ricky began.

"Do you think I'm deaf? Do you think I don't know what's going on? John was killed, and do you know who killed him? Well, I do." Footsteps, this time Stella's, came hurrying down the stairs. "I know who killed him. It was you. You-you Chowder Society. You killed him with your terrible stories. You made him sick-you and your Fenny Bates!" Her face twisted; Stella rushed in too late to stop Milly's final words. "They ought to call you the Murder Society! They ought to call you Murder Incorporated!"

7

So there they stood, Murder Incorporated, beneath a bright sky in late October. They felt grief, anger, despair, guilt-they had been talking of graves and corpses compulsively for a year, and now they were burying one of their own. The unexpected findings of the autopsy had puzzled and distressed them all; Sears had blown up, choosing to disbelieve. Ricky too had not at first believed that John could have been a dope addict. "Evidence of massive, habitual and longstanding introduction of narcotic substance…" then a lot of fancy medical language, but the point was that the coroner had publicly defamed John Jaffrey. Sears's ranting had been of no use-the man would not change his story. Sears would not alter his opinion that in the course of one autopsy the man had changed from a skillful professional to an incompetent and dangerous fool. The coroner's findings had circulated through Milburn, and some citizens said they sided with Sears and some accepted the autopsy's conclusions, but none came to the funeral. Even the Reverend Neil Wilkinson seemed embarrassed. The funeral of a suicide and drug addict-well!

The new girl, Anna, had been wonderful: she'd helped deal with Sears's rage, cushioning Mrs. Quast from the worst effects of it, she'd been as marvelous with Milly Sheehan as Stella had, and she'd transformed the office. She had forced Ricky to realize that Hawthorne, James had plenty of work if Hawthorne and James wanted to do it. Even during the terrible period of arranging John's funeral, even on the day he took a suit from John's closet and bought a coffin, he and Sears found themselves responding to more letters and answering more phone calls than they had for weeks. They had been drifting toward retirement, sending clients elsewhere as if automatically, and Anna Mostyn seemed to have brought them back to life. She had mentioned her aunt only once, and in the most harmless way: she had asked them what she was like. Sears had come close to blushing and muttered, "Almost as pretty as you, but not as fierce." And she had been staunchly on Sears's side in the matter of the autopsy. Even coroners make mistakes, she had pointed out with placid, undeniable common sense.

Ricky was not so sure; he was not even sure it mattered. John had functioned perfectly well as a doctor; his own body had weakened but he had remained competent at curing other bodies. Surely a "massive, habitual, etc." drug habit would account for the physical decline John had exhibited. A daily insulin injection would have got John used to needles. He found that if John Jaffrey had been an addict, it did not much affect what he thought of him.

And this: it made his suicide explicable. No empty-eyed barefooted Fenny Bate, no Murder Incorporated, no mere stories had killed him-the drug had eaten into his brain as it had eaten into his body. Or he could not take it anymore, the "shame" of addiction. Or something.

Sometimes it was convincing.

In the meantime his nose ran and his chest tickled. He wanted to sit down; he wanted to be warm. Milly Sheehan was gripping Stella as if the two of them were battered by a hurricane, now and then using one hand to pluck another tissue from the box, wipe her eyes, and drop the tissue on the ground.

Ricky took a damp tissue from his own coat pocket, discreetly wiped his nose, and returned it to his pocket.

All of them heard the car coming up the hill to the cemetery.

From the journals of Don Wanderley

8

It seems I am an honorary member of the Chowder Society. It's all very odd-in fact, just the peculiarity of it all is a shade unsettling. Maybe the oddest part of my being here is that my uncle's friends almost seem to fear that they are caught in some kind of real-life horror story, a story like The Nightwatcher. It was because of The Nightwatcher that they wrote me. They saw me as some sort of steel-plated professional, an expert in the supernatural-they saw me as a Van Helsing! My original impressions were correct; they all do feel a distinct foreboding-I suppose you could say they're on the verge of being scared of their own shadows. My role is to investigate, of all things. And what they haven't told me directly, but have implied, is that I am supposed to say, nothing to worry about, boys. There's a rational, reasonable explanation for everything-but of that I have little doubt.

They want me to be able to write, too-they're very firm about that. Sears James said, "We didn't ask you here so that we could interrupt your career!" So they want me to give about half of my day to Dr. Rabbitfoot, and the other half to them. There's the feeling, definitely, that part of what they want is just someone to talk to. They've been talking to themselves for too long.

Not long after the secretary, Anna Mostyn, left, the dead man's housekeeper said that she wanted to lie down, and Stella Hawthorne took her upstairs. When she came back down, Mrs. Hawthorne gave us all large glasses of whiskey. In Milburn high society, which I guess this is, you drink whiskey English style, neat.

We had a painful, halting conversation. Stella Hawthorne said, "I hope you knock some sense into these characters' heads," which mystified me. They hadn't yet explained the real reason why they asked me to come. I nodded, and Lewis said, "We have to talk about it." That silenced them again. "We want to talk about your book, too," Lewis said. "Fine," I said. More silence.

"I might as well feed you three owls," Stella Hawthorne said. "Mr. Wanderley, will you please give me a hand?"

I followed her into the kitchen, expecting to be handed plates or cutlery. What I did not expect was for the elegant Mrs. Hawthorne to whirl around, slam the door behind her and say, "Didn't those three old idiots in there say why they wanted you to come here?"

"I guess they fudged a little," I said.

"Well, you better be good, Mr. Wanderley," she said, "because you're going to have to be Freud to deal with those three. I want you to know that I don't approve of your being here at all. I think people should solve their problems by themselves."

"They implied they just wanted to talk to me about my uncle," I said. Even with her gray hair, I thought she could be no older than about forty-six or seven, and she looked as beautiful and stern as a ship's figurehead.

"Your uncle! Well, maybe they do. They'd never deign to tell me," and I understood part of the reason for her fury. "How well did you know your uncle, Mr. Wanderley?"

I asked her to use my first name. "Not very well. After I went to college and moved to California, I didn't see him more than once every couple of years. I hadn't seen him at all for several years before his death."

"But he left you his house. Doesn't it strike you a little bit funny that those three characters out there didn't suggest you stay there?"

Before I could reply she went on. "Well, even if it doesn't, it does me. And not only funny, but pathetic. They're afraid to go into Edward's house. They just all came to a kind of-a kind of silent agreement. They've never entered that house. They're superstitious, that's why."

"I thought I felt-well, when I came to the funeral I thought I saw-" I stammered, not sure of how far I could go with her.

"Bully for you," she said. "Maybe you're not as big a blockhead as they are. But I tell you this, Don Wanderley, if you make them any worse than they are already, you'll have me to answer to." She put her hands on her hips, her eyes sizzling, and then she exhaled. Her eyes changed; she gave me a tight pained smile and said, "We'd better get busy or I suppose they'll start to gossip about you."

She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a platter holding a roast the size of a young pig. "Cold roast beef all right for you? The carving things are in the drawer to your right. Start cutting."

Only after Stella rather abruptly left the house for what she called an "appointment"-after the strange scene in the kitchen, I had a passing notion of its character, and the momentary expression of utter misery which crossed Ricky Hawthorne's face confirmed it- did the three men open up to me. Bad choice of words: they did not "open up" at all, at least not until much later, but after Stella Hawthorne had driven off, the three old men began to show me why they had asked me to come to Milburn.

It began like a job interview.

"Well, here you are at last, Mr. Wanderley," said Sears James, pouring more cognac into his glass and removing a fat cigar case from the inside pocket of his jacket. "Cigar? I can vouch for their merit."

"No thanks," I said. "And please call me Don."

"Very well. I have not welcomed you properly, Don, but I will do so now. We were all great friends of your uncle Edward's. I am, and I speak for my two friends as well, very grateful that you have come across the country to join us. We think that you can help us."

"Does this have to do with my uncle's death?"

"In part. We want you to work for us." Then he asked me if we could talk about The Nightwatcher.

"Of course."

"It was a novel, therefore in large part an invention, but was this invention based on an actual case? We assume you did research for the book. But what we want to know is whether in the course of your research you discovered any corroborating evidence for the ideas in your book. Or perhaps your research was inspired by some inexplicable occurrence in your own life."

I could almost feel their tension on my fingertips, and perhaps they could feel mine on theirs. They knew nothing about David's death, but they had asked me to expose the central mystery of both The Nightwatcher and my life.

"The invention, as you put it, was based on an actual case," I said, and the tension broke.

"Could you describe that to us?"

"No," I said. "It's not clear enough to me. Also, it's too personal. I'm sorry, but I can't go into it."

"We can respect that," Sears James said. "You seem nervous."

"I am," I admitted, and laughed.

"The situation in The Nightwatcher was based on a real situation that you knew about?" asked Ricky Hawthorne, as if he hadn't been paying attention, or could not believe what he had just heard.

"That's right."

"And you know of other similar cases?"

"No."

"But you do not reject the supernatural out of hand," Sears said.

"I don't know if I do or not," I said. "Like most people."

Lewis Benedikt sat up straight and stared at me. "But you just said…"

"No, he didn't," Ricky Hawthorne put in. "He just said his book was based on a real event, not that it recounted the event exactly. Is that right, Don?"

"More or less."

"But what about your research?" asked Lewis.

"I didn't actually do much," I said.

Hawthorne sighed, glanced at Sears with what looked like irony: I told you so.

"I think you can help us anyway," Sears said, as if he were contradicting a voiced opinion. "Your skepticism will do us good."

"Maybe," Hawthorne muttered.

I was still feeling that they had blundered into my most private space. "What does all this have to do with my uncle's heart attack?" I asked. There was a lot of self-defense in the question, but it was the right question to ask.

It all came out-James had decided to tell me everything.

"And we've been having unthinkable nights. I know that John did too. It is not exaggerating to say that we fear for our reason. Would either of you dispute that?"

Hawthorne and Lewis Benedikt looked as though they were remembering things they'd rather not, and shook their heads.

"So we want your expert help, and as much time as you can reasonably give us," Sears concluded. "John's apparent suicide has shaken us all very deeply. Even if he was a drug addict, which I dispute, I do not think he was a potential suicide."

"What was he wearing?" I asked. It was just a stray thought.

"Wearing? I don't recall… Ricky, did you look at his clothing?"

Hawthorne nodded. "I had to throw it out. It was the most astounding assortment of things-his evening jacket, a pajama shirt, the trousers to another suit. No socks."

"That's what John put on when he got up the morning he died?" Lewis asked, astonished. "Why didn't you tell us before?"

"At first I was shocked by it, and then I forgot. Too much was happening."

"But he was usually such a fastidious man," Lewis said. "Damn it, if John jumbled his clothes up like that, his mind must have been jumbled too."

"Precisely," Sears said, and smiled at me. "Don, that was a perceptive question. None of us thought of it."

I could see him beginning to snatch up all the available rationalizations. "It doesn't simplify things to point out that his mind was jumbled," I pointed out. "In the case I had in mind when I did my book, a man killed himself, and I'm damn sure his mind was shaken, but I never found out what really happened to him."

"You're talking about your brother, aren't you?" asked Ricky Hawthorne cleverly. Naturally. So they all knew, after all; my uncle had told them about David. "And that was the 'case' you alluded to?"

I nodded.

"Uh oh," Lewis said.

I said, "I just turned it into a ghost story. I don't know what really happened."

For a moment all three of them looked embarrassed.

"Well," Sears James said, "even if you are not accustomed to doing research, I'm sure that you're capable of it."

Ricky Hawthorne leaned back into his eccentric couch; his bow tie was still immaculate, but his nose was red and his eyes bleary. He looked small and lost, in the midst of his giant furniture. "It will obviously make my two friends happier if you stay with us for a while, Mr. Wanderley."

"Don."

"Don, then. Since you seem prepared to do that, and since I am exhausted, I suggest we all say good night. You'll spend the night at Lewis's?"

Lewis Benedikt said, "That's fine," and stood up.

"I have one question," I said. "Are you asking me to think about the supernatural-or whatever you want to call it-because that absolves you from thinking about it?"

"Perceptive, but inaccurate," Sears James said, looking at me with his rifle shot's blue eyes. "We think about it all the time."

"That reminds me," Lewis said. "Are you going to stop the Chowder Society meetings? Does anyone think we should?"

"No," Ricky said with an odd defiance. "For heaven's sake let's not. For our sakes, let's continue to meet Don will be included."

So here I am. Each of the three men, my uncle's friends, seems admirable in his own way: but are they losing their minds? I can't even be sure they have told me everything. They are frightened, and two of them have died; and I wrote earlier in this journal that Milburn feels like the sort of town where Dr. Rabbitfoot would go to work. I can feel reality slithering away from me, if I start to imagine that one of my own books is happening around me.

The trouble is, I could almost start to imagine that. Those two suicides-David's and Dr. Jaffrey's-that's the problem, that simple coincidence. (And the Chowder Society shows no signs of recognizing that this coincidence is the main reason I am interested in their problem.) What am I involved in here? A ghost story? Or something worse, something not just a story? The three old men have only the sketchiest knowledge of the events of two years ago-and they can't possibly know that they've asked me to enter the strangest part of my life again, to roll myself back through the calendar to the worst, most destructive days: or to roll myself up again in the pages of a book which was my attempt to reconcile myself with them. But can there really be any connection, even if it is just the connection of one ghost story leading to another, as it did with the Chowder Society? And can there truly be any factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to my brother?

II - Alma

Everything that has beauty has a body, and is a body;

everything that has being has being in the flesh:

and dreams are only drawn from the bodies that are.

"Bodiless God,"

-D. H. Lawrence

From the journals of Don Wanderley

1

There is only one way to answer that question. I have to spend a little time, over the next week or two, in writing out in some detail the facts as I remember them about myself and David and Alma Mobley. When I fictionalized them in the book I inevitably sensationalized them, and doing so falsified my own memories. If I were satisfied with that, I would never have considered writing the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel-he's no more than Alma in blackface, Alma with horns, tail and a soundtrack. Just as "Rachel Varney" in The Nightwatcher was no more than Alma in fancy dress. Alma was far stranger than "Rachel." What I want to do now is not invent fictional situations and fictional peculiarities, but look at the peculiarities that existed. In The Nightwatcher everything was solved, everything came out even; in life nothing came out even and nothing was solved.

I met Alma not as "Saul Malkin" met "Rachel Varney," in a Paris dining room, but in surroundings utterly banal. It was at Berkeley, where good notices for my first book had obtained me a year's teaching job. The post was a coup for a first-book writer, and I took it seriously. I taught one section of Creative Writing and two sections of an undergraduate course in American literature. It was the second of these that caused most of my work. I had to do so much reading of work which I didn't know well and so much theme-grading that I had little time to write. And if I had barely read Howells or Cooper, I had never looked at the criticism about them which the structure of the course demanded I know. I found myself falling into a routine of teaching my courses, taking the creative writing work home to read before I ate dinner at a bar or cafe, and then spending my evenings at the library going through bibliographies and hunting up copies of PMLA. Sometimes I was able to work on a story of my own when I got back to my apartment; more often, my eyes burned and my stomach was in an uproar from English Department coffee and my instincts for prose were deadened by scholarly waffle. From time to time I took out a girl in the department, an instructor with a mint-condition PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Her name was Helen Kayos, and our desks, along with twelve others, were next to one another in a communal office. She had read my first book, but it had not impressed her.

She was stern about literature, frightened of teaching, careless about her appearance, hopeless about men.

Her interests were in Scots contemporaries of Chaucer and linguistic analysis; at twenty-three, she already had something of the feather impracticality of the old scholar-spinster. "My father changed his name from Kayinski, and I'm just a hard-headed Pole," she said, but it was a classic self-deception; she was hard-headed about Scots Chaucerians and nothing else. Helen was a large girl with big glasses and loose hair which always seemed on its way from one style to another; it was hair with unfulfilled intentions. She had decided some time before that what she had to offer the university, the planet, men was her intelligence. It was the only thing about herself that she trusted. I asked her out for lunch the third time I saw her in the office. She was revising an article, and she nearly jumped out of her chair. I think I was the first man at Berkeley to ask her to lunch.

A few days later I met her in the office after my last class. She was sitting at her desk staring at her typewriter. Our lunch had been awkward: she had said, comparing the articles she was trying to write with my work, "But I'm trying to describe reality!"

"I'm leaving," I said. "Why don't you come with me? We'll have a drink somewhere."

"I can't, I hate bars and I have to work on this," she said. "Oh, look. You could walk me back to my place. Okay? It's up the hill. Is that okay for you?"

"That's where I live too."

"I'm fed up with this anyhow. What are you reading?" I held up a book. "Oh. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Your survey course."

"Harvey Lieberman just told me that in three weeks I'm giving the main lecture on Hawthorne. I haven't read The House of the Seven Gables since high school."

"Lieberman is a lazy so and so."

I was inclined to agree: so far, three of his other assistants had also given lectures for him. "I'll be all right," I said, "as long as I can figure out some angle to tie it all up, and get all the reading done."

"At least you don't have tenure to worry about," she said, gesturing toward her typewriter.

"No. Just eating." This had the tone of our lunch.

"Sorry." She bowed her head, suffering already, and I touched her shoulder and told her not to take herself so seriously.

As we were going down the stairs together, Helen carrying a huge worn briefcase straining with books and essays, me carrying only The House of the Seven Gables, a tall freckled blond girl slipped between us. The first impression I had of Alma Mobley was of a general paleness, a spiritual blurriness suggested by her long expressionless face and hanging straw-colored hair. Her round eyes were a very pale blue. I felt an odd mixture of attraction and revulsion; in the dim light of the staircase, she looked like an attractive girl who'd spent all her life in a cave-she appeared to be the same ghostly shade of white all over. "Mr. Wanderley?" she asked.

When I nodded, she muttered her name, but I did not catch it.

"I'm a graduate student in English," she said. "I wondered if you'd mind if I came to your lecture on Hawthorne. I saw your name posted on Professor Lieberman's schedule in the departmental office."

"No, please come," I said. "But it's just a survey class, you know. It'll probably be a waste of time for you."

"Thank you," she said and abruptly continued on up the stairs.

"How did she know who I was?" I whispered to Helen, concealing my pleasure in what I thought was my heretofore invisible celebrity. Helen tapped the book in my hand.

She lived only three blocks from my own apartment; hers was a random collection of rooms at the top of an old house, and she shared it with two other girls. The rooms seemed arbitrarily placed, and so did the things in them-the apartment looked as if no one had ever considered where bookcases and chairs and tables ought to go; where delivery men put them, they stayed. Here a lamp had been put next to a chair, there a table heaped with books shoved beneath a window, but everything else was so haphazard that you had to weave around the furniture to reach the hall.

The roommates too seemed arbitrary. Helen had described them to me on the walk up the hill. One of them, Meredith Polk, was also from Wisconsin, a new instructor in the Botany Department. She and Helen had met while hunting for a place to live, found they had done graduate work at the same university and decided to live together. The third girl was a theater graduate student named Hilary Lehardie. Helen said, "Hilary never leaves her room and stays high all day, I think, and she plays rock music most of the night. I put in ear plugs. But Meredith is better. She's very intense and a little bit odd, but I think we're friends. She tries to protect me."

"Protect you from what?"

"Vileness."

Both of the roommates were at home when I reached Helen's apartment. As soon as I came in behind Helen, an overweight black-haired girl in blue jeans and a sweatshirt shot out of the door from the kitchen and glared at me through thick glasses. Meredith Polk. Helen introduced me as a writer in the English Department, and Meredith said "Dja do?" and zipped back into the kitchen. Loud music came from a side bedroom.

The spectacled black-haired girl cannoned out of the kitchen again as soon as Helen had gone in to get me a drink. She wove through the furniture to a camp chair near a wall against which stood what looked like hundreds of cacti and plants in pots. She slotted a cigarette in her mouth and stared at me with an intent suspicion.

"You're not an academic? Not on the regular staff?" This from a first-year instructor, years from tenure.

I said, "I just have a year's appointment. I'm a writer."

"Oh," she said. More staring for a moment. Then: "So you're the one who took her to lunch."

"Yes."

"Ah."

The music boomed through the wall. "Hilary," she said, nodding in the direction of the music. "Our roommate."

"Doesn't it bother you?"

"I don't hear it most of the time. Concentration. And it's good for the plants."

Helen came out with a tumbler too full of whiskey, one ice cube floating at the top like a dead goldfish. She carried a cup of tea for herself.

" 'Scuse me," Meredith said, and darted off in the direction of her room.

"Oh, it's nice to see a man in this awful place," Helen said. For a moment all the worry and self-consciousness left her face, and I saw the real intelligence that lay beneath her academic cleverness. She looked vulnerable, but less so than I had thought.

We went to bed a week later, at my apartment. She was not a virgin, and she was firm about not being in love. In fact she went about the entire matter of deciding to do it and then doing it with the brisk precision she brought to the Scots Chaucerians. "You'll never fall in love with me," she said, "and I don't expect you to. That's fine."

She spent two nights at my apartment, that time. We went to the library together in the evenings, vanishing into our separate carrels as if there were no emotion at all between us. The only actual sign I had that this was not so came one evening a week later when I found Meredith Polk outside my door when I came home. She was still wearing the jeans and sweatshirt. "You shit," she hissed at me, and I quickly opened the door and got her inside.

"You cold-hearted bastard," she said. "You're going to wreck her chances for tenure. And you're breaking her heart. You treat her like a whore. She's much too good for you. You don't even have the same values.

Helen's committed to scholarship-it's the most important thing in her life. I understand that, but I don't think you do. I don't think you're committed to anything but your sex life."

"One thing at a time," I said. "How can I possibly be wrecking her chances for tenure? Let's just take that one first."

"This is her first semester here. They watch us, you know. How do you think it looks if a new instructor jumps in the sack with the first guy who comes along?"

"This is Berkeley. I don't think anyone notices or cares."

"You pig. You don't notice or care, you don't notice anything or care about anything, that's the truth-do you love her?"

"Get out," I said. I was losing my temper. She looked like an angry frog, croaking at me, defining her territory.

Helen herself arrived three hours later, looking pale and bruised. She would not discuss Meredith Polk's astounding accusations, but she said she had talked to her the night before. "Meredith is very protective," she said. "She must have been to you. I'm sorry, Don." Then she began to cry. "No, don't rub my back like that. Don't. It's just foolish. It's only that I haven't been able to work, the past few nights. I guess I've been unhappy whenever I haven't been with you." She looked up at me, stricken. "I shouldn't have said that. But you don't love me, do you? You couldn't, could you?"

"There's no answer to that. Let me get you a cup of tea."

She was lying on the bed in my little apartment, curled up like a fetus. "I feel so guilty."

I came back with her tea. "I wish we could take a trip together," she said. "I wish we could go to Scotland together. I've spent all these years reading about Scotland, and I've never been there." Her eyes were brimming behind the big glasses. "Oh, I'm a horrible mess. I knew I should never have come out here. I was happy in Madison. I should never have come to California."

"You belong here more than I do."

"No," she said, and rolled over to hide her face. "You can go anywhere and fit in. I've never been anything but a working-class drudge."

"What's the last really good book you read?" I asked.

She rolled back over to face me, curiosity defeating the misery and embarrassment on her face. Squinting, she considered it for a moment. "The Rhetoric of Irony by Wayne Booth. I just reread it."

"You belong at Berkeley," I said.

"I belong in a zoo."

It was an apology for everything, for Meredith Polk as much as for her own feelings, but I knew that if we went on I could only hurt her more. She was right: it was not possible that I could ever love her.

Afterward I thought that my Berkeley life had settled into a pattern to which the rest of my life would adhere. It was, except for my work, essentially empty. But wasn't it better to continue seeing Helen than to wound her by insisting on a break? In the workbound world I saw as mine, expedience was a synonym for kindness. When we parted between us was the understanding that we would not meet for a day or two, but that all would continue as before.

But a week later the conventional period of my life came to an end; after it I saw Helen Kayon only twice.

2

I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R. P. Blackmur: "When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned." The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawthorne's work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare-by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life." When I had the ideas which would structure the lecture, the details fell onto the pages of my notebook.

This work and my writing students kept me fully occupied for the five days before the lecture. Helen and I met fleetingly, and I promised her that we would get away for a weekend when my immediate work was done. My brother David owned a "cottage" in Still Valley, outside Mendocino, and he'd told me to use it whenever I wanted to get away from Berkeley. This was typical of David's thoughtfulness; but a kind of perversity had kept me from using the house. I did not want to have to be grateful to David. After the lecture I would take Helen to Still Valley and kill two scruples at once.

On the morning of the lecture I reread D. H. Lawrence's chapter about Hawthorne and saw these lines:

And the first thing she does is seduce him.

And the first thing he does is to be seduced.

And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand.

Which is the myth of New England.

That was what I had been looking for all along. I put down my cup of coffee and started to restructure my remarks. Lawrence's insight extended my own, I could see all the books in a new way. I discarded paragraphs and wrote in new ones between the crossed-out lines… I forgot to call Helen, as I had promised to do.

In the end I used my notes very sparingly. Once, straining for a metaphor, I leaned on the lectern and saw Helen and Meredith Polk seated together in one of the last rows, up at the top of the theater. Meredith Polk was frowning, suspicious as a Berkeley cop. When scientists hear the kinds of things that go on in literature classrooms, they often begin to look that way. Helen merely looked interested, and I was grateful that she had come.

When it was over Professor Lieberman came up from his aisle seat to tell me that he had enjoyed my remarks very much, and would I consider taking his Stephen Crane lecture in two months' time? He was due at a conference in Iowa that week, and since I had done such an "exemplary" job, especially considering that I was not an academic… in short, he might find it possible to extend my appointment to a second year.

I was stunned as much by the bribe as by his arrogance. Lieberman, still young, was a famous man, not so much a scholar in Helen's sense as a "critic," a generalizer, a sub-Edmund Wilson; I did not respect his books, but I expected more of him. The students were filing up toward the exits, a solid mass of T-shirts and denim. Then I saw a face lifted expectantly toward me, a slim body clothed not in denim but in a white dress. Lieberman was suddenly an interference, an obstacle, and I agreed to give the Crane lecture to get rid of him. "Very good, Donald," he said, and disappeared. As quickly as that: one moment the seersuckered young professor was before me, and the next I was looking into the face of the girl in the white dress. It was the graduate student who had stopped Helen and me on the stairs.

She looked completely different: healthier, with a light golden layer of tan on her face and arms. The straight blond hair glowed. So did her pale eyes: in them I saw a kaleidoscope of shattered lights and colors. Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony. She was ravishing, one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever seen-no small statement, for Berkeley was so populated by beauties that you saw two new ones every time you looked up from your desk. But the girl before me had none of the gaucheness or assertive, testing vulgarity of the usual undergraduate knockout: she simply looked right, perfectly at home in herself. Helen Kayon didn't have a chance.

"That was good," she said, and the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke. "I'm happy I came after all." For the first time, I heard the Southern accent: that sunny drawl, that lilt.

"So am I," I said. "Thank you for the compliment."

"Do you want to relish it in private?"

"Is that an invitation?" And then I saw that I was being too quick, too self-consciously flattered and one-dimensional.

"A what? No, I'm not aware that it was." Her mouth moved: what an idea.

I looked up to the top of the lecture theater. Helen and Meredith Polk were already in the aisle, going toward the door. Helen must have begun to move as soon as she'd seen me look at the blond. If she knew me as well as she had said she did, she had known just what I was thinking. Helen went through the exit door without turning around, but Meredith Polk tried to assassinate me with a glance.

"Are you waiting for someone?" the girl said.

"No, it's nothing important," I said. "Would you join me for lunch? I never did have lunch, and I'm starving."

I was behaving, I knew, with appalling selfishness; but I also knew that the girl before me was already more important to me than Helen Kayon, and by letting Helen go at once-by being the bastard Meredith Polk said I was-I was eliminating weeks, perhaps months of painful scenes. I had not lied to Helen; she had always known that our relationship was fragile.

The girl walking beside me across the campus lived in perfect consonance with her femininity; even then, moments after I had first seen her in good light, she seemed ageless, even timeless, beautiful in a nearly hieratic and mythic way. Helen's separation from herself had kept her from gracefulness, and she was blatantly a person of my own blink of history; my first impression of Alma Mobley was that she could have moved with that easy grace over an Italian piazza in the sixteenth century; or in the twenties (more to the point) could have earned an appreciative glance from Scott Fitzgerald, flying past the Plaza Hotel on her devastating legs. Set down like that, it sounds absurd. Obviously I had noticed her legs, I had a sense of her body; but images of Italian piazzas and Fitzgerald at the Plaza are more than unlikely metaphors for carnality. It was as though every cell of her possessed ease; nothing less typical of the usual Berkeley graduate student in English can be imagined. The gracefulness went so deep in her that it seemed, even then, to mark an intense passivity.

Of course I am condensing six months' impressions into a single moment, but my justification is that the seeds of the impression were present as we left the campus to go to a restaurant. Her going with me so willingly, with such unconcern that it resounded with unspoken judgments, did contain a whiff of the passive -the ironic tactful passivity of the beautiful, of those whose beauty has sealed them off inside it like a princess in a tower.

I steered her toward a restaurant I had heard Lieberman mention-it was too expensive for most students, too expensive for me. But the ceremony of luxurious dining suited both her and my sense of celebration.

I knew immediately that it was she I wanted to take to David's house in Still Valley.

Her name, I learned, was Alma Mobley, and she had been born in New Orleans. I gathered more from her manner than from anything explicitly stated that her parents had been well off; her father had been a painter, and long stretches of her childhood had been spent in Europe. Speaking of her parents, she used the past tense, and I gathered that they had died some time ago. That too fit her manner, her air of disconnection from all but herself.

Like Helen, she had been a student in the Midwest. She had gone to the University of Chicago-this seemed next to impossible, Alma in Chicago, that rough knock-about city-and had been accepted as a PhD student at Berkeley. From what she said, I understood that she was just drifting through the academic life, that she had none of Helen's profound commitment to it. She was a graduate student because she had a talent for the mechanics of literary work and was bright; it was better than anything else she could think of doing. And she was in California because she had not liked the Chicago climate.

Again, and overwhelmingly, I had the sense of the irrelevance to her of most of the furniture of her life; of her passive self-sufficiency. I had no doubt that she was bright enough to finish her thesis (Virginia Woolf), and then with luck to get a teaching job at one of the little colleges up and down the coast. Then, suddenly and shockingly, she lifting a spoonful of mint-green avocado to her mouth, I had another vision of her. I saw her as a whore, a 1910 Storyville prostitute, her hair exotically twisted, her dancer's legs drawn up-her naked body was very clear for a moment. Another image of professional detachment, I supposed, but that did not explain the force of the vision. I had been sexually moved by it. She was talking about books-talking not as Helen did, but in a general-reader way-and I looked across the table and I knew that I wanted to be the man who mattered to her, I wanted to grab that passivity and shake it and make her truly see me.

"Don't you have a boyfriend?" I asked her.

She shook her head.

"So you're not in love?"

"No," and she gave a minute smile at the obviousness of the question. "There was a man in Chicago, but that's finished."

I pounced on the noun. "One of your professors."

"One of my associate professors." Another smile.

"You were in love with him? Was he married?"

She looked at me gravely for a moment "No. It wasn't like what you're thinking. He wasn't married, and I wasn't in love with him."

Even then I recognized that she would find it very easy to lie. This did not repulse me; instead it was proof of how lightly her life had touched her, and was a part of all that I already wanted to change in her. "He was in love with you," I said. "Was that why you wanted to leave Chicago?"

"No it was already over by then. Alan didn't have anything to do with it He made a fool of himself. That's all."

"Alan?"

"Alan McKechnie. He was very sweet."

"A very sweet fool."

"Are you determined to know about this?" she asked, with her characteristic trick of adding a soft, almost invisible irony which denied the question any importance.

"No. Just a little curious."

"Well." Her eyes, full of that shattered light, met mine. "It's not much of a story. He became… infatuated. I was in a tutorial, with him. There were only four of us. Three boys and myself. The tutorial met twice a week. I could tell he was getting interested in me, but he was a very shy man. He was very inexperienced with women." Again that soft, lobbing deflection in her voice and eyes. "He took me out a few times. He didn't want us to be seen, so we had to go places not in Hyde Park."