The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 24

"She's young, all right, but you're not, Agnes. Old enough, I'd say, to know better. Stay out of where you're not wanted. The minute she finds out about you, she'll stop you herself. Have a little pride for once in your life. Tell him you're not his free advice bureau. Tell him to pay some greenhorn girl himself."

After Bridget had said what they had wanted her to say, Nora could see that they were sorry. She saw Nettie desperately looking at Kathleen to say something to smooth things over.

"Of course she didn't really mean that she was going to go out there, Bridget. It was just a way of talking, like. A way of saying that she wished them well."

Ag neither confirmed Kathleen's words nor denied them: she had sense enough to let the matter drop, to let Bridget sniff silently, convinced that she was right, but too much of a lady to press home her point.

In the end what bothered Nora most was how right Bridget had been. Desmond's wife found out about Ag and brought all communication to an end.

She had come upon a letter Des was writing to Agnes. "She's awfully pretty, Ag, but very young and doesn't understand a thing. It's very often now I long for our good old chats." Underneath this, which had been written in Des's formal copperplate, was scrawled in a back-slanting script: "I have found this in my husband's desk, and having informed him of my discovery, he has agreed that from this moment all communication between you two must cease. There is a child to be considered after all." And she had signed her name: Harriet Browne O'Reilley. Underneath her signature, as if she were continuing a conversation, Ag had scratched: "This is the thing I cannot bear." And then she hanged herself.

Nora made herself imagine it: the letter with the three different handwritings, the things that Ag had done between the time she'd put the pen down and the time she'd tied the dressing-gown sash around her neck and kicked the chair away. She imagined Ag had done some ordinary things: made tea, perhaps, or washed out stockings. She knew Ag had never been upset or agitated: killing herself must have seemed to her simply the next thing to be done, like boarding a bus or shopping for a pair of shoelaces. "This is how it is," she must have said. "And I will do this now." Nora could see just how it was, Agnes's small efficient movements canceling her pain. Each night Nora would think of Ag before she went to sleep. She didn't want anyone else to think about her. She resented that she had not been the one to find her. It should have been Nora, not a neighbor breaking down the door with the police, afraid because they hadn't seen Ag leaving the apartment. It should have been herself, not the police, who'd called up Des in California. It should have been she, not her mother, who took the instructions from Des about the disposition of the body. No, not that: Des should not have been consulted. Nora should have made the plans. She would have stood up to the priest who refused Ag a Christian burial. She would have made up a story to fool him; she would have found a way to hide the circ.u.mstances of Ag's death. She would have seen to it that Ag had a proper funeral, that everyone came to pay respects and brought in Ma.s.s cards and took holy pictures with Ag's name on the back of them to put into their prayer books so that they'd remember her at Ma.s.s.

She would have done far better than her mother, who set out for the police station, her eyes apologetic and her posture cringing and came back having made the arrangements with an undertaker who was Presbyterian to have the simplest coffin and to send the bills to Des. She understood her mother's anger, and her shame, but her mother had got it wrong, she was angry and ashamed for the wrong thing, as Ag had died for the wrong thing, and left it to the wrong person to pick up all the pieces.

Kathleen said nothing about Ag when she came home from making the arrangements, and it was months before the family said a word about her. When Agnes's name came up in family conversation, Nora could see everybody take Des's part; it was easy, she thought with contempt, to know what they would say. They wanted to make a lesson from it, sew it up, as if it could be useful to their lives. Whereas the truth was only she had anything to learn of it. The lesson was not anything the women thought. It was much worse than anything they mentioned. The truth was that Ag was right to hang herself, except she should have done it earlier. The truth was women like that were better off not being born, and if you saw you had a girl child growing up like that you'd be best drowning it straight off, holding its head under the water till the breath went out of the doomed creature, so you'd save it all the pain and trouble later on.

The Magician's Wife.

Unlike most of her friends, Mrs. Hastings did not think of herself first as the mother of her children. She was proudest of being Mr. Hastings's wife. So that in their old age it grieved her to see her husband known in the town as the father of her son, Frederick, the architect, who was not half the man his father was, for beauty, for surprises. Frederick had put up buildings, had had his picture taken with mayors outside city halls, with the governor outside office buildings. She ought to have been proud of Frederick, and of course she was, really, and he was very good to them; they would not be half so well-off without him. She valued her son as she valued the food she had cooked, the meals she had produced, very much the same since the day of her marriage.

Her husband had added to his salary by being a magician. Not that he hadn't provided perfectly well for them; still it was something else that life would have been meaner without, the money he had made on magic. How had it first started? That was one of the arguments she had with his mother. His mother said he had always been that way, putting on magic shows in the barn as a boy. But she knew it hadn't started that way; she remembered the way it had. It was on their honeymoon. They saw a vaudeville show in Chicago, and there was a magician, the amazing Mr. Kazmiro, whose specialty was making birds appear. That night on the way to the hotel, Mrs. Hastings could see her husband brooding over something. When he brooded his eyes would go dull, the color of pebbles, and she could see him rolling the idea from one side of his brain to the other as you would roll a candy ball from one side of your mouth to the other if you had a sore tooth. In the morning (it shocked her, how handsome he was in his pajamas) he said, "May, let's go shopping." They went down to the area behind the theater where the shops sold odd things: white makeup in flat little tins, wigs for clowns or prima donnas, gizmos comedians used. It was in one of those stores that he bought his first trick; she remembered it was something with b.a.l.l.s and hoops and wooden goblets with false bottoms. She never looked too closely at his tricks- not then, not ever. It had shocked her how much the trick cost, ten dollars, but she had said nothing. It was her honeymoon. She never said anything about the expense except to ask what it was about these things that cost so much money. Her husband said it was a highly skilled business, that each of his tricks was the work of craftsmen. But that was how he got started, she remembered, on the fourth day of their honeymoon. No matter what his mother said, it had nothing to do with his life before he got married, his magic.

Once he had performed for the Roosevelts. It was 1935 and one of the Roosevelt grandchildren was recovering from measles. The boy was crotchety and there was nothing you could do to please him, one of the servants had said, one who had seen Mr. Hastings entertaining at the county fair in Rhinebeck. It was a wicked night, she remembered. It thundered and flashed lightning so that the lights flickered on and off. When the telephone rang, they thought it was a joke, some lady calling to ask if Mr. Hastings would care to come over to Hyde Park and do a small performance for a sick child. Her husband and children had thought it was a joke, for one minute. Of course her husband would be called to entertain the President, of course the car, the big black car driven by a man in a uniform, would come for him. She remembered how her husband had talked to the chauffeur, as if he had been brought up to order servants about. She remembered what her husband had said, not looking at the man in the uniform, but not looking at his feet either, looking straight ahead of him. She remembered he had said, "Do you mind if I bring my wife?" and the chauffeur had said, "As you wish, sir," and opened the door. That was the gallantry of him, so that she would get to meet Franklin Roosevelt, and Eleanor, who was as plain as she looked in her pictures and had a voice that was an embarra.s.sment; but she was, as Mrs. Hastings said to the people whom she told about it, "Very gracious to us, and a real lady."

All the vivid moments of her life had been marked by her husband's magic. Not only the Roosevelts- although how would she ever have met the Roosevelts if she had not married Mr. Hastings?- but the moments that heightened the color of everyone's ordinary life. There was a show for each of her birthdays and anniversaries, for each important day of each child's life. On one occasion Frederick had sulked and said, "It's my party and everyone's paying attention to him.'" And she had told him he should thank his lucky stars not to have a father like everyone else's, dull as dishwater, and that any other boy would give his eyeteeth to have a father who could do magic. And Frederick said- where did he get those eyes, those dull, brown, good boy's eyes, they weren't hers, or his father's- Frederick said, "Not if they really knew about it."

Frederick was not nearly so handsome as his father, particularly when his father was doing magic. Mrs. Hastings remembered the look of him when he was all dressed up, with his hair slicked back and his mustache. He looked distinguished, like William Powell. She knew all the women in the town envied her her husband, for his good looks and his beautiful manners and his exciting ways. Once Mrs. Daly, the milkman's wife, said, "It must be hard on you, him spending all his spare time practicing in the bas.e.m.e.nt." It was well-known that Mr. and Mrs. Daly had had separate bedrooms since the birth of their last child. Mrs. Hastings wanted to tell Mrs. Daly about the trick her husband had played on her in bed one night, pulling a pearl from the bodice of her nightgown, putting it in his mouth and bringing out a flower. But that was exactly the kind of detail Mrs. Daly wanted, which Mrs. Hastings had no intention of giving her. So she turned to Mrs. Daly and said in her highfalutin voice- her husband said, "Okay, d.u.c.h.ess," when she used it on him- "He always shows me everything while he's working on it," which was partly true, although he would never show her anything until he was sure it worked. But it was true enough for someone like Mrs. Daly, who slept in a single bed near the window, true enough to knock her off her high horse.

How could she be lonely up in the kitchen with the knowledge of him below her doing things over and over with scarves and boxes and cards and ribbons. She could imagine the man she loved, alone, away where she could not see him, practicing over and over the tricks that would astound not only her but every person they knew. Why would she prefer conversations at the kitchen table about money or food or what who wore when? She thought it a great and a kingly mercy that he kept his job as a machinist, which he hated, instead of quitting to work full-time as a magician, which he sometimes talked about. When he talked about it, a little flame of fear would go up in her, as if someone had lit a match behind one of her ribs. But she would say, "Do whatever you want. I have faith." What she liked really, though, was that during the day he went to his job, like anyone else's husband, but he spent his nights doing magic. He would come up the stairs every night in triumph, and every night he wanted her because, he said, she was the best little wife a man ever had; and every night she wanted him because she could not believe her good fortune, since she was, compared with her husband, she knew, quite ordinary.

And the years had pa.s.sed as they do for everyone, only for her it was different. Her years were marked not only by the birth and aging and ceremonies of children, but by the growth of her husband's art. After 1946, for example, he gave up the egg and rope tricks and moved into scarves and coins. His retirement was nothing that he feared. He did not go around like other men, taking a week to do a ch.o.r.e that could have been done in an hour. Nor did she go around like other women, saying, "I can't get him out of my hair; he doesn't know what to do with himself." She loved being the wife of a retired husband as she had never loved being the mother of young children. She loved hearing him take long steps from one end of the bas.e.m.e.nt to the other, loved the times she could hear him standing still, could hear, she thought, his concentration coming up to her through the ceiling, could see it seeping through the floorboards like waves of visible heat. She would never, never interrupt him, but she always knew when it was the last second of his work and she would hear his step on the stairway, would hear him say, "Got any beer?" And she would say, "I've had it waiting." It was the happiest time of her life, the years of his early retirement.

But then his eyes began to go. At first it was rather beautiful, the way his eyes misted over. It was like, she said to herself, a lake the first thing in the morning. He wore thicker gla.s.ses with a pink tint which the doctors said were more restful. They would have made any other man look foolish, but not her husband, with his fine, strong head, his way of holding his shoulders. Even at his age his looks were something other women envied her for. She could see the envy in the way they'd look at her as she walked with him in the evening.

She began to notice how queerly he held things, the funny angle at which he held the newspaper. Now she would hear him in the bas.e.m.e.nt, snorting with frustration, using words that she imagined he used only on the job, not words for her or the house. And worst of all, she could hear him drop things; sometimes she would hear things break. She would pretend to be sewing or reading when he came looking for the broom or the dustpan.

The doctors said nothing would reverse the process, so, as time pa.s.sed, there were more and more things he couldn't do. But the miracle of it was that the losses did not enrage him as, she knew, they would have enraged her. He simply accepted the loss of each new activity as he would have accepted the end of a meal. Finally one night he said to her, "Listen, old girl, you're my only audience now. I'm blind as a bat, and one thing n.o.body needs is a half-blind magician."

Did she like it better that he did his tricks only for her now, in the living room? Or had she liked it better sitting in the audience, watching the wonder of the people around at what he could produce from the most surprising places. On the whole she thought she liked it better watching the stupefaction, the envy. But it was in her nature, that preference. She had not as nice a nature as his. It was his nature to take her hand and say, after he had done a trick she had seen five hundred times, perhaps, and was not tired of, "I only make magic for you now." Making his almost total blindness into a kind of gift for her, a perfect gla.s.s he had blown and polished.

On the whole she blamed Frederick for what happened on the Fourth of luly, although she knew the idea had come from the grandchildren. Sometimes her husband would take them down to the bas.e.m.e.nt with him to show them some of the equipment. Sometimes he would do tricks for them, the simpler ones that he had done almost from the beginning and knew so well that he didn't have to see to do them. She understood the children's enchantment with him and his magic; he was a perfect grandfather, indulgent, full of secret skills. Of course she understood their pride- there was no one like him. But she didn't understand Frederick's going along with their d.a.m.n fool idea. His great virtue had always been his good sense. Why did he put his father up to it, without even asking her?

It was tied up with the grandchildren and the way they were so proud. They wanted their friends to see that their grandfather was a magician, so they egged him on to give a show at the Fourth of July Town Fair. Finally Frederick got behind them.

At first she thought it would be all right because of the look on her husband's face when he talked about it, because she knew what gave him that look: the prospect of once again astonis.h.i.+ng strangers. Nothing could make up for the loss of it, and it was something she could not give him. Sitting in that living room, honored as she was by the privacy of this intimate performance for her only, no matter how much she loved him, she had seen it all before.

And so she had to tell him what a good thing it was, how proud she would be, what a miracle he was in the lives of his grandchildren. At first she thought he would do only old tricks, and she felt safe. The audience would love him for his looks and because he was Frederick's father. She pressed his suit herself, weeks before; she pressed it several times just for practice. She looked through all her dresses to find the one that would most honor him. Finally she decided on her plainest dress, a black cotton with short sleeves. It was an old woman's dress but, being without ornament, the dress of an old woman who knows herself to be in a position of privilege. She would braid a silver ribbon into her long hair.

As the weeks went on, all ease was drained from her, a slow leak, stealing warmth, making the center of her chest feel full of cold air as if she had just walked into a cave. It was not the old tricks, the ones he almost didn't need eyes for, that he was doing. He was trying to do the newer, more complicated ones. She knew because of the household things he asked for: ribbon now instead of string, scarves instead of cotton handkerchiefs. When he showed her the act, as he always did before the performance, she saw him fumble, saw him drop things that he did not see so that the trick could not possibly go right. But she saw, too, that sometimes he was unaware that he had not done the trick properly. Sometimes the card was not the right card, the scarf the wrong color. All the life in her body collected in one solid disk at the center of her throat when she saw him foolish like that, an old man. But she would not tell him. It was not something that she could do, to say to him: your best life is entirely behind you- you are an old man. She could not even suggest that he do the simpler things. It was not in her; it had never been in her, and she understood what he was doing. He was risking foolishness to get from his audience the greatest possible astonishment, the greatest novelty of love.

She could not sleep the night before, looking at his sweet white body, the white hairs on the chest that still had the width and the toughness of the young man she had married. She poured boiling water over her finger so she had to go to the fair with her hand in a bandage. That annoyed Frederick, who said, "Today of all days, Mother."

Frederick was looking very foolish. He was wearing red, white, and blue striped pants and a straw boater which, with his thinning hair, his failure of a mustache, was a grave tactical error. His father came down wearing his white suit, blue s.h.i.+rt, red bow tie and provided, by his neat, hale presence, all the festivity Frederick had worked so hard to embody.

They had set up a stage on the lawn of the courthouse. First some of the women in the Methodist choir sang show tunes. Then the bank president's daughter, dressed like Uncle Sam, did her baton routine, then somebody played an accordion. Then Frederick got up onstage. All his business friends whistled and stamped and made rude noises. She was embarra.s.sed at the attention he was bringing to himself.

"Now I don't want to be accused of nepotism," he said. (It must have been some joke, some business joke; all the men laughed rudely as she imagined men laughed at dirty jokes.) "But when you have a talent in the family, why hide it under a bushel? My father, Mr. Albert Hastings, is a magician extraordinaire. He had the distinction of performing before Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And as I've always said, what's good enough for the Roosevelts is good enough for us."

The men guffawed again. Frederick stretched out one of his arms. "Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Hastings."

Albert had been backstage all the time. She was glad he had not been with her to sense her fear, perhaps to absorb it. A woman behind her tapped her on the shoulder and said, "You must be very proud." Mrs. Hastings put her finger to her lips. Her husband had begun speaking.

It was the same patter he had used for years, but there was a new element in it that disturbed her: grat.i.tude. He kept telling the audience how good it was to allow him to perform. Allow him? He would never have spoken like that, like a plain girl who has finally been asked to dance, ten years ago, five even. She hoped he would not go on like that. But she could see that the audience loved it, loved him for being an old man. But was that the kind of love he wanted? It was not what she thought he was after.

One of the grandchildren was onstage helping him. He made some joke about it, hoping that no one would doubt the honesty of his a.s.sistant. For the first trick the child picked three cards. It was a simple trick and over quickly. The audience applauded inordinately, she thought, for it was a simple trick and he used it first, she knew, simply to warm them up.

The second trick was the magic bag. It appeared tiny, but out of it he pulled an egg, an orange, grapes, and finally a small bottle of champagne. "I keep telling my wife to take it to the supermarket, but she won't listen," he said, gesturing at her in the first row of the audience. She got the thrill she always had when he acknowledged her from the stage. She began, for the first time, to relax.

The next trick was the one in which he threaded ribbons through large wooden cards. He asked his grandson to hold the ribbons. It was important that they be held very tightly. She could see her husband struggling to see the holes in the cards through which the ribbon had to be threaded. She could see that he had missed one of the holes, so when he pulled the ribbon, nothing happened. It was supposed to slip out without disturbing the cards. But he pulled the strings and nothing moved. He looked at the audience; he gave it an old man's look. "Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize," he said.

Then they applauded. They covered him with applause. How she hated them for that. She could feel their embarra.s.sment and that complicity that ties an audience together, in love or hatred, in relation to the person so far, so terribly far away on the stage. But it was not love or hate they felt; it was embarra.s.sment for the old man, and she could feel their yearning that it might be all over soon. To hide it, they applauded wildly. She sat perfectly still.

If only the next trick would go well! But it was the scarf trick, the one he had flubbed in the living room. She felt as though she could not breathe. She thought she was going to be sick. She should have told him that it had not worked. She should not have been a coward. Now he would be a fool to strangers. To Frederick's business friends.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have a magic box, a magic cleaning box. I keep trying to get my wife to use it, but she's a very stubborn woman."

She knew what was supposed to happen. You put a colored scarf in one side of the box and pulled a white one out of the other side. But in the living room he had pulled out the same colored scarf that he had put in. But she had not told him. And he had not seen the difference.

He did the same thing now. At least it was over quickly. He held up the colored scarf, the scarf he thought was white, and twirled it around his head and bowed to the audience. He did not know that the trick had not worked. The audience was confused. There was a terrible beat of silence before they understood what had happened. Then Frederick started the applause. The audience gave Mr. Hastings a standing ovation. Then he disappeared backstage with a strange, old man's shuffle she had not seen him use before.

Frederick got up on the stage again. He was saying something about refreshments, something about grat.i.tude to the women who had provided them. She was shaking with rage in her seat. How could he go on like that, after the humiliation his father had endured? And it was his responsibility. How could he go on talking to the audience, about games, about prizes, when that audience had witnessed his father's degradation? Why wasn't he with his father, to comfort him, to cover his exposure, when it had been his fault, when it was Frederick, through thickheadedness, or perhaps malice, who had caused his father's failure in this garish public light?

"Let me get you some supper," said Frederick, offering his mother his arm. He was nodding to other people, even as he spoke to his mother.

She turned to her son in fury.

"Why did you allow him to do this?"

"Do what?"

"This performance. This failure."

"He got a big kick out of it. He's a good sport," said Frederick.

"Everyone saw him fail," said Mrs. Hastings through closed teeth.

"It's all right, Mother. He thinks he did fine."

"It was a humiliation."

He shook his head and looked at her but with no real interest. He walked slightly ahead of her, too fast for her; she could see him searching the crowd for anyone else to talk to. He looked over his shoulder at her with the impatience of a young girl.

"Shall I fix you a plate?" he asked.

"You'll do nothing for me after what you've done to your father."

He stopped walking and waited for her to catch up.

"You know, Mother, Father is twice the person you are," he said, not looking at her. "Three times."

She stood beside him. For the first time in his life, Mrs. Hastings looked at her son with something like love. For the first time, she felt the pride of their connection. She took his arm.

The Imagination of Disaster.

I am aware of my own inadequacies, of course, but if this happens, no one will be adequate: to be adequate requires a prior act of the imagination, and this is impossible. We are armed; they are armed; someone will take the terrible, the unimaginable, vengeful step. And so we think in images of all that we have known to be the worst. We think of cold, of heat, of heaviness. But that is not it; that does not begin to be it. A mother thinks: how will I carry my children, what will I feed them? But this is not it, this is not it. There will be no place to carry them, food itself will be dangerous. We cannot prepare ourselves; we have known nothing of the kind.

But some days I think: I should prepare, I should do only what is difficult. I think: I will teach myself to use a gun. I hide behind the curtain, and when the mailman comes I try to imagine his right temple in the gunsight as he goes down the sidewalk. How sure one must be to pull the trigger, even to kill for one's own children, for their food, their water, perhaps even poison. The imagination is of no use.

The imagination is of no use. When I run two miles a day, I make myself run faster, farther, make myself feel nauseated, make myself go on despite my burning ribs. In case this one day will be a helpful memory, a useful sensation. Of endurance and of pain. My daughter comes and asks my help in making clay animals. On days like this, I want to say: no, no clay animals, we'll dig, we'll practice digging, once your father was a soldier, he will teach you to use a gun. But of course I cannot do this; I cannot pervert her life so that she will be ready for the disaster. There is no readiness; there is no death in life.

My baby son is crying. Will it be harder for males or females? Will they capture boy children to wander in roving gangs? Will my son, asleep now in his crib, wander the abashed landscape, killing other boys for garbage? Will my daughter root among the grain stalks, glistening with danger, for the one kernel of safe nourishment? Ought I to train them for capitulation? I croon to him; I rock him, watch the gold sun strike a maple, turn it golder. My daughter comes into the room, still in her long nightgown. Half an hour ago, I left her to dress herself. She hasn't succeeded; she's used the time to play with my lipstick. It is all over her face, her hands, her arms. Inside her belly is another tiny belly, empty. Will she have the chance to fill herself with a child, as I have filled myself with her and with her brother? On days like this I worry: if she can't dress herself in half an hour, if she cannot obey me in an instant, like the crack of a whip, will she perish? She can charm anyone. Will there be a place for charm after the disaster? What will be its face?

When the babysitter comes, I get into my car. She can make my daughter obey in an instant; she can put my son to sleep without rocking him, or feeding him, or patting him in his crib. On days like this I think I should leave them to her and never come back, for I will probably not survive and with her they will have a greater chance of surviving.

To calm myself I read poetry. When it comes, will the words of "To His Coy Mistress" comfort me, distract me as I wait to hear the news of the death of everything? I want to memorize long poems in case we must spend months in hiding underground. I will memorize "Lycidas," although I don't like Milton. I will memorize it because of what Virginia Woolf said: "Milton is a comfort because he is nothing like our life." At that moment, when we are waiting for the news of utter death, what we will need is something that is nothing like our life.

I come home, and begin making dinner. I have purposely bought a tough cut of meat; I will simmer it for hours. As if that were an experience that would be helpful; as if that were the nature of it: afterward only tough cuts of meat. I pretend I am cooking on a paraffin stove in a bas.e.m.e.nt. But I cannot restrain myself from using herbs; my own weakness makes me weep. When it comes, there will be no herbs, or spices, no beautiful vegetables like the vegetables that sit on my table in a wooden bowl: an eggplant, yellow squash, tomatoes, a red pepper, and some leeks. The solid innocence of my vegetables! When it comes, there will be no innocence. When it comes, there will be no safety. Even the roots hidden deep in the earth of forests will be the food of danger. There will be nothing whose history will be dear. I could weep for my furniture. The earth will be abashed; the furniture will stand out, balked and shameful in the ruin of everything that was our lives.

We have invited friends to dinner. My friend and I talk about our children. I think of her after the disaster; I try to imagine how she will look. I see her standing with a knife; her legs are knotted and blue veins stick out of them like bruised grapes. She is wearing a filthy s.h.i.+rt; her front teeth are missing; her thick black hair is falling out. I will have to kill her to keep her from entering our shelter. If she enters it she will kill us with her knife or the broken gla.s.s in her pocket. Kill us for the food we hide which may, even as we take it in, be killing us. Kill us for the life of her own children.

We are sitting on the floor. I want to turn to my friend and say: I do not want to have to kill you. But they have not had my imagination of disaster, and there can be no death in the midst of life. We talk about the autumn; this year we'll walk more in the country, we agree. We kiss our friends good night. Good night, good night, we say, we love you. Good night, I think, I pray I do not have to kill you for my children's food.

My husband puts on red pajamas. I do not speak of my imagination of disaster. He takes my nightgown off and I see us embracing in the full-length mirror. We are, for now, human, beautiful. We go to bed. He swims above me, digging in. I climb and meet him, strike and fall away. Because we have done this, two more of us breathe in the next room, bathed and perfect as arithmetic.

I think: Perhaps I should kill us all now and save us from the degradation of disaster. Perhaps I should kill us while we are whole and dignified and full of our sane beauty. I do not want to be one of the survivors; I am willing to die with my civilization. I have said to my husband: Let us put aside some pills, so that when the disaster strikes we may lie down together, holding each other's hands and die before the whole earth is abashed. But no, he says, I will not let you do that, we must fight. Someone will survive, he says, why not us? Why not our children?

Because the earth will be abashed, I tell him. Because our furniture will stand out shamed among the glistening poisoned objects. Because we cannot imagine it; because imagination is inadequate; because for this disaster, there is no imagination.

But because of this I may be wrong. We live with death, the stone in the belly, the terror on the road alone. People have lived with it always. But we live knowing not only that we will die, that we may suffer, but that all that we hold dear will finish; that there will be no more familiar. That the death we fear we cannot even imagine, it will not be the distinguished thing, it will not be the face of dream, or even nightmare. For we cannot dream the poisoned earth abashed, empty of all we know.

Out of the Fray.

She looked out of the window of a plane with pleasure for the first time in her life. The land gave way to water, and there was a minute when it was not possible to say where it left off and air began. The word ozone came to her mind, that comforting and fleshless territory where the mere act of breathing was a joy and every issue grew abstract. Now she could feel this, Ruth knew that she had changed her life.

Always before when any plane she flew on became airborne, she'd searched around for the stranger she would choose to die with. As a young woman, she'd picked people whose faces or clothes or postures indicated they would face death interestingly, or flippantly, or with some wit. After she had children, she looked for someone who seemed as if he would keep his head- if the children were with her, she'd want the practical help of such a person; if she were alone she'd want to go over the details of her life insurance and discuss the prospects of half-orphans finding psychological wholeness in maturity. But now she was with Phil, and they were on their way to London. It was a business trip for him; he worked for a human rights organization whose headquarters was in London, and he suggested Ruth come along: it would be, he said, their last vacation before marriage. Soon he would be her husband. She remembered that when she was with her first husband, she'd still searched planes, and that memory made her squeeze Phil's arm, guilty that these stray pieces of information could so rea.s.sure her, that she needed rea.s.surance. But it was an odd decision that they'd made, to marry. It struck everyone they knew as at best unnecessary, and it made them feel apart from other people. Like orphan children in a foreign country they'd become solicitous, protective, unnaturally alert. Phil felt something more, though, he was almost childishly proud of their decision, as if it were an original, brave idea. For the last month, he'd taken her to meet people he'd known in grammar school or worked with for six months in college. She felt it made the people cynical and bored, and she didn't blame them; he'd been married twice before and left a woman he had lived with. It would be for her a second marriage, and she had been reluctant to agree.

"How," she said, refusing him at first, "how can we do it, knowing what we know?"

"But what about the kids?" he'd said. "How can they go around saying 'that guy my mother lives with?"

"You like 'my stepfather'?"

"I do," he'd said. "It sounds like something you can count on."

And she had wanted that, that the children could count on him, somehow, even if he and she broke up. If they were married, she could name him in her will as the person to have custody in case both she and her ex-husband died. She had quite amicable relations with her children's father; still, she felt it would be odd to get him to agree to naming her paramour as the person in charge of their children's fate. If she could say "my husband" to her former husband, she could put the idea to him in language that had dignity and weight. It was important to her, this relation between language and the facts that it encircled. She was a science writer. She'd wanted to be a scientist herself; genetics was the field she had chosen. But quickly she learned that she lacked the kind of imagination that real scientific distinction called up; what she was good at was taking the findings- often brilliant, often crucial- of men and women who could not communicate what they had found, and making of them something articulate and shapely and still true. And so it bothered her that, in marrying, she was making a promise she couldn't keep. She felt like a child crossing her fingers behind her back: she felt it for both herself and Phil. When she thought of their marrying, she saw them as children, standing before a judge, their fingers crossed behind their backs, saying, "I promise I will never leave you." When what they meant was, "I will try."

Before they left for London, Phil had himself measured for a custom-tailored suit. My wedding suit, he'd called it. And he gave the children a hundred dollars each to buy new clothing for the wedding. Elena was fourteen; she was delighted with the prospect of new clothes. But Jacob was eleven; he told Phil he'd just broken his Walkman and asked if he couldn't use the hundred dollars for a new one instead. Phil never got angry with the children, but Jacob could see that he had hurt him and pretended he'd said what he said as a joke. When Phil pretended to believe him, Ruth felt herself fill with a surprising love that made the walls of her heart, which was a muscle after all, feel thin and stretched like a balloon filled up with water. She remembered thinking of heavy water, water with an extra molecule, made only artificially and never to be put in contact with living things. You could poison plants by watering them with heavy water; it could be dangerous if drunk.

Was Philip dangerous? She couldn't understand how a man so lovable, so tactful, and so generous of heart had left three women. It was an odd position she was in in her relation to his past. She didn't want to seem merely inquisitive, although there was an element of gossip in her desire to know the details of her predecessors. But there was more: there was something much worse. What she really wanted was to have him paint pictures so unflattering that they were little murders: then she could bury the mutilated carca.s.ses herself and never fear. But she knew the way of it, everyone did: people began, in great hope, love affairs, and then things soured and went bad. And so she and Phil spoke remarkably little about the women in his life, and his friends had been more than reticent. After three disasters, she suspected they had lost the energy for one more round of rea.s.surances: she was infinitely better than the others, they could see that now for the first time Phil was really happy, they were glad she was around.

They were driving through London in a taxi, the exciting route past Marble Arch. The ma.s.sive green of Hyde Park, the enlivened whiteness of the buildings made Ruth feel daring. "We're really here," she said to Phil. "We've made it."

"We always make it, darling," he said. "And we always will."

She kissed him on the mouth so that he would not feel her doubting.

"Tell me again how you met Sylvie," she said. They were on their way to visit Sylvie MacGregor, who was divorced from Jack MacGregor, Phil's oldest friend.

"It must have been, what, I guess 1965. Jack and I had just come from the San Gennaro Festival. I'd won two prizes, throwing rubber b.a.l.l.s and knocking over ducks or one of those games. I'd won a bottle of wine and a breakaway cane. For some reason we decided to drive up to Tanglewood. Well, I know why we did it, we were trying to pick up girls. Tanglewood is a terrific place to pick up girls. So I was walking with this cane. And when Sylvie saw me, she said I must be tired, did I want to sit on her blanket with her and her friend. I pretended to be a cripple for the whole day- I didn't want to embarra.s.s her. It's no wonder she chose Jack instead of me.

"Three months after that she'd married Jack; Jack and I were both working for Lindsay then. In the fall of 1967, Jack went across the country with the McCarthy campaign, and late the following January he told Sylvie he'd met someone else and was leaving. Sylvie tried to kill herself. She called me just in time. I went with her to Roosevelt Hospital in the ambulance and let her come back to my apartment. It was just after my first divorce."

Ruth imagined that apartment, ugly in the willed, self-punis.h.i.+ng style of the abodes of men who have left women. But, he told her, Sylvie brought it around wonderfully. She made him meet her at furniture stores, look carefully at swatches of fabric. She arranged for everything: the curtains, the deliveries. "But she didn't go too far," he said. "She never made me feel she was taking over, she made me feel it was my place."

"And were you lovers?"

"No. One night I suggested it, and she said, 'That's not the kind of thing I want.' I was actually a little relieved. She'd be quite something to take on: all that devotion. One of the reasons she was so devastated by Jack is that she'd given him everything, she'd had no reserve.

"She really fell apart," said Phil, "and people were ridiculous about it. They thought she was exaggerating. You know, that was the time everyone was leaving everyone. But only Sylvie got suicidal. And then she made this terrible decision: to grow old. All our friends were wearing long skirts or tight jeans, and she began wearing tweeds and cashmeres, putting her hair in a chignon. She couldn't stay in New York, it was no place for her, n.o.body understanding her, and her always being afraid of running into Jack or the new woman. She's Belgian, but she didn't want to go back. So she decided on London.