West Brewer police are still collecting testimony from neighbors in connection with the mysterious fire that destroyed the handsome Penn Villas residence of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Angstrom.

A guest in the home, Mill Jiss

A guest in the home, Miss Jill Pendleton, 18, of Stonington, Connecticut, perished of smoke inhalation and burns. Rescue attempts by valiant firemen were to no avail.

Miss Pendleton was p.r.o.nounced dead on arrival at the Sister of Mercy Homeopathic Sisters of Mercy Homeopathic Hospital in Brewer.

A man reported seen in the vicinity of the dwelling, Hubert Johnson last of Plum Street, is being sought for questioning. Mr. Johnson is also known as "Skeeter" and sometimes gives his last name as ]Farnsworth.

Furnace Township fire chief Raymond "Buddy" Fessler told VAT reporters, "The fire was set I"m pretty sure, but we have no evidence of a Molotov c.o.c.ktail or anything of that nature. This was not a bombing in the ordinary sense."

Neighbors are baffled by the event, reporting nothing unusual about the home but the skulking presence of a black man thought Pajasek taps him on the shoulder.

"If that"s my wife," Rabbit says. "Tell her to bug off. Tell her I"m dead."

"It"s n.o.body on the phone, Harry. I need to have a word with you privately. If I may."

That "if I may" is what puts the chill into Harry"s heart. Pajasek is imitating somebody higher up. He shuts his frosted-gla.s.s door on the clatter and with a soft thump sits at his desk; he slowly spreads his fingers on the ma.s.s of ink-smirched papers there. "More bad news, Harry," he says. "Can you take it?"

"Try me."

"I hate like Jesus to put this into you right on top of your misfortune with your home, but there"s no use stalling. Nothing stands still. They"ve decided up top to make Verity an offset plant. We"ll keep an old flatbed for the job work, but the Vat said either go offset or have them print in Philly. It"s been in the cards for years. This way, we"ll be geared up to take other periodicals, there"s some new sheets starting up in Brewer, a lot of it filth in my book but people buy it and the law allows it, so there you are." From the way he sighs, he thinks he"s made his point. His forehead, seen from above, is global; the worried furrows retreat to the horizon of the skull, where the bra.s.s-pale hair begins, wisps brushed straight back.

Rabbit tries to help him. "So no Linotypers, huh?"

Pajasek looks up startled; his eyebrows arch and drop and there is a moment of spherical smoothness, with a long clean highlight from the fluorescent tubes overhead. "I thought I made that point. That"s part of the technical picture, that"s where the economy comes. Offset, you operate all from film, bypa.s.s hot metal entirely. Go to a cathode ray tube, Christ, it delivers two thousand lines a minute, that"s the whole Vat in seven minutes. We can keep a few men on, retrain them to the computer tape, we"ve worked the deal out with the union, but this is a sacrifice, Harry, from the management point of view. I"m afraid you"re far down the list. Nothing to do with your personal life, understand me strictly seniority. Your Dad"s secure, and Buchanan, Christ, let him go we"d have every do-good outfit in the city on our necks, it"s not the way I"d do things. If they"d come to me I would have told them, that man is half-soused from eleven o"clock on every morning, they"re all like that, I"d just as soon have a moron with mittens on as long he was white -"

"O.K.," Rabbit says. "When do I knock off?"

"Harry, this hurts me like h.e.l.l. You learned the skill and now the bottom"s dropping out. Maybe one of the Brewer dailies can take you on, maybe something in Philly or up in Allentown, though what with papers dropping out or doubling up all over the state there"s something of a glut in the trade right now."

"I"ll survive. What did Kurt Schrack do?"

"Who he?"

"You know. The Schockelschtuhl guy."

"Christ, him. That was back in B. C. As I remember he bought a farm north of here and raises chickens. If he"s not dead by now."

"Right. Die I guess would be the convenient thing. From the management point of view."

"Don"t talk like that, Harry, it hurts me too much. Give me credit for some feelings. You"re a young buck, for Chrissake, you got the best years still ahead of you. You want some fatherly advice? Get the h.e.l.l out of the county. Leave the mess behind you. Forget that slob you married, no offense."

"No offense. About Janice, you can"t blame her, I wasn"t that great myself. But I can"t go anywhere, I got this kid."

"Kid, schmid. You can"t live your life that way. You got to reason outwards from Number One. To you, you"re Number One, not the kid."

"That"s not how it feels, exactly," Rabbit begins, then sees from the sudden gleaming globe of Pajasek"s head bent to study the smirched slips on his desk that the man doesn"t really want to talk, he wants Harry to go. So Rabbit asks, "So when do I go?"

Pajasek says, "You"ll get two months" pay plus the benefits you"ve acc.u.mulated, but the new press is coming in this weekend, faster than we thought. Everything moves faster nowadays."

"Except me," Rabbit says, and goes. His father, in the bright racket of the shop, swivels away from his machine and gives him the thumbs down sign questioningly. Rabbit nods, thumbs down. As they walk down Pine Street together after work, feeling ghostly in the raw outdoor air after their day"s immersion in fluorescence, Pop says, "I"ve seen the handwriting on the wall all along, whole new philosophy operating at the top now at Verity, one of the partner"s sons came back from business school somewhere full of beans and c.r.a.p. I said to Pajasek, "Why keep me on, I have less than a year before retirement?" and he says, "That"s the reason." I said to him, "Why not let me go and give my place to Harry?" and he says, "Same reason." He"s running scared himself, of course. The whole economy"s scared. Nixon"s getting himself set to be the new Hoover, these moratorium doves"ll be begging for LBJ to come back before Tricky d.i.c.k"s got done giving their bank accounts a squeeze!"

Pop talks more than ever now, as if to keep Harry"s mind cluttered; he clings to him like sanity. It has been a dreadful three days. All Sunday, on no sleep, he drove back and forth in Peggy"s borrowed Fury through Brewer between Mt. Judge and Penn Villas, through the munic.i.p.al headache of the Columbus Day parade. The monochrome idyll of early morning, Skeeter dwindling to a brown dot in brown fields, became a four-color nightmare of martial music, throbbing exhaustion, bare-thighed girls twirling bolts of lightning, iridescent drummers pounding a tattoo on the taut hollow of Harry"s stomach, cars stalled in the sidestreets, Knights of Columbus floats, marching veterans, American flags. Between entanglements with this monster celebration, he scavenged in warm ashes and trucked useless stained and soaked furniture, including a charred guitar, to the garage at the back of the Jackson Road place. He found no wallet near the sofa, and no black bag in the closet. Jill"s bureau had been along the wall of which only charred 2 by 4s remained, yet he prodded the ashes for a sc.r.a.p of the six hundred dollars. Back on Jackson Road, insurance investigators were waiting for him, and the sheriff of Furnace Township, a little apple-cheeked old man, in suspenders and a soft felt hat, who was mostly interested in establishing that his failure to be present at the fire could in no way be held against him. He was quite deaf, and every time someone in the room spoke he would twirl around and alertly croak, "Let"s put that on the record too! I want everything out in the open, everything on the record!"

Worst of all, Harry had to talk to Jill"s mother on the telephone. The police had broken the news to her and her tone fluctuated between a polite curiosity about how Jill came to be living in this house and a grieved outrage seeking its ceiling, a bird cramped in a cage of partial comprehension.

"She was staying with me, yes, since before Labor Day," Rabbit told her, over the downstairs phone, in the dark living room, smelling of furniture polish and Mom"s medicine. "Before that she had been b.u.mming around in Brewer with a crowd of Negroes who hung out at a restaurant they"ve closed down since. I thought she"d be better off with me than with them."

"But the police said there was a Negro."

"Yeah. He was a friend of hers. He kind of came and went." Each time he was made to tell this story, he reduced the part Skeeter played, beginning with having to lie about driving him south that morning, until the young black man has become in his backwards vision little more substantial than a shadow behind a chair. "The cops say he might have set the fire but I"m sure he didn"t."

"How are you sure?"

"I just am. Look, Mrs. -"

"Aldridge." And this, of all things, her second husband"s name, set her to crying.

He fought through her sobbing. "Look, it"s hard to talk now, I"m dead beat, my kid"s in the next room, if we could talk face to face, I could maybe explain -"

The outrage tested a wing. "Explain! Can you explain her back to life?"

"No, I guess not."

The politeness returned. "My husband and I are flying to Philadelphia tomorrow morning and renting a car. Perhaps we should meet."

"Yeah. I"d have to take off from work, except for the lunch hour."

"We"ll meet at the West Brewer police station," the distant voice said with surprising firmness, a sudden pinch of authority. "At noon."

Rabbit had never been there before. The West Brewer Borough Hall was a brick building with white trim, set diagonally on a plot of gra.s.s and flower beds adjacent to the tall madhouse, itself really an addition to the original madhouse, a granite mansion built a century ago by one of Brewer"s iron barons. All this land had belonged to that estate. Behind the borough hall stretched a long cement-block shed with a corrugated roof, some doors were open and Rabbit saw trucks, a steamroller, the spidery black machine that tars roads, the giant arm that lifts a man in a basket to trim branches away from electric wires. These appliances of a town"s housekeeping seemed to him part of a lost world of blameless activity; he would never be allowed to crawl back into that world. Inside the town hall, there were wickets where people could pay their utilities bills, paneled doors labelled in flaking gold Burgess and a.s.sessor and Clerk. Gold arrows pointed downstairs to the Police Department. Rabbit saw too late that he could have entered this half-bas.e.m.e.nt from the side, saving himself the curious gaze of ten town employees. The cop behind the greentopped counter looked familiar, but it took a minute for the sideb.u.ms to register. The collegiate type. Harry was led down a hall past mysterious rooms; one brimmed with radio equipment, another with filing cabinets, a third gave on a cement stairway leading still further down. The dungeon. Jail. Rabbit wanted to run down into this hole and hide but was led into a fourth room, with a dead green table and metal folding chairs. The brokennosed chief was in here and a woman who, though hollow with exhaustion and slow-spoken with pills, was Connecticut. She had more edge, more salt to her manner, than Pennsylvania women. Her hair was not so much gray as grayed; her suit was black. Jill"s pensive thin face must have come from her father, for her mother had quite another kind, a roundish eager face with pushy lips that when she was happy must be greedy. Rabbit flicked away the impression of a peppy little dog: wideset brown eyes, a touch of jowl, a collar of pearls at her throat. Nifty t.i.ts, Jill had said, but her mother"s cupped and braced bosom struck Rabbit in this moment of s.e.xless and sorrowing encounter as a militant prow, part of a uniform"s padding. He regretted that he had not enough praised Jill here, her boyish chest with its shallow faint shadows, where she had felt to herself shy and meager and yet had been soft enough in his mouth and hands, quite soft enough, and abundant, as grace is abundant, that we do not measure, but take as a presence, that abounds. In his mist, he heard the chief grunt introductions: Mr. and Mrs. Aldridge. Rabbit remembered in Jill"s song the tax lawyer from Westerly, but the man remained blank for him; he had eyes only for the woman, for this wrong-way reincarnation of Jill. She had Jill"s composure, less fragilely; even her despairing way of standing with her hands heavy at her sides, at a loss, was Jill"s. Rabbit wondered, Has she come from identifying the remains? What was left but blackened bones? Teeth. A bracelet. A flesh colored swatch of hair. "Hey," he said to her, "I"m sick about this."

"Yes-s." Her bright eyes pa.s.sed over his head. "Over the phone, I was so stupid, you mentioned explaining."

Had he? What had he wanted to explain? That it was not his fault. Yet Nelson thought it was. For taking her in? But she was unsheltered. For f.u.c.king her? But it is all life, s.e.x, fire, breathing, all combination with oxygen, we shimmer at all moments on the verge of conflagration, as the madhouse windows tell us. Rabbit tried to remember. "You had asked about Skeeter, why I was sure he hadn"t set the fire."

"Yes. Why were you?"

"He loved her. We all did."

"You all used her?"

"In ways."

"In your case" - strange precision, clubwoman keeping a meeting within channels, the vowels roughened by cigarettes and whisky, weathered in the daily sunslant of c.o.c.ktails - "as a concubine?"

He guessed at what the word meant. "I never forced it," he said. "I had a house and food. She had herself. We gave what we had."

"You are a beast." Each word was too distinct; the sentence had been lying in her mind and had warped and did not quite fit.

"O.K., sure," he conceded, refusing to let her fly, to let that caged outrage escape her face and scream. Stepdaddy behind her coughed and shifted weight, preparing to be embarra.s.sed. Harry"s guts felt suspended and transparent, as before a game. He was matched against this glossy woman in a way he was never matched with Jill. Jill had been too old for him, too wise, having been born so much later. This little pug, her money and rasping clubwoman voice aside, was his generation, he could understand what she wanted. She wanted to stay out ofharm"s way. She wanted to have some fun and not be blamed. At the end she wanted not to have any apologizing to do to any heavenly committee. Right now she wanted to tame the ravenous miracle of her daughter"s being cast out and destroyed. Mrs. Aldridge touched her cheeks in a young gesture, then let her hands hang heavy beside her hips.

"I"m sorry," she said. "There are always... circ.u.mstances. I wanted to ask, were there any... effects."

"Effects?" He was back with blackened bones, patterns of teeth, melted bracelets. He thought of the bracelets girls in high school used to wear, chains with name-tags, Dorene, Margaret, Mary Ann.

"Her brothers asked me... some memento..."

Brothers? She had said. Three. One Nelson"s age.

Mrs. Aldridge stepped forward, bewildered, hoping to be helpful. "There was a car."

"They sold the car," Rabbit said, too loudly. "She ran it without oil and the engine seized up and she sold it for junk."

His loudness alarmed her. He was still indignant, about the waste of that car. She took a step backward, protesting, "She loved the car."

She didn"t love the car, she didn"t love anything we would have loved, he wanted to tell Mrs. Aldridge, but maybe she knew more than he, she was there when Jill first saw the car, new and white, her father"s gift. Rabbit at last found in his mind an "effect."

"One thing I did find," he told Mrs. Aldridge, "her guitar. It"s pretty well burned, but-"

"Her guitar," the woman repeated, and perhaps having forgotten that her daughter played brought her eyes down, made her round face red and brought the man over to comfort her, a man blank like men in advertis.e.m.e.nts, his coat impeccable and in the breast pocket a three-folded maroon handkerchief. "I have nothing," she wailed, "she didn"t even leave me a note when she left." And her voice had shed its s.e.xy roughness, become high and helpless; it was Jill again, begging, Hold me, help me, I"m all s.h.i.t inside, everything is crashing in.

Harry turned from the sight. The chief, leading him out the side door, said, "Rich b.i.t.c.h, if she"d given the girl half a reason to stay home she"d be alive today. I see things like this every week. All our bad checks are being cashed. Keep your nose clean, Angstrom, and take care ofyour own." A coach"s paternal punch on the arm, and Harry was sent back into the world.

"Pop, how about a quick one?"

"Not today, Harry, not today. We have a surprise for you at home. Mim"s coming."

"You sure?" The vigil for Mim is months old; she keeps sending postcards, always with a picture of a new hotel on them.

"Yep. She called your mother this morning from New York City, I talked to your mother this noon. I should have told you but you"ve had so much on your mind I thought, Might as well save it. Things come in bunches, that"s the mysterious truth. We get numb and the Lord lets us have it, that"s how His mercy works. You lose your wife, you lose your house, you lose your job. Mim comes in the same day your mother couldn"t sleep a wink for nightmares, I bet she"s been downstairs all day trying to tidy up if it kills her, you wonder what"s next." But he has just said it: Mom"s death is next. The number 16A bus joggles, sways, smells of exhaust. The Mt. Judge way, there are fewer Negroes than toward West Brewer. Rabbit sits on the aisle; Pop, by the window, suddenly hawks and spits. The spittle runs in a weak blur down the dirty gla.s.s. "G.o.ddammit, but that burns me," he explains, and Rabbit sees they have pa.s.sed a church, the big gray Presbyterian at Weiser and Park: on its steps cl.u.s.ter some women in overcoats, two young men with backwards collars, nuns and schoolchildren carrying signs and unlit candles protesting the war. This is Moratorium Day. "I don"t have much use for Tricky d.i.c.k and never have," Pop is explaining, "but the poor devil, he"s trying to do the decent thing over there, get us out so the roof doesn"t fall in until after we leave, and these queer preachers so shortsighted they can"t see across the pulpit go organizing these parades that all they do is convince the little yellow Reds over there they"re winning. If I were Nixon I"d tax the bejesus out of the churches, it"d take some of the burden off the little man. Old Cushing up there in Boston must be worth a hundred million just by his lonesome."

"Pop, all they"re saying is they want the killing to stop."

"They"ve got you too, have they? Killing"s not the worst thing around. Rather shake the hand of a killer than a traitor."

So much pa.s.sion, where he now feels none, amuses Harry, makes him feel protected, at home. It has been his salvation, to be home again. The same musty teddy-bear smells from the carpet, the same embrace of hot air when you open the cellar door, the same narrow stairs heading up off the living room with the same loose bal.u.s.ter that lost its dowel and has to be renailed again and again, drying out in the ebb of time; the same white-topped kitchen table with the four sets of worn spots where they used to eat. An appet.i.te for boyish foods has returned: for banana slices on cereal, for sugar doughnuts though they come in boxes with cellophane windows now instead ofin waxpaper bags, for raw carrots and cocoa, at night. He sleeps late, so he has to be wakened for work; in Penn Villas, in the house where Janice never finished making curtains, he would be the one the sun would usually rouse first. Here in Mt. Judge familiar gloom encloses him. The distortions in Mom"s face and speech, which used to distress him during his visits, quickly a.s.similate to the abiding reality of her presence, which has endured all these years he has been absent and which remains the same half of the sky, sealing him in - like the cellar bulkhead out back, of two heavy halves. As a child he used to crouch on the cement steps beneath them and listen to the rain. The patter above seemed to be pitting his consciousness lovingly and mixing its sound with the brusque sc.r.a.pe and stride of Mom working in the kitchen. She still, for spells, can work in the kitchen. Harry"s being home, she claims, is worth a hundred doses of L-dopa.

The one disturbing element, new and defiant of a.s.similation, is Nelson. Sullen, grieving, strangely large and loutish sprawled on the caneback davenport, his face glazed by some television of remembrance: none of them quite know what to do about him. He is not Harry, he is sadder than Harry ever was, yet he demands the privileges and indulgence of Harry"s place. In the worn shadows of the poorly lit half-house on Jackson Road, the Angstroms keep being startled by Nelson"s ungrateful presence, keep losing him. "Where"s Nellie?"

"Where did the kid get to?"

"Is the child upstairs or down?" are questions the other three often put to one another. Nelson stays in his temporary room - Mim"s old room -for hours of listening to rock-pop-folk turned down to a murmur. He skips meals without explaining or apologizing, and is making a sc.r.a.pbook of news items the Brewer papers have carried about their fire. Rabbit discovered this sc.r.a.pbook yesterday, snooping in the boy"s room. Around the clippings the boy had drawn with various colors of ballpoint flowers, peace signs, Tao crosses, musical notes, psychedelic rainbows, those open-ended swirling doodles a.s.sociated with insanity before they became commercial. Also there are two Polaroid snaps of the ruin; Billy took them Monday with a new camera his father had given him. The photos, brownish and curling, show a half-burned house, the burned half dark like a shadow but active in shape, eating the unburned half, the garage studs bent like matchsticks in an ashtray. Looking at the photographs, Rabbit smells ash. The smell is real and not remembered. In Nelson"s closet he finds the source, a charred guitar. So that is why it wasn"t in the garage when he looked for it, to give to Jill"s mother. She is back in Connecticut now, let the poor kid keep it. His father can"t reach him, and lives with him in his parents" house as an estranged, because too much older, brother.

He and his father see, walking up Jackson Road, a strange car parked in front of number 303, a white Toronado with orangeon-blue New York plates. His father"s lope accelerates; "There"s Mim!" he calls, and it is. She is upstairs and comes to the head of the stairs as they enter beneath the fanlight of stained gla.s.s; she descends and stands with them in the murky little foyer. It is Mim. It isn"t. It has been years since Rabbit has seen her. "Hi," Mim says, and kisses her father dryly, on the cheek. They were never, even when the children were little, much of a family for kissing. She would kiss her brother the same way, dismissingly, but he holds her, wanting to feel the hundreds of men who have held her before, this his sister whose diapers he changed, who used to hold his thumb when they"d go for Sunday walks along the quarry, who once burst out oh I love you sledding with him, the runners whistling on the dark packed slick, the street waxy with snow still falling. Puzzled by his embrace, Mim kisses him again, another peck on the same cheek, and then finely shrugs his arms away. A competence in that. She feels lean, not an ounce extra but all woman; swimming must do it, in hotel pools, late hours carve the fat away and swimming smooths what"s left. She appears to wear no makeup, no lipstick, except for her eyes, which are inhuman, Egyptian, drenched in peac.o.c.k purple and blue, not merely outlined but re-created, and weighted with lashes he expects to stick fast when she blinks. These marvellously masked eyes force upon her pale mouth all expressiveness; each fractional smile, sardonic crimping, attentive pout, and abrupt broad laugh follows its predecessor so swiftly Harry imagines a coded tape is being fed into her head and producing, rapid as electronic images, this alphabet of expressions. She used to have buck teeth but that has been fixed. Her nose, her one flaw, that kept her off the screen, that perhaps kept her from fame, is still long, with a faceted lump of cartilage at the end, exactly like Mom"s nose, but now that Mim is thirty and never going to be a screen beauty seems less a flaw, indeed saves her face from looking like others and gives it, between the peac.o.c.k eyes and the actressy-fussy mouth, a lenient homeliness. And this, Rabbit guesses, would extend her appeal for men, though now she would get barroom criers, with broken careers and marriages, rather than hard-hearted comers who need an icy showpiece on their arm. In the style of the Sixties her clothes are clownish: bell-bottom slacks striped horizontally as if patched from three kinds of gingham; a pinstripe blouse, mannish but for the puff sleeves; shoes that in color and shape remind him of Donald Duck"s bill; and hoop earrings three inches across. Even in high school Mim had liked big earrings; they made her look like a gypsy or Arab then, now, with the tan, Italian. Or Miami Jewish. Her hair is expensively tousled honey-white, which doesn"t offend him; not since junior high has she worn it the color it was, the mild brown she once called, while he leaned in her doorway watching her study herself in the mirror, "Protestant rat."

Pop busies his hands, touching her, hanging up his coat, steering her into the dismal living room. "When did you get here? Straight from the West Coast? You fly straight to Idlewild, they do it non-stop now, don"t they?"

"Pop, they don"t call it Idlewild any more. I flew in a couple days ago, I had some stuff in New York to do before I drove down. Jersey was breathtaking, once you got past the oil tanks. Everything still so green."

"Where"d you get the car, Mim? Rent it from Hertz?" The old man"s washed-out eyes sparkle at her daring, at her way with the world.

Mim sighs. "A guy lent it to me." She sits in the caneback rocker and puts her feet up on the very ha.s.sock that Rabbit as a child had once dreamed about: he dreamed it was full of dollar bills to solve all their problems. The dream had been so vivid he had tested it; the st.i.tched scar of his incision still shows. The stuffing had been disagreeable fiber deader than straw.

Mim lights a cigarette. She holds it in the exact center of her mouth, exhales twin plumes around it, frowns at the snuffed match.

Pop is enchanted by the routine, struck dumb. Rabbit asks her, "How does Mom seem to you?"

"Good. For someone who"s dying."

"She make sense to you?"

"A lot of it. The guy who doesn"t make much sense to me is you. She told me what you"ve been doing. Lately."

"Hang"s had a h.e.l.l of a time lately," Pop chimes in, nodding as if to mesh himself with this spinning wheel, his dazzling daughter. "Today in at Verity, get this, they gave him his notice. They kept me on and canned a man in his prime. I saw the handwriting on the wall but I didn"t want it to be me who"d tell him, it was their meatloaf, let them deliver it, b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, a man gives them his life and gets a boot in the f.a.n.n.y for his pains."

Mim closes her eyes and lets a look of weary age wash over her and says, "Pop, it"s fantastic to see you. But don"t you want to go up and look in on Mom for a minute? She may need to be led to the pot, I asked her but with me she could be shy still."

Pop rises quickly, obliging; yet then he stands in a tentative crouch, offering to say away her brusqueness. "You two have a language all your own. Mary and I, we used to marvel, I used to say to her, There couldn"t ever have been a brother and a sister closer than Harry and Miriam. These other parents used to tell us, you know, about kids fighting, we didn"t know what they were talking about, we"d never had an example. I swear to G.o.d above we never heard a loud word between the two of you. A lot of boys, all of six when Mim arrived, might have expressed resentment, you know, settled in with things pretty much his own way up to then: not Harry. Right from the start, right from that first summer, we could trust you alone with him, alone in the house, Mary and I off to a movie, about the only way to forget your troubles in those days, go off to a motion picture." He blinks, gropes among these threads for the one to pull it all tight. "I swear to G.o.d, we"ve been lucky," he says, then weakens it by adding, "when you look at some of the things that can happen to people," and goes up; his tears spark as he faces the bulb burning at the head of the stairs, before cautiously returning his eyes to the treads.

Did they ever have a language of their own? Rabbit can"t remember it, he just remembers them being here together, in this house season after season, for grade after grade of school, setting off down Jackson Road in the aura of one holiday after another, Hallowe"en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine"s Day, Easter, in the odors and feel of one sports season succeeding another, football, basketball, track; and then him being out and Mim shrunk to a word in his mother"s letters; and then him coming back from the Army and finding her grown up, standing in front of the mirror, ready for boys, maybe having had a few, tinting her hair and wearing hoop earrings; and then Janice took him off; and then both of them were off and the house empty of young life; and now both of them are here again. The smoke from her cigarette seems what the room needs, has needed a long time, to chase these old furniture and sickness smells away. He is sitting on the piano stool; he perches forward and reaches toward her. "Gimme a weed."

"I thought you stopped."

"Years ago. I don"t inhale. Unless it"s gra.s.s."

"Gra.s.s yet. You"ve been living it up." She fishes in her purse, a big bright patchy bag that matches her slacks, and tosses him a cigarette. It is menthol, with a complicated filter tip. Death is easily fooled. If the churches don"t work, a filter will do.

He says, "I don"t know what I"ve been doing."

"I would say so. Mom talked to me for an hour. The way she is now, that"s a lot of talking."

"What d"ya think of Mom now? Now that you have all this perspective."

"She was a great woman. With nowhere to put it."

"Well, is where you put it any better?"

"It involves less make-believe."

"I don"t know, you look pretty fantastic to me."

"Thanks."