Chapter 2

MAISIE had never been analyzed, not actually paid for it, but time and patience and longevity accomplished the benign symptoms of the cure: complete selfishness and objectivity was Maisie, a diathesis, a quiddity was hers. She was Ego; her slight body was essential stuff. She was Me, now, not I, with its introspection, its sensibilities, as noted before, its headaches and chills, its pity and intrusion into other people's sorrows, its identity with misery, its introversion, its nymphomania, remorse, "Why did I do it?", its wherefores and inability to practice the antibiblkal "Don't cry over spilt milk,"

"What's done is done," the want to be forgiven, the neurosis of love. All gone! Without much time left to enjoy her isolation and her norm, her new freedom, she had her fling, nevertheless, and without actually incarcerating her they shut her up in her playroom which has been described. How did they know that she dreamed of a mechanism, a chemical, maybe, a sandwich, a robot, a rocket, that would accomplish her desire: inter the lot of them in an atomic upheaval that at the same time, in rotation-like, would bring back the dead ones, good as new, and Dougherty, voted most likely to succeed, would be president of the Union and Bessie write a column; the little girl who drowned in the well blossom and start menstruating, the premature boy expand his lungs and let out a big sob! What was left of her was a killer, but senility-plus and the good mental health, the normal outlook mentioned, kept her enchained, kept her from cutting off their heads and really mutilating Lamby; Daisy, out of the bog, could be suffocated in a pound or two of pastry flour, and Paula? A collision on the turnpike could be arranged (The New York Times). Shucks, why bother.

"Now that the ball is o-o-over," the old lady hummed.

And they, the live ones, without actually knowing it, longed, one supposes, for her demise, an even further withdrawal, geographic; wanted to place her in a closer still confinement and move her up on the hill, sweep out her room and burn her memoirs, disinfect her belongings; wouldn't they surely say at last, "It was for the best"? But only Lamby, the old maid, the dispossessed, encouraged the recurring daydream of herself sneaking into the old woman's room and choking her to death with her bare hands. Stinker! Old bitch!

Maisie's conversation, when she was a Little drunk from hot tea, feeling an occasional leftover euphoria, was not without interest and sometimes funny in its jumpy anachronisms, its overflowing anecdote and obsolete big names and amnesias. One listened sometimes for the end of a tale that would make headlines, often as it ended in forgetfulness or a change of pace and characters; a kind of Dadaism could shock or irritate the listener. Maisie's visions were as confusing as surrealism to them and they didn't have the key, either, that Maisie, if she had one, herself, secreted. She had lived, it was true, through a lot of things. Things and events, speculations, hurricanes and inventions. The march through Georgia was a polychrome as clear as the view through the living-room window. She remembered the Balloon Hoax, the blizzard of '88, the Boer war, the Boston Tea Party, so she said, Lincoln's assassination, the invention of the telephone, the grounding of electricity, the first Mixmaster, bloomers and bustles and high button shoes, outside plumbing, and Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood.

"That was the night the President came to dinner... 'Mr. President,' I said..."

"Which president, Granny?"

"Eddie."

Janey, who hadn't quite learned to control herself, got red in the face. "Did you know George Washington too, Granny?"

"Go to your room this instant, Janey!" said Sissy.

"As a matter of fact I did," said the old lady. "I sat on his lap."

When Maisie, herself, sensed an error, perhaps in her timing, her doubt was expressed always by the addenda: I sat on his lap, feeling, one supposes, that it made up the difference; she had been, indeed, very young at the time, but Pa-Pa had brought him home for a julep.

"Yes, Ma-Ma."

The old lady closed her eyes and saw Jefferson Davis bending over her mother's hand. "You are to be congratulated, Charlie, on your wife's good table as well as on her beauty," he said. "I thank you, suh," the old judge had replied.

"It was Jeff Davis."

"Jeff Davis," she repeated, as if it had been denied, and she saw columns and oleanders, and three big wild turkeys sitting on the tree, their fiery plumage; and later the smell of them hanging heads down outside on a hook, stiff with rigor mortis and the chill of autumn, staring at her, upside down, with glazed round eyes. She had helped her mother make a... what was it? Hot toddy? No! A...

"I'll have my milk shake," she said, as the scene changed to a backdrop of Chinese lanterns and a smoky New England evening.

"Wait, Ma-Ma, and see Paula."

"Paula?"

"You said, you know, that she might wear your blue silk from Paris, Ma-Ma, to the party, the old-fashioned party for charity... you remember?"

"Certainly I remember... have Ferris harness the mare... I can't walk! Stuff and nonsense," she added, "old-fashioned indeed! It took long enough coming all the way from Paris, I want it taken care of, what's more."

"Paula promised to be ever so careful, she said she would never come home if the least thing happened to it."

"She spills... Paula is sloppy, Sissy, what do you intend to do about it, she's an untidy girl and will make a bad wife, no telling..."

Paula and Maggie, and Janey behind them, crashed into the room.

"They're too big," said the old lady, "much too big, all of them."

Daisy appeared at the pantry door, her round face pink from the heat of the kitchen and the dividend of kisses from Jimmy (the gardener's son), who stayed away, curious as he was to see the vision, he felt sure, of Miss Paula in the old lady's Paris gown.

"Oh, oh, I can't stand it," Paula giggled, "it's so tight!"

The others are convulsed with laughter at Paula's struggles.

"I can't... breathe!"

"Saints preserve us," said Daisy, her hand to her mouth. "Oh, Miss Paula, you're pretty as a pitcher."

"Pitcher is right," screamed Janey, "a handle is all she needs."

Maggie is terribly jealous but can't help laughing at Paula's attempts, her writhings, to get comfortable in the tiny-waisted blue silk.

"You're too fat for Granny's dress!"

"I'm... just... pleasingly plump," said Paula. "For Christ sake let me out of here!" Her pretty face is pink, there are tears in her eyes.

"Paula!"

"I'm sorry, Mummy, I'm sorry, but oh! oh! they'll be here, what will I do?"

"Let out all your breath. Get light," suggested Janey, punching Paula's soft belly.

"Oh, Janey, you little rat!" Paula lifted up her skirt and kicked her sister; her bare legs shone.

"Saints preserve us," giggled Daisy.

"Don't you think you should wear stockings?" said Sissy doubtfully.

"Why?" said Paula.

Paula's breasts are pushed up nearly to her chin and the yellowing lace scarcely covers her dime-sized violet nipples. In spite of her foolery she knows she is lovely and Maggie aches with the knowledge, too.

Maisie is smiling her pointed smile; she knows that lovely and desirable as her granddaughter looks, she can't hold a candle to herself as she had looked, and she wishes they would all go away. "Painted little hussy," she thinks. Paula's lipstick, generously laid on, is a fiery scarlet; she remembered her own natural coloring, how all she did was secretly bite her lips to make them redder and they used to swell a little, too... her mother had used fine white starch for her own cheeks and sifted it over her neck and bosom.

"Paula, I wish you would not use that awful pancake make-up," said Sissy. "You're prettier without it."

"She's got a dc-hickey," said Janey.

"Shut up!" laughed Paula.

"That stuff is down to her stomach!" Janey shrilled.

"Tummy," corrected Maisie, sotto voce.

"Cripes!" screamed Paula, "the time! Where is that idiot? Mummy, may Jimmy drive me to the club? Peter's always late, he's probably tight, too."

"Paula, I want you to be not later than one thirty."

"Oh, Mummy, it won't be over!"

"It will, the club dances are always over by one."

"Oh, Mummy."

Sissy looked as if she had never been out that late in her life. "One thirty," she said firmly. "O.K."

"May I kindly have my milk shake?" asked Maisie sarcastically, "if you've nothing else to do, the lot of you."

Lamby had avoided seeing Paula in the blue silk dress; she had to five over, it seemed, generation after generation of good looks and charm that she herself had been deprived of. She was fed up with old Maisie's tales of conquests and capitulations; Sissy's drove of beaux and big choice of husbands, her flirtations carried on long after her marriage, and, still, her middle-aged, but real glamour. Now it was Paula, and Maggie was pretty, too, if not as obviously so as Paula; soon it would be Janey who, if she had only known it, had been handled a little already by her cousins, and dreamed of going to bed with a soldier; and riding, too, a white stallion like Joan of Arc, in her trail a perfect horde of pretty young men, crying "Long live beautiful Janey." Lamby's only petting had come once in a while from leftover smitten young men who, feeling warm all over and generous after a long evening with Sissy, would catch up with her on the stairs or on the porch and hug her.

No satisfaction had ever come to Lamby, not even in her dreams. How she had longed to be a boy and rape her sisters, get even with their pretty faces, spoil them completely for the pain they unknowingly gave her! Lamby had loved, as an adolescent, to distraction almost, the family doctor until she had heard him say to her mother, "She needs a real good purge to clear up her skin," and her passionate love had turned to murderous hatred. He had been the one, already paunchy, who, with knees apart on a straight chair, had first drawn her attention to the male anatomy, had awakened a desultory sexual curiosity. Her libido had merely registered a mild disgust for his lumpy parts, but later, having forgotten the original distaste, she was attracted to him and, lonely, had built up a nympho-manic continuous dream of him that he shattered in the hall... "a purge," he had said. Nastiness! She had taken, in her sleep, to dreams of women, their white breasts and smooth legs, and once, if the clap of thunder had not awakened her, came near to felicity; her fright and near-felicity had mingled. But these soft dreams must have had a mechanism for complete censorship: Lamby took no interest in women, even disliked them, felt a revulsion for their nearness and their society kisses. In the back of her head there stood a man. She had not given up. The sentiment, the sulky something of passion, the maternal instinct toward the male, the boy in him, was gone; an aging but avid yearning remained. It might be pride. Who knows.

Lamby measured out the bourbon for Ma-Ma's nightly milk shake into the big toddy glass that had belonged to the old man and added the milk. On the top she shook some grated nutmeg. She heard Paula's laughter in the driveway as she drove away with Jimmy, the tinny shifting of gears, the rattle of the battered station wagon. She picked up the bottle of bourbon again and out of the neck of it took a good swig.

"Watch out for the toddy glass!" called the old lady, as she always did. "Don't be careless and don't spill, watch out now!"

"I am watching out," muttered Lamby impudently.

"What's that?"

"Yes, Ma-Ma."

"Impudent!"

The milk shake lulled the old lady into slumberland almost before she had time to plan tomorrow's reminiscences. "Bessie," she murmured, "he down there on the couch... I want... talk to me, Bessie..."

"Ferris," she said, upon awakening on the dot; it was one thirty; the old clock downstairs distinctly said, "Ping!" One thirty had been on her mind; someone had said, "Be home now at one thirty sharp."

Silence.

The old lady lay with wide-open eyes waiting for something. She was used, at her age, to long wakeful nights; she had had her four hours and did not fret. She felt no fear in the thick dark of her room. How Ma-Ma, her Ma-Ma, had complained and sighed, and yawned, and wilted next day, over her insomnia, but she had been younger then, had later, in her nineties, got used to it, felt fine. A sweet astringent smell got into the old lady's nose a moment before she recalled the remedy that she used to help Ma-Ma's maid make in the pantry; how they "bruised" a handful of anise seeds, "steeped" them in rose water. How her mother looked as pretty as ever, ready for bed, with the two little lawn bags bound to her nostrils, her fine eyebrows arching up like a pony's ears, a fistful of thick curls falling over her lovely forehead, not too high, not too schoolmarmish, a real lady; she had worn a lace cap to bed, and gloves lined with cream; she had the softest plumpest hands, like Queen Victoria's, with dimples instead of knuckles, a tiny mauve shadow inside each indentation... "You may take the children away now"... the old judge... where did the horde of children come from? There had been twenty. How? When? "What did I want to know?" said Maisie to herself. "Why bother." She heard Bunce snoring in the hall outside her door and the old clock gave a little shudder and said distinctly, "Ping... ping... ping."

"I said I'd be home at one thirty sharp," said the old lady; she was very confused. "Am I home yet?"

The smell of anise had filtered away but for the last time the question of where did Ma-Ma get her babies came back, as if she were a little girl again; but wiser and older ones might well wonder, too. Maisie's Ma-Ma had never addressed her husband other than as "Mister"; never let him see her unless she was fully dressed, any words suggesting intimate apparel or furniture were taboo; parts of the body nameless; conversation domestic and cool; good nights always said downstairs.

"Good night, Mr. Herbert."

"Good night, my dear."

So how?... Maisie's mother had been a Yankee so she must have bundled, but no one would have guessed it from her face. This last is editorial, and not in old Maisie's head as she lay comfortably on her side, waiting for something, something that she had mislaid in her mind.

Ping... ping... ping... ping.

"Time will tell," she murmured; she was in the groove; it would.

And in the meantime, Lamby, completely unnerved by other people's pleasures, other people's dimples, deprived of feminine allure, unable to get in touch with the spit an' image in the back of her head, frustrated beyond female endurance, was slowly and surely getting drunk. In a word: leaving the premises once again; because this was not Lamby's first binge. Lamby had found the lighted exits more than once, the heavenly medication: "Drink me," it said. Lamby timed her spiritual wanderings to fit the old lady's unconscious hours, four of them.

Lamby opened her closet door and from the top shelf took down the bottle labeled conspicuously Clorox, and from behind it a glass that had held mayonnaise. She was careful and sharp about details, no one must miss a table glass and come snooping around for it; besides, the deceit was part of the femininity she longed for. She drank a quarter of a glass of the bourbon as if her throat were wide open; it went down without convulsion, without her needing to swallow.

"Ahhh!" The fiery caress hit her hard; there wasn't time for play; this was it. As if she had not planned it, she walked steadily to the dressing table and opened a drawer. She took out and arranged before her the contents: three lipsticks; an eyebrow pencil; a round box of mascara; a choice of rouge, powder and various creams; perfumes. She proceeded slowly and at intervals visited the closet. Her cheeks grew soft under her fingers as she lovingly manipulated them, her mouth swelled and smiled and arched as she cleverly drew it on and filled it in with three shades of scarlet. The thin hard mouth became a tantalizing receptacle for love, a yearning sucking instrument of desire, a bold and jutting invitation to rapture. Her heart beat faster in spite of the great gulps of depressant she had swallowed; her hands trembled a little as she painstakingly marked on and blackened her eyebrows, feathered them in, ah, she was an artist! She liked their meeting in the middle and curving to the hairline at the sides. She smoothed on the lovely deep rouge and blended it evenly, covering it softly with beige powder so that she resembled a peach. How they would bite her! She did not neglect to color the tips of her ears and lay on a delicate rosy pink almost to her nipples, which must be hid because they were inverted (how it angered her when she was sober!). She brushed a sparkling mixture into her hair that she wore short like the girls, and last of all an invention of her own -before fastening the foamy rubber make-believe breasts, she drew a seductive line with the eyebrow pencil between them. She wanted even more than she could buy, "These are just right, madam, very chic," but Lamby longed for a great squushy bosom, always had, "Oh, big ones! Big ones!" she had prayed. Paula's lovely oversized melonlike breasts made her sick with envy. She put down the perfume atomizer hard and it cracked, but she whispered the four-letter word, she wasn't completely drunk yet, and she was afraid of the old woman down there who had ears as acute as a ferret; even asleep she'd hear, she could hear the worms crawling in the ground like a robin. "I heard you!" She appraised the work of art she had produced in the mirror critically. She took up the little gadget she had found at the Five and Ten and bent her eyelashes up hard and generously applied the mascara with a stiff little brush. She outlined her eyes carefully with a black pencil and with her forefinger added the sky-blue shadow to her lids. Lamby longed to kiss the pouting mouth she saw reflected, it dazzled her; for a moment she felt an evil penetrating desire for herself but she didn't know how and it went away. She got up and swayed a little as she stepped into the black lace panties, but she was getting tired of the whole thing; she was incapable of seeing a thing through, had little imagination, really. She did not grasp the possibilities and let the whole thing go. Feeling a return of diluted anger, a slight inner depression, she went to the closet for quick oblivion, but a mechanism warned her, "Get this stuff off before you... before you..." Her head reeled.

Ping... ping... ping... ping.

She was frightened, the time was up.

"Lamby!" the old voice quivered up the stairs and through the keyhole. "Lamby."

Lamby lost her head and tipped the bottle up, felt its warmth and sweetness give her a split second's respite.

"Fresh air," she said, coming to.

She went to the window and pushed it up, sat on a stool and leaned out. The harvest moon, low in the west, shone on her synthetic face and exposed make-believe bosom. She looked as if she were everlastingly leaning out of a casement soliciting the passersby, a painted salacious grin on her face, her eyebrows elongated, the division between her breasts penciled in; an unsavory-looking woman, for sale.

The last hooker changed her mood, gave her confidence, made her laugh; "Caught with my pants down," she said vulgarly. "Lamby," she mimicked.

"Hi!" she called out. Someone, two people were coming cautiously up the drive displacing the little blue stones. Scrunch... scrunch...

Even Bunce stopped snoring, the old clock hesitated, Maisie did not call out. Everything listened. Lamby stared and controlled herself. The big orange moon silhouetted Paula and the gardener's son like cutouts, and the clinging hazy November dawn sent their voices out into the night as far as there were ears to hear, as if they were at sea. Listen!

"Paula, you said you would!"

"I'm afraid, Jimmy."

"Of what?"

"I don't know."

"Have you never done it?"

"No! No! Don't ask me!"

Her mouth was stopped and only Lamby saw them struggling and swaying together.

"Look, Paula, you said if I came back here we could go in and you would, you said everyone would be asleep. It was your idea."

"I'm afraid," repeated Paula. "Kiss me, Jimmy, again."

You could almost hear their beating hearts, the thick clinging of their lips; the blue silk gown snapped and sparked like summer lightning.

"No! No!" pleaded Paula in a loving weak voice.

"This then!" and he easily lifted one of her round breasts from its lacy frame. Paula stood still, her chin down, watching him. She put her hands on his narrow hips and it was a pretty picture, like a valentine with a backdrop of hearts and flowers. Encouraged, he cautiously slid his big hand down her thigh.

"No! Please! Not here! I'll go in with you."

"Quick!" said Jimmy, beside himself with desire.

Lamby closed the window and, trembling all over as if in a chill, went to the closet. She finished the bottle and sucked at its neck for the last few drops; it wanted to tease and avoid her mouth, but she drained it and threw it in the back of the closet among her shoes and boots and paraphernalia. She fell across the bed, and opening her dressing gown, murmured comforting words to herself, "Sweetheart, baby," but her spirit did not respond. She tore off her spongy bosom, and as if some one had come up behind her and given her a merciful blow, the coup de grace, lost consciousness; her mouth hung open, the rouge and bright lipstick came off on the pillow, and the old clock jauntily struck five.

Maisie, wide awake, wondered if Paula had spilled. Bunce raised himself laboriously and growled very low.

"Down, sir!" said Maisie and made one final effort in her ragged old head to visualize whatever it was she was looking for, waiting for....

Jimmy, inside the room that had housed so many similar scenes: a girl and a boy fighting for supremacy over the differences in each other, the differences spoiling their felicity, was a young man in a hurry; he was used to quick surrender. Paula, shaken and frightened at his progress, begged for time.

"Wait, Jimmy dearest," she whispered.

"I've finished waiting," he whispered back, anger welling up in him at the delay in his pleasure; her procrastination inflamed and infuriated him. Daisy didn't flirt, neither had Harriet, the grocer's daughter, needed any persuasion at all. Who did Miss Paula think she was! His longing and anger made him brutal. He stopped her mouth with his hand and no one heard the agonizing wail, but she got away. She had turned cold at reality. His passion spoiled his precision and he lost her. He stared at her, humiliated and sick.

"Oh, Jimmy," said Paula, seeking comfort after her ordeal, comfort from the enemy, silly thing! "Put your arms around me, kiss me good night, Jimmy."

"You little whore!"

He said it loud and plain.

The name! The word! Maisie's old body twitched spasmodically. At last it had come to her-from nowhere! She had a quick technicolored vision of her father's woods; the shiny rear end of Holly, the mare, her sides wet with sweat; and Ferris, handsome, defeated and angry. "Now will you call me Maisie!"

"Whore!"

"Well," she said, "I've got a better memory 'n any of them. My eyes are good, too." She raised up her hands to look at the long tapering fingers but it was still dark. "Prettier than Ma-Ma's at ninety," she said to herself, "and I'm a hundred.

"Well, Bessie..." and she closed her eyes to a more soothing abstract darkness than that which persisted so long in the room.

"Granny, are you awake?"

"Go 'way, child, can't you see your old Granny is asleep."

"But Granny."

"But me no buts," said Granny, good-naturedly. "Granny!" There was a sob in Paula's voice. "Well, what is it? Did you spill? Eh?"

Paula stood in the dark at the foot of her grandmother's bed. "Granny," she pleaded, "let me stay here, it's too late to go home now."

"What time is it?" said Granny noncommittally and without interest. What difference did it make.

"One thirty," Paula quickly lied.

Ping... ping... ping... ping... ping... ping.

"I mean..." said Paula.

"Well, what do you mean," said the old lady, querulously. "Do get on with it. Stay where you like and do pick up your feet."

"Oh, thank you, Granny dear." She hesitated... how much had Granny heard... what did she know? "Don't tell Mummy!"

"I haven't spoken to your mother in twenty years," said the old lady, "come next Michaelmas, and I don't intend to start now." What old memory was plaguing her?

"I'm sorry I woke you up; thank you, thank you again, Granny."

The old lady didn't answer and the beige light of dawn began to seep into the house. Evidence of sorrow and shame, violence and anger, espionage, had been secretly destroyed in the night, even Lamby's room with wide-open windows smelled faintly of Chanel Number Five and outside an early morning November chill had deposited the frost an inch deep. There were no footprints. When Daisy came in, sleepy-eyed and grumpy, to pull aside the curtains there was not so much as a cigarette butt, and no fingerprints on anything at all.

"Guess what!" screamed Janey. "Paula isn't home yet!"

"Be quiet, Janey, she phoned me from Granny's, she didn't want to wake me, eat your cereal." But Sissy had an uneven look.

Janey stared at her.

"Eat your cereal."

"Ma-Ma," said Sissy, "Paula did spend the night here?" She wanted very much to believe it.

"Never saw her before in my life," lied Granny, poker-faced. She watched Sissy between her fluttering pink lids. "What's she up to, can't fool me," she said to herself. It was a new day and she felt fresh.

"I wouldn't see that young man if I were you," she said, "he's not our sort."

"Oh, Ma-Ma!" said Sissy, laughing, "you're a dear."

"Drivel."

Lamby's hangover preceded her into the room and Sissy frowned.

"Where's Maggie?" Lamby said, trying to brighten up. "I'd like to shoot some golf."

"Tomboy!" snapped the old lady.

Lamby gave her a dirty look., "I suppose Paula's still shut-eye from the party." Lost forever in Lamby's drunken sleep was any recollection of last night. Paula was safe, except from herself. The old lady felt as if there were ghosts in the room, live ones, and she waved her hand before her eyes. "Get along with you," she said, "scat!"

"What's for dinner, mum?" said Daisy. The Irish apparition did appear from nowhere. She had been listening-at the pantry door. She looked sulky and downcast as only the Irish can, spreading around them an ectoplasm of despondency, a very slough of despair. It nagged and enraged the old lady; she could smell it.

"Git!" she said. "None of your sniveling in here!"

"Yes, mum, your honor." The girl backed out, not in the least offended. She was too low in her mind for the old lady's insults to touch her. She had not learned anything listening at the door and Jimmy hadn't shown up with the vegetables for dinner, the late crop of carrots and beets, cabbage and bleached celery, a handful of parsley. She would have warmed his cold hands, and if no one was looking, kissed his mouth hard; planned their meeting place for tonight and then maybe had the courage, in his strong arms, to tell him... Terribly depressed and made bold, devil may care, by it, she risked her neck. She stuck her head through the pantry door and said in a stilted, dignified tone, "We haven't no vegetables."

"Who's that?" asked the old lady, forgetting she had just dismissed her. "Oh, good morning, child," she said. "Lamby, I want you to plan a nice supper, Mr. Fiske is coming."

"Mr. Fiske?"

"Mr. Fiske?"

"The historian." The old lady sniffed at their ignorance.

"Who, Ma-Ma?"

"Fiske!" she said angrily. "Fiske, the historian!"

"Yes, Ma-Ma, we will." Sissy shook her head at Lamby.

"And none of that cold gruel you had when we had company last time, with onions in it. Phaugh, who ever heard of such a thing!"

"That was vichyssoise, Ma-Ma."

"Vichy-fiddlesticks, it was gruel."

"We won't have it, Ma-Ma, it's too late in the season... something hot..."

"We won't have it period," said Maisie. "Come, Bunce," she said, and smiled; she was leaving them for a while, "I'll pretty up."

"Spooks," she said, as she settled herself, "sneaking around, enough to give one the creeps."

Sharp-eyed, she noticed, immediately, a white glare on Bessie's gilded frame. A tremor of indignation shook her. The old lady was Argus-eyed indeed, and looking for trouble, as volatile as yeast. It had come off again; Daisy's careful mending didn't work.

"Daisy!"

"Ma-Ma?"

"I said Daisy!"

The name was carried from lip to lip; she heard it reverberating: Daisy... Daisy... Daisy...

"Mum?"

"Where is it?"

"What, mum?"

"'What mum,'" the old lady mimicked, "you know very well 'what mum.'"

But Daisy really didn't know; her face was red and swollen from weeping and from, if they both had known what the other was missing, a similar loss: Jimmy's.

"Please, mum, may I go... I..."

"You will sit right there until you tell me where it has gone."

"What, mum?"

The old lady had stalled for time, what was it called? She couldn't for the life of her remember its name, the little thing that Daisy had carelessly polished off the cherub, and no wonder, no one had ever told her and it wasn't in The New York Times or Chitty on Blackstone.

"The watchamacalht," she said. "Oh."

The old lady looked at the girl's stupid dazed face and it reminded her of something long ago... that same look, forlorn and sullen, glutinous and resentful; there was terror in it, too... Dody's fainting pregnant kitchen maid!

"Master Dodge?" she said softly, almost eagerly.

"What, mum? Please, mum."

"You may keep the thingamabob, my girl," the old lady said kindly, "it's nothing to cry about, it's neither here nor there."

"Oh, thank you, mum."

Still ignorant of the old lady's loss, intent on her own, Daisy went to her box of a room next the laundry and looked at her puffy face in the mirror, her red eyes. Cruelly, the untouched beauty of Paula's lovely face came into her mind, like a valentine.

"Sweet Jesus!"

It was part prayer and part invective.

The old lady mused: Dody's little girl had stood before her and she had given her something, a present. Her mind had skipped a generation easily, not wanting to dwell, one supposes, on the unbearable, or unwilling to see herself as she had been. "Hussy!" she had called the kitchen maid, "lying, thieving, little slut," and she had petted Dody and been secretly proud of his manhood; at fifteen, there was no doubt of it, he had easily seduced the girl and the child had been the image of him, as pretty as Bessie. That was why she had insisted on keeping the little thing, sending it out to nurse with one of the tenants, had it brought up right on the premises, after packing its mother off to the old country whence she came, wiser but not much richer. The old man, Maisie's husband, had licked Dody, horsewhipped him good; she hadn't dared interfere, but he hadn't been able to whip it all out of him by any means; his fame spread to the village and he was in demand. The girl who was born of Dody's high spirits to the kitchen maid had waited unknowingly on her grandmother, who sometimes stared at her and curled her lips and again wished, but did not dare, to caress her. She was a little bit of a thing, the quick plasma of one orgasm; undernourished, too, inside her frightened mama, and squeezed almost to death by her tight corset, hidden, until the moment of her slippery birth on the laundry floor, from the eyes of her mother's employers and starved by her fear of being dismissed for her too apparent carelessness. Dody had gone up to her room in the eaves, on a bet, to prove his majority to his brother and his friends, and she had giggled and let him try: "Come on now, Master Dody, let's see what you're made of." Inflamed from playing with the boys in the barn, excited by talk of women and girls, his curiosity inspired by Bessie and her tricks, it had been easy and quick. "It was nothing much," he told the boys, and the kitchen maid, impressed and eager for more, couldn't get him to come back. There were other games at fifteen. And that was when Bessie, jealous, had slapped her and said, "Leave Dody alone!"

"Lep or no lep, g'lang!" Pater Familias, the dispenser of colored pills and mustard plasters and purges, had shouted to his skinny nag; Death flashed in the sky with the northern lights and neck and neck he raced with it again, full of the joy of it. He had undone the blue child and pronounced her female, had washed his hands, had taken a good stiff drink of undiluted scotch, helped himself out of the decanter on the sideboard, and kept one more family secret faithfully.

Maisie listened. She thought she heard the cloppity-clop of the nag, its wheezing and sighing, the rattle and squeak of the old buggy straddling and bumping over a frozen winter road. She shook her head.

"We'll see," she said, "it's no use crying over spilt milk."

That had been the old man's feeble advice. He was getting too old to punish the high-spirited sons he had, God knows how, engendered, but he still got some pleasure out of it and each time didn't want to hear any more about it. He had leered at the buxom kitchen maid himself and felt her knee touch his leg sometimes when she had been allowed in the dining room, the waitress off. The boys were catching up fast with their bad blood, their choice of women, the fun of the scullery as opposed to the "ladies" they would no doubt (but not in this case) marry and beget on. He had slipped the wench a fiver as she struggled out with her rickety luggage, her barrel of knickknacks, as if he were the guilty one. "Good riddance," Maisie had said. "Yes, my dear."

"I'm thirty-nine," the old man had said, "and I would like to retire," and did.

Old Maisie sighed and fidgeted and tried to remember where all the capital that had seemed as firm as the rock of Gibraltar, as everlasting as the chalk cliffs of England, had gone, but it was unpleasant homework, to be laid aside for her best subject:

"Mother, dearest, you're the only one who understands me," said Dodge.

"Dear boy," murmured the old lady, nodding at his glistening likeness.

"Mother, dearest, you're the only one who understands," said Dougherty, slicking down his curly yellow hair and pulling at his embroidered waistcoat.

"Sweetheart," the old lady said out loud.

"Sissy!"

"Yes, Ma-Ma, I was just leaving."

"Sissy, what does the doctor say? Do try for a boy this time... all those big girls... didn't I hear Doctor Edwards?"

"Ma-Ma, please," said Sissy, "I'm going... may I bring you anything?"

"An ounce of horehound drops and some anise."

"I'll try."

"Do, Sissy, it would be nice to have a boy for a change."

She had all day to dream of boys and their shenanigans, lean men and leaner boys. She felt confident and closed her eyes.

"But what did become of Dody's little girl...?" The well! Had she drowned in the well? The old lady pulled herself up from her chair, "Get out of the way, Bunce!" and started rummaging in a desk drawer; a handful of old and faded pictures, round ones and square ones, slid onto the floor. "Darn!" Then she saw the little daguerreotype, velvet-lined, looking right at her on the desk. Lisa! It was Lisa who drowned in the well, her own baby; it kept escaping her.

"Lisa drowned in the well," she said, as if she were disciplining her old self. "It couldn't be helped." And Dody's little daughter disappeared around a corner in her mind, for good.

Two years ago the State police had come upon a crumpled old woman in her Sunday clothes, lying in the ravine. "Dead as a mackerel," the captain said, "too bad."

"Suicide," they wrote, and that had been Dody's little girl, the one Maisie mislaid in her old head. No relatives could be located but the old woman held in her hand a letter from New York City that read, Dear Mama: I can't come home for Christmas. The old woman, they said, had worn a path to the ravine, must have considered the jump a long time, and finally, armed with her explanation to God in her daughter's handwriting, had just fallen off on purpose; only a nine-foot drop, but enough, enough for the poor old thing. It was easy, easier than putting out the cat and climbing upstairs to bed, alone. Long since gone off in his buggy in the clouds was the old doctor who would have identified her by any strawberry mark or evil stain upon her broken body, excepting when Maisie thought she heard him and his bony nag with the heaves, outside. "Come in, Doctor Edwards, and sit by the fire, it's a wretched night."

"Tell me about Lisa, again," said Janey, her eyes shining, and the old lady told her over and over and over.

"Did she look like me, Granny?"

"Yes and no, she did and she didn't, she was prettier 'n you."

"Oh. Did everybody cry, Granny, hard?"

"It couldn't be helped."

"Suppose I fell in the well and drowned, would everybody cry, even Mama?"

"Go along, child."

"Can I have a television for Christmas?"

"Certainly."

"Toodle-loo, Granny."

"Toodle-loo," said the old lady. "Toodle-loo," she repeated to herself and chuckled., "Humph," she said, catching herself. Lamby stood there with her milk shake powdered with nutmeg.

"Goodnight, Ma-Ma, I hope you sleep well."

"I shan't."

"Don't then," said Lamby to herself.