The Memoirs Of Maisie

"WHAT'S become of Colin?" said the old lady suddenly, looking directly at Sissy. "Who?" said Sissy, startled.

"You know who," said the old lady, and for a moment she did, too, but it was passing quickly away from her. "Colin," she repeated and looked questioningly at Paula, could she be mistaken?

Paula shook her head, "I don't know any Colin," she said, "Granny."

"Lamby?"

Everyone but Sissy looked at Lamby. The old lady, chagrined at the sudden loss of a perfectly sensible recollection, laughed feebly and shook her finger at her eldest daughter. "One of Lamby's beaux," she said, "handsome, too! What's become of Colin?" she said, not caring any more.

"Colin-Olin-Bolin-John," singsonged Janey, "Colin-Folin-Wolin-Molin..."

"Uh! Uh! Uh!" warned Granny.

"Eeef, ieef, girnmie piefa pief," persisted Janey.

"Leave the table, child," said Granny, paling, "at once!"

"Oh, Ma-Ma, she didn't say anything."

"She will," said Granny, "forewarned is forearmed."

"Look!" cried Janey, "I've got four arms," and she stuck out her legs.

"I think you'd better go now," said Sissy, but she was relieved at Janey's spotlighting the attention, taking Ma-Ma's obviously perfectly good recollection out of the room with her.

"'Night," said Janey, good-naturedly. "Woof, woof, I'm a dog. I'm Colin-Olin."

Sissy saw a mild revival of interest cross the old lady's face and turned away but she felt her mother's look, she was struggling to remember, "Botheration!" she said.

"Don't trouble yourself, Ma-Ma," said Sissy, feeling ashamed of her deceit.

"I'll thank you to mind your own business," snapped the old lady. "Where's Daisy traipsed off to now," she added.

As it wasn't really a question, no one answered, but again Sissy was reprieved. At some crossroads in her mother's mind Sissy and Colin stood close together in each other's arms. It was with Colin she had become an adulteress; it was for Colin she wore the letter A that Ma-Ma visualized on her bosom.

"Paula," said the old lady, determined to converse, "what are you up to tonight?"

"Nothing much, Granny."

"I asked you a civil question and I expect a civil answer," Granny quoted from way back.

"But I'm just going to the movies with some friends, Granny."

"Who is he?" said the old lady, her mind still on the opposite sex.

"I really don't know," said Paula, patiently. "Frances' brother is home; it's a blind date."

"Poor dear," said Granny without any feeling. "I see better'n I ever did."

"Well," said Lamby to her sister on the porch, "an elephant never forgets."

If only Sissy could, but it was not to be expected with that Colin, the memory of whom, which she did not fight too hard against, still thrilled her. Her short and passionate mutiny, if that was it, against domesticity and trivialia and the unconditional devotion of a good man, her husband, had created almost, Colin. A business acquaintance of his, a fellow commuter, he had been right there all along but Sissy had not felt the need of him. She had listened out of inertia and a sort of bred-in politeness and with some distaste to his wife's dangling confidences and opaque criticisms. Sissy distinctly felt that the whole thing was in frightfully bad taste, not so much Colin's philandering which was none of her business, but the discontented and pouting wife's discussion, at all, of her mate. Sissy knew that her own husband, good and intelligent as he was in an uncontroversial way, irritated her a little at times, but to discuss one's husband with another woman she felt to be at least common and really disloyal. Even after her affair with Colin she did not feel disloyal or mean, whereas the other woman's betrayal seemed to her unforgivable, treasonable and disgusting. Her only remorse, which was not exactly remorse, it might be called a dissatisfaction with herself, was a conjectural uneasiness without definitive subject matter. Could she have held Colin? Sissy had never the least bit doubted, or lacked confidence in, herself, her woman self, before. The memory of what she had no way of solving or proving to herself tagged along after her at intervals and spoiled a little the moving beauty of a love that was so inexpedient and selfish like a diamond; something that could not be deducted, could not be "used," unmotivated, unrewarding. Convenience did not enter into it, it had taken courage, too; it was lovely....

While Lamby had been born with a sheaf of black hair down her back, disgusting her mother, frightening her a little (a monster?), and sported to this day a line of feathery hair etched down the center of her belly like the boys, Sissy was without doubt a female from the start. From the word go-she had; and Maisie aided and abetted her wholesome femininity. Lamby's undernourished womb, from the beginning, had long since shriveled and dried up, but as long as she could remember she had felt the disquieting pain, the gnawing physical frustration of an everlasting menopause, and had screamed, as a girl, with crampy pains that didn't make sense, the clenched fists of abortive and decimated, impoverished womanhood, poor thing, non sum qualis eram-born too soon, of a long line of conventionals who drew with a heavy pencil a line that did not deviate, between the sexes. Talents built on similar frustrations as hers were not encouraged, or considered by Lamby herself; Lamby didn't want votes for women, or a career, or even free will; Congress did not beckon. As has been pointed out, she wanted only what she wanted and went so far as to shop for secondary sex characteristics in the better shops and seek for an ecstasy in the fiery oblivion she kept on a shelf. No one can say she did not try or that she gave up easily.

But Sissy, purely female from birth, couldn't help herself, and without any effort flourished like a young willow that thinks with its roots and wins prizes with its foliage. Think of the infinite way-backness and uncountable parental and ancestral traits that heaped up to produce at long last, side by side, out of the very same womb, sisters in name only. (For the skeptical, Maisie's adultery had preceded by a number of years the conception of these twain.)

As adolescents, the bloodcurdling rows of Sissy and Lamby had shaken the foundations. The wallpaper curled as if in anguish, little bits of plaster piled up in the corners, the dogs fled, their tails between their legs, the premises, the cats arched their backs and spat sideways. Ma-Ma had trembled and the old man paled- what in Heaven's name had he begot at last! And he felt his years.

"Nasty, dirty, flea-bitten mucker!" Lamby screamed, beside herself.

And Sissy spit at her, her cheeks flaming and her blue eyes black, and shooting sparks. "Old maid!" she yelled.

Then Lamby would let out a shriek and rush to her room and, with a pencil stub picked up at random, write the four-letter word she had heard the cook use when she burned her finger, all over the portrait of Sissy, hand-painted, that Ma-Ma had hung in her room until the lead was shattered, and she herself relieved; next day to wash it off in fear. And then the sweet face with cheeks like peppermint candy and wheat-yellow curls would have its respite and Sissy herself after a long innocent sleep would resemble it again in the morning. But Sissy, blonde as an egg and good as the gold that made her look golden, was the one who topped both the cook and Lamby with an expression written in rounded characters that she slipped under her sister's door, after such a scene as has been described, for her to find in the morning. Premeditated, knowing its effect on Lamby, it was each time a continuous Chinese torture rather than a coup de grace, and a sin. All the venous impure blood in Lamby's system would climb into her head and her ears ached with it; her eyes became bloodshot with its overflow and her narrow face, suffused with it, turned almost black. It was Sissy's sin but Lamby did the blushing. It was Lamby's shame. That Lamby was evil, then, and Sissy innocent seems to be it, but whether it is true or merely apparent does not even remain to be seen because that is the way it always was and that is the way it would stay. Lamby had a knowledge without being told, of evil, sensed very well what the phrase meant. Sissy didn't and never really would. "Love me," she said and meant it. What her beaux, her husband, Colin thought, is aside the point and bestride the problem. That Sissy seemed to seduce easily is part and parcel of her, what one might rightly call innocence. "Love me," she said and love is all she saw shining out of her lovers' eyes and all she felt, followed by no shame whatever, ever. She was without the necessary knowledge of evil, clinching it, that cannot be taught and cannot be acquired; and Lamby, in her solitary room, next door, not exactly frigid, but certainly impotent, a female babilano, born with original sin imprinted in her plasmic conscience, suffered doubly, for herself, and vicariously, it seemed, or really and truly, for the sloe-eyed, rose-cheeked sister who would never really know what guilt was, like Chloe, little love.

Well, could she have held Colin? It was the only doubt in her love life. After she created him it had been easy to love him and she gave him an accumulation of dreams that had been building up in her like a sweet sap that was ready to be tapped. Colin was ready because that was his state of mind as regards pretty women. He knew from experience that a voluptuary lay only partially sleeping in Sissy but he also knew in this instance that it should not be startled and could not be gradually seduced with goodies. He was sure that Sissy did not give him a thought, scarcely knew he existed, which was true, and would snub him good if he laid a hand on her or whispered in her ear. But he was tired of pretty Mrs. S --, and in looking about for something else halfheartedly, saw no one that he couldn't have and no one that he wanted enough to go all over it again, the future assured, the end in sight, and tears. Myra S--, really pretty, was indiscreet and was capable of making scenes. He was so fed up with her deep and moony stares, her little attentions under the card table, as it were, that he would have liked to strangle her. No woman ever really repelled him but stupid women irritated his nerves after the event and their clinging fingers and obvious everlasting built-in desire cooled him off for good. He would have liked to insult Mrs. S--in some physical brutish way. "Look, it's gone," he would tell her. She misunderstood his intent look as he really thought he'd do just that, and at her acknowledging smile over her two no-trump he lowered his eyes. "Look, I'm dummy. I'm going out for a smoke," he said and went outside into the shrubbery, and that's where pretty Mrs. S--, thinking it was a ruse and a rendezvous with herself, found him with Sissy after she had overbid and hastily played out her hand in spades. "I'm dummy," she said, and wasn't she.

As for Sissy, trapped in the shrubbery of her own free will, the time had come; it looked like infidelity) her marriage vows a scrap of paper, sealing her infamy with a kiss, but she had simply been punctual at a meeting prerequisite to an adultery which she did not plan but which she would commit. She was not predatory, neither was she callous, but she was impartial, as has been said, and as to be impartial in its big sense is to be virtuous, Sissy, although we cannot call her immaculate, virginibus, puerisqtie, neither should we "sing Miserere" or "cry peccavi"; she didn't, and wouldn't. Let Lamby, befogged with liquor and lecherous yearnings, misbegotten, weep.

Sissy smiled.

If she had been aware of the assignation and its significance she might have said, "It is exactly half past eleven, you are right on time," but she thought she had gone to the mint bed for fresh late mint, cold and stunted but aromatic, for some juleps. She even, in her innocence, was longing for the little party at her house to break up so that she could go to bed (alone).

"Sissy."

"Colin."

He knew better than to wait a split second. The pomegranate that had gleamed on a limb too high for him to reach, shivered and fell away from its meager branch and fell into his outstretched hands. The sensualist, the carpet knight, the crapulous, held in his arms the woman he had not dared even dream of possessing and, lazy, had not planned to seduce. He moved his big hands over her responsive body gently, so gently, as if she might break, and waited for her to lift up her mouth. When she did he took her lips inside his own with a genuine sob. Completely off his guard with the purity of his real desire, tears jumped into his eyes, his vocal cords thickened and shortened, he could not speak, and he clung to her sweet wet mouth as if, starving, he sucked at his mother's breast. He felt his knees as weak as water and it was Sissy whose loins supported his. The moment, that was after all a moment only, disengaged itself from time and stood still. Neither spoke, neither advanced or retreated, the intimate pose of love looked like a white statue in the park, a bent and tender head, a raised and rapturous face. The long and ardent columnlike legs, the balance of perfection, the ease and grace of an anonymous and wordless architecture built itself up in that moment from what seemed like nothing but it was, wasn't it, an idea, a concentration, the stuff that builds pyramids. Unworthy as Colin was, he shared in this handsome performance, and a pure white heat, perhaps, burnt up any impurities in the mixture.

Sissy, being a woman, clung to the precious illusion, but Colin knew, as he returned to the house, even before he met Myra's eyes, that he had been fooled. He felt as if he had been lifted out of a magician's hat by the ears and exposed to ridicule, a wet and slinky, pink-eyed rabbit.

Away from Sissy, he reverted to type and imagined snares, laid delusions and set a score of booby traps to catch her, but he needn't have. She was right there. Still he believed she was inaccessible and made plans to seduce her; he needed it that way. Bored as he was with the usual thing, almost sick of victory, he nevertheless, from habit, or because he thought, and was proud of it, that he had the formula and it was a shame to waste it, determined to pursue and possess a virtuous woman, Sissy, and retire. Yes, he meant just that, retire.

The memory of what Sissy did to him in that moment stung him. The hunter had been succored by the hunted, his wounds licked. The woman had been happy without him. He had seen the rapt look that he had not anticipated, that he had not really, he himself, induced, and it was as if, in his terrible vanity, he felt that the woman, the special woman, had done it to herself, and he was not far from wrong.

Overcome, unprepared, abashed at true love staring him in the face, the philanderer, the make-believe lover, the fornicator, was in that brief encounter unmanned in the shrubbery, impotent as a fish, and Sissy hadn't even noticed it!

Well, wasn't Sissy the silly thing.

Colin, ashamed of his love that had smote him from behind, as it were, when he wasn't looking, and humiliated by his momentary loss of virility in the loving embrace of a good woman, returned to Myra and without any palaver or baby talk readjusted himself, one might say, temporarily. Not having read anything much, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal, a lot of silly and sometimes pathetic, sometimes threatening, love letters addressed to himself, and maybe when he was a boy, A Tale of Two Cities, and without insight, Colin didn't know that cohabiting with Myra wouldn't affect his love for Sissy; a man of action has to find things out the hard way.

So he returned almost at once to her and she expected him, did not imagine that he was suffering or suspect him of infidelity to herself.

And at last in her arms he gave her, made her, that which had been written, it looked as if, beforehand; but not, strictly speaking, of his own accord! Furious at himself for this "boy's love," this integrated serious thing, this sentiment, for Sissy, this tenderness and transport that unnerved him, he tried hard to break away from it, return to what he thought of as the male prerogative, his dynastic rights, almost, his pashalic bumbledom. He felt, it is true, like a woman in Sissy's embrace, seduced each time by an Amazon who took his sword away and swooningly fell upon it, depriving him at the same time of his only weapon and his manhood. He hated her happiness and his own-unprovoked -as if he dreamed it. He was really a misogynist, hater of women. Sissy spoiled his percentage and his average.

But he stopped seeing Myra, avoided her as if she were poison now, instead of the antidote he imagined she would be. Smitten, lovesick, he hung on the lips of Dido, some spell, some witchcraft reversing that sublime and simple vision, "Dido hanging on the lips of Aeneas." He was Sissy's captive, and so she returned to her family and almost drove the knave of hearts mad with her queenship, her not-thereness. Knowing that the formula was obsolete, he was indeed lost. Should he wait everlastingly in the shrubbery? That he was incapable of.

When Colin's wife came to tell Sissy that they were moving to Minneapolis, Sissy wasn't listening. Dreaming of Colin, remembering the feel of her body in his arms like a silver fork in its mold, she was letting reality slide, to Sissy there was such a thing as too much and she was taking a rest from Colin in order, too, to watch him in her mind's eye, go over the past thrills, anticipate the future ones, because she was all woman really, no single-breasted Amazon at all; Colin's imaginings, if she had known them, would make her laugh, "Silly Colin!"

Weeks later Sissy woke up and realized he was gone. "Why didn't somebody tell me?" Still she didn't fret overmuch or take on or get panicky, and gradually he receded in her memories, leaving that doubt, reinforced, but not much, by pretty Mrs. S--'s gossip, "I don't know the woman who could hold Colin," and maybe she was right. Sissy, pregnant again, with Maggie, was content, it was the thing she did best, and in her mind there was no connection between childbearing and passion. Not that she did not know, if she was asked, that one was the cause of the other, but she voluntarily separated big things, perhaps to enjoy them more, concentrate on each, and her perseverance amounted to real talent. Just as Maisie, there is no way of knowing whether for the same reason, never asked herself any questions of who begot whom, neither did Sissy; they were her babies, each one a kind of, if not virgin, vestal birth. If one day she should take up the study of morals, she would do a good job on it and not weaken her thesis by a too personal approach. In a way she was a thinker but without portfolio; you wouldn't guess it. Sissy, contented, didn't fret, serene, didn't, like a young and confident wife, wonder now she had him how to hold him; the suspicion that she hadn't, and could she have, came much later when he wasn't available. She might, indeed, not even have wanted him if she had had to devise ways and means, you know, like "See what a good cook I am," no curl-papers, feminine hygiene. What she didn't count on, or not count on, was Colin's easy give-up point. Colin wasn't a poet, he was at heart, to mix a metaphor, a fornicator. He did love Sissy, but he didn't like it and even if he did (like it) he was just a male and couldn't wait. Well, he was stupid.

Sissy didn't wonder, after Colin, why she wanted a room of her own, she just did. She wasn't fussy but gradually her husband's absent-minded habits, no offense intended, made her blush, at least raised the hair on the back of her neck. Sissy's husband, insensitive, undressed himself with a bang and left his trousers in a lump; vaguely eyeing his nudity in the long mirror, he gestured to the president of the board and repeated his lines; crossing the room, his private parts idly swinging against his thighs, he embroidered his thesis, and with a "thank-you-have-I-made-myself-clear-gentlemen" he did not close the door in the bathroom. So Sissy, if she had been a reader of books, preferred a room of her own to a room with a view. It didn't mean a bit that she didn't love him. She loved him just as much as ever and Colin was almost out of her blood. It had been an acute attack and was about over, but it left her, as we have said, with a stutter, a slight limp, as it were, a myopia as she gazed inward... "Could I have...?"

A note from Myra in the morning's mail said, Colin is dead, and it ended in the he she would, being like that, eventually, perhaps already, believe, of course we were just good friends. Sissy had long since, without questioning herself, moved back into her husband's room and didn't mind any more his behaviorism. After Maggie and then, a little later, Janey, God laid his hand on her and said, "Enough," and a gentle dose of the menopause put an end to her greatest talent, the thing she did best, and Sissy, rested, bloomed.

Colin is dead, the letter said.

"Sissy, what are you staring at?" said the old lady.

"Colin is dead," said Sissy out loud.

"Colin... Colin... never heard of him."

"He was," said Sissy, "a friend of mine," but this lie, this implied lie, equivocation at least, made her frown, she wanted to get away from Myra, the Myras, all of them. "I mean, Ma-Ma," and she looked steadily at the old lady, "I loved him." She meant the act itself.

Maisie, apperceptive from fasting and a minimum of sleep, sensed, without any premise or logic (because she really didn't know what Sissy was talking about) the adultery that she had long ago known about, but, past the age of self-identification, thought no more of it than she did, except when the very cat outstared her, her own.

"Shucks," she said.

At news of Colin's death, the tenuous string attached, not tied around Sissy's little finger to remind her, but attached to her viscera, gave way and was absorbed. What had been a slight distortion in her character, not unattractive, disappeared and she lost something, besides Colin, for good.

"Where's Lamby, shall I have her make your toddy?" said Sissy.

"Half sea's over, three sheets in the wind," the old lady said clearly. "Tipsy as David's sow."

"Ma-Ma! How can you say such things!" (So Maisie knew!)

The old lady chuckled. "I'm not dead yet," she said. "Jelly beans," she added, fondly, "is what I like."

Janey, hopping into the room from school, heard the last words of the old lady. "Me, too, slurp, slurp!" she said. "Where's Grant's tomb, Granny?"

"Humph," said the old lady, not following.

"Did you know President Grant, Granny?"

"He spit too much is all I can say."

Janey giggled, "Ptui-ptui."

"Janey!" warned Sissy.

"Leave the child alone, she has an inquiring mind," said the old lady. "Where did you say you saw him?"

"His tomb, Granny..."

"Oh, just like him," said Granny. "Some things are better left unsaid," she added sententiously.

"Darn old homework," said Janey. "Who cares about the Boston Tea Party."

"It was rather dull," said the old lady. "I sat next to old Mrs. McDaniel... she's aged."

She met Janey's impudent stare unblinkingly and Janey must have felt the need of topping the old lady's complacency.

"Brothers and sisters have I none but that man's father is my father's son," she said, looking directly at Maisie.

"Exactly," said Maisie, not the least nonplused, but "The child is brutal," she thought, "and wishes to intimidate me."

"Oh, big deal," said Janey sarcastically, talking to some invisible one around the corner. "Ver-ry funny!"

Sissy shook her head; the codes, if that is what they were, of Maisie and Janey evaded her, but that each led a satisfactory and even sensible inner life, even as she did, she felt was true. She didn't think it out but she knew it. Paula, too, and Maggie, she believed were sane. Lamby? They all had phases. No one of them could exactly decode the other but there was a message in each. Who knows the logic of the aged, the senile, which cannot be dismissed as vagaries or aberrations, and Paula, adolescent, what motivated her and what was her explanation? Maggie, fifteen, moody and uneasy, what was her thesis and what sort of decorum did they all make together? A sedimentation test, a metabolic reading, a blood count and a cardiograph, what would it prove? Presbyopia in Maisie, anemia in Maggie, a heart murmur in Paula, premenstrual symptoms in Janey? Maybe Sissy herself, sanest of the lot now that the little piece of catgut was absorbed that had tugged at her viscera and the menopause had cured her of trying, it looked like, to people the earth (a compulsion, it seemed), had a benign tumor.

"What about Nagasaki and Hiroshima?" said Janey, continuing her quiz, wiggling and twisting.

"Fool inventors!" snorted Maisie, and "Bang! Bang! You're dead," she said pointing her trembling old finger at Janey.

"Can you tie a bowline on a bight?" Janey yelled, "Granny!"

"Janey, stop it," said Sissy, "leave your Granny alone and do your own homework, Granny's tired."

"There's one born every minute," sighed the old lady, closing her eyes.

"Janey," she said opening them again, "don't go near the well."

Janey went out in the kitchen and made herself a big peanut butter sandwich.

"You'll spoil your supper," said Deirdre.

"I'm going to jump in the well!" said Janey, her mouth full, it had just come to her and her eyes popped.

"Shame on you, you'll get your feet wet," said Deirdre, "go along with you now."

Janey, without any map, no plans, no idea of navigation, went straight to the spot where if there really was a well there it would be. The old house, a shell, a phantom, bent over like an aged crone, off center and leaning to one side, Janey had seen before and heard it called a crying shame. The bricks of the chimney had gradually crept down its roofs and heaped up on the ground and they overlapped each other as if the turning of the earth on its axis had accomplished the design and distributed them like steps; the big cellar door gaped like a wound; the glass in the windows was shattered; an old iron bedstead could be seen listing with the upstairs floor and a chamber pot with blue flowers on it stood on the rotten kitchen table; the door off its hinges hanging, as it were, by a thread. A sign said, No trespassing. No hunting. No fishing. It was a forbidden place, a rickety, dangerous booby trap and Janey's heart beat fast as she disobeyed a long-standing rule, "Keep away from the old house, it's rotten." As for the well in Granny's admonition, no one thought seriously of that, that was way back; no one even knew which side of the Mason and Dixon line it was situated and it was even considered a little hole in the old lady's tympanum by some. Lisa? Maybe. But Janey recognized the well the minute she saw it, the old lady's stories made perfectly good sense to her, and she climbed up its side sticking her sneakered toes into the crevices, and finally straddled it and looked down.

"Crisis!" she said. "It must be fifty miles deep!"

Although the top of the well was several feet across, the bottom way down there looked no bigger than a little round mirror in Paula's compact, a black mirror, but it reflected Jane's image clearly, her impudent little face, her round eyes, her saucy mouth. She raised her hand to her forehead and it did, too. "Hello!" she called down to it but it didn't answer.

"Crisis!" she said again.

She looked around her and found a stone and dropped it in. It seemed to take a long time to fall. Janey had time to wonder if it would ever reach bottom... Plunk! The dead wet sound came back up the well a good minute, she thought, after she saw the image of herself break into a hundred pieces and settle back looking like molasses in a pan.

Janey looked a funny little Narcissus staring down into the old well; she sat comfortably now, for her, on the thick cold edge of it, a three-point sitting, her bottom and one foot flat on either rounded side, her knees up, her head between them. She wore jeans and a sweater so it was easy and she stayed like that almost motionless, her curls hanging down her cheeks, for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours.

Janey's daydream, the image of herself focusing her attention, was good literature, it had a beginning, a middle and an end, it had scenery, costumes, minor characters, paragraphs, chapters, asterisks and compound sentences, it even scanned, it had a love interest, and she sat like a lotus, symbolic, atop the stinking old well....

Indispensable Janey's reign was not so much a dictatorship as a blessing and her subjects knelt before her bier and wept at her untimely end. They braided tuberoses into her hair....

A little stiff and cold, hungry, Janey wiped the tears away with the back of her hand; her heart was beating in great slow throbs and her face was flushed; a fear she could not place made her jump when an old apple fell off a nearby tree and hit the ground hard. The moment-ago princess, dressed in cloth of gold and pearls in her ears, nimbly stood up, her legs apart, over the ancient well and saw herself, a queer triangle with a tiny head, reflected in its depths. "If I were a boy," she whispered and she unzipped the fly in her jeans.

But the fear came over her, a feeling of guilt, not so much for her straddling pretense as for her long self-centered daydream that had been perfectly innocent, so lovely. These are things not easy to explain, but when she got home late for her supper she tried to act as if she had been there all along doing her homework.

"Where have you been?"

"What have you been doing?"

"Nothing," said Janey, and she blushed, "I wasn't doing anything," and her mouth felt dry for her sin, her nameless sin, her headless, legless sin like a glob of protoplasm, if she had been able to visualize it.

In the meantime, in Janey's absence, the old lady had an experience that shook her, and when Sissy came in and saw her cheeks, the color of a leaden sky, she was worried. She did not want to startle or irritate the old lady and said nothing. She went around the room straightening up, pretending to.

"Ma-Ma?"

Maisie did not answer, although her eyes were open, she was not feigning sleep.

"Would you like me to call Doctor Taylor?" Sissy suggested gently.

"Stuff and nonsense!" the old lady quickly replied. "I'm not pregnant."

Sissy, relieved, laughed; a little of the old lady's own peculiar color came back into her face. It was passing, whatever it was.

"Bumpkin," she said, "slubberdegullion, embezzler!"

The old man had got in somehow without anyone (where had Deirdre been?) seeing him or hearing him. Bunce had, in fact, Bunce, usually cross and suspicious of strangers, feebly wagged his tail and the orange and black cat had smiled. He had come into the room and sat down and looked at Maisie, a strange grin on his wrinkled face, and made a timid gesture of almost supplication. Maisie was never startled at apparitions and did not suspect at first that this old creature of skin and bone, withered and dehydrated like an insect on a pin, might be, for instance, a burglar, a madman, the radio repairer. She meant to say, thought she said (as a person in a dream says out loud different things than he is dreaming), "What can I do for you, my good man?" but she said softly, "Philip?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Landsdowne?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You've aged."

"Haven't we all, ma'am."

"You might have written!"

Maisie pouted and a young, almost flirtatious look passed over her face, lightening it.

The old man tremblingly wiped his dripping rheumy eyes with a dirty handkerchief. "Bin marchin' all day," he said. "Marchin' and marchin' and marchin', marchin' through Georgia."

"What!" said Maisie; she inspected his ragged clothes. "What uniform is that?" she said, suspicious.

"Confederate, ma'am," he said, "I'm proud to say, and I don't take no nonsense from Yankees!"

"Perhaps you did not mean to say 'Marchin' through Georgia,'" said the old lady, intent for his answer, aware that he was trapped. She forgot who he was, felt only a desire to win. But she outdistanced herself and before he could answer, as he opened his mouth to reply, she said, "Jeff Davis is the president of the Confederacy." She had meant to quiz him-"Who, my good man, is the president of the Confederacy?" she had meant to say.

"That's right," said the old man.

"What?"

"Ole Jeff, he's president all right, heard it on the radio."

"I was forgetting myself," said Maisie politely, "have you dined?"

"A cup of coffee," the old man whimpered, "a cup of coffee, if it please your majesty... the parade..."

"Parade?"

"Was long."

The old man, with an effort, got up out of the chair and pretending to shoulder a gun straightened himself and took a few marching steps.

"Just before the Battle, Mother," he quavered.

"Be seated," said Maisie, "and I'll ring for tea."

"If you could spare a dime..."

"A singular request," said Maisie haughtily. "What regiment were you in?"

"I was a bugler," said the old man cajolingly. "I was only fifteen... a dime, ma'am, from those as can spare it to a poor ole man, ol'est livin' veteran, a ole sojer who fought and died for his country... little thanks," he whined, "from the likes of pretty ladies like you." He eyed her to see the effect of his flattery.

"You may go," said the old lady. "I'll ring."

The old man didn't budge.

"Begone! I have rung," said Maisie.

The old man edged toward the door, but first he spit on the floor. "Go on an' ring, y'ole whore, ring and dingdong to yer!" He stumbled out. "Dingdong, ding-dong! Toot toot! Git off the track...." He was gone.

"Daisy!" called the old lady feebly.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why didn't you come when I rang?"

"Ma-Ma," said Sissy, "you were dreaming."

"I shall have my Dad dismiss him for his impertinence," said the old lady with some spirit.

"Who, Ma-Ma?" said Sissy.

"That impudent groom," she said, and the whole incident, even the effect on her old blood vessels, passed away from her.

"Kitty?" she said to the cat. The cat looked out the window and said nothing; only the last inch of her tail moved irritably. Could she, too, have been misled? Who was the aged derivative, a veteran of what wars on what borders? Along what parallel had he marched? Had he been there at all? He must have been. Not with all her genius could the matriarch have figged him up out of her imagination with all the bits of this and that from the past, and then had him call her that private name to which she alone was entitled.

"I saw him," said Janey at supper.

"Who?" said Sissy. The old lady didn't look up, she was mincingly chewing her creamed chicken with her front teeth and was absorbed in what she was doing. She did not want to spill.

"The kindly old investigator, goin' along talking to himself," said Janey. "You know what?"

"Oh, must we," said Paula.

"Down boy," said Janey. "Mummy?"

"Yes, dear."

"You know my teacher, well you know what she wears around her neck? She has a gold chain and guess what? Ugh... fish again..."

"Mind your manners," said the old lady. "Think of the starving Armenians."

"Who?"

"You know who."

"Mummy?"

"Yes, dear."

"It's an eye! It really is, cross my heart and hope to die, a whole big blue gorgeous eye in glass! It's her husband's eye, he's dead, ugh!"

Janey, so cute, so normal, good-natured and lovable, like a cupcake in this family of highly seasoned fritters, you might say. Paula, though she still looked innocent, was self-convicted, Jimmy had left a scar on her ego, too; Maggie was thinking up hurdles and revenges, longing for seduction. Lamby was shortening the intervals between her "high lonesomes," Maisie exaggerating longevity while she probed into the past, even if it hurt, something compelling her, like a single-minded archeologist, to search in sealed places for proof of an existence she meanwhile ignored. The shaky aged clock hummed and ticked and rang out the passage of the irrevocable and the irretrievable, the young ones lengthening out and swelling into womanhood, the older ones just perceptibly dehydrating, shrinking a little, each in her way sublimating, compromising, not expecting too much any more. "She'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes!" bawled out Janey. She saw herself in diminution, no bigger than a glittering pin, the perspective following her like a wake behind a ship. She waited for her tiny self to dip and disappear behind the horizon.

Way down deep Janey was playing the fool, perhaps, because she was lonesome, she was clowning for air, anxiety was inherent in her, she felt but could not express it, outside the pale, as it were, of family life. Her nightmares had no subject matter, like her fears they were borderless, without circumference, while Lamby, old enough to know better, had the real thing: She felt her hands closing around the old lady's throat and she woke again and again from the homicidal dream in an agonized sweat. Maggie, too, had minor night terrors, too ridiculous to count, and so she never told, never wept in her mother's arms as Janey sometimes did, because how could she explain that she was a clothespin! Janey's healthy yells, "Help, there's a dinosaur in the bathroom!" didn't presage much.

Maggie, as a little girl, normally ridiculous, thought she was adopted (illegitimate) and she didn't know how close she was to being right, as to fact, at least. At fifteen she stared at Lamby and wondered if she, too, would end up an old maid, unloved, ugly. It looked as if Maggie, if anyone, would, under just the right pressures and circumstances and air currents, make a dramatic appeal for clemency by an overemphasis of some kind, run away to something else, drain the contents of the medicine chest, or climb down into the old well, maybe, and in a trance even drown there, come home a lovely and beloved corpse then, herself peeking through the door at everyone's grief, but it was Janey who wasn't "like that," who did it.

Janey, like Alice, believed in mirrors; she suspected, without the equipment to think it out, her imagination told her, that life went on on both sides of the big mirror over the mantel and that the real one was behind it, not in front of it. People, she was willing to admit, did the same things-the way she did at the bottom of the deep black well-but it meant something else. It meant something much more dignified and beautiful and glorious; it made sense. Wasn't the sky a deeper, stranger, nicer blue and herself more precise? People had to mimic the gestures of the ones behind the mirror, even the cat, eyeing her other self as she assumed angles, knew that, but the ones back there did it for a reason, on purpose; they knew all the answers. Janey raised her arm over her head reflected in the tiny pool but a split second after the image. "I don't want to do that but I've got to because you did," she hollered down the well. She stuck out her tongue. "You made me," she cried, and a murmur and a trickle and a whisper did not deny it.

Analogically, too, we should consider, even reflect, on Paula: Hadn't Paula thoughtlessly (but impelled!) reflected the old lady in her blue silk gown and come to grief from some error in timing, maybe, in Jimmy's arms (you little whore! how it stung her), but no wound had been inflicted on Maisie who knew what she was doing "back there" in Ferris' embrace and the nasty word had thrilled her, Ferris become her subject.

And Janey had to mimic on this side of life what Lisa did on that. She had all the details from Granny, hadn't she, but something didn't click or fit, she didn't really know what she was doing. Lisa did and smiled adorably out of the blue velvet frame. (Love me, kiss me.)

"Lisa!" called Janey. "Who am I?"

The old lady had forgotten why Janey shouldn't go near the well, she just kept on saying it, the way the rest of us say, "Don't point." Why? Well, this is hardly the time to go into that: the evil eye, the hex, the spit an' image stuck with pins to induce and hurry up the demise of one's enemy. Don't point, don't cast that spell, and gradually a hidden reference is all that is left: Don't point. The reason is forgotten, buried deep in the ancestral what-for and it's just plain bad manners. And Granny's "don't go near the well," with Lisa long since dead and twice obliterated in her old mind, is nothing much. That it seemed a presentiment after the fact can only be ridiculous, in the very language itself....

"Tell me about the olden days," said Janey.

The old lady smiled.

"'You ain't got no yeller calico?' 'Who says I ain't got no yeller calico?' 'I ain't says you got no yeller calico-I asks you, is you!'"

Janey rolled her eyes and followed the funny joky story out of Granny's past. "I'sa comin' though my haid is bandy leo," she caroled and Granny tapped her foot.

But Janey, very young, came back to the point.

"What really happened to Lisa, Granny, honest and truly, cross your heart and hope to die."

"Bessie?" said the old lady looking directly at Janey who resembled no one at all, and wondered who she was.

"No, Lisa."

"Don't catechize me," said Granny querulously, "I've work to do."

"I've been workin' on the railroad, all-the-live-long-day," sang Janey and the old lady hummed the tune, too, in her head.

"Well, toodle-loo," said Janey, politely, "sleep tight."

The old lady had already closed her eyes. "Tell them," she murmured, "that I am not at home."

"Did you call, ma'am?" said Deirdre at the door.

The old lady jumped. "Land sakes, child!" she said.

"Would you like anything?"

"If Mrs. Wharton calls again with Mr. James, tell them I am not at home," said the old lady.

"Yes, ma'am," said Deirdre tactfully. "Saints preserve us," she said in the kitchen and crossed herself, "she's touched."

Corybantic maybe she was, Maisie, but she spent a pleasant half hour planning the menus for the little men of distinction who would be home from New Haven for the holidays, and wrote a spirited letter to The New York Times of the disgrace to all of Lobby Prison where she said her husband's two brothers were still incarcerated although the war was over. "My heart bleeds," she wrote, "as do the hearts of sisters throughout the civilized world, for this unprecedented abomination in the eyes of our Lord Jesus Christ and I trust, Mr. President, that you will make it your bounden duty to rectify it, at once. I am, Sirs, yours in Jesus Christ, May Sparehawk Herbert, deceased." Maisie wrote her letters on invisible foolscap, one might say, and posted them in hollow imaginary trees, but she enjoyed writing them, nevertheless, and no harm done. The letter finished and signed with her distinguished name, she felt again around her neck the thin arms of the little simian, Bessie.

"May I, may I? Please, Ma-Ma, dear?"

"What, Bessie?"

"Sleep with you know who?"

"Dodge?"

"No, Ma-Ma."

"Dougherty?"

"May I? Yes, yes, Ma-Ma?"

Maisie couldn't remember why she had not let Bessie sleep with the boys but there had been a reason once and it must have been a good one. But Bessie's sweet teasing raised the corners now of her purple lips and, scarcely breathing, so close, in her eleventh hour, to death that she resembled it, she passed from dreaming easily into a light sleep.

"Ma'am?"

"Go 'way, child," said the old lady fretfully, hunching her shoulders. "Begone!" she said and opened her eyes, startled. She stared at Deirdre. Who could she be? "You should have had yourself announced, miss," she said, "and I am not at home to strangers."

"I'm Daisy, ma'am, and..."

"Of course, of course," said the old lady, "as if I didn't know. What is it now, am I to have no peace this day!"

"Captain Ratcliffe to see you, ma'am."

"I said I was not..." began the old lady cantankerously, "what was that?"

"Captain Ratcliffe, ma'am, to see you."

The old lady struggled a moment with her doubts, what interchange of state might this be, was the girl making fun of her?

"Show him in," she said, narrowing her eyes. (She might have said, "I'll see your hand, lay your cards on the table.")

As "Daisy" disappeared for a moment, the old lady snorted. "Now we'll see if that little bog-hopper can produce Captain Ratcliffe," she thought. Things had never taken such a turn before and she had better put a stop to it before it got out of bounds. Suppose Janey were to come home on the arm of Edmund Burke! Ridiculous ghosts! (She meant the live ones.) She felt jealous. "He might have let me know," she growled. "Well..."

"How do you do, ma'am," said a tall and prepossessing young man. He seemed a little shy and did not at once come forward. He smiled, the engaging smile of the very young; he meant it.

"You're taller than I thought you were," said the old lady, immediately accepting him, and touched by his youth and his candid gaze-this was no trick, "and the image of your mother; come, sir, and sit beside me; did you have a stormy passage? Do sit down, you must be tired, dear boy."

"It was nothing," said the young marine, modestly.

"Don't believe him, Granny!" called out Paula coming into the room. "He was the bravest of all. I'm sorry I'm late, Ian, dear. I was baby-sitting."

"Paula, mind your manners and keep your thoughts to yourself!" said the old lady irritated almost beyond endurance by this interruption. "This is Captain Ratcliffe, an old friend of my grandfather's on such and such a side." For the moment, in her annoyance, she forgot that she was his lineal descendant.

"But Granny, I brought him to introduce him to you," said Paula, tactless and happy.

The old lady gave a great "Humph."

"Of course, Granny," said Paula, suddenly realizing the old lady's delusion, "I knew he was your cousin... we're all cousins Ian says."

"I should hope so," said Granny, "I should hope so." She felt better, but the big moment had passed; she tried to regain it. "And Captain John Smith," she said, "he is well? The reprobate, fancy his lying like that... What mischief has he been up to now?"

Paula blushed for her Granny's lunacy, but her young marine smiled gently at the old lady and said, "I don't think he's such a liar, Mrs. Herbert, it has been more or less proved that Pocahontas saved his life."

"You may be right," said the old lady, "it's been a long time, quite a spell."

"Cannibalism," said Ian, his eyes shining, his white teeth glistening, "is one of the unfortunate aftermaths of-well-extreme hunger, if you know what I mean."

"Oh, Ian darling! You're hungry!" Paula jumped up.

"Stand down, Paula," said the old lady, the parliamentary language suiting her mood, she meant it.

"I mean cannibalism in Virginia," said Ian, staring in fascination at Paula's Granny.

"Naturally," said Granny.

"Lord So and So," said Ian, "perhaps you have heard, was himself burned at the stake when it became known that he had-well-ate, I mean eaten, his wife. She was a blonde," he improvised, and he smiled so adorably that both the old lady and the young girl wanted to suckle him. "White meat," he said softly.

"I beg your pardon, Captain," said the old lady, "but my grandfather told me that only Yankees ate each other, I doubt very much..."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but I have just come from a picnic on the St. James and the colonists cooked an Indian..."

"That's different," said the old lady.

"I, myself, prefer blondes," said Ian, looking at Paula. "I like to eat them up." He said this last very low and the old lady became suspicious.

"What are you saying?" she said.

"Granny, dear," said Paula, very pink, "Ian and I are engaged."

"What?"

"We're engaged."

The old lady sighed. "Well, don't overdo it," she said. She raised her hand, and Ian, a nice boy really, and delighted with his new relative, bent his head and kissed it. "I hope I may come again and talk," he said. "May I?"

"Indeed you may, dear," said the old lady. She was almost touched. "Watch out for the redskins, cousin!" She felt as if it was, and yet wasn't, a little joke, and Paula and Ian didn't know either.

Bunce thumped his old balding tail twice, energetically for him, as Ian left, and the cat, who had been audibly washing herself all over, between her legs and behind her ears, during the visit, suddenly leapt off the mantel and skidded sideways in front of him in a bid for his attention as if she wished to prove that she was just as crazy as the old lady.

Well, Paula's blind date had indeed materialized (he saw with his twenty-twenty vision a lot more than most young men) and they planned to marry.

"If she ever finds out you're laughing at her!" said Paula.

"But I'm not. I wasn't," said Ian. "I like the old girl, she-she fascinates me. She's an original." He looked at Paula and an uneasy thought came to him-where had he seen Paula before? In Paris on the boulevard St. Germain? In Essex on a horse? In Amsterdam- that pink buxom Dutch girl? He remembered a nurse who had washed him and tended to his needs and when he was healed slept with him-how many Paulas? But he wanted and needed a Paula. "Come here, Paula."

"Ian?" Paula had seen the expression, an expression of doubt, almost as if he wanted to run, on her lover's face, and the old scar hurt. She wanted to be comforted at her sudden loss of confidence but she was afraid he might think... what who thought...

"Baby doll," he murmured and he kissed and licked up her tears. "You're a sweet thing."

"But not an original," said Paula archly, she couldn't help it.

"God damn," said Ian to himself, "how stupid she is!" but he felt so badly that he had thought what he did not wish to think that he said, "God knows I love you, Paula, don't ever leave me," and he did, as he said it, mean it, he needed her.

"I love you, Ian," said Paula, "how sweet you look in your uniform," and she put her hands on his waist and felt him; what she meant was, "I desire your body"; she wasn't stupid. The English girl had linked her arm in his and pressed her wrist into his hand; "Amedican?" she had said. And the Dutch girl had said, "Bruder?" and thought, "Do it to me"; the girl on the boulevard had said, "It is sharming day, no?" and he had gone home with her. The nurse, without any fooling, had said, "You're well now and can go back the doctor says. You may sleep with me tonight if you like but be sure, to bring--." He censored the nurse as he put his arms around Paula.

"Show me your room, sweet," he said.

"Oh, Ian, no."

"Well, what's in here then," he said and he pushed her gently into the first door on the left. "Come," he said and he eased her willingly enough down beside him. He kissed her mouth and it swelled up and opened for him; he felt each round breast respond, too. He stroked her legs, her smooth thighs.

"Ahhh," said Paula, breaking away from the kiss that was building up into a rhythm in her blood, and again, really this time, he caressed her.

Sure of her, he let go of her, and Paula felt as if she had been pushed off a balcony. Really as if she were falling, she clung around his neck, big tears came out of her eyes and she gave a gulping little sob.

"You are adorable," said Ian, and she really was.

Her passion that had leaped at the feel of his hands and the pull of his mouth on her underlip left her quickly as he disengaged himself, and she stared at him, going back over it in her mind, visualizing what they had looked like together, and her soft and lovely face was such a deep rose that, as the setting sun shone in on it through the window, she looked like a memorial in a church. The light reduced the pupils in her eyes to the size of the head of a jet-black pin and the china blue around them seemed divided in a design like the spokes in a wheel. The pupils grew and diminished, almost, as she breathed.

Ian admired her and knew she was his and was glad. "It will be even better when we are married," he said.

"Yes," said Paula and she saw herself pouring his coffee, thought of, having his babies, "yes, Ian, won't it be wonderful."

Ian saw her naked in his bed and longed for the deep and precious sleep that would be also his... afterwards. Paula would someday ask him why. That terrible oneness that comes over a man, that quick and sudden loss of conflict, so that he is blacked out, becomes no one, with no identity (and he loves it!), that disengagement, she never would understand and might even resent. It's just one of those secrets. Didn't she have hers? She did, but she didn't know it. But wouldn't Ian wonder, too, and think, "Where is she? What is it? What is she keeping from me?" As for his own dark invisibility, nonexistence and nonresistance after the fact, "Sure, what of it?"

The whole family of women loved Ian as if he were a valentine, and each, with the exception of Sissy, felt his physical appeal, his manliness coupled with a winning almost feminine something or other, that made him more than a differentiation of sex and in Paula's case a breadwinner and a satisfaction, later, to her senses every so often-made him an exception, a partner. Sissy looked at Ian and sensed but did not feel, understood but did not partake of, his-sex. It was as if she had, and she had, outgrown him. His youngness did not charm her or weaken her, possibly because her maternal instinct was more than satisfied, it was busy as could be. She recognized in Ian a fine healthy animal with longings, perhaps, beyond his comprehension, but sane, trustworthy, and she was quite content to let him have Paula; she, herself, felt nothing and was glad of it; he was young and warm and damp. Her appraisal was disinterested.

"Your mother is very attractive," said Ian.

"Yes," said Paula, "I'm glad you think so," but she wasn't, she was jealous; even Paula, pretty as could be, was jealous. It was as if Ian had been dropped naked and shining into a savage village of deserted females, their men all gone off to war.

Janey climbed all over him and immodestly straddled him, punched him, wrapped her arms around his legs, pinched and tickled him, nearly swooned with pleasure from a pickaback ride. Every look she gave him was an invitation to lust, straight and simple and pure as a blood transfusion. But if any of the others (what about Ian?) recognized in her cavortings and proddings and pokings the mating instinct of the very young, no one said anything.

"Get off Ian," is all Paula said, "you're mussing him all up."

"Janey, do behave," said Sissy, but that's just what Janey was doing-behaving.

Maggie! Maggie was a parcel of puzzles, a secret mixture, a longing bride of sin, almost, itself, complicated beyond solution, and a variety of moods not even in the books. Her dark eyes brooded on something unmentionable; the taste of blood, her own, was in her mouth and did not sicken her. Was she born possibly in that marsh, that Cephesian marsh, the scene of man's birth according to Pindar, that cat-o'-nine-tails made her blush? Or did Tiki knead her out of red clay mixed with his own blood (New Zealand myth), the incestuous taste lingering on her tongue? Maggie, in a kind of catopsis which was more than perspicacity, knew she was different (illegitimate), dark and stormy like a squall. She longed for an orgasm that would tear her to pieces and cast her into everlasting hell. She longed to drink to the last drop her own sinful blood.... Her shyness was devastating, and Ian felt it. He watched her when she wasn't looking. He saw beneath her sad looks and veiled eyes-danger. He watched her hands when she grasped a doorknob and he shivered.

Ian had been graduated, not with honors, but with regret, by the university which hated to let him go, a healthy, intelligent white man, unique, they felt, in the lot of introspective neurotics, not hale fellow and not well met, whose pigmy libidos longed to return to the maternal womb, uterine brothers all, a fine state of affairs, their names writ in water on the parchment of their diplomas and the university running out of pap and pabulum for such as they. "We're little black sheep who have gone astray-baaa-baaa-baaa."

But the Army and the Navy and the Marines noticed the same thing and they snatched him and tossed him in the flames, as they used the most beautiful maidens to propitiate the vine. They gladly chanced the total sacrifice of Ian and said, "We wish there were more of them." So Ian became a leader of men and he kissed them good-by and wrote home to their mothers; he helped to bury them on the sides of the mountain. But an anger built up in him and the fasting and the enforced insomnia and the bitter cold of the nights and the blood of his friends on his unwashed shirts fed and fattened his slow-burning fury. It went on and on and a kind of lust took hold of him. In his leanness and his hunger he longed for strange food like a pregnant woman; he visualized indecent sandwiches and bitter drinks; and by the light of a single candle he made symbolic drawings that might have decorated the caves of Icelandic wild men fed on tallow alone and blubber. He forgot his home, the campus, his girl, and no longer opened his mail. Then they shot him in the guts where it hurt and hurried him off to save him, gave him a medal and back pay and two weeks in a hospital where the medics tenderly lifted out his insides and put them on a table and examined the coils thoroughly. They sewed him up and left him with the pretty, candid nurse who called his attention to his handsome body and explained, almost pedantically, its possibilities and potentialities. After this real catharsis, this complete examination in the nude, this lesson in reality that matched his maddest and most sickening dreams, it was time to go home and kiss his mother and sisters, shake hands with his father and take his girl to the drugstore for a soda. But the nurse who had smelled more of Lysol than Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass that she used when she was off duty had clinically spoiled him for holding hands with a virgin, and Dad and Mom could wait, so he went to Paris and other capitals that he had read about, until his money gave out, and then with little gifts for his folks and his medal in a box, he left his real life behind and sailed in a slow boat for home. The slower, the better, he was not eager to return. He was surprised to find that when he looked in the mirror over his dresser, he looked exactly the same as when he had left, as if the image had waited for him to return, hadn't budged. "It must be Mom's doing." It was true she had preserved him, him and his belongings and his paraphernalia: "Don't touch anything in Ian's room," she had warned his sisters. "Everything must remain the same," and it seemed to have, even himself. The eyes were as blue-black and clear and bright, the skin warm and smooth, his short brown hair was not touched with grey and his mouth was not grim, but soft and quick to smile as a girl's. He shrugged, mystified, at the young lad in the mirror and his parents said at dinner, "You haven't changed a bit," and, "Of course, Ian's just the same."

He need not face his girl because, as his sister gently told him, she had not waited for him, and the same night he got home he was the blind date that Paula had told Maisie about. "Nothing much," she had said, "I'm just going to the movies"; and now these two planned to marry, and blissfully, night after night, they caressed each other and whispered and anticipated the real thing, popping it up and practicing for perfection. Neither told the other a thing of the wounds each had endured, Paula possibly because at last she had the specific medication, now, that she needed and was healed, and Ian because his mother had, with her powerful maternal concentration, preserved him. It did not enter Ian's consciousness to seduce Paula; he played to his heart's content and she did, too, but he could wait, in this case, as if, oddly enough, it was a negative compulsion, and Paula's maidenhead was as safe as if it were up in her bureau drawer in a silver box with a sapphire on the lid.

But one night when they lay together, Ian looked over Paula's forehead and saw Maggie standing in the doorway, her finger on her lips. Her eyes were like the opaque deep darkness in a shotgun barrel, matching the blackness of the hall behind her. Everyone had long since gone to bed. For some reason Ian did not speak or get up or change the subject; if anything he intensified his caresses and Paula sighed in his arms. Ian let Maggie watch and it heightened his pleasure in her sister. It looked as if Maggie wasn't good for Ian, the sweet Ian who loved Paula, a bit. Maggie wouldn't be good for lots of people, a whole list of them was written down somewhere on a ledger, in a little notebook, too, with what looked like blank pages in Maggie's little-girl desk. Dear Diary...

"I love him!" said Maggie, alone in her room, staring into her mirror. "I love him! What does Paula know of love... as I know of love..." and she looked into a dark and yearning face that had written across it in big letters, unknown. And she did belong to that unclassified minority, one of those dead-end souls, almost, but embodied, deathless; like the "new"

"old" fish-mammal a fisherman off Madagascar hooked the other day and got his reward, too, for suspending Time itself. "Its name is coelacanth," said the professor of ichthyology. But you couldn't call Maggie by any old Greek name.

"Maggie," whispered Ian, "what is the matter?"

"Nothing." Maggie wouldn't sing.

Out of the Cephesian marsh, peopled with cat-o'-nine-tails, analogous to Maggie's imaginary birth, making her different, and out of this child's perverted, it seemed, imagination, there grew, aided by frustration and inhibition and censorship, trials and tribulations, sleepless nights and naughty addenda, at last, the purest daydream imaginable: a desire for brotherly love, implicit in Ian, "Ian, my brother"; her theme: All for one and one for all, and her thesis: Democracy.

Lamby also peeked.

"Aunt Lamby," said Paula, "isn't Ian beautiful?"

"You can say that again!" said Lamby.

Paula suddenly felt sorry, love was making her generous, for her old maid aunt who would never know the bliss she felt in Ian's arms, and hugged her.

"Down, girl!" said Lamby, and she took out a cigarette but her hands trembled and right in the middle of her forehead hung a bottle like a pendulum in a clock.

"See you later," she said.

And she did. Lamby was a peeping Tom. She peeked for a vicarious thrill, no matter how anemic.

"Cousin Maisie, may I come in?"

"Cousin Ian, dear boy..."

The old Maisie and the young captain of Marines, good soldiers both, found each other excellent company and spent hours and hours together.

("You don't have to be so polite, Ian," said Paula in between times.

"She's wonderful," said Ian.)

"The old girl," as he had called her, tickled his imagination, and she did have something, something devastating, and Paula didn't have it! "How long will she last," he asked himself, meaning Paula. The war of the parallels had sharpened up his perceptions and love didn't completely anesthetize him any more. Even in Paula's arms, kissing and fondling her, "On our wedding night," he thought ahead, "I'll be thinking." In Paris and London and Amsterdam it had hit him hard on the back of the neck (after his first introductory and purely clinical coitus with the disinfected nurse), like a sharp shell from the enemy, a hit, or a hand-to-hand and mouth-to-mouth encounter, and his knees buckled under him and his head reeled, his blood pounding, his tongue curled up, and all his life, his being, his essence shot out of him leaving him like something washed up on the beach....

"What are you staring at?" said Paula, pleased at his intent look, but turning around and looking behind her. "Is somebody here?" she said for fun.

"I love you," said Ian; he wanted to say, "Save me, take me home, wash me and dry me and put me to bed," but he didn't. "Come and kiss me," he said.

"I'll eat you!" Paula said suddenly, lifting up her body to him. She opened her mouth and snapped her teeth and gave a low growl pretending she was a dog, and shook her short curls, but she had been stricken, passion had jabbed her softest and most sensitive parts; still, she laughed it off, as it were.

Ian looked at Paula's perfect face and he saw her loveliness, her charm; he noted her sweetly rounded calves and remembered the satin feel of her and... the warmth, the softness, he would really find there, the loss of consciousness, the sweet crack-up... but he compared, even in moments like these, his young and desirable and nubile beauty with "the old girl." Maisie had a mysterious and cerebral fascination for him and he cannot help the comparison that lowers his esteem but not his passion for Paula.

Maisie and Ian discuss Torts ("Hand me my Chitty on Blackstone") and the Pimlico Mystery, the Dreyfus Case, the Moat Farm Murder; when Maisie glibly recited in gory detail the monstrous slaying of "Christopher Marlow by ffrancis Archer" on the first of June, 1593, Ian topped her with his breezy recollection of the abduction and murder, two centuries earlier, of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, by Thomas Mowbray; the chief accomplice to the bloody deed that "Colfax, ful of sly iniquitee... O false mordrer, lurking in thy den!" of whom Chaucer damningly versified, to be quoted by a young marine in 1954 who majored in English at Yale University.

"Is that so," said the old lady, delighted, and not taken aback a bit by so much erudition. "Your memory is as good as mine, I do declare!" and, "Fancy them calling you 'the imbecile Captain Ratcliffe'!"

They also compared notes on the Edwardses and the Jukes; colonial history, and magic; beaten biscuits, blizzards, coaching, the carryings-on of the "Governor's Set" when the Royal Governors lavishly entertained in the South.

"I read in The New York Times..." said Ian.

"Yes? What's that?" said the old lady eagerly.

"I read that a chapel has been dedicated to Pocahontas, in England."

"The British!" sniffed the old lady.

"But isn't that nice," said Ian.

"There was no need for Mr. Rolfe to make her his wife," said Maisie, "no need whatever. The British may do as they please, but I shall not receive her here!" Excited, she reached for the bell to ring for Deirdre.

Ian gently raised his hand and took her wavering outstretched fingers; he raised them to his lips.

"Your servant, Cousin Maisie, at your service," he said.

"Dear boy..." said Maisie. "Tomorrow we shall order the trap and drive in Papa's woods..."

"Goodnight, Cousin Maisie."

"A bientot."

Just before he closed the door, she lifted her hand, palm outward. "But I cannot receive Pocahontas," she murmured.

"Certainly not," said Ian.

Outside he ran into Janey who was jealous and had caught the last words of her Granny. "Iaye inkthaye athaye anniegraye isyaye utsnaye," she said.

"'He that calleth his brother a fool is in danger of hell-fire,'" said Ian, and he meant it.

The old lady kept him on his toes mentally and she had a special appeal, too, that he could not place, "an old-world charm." He laughed at himself for choosing that phrase to describe her to himself. She had her Rabelaisian, her slightly bawdy side, too, an eighteenth-century humor and use of words, too, from Fielding and Sterne and Smollett. He thought of her sometimes with her hair done high, a foolish frilled cap on top of it, her bosom exposed to the nipples, a naughty sensual smile on her lips, an engraving from Love in Several Masques. She excited him... he even dreamed one night that Maisie, enticing and seductive, with a big mouth and warm legs lay on her back in the field behind his house and provoked him almost out of his senses, but he awoke with his terrible desire un-appeased. Ian was so young, how could he divorce charm from sex-well, even if he could, awake and sane, he couldn't, asleep and mad. Maisie's dotage, on the other hand, saved her from modern dreams and she persisted, besides, in fitting him into the past, rather than the present. She sometimes loathed the fawning and obsequious "ghosts" who never contradicted her and never conversed intelligently, never expressed an opinion, all of them, even Sissy, who might have amounted to something! Every one of them was loco. But Ian! Ian was a gentleman and a scholar, her sort. Her cup ran over when he spoke of his graduation from Yale College and brought her news occasionally of the boys. According to her mood, or perhaps we should say, tense, he spoke of them as being very much missed by their classmates, or doing very well indeed and sent their respects and love to Mater. Ian read out loud a crumbling letter from Maisie's treasury of old data:

Yale College

1st February, 1839

Dear Madame:

The announcement of the death of our lamented classmate has caused us to feel deeply both for ourselves and for his relatives who are deprived by this sudden blow of one so justly dear to them. Especially with yourself would we sympathise. A mother's affections are indeed strong; and when he around whom they were twined pofsefsed the amiable qualities of the deceased doubly severe must be the stroke which severs him from you.

Warm-hearted in his friendships, frank and courteous, your son had sincerely attached to him the love of those whose intimate he was. Whilst there is consolation, there is also, in a measure, additional sorrow in lingering over the memory of those kindly traits of character which belonged to him. If it will at all soothe the bitterness of grief to have companions to share it, the gloom which has overspread the clafs, while it speaks loudly of the worth of him we lament, tells you that you are not alone in your sorrow.

Whilst we would offer you the poor tribute of our tears, we rejoice in the belief that you have higher consolation in that Faith which traces in every dispensation, however grievous, the hand of God ordering all things for good. It is indeed the richest blejsing of our holy Religion that amid the trials of life we can look up to a Heavenly Father and feel that our ways are all ordered by Him.

These beautiful and touching words of inspiration, though oft quoted, have lost none of their power to still a troubled spirit; "The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him-for He doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men." This trust in the mercy and goodnefs of God is a solace to our woes which the Christian most dearly prizes: It gives to his being a noble character, opening to him, even on this side of the grave, a view though distant and imperfect, of the high glories of his spiritual being. With the sincere prayer that this trust may support yourself and family under your present severe affliction, we remain with every expression of sympathy,

Truly yours,

Thomas C. Yarnall

Jacob Perkins

Donald G. Michell

Committee of the Sophomore Clafs.

We subjoin the following proceedings of the clajs. At a meeting of the Sophomore clafs held Thursday, January 31st, 1839, the following resolutions were adopted.

Resolved: That, as a testimonial of respect to the memory of our late clafsmate, D. P. Sparehawk, we will wear crape on the left arm for thirty days. Resolved....

"Cousin Maisie," said Ian, looking up, "are you asleep?" The old lady's head was bowed, her lips slightly open, her bosom rose and fell gently. On the mantel the painted cat swayed, flexing and releasing her claws, two rays as if from tiny searchlights escaping between her slanting, nearly closed eyes. Bunce snored loudly without pride; all ten cushions of his paws, the nails long and curving from inactivity, pulsating, as he dreamed his dog's dream of his last run, the scent of a rabbit in his quivering nostrils. Ian did not move. He thought of all the dead young men who had painstakingly improvised the carefully written letter in his hand and he glanced at Dody in his gilded frame and at Dougherty in his who had soon followed his brother-another letter had doubtless been written, new resolves made and carried out. He thought he saw duplicate smiles on the boys' lips as if he understood them, and he carefully folded the old letter that preserved their innocence as his mother had preserved his in the mirror. "It's just as well," he said to himself.

"Cousin Maisie?"

The old lady started. "Yes, yes. Who's there!"

"Were you asleep?"

"Stuff and nonsense, you write a very good letter," she said.

Ian felt she did not recognize or remember the correspondence and repudiated its solemn contents if she did. Her sufferings were long gone, and death...

"It will all come out in the wash," she said unexpectedly.

Ian, interested in the batch of yellow letters, picked another and smiled as he read it; noting the date, he figured it had been written by Maisie's great-grand-mother. It proudly expressed mother love for a little, very little, boy, who must have grown up to be Maisie's grandfather. "Listen, Cousin Maisie," he said, thinking to amuse her after the laborious letter of sympathy and death that had sent her to sleep, "... he is a most remarkable little fellow; weighing seventeen pounds... he tries to stand and crows..."

"Pish!" exploded the old lady.

"Why, Cousin Maisie, it's your grandad!" laughed Ian.

"Beaupere!" she said. "Seventeen pounds!" She visualized for a second the lean, bareboned, hardbitten old Yankee. "Crow indeed!" she said. "Fiddle-faddle!"

Well, Maisie, fickle, was doing all right with the young man so often at her side and sometimes disposed of the boys with a wave of her hand and with a what-were-we-saying? and changed the subject when Ian said, really interested, "I'd like to meet Bessie." Maisie leaned forward and whispered loudly, "She's a bold little hussie," and when he repeated his wish, "She'll come to a bad end." It looked as if Maisie had really gone back quite a ways, grown very much younger, as these strange words placed her, for the moment, back in the old-fashioned drawing room, beside Ian as an old beau-too young not to be jealous of her sensuous, precocious and blooming daughter; a rivalry already imminent in the nursery.

Together they went over innumerable old daguerreotypes and photographs and sketches, in almost all of which Maisie figured in the foreground. There was Maisie as a little minx with hand-painted cheeks, lolling against a fur rug thrown over a chest, with pink knees, and foolish rosebud mouth, her little skirt draped across her stomach and held up to one side with a rosette. There was Maisie with her sisters and her schoolmates, and Maisie with her tutor, Maisie in her phaeton and Maisie in a sleigh, and a charming group with Maisie serving chocolate, a picnic, a white cloth was spread under a big elm, sub Jove, a la belle etoile.

"I like this one best," said Ian; he held a photograph of Maisie stretched on an intricately carved Victorian sofa, lying over against a drapery of plush; one arm was laid along the back of the sofa and from her listless hand a rose hung down on a long stem. Maisie was looking straight at the camera; a sensuous and mysterious expression in her round eyes and on her full lips was caught and held there by the camera.

"Shucks," said Maisie, "I was prettier than that."

"Impossible," said Ian, gallantly.

"You had limbs, didn't you," Ian said, smiling at her.

"Indeed I did," she said.

"Not legs?"

"Certainly not!" The old lady was amused and Ian made up a little essay on "Limbs into legs into cheesecake."

"Cheesecake? No, thank you, too heavy."

He went on to discuss the use of the razor and the depilatory in the feminine toilet while the old lady chuckled and frowned and occasionally interrupted vivaciously.

"You boldly exposed your bosoms," he said, "but never your ankles; and the voluptuous and tantalizing bustle! What an idea! Enhancing your behinds like that! And look"-he pointed at a fashion drawing out of Godey-"look how tight the skirt is drawn across the front of her, really you can't miss a thing, it's indecent!"

"Tut, tut," said the old lady.

He told about the gradual shortening of ladies' dresses until, as he put it, "they reached halfway up the thigh. Only a cummerbund might have been left, if just as suddenly they hadn't dropped again; now we have the cover-up look to tease us men, with only an occasional plunging neckline, wow!... what I don't like is ears, I prefer soup-length hair, I hate the sticky fringe pasted on girls' heads and poodle haircuts. Eeek, I hate nasty ears!"

The old lady covered her ears coyly.

"Oh, not yours, Cousin Maisie, yours are distinguished and pale and tall, but girls' ears are obscene." He pretended to shudder.

"Little sluts," said the old lady sympathetically.

The whole family wondered what in the world Maisie and Ian were doing every day for hours on end, but it seemed preposterous to suggest that the maid stay in the room with them, or that they be chaperoned in any way.

"Ian, darling," said Paula, "you forgot what we planned for this afternoon."

"But Cousin Maisie is such fun," said Ian tactlessly, quickly adding, "We have our whole life ahead of us, sweetheart, you and I."

"Yes, Ian." Paula was satisfied. But Ian wondered what Paula would be like in twenty years.

"Ian," said Paula, "Granny gets plenty of attention, she's positively spoiled by all of us. Now, Aunt Lamby -if you want to be nice-"

"Lamby?" said Ian.

"Yes, poor Aunt Lamby."

"Lamby is hot," said Ian unexpectedly.

"Ian!"

Ian had found Lamby in the pantry last night making the old lady's toddy and she had already had some of her own private supply. Ian reached across her for a glass of milk, "Whoops," he said, "I'm sorry," as she staggered a little against his side; he grasped her arm to steady her and Lamby lifted up her chin, slow-motion. She sucked in her lower lip that was rouged and raised her heavy eyelids. What Ian saw in her uncovered look startled him, but at the same time gave him an evil stimulating desire. Lamby's invitation, under different circumstances, he might well have accepted.

"The old bitch!" said Lamby huskily; "furious. "Wait!" she said to Ian, but the ecstatic impious spell was broken and Ian fled. Lamby lost her man and it was her last chance. Murder was in her mind and her throat was dry with it as she went up to her room, where she desperately wet it down again and again. Not only had she felt real desire but she had inspired it, she well knew, and the old woman had cut her off from her last hope of pleasure. In her dipsomania she imagined that she had been circumcised and curtailed, abridged, nipped forever in the feminine bud. Poor Lamby.

"Whatever do you mean," persisted Paula, "aren't you ashamed; Aunt Lamby?"

"Yes," said Ian, "Paula, my sweet, yes. You heard me." He laughed. "Witch of Endor," he said and crossed himself. "Sexy hag!" he muttered. "I'm teasing you," he said finally and Paula easily believed him. Her sexual development was a thing of nature, purely physical and a little ahead of her; her mind and imagination could not project any other image than her own lovely one, or ones very similar. That in ugliness and sterility there might he a sexual sorcery, that analogous vampires wore symbolic amulets, or that Lamby could possess, sewed in her panties, a periapt, was definitely not in her reveries; and of the male and his occult world of weird orgiastic fancies she knew nothing. That poor Aunt Lamby's unveiled look had disclosed two wells of liquid aphrodisiac to Ian was not in her ken.

"Don't tease me any more," she said.

"I won't," said Ian, "let's forget it." He wanted to.

And, as he never saw again that look, it wasn't hard to forget Lamby, and Lamby, taking deeper and deeper potions, failed to recognize Ian next morning, as it were, so he felt nothing but pity for the secret woman in Paula's aunt.

But Paula, with all her enticements and poutings, couldn't break up his affair with Maisie. He began to confide in the old lady and she listened, although she sometimes appeared to doze, to his confessions. He told her things he would not dream of telling Paula or consider repeating to his mother and sisters. He spoke to Maisie, or rather, at Maisie, as if she were an oracle, impersonal and unprejudiced and bisexual, a true hermaphrodite like that Greek one in stone, faceless, but with limp waving curls on its shoulders and male genitalia between its legs. And he conceived for the old lady that strange love for the listener. The listener who does not intrude, scarcely is there, but in whom one reburies one's guilt forever.

"Think nothing of it," said Maisie.

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