The oldest part of the house, made of wood, was kept freshly painted, oyster-white shingles that glowed like radium in early dusk. And there was fieldstone, and there was faded red brick so aged it looked as if it might crumple at the touch, and there was practical white stucco like exposed bone. So many windows upstairs and down, but the windows were small and narrow, Colonial-style; the glass was so old it looked wavy. In the festive holiday season, which in Salthill-on-Hudson was taken up with Christian exuberance, each window visible from Old Mill Way was lighted with an electric candle, and strings of chastely white, glittering lights twined across the facade of the house and wrapped like cobwebs in adjacent trees. The shutters were dark green, a familiar patriot hue, and the sturdy front door was old oak, adorned with a brass American eagle knocker forged in colonial times. Through the summer, clay pots of bright red geraniums were placed on the front steps, and through the autumn, clay pots of chrysanthemums were placed on the front steps; the pots were carefully roughened with sandpaper, for a "countrified" look.

"It's hard to believe, such happiness. Not that we haven't worked for it, of course! Lionel is embarrassed to speak of such things, you know how a man like Lionel is. So we never speak of it."

The original house had been built in *6 by a prominent Manhattan tradesman named Elias Macomb. Little was known of Macomb except that he'd been a Tory converted in * to Federalism and to a generous financial support of the Revolution against Great Britain by the expedient threat of being tarred, feathered, and publicly lynched from a "liberty pole"; in *8*, the house would come into the possession of General Cleveland Wade, intimate friend and aide of President George Washington, and numerous rooms would be added, and the roof raised, and a barn and outbuildings constructed. With equal authority you could refer to the property as the "Macomb House" or the "Wade House," as subsequent owners felt obliged to explain in that earnest, animated way of homeown-ers who take their guests' polite questions about their property seriously, and have memorized passages of local history to be recited like sacred script. Beyond the house was the barn, of weathered wood, with a high stone foundation; at the peak of its roof, a brass rooster preened in unchanging profile. In front of the picturesque barn was a pond bordered by cattails, the rich sickly green of pea soup, and exuding a powerful odor; in April, dozens, hundreds! of vivid yellow daffodils bloomed and "danced"

in the hilly lawn and at the roadside. Beneath this picture, Happiness dwells here.

Middle Age: A Romance

This was the showcase home of the Hoffmanns, Camille and Lionel.

Their children were grown and gone. Their marriage persisted like a brave boat caught in an eddy. It was a classic vehicle so pridefully crafted and maintained, it would never break into pieces. Camille, the wife of the house, was naturally the more sensitive to the burden of History, the privilege of living in such a house; she'd furnished it with antiques, whenever possible, and had long been one of the local amateur experts in Revolutionary-era New York State history. Lionel was an enormously busy man, a senior vice president of Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., his family-owned firm, and one of the most successful of American publishers of medical textbooks and manuals, headquartered in Manhattan. Still, the Hoffmanns were intensely social like most Salthill residents. Now that their children had departed, in middle age they required another family, a more expansive and in a way more reliable family, close at hand, sociable as they, intimate without being familiar; they were rich, but not wealthy; they knew enough of wealth to understand that a true fortune involves the potential for tragedy, and tragedy was not a concept with which they felt comfortable. We love Salthill because it's a true American melting pot. Few in their large circle of friends had much interest in what had been known in an earlier, more primitive era as "social climbing"; for where, after all, was there to climb to, when you lived in Salthill-on-Hudson? Serious golfers belonged to the Salthill Golf Club, and boaters belonged to the Hudson Valley Yacht and Sailing Club, and there was the Lost Creek Tennis Club, but most members of the resplendent Salthill Country Club were the suburban nouveaux riches. (True, there were a dismaying number of these in Rockland County, and each year brought more as high-rise condominiums and $-million tract homes were being constructed along the scenic river or gouged out of rolling farmland.) The Hoffmanns and their circle were sensitive about being characterized as "suburban"; they thought of themselves as very different, another type of American entirely, Village-dwelling, or country-dwelling.

The Hoffmanns and their circle were as likely to be friendly with odd, independent, quirky types like Adam Berendt the sculptor and Marina Troy of the Salthill Bookstore as with neighbors on Old Mill Way, Old Dutch Road, Sylvan Pass, Wheatsheaf Drive, Deer Link, Derrydown Lane, Pheasant Run, Sparkhill Pike. They were as likely to be friendly with the founder of the Salthill Pro Musica, and the elderly Frenchwoman who taught ballet to children, and the minister of the Unitarian Church and his poet-wife, and with the bearded editor of the Salthill Weekly

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Gazette, and the retired merchant marine officer who raised orchids in his tiny Village rowhouse, as they were with people who owned National Historic Register houses like the Hoffmanns', and in whose sloping pastures Thoroughbred horses, pedigree cattle, and black-faced sheep peacefully grazed as in a dream of Old Europe. Just possibly there was a sharp class distinction between Salthill residents whose property was bordered by old stone walls and those whose property was bordered by mere fences-redwood, chain-link, picket, post and rail-but this was not a distinction that seemed to matter much, in terms of friendship. We need our friends. Constantly. Why, we don't know.

In their spacious burrow furnished, for the most part, with period antiques or precise reproductions, the Hoffmanns were known for their hospitality. The quaint old barn had long ago been converted into a wholly modernized guest house, and the Hoffmanns often had guests.

Even their guests had guests. They gave numerous parties, reciprocating parties to which they'd been invited. By custom in their circle, the Hoffmanns hosted a New Year's Eve dinner-dance party to which about forty of their closest friends were invited. Black tie for the men, long dresses for the women. The locally famous house would be lighted with candles.

The fifteen-foot Christmas tree in the two-storey front foyer would be ornately decorated. Banks of poinsettias, fires burning companionably in each of the several downstairs fireplaces. The first time Adam Berendt was a guest at this annual party he'd lingered outside on the flagstone steps in a lightly falling snow as other guests streamed past. He'd joked, "I'm afraid to cross that threshold. It looks like perfection inside." This was seventeen years, six months, and one week before his death. In the prime of young middle age, Adam was stocky, but not heavy; twenty pounds lighter than he would be in his fifties; with hard-muscled broad shoulders that made him look like a manual laborer, a homely-handsome face less battered and creased than it would become, and hair that was thick and spiky and only just laced with gray. For the formal occasion he wore not black tie (as the invitation had suggested) but a salmon-colored satin coat, and a black-and-white-checked silk shirt, and black dress trousers with satin trim. His bow tie was so white it appeared luminescent and just slightly oversized. Adam Berendt hadn't been so well known in Salthill at this time, not yet a "character"; he'd surprised only a few residents by buying the old Deppe House on the river, moving there from a rented carriage house on an estate in the hills. No one who saw him at Middle Age: A Romance

the Hoffmanns' that night knew with certainty if the man was being ironic, or playful; if he was mocking the Hoffmanns' New Year's Eve party, or all New Year's Eve parties; or if, in his bluff social innocence, rough-hewn as a frontier type, Adam imagined that this costume was appropriate attire.

Soon, perspiring in the clamorous crowd, dancing with one beautiful woman after another, Adam removed the salmon-satin coat, and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

Adam Berendt the local artist, sculptor. That was his identity in Salthill.

He'd been Camille Hoffmann's instructor in a night school art class; like other women in the class, Camille had fallen under Adam's spell. (There were few men in the night classes, and of these all were quite elderly.) What was different about Adam, oh, how to say! Certainly he was unlike other night school instructors of art, yoga, dance, pottery, creative writing, tennis, golf, and so forth, who shamelessly flattered their rich married-women students with the fervor of a freezing man tossing sticks of wood into a fire; nor did he charm, or seduce. He was friendly-but impersonally-to all. He was "inspiring"-cautiously. He spoke of genuine artistic talent as rare, and needful of cultivation; to be a professional was a commitment, and so to be an "amateur" might be preferable. Where he couldn't praise a woman's effort he stood silent and musing before it; there were evenings when he said very little, but communicated much with his facial expressions, the movement of his body. At other times he joked, teased. If a woman (never Camille Hoffmann, who was shy and uncertain of herself, especially in Adam's presence) smashed her clay figure out of disgust with it, Adam laughed and said, "My dear, it takes guts to take yourself so seriously." He seemed sometimes to speak in riddles. He paced about the room in clear enjoyment of his physical being, as one woman observed, like a steer on his hind legs, reciting poetry in a swinging cadence, to inspire and to disturb-Lucretius' On the Nature of Things.

Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. For the remainder of their lives these Salthill women would recall the shuddering sensation in their loins engendered by Adam Berendt's passionate baritone- You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

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Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

He hired a mini-bus to take them into Manhattan, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where, like a brooding centaur, he led them, his herd of mortal women, through the echoing halls of the Greco-Roman world; forbidding them to speak to one another, or to him, even to think-"Only just see." They saw so much! They were filled to bursting, like balloons being blown up beyond their capacity.

Adam Berendt gave off an odor, some evenings, of negligently washed male flesh. His clothes were often rumpled, and not very clean. He had only one "good" eye-the left-and this eye often gazed through them, and through their efforts at art, as if they didn't exist. Or, merely existing, in finite space and time, could not compete in Adam's imagination with another, more lofty and imperishable world. "The world of Forms. The world of Ideas. The world of the Soul. We know it's there, even if we can't always experience it." (But did they know this? The Salthill women were hopeful but confused.) If they dared to ask Adam personal questions he gently rebuffed them, and there was something thrilling in being so rebuffed, as they rarely were in Salthill among their set. Never would they learn where Adam Berendt had been born, and where he'd been raised; if he had a family; if he'd ever been married; and-what had happened to his right eye?

In their imaginations grown fevered and romantic from disuse, Adam Berendt exuded a mysterious authority. But it was an authority he did not exploit. Or so we believed.

"A I * Certainly not."

For he was Lionel Hoffmann and not by nature a jealous man. Tall, loose-jointed, taciturn, "very intelligent, and very rich" (as he'd once overheard a woman describe him, to his embarrassment); with a finely chiseled face that was handsome, or rather bland, depending upon the mood and taste of the observer; and dark hair that began to turn a distinguished gray at his temples when he was in his early thirties. On the commuter train, Lionel often glanced up from his newspaper to perceive numerous other men like himself; out of shyness, or chagrin, these others quickly glanced Middle Age: A Romance

away as Lionel did, concentrating on the earnest, data-surfeited columns of print that constituted the New York Times as if he were reading a bre-viary. As older men in the Hoffmann family were young-old men, active in the family-owned business well into their nineties, so younger men like Lionel, Jr., were old-young men, and even in boyhood Lionel had been a model of maturity, a reproach to his younger and more imaginative brother. A boy you can depend upon.

He'd fallen in love and married, young. He could remember Camille as a bride, but not himself as a bridegroom. Sometimes he had difficulty remembering Camille precisely, for she'd looked like so many young women in those years, and he was inclined to confuse her with-who was it?- one of his Colgate roommate's girlfriends? Kitzie, or had it been Mimi?

The one who'd wept in his arms, and surreptitiously wiped her nose on the shoulder of her dress.

No man in the Hoffmann family was likely to be jealous for no man in the Hoffmann family was sexually insecure. You were a man, and thoroughly a man, and good-looking, and intelligent, and you worked for Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., the most successful American publisher of medical texts and reference books, and there was no ambiguity in this.

Life was not a riddle for the Sphinx to answer (unless it was the Sphinx that asked the riddle), but something like a printout. Numerals, equations.

Once married, the Hoffmanns remained married, and had no further romantic inclinations. (But was this entirely so? True, Lionel Hoffmann in his poised, remote and whimsical way was drawn to the wives of certain of his friends, but never would he have approached them; nothing was more repugnant to him than the mere thought of an intimate relationship, a messy sexual relationship, with a social acquaintance. Never foul your own nest was Lionel, Sr.'s, most eloquent advice to his sons.) "Jealous of-who? Him? Never."

Adam Berendt, a local oddball artist. Sculptor. With one missing eye.

Or maybe blind eye. Built like a fireplug. Before the New Year's Eve party, Lionel hadn't been introduced to Berendt though he'd been hearing of him, in Salthill, for several years.

If Camille was romantically attracted to Adam Berendt, Lionel was obliged to feel a husbandly possessiveness, like a dull toothache. She was his wife, and vulnerable; and under his protection. If she makes a fool of herself, O God. Salthill was insular as an island.

(Most Salthill men commuted to work in Manhattan, and were often

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away five full days a week; many, like Lionel, maintained apartments in the city, and were frequently away overnight; you could imagine that the work life of a Lionel Hoffmann occupied most of his waking hours, not out of greed for more money but out of a genuine perplexity about what, other than work, a responsible adult man was meant to do? In the absence of their devoted husbands, which might one day be tabulated as an absence of years, Salthill wives were inevitably "drawn" to men not their husbands. Rarely were these catastrophic love affairs that resulted in divorce and remarriage, but rather romances of an indefinite nature: there were discernible cyclical patterns in which a woman might imagine herself in love with the husband of a friend, and when that infatuation dissolved she might imagine herself in love with the husband of another friend, and, in time, with another; and yet another; over a period of years in a social circle as constricted as the one to which the Hoffmanns belonged, a woman would eventually come round to imagining herself in love with a man, or men, with whom she'd imagined herself in love at an earlier time. So long as a woman didn't become involved with a man outside her social circle, such behavior was perceived by husbands to be harmless. This was Salthill-on-Hudson, where marriages, families, property were sacrosanct, and it was not the seventies.) At the New Year's Eve party, Lionel covertly observed this "Adam Berendt" whom his wife had invited, and of whom he'd been hearing rumors. Lionel was discreet as Lionel was always discreet. (Where another host would have winced at the salmon-satin coat, Lionel maintained a deadpan expression.) But over the course of the long, gay, champagne-enlivened evening, Lionel concluded that Adam Berendt was nothing more than warmly courteous to Camille; he didn't appear to be in love with her, nor did he encourage her to be in love with him. You could see, through Camille's pained eyes, how much more enlivened Adam was dancing, disco-style, energetically if not very skillfully, with Owen Cutler's opulently fleshy wife, Augusta, than with sweet-faced Camille Hoffmann.

Lionel concluded, He's crude. But a gentleman.

And later that night, at about two .., when most of the Hoffmanns'

guests had departed, and after a reckless kiss for both her husband and Adam Berendt, the hostess herself had disappeared upstairs to bed, the two men sat before a smoldering fireplace, and quietly talked. That is, Lionel talked. Pleasantly drunk on champagne, and stimulated by the occasion. Both men had removed their coats, and their ties were loosened.

Middle Age: A Romance

Lionel wasn't a man to speak easily, especially at one of his own parties.

His sense of being a host was something like a conscience. But now that the party was more or less over, he was speaking with animation, almost warmly. He liked Adam Berendt! A man so different from himself as to belong to another species. The subject was politics, morals, "human values." Lionel had been a boy in the sixties and disgusted by much of what he saw. Outside his family and relatives, that was. The "deterioration" of America as a serious moral nation. Then he'd gone to college-at Colgate, where his father had gone-and his life had been changed. His inner life.

Though possibly Lionel hadn't so much as glanced into a book of philosophy or poetry since graduation, it was his fervent belief that in certain of his humanities classes, his soul had been "forged." Of course, he'd gone on to the Wharton School as planned, and he'd made his way steadily enough in the world of business-"But what I remember best is 'Know thyself.'

That's Socrates, isn't it? And the Greek tragedies, I remember. A man makes a mistake, he owns up to it: puts out his eyes, or hangs himself.

There was no self-pity and pleading for justice or mercy. It was all a weird kind of justice. If you were guilty, you paid. Even if you weren't guilty. Because sometimes it wasn't clear what the crime was. And that's how life is.

What a world! I'm a Christian, but-you know. 'The meek will inherit the earth'-I wonder! It's more like winners and losers. Isn't it? People turning into birds, or trees, or rivers; a woman who's turned into a swan and she's raped by a-bull? Or is it the other way around? But really a god. The bull, I mean. And sometimes the gods were invisible. It was all a kind of parable, I guess? It sure wasn't Christian. This hunter who's torn apart by his own hunting dogs because he'd seen a goddess bathing naked in the woods. Just by accident he saw her, what's the blame? But he's punished anyway. He's turned into-what? I forget."

"A stag."

"A stag." Lionel pondered this fact. His voice was slightly slurred but steady. "What he'd been hunting. He's turned into it, and he's killed, and there's a weird justice there, yes?"

So he and Adam Berendt talked. Lionel talked. In the early hours of the New Year he was seized by nostalgia he hadn't known he'd felt; it was nostalgia for a lost youth, that in fact he'd never had. These things he would confess, almost!-to Adam Berendt. My friend. Adam is my friend.

Afterward he would recall with a vague glowing happiness the conversation he'd had with Adam Berendt that night. He would tell Camille that

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he liked her art instructor "very much." He would thank Camille for introducing them. He would tell friends how "sensible, solid" Adam Berendt was; "down-to-earth," "no bullshit." It was certainly Lionel's intention to see Adam again soon, and to cultivate a friendship with him, for the truth was that Lionel hadn't many friends, in Salthill or in Manhattan; it might even be said that since college, and his early bachelor days, he hadn't any close male friend. He had numerous "friends" in Salthill but no actual friend. (For in Salthill as everywhere, women kept the wheels of social life moving. Continuously these wheels move, up and down the familiar rutted ways.) Yet months passed after that New Year's Eve, and years. And Lionel Hoffmann who was so immersed in work never sought out Adam Berendt in quite the way he'd hoped to. And Adam, tactfully, didn't approach him. Their handshakes were brisk and matter-of-fact. And their greetings, standard Salthill-style, uttered with smiling good cheer: "How are you, Adam?" and "Lionel, how are you? "

Adam, how's a man to live when he knows he must die?

I - , the sixties. When Lionel was ten years old and a dependable boy. An A-student in the fifth grade at Broom Hills Country Day School, Westchester County. When Lionel saw his first dead body, in fact two. And never never told!

The sixties. Drugs! Long unkempt hair and slovenly clothes! Even such old, settled villages as Broom Hills, Bedford Hills, Katonah were not immune. Even revered families like the Thayers, the Briscolls, the Listers (neighbors of the Hoffmanns in Broom Hills Heights on spacious wooded lots overlooking the man-made Broom Lake) were not immune.

The men commuted faithfully to New York City on early trains, and in fall and winter never returned before night; the women dealt with domestic servants, sent out handwritten invitations to parties and personally addressed and signed upward of five hundred Christmas cards each, each year. The Vietnam War waged on the far side of the moon. Why it mattered so much, so suddenly, wasn't clear. If you didn't switch on the TV except for New York and local news, and again after eight .., and just rapidly skimmed certain newspapers, you could mostly avoid it. Children Middle Age: A Romance *

who attended Broom Hills Country Day were protected from it. In Broom Hills, as not everywhere else, life remained serene and more or less controlled. Moral control, and aesthetic control. Up-zoning was the vot-ers' most passionate issue. Boundaries had to be drawn, Custom had to be maintained. For if Broom Hills was not the ideal, there could be no ideal; and the human spirit cries out for the ideal, not in a faraway place and time but here and now. Yet, in Broom Hills as in less scrupulously zoned parts of the country, there were sometimes problems. Some of these were "drug problems." The legacy of the "hippie culture." For had not a hippie guru threatened America's parents with the terrible prophecy We'll get you through your children! And when children grew up but remained children, there was danger. When children left the protection of Broom Hills to attend college (in urban areas especially) there was danger. So it happened in the heat of August *66 that the twenty-year-old Yale dropout son of the Listers, the Hoffmanns' neighbors in the prestigious area known as Broom Hills Heights, injected his girlfriend and himself with a powerful amphetamine, and somewhere in the night they wandered barefoot in the woods behind the Listers' sprawling contemporary house, and they'd lain down to make love by moonlight, unless it was simply to die, and their bodies wouldn't be found for three days. Three days! The Listers would claim to believe that their "troubled" son had returned to New Haven where he lived with friends, they'd had no idea that he and the girl, who was sixteen, from Katonah, were anywhere nearby. In the heat of August, bodies decompose rapidly. These would be discovered in the woods about twenty feet from the mirror-smooth man-made lake, by several young boys who ran shouting for help.

Lionel Hoffman, aged ten, was not one of these boys. But Lionel's secret was, he'd discovered the bodies himself the previous day, drawn by the terrible smell, and had run away in terror, and an obscure sort of shame, and said nothing. And would say nothing. That stench! And the horror of what he'd seen: what his eyes had fastened upon. He'd gagged and nearly vomited, and forced to eat at mealtimes he'd gagged and vomited, right in the dining room, and it was attributed to the "flu"-this was an era, and it continues to the present time, in which much that's unspeakable within families can be attributed to "flu."

To Lionel, this was the sixties. This was what threatened, and awaited, when you brought into the scrupulously zoned villages of Broom Hills, or Salthill, foreign toxic agents.

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Of Lionel it would be said by the women in his life, he was "sensitive"

about food, mealtimes, odors. He had a "sensitive stomach" which surely indicated a sensitive soul.

S*, , to dog hair. And cat "dander." His sinuses clogged up as if with wet, wadded tissue. His brain ached and eyes watered.

Through the seemingly interminable years of their growing-up in the eighteenth-century restored burrow on Old Mill Way, Lionel's children, a boy and a girl, would pine loudly for a pet. For it was a fact that all their friends had pets, a dog or at least a cat, everybody's mom had cats, why couldn't they? why were they different? why was Daddy so selfish? Camille intervened in snatches of dialogue overheard by Lionel, approving when she was reasonably stern, hating her when she was apologetic, or plaintive as the children themselves. "Your father is allergic. You know that. He's so sorry. I'm so sorry, but there's nothing to be done about it."

Eleven-year-old Graeme protested, "Couldn't Daddy live in the barn?

It's all fixed up."

In the barn forever afterward he imagined himself. And smiled. While in the beautifully restored eighteenth-century Colonial on Old Mill Way with his wife and children, he was really in the barn. Or maybe in the woods.

He'd never told his parents or anyone in Broom Hills about discovering the hippie couple ( hippie couple was the formula phrase he'd settled for, derived from a news item about the drug deaths in a Westchester newspaper), nor would he tell his wife, Camille, whom he never told anything that might disturb; or might provoke in that alarmingly maternal way of even the least erotic women, to embrace a man passionately and comfort him. Oh, Lionel. How terrible for you. Ten years old. Oh!-I can imagine the smell.

He didn't want his wife, or any woman, touching him in such sympathy. Sympathy was too damned close to pity.

In the barn was his place of refuge at home. In the city, in the two-bedroom apartment on East 61st, where Lionel stayed two and sometimes three nights a week, in the grip of long hours at the office and an unex-Middle Age: A Romance

pected liking for the anonymity of city life, he required no place of refuge.

But he felt a tinge of guilt in Manhattan, for his burrow, his home, was in Salthill after all.

When Lionel's younger brother, Scott, died unexpectedly, of an aneurysm, at the age of thirty-six- thirty-six! -Lionel had been stunned beyond grief by the news. For days after the funeral, in Broom Hills, he'd been unable to speak. He was forty-one at the time and obsessed with the thought Is it beginning so soon? He saw Death as the glistening mirror-lake of dark water near where the hippie couple had died, and rotted, their young exposed flesh swarming with maggots. So soon! Our ending. Camille was sick with anxiety, fearing that her husband, too, had had a stroke of some kind, impairing his speech and hearing, and leaving his face frozen into a kind of pained grimace, like a handsome death's-head. She cautioned the children to be quiet in their father's company, for he'd had a shock, and was feeling sad. It was a fact that Lionel had sometimes resented Scott, but he'd loved him, too.

Loved him! Never. You're damned glad he's dead.

That isn't true! That is not true.

Now Scott can't have a better time than Lionel. Now people can't like him better than they like Lionel.

That is not true!

So grief paralyzed Lionel. His hair that had only been touched with gray at the temples was now riddled with silver. His manner was sombre, preoccupied. Weeks passed, he moved like a sleepwalker. The children avoided him. He carried with him the very spores of mortality, decay.

Camille went to parties and gatherings by herself, a brave, shaken woman, nervously smiling as she assured friends that Lionel was fine and would be seeing them again soon. ("Fine" had long been the most popular of Salthill adjectives, used in a great variety of contexts.) But inevitably there came the sun-spangled April morning when driving to the Village to catch the :8 train to Manhattan, in a procession of new-model gleaming luxury cars (his own was a cream-colored Lexus with four-wheel drive, sunroof, CD, and tape deck), passing along daffodil-lined Old Mill Way, and Old Dutch Road, and crossing the scenic woodplank bridge at Lost Brook and cruising south along Wheatsheaf Drive to Pheasant Run, and so to Fox Pass, through Battle Park to Linden Lane, West Axe and Depot, Lionel felt his gargoyle mask relax at last, and heard wild hyena laughter filling the interior of his car.

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Laugh, laugh! It burst from his pursed lips, out of his tight constricted throat. He hadn't felt so good in twenty years.

Requiescat in pace. The Latin was a consolation, grave and sonorous. You knew, but half-didn't-know, what it meant.

But the Hoffmanns were Lutheran, not Catholic. They'd been Lutheran for centuries. Camille, who'd been Presbyterian, had joined the Lutheran church when she'd married Lionel, and they'd exchanged vows in the First Lutheran Church of Broom Hills, New York. In Salthill, Camille attended Sunday services more frequently than Lionel, and while the children were young and tractable she'd brought them; Lionel tried always to observe Christmas and Easter though he had difficulty during services keeping his mind on what the minister was saying so earnestly, and when the congregation sang hymns or joined together in prayer he had to clench his jaws tight to keep from uttering-what, he didn't know.

Or maybe it was wild hyena laughter threatening to spill out.

Those Sunday mornings waking early with that sense of sick dread to be expiated by driving his family to the First Lutheran Church of Salthill.

A community of churchgoing folk, Sunday-morning Christians. The good news of the Gospels is that Jesus is your savior if you let Him into your heart, won't you let Him into your heart? Lionel had done so, numerous times.

But did Lionel truly believe?