"No, you didn't. You didn't at all."

"That's what I do when I let myself relax with someone. I chatter. I go on too much."

"You didn't. It was like you were singing to me."

Her face had not exactly come closer to his, but its not turning and moving away made it feel closer. Cautiously he bent his face into hers, a little sideways, and kissed her. Elizanne's lips took the fit snugly, warmly; she pressed slightly into the kiss, from underneath, looking for something in it. David felt caught up in a stream flowing counter to the current of everyday events, and began to run out of breath. He broke the contact and backed off. They stared at one another, her black eyes b.u.t.ton-bright in the sodium streetlight, amid the restless faint shadows of the half-brown big sycamore leaves. Then he kissed her again, entering that warm still point around which the universe wheeled, its load of stars not yet visible, the sky still blue above the streetlights. This time it was she who backed off. A car went by, with a staring face in the pa.s.senger window, maybe someone they knew-a spy, a gossip. "And there was even more," she said, giggling to show that she was poking fun at herself now, "that I wanted to say."

"You will," he promised, breathlessly. His cheeks were hot, as if after gym cla.s.s. He was worried about his father waiting for him; his stomach anxiously stirred. David felt as he had when, his one weekend at the Jersey Sh.o.r.e the past summer, a wave carrying his surfing body broke too early and was about to throw him forward, down into the hard sand. "I want to hear it all," he told Elizanne. "We have t-tons of time."

The Guardians

LITTLE L LEE'S SOFT BRAIN swam into self-consciousness in a household of four adults, with carpets that smelled of shoe soles, and a coal furnace that chuffed in the cellar, and dusty front windows that gave onto the back side of a privet hedge and a street where horse-drawn wagons sometimes clip-clopped along among the swishing automobiles. Lee heard them early in the morning: farmers going to market. On the opposite side of the street, asphalt-shingled row houses stood above concrete retaining walls, looking down at Lee's house like the choirs of angels in the songs at Christmas. Christmas was a time when an expectant cold light invaded the house and made the people within it very clear: Grampop, Granny, Daddy, and Lee's mother, who was, as it were, too important to have a name. swam into self-consciousness in a household of four adults, with carpets that smelled of shoe soles, and a coal furnace that chuffed in the cellar, and dusty front windows that gave onto the back side of a privet hedge and a street where horse-drawn wagons sometimes clip-clopped along among the swishing automobiles. Lee heard them early in the morning: farmers going to market. On the opposite side of the street, asphalt-shingled row houses stood above concrete retaining walls, looking down at Lee's house like the choirs of angels in the songs at Christmas. Christmas was a time when an expectant cold light invaded the house and made the people within it very clear: Grampop, Granny, Daddy, and Lee's mother, who was, as it were, too important to have a name.

Grampop was amazingly old, even when Lee was a baby. He would sit on the cane-backed sofa and hold stately discourse there with a visitor equally old, crossing and recrossing his legs, exposing a length of hairless white shin and the high black top of a b.u.t.toned shoe. Sometimes above the shoe Lee saw not white skin but the white of long cotton underwear, which only very old-fashioned country people wore. Unlike Daddy, Grampop wore a hat-gray, with a sweat-darkened band inside and two big dimples on the crown where he pinched it. When he entered the house, he would take the hat off and hold it pinched delicately between his thumb and forefinger; he would softly gesture with the hat in his hand as if it were a precious extension of himself, like his voice or his money. Once, Lee learned early, Grampop had had a great deal more money than he did now. These were hard times, depressed times, though the house was big and long, in its long hedged lawn: flowering shrubs in front and on the sides, and a gra.s.s terrace behind, a lawn broken by cherry trees and an English-walnut tree, and then a vegetable garden, a pear tree, a burning barrel, and a chicken house. Grampop had the chicken house built when he moved here. He smoked cigars, but his daughter, Lee's mother, couldn't stand the smell in the house, so he smoked outdoors, sitting in a lawn chair, or standing under a tree in a sweater, one elbow cupped in the hand of the other arm, surveying the world around him, a world on which his grip had faltered.

Granny, too, had lost her grip; her hands were bent as if holding something invisible, and waggled, with a disease that she had. Yet still she kept busy, cooking the meals and weeding and hoeing in the garden and watching out for Lee's welfare. When he, growing inch by inch, finally managed to climb up onto the lowest branch of the walnut tree, she stood directly below him and told him to get down. She wore gla.s.ses that sat c.o.c.keyed on her little hook nose, and these glinted in the afternoon light, tilted up toward Lee while he wondered if he should tell her that, though he had discovered he could get up, he hadn't yet learned how to get down. She looked very far beneath him. Her white hair flew out from her sharp small face like an exploding milkweed.

It was she who beheaded the chickens, on a log that stood upright in the chicken yard. When Lee once, on a sudden unstoppable bidding from within, while he hurried up the alley behind his backyard, went to the bathroom in his shorts, it was she who cleaned the yellow mess off his legs and told him it wasn't worth crying so hard about. It was she who pointed out that certain of the neighborhood children-the Halloran brother and sister, especially-were not suitable playmates. Granny, Lee's mother let him know, hadn't always been enfeebled: she had run Grampop's tobacco farm for him in their country days and had been one of the first women in the county to get a driver's license.

The family had owned a car when Lee was born, a green Model A Ford, but before he was old enough to go to kindergarten the car had disappeared, and was not replaced with another. That was how poor they had become. They were so poor that Grampop went to work for the borough highway crew and Granny cleaned the houses of her relatives-she had many; she had been the baby of twelve children-to bring in a few extra dollars.

Daddy worked, too, of course. He put on one of his suits almost every weekday and went off into the world beyond the front hedge. But the work he did there-adding up figures for other men, bookkeeping for a fine-gauge silk-stocking factory-didn't bring very much money home. The men who worked on the factory floor, as machinists and full-fashioned knitters, earned more, Lee became aware when he began to attend school with their children. These fathers were robust, cheerfully rude men with a pleased look about their eyes and a teasing crease about their mouths that Daddy didn't have.

Also, he didn't have a belly, the way workers and farmers did. Even Grampop had a belly, on which he would rest the wrist of the hand holding his cigar while he stood in the yard smoking. Often Lee and his grandfather were the only family members out there as the warm spring night crept in. There was a dewy weight to the air that pressed a wave of sweetness from the darkened bed of lilies-of-the-valley, and caused a scattering of cherry blossoms to fall. The old man would lift his head, listening to the birds' last chirpings. His glowing cigar end would somersault as he tossed it into the peonies. It did not occur to Lee that he, Lee, was the reason his grandfather stood there-"to keep an eye on the youngster."

It did occur to Lee, though not in words he could say, that he was a bright spot in a demoralized household. In the houses across the street-the narrow row houses lined up like gaunt, asphalt-shingled angels-the children outnumbered the parents, and the sounds of screeching and weeping that escaped the walls showed that a constant battle was being waged on near-equal terms. In Lee's house, the only sounds of battle arose between his parents. Some complaint, or set of complaints, lay between them. Otherwise, he felt the four adults as sides of a perfect square, with a diagonal from each corner to a central point. He was that point, protected on all sides, loved from every direction.

Yet there were sc.r.a.pes, scoldings, childish tantrums, vows to kill himself to make everyone else sorry, various ways in which he let his guardians down. Once, irritated at how his hair kept falling over his eyes as he tried to copy a comic strip while lying on the floor, he had taken his toy tin scissors and cut some off; his mother acted as if he had cut off a finger or his nose. Haircuts, in general, were dangerous. For one thing, the chief barber at the shop they went to was a rabid Roosevelt-hater, and gusts of shrill debate swirled around Lee's hot ears as he huddled embarra.s.sed on the chair, on a board laid across the broad porcelain arms. For another thing, his mother was usually dissatisfied with the haircut when he came home. Of the three barbers in the shop only Jake, the Roosevelt-hater, could cut Lee's hair to her satisfaction. When he pointed out to her that Jake's political opinions were the opposite of theirs, she said yes, but he was an artist.

His mother had this idea of art, of artistry, on her mind. She would sit crayoning with Lee on the floor, her weight gracefully propped on her arm, her legs folded within her nubbly wool skirt, but for the knees, white and round, that peeped from underneath. She praised Lee's little drawings beyond, he felt, their worth-or, rather, she penetrated into that secret place within him where they were valued very highly.

There was something disproportionate, something hotter than comfortable, about his mother. She had copper-colored hair and freckles and a temper. Sometimes after a fight that had rattled through the house all one Sunday afternoon, his father would say to Lee, with a certain sheepish pride, "Your mother. She's a real redhead." When Lee was even a little late coming home for supper from playing in the neighborhood, anger would show in a red V between her eyebrows. The sides of her neck would blush. More than once she whipped him, with a switch cut from the base of the pear tree, on the backs of his legs. It not only hurt but felt like a forced, unnatural exercise; it made him want to keep his distance. He liked his mother best when she sat alone at the dining-room table playing solitaire under the stained-gla.s.s chandelier, focusing on the turn of the cards, talking to herself, or when she pushed the lawnmower around the yard like a man. Their yard seemed huge, with its s.h.a.ggy, fragrant bushes (hydrangeas, bridal wreath, viburnum) encroaching greedily upon each other and upon the lawn, forming secret shady s.p.a.ces, dirt-floored caves where not even a weed could grow. He liked hiding in these caves, getting his shorts dirty.

At about the age of six, when first grade was teaching him how to read, he created a masterpiece of comic art-a drawing of their side hedge where the brick walk made a gap, one leafy edge slit so that a face on a long neck could be poked through, back and forth, imitating Betty Jean Halloran peeking to see if he was at home, available to play. She was tall for her age, and shy. Perhaps she sensed his grandmother's disapproval of her family, which lived down the street in a house without plumbing, just a pump on the back porch. Lee expected this paper trick to please both his female guardians, but his mother, studying the drawing and making the head poke out once or twice, conveyed without saying so that he had been cruel, because Betty Jean after all was a faithful friend, one of the few friends he had.

His being an only child was part of the soreness, the murmuring quarrel, between Daddy and his mother. Perhaps she would have been better off marrying one of the big-bellied full-fashioned knitters; at least there would have been less worry about money. But no, there was something sensitive and wary in her nature that shunned the world around her. Daddy did not shun it-on days when he didn't do accounting, he went off to teach Sunday school or watch a Sat.u.r.day softball game on the school grounds-but he always returned, and he indulged his wife and son in their conspiracy about art, a way to push back at the world without touching it. When he heard them talking about art, he would say, "It's miles over my head," obviously not believing it, believing instead that it was beneath him, who dwelt high and clear among numbers.

What he did not know but Lee did and his mother sensed was that crayoning was Lee's way of getting away from her, from all his guardians, into a realm quite his own, where love did not fall upon him but descended from him, onto the little creatures, the humanoid animals, the comically unchanging comic-strip characters that he copied, his nose a few inches from the carpet that smelled of shoe leather.

When Grampop entertained his old-man guests on the cane-backed sofa, they sometimes, in their mutual pleasure at the conversation, kicked up little b.a.l.l.s of fluff from the same faded carpet. Lee's mother complained about this, her face getting not quite as red as it did over the smell of cigars. Lee felt her heat, the afterglow of her unpredictable pa.s.sions, most intensely in the piano room, which blended into the living room through an archway with side pillars and a band of ornate stick-and-beadwork overhead. This pa.s.sage of carpentry was the grandest thing about the house, and his failure to succeed at piano lessons, though he took them for years, was the most distinct disappointment he made his mother suffer. The piano area, with its sheet music and bra.s.s candlesticks on top of the upright, belonged to his mother; the kitchen, with its warping linoleum and black stone sink, to Granny; the front room, with its sagging sofa and dusty view of the neighbors, to Grampop; and the front vestibule and door to Daddy, who was always going out or coming in.

As Lee lay on the carpet, his guardians in their att.i.tudes of suspended discomfort felt like the four corners of the ceiling far above him. The shelter they formed held through Depression and world war, and even his adolescence and his constantly outgrowing his clothes did not disturb the configuration, though Grampop underwent a cataract operation that made him hold his head very still while Lee read the newspaper headlines to him, and Granny stooped and her hands shook more and more and Parkinson's disease slowly stopped up her speech, and his father turned gray and had to find another accounting job when the hosiery mills went south after the war, and his mother put on weight, and the bushes in the yard grew taller and wilder, and Betty Jean Halloran became a beauty with a racy reputation and had long since stopped peeking around the hedge.

He had always dreaded one of his guardians' dying, disappearing into an unbelievable nothingness, ripping away a corner of his childhood shelter. As if knowing this, they contrived to stay alive until he was safely away at college and beyond, protecting him to the last from anything too ugly or frightening. They died, at tactfully s.p.a.ced-out intervals, in the order of their births. Grampop was over ninety, and healthy and walking within two days of his death; he felt queasy and went to bed on the first day, and on the second day believed the bed was on fire and, in escaping it, fell dead to the floor. Lee was at college when he heard about this. Granny lingered in bed another year, unable to talk or sit up on her own finally, and was found one morning by her daughter, asleep for good, her sharp nose and deep sockets smoothed into a youthful beauty of the bone. Lee by now was pursuing an M.F.A. degree in Iowa City. For some years Daddy shuttled in and out of hospitals with angina, and nonfatal heart attacks; his young doctor confided to the widow that he "gave them all a rough hour" at the end. Lee was living in San Francisco at the time, pursuing art and his ident.i.ty as an artist, and was relieved that he could not get to the bedside in time to see his father struggling for life, for air. His mother, like her father, dropped to the floor one day-the kitchen floor, the dishes just done and set in the strainer. She had moved from the long old house to a newer, smaller one, all on one level; her red hair went pure white, and she became mild and whimsical and good-tempered in her solitude, and never rebuked Lee with the rarity of his visits. Her once-a-week cleaning lady saw the body on the floor through the back-door window, and the police and undertakers and clergy did the rest, while Lee flew in from Taos, where he had moved when San Francisco didn't work out.

Now all were gone. Of that early-twentieth-century household, only Lee was left. The coal bin in the cellar, the shelves of homemade preserves, the walnut icebox, the black stone sink, the warping kitchen linoleum in the pattern of little interlocking bricks, the stained-gla.s.s dining-room chandelier shade, the front-hall newel post with ribs around it like the rings of Saturn or Plastic Man's telltale stripes, the narrow back stairs that n.o.body used and that became a storage s.p.a.ce choked with cardboard boxes and appliances to be repaired some day, the windowless stair landing where they had huddled in the pitch dark during mock air raids, the long side porch where hoboes had knocked for handouts, the pansy-faced calico cat that came to the porch to be fed but was too wild to come into the house, the tawny wicker lawn chair where Grampop would sit in the twilight with his cigar, watching the fireflies gather-only Lee was left to remember any of this.

As part of his self-consciousness, while old age overtook his once-infantile brain, he made occasional efforts to envision his situation as science proved it to be. He would look at the half-moon and try to see it not as the G.o.ddess Diana or as a comic-book decal but as a sphere hung in empty s.p.a.ce, its illumined side an infallible indication of where the sun was shining on the other side of the earth's huge round ma.s.s. He tried to imagine the surface under his feet as curved, and hurtling backwards toward sunrise. With a greater effort, he tried to imagine empty s.p.a.ce in something like its actual vastness, each star light-years from the next, and the near-absolute vacuum of interstellar s.p.a.ce containing virtual particles that somehow generated an energy the reverse of gravity, pushing the stars and the galaxies faster and faster apart, until the universe would become invisible to itself, cold and dark forever and ever, amen. He tried to picture organic life as Darwin and his followers described it, as not a ladder of being, climbing toward ever more complex and spiritual forms, but as a flat swamp, a diffuse soup of insensible genes whose simple existence, within however ign.o.ble and grotesque and murderous and parasitic a creature, tended to perpetuation of those creatures, without the least taint of purpose or aspiration. It was all in the numbers, as Daddy had said. What was was, and tended to be the same, generation after generation.

There was comfort in this, Lee thought. His guardians were still with him. They were within him, extending their protection and care. From Grampop-who had had a quaint, tentative gesture of lifting his thin-skinned hand as if to bestow a blessing or to ask for a moment's halt from the powers that be-he had inherited longevity, and from Granny a country toughness, a wiry fiber that had only slowly bent beneath age and disease. His father's receding realism was his, and his mother's intent, dissatisfied heat. His guardians were within him, propelling him like a tiny human crew within a tall, walking armature of DNA. They would not steer him wrong; his death would come tactfully, and was nowhere near close.

The Laughter of the G.o.ds

BENJAMIN F FOSTER-an ungainly name, carrying in the bearer's own ears a certain formal, distant resonance, as if he were a foster child-took an interest, once his father was dead, in how his parents had met, courted, and, deepest in the darkness, conceived him. His mother told him, "We met in the registration line the very first day of college, and the second we clapped eyes on each other we started laughing. And we didn't stop laughing for the whole four years."

"Didn't you date other people, ever?"

" 'Dating' seems to mean more now than it did in the Twenties, but no, not really. n.o.body else would have anything to do with us. That was our feeling. That was our fear. We were held together by fear, your father and I, a fear that n.o.body else would have us. We were freaks, Benjy."

She looked up, unsmiling but mischievous. Old age had made her tongue more reckless than ever, as if she were testing the echo off the walls of the house, where she lived with a deaf and lame old collie.

In the past their child, their only child, had tried to rea.s.sure himself that his parents had not been freaks in college by looking into their yearbook, called The Amethyst, The Amethyst, bound in padded purple-the year 1925, the college a small Lutheran one on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware. The college was named Agricola, after Johann Agricola, an early a.s.sociate of Luther's and, in regard to the burning issue of antinomianism, Luther's adversary for a time. bound in padded purple-the year 1925, the college a small Lutheran one on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware. The college was named Agricola, after Johann Agricola, an early a.s.sociate of Luther's and, in regard to the burning issue of antinomianism, Luther's adversary for a time.

The senior photos and write-ups were arranged not in alphabetical order but as if at a dance, boy paired with girl on facing pages. His parents were thus paired, as were their faithful friends the Mentzers, when Mrs. Mentzer was still a Spangler. Benjamin's mother, under her maiden name of Verna Rahn, was shown with glossy thick bangs. Elsewhere in the yearbook she appeared in a riding outfit with boots and jodhpurs, in a tubelike party dress and a glittering headband, and in a middy blouse with dark neckerchief-the uniform of the hockey team, for which she was listed as co-captain and "right inside." She had been cla.s.s secretary, her young son learned, and president of the hiking club, "a certain blue-eyed damsel from Firetown, Pa.," one with "a true innate love of nature" who could "ride a horse at break-neck speed." The motto the yearbook editors a.s.signed her was "Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky."

His father's motto was "The cause of wit in others," his nickname was "Foss," and his write-up was rather joshing, calling him a "ray of sunshine" and a.s.serting that "No fewer than a baker's dozen of the fair s.e.x have fallen victims to his winning and jovial disposition." The yearbook even more far-fetchedly claimed that his native town in New Jersey had "become famous on account of his brilliance." Yet the photocopied college records that at some point had been tucked into the yearbook showed him getting mostly C's and even D's, whereas Verna Rahn pulled in A's and B's; she was especially adept in Latin, though Benjamin had never heard her utter a single phrase of it. The college's purpose had been, it seemed, to produce ministers and marriages; pages at the end were devoted to a diary recording the year's flirtations and pairings. The lead item on a page t.i.tled "Jokes" was: Frosh (after attending one of Dr. Rutter's hygiene lectures)- Frosh (after attending one of Dr. Rutter's hygiene lectures)-"Some terrible things can be caught from kissing."Second Frosh-"Right! you ought to see the poor fish my sister caught."

"And yet," Benjamin pointed out to his mother when she was in her seventies, "you and Daddy didn't marry right after college. You didn't marry for how many years after graduation?"

"Three. We were giving each other time to get away, but nothing better occurred to us. We had no imagination, Benjy. We were cowards."

In trying to imagine their attraction, their need to pair off, Benjamin would begin with the fact that they were both tall, his father two inches over six feet and his mother no less than five nine, awkwardly large for a woman of her generation. She put on weight over the years, but in the yearbook she was slender; young, she looked like him, Benjamin thought, and as he grew old he looked more and more like her-faintly shapeless in the face, with a sly, flirtatious expression to the mouth, as if he were prepared to take back whatever he had just said. From his mother he had learned the social arts of teasing and side-stepping.

His parents loomed large in his first memories of them-giants in their underwear, shambling with their white flanks and patches of hair to the bathroom and back. His little room was tucked behind theirs, at the back of the house, but he was often in their bed, it seemed, sick or frightened of the dark. It was a maple four-poster painted blue-gray and stencilled with a silver crescent moon and several clumsy stars. Benjamin and his mother had done it together; she had made the stencils and he held them while she applied paint. The bed was too high for Benjy to climb into by himself at first; once he could hoist himself up he was often there, as at an observation post, while his mother and father moved about him in semi-nudity, with a docile mute air they lacked when fully dressed.

Until he was old enough to make the tub feel crowded, he took baths with his mother, to save hot water. More than sixty years later, he could still recall the sight of his legs receding in the narrow watery s.p.a.ce beside her, his feet squeezed between one of her hips and the porcelain side of the tub. To rinse his shampooed hair she would hold his head under the faucet until he thought he must drown. His parents, he realized when he was old enough to grasp some social history, were cultural products of the progressive Twenties, conditioned to expect a socialist revolution and to be unashamed of their bodies. What was natural, his mother believed, was healthy and good, even though germs and parasites could be argued to come from Nature as surely as, say, spoonfuls of cod-liver oil. The horrible lasting aftertaste as the thick transparent liquid oozed down his esophagus: that was Nature to little Benjamin-that and hay fever and the cat catching robins at the birdbath. He would find their feathers splayed in the gra.s.s. He was drawn entirely to the unnatural: to the radio, the movies, the newspapers, the blimp or skywriting airplane that once in a while appeared in the skies over their small town.

When he was thirteen they moved to a farmhouse eleven miles away; in these smaller quarters their bodies were placed in closer proximity. His grandparents occupied one room upstairs, and Benjamin's parents the other, leaving him a bed in a s.p.a.ce next to the stairs; his grandfather would tug his toe in the morning on the way downstairs, if it stuck out from the blankets. The walls were thin, and he could hear his parents murmur, sigh, and turn over on their creaking bedsprings. There would be a patting noise and his father's voice making a noise, "Ooo-ooh," "Ooo-ooh," in appreciation, Benjamin gathered in the dark, of his mother's bulk. "Your mother should have gone onto the burleycue stage," he would tell his son, as they drove into town together, "instead of marrying me. She had the figure for it, but not the temperament. A better man than I would have talked her into it." in appreciation, Benjamin gathered in the dark, of his mother's bulk. "Your mother should have gone onto the burleycue stage," he would tell his son, as they drove into town together, "instead of marrying me. She had the figure for it, but not the temperament. A better man than I would have talked her into it."

It was under the permissive blanket, somehow, of their country intimacy that Benjamin began to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. It happened one night that, because of the primitive laundry facilities in the bas.e.m.e.nt, he had no clean pajamas, and had to go to bed in his underwear. The unaccustomed sensation of his skin on the sheets stirred him into discovery. A quite magical realm, tight and fresh, opened up; at the climax he would feel as if he were somersaulting, the witness inside his head turned upside down. The sensation, if it had been a sound, was shrill, piercing through this world into another: not a dirty world but clean, the saying went, as a whistle. He was too innocent to think about the stains he left on his sheets, and once his mother did mention them in a fit of temper, but the gap between his mother and those upside-down sensations was so vast that his mind couldn't bridge it and went blank, so he made her no answer. He was never able, in later life, alone or within the body of a woman, to recover quite that initial, upending intensity-that experience of a sweetening, narrowing tightness yielding, as it were, a glimpse of icy, annihilating light beneath his feet.

Benjamin never doubted that his mother loved him better than she loved her husband. This knowledge gave him with his father the tolerant good humor with which one treats a defeated rival. When his father was dead, and Benjamin middle-aged, he tended to cut short, or turn his back on, his mother's offered outpourings of marital resentment. Even the wealth of sympathy cards-Earl Foster had been a courthouse bureaucrat, a Sunday-school teacher, a man of good will and good works-had inflamed her sense of grievance, in the way that becoming at last rich aggravates the injustice of having been short-changed all the years before. She let the tinted envelopes pile up, many unopened, on an old bra.s.s tray on a side table, and in the days after the funeral made no move to answer them: "What can I say except agree he was a saint? If he was such a saint what does that make me?"

"A fellow saint?" Benjamin suggested, wary of what he had long ago learned to recognize as his mother in a dangerous mood.

"Not by a far cry. Have you ever heard the expression 'Street angel, house devil'? That was your daddy."

"What did he do devilish?"

"You don't want to hear it. Or do you? Maybe you should."

"No, you're right, Mother, I don't."

Sitting stubbornly at the kitchen table in her black widow's dress with its green jade brooch, she went on, "When we first met, at college, my dad still had his money, and dressed me in what was considered high style, in what to your father's eyes looked like too broad a check, with too bright a bow at the neck. He was from New Jersey, and his people were terribly conservative, as you know-Presbyterians, down to the bone."

"I know." Though in fact his father all the while he knew him had been a Lutheran deacon; he had done his best to blend into his wife's locale.

"That was why he laughed at me; he said I looked like a Ziegfeld girl at a barn dance. And then," she went on, "the weekend we got married, the last day of August and terribly hot, Dad had come down a peg or two in the world, and for some reason the best thing I could find to put on was this wool suit that turned out to be suf suffocating-I nearly fainted on the train, and sweated big spots into it. My mother-in-law was reported to have said she thought only colored people got married in August. She was sick with diabetes already, the whole ceremony had been rushed together so she wouldn't hear of it ahead of time, and when she did she fainted dead away. At least the other Fosters said she did. Your daddy was meant to be the one who didn't get married and would support their mother in her decline. I realized when the others told me-it must have been my sister-in-law, she was always free with her news-I realized there were two kinds of women, the kind who really did faint and those who just nearly did, like me. When we got into our tiny stateroom in the Pullman, your father said I smelled like a pig."

"Oh, no!" Benjamin felt obliged to protest, at the risk of tipping her into an even more menacing, unpredictable temper.

"He was right," she said, "I was drenched, and ruined the dress. 'Pig' wasn't the worst word he ever used. Our so-called honeymoon, that whole first year when I was following him around with the surveying crew, all through the coal regions, we kept staying in these cheap boarding-houses that were really cathouses. You'd meet the girls on the stairs dragging up customers almost too drunk to walk. In the daytime everybody except me was sleeping. I got a world of reading done-all the Russians, Balzac, Flaubert. I never could take to d.i.c.kens-too jokey. One of the madams told me that what you look for in a girl is a high arch to the foot. That tells you all you need to know. I had flat feet, though she was too polite to point it out. I couldn't compete with your father's ideas of those girls on the stairs-thank Heaven I got pregnant with you and could come home to my father's house. I wish all these people scribbling how your father was such a saint could have heard his language when it was just the two of us stuck together, like dogs in rut."

She gestured with disgust at the stack of sympathy notes in the bra.s.s tray, and when Benjamin left the next day they had vanished, unanswered.

He had hungered, through his childhood, for the signs of happy union that he saw in the parents of his friends, a secret physical prosperity that oozed into society as respectability's hard-earned good cheer. His parents almost never went out to parties, and when they did his father was usually sick from the rich food and unaccustomed liquor. He had a Presbyterian stomach. But their old college friends the Mentzers held an annual New Year's party, which included other couples mated at Agricola, and off his parents would go into the dark with what Benjamin imagined as their old collegiate gaiety. At other reunion occasions he had heard Mrs. Mentzer, the once-beautiful Ethel Spangler, call his father "Fossie" with a fond purr that almost materialized the unimaginable conqueror of "no fewer than a baker's dozen of the fair s.e.x."

It was with a daughter of this crowd, not the Mentzers' but the Reifsneiders', that Benjamin had his first real date-his first parentally approved appointment with the fair s.e.x. He was old enough to drive, by a few months, and went off in a sports jacket, necktie, and clean shirt carefully harmonized by his clothes-conscious mother. He and Ada Reifsneider went to the movies and afterwards to the West Alton all-night diner for hamburgers and ice-cream sodas. They attended different high schools and didn't have much to talk about except their parents and the movie they had just seen, yet they managed well enough so that, parked in front of her dark house, he felt ent.i.tled to kiss her, which she seemed to expect. Her sallow face had regular features, but her lips were hard and cool, with a chill of prepared willingness he did not feel he had earned. He had felt clumsy, overdressed, and not quite right, and a.s.sumed that her sense of him agreed with his. He never called her again, though she was pretty enough. Whatever it was that must be discovered, the path was not through his parents' college days.

His mother in all the years he knew her had never had a haircut or gone to a hairdresser. Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor, when he lived boyishly close to the carpet. When she was a girl, she more than once told him (she told him everything more than once), her own mother would do up her hair in braids wound so tight on the top of her head that she wanted to scream. It frightened Benjamin, at night, to see her take out her pins and let her hair down and walk around the upstairs in her slip, looking like a graying witch, just her nose and her eyes peeping out through the curtain of her hair. Years later, in the late Sixties, he picked up a plump young hooker in the bar of a Chicago hotel. When they were done, she put her silvery minidress back on and walked around his room combing out her hair, long and uncontained in the Sixties style, and it came to him that this was how a woman was supposed to look, like Eve or Mary Magdalene in an admonitory old woodcut.

There was a hint of admonition, too, in the underwear drawer of his mother's bureau, its tumble of flesh-colored straps and intricate metal fastenings like a web of apparatus in a torture chamber. Her girdle and its stocking fasteners-flesh-colored b.u.t.tons, and wire loops shaped like snowmen-left cruel dents in her flesh, and on one of her feet the little toe was quite bent over the others by years of tight, pointy shoes.

At night, upstairs in the country house, his father, describing the adventures of his day in the city world, would mumble, and she would begin to laugh, and he would mumble again, and her laughter would be goaded to a half-suppressed shriek, an escape like that of steam, ending in a whimper begging for mercy, and he would mumble once more, and then in the contagion of her renewed glee he, too, would laugh, a few reluctant chuckles that ended the story. In the morning, when Benjamin asked her what had been so funny, she would say, "It's too hard to explain. It's not so much what your daddy says as how he says it that sets me off sometimes. I don't believe he even means to be funny at first; his life has been really a sad one."

Yet his parents didn't radiate sadness, though their misery and helplessness-their state of being trapped trapped-was a frequent theme of their conversation. After Benjamin's grandparents were both dead, a new bed was installed in the vacated room, but as far as Ben knew his parents rarely used it, staying in the too-high, noisy-springed one with the moon and stars stencilled onto the blue-gray headboard. When, summers, he visited with his growing family, there were too many bodies for the beds, and his parents would sleep on a flat farm wagon in the barn. They made so comical a sight there, uplifted on huge spoked wheels, surrounded by mounds of baled hay and rusted equipment, under motley layers of spare blankets and quilts, that his children would run out first thing in the morning, through the dew of the lawn, to catch their grandparents still thus abed, and cheer themselves with the hilarious, comforting sight. The old couple would sit up in greeting, both wearing black wool watch-caps, donned for warmth and to keep dust and dove droppings out of their hair. Pigeons cooed and thrashed in the upper reaches of the barn like left-over bits from their dreams.

As his mother's widowhood stretched past a decade and into its fifteenth year, it was as if her son, who tried to visit her for a few days every month, had always been the only man in her life. When she spoke of her husband, it was in the tone of startled reminiscence with which she might suddenly recall the dark-eyed little Schlouck boy with whom she had walked to the one-room school down the sandy dirt road that pa.s.sed along the edge of her parents' farm and over the rise to the main road. "My mother thought his people were too dark," she would say. Or, of her husband: "He was so hipped, after his heart began to act up, on paying in his extra thousand to the county retirement fund. He said he could see daylight for the first time in his life."

"Daylight?"

"I don't know how much daylight he thought he had left for himself. But he wanted to leave me set. set. Just like the driving. I hadn't driven since my father sold their Biddle and moved into town. But he forced me to drive, he even had me take a course from a high-school instructor, and get my license. He knew that without it I couldn't hang on out here." Just like the driving. I hadn't driven since my father sold their Biddle and moved into town. But he forced me to drive, he even had me take a course from a high-school instructor, and get my license. He knew that without it I couldn't hang on out here."

"So he was was a saint," said Benjamin, ironically. a saint," said Benjamin, ironically.

She missed the irony. She said solemnly, "He wanted to be. His mother had been terribly religious, so full of good works she would forget to feed her own family. But he had these doubts. We all had, back then. We read Mencken, Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis. Nothing was sacred. We laughed at everything, even at school, where half the professors were ordained, and half the boys were aimed that way. Of course, we were young-we could afford to laugh. Your father was such a kidder, so good-humored around people who didn't know him, it shocked me at first when he'd get these terrible bouts of depression. 'The blues,' he called them. He'd sit in a chair and not move. Everything disappointed him, especially me."

"Oh, no, I don't think so!" The protest was courteous; Benjamin had grown up with the impression that his parents' marriage had been a mistake, partially redeemed by his birth.

"Except my mother," his mother went on, looking past him from within the tattered wing chair where she now spent most of her days, rousing herself only to feed the pets and change television channels. "He admired admired her. She had a quickness I didn't; she could make money. It had been her management of the farm that had made my father rich, for a while, until he lost it on his friends' stock tips. That was our tragedy, if your father and I had one: we didn't know how to make money. And he was the only one of my suitors she ever approved of. The funny thing was, like Sammy Schlouck, he was dark. He could take a tan, your father, unlike you and me. We have the type of skin that can only burn." her. She had a quickness I didn't; she could make money. It had been her management of the farm that had made my father rich, for a while, until he lost it on his friends' stock tips. That was our tragedy, if your father and I had one: we didn't know how to make money. And he was the only one of my suitors she ever approved of. The funny thing was, like Sammy Schlouck, he was dark. He could take a tan, your father, unlike you and me. We have the type of skin that can only burn."

"Maybe that's what the attraction was. Opposite skin types."

She ignored the idea. "Was there an attraction? Or were we just looking for people who would maintain the suffering that we figured we deserved? We both felt embarra.s.sed at having been born. My parents had wanted a boy, and Daddy was the youngest of four, he always felt he was 'one more mouth to feed.' We hadn't had happy childhoods, either of us. Now you, you did. We were both amazed to see it. We didn't understand how you did it." there an attraction? Or were we just looking for people who would maintain the suffering that we figured we deserved? We both felt embarra.s.sed at having been born. My parents had wanted a boy, and Daddy was the youngest of four, he always felt he was 'one more mouth to feed.' We hadn't had happy childhoods, either of us. Now you, you did. We were both amazed to see it. We didn't understand how you did it."

"I had loving parents," Benjamin gallantly suggested. Parents, he didn't say, who had no one else to love.

"No," she argued, perversely, "it was something in you, you produced it out of yourself, in this miserable household. Ethel Spangler, after she married Howard Mentzer but before they had a child of their own, came to the house for an afternoon and when she left said to me, 'I hope this child gets some love in his life some day.' "

Benjamin laughed, incredulous and gratified. "What a thing to say! And yet you and Daddy kept on with her all those years."

"People used to hang on to each other," said his mother, "for fear that was all there was. Now, they let go and latch on to somebody else just like the first."

This was a dig-Benjamin had divorced and remarried twice-but he let it glide by. He saw his mother as the dispenser of more truth than he could bear. When he was seven or eight, and graduated from the shared bathtub, he asked her, having been invited to satisfy his curiosity about the facts of life, if in a woman wee-wee came out of the same place as babies did. Gently, frankly, like the progressive spirit she was, she answered him, but his embarra.s.sment was so intense it quite blotted out her answer, leaving his question to hang in his memory as a perpetual humiliation.

When she died, a long lifetime welled up through its leavings. In a small cedar chest opened by a key in her desk drawer, he found, wrapped in a ribbon faded from red to pink, a bundle of letters his father had written to her in the three years between college graduation and their marriage. They were ardent, stiff, earnest. Phrases swam up from the thin creased paper, scented not only with cedar but with, Benjamin imagined, the salt air of Florida, where his father had spent eighteen months: want to do right by everybody concerned... certain you are the mate the good Lord meant me to have... Ma has her ups and downs and is brave as h.e.l.l... Ed says the business climate here is bound to turn around, people always pull in their horns after a hurricane... miss you every day and especially after work... if, G.o.d forbid, she takes a turn for the worse... be with you on the old cane-back sofa in Olinger and kick back my heels and share a good laugh... almost chuck it all up and head north on the next freight train but... the docs say she has the determination of a saint or a mule... can hear your voice as sure as shooting... the sunsets come on so quick because of the lat.i.tude... I'm still your Sheik and you my Agnes Ayres... ninety-eight in the shade over by Arcadia... or die trying... want to do right by everybody concerned... certain you are the mate the good Lord meant me to have... Ma has her ups and downs and is brave as h.e.l.l... Ed says the business climate here is bound to turn around, people always pull in their horns after a hurricane... miss you every day and especially after work... if, G.o.d forbid, she takes a turn for the worse... be with you on the old cane-back sofa in Olinger and kick back my heels and share a good laugh... almost chuck it all up and head north on the next freight train but... the docs say she has the determination of a saint or a mule... can hear your voice as sure as shooting... the sunsets come on so quick because of the lat.i.tude... I'm still your Sheik and you my Agnes Ayres... ninety-eight in the shade over by Arcadia... or die trying... Benjamin could not bear to read continuously, it was like his mother's too-detailed answer to that childish question of his; his mind shied away. His father's handwriting even then, before he got his master's degree and a teaching job, had a schoolteacher's patient legibility; he formed each letter carefully, lifing his pen in the middle of a word. When his mother had at last died, he had already come back up north. The salmon upstream: Benjamin could not bear to read continuously, it was like his mother's too-detailed answer to that childish question of his; his mind shied away. His father's handwriting even then, before he got his master's degree and a teaching job, had a schoolteacher's patient legibility; he formed each letter carefully, lifing his pen in the middle of a word. When his mother had at last died, he had already come back up north. The salmon upstream: or die trying. or die trying.

An embossed chocolate box shaped like a heart held proof that his mother had at least once cut her hair. Verna Rahn's Haircut, Verna Rahn's Haircut, she had written in her little backslanted hand, she had written in her little backslanted hand, June 18, 1926. (Moths ate some of it!) June 18, 1926. (Moths ate some of it!) So this was its second packaging; bound with black thread, it was so long Benjamin didn't dare pull it from the box, which still smelled, very faintly, of chocolate. He let the hair stay in its thick coil, nested in tissue paper. Its color was an innocent pale shade of brown with no gray in it-light brown, like that of Jeannie in the song. A So this was its second packaging; bound with black thread, it was so long Benjamin didn't dare pull it from the box, which still smelled, very faintly, of chocolate. He let the hair stay in its thick coil, nested in tissue paper. Its color was an innocent pale shade of brown with no gray in it-light brown, like that of Jeannie in the song. A country country shade, he felt. Experimentally he touched it, and moved his hand quickly away, as if he had presumed to stroke something alive. shade, he felt. Experimentally he touched it, and moved his hand quickly away, as if he had presumed to stroke something alive.

And he found, folded at the bottom, under crocheted blankets and lace tablecloths and an Agricola pennant of purple-and-gold felt, something that he could never have given his mother but that his father had: a varsity football sweater, heavy-knit of yellowed white, the chest stiffened by its broad letter, the sleeves pinned up with oversized safety pins that were still there, their rust stains spread into the thick yarn. Another pin, in the back, took a tuck. This sweater, and the pins that had adjusted its fit on her slender body, gave off heat and implied the chill of vanished winters-mild moist Pennsylvania winters, young couples strolling the campus with open coats and unbuckled galoshes, their laughter making small white clouds.

His father had come to college on a football scholarship, though he always maintained he was too tall and skinny for the game. He had kept playing through a series of broken noses that became a feature of his mashed and melancholy face. Photographs survived, of him crouching purposefully in the unpadded leather helmet of the time. Under the folded sweater there was a game program that included Agricola's schedule; the team had played, amazingly, Cornell and Columbia and Rutgers. The little college had been overmatched-cannon fodder. His father had given his mother his all. He had clothed her in his pain, and their son had tagged on behind, uncertain what was so funny, but happy to be jealous.

Varieties of Religious Experience

THERE IS NO G G.o.d: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall. He lived in Cincinnati but happened to be in New York, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn Heights; her apartment had a penthouse view of lower Manhattan, less than a mile away. Standing on her terrace, he was still puzzling over the vast quant.i.ties of persistent oily smoke pouring from the Twin Towers, and the nature of the myriad pieces of what seemed white cardboard fluttering within the smoke's dark column, and who and what the perpetrators and purpose of this event might have been, when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skysc.r.a.per dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise. The earth below, which Dan could not see, groaned and spewed up a cloud of ash and pulverized matter that slowly, from his distant perspective, mushroomed upward. The sirens filling the air across the East River continued to wail, with no change of pitch; the cl.u.s.ter of surrounding skysc.r.a.pers, stone and gla.s.s, held its pose of blank mute witness. Had Dan imagined hearing a choral shout, a cry of protest breaking against the silence of the sky-an operatic human noise at the base of a phenomenon so inhumanly pitiless? Or had he merely humanized the groan of concussion? He was aware of looking at a, for him, new scale of things-that of Blitzkrieg, of erupting volcanoes. The collapse had a sharp aftermath of silence; at least, he heard nothing more for some seconds. the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall. He lived in Cincinnati but happened to be in New York, visiting his daughter in Brooklyn Heights; her apartment had a penthouse view of lower Manhattan, less than a mile away. Standing on her terrace, he was still puzzling over the vast quant.i.ties of persistent oily smoke pouring from the Twin Towers, and the nature of the myriad pieces of what seemed white cardboard fluttering within the smoke's dark column, and who and what the perpetrators and purpose of this event might have been, when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skysc.r.a.per dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise. The earth below, which Dan could not see, groaned and spewed up a cloud of ash and pulverized matter that slowly, from his distant perspective, mushroomed upward. The sirens filling the air across the East River continued to wail, with no change of pitch; the cl.u.s.ter of surrounding skysc.r.a.pers, stone and gla.s.s, held its pose of blank mute witness. Had Dan imagined hearing a choral shout, a cry of protest breaking against the silence of the sky-an operatic human noise at the base of a phenomenon so inhumanly pitiless? Or had he merely humanized the groan of concussion? He was aware of looking at a, for him, new scale of things-that of Blitzkrieg, of erupting volcanoes. The collapse had a sharp aftermath of silence; at least, he heard nothing more for some seconds.

Ten stories below his feet, too low to see what he saw, two black parking-garage attendants loitered outside the mouth of the garage, one standing and one seated on an aluminum chair, carrying on a joshing conversation that, for all the sound that rose to Dan, might have been under a roof of plate gla.s.s or in a silent movie. The attendants wore short-sleeved shirts, but summer's haze, this September morning, had been baked from the sky, to make way for the next season. The only cloud was manmade-the foul-colored, yellow-edged smoke drifting toward the east in a solid, continuously replenished ma.s.s. Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of G.o.d had intervened because there was none. G.o.d had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything.

Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books-Kierkegaard, Chesterton-read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building-its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds-would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

No. The great The great No No came upon him not in darkness, as religious fable would have it, but on a day of maximum visibility; "brutally clear" was how airplane pilots, interviewed after the event, described conditions. Only when Dan's revelation had shuddered through him did he reflect, with a hot spurt of panic, that his daughter, Emily, worked in finance-in mid-town, it was true, but business now and then took her to the World Trade Center, to breakfast meetings at the very top, the top from which there could not have been, today, any escape. came upon him not in darkness, as religious fable would have it, but on a day of maximum visibility; "brutally clear" was how airplane pilots, interviewed after the event, described conditions. Only when Dan's revelation had shuddered through him did he reflect, with a hot spurt of panic, that his daughter, Emily, worked in finance-in mid-town, it was true, but business now and then took her to the World Trade Center, to breakfast meetings at the very top, the top from which there could not have been, today, any escape.

Stunned, emptied, he returned from his point of vantage on the penthouse terrace to the interior of Emily's apartment. The stolid Anguillan nanny, Lucille, and Dan's younger granddaughter, Victoria, who was five and sick with a cold and hence not at school, sat in the study. The small room, papered red, was lined with walnut shelves. The books went back to Emily's college and business-school days and included a number-Cold War thrillers, outdated medical texts-that had once belonged to her husband, from whom she was divorced, just as Dan Kellogg was divorced from her mother. Had Emily inherited the tendency to singleness, as she had inherited her father's lean build and clipped, half-smiling manner? Lucille had drawn the shade of the study window looking toward Manhattan. She reported to Dan, "I tell her to not look out the window but then the television only show the disaster, every channel we switch on."

"Bad men," little Victoria told him eagerly, her tongue stumbling-her cold made her enunciation even harder to understand than usual-"bad men going to knock down all all the buildings!" the buildings!"

"That's an awful lot of buildings, Vicky," he said. When he talked to children, something severe and legalistic within him resisted imprecision.

"Why does G.o.d let bad men do things?" Victoria asked. The child's face looked feverish, not from her cold but from what she had seen through the window before the shade was drawn. Dan gave the answer he had learned when still a believer: "Because He wants to give men the choice to be good or bad."

Her face, so fine in detail and texture-brutally fine-considered this theology for a second. Then she burst forth, flinging her arms wide: "Bad men can do anything they want, anything at all!"

"Not always," Dan corrected. "Sometimes good men stop them. Most of the time, in fact."

In the shadowy room, they seemed three conspirators. Lucille was softly rocking herself on the sofa, and made a cooing noise now and then. "Think of all them still in there, all the people," she crooned, as if to herself. "I was telling Vicky how on Anguilla when I was a girl there was no electricity, and telephones only for the police, who rode bicycles wherever they went on the island. The only crime was workers coming back from three months away being vengeful with their wives for some mischief. The tallest building two stories high, and when there was no moon people stay safe in their cabins." Then, in a less dreamy voice, one meant to broadcast rea.s.surance to the listening child, she told Dan, "Her momma, she called five minutes ago and work is over for today, she coming home but don't know how, the trains being all shut down. She might have to be walking all that way from Rockefeller Center!"

Dan himself, before returning to Cincinnati today, had been planning to take the subway up to the Whitney Museum and see the Wayne Thiebaud show, which was in its last days. Dan relished the Disney touch in the artist's candy colors and his bouncy, plump draughtsmanship. Abruptly, viewing this show was impossible-part of an idyllic, less barricaded past.