"How could she know, unless you told her?" he said. "The truth is, Kate, that you ran. You just up and ran, and you never looked back. Maybe she couldn't call you; maybe something went bad for her, too. You've had some terribly hard knocks, but you're not the only one. Nobody ever is. Ginger says in her letter Cecie has had an awfully hard time."

I stared at the mass of whitish-green in my hands, seeing in it, not the roots of the killer of my poppies, but the living copper silk of Cecie Hart's hair, as I struggled to anchor a flimsy crown of white wax candles on it. The candles were burning, and Cecie was yelping with laughter and an occasional drip of candle wax, and I was laughing so hard that I thought I would wet the filmy nylon-curtain pants of my harem outfit. We were dressing for the Beaux Arts Ball in our junior year at Randolph, and I was going as Scheherazade and she as Grimm's Snow Queen.

"Be still, Cecie, or you'll burn yourself up," I heard my young voice gasp, and across the years, heard hers: " 'Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea,' " she chanted. We were reading Dorothy Parker that year. " 'And love is a thing that can never go wrong...and I am Marie of Rumania,' " we shouted together.

"That's not all Ginger says," Alan's voice broke in. "She says, 'I want you to come because I want to try to tell you how sorry I am about everything. I've known I was wrong to do what I did for a long time now, and I want to try to find a way to make it up to you. I need to know that you have a happy life. I miss you. I think you were the best one of us.' "

He was quiet, and I knew he was waiting for me to say something. But I did not; other voices filled the silence in my head.

" '...and love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Rumania.' "

Oh, Cecie...

When I first met her, I thought she looked like a garden elf, one of those Disneyesque little plaster figurines designed to peer out from beneath shrubbery or lurk in flower borders. It was not that she was grotesque, it was just that she was so vivid and so tiny. Even on a campus where petite cheerleaders and majorettes were worshiped like pocket Venuses, and taller unfortunates drooped their duck's-ass heads and padded around in soft leather Capezio shells even in January in order to look up sidewise under their Maybellined lashes at stocky, bull-necked, bandy-legged football players, Cecie was small enough to turn heads. Her size was accompanied by a noticeable lack of cuteness; even at four feet ten, Cecie could stalk like a duchess and freeze a fool at forty paces with her round blue stare. The Tri Omegas were always after her to cut her hair, which rioted all over her small head in red ringlets, like a honeysuckle thicket, giving her an antic Orphan-Annie aspect. And her purple-blue eyes were magnified like pansies behind her thick hornrimmed glasses, which completed the Annie look to perfection.

"You'd be so precious if you'd cut your hair and get some harlequins," I remember Sookie Carmichael saying to her once, after a chapter meeting. "Not that you're not cute as pie now; we all know that. But you're hiding your looks under a basket." Sookie never quite got it right. "And those clumpy saddle oxfords and thick tweed skirts don't do a thing for your darling little figure. Why don't you let me and Bitsy fix you up? You'd have to beat the boys off with a stick."

"A firehose would do fine, Sookie," Cecie said in her precise Virginia voice. I loved that voice. "Besides, if I were just like y'all we'd look like a tribe of pygmies around here. No fraternities would dare come around, scared they'd get eaten alive. Not that they aren't, anyway. Besides, y'all need me for dramatic contrast. Makes you look better."

And she smiled, her three-cornered kitten's smile, that set the dimples flickering.

"Well," Sookie said, not sure if she had been delicately skewered or complimented.

"That was mean," I giggled to Cecie later. "She only wants you to have a date every night. Fit in. Be happy. All that stuff."

"She only wants me not to embarrass the chapter by never being asked out," Cecie snorted. "Lord, she's a fool. Can you imagine me in harlequin glasses with rhinestones?"

I couldn't. Despite her size and her light, sweet voice there was nothing trivial about Cecie Hart. She was smart, she was tough, and she was singleminded in the extreme when it came to her studies. She studied constantly and with relish; she was one of the few people I ever met, besides myself and Fig Newton, who actually liked the process as well as the fruits of it, the A's, the Dean's List, the honoraries. Her clothes were indeed as severe and utilitarian as the chapter thought they were: serviceable tweeds and flannel skirts, plain, good sweater sets, tailored drip-dry shirts and shirtwaists, saddle oxfords. She owned one coat, a venerable camel's hair, and one raincoat, a khaki London Fog. There were few of them, and she took exquisite care of them. She pressed, mended, spot-cleaned, hemmed. She was the only one of us who never sent her laundry home. Sometimes, when she wasn't studying, she sewed for herself, using accomplished small stitches, and there were no cut corners or loose threads.

"I learned to sew in the convent; all of us could sew like demons by the time we got out," she said. "Kept the sisters in altar cloths, we did."

Cecie's parents had died in an automobile wreck when she was very small, along with an older brother; she did not remember them. A grandmother and a trio of spinster aunts had raised her in the big old family homeplace by the water, on the Eastern Shore. They were tiny, cultivated, devout Catholics who taught her music and sewing and what she called Advanced Ladyhood, and sent her to convent school when she was barely nine. They protected and adored her, if at a gentle remove, and the nuns had not been able to outwit or repress her, and it had been a good childhood, if an unworldly and rather lonely one. Her family was rich in culture and affection and antecedents but poor as church mice materially. They could barely send her out of state to school, even with the scholarships and the financial aid. Cecie, who planned to go on to law school after her graduation, knew it was up to her to make their investment work and get herself through Duke Law. Genteel poverty was one reason we knew each other down to the bottoms of our souls when we first met. As money calls out to money, so does the lack of it cry aloud to its own. It was the first of the great bonds between us.

The second was our utter lack of knowledge of what constituted reality. Cecie was pragmatic and tough in her self-discipline, but she was, in her microcosmic world born of loneliness and the company of naive, genteel old women and nuns, a match for me in all respects. Neither of us could have identified "real Life" when we met it, but it was perhaps less a handicap then than it would be today. Few young women of the late Fifties knew much about real life. "Get real" were words most of us had never heard, from our parents or anyone else. Cecie and I devoted the three years left to us at Randolph to the strict avoidance of real life, and succeeded gloriously. Sometimes I think I was the worst thing that could have happened to Cecie Hart. I was running from life, and something deep in her ardent soul was, even then and without her knowledge or permission, running toward it. I have to wonder, now, if I had not been there, whether Cecie might have met it earlier and with happier results. But I was there, and on the November day that she tossed her clothes into my room the great friendship of my life was born, and in a way, though neither of us ever named it, the great love.

They are love, those rare, blinding early friendships. Not everyone has them, and almost no one gets more than one. The others, the later ones, are not the same. These first grow in a soil found only in the country of the young, and are possible only there, because their medium is unbroken time and proximity and discovery, and later there is not enough of any of those for the total, ongoing immersions that these friendships are. They are not sexual in nature, or at least most are not; though perhaps, as the Freudians claim, there is no deep relationship that isn't, at bottom. But I do not think mine with Cecie had that dark note in it. We were both, at that time, simply too afraid of physical love. It had, however, much else that an intense love affair has: it charmed us, soothed us, fed us, consumed us. We discovered in each other and ourselves worlds, galaxies, a universe. Discovery, I think, is the hallmark, the one constant. Sadly, most of us are done with that by the time we reach full adulthood. These friendships may continue past first youth, but I don't think they often do. Their primary strength is that fire of exploration and validation. The friend becomes a cicerone, to go with you down to the bottom of your deepest depths, and out to the farthest crannies of your being. All your senses are open, all your reservoirs fill up at a prodigious rate, all your motors hum. A friendship like that is like the start of life, when, they say, a child learns more in a few short months than he ever will again. It was like that with Cecie and me. We could not get enough of each other, and we could not get enough of life, even though it was a life that did not exist except in the bright circle of air in which we moved together.

From the start we were called Mutt and Jeff. It was inevitable, with my lanky height and her childlike slightness, and the air of otherness that hovered around us. We stank of the abyss; of course we did. Neither of us minded. Apart, we might have smarted under the slight, stinging surf of talk that lapped around us; together we simply laughed. It is what I remember most of those three years, the laughter. We did not laugh at everything, of course, but we came near it. It was the laughter of perfect ease and utter delight; it was to us like deep drafts of air, after years of lungs constricted by too-narrow bodies. I don't remember too many days that did not begin with laughter at something, or end with it.

No matter how far apart we had been during the days, we touched base with each other automatically in the evenings. After classes, we ate together and studied together and visited up and down the hall together and went down for cokes or coffee together, and when we had somewhere to go, we went together. When we were apart during holidays and breaks, we wrote each other every day. Usually we played records and read in our room, reading aloud to each other and laughing, or, less often, sharing the passages that touched subterranean chords and wells in us, and brought the easy, ardent tears of untouched romantics to our eyes. We read all of Dorothy Parker, adoring and adopting that graceful, inch-deep cynicism: " 'Where's the man could ease a heart like a satin gown?' " we would chant to each other. And, " 'The sun's gone dim and the moon's turned black, for I loved him and he didn't love back,' " and " 'Scratch a lover, and find a foe,' " and " 'Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.' " No two young women have ever been so unjaded, or so eager to be.

We read other poetry, too, mostly Irish and English. All touched with the dark romanticism that flourished between the World Wars. I remember that when we first encountered the blood and snot and howling of the postwar poets, her nostrils whitened with disgust and I felt frightened and betrayed, as if I had been lured by Pan's pipes to the mouth of a snake pit. We turned then to Shakespeare or Dickens or Kipling, or each brought out for the other the early loves we had found in pages: I brought Maupassant and Conan Doyle and the Greek and Norse myths and laid them in her lap; she led me to The Waterbabies, and Wind in the Willows, and Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance.

" 'There is nothing half so worthwhile as simply messing about in boats,' " she would paraphrase Rat, talking of her childhood beside the shallow, blood-warm waters of Chesapeake Bay.

" 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll,' " I would intone, telling her of the great, cold seas off Cape Cod.

And always, over and around and under it all, there was the music.

It was that viscid no-man's-land that followed the prowling sexual exuberance of the Fifties' black rhythm and blues. "Junglebunny stuff," I could hear my father saying. The soprano weltschmerz of the teen angsters ruled. Connie Francis whined about everybody being somebody's fool and told us that all we had to do to be happy was to go where the boys were. Brenda Lee was sorry. The Everly Brothers groveled about being Cathy's clown. The Shirelles wondered cloyingly if someone would love them tomorrow. The hard-grooving Motown sound had not yet caught on, at least not in the Deep South. The lightlessly relevant folk rockers and the acid-drowned San Francisco sound and the cheeky, preening British had not yet come to town. At Randolph, the flipped and brush-cut young twisted and hully-gullied and jitterbugged and dirty-bopped and slow-danced to Dion and the Belmonts, and the Four Seasons and the Drifters and the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. Cecie and I could and did twist and bop as well as the next, but neither of us liked the music. To me it remained a kind of body noise, the ceaseless, subterranean pulse of my generation, forerunner to the white noise of the Seventies. Our music, Cecie's and mine, was music to be listened to and talked or even wept over, music with a dark thread in it, or else the soaring wings of Romance with a capital R. The first thing we did when we walked into our room, after tossing our books on our beds and shucking out of our clothes and into dusters or Bermudas, was to thumb through the stained pile of LPs in the window seat and select a groaning stack and plunk them onto my old gray Webcor portable. From then on until we finally went to bed, whatever we did was done to music.

One song, a treacly ballad called "While We're Young," was our unofficial anthem. "Songs were made to sing while we're young," we warbled and trilled in our faltering sopranos. "Every day is spring, while we're young..."

It wasn't the "young" of the later Sixties that we meant, that megamovement lurking only a few years ahead, that youthquake that wrenched an entire culture apart and spewed up flower children, Woodstock, psychedelics and drugs and love beads and bare feet and fire-blooming hawks and equally savage doves. It was a generic kind of youngness, a lift and swing of heart, a leap of pulse, a thrill of flesh, a cup-brimming brew of joy and yearning and silliness and tenderness and tears and laughter and prickling skin and pure sensation...we named it Impulse. Or sometimes, Romance. But it was, purely and simply, the being of young in a time of timelessness. And our music flowed through it like spilled May wine on morning grass.

We would...we did...go on to other kinds of music, other voices in other rooms, and the music of those brief years seemed, in retrospect, shallow and thin to us, perhaps even trivial. At least it did to me. With a few exceptions, I did not ever choose to play those old albums again. But still, even now, when I hear a snatch of "On the Street Where You Live," or a spilled splash of Tchaikovsky, or a sweet surge of Percy Faith, I am back with Cecie Hart, sitting on our twin beds on the top floor of the Tri Omega house in Randolph, Alabama, late into a May night, with moonlight and the heartbreaking scent of mimosa flooding into our window, talking, talking. Or I hear a sorrowing, searching curl of Mendelssohn's violins, and there we are, same place, same hour of night, but in thick quilted robes now, with sleet ticking against the black, frosted windows and the radiator hissing, sipping cups of thin, vile coffee made from powdered Maxwell House and hot tap water.

"Ugh," Cecie always said, shaking herself all over like a wet dog. "Coffee always smells like it should be thick and wonderful, like hot chocolate, and it always tastes...like this. Like pony piss."

And she would fish a dime out of her purse and go padding down to the basement and get a bottle of Coca Cola and a Baby Ruth from the machine, and bring me back a package of barbecued chips, and we would talk some more.

Always, always, like the music, the talking.

We talked about the things that young girls in dormitories and sorority houses all over the country did, in that time: about who was dating who and who wasn't dating at all and who had just broken up and who looked like a sure thing for a pin before the quarter was out. We talked about who we liked and who we loved and who we didn't like and who we hated and about a few who were simply beyond dislike and beneath contempt. Because there were very few things that we could not say to each other, we were able to admit that a few of our Tri O sisters fell into the latter categories.

"You'd think she was proud of that water buffalo ass, the way she prances around here naked. All she needs is a cowbird on her head," Cecie would snort. She was modest in the extreme, no doubt a stigma of the convent. I cannot ever remember seeing her completely naked.

"If she kisses me goodnight one more time to see if I've been drinking I'm going to throw up on her," I would say. Or, "She'd never on earth have passed that sociology exam if she hadn't been a k-ing that old fool all quarter. She was over there typing for him every afternoon last week. That brown stain on her chin ain't nicotine, friends."

We would look at each other, and burst into simultaneous song: "There is a brown ring...around her nose...and every day it grows and grows..."

And collapse into a heap, with weak, eye-watering laughter, laughter that I sometimes sought to keep going for the sheer pleasure of hearing Cecie laugh. It was a chiming, crystal thing, that laugh, that spiraled up and up until it teetered on the edge of affectation, and then it plunged suddenly into a rich, froggy guttiness, and took off upward again. People always laughed along with Cecie, even when they did not know what the joke was, and one of her prolonged late-night spells brought sisters to our door, knuckling their eyes from sleep, mouths twitching with answering laughter, to see what on earth was so funny. It was not often that we could tell them.

We talked of ourselves. Within months of her moving in with me, the dam of stony reticence that had kept the full spate of reality away from my consciousness cracked, and I told Cecie things I had not told a living soul, and would not, again, until much later. I never let the dam crumble entirely; the abyss yawned too blackly, the cold black sea of actuality pounded too savagely. But I did not move to mend the crack, either, and I am sure Cecie extrapolated almost the entire truth about me from the trickle I let through. I think she always saw me much plainer than I did myself, and vice versa. The trust we invested in each other was far more enormous...but fragile...than we realized.

"I'm not a Virginia Lee," I said abruptly one night, apropos of nothing. "I'm not a Virginian at all. And I don't have any money to speak of. The whole thing was my father's idea."

I could not look at her, and my heart was near to leaping out of my chest. The breath of the abyss blasted furiously up around me.

"Well, I knew that about the Lees," Cecie said mildly, not looking at me, either. "And I didn't much think you were a Virginian. My aunts know every Lee in the Old Dominion, quick or dead. They couldn't place your family. I hope it's not going to bother you that you told me. Lord knows, money is the very least important thing up home, and I don't care about your father. He sounds like an interesting man."

"Was," I said. "He's dead. But you're right, he really was an interesting man."

She did look at me then, briefly and delicately. I could feel the weight of it on my cheek and neck.

"I'm sorry about that," she said. "It's hard not to have parents. No matter how kind everybody else is, it's still hard."

She had never spoken of her own feelings about the loss of her family; that lay behind the door deep within her, that she did not open for me or anyone else. I was able to look at her then. Something welled up, warm and tremulous, inside me. It was not pity, but a stronger, purer thing altogether. Love, probably, though I was so unaccustomed to it that I did not know it then.

"My father shot himself," I said. "He did it last year, when he lost his money. It's why I'm here. The stuff about Randolph having a better interior design school was crap."

It was a gift to her, to thank her for accepting and containing the proffered truth of me, for giving me a glimpse of her own. And it was a kind of insurance. I sensed rather than knew that to hand someone the secrets of your heart is to bind them to you. I was right about that with Cecie; I did not learn until later that it is not always true. Not even usually.

"I want you to know two things," she said in the same voice that she might say good morning, or remark on the weather. "And then we won't talk about this anymore, because we don't need to. The first is, I will never tell anybody what you've told me. And the second is, I've never really been sorry that my parents and brother died. I've sort of liked it. I don't remember them, and I've gotten attention and love and things that I never would have had if they'd lived; people have always gone out of their way to please me because they've felt sorry for me. I'd never have made it to college if Bobby had lived; there wasn't enough money, and with the Harts it's always the sons who go. Not the daughters. So. Enough. Let's go out to Dairyland and get a limeade. My treat."

We shared, in so far as we could, our provenance. She told me about the strange, lost, primordial water-world of the Tidewater and the great Bay, about the seasons and the tides and the shining, writhing blue crabs that she pulled from the water on the dock in front of her grandmother's house, and the waterfowl and vast, loose Vs of geese that passed over each spring and fall on their way north and south. Once she had been on her way to mass and had stopped to watch the wild geese pass overhead and never made mass at all.

"Grammy found out about it and really let me have it; you'd have thought I was bound for hell that minute. But you know, it seemed as much like church to me as any service I've ever been to," she said.

She told me about the rich, dense ecosystem of the Tidewater, and about the stars and the clouds and the wild things of the Chesapeake. Cecie's curiosity about and love for the natural world was a living thing. She told me about her garden at home in the cove. She was passionate about that. Our room swam perpetually in a fetid green miasma of hanging and potted plants, and she is the only person I have ever known who really could root and grow splendid, shining plants from avocado pits. She talked to them all, sometimes in light, rapid convent French.

In return, I told her about sailing and tennis and horses and the East. I did not think it was a fair trade even then. I never thought to tell her about my life in Kenmore. To me it was no more real by then than something I had read in a book, long ago.

The one thing that Cecie and I did not talk about, except obliquely and with an ersatz veneer of weary sophistication, was sex. Here we were, I am convinced, unique, at least within the perimeters of Randolph University. All around us, in dormitory and sorority rooms, in parked cars and on blankets out at the lake and in fraternity party rooms, everyone talked of It and a good many did It. Despite the fact that pregnancy loomed like a glittering killer iceberg, and every quarter a few girls dropped out of school and disappeared from view, or married in haste and pretended it was a matter of glorious Impulse, sex was the universal obsession and the motive power behind all our music and dancing, the market impulse behind the sales of Fire and Ice lipstick and Tonis and Peter Pans and Listerine-the reason many of us were in college at all.

Looking back, it seems to me that on any given night the very campus rocked, quietly and cosmically, like Emma Bovary's carriage. I don't think the advent of The Pill, a few years later, resulted in many more instances of the Black Act and the Dirty Deed. I just think it wiped out a great deal of the monthly breathheld terror. It was not always possible to tell who was Doing It; if you were, you did not admit it, and the raw evidence of beard burn and hickies and ravenously smeared lipstick could just as well mean HP...heavy petting, an amenity permissible and even expected of pinned and engaged girls. There were no sanctions at all against the boys at Randolph. It was simply assumed that every boy who wanted to, did, whenever the urge struck. Since most of the girls denied it, I suppose we assumed that the guys were getting it from the same small group of rosy roundheels, but somehow the subject never came up. Guys did, we didn't...or did and said we didn't. Simplis in extremis.

But Cecie and I simply never talked of it. Oh, we learned and sang the raunchy songs with relish, and made the right noises when we were part of a group who was talking about it. Sooner or later every group did; where there were three or more of us gathered together in Its name, there It was also. Cecie would blow twin plumes of Pall Mall smoke through her nostrils, something it had taken her months of choking and coughing to master, when Ginger came crashing exuberantly into our room smeared from forehead to knee with lipstick caroling, "Yum, that SAE Bets fixed me up with is hot to trot."

"You've really got both feet in the trough tonight, Fowler," Cecie would drawl, and Ginger would burble with laughter. She relished physical touching the way a puppy did romping, and sought it, I expect, in the same happy-go-lucky spirit. We never knew just how far she went, but it was impossible to censure her for it. As well to censure a golden setter joyfully romping out of the water, shaking himself.

And I was able to say, world-wearily and through half-lowered lids, "It's even better with a little Bailey's Beach sand thrown in," when someone spoke slyly of an evening of making out. And everyone would laugh, and the looks that were thrown at me under Maybellined lashes told me that I was considered sophisticated in the extreme, undoubtedly a veteran of who knew what Kama Sutric Eastern excesses.

Even Fig Newton sometimes got into the act, with the grace of a charging rhino. One night she wiggled her toes in our faces and sang out, "Look, I shaved them. Makes them fun to suck."

"Ugh, Fig, YUCK," we shouted her down.

"Well, Sister does it," she said defensively.

"I'd as soon suck a rotten persimmon," Cecie said later that night, when we were alone. "Do you think Sister really does shave her toes?"

"She says she does," I said.

"Does Franklin really...you know, suck them?"

"I guess he does," I said. "Why on earth else would you shave them?"

Cecie gave the small all-over shiver that meant, with her, disgust and annoyance.

"The convent looks better and better," she said.

I think she more than half meant it. It's hard to say what a convent education does to young women on the deepest level; later I would meet many who seemed much the wilder and more wanton for theirs, as if each overtly physical act had a double meaning, the one that informed it in the moment and the one that said to the sisters, many long dead, "That to you, and that, and that!" But there was not much doubt what it had done to Cecie. About sex, as about other things to a lesser degree, she was chaste and remote. And it somehow annoyed her. After we read Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Tropic of Cancer, this time not aloud, she said, "I don't think it would be half so bad if you weren't expected to make those noises...during it. And if you could just do it in utter darkness and privacy, and not talk endlessly about it. But it just sounds messy and loud and somehow public, and there's no way it can be graceful. What a shame there's no other way to get children."

"You don't have to be loud or public about it," I said, amused. "Who says you do? Lord, Cecie, for all we know it's as graceful as Swan Lake. How do you know what it looks like?"

"Because I do," she said. "Somehow I know it looks just like that what's-her-name in Henry Miller's book, who pulled up her dress and did it to herself in the middle of the Tottenham Court Road. God! Not me, no thank you."

And I think she did mean that. Marriage and children were not in any of our talk at night, not even an alliance of any sort. Sometimes we made vague talk about Great Loves, and the suffering they entailed, but if we got more specific than that, we set foot on a heavily mined path that led inevitably to It, and we fled from it. She shied away, I am certain, out of a deep fastidiousness of soul. I shied out of embarrassment and fear of the ensuing entanglement. In my mind, It meant, inevitably, marriage, and that meant that strange, duplicitous, abyss-dance that had linked my father and mother.

And so I was able to say, when she said, "No thank you," "Amen." But I wondered about sex, endlessly and sometimes near obsessively. I would lie in bed at night, after we had turned off our lights, and move around two anonymous, androgynous figures in my head like cutout paper dolls, trying this position and that, and I still could not quite figure out what you actually did. Who gets on top of who? If it's him, does he mash the breath out of her? If it's her, how does it get up in her? I had seen male genitalia only in paintings and statues, cozy, chunky bundles that dangled straight down. Even if he lay on top, how would he get it inside her? And then what? Does that stuff come right out into her, or do you have to wait for it; is it like pushing the button on a can of shaving cream? Do they move? Does he? Does she? How do you know when it's over?

And the questions at the heart of it all: Does it hurt, and will I want to?

It did not seem likely to me, on those nights, that I would ever learn the answers, though common sense told me that one day even I would cross that damp chasm between those who had done It and those who had not. But my heart didn't believe it. Meanwhile, there was Romance and Impulse, and songs to be sung...while we were young...

And so we talked, if we talked of the future at all, about careers, and what we would do after school. I planned to go straight to New York and plunge myself into the esoteric world of Eames and Bertoia and Saarinen furniture and rich, thick textiles and bright, explosive abstract paintings and cool, sculpted white houses by the sea. Cecie meant to go through Duke Law, pass the Virginia bar, and then take off for a couple of years and roam the world before settling down to practice some nebulous, unnamed branch of law in an old house on the shore where water light danced on walls and ceilings and the tide slapped hollowly under a silver-gray dock. Neither of us thought how we would get from graduation day to those distant, shining futures, but neither of us doubted that the worlds of international design and law would welcome us with open arms. Our grades, after all, were exemplary.

"Come with me to Europe before we start to work," she would say. "It won't cost anything; we'll backpack and get jobs along the way if we need to."

"You come to New York with me," I replied. "You can practice out on Long Island if you have to have water and gray shingles, and I can come out on weekends, and we can earn enough to go to Europe in style."

"You're going to be perfectly happy to find somewhere wonderful and stay, Kate," she said. "But I'm always going to want to see what's around the next turn."

It was a simplistic prophecy, but I thought at the time it probably had a grain of truth in it. I also thought that somehow, when all was said and done, Cecie and I would stay close to each other through our lives. It was what you do think, in the middle of those devouring early friendships. That it is simply ludicrous to think that anything, even marriage, even death, can broach them, such is their power and sweetness.

Cecie was always the one of us who had doubts about that.

"You're going to meet somebody and get pinned and then married," she would say. "You've just got that look about you, no matter what you say. It's not that you don't date. You just haven't found anybody with any sense yet. Wait till you do."

"Not now," I said. "Not yet. I date just for fun now. There isn't anybody at Randolph I'm interested in. Besides, you date, too."

She did; and in spite-or perhaps because of-the Lee nose and the so-called Eastern la-di-da, so did I. They were, for the most part, as I had said: light, easy, spindrift alliances, borne up on gusts of laughter and music and the elaborately, ostentatiously romantic things we devised to do. We danced one night on the lawn of the president's formal rose garden to the music of "Moonglow" on the car radio, and fell in love, not with the boys who had brought us there, but with the idea of it all. We drank Lancer's and Mateuse and Rhine wine on blankets by the starpricked water of Lake Randolph, and went to fraternity formals in clouds of net and tulle bellied out over clanking plastic hoops, and we got huge, bulbous yellow chrysanthemums on football weekends, with fraternity letters tricked out in scattered glitter on them, and purple and white orchids for our wrists on formal weekends, and went to Destin and Panama City for house parties, and we laughed light laughter and sang and danced, and kissed light kisses. And none of it touched us to our cores; all of it blew about us like feathers in a summer zephyr.

A few times I got fairly serious about someone, most likely a brooding loner in the school of architecture on the G.I. Bill. Once I dated, for a quarter or so, the president-elect of the student body, and was so flown with myself that I went about mooing about first ladies, and bought a hideous lipstick called First Lady Pink. It took only one snort from Cecie to bring me out of that. I threw the lipstick away.

But when the affair ended, as it was predestined to do, I was briefly and badly hurt, and took to walking the campus at night in the November cold, alone, my hands jammed in my raincoat pockets. Cecie may have wanted to snort, but she did not, then. On the night that the fever of sorrow snapped I prowled for hours in a downpour and Cecie walked beside me, hands jammed into the pockets of her yellow slicker. She did not snort and she did not speak. She simply matched me, stride for stride, which, considering her short legs, took some doing. Neither of us was unaware of the drama of it all. Finally I turned to her, water running down my face, and said, "This is really stupid, isn't it?"

"It really is," she said. "But it's better than cancer."

I looked down at her, her face shadowed under the dripping rainhat, and then burst into laughter. She did too. We laughed until we had to hold each other up, and then we walked in the rain to Pennington's Drugstore and had hot chocolates. We had to stop several times on the way, doubled up once more with laughter, and we were still laughing when we crawled, sodden and chilled, into our beds. It became the talisman we invoked whenever sorrow struck, or the abyss stirred and howled beneath our feet.

"Well, it's better than cancer."

Oh, Cecie. It is. It is.

Chapter Four.

AFTER Alan went back into the studio I stayed in the garden for another hour. It is a secret one now, walled away from the beach, the houses on either side of us, and the road in front by dunes and a weathered fence and tall shrubs and whatever else I could coax into life in the constant rush of salt off the Atlantic. I began the garden when we moved into the house in Sagaponack, the year after we married. It was just a small beach shack then, a weathered gray cube among far grander houses around it, and it sported not a petal or a leaf that was not wild. But it had a magnificent view of the entire sweep of the South Shore from the upstairs crow's nest we added, and the dunes that shielded the first story from the sea were the tallest and wildest on all that coast. I started the garden before we even moved in.

At first I had a rich sweep of perennials in the border behind the dunes and beach plum, and I built up a tier of weathered wooden boxes and tubs so that passersby on the beach below could see them far above, like pennons on a rampart. We planted black pines, sedum, juniper and glossy privet to shield the deck and garden from the punishing torrents of salt wind, but I kept them shaped and clipped. Outside, on the dunes, were beach grass and sea oats, beach morning glory and sea rocket and dune spurge and panic grass...a subtle palette of wild gray-green that set off to perfection my carefully nurtured perennials. I hauled black soil and compost and fertilizer all one summer, and the next I had yarrow and bellflowers and delphiniums and lilies and iris and geraniums and feverfew and a full spectrum of the gaudy poppies. I loved the flowers and loved showing them off; we began our series of deck parties even before the house had a proper kitchen. I hauled food and liquor and ice out to Sagaponack from Bridgehampton and sometimes Manhattan for three summers, and everyone we knew and some we didn't came to have drinks in my twilight garden by the sea. I always loved my flowers best when the pearl-gray evening light ignited their colors to radiance. Stephen was just-born then, and the garden was a celebration, a destination. I was not even aware when it became a fortress.

When I had my first miscarriage I stopped some of the parties and let the shrubs grow wild, for I could not seem to get my strength back that summer. Two years later, when our daughter was stillborn, I enclosed the side approaches from the road to the garden in privet hedges. After that you could get to it only from the house, but you could still see the flames of the perennials from the beach, and I worked as assiduously to cultivate the garden for just the three of us as I had when passersby regularly saw it. We still had an occasional party, and our guests still loved my garden.

When Stephen died I let the black pines grow tall and wild and the juniper overrun the side yards, and we did not have the parties anymore. When they found the ovarian cancer and I came home from that first surgery, and the chemo that followed, I took down the tiers of tubs and pots that were visible from the beach, and put up the fence, and concentrated on my borders. It was about that time that I tired of perennials, and began replacing them with the annuals I have now. There were two exploratory surgeries after that, both with negative results, and the acute fear I had felt at first slid into chronic anxiety and then over into a kind of level white peace that was most pronounced when I was in the garden. Soon I was spending most of my daylight hours there. In winter I spent them at my desk in the alcove off the living room, that looked directly onto the sleeping garden. That was nearly five years ago, and all the perennials are gone now except the poppies. Now I have blanket flower, annual phlox, gazania, lantana, gerberer daisies, purslane, larkspur, statice, zinnias, marigolds, blackeyed susans, and a glorious rank of sunflowers, like sentinels, like Swiss guards at the Vatican. Each autumn I rip them out. Each spring I replant them.

"Don't you think it's okay now to plan further ahead than three months?" Alan said last spring, when I came home from the nursery with the bedding plants. "It's been four and a half years. In October you'll be officially cured. You can afford to look ahead now. I miss the iris and the lilies, and I miss seeing the colors from the beach. Now, when you're down there, it's like there's nothing at all up here behind the dunes. Those flowers always had a nice, go-to-hell look about them: look, world, Kate and Alan Abrams are up here."

"Is that what you think I'm doing?" I said. "Refusing to look ahead?"

"I know you are," he said. "You've been doing it for almost five years. I could understand it for a while, even if I didn't think it was exactly healthy, but there's just not any reason to do it now. You're virtually well. You need to get on with your life. We need to make some plans. We need to get you out of this fortress back here. It's beautiful, but it doesn't make a life, Kate."