"Drive slowly through town. I want everybody to see me in this car."

Michael drove sedately along the main street of the town. There were two people on the street whom she knew and she waved, grandly, all the time babbling excitedly. Skiing didn't interest her all that much, she said, what she really wanted to be was a singer. She sang in the church choir and was one of its soloists, but that wasn't what she meant. "What I want," she said, "is to go out dressed in a crazy costume, all feathers and spangles and long stockings, red is my favorite color, maybe after purple, and see twenty thousand people out there screaming 'Rita, Rita!' at me and pick up a microphone and belt out one song after another and have them go crazy and rip out the chairs and travel with my own band-New York, San Francisco, London, Paris . . . with the money coming in so fast I'd have to hire three college graduates just to count it."

Michael laughed at the girl's dreadful vision of the good life and hoped, for her sake, that her ambition would never be fulfilled. But he didn't have the heart to remind her of the many popular singers whose admirers had staged riots in their honor and who had wound up suicides or dead from drugs before the age of thirty. Instead he said, "There's a friend of mine, a Frenchman, who plays the piano and sings in bars and who's very good indeed. He's coming up here in a few days and he's very nice and I'm sure I can arrange to let him listen to you and give you some useful pointers."

"You're kidding . . ." She gasped at the grandeur of what he was offering as she said it.

"No. Honestly."

"Mr. Storrs," she said emotionally, "you're just the nicest man I ever met."

"I hope," he said, embarrassed by her intensity, "I hope later you'll find someone, lots of someones, a good deal nicer, Rita."

She leaned her head back against the leather bucket seat and closed her eyes, a dreamy smile on her face as he drove the last few hundred yards to the hotel.

When he took her skis off the rack, she said, "Better take yours off, too. They steal skis around here if they're left unlocked. Up to now it looks like heaven in Green Hollow, but when there's snow on the ground we get some real uglies up here."

Obediently, as Rita hurried in to begin her working day, Michael took his skis off the rack and put them and his poles in the hotel ski room. Then he went to the front desk and asked if there were any messages for him from Mrs. Heggener. There was a message. Mrs. Heggener wished to ski at two-thirty this afternoon. He hoped she wouldn't be as active on the slopes as she was in bed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

He had his lunch, alone, with Rita serving him silently and decorously, the dining room now alive with the first thin wave of skiers, most of them dressed in garish colors with outlandish stripes that reminded him of professional football uniforms.

At two-thirty, promptly, Eva Heggener came down into the lobby, where Michael was waiting for her. She was wearing a navy blue ski outfit, tucked in at the waist, that showed off her figure and a fur hat that made her delicately colored, sharply cut face look like that of a court beauty in an old Dutch painting. She glanced up at the clock over the front desk and nodded approvingly at Michael's promptness. He got their skis out of the ski room and put them on his car.

"We should really take my car," she said. "The bill for gasoline can mount up over a winter."

He didn't know whether or not she wished to annoy him with her offer, but she had. All peasants, he remembered. "I'll make it up in tips, perhaps," he said, meanly.

She laughed. "My," she said, mildly, "aren't we touchy."

"I fold like a flower at the slightest touch of wind," he said, as they got into the Porsche.

"Anemones," she said. "Famous for it. My American anemone." She patted his hand soothingly.

At the bottom of the lift he bent and put on her skis. "Service with a smile," he said, to get even with her.

On the way up, she asked, "How was the skiing this morning?" "Vigorous."

"Did Cully approve of you?"

"In a way. He's not what you call a demonstrative man."

"By the way," she said, as they mounted in the crystalline silent air, "do you know how to play backgammon?"

"I've played. Why?"

"My husband is always looking for partners. If you play with him be careful. No high stakes. He's terribly wily."

"I've been wily in my time."

"I'll warn him. By the way, I talked to him on the phone this morning and I spoke to him about you and he'd like us all to have dinner together tonight if he's not too tired."

"Wouldn't you rather have dinner alone, his first night back?" "There are so many first nights back with him, I think he looks forward to a change. We have said just about everything there is to be said between us."

"I'd be delighted," Michael said formally.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Rita told me you'd watched her ski this morning. She was all excited about what you told her-about the possibility of her taking up racing and then the thing about your friend the pianist. By the way, the manager told me he's arranged about the two rooms. It was a squeeze, we expect a crowd this weekend. Do they really need two rooms or are they just being proper?"

"They're just friends. At least, that's what they tell me."

"You never can tell about Americans."

"He's not American, he's French."

"Then I suppose they are only friends. We'll manage." She slapped her gloved hands together as if she were cold. "I'd be careful about what you say to the girl-Rita, I mean. It would be tragic if she turned from a charming first-rate servant into a second-rate ski bum and a third-rate singer."

"I don't know about the ski bum and the singer," he said, consciously restraining his anger, "but I'm sure no matter what I say or you say, she's not going to remain a servant."

"Men are naive," Eva said flatly. "They think a pretty face is a universal passport."

What about your face and your passport, he thought, but didn't say it.

They were at the top now and Michael saw that she slipped out of the chair deftly and made the little descent holding her poles under one arm and swinging down gracefully.

"Do you know the slopes by now?" she asked, as she ran her wrists into the thongs of the pole handles.

"Cully had me all over the place, and I've looked at the maps of the runs. Do you have any preferences?"

"Any run but the Black Knight," she said. "Steep places give me vertigo. Go ahead now, I'll follow you. I'll tell you if you're going too fast for me." She was all business now.

Michael set off on the easiest of the slopes, looking back from time to time to see how Eva was doing. She skied confidently and with grace and had obviously had a great deal of expert instruction. He put on speed and she followed on the heels of his skis. Vertigo, my ass, he thought, what is she trying to prove? But he stayed away from the Black Knight.

It was getting dark when they made their last descent, this time with Michael going at about three-quarter speed and Eva having no trouble keeping up with him. When they stopped near the lodge, her face was glowing as she looked up at the mountain and said, her voice tinkling in the frozen twilight, "That's what it's all about, isn't it?" and he wanted to kiss her there and then.

"Satisfied with your instructor?" he asked.

She nodded. "More than," she said. "Satisfied with your pupil?" "Some pupil," he said. He hadn't said a word about her skiing all afternoon, although there were moves she made that were unnecessary with the new equipment and the more modem refinements that were now being taught. "Maybe tomorrow," he said, "I'll say a word or two about how to improve your style." Lean back a little more, use your knees, not your ankles, flatten your skis on the turns, the usual, ever-changing, profitable mumbo jumbo.

"I will listen to teacher with bated breath," she said mockingly. "Maybe by the end of winter I'll ski as well as your new friend, Rita, and you'll advise me about taking up a new career."

He no longer wanted to kiss her as he knelt to get her out of her skis.

Mr. Heggener turned out to be neither bent over, coughing, rheumyeyed or barely able to move. He was a slender, gentle-looking man, perhaps fifty-five years old, his skin translucent, with a full head of white hair, and a small, neat white beard. His narrow face and dark, sad eyes looked like those of an eighteenth-century Spanish grandee and his manners were exquisitely polite and formally friendly. He was wearing a beautiful dark green pressed wool loden jacket, with elaborate black embroidery around the buttonholes and a gleaming white shirt and dark silk tie. Although the table at which they were seated was in front of the fireplace in which piled logs flamed brightly, he had a Scotch-plaid lightweight blanket over his shoulders. A little nervously, Michael had dressed for the occasion, too, and wore a collar and tie and a blue blazer. Eva was wearing the same loose long black gown she had worn the night Michael had arrived, but she had on jewelry tonight, a rope of pearls and a gold brooch high on her shoulder. They had started dinner late and by the time Rita was serving the dessert they were alone in the dining room.

Mr. Heggener was a perfect host and the conversation, Michael was relieved to discover, flowed easily-mostly about the lucky downfall of snow, the condition of the runs, the difficulty in finding teachers of acceptable caliber for the ski school, the inevitable growth of the town since Michael had been there before and the accompanying changes, the necessity of laying out courses for the new craze of cross-country skiing, the difficulty of finding good films for the new movie house of which Mr. Heggener was the principal owner. Mr. Heggener had a light, pleasing voice and spoke without an accent and was careful at first not to monopolize the conversation, bringing his wife and Michael into all the discussions. Mr. Heggener, Michael noticed, was interested in a rather Olympian way in his fellow townsmen and their peculiarities, but when he mentioned the names of any of them with whom he had to deal, it was always with some phrase of approval. During the meal he never touched his wife's hand, but Michael could see that he was deeply attached to her and listened intently when she spoke, which was not often. She seemed content to listen most of the time to the two men and sat back relaxed in her chair. She ate with a good appetite and smiled when her husband complimented her on how well prepared the meal was and told Michael that the present chef had arrived after a long line of dismally incompetent journeymen cooks, who had come to them highly recommended but who, he suspected, had come straight out of diners and hamburger stands.

Over dessert, he said, "I suppose, my dear Mr. Storrs, that you, like so many of our guests, wonder how I came to be here. My settling here, if it could be called settling, might be considered ... ah . . . fortuitous. There is a clinic outside town that somebody told me was run by a professor who had performed miracles. Perhaps he had" -Mr. Heggener laughed lightly-"with others. Unfortunately, he was not in his magic phase when I visited him. But I fell in love with the town. . . . Thank you, Rita," he said to the girl, who was putting a demitasse of coffee in front of him. He looked at it with amused distaste. "Sanka, unhappily. I am not permitted real coffee. However, yours is real, am I right, Rita?"

"Yes, sir," she said.

Mr. Heggener turned to Michael and his wife. "Shall we have a cognac?"

"Andreas . . ." Eva said warningly.

"My dear," Mr. Heggener said, "after such a superb meal, after hospital fare. . . . There is always a choice," he explained to Michael. "What your soul says is good for you and what some man in a white coat, who knows nothing of souls, since they have not yet described them in medical literature, although I am sure one day they will get around to it, as they undoubtedly will to everything else . . ." Michael could see that the man relished his qualifying clauses and had worked on them as a personal style. "What some man in a white coat, as I was saying, told you is bad for you. On balance, tonight, homecoming night, my soul has the better arguments. Mr. Storrs-a cognac?"

"Thank you," Michael said. He was feeling expansive, too, his fears of the meeting dissipated with the good food and the wine.

"Three glasses, please," Mr. Heggener said to Rita. "The Blue Ribbon." Then, to Michael, "Would you like a cigar?"

"No, thank you," Michael said. "Among the things the doctors and my soul agree on is that I should give up smoking."

"Have you managed it?" Mr. Heggener asked.

"Almost," Michael said. "I only smoked one cigarette today." It had been in the lodge with Rita at noon, after the workout with Cully.

"Abstinence has its own pleasures. No cigars, thank you, Rita. As I was saying"-Michael noticed that Mr. Heggener had a habit of using the phrase, like a composer going back to a series of notes he had used previously, to bring back the listener to a motif he had not yet exhausted-"as I was saying, the town pleased me, the gentle mountains. The majesty of the Alps dwindles men who live in its valleys. I come from a hotelkeeping family. Generations. We have old ledgers with the names of those noble young Englishmen who made the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. If I were of an unscientific turn of mind I would be inclined to say that I have hotelkeeping in my blood. When I see a place that has a certain intangible, attractive atmosphere, a combination of geography, population, beauty . . . and . . ." he chuckled, "I must say, the lure of profit, about it, my thoughts immediately run to building, buying, landscaping, personnel, length of season, etcetera. So with Green Hollow. Do you have some similar obsession, Mr. Storrs?"

"I'm afraid not." After a meal like the one he had eaten he would cast a pall over the table with a detailed account of the obsessions that ruled his life.

"A pity," Mr. Heggener said.

"I envy you," Michael said. "You have a fine place here."

"So they tell me," Mr. Heggener said. "My accountants, I am happy to say, also reassure me. Hotelkeeping, if one keeps a proper distance from the inevitable daily annoyances, can be a very satisfactory profession. It is a little like being the captain of a ship. One is the master, one charts the course, as it were, one can pick the most pleasant ports of call. One can invite the most interesting of the passengers to one's table to entertain you, as we have had the good fortune to invite you . . ."

Michael laughed. "I'm afraid it's the other way around. You've been entertaining me."

"Ah," Mr. Heggener said, sighing with mock theatricality, "I do like an active listener, I must confess, and I impose myself when I have one captive." Having satisfied himself with this apology, he went on sonorously, his neat white beard moving rhythmically, "As I was saying, one meets a great variety of people, all of them finally astounding in their various views of life, one hears all the gossip, which is dear to an old Viennese's heart. . ."

"You haven't been back to Vienna in two years," Eva said sullenly, as though the mention of the city had touched some old wound within her.

"True." Mr. Heggener waved his hand airily. "Which is why I can be sentimental about it after a good dinner. Despite its bustle and the stability of the schilling, if one is in Vienna for any length of time, there is no avoiding the feeling that you are visiting a crumbling museum, making glorious statements about the past and keeping a glum silence about the future. But enough of Vienna. I was speaking of the metier I was lucky enough to inherit. As I was saying, one must keep a proper distance to enjoy it. I am lucky there, too. I live almost half a mile away and I have an excellent manager here, whom, rightly or wrongly, I believe to be honest, to listen to the complaints about mistaken bookings or cold meals or leaky pipes or crying children. And I can contrive to be absent when cooks leave on holiday evenings and when chambermaids discover they are pregnant."

Rita had come up silently behind him with a tray holding a bottle of cognac and three small glasses and was waiting until Mr. Heggener stopped talking for a moment so that she could put the tray down on the table before him. If she had heard his words about pregnant chambermaids, her face didn't show it. "Ah, thank you, Rita," Mr. Heggener said, slightly embarrassed when he realized she was there. "Just put everything down here on the table." He watched while the girl placed the bottle and the three glasses in front of him. "And Rita," he said, "you must go off to sleep now. Since there was nobody to talk to in the hospital I am liable to talk all night here and I mustn't allow my garrulousness to deprive you of the rest your youth demands. Go, go, child, and sleep well."

"Thank you," Rita said and slipped off silently.

Heggener poured the cognac carefully, but with relish. He raised his glass. "To the best of all possible winters."

They drank to the best of all possible winters, although Eva barely touched the glass to her lips.

"Ah," said Heggener, sniffing the brandy, "my soul was correct, and the doctors, as usual, in error." He turned his head and looked at the door through which Rita had disappeared into the kitchen. "Eva," he said to Michael, "has told me about the interesting conversation you had with our charming Rita this morning."

"She's a lovely skier," Michael said. "With some coaching, she might amount to something, even race."

"And why not?" Heggener said. "In the field of athletics, the blacks of this country-by the way, I am an American citizen, Mr. Storrs, if that is of any importance to you-the blacks are a great natural resource. One has only to look at a game of football or baseball on the television to see how many of them there are, how beautifully they play, with what skill and ferocity and determination, how they excel. Perhaps if we could persuade enough of them to put on skis, we would finally do better than a place or two in the first ten in every other Olympics."

"Your broad-mindedness does credit to you, Andreas," Eva said, with a touch of sarcasm in her voice, "but you forget, the blacks have never congregated in the mountains in America."

"Perhaps we should invite them to altitude," Mr. Heggener said. "Perhaps in my will I shall leave a fund for that express purpose. One of my disappointments as a young man was that I never could win a race. Maybe after I'm gone my money will win one for me." He laughed, and white, even young man's teeth, his own, showed above the trim white beard. "It's an intriguing idea. Maybe from wherever I am I will be able to lean down and shout, soundlessly, of course, 'More wax, more wax!' to one of my dark proteges."

"You've skied, Mr. Heggener?" Michael asked. Somehow, it was hard to imagine the frail figure in the chair opposite him, with the plaid blanket thrown over his shoulders, as ever having been robust enough to cope with snow.

"After all, my dear Mr. Storrs," Mr. Heggener said, "I was born in Austria. Yes, I skied. And I have a limp to prove it." He laughed, then looked at Michael seriously. "Skiing, I take it, is not your profession?"

"No," Michael said, but added nothing more.

"I didn't think so. I mean nothing disparaging by that, I assure you."

"He also hang-glides," Eva said. The disapproval was plain in her voice.

"Oh," Michael said, "you recognized me." She had not spoken about it before, nor had he to her.

"I certainly did," Eva said. "I hope you've had your flight for the winter. The ski school is shorthanded enough as it is. At least wait until spring before you kill yourself."

"It looks more dashing than it is," Michael said.

"I've read the stories," Eva said. "I saw the picture of one of the champions hanging dead on a high-tension wire in California."

"He overrated himself."

"You don't overrate yourself?" By now she was frankly hostile, baiting him, and Michael wondered what her husband was thinking about this argumentative familiarity.

"I try not to," Michael said mildly.

"Hang-gliding," Mr. Heggener said, musingly, as though he had absented himself momentarily from the conversation. "Kin to the birds." He made a swooping graceful motion with his pale hand. "Every generation finds a new way to risk its neck. A new adventure. To say nothing of that old, permanent adventure. War." He poured some more cognac in the pause that followed the ominous word. He swished the brandy around in his glass and sniffed it. "Luckily," he said, "I was too young. And nobody was quite sure what side I was on. Adventure. And you, Mr. Storrs-have you had your war?"

"No, thank you," Michael said, uneasy with the question and not prepared to answer it honestly. "I was offered Vietnam, but luckily I was deprived of it. Anyway, I don't consider war an adventure. I don't mind risking my neck, I suppose, but not if it means killing anybody."

"An admirable sentiment," Mr. Heggener said. "Not widespread enough, I'm afraid." He made a brisk motion of his hands. "We were talking about professions. Mrs. Heggener has told me certain things about you, but she has been vague about that. If you don't mind my asking, what is yours?"

"I suppose you could call it business," Michael said uncomfortably.

"A wide field," Mr. Heggener said. "More explicitly . . . ?" He sounded apologetic. "I don't like to be inquisitive, but it seems as though we are going to be rather closely . . . ah . . . connected . . . this season. . . . Eva has told me she's offered you the cottage and I am delighted . . . and it might make it more comfortable if a certain exchange of information takes place. You must realize that you are not the ordinary type of young man one picks out of the ski school. . . ."

"My business?" Michael said. "It used to be dollars and cents. No more. As you said about doctors, my accountants said no, but my soul said otherwise."

"Ah, well," Mr. Heggener said, "leave it for another time."

The manager came into the room, treading softly. "I'm sorry to disturb you," he said in a low voice to Eva, "but there's a call in the office for you."