"I care about signs."

"Dollar signs you're supposed to care about!"

"If you gave up all hope-"

"I have, d.a.m.n it. Talk about signs, what's this bed?"

"The first time isn't typical."

"I know what's typical and what isn't," she threw out with a roar, "for goodness' sake I'm no virgin."

"Plainly," he said: which softened her.

"The way a thing begins is a sign anyhow. I believe that The way it begins is the way it stays. So if you want a sign that I don't think of him you've had it."

But it was not enough. He said again, "If you gave up all hope of him-"

"I have! Go to h.e.l.l if you can't tell that I have."

"No. You would give up all sign of him. That's all."

"The child stays," she said with a finality. "She goes with me wherever I go and she stays with me, and that's all."

"Because pt Nick. She's Nick's, there's the reason. Open and clear."

"She's mine, that's why."

"She's not mine. Just remember that. Don't have any expectations inconsistent with that"

"You don't have to tell me what to remember! I know what to remember without slogans!" she delivered up with the wrath of humiliation, and released from her covetous grasp the wrested puff of his weakling hair: it ascended on a thrust of draft from the open window like a horde of parachute-seeds preparing to fertilize the hotel-room carpet "Don't think I don't remember things without your advice! I remember how I got her, I remember how and where and when. Brighton! You think I can forget Brighton just like that? You think it's easy to forget Brighton?"

"Naturally Brighton. Brighton would stick to you," he answered, "like an icicle. He left you to freeze and went to warm himself G.o.d knows where. Reminisce about freezing while you're at it."

"I never reminisce," she said proudly. "I hate the past"

"Carpe diem. I married an American."

"Don't talk foreign languages at me, it's gauche."

"All I said was tomorrow we die."

"That's how I feel. Entre nous, that's just how I feel about things, Enoch, don't you?"

He said solemnly, "Let us vow to agree about everything."

"Don't think I don't know when you're being sarcastic!" But she had subsided. "All right. As long as I have my way in everything."

"Oh, you will, you will," he saluted her, and went his way, and let her have hers: so that it was difficult to see that their ways were divergent, they agreed so well. The next day he departed to resume espionage, his trade then, and she stayed to invent his future. "His future" became the thing they agreed on. It suited them both, like an eclipse to watchers satisfied to see their equal moon-borne shadows cover the parts that had been too light to bear.

2.

Exposition of this latter scene was my mother's, when I finished reading her letters.

"Of course it was a fib-Enoch's saying he didn't have any ambition. That was his way of covering up. He always has to cover things up, he's terribly complicated. It's right in his temperament, being negative about things. Negative and proud. The more negative and proud he is the more he's craving something. I ought to know him by now! Take my word for it: he's got a hollow craving in him, more than anyone: more than I have. That's why he's the only person I could have married, logically speaking," she concluded haughtily.

But this, I must be careful to explain, was afterward.

Also to be noted: before this statement, with all its rococo belligerence and artful defensiveness, she flung herself upon herself, she tore histrionically at her own skin; she performed, in short, a largeness of weeping, an avian elegance of screech; her elbows declared themselves two muses of grief.

But this too was afterward: after, I mean, I returned from William's office; and all because, arriving, I said I had seen William.

The significance of this was not at once plain to her.

"And what did you there? Frightened the mouse that was under the chair," she sang out. It was night and half-past nine o'clock, but she was brilliantly dressed and cheerful; she was engaging Enoch in enforced judgment of a hat in the shape of a cowl. "See? With the brim up I look like the Seven Dwarfs and with the brim down like Lady Macbeth. Which? Enoch, which?"

"Down," he said, and stiffly down also went his mouth, bored.

"No really, pay attention. You're not paying attention. Up?"

"Up is fine."

"You just said down! Because there might be photographers, and really I want to hide the ravagements just in case. From all that coughing I'm turned into a crone. Well h.e.l.lo, home is the hunter, home from the-look who's here. Wrinkled you are, the back of your skirt, what a pity you never give a minute to groom yourself. The least you could do for yourself. What do you think?" she greeted me. "Brim up or down? Enoch can't make up his mind."

"The Lady Macbeth way," I offered.

"Well all right, better a murderess than a Mother Superior. Just so I don't get taken for a nun. They have such blank eyes, nuns, but they wear things on their heads exactly like this. It covers, that's the point. Where in the world did you run into William?" she took up.

"I didn't run into him. I went to his office."

"On purpose? Oh I forgot, that's right, his boy's engagement party. That little Pettigrew sp.a.w.n. Was that today?"

I felt in awe of such omniscience. "You couldn't have known about it?"

"Of course I knew about it."

"But it was a surprise."

"To William's boy it was. Not to me. But I heard they had no intention of inviting you-they didn't want to embarra.s.s you, really their motives were perfectly reasonable, all things considered. The same nice group of them down from Harvard Law, that's why, and not one took you out the time before. What a waste, that bon voyage!-It's because you have no bosom. You're not social either. It's sickening, with you it's brain brain brain. Oozing brain all up and down the side of you."

"You mean of course the maternal side," Enoch said.

"Viper."

"Wipe her yourself," he only seemed to capitulate: "she's yours. Send not to ask for whom she oozes, she oozes for thee. As for me, I'm ready for compulsory gaiety"-laying aside a broad book-it was an atlas-with a sardonic sigh.

"Now don't say compulsory. Enoch, it's mean to say compulsory. If I ask you to go with me it's voluntary, isn't it?-Good G.o.d, if there are photographers! Won't William feast on I-told-you-so, he thinks flashbulbs fell with Lucifer. Only let's take the subway."

"The subway?" He was incredulous.

"Well why not? I haven't ridden the subway in years." Flailing, my mother collected her burgeoning gown at the knee; energies bickered in her throat. "All those loops hanging from the ceiling. I like the subway. What if someone threaded a big wide shiny ribbon, Virginmaryblue maybe, and satin, right through all those loops, right through the whole train, from one car to the other? Like a horizontal maypole, sort of. Wouldn't it be beautiful, all that waving and twisting underground? I like tunnels." She displayed a silvery face innocent as a plate. "You know where we're off to? Guess. You'll never guess."

I forfeited my guess by declining.

"A club, that's where," she said, her elbows pink with satisfaction. -"I suddenly couldn't stand all that reading, I suddenly couldn't stand bed, if you want to hear the truth. Static! Viscous! Another minute of it and I would've been ready for Dr. Freud, so I decided the way not to be sick was not to be sick," she explained. "Mind over mattress Enoch said it was, so here we are going to the loudest nightclub on the map. Oh look, you're not taking that d.a.m.n map? Not with you? Think how it'll look in the papers, just in case, and the hearings coming up!-I mean if there are photographers, columnists," she said joyously, "there are always columnists, vermin-"

"At the appropriate moment I will retire to the men's room," said my stepfather, "a palatial nook of Byzantine splendor and Roman proportions-"

"You and that map. Really. You don't have to memorize every village. Those stupid Senators aren't going to get you to tell the population of every little dump in the whole country, are they? It's bad publicity to be seen studying."

"Depends what the man is studying," Enoch said. "In this case, on the eve of my possible aggrandizement-"

"Not possible. Definite."

"-I'm learning how small I am. An atlas is a source-book for human insignificance. Puts you in scale, full of oceans, oceans full of islands, islands full of sand, sand full of infinities-"

"You full of stupidities. I'm not interested in feeling small, just remember that. Those d.a.m.n Taj Mahals round my ears, I was so depressed-what I want is to go out and get noticed. I admit it! It's not as though I'm afraid to admit it. I've been cooped up too long, I intend to feel something great before the night is out. I mean an experience. Like the haying scene-"

"The haying scene!" said Enoch, delighted. "The haying scene in a nightclub! And then stack it all up in Washington Square?"

"Well I meant the emotional equivalent. You know that's all I meant."

"The h.e.l.l you did. It's the pitchfork you're after. To each his own."

"I just want to feel something. I haven't felt anything in such a long time." She turned unexpectedly desolate, lifting her hooded head to the mirror and absently addressing my image in it: "You mean you got invited after all?"

"No," I said. "I just went."

"Rude, very rude. Did you dance?"

"There wasn't any music."

"Of course there wasn't any music," she said contemptuously, as though the idea had been mine. "Too many desks in the place. How did he look? Happy?"

"William?"

"Fool. His boy. William hates that Pettigrew girl. Afraid his boy won't be the first. William puts a lot of value on being first."

"She's very pretty," I said.

"Pretty, pretty, what's pretty? At that age it's no trick to be pretty. I was pretty too, what's pretty? For you it's a trick. I don't know how you manage to look practically thirty and no bosom. People ask if I had you at ten. I tell them certainly: she was ten at birth. Some people are born a hundred years old. It's the effect of what do you call it, Enoch? That word like the name of a German newspaper? That Eddie put in the-"

"Weltanschauung," Enoch said: "Come on, if we're going let's go."

"No not that one. The other word that Eddie-with the ghost in it."

"Zeitgeist," he obliged, and settled back into his chair again.

"That's the one. You know I heard from Eddie this afternoon. Already. I knew he could be trusted, whatever Enoch said," she informed me. "Two telegrams delivered together, one from last night when he landed out there, one from this morning. He flew. I let him fly to get him back here on time for the next number. Here."

She handed me two yellow paper squares and I read on one: GOLDEN WEST GOLDEN WEST.

I WILL MAKE YOU QUICK.

AS HAIKU OR SOME GIRL.

and on the other: IN SAN FRANCISCO.

THE ZEITGEIST BLOWS THROUGH SNEEZING.

FROM ITS ALLERGY.

"Teasing!" my mother said.

"He sent them collect," I observed.

"Teasing!" she repeated. "Of course as theory they're too rigid, but otherwise as poems they're not bad. Surrealistic. If you stare at them long enough they expand out of their superficial meaning into a deeper meaning, can you see that?-Never mind, I take it back, it's no use asking you. Wordsworth," she p.r.o.nounced, haughtily and heavily. "We don't print any of that ilk in Bushelbasket, do we?" She appealed beyond me to Enoch.