I burst in insistently: "What do you mean Enoch's in Washington?"

"They've started those hearings." But this was a surrender to despair: William's son, I saw, did not care to speak to me. Astonishment victimized him as it did not victimize his fiancee. She readily adapted to perplexities and surprises. Like Tilbeck (how quick and strange the parallel!), she took them for natural forces, and took herself for the same. She appeared to love to be confounded, and to confound. But William's son was a disillusioned moralizer. It had not yet settled in him that I was there. He had expected n.o.body. He dealt badly with chimeras, wrong turnings, breakages. Abruptly he threw out at me: "They got them going extra early."

"The hearings? Why?" I demanded.

"Oh don't start talking politics, it's such a bother." Stefanie allowed herself to slip into a shadowed hollow in the sand. Her stretching rubescent arm found a ledge of motor and she leaned deliciously, rubbing a powder of rust into the pocket crease of her elbow; henna glowed on henna; the curve of her wrist yearned downward like a rosy swan. "Look, I didn't come all this way in that d.a.m.n ship just to listen to politics."

But Mrs. Purse was fascinated. She was fascinated by Stefanie, who seemed stuffed with vindications. "That's a handsome little craft you've got there," she said placatingly. *Twenty-footer?"

"I don't know."

"You measure fore to aft on a straight line parallel to the center line, excluding sheer. Don't count bowsprits or b.u.mpkins. Looks to me like a twenty-footer. I see you don't have any sidelights on 'er. Not required to, probably, under twenty-six." A joyous cordiality lit her.

"That's man's talk," Stefanie said disgustedly, "and if you ask me it's just a bother. That ship's an engagement present from my father and that's all I have to know about it. He didn't say I'd have to join the d.a.m.n Navy to ride in it. I hate boat-talk like that even worse than politics."

Mrs. Purse reflected on the collapse of her comradeliness. "That's your loss, dear, if you don't want to gain something out of a Purse. From the way she sounded coming in I'd say she needs a bit of a tune-up."

"That ship's brand new," Stefanie said, miffed.

"Is it monogrammed?" I asked.

"Monogrammed? Well for Pete's sake you don't monogram a ship."

"Boat!" Mrs. Purse cried. "Boat, not ship."

"You don't monogram a broom either. Engagement present, is he that rich?" I said, mimicking a memory.

"Who?"

"Your father."

"Oh-" A bruise of recognition swelled her mouth. "You mean about that business at your bon voyage thing. What I said that time? You still mad about that? I always have to ask how rich people are. My fiance"-untypically she mocked the word-"doesn't think it's polite. William thinks I get it from my mother, it's all because my mother didn't go to Miss Lamb's or Miss Jewett's. Well for goodness' sake she couldn't, she was in California. I mean-even William says Miss Jewett's is full of nouveaus nowadays anyhow, and he doesn't send his kids there, so how come he blames my mother for never having gone? I mean if he wouldn't send his own kids? I mean look at Nanette-"

"Oh G.o.d. Stef," William's son groaned. "Cut it out, will you?"

"She's mad because I once asked her how rich she was. Well I know your father's always telling me I have this tendency to a.s.sess money-value, not that it's so bad if I do. If you ask me so does he. The only difference is I do it out loud."

The pods of Mrs. Purse's eyelids split wide. "Obviously no one here's ever been in want of a fat purse," and punched the jolly flesh of her padded jowl "I'd say three thousand, thirty-five-hundred for that little job?" she guessed, gliding her tongue toward the gold-brown of the cabin. "Though no one can match Mr. T. for generosity-" Did she hope someone would make her a gift of the boat then and there? She had a humorous afterthought: "A terrible lot of fathers in this conversation-I wish I had a penny in my purse for every one of 'em! Including," she added, "your stepfather. I didn't know you had a stepfather, what with your mother pa.s.sed away-"

"Her mother?" Stefanie said.

"She's dead."

"Her mother's not dead."

"Hm," said Mrs. Purse, unfazed by resurrection. "I'm glad to hear it."

I burnt my ships. (Ships, not boats.) "And Tilbeck lives off her," I told her for no reason other than danger.

She did not grasp this.

"He doesn't have any money of his own. It's all hers. If he gets Harriet Beecher a new dress, she's the one who's bought it."

"Who's this Tilbeck?" William's son asked finally.

"The caretaker," I offered, presenting Mrs. Purse with Vindication Number Three.

But it was less welcome than the others. She said heavily, "That makes sense. Someone employs him to live here? Your mother employs him? That makes sense." She sighed like a falling tree. "We were never taken in. Though it'll be a shock to poor Purse. Promises made and so forth. He had hopes. Well, I have to see to my hungover baby," and made a little distance between us.

"Hopes!" Stefanie said, uncomprehending but only briefly bitter. "Everybody has hopes some time or other. We had hopes until we got here." She turned up a pleading palm to William's son. "Come on, p.u.s.s.yhead, sit with me. Right here. The sand's so nice and warm under my f.a.n.n.y. Quit looking mean, you couldn't know the Marines'd landed."

But he did not respond. His legs spread with deliberation. I saw the bluish globes of sweat on the breast of his shirt, extending meridians down from his armpits and up from his navel and groin. "Exactly what're you doing here?" he put it to me.

"Vacationing."

"Cut it out. You gave up Europe."

"That's right," Stefanie accused. "She gave up Europe."

He persisted: "Last time we met you swore you didn't know this place existed. You didn't give up Europe just to come here."

"Why not?" Mrs. Purse intervened, showing a glint of vengeful little tooth below a fatness of gums. "Could be she's here for the same reason you are."

"Oh, not her! n.o.body even dates her! She never looks at anybody! Ovum and Virgin-dead Latins, that's all she likes," Stefanie blew out; her nape yielded to flatness and she spread her hair among seash.e.l.ls, laughing.

"You haven't seen her look at the caretaker," Mrs. Purse called back-she had begun to climb away from us. Her words dissolved: "Wait'll you've seen"-the gossamer tail of the dirigible came sailing out, and it might have been "Mr. Implausibility" that she smeared across the sky; or might not Perhaps it was only "Nicholas T.," with the orphan Gustave unthreaded in air.

"Mr. Generosity!" I yelled up the hill to Circe, spitting malice for malice. "He gives himself, like so few of us!" She thought me her dark rival in covetousness, not of cash but flesh. Ponderously she gained the earlobe of the slope, then its mound. The sun spattered her out of sight; little by little she faded off.

"Horrible thing, talks like a garage," Stefanie said. "What were all those horrible kids before? Bunch of ghosts."

"Tilbeck salvaged them out of the Automat."

She t.i.ttered. "What happens if you put a nickel in that woman?"

"She brings forth," I said, "a child, a machine, or a pun on pocketbooks. They're practising Urdu for digging fossils in Pakistan. I've only known them"-this was melancholy- "one day."

"What a day!" But she had already given up thinking of my acquaintance with Purses, or its length; she was rejoicing in life and weather. A sudden mood sat her up. "Did she mean you're in love?" she asked in awe. "With that what's-his-name-"

"Nick," I said. "Nick's his name. The source," I told William's son, "of Mrs. Vand's miscellaneous expenditures."

He took this meditatively. "You really do know everything," he said. "You did right along. That's quite an act you've been putting on."

"No act. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

"For Pete's sake, if it isn't politics it's got to be poetry. I just can't be bothered with that eth stuff," Stefanie said. "When even somebody like Euphoria Karp puts in an eth, I tell you they lose me. I go as far as a wilt, but believe me I draw the line at eths." But she screwed her face to cultural duty, as though all at once reminded that her fiance's tastes required it of her. "Who wrote that anyway? That eth business you just did?"

"Oh, just some Preacher." To William's son I said: "I got it all from your father."

"What do you mean all?"

I stated: "ALL"

"Knowledge she means," Stefanie said intelligently. "Anyhow it looks as if your sorrow didn't increaseth. What's this Nick like?"

I said abstractedly, "Young-"

But this made her scowl. "I don't like 'em young. How young?"

I was reluctant. "I guess around forty."

"Forty! Jesus Christ, I bet you think Methuselah's still in diapers. D'you put yourself to sleep counting wrinkles? I mean aren't men absolutely dry by then?"

William's son said, "Let it go, Stef."

"Well why?"-belligerent.

He mused unhappily down at his long feet. "You're in a gla.s.s house, that's why."

"Well my goodness! You're not old, and not too young, or anything. You're just right" she crooned, and reached up to pull him to her.

"Not that particular gla.s.s house."

She was genuinely baffled: "Well what other one is there?"

He addressed not her but me. "I know what you think," he said.

"I think you're brave."

"G.o.d, how I hate a satirist. G.o.d I hate 'em. Listen, you think I'm not like my father, right? Don't live up to the old family purity. You still think my father's got that old family purity."

"What gla.s.s house?" Stefanie insisted.

"I told you I wasn't a Christian gentleman. I told you that."

"Congratulations," I said, "on your fall among mortals," and to the girl, "Won't they miss you at home?"

"I'm out camping with old Beverly Reveille. Allegedly. (That's law again.) And p.u.s.s.yhead went and told William and his mama a regular b.i.t.c.h of a story. He's getting really good at stories. He's a beautiful liar," she praised.

"I'm getting more like the old man every day," he acknowledged.

It was true. Already he seemed domesticated. Obediently, familiarly, he laid his head on the sleek glissade of her lap. She had tamed the buffalo.

"I don't think you're like William at all, whatever anyone else around here says. -I bet your father never went away with your mother before they were married. -Oh." She bethought herself. "Is that what you mean by gla.s.s house?"

"Drop it, Stef," he begged. "Get your teeth out of it."

"You and me and her and this Nick forty, fifty years old? I don't see any resemblance."

"He's young," I said distinctly. (Obscenity-no, constancy, of the past. The hideous threat of constancy!-A boy of seventeen had made me.) But she was looking wilfully around her. "Don't apologize, p.u.s.s.yhead. You really don't have to. A secret's a secret. As far's the world's concerned, we might've come just because we're sh.e.l.l-fanciers or something. Or for the sc.r.a.p-metal. Or-I know!-because we're crazy about dense populations-" Her nostrils opened to challenge me. "I don't care who knows what."

"Me neither," William's son grunted, and threw a narrow brown trouser-leg over her taut linen thighs. "You dared me to it," he told me. "Cohabitation without benefit of the law. It has other benefits."

"It's not as though we weren't engaged," Stefanie said.

-He had lost the imperial mark.

"Look, while I'm on the subject-"

"I'm on the subject," William's son interrupted: he pressed his warm weight down, and granules loosened beneath her, sifting, hissing.

"-of engagements I mean, remember that weird man, Governor or somebody, you know, the night we got engaged after your bon voyage thing-"

"McGovern? My mother's editor?"

"That's who. That weird man. Him, the one with all the bedtimes. Does she still keep'm around?"

"He defected to California," I said.

"He was a weird one though."-Her program of domestication included a certain playing-off of one bull against another. It was curiously effective. Her fiance seemed calmed, even comfortable. She had trans.m.u.ted rage to a coziness. "William thinks California's a slum. Anyhow I adore weird men, don't you?"

"She's made an example of me," William's son said accommodatingly. "Talk about weird. Head of a cat-"

"Oh come on, p.u.s.s.yhead, it's just affection. Besides I don't care what your head is like"-she stroked it-" 'slong as your legs and stuff are all right. You have such nice legs."

"You too." He shut his eyes easefully. The sunlight beat a tune on their intertwinings. I felt, in their company, always obliged to play the part of voyeur. Such a part had I played on the terrace, watching the two of them kiss while the river darkled in ambush below. "Head of a cat, legs of a human. Centaur in reverse, that's me," William's son said.

As usual he compelled me to cheap philosophy. "In the end everything reverses itself," I vapidly announced, thinking how he had declined. Once she had called him halfway human: it was a clairvoyant celebration of her desire and her skill. -He had lost the imperial mark. He mewed. The tragedy of the halfway human: half power, half victim. The boy in the boat, force and gross potency of prow, bland boasting muscle of child. Or Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck crouching on the beach-the terror of the human head, the vital fork and member machined, made mechanistic. This island turned men from what they seemed to what they were. Plumed helmet shadowed little soft snout of a cat. My grandfather knew well how the place, on its own, would breed a museum: he had his will, though not according to the terms of the trust. I remembered how admirably the centurion had spurned his fiancee's arm, shining ochroid arch of horn, as we walked forth to the terrace; and the masterfulness of his "encore un peu" in the roseate circlet of her ear; and then, shutting me and all the universe out, his long peremptory kiss. Now his forehead was in the shade of her chin, and she twiddled in his rough dull hair; it was a weakness, and new in him. Head of a cat. He had abandoned the sneer of the helmeted centurion, keen and glorious, for sensuality. He mewed for her.

"Oh look, never mind reverse, not my p.u.s.s.yhead I hope! I mean I love cat's heads, the way they have their ears all velvety, but I could do without the crawly of their legs and their spooky tail and stuff, thank you," Stefanie said stoutly, giving out one of those sprays of laughter, like so many flying florets, that had recalled broken-hearted youth to her father-in-law-to-be.

But something in my statement recalled William's son to himself. "Speaking of reversal-" He flopped lazily erect, pulling torso from torso with exquisite reluctance, as though some fierce sticking plaster, with all their hairs embedded in it, hair of head and leg and p.u.b.erulent niche and cache of arm, had kept them close and dedicated. "-You know why the Senate moved up the date of those hearings? Very interesting."

"Interesting like a crutch," Stefanie said, left alone with her bosom. "Somebody's crown's loose over there, that's all. Not a real crown," she explained. "It's not as though they had a king or anything. If they had a king I could at least stand it. I'm crazy about royalty-"

"The regime needs bolstering," William's son confirmed.

"-especially queen's clothes. Tiaras kill me."

"What's that got to do with the hearings?" I asked.

"Government's suddenly in a terrific hurry to get an Amba.s.sador over. They figure a quick application of pomp and ceremony should do the trick. -That's according to a Senator pal of my father's. You know how my father's always crawling around horses' mouths. Trouble over there, dissident elements-"

"Communists," Stefanie said positively. "Bomb-throwers."

"-so now we want to get someone over as' fast as we can."

I wondered. "Pomp and ceremony?"-and thought how my mother's l.u.s.t for these would be fulfilled at last.