The Trial of Callista Blake

IV

The pavements throbbed with a golden, sometimes iridescent flame, which could not deceive Cecil Warner, for he was not drunk. The time hadn't come and never would when two bourbons on top of an average dinner could make a fool of him. The dancing fire was nothing in the world but the reflection of headlights on sidewalks wet with the return of winter rain.

On his left a separate darkness kept pace with him, blotting out the fire-ballet as he moved. I cast a shadow. It is the nature of a man to cast a shadow. This is done even by a few of the dead.

No. 'Their works do follow after them'; but that's not shadow, except by ill-advised figure of speech. That is what I shall term—(BAR AND GRILL twenty paces ahead)—shall term the immortality of consequences, of continuing events. Shadow's different. Shadow is the occlusion of light rays by an impermeable mass, me for instance. Avoid all ill-advised figures of speech. Go away, my love!

He observed it was Hanlon's Bar and Grill, corner of Main and Willard, damned if it wasn't—interesting, since he'd thought he was three blocks further west. He advanced through the logical absurdity of a revolving door. Quiet here tonight. He read the others at the bar in a practiced glance: four nondescript males and a large platinum wench, all unknown. He fumbled past his damp overcoat, drawing forth and consulting his thin and ancient pocket watch of yellow gold. His inner vision recorded, as always, the florid inscription he would see if his thumbnail opened the hinged back of the case: Ezra Allen Warner, 1880. A gift from his grandfather to his father, on the boy Ezra's graduation from college at twenty-one. For the last thirty-odd years Cecil had not been able to look on this delicate artifact without some dark stirring of the thought: I have no children. The fantastically graceful hands declared the present hour to be ten-thirty; they had been truth-tellers for eighty years. "Evening, Tom. Bourbon and water."

"Sure enough, Mr. Warner. Raining again, isn't it?"

"A sprinkle. A certain piddling effort. Possibly the tears of the gods are running thin in this latter age."

Tom's patient face was acknowledging him as a Character. "You could be right." Tom would have absorbed every word on the Blake case that the evening Courier had to offer; adult, seasoned, sensitive, he wouldn't mention it unless Warner did. He had even spoken Warner's name in a soft tone that would not carry down the bar. He poured the bourbon, gave the mahogany a needless swipe or two for friendship's sake in case the Old Man wanted to talk, and drifted back to his post of command.

Two men, blurred by Warner's preoccupation, were discussing space flight across the intervening blonde. Beyond them two others carried on an argument that rose to audibility only now and then. The Old Man heard and did not hear them; heard and did not hear the deeper counterpoint within him.

Tomorrow, assuming tomorrow came, the attack would follow a different line. Callista's adultery and deception, illustrative details by courtesy of the neighbors and Nathaniel Judd, plus T.J.'s dreary assertions and reassertions that the girl was being tried for nothing but murder—perhaps T.J. could even manage to believe that himself, for the duration. Callista's atheism; yes, almost certainly some one of the State's witnesses would most casually drop in the word "atheist." Protest, uproar, the Old Man scolding, T.J. doing a baritone solo on religious tolerance; then the mockery (Terence himself would hate it) of striking an answer from the record when no means existed to strike it from the jurors' minds.

"It don't push against atmosphere up there, account there isn't any."

"All right, I know that, but how does it push, 's what I don't get?"

"No she didn't! She said, her exact words, 'you never knew what was ordinary for Callista'—exact words."

"Were you there?"

"Hell no, like I told you, I couldn't get off from work, but the Courier's printing every word, so all you got to do is put two and two—"

"—pushes against itself, see? The satellite itself is the God-damn resistance, like you're shooting a pistol, and the recoil—you ever shoot a pistol?"

"Hate 'em. Sure way to get hurt."

Platinum said: "'S like this, Buck, what Sam's try'n'a tell you, you get up 'ere in shpace, you just be'r not fart."

"Now, June," said bartender Tom, "you want to watch the talk."

"I di'n' say single thing."

"Okay, June baby, just watch it is all."

"What I mean is, everybody figures the girl is nuts, that old woman Welsh and everybody. So what you're going to see, you're going to see an insanity defense. It always happens—"

"No sumbishn barkeep's telling me how talk."

"June baby, I keep telling you—"

"Happens every time. She'll be put away a few years, and then let out, do it all over again, like—"

"Only thing I'm try'n'a find out, what does it push against behind?"

"I'm beginning to think it's no use try'n'a explain it to you."

"Tom!"

"Hell, like a poisoner always does! You want to bet? Happened a million times. I read a book—"

"Tom!"

"Yeah? You better not have any more, June."

"Don't want any more—not why I called you. Just wanted say, 'm sorry 'f anything I said gave 'fense. None 'tended. All's I want's everybody be happy."

But the defense—

"Sure, June, that's okay."

"'S my whole life right 'ere, see? Ask anybody knows me."

"Okay, June!"

The defense never rests.

"Okay he says, he keeps saying okay, Jesus Christ, you ought to listen I'm telling you, not just keep saying okay, okay. Ever since I was little girl, honest, all's I ever wanted was everybody be happy."

4

I

Thought of work had halted Edith's aimless wandering on the Christmas-spattered evening streets downtown. Now the drawing table and empty chair in her studio brought Callista poignantly close in absence. How arrogantly, like a beloved child, Callista had captured her life!

Window-shopping with no heart for it, necessary gifts already bought, she had become fed up with Winchester, noise, people, sidewalk grit flung by the wind; with gaudy lights desperately imitating good cheer, drizzle-nosed bell-ringers and Santa Clauses, carols once pretty now done to death, fed up with crowd faces till she recoiled from them as from a rat-race of tragic masks.

Getting off the bus—she seldom used her car downtown, hating the struggle of searching out a parking space—her skirt was twitched up by the breeze for the lech of a pair of whistling teen-agers. Edith had been dourly amused. Try looking at the face some time, kids!—and the mood kept with her as far as her third floor walkup on Hallam Street. The hour was nine-thirty, Papa Doorn just closing his delicatessen on the ground floor, giving her a gentle "Good night, Miss Nolan!"

No mail but a swatch of ads drenched in the season's gladness, and the janitor would never provide a wastebasket in the entry. She dumped the mess in the studio trash-box, glancing at the cameras, screens, props, at the dim end of the studio. A fantastic way to earn a living, close to the mainstream of human vanity. But at this end, with the north light, wall-shelves, drawing table, work could be done after survival was taken care of. Callista's work for a year, and Edith's own. The bread-and-butter end of the studio was already dusty. Edith had canceled portrait engagements for the duration of the trial, disinclined to hire a temporary helper: why knock oneself out immortalizing the fish-faced?

She touched the table, symbolic touching of a hardness-without-coldness that was one element of Callista Blake. Stop it, Red! She's not here. She took down a folder of Callista's drawings—some careful, some swift, all begotten of a mind that could see, laugh, pity, understand. Also in that folder was a letter Callista had written after Edith's last visit to the detention cell, Saturday, three days ago. Edith knew the drawings. She would find nothing new in them now, when she was out of temper and moved by a wish to start some work of her own. Glance at that abandoned wagon in long grass? Or the supermarket clerk, homely day's end weariness caught in a dozen lines with that compassion of Callista's (at nineteen!) which she could almost never convey in spoken words? Not now. Edith glanced at a watercolor on the wall, one she had taken from Cal's apartment for safety with Herb Chalmers' distracted consent and after the police had given leave. A mountain slope, a wind-ravished pine, shouting deep color against a storm sky intense with the power of two worlds, the world of life and growth and dying before Callista's eyes, and the world of Callista's most observing self.

Off in her living-room the telephone rang. Edith ran for it. The voice was slurred, uncertain. "Miss Nolan—Edith—all evening trying to get you. Jim Doherty—now please don't hang up."

"Of course I won't." She tried not to snap. "What is it?"

"Had to ask you something." He was rather drunk. "May seem unreason'ble, guess you hate me anyhow, but—"

"I won't hang up. I don't hate you. What is it, Jim?"

"Maybe wouldn't blame you. You feel I let her down. Feel I'm an enemy or something—sorry—not what I'm trying to say—" She waited, watching her thin white fingers play with a pencil from the telephone table, a pinpoint of perception somehow important, as if it kept her distressed and startled mind from swirling away down the telephone mouthpiece like water down the hole of a handbasin. She heard a beat of mechanical music; Jim would be in a bar, the booth shut against a squalling of radio or television. The large-boned, dark-Irish face would be pale with alcohol, filmed with sweat, black hair disordered, wide mouth talking against its own unwillingness. Dark eyes rigid, unfocused, behind them Jim's own image of a crackpot redhead who was Callista's friend. He was a tall man; the stingy crannies of the booth would bother his legs. An impressive young stallion: any woman felt that much, and one could (sometimes) see why Callista—"Edith, what happened there, before adjournment? I've got to know. I sort of lost track, then they were taking her away. What—"

"You didn't hear what she said?"

"No, that's it, I didn't. I was praying—well, for her, though I suppose that doesn't mean anything to you, no offense, anyway I—"

"Didn't your friend hear what she said?"

"My—oh, you mean Father Bland. No, he didn't."

"Is he deaf?"

"Yes, a little." She heard the righteous reproach; it must have done Jim good to put her in the wrong. "What did she say?"

"She said: 'Go away, my love!'"

He would be still there. She heard breathing, and the background noise, a hot trumpet squeaking up the summits of banality. She said: "Jim, do you still love her at all?"

But how could she know the color of the word in his language? How was he to glimpse the meanings of it in her own? If even Sam Grainger couldn't quite admit that divergence of language long ago (my own language far simpler then!) if not even Sam (where are you?) then how could poor Jim Doherty who had no wish to think for himself?

"What she said, perhaps." She heard her own voice electric, hurting in her ears. "If she were still carrying it, what would you do? That would be wages of sin, I guess? The way it was God's will you should try out a virgin for variety, or kicks? Or did you just feel that if an unconventional, unreligious girl wasn't a whore she ought to be?"

"I shouldn't have called. God forgive you."

Edith set the instrument down. The trembling would presently stop. Overcharge of adrenalin, stupid physical need to slash again, with claws. She fumbled a cigarette from the box by the telephone. Anyway Jim would not call back. He'd rest on the dignity of his last word, which Father Bland would have approved.

Sam Grainger was in the world, somewhere. Married probably, with one of the symphonies, teaching. His myriad hours of violin and oboe practice, piano, harmony, counterpoint, all had been aiming at that. The violin for preference, oboe because good violinists are numerous. With affection that had never perished, Edith thought: What Sam wants, Sam earns and gets. She noticed she was thinking in the present tense. Fair enough: it would still be true. Sam Grainger would still be a man dedicated and absorbed, immune to discouragement, too big for distractions. He had not been too seriously distracted by an affair with a redheaded art student. So what has become of the old brownstone front, shabby-sacred rooms, thready hole in the rug, genially silly print of "The Storm"—Mrs. Cardle considered that one real nice for anyone that was artistic-like—and the bed that mysteriously didn't squeak if you lay across it instead of lengthwise? What stills the music, and where are the green shadows of Arcadia?

The rooms would have accepted the whispering and secret laughter of a crowd of lovers in seven years, all giggling at sad, vague, moral Mrs. Cardle and that grayish lump of dough, her husband, whose thick delirium of hate for the antique coal furnace in the basement was very nearly a form of love. You saw the Cardles dealing with an ebb and flow of Boston lodgers world without end. But they could have been human and mortal; the brownstone could have yielded to a flat-faced office building. If it had not, though, the center flagstone of the rear yard would look the same in a sluice of rain, the crack in it like the junction of Ohio and Mississippi, seen by young eyes from the window of the third floor back.

One gray afternoon—Edith's room dim, the curtains adequate—they had stood naked near that window to watch Mrs. Cardle trying to teach her old round-bellied bulldog to roll over and play dead. Behind closed eyes and seven years, Edith felt again Sam's chin at her shoulder, shiver of held-in laughter at the dog's patient refusal to understand and its resemblance to Mr. Cardle; Sam's arm under her breasts moving, she turning then, clutching his black curls in mimic savagery, twisting free of him, racing him to the bed, caught with welcome violence and sudden entering thrust, violently held through a long course of love, an animal riot of pleasure carrying them together to the height, to the moment when the heart must break and die a little, the explosion of not-pain, the blindness and the quiet. And the quiet: summit of a hillside, also homely truth of two bodies in the aftermath of orgasm, each comic-serious detail of throbbing and subsiding organs felt, known, recorded in the mind's continuing life history with acceptance, tenderness, satisfaction, relief, amusement, wonder. Kissing him slowly in the quiet, kissing the hard-tipped fingers of his left hand, fine bony rib cage and knotty shoulders, the lifetime red mark printed under his jawbone by the violin, his other love. And—"Time I should get back to work, Red-Top."

Edith had been jealous, in a way, yet she had never knowingly desired to cut him down to size or usurp the government of his private world. And surely there had been cause to resent his indifference toward her own work, ambition, oriented dreaming. Not indifference: call it lack of awareness. As on that heartbreak evening when she had taken down Mrs. Cardle's "Storm" and replaced it with a darktoned watercolor, a Nolan original and, in her judgment, good.

He never saw it.

When he slipped into her room he had not seemed much preoccupied with his own studies; he just looked at the watercolor and didn't see it. Cheerful, until her darkening hopelessly unreasonable mood infected him. When the quarrel began, over something else, some damned side issue now blanked out of memory, he still didn't see the picture.

That quarrel was patched up the next night, in bed. There were others. The essential trust of two-against-the-world was gone: in the darkness behind daily perception two strangers still winced and glared, astonished at the wounds. Drift then, from radiance to near-commonplace, above the organ-point of things unsaid.

In the summer after the school year, Sam had written, once; Edith had answered, twice. End of affair. Yielding to a long assault of cancer, Edith's mother died that summer. An emptiness then, plus discouragement with art school that kept her from going back. Instead she had taken a commercial course in photography, her dazed but practical father approving and footing the bill. The following summer, a purposeful wandering in Amy the Model A (a cantankerously good little heap even now in 1959), remembering more clearly than any other conversation what her father had said before she left: "Look, Skinnay, you marry or work at something you like, or just loaf a while and raise hell, but don't turn into a dutiful daughter taking care of the old man." Shoving aside a heap of paper work brought home—the old man was a C.P.A. and a good one—and turning up to her the bald head, moon face, tenderly sarcastic eyes. "Don't do that, or I will turn you over my knee, and your fanny, dearest, is not fat enough to sustain the impact. The old man takes care of himself." A purposeful wandering, for that summer she had surely been looking for something more than a place that would do for a photographic studio; looking for maturity perhaps. Then Winchester, the investment paying off in adequate survival, plus a bit of freedom. No more letters to Sam: end of affair, diminuendo to an imperfect cadence dissonant with the organ-point, the only resolution silence.

What did we think we were doing? I was fighting to be a person? Or just to make Sam admit I must sometimes be person first, sweetheart second? A lot of the time I was just damn well fighting ... Deep inside, very likely, the daughter of earth had been weighing consequences, a simpler Eve murmuring of home, nest, security, advantages of snaring a good man when there was one to be had.

My first, my only, which for a warmblooded redhead is absurd, gentlemen, no argument. What happens? Why this other drift that for some of us, many of us, extends from months into years of accepting dullness and the erosion of daily demands, waiting for the rainbow blaze that may never appear, the heart knowing all the time that there's only one life and not much time to live it? Edith fidgeted, angry at the introspection itself, at the fatigue or laziness that held her in this armchair when some other part of her honestly wanted to get up and go to work. O wind-sweet valley of Arcadia—remember me?

She noticed the chill, and got up then with a flounce of irritation. Caught by Jim's telephone call, she had not yet turned up the heat for the Burrow. Maybe she wouldn't bother. Turn it up in the studio, leave the Burrow cool for bedtime. Get to work! Or try to.

Dust filmed the fireplace mantel. In a half-light beyond the bedroom doorway, yesterday's panties gaped lewdly from the seat of a chair. She must have been seduced by some clever idea when she was on the point of tossing them in the laundry bag. At least she had made the bed. Too much alone, small Edith. She remembered with a wrench of pain that early last August Cal had just about agreed to give up her apartment and come share this one. August—Edith carried her coat into the bedroom, hung it properly, stuffed the offending panties away.

If Callista and Jim could have spoken each other's languages? Proposition absurd. Callista groping out of the jungle of an ugly childhood, Jim living (till Ann died anyway) according to surface impulses and ready-made directives of social and religious authority—no, there could have been no conversation. What ailed her, going overboard for that bundle of bad luck? Call it chance. Swept away by need, nearness, charm of a prepossessing male; maybe unknowingly goaded in spite of herself by the dithering emphasis of American culture on sexual activity as the end, cure, meaning for everything: luv-luv-luv. And Jim no more "to blame" than she. As much an accident as falling downstairs.

A gust rattled the bedroom window and hummed across chimney-tops and died. Go away, my love!

Edith changed out of the green suit into a cherished dingy blue bathrobe. In the bureau mirror she glimpsed her own color and motion. Clear sky-blue eyes would hold that color a lifetime, though the irises would some day blur at the rims, the vision would not remain 20-20, lids would crinkle, brows turn sandy-gray, then white. Grooves in the forehead would deepen, and the brackets at nose and mouth. Red hair must whiten—quickly, one could hope, without streaks. That smoothness from small chin down a slim neck to the collar of Venus with no sag or wrinkle at thirty-one—well. Already crowding her luck a bit there; pretty Ann Doherty, for all her needless dieting, had been starting a tiny double chin at twenty-six. The bathrobe unbelted allowed a gleam of small breasts neat and high, jaunty and delicate, red-tipped like white peonies. Fun for somebody, going to waste—are you listening, bitch in the manger? Her finger tapped the unsmiling woman in the glass, and she was stricken by thought of another face, also far from the conventional norms of beauty.

They used a hood, didn't they, electrodes concealed by an intolerable obscenity of black rubber?

No thought is finished until the thinker dies, then only blotted out, the death rattle a throat-clearing for what's not to be said. Mother, the morphine not helping yet, certain she'd left something on the stove to boil over, couldn't convince her. For thought is action. What's this, Edith? Philosophy A, Radcliffe, Class of '48 and all that?

All the same, she reflected, it is action, and the hell with Plato the Father of Half-Truths. So why wonder that an earlier self becomes a creature of mystery? Where was the cross thin woman who talked sharply to Jim Doherty a few minutes ago? You say: It was one I who thought and acted thus and so; now I am not what I was, but I inherit any continuing good and bad and all responsibility: if I don't clean up after the person I left behind, nobody else will. That was the thorny passage, the truth too easily blurred.

Yet only a few, she thought, could endure the concept of mind-as-motion. By contrast, how apparently solid and comfortable are the absolutes, static symbols, devices of everyday talk to create the illusion of a stillness in time, so that we can draw breath and feel for a moment that we know who we are! In a ship you can stay below, avoid the portholes, ignore the long rise and fall as the vessel encounters a rolling of the sea, and pretend your cabin is a landside thing: fine woodwork, carpet, all that, and if now and then you do feel a throb of engines or tilting of the world, why, Captain God's on the bridge and will see to everything. And yet it doesn't take too much courage to go stand at the bow and discover the wind in your face: a child can do it; a grown-up can recognize the captain as skilled but humanly mortal.

Edith crossed the hall to the studio, where cool light on the drawing table waited like a reminder of courage. She took out Callista's letter, carefully as though the pages were drawings, and the large light handwriting did have some of that quality, Callista's hand refusing to waver at any disturbance of her thought:

Dear Edith:

It was good to be with you, though I was unpleasant, ridding myself of accumulated venom. I can't safely talk in my worst way to anyone else—Cecil is too vulnerable. And I miscalculated, thought we had more time, was about to shut up and hear you (what I wanted above all) but then time up, opportunity gone.

Don't try to cut the red tape for another visit after the trial opens. When I see you now I think too much, in spite of you, of what I may lose. The work, freedom, gaiety, good talk I never heard till I met you. I'd better keep my shell until this is over, I seem to need it. Stay away just because I do cherish you. Dear Edith, I'm sickened to remember how I talked this afternoon—but maybe it won't end the way my present mood says it will. A mood is only part of a journey—you said that to me once, now I keep the words with me.

Cecil came to see me after you left—he looks ill, Edith. Does poor old Mrs. Wilks really do enough about looking after him? Look—I tried to tell him more about Mother and Herb, and the Saturday night uproar with Mother that I described to you. Give him more of that, will you? I made a botch of telling him, I suppose because I love him, my mind wouldn't focus on my own mess. How does it happen (C. let it slip) that Herb is meeting so many of the incidental expenses when I said so damn plain it was to come out of my money from Father's estate? Please try to find out, will you?

I can't think straight any more tonight. I slop off into self-pity, lose track altogether. I don't believe human beings are adequate for this kind of thing, Edith, I know I'm not anyway. You heard me whimper once, only once. Alone, I do a good deal of that, friend, I can't help it—hermit crab's a soft blob of nothing-much inside the borrowed shell. I'm no Latimer sticking his hand in the fire. Not even jailed for a Cause, just want to live. I don't know what love is either, but now and then I wonder if anyone ever knew more about it than I do.

My love to you,
Callista.

II

Terence Mann stopped playing, tense with a dissonance of perplexity. A wrong time and mood for Chopin: his hands had been dull in the C-sharp Minor Impromptu. No music now, but an impulsive sorrow of December wind leaning against the building in the dark. "Callista never cried."

To Maud Welsh, that had been "real unnatural." Judge Mann did not find it so. Self-pity was not evident as a quality of Callista Blake.

He understood with almost amused distress that he liked the girl. That, plus old dislike for the representative of her accuser the State: how far can you go with such a bias before the judicial lid blows off?

He remembered doubtfully a talk with Joe Bass the evening before—anything more than a flurry of wishful thinking? Increase of humanitarianism in the last century and a half? Well, social history agreed, if you read it with some detachment from the immediate terrors of the decade. And the increase could hardly be ignored or dismissed except by someone bitterly in love with his own pessimism. Modern postwar pessimism, although a cult like any other, was persuasive, deceptively articulate. Something contagious in a comprehensive the-hell-with-it.

Social history made it clear that capital punishment had dwindled in frequency from a common public entertainment to something almost rare. The states still practicing it gave evidence of official shame, or at least of a schizophrenic need to serve two contraries, to appease the recurrent vengefulness of their multitudes but also to hide the dirty thing, tacitly apologize, soften its most visible nastiness in the hope that conscience would shut up and sleep again. Such a condition would be preliminary to change. Like tuberculosis and venereal disease, capital punishment was on the way out but going out in the manner of things legal, with dreary and creeping slowness. Wasn't that how he had reasoned two years ago, when his name was up in the election more or less unopposed? Or had he honestly faced it at all?

Hadn't he simply regarded a judgeship as mostly useful work and $18,000 a year? And hadn't he accepted, without enough examination, the doctrine that a judge is only an instrument of something greater than himself? An instrument of what something, greater than himself in what way? The questions projected themselves beyond the cloud-curtain of mysticism. But it seemed to Judge Mann that unless they could receive a daylight answer, the doctrine itself was solemn nonsense.

Imagining Society with a capital S to be greater than the individual—no answer there, only a more opaque mysticism. The mental construction "Society" is an achievement of the individual brain, an organ that had better not be too dazzled by products of its own authorship.

The issue of capital punishment had been bound to arise. I knew the laws. I knew that New Essex was no more free than any other state from crime and the balancing crime of punishment.

From an unseeing stare at the carpet, his head jerked up as if at the entrance of another. Balancing crime of punishment: he had been thinking in specific words, talking to a half-personalized projection of the self, and the words had power to startle him.

It was a commonplace to Terence Mann that punishment itself is an archaic evil in the law. As special prosecutor, as defense lawyer on a few occasions, in the relatively clean region of civil law, he had tried to favor any reorientation of thought and action that might discredit punishment as a respected motivation and replace it by efforts at healing and reclamation. As a judge, familiar with the endless parade of minor offenders (most of them with no chance of redemption, for where in the modern state was there a sufficient will to redeem even the young, or the time, patience, money, wisdom, to implement it?), Judge Mann had been aware of no impulse in himself to punish, only of a desire to lessen disorder, and try for the long view. And then, Callista Blake. But—balancing crime of punishment: well, there it was simply his own unexpected rephrasing of the issue that had startled him. Apart from that, if that was significant, this self-castigation probably served no purpose.

Fashionable but without merit, to wail that we are all guilty. So we are, in a sense, and (unless one intends to do something about it) so what? Breast-beating is as solitary as any other form of masturbation. The modern spirit, he thought, for a long time before Hiroshima, had grown too fond of the wail, the masochistic acceptance of futility that ended in a downright enjoyment of it, a perversion as sterile as the antics of the louse-eaten monks of the Thebaid. Admit that two years ago he might not have been completely honest with himself. All right: what mattered now was that a slow broadening of reform might look very fine in the armchair perspective of a history book, but was no use at all to Callista Blake, nineteen years old. Capital punishment was on the way out, taking her along with it. Therefore in the very present specific instance: What to do?

He did not want now the fury or grief or laughter of Beethoven; not now the lofty tenderness or robust passion of Johannes Brahms. He took down his one-volume edition of the Well-Tempered Clavichord and glanced at a memory-stirring litter of pencil marks made long ago in the curly script of his teacher Michael Brooks. Mr. Brooks had died before the war, very old and partly blind. He might live another hundred years in these marks, far longer in the spreading influence of his fifty years of teaching, the impetus he gave to other lives continuing beyond any knowledge or measuring. Very good, Terence!... More slow trill practice absolutely essential!! Andante does not mean Adagio. In this Prelude schmaltz is possible but I do not like it. Excellent but you could do better. Bring out the inner voices.

He set the old book on the piano. Hands and brain were tired, the hour late, though the neighboring apartment-dwellers were tolerant and often kept their mechanical music perking until after midnight. For a while he was in that place: Well, Mr. Brooks, "container and thing contained": aren't we always bigger than what stirs within us? All the same it was a good way to talk to a child. But the very facility of his hands betrayed him, leaving his mind too free. Good at first, to continue private thought while Bach was speaking, but then only another troublesome dividing of the self.

Terence's father, not a patient man, would have said at this point or sooner: "God-sake, Terry, make up your mind!"

He would have said that, before 1928. In that year Father changed. And maybe the gray and harassed man could have entertained doubts earlier in his life on such an issue as capital punishment. He didn't have a closed or ungenerous mind; he couldn't afford to, a small-town doctor with two skittish growing boys and a wife who came to believe herself in deep other-worldly communication with Mary Queen of Scots. But many of Father's opinions were formed when he was a young man in the era of Teddy Roosevelt, and he didn't always remember to speak softly. Unlike his older brother Uncle Norden, who must have early learned the advantages of speaking softly at great length—anyhow Uncle Nord built up that accomplishment into a thundering good law practice.

Father (before 1928) would likely have said if you asked him that criminals so hardened as to commit murder—oh, put 'em out. For the good of society. Human failures: the unfit—odd word much loved by the nineteenth century, used apparently in a sort of gentleman's agreement that no one was going to ask: unfit for what? Father would not have spoken so out of vindictiveness or lack of human feeling: just the impatient judgment of a busy man with troubles of his own, who accepted a number of antique notions because he grew up with them. That few hardened criminals ever commit murder, that most murderers have acted on a blinding impulse unlikely to recur—such facts would have been outside his mental territory, and unacceptable. Knowledge of what Father would have said was for Terence a bloodstream thing, no longer traceable to any remembered words. Like most people including doctors, Dr. Carl Mann had never witnessed an execution, nor known anyone well who wound up in jail. Gentlemen don't.

After Elinor Mann's final breakdown and commitment, Father no longer announced his views with much positiveness. In that year 1928 the bottom fell out; Dr. Mann couldn't even get positive about Al Smith, in spite of a long-standing rage at the imbecilities of Prohibition. When not meeting the heavy demands of a country medical practice, he was beating out heart and brain in a private crucifixion, asking himself the wrong questions: What could I have done differently? Where did I fail her? As though a clarification of his own past might even then help to restore Elinor's mind, that had never really tolerated the difficulties of living before it made permanent retreat into the smoke of paranoid fantasy.

Terence's hands fell away from the piano, leaving the third Fugue unfinished. How had he arrived at contemplation of that time-eroded grief? The subject was Callista Blake, not Elinor Mann.

Who still lived, if you could call it that, in the curiously ordered world of yellow brick and manicured lawns that was Claiborne Hospital. She was seventy-eight this year, clouded by senility along with the psychosis. She recognized Terence on his visits, listening or seeming to, usually with patiently closed eyes, as he toiled to create a conversation.

Jack, successful in his own psychiatric practice, had more difficulty when he drove or flew from Boston to see her. Thirty-one years ago the cobwebs of her delusions had wrapped themselves inextricably around the life of the elder son, four years older than Terence and at that time in his Junior year at Harvard. Her voices (many others along with that of Mary Queen of Scots) had informed her that Jack was increasingly involved with gangsters and women of ill fame. The college authorities and, for some never-explained reason, Mayor Jimmy Walker, were all in it together. When she was on the point of going up to Cambridge to deal with all that, Dr. Carl Mann, goaded at last into understanding, said no. She flung an inkwell in his face and gouged it with a pair of scissors; though he was fairly muscular and she was not, it required the help of his office nurse to restrain her. Most of that was over, the dust settling, when Terence, sixteen years old, got home from school. Now in her antiquity the sorrows, fantasies, and angers of the past were still preserved for her by the specialized, selective memory of the schizophrenic, flies in amber. A year ago, Terence and Jack visiting her together, she told Terence that she could easily have forgiven poor Jack if he had lived. Then it came out, in a natural, pleasantly quiet conversation, that the slim gray-haired man sitting over there was nothing but a body, stolen for no good purpose by the unclean spirit of Henry VIII. Later, at the airport, Jack remarked: "Psychiatrically speaking it may be a poor symptom, but don't mind it, Terry. I'll make out all right as hell-fire Harry Tudor. Less of a strain than some of my other roles."

"Beyond psychiatry, isn't it?"

"If you mean beyond effective therapy, yes, boy." "Boy" from Jack was acceptable—always had been. "It was beyond existing therapy thirty years ago." Jack also counted years. "We just don't know the score on paranoid schizophrenia. We know approximately what to expect, which is something maybe. Mental disease could be the last holdout among medical enigmas, Terry. We may be sweating out cases like Mother's when there's a pill or a shot for cancer. It's the—oh, the inaccessibility of mental action." Jack had been tired, but not remote; fatigue never dulled a shining quality of his alertness. "Wait till you get some big case in court with a borderline paranoid as a star performer."

That conversation of a year ago had been hampered, Jack waiting on the start of his plane flight back to Boston; no leisure, bustling strangers, time pressure, uproar of loudspeakers and warming engines. Was it relevant now? Callista Blake a borderline paranoid? Rather urgently and emphatically, Judge Mann thought: No, she's not.

Psychiatry more or less stood in the wings, in People vs. Blake. The State's man called her legally sane. If he hadn't, the State would have had no trouble shopping around for someone who did. Warner had had the girl examined by a Dr. Coburn, who might or might not testify; so far Warner had dropped no hint suggesting an insanity defense.

Inaccessibility of mental action: that was relevant. Dominantly. For wasn't that the very essence of the principle of "reasonable doubt"? And was there any rational formula anywhere in the law, except the principle of reasonable doubt, at all likely to save Callista Blake?

Must see Jack again, soon. He looked out on the city's darkness past a false curtain of window-glass reflection; a city of magic under a lens of illusion, as long ago in the creaky white-pillared house in Emmetville where he grew up he used to look out from the bedroom he shared with Jack, at images that would not live by day. Especially on rainy nights the vacant lot on the other side of Maple Street became for the boy transfigured, a garden of living shadows; sometimes, under the lash of wet wind, even the sea as Conrad and Melville had given the sea to him. In winter, leaves fallen, one could look past the few naked trees at the back of the lot, to a gleam of water a mile away, Walton Pond reflecting the motion and glitter of the railroad yard on its far side. Every night at 9:25, the ghostly passage of a fourteen-car express (to Terence and Jack, The Express)—one of the great trains that couldn't be imagined as stopping at Emmetville. You did not hear its thunder, only saw the silent gliding of windows; then thirty seconds after the vanishing came the desolate splendor of the whistle crying for a grade crossing, the night imperfect until that music had fulfilled its mission and died. See him again; and bring out the inner voices.

The once vacant lot was now occupied in front by a filling station, in the rear by a drive-in theater; as a passion-pit, that probably served on a mass-production basis the same purpose once served by the vacant lot, where he and Jack occasionally discovered and snickered at the discarded rubber, stained handkerchiefs, and other detritus of hasty lechery. As for the gracious white house, where Terence had once known every spot, every squeaky board and dim hideaway in closets and under the eaves, it now belonged to someone who had made it a Tourist Home with noxious plastic animals on the front lawn, and called it Tumble Inn. So perish treasures of the spirit, to be born elsewhere in other guise, perhaps.

And he remembered the evening after his mother's commitment was made definite. Jack had been home for several days, his presence helpful in the confusion, the curious desolation like and not like a death; Jack would be returning to college in the morning. Terence had gone to bed; Jack was about to, lazily delaying. "How honest shall we get, Terry? Are you, inside of you, relieved? I am." Half undressed, Jack stood over Terence's bed, smoking, in ever-observant kindness.

"I guess I am."

"Bad, the last few months?"

"Each day a bit stickier. The moods. No—no way of talking to her. Every remark turned upside down. Like trying to see a room in a twisty mirror.... Jack—"

"What, kid?"

"Does it mean we shouldn't marry?"

"No." His brother's quiet hand waved away smoke from between them, and the question too. "It's probably not hereditary. Anyway your children get half the endowment from their mother. Marry a mattress type, Terry, brains optional. No, come to think, you couldn't get along with a clothhead. Make it a mattress type with gray cells; they do exist. Might have to hunt around a little. Testing mattresses." Jack sat down and spread his left hand light and warm on Terence's chest, frowning off at the window, saying to it: "Got a kid brother with social conscience yet."

It was, at sixteen, the first time Terence had encountered the full revelation of love for another, seeing that other as a complete human being all the more beloved for his separateness. He said only: "Not hereditary—how can you be sure, Jack?"

"Nobody's sure—just the best educated guess. I saw this coming more than a year ago. Had to study into the thing for my own sake, Terry: books, talk with one of the Psycho faculty up there who seems to be able to tell his ass from a barrel of flour, useful accomplishment. I had to answer that question you asked, and others. Like for instance asking a character I saw in the mirror: How about you, Jack, you going that way too one of these days? Studying it seemed to be the only method of meeting it head on."

"That why you switched to premed courses this year?"

"Partly. Would've anyhow, I think. Mother's brains began to get hurt and kicked around when she was small, I think—but not by the genes. Wish we'd known Grandpa and Grandma Kane. They seem to have been a lovely pair of pious frauds, probably started raping her wits as soon as she could talk. Uh-huh, Terry, I've got every intention of marrying and plowing a few seeds into that interesting furrow. You will too, my guess."

Terence had felt then a hunger to talk bawdy and blow the lid off in words; wondered also if he would cry, because of the secret inner fire that held no name in the language: happiness was not the name, and the new-discovered love for his brother was only a part of it, an opening of a door. "Got something all lined up?"

"Nope—playing the field. A premarriage elective. Technical studies, how to tease down the most drawers with the least squawk." He said that with no leer but a mild pagan amusement already far removed from the idiom of Emmetville. (As it turned out, Jack went on playing the field quite a while, not marrying till he was thirty-nine; in his terms that probably made sense too.) "You haven't tried it yet, Terry?"

The sixteen-year-old Terence flushed unhappily and shook his head on the pillow, wishing there had been a hundred experiences, suppressing an impulse to invent a few. But Jack wasn't dismissing him back to childhood. Jack said: "I hear tell, and ancient memories within this senile bosom do confirm, that in every well-conducted high school there is at least one—how shall I put it with utmost delicacy?—at least one kitty with an available pussy. Or two, or three." He grinned and took his hand away. "Relax, boy. There's no rush." As he finished undressing with his unfussy neatness, he asked: "Remember Cassie Ferguson, in my class?"

"Cassie—black hair, skinny, lot of eyebrow. Well well."

"Did the quiet, you-be-damn manner fool you? The ones who put out for the joy of it don't make much noise about it. Cassie was very very good for me. More tricks than a monkey on a greased flagpole." Jack turned out the light and sat on his own bed for a final cigarette; he said softly, recalling childhood: "We missed The Express. Did she blow?"

"She blew, she blew ..."

"Good night, Terence Mann."

He turned from the window, from the lights of Winchester. He ran the blunted tip of a thin finger along the edge of the piano's raised leaf, a motion of affection: another friend. A friend not exactly left behind when he went to law school, but—

It seemed to Judge Mann that his present way of existence, compared to that of, say, Michael Brooks, was not very successful, important, or useful to others. A majority of his countrymen would assess it differently of course: Mr. Brooks, never a concert performer even when young—poor health, no presence, no glamor—why, the old boy probably did well to make three thousand a year, if that. Obviously the bitch goddess wouldn't have looked twice.

He wondered (not long) why the thought of another face, familiar and vigorously detested, should have crowded away the cherished ugly features of Mr. Brooks. This face was a handsomely carved block of chilly pink meat under white hair. High falcon nose, flexible lips that squeezed a manifest delight out of elaborately precise diction. Words did not simply pass through the lips of Judge Cleever: they were escorted out, by a pair of busy pale red snakes, the only organs of the man's face that ever knew emotion. The lips writhed, twisted, enjoyed, were sickly passionate: "that you be taken hence to the place from which you came, and thence, at the appointed time, to the place of execution, where—" but give the dreary old cannibal credit, the apparatus under that raptorial beak would squirm with the same enthusiasm when it was ordering a poached egg. The pallid blue eyes of this pillar of society were astonishingly dull. Cleever was an earnest prohibitionist: no drink, no smoking, no cussing, likely hadn't been laid in thirty years, yet you could observe similar eyes whenever the drunk tank yielded its human load to the courts and hospitals. To learn of an original thought behind those soggy irises would be nearly as incredible as to learn of a generous one. Cleever had been a judge since the days of the political machine preceding Timmy Flack's, into his present miasmic twilight of senility. Automatically, in a new trial, if Terence Mann were for any reason disqualified, he would sit in judgment on the life of Callista Blake.

Thanks, Judge, thanks to your obscene simulacrum for reminding me of several things I must not do. Terence Mann flexed his hands to relieve a tension; then he played the third Fugue, to completion this time, and well enough. Mr. Brooks would have rubbed his fleshy nose and said: "Mmm."

Then he was compulsively searching through a pile of long unused material, until he unearthed the beginner's book, the first-grade instruction prescribed by Michael Brooks. He remembered insisting, eight years old, that he must pick out the book personally, so off to Simms' Music Store in Winchester with the tickled, slightly bumbling Doctor, who knew everybody and took occasion to introduce him to the lantern jaw and slow-motion smile of Hubert Q. Simms; and embarrassed the toe-twisting bejesus out of the boy with some well-meant cockadoodle about "latest threat to Josef Hofmann." Then four blocks down Court Street to (Terence hadn't quite believed it) Judson's Piano Store. This same piano now standing here thirty-nine years later, rather old as such things go but good as new. The Doctor's way, taking such a plunge out of nothing but faith in a small boy's dream. Probably that year he'd been just barely able to afford it. He should have lived another forty.

But Dr. Carl Mann, in the early winter of 1930, not drunk for he never was, a blue ugliness of ink still visible in the long seam of scar tissue across his face, his financial affairs well in order—in fact very little hurt by the smash of 1929, for country people still got sick and still paid for it as well as they could—and the night cloudy, yes, but no rain or ice on the roads, happened somehow to drive his car into the concrete abutment of the railroad overpass at Pritchett. His only unkindness the matter of uncertainty. It could easily have been a syncope as the coroner decided, or a mechanical failure of the car concealed by the total smash. Or the Doctor might have been uncertain himself, up to the last blind instant of no return.

Here anyway was the instruction book, pages gone brown at the rims, and with the script of Michael Brooks. Eyes on the notes! Get rid of that shoulder-arm tension!!

Judge Mann carried it to the armchair, with a go-to-bed glass of brandy. Not all those careful fingerings had been written in by Mr. Brooks. The last half of the manual (he had forgotten) had quite a few figures in an eight-or nine-year-old hand (correct too!) placed there after he had got by the first few hurdles with his enthusiasm still afire. The book would be more or less out of date, Judge Mann reflected: modern pedagogy had new notions, some good, some not.

He wondered if he was examining this relic from a middle-aged need to get nearer somehow in time to the mind of Callista Blake. Partly, maybe. Certainly the dignified black notes before his eyes, the passages of the third Fugue remembered, The Express, the first discovery of Huck Finn, Moby Dick, Beethoven Opus 57, the embrace of a Filipino girl whose body was a little golden candle flame—certainly none of all that had the effect of shutting away Callista Blake. She was very present. ("Which is the Clerk?") But more than anything else, here at the frayed, tired, lonely end of the evening, he was wondering—practically too, and with the special fascination of such practical problems—how he would go about helping a child beginner to free the fourth finger, strengthen the fifth, accomplish the small-immense passage from the five-finger cage to the wide-open country of the octave. And he found that he meant just that: how he would do it, he, Terence Mann, age forty-seven, not merely Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and for the County of Winchester, but also a pianist of more than decent competence.

If in the habit of speaking aloud in loneliness, he supposed he could have said reasonably to the imagined presence of Callista beyond the bright amber of the brandy: Not now, not while your life is proposed for burning, Callista. But afterward, maybe. Afterward. Possibly a letter to the New Essex Bar Association, explaining how for me the law has been an interlude of a quarter-century, and interesting, but now I would rather attempt something that I find more important. Which would annoy the holy hell out of them, Callista, but all the same I may write it.

A curious thought which he took to bed; sleeping quite soon, to encounter the inner voices of sleep, with moments of tranquillity.

III

She saw it behind her eyelids, a small cloud but deep, suddenly come, suddenly gone. The light strengthened; there was the rock, and a whiteness in the water. How could you know, Callista, that she was dead?

She had, as usual, dared to move her cot nearer the wall with the barred door and the graffiti, so that if she crouched at that end of the cot a triangle of shadow protected her from the glare of the naked bulb in the corridor. Matron Kowalski on night duty had a habit of turning that light off and on at chancy intervals after midnight. Regulations probably said it should burn steadily, but Kowalski was a zealous screw when not deep in a comic book, and doubtless hoped to catch her charges in bottomless wickedness by playing cute with the switch. Short-sighted as well as thick-witted, Kowalski had apparently never caught on to Callista's crime of moving the cot. Callista generally tried to retrieve the sin before Matron Flannery came on in the morning, though whenever she forgot, Flannery just looked sad and grumbled: "Now dearie, we gotta put that back where it belongs or it's my arse." And sometimes even shoved it back herself with a heave of a massive thigh.

Interesting but maybe unprofitable, to contrast that kindness with the satisfaction Flannery had shown a week ago in disciplining a shouting and clawing wench who didn't want to go downstairs. Flannery had caught the girl from behind with an arm like a side of beef, in the pattern of rape, a stiff block of finger jabbing at nerve clusters here and there, leaving no mark. And if Callista Blake the Weird Woman, Cold Callie the Monkshood Girl, were to create a disturbance, Flannery would be ready, would spread her flat feet and grunt in the same way, like a boar in rut, in the interest of law and order.

"I want more heat, I want more foodibles. I want more heat, I want more foodibles." The old woman down the corridor had been silent a while, the interval like the recession of a toothache. Hearing her resume, Callista dropped her face on her knees, listening more or less. Listening is an act of living. Listening, the human unit can at least say: I am not dead, I am here, I can prove it, the current of life is dancing in the delicate nerves, the brain recording, comparing, remembering—understand, I am not dead!

"I want more heat, I want more foodibles." She sounded plaintive at the moment, harping on a single string, a note in it much resembling enjoyment. The name was Watson; the nearly baritone voice brought the image of a body shriveled and small, crowding seventy perhaps. "I want more heat, I want more foodibles." Watson must have been picked up Sunday as a D&D, Callista supposed, raising hell somewhere in the chilly streets until somebody called the wagon. She couldn't be drunk now, two nights later, but the noise continued unchanged. She didn't belong here of course. "Ya-hoo! Kiss my cold aching ass, you dirty-dirty-dirty—all rise! All rise! I want more heat, I want more foodibles." Sooner or later the fumbling dustmop of the law would pick her up, shake her out into a different sort of institution. Or back to the streets and whatever dim hole of a room she lived in—with small possessions? Old photographs? Sewing-basket? Rocking-chair? "All rise!"

"You Watson, you shaddap." The voice of Kowalski.

"Fuck you, Polack, I want more heat, I want more foodibles."

"Listen here, you don't shaddap, I'm coming in there again."

"Yah!" Weary, diminuendo, but not actually a sound of yielding. Silence followed, as dust settles after an eddy of wind.

Callista tried to review the course of the day, long in retrospect. Maud Welsh all morning. Sergeant Shields, sober, exact, not unkind: four bobby pins and a paper clip. Sergeant Peterson a bleached mechanism for the production of not very good photographs, including one of the rock and the pond by daylight, not the light of a troubled and hazy moon. Trooper Curtis, plaster casts and fingerprints and so what? Sutherland R. Clipp who did everything. Trooper Carlo San Giorgio the nice boy. And Dr. Devens. None of them except Maud Welsh had remained very long on the stand; Cecil who understood the nature of the conflict had let most of them pass by with little or no questioning. Callista found she was remembering too mechanically; names and faces would not coalesce to any rationally useful larger pattern. Yet at some point—she thought it was during the testimony of Cousin Maud—something had been done or said that had lessened the opacity of the Blank, like a hint of dawn or false dawn beyond a dirty window.

Or was it anything done or said? Cousin Maud of the Plum Jam understood nothing of the interview with Ann at Covent Street, a happening far outside the cage where the life of Cousin Maud fluttered and squeaked. Perhaps this was the way of it: during the examination of Cousin Maud the Blank had thinned temporarily, of itself; a coincidence in time, maybe nothing to do with any word spoken. Probably during the cross-examination, when Cecil was questioning Maud about the Saturday night, the bedroom scene—A sorry Hamlet I made!

"Fuck your stinking jail too! We got rights, Polack. You ain't saving the taxpayers nothing, we all die of pee-neumo-nia, they gotta pay for a box. Listen, I been flang out of better jails before you was old enough to shove a finger up it. I want more heat, I want—"

Callista winced at the smack of Kowalski's feet passing her cell. She heard the clash of keys, clang of the iron door, high anticipatory whimpering (still that note of enjoyment?) broken off by the crack of a flat hand against flesh, repeated and repeated, Callista's body clenching in misery at each repetition of the sound, her scream of protest choked into silence by a bitten lip. They can't! Stop it! But it had happened the same way last night, would happen again and again, maybe always, here and there in the world, throughout the extent of foreseeable time: how long is that? Callista's fingernails were hurting her legs. Her mind held firm somewhere, listening.

Watson wasn't yelling much. She hadn't last night either, only a small rhythmic outcry. Mouse in a trap. "You gonna quiet down now?"

"Uh-huh. I'm sorry, Kowalski."

"Mrs. Kowalski."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Kowalski. Gi' me a butt."

"This ain't no charity ward." Anger spent, Kowalski probably just wanted to get back to her comic book. "Nor you ain't no psycho, you're putting on to get attention, beat the rap for what you done wit' your busted bottle. All the jerks on Mullen Street, you had to stick it into plain-clo'es cop. That was crazy, but now you're crazy like a fox. You know that t'ing punt'red his intestyne? Still in hospital, and that ain't good news for you, Crazy-like-a-fox."

Watson giggled. "Couldn't he'p it, he wasn't nothing head to foot on'y one big turd. Gi' me a butt. Just one, huh, please?"

"God give me patience!" That noise of Kowalski's was mechanical, a kind of breathing, blurred by the iron clang. Callista was standing by her own cell door. "Matron—"

Kowalski's square bulk swung about, her flat face slipping into shadow as her head turned from the light. "You, huh?"

"Will you take her a pack of mine? I don't use 'em much."

"Got plenty, huh?"

"Yes." Callista held the pack through the bars. Kowalski made no move to take it. "I'd like her to have it."

"You'd like.... You feel pretty big, don't you, Miss Blake? You feel real big wit' them cigarettes. I t'ought we was just dirt, now everyt'ing's okay, you can bend low 'n' give an old woman a pack of your butts." She held her voice down; Watson was mumbling and crooning to herself, perhaps not listening. "Maybe it wouldn't occur to you, Miss Blake, but that old trot's got pride. She ain't lickin' up no at'eist prisoner's dirty leavings. Me neither. Miss Blake, I wouldn't touch you not by a ten-foot pole." Callista saw thumb and forefinger of the woman's hand pinched in a circle at the shelf of her breasts. Her soft tones had lost distinctness, slipping back into the vaguer argot of a South Winchester childhood. "Ain't comin' in 'ere, not 'less Sheriff or somebody gives me direc' order, you can drop dead. You ain't human, you're a stinkin' t'ing, you can hang yourself I won't go in, leave you for Flannery to find by the morning."

Callista put the cigarettes away and sat on her cot gazing at interlaced fingers, trying (as if the time allowed were not short but the need urgent) to grasp the nature of hatred, especially in this new guise. Kowalski had not displayed it before, had seemed only an indifferent mechanism busy with her job. It occurred to Callista that she herself must have been shamefully unobservant. Did others unsuspectedly ache with this kind of loathing for her? T. J. Hunter? Cousin Maud? Jim? Why?

"I guess you don't talk, you can't be bod'ered."

"No, Mrs. Kowalski, I'd rather not talk."

"Oh, you'd rather not. Much too good to talk to a dumb Polack. Let me tell you somet'ing, Miss Blake, what they do after they pull the switch in that little room—what they do, they take out the heart, doing the oddopsy, understand? No matter you got lots of money, 'r' gonna be buried fancy somewheres, they take out the heart. They got a reason. All right, you don't talk."

Kowalski stood there a while longer, exercising great courage perhaps, or having faith in the cold iron of the bars. Then Callista sensed that the woman had gone away. I will think about the night of Saturday, the 15th of August.

Cousin Maud must have been telling the truth about that episode on the front porch. Callista could not remember seeing or hearing Ann then, but Cousin Maud would not have lied.

How unmistakably the bedroom was Mother's! Nothing there of Herb, who slept at the far end of the upstairs hall in a room Mother indulgently called "his den," as one might refer to a cat's favorite basket. Well, the entire house merely tolerated Herb Chalmers, who after all did nothing except own it, pay taxes and upkeep, and exist there. Poor Herb! If only he wasn't so inclined to agree with that estimate himself! By contrast, the spook of The Professor, the great Malachi Chalmers so respectably dead, was quite at home. Cousin Maud liked to behave as though all major directives were announced jointly by The Professor and Victoria.

The room smelled of Victoria, a scent resembling dilute vinegar now and then penetrating the ordinary flavor of sachet and face powder. That night, without asking, Callista knew her mother had been sitting for some time at the antique secretary desk, dealing with correspondence of the Thursday Society of Shanesville. And Victoria, after her absent-minded greeting, would go on sitting there preoccupied, long enough to make the point. "I'm sorry I didn't know you planned to come out tonight, dear."

"No plan—impulse. I wanted to talk to you, Mother."

"Oh, something terribly important? Well, dear, just make yourself comfortable till I'm through here and we'll have a nice little visit." Callista stood near the desk, where Victoria must at least be aware of her. "I wish you would sit down, Callista. It is a little trying to be stared at when one is attempting to concentrate."

"Sorry. But I wasn't staring at you, Mother." That was true. Her mind, too swiftly to be caught in the act, had generated an image perhaps well worth staring at: a thing approximately sixty days old (for it must have been conceived in the deep middle days of June) possessing a bent head larger than the blob of body, stubs with a blind intent to become legs and arms; a thing charged with the strain and pressure of life, and yet finger and thumb (if they could reach it) might pinch it out of existence like a soft bug: Mrs. Chalmers' grandchild. Callista's hand, driven by involuntary thought, dropped to rest at the level of her womb where the thing sheltered inaccessible—whether a motion of hostility or protectiveness or both, impossible to say; and Mother would never notice. "I was staring at something that happened a long time ago. You may not remember it. I wanted to find out if you did."

Resignedly, Victoria capped her pen and laid it on the unfinished letter; took off her amber-rimmed reading glasses and retired them deliberately to their case. "Callista, I must say that for anyone so young this habit of mulling over past events is not healthy, not the way to become adjusted to reality."

"I know, Mother. I'm not in tune with the times, am I?"

"If you realize it, I dare say that's a step in advance."

"What," said Callista, "is the virtue of being in tune with the times when the times are corrupt?"

"Callista, I am rather tired. Must we have one of your—your rather naïve philosophical discussions? All part of the process of adjustment I dare say, but frankly I am not up to it."

The big questions, Callista thought, always break the line and swim away. Too big, and a weak line; who wants the great dangerous things anyhow? Not Mrs. Chalmers nor the Thursday Society. "Mother, do you happen to remember the time I spilled that nitric acid?"

"Happen to remember! Callista, that passes belief." Large gray upturned eyes filled with tears. "I am not a monster. Am I?"

"I'm sorry, I spoke clumsily. I meant, do you remember the details? I was going-on-five—it's difficult—"

"What details? Naturally I remember them all perfectly. What do you want to know?" The sharpness was excusable; yet Callista wondered whether she truly regretted the cruelty of that blurted question. Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4—she had reread the play in the afternoon. A catalytic action, although it had been a seemingly random choice, a turning to Shakespeare for relief, illumination, distraction, and something more, in a time of trouble, as another might have turned to music, or physical exertion, or the warmth of a friend. Her thought still rang with it, reverberated, and she understood now that the choice had not been random at all: "Let me be cruel, not unnatural: I will speak daggers to her, but use none." "Your father was drunk, Callista, otherwise I don't suppose even he could have been so heedless as to leave that bottle where a child could knock it over. Is that what you wanted to know?"