I have thought the difference might be that my Mary knows she will live forever, that she will step from the living into another life as easily as she slips from sleep to wakefulness. She knows this with her whole body, so completely that she does not think of it any more than she thinks to breathe. Thus she has time to sleep, time to rest, time to cease to exist for a little.

On the other hand, I know in my bones and my tissue that I will one day, soon or late, stop living and so I fight against sleep, and beseech it, even try to trick it into coming. My moment of sleep is a great wrench, an agony. I know this because I have awakened at this second still feeling the crushing blow. And once in sleep, I have a very busy time. My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.

I sleep much less in time than Mary does. She says she needs a great deal of sleep and I agree that I need less but I am far from believing that. There is only so much energy stored in a body, augmented, of course, by foods. One can use it up quickly, the way some children gobble candy, or unwrap it slowly. There’s always a little girl who saves part of her candy and so has it when the gobblers have long since finished. I think my Mary will live much longer than I. She will have saved some of her life for later. Come to think of it, most women live longer than men.

Good Friday has always troubled me. Even as a child I was deep taken with sorrow, not at the agony of the crucifixion, but feeling the blighting loneliness of the Crucified. And I have never lost the sorrow, planted by Matthew, and read to me in the clipped, tight speech of my New England Great-Aunt Deborah.

Perhaps it was worse this year. We do take the story to ourselves and identify with it. Today Marullo instructed me, so that for the first time I understood it, in the nature of business. Right afterward I was offered my first bribe. That’s an odd thing to say at my age, but I don’t remember any other. I must think about Margie Young-Hunt. Is she an evil thing? What is her purpose? I know she has promised me something and threatened me if I don’t accept it. Can a man think out his life, or must he just tag along?

So many nights I have lain awake, hearing my Mary’s little purring beside me. If you stare into darkness, red spots start swimming on your eyes, and the time is long. Mary so loves her sleep that I have tried to protect her in it, even when the electric itch burned on my skin. She wakens if I leave the bed. It worries her. Because her only experience with sleeplessness has been in illness, she thinks I am not well.

This night I had to get up and out. Her breath purred gently and I could see the archaic smile on her mouth. Maybe she dreamed of good fortune, of the money I was about to make. Mary wants to be proud.

It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn’t thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering.It’s a safety place—everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it. Secret, quiet movement often awakens a sleeper when a deliberate normal action does not. Also I am convinced that sleeping minds wander into the thoughts of other people. I caused myself to need the bathroom, and when it was so, got up and went. And afterward I went quietly downstairs, carrying my clothes, and dressed in the kitchen.

Mary says I share other people’s troubles that don’t exist. Maybe that is so, but I did see a little possible scene play out in the dim-lighted kitchen—Mary awakening and searching the house for me, and her face troubled. I wrote a note on the grocery pad, saying, “Darling—I’m restless. Have gone for a walk. Be back soon.” I think I left it squarely in the center of the kitchen table so that if the light was turned on at the wall switch it would be the first thing seen.

Then I eased the back door open and tasted the air. It was chilly, smelled of a crusting of white frost. I muffled up in a heavy coat and pulled a knitted sailor’s cap down over my ears. The electric kitchen clock growled. It said quarter of three. I had been lying watching the red spots in the dark since eleven.

Our town of New Baytown is a handsome town, an old town, one of the first clear and defined whole towns in America. Its first settlers and my ancestors, I believe, were sons of those restless, treacherous, quarrelsome, avaricious seafaring men who were a headache to Europe under Elizabeth, took the West Indies for their own under Cromwell, and came finally to roost on the northern coast, holding charters from the returned Charles Stuart. They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren’t so unalike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people’s property. Where they merged, they produced a hard-bitten, surviving bunch of monkeys. I know about them because my father made me know. He was a kind of high amateur ancestor man and I’ve always noticed that ancestor people usually lack the qualities of the ones they celebrate. My father was a gentle, well-informed, ill-advised, sometimes brilliant fool. Singlehanded he lost the land, money, prestige, and future; in fact he lost nearly everything Allens and Hawleys had accumulated over several hundred years, lost everything but the names—which was all my father was interested in anyway. Father used to give me what he called “heritage lessons.” That’s why I know so much about the old boys. Maybe that’s also why I’m a clerk in a Sicilian grocery on a block Hawleys used to own. I wish I didn’t resent it so much. It wasn’t depression or hard times that wiped us out.

All that came from starting to say New Baytown is a pretty town. I turned right on Elm Street instead of left and walked fast up to Porlock, which is a cockeyed parallel with High. Wee Willie, our fat constable, would be dozing in his police car on the High, and I didn’t want to pass the time of night with him. “What you doing up so late, Eth? Got yourself a little piece of something?” Wee Willie gets lonesome and loves to talk, and then later he talks about what he talked about. Quite a few small but nasty scandals have grown out of Willie’s loneliness. The day constable is Stonewall Jackson Smith. That’s not a nickname. He was christened Stonewall Jackson, and it does set him apart from all the other Smiths. I don’t know why town cops have to be opposites but they usually are. Stoney Smith is a man who wouldn’t give away what day it is unless he were on the stand under oath. Chief Smith runs the police work of the town and he’s dedicated, studies the latest methods, and has taken the F.B.I. training in Washington. I guess he’s as good a policeman as you are likely to find, tall and quiet and with eyes like little gleams of metal. If you were going in for crime, the chief would be a man to avoid.

All this came from my going over to Porlock Street to avoid talking to Wee Willie. It’s on Porlock that the beautiful houses of New Baytown are. You see in the early eighteen hundreds we had over a hundred whaling bottoms. When the ships came back from a year or two out as far as the Antarctic or the China Sea, they would be loaded with oil and very rich. But they would have touched at foreign ports and picked up things as well as ideas. That’s why you see so many Chinese things in the houses on Porlock Street. Some of those old captain-owners had good taste too. With all their money, they brought in English architects to build their houses. That’s why you see so much Adam influence and Greek revival architecture on Porlock Street. It was that period in England. But with all the fanlights and fluted columns and Greek keys, they never neglected to put a widow’s walk on the roof. The idea was that the faithful home-bound wives could go up there to watch for returning ships, and maybe some of them did. My family, the Hawleys, and the Phillipses and the Elgars and the Bakers were older. They stayed put on Elm Street and their houses were what is called Early American, peak roofs and shiplap siding. That’s the way my house, the old Hawley house, is. And the giant elms are as old as the houses.

Porlock Street has kept its gas street lamps, only there are electric globes in them now. In the summer tourists come to see the architecture and what they call “the old-world charm” of our town. Why does charm have to be old-world?

I forget how the Vermont Allens got mixed up with the Hawleys. It happened pretty soon after the Revolution. I could find out, of course. Up in the attic somewhere there will be a record. By the time father died, my Mary was pretty tired of Hawley family history, so when she suggested that we store all the things in the attic, I understood how she felt. You can get pretty tired of other people’s family history. Mary isn’t even New Baytown born. She came from a family of Irish extraction but not Catholic. She always makes a point of that. Ulster family, she calls them. She came from Boston.

No she didn’t, either. I got her in Boston. I can see both of us, maybe more clearly now than then, a nervous, frightened Second Lieutenant Hawley with a weekend pass, and the soft, petal-cheeked, sweet-smelling darling of a girl, and triply all of those because of war and textbooks. How serious we were, how deadly serious. I was going to be killed and she was prepared to devote her life to my heroic memory. It was one of a million identical dreams of a million olive uniforms and cotton prints. And it might well have ended with the traditional Dear John letter except that she devoted her life to her warrior. Her letters, sweet with steadfastness, followed me everywhere, round, clear handwriting in dark blue ink on light blue paper, so that my whole company recognized her letters and every man was curiously glad for me. Even if I hadn’t wanted to marry Mary, her constancy would have forced me to for the perpetuation of the world dream of fair and faithful women.

She has not wavered, not in the transplanting from Boston Irish tenancy to the old Hawley house on Elm Street. And she never wavered in the slow despondency of my failing business, in the birth of our children, or in the paralysis of my long clerkship. She is a waiter—I can see that now. And I guess she had at lengthy last grown weary of waiting. Never before had the iron of her wishes showed through, for my Mary is no mocker and contempt is not her tool. She has been too busy making the best of too many situations. It only seemed remarkable that the poison came to a head because it had not before. How quickly the pictures formed against the sound of frost-crunching footsteps on the night street.

There’s no reason to feel furtive walking in the early morning in New Baytown. Wee Willie makes little jokes about it but most people seeing me walking toward the bay at three in the morning would suppose I was going fishing and not give it another thought. Our people have all sorts of fishing theories, some of them secret like family recipes, and such things are respected and respectable.

The street lights made the hard white frost on the lawns and sidewalks glint like millions of tiny diamonds. Such a frost takes a footprint and there were none ahead. I have always from the time I was a child felt a curious excitement walking in new unmarked snow or frost. It is like being first in a new world, a deep, satisfying sense of discovery of something clean and new, unused, undirtied. The usual nightfolk, the cats, don’t like to walk on frost. I remember once, on a dare, I stepped out barefoot on a frosty path and it felt like a burn to my feet. But now in galoshes and thick socks I put the first scars on the glittering newness.

Where Porlock crosses Torquay, that’s where the bicycle factory is, just off Hicks Street, the clean frost was scarred with long foot-dragged tracks. Danny Taylor, a restless, unsteady ghost, wanting to be somewhere else and dragging there and wanting to be somewhere else. Danny, the town drunk. Every town has one, I guess. Danny Taylor—so many town heads shook slowly from side to side—good family, old family, last of the line, good education. Didn’t he have some trouble at the Academy? Why doesn’t he straighten up? He’s killing himself with booze and that’s wrong because Danny’s a gentleman. It’s a shame, begging money for booze. It’s a comfort that his parents aren’t alive to see it. It would kill them—but they’re dead already. But that’s New Baytown talking.

In me Danny is a raw sorrow and out of that a guilt. I should be able to help him. I’ve tried, but he won’t let me. Danny is as near to a brother as I ever had, same age and growing up, same weight and strength. Maybe my guilt comes because I am my brother’s keeper and I have not saved him. With a feeling that deep down, excuses—even valid ones—give no relief. Taylors— as old a family as Hawleys or Bakers or any of the others. In childhood I can remember no picnic, no circus, no competition, no Christmas without Danny beside me as close as my own right arm. Maybe if we had gone to college together this wouldn’t have happened. I went to Harvard—luxuriated in languages, bathed in the humanities, lodged in the old, the beautiful, the obscure, indulged myself with knowledge utterly useless in running a grocery store, as it developed. And always I wished Danny could be with me on that bright and excited pilgrimage. But Danny was bred for the sea. His appointment to the Naval Academy was planned and verified and certain even when we were kids. His father sewed up the appointment every time we got a new Congressman.

Three years with honors and then expelled. It killed his parents, they say, and it killed most of Danny. All that remained was this shuffling sorrow—this wandering night sorrow cadging dimes for a pint of skull-buster. I think the English would say, “He’s let the side down,” and that always wounds the let-downer more than the side. Danny’s a night wanderer now, an early-morning man, a lonely, dragging thing. When he asks for a quarter for skull-buster his eyes beg you to forgive him because he can’t forgive himself. He sleeps in a shack in back of the boat works where Wilburs used to be shipbuilders. I stooped over his track to see whether he was headed home or away. By the scuff of the frost he was going out and I might meet him any place. Wee Willie wouldn’t lock him up. What would be the good?

There was no question where I was going. I had seen and felt and smelled it before I got out of bed. The Old Harbor is pretty far gone now. After the new breakwater went in and the municipal pier, sand and silt crept in and shallowed that once great anchorage sheltered by the jagged teeth of Whitsun Reef. And where once were shipways and ropewalks and warehouses and whole families of coopers to make the whale-oil casks, and docks too over which the bowsprits of whalers could project to their chain stays and figure- or fiddleheads. Three-masters they were usually, square-rigged; the after mast carried square sails as well as boom-and-gaff spanker—deep-hulled ships built to suffer the years at sea in any weather. The flying jib boom was a separate spar and the double dolphin-striker served as spritsail gaffs as well.

I have a steel engraving of the Old Harbor chockablock with ships, and some faded photographs on tin, but I don’t really need them. I know the harbor and I know the ships. Grandfather rebuilt it for me with his stick made from a narwhal’s horn and he drilled me in the nomenclature, rapping out the terms with his stick against a tide-bared stump of a pile of what was once the Hawley dock, a fierce old man with a white whisker fringe. I loved him so much I ached from it.

“All right,” he’d say, in a voice that needed no megaphone from the bridge, “sing out the full rig, and sing it loud. I hate whispering.”

And I would sing out, and he’d whack the pile with his narwhal stick at every beat. “Flying jib,” I’d sing (whack), “outer jib” (whack), “inner jib, jib” (whack! whack!).

“Sing out! You’re whispering.”

“Fore skys’l, fore royal, fore topgal’n’t s’l, fore upper tops’l, fore lower tops’l, fores’l”—and every one a whack.

“Main! Sing out.”

“Main skys’l”—whack.

But sometimes, as he got older, he would tire. “Belay the main,” he would shout. “Get to the mizzen. Sing out now.”

“Aye, sir. Mizzen skys’l, mizzen royal, mizzen t’gal’n’t, mizzen upper tops’l, mizzen lower tops’l, crossjack—”

“And?”

“Spanker.”

“How rigged?”

“Boom and gaff, sir.”

Whack—whack—whack—narwhal stick against the water-logged pile.

As his hearing got fuzzier, he accused more and more people of whispering. “If a thing’s true, or even if it ain’t true and you mean it, sing out,” he would cry.

Old Cap’n’s ears may have gone wonky toward the end of his life, but not his memory. He could recite you the tonnage and career of every ship, it seemed like, that ever sailed out of the Bay, and what she brought back and how it was divided, and the odd thing was that the great whaling days were nearly over before he was master. Kerosene he called “skunk oil,” and kerosene lamps were “stinkpots.” By the time electric lights came, he didn’t care much or maybe was content just to remember. His death didn’t shock me. The old man had drilled me in his death as he had in ships. I knew what to do, inside myself and out.

On the edge of the silted and sanded up Old Harbor, right where the Hawley dock had been, the stone foundation is still there. It comes right down to the low-tide level, and high water laps against its square masonry. Ten feet from the end there is a little passage about four feet wide and four feet high and five feet deep. Its top is vaulted. Maybe it was a drain one time, but the landward entrance is cemented in with sand and broken rock. That is my Place, the place everybody needs. Inside it you are out of sight except from seaward. There’s nothing at Old Harbor now but a few clammers’ shacks, rattlety things, mostly deserted in the winter, but clammers are a quiet lot anyway. They hardly speak from day’s end to end and they walk with their heads down and their shoulders bowed.

That was the place I was headed for. I spent nighttide there before I went in the service, and the nighttide before I married my Mary, and part of the night Ellen was born that hurt her so bad. I was compelled to go and sit inside there and hear the little waves slap the stone and look out at the sawtooth Whitsun rocks. I saw it, lying in bed, watching the dance of the red spots, and I knew I had to sit there. It’s big changes take me there—big changes.

South Devon runs along the shore, and there are lights aimed at the beach put there by good people to keep lovers from getting in trouble. They have to go somewhere else. A town ordinance says that Wee Willie has to patrol once an hour. There wasn’t a soul on the beach—not a soul, and that was odd because someone is going fishing, or fishing, or coming in nearly all the time. I lowered myself over the edge and found the outcrop stone and doubled into the little cave. And I had hardly settled myself before I heard Wee Willie’s car go by. That’s twice I had avoided passing the time of night with him.

It sounds uncomfortable and silly, sitting cross-legged in a niche like a blinking Buddha, but some way the stone fits me, or I fit. Maybe I’ve been going there so long that my behind has conformed to the stones. As for its being silly, I don’t mind that. Sometimes it’s great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start. When I am troubled, I play a game of silly so that my dear will not catch trouble from me. She hasn’t found me out yet, or if she has, I’ll never know it. So many things I don’t know about my Mary, and among them, how much she knows about me. I don’t think she knows about the Place. How would she? I’ve never told anyone. It has no name in my mind except the Place—no ritual or formula or anything. It’s a spot in which to wonder about things. No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself. Now, sitting in the Place, out of the wind, seeing under the guardian lights the tide creep in, black from the dark sky, I wondered whether all men have a Place, or need a Place, or want one and have none. Sometimes I’ve seen a look in eyes, a frenzied animal look as of need for a quiet, secret place where soul-shivers can abate, where a man is one and can take stock of it. Of course I know of the theories of back to the womb and the death-wish, and these may be true of some men, but I don’t think they are true of me, except as easy ways of saying something that isn’t easy. I call whatever happens in the Place “taking stock.” Some others might call it prayer, and maybe it would be the same thing. I don’t believe it’s thought. If I wanted to make a picture of it for myself, it would be a wet sheet turning and flapping in a lovely wind and drying and sweetening the white. What happens is right for me, whether or not it is good.

There were plenty of matters to consider and they were jumping and waving their hands for attention like kids in school. Then I heard the slow puttering of a boat engine, a onelunger, a fishing craft. Her masthead light moved south beyond the Whitsun rocks. I had to put everything aside until she turned her red and green lights safe in the channel, a local boat to have found the entrance so easily. She dropped anchor in the shallows and two men came ashore in her skiff. Little wavelets brushed the beach and the disturbed gulls took time to settle back on the mooring floats.

Item: There was Mary, my dear, to think of, asleep with the smile of mystery on her lips. I hoped she wouldn’t awaken and look for me. But if she did, would she ever tell me? I doubt it. I think that Mary, for all that she seems to tell everything, tells very little. There was the fortune to consider. Did Mary want a fortune or did she want it for me? The fact that it was a fake fortune, rigged by Margie Young-Hunt for reasons I didn’t know, made no difference at all. A fake fortune was just as good as any and it is possible that all fortunes are a little fake. Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him. The great artists of finance like Morgan and Rockefeller weren’t deflected. They wanted and got money, just simple money. What they did with it afterward is another matter. I’ve always felt they got scared of the ghost they raised and tried to buy it off.

Item: By money, Mary meant new curtains and sure education for the kids and holding her head a little higher and, face it, being proud rather than a little ashamed of me. She had said it in anger and it was true.

Item: Did I want money? Well, no. Something in me hated being a grocery clerk. In the Army I made captain, but I know what got me into O. T. C. It was family and connections. I wasn’t picked for my pretty eyes, but I did make a good officer, a good officer. But if I had really liked command, imposing my will on others and seeing them jump, I might have stayed in the Army and I’d have been a colonel by now. But I didn’t. I wanted to get it over. They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That’s for civilians.

Item: Marullo was telling me the truth about business, business being the process of getting money. And Joey Morphy was telling it straight, and Mr. Baker and the drummer. They all told it straight. Why did it revolt me and leave a taste like a spoiled egg? Am I so good, or so kind, or so just? I don’t think so. Am I so proud? Well, there’s some of that. Am I lazy, too lazy to be involved? There’s an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.

There is a smell and a feel of dawn long before the light. It was in the air now, a tempering of the wind; a new star or a planet cleared the horizon to eastward. I should know what star or planet but I don’t. The wind freshens or steadies in the false dawn. It really does. And I would have to be going back soon. This rising star was too late to have much of a go before daylight. What is the saying—“The stars incline, they do not command”? Well, I’ve heard that a good many serious financiers go to astrologers for instruction in stock purchase. Do the stars incline toward a bull market? Is A. T. and T. influenced by the stars? Nothing as sweet and remote in my fortune as a star. A beat-up tarot deck of fortune-telling cards in the hands of an idle, mischievous woman, and she had rigged the cards. Do the cards incline but not command? Well, the cards inclined me out to the Place in the middle of the night, and they inclined me to give more thought than I wanted to, to a subject I detested. That’s quite a bit of inclining right there. Could they incline me to a business cleverness I never had, to acquisitiveness foreign to me? Could I incline to want what I didn’t want? There are the eaters and the eaten. That’s a good rule to start with. Are the eaters more immoral than the eaten? In the end all are eaten— all—gobbled up by the earth, even the fiercest and the most crafty.

The roosters up on Clam Hill had been crowing for a long time and I had heard and not heard. I wished I could stay to see the sun rise straight out from the Place.

I said there was no ritual involved with the Place but that is not entirely true. Sometime on each visit I reconstruct Old Harbor for my mind’s pleasure—the docks, the warehouses, the forests of masts and underbrush of rigging and canvas. And my ancestors, my blood—the young ones on the deck, the fully grown aloft, the mature on the bridge. No nonsense of Madison Avenue then or trimming too many leaves from cauliflowers. Some dignity was then for a man, some stature. A man could breathe.

That was my father talking, the fool. Old Cap’n remembered the fights over shares, the quibbling with stores, suspicion of every plank and keelson, the lawsuits, yes, and the killings— over women, glory, adventure? Not at all. Over money. It was a rare partnership, he said, that lasted more than one voyage, and blistering feuds ever afterward, continuing after the cause was forgotten.

There was one bitterness old Cap’n Hawley did not forget, a crime he could not forgive. He must have told me about it many times, standing or sitting on the rim of Old Harbor. We spent a goodly time there, he and I. I remember him pointing with his narwhal stick.

“Take that third rock on Whitsun Reef,” he said. “Got her? Now, line her up with the tip of Porty Point at high water. See it there? Now—half a cable-length out on that line is where she lies, at least her keel.”

“The Belle-Adair?”

“The Belle-Adair.”

“Our ship.”

“Half ours, a partnership. She burned at anchor—burned to the waterline. I never believed it was an accident.”

“You think she was fired, sir?”

“I do.”

“But—but you can’t do that.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Insurance.”

“Then it’s no different now.”

“No different.”

“There must be some difference.”

“Only in a single man alone—only in one man alone. There’s the only power—one man alone. Can’t depend on anything else.”

He never spoke to Cap’n Baker again, my father told me, but he didn’t carry it to his son, Mr. Banker Baker. He wouldn’t do that any more than he would burn a ship.

Good God, I’ve got to get home. And I got. I almost ran and I went up the High Street without thinking. It was still dark enough but a rim of lightness lay on the edge of the sea and made the waves gray iron. I rounded the war memorial and passed the post office. In a doorway Danny Taylor stood as I knew he must, hands in pockets, collar of his ragged coat turned up, and his old peaked shooter’s cap with the earflaps turned down. His face was blue-gray with cold and sickness.

“Eth,” he said, “I’m sorry to bother you. Sorry. I’ve got to have some skull-buster. You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”

“I know. I mean I don’t know, but I believe you.” I gave him a dollar bill. “Will that do it?”

His lips were trembling the way a child’s lips do when it’s about to cry. “Thank you, Eth,” he said. “Yes—that will put me away all day and maybe all night.” He began to look better just thinking of it.

“Danny—you’ve got to stop this. Think I’ve forgotten? You were my brother, Danny. You still are. I’ll do anything in the world to help you.”

A little color came into his thin cheeks. He looked at the money in his hand and it was as though he had taken his first gulp of skull-buster. Then he looked at me with hard cold eyes.

“In the first place it’s nobody’s goddam business. And in the second place you haven’t got a bean, Eth. You’re as blind as I am, only it’s a different kind of blindness.”

“Listen to me, Danny.”

“What for? Why, I’m better off than you are. I’ve got my ace in the hole. Remember our country place?”

“Where the house burned down? Where we used to play in the cellar hole?”

“You remember it all right. It’s mine.”

“Danny, you could sell it and get a new start.”

“I won’t sell it. The county takes a little bit of it for taxes every year. The big meadow is still mine.”

“Why won’t you sell it?”

“Because it’s me. It’s Daniel Taylor. Long as I have it no Christy sons of bitches can tell me what to do and no bastards can lock me up for my own good. Do you get it?”

“Listen, Danny—”

“I won’t listen. If you think this dollar gives you the right to preach to me—here! Take it back.”

“Keep it.”

“I will. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never been a—drunk. I don’t tell you how to wrap bacon do I? Now if you’ll go your own way, I’ll knock on a window and get some skull-buster. And don’t forget—I’m better off than you are. I’m not a clerk.” He turned around and put his head in the corner of the closed doorway like a child who abolishes the world by looking away from it. And he stayed there until I gave up and walked on.

Wee Willie, parked in front of the hotel, stirred out of his nap and rolled down the window of his Chevrolet. “Morning, Ethan,” he said. “You up early or out late?”

“Both.”

“Must have found yourself a fancy piece.”

“Sure did, Willie, an houri.”

“Now, Eth, don’t tell me you’d take up with no streetwalker.”

“I swear it.”

“Can’t believe nothing no more. I bet you was fishing. How’s Missus?”

“Asleep.”

“That’s where I’ll be, come shift.”

I went on without reminding him that’s where he’d been.

I walked quietly up my back steps and switched on the kitchen light. My note was on the table a little left of center. I’d swear I left it right in the middle.

I put the coffee on and sat waiting for it to perk, and it had just begun to bounce when Mary came down. My darling looks like a little girl when she awakens. You couldn’t think she is the mother of two big brats. And her skin has a lovely smell, like new-cut grass, the most cozy and comforting odor I know.

“What are you doing up so early?”

“Well may you ask. Please to know I have been up most of the night. Regard my galoshes there by the door. Feel them for wetness.”

“Where did you go?”

“Down by the sea there is a little cave, my rumpled duck. I crawled inside and I studied the night.”

“Now wait.”

“And I saw a star come out of the sea, and since it had no owner I took it for our star. I tamed it and turned it back to fatten.”

“You’re being silly. I think you just got up and that woke me.”

“If you don’t believe me, ask Wee Willie. I spoke to him. Ask Danny Taylor. I gave him a dollar.”

“You shouldn’t. He’ll just get drunk.”

“I know. That was his wish. Where can our star sleep, sweet fern?”

“Doesn’t coffee smell good? I’m glad you’re silly again. It’s awful when you’re gloomy. I’m sorry about that fortune thing. I don’t want you to think I’m not happy.”

“Don’t give it a worry, it’s in the cards.”

“What?”

“No joke. I’m going to make our fortune.”

“I never know what you’re thinking.”

“That’s the greatest difficulty with telling the truth. Can I beat the children a little to celebrate the day before Resurrection? I promise to break no bones.”

“I haven’t washed my face,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine who was rattling around in the kitchen.”

When she had gone up to the bathroom, I put my note to her in my pocket. And I still didn’t know. Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary—do you hear? Who are you in there?