I’d taken only two of the back steps when the screen door whapped open and Allen boiled out yelling, “Where’s the Peeks? Didn’t you bring me the Peeks?”

“No,” I said. And, wonder layered with wonders, he didn’t scream his pain and loss. He didn’t appeal to his mother to agree that I had promised.

He said, “Oh!” and went quietly away.

“Good evening,” I said to his retreating back and he stopped and said, “Good evening,” as though it were a foreign word he’d just learned.

Mary came into the kitchen. “You’ve had a haircut,” she said. She identifies any strangeness in me as a fever or a haircut.

“No, pin curl, I have not.”

“Well, I’ve been going like spit to get the house ready.”

“Ready?”

“I told you, Margie’s coming for dinner.”

“I know, but why all the festive hurly-burly?”

“We haven’t had a dinner guest in ages.”

“That’s true. That’s really true.”

“Are you going to put on your dark suit?”

“No, Old Dobbin, my decent gray.”

“Why not the dark?”

“Don’t want to spoil the press for church tomorrow.”

“I can press it tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll wear Old Dobbin, as sweet a suit as you’ll find in the county.”

“Children,” she called, “don’t you touch anything! I’ve put out the nut dishes. You don’t want to wear the dark?”

“No.”

“Margie will be dressed to the nines.”

“Margie likes Old Dobbin.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“She did not.”

“Wrote a letter to the paper about it.”

“Be serious. You are going to be nice to her?”

“I’m going to make love to her.”

“I’d think you’d like to wear the dark—with her coming.”

“Look, flower girl, when I came in, I didn’t give a damn what I wore or nothing. In two short moments you have made it impossible for me to wear anything but Old Dobbin.”

“Just to be mean?”

“Sure.”

“Oh!” she said in the same tone Allen had used.

“What’s for dinner? I want to wear a tie to match the meat.”

“Roast chicken. Can’t you smell it?”

“Guess I can. Mary—I—” But I didn’t go on. Why do it? You can’t buck a national instinct. She’d been to the Chicken Bargain Day at the Safe Rite Store. Cheaper than Marullo’s. Of course I got them wholesale and I have explained to Mary the come-on bargains at the chain stores. The bargain draws you in and you pick up a dozen other things that aren’t bargains just because they’re under your hand. Everyone knows it and everyone does it.

My lecture to Mary Manyflowers died afoaling. The New Ethan Allen Hawley goes along with the national follies and uses them when he can.

Mary said, “I hope you don’t think I was disloyal.”

“My darling, what can be virtuous or sinful about a chicken?”

“It was awful cheap.”

“I think you did the wise—the wifely thing.”

“You’re making fun.”

Allen was in my bedroom waiting for me. “Can I look at your Knight Templar sword?”

“Sure. It’s in the corner of the closet.”

He knew perfectly well where it was. While I skinned off my clothes, he got it out of the leather case and unsheathed it and held the shiny plated blade up in the light and looked at his noble posture in the mirror.

“How’s the essay going?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you mean, ‘I beg your pardon, sir’?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I said, how’s the essay?”

“Oh! Fine.”

“You going to do it?”

“Sure.”

“Sure?”

“Sure, sir.”

“You can look at the hat, too. In that big leather case on the shelf. Feather’s kind of yellowy.”

I got in the big old wide-bottomed tub with the lion’s feet. They made them big enough to luxuriate in in those days. I scrubbed Marullo and the whole day off my skin with a brush and I shaved in the tub without looking, feeling for the whiskers with my fingertips. Everyone would agree that’s pretty Roman and decadent. While I combed my hair, I looked in the mirror. I hadn’t seen my face in a long time. It’s quite possible to shave every day and never really to see your face, particularly if you don’t care much for it. Beauty is only skin deep, and also beauty must come from inside. It better be the second if I was to get anywhere. It isn’t that I have an ugly face. To me, it just isn’t interesting. I made a few expressions and gave it up. They weren’t noble or menacing or proud or funny. It was just the same damn face making faces.

When I came back to the bedroom, Allen had the plumed Knight Templar hat on, and if it makes me look that silly I must resign. The leather hatbox was open on the floor. It has a supportmade of velvet-covered cardboard like an upside-down porridge bowl.

“I wonder if they can bleach that ostrich plume or do I have to get a new one?”

“If you get a new one, can I have this?”

“Why not? Where’s Ellen? I haven’t heard her young screechy voice.”

“She’s writing on her I Love America essay.”

“And you?”

“I’m thinking about it. Will you bring some Peeks home?”

“I’ll probably forget it. Why don’t you drop in at the store and pick it up someday?”

“Okay. Mind if I ask something—sir?”

“I’d be flattered.”

“Did we use to own all High Street for two blocks?”

“We did.”

“And did we have whaling ships?”

“Yep.”

“Well, why don’t we now?”

“We lost them.”

“How come?”

“Just up and lost them.”

“That’s a joke.”

“It’s a pretty darned serious joke, if you dissect it.”

“We’re dissecting a frog at school.”

“Good for you. Not so good for the frog. Which of these beauty-ties shall I wear?”

“The blue one,” he said without interest. “Say, when you get dressed can you—have you got time to come up in the attic?”

“I’ll make time if it’s important.”

“Will you come?”

“I will.”

“All right. I’ll go up now and turn on the light.”

“Be with you in a couple of tie-tying moments.”

His footsteps sounded hollowly on the uncarpeted attic stairs.

If I think about it while I tie a bow, the tie has a rotating tendency, but if I let my fingers take their own way, they do it perfectly. I commissioned my fingers and thought about the attic of the old Hawley house, my house, my attic. It is not a dark and spidery prison for the broken and the abandoned. It has windows with small panes so old that the light comes through lavender and the outside is wavery—like a world seen through water. The books stored there are not waiting to be thrown out or given to the Seamen’s Institute. They sit comfortably on their shelves waiting to be rediscovered. And the chairs, some unfashionable for a time, some rump-sprung, are large and soft. It is not a dusty place either. Housecleaning is attic-cleaning also, and since it is mostly closed away, dust does not enter. I remember as a child scrambling among the brilliants of books or, battered with agonies, or in the spectral half-life that requires loneliness, retiring to the attic, to lie curled in a great body-molded chair in the violet-lavender light from the window. There I could study the big adze-squared beams that support the roof—see how they are mortised one into another and pinned in place with oaken dowels. When it rains from rustling drip to roar on the roof, it is a fine secure place. Then the books, tinted with light, the picture books of children grown, seeded, and gone; Chatterboxes and the Rollo series; a thousand acts of God—Fire, Flood, Tidal Waves, Earthquakes—all fully illustrated; the Gustave Doré Hell, with Dante’s squared cantos like bricks between; and the heartbreaking stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the blood-chilling violence and cruelty of the Grimm Brothers, the Morte d’Arthur of majesty with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, a sickly, warped creature, a strange choice to illustrate great, manly Malory.

I remember thinking how wise a man was H. C. Andersen. The king told his secrets down a well, and his secrets were safe. A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders. The tale I may tell to Allen must be differentlybuilt from the same tale told to my Mary, and that in turn shaped to fit Marullo if Marullo is to join it. But perhaps the Well of Hosay Andersen is best. It only receives, and the echo it gives back is quiet and soon over.

I guess we’re all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn’t explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn’t explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic, because we don’t want them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.

A single unshaded light hung from a roof beam. The attic is floored with hand-hewn pine planks twenty inches wide and two inches thick, ample support for the neat stacks of trunks and boxes, of paper-wrapped lamps and vases and all manner of exiled finery. And the light glowed softly on the generations of books in open bookcases—all clean and dustless. My Mary is a stern and uncompromising dust harrier and she is neat as a top sergeant. The books are arranged by size and color.

Allen rested his forehead on the top of a bookcase and glared down at the books. His right hand was on the pommel of the Knight Templar sword, point downward like a cane.

“You make a symbolic picture, my son. Call it ‘Youth, War, and Learning.’ ”

“I want to ask you—you said there was books to look up stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Patriotic jazz, for the essay.”

“I see. Patriotic jazz. How’s this for beat? ‘Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!’ ”

“Great! That’s the berries.”

“Sure is. There were giants on the earth in those days.”

“I wisht I lived then. Pirate ships. Oh boy! Bang-bang! Strike your colors! Pots of gold and ladies in silk dresses and jewels. I sure wisht I lived then. Some of our folks done—did it. You said so yourself.”

“Kind of genteel piracy—they called them privateers. I guess it wasn’t as sweet as it sounds from a distance. Salt beef and biscuit. There was scurvy on the earth in those days too.”

“I wouldn’t mind that. I’d get the gold and bring it home. I guess they won’t let you do it any more.”

“No—it’s bigger and better organized now. They call it diplomacy.”

“There’s a boy in our school that won two television prizes— fifty dollars and two hundred dollars. How’s that?”

“He must be smart.”

“Him? Course not. It’s a trick, he says. You got to learn the trick and then you get a gimmick.”

“Gimmick?”

“Sure—like you’re a cripple or you support your old mother raising frogs. That gives you audience interest so they choose you. He’s got a magazine with every contest in the whole country in it. Can I get one of those magazines, Pop?”

“Well, piracy is out, but I guess the impulse lingers.”

“How do you mean?”

“Something for nothing. Wealth without effort.”

“Can I get that magazine?”

“I thought such things were in disrepute since the payola scandals.”

“Hell, no. I mean no, sir. They just changed it around a little. I’d sure like to cut in on some of that loot.”

“It is loot, isn’t it?”

“It’s all dough, no matter how you get it.”

“I don’t believe that. It doesn’t hurt the money to get it that way but it hurts the one who gets it.”

“I don’t see how. It’s not against the law. Why, some of the biggest people in this country—”

“Charles, my son, my son.”

“How do you mean, Charles?”

“Do you have to be rich, Allen? Do you have to?”

“Do you think I like to live without no motorbike? Must be twenty kids with motorbikes. And how you think it is if your family hasn’t even got a car, leave alone no television?”

“I’m deeply shocked.”

“You don’t know how it is, Dad. One day in class I did a theme how my great-granddad was a whaling captain.”

“He was.”

“Whole class bust out laughing. Know what they call me? Whaley. How’d you like that?”

“Pretty bad.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if you were a lawyer or in a bank or like that. Know what I’m going to do with the first chunk of loot I win?”

“No, what?”

“I’m going to buy you an automobile so you won’t feel so lousy when other people all got one.”

I said, “Thank you, Allen.” My throat was dry.

“Oh, that’s all right. I can’t get a license yet anyway.”

“You’ll find all the great speeches of our nation in that case, Allen. I hope you’ll read some of them.”

“I will. I need to.”

“You surely do. Good hunting.” I went quietly down the stairs and moistened my lips as I went. And Allen was right. I felt lousy.

When I sat down in my big chair under the reading light, Mary brought the paper to me.

“What a comfort you are, wiggles.”

“That suit looks real nice.”

“You’re a good loser and a good cook.”

“The tie matches your eyes.”

“You’re up to something. I can tell. I’ll trade you a secret for a secret.”

“But I don’t have one,” she said.

“Make one up!”

“I can’t. Come on, Ethan, tell me.”

“Any eary children listening in?”

“No.”

“Well, Margie Young-Hunt came in today. Out of coffee, so she said. I think she’s carrying a torch for me.”

“Come on, tell.”

“Well, we were talking about the fortune and I said it would be interesting to do it again and see if it was the same.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did so. And she said it would be interesting.”

“But you don’t like things like that.”

“I do when they’re good.”

“Think she’ll do it tonight?”

“If you care to offer me a penny for my thoughts, I think that’s why she’s coming.”

“Oh, no! I asked her.”

“After she set you up for it.”

“You don’t like her.”

“On the contrary—I’m beginning to like her very much, and to respect her.”

“I wish I could tell when you’re joking.”

Ellen came in then quietly so that you couldn’t tell whether she had been listening but I suspect she had. Ellen is a girl-girl-girl and thirteen to boot, sweet and sad, gay and delicate, sickly when she needs it. She is in that stage like dough beginning to set. She may be pretty, or not. She is a leaner, leans on me, breathes on me too, but her breath is sweet like a cow’s breath. She’s a toucher, too.

Ellen leaned on the arm of my chair and her thin little shoulder touched mine. She ran one pink finger down my coat sleeve and onto the hairs on my wrist and it tickled. The blond hairs on her arm shone like gold dust under the lamp. A devious one, she is, but then I guess all girl-girl-girls are.

“Nail polish,” I said.

“Mama lets me if it’s only pink. Your nails are rough.”

“Aren’t they?”

“But they’re clean.”

“I scrubbed them.”

“I hate dirty nails like Allen’s.”

“Maybe you just hate Allen lock, stock, and bobtail.”

“I do.”

“Good for you. Why don’t you kill him?”

“You’re silly.” She crawled her fingers behind my ear. She’s probably making some boy kids very nervous already.

“I hear you are working on your essay.”

“Stinker told you.”

“Is it good?”

“Oh, yes! Very good. I’ll let you read it when it’s done.”

“Honored. I see you’re dressed for the occasion.”

“This old thing? I’m saving my new dress for tomorrow.”

“Good idea. There’ll be boys.”

“I hate boys. I do hate boys.”

“I know you do. Hostility is your motto. I don’t like ’em much myself. Now lean off me a minute. I want to read the paper.”

She flounced like a 1920s movie star and instantly took her revenge. “When are you going to be rich?”

Yes, she’ll give some man a bad time. My instinct was to grab her and paddle her but that’s exactly what she wanted. I do believe she had eye shadow on. There was as little pity in her eyes as you’ll find in a panther’s eyes.

“Next Friday,” I said.

“Well, I wish you’d hurry up. I’m sick of being poor.” And she slipped quickly out. A listener at doors too. I do love her, and that’s odd because she is everything I detest in anyone else—and I adore her.

No newspaper for me. I hadn’t even unfolded it when Margie Young-Hunt arrived. She was done up—hairdresser done up. I guess Mary would know how it’s done, but I don’t.

In the morning the out-of-coffee Margie was set for me like a bear trap. The same evening she drew a bead on Mary. If her behind bounced, I couldn’t see it. If anything was under her neat suit, it was hiding. She was a perfect guest—for another woman—helpful, charming, complimentary, thoughtful, modest. She treated me as though I had taken on forty years since the morning. What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don’t understand why.

While Margie and Mary went through their pleasant litany, “What have you done with your hair?” . . . “I like it” . . . “That’s your color. You should always wear it”—the harmless recognition signals of women—I thought of the most feminine story I ever heard. Two women meet. One cries, “What have you done with your hair? It looks like a wig.” “It is a wig.” “Well, you’d never know it.”

Maybe these are deeper responses than we know or have any right to know.

Dinner was a series of exclamations about the excellence of the roast chicken and denials that it was edible. Ellen studied our guest with a recording eye, every detail of hairdress and make-up. And I knew then how young they start the minute examination on which they base what is called their intuition. Ellen avoided my eyes. She knew she had shot to kill and she expected revenge. Very well, my savage daughter. I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

And it was a good dinner, over-rich and too much of it, as company dinners must be, and a mountain of dishes not ordinarily used. And coffee afterward, which we do not ordinarily have.

“Doesn’t it keep you awake?”

“Nothing keeps me awake.”

“Not even me?”

“Ethan!”

And then the silent, deadly war of the dishes. “Let me help.”

“Not at all. You’re the guest.”

“Well, let me carry them.”

Mary’s eyes sought out the children and her spirit moved on them with fixed bayonet. They knew what was coming, but they were helpless.

Mary said, “The children always do it. They love to. And they do it so well. I’m proud of them.”

“Well, isn’t that nice? You don’t see it much any more.”

“I know. We feel very fortunate that they want to help.”

I could read their ferrety little minds, looking for an escape, thinking of making a fuss, getting sick, dropping the beautiful old dishes. Mary must have read their evil little minds also. She said, “The remarkable thing is that they never break anything, don’t even chip a glass.”

“Well, you are blessed!” Margie said. “How did you teach them?”

“I didn’t. It’s just natural with them. You know, some people are just naturally clumsy; well, Allen and Ellen are just naturally clever with their hands.”

I glanced at the kids to see how they were handling it. They knew they were being taken. I think they wondered whether Margie Young-Hunt knew it. They were still looking for an escape. I dropped the beam full on them.

“Of course they like to hear compliments,” I said, “but we’re holding them up. They’ll miss the movie if we don’t let them get to it.”

Margie had the grace not to laugh and Mary gave me a quick and startled look of admiration. They hadn’t even asked to go to the movie.

Even if teen-age children aren’t making a sound, it’s quieter when they’re gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children.

The three of us circled warily around the subject each one knew was coming. I went to the glass-fronted cabinet and took out three long-stemmed, lily-shaped glasses, cotton twist, brought home from England, heaven knows how long ago. And I poured from a basket-covered gallon jug, dark and discolored with age.

“Jamaica rum,” I said. “Hawleys were seamen.”

“Must be very old,” said Margie Young-Hunt.

“Older than you or me or my father.”

“It’ll take the top of your head off,” Mary said. “Well, this must be a party. Ethan only gets it out for weddings and funerals. Do you think it’s all right, dear? Just before Easter, I mean?”

“The Sacrament isn’t Coca-Cola, my darling.”

“Mary, I’ve never seen your husband so gay.”

“It’s the fortune you read,” said Mary. “It’s changed him overnight.”

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately. A flare of searing red pain formed in my bowels and moved upward until it speared and tore at the place just under my ribs. A great wind roared in my ears and drove me like a helpless ship, dismasted before it could shorten sail. I tasted bitter salt and I saw a pulsing, heaving room. Every warning signal screamed danger, screamed havoc, screamed shock. It caught me as I passed behind my ladies’ chairs and doubled me over in quaking agony, and just as suddenly it was gone. I straightened up and moved on and they didn’t even know it had happened. I understand how people once believed the devil could take possession. I’m not sure I don’t believe it. Possession! The seething birth of something foreign with every nerve resisting and losing the fight and settling back beaten to make peace with the invader. Violation—that’s the word, if you can think of the sound of a word edged with blue flame like a blowtorch.

My dear’s voice came through. “It doesn’t really harm to hear nice things,” she said.

I tried my voice and it was strong and good. “A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody,” I said, and I put the jug away in its cabinet, and went back to my chair and drank half the glass of ancient, fragrant rum and sat down and crossed my knees and locked my fingers in my lap.

“I don’t understand him,” Mary said. “He’s always hated fortune-telling, made jokes about it. I just don’t understand.”

My nerve ends were rustling like dry, windblown winter grass and my laced fingers had whitened from pressure.

“I’ll try to explain it to Mrs. Young—to Margie,” I said. “Mary comes from a noble but poor Irish family.”

“We weren’t all that poor.”

“Can’t you hear it in her speech?”

“Well, now that you mention it—”

“Well, Mary’s sainted, or should be, grandmother was a good Christian, wasn’t she, Mary?”

It seemed to me a little hostility was growing in my dear. I went on. “But she had no trouble believing in fairy people, although in strict, unbending Christian theology the two don’t mix.”

“But that’s different.”

“Of course it is, darling. Nearly everything’s different. Can you disbelieve in something you don’t know about?”

“Look out for him,” Mary said. “He’ll catch you in a word trap.”

“I will not. I don’t know about fortunes or fortune-telling. How can I not believe in it? I believe it exists because it happens.”

“But you don’t believe it’s true.”

“What’s true is that people get it done, millions of them, and pay for it. That’s enough to know to be interested, isn’t it?”

“But you don’t—”

“Wait! It isn’t that I don’t believe but that I don’t know. They’re not the same thing. I don’t know which comes first— the fortune or the fortune-telling.”

“I think I know what he means.”

“You do?” Mary was not pleased.

“Suppose the fortune-teller was sensitive to things that are going to happen anyway. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s different. But how can cards know?”

I said, “The cards can’t even move without someone turning them.”

Margie did not look at me but I knew she sensed Mary’s growing unease and she wanted instructions.

“Couldn’t we work out a test?” I asked.

“Well, that’s a funny thing. These things seem to resent a test and go away, but there’s no harm trying. Can you think of a test?”

“You haven’t touched your rum.” They lifted their glasses together and sipped and put them down. I finished mine and got out the bottle.

“Ethan, do you think you should?”

“Yes, dearling.” I filled my glass. “Why can’t you turn the cards blindfolded?”

“They have to be read.”

“How would it be if Mary turned them or I did, and you read them?”

“There’s supposed to be a closeness between the reader and the cards, but I don’t know—we could try.”

Mary said, “I think if we do it at all, we ought to do it the right way.” She’s always that way. She doesn’t like change— little change, I mean. The big ones she can handle better than anyone, blows up at a cut finger but would be calm and efficient with a cut throat. I had a throb of unease because I had told Mary we discussed this, and here we were seeming to think of it for the first time.

“We talked about it this morning.”

“Yes, when I came in for coffee. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I brought the cards.”

It is Mary’s tendency to confuse intentness with anger and anger with violence and she is terrified of violence. Some drinking uncles put that fear on her, and it’s a shame. I could feel her fear rising.

“Let’s not fool with it,” I said. “Let’s play some cassino instead.”

Margie saw the tactic, knew it, had probably used it. “All right with me.”

“My fortune’s set. I’m going to be rich. Let it go at that.”

“You see, I told you he didn’t believe in it. He leads you all around the bush and then he won’t play. He makes me so mad sometimes.”

“I do? You never show it. You are always my darling wife.”

Isn’t it strange how sometimes you can feel currents and cross-currents—not always, but sometimes. Mary doesn’t use her mind for organized thought and maybe this makes her more receptive of impressions. A tension was growing in the room. It crossed my mind that she might not be best friends with Margie any more—might never feel easy with her.

“I’d really like to know about the cards,” I said. “I’m ignorant. I always heard that gypsies do it. Are you a gypsy? I don’t think I ever knew one.”

Mary said, “Her maiden name was Russian but she’s from Alaska.”

Then that accounted for the wide cheekbones.

Margie said, “I have a guilty secret I’ve never told you, Mary, how we came to be in Alaska.”

“The Russians owned it,” I said. “We bought it from them.”

“Yes, but did you know it was a prison, like Siberia, only for worse crimes?”

“What kind of crimes?”

“The worst. My great-grandmother was sentenced to Alaska for witchcraft.”

“What did she do?”

“She raised storms.”

I laughed. “I see you come by it naturally.”

“Raising storms?”

“Reading cards—same thing, maybe.”

Mary said, “You’re joking. That isn’t true.”

“It may be joking, Mary, but it’s true. That was the worst crime, worse than murder. I’ve still got her papers—only of course they’re in Russian.”

“Can you speak Russian?”

“Only a little now.”

I said, “Maybe witchcraft still is the worst crime.”

“See what I mean?” said Mary. “He jumps this side and that side. You never know what he’s thinking. Last night he—he got up before daylight this morning. Went for a walk.”

“I’m a scoundrel,” I said. “An unmitigated, unredeemable rascal.”

“Well, I would like to see Margie turn the cards—but her own way without you mixing in. If we keep talking, the children will be home and then we can’t.”

“Excuse me a moment,” I said. I climbed the stairs to our bedroom. The sword was on the bed and the hatbox open on the floor. I went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet. You can hear the water rushing all over the house. I wet a cloth in cold water and pressed it against my forehead and particularly against my eyes. They seemed to bulge from inside pressure. The cold water felt good. I sat on the toilet seat and put my face down against the damp washcloth and when it warmed up I wet it again. Going through the bedroom, I picked the plumed Knight Templar’s hat from its box and marched down the stairs wearing it.

“Oh, you fool,” said Mary. And she looked glad and relieved. The ache went out of the air.

“Can they bleach ostrich feathers?” I asked. “It’s turned yellow.”

“I think so. Ask Mr. Schultz.”

“I’ll take it down Monday.”

“I wish Margie would turn the cards,” said Mary. “I would dearly love that.”

I put the hat on the newel post of the banister, and it looked like a drunken admiral if there is such a thing.

“Get the card table, Eth. It takes lots of room.”

I brought it from the hall closet and snapped the legs open.

“Margie likes a straight chair.”

I set a dining chair. “Do we have to do anything?”

“Concentrate,” said Margie.

“On what?”

“As near as possible on nothing. The cards are in my purse over on the couch.”

I’d always thought of fortune-telling cards as greasy and thick and bent, but these were clean and shining, as though they were coated with plastic. They were longer and narrower than playing cards and many more than fifty-two. Margie sat straight at the table and fanned them—bright-colored pictures and intricate suits. The names were in French: l’empereur, l’ermite, le chariot, la justice, le mat, le diable—earth, sun, moon, and stars, and suits of swords, cups, batons, and money, I guess, if deniero means money, but the symbol was shaped like a heraldic rose, and each suit with its roi, reine, and chevalier. Then I saw strange cards—disturbing cards—a tower riven by lightning, a wheel of fortune, a man hanging by his feet from a gallows, called le pendu, and Death—la mort, a skeleton with a scythe.

“Kind of gloomy,” I said. “Do the pictures mean what they seem to?”

“It’s how they fall in relation. If they fall upside down they reverse their meaning.”

“Is there a variation in meaning?”

“Yes. That’s the interpretation.”

The moment she had the cards Margie became formal. Under the lights her hands showed what I had seen before, that she was older than she looked.

“Where did you learn it?” I asked.

“I used to watch my grandmother and later I took it up as a trick for parties—I suppose a way of getting attention.”

“Do you believe in it?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes remarkable things come out. I don’t know.”

“Could the cards be a concentration ritual—psychic exercise?”

“Sometimes I think that’s true. When I find I give a value to a card it didn’t have before, that’s when it is usually accurate.” Her hands were like living things as they shuffled and cut and shuffled and cut again and passed them to me to cut.

“Who am I doing?”

“Read Ethan,” Mary cried. “See if it matches yesterday’s.”

Margie looked at me. “Light hair,” she said, “blue eyes. Are you under forty?”

“Just.”

“The king of batons.” She found it in the deck. “This is you”—a picture of a crowned and robed king holding a huge red and blue scepter and Roi de Bâton printed under him. She laid it out face up and reshuffled the deck. Then she turned the cards rapidly, speaking in a singsong voice as she did. A card on top of my card—“This covers you.” Crosswise on top—“This crosses you.” One above—“This crowns you.” One below—“This is your foundation. This before, this behind you.” She had formed a cross of cards on the table. Then rapidly she turned up four in a line to the left of the cross, saying, “Yourself, your house, your hopes, your future.” The last card was the man hanged upside down, le pendu, but from where I sat across the table he was right side up.

“So much for my future.”

“It can mean salvation,” she said. Her forefinger traced the line of her lower lip.

Mary demanded, “Is the money there?”

“Yes—it’s there,” she said absently. And suddenly she gathered the cards, shuffled them over and over, and laid them out again, muttering her ritual under her breath. She didn’t seem to study individual cards but to see the whole group at once, and her eyes were misty and remote.

A good trick, I thought, a killer at ladies’ clubs—or anywhere else. So must the Pythoness have looked, cool and composed and confusing. If you can hold people tense, hardly breathing, expectant for a long time, they’ll believe anything—not acting, so much as technique, timing. This woman was wasting her talent on traveling salesmen. But what did she want of us or of me? Suddenly she gathered the cards, patted them square, and put them in the red box, which said: I. Muller & Cie, Fabrique de Cartes.

“Can’t do it,” she said. “Happens sometimes.”

Mary said breathlessly, “Did you see something you don’t want to tell?”

“Oh, I’ll tell all right! Once when I was a little girl I saw a snake change its skin, a Rocky Mountain rattler. I watched the whole thing. Well, looking at the cards, they disappeared and I saw that snake changing its skin, part dusty and ragged and part fresh and new. You figure it out.”

I said, “Sounds like a trance state. Ever have it happen before?”

“Three times before.”

“Make any sense the other times?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Always the snake?”

“Oh, no! Other things, but just as crazy.”

Mary said enthusiastically, “Maybe it’s a symbol of the change in fortune that’s coming to Ethan.”

“Is he a rattlesnake?”

“Oh! I see what you mean.”

“Makes me feel crawly,” Margie said. “Once I kind of liked snakes and then when I grew up I hated them. They give me the willies. I’d better be going.”

“Ethan can see you home.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“I’d be glad to.”

Margie smiled at Mary. “You keep him right here with you,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be without one.”

“Nonsense,” said Mary. “You could get a husband by crooking your finger.”

“That’s what I did before. It’s no good. If they come that easy, they’re not worth having. Keep him home. Someone might grab him.” She got into her coat as she talked—a fast scrammer. “Lovely dinner. I hope you’ll ask me back. Sorry about the fortune, Ethan.”

“Will we see you in church tomorrow?”

“No. I’m going up to Montauk tonight.”

“But it’s too cold and wet.”

“I love the mornings on the sea up there. Good night.” She was out before I could even hold the door for her, out as though something was after her.

Mary said, “I didn’t know she was going up there tonight.”

And I couldn’t tell her: Neither did she.

“Ethan—what do you make of that fortune tonight?”

“She didn’t tell one.”

“You forget, she said there would be money. But what do you make of it? I think she saw something she didn’t want to tell. Something that scared her.”

“Maybe she once saw the snake and it stayed in her mind.”

“You don’t think it had a—meaning?”

“Honey roll, you’re the fortune expert. How would I know?”

“Well, anyway. I’m glad you don’t hate her. I thought you did.”

“I’m tricky,” I said. “I conceal my thoughts.”

“Not from me you don’t. They’ll stay right through the second show.”

“Come again?”

“The children. They always do. I thought you were wonderful about the dishes.”

“I’m devious,” I said. “And, in due course, I have designs on your honor.”