My dawdled steps toward home led through a minefield of the truth. The future was sowed with fertile dragon’s teeth. It was not unnatural to run for a safe anchorage in the past. But on that course, set square across it was Aunt Deborah, a great wing shot on a covey of lies, her eyes gleaming question marks.

I had looked in the window of the jewelry store at expanding watch bands and glasses frames as long as was decent. The humid, windy evening was breeding a thunderstorm.

There were many like Great-Aunt Deborah early in the last century, islands of curiosity and knowledge. Maybe it was being cut off from a world of peers that drove the few into books or perhaps it was the endless waiting, sometimes three years, sometimes forever, for the ships to come home, that pushed them into the kind of books that filled our attic. She was the greatest of great-aunts, a sibyl and a pythoness in one, said magic nonsense words to me, which kept their magic but not their nonsense when I tracked them down.

“Me beswac fah wyrm thurh faegir word,” she said and the tone was doom. And, “Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth abit aerest hire ladteow.” Wonder-words they must be, since I still remember them.

The Town Manager of New Baytown went crab-scuttling by me, head down, and only gave me good evening in return for mine first offered.

I could feel my house, the old Hawley house, from half a block away. Last night it huddled in a web of gloom but this thunder-bordered eve it radiated excitement. A house, like an opal, takes on the colors of the day. Antic Mary heard my footsteps on the walk and she flickered out the screen door like a flame.

“You’ll never guess!” she said, and her hands were out, palms in, as though she carried a package.

It was in my mind so I replied “Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth abit aerest hire ladteow.”

“Well, that’s a pretty good guess but it’s not right.”

“Some secret admirer has given us a dinosaur.”

“Wrong, but it’s just as wonderful. And I won’t tell till you wash up, because you’ll have to be clean to hear it.”

“What I hear is the love music of a blue-bottom baboon.” And I did—it blatted from the living room, where Allen importuned his soul in a phlegm of revolt. “Just when I was ready, to ask you to go steady, they said I didn’t know my mind. Your glance gives me ants whenever we romance, and they say I couldn’t know my mind.”

“I think I’ll burn him up, heaven wife.”

“No, you won’t. Not when you hear.”

“Can’t you tell me dirty?”

“No.”

I went through the living room. My son responded to my greeting with the sharp expression of a piece of chewed gum.

“I hope you got your lonely lovin’ heart swept up.”

“Huh?”

“Huh, sir! Last I heard, somebody had took and threw it on the floor.”

“Number one,” he said, “number one in the whole country. Sold a million copies in two weeks.”

“Great! I’m glad the future is in your hands.” I joined the next chorus as I went up the stairs. “ ‘Your glance gives me ants whenever we romance, and they say I couldn’t know my mind.’ ”

Ellen was stalking me with a book in her hand, one finger between the pages. I know her method. She would ask me what she thought I might think an interesting question and then let slip whatever it was Mary wanted to tell me. It’s a kind of triumph for Ellen to tell first. I wouldn’t say she is a tattletale, but she is. I waved crossed fingers at her.

“King’s X.”

“But, Daddy—”

“I said King’s X, Miss Hothouse Rhubarb, and I meant King’s X.” I slammed the door and shouted, “A man’s bathroom is his castle.” And I heard her laugh. I don’t trust children when they laugh at my jokes. I scrubbed my face raw and brushed my teeth until my gums bled. I shaved, put on a clean shirt and the bow tie my daughter hated, as a declaration of revolt.

My Mary was flittered with impatience when I faced her.

“You won’t believe it.”

“Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth. Speak.”

“Margie is the nicest friend I ever had.”

“I quote—‘The man who invented the cuckoo clock is dead. This is old news but good!’ ”

“You’ll never guess—she’s going to keep the children so we can have our trip.”

“Is this a trick?”

“I didn’t ask. She offered.”

“They’ll eat her alive.”

“They’re crazy about her. She’s going to take them to New York on the train Sunday, stay all night in a friend’s apartment, and Monday see the new fifty-star flag-raising in Rockefeller Center and the parade and—everything.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Isn’t that the nicest thing?”

“The very nicest. And we will flee to the Montauk moors, Miss Mousie?”

“I’ve already called and reserved a room.”

“It’s delirium. I shall burst. I feel myself swelling up.”

I had thought to tell her about the store, but too much news is constipating. Better to wait and tell her on the moor.

Ellen came slithering into the kitchen. “Daddy, that pink thing’s gone from the cabinet.”

“I have it. I have it here in my pocket. Here, you may put it back.”

“You told us never to take it away.”

“I still tell you that, on pain of death.”

She snatched it almost greedily and carried it in both hands to the living room.

Mary’s eyes were on me strangely, somberly. “Why did you take it, Ethan?”

“For luck, my love. And it worked.”