"What?"

"I think I'm discovering that I want to live."

III

Sergeant Peterson had droned his last and had been succeeded on the stand by Trooper Curtis, brisk and dry, with his plaster casts and fingerprints. Both men, Edith Nolan understood, were competent, honest, not deliberately wasting time. Hunter himself was not really unduly slow at this business of hammering home what was already clear and established: Callista had been there. The fingerprint evidence at Shanesville was quite negative: no prints except Ann's on handbag or key case, none but hers and Jim's on the Pontiac or the Dohertys' front porch. All right and so what? It was half past three before Hunter and Curtis were solemnly finished with that apparent futility. It had never occurred to Edith that any part of this ordeal could be a bore. But it was.

Then in a brief cross examination Warner brought out the fact that a police search of the grove between the pond and Walton Road had produced nothing at all. It could not matter. Curtis and Peterson had both acted rather pleased with their casts and photographs of the Volkswagen's tire marks on the shoulder of Walton Road. They liked things complete, well wrapped. But it couldn't matter, for in her statement to District Attorney Lamson Callista had admitted taking the Volkswagen first into the Dohertys' driveway, following the footpath, seeing Ann's body in the pond. She had admitted leaving then, driving around to Walton Road, parking there out of sight of her mother's house.

And the prosecution would surely not trouble to deny or even question Callista's story of what happened then, in that half hour. She had stumbled off into the thick second-growth woods on the other side of Walton Road, a tangle of saplings, briers, poison ivy, wiry bushes, and young locust trees thorny in the dark, to get through a miscarriage in secret like a wounded animal and have done with it. To Edith, on the first occasion when with Warner's help Edith had broken through the barriers and won a visit with Callista in the detention cell, Callista had said tersely, in haste to change the subject: "The brambles were the worst of it." And that visit was not a time when she would accept any word of consolation. Something held back, Edith knew, some private tormenting reason why, even to her, Callista could not speak freely about that agony in the woods. Later, maybe. Everything now must be qualified with such words: "later"—"some time"—"after all this is over, Cal, and you are free."

Curtis was gone. Something smart and bright-eyed was down there swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

"Your full name and occupation, sir?"

"Sutherland R. Clipp. I own and manage Clipp's Garage on Duke Street, uptown—you know, repairs, gas, body work, matter of fact we do everything, you'd be surprised."

In startled disgust Edith thought: Everything? How lovely for you, Mr. Clipp! With the utmost geniality, Mr. Clipp went on to testify that on the evening of Sunday, August 16th, he had been driving home to Winchester by Walton Road, after delivering a 1956 Buick in the nicest condition you could imagine to a customer in Emmetville. He wanted to emphasize that the Buick was a dish, in spite of—well, low mileage. He had practically robbed himself, but that was his way, the customer came first, and it paid off—oh—yes, he'd been watching the time that evening because he had to pick up his wife after a church supper; got talking with that (completely satisfied) Emmetville client, and besides, the car he'd taken in exchange was kind of a sad heap that wouldn't safely do anything over forty, and you know how women are if you keep them waiting, not that she—yes, he had passed the junction of Summer Avenue and Walton Road between 9:10 and 9:15, no later. He had seen a maroon Volkswagen parked under the pines, not too well off the road either, careless parking, one reason why he'd noticed it, although he always did notice them cheap foreign cars, which weren't too bad if all you wanted was economical transportation, like, however—what?—no, there wasn't anybody in the Volks or near it, unless somebody was scrouched down back of the dashboard when his headlights got there, but you couldn't hardly do anything like that in them foreign cheapies—"Your witness, Mr. Warner."

Edith heard Hunter begin snarling: "What possible bearing—"

"None, sir. I just wanted to make sure Mr. Clipp hadn't left out anything. No further questions."

During the short courtroom roar, checked by the gavel, Edith thought she could read exasperated forgiveness in the face of Judge Terence Mann. But foreman Peter Anson, she saw, was not amused, nor Hoag, nor Francis Fielding. Business is serious: to make fun of a man when he's advertising is something like interrupting him in the men's room.

State Trooper Carlo San Giorgio, solemn, deceptively fresh-faced and young, followed Mr. Clipp. He had stopped a blue and white Pontiac, license JD1081, on Walton Road two miles beyond the city line, at 8:34 P.M., Sunday, August 16th. The driver was a young woman who gave her name as Mrs. James Doherty, which agreed with her driver's license. Her driving had been unsteady, with some wavering over the white line.

"Was she driving fast, exceeding the limit?"

"No, sir, rather slow. Just unsteady."

"Did she seem in good command of herself when you spoke to her?"

"Yes, but I did ask if she'd been drinking a little."

"Was her response satisfactory to you as a police officer?"

"Well—yes, sir, it was."

"Did you notice any smell of alcohol on her breath?"

"A trifle." San Giorgio fidgeted. "Just barely noticeable."

"But according to your observation, she wasn't what you'd call drunk, is that right?"

"No, sir, she certainly wasn't. Spoke coherently, understood what I said—real polite and—and nice."

"Did anything in her appearance suggest she might be ill?"

"She was slightly hoarse. I'd stopped her car where there was a pretty good light from a house across the road, and I thought her eyes looked very slightly inflamed. Enough to suggest she might be—oh, perhaps coming down with a cold. You understand, sir, these were very slight things, otherwise I couldn't have let her drive on."

Back of all that, Edith knew—back of the hedging, the slowly chosen words, back of Hunter's questions blunted by the hearsay rule—was the thing that San Giorgio knew and keenly remembered and could not say. Warner's dark eyes had narrowed to cold watchfulness, and Judge Mann's pencil was still. There wasn't any hearsay rule in Mr. Lamson's office. But here in the arena, Carlo San Giorgio couldn't say: "She said she'd had one little shot of brandy. And I said: 'Oh well, Miss, I guess we won't throw the book at you for that.'"

Last night at dinner, Cecil Warner had done some thinking out loud about Trooper San Giorgio, who would have in his own young mind no reasonable doubt. San Giorgio could not repeat Ann's words on the stand. And yet if he could, the Old Man said, it ought (if juries were logical) to make no essential difference. For there was no defense, he said, except a reasonable doubt as to criminal intent. "Reasonable doubt!" he said, and set down his glass because his fat hand was shaking. "You see it, Red? T.J. can say that criminal intent and premeditation are proved up to the hilt by the mere presence of the poison in Cal's apartment. He will. He'll rub their noses in it. Against that and a flock of other circumstantial facts, we've got just one fact, the fact of something that happened in Cal's mind. Is it a fact?"

"You and I both know it, don't we? She had no intent to kill."

But instead of answering directly, the Old Man had said: "Red, do you understand she's not certain of it herself?"

Edith had not quite understood it, until then.

"Did you give her a ticket, Trooper?"

"No, sir. From the address on her driving license I knew she had only about a mile to go. I told her she'd better head straight for home, and I told her I'd follow along behind till she got there, which I did."

The youth was reliving it, Edith saw, and perhaps painfully. A pretty girl, hot night and hazy moon—had he hoped to be invited into the house for a quick check on burglars and a little drink? Oh, probably not. Ann had carried an obvious flag of conventional virtue. San Giorgio would have recognized and respected it, and done no more than a bit of summer's-night dreaming.

"You drove behind her car, as far as the house on Summer Avenue?"

"I did, sir. I saw her turn in at the driveway, and since she made it all right, I drove on."

"Did you note the time?"

"Yes, sir: 8:43."

"Mr. Warner?"

"No questions."

Later last night, up at her studio, watching the fire in the grate through the prism of his wineglass, the Old Man said: "Who started the legend that the law court is a place devoted to search for truth? Answer, lawyers of course. But not counsel for the defense, Red. We know our function is to persuade. The prosecution may fool itself now and then, and kick the word 'truth' around; we can't afford to."

Edith had said flatly: "The system stinks."

He wasn't startled; he only grumbled: "I agree. The adversary system stinks. But working inside of it, my own position has logic enough to satisfy me. I get it out of a hypothesis, Red—not abstract truth, but working hypothesis. I say a human being once born has a right to live, if the word 'right' is going to mean anything—or let's say, a right not to be murdered, judicially or any other way. In other words, I'd defend Cal if I thought she was guilty as hell."

Crew-cut gray hair and dignity marched to the stand, the face under the gray brush unknown to Edith but carrying a nearly unmistakable professional stamp. This would be bad. Look towards me, Cal! I'll wear this old green suit tomorrow, too. "Arthur J. Devens, M.D." Look toward me! But telepathy is like other kinds of magic, she knew: fun to play with as a notion; if it worked, we'd run screaming. "A.B. Columbia, 1930, M.D. from College of Physicians and Surgeons." And maybe soon, another century or so, there'll be no such thing as privacy on earth except in the dark center of a few minds not quite overwhelmed. The desert shall blossom like the rose: distilled sea water, atomic-power pumps, sure, nothing to it, but no room for roses, and no hiding place—"active as Coroner's physician for Winchester County, New Essex, since 1952." But friend, if something happens inside the mind I don't know, to make you remember me, to turn your head toward me, I will smile. I'll say with my lips: "We're going to win."

"—preliminary examination made on the scene. The body was that of a young white woman in the middle twenties, of slight build, height five feet two. Rigor was complete, a light reddish post-mortem lividity noticeable, the face not markedly cyanotic. A moderate quantity of white cohesive foam adhered to nose and mouth. The hands, though stiffened in rigor, were not clenched as one often finds them in drowning cases. The conjunctivae were congested. Cutis anserina—gooseflesh—was pronounced on the thighs and upper arms. Gooseflesh," said Dr. Devens politely and patiently to the jury, "is frequently evident after death by drowning, if the water is far enough below body temperature, as it ordinarily is even in the tropics. To sum up that preliminary, superficial examination: it suggested, but did not prove, that death had occurred with less struggle than is usual in a drowning. It did prove that life was not extinct when the body entered the water. There was at least some breathing, possibly the shallow breathing of unconsciousness, but enough inhaling and exhaling and choking reflex to cause that foam."

"Doctor, a hypothetical question: if a person were stunned, I mean knocked entirely unconscious, before falling or being thrown into the water, and then perished by drowning, would you expect to find the body, after twelve to thirteen hours of submersion, more or less in the condition of Mrs. Doherty's at the time you made that first examination?"

Edith saw Callista start as if struck in the face. Her dark brows gathered in that quick frown of hers, and she was leaning to Cecil Warner, whispering. She looked, Edith thought, more disgusted than angry. Cecil's poker face remained in control. He only listened, shook his head, patted her hand.

"Oh, hypothetical—well.... I dare say the findings wouldn't be inconsistent. Of course, Mr. Hunter, I looked for any sign of head injury, a matter of routine, and found nothing of the kind."

"Isn't it possible, Doctor, to receive a head injury, perhaps from a padded thing like a sandbag, that won't leave any marks?"

"No superficial marks, maybe. I think you'd find post-mortem evidence, likely subdural hemorrhage."

"Even from a blow that merely stunned?"

With some acid and faraway amusement Dr. Devens remarked: "Even as Coroner's physician, I'm not too versed in the lore of sandbags. But I think that a blow heavy enough to stun, followed very soon by death from another cause, would leave some internal evidence."

"Did you look for such evidence?"

"I did."

"Is that standard procedure, by the way, when there's convincing evidence of drowning?"

"I can't say that I lean very much on standard procedure. So far as I'm concerned, any case that reaches the Coroner's office is unique. When there's any possibility of homicide, I try to think of everything, including the apparently far-fetched. Yes, I examined the head: cranial section—well, I don't suppose you want those details. Head, neck vertebrae, all perfectly normal, uninjured. In fact the one and only injury on the entire body surface was a trifling abrasion on the right anklebone, which could have been caused in any number of ways—a fall, or the anklebone scraping against something: impossible to say. I also examined the palms for earth marks, such as she might have got if she'd fallen forward and tried to break the fall with her hands. There weren't any, but I dare say several hours' immersion would have removed them if they were ever there. The skin of the palms was perfectly clear."

"I see. Go on, please."

"The body was placed in the mortuary wagon from Shanesville, and at my suggestion was taken to the Winchester morgue. I accompanied it there; it was at no time out of my sight. I began the post-mortem at about 1:30 P.M., assisted by Dr. Miles Dennison and with the authorization of Mr. District Attorney Lamson. I think I should say at this point that shortly before I began the post-mortem, I was notified by Winchester Chief of Police Morgan Collins that there was a possibility Mrs. Doherty had drunk poison, thought to be aconitine. I therefore had this in mind before beginning the examination, and I consulted by telephone with the toxicologist Dr. Walter Ginsberg, and prepared the organs, blood samples and so on, that he told me he would need for his study. The body weight was one hundred and ten pounds, slightly undernourished. There was an appendectomy scar, old; no other scars, no evidence of chronic illness or disorder, no marks of violence; the subject had never given birth. The nasal cavities and bronchi contained some stiff foam and a few dark brown and black specks identified by microscopic examination as fragments of dead leaves. No algae were found. Some water was in the lungs, but very little. The heart, not markedly distended, contained fluid blood, but that is not diagnostic: clotted blood may appear in a drowning case. The viscera were quite noticeably congested."

"That is diagnostic?—congestion of the viscera?"

"No, sir—may appear in many other conditions."

"Including some kinds of poisoning?"

"Yes, Mr. Hunter."

"For example poisoning by aconitine?"

"Yes."

"Did you employ the Gettler test?"

"Yes—inconclusive. The blood in the left side of the heart had a slightly lower concentration of sodium chloride than the blood on the right. If that difference had been pronounced, you could call it fair evidence of inhalation of fresh water, but it was too slight. I don't attach any significance to it."

"Could the lack of a positive finding be significant?"

"I don't think so. It's a good test, but plenty of things may confuse it. For instance, a drowning may occur from pharyngeal shock—a spasmodic throat contraction that causes asphyxia before much water is inhaled. Logically still a drowning death, but no water to speak of, so there goes your Gettler test."

"You looked of course for evidence of aconitine poisoning?"

"Only in a limited sense, sir. Aconitine doesn't leave gross traces for post-mortem, it's a job for the toxicologist, a chemical job. Since I knew Dr. Ginsberg would be working on it, I simply bore it in mind, prepared what he needed, and kept my eyes open. I can say under oath that I found nothing inconsistent with aconite poisoning having occurred shortly before the drowning. But the actual immediate cause of death was, in my opinion, asphyxia due to immersion, in other words drowning."

"Doctor, will you give the jury a description of the effects of aconitine in a lethal or near-lethal dose?"

"Frankly, sir, I'll be drawing on textbook knowledge, because this is the only case I ever encountered. Homicide by aconite is decidedly rare. So is suicide." Callista looked up, not to the doctor who dutifully faced the jury and would not look at her, but searching the rows of spectators. "Aconitine will cause numbness, tingling in the mouth, also in the fingers, possibly cramps in arms and legs. There's marked salivation, nausea, burning sensation in stomach and throat." Edith moved in her seat, and smiled, and tried to call in silence: I'm here. But Callista's eyes, searching, immense, drowned, passed over her. "A slow, irregular, weak pulse is characteristic, with rapid shallow breathing, muscular weakness, a general collapse. Nausea and vomiting are usual; sometimes there are convulsions. The poison depresses the medullary centers of the brain, but the cerebrum is hardly affected, which means the mind stays pretty clear until the coma that may supervene at the end." Callista's eyes found what they were seeking. It would not be her mother, Edith knew: Victoria Chalmers sat over at Edith's left. "Those symptoms I've described begin soon after aconite is taken. I believe death, when it occurs, usually comes in about four hours—but it can happen in a matter of minutes."

Edith wished not to turn her head; she felt instead an unwillingness, distaste, reluctance to learn what would be written in the face of Jim Doherty. But she could not help it. Knowing where he was seated, she was forced to turn until a sidelong look gave her the image of him, completing at that instant the sign of the cross, his eyes lowered, his lips moving. But the man beside him was watchful, interested, attentive, probably missing none of the testimony.

"What is the minimum lethal dose, Dr. Devens?"

"About a milligram. Some individuals might take up to five or six, and recover. More than six milligrams would likely finish anyone, unless there was immediate medical attention—you understand, those figures refer to a pure concentration of the drug."

Callista's lips were moving also. As Edith looked to her again, she saw them shape unmistakable words: "Go away!" There would be no sound, Edith thought, even for Cecil Warner, who had taken hold of her hand and was showing the beginning of alarm. "Go away!"

"Is the drug readily soluble in alcohol?"

"Yes, Mr. Hunter."

Callista, be quiet! He can't hear you. He can't hear anyone.

"Assuming a person had taken four to five milligrams of the poison, Dr. Devens, he could still be saved by immediate medical attention?"

The girl said something to Cecil Warner, quick and possibly sharp; Edith caught the faint note of her voice under the dry dominating noise of Dr. Devens, the words indistinguishable, blotted out by his: "Certainly, sir, the patient could probably be saved. Stomach pump. Tannic acid I imagine, to render the poison inert. You'd give heart stimulants, say digitalis. A healthy patient would have a pretty good chance."

"Thank you, Dr. Devens. Cross examination, Mr. Warner?"

"No cross examination." But Warner was up, for once urgently quick-spoken. "Your Honor, in view of my client's exhaustion, may we have adjournment at this time?"

In the abrupt hush that followed Warner's question, Callista's voice, not loud, not really a cry, was surely heard by everyone, even by Jim Doherty. "Go away, my love!"

The Judge winced, speaking hastily: "The Court stands adjourned until ten A.M. tomorrow."

Edith also observed the press tables, and the jolly excited scramble for the telephones.

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.