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By Root 2230 0

were. His mother smoothed her lap robe. He told her how his job was. His mother plucked at a bit of lint and flicked it onto the floor. He told her about a postcard that had come for her at the house. The church was holding an Easter bazaar and they wanted her to check off which task she would volunteer for. This struck the son as comical, in view of his mother's disabilities. "They offered you your choice," he said, chuckling. "You could clerk at the needlework booth or you could tend the babies." His mother's hands grew still. She raised her head. Her face lit up and flowered. "Oh!" she cried softly. "I' tend the babies!" Maggie knew just how she felt.

Leroy was a long, thin infant, and Fiona worried she was outgrowing the bureau drawer she slept in. "When are you going to get started on that cradle?" she asked Jesse, and Jesse said, "Any day now." Maggie said, "Maybe we should just buy a crib. A cradle's for a newborn; she wouldn't fit it for long." But Fiona said, "No, I set my heart on a cradle." She told Jesse. "You promised." "I don't remember promising." "Well, you did," she said.

"All right! I'll get to it! Didn't I tell you I would?" "You don't have to shout at me," she said.

"I'm not shouting." "Yes, you are." "Am not." "Are too." "Children! Children!" Maggie said, pretending she was joking.

But only pretending.

Once, Fiona spent the night at her sister's, snatching up the baby and stomping out after a fight. Or not a fight exactly but a little misunderstanding: The band was playing at a club in downtown Baltimore and Fiona planned to come along, as usual, till Jesse worried aloud that Leroy had a cold and shouldn't be left. Fiona said Maggie would tend her just fine and Jesse said a baby with a cold needed her mother and then Fiona said it was amazing how he was so considerate of that baby but so inconsiderate of his wife and then Jesse said . . .

Well.

Fiona left and did not come back until morning; Maggie feared she was gone for good, endangering that poor sick baby, who needed much more nursing than Fiona could provide. She must have been planning to desert them all along, in fact. Why, just look at her soapbox! Wasn't it odd that for almost a year now she had borne off to the bathroom twice daily a tortoiseshell soapbox, a tube of Aim toothpaste (not the Morans' brand), and a toothbrush in a plastic cylinder? And that her toilet supplies were continually stored in a clear vinyl travel case on the bureau? She might as well be a guest. She had never meant to settle in permanently.

"Go after her," Maggie told Jesse, but Jesse asked, "Why should I? She's the one who walked out." He was at work when Fiona returned the next day, wan and puffy-eyed. Strands of her uncombed hair mingled with the fake-fur trim of her windbreaker hood, and Leroy was wrapped clumsily in a garish daisy-square afghan that must have belonged to the sister.

What Maggie's mother said was true: The generations were sliding downhill in this family. They were descending in every respect, not just in their professions and their educations but in the way they reared their children and the way they ran their households. ("How have you let things get so common?" Maggie heard again in her memory.) Mrs. Daley stood over the sleeping Leroy and pleated her lips in disapproval. "They would put an infant in a bureau drawer? They would let her stay in here with you and Ira? What can they be thinking of? It must be that Fiona person. Really, Maggie, that Fiona is so ... Why, she isn't even a Baltimore girl! Anyone who would pronounce Wicomico as Weeko-Meeko! And what is that racket I'm hearing?" Maggie tilted her head to listen. "It's Canned Heat," she decided.

"Candide? I'm not asking the name of it; I mean why is it playing? When you children were small I played Beethoven and Brahms, I played all of Wagner's operas!" Yes, and Maggie could still recall her itch of boredom as Wagner's grandiose weight crashed through the house. And her frustration when, beginning some important story with "Me and Emma went to-" she had been cut short by her mother.