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By Root 420 0

shop that sold such precious little things. These cups." A set of doll-house teacups, anchored to a diminutive tray, trembled in the palm of her hand. "Daddy gave them to me; I had a lovely childhood." The only daughter of a prosperous wheat grower named Fox, the adored sister of three older brothers, she had not been spoiled but spared, led to suppose that life was a sequence of agreeable events - Kansas autumns, California summers, a round of teacup gifts. When she was eighteen, inflamed by a biography of Florence Nightingale, she enrolled as a student nurse at St. Rose's Hospital in Great Bend, Kansas. She was not meant to be a nurse, and after two years she confessed it: a hospital's realities - scenes, odors - sickened her. Yet to this day she regretted not having completed the course and received her diploma - "just to prove, "as she had told a friend, "that I once succeeded at something. "Instead, she had met and married Herb, a college classmate of her oldest brother, Glenn; actually, since the two families lived within twenty miles of each other, she had long known him by sight, but the Clutters, plain farm people, were not on visiting terms with the well-to-do and cultivated Foxes. However, Herb was handsome, he was pious, he was strong-willed, he wanted her - and she was in love.

"Mr. Clutter travels a great deal," she said to Jolene. "Oh, he's always headed somewhere. Washington and Chicago and Oklahoma and Kansas City - sometimes it seems like he's never home. But wherever he goes, he remembers how I dote on tiny things." She unfolded a little paper fan. "He brought me this from San Francisco. It only cost a penny. But isn't it pretty?" The second year of the marriage, Eveanna was born, and three years later, Beverly; after each confinement the young mother had experienced an inexplicable despondency - seizures of grief that sent her wandering from room to room in a hands wringing daze. Between the births of Beverly and Nancy, three more years elapsed, and these were the years of the Sunday picnics and of summer excursions to Colorado, the years when she really ran her own home and was the happy center of it. But with Nancy and then with Kenyon, the pattern of postnatal depression repeated itself, and following the birth of her son, the mood of misery that descended never altogether lifted; it lingered like a cloud that might rain or might not. She knew "good days," and occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days, those days when she was otherwise her "old self," the affectionate and charming Bonnie her friends cherished, she could not summon the social vitality her husband's pyramiding activities required. He was a "joiner," a "born leader"; she was not and stopped attempting to be. And so, along paths bordered by tender regard, by total fidelity, they began to go their semi-separate ways - his a public route, a march of satisfying conquests, and hers a private one that eventually wound through hospital corridors. But she was not without hope. Trust in God sustained her, and from time to time secular sources supplemented her faith in His forthcoming mercy; she read of a miracle medicine, heard of a new therapy, or, as most recently, decided to believe that a "pinched nerve" was to blame.

"Little things really belong to you," she said, folding the fan. "They don't have to be left behind. You can carry them in shoebox."

"Carry them where to?"

"Why, wherever you go. You might be gone for a long time." Some years earlier Mrs. Clutter had traveled to Wichita for two weeks of treatment and remained two months. On the advice of a doctor, who had thought the experience would aid her to regain "a sense of adequacy and usefulness," she had taken an apartment, then found a job - as a file clerk at the Y.W.C.A. Her husband, entirely sympathetic, had encouraged the adventure, but she had liked it too well, so much that it seemed to her unchristian, and the sense of guilt she in consequence developed ultimately outweighed the experiment's therapeutic value.

"Or you might never