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By Root 549 0

wedding. On the wall above her was something like a hat rack—a row of short wooden arms. When you pressed a pearl pushbutton anywhere in this house, there was a clunk from the kitchen gong and one of the wooden arms would fly up, alerting a non-existent servant. Beneath each arm a yellowed label identified the room that had rung—or (in the case of bedrooms) the person. Mr. Armand. Mrs. Armand. Miss Caroline. Master Keith. Studying these labels, Morgan had the feeling that a younger, finer family lived alongside his, gliding through the hallways, calling for tea and hot-water bottles. Evenings, the mother sat by the fire in a white peignoir and read to her children, one on either side of her. A boy, a girl; how tidy. At dinner they discussed great books, and on Sunday they dressed up and went to church. They never quarreled. They never lost things or forgot things. They rang and waited serenely. They gazed beyond the Gowers with the placid, rapt expressions of theatregoers ignoring some petty disturbance in the row ahead.

“I’d like to invite Aunt Polly,” Bonny said, “but that means Uncle Darwin, too, and he’s so deaf and difficult.”

She was peering through black-framed, no-nonsense glasses, which she’d just started wearing for reading. Morgan said, “So did you die, when you think of it.”

“Me?”

“Where’s that girl I used to take out walking? I used to hold on to your arm, high up, and you would look off elsewhere and get pink, but you wouldn’t pull away.”

Bonny added a name to her list. She said, “Walking? I don’t remember that. I thought we always drove.”

He slid his fingers down the inside of her upper arm, where the skin was silkiest. The back of his hand brushed the weight of one breast. She didn’t seem to notice. She said, “Luckily, Jim doesn’t have many relatives.”

“She must be marrying him out of desperation.”

Then she did look up. She said, “Couldn’t you still love the girls anyhow? You don’t stop loving people just because they change size.”

“Of course I love them.”

“Not the same way,” she said. “It seems you get fixed on this one appearance of a person; I mean, this single idea you have.” She clicked her ballpoint pen. “And anyway, why leap ahead so? They haven’t all grown up. Molly and Kate are still in high school.”

“No, no, they’re gone, for all intents and purposes,” Morgan said. “Out every evening, off somewhere, up to something … they’re gone, all right.” He brightened. “Aha!” he said. “Alone at last, my dollink!” But it called for too much effort. He drifted over to the stove, depressed, and lit a cigarette on a burner. “House feels so damn big, we needed a ride-’em vacuum cleaner.”

“You always did want more closet space,” Bonny told him.

“They’ve dumped their hamsters on us and gone away.”

“Morgan. There were nine of us at dinner tonight, counting your mother and Brindle. When I was a little girl, any time there were nine at table we had to send downtown for Mattie Ida to come help serve.”

“What we ought to do is move,” Morgan said. “We could get a house in the country, maybe live off the land.” He pictured himself in sabots and a rough blue peasant smock. The house would be a one-room cabin with a huge stone fireplace, a braided rug, and a daybed covered in some hand-woven fabric. Unbidden, Amy in her Dutch-cap curls bounced in the center of the daybed. He winced. “I’ll take an early retirement,” he said. “Forty-five feels older than I’d thought it would. I’ll retire and we’ll have some time to ourselves. Won’t that be nice?”

“Now, don’t go off on one of your crazy schemes,” Bonny told him. “You’d die of boredom, retiring. You’d feel useless.”

“Useless?” Morgan said. He frowned.

But Bonny was on the track of something new, thoughtfully tapping her pen against her teeth. She said, “Morgan, in this day and age, do you believe the bride’s mother would still give the bride a little talk?”

“Hmm?”

“What I want to know is, am I expected to give Amy a talk about sex or am I not?”

“Bonny, do you have to call it sex?”

“What else would I call it?”

“Well …”

“I mean, sex is what it is, isn’t it?