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By Root 842 0

her, as she poked her glasses back up onto her nose while reading over the list of inventory, Henry thought she was the stuff of America, for this was back when the hippie business was beginning, and reading in Newsweek about the marijuana and “free love” could cause an unease in Henry that one look at Denise dispelled. “We’re going to hell like the Romans,” Olive said triumphantly. “America’s a big cheese gone rotten.” But Henry would not stop believing that the temperate prevailed, and in his pharmacy, every day he worked beside a girl whose only dream was to someday make a family with her husband. “I don’t care about Women’s Lib,” she told Henry. “I want to have a house and make beds.” Still, if he’d had a daughter (he would have loved a daughter), he would have cautioned her against it. He would have said: Fine, make beds, but find a way to keep using your head. But Denise was not his daughter, and he told her it was noble to be a homemaker—vaguely aware of the freedom that accompanied caring for someone with whom you shared no blood.

He loved her guilelessness, he loved the purity of her dreams, but this did not mean of course that he was in love with her. The natural reticence of her in fact caused him to desire Olive with a new wave of power. Olive’s sharp opinions, her full breasts, her stormy moods and sudden, deep laughter unfolded within him a new level of aching eroticism, and sometimes when he was heaving in the dark of night, it was not Denise who came to mind but, oddly, her strong, young husband—the fierceness of the young man as he gave way to the animalism of possession—and there would be for Henry Kitteridge a flash of incredible frenzy as though in the act of loving his wife he was joined with all men in loving the world of women, who contained the dark, mossy secret of the earth deep within them.

“Goodness,” Olive said, when he moved off her.

In college, Henry Thibodeau had played football, just as Henry Kitteridge had. “Wasn’t it great?” the young Henry asked him one day. He had arrived early to pick Denise up, and had come into the store. “Hearing the people yelling from the stands? Seeing that pass come right at you and knowing you’re going to catch it? Oh boy, I loved that.” He grinned, his clear face seeming to give off a refracted light. “Loved it.”

“I suspect I wasn’t nearly as good as you,” said Henry Kitteridge. He had been good at the running, the ducking, but he had not been aggressive enough to be a really good player. It shamed him to remember that he had felt fear at every game. He’d been glad enough when his grades slipped and he had to give it up.

“Ah, I wasn’t that good,” said Henry Thibodeau, rubbing a big hand over his head. “I just liked it.”

“He was good,” said Denise, getting her coat on. “He was really good. The cheerleaders had a cheer just for him.” Shyly, with pride, she said, “Let’s go, Thibodeau, let’s go.”

Heading for the door, Henry Thibodeau said, “Say, we’re going to have you and Olive for dinner soon.”

“Oh, now—you’re not to worry.”

Denise had written Olive a thank-you note in her neat, small handwriting. Olive had scanned it, flipped it across the table to Henry. “Handwriting’s just as cautious as she is,” Olive had said. “She is the plainest child I have ever seen. With her pale coloring, why does she wear gray and beige?”

“I don’t know,” he said, agreeably, as though he had wondered himself. He had not wondered.

“A simpleton,” Olive said.

But Denise was not a simpleton. She was quick with numbers, and remembered everything she was told by Henry about the pharmaceuticals he sold. She had majored in animal sciences at the university, and was conversant with molecular structures. Sometimes on her break she would sit on a crate in the back room with the Merck Manual on her lap. Her child-face, made serious by her glasses, would be intent on the page, her knees poked up, her shoulders slumped forward.

Cute, would go through his mind as he glanced through the doorway on his way by. He might say, “Okay, then, Denise?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

His smile would