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By Root 2517 0

wish to impress her on mine. Though I looked forward to seeing her, and thought of her anxiously and often, I was more comfortable with Charles. He was a lot like his sister, impulsive and generous, but more moody; and though he sometimes had long gloomy spells, he was very talkative when not suffering from these. In either mood, I got along with him well. We borrowed Henry’s car, drove to Maine so he could have a club sandwich in a bar he liked there; went to Bennington, Manchester, the greyhound track in Pownal, where he ended up bringing home a dog too old to race, in order to save it from being put to sleep. The dog’s name was Frost. It loved Camilla, and followed her everywhere: Henry quoted long passages about Emma Bovary and her greyhound: “Sa pensée, sans but d’abord, vagabondait au hasard, comme sa levrette, qui faisait des cercles dans la campagne.…” But the dog was weak, and highly strung, and suffered a heart attack one bright December morning in the country, leaping from the porch in happy pursuit of a squirrel. This was by no means unexpected; the man at the track had warned Charles that she might not live the week; still, the twins were upset, and we spent a sad afternoon burying her in the back garden of Francis’s house, where one of Francis’s aunts had an elaborate cat cemetery, complete with headstones.

The dog was fond of Bunny, too. It used to go with Bunny and me on long, grueling rambles through the countryside every Sunday, over fences and streams, through bogs and pastures. Bunny was himself as fond of walks as an old mutt—his hikes were so exhausting, he had a hard time finding anyone to accompany him except me and the dog—but it was because of those walks that I became familiar with the land around Hampden, the logging roads and hunter’s trails, all his hidden waterfalls and secret swimming holes.

Bunny’s girlfriend, Marion, was around surprisingly little; partially, I think, because he didn’t want her there but also, I think, because she was even less interested in us than we were in her. (“She likes to be with her girlfriends a lot,” Bunny would say boastfully to Charles and me. “They talk about clothes and boys and all that kind of malarkey. You know.”) She was a small, petulant blonde from Connecticut, pretty in the same standard, round-faced way in which Bunny was handsome, and her manner of dress was at once girlish and shockingly matronly—flowered skirts, monogrammed sweaters with bags and shoes to match. From time to time I would see her at a distance in the playground of the Early Childhood Center as I walked to class. It was some branch of the Elementary Education department at Hampden; kids from the town went to nursery school and kindergarten there, and there she would be with them, in her monogrammed sweaters, blowing a whistle and trying to make them all shut up and get in line.

No one would talk about it much, but I gathered that earlier, abortive attempts to include Marion in the activities of the group had ended in disaster. She liked Charles, who was generally polite to everyone and had the unflagging capacity to carry on conversations with anyone from little kids to the ladies who worked in the cafeteria; and she regarded Henry, as did most everyone who knew him, with a kind of fearful respect; but she hated Camilla, and between her and Francis there had been some catastrophic incident which was so frightful that no one would even talk about it. She and Bunny had a relationship the likes of which I had seldom seen except in couples married for twenty years or more, a relationship which vacillated between the touching and the annoying. In her dealings with him she was very bossy and businesslike, treating him in much the same way she handled her kindergarten pupils; he responded in kind, alternately wheedling, affectionate, or sulky. Most of the time he bore her nagging patiently, but when he did not, terrible fights ensued. Sometimes he would knock on my door late at night, looking haggard and wild-eyed and more rumpled than usual, mumbling, “Lemme in, old man, you gotta help