But Emily just looked at him, almost shyly, and then turned away from him.
     "How's your mother?" Mrs. Walthan asked, and Harvey had to admit he liked her for coming in that way.
     "She seems much happier in the city," Harvey said.  "There are some of her old friends there from the summers."
     "Well," Mrs. Walthan said, "I could tell her that she'll never get over it.  You never forget a husband going.  It's been eleven years for me, and I still think I'll see him next to me when I wake up.  I still look for him, you know, in my sleep, and for his coffee cups left here and there.  Oh, he wasn't the prize your father was, but you just get used to them, you know."
     And this warmed him, to have his father spoken of so easily and yet so admiringly.  He enjoyed having him spoken of that way and not in the way of his mother, complaining how she's told him, a man of his age, not to be outside and tramping in the woods.
     Harvey looked at Emily; she was fidgety, toying with the big bone buttons of her heavy parka, the one that made her seem so young.  She appeared frightened, and only further embarrassed by Mrs. Walthan's talk, so that he thought they should go home.
     That night he told Emily that he hoped he hadn't hurt her but he just didn't see what all the fuss was about.  He was still lying; until it had appeared that this little mystery might be solved, he hadn't realized how much he was enjoying it.  Emily said nothing at first.  Then she told him she couldn't understand why he didn't realize that all this was frightening to her, that she simply didn't like having some queer man she didn't even know coming into her house.  Didn't he know there was something very wrong, very strange, about it?  And once again he said they couldn't even be sure it was a man, and whoever it was certainly didn't mean any harm; and then he let it slip that he thought it was sort of fun, having this little mystery.  Emily said nothing more, and she seemed frightened in a foreign way, as if it were now Harvey of whom she was most afraid.  And they went silently to bed.

     On Sunday, Harvey woke early, remembering Novembers long ago with his father, how the huge cold hand would shake him under his warm blankets and he would dress quietly in the half light.  This morning he dressed in the kitchen so he wouldn't wake Emily, and then he went out in the woods and through the blowdown-- where the trees had been leveled by storms-- to the beach.  From the beach he walked along the shore to where the marsh stretched inland, up to the great hill, which his father had called the mountain and where Harvey had seen deer.  Brittle leaves jaggedly protruded from the ice and crunched beneath his boots as he followed the marsh inland to the mountain.
     Once he stood for a long time and tried to see the house; he couldn't.  And so he tried to imagine going back and coming suddenly, upon the house.  Some young girl had seen him at the store, who thought his face was handsome and his smile was kind, some lonely and all alone girl who thought his wife was beautiful and who for some reason needed eggs, had come upon their house and seen them go off for the day.  She didn't have many cigarettes and so had not left the proper amount; but she'd come there out of the woods, and the mystery of her gentle, childish love was something secretive and only for him...

     A small band of terns flew suddenly upon him; the leader shrieked and the band scattered back toward the sea.  The cold fog of the morning blew their mocking cries to him and he felt ashamed.  He moved again toward the mountain.
     He'd planned to cross the mountain and come back to the house along the dirt road; it was harder climbing than he remembered, and he felt fat when he reached the top.  He was starting down the other side when he saw and remembered the place where he'd seen the deer.  This was the spot; these were the branches he had looked through to the plot of moss and fern where the buck and doe were bedded and where they rose-- the muscular back touching the shivering doe with his wet nose.  And Harvey had sensed an aura of such great privacy that it seemed he'd opened the door of a church late at night without knocking.
     Harvey stood very still, listening.  Probably there were no more deer; there never had been many this close to the ocean.  And all the way from the house he hadn't seen any sign.  Slowly he began to walk down to the road; the fog made it difficult to guess the time, and he wondered how long he'd been gone.
     When he reached the house Emily was not there.  The coffee was still warm on the stove, and he found a note on the kitchen table: "Be back soon."  She hadn't taken the car, and Harvey drank his coffee thinking that she'd probably left the car there so that someone might think they were home.  Then the mysterious visitor would stay away.  He thought for a moment of moving the car, hiding it somewhere, but when he got up from his chair he felt tired and a little foolish.  He saw that Emily hadn't made the bed; to Harvey there was something much more inviting about an unmade bed than one that was made-- which was something Emily never understood.  Harvey undressed and in a little while fell asleep, his arms around Emily's pillow in a lovers embrace.

     In his dream the sea was mauve and he was moving noiselessly through the blowdown to the beach.  On the beach a girl was running on the wet sand with her hair flying gaily behind her, dancing in and out of the shallow mauve surf, and Harvey stopped before the edge of the woods so that he wouldn't disturb her ritual.  And then she heard him; he'd taken a step back and had crashed through the blowdown.  The girl fled from him while he struggled in a maze of branches and vines.  When he looked for her again, it was no longer a girl he saw, but a doe in effortless flight who seemed suspended at the apex of each new bound and yet hurtled so swiftly and lightly toward the safety of the mountain that he felt he'd seen no more than a leaf taken by the wind.
     He was still thrashing in the blowdown when Emily woke him.  In her great furry parka she knelt by the bed, her cheek cold against his shoulder, her warm-smelling hair in his face.
     "You silly man," she said.  "Why are you in bed at noon?"
     "I was dreaming," Harvey mumbled.
     "And I think I've made you angry," she said.
     "No," he told her.  "Why? Where were you this morning?"
     "You won't be angry with me?" she asked, and it was apparent that she didn't really think he would be, because she looked young and mischevious, hooded and smiling, with her eyes big and watery from the cold.
     "Of course I won't be angry."
     "Well I went to Mrs. Wathan's and asked her to call Cecil Moffett on her phone to find out if he's the one."
     "Oh."
     "Well, he's the one, all right, and he's really crazy."
     "How's that?"
     "He told Mrs. Wathan that he didn't like carrying eggs with him when he was digging clams, and so he just came and took one of ours when it was time for his lunch.  Now just listen to this.  He not only took an egg, but he boiled it right on our stove and ate his lunch right in our kitchen!"
     "Well, what did you say?" Harvey asked.
     "Well, I didn't say anything.  I mean, I don't even know who he is.  But I told Mrs. Wathan to say that we don't appreciate someone coming in our house and being so sneaky, and that we were thinking of doing something about it."
     "Doing what?"
     "Oh, nothing.  I just had her say that so he'd think we were going to do something.  And I also had her tell him that he'd better not come snooping around any more, but that she wouldn't tell us it was him-- you see, she told him she'd just heard about it, and that we didn't have any idea who it was."  Emily knelt, waving her still-mittened hands, her cold face flushing with the warmth of the house.
     And it left him, whatever it was that so briefly he'd known again, that he hadn't known for so long-- some elusive thing he was surprised to find still mattered to him, and about which he would never need to know any more than he had known as a boy.
     "Well, are you happy now?" he said.
     He failed to recognize the coldness of his own voice.
     "Oh, Harvey," she said, "you did say that you wanted to be sure!"  She pushed herself back from the bed and was sitting, small, on her heels.  "I just don't understand, when you know how frightened I am, and you seem to enjoy it, and you never tell me what you're thinking."
     Emily rocked back and forth, swaying in the great parka, and she pulled her hood lower over her face.  "I just don't understand," she said into the hood, "how you can find something so strange and so crazy so enjoyable."  And she began to cry.
     "I thought it was exciting," he told her.  "All the wondering about who it could be."

     That night an off-sea wind brought the first snow.  The wind moved low to the ground, gusting up the north wall of the house and tugging at the eaves as it swept over the roof to the woods.  Harvey lay awake, listening to the sounds he knew so well-- the dry scratching as the wind tunneled through the blowdown; the creaks that darted through the house like electricity-- he knew the particular boards these creaks followed-- the wooden shivers of the house that once had made him sit up in bed and call to his father.
     Then a loose pail, seized by the wind, rattled past the front steps; it banged on the bottom stone, seemed to hop, and then rolled away from the house.  He listened for it to stop; if it got away now, he wouldn't find it until spring, rusted and dented.  The pail was caught again and swept back toward the house.  He could follow it; it was in the wood lot now, waiting for the next gust to come through the blowdown and send it reeling back the other way.  Harvey caught hold of the edge of the bed and pulled himself up; Emily was asleep, her face seriously relaxed.
     When Harvey opened the door the snow swished against his bare legs, and he held his ribs to stop the shivers that seemed to begin at his spine.  The yard was awhirl with snow, billowing close to the ground, and he couldn't see as far as the wood lot.  He heard the pail begin to roll before he saw it; sweeping past him, it scraped against the frozen ground and skidded madly into the far cornerstone of the house.  He had never felt so cold, and seeing that the pail appeared to be weged under the house, he thought it hardly worth a naked venture into the snow.


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