"I'm so sorry," Lily said. 
            "Don't be," said Aunt Win.  "The old order changeth, giving place to new."
            It was Thanksgiving in Boston.  Aunt Win pulled herself to her feet by the edge of the table and sang to the tune of Colonel Bogey's march.
           
            Hitler
            Has only got one ball;
            Goering
            Has two but they are small.
            Himmler's
            Are very similar;
            But poor old Goebbels
            Has no balls
            At all.

            She had sung it in her palmy days in London during the War.  Now there was another enemy.  The cancer was back. 
            "What will you do?" said Lily.  She was up from Philadelphia with the baby, without her husband, without telling anybody why.
            "Defy it, and be damned to it," said Aunt Win.
            "Will you have to have radiation?" 
            "Not this time, darling.  No chemo.  Nothing.  I've worked in hospitals too long.  I've seen what happens."
            "I think you're very brave," said Mother.
            Dad poured another bourbon on the rocks.
            What would Mother say if she knew Lily had a lover in New York? 
            Lily tucked the baby, Eve, into the Snugli and walked up the beach into the wind to use the pay phone at the pharmacy, where she could speak in private.  Her lover was panicking with loneliness, and now because Lily's husband knew.   
            "What did you do, leave the letter lying around?  How can we ever put this on an honest footing?"         
            "I'm moving out." 
            "Does you family know?"
            "They wonder why John isn't here." 
            "I need you," he said.  "I'm losing it."
            She could be in New York tomorrow.  She'd tell them she had to leave sooner than expected.  The wind blew her and Evie down the beach, the seagulls wheeling and crying over the elementary school, the police station, the water tank.  John had cried out, when he found the letter, "What kind of man fucks my wife when she's pregnant?"  This whole thing was awful.  She knew that.  She smoked a joint in the shelter of the cemetery wall.  Dope was supposed to help if you had nausea.  Aunt Win might need some good Hawaiian before this was over.

            At Grand Central Station, her lover enfolded Lily, frantic with desire, baby and big nursing breasts and all.   In the taxi to his apartment they were already making love, and after they opened up his sofabed and fucked their way to that calm place beyond everything, she put her ear to his chest and listened to his heart.   
            "I get desperate," he said.  "Everything seems possible when you're here, but when I think about you going back to John..." 
            "Defy it and be damned," she said.  "Freedom!" she promised her darling.  She sang the Hitler song in the cab to Penn Station.  Her lover frowned like a Presbyterian, Eve complained, and the driver threw her a look in his mirror.
            "Hey little fella, don't you like the Big Apple?"

            Back in Philadelphia, Lily sublet an apartment and painted the kitchen with the baby on one arm.  She consulted a lawyer, breastfed, washed dishes, paid the rent.  She wangled a gig catering a small wedding with braised radicchio sauteed with almonds in lemon butter, leaving Eve with John.  He looked shellshocked, the dining room table a midden of papers.  There was no money.  She telephoned her parents and told them about the separation, not admitting to the other man.
            "Too damn bad," Dad said.
            "You're hard to please," was her mother's comment.     
            "Any chance you'll change your mind?" said her Dad. 
            "Not a snowball's.  How's Aunt Win?"
            "Working half time," said her father. 
            "Drinking," her mother said.   
            Christmas was coming.  Lily changed diapers, began giving solid food, took Eve to visit John.  The baby could pull herself up now, holding to the bed, a chair. 
            "You don't have to do this," John said.  "Do you?"
            Something had come for her in the mail, a book she'd helped write a chapter of, about the oil crisis.  She didn't have time to think about it.  It was terrifying, how little money there was.  The catering thing was happening, though, and she left John's and rushed the edible squash blossoms into a salad.  She was having diarrhea.  She dozed off the morning before a Bat Mitzvah and let a velouté sauce separate.  She caught herself stumbling.   
            "Isn't this what you wanted?" her mother said.  "Call Aunt Win.  She's quite sick all of a sudden.  You'll feel better worrying about somebody else for a change."
            "What's happening?"
            "She's shut up in her apartment trying to drink herself to death.  We want her to come to us."
            The voice at Aunt Win's sounded coarse, eroded. 
            "Are you okay, Aunt Win?"
            "No, thank you very much." 
            "What does the doctor say?"
            "How could he let this happen to me?  Oliver Laughton and I have been friends for thirty years.  I've trained his nurses.  I've done everything for him but wipe his bottom.  He should have caught the stinking thing when it could have been surged out."
            The voice struggled on, gritty and mean, like something under wet leaves clumped in a gutter.     
            "Do you know something?  Life is rotten.  And now I'm rotten too, and it doesn't matter a good God damn."
            "It matters to me," Lily said, plucking up courage.  "I can understand how you feel."
            "No, you can't."
            "I think I can, a little."
            "Oh no, darling, you can't.  You can't at all.  You may have left your decent little husband, but you don't know anything, and thank God you don't."
            Shaken, Lily mailed her parents a couple of joints, with instructions.  They didn't know she smoked, exactly, but Aunt Win might need them. 
            "You sent dope through the mail?" her lover said.  He was a lawyer.  He didn't even want to be talking about it on the phone.  "That's a federal crime." 
            "Nobody will open it.  Anyway, this isn't the only law I've broken.  Think of the seventh commandment.  What's a little crime by comparison?"
            He was coming for Christmas.  She hung up and balanced her tiny checkbook.  She bought a little Christmas tree nailed upright to a board.  She saw therapists and lawyers, safe in their lives.  She hunted dark blocks in borrowed cars for parking places late at night, gripping a slippery snowsuit with Eve asleep inside, coaxing herself into the desperate smell of the apartment, reaching for the phone. 
            "I don't think we should talk this often," her lover said, "for now.  It's too intense."
            Shivering, she willed him to stay another minute on the line, tugging up the ragged ends of happiness like a tiny blanket, her fingers cramped to the phone. 
            "I want you to be leaving him for you, not me," he said.  "By Christmas you should have had a chance to work things out." 
            On Christmas Eve, Lily left the baby at John's.  The heat went off in her apartment, and the hot water.  Her lover arrived, annoyed.  He wanted a hot shower.  He wanted to see the lit tree in Rittenhouse Square and sing "Hark the Herald" in a church at midnight, with Lily staggering through the strangely warm dark in high-heeled boots she was too tired to stand up in.  He was light, without encumbrances.  For the first time, he couldn't hold her down in bed.  He blew away like chaff.  In the morning, she didn't seem like Aphrodite to him any more, with her stretch-marked breasts.  He was through. 
            She took the baby, left the dishes in the cold sink, threw out her stiff little tree, and flew to Boston.  The earth was dark, with tiny jewelled lights, only Manhattan swathed in a black mist.
 
            Aunt Win sat in Mother's kitchen, wrapped in a sleeping bag.  She was cold because she was dying.  She was the lucky one.                         
            "I deserve anything I get," Lily said.  "Don't they stone you for adultery?"    
            "Now cut that out.  You do the best you can, that's all."  Win's cheeks drooped around a mouth she was still bothering to put lipstick on.  "Don't I know?  Granny had to order me out of bed when I had cancer the first time, after I fell into the mayonnaise at Jimmy's Harborside."   
            Win spent most of her time in the spool bed reading, looking down on the snowy garden and frozen fish pool.  She lent Lily her Agatha Christie collection and warned her to read slowly, but Lily gobbled the tidy stories, two or three a day.  She walked the blinding beaches opposite the gray finger of the lighthouse, ranging the cold cliffs where the sea gnashed rock.  The blue winter stabbed deep.  Only now, when the damage was done, did she see how bad it was.  Her lover was a shit, but she couldn't stop wanting him.  The terrible need went on, corrosive, metastatic.  Love dammed up in her, backlashed, came and gagged her.  She felt a strange pain in her gut one afternoon, and by evening there was blood in the toilet.
            She called New York, in case there had been some mistake.            
            "I'm bleeding my guts out." 
            "I know," he said, although he couldn't know.  He sounded scared.  "I've started a new life.  I'm happier now, less lonely."
            Not even this could change the fact that he was the other half of her soul.  Lily lay awake, stanching her agony with a pillow, while the lighthouse swept the sea, flashing the childhood pattern through the pines: one two, one two.  She wished she had some dope.  The joints she'd sent Aunt Win had disappeared of course, unmentioned.  Her guts turned inside out like a sock, wringing shit out of her, red and stinking, forcing involuntary groans.  She felt sorry for Aunt Win across the hall, having to hear that. 
            Her mother took over the baby.  She drove Lily to the hospital.  In the emergency room, they gave her a thin gown with strings and let her lie on a stretcher.  Her guts ground and she cried out until somebody hustled a bedpan she had to squat on in full view of the room of people.        
            "Are you all right?" a nurse said, staring at the red mess in the pan.    
            No, she was not all right.  A sick pain burned her, lifted her from the hospital bed again and again, careening her onto the toilet, where she flushed hot and spasmed to her scalp and had to cry out and brace her feet against the cold tiles to get some hold.  She crept back to bed drained and white. 
            The nurses used bitter orange to kill the smell.  They stopped food and drink, put in tubes, and fed her direct to the blood.  The doctors thought medicine might work.  If not, there was surgery.  When she told them she wanted to die, she'd never recover, she didn't deserve to, everyone would be better off if she were dead, they ordered barbiturates and nailed up the window. 
            She could have the pain shot every four hours.  After two and a half, all she could do was watch the clock hands inch from mark to mark until they brought a nurse, hunting around the puddled places on Lily's buttocks for the least bruised place.  The sting of the needle into the bruise was a pleasure in itself. 
            Mother brought Eve to visit, in blue overalls, against medical advice.  The baby talked nonsense, the only thing Lily understood.  She climbed over Lily's legs, dislodging the IV lines, and waved goodbye, leaving Lily in tears.  Hope was the most painful thing of all. 
            Outside the nailed up window, trains crawled across a bridge like a caterpillar on a branch.  People kicked soccer balls on the cold playground by the river and threw sticks for dogs, as if they thought these things worth doing.  Lily prayed to die, but God, usually so silent, answered no, she had work to do.  Her rage at this knew no bounds. 
            If she couldn't die, she wanted the worst up front this time.  In the first place, was she still married?  She dialed John's number.
            "I don't know," he said.  Let's see how it goes when you get well."
            "How can I get well with nothing settled?" 
            "It's not all about you.  You screwed me over and dropped the ball.  I'm left with the mortgage and one income.  I'm separated from my daughter."      
            "What can I do about it?"
            "Get well."
            "What then?"
            "We'll have to see how we both feel." 
            She threw the telephone across the room.  The nurses called the doctors.  They stuffed her with steroids and anti-depressants, and in the spring they sent her home with a strange, voracious appetite to convalesce at Mother's. 
                       
            She waked gingerly one afternoon in a haze of Easter lilies, with Win's abraded voice scolding across the hall.     
            "But I'm not going to get well, Polly."
            "Of course you are, Winnie dear, and we'll have lunch at Jimmy's on Saturdays, the way we always do."
            "Why do you torture me, darling," Win croaked.  "There's no more Jimmy's Harborside for me."
            Polly backed away down the stairs, her bracelets jangling.  She didn't know about the rotten black stuff oozing out of Win.  She didn't want to know.
            Precarious, uncured, Lily sat on the toilet shaking, flushed with cortisone.  Gulls wheeled over the garden, fat with old bait fish dumped by the lobstermen.  They cruised the choppy harbor, lifting past the pale hill of winter grass.  No blood, at least.  Lily made her way across the hall to Win's room, where Win sat up in bed knitting, watching birds come to the feeder.  She could knit without looking down.
            "Who's that for?" Lily asked.
            "I don't know.  A child.  I don't necessarily know yet who they're for." 
            Win went in to the hospital every few days now to have the fluid drained off her lungs.  She didn't go downstairs any more.  At dinnertime, she dressed in her best jewelry, though all she could have was eggnog, laced with Percodan and rum. 
            "You knit," she said.  "You made that cable stitch for John."  A chickadee sat on the twisted branch of a ginkgo tree and scolded.  "Smart girl.  Never knit a sweater for a man until you have the ring.  I found that out the hard way."
            A robin keened from a wind-wrought pine outside the window, violent and sweet.
            "All the birds are visiting me this evening," Win said. 
            "What was he like?"
            "What does it matter?  I loved him."  Win knit another whole row through the silence, until another voice thrilled invisibly from the cliff's edge.  "Song sparrow," she said, pulling a length of blue out of her knitting bag.  "My favorite.  I never lacked for beaux, but there was only one man I ever loved.  I gave him everything I had, as Granny used to say." 
            "What happened?"
            "He promised to leave his wife for me, but divorce isn't easy.  If you think it is, you try it."
            "Oh God," Lily said.    
            Aunt Win leaned forward.  "Listen, darling, have the surgery."
            "And shit through a hole in my stomach the rest of my life?"
            "Ought-to-be ain't Is.  I met a nurse in the Red Cross who used to say that.  She was from Alabama.  Ought-to-be ain't Is.  Think about it." 
            Dad paused in the doorway with the baby. 
            "Night-night, Mummy," he said.  "Night-night Auntie Win."
            "She always waves to me," said Win, dropping the red yarn, picking up the blue.    
            "How can I..."
            "Easy.  They can fix you up.  They do it all the time.  Ed Carter's a pal of mine.  All you have to do is give the word."
           
            John came for the weekend.  He put his suitcase in the baby's room and brought Win her rum eggnog and two Percodan.  At bedtime, he came to sleep with Lily, close but not touching.  He was a good person, unlike herself. 
            "Why do you care?" she said.  "You shouldn't."
            "Anyway, I do."
            In the morning they walked to the library, passing a man on a scaffold who looked transparent, overexposed.  Lily thought she would not fall down, but took care to move slowly, so as not to frighten anyone.  It was too hot.  If she stood up any longer, close to people, that would be the end of it.  Anyway, it was all a tragedy beyond anyone's control, and what excuse could there ever be for her?  By the time John left for the airport, she wanted to go where Win was going.  Her father put his arm around her and tucked her into bed. 
            In the middle of the night she woke up with a lamp on in the dark house.  She crossed the hall.  Win sat up in bed, reading.  She'd just had a blood transfusion and was feeling better.    
            "Can't sleep?" she said.  "I can't either.  I don't want to waste any of my time sleeping." 
            Outside was the cold spring night, the sea.  Lily could not imagine wanting time to live.  Everything in the black night was still calling to her.  
            "Did you ever see him afterward?" she said. 
            "Years later, he telephoned from the Ritz Bar.  Wanted to fan the flames again."  Win put down her book.  "I thought it would kill me to say no, and it nearly did, but I didn't go."  She picked up her knitting.  "John is a nice man.  A very nice man.  I wouldn't have chosen to live without a man, but it is possible.  You can."    
            A spark appeared on the black shadow of the lighthouse, grew and washed across the sea.  Lily and her aunt seemed to move in opposite directions through an enormous space, drawn by dark tides. 
            "We are ships that pass in the night," Lily said. 
            "You've always been one of the people I've loved most in the world, my darling," said Aunt Win.  She showed Lily the red squirrels she was knitting into the yoke of the little blue sweater.  They sat looking to the left with their tails curled.  "I'll tell you a story," she said. 
            "Thirty years ago, in the middle of winter, when you were a tiny little thing, Granny and I took you to the Telepix to see cartoons.  We squeezed into our seats and took off our mittens and coats and hats and scarves and leggings – do you remember leggings?  Then on came the News of the World, which is what we had before TV, and it was all about a fire.   Hoses squirted the flames, rescuers rushed through with stretchers, it was perfectly harrowing how many people had lost their lives, and I was just thinking, thank God that's over..."           
            Win paused and took a two-fisted swig of eggnog.
            "...when here came a plane crash.  Smoke rising from the wreckage, people in white coats dashing up in ambulances, dozens of casualties.  You stared with your eyes popped out.  I didn't dare look at Granny.  The very next thing, believe it or not, up came a shipwreck being hoisted from a watery grave..."
            Win clapped to her brow a hand that was much too thin.
            "...and you stood up and pointed at the screen and said in a loud voice, 'How many deaders are in that?'"
            A wild chuckle got into Aunt Win, got into them both.  The lighthouse cut across the dark.  One, two.  One, two.
            "See?" Aunt Win said.
            "What do you need?" said Lily.  "Do you need anything?" 
            "I'm afraid I won't be able to finish this knitting.  I'm not up for indefinite numbers of blood transfusions, though.  I think I'll go in to the hospital at the end.  My guys will have the right cocktail for me when the time comes."  Win picked up the sweater, working the red yarn.  "But I'm clinging a little.  I don't want it to be quite today."
                       
            Lily woke at dawn to a commotion, dogs trotting here and there, tags jingling, Aunt Win capsized against the bathroom door. 
            "I tried to get back into bed," she cried.  "I just can't any more." 
            "This is it," said Dad.
            The ambulance throbbed in the driveway.  Mother packed a few things in a bag.
            "That it should come to this," Win said. 
            The ambulance people came up the stairs.  She showed them her insurance cards.  Her face was yellow.  They tucked gray blankets around her on the stretcher as the wind cut in.    
            "Good-bye, dear," Mother said.  "We've loved having you."
            Dad made coffee.  The baby stumbled softly in a sleeping suit on the kitchen linoleum, bumping into his knees.  She walked a few steps, shot Lily a look, dropped, scrambled away, sat, yelled.  In spite of herself, Lily grinned. 
            Oh God, she thought, I loved him. 
            Pain stretched leisurely and sank lazy jaws into her, into her guts.  She ought to have been a better person.  It should never have come to this.  Blood.  Mother drove her to the hospital.  The day was dull and stifling.  People sat on the wall outside, where the first daffodils of spring waved near the traffic.       
            "You're running out of time," the doctor said.  "Think about surgery.  By Monday I want you back on IV's." 
            Quiet had the halls and corridors.  The old hospital stood on its original foundations in a square of grass, set like a gray stone jewel among the glass towers.  A couple carrying flowers went quickly toward the elevators.  An orderly wheeled a sick boy in a cart, showing him the closed gift-shop windows.  Win lay upstairs under morphine, gone beyond reach.  The real thing.  Lily wept because death was so far beyond her.  Someday, she thought.  Someday.  As if parting from a lover.  A wind was picking up, rolling the clouds downriver.
            Mother drove with slender ankles, casting concerned looks at Lily.  "For so long," she said, "we didn't recognize you."  She parked at the pharmacy and went in for medicine. 
            The town stood out across the water, oblongs and old spires.  Clouds boiled up in the west, spitting a few drops.  The sea was ruffled iron.  Lobster boats swung on their chains, dogs nosing the west wind.  A stationwagon rolled up, full of guys in blue suits, all with the same tie, and the driver got out to use the pay phone.  Some of the others stretched their legs.  Birds blew by, tumbling eastward.  The driver hung up and shrugged. 
            "Wrong number."
            "I thought you knew where this place was, Vinnie."
            Lily rolled down her window.  The salt air stung. 
            "Do you know the Harper School?" one of the men asked her.  "We're a singing group.  We're missing the concert." 
            Lily shook her head.
            The man punched the driver and laughed.  "Good going, Vinnie, you Wop  moron.  You get us lost in the boonies.  We don't even know where we are, let alone where we're going."
            "They give me this phony number," Vinnie mugged, "and then they leave town."
            "They would, knowing you're coming."
            Lily told them where they were.  She didn't know where anyone was going.  It was all much bigger than she'd thought.  How curious that they didn't take it as a tragedy.  They laughed some more and climbed back in the car.   
            "Thanks to you, we now know where our sorry asses are.  We'll probably never know where the heck we're going."  
            Mother came out with the medicine and drove home.  Dad had made pasta.  Evie picked strands of spaghetti off the high chair tray and pushed them into her mouth.  After dinner John called, needing some numbers for the insurance forms and to get an extension on the income tax. 
            "By the way," he told Lily, "I liked you this weekend.  You were gracious and straightforward and yourself."
            "Wasn't I always myself?  Where did I go wrong?"
            "It could be called wrong, but you only did what you had to do.  Someday you'll see how it all adds up."
            Just at sunset, something leaked through the barred black on the ocean rim, a streak of gay red star.  Gulls glided flashing up the cliff, soared over the lit pines and crooked Chinese trees, dropped down around the winter-wasted garden and the empty pool and beat upwind again.  Lily found the knitting bag in Aunt Win's room.  The little sweater with the squirrels would fit Eve.  If she finished it, Evie could have a great sweater.  There was another started, John's size.  She would have to learn the pattern.  Two white, four red, two blue.  Four red, two blue, two white.  She would have to have the surgery.  She would go back to the hospital and live.    

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