CONTINUED FROM LAST ISSUE

Aboard Columbia, Young and Crippen sleep.

     Oh, Jaysus, Mother Mary, help me,” Adie cries, who’s messed her pants.

The Cat Woman has parked the kitty on the sidewalk in front of Wallex Drug, gone in to buy a News Tribune, to see if her name is in it from the car that hit her crossing, last week, in front of Grover Cronins.  Yes, it’s on the second page:

      Helen Sheed (They’ve spelled her name wrong) a resident of Myrtle Street, was taken via cruiser…treated for abrasions and . . . She pushes on across Chester Brook 

…There was a grist mill here owned by one Thomas Rider; it passed into hands of David Mead and his descendants in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, and under Moses Mead, became a factory which manufactured wooden handles used for axes, hayrakes, pestles, rolling pins and such.                

     And to the foot of Piety Corner…So named because the deacons of first Parish Church once occupied its substantial houses…The garage sale is a disappointment.  Some dirty placemats and Christmas ornaments, a rusty meat grinder.  She has her pride; but buys a plastic pocketbook and a plaster Stella Maris, so as not to have walked so far for nothing.

 Priscilla goes with Nelson for an airing—they both need it.  The sun makes a brief appearance as they’re crossing the bridge at Elm, and dances on her river.  Nelson, far ahead, is into mud on the bank.  He swims here, he tells her, in the summer.  He’s the only one she knows who possesses the city in the same way she…He’s into a car wash now; it has a DO NOT ENTER sign.  Of course he cannot read it.   He emerges, grinning.  Now he finds a dollar in the gutter.  There’s a hot dog vendor on the corner, and he wants.  She buys them each one.  They’re delicious, and she thinks she probably needs more protein—she’s a vegetarian, but neglects to eat sometimes the substitutes, the beans the nuts, and turns like now into a ravening carnivore.

Helen Shaed has spotted a squirrel without a tail.  Third sign today that she’ll meet a stranger.  Last night she dreamed of a lion (at the gate?)  No, it was a tiger.  Just before she woke.  She threw it a child to keep it off, then, in remorse for what she’d done, herself.

     Ickle puddy sleeping on the blankets.  She gets a key to the restroom at Colwin’s.  Dirty.  She takes a napkin from her cart and wipes out the sink.

     Aboard Columbia, Young and Crippen sleep.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, hums Megan, on the commode.

   There’s something wrong with this Margo.  She seems to have locked herself in the bathroom.  Megan thinks she’s preggers.

Back at the Service Center, Nelson swipes Priscilla’s bike and starts to take off.  She grabs it by the seat and dumps him off.  You do that and I call the cops, she hollers at him, and he walks right away from her.  She goes and grabs him, pulls him to her.  Listen.  I didn’t mean to say that word.  Calmer now, she holds him by both arms.  It’s not a thing a friend does, is it?

     No.  He shakes his head. 

     And I’m your friend, and so I won’t; but listen, though, it doesn’t mean I won’t call someone, she goes on.

     Call who?

     Well, someone like Antonia’s husband, she’s inspired to say.  He’s a big man, strong, in spite of being sick.  A stern father…comes to help paint the offices, sometimes, carry out the trash, Jesus

Roldan.  The only father about this place.

     Nelson’s nodding.  Yeah, he says, OK, impressed.  He gets her bike and she locks it up, feeling weary and exhausted.  They go in and she makes him work awhile on the lamp they’re making out of wood scraps—knobs and discs and spindle shapes they got at a warehouse down on Water Street.  She has one home he made.  The electric parts they got at Woolworth’s blink on and off all by themselves.  She sets the paints before him: magenta, ochre, rose.  They’ll try to sell this one at the fair next month, she’s thinking; he’ll get money, learn that stealing’s not the only…What’s it matter he can’t read?  He’ll work, she thinks.  He’ll make things like those little boys in Persia make the rugs.  Yes, in a simpler age he’d be apprenticed to a carpenter, a fatherly shoemaker…

     In spite of recent disappointments concerning Mao and his revolution she’d once been so ardent about after that production of Fanshen in Boston she’d gone to with David while she was still a student at Mount Holyoke, she clung to these notions of what…? Of a society unlike this one she lived in…poorer, more attuned to need, not desire.  Must it always end up like this, this Gang of Four? 

     Hey!

     What?

     You doin’ it again.

     Thinking, yes… I was thinking about the little boys in Iran.  That make the beautiful rugs.

     What beautiful rugs?

     Persian rugs, they’re called.  Little boys have been making them for centuries.   I used to have one in my house. 

     And how they make them.

     They make little silk knots in different beautiful colors, to form designs that their great, great, great grandfathers made up from looking at nature.  They are something like puzzles.  And these designs were passed down from father to son, or mother to son.  I’m not sure.  There were so many things she wasn’t sure of, she only half knew.  So much she read about or forgot, or couldn’t connect to anything else.  And now there was no time to remedy this.

     They have to do it? he asks.

     Do what?

     Make the knots?

     Yes, that’s the bad thing.  They have to work many hours a day all week, and they can’t go to school.

     They don’t have to go to school? he says hopefully.

     They can’t.  They have to earn money for their families to eat.  They would like to go to school.

     No, they wouldn’t.

     Yes, they really would.  If they were to go to school, they could earn more money; but I think, in a way, they must be happy as they are. .

     Nelson paints his fingernails magenta.  She retrieves the magenta.  I’ll help you.  She picks up a brush.  Is this your brush or mine?

     It’s yours! he shouts.  It’s all yours, don’t you know!

     Of course it’s hers, the lamp, the whole construction in her head.  She’d like to give it to him, but she can’t. 

     Untreated leads to…

     And yet, she tells herself, she sometimes gets it right.  I won’t call them, police, but I’ll call someone.  Yes, she got that right.

Eulalie rests in a broth of sunlight on a bench in front of the Banks Square House.  In front of her Arizona Johnson, a little girl from the project sits on the curb and puts on her roller skates.  Her little brother, Painter Johnson stands on an old tire watching her with his stomach stuck out.  A man with headphones on is passing a metal detector over the scruffy lawn.  He stoops, picks up a rusted nut.

     Eulalie wonders what could possibly be the benefits of this apparatus.  Coins, someone told her once.  They look for coins and diamond rings that someone’s lost.  But how many coins would you have to pick up to even pay for the machine.  And what are your chances, really, of finding someone’s…?

     It’s only five, but Henrietta Rose, instead of going home first—mounting and dismounting two more buses—walks up to the Waltham Spa and has tea and a muffin, lingering over it an hour, and thence to the basement of St. Charles, known as the Italian Church, where she starts the coffee for the meeting at seven.  A humble coffeemaker after ten years sober.  One doesn’t get above oneself; she’s learned that lesson.  It’s difficult with two canes, and John the Indian is usually here to help, or else Dave, that shy new boy that rides a bicycle; but it’s too early for John and these shy new boys on bicycles because they’ve lost their licenses until well into the next century are given to lapses.  She puts on the hissing pot and digs out the powdered creamer and the lumpy sugar from the steamer trunk on the floor behind the stage, moving slowly with one cane.  She’ll see tonight if she can do it all herself.  From a tilting file cabinet, she takes the photo of Bill Wilson stuck among the plaster madonas and the catechism workbooks—Seven Bulwarks of a Catholic Home.  There’s a votive candle in here somewhere—they light it for the still suffering alcoholics, and a framed needlepoint of the Steps. She sets the speaker’s table up like a little altar. A few people come in.  The homeless and semi homeless deposit themselves in corners like the victims of a bomb: a young man with his foot in plaster, a young girl weeping over supper in a paper sack.  She asks the young man with the foot to set up the literature rack.  The lame and the halt, she thinks, but it is done.

The child of the weeping girl is on the floor with crayons and a coloring book.  He’s about the age of hers when she was drinking Bwana Bap, The People’s drink…It’s funny that she can’t recall her children in that setting.  Husband, yes, herself, atop an elephant . . . When did they menstruate?  When sprout pubic hair?    

The coffee’s done.  She takes some, creams it with some ghastly stuff, and pokes in the messy trunk t find some oatmeal raisin cookies, sets them out.  Still a half an hour until starting time.

Priscilla locks her bike to the swing set and climbs.  The elevator hasn’t worked for several months, and there’s a pervasive smell of rotting mop.  Frostie’ s home, standing in front of the open refrigerator.  She fixes tea.

     Find what you want and close, she says to Frostie.  You think I’m made of money?  Where are the others?  she asks.  He tells her Solie took Benno to the store, and says,  There  isn’t any juice. 

There isn’t anything.

     There’s last night’s casserole we’re going to have soon as I rest a minute, she says.

     He shuts the door and walks around the table eating a slice of bread.

     Ma, I…

     Stop milling.

     I’m not milling.  Ma I need your signature is all, and six dollars…

     Six dollars!  I might have thirty cents, you hunt through all my pockets…

     …to rent the skis…

     The skis!

     All the other kids have their own, of course.

     In Varnum Circle, kids have skis?

     Well it’s the school that’s going, not the project.  Can’t you write a…

     A check!  Rent skis!  What do you need the skis for?  To come down a mountain, right? Now if we lived on top of a mountain, there would be some sense; but since we live in Varnum Circle, Waltham, Massachusetts, where there isn't even snow this time of...

     Ma!

     They must transport you to this mountain…

     Ma, the bus is free.  The school pays!

     Pay      Who said that to her?

     Oh, that woman at the Sunshine Club.  Who played the harp.

     But first she must finish this.

     So they must transport you to this mountain, and then up the mountain, where you must rent skis to come down it!

     Ma!

     Usually he’d follow her in this. 

     and someone, somewhere has to pay for it.  Nothing’s free, speaks the great granddaughter of Enoch Rowan, a socialist since she’s seventeen.

     Here.  She says, taking up her bag and finding her last ten.   And get a hamburger if you want.  You see my logic, though?

     Yeah.  But going down is worth it.

     Hah.  You are my wonderful boy.  And I should appreciate the school lets you take college courses in the summer and all…

     Thanks, Ma, thanks!

     How can there be snow?  It’s April.

     Oh, there’s snow.  Or they make it.

     Make it!  And what can that cost!

     She shakes herself and takes her teacup to the sink.  She can’t be battling everything all the time.  She used to like the notion of going very fast over snow herself.  But the snow was never manufactured.

     This cross country skiing must be nice.  Why can’t you do that?

     Maybe when I’m old as you.

     Ah, yes.  Did Solie do her homework?

     I don’t think so.  I did mine.

     Solie.  She was first.  The first child comes and colonizes this world, fells the trees to make that first clearing, where the others come and settle comfortably, alert and curious, like Frostie; and babyish and playful like Benno; but never vigilant for tigers like the first.

     What did Solie pick up when she was sleeping in that bureau drawer on Spring Street?  That her mother worried about the world ending in nuclear disaster.  There must have been something communicated to her by the boxes stored everywhere with provisions, by the night alarms, the hastily called meetings, the arguments between David and Ross, between David and herself.  The house in Weston must have seemed to keep off the tigers.  She worried about the world, like her mother; but not in the same way.

It was a trying afternoon, I must say, Megan says to Margo, whose face is all blotchy.  And no one enjoyed it.  Except for the music.  And I'm sure I was the only one that listened.  Priscilla tried to get me something decent from the Bookmobile. I wanted something on Elizabeth the First, and all they have is this present Elizabeth.  World’s most boring woman.  All she cares about are dogs and horses.  Ought to let her son reign.  At least, they say, he has some other interests…     

The girl isn’t hearing a word she says.  And she’s only babbling on so that the poor creature can get a hold on herself so there isn’t a scene.

 

John The Indian arrives and sets up the sound system at the basement of St. Charles.  Young Ronnie chairs and asks the young man with the foot to read ‘How it Works’ out of the Big Book.  Never heard of periods or commas, seems.  All the results of our shoddy education system on display here.  But Henrietta admires them for taking on this difficult literature.  Bill Wilson liked big words and long sentences.  Any other organization she ever knew would have long ago modernized all this, taken out the references to the Depression, the iron lungs and all; and gender neutral pronouns, of course, even the Episcopalians have that…But we’ve more important things to…and it heartens her to see these, scruffy, half educated young men learn to read sitting around a table and reading the Big Book and the Step Book over and over like primers.      

For you never finished with them.  You started over.  Salutary for a reader of novels like herself.  Once, in her step group, she met a newcomer, a rather elegant woman like herself, who graduated from Radcliffe.  They finished up step twelve that night, and, she remembers, the woman asked her what they would read next.  We go back to step one, Henrietta told her.  My God, how boring, said the woman and she never came back.

Margo’s back with Adie in her geriatric…Who was it, Megan wonders, wrote that book on Mozart? 

She was the daughter of the singer Alma Gluck.  Oh, well, you wouldn’t know; you’re far too young.

     There’s something owed the young, too, Margo thinks.

     Why don’t they die?

     Lovey Mother, Adie yells

     What was her name? Megan asks herself.  It was the same, she’s thinking, as some town in Iowa…Davenport!  Yes, Marcia Davenport!  Megan says out loud, but Margo’s in the bathroom crying.  Adies’s hit her; didn’t want her corset off. 

     Margo tells herself that Adie doesn’t under…just it hurt her, catching the earpiece of her glasses, causing them to dig into her nose.  She’s overwrought, is all.  It’s no use blaming them.    

It wasn’t them that got you pregnant.  Of course not.  It’s she, herself, that’s thrown away her education, simply.  She can’t possibly go back until this baby’s out of diapers, and then her credits will be useless.

     Marcia Davenport was Alma Gluck’s mother, says Megan, marveling at her brain’s capacities.

     Two gentlemen of leisure, the Professor, badly listing, and the kid they call the Maggot, have taken themselves to dine at St. Charles Boromeo where the ladies of the Altar Guild are serving beans and franks.  The Professor chooses two pairs of trousers from the clothes box and holds them up.  Which of these, har, do you think the better?  he rolls his dirty eyeballs at Mary Regan, ladling beans.

 

 

Have to do an essay, Frostie, tells his mother, about who I think’s the greatest man our age. Hmm, Priscilla takes this up while getting out the casserole and sprinkling some extra cheese.  Churchill, Charles de Gaulle?   Chairman Mao, Adlai Stevenson…Priscilla wonders.   

You want to catch a pair of hummingbirds in coitus you need a slow motion camera, Megan tells Margo, who has almost thrown her dinner at her.  On the other hand, with frogs, the sexual embrace can last for weeks.

 Eulalie relaxes in her bath.  Alcide fed, in bed with the rails up, teeth in the container.  Helen Schade is coming in to watch him while she goes to choir.  She lifts a fine-boned ankle and admires her silky calf.  No hint of veins.  She remembers baths in the farmhouse kitchen in New Brunswick, the blackened copper tub, her sisters plaiting their hair in the steamy room and pressing their ruffled dresses with the tall black iron that you filled with stove coals… Oh, the farm was happiness.  But there were too many of them.  Not all could stay.  She and her sister Helene must come here to work.  How they wept that first winter on Cherry Street.  Walking the block to work in the dark, and home again in darkness, to wash her stockings, dry them on the sill.  Their hearts were always back there on the farm, the steaming kitchen, saving up their paychecks to return.  They always hoped they’d be asked to stay, but they never were.  Here was work, the Mill, Le Watch.  She cleaned the undersides of looms, then kept the spindles loaded, bettering herself; she walked demure down Moody Street, eyes on her lace up boots, and the young men’s eyes on her.

     Eulalie!  A voice in the steamy bath.

     Who calls?

     Your bust!

     Who?  What?

     Examine your bust, Eulalie!

     Dieu, who speaks!

     Above her right nipple, she finds it…size of a grape…heart stopped in the perspiring lilac tile, astes corruption.  Sacre!  Yes, it’s there.  No doubt.  Her mother’s voice, she recognized it.  Her lump found when she was fifty; killed her six years later.  She recalls the grotesque, swollen arm.  They cut it off to spare her the inert weight.  A dead thing, it preceded her to the grave.

     Giddy with quick breathing, she sits on the hopper, throws her wrapper over her.  Through the fabric she can’t feel it.

 

The two largest brains in history were Aknaton and Sir Isaac Newton, Megan tells Margo.  Newton’s brain is preserved in vinegar somewhere.

     The agency calls Margo back.

      I can’t, I can’t another minute.  I’m sick.  I’m going to kill someone!  

     They’re going to send Priscilla, they tell her.  She’s shaking all over she puts the pills in paper cups: Elavil to elevate, and Mellaril to ameliorate, and Restoril to restorate.  She always studies the literature that comes with them from the Pharmacy: Reduced libido, lowered sperm…laboratory trials show a count reduced to forty million sperm per cubic…Well, it’s only one you need, she thinks.

 Priscilla dozing when they call her in.  Frostie and his sister Solie gone up to the roof with Frostie’s telescope.  She’ll come, yes, till Rosa gets there at eleven, she tells them, but give her twenty minutes.  She clears the table and eats the bread crescents left on the plates.  Benno comes and winds himself around her.  To bed.  You must.  Mummy must go out again.

     No!

     Only for a couple hours.  Solie’s here.  Solie is his mother.  Fierce and vigilant for tigers.  Benno has interesting nightmares and always it is Solie who takes him in her bed.

     I might dream about the raccoon again.

     But raccoons are gentle animals.  They are vegetarians.

     What’s vegetarian?

     They eat carrots and tomatoes.  They steal from gardens.  It’s their only offense.

     What’s offense?

     Crime.  Well not crime.  We are the criminals.  We take all the space to grow the vegetables away from them.

     And put a fence.  That’s why it’s called offense.

     Well, maybe there’s a connection.

     The raccoon in my dream has pointed teeth.  I shine my flashlight at him and he has pointed teeth.

     That’s something you remember from when we lived with Daddy.  We heard a noise one night and Daddy went out with his flashlight to see and surprised some raccoons in the trash.

     Well, when I tell Solie the dream, she’s afraid with me.  And Daddy was afraid.

     No, he was just finding out what was the matter, and putting the lids on tight.  When you think of a raccoon, just think he’s hungry and wants to get your old peanut butter sandwich.

     And one was sick once.

     Oh, yes, I remember.  They came out of the Welfare once, when Benno was quite small, and there was a raccoon sitting on the stoop.  He was sick.  That was much more scary than the raccoon in the trash.  I didn’t want you to touch him because he might have been sick.

     And you went back in to get a piece of bread.

     Oh, yes.  She’d thought he either must be sick or hungry to be just sitting there on the stoop like one of the Welfare recipients. 

     Maybe he was just hungry, she says.   Did he eat the bread, do you remember?

     I think he did.

     I hope so.  Sick scares me, but pointed teeth don’t.  We have two pointed teeth.  She points to her cuspeds.  Come to bed now.  She gathers up his bones, his elbow in her as he fingers his cuspeds.  Then puts her uniform back on and goes up to call Solie down.  Who’s that?  she asks about the shadowy figure with Frostie.

     That’s Nelson Márquez.

     If he gets caught, he’ll go to jail.  It’s past the curfew.  Ah, well.  She can’t make everything right.

     Nelson Márquez, you go home!  she shouts nevertheless, into the darkness.  And to her daughter Soledad she says with even less hope:  You’ll do your homework please.  I have to work a couple hours.

     O.K.     She might and she might not, Priscilla thinks.  She’s failing history and science.  Her math grades are good however.  And she will make sure that Benno’s O.K.  That’s all she can count on.   People do what they want, she tells herself and tries to remember its how she operates herself.

They won’t cut her, not this body, Eulalie tells herself, and takes heart from this resolve, standing before the foggy mirror and repeating, Pas!

There’s a potluck supper at the Baptist Church on Lexington Street.  A talk and slide show on El Salvador.  The Reverend Thomas Withbroe.  The Professor dozes comfortably through it.       Helen Schade is come while Eulalie finishes dressing.  Puts on the TV and seats herself before it.   Eulalie, carrying corruption, says goodbye to Helen.  She’s put the urinal beside Alcide, will be back by ten, she tells her.  No hurry, says Helen comfortably.

The Professor snores softly in the slideshow dark.  

Ramona Márquez drags her son home, locks him up, and goes to services at La Iglesia de Cristo Misionera in the chapel of the Congregational Church.  The minute that she’s gone, he’s out the bathroom window to the roof of Building B, where Frostie’s left the door propped open.

Priscilla mounts her bike and coasts the block to Norumbega.  Martin Luther King, she’s thinking, was he the greatest man our age…?  But there were those before him, Dorothy Day, Thoreau… Well that was another century… A streetlight’s out in front of the Welfare, makes a sinister scene from out of some old black and white movie.  She skirts the Common with its warm lights and reassuring bus passengers at the south end, and goes straight up Moody without her morning detour over the little footbridge by the Mill.  She’s late, but thinks she’ll need some coffee to get through this shift and locks her bike to the stop sign outside the Waltham Spa and goes in to fill her thermos.  Eulalie’s there buying her fourth of a ticket for the lottery.  Did Alcide come back?  Priscilla asks.  He come back with police, Eulalie says, I hide his walker and then he go out again. 

He is impossible.

     Yes, impossible.  She wonders what accounts for deadness in Eulalie’s voice—usually she would cry, imposs i ble on a rising note.  Are you all right? Priscilla asks.  Eulalie turns her long and complicated French face with its massive ears and jowls and its slight tremor toward Priscilla, and there’s no seeing into it.  Of course. There is nothing the matter.  He is home with Helen Schade now and the rails up. Eulalie tells Priscilla.

     If that’s any guarantee of anything, Priscilla thinks.  Eulalie appears to have lost her sense of fun.  She sips some of her coffee, then puts it into her backpack and gets her bike and rides on, using the sidewalk here, though it’s forbidden for bicycles. 

It was on this block, just past the Irish Travel Bureau, a car came down Myrtle Street and sideswiped her, throwing her into a hedge.  The incident replays itself with variations on eighteen-wheelers; fortuitous hedges replaced by concrete or fences with iron spikes.  She shakes the scenes out of her head, pedaling vigorously up Adams Street.  Just a warning to her to be careful, that incident.  She is more careful now than in those days of scaling fences and lying down in front of massed policemen with truncheons.  She was never afraid then, never imagined real danger.  Still can’t.  It was all a drama, with a foregone conclusion…  It was all in the cause of peace and…Gandhi!  she thinks.  Gandhi, of course!  How could she not think of it?  Gandhi was the greatest man of our age.  S he locks her bike to the iron railing.  Margo’s got the door open and her jacket on.  You sick? Priscilla asks.

Yes, sick, I can’t…

     No, I have to get out of here, Margo cries, and she’s off down the street without giving report even.  Oh well, she’ll get it another day, or make it up.  None of them are above making up a report: quiet night, changed bed once, or:  restless night, changed bed three times…But what could be wrong with everyone tonight?    

She’s preggers, Megan tells her.  I can always tell.  Megan is on the couch with Opera News and a Public Television offering on.  Her eyes are bright with mischief, and Priscilla sees a hint of victory over Margo in them.  She avoids her for the time to tend to Adie, who has messed herself, and the laundry which is piling up.     She puts the load she finds in washer into dryer, loads the washer with what’s in the basket and puts Adie’s sheets to soak.  Yes, Gandhi, she thinks.  She wishes she could tell Frostie.  When she gets a minute, she’ll call.  Then she gets Winnie up and strong arms her on to the toilet.  Megan’s watching the news.  It seems the would-be assassin of the President is the son of a wealthy Texas oilman.  His apparent motive was to win the affection of a teen-aged movie actress that he’s never met.  My astronomer is on next, Megan tells her. We’ll watch it together.  OK, Priscilla says, walking Winnie back to bed.

Eulalia, carrying her new knowledge, crosses Spring Street, notes the green car pulled up at the circle: Leo Blakey, that Megan’s brother.  Good brother, that one, she thinks.  He never married.  Had his sister Winnie home with him until she took her stroke.  Funny, thinks Eulalie, how your life goes on, your thoughts go on in spite of…She hopes that Helen Shade will be all right with Alcide.  She still hears voices sometimes. 

Nelson Márquez, child of criminal tendency, encounters Frostie on the roof, pulls out his stash of stolen watches hidden in a hollow concrete block and passes one of them to Frostie.  La Schade has checked Eulalie’s fridge and eaten some olives, green.  She’s hearing voices telling her to steal some writing paper, write her sister Maddie, tell her some home truths. 

Frostie studies the cheap digital watch.  They’re stole from Woolworths, Nelson says.  Me and Dennis gonna move one.  Frostie’s figuring the economics: A coolie in Taiwan made maybe, twenty cents by its manufacture.  Woolworth’s buys it wholesale lots.  They, of course, are the losers when a kid like Nelson takes it off their hands, though of course they have insurance…   We get the money, we pay Ana for a fucking lesson, Nelson tells Frostie.  The establishment, in short, is robbed the value of one fuck, thinks Frostie, who’s his mother’s son.  A kind of justice, yes…  He focuses his telescope on Sirius in the Greater Dog.  He cannot see its dark companion.  Listen, Nelson, you think Dennis can?  I mean has he arrived at puberty? 

    At where?  

    Has he got hair, I mean, down there?

    Frostie, you are mad, his sister Solie says.

    I     Not really.

    You got?

    No, says Frostie.  I’m on the slow side.  The median age is twelve.

    And she, you sister?

    Solie, you got hair?  Kid wants to know.

    Hair where?

    Oh well, we know you got it on your head.

Leo Blakey comes up the steps to visit his sisters.  He goes in to Winnie first.  My name is Winnie Blakey and I live at number twenty Aspenwall, says Winnie by way of introduction. I know that, says her brother, aware that thirty years ago they lived at twenty Aspenwall.

     And who are you?

     Your brother Leo, Winnie.

     Well, pleased to know you.  I’ve been talking in my sleep they tell me.

     Have you?  So do I sometimes.

     They’re giving me a pill, the doctors.  Do they give you too?

     For talking in my sleep?  Oh, no, I just don’t tell them.

     They don’t like me doing it.  I wake them up and make them jump.  Say, what’s your name again?

     I’m Leo, Winnie.  Leo Blakey.

     Well, I’m sure it’s very nice to meet you.  Listen, there’s another thing.  I don’t tell

anyone…

     What is it, Sissy?

     There’s a lion in the tree out front.  A couchant lion.

     Is there now?

     Couchant, rampant.

     You don’t tell them though.  It’s wiser not.

     Oh, absolutely.  There’d be trouble.  What’s your name again?  You’re very kind.

     It’s Leo, Winnie.

      Well, wait a minute.

You want to see my armpits? Solie offers, then goes down to watch her brother Benno, having exacted a promise from Frostie to spell her later, so she can go to Nelson’s house.

What do you think, says Megan to Priscilla, this fuss about the presidential health? 

Now, Grover Cleveland had a cancer of the lip you know.  He smoked a pipe.  They operated on him out at sea in a hospital ship.  The public didn’t need to know the gristly details.  Yet one does, want to know.  At least in the case of someone interesting.  Most of them, including this present incumbent, aren’t of much interest.  I’ve heard enough already.  Was it you told me this afternoon I should try fiction?

Henrietta, leaning on her canes, awaits the bus from Roberts, sees it stop a block ahead of stop, and wonders will he pass her, runs out to wave.  Madame, you run in front of me…I might have…    

Chance I had to take.  You pass me by, I have to wait another hour.

And you stopped before the stop, she informs him. A bus is supposed to stop at stops!  Fumbling in her pocketbook for fare, she notes that he’s an Indian—bruised skin about the eyes, the loopy forelock. 

Yes, and Indian would be vague about the stops.  She sits, a little sorry—always had a soft spot for them—thinks she’ll ask his pardon later.  Let him stew a little first and learn to keep his wits about…

You ever wonder, Megan says, how birds copulate?

     Alcide wakes and sneezes, gets up and rummages in drawers.  Involved in her letter, Helen Schade doesn’t hear him.

      And there’s a traffic jam near Bemis.  Henrietta’s Indian has taken up a little reedy flute, is tootling one of those tiresome melodies that she remembers. Yes, he must calm himself, she thinks.  An Indian must always calm himself.  It’s odd.  She never knew one drive a bus—except, incompetently, in their own country.  They weren’t cut out for it.  This one is most likely a dreamy astrophysics student nights, or some such pursuit.

     The traffic is moving slowly past the old Murphy General Hospital—now housing overflow from the National Archives: papers of the Continental Congress, Indian Treaties, histories of the coastal forts and lighthouses, Daniel Webster’s papers, tax returns, patents on Paul Moody’s power loom, genealogies…  Yes, the Montague’s traced their ancestry to William Brewster; there were some other clergymen of note, but a surprising number of them came to no good end; one of her great uncles spend his prime in jail…

     There is stir among the passengers.  She looks out the window at an unfamiliar lighted square.  Where is she going?  She takes out her memo pad and asks her seatmate what day it is.  It is Tuesday, he says.  And this is supposedly a Bemis bus… Yes a Bemis bus.  She always takes it home after the meeting at St. Charles Borromeo; but it seems to be taking a different route.  I get off at Walnut, she says.

     Well, we’re nowhere near Walnut.

     Pardon me, but is this a Bemis bus?  a woman at the back calls out to the driver.

     No, I am Kenmore, says the driver pleasantly.  He has put his flute away and has found an open road, which he is plunging down with a bit of abandon which seems unwarranted.

     Kenmore.  We’re going to Kenmore.  We just passed Lewando’s Laundry, mutters the man beside Henrietta, and suddenly everyone is shouting at once:

     Bemis.  It says Bemis on your sign!  Just look!  God, we’re miles out of…this is crazy…

     The woman from the back has gone forward and is trying to correct his course, while he protests that he has always been a Kenmore bus, and reaches up to twirl the dial of his sign.

     No, you are Bemis! shouts the woman.  We are all Bemis passengers, and now we will all be late.

      It has already happened, sighs the man next to Henrietta, looking at his watch.

     He must stay calm, thinks Henrietta.  We must stay calm.

     But no one is calm.  The shouting woman finally convinces him to turn, so that they are bumping over streets that no bus ever took, with the woman browbeating him at every corner: turn here!  Turn here!  fuming through long red lights and bumping over curbs.  And now cars are honking at them.   We’re way into Watertown, says the man next to Henrietta.  A car is honking in the other lane, just below their window.  The man opens it, and they hear some words that sound like…hijacked!

      Are we hijacked?

     No, no, Henrietta’s seatmate shouts out the window.  Just an idiot.

     But he isn’t heard.  The bus comes to a sudden stop, throwing the instruction-giving woman into the driver’s lap.  Two police cruisers have parked in front of them.  The officers burst in and drag the driver out of his seat and onto the pavement.

     But he must have calm, thinks Henrietta.  And I was going to apologize to him.

     We’ve been driving all over two towns on a bus that says HELP.  Well, we needed help, didn’t we? says Henrietta reasonably.  You know I lived in India.  They are an extraordinary people.  They have a great deal of intelligence and talent, but some of them should not drive buses.

Alcide wakes and sneezes.   Marry her…thinks Alcide.  It’s the only answer.  He’s out of bed and rummaging in drawers.  Achoo!  But Helen Schade doesn’t hear it. She’s hearing voices speaking French or something, like those nurses at the State.  Haitians.  They were mostly Haitians.  Had last names that sounded like first names: L’Eveque Nancy was the woman who escorted them to the therapy, jingling her keys and opening the heavy doors that crashed behind.  She was nice. 

CONTINUED IN NEXT ISSUE