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  The two young men from Derry Medical Services got into their van and drove away.

  'Maine's the north-eastern anchor of Appalachia, Ralph - a lot of people don't realize that, but it's true - and May's dying of an Appalachian disease. The doctors call it Textile Lung.'

  'That's a shame. I guess she means a lot to you.'

  McGovern laughed ruefully. 'Nah. I visit her because she happens to be the last visible piece of my misspent youth. Sometimes I read to her and I always manage to get down one or two of her dry old oatmeal cookies, but that's about as far as it goes. My concern is safely selfish, I assure you.'

  Safely selfish, Ralph thought. What a really odd phrase. What a really McGovern phrase.

  'Never mind May,' McGovern said. 'The question on the lips of Americans everywhere is what we're going to do about you, Ralph. The whiskey didn't work, did it?'

  'No,' Ralph said. 'I'm afraid it didn't.'

  'To make a particularly apropos pun, did you give it a fair shot?'

  Ralph nodded.

  'Well, you have to do something about the bags under your eyes or you'll never land the lovely Lois.' McGovern studied Ralph's facial response to this and sighed. 'Not that funny, huh?'

  'Nope. It's been a long day.'

  'Sorry.'

  'It's okay.'

  They sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the comings and goings on their part of Harris Avenue. Three little girls were playing hopscotch in the Red Apple's parking lot across the street. Mrs Perrine stood nearby, straight as a sentry, watching them. A boy with his Red Sox cap turned around backward went past, bopping to the beat of his Walkman headset. Two kids were tossing a Frisbee back and forth in front of Lois's house. A dog barked. Somewhere a woman was yelling for Sam to get his sister and come inside. It was just the usual streetlife serenade, no more and no less, but to Ralph it all seemed strangely false. He supposed it was because he had gotten so used to seeing Harris Avenue empty lately.

  He turned to McGovern and said, 'You know what was just about the first thing I thought of when I saw you in the Red Apple parking lot this afternoon? In spite of everything else that was going on?'

  McGovern shook his head.

  'I wondered where the hell your hat was. The Panama. You looked very strange to me without it. Naked, almost. So come clean - where'd you stash the lid, son?'

  McGovern touched the top of his head, where the remaining strands of his baby-fine white hair were combed carefully left to right across his pink skull. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I missed it this morning. I almost always remember to drop it on the table by the front door when I come in, but it's not there. I suppose I put it down somewhere else this time and the exact locale has slipped my mind for the nonce. Give me another few years and I'll be wandering around in my underwear because I can't remember where I left my pants. All part of the wonderful aging experience, right, Ralph?'

  Ralph nodded and smiled, thinking to himself that of all the elderly people he knew - and he knew at least three dozen on a casual walk-in-the-park, hi-how-ya-doin basis - Bill McGovern bitched the most about getting on in years. He seemed to regard his vanished youth and recently departed middle age as a general would regard a couple of soldiers who desert on the eve of a big battle. He wasn't about to say such a thing, however. Everyone had their little eccentricities; being theatrically morbid about growing old was simply one of McGovern's.

  'Did I say something funny?' McGovern asked.

  'Pardon?'

  'You were smiling, so I thought I must have said something funny.' He sounded a bit touchy, especially for a man so fond of ribbing his upstairs neighbor about the pretty widow down the street, but Ralph reminded himself it had been a long day for McGovern, too.

  'I wasn't thinking about you at all,' Ralph said. 'I was thinking about how Carolyn used to say practically the same thing - that getting old was like getting a bad dessert at the end of a really fine meal.'

  This was at least half a lie. Carolyn had made the simile, but she had used it to describe the brain tumor that was killing her, not her life as a senior citizen. She hadn't been all that senior, anyway, just sixty-four when she died, and until the last six or eight weeks of her life, she had claimed to feel only half of that on most days.

  Across from them, the three girls who had been playing hopscotch approached the curb, looked both ways for traffic, then joined hands and ran across the street, laughing. For just a moment they looked to him as if they were surrounded by a gray glow - a nimbus that illuminated their cheeks and brows and laughing eyes like some strange, clarifying Saint Elmo's fire. A little frightened, Ralph squeezed his eyes shut and then popped them open again. The gray envelope he'd imagined around the trio of girls was gone, which was a relief, but he had to get some sleep soon. He had to.

  'Ralph?' McGovern's voice seemed to be coming from the far end of the porch, although he hadn't moved. 'You all right?'

  'Sure,' Ralph said. 'Thinking about Ed and Helen, that's all. Did you have any idea how screwy he was getting, Bill?'

  McGovern shook his head decisively. 'None whatsoever,' he said. 'And although I saw bruises on Helen from time to time, I always believed her stories about them. I don't like to consider myself a tremendously gullible person, but I may have to reassess my thinking on that score.'

  'What do you think will happen with them? Any predictions?'

  McGovern sighed and touched the top of his head with his fingertips, feeling for the missing Panama without realizing it. 'You know me, Ralph - I'm a cynic from a long line of them. I think it's very rare for ordinary human conflicts to resolve themselves the way they do on TV. In reality they just keep coming back, turning in diminishing circles until they finally disappear. Except disappearing isn't really what they do; they dry up, like mudpuddles in the sun.' McGovern paused and then added: 'And most of them leave the same scummy residue behind.'

  'Jesus,' Ralph said. 'That is cynical.'

  McGovern shrugged. 'Most retired teachers are cynical, Ralph. We see them come in, so young and so strong, so convinced that it's going to be different for them, and we see them make their messes and then paddle around in them, just as their parents and grandparents did. What I think is that Helen will go back to him, and Ed will do okay for awhile, and then he'll beat her up again and she'll leave again. It's like one of those sappy country-western songs they have on the juke out at Nicky's Lunch, and some people have to listen to that song a long, long time before they decide they don't want to hear it anymore. Helen's a bright young woman, though. I think one more verse is all she'll need.'

  'One more verse might be all she'll ever get,' Ralph said quietly. 'We're not talking about some drunk husband coming home on Friday night and beating his wife up because he lost his paycheck in a poker game and she dared to bitch about it.'

  'I know,' McGovern said, 'but you asked for my opinion and I gave it to you. I think Helen's going to need one more go-round before she can bring herself to call it off. And even then they're apt to keep on bumping up against each other. It's still a pretty small town.' He paused, squinting down the street. 'Oh, look,' he said, hoisting his left brow. 'Our Lois. She walks in beauty, like the night.'

  Ralph gave him an impatient look which McGovern either did not see or pretended not to. He got up, once again touching the tips of his fingers to the place where the Panama wasn't, and then went down the steps to meet her on the walk.

  'Lois!' McGovern cried, dropping to one knee before her and extending his hands theatrically. 'Would that our lives might be united by the starry bonds of love! Wed your fate to mine and let me whirl you away to climes various in the golden car of my affections!'

  'Gee, are you talking about a honeymoon or a one-night stand?' Lois asked, smiling uncertainly.

  Ralph poked McGovern in the back. 'Get up, fool,' he said, and took the small bag Lois was carrying. He looked inside and saw three cans of beer.

  McGovern got to his feet. 'Sorry, Lois,' he said. 'It was a combina
tion of summer twilight and your beauty. I plead temporary insanity, in other words.'

  Lois smiled at him, then turned to Ralph. 'I just heard what happened,' she said, 'and I hurried over as fast as I could. I was in Ludlow all afternoon, playing nickel-dime poker with the girls.' Ralph didn't have to look at McGovern to know his left eyebrow - the one that said Poker with the girls! How wonderfully, perfectly Our Lois! - would be hoisted to its maximum altitude. 'Is Helen all right?'

  'Yes,' Ralph said. 'Well, maybe not exactly all right - they're keeping her in the hospital overnight - but she's not in any danger.'

  'And the baby?'

  'Fine. Staying with a friend of Helen's.'

  'Well, come on up on the porch, you two, and tell me all about it.' She linked one arm through McGovern's, the other through Ralph's, and led them back up the walk. They mounted the porch steps that way, like two elderly musketeers with the woman whose affections they had vied for in the days of their youth held safely between them, and as Lois sat down in her rocking chair, the streetlights went on along Harris Avenue, glimmering in the dusk like a double rope of pearls.

  6

  Ralph fell asleep that night bare instants after his head hit the pillow, and came wide awake again at 3:30 a.m. on Friday morning. He knew immediately there was no question of going back to sleep; he might as well proceed directly to the wing-chair in the living room.

  He lay there a moment longer anyway, looking up into the dark and trying to catch the tail of the dream he'd been having. He couldn't do it. He could only remember that Ed had been in it . . . and Helen . . . and Rosalie, the dog he sometimes saw limping up or down Harris Avenue before Pete the paperboy showed up.

  Dorrance was in it, too. Don't forget him.

  Yes, right. And as if a key had turned in a lock, Ralph suddenly remembered the strange thing Dorrance had said during the confrontation between Ed and the heavyset man last year . . . the thing Ralph hadn't been able to remember earlier this evening. He, Ralph, had been holding Ed back, trying to keep him pinned against the bent hood of his car long enough for reason to reassert itself, and Dorrance had said (I wouldn't) that Ralph ought to stop touching him.

  'He said he couldn't see my hands anymore,' Ralph muttered, swinging his feet out of bed. 'That was it.'

  He sat where he was for a little while, head down, hair frizzed up wildly in back, his fingers laced loosely together between his thighs. At last he stepped into his slippers and shuffled into the living room. It was time to start waiting for the sun to come up.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  1

  Although cynics always sounded more plausible than the cockeyed optimists of the world, Ralph's experience had been that they were wrong at least as much of the time, if not more, and he was delighted to find that McGovern was wrong about Helen Deepneau - in her case, a single verse of 'The Beaten Up, Broken-Hearted Blues' seemed to have been enough.

  On Wednesday of the following week, just as Ralph was deciding he'd better track down the woman Helen had spoken with in the hospital (Tillbury, her name had been - Gretchen Tillbury) and try to make sure Helen was okay, he received a letter from her. The return address was simple - just Helen and Nat, High Ridge - but it was enough to relieve Ralph's mind considerably. He sat down in his chair on the porch, tore the end off the envelope, and shook out two sheets of lined paper crammed with Helen's back-slanted handwriting.

  Dear Ralph, [the letter began], I suppose by now you must be thinking I decided to be mad at you after all, but I really didn't. It's just that we're supposed to stay out of contact with everyone - by phone and letter - for the first few days. Rules of the house. I like this place very much, and so does Nat. Of course she does; there are at least six kids her age to crawl around with. As for me, I am finding more women who know what I've been through than I ever would have believed. I mean, you see the TV shows - Oprah Talks With Women Who Love Men Who Use Them For Punching Bags - but when it happens to you, you can't help feeling that it's happening in a way it's never happened to anyone else, in a way that's brand-new to the world. The relief of knowing that's not true is the best thing that's happened to me in a long, long time . . .

  She talked about the chores to which she had been assigned - working in the garden, helping to repaint an equipment shed, washing the storm windows with vinegar and water - and about Nat's adventures in learning to walk. The rest of the letter was about what had happened and what she intended to do about it, and it was here that Ralph for the first time really sensed the emotional turmoil Helen must be feeling, her worries about the future, and, counterbalancing these things, a formidable determination to do what was right for Nat . . . and for herself, too. Helen seemed to be just discovering that she also had a right to the right thing. Ralph was happy she had found out, but sad when he thought of all the dark times she must have trudged through in order to reach that simple insight.

  I'm going to divorce him, [she wrote.] Part of my mind (it sounds like my mother when it talks) just about howls when I put it that bluntly, but I'm tired of fooling myself about my situation. There's a lot of therapy out here, the kind of thing where people sit around in a circle and use up about four boxes of Kleenex an hour, but it all seems to come back to seeing things plain. In my case, the plain fact is that the man I married has been replaced by a dangerous paranoid. That he can sometimes he loving and sweet isn't the point but a distraction. I need to remember that the man who used to bring me hand-picked flowers now sometimes sits on the porch and talks to someone who isn't there, a man he calls 'the little bald doctor.' Isn't that a beaut? I think I have an idea of how all this started, Ralph, and when I see you I'll tell you, if you really want to hear.

  I should be back at the house on Harris Avenue (for awhile, anyway) by mid-September, if only to look for a job . . . but no more about that now, the whole subject scares me to death! I had a note from Ed - just a paragraph, but a great relief just the same - saying that he was staying at one of the cottages at the Hawking Labs compound in Fresh Harbor, and that he would honor the non-contact clause in the bail agreement. He said he was sorry for everything, but I didn't get any real sense of it, if he was. It's not that I was expecting tear-stains on the letter or a package with his ear in it, but . . . I don't know. It was as if he wasn't really apologizing at all, but just getting on the record. Does that make sense? He also included a $750 check, which seems to indicate he understands his responsibilities. That's good, but I think I'd have been happier to hear he was getting help with his mental problems. That should be his sentence, you know: eighteen months at hard therapy. I said that in group and several people laughed as if they thought I was joking. I wasn't.

  Sometimes I get these scary pictures in my head when I try to think of the future. I see us standing in line at Manna for a free meal, or me walking into the Third Street homeless shelter with Nat in my arms, wrapped in a blanket. When I think of that stuff I start to shake, and sometimes I cry. I know it's stupid; I've got a graduate degree in Library Science, for God's sake, but I can't help it. And do you know what I hold onto when those bad pictures come? What you said after you took me behind the counter in the Red Apple and sat me down. You told me that I had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, and I was going to get through this. I know I have one friend, at least. One very true friend.

  The letter was signed Love, Helen.

  Ralph wiped tears from the corners of his eyes - he cried at the drop of a hat just lately, it seemed; it probably came from being so goddam tired - and read the PS she had crammed in at the bottom of the sheet and up the right-hand margin: I'd love to have you come and visit, but men are off limits out here for reasons I'm sure you will understand. They even want us to be quiet about the exact location! H.

  Ralph sat for a minute or two with Helen's letter in his lap, looking out over Harris Avenue. It was the tag end of August now, still summer but the leaves of the poplars had begun to gleam silver when the wind stroked them and there was
the first touch of coolness in the air. The sign in the window of the Red Apple said SCHOOL SUPPLIES OF ALL TYPES! CHECK HERE FIRST! And, out by the Newport town line, in some big old farmhouse where battered women went to try and start putting their lives back together, Helen Deepneau was washing storm windows, getting them ready for another long winter.

  He slid the letter carefully back into its envelope, trying to remember how long Ed and Helen had been married. Six or seven years, he thought. Carolyn would have known for sure. How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? he asked himself. How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, 'I have to quit these peas, peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.'

  'A lot,' he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes again. 'A damn lot, that's what I think.'

  Suddenly he wanted very badly to see Helen, to repeat what she so well remembered hearing and what he could barely remember saying: You'll be okay, you'll get through this, you have a lot of friends in the neighborhood.

  'Take it to the bank,' Ralph said. Hearing from Helen seemed to have taken a great weight off his shoulders. He got up, put her letter in his back pocket, and started up Harris Avenue toward the picnic area on the Extension. If he was lucky, he could find Faye Chapin or Don Veazie and play a little chess.

  2

  His relief at hearing from Helen did nothing to alleviate Ralph's insomnia; the premature waking continued, and by Labor Day he was opening his eyes around 2:45 a.m. By the tenth of September - the day when Ed Deepneau was arrested again, this time along with fifteen others - Ralph's average night's sleep had shrunk to roughly three hours and he had begun to feel quite a little bit like something on a slide under a microscope. Just a lonely l'il protozoa, that's me, he thought as he sat in the wing-back chair, staring out at Harris Avenue, and wished he could laugh.