Three Stories Rosina Lippi All Rights Reserved Copyright 2007 I am making these stories available to my readers for

two reasons: because I am thankful to them for their support, and in honor of the first annual International PixelStained Technopeasant Day on April 23, 2007.

thanks to MaryDell for the graphic (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marydell/460536848/ )

If you enjoy these stories, please have a look at my other work. Complete lists at www.rosinalippi.com/weblog

Rosina Lippi A slightly different version of this story appeared under the title "Postcards from My Father" in Redbook June 1993.

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Lately, Claudia Busacca has been noticing that many of the old men she sees, on the street, in the grocery store, everywhere and anywhere she goes, resemble her father. In general, she thinks, there are just a lot of old Italian men around. They are easy to pick out: some are barrel shaped, with heavy heads of shaggy white hair; others have thinned away to a lumpy, hollow frame, so that a belt has to be hitched up high and tight. In the Greek diner out on Route One late on a Sunday morning, Claudia points out an old man of the first type to her husband. The man sits hunched over a newspaper, following the line of print with one thick finger. His glasses are smudged almost to the point of opacity. "Who does he remind you of?" Claudia asks Jeff, pointing with her chin. "An older Spencer Tracy?" She shakes her head. "Frank Sinatra, in a good toupe." "That's getting closer." "Ah, I get it. Another contestant for the Frank Busacca look-alike contest." Claudia smiles. "I just thought he looked very Italian." "All old men look Italian to you," Jeff replies. Back at home, the phone is ringing when they come in the door. It is Joe, Claudia's older brother, and this is his news: Dad hates all these pills because they make him faint, he isn't watching his salt, he's lost another ten pounds, and he won't let Joe move in with him to keep an eye out. She hangs up and immediately the phone rings under her hand. She concentrates on the vibration going up her arm. Then she picks it up. "Hi Daddy," she says. "That brother of yours," he greets her. This is the way it goes: a call from Joe, a call from Dad, then usually Joe again. After Claudia has had a chance to sort out her thoughts, she starts calling them back. "It might be cheaper to close down the shop and move it to Chicago," Jeff jokes sometimes when he catches a glance of the telephone bill in the confusion on Claudia's desk. He has yet to notice that she sees no humor in this. "What's this about your salt?" Claudia asks her father now. "What do you mean? I don't even have a salt shaker in the house anymore." He is indignant, huffy. Guilty. "Joe said something about a bacon and sauerkraut sandwich for breakfast." There is a rustling of paper on the other end, things are dropped. "Daddy, if you don't watch your salt, you're always going to be short of breath." "I'm short of breath even when I do," he says. This tone frightens her more than anything else; she has no way to respond to him that won't sound like her fear. "Sometimes I think you want me to live forever, but you don't want me to have any fun doing it," he says, finally.

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"Don't you want to live forever?" Claudia asks. "Of course I do," he says. Ten years ago, when Joe went into the navy and Claudia left for graduate school, the phone calls were different. Dad was the one with the questions that made her skin jump; he kept calling her back. Then he retired and bought a little pick-up truck and went out on the road for long weeks at a time. Even then the questions wouldn't stop: Claudia would get postcards of flimsy cardboard, fuzzy horizons against alarmingly blue skies, sometimes nothing but Daddy scrawled in pencil on the back, but usually with something to do or think about spelled out in clear terms: Call Joe, make nice, you only got one brother; or Transfer $500 from savings to checking; or, How many years will it take you to pay off your student loans? When Claudia first met Jeff, she had amused him with these postcards and with stories about her father, some her own, some family legend. They featured his temper, his sense of humor, or his adventures. Now, Jeff digs out his favorites when Claudia is especially worried about her father: anecdotes which he has altered ever so slightly, pieces of her life which he has digested into something new, his own. He feeds them to her in small doses, like medicine. "Do you remember what your father said when you got your master's?" Jeff asks that night in bed. She is curled on one side away from him. "He was afraid I wouldn't get a job. Or I wouldn't make any money if I did," she says, yawning. "He said that he and your mom must have had one heck of a smart iceman." Claudia turns over to face her husband. "He said milkman, not iceman." "Un-huh. I remember it clearly, I'm sure it was iceman." Milkman, Claudia thinks to herself. Milkman, Milkman, Milkman. She tries to swallow this, not wanting to have this discussion, not now. But then she can't let it go after all: the fact that Jeff has taken possession of this simple story so completely, that there is no more room for her in the telling of it, that fact irks. It itches. It irritates. So she tells him something she has never told him before: the end of the story. "Daddy always said that, about -- my parentage -- whenever I got a good report card." Jeff pushes himself up on one elbow to look at her. She has surprised him. "Did your Mom think it was funny?" "She laughed every time, she thought it was a great joke." "You didn't?" Jeff asks, a little put out. "No," Claudia replies. "I never did." When Jeff's breathing is even and steady, Claudia gets out of bed and pads softly out of the apartment and down the stairs. An inner door lets her into the bookshop which occupies the first floor of their home. She casts a quick glance around, the space slightly lit by the street lamp just outside. The bookcases which line the walls, the low shelves of toys and read-aloud books, everything is familiar and orderly and safe. She likes the shop best at night, when it is hers alone, when she doesn't have to tolerate customers looking at the books, every one of which she has picked for a purpose, when she doesn't have to see them be critical, dismissive, oblivious. In the

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day time, she takes over the office, the paperwork, the catalogs, and leaves the people part of things to Jeff. With her office door closed and the light on, she opens a file drawer. She has come down here, she tells herself, for her collection of postcards, but now she looks first through the bundle of stuff from graduate school: old seminar papers, her doctoral dissertation in its dusty black binding. It is both familiar and strange to her, like a child sent away in infancy who has now found its way home, unexpectedly, to look at her with judging and neglected eyes. Claudia finds the bundle of postcards. On top is the one which had been pinned up over her desk for the whole five years of her graduate education: a card from Rodeo Bob's Homestead Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, with a message printed carefully: What is that degree worth once you got it? Behind it is one postmarked the next day from The Breakfast Palace in Guadalupe, Arizona: We must have had a real intelligent milkman. In the morning the phone rings first thing when Claudia sits down to her desk in the shop. With a burst of Monday morning energy she snaps right to. "Green Gables, Children's Books." "Dr. Barton calling for Dr. Busacca," says a secretarial voice. "This is Claudia Busacca." "Hold please for Dr. Barton." She watches her fingers turn white on the receiver while she waits. It is Daddy's cardiologist; his report is short and very concise; she doesn't understand a word. She asks him to start again. "Maybe I've misunderstood," Dr. Barton says to her. "Your father says you're an MD?" "No," she says, and she finds herself smiling. "A Ph.D. But he thinks I should be allowed to practice medicine anyway." "Why yes," Dr. Barton says. "That sounds like your father, now that you mention it." He starts again, slower. Claudia tries to take notes, but after a while her pen slows, and then it stops. Perched on the uncomfortable bed in her dorm room Claudia had called her father, some years ago, to tell him that she had passed her qualifying exams. "Highest honors," she told him. "What do they give you for that? Any cash?" "No, Daddy, no cash." "You need some cash?" "You got some extra you want to send me?" He cleared his throat in a rush of satisfaction, always pleased when his children failed to ask for the things he wanted to give. He liked the challenge of forcing his good will on them.

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"Put it aside for a new pick-up. Or maybe Joe needs it, if you got some extra this month," Claudia suggested. "Joe's got a good job, tool and die is a good line," her father reminded her. "You want me to quit graduate school and learn how to cast drill bits?" "I want you should be there when I die," her father said. "Without me having to send you bus fare first." "I'll just show them my diploma," Claudia snapped back. "They let Ph.D.'s ride the bus for free." His laughter was hesitant, uneasy, and followed by a longer silence. "Well, I'll just put a little something in the mail," he said, finally. "You did a good job. Buy yourself a beer, celebrate." Her face hot with remorse and embarrassment, Claudia said: "Come on out here and drink that beer with me." "You find yourself a younger fella," her father told her. That night, in the bar in the basement of the graduate dorm, Claudia had met Jeff, who was wiry and very blond, who came from Baltimore where his mother, a widow, worked as a dispatcher for a trucking company, and who in four hours of intense conversation never once asked her what she was studying or who she was studying it with. The next morning Claudia found a postcard pushed under her door, Scenic Trenton by Night, and on its back her first real message from Jeff: I've been looking for a sane person willing to break out of this joint with me. After Dr. Barton gives her all the details, Claudia sits at her desk for a long time, listening to Jeff consulting with a customer on the right books for a four year old. He is cordial but not familiar; he is knowledgeable but not overbearing. He sells a great many books to this concerned grandmother, all hardcover. He comes into the office waving the charge slip over his head, a silly smile on his face. "Sneak literature into a daily diet of Ninja Turtles and get paid for it. Isn't this better than four sections of freshman composition?" he asks. Claudia doesn't answer. "Claudia?" Claudia wants to talk to Jeff, to tell him the things she has just learned, to make the sounds and the words which will set things in motion, but she can't. But it doesn't matter: without prompting, Jeff comes over and kneels beside the desk to put his arms around Claudia. The charge slip flutters, twisting to the ground: white, black, white, black. He doesn't watch to see it land, and Claudia remembers now why she married him. The morning Claudia and Jeff got married in the campus chapel, Daddy had called at five a.m. "Where are you?" she asked him, wide awake on the first ring.

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"Where do you think? Annapolis. Joe can't leave the base 'til six, we'll have some breakfast, and get on the road," he said. "You think we'd miss your wedding?" "I think you'd be late for it," Claudia replied. "You worried I'm gonna embarrass you?" Claudia thought of the wedding reception they had put together so carefully, the modest but elegant table of puff pastry and shrimp mousse, a sparkling wine which she could offer without wincing, mineral water with lemon, and a wedding cake layered with white chocolate and raspberries. "Daddy," she said. "Just don't be late." Putting on her wedding dress, an eighty year old relic Claudia had labored over until it deserved to be called antique, all she could think of was Daddy and Joe, headed up Route 1 toward Philadelphia in her father's pick-up truck, in a cab that smelled of peppermints and old vinyl. A half an hour after the ceremony should have begun, Claudia stood in the vestry with the priest, still waiting for Daddy and Joe, watching a summer storm which had come up without warning. The wind rose cool; the rain was warm; the two hundred year old oak that stood just in front of the chapel was struck by lightning and came down, just like that, in a tremendous crack and a flurry of leaves. At that moment, her ears still ringing, Claudia saw the pick-up truck pull into the no-parking zone next to the library; Daddy climbed out in his dusky black suit, the same suit he himself had been married in, with Joe close behind in his sailor's whites. "What a strange pair," the priest said, and then struck by an almost inadmissable thought, asked, hopefully: "That can't be them?" And Claudia was overwhelmed: by her anger at the priest who voiced so simply all the things she had been thinking; by her shame and frustration with her father and brother, who wandered toward them umbrella-less in the pouring rain, waving cheerfully as if they weren't late at all, as if what these people thought of them really didn't matter; and by the terrible clarity of her love for both of them. Watching her father and brother coming toward her, picking their way delicately over the fallen braches of the oak tree, both of them dripping rain, an urge came upon Claudia, icy-cold and clear: they would pile back into the cab of the pick-up truck, all four of them, Jeff too, and take off down the road. They would forget the church, forget the priest, leave the guests to eat mousse and drink wine on their own while discussing formalism as interpretation and ideology, and with rain streaming over the windows the four of them would drive off for places unknown, unnamed, while Vicki Carr played endlessly on her father's beloved eight track. This time Claudia calls Joe before he can call her. He is agitated, up in arms that there is nothing more to be done. "What about another surgery -- what about a heart transplant?" "Joe. He's seventy-four. He's at toxic levels on all his medications. He has diabetes, he has leukemia..." "Leukemia! Since when does he have leukemia?" "The doctor says it's not unusual, at his age."

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He digests this in silence. Then: "So what do we do now? Can they give him anything, so he can breathe?" "No," Claudia says. "There's nothing more to give him." Next, she calls her father, who wants to know exactly what the cardiologist had to say. "What do you think he said?" she asks, and curses herself for a coward. "Not much longer, huh?" She forces herself to answer. "He says by the end of the summer." It is August 15. Claudia and Jeff close the shop at 6:00 and trudge up the steps to home, continuing their discussion of inventory and airline schedules, temporary help and medicare, bookkeeping and cemetery plots. The phone begins to ring as they open the door. "I been thinking a lot about your mother," Daddy says, as if they were picking up a conversation interrupted only by a trip to the bathroom. "What about her?" "The summer Joe came along, it was hot like this and she was so big with him. I used to go and get her New York Cherry ice cream. It was her favorite. I haven't had New York Cherry ice cream in years and years. We sat out on the porch and ate ice cream until it was time to go to bed." "That's probably why Joe was such a moose, Dad." He laughs, and then he tries to catch his breath. Claudia attempts to breath for him, across the telephone line. Then when things get under control, he starts talking again. "I been thinking, Claudy. I never should have sold my pick-up." "No?" she says, wary now. "Jerry down the street wants to sell his, it's in good shape and he's not asking too much..." Next to Claudia, Jeff steps in closer, alarmed at the look on her face. She hushes him with an upheld palm. "... for Seattle, the climate out there does me good. Get out on the road again on my own, I'll be a whole new man." She feels the knot pull tight in herself and then she feels it break. "Don't you dare," she whispers. "Don't you dare." "I just thought..." "Dad," she says, her voice rising sharp, her panic pushing out words she will live with forever, until she is old and desperate herself, and her father's face has long since faded out of her memory. "You are being selfish and childish and foolish." "Maybe so," he says, and hangs up the phone. Jeff first suggests that Claudia call Joe, but when she rejects this out of hand and starts packing, he doesn't argue with her. Instead, he calls the airline and makes a reservation on the next plane.

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It gets her into Chicago at 11:35, thanks to the hour she's gained flying west. The cabby has a skinny neck in a collar that is too big, large knuckled hands, a concave chest. Joseph Manginelli, his license medallion reads. "My brother's name is Joe," Claudia tells him. "Yeah? You a Dago? You look like a Dago." "Yeah," Claudia says. "I'm a Dago." "So, you coming home from out of town?" "I'm just in to see my Dad," she says, her voice wobbling suddenly. "Then he brought you up right," the cabby says. "You come home to pay your respects. He brought you up right. I'll bet he sent you away to school, you must be a lawyer, a doctor, something like that." "Something like that," Claudia answers. Then she says, hopefully: "Do you know my Dad?" Claudia knows full well how ridiculous this question is, but she must ask it anyway. "Do you know Frank Busacca, used to sell Oldsmobiles on Lincoln Avenue at Northside Olds?" Joe Manginelli shifts in his seat, flexes one hand and then puts it back on the steering wheel. "No, can't say that I do," he answers. "Lotsa Dagos in this city. Your Dad sick, you coming home in the middle of the night?" "He's dying," Claudia says. He hands her a box of tissue over the seat. After a long time, when Claudia's crying has subsided, he speaks again. "He might not say it to you when you get there, but you done the right thing," the cabby says. "You remember that, when things get rough." Sometime later, the street lights begin to show Claudia familiar landmarks, and then she watches them go by her window: the boys' club where Joe played softball all summer long, the church where they were both confirmed, the Katie's Kwick Kut Beauty Parlor where her mother had her hair done every Friday afternoon. The Jewell Grocery looms up, brightly lit. She asks the cabby to pull over. "The address you give me is still three blocks away," he says. "I got to get something," Claudia says. "You want me to wait for you? I'll turn the meter off." "No," Claudia says. "I want to walk from here." "Maybe the neighbors ain't as friendly as they used to be." "So who is?" Claudia smiles at him. She finds the ice cream and then heads for home, the brown paper bag tucked into the crook of her arm, her suitcase in her other hand. At the flat, she fumbles for a minute with her keys, and her father opens the door for her. "What's that?" he asks, not in the least surprised to see her. "Ice cream. They didn't have New York Cherry, so I got you Peaches and Cream." "No salt, no liquid," he recites. "What's the matter?" Claudia says, her voice steady but her hands shaking. "You don't want to have any fun?"

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That night, Claudia sleeps in her girl's bed. She dreams of her father in an old pick-up truck. Together they are driving down a two-lane highway, the breeze washing through the open windows. This isn't the way they planned to go, but it doesn't seem to matter much; they drive on anyway. Sitting sideways on the bench seat, Claudia is content to watch her father grow younger with every mile, his hair darkening, his spine lengthening and straightening, his muscles gaining strength and definition, his eyes growing bright and his face smooth, until they look like brother and sister, until they are of the same age. Claudia wakes long past ten; she stumbles out of her room into an empty kitchen. She knows without looking that her father is not in the apartment, that she is alone. She tries to stay busy. She makes toast of Roman Meal bread, she puts the chipped saucer with its lump of margarine on the table, she makes coffee in the little aluminum pot. Over the sink her father has put up an index card with a thumb tack, on it he has printed No Liquids That Means Water. But Claudia goes to the freezer anyway. She gets out the icecream, which she puts on a plate of its own in the middle of the table. Finally she sits down at the table. The grey-marbled formica is slightly tacky, her bare forearms peel away from it reluctantly when she reaches for the sugar. The kitchen smells of olive oil and frying peppers, stale sponges and old newspapers. She butters her toast. The phone rings and she jumps as if bitten. "Hello?" she says, snatching the telephone from the wall in an awkward swoop. "Daddy?" "You know," her father's voice answers her. "When you and Jeff bought that bookstore I thought, all that schooling, to sell kids books." "Daddy? Daddy?" Claudia's voice catches. "Where are you?" "I mean, you could a done that here at home, you didn't need to go to graduate school for that." This causes her to pull up suddenly. "I thought you were glad the shop was doing so well." His breathing is hoarse and shallow. "I wanted you to be a professor, like you studied for." Claudia leans against the kitchen wall, bound to it by the kinked and coiled cord of the telephone. "Where are you?" she whispers. "Schneider's." Claudia has an immediate picture of him at the long, polished wood of the bar, hunched over on his stool, the ancient black telephone, its handset crusty with old spittle, cradled against his cheek. The only sentence which seems to live in Claudia's mind comes out of her mouth. "How is Mr. Schneider?" "Good. Monty's good." "What about Mrs. Schneider?" she asks.

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"Gloria's gone," her father says. "Oh. Cancer?" "Naw," Daddy says. "The guy who refilled the cigarette machine, she took off with him last month." The laughter which bursts out of Claudia causes her physical pain. She slides down the wall to sit curled on the floor, her knees hugged in to her chest, and laughs until her voice is hoarse. When her father comes through the door a half an hour later, thirty minutes to walk two blocks, winded, his face the color of sour milk, his lips almost blue, she is still against the wall, her arms slung around her knees. He falls into a chair, gasping. His hair stands up in spikes over a face which has been sucked dry, all loose skin and dewlaps, a rim of red under each eye. But he is neatly dressed: his shirt is clean and ironed, his shoes are polished. He has supplemented his suspenders with a piece of string through his belt loops to hold the folds of excess material in place. "You need a belt," Claudia tells her father, when his breathing has steadied. When it is clear that he will continue to breathe. "Waste of money," he whispers, and he starts to take pills out of the collection of bottles on the kitchen table to line them up in a row. Claudia waits a while; when it is clear he has nothing more to say, she begins. "You never told me that, back then," she says to him. "You never said a word about what I did with my degree." The fan hums to them as it continues on its arc through the room, casting a breeze which is gone before it gives any relief. "You didn't need me to tell you," he lifts one shoulder, impatient. "Your brother, now, you gotta point things out to Joe. He's like your mother." Claudia is suddenly short of breath. "Who am I like?" she asks; her voice sounds high and far away, a stranger's voice, a little girl's voice. Her father spoons into the melting icecream and then sticks his pills, two small red ones, a yellow one, three white ones, into the swirl of bone white and neon peach. "Not like your mother," he says. "Who am I like?" Claudia asks again, her forehead on her knees. "You're your father's daughter," he says. "No question." The linoleum is a brittle, speckled yellow; Claudia counts the red and green and blue drops that fall between her bare feet. When she is finally able to lift her head, she sees her father bend down to his spoon to sip softly at the icecream. Then he says: "I bought the pick-up truck." From his shirt pocket he takes out a worn key on a tarnished metal ring. He looks down at the key in his palm quizzically, as if he is not sure himself what door it might unlock. "How about we take a drive out into the country," he asks. Claudia responds: "I'm driving." Her father shrugs. "Whatever you want," he says. "What ever makes you happy." He tosses the key to Claudia; she catches it with her upheld hand.

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Rosina Lippi A slightly different version of this story appeared in Ploughshares.

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Maria flicks the IV line out of the way with the same movement she would use to shoo a fly and opens the King Arthur Flour Baker's Catalog while the new visiting nurse makes herself at home. This one's name is Corrine or maybe it is Doreen; she wears Spandex and polyester in icy greens and pale pinks. She smells of baby powder, Oil of Olay and rubbing alcohol. On her face is that soulful yet no-nonsense look the visiting nurses all share. And like all the nurses she moves through the house looking for what she needs until she finally sits down opposite Maria to bend her round, pale face over the bright red binder where all the details of this business of dying are recorded: grams of morphine, liters of saline, calories ingested, waste produced, and the aria of drugs, a litany of confounded expectations: compazine, emetrol, epoetin alfa, filgrastim, strontium-89, gemcitabine. Maria could recite most of this to Corrine-Doreen, but instead she turns her attention to King Arthur, and in his catalog she reads that there are some twenty different types of flour. There is stone-ground, hard red spring whole wheat, pumpernickel made of coarse ground rye berries, toasted amaranth which floats like feathers once the tiny grains have been popped. The nurse goes off to the bathroom; Maria never looks up. Trudy wanders in from the porch to flop down next to the couch and Maria lets a hand stray down to stroke her ears. Under her hand Trudy huffs and struggles to catch her next breath; she sounds awful, as if her erratic but eager heart is about to burst. The nurse appears at the door, one brow raised. "Are you in respiratory distress?" "No, that's just Trudy," says Maria. "My son's dog." "She needs medical attention." "She needs an entire new set of internal organs," corrects Maria. "She'll be fifteen in December." Trudy licks Maria's hand and settles down a bit. Her tail thumps once, twice. "We should weigh you," says the nurse. "And I need to check your IV port." "The IV port is ok, and yesterday I was down a pound from Friday." "Have you been taking your enzyme supplements?" Good bread, Maria reads, is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods. "Of course," she says. Ever since her final prognosis, people have been bringing Maria books. They fall into one of three classes: the serious, technical ones from those who cannot see her as anything but a lawyer; the frivolous, playful mysteries and love stories and thrillers from those who want to think of her as relaxed and cheerful during the process of dying; and the ones that get down to real business -- from her sister, Kbler-Ross's On Death and Dying and from her father, ever hopeful, Heal Yourself! His books are all about the power of the spirit and the potency of positive visualization. Maria considers telling this woman that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot visualize enzyme supplements at work. Instead Maria imagines pungent yeast growing warm and unchecked in dark, slippery caverns. Without any trouble at all, Maria visualizes her kitchen counter crowded with loaves of all shapes, thick slices spread

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with pale fresh butter, decked slabs of brie and mounds of calf's liver pt. She sees herself sitting there with her husband and son and her sister, her niece and her father. They are eating brioche, seven grain pumpernickel, Finnish sour rye, verterkake, dark herb bread, dry Italian rolls shaped like fat rosebuds. The nurse brings the scale to Maria and stands there with her arms crossed, waiting. In the end Maria gets off the couch and takes that long step up, but she keeps her gaze averted. Terraillon's scale has that accuracy professional cooks demand, she reads in her catalog. When every ounce counts. Another half pound has evaporated in the hot oven that is her cancer. Maria hears the pen scratching as the nurse writes down this number in the red binder at the bottom of a long list of such facts. When she is finally alone again, Maria negotiates the rest of the phone out from under piles of half-read books, unfinished letters, sticky spoons, squat brown pharmacy bottles, hypodermics in their crackly paper and plastic skins, and she dials the 800 number. From an amazed but thankful clerk Maria orders six kinds of flour, red wheat berries, rye flakes and masa harina cornmeal, black sesame, russian caraway, flax and poppy seeds, cake and grain yeasts, a grain mill, dough-rising baskets, baguette pans, wooden-handled baker's peels, covered ceramic baking dishes. There is a big blue sticker on the back of her catalog: You're the Boss, it reads. 100% satisfaction guaranteed. No questions. No quibbling. At the last minute Maria orders a set of measuring spoons and cups made not of plastic, but of copper and riveted to last a hundred years. She does not write down the total charged to her card or the order number, because she has broken out in a sweat and can no longer hold the pen. Maria falls asleep with the catalog open on her lap. When the door slams Maria wakes up. Trudy goes over to greet Sam, who is home from school without a single text book. Robert comes in behind him with a bag of Thai food and the mail and a briefcase too full to shut. Sam leans over the couch to kiss Maria's cheek and then he hangs his baseball cap on the IV stand. Robert puts the letters and the catalogs on her lap and disappears into the kitchen. Maria thinks of asking Robert to take her to a cafe, a movie, to visit a friend. She knows that he would be shocked enough at this request to put aside his weariness. It is months since she has left the house to go anywhere but the doctor's office or the hospital, her portable i.v. in its pouch slung over her shoulder, replacing the overstuffed workbag that occupied that spot for so many years. From the window behind the couch Maria can see her garden; she could sit there, where the flowers of high summer are coming into their own. The delphinium and foxglove and phlox are blossoming without any help from her. Or she could make a place for herself on the porch, and read her letters in the soft and forgiving early evening light. There is one from her father, one from a colleague spending a semester in Japan doing research for a comparative study of immigration policies. Another letter from a woman she once shared a hospital room with; she is in Mexico where she has found a greater variety of drugs and a world more open to speculation, now that there is nothing more to risk. There is a pointedly tacky postcard from her niece Dotty: young

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men with spectacular musculature lined up on a California beach to show off rear ends like so many cinnamon buns. Auntie M, it reads. I'm not in Kansas anymore. An old joke, but still Maria smiles. On the top of the new catalogs there is one from the Vermont Quilting Company and it draws her in: Maria is studies the combination of green and deep red in a Feathered Star, the symmetry of the Drunkard's Path, the delicacy and exacting, multilayered needlework of Japanese sashiko, the quirky juxtaposition of texture and shape in a silk and velvet crazy quilt. Annie calls just as she is about to reach for the phone. "You have quilts on every bed in your house," her sister says when Maria has told her what she has in mind. "Most of them antique, if I remember right." "I've never made a quilt," says Maria. "You've never run the Boston marathon either." "And I never will," Maria responds without a hitch. "But then I've never had any desire to do so." She finds herself to be both more fragile than she once was and in some things, more resilient. "I suppose you'd need a quilting frame." "Yup, I guess I would." "Let me ask you something." Maria slides down into her cushions, hunches over and covers herself with them as if the couch were a car headed for a brick wall with the gas pedal stuck firmly to the floor. Annie says, "Where exactly are you going to put this frame? I mean, in relationship to the new loom, the potters wheel, and the silk screening stuff." Maria knows that Robert is listening at the kitchen door. She says, "Room is the least of my problems. And, anyway, why shouldn't I have what makes me happy? Why is that a problem?" Annie is quiet, gathering her thoughts. "Time is your problem, Maria-May. Can we talk about that?" "Later," Maria says. "Tomorrow." "I'll come down on Friday night. Will you still be there to talk to?" "I have every intention of being here," says Maria. "Where would I go?" In the kitchen Robert and Sam eat ginger coconut chicken and pad thai. From where she is, Maria can hear the sound of knives grinding against stoneware, the click of forks against teeth, like castanets, like cymbals. Jaws working, working. Moist smacking, tongues clicking. The gnash of molars, liquid swallowing. When she can't stand it for one more minute, Maria stomps to the kitchen door and gives it a hard push. It swings twice. Slap. Slap. Comes to rest, closed. There is sudden silence on the other side. Good, she thinks. Good. Back on her couch, Maria dials the Vermont Quilting Company 800 number and orders yards and yards of fabrics, needles, batting, templates, cotton and silk and wool threads, and a quilting frame big enough to fill up a quarter of the family room. Robert brings her a tray: oatmeal with butter, heavy cream, brown sugar. A vanilla and almond butter milk shake made with Haagen Daz and protein powder. With some

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strange, dry satisfaction Robert dares anybody who might be keeping track to fit more calories into a glass. While Maria tries, truly tries, to get down what Robert has made for her, they talk about his day, about the judge's ruling which will make his life more difficult; about the client with more ethics than good sense or money. He asks her real questions; she was once a tax lawyer, after all, and that was not so long ago. Maria tries to pay attention; she pulls her lap blanket up over the pile of catalogs and listens with that weight on her upper legs. She is reminded of the soggy warm gravity of her son as a baby. "Dr. Despande called me at the office today," Robert says, cautiously. "Yes?" says Maria, raising an eyebrow. "She's concerned." Maria shrugs. "And well she should be," she says, going for the smile. "She brought up the h word again." "No," Maria says. "No hospice." Robert pauses. "The school called, too. He spends all his time drawing. He hasnt done homework in weeks." Maria looks up at the far wall, which is covered with Sams drawings. "I'll talk to him." "Will you?" This is the closest he will come to an accusation. Robert leaves with the tray, careful not to point out to Maria how much or how little she has eaten. Sam comes in with Trudy paddling behind. Without looking at his mother he goes to the opposite wall and pins up two new sketches. He is not fussy about his medium: some of these drawings of Maria are watercolor or charcoals but most are in ballpoint, or pencil, on cheap notebook paper. He has two new ones today. One of them in ballpoint pen, very small, in which Maria's eyes have swallowed most of her face; the other in red pencil, in which she is composed not of lines, but of clouds of hacheted shadow, of shadows and the lack of shadows. A mother of cumulus clouds. "So I hear homework is an issue," Maria says, trying for a conversational tone. Sam kicks at a pile of unopened boxes: clay and glazes, pottery supplies. He doesn't look at Maria, he looks at his pictures of Maria. "There's only so much energy available to me, you know," she tells him finally. "So maybe you shouldn't spend it slamming doors." Maria inclines her head, holds it there. Sam seems to accept this as an apology. "So what do you think?" he asks, shrugging his shoulder toward his artwork. If she squints, the wall of sketches turns into a crazy quilt of another kind, a strange landscape her son has created for her. Multiple versions of herself. Pick a mother, she thinks. Any mother. Any healthy mother, she corrects herself. "The three tenets of modernism," says Maria. "I knew them once, but I can only remember one." Somehow she has said the right thing: Sam comes to sit on the edge of the couch which has become Maria's daybed, her desk, her lifeboat, and his eyes scan the wall. "So what is it?" Maria slips her bony arms around her son's waist. He smells of shampoo, ginger, sweat. Where the hair meets his neck above a fraying collar she sees the last little bit of

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the strawberry mark he was born with. It has faded away almost completely. This strikes Maria as incredibly sad, her boy baby on the verge. She touches his neck with her nose. "The tenet of modernism," he prompts her. "You can never paint the same figure twice." Sam snorts. "Watch me," he says. Lately Maria sleeps only in short stretches, as long as it takes for her morphine to fade away. At three a.m., when the fists in her abdomen, in her pelvis, in her spine start to clench again, finger by finger, she takes her pills, goes to the bathroom, and then sits on the edge of the bed watching Robert dream. His sleep is so deep and focused that Maria is amazed and envious, but she is not surprised. It has nothing to do with how hard he works, how long his hours, how deep his sorrow and frustration. He has always been like this; there is no alarm clock that can wake him. Maria was once amused by Robert's unflappability. She once admired, grudgingly, his unflinching dedication to the sleep he needed. Robert mutters and turns in his sleep, and Maria notices that the quilt he pulls closer around his shoulders is frayed at the hem. The good quilt is downstairs on the family room couch. Little by little she has transported every photo, every book, every piece of pottery, every comfortable sweater or blanket down to that room. This bed -she has slept in it for all the twenty years of her marriage -- is strange to her now, made with the second best sheets and a quilt she has never much liked. Maria imagines farm women long dead who pieced together the blocks, who stretched the layers out between them and stitched them together. Maria doesn't know their names. She wonders if anybody does. In the closet there are three very large boxes from Cuddledown of Maine. Maria put in the order in the spring, after a particularly frank discussion with Dr. Despande. She had chosen the Cuddledown catalog because she could visualize it: somewhere in the vicinity of Portland, where hard winters taught people about the value of a wellmade bed. Three in the morning and she had imagined a young man who could not get through college without working terrible hours at unfulfilling jobs. When she dialed the 800 number he was there, waiting for her call. His name was Seth. From her catalog studded with sticky notes, Maria had ordered the World's Best Merino Wool Fleece Mattress Pad, and then without hesitation, the Ultimate Luxury Eiderdown and Arctic Goose Comforter. There was a pause on the other end. Seth wanted to be polite, she could sense that about him. He was very thankful when she offered him her platinum card number for purposes of confirmation. In just a minute Seth had come back on the line with a new level of energy in his voice, and why not? Maria had just bought a fifty-three ounce comforter for four thousand dollars. This figure should have shocked her, but instead she wondered what his commission might be, how much of her four thousand dollars he would get to take home. "Will you be needing sheets?" Seth had asked her. Maria ordered Italian linen and silk sheets and pillow cases and comforter covers, three-hundred-thirty thread count, jacquard woven. Three sets, with double gigluccio stitched hems.

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"What are you studying?" she asked Seth, once she felt they knew each other a little better. "Maritime science." Poor Seth, out of his depth in cold northern waters. She ordered a one hundred percent cashmere blanket. "These things will go out by federal express tomorrow, you should have them the day after," Seth had promised her. "Will that be soon enough, Mrs. Crowley?" "Oh I think so," Maria had said. "I surely hope so." They ended with a clumsy pause, and Maria was reminded of her indiscriminately affectionate mid-twenties, of disco hopping on Rush Street while she was a law student in Chicago, of saying awkward good mornings and then fluid goodbyes to young men like Seth. In those days when partings got easier with practice. From downstairs Maria hears nervous bumps and rattles and so she goes down, fully awake, to visit the other insomniac in the family. Trudy's harsh breathing can be heard from the top of the stairs; she rattles around the kitchen in the dark as if her life depended on never stopping. Maria turns on the overhead lights. She stands blinking as Trudy comes to a halt in front of her, her sides heaving. Trudy is in real trouble now, that is clear. Maria wonders if she should wake Robert, or call the vet. But she knows too that it is not the vet that Trudy wants; she would be as welcome as Dr. Despande at this moment. "Sorry I'm not Sam," Maria says softly, and Trudy moans in reply. She bends over to rub Trudy's head, and without warning her vision darkens; she grasps her i.v. pole and the door frame and tries to steady herself. She imagines dying here holding on to Trudy. Somehow that idea wouldn't seem so awful, if it weren't for Robert or Sam finding the mess. With little grunts she cannot control, Maria focuses on pulling herself up and she finds her way to a chair. When she manages to look up again, Sam is standing in the doorway. Her son is looking between Maria and Trudy with a deep sleepy confusion and something bordering on distrust, as if they had been plotting something together, something interesting and important from which they intend to exclude him. Trudy's breathing, underscored with a low whimper, makes Sam draw his shoulders up and turn to his mother. "Is she dying now?" There are hectic blushes rising on his face and neck. Sam kneels down next to his dog, and Trudy, always first and foremost Sam's animal, collapses against his bare legs. From there she looks up at him with an expression of utter relief and thankfulness. After a long time, Sam stands up. He turns to his mother and he smiles, a shy smile, apologetic. "That wasn't so bad," Sam says to her. "She's alright now." And then he says just what Maria has been thinking. He surprises her with that. "Do you think we could bury her in the garden when the time comes? She likes the garden." "Yes," says Maria. "She does. Yes, we can."

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"That way we'll be able to keep an eye on her." Sam looks down at Trudy. "Of course, we couldn't ever move away," he says, thoughtfully. "We couldn't leave her behind." Maria thinks of the years to come, how one day Sam will move on and leave Trudy behind in the garden, how he most probably won't think much about her on the day he goes; he will be looking forward to college, or an apartment, or a lover. How right that will be, then and there. Maria nods, because she dare not speak. Two in the morning, and still sleep will not come and so Maria sits in bed and watches the Personal Shopping Network. A woman named Gemma-Lee is selling Black Hills Leaf Band 10K gold rings worth $119.95 for just $39.99. "Look at the way it catches the light," says Gemma-Lee, flashing the ring under the eye of the camera. "Pure elegance." Christine from Wichita, Kansas calls in to order her ring: she and Gemma-Lee are acquainted, it seems, and they laugh together like sisters. "High time!" says Gemma-Lee. "What took you so long?" Maria pulls the quilt over her head and the light from the television shines through it and turns her pale skin an unacceptable shade of green. Maria lets the soft cotton of the quilt cover her face. It smells of Robert, of lavender, of herself. Long ago, an Amish woman may have died under this quilt, but Maria discovers that she does not want to. Perhaps it is time to get out the boxes Seth sent her from Maine. She will have to ask Robert to help her. Linda from Little Neck, Long Island has called in to list for Gemma-Lee all the Black Hills gold she has bought, the brooches and necklaces and bracelets. "What do you think of this gorgeous thing?" Gemma-Lee prompts. "That ring," says Linda, "is exactly what I need to be happy."

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Rosina Lippi All Rights Reserved A slightly different version of this story appeared in Glimmer Train Stories.

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Among the photographs on the study wall, weddings and family reunions, grandchildren, there is one that everyone takes a second look at. Almost everybody says the same thing, getting up close, maybe taking off their glasses: they all think it's from LIFE magazine. Most people stop then, but some come on out with it and ask who that is there with Roy. It is a striking picture. Roy, a young man then with a head full of wavy hair, wiry in his khakis, leaning out of an army jeep. His sleeves are turned up. One boot, the one out of the jeep on the cobblestones, is untied. He is reaching out to a dark haired woman who is leaning toward him. They are laughing. It is Vienna, VJ Day, August 7, 1945. I look at this picture everyday and sometimes, somehow I forget that it isn't a page from LIFE magazine. I see a young man who is a stranger to me in the deep tones and sharp contrasts of an old photo and I admire the lighting, the composition, the line of her back and arm as she leans in. I have taken some photography classes at a junior college, and in the basement I have a small darkroom, nothing fancy. Some of the black and white photos on the study wall are mine, but not this one. Roy came home about a year after that picture was taken, but he didn't leave the army behind him. Every year he went back to it, every third weekend and two weeks in the summer. I stayed home with our children, two boys and a girl. In twenty-five years, we never had a family vacation, but he made it up to them in other ways. Little League, boyscouts, PTA; he helped our Ginny build her own doll house when she was nine. She still has it. When the children were older and he had been on the job twenty years we'd have a little time away once in a while: a cabin in Wisconsin, once a weekend in Montreal. At night we would lie in bed, holding hands, and we would talk. Mostly about work, the children, the bills. But sometimes Roy would talk about retirement, from the office, from the army. We would spend our time touring the world, jumping rides on army transports as a retired reserve officer was entitled to do: Hawaii, Japan, Australia. Austria. Her name is Martine. When he came to Vienna with Army Intelligence in late May of 1945 just two weeks after the Germans surrendered, she was his first contact, his community liaison and translator. He wrote to me about her that very first day. I still have the letter. We keep things in this family: the confetti from our wedding, the children's baby clothes, all their toys, their scribbles and drawings, old ration books, show bills, uniforms. My early attempts at pottery. Roy has some of the worst of them on his workbench holding nails and bolts and washers. This particular letter was longer than his usual ones, although he did tend to write chatty letters. Martine was kind to him, had taken him home that first week of working together. She had two children and her husband had been killed in a concentration camp; he was Jewish, a lawyer. Somehow she had managed to stay out until almost

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the very end and she had managed to save her girls, but the house they had on the outskirts of the city had been bombed. When I think of that house the way he described it, dust sifting down from what was left of the roof, the windows covered in newspaper to keep out the wind, it doesn't surprise me that they became friends in that last summer of the war. Roy has always been easy around women; he strikes up friendships with them as quickly as he does with men. And she had a house falling down around her ears, and two little girls, and numbers tattooed on her forearm. It doesn't surprise me at all. I am sixty-four years old and I have never been very far from home. Somehow I am standing here with my husband; there is a suitcase next to me. It is January in Chicago and we are wearing our heaviest coats, but there are transports scheduled today and this is our plan: to fly west to where it is warm, Hawaii, the South Pacific, and then to find our way around to Europe, and to Austria. Martine loved the sun, he says; we will write to her from someplace with palm trees to tell her we are coming. The private behind the desk in the hangar is very polite: yes sir, she says to Roy's low inquiry, of course sir. We sit on folding metal chairs near a small space heater; there will be a wait; there is always a wait. We can see our plane on the other side of the hangar: a single mechanic is banging at something on the underside of the wing lackadaisically. Nearer to us another plane is being loaded with cases and boxes and bags. We can see someone in the cockpit, writing on a clipboard. I lean over to the young woman at the desk. "Where is that plane going?" I ask. "Munich, ma'am." She smiles at me as I feel my heart take up an extra beat. Roy and I look at each other, and I see that he had already known about this transport. It seems to me, now as I get old, that every once in a while something--fate or destiny, or God, once I might have said God-- takes your hand and leads you off to places you would rather not go. Now, seated in this plane with boxes of supplies and bags of mail and a jeep (they drove it right up a ramp and into the belly of the plane; I can reach out and touch a headlight if I like), flying east instead of west, I am afraid. There is no service on a transport like this: I take out the food I have packed to tide us over, but Roy has fallen asleep and so I wrap his sandwich up again and turn to look out the window over the drab green of the wing while I eat. In this bag I have everything I can imagine to be necessary for an adventure; as we travel the world we will not lack handcream or small clothespins to hang up our washing. In a leather portfolio I have my special things: a few postcards I especially like, one of them a study of Drer's, the praying hands; my own photos of the children: our oldest, Ginny, with her husband and little boy; Carl and his wife and two girls; and Mark with Andrea--they are expecting their first baby. I look briefly into my notebook and address book and then I check my small stock of writing paper, envelopes, pens and pencils. We were once great letter writers, both of us. I think it was that discovery, the summer when Roy went to work on his uncle's farm in Wisconsin, that really brought us

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together. The first letter I have from him was dated June 1940, postmarked Deep Lake, written before we were engaged but after we had gone together into the darkness of trying to please each other. And then there are all the letters from the war: the ones written from England, and thirty-two letters from Vienna; I think it would come to about two a month. The first one came in May, 1944 and I tore it trying to get it out of the envelope: it had been weeks since I had heard from him and my hands shook in relief and vexation. For me the war was only this: living from letter to letter, taking my nourishment from thin sheets of cheap paper that came in envelopes covered with cryptic notations from censors and clerks. The last letter Roy wrote from Vienna came to me on a Saturday morning in late August, 1946. I can see myself as I stood on the porch with it in my hands, starring at my own name in his large, back-slanted hand. I wasn't aware then that he had already started on his way home. It was a sunny, clear day and I could see the crease in the mailman's trousers as he walked away from the house. I rocked on the porch for a long time with the letter unopened in my lap; eventually I got up and went in to start the ironing, but first I put it away just as it was in the top drawer of my dresser. The next day when Roy stepped out of the cab without any warning it was in the drawer, unopened, and it is unopened still. Roy never wrote me another letter. Driving toward Vienna in a rental car, we cross the border into Austria. The highway is nearly empty and the mountains are bright with snow, dull with evergreen. We have slept well and eaten a breakfast of rolls and butter and coffee, and now we are on our way, the map on the seat between us. Somehow over the years we have gotten into a habit which sets us off from our friends and the people we grew up with: if we are alone in the car, I always drive and Roy always navigates. If you ask Roy why this is he will say that when he drives I spend all my time watching him watch the road; it has gotten many laughs over dinner, that line. I suppose it is true that I am not trusting when I sit in the passenger's seat; but all these years Roy has never noticed that it is not him I am watching, but the drivers around us, people we do not know, people with blank faces, who are nothing and everything to us as we go to the store for groceries, drive our grandchildren to the zoo. My boys still tease me about this, but Ginny understood from the beginning. I remember driving to Wisconsin in the middle of a winter storm: we sat together in the back seat with her Jay in the car seat between us and our heads bent together into a tent over him, watching the traffic. I remember the brush of her hair against my cheek as we watched the road, the snow, the trucks; her husband worked the clutch and gas and break with a light touch while Roy hunched over the map next to him. We have been quiet for a while; I am intent on the road, the strangeness of the signs, the newness of the car. Roy watches Austria fly past. "Have we driven past Dachau?" I ask. "Dachau?" Roy echoes.

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He doesn't answer me for a long time. Then: "I think it's over on the other side of Munich. You don't want to see Dachau, do you?" I try to list for myself the things I would like to see. The village where Richard the Lionhearted was kept for ransom. In Vienna the big ferris wheel, the old city, the museums with their Holbeins and Drers and Klimts. Maybe the Spanish riding horses. I think of my old address book safe in the leather portfolio: Martine Rosenfeld 13 Dreikugelgasse VI Hatlersdorf bei Wien and in the column meant to keep track of Christmas card exchanges: sent '46 '47 '48 '49 '50 '51 '52 '53 '54 '55 '56 '57 rec. '46 '47' 48 '49 '50 '51 - '53 - '55 - In '53 Martine wrote that she was remarried; in '55 she sent a picture of her new daughter. Then nothing. Roy turns to me and puts his hand on my leg. We are driving through Linz and the sky is angry with smoke and fumes; a city of furnaces and factories. In his letters from Vienna, Roy was constantly trying to rebuild some part of Martine's house, but scavenging the materials was difficult and it was a big project. I imagined him on the telephone, calling in favors, making deals, drawing up plans. He has always been good with his hands, and quick to see that a job needed doing. And when there was nothing to fix, no leaky faucets, no loose wires, he would make up little projects. All of our closets are fitted with special shelves for shoes; in the study the bookshelves are sized to fit six different book sizes; in the kitchen every box and bottle and canister has a special niche. The boys each have treasure chests of oak with secret compartments and sliding doors on drawers of varied sizes. When Ginny was nine she and Roy built a doll house out in the garage. They spent hours at his workbench; from the kitchen window I could see them, his dark head bent over hers, his arms around her shoulders as he showed her how to steady the saw, how to balance it. In the end she did every little bit of it herself. Roy wouldn't step in when she got frustrated; at the most he would reach in and put one large hand over her small soft one to move it a bit, to make her relax her grip. And he would talk to her, calmly explain things again, show what she needed to do to get it right. Sometimes she would howl in frustration and then he would tell her to put things down, it was time for a break. They had many dishes of ice cream that summer on the kitchen step talking in low voices about the virtues of two bedrooms and a nursery versus three smaller bedrooms and a den, open walls or closed walls, paint or wallpaper. From her father Ginny learned to build things to care about, and to take responsibility for the things she created; I tried to teach her those lessons I struggle with

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myself every day: when to be patient with herself, and how to tell the difference between the caution that sustains life and the fear that can devour it. We decide it is time to stop for lunch. We drive off the main road into a small town, maybe you would call it a village, but it is not very picturesque. There is very little traffic here; we decide that it must be a holiday of some sort. On the main square in the center of town there are two public houses and we go into the one that looks older. The hallway has a low ceiling and it is very bright with firelight reflected in oak panelling. Off to the left is the dining room, we take a table near a massive oven tiled in bottle green and Roy orders lunch from a waitress who does not speak English. When he stumbles a bit my four semesters of evening school German prove to be some good after all. Over our food Roy tells me a story about Martine. It is a story I know well, but I let him talk. I try to remember that he must be scared too. It is about the time they interrogated a small man who had seemed so harmless, but who had told them things which gave them nightmares; I close my eyes and I see Roy sitting low in his chair behind the desk, taking notes, struggling to keep his composure, and Martine, sitting on the edge of the desk in front of the prisoner. Her voice grows softer and softer until it threatens to fade away altogether. The summer that Ginny was sixteen we had a recurring argument. In itself this wasn't surprising: we are very much alike, both stubborn. From the time she could get around on her own we have been pulling at each other, but this was different. Now, looking back at Ginny as she was that summer when everything about me irritated her and I found myself observed from angles I never knew existed, I see that there are times when a girl must negate her mother to find the woman in herself. She asked me hard questions about Martine; she accused me of being afraid of the truth. I don't understand, she would say, how can you let him talk about her? My answers never satisfied her. Ginny did not really want to hear about my anger, but she needed to show me her own. Then one day Ginny looked me straight in the eye with fierce concentration and asked why I had never just taken down that picture and thrown it away. This is what I could not explain: Roy is my husband, but Martine has been my silent partner for forty years. Roy consults the map once again and calculates another hour and a half on the road. An hour later we are in the outskirts of Vienna and the car starts to hitch and buck. We pull off the road and Roy has a look; he is not happy. We find a telephone and begin negotiating through a series of voices and languages to find help. It is midafternoon on a sunny winter day, and we sit in a small coffee house waiting for the tow truck. Suddenly I relax: things have been taken out of our hands for the moment; the coffee is very good; there is a fire and the room is warm. This is a

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guest house; the small sign outside says there is a free room upstairs, undoubtedly with a soft, shapeless featherbed. This is comforting: I think of release from this relentless course we have somehow set ourselves. We could take the room, get a good night's sleep. The postcard was never sent; tonight, after a good meal and a long walk in the snow we could call ahead. "Wait," Roy says, turning to me. "What about a taxi?" This is the difference between us: Roy runs at things full on, and I let them run at me. I have another photo with me, another old photo in black and white. It is Martine's house, just before Roy left Vienna in 1946, as he rebuilt it. The walls are thick and stuccoed white, the eaves of the roof reach low over deep-set window casements. The garden next to the house is dense and green and roses bloom over the wall. Now as we pull up in a taxi, the house hasn't changed at all, only the roses are missing and the garden is lost in snow. I look again and see other differences: curtains at the windows; in the photo the front door was some kind of wood, now it is painted dark green. Pebbles crunch underfoot as we make our way. It is very cold. Standing here on Martine's doorway I realize that I am a ghost to her, that she is about to be frightened, maybe as frightened as I am. Roy takes my hand and when I look in his eyes I see terror and elation; suddenly, I am released from my own fear. He is offering me a distraction, and I take it: I squeeze his hand. When she opens the door I feel Roy's hand tense: this is the woman from the photo, young and dark-haired with a small mouth and wide-set eyes. She smiles at us, expectantly. Roy tries to ask her something, his voice rasps and he clears his throat and tries again. She leads us into the house; we learn that she is Rita, Martine's youngest daughter, that it is a holiday and her father has gone out to pay a call but will be back shortly, and that Martine is dead. We are on our way home: I am driving, and Roy is watching me watch the road. It is twenty-four hours since we saw Martine's daughter; it is more than twenty-five years since Martine died in a car accident. "Christmas 1965," he says now, mostly to himself. "Christmas 1965 she had already been dead five years." "Jeannie," he says. "When Carl and Lucy lost their first baby." I finish the thought for him. "Martine had been dead over twenty years." In December 1957 when Martine hadn't written for two years and Roy checked the mail every day impatiently, I remember thinking that in the end women are more practical than men. Martine let go because it was too painful or not painful enough anymore; Roy kept her with him by sharing her with me. Now a line from his second last letter from Vienna comes back to me, I know it word for word: I am trying to find my way back to you.

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I read that letter once and I put it away; I knew when I did that I would never read it again, not because I was angry -- the anger would come later -- but because that line struck at me like a live thing, embedded itself in my flesh, and would live with me forever. A transport is just about to leave when we arrive at the airbase and there is room for us. We do not inquire about transports east, to the Pacific. We are going home. The trip will have lasted less than four days. We are ordinary people; I am not especially courageous or cowardly. Once Ginny expected more of me and I disappointed her. Now she has been married herself for a while and she has not brought this matter up to me since her son was born. She has found out for herself that marriage is not a state of knowing, but a state of not knowing, and that marriage survives because of secrets, not in spite of them. Roy was awake for most of last night and now he falls into a deep and fitful sleep as soon as we take off. I take out my portfolio and go through it slowly. In the back, tucked carefully behind the pictures of the children, is the letter I am looking for, Roy's last letter from Vienna. I weigh it in my hand. The glue has dried to brittleness and the flap cracks open audibly, but Roy sleeps on. On the one sheet of paper folded inside there is a single line: I am coming home to you. I turn my face to my husband; it is my turn to sleep, too

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