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  She put her head down on her knees abruptly, and I got a wet dishcloth and put it on the back of her neck, and then rubbed it over my own face. In a moment she was better.

  “So then the ambulance came and they got her on a stretcher and into the ambulance and started an intravenous something-or-other and packed her full of gauze…. I rode with her of course. They took her into emergency surgery like a shot, and I sat like a fool staring at the wall and trying to remember what firm her husband worked for. The desk nurse finally had to call him. He was there in less than ten minutes. I never saw a kid so devastated. He kept asking over and over, ‘But what was she doing there? I told her never to go over there by herself. What was she doing there?’ And then he cried and I cried, and finally we both stopped crying and just sat there staring at the wall until the doctor came out and said she’d be all right.”

  “Thank God for that. How bad was she, really?”

  “Nearly dead, from what I could gather. She almost bled to death. Nobody has any idea how long she’d been there. If I hadn’t—But he said she’s young and healthy and will be okay.”

  “Did he say anything about other children?”

  “Oh, yes, no problem. It was a ‘good, clean miscarriage’—lovely phrase, isn’t it? It was the blood loss that almost killed her. I stayed until one of the older men from the firm came to be with Buddy, then I came on home. I think I felt as sorry for him as I did for her. He was just in pieces. His first little boy…”

  “How…how do you know it was a boy?”

  “Because I went back over there when I got home and threw a load of sand over…everything,” said Claire and began to cry. I went into the downstairs bathroom and vomited. I hardly ever do that, and I have never seen Claire cry. I suppose we both knew that the silly, elfin child that had been Pie Harralson had bled away with her baby and what was left would be something else entirely.

  We were wrong, though. At least on the surface, Pie did not seem to have changed all that much. Walter and I went over to the hospital to see her after I had called and been told she had recovered sufficiently to have visitors. We did not want to go, but of course we had to—you just do. We knocked at the half-open door of her room, mercifully not on the maternity floor, and heard a deep masculine voice call “Come in,” and tiptoed in, faces grave with the sheeplike lugubriousness hospitals paint on you. The room was throttled with flowers and baskets of fruit, and Pie lay propped up in her narrow hospital bed in a surge of yellow lace, surrounded by magazines and folded newspaper crossword puzzles. Her television was on—Let’s Make a Deal was going on, insanely, with the sound off—and a big man rose from one of the chairs by the window and came toward us.

  “Colquitt and Walter!” Pie yelped. Her voice was weak but nearly as breathless-bright as always. “Aren’t you loves! Look at those gorgeous mums! Daddy, these are my super next-door neighbors, Colquitt and Walter Kennedy. This is my daddy.”

  He shook hands with both of us and mumbled something about how nice we were to come see his baby. He retreated then to the chair and sat down heavily. Kim had been right. He did look like a grotesque parody of his daughter. But nothing else about him fitted Kim’s description. The bluff heartiness, the posturing, the inflamed face, the badinage were missing. He was gray-white and his eyes were swollen and bloodshot. He looked older than I had imagined.

  “Pie, I’m so terribly, terribly sorry,” I said. “I’d give anything if I’d been home.”

  “Don’t you worry a minute about it, Colquitt,” she said. “That darling Mrs. Swanson was, and she saved my life—she really did, all the doctors say I’d have died—but I feel just fine now. Really. I’m eating like a horse and I’m not all that weak anymore. Just too thin, the doctor says…”

  Her voice trailed off as though she had only then comprehended the reason for the thinness, and she looked quickly at her father. His mouth worked silently, then his face straightened. I slid a glance at Walter. I could not quite assess the girl in the bed. She seemed more like a child than ever, a very young child, to whom a visit to the hospital, the flurrying attention of doctors, the whispered urgency, were high adventure. Just that. She did not seem to realize she had lost a baby, nearly died herself.

  As if she had read my thoughts, she said swiftly, “It’s terrible about the baby, I know. I’m really heartbroken.” You’re not, I thought. “And Buddy and Daddy…but I keep telling them, look on the bright side, I’m young and healthy, that’s the important thing. I’ll have millions of babies, millions of grandbabies for Daddy. Really. I wish you’d take Daddy out and cheer him up, though. You’d think the world had come to an end.”

  “Of course, we’d love to. Wouldn’t you like to come have some supper with us, Mr. Harralson?” I said hastily, and then realized that of course his name was not Harralson. That belonged to Buddy. I thought dimly that it might be the only thing that did now.

  He smiled bleakly at my confusion. “It’s Gladney. Matt Gladney. And you’re mighty sweet to ask me, honey, but I think I’ll stay around here with Punkin-pie for a little while, until her mama can get back from the motel. Or Elliott, from the office. When he can spare the time, of course.”

  Elliott, I realized, must be Buddy. We had never heard his proper name. Nor Pie’s, for that matter.

  “Now, Daddy,” Pie purred. She literally purred. It was a silky, oddly disturbing sound. “Buddy’s been here lots of times. Be fair. Besides, you don’t really mind being stuck with your silly baby for a little while longer, do you?”

  Walter stared at her. Matt Gladney said nothing. I said, “Well, if you have some spare time on your hands and you need to get away for a little while, Mr. Gladney, please come by and see us. We want to get to know Pie’s family; she’s going to make us a nice neighbor.” I knew I was babbling but could not stop the words. “You know where we are, the white brick next to Pie’s house—or maybe you haven’t seen the house yet?” Oh, God, stop me, I prayed.

  “I’ve seen the house,” he said. “But I wish to God I never had. I wish to God I’d taken a rag and a can of kerosene and a match and burned the goddamned thing right to the ground.”

  He made a small, choking sound and turned away. Pie gave us a helpless child’s smile, and I hugged her and said, “We’ll come back and see you in a day or two,” and we fled before she could reply.

  5

  WHAT ON EARTH got into Eloise tonight?” Roger Swanson asked on an early December evening some weeks later. We always repair to our house or theirs after Eloise Jennings’ annual Christmas party. The snickering fire behind the brass fender, the softly lit cedar, the Oxford College “Festival of Carols and Lights” on the stereo are soothing.

  Kim had joined us about ten, though he had refused, politely, Eloise’s invitation to her own affair. The house was taking shape and was generating a good bit of talk around the neighborhood, and he had become a reluctant minor celebrity. Eloise invariably referred to him as “that young architect of Colquitt’s,” which bothered no one who knew Eloise, Kim least of all.

  “She’s just pissed off because I’d rather hang around Colquitt’s body than hers,” he told us and the Swansons once after Eloise had come over, dropped her little appellation, and gone home. “Hers looks like it ought to be on Mount Rushmore.”

  “Competition is what got into Eloise,” Claire said tartly. “Too much talk about Pie’s losing her baby. Eloise can’t stand the thought that somebody might upstage her from her Earth Mother role. If you can’t be anything else, be a professional brood mare. She may be right about Pie, though. I got the impression she wasn’t all that broken up about the baby, though her poor little husband and the famous Daddy sure are in shreds over it. You have, I presume, met Daddy? I don’t think he left the room the entire time she was in the hospital. Something a little funny there—or am I a dirty, paranoid old lady?”

  “You’re a dirty, paranoid old lady,” said Roger. “What do you think, that he’s got a thing for his baby daughter?”


  “Not exactly, I just—”

  “I think that may be exactly what it is,” said Walter. “With no little encouragement from Lolita. When we were over there, she was out-and-out flirting with him. It was damned creepy.”

  “If you think daughter and Daddy are creepy, you ought to catch the sonny-and-Mama show,” Kim said. “The mother of the groom was there when I went to see Pie, and she couldn’t keep her hands off poor old Buddy. Smoothing his hair, and straightening his tie, and saying what a soldier he’d been about the whole thing, and not once even looking at the bereft little mama, who was glaring daggers at her. She’s the soldier in the family; looks exactly like Douglas MacArthur. And he was practically peeing on the rug with gratitude. If you ask me, there’s something Tennessee Williams about the whole tribe of ’em.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been to see Pie,” I said.

  “Why not? I’m not a total ogre. You sound like you’re surprised I didn’t send her a congratulations card.”

  “I didn’t mean that. It just—isn’t like you, somehow.”

  “I have a lot of sterling characteristics you haven’t run into yet, Col,” he said. “For all my soaring genius and artistic crustiness, I’m still a pushover for a pretty lady, and Pie is that, if she’s nothing else. You don’t really think I come over here to listen to you talk about architecture, for that matter, do you? It’s because I’m waiting for my chance to run off to Madagascar with you. No, the reason I went to see Miss Pie was because I was afraid she’d change her mind about the house, and I was going to get her to sign a check and then strangle her.”

  We all laughed, and fell silent. Walter got up and went into the kitchen and clinked some glasses around, and Claire looked gravely at Kim and then at me. The silence lengthened. What on earth is the matter with everybody? I thought. Surely nobody takes that prattle of Kim’s about Madagascar seriously.

  “What a pack of jackals we are,” I said rather loudly into the silence. “Pie’s poor father is crazy about his daughter, and he’s just lost his first grandchild. And almost lost Pie. And Buddy’s mother is naturally concerned about him; he’s her only child, she’s literally raised him. It just shows you how little drama we have in our own lives if we have to invent Tennessee Williams goings-on about those poor, simple children and their parents.”

  “Well,” said Claire, “all seems to be going smoothly now. I saw the Munchkins over on the site yesterday, looking pleased as punch, showing off the house to a guy from Buddy’s firm. He’s that tall, distinguished man who came to be with Buddy when Pie was in surgery; he looks just like Gregory Peck. Who would I be talking about, Walter? You know most of those people.”

  “I don’t have the foggiest. Everybody I know down at Skinner, Franklin, Et cetera, Et cetera is ugly as seven miles of bad road. And, as Miss Pie points out, older than God.”

  It turned out that the man was a new senior partner at Buddy Harralson’s firm, lured from a lucrative Connecticut practice by one of the partners who’d gone to Choate with him.

  “A fine addition to the firm,” rumbled the partner, who was a friend of Walter’s. “We were extremely fortunate to be able to persuade him to join us.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” smirked Eloise Jennings when I told her who the man was, in response to her avid questions. She too had seen him on the site with the Harralsons.

  “I heard there was something funny with a law clerk in his firm back in Connecticut, and he was only too happy to come down here. Don’t ask me how I heard it either, because I’m not going to tell you.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to disclose your sources, Eloise,” I snapped. “Even though most of them seem to be safely hidden away in a septic tank somewhere.” I watched her indignant back departing down our driveway with satisfaction. Unfounded malice is her specialty, and I have never been as quick to excuse it because of her obvious inferiority complex over her origins as, say, gentle Virginia Guthrie. She does a lot of damage with her tongue, and I cut her off whenever I can.

  “He’s a brilliant man,” Buddy Harralson told us one Saturday in January after the attractive stranger had made a cursory tour of the nearly completed house with the young Harralsons and had driven away in his lustrous BMW Bavaria. “He’s only been with the firm about six months and he’s already completely reorganized the tax department. I’m working almost exclusively with him.”

  “Buddy’s his protégé,” bubbled Pie. “Luke told me he’s got more promise than any young lawyer he’s ever seen, at this stage.”

  She was looking radiant again, her rosy blondness glowing against a satiny nutria trench coat. “Daddy gave it to me for Christmas,” she said when I complimented her on it. A little of the pink pleasure that had bloomed in Buddy’s face at her words about his promise ebbed. Or perhaps I imagined it.

  “Luke?” I said. The man I’d seen with them had seemed impeccably dignified and somehow unreachable, even in a faintly shabby camel’s hair coat and tweed hat. He did not look as though he would have a nickname, or share it with a junior lawyer if he did. He did indeed remind me of Gregory Peck, though. He was, from a distance, a strikingly handsome man.

  “Lucas Abbott. Schuyler Lucas Abbott, please,” Pie said, dimpling. “Isn’t he gorgeous? He’s going to make my sweet husband into a star. He’s teaching him all about tax law”—she crinkled her nose—“and he’s going to get us into the club—they have a reciprocal with his club in Connecticut, it’s some famous, fancy old thing—and he’s going to get his daughter to play tennis with me when his family moves down here. He’s looking for a house now. He says if he’d seen the plans for mine he’d have put a gun to Kim’s head until he agreed to build it for them and not us. He just loves it.”

  “Well, it’s a beauty,” Walter said, looking up at the bulk of the house, darkening against the grape-colored sky.

  It was. The exterior was done now, and the roof on, and the windows in. Against the delicate crosshatching of the winter trees it looked more alive and sweetly grown than ever, waiting. I thought with pleasure of yellow lights in those windows, smoke curling up from the chimneys like the breath of the house. It needed life now, like a heart to beat.

  As January melted into February and the soft gray thaws of soon-to-be spring came, the interior finishing of the house went on and Buddy and Pie appeared more often on their Saturday and Sunday excursions, she laden under swatches of carpeting and books of wallpaper, he gravely poring over chips of paint samples. Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with the lemon icing I yearn for all winter. Wild violets and a few crocuses pushed up through the mud. It was a warm, wet spring, and Kim Dougherty’s boots were left, by unspoken agreement, on the patio when he came for his Scotch and water.

  “I switch in April,” he said. “Vodka touches not my lips until after I’ve given the IRS its pound of flesh.”

  I thought he seemed quieter that early spring, preoccupied, though his skirling banter never flagged. But it seemed forced, desultory talk to mask the fact that his mind was far away.

  “Are things going badly with the house?” I asked him finally.

  “No. I never saw a house go up so smoothly—though I haven’t seen many houses go up,” he said. “Why?”

  “You’ve seemed a million miles away lately. Like something was bothering you. I thought maybe you were running into snags over there.”

  “Not over there. That baby is a jewel of a house. I’m running into snags at the office, though.”

  Walter and I waited; we had never pressed Kim. It was a major bone in our friendship. He would tell us or not.

  “The fact is, I don’t seem to be able to design worth shit,” he said finally, looking into the depths of his glass. “I’m a good month behind on the Douglas plans, and that should be a piece of cake. It’s a fantastic site—it just seems to be sitting there telling me what to do on it, just shouting out sometimes, and it’s like I can’t understand w
hat it’s saying. When I first saw it I knew just what ought to go up there, I just had it whole in my mind. Like, as you say, Col, it just grew right up out of the ground. Christ, I could see it. And now I can’t. I can’t even get a pencil going. What I’ve done so far is garbage; I’d have flunked out of first-year architecture if I’d submitted what I’m doing now. I can’t show the Douglases what I’ve got. They’ve been over there and looked at the Harralson house, and they think I’m God Almighty. And I sit there doing tic-tac-toe on a brand-new tracing pad.”

  “Everybody gets stale,” I said, distressed. He seemed, suddenly, as fragile and vulnerable as a child. “You’ve been pushing awfully hard on this one. Maybe you ought to ease up for a little while and just rest your head. Can’t Frank take over?”

  “He’s going to have to. But it’s a crummy deal for the Douglases. He’s damned good, but he’s not as good as I am—or was. It was me they wanted.”

  “Maybe this one has just plain demanded too much of you,” Walter said. “That happens to me sometimes. I get a campaign going that I really love, and just can’t seem to put it away. It obsesses me, and I’m no good at all till it’s sort of finished itself in my mind.”

  “No,” Kim said. “It’s never been like that with me before. When a design’s done, it’s done. I’m not tired or obsessed or any of that temperamental shit. I just can’t design. Something’s gone. It’s like some ear inside me that used to be able to listen to a site isn’t there any more. I’m beginning to think I’m a one-house architect, than which there is nothing sorrier. Maybe I should have been a lawyer like the old man wanted me to be. Or gone into the business, God help me. Sell carpets.”

  It was a heavy, painful joke, and no one laughed. He had another Scotch and stared a while at the dying fire, and then went home. I listened to his old VW chugging off down the street. My heart hurt, physically. I wondered if it was the way I would have felt about the children I would never have. For the first time, regret for them washed over me.