Jesse Ball is the author of five previous novels, including A Cure for Suicide, Silence Once Begun, and Samedi the Deafness, and several works of verse, bestiaries, and sketchbooks. He was named a finalist for the 2015 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and a 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Ball received an NEA creative writing fellowship for 2014 and the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and his verse has been included in the Best American Poetry series. He gives classes on general practice in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Fine Arts Writing program.

On that clear and fortunate morning, Ezra Wesley woke with the special gladness of a person who will die within the month. He did not know that he had this gladness, for, of course, the one who has it never knows its source. One mustn’t know — otherwise, one most certainly would not be glad! However that may be, glad he was. His wife, Loring, was watching him. She said nothing. Could she tell how glad he was? She was a very observant person.

They had lived together, after all, for forty-five years, and she knew his habits. Could she tell that this was the special happiness of one who will soon be departing? She could not.

But as I said, it was morning, and the sun had risen. So, soon they were walking out by the canal that ran beside their home, walking down into the near district of the town where a fine place was and breakfast might be found. They sat there, this old woman, this old man, and ate something, and had this conversation:

— There is a little box by the window of the room upstairs, the room we never use.

— I know the box you mean. It is the box that I once tried to open and you said,

— I said, do not open that box until I have been dead three months.

— You did, she said. You said that.

— Well, now I am thinking, said he. I am thinking that three months was not the right measure. I believe one year to the day.

— I will keep that in mind, she said. If you die. Of course, if I die first, you and your little box won’t do anyone much good.

— That much is true, Loring. I suppose that much is true.

He complained of a cough. The cough was not a bad one. To listen to him cough, well — it didn’t distress one, as the hearing of some coughs do. Yet, as the days passed, the cough grew worse. Oddly enough, the joy that he felt seemed to intensify, so that the cough was accompanied by a nature gladder and gladder.

And so things continued. Their life was a simple one. He had been a great chess player. They had both been famous masters, he and she, and both had played in major tournaments in their time. He had been a champion for a period of years. They were not forgotten, not even then, so long after, and would occasionally be visited by old friends, or young people, curious about their accomplishments. As well, they still took students, although at present there were none. Yet, on the street by their door, hung a little sign. Chess lessons by appointment. Inquire within.

Loring finally went for the doctor when three weeks had passed. There was a red figure of a woodsman in the study. She had been staring at it for at least an hour, trying to decide if she should go. The window was open, and a gust blew such that the figure tipped. This was not uncommon, and, in fact, they had often joked about the woodsman’s sure-footed nature. Yet this time, she took it for a sign, and went immediately for the doctor.

He came quickly, being that the Wesleys were somewhat important in the town, or perhaps it was simply his way, to come quickly when called. Perhaps he was an old family friend. Who can say? In any case, there he was, and he examined Ezra, and found that he was very ill indeed. The manner of his illness was a subtle one. He had perhaps been ill for years. Would it have been good to know of the illness? Loring asked. Could it have been averted? No, no. The illness is incurable. It is best not to know. What has happened so far, in some sense, is for the best. Loring was crying, and Ezra was holding the quilt that was over his knees. The woodsman remained toppled, although that, in and of itself, was meaningless.

This continued through the next days: Loring would cry. Ezra would sit quietly, or console her. In truth, the joy that had grasped him at first had simply grown and grown. He felt very keenly the pleasure of life, and told her that she must under no circumstance cry. He kissed her and they went again on walks by the canal. The cough faded and was gone. A beautiful weather descended on the town. Such a fall…those who lived through it remember it always. They were as they had been when they had met, this old couple, feeling on the verge of discovery. Each represented to the other all that was new and unknown about life, all that had been promised.

On the thirtieth day, Loring woke and Ezra did not. His eyes were shut, and his hands were at his side. He had gone to sleep with his clothes on, like some pharaoh. Somehow, Loring had not noticed.

Although it may seem to those of you who have only heard of such things that it would be strange to sit for a long while in a room with a dead person, it is quite common, I must tell you. If the person is dead, then there is no particular reason to call anyone. And besides, one feels in some way that nothing matters at all, and that any action is as good as any other. Then, to simply sit and look again and again upon the countenance of the one who died, it is what passes. And in this way it is not really an uninterrupted staring. It is a series of glances, each one as full of surprise as when one hears a noise and turns. One is expecting something, and can’t say what — yet when one sees it, one knows what one knew, what one knew and couldn’t say. It is this way with death. It is in our nature to feel the extent of it when we face it, and to have it fall away the moment we turn.

And so she went on there in the bedroom, looking at her husband, and looking away, looking at him and looking away, and wondering what was left, and why.

But of what we are capable, we seldom know. Friends came and the matter was arranged. The day was set for a funeral, and although Ezra had in his possession better clothes, Loring insisted he be buried in the clothes he had worn. For who better to clothe one for death than one’s own hand, galvanized by an originless joy?

He was buried on the top of a hill in a cemetery in that town. There had been talk of removing him to a far city, the place of his birth, where his chess playing was perhaps best remembered. Yet Loring had made her wish known, that he should lie in the nearest cemetery, and that is what they did.

A file of black-clad men and women, on a rainy morning, threading their way up a hill, to where a grave had been dug. His body was put in, and then everyone was gone away.

To Loring it seemed that suddenly everyone was gone away. It was a week later. It was month later. She found herself again and again there by the grave, and it was as though the funeral had just ended, and yet no one was there. His death was still so fresh that she could remember how they had been standing by the bedroom door, and he had observed the way the floor was uneven. The bed, he had said, is uneven because the floor is uneven. And she had said, perhaps the whole house is uneven. And he had said, unsmiling, do not blame the house. It is a good house. He had never been one to smile when laughing. And then they had gone to sleep.

Many worried that Loring would not be able to get along after Ezra’s death, but those fears proved groundless. Neighbors saw her each morning on the walks she had once taken by his side, and they saw at her evening, returning from the market. The signboard was still posted by the house, and she continued to take students, and to teach them well.

To her the grief did not diminish, but for the rest — it was soon old news. Life is always presenting new things that distract us from the old. After a while, no one asked her anymore about her husband, was she missing him. She came and went and it was for others as though he had not been. Yet each day she went to the cemetery, and renewed the freshness of his loss, and kept it close. For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core. And in that she was admitted into her own secret, and she went about as a person in a cloak and comforted thereby.

A knock came at the door of Loring’s house. When she went to see to it, there were two there: a boy and his mother. The boy’s name was Stan. His mother said things like, he is a prodigy, and, he can already read nearly anything, and, well, listen to him speak — it is just like talking to an adult.

Loring looked at this Stan. Will you speak? He spoke a bit, not much. I can play chess, he said. Will we play?

Who has he played? Loring asked. Nearly everyone, the answer was. He’s beaten them all, his father, his uncle, a man in the town square. I see, said Loring. How old is he? Five, five years old, or will be within the month.

Set up the board, she said to the boy. The board, though, was already set up. So, she disordered the pieces and pushed them all off. Set it up, she ordered. Be quick about it. To the mother, she said, it is often telling how a person does this.

He stumbled a bit and was clumsy, for the pieces were large. But soon he had the board all set up properly.

They sat down to play, and this is how it was: There was a mother standing by a door, dressed nicely in the sort of clothes one wears for a visit. There was a little boy sitting on a chair much too big for him before a chess set. And there was an old woman in clothes she had worn these many years, in a chair she had sat in this many years, before a chess set she had used for many years.

The first game the boy lost quickly. It was over as soon as it had begun. But the second — in the second, a very odd thing happened. He played an actual opening, and played it properly — and the opening was that that had been conceived by Loring’s husband, the Wesley-Fetz Counter Gambit. It was not much used. Ezra had used it, but few others. And now here, this boy was playing it.

He looked up suddenly from the board and his gaze met hers. She was sitting there, this old woman, sitting there with a child, and yet when he looked at her then, his eyes were like leaden impressions. They riveted her. She, hand still outstretched, having taken the bishop, was frozen, peering at him, and to her it seemed terrifying: as though she could see her husband, staring at her through the child’s face.

She coughed several times and looked away, set the bishop down. He made some move. She looked back at him and it was gone. He was simply a boy, some boy. She made a move and he would be forced to exchange queens. The boy resigned, and looked steadily out the window.

— I accept him as a student, said Loring.

They set up the board and stood.

— He is a prodigy, his mother said again. I am sure you can teach him a lot.

— We shall see, said Loring. Perhaps there is not much to teach.

— I don’t know what you mean.

Then she and the mother made arrangements, and the cost was established. The boy would come seven times over the course of the summer, once a week on Tuesdays, and stay the day. The mother gave some deposit and rose to go to the door.

— Until next week, she said.

— Goodbye, said Loring.

The boy looked at her and said nothing. Loring shut the door and then went and stood by the chessboard. Her heart was beating very fast, and she felt that something was happening, but she couldn’t say what. There was a photograph of her husband on the wall of that parlor, but in that moment Loring would not look at it. This feeling, that she could not do so — what did it mean? She could not say, and troubled, she went out of the house and shut the door.

While it was true that she was often seeing her husband, or having the feeling he had just left a place where she was arriving, still rarely had she seen him so clearly.

If a person were to die and be born again into a new body, in what way would that happen? In what way would the previous life inhabit the new life? Who knows such answers and may be trusted to speak truthfully?

Tuesday morning came.

And soon the sound of the knocker.

Loring opened the door and held it partway. In with the boy. Some pleasantries with the mother there by the door, and then the departure. Loring came from the hall to the parlor where the boy was waiting.

— Your mother and I have made a bargain. But you and I have made no bargain at all.

This was the sort of manner she had always adopted.

The boy watched her.

She sat in a high-backed chair by the fireplace. Her back was to the boy.

— I offer you also a bargain. I will teach you things about chess that will be helpful to you in your play. In return for that, you will do your best to listen to what I tell you. I don’t like to repeat myself, and in fact, I won’t. That’s how it is.

The boy came around and sat on the hearth rug.

— Shall I say what I want?

He really didn’t look very much like a child at all.

— That’s what a bargain is, replied Loring.

— Will you answer all questions? Not just chess questions?

— But you are here to learn chess.

The boy started to say something, then stopped. He messed around with his foot and then spoke up.

— My parents would never be able to tell. They don’t really know anything about chess.

— I see, said Loring. Let’s say then that that’s our bargain.

She reached out her hand and the boy took it. They shook.

In the night she had had a dream about her husband. He was on a ship carved from wood, from some enormous single tree. The captain of the ship was sitting frozen in a chair nailed to the deck. The mate was shouting that there must be some crack in the wood, somewhere, but that it could not be found. Her husband was not the captain, but he might have been, and if he wasn’t, then he was elsewhere in the ship. The night was early in that sea, and the waves grew worse the closer it came to dawn. If the crack could not be found…All night, Loring had this dream, repeating, and each time she strained to remember how it had ended before, but could not. When she woke, she found that she was sitting in the chair in the parlor, and facing her husband’s picture on the wall. What could she say to him, were she to see him? One never knows the uses of the things one does.

And then she was there at this bargaining, and just done shaking the boy’s hand, remembering the dream, and the long night.

— We will then begin, she said. Chess is a complicated game. It is complicated not simply because of the complications of the pieces and the squares, but also because of how people feel about chess. You will often meet people and play them and you will find that when you beat them in chess they feel they have been defeated completely, as though your mind were proved better than theirs. This is not true, of course. But many people believe it to be true, and even some who know that it is not true will still feel that it is true, viscerally. So, the question is, in what way can this be used as a part of the game. Well, actually, that is not the question at the moment. At the moment I am just describing the game, and showing you that this too is a part of it. Another part of the game is stamina. One can become tired over a series of games. Hopefulness can mediate the effects of that exhaustion.

Stan was looking in the other direction. It was unclear whether or not he had been listening.

— Where did you learn to play? he asked.

— I was taught by my brother. He was also a master, but much older.

— Where is he?

— Oh, he died very long ago.

— Was he that old?

— No, he was killed. By mistake.

There was a clock on the mantel. It made a distinct tick and one might imagine that the boy, in future years, would think back on his time in that quiet room, and that the particular ticking of that clock would be recalled to him as part and parcel of that moment. In fact, one never knows what one will remember or why. There is a clock museum, for instance, at least it is called a clock museum (it is the front room of someone’s house), where there are at least two hundred clocks, all going at the same time. The noise is bewildering and wonderful. Everyone who hears it feels they must return and sit a little longer in one of the chairs here and there throughout the room, but of course, they do not come back.

Just as the return to the clock museum is lost, so is the sound of the clock in the Wesley house. The boy was drowsing and wakes at a loud tick. Loring was watching him and considering. They had just played another three games, all of which the boy lost. She had told him to look at the games, and to tell her in ten minutes why he had lost, and in the thinking, curled up in that black oak chair by the wall, he had fallen asleep.

— I have a question for you, he said.

He was wearing a very light brown color and this made him appear sympathetic to all those who saw him that morning. Someone in the street had even said to someone else, why, that is a fine little boy. Not everything in the world is for the worse.

Of course, this is not at all true. It is simply an explanation of the light brown color, and in that sense I stand by the anecdote.

— What is your question?

— Is that your husband on the wall?

Loring was astonished. Could he know nothing about Ezra? One is always surprised by the lack of knowledge others show about our dead. But for him not to know? When she had seen Ezra looking through his eyes?

— He was a chess player as well. That’s him, there. Fifteen years ago, I believe it was taken. I would have to say that: that it was fifteen years ago. Or perhaps longer, perhaps twenty-five.

— Was he very good?

— He was the strongest one for some years, the strongest of all. The best players would gather in some city, to play for some purse, I too, and he would defeat us all. But his style was too wild, and it tired him.

— I don’t understand.

— I will explain this eventually. For now, to answer you. He was also, like me, a master. Now, do you know what went wrong in those games?

— No.

— Figuring out what you did wrong and fixing it, that’s what being a chess player really is.

The bell rang, then, and a bunch of letters fell through the slot in the front door. The two in the parlor could hear them land, one by one on the wood floor of the hall.

— One moment, said Loring.

She was gone and came back and in coming back took a dull knife from the drawer of a desk. One letter she opened. The others she had left by the door. This letter was small, and shaped like a letter. Not all letters are, you know!

— Hmmm, she said.

and

— Something is ready in town. I am going to go down and pick it up. You shall come with me. We’ll get lunch there. There’s nothing to eat in the house anyway.

The boy got his coat and she fetched hers from a peg in the hall. Out the door they went. The hour was eleven. It was that sort of day where eleven means waiting. So, in that way, it was very comfortable to set out at such a time.

Beyond the door, the street was also extremely concerned with the hour of eleven, and with waiting. The street was solemn in that way, observant of the hour. The boy was very solemn at first, too, and strove to walk slowly, at the pace that Loring set, but at the canal he could not help but climb onto the lip and run with wildness back and forth. Loring said nothing in warning, and did not discourage him in the slightest. You must have imagined that she would permit behavior of this sort! It is quite clear from her character, as someone might tell you who knew her well, or who had known her. If you would speak to such a person about her, they might tell you a story such as this:

Why, once, on a bet, in younger days, she had stolen an automobile. She had been that sort of young woman — and nothing was too much for her. Someone tried to rob her once, an Italian, and she had brandished a knife at him. Do you see?

But now the boy had found a piece of glass. He brought it to her, in this way, saying,

— A piece of glass.

She took it and looked at it. Much of the deep depression that surrounds us in life has to do with this one thing — that we can’t even see the smallest plainest objects.

— Not much use, she said, unless you put it on top of a wall where someone might climb and cut themselves. The walls in old parts of Spain are like that. The tops are all broken bottles.

This was the sort of fact that a boy likes to hear, she thought to herself.

— Looking down a hill at the old stone houses with their intermittent walls, one can see the sun setting fire to the tops of those in the distance, when the sun strikes properly.

— Can I have it back?

— Of course.

She handed him the glass and he took it. In the exchange, she touched his hand, and as during their bargain, was momentarily shaken. It was a child’s hand. This was an odd thing to recall when looking at a child, when speaking with a child, but you must understand, already the boy was not entirely a child. And yet the hand restored it all again.

— But I don’t want to carry it, he said. And I can’t put it in my coat.

— Why don’t you hide it? she said. Put it somewhere. You can get it on the way back.

He looked around for a spot, but was having trouble.

— Well, the best place is probably wherever it was. If you can find that spot, exactly, I’m sure it will all go very well for you.

He looked around on the ground for that spot. At this moment a man came up.

— Have you lost something? he said.

The situation was explained to him. He frowned.

— Throw it into the canal. It will go somewhere, and if you find it again, then it will really mean something.

This was as good a suggestion as any, and so Stan threw the glass into the canal. He was at first worried that he had thrown it too much, and not let it drop enough, because he wanted it to be as much seemingly the will of the glass, as his own will. And yet it went off and was gone, and that was enough.

The man also went off and was gone.

— The people, you see, said Loring, who walk by the canal, are quite different from the regular run of people. Why this man, for instance, fit the bill. Not always is it the case that people come with a worthwhile suggestion.

— Fit the bill?

— Of the place — he joined the category of people who are interesting enough to want to walk by the canal, even though it is a bit dingy and old and doesn’t get cleaned nearly often enough.

— Well, I like the canal.

— I’m glad of that, said Loring. I used to walk here every day. I still do. I still do. But I used to walk here with my husband. Every day.

And so they passed on along the canal and out into a square. Across the square they went and there in a building, Loring claimed something or other, a package of some sort, something she had left and was now obtaining, perhaps repaired or restored. The details are not all clear. Out into the street she went, and with Stan, she made her way to a stall where sandwiches were made. Finest Quality, it said.

— Can I ask you another question?

— When we are through eating.

— But if I ask now, will that be all right? You can answer later.

— Go ahead.

— What things end up in dreams? I remember some things that have happened that happen again. But other dreams are things that never happened, or terrible things — nightmares. But even the nightmares — why are they of one sort and not another? Why one night am I falling and another night being chased?

They ate their sandwiches and Stan’s became a bit of a mess.

— Is it true about the sandwiches? Are these good?

— There was a cafe that used to be here. Their sandwiches were quite wonderful, but they came cut into many pieces and served on china. One would get tea with them, and sometimes little pastries.

— Where is it?

— It’s gone.

— Dreams, she said, are easily explained by stupid people. They are easily dismissed. They are meaningless. Nothing can be based on them — no predictions, no hopes. No one has any dreams that have anything to do particularly with him or her. A dream is simply images, as though one were traveling aimlessly by car not on a street but through a series of rooms, and one sees things, looking there out the window. But they are useless and one shouldn’t pay attention.

When Stan looked like he wanted to object, she continued.

— At least, this is one view. Another view is that dreams may be explained easily (again, easily) with the use of certain books. This group of people would say that a dictionary of some sort (made by some truly brilliant person) will give you exact definitions for anything you might encounter in the dream world. Through the use of a book of this sort, you can tell what your dream means, and what its significance is in your life. There are other books that will tell you that dreams are the way that higher beings communicate with lower beings, and in so doing, give instructions about how life is to be led.

She paused.

— Of course, I don’t agree with any of that. Do you?

Stan explained a dream to her that he had had. It took a while. When he had done, she told it back to him.

— So, she said, you were drawing for your father. He gave you paper and a pencil and told you to draw a wire. You drew a line and he said, that is a line. I want you to draw me a wire. So, you drew a line between two buildings, and drew the buildings, and then you drew someone with an umbrella about to step onto it. He took the paper and crushed it, and you felt terrified that this would make the person fall. Then, in the dream, the person fell, and you were falling, and your father was speaking to your mother, you could hear his voice. He was saying, before he was born…, but you couldn’t make out anything after that.

— That’s right, said Stan.

— Was it frightening?

— Only that the person with the umbrella, a young woman. That she would fall. And, my father. He was accusing me of something.

— One thing about dreams, said Loring. Is that we know many things, and some of them we learn from life. But others, it seems that we could not have learned them from life. Some of them we see in dreams. Do you know anything that you never learned or saw?

A bus came then and there were many red flags along the top. They were flying in the wind. People were hanging out the windows of the bus. The driver was waving. They were tourists of some kind, and seemed very happy. Stan waved to them.

Loring took his hand and led him up the hill. This time they had to pause several times, for he had grown tired. It was a long way for a boy to walk without stopping, and, of course, she was far too old to carry him.

— He played that opening with black, she said. The opening you played that first day. My husband played it. It is a very sharp opening. That means, sharp, means that it is easy for either side to lose. I will show you a game now that he played once, against another man, a great player himself. He used this opening against that man, Hulder, because it was that man’s favorite opening, and Hulder has used it repeatedly to crush his opponents. The match was to be until ten victories. No one had found a really good way to stop Hulder with this opening. And so, my husband played this opening against Hulder, and played the very same moves that Hulder had played. Thus, Hulder had to play against his own opening, in a way, had to play black against his own moves as white, and in doing so, he showed Ezra how to neutralize the opening. Of course, Hulder didn’t really want to do it, to show him — so he actually made a bad move on purpose, thereby losing the first game. In the second game, Hulder played white and got into complications where he beat my husband. Then in the third game, my husband played white again, and played the opening. Hulder faltered this time in his resolve and played the best defense he could, which was sufficient for a draw. In the third game, then, Hulder had to play something else, because his own preparation in those lines had all been given to my husband! The game would have just ended up a draw. He actually lost that game. And of course, Ezra had used all his time to come up with other variations in other openings, which he sprang in the following games. He won the series 10–4, with 6 draws. Hulder was shattered and never played at that level again.

— Did your husband like playing chess?

— He did.

She showed him the moves of the game, advising him not to play that opening for some years yet, as the ways in which the opponent could go wrong, although ever present, were very difficult to punish unless one knew how.

— But I must know how! You have to teach me.

— I will, she said, I will. But it takes time.

When they had played through all the games of that match on the board by the window, Stan was very tired indeed. He had been tired from the walk, as I told you, and now he was tired from concentrating. He went and lay on the mat.

Loring moved her hands as if to say, you mustn’t do that, we aren’t done here, but this gesture had no effect on him, and so she went and sat in the chair again.

She made quite a picture, I must say, sitting in that chair. She was a rather severe old woman, with the intelligent desirous eyes of a horse, always flickering, signaling. Yet few could say what they signaled. She sat in the chair with her hands folded and looked like the name of a region on an antiquated map. By this I mean, correct in a way that fits with something one doesn’t understand.

At four the mother came and took the child, and carried him out over her shoulder, still sleeping.

— Quite a day, said Mrs. Wiling. His first day of lessons.

— That’s so, said Loring.

— Did he do well? Did he learn much?

— It is generally the first talent that really gifted people have.

— What do you mean?

— Learning much from little — that’s the talent we must hope your son has. Goodbye.

But she had certain exceptions, or I should say, she had made certain exceptions over the years. The trouble is, as you get older, the people you like die and are not replaced with others, so that it is easily possible to end up with no one at all to talk to, or at least, no one you would want to hear responding to whatever it is you might have ended up saying.

This was the trouble that Loring was in. Aside from the times when a visitor came to town — some old acquaintance from their tournament days — aside from that, it was simply a matter of reading books and sitting in chairs. Of course, walking as well, visiting the cemetery, and looking at things, plants and such, animals here and there — but she tired easily, and so mostly it was about sitting and reading.

The book that she was reading at that time was called The Miraculous Indifference of the Eleventh Century. It was about how, for whatever reason, during the eleventh century A.D., there had been several severe bouts of indifference, documented in cultures geographically remote from one another. The meaning of this was unclear, and the historian did himself few favors. Nonetheless, the book was terribly funny, although not meaning to be, and this caused Loring much grief, for when she would begin to laugh, she would be placed back in the room where she was sitting, and the hollow sound of her laugh coming off the wooden ceiling, floor walls, the glass of the windows, it made her feel that she had no one to whom to tell anything, that no matter how much comedy might be found in a passage, it was useless beyond what it might avail her directly. Even should she come upon the most tremendously wonderful thing that had ever been written, she could not say it and have someone useful hear.

Of course, this situation had not come about for lack of trying other options. Do you believe that she did not write letters to him after he was dead? Oh, certainly she did, reams and reams of letters, buried in a box. She wrote him a hundred letters, two hundred letters, a letter a day, and buried them in the ground by his grave. She sat on the grass there and spoke to him. She lay awake in their room and whispered, feeling that somehow whispers travel farther than things said outright.

No proof came that he had heard any of this, that he had read any of the letters. But, of course, neither did there come any proof to the contrary.

She sat at her desk in the evening time, and began to write a letter. It was not the first letter she had written concerning the boy.

e.

He came again, this time for the lesson. I watched him very carefully, and put your sweater in the way, on the chair where he was to sit. When he moved it, he put it on the table on the far side of the room — which is what you always did. I don’t know what that means. Is that just the place where sweaters should go? Or something more?

I asked him to say your name and he said it the way it used to be said — not the way it is pronounced now. But did I perhaps say it that way unwittingly? I can’t remember.

Why am I even writing to you? If it is true, and something of you is in him, then is any part of you elsewhere, receiving such missives as these?

There is no chance of it, I suppose. Then what is this writing? What is it? Is it less purposeless than some other fragile thing?

I feel there can be no good out of it — out of any of it. But then I feel something else, a certainty that through his eyes you will look at me, and see me, and that I will see you the same. Such a moment — for that I would give the rest, all the rest, all these useless rags, buildings, people.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn’t what is or what was.

For me that what-is-to-come, well, you know, you know what it is, my love. I am reaching out towards you in your narrow space.

yours,

l.

When she had finished writing the letter, she looked at it carefully. She held it in her hands, looking at it carefully, and then she tore it up. The torn-up pieces she left there on the table, as if they might do something for one another in such a state.

Just at the strike of nine, the boy arrived. Loring had left a note on the door. It said,

LET YOURSELF IN. I AM UPSTAIRS.

The boy came into the house. Two shoes faced him in the narrow passage, two shoes in the very middle. As many things seem hostile when arrayed in strangeness, so one might imagine the dark hall of this house with its shuttered windows to frighten him, but he was not frightened. He stepped over the shoes, went straight through and found the stair and climbed. These were steep steps, of the sort in old colonial houses. He was by no means assured of an easy time, and stopped halfway up at a little window carved in a half-moon. The glass was warped and the street below was bent into an impossible shape. He sat looking through for quite a while until the voice came from above.

— Stan?

— Here on the stairs.

He went up the rest of the way.

Loring was sitting in a room off to the left. At the top of the stairs were three rooms. One was the bedroom, one a workroom, and the third, well, she was in it. That room was for nothing at all, and never had been. Loring and Ezra had never liked the room. There was something wrong with it, but they couldn’t say what. They would occasionally put things in there because they felt something would happen. The things that happened were never anything that one could really know about.

The room was at this time empty save for one chair, and a little table by the window. On that table, sat a box. It was shut, closed with a tiny clasp over which wax had been dripped. The wax was unbroken.

— Hello, said the boy.

Loring looked at him and thought, If you are listening, when I ask you this question, you will respond to something else I have said.

— Did you finish the problems I left you with?

— Is this the room you were talking about?

— What did I say about it? asked Loring.

— You said that it was almost like the room was in this house and in another house, and that was why it didn’t really work to put anything in it, unless you felt like the things in it would also be elsewhere.

It took him a little while to say this and he got it wrong the first time, but the second time said it straight through with a very serious expression.

— That’s right, she said. That’s what I said.

— But why would you sit in a room like that?

She didn’t reply.

— Anyway, I can’t feel it. It just feels like a room.

— The…

— What is in that box?

It was an ordinary question, and of course, one that troubled Loring to no end. In all the time since her husband’s death, she had puzzled over nothing so much as this. Of course, the permission to open the box had long been received. That it could have been opened at three months is clear. Three months had been the agreement for quite a while before he had suddenly changed it, and in some ways it would make perfect sense to honor the previous agreement. The year’s permission was also long gone, for had not one year, then two, three, four, five, all come and gone? Why then was the box still there, still unopened?

The truth was this: as long as Loring did not open the box, some mystery still remained, some hint of life, a secret kept — an act still continuing in its efficacy, on the part of Ezra. And so in preserving the shut box, she preserved his living nature, and whenever she pondered opening it, she played with his living will that it be opened, and with what his expectations had been for what she would feel upon opening it. Now necessarily, in order for this to work at all, she had to actually permit herself the possibility of breaking, and opening the box. And so it was, that once a month, she would sit with the box and decide whether or not the time had come to open it, and each time she did so, she did not know whether or not it would be opened.

Such days were special, and she would dress especially for them. She would close all the shutters of all the windows, and turn all the photographs and portraits to face the wall, even Ezra’s photograph in the parlor.

She would take off her shoes and put them by the door, pointing out. And then she would walk backwards up the stairs, and into the little room, and there sit in the chair and observe the box. She would do this all at the hour of dawn, leaving the whole day to sit and think.

Of course, in this case, it happened that the boy arrived, and she had seen that he would come and left the note that he might enter on his own. And now there he was, standing in the doorway, and his mind too was on the box.

— You may pick it up, she said. But be careful.

He went to the table, to the top of which he could barely reach. She reached out and got hold of him under his armpits, and with great effort tried to lift him up. She got him partway up but then dropped him back down and sank herself to a knee and then sat flat on the floor.

— Are you all right?

— I’m, I’ll be fine. Just, give me a second.

She managed to find her feet and went out of the room. In a few minutes she returned with a stool. He clambered up onto the stool, and from there to the table, where he sat on the edge. Then he took ahold of the box and moved it towards himself.

This in itself was a rather tumultuous event for Loring, as the box had not been moved since Ezra placed it there. She never permitted herself to touch it, not wanting to know what it weighed, or whether the contents shook.

Stan leaned over the box and examined it closely. It was made of dark ebon wood, and hardly any grain was perceptible. It was about the size of a hat box — large, in fact. Almost anything could be in there.

He looked at Loring. She was making a gesture that she often made, pressing the tips of her fingers in turn with the thumb and forefinger of the opposite hand.

— Can we open it?

Loring shook her head. The boy sitting there, holding the box, hovering over it; with his corduroy pants and clean white shirt, his small scrunched face and unkempt hair, he bent and swelled in her mind’s eye. It was very hard to look at him, and she imagined so much what he might be, or had been. His voice was not entirely the voice of a child. But was this just because he was a prodigy? But why was he a prodigy, and why had he come to her?

— What do you know about my husband? she asked.

Tilting his face like the moon-shaped window on the stair, the boy earnestly answered,

— He lived in this house. He was better at chess than you or I. He would stand for long periods of time; he preferred not to sit. I don’t believe that would be very comfortable. Do you?

— It is not comfortable, said Loring. What else do you know?

— He gave you this box?

— I didn’t tell you that.

— What is this? Did you put it here?

— Wax. No, I didn’t.

— Hmmmm. Did someone else then, not him, give you the box? Do you think he would have been a good teacher to have, if he was the one here, and you had died?

— No, said Loring. He wasn’t really a good teacher at all. He never had any idea why he did things. Let’s go downstairs.

Remember, of course, that there are many sorts of houses. In some houses, more things can happen than in others. In certain, special houses, virtually anything at all can happen. If you have perhaps at some time been in a house of this sort, then you will know exactly what I mean. One feels an enlarging of the self in these places — because our personalities, our selves, border on the possible, and when the possible grows, well, so then do we.

Of course, it should be clear by now that this house, no. 32 Oaken Lane, was such a place.

— I have a question.

— Yes?

— Will you read to me from one of these books?

He was standing by a large bookshelf in the hall. Loring had gone on ahead into the parlor.

— I can’t see all the titles, it is too dark.

— There is no light in the hall, said Loring. It was an idea my husband had — that halls should only be lit by light coming through doors. I still hold to it.

— How about this one? asked the boy.

He started to pull out a large volume, and it began to tip. It was far too heavy for him, and it fell heavily, splaying open.

The page it opened to had an illustration of a vulture sitting in a barber’s chair. Beside the picture it said, the history of barbers is the history of blood and hair.

— I haven’t read this book, said Loring. That’s something to know: owning books is not the same as having read them, although I suppose for some people it is.

— I have read all the books that I own, said Stan, and some that my parents have.

— Perhaps this one, said Loring.

She took down a thin book from a high shelf. It was called The Hour Is Late & Therefore Early. The author was C. P. Dodds.

— I believe you will enjoy this, she said.

— Why do you close your eyes so much when I am here?

— I am trying to hear what you’re saying, she said. Very carefully, I am trying.

— Would it help for me to speak louder?

— No, no.

She laughed.

— I can hear you perfectly well. I am simply trying to hear exactly what you’re saying. It’s not easy, you know, to pay real attention to what people say. It isn’t always exact the same as the words they are saying.

— Your eyes are closed right now.

She opened her eyes.

— We will now play one game, and then I will read from this book a little. But, you mustn’t tell your parents that we are reading. That is not why they are sending you here.

The boy put his finger over his lips.

So it was that a portion of their bargain was fulfilled: before the day was through, the boy would be read to, which apparently was what he wanted. They played a game of chess, and he lost, this time miserably. Perhaps it was that she simply tried a bit more than usual, or perhaps he was thinking of something else. In any case, it was a disapproving look that Loring gave him, and he appeared to feel it keenly.

— Let’s read in the kitchen, said Loring. That was another of Ezra’s rules, that the kitchen is a good place for reading aloud. Whether it is true or not, or whether it was just so for him and for me, is something else.

— I am ready to be read to in the kitchen.

— Well, good, let’s go then.

And so into the kitchen they went. To get there, one proceeds down the dark hall (for although it is day, all the shutters are closed), to the very end, where there is a quick right turn and then a left. One opens a door and goes into the pantry, a small room, and through the pantry into the kitchen, which occupies the rear of the house.

Loring remembered a poem about kitchens that went like this:

Let me die in a kitchen,

Where bread is baking,

and the hour is nigh to three.

For in the marshes,

a little house goes running

on long legs,

and I begin to remember

the places I have been

when things are newly made.

One might say, and I cannot object, that this is not really a poem about kitchens. But it mentions a kitchen, and does so in the very first line.

Where the table was, in relation to the pantry, one could not see beneath it, but a child might.

What a child would see is this: a trap door!

How that had come to be there no one could say, but both Ezra and Loring had dearly loved it. It led to the basement of the house, which, behind, projected out of a hill, and so was an alternate first floor on one side. That room will not be discussed at this time, but it is there the trapdoor led. If Stan saw it, he said nothing.

And indeed, it is quite likely that he did not see it, for there was little light in the room. That is the first thing Loring set about fixing, for as she would have said, if asked, another of Ezra’s rules was that one ought not be in a dark kitchen, as it tempts fate.

By this he would never mean that an accident of one sort or another might happen there.

So, the kitchen table at one end, and windows all along, looking out. A stove in a corner, and shelves hanging here and there between windows. Pots, pans, herbs, etc., also hanging. Chairs of a delicate character, long-limbed, thin-armed chairs which drew many compliments always, doubly. That is to say, one complimented first their appearance, and then one sat, and complimented again, saying the appearance, however fine, was no match for the actual experience of sitting.

Sadly, such a thing would be lost on Stan, being that he lacked the appropriate proportion to truly understand the chairs. He clambered up into one as Loring opened the windows and flung out the shutters.

She fetched a cushion from a closet, and gave it him. He, in putting the cushion down, stood on the chair, and had a look around.

Out the window (for now he could see well through the window) there was a fine sight.

an absolute armada of hot air balloons flooding into view from the west.

— Do you see that?

Loring turned.

— Ah, yes, the Jubilee.

She spat on the floor. I suppose in the kitchen, with all the sawdust on the floor, spitting was allowed.

— Many balloons is a jubilee?

— It would not be a bad definition, said Loring.

She continued her small tasks, putting the kettle on for tea, lighting the gas, etc.

Stan watched the procession thread its way through the air. The wind must have changed, or the pilots had decided something, for now the parade led seemingly to the house itself. Balloon after balloon loomed into view and was dragged away out of sight, just when disaster might have come. The people on the balloons were all holding hands and their mouths were shut.

How difficult it is for a child to understand such things!

Finally Loring came over, book in hand.

— Are you ready?

He sat on the cushion, and curled up in the wide chair.

— How many balloons does it take to make a jubilee?

— At least a hundred, said Loring. Any fewer, and it would be paltry. No one would come to see it.

Now, you may imagine that she was testing him by reading from this particular book, which, as anyone who has read a biography of Ezra Wesley knows, was the late master’s favorite book. He had read it dozens of times, and this copy was the copy he took with him on long train rides. It was said by some that his compulsive carrying of this book was especially ridiculous on the basis that he had in fact memorized the book. That, though, had never been completely established, for although he had on numerous occasions recited from it, he had never actually recited it in its entirety. In any event, if it was a test, it was a test that began when she started to read, for it was not from the book that she read at all! She had opened another, smaller book, within the first book, and looking down at the boy, who could see none of this, read aloud from it.

— It was a cold day, and the dogs were dying one by one. As they drew farther into the wilderness, the will of the rider seemingly intensified until the dogs obeyed him even before the desperate pleas of their own ragged frames. They had dragged him for days through that bleak landscape, and now, crossing some invisible barrier in the monochrome world, they all at once set to perishing. And so it was that when the last dog died, the man alit from the dogsled, and continued on foot.

— What is a dogsled? interrupted Stan.

— You know what a dog is?

He frowned at her.

— You know what a sled is?

— Of course.

— Make the dogs pull the sled and you have a dogsled. People say that this really happens in the coldest parts of the world, but I have never seen it. Do I believe there are dogsleds? I don’t believe it or disbelieve it. It does seem unlikely, though, that dogs could be found who would want to do this.

— Is this the second book of a series?

— No.

— Then, how do we know where the man was before?

— We don’t, yet.

— All right. What’s monochrome?

— We’ll get nowhere if I define everything for you. Just listen and pick things up by what they might seem to mean.

She drew a breath and began again.

— The snows began to end, then, as he ascended that final hill. At its crest, the weather broke, and there was green grass, stretched out like a promise. The man fell to his knees there, and tears ran down his face. Then the dogs were licking at his face again, climbing over their own harnesses, to wake him, and he was leaned over the front of the sled, confused by the cold, biting wind cutting into his eyes, and there were miles still to…

Stan was asleep. He was always falling asleep, this one. She moved closer and put her face near his, listening. A small rasping sound accompanied his breathing.

— Would you have stayed awake for the other book? she asked.

Of course, the boy said nothing.

Customarily, this day was passed by Loring in that upstairs room. Sitting there in the kitchen, with the daylight and the distances the balloons had made just beyond the window, she felt drawn too far out of herself and her habits. She left the boy sleeping and went back upstairs, and sat again.

And now, the problem was before her, presenting itself, like an occasion of laughter, generously and all at once. Should she open the box?

It was in its new place, where the boy had moved it. She did not dare to touch it to move it back. The lines on the table where it had been, faint dust lines, remained. It was almost like there were two boxes now. It troubled her to think of what the difference would be now, in opening it when it had been moved.

She stirred then to open it, but stood instead, and then sat down again. The walls of the little room were a thin color, and she felt that she could see into the distance, despite all evidence to the contrary.

A dog was whining on the street below. She heard its mistress speaking. The woman said,

— The last one is coming. We can see it best from over here. No, no.

And then there was a knocking at the door.

Loring came down the stairs, as swiftly as she could, and looked through the little window to the right of the door, which opened with a flap. There was indeed a woman outside, and holding a dog.

— What do you want?

— Excuse me, excuse me.

— What do you want?

— I live just down the road. I wonder, I know it is far too much to ask, and I would never want to presume, but I have seen this house so many times and thought how lovely it must be inside, and I was wondering, there is the Jubilee, did you know, the Jubilee is this week, and I was wondering if it might be possible to observe the final balloon from your window, as you see, it is heading into the distance there, and can’t really be seen from the street and by the time I got to the top of the hill, it would already be gone. Might I?

— You want to look at the balloon from my window? That’s what you’re saying?

— I hope it isn’t the wrong thing to say? Did I say that, the wrong thing? I’m terribly sorry if I did. My dog, of course, must come, if I come in. I can’t leave him behind. He is so anxious.

Now, here’s the thing. It wasn’t a dog at all. This woman had her husband on a leash.

Loring stared dumbfounded at the pair. From behind her, in the house, a voice came.

— How long was I asleep for?

Stan was there, rubbing his eyes and looking out at the strange scene.

— For a hundred years! yelled the woman.

— For a thousand, barked her husband.

And then there were more of them in the street, all running together, and the woman and man joined them. It was a circus — they were tumblers. They made a human pyramid in the street right there, and the woman was hoisted all the way up to the top.

— In celebration of the wonderful JUBILEE!!! she shouted.

And they all ran off.

— Now, why do you think that woman would ask such a thing?

— What did she ask?

— She wanted to come in and go upstairs to the window. She said the last balloon might still be seen.

— Was it the truth? asked Stan. I bet she just wanted to see the balloon.

— It could be, but these circus people: one never knows what they are up to.

She spat again on the floor. Some of the spit landed on the arm of her threadbare housedress. She wiped it with her hand until it was absorbed. Her look of disgust, though, was clearly for the circus people, and not for having spit on herself. Spitting on oneself: to her it was of no moment.

— Won’t you tell me more about the circus people?

— No.

— Oh, come, Loring, and tell me! If you don’t tell me, who will you tell? It will just be lost.

— Well…

She smiled.

— It isn’t their vagrancy that bothers me, but their costumes. I can’t trust people who wear such clothing. I knew a man once, Lemuel Jeffers. He got into a difficulty with circus people, and it didn’t end well. The circus had arrived in the town where he was living, and he went to see it, naturally, for who among us is not curious about a circus, particularly when we live in a town to which a circus comes. There are the posters and the general feeling of excitement, a feeling of excitement that quite possibly precedes the actual arrival of the circus. That is not beyond possibility. So, he went to the circus, and was made a fool of. There was one seat in the circus that the clowns had decided — whoever it is that sits in that seat, he or she will be the butt of all jokes. Lemuel sat there. So, the clowns threw things on him, they tugged at him. He took it all in good grace, but apparently this was the wrong way to behave, for it emboldened them. Finally, they bore him off into the middle of the ring and set a papier-mâché ass’s head on his shoulders. They made him cry out like an ass, like a donkey, and say, Oh my but I am an unfortunate one.

She cleared her throat.

— I don’t mean to overestimate the effects of this, but anyone can see quite clearly that it ruined Lemuel’s reputation in the town. He became very ill thereafter, and retired to a country house owned by his sister. What’s worse is this — the circus felt that the gag was so inspired that they found someone who looked like him at the next show, and humiliated that person, and again at the next show, and so forth. So, the persecution went on from him to everyone who looked like him. A sad state of affairs for Lemuel and for those with his visage.

— Of course, she continued. Of course, I like circuses very much. Don’t let me prejudice you. I have been to at least twenty different circuses, and they have often brought me great pleasure.

— But this one, said Stan. Why does it do that — in the street?

— Perhaps it is a roving circus that landed with some of the balloons. Or perhaps the town paid for it, and paid them to go about at the Jubilee, up and down the streets in celebration. The mayor is quite capable of such a thing. In any case, let us get to your lesson, for it is almost time for your parents to arrive.

They went in, and she took all the pieces off the board except the knight.

— How well do you know the knight?

— Pretty well.

— Yes?

— Yes.

— Then, let’s see you start here and go to every square on the board without repeating a single square. Call me when you have it.

The boy sat staring at the board.

Every now and then in the street came a great rushing sound and the circus passed again. It must have gone up and down the street, up and down all the streets (if one guess at a consistency of sorts) at least a dozen times. When the moment for the thirteenth visit of the circus came, instead there was quiet, and a knocking.

— Your mother, I believe, said Loring.

They went to the door and opened it. Indeed, the mother was there, and with her eight other boys and girls. These were Stan’s brothers and sisters, a motley bunch. Many of them wore hand-me-downs and went without food just so they could pay for Stan’s chess lessons.

Of course, that’s not so. The lessons weren’t really very expensive at all, and in fact, these weren’t Stan’s brothers and sisters. They were just a bunch of children who had taken to following Stan’s mother about. She had very fine features and this reassured the street children. They wanted a chance to sit with her and hear her sing. But, of course, she would never sing for them.

— Time to go, she said to Stan, and a hush fell over the children.

The street there by their feet was full of crepe paper and ash from the balloons. Why the balloons would leave a trail of ash was another question entirely. More came, and the group looked up from the doorway. Just ash falling through the open air onto their shoulders! There in the sky, high above, so high one could scarcely make out more than a dot, was the entire flotilla of balloons.

— I wasn’t aware balloons could go so high, said Mrs. Wiling.

— They can’t, said Loring. It will be the death of them. That’s far too close to the sun.

— That’s what the ash is, said Stan. It’s the end of them!

— Sharp, Stan, said his mother, patting him on the head.

The other children were all crestfallen. Why could they not have seen it at once, and said it, and been praised? What a miserable world it was, where poverty meant not only to wear old clothes, but also to lack the bravery to make keen observations about tragedies involving balloons.

— Next week, then, said Loring.

She went inside. A few moments later, she could be seen at the parlor window, this time with a telescope. What she saw is not reported.

It has often plagued princes that they are known to be more cowardly than other men, despite all the advantages they begin with. Likewise, the most common birds may find themselves disgusted by the behavior of an eagle when it is confronted by a dog. Now, that is not even taking into account whether or not the other birds recognize the eagle (as many men do) to be the preeminent bird. Of course, although I find eagles very special and fine to see and come close to, when it is possible, as in the case of a convalescing eagle with a broken wing, I nevertheless strongly disagree with anyone setting the eagle up as the best bird. Ravens, crows, and owls are far more compelling to me, and I haven’t gotten so far as to mention that magnificent fellow, the Ceraneous Vulture, who looks like nothing so much as a bishop or archimandrite free of his burdensome entourage and set foot upon the common roads with nary a care. I have even, I will tell you, seen a pair of these fine darlings together, quarreling, and the spectacle was something marvelous.

To wit, cowards are odious, and even more so when discovered among the ranks of the strong.

These are some of the thoughts that crossed Loring’s mind as she stared upwards through the telescope. I won’t go deeper into it, other than to say that part of the equipage from the balloon procession broke off and fell, and that perhaps even one or more of the children were nearly killed in that way, right in the street.

Of course, they were quick-footed and managed to escape. How glad they were, suddenly after, laughing and examining the wicker crates and leather bindings, the smashed provisions. One found a tricorn hat and started immediately giving orders to the others, who obeyed without question. At some point in these proceedings, Loring went inside and shut the window.

Downstairs in the parlor, she set the pieces up again on the board. He probably hadn’t managed the Knight’s Tour; there hadn’t been very much time. It was likely, though, that he was thinking about it at that moment. Might one say that? That someone else would be thinking of something just then?

She sat down in the chair, the high-backed one, where she often slept. Then she stood and turned Ezra’s photograph about the right way, so it was no longer facing the wall. She sat again, and leaned full back in the chair. She looked at the photograph then, as she had looked at it a thousand times, and it seemed to her to be the mention of her task — to go at once to the cemetery. There was still some light left. She wasn’t really hungry at all, and could eat later. She would go to the cemetery.

Where the road ended, there was a little path down into a sort of basin, across which one could go with ease, as there was very little underbrush. Beyond this, the wall that surrounded the cemetery could be seen, but there was a place, and it was the place to which the path led, where the wall had fallen down in parts. This was the entrance Loring always used, for she did not often go in through the tall gates that faced the boulevard. In this way, even her entrance into the cemetery was private, and she liked that.

This was not the sort of cemetery where one is allowed to have a real say in what the tombstone will look like. All of these were exactly the same, more like small obelisks, or markers, about two feet high and eight inches square. The writing was very small, very small indeed. What was most interesting perhaps was that, beyond the rule that the stones be of the same sort, there was no rule that they be in lines. So, the stones on these hills were haphazardly placed, and gave an odd impression.

Another fineness of this particular place was the profusion of stone staircases laid on one or another hill. These made good places for sitting, and gave an odd sense of ill-founded purpose to the proceedings.

You can begin to see now why Loring liked this cemetery, and why she had not wanted her husband shipped away to be buried elsewhere. Of course, the niceness of this cemetery probably had nothing to do with that. She just wanted him near.

That a person should treasure the physical body of a dead lover is unsurprising, to say the least. In some sense we define our location in respect to the place where our counterpart stands, when they are still standing. No less then can we define our location in this way when they have perished. And so it is that there is a particular psychological condition, entirely undocumented, which has to do with the malaise and confusion one feels when one has been too long away from the place of burial of the ones one loves.

In no way would Loring, not even knowing the existence of this condition, risk such an issue.

Therefore, not a day passed wherein she did not go to the cemetery, and she had learned its appearance in the morning, afternoon, evening, and night. It was the night she liked best, of course. Wasn’t it an old monastic practice to sleep a night in a cemetery? But she had sprained her ankle falling one black night, and since then, had kept more to the day when she could.

The caretaker was there, and saw her walking. He came up, and with him his wife and daughter.

This wife and this daughter, they were the same person, by a series of odd coincidences, but we will not go into that at the moment. Suffice it to say — do not be prejudiced against Gerard for this simple reason. There is proof that he is not to be blamed!

— Mme. Wesley. I hope you’re well.

— Quite so, Gerard. Hello, Mona.

— Hello, said Mona, looking at her feet.

This was a habit of hers. Mona was not shy, but it was understood in the town that she didn’t like looking at people much.

— I believe there was an accident, said Gerard. The balloon extravaganza caught fire. Everyone perished. I was asked my opinion by a correspondent from a national newspaper. He was here half an hour ago and left. He was looking for the crash site.

— What did you say?

— I said I didn’t think there would be a crash site. Such an accident, at such a height, wouldn’t the debris just spread out across the county?

— I would think so, said Loring. But I’m not a correspondent. I believe that correspondents are supposed to be at the scene when they get their story. Maybe he was worried that it might not count for much if he was elsewhere, even if there was nowhere to be.

— It was odd that he was here in the first place, said Mona. To arrive so soon after it happened? When must he have set out? The correspondents don’t cover the Jubilee. He must have proposed to himself that there would be an accident, and come when there had still not been one.

These are the sort of dark thoughts that Mona had. She had, if anything, been bleaker as a child than now. She had been one of those known as stationary children or stationaries because she refused to move much. This caused endless difficulties for her mother, who eventually perished, for other reasons. Her father kept her on afterwards, in one or another capacity. She was older than he, of course, and so he relied on her advice in order to run the cemetery.

— Did you pass the new plots on your way up the hill?

— I don’t know.

— The ground is still broken a bit around them, hasn’t settled in yet. You didn’t see?

— I suppose I did, said Loring, looking back.

— It’s no use to look from here, said Mona, not unless you can see through that hill and out the other side.

She laughed.

— People are so stupid sometimes. Anyway, what I was saying is this: The new plots are doubled up. That Grish family died, all of ’em from blood poisoning. There were six of them and just three plots, so there was a big conversation here with the constabulary about if there should be a lottery between them to see which three would get the graves, because, of course, someone has to pay for them, or whether donations would be sought out, which likely wouldn’t come, as they weren’t well-respected. Leastways, it was decided to put them all in, and so the pairings had to be made. Now, this was a particular problem, as Gerard didn’t know them at all and didn’t have anything useful to say in the matter, but luckily Jan, our digger, he knew them in some small way. I don’t think he gets around very much, but he had some experience calling on them, and so he was brought in to say which of them might not mind being in the grave with which other, and so forth.

Gerard had sat down on one of the stones. It did not look very comfortable. Loring sat too, but on the stair.

— There were six of them, as I said, and so it would seem like putting the husband and wife together would make sense, except that it was ruled out immediately on the basis of their hating one another furiously (which perhaps was the cause of death). So, the mother, Celeste, was put with Jimmy, the third oldest, and the father with the youngest, Peter, who he had been seen with once at the fair (someone said) and had appeared to have been having a good time. That left the other two, Gladys and Rollins, who supposedly couldn’t stand to be in a room together. However, there wasn’t anything for it. Three coffins, three graves, six bodies, in they went. Not even money for stones. They all got one stone. It said, Grish Family, blood poisoned. I don’t really know what that means, do you?

But by then night had fallen, and so the couple went off down the hill to their house, which was within the cemetery walls. (A cemetery watcher’s house within the cemetery walls: a fine thing!)

— I will find my own way out, said Loring.

was such that Loring was entirely exhausted by the time she reached the grave. She had to pick her way carefully. That night happened to be extremely dark. There was no moon and the clouds were sufficient to dull any impression of stars. She sat on the ground there and sank her fingers in the earth.

— My love, she said.

It will perhaps confuse you if I explain that as she sat there, she heard in her head the playing of a concert they once saw in Munich, in their middle age. Young people always assume that such things require great powers of memory or concentration, but of course, all things come with time and chance, and all things that come of their own accord are in that way blessed with great strength. So it is that one may suddenly be visited by a memory with great presence, whether it is that of music, or the feeling of a day, or a sight seen from afar, a face, a sense of a period of one’s life as though a foot is dipped into a pool of water — yes, you see what I mean. What she heard was not the music itself; that would be absurd. Instead, for her there: what she felt to hear that music, and the sense of the music happening. Do not believe, oh my friends, that this is counterfeit, either. It is what we have. The sense of music swelling up into the broad night, with little fists of stone graves littered on the hill around…

So, she sat there awhile in the night until she was too tired to sit, and then she lay down, and soon fell asleep. When she woke it was the morning, and at least ten birds were in the tree above her head.

They were doing that bird thing that involves sleeping with the head under one wing. Another way of writing the above sentence would be, when she woke it was the morning, and ten headless birds were draped throughout the tree above her head. Of course, that would be misleading in the extreme, as when she woke, they woke too, and one after another beheld the glittering day. For them it was a moment of true significance, and having no shame, they sounded their horns, and climbed about on the shoulders of the branches with great impetuousness.

For Loring, it was a matter of sitting up again, and maneuvering to the tree, and sitting with her back to it. The gravestone was to her left, the greater part of the cemetery to her right. That there had been clouds in the sky the night before would in no way be evident any longer, as the endless blue whirling of the sky set about this way and that, and Loring closed her eyes again, and slept for another hour before the sun was full in her face, and drove her all the way home, though she went haltingly, weakly, and stopped often for rest. It is a difficulty, one might say, that the old who are strong willed do themselves harm with this will, for they never cease to demand too much until they no longer can and are swept away.

Loring went to the door and opened it. Indeed, it was not Stan at all, but the town doctor, Matthews, with whom we have previously been concerned. It had become his habit, every now and then, to stop by and play a game of chess with Loring. Of course, she would always give him odds, pawn and move, or even knight odds, depending on her mood. Nonetheless, he was an excellent player, and a discreet one. His manners were impeccable.

— John, why, hello.

— Hello, Loring. Have you time for a game or two? I was just passing this way.

— Yes, yes. A student is coming by, but that will be all right. Come in.

She welcomed Dr. Matthews into the house, and took his heavy coat, which he wore, even in the summer heat, being a very superstitious man. One somehow assumes that by their nature doctors, scientist, etc., would be immune to such nonsense, but of course it isn’t the case at all. One might imagine a world of reason where all things fit into proper compartments, and then another, a hazy place of indistinct longings and infrequent arrivals — the first like a counting house, and the second like a train station during a land invasion. Is this hard to see — I am taking back my calling Dr. Matthew’s superstition nonsense. Superstitions may be quite useful.

— You are looking well.

Loring was wearing an outfit that resembled nothing so much as a canvas sack with holes for the head and arms. To say that she had never troubled herself much over her appearance would be an understatement of the gravest sort. She had at one time had a great deal of youthful charm and exuberance. Now, in her latter days, utility was the matter foremost in her mind concerning clothing, and she would, in winter, wear as many as three dresses at the same time.

— Thank you, John.

They went into the parlor and sat down. The pieces were set up and Loring removed her queen’s knight.

— Have you been playing much? she inquired.

— Oh, a game here or there.

They continued on and he soon blundered one piece and then another. He pushed his king over and smiled at her.

— Again?

And so they began again. The doctor loved to play in the romantic style of the nineteenth century. While such a style is delightful, scintillating, etc., it is generally effective only against weaker opponents. One must however appreciate that the character of their visits was enlivened by his archaic gambits, and she appreciated them in the spirit in which they were given.

Midway through the third game, a loud knock. The boy had arrived.

What did that meeting look like? The boy came in, wearing even then the sort of clothes a boy would wear to school; perhaps his parents were preparing him for that day which loomed in the near future, or perhaps all the clothes he owned were stiff and proper. In any case, he looked a boy with everything well in order. The doctor, of course, having delivered him, knew him well.

— Why, Stan, he said, are you a chess player?

Stan smiled.

— Dr. Matthews, it doesn’t look like you’re doing very well.

— She is relentless, said Matthews, grimacing. Don’t you think?

— Oh, no, said Stan. She is very kind and helpful. A good teacher.

— Well, perhaps that is the problem, said the doctor. I come here for beatings and not for lessons. One of these days, Loring, you should give me some advice instead of spotting me a knight and beating the side of my head in.

— I will consider it, she said.

As the doctor’s eyes passed across the parlor, from the boy to the chess board, they lit on the photograph of Ezra and his eyes narrowed. He looked at the boy and again at the picture and then at Loring. She did not see him, for she was busy staring at the board.

— Mate in five, she said. Unavoidable.

Stan came over to the board.

— Ah, said the doctor sadly. I see it now. My bishop here will fall when the rooks trade off, because of this intermediate queen check. At that point, it won’t be protected. After that, there’s nothing to be done. I can move this pawn, but, well…

Stan patted the doctor on the shoulder. Matthews was staring at him very carefully. He said nothing.

— Well, I am going to have to begin Stan’s lesson now, so if you don’t mind my kicking you out without tea…

The doctor got to his feet.

— I see, I see, he said. It’s no trouble. Thank you for the games.

— I will see you to the door, said Loring.

She fetched his coat, and together they stepped out into the street. The boy was still by the chessboard. The doctor motioned that she should shut the door.

— Do you know, he said. Do you know how old that boy is?

— Five years old.

— Five years, four months, two days.

Loring looked at him.

— What do you mean?

— I don’t mean anything at all. I delivered that boy on the very morning that,

— I understand perfectly well, John. That must have been where you were when,

— When I was called to this house with a certificate, yes. I came from there.

— I see.

They looked at each other for a moment longer, and then, unsure what to say, or if anything at all should be said, the doctor gave a curt half-bow, and tramped off down the street. Loring leaned against the door and looked up at the second floor of the house opposite. A fine web of ivy had overtaken the entire face and hung in strands, like hair from the withers of an ox.

— Born at the very hour, she said.

A woman was passing selling bread. She had a dark green shawl wrapped over her shoulders, and her basket had a thick leather strap that held it to her back.

Loring bought a loaf of bread from the woman and took it indoors. It was still hot from the oven. The woman must just have come from baking. Yet she did not have the look of someone who had just baked something. Perhaps she was the sister of the baker. What should such a person look like?

— I have a question, the boy said.

— What is it?

— How did Ezra become so strong?

— It was a part of him, of his habits, his style. He had enough will to force himself to do what he wanted to do. He arranged his life in such a way that all his activities supported his great hope, of being the champion. Even I, even my chess playing became arranged so that I would play in the way that would best serve the development of his skill. He wasn’t very nice, and he wasn’t very likeable. Not many people liked him. But being liked wasn’t what he wanted. Later, of course, he was very beloved, but that’s different from being liked. The main thing was, he beat them all, every last one.

— Do you think I could do the same?

The cloth of the boy’s sweater had pilled. Loring pulled at it and set the fragment on the table.

— What do you mean?

— Well, perhaps if I learned about him, it would help me to be like him, to become a master.

— I can tell you many things about him, and show you, she said.

And she thought, If you are listening, please go and sit in the chair on the other side of the room.

A moment passed. Another. The glass of the windows looked suddenly very thin to Loring and she wondered how it could be that none of the panes had ever broken, not in all the years the house had stood.

The boy went and sat in the chair. He was holding something in his hand.

— What’s that? asked Loring.

— It’s an apple, he said.

She pried open his hand. It was the core of an apple.

— That’s not an apple, she said. It was an apple.

— It is an apple to me, said Stan.

— I am going to cut this bread, she said. Would you like some?

They went then into the kitchen, and something stops us from following.

By what notion Loring had preserved that sense of herself which was her husband’s, we cannot say. Perhaps that was what was in the box, for certainly it was nothing she knew of. Yet, the sense remained, she was the same person, and in the same way, as though he were still beholding her and keeping her to the idea of her that he had always had.

They used to say to each other, when one would leave the house, the one staying would say:

Nonetheless, my love, I hold out my hand only to you as the train departs!

And the other would smile and go.

did Loring decide. That the boy should be encouraged to play, but slowly, slowly — that also was decided. But none of it was in the nature of persuasion. Loring was not trying to persuade herself of anything, and certainly, she did not want to persuade the boy of something that wasn’t true. Rather, she was investigating, and the thing she saw was terrifying, entrancing.

— I do not believe there is any other world, she said.

— Another world? asked Stan.

They were speaking of metaphysical matters. Stan was continually asking questions about dreams.

— Yes, there are many who will tell you about it, but it must not be true.

— Why is that?

— Not because no one has come back from it, said Loring. But, because…

And here she paused.

— Because why?

Loring fussed with the edge of the tablecloth a moment.

— Because nothing is ever that way — the way people guess it will be. And so many want it to be that way, that there is another world. There mustn’t be. Do you see?

— Could we sit out on the lawn a bit?

She found a cloth from some hamper and tucked it under her arm.

They went together out the front door and around. To get to the back of the house they actually had to go down a lane that curved out and behind, past many other houses. There was no immediate access to the back. When they reached the next road, they turned and came along past a ridge of rock or an old stonewall, it was hard to say which it was. Then there was a long grassy rise, and there in its heart, the back of the house. Of course, they could have reached it just as well by climbing down through the trapdoor, but Loring was not much good at climbing down through trapdoors anymore, and besides, it was not the same thing — to take someone out to sit on the grass and to take someone through a trapdoor to go out and sit on the grass. Someone like Loring was skilled at nearly everything, and she did not get that way through imprecision. Therefore, they went the long way around.

— This is a book of photographs of him, taken by the artist Glisseau. He was very famous, and known for choosing his subjects very carefully. He has a book of photographs of Mussolini from his early days, and he photographed Pierre Solon on the day of his suicide.

She turned the pages for him, showing him photograph after photograph. In fact, she had not looked at the book in years, and it pained her to do so. She had forgotten a little what her husband had looked like to others.

— What are these things he’s wearing?

— Those are spats — to keep one’s boots clean. Although, really people wore them more for style than anything else.

In the photograph, Ezra was standing in front of some villa, holding a violin. Loring was looking out the window at him.

— He didn’t play the violin, she said. It was someone else’s. Oh, it was his.

She had turned the page and Ezra was standing with his arm around another man. Someone else was buried up to his neck, and the two were laughing at him.

— That’s Federico Marz. He was a terrible chess player, but a wonderful man. They used to play great practical jokes on the other masters. The one in the ground is Garing. I believe they gave him sleeping pills and buried him while he was asleep. When he woke, he was in the ground, and they had hired dancing girls to dance around and tease him. Somehow they didn’t make it into the picture. But he was a long-suffering fellow. He didn’t hold a grudge.

— Buried him to his neck — that’s awful, said Stan. Isn’t it, isn’t it awful?

— He was only like that for ten minutes, I think, said Loring defensively. See, here they are a week later — all friends.

Garing, Marz, Ezra, and Loring were in an high-backed carriage of some sort. It was a broad, open day and they were all four very young.

— Anna must have taken this. There are no photographs of her, though. She avoided it at all costs. She was Glisseau’s wife, but she loved someone else. It was never clear whom. Glisseau was more like her brother.

A man in the background was holding a donkey.

— That’s Glisseau there, sneaking into the picture. He had a sense of humor, too, of course, and liked being in his own pictures.

— I haven’t been photographed, said Stan.

— That is probably not true, said Loring.

She turned another page. There, Ezra was standing with a very beautiful girl in a garland of flowers who was giving him some kind of plate covered in gold. It was raining very heavily in the photograph and the crowd before them bristled with umbrellas. The girl was very wet and laughing. She had committed her whole self to this enterprise of giving him the gold plate. Ezra had no expression whatsoever on his face.

— This is when he won the tournament at Viso.

— Do you think I look at all like him? asked Stan. I would like to look like that.

Loring was looking deeper and deeper into the photograph. Her voice came again, very quiet.

— Viso was a sort of gambit tournament, sponsored by an industrialist. The man, Dubuffet, a napkin-maker, or was it roof tiles, I can’t recall, he fancied himself a skillful player, and had come up with a move in an opening line. No one played it because it was terrible, and he didn’t like that, so what do you think he did? What would you do in that situation?

— Think of another move.

— Well, he liked his move, so he made a big prize fund and set up a tournament in which the players had to alternate taking black and white and playing this same sequence every game. Unfortunately for some of the players, the resulting positions didn’t favor their proclivities. But Ezra enjoyed dubious play in open tournaments. He would play solidly against strong players, but in the opening rounds, he’d often sac unnecessarily. To him it was a joy to see terrific imbalances — he liked nothing better than to have three minor pieces for a queen, if it could be managed. Of course, he would only do such a thing if the pawn structure favored it.

Stan nodded a little uncertainly.

— We have that golden plate upstairs somewhere. Trophies are rather odious, though, and terrible to look at. Especially a golden dish, of all things. Better to just pawn it.

She laughed.

The sound of a crowd came closer suddenly, although it had not been there at all. Suddenly it was there, perhaps ten children and a teacher: a class, out for a walk from the nearby school.

— That is Miss Carnaugh. She is very strict, I hear, said Loring, peering under her hand. Perhaps you will have her as a teacher someday.

— I don’t believe I will go to school, said Stan. I wouldn’t like it.

— Your mother says you will.

The students appeared to be ten or eleven. They were playing some trust game where the students would fall from things and be caught, or get wrapped up in a bag and dragged around and then released.

— I have never understood these games, said Loring. I don’t know why you would want to make children more trusting. That is their principle fault to begin with.

— What do you mean?

Loring shook her head.

And with that, they went back to the house.

Just then, a man was coming out of the house next door.

— I’m sorry to bother you, he said. But I believe this is yours. It was brought to our house yesterday and my daughter accepted the delivery. Of course, she shouldn’t have; it isn’t ours at all. But she did. In any case, here it is now for you.

He handed a long, flat package to Loring.

— Thank you, she said.

If the man was not a mortician, then it is impossible to say anything about him; he spoke soberly and quietly, dressed somberly, made persistent but nonconfrontational eye contact, and wore bifocals. His hair cut was so vague as to be indescribable. In general, one wouldn’t be wrong to mention that he gave the comforting effect of a tree branch.

— Shall we open the package? asked Stan.

— Inside.

They set the package (which was very light) on the floor of the parlor. A scissors was to hand. But first:

The package was not addressed to Loring. As anyone could see, the exterior was entirely blank. Why the man would have thought that it was destined for Loring was a fact completely unexplainable. They might as well open it, then, to see.

Open it they did. Loring handed the scissors to Stan. The boy proceeded to cut here and there enthusiastically. He soon had one end undone, then the other. He put the scissors down and unfolded the cardboard. Inside was the single wing of a large bird.

— But what can it mean? mused Loring.

— What will you do with it?

— Quite right, Stan. What will we do with it?

— It would be a good prize in a contest.

— A jumping contest, said Loring. For people who fall out of planes and survive.

— Do people survive that? asked Stan.

— From time to time. We can call it the Daedalus prize.

She put it back in the box.

— Stick this in the closet for me, Stan. Thank you.

— Did you ask the man to deliver that wing? asked Stan.

He sat on the floor and stared up at Loring, who sat in the chair. They were in the middle of talking about pawn formations.

— Of course, she said. I thought it would be good for you, once in your life, to open a package and find something that you could never predict. It will change how you open packages from now on. The delivery of the package: that was today’s lesson.

— Like all swindlers, Ezra loved magicians, most especially those who escaped from bonds: handcuffs, ropes, boxes, etc. And make no mistake, Ezra was a swindler, even though he was a great master. He made terrible moves all the time! It’s just that it was hard for his opponents to see. But a magic show, have you seen such a performance?

They had been talking about Ezra for the past hour, with Stan asking questions of every sort, and Loring answering. The boy had apparently gotten a biography from someone and was reading it with the help of his oldest sister.

— I haven’t ever been to a show, he said, with as much sadness as he could muster.

— Well, in these, the magician, usually a man, is bound so he can’t possibly get out, and then, miraculously, he does. I am going to read to you from an account written by one such magician. He was a very good one, but they locked him up, and while he was in jail he wrote this book. As soon as he was done, he escaped.

— Did he stay escaped?

— He was stabbed in his sleep by the father of a girl he had taken in. He bled to death while trying to crawl out of the building. It was a boarding house with very long hallways. They rarely make buildings with hallways like that anymore. I suppose they are hazardous, at least for people who have been stabbed.

— All right, said Stan, a bit confused.

— Shall we start?

— Yes.

Stan curled up into something like the shape of a rabbit.

Loring opened a small square volume, shaped to look like a toffee box. One side unlocked, and then the flap opened and the pages might be turned. She rustled about in there for a minute or two before finding the passage she wanted.

— When one is dying, it is easy to grow fearful. And can it be called anything else but dying — being handcuffed, sewn into a bag that is then wrapped in chains and thrown into a river? The first minute, there is tremendous urgency. One feels one must struggle to escape, one tries as hard as one can, even in the smallest things: to grip the lock pick between two knuckles, pointing backwards, to use the slightest bit of razor to cut the bag. But in the second minute, and in the third, time stretches out. One feels no urgency at all, just a drifting lethargic sadness. This is the feeling of parting, and it grows on one as the breath slowly fails in the lungs. One begins to believe that one is saying goodbye — but if it happens that one believes too much, then that’s the end. Then the onlookers can dredge the river for a dead man chained up in a sack. But, if one can believe, in the midst of all that sadness, all that leave-taking, that a small thing and another small thing, each carefully, correctly done, will lead to escape…such a person may be called an escape artist, and for him there is always the tiniest bit of hope.

— Are there many of them?

— No, not many, said Loring. Of course, the bad ones don’t get very far.

She laughed.

— No, they don’t get very far at all.

— But are there any around here?

— There was one, a good one, but I don’t think he performs anymore. His theater was in a city nearby here. He was the only act that performed there; all the rest of the time, the theater was shut and no one could go in.

— Oh, I should just love to see it!

— It is something.

— What was his name?

— Dardanelle. Theodore Thomas Dardanelle, sometimes known as Menduus. He had one other amazing trick — with a broom, that I have never seen anyone else do. But I won’t ruin it for you. Perhaps one day you’ll see him, or someone else — one of his apprentices, do it. In any case, the time has come for us to play our weekly match. To the board!

Stan sat at the board. Loring sat.

The hands of the clock spun! Pieces fluttered and stood, and gathered at the corners of the table, sullen white and disconsolate black.

Soon, the boy had lost four more games.

— Next week, said Loring, we will talk about blindfold chess.

The doorbell rang.

— And here is your mother.

Stan stood, and crossed the floor. As he passed by the photograph of Ezra, it would not have been hard to suppose that there was some resemblance between the two.

Stop there, thought Loring.

Stan stopped, and stood for a minute.

— Goodbye, he said.

may be found any number of curious things. And this is the magic of an envelope, to seal away an idea and give it direction; it is sent from one place to another, from one person to another, and either of them, or neither one, may be alive at the time that it is read. Or perhaps one is, and the other is not. That is likely to be the most interesting of the various possible scenarios. Imagine for instance, that I was a general, and I wrote a message and sealed it, asking another general for help. Send troops, I might say. We are hard pressed. Immediately thereafter, we are all killed. I myself am killed in the very tent where I wrote the message, sitting in the very chair where I sat when I wrote the message. It would have been a lovely and most precise tent — of canvas and wood, with a pallet for snatching what rest I could. The flap to the tent would fly open and the colors would be wrong. I would see immediately that the soldiers entering were wearing uniforms terrible to my eyes. Then I would be bayoneted and the trinkets would be stripped from my body by the fierce enemy. My head would be cut off and hung from a cavalryman’s saddle. Some hours later, in some other part of the landscape, the general to whom I wrote, an old friend, would receive the note. He would see my hand, for I would have written to him many times during my life, and he would remember it with fondness. Why, of course, he would say. Even though I have too few men for my own purposes, why, of course, I will send them. But then the news would come that my head has been posted on the gates of this or that city. Can you imagine the sentiment with which he would behold my message, reading it then for a second time?

Yes, Loring was a letter writer, and she had written many letters in her life, both to the living and to the dead, to famous figures, and to, when she herself was famous, obscure jumpers-up. She had cried onto the paper of some, bled onto others in camps and wartime hospitals. She had hidden letters in cans, and buried them, just over enemy lines where they could be reclaimed by partisans, or at the very least, she had imagined doing so. Oh, she was familiar with the letter in a way that we can scarcely know it.

And so I say, that when she sat down to write out her plan in a letter to her deceased husband, about her deceased husband, in his incarnation as a child who was now her living student, it may be understood that she was fully in possession of all the equanimity that might be had in such confusing circumstances. The letter follows.

was very reasonable. That is, there was a lot of reasoning in it.

e.

It is now certain to me that something has happened. What it is, I do not know. If it is possible to write to you, to speak with you, as I always have done, when you are in some sense my adversary, hiding in plain sight, who can say? I will try it by imagining you, as I always have, as my dearest friend, and thinking that, if you hide, it is only because things that are clouded for me are equally clouded for you.

I want to be sure that what I believe is true.

My plan is as follows:

1. To try to speak through the boy, to you.

2. To try to plumb the boy’s memories, and see if he can recall anything that you or I know or knew.

There is a child’s song about a man in a marsh who is sinking out of sight. Do you remember it? I used to sing it sometimes, even though the tune is dreadful.

The man is sinking slowly out of sight and a woman who is passing sees him. She is too far to save him, but she asks for his hat, and then asks for his shirt, and for his watch and watch chain. The man throws his hat to dry ground and his shirt and his watch and watch chain. But he cannot come himself and he cannot be saved. The woman says something like:

if I’d a length of rope, I’d throw it you,

and drag you out right quick—

but i can’t and so

instead you should

throw me your walking stick…

Then the man says,

if you’d a length of rope, you’d throw it me

and save my life right quick—

but you can’t and so

as i sink i throw

to you my walking stick

Ezra, am I sinking? Or are you?

yours,

l.

PS I remain confused about what it would mean if the boy IS you. Would then the things about him that are unfamiliar to me be things that were true about you, but that changed over time, so that when you met me they had all vanished? In that sense, would I now be discovering the last of you — to find a whole that had always been lost to me?

— Come in, said Loring. It was to be raining, but apparently it is not.

— It isn’t raining at all, agreed Stan’s mother.

The two stood looking at each other. Finally, Stan’s mother spoke.

— I wondered, could you tell me how Stan is doing? I didn’t want to ask you when he is around. This is the first time he’s really been away from home for any length of time, and certainly the first he’s been with a stranger.

— I’m not really a stranger, said Loring. Not to him.

— No, of course not. Of course not. But I was wondering…

— Yes, well, he is a…

At this point it occurred to Loring that this was her chance to learn things about Stan that he himself did not know, or would not tell. But, which to ask first?

— …he is a shy one. I wonder, do you know, does he get on well with other children?

— Not well at all. They like him well enough, but he won’t bother with them. He would rather sit indoors and read.

— And his father, said Loring. What’s their relationship?

— Good, said Stan’s mother curtly. Do you have any reason to suppose it’s not?

— No, no. No, no, no. I am just trying to think of the boy, to know him better so that I can teach him properly.

Stan’s mother nodded her head slightly, still not entirely reassured.

— Does he have any particular objects he likes to keep around himself?

— Well, a chess set that we bought him, and a whitish colored stick.

— A whitish colored stick?

— Yes.

— How long is it?

— About this long.

— And you say it’s a stick.

— Yes. He put marks in it and he uses it as a ruler, to poke things, and to reach things that are high up. It’s kind of hooked on the end.

— Like a bird talon?

— I don’t know, said Stan’s mother. I don’t know that. Anyway, is he learning or not? How is his chess?

— It is…

There was another knock at the door, very slight, and then another louder, and then a tumult of banging and shouting. The door, which actually had not been properly closed, swung open, spilling three or four boys and a girl or two onto the hall carpet. These were the selfsame ones who had been following Stan’s mother before. Now, here they were again.

— What are you doing? she asked.

— Just waiting for you, they said. We got impatient.

— If you are going to wait, then wait. If you are going to be impatient, there is a glue factory that way. That’s where orphans go, and not to work, either.

They all laughed a hearty laugh together at that.

— We are ready for you to come out, they said, completely disregarding the glue factory scenario.

— If you’ll pardon me, said Stan’s mother to Loring.

She took up an atlas that was leaned against the wall and drove the children out with furious blows. She really was quite strong, you know.

When the children were gone, she came back.

— They are always after me, she said.

— It is true in my experience, said Loring, that they want to be near you. Who can say why.

— We will be over here! came a shout from outside.

A quick look into the distance would have made clear that the children were balanced on several lightpoles. How they had climbed them is unknown. In fact, neither woman looked out the door. Instead, they were concluding their business.

— I will bring him tomorrow.

Loring nodded.

Loring sat remembering things. She remembered an orange sail that had often been on certain boats. This sail had gone out of use. It was now no longer to be found. Although once it had been so common that all recognized it by sight, now there was not even a single one in existence. It had been many years since she had last looked out to sea, and found there, darting above the horizon, that particular cloth, angle, texture.

Next she thought of the weather, and how it seemed to be true that everyone felt weather was different during childhood. Of course, it couldn’t be true. She thought of her own childhood, and of the weather then, and discovered that she too felt the weather was different. Although, of course, she thought, I lived in a different place. Most everyone ends up in a different place from the place of their childhood, and so it makes sense that the weather would be different. But then she thought, perhaps that’s not true. Many people stay in the same place.

Once, she said to herself, there was that storm at the zoo. We had gone to the zoo, and torrential rains came. The zoo had just been built that year, and they hadn’t known much about zoo-building, and certainly not about flooding, for all the cages began to flood when the rain came on. Such a rain, not in all the remaining years have I seen its like. She thought about how she and her father had sheltered under a tree and had watched the animals drowning. She had cried and cried. Her father had not covered her face. Rather, he pointed out how sad it was.

To come all this way, he had said, and then die in a cage.

That had been the first public photograph of Loring. A photographer had taken it just as she and her father left the zoo, the rain abating. Behind them a ruined, broken landscape, with dead animals here and there. And she, dressed in a blue smock with her single braid wound tight about her neck. Of course, in the photograph, the smock was not blue.

— And now we are going to try something, said Loring.

The two were in the bedroom, where they hadn’t gone before.

— And now we are going to try something. Please, go, stand there by the window.

Stan went and stood by the window. A light fell now on the front of his face and shoulders.

— Would you mind, she said, putting on this jacket?

It was one of these very light jackets that aren’t really for wearing outdoors, and have buttons like those on a shirt. This one was grey.

— All right, he said. Is this for me?

He put the jacket on. It fit quite well.

— It is, she said.

— Thank you.

Loring watched him there a moment.

— Keep looking out the window, she said. Don’t turn around.

She was wearing unusual clothing: a Chinese style shirt that buttoned on one side, in muted but iridescent green like a fish seen in muddy water; a pair of broad khaki pants; and her hair was tied up in a kerchief. The matter is confused, but becomes clear when one sees the photograph that she then took out of her pocket. In it, she, a younger woman, is wearing the same clothing, the Chinese shirt, the pants, the kerchief. She is standing by the window of a bedroom, beside a man who is wearing a light grey jacket. The light is falling on their faces, on their shoulders. It would seem the hour is before noon. She has one hand on the windowsill, the other on his shoulder. In the man’s hand is a folded wallet, of thick red paper tied with string. It hangs, held there by his fingers at the bottom right of the photograph. They are neither one young anymore.

Loring went over to the window. The room was small, and one had to go around the bed to get to the window. The floor creaked whenever it was crossed, and she crossed it then.

— Hold this, she said.

She handed him a paper wallet. It was red.

— In the other hand, she said. Now, look out the window.

She took a deep breath, and then stood by him, looking out the window. One of her hands went to the sill, and the other to his shoulder.

— The other hand, she said again, a bit harshly. Put it in the other hand.

— I’m sorry.

He took the wallet and held it in his right hand.

On the bureau, the photograph lay flat, and by the window, her reenactment was a mirror. The light fell on their shoulders, on their faces. Whether her eyes were opened or closed in the photograph, one can’t say, but now they were closed, now they were open, and she was desperately trying to find something, struggling without moving at all.

The boy seemed to sense this. He stood, stock-still, like a deer.

The sound of the clock in the parlor climbed the stair and entered the room.

— I am, she began to say, and stopped.

Open the window, she thought. Open it.

There was a painting on the wall by the bed of a religious procession in a Spanish mountain town. Everyone was hidden under cloth masks, and carrying torches. They were on a steep incline and the village spread out below, its own lights visible in the painted darkness.

He opened the window and turned to look at her.

She took her hand off his shoulder.

— You know, he said. When I came here with my mother, I felt that I had been here before. But now I think that I was never here.

— Never? she asked.

— Either never, or so many times that the place disappears. Aren’t they close to being the same? I think this is an awful place. Many places are awful. I am told I should come here. My mother tells me to; she brings me here. Then I am here, and I do not have the feeling that I was brought here. I know she is my mother, but I do not see why, or why I should go with her, except when she brings me here. Then, I feel — she is serving me, because.

He put the wallet on the windowsill.

— Because, I want to be here, however awful it is. I am very tired. I just woke up, but I am tired. Why is that?

Lie down on the bed, she thought.

Through the open window came the noise from a kitchen in the house opposite. Just bustling kitchen sounds, things being placed atop one another, things being cut, water poured, cabinets open, shut.

Lie down on the bed.

The boy went and lay on the bed.

— Take a nap, she said. I will be back in a little while.

She went out and closed the door.

Then, in the room, a deep quiet as of distance. One could shout, for instance, at the edge of a vast park, and not be heard within. In this way was the tiny room sealed within itself. On the bed, the boy lay and a slight rasping sound came as his hands moved against the bedspread. Everything in the room had been there so long that the weight of each object had settled and things were as though joined. Lying there, the boy’s weight began also to settle. Although the window was open, no sound of any kind reached the bed. It was as though horse messengers were continually setting out across the steppes where in the folds of such indescribable cloth, they would lose their way and perish.

Loring went down to the kitchen and put water on to boil. She got out a teapot, and a little metal basket that divided to open and close again perfectly. This apparatus was joined to a chain that ran to a little weight with an hourglass on it. The hourglass, of course, would tell one when the tea was appropriately steeped.

She filled the tiny basket with tea leaves, shut it, and set it in the teapot. Then she went to the window.

Below, in the field, the teacher’s class was again playing.

Things must be bad in the schoolhouse if they are forced out of doors on every possible occasion, thought Loring. For the children did not look like they wanted to be out of doors. They were sitting in a line in the grass, trying to read from a book. Every other child had a book. While the one was reading, the other was looking over the shoulder. Each of those other ones wrote in a notebook occasionally with pencils that were tied to the notebooks with string.

And yet, the teacher was the very picture of gaiety and joy. In a loose dress with her limbs bare, she ran back and forth in the field, calling to the children, as if to tempt them away from their work. Yet not a one went to her. There must be some secret punishment at work, and she is testing their resolve, thought Loring approvingly.

The pot shrieked from above the flames, and Loring attended to it, and to the remaining preparations of the tea. From the pantry she took some sort of cookie or cake, from a cabinet, two cups, from elsewhere, milk, sugar, spoons of overmastering delicacy, and with all such things assembled on a tray, went back upstairs, slowly negotiating the steps, and passing in the process, the eighty-three episodes of Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, framed plates placed in order up and down the staircase. No. 51 caught her eye, Gracias á la almorta, the brutalized, impoverished figures huddled around a bowl of millet in a dimly unknowable place of suffering. She felt they were so cheerful, these drawings. One couldn’t help but smile. Is that how it is? Must brutality point to kindess, lack to plenty? Or does one just grin willfully at one’s tormentors, even when it seems they are not present, they have long gone away.

When she opened the door to the bedroom, Stan was asleep. She set the tray down on a high table by the bed and went to stand there over him. He had taken the jacket off and covered his face with it. He was lying there, with the jacket over his face.

Loring moved so that she stood sideways to the bed. Her eye could now regard it only in the edges. She looked again and saw a figure, lying in the bed, half covered in a grey jacket, of a sort she knew well.

She stood there quietly, the pleasure of this small but persistent, until at length the boy awoke.

— What is that? asked the boy cheerfully.

— Tea, said Loring. Tea and a bit of something to eat.

— Can I have some?

— It’s for you, of course. Come over here.

The light had changed a bit in the room. So, too, had the sound. With her entry, the noise of wind and the limbs of trees battering against one another and against the house.

— It is nice to be in a small house, observed Stan. Then you have the outside as well.

— That’s so, said Loring. The main thing is — that you can feel the weather. If you can ignore it entirely, your life is a bit sadder — which is something no one would have predicted.

The boy began to eat. Loring poured his tea and added sugar and milk for him.

— Do you like tea? she asked.

— I must, he said. Because the smell woke me up, and I was in the middle of a good dream.

His voice sounded fuller and richer. It sounded, in short, much more like her husband’s. Loring listened carefully. She shut her eyes, trying to hear every bit of it.

— What was the dream? she asked.

— I was reading a book of myths last night. I think it came from that.

Loring nodded.

— I was at a kind of doorway between one kingdom and another. There was a long wall stretching in either direction. I had a little house…

— A hut?

— Yes, a hut, on top of the wall. When people came, I was supposed to ask them questions. This was my dream.

— What kind of questions did you ask?

— Well, there was a list, but I didn’t read it. I knew the ones I liked.

— Were they difficult questions?

— I remember the ones I asked — there were four of them:

when do you believe you will return to the place you came from?

what is the heaviest thing you are carrying?

have you passed anyone dead or dying?

if you would be paid to turn back now, would you?

— Did you have money to pay them if they agreed?

— I didn’t have anything at all. Just a broom to sweep the top of the wall, and a little barrel of food. Someone would come on horseback every now and then to give me more.

— What if someone came who was to be turned back? How would you do it?

— I don’t know, he said. It doesn’t sound like a very good system, does it?

— It sounds like an excellent system, said Loring. I wouldn’t mind doing that job.

— Well, it is a good system for the one who stays there, but I just don’t know what it does for the kingdom, said Stan.

He took a bite of a black-colored cake.

— It wouldn’t be the same kingdom without the person at the end, would it? said Loring. You could almost say that you serve both kingdoms — the kingdom that employs you, and the other kingdom on the other side of the wall, because you make the difference between them clear. It is an impossible difference to know or understand, but you make it clear.

— The tea is good, said Stan. I like tea, and also black cake.

— Finish your cake, because we have three things left to do today before you leave.

listed neatly:

1. A lecture on playing chess with your eyes closed.

2. A short match.

3. A drawing exercise.

— In the dream, asked Loring, when you were at this hut atop this wall in the midst of this wasteland, waiting there with your broom and your barrel of food: did anyone actually come to the gate?

— No, said Stan. No one came.

— Chess is many things, but one thing it IS not is a game that is played on a board. Make no mistake, good chess is played entirely in the head. And that is why it is no difficulty at all for masters to have a game wherein they simply announce the moves to another and never look at a board at all.

— But doesn’t that become confusing very quickly?

Stan was sitting on the floor underneath the table. He had discovered a hole of some kind, possibly a mousehole, in the wall by the near table leg. He was trying to peer into this hole, and at the same time was listening very carefully, one supposes.

— Yes and no, said Loring. In fact, people have been known to play not only blindfold, but also simultaneously. That is to say — if I showed up in a town and had no money to pay for my dinner, I might be convinced to give a simultaneous exhibition wherein I would play ten or fifteen people at the same time, going from board to board and making my moves. Now, a blindfold simultaneous exhibition, as you may imagine, is a little more difficult. There, one goes from board to board and is simply told the last move that happened. You are at board three. Your opponent played pawn to c3. What is your move? This may seem entirely impossible, but players do it, and have done it, playing blindfold simultaneously against more than thirty master-strength players. Of course, it takes its toll on the mind. In fact, that’s why it has been outlawed in certain countries. The sense is, it shortens the careers of the best masters. It ages you, mentally, which is an awful idea.

— Can you do it? asked Stan.

— I have only done it with three or four games going on at once. Ezra gave an exhibition once where he did twenty boards.

— Did he win?

— He won fifteen, drew four, and lost one.

— To whom did he lose?

— To me. It was a trick. The organizers switched me in for the amateur that was supposed to be playing. He, of course, recognized it at once, but it didn’t help. Here, let me show you the moves.

Stan climbed up into his chair, leaving his perhaps-mouse-hole behind somewhat regretfully.

She showed him the moves of the game on the chessboard.

— And here he is forced to resign. He’ll lose his knight no matter where it moves. Any of these pawn moves lose immediately also. That’s called zugzwang.

— Shall we play a game without a board, asked Stan.

They tried, but it soon proved impossible. Stan could not remember which piece was where and kept trying to move knights that were hiding elsewhere or rooks that had already been taken off the board.

— Don’t worry, said Loring encouragingly. It comes in time. Let’s play our weekly match.

While they played, many things happened all around them. Loring thought about the open window upstairs and that it should be shut. She thought about the photograph that was lying on the bureau in that same room. She thought of the teacher that she had seen instructing the class, and of the dog that had been barking early that same morning. Mostly, though, she thought of standing in the bedroom and looking at her husband out of the corner of her eye.

— What have you been thinking about, Stan? she asked after he lost all four games in a row, quite badly.

— I was thinking about what you told me.

— What is that?

— About imagining things that might happen or might have happened. About trying to pretend that those things are real, in order to see what might be true about them. You said I should, if I felt the edge of something, I should follow it and see where it leads.

— And what were you imagining?

She sat up.

— Well, there came a knock at the door, and when you went to check, it was my father, only he looked different than the way that he usually looks.

The boy told Loring a story then, in which she was included as a character. They were sitting there, at lessons, as always, and a knock came at the door. Loring went to answer it, but there was no one there.

— A hermit always longs for visitors, said Loring, until they come, and then he wishes them gone.

— Are you talking about my dream?

— No, no, just speaking to myself. It is what old people do. You remembered those dreams very clearly, didn’t you?

— I have been trying to. I remember them partly, and make it up partly — make up what happened.

— I see, she said.

She looked at the boy in front of her. He was looking at her very closely; she felt herself being looked at. Who is it, she wondered, who is looking at me? If it is you, please put your hand out and touch my arm.

The boy sat and did nothing.

A moment passed.

Put your hand out and touch my arm.

But nothing happened. Loring was suddenly seized with a grave fear. Was it all a cruel trick? She stood up and rushed out of the room. The boy jumped up and followed after her. She stopped in the pantry, leaning against the shelves. Was she crying?

— Are you all right? asked Stan.

She knelt down next to him.

— I’m all right, she said.

— Will you tell me a story?

— I will.

And now it had been such a long time, such a very long time, and the mother must be arriving, might already have arrived — couldn’t possibly not be nearly to arrive.

— Shall we wait outside for her? asked Loring.

— All right, said Stan.

They went out to the steps and sat with the door shut and locked behind them.

— It is a nice thing, Loring said, to lock your door behind you when you sit on the stoop. Then, when it happens that the mood strikes you to rush off somewhere, you are totally prepared for it. Also, you have the complete freedom of your surroundings. If the door isn’t locked, then you, positioned in front of it, are in some sense defending the door. If it is locked, however, then you are a sort of sortie, sent out of the gates to some unknown end. Do you know to what purpose you have been sent out?

— To do the Knight’s Tour? asked Stan.

— Have you gotten it yet?

— I think so, said Stan, but I’m not sure.

— We can check it next time on the board, with you crossing off squares.

Then, a girl named Valerie showed up. She was like that, apparently. She would just show up and then she would be somewhere.

— Hello, said Valerie. I came to get Stan.

Stan looked at her a bit distrustfully.

— I’m your sister’s friend. Don’t you remember me?

Stan shook his head.

— Well, said Valerie, in that case, it will have to be kidnapping. Ms. Wesley, if you don’t mind I’m going to have to kidnap this boy.

— Don’t let her, shrieked Stan, suddenly seeming like he was actually afraid.

His face had become red. Afraid, really! And I believe he was, after all a five-year-old may cry about anything at all.

For some reason, Loring decided to continue the joke. Perhaps it was because she was tired, perhaps because he hadn’t touched her arm when she gave him the invisible request.

— Oh, take him away, she said. For all I care. But be sure to stuff something in his mouth or he’ll call for help.

Stan began to cry. It was just too much for him. He wasn’t at all prepared to be taken away by someone he didn’t know.

— But you know me, Valerie kept saying. You know me. You know me.

As is obvious, this is a pretty worthless thing to say if the other person doesn’t believe it.

Finally, the two of them walked Stan the whole way home. It was exhausting for Loring, for she was very old, and not given to sudden exertion. They had to stop many times, and by the end she felt the thinness of her old bones. As soon as she got out of sight of the house, she collapsed on a short wall, actually collapsed. Her body gave out. She fell onto her hands and hip and the stone cut her fingers in places.

Someone was there and speaking to her.

— Are you all right?

— Oh, she said. Oh, I’m okay. I just…

Three young men stood there.

— You don’t look all right, said one.

— She looks like she just collapsed on that wall.

— Not just, said the third. I expect she’s been there for a while.

And she had, she had been there for about an hour, trying to recover.

— I’m all right, said Loring weakly.

— Well, said the first one, it won’t do unless we help her out. Where do you need to go? he asked her.

— I am all right, she said. You don’t have to help me.

— He’s going to help you, said the third. I am also. So’s he.

Loring saw this was going nowhere. She might as well accept their help. Of course, it was quite clear that she needed it anyway.

— Over that way, she said, vaguely waving her arm.

— You really shouldn’t go out so far alone, said the youngest one.

He must have been about twenty. They were all three wearing the same sort of work suit and appeared quite recently to have been mending something.

— Here, let me help you.

The three hoisted her up and so along they went, with them practically carrying her. Of course, being carried a long distance is not always the most comfortable experience, so the three cheerfully gave her an opportunity to rest here and there, peppering her all the while with gentle questions to distract her from the task at hand, and reassuring her with pleasant sounds and the occasional hearty song.

In such a style, they arrived back at Loring’s house, where the young men saw her over her doorstep and went away, promising to return for a supper of some sort which Loring assured them she would make out of gratitude. Although, they did say, they often skipped supper to go to the dance hall in the next town.

There is just enough time, one explained, to get there and back if we leave the minute work stops.

Loring made her way slowly to the chair in the parlor and sank into it. She was not embarrassed by what had happened, but she did feel foolish. Her hands were feathered with little cuts. Her legs hurt terribly, especially by her ankles.

Keep working, she told them. There’s much left for you to do.

Ezra had told her once that speaking to things was never useless. This is not the same thing as believing her legs could hear her. Do you see what I mean?

Why did I begin to cry earlier? thought Loring.

At the same time, she thought: the box is upstairs, sitting in its new place closer to the edge of the table.

At the same time, she thought: the boy does not actually seem to be able to play chess at all. What a silly idea that was — that he might have anything to do with Ezra.

And yet, it might come and go. This is something the old often have faith in — that things come and go. People used to believe such things. A statue in the center of a town: sometimes is a god, and other times, it is something upon which to hang laundry. Anthropologists rack their brains for the way this works, but it is in plain sight. Life’s daily routines can be a cycle like the moon’s phases; when the moon is full, things are different, baldly different, than when the moon is new. Why should a statue not be just the same? Or a boy? Or anything, anything at all.

The next morning early, Loring woke up, ate one piece of toast with the tiniest bit of butter and jam, drank one cup of tea, and set out for the cemetery. She was getting older. She had now, in fact, outlived her husband by five years. It was not clear that she would continue living, or that she would keep her health. Yet to Loring, there was simply the ongoing process of days, the rituals she had made and kept. She loved her husband. He had died. His body was there, in the cemetery, and so she would go there. She would. As much as she might be permitted, she would be close to him. That she was embarked on this idea, regarding the boy, quite literally the way one embarks upon the sea in a coracle, made no difference. She visited her husband in his death in the grass, and sat by the tree day in day out. She had learned the shape of the bark on the near trees. Even the clouds that came and went there, they were familiar to her, and she might have greeted them by name, if she had cared to. Of course, she did no such thing.

Out of the house, she went, taking with her a stick, an old Basque stick. Although Loring did not know it, the end would unscrew to provide a defensive point. Basque shepherds used them for, well, I have never heard a truly good reason why Basque shepherds needed a fancy sword-cane. I suppose it enlivened things, up there in the high pastures. With this accoutrement, Loring set forth.

Someone had put a thin wooden taper with the head of a horse into the ground by Ezra’s grave. Such things existed in the world. Gerard had heard of them soon after Ezra’s death, and thinking that there might be people flocking to the graveyard to pay their respects (a thing that never actually happened), he purchased a store of these horse-head chess-themed tapers, which he kept on sale in a little gift shop which adjoined the house which adjoined the gate which adjoined the cemetery, or which, as we have previously said, was within the cemetery. All of it was within the cemetery.

And so someone had come and bought one, and having bought it, had set it there, but having set it there, had not lit it.

Loring mused on the matter and, after a while, forgot what she was thinking about. At that point it even become possible for her to look at the taper and not see it, to look at it and not think anything at all. Aren’t our minds fragile and terrible? Anything can escape us — no matter how large, how small.

The sky was wonderfully clear of obstacles. No planes, no balloons, no dirigibles, if ever such things came and went thereabouts.

But in the distance it appeared a lone kite was flying, or being flown. Loring’s sharp eyes picked it out. It was a red kite and it moved speedily here and there, darting like a fish.

Where Loring was, there was no wind. All the wind had gone elsewhere, to the kite perhaps. Could it be that kites draw wind to them? Is that why the owners of windmills embrace the pastime of kiting? Or do they despise it? It must be one or the other.

On the way back, unfortunately, Loring was laughed at by a pair of young women. How it happened was this:

She went out the main gate of the cemetery and continued up the boulevard to the place where one branching street would lead to another and to her own eventually at the base of the hill on which sat her house. As she passed by a high house, she saw two girls leaning on the wall, dressed well.

In Loring then the feeling that we sometimes have — to speak to someone and be joined with them for a moment. These girls reminded her somehow of her own youth, or perhaps it was not so — perhaps she simply wanted to know the time. In any case, she to them:

— Do you know the time?

One girl laughed, a short hoarse bark. The other sneered.

— Do you know the time? she parroted, in a nasty imitation of Loring voice.

— Do you know the time? the nasty girl said again.

— Oh, said Loring, slightly distressed.

— What a moron, said the second girl. As if the clock weren’t right there on the church. As if the clock didn’t ring less than a minute ago. As if she herself were not wearing a watch. What a moron.

— What a god-given fool, said the first girl.

They both laughed that short hoarse barking laugh again, and looked closely at Loring.

— Come over here, they said.

— No, said Loring. Leave me alone.

One actually laid a hand on her and drew her over to the house.

— Come here, aren’t you Loring Wesley? I think my mother knew you. Is this what you look like now?

— Can you see this dress she’s wearing? It isn’t fit to take a shit in. And this scarf, why it’s filth all over. Oh, no, no, you can’t go out like that. Don’t you have anyone to look after you?

At this point the mother of one of the two girls came out of the house.

Loring tried to get away.

— Mother, do you know this old woman?

The mother looked at Loring, pushed her spectacles down and looked again.

— Why, Loring, she said. Loring Wesley. What are you doing out and about?

— Just back from the, back from the cemetery, Lisa.

Loring felt that invoking her loss might make them lose interest, or give her credit, or something, and allow her to go.

— Oh, still on about that, said Lisa. Girls, why don’t you go inside.

— Just look at her clothes, Mother. She shouldn’t be allowed, not like that, she just shouldn’t be allowed.

— Leave off! Inside, girls.

The girls went off snickering in all their youthful beauty.

Meanwhile, Loring was leaning on the wall, her back partly turned to the woman, Lisa.

— Loring, dear, you mustn’t listen to them.

But then,

— You do look in a bad way. Can I…

— No, no, said Loring. I just fell. This dress was fine when I went out this morning, I just, I…I was attacked by dogs.

— Oh, I just knew something vile had happened. Well, let me walk you home.

— Oh, no, no.

— Well, if you won’t let me, you will at least let my son.

She went to the door of her house and called up.

— Claude! Claude Patrick!

Her son soon came.

— Claude, I want you to help Loring here back to her house. She is an old friend of ours.

Beneath her breath she said, She and her husband were once the most famous people in the town.

The woman went back inside.

— Goodbye, Loring. Goodbye.

This was a most helpful young man. He behaved himself on the walk like a true friend, saying comforting things, and inquiring about this or that. He seemed to have paid no attention to whatever cruel things his sisters had said, and in fact, demonstrated complete ignorance even of their existence.

— Sisters? said he. Those are just my half-sisters. My father has nothing to do with them and neither do I. Spiteful creatures. Do you know what I caught them doing the other day? They had been denied money for one reason or another and so they were angry. They went together into that field by the house and found a turtle and when I saw them they had cracked open its shell with a hammer. They were removing the turtle completely from its shell and it was crying out in pain. It sounded like a cat being squeezed to death. I will never forget it.

Loring stared at Claude with an appalled look on her face.

— What did you do then?

— I cuffed them about a bit, and used a shovel to put the turtle out of its misery.

He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

— Anyway, he said. You can see you got off easy if they were mean to you. That’s the least they can do.

in the chair in the parlor for a very long time. She ached all over, and thought often about going up the stairs to the bed and lying down, yet she could not do it. So, she sat, painfully on the chair, and retreated into herself, and remembered watching while the boy slept. Again she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and again he vanished.

It was nine o’clock in the morning. A brilliant sun overcame the town. Everything could at last be properly seen. The fifth visit was shortly to begin. Let us look through the house and see what such a light can do.

In the front room:

1 small table (with chess pieces), aforementioned

11 various framed photographs (a list will follow)

E. Wesley

unknown horse, apparently brown

old house with mansard roof on dimly lit avenue

girl (perhaps Loring)

well-dressed man holding an eggplant and a cleaver (apparently Loring’s brother prior to his untimely death)

man asleep face covered with bowler hat (E.W.)

pair of young people holding a steamer trunk (parents of E.W. or L.W.)

unkempt garden. man digging in the distance.

distinguished looking woman by a lake

L.W. holding newspaper with photograph of L.W. on cover, holding newspaper with photograph of L.W., etc., and headline “Girl Chess Whiz Calculates Endlessly!”

abandoned train station with a sign: For Sale in the distance, some German town.

1 poster for a natatorium

1 architectural plan for the Eiffel tower, looking quite different from the way it actually turned out

2 stuffed burrowing owls

8 old-fashioned round brooms, apparently unused

1 scythe (mounted on wall)

5 chairs (described hereafter)

two of same type by table

one high backed by fireplace

others unknown

1 fireplace paraphernalia: pokers, etc.

72 panes of glass in one particular window (an ordinary division of glass in the others)

And then into the hall, where book shelves are drawn up like curtains, close enough by that they are no use to anyone. One must press ones back against one in order to have sufficient distance to see the other. There is hardly any light at all, even now, in the hallway, and the bookshelves defeat us.

Into the pantry then, where various goods are stacked: tins of every conceivable kind. What did they previously contain? Why, toffee, cookies, sweetmeats, crackers, cured sausages, cheeses, and more. Plates, there too, and serving dishes. A rack of old knives, some worn down to be like the last sliver of a moon, just by sharpening. Years of sharpening. And the sharpening wheel, of course. Someone said to someone else, this: Ezra sharpened all their knives. He would sharpen things even that didn’t need sharpening, just to sharpen them, and when he was done, he would sharpen them some more. He took a ball-peen hammer and sharpened it until it was a hatchet. Such a thing: it’s not even possible, is it?

Then the kitchen, where we have sometimes been.

Oh, but the door has opened.

The front door opened, and Loring was there, holding it. Before her, the boy and his mother. One nodding to the other, the other nodding back, Stan stepping up from the stoop into the house and past Loring. He, continuing past her again, into the parlor.

The mother handed Loring an envelope with some money in it. The fifth visit began.

It took Stan only a moment after his mother was gone to burst out with enormous news. He virtually leapt out of his shoes.

— Loring! he said. Look at this!

He had a rolled-up handbill. It advertised:

MENDUUS,

IMPRESARIO and TECHNICIAN of the IMPOSSIBLE

daily shows at the hour of 3

admittance denied upon whim

otherwise all admitted freely

cost paid for by G.I.F.P.A.

Kenstock Theatre, Kenstock & Gravil Mews, Kenstock Township

— Well, said Loring. Well, well.

— What is the GIFPA? asked Stan. And can we go?

— The Government Initiative for the Performing Arts. Kenstock, eh?

Loring looked at Stan.

— It’s Menduus, he said. The magician you told me about! I told my sister and she found this — he is still giving shows. Will you take me there?

— Yes, said Loring, I don’t see why not. But, how would we get there?

This she mused to herself.

She went into the hall and fetched the schedule.

— There is a bus, she said, in fifteen minutes that will bring us well in time. The bus returns at five. Your mother will be here at five. Some excuse must be posted on the door to say we will be late returning. But late from where?

They thought in silence.

— But, said Stan. Why say anything? She might not care.

— You’re right, said Loring. It might not even occur to her to ask where we have been.

And that settled the question. Thus, next:

The Preparations for Traveling by Bus and the Seeing of a Magician in the Next Town.

Loring had a slip of paper in her pocket. It read:

You will observe the boy at the theater and record his reactions. You will ask him questions. You will learn if it is all a vile trick.

All night she had been troubled by this: might it all be a vile trick.

1. if Stan was twelve years old

2. if her enemies had come up with a revenge

3. if it is all a lie, not a revenge. not a vile trick, not twelve years old, simply an actual but unfortunate thing

—

She had another note. That one said:

My dear love,

I am terrified all the time, but can’t say why. Where before you might solve this with nearness — just the quality of being near — now there is no solution. I am an old woman writing herself notes about fear, but there is no solution. Although this is true, it is also a glowingly bright day. I have a pile of letters that I am sending as a sort of joke. This invigorates me. Shouldn’t one laugh in the teeth of Thursdays and such other ignoble fools? I am writing this on a spool of thread — on a thread that I have drawn out from a spool. It will not bear reading. Yes, this all written on a piece of thread. It was an old gesture, invented by a woman named Marla Jone. She was a colonist in Massachusetts and died of the cold in her farmhouse. These were Loring’s thoughts about the thread technique. She admired Marla Jone quite frankly.

The bus trip went as follows:

Loring paid for the bus. It cost almost nothing. Stan got in first. They thought it would be less suspicious that way. He went and found a seat. She got on, paid, and sat beside him. He was by a window, halfway to the back.

And who else was on the bus? Why no one at all of note. A cadre of total nothings. Forgettable. They said things like:

— Oh my

and

— The weather…x.

also

— We mustn’t forget to…when we get there.

Yes, darling, I think to myself when I hear such things. You will never get where you are going. How sure you are to perish on the way. And I, presiding over it all. We mustn’t give them faces.

The bus snaked through the most beautiful green country anyone had ever seen. Sheep dotted the heather, congregating in groups, teaching one another the behavior of stones, only occasionally, idiotically running all at once for fifty paces or so and then stopping stock still once more.

Ahead came a wall, yes, a town wall, even this was given them. Through it the road went and the bus, and they were on cobblestones. The bus careened to a halt.

— Goodbye, Stan told the driver.

— I come through right at five, he said. Tug that sign down if you’re here. Then I’m sure to see you.

Away then, the bus.

There was a sign with a rope which when tugged a portion would drop down.

— Not yet, said Loring.

Stan took his hand off the rope.

The bus trip was like a passage along a zoetrope. The landscape repeated itself, beautifully, excruciatingly. The world spins and we pass on! First a set of trees, a house with candles in a high window. A hedge. A bright-yellow painted sign with solid-black lettering. Men walking together, carrying burlap sacks. One is driving the others. A church spire, distant across hills. The edge of a lake, obscured by bushes. The entrance to some vast estate — lovely shadows lurking along paths and the long marble approach. Then, a set of trees, a house with a candle. A hedge. A bright-yellow sign. Men walking together, driven on. Church spires, lakes, entrances to other realms!

A sort of rain began to fall and then was done. It must have been a passage rain, thought Loring, rain that comes when one crosses thresholds, valued in Roman times, but since in disrepute, for NOW they were upon that longed for thing: THE VILLAGE OF KENSTOCK.

or almost. The alley on which they were walking went between two churches. KENSTOCK MEWS was its name. Soon the churches were gone and the backs of houses arched to the left and right. Stone walls high and burdened, abounded. Weeds, cats, stones, glass, the sound of things dripping. Something churchlike loomed again, except this building FACED THE ALLEY.

A man in a scarlet uniform stood on the magnificent steps.

— I will let you in, he said, but you must hurry. In your case, one ticket will be enough if you promise to take no more between you than one person can carry.

— Of what we see?

— Yes, of what you see.

— Tell him we agree, said Stan.

— We agree, said Loring.

She paid the man and he stamped both his feet, one, TWO.

The door swung open from within.

— It must have been a church, too, at one point, said Loring.

— How come?

— Well, look at the pews. And that’s the place where the altar would have been.

It would have been a small church, if a church it had been, perhaps some Quaker meetinghouse of sorts. There was room for perhaps fifty people, certainly not many more. In fact, at that moment, the place was empty.

— Take your seats, take your seats, murmured the doorman.

Somehow, he had come up behind them.

Loring and Stan sat in the first row, facing an empty stage. Behind the stage was a large window of painted glass on which many birds had suddenly alighted from the grass of a field.

A bell rang, then, and the show began.

— Menduus, said the man, who was suddenly sitting beside them, has played for the audiences of every great city. His deeds are a part of the unfailing lore of magicians. He is an old man, a very old man. Why then does he let this theater, why then does he print up bulletins, why then does he decide: I will again perform, for one season, and most often to an empty room.

Loring and Stan dared not reply. The man went on, rising and walking up the steps onto the stage.

— Because, I have come up with a new effect, and I was given the choice therefore, by my having come up with it, to either gift it to another magician, who would thereby make his name, or to enact it myself. I chose the latter. Now, I must tell you, I do not always attempt the effect. During some performances, it proves impossible. Then I must be rescued.

Menduus gestured to his left. There the doorman stood to the right of the stage, holding an enormous pair of scissors.

— You see.

Menduus gestured again, and the doorman began to crank a long box. A brass band struck up its tune from within the box, mechanically bidden. Bellows heaved, horns blew, a drum beat. When the din had subsided, Menduus bowed.

— There will be, he said, only one feat today.

He pulled a lever in the wall, and section of the ceiling opened. A gallows descended and took up the entire stage. I am going to be hanged by the neck until I am unconscious. Then, I will free myself with the aid of birds and music. At the end of the performance, I will remain alive.

He snapped his fingers.

The doorman hurried over and handed Loring and Stan a couple handbills.

They read:

1. Hanged by the neck

2. Freed by divine intervention

3. Remains, therefore, Alive

— First, said Menduus, I am going to meditate. My assistant will tie my hands at some point, and the show will begin in truth.

He sat down on the stage with his back to them. The import of his costume was suddenly clear — it was the garb of a convict. The assistant had donned executioner’s robes. The lights dimmed.

Stan grabbed Loring’s hand.

— I am so excited, he said. Do you think he will do it?

— I haven’t the slightest idea, said Loring, what on earth will happen.

She looked down at Stan and thought, wrap your arms tightly around yourself and rock back and forth. Do this the whole performance.

Stan, beside her, he wrapped his arms around himself. He began to rock back forth.

The bell rang again. The executioner dragged Menduus to his feet, and pulled him up the stairs of the gallows. At the top, they reached the rope, which lay flat on the trapdoor. The executioner bound Menduus’s hands behind his back with a smaller rope. He lifted the noose and set it around the old man’s neck, then tightened it until it stood on its own, stiff in a line, back and up towards the window.

He stepped away from Menduus, who stood with eyes shut, muttering to himself.

— He isn’t ready, said Stan. He doesn’t look ready.

The executioner knelt and took hold of the trapdoor switch. He looked to Menduus, then out into the audience.

— It is earned and it is given, he intoned, and he pulled the switch.

Out dropped the floor, down fell Menduus. The rope jerked tight, and he hung there, hanged, before them, feet jerking back and forth, body taut as a rictus grin. A spasm of the body, another, and then it was still.

One moment, then another.

Stan gasped. He was crying. He was holding his body with his arms and rocking back and forth, and crying.

Loring could scarcely look at him. Her eyes were on the stage.

For of a sudden, the hanged man’s arms had come unbound. His arms came around, one from the left and one from the right, and in his right hand he held a flute.

He hung by the rope and with the flute he began to play. It was a light melody, a song of fields and dew, of starlight — something like the bubbling of a creek, or the patter of rain. The song swelled, and it was darker now, more insistent. The color was that of courts, of troubadors. He was calling now. What was he calling for?

A fluttering of wings behind them. A powerful stirring of wings, and then two birds, overhead. They circled the room, they circled the room and they dove. Between them was a line of metal, a wire of sorts. It was razor sharp and they dove, holding it between them, they dove beneath the gallows, one on each side of Menduus, and severed the hanging rope.

The magician dropped to the ground, landing nimbly on his feet. He blew a last salute to the pair, who disappeared into the darkness, and bowed to his awestruck audience.

Loring jumped to her feet, and Stan as well. They were both clapping and clapping. Loring called out,

— You are a prince among men!

— I have been told that, said Menduus, bowing once more.

He called his assistant on stage, and they bowed together. Then he went away and out a door in the back. The assistant stood watching them.

— It’s over, he said. You can go. But you mustn’t speak of it.

— Oh, I won’t, said Loring.

— I didn’t mean you.

— I know, said Stan. Not a word.

The assistant let them out the front door, which was much nearer the bus station. It was only four-thirty, but the bus was already waiting for them.

— I was about to leave, said the driver, but then I saw you coming.

Loring sat with a cup of tea and her head in her hands, drinking in this one thing: her eyes sidelong seeing the boy rocking, with knit cap and brown quilted coat. It was so nearly there. She could so nearly feel Ezra’s life in the boy. But it flickered. It was there and gone. A lilt to a particular vowel, an angle to the face. She counted on her hands all the things she longed for, and there was simply one. One thing — to have the freshness of that first encounter once again when she had seen him in the boy.

— I will see you again, she said to herself. I know I will.

was to give Stan some sheets of paper on which she’d written things Ezra had said. Read these, she said, if you would be like him. These are the sorts of things he would say. And here is how he would say them. She had set him up on the floor and show him how he would stand. This is how he would stand, she had said. This is where he would like while he spoke. I will see you in a week, she said. In a week, we will have our next visit.

Loring had left the door open this time.

The mother let Stan run up the stairs and into the house, and she went off into her own day, and whether she heard the door shut or not, who can say?

For Stan closed it, and went into the parlor, and that is where we go, to where Loring is waiting, her eyes radiant.

— In our game, she said, I am going to call you Ezra.

He set down his things.

— Yes, dear, he said.

— In our game, I am going to take you places in the house. There we will do things to see how they are, to see how they feel. Do you know what I mean?

Raise your hand to your cheek, she thought. Brush at something that isn’t there.

He raised his hand to cheek. He brushed at something that wasn’t there.

— We won’t play chess today, she said. That was something we used to do. We don’t do that anymore.

— No we don’t, he said. We are through with that.

They walked hand in hand through the house. They walked in the kitchen. She led him there.

She said,

— You are getting old. You are almost as old as I am.

— I feel old, he said.

She laid her hand on his cheek. It was cold.

— I don’t see you where you are, she said. I think about where you will be.

— I am a long way from where I was when I first came.

She took a book down from a shelf in the kitchen. In it were old photographs.

— Do you know who this is? she asked.

— That’s James Len.

— And that?

— That’s Myra Lossen.

— What house is that?

— That’s the house on Faring Road where you broke your arm.

— And how did I break it?

— I broke it.

— How did you break it?

— We were cutting down a tree. I cut off the branch and it landed on your arm. It was an accident.

— And you were sorry. What did you do?

— I bought you a yellow flower every day for seven years, and we kept the dead ones. At the end of it, we burned them all in a fire, and laughed that your arm was good as new.

Loring led Stan into the hall. She led him up the stairs.

— I have clothing for you here, she said.

Laid out on the bed was a full set of clothing.

— But you, said Stan. You must change too.

He went to the closet and opened it. He found a dress, a pale dress with lace at the edges. He found gloves and he found a veil.

— These, he said, these you should wear.

Loring took the things and went down the stairs.

She could hear him, dressing. She heard the door open, and she heard the door to the spare room as it creaked open. She could hear him pull a chair over to the table, could hear him at the box.

She went up the stairs, and she was dressed as he had bid her.

What she saw there was something like her husband, dressed as he had been.

— Ezra, she said. What is in that box?

— My Loring, he said, my Loring. These are feathers for your hair. These are rings for your fingers.

She knelt by him and he put feathers in her hair. He put rings on her fingers. She pressed her face against his, and ran her fingers along his back. She was crying and crying.

— I said, also, that in the box there would be an order, something to be fulfilled. I said that.

— Ezra, she said. What is it you would have me do?

— First he said, have you not wondered where I am?

— I have dreamt, she said, I have imagined that I would go away. I would find it possible one day to go away from all I have, that there would be a place where I was going, and I would go to it. I would go there, and in that place I would be awaited. I believe it would involve nothing at all, a short trip, as if by car or boat, as if by water. I would say, already we are here, we are here, and we would be there.

She took a deep breath.

— Will you not tell me what you ask?

— I will not say yet, he said. For that we wait.

— No, tell me.

She pulled at his hands with her gloved hands. Tell me.

— No! NO! he shouted.

He pulled himself away from her and ran into the bedroom. He climbed onto the bed and there collapsed, weeping, and was soon asleep.

He was still asleep when his mother came, and dressed as he was, she took him away.

The seventh visit was not a week later. It was that morning after. Loring was where she had been that whole night, sitting in the room, beside the opened box. There was nothing in it. The paper had been taken away by the boy. She might never see it. The very thought filled her with terror. There was a knock at the door. Again, a knock at the door. Then someone beating on the door.

Stan’s mother said to Stan, she said,

— You will tell her what you told me.

Stan, eyes red, looking at his feet.

— You will tell her, she said again. I will talk and then you will talk and we will be through with this.

Loring went slowly down the stairs. She went slowly to the door. She opened it.

— I am not coming in, said the mother. I am not coming in, and Stan is not coming in, not ever again. You are a mad person. I can’t believe I let Stan into your house in the first place. I don’t even want our money back. I don’t want anything. I want you to leave Stan alone and never speak to him again. I want you to never speak to anyone again about any of this. I want you to stay in your house and die and be gone. Stan, tell her what you think.

Loring looked at Stan.

He looked up at her and his face was hard. It was the face of a little boy, curled up like a muscle.

— I don’t care at all about you, he said. I don’t care about chess, either, or about your husband. I thought we were playing a game, and I was bored of my house and my family, so I didn’t mind coming here. Then I thought I could get a magic show out of it. Then I thought I could see how far you would go. But you smell awful. Your house smells awful. Your skin is hard to look at. I don’t want to look at you anymore, or be near you. My mom was angry about the clothes you made me wear and she started asking me questions. Then she found the papers you wrote for me. Then my father came. You knew this would happen. I don’t ever want to see you again.

— You see, said the mother. You are by yourself in this. It’s always been that way.

Loring looked down at Stan. Her eyes were wide and her expression pleading.

— Wait, she said.

The boy recoiled from her. In a second, his mother was between them.

— That’s the end of it.

She pushed Loring into the house and shut the door. Then they went away.

—

In the parlor, Loring was crying. She was sitting in the chair and holding Ezra’s picture in her hands. She had thrown the gloves off. She had thrown the veil onto the ground. She was coughing and weeping and coughing. She could scarcely see.

If she could reason with herself, it was not in a way that anyone could know. She was thinking about objects, about the spaces between objects. She was thinking about the cemetery and then she wanted to be there. She wanted to reach the cemetery that second.

— I will go there, she said.

Loring went out into the street. She felt that if she did not go outside, she would not be able to go ever again. The day was a long low-ceilinged day, and there was a shawl of grey pulled over the town. But there by the edges, it was breaking. What passed at the edges could not at first be seen.

It was long and far. It was like something heard, but it was seen. She was smiling and her face was unchanged, it was like a last face, the last face a person wears.

In the distance, she saw birds turning in the air — a hundred of them, all turning. Where had they been going, and why in error? They turned in a great sweeping arc, and came back.

Oh, my love, she thought, and she ran there, as if running, crying out,

Nonetheless, my love, I hold out my hand only to you as the train departs!