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He understood when he came to the knife. “By the way, both John and Herbie seem terribly set up about the way our Becky is gnawing on the bit. As an A.D., I think she makes a fine figger of a woman, and that’s about all. She has come up with a few of those zany and startling ideas that impress hell out of everybody until somebody realizes that the stock isn’t moving off the shelves. Anyhow, it doesn’t look as if any of the stuff will be farmed out while our Becky is in high favor. I understand she has been given a raise. But, as old hands like you and I know, it can’t last.”

He balled the letter and threw it into a corner. A little later he got it and smoothed it open and read it again. There was a damp shifting in his middle, a visceral turning like the slow wringing of a wet warm towel. And he realized he had shut his jaws so tightly his teeth were hurting.

It took five drafts before he was really satisfied with his casual Dear Herbie letter. He had to achieve an unmistakable ring of honesty, optimism and complete mental health. He drew some quick and clever little Mexican cartoons in the margin. He added a postscript that said, “In my spare time I’ve been blocking out some new concepts in advertising art that seem valid and exciting to me. Most anxious to check your reaction when I get back. I know how skeptical you are of anything too glib and flashy and startling.”

He stretched out on the bed and waited for his headache to go away. That Goddamn Trev! Hell of a job trying to protect yourself at long range. Have to write some more. Schedule them out. One to John Sessions soon. One to Becky. Another to Herbie. Damn!

Agnes Partridge Keeley received a long business letter from her accountant. Much of it was concerned with tax matters. At the very end he became, she decided, impertinent.

“I strongly advise you to reconsider your decision on granting permission for your tenants at 55 Shore Terrace to sublet. Mr. Galt has been told by his doctors that he must get away from sea level. Your attorneys agree with me on this matter.”

She wrote back immediately. She called his attention to the terms of the lease. She said that she was an artist, but she was also a businesswoman. She doubted that Galt was that sick. She said she would entertain an offer of half the remaining rental due under the lease, and an immediate transfer of property to her so it could be rented again. And she asked him to employ at a sum not to exceed two hundred dollars, some investigative agency which could put together a complete report on the past history of one Gambel Torrigan. She wanted it as soon as possible. She gave him the facts the agency would need.

Colonel Hildebrandt received a letter from Brigadier General Thornton R. Pope, U. S. A. (Ret.) in Falls Church, commenting at length on the career and death of a long-term mutual friend and officer, and advising the colonel that the books he wanted should be airmailed within the week.

Miss Monica Killdeering received a long newsy letter from Eleanor Hipper in Kilo, catching her up to date on everything that had happened in the town since she had left. By a not very striking coincidence, Monica had a long letter to Eleanor partially completed. In it she said, “There is a very
intense
young
man here from Philadelphia named Harvey Ardos. The quality of his mind is
excellent
, but he has practically
no
educational background. We have had very
long
talks about everything under the
sun
, and he is constantly amazed to learn that the greats of history have written down the thoughts he has arrived at independently. He is an
independent thinker
. I guess that we are the hardest workers in Mr. Gambel Torrigan’s class. Mr. Torrigan assigns
problems
to us and we must come up with
solutions
. Mr. Torrigan never seems to like Harvey’s solutions and it makes him
furious
.”

Barbara Kilmer had a letter from her father, and she guessed that it had been typed by him on the office machine. “Your letters have been appreciated, my dear. You have a nice gift of expression, and it is almost as good as being there. I have noticed, however, that you make no reference at all to any social activity. I hesitate to write you in this way, but your mother and I have been alarmed to see how completely you retreated to yourself after Rob’s death. I know what a sickening tragedy it was, but I also know that you are a young woman and your life is not by any means over. I debated a long time before taking the step of giving you the present of this summer course. I hoped that it would rekindle your interest in your art, and also make you more aware of the people around you. I thought this might happen if you were in some place where you had never been before, some place out of the country where there would be a minimum of things to remind you of your husband.

“But there is a flatness about your letters that indicates to me, though I have not discussed this with your mother, that you are still remote, standing to one side, a little apart from life. My dear, I can understand how you have a feeling of futility, of purposelessness. Perhaps you should realize that such feelings are not unique with you. I am 51 years of age and I have spent my productive years this far puttering around inside the mouths of friends and strangers. Perhaps I have relieved some pain. Possibly I have made some people happier by making them handsomer. And in many instances I have saved or prolonged lives by detecting the evidence of disease of which the dental patient was unaware. But, too often I suppose, I reflect that this was my one life given to me to live, and I seem to have spent it in a sort of haze, far removed from high adventure, great accomplishment or any particular degree
of memorability. I have a comfortable home and a good marriage and a saddened daughter. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that for any introspective person there is an inescapable aroma of futility about life itself, regardless of how it is spent. Enough of this morbid nonsense, dear. I want you to live and laugh and love and be happy. I’d like to see all the stars back in your eyes.”

The letter was in her mind all day. That night there was a sallow moon, and a wet and gusty wind. She walked beyond the wall and leaned against it and felt the sun-heat locked in the stones. There was something chained loosely to the floor of her heart, some small creature that tugged at the rusty staples and fumbled with corroded locks. And when it gave sudden tugs to free itself, she could feel the reverberations in her whole being, rippling along her flanks and trembling upon her lips.

Bitsy Babcock received three letters from three young men, and all of them were so curiously similar, that she had to keep glancing ahead to the signature to keep clear in her mind who had written each one. Mary Jane had received one very like Bitsy’s and one that was deliciously naughty. At least when they sat in the room trading letters, on first reading it seemed to Bitsy to be cleverly daring. But when she read it over again it seemed to her to be rather nasty and pointless. And all the rest of the letters were shallow and meaningless and boring. She knew she would answer her letters, and the three she would write would be almost identical.

Paul Klauss received a letter and financial report for June from his store manager. Business was slow. They were starting to tear the street up again. Some woman was driving him crazy phoning all the time, refusing to take his word that Mr. Klauss was in Mexico on vacation. She wouldn’t give her name.

Hildabeth and Dotsy both had letters from friends in Elmira and from their married children. And the letters made them homesick.

In the uplands of Mexico in the summer, during the hours of sunshine, the butterflies are busy among the flowers. There are an incredible number of blooms, most of them in the hot colors—reds and oranges and yellows. The butterflies are as vivid and seem as numerous as the petals. Here and there, on green slopes, are the bright little villages the beekeepers have constructed for their charges, cubical houses set aslant and in random pattern, each painted a different color, all pleasantly faded by the sun. There are great wild bees that come after the flowers too, angry, metallic, careless brutes that fly head-on into the garden walls, gorged with nectar and irritable with the frequent dizzying impact of stubborn iridescent head against stone. The large hummingbirds poise with precise hypodermic, and the throbbing of their wings is less sound than sensation. Grazing cattle move up off the barranca slopes, blandly furtive, to munch the gay blooms off garden walls until chased away into a lumbering, indignant trot.

But, in the dusk, when the bees and butterflies and hummingbirds and cattle are gone, there is the time of half light when the moths come to the blooms, gray and brown, soft and hungry, curiously sinister, coming with the first bawdy scent of jasmine on the evening air.

John Kemp sat at dusk on the stone bench in the enclosed patio, his pipe drawing well. It was a Friday evening, the fourteenth day of July. The thunder had mumbled and then moved off into the southwest. No rain had fallen at El Hutchinson, but the faint shift of breeze had the washed smell of rain. Though he did not consider himself to be a particularly thoughtful or introspective man, John knew that these quiet times were necessary to him. And enjoyable.

Classes were now limited to five days a week. The weekend was ahead of him, and he looked forward to it with anticipation in which was mingled a nice little tingling edge of excitement. From the moment he had seen her at the lunch counter in New Orleans his awareness of Barbara Kilmer had increased steadily, inevitably. He had been intrigued by the reason for her reserve, her air of grave remoteness, until he learned that she had been widowed less than a year ago.

She seemed always to be on the edge of his thoughts, so that there was a continual flavor of her about him, like music just beyond the edge of audibility. She had seemed determined to keep him at arm’s length along with the others. But he had noticed that she was having difficulty with Paul Klauss. The pretty man was uncommonly persistent, never faltering in his attempts to ingratiate himself with her, apparently oblivious of the reasonably obvious fact of her distaste for him. John judged that something had happened between them very early in the session, that very probably Klauss had stepped out of line.

Though he felt slightly guilty when he realized that in his own way he was stalking her as determinedly as Klauss, and such conduct was perhaps equally reprehensible, he found in the matter of Klauss’s pursuit, an opportunity to interpose himself. Though there was no word spoken about it, he knew that she quickly became aware of the way he would lengthen his stride in order to take the last remaining seat at a table where she was sitting so that Klauss would stand, obviously angry, and then turn away. And, at class, he would sit where Klauss obviously planned to sit. And once he had kept them apart on the red bus by arriving at the entrance door at the same time as Klauss and contriving to step on his foot before apologizing profusely and preceding him into the bus.

He sensed that in some unreadable area of her she was amused and grateful. She had turned toward him slightly in her emotional attitude, slightly but detectably, a flower making
a quiet quarter turn toward the light. And, once she was assured that he was making no attempt to force conversation with her, she co-operated in the conspiracy, lagging behind until she could be certain they were both heading for the same table where two people already sat.

He told himself that this was summer intrigue, and certainly not on a very volatile level. Nothing more. Equivalent to one of those shipboard deals that never get beyond the stage of maneuver. He did not want it to be more important than that, and yet he had the uneasy suspicion that it might be. In attempting to analyze how she affected him, the easiest factor was the physical. She had a lovely body and moved with unconsciously provocative grace. He desired her. That was an uncomplicated drive. But there was more beyond that—or in another sense more that was perhaps more important. He felt a strong need to protect her. It was laughably close to those boyhood daydreams where he wanted so desperately to defeat a flock of scoundrels before the eyes of his eighth-grade beloved. He wanted to protect her, and more. He wanted to be able to watch her in homely things, brushing that white sheen of her hair with her strangely dark brows knitted in cosmetic concentration, brushing her teeth, putting on a robe, making coffee, washing plates, hanging out washing, pushing a supermarket cart. He wanted to see the shifting and untellable mysteries of her dissolved into the ordinary. More than anything, he wanted her to glow and laugh. At one lunch Park Barnum told John and Barbara and Bitsy about some of the trials and turmoils of a small advertising agency in Manhattan. He told it so amusingly and well that it was not spoiled by the consciousness that he had told it many times before, editing and exaggerating his material. One story was really very funny. And as John laughed he heard Barbara laugh beside him. It was the first time he had heard her laugh. And, he realized, it was not the sort of laugh he would have expected, not light and fragile at all. It was a hearty, husky, earthy burst of sound. He glanced at her and saw her face alight. A moment later she was composed again, smiling evenly and rather carefully at the rest of Park’s monologue. And John Kemp felt a shaft of pain and loss so deep and sudden that for a few moments he was unable to identify it for what it was, pure jealousy and envy directed against the dead husband, and a sense of outraged indignation that one man should have been permitted to be given so much.

And after that he wished that he were the world’s greatest clown, such a genius of comedy that he could make her laugh at any time.

Some days before, on the day as a matter of fact that he had received, forwarded from New Orleans, the casual, proud, brave and deeply moving letter from Mary Jenningson in California, he had gone for an evening walk outside the wall and had seen Barbara standing in pallid moonlight against the wall, her shoulders held in a strange and rigid way, as though she faced execution.