The last time George and the three women met, it was on a warm October afternoon in that same small Greek restaurant, with bluish fluorescent lights overhead, in Stamford, Connecticut. Their knees were crowded under the tablecloth, and inadvertently rubbed one against another. Though they all wore glasses (Ruby was seriously myopic), even so it was difficult to read the menu.
“Nice,” George said. “Gives the place the feel of a modest bordello.” And only Evangeline laughed; Olive made a face, and Ruby sighed in disgust, but it was merely to tease. Not that it escaped him that behind the ribbing was an old and avid jealousy; they adored what they could not attain. He had decided on Stamford as the geographical midpoint of their reunion, he told them, because it was equidistant from wherever their fates might eventually drive them. It was the very center of the planet’s fragile equilibrium. But why, they asked, this unprepossessing eatery smelling of fried eggplant? Because, he said, the eggplant is earth’s most beautifully sculptured fruit.
The four of them had been at library school together, and had exchanged clandestine notes in a course on the History of Books, which George, one of three males in the class, had named Spinsters 101. The two others he called Mouse One and Mouse Two. The notes were all about George, and George wrote notes about himself: “six feet two, brainy, unusual.” Or else: “early balding, doomed to success.” And once, nastily: “Lady librarians never marry.”
By the time they graduated, he had slept with all of them.
They had long ago forgiven him, and also one another. And they had all agreed to abide by the Pact—George’s invention. Its terms were simple enough: once a year they were to gather at this very spot, if possible at their usual table (but they must insist on this), the one closest to the kitchen. All correspondence, any exchange of any kind in the long intervals between meetings, was forbidden. Tales of dailiness and its intimacies, their cluttered lives, their tiny news and parochial views were never to be the object of their coming together. Consensus was forbidden; the Pact was a treaty of solitary will. “Our interest,” he explained, “lies in extremes. Abhor the mundane, shun the pedestrian. Cause the natural to become unnatural.” And then this: “What is our object? To live in the whirlpool of the extraordinary. To aspire to the ultimate stage of fanaticism. To know that eventuality is always inevitability, that the implausible is the true authenticity.” He spoke these words with the portentousness of Laurence Olivier as Henry V rallying the troops on St. Crispin’s Day.
They were sensible women, and took it as the joke they believed it was meant to be: to live life as a witticism. As a feat. As an opera. But it was also an Idea, and George was a master of ideas. They had their Idea, too: they were committed feminists, despised patriarchy, and loathed what they could instantly sense was male domination. George was exempted from such despicable categories. He was a schemer of witchcraft. His brain was neither male nor female. It was, they understood, a vessel of daring, and they had only to climb aboard to feel its oceanic sweep. They were not four, or three, or two. They were, counting George, One.
He had been drawn to them, lured by those dusty old curios—their preposterous names. It was as if they had been situated together the way artifacts similar in the taste of an era are collected in the same museum vitrine. It must mean something, he said, that you are all named for grandmothers or great-grandmothers.
“Well, what does it mean?” Ruby asked.
“He thinks we’re ghosts,” Evangeline said.
But Olive said, “It was just the way the schedule worked out. We were assigned to the same class in the same room at the same time. It was bound to happen.”
“What a pedant you are,” Evangeline said.
Evangeline’s grandmother’s name was, in fact, Bella, but she let the misapprehension stand. She had no wish to admit that she was stuck with Evangeline because it was her grandmother’s favorite poem. Still, nothing could prevent George from declaiming the first twenty-two lines of it, which he had, in hoarse and secretive breaths, by heart. The rest of them could remember only the opening words: “This is the forest primeval.” Nowadays nobody quoted Longfellow, or even knew who he was. And they were all dumbstruck by George’s acrobatic memory. This alone set him apart.
It lasted—the Pact—four years. Or it might have been four, had the Greek restaurant with the bluish fluorescent lights not in the interim been replaced by a used-car lot.
On that fourth year, only Evangeline showed up.
“It can’t be a Pact if it’s only the two of us,” Evangeline said. “A Pact has to have several parties, like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the Triple Entente. It can’t be just us.”
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They walked around the block, looking for a coffee shop. It was a shabby neighborhood, battered stucco houses with high stoops, noisy ragamuffins with their sticks and balls.
“Ragamuffins” was George’s word. Evangeline noticed that he had taken on something like a British accent, though not quite. He looked different. Not that old student outfit, sweatshirt and jeans and no socks. He wore an actual suit, with a surprising vest that had a little pocket for an old-fashioned watch on a chain. The jacket was a showy tweed, with outmoded leather patches on the elbows and pimpled all over with forest-green nubbles. The patches were a bright orange worthy of parrots. His tie was diagonally striped, and it, too, had the look of obsolescence. He’d acquired the suit in New Zealand, he said, to look more like the New Zealanders. They were notorious swimmers, and in summer went about half naked, but otherwise they dressed like peacocks.
In the end, they found a dirty little park, more concrete than leafy, and sat on a bench sticky with bird droppings. But it could not be avoided: they spoke of the mundane and the pedestrian and the parochial—what had become of the defectors. Ruby had found a job as the librarian of an elementary school in an obscure Ohio town (population 1,396). Olive, who had settled in Chesapeake, Virginia, was already the mother of two little boys, and worked part-time in the local branch of the public library. She was no longer Olive; she had changed her name to Susan—talk of the mundane! And even Evangeline, who hadn’t defected and remained loyal to the Pact, had to acknowledge that she was more chauffeur than librarian. She drove a green truck outfitted with bookshelves to a far weedy corner of the Bronx, on the odorous edge of rusted railroad tracks.
But George had emigrated to New Zealand. His position there, he said, had a future. Though he was now on the middle rung of a great university library in Auckland, in five years, he predicted, he would be its director. It was an ingenuity of foresight that had landed him in the very first library to digitize, not only in New Zealand but in the world at large. New Zealand was a model, and it was in connection with this revolutionary transition that he had been sent as a liaison to New York on an errand that required discretion. His value was recognized. The director had arranged for him to stay at the Waldorf, certainly to facilitate meetings but also for his personal comfort.
Evangeline herself had an unexpected story to tell. In that forlorn neighborhood, where on Friday afternoons the clusters of children and their mothers were congregated under umbrellas (it seemed always to be raining), waiting for the green truck and its cargo, she, too, beheld her imminent good fortune. She had seen surveyors’ chalkings on the pavements around a disused old comfort station, marked for renovation. It was a low handsome concrete building in the style of a Greek temple; weathered carvings of Hygeia, the goddess of health, and Amphitrite, the goddess of waters, ran across the frieze below its pediment. From the look of it, you couldn’t imagine that it had once housed public toilets. What it promised for Evangeline was that the truck with its dented fenders and its rain-damaged books would be cashiered, and she would soon be permitted to come indoors.
“An anointment,” George said. “From bottom feeder to kingfish.” It meant, Evangeline knew, that he didn’t think much of her prospects. She was letting down her solitary will.
They abandoned the bench and walked together to the train station. According to the Pact, its adherents were obliged to disperse immediately after the completion of the proceedings of the reunion; no one was to spy on the destination of the others. But it couldn’t be helped: they had to board the same train, and because of the rush-hour crowding had to sit in the same car. George was heading for Grand Central in Manhattan to get to the Waldorf and Evangeline for the Fordham stop in the Bronx. They had even found seats directly across the aisle.
Leaning over, Evangeline asked, “But we still haven’t decided where to meet next time. Or when.”
“Same date as always.”
“How do you know you’ll be able to come? Supposing the university doesn’t send you?”
“As it happens, I have another reason. A family reason. I’ve told you about my uncle.”
He had. He had told all three of them at their very first meeting in the Greek restaurant; he had told them every jot and tittle of what he called his blighted yet colorful bloodline. His parents were suicides. Side by side, like Stefan Zweig and his wife, Lotte, in Petrópolis, they had taken poison. He was then a child of two. He knew nothing about it for years, only that his mother and father weren’t really his mother and father: they were his great-aunt and his great-uncle. They were both very old, and his aunt was dead. In their prime, they had been vaudevillians. Their closets were packed with stage apparel. George often had his dinners in the wings. The Waldorf was agreeable, he admitted, but he’d much prefer to stay with his unregenerate uncle, at ninety-nine still hankering after a gig.
None of the others had known where Petrópolis was. Olive guessed Greece, but Evangeline said, “Two suicides? One would be excessive, but two is exorbitant.”
Ruby asked, “Is that Oscar Wilde?”
“Evangeline, how heartless you are,” Olive said. Still, George didn’t mind: the uncommon was his legacy. It was what he sought. He knew he was a sport, a daring mutation. He took his stand on the precipice of life, and, if Evangeline wanted to mock, it was all right with him. He knew it was out of envy.
The train was rattling into the station at Fordham.
“Fine,” Evangeline said, “same date, but where?”
“Same place.”
“But there’s nothing there!” she called as she stepped out of the car.
“There will be,” he yelled back.
The newly constructed library had a laboratory look, sleek and metallic. It betrayed everything library school remembered. Gone were the wood-panelled walls, gone were the wooden drawers with their rows of handwritten index cards. Gone were the pencils with those overworked rubber date stamps on their tails. And gone were the footprints of winter boots (here they left no marks on the all-weather carpet), and, in summer, gone was the staccato creak of antique fans as they turned their necks from side to side. Instead: rows of computers with their cold faces, air-conditioners, and their goosepimpling blasts. Polite young men with research degrees—Mouse One and Mouse Two—behind steel desks. Because of the double-glazed windows you could never smell the rain.
Evangeline blamed Hygeia and Amphitrite for permitting this invasion; they had since been removed as unfit for a contemporary building. The plumbing was new, the temple bare of its goddesses. Its visitors were called, condescendingly, customers, as if they were coming to argue over the cost of tomatoes in a market. The children’s room was located in what had been the women’s toilets, far from the hushed center. And, unlike the shrieks and the tumult that had greeted the green truck when it veered into view, here it was disconcertingly quiet. Many of the customers seemed to be hobbyists, or half-insane cranks catching up on their sleep, or lonely browsers searching for spiritual succor.
The more typical customers came and went with their emptied plastic grocery bags newly loaded, but the hobbyists were the most persistent. They would arrive at ten in the morning and sit at the reading tables until four in the afternoon. They were mostly elderly widows copying needlepoint patterns, or genealogical enthusiasts hoping to find a royal ancestor, or back-yard farmers who grew potatoes in pots and were looking into the possibility of beekeeping.
But one of these oddities appeared to be a generation younger than the rest, and turned up only one day a week, generally not long before closing. He was of middling height and habitually carried a worn canvas portfolio. He wore a seaman’s cap—an affectation, Evangeline decided, meant to counteract mediocrity. He would spend no more than half an hour with a writing pad and—this was notable—a child’s box of crayons, gazing at colorful photographs in sizable volumes and making notes. His subject was birds, she saw, each time a different bird. His drawings were moderately talented. He used every crayon in the box. Though he always arrived late in the day, he rarely overstayed; but once, hurrying to pack up when the lights were already switched off, he left behind one of his papers. It had slipped from the table to the floor, unnoticed.
Evangeline picked it up. It was a picture of a bird with pink legs and yellow breast feathers, and under it, in capital letters, “small-headed flycatcher.”
“I saved this for you,” she told him the next time he came. “I thought you might be missing it.”
“It’s extinct,” he said, “so it’s really missing. You can only see it in Audubon.”
“Are you an artist?” she asked, though she doubted it. He didn’t have the look of an artist. He said he was interested in bird-watching, and it was only his amateur’s illusion that he might some day spot an actual small-headed flycatcher. It turned out that he was a math teacher in a nearby high school. She asked him, politely, what subjects he taught. Elementary algebra, he said, intermediate algebra, geometry, trigonometry, spherical trigonometry, and, for the advanced students, introduction to calculus. His recitation was insistently precise.
After that she dismissed him as intolerably earnest. Even his drawings of each minute nostril hole in each beak testified to dogged monotony: beak after beak after beak, all with those tiny black specks. But he began arriving earlier, and lingered on, and now and then he approached her desk to display his latest work.
“This one,” he explained, “is a blue mountain warbler, and look at this eastern pinnated grouse, it’s really a species of prairie chicken. They’re both extinct. Did you know what a butcher Audubon was? He killed thousands of birds to lay out their carcasses to paint.”
And then he invited her to go bird-watching on the coming Sunday.
Looking up from her keyboard (Evangeline, too, was now digitized), she choked down a laugh. Was this middle-sized fellow in a seaman’s cap courting her?
“I have an excellent pair of binoculars,” he told her, “manufactured just outside of London. Very old firm, same outfit that makes the insides of grandfather clocks.” He held out his hand in formal introduction. “Nate Vogel. Unfortunately, my name is a coincidence.” And he added, in a voice she recognized as teacherly, “It means bird, you know.”
Evangeline glanced down at her computer screen to check the date. September 26th. In three weeks it would be time for the Pact. She had already consulted her “Atlas of the Seven Continents” for Petrópolis (it was in Brazil), but what did she know of New Zealand? Nor would she come to George empty-handed, with nothing unusual of her own to tell.
On this ground she agreed to go bird-watching with Nate Vogel. After all, isn’t the ludicrous also a kind of fanaticism, and must not the natural be made unnatural? And anyhow, she reflected, birds are the descendants of dinosaurs.
“You’d better put on your galoshes,” he warned her. “Where we’re going the soil can be moist. It’s only a short drive.” But galoshes were what Evangeline’s grandmother had worn when it snowed, and in the stifling dry heat of late summer sandals were good enough.
Their destination turned out to be a swamp. He led her through a watery forest of waist-high yellow-haired cattails where mosquitoes hovered in swarms, and showed her how to keep her head down so as to be camouflaged by the wild tangle of vegetation all around. The air was too dense to breathe, and the mud was seeping upward between her naked toes. Small thin snakes—or were they large fat worms?—came crawling out of the nowhere of this dizzying shiver of living things.
Evangeline said, “My feet are drowning.”
“Quiet, don’t speak, it makes vibrations they can feel. See over there?” He passed her the binoculars. His whisper was as thin as a hiss. “It’s a saltmarsh sparrow, nothing special, they’re common around here.”
“What am I supposed to look for?” she whispered back.
“You have to do your homework first. You have to be prepared.”
“Prepared for what?”
“The thrill of identification.”
What Evangeline saw was a bird. It was a bird like any other bird. And, like any other bird, it instantly flew away.
“Now look what you’ve done,” he said. “I told you not to speak. You’ve missed everything. Now we just have to wait.”
Submissively, she handed back the binoculars. They sat side by side in silence, squatting in the wet. And then, disobeying his own rule, he explained exactly what she had missed: “The saltmarsh sparrow has a flat head with orange eyebrows and orange sidelocks and a speckled belly. The male is sexually promiscuous.” Was this a direct quote from Audubon?
“I didn’t know that birds are subject to moral standards,” Evangeline said.
“Sh-h-h! There’s another one. No, no, over there, to your left, quick, here, take the binoculars!”
This second bird was indistinguishable from the first. But now she knew what to look for: eyebrows and sidelocks, the thrill of identification. And she did feel a thrill, a horrible one. The bird was gazing at her with its single eye on the side of its flat head—a pterodactyl’s cold indifferent Mesozoic eye.
They met again in the library on Monday afternoon. “I hope you enjoyed our little excursion yesterday,” he said. “I hope you found it enlightening.”
She decided to punish him. “I had to throw out my best sandals. They were soaked.”
“What size are they? I’ll be glad to get you a new pair.”
But, instead, he brought her, on the following Monday, a small square box with a ribbon glued to its top. Inside was a necklace with a pendant: a shiny miniature monocular.
“It isn’t real silver,” he informed her. “It’s chrome, so it won’t ever tarnish. I thought you’d like it as a memento.”
He had come without his seaman’s cap, and also without his crayons. Evangeline thought he looked somewhat taller in the absence of the cap, as if it had been squashing the top of his head. And it was true that his hair stood up like a hedge. It irritated her that his eyelashes were almost invisibly pale. He was one of those self-flattered men who were still as blond as young children. The memento she slipped into her purse, intending to forget it.
He said, “So how about dinner Thursday next week?”
“Sorry,” Evangeline said. “I have a meeting in Stamford.”
“What kind of meeting?”
“I do have a private life,” she retorted.
“Fine, then the week after,” he said.
Evangeline was pleased to have outwitted him—the Pact was set for Wednesday. But ornithology had anyhow enlightened her: George was a bird in the bush, and the bush was on the nether side of the globe. He had abandoned his natural habitat and had migrated to unknown skies and foreign seasons. Had he evolved to new instincts? In the space of a year she had almost forgotten the color of his eyes. She longed for the thrill of identification.
On the Internet she read:
But the Internet couldn’t tell her whether George’s eyes were brown or gray, or how and where he lived. Surely not in commonplace university housing. Then in a little shack (he would call it a cottage) on the rim of the fathomless Pacific, together with a Maori lover? She knew what “marine animals” meant. In the treacherous tides ringing the coast of New Zealand, the shadows of sharks, and also of dolphins. George would seek out the sharks.
The train to Stamford had empty seats; it was the middle of a weekday afternoon. And now the parking lot, too, was gone. Still, hadn’t George, spurred by the ingenuity of foresight, promised that something, after all, would be there? And something was: a swarming and a roaring of dump trucks and cement mixers and steam shovels and muscular men in hard hats and hired ragamuffins handing out anti-gentrification leaflets, all surrounding a mammoth billboard with a picture of a very tall building and a newsworthy message in noisy purple and green paint:
But it was George she was watching for. Was he late, or was she too early? Or was it she who was late, and he’d given up on her and gone back to his suite at the Waldorf? Impossible; he wouldn’t desert his most loyal adherent to the Pact. Or did he suppose that she, like the others, had succumbed to the hollow quotidian? A fine brown dust was beginning to thicken her throat. Her lips were coated with grit. Then it came to her how foolish she was: he knew better than to wait in a fog of dirt. He was expecting her to show up at their old bench.
The bench was missing most of its slats. The bird droppings had multiplied. And what species of bird might they be? There were owls in Connecticut; in one of his most careful drawings Nate Vogel had crayoned a long-eared one. It almost resembled a rabbit. The subtlety of its colorings had required three separate shades of gray: dun, dove, and dusk.
But George was not there. After an hour and a half, and by now it was two and a half, he still was not there. She pondered why. Doubtless the university had promoted him, and he was no longer, like some freshly recruited underling, sent abroad on a superfluous errand—wasn’t it clear that the world was already sufficiently cyberized? Or might it be that the ancient great-uncle had died in his absence, and he had no further reason to turn his back on New Zealand? The Pact was the fruit of his own, his central—his necessary—passion. Why would he abandon it? It was the seed of his Idea.
On the train back to Fordham—it was again rush hour, and so crowded that she had to stand holding on to an overhead strap—she all at once saw his Idea. Or she felt it, like a thunder coursing through the churn of the blood in her skull. George had allowed himself to disappear, it was his solitary will at work, it was fanaticism’s ultimate flourish. He meant to shock her, he meant to undo her expectation, he meant to disappoint and to betray. The shock of his disappearance was not a negation of the Pact; it was its electrifying fulfillment.
The next week she consented to have dinner with Nate Vogel. His original notion of Thursday was a mistake. He preferred Saturday night, the traditional time, he said, for a real date. Date? This was galoshes again: the last traces of her grandmother’s era. He had discovered a nice little bar right here in the neighborhood, four or five blocks from the library. On a mild autumn evening, when the library closed early for the weekend, they could walk there. She dreaded his intention: the dark, the booze, the thumping beat of the piped-in rock, the side-by-side intimacy of bodies in close quarters.
On the way, he asked whether she knew that vegetarians lived longer than meat eaters. “Somewhere between six and ten per cent,” he said. “And here we are. This is the place. I tried it out before I broached it.”
The sign on the window read “health bar.” There were rows and rows of salads to choose from, and little round tables with artificial flowers at the center of each. The lights were bright. The music was Mozart. He said, “The avocado with persimmon is excellent.”
But Evangeline ordered eggplant.
“Did you know,” he said, “that the persimmon means change? Because it’s bitter when it’s green and sweet when it turns orange.”
He gave her his most importuning look. His breath was close, too close, to her own. For the first time she observed his eyes; they were the color of one of his most frequently used crayons. It was labelled taupe. Evangeline wondered whether there might also be an esoteric crayon that matched George’s eyes. Aubergine, perhaps, like earth’s most beautifully sculptured fruit.
And now he put out a forefinger to touch her lips; was this a presumptuous prelude to a kiss?
It was not. How chaste he was!
“I can’t help noticing,” he said, “that you have the archaic smile. Do you know what that is? Let’s go to the Met and I’ll show you. Is next Sunday O.K.?”
He took her to the Greek and Roman galleries. On plinth after plinth, a procession of ancient stone heads, each with its meaningful yet inscrutable smile.
“It could be a sign of revelry,” he said, “or it could be derision. Nobody really knows.”
“I choose derision,” Evangeline said.
“Let’s go look at the Buddha smiles. To compare.”
He led her through the Asian halls, and then to Egypt, evading the sarcophagi to search for pharaonic mirth.
“We think we’ve got the cream of the crop in the Mona Lisa,” he said, “but look at Nefertiti! Did you know that her left eye is missing? It was made of quartz, but they’ve never found it.”
They sat on the topmost steps in front of the Met. The sun was abnormally hot for October, and the afternoon air had a dizzying haze. It seemed to Evangeline that they had walked endless miles, from one civilization to another. An ice-cream cart was parked on the sidewalk below.
“Are you parched?” he asked, and came back with two orange Popsicles. “Did you know how Indian summer got its name? From the Iroquois hunting season. Next time we could check out the local Pinnipedia.”
He was proposing an expedition to the Bronx Zoo. How wholesome he was!
They were leaning against the wrought-iron fence circling the sea lions’ pool. The sea lions, sprawled on their boulders, too lethargic to dive, were all barking loudly in chorus. Against the din he said, “Do you know the difference between a seal and a sea lion? The sea lion has earflaps and can walk on its flippers. The seal has these apertures instead of ears and can only go on its belly. And did you know”—and here he grew excited—“that the hippopotamus evolved from the dolphin? In terms of aeons, it happened all of a sudden.”
He bought her a balloon in the shape of a giraffe, and also two ice-cream cones—her choice, one vanilla, one strawberry. But it was getting too cold for ice cream. Indian summer was over. They were both wearing sweaters. “And by the way,” he said, “I hope you won’t mind, but pretty soon I’ll be moving out of the neighborhood.”
“Why would you do that?” It came as a jolt to Evangeline that she was not indifferent to this announcement; somehow it embarrassed her. And why should she mind?
He had done his homework, he explained. Looked at all the want ads, asked around, got a tip about an opening in a well-funded private high school for girls, principal soon to retire, and so forth. All this was muddling: she had no inkling that Nate Vogel might be ambitious. How could a man so sure, so lacking in anxiety, so satisfied in his habits, so at home with equations, want to change his perfectly normal life? And no, he hadn’t applied to the math department; he detested Euclid, he was sick of Pythagoras, he didn’t care whether zero existed or not. Evangeline declined to believe him. For once he was making things up.
“It’s in Connecticut,” he told her. “The school. I got the job. It means a big jump in pay. And they like it that I do math. It’s all about budgets.”
How uninspired to be gratified by something so banal as running a fancy school! As if Connecticut were kin to the dolphin-thronged coast of New Zealand.
And then she remembered that implausibility is the true authenticity. Otherwise how could the hippopotamus have once been a dolphin?
And then she thought, He always means what he says. And everything he says is so.
And then she thought, How wholesome he is, how chaste!
And then she thought, Chaste needn’t mean celibate.
Six months later, she married him. And like Hygeia and Amphitrite before her, she decamped. Mouse One and Mouse Two were anyhow at war, vying for head librarian. Mouse Two had turned tiger and, by virtue of clearing out the cranks who commandeered whole tables for their hobbies, had won. He would have ousted Nate Vogel.
The girls’ school was located in the suburbs of Stamford. Evangeline could hardly admit to surprise; everything that happens is inevitable, evolution is sudden. They were given a perk, a little house of their own, set in an acre of greenery; it was called the Principal’s House. Still, she regretted that swamps and zoos were behind them.
“Posh,” Evangeline said. “And those silly uniforms the girls have to wear.” She was thirty-seven years old, the age of the beginning of nostalgia, when early discontent becomes regret. She regretted the long-ago loss of the green truck. She regretted that Mouse Two now reigned in place of the goddesses of water and well-being. She regretted that George had so far receded in her longings that she not only couldn’t recall the color of his eyes; his voice, too, with all its clairvoyance, had faded. The words survived, but not the clarion call. George was nearly beyond retrieval, a tiny glint of a mote, like a wayward flea.
She did not regret marrying Nate Vogel. They named the baby Bella, after Evangeline’s grandmother. Together, they worked to suspend a shiny miniature mobile over Bella’s little bed, where it wafted and twisted and fitfully caught the light. Bella gazed at it intelligently, though it was only a chrome monocular and not a real toy.
It was December. Evangeline liked to walk in the cold. Bella in her puffy swathings and Muscovite wool hat, under blankets in her carriage, was no more than an amorphous bundle. Evangeline wore furry Muscovite boots. A steamy cloud spilled out of her throat with every breath, but still she pushed the carriage everywhere, through unfamiliar streets and small icy plazas and rows of shops of every kind. She walked and walked: a private walk, a secret walk, secret even from Nate Vogel. And finally there it was, transfigured. Risen as pledged. It had renewed its surround, it had staunchly gentrified. Its fifteen luxury floors looked down on a lavish playground, where silky-cheeked children in thick winter regalia were bobbing on seesaws and shrieking down slides. Shivering nannies stood by. The ragamuffins were nowhere.
And next the bench. A different bench, stone sparkling with mica, impregnable to harm. Only the bird droppings were the same. Or were they? How do owls fare in December?
Bella was howling, and they were far from home, with miles to go. But Evangeline had seen what she wanted to see: that George was yet again not there.
April came, and Evangeline pushed Bella’s stroller around the neighborhood, peering into the windows of stores. Trees grew all along the sidewalks. A bus snorted its way down the street. Bella pointed with her tiny finger and said “Buh.” When a second bus followed in the fumy wake of the first, Bella pointed again and said “Buh-buh.” She was already mastering arithmetic.
They passed a store with its door open; it was a bookshop going out of business, collateral damage of the new age of digital reading. Evangeline looked in. A man was on his knees, pulling books off their shelves and thrusting them into cardboard boxes. She could see only his elbows as he bent forward to the lowest shelf. He was wearing a nubbly tweed jacket; the elbow patches were of leather worn into creases, the color of ripened persimmon. When he stood and showed his face, it was again not George.
Nate Vogel was content. Every morning at breakfast the chatter of flocks of adolescent girls came to them through the open windows like undulating notes of nightingales. “What a pity,” he said, “there aren’t any nightingales around here. Not a single one. They winter in Africa and summer in Europe.” He had looked up the history of the Principal’s House. The school was founded just before the Battle of Appomattox. “Did you know,” he said (and she was sometimes attentive), “that it was used by the Underground Railroad?” He no longer wore his seaman’s cap; it was unsuitable for his office, it had no dignity. His hair stood up, an unplowed harvest, an improbable wheat field.
Bella, too, was content. Now she was mastering the art of two-leggedness.
One night in a dream Evangeline understood why she couldn’t remember the color of George’s eyes. They were colorless. A white light streamed out of them, turning everything translucent. When she awoke, she was uncertain of the meaning of her conscious life: was she no different from Ruby and Susan (formerly Olive), or was she, in truth, burning always with the hard, gemlike flame of her solitary will? ♦
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