sitting anywhere, she ground an ax of self-esteem. Offer her a cup of tea and she would say, “Why, these cups look just like a set I gave to the Salvation Army last year.” Show her the new swimming pool and she would say, slapping her ankle, “I suppose this must be where you breed your gigantic mosquitoes.” Hand her a chair and she would say, “Why, it’s a nice imitation of those Queen Anne chairs I inherited from Grandmother Delancy.” These trumps were more touching than they were anything else, and seemed to imply that the nights were long, her children ungrateful, and her marriage bewilderingly threadbare. Twenty years ago, she would have been known as a golf widow, and the sum of her manner was perhaps one of bereavement. She usually wore weeds, and a stranger watching her board a train might have guessed that Mr. Pastern was dead, but Mr. Pastern was far from dead. He was marching up and down the locker room of the Grassy Brae Golf Club shouting, “Bomb Cuba! Bomb Berlin! Let’s throw a little nuclear hardware at them and show them who’s boss.” He was brigadier of the club’s locker-room light infantry, and at one time or another declared war on Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and China.
It all began on an autumn afternoon?and who, after all these centuries, can describe the fineness of an autumn day? One might pretend never to have seen one before, or, to more purpose, that there would never be another like it. The clear and searching sweep of sun on the lawns was like a climax of the year’s lights. Leaves were burning somewhere and the smoke smelled, for all its ammoniac acidity, of beginnings. The boundless blue air was stretched over the zenith like the skin of a drum. Leaving her house one late afternoon, Mrs. Pastern stopped to admire the October light. It was the day to canvass for infectious hepatitis. Mrs. Pastern had been given sixteen names, a bundle of literature, and a printed book of receipts. It was her work to go among her neighbors and collect their checks. Her house stood on a rise of ground, and before she got into her car she looked at the houses below. Charity as she knew it was complex and reciprocal, and almost every roof she saw signified charity. Mrs. Balcoim worked for the brain. Mrs. Ten Fyke did mental health. Mrs. Trenchard worked for the blind. Mrs. Horowitz was in charge of diseases of the nose and throat. Mrs. Trempler was tuberculosis, Mrs. Surcliffe was Mothers’ March of Dimes, Mrs. Craven was cancer, and Mrs. Gilkson did the kidney. Mrs. Hewlitt led the birth-control league, Mrs. Ryerson was arthritis, and way in the distance could be seen the slate roof of Ethel Littleton’s house, a roof that signified gout.
Mrs. Pastern undertook the work of going from house to house with the thoughtless resignation of an honest and traditional laborer. It was her destiny; it was her life. Her mother had done it before her, and even her old grandmother had collected money for smallpox and unwed mothers. Mrs. Pastern had telephoned most of her neighbors in advance, and most of them were ready for her. She experienced none of the suspense of some poor stranger selling encyclopedias. Here and there she stayed to visit and drink a glass of sherry. The contributions were ahead of what she had got the previous year, and while the money, of course, was not hers, it excited her to stuff her kit with big checks. She stopped at the Surcliffes’ after dusk, and had a Scotch and soda. She stayed too late, and when she left it was dark and time to go home and cook supper for her husband. “I got a hundred and sixty dollars for the hepatitis fund,” she said excitedly when he walked in. “I did everybody on my list but the Blevins and the Flannagans. I want to get my kit in tomorrow morning?would you mind doing them while I cook the dinner?”
“But I don’t know the Flannagans,” Charlie Pastern said.
“Nobody does, but they gave me ten last year.”
He was tired, he had his business worries, and the sight of his wife arranging pork chops in the broiler only seemed like an extension of a boring day. He was happy enough to take the convertible and race up the hill to the Blevins’, thinking that they might give him a drink. But the Blevins were away; their maid gave him an envelope with a check in it and shut the door. Turning in at the Flannagans’ driveway, he tried to remember if he had ever met them. The name encouraged him, because he always felt that he could handle the Irish. There was a glass pane in the front door, and through this he could see into a hallway where a plump woman with red hair was arranging flowers.
“Infectious hepatitis,” he shouted heartily.
She took a good look at herself in the mirror before she turned and, walking with very small steps, started toward the door. “Oh, please come in,” she said. The girlish voice was nearly a whisper. She was not a girl, he could see. Her hair was dyed, and her bloom was fading, and she must have been crowding forty, but she seemed to be one of those women who cling to the manners and graces of a pretty child of eight. “Your wife just called,” she said, separating one word from another, exactly like a child. “And I am not sure that I have any cash?any money, that is?but if you will wait just a minute I will write you out a check if I can find my checkbook. Won’t you step into the living room, where it’s cozier?”
A fire had just been lighted, he saw, and things had been set out for drinks, and, like any stray, his response to these comforts was instantaneous. Where was Mr. Flannagan? he wondered. Traveling home on a late train? Changing his clothes upstairs? Taking a shower? At the end of the room there was a desk heaped with papers, and she began to riffle these, making sighs and noises of girlish exasperation. “I am terribly sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, “but won’t you make yourself a little drink while you wait? Everything’s on the table.”
“What train does Mr. Flannagan come out on?”
“Mr. Flannagan is away,” she said. Her voice dropped. “Mr. Flannagan has been away for six weeks.”
“I’ll have a drink, then, if you’ll have one with me.”
“If you will promise to make it weak.”
“Sit down,” he said, “and enjoy your drink and look for your checkbook later. The only way to find things is to relax.”
All in all, they had six drinks. She described herself and her circumstances unhesitatingly. Mr. Flannagan manufactured plastic tongue depressors. He traveled all over the world. She didn’t like to travel. Planes made her feel faint, and in Tokyo, where she had gone that summer, she had been given raw fish for breakfast and so she had come straight home. She and her husband had formerly lived in New York, where she had many friends, but Mr. Flannagan thought the country would be safer in case of war. She would rather live in danger than die of loneliness and boredom. She had no children; she had made no friends. “I’ve seen you, though, before,” she said with enormous coyness, patting his knee. “I’ve seen you walking your dogs on Sunday and driving by in the
