Koko

no more than two or three inches out of the way and as Poole squeezed past her he saw the white flecks of powder in her hair sift down to the white scalp.

“You’re the one who called? Dr. Poole?”

“Yes, and—”

“Who’s that one? You didn’t tell me about that one.”

“Maggie Lah. She is a close friend of ours.”

The odd pale dog’s eyes inspected him. Poole had become aware of a close, dank, musty smell as soon as the door closed. Mrs. Dengler’s nose was upturned and very broad, with three deep creases across its top just beneath the bridge of the old-fashioned glasses. She had virtually no lips, and her neck was very thick. Her shoulders too were thick, sturdy, and bent forward in a permanent stoop.

“I’m just an old woman who lives alone, that’s all I am. Now, now. Yes. Come along.” With little phrases she motioned them toward a coat rack and stood rubbing her hands over her wide upper arms. In the darkness of the hallway Mrs. Dengler’s large square face seemed to shine, as if it drew all the light in the house to it.

Helga Dengler’s pale eyes moved from Poole to Maggie to Underhill and back to Maggie. There was a sense of heavy shapelessness about her, as if she were far heavier than she looked. “So,” she said. A staircase, in the darkness no more than an impression of a wooden handrail and newel posts, rose into the gloom at her back. The floor was slightly gritty underfoot. Dim light came through a half-open door down the hall.

“You’re very kind to have invited us, Mrs. Dengler,” Poole said, and Maggie and Tim Underhill said similar things that tangled together in the air and then broke off.

As if their words had reached her after a delay, for a moment she merely gleamed at them. Then: “Well, the Bible tells us to be kind, doesn’t it? You men knew my son?”

“He was a wonderful person,” Poole said.

“We loved your son,” Underhill said at the same moment, and their sentences also tangled together.

“Well,” she said. Poole thought that he could look all the way through her eyes and see nothing but the clear blue color of blue jeans washed a thousand times. Then he thought that their queer awkwardness was forced on them by her: that she had wished it upon them.

“Manny tried to be a good boy,” she said. “He had to be trained to it, like all boys.”

Again Poole had the sense of a missed beat, of a second that fell either into Helga Dengler or out of the world altogether.

“You’ll want to sit down,” she said. “I guess the living room is where you’ll want to go. This way. I’m busy, you see. An old woman who lives alone has to keep herself busy.”

“Have we interrupted something?” Poole asked. She smiled her hard twitch of a smile and motioned for them to follow her down the hall and through the door.

One low-wattage bulb burned beneath an ornate lampshade. The single bar of an electrical heater glowed red in the corner of the crowded room. Here the musty odor was not so noticeable. The furniture seemed to glow and ripple. Purple stained-glass tiger’s eyes shone down from little shelves and from a table beside a couch of worn plush. “You can all sit there, it used to be my mother’s.” The rippling glow was reflected light streaking across stiff clear plastic covers which creaked when they sat down.

Poole looked sideways at the tiger’s eyes on the round table and saw that they were marbles, cracked on the inside in such a way that they caught the yellow light. There were dozens of them fixed in an arrangement on a piece of black cloth.

“That’s my work,” the woman said. She was standing in the center of the room. On the wall behind her was a framed photograph of a uniformed man who in the general darkness resembled a Boy Scout leader. Other pictures, of puppies tumbled together and kittens entangled in yarn, had been placed in random positions on the walls.

“You can have your opinion, and I’ll have mine,” Mrs. Dengler said. She took a half-step forward, and her eyes seemed to swell behind the round lenses. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, that’s what we told them over and over again.”

“Excuse me?” Michael said. Underhill was smiling either at Mrs. Dengler or at the pictures only half-visible behind her. “You said … your work?”

She visibly relaxed, and stepped backwards again. “My grape clusters. You were looking.”

“Oh,” Poole said. That was what they were. The purple marbles, he saw, had been glued to the black fabric in the shape of a cluster of grapes. “Very nice.”

“Everybody always thought so. When my husband had his church, some of the congregation used to buy my grape clusters. Everybody always said they were beautiful. The way they catch the light.”

“Beautiful,” Poole said.

“How do you make them?” Maggie asked.

This time her smile seemed genuine, almost delicate, as if she knew she took an immodest amount of pride in her grape clusters. “You could do it yourself,” she said, and finally sat down on a footstool. “It’s in a pan. I always use Wesson oil. You use butter, it spatters. And it burns. My husband would use butter for everything, but he had the feeling for meat, you see. You use that Wesson oil, little girl, and you’ll always get your marbles to crack in the right way. That’s what nobody understands—especially in these times. You must do things right.”

“So you fry the marbles,” Maggie said.

“Well … yes. You use your pan and your Wesson oil. And you use low heat. That way they crack all the same way. That’s the good part of it. They all turn out just right. Then you turn them out of the pan and run cold water over them for a second or two, that seems to set them somehow, and after they cool down you glue them to your form. A dot of glue, that’s it. And then you’ve got your cluster, a beautiful thing for all eternity.” She beamed at Maggie, all the light concentrated in the heavy, thick center of her face. “For … all … eternity. Like the Word of God. Each one takes twenty-four marbles. To come out exactly right and lifelike too. Well. Better than lifelike, in some ways.”

“Being all alike,” Maggie said.

“All just alike. That’s the beauty part. With boys, you know, you can just try and try. You can do what you will, but they will resist.” Her face closed up for a moment, and the center of her face seemed to dim. “Nothing in life comes out the way you expect, not even for Christians. You’re a Christian, aren’t you, little girl?”

Maggie blinked and said oh yes, of course.

“These men pretend, but they haven’t fooled me. I can smell the beer on them. A Christian man doesn’t drink beer. My Karl never touched a drop of liquor, and my Manny never did either. At least not until he got away, into the service.” She glared at Poole as if she held him personally responsible for her son’s lapses. “And never mixed with bad women, either. We beat that into him. He was a good boy, as good as we could make him. And considering where and what he came from.” Another sullen look at Poole, as if he knew all about that. “We got that boy to work, and work he did until the day the army took him. School is school, we said, but your work is your life. Butcher-work came from God, but man made schoolwork and reading any book but one.”

“Was he happy as a child?” Poole asked.

“The Devil worries about happiness,” she said, and the weird pale light went on in her face and eyes again. “Do you think Karl thought about such as that? Do you think I did? Those are the questions the other ones asked. Now you tell me something, Dr. Poole, and I’ll rely on you to tell me the truth. Did that boy drink liquor in the service over there? And did he waste himself with women? Because in your answer I’ll know what sort of man he was, and what sort you are too. The bad marbles crack all wrong, oh yes. The bad marble falls to pieces in the fire. The mother was one of those. Tell me—answer my question, or you can leave this house. I let you in, you’re not a policeman or a judge. My opinions are as good as yours, in case they’re not a lot better.”

“Of course,” Poole said. “No, I don’t think I can remember your son ever taking a drink. And he remained … what you would call pure.”

“Well. Yes. Yes, he did. This one thing I know. Manny stayed pure. What I would call pure,” she added, with a blast of ice straight from her eyes into Poole’s heart.

Poole wondered how she could have known that before he told her, and if she had known why she had asked. “We’d like to tell you some things about your son,” he said, and his words sounded clumsy and ill-chosen.

“Go on,” the woman said, and again used her peculiar psychic strength to alter both herself and the atmosphere in the room. She seemed to sigh inaudibly: both her thick body and the air grew heavier, as if filled up