The New Yorker Stories

golden retriever–black lab mix. When he wasn’t in the tributary to the York River, he was wriggling in the field, trying to shed fleas. The dog and the kitchen were the two things Dale felt sure she would miss most when they had to vacate the house. They had it through the following summer, when the philosophy professor and his wife would return from their year in Munich. By then, Nelson’s book would supposedly be finished. Dale knew she was not going to enjoy the home stretch. Nelson had written other books, which inevitably made him morose because of the enormousness of the task. Then the music selections would really become eclectic.

Dale reached into the flour bin of the Hoosier cabinet and took out her secret stash of doughnut holes, which she bought on Saturdays at the Portsmouth Farmers’ Market. She did not eat doughnut holes: they were exclusively for Tyrone, who thought Dale had invented the best game of fetch imaginable. He would race for the doughnut hole, sniff through the field for it, throw it in the air so Dale could see he’d gotten it, then gulp it down in one swallow. She had taken to applauding. Lately, she had started to add “Good dog, Tyrone” to the applause.

“Is that cigarettes?” Brenda whispered to Dale, though Nelson and Jerome were already walking up the stairs.

“Doughnut holes,” Dale whispered back. “You’ll see.” She plunged what remained of them, in their plastic bag, into the deep pocket of her coat.

“I keep peanut M&M’s in my lingerie drawer,” Brenda said. “And Jerome—you know, he doesn’t think I know he still drinks Pernod.”

“It’s for a dog,” Dale said.

“Pernod?” Brenda asked.

“No. Doughnut holes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on,” Dale said. “You’ll see.”

At dinner—during which Dale could sense Brenda’s respect for her, both as a cook and as a crazy woman (she’d sent three doughnut holes up in the air at the same time, like the last moments of the Fourth of July fireworks)—they discussed the brass sundial Dale had placed atop autumn leaves in the center of the table. Nelson informed everyone that the piece sticking up was called the gnomon.

“No mon is an island,” Jerome said. Jerome very much enjoyed wordplay and imitating dialects. Dialect from de islands was currently his favorite. He and Brenda had recently vacationed in Montego Bay.

“And this is the shadow,” Nelson said, pointing, ignoring Jerome’s silly contribution. “This is the plate, this the hour line, this the dial, or diagram.”

“You are a born teacher,” Brenda said.

“I broke that habit,” Nelson said. He had. He had resigned when the theorists outnumbered what he called “the sane art historians.” Worried that his ex-colleagues would resent his work with Roman coins, he was fond of stressing that he was not a numismatist. Dale had left with him, retaining only two loyal students who drove hours each week to work with her in the darkroom.

“Groton or no Groton, he had such an interest in knowledge that we had nothing to worry about with Nelson. I wore her down, and I was right to have done it,” Jerome said. The time would never come when Jerome would not want to be thanked, one more time, for having saved Nelson—as they both thought of it—from the clutches of Groton.

“Which I thank you for,” Nelson said.

“And, if I’d been around at your birth, I could have stopped her from naming you for a sea captain,” Jerome said.

“Oh, Nelson is a lovely name,” Brenda said.

“Of course, if I’d been around at your birth, people might have suspected something funny was going on,” Jerome said.

“I thought you met Didi in Paris, when Nelson was five or six,” Brenda said.

“He was four. He was five when we got married.”

Didi had gone to Paris to study painting. Actually, she had gone to have an affair with her Theosophy instructor. That hadn’t had a happy ending, though Didi had met Jerome at Les Deux Magots. No snail-like dawdling; by her own admission, she had struck with the speed of a snake.

“I didn’t understand what you meant then, when you said ‘If I’d been around,’ ” Brenda said.

“I was just saying if. If things had been otherwise. Other than what they were. If.”

“But I think you implied that you knew Didi when she gave birth. Didn’t he?” Brenda said.

“Brenda, you were a child when all this happened. You need not be jealous,” Jerome said.

“I know I should let this drop, Jerome, but it seemed sort of strange to suggest you might have been there,” Brenda said. “Am I being too literal-minded again?”

“Yes,” Nelson said.

“Well, no, I mean, sometimes I feel like something is being said between the lines and because I’m a newcomer I don’t quite get it.”

“I’ve lived with you for six years, Brenda,” Jerome said. He said it with finality, as if she would do well to drop the subject, if she wanted to live with him another six seconds.

Brenda said nothing. Dale gestured to the soup tureen, beside the sundial. Also on the table was a silver bowl of freshly snipped chives and a little Chinese dish, enameled inside, that Dale had found for a quarter at a tag sale. People in the area did not value anything they were selling that was smaller than a beachball. The Chinese dish was an antique. Inside, there was a pyramid of unsweetened whipped cream.

“Fabulous. Fabulous soup,” Jerome said. “So when are you going to let me bankroll your restaurant?”