because he did not understand why I had sent his parents away or because this was very different from basketball in a high-school gym and he needed a look from me, a word, something. Then I saw it was mom and dad his eyes were balancing in their bitter light; there was that in his face, the knifed look hanging tight over a brother's small betrayal, not understanding what I had to do and yet not moving either, held there by the camera in my hands or by her, by her indeed, lean dank bird; of course; it would be impossible to slip one's shoulders out from the cool shellac of those hands, to turn one's back on such presence as this. The light in the pantry was bad. I was doing everything too quickly and I knew it would be nothing but blind luck if any of this found life at all, caught the silver crystal and began to grow. I could see it in foreflash, underexposed, their bodies incomplete, her face a nest of scattered dusk, tangled gray light at the edges of the screen, and then I wondered if I would ever watch it, this or any part of it, and I wondered why this mute soliloquy of woman and boy should mean anything more, even to me, than what it so clearly was, face of one and head of the other, and I wondered of this commercial whether it would sell the product. I focused again, her hands on his shoulders, a strange, a very strange expression, something like the curiosity that follows a man out of a room, a totally uncharacteristic look in her eyes. I felt no power doing it this way. The light was worse than bad and I hadn't made the proper readings. I was going too quickly. I was not framing. I was ending the shots too soon. But I had to do it and be done with it and maybe this was the best way, to obliterate the memory by mocking it, no power at all, spilling seed into the uncaptured light. Then I began to shoot the last sequence and I found I could not stop. Through the viewfinder I saw them, motionless, supremely patient, steadfast, her long fingers knuckle to tip visible over his shoulders, her left eye looking past his ear and into the eye of the camera, and I kept shooting for two or three minutes, lost somewhere, bent back in twenty-five watts of brown light, listening for a sound behind me, and of all the things I wondered that evening the last was how much she knew.
Laura was not in the dining room. Glenn sat at the table without looking up. I thanked him for everything. I told him it was regrettable but necessary that sometimes certain things had to be done that seemed excessively rash. Sullivan was waiting for me at the door. I told him that people under pressure sometimes say or do things which appear necessary at the time but which later are seen to be foolish and unforgivable. Bud was in the kitchen doorway and I thanked him and apologized. Then I went to the table and offered my hand. Glenn looked up, took it, smiled, pressed, and softly cursed me. It was sweetly done, a nice bit of Hollywood there, the vintage years, and it won a smile in return. We released and I backed off. Then the capillaries flared in his wild eye, the thin whispering streaks, hints of cold deacon fury, the kind of cold that burns, the cold that sticks to hands, that furious cold light damning my soul, those arctic streaks, those veins in the cube of ice inside his eye.
She stood on the sidewalk looking at me come down off the porch. It was unlike her to wait. I had expected her to be halfway up the street and then I thought of the way she had stared at me all through the last sequence, those two or three minutes when I was not sure where I was. Something soft drifted off her now. The streetlights were on. I had the camera on my right shoulder.
'I'd like to take a bath,' she said. 'We've been taking sponge baths in the camper. When it's warm enough we go down to the river. At first it was only a nuisance. Now it's a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.'
'Have the others seen you without clothes?'
'We use great tact, David. I assure you. Elaborate schedules have been worked out. Pike is a master at that sort of thing. A quartermaster in fact. He's taken to posting all sorts of rosters, dockets and inventories. I assure you, it's all very discreetly done.'
'Let's go to a motel,' I said. 'We can get a cab to take us.'
'Is that necessary?'
'I don't think they care for men taking women up to their room at the hotel. They're pretty, you know, stodgy.'
'We'll unstodge them.'
Sullivan spent close to an hour in the bath. I sat looking at the partly open bathroom door, trying to think of nothing. Then I stood in the doorway. She lifted one leg out of the water, as I knew she would, and moved her hands along her calf and looked back at me over her shoulder. A word arrived then from the eye of the deacon Yost. Abomination. I went back to the bed and sat down. She had looked at me to see if I was pleased. I sat waiting. Then I turned on the lamp by the armchair and switched off the overhead light. She got out of the tub. I went in quickly and watched her dry off with a large white monogrammed towel. Then I moved closer and moved my hands over the towel over her body slowly. We said nothing. I was following her toward the bed, following a sense of unimaginable pleasure, knowing this was old Yankee guilt, salt and peter. The walls were black and white and she was at the bed. Abomination.
She was covered now, even her breasts, and lying rigid, a message that this was the end of a stanza, that now she would wait for the turn of my turn. How much she knew about that moment, and taught me, in her absurd concealment; that the true and best lewdness, that is to say the ugliest, is nothing more than modesty so fanatic it cannot bear to move for fear it might touch itself. I undressed standing by the bed as I had done that night in Maine, darkness then, wondering whether she could see me, lewd virgin Maine, a different kind of room.
She watched me standing above her and I tried to think of nothing. She was absolutely still, watching
'Don't be afraid,' she said. 'Tell me what you want me to do.'
'I don't know yet. Let's just stay like this for a moment. Do you remember the night we spent in Maine in that old house? You told me a bedtime story.'
'Don't be afraid, David.'
'I'm not.'
'You were in terror back there.'
'Yes,' I said.
'You mustn't be afraid. I'll help you. I'll do anything you want me to do.'
'First, before anything else, I want you to tell me a story. Like in Maine. Like the story you told that night before I went to sleep.'
(So ready, so lewd and willing was Sullivan, so skilled the artist immersed in her craft that she did not even pause at this request, much less break into waves of saving laughter.)
'And a deep sleep it was,' she said.
'A story. A bedtime story.'
'I have just the thing. It's about an evil old uncle of mine and the incredible experience we shared in a small boat on a fog-shrouded day in Somes Sound.'
'Are you going to make it up?'
'It's real,' she said. 'You made me think of it when you mentioned Maine.'
'Tell me then.'
'I had a hated and feared and bloody Ulsterman of an uncle,' Sullivan said. 'At the age of eighteen he left Dublin for Belfast, renouncing church, state, family and the adulterous shade of Parnell. My father's brother he was, the blackest of ex-Catholics, a blasphemer of the militant and dour type, not at all merry and joshing and ribald like the likes of my dead dad. Years later he came to this country and settled eventually in Maine, in a small town not far from Bar Harbor. And I went to visit him once, seeking to redress an old family grievance. It was a quiet simple town, a fit and proper place for Uncle Malcolm. He came to the door and I had almost forgotten how wild and ominous a man he looked-bald, firm, compact, real as a keg of stout. His eyes were dark, two pilot lights burning, and he looked at me as though I were the Pope's most favored concubine. He hated Catholics. He hated my father like plague, like incense. Brothers they were, stem and stern, Shem and Shaun, tight Dublin and tighter Belfast. In my letter I had given no hint of the purpose of my visit. We sat on the porch. It was a moonlit night. Statues of patriots stood on the green. No barding lads or songsters rolled out of the pubs and not a dark hop of Guinness in sight. There were no pubs; there were statues. I sculpt, as you know, and those statues, David, chilled me. Such Christianity. Such Christlessness. They looked like buggered schoolmasters pretending it was only the corner of a desk behind them. There is some grace to war; certainly there was to our revolution. But it would take a blind man with very stubby fingers to think some grace into those stones. Nothing demonic, no swirl of tunic, no hunt, no bad
