When everything was set up we were called to the table. I had expected Mr. Wainwright to leave the serving of the food to his wife-in fact I had been very surprised to see him hovering with knives and forks-but now he pulled out our chairs and announced that he was our waiter. When he was that close I could smell him, and hear his breathing. His breathing sounded eager, like a dog’s, and his smell was of talcum and lotion, something that reminded me of fresh diapers and suggested a repulsive intimacy.

“Now my lovely young ladies,” he said. “1 am going to bring you some champagne.”

He brought a pitcher of lemonade, and filled our glasses. I was alarmed, until I tasted it-I knew that champagne was an alcoholic drink. We never had such drinks in our house and neither did anybody I knew. Mr. Wainwright watched me taste it and seemed to guess my feelings.

“Is that all right? Not worried now?” he said. “All satisfactory to your ladyship?”

He made a bow.

“Now,” he said. “What would you care for, to eat?” He reeled off a list of unfamiliar things-all I recognized was venison, which I certainly had never tasted. The list ended up with sweetbreads. Frances giggled and said, “We’ll have sweetbreads, please. And potatoes.”

I expected the sweetbreads to be like their name-some sort of bun with jam or brown sugar, but couldn’t see why that would come with potatoes. What arrived, however, were small pads of meat wrapped in crisp bacon, and little potatoes with their skins on, that had been rolled in hot butter and crisped in the pan. Also carrots cut in thin sticks and having a slightly candied flavor. The carrots I could have done without, but I had never tasted potatoes so delicious or meat so tender. All I wished was for Mr. Wainwright to stay in the kitchen instead of hovering around us pouring out lemonade and asking if everything was to our liking.

Dessert was another wonder-a satin vanilla pudding with a sort of lid on it of golden-brown baked sugar. Tiny cakes to go with it, iced on all sides with very dark, rich chocolate.

I sat replete, when not a lick nor a crumb was left. I looked at the fairy-tale tree with the ornaments that could have been miniature castles, or angels. Drafts came in around the window and moved the branches a little, causing the showers of tinsel to wave and the ornaments to turn slightly to show new points of light. Full of this rich and delicate food, I seemed to have entered a dream in which everything I saw was potent and benign.

One of the things I saw was the firelight, a dull rusty glow up in the pipe. I said to Frances, without alarm, “I think your pipe’s on fire.”

She called out in a spirit of party excitement, “Pipe’s on fire,” and in came Mr. Wainwright, who had finally retired to the kitchen, and Mrs. Wainwright close behind him.

Mrs. Wainwright said, “Oh God, Billy. What do we do?”

Mr. Wainwright said, “Close off the draft, I guess.” His voice was squeaky and scared, unfatherly.

He did that, then yelped and shook his hand, which must have got burnt. Now they both stood and looked at the red pipe, and she said shakily, “There’s something you’re supposed to put on it. What is it?-baking soda.” She ran to the kitchen and came back with the box of baking soda, half weeping. “Right on the flames!” she cried. Mr. Wainwright was still rubbing his hand on his trousers so she wrapped her apron round her own hand and used the stove lifter and scattered the powder on the flames. There was a spitting sound as they began to die down and smoke rose into the room.

“Girls,” she said. “Girls. Maybe you better run outside.” She was really crying now.

I remembered something from a similar crisis at home.

“You could wrap wet towels round the pipe,” I said.

“Wet towels,” she said. “That sounds like a good idea. Yes.”

She ran to the kitchen, where we heard her pumping water. Mr. Wainwright followed her, shaking his burned hand in front of him, and both returned with towels dripping. The towels were wrapped around the pipe, and as soon as they began to heat up and dry others were put in their place. The room began to fill up more and more with smoke. Frances started coughing.

“Get some air,” said Mr. Wainwright. It took him a while, with his good hand, to wrench open the unused front door, letting fly the bits of old newspapers and rotten rags that had been stuffed around it. There was a snowdrift outside, a white wave lapping at the room.

“Throw snow on the fire,” said Frances, still sounding jubilant between coughs, and she and I picked up armfuls of snow and threw them at the stove. Some hit what was left of the fire and some missed and melted and ran into the puddles that the drip from the towels had already made on the floor. I would never have been allowed to make such a mess at home.

In the midst of these puddles, the danger over and the room growing frigid, stood Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright with their arms around each other, laughing and commiserating.

“Oh your poor hand,” said Mrs. Wainwright. “And I wasn’t the least bit sympathetic about it. I was so afraid the house was going to burn down.” She tried to kiss the hand, and he said, “Ouch, ouch.” He too had tears in his eyes, from the smoke or the pain.

She patted him on the arms and shoulders and down lower, even on his buttocks, saying, “Poor poor baby,” and things of that sort, while he made a pouty face and kissed her with a great smack on the mouth. Then with his good hand he squeezed her behind.

It looked as if this fondling could go on for some time.

“Shut the door, it’s freezing,” cried Frances, all red from coughing and happy excitement. If she meant for her parents to do this, they took no notice but went on with the appalling behavior that did not seem to embarrass her or even to be worth her notice. She and I got hold of the door and pushed it against the wind that was whipping up over the drift and blowing more snow into the house.

I did not tell about any of this at home, though the food and the ornaments and the fire were so interesting. There were the other things I could not describe and that made me feel off-balance, slightly sick, so that somehow I did not like to mention any of it. The way the two adults put themselves at the service of two children. The charade of Mr. Wainwright as the waiter, his thick soapy-white hands and pale face and wings of fine glistening light-brown hair. The insistence-the too-closeness-of his soft footsteps in fat plaid slippers. Then the laughing, so inappropriate for adults, following a near disaster. The shameless hands and the smacking kiss. There was a creepy menace about all of this, starting with the falsity of corralling me to play the role of little friend-both of them had called me that-when I was nothing of the kind. To treat me as good and guileless, when I was not that either.

What was this menace? Was it just that of love, or of loving-ness? If that was what it was, then you would have to say that I had made its acquaintance too late. Such slopping-over of attention made me feel cornered and humiliated, almost as if somebody had taken a peep into my pants. Even the wonderful unfamiliar food was suspect in my memory. The movie magazines alone escaped the taint.

By the end of the Christmas holidays, the Wainwrights’ house was empty. The snow was so heavy that year that the kitchen roof caved in. Even after that nobody bothered to pull the house down or to put up a no trespassing sign, and for years children-I was among them-poked around in the risky ruins just to see what they could find. Nobody seemed to worry then about injuries or liability.

No movie magazines came to light.

I did tell about Dahlia. By then I was an entirely different person, to my own way of thinking, than the girl who had been in the Wainwrights’ house. In my early teens I had become the entertainer around home. I don’t mean that I was always trying to make the family laugh-though I did that too-but that I relayed news and gossip. I told about things that had happened at school but also about things that had happened in town. Or I just described the looks or speech of somebody I had seen on the street. I had learned how to do this in a way that would not get me rebuked for being sarcastic or vulgar or told that I was too smart for my own good. I had mastered a deadpan, even demure style that could make people laugh even when they thought they shouldn’t and that made it hard to tell whether I was innocent or malicious.