"I wasn't," Mr. Rebeck answered. "I was just wandering around." He could feel the sudden sweat on his wrists and he wondered if he was frightened. His stomach felt cold.

"Visiting your friend," Mrs. Klapper said.

Mr. Rebeck remembered his supposed acquaintanceship with the Wilders and nodded. "Yes," he said. It's a quiet place, and we were good friends." He wanted something to lean against, but he stretched his arm behind him and could not find the tree.

"If you're going to see your husband," he went on, "maybe you'd rather go alone. I mean, I wasn't doing anything"—might as well get that in—"but maybe you'd rather go by yourself."

"I don't like going by myself," Mrs. Klapper said. "A little company never hurt anybody." She smiled, her mobile mouth as quick as a whitecap on the sea. "You're worried Morris would mind?"

"It isn't exactly that," Mr. Rebeck began. "I just thought—"

"Morris wouldn't mind. Come on." She half extended her hand to him and then let it drop to her side. "Come on, we'll talk like two friends and make a little noise. Quiet is all right, but enough is enough. Around here it gets too quiet sometimes."

The cold feeling was suddenly gone from Mr. Rebeck's stomach, and in its place a small but earnest thimbleful of wine radiated warmth, like a sun born unexpectedly into a frozen universe. He felt unhooked from himself, dislocated, and he listened with interest to himself saying, "Thank you. I'd like that very much."

Together they walked slowly up the gradual hill beyond which the white house over Morris Klapper loomed and dwarfed the scrubby trees that surrounded it. Neither spoke, nor did they look at each other. Their bodies walked on, while their minds stood a few minutes behind them in the clearing before another house and mused over a still moment when one offered and another accepted.

The building grew great before them, pillar and scroll, marble and iron, far bigger than the Wilder mausoleum, and still the foundation could not be seen. Mr. Rebeck, having just made the pleasant discovery that Mrs. Klapper was smaller than she looked, was practicing looking down at her.

"It's very big," he said. He had never learned to like mausoleums, especially large ones, but he tried hard to get an admiring tone into his voice.

"I wanted it big," Mrs. Klapper answered. "I wanted everybody should know who's buried here." She stopped for a moment to shake a pebble out of her shoe. "You know, I didn't have to give him a big funeral. I mean in his will it didn't say anything about it. His partner said to me—Mr. Harris, his name is—he said, 'Look, Gertrude, all Morris wanted was a little tiny funeral, with maybe a couple of friends and no speeches, please.' He said, 'Gertrude, believe me, we used to talk about it and he didn't want you should fire cannons over his grave or hire a Grand Rabbi.'" She raised her eyebrows at Mr. Rebeck. "Down on his knees, practically. So I said, 'Mr. Harris, I want you to know I appreciate your efforts in Morris's behalf'—just like that—'only I think I knew my husband a little bit better than you did, excuse me, because I was married to him. Morris is going to have a big funeral,' I said, 'with a lot of people, and he is also going to have a big house, marble, the way he wanted it. Maybe you don't want to pay for such a big funeral, Mr. Harris—all right, I'll pay for it. Don't tell me how to bury my husband,' I told him. 'When you die, God forbid, you can have a little tiny funeral and not invite anybody and have a house the size of a cheesebox, but don't tell me how to bury my husband.'"

She was walking faster as she finished, and breathing a bit harder. Mr. Rebeck had to take three short steps to fall into the rhythm of her stride again.

"We could walk a little slower if you're tired," he suggested. Mrs. Klapper looked at him for a moment as if he had suddenly stepped from behind a bush and grabbed her arm. Then she smiled.

"No," she said. "I'm fine." But she did slow her pace, seemingly as unconsciously as she had quickened it.

When they finally topped the low hill they met a man and a woman who greeted them as saviors and asked if they knew where a particular grave was located. And Mr. Rebeck made a mistake, as far as his role of quiet-seeking visitor was concerned. He told them.

He gave the directions carefully, never once noticing the sudden wonder in Mrs. Klapper's eyes. The couple were tired, and angry with each other, and quite lost, and it pleased him that he could help them. So he was quite thorough: he told them the road they must take and the paths they would have to take to reach the road, and he told them to count the marble angels along the way and turn right at a certain angel, and he told them that the grave they sought was very close to the path and would be easy to find. The man and woman were very grateful, and the woman turned around as they walked away and waved at Mr. Rebeck. He waved back.

When he turned around again he met Mrs. Klapper's eyes and knew that he had made a tactical error. There was speculation in her stare, compounded with wonder and a certain amount of awe. She had never looked at him like that before, and the fear that is never far from the hearts of affectionate people returned to his own. He had not considered the effect his casual knowledge of the cemetery might have on her, because he had not even thought of it as knowledge. Someone had asked him for directions, as they had occasionally over nineteen years, and he had known the way. Now, at best, she would mark him as unusual, a freak perhaps, at all events a man with a gimmick memory. She would be amused—she seemed easily amused—but from that time on, she would think of him as a little less than human. That would be the best that could happen. At worst, she would not be amused. She would ask questions, and he would have to lie to her, as he had once before. This depressed him; he did not want to lie to her again, and he knew how poor a liar he was.

He turned away before the couple were out of sight and looked at the mausoleum with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped back. "Well," he said with what he hoped was a calculating but quite unprofessional air. "Well, this certainly is a big house." That was safe. That wouldn't take nineteen years of living in a cemetery to figure out. A man could just look at it and see how big it was. "It certainly is," he said again.

Behind him, Mrs. Klapper said, "I hope they find the place they were looking for."

"Me too," said Mr. Rebeck. "I may very easily have given them the wrong directions. I wasn't at all sure."

"Oh?" Mrs. Klapper was standing at his side now. "You seemed pretty sure."

"Well, you know how it is." Mr. Rebeck smiled hopefully at her. "A man hates to have people think he doesn't know his way around."

Mrs. Klapper smiled back. "Believe me, I understand."

There was a long silence, during which Mr. Rebeck looked at the Klapper mausoleum with frantic admiration and Mrs. Klapper rummaged for a handkerchief in her purse. It took her a while to find it because she was looking at Mr. Rebeck, and when she did find it she held it in her hand for some time and then stuffed it back into her purse.

"One headstone," she said quietly. "That's what gets me. A mausoleum, all right, a mausoleum I could see. But one headstone out of a thousand, five thousand, this takes a very good memory."

"I've got a very good memory," Mr. Rebeck said. It was to be the living-room sorcery then. "I can take a deck of cards and—"

"I know you've got a good memory," Mrs. Klapper said absently. "This must be a real blessing. Me, I'm always forgetting things. Did you ever find your watch?"

The question was asked in such an expressionless tone of voice that it took Mr. Rebeck a moment to realize that it was a question at all. When he did realize it, he answered hastily, without looking at his forearm.