"Yes," he said. "I found it right along Fairview, about a mile from the gate. It must have dropped off while I was talking to you and I didn't even notice it."

As he spoke he looked down at his wrist. It was brown, like the rest of his arm, and covered with fine black hairs. He did not look up immediately.

"I left it home today," he said softly. "It had to be fixed." He raised his eyes very gradually and looked at Mrs. Klapper. "Something was wrong with it."

Mrs. Klapper looked at him for a long time, and he looked back at her. There is nothing marvelous about meeting a person's eyes, he thought. Your eyes may start to water after a bit and you may get a kink in your neck, but the soul is far behind the eyes and doesn't even know what's going on up front. So he stared back at Mrs. Klapper, directly and with dignity, until she began to blur and go out of focus.

It was Mrs. Klapper who looked away at last. She walked to the steps of the mausoleum and sat down. "All right," she said. "Forget it. Forget I asked anything. A woman shouldn't play detective. It makes people lie to her, and then she catches them lying and feels proud of herself. Forget I asked. I'm a nosy old woman and I want to know too much. Don't tell me anything."

Mr. Rebeck rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and felt the sweat there. "Mrs. Klapper—" he began.

"Don't tell me anything." Mrs. Klapper made a cutting motion with the edge of her hand. "It's better I shouldn't know. I got a very bad habit."

Mr. Rebeck rubbed his neck again and looked down at her. Quite suddenly he grinned. "Move over," he said.

Mrs. Klapper blinked at him a little bewilderedly. She moved over slightly on the mausoleum step.

"I have to think for a moment." He sat down beside her and looked at the ground. He could feel her eyes on him, but he did not turn his head.

Rebeck, he thought, you have reached one of those Crossroads people write about. As it is your first Crossroad in a good while, I think you ought to take very good care of it and examine it carefully. Not too long, though, please. There is a hypnotizing quality about Crossroads. You can stand and look at them long and long, as Whitman insisted on putting it, and forget the Cross.

He looked down at his wrist and thought, If you had been wearing a wrist watch for any length of time, there would be a white band around your wrist where the sun could not reach. Hurray for you, Jonathan. You and Mrs. Klapper ought to form a detective society.

Should I tell her now? he wondered. Why not? I've been telling everybody lately. Don't exaggerate, Rebeck. Who is everybody? Michael and Laura. Michael and Laura hardly count. They're ghosts. They know what's possible and what isn't. This woman is alive. Make no mistake about that. She is alive, and that means she can hear the truth. It does not mean that she will know it when she hears it.

You'll have to tell her sooner or later. She'll be just as incredulous whenever you do. At worst, she'll run screaming out of here, which might be very interesting to watch, but lonesome later on. At best—what would she do at best? Probably say something like "Okay, but isn't it a little silly?" What will you do then? Maybe it is a little silly.

Get off the Crossroads, Rebeck. You are beginning to turn around in small, neat circles. A car might hit you.

Maybe it is silly, he thought again. That has nothing to do with it. A lot of serious things are silly, even to the people who do them. That's no way out.

Look at it another way. If you don't tell her, she won't ask you again, but she won't like you very much because you've made her feel nosy. Oh, she will be friendly and cheerful and all that because she is friendly and cheerful. She'll simply stop coming. Even to see her husband, if it means running into you. On the occasions you do meet, you'll smile and wave furiously at each other, the furious-ness increasing in direct proportion to the distance between you. Right there you have the nucleus of one of those fifty-year friendships.

Is she that important to you? Privacy is important too, and there is less of it.

No. She is not that important. Not yet. I barely know her. She is not important as an individual. She is a Symbol.

Oh, that's fine. A Symbol of what?

How should I know? As Symbols go, though, she's very nice.

Mrs. Klapper shifted impatiently beside him. "Rebeck, pardon an old woman, but are you laying an egg?"

Whenever Mr. Rebeck thought about it later on, he was always sure that the scales were kicked over when she called him by his name. She never had before. Laura always called him Mr. Rebeck.

He got up and stretched, thumping his chest as if he were taking a shower. Then he looked down at Mrs. Klapper.

"Come on," he said. "Let's walk."

Chapter 8

Hills had no meaning for Laura any more. She remembered them; in the cemetery there were roads that arched up suddenly, curved and hung, and then dipped to rise again, coiling on themselves like toads' tongues, and these she accepted as hills. Even now, if she thought hard, she could remember what it had been like to climb hills. But the actual rise and fall of land under her feet as she walked did not reach her. Roads and walking she remembered; so under her feet there were pavement and gravel and yellow-brown dirt, pebbles, weeds, grass, even the stunted star that she had been told lived at the center of the earth. Where Laura walked there existed only what Laura remembered, and Laura had forgotten about up and down. So there was no up and down now, exactly as there is no up and down in space, and Laura walked a flat, submissive road that her feet never quite touched.

Actually, she was walking up a small hill, a momentary shoulder-hunch of a road that wound through the poorer section of the cemetery. It was no potter's field; the Yorkchester view was that excessive poverty was just as ostentatious as excessive wealth. The graves were well kept and neat, and the ivy that covered most of them was closely trimmed, but there were so many of them. Headstones crowded within six inches of one another, and statues touched elbows. There were enough Christs, Madonnas, and angels standing in the field to people a thousand heavens, and the short grass that grew between them had a tentative look about it.

The ragged blanket of earth had been stretched about as far as it would go, Laura thought. Sooner or later it would rip down the middle with a sound like fire, and the dead would be revealed, blinking in the light, lying feet to head and feet to head, kicking out with their legs for room to be dead. Get your feet out of my eyes, friend, and quit that talking to yourself. I don't want to hear you. Leave me alone. We're dead. I don't have to be your brother now.

There were a lot of people in the cemetery today. Was it a weekend? Didn't they have anything else to do with their holidays but come out here and stand around a piece of stone with their hats off? She was glad that her parents weren't here. They had sense enough to realize that there is a little dignity in death but none at all in mourning.

To them all—to the middle-aged man laying flowers at the feet of a trim and perfect statue; to the pregnant woman who had brought a wooden folding chair with her; to the three old women who got out of a big car, wept, got back into the car, and drove away; to the yellow-haired young man who sat down on the grass in the middle of a family plot and spoke politely in Italian to all the gravestones—to them all, she said aloud, "Do you think your dead can hear you, do you think they know you weep? They're not here, not one of them, and if they were they wouldn't know you. They're a long way gone and they wouldn't come back if they could. Go home and talk to each other, if you know how. We don't want you here. You didn't want us when we were alive, and now we don't want you. Go away. Tell your bodies to take you home." And although they could not hear her, she felt for a moment that she was more than Laura, that the absent dead had truly chosen her to speak for them.