"Yes but he drifts further away," Mrs. Springer is whining. "He's well off. He has no reason to come back if we don't give him one."

Eccles sits down in the aluminum chair again. "No. He'll come back for the same reason he left. He's fastidious. He has to loop the loop. The world he's in now, the world of this girl in Brewer, won't continue to satisfy his fantasies. Just in seeing him from week to week, I've noticed a change."

"Well not to hear Peggy Fosnacht tell it. She says she hears he's leading the life of Riley. I don't know how many women he has."

"Just one, I'm sure. The strange thing about Angstrom, he's by nature a domestic creature. Oh dear."

There is a flurry in the remote group; the boys run one way and the dog the other. Young Fosnacht halts but Nelson keeps coming, his face stretched by fright.

Mrs. Springer hears his sobbing and says angrily, "Did they get Elsie to snap again? That dog must be sick in the head the way she keeps coming over here for more."

Eccles jumps up – his chair collapses behind him – and opens the screen door and runs down to meet Nelson in the sunshine. The boy shies from him. He grabs him. "Did the dog bite?"

The boy's sobbing is paralyzed by this new fright, the man in black grabbing him.

"Did Elsie bite you?"

The Fosnacht boy hangs back at a safe distance.

Nelson, unexpectedly solid and damp in Eccles' arms, releases great rippling gasps and begins to find his voice.

Eccles shakes him to choke this threat of wailing and, wild to make himself understood, with a quick lunge clicks his teeth at the child's cheek. "Like that? Did the dog do that?"

The boy's face goes rapt at the pantomime. "Like dis," he says, and his fine little lip lifts from his teeth and his nose wrinkles and he jerks his head an inch to one side.

"No bite?" Eccles insists, relaxing the grip of his arms.

The little lip lifts again with that miniature fierceness. Eccles feels mocked by a petite facial alertness that recalls, in tilt and cast, Harry's. Sobbing sweeps over Nelson again and he breaks away and runs up the porch steps to his grandmother. Eccles stands up; in just that little time of squatting the sun has started sweat on his black back.

As he climbs the steps he is troubled by something pathetic, something penetratingly touching, in the memory of those tiny square teeth bared in that play snarl. The harmlessness yet the reality of the instinct: the kitten's instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.

He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother's legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees, and their repulsive breadth and pallor, laid bare defenselessly, superimposed upon the tiny, gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood. Strong – as if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world – he steps forward and promises to the two bowed heads, "If he doesn't come back when she has the baby, then you should get the law after him. There are laws, of course; quite a few."

"Elsie snaps," Mrs. Springer says, "because you and Billy tease her."

"Naughty Elsie," Nelson says.

"Naughty Nelson," Mrs. Springer corrects. She lifts her face to Eccles and continues in the same correcting voice, "Yes well she's a week due now and I don't see him running in."

His moment of sympathy for her has passed; he leaves her on the porch. Love never ends, he tells himself, using the Revised Standard Version. The King James has it that it never fails. Mrs. Springer's voice carries after him into the house, "Now the next time I catch you teasing Elsie you're going to get a whipping from your grandmom."

"No, Mom—mom," the child begs coyly, fright gone.

Eccles thought he would find the kitchen and take a drink of water from the tap but the kitchen slips by him in the jumble of rooms. He makes a mouth that works up saliva and swallows it as he leaves the stucco house. He gets into his Buick and drives down Joseph Street and then a block along Jackson Road to the Angstroms' number, 303.

Mrs. Angstrom has four—cornered nostrils. Lozenge—shape, they are set in a nose that is not so much large as extra—defined; the little pieces of muscle and cartilage and bone are individually emphatic and divide the skin into many facets in the sharp light. Their interview takes place in her kitchen amid several burning light bulbs. Burning in the middle of day: their home is the dark side of a two—family brick house. She came to the door wearing suds on her red forearms and returns with him to a sink full of bloated shirts and underwear. She plunges at these things vigorously while they talk. She is a vigorous woman. Mrs. Springer's fat – soft, aching excess – had puffed out from little bones, the bones once of a slip of a woman like Janice; Mrs. Angstrom's is packed on a great harsh frame. Harry's size must come from her side. Eccles is continually conscious of the long faucets, heraldic of cool water, shielded by her formidable body; but the opportunity never arises for a request so small as a glass of water.

"I don't know why you come to me," she says. "Harold's one and twenty. I have no control over him."

"He hasn't been to see you?"

"No sir." She displays her profile above her left shoulder. "You've made him so ashamed I suppose he's embarrassed to."

"He should be ashamed, don't you think?"

"I wouldn't know why. I never wanted him to go with the girl in the first place. Just to look at her you know she's two—thirds crazy."

"Oh now, that's not true, is it?"

"Not true! Why the first thing that girl said to me was, Why don't I get a washing machine? Comes into my kitchen, takes one look around, and starts telling me how to manage my life."

"Surely you don't think she meant anything."

"No, she didn't mean anything. All she meant was, What was I doing living in such a run—down half—house when she came from a great big stucco barn on Joseph Street with the kitchen full of gadgets, and, Wasn't I lucky to be fobbing off my boy on such a well—equipped little trick? I never liked that girl's eyes. They never met your face full—on." She turns her face on Eccles and, warned, he returns her stare. Beneath her misted spectacles – an old—fashioned type, circles of steel—rimmed glass in which the bifocal crescents catch a pinker tint of light —her arrogantly tilted nose displays its meaty, intricate underside. Her broad mouth is stretched slightly by a vague expectation. Eccles realizes that this woman is a humorist. The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't – whichever seems likelier to win an effect. The strange thing is how much he likes her, though in a way she is plunging at him as roughly as she plunges the dirty clothes. But that's it, it's the same to her. Unlike Mrs. Springer, she doesn't really see him at all. Her confrontation is with everybody, and secure under the breadth of her satire he can say what he pleases.

He bluntly defends Janice. "The girl is shy."

"Shy! She wasn't too shy to get herself pregnant so poor Hassy has to marry her when he could scarcely tuck his shirt—tail in."

"He was one and twenty, as you say."

"Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old."

Epigrams, everything. My, she is funny. Eccles laughs out loud. She doesn't acknowledge hearing him, and turns to her wash with furious seriousness. "About as shy as a snake," she says, "that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody's sympathy. Well she doesn't get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father—in—law talk she's the worst martyr since Joan of Arc."