Then he remembers Janice with her legs paralyzed talking about toes and love and orangeade and this perhaps seals shut something in his face, for Lucy Eccles turns her head impatiently and says, "Well you better get going down that nice straight road. It's twenty of one."

He begins to put on his shoes and socks. "How long does it take to walk to the bus stop?"

"Not long. I'd drive you to the hospital if it weren't for the children." She listens to the stairs. "Speak of the devil: here comes one."

The older girl sneaks into the kitchen, dressed just in underpants.

"Joyce." Her mother halts halfway to the sink with the empty cups. "You get right back up to bed."

"Hello, Joyce," Rabbit says. "Did you come down to see the naughty man?"

Joyce stares and hugs the wall with her shoulder blades. Her long golden stomach protrudes thoughtfully.

"Joyce," Lucy says. "Didn't you hear me?"

"Why doesn't he have his shirt on?" the child asks distinctly.

"I don't know," her mother says. "I suppose he thinks he has a nice chest."

"I have a T—shirt on," he protests. It's as if neither of them see it.

"Is that his boo—zim?" Joyce asks.

"No, darling: only ladies have bosoms. We've been through that."

"Hell, if it makes everybody nervous," Rabbit says, and puts on his shirt. It's rumpled and the inside of the collar is gray; he put it on clean to go to the Club Castanet. He has no coat, he left Ruth too hastily. "O.K.," he says, tucking in the tail. "Thank you very much."

"You're very welcome," Lucy says. "Be good now." The two females walk with him down the hall. Lucy's white legs mix in pallor with the child's naked chest. Little Joyce keeps staring up at him. He wonders what she's puzzling about. Children and dogs sense the invisible. He tries to calculate how much sarcasm was in that "Be good now" and what it meant, if anything. He wishes she could drive him; he wants, he really wants, to get into a car with her. His reluctance to leave pulls the air between them taut.

They stand at the door, he and Eccles' baby—skinned wife and between them Joyce's face looking up with her father's wide lips and arched eyebrows and under them all Lucy's painted toenails, tiny—scarlet shells in a row on the carpet. He strums the air with a vague disclaimer and puts his hand on the hard doorknob. The thought that only ladies have bosoms haunts him foolishly. He looks up from the toenails to Joyce's watching face and from there to her mother's bosom, two pointed bumps under a buttoned blouse that shows through its summer weave the white shadow of the bra. When his eyes reach Lucy's an amazing thing enters the silence. The woman winks. Quick as light: maybe he imagined it. He turns the knob and retreats down the sunny walk with a murmur in his chest as if a string in there had snapped.

At the hospital they say Janice has the baby with her for a moment and would he please wait? He is sitting in the chair with chrome arms leafing through a Woman's Day backwards when a tall woman with backswept gray hair and somehow silver, finely wrinkled skin comes in and looks so familiar he stares. She sees this and has to speak; he feels she would have preferred to ignore him. Who is she? Her familiarity has touched him across a great distance. She looks into his face reluctantly and tells him, "You're an old student of Marty's. I'm Harriet Tothero. We had you to dinner once. I can almost think of your name."

Yes, of course, but it wasn't from that dinner he remembers her, it was from noticing her on the streets. The students at Mt. Judge High knew, most of them, that Tothero played around, and his wife appeared to their innocent eyes wreathed in dark flame, a walking martyr, a breathing shadow of sin. It was less pity than morbid fascination that singled her out; Tothero was himself such a windbag, such a speechifier, that the stain of his own actions slid from him, oil off a duck. It was the tall, silver, serious figure of his wife that accumulated the charge of his wrongdoing, and released it to their young minds with an electrical shock that snapped their eyes away from the sight of her, in fear as much as embarrassment. Harry stands up, surprised to feel that the world she walks in is his world now. "I'm Harry Angstrom," he says.

"Yes, that's your name. He was so proud of you. He often talked to me about you. Even recently."

Recently. What did he tell her? Does she know about him? Does she blame him? Her long schoolmarmish face, as always, keeps its secrets in. "I've heard that he was sick."

"Yes, he is, Harry. Quite sick. He's had two strokes, one since he came into the hospital."

"He's here?"

"Yes. Would you like to visit him? I know it would make him very happy. For just a moment. He's had very few visitors; I suppose that's the tragedy of teaching school. You remember so many and so few remember you."

"I'd like to see him, sure."

"Come with me, then." As they walk down the halls she says, "I'm afraid you'll find him much changed." He doesn't take this in fully; he is concentrating on her skin, trying to see if it does look like a lot of little lizard skins sewed together. Just her hands and neck show.

Tothero is in a room alone. Like waiting presences white curtains hang expectantly around the head of his bed. Green plants on the windowsills exhale oxygen. Canted panes of glass lift the smells of summer into the room. Footsteps crunch on the gravel below.

"Dear, I've brought you someone. He was waiting outside in the most miraculous way."

"Hello, Mr. Tothero. My wife's had her baby." He speaks these words and goes toward the bed with blank momentum; the sight of the old man lying there shrunken, his tongue sliding in his lopsided mouth, has stunned him. Tothero's face, spotted with white stubble, is yellow in the pillows, and his thin wrists stick out from candy—striped pajama sleeves beside the shallow lump of his body. Rabbit offers his hand.

"He can't lift his arms, Harry," Mrs. Tothero says. "He is helpless. But talk to him. He can see and hear." Her sweet patient enunciation has a singing quality that is sinister, as if she is humming to herself.

Since he has extended his hand, Harry presses it down on the back of one of Tothero's. For all its dryness, the hand, under a faint scratchy fleece, is warm, and to Harry's horror moves, revolves stubbornly, so the palm is presented upward to Harry's touch. Harry takes his fingers back and sinks into the bedside chair. His old coach's eyeballs shift with scattered quickness as he turns his head an inch toward the visitor. The flesh under them has been so scooped that they are weakly protrusive. Talk, he must talk. "It's a little girl. I want to thank you" – he speaks loudly – "for the help you gave in getting me and Janice back together again. You were very kind."

Tothero retracts his tongue and shifts his face to look at his wife. A muscle under his jaw jumps, his lips pucker, and his chin crinkles repeatedly, like a pulse, as he tries to say something. A few dragged vowels come out; Harry turns to see if Mrs. Tothero can decipher them, but to his surprise she is looking elsewhere. She is looking out the window, toward an empty green courtyard. Her face is like a photograph.

Is it that she doesn't care? If so, should he tell Tothero about Margaret? But there was nothing to say about Margaret that might make Tothero happy. "I'm straightened out now, Mr. Tothero, and I hope you're up and out of this bed soon."

Tothero's head turns back with an annoyed quickness, the mouth closed, the eyes in a half—squint, and for this moment he looks so coherent Harry thinks he will speak, that the pause is just his old disciplinarian's trick of holding silent until your attention is complete. But the pause stretches, inflates, as if, used for sixty years to space out words, it at last has taken on a cancerous life of its own and swallowed the words. Yet in the first moments of the silence a certain force flows forth, a human soul emits its invisible and scentless rays with urgency. Then the point in the eyes fades, the drooping lids close, the lips part, the tip of the tongue appears.