“Have you had queer sensations recently, like silk being drawn across your stomach?” she asked me. “Or heard loud whistles, on people talking? I hear them saying, ‘Don’t wake Claudia. It’s not time for her to awake.’

“I have had some sensations,” I said. For the past month I had had a terrible tight feeling around my head, as if my forehead were about to burst. And my nose had been so constricted that I had been almost unable to breathe. Fay had said it was the usual sinus inflammation that people felt so near the ocean, with the strong winds, plus the pollen from all the flowers and trees, but I had never been convinced.

“Are they getting stronger?” Mrs. Hambro asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Will you be over Friday afternoon?” she said. “To the group? When it meets?”

I nodded.

At that, she arose and put our her cigarette. “If Fay wants to come,” she said, “she’s welcome. Tell her she’s always welcome.” Without another word she left.

Completely overwhelmed, I remained seated where I was.

That evening, when Fay found out that Claudia Hambro had come by, she had a terrible fit.

“That woman’s a nut!” she cried. She was in the bathroom washing her hair at the bowl; I was holding the spray for her and she was rubbing the shampoo out. The girls had gone to their rooms to watch tv. “She’s really out of her mind. My god, she had shock treatment a couple of years ago and she tried to kill herself once. She believes Martians are in touch with us—she has that nutty group that meets over in Inverness Park—they hypnotize people. Her father’s one of the most arch-reactionaries in Marin County, one of the big dairy ranchers out on the Point that’s responsible for our having the worst high school in the fourteen western states.”

I said, “She asked me to come over on Friday and take pant in a meeting of their group.”

“Of course she did,” Fay said. “She tracks down everybody who moves up here. I’ll bet she told you it was ‘destiny that brought you up here.’ Right?”

I nodded.

“They think they’re pawns in the hands of superior beings,” she said, “When actually they’re pawns in the hands of their own subconsciouses, which have run amock. She ought to be in an institution.” Grabbing a towel she pushed rudely past me, and out of the bathroom, down the hall to the living room. Following after her I found her kneeling down in front of the fireplace, drying her hair. “I suppose they’re harmless,” she said. “Maybe it’s better for their systemized schizophrenia to take the form of delusions about superior beings than to go into overt paranoia of a persecution type and imagine people are trying to kill them.”

Hearing Fay say all this, I had to admit that there was a good deal of truth in it. A lot of what Mrs. Hambro had said hadn’t rung right to me; it did have the sound of mental derangement.

But on the other hand, every prophet and saint has been called “insane” by his times. Naturally a prophet would appear insane, because he would hear and see and understand things that no one else could. They would be stoned and derided during their lifetimes, exactly as Christ had been. I could see what Fay meant, but also I could see not a little logic in what Claudia Hambro said.

“Are you going?” Fay said.

“Maybe so,” I said, feeling embarrassed to admit it.

“I knew this would happen,” was all she would say. For the nest of the evening she refused to say another word to me; in fact it wasn’t until the next morning, when she wanted me to go down to the Mayfair and shop for her, that she said anything to me.

“Her whole family’s that way,” Fay said. At the closet she was putting on her suede leather jacket. “Her sister, her father, her aunt—it’s in their blood. Listen, insanity is an infection. Look how it’s infected this whole area, all around Tomales Bay, here. A whole group of people being influenced by that nut. When I first met her three years ago I thought, My god, what an attractive woman. She really is beautiful. She looks like some jungle princess on something. But she impressed me as cold. She has no emotions. She has no capacity to feel normal human emotions. Here she’s got six kids and yet she hates kids; she has no love for them or for Ed. And she’s always pregnant. She’s nuts. It’s the two-year-old mind that controls the world.”

I said nothing.

“She looks like some successful Marin County upper middle class suburban housewife that gives barbecue parties,” Fay said. “And instead she’s a grade A nut.”

Opening the front door she started out.

“I’m going down to San Francisco,” she said. “And visit Charley. You be sure and be here when the girls get home. You know how scared they are to get home and find nobody here.”

“Right,” I said. Since their father’s heart attack, both children had had a lot of anxiety during the night, bad dreams for instance, and spells of unmanageability. And Elsie had begun to wet her bed again. Both girls now asked for a bottle each night before going to bed. That probably had a good deal to do with the bed-wetting.

I knew that in actuality she was not going down to San Francisco to see Charley but was going to meet Nat Anteil, probably somewhere between Point Reyes and Mill Valley, possibly in Fairfax, and have lunch with him. They had been having trouble meeting each other, since his wife Gwen had become suspicious of the time they spent together and had insisted on accompanying him over in the evenings. Since his wife no longer permitted him to visit Fay by himself, he and Fay were up against it.

And in a small town where everybody knows everybody, it is very hard, if not impossible, to have a secret relationship. If you go into a bar with somebody else’s wife, you are recognized by everyone who is there, and the next day it’s written up in the Baywood Press. If you stop to buy gas, Earl Frankis, who owns the Standard Station, recognizes your car and you. If you go into the post office, you are recognized because the post master knows everyone in the area; it’s his job. The barber notices you as you walk by his window. The man in the feed store sits at his desk watching the street all day long. All the clerks at the Mayfair Market know everyone, since everyone charges there. So Fay and Nat had to meet outside the area if they were going to meet at all. And if their relationship became a matter of public knowledge, it was not my fault.

However, they had done fairly well in keeping it under cover. When I was downtown shopping, I didn’t hear anybody discussing it, either at the Mayfair or the post office or the drug stone. Several people asked me how Charley was. So they had been discreet. After all, even Nat’s wife was ignorant. All she knew for sure was that he and Fay had been together at Fay’s house several times, and no doubt Nat had told her that I was present, and possibly the two girls. Possibly he and Fay had even concocted a story to explain it—Fay had a set of the Britannica, for instance, and the big Webster’s dictionary, and Nat could always say that he was over using her various reference books. And she had already given the pretext that she needed help with her checkbook. And everybody in north west Marin County knew that Fay called up everyone and asked them for favors; she made use of everybody she met, and the sight of Nat Anteil driving over to her house or being driven over might stir no comment, as such, because he simply became another person ensnared, doing her work for her while she sat out on the patio and smoked and read the New Yorker.

The real fact was that for all her energetic bouncing around, her scaling cliffs and gardening and badminton playing, my sister has always been lazy. If she could she would sleep until noon. Hen idea of work is to spend two evenings a week—four hours—shaping clay pots, something that the Bluebirds did in the afternoon with about as much effort—and to them it was considered fun. The house had six or seven statues that Fay had made, and to me they looked like nothing on earth. Building a trf tuner, in my high school days, I used to spend whole days, ten hours without interruption. I never saw Fay spend more than an hour at any one thing; after that she became bored, stopped, did something else. For instance, she could not bear to iron clothes. It was too tedious for her. She wanted me to try my hand, but I simply couldn’t get the hang of it, and so it had to be taken down to San Rafael to a laundry there. Her idea of work, of creative work, was derived from the progressive nursery schools that she had gone to as a child in the ‘thirties. She had never had to work, as I had done and still do.