"… go?"

Saxony was in the crook of my arm again and peering at me.

"Excuse me?"

Her expression was tight and flushed, and I assumed that she was as nervous about this as I was.

"Don't you think we should go? I mean, I think it's time, isn't it?"

I looked at my watch without really seeing it, and nodded.

We crossed the street and went up the walk to the house. A screen door, a natural-wood mailbox with just the name in white block letters (what incredible mail must have been in there at one time!), and a black doorbell that was as big as a checker. I pressed it and a deep chiming went off in the back of the house. A dog barked and then abruptly stopped. I looked at the floor and saw a matching brown mat that said "GO AWAY!" I nudged Saxony and pointed to it.

"Do you think she means us?"

That's all I needed. I had thought the mat was a funny idea, and then she had to make it into something else to worry about. What if Anna really didn't want us –

"Hi. Come in. I'd better not shake hands with you. I'm a little greasy from the chicken."

"Hey, look, it's Nails!"

It was. A white bull terrier had shoved its head between Anna's knees and was checking us out with those hilariously tight, slanty eyes.

Anna closed her legs tighter and held its head between them like a punishment stock. The dog didn't move, but I could see its tail wagging behind Anna.

"No, this one is Petals; she's Nails's girlfriend." Anna let her go and Petals came right over to say hello. She was as friendly as the other one. I had never seen bull terriers before today, and then the two of them within a few hours. But it made sense, with Nails just down the street.

A wide hallway led straight to a flight of stairs. Halfway up them, above the landing, two big stained-glass windows beamed Technicolor light across some of the lower steps and the last part of the hall. The walls were white. On the left as you walked in was a big gold fish-eye mirror next to a bentwood hat rack with two slouchy men's hats on them. His hats? Had Marshall France actually worn them? To the right of the rack were eighteenth– and nineteenth-century ascension balloon and zeppelin prints in expensive modern silver frames. Next to them, and a big surprise to me because I'd pictured France as a modest man, were framed mock-ups of the Van Walt covers to all of his books. I didn't want to appear too snoopy, so I stopped peeking at the pictures. Maybe later, when we were all more comfortable with each other (if there was going to be a later after tonight). I began playing with Petals, who kept jumping up and down by herself in the middle of the hallway. Then she started jumping on me.

"These dogs are incredible. I neyer really knew of them before today, but now I think I want one!"

"You'll see a lot of them around here. We're a little bull-terrier enclave. They were the only dogs my father ever liked. If she gets to be too much for you, just push her away. They are the world's greatest dogs, but all of them have a tendency to get a little crazy sometimes. Come on, let's go into the living room."

I wondered what she was like in bed but suppressed the thought, since it seemed sacrilegious to do it with the daughter of France. The hell with it – she was sexy and had a great deep voice and she wore the kind of jeans-and-T-shirt clothes that showed she still had a very nice, full figure. Walking into the living room, I pictured her in a Paris atelier living with a crazy Russian painter whose eyes glowed like Rasputin's and who took her fifty times a day in between painting nude portraits of her and drinking absinthe.

In the incredible France living room my first amazed inventory took in: a hand-carved olive-wood Pinocchio with moving arms and legs, six-foot-tall department store mannequin from the 1920's that was painted silver and looked like Jean Harlow with her hair swept up on her head, Navaho rug. Hand puppets and marionettes. Masks! (Mostly Japanese, South American, and African on first glance.) Peacock feathers stuck in an earthenware pitcher. Japanese prints (Hokusai and Hiroshige). A shelf full of old alarm clocks with painted faces, metal banks, and tin toys. Old leather-bound books. Three square wood boxes from a Shanghai tea exporter with yellow, red, and black flowers and fans and women and sampans. A stereo somewhere was playing the score to Cabaret. A ceiling fan with wooden blades hung unmoving.

We stood in the doorway and gasped. He wrote the books, and this was his living room, and it all made perfect sense.

"People either love this room when they first come in or they are horrified." Anna pushed between us and went in. We stayed frozen in the doorway, looking. "My mother was very conservative. She liked antimacassars and doilies and tea cozies. All of her things are boxed up in the attic now, because as soon as she died, Father and I transformed this room. We did it over into what we'd envisioned for years. Even when I was very young, I liked the same things that he did."

"But it's great! When I think of all the books and the characters, and then all of this…" I spread both arms toward the room. "It's all him. It's completely Marshall France."

She liked that. She stood in the middle of the room, beaming, and told us to come in and sit down. I say "told" because whatever she said sounded either like an order or a definitive statement. She was not an insecure person.

Saxony, however, went right over to a hand puppet that was hanging from a hook on the wall.

"May I try it?"

I didn't think that that was the sort of thing to ask right after you'd come in, but Anna said that it was okay.

Sax reached for it, then stopped and stepped back. "It's a Klee!"

Anna nodded but didn't say anything. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

"But it's a Paul Klee!" Saxony looked from the puppet, to Anna, to me, totally flabbergasted. "How did you… ?".

"You're very good, Miss Gardner. Not many people know how rare that is."

"She's a puppeteer," I said, trying to get into the act.

"But it's a Klee!"

I wondered if she was trying to imitate a parrot. She took it off the wall and handled it like the Holy Grail. She started talking, but it was so quietly that it was either to herself or to the puppet.

"Sax, what are you saying?"

She looked up. "Paul Klee made fifty of these for his son, Felix. But twenty of the originals were destroyed when the town of Dessau was bombed during the war. The rest of them are supposed to be at a museum in Switzerland."

"Yes, they are in Bern. But Father and Klee had a great correspondence going between them for years. Klee wrote first to tell him how much he liked The Green Dog's Sorrow. When Father later told him about his collection, KIee sent him that one."

To me the puppet looked like something from a fourth-grade arts-and-crafts class.

Sax sank into a nearby leather chair and went on communing with the Klee. I looked at Anna and smiled, and Anna looked at me and smiled. For two seconds it was as if Saxony wasn't in the room with us. For two seconds I felt how easy and nice it would be to be Anna's lover. The feeling passed, but its echoes didn't.

"So who are you, Mr. Abbey? Besides Stephen Abbey's son."

"Who am I?"

"Yes, who are you? Where are you coming from now, what do you do… ?"

"Oh, I see. Well, I've been teaching at a prep school in Connecticut…"

"Teaching? You mean that you are not an actor?"

I took one of my deep breaths and crossed one leg over the other. A bit of hairy ankle showed between the cuff and the top of my gray sock, so I covered it with my hand. I tried to laugh off her question/statement. "Ha, ha, no, one actor in the family was enough."

"Yes, genug. I feel the same way. I could never be a writer."

She looked at me calmly. Again, that kind of unspoken, just-between-us intimacy was there. Or was I fantasizing? I pulled on my shoelace and undid the bow. I was tying it again when she spoke.