There was shock like that and yet a welcome energy everywhere, and people going around with money in their pockets. I felt cut off from men of my own age, but my being cut off in a way was nothing so new. And there were others in the same boat. Farmers’ sons were exempt from service to look after the crops and the animals. I knew some who took the exemption even though there was a hired man. I knew that if anybody asked me why I was not in service it would be a joke. And I was ready with the response that I had to look after the books. Krebs’s books and soon others. Had to look after the figures. It wasn’t quite accepted yet that women could do that. Even by the end of the war, when they’d been doing some of it for a while. For truly reliable service it was still believed you needed a man.

I’ve asked myself sometimes, Why should a harelip, decently if not quite cleverly tidied up, and a voice that sounded somewhat peculiar but was capable of being understood, have been considered enough to keep me home? I must have got my notice, I must have gone to the doctor to get an exemption. I simply don’t remember. Was it that I was so used to being exempted from one thing or another that I took it, like a lot of other things, completely for granted?

I may have told my mother to be quiet on certain matters, but what she said did not usually carry much weight with me. Invariably she looked on the bright side. Other things I knew but not from her. I knew that because of me she was afraid to have any more children and had lost a man who was once interested in her when she told him that. But it didn’t occur to me to feel sorry for either of us. I didn’t miss a father dead before I could have seen him, or any girlfriend I could have had if I’d looked different, or the brief swagger of walking off to war.

My mother and I had things we liked to eat for supper, and radio programs we liked to listen to, and always the BBC overseas news before we went to bed. My mother’s eyes would glisten when the king spoke, or Winston Churchill. I took her to see the movie Mrs. Miniver, and she was affected by that as well. Drama filled our lives, the fictional kind and the real kind. The evacuation from Dunkirk, the brave behavior of the royal family, the bombing of London night after night and Big Ben still ringing to announce its somber news. Ships lost at sea and then, most dreadfully, a civilian boat, a ferry, sunk between Canada and Newfoundland, that close to our own shores.

That night I could not sleep and walked the streets of the town. I had to think of the people gone to the bottom of the sea. Old women, nearly old women like my mother, hanging on to their knitting. Some kid bothered by a toothache. Other people who had spent their last half hour before drowning complaining of seasickness. I had a very strange feeling that was part horror and part—as near as I can describe it—a kind of chilly exhilaration. The blowing away of everything, the equality—I have to say it—the equality, all of a sudden, of people like me and worse than me and people like them.

Of course this feeling vanished when I got used to seeing things, later in the war. Naked healthy buttocks, thin old buttocks, all of them being herded into the gas chambers.

Or if it didn’t quite vanish, I did learn to bat it down.

I must have run into Oneida during those years, and kept track of her life. I would have had to. Her father died right before VE-day, mixing up the funeral with the celebrations in an awkward way. The same for my mother’s, which occurred the following summer, just when everybody heard about the atomic bomb. My mother did die more startlingly and publicly, at work, just after she said, “I’m going to have to sit down.”

Oneida’s father had hardly been seen or heard of during the last year of his life. The charade of Hawksburg was over, but Oneida seemed busier than ever. Or maybe you just got the feeling then that everybody you met was busy, what with keeping track of ration books and posting letters to the front and telling about letters they had got in return.

And in Oneida’s case there was the care of that big house, which she now had to run alone.

She stopped me on the street one day and said she would like to have my advice about selling it. The house. I said that I wasn’t really the person she should be talking to. She said maybe not but she knew me. Of course she didn’t know me any more than she knew anybody else in town, but she persisted, and came to my house to talk further. She admired the paint job I had done, along with rearranging the furniture, and she remarked that the change must have helped to keep me from missing my mother.

True, but most people would not have come right out and said that.

I wasn’t used to entertaining, so I didn’t offer any refreshments, just gave her some serious and cautionary advice about selling and kept reminding her that I was no expert.

Then she went ahead and ignored everything I had said. She sold it at the first offer and did that mainly because the buyer went on about how he loved the place and looked forward to raising his family there. He was the last person in town I would have trusted, children or no children, and the price was pitiful. I had to tell her so. I said the children would make a shambles of it, and she said that was what children were for. All banging around, the very opposite of her own childhood. As a matter of fact, they never got a chance to, because the buyer proceeded to pull it down and put up an apartment building, four stories high, with an elevator, and turned the grounds into a parking lot. The first genuine building of this sort the town had ever seen. She came to see me in a state of shock when all this began and wanted to know if she could do something—have it declared a heritage building, or sue the buyer for breaking his never-written word, or whatever. She was amazed that a person could do such a thing. A person who went regularly to church.

“I wouldn’t have done it,” she said, “and I’m only good enough to go at Christmas.”

Then she shook her head and burst out laughing.

“Such a fool,” she said. “I should have listened to you, shouldn’t I?”

She was living in half of a decent rented house at this time but complained that all she could see was the house across the street.

As if that wasn’t all most people get to see, I didn’t say.

Then when all the apartments were finished what did she do but move back into one of them, on the top floor. I know for a fact she did not get a reduced rent, or even ask for one. She had let go of her bad feelings for the owner and was full of praise for the view and the laundry room in the basement where she paid in coin every time she did her washing.

“I’m learning to be economical,” she said. “Instead of just throwing something in when I feel like it.”

“After all, it’s people like him who make the world go round,” she said of her shyster. She invited me to come and see her view, but I made excuses.

This was the beginning of a time, however, when she and I saw a good deal of each other. She had got into the habit of dropping by to talk about her housing woes and decisions, and she kept on doing so even when she was satisfied. I had bought a television set—something she had not done, because she said she was afraid of becoming an addict.

I didn’t worry about that, being out most of the day. And there were a lot of good programs in those years. Her tastes mainly coincided with mine. We were fans of public television and particularly of English comedies. Some of these we watched over and over. Situations appealed to us, rather than just the telling of jokes. I was embarrassed at the beginning by the British frankness, even smuttiness, but Oneida enjoyed that as much as anything else. We would groan when a series started all over again from the beginning, but we invariably got sucked in and watched it. We even watched the color fading. Nowadays I sometimes come across one of those old series all brightened up fresh as new, and I switch the channel, it makes me feel so sad.