At first Elwood found nothing much to notice. Laura was to be observed walking along the main street, making her way to church on Sunday mornings, where she taught Sunday school to the five-year-olds. On three other mornings of the week, she helped out at the United Church soup kitchen, which had been set up beside the train station. Its mission was to dish out bowls of cabbagy soup to the hungry, dirty men and boys who were riding the rails: a worthy effort, but one that was not viewed with approval by everyone in town. Some felt these men were seditious conspirators, or worse, Communists; others, that there should be no free meals, because they themselves had to work for every mouthful. Shouts of “Get a job!” were heard. (The insults were by no means one way, though the ones from the itinerant men were more muted. Of course they resented Laura and all the churchy do-gooders like her. Of course they had ways of letting their feelings be known. A joke, a sneer, a jostle, a sullen leer. There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.)

The local police stood by to make sure that these men did not get any smart ideas into their heads, such as remaining in Port Ticonderoga. They were to be shuffled along, moved elsewhere. But they weren’t allowed to hop the boxcars right in the train station, because the railway company wouldn’t put up with that. There were scuffles and fist fights, and—as Elwood Murray put it, in print—nightsticks were freely employed.

So these men would trudge along the railway tracks and try to hop farther down the line, but that was more difficult because by then the trains would have gathered speed. There were several accidents, and one death—a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen fell under the wheels and was virtually cut in two. (Laura locked herself in her room for three days after that, and would eat nothing: she’d served a bowl of soup to this boy.) Elwood Murray wrote an editorial in which he said that the mishap was regrettable but not the fault of the railway, and certainly not that of the town: if you took foolhardy risks, what could you expect?

Laura begged bones from Reenie, for the church soup pot. Reenie said she was not made of bones; bones did not grow on trees. She needed most of the bones for herself—for Avilion, for us. She said a penny saved was a penny earned, and didn’t Laura see that during these hard times Father needed all the pennies he could get? But she couldn’t ever resist Laura for long, and a bone or two or three would be forthcoming. Laura didn’t want to touch the bones, or even see them—she was squeamish that way—so Reenie would wrap them up for her. “There you are. Those bums will eat us out of house and home,” she would sigh. “I’ve put in an onion.” She didn’t think Laura should be working at the soup kitchen—it was too rough for a young girl like her.

“It’s wrong to call them bums,” said Laura. “Everyone turns them away. They only want work. All they want is a job.”

“I daresay,” said Reenie in a skeptical, maddening voice. To me, privately, she would say, “She’s the spitting image of her mother.”

I didn’t go to the soup kitchen with Laura. She didn’t ask me to, and in any case I wouldn’t have had the time: Father had now taken it into his head that I must learn the ins and outs of the button business, as was my duty. Faute de mieux, I was to be the son in Chase and Sons, and if I was ever going to run the show I needed to get my hands dirty.

I knew I had no business abilities, but I was too cowed to object. I accompanied Father to the factory every morning, to see (he said) how things worked in the real world. If I’d been a boy he would have started me working at the assembly line, on the military analogy that an officer should not expect his men to perform any job he could not perform himself. As it was, he set me to taking inventory and balancing shipping accounts—raw materials in, finished product out.

I was bad at it, more or less intentionally. I was bored, and also intimidated. When I arrived at the factory every morning in my convent-like skirts and blouses, walking at Father’s heels like a dog, I would have to pass the lines of workers. I felt scorned by the women and stared at by the men. I knew they were making jokes about me behind my back—jokes that had to do with my deportment (the women) and my body (the men), and that this was their way of getting even. In some ways I didn’t blame them—in their place I would have done the same—but I felt affronted by them nonetheless.

Father noticed none of this. Or he chose not to notice.

One afternoon Elwood Murray arrived at Reenie’s back door with the inflated chest and self-important manner of the bearer of unpleasant news. I was helping Reenie with the canning: it was late September, and we were doing up the last of the tomatoes from the kitchen garden. Reenie had always been frugal, but in these times waste was a sin. She must have realized how thin the thread was becoming—the thread of excess dollars that attached her to her job.

There was something we should know, said Elwood Murray, for our own good. Reenie took a look at him, him and his puffed-up stance, evaluating the gravity of his news, and judged it serious enough to invite him in. She even offered him a cup of tea. Then she asked him to wait until she’d lifted the last jars out of the boiling water with the tongs and had the tops screwed on. Then she sat down.

Here was the news. Miss Laura Chase had been seen around town—said Elwood—in the company of a young man, the very same young man she’d been photographed with at the button factory picnic. They’d first been spotted down by the soup kitchen; then, later, sitting on a park bench—on more than one park bench—and smoking cigarettes. Or the man had been smoking; as to Laura, he couldn’t swear to it, he said, pursing his mouth. They’d been seen beside the War Memorial by the Town Hall, and leaning on the railings of the Jubilee Bridge, looking down at the rapids—a traditional spot for courtship. They may even have been glimpsed out by the Camp Grounds, which was an almost certain sign of dubious behaviour, or the prelude to it—though he couldn’t vouch for this, as he hadn’t witnessed it himself.

Anyway, he thought we should know. The man was a grown man, and wasn’t Miss Laura only fourteen? Such a shame, him taking advantage of her like that. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head in sorrow, smug as a woodchuck, his eyes glittering with malicious pleasure.

Reenie was furious. She hated anyone getting the jump on her in the gossip department. “We certainly thank you for informing us,” she said with stiff politeness. “A stitch in time saves nine. “This was her way of defending Laura’s honour: nothing had happened, yet, that couldn’t be forestalled.

“What did I tell you,” said Reenie, after Elwood Murray had gone. “He’s got no shame.” She did not mean Elwood, of course, but Alex Thomas.

When confronted, Laura denied nothing, except the Camp Grounds sighting. The park benches and so forth—yes, she had sat on them, though not for very long. Nor could she understand why Reenie was making all this fuss. Alex Thomas wasn’t a two-bit sweetheart (the expression Reenie had used). Nor was he a lounge lizard (the other expression). She denied ever having smoked a cigarette in her life. As for “spooning”—also from Reenie—she thought that was disgusting. What had she done to inspire such low suspicions? She evidently didn’t know.

Being Laura, I thought, was like being tone deaf: the music played and you heard something, but it wasn’t what everyone else heard.

According to Laura, on all of these occasions—and there had been only three of them—she and Alex Thomas had been engaged in serious discussion. What about? About God. Alex Thomas had lost his faith, and Laura was trying to help him regain it. It was hard work because he was very cynical, or maybe skeptical was what she meant. He thought that the modern age would be an age of this world rather than the next—of man, for mankind—and he was all for it. He claimed not to have a soul, and said he didn’t give a hang what might happen to him after he was dead. Still, she meant to keep on with her efforts, however difficult the task might appear.