Anna looked up. “What about him?”

  Helen peered at her for a few seconds, then shrugged, Anna’s gaze traveled from Helen to the begonias in the window. They had new flesh-colored flowers. Helen sat on the edge of the table, bending it a little. She was looking into the living room, through the living room window at the Paullys’ house. She said, “For the first moment, Sam’s death, and Alfred’s too, was like the beginning of a trip. In a way almost interesting, a change. As soon as it felt like a trip, then each day that I got through felt like an achievement, as if I had a direction. It was odd how for a few days that sense buoyed me up and gave me lots of energy. In the midst of it all, I felt intensely brave, each time, intensely full of purpose. Each time, and I made the mistake twice, I let that sense of its being a trip sort of take me over for a while. I let myself think there was going to be an end, that the little counter would move across the scale of days and then stop, and it would be all right, the same, good again. And each time I realized one morning that surmounting one day didn’t lead me anywhere, at least not closer to Sam or Alfred again. It wasn’t like a trip at all. It was final, forever. I would die myself and not see either one ever.”

  “Your father is not dying.”

  “Why are we gathered here? I think it’s some kind of instinct.”

  “Everyone’s not here. Todd isn’t here.”

  “Do you think he would be after what she’s said?”

  “They were here together for Christmas. And the twins, too. We live here. Chrissy came home for her own reasons.”

  “I can’t help thinking—”

  “Don’t think it!”

  “Mother.” Helen slipped off the table and squatted with middle-aged difficulty next to Anna’s chair. Her face ducked down and then up, like a shovel, scooping Anna’s eyes into her own. She was not whispering, but her voice was low. Insensibly, Anna leaned toward it. “I think, Mother, that we aren’t here for Daddy, not even Claire. We’re really here for you. We’re gathered around you. Yes! Like we’ve always been. That’s why Chrissy is here but not Jimmy and Jeremy. I mean, you don’t really like Jimmy and Jeremy, and never have. I often think you don’t like men, actually, not even Daddy.” She looked away toward the kitchen, but Claire did not appear. “I’ve never known how you did it, Mother, how you made yourself seem so right all the time, and so good; how it was that in the same room with you, Daddy seemed somehow wrong, always, even when we loved him best, and wanted to defend him and be with him more than anyone else in the world.” She cleared her throat and jerked, almost losing her balance. “Here I am, the missionary to China, the foreign correspondent, the explorer-anthropologist, right here, with my mother—”

  “Surely you can’t blame that on me, I never stopped you—”

  “And Claire, too. If anyone could have made herself the center of a family by sheer force of will, you’d have thought Claire was the one. But no.”

  She stood up with a crackle of joints that made Anna wince. “You have to see, Mother. You have to see in a way that you’ve never seen before. You can’t keep Daddy simply because you want to. He can’t be in the orbit anymore. Really not. Really. You’ve never let any one of us not need you, but now Daddy is going to escape.”

  “Maybe my failure is only that you can’t take the blame for your own failures.”

  “No, Mother.”

  The others, having finished the dishes, seemed to sweep through, sweeping Helen away. There was talk of at last getting some work done, at last the sun breaking through. Nelson was let out, with admonitions about staying nearby. There was nothing for Anna to think. Inside her, top to toe, heart to fingers, a figure like the cartoon in the electric company ads sizzled and hissed.

  “Now Mother,” said Susanna, in her usual tone of voice—defeated? full of dislike?—“I’m just going over to the office for a few minutes. I want to pick up my tax forms, anyway, and see what came in the mail. I might have to show one house, but surely not more than one. Helen has to wait for the washing machine repair man, but he promised early afternoon, and she’ll be back by three. Christine will be here, okay? She’s got her own car and everything.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Now don’t worry about Daddy. I think he’s fine. Claire is always ready to panic.”

  “He said today was Seth’s hundredth birthday. I’m afraid he thinks he can let go now, or something.”

  “Don’t worry! Things don’t happen that way, and you know it.”

  “Besides, I just now realized it’s Seth’s ninety-ninth birthday. I’m sure it is. I’ll find that old album.” Still, however, she could not stand up. A narrowing glitter had fallen over things, and the knobby headache of the night before, the week before, the months before materialized at her temples and the bridge of her nose, spreading.

  “Christine will find it. You make Christine do things for you, Mother. She can sit with Daddy when he wakes up and she can answer the phone and everything.” Susanna was so close to her by this time that Anna could smell her cosmetic smells and the lemon juice she liked to rinse her hair with. It was all she could do not to lean away. Helen was wrong. Anna had not intended this nest of daughters. It was Ike who hated their leaving, who had knocked around the house so resentfully after Susanna’s elopement, slammed down the phone angrily when one of his male friends declined a tennis date, refused pettishly to go swimming without the girls, and tried impatiently to teach her golf. Not she, not she. She, like Christine, swam through solitude like a seal, didn’t she? Susanna’s inquiring posture demanded acquiescence with all these arrangements. Yes. Helen would be coming back. Susanna would be going somewhere. Who would be staying? Oh, yes. Chrissy. To answer the phone. Anna nodded. Before Susanna left, she wanted to ask if today had to be the day for fingering her whole life, for deciding good and evil. Susanna said, “You’ll be fine, Mother,” and put her hand on Anna’s shoulder prefatory to moving away.

  I have worked hard and been happy, thought Anna. With my hands I have made something every day. Wasn’t that good? Did she have to repent because happiness came easily to her, because in the midst of anything, however perilous, a color, a shape, a harmony, or a fragrance was enough, because activity itself was enough? Helen had her back to her, and she was looking once again in her purse. No doubt for the car keys. Helen would say, There was a bowl of happiness in this family, and you drank it all. Anna looked away before Helen could turn around.

  She got up for good-byes, even went hospitably to the door, but then flopped down again, without having spoken. She did not know.

  When Chrissy, after a huge preliminary sigh, opened her mouth, she did not mention Helen. She said, “You know what I really want to do, Grandmother?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want to spend the end of the world traveling around watching everything disintegrate.”

  “What?”

  “I wouldn’t even need that much money. I’d take Nelson, and we’d hitchhike around the country, maybe taking notes and pictures. We’d record the end of everything.”

  “I—”

  “Grandmother.” Christine leaned forward, intent. “Everything they say about Todd and my being pregnant is predicated on the notion that things will go on as they are. But they can’t, you know. They really can’t. Since we got married, I’ve all the time been catching myself thinking, Well, if it happens, we’ve got the garden, and all these canned goods, and we don’t live all that near Chicago, and the wind blows west to east. I think if I had a baby I’d be crazy, wanting to reinforce the concrete walls of the basement, or hoard water containers and cyanide pills. Whenever I think of having a baby, I think about pictures in old Life magazines about the war, these women walking out of Warsaw with babies in their arms, just completely powerless with love and fear. I don’t want to be like that.”

  “Honey—”

  “But, see, if I stopped now, threw myself into the life of a refugee, in a way, right now, I’d avoid that. I’d learn things, too. When I think about what I would learn, it takes my breath away.”

  The discussion was so outrageous that Anna was unable to make a reply when Christine looked up at her, anxious for one. She had hoped to gently probe, somehow, after clues to Helen’s real opinion of her, to elicit the truth from Christine without igniting love and concern that would make for tact. She had imagined sneaking away with some perfect knowledge of herself from Helen’s perspective, and possibly Claire’s and Susanna’s. Now, however, she had nothing to say. She could only pick up her knitting in amazement at the idea of Christine, shawled and fleeing, her banjo, her stereo, her blender, her wedding silver, everything wrapped in Indian bedspreads on a handcart in the shadow of the Prudential Building.

  “If I were a man, no one would object. If I did have this baby, I’d tell her not to mistake love for adventure, believe me.” She spoke grumpily.

  “Well, it seems to me that a person thinks about the end of the world—”

  “I do. All the time.”

  “Because all of this seems like the end of the world, but—”

  “It is, though! Don’t you read the newspaper? I mean it isn’t just Vietnam, though we’ve done everything we could to make the country a wasteland! South of the Sahara, in Africa, people are dying of famine by the thousands. And the jet stream is moving! Did you know that? This whole area right here is going to be a desert, because when the jet stream moves, it makes all the weather patterns change. And there’s pesticides everywhere! There was this guy in school with me who was really thin, like a hundred and twenty pounds. He started having these symptoms—weakness, trembling, feeling sick to his stomach. They thought it was too much fried food, and then maybe some other things. It was all one fall, about two years ago. Anyway, everything cleared up in January. Well, that spring I was reading Silent Spring for a course, and Rachel Carson was describing the symptoms of insecticide poisoning in birds, and they were just the same as Kent’s. So I asked the girl who was living with this guy what he’d been eating in the fall, and she said he’d eaten a lot of apples from a neighboring orchard, only from that orchard. Well, it was well known that that grower used tons of DDT and always had. Anyway, this guy, this guy we knew and saw all the time, he got poisoned just from eating apples! It’s all ending! People have been thinking that they could do anything and have anything. Anyway, it’s coming. All the psychics say so. Nineteen eighty-one or two. What do you tell a ten-year-old kid when the end is near? ‘That’s life?’ ” Christine threw herself back against the sofa and snatched up a magazine. Anna’s mouth fluttered open, ready with reassurances, but how could she reassure someone who had asked about the A-bomb at six, had begged for a fallout shelter at ten, had declared herself a Catholic during the Cuban missile crisis so she could be sure of going to heaven, and for all those years had hidden in the kitchen with her fingers in her ears while the news was on? Finally, Anna offered, “I thought you grew out of all that stuff.”

  “I put it out of my mind for a while, but everything got worse anyway.”

  “What does Todd think?”

  “Half the time he thinks I’m neurotic and half the time he thinks that our love shows we’re fated to survive.”

  Now this, Anna thought as she knitted stitches off the cabling hook, then put the hook between her lips, was interesting. Even in the most perilous cold war days, the habit of going on had been strong enough to bar any imaginings of “the end.” On the other hand, the possibility of failing to survive had stalked her life, and Ike’s even more. She said, “Did I ever tell you about that time on the ranch when I was really sure we’d had it?”

  Christine shook her head.

  “I was real young. We hadn’t been there long, because your mother wasn’t born yet. We’d spent a lot of money on some special feed, and then Abel had gotten in a poker game, and then, to top it off, I had actually lost a couple of dollars out of my pocket in town. After living with Mama and Papa, I wasn’t used to thinking that a couple of dollars could really make that much difference, but a day or so later, when we all got together, it turned out that none of us had any money, just enough for either horsefeed or a part for a piece of broken machinery—I can’t remember what it was, now—or some food. Well, Daddy and Abel were just as mad as Tucker at each other, and being hungry made them madder. So your grandfather got so mad that he ran out to the barn and jumped on the horse—there was only one then—and rode off into town. Abel wouldn’t talk to me, and I was half afraid that he might beat me up, because he had just an ungovernable temper. I went to our room and wedged a chest against the door. Abel kept coming to the door and shouting at me to make him some biscuits, since we did have a little flour and some bacon grease. The more he shouted, the scareder I got; then I heard a loud crashing noise, and I just assumed that he had destroyed something, anything, the whole kitchen wouldn’t have surprised me. So I got into bed and pulled the covers over my head and put my fingers in my ears. Ike had the horse and the five or six dollars we all had between us, and he didn’t come back by dark, or by morning the next day either. My stomach hurt from being hungry, and from having to go to the bathroom, but as hungry as I was, I figured Abel was hungrier, and therefore madder, and if he had wanted to beat me up the day before, he would kill me today. I began to think that your grandfather had just left us, and for some reason, I wasn’t surprised. And then, sometime in the afternoon, there came a scratching noise. At first I thought it was Abel trying to lure me out of my room, but then I realized it was coming from the window. Well, it was your grandfather, grinning and singing, in a new shirt! I opened the window and let him in, and let me tell you, he could barely make it. I was all set to be mad, but then he made me look out the window, and there were all these parcels arranged there on the ground, and I saw that he’d bought food and even salt meat. And when I opened my mouth to say something, he held out his hand and in it was a diamond ring! I was so surprised that I’m afraid I didn’t even say much, maybe oh, or something, not enough to please your grandfather, but that’s a separate story. Well, he’d gotten into a poker game and won four hundred dollars! And, of course, being your grandfather, he’d bought a diamond ring instead of calves or chickens or machinery. I went right out to the kitchen and made a huge dinner, with a pie each for the two of them. Must have been peach because it was early summer.”

  “What was the loud crash?”

  “Well, Abel had gotten so mad that he kicked the door to his room off its hinges.”

  “My Lord!”

  “Your uncle Abel was something, you know.”

  “Sounds like Grandfather was, too.”

  “They had a pair of tempers between them, I’ll say that.”

  “What happened to the ring?”

  “We pawned it sometime. Probably the year after we left the ranch.”

  “You pawned it? You really did, after that romantic story?”

  “Well, if it’s diamond rings or rent and food, there’s not much choice.”

  Christine shook her head, Anna noted, with disbelief. She could not imagine life without plenty but could imagine cataclysm, chaos, finality. Anna shook her own head.

  “Whatever happened to the ranch, anyway?”

  “We had to sell it.”

  “Were you sorry?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Whenever you talk about it, it sounds so beautiful.”

  Anna didn’t know what to say. Had it been “beautiful”? Or had she, like Ike, touched things up? For a moment, she tried to remember with absolute care and fidelity something about the ranch. In silence, not speaking, not telling a tale, she could not. She said, “Sometimes the mountains were nice.” When Christine twisted her mouth, a little disappointed, Anna said, “When I went up into the mountains as a child, it was very beautiful. We’d ride the train up the line to Kane, and then my father would get a horse and wagon and we’d bump up an old trail to a cabin my parents had. It wasn’t way up high, but there were peaks all around. That was pretty.” Christine still looked disappointed. Anna sighed. In a moment she said, “Your grandfather wasn’t a farmer, and your great-uncle Abel wasn’t much of one either. Everybody thought there was money to be made by the fistful when they went out there during the first war, but they soon found out that it takes more than a fondness for horseback riding to raise cattle.”

  “What happened?”

  “Everything.”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, let’s see. They got on all right the first year or so. They homesteaded some land, and then their mother gave them some money to buy it outright. She frankly didn’t want Abel back in Iowa. He’d been into some kind of trouble, though I never got to know exactly what. But anyway, it was worth it to her to make sure nothing discouraged them, like a big mortgage payment, so they got this ranch and some cattle, and they did pretty well by themselves until the summer Daddy and I got married. There was a terrible drought that summer, no grass anywhere, and no hay or feed either, at least not till the fall. Ike’s mother sent us a little, and my mother did, too, and then there was that poker game. We had rain the next year, and the next, so we hung on. Daddy liked to think of himself as a rancher, you know, and he sort of liked that life. He hated the work, but he liked being outdoors, and he liked the hunting and fishing and gambling and drinking. It was my home, so I liked it, too. We had friends all down the east side of the Big Horn mountains and family in the Big Horn Basin. But Daddy didn’t pay enough attention. He wanted to play baseball and go into town. He was never convinced that he couldn’t be a gentleman and a rancher at the same time. I don’t know, though. We had neighbors who killed themselves working, but beef prices just went down anyway, and it seemed like everybody sold out or got sold up. And then Ike and Abel couldn’t get along for a minute, and if an argument wouldn’t settle it, they’d have a fight. I couldn’t stand that. And your mother came along first thing and then Claire. The year we had Susanna, I think we all realized it wasn’t going to last, and even when cattle prices went up, it seemed like nothing was going to keep us there. Iowa, Iowa, Iowa was all I heard about. So we sold the cattle and the horses and the chickens, and some people who thought maybe prices were going to stay up bought the ranch, and we left. At least we owned what we had, so we didn’t sneak away because we were in debt like some folks had to. It was happening all around us, even with the dude ranches, so Daddy talked very sensibly about it and was hopeful about Iowa. I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was selling the ranch there or getting a job here, but after that he always kind of thought he was a failure, more so as time went on, in fact. Aside from the fact that what we’d sold for there couldn’t buy anything here, farming here had nothing to do with horses and the range and the wild West. Daddy couldn’t feature himself behind a plow.”