The country between Wrightsville and the Mahoganies has flexible contours—a hilly land with life of its own, stone fences running and little crooked bridges named Sheep Run and Indian Wash and McComber’s Creek rattling over moving water and the heave of green, clover-flecked, overlapping meadowlands, like deep-sea swells, in which schools of cows shift placidly, feeding. Here are the great dairies of the state; Ellery saw hospital-like barns, the flash of stainless steel vats, slow herds grazing, all the way up to the foothills.

  And the road was a clean wake foaming toward the mountains.

  But they darkened this road with their cargo of secrets; it was a sinful cargo, piratical and contraband, of that Ellery had no doubt.

  The character of the country changed as the convertible climbed. Scrub pine appeared, outcroppings of granite. The cows became sheep. Then the sheep disappeared, and the fences, and there were lone stands of trees, and then clumps, and then patches of woods, and finally a great and continuing forest. The sky was nearer here, a cold clear blue, like a different sea, with clouds sailing it swiftly. And the air was sharp; it had teeth.

  They rolled through the woods past immense dark glens where the sun never came under great pine and spruce and hemlock, and everywhere were the granite bones of the mountain. A giant country; and it made Ellery think of Diedrich and he wondered if some relentless harmony of subject and mood had not made Sally choose this place for her confession.

  And there was Quetonokis Lake, a blue wound in the mountain’s flank, stanched by its green hair, and lying quietly.

  Sally ran the car up to a moss-sprayed boulder on the lake’s edge, turned off the ignition.

  There was laurel all about, sumac, and the spicy breath of pine. Birds flew off, settled on a log in the lake. They poised for flight.

  Ellery said: “Well?” and they rose.

  He offered a cigaret to Sally but she shook her head; her gloved hands were still on the wheel, gripping it. Ellery glanced at Howard; but Howard stared at the lake.

  “Well?” said Ellery again. He put the cigarets back into his pocket.

  “Ellery.” It came out crookedly, and Sally wet her lips to try again. “I want you to know this is all my doing. Howard was dead against it. We’ve been arguing in corners and in snatches for two days. Ever since Wednesday, Ellery.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Now that we’re here I don’t know how to begin.” She was not looking at Howard, but she stopped and waited.

  Howard said nothing.

  “Howard. May I tell Ellery about…you? First?”

  Ellery could feel the wood in Howard. His body was as rigid as the trees. And suddenly it came to Ellery that what he was about to hear was at least one root of Howard’s great trouble. Perhaps the biggest root, the root that plunged deepest into his neurosis.

  Sally began to cry.

  Howard slumped in the leather seat and his lips loosened under the pull of his misery. “Don’t do that, Sally. I’ll tell him myself. Just don’t do that!”

  “I’m sorry.” Sally fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief. She said, muffled: “It won’t happen again.”

  And Howard turned to Ellery and said, quickly, as if to get it over with: “I’m not Diedrich’s son.”

  “No one knows it outside our family,” Howard said. “Father told Sally when they got married. But Sally’s the only outsider.” His lip curled. “Except me, of course.”

  “Who are you?” asked Ellery, as if it were the most ordinary question in the world.

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  “Foundling?’

  “Corny, isn’t it? It’s supposed to have gone out with Horatio Alger. But it’s still happening. I’m it. And let me tell you something: When it happens to you, it’s the most wonderfully new thing in the world. It never happened before to anybody. And you pray to God it’ll never happen to anybody again.”

  This was said matter-of-factly, almost impatiently, as if it were the least important of the elements of the problem. By which Ellery knew that it was the most deeply imbedded.

  “I was an infant. Only a few days old. In the traditional way I was left on the Van Horn doorstep, in a cheap clothesbasket. There was a piece of paper pinned to my blanket with the date of my birth on it—just the birth date, no other message. The basket’s up in the attic somewhere; Father won’t part with it.” Howard laughed.

  Sally said: “It’s such a tiny basket.”

  Howard laughed.

  “And there was no clue?” Ellery asked.

  “No.”

  “How about the basket, the blanket, the piece of paper?”

  “The basket and the blanket were of very cheap quality—standard stuff, Father says; he found that they were sold everywhere in town. The paper was just a piece torn off a sack.”

  “Was your father married?”

  “He was a bachelor. He didn’t marry till he married Sally, a few years ago…It was just before the First War,” Howard said, looking at the birds, who had settled back on the log again. “How Father finagled it I don’t know, but he managed somehow to get a court order of adoption—I guess they weren’t as strict about adoptions in those days. He got a first-class nurse to take care of me; I suppose that helped. Anyway, he gave me the name of Howard Hendrik Van Horn—Howard after his father, the old fire-eater, and Hendrik after his grandfather. And then the War came along and he got Wolfert down from Boston and went off.

  “Wolfert wasn’t very nice to me,” said Howard with another laugh. “I seem to remember him walloping me all over the place, and the nurse crying and arguing with him. She stuck only till Father got back from the trenches. After that, there was another nurse. Old Nanny. Her name was Gert, but I always called her Nanny. Original, wasn’t I? She died six years ago…Of course, there were tutors afterward, when father got more prosperous. All I can remember are giants, lots of giants. Their big faces came and went.

  “I didn’t know I was somebody else till I was five. Dear Uncle Wolf told me.”

  Howard paused. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the back of his neck and then he put the handkerchief away and went on.

  “I asked Father that night what it meant, if he was going to send me away, and he picked me up and kissed me and I guess he explained it all to me and reassured me, but for years afterward I went around afraid somebody would come and take me away. Every time I saw a strange face coming I’d hide.

  “But I’m getting away from the point. There was a big row that night between Father and Uncle Wolfert. About Wolfert’s having told me I’d come in a basket out of nowhere and that Father wasn’t my father. I was supposed to be in bed asleep, but I remember hearing angry voices and creeping down the stairs and sneaking a look through a pair of…portieres, I guess they were. Father was madder than I’ve ever seen him since. He was yelling that he’d intended to tell me himself, when I was a few years older, that it was his job and he’d have known how to do it right, and what did Wolfert mean by scaring the hell out of me when his back was turned? Uncle Wolfert said something—something pretty nasty, I guess—because Father’s face got like a rock and he made a fist…you know how big his hand is, but it looked to me then like one of those old Civil War cannon balls piled up at the Soldiers’ Monument in Pine Grove…made a fist and hit Wolfert with it smack in the mouth.”

  Howard laughed once more.

  “I can still see Wolfert’s head snapping back on his skinny neck and a flock of teeth spraying out of his mouth, the way they used to do it in the slapstick comedies in the movies when I was a kid, only these were real teeth. His jaw was broken and he was in the hospital for six weeks; they thought for a while an important nerve or vertebra or something in his neck had been injured and that he’d be paralyzed for life or die. It wasn’t, and he didn’t, but father’s never hit anybody since.”

  And so Diedrich was carrying his own burden of guilt around, which his brother had doubtless been exploiting for twenty-five years. But this was relatively trivial; even the strong carry such guilt feelings with them; the important part of the story was Howard’s part, and what it explained about his neurosis. The powerful attachment between Howard and Diedrich had been born out of Howard’s fears concerning his origin, fears bred by Wolfert and fixed in Howard’s unconscious mind traumatically by the violence of the whole episode. Knowing he was not Diedrich’s child, and not knowing whose child he was, Howard clung to Diedrich and made of him the colossal father-image he was later to hammer out of stone, the symbol of his security and the bridge between him and the hostile world. So that when Sally came along, and the father married her…

  “The only reason any of this is important,” Howard was saying earnestly, “Is that, if you’re to understand what happened later, and the spot we’re in, you’ve got to know what Father means to me, Ellery.”

  “I think I know,” said Ellery, “what your father means to you.”

  “You can’t possibly. Everything I am, everything I have, I owe to him. Even my name! He took me in. He provided the finest of care, at times when it meant real sacrifices. And always with his brother needling him and telling him what a sucker he was. He gave me an education. He’s encouraged my yen to be a sculptor, from the time when I messed around with those kid modeling-clay sets. He sent me abroad. He took me back in. He’s made it possible for me to continue my work without economic pressure. I’m one of his three heirs. And he’s never once thrown anything up to me, about my failure to produce anything recognizably successful, about my laziness at times…anything. You yourself saw what he did last night—bought me a museum—so I’d have a practical immediate outlet for whatever talent I possess. If I were Judas I couldn’t hurt him or let him down. I mean, I wouldn’t want to. He’s my reason for being. I owe him everything.”

  “Don’t you mean, Howard,” said Ellery with a smile, “that he’s acted exactly like what he is—your father?”

  Howard said angrily: “I didn’t expect you to understand it,” and he jumped out of the car, walked over to the boulder, and sat down on the moss to kick at a stone, miss it, pick it up, flip it at the log.

  The birds rose again.

  “That’s Howard’s part of the story,” said Sally. “Now let me tell you mine.”

  Ellery moved over in the seat and Sally turned around and tucked her legs under her. This time she accepted a cigaret. She smoked for a moment, her left arm resting on the wheel. It was as if she were groping for the sesame word. Howard glanced over at her, and then he glanced away.

  “My name was Sara Mason,” she began hesitantly. “Sara without the h. Mama was very particular about that. She’d seen it spelled that way in the Record and she thought it had elegance…It’s Dieds who started calling me Sally,” she smiled faintly, “among other things.

  “My father worked in the jute mill. Jute and shoddy. I don’t know if you know what a jute mill can be like. Before Dieds bought it it was a hellhole. Dieds made it into something decent. It’s very successful now—the jute’s used for so many things, even goes into phonograph records, I think—or is it the shoddy? I never can remember. Anyway, Dieds took the whole place over and reorganized it. One of the first things he did was to fire my father.”

  Sally looked up. “Papa was just no good. The job he had in the mill was one that’s usually given to girls—unskilled, not very hard. But he couldn’t make good at that, either. He’d been everything—he’d had a pretty good education—and he’d been a failure at everything. He drank, and when he drank he’d beat up Mom. He never beat me—he didn’t get the chance. I learned very early how to stay out of his way.” She smiled the same faint smile. “I’m the prize example of Darwin’s theory. I had a raft of sisters and brothers, but I’m the only one who survived. The others died in infancy and early childhood. I imagine I’d have died, too, if Papa hadn’t died first. And Mom.”

  “Oh,” said Ellery.

  “They died a few months after Papa lost his job at the mill. He never did get another job. One morning he was found in Willow River. They said he’d blundered in the night before, drunk, and just drowned. Two days later, Mama was taken to Wrightsville Hospital to be delivered of her umpteenth baby, prematurely. The baby was born dead and Mom died, too. I was nine years old.”

  It was a typical Polly Street case history, Ellery reflected. But he was beginning to be puzzled. In none of this was the germ of the Sally beside him. Sociologically, there are few miracles. How had grubby little Sara Mason become Sally Van Horn?

  She smiled again. “It’s really no mystery, Ellery.”

  “You’re a very annoying female,” snapped Ellery. “Well, how?”

  “Dieds. I was a minor, penniless, the only relatives I had were one in New Jersey, a cousin of Mom’s, and the other in Cincinnati, a brother of Papa’s; and they didn’t want me. Well, they were both very poor, with large families; I can’t blame them. I was headed for the Slocum Orphanage as a ward of the County when Dieds heard about me. He was a trustee of the hospital and he was told about Mom’s dying and leaving a brat…

  “He’d never seen me. But when he found out who I was—the orphan of Matt Mason, whom he’d fired…I used to ask him why he bothered. Dieds would always laugh and say it was love at first sight. His first sight of me was the day he came to see me at Mrs. Plaskow’s house on Polly Street; she was the neighbor who took me in. I can still see Mrs. Plaskow, a big, stout, motherly woman with gold-rimmed eyeglasses. It was a Friday night and Mrs. Plaskow was lighting candles—they were Jews, and I remember she explained to me that the Jews lit candles on Friday nights because sundown Friday was the beginning of the Jewish sabbath and had been for thousands of years—and I remember being terribly impressed when there was a knock at the door and little Philly Plaskow opened it and there was this huge man looking around at the candles and at the kids and saying, ‘Which one is the little girl whose mother died?’ Love at first sight!” Sally smiled again, a little secretively. “I was a dirty, frightened brat with skinny arms and legs and a chest you could have played chopsticks on. I was so frightened I fought back. An alley cat.” This time she laughed. “I think that’s what did it. He tried to take me on his lap and I battled him off-scratched his face, kicked his shins—while Mrs. Plaskow started to cry and the Plaskow kids all danced around screaming at me…” Her expression changed. “I remember how strong he was, how big and warm and wonderful-smelling…smelling even more wonderful than the fresh-baked bread on the kitchen table. And I found myself shrieking and wetting his tie while he kept stroking my hair and talking quietly to me. Dieds is a fighter himself. He goes for fighters.”

  Howard got up and came over to the car and said hoarsely: “Let’s get on with this, shall we?”

  “Yes, Howard,” said Sally; and then she said: “Well, he made an arrangement with the County authorities. He set up a fund for me—I don’t have to go into the details. I was brought up in private schools, with kind and understanding and progressive people, the right private schools. On Dieds’s money. They were schools in other states. Eventually I went to Sarah Lawrence. Abroad. I’d become interested in sociology.” She said lightly: “I have a couple of degrees, and I did some rather interesting work in New York and Chicago. But I always wanted to come back to Wrightsville and work here—”

  “In Polly Street.”

  “In all the Polly Streets. And that’s what I did. I’m still doing it, in fact. We have staffs of experienced people now, day schools, clinics, a complete social service program. Chiefly on Dieds’s money. Naturally, I saw a great deal of him…”

  “He must have been very proud of you,” murmured Ellery.

  “I suppose it started out that way, but…then he fell in love with me.

  “I don’t think I can quite describe how I felt when he told me. Dieds had always corresponded with me. He’d made flying trips to see me when I was at school. I’d never thought of him as a father…more like a big strong protecting angel of a very masculine type. Would it sound awfully silly if I said, ‘like a god’?”

  “No,” said Ellery.

  “I’d kept every letter he ever wrote me. I had snapshots of him tucked away in hiding places. At Christmas I’d get enormous boxes of the most wonderful things. On my birthday there was always something exquisite—Dieds has fantastically good taste, almost a woman’s sense of the unusual. And at Easter, gobs and gobs of flowers. He was everything to me, everything that was good, kind, strong, and oh, a comfort, a place to put your head when you were lonely. Even when he wasn’t there.

  “And I’d got to know other things about him: that only a year or so after he’d established that big fund that was to care for me and educate me, for instance, he went broke. In the 1929 market collapse. It wasn’t an irrevocable trust; he could have taken the money and used it—heaven knows he needed it. But he wouldn’t touch it. Things like that.

  “When he asked me to marry him, my heart flopped right up into my mouth. I got actually dizzy. It was too much. Too terribly much. There was so much…much feeling in me that I felt I couldn’t stand it. Physically. All the years of adoring, of worshiping, and now this.”

  Sally stopped and then she said, very low: “I said yes and cried for two hours in his arms.”

  Suddenly she looked into Ellery’s eyes.

  “You’ve got to realize, really understand, that Diedrich created me. Whatever I am, he shaped with his hands. It wasn’t just money and opportunities. He took a creative interest in my progress. He directed my schooling. His letters were wise and adult and terribly right. He was my friend and my teacher and my confessor, chiefly by remote control, but the lessons sank in somehow that way, maybe more than they’d have done if I’d seen him frequently. He was so vital to me that in my own letters to him I told him things other girls hesitate to tell their own mothers. I never found Dieds wanting. He was always there with just the right word, the right touch, the right gesture.

  “If not for Dieds,” said Sally, “I’d be a Low Village slattern married to a struggling factory hand trying to bring up a brood of undernourished kids—uneducated, ignorant, dried up, full of pain, and without hope.”