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“Lillian, you’re too polite,” Vladimir kept telling her.

She did not think so. Perhaps she was not one to return shoves in the bus line, but she did fire off censorious glares; and true, she never yelled at the paper boy who daily flung her Chronicle to a rain-soaked fate, but she did beckon him to her door and remind him of his responsibilities. If she was always the last to board the bus, if she continued to dry out the paper on the stove, that was the price she must pay for observing the minimal courtesy the world owed itself if it was not to go under. Civilized she was. Excessively polite, no.

In any case, even if she had wanted to, she could not change at this stage of life. Nor had Aunt Bedelia ever changed in any manner. Not that she really compared herself to her phenomenal aunt, who, when she had died four months ago at the age of ninety-one, was still a captivating woman; no faded great beauty (the family ran to horse faces), but elegant, serenely vivid. Any other old lady who dressed herself in long gowns circa 1910 would have appeared a mere oddity; but under Bedelia’s antiquated hairdo sat a brain; in her gnarled, almond-scented fingers lay direction. She spoke of Bach, of the Russian novelists, of her garden and the consolations of nature; never of her arthritis, the fallen ranks of her friends, or the metamorphosis of the neighborhood, which now featured motorcycles roaring alongside tin cans and blackened banana peels. At rare moments a sigh escaped her lips, but who knew if it was for her crippled fingers (she had been a consummate pianist) or a repercussion from the street? It was bad form, ungallant, to put too fine a point on life’s discomfitures.

Since Bedelia’s death the flat was lonely; lonely, yet no longer private since a supremely kinetic young woman, herself a music lover, had moved in upstairs. With no one to talk to, with thuds and acid rock resounding from above, Lillian drifted (too often, she knew) into the past, fingering its high points. The day, for instance, that Vladimir had entered their lives by way of the Steinway grand (great gleaming relic of better times), which he came to tune. He had burst in, dressed not in a customary suit but in garage mechanic’s coveralls and rubber thong sandals, a short, square man with the large disheveled head of a furious gnome, who embellished his labors with glorious run-throughs of Bach and Scarlatti, but whose speech, though a dark bog of Slavic intonations, was distinctly, undeniably obscene. Aunt Bodelia promptly invited him to dinner the following week. Lillian stood astonished, but reminded herself that her aunt was a sheltered soul unfamiliar with scabrous language, whereas she, Lillian, lived more in the great world, riding the bus every day to the Opera House, where she held the position of switchboard operator (Italian and German required). The following morning at work, in fact, she inquired about Vladimir.

Several people there knew of him. A White Russian, he had fled to Prague with his parents in 1917, then fled again twenty years later at the outbreak of the war, eventually settling in San Francisco, where he quickly earned the reputation of an excellent craftsman and a violent crackpot. He abused clients who had no knowledge of their pianos’ intestines, and had once been taken to court by an acquaintance whom he had knocked down during a conversation about Wagner. He wrote scorching letters of general advice to the newspapers; with arms like a windmill he confronted mothers who allowed their children to drop potato chips on the sidewalk; he kept a bucket of accumulated urine to throw on dog walkers who were unwary enough to linger with their squatting beasts beneath his window. He had been institutionalized several times.

That night Lillian informed her aunt that Vladimir was brilliant but unsound.

The old woman raised an eyebrow at this.

“For instance,” Lillian pursued, “he is actually known to have struck someone down.”

“Why?” Her aunt’s voice was clear and melodious, with a faint ring of iron

“It was during a conversation about Wagner. Apparently he disapproves of Wagner.”

Her aunt gave a nod of endorsement.

“The man has even had himself committed, Aunt. Several times, when he felt he was getting out of hand.”

The old woman pondered this. “It shows foresight,” she said at length, “and a sense of social responsibility.”

Lillian was silent for a moment. Then she pointed out: “He said unspeakable things here.”

“They are mutually exclusive terms.”

“Let us call them obscenities, then. You may not have caught them.”

The old woman rose from her chair and arranged the long skirt of her dove gray ensemble. “Lillian, one must know when to turn a deaf ear.”

“I am apparently not in the know,” Lillian said dryly.

“Perhaps it is an instinct.” And suddenly she gave her unique smile, which was quite yellow (for she retained her own ancient teeth) but completely beguiling, and added: “In any case, he is of my own generation, Lillian. That counts for a great deal.”

“He can’t be more than sixty, Aunt.”

“It is close enough. Anyway, he is quite wrinkled. Also, he is a man of integrity.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“It is my instinct.” And gently touching her niece’s cheek, she said good night and went to her room, which peacefully overlooked the back garden, away from the street noises.

Undressing in her own smaller room, Lillian reflected, not for the first time, that though it was Bedelia who had remained unwed—Lillian herself having been married and widowed during the war—it was she, Lillian, who felt more the old maid, who seemed more dated, in a stale, fusty way, with her tight 1950s hairdo, her plain wool suits and practical support stockings . . . but then, she led a practical life . . . it was she who was trampled in the bus queue and who sat down to a hectic switchboard, who swept the increasingly filthy sidewalk and dealt with the sullen butcher and careless paper boy—or tried to . . . it seemed she was a middlewoman, a hybrid, too worldly to partake of Aunt’s immense calm, too secluslve to sharpen herself on the changing ways . . . Aunt had sealed herself off in a lofty, gracious world; she lived for it, and would have died for it if it came to that . . . but what could she, Lillian, die for? . . . she fitted in nowhere, she thought, climbing into bed, and thirty years from now she would not have aged into the rare creature Aunt was—last survivor of a fair, legendary breed, her own crimped hairdo as original as the Edwardian pouf, her boxy suits as awesome as the floor-sweeping gowns—no, she would just be a peculiar old leftover in a room somewhere. For Aunt was grande dame, bluestocking, and virgin in one, and they didn’t make that kind anymore; they didn’t make those eyes anymore, large, hooded, a deep, glowing violet. It was a hue that had passed . . . And she closed her own eyes, of candid, serviceable gray, said the Lord’s Prayer, and prepared to act as buffer between her elite relative and the foulmouthed old refugee.

Aunt Bedelia prepared the dinner herself, taking great pains; then she creaked into her wet garden with an umbrella and picked her finest blooms for a centerpiece; and finally, over the knobbed, arthritic joint of her ring finger, she twisted a magnificent amethyst usually reserved for Christmas, Easter, and Bach’s birthday. These touches Lillian expected to be lost on their wild-eyed guest, but Vladimir kissed the festive hand with a cavalier click of his sandals, acknowledged the flowers with a noisy inhalation of his large hairy nostrils, and ate his food with admirable, if strained, refinement. During coffee he capsized his cup, but this was only because he and Bedelia were flying from Bavarian spas and Italian sea resorts to music theory, Turgenev, and God knew what else—Lillian could hardly follow—and then, urged by Aunt, he jumped from the table, rolled up the sleeves of his coveralls, and flung himself into Bach, while Aunt, her fingers stiffly moving up and down on her knee, threw back her head and entered some region of flawless joy. At eleven o’clock Vladimir wrestled into his red lumber jacket, expressed his delight with the evening, and slapped down the steps to his infirm 1938 Buick. Not one vulgar word had escaped his lips all evening.

Nor in the seven following years of his friendship with Bedelia was this precedent ever broken. Even the night when some drunk sent an empty pint of muscatel crashing through the window, Vladimir’s respect for his hostess was so great that all scurrility was plucked from his wrath. However, when he and Lillian happened to be alone together he slipped right back into the belching, offensive mannerisms for which he was known. She did not mention this to her aunt, who cherished the idea that he was very fond of Lillian.

“You know how he detests opera,” the old lady would assure her, “and yet he has never alluded to the fact that you work at the Opera House and hold the form in esteem.”

“A magnanimous gesture,” Lillian smiled.

“For Vladimir, yes.”

And after a moment’s thought, Lillian had to agree. Her aunt apparently understood Vladimir perfectly, and he her. She wondered if this insight was due to their shared social origins, their bond of elevated interests, or their more baroque twinhood of eccentricity. Whatever it was, the couple thrived, sometimes sitting up till midnight with their sherry and sheet music, sometimes, when the Buick was well, motoring (Bedelia’s term) into the countryside and then winding homeward along the darkening sea, in a union of perfect silence, as the old lady put it.

Bedelia died suddenly, with aplomb, under Toscanini’s direction. Beethoven’s Ninth was on the phonograph; the chorus had just scaled the great peak before its heart-bursting cascade into the finale; Aunt threw her head back to savor the moment, and was gone.

The next morning Lillian called Vladimir. He shrieked, he wept, he banged the receiver on the table; and for ten days, helpless and broken, he spent every evening at the home of his departed love while Lillian, herself desolated, tried to soothe him. She felt certain he would never regain the strength to insult his clients again, much less strike anyone to the ground, but gradually he mended, and the coarseness, the irascibility flooded back, much worse than in the past.

For Bedelia’s sake—of that Lillian was sure—he forced himself to take an interest in her welfare, which he would express in eruptions of advice whenever he telephoned. “You want to lead a decent life, Lillian, you give them hell! They sell you a bad cut of meat, throw it in the butcher’s face! You get short-changed, make a stink! You’re too soft! Give them the finger, Lillian!”

“Yes, of course,” she would murmur.

“For your aunt I was a gentleman, but now she’s gone, who appreciates? A gentleman is a fool, a gentleman’s balls are cut off! I know how to take care of myself, I am in an armored tank! And you should be, too. Or find a protector. Get married!”

“Pardon?” she asked.

“Marry!”

“I have no desire to marry, Vladimir.”

“Desire! Desire! It’s a world for your desires? Think of your scalp! You need a protector, now Bedelia’s gone!”

“Aunt was not my protector,” she said patiently.

“Of course she was! And mine too!”

Lillian shifted her weight from one foot to the other and hoped he would soon run down.

“You want to get off the phone, don’t you? Why don’t you say, ‘Vladimir, get the shit off the phone, I’m busy!’? Don’t be a doormat! Practice on me or you’ll come to grief! What about that sow upstairs, have you given her hell yet? No, no, of course not! Jesus bleeding Christ. I give up!” And he slammed the receiver down.

Lillian had in fact complained. Allowing her new neighbor time to settle in, she had at first endured—through apparently rugless floorboards—the girl’s music, her doorslams, her crashing footfall which was a strange combination of scurry and thud, her deep hollow brays of laughter and shrieks of “You’re kidding!” and “Fantastic!”—all this usually accompanied by a masculine voice and tread (varying from night to night, Lillian could not help but notice)—until finally, in the small hours, directly above Bedelia’s room where Lillian now slept, ears stuffed with cotton, the night was crowned by a wild creaking of bedsprings and the racketing of the headboard against the wall. At last, chancing to meet her tormentor on the front steps (she was not the Amazon her noise indicated, but a small thin creature nervously chewing gum with staccato snaps), Lillian decided to speak; but before she could, the girl cried. “Hi! I’m Jody—from upstairs?” with a quick, radiant smile that heartened the older woman in a way that the hair and hemline did not. Clad in a tiny childish dress that barely reached her hip sockets, she might have been a prematurely worn twenty or an adolescent thirty—dark circles hung beneath the eyes and a deep line was etched between them, but the mouth was babyish, sweet, and the cheeks glowing pink against the unfortunate mane of brassy hair, dark along its uneven part.

Having responded with her own name (the formal first and last), Lillian paused a courteous moment, then began: I’m glad to have this opportunity of meting you; I’ve lived in this flat for twenty-four years, you see . . .” But the eyes opposite, heavily outlined with blue pencil, were already wandering under this gratuitous information. Brevity was clearly the password. “The point is—” restoring attention, “I would appreciate it if you turned down your music after ten P.M. There is a ruling.”

“It bugs you?” the girl asked, beginning to dig turbulently through a fringed bag, her gum snaps accelerating with the search.

“Well, it’s an old building, and of course, if you don’t have carpets . . .” She waited to be corroborated in this assumption, but now the girl pulled out her house key with fingers whose nails, bitten to the quick, were painted jet black. Fascinated, Lillian tried not to stare.

“Not to worry,” the girl assured her with the brief, brilliant smile, plunging the key into the door and bounding inside, “I’ll cool it.”

“There’s something else, I’m afraid. When that door is slammed—”

But the finely arched brows rose with preoccupation; the phone was ringing down from the top of the stairs. “I dig, I dig. Look, hon, my phone’s ringing.” And closing the door softly, she thundered up the stairs.

After that the phonograph was lowered a little before midnight, but nothing else changed. Lillian finally called the landlord, a paunchy, sweating man whom she rarely saw, and though she subsequently observed him disappearing into his unruly tenant’s flat several evenings a week, the visits were apparently useless. And every time she met the girl she was greeted with an insufferable “Hi! Have a nice day!”

Unfortunately Lillian had shared some of her vexation with Vladimir, and whenever he dropped try—less to see her, she knew, than to replenish his memories of Bedelia—his wrath grew terrible under the commotion. On his last visit his behavior had frightened her. “Shut up?” he had screamed, shaking his fist at the ceiling. “Shut up, bitch! Whore!”

“Vladimir, please—this language, just because Bedelia’s not here.”

“Ah, Beddia, Bedelia,” he groaned.

“She wouldn’t have tolerated it.”

“She wouldn’t have tolerated that! Hear the laugh—hee-haw, hee-haw! Braying ass! Bedelia would have pulverized her with a glance! None of this farting around you go in for!” His large head had suffused with red; his hands were shaking at his side. “Your aunt was a genius at judging people—they should have lined up the whole fucking rotten city for her to judge!”

“It seems to me that you have always appointed yourself as judge,” Lillian said, forcing a smile.

“Yah, but Vladimir is demented, you don’t forget? He has it down in black and white! Ah, you think I’m unique, Lillian, but I am one of the many! I am in the swim!” He came over to her side and put his flushed head close, his small, intense eyes piercing her; “You read yesterday about the girl they found in an alley not far from here, cut to small bits? Slash! Rip! Finito! And you ask why? Because the world, it is demented! A murder of such blood not even in the headlines and you ask why? Because it is commonplace! Who walks safe on his own street? It is why you need a husband!”

Lillian dropped her eyes, wondering for an embarrassed moment if Vladimir of all people could possibly be hinting at a marital alliance. Suddenly silent, he pulled a wadded handkerchief from his pocket with trembling fingers and wiped his brow. He flicked her a suspicous glance. “Don’t look so coy, I’m not in the running. I loathe women—sticky! Full of rubbishy talk!” And once more he threw his head back and began bellowing obscenities at the celling.

“It’s too much. Vladimir—please! You’re not yourself!”

“I am myself!”

“Well then, I’m not. I’m tired. I have a splitting headache—”

“You want me to go! Be rude, good! I have better things to do, anyway!” And his face still aflame, he struggled into his lumber jacket and flung out the door.

That night her sleep was disturbed not only by the noise, but by her worry over the violence of Vladimir’s emotions. At work the next day she reluctantly inquired about her friend, whose antics were usually circulated around the staff but seldom reached her cubicle. For the first time in years, she learned the weird little Russian had gone right over the edge, flapping newspapers in strangers’ faces and ranting about the end of civilization; storming out on tuning jobs and leaving his tools behind, then furiously accusing his clients of stealing them. The opinion was that if he did not commit himself soon, someone else would do it for him.

On the clamorous bus home that night, shoved as usual into the rear, Lillian felt an overwhelming need for Bedelia, for the sound of that clear, well-modulated voice that had always set the world to rights. But she opened her door on silence. She removed her raincoat and sat down in the living room with the damp newspaper. People at work told her she should buy a television set, such a good companion when you lived alone, but she had too long scorned that philistine invention to change now. For that matter, she seldom turned on the radio, and even the newspaper—she ran her eyes over the soggy turmoil of the front page—even the newspaper distressed her. Vladimir was extreme, but he was right: everything was coming apart. Sitting there, she thought she could hear the world’s madness—its rudeness, its litter, its murders—beat against the house with the rain. And suddenly she closed her eyes under an intolerable longing for the past: for the peaceful years she had spent in these rooms with Bedelia; and before that, for the face of her young husband, thirty years gone now; and for even earlier days . . . odd, but it never seemed to rain in her youth, the green campus filled the air with dizzying sweetness, she remembered running across the lawns for no reason but that she was twenty and the sun would shine forever . . .

She gave way to two large tears. Shaken, yet somehow consoled, and at the same time ashamed of her self-indulgence, she went into the kitchen to make dinner. But as she cooked her chop she knew that even this small measure of comfort would be destroyed as soon as her neighbor came banging through the door. Already her neck was tightening against the sound.

But there was no noise at all that night, not until 1.00 A.M., when the steady ring of the telephone pulled her groggilly from bed.

“Listen, you’ll kill me—it’s Jody; I’m across the bay, and I just flashed on maybe I left the stove burners going.”

“Who?” Lillian said, rubbing her eyes. “Jody? How did you get my number?”

“The phone book, why? Listen, the whole dump could catch fire, be a doll and check it out? The back door’s unlocked.”

Lillian felt a strange little rush of gratitude—that her name, given to such seemingly indifferent ears on the steps that day, had been remembered. Then the feeling was replaced by anger; but before she could speak, the girl said, “Listen, hon, thanks a million,” and hung up.

Clutching her raincoat around her shoulders, beaming a flashlight before her, Lillian nervously climbed the dark back stairs to her neighbor’s door and let herself into the kitchen. Turning on the light, she stood aghast at what she saw: not flames licking the wall, for the burners were off, but grimed linoleum, spilled garbage, a sink of stagnant water. On the puddled table, decorated with a jar of blackened, long-dead daisies, sat a greasy portable television set and a pile of dirty laundry in a litter of cigarette butts, sodden pieces of paper, and the congealed remains of spareribs. Hesitating, ashamed of her snoopiness, she peered down at the pieces of paper: bills from department stores, including Saks and Magnin’s; scattered food stamps; handwritten notes on binder paper, one of which read “Jamie hony theres a piza in the frezzer I love U”—then several big hearts—”Jody.” A long brown bug—a cockroach?—was crawling across the note, and now she noticed another one climbing over a sparerib. As she stood cringing, she heard rain blowing through an open window somewhere, lashing a shade into frenzies. Going to the bedroom door, which stood ajar, she beamed her flashlight in and switched on the light. Under the window a large puddle was forming on the floor, which was rugless, as she had suspected, though half carpeted by strewn clothes. The room was furnished only with a bed whose convulsed gray sheets put her in mind of a pesthouse, and a deluxe television set in a rosewood cabinet; but the built-in bookcase was well stocked, and having shut the window, she ran her eyes over the spines, curious. Many were cheap paperback thrillers, but there was an abundance of great authors: Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac, Melville. It was odd, she puzzled, that the girl had this taste in literature, yet could not spell the simplest word and had never heard of a comma. As she turned away, her eardrums were shattered by her own scream. A man stood in the doorway.

A boy, actually, she realized through her fright; one of Jody’s more outstanding visitors, always dressed in one of those Mexican shawl affairs and a battered derby hat, from under which butter-yellow locks flowed in profusion, everything at the moment dripping with rain. More embarrassed now than frightened—she had never screamed in her life, or stood before a stranger in her nightgown, and neither had Bedelia—she began pulsating with dignity. “I didn’t hear anyone come up the stairs,” she indicted him.

“Little cat feet, man,” he said with a cavernous yawn. “Where’s Jody? Who’re you?”

She explained her presence, pulling the raincoat more firmly together across her bosom, but unable to do anything about the expanse of flowered flannel below.

“Jody, she’d forget her ass if it wasn’t screwed on,” the boy said with a second yawn. His eyes were watery and red, and his nose ran.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, going past him.

He followed her back into the kitchen, and suddenly, with a host-like warmth that greatly surprised her, he asked, “You want some coffee?”

She declined, saying that she must be going

At this he heaved a deep, disappointed sigh, which again surprised her, and sank like an invalid into a chair. He was a slight youth with neat little features crowded into the center of his face, giving him, despite his woebegone expression, a pert, fledgling look. In Lillian’s day he would have been called a “pretty boy.” He would not have been her type at all; she had always preferred the lean profile.

“My name’s Jamie,” he announced suddenly, with a childlike spontaneity beneath the film of languor; and he proffered his hand.

Gingerly she shook the cold small fingers.

“Hey really,” he entreated, “stay and rap awhile.”

“Rap?”

“Talk, man. Talk to me-” And he looked, all at once, so lonely, so forlorn, that even though she was very tired, she felt she must stay a moment longer. Pulling out a chair, she took a temporary, edge-of-the-seat position across the hideous table from him.

He seemed to be gathering his thoughts together. “So what’s your bag?” he asked.

She looked at him hopelessly. “My bag?”

“You a housewife? You work?”

“Oh—yes. I work” she said, offended by his bold curiosity, yet grateful against her will to have inspired it.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

He was speaking to her as a contemporary, and again, she was both pleased by this and offended by his lack of deference. “Lillian Cronin,” she said uncertainly.

“I’m Jamie.” he sighed

“So you mentioned.” And she thought—Jamie, Jody, the kinds of names you would give pet rabbits. Where were the solid, straightforward names of yesteryear—the Georges and Harolds, the Dorothys and Margarets? What did she have to say to a Jamie in a Mexican shawl and threadbare derby who was now scratching himself all over with little fidgety movements? But she said, breaking the long silence, which he seemed not to notice: “And what is your bag, if I may ask?”

He took several moments to answer. “I don’t know, man . . . I’m a student of human nature.”

“Oh? And where do you study?”

“Not me, man, that’s Jody’s scene . . . into yoga, alpha waves, the whole bit . . . even studies macramé and world lit. at jay cee . . .”

“Indeed? How interesting. I noticed her books.”

“She’s a towering intellect,” he yawned, his eyes glassy with fatigue. He was scratching himself more slowly now.

“And does she work, as well?” Lillian asked, once more ashamed of her nosiness.

“Work?” he smiled. “Maybe you could call it that . . .” But his attention was drifting away like smoke. Fumbling with a breadknife, he picked it up and languidly speared a cockroach with the point. Then, with the side of the knife, he slowly, methodically, squashed the other one.

Averting her eyes from the massacre, Lillian leaned forward. “I don’t mean to sound familiar, but you seem a quiet person. Do you think you might ask Jody to be a little less noisy up here? I’ve spoken to the landlord, but—” She saw the boy smile again, an odd, rueful smile that made her feel, for some reason, much younger than he “You see—” she continued, but he was fading from her presence, slowly mashing his bug to pulp and now dropping the knife to reach over and click on the food-spattered television set. Slouched, his eyes bored by what the screen offered, he nevertheless began following an old movie. The conversation appeared to be over.

Lillian rose. She was not accustomed, nor would Bedelia have been, to a chat ending without some mutual amenity. She felt awkward, dismissed. With a cool nod she left him and descended the splashing stairs to her own flat. Such a contrast the youth was of warmth and rudeness . . . and Jody, an illiterate studying Dostoevsky at college . . food stamps lying hugger-mugger with bills from Saks . . . it was impossible to bring it all into focus; she felt rudder-less, malfunctioning . . . how peculiar life had become . . . everything mixed up . . . a generation of fragments . . .

Climbing heavily back into bed, she wondered what Bedelia’s reaction would have been to Jody and Jamie. And she remembered how unkempt and disconcerting Vladimir had been, yet how her aunt had quickly penetrated to the valuable core while she, Lillian, fussed on about his bad language. No doubt Bedelia would have been scandalized by the filth upstairs, but she would not have been so narrow-souled as to find fault with spelling mistakes, first names, taste in clothing . . . Bedelia might not have pulverized Jody with a glance, as Vladimir suggested, but instead seen some delicate tragedy in the worn cherubic features, or been charmed by the girl’s invincible buoyancy . . . it was hard to tell with Bedelia which facet she might consider the significant one . . . she often surprised you . . . it had to do with lameness of spirit . . .

Whereas she, Lillian, had always to guard against stuffiness . . . Still, she tried to hold high the torch of goodwill . . . too pompous a simile, of course, but she knew clearly and deeply what she meant . . . so let Vladimir rave on at her for refusing to shrink into a knot of hostility; what was Vladimir, after all? Insane. Her eyes opened in the dark as she faced what she had tried to avoid all day: that Vladimir had been wrenched off the tracks by Bedelia’s death, and that this time he felt no need to commit himself. Without question it was Lillian’s duty to enlighten him. But she winced at the thought . . . such a terrible thing to have to tell someone . . . if only she could turn to Bedelia . . . how sorely she missed her . . . how sorely she missed George’s lean young face under his army cap . . youth . . . sunlight . . . outside the rain still fell . . . she had only herself, and the dark, unending rain . . .

“Stop this brooding,” the said aloud; if she had only herself, she had better be decent company. And closing her eyes, she tried to sleep. But not until a gray, watery dawn was breaking did she drop off.

The Opera House telephoned at three minutes past nine. Leaden, taut-nerved, sourly questioning the rewards of her long, exquisite punctuality, she pulled on her clothes and, with burning eyes and empty stomach, hurried out of the house. At work, though the board was busy, the hours moved with monumental torpor. She felt increasingly unlike herself, hotly brimming over with impatience for all this switchboard blather: calls from New York, Milan; Sutherland with her sore throat, Pavarotti with his tight schedule—did they really think if another Rigoletto were never given that anyone would notice? She felt an urge to slur this fact into the headphone, as befitted a taunt traipsing in at a quarter to ten, as befitted someone with minimally combed hair and crooked seams and, even worse, with the same underwear on that she had worn the day before. As if a slatternly, cynical Lillian whom she didn’t recognize had squeezed slyly into prominence, a Lillian who half considered walking out on the whole tiresome business and indulging in a lavish two-hour lunch downtown—let someone else serve, let someone else be polite.

Sandwiched into the bus aisle that night, she almost smacked an old gentleman who crunched her right instep under his groping heel; and as she creaked into the house with her wet newspaper and saw that a motorcyclist had been picked off on the freeway by a sniper, she had to fight down a lipcurl of satisfaction. Then, reflectively, still in her raincoat, she walked to the end of the hall where an oval mirror hung, and studied her face. It was haggard, flinty, stripped of faith, scraped down to the cold, atavistic bones of retaliation. She had almost walked off her job, almost struck an old man, almost smiled at murder. A feeling of panic shot through her; what were values if they could collapse at the touch of a sleepless night? And she sank the terrible face into her hands, but a ray of rational thought lifted it again. “Almost.” Never mind the querulous inner tremble; at each decisive moment her principles had stood fast. Wasn’t a person entitled to an occasional fit of petulance? There is such a thing as perspective, she told herself, and in the meantime a great lust for steam and soap had spread through her. She would scrub out the day in a hot bath and in perfect silence, for apparently Jody had not yet returned from across the bay. God willing, the creature would remain away a week.

Afterward, boiled pink, wrapped in her quilted robe, she felt restored to grace. A fine appetite raced through her, along with visions of a tuna casserole, which she hurried into the kitchen to prepare, hurrying out again at the summons of the telephone. It was Vladimir, very excited, wanting to drop by. Her first response was one of blushing discomfort: entertain Vladimir in her quilted bathrobe? Her second she articulated: she was bone-tired, she was going to bed right after dinner. But even as she spoke she heard the remorseless doorslam of Jody’s return, and a violent spasm twisted her features. “Please—next week,” she told Vladimir, and hung up, clutching her head as tears of rage and exhaustion burst from her eyes. Weeping, she made a tuna sandwich, chewed it without heart, and sank onto her unmade bed. The next morning, still exhausted, she made an emergency appointment with her doctor, and came home that night with a bottle of sleeping pills.

By the end of the week she was sick with artificial sleep, there was an ugly rubber taste in her mouth, her eye sockets felt caked with rust. And it was not only the noise and pills that plagued her: a second neighborhood woman had been slashed to death by the rainman (the newspapers, in their cozy fashion, had thus baptized the slayer). She had taken to beaming her flashlight under the bed before saying the Lord’s Prayer; her medicinal sleep crackled with surreal visions; at the sullen butcher’s her eyes were morbidly drawn to the meat cleaver; and at work not only had she upset coffee all over her lap, but she had disconnected Rudolf Bing himself in the middle of a sentence.

And never any respite from above. She had called the landlord again, without audible results, and informed the Board of Health about the cockroaches, its reply being that it had no jurisdiction over cockroaches. She had stuck several notes under Jody’s door pleading with her to quiet down, and had stopped her twice on the steps, receiving the first time some capricious remark, and the second a sigh of “Christ, Lilly. I’m trylng. What d’you want?” Lilly! The gall! But she was gratified to see that the gum-snapping face was almost as sallow as her own, the circles under the eyes darker than ever, new lines around the month. So youth could crumble too. Good! Perhaps the girl’s insanely late hours were boomeranging, and would soon smash her down in a heap of deathlike stillness (would that Lillian could implement this vision). Or perhaps it was her affair with Jamie that was running her ragged. Ah, the costly trauma of love! Jealousy, misunderstanding—so damaging to the poor nervous system! Or so she had heard . . . she and George had been blessed with rapport . . . but try not to dwell on the past . . . yes, possibly it was Jamie who was lining the girl’s face . . . Lillian had seen him a few times since their first meeting, once on the steps—he smiled, was pleasant, remembered her, but had not remembered to zip his fly, and she had hurried on, embarrassed—and twice in the back garden, where on the less drenching days she tended Bedelia’s flowers, but without her aunt’s emerald green thumb . . . a rare sunny afternoon, she had been breaking off geraraniums; Jody and Jamie lay on the grass in skimpy bathing suits, their thin bodies white, somehow poignant in their delicacy . . . she felt like a great stuffed mattress in her sleeveless dress, soiled hands masculine with age, a stevedore’s drop of sweat hanging from her nose . . . could they imagine her once young and tender on her own bed of love? Or now, with a man friend? As if everything closed down at fifty-seven, like a bankrupt hotel!—tearing off the head of a geranium—brash presumption of youth! But she saw that they weren’t even aware of her, no, they were kissing and rolling about . . . in Bedelia’s garden! “Here, what are you doing!” she cried, but in the space of a moment a hostile little flurry had taken place, and now they broke away and lay separately in charged silence, still taking no notice of her as she stood there, heart thumping, fist clenched. She might have been air. Suddenly, sick from the heat, she had plodded inside.

The next time she saw Jamie in the garden was this afternoon, when arriving home from work and changing into a fresh dress for Vladimir’s visit, she happened to glance out her bedroom window. Rain sifted down, but the boy was standing still, a melancholy sight, wrapped in a theatrical black cloak, the derby and Mexican shawl apparently having outlived their effectiveness as eye-catchers . . . youth’s eternal and imbecile need to shock . . . Jody with her ebony fingernails and silly prepubescent hemlines; and this little would-be Dracula with his golden sausage curls, tragically posed in the fragile mist, though she noticed his hands were untragically busy under the cloak, scratching as usual . . . or . . . the thought was so monstrous that she clutched the curtain . . . he could not be standing in the garden abusing himself; she must be deranged, suffering prurient delusions—she, Lillian Cronin, a decent, clean-minded woman . . . ah, God, what was happening, what was happening? It was her raw nerves, her drugged and hanging head, the perpetual din . . . even as she stood there her persecutor was trying on clothes, dropping shoes, pounding from closet to mirror (for Lillian could by now divine the activity behind each noise) while simultaneously braying into the telephone receiver stuck between chin and shoulder, and sketchily attending the deluxe television set, which blared an hysterical melodrama . . .

Outside, she saw the youth sink onto a tree stump, from which he cast the upstairs window a long, bleak look . . . they must have had a lovers’ quarrel, and the girl had shut him out; now he brooded in the rain, an exile; or rather a kicked puppy, shivering and staring up with ponderous woe . . . then, eyes dropping, he caught sight of Lillian, and a broad, sunny, candid smile flashed from the dismal countenance . . . odd, jarring, she thought, giving a polite nod and dropping the curtain, especially after his rude imperviousness that hot day on the grass . . . a generation of fragments, she had said so before, though God knew she never objected to a smile (with the exception of Jody’s grimace) . . . and walking down the hall away from the noise, she was stopped woodenly by the sound of the girl’s doorbell. It was one of the gentlemen callers, who tore up the stairs booming felicitations which were returned with the inevitable shrieks, this commingled din moving into the front room and turning Lillian around in her tracks. With the door closed, the kitchen was comparatively bearable, and it was time to eat anyway. She bought television dinners now, lacking the vigor to cook. She had lost seven pounds, but was not growing svelte, only drawn. Even to turn on the waiting oven was a chore. But slowly she got herself into motion, and at length, pouring out a glass of burgundy to brace herself for Vladimir’s visit, she sat down to the steaming, neatly sectioned pap. Afterward, dutifully washing her glass and fork at the sink, she glanced out the window into the rain, falling in sheets now; the garden was dark, and she could not be sure, but she thought she saw the youth still sitting on the stump. It was beyond her, why anyone would sit still in a downpour . . . but everything was beyond her, insurmountable . . . and soon Vladimir would arrive . . . the thought was more than she could bear, but she could not defer him again, it would he too rude . . .

*  *  *  *  *

He burst in like a cannonball, tearing off his wet lumber jacket, an acrid smell of sweat blooming from his armpits; his jaws were stubbled with white, great bushes sprouted from his nostrils.

“You look terrible!” he roared.

Even though she had at the last moment rubbed lipstick into her pallid cheeks. She gave a deflated nod and gestured toward the relatively quiet kitchen, but he wanted the Bedelia-redolent front room, where he rushed over to the Steinway and lovingly dashed off an arpeggio, only to stagger back with his finger knifed up at the ceiling. “Still the chaos!” he cried.

“Please—” she said raggedly. “No advice, I beg of you.”

“No advice? Into your grave they’ll drive you, Lillian!” And she watched his finger drop, compassionately it seemed, to point at her poor slumped bosom with its heart beating so wearily inside. It was a small hand, yet blunt, virile, its back covered with coarse dark hair . . . what if it reached farther, touched her? . . . But, spittle already flying, Vladimir was plunging into a maelstrom of words, obviously saved up for a week. “I wanted to come sooner, why didn’t you let me? Look at you, a wreck! Vladimir knew a second one would be cut—he smells blood on the wind! He wants to come and pound on your door, to be with you, but no, he respects your wish for privacy, so he sits every night out front in his auto, watching!” Here he broke off to wipe his lips, while Lillian, pressing hard the swollen, rusty lids of her eyes, accepted the immense duty of guiding him to confinement. “And every night,” he roared on, “while Vladimir sits, Bedelia plays Komm, Jesu, Komm, it floats into the street. It is beautiful, beautiful—”

“Ah, Vladimir,” broke pityingly from her lips.

Silence. With a clap of restored lucidity his fist struck his forehead. It remained tightly glued there for some time. When it fell away he seemed quite composed.

“I have always regretted,” he said crisply, “that you resemble the wrong side of your family. All you have of Bedelia is a most vague hint of her cheekbones.” Which he was scrutinizing with his small, glittering eyes. Again, nervously, she sensed that he would touch her; but instead, a look of revulsion passed over his features as he stared first at one cheek, then the other. “You’ve got fucking gunk on! Rouge!”

With effort, she produced a neutral tone. “I’m not used to being stared at, Vladimir.”

”Hah!, I should think not,” he snapped abstractedly, eyes still riveted.

Beast! Vile wretch! But at once she was shamed by her viciousness. From where inside her did it come? And she remembered that terrible day at work when a malign and foreign Lillian had pressed into ascendancy, almost as frightening a character change as the one she was seeing before her now, for Vladimir’s peering eyes seemed actually black with hatred. “Stinking whore-rouge,” he breathed; then with real pain, he cried, “Have you no thought for Bedelia? You have the blessing of her cheekbones! Respect them! Don’t drag them through the gutter! My God, Lillian! My God!”

She said nothing, it seemed the only thing to do.

But now he burst forth again, cheerfully, rubbing his hands together. “Listen to Vladimir. You want a husband, forget the war paint, use what you have. Some intelligence. A good bearing—straighten the shoulders—and cooking talent. Not like Bedelia’s, but not bad. Now, Vladimir has been looking around for you—”

“Vladimir,” she said through her teeth.

“—and he has found a strong, healthy widower of fifty-two years, a great enjoyer of the opera. He has been advised of your virtues—”

“Vladimir!”

“Of course, you understand Vladimir himself is out, Vladimir is a monolith—” A particularly loud thump shuddered the ceiling, and he jumped back, yelling. “Shove it, you swine! Lice!”

“Vladimir, I do not want a man!” Lillian snapped.

“Not so! I sense sex boiling around in you!”

Her lips parted; blood rushed into her checks to darken the artificial blush. For certain, with that short potent word, “sex,” his hands would leap on her.

“But you look a thousand years old,” he went on. “It hangs in folds, your face. You must get rid of this madhouse upstairs! What have you done so far—not even told the landlord!”

“I have! “she cried; and suddenly the thought of confiding in someone loosened a stinging flood of tears from her eyes, and she sank into a chair; “He has come to speak to her . . . time and time again . . . he seems always to be there . . . but nothing changes . . .”

“Ah, so,” said Vladimir, pulling out his gray handkerchief and handing it to her, “the sow screws him.”

She grimaced both at the words and the reprehensible cloth, with which she nevertheless dabbed her eyes. “I don’t believe that,” she said many—

“Why not? She’s a prostitute. Only to look at her.”

“You’ve seen her?” she asked, slowly raising her eyes. But of course, if he sat outside in his car every night . . .

“I have seen her,” he said, revulsion hardening his eyes. “I have seen much. Even a batman with the face of a sorrowful Kewpie doll. He pines this minute on the front steps.”

“That’s her boyfriend,” Lillian murmured, increasingly chilled by the thought of Vladimir sitting outside all night, spying.

“Boyfriend! A hundred boyfriends she has, each with a roll of bills in his pocket!”

Tensely she smoothed the hair at her temples. “Forgive me, Vladimir,” she said gently, “but you exaggerate. You exaggerate everything, I’m afraid. I must point this out to you, because I think it does you no good. I really—”

“Don’t change the subject! We’re talking about her, upstairs!”

She was silent for a moment. “The girl is—too free, I suppose, in our eyes. But I’m certain that she isn’t what you call her.”

“And how do you come to this idiot conclusion?” he asked scornfully.

She lifted her hands in explanation, but they hung helplessly suspended. “Well,” she said at last, “I know she reads Dostoevsky . . . she takes courses . . . and she cares for that boy in the cape, even if they do have their quarrels . . . and there’s a quality of anguish in her face . . .”

“Anguish! I call it the knocked-out look of a female cretin who uses her ass every night to pay the rent. And that pea-brain boyfriend outside, in his secondhand ghoul costume to show how interesting he is! Probably he pops pills and lives off his washerwoman mother if he hasn’t slit her throat in a fit of irritation! It’s the type, Lillian! Weak, no vision, no guts! The sewers are vomiting them up by the thousands to mix with us! They surround us! Slop! Shit! Chaos! Listen to that up there! Hee-haw! Call that anguish? Even pleasure? No, I tell you what it is! Empty, hollow noise—like a wheel spun into motion and never stopped again! It’s madness! The madness of our times!”

But as he whipped himself on, Lillian felt herself growing diametrically clear and calm, as if the outburst were guiding her blurred character back into focus. When he stopped, she said firmly, “Yes, I understand what you mean about the wheel spinning. There is something pointless about them, something pitiful. But they’re not from a sewer. They’re people. Vladimir, human beings like ourselves . . .”

“Ah, blanket democracy? What else would you practice but that piss-fart abomination?”

“I practice what Bodelia herself practiced,” she replied tartly.

“Ah,” he sighed. “The difference between instinct and application. Between a state of grace and a condition of effort. Dear friend Lillian, tolerance is dangerous without insight. And the last generation with insight has passed, with the things it understood. Like the last generation of cobblers and glass stainers. It is fatal to try to carry on a dead art—the world has no use for it! The world will trample you down! Don’t think of the past, think of your scalp!”

“No,” she stated, rising and swaying with the light-headedness that so frequently visited her now. “To live each moment as if you were in danger—it’s demeaning. I will not creep around snarling like some four-legged beast. I am a civilized human being. Your attitude shows a lack of proportion, Vladimir; I feel that you really—”

A flash of sinewy hands; her wrists were seized and crushed together with a stab of pain through whose shock the felt a marginal heat of embarrassment, a tingling dismay of abrupt intimacy. Then the very center of her skull was pierced by his shriek. “You are in danger! Can’t you see!” and he thrust his face at hers, disclosing the red veins of his eyes, bits of sleep matted in the lashes, and the immobile, overwhelmed look of someone who has seen the abyss and is seeing it again. Her heart gave the chop of an ax; with a wail she strained back.

His fixed look broke; his eyes grew flaring, kinetic. “One minute the blood is nice and cozy in its veins—the next, slice! And slice! And slice! Red fountains go up—a festival! Worthy of Handel! Oh, marvelous, marvelous! The rainman—” Here he broke off to renew his grip as she struggled frantically to pull away. “The rainman, he’s in ecstasies! Such founts and spouts, such excitement! Then at last it’s all played out, nothing but puddles, and off he trots, he’s big sucress! And it’s big city—many many fountains to be had, all red as—as—red as—”

Her laboring wrists were flung aside; his hands slammed against her face and pressed fiercely into the cheeks.

“Vladimir!” the screamed. “It’s Lillian—Lillian!”

The flared eyes contracted. He stepped back and stood immobile. Then a self-admonishing hand rose shakily to his face, which had gone the color of pewter. After a long moment he turned and walked out of the house.

She blundered to the door and locked it behind him, then ran heavily back into the front room, where she came to a blank stop, both hands pressed to her chest. Hearing the sound of an engine starting, she wheeled around to the window and pinched back the edge of the shade. Through the rain she saw the big square car jerk and shudder while its motor rose in a crescendo of whines and abruptly stopped. Vladimir climbed out and started back across the pavement. Her brain finally clicked: the telephone, the police.

With long strides she gained the hall where the telephone stood, and where she now heard the anticipated knock—but mild, rueful, a diminished sound that soon fell away. She moved on haltingly; she would call the police, yes—or a friend from work—or a doctor—someone, anyone, she must talk to someone, and suddenly she stumbled with a cry; it was Vladimir’s lumber jacket she had tripped over, still lying on the floor where he had dropped it, his wallet sticking out from the pocket. Outside, the Buick began coughing once more; then it fell silent. A few moments later the shallow, timid knock began again. Without his wallet he could not call a garage, a taxi. It was a fifteen-block walk to his house in the rain. If only she could feel Bedelia’s presence beside her, look to the expression in the intelligent eyes. Gradually, concentrating on those eyes, she felt an unclenching inside her. She gazed at the door. Behind it Vladimir was Vladimir still. He had spoken with horrifying morbidity and had even hurt her wrists and face, but he was not the rainman, Bedelia would have seen such seeds. He had been trying to warn her tonight of the world’s dangers, and in his passion had set off one of his numerous obsessions—with her fingertip she touched the rouged and aching oval of her cheek. Strange, tortured soul who had stationed himself out in the cold, night after night, to keep her from harm. Bending down, she gathered up the rough, homely jacket; but the knocking had stopped. She went back into the front room and again tweaked aside the shade. He was going away, a small, decelerated figure, already drenched. Now he turned the corner and was lost from sight. Depleted, she leaned against the wall.

It might have been a long while that she stood there, that the noise from above masked the sound, but by degrees she became aware of knocking. He must have turned around in the deluge and was now, with what small hope, tapping on the door again. She hesitated, once more summoning the fine violet eyes, the tall brow under its archaic coiffure, which dipped in an affirmative nod. The jacket under her arm, Lillian went into the hall, turned on the porch light, and unlocked the door.

It was not Vladimir who stood there but Jamie, as wet as if he had crawled from the ocean, his long curls limply clinging to the foolish cape, his neat little features stamped with despair, yet warmed, saved, by the light of greeting in his eyes. Weary, unequal to any visit, she shook her head.

“Jody?” she thought she heard him say, or more likely it was something else—the rain muffled his voice, though she caught an eerie, unnatural tone that she now sensed was reflected in the luminous stare. With a sudden feeling of panic she started to slam the door in his face. But she braked herself, knowing that she was overwrought; it was unseemly to use such brusquencss on this lost creature because of her tangled nerves.

So she paused for one haggard, courteous moment to say, “I’m sorry, Jamie, it’s late—some other time.” And in that moment the shrouded figure crouched, and instantaneously, spasmlike, rushed up against her. She felt a huge but painless blow, followed by a dullness, a stillness deep inside her, and staggering back as he kicked the door shut behind them, she clung to the jamb of the front room entrance and slowly sank to her knees.

She dimly comprehended the wet cloak brushing her side, but it was the room that held her attention, that filled her whole being, it had grown immense, lofty, and was suffused with violet, over-whelmingly beautiful. But even as she watched, it underwent a rapid wasting, paled to the faint, dead-leaf hue of an old tintype; and now it vanished behind a sheet of black as the knife was wrenched from her body.