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glass display mausoleum constructed from twin percolator tops. Shows me this fetus floating in formaldehyde and just as I am trying to tell him, Hey, I know someone who’ll write this up for national publication in This Week , he looks at me and warns me that we shouldn’t push the birth.
    So I don’t know what’s possible. I’ve been trying to improve my economic situation, pounding out screenplays at the cost of one million brain cells per second when the only way to get anywhere in this town is to blow Arthur Godfrey’s cousin. But you know how it is, sweetheart—the winds of fortune don’t seem to be blowing in this poor hillbilly boy’s direction. I’d sure like to get to NY to see you and Rosalie. Maybe I can work out a deal with TWA—they’ll let me ride the baggage compartment if I clean out their reusable airsickness bags. I’m hoping to figure out some way to be there by Christmas. Meanwhile say Hi! to Rosie and give her a giant hug and kiss from her Daddy.
    So my dear, the lights are going off one by one in the chandeliers of Hollywood as the dawn comes. I must go now, for if the sun hits me I will shatter like fractured glass.
    Love and kisses,
    Big Youth
    Big Youth indeed. It occurs to Vera that Lowell’s letter is almost as crazy as the KGB receptor’s, as single-minded as the cryptobiologists’, as self-serving and loaded with meaningless rhetoric as Eighteenth District Representative Terry Blankett’s. By now, though, she’s come to accept it for what it is—Lowell’s idea of a love letter—and it’s the only one she reads twice. Then she refolds it and goes for the coffee that by this time she really needs.
    In the coffee room she finds Mavis Biretta watching the coffeepot fill drip by drip. “Morning,” says Vera.
    “Fine,” says Mavis. “I’ll be just fine when I get a cup of this.” They stand there staring at the coffeepot like strangers on an elevator watching the numbers light up. Finally Mavis pours two cups and brightens visibly as the coffee works on her like some subtler, less aggressive version of Popeye’s spinach.
    Nearing sixty, Mavis looks like one of those European character actresses who play aging ballerinas: taut, as if not just hair but also skin and sinew were pulled back in that perfect graying doughnut at the base of her skull. Once Mavis was an actress. At the height of her career, she was Judy Holliday’s understudy in Bells Are Ringing . Mavis is nothing like Judy Holliday. Still, Vera can’t look at her without thinking that Judy Holliday would be old now, too, and of how Judy Holliday and Gracie Allen are Lowell’s all-time favorite actresses.
    Had anyone but Carmen told Vera that Mavis went from the Broadway stage to a job as a diener in the Medical Examiner’s Office, Vera wouldn’t have believed it. Though Vera can’t help watching for signs of those years spent chainsawing ribcages, sewing cadavers, doing the junky physical work of the autopsy room, the only clue is Mavis’s intimate knowledge of every murder committed in New York during that time, of choice grisly stories— CRAZED KENNEL OWNER FEEDS STRAYING SPOUSE TO PINSCHER PUPS —which she recycles endlessly for fresh This Week copy. Yet Mavis is anything but a ghoul. When Vera started at This Week , she managed the sitter’s sick days by bringing Rosie in to work and parking her with Mavis. And Mavis, who has no children and whose husband had recently died, seemed to enjoy moving everything sharp or halfway important out of a five-year-old’s reach.
    Now Mavis says, “How’s Rosie?”
    “Fine,” Vera says. “No, that’s not true. Terrible.” But that’s wrong, too. The truth, if she could tell it, would make her life with Rosie sound like a chilly two-career marriage. Most nights when Vera comes home, Rosie’s in her room with the door shut, the radio going, busy with homework, the latest Judy Blume, and Byzantine game plans for Dungeons and Dragons. At dinner, Rosie will