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finale, by all of them at once, grouped around different parts of her, though it was (in the finale) she who was the aggressor, she who was voraciously ravishing them, frantically forcing the bunched and spurting organs into every orifice—vagina, anus, mouth, ears, nose, etc. He had even dreamed once that she asked him if it were true that there was a small uncovered opening in the pupil of the eye, because if it were, she had said, she would have room there (during the finale) for a miniscule organ, like that of a praying mantis to enter her as well! So that now, actually confronted by the scene, one would think he was not unprepared, yet as dreams of death do not prepare a young man for the firing squad, but perhaps only build to the terrible intensity of it, so Mr. Christian appeared now to be actually strangling with shock.
    “. . . urg . . . ack . . . chchch,” were the sounds he produced for the first moment as he clawed at the air in front of him; then he came toward them like a man on stilts, picking up a chair and raising it stiffly over his head.
    “Daddy!” cried Candy in real alarm, but it was too late, for he swung the chair down at Emmanuel, who was leaping from the bed; it missed him and shattered against the bedpost. But he still retained a leg of the chair, and this, as a club, was a more formidable weapon than the chair itself, as he came relentlessly forward after the gardener, managing at last to speak through his grating teeth:
    “You . . . You . . . You . . . COMMUNIST!”
    He swung repeatedly at the gardener’s head, making little cries of repulsion, as might a woman in having to kill a snake with a stick, and hitting instead in his blind fury the bedroom wall, again and again; but there was no escape for the gardener. Yet he was not prepared to die, and whimpering like a trapped animal he dived for his pile of clothes, near the bed . . . for it was among them that he had left his trowel, which he managed to recover in a scuttling frenzy and to raise on high—as Mr. Christian lunged in for the kill—and then, before making his getaway, to plunge it with a cry more of fear than of triumph, right down through the top of Mr. Christian’s black, splitting headache.

5
    “O H D ADDY, D ADDY, poor Daddy,” Candy was saying at his bedside in the Municipal Hospital a day later. By virtue of one of the most extraordinary wounds ever received or administered in Racine County, Mr. Christian was not dead, but had suffered a partial lobotomy when the trowel had entered his cranium. Now, he was half sitting in bed, his head swathed in a great hulking bandage, an expression of complete repose on his face.
    “Now, don’t worry, kitten, he’s going to be all right,” Candy’s Uncle Jack assured the girl, standing close beside her, stroking her shoulder comfortingly, “he’s going to be all right.”
    Candy squeezed his hand in her own, as though it were he who needed comforting, “Oh yes, Uncle Jack,” she agreed softly, “I know that he is.”
    Uncle Jack Christian was her father’s twin brother. They looked exactly alike, though Jack somehow seemed much younger, more alive to the feelings and needs of her own generation—at least, that was what Candy had often told herself, and her father, too. Before his marriage, he and Candy had been pals, and they continued to be very close, and when together engaged in a good deal of innocent, pawing affection—rather to the annoyance of Mr. Christian—though they did not see much of each other now because Candy’s father took such strong objection to his brother’s vivacious wife, Livia, and considered her a bad influence on Candy.
    “Now, why don’t we go have some tea with your Aunt Livia?” Uncle Jack suggested. “Or perhaps you’d prefer a drink—I know I could use one.”
    Like Professor Mephesto, Uncle Jack was one of Candy’s heroes, too.
    “Yes, I could use a drink,” she said gravely.
    Aunt Livia was waiting for them in the car. She