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her back. Just so, on her bicycle, coasting downhill, she has lost control and closed her eyes to avoid seeing her own disaster. Dizzily, she says, “No, I don’t,” and hopes Freddy will disappear. But Freddy continues to hang on, his face thrust among the leaves, until Bradley, quite puzzled now, says, “Well, is he a friend of yours, or what?” and Irmgard again says, “No.”
    Eventually, that day or the next day, or one day of August, she notices Freddy has gone. Freddy has vanished; but Bradley gives her a poor return. He has the tennis racket, and does nothing except practice against the house. Irmgard has to chase the balls. He practices until his arm is sore, and then he is pleased and says he has tennis arm. Everybody bothers him. The dogs go after the balls and have to be shut up in the garage. “Call the dogs!” he implores. This is Bradley’s voice, over the lake, across the shrinking afternoons. “Please, somebody, call the dogs!”
    Freddy is forgotten, but Irmgard thinks she has left something in Montreal. She goes over the things in her personal suitcase. Once, she got up in the night to see if her paintboxwas there – if that hadn’t been left in Montreal. But the paintbox was there. Something else must be missing. She goes over the list again.
    “The fact is,” Bradley said, a few days ago, dabbing pink lotion on his poison ivy, “I don’t really play with any girls now. So unless you get a brother or something, I probably won’t come again.” Even with lotion all over his legs he looks splendid. He and Irmgard stand side by side in front of the bathroom looking glass, and admire. She sucks in her cheeks. He peers at his sty. “My mother said you were a stockbroker,” Irmgard confides. But Bradley is raised in a different political climate down there in Boston and does not recognize “stockbroker” as a term of abuse. He smiles fatly, and moves his sore tennis arm in a new movement he has now.
    D uring August Freddy no longer existed; she had got in the habit of not seeing him there. But after Bradley’s train pulled out, as she sat alone on the dock, kicking the lake, she thought, What’ll I do now?, and remembered Freddy. She knows what took place the day she said “No” and, even more, what it meant when she said “Oh, I still like Freddy.” But she has forgotten. All she knows now is that when she finds Freddy – in his uncle’s muddy farmyard – she understands she hadn’t left a paintbox or anything else in Montreal; Freddy was missing, that was all. But Freddy looks old and serious. He hangs his head. He has been forbidden to play with her now, he says. His uncle never wanted him to go there in the first place; it was a waste of time. He only allowed it because they were summer people from Montreal. Wondering where to look, both look at their shoes. Their meeting is made up of Freddy’s feet in tornshoes, her sandals, the trampled mud of the yard. Irmgard sees blackberries, not quite ripe. Dumb as Freddy, having lost the power to read his thoughts, she picks blackberries, hard and greenish, and puts them in her mouth.
    Freddy’s uncle comes out of the foul stable and says something so obscene that the two stand frozen, ashamed – Irmgard, who does not know what the words mean, and Freddy, who does. Then Freddy says he will come with her for just one swim, and not to Irmgard’s dock but to a public beach below the village, where Irmgard is forbidden to go; the water is said to be polluted there.
    Germaine has her own way of doing braids. She holds the middle strand of hair in her teeth until she has a good grip on the other two. Then she pulls until Irmgard can feel her scalp lifted from her head. Germaine crosses hands, lets go the middle strand, and is away, breathing heavily. The plaits she makes are glossy and fat, and stay woven in water. She works steadily, breathing on Irmgard’s neck.
    Mrs. Queen says, “I’ll wager you went to see poor Freddy the instant