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lightless black stone into the depths of her unconscious, but the circles of its passing spread endlessly outward. Mike went from troubling infancy to difficult childhood.
    John Winship continued to keep the homeplace mowed and swept and painted, but he dreamed no more grand dreams for it and could not have said why he did not sell or rent it, knowing only that he must not, that the land was not only his but was, in some indefinable way, him. He did not think to move there himself. All he would ever have of Claudia was moored in the Pomeroy Street house. If he thought at all, he thought that someday DeeDee and a shadow husband might live there. He did not consider that Mike would ever live in the homeplace. He did not consider Mike much at all. If he stayed in his study and kept the stout oak door shut,he could not hear her thin, starveling wails from the nursery and could forget for long stretches at a time that she was there. And somehow, when Mike was not there, Claudia was. To hear the baby’s cries again after a long period of silence was to bear almost anew the terrible spear of his wife’s death. John Winship’s face gradually sank in upon itself like an effigy on a crusader’s tomb.
    Pixielike DeeDee, who grew more like her mother every day, was the only being in the house who could coax a ghost of the old magical animation back into her father’s face. Despite Rusky’s attempts to interest him in the new baby, an attenuated infant with his own long, light bones and narrow skull and lambent eyes, he could bring himself only to touch her silky skull with the tip of his finger occasionally, or let her tiny fist close over it. He could not and did not rock her and sing college songs and popular ballads to her, as he had to baby DeeDee. He grew more and more silent, rigid, withdrawn, canted within himself. Attitudes hardened into prejudices, ideas into obsessions. The law and the homeplace and the young wife frozen for all eternity into the silver frame on his desk were the bones of his life, the armature on which he hung his days. DeeDee could skip in and out of his tower at will. Mike hovered outside, staring in at him with his own luminous seawater eyes, and could not enter. But she never ceased in the battering.
    She was, of course, a trying child from the beginning. She cried loudly and long, and could not be comforted except by Rusky, and then only after much rocking and crooning. DeeDee, busy with first grade at the Lytton Grammar School and her tea sets and coloring books and dolls, clearly had little use for this new doll that would not allow itself to be dressed and fondled, but only wailed its frail and inconsolable grief into the silent house. John Winship continued to close hisstudy door against the importuning cries. Mike wept on alone except for the patient black woman and her tiny son, who slept tranquilly in a wash basket beside Mike’s crib. After a while, as she grew, Mike stopped crying and began to do battle.
    She balked and disputed on all sides the adults who attempted to manage her. Few even tried after a while, except Rusky, whose halfhearted admonitions never slid over into exasperation and whose arms were always outstretched for comfort instead of retribution. She fought with her small, flying fists the Lytton children who fell into her orbit. Not many did, until she entered first grade. Then she became the terror of her small society: slight, elfin, a slip of a child with thistledown hair and a quicksilver mind, curious about everything, contentious when the answers baffled her or failed to engage her intelligence, without physical fear, passionately devoted to the perceived underdogs around her. Her gruff goblin voice and belly laugh contrasted sharply with her spindrift appearance. Like her father, Mike in a passion drew eyes like a magnet. Notes and phone calls from her teachers streamed into the house at first, but John Winship dealt with them by not dealing with them, and eventually