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to fade to purple. The house was on a hilltop; from the patio she could see perhaps fifteen miles. Most of it was rolling country; a few ravines, a few sparsely timbered hillsides. To the south lay a plateau, some of it tilled. Nature’s green, Helen decided, did not harmonize with Nature’s purple. Other evenings, when the sunset was a brighter red, the land displayed unimaginable tints: peacock blues and yellows, umbers, russets, thin crimsons, flashes of orange. But not today.
    She had brought sunglasses and a book; they lay neglected. Helen was pensive. Helen was periodically (three or four times a year) depressed by a wholly natural feeling that “things were too good.” Joe had told her many times that this was a curiously religious feeling. Original sin, he believed, was so strong a tradition that most of us were unable to tolerate pure enjoyment. It was generally felt (but rarely said) that some punishment ought to accompany any pleasure. Lacking other means (hives, flagellation), Helen fell back on an obscure condemnation of an equally obscure guilt. Her fits of expiation lasted, at their most murderous, for anywhere from five minutes to a quarter of an hour, and were usually followed by an extravagant dinner.
    Helen knew that her attacks were senseless. Normally she felt no great lacks, no great inadequacies. There were, of course, attributes and experiences that she did not have, and would not have: a reflective mind, familiarity with far places, a professionally viable talent, a long spell of living dangerously (a moll, or a frontier wife); but these she did not want, and would not want. What she had was enough, and more than she had hoped for. Sally and Dave were healthy and intelligent; initiative had been encouraged. They were not simply adventurous; they were confidently eccentric, which was some comfort in a time when you could see your neighbors settling gummously into a series of transparent molds, like bad soufflés in Pyrex casseroles. The Harrisons’ home was all they had wanted, built for them by an architect of their choice. The house fitted them. It looked, as Joe had once said, not only lived-in, but born-in and died-in. The children had done their own murals—ghastly—and painted them over every March, revealing newer—ghastlier—talents. The walls of Helen’s workroom, which was Joe’s office as well, consisted almost wholly of numbered cabinets, which simplified their lives enormously. One of them would remember that Helen’s gardening gloves were in 18; that the Menuhin program had been tossed into 12; that Joe’s short stories (three; unpublished; Maupassant) lay, as they should, in 1. A rabbit’s foot and four unopened decks of cards were in either 7 or 8; two Christmas ties that Joe had never worn were in 14. What paintbrushes were not in the basement were in 13, which was consequently never opened. In 6, three sets of military brushes and the 1955 Who’s Who. In 10, dance programs from Helen’s school and college days. They came out with each newfound wrinkle, and Helen pawed through them, remembering desperately: “Charlie Lindstrom! I wonder whatever happened to him? There was a man. Those nights on the beach.”
    Joe would look up, irritated. “It says here that the sea horse lays twelve thousand eggs.”
    â€œThick dark brows, he had, and a tiny little cleft in his chin, and the warmest eyes.”
    â€œThe Wendigo,” Joe would say. “The Abominable Snowman. Whatever became of Fatty Arbuckle?”
    They had it all, really: a better home and garden (twenty acres), the children, the work, the friends. The friends were various, and few were “business” friends. Even fewer were “neighborhood” friends; there was no neighborhood. This was the country, the valley, and this was an age of highways, thruways, speedways, freeways; anyone within sixty miles of them could come to dinner.