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thought. Spying on ourselves. We are at the mercy of our own detachment. A thought for breakfast.
    He folded the lightly toasted slice, ready at last to eat. In his ordinary body she saw the power of conviction. A lean and easy frame. A mild face, clear eyes, high and sad and mottled forehead. There was a burning faith in this man, a sense of cause. Mary Frances saw this more clearly than ever now that he’d been sent away from the councils and planning groups, the task forces, the secret training sites. Deprived of real duties, of contact with the men and events that informed his zeal, he was becoming all principle, all zeal. She was afraid he would turn into one of those men who make a saintliness of their resentment, shining through the years with a pure and tortured light. The radio said high seventies. God is alive and well in Texas.
    Suzanne came in, hungry all over again, their six-year-old. She stood with her head propped against her daddy’s arm, feet crossed in a certain way, half sullen, a routine bid for attention. She had her mother’s matter-of-fact blondness, hair thick and wiry, her face paler than Mary Frances’s, without the wind-roughened texture. Because they’d wanted a child but had given up hope, she was a sign of something unselfish in the world, some great-hearted force that could turn their smallness to admiring awe. Win gathered her in, allowing her to collapse dramatically. He fed her the rest of his toast and made slobbering sounds while she chewed, his gray eyes excited. Mary Frances listened to Life Line on KDNT, a commentary on the need for parents to be more vigilant in checking what their children read and watch and listen to.
    “Danger everywhere,” said the grim voice.
    Win tapped his breast pocket for a cigarette. Suzanne hurried out, hearing the school bus. A silence fell, the first of the day’s pauses, the first small exhaustion. Then Mary Frances in her Viyella robe began to remove things from the table, a series of light clear sounds hanging in the air, discreet as hand bells.
     
     
    The two men sat in Win Everett’s temporary office in the basement of the Old Main, under a weak and twitchy fluorescent light. Win was in shirtsleeves, smoking, eager to talk, surprised and a little dismayed at the high anticipation he felt, sharing news with a former colleague face to face.
    Carpenters worked in the hallway, men with close-cropped hair and poky drawls, calling to each other under the steam ducts.
    Laurence Parmenter leaned forward in his chair, a tall broad man in a blue oxford shirt and dark suit. He showed a vigor even in repose, his blond hair touched with silver at the sideburns, and he had the air of a man who wishes to conduct business, affably, over jokes and drinks. Win thought he was an impressive sort of fellow, self-assured, well connected, one of the men behind the crisp and scintillating coup in Guatemala in 1954, a collector of vintage wines, friend and fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs.
    “My God, they buried you.”
    “Texas Woman’s University. Savor the name.”
    “What do you teach?”
    “History and economics. Somebody in the DDP asked me to check out promising students for them. Foreign girls in particular. If there’s a future prime minister here, the idea is we recruit her now, while she’s still a virgin.”
    “Christamighty.”
    “First they hand me over to the psychiatrists,” Win said. “Then they send me into exile. What country is this anyway?”
    They both laughed.
    “I say the name to myself all the time. I let it flow over me. I linger in its aura.”
    “Texas Woman’s University,” Parmenter whispered almost reverently.
    Win sat nodding. He and Larry Parmenter had belonged to a group called SE Detailed, six military analysts and intelligence men. The group was one element in a four-stage committee set up to confront the problem of Castro’s Cuba. The first stage, the Senior Study Effort, consisted of fourteen high officials,