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and others’ too—women’s eyes, watching me enviously. It was a novel sensation for me, and I couldn’t help but revel in it. After several numbers, Jamie escorted me back to our table and excused himself. I sat down, flushed and out of breath.
    “You look especially pretty tonight,” Henry said.
    “Thank you.”
    “Jamie has that effect on girls. They sparkle for him.” His expression was bland, his tone matter-of-fact. If he was jealous of his brother, I couldn’t detect it. “He likes you, I can tell,” he added.
    “I’m sure he doesn’t dislike anyone.”
    “Well, at least not anyone in a skirt,” Henry said, with a wry smile. “Look.” He gestured toward the dance floor, and I saw Jamie with a willowy brunette in his arms. She was wearing a satin dress with a low-cut back, and Jamie’s hand rested on herbare skin. As she followed him effortlessly through a series of complicated turns and dips, I realized what a clumsy partner I must have been. I wanted to cover my face with my hands; I knew everything I felt was there for Henry to see. My envy and embarrassment. My foolish yearning.
    I stood up. I don’t know what I would have said to him, because at that moment he rose and took my hand. “It’s late,” he said, “and I know you have church in the morning. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
    He was so gentle, so kind. I felt a rush of shame. But later, as I lay sleepless in my bed, it occurred to me that what I’d shown Henry so nakedly wasn’t new to him. He must have seen it before, must have felt it himself a hundred times in Jamie’s presence: a longing for a brightness that would never be his.
    J AMIE RETURNED TO Oxford, and I put him out of my thoughts. I was no fool; I knew a man like him could never desire a woman like me. It was marvel enough that Henry desired me. I can’t say whether I was truly in love with him then; I was so grateful to him that it dwarfed everything else. He was my rescuer from life in the margins, from the pity, scorn and crabbed kindness that are the portion of old maids. I should say, he was my potential rescuer. I was by no means sure of him, and for good reason.
    One night at choir practice, I looked up from my hymnal and saw him watching me from one of the rear pews, his face solemn with intent. This is it , I thought. He’s going to propose. Somehow I got through the rest of the practice, though the director had to chide me twice for missing my entrance. In the choir room afterward, as I unbuttoned my robe with clumsy fingers, I had a sudden vision of Henry’s hands undoing the buttons of my nightgown on our wedding night. I wondered what it would be like to lie with him, to have him touch my body as intimately as though it were his own flesh. My sister Etta, who was a registered nurse, had told me about the sexual act when I turned twenty-one. Her explanation was strictly factual; she never once referred to her own relations with her husband, Jack, but I gathered from her private smile that the marriage bed was not an altogether unpleasant place.
    Henry was waiting for me outside the church, leaning against his car in his familiar white shirt, gray pants and gray fedora. That was all he ever wore. Clothes didn’t matter to him, and his were often ill-fitting—pants drooping at the waist, hems dragging in the dirt, sleeves too long or too short. I laugh now when I think of the feelings his wardrobe aroused in me. I practically throbbed with the desire to sew for him.
    “Hello, my dear,” he said. And then, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”
    Goodbye. The word billowed in the space between us before settling around me in soft black folds.
    “They’re building a new airfield in Alabama, and they want me to oversee the project. I’ll be gone for several months, possibly longer.”
    “I see,” I said.
    I waited for him to say something more: How he would miss me. How he would write to me. How he hoped I’d behere when he returned. But he said