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reds.
    "It's a Brueghel," she said.
    "Right," Frank replied, recognizing the name vaguely.
    " The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, fifteen fifty-nine,"
    she said. She examined Frank's expression, as if for signs of incredulity. "It may surprise you that I studied at one of your Eastern universities for a few years. My father liked to think of himself as a progressive man. Very liberal, always took his daughters seriously. He found pleasure in the fact I took up a thing as impractical as art history; used to drop it in conversation with friends at the Rotary and then chuckle in his way at their bemusement. He died while I was out there, just after I'd started my final year."
    With her one good hand, she picked up a box of cigarettes, removed one, and lit it. Almost demurely, she blew the smoke down toward the floor.
    "My mother wasn't so liberal. Spending all that money to look at pictures, for a girl, no less--what a waste, hey? So I came home--three years, no degree." She drew slowly on her cigarette. Her thoughts seemed to wander.
    Though the shades were half pulled, the air in the front room was stifling. Frank could feel the back of his shirt dampening against the leather of the chair.
    "I'm just wondering if maybe you could tell me a little about your symptoms."
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    "My symptoms?" she said, leaning forward. "Yes, I can tell you about my symptoms. Some mornings I wake up shaking, and I'm afraid to get out of my bed. If I take some of the pills I can manage to get up and make my children breakfast. Some mornings the fear's bad and I have to grit my teeth to get through it."
    She rubbed her half-smoked cigarette out into the tarnished silver ashtray on the coffee table.
    "And I'm afraid of my son."
    "Why is that?"
    Her already rigid body tightened a notch further. "Like I said, if I take the pills, it's fine."
    Noticing her strained expression, Frank decided to back off. "You were saying you'd been to college. That's unusual for most of the women I see."
    Mrs. Buckholdt leaned back in the couch and gave a small frown of acknowledgment, as if to say, yes, it was a pity more couldn't go. As she relaxed, a remnant of what must have once been coquettishness surfaced in her face, and Frank glimpsed how she must have looked to the other high school kids, the ones who'd never dreamt of leaving.
    "My parents were good Lutherans. We'd always gone to this big, very plain barn of a church over in Long Pine, whitewash walls, a simple cross. My mother--when she came to visit me at college--those Gothic stone halls we lived in, she didn't like them, found them suspicious. There was something Catholic about gargoyles on the head of a drain; she didn't like the smell of it. She'd been happy with my father 34
    out here, couldn't imagine why a person would want to leave."
    She gazed past Frank, through the window that looked out over the side yard.
    "I'd always pictured heaven as a rather ordinary place, where you met the dead and people were more or less comfortable. I think I imagined the whole world that way, as an ordinary place. But those paintings . . . they were so beautiful. I'd never seen anything so perfect in my life. Do you know Gericault? Do you know his pictures of Arcadia, those huge, lush landscapes of his?"
    Frank shook his head.
    "You should see them someday. They're beautiful things to see." She spoke in a slow, reflective manner.
    "You came home, then," he asked, "when you left college?"
    "Yes, to my parents' house." She smiled. "Jack was just starting as an officer down at the bank. He'd spent a year at the state university, read a good deal. He didn't want to stay here forever. Kept telling me that, because he knew it had been hard for me--coming back. He'd drive me out to the lake in his convertible. And he'd talk about a house in a town out in California. Always California. An orange tree in the backyard, how you could drive with the roof down all year round, a porch with a view of the ocean. I kept thinking of being