Friend of My Youth

was still so much light in the sky, and that so many lively, brightly dressed people were in the streets, speaking French and German, and probably lots of other languages that she couldn’t recognize. Every year at this time, the captain’s home town held a festival.
    Averill brought Bugs’ body home on a plane, to a funeral with fine music, in Toronto. She found herself sitting beside another Canadian returning from Scotland—a young man who had played in a famous amateur golf tournament and had not done as well as he had expected. Failure and loss made these two kind to each other, and they were easily charmed by the other’s ignorance of the world of sport and of music. Since he lived in Toronto, it was easy for the young man to show up at the funeral.In a short time he and Averill were married. After a while they were less kind and less charmed, and Averill began to think that she had chosen her husband chiefly because Bugs would have thought the choice preposterous. They were divorced.
    But Averill met another man, a good deal older than herself, a high-school drama teacher and play director. His talent was more reliable than his good will—he had an offhand, unsettlingly flippant and ironical manner. He either charmed people or aroused their considerable dislike. He had tried to keep himself free of entanglements.
    Averill’s pregnancy, however, persuaded them to marry. Both of them hoped for a daughter.
    Averill never saw again, or heard from, any of the people who were on the boat.
    Averill accepts the captain’s offering. She is absolved and fortunate. She glides like the spangled fish, inside her dark silk dress.
    She and the captain bid each other good night. They touch hands ceremoniously. The skin of their hands is flickering in the touch.

Oh, What Avails

    I— Deadeye Dick
    They are in the dining room. The varnished floor is bare except for the rug in front of the china cabinet. There is not much furniture—a long table, some chairs, the piano, the china cabinet. On the inside of the windows, all the wooden shutters are closed. These shutters are painted a dull blue, a grayish blue. Some of the paint on them, and on the window frames, has flaked away. Some of it Joan has encouraged to flake away, using her fingernails.
    This is a very hot day in Logan. The world beyond the shutters is swimming in white light; the distant trees and hills have turned transparent; dogs seek the vicinity of pumps and the puddles round the drinking fountains.
    Some woman friend of their mother’s is there. Is it the schoolteacher Gussie Toll, or the station agent’s wife? Their mother’s friends are lively women, often transient—adrift and independent in attitude if not in fact.
    * * *
    On the table, under the fan, the two women have spread out cards and are telling their fortunes. They talk and laugh in a way that Joan finds tantalizing, conspiratorial. Morris is lying on the floor, writing in a notebook. He is writing down how many copies of
New Liberty
magazine he sold that week, and who has paid and who still owes money. He is a solid-looking boy of about fifteen, jovial but reserved, wearing glasses with one dark lens.
    When Morris was four years old, he was roaming around in the long grass at the foot of the yard, near the creek, and he tripped over a rake that had been left lying there, prongs up. He tripped, he fell on the prongs, his brow and eyelid were badly cut and his eyeball was grazed. As long as Joan can remember—she was a baby when it happened—he has had a scar, and been blind in one eye, and worn glasses with a smoky lens.
    A tramp left the rake there. So their mother said. She told the tramp she would give him a sandwich if he raked up the leaves under the walnut trees. She gave him the rake, and the next time she looked he was gone. He got tired of raking, she guessed, or he was mad at her for asking him to work first. She forgot to go and look for the rake. She had no man to help her with anything. Within a little more than half a year, she had to sustain these three things: Joan’s birth, the death of her husband in a car accident (he had been drinking, she believed, but he wasn’t drunk), and Morris’s falling on the rake.
    She never took Morris to a Toronto doctor, a specialist, to have a better job done fixing up the scar or to get advice about the eye. She had no money. But couldn’t she have borrowed some (Joan, once she was grown up, wondered this), couldn’t she have gone