Friend of My Youth

face against the colored glass. You can’t see in through this glass, because the hall is dark, but if you get your eye in the right place you can see out. There is more red than any other color, so she chooses a red view—though she has managedevery color in her time—blue and gold and green; even if there’s just a tiny leaf of it, she has figured a way to squint through.
    The gray cement-block house across the street is turned to lavender. Morris stands at the door. The door opens, and Joan can’t see who has opened it. Is it Matilda or is it Mrs. Carbuncle? The stiff, bare trees and the lilac bush by the door of that house are a dark red, like blood. Morris’s good yellow sweater is a blob of golden red, a stoplight, at the door.
    Far back in the house, Joan’s mother is singing along with the radio. She doesn’t know of any danger. Between the front door, the scene outside, and their mother singing in the kitchen, Joan feels the dimness, the chilliness, the frailty and impermanence of these high half-bare rooms—of their house. It is just a place to be judged like other places—it’s nothing special. It is no protection. She feels this because it occurs to her that their mother may be mistaken. In this instance—and further, as far as her faith and suppositions reach—she may be mistaken.
    It is Mrs. Carbuncle. Morris has turned away and is coming down the walk and she is coming after him. Morris walks down the two steps to the sidewalk, he walks across the street very quickly without looking around. He doesn’t run, he keeps his hands in his pockets, and his pink, blood-eyed face smiles to show that nothing that is happening has taken him by surprise. Mrs. Carbuncle is wearing her loose and tattery seldom-seen housedress, her pink hair is wild as a banshee’s; at the top of her steps she halts and shrieks after him, so that Joan can hear her through the door, “We’re not so bad off we need some Deadeye Dick to take my daughter to a dance!”
    II—Frazil Ice
    Morris looks to Joan like the caretaker when she sees him out in front of the apartment building, cutting the grass. He is wearing dull-green work pants and a plaid shirt, and, of course, his glasses, with the dark lens. He looks like a man who is competent,even authoritative, but responsible to someone else. Seeing him with a gang of his own workmen (he has branched out from the lumberyard into the construction business), you’d probably take him for the foreman—a sharp-eyed, fair-minded foreman with a solid but limited ambition. Not the boss. Not the owner of the apartment building. He is round-faced and partly bald, with a recent tan and new freckles showing on the front of his scalp. Sturdy but getting round-shouldered, or is that just the way he looks when pushing the mower? Is there a look bachelors get, bachelor sons—bachelor sons who have cared for old parents, particularly mothers? A closed-in, patient look that verges on humility? She thinks that it’s almost as if she were coming to visit an uncle.
    This is 1972, and Joan herself looks younger than she did ten years ago. She wears her dark hair long, tucked back behind her ears; she makes up her eyes but not her mouth; she dresses in voluminous soft bright cottons or brisk little tunics that cover only a couple of inches of her thighs. She can get away with this—she hopes she can get away with it—because she is a tall, slim-waisted woman with long, well-shaped legs.
    Their mother is dead. Morris has sold the house and built, or rebuilt, this and other apartment buildings. The people who bought the house are making it into a nursing home. Joan has told her husband that she wants to go home—that is, back to Logan—to help Morris get settled, but she knows, in fact, that he will be settled; with his grasp of things Morris always seemed settled. All he needs Joan to help him with is the sorting out of some boxes and a trunk, full of clothes, books, dishes, pictures, curtains, that he doesn’t want or doesn’t have space for and has stored temporarily in the basement of his building.
    Joan has been married for years. Her husband is a journalist. They live in Ottawa. People know his name—they even know what he looks like, or what he looked like five years ago, from his picture at the top of a back-page column in a magazine. Joan is used to being identified as his wife, here and elsewhere. But inLogan this identification carries a special pride. Most people here do