Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance.
    And even in that memory, her mother was only a hip and a shoulder, in a heavy coat.
    Lionel said that he could hardly get more of a sense of his father than that, though his father was still alive. A swish of a surplice? Lionel and his mother used to make bets on how long his father could go without speaking to them. He had asked his mother once what made his father so mad, and she had answered that she really didn’t know.
    “I think perhaps he doesn’t like his job,” she said.
    Lionel said, “Why doesn’t he get another job?”
    “Perhaps he can’t think of one he’d like.”
    Lionel had then remembered that when she had taken him to the museum he had been frightened of the mummies, and that she had told him they were not really dead, but could get out of their cases when everybody went home. So he said, “Couldn’t he be a mummy?” His mother confused mummy with mommy, and later repeated this story as a joke, and he had been too discouraged, really, to correct her. Too discouraged, at his early age, about the whole mighty problem of communication.
    This was one of the few memories that had stayed with him.
    Brendan laughed—he laughed at this story more than Lorna or Lionel did. Brendan would sit down with them for a while, saying, “What are you two gabbling about?” and then with some relief, as if he had paid his dues for the time being, he would get up, saying that he had some work to deal with, and go into the house. As if he was happy about their friendship, had in a way foreseen it and brought it about—but their conversation made him restless.
    “It’s good for him to come up here and be normal for a while instead of sitting in his room,” he said to Lorna. “Of course he lusts after you. Poor bugger.”
    He liked to say that men lusted after Lorna. Particularly when they’d been to a department party, and she had been the youngest wife there. She would have been embarrassed to have anybody hear him say that, lest they think it a wishful and foolish exaggeration. But sometimes, especially if she was a little drunk, it roused her as well as Brendan, to think that she might be so universally appealing. In Lionel’s case, though, she was pretty sure that it was not true, and she hoped very much that Brendan would never hint at such a thing in front of him. She remembered the look that he had given her over his mother’s head. A disavowal there, a mild warning.
    She did not tell Brendan about the poems. Once a week or so a poem arrived quite properly sealed and posted, in the mail. These were not anonymous—Lionel signed them. His signature was just a squiggle, quite difficult to make out—but then so was every word of every poem. Fortunately, there were never many words—sometimes only a dozen or two in all—and they made a curious path across the page, like uncertain bird tracks. At first glance Lorna could never make out anything at all. She found that it was best not to try too hard, just to hold the page in front of her and look at it long and steadily as if she had gone into a trance. Then, usually, words would appear. Not all of them—there were two or three in every poem that she never figured out—but that did not matter much. There was no punctuation but dashes. The words were mostly nouns. Lorna was not a person unfamiliar with poetry, or a person who gave up easily on whatever she did not quickly understand. But she felt about these poems of Lionel’s more or less as she did about, say, the Buddhist religion—that they were a resource she might be able to comprehend, to tap into, in the future, but that she couldn’t do that just now.
    After the first poem she agonized about what she should say. Something appreciative, but not stupid. All she managed was, “Thank you for the poem”—when Brendan was well out of earshot. She kept herself from saying, “I enjoyed it.” Lionel gave a jerky nod, and made a sound that sealed off the conversation. Poems continued to arrive, and were not mentioned again. She began to think that she could regard them as offerings, not as messages. But not love-offerings—as Brendan, for instance, would assume. There was nothing in them about Lionel’s feelings for her, nothing personal at all. They reminded her of those faint impressions you can sometimes make out on the sidewalks in spring—shadows, left by wet leaves plastered there the year