Lancelot

that what you mean? What are you mourning? Them? Me? Us?
    You know the main difference between you and me? With you everything seems to get dissolved in a kind of sorrowful solution. Poor weak mankind! The trouble is that in your old tolerant Catholic world-weariness, you lose all distinctions. Love everything. Yes, but at midnight all cats are black, so what difference does anything make? It does make a difference? What? You opened your mouth and then thought better of it—
    But don’t you see. I had to find out. There I was in early middle age and I couldn’t answer the most fundamental question of all. What question? This: Are people as nice as they make out and in fact appear to be, or is it all buggery once the door is closed?
    So I meant to find out once and for all. There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.
    In the back of my mind all along was the sensation I had when I opened my father’s sock drawer and found the ten thousand dollars under the argyles my mother, nice lady that she was, had knitted for him, honorable man that he was.
    One has to know. There are worse things than bad news.

6
    IT WAS LUNCHTIME when my daughter Lucy came down for breakfast in quilted housecoat, face voluptuous, sleepy-eyed, slightly puffy.
    â€œAren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked her, remembering it was Tuesday.
    â€œI’m not going back to school.” Her pale heavy face slanted sullenly over her food, eyes blinking regularly. Was she crying?
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI’ve got a job.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œWith Raine.”
    â€œDoing what?”
    â€œI’m going to be her social and recording secretary.”
    â€œJesus, what’s that?”
    â€œDaddy, they are the most wonderful people in the world.”
    â€œThey?”
    â€œShe and Troy. They are the only people I’ve ever known who are completely free.”
    â€œFree?”
    â€œFree to make their own lives.” Lucy looked up at last.
    How little we know our own children! I think I had not looked at her in years. How did I size her up, this little stranger? She was not like her mother. The years would not treat her well. At sixteen she was at her prime; later her face would get heavy in the morning. She was like a child whom voluptuousness had overtaken unawares. By the time she becomes fully aware of it, she will have run to fat. Her own chemistry had played a trick on her and her face was heavy with it. This innocent voluptuousness was the sort—and here I shocked myself—to inspire lewdness in strangers.
    â€œWe sat up all night in the motel room talking.”
    Then perhaps life was as innocent as that: they sat up all night talking. Margot sick and Lucy talking. Why not?
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œEverything. Raine, you know, is deep into I.P.D. Did you know she was president of the national association?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œMy job will really be to be recording secretary for I.P.D.”
    â€œWhat will you learn from that?”
    â€œI’ve learned more in the last three weeks than I ever learned in my life.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œAbout myself. What makes me tick. For example, about the lower centers.”
    â€œThe what ?”
    â€œThe four lower centers. As opposed to the three higher, consciousness, mind, spirit.”
    â€œYou mean you want to go back to California with Raine?”
    â€œI’m going to live with Troy and Raine.”
    â€œI didn’t know they were married.”
    â€œThey’re not. And I’m glad they’re not. If they were married, I’d be like a daughter or something. This way we’re equals, a threesome, one for all, all for one.”
    Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?
    â€œHave you spoken to your mother? You’ll have to have our permission, you know.”
    â€œShe’s all for it. At least she said so this morning. I hope she’s not out of her mind—she said she had a 103-degree fever.”
    Then she was sick and all is niceness and not buggery.
    â€œYou mean you want to live with Troy and Raine?”
    â€œYes. Do you want to see their house, rather Raine’s house? Isn’t that neat?”
    From her pocket she took out photos of Raine and of the house, the first inscribed with writing: I