Ruffly Speaking

fiercely narrowed, as if she suffered from some form of chronic conjunctivitis that made vision painful. Although I’d removed the aid, Alice Savery’s voice was loud and somehow impersonal. Her tone was at once authoritative and pitiful: “Alfred would never have let them get away with it,” she said firmly. The small gray-and-brown figure peered to the left, then to the right. “They stole my garden. I had roses, beautiful roses. And in my white garden, there were two weeping pears that they cut down. They brought in a machine to tear up their roots.”
    I found myself speaking very simply. “Miss Savery, your carriage house is burning. The fire could spread. It could be dangerous here. We need to leave. Come with me.”
    Her slate-gray gaze moved systematically back and forth without pausing even briefly on me. “Can you smell it in the air?” But she was voicing an observation, not asking a question.
    “Of course. The smoke—”
    She blew out a scornful breath. “At first, one finds it all so very easy to dismiss. It can be so dreadfully, dreadfully subtle. One learns to adopt a multifaceted approach. There are some who disagree, but I count myself among those who subscribe to the theory that aluminum does indeed play a contributory role.” The strained expression on her tight face suggested a painful struggle with some complex problem of logic. Once again entirely sure of herself, she gave a stiff smile accompanied by a mechanical jerk of the chin. “Secondary smoke is an entirely different matter.” She paused a moment. When she spoke, her voice was still loud, but her tone now suggested the expectation and fear that she might be overheard. “They have very powerful lobby groups.” Projecting her voice as aiming it at the most distant seat in a large lecture hall, she added a single word in a confiding stage whisper: “Viruses.”
    As I understood the tobacco industry and its lobby groups, the term was apt enough. Alice Savery, however, turned out to be speaking literally. Her objection to cigarette smoke was based not so much on the threat it posed to human lungs as on its capacity to infect plants with something called the tobacco mosaic virus. I wondered whether it existed at all. The rabies virus certainly existed. So did HIV. As Alice Savery saw it, those were the two principal viral weapons directed at her, and their chosen agents of contagion were, respectively, dogs and homosexual men. “This Lamb,” she almost shouted, “made no effort whatsoever to disguise it. One knew immediately.” She shook a bony fist. “When one works in one’s garden, insect bites are an inevitability, not to mention two potentially rabid—” She broke off. Her eyes blazed at me. “He committed suicide. He was an extremely foolish person.”
    “Come with me,” I said gently. But, again, Alice Savery paid no more attention to my words than she did to the wails of the sirens or to the shouts of the firefighters that now reached me through the open windows. Desperate to communicate with her, I went striding to the big window that faced the backyard, and I pointed dramatically at the carriage house. Flames seemed to leap out to kiss the thick streams of water from the hoses.
    Alice Savery followed me. At last taking in what I’d been trying to convey, she stared briefly at the scene, but then moved away from the window and back toward her desk. “They stale my garden.” She was enraged and grieved. “And now they’re burning down my carriage house. The children have done that, you know. They steal my flowers. Only yesterday, they came and ripped them out. They hide in my carriage house, and they think I don’t know. They sneak in there, and they smoke cigarettes. My poor—
    I approached her slowly and cautiously, as if she were a strange dog that might suddenly turn on me without warning as I tried to rescue it from danger. I offered her my arm. She took it. I led her to the door. As I turned the knob, I told her, “My dog is waiting in the hall, but he’s very friendly, and I promise you that he’s had all his shots. He won’t hurt you.” Rowdy’s leash was jammed in the closed door. In opening the door, I freed him.
    Only when Alice Savery caught sight of Rowdy did I finally realize that my assurances—indeed, every word I’d spoken—had been utterly wasted.
    “Miss Savery, you can’t hear anything I’m saying, can you?” I asked softly.
    Even if Alice Savery had heard me, her