The Moviegoer

up my sleeve to see my watch, she sucks in her breath. “Back to the halt and the lame and the generally no ’count.”
    â€œSweetie, lie down first and let me rub your neck.” I can tell from her eyes when she has a headache.
    Later, when Mercer brings the car around to the front steps, she lays a warm dry cheek against mine. “m-M! You’re such a comfort to me. You remind me so much of your father.”
    â€œI can’t seem to remember him.”
    â€œHe was the sweetest old thing. So gay. And did the girls fall over him. And a mind! He had a mind like a steel trap, an analytical mind like yours.” (She always says this, though I have never analyzed anything.) “He had the pick of New Orleans.”
    (And picked Anna Castagne.)
    Mercer, who has changed to a cord coat and cap, holds the door grudgingly and cranes up and down the street as much as to say that he may be a chauffeur but not a footman.
    She has climbed into the car but she does not release my hand.
    â€œHe would have been much happier in research,” she says and lets me go.
    6
    THE RAIN HAS STOPPED. Kate calls from under the steps.
    She is in the best of spirits. She shows me the brick she found under linoleum and the shutters Walter bought in a junkyard. It bothers her that when the paint was removed the shutters came somewhat frayed from the vat.
    â€œThey will form a partition here. The fountain and planter will go out here.” By extending the partition into the garden, a corner of the wall will be enclosed to form a pleasant little nook. I can see why she is so serious: truthfully it seems that if she can just hit upon the right place, a shuttered place of brick and vine and flowing water, her very life can be lived. “I feel wonderful.”
    â€œWhat made you feel wonderful?”
    â€œIt was the storm.” Kate clears the broken settee and pulls me down in a crash of wicker. “The storm cut loose, you and Mother walked up and down, up and down, and I fixed myself a big drink and enjoyed every minute of it.”
    â€œAre you ready to go to Lejiers?”
    â€œOh I couldn’t do that,” she says, plucking her thumb. “Where are you going?” she asks nervously, hoping that I will leave.
    â€œTo Magazine Street.” I know she isn’t listening. Her breathing is shallow and irregular, as if she were giving thought to each breath, “Is it bad this time?”
    She shrugs.
    â€œAs bad as last time?”
    â€œNot as bad.” She gives her knee a commonplace slap. After a while she says: “Poor Walter.”
    â€œWhat’s the matter with Walter?”
    â€œDo you know what he does down here?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHe measures the walls. He carries a little steel tape in his pocket. He can’t get over how thick the walls are.”
    â€œAre you going to marry him?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œYour mother thought it was the accident that still bothered you.”
    â€œDid you expect me to tell her otherwise?”
    â€œThat it did not bother you?”
    â€œThat it gave me my life. That’s my secret, just as the war is your secret.”
    â€œI did not like the war.”
    â€œBecause afterwards everyone said: what a frightful experience she went through and doesn’t she do remarkably well. So then I did very well indeed. I would have made a good soldier.”
    â€œWhy do you want to be a soldier?”
    â€œHow simple it would be to fight. What a pleasant thing it must be to be among people who are afraid for the first time when you yourself for the first time in your life have a proper flesh-and-blood enemy to be afraid of. What a lark! Isn’t that the secret of heroes?”
    â€œI couldn’t say. I wasn’t a hero.”
    Kate muses. “Can you remember the happiest moment of your life?”
    â€œNo. Unless it was getting out of the army.”
    â€œI can. It was in the fall of nineteen fifty-five. I was nineteen years old and I was going to marry Lyell and Lyell was a fine fellow. We were driving from Pass Christian to Natchez to see Lyell’s family and the next day we were going up to Oxford to see a game. So we went to Natchez and the next day drove to Oxford and saw the game and went to the dance. Of course Lyell had to drive home after the dance. We got almost to Port Gibson and it was after dawn but there was a ground fog. The Trace was still dark in low