The Progress of Love

his polished shoe.
    It would be wrong to say that Dane understood anything right then. But he forgot the woman who was talking and the coffeepot he was holding. He felt a secret, a breath of others’ intimacy. Something he didn’t want to know about, but would have to.
    Not so long afterward, he was with his father on the street, and he saw Wyck coming toward them. His father said, “Hello, Wyck,” in a certain calm, respectful voice men use to greet other men they don’t know—or perhaps don’t want to know—too well. Dane had veered off to look into the hardware store window.
    “Don’t you know Wyck Tebbutt?” his father said. “I thought you might’ve run into him at Violet’s.”
    Then Dane felt it again—the breath he hated. He hated it more now, because it was all around him. It was all around him if even his father knew.
    He didn’t want to understand the extent of Violet’s treachery. He already knew that he would never forgive her.
    Now Dane is a broad-shouldered ruddy man with the worn outlines of a teddy bear and a beard that is almost entirely gray. He has grown to look more and more like his mother. He is an architect. He went away from home to college, and for a long time he lived and worked in other places, but he came back several years ago, and is kept busy now restoring the churches and town halls andbusiness blocks and houses that were considered eyesores at the time he left. He lives in the house he grew up in, the house his father was born and died in, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old stone house that he and Theo have gradually brought back to something like its original style.
    He lives with Theo, who is a social worker.
    When Dane first told Wyck and Violet (he has forgiven her—them—long ago) that somebody named Theo was moving in with him, Wyck said, “I take that to mean you finally turned up a serious girlfriend.”
    Violet didn’t say anything.
    “A man friend,” Dane said gently. “It isn’t easy to tell, from the name.”
    “Well. That’s him’s and your business,” Wyck said affably. The only sign he gave that he might be shaken was in saying “him’s” and not noticing.
    “Theo. Yes,” said Violet. “That is hard to tell.”
    This was in the little two-bedroom house on the edge of town that Violet moved to after she retired from the phone company. Wyck had moved in with her after his wife died and they were able to marry. The house was one of a row of very similar houses strung out along a country road in front of a cornfield. Wyck’s things were moved in on top of Violet’s, and the low-ceilinged rooms seemed crowded, the arrangement temporary and haphazard. The moss-green sofa looked bulky and old-fashioned under an afghan made by Wyck’s wife. A large black velvet painting, belonging to Wyck, took up most of one living-room wall. It depicted a bull and a bullfighter. Wyck’s old sporting trophies and the silver tray presented to him by the insurance company sat on the mantel beside Violet’s old shell and tippling Scotsman.
    All those old dust catchers, Violet calls them.
    But she kept Wyck’s things there even after Wyck himself was gone. He died during the Grey Cap game, at the end of November. Violet phoned Dane, who listened to her at first with his eyes on the television screen.
    “I went down to the church,” Violet said. “I took some things down for the rummage sale, and then I went and got us a bottle of whiskey, and when I got back, as soon as I opened the door, I said, ‘Wyck,’ and he didn’t answer. I saw the back of his head in a funny position. It was bent towards the arm of his chair. I went around in front of him and turned off the television.”
    “What do you mean?” said Dane. “Aunt Violet? What’s the matter?”
    “Oh, he’s dead,” said Violet, as if Dane had been questioning it. “He would have to be dead to let me turn off the football game.” She spoke in a loud, emphatic voice with an unnatural joviality—as if she was covering up some embarrassment.
    When he drove into town, he found her sitting on the front step.
    “I’m a fool,” she said. “I can’t go inside. What an idiot I am, Dane.” Her voice was still jarring, loud and bright.
    Theo said later that many old people were like that when someone close to them died. “They get past grief,” he said. “Or it’s a different kind.”
    All winter, Violet seemed to be all right, driving her car when the weather permitted, going to church,