The Progress of Love

worse if somebody made me stay.
    Andrew’s mother lived in Toronto, in an apartment building looking out on Muir Park. When Andrew and his sister were both at home, his mother slept in the living room. Her husband, a doctor, had died when the children were still too young to go to school. She took a secretarial course and sold her house at Depression prices, moved to this apartment, managed to raise her children, with some help from relatives—her sister Caroline, her brother-in-law Roger. Andrew and his sister went to private schools and to camp in the summer.
    “I suppose that was courtesy of the Fresh Air fund?” I said once, scornful of his claim that he had been poor. To my mind, Andrew’s urban life had been sheltered and fussy. His mother came home with a headache from working all day in the noise, the harsh light of a department-store office, but it did not occur to me that hers was a hard or admirable life. I don’t think she herself believed that she was admirable—only unlucky. She worried about her workin the office, her clothes, her cooking, her children. She worried most of all about what Roger and Caroline would think.
    Caroline and Roger lived on the east side of the park, in a handsome stone house. Roger was a tall man with a bald, freckled head, a fat, firm stomach. Some operation on his throat had deprived him of his voice—he spoke in a rough whisper. But everybody paid attention. At dinner once in the stone house—where all the dining-room furniture was enormous, darkly glowing, palatial—I asked him a question. I think it had to do with Whittaker Chambers, whose story was then appearing in the Saturday Evening Post . The question was mild in tone, but he guessed its subversive intent and took to calling me Mrs. Gromyko, referring to what he alleged to be my “sympathies.” Perhaps he really craved an adversary, and could not find one. At that dinner, I saw Andrew’s hand tremble as he lit his mother’s cigarette. His Uncle Roger had paid for Andrew’s education, and was on the board of directors of several companies.
    “He is just an opinionated old man,” Andrew said to me later. “What is the point of arguing with him?”
    Before we left Vancouver, Andrew’s mother had written, “Roger seems quite intrigued by the idea of your buying a small car!” Her exclamation mark showed apprehension. At that time, particularly in Ontario, the choice of a small European car over a large American car could be seen as some sort of declaration—a declaration of tendencies Roger had been sniffing after all long.
    “It isn’t that small a car,” said Andrew huffily.
    “That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is, it isn’t any of his business!”
    We spent the second night in Missoula. We had been told in Spokane, at a gas station, that there was a lot of repair work going on along Highway 2, and that we were in for a very hot, dusty drive, with long waits, so we turned onto the interstate and drove through Coeur d’Alene and Kellogg into Montana. After Missoula, we turned south toward Butte, but detoured to see Helena, the state capital. In the car, we played Who Am I?
    Cynthia was somebody dead, and an American, and a girl.Possibly a lady. She was not in a story. She had not been seen on television. Cynthia had not read about her in a book. She was not anybody who had come to the kindergarten, or a relative of any of Cynthia’s friends.
    “Is she human?” said Andrew, with a sudden shrewdness.
    “No! That’s what you forgot to ask!”
    “An animal,” I said reflectively.
    “Is that a question? Sixteen questions!”
    “No, it is not a question. I’m thinking. A dead animal.”
    “It’s the deer,” said Meg, who hadn’t been playing.
    “That’s not fair!” said Cynthia. “She’s not playing!”
    “What deer?” said Andrew.
    I said, “Yesterday.”
    “The day before,” said Cynthia. “Meg wasn’t playing. Nobody got it.”
    “The deer on the truck,” said Andrew.
    “It was a lady deer, because it didn’t have antlers, and it was an American and it was dead,” Cynthia said.
    Andrew said, “I think it’s kind of morbid, being a dead deer.”
    “I got it,” said Meg.
    Cynthia said, “I think I know what morbid is. It’s depressing.”
    Helena, an old silver-mining town, looked forlorn to us even in the morning sunlight. Then Bozeman and Billings, not forlorn in the slightest—energetic, strung-out towns, with miles of blinding tinsel