Who Do You Think You Are

traffic and licking up an ice cream cone. Both the old ladies is dead.”
    “So he isn’t in the parades any more?”
    “There isn’t the parades to be in. Parades have fallen off a lot. All the Orangemen are dying out and you wouldn’t get the turnout, anyway, people’d rather stay home and watch their T.V.”
    O N LATER VISITS Rose found that Flo had turned against the Legion. “I don’t want to be one of those old crackpots,” she said.
    “What old crackpots?”
    “Sit around up there telling the same stupid yarns and drinking beer. They make me sick.”
    This was very much in Flo’s usual pattern. People, places, amusements, went abruptly in and out of favor. The turnabouts had become more drastic and frequent with age.
    “Don’t you like any of them any more? Is Ralph Gillespie still going there?”
    “He still is. He likes it so well he tried to get himself a job there. He tried to get the part-time bar job. Some people say he got turned down because he already has got the pension but I think it was because of the way he carries on.”
    “How? Does he get drunk?”
    “You couldn’t tell if he was, he carries on just the same, imitating, and half the time he’s imitating somebody that the newer people that’s come to town, they don’t know even who the person was, they just think it’s Ralph being idiotic.”
    “Like Milton Homer?”
    “That’s right. How do they know it’s supposed to be Milton Homer and what was Milton Homer like? They don’t know. Ralph don’t know when to stop. He Milton Homer’d himself right out of a job.”
    After Rose had taken Flo to the County Home—she had not seen Milton Homer there, though she had seen other people she had long believed dead—and was staying to clean up the house and get it ready for sale, she herself was taken to the Legion by Flo’s neighbors, who thought she must be lonely on a Saturday night. She did not know how to refuse, so she found herself sitting at a long table in the basement of the hall, where the bar was, just at the time the last sunlight was coming across the fields of beans and corn, across the gravel parking lot and through the high windows, staining the plywood walls. All around the walls were photographs, with names lettered by hand and taped to the frames. Rose got up to have a look at them. The Hundred and Sixth, just before embarkation, 1915. Various heroes of that war, whose names were carried on by sons and nephews, but whose existence had not been known to her before. When she came back to the table a card game had started. She wondered if it had been a disruptive thing to do, getting up to look at the pictures. Probably nobody ever looked at them; they were not for looking at; they were just there, like the plywood on the walls. Visitors, outsiders, are always looking at things, always taking an interest, asking who was this, when was that, trying to liven up the conversation. They put too much in; they want too much out. Also, it could have looked as if she was parading around the room, asking for attention.
    A woman sat down and introduced herself. She was the wife of one of the men playing cards. “I’ve seen you on television,” she said. Rose was always a bit apologetic when somebody said this; that is, she had to control what she recognized in herself as an absurd impulse to apologize. Here in Hanratty the impulse was stronger than usual. She was aware of having done things that must seem high-handed. She remembered her days as a television interviewer, her beguiling confidence and charm; here as nowhere else they must understand how that was a sham. Her acting was another matter. The things she was ashamed of were not what they must think she was ashamed of; not a flopping bare breast, but a failure she couldn’t seize upon or explain.
    This woman who was talking to her did not belong to Hanratty. She said she had come from Sarnia when she was married, fifteen years ago.
    “I still find it hard to get used to. Frankly I do. After the city. You look better in person than you do in that series.”
    “I should hope so,” said Rose, and told about how they made her up. People were interested in things like that and Rose was more comfortable, once the conversation got on to technical details.
    “Well, here’s old Ralph,” the woman said. She moved over, making room for a thin, gray-haired man holding a mug of beer. This was Ralph Gillespie. If Rose had met him on the street she would not have