Who Do You Think You Are

throat. Anna was all right, she took her cough medicine, she sat up in bed, crayoning. When her mother came home she had a story to tell her. It was about some princesses.
    There was a white princess who dressed all in bride clothes and wore pearls. Swans and lambs and polar bears were her pets, and she had lilies and narcissus in her garden. She ate mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream, shredded coconut and meringue off the top of pies. A pink princess grew roses and ate strawberries, kept flamingoes (Anna described them, could not think of the name) on a leash. The blue princess subsisted on grapes and ink. The brown princess though drably dressed feasted better than anybody; she had roast beef and gravy and chocolate cake with chocolate icing, also chocolate ice cream with chocolate fudge sauce. What was there in her garden?
    “Rude things,” said Anna. “All over the ground.”
    This time Tom and Rose did not refer so openly to their disap pointment. They had begun to hold back a little, maybe to suspect that they were unlucky for each other. They wrote tenderly, carefully, amusingly, and almost as if the last failure had not happened.
    In March he phoned to tell her that his wife and children were going to England. He was going to join them there, but later, ten days later. So there will be ten days, cried Rose, blotting out the long absence to come (he was to stay in England until the end of the summer). It turned out not to be ten days, not quite, because he was obliged to go to Madison, Wisconsin, on the way to England. But you must come here first, Rose said, swallowing this disappointment, how long can you stay, can you stay a week? She pictured them eating long sunny breakfasts. She saw herself in the Emperor’s nightingale outfit. She would have filtered coffee (she must buy a filter pot) and that good bitter marmalade in the stone jar. She didn’t give any thought to her morning chores at the station.
    He said he didn’t know about that, his mother was coming to help Pamela and the children get off, and he couldn’t just pack up and leave her. It would really be so much better, he said, if she could come to Calgary.
    Then he became very happy and said they would go to Banff. They would take three or four days’ holiday, could she manage that, how about a long weekend? She said wasn’t Banff difficult for him, he might run into someone he knew. He said no, no, it would be all right. She wasn’t quite so happy as he was because she hadn’t altogether liked being in the hotel with him, in Victoria. He had gone down to the lobby to get a paper, and phoned their room, to see if she knew enough not to answer. She knew enough, but the maneuver depressed her. Nevertheless she said fine, wonderful, and they got calendars at each end of the phone, so that they could figure out which days. They could take in a weekend, she had a weekend coming to her. And she could probably manage Friday as well, and part at least of Monday. Dorothy could do the absolutely necessary things for her. Dorothy owed her some working time. Rose had covered for her, when she was fogged in, in Seattle; she had spent an hour on the air reading household hints and recipes she never believed would work.
    She had nearly two weeks to make the arrangements. She spoke to the teacher again and the teacher said she could come. She bought a sweater. She hoped she would not be expected to learn to ski, in that time. There must be walks they could take. She thought they would spend most of their time eating and drinking and talking and making love. Thoughts of this latter exercise troubled her a bit. Their talk on the phone was decorous, almost shy, but their letters, now that they were sure of meeting, were filled with inflammatory promises. These were what Rose loved reading and writing, but she could not remember Tom as clearly as she wanted to. She could remember what he looked like, that he was not very tall, and spare, with gray waving hair and a long, clever face, but she could not remember any little, maddening things about him, any tone or smell. The thing she could remember too well was that their time in Victoria had not been completely successful; she could remember something between a curse and an apology, the slippery edge of failure. This made her especially eager to try again, to succeed.
    She was to leave Friday, early in the morning, taking the same bus and plane she had planned to take before.
    Tuesday morning it began to