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military home to you, Hector, and if you’ll recall I mentioned it strictly in the context of my own unfortunate demise.”
    The General, who had shaved and dressed in the specific hope that if he did he and Aurora might get through one evening without a fight, was annoyed to realize that they were heading straight into a fight.
    “Your death, you mean,” he said. “Don’t keep calling it your demise.”
    “Yes, my death, Hector,” Aurora said. “I don’t see why I can’t choose my own name for it. Demise, departure, death—I don’t care. If you’re trying to reform, you’re not succeeding. I scarcely got up my own stairs before you started picking on me.”
    The General felt, as usual, that his tongue had betrayed him. Despite his best effort to say only the right things, invariably whatever he said turned out to be the wrong things.
    “I’m just going to die, when I go,” he said lamely. “I’m not going to demise.”
    “Yes, but that’s you,” Aurora said, cooling slightly. “Hector Scott, plain soldier. Of course you’re just going to die, although I imagine you’ll expect America to give you a twenty-one-gun salute, or whatever number of guns is appropriate to your age and attainments.”
    “Oh, they hardly ever do that anymore,” the General said. “I doubt it would occur to them to do it for me. They’ll just drop me in a hole and that will be that.”

    The thought that his own burial would lack ceremony made the General feel sorry for himself; he had always supposed he would have a military funeral and a twenty-one-gun salute. The fact was, he had lived too long: even towering figures, even an Eisenhower, would be lucky to get that kind of attention nowadays. He himself had not quite been a towering figure and could not expect much.
    “Hector, we must stop this quarreling,” Aurora said. “We’ll be too upset to eat. Now we’re even quarreling about dying, when the obvious fact is that neither of us is dying, demising, departing, or going anywhere at all. We’re living on forever, quarreling every step of the way. I’m sure if there turned out to be an afterlife you’d get there first and lie in wait for me. You’d ambush me, just as you did tonight, and we’d resume our quarrels.”
    She walked into her bedroom and stood by her window nook, trying to gain control of her emotions. Hector had the irritating habit of being at his best and his worst at the same time; on countless occasions in their twenty years together his best and his worst had manifested themselves within a few seconds of one another. Just as she had softened toward him for taking her into his arms and allowing her to cry about Tommy, he had made an insulting remark about her packing him off.
    The General hobbled into the bedroom behind her, feeling very low in his thoughts. He was saddened by his own propensity for angering Aurora, even on occasions when he was making a special effort to keep her in a good mood. Special efforts didn’t seem to count for much in this life—not really, the General concluded. Whatever ground one gained by a special effort was rarely ground one could hold for more than a few seconds, after which it was back to trench warfare. Aurora’s chance reference to the Battle of the Somme didn’t describe his life as it might be in a military home. It described his life as it was with her. Mud, barbed wire, and sudden death were likely to be one’s portion.
    He crutched himself over to the window and stood beside her silently. He didn’t know what to say.

    On the sidewalk below them, under the streetlight, two squirrels sat facing one another as if in conversation.
    “Do you think those squirrels are happier than we are?” the General asked. Aurora loved animals and could sometimes be distracted by references to them.
    Aurora knew he was trying to atone for his wounding remark, but she still felt wounded and did not intend to be led into a discussion about the happiness of