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rebellious voice within her cries out that it is all cruelly unfair; she has done everything that she was taught a wife is expected to do; she has kept house and cared for children and listened to Tom, laughed at his jokes and never said no when he felt like making love—done all those things, been a faithful and quiet wife when often she didn’t want to at all, and there he is, unable to keep his eyes off Babs, laughing at all
her
jokes.
    Tom has promised Barbara that he will leave Jessica; this winter they will get a divorce, and he will apply for a teaching job at Stanford or U.C., and he and Babs will live in San Francisco; they are both in love with the city.
    Avery has recently begun psychoanalysis with a veryorthodox Freudian; he says nothing, and she becomes more and more hysterical—she is lost! And now this untimely visit from her parents; agonized, she questions them about events of her early childhood, as though to get her bearings. “Was I nine or ten when I had whooping cough?”
    “What?” says Jessica, who had daringly been embarked on an alternate version of her own life in which she did not marry Tom but instead went on to graduate school herself, and took a doctorate in Classics. (But who would have hired a woman professor in the Twenties?) “Tom, I’d love another drink,” she says. “Barbara? You too?” Late in her life Jessica has discovered the numbing effects of drink—you can sleep!
    “Oh, yes, divine.”
    Sipping what was still his first vermouth, Devlin repeats to himself that most women are disgusting. He excepts his mother. He is sitting next to Babs, and he cannot stand her perfume, which is Joy.
    Looking at Jessica, whom, curiously, she has always liked, Barbara feels a chill in her heart. Are they doing the right thing, she and Tom? He says they are; he says Jessica has her bookstore and her student poet friends (“Fairies, most of them, from the look of them,” Tom says), and that living with him does not make her happy at all; he has never made her happy. Is he only talking to himself, rationalizing? Barbara doesn’t know.
    All these people, so many of them Southern, make Avery’s husband, Stanley, feel quite lost; in fact, he finds it hard to understand anything they say. Tom is especially opaque: the heavy Southern accent and heavier irony combine to create confusion, which is perhaps what Tom intends. Stanley thinks Tom is a little crazy, and feels great sympathy for Jessica, whom he admires. And he thinks, Poor Avery, growing up in all that—no wonder Devlin’s queer and Averyhas to go to a shrink. Stanley feels an awful guilt toward Avery, for not supplying all that Tom and Jessica failed to give her, and for his persistent “premature ejaculations”—and putting the phrase in quotes is not much help.
    “I remember your whooping cough very well indeed,” says Tom, pulling in his chin so that the back of his head jerks up; it is a characteristic gesture, an odd combination of self-mockery and self-congratulation. “It was the same summer you pushed Harry McGinnis into the swimming pool.” He turns to Stanley, who is as incomprehensible to him as he is to Stanley, but he tries. “Odd gesture, that. Her mother and I thought she had a sort of ‘crush’ on young Harry, and then she went and pushed him into the pool.” He chuckles. “Don’t try to tell me that ladies aren’t creatures of whim, even twelve-year-old girls.”
    “I was nine,” says Avery, and does not add, You had a crush on Harry’s mother, you were crazy about Irene that summer.
    Jessica thinks the same thing, and she and Avery are both looking at Tom, so that he feels the thought.
    “I remember teasing Irene about the bathing suit she wore that day,” he says recklessly, staring about with his clear blue eyes at the unfamiliar room.
    “What was it like?” asks Barbara, very interested.
    “Oh, some sort of ruffled thing. You know how those Southern gals are,” he says, clearly not