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meaning either his wife or his daughter.
    “I must have thought the whooping cough was a sort of punishment,” Avery says. “For having a crush on Harry, as you put it.”
    “Yes, probably,” Jessica agrees, being herself familiar with many varieties of guilt. “You were awful sick—it was terrible. There was nothing we could do.”
    “When was the first summer you came to Maine?” Devlin asks Babs, coldly curious, nearly rude. It is plain that he wishes she never had.
    “Nineteen thirty-five. In September. In fact September 9th,” she says, and then blushes for the accuracy of her recall, and looks at Tom.
    “Verlie took care of me,” says Avery, still involved with her whooping cough.
    Jessica sighs deeply. “Yes, I suppose she did.”
    Almost ten years later, in the middle Fifties, Tom and Barbara are married. In the chapel of the little church, the Swedenborgian, in San Francisco, both their faces stream with tears as the minister says those words.
    In her forties, Barbara is a striking woman still, with her small disdainful nose, her sleekly knotted pale hair, and her beautiful way of walking, holding herself forward like a present. She has aged softly, as very fine-skinned, very blond women sometimes do. And Tom is handsome still; they make a handsome couple (they always have).
    Avery is there; she reflects that she is now older than Barbara was in 1935, that summer in Maine. She is almost thirty, divorced from Stanley, and disturbingly in love with two men at once. Has Barbara never loved anyone but Tom? (Has she?) Avery sees their tears as highly romantic.
    She herself is a nervy, attractive girl with emphatic dark eyebrows, large dark eyes and a friendly soft mouth, heavy breasts on an otherwise slender body. She wishes she had not worn her black silk suit, despite its chic; two friends have assured her that no one thought about wearing black to weddings anymore, but now it seems a thing not to have done. “I wore black to my father’s wedding”—thank Godshe is not still seeing Dr. Gunderscheim, and will use that sentence only as a joke. Mainly, Avery is wondering which of the two men to marry, Charles or Christopher. (The slight similarity of the names seems ominous—what does it mean?) This wondering is a heavy obsessive worry to her; it drags at her mind, pulling it down. Now for the first time, in the small dim chapel, candelit, it wildly occurs to her that perhaps she should marry neither of them, perhaps she should not marry at all, and she stares about the chapel, terrified.
    “I pronounce you man and wife,” says the minister, who is kindly, thin, white-haired. He is very old; in fact he quietly dies the following year.
    And then, almost as though nothing had happened, they have all left the chapel: Tom and Barbara, Avery and Devlin, who was Tom’s best man. (“I gave my father away” is another of Avery’s new post-wedding jokes.) But something has happened: Tom and Barbara are married. They don’t believe it either. He gives her a deep and prolonged kiss (why does it look so awkward?) which embarrasses Devlin terribly, so that he stares up and down the pretty tree-lined street. He is thinking of Jessica, who is dead.
    And he passionately wishes that she had not died, savagely blames Tom and Barbara for that death. Trivial, entirely selfish people—so he sees them; he compares the frivolity of their connection with Jessica’s heavy suffering. Since Jessica’s death Devlin has been in a sort of voluntary retreat. He left his window-display job and most of his friends; he stays at home on the wrong side of Telegraph Hill, without a view. He reads a lot and listens to music and does an occasional watercolor. He rarely sees Avery, and disapproves of what he understands to be her life. (“You don’t think it’s dykey, the way you sleep around?” was the terrible sentence he spoke to her, on the eve of Jessica’s funeral, and it has never been retracted.) Sometimes in his