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continuing. From the square shape of his head Foxy guessed he was Swiss rather than French in ancestry.
    Her side was nudged and Freddy Thorne told her, “Roger thinks auctions are like Monopoly games. All over New Hampshire and Rhode Island they know him as the Mad Bidder from Tarbox. Highboys, lowboys, bus boys. He’s crazy for commodes.”
    “Freddy exaggerates,” Roger said.
    “He’s very discriminating,” Bea called from her end of the table.
    “That’s not what I’m told they call it,” Harold little-Smith was saying to Janet.
    “What are you told, dear?” Janet responded.
    Harold dipped his fingers into his water goblet and flicked them at her face; three or four drops, each holding a spark of reflection, appeared on her naked shoulders. “ Femme méchante ,” he said.
    Frank Appleby intervened, telling Ken and Foxy, “The phrase the children use when the alarm goes would translate into decent language as, ‘The Deity is releasing gas.’ ”
    Marcia said, “The children bring home scandalous jokes from school. The other day Jonathan came and told me, ‘Mother, the governor has two cities in Massachusetts named after him. One is Peabody. What’s the other?’ ”
    “Marblehead,” Janet said. “Frankie thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.”
    Bea Guerin and the silent wife of Freddy Thorne rose and took the soup plates away. Foxy had only half-finished. Mrs.Thorne politely hesitated. Foxy rested her spoon and put her hands in her lap. The soup vanished. Oh thank you. Circling the table, Bea said singingly, “My favorite townsperson is the old lady with the National Geographics .”
    Little-Smith, aware that Ken had not spoken a word, turned to him politely; fierily illuminated, the tip of his nose suggested something diabolical, a cleft foot. “Did Frank tell me you were a geographer, or was it geologist?”
    “Biochemist,” Ken said.
    “He should meet Ben Saltz,” Janet said.
    “The fate worse than death,” Freddy said, “if you don’t mind my being anti-Semitic.”
    Foxy asked the candlelit air, “ National Geographics ?”
    “She has them all,” the little-Smith woman said, leaning not toward Foxy but toward Ken across the table. From Foxy’s angle she was in profile, her lower lip saucily retracted and her earring twittering beside her jaw like a tiny machine. Ken abruptly laughed. His laugh was a boy’s, sudden and high and disproportionate. In private with her, he rarely laughed.
    Encouraged, the others went on. The old lady was the very last of the actual Tarboxes, and she lived in one or two rooms of a big Victorian shell on Divinity Street toward the fire station, crammed in among the shops, diagonally across from the post office and Freddy’s office, and her father, who had owned the hosiery mill that now makes plastic ducks for bath tubs, and teething rings, had been a charter subscriber. They were neatly stacked along the walls, twelve issues every year, since 1888.
    “The town engineer,” Frank Appleby pronounced, “calculates that with the arrival of the issue of November 1984, she will be crushed to death.”
    “Like a character in Poe,” little-Smith said, and determinedlyaddressed his wife. “Marcia, which? Not ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’ ”
    “Harold, you’re confused by ‘The House of Usher,’ ” she told him.
    “ Non, non , tu es confuse ,” he said, and Foxy felt that but for the table between them they would have clawed each other. “There is a story, of walls squeezing in.”
    Janet said, “It happens on television all the time,” and went on in general, “What can we do about our children watching? Frankie’s becoming an absolute zombie.”
    Frank Appleby said, “It’s called ‘The Day the Walls Squeezed In.’ As told to Jim Bishop.”
    Ken added, “By I. M. Flat, a survivor in two dimensions,” and laughed so hard a candle flame wavered.
    Marcia said, “Speaking of television, you know what I just read? By