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extravagant personae of my parents and Cash grandparents, plus the whole seductive and beautiful Mountain-church-philosopher business, would have seen to that. The fact that I was bright enough, funny, vulnerable, and matched him almost inch for inch in height, slenderness, and exaggerated Victorian-valentine purity of feature was merely a plus.
    After a few bad days and weeks following his promise at the inn to Caleb and Sarah to bring me north to meet his mother, I did not really fear that Joe would try to move off the Mountain and take me with him. That first summer in the little stone guesthouse we rented behind the larger home of the Dean of Graduate Studies, in a hardwood grove bordering the Steep, was a magical one. I started the first of the gardens for which I have become modestly renowned, began the series of small evenings of food and drink and talk that have become Trinity traditions, and began to lay down, with perfect intent and to the best of my abilities, a life for Joe that was so ordered and fulfilling and rich in substance that he would not miss the benison of scope. If he knew what I was about, he gave no sign. He must have known; from the very first Joe and I were able to read each other’s minds and hearts. I concluded from his silence and the contentment with which he let me wrap him in a web of beautiful days that he was saying to me, Yes. All right.

    34 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    Make me a life here that I could have nowhere else, and I will not ask you to leave. I will let you build me a world, and the larger one will come to us.
    But just for insurance, just for good measure, I covertly threw into the college incinerator, on the second day of my marriage, the little round cardboard wheel of Enovids the college physician had given me. I said nothing to Joe and made love to him, and cooked and entertained for him, and laughed with him, and talked long into the summer nights with him, and waited. And I knew past all doubt the exact moment, on an August night of long, slow rain and sweet fresh flower breath from my new garden, that I got pregnant.
    And knew that for a few months, at the very least, I was safe.
    The next April, when our daughter Lacey was born blind, I knew I was safe forever. We would not leave the Mountain now. If Lacey was to live without sight, she would live at least in Eden. The world that kept me safe would keep her too.
    Only decades later did I come to know that Joe occasionally fancied I had somehow literally blinded her with my terrible fear, bought my safety with her sight. But I honestly think he had thought it only a very long time ago, and not often even then. And by that time there were none of those terrible thoughts that had not visited me in the dark still nights when I could not sleep.
    On an evening nearly twenty-one years later we sat in a garden identical save in scope to that first one, having our drinks in the cool spring twilight and reading a letter from our daughter, in college a continent away. She had written to tell us she was going to Europe with friends that summer, to backpack through Spain and Italy and the HILL TOWNS / 35
    south of France, and hoped we might join her afterward and travel in Yugoslavia. Her friends had to leave her in Rome, but she was on fire to go farther, into that strange, hybrid old country across the Adriatic from Italy.
    I hear that Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city in the world , she wrote in her dark, angular letters, on the paper with the raised lined grids that she used. I wish you’d come be my eyes. There doesn’t seem any reason you can’t, now. I’m well out of the nest. I’ve always wanted to see Dubrovnik .
    Joe put the letter down and looked out over the stone wall, spilling white clematis now, into empty blue air above the lip of the Steep. Our house commanded the whole valley like a fortress. He did not speak, but I knew he was thinking what I was thinking: Lacey for all her blindness would probably see