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studied. After that, they necked. The boy was admiringly respectful to John Winship, and by the time he and Mike began their senior year in high school, John was spending many of his evenings with the two of them. He would come out of his study, rubbing his eyes and stretching, and put the coffeepot on in the kitchen and settle into the wing chair in the living room that had been his in the years when he and Claudia and baby DeeDee had gathered there in the evenings, and Bayard Sewell and a reluctant Mike would close their books and sit up straight on the couch, and John would engage Bayard and, peripherally, Mike in conversation.
    Mostly, they talked about Negroes. Or John Winship did, and Mike and Bayard Sewell listened.
    John Winship had become in his mid-forties one of those conflicted and caricatured well-placed Southerners who professed to care for and understand individual blacks, but who feared and hated the race collectively. He had fed and supported Rusky and J.W. in his home, seen to their welfare, paid their medical bills, trusted his children with Rusky, paid her funeral costs, and was now supporting and educating her son. But he had no words but harsh and bitter ones for Negroes in the aggregate.
    From the beginning, the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement had nearly maddened him.
    “They’re looking to take over everything. Our schools and churches, our daughters, our very land. We have to stop them here and now,” he would intone, andMike and Bayard Sewell would stare at him in the lamplight, seeing in the flush of animation on his ascetic face something of the magnetism that had first drawn Claudia Searcy to him. They listened attentively to his cant, but they paid little heed to his words. Somewhere in the long twilight of his isolation, John Winship had become a bigot, fearing and scorning, in addition to the Negroes, Jews, Republicans, and Northerners. The latter three were little more than the butt of his jokes, but the Negroes could move him to corrosive rage. Even though Mike and Bayard had heard these diatribes many times before, they always nodded, and Bayard usually would murmur something like, “Yes sir,” or “I can see why you might say that.” Mike knew that he did not share her father’s sentiments, and she had, in the beginning, challenged his sincerity.
    “Well, I like your daddy,” he said. “He doesn’t have anybody else to blow off steam to, and he’s got a lot of sense about most other things. It doesn’t hurt anything to listen to him.”
    And indeed, it did not. John Winship seemed, so far as he was able, to dote on Bayard Sewell.
    “He’s going to make his mark, that’s for sure,” he would say. “It’s a shame there’s no money for college, but I’ve spoken to Flora, and there isn’t an extra cent. A boy like that shouldn’t have to grub for a night-school education.”
    “You did, Daddy,” Mike said.
    He frowned. “But you always hope it’ll be easier for the boy coming after you,” he said.
    “What about the girl?” Mike did not say.
    To Bayard Sewell, she said, “You’re the son I was supposed to be. You’ve made him happier than I ever could.” She did not say it with bitterness, but gratitude and a sense of the fitness of things. She felt not the slightest curl of anger. Mike’s anger had always radiatedoutward from the Pomeroy Street house, not in upon it. When she met Bayard, it had faded like smoke.
    The whole town adored Bayard Sewell.
    “You’re a lucky girl,” someone or other was always saying to Mike when it became clear that the friendship was more, was a flame, consumed everything, was destined to endure. And it was all those things. Mike was in love with every atom of her being. It was Bayard Sewell who was sensible and restrained in the long summer nights on the wisteria-hung side porch of the Pomeroy Street house, when they kissed until Mike was nearly mad with it.
    “It’ll be all that much better for waiting,” he would say