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Rome. Young Gwen couldn’t havesounded more different. She was reading the news now, coming over the speakers in the hallway. Her voice irritating, whispery. Like someone standing behind you and playing with your hair.
    Dido was listening too, without comment, but she felt like stepping into the studio and taking over. She became aware of Eddy, who was leaning his long, sinewy body against Eleanor’s desk, ignoring everyone except herself. He fixed her with his small, intent eyes. He wanted to know if she’d ever been to Prosperous Lake. He was driving out there tonight.
    “I’m sorry,” Dido said, feeling and sounding invincible in her formality. “I have another engagement.”
    “What engagement?”
    His expressive eyes—how small they were—didn’t let up, and against her will she laughed a little.
    “What engagement?”
    “We’re going to the movies.”
    “Who’s ‘we’?”
    Dido licked her dry lips. She didn’t like this man and didn’t feel the need to answer. He smiled and shrugged and headed out the door.
    After he left, Mrs. Dargabble said something so quietly Dido wasn’t sure she’d heard properly.
    “Perhaps I’m wrong,” Mrs. Dargabble said. “But I don’t think so.”
    “You don’t think I should get mixed up with him.” Dido looked thoughtfully out the big plate-glass window with its view of the street and saw Eddy heading up to Franklin Avenue. He carried himself with easy pride, like a professional soldier on leave. And she took away the image of a man pacing himself to outlast any number of wars.

 
     
 
    IN THE LITTLE BOOTH OF LIGHT , speaking into the silver fruit hanging off the silver bough, Gwen struggled with the words on the greens. They twisted a little and moved away, capitalized, cagey. She tightened her grip on the page and stumbled. Alone, but heard for miles, she winced and stumbled again.
    The news. Gwen Symon was reading the news. She heard herself make the mistake in her head and then she made it on air in a small voice flattened by panic. She remembered the fat actress with stage fright in
On Stage
, who lost weight by eating lettuce without any salad dressing and got over her fright by imagining that everyone in the audience was a rabbit.
    Her voice came over the speakers in the hallway and then she herself came out into the hall—greens in hand and white-faced—as white-faced, thought Eleanor, as George VI after the crown was put on his stuttering head. Gwen carried the greens back to the newsroom and gave them to one of the two newsmen, who took them without looking at her—she who had ruined their long day’s work in fifteen minutes by booting one story after another.
    Eleanor, from her safe perch, heard it all. Harry stopped on his way past her desk and said with a grimace, “I could hearthe sheets rustling.” He recognized the softness of uncertainty, of nakedness, of no confidence at all. The loneliest voice he’d ever heard.
    “You should help her,” Eleanor said to him.
    He jigged his head back and forth, as if considering it, and turned towards the door.
    “You’re helping Dido,” Eleanor called after him, “who needs it less.”
    All right. He would teach Gwen how to read, as he’d taught his sister how to drive, how to navigate the lines of words, the lanes of vocabulary without embarrassment, accident. How to look ahead so that her voice flowed, rather than straight down at one stumpy phrase after another.
    “I pretend I’m talking to one person,” he told her the next afternoon in his office.
    “I’m no good at that. I seize up. I run out of things to say.”
    She was watching his sensitive mouth. She would take away the memory of him smoking, and the spit-spit sound of getting the bits of tobacco off his tongue and lip. And of the three unfortunate things that were to happen to him that winter, one after the other, three months in a row.
    The question she asked: How can you be a personality on the air when you have no