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to steal over her like a warm and loving flame. She felt peaceful and young, very strong, as if she could go on being a mother forever. She was twenty-four.
    She was nearly asleep. Faintly she sensed cold streams of sweat on her cheek, once more the locust’s alien chatter, threatening rain, the voice saying, “ ‘Member, Helen, ‘member when we lived in Wilson Court? The apartment? ‘Member the whistle, the way it used to wake us up? ‘Member, Helen, ‘member when Peyton and Maudie came there was so little room? Remember how hot it was … Remember?” He drank again, draining the glass. “And remember …”
    Remember. Oh, remember. How remember moments of forgotten time? Where is the way now (she wondered) through that dark up-spreading wood? Leaf, locust, sunlight in the hollow, all those she had known, all had fled like years. Now silence sounds where no light falls, and she has lost the way. Rich. Poor. They were poor then, before her mother died, before the inheritance came. They loved each other. Not so much because they were poor, but because they were both still young and hadn’t had to grow up to things. The apartment was backed up against the shipyard wall; a chill blue fog on winter mornings, rising from the river, cast an elegant mist over the streetlights outside; within, warm in bed, hearing people stirring in the halls around them, they felt propertied and secure; life like this, for all they cared, could go on forever. They slept late then. In the summer Maudie cried. (What’s wrong with the kid? he’d say. She shouldn’t holler like that.) What’s wrong? What’s wrong? The shipyard whistle blew, a weird wail, waking them up. Kick the sheets off. On summer nights his legs were long and white, faintly perspiring. Oh, my sweet, he’d say. Oh, love …
    Now, gently drowsing, she remembers the whistle blowing. It surrounds space, time, sleepy summer evenings many years ago: a remote sad wail involving sleep and memory and somehow love. They’d fight on summer nights because it was hot and Maudie cried and the icebox made a dripping noise, and because the whistle blew. But they loved each other, and the whistle—now it’s a part of sleep and darkness, things that happened long ago: a wild, lost wail, like the voice of love, passing through the darkened room and softly wailing, passing out of the sphere of sound itself and hearing.
    “Oh, they were the days. And remember how Peyton … Oh——” halting, his face startled and distressed, as if he had had his hand in fire and only then had felt the pain. His lips trembled. He’s going to cry, she said to herself: He’s going to cry.
    “Peyton.”
    He’s feeling it now. Ah, that sorrow hurries like the wind.
    He thrust his head forward into his hands again. ”My little girl.”
    Yes, perhaps now it will be upturned, the chalice he has borne of whatever immeasurable self-love, not mean, yet not quite so strong as sin …
    “My little girl.”
    Upturned in this moment of his affliction and dishonor to find there not that pride he would clasp to his heart like a lover, but only grief. Only grief.
    He got up from his chair, weaving toward her with outstretched arms. He could hardly walk. The patch of silver hair lay bristling and disheveled. “Honey,” he said, “oh, honey. Let’s be good to each other. Just now. Let’s be good to each other. Let me stay here tonight.”
    She arose silently and turned toward the stairs. “Honey, let me stay. At least just let me stay.”
    She didn’t answer as she left the room and began to climb the stairs.
    “Would you call Mr. Casper for me?” he said. “I can’t. Will you call him for me? I just wouldn’t know what to say.” There was a moment’s silence. “Honey, let me stay. Even if it’s your house.
    “Yes,” he muttered then, “even if it’s yours.”
    For an instant, as if conjured out of time and remembrance by the sound of music, those brief, petulant words made her conscious of a