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Jane. “For dinner.”
    “Margie and Tom! I’d love to, Rollie!” Jane was beaming, and she brought her hands down on her thighs for emphasis. “I’ll phone them tonight. It was always you who didn’t want them, you know, Rollie. They didn’t mind. I mean—about Bertie. Bertie was always locked up in his room, anyway!” Jane laughed, happy at the idea of inviting the Jacksons. “It was always you who thought Bertie bothered them, or they didn’t like Bertie. Something like that.”
    Roland remembered. The Jacksons, like most people, were disgusted by Bertie, a little afraid of him for all Bertie’s smallness, as normal people were always afraid of idiots, unpredictable things that might do them harm. Now Roland felt that he wouldn’t mind that. He knew he would be able to laugh, make a joke, put the Jacksons at their ease about Bertie, if they went into Bertie’s room “to visit with him” the night they came. They never asked to, but Jane usually proposed it.
    The Jackson evening turned out well. Everyone was in a good mood, and Jane didn’t suggest during the pre-dinner drinks time “saying hello to Bertie,” and the Jacksons hadn’t brought a toy for him, as they had a few times in the past—a small plastic beach ball, something inane, for a baby. Jane had made an excellent Hungarian goulash.
    Then around ten o’clock, Jane said brightly, “I’ll bring Bertie out to join us for a few minutes. It’ll do him good.”
    “Do that,” said Margerie Jackson automatically, politely.
    Roland saw Margerie glance at her husband who was standing with his small coffee by a bookcase. Roland had just poured brandies all round into the snifters on the coffee table. Bertie could easily sweep a couple of snifters off the low table with a swing of his hand, Roland was thinking, and he realized that he had grown stiff with apprehension or annoyance.
    Bertie was carried in, in Jane’s usual manner, held by the waist, face forward, and rather bumped along against her thighs as she walked. Bertie weighed a lot for a five-year-old, though he wasn’t as tall as a normal child of that age.
    “Aaaaagh-wah!” Bertie’s small slant eyes looked the same as they might if he were in his own room, which was to say they showed no interest in or awareness of the change of scene to the living room or of the people in it.
    “ There you are!” Jane announced to Bertie, dumping him down on his diapered rump on the living room carpet.
    Bertie wore the top of his pajama suit with its cuffs turned up a couple of times because his arms were so short.
    Roland found himself frowning slightly, averting his eyes in a miserable way from the unsightly—or rather, frightening—flatness of Bertie’s undersized head, just as he had always done, but especially in the presence of other people, as if he wished to illustrate his sympathy with people who might be seeing Bertie for the first time. Then Margerie laughed at something Bertie had done. She had given Bertie one of the cheese stick canapés that were still on the coffee table, and he had crushed it into one ear.
    Margerie glanced at Roland, still smiling, and Roland found himself smiling back, even grinning. Roland took a sip of his brandy. Bertie was a little clown, after all, and maybe he enjoyed these get-togethers in the living room. Bertie did seem to be smiling now. Occasionally he did smile. Little monster! But he’d killed a man in return, Roland thought, and stood a bit taller, feeling all his muscles tense. He, Roland, wasn’t entirely helpless in the situation, wasn’t just a puppet of fate to be pushed around by —everything— a victim of a wildly odd chance, doomed to eternal shame. Far from it.
    Roland found himself joining in a great burst of laughter, not knowing what it was about, till he saw Bertie rolling on his back like a helpless beetle.
    “Trying to stand on his head !” cried Jane. “Ha-ha! Did you see that, Rollie, dear?”
    “Yes,” said Roland.