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against Walter Knight’s bulk, proof of her helplessness, her dependence, her very love. “Take care now,” she would say softly, her eyes nearly closed, “we’re so happy you came.” All the world could see: there was bride’s cake under her pillow upstairs, and upstairs was where she wanted to be.
    After everyone had gone, she would hum dance music as she and Lily blew out the candles, closed the glass doors, picked up napkins here and there from the floor. Of thee I sing, ba-by, da da da da da da-spring, ba-by . “Do you know,” she would break off suddenly and demand of Walter Knight, “how many times Harry Scott’s sister saw Of Thee I Sing when she was married to that man who did business in New York City?”
    “I can’t imagine.”
    “ Fourteen . She saw it fourteen times. With customers.”
    “I trust she knows the lyrics better than you do.”
    “Never mind about that.”
    Still mesmerized by her own performance, she would go then to sit on the edge of Walter Knight’s chair. “You go on up, Edith,” he said invariably, kissing her wrist. “I’ll be along. I want to finish this drink.” Embarrassed, Lily would find more ashtrays to empty, more glasses to pick up: she did not want to follow her mother upstairs, to pass her open door and see her sitting by the window in her violet robe, filing her nails or simply sitting with her hands folded, the room a blaze of light. Of thee I sing, baby .
    Walter Knight would sit downstairs, looking at the pages of a book until it was time to go to the earliest Mass. He did not, however, go to Mass; only to bed. “I like to watch the sun come up,” he explained. “Most people are satisfied to watch it go down,” Edith Knight said one morning. “Ah,” he answered. “Only in California.”
    Edith Knight spent the day after every party in her room, the shutters closed. Although the doctor had told her she had migraine headaches, she would not take the medicine he gave her: she did not believe in migraine headaches. What was wrong with her, she told Lily and Walter Knight every Sunday morning, was a touch of the flu complicated by overwork and she never should have taken two drinks; what was really wrong with her, she had decided by the end of May, was a touch of pernicious anemia complicated by the pollen and she needed a change of scene. She would take Lily abroad. She had always wanted to see Paris and London, and the way they were abroad, you could never tell. It was the ideal time to go.
    A week later they left for Europe, and it occurred to Lily later that the highlight of the trip for her mother, who kept her watch all summer on Pacific Standard Time, had been neither Paris nor London but the night in New York, before they boarded the Normandie , when they met Rita Blanchard for dinner at Luchow’s. In New York for a week on her way home from Paris, Rita looked pale and tired; she dropped a napkin, knocked over a glass, apologized, stuttering, for having suggested Luchow’s: possibly Lily did not like German food. Lily loved German food, Edith Knight declared firmly, and it had been an excellent choice on Rita’s part. She for one did not hold with those who thought that patronizing German places meant you had pro-German sympathies, not at all; at any rate, anyone could see, from Rita’s difficulty with the menu, that Rita’s sympathies were simply not pro-German, and that was that. The night was warm and the air heavy with some exotic mildew—the weather was what Lily always remembered—and after dinner they walked down a street where the sidewalk was lined with fruit for sale. Rita noticed that some of the pears were from the Knight orchards; unwary in her delight, she drew both Lily and Edith Knight over to examine the boxes stamped “CAL-KNIGHT.” “Do tell Walter,” Edith Knight said to Rita in her dry voice. “Do make a point of ringing him up when you get home. He’ll so enjoy hearing.”
    After Walter Knight left the Legislature