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Hampshire.”
    She was slightly appalled. “Am I? I didn’t mean to. But it’s true we haven’t seen so much of each other since we’ve grown up—especially since she married Tom Russo. He seemed to want to keep her pretty much to himself. And of course I have my own affairs.” The word embarrassed her, and she added quickly, “I do a lot of traveling, for example.”
    “But Laurel was here with you last week.”
    “Part of last week.”
    “Did she say why she moved out on Tom?”
    She shook her blond head. “Not really. In fact, she intended to go back to him. But first she said she had to get her nerves under control.”
    “What was the matter with her nerves?”
    “She said it made her nervous living in that house. She said it gave her nightmares. I told her she was probably blaming the house for problems that were caused by other things.”
    “What other things?”
    “Tom wanted children; she didn’t. She said she didn’t want to bring children into this world.”
    “What did she mean?”
    “I don’t know. All the violence and cruelty in the world, I guess.” She lifted her hands and made karate chops at the air, like a soft embodiment of the world’s violence. “Laurel used to talk about it all the time.”
    “Did Tom Russo treat her badly?”
    “Not to my knowledge. He treated her quite well, according to his lights. I’d say he put her on a pedestal.”
    “That isn’t always doing a woman a favor.”
    “I know that,” she said with a self-referring smile. “They put you on a pedestal and leave you there to gather dust. But thatwasn’t how it was with Laurel. Tom Russo really worshipped her.”
    “Then why did Laurel leave him? Because the house made her nervous?”
    Joyce stood up and faced me. “I’ll tell you what I really think. I think Laurel left him on account of Laurel. It’s hard for her to stay with anything or anybody. She has no real self-confidence; in fact, she doesn’t like herself very much at all. She seems to consider herself unworthy.”
    “Unworthy of Tom?”
    “Unworthy of having any kind of a life. She’s a really decent girl, with really deep feelings.” For the first time, Joyce’s own feelings were coming up from their artesian depths, and her impression was no longer blurred. “I think she’s a fine person in spite of everything. But the way she talks about herself, you’d think she was the worst sinner in the world.”
    “Is she?”
    “She’s made her mistakes. But it isn’t for me to judge her. We all make mistakes.” She looked around her living room as if it was crowded with the ghosts of her own.
    “Can you give me an example of Laurel’s mistakes?”
    She was embarrassed. “Well, she ran away to Vegas with a boy when she was at River Valley School. The two of them ran out of money, and actually made a ransom demand on Laurel’s parents.”
    “A ransom demand?”
    “They pretended she had been kidnapped, and asked her parents for a thousand dollars for her return. They collected it, too, I heard, and lost every cent of it on the tables. Then Laurel’s father brought her home.”
    “How old was she at the time?”
    “About fifteen. She was a junior at River Valley that year.”
    “Do you remember who the boy was?”
    “I think his last name was Sherry. He was a senior, and I never really knew him. He never came back to the school.Neither did Laurel. Her parents kept her at home with private tutoring until she was ready to go away to college.”
    “No more boy friends?”
    “She had boy friends in college and afterward. But none of them stuck with her. Laurel’s difficult, as I said. She needed someone steady and faithful, like Tom.”
    “I heard they met in the drugstore.”
    “That’s true. I happened to be with her that day. Laurel went in to get a prescription filled. Tom got so excited and nervous when he saw her it must have taken him fifteen minutes to fill it. When we finally got away, he followed Laurel right out