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grudged. For it seemed, according to my course in elementary drama, that whether in Shakespeare’s times or now, a drama must do what the theater calls “externalize.”
    What my mother did was to join the community. First, she took a job—in our present circumstances quite natural. If she chose the library, where else would a literate woman who had never worked be employable? And in addition she did have the incomplete library degree that in Greensboro had been considered just the right tone of enthusiasm. If Craig Towle spent some of his time there, so did many others. Once employed, of course, she really had to go along with the other staff, to Luray’s Tuesdays. On Saturday mornings, now that we had no man in the house, she might even have to appear at the hardware store, gravitating there along the accepted route of butcher, vegetable store, and baker, formerly ordered from by telephone, and so, after a cup in the tea shop, to the bookstore which supplied her with novels for the weekend, where she could appear in person for orders once delivered. On Saturday afternoons, once shunned as the busiest, she continued her circuit, even switching garages—at last taking umbrage, now that she was a lone woman, at Rudie the garage man’s broad remarks, though the only other garage was at the farther end of town, where Craig Towle kept his car.
    One place she never went near, and that was Cobble Row. Also, the time Craig Towle spoke at a college lecture series, she did not turn up, though since I was on the speaker’s committee she had attended every other one. We did not ever mention this. Meeting him head on was not what she was after. Meanwhile, we began having guests, not always on the weekend, smart couples garnered from a long-gone past I had only heard about—their arrivals and departures always clocked to some inner timetable she had, whereby she could meet them at the station as smartly attired as they, and bubble off with them. It had always been her habit—as my father said, “never to leave the house without preparing to meet the King of France”—and she did not neglect this now. If the guests had driven down, she might take them to tour the little sights of town, where in their midst, nestled in their cars among their furs, she might be perceived to have her own crowd. “If you had only made the effort sooner,” they said happily, as yet unaware she would never make the effort to visit them in return.
    So it was my mother joined the community, with every good reason for it.
    Even to a man as skilled in evasion as Craig Towle, it must have seemed that she was to be encountered everywhere, flitting his surface life, a proud hat at the restaurant table—though she never now wore the slouch one—a perfume and a low voice leaving the library’s front desk just as he entered, her elegant legs still in short skirts; a woman with her past swinging idly behind her and her lips still ripe, her children well behind her, as his were, a woman grown and with a finish to her, in the perfection of middle age. But he would be clever enough to see what she was doing, and this I think was the final attraction, that her remoteness, and perhaps a touch of its skill, were like his own. It was the one thing, perhaps, that youth could not oppose.
    As for “the young crowd”—which the town still called them, as if we had none of our own—they had departed. We saw them as seasonal. Last year they had been summer people. This year they would be at winter sports—which we could not provide. But thanks to their absence perhaps, the newest housekeeper at Towle’s reportedly had so far stayed. Craig Towle himself was spending two days a week lecturing on the theater at Harvard, where, spotted in a pub frequented by medical students, he made the newspapers on a rumor he was writing a play about leukemia, which he denied. Since then the newsmen had neglected him, and us.
    So the winter of Craig Towle’s second year with us