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a balloon over a caption that provided advice in Latin, his band of winged consorts in flight behind him.
    William Oliver walked to the stoves and took two steps up onto the ladder and looked into the boiling water. Then he jumped down and walked back to the shelf where he kept the record of the supplies we used. He counted my entries twice and then set the paper back on the shelf. I could feel him walking up behind me.
    “Mary,” he said.
    The first day we met he said that I reminded him of his aunt Mary, who grew to a fine old age despite having gone blind in one eye and deaf in both ears. Aunt Mary had to use a trumpet and yell “What?” whenever anyone spoke. But then he said I was nothing at all like her because Aunt Mary had never married, even though she was a woman of upstanding character and let everyone around her know it. Anyone could see that living as a spinster on the beneficence of my relatives was not to be my fate. Fate. That was the word he used, as if that was the word for my future and he had something to do with it.
    Now he leaned close and looked over my shoulder into my washtub. I believe he must have had sausage for breakfast, for his breath reeked of onion. He said my name again. Then he said he had a special task for me and I must come with him to his office. I looked around but the others were bent over their tubs and acted as if they had not heard anything at all. So I followed him around the side of the building and up the alley between the laundry and the lawyer’s office next door and through the front door underneath the bell that rang whenever a customer came in. Then William Oliver opened a wooden door behind which stood a flight of dirty stairs. In the room at the top, his suit coat hung from a curved hook on a tarnished brass stand, his hat on top of the stand.
    “Sit down,” he said, and pointed to the chair that faced his desk. The desk was a door laid over two sawhorses.
    I hesitated.
    “You have nothing to fear,” he said. He turned and stood with his back to me and studied the street below. I listened to the sound of a wagon and team as it moved by the building, the rattling of the harness and the grinding of the wheels. I sat.
    There were papers laid out across the desk and a ledger book with a green paper cover and a tin can out of which stuck two yellow pencil stubs. A loud sound came from the street, and William Oliver stepped back from the window. But still he looked out at the sky.
    “I was born and raised in Tennessee,” he said. He spoke like someone speaking to a friend, but I was not his friend, and I did not like being alone with him in his room. “I got some money when my daddy died and I came north,” he said. “It’s an old story. My eldest brother got the land. I got something to tide me over. I carried the New Testament, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress , and Huck Finn with me. Before he died, my daddy said that each of these would offer advice for the road ahead. He has not been wrong.” He turned to consider me. “Your father is raising you right?” he said. “Some sort of social training? Some expectation that you will rise?”
    I did not reply.
    He came toward me and sat down across from me and twisted in his chair and reached for a metal flask that stood behind him on a shelf. “I don’t suppose you’ll take a drink.”
    I shook my head.
    “Of course not,” he said. “But you won’t mind if I do.”
    “Mr. Oliver.”
    “William,” he said. He poured two fingers of whiskey into the flask’s cap and raised the cap to his lips and drank its contents in a single swallow. Then he lifted the cap and gestured at me. “I know your father,” he said. “I have met his wife. The beautiful Elise.” He looked at the cap and then lifted the flask, poured, and drank again.
    “My mother is dead,” I said in a flat voice. My mother is dead , I thought. She is dead.
    “I know,” he said. “Such a sad day. Such sorrow across the land. But