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toward her, like the gold ring on a merry-go-round. ‘Gone away to catch the bus, away, away to catch the bus,’ she would sing to Spencer during the long evenings they were left together.
    Maud was five and liked being left home with Spencer who was old , twelve. He was offhand with her but kind, like a preoccupied hunter with his admiring dog. The house was very quiet. From the parlor windows she watched boats on the river, the moving string of lights over black water, tankers mostly, and some small shadowy white yachts and tugs working their way noisily to the port of Albany.
    Maud told Spencer the boats were going to their night duty. He listened to her fancies absently, for he was usually intent on his homework or on an old train set he was repairing. It had been given to him by Mr. Rossi, who raised mushrooms in dark sheds in Ravena, the next town to theirs, and had belonged to Rossi’s son Angelo, now grown up and become a priest. So intent was Spencer on restoring the caboose that Maud had to make her river-traffic observations over and over again. Finally he would grin at her. He never answered, but she knew he had heard and was satisfied. If he said anything at all to her queer ideas it would be to call her by the pet name he had given her: ‘O Beastie!’ She never minded it, because she could discern the affection in his voice. She loved Spencer dearly in return, and she knew, even then, that she was indeed an ugly little girl.
    Spencer and Maud had adjoining bedrooms. When she was very little, the solid sliding door between their rooms was kept open. But later Spencer began to have secret projects, plans he wrote down on the left-hand blank pages of discarded ledgers from the mushroom plant, notes he didn’t want anyone to see, things he was planning to build out of his father’s stores of wire and silver paper. Later still, he had other occupations that took him to his bed in late afternoon. Maud could hear the springs of his bed making tinny, tuneless sounds. Once he pulled the door shut, he told her never to try to open it, and she never did. She listened to the sounds behind the door, the dropping of tools, Spencer talking to himself, his contented sighs accompanying the rasps of the bedsprings. From her exclusion she learned valuable lessons: she knew more about the nature of reality when it was hidden from her or merely suggested to her, lessons, her roommate Liz told her, that were well known to photographers.
    Maud never minded Spencer’s shutting himself away. So great was her fondness for him that she felt protected from behind the door, knowing that he was there. She felt safe going to sleep, and happy when she woke in the morning to hear the thumping, rushing, banging sounds of Spencer dressing for school. Sometimes Maud knelt on her bed and crooked her neck so she could watch him from her window walking up the road from their house to the school she knew was there but had not yet been to. She could see his back covered by the heavy plaid coat with a belt which he wore all the time he was growing up until it became small enough to be made into a jacket. His books swung from his bare hand by a strap and his other hand was always in his pocket, pockets being their mother’s suggested substitute for gloves. Their cat, a narrow brindled tomcat named Flo (for their mother, Florence, who in turn had been named, providentially, for Florence Nightingale) would follow him to the top of the hill and then come back to wait for Maud to come out later on. Flo was not allowed in the house, ever. Their mother thought cats stole the breath from babies and made older children sneeze.
    The air left behind in the house by Spencer seemed protective, friendly, patient, to Maud. Close to nine o’clock, a little later in the winter when the roads were bad, her mother walked down the hill from where the bus had dropped her off. ‘Drop me off here,’ Maud once heard her say to a