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you’re going, with something for you both to make you sleep.”
    “All I hope is you lay awake tonight and remember how little you were good for!” cried Fay.
    He took them on, through the necessary office gates, and when they came outside the hospital into the air and the sounds of city streets and of tonight, he helped them into his car.
    “I’ll phone Adele,” he said to Laurel. That was his sister in Mount Salus. “You can take him home tomorrow.” Still he did not turn to go back into the building, but stood there by the car, his hand on the door he had closed. He gave the drawn-out moment up to uselessness. She felt it might have been the hardest thing he had done all day, or all his life.
    “I wish I could have saved him,” he said.
    Laurel touched her hand to the window glass. He waved then, and quickly turned.
    “Thank you for nothing!” Fay screamed above the whirr of their riding away.
    Laurel was still gearing herself to the time things took. It was slow going through the streets. There were many waits. Now and then the driver had to shout from the wheel before they could proceed.
    Fay grabbed Laurel’s arm as she would have grabbed any stranger’s. “I saw a man—I saw a man and he was dressed up like a skeleton and his date was in a long white dress, with snakes for hair, holding up a bunch of lilies! Coming down the steps of that house like they’re just starting out!” Then she cried out again, the longing, or the anger, of her whole life all in her voice at one time, “Is it the Carnival?”
    Laurel heard a band playing and another band moving in on top of it. She heard the crowd noise, the unmistakable sound of hundreds, of thousands, of people blundering .
    “I saw a man in Spanish moss, a whole suit of Spanish moss, all by himself on the sidewalk. He was vomiting right in public,” said Fay. “Why did I have to be shown that?”
    “Where you come from?” the driver said scornfully. “This here is Mardi Gras night.”
    When they reached there, they found that the Carnival was overflowing the Hibiscus too. Masqueraderswere coming and going. The cat was off its chain and let inside; it turned its seamed face to look at them and pranced up the staircase and waited for them on the landing, dressed in a monkey coat sewn with sequins.
    “All on my birthday. Nobody told me this was what was going to happen to me!” Fay cried before she slammed her door.
    Her sobbing, the same two close-together, accusing notes running over and over, went on for a time against the thin sounding-board between the two beds. Laurel lay in the dark waiting for it to reach its end. The house took longer than Fay did to go to sleep; the city longer than the house. Eventually she heard the ludicrous sound of chirping frogs emerge from the now completed excavation next door. Toward morning there was the final, parting shot of a pistol fired far off. Nothing came after that; no echo.
    They got away in the afternoon. Judge McKelva’s body was on board the smooth New Orleans-Chicago train he had always so enjoyed travelling on; he had taken full pleasure in the starched white damask tablecloths, the real rosebud in the silver vase, the celery crisp on ice, the strawberries fresh from Hammond in their season; and the service. The days of the train itself were numbered now.
    In the last car, the two women lay back in chairs intheir compartment partitioned off from the observation section behind. Fay had kicked off her shoes. She lay with her head turned away, not speaking.
    Set deep in the swamp, where the black trees were welling with buds like red drops, was one low beech that had kept its last year’s leaves, and it appeared to Laurel to travel along with their train, gliding at a magic speed through the cypresses they left behind. It was her own reflection in the windowpane—the beech tree was her head. Now it was gone. As the train left the black swamp and pulled out into the space of Pontchartrain, the window