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looked out at the rain resentfully, as though it had purposefully done her an injustice, and went on wheezing instructions. Maids, florists, saxophonists, and pastry-bakers paraded through the lake to be interviewed and waded out rejected. My mother was fastidious: she shivered, and no one could satisfy her visions. Plainly, it was all to be a spectacle—she planned embankments of flowers, a whole heaven of colored lanterns, bowers of ice cream, antiquated syncopations. It was to be very like the coming-out party of her own girlhood, which had miscarried—the invitations withdrawn in anger and shame (the former hers, the latter her parents'). "They said I had to choose between capital-P Party and small-p party," she reminisced hoarsely, while the rain and the carpenters' hammers continued to drum, sometimes in one voice, sometimes fugue-like, through the house. Half-sick and hallucinated, she was about to succumb to what had never taken place. She blew her nose and coughed, and wandered about with streamers of tears escaping her round lids; and her special little snort, preceding her down a hallway, made the hammers beat faster, and the rug-men roll, and the polishing-machines race in circles, and the doors fly from their hinges. Only the rain could not be frightened into a display of conscience: it came down wearily, systematically, reservedly, meticulously, and ladled whirlpools into the lake on the terrace.
    I tried on the gold and silver gown. My mother held her handkerchief to her chin and struggled with what promised to be a violent exhalation: instead it was only a gasp. "Everything looks better in Paris," she scraped out, surveying my figure. "I suppose it's their light."
    "You don't think I'll do?"
    "Perhaps under the lanterns," she equivocated. Her meditative glower alarmed me: it was indirect; it was queer.
    "What's the matter?"
    "Fm afraid I made a mistake. I don't like you in those metallic colors."
    "They don't become me then?" I said, appealing to the mirror.
    "Oh, they become you. It isn't that. And the fit is very nice, you know. It's only—" she hesitated scrupulously—"you look as though you're dressed up in money."
    "You mean I advertise you."
    "No," she said pensively, "not me."
    "I can't help it," I murmured, "if I look like cold cash."
    My mother rasped privately into her cloth. "You look like your father," she ventured at last.
    It was the first time in months she had spoken of him; she cast her head regretfully aside, as though the gesture could erase the smudge of sound from the air. But I continued to hear it; her words hovered tangibly near, like winged insects, prowling and skimming; and the dress she had brought for me singed my skin with a blaze of gold and silver, the hot gold of my father's beach and the burning silver of his sea.

5
    I wore it. I wore it while the little orchestra assembled, and the violins, tuning up, quarreled with one another; I wore it while the guests and their umbrellas came jollying through the door in bunches, like complicated domes of cabbage, dropping shining puddles on the glazed ball-floor; I wore it all that while. And then the dancing began, and at once and pleasurably and plausibly the moon bloomed behind a trellis of corpse-thin clouds, like an old skull working itself out of a grave, and a certain smell steamed up from the river, and at that moment the long flood ended. And still I wore that gown, silver and gold, lust-bringing, redolent not of wealth (which I knew to be capacious, freeing, salubrious, like air or water) but merely of money—small money, cheap and bad money, beggar's money. And he, brought on by my mother's look, which could conjure but never exorcise, he wore it with me, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck: when I glittered it was with his greed, and when, on the other hand, standing quite still that I might subdue the flash and clink, I tried to dissemble dullness, it was with his cunning and his guile. But he was with me, and all around me; he