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clung; he was the terrorist guest at my mother's party.
    For it
was
her party, although ostensibly it was mine; it was plainly hers despite the swaying of the Bon Voyage banner among those Oriental lanterns. Everything had taken place exactly as she had foreseen. All the rooms had become one room, and butlers slid here and there dumbly offering canapes; the bar was very discreet. It was a gallant scene, albeit a little soiled with romantic overuse, and I felt that the dancers, who composed themselves too decorously, as for a pointillist picture in a suburban dinette, knew it: even the musicians were uneasy with their worn dogmatic tunes evoking nothing, and their jittery short chords and dated trios, and a kind of dissatisfaction, or perhaps merely impatience, sighed through their playing.
    I went upstairs to my mother. She was in bed with fever; she lay kneading the bedclothes and sweating angrily.
    "What are you doing up here?"
    "I came to see how you are."
    "Go down, I hear a waltz."
    "Are you all right?"
    "I can't sleep, I'm sick. I'm fighting ghosts." She menaced me feebly. "Damn it, go down."
    "I'll stay awhile if you want."
    "No, your perfume is agonizing. I can't bear sweetness, I have ghosts in my head. Your rustling is killing me. Go down, damn it, go down."
    The party was failing. There was laughter, but it belonged to arguments and mockery. The strangers ate, danced, drank. They did not know me, they did not care about my voyage, they did not believe in it: they sat on gilt-legged chairs wiggling their long black shoes and cursing the music.
    I appealed to the saxophonist.
    "Can't you get them to play something else?"
    "Mrs. Vand gave us our program, miss."
    "I don't like it. Do something else."
    "We promised Mrs. Vand we'd follow her list exactly."
    "You sound terrible. They just woke you up after thirty years."
    The saxophonist blushed. "We do dur best You know Mrs. Vand instructed us exactly."
    "Look, it's my party—"
    "Sorry, miss. Mrs. Vand is paying us."
    One of the butlers came by with a tray of crystal goblets.
    "Stuff tastes like watered punch," someone remarked. "Is she a teetotaler?"
    "Who?" his friend wanted to know.
    "Mrs. Vand."
    "Not on your life! Though maybe the daughter is. It's the daughter's party, after all—"
    "Do you know her?"
    "The daughter? No. Do you?"
    "No. No one does."
    I went upstairs again.
    "Are you back?" said my mother.
    "Who did you ask here anyway?"
    "Is something the matter?"
    "It's a rotten idea, the whole thing."
    "I'm sick," said my mother. "I'm sick, go down."
    "They can't tell they're drinking champagne," I accused her.
    My mother plucked the sheet upward to her face and coughed into it guiltily, warding me off with it. "It must be the poets," she scratched out finally. "You know—My staff."
    "Your what?"
    "It isn't easy to find people in summer," she broke out in her odd fever-voice. "Practically everyone's out of town. I asked whom I could," she acknowledged finally. She took a harsh breath. "Why won't you go away?"
    I waited. "I thought you said something about decent society."
    "I'm sick, I have ghosts in my brain. Go away."
    "The ghosts are all downstairs," I murmured, getting up and going to the door.
    Behind me I heard my mother bore fitfully into her pillow. "So is William's boy," she uttered faintly; her huddled back divulged not how far she had gone for me, but how far she had given me up.
    I found them after a while, my mother's "staff," eight pale poets, small light-eyed supercilious lads; two of them were the critical young men I had overheard earlier. I observed that their goblets, which the ingrates were still clutching, had been freshly filled. They had camped down all together, in a cluster, surrounded by idle dancers still vaguely bobbing on the margins of the talk, and ferocious-looking girls with violently curly hair, and girls as plaintive and unaware as butterflies, and earnest angry minuscule-nosed balding young men with slipping eyeglasses. The