"Roy, you keep at it, hear? Hang on to her and one of these times the dams will bust and she'll cry her eyes out. The laid-back thing is a pose. I remember how it was with me. I didn't want anybody to know how torn up I was inside. It seems as if it happened to me a hundred years ago. But I'll never forget it. When her mother left her and went to New York which to a kid can be the other side of the moon she wondered if it was because there was something wrong with her and her mother didn't really love her. That it was all just pretend. But Mother came back with hugs and presents. Now she is gone for good and Janie is wondering again if she is unlovable. So she is keeping people at arm's length. Okay, so that's parlor psychology, but give it a try. Okay?"

"Okay. I'll try it. Lindy's mother is pretty down, of course, and so I've left Janie with her maybe more than I should have.

But she has a married brother in Toronto and they are coming _ down for the memorial service and they've asked her to go P back up there with them for a while before the cold weather starts. I'm going to encourage her. Then Janie and I will have a lot more time together."

"When's the service?" it "A week from tomorrow. A lot of the magazine people will be coming up for it. I really miss you, Peg. It doesn't seem to be letting up at all."

"I wouldn't want it to. If I go through it, I want you going through it too."

"When I promised Janie a trip down there for Easter vacation, she just raised one eyebrow and looked at her fingernails and said, "How terribly nice!" Big reaction, huh? Easter seems too far away from where I sit."

"What we got to do is both hang in there."

"On the way back up here I decided you are right about holding off until the spring."

"How goes your work?"

"I kept in pretty close touch, you remember. A few loose ends. Not too many. We jumped a little too soon on some things, and a little too late on others. Name of the game. All three funds look very solid right now, and down at the shop they smile at me whenever they see me. Listen, would it bother you if I called you up quite a lot? Even when there isn't much to say?"

"I would like that quite a lot, Roy."

"Good. Got to go. Consider yourself kissed."

"Likewise. Bye."

In the middle of the afternoon, John Tinker Meadows ordered a car from the vehicle pool and drove down to where he had failed to keep that final date with Molly Wintergarten. The gate had been destroyed. It seemed to have exploded outward.

He got out to examine the pieces and he found the small shards of headlight lens glass in the dirt and realized then how angry she had to be when she drove out. She had driven right through the gate. He had a mild sense of wonder.

The double-wide had been shoved off its foundations by the high water. It was unlocked, the door ajar. He climbed up to the door and looked into the shadowy interior. He smelled wet rot and mildew. He jumped down and dusted his hands and strolled about under the trees, picked up a few stones and tossed them out into Burden Pond. He had the habit of thinking in terms of symbols and how they could be worked into sermons. The house off its foundations. The shattered gate. The smell of decay. The ripples that spread from the small stones he threw.

He could interpret them as symbols, and figure out all the sad and touching ways they could be used, but they were without impact upon him, just as her funeral service and burial service had touched him no more than would a public television special about coming of age in Samoa. It seemed to him as if there was some sort of membrane stretched across his mind. It had a springiness about it. Everything dented the membrane imperceptibly and bounced away, leaving what was underneath quite untouched. He saw that the importance or un importance of the event made no difference in the degree of penetration and the height of rebound. A bug song was as significant as thunder, a hangnail equivalent to death. Perhaps, he thought, the membrane is stretched across nothingness.

Perhaps, without knowing I was doing it, I have used myself up. So now there is nothing left to feel any emotion with.

Perhaps I have achieved true holiness in the Hindu sense a person who is not affected by anything and who has no effect whatever on his environment, who lives in a holy condition of total indifference to time and space. And he remembered, without surprise, from his study of the history of religions, that the truly holy man in the Hindu religion used total sexual debauchery as one of the tools for attaining the ultimate holiness.

It is, he decided, a kind of warped freedom. I can stay or go, live or die, laugh or cry, and it will not mean anything of any importance to anybody, ever. I have used everything up.

He looked at the time. Mary Margaret wanted him to join her in more preliminary discussions with the Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy. The boys had taken a Gulfstream down and picked him up and brought him back this morning, and Mary Margaret had been guiding him all day, and no doubt answering a few thousand questions. He hoped the Reverend Birdy would jump right in, hopping and whirling with energy, ready to take a big preaching load as soon as the audiovisual people smoothed some of the rough edges.

He walked over to the car and it looked curiously unfamiliar to him. Had not the one he had driven down been a darker color, a deeper maroon? This two-door was red. The interior did not look the same. The dashboard array had that same unfamiliar look. Yet he knew he drove it down. It had been standing in the shade in the corner of his vision, and he was totally alone.

It gave him a feeling of apprehension which he quickly shook off. Little things had been happening for at least a year.

Maybe longer. One of the office women would bring him a letter transcribed from a tape he had dictated, and he would not be able to remember saying any of those things he read in the letter. But it would be a letter so bland and unimportant it could not possibly be any part of some kind of conspiracy. He would find himself in front of a bookshelf with no idea of what book he was after, or why he was looking for it.

He got into the strange car, started the engine, turned up the air conditioning and slammed the door. He drove back to the gate and stopped and got out and stared blankly at where the gate had been, at the shards of wood spread about, and the glitter of glass, and suddenly remembered that Molly had driven right through it. She had been very angry. He decided to tell Finn Efflander to unload this piece of land for whatever they could get. It was too far from the Center to be of any possible future use to them.

He was back on the Interstate before he remembered that Finn was gone for good. So he would have to tell that Harold Sherman to sell the property which had been given to the Church in a codicil to a will. It depressed him to think of talking to Harold Sherman. The man seemed forever on the verge of bowing to him, or dropping to his knees. Please, sir.

Yes, sir. No, sir. And he had an irritating habit of dry-washing his hands while talking. Though he seemed competent, he did not have Finn's knack of summarizing the operations in a brief verbal report. When asked about anything, Sherman brought in pounds of paper, ring binders, printouts. And Sherman kept telling him not to worry about anything, not to try to get into the trivia of operations, telling him he had far more important work as the spiritual leader of the worldwide flock. He kept saying everything was under control, that he was busy installing new controls and procedures which would make everything run more smoothly than ever before.

He slowed down at the place where Molly had been fatally injured, but he was not certain it was the right place. There was no remaining sign. He pulled off onto the wide shoulder and got out. Trucks slammed by, gusting hot air and diesel stink at him, an instant gale that rocked his car on its springs. He walked a hundred yards north, waited for a gap in traffic and then walked back on the grass of the median until he was opposite his car. The sun was a weight upon him. He walked the same approximate distance south and as he was waiting to cross back over to the side where he had parked, he saw a metallic glint in the grass another fifty feet further south. As he approached it he saw that it was a chrome door handle. He picked it up. There seemed to be a certain familiar contour to it, the way it fit his hand. He had opened the door of her little yellow car for her many times. It had been ripped off the door.

He then noticed the ruts in the soft turf where probably the ambulance and the tow truck had driven onto the median. The door handle was sun hot, almost too hot to hold comfortably.

He flipped it away. It was tangible, but not a bridge to memory of her. In eulogy, all he could think of was the trite and borrowed "Alas, poor Molly!" More tangible than the door handle was the memory of the sweat-tang scents of her body, fresh from the contrived misdirection of the tennis club.

He was almost across the highway when he heard the shocking blare of air horns, scream of tires, and he dived to safety as the lumber truck thundered by, a man up in the high cab shaking his fist. It upset John Tinker Meadows to realize he had crossed without even looking for northbound traffic. He could have died more quickly than she, and very near the same place. Everything today seemed to be turning into symbols and hidden messages. He remembered to look for a long gap in the traffic before he drove back into the right-hand lane.

Twenty.

The Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy was nothing like what Mary Margaret Meadows had expected, and in fact was not like anyone she had ever met anywhere. He was much larger, for one thing. Six foot five, she guessed, and weighed at least two-fifty. When they walked together he made her feel dwindled. He wore a white suit so wrinkle proof it presented a smooth and dazzling expanse of back and chest. He wore a blue shirt with blue lace ruffles, and a starched ministerial collar. He wore a broad-brimmed planter hat with a blue bandanna band. The white cuffs of his trousers were tucked into dark blue boots of western style.

His head was huge, his face broad and brown, the features thickened by time and weather, from potato nose to scarred jutting brow. The wide lips lay firm and level, showing nothing, asking nothing. He moved slowly and with a ponderous courtliness, stepping way back with extravagant half bow to let her precede him. He made so little comment on what he was told she began to hear her own voice in her ears, prattling along, full of empty little nervous giggles. He was not content to ride past anything in the air-conditioned limousine. He asked politely each time if he could get out.

"Of course!" she kept saying. But he kept asking. His black hair was coarse and touched with gray, his eyes a vivid and memorable blue.

There is not much you can say about an airstrip and a small control tower, five aircraft including the helicopter. Those are all the airplanes, and those are the men who fly them and maintain them. The tower has reception from the weather satellite that covers this whole part of the East from Washington to Jacksonville."

He climbed up into the tower with the heavy agility of a big polar bear. He stayed up there talking to one of the employees for ten minutes while she waited in the shade of a hangar. After that he went into the larger hangar and talked to the boss 3*3 mechanic. He did not volunteer any information as to what he had talked to them about, and she felt a reluctance to ask him.

He seemed fascinated by the Mall. He covered all of it, strolling slowly, stopping to look into every store and walking through the larger ones, up and down the aisles. He stood for a long time without comment, his back against a wall, watching the traffic flow of people. Many turned and stared at him, then asked each other low-voiced questions.

Rolf Wintergarten had come back to work that morning.

She took Tom Daniel Birdy up and introduced him. For once he did not stay and talk, but went back out into the corridor and said, "What's wrong with that there man?"

"His wife died very recently. We buried her here Wednesday at midday. She was in an automobile accident and never regained consciousness. They hadn't been married very long.

She was much younger than Rolf. She was his second wife."

"You wait right here," he told her, and he turned and went back in. Before the outer door closed she saw him taking big strides toward the door to the inner office and saw one of the women trotting after him saying, "Sir? Sir!"

It was twelve minutes by her watch before he came back out.

He took out a big white handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes, then blew his nose.

"Might be to be'p him a little maybe."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I made him up a para-bell."

She frowned at him, puzzled.