Somewhere a woman was yelling for Sam to get his sister and come inside. It was just the usual streetlife serenade, no more and no less, but to Ralph it all seemed strangely false. He supposed it was because he had gotten so used to seeing Harris Avenue empty lately.
He turned to McGovern and said, "You know what was just about the first thing I thought of when I saw you in the Red Apple parking lot this afternoon? In spite of everything else that was going on?"
McGovern shook his head.
"I wondered where the hell your hat was. The Panama. You looked very strange to me without it. Naked, almost. So come clean-where'd you stash the lid, son?"
McGovern touched the top Of his head, where the remaining strands of his baby-fine white hair were combed carefully left to right across his pink skull. "I don't know," he said. "I missed it this morning.
I almost always remember to drop it on the table by the front door when I come in, but it's not there. I suppose I put it down somewhere else this time and the exact locale has slipped my mind for the nonce.
Give me another few years and I'll be wandering around in my underwear because I can't remember where I left my pants. All part of the wonderful aging experience, right, Ralph?"
Ralph nodded and smiled, thinking to himself that of all the elderly people he knew-and he knew at least three dozen on a casual walk-in-the-park, hi-how-ya-doing basis-Bill McGovern bitched the most about getting on in years. He seemed to regard his vanished youth and recently departed middle age as a general would regard a couple of soldiers who desert on the eve of a big battle. He wasn't about to say such a thing, however. Everyone had their little eccentricities; being theatrically morbid about growing old was simply one of McGovern's"Did I say something funny?" McGovern asked.
"Pardon?"
"You were smiling, so I thought I must have said something funny."
He sounded a bit touchy, especially for a man so fond of ribbing his upstairs neighbor about the pretty widow down the street, but Ralph reminded himself it had been a long day for McGovern, too.
"I wasn't thinking about you at all," Ralph said. "I was thinking about how Carolyn used to say practically the same thing-that getting old was like getting a bad dessert at the end of a really fine meal."
This was at least half a lie. Carolyn had made the simile, but she had used it to describe the brain tumor that was killing her, not her life as a senior citizen. She hadn't been all that senior, anyway, just sixty-four when she died, and until the last six or eight weeks of her life, she had claimed to feel only half of that on most days.
Across from them, the three girls who had been playing hopscotch approached the curb, looked both ways for traffic, then joined hands and ran across the street, laughing. For just a moment they looked to him as if they were surrounded by a gray glow-a nimbus that illuminated their cheeks and brows and laughing eyes like some strange, clarifying Saint Elmo's fire. A little frightened, Ralph squeezed his eyes shut and then popped them open again. The gray envelope he'd imagined around the trio of girls was gone, which was a relief, but he had to get some sleep soon. He had to.
"Ralph?" McGovern's voice seemed to be coming from the far end of the porch, although he hadn't moved. "You all right?"
"Sure," Ralph said. "Thinking about Ed and Helen, that's all.
Did you have any idea how screwy he was getting, Bill?"
McGovern shook his head decisively. "None whatsoever," he said.
I "And although I saw bruises on Helen from time to time, I always believed her stories about them. I don't like to consider myself a tremendously gullible person, but I may have to reassess my thinking on that score."
"What do you think will happen with them? Any predictions?"
McGovern sighed and touched the top of his head with his fingertips, feeling for the missing Panama without realizing it. "You know me, Ralph-I'm a cynic from a long line of them. I think it's very rare for ordinary human conflicts to resolve themselves the way they do on TV. In reality they just keep coming back, turning in diminishing circles until they finally disappear. Except disaPPearing isn't really what they do; they dry up, like mudpuddles in the sun."