knew no such thing. He had just seen it-had seen Nat try to grab the aural contrails his fingers left behind.
"Ralph?" Helen asked. "Are you all right?"
"Sure." He looked up and saw that Helen was now surrounded by a luxurious ivory-colored aura. It had the satiny look of an expensive slip. The balloon-string floating up from it was an identical shade of ivory, and as broad and flat as the ribbon on a wedding present. The aura surrounding Gretchen Tillbury was a dark orange shading to yellow at the edges. "Will you be moving back into the house?"
Helen and Gretchen exchanged another of those glances, but Ralph barely noticed. He didn't need to observe their faces or gestures or body language to read their feelings, he discovered; he only had to look at their auras. The lemony tints at the edges of Gretchen's now darkened, so that the whole was a uniform orange.
Helen's, meanwhile, simultaneously pulled in and brightened until it was hard to look at. Helen was afraid to go back. Gretchen knew it, and was infuriated by it.
And her own helplessness, Ralph thought. That infuriates her even more.
"I'm going to stay at High Ridge awhile longer," Helen was saying.
"Maybe until winter. Nat and I will move back into town eventually, I imagine, but the house is going up for sale. If someone actuilly buys it-and with the real estate market the way it is that looks like a pretty big question mark-the money goes into an escrow account.
That account will be divided according to the decree. You know-the divorce decree."
Her lower lip was trembling. Her aura had grown still tighter; it now fit her body almost like a second skin, and Ralph could see minute red flashes skimming through it. They looked like sparks dancing over an incinerator. He reached out across the table, took her hand, squeezed it. She smiled at him gratefully.
"You're telling me two things," he said. "That you're going ahead with the divorce and that you're still scared of him."
"She's been regularly battered and abused for the last two years of her marriage," Gretchen said. "Of course she's still scared of him."
She spoke quietly, calmly, reasonably, but looking at her aura now was like looking through the small isinglass window you used to find in the doors of coal-furnaces.
He looked down at the baby and saw her now surrounded in her own gauzy, brilliant cloud of wedding-satin. It was smaller than her mother's, but otherwise identical... like her blue eyes and auburn hair. Natalie's balloon-string rose from the top of her head in a pure white ribbon that floated all the way to the ceiling and then actually coiled there in an ethereal heap beside the light-fixture. When a breath of breeze puffed in through the open window by the stove, he saw the wide white band belly and ripple. He glanced up and saw Helen's and Gretchen's balloon-strings were also rippling.
And if I could see my own, it would be doing the same thing, he thought. It's real-whatever that two-and-two-make-four part of my mind may think, the auras are real. They're real and I'm seeing them.
He waited for the inevitable demurral, but this time none came.
"I feel like I'm spending most of my time in an emotional washingmachine these days," Helen said. "My mom's mad at me... she's done everything but call me a quitter outright. and sometimes I feel like a quitter... ashamed..."
"You have nothing to be ashamed of," Ralph said. He glanced up at Natalie's balloon-string again, wavering in the breeze. It was beautiful, but he felt no urge to touch it; some deep instinct told him that might be dangerous for both of them.
"I guess I know that," Helen said, "but girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It's like, 'Here's your Barbie, here's your Ken, here's your Hostess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it'll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you'll get the blame." And I think I could have gone down the line with that-I really do. Except no one told me that in some marriages Ken goes nuts. Does that sound self-indulgent?"
"No. That's pretty much what happened, so far as I can see."
Helen laughed-a jagged, bitter, guilty sound. "Don't try to tell my mother that. She refuses to believe Ed ever did anything more than give me a husbandly swat on the fanny once in awhile... just to get me moving in