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he studied and would one day turn it off and write it all down. Naive, no doubt. But being with him made Charlotte realize how on her own she'd grown grimly practical, a student of what was required for praise and advancement. The pleasure he gave made her forget all that. Yes, he was deluding himself, mistaking a simple thing like taking drugs for the complexity of figuring out how to live, but the very youthfulness of the error opened something in her, a nostalgia of her own for romances she'd never had.

"He didn't use me, Wilkie," she said. "You're wrong about that. I did what I thought was best."

At the beginning of spring, Eric told her he'd been to a doctor and was tapering off. This was why he felt so sick, he said. Some days he barely left the bed. She ran baths and washed him just as he had washed her those first weeks after they made love. It was on a Friday afternoon that whatever supply he'd managed to build up ran out. To go off too quickly was dangerous, he said.

She hesitated at first. They could stay together there in the apartment and see it through, call the doctor if necessary. But he looked awful, his skin green, his eyes sunken. It was just a short walk through Washington Square Park to a building down on MacDougal Street. Four flights up past the old Italian ladies chatting on the landings. Seven or eight kids, in their twenties most of them, crowded into a little apartment, the shades pulled over open windows, everyone smoking, shouts from the street and the sound of motor engines bouncing off the building opposite into the dank, carpetless living room. The boys wore wing tips like her father's. Wing tips and turtlenecks, the girls in corduroy pants and oversize sweaters. They stared at her as she imagined they would at their mothers. Someone was writing up a flyer. There were meetings she should attend. "In the kitchen," someone told her, guessing her purpose for being there. A man with a lazy eye, who spoke with a slight Canadian accent, was the one she gave the money to and received in return a small envelope. Walking back up lower Fifth Avenue, Charlotte noticed the couples hand in hand, emerging from the brightly lit lobbies of the fancy buildings, headed out to dinner, the Henrys and Betsys, who when they glanced at her saw one of their own, her anxious mind calculating the efficacy of her disguise, wondering if they could ever guess her errand.

To her surprise, Eric had made the bed while she was gone, and tidied the kitchen as well. He'd cleared his books off the table and stacked them by the door.

"You'll take less?" she asked, and he nodded.

Despite the sickness, he looked younger than when she'd met him, his features somehow more open, no longer organized by inquisitive zeal. Again, she offered to phone the doctor. He had never been to one, of course, so there wouldn't have been a number to call. Instead, she put the envelope down on the counter and went into the front room. One thing she couldn't do was watch him at it. Still in her coat, she sat by the window, looking through the bars of the windows at the passersby.

Once the summer came, she thought, they would go up to Massachusetts and use the Finden house for a few weeks when her parents weren't there. They'd take the Jeep to the lake and on the way back buy corn and fruit at the farm stand. Come fall, Eric would get back to his classes, she would finish her thesis. They might get married in a year. She would meet his brothers and sisters. His parents would come around, eventually.

The Day was a public Thanksgiving for the Mercies of Heaven in the Year that is past, Sam intoned. I laid aside the subject I intended and in the Morning I composed a sermon on the line in 1 Samuel. She wept, and she did not eat. A sermon on the Thanks offering, prosecuting that Observation, that a sense of Affliction was oftentimes a Hindrance to the work of Thanksgiving, but that it ought not to be so. My son died about Noon. My sermon in the Afternoon proved very acceptable, and reasonable, and serviceable.

Why you? Charlotte thought. Of all I've read and forgotten, why a pompous old preacher? Why not Whitman's singing or