began to retire, or retreat, more and more from an active life in architecture. The buildings he would have been called on to build came to seem to him at once heavy, obtuse, and lifeless, and at the same time ephemeral. He remained with the firm; he was constantly consulted, and his ideas and exquisite initial sketches (when reduced to ordinariness by his partners and their teams of engineers) continued to alter the cities of the east, hut they were no longer his life's work.
There were other schemes to occupy him. He designed a folding bed of astonishing ingenuity, in effect an entire bedroom disguised as or contained within a sort of wardrobe or armoire, which in a moment—a quick motion of brass catches and levers, a shift of heavy counterweighting—became the bed which made the bedroom a bedroom. He enjoyed that idea, a bedroom within the bedroom, and even patented his scheme, hut the only buyer he ever found was his partner Mouse, who (chiefly as a favor) installed a few in his City apartments. And then there was the Cosmo-Opticon: he spent a happy year working on this with his friend the inventor Henry Cloud, the only man John Drinkwater had ever known who could actually sense the spin of the earth on its axis and its motion around the sun. The Cosmo-Opticon was an enormous, hideously expensive stained-glass-and-wrought- iron representation of the Zodiacal heavens and their movement, and the movement of the planets within them. And it did move: its owner could sit within it on a green plush seat, and as great weights fell and clockwork ticked over, the dome of many-colored glass would move just as the heavens did in their apparent motion. It was a measure of Drinkwater's abstraction that he thought there would be a ready market for this strange toy among the wealthy.
And yet—strange—no matter how he removed himself from the world, no matter how he poured the rich gains of his working life into such schemes, he flourished; his investments turned over at a great rate, his fortune only increased.
Protected, Violet said. Taking tea at the stone table he had placed to overlook the Park, John Drinkwater looked up at the sky. He had tried to feel protected. He had tried to repose himself within the protection she was so certain of, and to laugh at the world's weather from within it. But in his heart he felt unsheltered, bare-headed, abroad.
In fact, as he grew older, he became more and more concerned with the weather. He collected almanacs scientific and not so, and he studied the daily weather surmise in his paper though it was the divination of priests he didn't entirely trust—he only hoped, without having reason to, that they were right when they read the omens Fair and wrong when they read them Foul. He watched the summer sky especially, could feel as a burden on his own back any far-off cloud that might obscure the sun, or that might bring others after it. When fluffy harmless cumulus trod the sky like sheep, he was at ease but watchful. They could combine suddenly into thunderheads, they could drive him indoors to listen to the dull fall of rain on his roofs.
(As they seemed just now to be doing, over in the west, and he powerless to stop them. They drew his eye, and each time he looked they were piled that much higher. The air was dense and palpable. There was then little hope that rain and storm would not begin soon. He was not reconciled.)
In the winter, he wept often; in the spring he was desperately impatient, rageful when he found heaps of winter still piled in the corners of April. When Violet spoke of spring she meant a time of flowers and baby animals—a notion. A single clear day in April was like what she had in mind, he supposed. Or May, rather, because it had become clear to him that her idea of the qualities of months differed from his: hers were English months, Februaries when the snow melted and Aprils when flowers burst, not the months of this harsher exile place. May, there, was like June here. And no experience of these American months could change her mind: or even reach it, he sometimes thought.
Perhaps that conspiracy of cloud on the horizon was stationary, a kind of decoration merely, like the high-piled clouds behind country scenes in his children's picture books. But the air around