mysterious halls. "Boy," he'd say, "you ought to go to school with my father. He never lets you forget a thing." On the other hand, when they questioned him about schoolroom fixtures like the Pledge of Allegiance or Arbor Day or Prince Henry the Navigator, he was made of ignorance. They thought he was strange, when they noticed him at all.
"So Claude Berry's dad got in trouble for keeping him out of the public school, and it became a case," Cloud was saying. "All the way to the State Supreme Court."
"Bent our bank accounts out of shape," Doc said.
"And eventually was decided in our favor," Mom said.
"Because," Cloud said, "It was a religious thing, we claimed. Like the Amish, do you know about them?" She smiled slyly. "Religious."
"A landmark decision," Mom said.
"Nobody's heard of it, though," Doc said, wiping his lips. "I think, the court surprised itself by the way it decided, and it was kept quiet; don't want to start people thinking, get their wind up, so to speak. But we've had no trouble since then."
"We had good advice," Cloud said, lowering her eyes; and they all consented silently to that.
Smoky, taking another glass of sherry and arguing from ignorance, began talking about a loophole in the Standards he knew of—that is, himself—and the superior education he'd anyway received, and how he wouldn't have it any other way, when Doctor Drinkwater suddenly struck the table with his palm, gavel-style, and beamed on Smoky, the light of a bright idea in his eyes.
What About It
"What about that?" Daily Alice said to him much later when they lay in bed.
"What?"
"What Dad suggested."
They had just the sheet over them in the heat, which only since midnight had begun to break apart into breezes. The long white hills and dales made by her body shifted cataclysmically and settled into a different country. "I don't know," he said,, feeling muzzy and thoughtless, helpless against sleep. He tried to think of some more pointed answer, but instead fell off into sleep. She shifted nervously again and he was snatched back.
"What."
"I think of Auberon," she said quietly, wiping her face on her pillow. He took her up then, and she hid her face in the hollow of his shoulder and sniffed. He stroked her hair, running his fingers soothingly through it, which she loved as much as a cat does, until she slept. And when she was asleep, he found himself staring into the sparkling phantasmal ceiling, surprised by sleeplessness, not having heard of the rule whereby one spouse can trade a restlessness for the other's sleep—a rule spelled out in no marriage contract.
Well, what about it then?
He had been taken in here, adopted, it seemed not an issue that he would ever leave. Since nothing had before been said about their future together, he hadn't thought about it himself: he was unaccustomed to having a future is what it was, since his present had always been so ill-defined.
But now, anonymous no more, he must make a decision. He put his hands behind his head, carefully so as not to disturb her still-fresh sleep. What sort of a person was he, if he was now a sort of person? Anonymous, he had been as well everything as nothing; now he would grow qualities, a character, likes and dislikes. And did he like or dislike the idea of living in this house, teaching at their school, being—well, religious he supposed was how they would put it? Did it suit his character?
He looked at the dim range of snowy mountains which Daily Alice made beside him. If he was a character, she had made him one. And if he was a character, he was probably a minor one: a minor character in someone else's story, this tall story he had got himself into. He would have his entrances and exits, contribute a line of dialogue now and then. Whether the character would be crabby schoolmaster or something else didn't seem to matter much, and would be decided along the way. Well then.
He examined himself carefully for feelings of resentment at this. He did feel a certain nostalgia for his vanished anonymity, for the infinity of possibilities it contained; but he also felt her breathing next to him, and the house's breathing around him, and in rhythm with them he fell asleep, nothing decided.
While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where