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window.

"Mrs. Vogt, your mother called our office around noon, saying something about the help stealing. When I come out here, you'll excuse me but she was talking out of her head and it looked like things wasn't tended to. Sheriff thought he ought to get ahold of y'all first, if you understand me. Mr. Vogt being before the public and all."

Marian understood him. Mr. Vogt was commissioner of public works inSt. Louisnow and was not in the party's best graces.

"To my knowledge, nobody else has saw the place," the deputy said.

Marian found her mother asleep. Two of the old people were still sitting at the table waiting for lunch. One woman was out in the backyard in her slip.

Marian telephoned her husband. "How often do they inspect these places?.. They must not have seen anything... I don't know if any relatives have complained, I don't think these people have any relatives... No. You stay away. I need some Negroes. Get me some Negroes... and Dr. Waters. I'll take care of it."

The doctor with an orderly in white arrived in forty-five minutes, followed by a panel truck bringing Marian's maid and five other domestics.

Marian, the doctor, and the orderly were in Grandmother's room when Francis came home from school. Francis could hear his grandmother cursing. When they rolled her out in one of the nursing-home wheelchairs, she was glassy-eyed and a piece of cotton was taped to her arm. Her face looked sunken and strange without her teeth. Marian's arm was bandaged too; she had been bitten.

Grandmother rode away in the doctor's car, sitting in the backseat with the orderly. Francis watched her go. He started to wave, but let his hand fall back to his side.

Marian's cleaning crew scrubbed and aired the house, did a tremendous wash, and bathed the old people. Marian worked alongside them and supervised a sketchy meal.

She spoke to Francis only to ask where things were.

Then she sent the crew away and called the county authorities. Mrs. Dolarhyde had suffered a stroke, she explained.

It was dark when the welfare workers came for the patients in a school bus. Francis thought they would take him too. He was not discussed.

Only Marian and Francis remained at the house. She sat at the dining-room table with her head in her hands. He went outside and climbed a crabapple tree.

Finally Marian called him. She had packed a small suitcase with his clothes.

"You'll have to come with me," she said, walking to the car. "Get in. Don't put your feet on the seat."

They drove away in the Packard and left the empty wheelchair standing in the yard.

There was no scandal. The county authorities said it was sure a shame about Mrs. Dolarhyde, she sure kept things nice. The Vogts remained untarnished.

Grandmother was confined to a private nerve sanatorium. It would be fourteen years before Francis went home to her again.

* * *

"Francis, here are your stepsisters and stepbrother," his mother said. They were in the Vogts' library.

Ned Vogt was twelve, Victoria thirteen, and Margaret nine. Ned and Victoria looked at each other. Margaret looked at the floor.

Francis was given a room at the top of the servants' stairs. Since the disastrous election of 1944 the Vogts no longer employed an upstairs maid.

He was enrolled inPotterGerardElementary School, within walking distance of the house and far from the Episcopal private school the other children attended.

The Vogt children ignored him as much as possible during the first few days, but at the end of the first week Ned and Victoria came up the servants' stairs to call.

Francis heard them whispering for minutes before the knob turned on his door. When they found it bolted, they didn't knock. Ned said, "Open this door."

Francis opened it. They did not speak to him again while they looked through his clothes in the wardrobe. Ned Vogt opened the drawer in the small dressing table and picked up the things he found with two fingers: birthday handkerchiefs with F.D. embroidered on them, a capo for a guitar, a bright beetle in a pill bottle, a copy of Baseball Joe in the World Series which had once been wet, and a get-well card signed "Your classmate, Sarah Hughes."

"What's this?" Ned asked.

"A capo."

"What's it for?"

"A guitar."

"Do you have a guitar?"

"No."

"What do you have it for?"Victoriaasked.

"My father used it."

"I can't understand you. What did you say? Make him say it again, Ned."

"He said it belonged to his father." Ned blew his nose on one of the handkerchiefs and dropped it back in