109

THE PORTABLE I^-LU

"Things", Lu-lu once said, "happen to me that

started out to happen to someone else. I simply stand

still and they fall about me like snow or birds." This,

like so many of Lu-lu's abrupt statements about herself,

succeeded In conceptualizing the girl while at the same time

being not quite true. The New England summer that year

Indeed seemed to exist only for her---completely, exuber

antly, selfishly, she accepted that season as her own while

the rest of us marked only the paper progression of the

calendar days. That summer "happened" for her, but far from

standing passively wile eventspommeled her, she rushed for

wards, claiming not only heat and sea and lazy mornings but

people---Bob and myself and even the others---- collecting

us as a child would butterflies In a Jar to place on a shelf—

the symbol of a particular phase In a life.

June was not possessed by Lu-lu. She had not yet

arrived. She was then unknown — unnamed like the new sign

less shops. That tepid limbo month held only the pale New

Yorkers sanding down their cetboats and children with pink

shoulders and large dogs. The Island resort was still encased

In the drowsy Introspection of winter the days so quiet

you could hear the sound of hammers on the air, the flap of
 110

sneakers on the brick walks.

June --- foggy, uneventful, bridesmaid to the summer

and the month In which the Seaview Inn officially opened for

those aging ones who returned faithfully year after year to

mildew quietly on the window-seats of their private rooms.

The Inn was small and old and the dining-room catered only

to guests — each of the septuagenarians possessing a partic

ular table, holding dominion over It as they would a pew In

church, their various containers of colored pills grouped

around sugar bowls like floral decorations. There ws.s a

great deal of crystal and thick cloth and a mahogany china

closet which, lacking china, served primarily as a prop for

Mrs. Taylor, hostess and owner, whose nervousness and constant

exhaustion made it a necessity. There was also a silence in

the dining room so complete that one would think plates and

forks were made of felt; a silence extending like something

tangible to the doors which swung into a breezeway and then

into the welcome steam and clutter of the kitchen.

There were four waitresses. Mary-Agnes, Kay and I

came from the mainland on the same day, boarding boat and

bus together and not realizing that we were working at the

same place until we all got off at the gates of the Inn s

garden. Mrs. Taylor met us with much vague clucking, gave

us towels, uniforms and a key to our "apartment" - a

 Ill

cluster of rooms on the top floor of a building which housed

the Seavlew's tool-shop and a dairy-bar that specialized in

hot-dogs-on-a-stick and warm root-beer in frosted mugs. The

inside stairway was winding and dark like the ascent in an

amusement-park funhouse, finally emerging into a small sitt

ing-room papered with pictures of boats end smiling, unknown

faces and ventlllated by a skylight. The skylight was always

open, and we'd often come back from work to find a gull

stalking indignantly back and forth across the sofa.

Mary-Agnes, personifying that feminine type of the

double name, writer of long, witty letters in which dots

over I's become circles, sleek product of the city, quickly

and carefully unoacked her many bags and sought the organi

zation of home. She bought three cans of grey paint, equal

izing the cost among us ?nd scotchtaplng a note on the door

of the empty room, informing our unknown roomate that she

owed 61^ for home Improvements". She then proceeded to paint

the floor in the sitting room, helpfully leaving a broad

strip in the middle where we could walk.

Such an orderly and maternal mind was a necessity,

particularly for Lu-lu who delighted in ignoring her admon

itions and advice. Mary-Agnes with neat drawers and colffed

heed, underlining the pleasant thoughts in books with pen and

small ruler, was the light upon which Lu-lu's darkness was
 112

all the more pronounced, the requirement of contrast upon

which the latter thrived,

Lu-lu enjoyed tramping around after Mary-Agnes,

but it was Kay with whom she spent most of her time in the

beginning. Kay was pretty and foolish, guileless and awe-

inspired by everything from a scallop to a speedboat ---

replying to wonder with a quick, white smile and a sigh

like a baby being dipped into the warmth of his first bath.

Her personality was easy, accessible and two-dimensional and

Lu-lu, confiding in her, flattering and befriending her,

removed all props around her, leaving Kay, in the end, sol

itary and consumed. Lu-lu needed people -- even I, the

indispensable watcher; like the multitude of others, the

necessary "voyeur” to her flagrant Intensity and childish

whims. Possessing a feverish individuality, she needed

others like thirst needs water --- needed them even to give

her a name.
She arrived a week later than we, Mrs. Taylor

was Just about to hire someone else when, one morning, she

appeared in the kitchen and standing first on one foot, then

the other, asked the cook in a voice of tanned Innocence if

she could frost the cake he was baking. Within five minutes,

everyone had noticed her — Mrs. Taylor because what she had,

for over a week now, considered to be mythical (the "fourth

waitress") had become flesh with chocolate icing on her face

 113

because she was in the way,

and. no shoes; Bob, the cook,
flhP was a foreign element, bhe
he rest
and the rest of
of us
us because
because sne .p.TTpd with
^ ^ h a laundry bag filled with
nt^ with wit
"e oontentadl, settled In the
-umpledolothanandbooKs, stripped. Like
-0. „nioh everything es^^^^

e ,„nlshed end unpopular of

peace with the most spH^ *
the furniture. of tripping

.s a ° ^^^„lng »lth the old people

a dropped potato-o
V + cats while tnen
about diseases and pe^ even more dangerous
■Ku the inn, she wa
^he kitchen. Outside loaJam of thoughts
. . «nd exhuberant, a mgJ
’*'0 normalcy----- clever while talking about
wall^®*^
®'nd Vague desires, e^® gold driftwood and common
2®n or a wild island fl®'* i^^hteen years old and a
She was eig
shells to the tourists* ^ skipping both the

Senior in college----- careless intelligence

Hers wes a
®lgbt and tenth grades. it were a spare handker-
>'hich she carried about as it until you caught

chief and you were never thinking of

yourself refering to some ^ the life around her.

the peculiar way m .ualneee that el^ng abcut

this casual
Was this carelessnes , tramp happily over
u. 4- caused her
^er all the time,
freshly-painted middle strip of the apartment's floor, or
to periodically quote entire acts of Shakespeare or read our
fortune In the lip of foam at the edge of the sea or a glass
of beer that endeared her to the cook and made him name
her like a stray pup or a shaggy-headed waif that didn't
have a name — Lu-lu, a little Iodine, a precocious, undis
ciplined, , quick-witted Lu-lu. It seemed Improbable that

she had ever been known by anything else.

Bob, like many of the men who lived all year In
that strictly seasonal town, was fully employed only In the
summer. In the winter he played cards, went scalloping and,
with his sons, repaired his rambling clapboard house on the

coast while his wife taught second grade in the community

school. Each June would bring a new group of waitresses,
painters, fishermen and sightseers to the Island, and each
summer. Bob would emerge as cook, and with sleek, dark hair
lacking either part or comprimlse and a voice smooth as water,
would treat the newcomers with the slick, condescending humour

and proud scorn that repaid. In part, the emptiness and

futility between October and May, the emptiness that their
absence and the dearth of sun made inevitable — his contempt

of them enabling him to endure himself through those months

when all that remained was snow and poker- and a town of

closed shops.
 115

^ tv vesrs nli self-educated elth a

He was forty yee^s
r,a a brillia>^^ mind, both of which
poetic use of language and a
. KitterlJ, indicating that he could
he used carefully ana
and bitter
bit^e^ jr, ^, ^ wAnted
with. his
u.« „ life
1 ife if he had only wanted
wa,
hav e done very much more bewildering

'^n- Lu-lu wae entrance protected her.

Uccneletency. teased. „ee alternately

This seemed normal enough t nery-Agnee thought
Shy and effusive, docile and wild,

him corrupt and a bad 1""“"'’°®'^ jpeb too friendly

»Lu-lu«, she eeW,

« flanker to yourself.
and naivet. You're a standing in the
Id Lu-in. incj'
«Uhmmmm», ea vitchen, Lu-lu and Kay
, j-oom ana js -*
hreezeway between dint g Lu-lu had a book
U . nlste of botcahes.
Sharing one fork and a P ^ laundry bucket and
closed li*i
Propped up against the equal avidity.
d. sy^^P
'^aa gulping down words an j ^dmit.
but a coninan. ■«
«He's nothing interesting, but he's
I mean he's bright and fn f^ary-Agnes sighed,
a. ,r ffood nature.
"^-aklng advantage of 5"^ tful °f ® woman. Why now you re
"Aman should always be enough, but you don't
. vhich is
Piaying poker with him>
®ven know how]" , muttered. "He takes
point-, W-l“
"A vpenny S' ^

®^ay all my tips."

 116

"And keeps them, and he talks about you and takes

you around with him as though you were a toy poodle."

"He*s my pet too. Don't worry Mary-Agnes, I'll

get It all back --- what Bob has taken will all return to

Lu-lu.« They began to laugh, Lu-lu stopping as abruptly as

she had begun, and looking solemn, left Mary-Agnes' and Kay's

giggles trail off lonely as a piece of string.

The door swung open, exposing the tablau of an

aged couple peering at menus and a distraught Mrs. Taylor.

"What, what are you doing?", she gasped. "Books,

stolen food, aet out. Out! Tend to your people", she cried

dramatically, and waving her fat arms like wooden poles,

scattered the girls like chickens before a broom

It was Inconceivable that Lu-lu should ever be

fired. She was absent-minded, stood in the dining room as if

her ankles were broken and was frequently late. Yet the

guests adored her. They Invited her on boating picnics with

their young and handsome nephews, gave her Yacht Club pass
cards and loaned her their cars. Smiles on old faces emerged

as if from cold storage as she talked with them and wrinkled

hands continually stuffed crisp bills into her own. Lu-lu's

pockets never Jangled. They whispered richly. She seemed

as indispensable to the old folk's contentment as their

bottles and packets of pills.

ijt, -
 117

Her only difficulty was with one of the staff —

Mrs. Holmes, a distant relative of Mrs. Taylor's and the

Inn's receptionist. People, on their first encounter ^Ith

Lu-lu, momentarily found her appalling and then appealing.

Mrs. Holmes found her merely appalling, and the girl, real

izing this, reveled in the quiet rage and dislike that she

caused in the older woman. Such a conscious effort to dismay

angered Bob, who spent hours berating Lu-lu about it followed

by hours of ignoring her completely. At such times, she

would do anything to ms-ke him aware of her again---from

printing her name in cloves on the baked ham to buying books

of crossword puzzles for his amusement.

"You are being conned, Lu-lu", Mary-Agnes would say.

"You are buying newspapers and magazines for his crossword

puzzles. He looks at you as if your brain were wraped in

cellophane, and you do anything he wants. That is a dangerous

trend Lu-lu."
"Who", Bob would say to her, hunched in dark tor^-.

ment over the empty squares, "ever told you you were bright?"

She was much too impatient and illogical to do them well,

and she amazingly managed to fill out some of the puzzles

with all the wrong words and combinations. They sat at a

table littered with peanut butter and Jelly Jars in the

kitchen or down by the dock in Bob's car — he really complet

ing them in ink while Lu-lu scrawled nonexistent, lovely

 118

words as laboriously as a child on lined yellow paper..

It was the childishness that had always protected

and excused her that he denied — at least outwardly, and

it was the retraction of this denial that she seemed to insist

upon most stubbornly. In the afternoons, as we waited for

tardy guests to finish their deserts, we sat in a small room

off the kitchen trying to converse with Bob's shy and freck

led sons who ate standing up, leaning against the ice-chest,

gulping their chocolate milk down quickly through pink straws

and eating around the raisins In their bread pudding. The

bus-boy would be there and the dishwasher and the Inn's lone

bellhop, and Bob would wander in periodically and stand

behind Lu-lu, waiting until his boys clattered up the street

with their empty pop bottles before he began the inevitable.

HAnd who is going to be the man who makes a woman

out of you, Lu-lu?"

"But I am a woman, Uncle Bob."
' "But you fancy yourself a child." avt-.-

•^Because being a child makes me more lovable."

He laughed. "Do you want everyone to love you

Lu-lu?"
"Only those who are Important."

"And of course you find me important."

"The most Important", she would chime, and In the
 119

midst of degreds.tion seem eager and good-natured.

The conversations in the back room including us

all seemed to be put on for our benefit, v?hlle at the same

time, we felt as if we were tapping a private phone. Like

an octoscope, the pattern of the afternoons depended upon

the variations of people and moments, and yet each day it

was as though the daily scene had been planned, recorded,

replayed while we sat applauding and grateful, waiting for

the deviation that would prove that play was not perfection.

And always ending with the same sly words --- tired

and expected.

"Jumpi Lu-lul "

The smile and the disarming shrug. "How high, ol'

Rob?" And her friends would say that they feared for her.

But it was not the scenes at the help's table

that were important not the mental Jousts that they Indulged

in every day. That was sport — that was a ball tossed and

received. It was the episodes seemingly born of themselves

that made all the difference---words and actions, composed

and lonely, unrelated to her known self, that exposed the

menace concealed by the innocence.... that showed the plotter/^

usually masked by the unaware.

"It's the impossible situation that I enjoy", she ^

once said to me on the beach. "If one achieved only that

 120

which was accessible to all, it would naturally be meaningless

....as if all the rings on the merry-go-round were made of

brass. So veer as close as possible to the seduction of

that which emphasizes your own fallibility. The gentle

seduction and destruction of that which has made you less. "

Lu-lu seldom spoke to me when we were with others,

but when alone, she insisted on long, turgid soliloquies

which could hardly be called conversations but which, I also

believe, could only have been spoken to me, for I was perhaps

the most conscious and yet the moat passive of us all.

"And must one be defeated in the process?", I asked.

"It may seem so at first." She skipped a thin

flat stone over the water. It split the surface and skimmed

upwards again in a high arc, striking the water again in

little stuttering skips before it sank. "But one must be all

things at one time or another in order to be receptive to

events. So that all things ma^ happen to you and you to all

things, you sometimes have to fall back a bit."

"Have you always won, Lu-lu", I said. Are you so

malleable that you will always win?"

These stilted little talks by the sea were as much

a part of her as the awkward eagerness seen in the dining

room or the restless and immature intellectuality observed

at a party, but they occurred so Infrequently that they

 121

seemed almost imaginary. Then she had escaped again by fall

ing silent.

“What? oh sure. One can’t lose."

The summer went on —the crov;ds changed, it

became foggy in the morning and cooler at night. We rented

sailboats and soootej:’S and Lu-lu would sometimes catch fish

which she gave to the Inn and which Mrs. Taylor advertised

on the menu as Fresh Island Scrod---Only This Morning Happy

In The Deep. We met Bob's wife one evening after work. It

was still light at nine o'clock then and the air smelled of

clams frying and salt, and she smiled genially at us as we

came out of the gate with our cardigans and left-over cookies

wrapped in paper towels. After that, Lu-lu made a special

point of seeking her out, always greeting her with a witty,

vertiginous rush of self. The movie theatre burned down,

Kay served an omelet to a popular television comedian and we

had parties every night after the dairy-bar closed.

The parties were invariably and patiently broken

up by the local police or Mrs. Taylor's son-in-law (he worked

in a gas-station and wore shirts with "Eddie" stitched in

red above the pocket) about two a.m. but they were nonethe

less highly successful and always crowded, people spilling

like animal crackers from the narrow box of the apartment

onto the roof. Lu-lu became more and more impatient as the
 122

night went on, dipping quickly into people's minds and Just

as quickly out again, pouncing on thoughts and feelings as

if they were small bones to be cleaned and consumed. At

times Bhe was at her most charming---impressing and bewild

ering us all with a febrile energy — while other moments she

would sit gloomily sedate, storing fixedly at a new acquain

tance, later saying only that they reminded her of a long

bus-ride.
At one party, Lu-lu sauntered around, peering from

beneath the thick man® of hair that almost concealed her eyes

and sipping milk from a shot glass — finally settling down

beside Kay who was being overwhelmed by the .blond blandness

of an ivy —lea.gured wrioh—kids' companion". He had been

giving an adventurous account of personal history for half

an hour and manfully gulping great quantities of beer, had

his arm 8.round Keys's shoulder.

"Ooooh", Kay said, "I Just don't know how you find

the time. He's writing a novel, Lu-lu, as well as sailing

snd playing tennis.... "

"I saw you yesterday." Lu-lu sloshed milk about

in the glass. "You were playing with a very tiny man."

"That was on of the boys I ,ahh, baby-sit for,"

he said in a deep voice and sniffed loudly.

"Oh, but your form was good."

 123

"He tutors them in french and math too," Kay gurg

led her words as if from underwater. He's like, a Rennais-

sance man."

"How many bones in the human body," Lu-lu muttered.

"True or false,"

"What?" he said.

"Hee", Lu-lu grinned. "I said, 'Gee'. What's

your novel about?"

"Mostly autobiographical." He patted his shirt and

gazed at Kay from lowered, sun-bleached lashes. He smelled

so clean he almost squeaJced. "I've been around. I think

It'll be a pretty interesting book,"

"This winter he's going to be a ski-bum", Kay said

and gave him her pack of cigarettes. "I think it's wonderful

that that terrible accident didn't, like, mar your mental

attitude towards skiing. Why, he was in the hospital for

months." she said to Lu-lu quickly assembling all the

romanticisms that might appeal to her,

"Aren't you afraid you're going to die young",

Lu-lu said, "I mean, being the Byronic type and all..."

"yeah, yeah", he said eagerly. "Life's a day.

I'm not gonna sit around on my ass waiting for dusk. I

don't want to stick around when I can't swingl"

"Rupert Brooke. A poet. Narcissus and an awful bore
 124

Too. Also. He died at an early age of a mosquito bite on

his upper lip. Beware of mosquitoes”, Lu-lu grimaced at

him and bolted to her room. There she clambered Into the

green pajamas that appeared to have once belonged to a

very fat maiden aunt and began to read, Ignoring those who

came In and sitting awkwardly at the foot of her bed like the

Invisible panda-bears of the Imagination, coaxed her to

rejoin the party.

Despite all this, or perhaps because of It, she

remained the fond enigma of the summer crowd It was

always her absence from a group that was noted, her wandering

attention and approval that was sought, her precociousness

that we all attempted to make our own. With Inimitable,

Ingenuous skill, she pushed about and captured our lives like

chessmen, checking us on the small white square of conven

tionality. Lu-lu was adding to her collection of wooden

souls and we — even Bob — were loosing the game.

He was defeated the morning Lu-lu went to town

and brought back gifts for all of us — undoubtedly picked

up under questionable circumstances as she had no money

with her. All were consciously flamboyant---a heavy stamp

of butterflies to press upon sealing wax, a coke bottle that

had been melted and flattened Into a weird surreal agony, a

recorder upon which only one plaintive note could be regls

tered ~ and yet Bob's present was the strangest of all.

 125

She brought him a twisted little metal object, about an

inch high which seemed to be nothing more than an abstract

lump of holes and une'^en planes and which defied familiarity

because whichever way one viewed it, it seemed to be from

the wrong angle. Everyone said it looked like a diseased

molar, but Lu-lu knew it was more, and told Bob that it was

everything and anything he wanted It to be,

"You can use it to open bottles or Jangle against

you key—chain and make people think you have money in your

pocket or you can Just carry it with you to keep from being

lonely", she said, and Bob took it and put it in his pocket.

It could be anything and for Bob it was all things

it was his "portable Lu-lu", his quixotic, intriguing, tiny

love-object---because after she gave it to him, there was

s change, not a dramatic or sudden one but very definitely

a change---as Imperceptible as ice melting in a glass or

the new length of the nights — and Just as sure. Mrs. Holmes

shuffled the papers on her desk and spoke of Lu-lu's recently

observed reluctance to "mix with the summer young people."

Mrs. Taylor noted the frequent absence of the Ihn's Jeep

which Bob used now to transport Lu-lu to the beach and the

coffee-houses up-island and fretted silently. And in the

kitchen. Bob became more indulgent and less verbally cruel,

Lu-lu remained the same---filling and commanding our lives

as completely as before, although we were involved less and

less with her life.

 126

She came down with a bad cold one morning after

a rainy night of sailing in a borrowed woodpussy and couldn't

come to work for three days. She lay in bed res.dlng and

drinking apple Juice in a room smelling of medicine and

sea-soaked clothing, and Bob would leave work as soon as

the serving hours were over and go up to see her. Walking

up the stairs later, we could hear their laughter or eager

conversation and see Bob and sometimes two or three younger

people standing about in the cramped room watching the girl

propped up against her mountain of pillows as if they were

awaiting the distribution of fortunes.

She came back to the Inn as healthy as before,

getting up at least an hour before the sleepy Kay and

Mary-Agnes, to help Bob make biscuits or weed the gardens

for Mrs. Taylor. Every day she'd go swimming before break

fast and walk all over town, looking carefully at everything

she had seen at least ten times before and talking so fast

that it was as if she expected somebody to cut the whole

summer away from her in an even ice-blue chunk before she

could do it herself.
It seemed Impossible that the summer should end —

that life being much more real than any existing before June,

and in our fashion, each of us clung to it. We expected

Lu-lu to be the last to leave, but one day she told us all

abruptly that she was leaving after the lunch hour and that
 127

she had already privately given Mrs. Taylor her week's notice.

She shoved her collection of faded clothes, worn

sandals and shells Into the same laundry bag, emptying the

room as completely as if it had belonged always only to the

dust and the cracked mirror that reflected the stripped bed

and barren shelves. She insisted upon taking the bus, even

though there was the Jeep and any number of cars available.

Bob came to the apartment and called for her, giving her a

lunch he had packed in a shoe box and nervously fingering

his sunglasses. The orange bus pulled up in the lot beside

the Inn, and Bob turned quickly and walked away across the

garden, but always looking back until Lu-lu, flinging her

dark hair back impatiently, ran after him and kissed him

longly — before the dim and watery eyes of Mrs. Weinhelraer

who was sitting under a lemon umbrella reading Antonia,

and the more alert and blinking eyes of Mrs. Holmes with

whom Lu-lu had at last made peace. Then she was in the bus,

leaning out the window over the shiny black lettering of

Regional School and driving away.

"I'll write to you especially. At least once",

she shouted to me and no more to anyone. Bob had left, and

Lu-lu continued to grin and wave from the window until the

bus rounded a corner.

The sea and sky wed September as soon as she comes to
 128

New England — changing color and design, tempting the native

rather than the visitor who must return to less fickle lives.

I stayed on, even after Kay and Mary-Agnes left, even though

most of the tourists had gone and there weren't many tips.

When I went out for breakfast, there was a thick dew on the

grass, and the radiators were thumping and steaming in the

Inn. The Seaview was the only guest house on the Island

that had heat, and they always advertised it in the little

Jazette, hoping to get the early fall trade when the sea was

very blue end the harbor empty. The mornings would be rusty

and chill, but by afternoon, it would have warmed up, and

I'd bicycle down to the beach. With so few people around,

the gulls could swoop right down to the wooden walk leading

to the lighthouse, dropping their shells and floating up

high and away again on the air currents. Lu-lu had always

brought them stale bread and after awhile, they seemed to

recognize her. She wsnted to ma.ke pets out of everything,

but she never quite succeeded with the gulls. They were

much too wild for that, but they did greet her every day

with a grey, liquid swoop and come close enough to pick

the bread out of her hands. It was important for her to be

something special, even to the birds. They would never come

to me, and when I approached their huddled groups on the

beach, they would scream and shuffling hurriedly off, fall

away over the ocean.

 129

The loneliness of the beach became that of the Inn.

Just Bob, the bus-boy and I were left, although some nights,

when they had more than twenty reservations, an older town-

woman would come in and help me serve. Bob never spoke of

Lu-lu, but he always seemed alert to the possibility of her

presence, and whenever he heard the door slam or sometimes

even when he looked at me, mixing juice or making salads

behind the counter, I knew he was imagining she was there.

One morning when I csine back from town, I found him in her

room. I wasn't surprised to see him there. I Just wondered

how many times he had been there before, thinking of what it

really meant to have that room empty, thinking of the fact

that life does go on — that after August there are pale

arms and separations, responsibility and snow on the fishing

docks, and yet thinking too that that fact didn't make any

difference.
I saw him standing in the room, his body slumped

against the wall as if it were void of bone, and wondered

why Lu-lu thought this was necessary---my mind fluttering

over the past three months like a film projector, seeing,

imagining, recalling everything that had happened and stop

ping with the image of what Bob vjas at that moment — a

tired, middle-aged man with the hair lov; on his neck the color

of squirrels.
"Your friend Lu-lu», he said. "It's not right
that people should need her so», and dropping the metal port-

able on the bureau, he brushed past me, ^olng from the

apartment and, I later discovered, from the town-- desert

ing fleeing, casting off the Island, the freckled boys, the

elderly ones awe.ltlng oatmeal and cakes, the home of many

years---discarding them all like a too-warm coat.

It was quite a delicious shock to the little

town who thought it knew its own so well. In the contempla

tion of what he had been to them and to his own family, they

would hardly believe that he was the innocent, that it was

his seduction that had been enacted that summer. They would

be unable to trace his disappearance back to a warning or a

fight or an affair, and they would hardly think of Lu-lu

at all.
In November I received the card that she had pro-
mlsed. It was postoarked from the town of her college and

written casually In pencil, speaking of the dullness of

school, the purchase of a basset hound, the wish to find

snow at Thanksgiving so she could go ekllng. She had sent

the scrap of promised oorrespondanoe---trusting that I

would know the awfullness that lay behind the fact that
this was all there was to ssy — that she had never planned

to have to tell the truth any differently.