end, ivory-colored, offering itself like something precious.
He wanted to go to Catherine again but forced himself home instead. When he let himself into the apartment, he found his mother standing in the middle of the parlor, on the carpet she had paid too much for. It seemed for a moment—only a moment—that she was herself again, that she had made supper and put the kettle on.
She stood transfixed in her nightgown. Her hair flowed to her shoulders; wisps of it stood around her head in wiry confusion. He had never seen her so, in the parlor with her hair undone. He remained dumbly at the entrance, uncertain of what to do or say. He saw that his father stood at the window with his breathing machine, looking not out at the street but into the room. He saw that his father was frightened and confused.
He said, “Mother?”
She stared at him. Her eyes were not her own.
“It’s Lucas,” he said. “It’s only Lucas.”
Her voice, when she spoke, was low. She might have feared being overheard. She said, “He mustn’t sing to me no more.”
Lucas glanced helplessly at his father, who remained standing at the window, looking into the room, watching intently the empty air before his eyes.
His mother hesitated, searching Lucas’s face. She seemed to be struggling to remember him. Then, abruptly, as if pushed from behind, she fell forward. Lucas caught her in his arms and held her as best he could, awkwardly, with one hand under her left arm and the other on her right shoulder. He could feel the weight of her breasts. They were like old plums loosely held in sacks.
“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”
He got a better purchase on her limp form. He worked his right arm around her waist.
She said, “I know what language you sing in now.”
“Come back to bed. Come along, now.”
“It isn’t right. It isn’t fair.”
“Hush. Hush.”
“We done what we could. We didn’t know what’d happen.”
“Come, now.”
Lucas snaked his arm farther around her, supporting her under her opposite armpit. At his direction, she walked unsteadily with him into the bedroom. He set her down on the bed. He pulled her legs up, arranged her as best he could, with her head on the pillow. He drew the counterpane over her.
“You’ll feel better if you sleep,” he said.
“I can’t sleep, I never will. Not with that voice in my ears.”
“Lie quietly, then. Nothing will happen.”
“Something will. Something does.”
He stroked her hot, dry forehead. It was as impossible to tell time in the bedroom as it was at the works. When she was quiet, when she slept or did not sleep but was quiet and breathing steadily, he went out of the room.
His father hadn’t moved. Lucas went to the window and stood beside him. His father continued staring at the empty air. Lucas saw that the seven pennies still lay on the tabletop, untouched.
He said, “Father, are you hungry?”
His father nodded, breathed, and nodded again.
Lucas stood with his father at the window. The ashman ambled by, dragging his bin. Mr. Cain shouted, “No place, everyplace, where’s the string of pearls?”
“I’ll get you something,” Lucas said.
He took the pennies, went out, and found a man selling a cabbage for three cents, and a woman selling a hen’s egg that, after some argument, she let him have for four. It seemed it might be propitious that his mother had asked after chickens and he had gone out and found an egg.
He cooked the egg and boiled the cabbage, and set a plate before his father. He was seized by an urge to take his father’s head in his hands and knock it sharply against the table’s edge, as Dan did with his machine at the works, knocking it when it threatened to seize up, ringing his wrench against its side. Lucas imagined that if he tapped his father’s head against the wood with precisely the correct force he might jar him back to himself. It would be not violence but kindness. It would be a cure. He laid one hand on his father’s smooth head but only caressed it. His father made noises when he ate, ordinary slurpings combined with low moans, as if feeding were painful to him. He lifted a spoonful of cabbage to his mouth. A pallid green string dangled from the spoon. He slurped, moaned, and swallowed. He took a breath, then ate again. Lucas thought, Four across, six down.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
Lucas read his passage. He put out the lamp but could not sleep. He lay awake in the room. There were the walls. There was the ceiling, with its black triangles of missing plaster and its stain in the shape of a chrysanthemum. There were the pegs on which the clothes hung, his and Simon’s.
He rose and went to the window. Emily’s light was on. Emily was lazy and cross, Catherine said so. Her stitches had sometimes to be resewn, but she remained sullen, unrepentant.
And still, Simon had gone to her. Only Lucas knew. Once, a month or more ago, he had looked out the window and seen Simon there, with Emily, who’d left her curtains open. It had seemed impossible at first. Simon had said he was going out for his pint. He was promised to Catherine. How could he be in Emily’s room? For a moment Lucas had thought that some other Simon, his living ghost, had gone there to haunt Emily, because she was lazy and cross, because her stitches were sloppy. He’d watched as Emily stood slightly apart from that other Simon and removed her bodice. He’d watched her breasts tumble out, huge and lax, with aureoles the color of lilacs going dark with age. He’d seen Simon reach for her.
Emily had gone to the window then, to draw the curtains, and seen Lucas watching her. They’d regarded each other across the empty air. She had nodded to him. She had smiled lewdly. Then she’d closed the curtains.
Lucas had wished Simon dead that night. No, not dead. Brought low. Brought to justice. He’d imagined consoling Catherine. He hadn’t asked for what happened to Simon. He hadn’t meant to ask for that.
He stood now at the window. Behind her curtains Emily was still alive, still fat and lewd, still eating Turkish delight from the tin. Lucas wondered why he’d wished harm to Simon and not to Emily, who was more at fault, who had surely lured Simon with some trick. Lucas struggled now to wish her well, or at any rate to wish her no ill fortune. He stood for a while at the window, wishing her a long and uneventful life.
In the morning, there was nothing to give his father for breakfast. His father sat at table, waiting. Lucas didn’t speak to him about food. He kissed his father’s forehead and went into the bedroom to
