JERRY BUMPUS
119
scrawled, at last completing a dozen lines or so. Then he and Abbott sat
down and read them over several times and tried tearing them apart,
but it was dawn and the lines were awfully good.
Abbott didn't appear later in the day, and Lutz saw nothing of
Ockersly or Cookie. Lutz made himself tea and, sitting by his lamp, he
found , not at all by accident, late in the night, in the utter stillness of
the great empty house, the same lines in slightly different form over
which Abbott and he had struggled. They were from
The Providential
Species,
Abbott's first collection, published some thirty years ago.
Wearing pearls and a long gown of white satin and lace, as if out
for an evening, she found herself here instead, a wide hat and veil her
only concessions to the fact that she had traveled so far from civiliza–
tion. She took Ockersly's arm when he got out and came around to
help her from the car. With wonderful slowness she started up the
steps, her back straight, her head lifted, serenely indomitable before the
prospect of climbing all the way to the top. She paused, clutching her
throat beneath the veil and uttering two small gasping cries. And she
was indomitable before that, too, the more elaborate circumstance of a
disease which she bravely attempted
to
disguise. Though the veil, the
satin and lace perhaps weren't intended to conceal but complement.
She would inveigle the pack of afflictions stalking her and make them
her entourage, a claque of fairies in satin and lace, wearing pearls in
their eyes-and they would grace her, magically become her special
qualities!
She and Ockersly reached the top of the stairs. The veil was heavy,
thicker than muslin . Could she actually see through it? She extended
her hand. "At last," she said, breathless. "My dearest Hershel."
Maybe Lutz's jaw dropped, maybe he went bug-eyed. He hid his
face by taking her cold thin hand and putting his lips to it. She
murmured. Perhaps she wasn't speaking but gasping for breath. Lutz
began, "Madam ... "
"Please. Ida. Lovers have other formalities" -and she drew Lutz to
her. He smelled smoke in the veil and in her whitish yellow hair.
Ockersly turned away when Lutz glanced at him over her shoulder. "So
many years," she said. She and Lutz again looked at each other, or
rather Lutz stared into the veil and believed he saw the outline of her
rather long face, her lips lifted in a calmly leonine smile.
"I ..."
She waited.
"I hardly know how to say this, but ... "
She lifted the veil.
