“Then Victor Hugo. Do you suppose he didn’t take an interest in the things people said to each other?”

“Can’t I make you understand? This is a—an obsession!”

“Balls.”

“Thank you. Point C. I don’t know why I bother—but I might as well finish. — Ralph?”

A long silence. Maybe she was lighting another one of his bone-dry cigarettes.

“Ralph, he has no friends. At all. And he misses his brother.”

Neither one of them talked for a long time. I wondered what was going on. Then I heard Ralph.

“I think we did wrong to move in here. It’s a barn, all those rooms. If Berry-berry’d given us some hint he wasn’t gonna make the move with us, we could’ve . . . It’s almost spooky up there. All you can hear is the clock and that goddamned refrigerator.” (A pause) “If he’d just said, ‘Now look here, Ralph, I may not make the move with you to Seminary Street, I may just fly the coop instead,’—Christ knows I wouldn’t of sit on him. Hell, with all those rooms, I feel like a Boston billionaire. And what am I worth, I’m not worthy fifty thousand dollars. But I hate an empty room. Did you throw away The Painted Desert when we moved?”

“No,” Annabel said. “It’s in your closet. Do you want it? It’s not interlocking either, but if you want it, I’ll get it.”

“No, I just wanted to make sure we still had it.”

A moment passed, and then Ralph said, “No postcards, no nothin’, huh?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s too damn busy and more power to him. You can bet your (pause) bottom dollar, I didn’t sit around writing postcards when I was on the bum.”

“Don’t say ‘on the bum’! It was a lecture tour, and you know it. —Clinton! Are you in that bathroom?”

I moved away from the laundry chute.

“Yes, why?”

“Listening?”

“Listening to what?”

“Never mind,” she said. That was the end of the talk between Ralph and Annabel. She is now at the kitchen table writing a letter to Bernice O’Brien. I hope she asks me to mail it for her.

While Annabel Williams wrote her letter that evening, Clinton sat in the basement helping his father with the jigsaw puzzle. There was no conversation between them. Clinton knew the old man’s mind was not on the puzzle: once, for instance, he had hold of the very piece he was looking for, but instead of putting it in, he went to his hiding place behind the furnace and poured himself some bourbon.

These puzzles had been in the family for more than twenty years so that by now the pieces were as familiar to Ralph as his own memories. Some days they would fall together almost without any effort at all on his part; at other times the cardboard fragments seemed so capricious it would have been a relief to learn that some devil had actually reshaped them, carved new notches into some and, into others, totally irreconcilable curves. His rememberings followed a similar pattern. Therefore, whenever he came upon one of these snags in the puzzle, his thoughts would turn inevitably to his old days on the road.