These are the kind of nerve-racking things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit this summer, because of all this suspense around here.

The world needs to have its Indian summer. The sun has retreated, deep into the skies, a kind of death has taken place. Indian summer shows the world in its most brilliant colors, and most sad, too, lying, as it were, in state. As a rule, in this gentle season, the people pass by, paying their respects, and in this way accustom themselves to the approach of winter.

But the autumn of this year was a freakish season. The warm time had no real September in which slowly to wane and die; the last weeks of this ninth month were as cold as any ordinary November should be. The leaves had hardly turned color before strong winds and icy rains had beaten most of them from their branches and made a pulpy slush on the sidewalks and streets. Even on fair days the sunlight was muted by a vast and heavy veil of clouds, and there was not much color to be seen in the city—only on the traffic lights and certain bold umbrellas. The early days of October did bring sudden and sunny splotches of warmth, intermingled with more rains, so that on certain afternoons children could walk home from school with their sweaters under their arms or tied about their necks, and there were brief and frantic rashes of roller-skating in the streets; but even on the finest mornings, most people, already made cautious by so many bleak surprises, left their houses wearing raincoats and rubbers.

It was as if the sun, by some awful accident, had suddenly been snatched from the world, and in the place of Indian summer was this terrible art of the skies, a phantasm of gloom and judgment and anger, with only the briefest glimpses of blue and gold.

And so it was, right into the second week of October, when Ralph Williams contracted a cold. Annabel had heard of recent instances of older persons who had gone from colds into pneumonia and died from it. Ralph hated the idea of death, and he offered only slight resistance when Annabel, after a telephone diagnosis from Dr. Bolz, argued that he should be put to bed.

Therefore when Saturday came around it looked as if Ralph’s room would be the family’s weekend headquarters. When Echo O’Brien arrived from Toledo at noon, she rushed straight up the stairs and found him and Clinton engaged in a game of checkers. The old man received her with a bleary-eyed grin. He was propped up on pillows and wearing brand-new green pajamas with a mandarin collar that made him look like a jolly and wicked old Buddha. Echo paused just inside the door, pocketbook in one hand, car keys in the other, her eyes big with concern.

“Ralph, I swear, if I’d known you was sick, I’d have brung my thermometer and nurse’s cap and two barrels of beer. Good lord, now listen, tell me how you feel?”