Echo sat down again. “Oh.” She looked at the lighted cigarette in her hand, and waved it toward Clinton. “Thanks, lover.” Then she took a couple of deep puffs, and as the downstairs door banged shut, she started to sing:

” ‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,

What the heck do we care.’ “

Berry-berry’s footsteps were heard on the stairs.

” ‘What the heck do we care,

What the heck do we care no-ow?’ “

Then she wrinkled her forehead and poured all of her attention onto the checkerboard.

Berry-berry stood at the door of the bedroom. “Hi, everybody.”

During the moment in which greetings were exchanged in the room, Clinton continued to study Echo’s face. She looked up from the checkerboard and said, “Hi, handsome. Your daddy’s skinnin’ me alive.” Then she gave Berry-berry a smile so filled with love that Clinton felt a pang of deep sadness. It was like a blow to the chest and it had caught him off guard. He wondered why this smile should have so great a power over him: simply because he coveted it for himself? Then why not other smiles on other days?

There was a graver reason that he could not name, even in his own mind, but it was within him and he felt it: that in Echo’s gift of love was some unearthly purity that Berry-berry could never return. Then suddenly the sadness grew and extended itself beyond any connection with the persons in the room; and for a moment Clinton knew that in this difference, the difference in the love offerings people make to one another, lay the reason for all the pain of the world. And immediately this knowledge was gone from him. It had been like the visit of some ghostly bird, a truant from heaven: at the instant he had tried to catch hold of it, the creature was gone. Of its message, nothing remained but a vague sense of doom.

Clinton imagined that in some way Echo O’Brien knew these thoughts that were going on in him, and perhaps even shared them.

Now Berry-berry stood between Echo and Ralph, studying the checkerboard. He touched Ralph’s shoulder and indicated a possible move.

Ralph said: “That’s what I was gonna do anyway. Listen, you think I need help? You’re crazier’n I give you credit.”

Clinton thought of the bottle in Echo’s pocketbook. He wished there was something he could do for her that would give her such perfect calm and peace that she would have no need for the nerve medicine. But he could think of nothing at all.

“He sure don’t need any help,” Echo said. “I bet you didn’t know this; I bet you didn’t know my worthy opponent has got a bigger brain than Albert Schweitzer! Mamma said it’s a fact. She studied his bones in a snapshot.”

“Echo,” said Clinton.

“What you want, baby?”

“I feel like washing your car. You want me to wash your car?”