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When I went back to the cemetery in October, half a year after her death, I could not remember at once where Hopestill was buried. At the time of her funeral, I had not heeded any landmarks, and all I could see, in my mind’s eye, was her grave as it was yawning for her casket and, a few minutes afterward, as it became a fresh mound and pile of flowers. Built on a hill, this graveyard of a small New Hampshire town was cut by a spiraling road into four or five sloping tiers, all similar in appearance. Identical paths ran parallel to each other and every tree, spruce, or cedar, or elm, was mimicked by a twin. Hopestill was at the very top, beside her father. They were farther up even than the graveyard’s only mausoleum which, in a splendor of marble and genuflecting angels, housed the bones of a distinguished bishop, native of the town, who had returned from the wide world to settle in the dust of his last vestments under his boyhood’s earth. Miss Pride, the connoisseur of graves, had remarked as we drove away, “I’d walk if I were buried there. From what you can tell of his Grace’s taste from that outrageous excrescence, he must have been a trying party when he was alive. I dare say he went in for parlor statuary.”

It had begun to snow long before the bus that brought me had bumbled into the little town, and by the time I had found her stone, it was covered over by a deep layer of white which was replaced by another as soon as I had brushed it off. Indeed, there was no need for me to see it, for I clearly remembered the bare factual legend engraved on the plain granite oblong: that she had been born some time and given the name Hopestill Pride Mather, and, being married, had taken McAllister, and that she had died a little more than twenty-one years after her birth. Nor was I, uncovering it and shielding it from the snowfall by my hunched-up body, urged by this physical symbol into recalling her better. I could not, as I crouched there, gazing, feel any harmony with her soul as it existed now or with her soul as it was arrested when her breathing stopped. I had not the faith as had her loving old friend the Admiral that her “spirit” still lived, though what he meant, approximately, was, “I have faith that Hopestill’s soul continues its existence. What I know exists is my faith.” But I granted the possibility that a soul might continue to operate in some imponderable place. There was, though, no affective coloring to the hypothesis: the grave could not become to me more than a little elevation of the soil and a flat stone and the skeleton which I visualized could not be hers but merely “skeleton,” merely “heap of bones,” and it was almost an accident that these bones had been the framework of someone I had known. I wondered when, in her grave, her hair had stopped growing and when its gloss was gone and if its dust were gray or red. I could see it yet, blandished by every change of light, the only remnant of her loveliness left when she lay in the fern-fingered casket. I shivered with the cold and with the memory of my mother’s obsession over Ivan’s hair which she thought had grown long in the water and was tangled with seaweed.