“If only you could have known Edward then. You see, he seemed so much more alive than other boys. He cared so much.” She faltered, for how could she describe him to Henry who had only seen an exasperated difficult middle-aged man, Henry who couldn’t imagine that redheaded boy, swinging a baseball bat, always off somewhere in a hurry?

“What did he care about?”

Isabel thought about this for a moment. “You know, I used to steal up to his room when he wasn’t there and try to find out. Once it was photography. He said he wanted to make a record of the town, the real town was what he said, and that seemed to be things like empty lots and the shacks where the colored people lived, things like that. Then he had a big black notebook where he copied out things he liked, Walt Whitman at one time, then Shelley, then all kinds of things I couldn’t understand about socialism, government. Even then I hated all that. I was jealous, I suppose.”

“Maybe you were just right,” Henry said, smiling at her.

“No,” she frowned, “I didn’t care about such things.” She wanted now terribly to try to say it to Henry, just once, to bring these two parts of her life together just once, to explain how Edward felt responsible, also ashamed of their father, how he always wanted to make up somehow for their being rich. But just then the car swung into the airport, and Henry clamped on the brakes.

Bel took out a mirror and powdered her nose nervously, meeting herself and surprised at how neat and pulled together she looked, a middle-aged woman with cool gray eyes, in a soft blue hat. No one would know, she thought. No one would guess all the images that crowded behind her eyes and that now she would never be able to tell Henry.

“You’re going to be all right,” he was saying.

“But I wanted to tell you—I wanted to explain.”

“There’s no time now, honey.”

At the very last minute she clung to him, just as they were wheeling out the bags. The huge silver plane made everything look dwarfed and out of proportion. The people who were rushing around in little trucks looked like insects; the people who were waiting to get on looked like insects too. She had become an object, she felt, a thing to be transported, cut off from everything human and safe.

“I can’t, Henry,” she breathed. “I’m too scared.”

“They won’t eat you.” He turned her around and kissed her hard on the mouth. “I wouldn’t be scared of a lot of old professors.”

“It’s Edward,” she said, but there was no time to explain. She was being gently pushed on her way. She was walking up the shiny steep steps alone. She had to do it alone.