“Could you make yourself young for me?” He tried to keep his voice casual, but he could hear the strain in it.

Mother looked at him sharply. Then she smiled. “How young?”

He was flustered. “I don’t know. Young.”

“Well, it’s sort of silly. But I’ll try.” Her face made a little pout of concentration. She put her knees together, sat up straight in the chair, squinted her eyes shut.

For a moment her body and clothes, in the still sunlight of the terrace, became murky and dark, shrinking. And then before him sat, in a middy blouse and pleated cotton skirt, a little girl of about twelve. She had a blue ribbon in her hair and her face was bright, pretty, well-scrubbed, pink-cheeked. She wore black shoes with buckles and little white socks.

The blue jay flew away. The cat, startled, turned back toward the kitchen.

“Jesus!” Barney said, and turned toward Daddy. Daddy remained unchanged, not even looking at his child-wife.

“Well,” Mother said, “how do you like me?”

He stared at her. She was a very pretty little girl, very proper, but with a flirtiness in her eyes. She had the same pout that she would wear as an old woman with false teeth and sagging jowls—a woman who never exercised, never walked except to shop for dresses in drab department stores. The flirtiness in her now was frank and not hidden. And the astonishing thing about her was the look of health.

“Jesus, Mother,” he said, “I’ve never seen you look better.”

“Don’t try to be funny, Barney,” she said. And then, astonishingly, she winked at him. “Let me show you how I looked when I married your father.”

She shut her eyes again and her form melted and darkened and grew. And she sat in front of him then, his mother, as a beautiful flapper of twenty-five. She wore a cream-colored cloche hat over dark, shiny bangs and a low-cut, scoop-neck jersey dress with a short skirt, also cream-colored. Her hose were pale beige silk and her shoes silken. She had a long rope of white beads. Her face shone with health, with sex. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

He stared at her. She was clearly his mother, yet so different. So beautiful—more beautiful than Isabel—with her long white throat, her high breasts.

She leaned forward toward him, confidentially. “Barney,” she said, in a youthful, trilling voice—a theatrical, coquettish voice, “I think I’d like a cigarette.”

“Sure,” he said weakly, and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a pack of Trues. He held the pack out to her and she reached out with scarlet fingernails and took one delicately. “These dumb filter tips,” she said. “I always smoked Sobranies, or Cubebs.” She laughed—a trilling, light, airy laugh.

Daddy was staring toward Central Park, his liver-spotted hands folded in his lap, his face set. Below his pants cuffs his clocked maroon socks were wrinkled over bony ankles.

Barney lit her True with his Cricket, then lit one himself. When she bent toward him he could see the edge of fine lace at the top of the beige chemise beneath her neckline and below that the hint of cleavage. He was becoming aroused. It did not frighten him. Somehow his spirit had moved imperceptibly to a place of no rules, here on this cedar deck in Manhattan with the spring sun heating the back of his neck.