‘Aren’t you going to hang your jacket up?’ his mother asked, as he started up the stairs to his bedroom.

I’m sending this suit to the cleaners,’ he muttered, and went up. In his bedroom he took out the pen set and put it far in the back of the drawer that contained extra blankets. In the shower he stood with his face turned up and let the water jab at his eyes.

After he had dressed he stopped in the doorway of the bedroom and went back and took the pen set out of the drawer and stood looking around the room. Then, remembering, he got a chair and stood on it inside his closet and laid the set on the top shelf where the maid never cleaned. His mother was calling him. He went downstairs, putting on his glasses, and smelled the meatballs heating. He filled a pot with water and sat at the table, while his mother sat beside the stove ready to drop two handfuls of spaghetti into the pot.

She asked, ‘Was it hot in the city today?’

‘It certainly was,’ he said, wiping his hand across his warm face. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the linen napkin.

‘Somebody said people were dropping dead on the streets.’

‘I wouldn’t doubt it,’ he said.

She waited until he had his meal before him and was eating, and then she rolled her chair up behind him and sat looking through the screen door at the little backyard.

‘Mr Gargan’s summer place must be pleasant now,’ she said.

He muttered something with a full mouth.

‘You’d think he’d invite you out there once.’

He shrugged his shoulders, and tried to remember whether there was anything on the top shelf of his closet that the maid could possibly go looking for.

After supper he went out onto the porch and sat in one of the two beach chairs. Across the street the porches were filling with groups of people. Bligh called out to him from five houses up. He smiled back and waved.

‘Hot enough for you today?’ Bligh laughed.

Newman laughed and shook his head appropriately. Then turning in the opposite direction he quickly took his glasses off and held them. Here and there along the street the hoses started spurting, while from up on the porches people dreamily watched the cool arcs of water. A flight of girl’s laughter came from somewhere and vanished. The windows were all open. A pot falling in a kitchen rang down the street. Mr Newman heard his mother behind him in the living room. She switched on the radio and a soprano sang.

‘You’d better water the grass,’ she warned through the window behind him. ‘It’ll burn up sure.’

He nodded but remained seated there. It would be bad if he came down off the porch now: everybody on the street was outside, and if someone should happen to stop and talk he knew he would get nervous. Until now it had been all right to wear the glasses on the street; yesterday or the day before he could have overridden their new stares. Yesterday he had been the man who worked for the Corporation. When talking to Carlson or Bligh or Fred next door about conditions he had always been the man who worked for the Corporation. It was who he was. Whatever they might see in his glasses would be dispelled by the sheer fact of who he was. But it was all vanished from behind him now, and he knew he would be standing before them all alone and he would blush if they noticed, like a stranger he would shift his feet before them, like one who was ashamed of how he looked.