Frances did not care for the idea that her life should have an overall guiding structure, or frame. Yet she wanted one.

What kind of woman could Frances Johnson be or avoid being?

Remaining at the porch beam, she anticipated the limp, thin sheet of her bed and its propensity to twist into a spiral. Frances wished to call someone, but it was unduly, extravagantly late, too late to use the telephone, anyway. And whom to call? Perhaps someone she had forgotten, a type of friend, a blank to be filled in, not her mother.

Frances heard a noise in the yard. It was Ray, carrying a bucket. He steered around the gutter pipe in the dark, then poured rippleless water from the bucket onto the lowest porch step. “I dug up that vine growing on the fence today,” he told her. Ray did not care for vigorous plant life.

He tied a rope around the neck of a soft white sack that contained the dead vine, presumably, and other refuse.

Ray stood on the porch, facing her, posture solid and tall. “Frances,” he remarked, “I want your life to be fruitful, not only for yourself, but for others.”

“Oh, make sense, Ray,” she said irritably.

“Someone wants to meet you,” he said. “Mark.”

Her temper flared at the prospect of another introduction. “God!” she cried. “Mark Hodgkins? For the love of Hell, why?” Mark Hodgkins owned Munson’s cinema. The place was perpetually damp from its old carpeting, which, patterned in violent green whorls, always retained moisture from springtime rains. Hodgkins had worked hard through the years to dry the carpet, installing numbers of electric fans throughout the theater, each larger than the next, but to no avail; the place remained dank as it had been on the day Hodgkins purchased the building and planned it to be a bright entertainment-spot for the town.

Though the cinema did not succeed in the way he wished, Hodgkins’ efforts were still impressive, because he was a man who had trouble moving the bones in his fingers, jaw, arms, and legs due to a creeping, indeterminate illness. As Frances’ father had once remarked, Mark Hodgkins had compensated beautifully for his bad luck in one of life’s biggest areas—the body. Hodgkins was not a gloomy man. He often joked, and carried colorful magazines in his coat pocket.

“I already know Hodgkins, don’t you realize that?” Frances told Ray, sighing angrily. “And dammit, Ray, it’s getting late!”

“No, Frances. Not Mark Hodgkins.”

“Well, who then, Ray?”

“I’m talking about Doctor Mark Carol.”

The sound of the unfamiliar name rang jaggedly into the dark. It was unusual to hear an unknown name in Munson, and this one stopped Frances with a sting as brief as the name itself. A weight in Ray’s voice caused her to feel that the strange man was inevitable, and that the uttering of his name made him part of her.

“Mark Carol?”

“Yes,” said Ray.