It had been the skeletal accordion-limbed piano player who saved them. Scully. They’d flown through that first season of summer and fall five years before heedless as children, living in a cramped basement room and sharing a cold-water bathroom with a dozen other hotel workers, Joey from the start working at the Maplewood as a dining room waitress and singing from time to time in the small clubs that sprang up and disappeared, while Jamie went through a string of jobs not from an unwillingness to work but a restlessness that drove him distracted from place to place as if intent on unraveling the workings of the entire town as quickly as he could. Both of them not oblivious so much as in some dream-trance of summer and so disregarded any signs or indications that they should make preparations of any kind until the wet cold third weekend of October when the leaves stripped from the trees and Monday morning the trains were filled leaving and shutters began to go up over the tiers of windows as if the hotels were closing their eyes against the sudden damp chill. Not even the few rare clipped mornings earlier in the month when all had gazed off at the snow topping the Presidentials, the glaze of white brilliant against the sky—this had seemed to them nothing more than a moment, a flare to the festive quickened life around them. Their summer wages: new clothing hung from a strung wire across one corner of the room and the memory remnants of whiskey-laced summer dawns, the etching of color as an electric current promising the day only hours of sleep away from them. And all either of them needed then on those foot-soaked dawnings was not to sleep or eat or even think of the work that waited once more but only now to be alone one with the other and let loose the creature they made together, the loveliness of tongues and skin. Walking from wherever they were to the small basement room, holding tight one to the other, their heads together, the smell of each sharp as must to the other’s nostrils, staggering up that long swooping main street of Bethlehem, not even noticing or when they did laughing back at the tight pursed glares or purposefully turned-away eyes of the other early morning walkers, the guests—middle-aged women in pairs dressed in long white frocks and white gloves and with their hair up under wide-brimmed hats or older men in full suits alone out walking for the mountain air and striding along away from the sluggish downward spread of their own bodies and the pull of the earth made all the keener for the sotted sex-wraithed stain of youth passing them by—and Joey and Jamie knowing this hatred and knowing it did not apply to them, that it was a bitterness not of their making. “You gotta wonder about it,” she told him once. “All anybody needs is a good drink and a good fuck. What’s so hard about that? What’s the big fucking deal?” He couldn’t tell her otherwise. And he knew the sorrows layered behind her words. The only thing to do, the only thing that mattered at all was to steady her with his one arm and hold her cheek tight against him with his free hand and take her near earlobe between his teeth. Hear her breath freeze up in her throat.