Maureen could be a raucous tease. Her rangy body was wide but not deep—she had broad hips but shallow breasts—and all summer she bore around the base of her neck a pink noose of sunburn, freckled and flaking, from working in her garden in a peasant blouse and no sunhat. A redhead, she remained loyal to the long, ironed hair of the flower-child era years after the flower children had gone underground or crazy or back to their parents. When I described these events to her, leaving out the odd physiological effect which holding Winifred in my arms always produced, Maureen laughed and tossed her mane as if about to devour me with her prominent white teeth. “Jeanne is incredible,” she said. “Imagine setting a date with your boyfriend at one in the morning in the faith that your husband would be off sleeping with the guy’s wife! It sounds as though the snowstorm held everything up—that’s why she kept egging Freddy to stay.”

“I can’t believe,” I said, as primly as I could while wearing no clothes, propped up in her bed with a cigarette and a glass of red vermouth, “that things are as cold-blooded and as, as set-up as that. My guess is he swung by because he thought the party was still on.”

“But he could see there weren’t any cars!”

“Ah,” I said, in modest triumph, “Freddy’s car was out front, plowed in.”

“Plowing, that’s the theme,” Maureen said. “ ‘If ye had not plowed with my heifer’—what?—‘ye had not found out my riddle.’ ” She and Rodney had met at a summer Bible school, and Rodney still retained the well-combed, boyish shine of a future missionary. “Anyway,” she went on gaily, giving the bed such a bounce that I spilled vermouth into the hairs of my chest, where—damn!—Jeanne might smell it, “I can see you feel you let Freddy down, but don’t. She’s screwing that odious little New York poet, everybody at Bradbury says.”

“I wish you wouldn’t tell me all this. I’d like to keep some innocence.”

“Martin, you love it, you love knowing everything,” she told me, and nuzzled at the spilled vermouth with a faceless, thrusting, leonine seriousness that rather frightened me. I fought her off by finding her ears in all that hair and using them as handles to pull her head up from my chest. Her face, thus tugged back, with uplifted upper lip and slit eyes, reminded me of Winifred’s held to be kissed in the snow, and of a death mask. Maureen’s was not a female body that hid its bones, its lean doomed hunger. Laughing but hard-eyed, spiteful though playful, she said, “Rodney says you’re just like a woman, you’re so nosy.”