Through the next two days, Max surprised me by being a great help in the packing up. While I stood around in the midst of my inheritance paralyzed by the imagined importance of everything, all these artifacts fragrant of my past and my ancestry, he made decisions. Keep this, take that. He did the heavy lifting, and broke nothing; I looked at him with newly respectful eyes. He might turn out all right after all. He was just a child of his times, in less of a hurry to leave home than I had been. When he and I drove away in the loaded U-Haul truck, we left the rest of the funeral meats in the woods, as a last feast for the cats. “O.K., kitties,” I told them as they mewed up at my face. “Now you’re on your own.”

In the months to come, as fall activity was renewed at Rutgers, I avoided going back. I was afraid of getting sucked in. Everything was handled over the telephone. It was almost eerie, to see society smoothly bring into play its perfected machinery for the transfer of property. My lawyer, another old high-school classmate, arranged for the estate assessment and sent me forms to sign and return. The realtor kept me apprised of prospects and offers. When I asked him if he, on his latest showing of the house, had noticed any cats around the back porch, he pretended to search his memory before saying, “Why, no!” Their mewing, furry, hungry substance had vanished like the matter of a dream. My mother’s meagre treasures—the rose-pattern china, the pine corner cupboard, a curly-maple sewing table, two lace tablecloths, some Navajo silver-and-turquoise jewelry from my parents’ single trip west, six ladderback dining-room chairs—found their niches in our home or our daughter’s, with a few pieces promised to Max when and if he ever settled down. Little Peter wanted the wind chimes. Josie inherited her yellow plastic dog-dish. In Pennsylvania, the auction crew came into the house, cleaned it out of every tattered piece of furniture and memorabilia, including Life magazines from V-E and V-J Days, and in late October sent me a respectable check for the proceeds at auction. In early November the realtor had found a retired couple from Philadelphia whose bid was in the bottom end of my asking range, but who promised to keep renting the fields to Adam and Dwight. The buyers vowed they had no intention of developing the acreage but refused to sign a covenant without a sharp reduction in the price. I backed down. The farm could take its chances, like the rest of us. We set the date of the signing for the week after Thanksgiving.