I felt guilty, selling the place. My mother had believed it to be a piece of lost Eden and wanted me to live on it for my own good. Pathetically, she would argue that I could still teach at Rutgers, with a readjustment of my schedule that would bunch my teaching into a few days in the middle of the week. “What about my wife?” I asked.

“Tell Evelyn,” she said, “that I’ve never felt right, as a woman, off this place. There’s magic in the soil, I do believe it. Two days away, and I used to get the most terrible cramps.”

“My kids, Mother. They’ve been raised New York–suburban.”

This was before Nancy had married and Max had dropped out of Dartmouth. “It’s not too late to fix that,” my mother said. “When they were smaller they used to love it here.”

I sighed, and we dropped the subject, knowing that I was the problem. I was the one to whom the farm meant poison ivy and crabgrass, and bush-whacking that would be invisible the next summer, and indoor plumbing that was forty years out of date, and a pack of asthma-inducing cats at the back door.

I didn’t call Amy Stauffer for weeks, and when I did she sounded vague. “I know he went out and looked the situation over,” she said.

“But did he trap any?”

“He has the traps right now in his other truck, I think he told me. Anyway, he didn’t see any cats.”

“None? What time of day was he there?”

“I guess around their dinnertime,” she said, with an audible smile in her voice. I saw her clearly, stolidly sitting at her tidy desk in Emmetstown, with the wild ducks on the wall and the door leading back to the concrete-floored cages—a genie whom I had conjured up but could not quite control, through some little glitch in interstate communications.

“I’d be happy to drive over,” I told her, “but I don’t see how it would do any good.”

“No, David,” she said sadly, as to a former lover. “I don’t either.”