Fall exploded in color and then left them, so that by the third week of November it already seemed like mid-winter, the trees stripped bare, the grass dead, the flowerbeds withered and the fountain transformed into an ice sculpture. The jack-o’-lanterns had long since collapsed on themselves and the dozen or so uncarved pumpkins on the front porch were frozen through till they were like so many cannonballs stockpiled against an invasion. Mice thrived in the house, legions of them appearing and disappearing like phantoms, and the cats, which could have earned their keep, just seemed bored by the whole spectacle. What else? The furnace burned fuel like a battleship at sea and it didn’t seem to make much difference, since the house was inhumanly cold in all its sixty-four rooms except in the kitchen and within ten feet of one of the fireplaces. The women shopped at the A & P, cooked, cleaned and took the sacrament one night a week. The men typed, read, split wood and took the sacrament with them, though some began to feel that the regimen was too confining. Why not two nights a week? Three? Why not (it was Charlie who proposed this, only half-jokingly) every day?

For the children—the teenagers, the offspring—who’d passed their test with flying colors, it was to be once a month like an infusion of vitamins. Lori was the exception, though Lori wasn’t a child and wasn’t one of their offspring either. She was a presence, already becoming a fixture, serving as an intermediary between the other teenagers and the adults, and she pitched in with the housework and the cooking too, as did both the Nestlings once they came out of their haze. After a while, nobody asked her about school anymore or wondered what she was doing there among them or who exactly had invited her or why. She did seem to have money though (rich parents?) and she never failed to make a weekly contribution to the grocery pool, which was more than could be said for some—all the men, except Dick, were hurting, deprived of their salaries and stipends, and none of the women worked outside of the house. Something had to give. And so at the next meeting, when Tim and Dick revived the idea of conducting psychedelic seminars, just as they’d attempted to do in Zihuatanejo before the black shirts descended on them, what had once sounded so intrusive began to sound better, much better, salvatory even.

“What are we going to charge?” Rick Roberts wanted to know.