“Good for her,” Mim says.

“It isn’t the gangsters who are doing the country in,” Pop says. “If you ask me it’s the industrialists. The monster fortunes. The Mellons and the du Ponts, those are the cookies we should put in jail.”

Rabbit says, “Don’t get radical, Pop.”

“I’m no radical,” the old man assures him, “you got to be rich to be radical.”

Monday, a cloudy day, is Harry’s first day out of work. He is awake at seven but Pop goes off to work alone. Nelson goes with him; he still goes to school in West Brewer and switches buses on Weiser. Mim leaves the house around eleven, she doesn’t say where to. Rabbit scans the want ads in the Brewer Standard. Accountant. Administrative Trainee. Apprentice Spray Painter. Auto Mechanic. Bartender. The world is full of jobs, even with Nixon’s Depression. He skips down through Insurance Agents and Programmers to a column of Salesmen and then turns to the funnies. Goddam Apartment 3-G: he feels he’s been living with those girls for years now, when is he going to see them with their clothes off? The artist keeps teasing him with bare shoulders in bathrooms, naked legs in the foreground with the crotch coming just at the panel edge, glimpses of bra straps being undone. He calculates: after two months’ pay from Verity he has thirty-seven weeks of welfare and then he can live on Pop’s retirement. It is like dying now: they don’t let you fall though, they keep you up forever with transfusions, otherwise you’ll be an embarrassment to them. He skims the divorce actions and doesn’t see himself and goes upstairs to Mom.

She is sitting up in the bed, her hands quiet on the quilted coverlet, an inheritance from her own mother. The television is also quiet. Mom stares out of the window at the maples. They have dropped leaves enough so the light in here seems harsh. The sad smell is more distinct: fleshly staleness mingled with the peppermint of medicine. To spare her the walk down the hall they have put a commode over by the radiator. To add a little bounce to her life, he sits down heavily on the bed. Her eyes with their film of clouding pallor widen; her mouth works but produces only saliva. “What’s up?” Harry loudly asks. “How’s it going?”

“Bad dreams,” she brings out. “L-dopa does things. To the system.”

“So does Parkinson’s Disease.” This wins no response. He tries, “What do you hear from Julia Arndt? And what’s-er-name, Mamie Kellog? Don’t they still come visiting?”

“I’ve outlasted. Their interest.”

“Don’t you miss their gossip?”

“I think. It scared them when. It all came true.”

He tries, “Tell me one of your dreams.”

“I was picking scabs. All over my body. I got one off and underneath. There were bugs, the same. As when you turn over a rock.”

“Wow. Enough to make you stay awake. How do you like Mim’s being here?”

“I do.”