But she cannot stop him, of course; and, in any case, he comes to an end a few minutes later; and there is a very faint round of applause—very faint, which he nonetheless acknowledges with a defiant little smile.

Brian Farley stops Monica, as she knew he would, to say that she really should have checked with the boys in her classes, to see what they intended to read. “Leonard isn’t a very stable person, as you must know,” Farley said, “and this afternoon’s performance isn’t going to do him any good.”

Monica knows that Farley is right; but her pulses leap in a fiery little rush of irritation. She says stubbornly that she couldn’t possibly have checked out her students’ material—she couldn’t possibly have censored any of it.

And suddenly they are arguing, in the corridor outside the Founders Room.

“Your colleagues took time to glance through their students’ material, and no one ‘censored’ anything,” Farley says. “It was only a matter of good taste and judgment.”

“Our students aren’t children,” Monica says, “—they can hardly be told what to do. Leonard thinks of himself as a writer—he’s very serious about everything he does—I don’t see how I—”

“Never mind about Leonard,” Farley says angrily. “The fact is that while our students aren’t children they aren’t adults either, they’re adolescents, some of them are extremely immature, they look to us for adult supervision which is the point, isn’t it,” he says, as Monica begins to draw away, her face stiff with opposition, “—the point of the school? Of people like us?”

Monica’s rage carries her for some distance, for some miles, until, suddenly, braking her car to a stop on the Poor Farm Road, she feels a wave a dizziness, vertigo—a sense that the world is too vivid and solid and hard-edged to contain her.

The panic attack lasts for approximately ten minutes.

And when, finally—slowly—it lifts she finds herself drenched in perspiration; chilled and shivering. She cannot remember at first where she was coming from or where, with such a sense of desperate urgency, she is headed.

13

Sheila telephoned to apologize, hours later.

Hours later, Sheila telephoned to say she’d been off her head, she hadn’t known what she said or what she meant, she hoped Monica would forgive her.

(But what had she said? She couldn’t remember.)

She was wretchedly lonely, she said.

She said she would continue with the plans, the arrangements, if Monica thought that wise.

She said it would be over with soon.

She said that her basic wish was simply to die and get the entire business finished but (this in a voice trembling with hilarity) she was balked by the thought of a memorial service of some kind . . . rows of solemn “mourners” . . . sappy banalities that were sure to be said aloud and perhaps even published.