By 9:00 or 10:00, the mood waffled. Merle, who was relatively alert, made Edmund and Polly sandwiches and asked them to keep the drunks away from Dee and Papa’s rooms. They grabbed Lemon and May and drew large signs for the bedroom doors: Verboten! They thought this was very funny, but beyond the door, they felt the tenor of the party swing. They played checkers with Dee’s jewelry, rings versus earrings, while arguments began below the open window. The man who looked like Beethoven kept talking to Jane, and Merle didn’t like it; they could hear him ask what the man thought he was doing. The man bellowed for Rita and the agent, and off they went.

In the morning, a minefield of comatose adults blocked the path to the front door. Someone had thrown up in the bathtub, and incense had burned off a plate and scorched the marble table yellow. Edmund picked up a blue worry-bead roach and put it in his pocket. Rita’s room was empty. Edmund, in a good mood, wondered if she’d ever return.

Everyone was gone when Dee and Papa got home the next afternoon, and the place was almost clean. Polly watched Dee look around, seeing mostly invisible things. Edmund followed her up the stairs dragging her suitcase, and Jane stuck to the kitchen, destroying the last bits of evidence.

Papa asked Merle to make him a drink and come outside, and soon Polly saw that Merle was crying. But why? Nothing was broken, and it didn’t seem as if Papa was angry. They sat quietly, Merle wiping at his face, petting the worried dog, and sipping a drink.

The big party for Papa in late August would be a combination of a birthday and retirement celebration, held at the place with the hedges where they’d gone for Edmund’s birthday. Papa’s brothers and his sister Inge and Perdita’s sister Odile were flying in from Montana. Dee’s children were all coming from California.

Dee said she was behind on everything—she’d failed to spring clean, and now she was in danger of not summer cleaning. She gave Edmund and Polly each a dollar and they stripped all the bedding; she ran both washers, the old and the new, and bullied Merle into hanging extra lines and hauling a third broken machine with a mangle outside. When the sheets and blankets were all on the line, Polly and Edmund ran between the waving linen as if it were a maze. By the time it dried, they’d lost interest and floated off toward the Sound. Jane made the beds, and for once Rita helped, before she retreated to the greenhouse to paint a hillside of sheets, which would one day sell for $50,000.