The shower started. He looked at the ceiling. The walls were done in a pale lime green, making the ceiling the softest white imaginable. He wanted Karen to come to Port Smith. More honestly at this moment, he wished he could insist on an end to this. When they had begun to see each other again, more than four years ago, she had said that he could not come back to live with them only to leave again. If he came back, he came back to stay, and if he left, they would have to divorce. She was right. No one, particularly Steffie, could live in such confusion. Karen was as hard on herself as a monk, but she thought it was necessary; if he wanted her, he had to accept the conditions she felt she had to impose on herself. He knew that he could not argue. He had seen the results.

People assumed things about him because of the war and the Leikman case, and if they heard stories about her—it was still possible, and she never forgot—they assumed other things about her. They had to know her. Few people ever got it right, even then. Up here, if they knew her but had only met him, they guessed that he had something that could not be determined in the equation of their marriage. The people she worked with were in awe of her competence with people and her crisp rationality. In her five years in Manitou she had advanced to Assistant Superintendent of Schools, in charge of the junior highs, and if she were a man, they would be grooming her as the Superintendent’s successor. That was part of what made the people she worked with look for an indeterminable factor in him. He had been too close to the blood and despair of life. He had had his hands in it. Her friends did not want to believe that she had carried the child of a man who had done what he had done.