“Flowers! The biggest bouquet of orchids I have ever seen. With us months late in the rent and owing everybody and Mrs. Gottlieb not talking to me, he had gone and spent his entire pay check on a bouquet of orchids!” She lowered her head slightly, then looked up, and her eyes snapped angrily. “I took them and put them in a vase, Mr. Driscoll, and then I finished packing and I left Henry.” She breathed heavily. “What else could I do? He was insane! Of course, I missed his sweet singing for a while, and the sound of his voice when he laughed, but Mother knocked all of that out of me soon enough. She said good riddance, and she was right. I don’t doubt that for a moment.”

Mrs. Cramer rose. “Henry went to Alaska,” she said softly, “and drank himself to death. He died of cirrhosis of the liver. It’s funny, but I heard about it only a week after I met Adam. Wouldn’t you please have some tea?”

“Thank you. We’d be glad to have some.”

“It won’t take a minute. You can look over the photographs.”

Peter Link walked over and squatted by the chair. When Mrs. Cramer disappeared and the door closed, he snapped the shutter of his camera four times, quickly.

“Nothing is ordinary,” Driscoll said.

“What?”

“Never mind. I was just thinking.” He studied the photographs, which looked oddly out of place in the heavy family album. At a small snapshot of a child in a striped sunsuit seated by a washpan, fishing pole in hand, he stopped. “Doesn’t look much like a firebrand there, does he?” Driscoll said.

“That’s all right. Hitler was a baby, once.”

“Yeah.”

“Ed, it’s not my job, I only take pictures, but I think you ought to turn her off.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because Lubin wants a story on this guy Cramer—not on Lady Macbeth.”

“I know.” Driscoll nodded. “But Lubin doesn’t tell me what methods to use. I use my own. And they vary. Right now I think I’ll use the listening method.”

The younger man lowered his voice. “I understand about all that,” he said irritably, “only she isn’t talking about him, for Chrissake!”

“Isn’t she?”

Link grunted softly and made a gesture of hopeless, resigned confusion with his hands. Grinning, Driscoll closed the album.

Several minutes passed, then Mrs. Cramer swept back into the room.

“These are potted-ham sandwiches,” she said, “and I’ve iced the tea. Do you gentlemen like potted-ham sandwiches?”

She sat down on the couch and took up the fan. Her skin was as white and delicate as the ivory, almost translucent in the louvered sunlight.

“Mrs. Cramer,” Driscoll said, “we’d like to hear the rest of your story, if you don’t mind.”