He stirred inside his lethargy. Somewhere on a slab perhaps they had laid the queasy legs. But the face drifted behind his own, its lips blowing outward on unshaped words, trying to resist the shapelessness. It was this after all that every one of them had tried to do, his mother building her bright room, Eden taking the train into Europe, the Connie Tiarkses and the Joe Barnetts, each with a nervous but convinced contribution towards the business of living. Putting up a structure in the face of shapelessness, building, if not in brick or stone, a resistance to annihilation. And it was on this justification that the remote face on the pavement asked for admission, his theme as urgent as the others that wove and interwove through the empty house. This was a receptacle. They were two receptacles, he felt, the one containing the material possessions of those who had lingered in its rooms, the other the aspirations of those he had come in contact with. Even that emotional life he had not experienced himself, but sensed, seemed somehow to have grown explicit. It was as if this emanated from the walls to find interpretation and shelter in his mind. So that the two receptacles were clearly united now. They were like two Chinese boxes, one inside the other, leading to an infinity of other boxes, to an infinity of purpose. Alone, he was yet not alone, uniting as he did the themes of so many other lives.

2

Kitty Goose stepped down into the street. She could not pull too hard at a hesitant door, almost jerking from its socket either knob or arm. It was the weal in the hall linoleum that made the eye water, the breath catch. She suspected a burst shoulder seam. This before the rush, the bang of released door, that cleared the mind of anxiety, and set the ship knocker from Yarmouth dancing on its sea of brass. There was frost in the street, a thin, white fur, on the puddles a coat of gelatinous ice that snapped too loudly underfoot. This all added to the tension, of course, the sharp, frosty air tautening her hands, rolled already inside the muff into a nervous ball. Back there, she knew, they were watching, would have seen, on turning the head, the forms of the two Miss Spaldings, stiff as the parlour furniture, black and upright as horsehair chairs, and about as charitable as these. It was too much, the emotional parsimony of the two Miss Spaldings, just when you were ready to give more than you possessed. At least you could have offered the breath that was bursting in your lungs, the words that were waiting for expression in your mouth. But the street was unappreciative, if not exactly blind. Over the way a Mrs Hicks slowly wiped at a dusty plant. Kitty Goose composed her face to meet the world’s inquiring eye.

Kitty Goose, Kitty Goose, she repeated over and over again. This was a habit that she had when happy, finding some satisfaction in the abstraction of her own name, or else attaching to this a string of vague but stupendous future events. She shaped her name in a half-chant, not loud enough for windows. She walked down the street with all the emphasized carelessness that goes with a secret and important errand.