Oh, we play beautifully, ingeniously, with a strict sense of ceremony, never more alert to our intersecting phrases and spelled out consonance. Lonnie H. plays with her eyes sealed shut, as though dreaming her way through a tranced lifetime, backward and also forward, extending outward, collapsing inward. Your foot does its circling journey, around and around, keeping order. Next to you is Robert Mooney whose face, as he puffs away, has grown rosy and tender, a little shy, embarrassed by his virtue, surprised by it too. Rhonda’s forehead creases into that touching squint of hers. (You can be seduced by such intense looks of concentration; it’s that rare.) Cecile’s wrist darts forward, turning over the sheets, never missing a note, and Pierre’s fingers move like water around his tricks of practiced tension and artful release.

And Mrs. Mooney, our audience of one, listens and nods, nods and listens, and then, after a few minutes, when we’re well launched, leans down and pulls some darning from the brocade bag on the floor. A darkish tangle, a lapful of softness. She works away at it throughout our nine pieces. These must be Robert Mooney’s socks she’s mending, these long dark curls of wool wrapped around her left hand, so intimately stabbed by her darting needle. Her mouth is busy, wetting the thread, biting it off, full of knowledge. Between each of our pieces she looks up, surprised, opens her teeth and says in a good-natured, good-sport voice, “Perfectly lovely.” At the end, after the conclusion has been signaled with an extra measure of silence, she stows the socks in the bag, pokes the needle resolutely away, smiles widely with her stretched mouth and begins to applaud.

Is there any sound so strange and brave and ungainly as a single person clapping in a room? All of us, even Madam Bessant, instinctively shrink from the rhythmic unevenness of it, and from the crucial difficulty of knowing when it will stop. If it ever does stop. The brocade bag slides off Mrs. Mooney’s lap to the floor, but still she goes on applauding. The furious upward growth of her hair shimmers and so do the silver veins on the back of her hands. On and on she claps, powerless, it seems, to stop. We half rise, hover in mid-air, then resume our seats. At last Robert Mooney gets up, crosses the room to his wife and kisses her loudly on the lips. A smackeroo-the word comes to me on little jointed legs, an artifact from another era, out of a comic book. It breaks the spell. Mrs. Mooney looks up at her husband, her hard lion’s head wrapped in surprise. “Lovely,” she pronounces. “Absolutely lovely.”