Her father did not die, not then. Instead he made something of a limited recovery, getting out of bed eventually, getting himself dressed, taking short walks in the neighborhood, going as far as the corner for a newspaper or a loaf of bread. His clothes hung loosely on him, looked clownish and poor, and Kay wondered at that time why her mother didn’t do something about those miserable clothes. He had given up smoking at the start of his illness; now he gave up cards. If he came upon a group of men hunched over a game, he shook his head in a puzzled but unreproachful way as though powerless to understand why grown men would idle away valuable time.

He started to read a thick book about butterflies. Kay remembers that her mother bought this book in a second-hand store; she was always haunting such places. She loved a bargain. The book was old, its cover damaged, but the color plates were in beautiful condition. Better still, here and there, preserved in the pages close to the spine, were the dried pressed bodies of real butterflies, captured by some previous reader. They were exceedingly fragile but had kept their color and, like thin sheets of mica, glinted with metallic richness. When her father came across one of these flattened creatures, he left it where it was, untouched, as if it were a sign of good luck.

About this time Kay and Philip went to Sardinia. This was their so-called honeymoon, delayed nearly two years because of her father’s condition and also because of revisions to her thesis. It was a terrible day when they left, an afternoon in late January. It was necessary to land in Toronto in order to de-ice the plane. They taxied into a hangar where the whole of the plane-the wings, body and nose-was covered with pink foam. Kay remembers it took more than an hour to restore the plane’s silvery sides, and even then they rose with a shudder into a gray, torn-up looking sky. It seemed not all that improbable that they would perish. Philip ordered a bottle of champagne somewhere over Quebec, Kay’s first taste of champagne, though she was twenty-five years old at the time, a tall, loping, solemn girl with a head full of roughly filed facts and opinions.

Crossing the Atlantic, Philip ignored her. He had struck up an acquaintance with a Belgian priest across the aisle, and the two of them were soon trading anecdotes-miracles and blessings of a medical and spiritual nature. Half-dozing, Kay listened to Philip describe the spontaneous recovery of one of his patients. It took a minute or two to realize it was her father’s case he was recounting, the story was that full of echoes, pauses and resonance; her father with his flapping, shabby clothes became a kind of golden fabulation, a character in a rich folktale who had burst through to reality and health.