The girl nodded and brushed at her skirt. Someone had surely given her that suit, it fitted her so poorly. Folds of the thick fabric were bunched beneath the belt she had buckled around her waist. She touched her hair; short wisps stood straight up from the encircling braid. He thought, the braid doesn’t suit her at all; she doesn’t know what to do with her hair. She was tall, handsome perhaps. Bits of grass and smudges of earth clung to her legs. She couldn’t be over eighteen.

She preceded him to the car, looking back suddenly with her hand on the door as though to make sure it was still all right. He waved her in. She stooped, her black handbag, its leather cracked, hanging straight from one wrist.

Fern nodded to her shortly as she sank against the back seat. “Hello. Watch out! Don’t sit on the eggs,” she said. “I wish you’d eat them. The smell is driving me crazy.”

Max sighed. Cars were boring and alarming. There was still a distance to be traveled. The camp chairs were already set up in the hall; the more important people, people like his own wife, Eva, were already there, trying out the microphone. “Comrades…”

As Fern wrenched the car into second gear, Max asked, “What’s your name?”

“Annie.”

She had answered like a servant. Max regarded her questioningly, but she only lowered her head.

“Where are you going?” asked Fern.

“To meet a friend,” the girl replied. “He’s on a ship coming to San Diego sometime today. Maybe he’s already there.”

“How about your last name?” he pressed.

“Last night, did you see the planes?” Fern asked, turning for an instant to the back seat, her voice young, even girlish, with interest. The change of tone was so marked in contrast with the indifferent way she’d inquired after Annie’s destination that it broke Max’s preoccupation with the mystery of the girl’s presence on the road.

What kind of man, he wondered, might Fern have stashed away in San Francisco? Or was she another of those young-old girls for whom the party gave a world of reasons to explain all that was meager in their own lives? He was instantly ashamed. What if they were forlorn, discordant? It was their devotion that counted. Who was he to ask for purity? Yet Fern…Oh, Fern!