“He was always unhappy,” she said.

“Maybe he just went for a swim,” Annie said helplessly.

“With his clothes on?” the girl asked, and began to laugh, and laughing still, to pound the policeman until he gripped her hands in his. She calmed down at once; almost to a stupor. “You go tell Ernie,” she said to Annie and then, still gripped by the policeman, began to move on toward the path.

“I can’t have lunch,” Annie said. “I’ll have to do Sigrid’s work and mine too.”

Climbing the path, Greenhouse following her silently, she was gripped with terror as though the event which had already taken place was still about to happen.

Joe had been a plain, secretive boy, melancholy it was true. But now he was invested with a powerful mystery. To take one’s own life required unimaginable resolution. How long had it been forming in him? Had what happened between him and Annie strengthened the resolve? The sight of her weeping had sent him flying, in terror, from the breakfast table. She did not think, now, that it was because she had been weeping that he had fled. He must have lived in unremitting anguish, but it had not been apparent to either Sigrid or herself. How could she have known? Oh, Sigrid had been worried in her way, but then had shoved the worry aside brutally. Would she feel responsible now? And should she, Annie, have forced her out of her drunkenness that night to tell her Joe had not been to work?

They had, by then, reached the top of the cliff. Annie saw Ernie’s wife carrying a tray of French fries and a malted milk to a waiting car, an expression of loathing on her face. Greenhouse, paler than usual, was staring down at the smooth surface of the macadam with its islands of oil patches where cars had idled.

“The confusion,” he said. “I can’t bear it. Turgidity, confusion …” He looked up at her face. “I came down here to gather up my resources.”

He was so full of complaint. So elderly.

“It didn’t happen to you,” she said. “None of us count in your life.”

“That’s stupid. You don’t understand. I’ve been on the verge of a breakdown. I’m thirty-seven years old. Everything bores me.”

People did not grow up—they grew down, to the small patch of earth they’d marked out as their own. He was disgusting!

“Every cliché of Christian sanctimony is written on your mug,” he flung at her. “Do you think I can’t see what you’re thinking? That I should be pitying that dead man? I should be concerned about his troubles? What cant! If you were truthful—”

“I have to go. Ernie’s seen me. I have to tell him about Sigrid.”

Greenhouse began to walk up toward the road.