How broodingly she watched Max, smiling when she caught his eye. Nothing was all right, Annie thought, and took pleasure in the cruelty of her knowledge, wanting to bang Eva on the head, wanting to shout at her that her life was held together only by laundry lists and party slogans. To join the damned would be more bearable than the older woman’s insistent and meaningless certitudes. But Max’s patience with his wife shamed Annie. It was not necessary to behave as if you were damned, even if you were. And thinking that, she was alarmed; Joe must have felt damned before drowning himself. She tried, resolutely, to admire Eva. How well she ran her household even though she worked! What affection she lavished on Thomas!

Max had not explained to Annie what he did for a living until one day he arrived home late saying he had a job with a shipbuilding plant in San Pedro. He had been going to a machinists’ training school and had finished the program.

That night Eva had to go to a church group to try and raise money for some imprisoned Mexican boys who’d been accused of killing an old drifter in Los Angeles. Max and Annie and Thomas ate together. Max was silent through the dishwashing. He put Thomas to bed. Annie was reading Winesburg, Ohio.

“Don’t read now. I have to speak to you.”

She was instantly frightened. In the second before he began to talk, she saw imperiled the warm safety in which she had been living these months. Something was about to blow the walls down.

“Don’t be scared. Try not to be,” he urged her.

“Have I done something?”

“Eva and I are having a difficult time together.” At her look of surprise, he laughed aloud. “I know you,” he said. “You think you see everything, don’t you?” She turned away so that he would not see her chagrin.

“It’s not a noisy bad time,” Max said. “I won’t tell you much about it. Some of it’s to do with the way I’m heading, changing, politically. Eva, she’s…bewildered. And it’s not only that.” With unexpected bitterness, he said, “I’m not fit to live with.”

Her disbelief amused him. “Annie, you live in this house like a child,” he said gently. She thought guiltily of her surreptitious and constant preoccupation with their closed bedroom door.