The party had not so much taken her in as given her temporary shelter, and when she’d wandered in and out of it, not a “serious” person, after all, they’d paid little enough attention to her.

The “serious” person had died. Ethel Schaeffer with her singleminded vision, her kindness a lambent wash of feeling that blindly blessed the self-deceivers around her, the small tyrants, the secret bullies, or people like Theda and Max, turning and twisting inside definitions they were endlessly questioning, or someone like Lavan, scuttling from one dogma to another, carrying his own betrayer in himself, always secret, always transparent in his secrecy, a kind of underground man of fashion.

What had she understood from all of it? That she belonged to something even as abstract as a class? How primitive she had been, she thought, if only now she had begun to classify that which was not herself. A flash of memory illuminated a picture from years gone by: she was sitting on the stony driveway of the old Nyack house with a large flat stone near her knee, her hand gripping a round stone as a hammer, and cleaving open other stones, discovering how different each was from the other, and she had named them names of her own imagining.

As she parked in front of her apartment, she felt a powerful rush of gratitude, even toward Calvin Schmitter, and realized at that same moment as tears came to her eyes that her emotion was facile. What lay behind it was the knowledge that she was going to leave California as soon as she could.

The war was over; Max, she’d heard from Eva, would be coming home soon, coming home to Eva. She did not think she could slip back into their lives again like the nervous castaway of that earlier time—nor, she knew, could they allow her to.

In all of Max’s letters, he had never written of his domestic unhappiness which Annie had seen so clearly, if not understood. As for love between Annie and Max, she did not understand that either. She put it down to a kind of passionate interest which satisfied her sense of its uniqueness without binding her to the frightening uncertainties of loving.

She would have to put aside some money; she had four hundred dollars in an envelope. It had seemed a mighty sum, but with moving on in her mind, it was nothing. She lived for the next few months without movies or purchases or restaurants. She saved another one hundred and fifty. She took the amber beads Ben Greenhouse had given her and showed them to Theda. Theda draped them around her long neck and they slid down over her green sweater. Theda smiled, pleased, peered into a mirror. “I want to sell them,” Annie said.

“They suit me,” Theda murmured, turning her head this way and that.

“What do you think?”