“Do you know this one, honey? About the traveling salesman on the New Jersey Turnpike who sees a huge billboard saying ‘Mother Murphy’s Whorehouse, five miles ahead to Exit 32, $5 a lay.’ Oh boy, he thinks, what a bargain. And then after a while there’s another sign: ‘Mother Murphy’s Whorehouse, one mile from Exit 32.’ Then at Exit 32 there’s a road marker saying ‘This way to Mother Murphy’s Whorehouse.’ He follows the directions and arrives at a gracious old home where a little old lady in lavender is sitting on the porch knitting. ‘Are you Mother Murphy?’ he asks. And the old lady nods and holds out her hand. ‘Five dollars, please.’ He gives her the five and she points out the entrance, which is all set up with neon arrows pointing the way through corridors until he comes to another door. This he opens, and finds himself back outdoors in front of a big sign that says ‘You’ve just been fucked by Mother Murphy.’”

Laughing at him laughing, Marguerite said, “Now why did you tell me that, Richard?”

“That’s me, honey, always fucked by every Mother Murphy!” He laughed hard, but his expression was a grimacing wound.

“Sometimes I feel guilty,” he would say—sitting in his garden propped against a packing box, an open book in his lap—“having it so easy here with all that’s going on at home. It is, after all, a very easy life.” And he’d wave his hand around to include his rooms, the quiet old countrywoman who served him, and the church beyond his gate, where he saw to the minimal spiritual needs of a congregation made up of transients and the few old residents he would, in time, bury.

“Have you ever been in love, Richard?” she asked one night.

“I was waiting for that,” he said dryly. He was silent a moment, dragging on his cigarette. “Yes, yes . . . very much.” He spoke haltingly, as if thinking out the words. “Too much so—it’s all over and gone. ‘Mr. Kurtz—he dead.’ Mr. Wareham, too.”

She began to wonder what arrangement was possible between them. And wouldn’t the folks in Gloversville drop in their tracks if she did become a minister’s wife. Richard lived on a small income and an even smaller wish to increase it. She could work. Could that be an arrangement? She had realized that there wouldn’t be physical love between them. “After passion,” he had told her, “there comes the better part of being together—that long abiding loyalty which leaves one free of one’s senses.” Theirs could be a comradely arrangement, an affectionate one, and not unpleasant for either of them.

Perhaps that’s what freedom was all about. To look at things squarely, see they weren’t perfect and never would be, and accept them gracefully for what they were—an arrangement. She and Richard’s garden could come to maturity together.