All these daughters—impetuous, primping, boy crazy, angling for attention. Showing up on her doorstep clutching their dreadful school anthologies, peeking around her down the hallway, breathless and babbling, for a glimpse of Ted. These children with no discipline, no core. The interviewer last week had come with two horrid little girls. Despite her instructions, despite her firm warnings, they rampaged through her house during her cheap moment of glory, snatching Frieda’s toys and waking the baby. Sylvia listened to the little girls’ squealing and slamming of doors as the interviewer’s tape wound and unwound on the reel. Chagrined as she was, she also had the uneasy feeling that it was a just punishment for indulging her ego. The BBC hadn’t called her for herself, she suspected; despite her New Yorker contract, despite the grants, her poems were still only trickling into magazines. The Colossus had hardly been reviewed. The producer most likely thought of her because she was Ted’s wife. There would be children screaming in the background.

She can see nothing through the mullioned windows of the locked church. There are no lights on inside. The diamond-patterned panes are rain-filmed and murky, virtually opaque. Shouldn’t the church be open? What if someone needs to pray? she wonders. She thinks of knocking the iron sanctuary ring to see if the rector is really inside, spying on her silently through the louvered window in the belfry. Where are her guts? she thinks with scorn. She’s got no self-control; she’s merely looking for excuses to keep from going back to her study to face her unfinished poems. The laundry, mowing the lawn, a crow nip, walking in the rain, a spontaneous urgency to bake—any and all will do. Percy’s crisis next door had satisfied that need most of yesterday. She was doctoring Frieda’s finger in the kitchen, Ted beating a retreat up the stairs, when she heard Rose’s shouting, then the banging on the door. Rose’s hair was crazy and loose. Her buttons undone, she clenched her slip. Percy was having a stroke.