With his books shelved and his workspace prepared, David felt at home anywhere.

The remaining boxes were all David’s as well, except for one or two belonging to their daughter, Stephanie. Magazines. David had a peculiar reverence for the printed word that apparently forbade him throwing away anything it was printed on, so that during their marriage they had moved from apartment to apartment an ever-increasing number of boxes filled with old Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s, battered old copies of Ramparts and Rolling Stone.

She smiled wryly at one box marked STEPHANIE.

He had apparently communicated this trait to his daughter; she was five years old and she already had her own twinebound box containing back numbers of Children’s Digest and Humpty Dumpty.

The thought of Stephanie drew Corrie to the screen door. She heard the slow creak of the swing chains, saw Stephanie rocking listlessly. Stephie, as she was called, had her mother’s fair skin and hair, but temperamentally she seemed closer to David: she already showed signs of being as imaginative as he was. Corrie might have said over-imaginative. Sometimes David and Stephie seemed attuned to a wider spectrum of sensory impulses than Corrie knew existed.

David taught her to read early. Her kindergarten teacher in Chicago had suspected she was gifted, and a series of tests administered to her bore this out. David reacted to the news as if he had been personally and entirely responsible. I told you so, he kept telling Corrie, as if she had maintained that the child was a congenital idiot. Or as if his genes had been transmuted to Stephie pristine and untainted by Corrie’s. Though she guessed that wasn’t fair; after all, it had been David who had read to her from the time he had gotten the child’s attention, and at a period in his life when time had been at a premium.

She opened the door and went out onto the porch. Stephie sat idly turning the pages of a book about gnomes, but she was no longer looking at them with any semblance of interest.

She looked up at Corrie. Can we watch TV?

No, we can’t. Sorry.

Why not?

Daddy didn’t hook it up to the antenna yet.

David had said that he would, but Corrie had turned it on a little past noon and there was only the blank white screen, the white noise of static emanating from the speaker. The lead wire wasn’t even hooked to the little screws on the back of the set, and when she finally found a screwdriver and leant over the set to fix it she had seen through the window the antenna itself leaned against the back porch wall, still in its cardboard carton. Maybe he would tomorrow. Or tonight, if he came in in time.

Corrie had left the sound on anyway, turned all the way up. At least it was something out of this century. Nothing else in the house seemed to be.

Don’t you want to play in the playhouse Daddy fixed you?

She closed the book. I suppose so, she said. She arose and went somewhat grudgingly down the flagstone steps toward the playhouse under the elm. She played as if it were work she was forced to do, Corrie thought, thinking of herself. Today she had felt like a child forced to play grownup in a cavernous nineteenth-century house with someone else’s furniture, someone else’s past.

Though not forced, she thought hastily. David had been scrupulously fair about that. It had been a joint decision. Except that David had thought of it, David had been the one enthused about it, and David had a way of leading you along on the ragged edge of his enthusiasm until you were someplace you hadn’t planned to be, wondering how you got there. She could have gone to Orlando and stayed with her older sister Ruthie and her husband Vern; she could have stayed in Chicago. But she knew that David would have done it anyway. He would have come alone, and that would have been worse.

David had been a drifter when he married her, and though he had made an enormous effort to change or at least convince her he had changed, there was still a lot of drifter in him: a refusal to put down roots, to think of any one place as home, a disinclination to do for very long anything he didn’t want to do.