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and Ellen were finally able to pry Mum out of the sickroom and get her to lie down for a few hours. She fell asleep smiling triumphantly, as if she had scored a hand-to-hand victory over the Reaper.
    Wolcott Thorp, apprised by Christopher of the stroke, drove down from Connhaven on the night of the fifth, looking like a miniature Russian in his old-fashioned greatcoat and astrakhan hat.
    â€œGodfrey’s all right, isn’t he? He’s going to live?”
    They reassured him; and he sank into a chair in the foyer, beside the little table with the silver salver on it. “All my old friends are going,” he mumbled. He was so pale that Joanne got him some brandy. “And those of us who survive feel guilty and overjoyed at the same time. What swine people are …”
    It was some time before he was able to go upstairs and look in on the patient, who was being tended again by Margaret Caswell. For ten minutes Thorp chattered to his friend with desperate animation, as Godfrey stared helplessly back at him; until, clearing his throat repeatedly as if he himself had developed a paralysis, Thorp allowed Mum to shoo him out.
    â€œIt’s too much to have to watch,” Thorp told Jo and the twins downstairs. “I’m too big a coward to sit there while he struggles with that paralysis. The way he tried to talk! I’m going home.”
    â€œBut you can’t, Uncle Wolcott,” said Jo, giving him the courtesy title she had used since childhood. “It’s started to snow, and the report on the radio is that it’s going to be a heavy one. I’m not going to let you take that long drive back over slippery roads. The plows won’t even have had time to go over them.”
    â€œBut Joanne,” said the old curator weakly, “I have a huge day tomorrow at the Museum. And really, I’d rather—”
    â€œI don’t care what you’d rather. You’re not leaving this house tonight, and that’s that.”
    â€œJo’s right, you know,” Christopher put in. “Anyway, Uncle Wolcott, you don’t stand a chance. This is the new Joanne. Look at that chin, will you?”
    â€œYou look at it,” said his sister Ellen. “Oh, hell, why did I ever come home? Who’s for a snack?”
    January 6: The snow had fallen through half the night. From the kitchen window Christopher could look out across the white earth, an old bed with fresh sheets, past the glasshouse to the woods, where the conifers stood green among the sleeping nudes.
    From behind him came a rattle of pans and the homely hiss of bacon; all around him, creeping like woodsmoke, lay warmth. Making the sounds and evoking the smells was Joanne; when her mother had turned nurse, Jo had taken over the housekeeping and cooking chores. Chris had promptly given himself the KP assignment for breakfast.
    It was not a morning for fantasy; the day was too clear, the smells too real—it should have happened on a black night, with wind tearing at the house to an accompaniment of creaks. But, as Jo and Chris later agreed over clutched hands, perhaps that was what made it so creepy—the dreadful nightmare striking on a crisp morning to the smell of frying bacon.
    For at the very instant that Christopher turned away from the window with a wisecrack about to part his lips—at the very instant that he opened his mouth—he screamed. Or so it seemed. But it was a fantastic coincidence of timing. The scream was hysterically feminine and originated upstairs. It was repeated and repeated in a wild fusillade.
    Jo stood fixed at the kitchen range with the long fork in her hand; then she cried, “ Mother! ” and flung the fork down and ran for the doorway as if the kitchen had burst into flames. And Chris ran after her.
    In the hallway stood Wolcott Thorp, one leg raised like an elderly stork, caught in the act of putting on his galoshes in preparation for his return to Connhaven.