Jack Mann answered the phone with a yawn, as if he were expecting his mother-in-law. But it was simply contented, end-of-the-day fatigue.

He picked up the receiver and smiled at his pretty young wife, Laura. She was combing their daughter’s hair, getting her ready for bed. Betsy was a lovely child, delicately blond and appealing, like her mother.

It was a still, soft evening, early summer in Chicago, and pleasant weather.

“Hello?” Jack said into the phone, coming down from the yawn with a comfortable sigh.

“Hello? May I speak to Jack Mann, please?”

“Speaking.”

It was a male voice and unfamiliar to Jack.

“Mr. Mann, my name is Winkler.” The voice was cultured, a little shy. “Some friends of yours asked me to call....”

Oh God, Jack thought. He’s visiting town and wants a free sack. Or worse, a free girl.

Laura Mann looked up to see her husband’s comical dismay. “Who is it?” she whispered.

Jack shrugged. “What friends?” he asked.

“The Pringles. Sunny and Page,” Winkler said.

Jack Mann came to astonished attention. “Page Pringle?” he said, and Laura’s face, too, became tense with interest. She forgot Betsy’s hair and watched Jack.

“Is he all right?” Jack asked. “Where is he?”

“Yes, he’s fine,” said Winkler. “I talked with him just two days ago. He says you were roommates at the University of Illinois for a year.”

“That’s right. He signed up for my math course, and when I passed him he offered me a bunk. We ended up good friends. But ...” Jack’s face wrinkled into a mass of worried lines. “I’m surprised to hear he mentioned me to you, after the set-to we had last time we met. My wife and I have been damn worried about him—and Sunny.”

“They’re out in California, in Barstow. On a honeymoon, they said,” Winkler told him. “Should be back here in Chicago in a week.”

Jack, listening to the strange voice, felt himself getting careful and suspicious. Who the hell was Winkler? Sunny and Page Pringle were Jack’s friends, arguments or no, and there was a lot about their lives and their marriage that a stranger would have been stunned speechless to learn.

It was the most curious marriage in all Jack’s wide knowledge: shocking, illegal, passionately faithful, even wildly wonderful at times. Some miracle had held it together, but there was no way of telling for how much longer. It seemed to Jack, whenever he saw Page and Sunny, that the bonds of their love were about to snap and send them spinning apart for the rest of their lives.

“Who are you, Mr. Winkler?” Jack asked frankly.

But Winkler, like Jack, became wary in his turn. “I live here in Chicago,” he said. “I work here, and....”

“And?” Jack prompted.

“Mr. Mann, this is pretty forward of me, but I wonder if I could meet you? If you’d care to have dinner with me?”

“Just a minute,” Jack said, covering the receiver. “Some guy who says he knows the Pringles and they told him to look us up,” he whispered to Laura.

“Well, ask him to dinner with us tomorrow,” she said. Husband and wife gazed uncertainly at each other for a moment. Winkler could be a blackmailer, a detective or a guy with a grudge, as well as a friend. At last Laura made up her mind for both of them. “If it’s about Page and Sunny Pringle, I want to hear it,” she said.

So Jack invited him.

* * *

Winkler’s cautious voice sounded almost relieved. “Thanks, Mr. Mann; I’ll be there,” he said.

Jack hung up, giving Laura a wry grin. “Well, now we’ve done it,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Who the hell could he be?” He walked toward Laura, catching Betsy on the way and hoisting her into his arms.

“Didn’t he give you a clue?” Laura’s lips were parted with curiosity.

“Just that he met the Pringles in Barstow, California.” He sat down and released his daughter, who scampered out of the room.

“Damn it, honey, do you suppose those two kids worked it out?” Jack said. “Went back together in spite of everything?”

“It doesn’t sound like Page,” Laura answered. “But still, the way he loves that girl is something. It seems to be a case of head against heart. Only I always thought Page was two-thirds head.”

“He thought so too, till he fell for Sunny,” Jack said, lighting a cigarette. “I never saw a kid so much in love. And being married to her only made it better. Gosh, life is goofy. You’d have thought that was the world’s ideal marriage. Two handsome, intelligent people, madly in love, charming, ambitious, happy. They couldn’t miss.”

“That just made it tougher for them when everything suddenly went to hell,” Laura said.

“Yeah. They didn’t know about each other when they married. At least we knew about us, honey. We knew the worst. Maybe we figured we couldn’t last and when we did, it came as a wonderful surprise.” They smiled at each other.

“Here we are, safe and comfortable and indecently happy,” Jack went on. “If I could just teach you to squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom.” She laughed.

“Couple of queers,” he said, speaking the word gently, without malice. “And we made it. The Pringles barely had seven months before the sky fell on them.”

Laura shook her head with pity. “I still think they could make it work,” she said. “They have a tough thing to live with, but Sunny’s ready to try. If Page could only—”

“Page is the problem child. He always was,” Jack said.

“Problem? Or child?”

“A little of both. And in a crisis, a lot of both,” he said.

“Maybe this thing will force him to grow up,” Laura said.

“Maybe. If he has the guts to go back and live with Sunny.”

“Lord, she’s beautiful,” Laura remembered. “I don’t see how he can keep his hands off her.”

“Hang on, doll,” Jack laughed. “Just because you can’t—”

“I never touched her!” she protested indignantly. But his doubtful grin made her add, “Well, not like you think, darling. I never made a pass at her. You know, the kind you make when you feel like bed.”

“You never felt like bed with Sunny Pringle?” Jack teased. “Come on, honey, don’t put me on.”

Laura pulled her poise around her like a shawl. “Sunny’s a wonderful girl,” she said. “She is also the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life. And to make it all perfect, she’s in love with her husband.” She spoke ruefully enough to make him chuckle again. He couldn’t help kidding this wife he treasured, but he did it with obvious love and she never resented it. Their relationship was odd, but satisfying to them.

“I just held her,” Laura admitted. “I comforted her when she hit the dumps. I even kissed her hair. Like a sister. You show me a sister who could be any more proper than I was!”

“I’ll show you a sister who’d have kissed more than her hair, that’s for damn sure,” he said.

“Jack, you talk like a jealous husband.”

“Which I am,” he said softly.

She relented and went over to his chair, going behind to massage his shoulders. He relaxed with a sigh.

“I know you are,” she said. “You’re never noisy about it, but it hurts you to see me with a woman. Jack darling, sometimes I think you ought to find somebody, too. Just for now and then, for a release. You wouldn’t feel so possessive about me, then. It’d make you happier.”

“I’m as happy as I can stand to be,” he said, caressing her hands. “I have you and Betsy. And I’m through horsing around with pretty boys forever. When you hit forty you look too silly chasing the teen-agers. All I want now is my family.”

She smiled down at the top of his brush cut.

“And if I have to be a little jealous ... well, what the hell. It’s a small price.”

She gave his head a fond shove, dislodging his heavy tortoise-shell glasses. “Okay, have it your way,” she said. “Just explain one thing to me. How come two inverts like us can make a marriage work, and two normal people like Page and Sunny can’t?”

“If I could explain that, I’d write a book.”

Laura was a lesbian. But like all lesbians, she couldn’t escape her femininity. She loved Jack Mann in every way but one, and she would never leave him. Her love had given her the courage to bear him their child. She admired his mind, enjoyed his company, and needed him. No other man would ever touch her.

Jack gave her her head with the women she wanted, but she never abused his confidence, nor exposed him and Betsy to her occasional crushes. That part of her life was completely separate from her home.

For Laura and Jack Mann, home, love, and marriage were inviolate. Their life together hadn’t been easy to build, and they were proud of it. It made the Pringles’ crack-up all the more sad and dramatic to them.

“If you and I had found out about ourselves what Page and Sunny found out—so suddenly—after they were married,” Jack mused. “Honey, I’m not so sure I could have taken it any better than Page did. It was that bad.” He ditched his cigarette in an ashtray by the chair.

“Did you ever know anybody named Winkler?” she asked him.

“I will tomorrow night,” he said.

“What does he want to tell us? That Page and Sunny are going to stick it out?” Laura said.

“Think it over,” Jack said. “If he can tell us that, he knows the whole damn crazy story.”

“He couldn’t!” she cried. “Almost nobody knows.”

“If he doesn’t, I’ll bet my last dollar he wants us to tell him,” Jack said. “And that gives me an idea.”

“An idea who he is?” she said.

But he only winked at her.

Winkler, tall and reserved, inclined his silver head and listened, absorbed, while Jack talked. He was kind and friendly, almost ceremoniously polite.

The Manns had greeted him earlier in the evening with misgivings. But he seemed more afraid of them than they of him, and it made them anxious to reassure him. Jack was naturally gregarious, Winkler naturally shy, so it was inevitable that Jack should take over the conversation. He spoke of Page and Sunny Pringle, answering Winkler’s questions about the safe, innocent side of their lives.

“Page was a good-looking boy,” Jack said. “Over six feet, blond, clean-cut. It’s a lucky thing, too, considering how he met Sunny.”

Laura kicked him under the table, the way she did when he spoke too warmly of other men, and poured Winkler some more coffee to distract him.

“He seemed very intelligent,” Winkler told Jack. “It’s hard for a stranger to judge, though, and I only talked with him for a little while in the restaurant where we met. He seemed to need somebody to talk to and I was there. Later he said he wanted you to know that the things you told him during your argument were beginning to make sense now. He said you’d know what he meant.”

Jack nodded. “Where did you meet?” he asked.

“It was a little hash house in Barstow. On Route 66. He was with the loveliest girl I ever saw. His wife?”

“Sunny,” Laura said.

“I’m surprised he asked you to come here,” Jack said. “I didn’t think he had much respect for me after that fight.” Laura gave him a warning frown, and he got up to get the Cointreau and liqueur glasses. While he poured, Winkler asked awkwardly, “Why was it a good thing Page was so handsome when he met Sunny? Didn’t she like a plain face?”

“It wasn’t the face,” Jack said. “It was the rest of him. He was stark naked.”

Winkler blanched a little. He had all the earmarks of a lawful upright man; a good man, but one with ordinary tastes and ordinary morals.

“Could I hear the story?” he said. “I asked for it, and I won’t condemn it.”

“It’s pretty rough, Mr. Winkler,” Jack said candidly. “And we don’t know you. I wouldn’t want the Pringles hurt.”

“They never will be, not by me,” Winkler said with a strange intensity that impressed Jack and Laura. Laura tried to shoot her spouse a strong “no” look, but Winkler had already persuaded him. She saw it coming and she was right. Jack would tell him, even though he was a stranger.

Or perhaps Jack, shrewd and intuitive with people, saw what Laura missed: that Winkler had known Page and Sunny somewhere before and that his feelings for them were warmer and deeper than he admitted.

* * *

The way Page met Sunny was simple and slightly shocking. She was a fair-haired, spirited girl with a lovely face. She was a college freshman and hadn’t learned to handle her emotions yet, but she had the willow-limbed grace and softness that men admire, and enormous charm. Her eyes were a double-take true green, and she had been “Sunny” ever since the first pubescent boy had noticed that kindling smile of hers.

It was mid-October, an Indian summer afternoon, smoky and golden and warm enough to work up a sweat. Sunny was playing baseball at Lake o’ the Woods with her sorority, fielding badly but enthusiastically.

Toward the end of the game she plunged through the underbrush at the edge of the field, chasing the ball, and there was Page. He was standing on the strip of beach bordering the lake, laughing and drying himself roughly with his flannel shirt. He was bare as a winter tree and he saw Sunny at the same moment she saw him. There was a startled silence and then the friend with Page, who was Jack Mann, his roommate, said, “See you later, children. You won’t be wanting a chaperone.”

Page threw his shirt on the ground and stared at Sunny. “Come on in,” he said softly. “The water’s fine.”

Sunny threw him an enchanting smile. “I lost my ball,” she said, embarrassed but fascinated.

Jack spotted it as he retreated from the scene and tossed it to Page. Page held it out, daring her to come and get it. And Sunny, with her heart beating hard and making her breathless, walked up to him and held out a bold hand. He dropped the ball into it, while she looked him up and down to show off her sophistication. But she discovered, with a bright blush, that she hadn’t any.

He laughed and she turned and ran, clutching the ball. But at the bushes she looked back. “You’re beautiful,” she cried. He kept laughing, watching her until she disappeared through the bushes and back to her game.

They met once again that day, when Page and Jack walked past her group on the way to Page’s ramshackle runabout. Jack climbed in while Page approached Sunny, who was cooking a wiener to death while she kept her eyes on him.

“I’m Page Pringle,” he said.

“How do you do?” Sunny answered solemnly. “I’m Sunny Rotheli.”

They smiled at each other. “Your hot dog is burning up,” he remarked.

She snatched her stick out of the fire and flipped the dog over her head into the leaves. “Oh!” she said.

He touched her fair face with his hand. “I’ll call you, Rotheli,” he said.

“You do that, Pringle,” she said, half irked and half infatuated.

Page gave Jack a crazy ride back to town.

* * *

They got off to such a fine start that it seemed like a pre-destined romance, if there are such things. They made a perfect couple, in a wonderful old-fashioned way, complementing each other. They even looked perfect: two blond heads, two pairs of green eyes, two quick smiles.

“You look like an old married couple,” Jack commented.

“What do you know about old married couples?” Page said.

But Jack, who was a good bit older than his undergraduate friend, insisted it was true. Page and Sunny took to each other in a way that seemed almost chemical, adopting each other’s gestures and expressions with a sort of passionate admiration. For those first few months the affair was fast and thrilling, even slightly delirious.

* * *

Their first date was a careful game of hints and titillations and sudden sweet impressions. He liked her voice, the firm lines of her body, her warmth. They would both have preferred to sit and look at each other without speaking, but they felt the necessity to impress each other with talk and were afraid to be quiet—until late in the evening when silence unexplainably became possible ... and lovely, and intimate.

They were sitting in Page’s car—“Bucephalus,” he called it, the rumbling warhorse. The cold autumn air touched them through a score of cracks in the doors and windows and made them pull closer together for warmth. Page put his arms around her and blessed the weather.

“You feel so sweet,” he told her.

“I’m not sweet,” she objected. “That’s for little girls.”

“How old are you, little girl?”

“Eighteen.”

“That’s pretty old.”

She sighed. “All right, seventeen, but only for six more weeks. And I know my way around, which I would have thought you’d notice. How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight. I’m a vet. Korea.” He kissed her neck, rubbing a hand in her bright hair, and then pulled away slightly to see her face. She was serious about “sweetness” being for children. But she had it, and in spite of her best efforts it showed.

Page could just begin to glimpse it as he held her in his arms and felt her pulsing against him in the dark. That was when the welcome silence fell, and neither of them worried about it. It was good to sit there and just hold each other, feeling each other’s breath or the tickle of a moving eyelash. So good that Page felt a curious sense of foreboding when Sunny’s closeness began to excite him. He almost wished it wouldn’t happen; not this fast, anyway. He held her tenderly, trying to control it, and wondered why in the name of reason he should feel a singing in his head over this pretty girl, superficially like so many other pretty girls he had known.

I want her to be perfect, he thought. I’m afraid she’ll disappoint me. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m afraid I’m not good enough for her, good enough at love to satisfy her. And having challenged himself on a very touchy point, he kissed her ardently.

She reacted with a moan of pleasure that told him she had been restlessly waiting for it. It was almost too much. She went after his mouth like a bounty-hunter on a hot trail and he said, “Hey! Slow down, honey. Don’t rush it.”

Her face had a familiar determination and he asked, “Sunny, are you a virgin?”

“Heavens, no!” She was insulted. But she stopped pulling on his collar and trying to kiss him.

He let her discomfiture build a moment and then lifted her face and said, “It’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s a nice change.”

“You think I’m lying!” she exclaimed. “Page, I’m not a virgin. Oh, I’m not trying to brag, I think that’s crude. But you have a right to know the truth.”

“Then tell me the truth.” He said it gently, smiling, and offending her again with his fatherly attitude.

But the feel of his big arms around her softened her up a little. “Well,” she said reluctantly. “I’ve done everything else but.” She could feel him laughing silently at her and with an angry jerk she started to get out of the car. But he pulled her back.

“No, honey, don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to laugh.” But he was still laughing.

She struggled for possession of her hands, to give him a good whack, but he wouldn’t give them up. And suddenly, to her dismay, she felt a strong erotic spasm in response to his superior strength. At once she stiffened. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of exciting her, not when he didn’t play fair. In a small voice she asked, “How did you know I’m a virgin?”

“You laid it on too thick, Sunny.”

“Laid what on?”

“The sophistication bit.”

For a moment she thought she might cry with humiliation. And then laughter spilled over in her and saved her. “I must look like an idiot,” she said, embracing him again.

“There’s so much about you I don’t know,” Page said. “I want to know everything.”

“I’m not at all exciting,” she said naïvely.

“The hell you aren’t.” She could tell from the way he was breathing that she had said the wrong thing again.

“Well, my life isn’t exciting,” she corrected herself.

“It is now,” he said and she felt his firm, cool hand slip under her sweater. Beneath his strong fingers she felt a melting delight and suddenly the famous riddle of life seemed dazzlingly clear.

She yielded to him just to see what it was all about. And the brief surrender became permanent, a lifetime commitment.

He pushed her head back on the car seat, kissing her, catching her hands again and making them do strange things in strange places. She gave up trying to stop him then, from that night forward. The feel of his hard male body moving against her brought her to life all over and made her need him terribly; need things she had never even tried before.

It was Page who restrained her; Page who made her hands do what her body was aching to do instead until she began to cry with frustration. It had been an electric shock to her that she could feel like this about a man; about this man; and she couldn’t be content with going only halfway.

“Page, please,” she begged, but they had petted too ardently; it was too late. He collapsed beside her, answering her with sleepy kisses. When he came to himself somewhat, he wiped her wet cheeks with his fingers.

“Sunny?” he whispered, surprised. “Did I hurt you?”

“I wish you had,” she said.

“Darling, I couldn’t. Not like this. When it happens I want it to be right: a beautiful thing in a beautiful place. You deserve that. I’m no animal.”

“It should have been tonight,” she said, quivering.

“No.” He amazed himself. With any other girl he would have demanded it, but he didn’t want it that way with Sunny.

“You think I’m a born whore, don’t you?” she said tearfully.

“A born angel is more like it,” he said, holding her tightly. They both felt reckless and strange, loath to leave each other but faced with a curfew. Almost strangers and almost lovers, they looked at each other by the light of the street lamp outside, and said simultaneously, “I love you.” The coincidence of it startled them.

Page buried his face in her shoulder. “And I don’t even know you,” he marveled.

“You will,” she promised happily. “After we’re married.”

“I don’t know what made me say it,” Page said, crushing his cigarette in an ashtray and walking nervously around his room. “We said it together. ‘I love you.’ It was the damnedest thing.” He clapped his hands against his sides and let himself fall on the couch next to Jack Mann. “Help me out, Jackson,” he said. “I don’t want a passionate romance with a freshman virgin.”

“You have something against freshmen?” Jack said.

“Well, I’m not in love with her, for one thing. I just said I was. You know, the moon and the rest of it. She smelled so nice.”

“I never saw you in such a hurry to back out of an affair before. No matter how she smelled.”

“I never worried about an affair before.”

“It’s obvious you’re nuts about the girl,” Jack said.

“The hell!” Page snapped. “She wants to get married.”

“Good for her.”

“You louse!”

“Hang on to her, boy,” Jack advised. “She’s a rare one.”

Page got up and paced around again. “Well, what do you do if you’re in love with a girl but you don’t want to marry her?” he asked.

Jack shrugged. “Live with her?”

Page grimaced and gave up.

* * *

But if Page complained, he was also intrigued with the idea of letting himself get hooked. He didn’t want to be married, it was true. But he didn’t want to be in love either, and that was already a lost cause.

Jack was not fooled. He was a sharp student of humanity. He had to be: it was part of his self-defense. Any man who feels for other men what Jack Mann felt has to guard himself carefully. He watches his tongue, which might slip; his hands, which might wander; his wisecracks and lies, and guards his feelings with a tough sense of humor.

The virtue of Jack’s abnormality was that he understood people instinctively. He knew Page, and nothing Page could say would hide from Jack his love for Sunny.

* * *

By the following spring, Sunny Rotheli was no longer a virgin. But it had all been accomplished in a beautiful place at a beautiful time: a starry evening, a rich, perfumed hotel room, a dime-store diamond. Sunny had felt a wistful nostalgia for the drafty auto and the cold October moon, but it couldn’t be helped. She had enough sense to realize she was special to him and that he would not take her there where he had made love to so many other girls.

Their infatuation did not abate, although Page kept hoping the thing would burn itself out from sheer overheating.

As for Sunny, all that mattered now was to get Page to propose. She tried everything: teasing, threats, even subversion. She complained to Jack and tried to promote sabotage from behind the lines.

But while Page would admit to any poetic excess of passion, he wouldn’t propose marriage.

“Live with me, then,” Sunny said mournfully.

“I can’t ask you to do that,” he protested.

“You aren’t asking me, you worm!” she said. “I’m asking you.”

“Somebody has to protect you from yourself,” he said. But the truth was he had promised himself a year or two of travel after college. He had seen Korea in the Marines and it wasn’t his idea of a pleasure cruise. Now he dreamed of Europe.

He had a little money and a lot of wanderlust saved up. He was sure he could write, and he was going to prove it in a Paris garret, find a rich older woman to keep him, become noticed and influential, and come home to claim Sunny in triumph.

Actually, beyond the daydreams, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, except give himself a champagne playtime before he settled down to the beans-and-gravy of earning a living. He meant to earn the living with his typewriter, with words. And he might even take Sunny at her word: make her his mistress and dispense with the marriage bit.

But as Jack kept telling him, Sunny was the kind of girl you marry and consider yourself damn lucky to have caught. She would make a poor and moody mistress but a sensual and loving wife. She needed security with one man. After that she’d be all loving and giving, like Sunday’s child.

“What do you know about women?” Page would blow off at Jack when they discussed it.

“I like ’em,” Jack said with a cynical amusement he couldn’t share with Page. Loneliness was the abiding condition of Jack’s life. It was the reason a close friendship like the one with Page meant so much to him.

“I like them too. But that doesn’t mean I understand them!” Page said.

“Hell, you don’t like them. You just love them.”

“I like Sunny,” Page restored.

“Oh, Sunny. She’s the one you’re going to marry. That’s the one woman a man has got to like as well as love,” Jack said.

“Thanks, Dorothy Dix. Why don’t you write a column on the subject? You’d make a mint.”

“Damn right I would,” Jack said. “I’d have every old maid in the country sending me sachets.”

“Including Sunny Rotheli,” Page said.

“She won’t be an old maid. If you turn her down like the ass you are, somebody else will grab her fast.”

“I’ll be through school in June, and by God, I’m taking off,” Page said, gazing out the window. “I’ve planned it for two years. Once you’re married, you’re stuck with furniture and drooling babies and a jealous wife. And eight hours of brown-nosing a day to support the whole ugly mess. No thanks, man. Not for me.”

“Not even with Sunny?”

“Not for a while.”

* * *

“He meant it, too,” Jack told Winkler. “Came June that year and he promised Sunny he’d be around all summer. She lived in one of the Chicago suburbs, Hillsburg—west, on the Burlington line.”

Winkler was motionless listening to this story that had started out like so many classic college romances and had turned slowly into something so frighteningly different. He was fascinated and repelled at the same time by the brilliant little man talking to him. Jack was too calmly frank about himself; so frank he confounded Winkler, who found that he had become the helpless audience of a sort of modern ancient mariner.

“So Page went back on his promise, and didn’t see Sunny?” Winkler asked when Jack paused for a drink.

“He took off for Europe,” Jack said. “He was afraid if he saw her once more he wouldn’t go. It was then or never. But the poor guy outfoxed himself. He was even unhappier over there than Sunny was back here.”

“What did Sunny do?” Winkler said.

“What could she do? Went back to school for two more years. She didn’t see him again until the summer before her last year in college. I had gone to New York by that time, but they told me about it later. Page had just started to work for the Chicago Tribune. Decided to use his writing ability in journalism.”

“Was Sunny still in love with him?” Winkler asked.

“Yes. Oh, she got engaged to some hometown guy, and she might have married him. It shook Page up to find that ring on her finger. He proposed to her on the spot ... gave her such a rush she couldn’t turn him down. But when she said yes, neither of them suspected their marriage would end up the horrifying mistake it did.”

It was Sunny who noticed Page’s car first, parked in her family’s back yard. Nobody but Page would drive a crumbling runabout like that one.

“Page Pringle!” she exclaimed.

“Who’s that?” her father asked, pulling his car in beside Page’s heap.

“The grande passion of two years ago,” said his wife.

They found him in the kitchen. The thermostat in the refrigerator had gone haywire and, finding all the food frozen, Page had started out to fix it. Sunny’s little brother, Chuckie, gave him admiring help. Page had gotten sidetracked and carved six bloody half moons out of an icy tomato for Chuckie when Sunny and her parents caught him.

The motor in the refrigerator droned on in the background. He had forgotten to turn it off and it was working gamely to chill the whole kitchen. Page and Sunny looked at each other, afraid and relieved, intensely affected by the sight of each other.

“I was just fixing the ice box,” Page said clumsily. It was a declaration of love. He hated his shuffling embarrassment, but she caught his hands and saved him.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Cripes,” said Chuckie with the traditional disgust of the young for romance. “Show me about the tomato, Page.”

“Meet my family,” Sunny said, and introduced them. He turned willingly to shake hands, welcoming the chore he used to think of as the first step down the aisle.

Because this time he was sure; this time it was for keeps. He had been around the world now, and the world had only one Sunny. He was certain, with the confidence of his youth and their mutual passion, that she was still his. He had the pressure of her hands and the look in her eyes to prove it.

Lord, he thought, I want her right now. He stared overlong until Ben Rotheli, her father, cleared his throat and offered him a beer. They went into the living room with Chuckie trailing behind, his hands full of melting tomato chunks.

Page couldn’t keep still. “Sunny, you look wonderful. Just great,” he said impulsively and interrupted Ben’s description of a double play. Rotheli laughed and so did Sunny.

“I’m not very subtle, am I?” Page grinned, turning red.

“Everything in the refrigerator is ruined,” June Rotheli announced, coming in from the kitchen.

“Oh, my God, it’s all my fault.” Page got up.

They brushed it off good-naturedly but he insisted on taking them out to dinner. “Let me get back in your good graces,” he said eagerly, and they smiled at him and liked him. Page could hear echoes of Sunny’s laugh in her mother’s and it made him like June Rotheli immensely.

Chuckie got a good start on a case of hero-worship that night. Anybody who could saw a frozen tomato apart and spoil all the food in the refrigerator and take the whole family out to dinner in one day was a very superior man.

They went home to Hillsburg after dinner and sat on the front porch for a while. Page had been prepared to tolerate his future in-laws. Instead, he liked them.

He put his arm around Sunny, coasting on the porch swing, and fed her peanuts. Chuckie sat at his feet, infatuated as small boys often are. Page noticed how fond of his son Ben Rotheli seemed. Not that a man doesn’t take special pride in a son, but this was a relationship close and warm beyond the usual. Often, as he talked, Ben’s hand came in touch with his son’s shoulder as if to say: “This is my boy, my brains, my bones, my immortality.” It wasn’t the easiest attitude for a small son to bear, though Chuckie took it pretty well in stride.

When the phone rang Chuckie jumped up to get it. But it was for Sunny. He came back to the porch to call her and his face wore an impish grin. “It’s Ralph,” he said.

“Bed for you, mister,” Ben Rotheli told him as Sunny went in.

“I’ll be over tomorrow, Chuckie,” Page said.

“We’ll have to go somewhere else,” Chuckie said. “Ralph will be here. Maybe we could go fishing.”

“Maybe we could throw Ralph in the lake,” Page said.

Chuckie laughed and Ben and June shooed him in the house, following him in a tactful move that left the porch to Page.

When Sunny came back, they were alone with the fireflies and the sounds of a summer night. Alone with two years of love to catch up on.

“I like your family, honey. I didn’t think I would,” he said. “Your dad is awfully fond of Chuckie, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” Sunny plucked at a loose thread on her skirt and Page admired her passionately in silence, his hands moving carefully on her arms. “We’re a mixed-up family,” she added.

“Does it make you jealous? Girls are supposed to be jealous of their fathers.”

“No.” She laughed. “I understand why, you see. Dad and Mom lost a baby: their first. A son. He would have been quite a bit older than me. So when Chuckie came, years later, he seemed like a second chance.”

“Did the first one die at birth?” Page kissed her neck.

“He lived a little while, but they lost him at about three weeks.”

“How did he die?” Page didn’t care especially about it but he was afraid to blurt violently, “Darling, marry me!” the way he wanted to. It might scare her off.

“I never knew how it happened,” she said of her lost brother. “They never come out and say he died; it’s as if the words would hurt too much. So I’ve gotten the habit of saying they lost him.

“Mother can’t talk about it at all. She was sick before he came, and, afterwards she had a nervous breakdown. Cracked up completely. She couldn’t even leave the hospital for almost a year, and it was ten years before the doctor let her try again. She got me.”

“Must have been rough,” Page said. “Darling, you smell like roses.”

“It was. They named him Roger. It’s too bad they gave him a name—makes him seem too much like a real person.”

“Were they sorry you were a girl? What kind of perfume is that?”

“No. Mother came back to life and nearly spoiled me ... Chanel Number Five.”

“Why didn’t they name Chuckie ‘Roger’? Does Chanel smell like roses?”

“Because Mother was afraid of the name. No, you nut, it’s an aldehyde scent. Strictly chemical. Your smeller’s confused.”

“Honey, I don’t care what it is, you smell like roses.” He turned her head and kissed her forehead reverently, and then her cheeks and nose, and then his lips parted over hers and he touched her soul with his tongue. Her response was as hot and knowing and loving as he had remembered, and he held on to her urgently.

“Sunny, Sunny,” he murmured. “You’re my whole life. I knew it back in school but I wouldn’t admit it. Darling Sunny, thank God it’s not too late. You haven’t changed. I was so afraid—”

“You!” she cried suddenly, giving him a hard shove. “You worm!”

He leaned back, startled, unwilling to release her. “I know I’ve been gone a while—”

“Two whole years! And I was just getting over you, damn you!” she said, throwing her arms up across her breasts and glaring at him.

“Tell me what an ass I am if it’ll help,” he said.

“What an ass you are?” she said dismally. “I’m the ass. Sitting here like Heaven’s own fool and letting you—”

“Letting me what?”

She pushed his groping hands away again.

“Tell me; let me hold you. Oh God, Sunny ... Sunny....”

“I have a date with Ralph tomorrow,” she said curtly.

“I’ll drown him for you. Chuckie and I are going fishing. I’ll drown the bastard.”

It made her laugh and the laughter took her over the line to tears. Not too far from a mild hysteria, she held out her left hand to him. He caught it gratefully and kissed it and his lips met full on a cold hard stone. Surprised, he lifted his head and saw for the first time the grim flash of a diamond. He looked at her.

“Ralph’s?” he said.

Sunny nodded. “And he’s such a nice guy,” she said tearfully. “Such a good-natured, dependable, rich....” Her voice climbed.

“Okay, skip the torture treatment,” he said, still gripping her hand as if it were keeping him from a fall over a cliff. “Somehow I thought—”

“I’d sit around on that fine little duff of mine you admire so much and wait for you? Oh, Page, did you?”

“I guess so.” He grasped her other hand to crush with the left one. “Sunny, marry me. Marry me!” he said.

“Ask me, don’t tell me.”

He looked at her, hope dawning all over his face. She wasn’t shocked. She wasn’t even surprised. If she hadn’t loved him so deeply she would have laughed at him.

“Will you marry me?” he asked, softly and obediently.

“Not yet.”

It took Page several seconds to realize that she had said “Yes.” Qualified, but still “Yes.” When he did, he yanked frantically on the diamond ring, muttering, “Damn, damn, damn!”

“Are you trying to break my finger?” she said.

“No, just the ring. Sweetheart ...” he stopped long enough to ask ... “when? Next week?”

“No, Page—”

“But my mind’s made up. I can’t wait any more.”

She listened open-mouthed, too overcome by his brazen love to throw her two long years of lonely waiting at him. “I’m a fool to marry you at all,” she said.

“You said yes, didn’t you?” he asked.

She looked away and he saw her tears then, shiny trails on her faultless cheeks.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“Would I say yes if I didn’t?” She spoke with shame. She had meant to punish him when he came back—if he came back. And here he was, providentially dumped at her feet; hers to tease and torture till he knew exactly what she had been through. And what was she doing? Falling into his greedy arms like a good-hearted little whore.

“I just want to hear you say it,” Page said.

“I love you. That’ll be two bits,” she said bitterly. And suddenly, in her words, he recognized what grief she had spent on him, what dragging hours of regret.

“I can’t make it up to you, can I?” he asked, pulling her head down on his shoulder to cry. “Darling, can you believe I’m as sorry about that damn trip as you are? It didn’t prove a thing—except that I can’t live without you, and maybe that makes it worth something. Please, baby, please—tell me you love me.”

“Haven’t you humiliated me enough for one night?”

“I’m not trying to humiliate you, you lovely, lovely girl. I’m trying to make you understand ... forgive me ... take me back.”

“The last time I saw you, you were driving away in that crazy car of yours, shouting, ‘Next weekend, honey. Look for me.’ Well, I looked, all right. That was a long weekend, Page. It lasted two years.”

“Do you hate me, Sunny?”

“Of course I hate you!... Darling ... darling....” She was crying still. “I hated you enough to think I could marry Ralph. I had to hate you. It was either that or keep on loving you, and hating didn’t hurt as much.” She sighed and blew her nose on a tissue. “Now my family wants me to marry Ralph. They like him; they know him. But who is Page Pringle? Just a guy who broke their daughter’s heart.”

“I thought they liked me. They were so nice to me tonight.”

“What else could they do?” she said and worried him.

“They’re wonderful people,” he said. “I want them on my side.”

“What about your parents?” Sunny asked. “How do they feel about this?”

“They don’t know about it yet.”

“And I don’t know about them,” she said. “I get the feeling you don’t want me to. I don’t think you even have a family. You just sprang full blown out of a beer bottle one day, with a full head of foam. Tell me about them.”

“When you tell me you love me.”

“I’ll tell you when I’m good and damn ready!” she flared, and he bent her firmly against him and kissed her.

“You’ll tell me now,” he said. “Say it! Please say it.”

When she heard the pleading in his voice her self-righteousness dissolved and she whispered, “I love you.”

“I love you, Page,” he told her.

“I love you, I—I—oh, God, Page, I do. Isn’t it awful?” She felt her tears rush up again and cried impatiently, “What’s your mother like? A fishwife with marcelled hair?”

He was kissing her, but she struggled free and clamped her arms over her breasts again, turning her back to him.

“Come on,” she said, trembling. “Make with the family history. If I have to return Ralph’s ring and take you instead, I want to know what I’m getting.”

“You mean heredity and all that? I’m not an epileptic,” he groaned. “Or a bleeder. Or a compulsive criminal.”

She was trying to zip her skirt shut while he talked and he was trying to stop her. He won. She felt too undignified wrestling with him and covered her bosom again instead. “Come on, darling. Job? Money?” she said.

Exasperated, he sighed, “I’m writing. For the Trib. I’ll be the best damn journalist in this country in a few years, and you’re going to be my wife. And you’ll be glad I made you marry me. And you have the most beautiful goddamn neck and you smell like roses and oh, honey, honey, I can’t talk, don’t make me talk, all I want is—”

“Page Pringle, if you touch me there again I’ll put on a chastity belt and give the key to Ralph!”

“Oh, that bloody bastard!”

“Page!” She turned to look at him with angry reproof, but burst out laughing instead. Her arms loosened and he caught her up with an almost bone-cracking strength that left her breathless for a moment.

She kept begging for information about his family, tormenting him by talking in and over and around his kisses, but he had said his stubborn last word on that or any other subject until one-thirty in the morning.

He was holding her then, protecting her from the cool air and treasuring the closeness of her; bothered only by one question: the sort that dogs a man in love.

“Sunny?” he said, too casually. “Did you ever—I mean—do this with anybody else? I mean—it’s okay, you were engaged to Ralph, after all.... Not that I expected you to be faithful to me all this time while I was roaming around.... But, well, I mean—did you?”

She let him work his way through this painful speech and then she kissed him gently and intimately and whispered, “You’ll never know, my own darling worm. Never. Suffer, Page.” It was a time-honored female tactic and it worked. He did suffer, and he never knew the truth.

Ralph was informed abruptly of his new status when he came for Sunny the next day and found Page glaring at him over an afternoon beer like a caveman.

Ben and June Rotheli were deeply concerned, but it was Sunny’s decision and they stayed out of the fracas. Even so, had they guessed how fast the wedding was coming up, they would have objected sooner.

They had to be grateful, at least, that Sunny had informed them of the time and place. “I suppose that’s really something, these days,” Ben said.

“And I’ve always dreamed of a white wedding for her,” June lamented.

Sunny tried to reassure them through several long nights of family argument. “Dad’s been telling all my boyfriends for the last three years he’d pay them a thousand bucks to elope with me,” she smiled. “So he wouldn’t have to finance a big wedding.”

But not even Sunny wanted it done quite so fast. They were to be married in Wheaton, the DuPage county seat, just as soon as the blood tests were dry and the license legal. She was too much in love to resist, but she was too sensible not to worry. It amazed her when her father, Ben, unexpectedly announced to his wife, “What the hell, June. We got married in a hurry, too. And it worked out.” Sunny threw her arms around him gratefully while June raised martyred eyes to the ceiling.

Ben sounded confident, but he was wondering at himself. In the few short days he had known Page he had begun to like him, respect him far more than the run of Sunny’s beaux. Why? Because he loved Sunny so whole-heartedly? Because he got along with Chuckie? Because he was friendly and honest? Sure, all that. But something else, Ben thought. Maybe he reminds me a little of myself at that age. Maybe that’s it. There’s a bit of egotist in all of us. We can’t help liking the people who like us, who are interested in the same things, who might even resemble us.

June had to surrender. Everybody was on Sunny’s side, even Chuckie, and the wedding came off as planned. Sunny wore a pale gold dress that matched her hair, and Page found himself actually tremulous at the sight of her.

“Why couldn’t your family come?” she asked him unhappily as they were driving to Wheaton. “I wanted to meet them so badly. There won’t be anyone there but us and my family.”

“I know. They sent you their love and all,” he said uncomfortably.

“And all,” she echoed with resentment.

“Mother is sick,” he told her.

“How sick?”

“Housebound. And Dad’s out of town. Couldn’t make it back.”

“For your wedding?” she said. “His only son?”

“Don’t make a fuss, honey. This is our wedding day,” he said. Moments later, stopping for a red light, he bent to kiss her, but she wouldn’t give him her lips.

“You’ll smudge me,” she said, prim and miffed.

But he was too happy to complain. “Sunny, sweetheart,” he said. “My almost wife.” The line of cars began to honk behind them and he stepped hard on the gas. The sudden acceleration made her laugh and dispelled for a minute her secret doubts and fears.

* * *

The ceremony was quick and simple. June cried and Ben Rotheli, watching from behind the couple, felt a strange aching loneliness for the son he had lost so long ago: his first child, Roger. He couldn’t have explained it, having known the child a mere three weeks. It had been hard for him to shift his hopes to Chuckie; hard on Chuckie too, feeling so much expected of him. Ben tried not to let it show.

Now, looking at the broad back and blond hair of his new son-in-law, Ben felt a swell of affection. Perhaps, in a way, Page could take Roger’s place. Roger would have been about this age, and Ben wanted to know Page much better, wanted him to like him. And so he indulged in a pride and fondness that were rather special.

* * *

Page was blissfully happy. He had been two years making up his mind to this marriage and he had no misgivings. For Sunny, there were minutes of quiet fear when she realized how little she actually knew of Page, how much she was relying on their mutual love.

But they were short minutes, swallowed up in the sheer joy of being married to the one man she had always loved and wanted above all others.

They took a small furnished apartment in Chicago. It was cramped and plain, but they loved it. They went to the movies, bought modernistic ashtrays, soaped each other and made love in the shower. It was all wonderful, all so normal: pure sunshine and fun with no clouds of calamity visible on the horizon.

The only thing that bothered Sunny was the mystery of Page’s parents.

“I guess they disapprove of me, hm?” she said once, needling him.

“How could they when they don’t even know you?” he said.

“Do they know of me?”

“Certainly. They know I’m married.”

“You said they lived here in town. Can’t we drop in on them?”

“No,” he said quickly.

“Would they kick me out?” she asked.

“It isn’t that, honey. It’s just—”

“Just that they hate you? Or me, or us, or something.”

“They love me, they’re very proud of me. But my life with them is over, now. I’m yours, not theirs. They’ve had me for the past thirty years. The hell with them.”

Sunny was shocked at the way he spoke, but she was afraid to press him further on the subject.

* * *

Page and Sunny spent only one month in Chicago, for Page was being transferred to the Tribune’s New York office. They spent most of their spare time packing and visiting the Rothelis. But finally, a few days before their departure, Sunny demanded, “Let me meet your parents, Page.” She felt it was then or never.

He looked up from the fried egg he had been tranquilly enjoying, his breakfast obviously ruined. “No,” he said, and forked half a yolk into his mouth.

“I’m their daughter-in-law, and I want to know them. They’re my family now, too.”

He put down his fork and they argued, briefly but fiercely. Sunny forced the issue. “All right!” Page shouted. “They’re just a pair of kindly gray-haired squares and you’ll be bored to tears. But if we don’t go, you’ll imagine all sorts of horror stories.”

“Now you’re being reasonable, darling,” she beamed. But when he sulked at her she added, “Is it a feud between you, or something?”

“No,” he said. “We’ve just drifted apart. I feel badly about it. I’m not what they thought I’d be when I grew up.”

“What did they think you’d be?”

“The President. What else?” He gave her a rueful grin.

They went over on a Sunday afternoon three days later. Page was nervous and Sunny, taking her cue from him, started chewing her nails. She began to realize how much she wanted the Pringles to like her, the way her parents liked Page.

She followed Page into one of the modern glass-faced buildings on the Outer Drive, north of the Loop, and took the elevator up. A maid showed them into the Pringles’ spacious living room, which had a marble fireplace and a huge picture window looking out on Lake Michigan. Sunny had pictured a pair of gloomy hermits living in faded Victorian gingerbread and speaking in whispers.

Instead, a vigorous, tall man, aging but with straight back and strong shoulders, came into the room, smiling, and held out his hand to her.

“You must be Sunny,” he said as, speechless, she gave him her hand to shake. “I’m Page’s father. I’ve been asking him to bring you over ever since the wedding. I’m so pleased to meet you at last.”

Nonplussed, Sunny could barely say, “Thank you.”

Mr. Pringle mixed them cocktails, speaking easily as he did so. “You must have been a lovely bride,” he told Sunny, serving her a martini. “I’m sorry we had to miss it.”

“We missed you, Mr. Pringle,” Sunny said faintly.

Page had not spoken a word, not even a greeting, since they had entered the apartment.

“Of course,” Mr. Pringle said. “But Page didn’t let us know in time. I was in Canada on business when he wired me ... the day of the wedding.” His eyes were on his son, who looked away.

“I see,” Sunny said softly, taking refuge in a sip of her drink. Anger, resentment, and curiosity all boiled within her. It was as if Page were deliberately trying to alienate them all.

Fifteen minutes later they went in to meet Mrs. Pringle, who was propped up in bed, dressed in a pink mandarin bed jacket. She was a handsome woman in her sixties, a perfect match for her husband, to judge by appearances.

She held out a gracious hand to Sunny. “My dear, how lovely to meet you at last. I must say, you’re just as beautiful as Page said you were.”

Charmed and astonished, Sunny stammered her thanks and sat down at the bedside. She was utterly unsure of herself by now. But Mrs. Pringle did most of the talking while Page stood at attention at the foot of her bed, remote and cool.

“You will forgive us for not attending the wedding?” Mrs. Pringle pleaded. She was rather formal, but in an anxious way that tried to please, as if Page had warned her Sunny was a difficult person. “I rarely leave this bed any more,” she apologized.

“I understand,” Sunny said warmly. “Page told us you were ill.”

“I see as much of life as I can from here,” Mrs. Pringle smiled. “Not much, but enough to occupy me. I don’t mind being alone half as much as most people would. You see, before we got Page, I was quite a loner, by choice.”

“Before you ... got Page?” Sunny repeated, confused.

“Yes. I guess it’s all in your nature. Some like solitude, some don’t. Page was a great joy to us, though. He was just tiny when we got him. He never knew any other family.”

Sunny’s mouth opened slightly. “He—didn’t tell me,” she whispered. She had to force herself not to turn and stare at him.

“Oh!” Mrs. Pringle paused a moment, plainly afraid of offending her son. But the fat was in the fire. She had taken it for granted that Page would have told his wife so fundamental a fact about himself. “Well, George and I always wanted a boy,” she said restrainedly. “That’s the nice thing about adopting, you can choose your favorite.” She laughed, a small flustered sound, and Sunny pitied her.

It was no crime to be adopted. What earthly reason did Page have for keeping it secret?

“He was a very good baby,” Mrs. Pringle said nostalgically. “I wish we could have gotten another. I would have liked a brother for Page. Are you an only child, Sunny?”

“No. My brother Chuckie is eleven now. And my parents had another son, before I was born, but I never knew him. He died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Well, we intended to adopt another before my health gave way. But after that we couldn’t, so we’ve had to concentrate everything on Page. I hope we haven’t spoiled him for you.”

“I like him the way he is,” she said. But her anger sparkled on the surface of her words.

“I wish you didn’t have to leave so soon for New York,” Mrs. Pringle added. “Will you write to us, Sunny? Page never will.”

“With pleasure, Mrs. Pringle.” Sunny could hardly keep her eyes off Page now, and he stared sullenly out the bedroom window.

* * *

A half-hour later Sunny rode down in the elevator with her silent husband, and not until they were in the car and on their way home did she say, “All right, Page. I love you and I’m your loyal wife. But I don’t like being lied to.”

He knew the storm was coming and he wanted to keep calm, explain things temperately to her. He lighted two cigarettes, passing one to Sunny. “I just can’t get along with them,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got plenty of time.”

“Well, Sunny, damn it, in the first place, I’ve always been sort of ashamed of being adopted.”

“You’re nuts!” she said. “That attitude went out when Freud came in. Some of the nicest people I know—”

“Sure, sure.”

“—are actually proud of it.”

“Will you let me tell you!” he said, suddenly so upset that she shut her mouth and began to worry about his driving.

“You see, with most parents who adopt kids, it’s different. They tell them about it, even before the kid understands what it means. He grows up knowing everything. It’s nothing new, it doesn’t scare him, and he comes to comprehend it gradually.

“But with me they waited till I was twelve years old, an only child, brought up in a formal household, stiffly disciplined, afraid of his mother and father. And then I found out the truth by accident. Otherwise they never would have told me.” He spoke resentfully and made her feel he might be at least partly justified.

“How did it happen?” she asked.

“The family doctor let it out. The adoption had been arranged through him instead of an agency because it was faster, and my parents trusted him. So he knew about it from the start. Doc Blue....

“Well, I went in in the fall for a school check-up when I was twelve. I’ve never known if he let it slip on purpose, I think he did. I think he thought I had a right to know, and my Dad hadn’t told me.” Page slowed up for a red light.

“He measured my height,” Page said, speaking uncomfortably. “I asked him if he thought I’d be as tall as my father.... He’s six-two. And Doc Blue just grabbed the opportunity. He said, ‘You can’t always tell, Page ... unless you know a boy’s ancestry.’

“I started to fill him in on the Pringles. I was up to my ears with my illustrious forebears. But the doc interrupted. He said, ‘I know your Dad is proud of his family, but you ask him about it ... where you fit in. I don’t think he’s told you everything.’”

“He stuck his neck out, didn’t he?” Sunny said.

“Yeah. But Dad had promised him at the time he adopted me that he’d tell me the truth. So Doc Blue felt he had a duty to speak up. He thought I should know.

“I went home and asked Dad ... and he told me, all right. And told Doc Blue to go to hell. He’s never forgiven him, not to this day. Hates his guts, though I have the feeling Mother would have relented after a few years.” Page laughed unpleasantly. “You can’t mention Doc Blue’s name in front of Dad. Poor Mother. Blue was always her favorite, and I know she misses him. But she wouldn’t dare go near him without Dad’s approval, and she’ll never get that.”

“Your father didn’t seem like such a tyrant.”

“He is, though. The kind women love to be dominated by,” Page said candidly. “It wouldn’t show so much to you. He’s sixty-seven and you’re only twenty. But when he was young he never had to chase the girls. They chased him.”

Page spoke with secret admiration and Sunny sensed that in spite of his resentment, he still had a lot of unadmitted love for the man. “But he was absolutely faithful to Mother, and his principles and his family heritage. Family meant more to him than Mother or me or his life. Than anything!” Page took a corner on squealing wheels.

“Your father loves you, darling, he’s proud of you,” Sunny said. “It shows in his face. And your mother, too. They said some fine things about you, and they weren’t acting. You must have known that all these years.”

He threw his cigarette out the window and his face was pale and tense. “Sure they love me. They’re stuck with me. But the day I discovered I wasn’t a born Pringle I spoiled it for them. As long as nobody knew but them, they could damn near convince themselves I was really their flesh and blood. But once I was in on the secret—once I questioned my identity, my Pringle ancestors—the illusion was wrecked.

“I had to be arrogantly sure of myself, a Pringle to my finger-tips. How else could Dad turn me into a carbon of himself? And that’s what he wanted a son for.”

“My father loves Chuckie a little that way,” Sunny said.

“A little. I know, I saw it. But not like Dad loved me. I was an obsession. Besides, Chuckie is Ben’s own child. He sired him and he loves him for himself. Not because he’ll give some kids the name Rotheli some day.

“I tell you, Sunny, my parents spent many bitter years blaming each other for not being able to have their own child. For having to settle on some stranger’s issue to carry on their name. For sending me to Doc Blue when he turned out to be a black-hearted traitor.”

“But they were so—”

“So charming, so nice! I know, God, I know. They’re even nice to me! Their borrowed bastard, who exploded their selfish little daydream by finding out he had alien blood in his veins.”

Sunny listened to him with an aching heart. “Did a family name really mean all that to them?” she asked. “Couldn’t they go on loving you after you knew? They certainly love you now.”

“I don’t know. I’ve made things pretty hard for them,” Page said. “I hated the whole mess, I hated my ignorance. I hated being a nobody without a name or a family.”

“They were your family. You should have been grateful.”

“They were my room and board. I was their immortality. It wasn’t a fair trade,” he retorted.

“Page, did it ever occur to you how they must have yearned for a child, how they must have adored you when they got you? Maybe their motives weren’t the purest, but nobody’s are. If they hurt you, you’ve gotten back at them. Can’t you call it quits?”

“I was only a name to them. Their name.”

“You’re more than that now. Surely even you can see that.” She turned to face him as he pulled the car into their carport and turned off the motor. “Darling, I’d hate to think, if I ever wronged you somehow, that you’d hold it against me the way you have against them. It scares me.”

“You could never hurt me like that, sweetheart.”

“By mistake, by accident, I might,” she whispered.

“They took my childhood away from me. My name.” His voice was hard.

“What is your real name?”

“I don’t know.” His face was sad.

“Do they know?”

He sighed. “No. Doc Blue wouldn’t tell them. They gave him several thousand bucks and a promise never to contact my real parents. He gave the money to my real parents, and me to the Pringles. I was bought and sold for hard cash, Sunny. And my own name got lost in the shuffle.”

“The Pringles couldn’t take your name away from you if they never had it to give,” Sunny said. “They only had one name to give you—their own.”

“It hurts me to use it,” he said. “I’m a man without a past or a heritage. I wish I had a real name to give you, Sunny. A real father to know and love.”

“You have, if you weren’t so blind stubborn!” she cried.

“Anybody could have brought me up. I’d make just as good a Smith as a Pringle.”

Sunny crushed her cigarette. “If Doctor Blue knows your name,” she said thoughtfully, “why don’t you get it from him?”

“I’ve been trying to since the day he let the cat out of the bag,” Page said, his hands limp on the rim of the steering wheel. “I’ve begged him, offered him money, threatened him. Even broken into his office and gone through his papers. And been caught at it. He’s immovable, a sickeningly honorable old son of a gun.”

“You know, you’re more fanatical on the subject of family than the Pringles,” Sunny said. “Maybe they cured themselves by giving you the disease.”

“Well, they exposed me to it long enough,” he said.

“You’re a grown man, Page!” she said. “Make your own name now, your own place in the sun.” She was full of pity and love, and disappointment in him. “A name is just a label, darling. It doesn’t matter half as much as the man himself.”

“A name is a history, a home, everything,” he said unhappily.

“Maybe your real parents were sad, ugly people who couldn’t have done half the things for you that the Pringles—”

“To hell with the Pringles! I’d rather love my own flesh and blood, no matter who, than grow up a stranger in borrowed luxury. And I’ve been a stranger there since I was twelve, Sunny.”

“You’ve made yourself a stranger,” she exclaimed. “You big dumb nut. Page, I’m actually ashamed of you!”

He slammed his fists against the wheel and the horn barked accidentally, startling her.

Jack and Laura were sitting with Mr. Winkler in the Manns’ living room after dinner, while Jack narrated the story. “Page made himself unhappy, it’s true,” Jack said. “The Pringles were ready for the peace pipe years before he was. But they had made the cardinal mistake that adults can make with kids. They made him feel, right or wrong, that they only loved their name. Not him. They loved the idea of a son and heir, not the son and heir himself.”

“Well, he and Sunny moved to New York, then,” Winkler said. “Were you and Laura married?”

“Yes. They looked us up right away. Even took an apartment near us on East Fifty-second. Sunny was upset about this thing when they first arrived, but everything went so well for them that she soon relaxed. Used to sit and gab with Laura. They hit it off right away.

“And Page was really happy. Always smiling. Loved his work, loved his wife. And he was making ‘Pringle’ his own name at last. Nobody there knew his family, so the name was more his own than it had ever been before.

“He kept on with the Trib and did very well. When I look back, those first months in New York seem like a sort of reprieve,” Jack said.

“Reprieve from what?” Winkler leaned forward on his elbows, hands hanging between his knees.

“You’re a good audience, Mr. Winkler,” Jack grinned.

Winkler shrugged, suddenly shy again. “You’re a good talker,” he said.

“Well, around Christmas everything was going beautifully for them,” Jack resumed. “We saw them then at a party we threw, and they were the happiest couple there.

“But it wasn’t long after that this whole crazy tragedy blew up in their faces. Hard to believe, but it sure as hell happened.”

Winkler’s cigarette burned forgotten in the ashtray beside him.

* * *

It was one of those red-and-green gatherings that stud the Christmas season. Most of Jack’s guests were straight. He didn’t like to mix many gay people into his parties. He had renounced the painful homosexual adventures that used to fill his life before he got married, and it made him feel socially clumsy and anxious when the old gay crowd turned up.

Besides, no one in his office crowd knew he was an invert, and he wanted to keep it that way.

There were plenty of drinks, carols, and conviviality. Laura turned out all but the Christmas lights and candles, and the rooms took on a multi-colored jukebox glow.

* * *

Sunny, full of laughter, was the center of the carol singing. Her voice was small but true, and pleasantly husky. She sat on the sofa, crowded in by admirers, and sang “Santa Baby” and “The Christmas Song” to warm applause. Page was enough of a bridegroom to get foolishly jealous.

She was too popular, too beautiful, with her radiant smile and the smooth skin of her breasts showing down to the line of a daringly cut dress.

“That thing is too damn low,” he growled, but she stuck her tongue out at him and he either had to laugh or be laughed at.

It was a night for costumes. One of the guests was a well-pillowed Santa Claus. One came dressed all in white bunny fur, just for the hell of it. And later in the evening somebody climbed into a grass skirt Jack had brought back from a trip to Hawaii, and favored them with a hula. He made a lei of a Christmas wreath and rigged up a pair of glass ornament breasts which generated a lot of hilarity.

Page, still grumping, muttered to Jack, “I hate that kind of stuff.”

“What stuff? Hulas?” Jack said. They were standing together by the wall watching the performance.

“Men doing hulas.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jack said, laughing. “He’s not half bad. You’re just mad because everybody wants to lay Sunny.”

Page lit a cigarette. He knew he was high and not very cogent. He directed his anger at the dancer, who was enjoying his innocent transvestitism as much as his audience.

“I don’t know why people think that’s so damn funny,” Page said. “He probably gets a secret charge out of it.”

“Come on, old buddy, I’ll doctor your drink,” Jack said and led the way to the kitchen. Page followed him on an off-balance course through the swinging door.

“No more of that sweet junk,” he said, grimacing at the eggnog. “Gives you a rotten hangover.” He handed Jack his glass and Jack handed it back with a couple of inches of whiskey in it. Page tasted it critically and then turned to his host. “You look uncommonly sober for this hour of the night,” he said with disapproval.

“I am. I’m on the wagon.”

“What? Goddam. Are you sick?” Page said.

“Laura cured me,” Jack told him.

“Well, get that damn hula dancer on the wagon with you. Cure him and he won’t make such a horse’s ass of himself at the next party.”

“Still worried about Sunny’s dress?” Jack said.

“Oh, the hell with Sunny’s dress. It’s men in dresses I’m worried about.” Page hiccoughed.

“Page, I didn’t know. Shall we dance?” Jack said, and laughed at him.

“Oh, shut up.” Page finished half his drink in one gulp.

Jack knew perfectly well that Page was straight. He was also tight, and aggravated, and men in skirts were handy whipping boys. But it surprised Jack that his old roommate could be so harsh on the subject.

“I’m no fairy,” Page declared, “but that pansy in the grass skirt—”

“—is married and has four kids,” Jack informed him.

“Lots of fags get married to fool their friends,” Page said.

“How would you know?”

Page threw up his hands in a gesture of comical disgust. “I heard it somewhere,” he said. “You don’t think I know anything about a lousy queer first-hand, do you?”

It hurt Jack, but it was an old familiar pain; one he had long since learned to tuck under his heart to heal at leisure. It joined a battalion of old scars and his face showed no sign of it.

Jack understood better than he ever had how deep Page’s conformity went. Page wasn’t worried about his masculinity; that had never been a problem to him. He was worried about being different. He had been raised in a conservative home where old-fashioned morals and conformity were prime virtues. Then he suddenly found out the family he was supposed to honor wasn’t his at all. The morals he respected included lying. And his comfortable conformity had been painfully stripped from his back, like a suit of clothes. He stood exposed, without a name or identity. At that moment, conformity became very dear to him. He wanted to be like everybody else with a family all his own.

As for the odd balls in this world, he had little but contempt for them. And a small secret awe for the few who could be deliberately different and still respect themselves.

But nobody had ever asked Page if he wanted to be different. Instead he grew up a member of a minority group, in spite of himself. When he thought of orphans and adopted children, he thought of the huge neglect they suffered, the rare love, the vague pity of charitable ladies fussing over them. And he classed all adopted children among the orphans.

Jack watched him in silence a moment. “Next you’ll be telling me I’m queer,” he said wryly.

Page laughed and clapped Jack on the back. “Okay, boy, you win. It’s that eggnog I was drinking. I should know better.”

“I still say it was Sunny’s bosom that got you started,” Jack said. “If Laura had a bosom like that I’d never complain about anything again, so help me.”

* * *

Jack and Laura saw the Pringles often, especially after Jack learned he was being transferred back to Chicago. It was a promotion to his home office, and he felt he owed it to Laura and Betsy to go. But he hated to leave New York. They gave him three months to make the move.

Sunny, homesick for Hillsburg and Chicago, spent a lot of hours with Laura swapping information and feminine chatter.

“Go see Page’s family if you get a chance,” she pleaded. “They’d be so happy to hear about us first-hand.”

“We will. Why doesn’t Page ever talk about them, Sunny?” Laura asked. “I asked him about his father once and he said the strangest thing. He said, ‘I don’t have a father.’ I told him everybody has a father and he said, ‘Everybody but me.’ What does that mean?”

Sunny tried to explain it to her.

“I don’t get it. What does he want from them?” Laura said.

“He wants to turn back the clock thirty years and stay with the worms who had him in the first place.”

Laura laughed. “Were they worms?”

“Maybe not. But they’d have to go some to beat the Pringles. I’m hoping Page will get over this when he has a son of his own.”

Laura, stooped over a suitcase, straightened up and stared at Sunny. “Hey!” she said. “You’re not—?”

Sunny smiled. “I wasn’t going to tell anybody so soon,” she said. “I’m not really sure yet. I just know, like you do.”

Laura came over and took her hands. The warm firm grasp gave her a quiet shiver of delight—the kind Laura so often experienced in contact with lovely women. “Sunny, I’m so happy for you,” she said. Up until that moment Laura had both admired and feared Sunny a little. People so beautiful sometimes inspire a sort of timidity in others, and Laura was naturally shy. But now, with the sharing of this secret, Laura felt close to her. She had the courage to touch Sunny, even to hold her.

“Does Page know yet?” she asked.

“No. He’ll go into orbit when he finds out,” Sunny laughed. “He’s been after me since our wedding day to do this.”

“When will you tell him?”

“The minute I’m sure. I have to see a doctor first.”

“See Dr. Settick,” Laura said. “Richie Settick. He delivered Betsy and he’s the greatest. I’ll give you his address.”

“I was going to ask you,” Sunny said, pleased. “I don’t know any doctors here.”

Laura was thinking of Jack’s incredulous reaction to the news that Laura was carrying their child. But for him, older and with a sexual abnormality to fight, it had seemed like a real miracle. It gave him a soaring feeling that a normal man, sure of his virility, would never know.

Laura sat down on her bed next to Sunny and put her arms around her. “You should have seen Jack’s face when I told him he was going to be a father,” she said.

Sunny’s laugh brought her slim, smooth body even nearer Laura’s. What Sunny thought she was doing there in Laura’s arms she didn’t say. But it didn’t seem to alarm her. She submitted to a shy, sisterly kiss from Laura—a kiss that scarcely mussed her shining hair—and then pulled away with an easy motion and said, “Got any maternity clothes I can borrow?”

“Plenty,” Laura said, and the regret she felt at the lost contact did not show in her voice.

She never did discover what Sunny thought of that indiscreet caress. She was only grateful that it didn’t interrupt their friendship. Sunny was one of the good things in life that Laura would never possess, and Laura had the sense to see it early and keep the relationship platonic. Sunny’s love was given for the rest of her life ... and given to a man.

Dr. Settick had been practicing in Manhattan for about six years. He was in his thirties, stocky and good-looking, full of good-humor. He had managed to avoid marriage, though some of his obstetrics patients made a habit of proposing.

“Well,” he told Sunny, “if that’s not a baby in there, you’ll make medical history.”

She hugged herself with a happy laugh. “Thank you, Doctor!”

“Don’t thank me. I had nothing to do with it, I’m sorry to say,” he told her with a grin.

She went home that evening ready to tease Page frantic before she told him the news. But when he got home he cut her off with big news of his own.

“Sunny, don’t say a word!” he said as he came in the door. “Guess what?”

“That was my line,” she said as he carried her into the bedroom and lowered her into the pillows. “You couldn’t have been promoted again? Back to Chicago?”

He fell on top of her, laughing. “Better!” She began to squirm under his weight and to wonder if it would hurt the baby. “They want me to write my own column.”

She stopped wiggling. “Darling! The Trib?” she cried.

“No, the Sunday Magazine. Almost two million circulation. Imagine, honey—a magazine. I get a byline and my picture, every damn week of the year. One of their editors has been following my feature stuff and liked it. We’re in New York a half year and this happens. I knew this was my town. Goddam!”

“What will you write about?” she said.

“Whatever comes into my head. You, for example. You inspire me.” He gathered her in his arms and kissed her triumphantly. “Oh, baby,” he murmured. “If it weren’t for you, I’d never have gotten this. Or if I had, it wouldn’t have meant anything. Nobody in the world matters to me but you. You make everything so right, Sunny. I’ll write every word for you. That way I know it’ll be good.”

She felt a few tears coming on; the kind that take a smile beyond its natural borders.

“You’re ashamed of me!” he exclaimed.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, making your wife cry,” she said, laughing at the same time. “As a matter of fact, I had something to tell you, but I don’t think I’d better. So much good news would be bad for you.”

“Try me.” He got up and went into the kitchen. “How about a toast? Scotch or whiskey?” he called.

“Scotch,” she answered, sitting up and feeling her abdomen with new care.

“Honey, let’s call your family,” he said. “Your dad would love to know. He’s been great to me, as if I were part of the family.”

“Well, you are, goofy,” Sunny said, leaning against the kitchen door and accepting her drink from him.

“To us,” he said, lifting his glass. “My favorite people.” They clinked glasses and drank, watching each other, too happy to feel sensible.

“Oh, honey,” he said, overcome with her beauty, her love for him. “Honey baby, I love you so.” He pulled her tight to him and moved against her, slowly, rhythmically, guiding her hand in an intimate caress.

She responded with pleasure; subjecting herself to his will with sensual delight. And then, equally feminine, she took advantage of his mood to whisper, “Let’s call your family, too.”

“Don’t spoil it,” he said softly.

“My father isn’t the only one who cares about you.”

“Nothing doing.” He dropped her hand. “Dad would take it for a peace treaty.”

“He’s earned it.”

Page finished his drink, ignoring her. “Oh God, I forgot. You started to tell me something. What was it, honey?”

She let herself be sidetracked, too excited to keep still. “Your charming wife ...” she said seductively, and kissed his mouth.

“My charming wife,” he repeated, grabbing her again, “has been elected Miss Dill Pickle in Pratfall, Indiana.”

“No.” She grinned at him. “I’m going to make you the happiest man in the world next August.”

“What’s wrong with now?” Suddenly he stiffened. “What? Sunny! My God! Are you ... expecting?”

“Yes.” She glowed at him.

“Are you sure?” His voice dwindled to a whisper.

“Dr. Settick says so.”

“Who’s he?”

“My obstetrician. Laura recommended him.”

“He’d better be the best damn—”

“He is.”

“Oh, darling. This is too much.” He put his arms around her, so proud and amazed that his voice cracked like an adolescent’s.

“If you weren’t such a good writer and such a good husband,” she told him, “you’d never have gotten us into this mess.”

“Some mess,” he said ardently. It was a long time and a lot of gentle kisses before either of them moved. “And it won’t be any poor little unwanted bastard, either,” Page said. “This is the most wanted baby anybody ever had. My child. My son. How can I wait till August?”

“Let’s call Hillsburg,” she said. “Just think, Chuckie will be an uncle at the tender age of eleven. He’ll love that!”

“No, let’s not call tonight,” Page said. “Tomorrow you can tell the whole world, but tonight I want just us to know.”

She was touched by the idea.

“If it’s a boy we’ll name it Ben,” he said. “Your dad will bust his buttons.” He led her back toward the bed.

“Oh, it’s a girl, I can tell. And your dinner’s burning up on the stove. We’ll name her Katherine and call her Kate.”

“The hell with dinner,” he said, easing her down on the bed. “And Kate is too old-fashioned.”

He undressed her with hands that adored her lovely fresh body, her fragrant curves and slopes, her warmth. He pressed his big hands together side by side on her little belly, smothering it, and said in an awed tone, “God. Think how tiny it is. How alive.”

She reached for him and pulled him down on top of her.

“Honey, no. I’m too heavy,” he protested anxiously, but she smiled and silenced him with kisses.

* * *

They planned to call the Rothelis the next night at six, but chance fouled their neat timing; chance or fate, heaven or hell—whatever controls these things. This was the night for the sky to fall and shatter their lives.

At five minutes to six, their phone rang. It was George Pringle, Page’s step-father. Sunny came in from the kitchen and picked up the phone. Page, looking at the paper, saw her look at him cautiously.

“My parents?” he guessed aloud. She nodded, speaking fond trivialities into the receiver. He could tell she was worried about what he would say to them.

What the hell, he thought. I’ll tell them the news. This is no night for harsh words. Maybe Sunny’s right, it’s time to sign the treaty.

He surprised himself. He hadn’t planned any reconciliation. But he was full of a new self-assurance, a gratitude that took in the whole world. The Pringles’ call happened to come at a lucky time. He could talk to his step-father man to man now, and he would.

He took the phone Sunny held out to him and whispered, “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be nice to him.”

But she shook her head. “Your father’s worried about something. He didn’t call you just for a chat. He has too much pride for that.”

She was right. Page frowned at her as he spoke. “Dad?” he said in a friendly voice.

The elder Pringle answered at once and the words seemed to tumble out of him pell-mell, more breath than voice. “Page, my son, I have something to tell you. You remember—”

“Sorry, Dad, I can’t hear you very well,” Page said, wondering if his mother had taken a bad turn. “You sound like you have bad news.”

“Yes, I’m afraid—”

“Then let me give you our good news first. We were just going to call you.”

“You were?” Pringle was frankly skeptical, and it made Page feel guilty.

“Two things,” Page said. “I’m going to do a column for the Sunday Magazine. Got the offer yesterday. Byline, picture, and all.”

Silence. Page frowned again. “Dad? What do you think of that?”

“I’m delighted for you, Page,” his father said in a curiously weak voice.

“Well, if that doesn’t get you, how about this: Sunny’s going to have a baby! In August.” Another queer silence. “Dad, for God’s sake!” Page said irritably. “Don’t you hear me?... Dad, are you there?” The irritation verged suddenly on alarm.

“Yes, Page, I’m here. Are you sure about Sunny?”

“Sure I’m sure. She saw the doc yesterday.... Well, say something. Say it’s great. Say you’re happy for us. Or aren’t you?”

“Page....”

“Dad, tell me, is something wrong?”

“My boy, I have to tell you this. I’d have given anything in my life to spare you, especially now,” Pringle said. “But you must be told. I mean, now that Sunny—”

“Told what?”

“Page, you’ve got to believe me—”

“Well, damn it, tell me!” Page demanded.

Sunny felt a sharp foreboding, seeing the concern on Page’s face. She sat down in an easy chair where she could follow the talk. Page began to pale as he listened to his father.

“You remember Dr. Blue?” Pringle was saying.

“Sure I remember him,” Page said. And in a sudden sick flash, away in the back of his frightened soul, he saw what was coming.

“Well, your mother wanted to see him again. She has for some time, as you’ve guessed. She trusts him, and lately, with you gone and our life so restricted, she wanted to patch things up a bit.” He related these old problems awkwardly. “We talked it over and I decided if it would cheer her up a little, it was worth calling him in. Let bygones be bygone. I’m not a man to carry a grudge to my grave.”

“Yes,” Page said, seized by a wish to hang up, to stem the stream of words.

“He was glad to hear from us,” Pringle went on, “and he came to see your mother yesterday. They had a lot to talk about. They talked mostly about you, Page. Mother told him you were married now. To Sunny Rotheli....”

“Oh.” His tongue felt sticky dry. “Well, I’ll bet he was glad to hear I’ve settled down. He had me figured for a burglar when he caught me in his office that time.”

“Page,” his step-father said in a trembling voice. “There’s no way to break this to you gently. I—I....”

“Dad ... did he tell you who I am? Do you know who I am, Dad?” That had to be it. Page felt himself shaking, and Sunny, watching him, shook too. Her hands were knotted in her skirt, soaking the cloth with her perspiration.

Pringle cleared his throat. “You are Sunny’s brother,” he said.

Four words. They shot across the wires like electric darts and paralyzed Page. He stood gripping the phone, staring stupidly at the floor, unable to make sense. “I’m what?” he said faintly at last.

“You are Sunny’s brother. You are a Rotheli. You were christened Roger Rotheli. Page, do you understand me? Sunny is your sister.”

Page went dead white. His jaw slackened and he turned slowly to stare at Sunny. “That’s impossible,” he whispered.

“It seems the Rothelis had a boy,” Pringle said, “some years before they had Sunny. I guess you know that. Sunny even mentioned it to your mother and me. They had a little boy named Roger. He came just nine months after they were married. It was in the Depression, and Ben Rotheli was out of work. June was very sick, frail and emotionally upset all through the pregnancy. They hadn’t planned to start a family for several years. But the thing happened anyway and that, on top of their money worries and her bad health, nearly finished her.

“She had a drastic mental breakdown. Didn’t even know her husband for a while, and when he brought the baby in to show her, she tried to throw it at him. She thought it was a doll. When he swore it was hers she became hysterical and accused him of lying. She said it couldn’t be hers because she’d never had a baby and anyway she hated babies and that one most of all. Ben tried to show her the baby’s eyes, because they looked so much like hers, but she wouldn’t listen.” He paused. “That was you, Page.

“Ben wanted to keep you. He tried to figure out a way. But he didn’t have a dime, and he couldn’t stay home and care for you while he was out job-hunting. June was too sick even to know her own baby, much less love him or tend him. Every penny Rotheli could borrow went to pay hospital bills. He didn’t even have enough to feed himself more than a couple of cans of beans every other day. The baby had to be farmed out to a welfare agency the first few weeks.... Page? Do you hear me?”

“I hear....”

“Well, at the time this happened, Ben was living in a tiny basement apartment just off North Clark Street, not far from where we were. Dr. Blue had delivered you and he was taking care of June. It looked doubtful that June would ever recover her reason. As you know, Dr. Blue had been our family doctor for years, and he knew how much we wanted a son. Of course we didn’t know the Rothelis or anything about them then. We’ve still never met them, or known your real name till now. But when you were born, Dr. Blue came to us. He had talked it out with Ben, and promised him you’d have as loving and kind parents in us as it was possible to find.

“We wanted a boy desperately, and we were willing to pay generously for him. And Ben was just as desperate to find good loving care for you in a private home. That came first with him. But he was also hopelessly in debt. I think if there’d been the least chance June might have come out of it and been able to raise you herself, Ben wouldn’t have signed the adoption papers. But you couldn’t speak the word ‘baby’ in her hearing. It was that serious. And he was afraid she would end up a charity case in the city hospital psycho ward—practically a guarantee she’d never recover. Her condition looked permanent.

“Well, there we were with several thousand dollars in our hands to pay up all his bills. All June’s hospital bills and drugs and doctor’s fees until she was completely recovered. To us it was a small price in exchange for the son we wanted, and the money would never be missed. To Rotheli, it was a hand up out of the hellhole. He sacrificed the baby he didn’t know for the wife he loved.

“Dr. Blue drew up an agreement. In addition to the financial arrangements, both sides agreed never to try to contact or know each other. The doctor refused to help us until we all signed it.

“June was sick for almost two years, and in and out of the hospital after that for the next four and a half. You were in second grade by the time your mother was a well woman, Page; by the time she could have cared for you herself.”

There was a long silence between adopted son and step-father. Finally Pringle spoke again in a voice weary and near to breaking. “My dear son,” he said. “I know how you must feel—how impossible this seems. It just couldn’t have happened—”

“But it did, thanks to you,” Page broke in irrationally, pressing a hand over his mouth to crush the sobs. He had not wept since he had first learned of his adoption so many years ago.

“All the records tally,” Pringle said. “We checked them immediately, of course, over and over. There’s no way out of it.”

“No way. You’ve ruined our lives. You ruined mine years ago and how you’ve ruined ours,” Page cried out so bitterly that Sunny shuddered, hugging herself with fear.

“My boy, would you rather I hadn’t told you?” Pringle was shaken with grief, fully as much as Page, but Page was too stricken to realize it.

“I’m not your boy!” he said fiercely. “Oh, God! Nothing makes sense any more. I suppose you’ve told the Rothelis.”

“No one knows but us and Dr. Blue,” Pringle assured him. “If I had known Sunny was pregnant....” He stopped, uncertain himself what he would have done.

“You would have told me just the same,” Page said.

“It’s imperative that you separate now,” Pringle said. “You aren’t blaming us for this, are you, Page? You can’t imagine how we’ve suffered over it. I would have gone through hell to spare you.”

“Why didn’t you, then!” Page was incapable of logic. “You didn’t have to adopt me.”

“Perhaps you hate me now,” Pringle said sorrowfully. “But later you’ll understand Page, there are urgent things to settle. If Sunny is really pregnant, she must get an abortion.”

“Now you want me to murder my own child!” Page cried.

“Page! Stop it!” Sunny said, horrified.

“Your child is the product of incest,” his step-father said, and the word tolled in Page’s ear like a death-knell. “I’m certain Dr. Blue will help us. He has to share the responsibility for this thing. Get Sunny on the earliest possible flight to Chicago, and—”

“Haven’t you done enough?” Page said. “Every time I come near you something rotten happens. This is the end. You just let me figure this out!”

“Page, wait! Listen to me!” Pringle said, but Page slammed the phone down and pulled the cord out of the wall. He flung it into a corner where it landed with an ugly clatter.

Sunny waited in tense silence in the chair, holding herself together by sheer force of will.

Page stood motionless in the middle of the room with his back to her, his head in his hands. “Page?” she whispered, afraid her voice might unhinge him. “Who are you, darling? Did your father tell you?”

He turned and walked into the bedroom. She followed to find him pulling open his dresser drawers and throwing clothes on the bed. Sunny took his arms and made him look at her. Her face made him cry again, briefly and harshly: her beautiful, sensitive face. Suddenly he caught her to him, holding her in arms made powerful with misery.

“Page, you must tell me. You always wanted to know who you are. Was it so awful?” She spoke to him soothingly as his mother might have.

Instead of explaining he picked her up and put her one last time on the bed, meaning to leave her. But he gazed down at her and found he couldn’t move. He had been so warm and ready for love, so enchanted with her before the call came and blasted his life. It was beyond his courage to tell her and then walk out and leave her forever.

Instead he sat down and tried to open his mouth and declare that he was her brother. Roger Rotheli. That the father-in-law he loved and admired was his own father. His tongue refused to move.

He sat there beside his wife and felt the utmost love he had ever felt for her, and the deepest despair. He leaned down and kissed her brow, afraid of her sweet mouth. And abruptly, to his helpless dismay, was consumed with a raging desire for her.

Just once, before she learns the truth, he told himself in anguish. And without a word he took her. For Sunny, his sudden furious love-making was a nightmare. His hands that had been so gentle were hard, his lips bruised her, his tears terrified her.

Weeping and tremulous, she gave herself and prayed that her tenderness, her fright, her very flesh, would calm him, bring him back to sanity. But when it was over he simply lay across her, a dead weight, and said nothing.

Sunny held him tightly and murmured, “Page, my darling, whatever it is, we have to face it together.” He turned his face away so she couldn’t see it. “My darling, my love, nothing in this world can whip us as long as we have each other,” she told him.

“One thing,” he said.

“Was your father a ... an evil man, Page? A criminal? Or sick?” She spoke as she might have to an ailing child.

Page rose suddenly and began pulling his clothes together. “No,” he said. He zipped up his pants and put his jacket on and started out of the room, not daring to take time to collect his clothes. He felt he had to leave at once or he would want her again. It was a nightmare.

“Page!” Sunny cried, running after him into the living room. “For the sweet love of God, tell me!” When he opened the front door and turned to face her like a man taking permanent leave of his woman, she gave a little scream. “Tell me,” she demanded.

“Sunny, I—I—”

“You what? Page, are you trying to destroy me? You what?”

She stood with fists clenched, eyes wild in a flushed face, only half dressed.

“I’m your brother,” he said in a weird, strained voice.

Again a fateful silence struck the room. Page hesitated, waiting for her to faint. He would catch her, put her on the sofa, and sneak out before she regained her senses. It would be cowardly but easier. He dared not stay under the same roof with her.

But she didn’t faint. She only stood gazing at him while her face, that had been in the ruins of despair, slowly took shape again. A great wave of trembling went through her and subsided. Like Page, she lost her voice entirely for a minute ... an inherited trait they shared in emotional moments. When it came back she said, “You are Roger? My brother, Roger, who died?”

He nodded, ready to bolt. For a second they stared incredulously at each other, as fascinated as they were appalled. Sunny absorbed it bravely, better than he had.

“Page, shut the door and come here,” she said. Her voice was still quavery but she showed no signs of fainting. The blood had left her face and her eyes grew wide like green flowers above her white cheeks. But he wouldn’t come near her.

“I can’t stay, Sunny,” he said.

“You can’t stay?” It didn’t make sense at first.

“I commit the foulest kind of sin every time I look at you,” he said. “Now that we can’t ... I mean ... I want you terribly.”

“Page, are you absolutely certain? There’s no mistake?”

“Doc Blue told Mother when he learned your name. The records verify it. Good old Doc Blue ... my evil spirit,” he said acidly.

Sunny sat down on the arm of the sofa and Page moved to leave again, but she stopped him. “You can’t go!” she cried.

“I can’t stay, that’s for sure,” he said grimly.

“But where will you go?”

“The Manns’, I guess.”

“What will you tell them?”

“My God, that’s right.” He slapped his face with one hand. “I can’t tell any of our friends.” The enormity of it hit him brutally and he drew the hand over his grimacing face. “I guess I’ll have to get a hotel room somewhere.”

“Page, darling,” Sunny said, in better control of herself now, “did it ever occur to you that it’s too late for that? There’s no point in leaving me now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m pregnant with your child. You can’t do any more harm. It’s all been done. Does it matter then if we still make love?”

He was so shocked that he took a few steps toward her, his face screwed up with the effort to understand her. “Are you trying to tell me we should go on living together, as if this hadn’t happened?” he said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Sunny was taken aback by his disgust. She looked down, unprepared for this turn. “Darling, that baby was conceived in love and innocence,” she said.

“We aren’t innocent any more, Sunny. Neither is our love.”

“I love you so much,” she said miserably.

“You’re in love with your brother,” he said, still stunned by it. “It’s evil now.”

“Evil!” The word made her reel; she was frightened by his revulsion for the situation. “I can’t be ashamed of my love for you, no matter what you call it!” she flashed. “I won’t apologize for falling in love with you!”

“We don’t have to apologize for it, we have to do something about it,” he cried.

“What? Stop loving each other?”

“Separate,” he said miserably. “God, Sunny, I’ll never stop loving you.”

“Then stay with me.”

He threw out his hands at her. “You’re my sister, can’t you understand that? I’ve found my name at last. I’m your brother, I’m a Rotheli.” Just the thought of it shut him up for a second. “And you’re sitting there suggesting that we go on as if we were normal, ordinary, wholesome lovers! It’s unbelievable!”

All his ideals: normality, wholesomeness. How could he face the world without them?

“Page, you talk about us as if we were diseased!” she shot back at him. “Were we degenerates when we married, when we made love to each other? Does just knowing it debauch us somehow?”

“Only if we stay together,” he said, “and keep on committing an act we know now is criminal.”

“No!” she said with the ardor of a woman fighting for her love. “I’ll never accept that, Page. I can’t believe a love like ours is anything but good.”

“Well, now you have to believe it,” he said. “It’s dirty and it’s wrong, Sunny. The sooner you face it, the less grief this will bring us both.” He seemed to be struggling to convince himself as much as her.

“The sooner I face what? The baby in my arms—your baby? How do I explain him away? What shall I tell this ‘most wanted baby in the world’? Daddy doesn’t exist, dear? Mother just stirred you up in a test tube?”

“Would you rather tell him his father is also his uncle?” Page shouted.

“Does he have to be told? Does anyone?”

“Things like this don’t stay secret forever, no matter how you try. Suppose he’s born a monster. How will you explain that?”

Sunny put a frightened hand over her stomach. Like most people she had only hazy ideas of what happened to children born of incestuous unions, and all the ideas were gruesome.

“It will be beautiful,” she said, shaken but still brave. “It has to be, to prove our love is right.”

“It will only prove we found out about ourselves too late,” he said sorrowfully.

“It’ll be healthy and normal,” she said. “A sign—”

“Stop it, Sunny! There are no signs from heaven any more. All the miracles happened long ago. There aren’t any left for us. Darling, there’s only one way out.”

“What?” She was crying now, unable to control her face.

He tried to say it kindly, but the word itself was cruel. “An abortion.” It was her turn to register shock and disbelief. “Dad said Doc Blue might do it,” he added rigidly.

“Your father said that?”

“In this case, he happens to be right.”

Sunny shook with resentment. “How can you think such a thing? This innocent baby, this part of yourself you were so almighty proud of, and you want to murder—”

“And you want to go on living with me. Me, your brother!” he shouted. “And give birth to an imbecile—”

“Page, don’t!” she cried with all her strength. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” She collapsed into the sofa, whimpering.

He stood in the door for a moment, watching her until she looked up to see if he had gone. They gazed at each other, speechless with the size of their despair and the size of their love.

“Don’t tell anyone. Anyone,” she pleaded.

He nodded and pulled the door shut behind him.

“And let me know where you are,” she called after him. “Page? Page!” But the door was closed; he had left her and nothing indicated he had heard; or, having heard, that he would keep in touch.

Sunny sat where she was until the cramps in her legs reminded her of the hours that had passed. Like a hurt animal she roused and shook herself. With all the care of other nights she performed her usual nightly chores: bathed, brushed her teeth, curled her hair on trim tin rollers. It comforted her, as if she could enter the bedroom when she finished and find Page waiting for her.

To her surprise her hands moved, her heart beat, her mind functioned. She looked at her face in the mirror and her features were still in their places. She touched them to be sure.

For the first time she studied her face for signs of similarity to her husband’s. She got his photograph from her dresser and, turning on both dresser lamps, stood at the mirror full front, holding Page’s picture at the level of her own face.

It was several minutes before it began to come clear: the tiny dents at the sides of their noses, the sweep of the jawline, the full curve of the underlip. But suddenly the likeness leaped at her, like a light switched on in a basement, and made her wonder how they could have missed it all this time, why their friends and family hadn’t caught it. All those small subtle signs imploring recognition: those two mouths that knew the feel of each other so well, those two pairs of green eyes that looked at each other so often but saw, it now seemed, so very little.

But the thing that astonished Sunny the most, hurt the most, was the sudden total opposition of their views. Their faces might be alike, their love painfully strong. But in their minds something terrible had happened. He had taken one tack and she another, and the two were irreconcilable.

Sunny’s first thought, when she was able to think, was to save their marriage somehow. The morality of the thing was secondary; everything was secondary to her love and her life with Page. They would worry about morality after they agreed to stay together.

But to her tragic surprise, they didn’t agree. He saw things exactly in reverse: morality dictated a separation. Their marriage was an offense to society, to religion, to the law. Page couldn’t live with that and keep his self-respect.

Sunny put Page’s neglected clothes back into his dresser drawers and told herself he would have to come get them sooner or later. She would see him then. In the meantime she would contrive a way to lure him back to live with her, back where he belonged.

She knew he had adopted his step-father’s attitude. All the curses he flung at Pringle on the phone didn’t change that. But she hoped Pringle’s words would carry less weight with him in the long run than her own.

In the next few days she spent a lot of time at the mirror with Page’s photo in her hand. It gave her the same message every time: You are brother and sister. It’s true. You look alike and nobody saw it before simply because nobody would have believed it.

Gazing at her guilty features she realized that Page would never be persuaded of the morality of their marriage. She would have to win him back on the strength of his love for her alone, and let the morality go hang. She felt she would die without him.

* * *

Page did not come back for several days. She guessed he was holed up somewhere, suffering as she was and uncertain what to do. She waited at first with confidence, sure that he would need his things. He couldn’t get them without seeing her and he couldn’t see her without wanting her; that was her secret weapon. She didn’t leave the house.

But when three days had passed she began to get scared. Finally, swallowing her pride, she called Jack Mann. “He isn’t home yet,” she said, “and it’s past dinnertime. Have you heard from him?”

“No, honey, not for the past few days. I was going to call you, in fact. His office says he’s home with the flu.”

“What?” she exclaimed. So Jack caught on at once that something was wrong. It humiliated her, and yet relieved her that she could share some bit of her troubles.

“I tried to get him for lunch yesterday,” Jack explained kindly. “Only have a couple of weeks left before I go to Chicago, you know.” He paused. “Want to talk about it, Sunny?” he asked.

She was not offended; only afraid to discuss it. “I guess I have the bug, myself,” she said. “If you do hear from him, Jack—”

“I’ll call you right away.” Again he waited, giving her an opening. His instinct for people, for trouble, for people in trouble, was too good. There was no fooling him.

But she said, “Thanks, Jack,” and hung up quickly to avoid crying over the phone.

She wondered, as she replaced the phone, if she had better call the police. But she was afraid if they were called in, the whole fantastic mess would come out in the papers. And if that happened it would destroy Page.

In the middle of the morning’s anxious monotony she had an idea. Page must have realized what she was up to, waiting there for him in that neat little trap, ready to grab him when he came for his things. Couldn’t he be watching the place, waiting till she went out for a while? He could get in and grab his things then without having to face her, and it would spare him the temptation he dreaded.

With the speed of new hope she got her coat and purse and left the apartment. The cold air outside felt good to her. She glanced quickly up and down the block, wondering if he saw her from the shadows of a doorway. If he did he wouldn’t show himself.

Sunny walked toward the market on the corner where she bought her groceries, bending her head slightly against the gray wind. Her eyes were open wide, aching to see behind her. She spent six or seven minutes in the shop. That should give him time to get in, she thought, and went out without buying so much as a package of gum.

She ran back to her building with her heart struggling to break out of her ribs all the way, and hurried into the warm entrance hall.

They met halfway on the stairs. Sunny was dashing up with her head down and saw his feet first. Page stopped in his tracks, motionless with surprise and indecision. “You got me after all,” he said at last, as if she ought to move aside and let him pass to make up for it.

“Caught you like a thief,” she said to shame him.

“It won’t do any good, Sunny,” he said brusquely, trying to shove past her, but she threw frantic arms around him. And suddenly he dropped his bundles and kissed her.

“I love you,” they said together, the way they had at the beginning of their love. It made her cry and made him wild to escape the need that swelled in him.

“Let me go,” he said, pulling her arms away, but he saw that if he left her there on the stairs she would become hysterical. She was close to it already. He hesitated a few seconds and then the shame caught up with him. She would take him for a weakling.

He retrieved his belongings and took her elbow, mounting the stairs with her. “This will only hurt both of us,” he said grimly. “But if you want to talk about it....”

“Thank you, darling,” she said and let him unlock the door for her. She went in ahead of him and saw at once a note he had propped on the phone table. She started for it but he grasped her hand, letting his things fall again.

“It’s just a note,” he said impatiently. “If I hadn’t taken time to write the damn thing—”

“I wouldn’t have caught you red-handed,” she said. She freed her hand and picked it up, ignoring his plea not to read it. It said, “I love you desperately. I will always love you, only you. Sunny, there will never be anyone else. Page.”

When she looked at him again through wet eyes, he was gazing at the floor. “It’s not as if you didn’t know it,” he said, embarrassed.

“I just like to be told,” she said.

“It’s against the law to tell you now,” he said. “Did you know that? Our marriage is legally dead. If we went on living together we’d be criminals.”

“Does that scare you so much? I’m willing to be a criminal, I’m willing to be anything, if it means keeping you. But you’re not willing to do that for me. You just want to sneak in and out of here with your clothes before I catch you.”

“Don’t you wonder what living with a sickness like this all our lives could do to us?” Page said earnestly. “It would be slow poison. All you’re thinking about is right now. You want me and—and I want you.” He stopped, trying to steady himself. “But suppose I gave in and we went back together. Even if nobody ever found out it would destroy us, Sunny—”

“Destroy you!”

“Knowing every time we touched each other, every time we kissed—”

“Page, I won’t have our love defiled, not even by you.”

“And what if somebody did find out? Do you think they’d approve of it?

“Your parents won’t tell, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

“My father would despise us if we stayed together.”

“Well, who is more important, your wife or your father?” she cried spitefully. “You never seemed to give a damn for him before.” Seeing him brace for a fight she softened suddenly, imploring him. “Darling, your father wouldn’t despise us. He wouldn’t approve, it’s true, but if he saw we meant it; saw how deep our love is.... He loves you too much to risk breaking with you forever. And I have a woman’s feeling your mother secretly wishes we’d stay together, no matter what. They love us, Page.”

“Sure they love us. That doesn’t make us right.”

“Oh, say the damn word!” she exclaimed, shaking her head till the blond curls flew. “We’re both so scared of it we can’t pronounce it.... Well, say it, go on!” she taunted.

“Say what?” he muttered stubbornly.

“Incest. Incest, Incest, Incest!” she shouted. “That’s it, that’s the one big fact in our lives. Let’s at least call it by its right name.”

“Let’s just get rid of it, end it,” he said.

“Page, you know you can’t leave me,” she said, approaching him. “Any more than I can leave you.”

“All right,” he flared. “We’ll live here and raise that little idiot we spawned. And someday, somehow, the news will leak out. Only by that time I’ll have a name, a reputation. We’ll be well known. Our child will have ears and he’ll understand things—at least I hope he’ll understand things—and either this gets plastered all over the papers or somebody gets smart and blackmails us. We lose our sanity either way. We’re helpless, completely trapped.” He stopped, out of breath.

“I’ll take that chance,” she said. “For you.”

“You will now, but not ten years from now. How would you like your child to have to face it with us? Sunny, there are things you can face by yourself, but not with a child to protect.”

It was true. She felt the uprush of unwanted tears and cursed softly to herself. “We might never have to face it. We could move.”

“Where? The moon? You can’t escape yourself, anyway. You take yourself with you wherever you go—and your secrets and your shames. We’d have to look at each other every day, every night in bed, and know....” He gazed at her quietly for a minute, with his love, terrible and sharp in his heart, making him weak. “Sunny? Are you afraid to have an abortion?” he asked.

Sacrifice the baby, he was begging her, and maybe we can live together. If it’s just you and me with no kids to suffer with us.

She understood. “Yes, I’m afraid,” she said truthfully. “But not so much of the pain as—” She gave a little sob. “I love this baby, Page.”

“You’d rather have the baby than me, is that it?” he said roughly.

“I’d rather have you both,” she wept. “We belong together, Page.”

“Not in the eyes of the law.”

“The law can go to hell!”

“Swearing won’t change it. Why do you suppose incest is forbidden?” he asked. “Because brothers and sisters are falling all over each other trying to get hitched? No, Sunny, no. It’s to protect children, preserve the race. Did you ever hear of inbreeding? It happens to dogs and cows. They get nervous and weak. They get stupid. They bleed. It happened to the great royal families in Europe. What was it? Inbreeding. Incest.”

“But that took generations,” Sunny protested. “That doesn’t happen the first time.”

“It can,” he said with the certainty of a man who isn’t sure of his facts; only his prejudices. “I knew a brother and sister who were the children of first cousins. What do you think they were like?”

“Both gargoyles, of course,” she fumed.

“He was completely hairless from the day he was born. He didn’t have a hair on his body—not on his head or his chest or his genitals. Not one lousy eyelash did that guy have. He looked like polished plastic.”

“You can live with a thing like that,” she whispered.

“And his sister,” Page went on, “was a hopeless cripple from the waist down. Her legs never carried her one inch in her life. They were just a detour for her blood. They hung from her hips like sacks of water, and you’d have sworn there wasn’t a bone in either one. She went everywhere in a wheel chair. Her brother pushed her.”

“It might have been an accident or an illness,” she protested, trying to hide the anxiety he had roused in her.

Page lighted a cigarette from the one that was burning out. “Their parents were cousins. That’s the only explanation,” he said. “Cousins, Sunny. We’re brother and sister.”

She covered her face with her hands and cried. It tore him nearly to pieces to watch her. He had dramatized it for her, tortured her with it, in the hope that she would agree to the abortion. He felt it was the only chance for them to stay together. But it didn’t work.

“Maybe Dr. Blue was wrong,” she said pathetically.

He reached her in one big step and took her hard by the shoulders. “Maybe our eyes aren’t the same color and our hair isn’t blond and our noses and our ears and our mouths—” He faltered. “That mouth of yours, that mouth I love so unspeakably much,” he said, helpless with her closeness “... is my own mouth.” His voice separated each awful word. Sunny covered her lips with her hands as if they were court evidence of guilt. “It’s so obvious,” he said, studying her face, lifting his fingers to touch it. “God, why couldn’t we have seen it and saved ourselves before we fell in love? I’ve spent hours in front of the damn mirror. And the more I look at myself, the more I see you.

“I saw my face for the first time three days ago, Sunny. My face: your face. The same!” It was a cry of despair. She bent her head like a little girl being blamed for something she can’t understand. But he raised it again till he could see every feature.

“Oh, my darling,” he said, wiping ineffectually at her tears. “Oh, my love, my wife, my—my sister.”

He caught her in a crushing embrace, hiding his face in her soft neck, and she felt him shake with sobs that only a strangling repressive effort kept silent. He released her abruptly and turned, picking up his bags and hurrying toward the door. Sunny rushed after him, catching at his sleeve.

“Page, where are you staying?”

“I’ll get in touch with you,” he answered.

“I’ll die if I don’t know. Page!” she begged.

“Sunny, I have to be alone a little while. Can’t you see that? I’ll call you, darling.” He struggled toward the door, afraid to prolong the stay. He would succumb to her and betray them both, and end up hating her for it. To make love to Sunny now was to make her filthy as well as himself. His love was turned to lust since his wife had turned into his sister. Those were his feelings, a Pringle’s feelings, and he couldn’t escape them. Physical love with Sunny would be wrong and he despised himself for wanting it so constantly.

He pushed her firmly away and reached the door. She stood where she was, momentarily defeated, crying and heart-sick. Page was too moved, too in love and too worried, to leave her without another word. He said, almost hoping she wouldn’t hear, “Maybe if you got an abortion ... we could—”

She straightened up and said with a fierce pride that surprised him, “Never!”

He shut the door quietly behind him.

* * *

Sunny waited another couple of days alone in the apartment, afraid to go out and leave the reinstalled phone untended. But Page, in spite of his promise, didn’t call.

Sunny phoned his office at the Sunday Magazine twice, but they told her politely that Mr. Pringle was out covering a story, and gave her her own number to call.

He thinks if we just don’t see each other or hear each other, the problem will disappear, she thought angrily. For the first time since she had known him she was tempted to question Page’s courage. Not his physical courage; he had been in Korea, and his record was good. It was his moral courage she wondered about.

Sunny called Jack again. She knew her call would advertise serious trouble between her and Page, but he was their closest friend and she trusted him. “I don’t know where he is,” she admitted to him.

“Well, I don’t know where he’s living, but I do know he’s in his office part-time. We talked yesterday about getting together for a drink.”

“They keep telling me he isn’t there,” she said.

“He probably isn’t. He’s out a lot on interviews. Why don’t you go down there, if it’s that urgent?”

“He’d kill me,” she said.

“The hell with him,” Jack retorted. “If he hurts you, I’ll break his head. It’s worth a try, Sunny. If it doesn’t work, let me know. I’ll try to work something out.”

She thanked him and hung up somewhat reassured. It made sense for Page to hold tight to his job. He needed work right now, all the more since he had given up his wife. Sunny wished sourly that she had a similar crutch to lean on.

* * *

She took Jack’s advice and went to the midtown offices of the Sunday Magazine, but it was all for nothing. She wasn’t admitted to see him and had to leave, frustrated and furious. But Page suffered over it, too. He was angry that she should have tried to approach him in public and make a display of their trouble, especially here where he had a new job and had to establish his worth. But not all the wrath he could muster over her dangerous foolishness helped him forget that he had turned her out; embarrassed and hurt her. He ached with regret over it, wanting to rush home and hold her and beg her to forgive him.

He stood in his small private office, looking out the window at the complex geometry of the city. The street thirty-two stories below looked so inviting that he let himself wonder how it would feel to jump. But anything was better than suicide, any act less final than death.

Page fell into his swivel chair and wept all over his bright, self-confident new column. For the first time he really wanted to change; try to accept the thing for Sunny’s sake, but he couldn’t do it. Not yet. It still seemed too much like a weak surrender to him. Sunny would have to wait and let him come to her. For when she approached him, and worst of all, in public, he panicked. It was partly the uncontrollable sex thing, partly moral confusion, partly painful love.

Jack and Laura were packed and Jack had located a temporary apartment for them in Chicago. Their New York place was almost empty. The moving van would pick up the remaining things in the morning.

Jack had talked Page into a last night’s outing. “You can’t let me go without a send-off, old buddy,” he said. Privately, he hoped he could help with whatever was troubling the young Pringles. It was probably a typical newlywed complaint, but Jack pretended at first that he didn’t know anything was amiss.

He met Page at a quiet little bar in Jack’s neighborhood. Both of them were early. Jack was surprised at Page’s appearance. He was wearing the right sort of clothes: the style-conscious young-executive sort. His shirt was hand-tailored, his shoes were new. And yet he looked neglected and unpressed.

“You look like I did when I was drinking myself to death,” Jack said humorously.

“How?” Page said, anxious to get the first drink down and the second one ordered.

“Seedy,” Jack told him.

“Thanks.” Page gulped over the hot whiskey.

Jack ordered a glass of milk and Page’s eyebrows soared, “Jesus, are you still on the wagon?” he croaked, clearing his burning throat.

“More or less. Mostly more,” Jack grinned.

“Jack! You’re my friend. Get drunk with me, for God’s sake.” He looked so dismayed, with his face in lines and a button loose and his eyes lost and troubled, that Jack, against his better judgment, ordered a shot of Scotch.

“I do this out of sheer misguided brotherly love,” he told Page. “Laura will probably divorce me when she finds out, but if it’s that serious....”

“It’s that serious.”

Jack waited for him to pick up the cue and tell him his problems. He knew how to listen sympathetically to people, because he cared about them. He was really interested, even in the dreariest dilemmas.

“I can’t talk about it,” Page said, putting the second drink away and signaling for the third.

“Well then, what the hell am I doing sitting here getting drunk with you?” Jack demanded to know.

“Shut up and drink,” Page said solemnly.

“It’ll take all night to get drunk on this stuff,” Jack said. “You could down ten shots in a row and be sober as a pole. Why don’t we go up to my place?”

“And slobber over your lovely wife?” Page objected.

“She isn’t home,” Jack said. She was, in fact, down in the Village saying good-by to a few close friends.

“She isn’t? Let’s go.” The drinks seemed slightly stronger to Page than Jack’s description—perhaps because he took down four or five in less than ten minutes and they landed in an empty stomach.

Jack eyed him critically. “Can you stand up?” he kidded.

“Certainly, if you promise not to watch.”

They headed outside and the fresh air steadied Page. He was glad to go with Jack. He had no wish to display his misery in a public bar. At the same time he yearned to get high, to relax with an old friend who wouldn’t judge him; muddle himself up and think about something besides Sunny Pringle, his wife who was not his wife: his beautiful, bewitching, seductive, adorable sister. But the liquor was just so much acid eating up his little tin inhibitions. The higher he got the more he thought of her; the more tempted he was to confess himself for the sake of the comfort Jack would give him.

* * *

The Manns’s apartment was bare except for packing boxes full of books and the built-in kitchen appliances. Jack and Page settled, with two glasses and a bottle, in the kitchen.

Page wouldn’t talk about the thing for a while. He had given himself strict orders, while he was still sober, not to mention it at all, not even to this oldest and best of his friends. Not that Jack would ever use it against him. But having revealed the thing once he might do it again, and the more people who knew, the shakier Page’s future.

But as the evening wore on and the level in the whiskey bottle sank, the urge for admission came over him again. It had all been stopped up inside him for the past lonely, worried weeks. He wanted another viewpoint, help, somebody to tell him what to do. Above all, he needed someone to tell him he was right.

Jack was almost too easy to talk to. If you were sad he cheered you up, if you were wrong he righted you, if you were happy he lived it up with you. He was the one who had seen, even before Page himself, what a rare and wonderful girl Sunny was.

Page put a friendly arm around him. “Jack, what would I do without you?” he said in an unusual show of affection, brought on by straight Scotch.

“Why, you’d go straight to hell, old buddy. What else?” Jack grinned. “Fill your glass?”

Page handed it over. “What did you say was the name of that drink?” he asked, aware that his tongue was stumbling around in his mouth, like a mole lost in the daylight.

“‘Jack’s Damnedest,’” Jack said. “Never fails.”

“What’s in it?” Page studied the glass suspiciously.

“Ten parts whiskey,” Jack said.

“Ten parts whiskey to what?”

“To your health.”

Page smelled it doubtfully.

“Man, you don’t smell the stuff, you drink it,” Jack said.

Page drank. “You know, sometimes I feel like I can tell you just about anything,” he said. “Women don’t understand some things.”

“Well, let’s have it,” Jack said. “No, wait, let me guess. Sunny can’t cook?”

“Oh, hell, she can cook anything.” Page made a sweeping gesture and tumbled an ice tray to the floor.

“She squeezes the toothpaste from the top and you squeeze from the bottom? That’s Laura’s specialty. Ought to be worth a trip to Reno.”

Page wrapped both hands around his glass. “Guess again, Counselor.”

“Well, there’s only one other problem we haven’t examined. You don’t get along in bed?”

Page found himself laughing, knowing it was the liquor that tickled him, and trying to stop. Jack slapped him on the back.

“Maybe you’d better tell me,” Jack said. “I’m not doing so well.”

“I only wish it were all as simple as sex,” Page sighed.

“Simple be damned. That’s an art.”

Page finished the drink and stared slowly up the wall behind Jack’s head, unable to look squarely at him. He felt the words coming up in his throat, and he had nothing left to fight them with. It was wrong, it was grossly unfair to Sunny. And yet he felt safe with Jack, who had had an earful of Page’s escapades over the years and never betrayed him.

Page was so bewildered that his thinking apparatus had ground to a halt. The whiskey made it a cinch to surrender. He needed help and Jack was there to give it.

“I don’t know how to say it,” he began. “It’s so ugly. So humiliating and queer. It’s impossible, Jack, no kidding. But it really happened.”

Jack stared at this odd introduction. “The whole world’s a little queer, Page,” he reassured him. But he was thinking, Jesus don’t tell me Sunny’s gay. He knew Page wasn’t but he was never as sharp about the girls.

“Help me,” Page said. “I’ve got to tell somebody.”

“Is it about Sunny?” Jack asked.

“About both of us. You see, we ... we’re....” Page looked at him very hard and suddenly lost his nerve. “I’m adopted,” he told his shoes, retreating.

“So?”

The liquor whirled in Page’s head and his heart ached and he knew, as well as he knew his real name, that Sunny was thinking of him at that moment.

“So Sunny is my sister.” He had to force the words out and his voice boomed unnaturally from the effort.

Jack was stunned almost the way Page himself had been when he first heard it. But before he could answer, offer his sympathy, Page bent his head into his hands and sobbed, knocking over the whiskey glass at his feet. A lone ice cube skidded out.

Jack left him alone for several minutes before he put a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Your sister?” he echoed. “Are you sure?”

“You think I’m kidding? About a thing like this?” Page stood up like a shot to dramatize his words, stood there wavering, trying to stabilize himself.

“You, of all people,” Jack said, dazed.

“Why do you say it that way?” He flushed the truth out of Jack, who was too shaken up for white lies.

“You hate everything like this, everything that isn’t normal and ordinary,” Jack said. “This must have been unbearable. My God.”

Page was offended. “I don’t like abnormality, no,” he declared still trying to balance himself.

“Sit down, boy, sit down,” Jack said, giving Page’s hand a tug and toppling him back onto his packing box. “And I suppose you think this is completely abnormal?”

“Well, what do you think it is? Clean, wholesome fun?” Page demanded.

Jack got up and filled their glasses again. “I guess I just think it’s an accident,” he said. “You can’t very well blame anybody for it.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Page answered. “Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I know nobody planned to marry us off knowing we were brother and sister. But it could have been avoided, if my real parents had kept me. If the doctor had told Dad who I was. If my step-parents had kept it to themselves when they found out.”

“That wouldn’t have been strictly moral, would it?”

“No. But at least I wouldn’t have had to—” Page stopped, ashamed, and let Jack finish for him. “You wouldn’t have had to face it,” Jack said, sitting down with their fresh drinks. “I guess there’s something in that.”

“Remember when Sunny and I were going together in college? You used to tell us we were like an old married couple. We even looked alike.” Page laughed sadly.

“I remember. But I never thought....” Jack put his drink down between his feet. “You know something, Page? I think you and Sunny could make a go of it ... provided you keep quiet about it.”

“That wouldn’t be strictly moral, Jackson,” Page said, throwing Jack’s words back at him.

“I’m not so sure this is any time to be moral,” Jack said, rolling some whiskey thoughtfully around in his mouth.

“You can’t be moral on a part-time basis. It’s a condition, like being alive,” Page objected. “You have principles to live by. You can’t chuck them overboard at the first crisis.”

“Some things are more important than principles, old buddy.”

“If you’re talking about love, you’re wrong. Love has to be moral too, Jack.”

“Love has its own morality, doesn’t it?”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, it means you and Sunny have to work something out so you can go on living together. Because you love each other too much to live apart.”

“That thing would eat us alive, Jack.”

“I doubt it.”

Jack’s calm, rational attitude angered Page. “You make it sound like a little misunderstanding between friends,” he said. “Some trifle we can just smooth over if we give it the old college try.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Jack said. “I guess I don’t shock so easily, Page. I’m used to odd balls in my life.” It was as close as Jack had ever come to revealing his homosexuality to Page.

He got up and went to the book-loaded cartons in the living room. Page could hear him pottering around, skimming pages.

“I want to read you something,” Jack called. “Just remembered it. Ever hear of Lord Byron?”

“Sure. English 231. The girls called him Gorgeous George.”

Jack found his book and blew dust off the top. He brought it back to the kitchen and sat down by Page again. “Lord Byron was in love with a lady named Augusta Leigh,” Jack said.

“So what?”

“So he wrote her a very beautiful poem.”

“Spare me the literature,” Page said.

“I’ll just read you a couple of lines. Listen.” He marked the words with his finger and read: “‘For thee, my own sweet sister—’”

“Whose sister?” Page flared.

“Byron’s. Augusta.”

“He was in love with his sister?”

“Didn’t they teach you anything in English 231, old buddy?”

“Well, I don’t want to hear about Byron’s troubles,” Page grumbled. “He’s dead.”

Jack ignored him. “‘For thee, my own sweet sister,/ In thy heart/ I know myself secure, as thou in mine;/ We were and are beings who never each other can resign.’”

Page hiccoughed. “The poor broad was in love with him, too?”

“‘It is the same, together or apart,/ From life’s commencement to its slow decline/ We are entwined—’”

“Jack, for God’s sake, this is very painful—”

“‘—Let death come slow or fast,/ The tie which bound the first endures the last.’”

“Oh, Jesus! You mean they were stuck with each other?”

“Well, they weren’t married, but they always loved each other,” Jack said, closing the book. “They settled for making love whenever they could. And they had a daughter.”

“An idiot?”

“Now where in hell did you get that medieval idea?” Jack said.

“Was she an idiot?”

“No, she was a normal girl. Why, Page? Is Sunny pregnant?”

Page nodded.

After a moment Jack said quietly, “I should think you’d have to stay with her now.”

“Jack, if Laura were your honest-to-God sister, what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” Jack admitted. “But I wouldn’t let her go.”

“You’d keep her? As your wife?”

“Not as my cook and bottle washer, that’s for sure.”

“You’re as bad as Sunny,” Page complained. “You two would make a lovely pair.”

“I’ve always thought so,” Jack said sardonically.

Page stood up again. “Knock it off,” he said, and took a swipe at Jack that nearly staggered Page back to the floor. Jack lowered him onto his packing box again and Page tried to control himself. “Forgive me, Jack, I didn’t mean it,” he said, humiliated. “It’s the whiskey.”

“Forget it.”

“No, I want you to know,” Page protested with drunken urgency. “I’m sick of myself. I can hardly bear to think of it. I know we were innocent when we got married. But that only makes it seem worse. More sinister, more tragic. We were so damn happy. And now—the contrast is torture. I can’t have her back and just because I can’t, I want her so much I get crazy with it. Did you ever want anybody that much?” He was clutching Jack’s lapels, talking straight into his face.

“Yes, I did,” Jack said without flinching. But he didn’t describe the kind of love that tore him up that way.

“No, you didn’t, you couldn’t have. Nobody ever did.”

“You mean,” Jack said, “nobody ever suffered as much as you did. Or as long or as hard.”

But Page was too drunk and too desolate to hear the parody of self-pity in Jack’s voice. “That’s it,” he said. “And to have to think of yourself as—as good as queer, on top of everything else—”

“Oh, nuts,” Jack said. “No one knows about it but you and Sunny.”

“And the doc, and my step-parents. And now you,” Page said, suddenly resenting Jack. “And for every one of us who knows, I get sick to my stomach.”

“You mean if nobody knew you’d feel swell about it?”

“That’s not what I mean!”

“You’re so damn mixed-up right now you don’t make sense,” Jack said, speaking steadily with firm hands on Page’s shoulders that helped to quiet him. “Am I right?”

“I guess.” Page said.

“Just because a man is different from the rest doesn’t make him contemptible, Page,” Jack said.

“Just miserable.”

“Depends on how strong he is. How much of a man. These things happen to people and they have to learn to live with them. The better they face them, the stronger and finer they are in the end.”

“You mean, live with incest and be healthy,” Page said.

“I mean live with Sunny and be happy. And let the rest go to hell. You don’t need to climb on a soapbox in Bughouse Square and explain that your wife is also your sister. You don’t have to get yourself punished in public to make your marriage permissible. You’ll only lose everything that way,” Jack told him. “Some things have to be kept secret if you want to make it in this world.”

“You’re telling me to do what Sunny wants me to do: keep it quiet and go on as if it hadn’t happened.”

“Keep it quiet, yes, but for God’s sake, don’t go on as if it hadn’t happened. Face it. Between yourselves. Adjust to it the best you can and don’t let it defeat you.”

“Jack,” Page said uncertainly. “How can you respect me, knowing about it?”

“Am I talking as if I didn’t?”

“No, but—”

“Page, listen. Learn something about charity. You respect me, don’t you?”

“You know how much I think of you, Jack. I couldn’t sit here and tell this to anyone else in the world.”

“Well, would it make a difference to you if Laura were my sister and we were still married? Would you shove my teeth down my throat and turn me over to the cops if you found out such a thing about me?”

“I can’t say I’d admire you for it,” Page said. “But I wouldn’t meddle, if you wanted things that way. But hell, Jack, there’s nothing wrong with you. You can’t possibly know how it feels—”

“I know exactly how it feels. What if I told you I’ve been as misfit and miserable with my problems as you ever were with yours?”

“My God, Laura isn’t—” Page began.

But Jack stopped him with a wry smile. “No, she’s not my sister. It’s me. I’m gay, Page.” He hadn’t planned to say it, but when it came out, it came simply and generously. It was a brave risk to speak like that to Page Pringle, who couldn’t watch a man do a hula in fun without condemning him. It might cost Jack a valued friendship. But he was hoping it would comfort Page instead; show him with a shock that you could be different from the pack and survive. Better than that: live a good life, love a good wife, and enjoy the respect you deserved.

“Gay?” Page repeated doubtfully. “You mean ... a homo?” The word tasted even worse to him than ‘incest’. It smacked of pretty boys cruising the streets in ridiculously tight pants.

Jack nodded, letting his hands fall away from Page’s shoulders. In almost the same gesture Page released Jack with a shudder and they sat looking at each other. Page was acutely embarrassed. Self-conscious and clumsy and drunk, he fumbled for a way out. “Well, that must make things dull for Laura,” he said, forgetting even that Jack and Laura had a child. Jack didn’t smile.

After a few minutes of mortified silence Page stood up, steadying himself with a hand on the kitchen counter. “I’d better go,” he said, afraid to say more. The thing revolted him and yet he was ashamed to feel that way. He wasn’t too drunk or too callous to realize what a sacrifice Jack had made for him. And yet he felt remorse that Jack had thought it necessary.

Jack rose and followed him, handing him his cigarettes and coat as he reached the front door.

“I’m sorry you told me, Jack,” Page said quietly.

“I can see that.”

“Sort of ironical, isn’t it?” Page said, not sure if he were joking or trying to hurt his friend.

“What’s ironical?”

“Your name. Mann.” Page began to laugh against his will.

“Laura doesn’t think so,” Jack answered. He had himself under tight control. But he knew now he had forfeited Page’s friendship. Tired and profoundly disappointed, he felt a sudden pity and scorn for Page; pity and regret for himself.

“I should have known you couldn’t grow and learn a little,” he told Page. “You can’t see any parallel between us. You can’t see how my problem lets me understand yours. You only see that I’m queer—your word, by the way. And suddenly I’m not like you any more and you want to wipe me off like so much mud on your hands.

“Well, go on. I only wish to God Sunny had gotten the man she deserves and not her chicken brother.”

Page paused in the doorway, insulted and shocked. “You hate me for having the strength to leave her, to do what I know is right,” he said. “You hate me because I’m a normal male. And if I weren’t so drunk—”

“Yeah, well, you are that drunk, Brother Pringle. Go home and sober up.”

Page lunged at him but Jack ducked, grabbed Page, spun him out the door, and let him blunder noisily into the wall across the corridor. Page stood there dizzily, searching for his equilibrium like a man trying to find his shadow; turning around and around with increasing frustration.

Jack shut the door and leaned against it, exhausted. He felt like crying, the way he had when he was a kid and too small to defend himself. He had learned a lot about fighting since then. But when something like this happened, he felt vulnerable, as if he and not Page had had the worst of it.

“Now you know why we haven’t seen each other since then,” Jack said quietly to his guest, Mr. Winkler. Repeating the story had been almost like reliving it; Jack felt tired and used. He poured himself another drink. “It’s funny how you don’t suspect so much prejudice, so much contempt, in somebody you know that well,” he said.

“Well, maybe his confusion was the Pringles’ fault,” Winkler suggested, staring thoughtfully at the floor. He added diffidently, “Then again, maybe there was some sense in his father’s ideas.”

“Sure there was. Quite a lot. Page wouldn’t have swallowed anything vicious or stupid,” Jack said. “Do you know the Pringles, Mr. Winkler?” He looked at his visitor curiously.

“Me? No, no,” Winkler said. “I suppose, being older, I can’t help sympathizing with them a little.” He cleared his throat. “You lost track of Page and Sunny after that?”

“No. Sunny began to write to Laura. She didn’t have anybody else. She was madder than hell at Page when she found out he’d told me everything. But she trusted us enough to get over it eventually.”

“I’m glad she did,” Winkler said. “I was afraid I’d miss part of the story.”

* * *

On their own, Page and Sunny began to read books on incest. Page took the ones on law and medicine; Sunny, all the history and mythology and psychology she could find. They both dug out what they were looking for and ignored the rest.

Page wanted to damn incest medically and legally. Sunny wanted to whitewash and glamorize it. And the books, which reflected the world’s confusion on the subject, gave them both ammunition.

What is incest? Why is it so wrong? Why are there strict laws against it? Because, said Sunny’s books, it’s so alluring. If the laws weren’t strict, everybody and his brother—literally—would be taking it up. The boy with his beloved mother, the girl with a father she worships, the brother and sister sharing the same bed too long or discovering each other erotically in some kind of emotional crisis.

There have to be laws against it, Sunny concluded, or we’d have an epidemic.

She read about the ancient Ptolemies, fabled kings and successors of Alexander the Great, who practiced incest for three hundred years and produced a defiantly healthy line to the end.

She read about Cesare Borgia, who fell madly in love with his luscious sister Lucrezia, and who arranged the plot by which her husband, the Duke of Besaglia, was strangled.

She read of strange customs in the Melanesian Islands where sisters turned away and covered their faces at the approach of their brothers, so powerful was the forbidden attraction between them.

She read about the gold-encrusted Pharaohs, children of the Sun, who married their sisters to preserve the purity of royal blood. And she saw that after several thousand years of inbreeding they were still producing tough healthy children. Even Cleopatra, the symbol of seductive femininity, married her brother. And the poetry of love in Egypt still uses the words ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’ to mean ‘Lover’ and ‘Beloved.’

* * *

Sunny ignored the bloodshed and bitterness and rigid strictures against incest that spotted these narratives. They were in the sections she skipped: the austere laws of Leviticus in the Bible, the tales of crop failure and calamity ascribed to incest in ancient Greece, the awful tragedy of Oedipus.

The thing that confused her most was not in the books. It was a small, almost artificially forced feeling, that she adored her husband even more because he was her brother. Perhaps she had to feel that way or lose her mind.

Sunny continued to see her doctor for regular check-ups. Finally, burning with curiosity, she asked, “Doctor Settick, what happens if two people, say two first cousins, get married and have children?”

He screwed his handsome young face into a laugh. “Whatever put that in your head?” he asked. When he looked at her that way she wished she were in the hands of an older, more businesslike doctor. But she liked Settick. She laughed a lot in his office, and it was the only place where she did.

She blushed at his question. “I read about it once,” she said. “When you’re pregnant you read all sorts of goofy books. If a brother and sister had a baby together would it—would it—”

“Would it what?”

“Would it be an idiot? A monster?”

“Not necessarily,” he said.

She tried to look casual, not relieved. “Oh,” she said, hoping he would go on. He did, crossing his arms over his chest while she looked demurely at the white sheet that covered her.

“When two people that closely related have children, however,” he said, “the children are likely to have their parents’ strengths and weaknesses magnified.”

“How does it work?”

“Well, if you have bad eyes and your husband, who is also your brother”—he smiled interestedly at her—“also has bad eyes, your child is going to have a terrible pair of eyes. On the other hand, if you both have good vision, he’ll probably see like a hawk.”

“That sounds normal.”

“Almost. Incest just seems to exaggerate the parents’ characteristics in the children.”

“If you were both healthy, then, your children would be, too?”

“Very likely.” There was a small line of intrigue between his eyes. “Why all the questions?”

“Oh, my husband was telling me about a family he knew where the parents were first cousins. And their kids were crippled and bald.”

“You tell him it was probably some other complication than consanguinity,” said Settick. “That might have intensified the trouble, but it probably didn’t cause it unless there had been a lot of close inter-marriage over several generations. Why hell,” he said, “my own brother fell madly in love with our first cousin once.”

“He did?”

“Sure. Fortunately he was only thirteen at the time. He got over it. Still, it wouldn’t have been such a catastrophe if he hadn’t. From the standpoint of having kids, anyway. But he got smart and put off marriage. Didn’t get hooked till he was thirty-two.”

“That’s kind of old,” Sunny said.

“Couldn’t be helped. The damn fool went through medical school. And dragged me after him. Takes quite a while, you know, particularly if you specialize.”

Sunny chuckled with him. He had reassured her and she went home from the examination feeling better.

* * *

But Sunny had not reassured her doctor. Richie Settick had a couple of favorite patients, and one of them was Sunny Pringle. It was not the incest talk that bothered him. He dismissed that as vagrant curiosity inspired by her reading. His patients came up with all manner of moon-shot questions. He had learned to answer with a straight face, even when they brought him their horoscopes and ordered their babies delivered on a propitious day.

What troubled him about Sunny was that she was actually losing weight. Although the foetus continued to grow and Sunny didn’t complain, she was obviously worried and unhappy. And she was getting visibly thin.

“At the rate you’re going,” he informed her the next time she came, “you won’t need to bother with maternity clothes till the last week.”

“Oh, I’ll wear them anyway. Makes me feel motherly,” she said. “Besides, I’ll look like I’ve swallowed a watermelon the next time you see me.”

But she didn’t. When she came back her face and limbs were thinner still, her waist still small.

“You look too sexy to be as far along as you are,” he told her critically. “In five months of pregnancy you’ve lost two pounds. What are you trying to do, disappear?”

“Will it hurt the baby?” she asked anxiously. “I can’t work up an appetite.”

“Nuts,” he clucked at her. “I don’t see how you could be getting the minimum healthy diet. And I don’t mean just vitamin pills.”

“Dr. Settick,” she said seriously, “if anything happens to this baby, I’d want to die. But when I force myself to eat I upchuck.”

“What’s all this dying talk?” he broke in. “That’s no way to carry on, Sunny. Nothing’s going to happen to the baby. That’s number one. But if anything did, there’s nothing in God’s world to prevent you from having a whole passel of kids if you want them.”

“Yes there is,” she said quietly. The last few empty months in the apartment had made her desperate to talk to somebody, the way Page had been desperate when he confessed to Jack Mann. She didn’t want to open her soul to Dr. Settick. But he stood there waiting for some explanation; compassionate and friendly and with the sort of frank, good-featured face Sunny fell for. So she said in an unsure voice, “My husband doesn’t want any more children.”

“Can’t stand them, hm?”

“No.” She looked away, already sorry she had spoken. But the doctor came over to her and touched her gently. “Any time you want more you just come and see me,” he said. The words were insolent but Settick wasn’t. His tone was quite respectful. “You can always tell him it was an accident,” he added.

Sunny didn’t know whether to laugh or lose her temper. She turned scarlet and couldn’t look at him. “I love him,” she said.

“He’s making you unhappy, isn’t he?” Dr. Settick stood where he was, taken with the daffodil lights in her hair, the trembling of her finely-sculptured mouth.

“It’s something neither of us can help,” Sunny said, squirming with the intimacy of the situation.

“I’ll tell you something,” Settick offered. “The beautiful Mrs. Pringle is hurting her baby’s health by hurting her own. And if Mr. Pringle is to blame, I’ll talk to him myself. I’d rather flatten him out on the floor, but I’ll talk to him, I promise.”

“There’s nothing you can say that would help,” she said. “He won’t come.”

“With a wife like you?” He took the sexual implication of the phrase, and again she didn’t know how to handle him. His hand touched her breasts and it was no neat medical gesture. Sunny brushed it quickly away.

“Hey,” she said. “None of that. I told you, I love the guy.”

“Okay, you love him,” Settick said, turning away from her with a sigh. “These things happen. Wives do love their husbands, although to hear some of my patients talk you’d never believe it. You know something, Sunny? You’re all backwards. You not only love your husband, you actually want more children. Do you know how many women come in here day after day telling me what slobs they’re stuck with and how many screaming brats they’ve got at home? They hate being mothers, they hate being wives. God, it’s enough to keep a man single for the rest of his life.”

She smiled at him. “They’d probably all stay right where they are if you gave them a choice.”

He shook his head with a laugh. “What makes you such an optimist?” he said.

“I have to be. It’s all I’ve got.” For a moment she was afraid she would lose control and cry in front of him. But she found a measure of dignity by staring carefully at the large stethoscope through which mothers were allowed to listen to their growing baby’s heartbeats. She had heard her baby’s heart not ten minutes ago. It sounded like the rapid tapping of a metronome in the next room, and it moved her unspeakably.

“I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter, Sunny,” the doctor urged. “I didn’t mean to get fresh just now. Forget it, will you? That’s the price you pay for being so damn beautiful.” He smiled disarmingly.

“It’s okay,” she said, letting him persuade her that he meant no offense.

“You’re worried and you’re not eating right,” he said briskly. “I’m going to put you on a diet, to gain, and some tranquilizers.”

She protested but he wrote a prescription for her. “It’s for the baby,” he said. “You don’t have to live on them.”

Sunny got off the examination table, holding her sheets around her.

“Are you getting a divorce by any chance?” Settick asked, unable to resist.

“We don’t need to,” she said cryptically.

He surprised himself by recalling at that moment the questions on incest one of his patients—was it Sunny?—had put to him: just a fleeting notion that crossed his mind and left it the moment he saw her out the door.

* * *

Sunny’s letters to Laura and her talks with Dr. Settick were her only relief from solitude. Laura was the sole person she could tell everything to. Her notes were restrained at first, but Laura’s warmth and concern shone through her answers and gave Sunny the courage to be honest.

“It takes two to dissolve a marriage, just as it takes two to make one,” Laura wrote. “So Page can’t call it quits by himself, whatever the heartless law books say. Fight for him. He’s worth it. Or at least he will be when he grows up and realizes life is more important than arbitrary rules.”

Sunny reread the letter a dozen times. And from then on her own letters were graphic charts of her heart and mind. She described the long gray days that not even a sweet spring breeze could brighten. And the nights, infamous in the poems of separated lovers, and hourglass-endless.

“I like being mad at Page,” she wrote Laura. “It gives me energy—keeps my pride alive. I think how mean I’ll be when he comes home. And when he begs me to take him back—oh, how tender and passionate! I have only one fear, Laura—that he’ll never come. The longer he waits, the more I wonder. Maybe I’ll have to start crawling again after all.”

Sunny took Laura’s sympathy with gratitude, with greed, but it didn’t replace her husband. And it was all Laura could give her.

* * *

Page’s Sunday Magazine column was getting noticed. It was funny, a little rough and overstated, but clever. Sunny loved it. It surprised her and made her laugh—and then weep because he hadn’t shared it with her before he shared it with the public.

She cut out the columns, pasting them in a scrapbook. The best she taped to her mirror to memorize:

“It’s like a gold yoyo,” he said of a modern canvas. “If you want it you’ll pay anything for it. If you don’t, nothing is too damn much.”

He quoted a famous movie producer signing a witless young lovely for a new film: “Never mind about the lines. Just be sure to bring your face along.”

Sunny yearned with a choking envy to share all this with him: the excitement he felt as his name gained currency, the pleasure of turning out quotable prose, the odd thrill of having your words read by people you would never know. To be denied her part in his blossoming career was one of her worst burdens.

One morning, after reading his newest column, she suddenly chucked her pride and wrote him a fan letter:

She mailed it on a Monday morning in April. Tuesday was the first of May, and it was the day Page called her after nearly three dismal months of silence.

When the phone rang she ran to it from the kitchen as if she had been expecting it. With trembling hands she lifted the receiver. It might be Dr. Settick, after all. He had called her several times and once ended up asking her to dinner.

“Hello?” she said.

“Sunny?” It was Page. His voice sounded a little unsure, but there was no mistaking it.

“Oh, Page!” She pressed a hand over her mouth for a second and then said weakly, “How are you?”

“I’m miserable,” he said. “How are you?”

“Oh, darling!” Her heart kicked joyfully. “Are you really miserable?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes; God, I can hardly stand it. Did you get my poem?”

“Honey, it was beautiful. It was immortal,” he said.

“Page, can we meet somewhere? I mean—”

“Yes,” he said and she knew at once he had been thinking about it hard. He wanted to see her so much that he knew an argument would end up in his ignominious surrender. “Can you have dinner with me tonight?” he said.

“Can I!” she cried. “Beg me, darling.”

“Please, baby. Please.... I have your poem in my pocket. Any girl who can write such deathless verse deserves a filet mignon,” he said.

“Oh, you wonderful idiot. Darling, when will you pick me up?”

“Sunny, maybe I’d better meet you,” he hedged. He knew what would happen to him if he got caught in that apartment again. Sunny knew too and she couldn’t give up without trying.

“I’ve fixed the place up so nicely,” she said. “You won’t know it. I want you to see the new curtains and—”

“No,” he said anxiously, and she was afraid of scaring him off. She gave in with the hope that when they were physically close she could move him better than she could on the phone. All she asked was the chance.

“Where are you staying?” she said.

“Let’s not get into that.”

“I’m not going to storm the gates, Page. I really need to now. What if the baby comes and I have to contact you?”

“You can always call the office,” he said.

“Sure, and get told off again,” she reminded him. “Page, it might be an emergency. I’m completely alone in this city. The only friends I had were your friends and I never see any of them. And Jack and Laura are gone now. About the only human being I see who gives a damn about me is Dr. Settick.”

“How much of a damn?” he said, feeling an upswell of jealousy that suddenly made him determined. “All right,” he went on, “but Sunny, play fair. Promise me you won’t call unless it’s really urgent.” Somewhere in the back of his mind was the unacknowledged thought that he secretly wanted her to come; but he sternly ignored it.

“I promise,” she said. You can’t go to hell for breaking one lousy promise, she reasoned.

“I’m on East Thirty-second Street,” he said with misgivings, and gave her the number and the phone. If she ever showed up, his conscience would blast him.

Sunny wrote it down on the phone pad with a sense of triumph.

They agreed to meet at a small restaurant on Tenth Avenue.

* * *

But Sunny had other plans. She knew Page would blow his top if he found her in his rooms that very day. But she was as sure as love could make her that his anger would die a quick death.

She heard the tremor of love and long denial in his voice. If it was so desperately hard for her, a woman, to forbid herself the love she needed, how difficult mustn’t it be for a man? A young vigorous passionate man who adored his wife?

He’ll never resist, she told herself, laughing aloud with anticipation. She made herself stunningly beautiful. She took pains she rarely bothered with and hardly needed. But it made her feel irresistible to know there was a sheen of exotic color over her eyes, an underfilm of silver witchery on her lips, a fragrant mist in her swinging yellow hair.

She was still slim enough to look chic in a small-waisted dress. It had a full, soft skirt that hid her six-month stomach. She put on her four-inch heels, her sequined cocktail hat, black gloves and purse, and checked herself out in the mirror, ticking off each feature like a C.P.A. going over his books. Her glamorous reflection surprised her.

She looked older, beautiful in an experienced way. It was not just the makeup. It had something to do with the past three months of solitary introspection and yearning. She was full of the new things she had learned from the books, the new life she felt within her, and the new depths and shadows her heart had explored. They changed her face. She was no little girl any more. She was a lovely woman.

Sunny left her apartment early, hailed a taxi, and gave Page’s address to the driver in a confident voice. When she got out in front of the new apartment building, it was forty minutes before their date. She decided he was probably taking his shower.

Inside the front door she found his mail box with a button beneath the name. There was a small speaker and she knew he might ask through it who was there.

Well, the worst he can do is make me wait down here till he’s ready, she thought. Still, how much better to get a foot in the door. He’d never be able to resist that foot—not when it was followed by her slim, silky leg. So she boldly pushed the buzzer. A wave of goose bumps fanned over her back and neck while she waited.

In a moment the speaker came on. To Sunny’s amazement, a feminine voice answered. Sunny looked to see if she had pushed the right button. She had. The voice repeated, “Who’s there?”

“The florist,” Sunny said. “I have a corsage Mr. Pringle ordered.”

“Oh. Okay.” The speaker went off and a buzz sounded. Sunny went inside and up a flight of stairs. On the second floor she found his door to the left of the landing. It opened before she could knock.

Sunny found herself facing a valentine-pretty girl, very young, very efficient looking, with her hands full of typed copy. The girl stared at Sunny, fully as startled as her visitor. After an anxious pause she said, “Was Mr. Pringle expecting you?”

“Apparently not,” Sunny said coolly. “May I come in?”

The girl hesitated briefly and then stepped aside. “Please,” she said. “I—I should explain, I was just here to bring Mr. Pringle some notes I took for him at the library. He doesn’t have time to do all his own research, so I—”

“Oh, you don’t have to explain,” Sunny said with dangerous charm. “I understand perfectly.” She looked sharply at the flustered girl who lowered her eyes in confusion. “Of course you’re his secretary.”

“Yes. I’m Pat Burridge. I—hope you won’t jump to conclusions,” she said with a clumsy laugh.

“Why not?” Sunny said.

“Oh, but really, it’s not what you think!” Pat cried, wide-eyed and innocent as milk. But there were a few sour curds floating around. She was ready to defend herself and fast if Sunny didn’t ease up. And she was impatient to know who Sunny was. Sunny made her wait.

“What do you think I think, Miss Burridge?” Sunny said. “That you’re sleeping with him?”

“How dare you!” the girl exclaimed.

“Well, Mr. Pringle and I have been having a little affair ourselves for some time now,” Sunny said, pulling off her gloves. “I’m not surprised he’s getting tired of me.” She gave Pat a critical going-over that made the secretary frantic.

“Whoever you are, you have no right to talk to me that way!” she cried.

“Oh, hell, if you’re going to be a bitch, be a good honest bitch,” Sunny said. The shock of the situation had frozen the fury in her veins and given her a sardonic composure that staggered Miss Burridge.

“If you think I’m having relations with Mr. Pringle,” the girl panted, “it might just interest you to know that I’m engaged to a very nice man.”

“Poor man. This will come as something of a shock, won’t it?”

“And I happen to be a virgin!” Pat declared.

“Fancy!” Sunny said, sauntering across the room. “All hail to the last member of a vanishing race.”

“You have a filthy mind!” Pat said.

“And you have a filthy habit: sleeping with a married man.”

“Evidently I’m not the only one,” Pat snapped.

“Ah, but there’s a difference. I’m a married woman.”

“Besides,” Pat went on with noisy outrage, “Mr. Pringle is not a married man.”

“Really?” Sunny said with genuine astonishment. “Did he tell you that?”

“He certainly did. His divorced wife calls him on the office phone all the time but he has me tell her he’s out.” She evidently considered a divorced man even less attached than a bachelor.

“Well!” Sunny said with sugary sarcasm. “I guess that makes it all right for you to sleep with him, then, as long as your fiance doesn’t find out what his bride-to-be does in her spare time.”

Abruptly Page burst into the room behind Pat, who turned around with a gasp.

“Page, darling!” Sunny said, beautiful in her anger.

Page’s face fell. “Oh, God,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Which one of us are you referring to, darling? Well? Go on, introduce us.”

He looked distractedly from one to the other, caught between two fighting females; a nightmare for any man. “Miss Burridge,” he said resolutely. “My wife, Mrs. Pringle.”

Pat Burridge’s expression changed from anger through shock to mortification. “Mrs. Pringle?” she repeated to him. “But you said—”

“Never mind what I said!”

“How do you do, Miss Burridge?” Sunny said with savage courtesy.

“I’d better go,” Pat said. “Here’s your key, Mr. Pringle.” She stopped, raising a hand to her mouth. “Oh! I mean—Well, he only gives it to me so I can bring him the notes when he’s not home!” she cried, and ran weeping out the front door.

The Pringles were so mad at each other that neither of them could talk for a few seconds. Finally Page said, determinedly calm, “You promised me you wouldn’t come here. Your promises aren’t worth a damn, are they?”

“It’s forbidden for your wife to come here; only your secretary is allowed,” she shot back.

“For your information, Pat Burridge comes over here nearly every afternoon about this time with a bunch of research notes I’ve assigned to her. She puts them on the desk and leaves,” he said.

“After she warms up the bed.”

“She doesn’t go near the damn bed!”

“Oh, an experimenter. She likes the couch in the living room.”

“Sunny, cut it out. Pat is a nice decent kid, but I’m not sleeping with her.” He glared at her over the back of a chair upon which he was leaning stiff-armed.

“Why not, darling? You could climb in bed with her and still feel nice and clean. After all, she’s not your sister.”

Surprised at her, he answered, “I could, but I don’t.”

“I suppose she means more to you than your own wife!” Sunny cried unhappily.

“How many times do you have to be told, Sunny? You’re not my wife.”

“Then don’t introduce me as Mrs. Pringle. It might confuse people.”

“That was a slip of the tongue.” His anger blew itself out suddenly. “Sunny, for the love of God, how could I make love to any other woman while you’re alive? Do we have to shout at each other? This is our first meeting in three months. Darling ... my love, my wife—”

“You just got through hollering that I’m not your wife,” she wept. “Make up your mind before I lose mine, will you?”

Page dropped his head in his hands to compose himself and then lifted it to look at her. “I’m going to read you something,” he said, going to his desk, “from an outline of American law.” He picked up a big black leather-bound book with torn matchbook covers marking various pages, and turned to an underlined passage.

“‘Where the parties to the marriage are closely related,’” he read her, “‘—such as brother and sister or ancestor and descendant—the marriage is void.’ Void, Sunny. ‘And a decree of annulment should be and apparently is unnecessary.’” He shut the book and dropped it on the desk with a bang, looking at her.

“What does it mean?” she said.

“It means we aren’t married. And there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it even if we want to. We are automatically un-married, because our marriage was never valid in the first place.”

“There is something we can do about it,” Sunny said, trembling.

“What?” His face and voice were weary but, like her, in his heart he kept hoping ... hoping for nothing less than a revolution in Heaven’s laws and Earth’s traditions.

“Keep it a secret,” she said. “What the law doesn’t know the law can’t very well change.”

He sat down heavily in his desk chair and said, “the law has eyes and ears, Sunny. We might get away with it for a while, but—”

“I’d rather have that little while than nothing at all.”

He put his head down on his crossed arms for a minute and the sight of him like that, near despair, twisted her heart. “Oh, Page,” she whispered, afraid to touch him. She folded into the chair he had been leaning on moments ago. “Can’t we live with it? Can’t we even try? Do we have to be so damn tragically moral?”

“I’ve been reading,” he began, but she interrupted:

“So have I.”

“Have you read Freud?”

“A little,” she said.

“Have you any idea what a childish, immature, emotionally crippling sort of thing incest is?”

“Page, we didn’t commit incest! It happened to us!” she said passionately. “We had no idea we were brother and sister. We chose each other as normally and innocently as other husbands and wives.”

“Did we, Sunny?” He spoke softly, looking away from her. It frightened her.

“What on earth do you mean?” she said indignantly.

“I mean, isn’t it just possible that we recognized each other subconsciously? People fall in love with the people who remind them of themselves, Sunny. Couldn’t we have fallen in love and refused to admit the awful truth we were half-aware of? Tried to hide and deny it so we could get married with a clear conscience?”

“No!” she said appalled.

“Isn’t it possible that what we fell in love with and desired in each other was our own selves, without ever permitting ourselves to realize it? If we did that, we’re as guilty as anybody else who ever committed incest.”

“We didn’t do it,” she protested. “Page, we don’t look that much alike.”

“Oh, don’t we, though!” he said, rising quickly and grabbing her hand. “Look at my eyes. My hair.” He took a handful of hers and held it out so her eyes could compare. “Same color, same texture, same everything,” he said.

“A lot of people have hair like that. There aren’t that many kinds of hair!” she said.

“Look, Sunny, even our hands,” he said, and though his was heavier and hairier, the basic bone structure was the same.

But Sunny was incapable of hating their similarities. She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed it and suddenly he leaned over her, almost tumbled into the chair with her, and kissed her mouth hard.

Before they knew it, they were making love in the chair. It was awful; agonized, furtive, rushed. The chair tipped precariously. They hurt each other, half on purpose. And yet, in spite of that, it was beautiful. They gripped each other with hands like traps. They kissed each other everywhere, desperate to leave a touch of love all over each other.

Sunny clung to him ecstatically, sobbing his name when he freed her mouth for a second. He felt himself losing control, and the harder he tried to fight free the more deeply entangled he became.

“Sunny, no,” he pleaded at the very moment that he was tearing the buttons off her dress in a fever to touch her warm satin skin. “Oh, dear God, stop me,” he muttered, kissing her all the while so that she couldn’t answer him.

He wanted to punish her for making him do the terrible thing he had resisted so long. He took a bite in her delicate shoulder that made her sob with startled pain. His hands twisted the shining flesh of her back and his lips bruised her full sweet breasts.

Sunny knew why he was doing it and at first she didn’t try to stop him, hoping it might ease him. But it got too bad. She finally combed his cheeks with her nails in self-defense and shocked him into gentleness. After that they made love, as much love as blood and breath would bear, until they were utterly worn out. Only sheer exhaustion stopped them.

* * *

The chill air woke them. Page got up and fetched a down comforter from his bedroom and wrapped her in it, giving her a cigarette while he fixed them a drink.

He had put on his bathrobe. His actions, as he poured the drinks, were almost normal. But his grim-lipped silence belied them.

There was a mournful quiet, broken only by the rustle and crack of the liquor flowing over the ice cubes. He walked over to her, handed her a glass, and sat down on the rug beside her. They leaned back against the sofa and drank. Page put an arm around her.

“Page,” she said. “Do you really think we can live apart when we love each other like this?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted finally, and she wondered if it were the first break in his armor of rectitude.

“Tell me you don’t want me, darling,” she teased.

“I can’t,” he said softly.

“Tell me you want me more every time we make love. Tell me that pretty soon you won’t be able to resist me at all any more. Tell me we can try living together again ... just for a while.”

He inspected his drink. “How do you feel right now?” he asked her. “After we’ve made love. Tell the truth.”

“I’d be unbearably happy if I weren’t so afraid it will be the last time,” she said.

“Is that all? No shame? No regret? No wonder, even, that maybe it’s wrong?” He looked at her.

“No,” she said, sniffling. “I’m too glad to be back in your arms to care about the rest.”

“Suppose,” he said, his voice still low, “that your father—our father—went a little crazy and forced you to go to bed with him. I mean, made love to you. Would you feel anything then?”

“Don’t you ever speak like that again,” she said rigidly.

“It’s exactly the same thing,” he said.

“It is not the same thing! I grew up in my father’s house, I knew all along he was my father. I could never let him touch me that way. He could never want to.”

“You’re saying the only difference between him and me is, you knew all along who he was. If you and I had always known we were brother and sister, you couldn’t let me touch you, either,” he said. And he was right.

Sunny groaned and hung her head. “Darling, I’m not much for logic,” she said at last. “All I know is I’m miserably in love with you and I don’t care who you are.” Her voice rose, becoming stubborn.

He looked so unhappy that she set her drink down and took his face in her hands, trying to kiss some cheer into him. But he stopped her. So she stayed where she was, kneeling in front of him, afraid to look at him again. In silence she began a tormented debate with herself, deciding at length to make one final try; one ultimate sacrifice.

“Page?” she said unsteadily.

“Hm?” He fingered the slim knee winking out of her blanket at him.

“If I don’t have this baby—could we—would you live with me?”

He looked slowly up at her green eyes that glittered with tears and took her hands. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re too far along now. If you’d been willing three months ago....”

“I wanted the baby so much,” she whispered. “But I’d do anything to have you back, darling. I almost wish I could tear it out now—” She stopped, feeling the baby kick. It made her sick. Grasping one of his hands, she put it on her abdomen and held it there fiercely, over his protests, until he felt the solid thump of a small foot under it. He looked up at her, astonished. At that moment, for the first time, his child became real to him: a human being with a beating heart and moving limbs.

He got up and walked to the other side of the room and she could tell from the inclination of his head that he was deeply disturbed.

“Can we live together if I destroy this child?” she asked.

“This child,” he repeated in a daze. “Our child. My son.”

“If it’s between you and the baby, I choose you,” she said, trembling uncontrollably. “I don’t know how I’d get rid of it now, I don’t know if it would kill me just to try. But I’m willing.”

“No, Sunny,” he said firmly.

“You thought it was a good idea not so long ago,” she reminded him. “You said—”

“I know what I said. It was barbarous!”

“You asked me to get an abortion and I didn’t think I could. But I hadn’t been living without you for three months then. I think I could do it now.”

“I won’t let you do it now and don’t ever bring it up again,” he said.

“Well then, can we live together anyway, even if I have the baby?” she implored him.

“No we can’t, Sunny!” he cried, throwing out his arms for understanding. “I wish that poor little kid had never been conceived but I’m not going to murder it,” he added. “The night I found out about us I was half mad with grief and that baby seemed like the crowning blow. But it wasn’t a person, then, honey. It was just a mess of proliferating cells. Now it’s a baby. You can’t go around murdering babies. Go ahead and have it.”

“Thanks a lot! You’re too generous, Page,” she said. “You get me pregnant and then graciously allow me to have the damn baby. And just how shall I support this creature, now that I’m permitted the joys of an illegitimate birth, labor pains, no money in the bank, no husband in my bed, no father for my child? Shall I feed it pipe dreams and dress it in lullabies? Shall I wrap Junior in an old rag and pass the tin cup around to my neighbors?”

“Good God, Sunny, there’s money in the bank,” he said.

“I’ve been spending some these past few months, you know,” she said. “There’s the rent. And I can’t seem to stop eating—not entirely, anyway. Oh, and the doctor bills. And I’ve seen at least two movies.”

“Well, God damn it, I know you’ve spent money. I’m making money and every cent I don’t need is in your bank account.”

“It is?”

“Don’t you ever read the balance sheet they send you?” he demanded, insulted that she should have thought he would let her starve.

“No. I can’t understand it,” she said. “I didn’t know if it was the top figure or the bottom one.”

“Oh, God,” he murmured, almost laughing with exasperation. “Sunny, did you think I’d send you to the poor house?”

“I didn’t know. I don’t know you at all any more, Page.” She got up from the floor and walked across the room to where he stood with his back to her, putting her hands lightly on his hips.

“I always thought we were so much alike before we got married, darling. And I don’t mean our faces, either. I mean in the way we thought, the way we looked at life.

“Remember when we met? I ran out of the bushes and there you were, standing by the lake, completely bare. Anybody else would have covered himself up and acted like a silly fool. I kept waiting for you to make an ass of yourself. But you just stood there and kidded me and let me look at you and didn’t seem to mind at all that your clothes were piled up under a tree twenty feet away.

“Page, I never was so excited, so scared, so thrilled, in my life. The way you looked at me, the way you stood there, seemed to sum up your whole attitude toward life—and mine. You were bold, you were amused with me and with yourself. You were so wonderful to look at. And you weren’t ashamed. All I could think of from that day on was, ‘That’s the kind of man I could adore and live with and take care of for the rest of my life.’

“You made me feel so womanly, Page. So feminine and passionate. I always liked boys and I’d had my share of crushes. But I’d never felt like that before till I met you.”

“I know, baby, I know,” he said softly. “It was wonderful. But hell, it was normal, sweetheart. Moral.” He paused, trying to keep himself controlled, pulling her arms around him as he continued. “God, you were gorgeous. I couldn’t quite believe you. When you suddenly burst in on me I was too surprised to move. And when I could, I was afraid I’d lose you if I did. So I stood there and kidded you to make you stay. To make you look at me as long as possible.”

“There was never anything Puritanical about our romance,” she said. “A lot of people say we went too far.”

“I’m no Puritan, honey,” he protested. “We were two unrelated kids as far as we knew. If two people are clean and decent and really in love, then what they do with their bodies is only an expression of their love. No sin, certainly. But there are some things I won’t and can’t do, things that offend me morally.”

“You break down and do them, though,” Sunny said. “You hypocrite. And don’t you call me a moral offense.”

“Do you have to twist everything I say? Don’t you know—”

“I know we used to agree on everything!” she wailed. “Now we can’t agree on anything at all.”

“That’s because everything in our lives resolves around the central fact of incest.”

She reclaimed her arms and moved away from him, the old despair fighting up in her again. “No, it’s not just that,” she said. “You’ve changed, Page. You’re a different man from the one I married. You even had a bad argument with Jack Mann, your best friend, because he tried to put in a good word for me.”

“I suppose Laura told you,” he said angrily. “Well, Laura’s all wet. Sure, he put in a good word for you. I expected him to. But that’s not why I broke off with him.”

“You broke off with him because you couldn’t take the truth!” She cried. “You broke your promise to me and told him our secret, and when he told you what a twerp you are, you went to pieces.”

Across the length of the small room they looked at each other as if the Grand Canyon, narrower but just as deep, yawned between them.

“That had nothing to do with it,” Page said. “I dropped him because he’s a damn fairy!”

Sunny was too startled to answer him for a moment. When she finally did it was with a dour laugh. “Page, I really think you’re dotty,” she said. “Jack Mann is about as much of a fairy as you are. And I’m here to state you aren’t.”

“He told me so himself,” Page said. “He was trying to make me understand, as he put it, that abnormality can be fun.”

“Like hell he was,” Sunny flashed. “He was probably trying to get it through that thick skull of yours that you can live with abnormality. You don’t have to turn tail and run.”

“Don’t you listen when I tell you something?” Page shouted. “He’s queer, Sunny!”

“Well, what do you want me to do, write to my Congressman? Besides, there are all kinds of homosexuals. You don’t have to put on lipstick and skirts and flirt in the streets. If Jack is a homosexual, that’s his business. If we’re incestuous, that’s ours!”

“I might have known you’d react like this,” he said harshly.

“Jack Mann is a good friend of mine,” she cried with feeling, “and I wouldn’t care if he were an ape in the zoo; it’s all the same to me. I like him and I’m grateful for his friendship. If it weren’t for Jack, I would have been even more miserable than I am.”

Page picked up his forgotten drink and finished it, as if the only way to deal with such idiocy was to get drunk.

She marched up to him as he smacked the glass down on his desk. “You listen to me, Page Pringle,” she said. “I’m ashamed of you.”

“You’re what? You’re ashamed of me!” he said in disbelief.

“I’m ashamed of the way you treated Jack. You weren’t afraid to be his friend when you thought he was normal. You would never have guessed, and he didn’t have to tell you. Don’t you suppose it hurt him to speak the truth? And why did he do it? Because he’s a true friend. Because you matter to him.”

“I’ll bet I do!”

“And I don’t mean that way!” she broke in. “Did he ever lay a finger on you?”

“I’d have tied him in knots if he had.”

“You’re a damn coward, Page. You’re afraid of Jack because he’s more of a man than you are.”

He stared at her open-mouthed, his face going scarlet.

“He has guts. I mean that, Page. He had the courage to tell you a terrible secret, to risk losing your affection and respect—which by the way he did—because he had faith in you. He wanted to help. His mistake was that you weren’t worth it.”

“Sunny, that man is a degenerate—”

“And you’re a rotten coward!” she said with bitter tears. “I know what Jack is, and it isn’t degenerate. If you had his courage, you’d be a better man.”

“You mean I’d be in your bed. Like the coward I am not,” he said, slamming a heavy fist down on the desk and making his whiskey glass jump.

“You are a coward, Page, because you can’t face this thing,” she said, calmer now but still crying. “Because from the very night you found out you were my brother you’ve been running away from me. You ran out that night and you’ve been running like a frightened hare ever since.”

“I have the courage to see this marriage has to end,” he said, shaking with rage. “Hopelessly as I love you, I have the courage to admit that our life together would be one long nightmare and our baby’s life would be ruined by it.”

“You’d see to that, wouldn’t you?”

“The hardest thing I ever did was leave you, Sunny. If that’s being a coward, all right, I’m a coward. I love you, I never loved anybody like I love you, but—”

He stopped, too broken up to talk. “But it’s over,” he said hoarsely at last. “If you think a coward could face that, you’re wrong. You’re the coward, Sunny, as long as we’re pointing fingers. You’re the one who’s clinging to rosy dreams.”

“Page, you think if you look the other way and keep your front door locked this whole mess will clean itself up. God, I wish I had the strength to slug you! That law book you read me: ‘We don’t have to do anything, we’re automatically un-married.’ How nice for you. That’s a coward’s way out, Page, and that’s what you are. Coward!” She shrieked.

His eyes took on a hot shine and she could see the muscles working under the skin of his face. “You come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.” He was perilously angry and Sunny’s temper vanished suddenly in wave of fear. He grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her roughly after him into his small kitchen. Sunny scrambled after him, afraid he would crack her wrist. She had never seen him like this before, and yet it was a strangely familiar expression he wore. She gasped when she recognized it: it was the look her father, Ben Rotheli, wore one time when a local business rival tried to ruin him by impugning June’s virtue. It was a look of uncontrollable fury.

Page released her by the sink and went to a drawer in one of the cupboards. She stood silent and shaking while he pulled the drawer open and fumbled in it. But when he took out a chef’s knife, heavy-handled and with a massive blade of spotted steel, she gave a little scream.

“Now who’s a coward?” he said, glaring at her, waving the blade slowly back and forth under her face.

Sunny stood white and still in front of him. “Go ahead, operate,” she whispered. “You never wanted the baby, anyway.” There was almost more contempt than fear in her voice.

“Not on you,” he said and his voice went deathly quiet, like hers. Sunny dared to look at his face then. “If I hurt you you’d have a good reason for calling me a coward,” he said. “And you’d be right.”

Her eyes went huge with alarm then. “Page, don’t hurt yourself,” she begged. “I didn’t mean it. Page!”

“Sure you meant it.” He was temporarily demented with wrath and humiliation, and before she could stop him he put his left hand down on the drainboard of the sink, palm up and with the fingers spread, and struck a terrible blow to the little finger. Sunny shut her eyes.

There was an awful silence. Page dropped the knife with a nerve-scraping clatter into the sink and lifted his hand. Slowly Sunny opened her eyes and looked at it. The finger clung to its place by a forlorn thread of skin, hanging horribly backwards and upside-down against the back of his hand and bleeding heavily. He picked up the knife again and sawed it free and threw it at her feet.

Sunny had covered her mouth with both hands in an effort to stifle her shock. Now she stooped as if in a dream and recaptured the severed finger. A strange sort of calm enveloped them both as she straightened up. Having touched the awful thing, so lately living, her horror left her. She was almost drowned in a well of love and pity.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she wept softly. “You fool. You big baby.” His disembodied finger vanished within her clenched hand. She stared at the tiny red rivers seeping through the cracks of her own fingers and blending with her tears.

“Yes, I did,” he said, holding his left hand up carefully to stem the copious blood flow. The pain was only half-real to him. The whole action, in fact, seemed dreamlike. “It was worth it. I can tell by your eyes. I’m not a coward, Sunny.”

“I didn’t mean this way, darling,” she said. “You’re the bravest man in the world. I meant—the other way. Morally.”

“You mean I did all this for nothing?”

She shook her head. “Page, if you offered me the world on a string it wouldn’t mean half to me what this poor bloody finger means,” she wept. “Darling, what a stupid, gruesome, brave thing to do. Page ... I love you more than I can bear. Forgive me.”

And she went to him and kissed him and his gory hand. They stood together with their arms around each other; damp and discolored with blood and tears; too stunned to talk any more.

“You know, Laura, I don’t think either of us really knew what courage meant that day,” Sunny wrote to Laura Mann. “We were a couple of little kids lost in the dark, each one hanging on to the other, near dead with fright and both shouting how brave we were. To Page, courage was the strength to do what he thought was right. To me, courage was the guts to do what I knew damn well was wrong. (By conventional standards, at least). We were at opposite ends of the pole, too proud to meet halfway.”

* * *

Sunny left Page’s apartment that night with Page asleep from the effects of a sedative the doctor had given him. She went home in a taxi. There had been no verbal understanding between her and Page. It seemed as though the more they talked about their problem, the farther they drew apart. They traveled away from each other on the wings of their own words.

But when they kissed or clasped hands or stood and shared a lingering look, words were unnecessary. They had made love this time, they had been so close to one another that Sunny began to hope the future wasn’t all black.

Page had told her with his hands, his eyes, his mouth, how much she was cherished. No matter how wrong and painful and misunderstood their speeches were, they never misunderstood each other’s kisses.

She spent the next few days expecting him to call her, and when nearly a week went by and he didn’t, she was gravely hurt.

What does he expect me to do, make all the advances? she wondered. I’ve swallowed my pride. Let him swallow his this time.

* * *

It was in a downcast mood that Sunny went to Dr. Settick for her six-month check-up. She sat in the examination room, staring at the white gown that covered her and trying not to think of Page. She hardly heard the doctor enter.

He walked around in front of her, pulled her chart out of a folder, and checked her weight without a word of greeting. Total gain for six months: two pounds. He noted it, still silent, and turned to look her over.

It was so unlike him to keep quiet that she glanced up at him. “Am I all right?” she asked anxiously.

“I don’t know,” he said, straightening up. “Are you all right? You tell me.”

“I feel all right,” she said.

“How does your husband feel?” He eyed her closely.

“He had a slight accident last week,” she answered. “I imagine he’s still pretty uncomfortable.”

“Oh? You wrung his neck, I hope. Sunny, you’re badly underweight. The baby seems to be all right. His heart is strong and he’s growing. But frankly, you worry me. The first time I saw you in here you were smiles all over, just like your name. And when I told you you were going to be a mother you nearly floated out of here. Now you’re moody, gloomy, listless....” He sighed. “I’m the last guy to make predictions, but I don’t like what your husband’s been doing to your state of mind.”

“It couldn’t be helped,” she said shyly.

“Well, something had better be done about it,” Settick said, “if you want me to take responsibility for delivering that baby in good condition.”

“Is it that bad?”

“It could be. It depends on how much pressure you’re under and how strong you are to resist it. This is your first baby and there’s no way of telling.”

“What can I do?” she asked. “If anything happens to my child—”

“Do you ever see your husband?” the doctor asked.

“Now and then.”

“Does it upset you a lot?”

“I guess it does,” she admitted with restraint.

“Then you shouldn’t see him at all,” Settick told her. “I mean that, Sunny. You’re in no shape to fight and argue and whatever the hell else you do with the guy. I’m telling you honestly: forget him till after the baby comes. Don’t call him and don’t let him in. Tell him it’s doctor’s orders and if he gives you a bad time tell him to call me. I think I have good medical grounds for asking you to do this.” He stepped closer to her, though there was a careful lack of intimacy in his manner.

“Sunny, you’re such a damn sweet girl,” he said. He leaned his weight on the examination table behind her, his eyes averted. “You ought to be the way you were the day I met you, and instead you’re coasting downhill. There’s nothing physically wrong, nothing I can prescribe any more pills for. But it’s obvious your husband’s making you miserable, and if he doesn’t quit it’s my professional opinion he may injure this child you’re carrying. Or you. I don’t know how I can make it any stronger.”

“I don’t know if I can stop seeing him,” Sunny said.

“Well, okay, it’s your choice,” Settick said, shrugging. “You can choose between husband and baby. At the moment, I think baby comes first. You can square things up with your husband later.”

Sunny breathed deeply and fought her tears. To make it easier for her, Dr. Settick pretended not to notice and re-aligned the papers in her file.

“If I can’t see him at all, I think I’d better get out of the city,” she said when her nerves steadied. “Because if I’m still here and he’s still here, I’ll see him, Doctor.”

Settick folded his arms on his chest, and shook his head at her. “Brother,” he said. “You sure are a case. The guy makes you sick and you adore him for it. If you love each other so much why aren’t you happy? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I guess it doesn’t,” she agreed.

“I don’t mean to pry,” he added. “But if you have to move out of New York, move quickly. I suggest California.”

“Why California? It’s so far away.”

“That’s exactly why,” he said. “Ever been there?”

“No.”

“That makes it even better. He won’t suspect it. He’ll think you went home to Mama. And when he finds out otherwise, he won’t know where to look. My brother Brian lives in Los Angeles,” he went on. “I told you about him. He’s an obstetrician too. I want to keep close track of you, Sunny, and give you the best medical care. Brian is the best ... Could you finance the trip?”

“I think so, Page puts money in the bank every month.”

“Wait till the last minute and then close out the account. You’ll like the coast,” he added reassuringly. “Brian’s wife will show you around.”

Sunny couldn’t help being touched and grateful for his concern. “I’d only do this for the baby,” she said. “I don’t care about myself.”

“What happens to you happens to Junior. Think of it that way.”

“All right, then.” She had made a momentous decision; now she felt tired. After a minute she became conscious of the silence and glanced up at him. “May I go now?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, but there was an avalanche of words piled up and waiting behind that ‘yes’ for some gesture of Sunny’s to release them. “I’ll call you when I’ve made the arrangements,” he said. “You can go home and pack.”

“Thank you.” She paused. “If I weren’t so tired I wouldn’t let you talk me into this, you know.”

“That’s the first time I’ve been glad to see you tired,” he grinned.

She smiled, letting him help her down from the table, and found herself standing right in front of him, suggestively close. Oddly immobile, whether from weariness or a desire to be comforted she never knew, she stood there until she felt his arms go around her. She had known they would, and her behavior actually encouraged it. She even knew he would kiss her, and she didn’t want his kiss. But she wanted to be held; she wanted to be caressed and reassured by a man’s gentle strength, and she was willing to pay for it.

It was a chaste kiss: the kind a man gives a woman he reveres; a woman he can’t have and yet can’t give up. It surprised Sunny, who thought the young doctor would make the most of this chance to rouse her sexually. But he seemed to know that such a move could only repel her then. Instead he touched her lips lightly with his and kissed her forehead. And then he wrapped her in the strong embrace she yearned for and rocked her tenderly.

He was so kind, so careful to control his fascination with her lest he offend her, that he won her over. She clung to him and let herself cry into his starchy clean coat.

“Sunny,” he said, afraid of breaking the spell but more afraid he’d never talk to her again. “I have no right to say this, but—”

“Don’t then, please,” she pleaded.

“Let me. Just listen for one minute. I have no claim on you. You belong to another man. You love him. For some reason he sees fit to torment you—”

“You’re being unfair!”

“Okay, I’m unfair. I don’t know all the facts.” He held her closer. “But I do know you’re bitterly unhappy because of him and you’re making yourself sick over it. Every time I see you I want to take you in my arms and brush away the tears and make you smile. Sunny, I haven’t been very subtle about this. I guess it’s no secret that ever since you’ve been coming here I—I’ve had a special interest in you.”

“Dr. Settick—”

“My name is Richie,” he said gently. “Let me finish. For want of a better word let me say I’m infatuated with you. If you weren’t married I’d call it something much stronger. I’d want you for my own.”

“Richie, I didn’t mean to start this,” she said, pressing away from him. But he held her firmly.

“Just one last thing,” he said. “I know I can’t have you. But please let me help you. I can’t tell you what it would mean to me to see you safely through this pregnancy. If I thought we could get away with it I’d certainly keep you here where I can watch over you myself. The next best thing is to put you in Brian’s care. And when the baby’s due I’m coming out there to deliver it. I want you to promise me—”

“I can’t ask you to drop everything and—”

“You don’t have to ask me, I want to do it.” He looked down at her and she could see in his serious clean-featured face that he meant it. “I’ve been planning a couple of weeks off later in the summer anyway. I’ll be in close touch with Brian. And I want you to write me, too. Sunny, let me do this. Don’t be embarrassed by my feelings for you. Don’t even think about them. I’m a good doctor, and I’ll take good care of you. Please. It’s all of you I can ever have.”

The rush of words stopped. Sunny was tempted simply to resign her will and be cared for. She needed it so much and he wanted so much to do it. Was it wrong to accept his help, just because he loved her? He was a doctor, he was trained to care for people.

“Richie,” she said awkwardly, “I’m grateful to you—”

“Then don’t turn me down.”

“I ... I can’t turn you down. I need you too much. But you mustn’t expect me to leave my husband. I can never thank you enough for what you’re doing for me, only—”

“I’ll never take advantage of you, Sunny.”

She smiled at him then. “You make me feel terribly selfish,” she said.

“I’m the selfish one.”

She put a hand on his arm. “I want you to know about Page. It’s never been a question of love between us, Richie. That’s the only thing we’ve been sure of in all this mess.” She remembered suddenly that she was clad in a loose gown with nothing underneath it. He brought it to her attention inadvertently, being extremely close to her as he was. With a deep blush she said, “I’d better dress.”

“Sunny, have dinner with me tonight?”

It would be nice to have some company, some laughter. She relented without a struggle. “All right, if you’ll let me cook it for you,” she said. “I haven’t cooked a meal for a man in months. Seven o’clock?”

“You’ve got a deal,” he said with a grin.

* * *

She got a roast on the way home and some squash and fresh broccoli—the sort of things that take a little doing when they’re spiced and wined and buttered right, things women never fix for themselves. It felt good to be busy in the kitchen, even though the bother wasn’t for Page.

She wondered once, briefly, if Page would choose that evening to come over. He’d blow a fuse, she thought. But it was too late to change things: already quarter to seven.

Richie arrived ten minutes later, with a spray of yellow roses and a bottle of champagne under his arm. “I thought as long as we were doing it, we might as well do it right,” he said handing them to her. He looked very handsome in his dark suit. He was fair, like Page, but heavier set and shorter. His features were fuller, more emphatic than Page’s: one might say a little coarser, though coarse only by comparison. He was a sensitive, intelligent man, and he was pleasant company that evening.

The champagne eased Sunny’s apprehensions about Page and she relaxed and enjoyed herself. Richie talked about himself at her insistence, telling her about the medical school he had attended and why he had specialized in obstetrics. “I just like women and babies, I guess,” he laughed. “Not a very scientific reason.”

She laughed with him and listened with interest, and he found himself growing expansive with her attention on him and the champagne in him.

“It’s a pleasure to talk like this,” he told her when the dinner was over and they were drinking their coffee with Page’s prize Drambuie. “I spend so damn much time every day listening.”

“That’s why you’re so popular,” she said.

“You think so?” he chuckled. “I used to have an old professor who insisted the bedside manner was half the cure. Any time you want to let me practice it on you, I’d be delighted.”

The time went much too fast. Sunny was surprised and disappointed when Richie got up to go a few minutes past eleven.

“I’m afraid I kept you too long,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you really?”

“No,” she admitted with a little smile. “I’d keep you longer if I could.” But when he reached toward her she added quickly: “But just to talk. Nobody else can make me smile these days.”

He let his hands fall back. “When you take up medicine you give up normal hours for the rest of your life,” he said. “You have to sleep wherever you can and whenever you get the chance.”

She saw him to the door, getting his coat from the hall closet. There was a clumsy little silence after he had put it on and stood there in front of her, hesitating. She hoped, suddenly self-conscious, that he would not try to kiss her.

But he only said, “Thank you, Sunny, for a beautiful evening. Everything was perfect. Especially you.”

She surprised herself and him both by kissing his cheek, a swift, soft, tip-toed peck. “That’s for taking such good care of me,” she said.

He couldn’t help kissing her then, and she wondered, while he held her, what might have happened to her life if she had met him before she met Page. It was idle conjecture, really; she loved Page with her whole heart. But Richie Settick was a fine man; strong, intelligent, attractive. And while he respected her feelings for her husband, he was not sorry she admired himself and liked him and needed him. He would do nothing to discourage her.

He squeezed her one last time. “I’ll call you tomorrow, after I’ve talked to Brian,” he said, gave her one long look, and left.

* * *

Richie’s call came just five minutes after unpredictable Page had walked in on his wife, and Sunny was so flustered on the phone, trying to warn Richie without making Page suspicious, that Richie finally caught on.

“Is your husband there?”

“Extremely!” she said and he muttered, “Oh, God. Well, I’d better call you back.”

“No, I’ll call you,” she said, afraid he might call again before Page left. Or perhaps Page had no intention of leaving. She couldn’t guess what he had come for.

Sunny hung up and followed Page into the kitchen, where he had gone while she was on the phone. She found him with his head in the refrigerator, sampling the previous night’s leftovers.

“Boy,” he mumbled through a full mouth. “Good, honey.” He waved a piece of roast beef at her.

“Is that all you have to say to me?” she said, half-joking, half-dismayed.

“No.” He glanced at her almost bashfully, and turned away, finding a knife in the kitchen drawer to cut the meat. The sight of him with a blade in his hand made her gasp.

“It’s all right,” he said hastily. “I just want something to eat. I always thought I married a crackerjack cook.” He gave her a smile that seemed more like a cover-up for something else. He was too casual, too much the sophisticated spouse calling on his estranged wife to chat. She half-expected a polite inquiry on the health of her lovers.

“How is your hand, darling?” she asked. The wound was one week old.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’ll bet it hurts a lot,” she said. “What did you do with the finger, Page?”

He blinked, humiliated by the discussion. “Threw it in the garbage,” he said briefly.

“But it was a part of you,” she protested. “I know it sounds silly, but—”

“It certainly does,” he said, refusing to look at her and eating a chunk of beef. “What would I do with the thing? Pickle it?”

“I guess not,” she admitted. She put a cautious hand on his shoulder. “Page? Why are you here?”

“To see you.”

“Don’t be so damn matter-of-fact about it,” she cried. “This is the first time you’ve come to see me since this thing happened. Page, put that meat down and talk to me.” She snatched it from him and re-wrapped it in aluminum foil.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What did you come for?” She faced him with her hands folded over her bosom and he knew he would have to do battle to get them down again. She wasn’t going to give him any help.

He made a fuss over his sticky hands and spent some minutes cleaning them up.

“How are you feeling?” he said lamely. “I mean, what does the doctor say? I mean you scared me last week. You were so thin and white. You looked so beautiful, honey, but too damn skinny. Are you all right?”

He delivered this halting speech, full of love and embarrassment, without looking at her. She decided not to answer till he looked at her. Eventually, in the ensuing silence, he had to.

“Darling?” he questioned softly. “Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not.”

He paled. He blushed easily when he was self-conscious and conversely went white with alarm. Sunny’s reactions were identical, and it touched her to see the trait in Page, even though it was another physical proof of their blood tie. “Are you really sick or are you trying to scare me?” he said.

“I’m really almost sick. Dr. Settick says I have to get out of New York for a while. He doesn’t want me to see you any more.”

She hadn’t stopped to think that her words would be antagonistic. She meant to spite him and instead infuriated him.

“You tell that bastard he can take a flying jump at the moon!” he exploded. “Who is he to tell you if you can see your own husband?”

“My ex-husband,” she reminded him. “Be consistent, Page. He said it because I get so upset he’s afraid it will affect the baby’s health. And mine. He said if my depression lasts he can’t answer for the baby’s safe delivery. He said it would be on your conscience.”

She hadn’t intended to tell him that. She meant to slip away on her trip and leave him a reassuring note. No recriminations. But the way he gnawed on that roast beef, maligned Richie, avoided her, with such a show of casual sophistication, incensed her. She knew he was trying to hide his love, to prevent a burst of uncontrollable desire for her. But it made her want to tear down his cool self-righteousness.

“Page, I wish I could make you come to me on your knees,” she cried. “I wish I could make you feel what I feel when I crawl to you and beg you to kiss me and need me and—” She broke down and cried.

Watching her, his anger melted. “Don’t go away,” he began. “Please, Sunny. I couldn’t live in this town if you weren’t here. Just knowing I can see you if I have to—”

“If you have to!” she shouted. “That’s too big an ‘if,’ Page. Either live with me as my husband or consider the annulment official and leave me forever. Make up your mind.”

“Darling, I can’t. Don’t force me—”

“Well, which is better?” she asked brokenly through her tears. “This piecemeal love-making? This frantic once-a-month stuff that exhausts us both? Or making up our minds we have to have each other anyway, and so living together? Page, I can’t take this and neither can you.

“You say it’s wrong for us to sleep together because we’re brother and sister. Well, why do we do it, then? Why don’t we say good-by and get it over with? This installment-plan passion is just as immoral as living together and a lot more agonizing. You say you have principles. All right, stick to them!”

She finished with a small cry of dismay. She had delivered an ultimatum to him by mistake. All the pent-up wrath of the preceding months boiled out of her and she couldn’t stop it.

“That doctor’s been brainwashing you!” he said.

“He’s been telling me the truth.”

“He’s trying to turn you against me! And he’s probably in love with you.”

“Yes, he is!” she fired back with vindictive pride.

“Oh, God!” he cried. “And I suppose you’ve invited him over here—to my apartment—”

“My apartment,” she corrected him. “You forfeited your right to it months ago.”

“I suppose that roast beef was for him.”

“You don’t think I’d cook all that for myself, do you?” she said in a voice made unsteady with tears. “He’s a lot better company than you are, too.”

“Don’t you leave this city,” he warned. “I’ll have that bone-picker jailed for alienation of affections!”

“Can you sue if the affections belong to your mistress, not your wife? Since we’re getting technical, let me remind you as you keep reminding me: we’re not married. And I’m no more sleeping with Richie Settick than you are with your secretary.”

They stared at each other. Page dared not relent for fear of crushing her in his arms and forgiving her everything, even the things she only did in his imagination—and those were the worst of the lot.

“You think I let him make love to me, don’t you?” she said.

“No,” he said and the admission surprised her almost as the sudden quiet of his voice. The starch in him washed out suddenly.

He went to her, hesitant and ashamed of his outburst, expecting the frigid reception he deserved. But she moved toward him and he caught her, holding her tightly as if he meant to keep her there forever.

“Every time I shout at you I get myself in trouble,” he said unhappily. “I’m so damn jealous I’m acting like a five-year-old. If I can’t have you I don’t want anyone else to. But you see Settick too much and you like him too much. No wonder he’s in love with you. He’d have to be blind not to be. And he’s too damn available.”

“But darling, the man I want is so unavailable.”

He kissed her mouth, long and tenderly. She only said one word when he released her: “Stay.”

But he wasn’t ready; not yet. He was thinking, he was suffering, he was even softening. But it was still beyond his courage to commit himself.

He left her moments later. Sunny didn’t beg, she didn’t cry. She sensed a new attitude in him, a new gentleness, and she didn’t want to frighten it off. He was trying to control the emotions that had mastered him so often in the past, and, for the first time, he was taking a cautious look at her side of things.

An hour later she called Richie Settick back on the phone.

“You have a reservation on a jet flight to Los Angeles for Thursday, honey,” he told her. “Tessa, Brian’s wife, will pick you up at International Airport. She’ll have an apartment for you, too; something small, near Brian’s office. They wanted to take you in themselves, but I told them no. They have four little kids and it’s a madhouse.”

“Thanks a million, Richie,” she said. “I’d better let my parents know where I am.”

“Wait till you get out there,” he said. “And don’t let them tell Page.”

“I’ll say it’s a trial separation,” she said. “They don’t even know I’m pregnant and they’re awfully fond of Page. They’d be heart-sick if they thought we were breaking up.”

“This won’t be half as bad as you think, Sunny,” he comforted her. “I’ll drive you out to Idlewild Thursday.”

“Thanks, Richie.”

“Now get yourself packed and get your money from the bank,” he said. “And don’t do it all at once and wear yourself out. That baby’s still got almost three months to go, and we don’t want him coming early. Might louse up my vacation.”

She obeyed him; she was too tired to argue. Richie was efficient and strong and he simply took over, helping her pack, running last-minute errands for her, getting things in order. She told him about Page’s visit.

“And you told him you were leaving? You shouldn’t have done that, Sunny.”

“I don’t know why I did, except that he made me so angry. I wanted to see him really afraid of losing me.”

“But my God, he’ll be after you all the time,” Richie said. “I’m surprised he hasn’t barged in already.”

“Not that boy,” she said with weary sarcasm. “I told Page I was leaving, yes,” she added. “But not when or where. I’ve stuck it out all these months and he just figures I won’t leave now. And I wouldn’t, except for the baby.”

She sat down glumly on a suitcase. “Maybe I ought to stay,” she whispered, almost to herself. “He really tried to understand a little.”

“A little isn’t enough. Now forget it. Don’t think about him,” Richie ordered her. “Think about that instead.” He indicated her small belly.

“I don’t see how there’s room for a mouse in there,” she mourned, looking down at herself, “let alone a baby.”

“Some of the smallest girls have the biggest babies,” he said.

“But they stick out, don’t they?” She lifted her sad face for his reassuring reply and he kissed it instead. She murmured wryly, “Enter Page, twirling mustache. Sunny screams. Gallant doctor draws pistol and defends virtue of wronged damsel. Duel follows. Everybody drops dead. Justice is served. Fanfare. End of story.” She glanced at Settick. “Maybe we’d all be better off dead,” she said.

“The hell with that noise,” he retorted cheerfully. “Nobody’s better off dead.”

“Not even the screwballs? The queers and the criminals?”

“Not even them. Not in my book.” He was kneeling with one leg on her other bag, forcing it shut. “There’s always a chance the square peg will find a square hole.”

“How about the people who make love to corpses? Or their own sex? Or their own brother?”

There was a small bemused pause. “You have a morbid imagination, honey,” he said, smiling.

“You mean you condone all those things?” she said, feeling an almost compulsive need to talk about it. “Murder? And sodomy? And—incest?”

“No,” he said calmly. “I don’t condone. And I don’t condemn. I try to correct. I had a patient a few months ago—can’t remember which one, they all ask questions—who wanted to know about incest.” His look made her heart skip.

“What did you tell her? Sure, go ahead? Incest is better than nothing?”

“No. She wasn’t committing it, she was asking about it,” he said.

“How do you know?” Sunny felt as if she were playing dangerously near the cliff of confession: one slip and over she’d go. Or was confession unnecessary? Had he already guessed? She didn’t think so, because she felt he would have asked her about it if he had.

“Well, come to think of it, I don’t know whether she was or not,” he answered. “Stranger things have happened.... There you are, all packed. We have three hours to get the plane.”

“What did you tell her, Richie?”

“About the incest? She wondered if it would affect the children. Why?”

“Maybe it was her own baby she was worried about.”

“Maybe it was.” He stared at her. “My God, maybe it was. Why am I so dense about these things? Damn. Takes a woman to see through another woman, I guess.” He kept staring at her and she had the sudden premonition that he would remember at any second.

She got up lightly. She was sweating nervously and longed for him to drop the subject. He did, at once, almost as if he knew it embarrassed her. If she had trusted herself she would have dismissed it with one last silly crack, to throw him off. But her composure was riskily thin and she was afraid it showed.

Just don’t let him put two and two together, she prayed.

* * *

He drove her out to the airport. They didn’t talk much until they got there and checked her bags and went to have a drink.

“Do you really want me to have a martini?” she said.

“Sure. One won’t hurt you. Might do you some good.”

When their drinks came, Sunny said, “Richie, Page will find out I’ve gone sooner or later. I didn’t leave any note or address, but he knows your name. And it won’t take him long to find you, once he knows I’m not in New York. It might be tomorrow or a month from tomorrow, I don’t know. But I do know he’ll think it’s all your fault.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sunny. I can handle him. If he really loves you, I’ll use his love to convince him. After all, you aren’t leaving forever. Once the baby is safely delivered and you’ve got your health back, there’s no reason why you can’t see him again. He wouldn’t hurt you, would he? Physically?”

She shook her head. “I feel as if I’m dreaming,” she said. “This place, those big planes roaring out there. I’ve never even flown before. Did I tell you that?”

“It doesn’t scare you, does it?” he asked.

“No. I feel sort of numb. I’m glad; I don’t know if I could go through with it otherwise.”

He took her to the gate and handed her ticket to her. She turned to thank him, with the wind whipping her hair, and found herself crying. Richie put his arms around her and held her so hard she thought he meant to crack her ribs. But she returned the embrace without protest. At last she lifted her head and said, “Thank you.” It was all she had composure for, but he could see in her face how much she meant it.

“I wish I were free to tell you how much I love you,” he said.

But she put a restraining finger on his lips and gave him a warning smile. “When you see my frantic husband—and he’ll be pretty frantic, believe me,” she said, “—will you please tell him for me that I love him ... very much?”

“I’ll tell him,” he said, as if to atone for his declaration of a moment before. “And remember, Sunny, no matter what happens, I’m going to deliver that baby. I’ll see you in a couple of months. Take care.”

Sunny smiled. She went through the gate and walked to the plane, up the ramp, and inside.

Settick stood and watched her disappear, then found her when she took her seat by a window toward the back, and stood with his hat in his hand, waving and cursing silently the name of Page Pringle, until she vanished in the clouds.

“So you finally lost track of them, then?” Mr. Winkler asked Jack disappointedly, accepting a sandwich from Laura. It was after three A.M. In a little while the summer streets of Chicago would be light again and hot with the June warmth that had scarcely abated in the dark hours.

“No,” Jack said. “The Rothelis called us and filled us in a couple of weeks ago. They were trying to find the Pringles to tell them where Sunny was. June thought we’d have their phone number. She told us Sunny was in Los Angeles. She thought Page and Sunny were headed for a divorce and she was pretty worried.”

“Then she still didn’t know the truth? I mean, that Page was their lost son, Roger?”

“No. She told us all she knew and we guessed at the rest.”

Winkler’s face was tired but no less interested. The sandwich revived his energy and he listened carefully, like a student at a lecture who would write a paper on the subject as soon as he got home.

And Jack, by this time, was speaking to him with the familiarity of long acquaintance; long only in hours, but deep in perception. Jack now knew who Winkler was. It made him feel safer and easier in relating the story.

* * *

Page brooded silently for four days in New York until he could stand it no more. His jealousy was full-blown; his loneliness made all the days seem gray.

He stood in the middle of his living room, trying to ignore the phone. At last he grabbed it with a sort of sideswipe, pretending he wasn’t quite aware of what he was doing and that would make it all right to call her, just as it’s all right to do outrageous things in your dreams because it isn’t the real you doing them.

He dialed her number, rehearsing his speech. It shocked him severely when the operator broke in after a couple of rings to ask what number he was calling. He told her.

“That number has been disconnected, sir,” she said.

He hung up without answering, standing perfectly still and saying to himself, She did it because she doesn’t want to hear from me. She did it because she wants me to think she doesn’t have enough money in the bank. She’s only trying to scare me.

And Page was frightened. He rushed downstairs and hailed a cab, driving over to her apartment with his heart pounding in his throat. Her windows were dark, though it was nearly eight o’clock. Perhaps she was at a movie. Or out with the doctor.

The small entrance hall was faintly lighted and he went up the stairs to her rooms with noisy carelessness. He still had a key and put it to the lock. But it didn’t fit. That’s going too far! he thought angrily.

Chagrined, he shuffled down to the basement in search of the janitor, whose room was behind the furnace.

“Hello, Mr. Pringle,” the janitor said amiably, opening his door.

“Hi. Say, I seem to have lost my key,” Page said, hoping his embarrassment didn’t show. “Could you let me in my wife’s apartment?”

“That lock’s been changed, boy.” The janitor gave him a curious stare. “And anyways, she ain’t there.”

Page felt like hitting him. “Where is she?” he asked.

“How should I know? Just left, without no address.”

“Did she go—alone?”

“Had some young fella to help her. Blond, like you, but not so tall. Seemed to think a lot of her.” He smiled the lecherous grin of the aged and impotent.

“Settick!” Page said.

He turned and ran up the stairs with the janitor’s evil laughter floating after him. He raced to the nearest drug-store with a phone booth. In a moment he had Dr. Richard Settick’s home address in his pocket, and in another moment he was in a taxi on the way there.

It was about eight-thirty when Richie Settick answered the ring at his door. He opened it with a wide friendly sweep, the way he usually did, and froze. He was confronted with a strange tense man whose face was bafflingly familiar.

Page was holding himself together by a strict effort of will, as if he feared letting go and blowing to bits in front of this rival. For a moment Settick thought he had a crackpot on his hands.

“What do you want?” he said.

“My wife.”

And Richie knew immediately who he was facing. Whatever else he knew, or guessed, he didn’t say. Page was trembling, and the little twitch around his eyes gave warning of the rumbling violence inside him.

“Come in, Page,” Richie said, and such was Page’s emotional state that he never stopped to wonder how Richie recognized him without having seen him before. Richie, on his guard, stepped aside to let Page pass. He had expected a noisy, threatening bully. Instead Sunny’s husband was stiff and silent.

“Where is my wife?” Page said.

“She’s on a little trip,” Richie told him. “Sit down, Page.”

“I want Sunny,” Page warned, ignoring Settick’s invitation with a darkening face.

“I had to send her away.”

“Don’t you understand English? Where is my wife?” Page was shaking visibly. Richie judged, being smaller and not having the advantage of anger, that he’d get a shellacking unless he betrayed Sunny. So it took some courage for him to declare, “I can’t tell you where she is. If you find her she’ll have that baby on the spot. It might kill her, Page. And not many babies survive such a premature birth, either.”

“No one can say that for sure. You’re trying to bluff me,” Page said in a strong, urgent voice in spite of his shaking. He had pride, like Sunny, and he would not let himself come apart in front of this man she admired. Settick was calm and forceful, well-informed, a man to respect. Page could appreciate it without liking it. He was ready to hate this man who had persuaded Page’s wife to leave him. But he knew Sunny would not listen to an ordinary man. Accordingly, in spite of his bitterness, he was curious, and he felt no contempt for Settick.

“I’m a doctor. I know when a pregnant girl is in trouble,” Richie told him. “If Sunny loses that baby you’ll have yourself to blame, not just for the baby’s death but for what happens to Sunny because of it. And it’ll be rough, I can promise you that.”

Page watched him, suddenly recalling his mother, June Rotheli, and Pringle’s story of how she had tragically lost her mind when he, Roger, was born. Sunny might do that if she lost her child. She was a lot like her mother. The thought made him weigh Settick’s words.

Richie watched his face work around these ideas, wondering what it was that made him wince, hoping his own words had made some sense.

“You don’t want to kill that baby, do you?” Richie said.

“I just want Sunny,” Page said, astounded to feel himself retreating a little. Richie felt it too and began to think Page wouldn’t spread him around the living room.

“Then give her another few months,” Richie pleaded quietly. “Till the child is born and you know they’re both okay. She loves you, Page, she didn’t want to go. I insisted because every time she saw you she came all unglued. You weren’t living with her, anyway. You rarely saw her.”

“And I suppose she told you why, you—conniving bastard!”

“No, she didn’t. She just said it couldn’t be helped and you loved each other in spite of it.” Richie lighted a cigarette and continued seriously, “She talked to me quite a lot, though, when she came in for her examinations. I don’t think she has many problems I don’t know about—or couldn’t figure out. Would it help you any to know, Page, that I think....” He paused, then proceeded cautiously, “... I think this baby will be normal?” He waited, ready for a wild reaction from Page.

But Page deliberately misunderstood him. “Of course it’ll be normal,” he said quickly. “She hasn’t starved herself that much.” He covered his face with his hands for a moment as if he were afraid to comprehend Richie’s full meaning, as if his hands could hide his thoughts from the doctor. When he dropped them he said, “I’ll ask you once more: Where is she?”

“If I told you you’d go straight to her.”

“Do you know what this is doing to me?” Page said roughly.

“You’re not pregnant. She is.”

“I have to know! God Almighty, are you trying to drive me nuts?” He reached the doctor with one giant step, pulling him up by the lapels and shaking him.

Richie looked him straight in the face. “No.”

Page gave him a stout shove that sent him walloping into his door. But Richie caught him on the rebound, plowing a fist into Page’s solar plexus. Page hit the floor on his knees, struggling loudly for breath while Richie watched, unwilling to press his advantage.

When Page could talk he mumbled furiously, “You’re in love with her. You wouldn’t do this otherwise. Damn you! Probably going to meet her somewhere.”

Richie said nothing. When Page recovered he helped him to his feet and pulled him to the front door. “She’ll be back as soon as she’s had the baby,” he said.

“I’ll find her,” Page swore, pushing the tumbled hair off his forehead. “If you think I’m going to wait two or three months for my wife, you’re crazy.”

“You’re the crazy one,” Richie answered. “And you know it well enough to be ashamed of yourself right now.”

For the second time in the past few days, the fight went out of Page. He loved Sunny and he had to find her. Richie loved her and he had to hide her. Page understood that suddenly and understanding made him quieter, less desperate.

He looked at Settick with the clear green eyes so much like his sister’s, and experienced an irritated gratitude toward this man who had cared for her.

“If I’d been with her all this time, she wouldn’t have had to turn to you,” he said, almost to himself. He wondered how he could admit this without feeling cowardly about it, or humiliated.

“I wish I could hate you for what you’ve done,” he said frankly to Richie. “I wish I didn’t understand why you did it. I could break your head then with a clear conscience.” He smiled tentatively. “You think I’m a dangerous character, don’t you?”

“You were, a minute ago.” And seeing Page collect his wits, control himself, made an impression on Richie. For the first time since his arrival, the doctor saw what Page could be like when he had himself in hand, and it made him jealous; not of a shadow or a name on Sunny’s lips; but jealous of this flesh-and-blood man facing him now and showing signs of civilized intelligence at last.

“Does it make any difference if I say I had to avoid her? And it hurt me as much as Sunny?” Page shot Settick a glance. “Will you tell me where she is if I give you my word not to frighten her?”

Richie shook his head. “All you have to do is be there, and she’s frightened,” he said. “I can’t take the chance. She isn’t that strong.”

“I keep my word, Settick,” Page said. It was as close as he could bring himself to pleading.

“Give her these months, Page. Give her her child safe and sound. After that, she’s all yours.”

And Page saw that until then, she was all Richie’s; not in any adulterous sense, but in the sense of safe-keeping. More argument with the young doctor would gain him nothing.

He left, wondering at his own self-control and perception. Richie wondered, too, if Sunny hadn’t exaggerated her husband’s difficult temper. Both men felt a grudging esteem for each other and in different circumstances they would very likely have been friends.

For Page, in the trial of soul-searching and steadfast love, found himself changing for the better. He was not yet quite a man, but no one could call him a temperamental college boy any more, either.

He went home and placed a call to the Rothelis, fingering the library notes Pat had left on his desk that afternoon. Deliberately, he dumped the notes into the wastebasket. It would be a while before he wrote anything more.

Ben answered. It was the first time Page had heard his voice since he knew Ben was his father, and he listened with new attention, hearing echoes of his own voice in it.

“Page! Good to hear from you,” Ben said, and Page felt a melancholy fondness for him. He had been so resentful against the Rothelis in the months since he had known the truth that it surprised him to feel love for them now.

“Ben,” he said, anxiety making him brusque. “I’m looking for Sunny. Is she with you?”

“Looking for Sunny?” Ben said, his tone sharpening. “What do you mean?”

“I mean she left me. I mean—” He couldn’t describe the reasons for their separation. He couldn’t blurt out to Ben, You’re my father! There was no adequate explanation but the forbidden one. “We quarreled,” he mumbled.

“What about?” Ben said dubiously.

“I can’t explain it now. Is she there?”

“What makes you think she’d be here?”

“I don’t know. Don’t girls usually go home to their mothers when they fight with their husbands?”

“Sunny wouldn’t pull a trick like that,” Rotheli answered, fully alarmed now. “She’s not that kind!” He seemed to be trying to convince them both.

“Well, she’s not in New York. And if she’s not with you, I—oh God, I don’t know where to look.”

“She’s all right, isn’t she? She isn’t sick?” Ben asked.

“No, but she’s pretty damn pregnant,” Page said.

“She’s what?” Ben Rotheli shouted over the phone.

And Page remembered too late that Ben hadn’t known. Sunny made Page promise not to tell anyone until their problem was settled.

“Page, is my daughter pregnant?” Rotheli demanded. His anger snapped over the wires and Page heard June cry out in the background.

“Yes, Ben,” he admitted. “You know how women are when they’re that way,” he pleaded. “They change, they aren’t themselves. I never dreamed she’d ... Ben, don’t be too hard on me.” He didn’t want to antagonize this father of his who didn’t know he was talking to his own son.

Ben remembered how June had been when she was carrying her own children and he relented a little. But his voice was still cold when he said, “Well, we’ve got to find her, fast. You get in touch with the police there, and I’ll—”

“The police? Oh God no!” Page broke in, thinking what would happen if publicity brought the truth out.

“God damn it, Page, you do as I tell you!” Rotheli ordered him. “If you’re not going to get the cops to find your wife, I’ll get them to find my daughter!”

“All right, all right,” Page said, deferring like a dutiful son, but only to quiet Ben. He would find Sunny himself, without any help from the police. “And Ben—if you hear from her, call me right away. I’ll do the same.”

They ended the conversation on that agreement and Page spent a sleepless night, waiting for daylight and another chance at Settick. He sat on his bed and smoked, studying maps, trying to put himself in Sunny’s shoes. She hadn’t gone home. Was she across the river in New Jersey? Or across the continent?

* * *

He set out early after the doctor, only to discover that Settick made his hospital rounds in the morning and wasn’t in his office. Page would have to come back at one o’clock and sit in the waiting room, a lone buck in a forest of pregnant girls.

No thanks, he thought. And suddenly he began to wonder if Ben had been lying to him. After all, Sunny had doctor’s orders not to let Page know where she was. Suppose she had been there at Ben’s elbow, full of stories about the baby dying, scaring Ben into lying? She would have made a convincing actor out of a wooden Indian.

Abruptly, Page changed his plans and called the airport. There was nothing available immediately but they promised him the first cancellation to Chicago. Restless and worried, aware of his loneliness like a chronic pain, he packed and went out to wait for a plane. Six hours later he got a place. He never thought to call the Sunday Magazine until he was airborne and then dismissed it with a silent curse.

He timed his arrival in Hillsburg for nine o’clock the next morning, when Ben would be gone for the day. If Sunny was there it would be a lot easier to abduct her from her mother than her father.

He drove up and parked his rented car in the Rotheli’s back driveway. There was no sound, no signal to warn June, who was washing dishes in the kitchen, that he was coming. She saw him standing in the doorway and gave a small shriek. A cup hit the sink and shattered.

Page smiled at her, but his eyes searched the room, looking for traces of Sunny.

“Hello, June,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” At the sound of his voice she began to cry. “It’s all right,” he said, dismayed at having to comfort her.

“Page!” she exclaimed at last.

He took her into bashful arms and hugged her.

“Is she here? I thought she might have asked you not to tell me,” he said, unable to postpone the question.

“I’m so glad to see you,” June wept, making him wait anyway for the answer. “You terrified us when you called.”

“But Sunny ... is she—”

“No, she isn’t with us.”

His face fell. He looked so completely whipped that she put her hands against his cheeks, a little caress of Sunny’s that touched him. “I probably shouldn’t tell you ... but we got a telegram from her late last night. She’s fine.”

“Thank God!” He leaned heavily against the wall, pulling June with him. It was all happening too fast. His heart labored like a bellows.

“We tried to call you right away, but you weren’t home,” June said. “And your office this morning said they didn’t know where you were either. So then we began to worry about you.” She laughed with relief, a laugh like Sunny’s that made Page ache. He had never before realized how alike they were.

“Where is she?” he said.

“I can’t tell you,” June said, looking away.

“Now don’t you pull that on me!” he protested. “June, she’s my wife. I adore her. I’m going insane without her,” he cried passionately.

June had thought she could tell him everything over the phone. Instead here he was, sweating and desperate, in her own kitchen. His eyes were on her like two green lights, and he clutched her arms with his hands.

She wanted to tell him. She couldn’t help it. She felt the same attraction to him that Ben had when they met. But Sunny’s wire was explicit: “Don’t give Page my address. Very important.”

“She said not to tell you, Page,” June apologized.

“Of course she did, she’s mad at me,” he said, using any argument he could to soften her up. “June, I’ll die without that girl. I can’t help it if I sound melodramatic. All I ask is a chance to talk to her, to explain. How can I when I don’t even know where she is?”

It sounded so logical. June was sentimental and loving, and she wavered. Page implored her to give him the address. She heard the pain and the love in his voice and wished Ben were there to handle him instead.

How could two people patch up a marriage if they were a country apart? she asked herself. Besides, Sunny was pregnant now. June knew how that went, how miserable you felt, how irritable and unreasonable. And how terribly you needed your husband.

She thought of her own suffering when Roger was due and how hard she had leaned on Ben then, calling him names and abusing him. But he had been strong and patient, and her gratitude had never faded.

She was sure Sunny was being stubborn and silly. Whatever the quarrel, it didn’t merit a divorce. And yet Sunny was setting up residence in another state. June knew how the young Pringles loved each other and she finally broke in on Page’s disjointed tirade.

“Ben will kill me when he finds out,” she said uncertainly, “but I think Sunny needs you as much as I once needed him.”

Page waited, afraid to speak for fear she would change her mind. At last she pointed to the telegram in a letter holder on the kitchen table. Page sprang across the room and grabbed it, scribbling Sunny’s address on a paper napkin: 4225 Los Feliz, Los Angeles, California.

“Los Angeles! What’s in Los Angeles?” he said.

“Sunny.” June smiled.

“My God, the Coast.” He stashed his astonishment in a pocket with her address. “June, you’re a saint!” He gave her a violent hug and dashed out. June ran after him, startled at his odd behavior.

“Page, wait! Where are you going?” she called.

“To get my wife.”

“But you haven’t been here ten minutes. Ben will want to see you. What shall I tell him?”

But Page was already backing out. He waved at her and turned down the drive.

* * *

June went back in the house and called Jack and Laura Mann. She hadn’t met them but she’d heard Page mention them and knew them second-hand through Sunny’s letters. She told the Manns where Sunny was and Page was headed, and they gave her the Pringles’ phone number.

June introduced herself to George Pringle in a friendly voice, assuring him that Sunny was fine and Page would soon be with her. “And they’re expecting a baby!” she said cheerfully. “I’m sure they won’t mind if I tell you.” But she was surprised when her news seemed to aggravate him.

“What’s she doing in California?” Pringle said, in a voice sharp enough to hurt June’s feelings.

“They quarreled,” she said.

“What about?”

“Sunny didn’t say. But she’s acting foolish. She wouldn’t even give Page her address—”

“But you did? Aren’t you interfering a bit, Mrs. Rotheli?”

“Mr. Pringle, I didn’t have to call and tell you any of this,” June replied. “And if you’re going to be unpleasant—”

“Forgive me,” he said hastily. “You must understand that I’m worried.”

“I don’t think you need to be. They’re in love and they’ll work it out. It’s hard for a man to comprehend what a girl feels like when she’s pregnant. She doesn’t believe it now, but her husband is the best medicine for her.”

Pringle understood from the conversation that the Rothelis had no idea Page was their son. “Mrs. Rotheli, I think this is more serious than you realize,” Pringle began, but he couldn’t tell her the rest of it. It would have been brutal, unforgivably impersonal, over the phone.

But he felt something had better be done about it at once. It was his plain moral obligation to protect Page and Sunny from themselves. If he could do it only by following them to Los Angeles, that is what he would do.

He thanked June and hung up, calling O’Hare Field for jet reservations the moment his line was clear.

“I’m going out there tonight,” he told his wife moments later. “I’m certain Sunny went there to escape Page and I can’t understand why he doesn’t take this God-given chance to let her go. I know how much he loves her. Lord knows it isn’t easy for the boy. But she’s done all a woman can to help him, and he knows how evil this relationship is.”

“George,” his wife said mildly, “stay home.”

“What?” He stared at her. They so rarely disagreed on anything that it shocked him to hear her object. “Somebody has to help them, Lucia. They haven’t strength to help themselves.”

“Don’t you think they have more strength at their age than you have at yours?”

He left his packing momentarily to explain, “It’s not a question of physical vigor, my dear.”

“George, I’ve thought about this till my head ached.”

“Of course you did. We agreed long ago their marriage wasn’t valid.”

“We agreed. You and I. They didn’t.”

“They are very young, very much in love,” he said formally. “You have to remember what that feels like, Lucia dear.”

“I remember,” she murmured. “Do you?”

“Why certainly. Only for a woman, it’s different. They’re not as reasonable as a man. They have a weaker sense of honor and morality.”

“I am an honorable and moral woman, George,” Lucia said with great dignity, “and I believe Sunny is, too. She deserves a chance to keep Page if she can win him away from your stuffy principles.” She stopped, amazed at herself.

Pringle dropped a handful of underclothes and marched to her bedside to stamp out the anarchy. “Lucia, do you feel well?” he said, restrained but not unkind. She began to cry and he added gently, “My dear, I love both of those children. I’d give my soul to change things, but I can’t. They have to be separated. They are not husband and wife, they are brother and sister. Once you understand that, you see at once what must be done.”

“I can’t believe she meant to leave Page forever,” Lucia said. “I can’t believe it’s right for us to meddle. They don’t want your help, George.”

“They need it. It’s my moral duty—”

“It’s your moral duty to mind your own affairs!” she cried with the courage of conviction.

“My son is my affair!” he declared.

“Perhaps they can build a life together, but not if you insist they’re doing something dirty and terrible. Page can’t take that and you know it.”

“That’s why I’m doing it,” he said determinedly. He looked at her clear bright eyes and flushed cheeks; her anger gave her the look of youth he had almost forgotten. He was inexpressibly shocked at her.

“I lie here alone in this bed day after day,” Lucia said, unable to return his gaze, “and I think about that boy I love so much: how we alienated him with our stingy love, our cold, correct home, our speeches about the grand old name of Pringle.” She caught her breath. “And then I think what it did to him when we called and told him about Sunny. I don’t know what’s right and wrong any more, George. I only know in spite of my love I’ve lost my son. I wouldn’t care if Sunny were his own mother, I’d want him to have her.”

Pringle finished packing, silent with heavy disapproval. “You’ll come to your senses in a day or two, and see that I’m right,” he said finally. “Have Edna call my office and tell them I probably won’t be back until Monday.” He kissed her cheek. But she was weeping and desolate, and because he loved and needed her, he sat down on her bed and held her in his arms. “You’re overwrought, darling Lucia,” he said tenderly. “I’ll call Dr. Blue.”

“No. No more pills. George, it would almost make me well again if you’d stay home and let them patch it up.”

He put his hand on her forehead. “You’ll feel better after you rest,” he said, lowering her into the pillows. He tried to believe that it was merely a little fever, an excess of anxiety, that prompted her words. To think otherwise was to admit he didn’t know his own wife after thirty-four years. And that was preposterous.

He kissed her once again and walked softly out of the room with his suitcase.

“That was about ten days ago,” Jack told Mr. Winkler. “The next thing we knew, you were on the phone to tell us you’d seen Sunny and Page in California and Page was having a change of heart.”

“They were driving back to Chicago,” Winkler said. “They ought to be here in a week or so. I suppose they’re trying to figure out how to break it to the Rothelis when they get here.” He shook his head. “Amazing story, isn’t it? The adoption and all. Hard to believe, even when you know it happened. It sounds like the kind of crazy switch you’d find in a Gilbert and Sullivan plot, only this one isn’t comical.”

They all sat quietly for a moment: Jack studying his guest; Winkler looking at the floor as if the weird story had shaken his composure; and Laura watching the two men in silence.

“Do you think they’ll ever forgive the elder Pringles?” Winkler asked, his eyes moving slowly up to Jack’s face.

“If the Pringles will let them,” Jack answered.

“I hope it works out,” Winkler said. “You see, I have a son just about Page’s age. I’ve been thinking while you were telling the story what it would do to me to lose his respect, his love. It must be hell for Pringle.” He spoke with paternal compassion.

“I don’t doubt it,” Jack said with a nod.

The clock sounded the half-hour. It was five-thirty in the morning, and the chime brought Winkler to his feet.

“I have to go,” he said. “I shouldn’t have kept you youngsters up all night.”

“Our pleasure, Mr. Winkler,” Jack said. “We enjoyed it.”

“If you hear from Sunny and Page again, I’d like to know whether they’re all right,” Winkler said.

“We’ll give you a call,” Jack offered.

“You ... might have trouble reaching me. Page said he’d contact you at the end of the week. Can I call you then?”

“Sure,” Jack said, smiling at the dodge.

At the front door Winkler turned. “Thanks for the dinner, Laura,” he said.

“I’m glad you liked it,” she answered, standing beside Jack.

Winkler hesitated. “Do you think,” he said, “that Page ever really loved his step-father?”

“I think he still does, very much,” Jack said. “It’s just a question of pride now. It’s hard to admit you’ve been wrong. And Pringle’s in line for a few apologies of his own. He shouldn’t have followed them to L. A.”

“I guess not. He must have had had the best intentions, but ... the road to hell, and all that. Well!” He brought himself up straight and back to reality. “Thank you again. And good night.”

* * *

“He’s a funny old guy,” Jack said.

“Probably a lot like Mr. Pringle,” Laura agreed. “Aristocratic, high principles, and all. But Jack, you shouldn’t have told him—”

“But, darling, I wanted to,” he said, turning around and taking her in his arms. Jack and Laura were about the same height, but he always made her feel small and feminine. In spite of her own odd nature, she loved him. He was her home, her refuge. And his love was her security. Through Jack she could understand Sunny’s need for Page.

“I’m afraid someday you’ll hurt Betsy,” Laura chided. “You don’t have to tell people you’re gay.”

“I had to make Winkler understand,” he said. “It was part of the story.”

“It shocked him, though.”

“He’ll recover.” He kissed her forehead, in a gesture as intimate as things normally got between them, and said, “Come on. We can squeeze in a nap before Betsy wakes up.”

* * *

Jack was expecting Page’s call, but not the very next day. He was startled to hear the familiar voice saying, “Jack, how are you? This is Page Pringle.”

“How are you, old buddy?” Jack answered with a calm he didn’t feel.

Abashed, Page said, “Did you know we were in Chicago?”

“We knew you were coming,” Jack said. “Talked to June. How are you?”

“Okay, thanks. We flew back.” Page, who didn’t deserve Jack’s friendliness, was grateful and surprised. He talked a little too fast to cover his emotions. “We damn near didn’t make it, though. Got lost. On the high desert.” His voice was suddenly terribly tired.

“My God,” Jack said. “Are you all right? Sunny—”

“I am, but Sunny’s over at Wesley Memorial Hospital. She’s in labor. It’s a miracle that baby didn’t come out there on the sand.”

“It’s premature, isn’t it?” Jack said. Laura was hovering anxiously over him now.

“About nine weeks. Sunny’s doctor just flew in from New York. He knows the case and she wanted him here for the delivery. They say he’s a damn good man.”

“Settick?”

“You know him?” Page said.

“Sure. He delivered Betsy.”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten.” Page couldn’t say more without making some kind of apology, however clumsy. “Jack ... I want to tell you—”

“Forget it, boy.”

“No, let me say it. I can’t look you in the eye till I say I’m sorry. You said a mouthful that night, and I behaved like an ass. I guess because you were telling me the truth and the truth was so damn painful. Like sandpapering a sunburn. And I know all about sunburns now.

“Jack, I didn’t straighten out until Sunny and I got lost and came to grips with the truth for the first time. You saw it before anybody else. Whatever I said that night, please don’t hold it against me. I’m not the same guy any more.”

“You’re forgiven,” Jack said. “Where are you?”

“At the hospital. I want to stay as close to Sunny as I can.”

“She’s still in labor?”

“Yeah. Pretty rough.”

“Want some company?” Jack said.

“Sure do.”

“I’ll be over in half an hour. With cigarettes.”

“Good boy, Jack. Thanks.”

“I’m coming too,” Laura said as Jack hung up the phone.

“Honey, it’s turning into a damn convention. The Rothelis are with him and I expect the Pringles will show up later.”

“This baby meant the world to Sunny, Jack,” Laura said. “If anything happens to it.... Well, June went to pieces over her first, and she might do Sunny more harm than good. I want to be there just in case.” Laura’s affection for Sunny had an undoubted erotic tinge. But at that moment she didn’t even consider it. Her concern was quite selfless. Jack saw there was no arguing with her and surrendered good-naturedly.

They drove over to Wesley Memorial Hospital, taking a carton of cigarettes, apples, a pint of scotch, and a plastic pacifier for the baby.

“Nine weeks early,” Laura mused. “That’s not too bad, you know. Betsy was four weeks early and she was almost six pounds.”

“Yes, but you didn’t quit eating. And you weren’t lost on the desert, either.”

She fell silent, wondering about it.

They parked their red Volkswagen two blocks away and walked to the hospital, taking the elevator up to the maternity waiting room. They saw Page first, talking to a handsome middle-aged couple that Laura knew at once must be the Rothelis.

They approached with caution. Page hadn’t warned them whether the Rothelis knew yet who he was and it seemed highly unlikely that they did. Page was badly sunburned, the skin still red across his nose and cheekbones; it had been cruel exposure for his fair skin, and it must have been as bad for Sunny’s.

Page and Ben Rotheli stood up and Page gripped Jack’s hand hard with emotion. Jack was absorbed for a moment in matching the features of father and son. The resemblance was subtle. If you knew about them, you saw it. If you didn’t know, and weren’t looking for it, it would escape you.

“June ... the baby?” Laura said.

“Not yet,” June said, shaking her head. The strain of the wait showed in her eyes. Impulsively Laura put a warm hand on June’s and squeezed it, thinking how hard June must be trying to control herself now, for everyone’s sake.

“It’ll be all right,” Laura said. “My little girl came early, too.”

“Did she?” June said eagerly, and they launched into comforting woman-talk.

“She’s been in true labor about ten hours,” Page told Jack. “She’s pretty weak after two days on that damn sand. It’s incredible how many pints of water you lose in that heat.”

“I believe it.”

“The pains started then, actually,” Page said. “But it was false labor.”

“How’s it going now?” Jack asked.

“Settick says she’s got a lot of natural stamina. The baby’s alive. They can hear its heartbeat. They’re giving Sunny injections of saline solution to speed things along.”

“Thank God for Dr. Settick,” Rotheli said with feeling. “He took right over when he got here. One of the other doctors told us he was doing a brilliant job. If anyone can bring her and the baby through, he can.”

Page nodded agreement without a show of jealousy. His opinion of the young obstetrician had been drastically revised when he understood that Sunny’s life might be in his hands.

“She’s got to be all right,” he told Jack. “The baby comes second.”

“You can always have more kids, Page, but you’ve only got one Sunny,” Ben said gently, putting a hand on Page’s shoulder. Jack realized then that Ben and June still did not know that Page was Roger Rotheli.

“June, I’m going down for a sandwich,” Ben told his wife after a minute. “Can I bring you anything? We haven’t eaten since we got here eight hours ago,” he said to the Manns.

“Go along with him, June,” Page said. “We’ll get you right away if there’s any news.”

Reluctantly, June let herself be persuaded, largely because Ben seemed to need her company. She had no appetite herself. She was so tired, her face so like Sunny’s, that Page, watching her walk out, felt a great warmth for her.

He sat with the Manns in silence for a minute.

“Have a cigarette,” Jack said finally, offering Page the carton. “It’ll calm your nerves.”

“Thanks.” Page opened a fresh pack and lighted one. “What I really need is a wake-up-and-swing pill,” he chuckled. “After that desert vacation and this baby business, all I want to do is lie down on the floor and sleep for a week.”

“The Rothelis don’t know who you are yet, do they?” said Laura.

“No.” He sighed a cloud of fresh smoke. “I can’t even think about that now. Not till Sunny’s out of danger.”

“I thought we’d see the Pringles here,” Jack said.

“I didn’t call them. They don’t know we’re back, and Mother’s bedridden.”

“Still quarreling?”

“Oh, that’s not it. You see, they haven’t met the Rothelis, and this seemed like a lousy time for it, with all of us so worried. It’d drive me nuts to have them on my neck.”

Jack bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “How the hell did you get lost in the desert?” he asked.

Page told him in a voice that was grim.

* * *

He had arrived out in Los Angeles in the early evening and driven a rented car to Los Feliz Avenue. Sunny’s apartment was one of the scores lined up in neatly landscaped rows on the big avenue. He picked out her number behind a waving palm frond, and then had to spend twenty minutes finding a parking spot.

Her rooms were on the ground floor in the back, surrounded with freshly watered orange day lilies, their leaves weighted with water diamonds. It was a perfect setting for her.

Page knocked on her door and waited several minutes. He could hear her walk across the room finally and stop by the door.

“Who is it?” she said and her voice struck joy and relief into his heart. But he was afraid to answer for fear she would keep the door locked. Then what could he do—break in a window?

“Brian?” she said, sounding more alert this time.

Page had no way of knowing Richie Settick’s brother’s name. He only knew Sunny seemed to be expecting a man and his sudden anger triggered the voice out of his throat. “Sunny? It’s me, darling. Page.” Silence. “Let me in.” Again, silence. “Sunny, can’t you hear me? Darling, let me in.”

Very slowly the door opened. Sunny’s face, heart-catchingly lovely, gazed out. They studied each other warily. She put a protective hand over her stomach, Richie’s warning ringing in her ears.

“How did you find me?” she said and he saw the alarm in her big eyes.

“Your mother,” he said softly.

She appeared shocked at this, but she didn’t question it. “What do you want?” she asked.

“I want you,” he whispered.

“Dr. Settick said—”

“I know what he said. I talked to him.”

“Did you hurt him?”

“No. He gave as good as he got. He’s a good man, damn him. Sunny, please come back with me.”

“To live with you?” She looked at him with yearning, resenting his intrusion, his threat to her child, yet knowing that if he wanted her back as his wife, she would go.

“Can we talk about it?” Page said.

“That’s all we’ve done. It hasn’t helped much.”

“We’ve only shouted at each other,” he said. “Sunny, don’t make me stand out here in the dark. Anybody could hear us. I feel like a damn Fuller Brush man.”

“You stay right where you are and tell me what you want from me, Page.”

“I want to take you on a honeymoon,” he said, coming closer to keep it private. “We’ve never had one. I thought we could take our time and see the West and ... maybe settle this thing.” He hadn’t known when she opened that door what he would say to her. But suddenly he had found the words.

“And fall smack into the same old ugly rut when we got back,” she said. “I sit at home for months while you make up your mind you can’t live without me. Then we meet for a few agonizing hours and yell and hurt each other and make dreadful, guilty love because your real name is Roger Rotheli. And then home I go to sit and weep for another few months. Or have a miscarriage.” Her voice rose and he hushed her with a worried stare.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” she finished more quietly.

Abruptly he pushed his way in, moving so fast she hadn’t time to thrust the door between them. He took her in his arms and kissed her. For all his strength and passion, he seemed like a child begging her to make up his mind for him.

She returned his kisses helplessly. “Page,” she murmured while he hugged her and he shuddered at the tears in her voice. “I will not tell you what you should do.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“Not with words,” she conceded. “You’re asking another way. But darling, you have to face this alone. I’ve made up my mind; now you make up yours. Either you take me back or you leave me. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Help me,” he whispered into her shoulder, admitting his dilemma at last. “I can’t live like this. I’m so lost, Sunny. It all seems clear to Dad. And it seems just as clear to you. Only you’re on opposite sides of the fence, you two. I’m at dead center and you’re both pulling on me till I’m coming apart at the seams. I can’t move one way or the other.”

“Climb off the fence, Page,” she pleaded.

“Say you love me,” he said, searching for comfort, trying to forget everything but Sunny’s presence.

She stroked his head and let her random tears fall unchecked. “You’ve known that all along, and it just makes things worse.”

“Just say it, Sunny. My darling, darling Sunny. Please.”

“I love you,” she said. “I love you, Roger.”

She shocked him rigid. He stared at her to see if she meant to hurt him. She was bravely serious.

“Good night, my darling brother,” she said, and closed the door softly in his astonished face.

* * *

Neither of them slept. Page, stripped of his pride and wavering between two identities, sat down shamelessly on Sunny’s door mat and spent the night watching the stars.

He wanted to be up there where there were no riddles, no flesh and breath, no incest. Nothing but the fire-punctured dark; nothing but the flow of Infinity.

Our love will last in spite of everything, he thought. The only question is, will it hurt more if we’re together or apart?

But he already knew the answer. He couldn’t fool himself any longer. The real question was the one she threw at him as she shut the door: was her brother brave enough to live with her? Take his sister for his wife? Could he survive the horror and scorn they might have to face? Conquer his fear and make her the strong, loving husband she needed?

He let it spin around in his head, a crazy carousel that had no starting place and no stopping; just endless indecision.

* * *

Sunny lay on her bed and watched the moonlight slide across her ceiling. Perhaps, being a woman, her decision was easier than his. Her love was her life. It didn’t matter whether she was Page’s sister or not. Alone, she didn’t know who she was. With Page she did know and she was unafraid.

Her heart dilated with love and pity for him. But if I make this decision for him I’ll be open to a lifetime of blame, she thought. Whatever goes wrong with us he can blame on me. No, if there’s any fault-finding, we’ll have to share it.

But she went cold at the thought that he might leave her again, whipped by his fears.

Sunny didn’t realize that Page had spent the night only fifteen feet from her bed until she heard him talking in the morning. His voice came clearly through her front door. She dropped her toothbrush and ran to let him in.

The door opened on Page and George Pringle, and it wasn’t any happy chat they were having. They fell silent at the sight of her, as, she looked from one to the other in surprise, convinced that Pringle must have come along to prod Page into saying good-by to her.

“Won’t you come in?” she said frostily. “I might have known Page would want to face his wife with a chaperone.”

Mr. Pringle got the point: Sunny had not left Page out of any noble desire to end their illegal marriage. Silently he ushered Page inside ahead of him, taking off his hat as he followed. Sunny shut the door and turned to face them, arms folded and eyes contemptuous.

“I didn’t expect this,” she said. “Page has always been brave enough to come calling by himself until now.”

“Sunny!” Page flared.

“Page had no idea I was coming,” Pringle said.

“Really?” Sunny said sarcastically. “Well, you seem to have timed it perfectly. Congratulations. I suppose you also got my address from my mother?”

“Don’t misunderstand, Sunny,” Pringle said. “Your mother loves you, and she’s very worried about you. I couldn’t tell her the truth.”

“You’re too generous, Mr. Pringle.”

“I know I’ve lost your affection because of this thing,” Pringle said regretfully. “And it grieves me. I’ll tell you the truth, though it has given me a great deal of pain. Lucia feels as you do, my dear: that you and Page should—should live together as man and wife.” His gaze dropped. It humiliated him to admit this, yet it might win him her goodwill.

“Mother said that?” Page asked, disbelieving.

“Yes. I was most unhappy, as you must realize. But I felt I had to come here, in spite of her objections, when I learned that Page had followed you, Sunny. I felt that I had a duty to help you two.”

“You have a duty to leave us alone. We don’t need your help!” Sunny declared. “We just need each other.” Pringle at that moment was her worst enemy. “I know exactly what you want to tell us, as if it weren’t already branded on our brains: We are brother and sister.” She gave the words a hard punch that made them almost unbearable to hear, and suddenly found herself weeping.

Pringle stood alone in the center of the room, embarrassed, unsure, full of smothered love. He didn’t know how to proceed. He only knew he cared enormously for his “children” and he thought he was morally right. “I love you both,” he said hesitantly, trying to reach them.

“Then have mercy on us!” Sunny said.

“But I’m afraid you’ll end up together again.”

“We haven’t made any decision yet,” Page said.

“You coward!” Sunny shot at him, forgetting for a second what havoc that word had wreaked the last time she used it. Her eyes darted to his mutilated left hand. Quickly he made a fist of it.

“Do you really think you can keep each other and live normal lives?” Pringle said incredulously.

“I can’t think at all, God damn it,” Page said. “I’m paralyzed until you get out of here!”

Pringle hesitated a moment and then went to the door. “All right,” he said. “But if you can’t separate on your own, I warn you I’ll do all I can to separate you myself.”

The three of them looked at each other for a second. “The hell of it is,” Sunny said to Pringle through her tears, “you really do love us. I believe that.”

“My children, I love you very much,” he said gratefully. “That’s why I’m here.”

They watched him turn and go in silence. Sunny had always been fond of her father-in-law, since their first warm meeting, and she regretted the hard words she had spoken. Yet she had had to say them.

For several moments after Pringle departed, Page and Sunny did not speak. Sunny was too proud and hurt to start begging again and Page was still too mixed up to declare himself. But Pringle had stated the challenge for them now, and a decision had to be taken.

They were afraid of losing the fragile tie Pringle’s presence had bound between them, and suddenly they spoke each other’s names at the same instant.

“We seem to have a talent for that,” Page said, smiling. He went to her and touched her hair. “Come with me, Sunny,” he said fondly.

“Right now? Without knowing where we’re going or how we’ll end up or—”

“How can we know that now, darling? We’ll figure it out while we’re traveling. We’ll get to know each other all over again.”

She had sworn she wouldn’t go back to him until he made it formal and final that she was his wife for the rest of their lives. But, like her mother, she was made to yield. She still hoped she could bring him around as long as she was physically close to him.

He saw her indecision and clasped her tightly to him. “Sunny, it’s the only way. We can’t leave the thing hung up.”

And she began to understand what he wanted: a chance to test himself and his temper and his nerves; to test his love in different places with different people; to see how he and Sunny made it together, confined with each other in a motel room or a car twenty-four hours a day. Maybe it would work. If it convinced Page he could take it, Sunny was willing to try it.

“All right,” she said finally. “But if this doesn’t do it—”

He interrupted her with a kiss. She could feel him fighting himself, trying to keep things fraternal. But they went radically out of bounds in a matter of seconds. His mouth opened on hers and he began to rock her with his hips. He tried once more to stop, burying his face against her neck and shuddering with the effort. Then she heard him murmur helplessly, “Oh, the hell with it.”

“That’s the spirit, darling,” she whispered, laughing softly. “After all, if it’s going to be a honeymoon....”

Page swung her up in his arms and carried her to the unmade bed. He stretched out with her, and the weight of his big body made her groan with pleasure.

“Oh, God!” he exclaimed, moving over. “The baby!”

“Baby wants more,” she told him, green eyes twinkling. Reassured, he embraced her again. “Mmmm,” he whispered. “Pepsodent.”

Sunny laughed again and hugged him in a spasm of pure joy. When he began that silly intimate teasing that always led to love, she knew what he was feeling and she was temporarily sure of the world.

* * *

“We’ll have to call Mom and Dad,” Sunny said later.

Page looked up from the map he was examining. “They’ll only worry,” he said. “Let them think we’re still out here till we show up in Hillsburg.” He tickled her beautiful face. “When are we going to tell them about me, honey?” he asked.

Sunny looked at the ceiling, bristling all over with alarm. “Never, I hope,” she said with forced calm.

“Is that fair? I’m their own child, their first-born son.”

“It would kill them,” Sunny said. “Page, believe me, they couldn’t love you more if they did know ... and the knowledge might destroy Mother.”

“On the other hand, it might make her very happy,” he said. “Women are peculiar creatures. I can’t help it, darling, I think they ought to know. My step-parents know. Don’t my real parents deserve the truth at least as much?”

“Not when it’s so painful.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he said flatly, and she saw that he was not going to give in. But thanks to Richie Settick, he was afraid to press the argument. Instead he would file it away and fetch it out to fluster her with in a day or two.

He folded the map and said, “Let’s get going, honey. I’ll help you pack.”

She obeyed him docilely, glad it was Page giving the orders now and not Settick. “Poor Richie will worry himself sick when he finds out I’m gone,” she said. “So will Brian. That’s his brother, darling. The doctor I’m seeing out here.”

“Well, let them worry,” Page said with heartless satisfaction. “Damn country is infested with Setticks and they don’t care how I worry.”

Sunny made him call Hillsburg before they left. She told the Rothelis they would be in Los Angeles another couple of weeks, and allowed June to think they were reconciled.

It was a good day to start a trip: clear and fair and warm. They drove east on the San Bernardino freeway. Page wasn’t used to the recklessness of Los Angeles’ drivers, and he wasted some breath swearing at them.

They got off on Route 66 in the town of San Bernardino and traveled north over the Cajon Pass toward the beautiful high desert country. Sunny loved the great green mountains and blue vistas, the flat white tape of highway pasted over the hills, the cactus and the Joshua trees.

By late afternoon they were near Apple Valley on the desert, thirty-five-hundred feet above sea level. The air was brittle-clear and cooling fast as the sun descended. Apple Valley was five miles off the main road, and they turned in to spend the night.

They got a room and had dinner at the Apple Valley Inn.

“I haven’t eaten so much in months,” she laughed. Page clasped her hand across the table and smiled at her.

“And Settick told me the mere sight of me would give you a miscarriage,” he snorted.

“It nearly did,” she said, sobering.

“Did I make up for it?” he asked, and she nodded. They were serenaded during dessert by an ambulant trio who took them for newlyweds until they spotted Sunny’s maternity dress. Their embarrassment sent her into gales of laughter.

Later they walked around the hotel grounds, hand in hand in the starlight. And then went to bed and made love and slept like winter squirrels until ten the next morning.

They decided to skip breakfast and drive a while before they ate. It was clear and warm with the promise of real heat by noon. They went only thirty-five miles before Sunny announced she was starving.

“You see? I’m a good influence on your appetite,” Page said.

They stopped at the next place they saw: a little hamburger joint outside the town of Barstow. Sunny ordered two hamburgers and a beer.

“Shouldn’t you be drinking milk?” Page said.

“Not when there’s beer around. I’ll drink a quart of milk for lunch, I promise.”

“You’re happy, aren’t you, honey?” he said, smiling at her.

“Whatever gave you that idea?” she grinned.

* * *

Their breakfast was almost gone when George Pringle came in. He made his way toward their table, watching them with worried eyes. Sunny gasped when she saw him, awed by his determination.

“Sit down, Page,” she told her angry husband, who was half out of his seat, “or I swear to God I’ll have this baby right now. In your lap.”

He sat down.

Pringle hesitated a second and then sat next to Sunny.

“Children,” he began, but Page interrupted.

“We are not children,” he said sharply. “If you’d ever get that into your head it’d solve half our problems.”

“I thought I’d lost you for a while when you turned off 66,” Pringle said, avoiding for the moment the urgent subject that brought him there.

Sunny put a hand on his arm. “Mr. Pringle, we won’t go through this again with you,” she said. To her surprise, instead of arguing he put his head in his hands in a gesture Page had made familiar to her. It dramatized the profound influence Pringle had had on his unruly step-son.

“I couldn’t let you get away without trying once more to make you see reason,” he sighed, looking up.

“You just make me see red,” Page retorted.

“There’s no need for cruelty, Page,” his father said.

“Cruelty?” Page said skeptically.

But Pringle meant it and his face showed it. He looked for the first time like an old man. Page felt a guilty shock to realize he was not the only one who was suffering. He had never let himself think of George Pringle as a vulnerable human being like himself. He cherished the mental image of a cold, correct, remote man. It was an image Page had formed in his early childhood and one that had long since ceased to bear any resemblance to his step-father. It had suited Page to think he could lash out at Pringle without hurting him. Now the hurt was vividly visible and Page had a good long look at it. His shame and surprise quieted him.

“Do something for me, Dad,” he asked. “Go back to Los Angeles and take the next plane home, before we end up enemies. We’ll call you when we get back and let you know what we’ve decided.” The affection he had always felt for Pringle was reasserting itself for the first time in many years, at this odd time and place. It shook Pringle up and moved him to surrender. Perhaps if he yielded now he could salvage that love Page still felt in spite of everything. Perhaps it was worth more than the strict morality he was trying to force on the younger man. Pringle trembled inwardly with self-rebuke. He was becoming as soft and sentimental as Lucia! But he couldn’t stop himself.

“All right, Page, if it has to be that way,” he said with misgivings. He seemed too tired, too irresolute, to keep battling with them. There was nothing more he could do and he even sensed that he might drive them back together if they teamed up against him in their resentment of his meddling. He left them at last, proud and silent but with a noticeable slump in his back.

* * *

“So he left you in peace?” Jack asked Page. “Have an apple.”

“It was screwy, you know?” Page said as he took the fruit. “I thought I hated him. The more he followed us the madder I got. But suddenly, in Barstow, everything changed. I felt sorry for him. And that made it possible for me to love him again. All of a sudden he was a human being like the rest of us, and miserable over my unhappiness ... trying so hard to save us both, as he saw it. And he stood to lose even the little love I still felt for him. It was a brave thing he did. A little stupid but brave. I didn’t know that before.” He took a bite from the red winesap in his hand.

“When Dad caught up with us, another crazy thing happened. I felt closer to Sunny; more like a husband and less like a brother.”

“Why haven’t you told the Rothelis who you are, Page?” Laura asked, huddling close to the men so the strangers in the waiting room couldn’t eavesdrop.

“I will when Sunny’s all right,” Page said. “They should know the truth.” His jaw hardened and he stopped chewing his apple.

“You’re right,” Jack said shrewdly. “That’s the way to get even with them.”

“Get even? That’s a lousy way to put it.”

“Why, hell, man, they gave you away when you were a baby, didn’t they?” Jack said, and Laura understood at once what he was trying to do. “They made you suffer, didn’t they? All these years you’ve been miserable because you didn’t know who you were. And what were they doing? Living comfortably and forgetting all about poor little Roger. What the hell, they have Chuckie now.”

“Jack, that’s a pretty rotten attitude,” Page said stiffly. He didn’t recognize his own undressed desire for vengeance. He had always hidden it under the robes of justice and retribution, and it had looked so noble. Now it was parading in Jack’s words like a heartless whore on a streetcorner.

“It’s a perfectly reasonable attitude,” Jack said with mock chagrin. “They ought to know what they did to you. They ought to suffer a little themselves. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“Well, they did suffer,” Page said uncertainly.

“But that was years ago!”

“Jack, you’re making it sound like—”

“No news yet!” Laura broke in, in an over-bright voice, and Page shut up as June and Ben rejoined them. They sat down next to their tense son, who glowered in silence at his old roommate. Jack, afraid Page in this temper would blurt out the truth, suggested the two of them go out for a drink. It was a chance to patch things up again before they got out of hand.

Page refused at once, but everybody insisted.

“Go over to Jocko’s, why don’t you?” Laura said. “It’s only a block away. I’ll call if anything happens.”

Jack hauled Page, resisting nervously, down the main hall.

“God damn it, Jack, they’ll come to get me and I won’t be here,” he said. “They’ll have to tell Sunny I’m out getting swacked with a drinking buddy. What will she think?”

“She’ll think old Jack did the right thing and got you out of everybody’s hair for half an hour,” Jack grinned.

* * *

It was late afternoon, pearly light and mild. Jack hustled his charge along for a block and turned him into Jocko’s. He ordered two double dry martinis and after a circumspect silence, put a hand on Page’s shoulder. “Take it easy boy,” he said. “I had no business being so rough on you then. You’ve got enough on your mind.”

Page, in his befogged state, had forgotten his gripe. “What? Oh, sure,” he said, lighting a cigarette and singeing a finger in the process. “God,” he murmured. “She’s got to be all right.”

“Women are a lot tougher than they look,” Jack said kindly.

Page wiped his sweaty forehead with a damp handkerchief and made Jack chuckle. “If there ever was a nervous young father, Page, you’re it,” he said.

“If there ever was a father with good reason to be nervous, I’m it too,” Page countered.

When the drinks came he emptied half his glass. Jack watched him a moment and said, “I have something on my mind that I probably should have told you sooner. Only things have been so unsettled—”

“I’m too far gone for confessions right now,” Page said.

“You ought to know this, though,” Jack insisted. “I met your step-father.”

“You did?” Page turned to look at him with an interested stare. “How did that happen? Did you call him up?”

“No, he called me. In fact he came over and had dinner with us.”

“He did? For God’s sake,” Page said. “How did he know who you were?”

“I didn’t ask him. The Rothelis, or maybe you mentioned us.”

“What did he want?” Page asked.

“Do you know anybody named Winkler?”

“Winkler? No. What is this, Jack?”

“Think hard. Anybody?”

“Some remote cousins of Mother’s have that name, I think. But I don’t know them personally.”

That was enough for Jack. He ran a wet finger around the edge of his martini glass until it sang.

“Your father told us his name was Winkler,” Jack said. “I wondered where he picked up the name. He stayed till five in the morning.”

Page frowned. “What the hell did he do that for?”

“I guess he wanted us to reassure him. He’d just gotten back from California and he felt as if he’d failed with you. He wanted to know your whole story from A to Z, as if he’d never heard it. He wanted to know if you’d leave Sunny, and if you’d forgive him for interfering the way he did.”

“He asked you all that?”

“Not directly. He didn’t want us to know who he was. Just said he had run into you in Barstow and thought you were a nice young couple. And you told him to look us up.”

“The old son of a gun,” Page said, shaking his head with amazement. “He must have been damn worried to do such a thing. It’s not like him.”

“I didn’t think so,” Jack smiled. “I hadn’t been talking very long before I got the picture. He carried it off pretty well, but when he asked questions you could tell the main thing he cared about was how a father and son should get along. And whether a moral man could tolerate incest.”

“How did he take it?”

“Well, some of it hurt, all right. But he showed guts. He heard me out. Now and then, when it got bad, he asked the things he had to know, but he didn’t condemn you. Or me, either.”

“Did he tell you who he was before he left?”

“No. He got a bit flustered. Wouldn’t let me call him for fear I’d find out his real name. I’m still supposed to think he’s ‘Mr. Winkler’. Laura never did catch on, by the way. Shall I tell her?”

“If you want to. I trust you two.”

“You don’t feel bitter about him now, do you?” Jack said.

“Not any more. There was so much love for us in all his bungling. Maybe it’s a good thing in a way that he did it. It made me realize how much I mean to him after all these years.”

“Why don’t you call him? He doesn’t even know you’re back,” Jack said.

“Sure,” Page said, looking at Jack as if it had just occurred to him. He left his bar stool and went to the pay phone in the back of the bar.

When he returned Jack had ordered another round.

“He was pretty relieved,” Page reported. “So was Mother. I don’t know what you said to him, Jackson, but I don’t think he feels as bad about things as he did. He may never approve of us—Sunny said that once—but I don’t think he’ll fight it any more.”

“Good.”

“And I called the hospital,” Page said. “It’s still going on. Ben says they haven’t heard any more.”

“Well, bottoms up,” Jack said judiciously. “We’ll finish this one and head back. You can tell me what happened on the desert.”

“You in a mood for horror stories?” Page said with an ironic grin.

Pringle’s unexpected visit in Barstow had taken the sparkle out of the beautiful morning. Suddenly Page and Sunny noticed it was very hot and dry. They didn’t talk about Pringle, with a tacit understanding that it would only have led to lower spirits and perhaps a fight.

“Come on,” Page said, leading her out to the rented dark blue Ford. He backed out toward the highway.

“Let’s do something fun,” Sunny said. “Let’s go see something interesting.”

“What’s to see, sweetheart?”

She had taken a travel guide map from the glove compartment and was studying the territory. They drove along while Sunny mentioned various oddities marked on the map; old mines, great dry lakes, craters. Page dismissed them all as tourist traps.

“Darling, let’s get off this dreary highway and see something,” Sunny pleaded. “This is supposed to be a honeymoon. Don’t let your father ruin this, too.”

“Okay, honey, you win,” he said half-heartedly. “What’s the next stop on the map?”

“Amboy Crater,” she said. “And Bristol Dry Lake.” He made a face.

“Well, it says ‘Point of Interest’ on the map,” she said.

With a sigh he turned south off Route 66 at Amboy, a scarcely noticeable desert town, and went a mile or two to the crater. Sunny made him stop so she could get out and look.

The crater loomed, black and ancient, in a plateau of iron-hard rock, all of it weather-cracked, split, and dried like a diseased sea. It spread out for miles, rising about six feet above the desert floor, and all around the edges dead black fingers of lava rock probed the sand.

“Just think, it came out of that crater once, like the sea in hell,” Sunny said, awed.

“Gives me the creeps,” Page told her. “Come on, let’s find something cheerful.”

“How about the Dry Lake? It’s only half a mile further,” she said.

It was not much to see. Not as dramatic and eerie as the old crater. Just miles of flat, dry, hard-baked mud. They got off the road and drove around on it for a while.

“Make a good race-track,” Page commented. “Gosh, it’s big.”

“Only about eight miles long on the map,” Sunny said. But when she looked up it seemed as if they were completely surrounded by cracked mud. It was all one could see in four directions, except way out in the crystal distance where the violet mountains rose.

“I wonder if anything lives out here?” Sunny asked.

“Nothing with any sense,” he said. “Had enough?” And he turned the car around.

“Where are our tracks?” Sunny said, peering over the hood.

“You don’t make tracks on this stuff, it’s like so much cement.”

They drove a little farther. “We’re kind of low on gas, aren’t we?” Sunny said, glancing at the meter.

“It’s not far, honey, just a couple of miles. We’ll make it.”

“We ought to be back on that road by now. I’m afraid we’ve gone past it,” Sunny fretted.

Page had not realized how low the gas was, as a matter of fact, preoccupied as he was with his father. Sunny fell silent, trusting him. But ten minutes later Page began to notice that the terrain looked different. It was not as smooth as the lake bed. Rocks and clumps of tough weeds studded the ground. He figured he had enough gas for another ten or twelve miles, and glanced at Sunny beside him in the front seat. She was sweating freely, but she didn’t look frightened.

Suddenly a sharp report jolted the front of the car. Page stopped as fast as he could and leaped out to see the damage. He looked under the hood and abruptly fell to his knees at the side of the car, trying to wrench a hub cap off. Sunny heard him banging and leaned out his window. “Can I help?” she said.

“The keys!” He grabbed them from her hand and opened the trunk, coming forward quickly with a lug wrench. But he was too late.

Mystified, Sunny said, “What’s the matter, darling?”

“It’s all right,” he said, but his face was worried.

He sat down in the driver’s seat, trying to wipe the wrinkles off his forehead. “Damnedest thing. I guess we hit a loose rock. Bounced up and struck the fan and bent one of the blades.”

“Is that bad?”

“I’m afraid so, honey. The blade sheared the radiator tubing. We’ve lost all our water. I was hoping to catch some of it in the hub cap.”

“What can we do?” She was more scared than she wanted him to know. The desert is haunted with ghastly tales of the uninformed and unprepared.

“I guess we can drive a way without it,” Page said. “We can’t be more than half a mile from that road.” And yet he knew that at some point they had driven out of the lake, and God only knew where they were now. He prayed they weren’t going around in a fatal, sandy circle.

Resolutely he started up again. There was no road, no sign, no hut, no human being. Nothing but bigger rocks and softer sand.

The sand, in fact, was becoming treacherous to drive on. Inevitably, the car gave a mushy jolt and began to slow down.

“Is the gas gone?” Sunny said.

“No. Damn sand,” he muttered. As he spoke the car sank to a standstill. Page gunned the motor a few times and cut it off. “No sense wasting what’s left,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Darling, don’t be afraid. We’re so close to civilization, we can’t go too far wrong.”

“We were close,” she said.

He squeezed her knee and then got out. “You stay there and try not to sweat,” he told her. “I never let my pregnant wives pull the plow.”

But his cheerful mood faded rapidly. He labored in the unblinking sun for almost two hours, digging tracks under the wheels, shoving while Sunny tried to back out, creating traction out of bath towels and deflated tires.

“Worse than shoveling maple syrup,” he gasped to Sunny, tearing the shirt off his hot back. The air he was inhaling so hard felt like steam in his lungs. By the time they got out of the hole he was trembling with heat and fatigue.

“Move over, sweetheart, let’s get out of here,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat.

“On half a gallon of gas?” she said. “Besides, all the sand looks the same. You can’t tell the soft from the hard.”

“We’ll try another direction,” he said, heading in what he judged was a northerly route. “I think this will have us back on 66 in no time.” He could sense that she wanted to believe him, and he fell silent, afraid anything more he might say would only scare her. He felt his limbs quaking and his heart working overtime, and he didn’t know what he would do if they got stuck again.

“You’re awfully tired, darling, I can tell,” Sunny said softly.

“I’m not in shape for pushing cars across the desert,” he cracked. He was painfully thirsty. She must be, too.

The ground became progressively rougher, with big outcroppings of rock here and there. Through them Page threaded a cautious trail. Sunny studied the map.

“It shows rocks for a hundred miles in all directions,” she said. “We could be just about anywhere.”

“That’s a big help.”

“I thought you said we were going back to 66,” she said.

“Well, I think we are, sweetheart. But I’m not sure.”

“Oh, Page,” she whispered and he took her hand and held it hard, trying to encourage her. “At least the sun’s going down,” she said bravely. “It won’t be so hot.”

Then the engine coughed and there was a grinding wrench along the underside of the car. Page stopped and opened the door in almost the same motion. He dropped to his knees in the sand and slid under the motor to see what had happened. Moments later he emerged, dusty and splattered. Sunny didn’t dare ask him what he had found.

“Well, we’ve run over a goddam rock,” he said angrily. “There’re so many after a while you just don’t notice them.”

“It can’t be too bad,” she said hopefully.

“No. It just pierced the crankcase housing, that’s all.”

“Can you fix it?” Her voice was small and scared.

“All the oil has poured out. Also, the motor’s had it, without water. I’m afraid this buggy is finished,” he said. He spoke matter-of-factly, but for the first time since he realized they were lost, he was genuinely frightened.

Wearily he climbed up on the seat beside her. “We shouldn’t have rented this car, we should have bought it,” he said. “At least we could collect the insurance.”

She burst into tears. “Page,” she wept, and he took her in his arms. “What will we do?”

“Rest. And save our strength. Did we bring anything to eat? Or drink?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Not one crumb. And I even thought of asking you to pick up a six-pack of beer in that lunch place.”

They thought about the cold wet beer for a moment and then he said with a vigor he didn’t feel, “In the morning I’m going to try to walk back.”

“And leave me here in this wilderness?” she cried, terrified. “Darling, you’ll get lost. We might be fifty miles from the road.” She clung to him in a panic, but he only held her, unwilling to give up the idea.

Hungry, thirsty, exhausted, they huddled together in the car while the vast world of hot rocks and sand around them began to cool.

“Let’s try to sleep,” he said. “Here, honey, get in the back seat and lie down. You can use that blanket in your bag.”

“I’d rather have an air conditioner,” she said. “What about you, darling? Where will you sleep?”

“Under the car, I guess,” he said, covering her.

“Aren’t there snakes?” she asked.

“If there are, they’re cooked.” He took her hand. “I’ll be all right, sweetheart. You go to sleep.”

She lay in the uncomfortably short back seat and tried to rest, while Page sat up for a while, wondering how to get them out of there. His overpowering worry was Sunny. How well could she bear up under that deadly sun?

Before he crawled under the car to sleep he leaned into the back seat and kissed her face tenderly. “Darling,” he whispered. “My love. Sleep tight.”

* * *

At the first sign of light Page sat up to watch the dawn. It was warm, with the temperature near ninety. The sun came out early, climbing up the sides of the distant hills. It surprised Page when he first saw the brightening sky. He had expected the sun from another direction. Sunny awoke in time to see his consternation.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“The sun ... the damn thing does come up in the east, doesn’t it?”

“Ordinarily.” She stared at him.

“Then we’re headed west,” he said. “Not north. Back to L. A. God! If we keep on going pretty soon we’ll reach the ocean.”

“Or a lemonade stand,” she said wistfully.

He smiled at her. “You’re a good girl, Sunny,” he said. He spoke with such love that she bent and kissed his hair as he sat on the ground. His neck was scarlet and throbbing hot.

“Page, you got burned yesterday,” she said with concern.

“Not bad,” he lied. But his scalded skin had been robbed of water and oil, and from neck to waist he was a painful red.

Sunny lifted her head and gazed around the sand. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

“We’re going to get out of this damn oven,” he said, thumping the rear fender as he shoved himself to his feet. “Before it bakes us to a turn.”

She climbed out and shook herself carefully.

“How do you feel?” He was hyper-conscious of her condition.

“I’m all right, darling,” she said. She couldn’t start the day by telling him how thirsty and faint she was. She felt a kick in her abdomen and was momentarily overwhelmed with an uprush of love and anguish for the poor little creature she was carrying. Her fate was his. She would want to die if the baby didn’t live.

Page took her hand and led her to an outcropping of rock some forty yards from the car. The short walk made her tired. He settled her there, spreading the electric blanket under her to keep her off the sand, and sat down beside her.

“We ought to have some shade here for most of the morning,” he said, squinting at the high-rising rock. “In the afternoon we can move around to the other side.”

“What do we do at noon?” she said.

“We fry,” he answered briefly. He scanned the area with tightly narrowed eyes, standing up to look around. He couldn’t sit there on that sand and wait for the world to come rescue him. He had to do something.

In less than an hour they heard the buzz of a plane.

“God damn! Of course! I should have thought of that,” he cried, running back to the car. He wrenched the rear view mirror off its bracket and jumped out, holding the mirror toward the sun. A series of bright flashes resulted, but the plane, cruising over twenty thousand feet in that mountainous country, proceeded eastward indifferently.

Sunny discovered a package of gum in her purse and when Page came dejectedly back with the mirror, she shared it with him. It took them some time to soften it in their dry mouths, but the sugar tasted wonderful. Page took only one stick.

Sunny saved the rest. “Three sticks of Doublemint,” she said. “All our worldly goods. It makes me feel like crying.” The tears began to fall, and Page put his arms around her.

“Oh, I’m all right,” she said, ashamed of herself. “I guess it was seeing that plane. Those people up there, so cool and comfortable. Eating a big breakfast and looking out the window at all the damn rocks.”

“There must be a lot of air traffic around here,” Page said. “Hell, the big army bases, the commercial flights, private parties. I’m going to pile up a mess of stuff in that clear space in front of the car and the next time one goes over I’ll light it. Maybe it’ll fire up bright enough to catch somebody’s eye. I’ll have to use your clothes, honey. Okay?”

“Anything,” she said. She leaned back weakly against the rock shelf. It was hot in the shadow, the temperature rising steadily through the nineties. She looked at her watch: not quite nine A.M. Where will we be when it’s nine in the evening? she wondered. Oh, God, please save us. All three of us.

Page spent the next hour building a pyre out of their suitcases, their clothes, and a spare tire from the trunk. Afterward he found the towels he had used to get the wheels out of the sand and made an S with them. He walked over to Sunny and squatted beside her, wiping his sweaty face with a grimy cloth. “Sunny, I need the blanket,” he said.

“What for?” she asked, rolling off it without protest.

“I’m making an S O S in the sand over there. If they see the fire, they’ll come low enough to read the letters.”

He took out the pen knife he carried in his change pocket and, with Sunny’s help, cut the blanket into several strips. Sunny held it taut while Page sawed through the material.

“That should do it,” Page said a half-hour later, gathering up the long wool streamers and heading for the S made of towels. Sunny started to follow him but a sudden hard cramp sent her back to the ground.

For fifteen minutes, while Page worked on the distress signal she sat motionless, paralyzed with the pain. Her instinct recognized it. She had never had a baby before, but she knew that she had just had a labor pain.

She leaned against the rock, grateful for the shade, and told herself, I will be calm, over and over. Maybe it will go away. The books talk about false labor. I’ll sit here and take it easy.... If that little mite comes out here, it won’t live five minutes.

It didn’t occur to her that she wouldn’t, either. Her whole being revolved around that baby. Sunny had a lot of sense and a great desire to save her child. She forced herself to lie down on the sand and remain quiet. Time passed, one straggling second at a time, but the cramp did not repeat itself.

When Page came back she told him nothing.

“That’s it, darling,” he said. “Save yourself.”

“You, too,” she murmured. “Lie down, Page.”

He sat instead. They were both stunned with the sky-rocketing heat.

“How hot do you think it is?” Sunny asked. Little streams of sweat were trickling into her ears and down her breasts and arms.

“Seems hotter if you talk about it.” He scanned the shiny blue sky, shading his eyes with his left hand.

Page estimated it was well over a hundred degrees by then, but didn’t tell her so. “There might be some moisture left in the radiator,” he said. “Give me your hanky, I’ll soak it up.”

“If there is, it’ll be hot enough to brew coffee,” she said.

Page left her briefly. The heat pierced the soles of his shoes and traveled up his legs like shock waves, and the sun felt hot enough to melt his hair. He returned on shaky limbs with a pitiful small dampness. “Suck on it,” he told Sunny. “It’s all there was.” He stroked her cracking lips with it. They had not eaten or drunk now for twenty-four hours.

Sunny would have insisted on sharing the moisture with him had it not been for that cramp. Now she felt an obligation to be selfish.

Shortly another plane began to drone toward them. Sunny sat halfway up, searching the sky.

“There it is,” she said. “Quick, light the fire.”

“Too high,” he said, shaking his head. “Probably a jet.”

Sunny lay down as the plane passed, too faint to lower herself carefully. Page watched her drop back with worried eyes. He knelt and wiped her forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. The rising heat made her face pink, but it was not a healthy color.

“I might find a little water in these rocks somewhere,” he said. “There are mineral springs in the desert sometimes.”

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered, frightened. Her worst fear was to die abandoned on the sand.

“I’ll just go a short way and whistle so you’ll know where I am,” he promised. “Darling, I’ve got to try something. You need that water. It isn’t ten-thirty yet.” He didn’t need to remind her of her empty stomach or the dry fuzz forming on her tongue.

After a tired struggle with herself she said, “Keep whistling.”

“I will.” He kissed her, bending over her with his hands planted in the sand. His burned lips scratched her skin lightly. Then he got up and walked. In twelve minutes he was back.

“God. It’s a furnace out there,” he said.

“Find anything?”

“A few scraggly cactus plants. I tried one. Tasted like rotten vinegar.” He stretched out beside her in the narrow margin of shadow they had left as the sun sailed up the sky toward high noon.

Page made seven or eight trips altogether, whistling to comfort her. But he came back from the last search staggering from the furious heat. He looked at the yellow world prostrate under the sun, the savage sun that plainly meant to murder them. And he hated it illogically as though it had a human conscience.

Sunny was sitting up, huddled against the last few planes of shady rock. Already sunlight was slanting down the steep western slope and on the east there was no shadow at all.

Noon. The sun’s hour of hours.

Page dropped to his knees, panting. One swallow of water and he thought he could move mountains. He couldn’t leave Sunny here in the blaze of the hammering heat. Her eyes were clenched shut and her face was taut.

“Darling,” he said from a sandy throat.

“No water?” she whispered.

He shook his head, taking her in his arms. She half-collapsed against him. “I’m so thirsty,” she admitted out of her weakness.

“Where’s that gum?” He fumbled in the purse and pulled out a stick. “Here, honey. It’s not wet but there’s a little sugar in it.”

“I’m so dry,” she murmured.

“Try. Come on.” She worked on it for some minutes and finally it began to yield. It tasted pathetically good. She chewed all the sweetness out of it and then swallowed the whole lump. Perhaps the hunger pangs could be fooled for a minute.

“I’m going to take you back to the car and we’ll lie underneath it, till we’ve got more shade here,” he said.

She let him pull her unsteadily to her feet. He started out, guiding her slowly and carefully. But about halfway to the car she suddenly folded in the middle. He caught her and carried her the rest of the way, laying her on the sand when he got there and pushing her under the car. Then he slid in beside her.

Page put a hand on Sunny’s leg, close beside his, but their mutual heat was unbearable and he had to remove it. The pulsing air swirled and waved up from the desert floor, liquid orange with heat. It crushed their chests and stuffed their burning noses and drained the vital fluids from their flesh.

Another plane went over. Page scrambled out to look.

“It’s pretty low,” he called, and ran over to the bonfire site, lighting the inflammable clothes first. They caught at once and Page stepped back. It seemed insane to add even this small heat to the radiant desert, but it couldn’t be helped.

The plane was small, probably private, and not impossibly high. An alert pair of eyes, studying the desert floor, might catch that fluttering light.

But it was only a matter of minutes before Page realized they hadn’t seen. They were going on.

He watched them go, fighting off despair. The fire had reached its peak. There was no way to save it now for another try. He stood with his head in his hands—the Pringle gesture Sunny knew so well—and tried to compose himself for her sake. He had been in tight places before, but always by himself, and always with a way out.

He crawled under the car again. “It’s two-thirty,” he told her at last. “When the sun gets a little lower I’ll take you back to the rock. Could you chew another piece of gum?”

“No,” she whispered.

He didn’t press her, but he was afraid her mouth would be so dry that even the tiny jot of sugar in the gum would be inaccessible to her before long: so much powder on her tongue.

“We might as well go now,” he said.

Carefully, he dragged Sunny after him, out from under the car, and saw at once that she was dangerously weak. There was no possibility of her walking back to the shade of the rock. The safest way to move her was to pull her, and Page fashioned a cloth sled out of the blanket strips in his S O S. He laid her on it tenderly and towed her as fast as he could force himself to move over the sand to the rock.

He fell down beside her in exhaustion and slept for a while. When he awoke it seemed as if centuries had passed. He lifted his head, only to feel an alarming dizziness come over him. He lowered it at once and a few minutes later tried again. It was better this time. It was still daylight, still stupefyingly hot. Five minutes after three. The terrible sun stuck jealously in the sky.

The rock Page leaned against rose twelve or thirteen feet from the ground. It was a bad shape for climbing, but new hope made him get up and try.

The thing had a number of sheer walls and a couple of rough ones, with few spots for secure footing or handholds. Page chose the best side and started doggedly up.

It seemed to the eyes like a short way to the top, but to his limbs and lungs it was a taxing struggle all the way. Page fell back twice before he collapsed on the sharp summit. The burning stone cut his midriff. Quickly he lifted himself up for a look, dizzy again with the climb and the endless blasting heat. He straddled the thin ridge and looked around.

Rocks and sand ... rocks and sand ... black rocks and yellow sand.... The car, the broken S O S, the pile of useless ashes where the fire had been. It didn’t look promising.

He climbed down, letting himself fall most of the way into the soft sand. Sunny was a strange flushed color, breathing noisily, lying quite still. He thought of Richie Settick. Perhaps Sunny was weaker than Page wanted to believe. He needed to hear her voice.

“It’s after four now,” he said. “Sun’ll go down soon.”

Her lips began to work and he leaned very close to hear her. “This is hell,” she said with the merest flutter of breath behind her words. “The sun never sets in hell. You have to look at your mistakes in broad daylight for the rest of eternity. You have to burn straight through until you’re pure.”

“I’m going to get you out of here,” he said. “Sunny, do you hear me?”

“It’s too late,” she moaned.

“My God, darling, what do you mean? We’re alive, aren’t we?”

“It doesn’t matter, Page,” she said. He had to read her lips to grasp her meaning. She made almost no sound. “The baby....” She put a hand across her stomach. “I think it’s ... dead.”

He was stricken silent. After a tortured pause he said, “How do you know?”

“Doesn’t move.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s dead. Sunny, I won’t let you give up. Sunny, Sunny, I love you so,” he said. “Darling, this isn’t any supernatural punishment we’re going through. If I weren’t such a stupid jerk we wouldn’t be here, and I’m going to do something about it.” She smiled wanly and tried to quiet him but he said, “No, I have to tell you now,” and she knew he meant there might not be another chance. So she listened in silence.

“Sunny, there isn’t any right or wrong any more,” he said. “There’s only life. And love. To live is right, to die is wrong. Nothing else makes sense. There is no logic but love. No morality but survival.”

He kissed her captive hand and spoke again with his mouth moving against her skin. “Darling, all I understood these past few months was that you were my sister. When I knew that, it was as if you stopped existing as a wife. You were my own flesh and blood and everything else came second: love, happiness, the baby—everything. But I was wrong, Sunny. And I damned near ruined both our lives.”

She was so moved and heartened to hear him talk this way that she found herself almost willing to hope again for a miracle. Her eyes, green drops in her tired face, remained fastened on him.

“Now that I know where I was wrong, the rest falls into place,” he said, putting his head down in the sand next to hers. “... I climbed the rock here,” he told her. “But everything looks the same. Just a few more rocks to the north. That’s the only—” He stopped talking, feeling a jerk of pressure in her hand. “What, honey?”

“66—is north,” she whispered.

“Yeah, but how far? A day’s walk? Two days? I can’t leave you that long,” he said.

“You must have seen the lava bed ... the black rocks....”

“No, the bed looks like a big strip of dusty tar. This was just more stones.”

“But the stones—get thicker—near the bed. The crater—”

“Sunny, we’ve left that lava bed maybe thirty or forty miles behind us.”

“Check the map. There’s another bed,” she panted.

“Another one?” He came to life, lurched to his feet, and weaved back to the car. The map was still on the front seat. Page opened it, moving and seeing somewhat like a drunk. His eyes were unfocussed for a moment, but he finally found Amboy Crater where they had turned off the big highway. He ran a finger slowly in a westerly direction, the way they must have taken. The terrain was represented as rugged and rocky. And sure enough, maybe thirty-five miles from Amboy, lay another lava bed: a long thin one with its own crater, which intersected Route 66.

“My God, we must have crossed right over it. I never even saw it,” he said to himself. If that mass of black rocks to the north was really it, they might be as close as three or four miles to 66. Or as far as ten miles. Either way, it seemed suddenly possible to reach it.

Page looked up at the sky. The sun was sliding down the western side toward the blue peaks. He judged the temperature to be still well over a hundred degrees. In another two hours, without the pitiless sun up there, he might be able to start walking—if that was in fact the lava bed ahead. But in the fast-falling desert dark he might also lose his way, and lose Sunny too.

He stared northward, balancing his chances. We can’t live through another day, he thought. I have to do it now, while I can still see.

“I’m going up to the highway,” he said in her ear. “You were right, that bed can’t be far. I’m starting now, so we can get you out of here this evening. You can’t take any more sun tomorrow. Do you understand? Sweetheart, don’t be afraid. I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Go,” she murmured, unprotesting. “I’m in labor.”

Page couldn’t disguise the shock and alarm on his face. “Dear God! I can’t leave you now. You can’t have that baby alone, Sunny.”

“Pains ... still far apart,” she said laboriously. “Won’t be for a while ... hours, maybe. Phone Settick.” It hurt to talk; she was afraid of triggering another cramp.

“I’ll get an ambulance and call the doctor,” he said, recovering himself a little. “There must be a good hospital in Barstow. You’re going to be all right, darling.” He kissed her mouth. “When we get out of here—I’ll never leave you again,” he whispered.

She watched him rise, tying her white handkerchief around his neck. He set out after one last look at her, wrapping a towel around his head like a turban.

Page walked, as nearly as he could judge, straight north. He thought of nothing but Sunny ... Sunny, his wife ... alone and sick and terrified in the small shade of a rock. He thought of the pains she was experiencing, and the baby.

Every fifty yards or so he turned back to look at her big brown rock. The car soon disappeared from view, and little by little the rock sank with it. Ahead he searched for the low black shelf that would mark the border of the lava bed.

He stumbled forwards in this manner, half afraid his heart would collapse like punctured plastic beneath his ribs. It was about seven o’clock, with the sun nearly hidden at last behind the hills, when he saw the headlights of a car.

Page stood blinking at them in a near-stupor. At first he thought he was gazing at a mirage. They seemed to be coming right toward him, though they were still far away. But abruptly they swerved and headed east.

“No! No!” he croaked. “Over here!” For a sickening instant he thought his first and last real hope had evaporated. But another pair of headlights materialized about where the first had, followed by several more in quick succession. And then some coming from the east and traveling west.

“The road!” He fell on his knees and wept. And suddenly lifted a bewildered head. Where was the lava bed? He rose shakily to his feet and turned around twice before he saw the black table to the east.

It must be the second bed, all right. We came back so far we overshot it, he thought.

He ran forward to the highway, dropping the towel as he went. It had only taken him, weak and lost as he was, three hours to reach the road. Sunny couldn’t be far behind him at that rate.

“The car that finally stopped was a beat-up ’34 Chevy,” Page told Jack in the cool softly-lighted bar. “Had an old desert rat in it named Norcross. He took charge. Fed me sandwiches and tea from his food box. Stopped some guy in a station wagon and sent him back to Barstow for an ambulance.

“He knew that desert like his own hand. Drove in on a dirt road just east of the lava bed—the one I was looking for and missed—and found Sunny in forty minutes. She drank a quart of that tea. He made her take it in small doses. I swear I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t gotten to her so fast.” His face was drawn as he thought of it.

“It was a miracle, and that’s the word for it. Norcross drove us back to 66 and the ambulance picked us up there a few minutes later.”

“How did you get Settick so fast?” Jack asked.

“We got Brian first. The guy who got the ambulance for us called him in L. A. He got out to Barstow in a private plane. But by the time he arrived Sunny’s pains had remitted. She wanted to come back to Chicago and have the baby, and you couldn’t talk to her about it. I never saw a girl so set on anything in my life. There weren’t any other symptoms yet and she swore she’d make it back. Brian was against it at first but she told him she wanted her mother. And she wanted Richie to deliver the baby. She promised him, or something, and she was convinced if he didn’t she’d lose the baby. He could never have made it all the way to Barstow but Brian called him in New York and they arranged to have him leave that night for Chicago.

“I think the worst fear Sunny had was that the baby would die. That was why she wanted June, and no other doctor but Richie. Brian said it might make the difference as to how well she pulled through it herself, so we hired a hospital plane and flew back here last night. Richie was waiting for us.”

“Turned out to be an expensive honeymoon, didn’t it?” Jack said.

“You said it,” Page agreed. “But if she makes it, it’ll be worth every damn penny. Come on, boy, it’s been over thirty minutes. I want to get back.”

Jack slid off the bar stool and they walked out into the early evening together. “So you brought her straight to the hospital then?” he asked.

“Yes, and called the Rothelis. They came in about five this morning.”

“You still think you’re going to tell them who you are?”

“Let’s not get started on that again, Jackson. You’re too good a friend. I don’t want to lose you twice.” He walked in silence for half a block and then he added, “It’s not as selfish as you think. I mean, they’ve been looking for me all these years, too, just the way I’ve been looking for them.”

“And here you are, a member of the family twice over. What a handy arrangement.”

“Spare me the humor,” Page said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s my decision, that’s all. Not yours.”

“Yours and Sunny’s,” Jack said. “Is Brian Settick still here?” he asked while they waited for the elevator.

“No. He delivered us safely to Richie and flew back. It was damn nice of him to come all that way with us.”

“What about Richie?” Jack said as they entered the elevator.

“This is his vacation. A little earlier than he planned, but....” They looked at each other. “I know,” Page said quietly. “He’s in love with her. But he’s in there saving her life and maybe my child’s. I can’t feel too bad about the guy.”

Jack smiled at him with a new respect.

They went directly to the maternity waiting room where Ben and June and Laura greeted them.

“Still no news?” Page said, disappointed.

“Not yet,” June said. “One young man came in ten minutes ago to say it wouldn’t be long, and everything’s still all right.”

Page sat down wearily next to Laura. Jack stood by the door for a minute and finally said, “I can’t stand the suspense. I’m going to mosey around a while.”

They hardly paid him any attention.

Jack went out with an idea of getting the truth on Sunny’s condition. It was possible that the nurses and others were trying to soften things for her relatives. He looked around the halls, joshed with the nurses at the central desk, and tried to pump them for information. But they were evasive.

* * *

After fifteen minutes he decided it was no use and started back toward the waiting room. He was nearing the door when he saw a young man, blond and stocky, pulling a white surgical cap from his head as he hurried toward the room from the opposite direction. Jack stopped him at the door.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Dr. Settick?”

“Yes,” Settick said impatiently, reaching for the door. Jack caught his arm.

“I’m Jack Mann. Laura’s husband. You delivered our daughter, Betsy. Remember?”

Settick looked up at him then. “For God’s sake,” he said with a tired smile, and gripped Jack’s hand. “I sure do remember. What are you doing here?”

“Came to hold a friend’s hand,” Jack said with a smile.

“Well, how are you? How’s Betsy? She must be quite a young lady by now.”

“Sure is—and we’re all fine.”

“Jack can you hold on a minute?” Settick said. “I have a difficult case here and I want to tell her family—”

“Sunny Pringle?” Jack interrupted.

Richie, about to enter the waiting room, turned again to gaze at Jack. “You know her?” he said, surprised.

“That’s why I’m here. Page is an old buddy of mine.”

The doctor rubbed his forehead, frowning, and his expression alarmed Jack. “No kidding,” Richie said. “Maybe you’d like to give them the news, then. I’m pretty beat.”

“Sure,” Jack said. “How’s Sunny?”

He watched Settick’s face and experienced abrupt relief when he smiled again.

“She’s exhausted, but she’s okay,” Richie said.

Jack hesitated. “A million thanks, doc,” he said at last. “I speak for her family, too, especially Page.... Then I guess the baby came?”

“Yes, it came.” He spoke quietly, obviously holding himself in.

“No go?” Jack asked, almost afraid to know.

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Richie said. “There’s some hope. Quite a bit, in fact. It’s pretty small, only three and a half pounds, and dehydrated, but we’re going to keep a twenty-four hour watch. You know, Sunny’s had problems all through this pregnancy....” He hesitated, not sure how much Jack knew.

But Jack nodded. “I know all about it,” he said.

Richie gave him a fleeting glance of surprise. “Well, that, and its coming so early.... I wouldn’t want to say anything for sure.”

“Boy or girl?”

“A boy. I think she wanted a boy. She never said so, but when I told her I wish you could have seen the look on her face. She looked the way she did the day I told her she was expecting.” He smiled to himself, and Jack understood. That was one fine intimate moment Settick had shared with Sunny; probably the last. And it had happened while he was delivering another man’s child to her.

Jack felt a strong sympathy for him. Settick had no way of knowing that Jack knew his feelings for his favorite patient. And Jack had no intention of humiliating him with the knowledge. But the sympathy communicated itself to Settick and he opened up a little.

“He isn’t deformed?” Jack asked.

“No, he’s perfect. Just so damn tiny, and I don’t know how strong he is. Any little kid who can live through that desert and a premature birth must be pretty tough, though. We can’t feed him for a little while yet—I don’t think he could take it. But I want to get him started on water as soon as I can. He needs the fluids badly.”

A little silence fell and Jack took advantage of it to press a question that had made him apprehensive for many months. “Doc,” he said, speaking cautiously. Richie, lost in himself, looked up. “What do you think—about talking to Page and Sunny?” Jack said. “It’s a hard thing to ask you, but somebody’s got to and they’ve had an earful from me.”

“Talking to them? What about?” Richie said.

“You know what about,” Jack said simply. “I wouldn’t ask you otherwise.” He saw from Richie’s face that he understood and was on his guard. All the doctor had to go on was Jack’s word that he was Page’s friend.

Jack pulled him to the wall out of the stream of corridor traffic, and spoke with hasty urgency.

“The incest, Doc,” he said. “Let’s not beat around the bush. Page was the one who fought it, the one who feared an abnormal child and all the rest. If you’d give them just five minutes—”

“They’d resent it,” Settick objected. “I’ve stuck my nose too far into their business as it is.”

“One more inch,” Jack said.

“He wouldn’t leave her now, would he?” Richie said. “With the baby and all?”

“What if they lose the baby? Somebody’s got to get to him before that, if it happens.”

“But he’s jealous of me. I mean—” He stopped himself, but Jack shook his head.

“You’d be surprised what a big boy he’s getting to be,” he said with a grin. “He can take it. Do this for them, Doc. Sunny would always remember it.”

Richie turned away for a minute of self-argument. “Would it save the marriage?” he said. “Because that’s the only justification for it. Sunny doesn’t know I know about her and Page. And I tried to tell Page once, but he didn’t catch on.”

“It might be the only thing that could put Page on the right track permanently,” Jack said.

Another pause, this one briefer, and Settick said, “Okay. I’ll do it for Sunny.”

Jack clapped him on the back.

“You don’t mind telling her family about the baby?” Settick said.

“Not a bit.”

“Thanks. Tell them they can see her for a minute when she gets to her room. I wouldn’t let them ordinarily till she’s rested, but she needs her mother. And Page. The baby’s in the nursery if you’d like a look.” He started to walk away, but Jack called him.

“Richie,” he said. “I’m glad you got here in time. Page said Sunny was determined to get back here for you.”

“I’m pretty glad myself,” Settick said. And then he turned and walked off down the hall.

* * *

Jack entered the waiting room, walked over and sat down, and looked at everyone. Page was brooding in silence, the others conversing quietly.

“It’s a boy,” Jack said. They all looked up slowly and suddenly June gave a gasp and clutched Jack’s arm.

“What?” Page cried as the words registered in his head. Jack smiled. “It’s a boy. Sunny’s fine.”

“And the baby?” they all asked together.

“He’s very small,” Jack said. “Three and half pounds and Settick says he’s had a hard time of it. But he’s perfectly formed and he has a chance. He’s in the nursery now.”

“Oh, my God,” Page said. A heavy pulse was visible in his throat. June cried freely and so did Laura. Rotheli was speechless with joy and relief.

“I ran into the doctor in the hall,” Jack explained. “He was beat to the bricks. Told me to tell you the good news.”

“Can I see Sunny now?” Page said, springing up and heading for the door.

“Calm down, old buddy,” Jack said, chuckling. “What would she do with a nervous nitwit like you in her room? The nurse’ll come get you when it’s time. Relax boy, she’s okay.”

They filed up to look through the nursery windows.

“Look at all the babies,” Jack said. “Makes you realize what they mean by ‘population explosion.’”

Laura shushed him and they walked along looking for name-tags on the plastic bassinets.

“Here he is!” Rotheli exclaimed. He had gone off to investigate on his own, and called them from the end of a corridor where he was looking through the glass into a special room for the premature babies. Page rushed up, followed by the others.

“Lord,” he said, astonished by the impossibly small baby in the incubator. “Is that all?”

“Is that all?” June cried, amused and dismayed both, as Laura and Jack joined them.

“He’s so wrinkled. He looks like the map of Asia,” Page said.

“He’s absolutely beautiful,” June whispered.

“He’s absolutely bare, too,” Page said. “What’s the matter with these damn nurses? The poor kid will freeze to death.”

“He’s in an incubator,” Laura said with a smile. “It’s body temperature in there.”

“Well, doesn’t he need diapers like the rest of them?” Page asked.

“After two days on the desert?” Jack grinned.

“He’s too little to stand dressing yet,” Laura said gently. “He’s okay, new papa. They know better in there what to do with him than you do.”

A young nurse came in and hung a card reading: “Baby Boy Pringle” on the end of the incubator, and then, seeing the crowd outside the window, she smiled at them. Jack pointed at Page, who went red with the first flush of fatherly pride.

“Hey,” he said, turning curiously to Rotheli. “She just put that sign up. How did you know it was our baby?”

“He looks—well, a little like both of you. God, I remember when I first saw Roger,” Rotheli said nostalgically. “I must have told you about Roger, Page. He was our first. We lost him.” His eyes were fixed on his grandson with a wonderful expression.

Page stared at him. “Was—Roger that little?” He had been going to say, Was I that little? The near miss made him shaky.

“Not that little, but he was small, and had those same eyes....”

“The most beautiful eyes,” June whispered, surprising them all with this recollection salvaged from sickness. Page watched her, fascinated, the way children are, to hear his own mother speak of him with such love in her voice. He cherished every word and never afterward forgot it. “You watch,” June said. “This one will have eyes like that when he gets them open. Great big dark blue eyes that dominate his whole face. Like two plums pressed in a cookie. So bright and sweet.”

Page wanted to embrace her. Here he was, a man and a father, with the living proof of his virility in that bassinet, and he wanted to put his arms around June and selfishly tell her everything and be mothered. There was nothing of revenge left in his feelings at all. But he responded to Jack’s tug on his sleeve and got hold of himself. Jack had been keeping an eye on him and he could see what was building up.

Page looked back at his infant son: so small and homely, face screwed up, chest working, small fists clenched tightly. He felt love and hope and fierce anxiety all at once.

“I have to see Sunny,” he said. “I have to.”

“You think you’re tired,” Jack reminded him. “Let the poor girl catch her breath.”

Moments later a nurse came to fetch Page. But when the others tried to tag along she held up a hand to stop them.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Usually we only let the fathers in. Dr. Settick wants to see them together for a minute. Mr. and Mrs. Rotheli?”

Ben nodded at her.

“I’ll come for you when the doctor is ready. Your daughter is anxious to see you. She’s been through quite a lot, you know. I don’t know how long you’ll be able to spend with her today. Mr. Pringle, you come with me.”

She went off with a starchy rustle and Page rushed after her. Jack called after him, “Keep in touch, boy!” but Page was too distracted to hear.

June turned and told Jack, “I’ll tell him for you.”

Page went directly to Sunny’s bed. He leaned over her, pausing for a moment to look at her and reassure himself, and then kissed her very gently. He didn’t even notice Richie Settick in a corner of the room.

“Darling, you’re wonderful,” he whispered. “I’m so proud of you.”

She was weak and quiet beneath her falsely healthy sunburn, but profoundly happy. She knew the whole truth about the baby’s chances, but she knew the scope of Richie’s ability, too, and her hopes were strong.

“Did you see him?” she asked. “How does he look? Is he in an incubator?”

“Yes. He looks like the future president of the United States,” Page laughed. He kissed her again while she smiled at him and would have kept on kissing her, but Richie cleared his throat and Page looked up suddenly.

“Sorry to butt in,” Richie said.

Page turned to face him. “Don’t apologize,” he said quickly. “That’s my department.” He held out his hand.

Richie came over to take it but added uncomfortably, “I have one more thing to say to you. You may not feel so apologetic afterwards.”

“You’ve earned the right to speak your mind,” Page told him. “Shoot.”

Sunny stiffened a little. She hadn’t expected any speeches from Richie and for a dread moment she imagined him confessing his love for her. She watched him anxiously.

“I wanted to say this to you now,” Richie said, “before I have to leave. Before we know for sure how things will turn out for the baby, and all.”

“Say what?” Page said. Sunny tried to interrupt but Settick silenced them both with a wave of his hand.

“This isn’t easy for me—or for you,” he said self-consciously. “But I—oh hell, I don’t want to sound like a pompous idiot. I just want you to know that I—I understand what the problem is between you two.”

He stopped a moment and looked at their faces, both turned toward him with amazed attention. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you together,” he went on quietly. “You look a lot alike.”

Sunny’s mouth dropped open and Page made a sudden move as if to break in on the doctor. But something in Settick’s expression stopped them and they let him finish.

“I don’t know whether it’ll make any difference to you—what I’m going to say,” he continued. “I figured the whole thing out months ago, Sunny. The incest thing. It wasn’t your fault I did. You were too unhappy to keep secrets very well.

“Page—if you’ll forgive me—there’s only one thing wrong with your wife. And I don’t mean the fact that she’s your sister.” The Pringles stared at him. “I mean the fact that she’s afraid of losing you. If she knew your marriage was secure for the rest of your lives, she’d be a well woman right now.

“I know why you objected to the marriage, Page, and I respect your reasons. God knows I’m not passing judgment. I only want to make you see, if I can, that the reasons don’t stand up any more. Sunny’s life is at stake, and maybe your sanity. Don’t worry about the baby. I’m going to watch that child day and night if I have to stay here a month. Whatever happens, I can assure you of this much: there’s not a damn thing wrong with his heredity. If he makes it he’ll be strong and sane and healthy.”

There was a little silence while Richie girded himself for the last and toughest thing to say. Sunny and Page waited intuitively for him to go on. Settick walked to the door and put his hand on the knob. At last he turned back and added, “I can’t tell you to go back together. I can only ask you to, and recommend it ... not as a ‘professional man,’ but as a friend.”

He smiled a little. “For God’s sake, Page, don’t let her go. Don’t ever let her go.”

The two men looked hard at each other and then Richie left them alone together.

Jack and Laura were permitted to see Sunny in the evening. It wasn’t the usual hospital procedure, but Sunny wasn’t the usual hospital case, and Settick had arranged a few privileges for her. Anything that would keep her spirits high was granted, and the Manns were near the top of her list.

When they arrived, she had just wakened from a long nap and was talking intimately to Page. She looked beautiful in spite of the harsh burn on her face when she turned to greet them, and Laura felt a catch in her throat as she bent to kiss Sunny’s cheek.

Sunny took her hands with affection and thanked Jack for nursing Page through the delivery.

“You look great, honey,” Jack said. “And so does the baby.”

“Does he?” She beamed. “They won’t let me see him till tomorrow. He can’t be moved tonight and I can’t get out of bed.”

Jack and Laura obligingly launched into friendly praises of little Pringle, talking with the comfortable closeness of long acquaintance, until Jack finally said, “I can’t wait any longer, Page. I have to ask. What did you do about the Rothelis? Did you tell them who you are?”

It was Sunny who answered him. “When they came in this afternoon they were so happy, so relieved,” she said.

* * *

Her parents had chatted with her and Page for a little while. Sunny was tired but full of Demerol, a synthetic derivative of morphine, that made her unnaturally talkative. Her parents didn’t keep her long—just enough to reassure themselves she was all right. Before they left, Ben asked what they planned to name the baby.

Sunny and Page drew a blank. They hadn’t talked about it since the happy night Sunny revealed her pregnancy to Page and he suggested calling the child Ben, after her father. After that they dropped the subject as if to mention it was to put a hex on the child.

Sunny, thinking fast, said, “‘Baby Boy Pringle,’ just like on the card,” and they laughed. But Page broke in and took over.

“We’re going to call him Roger, Ben,” he said.

And the laughter stopped abruptly. Ben looked at his son-in-law with disbelief at first and then a slow grateful smile spread over his face. He put his arms around Page and gave him a bearhug that made Page groan and chuckle all at once.

“My God!” Ben exclaimed, savoring it at last. “It’ll be like a chance to watch our own Roger grow up. You have no idea how much they look alike. Page, you didn’t do this just for us? You don’t have to bribe us to babysit, you know.”

“I did it for all of us, Ben,” Page said.

And Ben, oppressed suddenly with the memory of his first son, went to Sunny’s bedside. “I want you to understand something, honey,” he told his daughter. “There’s something your mother and I never told you. Right now, with everything happening the way it is—I feel as if you ought to know. It’s about our Roger. You see, he—didn’t die when he was a baby. We had to give him out for adoption.”

He threw June a hasty glance to see how she was taking it, but she nodded at him to go on.

Sunny, taken aback at the confession and wanting to make it easier for her father, said at once, “I know, Dad.” And bit her lip, realizing too late that in his view, she couldn’t possibly know.

“You know?” he repeated, shocked.

“I mean—you never said he died, Dad. You only said you lost him. Never in all these years did you tell us he died. Chuckie and I figured out years ago that something else might have happened to him.”

Ben stood gazing irresolutely at her for a minute until June said, “It was done through our doctor. He gave Roger to a fine family. A man and his wife who’d wanted a son for years and could never have one of their own. We never knew them, but the doctor told us they were wonderful generous people and they’d bring him up with love. That was the most important thing.”

“Yes, of course,” Sunny said softly. She was afraid she would start crying if she said any more.

“We had to do it, Sunny,” Ben said. “Your mother—”

“I know, Dad.”

“It was the only tragic mistake I think we ever made in our marriage,” Ben went on. “We’ll never stop wondering where he went, what happened to him. But in a way I think it’s just as well we don’t know. He might not want to know us, he might resent us, he might even disappoint us. I wish him much happiness, wherever he is. But now that we have Page in the family....” He smiled at him. “We’ve got a son.”

For a moment Sunny felt the shattering confession close to the surface, and she watched Page tensely, holding her breath. But Page had seen his parents looking at his own son a little while before, and he knew he was as close to them as he would ever be. The desire to confront them with the truth had dissipated when they were confronted instead with his child. He would never tell them now.

* * *

“Then they never really lost Roger at all,” Laura said softly. “I’m so glad, Sunny. So awfully glad.”

“Have the Pringles seen the baby yet?” Jack asked.

“June and Ben are going over to their place tomorrow for lunch. It’ll be their first meeting,” Page told him. “Looks like you called things right, Jackson.”

Jack ignored the compliment. “Are you planning to go back to New York one of these days?” he said.

“Damn right,” Page said. “I don’t know what the Sunday Magazine will want to do about me. But I know what I want to do: stay in that town and write.”

“Alone?” Jack said, glancing at Sunny.

“Are you kidding? With three mouths to feed instead of two?”

And Sunny laughed at him the way she used to when Page was courting her, and kissed his hand.

* * *

“What if they lose little Roger?” Laura asked Jack going down in the elevator at the close of visiting hours.

“They won’t, if sheer love can keep him alive,” Jack said. “If not ... it’ll be bad, but they’ll have each other. And I have the feeling Page is willing now to have more children, whatever happens.”

“Do you think they’ll be happy?”

“Do you doubt it?” he said.

“Page is a funny guy, Jack. He never actually said she was his wife now, in so many words. And a scandal could still hurt him.”

“Could hurt anybody, sweetie,” Jack said, putting a hand on her neck and tickling it lightly. “But not half as much as a divorce. I think they could face a scandal all right, if they ever had to.”

Laura turned to smile at him. “Well, they’ll never have to on my account,” she said. “No one will ever get that story out of me.”

He knew she was scolding him gently and he said, “You mean ‘Mr. Winkler’? He was Page’s step-father, honey—George Pringle.”

Her mouth fell open and he hugged her as the elevator door opened on the ground floor, laughing at her surprise.

“The elder Pringles are not fools, after all,” he said. “And neither are the younger Pringles. They’ll make it.”

THE END
of an Original Gold Medal Novel by
Ann Bannon

Blood of the Grape

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