"The curse of great facility in a child," said Mr. Watkins, "is that it easily produces laziness. I was the same. Thank Petey, I was taken down a peg or two."

His face moved like a shaking sort of bog and I guess he was laughing, but for myself I could have ripped my face right off my living bones. What torture to hear that a life had been available to me that I had not been man enough to live.

Again I sought refuge in his canvas-the blue-winged bird, the white-ringed eye, the beak, the crunching locust. I felt bilious, and very very sad, to have arrived in this great new country with my heart and my pockets and my life so very empty.

"In any case," I said, "we can discuss my work another time for it is late. Fate has given us the opportunity to spend many hours together."

And so, without even having the politeness to ask them how their unlikely marriage had come to pass, I bade them good night and slipped into bed beside Mathilde whose throaty contented murmur should have reminded me of all the sweet and sweaty comforts of our convivial conjugal life, but now, on my back, straight as a plank, staring into the inky ambiguous air above my head, I was cut and twisted by a considerable sadness in whose particular rubbed and layered charcoal I recognized the dye of jealousy. All around me in that cold and empty house art was being made such as had not been made before. These artists showed themselves each day more remarkable than the day before while I, who had apparently been granted talents in plenty, had wasted and abused my gifts.

How can you love a woman and be jealous of her? By this light my admiration of Mathilde took on another hue, and I lay awake listening to the condemned cattle become restive with the dawn.

I had thought myself a young man until then.

WHAT PLEASURES I had expected of my grandes vacances must stay as private as Long Island oysters in their blue and ashy shells, but finally the morning came when I woke to find myself alone in heaven and Mathilde departed to her linseed shore-some five feet from my hand. There she once more scraped and rubbed and pounded at two yellow faces glowing from a muddy ground.

I nuzzled her neck, inhaled her sleep and tobacco smoke. She murmured in her throat and kissed my lips and eyelids, and I soon understood I was put out to pasture on a promise, as they say, from a genius of the female sex.

Down in the brick-floored kitchen my lovely screw-spined mother-out-law gave me her garlic welcome-a tin cup for my tea and a slathering of white lard and salt on a heel of black-crust bread. As for conversation, Maman was occupied arguing with her Pennsylvania stove, riddling and raddling and poking and punishing it, until-seeing me about to take my breakfast out on the front porch-she sternly ordered I must never show my face out there as this access was reserved only for the clever Jew.

She spoke to me like that? Well, bless her muddled head. I was a fool to be offended, and I was much too exercised by the gentleman who had his portrait painted with his legs apart. I carried my tea and the huge burthen of my pride and jealousy up the cold and dusty stairs. Mathilde made it clear she would permit just one final kiss, well never mind, ma'am, that will be enough for now.

She wished to know why I did not visit my old mate Watkins.

Damn this, I thought. I came down all the way from Wethersfield, and now I am sent out to the back paddock for the day.

Across the hallway the second great genius of our age donated me a bright blue eye from his crusted mussel shell of a face. He asked me how I liked his heron wing and was it not about the best heron wing that man had ever made? The back of his hand was like those knurled Australian banksia seeds, scorched lips and scumble, but he had maintained the maiden treasure of his palm and fingers, petals the color of white English rose. He held them up to me, an awful sort of vanity, I thought, a badge. Such arrogance in the midst of such misfortune. The very same man who had told me I was not worth a bootlace.

I asked him was there any wood to chop.

He did not suggest that was beneath me. He said his wife was eager to natter with me about "old times." Dear Jesus, what a thing to call those nightmares. I found her on the back veranda. She who I had always thought of as old Mrs. Piggott had turned out strangely glossy, slender and collected in her form. With bright birdie eyes she greeted me, looking up from her fresh-killed herons. She sat on a three legged stool, behind a narrow bench, and arranged the deceased, smoothing out their cooling bones.

She looked up at me in the way of a woman interrupted darning socks, pausing as she threaded fine wires through dead flesh. It was sunny in the yard but all her labor was conducted on the chilly damp back veranda, on whose greasy black floors the previous inhabitants appeared to have butchered many beasts. A line of rusty meat hooks were suspended above her head. Like beads, I thought. R.I.P. In Memoriam.

Perhaps, at that moment, when I was back among my own kind, amid the blood and tallow of New York, young Olivier was standing on Godefroy's uplifting porch. I drank cold tea and made a cigarette and watched Mrs. Piggott play with dead things. I leaned against the veranda post. I wondered how my thin-nosed Olivier was doing with his beautiful American.

Mrs. Piggott bent and twisted the wires to raise the birds' inquiring heads toward me, as if to say wotcha, chap.

She asked me did I wish to have a free ticket to Mr. Eckerd's theater. It was a roaring show about the French Revolution. As if encouraging me to leave, she nodded at the dappled muddy path which led from the veranda beneath the sumac, thrust through the tangled rose hips and beside the maple.

I asked her would she mind doing me a favor.

She said she was happy to oblige.

I asked her would she tell me about my father. It was surprisingly hard to say those words.

She laid a small soft bird upon her aproned lap. She was silent a moment while she measured wire from beak to tail.

"As long as you live," she said, and one bright eye held me like a pin. "As long as you live, so does he."

She clipped the wire, and I had no idea what was being said between us. I was a grown man but frightened as a child to imagine what those blue doll's eyes had seen.

I said, "What brought you here?" In other words, please tell me anything but what I asked.

She pushed her wire in up the birdie's bottom and, by dint of pinching and massage, managed to bring it out the beak and thus she was able to twist its head to look at me.

"What brought me here?" She laid the dead creature beside her clogs and set to measuring and clipping wires. "Your father was a fine brave man," she said. "While you live, he lives," she repeated.

Everything in me wished to know in which way I was like him, but I lacked the spine. She had seen him die, I knew it, but I did not want to live the horror of that day, the soldiers marching with their cheery yellow coffins while Monsieur tossed his sovereign with his single hand.

"Afterward," she said, and I knew she meant after I saw your pater murdered, "afterward I had nowhere else to go but the place I did not wish to see again. Do you know," she said, "I was never Mrs. Piggott in any sense at all."

I did not ask her how that was and never would. I looked at her, with her wire and birds and clogs, and I breathed the fall air and river wrack and lard, and I had no wish to descend into the maze of this peculiar foreign life. You can go mad that way, imagining the lives of others, all crowded in like a universe of stars all murmuring and crying with their dreadful want. "I returned to the printery," she said. "There was nothing but smoke and ruins and bans nailed on the trees announcing the punishment by hanging for a counterfeit. I made a gruel of flour and water and crawled down the fallen stair, and got in underneath like a cat set to die beneath a house."