"Brain fever," she said from the kitchen. "He ran this terribly high fever for days and days, lying in his bunk, sweating and shivering, sweating and shivering. The doctor at the veteran's hospital over in Troy-Dr French?-he told us that most men would have died." She brought back one of her little decorated plates with a cookie on it and set it before me. She still had the hairbrush in her hand. The long white hairs entangled in its bristles made me shudder. "Dr French said that Lawrence had fought a long, heroic battle against the fever, and survived!"

Oh. So thatwas the kind of hero he was.

"But..." She sighed. "It was the fever that left him... well, like he is."

"And you've taken care of him ever since?"

She smiled. "I wash him and feed him and... everything. He likes it when I brush his hair. He doesn't say anything, but I can tell by the way he sometimes smiles."

So she had lived alone with him up here for more than forty years, cleaning him and feeding him and brushing his hair. Forty years. So long that the existence of Mr McGivney had dropped out of the collective memory of the block, which now thought of Mrs McGivney, when it thought of her at all, as just a shy old crazylady. But she thought of herself as the bride who had made a cozy nest for her soldier bridegroom.

I started to ask if she didn't get lonely, up here all day without anyone to talk-but a child's instinct for social danger stopped me short. Of course she got lonely! That's why I was sitting there, eating cookies. That's why she gave me a whole nickel for buying a pickle that only cost a nickel. I could feel the jaws of the trap closing. I should never have asked her about her husband. Now that I knew how lonely she was, I'd feel obliged to come whenever she tapped at her window with that nickel and sit with her and listen to her talk about how her husband liked it when she turned the gaslight on. Another responsibility in my life. And sometimes when I dared to glance over, he'd be grinning his silent scream of a smile. Right then and there I decided I'd have to be careful about going into the back alley too often. I'd stay out of the alley altogether for at least a week to get her used to not seeing me and depending on me.

It was during that week of emotional weaning that my life toppled out of balance because of an incident that might seem trivial: a tube burnt out in our radio. There wasn't enough money in the Dream Bank to buy a new one, so I had to do without the daily hour-long dose of reality-masking adventure programs essential to my well-being, just when all the stories were at their most exciting and dangerous moments-or so it seemed to me, and all because we didn't have the dollar and a quarter for a new tube.

Mother was furious because we'd only had the radio for three years. I reminded her that the radio was secondhand when we bought it, but she said we'd been robbed and she'd be goddamned if she was going to let them get away with it! She was sick and tired of everybody doing her in! Sick of it! Sick of it! Her famous French-'n'-Indian temper carried her out of her sickbed and down to the pawn shop on South Pearl where we had bought the radio. I went with her, trying to calm her down all the way, but she stormed into the shop and slammed the radio down on the counter. I winced at the possibility of additional damage. The old Jewish man who owned the pawnshop came out from the back room and I smiled a feeble greeting, embarrassed by the scene I knew would follow. He had been good enough to let us have the radio for nothing down and only a quarter a week because we looked like 'good people'. Mother said the tube had burned out and what was he going to do about it? He shrugged. "Tubes burn out, Missus. It happens." Well, she wanted him to put in a new one and right now, because her boy was missing his programs! The pawnbroker said he'd end up in the poorhouse if he gave everybody tubes every time they burnt out, but here's what he could do. He could give us a new tube for a quarter down and a quarter a week until it was paid for. How was that? Mother snatched up the radio and said, "To hell with you, mister! This is the last time we do business with your sort!" And she stormed out. I smiled weakly at the man. He thrust out his lower lip and shrugged, and I had to run to catch up with my mother, who was steaming up the street towards home, muttering in a rage that she'd be damned if her boy would go without his radio programs because of a lousy buck and a quarter. She'd get a job in some goddamned hash house to pay for the goddamned thing! I reminded her that she was still weak from her last lung attack, but she said she knew how much that radio meant to me, and that her kids had just as much right to listen to the radio as the kids of those snooty hoi polloi bastards! She'd get that tube, and she didn't care if it killed her! Then I got angry. So it would be my fault if she got sick and died and Anne-Marie and I ended up in the orphanage! I told her to forget the radio. I didn't want the radio! I was sick of the radio! I didn't care if I never heard a radio again! And we continued home, walking fast in the hot silence of a double rage.

When we slammed into our apartment, Anne-Marie knew things had gone badly. She shot me a scared look and begged Mother to get back into bed and rest so she wouldn't get sick again. Mother started on the "I'll be goddamned if my kids..." routine, but I interrupted her, saying that she didn't have to worry about the damned tube anymore. I had a plan for getting the money. She wondered what I had in mind, but I told her it was a secret. With one of her sudden mood lurches, she took Anne-Marie onto her lap and started rebraiding her hair. I went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, the only place in our little apartment that I could be alone to think. Now that I had succeeded in shutting Mother up, all I had to do was figure out some way to get the money.

When I came back into our kitchen I had a plan... well, sort of. Pretty soon Mother and I were playing pinochle while on the floor beside the bed Anne-Marie, dressmaker-to-the-stars, murmured soothing assurances to a flustered movie star who needed something really spectacular to wear that night. Mother's rages were brief, and I think she knew how stomach-wrenching they were for us because afterward she always tried to be light-hearted and fun. That night she told us about the wild stunts she'd got up to when she was a kid, and Anne-Marie and I laughed harder than the stories deserved, because we were so relieved.

A red-and-gold sign above the new store read: The Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which called up images from books I had read about the South Seas and planters and dangerous natives and tall-masted sailing ships. The new A & P was what they called a 'neighborhood store', not much bigger than an ordinary corner store, but its prices were a little lower and you were allowed to walk around and pick out your own cans and fruit and everything, which was novel and interesting at that time. Also, there were intriguing new foods, like maple syrup that came in a can shaped like a log cabin. You poured it out of the chimney and when it was empty you could use the cabin as a toy or a bank. And there were three kinds of coffee that they let you grind for yourself in machines where you could choose between drip grind and 'regular' and that coffee gave off so delicious an aroma that you closed your eyes and just breathed it in. The most expensive coffee was called Bokar, a name redolent of Africa so it was right that the bag should be black; the middle-priced one, Red Dot, came in a yellow bag with a red dot; we always bought the cheapest coffee, Eight O'Clock, which came in a red bag. I used to wonder if the Bokar tasted as good as it smelled. But then, no coffee tastes as good as it smells, an apt metaphor for the gap between anticipation and realization. The cheaper prices and wider selection attracted everyone for blocks around, but you couldn't charge things there so, in the end, Mr Kane's slate won out over the A & P's novelty and economy, and it closed within the year.