Lekh Lekha

. : Saturday morning and Becky’s little cousin stood on the bema, hair scattering into a loose pool the bright cold winter sunlight crowding in through the giant windows that made up the synagogue’s back wall. Mara (after their great-aunt) looked down at the wide wooden podium that held her prayer book and the silver yad with its gently curled fingers (the index however unfurled and reaching hungry for the words) and a Torah open to a chapter in the middle of Sh’mot. She gripped the sides of the podium until the bone of her knuckles gleamed through the skin, stretching it into translucence; this fortress, this knotted grained prism supporting her frame like a pillar, she was stuck to it, a butterfly blown against a tree in a storm. Her puppet-joint fingers twitched with minds of their own, tapping where she held, the chipped black fingernail polish (bitten) in contrast with the lavender of her dress, her white shoes, that Mogen David from Aunt Edna that lit up her throat on a silver chain. She held her shoulders conscientiously straight, but her right leg would not keep still. Now its toes grazed the floor. Now it was airborne. Now it dipped down for a fresh landing, skating across the bema in a smooth arc, leaving a darker semicircle stamped on the carpet as it rubbed against the nap.

Becky was conscious of Thad’s hand in hers. Nobody was watching of course. Eyes ears hearts on the Bat Mitzvah. Still, the energy of the room seemed centered, made concentrate, somewhere between her boyfriend’s fingers and her palm. This was the locus of all points. You can bring a date if you want. You’re a big college girl now. Yes Mother, and shall I teach him “sit” and “heel” and “stay,” before I come? The looks in her parents’ eyes when she walked into the hotel lobby on Thad’s arm, knees still weak from the four-hour haul from Pittsburgh. Thank God she’s not a lesbian at least. Some of the grandfolk looking disconcerted, a bristling flock: but he’s not Jewish. We are an accepting people. A tolerant people. As she told Thad that first night, wanting to put her arm through his but frozen from it by the night, by the stillness, the newness of him: Your people and mine, we have a lot in common.

Through those windows at the back wall was the yard with its hedges and growing snowbanks, the parking lot with its minivans and station wagons (it was a Reform temple) partially obscured by the flakes that had begun to stick to the asphalt like a tongue on a popsicle. Still the white tumbled down in trembling feathers, silent, winking like the whites of eyes. It didn’t seem safe somehow. All that glass. High winds could break it. It made the room so much colder; not an effective barrier against the fourteenth of February, against mounting winter.

Mara bent forward, a straight line pointing from her nose to the roll of sheepskin before her. Her hair was too thick and full for her thinness; it tossed foamlike about her face; her eyes peeked out from an underwater cave. She was all bone, all mousy thirteen-year-old, all shrinking child. Becky held her lips together. The need for air clawed hollowly at her chest, lungs, but she kept herself still and unfulfilled. She didn’t want to miss the miracle.

The rabbi dipped his head at Mara. She raised the yad like a cup. There were rose petals in her hair and her legs were lollipops. She began to sing, her voice a choppy sea. The pointing finger pulled her along by the hem of her dress. When? When? The frail pipe of her voice quivered in high wind. The Hebrew carried it, blew it ahead in gusts, and once it stumbled on her lips. Then Becky saw the click, like a light switch. The struggle dissipated – the motions were all the same but Becky saw the meaning was different, it had changed, there had been a rebirth. Mara’s fingers stroked the podium without strangling it, her feet held firmly to the floor, her load lifted, her voice settled into the rocking-horse gait of the Torah trope. It would be all right. Becky knew. Mara was Bat Mitzvah now. She was all grown up.


. : More than four years ago. The first day of school. The first day of high school. All summer Becky Weinblum, fourteen and growing, had dreamed and planned and scribbled lists on yellow legal pads. To Do: Highschool. She needed a friend. Not just a friend, she had friends, no this had to be a special friend, a best friend. A girl, a girl who kept up with the news and drank coffee from a thermos and didn’t wear mittens or a coat in January and always had a date to the school dances. A girl with a secret in her smile. One nobody knew yet; but Becky would know her. They would join the volleyball team together, revitalize the school newspaper, and double date to senior prom. Top of the list. Number one priority.

At lunch there was a table in the corner, and Margaret Fulbright sat there alone with her key lime yogurt and a copy of the New York Times. This was the “Love you darling! – Mags” of Becky’s twelfth grade yearbook. This was Mags who spilled milk on the carpet in Becky’s basement a few months later, who threw Becky a surprise Sweet Sixteen in North Park. This was Mags. And Becky, as if she had known it would be all along, sat down beside her, set down her purple tray, and said, “I’m Rebecca.”

Mags turned her eyes up in welcome. They were brown oceans. It’s like everyone said – there are things you can know without any words.


. : The road called to them, but by the time the service was over it had vanished, hiding under a new tight skin of snow. It was all right, it was only one o’clock and there was a reception in the basement of the synagogue and Aunt Edna had made a pumpkin cheesecake you didn’t want to miss. Nothing was ruined. Romantic weekend proceed as planned.

“Mazel tov.” Not bad for a goy. It took Becky a moment, but she recognized. That half-laugh punctuating the ends of his sentences. His fast wet eyes.

She touched Thad’s elbow, said of him, “My boyfriend.” Then, “Thad, this is James. He’s an old high school friend.”

“Come with me,” said James. That look. Becky hadn’t seen him since last summer, but that look was as familiar as if she had it hanging in her dorm, framed.

“Where?”

Tugging. “Outside.” She laughed. Thad shifted. “It’s snowing. It’s beautiful. Look. We’ll make a snow angel.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Becky. She couldn’t stop smiling.

“Let’s have fun. Hey, Beck? We never get snow like this. Thad, you like snow?”

“We have plans,” said Thad.

“We can’t,” said Becky. “We have dinner to make, and a reservation at the Renaissance Hotel. As soon as this lets up – ”

“Right. Right,” said James, mock-angry. “Happy Valentine’s Day. See you guys later.” His hands were parallel to his thighs as he walked off, a fixed distance from the floor even as his body bobbed up and down with his gait. Becky should have expected to see him there; he was hooked on bat mitzvot. From all those summers he spent at the JCC. Families knew it and invited him.

Thad walked her to the punch table and drew them each a glass. “We were good friends. We’ve kind of lost touch though.” She loved her mother’s punch, the citrus fuzz of cold sherbet and 7-Up washing the insides of her cheek, always the same. “He’s funny. You know…I like him. He makes me nervous though. I don’t know why.”


. : At Pitt she lived in a single in Holland Hall, an all-girls dorm. Most other freshmen had doubles. Don’t you feel you’re missing out on something, not having a roommate? No. No, not really.
She was orderly, but not excessively neat. Windbreakers and playing cards and tennis balls weren’t always put away, but everything did have a place; if she needed to clean it, it wasn’t too much trouble. The windows were small and tended to stick, and there was no air conditioning, but she dimmed them with curtains, anyway. The city was too busy when her eyes were tired. It distracted her from her reading. She wasn’t used to city life yet, it had been six months at this school and still sometimes she couldn’t wrap her head around it. She had grown up mostly in Mississippi. Her family moved to the South Side of Pittsburgh when she was in eighth grade. Also not too far from Pittsburgh, in Ohio: that’s Mara – and Becky’s aunt and uncle and a few other assorted cousins.

The last girl who lived in this room, she wrote all over the walls, all over the wooden frame of the bed in soft lead pencil. It was mostly quotes. How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss? and I have a bad bad feeling about this bad bad feeling. Probably from movies.

Thad went to Carnegie Mellon, down the street. Thad grew up in the Bronx. His family was poor, he was even homeless for a year in grade school, but he did all right for himself. He did more than all right. He was salutatorian of his graduating class, now was at CMU on a full scholarship for minorities. Won some sort of science competition as a junior. Placed in a national essay competition in twelfth grade. Worked like a dog now, both at schoolwork and as a waiter at LuLu’s Noodles. Determined to keep his pockets full. Facts, details, names, dates, times. The tick marks that define a troubled past. The tallies that add up to a boy worth admiring. He told Becky the stories of his scars (jawline, knuckles, right calf, right eyebrow), she told him about the boys who broke her brother David’s nose after school. “Kike,” they screamed. “Kike.”
Becky had a wall papered in twelve calendars. There was one for every month of the year. They were all different, and they were all turned to different months, and arranged in order. The special days were outlined with highlighter, the occasion scribbled in with pen. Pink was for birthdays. Yellow was holidays (Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Pesach, Sukkot, Valentine’s Day). Orange meant a special occasion. That was for spring break, and the big tennis tournament at the end of March, and Mara’s bat mitzvah, in February. And Becky’s three-month anniversary with Thad, on the thirtieth of January. Not so long past.

Becky didn’t do cute calendars. No bulldog puppies or peppy Daily Inspirational Quotes! for her. She liked to smile or to tilt her head, and to these ends she had a Far Side and an Escher, a Norman Rockwell and a Magic Eye. The last of these might have been her favorite. For the month it was turned to, the secret picture, buried in an irregular yellow-gold pattern like crumpled daffodils and squashed bumblebees, was a wall clock, 12:15 is what she thought it read. She liked the way she had to make her eyes go lazy and far away to see it. Like she could look through walls.

On her birthday, in October, she’d gone to a CMU frat party. She’d gone with friends but left early and alone, having liked beer less than she thought she would on the first try. She had still been glad she’d gone. The drinking barrier seemed an appropriate one to break on her first college birthday. Thad found her stumbling along South Negley in the wrong direction, humming “What a Wonderful World” and sometimes stopping to spin herself dizzy. He walked her home. They had been inseparable ever since, but sometimes she caught herself examining his face as if she’d never seen him before in her life.


. : Three-thirty. Outside the snow blunted the afternoon angles, visible static, white noise. The guests cooed over the cheesecake and Aunt Edna glowed. Mara moved from one crumb-encrusted table to the next. Becky could see she’d grown an inch at least, maybe two, since the scared little girl she had been that morning. “I can’t,” she had whispered, and clutched Becky’s hand. Now her shadow fell long in the fluorescent basement light, the fullness of what she had accomplished spilled from her lips and eyes. She and not her mother selected and set aside the gift table, and with uncharacteristic restraint she shook not a one of her presents in search of hints. She’d open them tonight, she said, before bed. She did not ask to change out of her dress. Her voice had deepened and she chose her words with precision. That smudge of color on her lips that had been gaudy at noon was now understated, sophisticated. “Did I do all right, Becky?” But she knew that she had.

Becky remembered her own bat mitzvah. That sudden, seizing moment. Those moments she lived for.
“If we don’t leave soon we’ll lose our dinner reservations.” Thad could not stop playing with his tie. He rubbed its silk on his cheek. He lipped it like a horse. His wristwatch waved frequent hellos to his eyes.

“Can I control the weather?”

“We’re just going to have to risk it, pretty soon.”

“It’ll let up.” There was no question. This snow, this intensity, this couldn’t last forever. This cold. The salt would bite through. Nothing for it but to wait and numb the mind.

The rabbi had turned on a radio. It was sitting on the gift table in a nest of tissue paper and silver bows. The older members of the congregation had begun to huddle around it as if it were a fire, and it crackled off severe weather warnings and updates on the condition of the roads. Nobody had left. Only a few families who lived close enough to walk. Mr. Meisner leaned his seventy years dulled ears in towards the warmth of the weather report. His wife sat by the window, watching the sky come to pieces. The metal glow of her wheelchair gleamed reflected in the pane. She was in profile; the right side of her face, pulled tight and diagonal by stroke, Becky couldn’t see. She could move nothing but her eyes. Up and down, up and down they flicked, spectators of a vertical tennis match.


. : Junior year, Becky and Mags organized a ski trip to Seven Springs. It was for Forensics. They got permission from the school board to fundraise (by candy, by cookie, by hoagie) and recruited eight other girls and boys from the team. By winter break, everyone had earned enough to pay for his or her own trip. The weather was perfect. The bus came on time. No one was injured, no one fought, no one got too cold. There were enough snacks for everyone and the thermos kept the hot chocolate hot. All day Becky tramped about in skis and orange-tinted goggles, thinking, Look, this worked. This worked. It’s working. All day she thought of nothing else. She was silent, plumped with joy like a grape, as she as Mags rode the lifts, legs dangling with the skis swinging heavy from the ends like spears of kosher pickle. She was so busy smiling she forgot to laugh when they passed over the bright red trash cans, white lettering screaming PITCH IN. She was so busy overflowing inside that she forgot even to love how her skis looked each time, pointing straight down Little North Face before she took off, parallel and prepared. The wind.


. : Six-thirty. Sunset’s last orange bled from the windowpanes in the main sanctuary. Those giant windows. Great and blank and clear. Becky pressed her fingers against them, the utter lack of heat they carried as sudden as electric shock. The snow divested them of meaning. There was no separation anymore between the chaos outside and herself, where she was, here. Below, the adults had opened the wine. To keep warm, they said, and really, only one or two were in danger of overdoing it, yet. “Would your mom let us have some?”
Becky looked at Thad, forehead quirked. “Well, yes.” Wine had, somehow, never occurred to her as alcohol in particular. There was, after all, the tradition of the youngest drinking from the cup after Kiddush. So Thad was gone, to borrow warmth. The structure of the day, its foundation, felt – loose. No. Intangible. Their night could not be ruined. Their romantic weekend. This snow was a transient, not here to stay the night, not here to settle in. They should be able to do something about it. Shouldn’t we be able to do something about it?

“Come with me.” James again, appearing behind her. Funny how the same words coming from the same mouth can combine differently with time. But I should tell Thad first. There was a metallic taste behind the fingers around her wrist, although James’ grip was gentle enough. He’ll worry. Where…?

“So he’ll live. We’ll be back.” The steadiness of the look he gave her was enough to make following him the easiest thing to do.

They were outside now. The yolk-orange puddles from the streetlamps twitched feverishly on pillows of snow. They were walking. The shine of his dress shoes pressed a patterned rail into the blankness on the ground. Becky had changed out of her skirt two hours ago, tugging khakis and a hooded sweater (P-I-T-T) from her suitcase in the back of the blue Chevy she and Thad were going to drive to the Renaissance soon (soon, when this damned snow stopped, when they could find the road again, when they could reclaim the day). Already the synagogue faded goodbye.

“What are we doing, James?”

They walked a little longer. James’ hair was thicker and longer in the middle than on the sides – a shaggy hedgerow. It looked brittle in the cold. Snowflakes hung from it like leaves, the wiry strands the twigs of the tree. Quiet the night grew more settled, flushing its lighter, mixed blue into navy. Like crickets hummed the streetlamps, and the rest was silence.

Finally James said, “Blankets.”

“What?”

“It’s fucking cold. In the temple. Those windows suck the heat right out, and Mrs. Meisner is looking pretty bad.” He lit a cigarette as he walked. He offered the pack to Becky; she shook her head. “We’ve got her under tablecloths, but there’s nothing warm enough. There’s a Wal-Mart down the road. I hate it, but you know. Nothing else nearby.” He seemed about to go on. He didn’t.

“You hate it?”

“Yeah, don’t get me started.” His whole body was right now centered on his face, which was concentrated on his lips, which were pursed, gripping but loose as fingers, around that cigarette. “You should see what…Don’t get me started.” He pulled abruptly with both hands at his hedgerow. “But for an emergency, you know…Sorry, I needed you because, well, we should bring back more blankets. Than just one. In case everybody has to stay the night.” No no no no no no no. “Besides.” He shoved his hands in the direction of his pockets; they fell in by accident. “It’s an adventure.”

“It’s a good time for an adventure, I guess,” Becky said. Things were righting themselves. The pattern was growing clear again. “Mags and I decided last year, you know, this is our first year of college – we’ve got to have an – experience of some sort. Brush with death counts. Close calls. This fits I think.” She saw the piece fall into place. Neat. Clean.

James chuckled then. Soft, like coffee. “Did you.”

“Like we decided we needed to have our first kisses in tenth grade, and we both did, almost the same night too. It’s funny, how there is a right time for things.” James was looking at her. She felt, without seeing, how his eyes squinted upwards in silent laughter.

“I don’t think you know Mags as well as you think you do,” he said.

This was silly. “She’s my best friend.”

“Maybe.” James let out a lungful of smoke that curled like a flooding river in front of the stars. “She ever tell you about the time she ran away from home?”

“Well. No. Of course I don’t know everything about her life. Not if it’s from before we met – ”

“This was the summer after junior year. When you were on vacation in Florida. She called me one day. Told me ‘See you, James,’ and hung up.” He stopped walking, sat down in the snow, tossed away the dying cigarette in a long arc. Becky hadn’t noticed until now, but he wasn’t wearing his jacket. He must have left it at the synagogue. He was in just a blue button-down, and the sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and the collar unbuttoned. Well, he loved the cold. “She hitchhiked to Texas to stay with some girl she’d met online. Came back three weeks later, she’d had an amazing time, she said. Spur-of-the-moment, totally.”

There was a vague memory, a photograph of a vivid redhead in a cowboy hat stuck to Mags’ mirror, the Post-It note underneath proclaiming “Cassie” in Magic Marker. But Becky had never heard the story. She’d thought there wasn’t a story to tell. Just some friend, Mags had said. “That doesn’t sound like her at all.”

“Well, she is who she is,” said James.

“Didn’t know you guys were such good friends, for her to tell you all that.”

“You don’t know a lot of things. Sit, Beck.”

“In the snow?”

“Sit. We’re making a snow angel.”

“I’m going to be soaked. Freeze my fingers off.”

“Get down here.”

“I’m going to get frostbite.”

“Snow angel.” He pushed at her legs, catching her off balance, and she fell, found herself sitting, facing him. He leaned forward and she was afraid he was going to slap her or kiss her or shout obscenities in her ear or sing. She was afraid he would do nothing; there was no end to the possibilities of what he would, what he would not do; but he looked at her then, and his eyes were cinders and they were wet as a thunderstorm in summer, and he, burning and melting and rushing and growing now, dark seeping from his pockets and starlight glowing from his hands, whispered: Go.


. : They came back. Their hands were red and shining in the main sanctuary’s stillness. They dropped the blankets, floral-patterned and vacuum-packed in plastic, but their fingers stayed frozen in birdclaw rigor mortis. James went to the bathroom, to run his under warm water. Invisible until he’d left, Mara was sitting in the corner, alone, and everyone else still downstairs. A parabola of starlight through the window patterned her shoulder and the rest was shadow. “Mara, take one of these down to Mrs. Meisner,” said Becky. While these thaw.

The Bat Mitzvah stood, came to Becky. She took her cousin’s blood-slowed hands in her feather ones. “You’re so cold, Becky.” They were regaining life. Mara’s gaze was down, fixed on the pairs of hands intertwined. This was the first time, Becky remembered, that she’d touched Mara since the bat mitzvah. Woman, woman, woman, Becky heard in the girl’s breath, felt in the unspoken knowledge of her touch.

“It’s okay. I’m fine. The blanket, Mar?”

Mara looked up and her eyes – look at them, they almost wrenched a gasp from Becky’s throat. They were two small brown fish, drowning in tears. They made her think of Mags’ eyes.

“Mara?” But Mags was not Mags, not always. She was Margaret also, sometimes. Maybe, even, there was someone somewhere who called her Meg.

Mara was moving her head. Her nose pointed towards her right shoulder, then her left, then her right again. “Can’t.”

“Why not?”

She could not speak. Her new words were swallowed. She wrapped her arms around her cousin’s waist. “Say something. Come on.”

Mara said, “She got so blue.” She was talking into Becky’s chest, her voice causing thick hollow vibrations like in a cave. “Mrs. Meisner. She’s blue. First she was yellow, you know how she’s always been yellow, but then she got blue like – like the bottom of a swimming pool and.” Some hard, some difficult breathing gasping through tears. “She. Scares me.”

“She’s probably blue because she’s cold. Don’t you get a little blue when you’re cold? Around the lips? She’s just a person, Mara.” Becky took those thin shoulders, straightened her arms until she had her cousin whole in front of her, and made her eyes relax, seeing through walls; rearrange this, make sense of it. But Mara pulled away.

“Nobody gets blue like that,” she whispered, and ran. In her wake her shadow, stunted in the starlight, broken.


. : Eleven fifty-eight. Downstairs the hot breath of the sleeping mingled in a visible mist and they were all drawn deeper into dream. Snowstorm forgotten. Prison melted. It’s tomorrow already for them.

The moon, so much stiller than the sun, painted Thad’s face, painted the hollows of his neck until Becky decided that her head fit right there, like that. “I guess we lost our reservations,” said Becky, and they laughed.

“At least now I know what a bat mitzvah’s like,” said Thad, and Becky said, “Well they’re not normally like this,” and they laughed again.

“It’s almost gone.” Thad looked at his watch.

“It is, and we didn’t celebrate.”

“We did our best.”

“That hotel.” The weather was perfect the bus arrived on time nobody fought. “Our romantic weekend.”

He kissed her. But that was nothing new.

“Look,” she said, and something here was tugging at her, was important, was fighting its way up like a climber out through her esophagus, was needing to breathe, was. “I needed to get out. You know? To get – someplace. To not – stagnate. I know you know. I know, you,” he must understand, “I have always felt with you, with you, when I met you, when my eyes and your eyes – Well, yes…”

She stared out the windows, that back wall that was not a wall but the world. The eternal flame, a frosted bulb in a metal frame, that light that in honor of the first temple in Jerusalem they could not let burn out, hung above the bema like a private star. Outside she could see shapes, threatening to become, to grow, to evolve; her eyes said stop, shapes, and they did. “You think I’m smart. You don’t know who I was. Who I probably still am. I had to work. Things don’t come naturally to me; I had to fight to move ahead, it didn’t just happen. I’ve told you things about me. I haven’t said me…They beat up my brother, they called me kike too, before we moved to Pittsburgh, it’s been fine here, discrimination isn’t my life, but a shape, a general shape, a sort of – I had to fight hard. I had to make lists. I had to show myself the way. I wouldn’t be here.”

He must have understood, because he said, “Yes. To make plans. Me too.” Things they both suspected. “An hour for calc. An hour for English. A half-hour for play.”

“Growth needed a time slot. Like studying or eating.”

“Yes.”

He must have understood, but had she? What had she meant? She thought she saw him now. She thought her eyes were in focus, at attention. But she still ached, this ache deep and unreachable that she’d been feeling her whole life – made unbearable now only by her knowledge of it. It was inside her, it was pushing, it was crying for birth. This was new; she trembled in the face of this quake from the inside, an invisible one, an inversion that attacks without warning. And it was quite clear in her mind, this day, this night: the crackling radio, her own flippant nonchalance when she knew, must have known, the bird was flown, Mara’s spurt and shrink spurt and shrink like a yo-yo, but he’s not Jewish; a cold shower of snow down her back, Mrs. Meisner’s blue blue hands as she tucked the blanket around her, and those words – James’, when they had finished their snow angels and were lying there tracing the stars with the fingers of their souls: Beck, why don’t you ever let anything happen? Her head and her chest were caverns and her life was sound and it was all echoes, yodeled from wall to wall, and she was blind, of a sudden, to things that had been clear, and saw others she could never have guessed. In that hotel, I am sure you know, I think you sense it, what I was going to give you tonight, and she wasn’t sure whether she had said it aloud or not. I saw my path, was it too obvious? I’d laid my landmarks and the signs all pointed one way…But now the foundation’s melted and nothing’s sure…

You know how the sky’s the only perfect thing there is? James had said. She hadn’t known but she had felt it. The snow she was lying on melted into her shoulders. For the moment there were no blankets left in the world; there was a more immediate risk to take. And everybody’s always making categories out of it and pictures and shapes. Giving it names. The Seven Sisters. Orion’s Belt. The Dippers Big and Little. Pretty soon, they figure, we’ve got to be able to get it all down.

A beautiful idea, she’d said.

No, he’d answered. He’d sat up and his look got its hooks into her, pulled at something inside of her. Because you can’t ever. Get it all down. The star you’re looking at might have already died. It’s so many lightyears away you’ll just never know. Constellations will change, because stars will die and planets will die and there will be black holes and wormholes and holes and not-holes, all sorts of things we don’t know about yet or understand. And the universe goes on and on too, off into infinity, in a way we can’t comprehend. There have to be things out there we don’t have a clue about. Certainly things we’ll never see; things that change, grow, every day or every second. Things we couldn’t pin down at all, even if we knew they existed. Even the sky isn’t forever. Even the sky doesn’t have a plan.

Not a word he had said made sense. Not then.

Now, she looked at Thad. She felt James’ presence, his words, he was there, but he wasn’t in Thad; he was somewhere else. She did not know what Thad saw as she looked at him. She did not know what she wanted him to see. She was about to do something, anything, nothing; she didn’t know what she was going to do. The endings were endless, and they were all beginnings. Delicate and clear, her breath pulsed through her throat as if through a reed, teasing her mouth open, and she felt, rather than heard, the round and endless syllable of the word she passed on to him.

--for S.H.