Angstrom takes him back through the house and in the dark of the dining room touches his arm

Angstrom takes him back through the house and in the dark of the dining room touches his arm. "He liked things just so," he says. "I never saw a boy like him. Any rumpus in the family he'd take hard out of all reason ? when Mary and I, you know, would have our fun." Eccles nods, but doubts that "fun" quite describes what he's seen.

In the living?room shadows a slender girl stands in a barearmed summer dress. "Mim! Did you just get in?"

"Yeah."

"This is Father ? I mean Reverend ='

"Eccles."

"Eccles, he came to talk about Harry. My daughter Miriam." "Hello, Miriam. I've heard Harry speak very fondly of you."

"Hi."

With that word the big window behind her takes on the intimate glaze of the big window in a luncheonette. Flip greetings seem to trail behind her with wisps of cigarette smoke and drugstore perfume. Mrs. Angstrom's nose has delicacy on the girl's face, a sharpness Saracen or even more ancient, barbaric. Taken with the prominent nose her height at first glance seems her mother's, but when her father stands beside her, Eccles sees that it is his height; their bodies, the beautiful girl's and the weary man's, are the same. They have the same narrowness, and a serviceable vulgarity that offends him. They'll get through. They know what they're doing. It's a weakness of his, to prefer people who don't know what they're doing. The helpless: these, and the people on top, beyond help. The ones who maneuver more or less well in the middle seem to his aristocratic prejudices to be thieving from both ends. When they bunch at the door, Angstrom puts his arm around his daughter's waist and Eccles thinks of Mrs. Angstrom silent in the kitchen with her wet cheeks and red arms, a mad captive. Yet, turning on the pavement to wave at the two of them in the doorway, he has to smile at their incongruous symmetry, the earringed Arab boy with her innocent contempt for his eunuch's collar, and the limp?faced old woman of a printer, paired in slenderness, interlocked.

He gets into the Buick thirsty and vexed. There was something pleasant said in the last half?hour but he can't remember what it was. He feels scratched, hot, confused, and dry; he's spent an afternoon in a bramble patch. He's seen half a dozen people and a dog and nowhere did an opinion tally with his own, that Harry Angstrom was worth saving and could be saved. Instead down there between the brambles there seemed to be no Harry at all: nothing but stale air and last year's dead stalks. The day is declining through the white afternoon to the long blue spring evening. He drives past a corner where someone is practicing on a trumpet behind an open upstairs window. Du du do do da da dee. Dee dee da da do do du. Cars are whispering home from work. He drives across the town, tacking on the diagonal streets along a course parallel to the distant ridge of the mountain. Fritz Kruppenbach, Mt. Judge's Lutheran minister for twenty?seven years, lives in a high brick house not far from the cemetery. The motorcycle belonging to his college?age son is on its side in the driveway, partly dismantled. The sloping lawn, graded in fussy terraces, has the unnatural chartreuse evenness that comes with much fertilizing, much weed?killing, and much mowing. Mrs. Kruppenbach ? will Lucy ever achieve that dimpled, obedient look? ? comes to the door in a dark wool dress that makes no compromise with the season. Her gray hair girdles her head with braids of great compactness. When she lets all that hair down, she must be a witch. "He's mowing out back," she says.