Men and Angels by Mary Gordon Page A

examining birds’ entrails. To make up to Laura for her crabbed surveillance, she offered her a glass of wine.
    “I never drink, Anne, thank you,” Laura said.
    Anne felt herself blush, as if the girl had accused her of being both a drunkard and a boor. “Of course you don’t. How stupid of me. Would you like cocoa?”
    “Wonderful.”
    “Cocoa?” Sarah said. “Can I get Peter?”
    “Yes,” said Anne. “We’ll all make it together.”
    Peter came down the stairs with his sister, both of them chastened, loving, guilt drawing them together like a weak magnetic field. Sarah got down the measuring cup. Peter took out the cocoa. They took turns measuring the cocoa, the sugar, the milk, the pinch of salt. They took turns stirring the mixture. There are my children, Anne said to herself, these are the ones I missed. She could smell their thin high sweat; they should have taken off their sweaters. But it was autumn and she understood their feelings: woolen clothes on such a day were a pleasure in themselves.
    She brought the cocoa to the table on a tray. The children sat next to her, showing her their leaves. The thickish light fell on their hair. She touched the heads of her children, feeling the texture of their hair. Then she looked up at Laura. She was standing back and smiling. They had excluded her; she sat outside the frame, outside the circle of the light. Guiltily, Anne said, “You must thank Laura for the wonderful expedition.”
    “Oh, yes,” Peter said.
    “Why don’t you give her a thank-you kiss?” Anne said to Sarah.
    The children got up and walked out of the circle of the lamplight. How sweet they were; how hungrily the poor girl took their kisses. She was a girl who had not, it was clear, been held enough, been treasured. So it was a fine thing: she was good for the children, the children were good for her. Things were really working wonderfully. Anne knew she was very lucky. She was sure that when she got more used to living with a stranger, her unpleasant feelings would just disappear. She brought the cups to the sink, ashamed of herself for wishing Laura were not there.
    It was a clear day early in November. That morning as she’d come down on the bus, the mist had risen. Gradually it revealed the road. A little at a time it burned away and left behind it hills and mountains. Trees appeared where seconds earlier a white fog seemed a permanence, like earth or stone. But it was lunchtime now; she walked the forty-five blocks from the Columbia library to the restaurant that Ben had chosen. The streets she walked on were struck by sun. She watched it glance off buildings, fall in solid bars upon the sidewalks and the streets.
    She’d worked all morning in the library. All the time she worked, she felt like an impostor. She had no business being there, she thought. It was possible that she looked like the others, but it was a lie. She was nothing like them. They were twenty, they were twenty-five or they had written fifteen books and thirty articles, they could sit for hours turning pages, writing things on cards. They never wanted to get up. Their minds—she could almost see their minds hovering above their pages, lively, angular—could settle on the things before them. They weren’t always thinking of their children—they didn’t have children, none of them had children, she was sure of it—they were thinking of the words, the print. They were saying words in their minds like “iconography” and “plastic form.” Of course she said them too, but she was also thinking words of one syllable, home words, the names of foods, toys, children’s games. She was looking at Eakins’ The Clinic of Dr. Agnew and worrying that she hadn’t taken Sarah to the dentist. She thought she’d have to tell Ben it was impossible. She couldn’t do the job. He had misjudged her, imagining she still was what she once had been.
    How could she possibly do it? What she had to do was build a house for a woman she