The Followed Man by Thomas Williams

were killed in an accident."
    For a moment her face was still,
and then she said, "Your whole family? My God!"
    "Yes," he said.
    "Oh, my God! Your wife and
children?" She kept looking straight at him, tears running from
her green eyes. Blood infused the rims of her eyes beneath the
glitter of the tears.
    "I shouldn't have told
you," he said. "I didn't mean to bring anything like that
here, and I'm sorry. I don't know why I told you. I'm sorry."
    "I've still got Mickey and
Marcia, but you got nobody. Lord Je­sus God, you think you got
troubles and you're the only one and then you find out other people
got troubles worse than you."
    His throat was tight, not
painful but in a stasis caused by a famil­iar apprehension. All
at once she had taken on the power of cer­tain ordinary people he
had encountered every once in a while all his life, people who had,
for no reason he could find of vanity or gain, demonstrated that
intensity of sympathy for someone else. He had always felt smaller
than those people, alien to them, and no matter what successes had
come to him in life he had always been haunted by the possible
existence of another race that was in some way more generous and real
than his own.
    "But how could you stand
it?" she asked. She pushed her large hands down her thighs
toward him, smoothing the fawn material of her slacks.
    "I'm here to find out how
you can stand your loss," he said.
    "I didn't think I could,
but I'm not the first woman they came and told her her husband was
dead."
    "No, that's true," he
said.
    She looked at her small silver
wristwatch. "Sheila ought to be back with Mickey and Marcia."
Within a few seconds the buzzer rang and soon they were back, all of
the doors' locks undone, in­cluding the police lock's iron
buttress, the angle of which suggest­ed immediate and violent
siege. The children, still in a wild, play­ground mood, caromed
off each other and the furniture.
    Soon the buzzer rang again, and
it was Robin. Luke went down to his car with him to hold the
building's door open while Robin carried his floodlights and other
paraphernalia up to the apart­ment.
    Then there were serious
discussions, Robin extremely expert in these matters, of a barrette
for Marjorie's long hair, of a touch of powder, a suspicion of eye
shadow, of the children's clothes and the qualities of direct and
reflected light. Marjorie was patient and cooperative while Robin, it
seemed to Luke, assumed Mad Hatter­like dictatorial powers,
moving or having moved for each shot nearly every movable object in
the apartment. After their initial fascination, the children were not
so patient. When not forced into place they wandered here and there,
touching the equipment in spite of Mrs. Ryan's horror at their doing
that.
    After more than an hour of this
the children began to get hun­gry and querulous, so he and Robin
put the apartment back the way it had been, each piece of funiture
covering its shadow pat­tern against non-faded carpet or wall.
When all of Robin's equip­ment was boxed, telescoped and strapped
again, they were ready to say good-bye.
    Marjorie was still flushed and
excited by all of it. As they were ready to leave, her hand moved
toward Luke's nervously, as if to touch his hand or shake his hand.
Her gesture had been strange, at least according to his social
instincts about her, so his hand was a second late. When their
hesitations were over and their hands did meet, her large hand warm
within his, it had become an event, and they smiled about it.
    "If I have any more
questions, can I call you?" he said.
    "Sure," she said.
"Call me anytime, Luke."

5.
    That evening as he was about to
go out to eat he got a call from Ham Jones, a Wellesley real estate
man he'd known for a couple of years as an occasional tennis partner
and less occasional poker player. On Luke's way to New York they'd
met at the Eastern shuttle in Logan airport and had an early,
airplane-nervousness drink together. Ham had just come in from