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convinced Miss Beryl that her son's anxiety had less to do with the possibility that his elderly mother might go up in flames than that the house would. Miss Beryl was not proud of entertaining such unkind thoughts about her only child, and at times she even tried to reason herself out of them and into more natural maternal affection.
    The only difficulty was that natural maternal affection did not come naturally where Clive Jr. was concerned. The Clive Jr. who sat on the television opposite his father seemed pleasant enough, and the face the camera caught did not seem to be that of an unhappy insecure, middle-aged banker. In fact, Clive Jr." s face, still boyish in some ways, seemed full of possibility at an age where the countenances of most men were etched indelibly by the certainties of their existences.
    Clive Jr. " at least the Clive Jr.
    who sat on the television, still struck Miss "Beryl as unresolved, even though he would be fifty-six on his next birthday.
    Clive Jr. in real life was a different story. Whenever he appeared for one of his visits and gave Miss Beryl a dry, unpleasant peck on the forehead before scanning the living room ceiling for water damage, his character, if character was the right word, seemed as fixed and settled as a fifth-term conservative politician's. She endured his visits, his endless financial advice, with as much good cheer as she could muster.
    He would tell her what to do and why, and she would listen politely for as long as it took before declining to follow his advice. In her opinion Clive Jr. was full of cockamamie schemes, and he treated each as if its origin were the burning bush and not his own fevered brain.
    "Ma," he often said, on those occasions when she emphatically declined to follow his advice, "it's almost as if you didn't trust me."
    "I don't trust you," Miss Beryl said aloud, addressing her son's photo on the television, then adding, to her husband, "I'm sorry, but I can't help it. I don't trust him. Ed understands, don't you, Ed." Clive Sr. just smiled back, a tad ruefully, it seemed to her.
    Since his death he'd increasingly taken their son's side in matters of conflict.
    "Trust him. Beryl," he whispered to her now, his voice confidential, as if he feared that Driver Ed might overhear.
    "He's our son. He's the star of your firmament now."
    "I'm working on it," Miss Beryl assured her husband, and in fact, she was.
    She'd loaned Clive Jr.
    money twice during the last five years and not even asked him what he intended to do with it. Five thousand dollars the first time. Ten thousand the second. Amounts she would not be pleased to lose but which, truth be told, she could afford to lose. But both times Clive Jr. had paid her back when he said he would, and Miss Beryl, on the lookout for a reason not to trust her son, discovered that she was mildly disappointed to have the money back in her own possession. In fact, she was unable to fend off a particularly shameful suspicion--that Clive Jr. had not needed the money at all, that he'd borrowed it to demonstrate to her that he was trustworthy.
    She even began to suspect that what he must be after was not part of what would be his soon enough, but rather control of the whole. But to what end?
    Miss Beryl had to admit that the logic of her suspicions was flawed.
    After all, her money, the house on Upper Main IS and its considerable contents, everything would belong to Clive Jr. eventually, when, as he put it, "the time came."
    One of the things that drove her son to distraction, Miss Beryl suspected, was not knowing how much "everything" amounted to. There was the house, of course, and the ten thousand dollars he knew his mother had because she'd loaned it to him. But how much more? It was this information about her finances that Miss Beryl did not trust her son with. She had an accountant in Schuyler Springs do her taxes each year, and she instructed him to surrender no information about her affairs to Clive Jr. For legal advice,