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bought. As a child he had mourned the unbought flowers, beseeching the even gray greenhouse light with their hopeful corollas and tepid perfume. He surveyed the party for a woman to bring home and picked Bea Guerin. Dear Bea, of course I want to fuck you, how could I not, with your steamy little body so tired and small and kind. Just about all lilies, aren’t you? Now spread your legs. Easy does it. Ah . The moisture and light within the greenhouse had been so constant and strong that even weeds grew; even when bright snow was heaped against the glass walls like a sliced cross section in a school book, clover from nowhere flourished around the legs of the tables and by the rusty pipes, and the dirt floor bore a mossy patina and was steeped in an odor incomparably quiet and settled and profound. He saw them, his father and mother, vader en moeder , moving gently in this receding polyhedral heart of light carved from dank nature, their bodies transparent, and his mind came to a cliff—a slip, then a skidding downward plunge. Left fist clenched upon himself, he groped in his mind for the party, but it was no longer there.
    God help me, help me, get me out of this. Eek ik, eeik ik . Dear God put me to sleep. Amen.
    A golden rooster turned high above Tarbox. The Congregational Church, a Greek temple with a cupola and spire, shared a ledgy rise, once common pasturage, with a baseball backstop and a cast-iron band pavilion used only on Memorial Day, when it sheltered shouted prayers, and in the Christmas season, when it became a crèche. Three edifices had succeeded the first meetinghouse, a thatched fort, and the last, renovated in 1896 and 1939, lifted well over one hundredfeet into the air a gilded weathercock that had been salvaged from the previous church and thus dated from colonial times. Its eye was a copper English penny. Deposed once each generation by hurricanes, lightning, or repairs, it was always, much bent and welded, restored. It turned in the wind and flashed in the sun and served as a landmark to fishermen in Massachusetts Bay. Children in the town grew up with the sense that the bird was God. That is, if God were physically present in Tarbox, it was in the form of this unreachable weathercock visible from everywhere. And if its penny could see, it saw everything, spread below it like a living map. The central square mile of Tarbox contained a hosiery mill converted to the manufacture of plastic toys, three dozen stores, several acres of parking lot, and hundreds of small-yarded homes. The homes were mixed: the surviving seventeenth-century saltboxes the original Kimballs and Sewells and Tarboxes and Cogswells had set along the wobbly pasture lanes, quaintly named for the virtues, that radiated from the green; the peeling Federalist cubes with widow’s-walks; the gingerbread mansions attesting to the decades of textile prosperity; the tight brick alleys plotted to house the millworkers imported from Poland; the middle-class pre-Depression domiciles with stubby porches and narrow chimneys and composition sidings the colors of mustard and parsley and graphite and wine; the new developments like even pastel teeth eating the woods of faraway Indian Hill. Beyond, there was a veiny weave of roads, an arrowing disused railroad track, a river whose water was fresh above the yellow waterfall at the factory and saline below it, a golf course studded with bean-shapes of sand, some stubborn farms and checkerboard orchards, a glinting dairy barn on the Nun’s Bay Road, a field containing slowly moving specks that were galloping horses,level breadths of salt marsh broken by islands and inlets, and, its curved horizon marred, on days as clear as today, by the violet smudge that was the tip of Cape Cod, the eastward sea. Casting the penny of its gaze straight down, the cock could have observed, in dizzying perspective, the dotlike heads of church-goers congregating and, hurrying up the gray path, the red head of Piet Hanema, a