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the wharf?” or “Am I on the right road to East Mather?” Using words and gestures that have become rote, Ray heads it on its way, with something of the satisfaction with which he mails a letter, or flushes a toilet, or puts in another week at Unitek Electronics. Catty-corner across the awkward intersection (Wharf Street swerves south and meets Reservoir Road and Prudence Lane at acute, half-blind angles), Mr. Latroy, a milkman who is home from noon on, and who is also an auxiliary policeman, directs automobiles uncertain if, to reach the famous old textile mill in Lacetown, they should bear left around the traffic island or go straight up the hill. There is nothing on the corner to hold cars here except the small variety store run by an old Dutch couple, the Van der Bijns. Its modest size and dim, rusted advertisements are geared to foot traffic. Children going toschool stop here for candy, and townspeople after work stop for cigarettes and bread, but for long tracts of the day there is little for Mr. Van der Bijn to do but sit behind his display windows and grieve that the cars passing through take the corner too fast.
    There have been accidents. Eight years ago, around eleven o’clock of a muggy July morning, when Susan Craven had been standing on her sidewalk wondering whether she should go to the playground or Linda Latroy’s back yard, a clam truck speedily rounding the corner snapped a kingbolt, went right up over the banking, swung—while the driver wildly twisted the slack steering wheel—within a foot of unblinking, preoccupied Susan, bounced back down the banking, straight across Prudence Lane, and smack, in a shower of shingles, into the house then owned by Miss Beulah Cogswell. She has since died, after living for years on her telling of the accident: “
Well
, I was in the kitchen making my morning
tea
and naturally thought it was just
another
of those dreadful sonic booms. But,
when
I go with my cup and saucer into the front parlor, here
right
where my television set had been was this dirty windshield with a man’s absolutely
white
face, mouthing like a fish, the carpet
drenched
with shingles and plaster and the corner cupboard three feet into the room and not one, would you
believe
it, not a single piece of bone china so much as
cracked!
”
    Now her house is occupied by a young couple with a baby that cries all night. The Cravens have moved to Falmouth, selling their house to the Blandys. And the Latroy girls have heard that Susan is married, to a pilot from Otis Air Force Base; it’s hard to believe. It seems just yesterday she was brushed by death, a rude little girl with fat legs.
    Long before this, so long ago only the Van der Bijns and Mrs. Billy Hannaford witnessed the wreckage, a drunken driver took the corner too fast in the opposite direction fromthe truck and skidded up over the curb into the left-hand display window of the variety store. No one was hurt; the Van der Bijns were asleep upstairs and the drunk, well known locally, remained relaxed and amused. But the accident left a delicate scar on the corner, in the perceptible disparity between the two large plate-glass panes: the left one is less wavery and golden in tint than the right, and its frame is of newer molding, which does not perfectly match.
    Somewhere between these two accidents there is an old man down from New Hampshire, lost, blinded, he said, by blazing headlights, who drove right over the traffic island, straddling it in his high 1939 Buick, shearing off the Stop sign and eviscerating his muffler on the stump. And lost in the snowy mists of time is the child who sledded down Reservoir Road and was crushed beneath a big black Peerless, in the days before cars could be counted on to be everywhere. It is strange that more accidents do not occur. Everyone ignores the rusty Stop sign. Teen-agers begin drag races down by the wharf and use the traffic island as a finish post. Friday and Saturday nights, there is screeching and