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staggering toward home.
    He heard the phonograph the moment he opened the door. His mother was sitting alone in the kitchen. Her life was right where he had left it. As he stuck his head and half his body inside, she stood up. Her eyes went from his face to the front of his sweater, where dirt from the cabbage had rubbed off on him, and from that to where his hand was still out of sight holding the cabbage behind the door.
    “Where did you go?” she said. “Are you all right?”
    Already his confidence in what he had done was leaking away. The last block of the way home, the cabbage had weighed like solid lead. It seemed to him that all that day he had been carrying weights too heavy for his strength up to that house he hated and took refuge in. Now by its root he dragged the upended cabbage around the door, and watching her face for her response, said, “I brought you something.”
    She was standing straight beside her chair. Her head did not move as she glanced at what he offered her; only her eyes flicked down and back up. She said nothing—not “Oh, how nice!” or even “Where did you get it?” Nothing.
    Panic began to rise in him, for here in the kitchen he could not pretend that the cabbage was anything but ridiculous, a contribution to the household that would have made his father snort in incredulous contempt. Moreover, and this was worse, it had been stolen. His mother knew at once that it was a theft he brought home. He remembered her angry whisper coming with the rush of warm air through the register: “I wonder how we’ll feel if he turns out bad. What if we make him into a thief, or worse?”
    “Ma …” he said.
    It was more than he could do to support her still look. Still clutching the cabbage root, he let his eyes slide away until they settled on the
castra.
There lay reassurance. The daubed wall was tight and neat, the tents stood in mathematically preciserows. Like a dog on a track his mind ducked after his eyes, and he found himself repeating other words like
castra
that had a different meaning in singular and plural: words like
gratia-gratiae
, and
auxilium-auxilia
, and
impedimentum-impedimenta
, and
copia-copiae
; and even going over some of the words that customarily took
in
with the accusative: names of towns, small islands,
domus, rus.
Such words, though really exceptions, were supported by all the precision and dependability of law.
    Out of the register came the squawk of the needle being taken carelessly off the record, a big burst of laughter, a woman’s squeal, shouts whose words he refused to hear, and then the music again, good old “Nobody Lied,” his own contribution to the parlor fun.
    He brought his eyes unwillingly back to his mother, opening his mouth to say, “I …”
    She was looking at him with odd intentness. Her hands hung awkwardly before her as if she had forgotten them there. Her mouth twitched—smile, or grimace such as she made when the parlor grew rowdy?
    Perhaps the true climax of that rueful day, perhaps the culmination of that depressed period of their life as a family, was that tableau in which Bruce after a fashion presented and his mother in some sort accepted the grotesque vegetable he had stolen to compensate her for the uncertainties and deprivations of her life. He brought her this gift, this proof of his love and loyalty, and they stared at each other with emotions mixed and uneasy. What should they have said there in that kitchen? What another family might greet with great belly laughs they could not handle so easily. They had no margin for laughter.
    The slap-tongue sax was pounding through the pipes. He wanted to say to her, “I’m awful, I have filthy thoughts, I steal, I cheat on merit badges sometimes, I’d even cheat in school if I couldn’t get on the dean’s list any other way. I’m a crybaby and people laugh at me and I’m sorry, I …”
    He said none of it. She said, with her eyes glittering full, “Ah, poor Bruce!”
    She put