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his mother and father were touring Wales in a rented three-wheel Morgan; and twenty years before Ann was born. Ann was conceived in 1948. Her mother, already Rubensian, to be generous about it, stood on an Early American cobbler’s bench grasping her ankles as the then-wasplike Dad Fitzgerald—so recently the squash champion of the D.A.C.—laced into her from the rear. As he had his orgasm, he commenced making the hamster noises that lay at the bottom of his wife’s subsequent sexual malaise. His legs buckled and he fell to the floor and dislocated his shoulder. What neither of them knew as they drove to the hospital was that Ann’s first cell had divided and begun hurtling through time in a collision course with Nicholas Payne, then knuckling around the inside of a Wyandotte playpen.) But he never did and now it was too late.
    “You wonder about old man Payne,” said Fitzgerald.
    “Yes, you do.”
    “He has the finest law practice in the entire Downriver.”
    “Yes he has.”
    “He’s right up there, you know,
up
there, and he throws this classic second generation monstrosity on the world.”
    “You wonder about the mother,” said Missus Fiztzgerald. “She was once the chairman of the Saturday Musicale. She got the Schwann catalogues sent to everybody. How could decent people develop a person in this vein? I ask myself these things.”
    “Yes, but like all women you fail to come up with answers.”
    “All right now.”
    Dad made his fingers open and close like a blabbing mouth.
    “I’m sick of the theory approach to bad news,” he said. “I’m a pragmatist. In my sophomore year in college two things happened to me. One, I took up pipe smoking. Two, I became a pragmatist.”
    Mom Fitzgerald began to circle the Dad, her neck shortening under the blue cloud of ’do. “Well, you little pipe-smoking pragmatic G.M. executive you,” she said. The hands which banished bad thoughts flew about in front of her. “You’re going to give us one of your little wind-ups, are you? Your college history, are you?”
    “I—”
    “I’ll pragmatize you, you wheezing G.M. cretin.”
    “Your pills, Edna, your pills. You’re getting balmy.”
    “Show me that little trick with your hand, where it tells me I’m talking too much.”
    “Get your pills, Edna.”
    “Go on, show it to me.”
    He showed her the blabbing motion with his hand at the same time he told her, “Get the pills, Edna.” She slapped his hand open. He made the blabbing motion again. “Get your pills I said!” Then she nailed him in the blaring red mug and ran for it. He galloped after her grunting and baying as he hauled her away from the desk. She turned then and raked his chest with a handful of ballpoint pens and a protractor.
    He tore open his shirt, revealing his chest, and seeing with his own starting eyes the blue and red lines all over it.
    “You maniac! You shitbird! Oh my God you piss-face you!”
    Wayne Codd, deliriously attracted to this compromisingepisode, sprinted across the immense living room. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, looking in on the extraordinary uproar of Dad Fitzgerald stripped to the waist, his wife sobbing on the couch, her bum in view, sheathed in a vast reinforcement of pink rubberized girdle and a systematic panoply of attachments; everywhere it was not held back, terrible waffles of flesh started forward. Codd felt he had them dead to rights.
    “Saddle my horse, Codd,” said Fitzgerald.
    “You want to ride horseback?”
    “Saddle that horse you God damn mountain bonehead.”
    Codd looked at the scrimshaw on Fitzgerald’s chest.
    “No one talks to me that way, Fitzgerald.”
    “Oh, of course they do. Now saddle the horse. No cheap talk.”
    Codd darted for the stable. It was the wrong time for a face-off. He meant to keep a low silhouette.
    Fitzgerald turned to Edna.
    “Duke,” she said. His chin rested fondly on his abstract expressionist chest. Their obsession with Payne was temporarily