A Third Outright

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I HAVE always remained friends with my ex-husbands, though not, for reasons I fail to understand, with my lovers. It may be property: I am a believer that property is the basis for most every bond and antagonism. No matter how lovey-dovey the marriage or how splodiferous the divorce, spouses joined or cleaved are forced to face each other across the mahogany to deal with property. Lovers are entirely different. They stagger about, under the power of some mystical feeling. No one knows how it begets or leaves; but, when its gone, one has only a charley horse of the heart and at best a string of pearls. Pearls, my mother told me, dissolve in vinegar; but real estate has metes and bounds and what downtown they call bankability. Anyway my very first husband has remained in the sleepy law firm in the sleepy town where I left him. When I needed help with my mothers surprising last wishes, I naturally called Hawthorne. Who better to divine the soundness of my mother s mind, what dark motives drove her, what gossip she was listening to? For one thing the senior partner in that firm, Judge Osgood, drew up the will. And Hawthorne knew me better than most. We had played with each other as children; we had gone to the university together, though I must say he ran, or rather shuffled, with a dif ferent set. We had married in that pre-pill world when hormones drove couples from the backseat of the Buick to the altar; it was all we could do to stay dressed until the bouquet was thrown. Such frenzy did not often affect Hawthorne and me. I remember send ing him a card one Valentine s Day, when we were just engaged, that reddened his face for a month: More stimulation, less simu lation, Fd written, to the glee of the entire Kappa house. And now, as I came back to that lovely, eternal, piteous town, it was Hawthorne's earnest and clean-shaven face that greeted me.