“Anybody ready for another drinkie?” Breton stood up and walked to the mirror-backed cocktail cabinet. Drinkie, he thought. Christ! What are they doing to me? He poured himself a generous shot of Scotch, tempered it with soda, and leaned against the cabinet, watching the tableau at the other side of the room. Miriam Palfrey’s body was limp in the chair but her hand was moving as quickly as it was possible to write without the aid of shorthand, producing thirty or more words a minute. The material she turned out was usually flowery, outdated prose on unrelated subjects, with a high proportion of words like Beauty and Love, always written with the initial capital. The Palfreys claimed it was dictated by the spirits of dead authors, whom they tentatively identified on a stylistic basis. Breton had his own ideas, and he had been more shocked than he cared to admit by Kate’s uncritical acceptance of what he regarded as a party trick straight out of a Victorian drawing room.

Sipping steadily at his drink, Breton watched Kate as she gathered up the sheets, numbered the corners and set them in a neat pile. Eleven years of marriage had not made any real physical changes in her — tall and still slim, she wore richly colored silks as though they were natural plumage, reminding Breton of a gorgeous and exotic bird; but her eyes had grown much older. Suburban neurosis, he thought, that must be it. Fragmentation of the family reflected in the individual. Give it a label and forget it. A woman is never completely a wife until all her own family are dead. Amalgamate orphanages and marriage bureaus. I’m drinking too much…

A low gasp of excitement from Kate brought his attention back to the group at the table. Miriam Palfrey’s hand had begun to trace what, at that distance, looked like an intricate circular pattern, like a drawing of a freshly opened carnation. He went closer and saw that she was writing in a tight, slowly spreading spiral, moaning faintly and shuddering as the pattern grew. An edge of the black cloth across her upturned face alternately clung and fluttered, like the breathing apparatus of a marine animal.