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shadows, a mellow violet falling diagonally across the uprights of stone, glass and brick, and the western end of the street dazzled like a burning acetylene torch. Eastward, over the river and the lake behind the dam, there was such a blue as appears only over water in the middle of June. The traffic of three o’clock in this neighborhood seemed to idle, jostling amid the buildings without a strong tidal impulse.
    â€œI’m tired,” Leslie said, as they waited for a light to change at the end of the first block. She smiled apologetically, a smile intended to express finality.
    Martha turned a quizzical eye. “Shopper’s fag,” she said. “And we haven’t even crossed a merchant threshold. O.K. Me too. How about a movie? I never go in the afternoons. Or we’ll drive out around the lake. Ah, let’s do that. I’d like to.”
    Her tone was that of a wooer who understands that she has been tedious.
    Leslie dropped her lids and shook her head. “We’ll be seeing you and Dave on Saturday anyway. And oh, a new man from the hospital, a neurologist Ben met, is coming. I understand his wife is quite a doll. Tell Dave.”
    Martha did not spoil the day further by coaxing. She knew Leslie. She knew the point at which Leslie folded her petals and left the whole wide world to get along—as beautifully as it could—without her.

chapter 3
    S HE WAS twenty-seven that summer and had lived in many places. Among childhood friends in Manhasset, at school, and in Manhattan she had left legends behind her—of course not large-scale legends but a sort of colorful abandonment of debris like the fascinating junk left in a playground when the children go home. The host of people who remembered her to this day had not so much known her as known things about her. Colorful, memorable remarks, follies, or lightning-swift generosities that must have come from a rare individual.
    But perhaps, in spite of what people said, she was nobody at all.
    â€œDon’t you see,” she said once to one of the nice men who had loved her, “what I was always most afraid of was that I was hollow.”
    That was easy to refute. He said, “Hollow people aren’t afraid of being hollow. Nuts aren’t afraid of going nuts. Your worry saves you.”
    She liked to be consoled, so she said maybe that was the case. But the comfort of logic was unbearably transient. The man said, “Aren’t women supposed to be hollow? I mean, to adapt themselves to a male type and take their form from him?”
    Leslie tapped her large front teeth and thought it over. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God!”
    When she was alone in the present she knew she was nothing at all. But when she remembered all she had done (good God!) and thought and said, it seemed to her, too, that a hollow person could not have left such vivid traces behind her, like a path of confetti. And she, naturally, remembered more of the Leslie legend than anyone else. Others only had parts of it. They had never seen her diaries.
    She remembered how her mother used to tell of a trip the family had taken through the South in the late forties. “Leslie even flirted with a chain gang ,” Mrs. Skinner said. She could not get over it, never seemed to cease marveling, since of course it was all so innocent.
    Poor chained convicts on a dusty road in Georgia—what a fleeting appearance they had made in the legend of this heroine of the Republic. It took Mr. Skinner ten minutes to change the tire while plump young Leslie simpered and smiled across the ditch and barbed-wire fence that separated her from the astonished cons. Then time separated them forever, except in Mrs. Skinner’s tale.
    There had been multitudes in her legend of love. As late as her twenty-second year when she left college for her first job, she wrote on a loose-leaf sheet that became part of her diary, “I know that it is wrong to think