On a clear winter morning in January, 1957, Billy Fitzgerald ended his studies for the priesthood and withdrew from St. Joseph Seminary College in St. Benedict, Louisiana. He returned home to Charleston, South Carolina and took up a job driving a beer truck. It wasn’t the rigor of academic studies and certainly not any lack of religious devotion or commitment that caused Billy to leave St. Joseph.

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Ellen was a little awkward now. Tall, straight black hair then iron-gray, pulled back but not severe, gray suits, white blouse, all business, she had been rather stately. She moved with purpose, but still Harry could not predict her intent. She lived only in his head. It was a month after her death that she took up residence there. Where she had been in the interregnum, what she had done,

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The Barnum and Bailey Circus is in town. It is West Palm Beach, Florida and Marcia Matherton is seated in the first row facing the center ring. A small boy and girl entranced by the spectacle sit on either side of her. In the center ring, six white horses gallop two abreast at speed in a tight circle. A woman in a pink tutu is balanced with a foot on each of the two lead horses. As they fly around the circle,

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There was a time when my Uncle Walter lived with his sister-in-law. She was my mother. It was in Spring Lake, New Jersey during the war and after my father left for the Pacific Theatre. When Uncle Walter came, there were the three of us. I was in high school. Mother worked in the candy store just around the corner from the bicycle shop on Third Avenue.

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It’s hot; over a hundred degrees. The August air hazy with DC automobile fumes burns the lungs. Percy Moneyworth is shuffling down K Street bulked up in a dark green sweater, a ratty brown overcoat that hangs below his knees and a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He looks as though he is wearing all the clothes he owns.

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Change comes slowly to the piney woods of north Florida. Like evolution, life advances in increments so small as to be scarcely noticeable. An isolated expanse of sand, palmettos, scrub oak, and jack pine, this region below the dip of the Saint Mary’s River looks and feels like a stretch of eternity.

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“How unobtrusively and simply do those events take place on earth that are so heralded in heaven! On earth it happened in this wise: There was a poor young wife,…” It was the traditional family reading of Martin Luther’s Christmas sermon and Mirabelle Arablla Southerland was in no mood for it. She was still upset and bothered, and the self-assured calmness of her father’s voice only added to her disquiet.

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The room is a single-bed dorm room in a redbrick building constructed before the Civil War. It is hot and musty and smells of age and decay. Thurmond Roydal crosses the room and lifts a black and white promotional photograph of Gertrude Lawrence from his dresser. He studies the woman’s features for a moment then gently traces the outline of her face with his fingers. Her look is withdrawn and distant. A highlight on her lower lip expresses its contour and contributes

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In the solarium, fronted by large plate glass windows that looked north on the flowering mountains, Horace Becker was sunk in his armchair, bent over his book. Small, it was a thin volume, paperback, as slim and meager as Becker himself; he read: “He saw a landscape, a tropical swampland under a heavy, murky sky, damp, luxuriant and enormous, a kind of prehistoric wilderness of islands, bogs, and arms of water, sluggish with mud; he saw, near him and in the distance,

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