To her husband, Van, who loved her (in his way), both the fact of her dying and her continuous, ferociously whispered accusations were intolerable. She was supposed to have died early in the summer. “To be quite honest, old man, I’m surprised she lasted through the spring,” the friendly internist whose charge she was had said to Van in June. But June had passed, July, August, September; and in the middle of October still she “lingered on,” as the false old phrase would have it. As Penelope herself cried out, “My God, I’m lingering on—is that what malingering comes from, do you suppose? Have you thought of that? God, why am I still here?” “Here,” practically speaking, was the Moores’ country weekend house, on a bend in a river, in California’s High Sierras. It was a house that a local contractor had thrown together, somewhat hastily, on speculation—and which the Moores had bought on a hasty impulse. It was not well planned: some rooms, the master bedroom and the kitchen, were impractically large and drafty; the dining-living room was small and cramped.
