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1 3 4 Y ‘ ‘ S T E P H A N O S I S D E A D ’ ’ J O Y C E C A R O L O A T E S ‘‘Have you heard? – Stephanos is dead.’’ ‘‘Oh no! When – ?’’ ‘‘Just this morning, I think.’’ ‘‘But how?’’ ‘‘A heart attack, or an aneurysm – something sudden.’’ ‘‘My God! Stephanos . . .’’ Mickey was standing beneath an overhang just outside the quaintly titled Smila’s Sense of Organic Foods, waiting out the worst of a sudden thunderstorm. Despite the loud thrumming of rain on the overhang and on the pavement it was impossible not to hear this emotional exchange between a tall rawboned Midwesternlooking professor of math at the university and a middle-aged woman who was someone’s wife. (Mickey knew this was insu√erably snobbish. In fact, in certain quarters, Mickey herself, despite her Ph.D. and post-doc status, was no more than ‘‘someone’s wife.’’) And she knew Angelo Stephanos, or had known him, slightly. Mickey met the glances of the math professor and his companion with an expression of surprise and sympathy, for it seemed only tactful; she wasn’t prepared for the looks of extreme sorrow, even 1 3 5 R horror, on their faces, nor for the way in which they seemed not to see her, as if she were invisible. ‘‘But where did it happen?’’ ‘‘In his house, I think. Just – within minutes.’’ ‘‘He can’t be very old – not fifty . . .’’ ‘‘He’d been sick, someone was saying, after he’d returned from India . . .’’ ‘‘That wasn’t Stephanos, that was Bandeman, he came back with malaria; I think you’re confusing them . . .’’ ‘‘Stephanos was such a world traveler! He went to all sorts of dangerous places, like Kashgar, and Tibet, and then, to die at home – ’’ ‘‘Poor Beata! She’s so devoted to him . . .’’ ‘‘My God! Are you sure? It’s impossible to believe that Stephanos is gone.’’ Now another woman joined the two, astounded and aggrieved – ‘‘Stephanos? Angelo? Died? What are you saying?’’ Mickey recognized Abigail Burdine, wife of one of Mickey’s husband’s older colleagues in the Political Science Department: a woman Mickey considered cold-blooded and aloof, except at this moment she looked stunned, as if someone had struck her in the face. Abigail Burdine was a woman whom Mickey knew, but not well; who hadn’t been particularly friendly to Mickey in the early, di≈cult years at the university when Mickey’s husband hadn’t yet been granted tenure and exuded, in the eyes of tenured faculty and their smug spouses, something of the precariousness of a rock climber on a near-vertical slope: you felt sympathy for such vulnerability , but did not want to become involved with it. Eventually, when Mickey’s husband was promoted, and women like Mrs. Burdine were marginally friendlier to her, Mickey hadn’t been able to respond with any sort of convincing warmth. She’d perfected a method of not-seeing which was a kind of reverse social radar. Now crowding beneath the overhang, grocery bags gripped in both arms, the Burdine woman repeated in breathless disbelief: ‘‘Stephanos is dead? You mean – Angelo Stephanos? Are you serious ? How?’’ 1 3 6 O A T E S Y ‘‘Heart attack, or maybe an aneurysm . . .’’ ‘‘My God – when?’’ A surprise to Mickey, and something of a rebuke, that the woman who’d snubbed her for years was capable of such emotion. ‘‘The news is just going out. It’s on the university website. You can check your cellphone . . .’’ ‘‘My God! Oh.’’ By this time a half-dozen individuals were standing beneath the overhang as rain pelted the pavement. A sleety sort of rain striking the pavement like machine-gun fire. It was a relief to Mickey when shoppers emerged from Smila’s who had no awareness of or interest in news of Stephanos’s death. They stood quite quietly by themselves staring out at the rain and biding their time until they could rush out to their vehicles. Mickey saw with a smile how one straggly-haired young man, wearing a shiny yellow poncho, placed his purchases in his bicycle basket, covered them...

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