Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
T.S. Eliot The Waste Land 1922
May Barton sat parked along elegant Sutton Street in the damp dusk of a raw New England spring and watched the artistic, intellectual and mostly wealthy residents of East Side Providence arrive at their front doors. A platinum-haired woman wearing a voluminous black coat turned off the sidewalk into a courtyard and opened a heavily ornamented door into an old building cut into apartments. May saw the lights come on inside and a moving figure draw, and cast interesting shadows against, the shades. The woman in black and white was home.
There would be no such homecoming for May tonight. She was, in fact, waiting to see yet another in the endless string of unsuitable or unobtainable houses she was always seeking to possess. Just before six o'clock, May left her car and began to walk down the block to where the real estate agent was unlocking this new prospect. She walked quickly, but with a thought for how she looked. Providence was a small city, and at this time of evening any number of people she knew - or at least knew her - could be climbing College Hill.
May was not particularly hopeful about the house for sale. But she was certain that her house would appear and that one day she, too, would be able to come home in the way she believed other people did. She had once read of a woman who viewed 400 houses before finding the right one. What number, May wondered, was she up to now?
