VENTUALLY, THEY REACHED IRELAND, at that time a haven for scholars, artists, and intellectuals whose homelands had fallen under the control of yahoos, fascists, and philistines.  Among those fugitives was the Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, formerly a professor at the universities of Berlin and Graz.  Not long after Andy and Rosetta reached Ireland, Schrödinger gave a series of lectures on biology under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.  At one of these lectures, Andy and Rosetta tested their new identities in public for the first time.  They had become a young couple of Scotch-Irish extraction.  Andy was a struggling painter whose work was nearly monochromatic.  He was loud and unpredictable, attractive and intimidating.  Rosetta was a struggling poet whose work was so melancholic that she began to exhibit the outward and visible signs of poetic melancholia herself: the pale skin, the tendency to faint away, the circles under the eyes, the nervous tremor in the fingers, an interest in drink, a craving for cigarettes, and a constant fatigue that resembled ennui.  Actually, Rosetta wanted to write about hope, and Andy wanted to ridicule the viciousness he saw, but for the sake of their incognito, they set those impulses aside.  When they felt confident that the Bat could go undetected, they left for America, and a year later Schrödinger published his lectures as a slim book with the title What Is Life?
    By the time they reached America and settled in Babbington, Rosetta felt threatened by her own work, and yet the mood that it induced in her kept her working at it.  She had developed an elaborate auto-referential system in which her early poems inspired subsequent ones and became their subject matter.  Not even the end of the war changed her mood.  She was on a self-propelled downward spiral, and she couldn’t see how to end it.  Fortunately, chance intervened.
    One day, while she was shopping at the Babbington Market, she noticed beside the cash register a pad of coupons.  She picked it up and read: 

    “Are they kidding?” she asked Mr. Delmonico, who supervised the fruit-and-vegetable department.
    “Kidding?” he asked.
    “Do they think I would want to eat these string beans on a beach in Miami?”
    “I don’t know.  It’s just a gimmick.”
    “Do they really give you this?  A trip to Miami?”
    “Sure.  There’s only one prize, I guess, but somebody gets it.”
    Rosetta tore one of the coupons from the pad, took a pencil from her purse, and, with hardly a moment’s hesitation, wrote, “I’d rather eat Troubled Titan Brand French Cut String Beans almost anywhere but where I find myself, drowning in a sea of doubt, sinking in tempestuous darkness while all around me great sea-worms writhe and scream, ecstatic with the smell of me, and hungry, hungry, hungry.”
    Mr. Delmonico read it.  “You haven’t got a chance,” he said.

Kraft’s latest sexy-sweet novel devolves into a perfect madeleine—dissolving just as you bite into it, leaving an insatiable desire for more.

At Home with the Glynns is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin’s Press, at $11.00.

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At Home with the Glynns is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.