It had rained for two days in Isle End after two weeks of miserable, humid weather. It was early in August for things to go brown at the edges as if they’d been in an oven. Then the two days of rain came with temperatures dropping twenty degrees from the high nineties, and the heavy rain turned the world to gravy, and everything steamed green. Sunday morning, the sky was a crisp blue, fifty-eight degrees at eight A.M.
The house Professor Freeman Post Gordon owned was on a green lawn beside green woods before the blue-green shore. He was known in Isle End as Flash Gordon. His housekeeper, Bette Awad, called him that behind his back, and the name stuck. She had confused the stories he told her children, Mambo and Mae, and their friends (primarily Richard Limb) with the Saturday morning television shows the children watched. Bette Awad’s younger daughter, Mambo, was pretty and slim, and black-haired like a kewpie doll. Her older sister, Mae, looked like a smudged version of Mambo; she was retarded, perpetually six or seven years old, although her body at nineteen was a woman’s and already tending to her mother’s overweight. The house they all lived in was a three-story greystone, unusual in Isle End. It had belonged to Flash Gordon’s wife, Dorothy Potter Gordon. It was because Dorothy was an Ender that Flash Gordon had come east every summer from Ohio where he taught medieval literature at a small college. When he had retired ten years before, they had returned to Isle End for good.
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