The Last Chairlift

29. THE GOOD SHEPHERD

Your first loss of a loved one, the first death of someone dear to you—when it happens, the pace of everything changes. In the past, there were times when nothing seemed to be happening. When you lose someone, you’re aware of the earth’s motion; the world is always moving, always ahead of you. For the rest of your life, you know there are other deaths coming—one after another, yours included.

Matthew Zimmermann turned twenty-five in October 1967. We were the same age when Zim went to Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, on December 13 of that year, but I turned twenty-six only five days later. In truth, Zimmer was almost a year younger than I was. As I read in one of the press reports, the news of Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann’s death was carried to his parents’ Park Avenue home on a Sunday (February 18, 1968) by a special representative of the secretary of the army. Zim’s father, Colonel Thomas Zimmermann, said only that his son was killed in action in Vietnam on February 17, 1968. A more explicit press report, quoting the official telegram of notification, stated that Zim died from “wounds received while on a combat mission when his unit came under hostile small-arms and rocket attack while searching for remains of a missing soldier of his unit.” (As Nora later said, this sounded like an official telegram; a lot was left to the imagination.) Knowing Zim’s ideas concerning what second lieutenants were supposed to do—a platoon leader was expected to set an example, and to take care of the platoon—I was not surprised to hear how Zim died, searching for the body of a missing soldier amid a rocket attack and small-arms fire.

When I called my mother in Manchester, I was a little surprised to hear what the trail groomer told me. “Your mom has shut herself in the bedroom—she’s not talking about it,” Molly said, not in her usual voice. I could tell she was trying to keep her voice down. “I should have shot him in the driveway, Kid—I had a pretty good angle, out the kitchen window,” the ski patroller told me very softly. I knew Molly was trying to protect me from my mother, who not only must have been talking about it; knowing Little Ray, she probably had a lot to say. “There was nothing obstructing Zim’s knees when he was doing the lunges,” Molly was saying, more softly, when I heard my mom calling. (My mother might have been in the bedroom, but the door had to be open.)

“Is that my one and only?” I heard my mom ask.

“Better hang up, Kid,” Molly whispered to me.

“You should have let me shoot him! Both of you are to blame! Zim would be alive if you had let me shoot him!” my mother screamed. “He was just a boy—Zim was a little boy! He was still growing!” my mom was wailing, again, when Molly hung up the phone.

I read somewhere that daily burial rates at Arlington National Cemetery peaked at twenty-eight in 1967. Zim’s burial was described to me in a letter from another Exeter wrestling teammate who was in the military: Zim was buried on a grassy knoll at Arlington, under the same kind of government-issued headstone as the good soldier beside him—Zim’s grandfather, General Joseph Zimmermann.

“The big-deal, World War One Zimmermann,” the snowshoer had called the general.

“Dear Team,” the letter from my Exeter wrestling teammate in the military began, because he was writing to me and the rest of Zim’s teammates. He explained to us that it was customary to wait several weeks or months for a funeral service at Arlington; however, in Zimmer’s case, the scheduling was “expedited,” our teammate told us. (There was the World War II Zimmermann, the colonel, to consider; Zim’s grandfather wasn’t the only big deal.) Our teammate mentioned the “military chaplain” and a “chapel service”—the “Caisson Platoon” was cited, but I never knew how Zim felt about horses. There’d been a “procession” and a “military band,” even a “firing party” and a “rifle volley.” I’m guessing it was at Zim’s graveside, at Arlington, where a bugler played taps.

Of course they gave Zim a medal; it had been pinned to the flag, which was folded in a certain way (with the medal on top) and then presented to Zim’s mother. Our teammate in the military took pains to tell us all this, and he told us there would probably be a “memorial service of some kind—at a later date, in New York.”

I’d never met Colonel and Mrs. Zimmermann—only Elmira, the dutiful housekeeper. The memorial, I imagined, was for Zim’s New York and New Haven friends—it was also, of course, for friends of the Zimmermann family. So I was more than a little surprised when I was invited, but not at all surprised that the invitation was mailed to me in care of Mr. Barlow at the little English teacher’s Exeter address.

Before Zim left for Vietnam, he knew I’d already finished my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City. I was able to live off the small advance I’d been paid for my first novel—I was still writing the last third of it—because I was living rent-free. Between the snowshoer’s faculty apartment in Amen Hall and the oh-so-familiar futon in the TV room of the house my mother shared with Molly, I always had a place to stay—I could, and did, write anywhere.

I could even write in Nora and Em’s rat’s-ass apartment in New York. If you were walking, it was equidistant from Columbus Circle and Carnegie Hall—in the northeast corner of Hell’s Kitchen, near Ninth Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street. I was welcome to sleep on Nora and Em’s couch; I could write on their kitchen table. It was a walk-up apartment, over a bad restaurant that kept changing. It was a bad Greek place when I was finishing my first novel, but it would continue to evolve—it always got worse.

Longhand Man, Nora called me, because I wrote my first novel in notebooks. (Not just the first one.) I type too fast; it’s better for me to write novels and screenplays by hand. Em wrote in longhand, too, but for a different reason. Em didn’t like typewriters because they were noisy; typewriters were like talking. When Em wrote by hand, she could write quietly; writing, for Em, was like pantomime.

And before Matthew Zimmermann went to Vietnam, he also knew that the snowshoer’s parents had offered me what they called a “research job.” The little Barlows, a nonstop writing team, believed I would benefit from some exposure to the “adaptation process.” The Kiss in Düsseldorf, the first of John and Susan Barlow’s Nazi-era novels, was being adapted as a movie. The two Barlows were writing the screenplay; they were calling me their “literary assistant.” As it would turn out, my “research job” wasn’t quite as vague as it sounds. I was supposed to be of assistance to the writing team, and to the film’s director. The snowshoer was cynical about my learning anything of literary value from his parents, but I was interested in the “adaptation process”; whatever one thought of their writing, the little Barlows were screenwriters, and their director had made some interesting films. The director wasn’t an unknown.

So Zim knew, before he went to the war, that I would be living like a nomad for the foreseeable future. All writers are nomads, I would one day believe, but Zimmer knew more than I did; he would even instruct Elmira to mail my invitation to his memorial in care of Elliot Barlow. Zim had told Elmira to be sure the snowshoer was invited, too. (But not my mother. Zim knew my mom wouldn’t want to go. She’d told him she wasn’t saying goodbye; Zimmer knew my mom only wanted to hug him and kiss him like crazy if he came back alive.)

The little Barlows had a pied-à-terre in New York, and one in Vienna—small but comfortable apartments, in both places. When Elmira mailed the invitation to Zim’s memorial to Elliot in Exeter, I happened to be working with John and Susan in their Vienna apartment. The snowshoer called me right away, telling me there was a printed invitation to the memorial service for Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann at St. James’ Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue, between East Seventy-first and East Seventy-second Streets—only a few blocks south, I knew, of the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment. On the back of the formal invitation was a handwritten message from Elmira; a “select few” were also invited to a “reception” at the Zimmermanns’ apartment, after the church service. Zim had given his main mother, as he called Elmira, a short list. In the event of his death in Vietnam, Zim wanted me at his memorial service, together with one of his wrestling coaches at Exeter—“the small one,” Elmira specified. Coach Dearborn had made Mr. Barlow the lightweights’ coach at Exeter; the snowshoer had been Zim’s principal workout partner there.

I really needed a break from the little Barlows and their Nazi storm troopers—those two SA men who are seen kissing each other during Hitler’s two-and-a-half-hour speech in Düsseldorf in 1932. Those Sturmabteilung guys, the two kissers, were John and Susan Barlow’s main characters; one of them murders the other. Soon the kissing killer is murdering more storm troopers. I had some empathy for these fictional characters—even for the murderer, but especially for his first victim. Their historical counterparts were less sympathetic. Rudolf Hess and Ernst Röhm—they were actual SA guys. As Uncle Johan had first informed me, Röhm was co-founder and a leader of the Sturmabteilung. (It was Uncle Martin who’d told me Röhm was wounded on the Western Front, where he’d lost a piece of his nasal bone.) My principal “research job” for The Kiss in Düsseldorf was to view hours and hours of archival footage, everything from newsreels to propaganda films. The director wanted me to find early footage of Hess, Röhm, and Martin Bormann from before they were Nazis. They were Freikorps guys originally, as Uncle Martin had said. Right-wing nationalists, Uncle Johan called the Freikorps. Uncle Martin said Hitler had Röhm killed because Röhm was a homosexual, but Hitler had targeted other Freikorps guys for execution—including Röhm. (In a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler had implied that the Freikorps were enemies of the state.)

The director of The Kiss in Düsseldorf had been born in Philadelphia, but he thought of himself as an émigré; he said his parents were Russian Jews who were wise to get out of Russia and come to America from Europe. He knew a lot more about Nazis than I did. He wanted film of Hess, Röhm, and Bormann when they were young men—“even if they’re so young that we don’t recognize them,” the director told me. He was a great guy; I really liked him. His idea was to intercut the archival footage of future Nazis with the fictional characters and their made-up story. He wanted me to find—on the youthful faces of these right-wing nationalists in the Freikorps—“some indication of their intrinsic intolerance, their xenophobic hatred of others.” (The Freikorps were anti-communist, and they seemed to have some anti-Slavic racism going for them; the ones who later became Nazis took to the ideology of anti-Semitism and ethnic cleansing rather naturally.)

As for the elderly and crippled projectionist who screened the hours (and hours) of archival footage for me, he was the right age to have been a Nazi. The director and I were convinced that he had to have been a participant. The projectionist not only recognized Hess, Röhm, and Bormann when they were too young to look like the monsters they would become, but when they appeared onscreen, he stood and saluted them. During the lengthier screenings, the elderly projectionist was inclined to detach his prosthetic leg, which he bent at the knee before he placed it on an adjacent chair. As a result, when we were viewing the longer archival films, the projectionist stood and saluted Hess, Röhm, and Bormann on one leg.

The Freikorps guys weren’t my only “research job” for the little Barlows. There was archival film of Hitler’s speech to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf in 1932—these industrial magnates included many of Germany’s wealthiest men. In their screenplay, the writing team was very clear concerning how they wanted the speech to be used. We see Hitler assuring the Industry Club that National Socialism would be good for business, but there is no sound; while we watch Hitler speak, we hear (as voice-over) the mundane conversation of the two SA men who are lovers.

Conversely, when the camera is showing us the kissing storm troopers—for two and a half hours, the SA lovers pay no attention to Hitler’s speech—we are hearing Hitler’s voice-over, the most confounding and ominous excerpts I could find. My German was (and is) terrible. I had an English translation of the Düsseldorf speech, and the infinite willingness of the one-legged projectionist, who showed me the two and a half hours—again and again. Occasionally, I called Uncle Johan for help—when I couldn’t understand the German or the English translation. For example, when Hitler says, “But if a Weltanschauung cannot be applied to every sphere of a people’s life, that fact in itself is sufficient proof of its weakness,” I was lost.

“It’s not a translation problem, Adam,” Uncle Johan assured me. “It’s Hitler’s anti-democracy thing; it’s a totalitarian argument. Hitler believed there was a conflict between the principle of democracy and the principle of authority—he was an authoritarian, he hated democracy!”

“You should be the Barlows’ literary assistant,” I told Uncle Johan, but he gave me a pep talk—as he used to do when I was a child. Uncle Johan made me feel guilty for not appreciating the opportunity the little Barlows had given me. I was learning about another kind of storytelling. My first novel, which I was still completing, was also a historical novel. I would be paid to adapt that novel as a screenplay; although the movie was never made, I would learn something from that process, too.

Uncle Johan was right about the little Barlows, and he was right about Hitler. As for “the principle of democracy,” Hitler labeled it “the principle of destruction”; Hitler equated what he called “the principle of authority” with “the principle of achievement.” In Düsseldorf, when Hitler said, “Internationalism and democracy are inseparable conceptions,” he meant they were both bad ideas. (This appeared to go over well with the German industrialists.)

While the two Sturmabteilung guys are flirting with each other, but before their fatal kiss, I found a passage from Hitler’s speech that the director chose to use as voice-over—when Hitler pontificates, “I am of the opinion that there is nothing which has been produced by the will of man which cannot in its turn be altered by another human will.” The Industry Club of Düsseldorf must have loved that.

“Music to the ears of businessmen!” Uncle Johan shouted, reciting the chosen voice-over from the Düsseldorf speech—as Johan was wont to do—in German and in English.

The director also liked and used a shorter excerpt I showed him from Hitler’s National Socialist sales pitch to the industrial magnates. When the storm troopers are kissing and groping each other, Hitler’s voice-over is in German with English subtitles: “Life in practical activity is founded on the importance of personality.” In the context of what is happening onscreen, and what will follow, I’m guessing the juxtaposition of Hitler’s off-the-wall remark playing over the kissing SA men gave the director the lunatic dissonance he was looking for.

One of the kissers would kill the other one; the murderer would keep killing other storm troopers. One-liners from Hitler’s Industry Club speech would work as voice-over for the first two murders. When the storm trooper shoots his lover, Hitler’s voice-over—referring to “the superiority of the white race”—is the only sound. When the murderer strangles the next storm trooper, we hear Hitler’s voice asserting “the right to organize the rest of the world.”

This was arguably more effective in the film than it had been in the little Barlows’ political thriller, but Elliot Barlow had disparaged his parents’ writing—“overkill,” he’d called it—and the snowshoer wouldn’t like the movie of The Kiss in Düsseldorf much better.

“Mord, mehr Morde, noch mehr Morde!” Uncle Johan had once raved about the little Barlows’ murder novels. (“Murder, more murders, still more murders!” my uncle had declared; he’d been praising the murder-writing team, of course.)

But Johan had made me feel guilty for failing to appreciate the opportunity the little Barlows had given me, and I felt more guilty for how relieved I was when the snowshoer called me to tell me about the invitation. John and Susan Barlow were generous to me; I knew they would let me go to New York for Zim’s memorial. I’d given them the excerpts they wanted from Hitler’s speech in Düsseldorf. I’d found the archival footage the director was looking for—or at least what we imagined was the “intrinsic intolerance” and the “xenophobic hatred of others” on the youthful faces of those right-wing nationalists in the Freikorps. The writing team and the director of The Kiss in Düsseldorf didn’t need me anymore; yet I felt guilty for using Zim’s death, and his memorial service, as an excuse to quit a job I was simply tired of.

“Cynical characters, bleak nonendings,” Elliot Barlow had said of his parents’ Nazi-era novels and their Cold War novels. Now I knew firsthand what the snowshoer meant; the über-noir of The Kiss in Düsseldorf was getting me down. When I left Vienna for New York, I also felt guilty that I was looking forward to the memorial service for Matthew Zimmermann—2lT US ARMY VIETNAM, as his headstone in Arlington had been marked. I felt guiltiest, of course, for my small hands—my multiple finger injuries, my many extensor- and flexor-tendon surgeries. My little hands had saved me from the war in Vietnam, where Zim had died.

The snowshoer said he was taking the train to New York. It took forever to take the train from Exeter to Boston, and then from Boston to New York, but the little English teacher didn’t want to drive; he had student essays to read, and blue books to grade. “I can work on the train,” he said. We would take the train together, back to Exeter from New York. I would have my writing notebook with me; I didn’t care how long the train took. We would stay at the little Barlows’ pied-à-terre in New York. The writing team’s apartment was on East Sixty-fourth Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, on the Upper East Side. We could walk to the church and the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment from there; it sure beat staying at Nora and Em’s.

We knew St. James’ was an Episcopal church, but the snowshoer thought it had a Catholic-looking spire—a beautiful church with arches and a vaulted ceiling. On a sunny afternoon in late March, the stained-glass windows were brightly shining. The place was packed, but there wasn’t much of a military presence. Of course there were soldiers in uniform around, but the soldiers weren’t part of the service. No bugler played taps; the recessional hymn was a rousing one, about the resurrection to eternal life. The priest’s readings from the Bible were strictly from the New Testament, beginning with one from Romans: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us.” I stole a look at Elliot and saw that he took no comfort from this, nor did we feel more comforted by the priest’s efforts to throw himself full-tilt into First Corinthians—that strained, overreaching passage about Christ, how he’d been raised from the dead.

As First Corinthians says: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.” I could see the little English teacher thinking: What an awkward sentence! Or so I imagined, while the priest ventured into even more abstract territory.

Since this service, I have stayed away from Second Corinthians. There are certain mystical generalizations that simply don’t apply to young men killed in wars—such as, “we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” The snowshoer and I just looked at each other; then we had to look away. We didn’t want to think of Zim as transient.

There was a final prayer, of course, but I blocked most of it out—all I really remember is the sound all of us made when we knelt on the kneeling pads. “ ‘Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant Matthew Zimmermann,’ ” the priest read from The Book of Common Prayer, but I was determined not to listen; nothing in the memorial service had anything to do with Zim. Yet fragments of the final prayer remain—“ ‘into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light,’ ” the priest prayed on. Then the recessional hymn came crashing down upon us—more assurances of the resurrection of the dead—and Mr. Barlow and I were walking north on Madison Avenue, making our way to the reception at the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment.

“ ‘I am the good shepherd,’ ” Elliot Barlow was reciting, from the Gospel according to John. “ ‘The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,’ ” the snowshoer recited. We both felt that the priest should have read this bit from the Gospel according to John. It at least sounded like the duties a good second lieutenant would risk his life to uphold. We both believed Zim had been a good shepherd.

It was a Sunday in New York—March 24, 1968. A week later, President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. Four days after LBJ’s announcement that he wasn’t going to run again, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Only two months later, Bobby Kennedy would be shot to death in Los Angeles. But that Sunday in New York, the snowshoer and I already had the feeling that it was a little after midnight in America. Nora said the war in Vietnam wasn’t the only thing that was going off the rails. At the end of August that year, there were tens of thousands of protesters in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. Our fellow liberal Democrats wanted McCarthy, but Humphrey would be nominated. Many of the protesters were beaten by the police; Chicago looked like a police state. After the convention, Nora went around reciting a headline from The Washington Post—McCarthy was refusing to support Humphrey, or something like that. Don’t bother to read the article, Em pantomimed. Nixon would win the election; there would be four more years of our guys in combat, seven more years of the war in Vietnam.

That Sunday in New York, in March 1968, I was twenty-six. I was young and naïve enough to say to Mr. Barlow that I hoped our country would never again be as divided as it was right then; what I meant, of course, was that we couldn’t possibly be more divided as a country than we already were. I would be wrong. Elliot Barlow, as always, was kind to me—he never put me down.

“I hope so, too, Adam,” the snowshoer said. “But we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Then we arrived at the Zimmermanns’ apartment building, where the doorman showed us to the elevator and Elmira let us in. “Adam, you know where the colonel’s bedroom is—please put your coats there,” the housekeeper told me brusquely when I kissed her cheek; she’d been crying and was trying not to cry again. “And you must be Matthew’s wrestling coach—the little one,” Elmira said to the snowshoer.

“I’m Elliot Barlow,” Mr. Barlow said. At Exeter, I was used to the unspoken understanding that the snowshoer was my stepfather, although he was the only father I’d known, and a good one; I never let the stepfather label pass without clarification.

“Officially, Mr. Barlow is my stepfather,” I told Elmira. The housekeeper was leading us down a hallway to the colonel’s barracks, as if she didn’t trust me to remember the whereabouts of his solitary sleeping quarters. “But I never met my biological father,” I was saying, as I was in the habit of doing whenever the word stepfather came up. “I know that Mr. Barlow is the best father I could have had,” I told Zim’s faithful family housekeeper.

In retrospect, this wasn’t the smartest or the most stabilizing thing I could have said to Elmira, who’d been more than a second mom to Zim—she’d been his main mother. Elmira, who’d been holding herself together, broke down in the colonel’s bedroom. She suddenly grabbed that photo of Zim, when he was a toddler, not yet in uniform—when Zim was tightly holding one of the officers’ caps, either his grandfather’s or his father’s.

“Matthew was my only baby—I had no babies of my own!” Elmira cried, showing the photo of Zim as a child to Mr. Barlow. I felt responsible for her unraveling. My calling Elliot Barlow the best father I could have had—what bad timing. This made Elmira sense that her character was of a kindred nature to the snowshoer’s. She wasn’t wrong—she was just overwrought. “He knows how I feel!” Elmira said, sobbing; she seized the little snowshoer in her arms, hugging him to her big chest. I was afraid she would drop the photo of Zim, which I took from her trembling hand.

I’d been surprised to see Elmira snatch the photo from the colonel’s night table. Someone had moved the photo from the top of the small chest of drawers, where it once stood at attention alongside the photographs of General Zimmermann and Colonel Zimmermann. The colonel must have moved Zim’s picture closer to him. I returned Zim’s photo to the exact spot on the night table where I’d seen the housekeeper grab it—the edge of the night table closest to the colonel’s bed. The photo faced the colonel’s pillow. His young son’s face, in the light of the alarm clock, must have been the last face the colonel saw before he fell asleep; his young son’s face, under the arching gooseneck lamp, must have been the first face the colonel saw when he woke up.

The way Elmira went on hugging Mr. Barlow, I was worried that he couldn’t breathe. Then I realized the two of them were talking about the Picasso that wasn’t a real Picasso. “I’ve heard about it,” Elliot was saying. “Naturally, I would love to see it,” the snowshoer said. But Elmira wasn’t ready to let the little English teacher go.

“It wouldn’t matter to me, if you peed on it—I keep wishing someone would steal it,” the housekeeper told Mr. Barlow. “But as long as the painting is here, everyone is supposed to make an effort not to pee on it,” Elmira was saying, when we all heard someone call her name.

“Coming!” the housekeeper called. Before someone had summoned her, we’d heard no voices, not even the murmur of quiet conversation. It was either a small reception or a silent one, or both, Mr. Barlow and I were thinking—when Elmira left us in the colonel’s bathroom with the painting of the three-breasted nude.

“Two breasts should be enough,” we heard Elmira mutter to herself in the hall.

The snowshoer was appalled by the painting. “This is the kind of thing only a novel can make credible,” the little English teacher told me. He asked me to remind him why the Zimmermanns slept in separate bedrooms.

“She snores, he farts,” I reminded him.

“The three breasts would do it for me,” the snowshoer said.

The living room and dining room of the penthouse apartment were one big room, designed for entertaining. The dining-room table, piled with food, had attracted only the younger people; there were only three. Yalies, I presumed—probable Bonesmen, I knew Elliot was thinking. At opposite ends of a long sofa, two women in mourning sat as still as stones. The older one—small but fat, to use Zimmer’s words—was surely Zim’s mother, her face hidden in a black veil. People approached her and bowed to her, saying nothing. Occasionally, someone touched her hand. The other woman on the sofa, the younger one, was Zim’s fiancée. His engagement had been mentioned in his obituary in The New York Times; it was there I’d learned her name. Francine DeCourcey—of New York and Paris, the newspaper had said without further explanation. “She’s French!” my mother had cried on the phone to me, before handing the phone to Molly and shutting herself in the bedroom.

“What is that about?” I’d asked Molly.

“Don’t ask me, Kid,” the snowcat operator had said.

Small and thin, Francine DeCourcey sat on her far end of the sofa. No one came near her; perhaps no one dared.

A group of women around Zim’s mother’s age huddled together, discreetly whispering, or not speaking at all. A group of men in uniform had also formed, and they were talking in subdued tones. Whatever their subject was, they seemed to be in agreement about it, and whatever it was, they seemed angry about it. For this occasion, would Colonel Zimmermann be in uniform, or was it the protocol for retired military men to wear civilian clothes? The snowshoer and I didn’t know. The soldiers in uniform were older men. We did not see any younger ones. Were there no young men from Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann’s platoon? And we didn’t see someone who might have been Colonel Zimmermann among the military men.

What were they talking about? Mr. Barlow and I were wondering. We’d seen some scruffy-looking people gathered outside the apartment building—not near the front entrance, where they would have attracted the doorman’s attention, but near an alley alongside the building. Anti-war protesters, the snowshoer and I had first imagined. But at the family home of a fallen soldier? We thought not.

Mr. Barlow was brave enough to bow to Mrs. Zimmermann, and to touch her unmoving hand. I did the same. But Elliot was hesitant to approach the fiancée. It was a very long sofa, and the motionless Francine DeCourcey seemed far, far away. She looked shattered; she looked as if she might continue breaking apart if you so much as spoke to her. Especially if you lied to her, I was imagining—if I told her, for example, that Zim had never stopped talking about her. Francine DeCourcey looked so sad, I was thinking of lying to her—just to say something. I’m guessing she noticed me because I must have been wringing my hands.

“Are you Adam?” she suddenly asked me; she patted the sofa cushion beside her. “Come sit here,” Francine said. She had a French name, but she didn’t have a French accent. “Give me your hands,” she told me, when I was sitting next to her. I knew she wasn’t interested in a palm reading. Zim had probably told her about my damaged hands, my 4-F trigger finger. She knew my hands had been my ticket out of Vietnam. Her fingers traced the ropey scar tissue from the flexor-tendon surgeries in my palms. “If Matthew had your hands…” Francine started to say, her voice just stopping. She’d seen the snowshoer hovering between the two mourners on the long sofa. “Is that Matthew’s little wrestling coach?” Francine whispered to me.

“Yes, his name is Elliot,” I whispered, beckoning Mr. Barlow to join us. I refrained from repeating the stepfather-but-not-a-stepfather saga.

When the snowshoer was sitting between us on the sofa, Francine DeCourcey put one hand on his chin, turning him to face her, as if Mr. Barlow were a beloved but disobedient child. “When I first met Matthew, he was almost as small as you,” she said.

“He was almost as small as me when I met him—I know,” Mr. Barlow told her.

“I know!” Francine DeCourcey cried. “But why did he keep growing? If he’d stayed as small as you, they wouldn’t have taken him, would they?”

“They wouldn’t take me for Korea—I know,” the little English teacher told her.

“You see? It’s just so unfair! I could have loved him, if he’d just stopped growing,” Francine said to the snowshoer. “I could have loved him, if he’d had your hands,” she told me, reaching across Elliot’s lap, again taking hold of my damaged hands. I imagined then that Francine DeCourcey had the highest aspirations for her love of Matthew Zimmermann. I thought of the photo of Zim as a child, now on the colonel’s night table. I added Francine’s aspirations for her love of Zim to the weight of the expectations Zimmer had grown up with. It amounted to a crushing weight.

Though I failed to recognize him at first, it was the former Yale 130-pounder who rescued the snowshoer and me from the end of the long sofa, where Zim’s fiancée had no intention of letting us escape. “Weren’t you the Pitt one-thirty at West Point?” the Yalie asked me. “Zimmer said you were going to kill me—Zim could almost kill me, so I believed him,” the former wrestler said. I’d first seen him at the weigh-ins; he’d been stripped to his jock at West Point. Of course I hadn’t recognized him here in a coat and tie. When he extended his hand to me, and I shook it, he pulled me to my feet. He quickly performed the same rescue procedure on Mr. Barlow. “And you must be Zimmer’s wrestling coach, from Exeter—the workout partner who killed him in practice every day, Zim told me,” the Yale wrestler said. “These two guys haven’t met the other guys, Francine,” the Yale 130-pounder said to Zim’s bereaved fiancée. It was apparent that they knew each other; the cold dislike that passed between them seemed permanent and mutual.

The former Yale wrestler wouldn’t have made weight at 130 pounds, but, like me, he hadn’t really grown very much since that tournament at Army where we didn’t wrestle each other. Zimmer was the one who’d kept growing. The snowshoer, of course, had somehow stopped growing—years ago. The Yale 130-pounder introduced us to the two other young Yale men who were standing around. “This guy was Bartleby’s teammate at Exeter, and the smaller one was Bartleby’s coach and workout partner,” the former 130-pounder said.

“Bartleby,” Elliot Barlow repeated. The snowshoer and I knew the Bonesmen had nicknames. We’d not known what Zim’s nickname was; we didn’t know if a Bonesman’s nickname was supposed to be a secret. I just remembered that Zimmer had asked me not to call him Bartleby; it was clearly not a name he liked.

“Zimmer asked me not to call him Bartleby,” I told the three Bonesmen.

“Was Bartleby your nickname for Zim?” Mr. Barlow asked them.

“Zim, Zimmer—you wrestlers have your own nicknames,” one of the Bonesmen snidely said to the Yale 130-pounder. I empathized with my fellow wrestler, who seemed to be caught in the middle of a conflict of nicknames. Did the Bonesmen know Zim had hated being called Bartleby?

“I think Zim would have preferred not to be called Bartleby,” the Yale 130-pounder told the snowshoer and me. I believe he meant this sincerely; he may have been apologizing, also sincerely. The former Yale wrestler definitely wasn’t trying to be funny, but the other two Bonesmen laughed. The two who laughed definitely thought it was funny that Matthew Zimmermann would have preferred not to be called Bartleby.

“Fuck you two, and your secrets,” the little English teacher suddenly told the two Bonesmen who’d laughed. The Yale 130-pounder was definitely feeling caught in the middle of something now.

What the snowshoer had suddenly shown me was an instinct he’d almost managed to hide in his faculty apartment in an all-boys’ dormitory. Elliot Barlow had an interior mischief, an instinct for confrontation—not only a need to express himself as who he was, but to do so purposely, even at some real or imagined risk to himself. It was insufficient for Mr. Barlow to dress himself as a woman in the privacy of his apartment, or to venture out (as a woman) into downtown Exeter in the late-at-night or early-morning hours. This simply did not say, not strongly enough, who he was. It was necessary for the woman inside him to show herself to people who were predisposed to desire her—the very people who would hate her, and try to hurt her, for being who and what she was.

In the case of the two Bonesmen who thought it was funny that Zim hated being called Bartleby, or even that Zim regretted belonging to Bones, it was clear that the snowshoer had willfully provoked them. The little English teacher had known he was picking a fight. It was also clear that the Yale 130-pounder wanted no part of a matchup with me or Mr. Barlow; the former wrestler had been forewarned. Zim had told the Yale wrestler that I could kill him—and the 130-pounder also knew that Mr. Barlow had regularly killed Zim in practice.

But the other two Bonesmen weren’t wrestlers; I could see they were sizing up the snowshoer as someone too small to be taken seriously—a big mistake. The former Yale wrestler could also see what his two pals were thinking. “Just don’t,” he told them.

The Bonesman who hadn’t spoken, the one who’d only laughed, spoke to me—not to Elliot Barlow. “You should tell your little squirt of a wrestling coach to go fuck himself,” the heretofore-nonspeaking Bonesman said.

“I would prefer not to,” the snowshoer said, in the respectful but willfully irritating way the original Bartleby had spoken. I saw that the little English teacher had staggered his stance, his right foot ahead of his left, his weight on the balls of his feet, which he kept moving, and his knees were bent. Mr. Barlow, I knew, was one single-leg lunge away from a high crotch or an inside trip or a freight-train double.

“Oh, shit,” I heard the Yale 130-pounder say.

That was when Elmira interrupted the standoff. I hadn’t seen the housekeeper, or where she’d come from, but she was suddenly standing beside the snowshoer and me. Her arms were folded on her big bosom as she stared down the Bonesmen; Elmira’s contempt for the Yalies was as evident as the dislike they’d earned from Francine DeCourcey. “Adam, if you and Mr. Barlow can lend me a hand—in the kitchen—there’s something we need to carry outdoors,” the housekeeper told us.

“Outdoors,” Elliot Barlow repeated. Like a good wrestler, his feet never stopped moving, and his eyes were steadfast in their focus—staring at the sternum of the Bonesman who was of the opinion that the snowshoer should go fuck himself.

“It’s windy outdoors,” Elmira added, hooking arms with the little English teacher, and with me. “Let’s go get your coats.” She steered us along the hall to the colonel’s quarters, where I was glad to see again that photo the colonel had moved closer to him—the one of Zim as a toddler in an officer’s cap. It spoke well of the colonel that he wanted his dear son nearer to him, where the colonel could keep an eye on him—where the colonel slept, where the colonel dreamed.

“Where is the colonel?” I asked Elmira, when the snowshoer and I were putting on our coats.

“You’ll see,” the housekeeper said, sighing. She led us along the hall—this time, to the kitchen. It was closed off from the dining room by two tall swinging doors, the way kitchens designed for servants often are. Two ovens, two refrigerators, two sinks—countertops, everywhere you looked. A service elevator opened into the kitchen. “The colonel has already taken the soup pot and the ladle—the rest is for us to take down,” Elmira said, sighing again.

“Down,” the snowshoer repeated, staring at the service elevator. There were sandwiches piled on a platter on one of the countertops—the same sandwiches we’d seen on the dining-room table. There were paper plates and paper bowls and paper napkins and plastic spoons on a second platter.

A third platter was empty. The housekeeper told us it was necessary—to prevent the paper and plastic stuff from blowing away in the wind. “I’ll carry the empty platter,” Elmira told us, picking it up. She’d already put on a wool jacket. I took the platter of sandwiches; Elliot was in charge of the paper and plastic stuff.

“Oh, boy—a picnic,” the snowshoer said.

“You’ll see—it’s not exactly a picnic,” Elmira told him, as we got into the service elevator. On the ground floor of the apartment building, the elevator opened into an area where the garbage and trash were separated and collected.

In the alley beside the building, where the refuse was picked up and taken away, Mr. Barlow and I recognized the scruffy-looking bunch of wanderers we’d noticed before; they were not, as we’d first imagined, anti-war protesters. They were the homeless people, the drug addicts, the strays and castoffs of humankind—just a few of the poor souls Zim had tried to help.

“There are only seven of them—I thought there would be more,” Elmira said; she sounded disappointed. “They came to mourn Matthew, not for a handout,” the housekeeper wanted us to know. “But Mrs. Zimmermann wouldn’t let them in—they were not invited—and the colonel couldn’t leave them unfed or unattended.” Elmira sounded neutral about this. It wasn’t clear what the housekeeper would have done, if left to her own devices. Would Elmira have let in the strays and the castoffs, or would she have left them unfed and unattended?

Mr. Barlow was offering the paper bowls and the paper plates; no one wanted a napkin, but the seven lost souls all took a plastic spoon. A dignified-looking older gentleman clenched the spoon in his teeth, like the stem of a pipe. He’d once been well dressed but was now disheveled. His gray flannel trousers had lost their crease; his tweed jacket, one with leather elbow patches, sagged off his shoulders. His button-down, pinstriped shirt was soiled and untucked; he’d not changed his clothes for days, even weeks, but an aura of dignity remained as attached to him as the full beard on his face. The gentleman purposely moved to the rear of the line that had formed for the soup. He may have been setting an example of good manners for the others, or the way he kept drinking from the flask in the side pocket of the tweed jacket had diminished his appetite. His sips from the flask required an unusual kind of coordination and dexterity; he would part his lips just enough to admit entrance to the short neck of the flask, while he kept his teeth tightly closed on the plastic spoon.

Colonel Zimmermann gripped the handles of the soup pot with a pair of pot holders. Elmira was ladling out the soup. She’d given the empty platter to the snowshoer, and had shown him how to use it to protect the paper and plastic stuff from the wind. “You must be Matthew’s little wrestling coach!” the colonel had hailed Mr. Barlow. “Was it Korea, where they wouldn’t take you?” he asked.

“Yes, sir—I was too small,” Elliot answered him.

“Good for you!” the colonel said. “And you must be Adam, the wrestler who’s going to be a writer,” he said to me. “Does that trigger finger give you any trouble when you’re writing?” he asked.

“No, sir—no trouble,” I told him.

“Attaboy!” the colonel said. Whether or not he’d dressed according to military protocol for a retired colonel, I had no idea, but Zim’s father was appropriately dressed for a memorial service; he wore a black business suit and a black necktie with a white dress shirt. A star-shaped medal of considerable distinction hung around the colonel’s neck; the medal’s weight prevented his necktie from flapping in the March wind. A cluster of other medals and military insignia decorated one breast of his suit jacket, giving him a lopsided appearance. The brightly colored ribbons, the glitter of gold and silver, marked Colonel Zimmermann as a man of undoubted bravery and distinguished service. He was so fit-looking, small but strong, the colonel seemed of indeterminate age. I’m guessing he would have been in his sixties, possibly in his early seventies—definitely closer to Uncle Martin’s or Uncle Johan’s ages than to my mother’s. (Zim had only said of his parents that they were older.) In any case, the colonel was at work without a coat—with only his medals to keep him warm, or perhaps the steaming soup pot also warmed him.

“Fernando,” the colonel suddenly said, not sharply but firmly. “Stop that.”

“Stop what, sir?” a young man in the soup line asked, politely and with seeming innocence. At a glance, he was a good-looking guy with a bad tattoo.

“You know what,” Colonel Zimmermann told him good-naturedly. The others in line gave Fernando their universally disapproving appraisals; they knew what he’d been doing. I’d seen nothing; I’d begun by offering sandwiches at the front of the soup line. A middle-aged woman took too many sandwiches; she had trouble balancing her soup bowl and her paper plate.

“You can come back for seconds, Mary—you don’t need to take every sandwich in sight,” Elmira said to her.

“Ya nevah know, Elmira—there are opportunities that don’t come again,” Mary informed the housekeeper with biblical authority. Mary promptly ate all of one sandwich, but she yielded her position to the boy in line behind her. Then it was the boy’s turn to take as many sandwiches off my platter as he could hold.

“For God’s sake, Felix,” was all Elmira said.

“Attaboy, Felix,” the colonel encouraged him. Felix was a nice-looking kid, except for a birthmark or a burn scar on his forehead; the boy’s floppy bangs only partially concealed this blemish. Felix was too young a kid to be safely on his own. I imagined he must be a runaway, as Buddy had been.

Elmira had made no mention of Buddy. I’d immediately looked for Buddy, of course, but did not find her in the soup line. There was one young woman, certainly an underage girl, who at first reminded me of Buddy, with the same air of outer calm but inner mayhem about her. She was in line in front of Fernando. When I offered her the sandwiches, she was too shy to look at me; she took only one sandwich.

“Take more, Lucy—ya nevah take enough of nothin’,” Fernando said to her, but Lucy shook her head. When she smiled at me, her lips parted only slightly. I had the impression that Lucy might have been missing some teeth, because she wouldn’t open her mouth to take a bite of her sandwich while I was standing in front of her.

I moved on to Fernando, who helped himself to three or four sandwiches. “I’m takin’ more for Lucy—she’s gonna want more; she always does,” Fernando told me. “Ya don’t know the difference between what ya want and what ya don’t—ya nevah do,” he said to Lucy, who was vigorously chewing. She’d almost finished her one sandwich, but I still hadn’t seen her open her mouth. I moved on.

Next in line, a young Black couple hadn’t stopped whispering to each other. They clung together fearfully—as if they were being hunted, or they’d been betrayed—but I knew their story. Zim had written me about them. Not long before Zimmer left for Vietnam, the young man had been sent home from the war. Elmira had discovered that, in his absence, there was no one looking after his younger sister. The girl had managed to “get herself pregnant”—the unlikely way the housekeeper had described the pregnancy to Zim.

The way Zim had described the situation to the colonel was that “a kid was expecting a kid,” and there would be no one to look after the young mother or her child if Colonel Zimmermann didn’t “pull some strings” and bring the older brother back from combat. While it was highly unlikely that the younger sister had managed to get herself pregnant, the colonel did pull some strings; the older brother was brought home and relieved of further military obligations. The young man was endeavoring to look after his pregnant sister, as best he could. Elmira would help them, Zim had written me. What was not helping the young pair was their whispering to each other, because the whispering concerned the identity of the baby’s father. The brother wanted to know who’d knocked up his baby sister. The sister, wisely, wouldn’t say who it was.

Elmira (and the colonel, of course) had told the brother to let it go. It wouldn’t help him, or his sister, if he knew who the baby’s father was. “It’ll only make more trouble,” the housekeeper had told the brother. His sister didn’t need to be told.

Their parents had abandoned them, Zim wrote me. The brother was Talib and his sister was Ayla.

“The only thing that matters, Talib, is that you aren’t that baby’s father, and we all know you aren’t,” Elmira had told him.

“Nothin’ that bad happened, Talib—that’s all you need to know,” Ayla had said. But Talib was obsessed. Who did it? he kept asking. Talib whispered names. He named his high school friends—as if they were the only ones who could have done it, knowing Talib was away. “Are you kiddin’, Talib?” Ayla whispered back to him.

Thanking me, Talib took two egg salad sandwiches; with one of the sandwiches, he pointed to his pregnant sister. “She’s got mornin’ sickness—just thinkin’ about eggs makes her puke,” Talib told me.

“Just you pointin’ at me with those eggs makes me think about pukin’, Talib,” Ayla told him.

“I don’t think there are any eggs in the soup,” I said to her, trying to move on—not wanting to hold the platter of egg salad sandwiches in front of her.

“Thank you—I’ll wait and see what’s in the soup,” Ayla said.

“I don’t know why they call it mornin’ sickness—the pukin’ part isn’t limited to the mornin’,” Talib was saying.

“Not everyone needs to know everythin’ about somethin’, Talib,” Ayla whispered to him.

“Not everyone, Ayla, manages to get herself pregnant—not even the Virgin Mary acted entirely alone,” Talib whispered back to her. I moved on. Anyone seeing them would have thought they were an attractive young couple. A tall, slender young man with his hair cut short and wearing military fatigues—in Talib’s case, the fatigues were his working clothes, not a costume—and a pretty young woman who was noticeably pregnant.

“If you’re going to keep doing that, Fernando, you’ll have to move away from Lucy,” Colonel Zimmermann said. I saw that Fernando was dry-humping Lucy from behind. I just offered the sandwiches to the older gentleman, who seemed indifferent to eating or the humping.

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” Fernando said; he sounded sincere, but his bad tattoo told another story. It was a sailor’s tattoo—a tall ship’s mast ran up one side of his neck, reaching to his temple. But the ship’s mast was only the background of what was also a true-love tattoo. On Fernando’s cheek was a heart, pierced by a dagger. The pommel of the dagger was a dark knob under Fernando’s eye, the hilt stood parallel to his nose, and the blade crossed his chin, the tip touching his throat. The true love’s name, written in small capitals on the bleeding heart, was not LUCY—she was someone Fernando had fooled around with, before Lucy. As tattoo artists know, a true-love tattoo lasts longer than many true loves.

“You’re not doing anything to encourage Fernando, are you, Lucy?” Colonel Zimmermann asked the girl. With her lips tightly closed, she shook her head, but I could see that Lucy’s denial was met with disbelief by the others in the soup line—not to mention by Elmira.

“You are encouraging Fernando, Lucy—I’ve seen you be encouraging to him,” the housekeeper said.

“Lucy, go stand beside Adam—he’s got the sandwiches,” Colonel Zimmermann told her. The girl complied with downcast eyes—not looking at me, or at the sandwiches. The older gentleman was looking at me—not at the sandwiches.

“Not especially hungry today, Professor?” Colonel Zimmermann asked the dignified-looking gentleman.

“Not especially hungry every day, Colonel,” the professor answered. I’d noticed that his flask was empty. He kept uncapping it and lifting it to his lips, where he tilted it, but there was nothing left in the flask—only fumes, I imagined. “And you—your name is Adam, and you’re going to be a writer?” the professor asked me. The snowshoer would tell me later that I’d failed to understand the Em-like pantomime the colonel was performing with the soup pot; his gyrations and contorted facial expressions were intended to forewarn me not to speak of publishing my writing to the alcoholic professor. But I misinterpreted Colonel Zimmermann—I thought he’d burned himself with some spilled soup. I explained to the older, academic-looking gentleman that I’d received an advance for my first novel, which I was still writing. The novel would be published by Random House when I finished it, I said.

“Random House—not exactly a small-press publication!” the professor exclaimed, stumbling out of the soup line. “And they’ve paid you an advance!” he cried, the plastic spoon snapping in his clenched teeth and the paper bowl and paper plate falling from his outstretched hands, like the hands of a supplicant, or of someone praying. “Random House!” the professor repeated. That was when Lucy licked my face. I was too surprised to react right away, and I still had both hands on the sandwich platter. Lucy began by licking my cheek, then my ear, then the side of my neck.

“Stop licking him, Lucy—you don’t even know him!” the colonel said. This time, he spoke sharply.

“You see? That’s what she does—she don’t know what she means, she don’t know she’s bein’ encouragin’,” Fernando said.

“You can’t lick men and not encourage them, Lucy,” Colonel Zimmermann advised her, more gently.

“It’s disgusting, Lucy,” Elmira added.

“She don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Fernando tried to assure us. Lucy smiled. Nothing was meant by her smile, I was thinking, but her lips were parted. I could see the gaps where her teeth had been.

“He’s publishing a first novel,” the professor was saying to himself; he was shuffling away from us, leaving the alley. Lucy’s licking was of no more concern to him than the humping.

“It’s a historical novel—I don’t think anyone will read it. It was just a small advance!” I called after the old academic, but he’d already reached the sidewalk.

“The professor has written some books, but I don’t believe he’s been published,” the colonel confided to me quietly. It would have been best, I imagined, if the professor had walked into the traffic on Park Avenue, where he could have been instantly killed by a car, but he turned south on the sidewalk, where he was lost from our sight.

A strained silence and a loss of concentration seemed to unhinge the soup line. We could all hear what Talib whispered to Ayla, and what she whispered (more loudly) back to him.

“It wasn’t Reggie, was it?” Talib had whispered.

“What must you think of me?” Ayla whispered, harshly. “I would sooner have sex with a dog than with Reggie!”

“Let it go, Talib, let it go,” Colonel Zimmermann said, so softly he was almost whispering.

“There’s lots more soup,” Elmira said. Mary, Felix, Fernando, and Talib had the most soup. Even Ayla had a little, her morning sickness notwithstanding. Mr. Barlow and I were disinclined to return to the gathering in the Zimmermanns’ upstairs apartment; we felt more at home in the alley with the castoffs Zim had helped.

Talib was the first to pay his respects to Zim, specifically; he spoke directly to Colonel Zimmermann as we were leaving the alley. “I know I speak for all of us—Colonel, sir—when I say how sorry we were to hear about your Matthew.”

“Thank you, Talib,” the colonel said. He would not let anyone carry the soup pot for him; he would not let Elmira persuade him to take the service elevator, either.

“They don’t like us to carry food through the lobby, Colonel—not even you,” Elmira reminded him.

“Then we’ll forgive them for not liking us when we do it,” the colonel told her.

We were a strange assortment of vagabonds—we looked decidedly out of place on Park Avenue. Not a single taxi, whizzing by, slowed down to take an inquiring look at us. Not even Colonel Zimmermann—elegantly dressed in funereal attire, and with half a chest of medals—caught the cabbies’ eyes. To the taxi drivers, the colonel was just a crazy old man carrying a soup pot.

“Colonel Zimmermann, sir,” Mr. Barlow began; he was struggling with the two platters, trying to shield the paper bowls and paper plates and paper napkins from the wind. A telltale trail of fallen plastic spoons marked the snowshoer’s path along the Park Avenue sidewalk. “Sir,” Elliot Barlow said a second time, as a paper plate was blown away in the wind, “your Matthew was a good shepherd.”

“Good soldiers are good shepherds, Mr. Barlow—thank you for noticing!” the colonel warmly said.

“For God’s sake—give me all that, Mr. Barlow,” Elmira said. She took the two platters with the paper and plastic stuff, hugging them to her capacious chest—the soup ladle held fast in her fist, like a mace. “Adam, give those sandwiches to Talib—he’s a good soldier; he can carry them,” the housekeeper told me. Talib took the platter of egg salad sandwiches from me—he was clearly used to taking orders from Elmira—then the good soldier who’d been saved from combat spoke to Colonel Zimmermann.

“I doubt, Colonel, that I am dressed appropriately for the party upstairs,” Talib told the retired commanding officer.

“You are most appropriately dressed, Talib—someone in fatigues should be there,” the colonel said to the dutiful soldier.

Ayla was keeping her distance from the egg salad sandwiches, or she was worried about her close proximity to the eggs in the elevator that would take her to the thirteenth floor. Yet the colonel also considered that the pregnant younger sister may have doubted the appropriateness of how she was dressed for the party upstairs. “And you, Ayla—you and your baby—look wonderful. There is no one at the party upstairs who looks as wonderful as you do,” Colonel Zimmermann told her. The hooded sweatshirt Ayla was wearing was probably Talib’s, I thought, but everyone could still see the sizable bump in the skinny young woman’s belly.

The doorman held the door open for the colonel and Elmira; he looked relieved that only Talib and Ayla followed those first two into the lobby. The snowshoer and I were left on the Park Avenue sidewalk with Fernando and Lucy, and with Mary and Felix—a couple of unlikely couples.

Mary was old enough to be Felix’s mother, but she wasn’t. “Where ya goin’?” Mary asked the boy, in a less-than-motherly way.

“I got nowhere to go,” Felix told her matter-of-factly.

“I’m goin’ to a nowhere I know somethin’ about—if you wanna come,” Mary said to him. The boy hesitated a long time; I thought the snowshoer was going to take him down and rub his face on the sidewalk. But Mary just started walking away; Felix quickly followed her.

That left the no-less-indecisive Fernando and Lucy. The bright sunlight was cruel to Fernando’s facial tattoo. The bleeding heart, stabbed on Fernando’s cheek, bled more profusely in the sun; the name of Fernando’s onetime true love, MYRTLE, was easier to read on the pierced heart. Lucy looked at him, then looked away. She was an underage girl with missing teeth. Whatever else Lucy was missing wasn’t clear, but it seemed evident she had not thought through the repercussions that could come from her licking men. “I’m goin’,” Fernando said, looking at Lucy, but she wouldn’t look at him. “You comin’, or what?” Fernando asked her, but Lucy shrugged; she kept looking away from him. Fernando was half a block away, and walking faster, when Lucy called to him. Lucy’s voice and her thoughts were clearer than the snowshoer and I were expecting.

“I do know the difference between what I want and what I don’t, Fernando! Sometimes, I do know what I mean—sometimes, I do know when I’m bein’ encouragin’!” Lucy called to him, but he just kept walking. “I know why Myrtle left you!” Lucy screamed after him. Fernando appeared to trip, or he staggered for a second, but he kept walking. “Because Myrtle found out about Buddy!” Lucy screamed. We watched Fernando veer west, across Park Avenue; speaking strictly for myself, I was hoping he would be struck and flattened by something. “Buddy left him, too—everybody with half a brain leaves Fernando, eventually,” Lucy said to the snowshoer and me.

“Did you know Buddy?” I asked the girl.

“I wasn’t around when Buddy was around—I just heard about her,” Lucy told me. “Buddy isn’t around anymore, or nobody’s seen her around here,” the girl said.

A taxi whizzed by, the windows open, the radio blaring—or Simon and Garfunkel, unseen, were somehow singing “Scarborough Fair” in the cab’s backseat.

“What about you guys—where are you goin’?” Lucy asked us. I thought she was being a little encouraging. We walked together, east to Lexington Avenue, and along Lexington to East Sixty-fourth Street, to the little Barlows’ pied-à-terre. Lucy had a look at the writing team’s apartment, while Mr. Barlow and I packed up our things and changed our clothes. I had my writing notebooks with me, and all the other stuff I’d brought from Vienna.

I hadn’t noticed that the snowshoer was wearing a bra until we were walking against the wind on Lexington Avenue. The wind whipped the little English teacher’s necktie over his shoulder and pressed his white dress shirt flat against his chest, where I got a glimpse of the bra—only briefly, before the snowshoer clutched his overcoat closer to his chest. The cups of the bra were too small for my mother. Was Mr. Barlow buying his own bras now? I wondered. A training bra, I presumed. At least it was white, I was thinking—a black bra would have been more noticeable under a white dress shirt.

“Lose the bra, Elliot,” I said to him when we were changing our clothes for the train.

“I thought you’d never notice,” the snowshoer said.

“I noticed it, too!” Lucy called to us from the living room.

I felt I had failed to be the snowshoer’s good shepherd. At Zim’s memorial, of all occasions, I had failed to watch out for Mr. Barlow. I’d let the little English teacher pick a fight with a couple of Bonesmen in a bra. What a bad soldier I would have been, I was thinking, as the three of us took a taxi to Penn Station.

“Don’t worry—I’m not goin’ all the way to New Hampshire, but I’ll take a ride to Penn Station,” Lucy had told us.

Our taxi driver was a hippie with a dirty-blond beard and a ponytail tied with a red ribbon. His cab was adorned with peace symbols, and he had a GET OUT OF VIETNAM bumper sticker. All the way to Seventh Avenue, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” was playing on the radio—the old Pete Seeger song, but it was the Peter, Paul and Mary version.

I was also thinking I had failed Francine DeCourcey, Zim’s fiancée. I believed I could have comforted her more—I should have tried harder to reach her in her grief. The song just repeated itself. Peter, Paul and Mary just kept singing. Lucy sang along with them. They were asking where the flowers, the young girls, and the soldiers had gone.

Where has the snowshoer gone—where is he going? I was worrying. Peter, Paul and Mary just sang. Our hippie cab driver was singing, too. The young girls in the song would never learn—that was the message.

I just looked at the little English teacher; he was always the smallest person, always stuck in the middle of every backseat. Mr. Barlow was between me and Lucy; he was even smaller than the underage girl beside him. Of course Elliot noticed how I was looking at him. I’m sure it was a desperate look.

“I’m sorry—please don’t worry about me, Adam,” the snowshoer whispered.

It was late afternoon or early evening, and it was a Sunday—Penn Station, as Zim used to say, was a zoo. Yet Lucy knew where to go; the wayward girl led us through the labyrinth. If Buddy had been around, we would never have found her in the swarms of arriving and departing passengers. If there were other runaways—other strays and castoffs of humankind, adrift in Penn Station—the snowshoer and I didn’t see them. We followed Lucy; the girl knew her way around. “Outward-bound, Boston—right?” was all the girl asked us, before leading us to our track. We were waiting for the gate or entranceway to our platform to open; until then, I’d not noticed a police presence in Penn Station. But when we stopped moving—we were just standing with Lucy, and with our fellow travelers to Boston—Mr. Barlow and I began to notice all the cops.

When Lucy covered her mouth with her hand, before she spoke, Elliot and I just assumed she didn’t want us to see her missing teeth. (Fernando wasn’t the one who’d knocked out the girl’s teeth, Elmira had told us; Lucy’s father had done it.) “Don’t talk to me—you don’t even want to look like you know me, or anythin’,” Lucy said into her hand, to the snowshoer and me.

The cops were usually in pairs; Mr. Barlow and I now noticed that two of them were looking at us, or they were checking out someone in our near vicinity. “Don’t look at the cops when they’re lookin’ at you,” we heard Lucy say, but we couldn’t see her, and her voice sounded farther away. The two cops were threading their way through the crowd in our direction, but Elliot and I stopped watching them.

“Do you know that girl?” one of the cops asked the snowshoer and me, when they were suddenly standing in front of us.

“What girl?” I asked, looking all around. As expected, Lucy was nowhere to be seen; she’d slipped away.

“The officer must mean the girl who showed us to our departure platform,” the little English teacher told me patiently—as if he were used to speaking to an inattentive child. “We asked a girl if she knew where the track to Boston was, and she brought us here,” the snowshoer said to the policemen.

“Oh, that girl,” I said, with steadfast indifference.

“Come on, let’s go,” the second cop said to his partner—the one who’d asked us if we knew Lucy. It was clear they weren’t going to find the girl, nor would they try very hard to look for her.

“Never mind—thanks,” the first cop curtly said to us. Then they moved on; we didn’t watch where the cops went next, as if Lucy were still instructing us not to look at them.

Five years later, Mr. Barlow would be living in New York City. One day, I would try living there, too. But that Sunday in 1968, we were both beginners in Penn Station. On the station platform, we didn’t know which train car we belonged in; one of the conductors had to show us where to board.

Then there was the awkwardness of all my luggage, from Austria—the giant duffel bag with my winter clothes, and the two heavy backpacks with my writing notebooks. When the well-built young man in the business suit spoke to me, the snowshoer and I were laughing. Mr. Barlow had been teasing me about the Canadian stickers I’d plastered both backpacks and my duffel bag with. If you were an American in Europe at that time, you knew you would be better treated by the Europeans if they thought you were Canadian. The Vietnam War was increasingly unpopular in Europe, if not yet as unpopular in the United States. “I hope you’re an actual Canadian,” the fit-looking young businessman said to me. The snowshoer and I were struggling to lift my giant duffel bag onboard the train. “Or are you just another fucking draft dodger?” the business guy asked me.

The bully patriotism was somewhat new then, or it seemed more surprising. I was taken aback by how well dressed the guy was, more than by his aggressiveness. The snowshoer, standing on the station platform, just bent both knees and shoved the duffel bag up to me; the bag drove me backward on the landing between the coupled cars of the train. Mr. Barlow’s small bag and one of my heavy backpacks were already aboard.

“I’m talking to you, pal,” the business guy said, pointing at me.

“He’s not your pal—he’s my pal,” the little English teacher told him politely but firmly.

Where the snowshoer was standing on the station platform, he blocked me from getting off the train—he also blocked the businessman from climbing onboard. “Get out of the way, you flaming fag,” the fit young man said, pushing Elliot out of his way. I just stood there, on the landing between the coupled cars. Not everyone is cut out to be the good shepherd Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann was, I was thinking.

The snowshoer’s hands were bigger than mine. Considering how small Mr. Barlow was, his hands always looked large to me. Suddenly his hands were locked at the businessman’s waist, the knuckle of one thumb pressed into the guy’s navel. The businessman was clawing at Mr. Barlow’s locked hands, but there were no loose fingers to peel apart. When Elliot locked his hands, he knew how to tuck his thumbs and fingers away; there was nothing to grab. The snowshoer’s locked hands were a double knot.

I just waited for the back-heel trip; Mr. Barlow had a good one. I knew it was coming. The business guy had no idea what was coming. His left cheek was what made a slapping sound against the pavement of the station platform. The little snowshoer had to step over the guy to board the train; Mr. Barlow brought the second of my two backpacks aboard with him.

We took a long time stowing my bags. When the train began to move, we had just sat down. The business guy was still on the station platform, but I was relieved to see he was sitting up of his own accord. The two people attending to him were not holding him up, and the businessman had a reasonably alert expression on his face. The way the guy just talked and talked made me wish I could have heard his account of what happened to him.

“ ‘There was this midget fairy—he managed to get behind me, somehow,’ ” I said to the snowshoer, as if that were the whole story.

“ ‘There were four of them—two of them held me, while the other two picked up the station platform and hit me in the face with it,’ ” Mr. Barlow began his version of the story.

“ ‘Four huge guys—all of them were communists,’ ” I told the little English teacher, who began to laugh.

We were both laughing when the train pulled out of Penn Station, but I didn’t really feel like laughing. I felt afraid. I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a good shepherd. I was wishing I’d told Zim about Mr. Barlow. Matthew Zimmermann had been a hero. Maybe Zim would have known how to save the snowshoer.