The Last Gentleman

Chapter Two

IT WAS THE DAY after he broke off his analysis that the engineer received a sign: he set up his telescope in the park to photograph the peregrine and had instead and by the purest chance witnessed the peculiar behavior of the Handsome Woman and her beautiful young friend. Every morning thereafter the engineer returned to the park and took his position beside the same outcropping of rock.

The peregrine returned to his perch. Every morning he patrolled the cornice, making an awkward sashay in his buff pants, cocked a yellow eye at the misty trees below, and fell like a thunderbolt, knocking pigeons out of the air in all directions. The engineer took a dozen photographs at magnification one fifty, trusting that at least one would catch the fierce eclipsed eye of the falcon.

Every morning after work he set up his Tetzlar. After taking his two bearings, one on the eyrie of the peregrine, the other on the park bench, he had then only to lock the positions into the celestial drive, press a button, and the instrument would swing in its mount and take aim like a Navy rifle.

The Handsome Woman came four days later, left a note, but the girl did not come. Again he prized open the semicircle of tin and again he found a verse.

From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,

That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.

After that, neither one came.

At night he sat at his desk in the Y.M.C.A. casting about in his mind and drumming his fingernails on the steel top, which had been varnished to represent wood grain.

For two weeks he spent every spare moment at his vigil, coming to the park directly from work, forgetful of all else, sometimes forgetting to change his engineer’s smock.

What had become of his love?

Emerging one morning from Macy’s sub-basement, the engineer stood blinking in the sunlight at Nedick’s corner. It was the most valuable spot on the entire earth, having been recently appraised, he had read in The Times, at ninety dollars per cubic inch. It gave him pleasure to stand in Nedick’s and think about the cubic inch of space at the tip of his nose, a perfect little jewel of an investment.

For a minute or so he stood watching the bustle of traffic, garment porters pushing trucks of dresses, commuters from Penn Station pouring down Thirty-fourth Street.

Then, and for several mornings running, he experienced a hallucination which, however, he did not entirely recognize as such, a bad enough sign in itself. When he got sick, his sense of time went out of kilter, did not quite coincide with the ongoing present moment, now falling behind, now speeding ahead: a circumstance that no doubt accounted for the rich harvest of déjà vus. Now, as he stood in Nedick’s, it seemed to him that the scene which took place before his eyes was happening in a time long past. The canyon of Seventh Avenue with the smoking rays of sunlight piercing the thundering blue shadow, the echoing twilight spaces as dim and resounding as the precipice air of a Western gorge, the street and the people themselves seemed to recede before his gaze. It was like watching a film of bygone days in which, by virtue merely of the lapsed time, the subject is invested with an archaic sweetness and wholeness all the more touching for its being exposed as an illusion. People even walked faster, like the crowds in silent films, surging to and fro in a wavelike movement, their faces set in expressions of serious purpose so patent as to be funny and tender. Everyone acted as if he knew exactly what he was doing and this was the funniest business of all. It reminded him of a nurse he had in the South. Once his father took some movies of him and his nurse in a little park. Ten years later, when on Christmas Eve the film was shown and D’lo, passing in the hall behind the projector, stood for a moment to see herself with the others, the black nurses whose faces were underexposed and therefore all the more inscrutable but who nevertheless talked and moved and cocked a head with the patent funniness of lapsed time — D’lo let out a shriek and, unable to bear the sight of herself, threw her apron over her head. It was, he reckoned, the drollness of the past which struck her, the perky purpose of the people who acted for all the world as if they knew what they were doing, had not a single doubt.

Still no sign of the women in the park, and he cut short his vigil, watching only during the noon hour. There was more time now to attend to his physical health. He took pains to eat and sleep regularly and to work out in the Y.M.C.A. gym. He punched a sandbag an hour a day, swam forty laps in the pool, or, on cool days, jogged three times around the reservoir in the park. After a cold shower and a supper of steak, milk, vegetables, and wheat germ, he allowed himself a half hour of television and spent the remaining three hours before work seated bolt upright at his desk trying to set his thoughts in order.

He began the day by reading a few lines from Living, a little volume of maxims for businessmen which he had come across in Macy’s book department. It made him feel good to read its crisp and optimistic suggestions.

On your way to work, put aside your usual worries. Instead keep your mind both relaxed and receptive — and playful. The most successful businessmen report that their greatest ideas often come to them in such intervals.

Yes. And it was in fact very pleasant walking up Broadway instead of riding the subway every morning, one’s mind wiped clean as a blackboard (not that it was necessary for him to try to “put aside your usual worries,” since he forgot everything anyhow, worries included, unless he wrote them down).

Cheerful and sensible though his little book of maxims was, it was no match for the melancholy that overtook him later in the day. Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where they had been miserable in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery. Color returned to their cheeks and they left the train with a spring in their step.

Every day the sky grew more paltry and every day the ravening particles grew bolder. Museums became uninhabitable. Concerts were self-canceling. Sitting in the park one day, he heard a high-pitched keening sound directly over his head. He looked up through his eyebrows but the white sky was empty.

That very night as he sat at his console under Macy’s, his eye happened to fall upon the Sunday Times, which lay in a corner. There on the front page of an inner section was a map of Greater New York which was overlaid by a series of concentric circles rippling out to Mamaroneck in the north, to Plainfield in the South. He picked it up. It was one of those maps illustrating the effects of the latest weapon, in this case some kind of nerve gas. The innermost circle, he noted idly, called the area of irreversible axon degeneration, took in Manhattan Island and Brooklyn as far as Flatbush, Queens as far as Flushing, and the lower Bronx. The next circle was marked the zone of “fatty degeneration of the proximal nephrone,” and the third that of “reversible cortical edema.”

He frowned at the flickering lights of the console. Was it possible, he wondered, that — that “It” had already happened, the terrible event that everyone dreaded. He smiled and socked his head: he was not yet so bad off as to believe that he was being affected by an invisible gas.

Then, after looking at the map another ten minutes, he saw it at last, and his heart gave a big bump in his neck. Like a funnel, the circles carried his eye plunging down into the heart of Manhattan Island to — there, just inside the southeast corner of Central Park; there the point of the compass had been stuck while the pen swiveled, there just north of the little amoeba of the Pond.

The bench, where the Handsome Woman had sat, was exactly at ground zero.

He smiled again. It was a sign. He knew he would see the two women again.

He resolved to resume his vigil.

He needn’t have bothered. The very next morning, an unmemorable day neither cloudy nor clear, hot or cold, the engineer, who had emerged from Macy’s only to plunge immediately underground again, caught sight of the Handsome Woman on the subway level of Pennsylvania Station. It was not even necessary to follow her. She took his train. When she did not get up at Columbus Circle, he stayed on too.

The train burrowed deep into the spine of the island and began a long climb up into Washington Heights, where they emerged, she taking an elevator and he a flight of steps (but why? she didn’t know him from Adam), into a gray warren of a place which descended in broken terraces to the Hudson River. From the moraine of blackened gravel which covered the rooftops below, there sprouted a crooked forest of antennae and branching vent pipes. A perpetual wind pushed up the side streets from the river, scouring the gutters and forcing the denizens around into the sunny lee of Broadway with its sheltered bars and grills and kosher groceries and Spanish hairdressers.

He followed the Handsome Woman into a great mauve pile of buildings. Inside he took a sniff: hospital.

This time, when he saw her bound for an elevator, he entered beside her and swung around behind her as she turned. Now, eight inches in front of him, she suddenly looked frail, like a dancer who leaves the stage and puts on a kimono. There arose to his nostrils the heavy electric smell of unperfumed hair.

She got off at the tenth floor, so up he went to the eleventh and back down the steps in time to catch a glimpse of her foot and leg disappearing through a doorway. He kept on his way, past the closed door and other doors, past a large opening into a ward, and to the end of the corridor, where he cocked a foot on a radiator, propped his mouth on a knuckle, and looked out a sooty window. As usual, he had forgotten to put on his jacket when he left Macy’s, and his tan engineer’s smock gave him the look, if not of a doctor, at least of a technician of sorts.

Directly a man came out of the room into which the Handsome Woman had disappeared, and, to the engineer’s astonishment, made straight for him.

At first he was certain he had been found out and someone had been sent to deal with him. His imagination formed the picture of a precinct station where he was charged with a misdemeanor of a vaguely sexual nature, following a woman on a subway. His eyes rolled up into his eyebrows.

But the stranger, an old man, only nodded affably. Lining up beside him, he rubbed himself against the vanes of the radiator and began to smoke a cigar with great enjoyment. He cradled one elbow in the crook of the other arm and rocked to and fro in his narrow yellow shoes.

“It looks like Dr. Calamera is running late.” The stranger screwed up an eye and spoke directly into the smoke. He was a puckish-looking old fellow who, the engineer soon discovered, had the habit of shooting his arm out of his cuff and patting his gray hair.

“Who?” murmured the engineer, also speaking straight ahead since he was not yet certain he was being addressed.

“Aren’t you assisting him in the puncture?”

“Sir?”

“You’re not the hematologist?”

“No sir.”

“They suspect a defect in the manufacture of the little blood cells in the marrow bones, like a lost step,” said the stranger cheerfully, rocking to and fro. “It don’t amount to much.”

Two things were instantly apparent to the sentient engineer, whose sole gift, after all, was the knack of divining persons and situations. One was that he had been mistaken for a member of the staff. The other was that the stranger was concerned about a patient and that he, the stranger, had spent a great deal of time in the hospital. He had the air of one long used to the corridor, and he had developed a transient, fabulous, and inexpert knowledge of one disease. It was plain too that he imputed to the hospital staff a benevolent and omniscient concern for the one patient. It amounted to a kind of happiness, as if the misfortune beyond the door must be balanced by affectionate treatment here in the corridor. In hospitals we expect strangers to love us.

An intern passed, giving them a wide berth as he turned into the ward, holding out his hand to fend them off good-naturedly.

“Do you know him?” asked the old man.

“No sir.”

“That’s Dr. Moon Mullins. He’s a fine little fellow.”

The illness must be serious, thought the engineer. He is too fond of everyone.

The stranger was so wrapped up in cigar smoke and the loving kindness of the hospital that it was possible to look at him. He was old and fit. Ruddy sectors of forehead extended high into iron-colored hair. Though he was neatly dressed, he needed a shave. The stubble which covered his cheeks had been sprinkled with talcum powder and was white as frost. His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing-board smell that pierced the engineer’s memory. It reminded him of something but he could not think what.

The engineer cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you from Alabama?” He had caught a lilt in the old man’s speech, a caroling in the vowels which was almost Irish. And the smell. The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own back yard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch.

“I was.” The old man took a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and knocked it against his nose.

“From north Alabama?”

“I was.” His yellow eye gleamed through the smoke. He fell instantly into the attitude of one who is prepared to be amazed. There was no doubt in his mind that the younger man was going to amaze him.

“Birmingham? Gadsden?”

“Halfway between,” cried the old man, his eye glittering like an eagle’s. “Wait a minute,” said he, looking at the engineer with his festive and slightly ironic astonishment. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you—” snapping his fingers.

“Will Barrett. Williston Bibb Barrett.”

“Over in—” He shook his hand toward the southwest

“Ithaca. In the Mississippi Delta.”

“You’re Ed Barrett’s boy.”

“Yes sir.”

“Lawyer Barrett. Went to Congress from Mississippi in nineteen and forty.” Now it was his turn to do the amazing. “Trained pointers, won at Grand Junction in—”

“That was my uncle, Fannin Barrett,” murmured the engineer.

“Fannin Barrett,” cried the other, confirming it. “I lived in Vicksburg in nineteen and forty-six and hunted with him over in Louisiana.”

“Yes sir.”

“Chandler Vaught,” said the old man, swinging around at him. The hand he gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. “I knew I’d seen you before. Weren’t you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall’s in Hattiesburg?”

“No sir.”

“Worked for the highway department?”

“No sir.”

“How did you know I wasn’t from Georgia? I spent many a year in Georgia.”

“You don’t sound like a Georgian. And north Alabama doesn’t sound like south Alabama. Birmingham is different from Montgomery. We used to spend the summers up in Mentone.”

“Sho. But now you don’t talk like—”

“No sir,” said the engineer, who still sounded like an Ohioan. “I’ve been up here quite a while.”

“So you say I’m from somewhere around Gadsden and Birmingham,” said the old man softly in the way the old have of conferring terrific and slightly spurious honors on the young. “Well now I be damn. You want to know exactly where I come from?”

“Yes sir.”

“Anniston.”

“Yes sir.”

“He don’t even act surprised,” the old man announced to the hospital at large. “But hail fire, I left Anniston thirty years ago.”

“Yes sir. Did you know my father?” asked the engineer, already beginning to sound like an Alabamian.

“Know him! What are you talking about?”

“Yes sir.”

“We used to hunt together down at Lake Arthur,” he cried as if he were launching into a reminiscence but immediately fell silent. The engineer guessed that either he did not really know his father or they were on different sides of the political fence. His cordiality was excessive and perfunctory. “I got my youngest boy in there,” he went on in the same tone. “He got sick just before his graduation and we been up here ever since. You know Jamie?” For all he knew, the engineer knew everything.

“No sir.”

“Do you know Sutter, my oldest boy? He’s a doctor like you.”

“I’m not a doctor,” said the engineer, smiling.

“Is that so,” said the other, hardly listening.

Now, coming to himself with a start, Mr. Vaught took hold of the engineer’s arm at the armpit and the next thing the latter knew he had been steered into the sickroom where Mr. Vaught related his “stunt,” as he called it.

It seemed to be a roomful of women. There were only three, he determined later, but now with Mr. Vaught gripping him tight under the armpit and five pairs of eyes swinging round to him and shooting out curious rays, he felt as if he had been thrust onto a stage.

“And listen to this,” said Mr. Vaught, still holding him tightly. “He didn’t say Gadsden and he didn’t say Birmingham, he said halfway between.”

“Actually I didn’t say that,” began the engineer.

“This is Ed Barrett’s boy, Mama,” he said after pointing the engineer in several different directions.

A pince-nez flashed at him. There was a roaring in his ears. “Lord, I knew your mother, Lucy Hunicutt, the prettiest little thing I ever saw!”

“Yes ma’am. Thank you.”

The women were taken up for a while with tracing kinships. (Again he caught a note of rueful eagerness in their welcome: were they political enemies of his father?) Meantime he could catch his breath. It was a longish room and not ordinarily used, it seemed, for patients, since one end was taken up with medical appliances mounted on rubber casters and covered by plastic envelopes. At the other end, between the women, a youth lay in bed. He was grinning and thrashing his legs about under the covers. The Handsome Woman stood at his bedside, eyes vacant, hand on his pillow. As the engineer looked at her he became aware of a radiance from another quarter, a “certain someone” as they used to say in old novels. There was the same dark-browed combed look he remembered. Again a pang of love pierced his heart. Having fallen in love, of course, he might not look at her.

“—my wife, Mrs. Vaught,” Mr. Vaught was saying, aiming him toward the chunky little clubwoman whose pince-nez flashed reflections of the window. “My daughter, Kitty—” Then Kitty was his love. He prepared himself to “exchange glances” with her, but woe: she had fallen into a vacant stare, much like the Handsome Woman, and even had the same way of rattling her thumbnail against her tooth. “And my daughter-in-law, Rita.” The Handsome Woman nodded but did not take her eyes from the patient. “And here all piled up in the bed is my bud, Jamie.” The patient would have been handsome too but for a swollen expression, a softening, across the nosebridge, which gave his face an unformed look. Jamie and Kitty and Mrs. Vaught were different as could be, yet they had between them the funded look of large families. It was in their case no more than a blackness of brow, the eyebrows running forward in a jut of bone which gave the effect of setting the eye around into a profile, the clear lozenge-shaped Egyptian eye mirroring the whorled hair of the brow like a woods creature.

He sized them up as Yankee sort of Southerners, the cheerful, prosperous go-getters one comes across in the upper South, in Knoxville maybe, or Bristol.

“Where’re you from,” cried Mrs. Vaught in a mock-accusatory tone he recognized and knew how to respond to.

“Ithaca,” he said, smiling. “Over in the Delta.” He felt himself molt. In the space of seconds he changed from a Southerner in the North, an amiable person who wears the badge of his origin in a faint burlesque of itself, to a Southerner in the South, a skillful player of an old play who knows his cues and waits smiling in the wings. You stand in the posture of waiting on ladies and when one of them speaks to you so, with mock-boldness and mock-anger (and a bit of steel in it too), you knew how to take it. They were onto the same game. Mrs. Vaught feasted her eyes on him. He was nice. (She, he saw at once, belonged to an older clan than Mr. Vaught; she knew ancient cues he never heard of.) She could have married him on the spot and known what she was getting.

It was just as well he hadn’t pretended to be a doctor, for presently two doctors came in. One, a gaunt man with great damp hands and coiling veins, took the patient’s arm and began massaging it absently. The doctor gave himself leave not to talk and not to focus his eyes. The hand was absent-minded too, felt its way into the boy’s armpit, touched the angle of his jaw. What I am doing is of no importance, said the hand. Nothing was important but an unfocused fondness which seemed to hum and fill the room. Now, while the hand went its way, browsing past bone and artery and lymph node, the doctor leaned over to read the title of the book the boy had closed on his finger.

“Tractatus Log—” he began, and exchanged glances with his assistant, a chesty little house physician with a mustache and a row of gleaming pencils and penlights clipped in his pocket. The doctors gazed at each other with thunderstruck expressions which made everybody laugh. Again the youth’s eyes narrowed and his legs began to thrash about. Again the big damp hand went about its business, this time gliding to the youth’s knee and quieting him. Why, he’s seriously ill, thought the sentient engineer, watching the monitory hand.

“It’s not too hard to read,” said the patient, his voice all squeaks and horns. “Sutter gave it to me,” he told the Handsome Woman, who was still gazing dry-eyed and had taken no notice even of the doctors.

“What a wonderful man,” cried the engineer when the doctors left. “I envy you,” he told the patient.

“You wouldn’t envy me if you had to live in this room for five weeks.”

“I wouldn’t mind at all,” said the engineer earnestly.

They looked at him. “How long have you been up here?” Mrs. Vaught asked.

“Five years. Seven, including my two years at Princeton. All my immediate family are dead. Do you know this is the first time I have talked to a, ah, family in years. I had forgotten—” he broke off and rubbed his forehead. He saw that he was expected to give an account of himself. “No, really. I don’t think it is bad to be here. It reminds me of a time I was in the hospital — for three months — and it wasn’t bad at all! In fact I felt better in the hospital than anywhere else.”

“What was the matter with you?” Jamie asked him.

“I had a nervous condition, nothing very serious, an episode of amnesia, if you want to know the truth.”

“Amnesia,” said Kitty, looking at him for the first time.

“Yes. I didn’t know my own name, but I knew enough to put myself in the hospital. It was caused by a toxic condition.”

“You committed yourself,” said Mrs. Vaught.

“Yes ma’am. I went to a very expensive place in Connecticut and was soon much better.”

“How did you recover your memory?” Kitty asked him curiously.

“That was the strangest thing of all. For two months I remembered nothing. During this time I had gotten into the habit of playing Chinese checkers with another patient, a girl with a more serious condition than mine. She had not spoken to anyone for two years — she had not uttered a single word — even though she had received shock treatment. There was something familiar about her. Perhaps that was why I was attracted to her — that and the fact that I too was shy about talking and since she—”

They all laughed and he looked startled. “Yes, it’s true. I was shy! I don’t know why I’m not shy now. Anyhow she said nothing and I remembered nothing, and so it wasn’t bad. You asked me how my memory came back. It was very simple. One night as we played Chinese checkers I looked at her and remembered who she was. ‘Aren’t you Margaret Rich?’ I asked her. She said nothing. ‘Didn’t your family have the cottage next to ours in Monteagle ten years ago?’ (That was before we started going to Mentone.) Still she said nothing. ‘Why, I remember the dress you wore to a dance,’ I told her (I always remember the remote past first). ‘It was an orange-colored cotton twill sort of material.’ ‘That was my piqué,’ says she as normally as you please.” For some reason he flushed and fell silent.

“Do you mean that she spoke normally after that?” asked Kitty presently. She had swung around and was searching his face with her bold brown eyes.

“No, not normally, but it was a beginning,” he said, frowning, feeling irritated with himself for being garrulous.

“I don’t understand why she didn’t speak before,” said Jamie, thrashing his legs.

“I understand it!” cried Kitty. But then she blushed and turned away.

The others were not as amazed by the engineer’s somewhat disconnected story as one might expect. For, strange to say, it was understood that it was open to him at that moment to spin just such a yarn, half-serious and curious.

“Yes, I know why your stay in the hospital was not so bad,” said Jamie. “You weren’t really sick.”

“I’ll trade with you any time,” said the engineer. “Believe me, it is a very uncomfortable experience to have amnesia.”

At that moment the Handsome Woman whispered something to Kitty and the two of them kissed the patient, said their goodbyes and left. He waited for another brown-eyed look but Kitty had lapsed into vacancy again and did not seem to notice him. The talkative engineer fell silent.

Presently he roused himself and took his leave. The patient and his mother asked him to come back. He nodded absently. Mr. Vaught followed him into the hall and steered him to the window, where they gazed down on the sooty moraine of Washington Heights.

“You come on up here and see Jamie again, you heanh me,” he said, drawing him close and exhaling his old-man smell of fresh cotton and sour breath.

“Yes sir. Sir?”

“What’s that?” said the old man, giving him a hairy convoluted ear.

“The lady who just left. Now is that Mrs. Rita Sutter or Miss—”

“Mrs. Mrs. Rita Vaught. She married my oldest boy, Sutter Vaught. Dr. Vaught. They’re divorced. But I’m going to tell you, we’re closer to her than to Sutter, my own flesh and blood. Oh, she’s a fine woman. Do you know what that woman did?”

“No sir,” said the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve to get the straight of it.

“Why, she’s the one who went up to his school when he got sick this time and got him into the hospital. When there was no room. That’s not even a regular hospital room!”

“And, ah, Kitty?”

“Kitty is Jamie’s sister. You want to know what she’s done for Kitty?”

“Yes sir.”

“She invites Kitty to come up here to New York not for a week but a year, to take ballet. She’s taking her to Europe next month! And she’s not even kin! What are you going to do with a woman like that,” cried the old man, taking the engineer by the blade of muscle at his shoulder and squeezing it hard.

“All right,” said the engineer, nodding and wincing.

“And she’s second in command to the third largest foundation in the world!”

“Foundation,” said the engineer vaguely.

“She’s executive secretary. She can pick up the telephone andspend five million dollars this afternoon.”

“Is that right?”

“You come on up here in the morning and see Jamie.”

“Yes sir.”

He did go see Jamie but Kitty was not there.

“What about Kitty?” he asked Mr. Vaught in the hall. It was not really a bold question since Mr. Vaught had once again set a tone of antic confidence, as much as to say: here we are two thousand miles from home, so it’s all right for me to tell you about my family.

“Do you know what they’ve had that girl doing eight hours a day as long as I can remember?”

“No sir.” The other, he noticed, pronounced “girl” as “gull,” a peculiarity he last remembered hearing in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Ballet dancing. She’s been taking ballet since she was eight years old. She hopes to try out for the New York City Center Ballet Company.”

“Very good.”

“Lord, they’ve had her studying up here, in Chicago, Cleveland, everywhere.”

The engineer wondered who “they” were. Mrs. Vaught? “She must be very good.”

“Good? You should see her prizes. She won first prize two years in a row at the Jay Cee Festival. Last year her mama took her up to Cleveland to study with the world’s most famous ballet teacher. They lived in a hotel for nine weeks.”

“It must require a great deal of self-sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice? That’s all she does.” The other’s eye glittered through the billowing smoke. Yet there was something unserious, even farcical, about his indignation.

“Even now?”

“I mean all. She dudn’t go out to parties. She dudn’t have, just as to say, dates. If a young man paid a call on her, I swear I don’t think she’d know what to do.”

“Is that right,” said the engineer thoughtfully.

“I don’t think it’s worth it, do you?”

“No sir,” he said absently. He rose. “I think I’ll go in and see Jamie. Excuse me, sir.”

“That’s all right!”

Without quite knowing why he did so — for now he had the Handsome Woman’s name and had looked her up in the telephone book and now knew where Kitty lived — he kept up his vigil in the park.

Once he went to look at the house they lived in. They had, Kitty and Rita, a charming cottage in a mews stuck away inside a city block in the Village. He had not imagined there could be such a place in New York, that the paltry particles, ravening and singing, could be so easily gotten round. But they were gotten round, by making things small and bright and hiding them away in the secret sunny center of a regular city block. Elsewhere in New York — wherever one stood — there was the sense of streets running a thousand miles in either direction, clear up to 302nd Street and petering out in some forlorn place above Yonkers or running clean to Ontario, for all he knew. They, Kitty and Rita, got out of the wind, so to speak, found a sunny lee corner as sheltered as a Barbados Alley.

Then why not pick up the telephone and call her up and say, what about seeing you? Well, he could not exactly say why except that he could not. The worst way to go see a girl is to go see her. The best way is not to go see her but to come upon her. Having a proper date with a girl delivers the two of you into a public zone of streets and buildings where every brick is turned against you.

The next day Rita came to the bench and Kitty joined her. It was not until he saw them through the telescope that he knew why he had kept up his vigil: it was because he did not know enough about Kitty.

When they left, they turned west. He waited. After five or six minutes they came through the maples and crossed the meadow toward the Tavern-on-the-Green. There they sat not half a mile away but twenty feet, outlined in rainbows and drifting against each other weightless and soundless like mermaids in the shallow ocean depths. Packing his telescope, he walked south past the restaurant and turned back. He found a table against a peninsula of open brickwork where by every calculation — yes: through a niche he caught a glimpse of the gold chain clasping the hardy structures of Kitty’s ankle. He ordered a beer.

Like all eavesdroppers, he felt as breathless as if the future of his life might depend on what was said. And perhaps, he being what he was, it did.

“It’s no use,” Kitty was saying.

“It is use,” said Rita. Her hair stirred. She must be turning her head to and fro against the bricks.

“What do you think is the matter with me, Ree?”

“Nothing that is not the matter with all of us.”

“I am not what I want to be.”

“Then accept yourself as you are.”

“I do!” Kitty had a trick of ending her sentences with a lilt like a question. It was a mannerism he had noticed in the younger actresses.

“What is it?”

“Everything.”

“Ah.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Tell me,” said Rita, turning her head to and fro.

“Do you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“The truth is, I’m stupid. I’m the stupidest person in the world.”

“I see.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“What would help?”

“I’m serious. Val and Jamie and you and Sutter are all so smart.”

“You’re the best of the lot,” said Rita idly, turning her head against the bricks.

“Sometimes I think other people know a secret I don’t know.”

“What secret?”

“The way they talk—”

“People, what people? Do you mean a man and a woman?”

“Well, yes.”

“Ah.”

“Do you know, before I meet somebody—”

“Somebody? Who is somebody?”

“Before I meet them — if I know I’m going to meet them — I actually have to memorize two or three things to say. What a humiliating confession. Isn’t that awful. And it is getting worse. Why am I like that?”

“Why say anything?”

“I keep thinking that it must be possible to be with a person with things natural between us.”

“A person? What person? I’m a person. Aren’t things easy between us?”

“Yes — because you’ve spoiled me.”

“Like hell. Finish your sandwich and get back to work.”

“Ree, I’m not even a good dancer.”

“You’re good, but you’re lazy.”

“No, Can Can.” Or did she say Quin Quin?

“So now I’m getting old.”

“No, Ree. But in a particular relationship do you think it is one’s attitude or the other person who counts?”

“Who is this other person?”

“Do you remember what Will said yesterday?”

“Will?”

“Will Barrett? You know, the boy Poppy brought in.”

“So now it’s Will.”

“Didn’t you like him?”

“You make him sound like Cousin Will from Savannah.”

“Well.”

“Honey, I’ve got news for you.”

“What?”

“That boy is not well.”

“Not really.”

“Really. And I can assure you there is nothing romantic about mental illness.”

“But he isn’t—”

“Wait. I suddenly begin to get it. I do believe that it is his symptoms which interest you.”

“No, I think he’s very nice.”

“Yes, I see it! You’re the girl who can’t talk. And he can’t remember. That makes you a pair.”

“No.”

“So you’re going to remember for him and he’s going to talk for you.”

“No.”

“Only it’s more than that, isn’t it? You also believe you can help him.”

“Help him? Why does he need help?”

Rita’s reply was not audible. They had gotten up and were moving away.

He sat deep in thought until he finished his beer. My need for eavesdropping is legitimate enough, he said to himself, screwing up an eye. What with the ravening particles and other noxious influences, when one person meets another in a great city, the meeting takes place edge on, so to speak, each person so deprived of his surface as to be all but invisible to the other. Therefore one must take measures or else leave it to luck. Luck would be this: if he saw her snatch a purse, flee into the park pursued by the cops. Then he would know something and could do something. He could hide her in a rocky den he had discovered in a wild section of the park. He would bring her food and they would sit and talk until nightfall, when they could slip out of the city and go home to Alabama. Such a turn of events was unlikely, however.

The Vaughts liked the engineer very much, each feeling that he was his or her special sort of person. And he was.

Each saw him differently.

Mr. Vaught was certain he was a stout Southern lad in the old style, wellborn but lusty as anyone, the sort who knows how to get along with older men. Back home he would have invited the younger man on a hunt or to his poker club, where he was certain to be a favorite. The second time Mr. Vaught saw him, he took him aside ceremoniously and invited him to Jamie’s birthday party.

Jamie — who, he was told, had a severe and atypical mononucleosis — saw him as a fellow technician, like himself an initiate of science, that is, of a secret, shared view of the world, a genial freemasonry which sets itself apart from ordinary folk and sees behind appearances. He lent the engineer a tattered offprint of a scientific article which was written by his brother and which he kept under his pillow. It was titled The Incidence of Post-orgasmic Suicide in Male University Graduate Students, and divided into two sections, the first subtitled “Genital Sexuality as the Sole Surviving Communication Channel between Transcending-Immanent Subjects,” and the second, “The Failure of Coitus as a Mode of Reentry into the Sphere of Immanence from the Sphere of Transcendence.” The engineer read the article twice and could not make head or tail of it, except a short description of technical procedure in which Dr. Sutter, following some hunch or other, had examined the urethral meatus of some thirty male suicides for the presence of spermatozoa.

To Mrs. Vaught elder he was as nice as he could be. His manners were good without being too ceremonial. There was a lightness in him: he knew how to fool with her. They could even have a fuss. “Now you listen to me, Billy Barrett, it’s time you buckled down,” etc. So acute was his radar that neither Mrs. Vaught nor her husband could quite get it into their heads that he did not know everything they knew. He sounded like he did. She would speak allusively of six people utterly unknown to him—“So I took one look at her when she got home from school and of course her face was allbroken out and, I said ho-ho—”

“Who is that now?” asked the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve.

“Sally, Myra’s oldest.”

“Myra?”

“My stepdaughter.”

She was much as he remembered other ladies at home, companionable and funny, except when she got off on her pet subject, fluoridation or rather the evils of it, which had come in her mind to be connected with patriotic sentiments. Then her voice become sonorous and bell-like. She grew shorter than ever, drew into herself like a fort, and fired in all directions. She also spoke often of the “Bavarian Illuminate,” a group who, in her view, were responsible for the troubles of the South. They represented European and Jewish finance and had sold out the Confederacy.

“You know the real story of Judah P. Benjamin and John Slidell, don’t you?” she asked him, smiling.

“No ma’am,” he said, looking at her closely to see if she was serious. She was. In her smiling eyes he caught sight of fiery depths.

Rita, however, paid no attention tohim. She looked through him.

Kitty? Twice she was in Jamie’s room when he came up, but she seemed abstracted and indifferent. When he asked her if she wanted a Coke (as if they were back in high school in Atlanta), she put her head down and ducked away from him. He couldn’t understand it. Had he dreamed that he had eavesdropped?

On his fourth visit to Jamie he had a small amnesic fit, the first in eighteen months.

As he climbed into the thin watery sunlight of Washington Heights, the look and smell of the place threw him off and he slipped a cog. He couldn’t remember why he came. Yonder was a little flatiron of concrete planted with maybe linden trees like a park in Prague. Sad-looking Jewish men walked around with their hands in their pockets and hair growing down their necks. It was as far away as Lapland. A sign read: Washington Heights Bar and Grill. Could George Washington have set foot here? Which way is Virginia?

He sat down under a billboard of Johnnie Walker whose legs were driven by a motor. He puts his hands on his knees and was careful not to turn his head. It would happen, he knew, that if he kept still for a while he could get his bearings like a man lost in the woods. There was no danger yet of slipping: jumping the tracks altogether and spending the next three months in Richmond.

It was then that he caught sight of Kitty coming from the hospital, head down, bucking the eternal gale of the side streets. He knew only that he knew her. There were meltings of recognition about his flank and loin. He wished now that he had looked in his wallet, to make sure of his own name and maybe find hers.

“Wait,” he caught her four steps down the IRT.

“What? Oh.” She smiled quickly and started down again.

“Wait a minute.”

“I’ve got to go,” she said, making a grimace by way of a joke.

“Please come over here for a moment. I have something to tell you.” He knew that he could speak to her if he did not think about it too much.

She shrugged and let him guide her to the bench.

“What?”

“I, ah, thought you might do me a favor.” He looked at her hard, groping for himself in her eyes. If he could not help her, hide her in Central Park, then she could help him.

“Sure, what?”

“You’re going in the subway?”

“Yes.”

“I just came out. To see, ah—” He knew he would know it as soon as she thought it. She thought it. “—Jamie.”

“Good. He’ll be glad to see you.” She eyed him, smiling, not quite onto whatever roundabout joke he was playing and not liking it much.

“I changed my mind and decided to go back downtown.”

“All right.” But it was not all right. She thought he was up to some boy-girl business. “What’s the favor?”

“That I ride with you and that you give me a punch if I miss my station.”

“What?”

“Do you know where I live?”

“Yes. At—”

He touched her arm. “Don’t tell me. I want to see if I know when I get there.”

“What’s the matter — oh”—all joking aside now, eyes black as shoe buttons. She saw he was sweating.

Oddest of all: strange as he felt, having slipped six cogs, the engineer knew nevertheless that it was a negotiable strangeness. He could spend some on her. “Nothing much. Will you do as I say?”

“Yes.”

Above them, Johnnie Walker’s legs creaked like ship’s rigging.

“Let’s go.” He started straight out, not waiting on her.

“That’s the wrong subway,” she said, catching up with him. “I’m taking the IRT.”

“Right.” It was like a déjà vu: he knew what she was going to say as soon as she said it.

They rode in silence. When the train came to the first lights of the Columbus Circle platform, he rose. “This is it,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, watching him sloe-eyed.

“Thank you,” he said, taking her hand like a man’s, and left quickly.

He stopped at a gum-machine mirror to see how he looked. There was nothing much wrong. His face was pale but intact. But when he straightened, his knee gave way and he stumbled to the edge of the platform. The particles began to sing.

A hand took his. “This way,” said Kitty. Her hand was warm and grubby from riding subways.

She led him to a bench on an arc of the Circle. It is strange, he thought, musing, but love is backwards too. In order to love, one has not to love. Look at her. Her hand was on his thigh, rough as a nurse. She made herself free of him, peering so close he could smell her breath. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re pale. Your hand is so cold.” She made a slight movement and checked it. He knew she had meant to warm his hand in her lap.

“As long as you are here, will you go over there and buy me a glass of orange juice?”

She watched him drink the juice. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“No.”

“Did you have supper last night?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember to eat?”

“I eat when I get hungry. I don’t remember that I have eaten.”

“Are you hungry now?”

“Yes.”

They walked to the automat on Fifty-seventh Street. While she drank coffee, he ate four dollars’ worth of roast beef and felt much better. I’m in love, he thought as he drank his third glass of milk.

“I don’t think there is anything wrong with you,” she said when he finished.

“That’s right.”

“What will you do now?”

“Go home and go to bed.”

“You work at night?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“There’s one more thing—” he said.

“What?”

“Write your name and telephone number on this.”

She smiled and did so but when she looked up and saw him she grew serious. “Oh.”

“Yes, I need somebody to call. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes.”

The sicker I am, the more I know, he thought. And the more she loves me. “Suppose I need to call you at three o’clock in the morning and say come to Weehawken.”

“Call me.” Her face clouded. “What about next month?”

“What about it?”

“I’ll be in Spain. In Torremolinos.”

“Write it down.” After she wrote it, he asked her. “Now what if I call you over there?”

She looked at him, taking a tuck of lip between her teeth. “Do you mean it?”

“I mean it. You’re the one I’m going to call.”

“Why me?”

He drew his chair closer to the corner of the table and put his hand in her lap. “I’m in love.”

“You are,” she said. “Oh.”

“I’ve never been in love before.”

“Is that right?” Keeping a wary eye on him, she turned her head toward the empty automat.

“Hold still,” he said, and leaning forward put his mouth on hers before she closed it. She held still from the habit of ministering to him. She was helping him. But hold on!

“Good Lord,” she said presently and to no one.

“I never thought it would be so simple,” said he, musing.

“Simple?” She was caught, betwixt and between being a girl full of stratagems and a rough and ready nurse.

“That you are in love and that there is time for it and that you take the time.”

“I see.”

“Let’s go to your house.”

“What for?”

He kissed her again.

She tucked the corner of her mouth and began to nod and slap the table softly.

What he wanted to tell her but could not think quite how was that he did not propose country matters. He did not propose to press against her in an elevator. What he wanted was both more and less. He loved her. His heart melted. She was his sweetheart, his certain someone. He wanted to hold her charms in his arms. He wanted to go into a proper house and shower her with kisses in the old style.

“What do you do when you also have breakfast?” she asked him.

“What? Oh,” he said, seeing it was a joke. “Well, I’m not joking.” He’d as soon she didn’t make Broadway jokes, gags.

“I see you’re not.”

“I love you.”

“You do.” The best she could do was register it.

“Let’s go to your house.”

“You said you worked last night and were going to bed.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“I think you need some sleep.”

“I need very little sleep.”

“You’re pretty tough.”

“Yes, I’m very strong. I can press 250 pounds and snatch 225. I can whip every middleweight at Princeton, Long Island University, and the Y.M.C.A.”

“Now you’re joking.”

“Yes, but it’s true.”

“You weren’t so strong in the subway.”

“I blacked out for a second.”

“Do you think you’re going to have another spell of amnesia?”

“I don’t think so. But I’d like to have you around if I do.”

“For how long?”

“Let’s begin with the weekend. How strange that it is Friday afternoon and that we are together now and can be together the whole weekend.”

“This all seems like a conclusion you have reached entirely on your own. What about me?”

“What about you?”

“Oh boy,” she said and commenced nodding and slapping again. “I don’t know.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Go?”

“Now. For the weekend.”

“You don’t fool around, do you?”

“Don’t talk like that”

“Why?”

“Because you know it’s not like that.”

“What is it like?”

“Where then?”

“I’m sorry,” she said and put her hand on his, this time a proper girl’s hand, not a nurse’s. “Rita and I are going to Fire Island.”

“Let Rita go and we’ll stay home.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Rita is very dear to me. I can’t hurt her feelings.”

“Why is she dear to you?”

“What right have you to ask?”

“Now I’m sorry.”

“No, I’ll tell you. For one thing, Rita has done so much for us, for me, and we have done so badly by her.”

“What has she done?”

“Oh Lord. I’ll tell you. You hear about people being unselfish. She actually is — the only one I know. The nearest thing to it is my sister Val, who went into a religious order, but even that is not the same because she does what she does for a reason, love of God and the salvation of her own soul. Rita does it without having these reasons.”

“Does what?”

“Helps Jamie, helps me—”

“How did she help you?”

“Mama took me up to Cleveland but I became terribly depressed and went home. I went to work in Myra’s real-estate office for a while, then came up here to school — and got horribly lonely and depressed again. It was then that Rita grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and began to put the pieces back together — in spite of what my brother did to her.”

“What did he do to her?”

“Oh,” she shrugged. “It’s a long story. But what a horrible mess. Let’s just say that he developed abnormal psychosexual requirements.”

“I see.” He frowned. He didn’t much like her using the word “psychosexual.” It reminded him of the tough little babes of his old therapy group, who used expressions like “mental masturbation” and “getting your jollies.” It had the echo of someone else. She was his sweetheart and ought to know better. None of your smart-ass Fifty-seventh Street talk, he felt like telling her. “I was wondering,” he said.

“What?”

“I love you. Do you love me?”

“If you don’t kill me. I swear to goodness.”

He fell to pondering. “This is the first time I’ve been in love,” he said, almost to himself. He looked up, smiling. “Now that I think of it, I guess this sounds strange to you.”

“Not strange at all!” she cried with her actress’s lilt.

He laughed. Presently he said, “I see now that it could be taken in the sense that I say it without meaning it.”

“Yes, it could be taken in that sense.”

“I suppose in fact that it could even be something one commonly says. Men, I mean.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Did you take me to mean it like that?”

“No, not you.”

“Well?”

“It’s time for me to leave.”

“You’re going to Fire Island?”

“Yes, and you’re sleepy.”

All of a sudden he was. “When will I see you?”

“Aren’t you coming to my birthday party Monday?”

“Oh yes. In Jamie’s room. I thought it was Jamie’s birthday.”

“We’re two days apart. Monday falls between. I’ll be twenty-one and Jamie sixteen.”

“Twenty-one.” His eyes had fallen away into a stare. “Go to bed.”

“Right.” Twenty-one. The very number seemed hers, a lovely fine come-of-age adult number faintly perfumed by her, like the street where she lived.

When his soil-bank check arrived on Friday, he, the strangest of planters, proprietor of two hundred acres of blackberries and canebrakes, was able to pay his debt to Dr. Gamow. Having given up his checking account, he cashed the check at Macy’s and dropped off the money at Dr. Gamow’s office on his way home Monday morning.

Sticking his head through Dr. Gamow’s inner door at nine o’clock, he caught a glimpse of the new group seated around a new table. It didn’t take twenty seconds to hand over the bills, but that was long enough. In an instant he sniffed out the special group climate of nurtured hostilities and calculated affronts. Though they could not have met more than two or three times, already a stringy girl with a shako of teased hair (White Plains social worker?) was glaring at a little red rooster of a gent (computer engineer?). She was letting him have it: “Don’t act out at me, Buster!” The old virtuoso of groups heaved a sigh. And even though Dr. Gamow opened the door another notch by way of silent invitation, he shook his head and said goodbye. But not without regret. It was like the great halfback George Gipp paying a final visit to Notre Dame stadium.

But that left him $34.54 to buy presents for Kitty and Jamie and to eat until payday Saturday. Sunday night he sat at his console under Macy’s racking his brain. What to give these rich Texas-type Southerners who already had everything? A book for Jamie? He reckoned not, because not even Sutter’s book held his attention for long. It was felt, fingered, flexed, but not read. His choice finally was both easy and audacious. Easy because he could not really afford to buy a gift and himself owned a single possession. Then why not lend it to Jamie: his telescope. The money went for Kitty’s present, a tiny golden ballet slipper from Tiffany’s for her charm bracelet.

“I don’t have any use for it right now,” said he to Jamie as he clamped the Tetzlar to the window sill. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.” Not for one second did he, as he fiddled with the telescope, lose sight of Kitty, who was unwrapping the little jewel box. She held up the slipper, gave him her dry sideways Lippo Lippi look, tucked in the corner of her mouth, and nodded half a millimeter. His knee leapt out of joint. What was it about this splendid but by no means extraordinary girl which knocked him in the head and crossed his eyes like Woody Woodpecker?

Jamie’s bed was strewn with neckties and books — three people had given him the same funny book entitled So You’re a Crock. The nurses bought a Merita cake and spelled out “Happy Birthday” in chart paper. The internes made a drink of laboratory alcohol and frozen grapefruit juice, as if they were all castaways and had to make do with what they had. From an upper Broadway novelty shop Mr. Vaught had obtained a realistic papier-mâché dogturd which he slipped onto the bed under the very noses of the nurses. As the latter spied it and let out their screams of dismay, the old man charged fiercely about the room, peering under appliances. “I saw him in here, a little feist dog!”

Screwing in the terrestrial ocular fitted with a prism, and focusing quickly on the Englewood cliffs, the engineer stepped aside. The patient had only to prop himself on an elbow and look down into the prism. A little disc of light played about his pupil. The engineer watched him watch: now he, Jamie, would be seeing it, the brilliant theater bigger and better than life. Picnickers they were, a family deployed on a shelf of granite above the Hudson. The father held a can of beer.

Once Jamie looked up for a second, searched his face for a sign: did he really see what he saw? The engineer nodded. Yes, he saw.

“What kind of beer is he drinking?” he asked Jamie.

“Rheingold,” said Jamie.

The others took their turn, all but Rita, then Moon Mullins, who swung the Tetzlar around to the nurses’ dormitory. There was no talking to Jamie this morning. He must watch the tugs on the river, the roller coaster at Palisades Park, the tollhouse on the George Washington, Bridge, two housewives back-fencing in Weehawken. Now it was Jamie who became the technician, focusing on some bit of New Jersey and leaning away to let the doctors look.

Mrs. Vaught elder couldn’t get over it. Her pince-nez flashed in the light and she took the engineer’s arm. “Would you look at the color in that child’s face!” She made her husband take a look through the telescope, but he pretended he couldn’t see.

“I can’t see a thing!” he cried irritably, jostling his eye around the ocular.

Presently Kitty left with Rita, giving him as she left a queer hooded brown-eyed-susan look. He sat down dizzily and blew out his lips. Why couldn’t he leave with them? But when he jumped up, Mr. Vaught took him high by the arm and steered him out into the hall. He faced the younger man into a corner and for a long time did not speak but stood with his head down, nodding. The engineer thought the other was going to tell him a joke.

“Bill.” The nodding went on.

“Yes sir.”

“How much did that thing cost you?”

“The telescope? Nineteen hundred and eight dollars.”

“How much do you make a week?”

“I take home one forty-eight.”

“Did your father leave you anything?”

“Not much. An old house and two hundred acres of buckshot.”

The engineer was sure he was in for a scolding — all at once the telescope seemed folly itself. But Mr. Vaught only took out his fried-up ball of a handkerchief and knocked it against his nose.

“Bill”

“Yes sir.”

“How would you like to work for me?”

“I’d like it fine, sir, but—”

“We have a garage apartment, which Mrs. Vaught did over completely. You’d be independent.”

“Well, I really appreciate it, but—”

“You’re Ed Barrett’s boy,” began Mr. Vaught in an enumerating voice.

“Yes sir.”

“Dolly knew your mother and said she was the sweetest little lady in the world.”

“Yes sir.”

“Your mother and daddy are dead and here you are up here fooling around and not knowing what in the hail you are doing. Isn’t that so?”

“Well, sir, I’m a humidification engineer.”

“What in the woerrrld is that?” asked the other, his mouth gone quirky and comic.

The engineer explained.

“Why, hailfire, man, you mean you’re the janitor,” cried Mr. Vaught, falling back and doing a jaunty little step. For the first time the engineer caught a glimpse of the shrewdness behind the old man’s buffoonery.

“I guess I am, in a way.”

“Tell me the truth now. You don’t know what — in — the— woerrrld you are doing up here, do you?”

“Well now—” began the engineer, intending to say something about his scientific theories. But instead he fell silent.

“Where did you go to college?”

“Princeton.”

“What’s your religion?”

“Episcopalian,” said the engineer absently, though he had never given the matter a single thought in his entire life.

“Man, there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“No sir.”

But if there is nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all. “However, I do have a nervous condition—”

“Nervous! Hell, I’d be nervous too if I lived up here with all these folks.” He nodded down at the moraine of Washington Heights. “All huddled up in the Y in the daytime and way up under a store all night. And peeping at folks through a spyglass. Shoot, man!”

The engineer had to laugh. Moreover, suggestible as he was, he began to think it mightn’t be a bad idea to return to the South and discover his identity, to use Dr. Gamow’s expression. “What would you want me to do, Mr. Vaught?”

“All right. Here’s what you do. You come on down with us. Spend a year with Jamie. This will give you time to finish school if that’s what you want to do, or look around for what kind of work you want. Whatever you want to do.”

“I still don’t exactly know what it is you want—”

“Bill, I’m going to tell you something.” Mr. Vaught drew him close enough to smell his old man’s sourness and the ironing-board smell of seersucker. “I need somebody to help me out. I’m taking Jamie home”—somebody didn’t want him to! — “and I want you to come down with me.”

“Yes sir. And then?”

“Jamie likes you. He dudn’t like anybody else at home but he likes you. (He likes Sutter, but that sapsucker — never mind.) He’s been up here four years and he’s smart as a whip about some things but he doesn’t know enough to come out of the rain about some others. He can’t drive a car or shoot a gun! You know what he and Kitty do at home? Nothing! Sit in the pantry and pick their noses.”

“How do you know I won’t do the same thing?” asked the engineer, smiling.

“Do it! But also show him how folks act. I just saw what effect you had on him. That’s the first time I’ve seen that boy perk up since I been up here. Can you drive?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

“Yes sir.” He got one to drive the Auchinclosses’ Continental.

“What do you say?”

“Do I understand that you would want me to be a kind of tutor or companion?”

“Don’t have to be anything. Just be in the house.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve had some experience along these lines,” said the engineer and told him about his tutoring stints with his young Jewish charges.

“You see there! We have some of the finest Jewish people at home you’ll ever find,” he added, as if the engineer were himself Jewish. “Right now the main thing we need is somebody to help me drive home.”

The proposal was not quite as good as it sounded. Mr. Vaught, he early perceived, was the sort of man who likes to confide in strangers. And the farther he got from home, one somehow knew, the more confidential he became. He was the sort to hold long conversations with the porter on train trips, stand out with him on dark station platforms. “How much do you make, Sam?” he might ask the porter. “How would you like to work for me?”

“I had this boy David drive us up, ahem,” said Mr. Vaught, clearing his throat diffidently. “I didn’t know we were going to be up here this long, so I sent him home on the bus. He couldn’t drive either. He like to have scared me to death.”

The engineer nodded and asked no questions, since he understood that the “boy” was a Negro and Mr. Vaught was embarrassed lest it should appear that the engineer was being offered a Negro’s job.

“Mrs. Vaught is certain you’ll be comfortable in Sutter’s old apartment,” he added quickly (you see it’s not a Negro’s job). For the first time the engineer began to wonder if the proposal might not be serious. “Come on, let’s go get us a Coke.”

He followed the older man to a niche off the corridor which had been fitted out as a tiny waiting room with a chrome sofa, a Coke machine, and a single window overlooking the great plunging battleship of Manhattan.

Mr. Vaught put his hand on the younger man’s knee and gave it a shake. “Son, when you reach my age I hope you will not wake up to find that you’ve gone wrong somewhere and that your family have disappointed you.”

“I hope so too, sir.” He was sure he would not. Because he had lived a life of pure possibility, the engineer, who had often heard older people talk this way, always felt certain he would not repeat their mistakes.

“It’s something when the world goes to hell and your own family lets you down, both,” said Mr. Vaught, but not at all dolefully, the engineer noticed. His expression was as chipper as ever.

The tiny room soon became so thick with cigar smoke that the engineer’s eyes began to smart. Yet, as he sat blinking, hands on knees, he felt quite content.

“Ah, Billy, there’s been a loss of integrity in the world, all the things that made this country great.”

“Yes sir.”

“But the bitterest thing of all is the ingratitude of your own children.”

“It must be.”

Mr. Vaught sat on the very edge of the sofa and turned around and looked back through the smoke. “Rita’s the only one that’s worth a damn and she’s not even kin.”

“Sutter’s the oldest,” said the engineer, nodding.

“The oldest and the smartest and still isn’t worth a damn. Never was and never will be.”

“He wrote some very learned articles.”

“I’ll tell you what he did. He went to the bad on liquor and women.”

“Is that so?” All his life the engineer had heard of men who “went to the bad” on women, but he still didn’t quite know what it meant. “Isn’t he a good doctor?” he asked the older man.

“He had the best education money could buy and you know what he does?”

“No sir.”

“He went to Harvard Medical School and made the second highest grades ever made there. After that he interned at Massachusetts General Hospital. Came home. Practiced four years with wonderful success. Was doing people a world of good. Then he quit. Do you know what he does now?”

“No sir.”

“He’s assistant coroner. He makes five hundred dollars a month cutting on dead people in the daytime and chases women all night. Why, he’s not even the coroner. He’s the assistant. He works at the hospital but he doesn’t practice. What he is is an interne. He’s a thirty-four-year-old interne.”

“Is that right?”

“You know that boy in there,” Mr. Vaught nodded toward the room.

“Yes sir.”

“He is evermore crazy about his big brother and I be dog if I know why. And smart!”

“Which one?”

“Both.”

“—”

“I’ll tell you what happened, though.”

“What?”

“I made a mistake. Three years ago, when my other daughter Val had her twenty-first birthday, I got the idea of giving each of my children a hundred thousand dollars if they hadn’t smoked till they were twenty-one. Why not enjoy your money while you’re living?”

“That’s true,” said the engineer, who owned $7.

“Anyway I didn’t want to have to look at the bunch of them tippy-toeing around and grinning like chess-cats, waiting for me to die. You know what I mean.”

“Yes sir,” said the other, laughing.

“So what do you think happens? Sutter is older, so he gets his check the same time as Val. So Sutter, as soon as he gets his money, quits practicing medicine, goes out West, and buys a ranch and sits down and watches the birdies. And when he spends the money, do you know what he does? He takes a job at a dude ranch, like a ship’s doctor, only he’s taking care of five hundred grass widows. Oh, I really did him a favor. Oh, I really did him a big favor. Wait. I want to show you something. Today, you know, is Kitty’s and Jamie’s birthday. Kitty is twenty-one and Jamie is only sixteen, but I’m going to give him his money now.”

The engineer looked at the other curiously, but he could fathom nothing.

“Maybe you and Jamie would like to take a trip around the world,” said Mr. Vaught without changing his expression. He was fumbling in the back pocket of his seersucker pants and now took out a wallet as rounded off and polished as a buckeye. From it he plucked two checks and handed them to the engineer, watching him the while with a brimming expectation. They were stiff new checks, as rough as a cheese grater, bristling with red and black bank marks and punch-holes and machine printing. A row of odd Q-shaped zeros marched to the east.

“This one must be for Kitty,” he said, reading the word Katherine. “One hundred thousand dollars.” It seemed to be what the old man expected, for he nodded.

“You give it to one, you got to give it to all. I hope she dudn’t mess me up too.”

“Did Val mess you up?”

“Val? She was the worst. And yet she was my girlie. I used to call her that, girlie. When she was little, she used to have growing pains. I would hold her in my lap and rock her in the rocking chair, for hours.”

“What did she do?”

“With the money? Gave it to the niggers.”

“Sir?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. She gave it to the niggers.”

“But—” began the engineer, who had formed a picture of a girl standing on the front porch handing out bills to passing Negroes. “I thought Kitty told me she went into a, ah, convent.”

“She did,” cried the old man, peering back through the smoke.

“Then how—”

“Now she’s begging from niggers. Do you think that is right?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Let me ask you something. Do you think the good Lord wants us to do anything unnatural?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said the engineer warily. He perceived it was an old argument and a sore subject.

“Or leave your own kind?”

“Sir?”

“I mean to go spend the rest of your life not just with niggers but with Tyree niggers — do you think that is natural?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You’ve heard your daddy talk about Tyree niggers?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Not even niggers have anything to do with Tyree niggers. Down there in Tyree County they’ve got three different kinds of schools, one for the white folks, one for niggers, and a third for Tyree niggers. They’re speckled-like in the face and all up in the head. Some say they eat clay. So where do you think Val goes?”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer.

“She went to Agnes Scott, then to Columbia and was just about to get her master’s.”

The engineer perceived that here was one of those families, more common in the upper South, who set great store by education and degrees.

“So what do I do? Two weeks before graduation I give her her money. So what does she do?”

“Gave it to the Tyree niggers?”

“Man, I’m telling you.”

An easy silence fell between them. Mr. Vaught crossed his legs and pulled one ankle above the other with both hands. The little lobby, now swirling with cigar smoke, was something like an old-style Pullman smoker where men used to sit talking by night, pulling their ankles above their knees, and leaning out to spit in the great sloshing cuspidor.

“Let’s get us another Coke, Bill.”

“I’ll get them, sir.”

Mr. Vaught drank his Coke in country style, sticking out a little finger and swigging it off in two swallows. “Now. Here’s what we’ll do. The doctors say Jamie can travel in a week or so. I aim to start home about Thursday week or Friday. Mama wants to go by Williamsburg and Charleston. Now you going to quit all this foolishness up here and come on home with us. What I’m going to do is get you and Jamie a little bitty car — you know I’m in the car business. Do you play golf?”

“Yes sir.”

“Hell, man, we live on the golf links. Our patio is twenty feet from number 6 fairway. You like to sail? The Lil’ Doll is tied up out at the yacht club and nobody will sail her. You’d be doing me a great favor.”

The engineer wished he would mention a salary.

“You and Jamie can go to college — or go round the world! Now isn’t that better than being a janitor?”

“Yes sir.”

“You think about it.”

“I will. Sir?”

“What?”

“Here — I’m going to write down my number here in New York.” Meaning, he hoped: you didn’t mention a figure and when you want to, it is for you to call me.

“Sho now,” said Mr. Vaught absently, and shoved the slip of paper into the side pocket of his seersucker, a bad enough sign in itself.

He stayed only long enough to watch the presentation of the checks. Kitty was back and without Rita!

Standing between Jamie and Kitty, Mr. Vaught crossed his arms, a check in each hand.

“When was your last cigarette?” he asked Jamie.

“There was no last cigarette,” said Jamie, grinning and thrashing.

“Your last drink?”

“There was no last drink.”

“Then go buy yourself a drink.”

“Yes sir,” said Jamie, taking his check.

“Kitty?”

“No cigarette and no drink.”

“Then go buy yourself one!”

“I might,” said Kitty, laughing.

“I mean it! They’re certified. You can cash it right down there at the bar on the corner.”

“Thank you, Poppy,” said Kitty, kissing him.

The checks were passed around among family, nurses, and internes.

Once again Kitty left and once again the engineer tried to follow her, but Jamie stopped him.

“Bill.”

“Yes?”

“Come here.”

“What?”

“Did Poppy speak to you?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“We didn’t get down to terms.”

“That’s Poppy. But what do you say in general?”

“I say O.K., if I can be of use to you.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Where do I want to go?”

Jamie waved the check. “Name it.”

“No sir. You name it. And I think you’d better name a school.”

“O.K.,” said Jamie immediately and cheerfully.

During the next week he set about putting his life in order. He ate and slept regularly, worked out every day, went down to Brooks Brothers like his father and grandfather before him and bought two ten-dollar pullover shirts with a tuck in the back and no pocket in the front, socks, ties, and underwear, and dressed like a proper Princetonian. At work he read business maxims in Living.

The only way people are defeated by their problems isby refusing to face them.

One day, some years ago, a now famous industrial counselor walked into the office of a small manufacturing concern. “How would you like to increase sales 200 % the first year?” he asked the president. The latter of course tried to get rid of him. “O.K., I’m leaving,” said the counselor. “But first lend me your scratch pad.” He wrote a few lines and handed the pad to the executive. “Read this. Think about it. If you put it into practice, send me a check a year from now for what it was worth to you.” One year later the counselor received a check in the mail for $25,000.

The counselor had written two sentences:

(1) Make a list of your problems, numbering them in the order of priority.

(2) Devote all your time, one day, one month, however long it takes, to disposing of one problem at a time. Then go to the next.

Simple? Yes. But as a result this executive is now president of the world’s third largest corporation and draws a salary of $400,000 a year.

It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments. Back to the South, finish his education, make use of his connections, be a business or professional man, marry him a wife and live him a life. What was wrong with that? No more pressing against girls, rassling around in elevators and automobiles and other similar monkey business such as gives you stone pains and God knew what else. What was wrong with a good little house in a pretty green suburb in Atlanta or Birmingham or Memphis and a pretty little wife in a brand-new kitchen with a red dress on at nine o’clock in the morning and a sweet good-morning kiss and the little ones off to school and a good old mammy to take care of them? The way to see Kitty is not not to see her but to see her.

But it didn’t work. Kitty’s phone didn’t answer. Outside in the park the particles were ravening and singing. Inside he went careening around the dark Aztec corridors of the Y.M.C.A. wringing out his ear and forgetting which floor he lived on. When he lay in bed, one leg defied gravity and rose slowly of itself. His knee began to leap like a fish.

Once when he called Kitty, someone did pick up the telephone but did not speak. “Hello, hello,” he said. “Who’s there?” But there came only the sound of breathing and of the crepitation of skin on plastic. Presently the telephone was replaced softly.

Nor did he hear from Mr. Vaught. He went once more to visit Jamie and, coming face to face with the older man, waited upon him smilingly. But the old man pulled out his gold watch, mumbled an excuse, and was off down the hall like the white rabbit.

Very well then, said he to himself, good day. If they wanted him, let them send for him.

Wednesday when he came home from work he was handed a message with his key. It was from Kitty. Meet me in the park, at the zoo, at four thirty. He went and waited until five thirty. She did not come.

Meanwhile he was getting worse. Thursday morning he slipped another cog. It came, he hoped, from working a double shift and not eating. The day man, a fellow named Perlmutter who had a sick wife, did not show. Like an idiot, he offered to stay on, figuring, what with his new plans and his expenses at Brooks Brothers, that he needed the money.

After sixteen hours underground he came staggering out into the gorge air of Seventh Avenue. For some ten minutes he stood, finger to nose, in the thunderous blue shadow of Pennsylvania Station. A bar turned in his head. Now let me see, said he, and taking out Living from his pocket, read a few maxims. Hmm. The thing to do is make a list.

Somewhere in the smoky vastness of the station lanced through with late slanting cathedral beams of sunlight — late or early? was it evening or morning — and haunted by old déjà vus of Here-I-am-up-from-Charlotte-or-Chattanooga-or-Tuscaloosa-and-where-do-I-go-from-here, he got turned around good and proper and came down on the wrong platform, headed in the wrong direction, and took the wrong train. He must have dozed off, for when he woke up he was in New Lots Avenue, or perhaps it was Far Rockaway.

What woke him? Something. His heart was thumping, making a regular commotion. Now he knew! A pair of eyes had been looking at him, gazing into his even as he slept with eyes open. Who? Rita. Or did he dream it? The train had stopped. He looked around but there was no one. Yet somebody was following him. He knew that. Goofy as he was, his radar still swung free and there was a prickling between his shoulder blades. Somewhere in Brooklyn he changed to an old local with straw seats and came out at a seaside station.

It was dark. He found himself in a long street which was nearly black between the yellow street lights at the corners. The sea was somehow close. There was a hint of an uproar abroad in the night, a teeming in the air and the sense of coming closer with each step to a primal openness. He walked six blocks in the empty street and there it was. But it was nothing like Wrightsville or Myrtle Beach or Nag’s Head, lonesome and wide and knelling. It was domesticated. There were notion shops right up to the sand and the surf was poky, came snuffling in like lake water and collapsed plaush on a steep little old brown beach.

He looked behind him. No one followed him in the street. The drowsiness came again. He had to sleep then and there. He lay down in the warm black sand of a vacant lot and slept two hours without moving a muscle. He woke in his right mind and went back to the Y.

Jogging home from the reservoir the next morning, he spotted Rita two hundred yards away, sitting on a bench next to the milk-fund booth, the toilet-shaped telescope case under her hand. All at once he knew everything: she had come to get rid of him. She hoped he would take his telescope and go away.

But she was, for the first time, as pleasant as could be and patted the bench next to her. And when he sat down, she came sliding smack up against him, a bit too close for comfort. He humped himself over in his sweat suit and tried to smell as good as he could.

Her fist came softly down on his knee; she looked him in the eye and spoke not eight inches away. He couldn’t hear for listening.

“But you and I know better,” she was saying. “He’s got no business going home.”

“Jamie?”

Looking into her eyes was something of a shock. Every line of her face was known to him. Yet now, with her eyes opening into his, she became someone else. It was like watching a picture toy turned one degree: the black lines come and the picture changes. Where before her face was dark and shut off as a gypsy, now her eyes opened into a girlishness.

“Bill—”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Oh come on. Rita.”

“O.K., Rita.”

Again the fist came down softly on his knee.

“I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“The Vaughts are very fond of you.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“The extraordinary part of it is that though you are a new friend — perhaps because you are a new friend — you have more influence with them than anyone else.”

“I doubt it. I haven’t heard from them in several days.”

“Oh, they carry on about you something awful. They plan to take you home with them, don’t they?”

“When did you hear that?”

“Yesterday.”

“Did Mr. Vaught tell you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“But never mind about Poppy. Right now it’s Jamie who needs us.” As gravely as she spoke, he noticed that she cast her eyes about, making routine surveys of Eighth Avenue. There was about her the air of a woman who keeps busy in a world of men. Her busyness gave her leave to be absent-minded. She was tired, but she knew how to use her tiredness.

“Why?”

“Jamie can’t go home, Bill.”

“Why not?”

“Let me tell you something.”

“All right.”

“First — how much do you care for Jamie?”

“Care for him?”

“Would you do something for him?”

“Yes.”

“Would you do anything for him?”

“What do you mean?”

“If he were in serious trouble, would you help him?”

“Of course.”

“I knew you would.”

“What is it?” he asked after a moment.

Rita was smoothing out her skirt until it made a perfect membrane across her thighs. “Our Jamie is not going to make it, Bill,” she said in a low thrilling voice and with a sweetness that struck a pang to the marrow.

There passed between them the almost voluptuous intercourse of bad news. Why is it, thought he, hunkering over and taking his pulse, I cannot hear what people say but only the channel they use?

“So it’s not such a big thing,” she said softly. “One small adolescent as against the thirty thousand Japanese children we polished off.”

“How’s that?” said the engineer, cupping his good ear.

“At Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“I don’t, ah—”

“But this little guy happens to be a friend of mine. And yours. He has myelogenous leukemia, Bill.”

Oh, and I’m sick too, he thought anxiously, looking at his hands. Why is it that bad news is not so bad and good news not so good and what with the bad news being good, aye that is what makes her well and me sick? Oh, I’m not well. He was silent, gazing at his open hands on his knees.

“You don’t seem surprised,” said Rita after a moment.

“I knew he was sick,” he murmured.

“What’s that?” she asked quickly. He saw she was disappointed by his listlessness. She had wanted him to join her, stand beside her and celebrate the awfulness.

“Why shouldn’t he go home?” he asked, straightening up.

“Why shouldn’t he indeed? A very good question: because just now he is in a total remission. He feels fine. His blood’s as normal as yours or mine. He’s out of bed and will be discharged tomorrow.”

“So?”

“So. He’ll be dead in four months.”

“Then I don’t see why he shouldn’t go home or anywhere else.”

“There is only one reason. A tough little bastard by the name of Larry Deutsch up at the Medical Center. He’s got a drug, a horrifyingly dangerous drug, which incidentally comes from an herb used by the Tarahumaras.”

To his relief, Rita started on a long spiel about Jamie’s illness. He knew the frequency of her channel, so he didn’t have to listen.

“—so Larry said to me in the gentlest voice I ever heard: ‘I think we’re in trouble. Take a look.’ I take a look, and even knowing nothing whatever about it, I could see there was something dreadfully wrong. The little cells were smudged — they looked for all the world like Japanese lanterns shining through a fog. That was over a year ago—”

Instead he was thinking of wars and death at home. On the days of bad news there was the same clearing and sweetness in the air. Families drew closer. Azaleas could be seen. He remembered his father’s happiness when he spoke of Pearl Harbor — where he was when he heard it, how he had called the draft board the next morning. It was not hard to see him walking to work on that Monday. For once the houses, the trees, the very cracks in the sidewalk had not their usual minatory presence. The dreadful threat of weekday mornings was gone! War is better than Monday morning.

As his sweat dried, the fleece began to sting his skin.

“—fact number two. Jamie has the best mind I ever encountered. Better even than Sutter, my charming ex-husband. It’s really quite funny. His math teacher in New Hampshire was glad to get rid of him. ‘Get him out of here,’ he told me. ‘He wants to argue about John von Neumann’s Theory of Games—’”

It was her silences, when they came, that he attended.

“So what is the problem?” he asked.

“He’s remitted on prednisone. Poppy and Dolly refuse to admit that he is going to die. Why not give him another pill, they say. Well, there are no more pills. He’s been through them all.”

He was silent.

She regarded him with a fond bright eye.

“Somehow you remind me of the lance corporal in Der Zauberberg. Do you mind if I call you lance corporal?”

“No ma’am.”

“What would you like to do if you had your choice?”

“I do have my choice. Go with Jamie.”

“No, I mean if Jamie hadn’t showed up.”

“Oh, I’d go see Kitty.”

“Leave all of us out of it. And suppose, too, money is no object.”

“I guess I’d finish my education.”

“In what?”

“Oh, metallurgy, I expect.”

“What school would you pick?”

“Colorado School of Mines.”

“You’d like to go out there?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“Suppose Jamie would want to go too.”

“That’s up to him.”

“Take a look at this.”

He found himself gazing at a curled-up Polaroid snapshot of a little white truck fitted with a cabin in its bed. The truck was parked on a stretch of meager shingly beach. Kitty, in long shorts, leaned against the cabin, wide-brimmed hat in hand in a burlesque of American-lady-on-safari.

“What is this?”

“Ulysses.”

“Ulysses?”

“He was meant to lead us beyond the borders of the Western world and bring us home.”

“I see.”

“But seriously now, here’s the proposition,” she said. And he found that when she gave him ordinary directions he could hear her. As of this moment you are working for me as well as for Poppy. Perhaps for both of us but at least for me. Keep Jamie up here long enough for Larry to give him a course of huamuratl. You two rascals take my apartment here in the city and here are the keys to the shack on Fire Island. Now when you get through with Larry, take Ulysses and take off. Go home. Go to Alaska. In any event, Ulysses is yours. He has been three hundred miles, cost me seven thousand dollars, and is as far as I’m concerned a total loss. Here is the certificate of ownership, which I’ve signed over to you and Jamie. It will cost you one dollar. Jamie has coughed up. She held out her hand. “I’ll take my money, please.”

“I don’t have a dollar.”

The articles, papers, keys, photograph she lined up on his thigh. He looked closely at the snapshot again.

“What did you get it for?” he asked her.

“To camp in Europe. Isn’t that stupid? Considering that I’d have to buy gas for that monster Ulysses by the liter.”

“You’ve already told Jamie?”

“Yes.”

“And Mr. Vaught agrees to this?”

“He will if you ask him.”

“What about Kitty?”

“My friend, allow me to cue you in. Perhaps you have not noticed it, but our young friend Jamie is sick to death of the women in the family. Including me. Kitty and I made him the same deal: the three of us for Long Island and the camper (it sleeps three) and he laughed in our faces and I can’t say I blame him. Let me put it to you straight out.”

“All right.”

“Just suppose you asked him — you said, Jamie, I got Ulysses parked outside in the street — come on now, let’s me and you hit the road. What would he say?”

“He wouldn’t like the Ulysses part.”

“Dear God, you’re right.” Her fist came down on his knee and stayed there. “You’re right. You see, you know. All right, leave out the word ‘Ulysses.’ What then? What would he do?”

“He’d go.”

“You know something: you’re quite a guy.”

“Thank you.” He plucked at his sweat suit. It came away from him like old skin. “Then you mean Kitty will go to Europe, after all?”

“My dear young friend, hear this. I do believe you underestimate yourself. I do not believe you realize what a hurricane you’ve unleashed and how formidable you yourself are. You’ve got our poor Kitty spinning like a top. Not that I blame her. Why is it some men can sit like Achilles sat and some men can’t? But I propose to you, my lordly young sir, that we give our young friend her year abroad, which is the only one she’ll ever have. Seriously, Kitty saved my life. She is the sister of that son of a bitch I married. She bucked me up when I needed it and by God I’m returning the favor. Do you have any idea what it would be like to be raised by Poppy and Dolly, who are in their own way the sweetest people in the world, but I mean — God. You have no idea what it’s like down there these days, the poor bloody old South. I’ll tell you what. Give her her year in Florence and then if you haven’t forgotten all about her, I’ll send her home as fast as her little legs will carry her. Or better still, when you and Jamie get through with Larry, come on over and join us!”

The next thing he knew, she was thrusting something into his pocket, but he didn’t have a pocket, then inside the drawstring of his sweat suit, tucked it with a fierce little tuck like an aunt at Christmas. “Your first month’s salary in advance,” she said, and was on her way.

Taking the check from his loin, he read it several times. It seemed to be postdated. He scratched his head. On the other hand, what was today’s date?

It was the first hot night. There were signs of summer. Fires had broken out in Harlem. Twice there were gunshots as close as Seventieth or Eightieth Street. Police cars raced north along Central Park West. But the park was quiet. Its public space, paltry by day, was leafed out in secrecy and darkness. Lamps made gold-green spaces in the rustling leaves.

He strolled about the alp at the pond, hands in pockets and brow furrowed as if he were lost in thought. It was a dangerous place to visit by night, but he paid no attention. He felt irritable and strong and wouldn’t have minded a fist-fight. A few minutes earlier a damp young man had fallen in step on his deaf side.

“Didn’t we take philosophy together at the Y?” the stranger murmured, skipping nimbly to get in step.

“What’s that,” said the engineer absently.

“I thought it unconscionably bad,” murmured the other.

“Eh?” The engineer cupped his good ear.

“Are you interested in the Platonic philosophy?” the other asked him.

“In what?” said the engineer, stopping and swinging around to hear better but also bending upon the other such an intent, yet unfocused gaze that he melted into the night.

Strong and healthy as he felt, he was, if the truth be known, somewhat dislocated. The sudden full tide of summer sent him spinning. The park swarmed with old déjà vus of summertime. It put him in mind of something, the close privy darkness and the black tannin smell of the bark and the cool surprising vapors of millions of fleshy new leaves. From time to time there seemed to come to him the smell of Alabama girls (no, Mississippi), who bathe and put on cotton dresses and walk uptown on a summer night. He climbed the alp dreamily and stooped over the bench. The cul-de-sac held the same message it had held for days, a quotation from Montaigne. He read it under a lamp:

Man is certainly stark mad. He can’t make a worm, but he makes gods by the dozens.

No one had picked it up. Nor was it very interesting, for that matter: when he sniffed it, it smelled not of Montaigne but of a person who might quote Montaigne on such a night as this, an entirely different matter.

“Wait—” he stopped in a dapple of light and leaves and snapped his fingers softly. That was what his father used to say. He too quoted Montaigne on a summer night but in a greener, denser, more privy darkness than this. The young man in the park snapped his fingers again. He stood a full minute, eyes closed, swaying slightly. He raised a hand tentatively toward the West.

Yonder was not the alp but the levee, and not the lamp in the trees but the street light at Houston Street and De Ridder. The man walked up and down in the darkness under the water oaks. The boy sat on the porch steps and minded the Philco, which clanked and whirred and plopped down the old 78’s and set the needle hissing and voyaging. Old Brahms went abroad into the summer night. West, atop the levee, couples sat in parked cars. East, up De Ridder, from the heavy humming ham-rich darkness of the cottonseed-oil mill there came now and then the sound of Negro laughter.

Up and down the man walked and spoke to the boy when he passed the steps. More cars came nosing discreetly up the levee, lights out and appearing to go by paws, first left then right. The man grew angry.

“The prayer meeting must be over,” said the man ironically.

Out poured old Brahms, the old spoiled gorgeous low-German music but here at home surely and not in Hamburg.

“What do they expect,” said the man now, westbound. He took his turn under the street light and came back.

“Now they,” he went on, nodding to the east. “They fornicate and the one who fornicates best is the preacher.”

The Great Horn Theme went abroad, the very sound of the ruined gorgeousness of the nineteenth century, the worst of times.

“But they,” he said to the levee—“they fornicate too and in public and expect them back yonder somehow not to notice. Then they expect their women to be respected.”

The boy waited for the scratch in the record. He knew when it was coming. The first part of the scratch came and he had time to get up and hold the tone arm just right so the needle wouldn’t jump the groove.

“Watch them.”

“Yes sir.”

“You just watch them. You know what’s going to happen?”

“No sir.”

“One will pick up the worst of the other and lose the best of himself. Watch. One will learn to fornicate in public and the other will end by pissing in the street. Watch.”

The man stayed, so the boy said, “Yes sir.”

“Go to whores if you have to, but always remember the difference. Don’t treat a lady like a whore or a whore like a lady.”

“No sir, I won’t.”

The record ended but the eccentric groove did not trip the mechanism. The boy half rose.

“If you do one, then you’re going to be like them, a fornicator and not caring. If you do the other, you’ll be like them, fornicator and hypocrite.”

He opened his eyes. Now standing in the civil public darkness of the park, he snapped his fingers softly as if he were trying to remember something.

Then what happened after that? After he—

Leaning over, he peered down at the faint dapple on the path. After a long moment he held up his watch to the lamplight. After a look around to get his bearings, he walked straight to the corner of the park and down into the BMT subway.

Yet he could scarcely have been in his right mind or known exactly where he was, for what he did next was a thing one did at home but never did here. He dropped in. He walked up to Rita’s apartment in the Mews and knocked on the door at eight thirty in the evening.

Kitty answered the door. Her mouth opened and closed. She could not believe her eyes. He defied the laws of optics.

“Oh,” she said, fearing either to look at him or to take her eyes from him.

“Let’s walk up the street,” he said. “It’s a nice night.”

“Oh, I’d love to,” she cried, “but I can’t. Give me a rain check.” She was managing somehow both to stand aside and to block the doorway.

“Let’s go ride the ferry to Staten Island.”

“Oh, I can’t,” she wailed like an actress.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” he said after a moment.

“What? Oh. Oh.” But instead of standing aside she put her head over coquettishly. Tock, she said, clicking her tongue and eyeing the darkness behind him. They were having a sort of date here in the doorway.

“There is something I wanted to ask you. It will not take long. Your phone didn’t answer.”

“It didn’t?” She called something over her shoulder. It seemed that here was the issue: the telephone. If this issue could be settled, it seemed, he would take his leave like a telephone man. But it allowed her to admit him: she stood aside.

So it was at last that he found himself in the living room standing, in a kind of service capacity. He had come about the telephone. The two women smiled up at him from a low couch covered with Navaho blankets. No, only Kitty smiled. Rita eyed him ironically, her head appearing to turn perpetually away.

It was not a Barbados cottage after all but an Indian hogan. Rita wore a Chamula huipil (Kitty was explaining nervously) of heavy homespun. Kitty herself had wound a white quezquemetl above her Capri pants. Brilliant quetzals and crude votive offerings painted on tin hung from the walls.

They were drinking a strong-smelling tea.

“I’ve been unable to reach you by phone,” he told Kitty.

The two women looked at him.

“I may as well state my business,” said the engineer, still more or less at attention, though listing a bit.

“Good idea,” said Rita, taking a swig of the tea, which smelled like burnt corn. He watched as the muscular movement of her throat sent the liquid strumming along.

“Kitty, I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Could I speak to you alone?”

“You’re among friends, ha-ha,” said Kitty laughing loudly.

“Very well. I wanted to ask you to change your mind about going to Europe and instead go south with Jamie and me.” Until the moment he opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wished to ask her. “Here is your check, Mrs. Vaught. I really appreciate it, but—”

“Good grief,” said Kitty, jumping to her feet as if she had received an electric shock. “Listen to the man,” she cried to Rita and smacked her thigh in a Jewish gesture.

Rita shrugged. She ignored the check.

The engineer advanced and actually took Kitty’s hand. For a second her pupils enlarged and she was as black-eyed as an Alabama girl on a summer night. Then she gaped at her own hand in stupefaction: it could not be so! He was holding her hand! But instead of snatching it away, she pulled him down on the couch.

“Here. Try some hikuli tea,”

“No thanks.” As he lay back among the pillows, his eye fell upon a votive painting. It showed a man who had been thrown from a motorcycle and now lay in a ditch. He had apparently suffered internal injuries, for blood spurted from his mouth like a stream from a garden hose.

“That’s my favorite,” said Kitty. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“I guess so.”

“He was cured miraculously by the Black Virgin.”

“Is that right?”

As Kitty went on, no longer so nervous now but seeming rather to have hit upon a course she might steer between the two of them, he noticed a spot of color in her cheek. There was a liquid light, not a tear, in the corner of her eye.

“Ree’s been giving me the most fascinating account of the hikuli rite which is practiced by the Huichol Indians. The women are absolved from their sins by tying knots in a palm-leaf string, one knot for each lover. Then they throw the string into Grandfather Fire. Meanwhile the men — Ree was just getting to the men. What do the men do, Ree?”

“I really couldn’t say,” said Rita, rising abruptly and leaving the room.

“Tie a knot for me,” said the engineer.

“What,” cried Kitty, craning her neck and searching the horizon like a sea bird. “Oh.”

“Let us now—” he began and sought dizzily to hold her charms in his arms.

“Ah,” said the girl, lying passive, eyes full of light.

“I’ve reached a decision,” he said and leaned back uncomfortably among the pillows, head in the air.

“What is that?”

“Now you know that I need you.”

“You do?”

“And that although I will be all right eventually, I still have a nervous condition, and that for some time to come I’ll need you to call upon.”

“You will?”

“I’ve loved you ever since I saw you in Central — that is, in Jamie’s room.”

“Ah.”

Love, he thought, and all at once the word itself went opaque and curious, a little howling business behind the front teeth. Do I love her? I something her. He felt his nose.

“Let’s go home, either to your home or mine, and be married.”

“Married,” said Kitty faintly.

Dander from the old blankets was beginning to bother his nose. “Would you mind taking this off,” he asked her presently and took hold of her quezquemetl. “Aren’t you hot?”

“Are you out of your mind,” she whispered fiercely.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” He hadn’t meant to undress her but only to get her out of these prickly homespuns and back into decent Alabama cotton.

Kitty sat up. Her eyes were fixed in a stare upon a bowl of tiny cactus plants. “The Huichol believe that things change forms, that one thing can become another thing. An hour ago it sounded like nonsense.”

“Is that right?” He had heard it before, this mythic voice of hers. One of his aunts lived in Cuernavaca.

“The hikuli plant is the deer. The deer is the corn. Look at that.”

“What?”

“That color.”

He looked down at the blanket between them where forked Navaho lightning clove through an old brown sky, brown as old blood.

“What about it?”

“Do you see the depths opening into depths?”

“No.” He tried to blow his nose but the mucous membranes had swelled against each other like violet eiderdowns. “I think I’ll be going.”

“Wait,” she called from the doorway as he walked rapidly off into the night, forgetful of summer now, head ducked, shouldering as if he were still bucking the winter gales. He waited.

“All right,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

He gazed vaguely about at the shuttered shops and dark brownstones.

“We can’t go back there,” she said. Her pale face loomed unsteadily in the darkness. He was thinking about the reciprocal ratio of love: was it ever so with the love of women that they held out until the defeat of one’s first fine fervor, not merely until one feigned defeat but rather until one was in truth defeated, had shrugged and turned away and thought of other matters — and now here they came, all melts and sighs, breathing like a furnace. Her lips were parted slightly and her eyes sparkled. His nose was turning to concrete.

“And we can’t go to the Y.” She had taken his arm. He felt importunate little tugs at his elbow as if he were a blind man and she wanted him to cross the street.

She pulled him close. “Do you notice anything?”

“No.”

“The lampposts.”

“What about them?”

“They seem alive and ominous.”

He was displeased with her. Was it then the case with love that lovers must alternate, forever out of phase with one another? It did not suit her to be fanciful. Was she drunk? She gave him a kiss tasting of burnt corn. He wished she would chew Juicy Fruit like a proper Alabama girl.

“I do know a place,” he said finally. “But it won’t do at night.”

“Why not?”

“It’s in the park.”

“Wait,” she said and flew back to the cottage. He waited, listing at a ten-degree angle. Had he, empathic as ever, got dizzy from her dizziness?

When she returned, she wore a skirt and blouse instead of pants and quezquemetl. “Take this.” She pressed something into his hand.

“What’s this for?” It was a small revolver, a police special, with hardly a quarter inch of barrel.

“For the park. My brother gave it to me as a going-away present when I came to New York.”

“Sutter?”

“Yes. He’s a police surgeon.”

He stuck the pistol into his coat pocket and allowed himself to be nudged toward the subway.

They walked from the Broadway subway exit to the park. Fifty blocks north there were more fires in Harlem and the sense of faraway soundless tumult. Police sirens kicked out, subsided toa growl.

He hesitated. “I don’t know.”

Again the nudge at his elbow. “Don’t worry. They’re all up there.”

He shrugged and took her into the Ramble, a densely wooded stretch. Holding her behind him, he walked swiftly along a path, stooped and holding the girl’s head down, turned into a thicket of privet whose bitter bark smelled like the dry rain gutters of his own house. Dark as it was, with no more light than a sinking gibbous moon, it didn’t matter. He knew the southwest quadrant of the park as he knew his own back yard. (Though he could not see them, he knew when he passed the Disney statuettes, could have put out a hand and touched Dopey.)

The place was down a ravine choked with dogbane and whortleberry and over a tumble of rocks into a tiny amphitheater, a covert so densely shaded that its floor was as bare as cave’s dirt. By day it looked very like the sniper’s den on Little Round Top which Brady photographed six weeks after the battle: the sniper was still there! A skeleton in butternut, his rifle propped peaceably against the rocks.

He set the police special in the dust beside him and drew Kitty down on the other side. They leaned into the curve of a shallow overhang of smooth rock facing the cleft where they entered. There was no sound of traffic or sight of the lighted windows of the apartment houses along Central Park West, or any sign of the city at all except, when he moved his head slightly, a chink of red sky over 110th Street.

“My Lord,” said Kitty. “How could anybody find us here? I can’t even see you.” Her fingers brushed clumsily across his face.

He kissed her with an amiable passion, mainly concerned now to bear with her, serve her anticness as gracefully as he could. He aimed to guard her against her own embarrassment. His nose was no better.

“To answer your question,” she said softly, “Yes.”

“Fine,” he said, nodding in the dark. What question?

“Dearest,” she breathed, holding her hand to his cheek with a tenderness that struck dismay to his heart.

The puzzle is: where does love pitch its tent? in the fine fervor of a summer night, in a jolly dark wood wherein one has a bit o’ fun as the English say? or in this dread tenderness of hers?

“Don’t go away, darling,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”

“All right.”

She moved away. As he traced a finger in the dust, drawing the old Northern Pacific yin-yang symbol, he heard the rustling of clothes and the singing of zippers. She returned without a sound. He embraced her and was enveloped in turn by the warm epithelial smell of her nakedness. What a treasure, he thought, his heart beating as rapidly and shallowly as a child’s. What suppleness.

“Hold me,” whispered Kitty with her dismaying tenderness. “My precious.”

“Right.” Now holding her charms in his arms at last, he wondered if he had ever really calculated the terrific immediacy of it.

“Why don’t you—” she said.

“What? Oh. Pardon,” said the courtly but forgetful engineer and blushed for his own modesty, clad as he was from head to toe in Brooks Brothers’ finest. Making haste to sit up, he began unbutton his shirt.

“Now. Oh, my darling, do you love me?”

“Oh yes,” said the engineer, swinging her forty-five degrees in the dust so that he could look past her toward the opening of the covert. The sky was redder. From the same direction there came a faint crepitant sound like crumpled newspaper. The cops and the Negros were shooting it out in Harlem.

“Will you cherish me?”

“Yes, certainly,” said the engineer.

“I don’t mean just now. I want to be protected always. I want to be cherished.”

“I will,” he assured her.

“Do you know what matters most of all?”

“What?”

“Love.”

“Right.”

“Love is everything.”

“Yes.”

“Rita asked me what I believed in. I said I believed in love.”

“Me too.”

“Besides which I want to prove something to myself,” said the girl, almost to herself.

“Prove what?”

“A little experiment by Kitty for the benefit of Kitty.”

“What experiment is that?”

“Let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with Kitty,” she said.

“I didn’t say there was.”

Holding her, he couldn’t help thinking of Perlmutter, his young fresh-eyed colleague at Macy’s. Though he was from Brooklyn, Perlmutter looked like an Indiana farm boy. Perlmutter spoke of his wife with a lack of reserve, though not of respect, which was startling. Making love to his wife, Perlmutter said, was like “being in heaven.” Now he understood. Kitty too, he would have to say, was an armful of heaven. The astounding immediacy of her. She was more present, more here, than he could ever have calculated. She was six times bigger and closer than life. He scarcely knew whether to take alarm or to shout for joy, hurrah!

“Never mind. What about you, you big geezer?”

Geezer, thought the engineer. “What about me?”

“You were the one who was always sweeping Kitty off her feet before! What happened?” She even socked him, jokingly but also irritably. The poor girl could not get the straight of it: the engineer’s alternating fits of passion and depression.

He was wondering: had the language of women, “love” and “sweeping one off one’s feet,” and such, meant this all along, the astounding and terrific melon immediacy of nakedness. Do women know everything?

“What about it, friend?” asked Kitty, heaving up, her pale face swimming above him. “Kitty wants to know.”

“Know what?”

“Is this the same Will Barrett who swept Kitty off her feet in the automat?”

“No, but it’s just as well,” he said dryly.

“Tell Kitty why.”

“Kitty might be too attractive,” said the chivalrous but wry engineer. “So attractive that it is just as well I don’t feel too well — for one thing, my sinuses are blocked—”

“Oh that’s sweet,” said Kitty in as guttural, as ancient and risible and unbuttoned an Alabama voice as Tallulah Bankhead. Did he know anything about women?

“Do you feel bad,” she asked suddenly and touched his face. “If it is not possible now to—” she broke off.

He felt just bad enough — his head was caulked, the pressure turning him ever away into a dizzy middle distance — and so it was just possible.

“Lover,” said Kitty as they hugged and kissed.

“Darling,” said the engineer, not to be surpassed — was this it at last, the august secret of the Western world?

“My sweet,” said Kitty, patting his cheek at the corner of his mouth.

But is love a sweetnesse or a wantonnesse, he wondered.

Yet when at last the hard-pressed but courteous and puisant engineer did see the way clear to sustaining the two of them, her in passing her test, him lest he be demoralized by Perlmutter’s heaven, too much heaven too soon, and fail them both — well, I do love her, he saw clearly, and therefore I shall — it was too late.

“Dear God,” said the girl to herself, even as he embraced her tenderly and strongly — and fell away from him.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m so sick,” she whispered.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, shaking his head dolefully. Even their sicknesses alternated and were out of phase.

She went to the farthest corner of the sniper’s den and began to retch. The engineer held her head. After a moment she asked in a dazed voice. “What happened?”

“I think it was that tea you were drinking.”

“You are so smart,” she said faintly.

What with her swaying against him, he was having a hard time finding her clothes. It was too much for a man to follow, he mused, these lightning hikuli-transformations from Kitty as great epithelial-warm pelvic-upcurving-melon-immediate Maja to Kitty as waif, huddled under his arm all ashiver and sour with gastric acid. But when they were dressed, they felt better. Now trousered, collared, buttoned up, he at least was himself again. There is a great deal to be said for clothes. He touched Kitty to place her, like a blind man. To his relief she sat hugging her decent skirted knees like a proper Georgia coed.

“Do you feel better?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said, hardly audible. “But talk to me.”

“What about?”

“Anything. Anything that comes into your head.”

“All right.” After all, this was one thing he was good at. “I was thinking about the summer of 1864,” said the engineer, who always told the truth. “My kinsman took part in the siege of Richmond and later of Petersburg. We have a letter he wrote his mother. He was exactly my age and a colonel in the infantry. Petersburg was a rats’ war, as bad as Stalingrad. But do you know that even at the worst the officers would go to balls and cotillions? In the letter he thanks his mother for the buttermilk cookies and says: ‘Met Miss Sally Trumbull last night. She said I danced tolerably well. She gave me her handkerchief.’ He was killed later on in the Crater.”

“Would you take me to a dance?” asked Kitty, her head turned away.

“Sure. But what is curious is that—”

“I’ve been dancing five hours a day for years and I can’t remember the last dance I went to.”

“—he did not feel himself under the necessity, almost moral, of making love—”

“I love to dance.”

“—in order that later things be easy and justified between him and Miss Trumbull, that—”

“My grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer,” said Kitty.

“—that even under the conditions of siege he did not feel himself under the necessity, or was it because it was under the conditions of siege that—”

“You’re so smart,” said Kitty, shivering and huddling against him. “Oh, I’m so cold.”

“I must speak to your father,” said the engineer absently.

The girl started nervously and stopped shivering. “What for?”

“To ask your hand in marriage,” said the engineer somewhat formally.

“You know everything,” said Kitty, commencing to shiver again. “You’re so smart.”

“No, but I know one thing.”

“Tell Kitty.”

“I know what you fear most.”

“What?”

“People, and that is the trouble. The source of your happiness is also the source of your nightmares.”

“That’s true.”

Even now he was at it again, scheming, establishing his credentials. Like all women, she was, he knew, forever attuned to fortunetelling, soothsaying, and such. If he told her something, she might tell him. For there was something he wanted to know.

“I know who you like to be with.”

“Who?”

“Rita and me.”

“That’s right. Why is that?”

“You like Rita because she is among other things a woman and no threat to you. You like me and that would be enough to put you off ordinarily because I am a man but you know something is wrong with me and that neutralizes the threat.”

“Yes,” said the girl gloomily. “Oh, dear. I really don’t feel well.”

“What about Rita?”

“What about her?” He could scarcely hear her.

“What about the notes, verses, and so on, she leaves in the park for you?” He had calculated correctly. Knowing as much as he did about her, he judged that in her eyes it must appear he might know everything. She would not think to ask how he knew about the notes. For all she knew, Rita could have told him.

“The notes in the bench, yes. It is not quite what you think.” Was she now smiling down at her crossed legs?

Kitty said:

The notes. You know, I have a confession to make. I led her on. It’s my fault.

Here it comes again, he thought, the sweet beast of catastrophe. Am I not like Rita after all and do I not also live by catastrophe? I can smell it out every time. Show me a strange house and I can walk straight to the door where the bad secrets are kept. The question is: is it always here that one seeks one’s health, here in the sweet, dread precincts of disaster? Strange: that her disaster now enables me, that now I could love her again and more easily from the pity of it.

No, no, no, Kitty said, I don’t mean there was anything really wrong. Nothing has ever happened, not the least thing. But what I don’t know is whether from the very beginning I didn’t know in my heart of hearts what I was doing — the way a child knows nothing and yet knows everything. I’ve often wondered whether a person who found herself for the first tune in her life really and truly liked by another person and having the power for the first time to make another person like her, would she not use that power every time? Rita is a remarkable person and, wonder of wonders, she liked me. I had never dreamed that anybody would like me. And I knew exactly how to make her like me! This whole thing started last summer. The notes? They’re notes, that’s all. Poems.

Everything happened last summer in one week. Do you think there are times like that when everything comes to a head for several people and after that their lives take a different turning? Jamie and I had gone out to see Sutter and Rita, in Tesuque. Val came out a little later. A few days later and everybody had gone off in different directions. First, I think Sutter found out that something was wrong with Jamie. Sutter could look at you and tell what was wrong with you — he’s about shot now — but I remember he did take Jamie to the laboratory. Then he and Jamie went out into the desert and got lost etcetera etcetera. After that Val left to become a postulant or something. Then I came to New York with Rita, She and Sutter had already separated. I had never met anybody like Rita. My own life had been abnormal. I had polio as a little girl and was crippled and overcame it with ten years of toe dancing (like Glenn Cunningham, Poppy said). I had tutors and Poppy sent me to a school in Switzerland — now you talk about something peculiar: those girls were a mess. I came home. My life at home. Do you know what everybody does? We live in a country club; we are not just members, we live right there on the golf links along with a hundred other houses. The men make money and watch pro football. The women play golf and bridge at the club. The children swim in meets. The mothers of the losers hate the mothers of the winners. At night Mama always gets mad at Huntley-Brinkley, turns off the TV and gets off on the Negroes and the Jews and the Federal Reserve Bank. Sunday we go to church. That’s what we do at home. Then all of a sudden I found myself with Rita. She showed me something I never dreamed existed. Two things. First, the way she devoted herself to the Indians. I never saw anything like it. They adored her. I saw one child’s father try to kneel and kiss her foot. Then she showed me how a thing can be beautiful. She kept Shakespeare’s sonnets by her bed. And she actually read them. Listen to this, she would say, and she would read it. And I could hear it the way she heard it! Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Poetry: who’d have thought it? We went for walks. I listened to her but then (is this bad?) I began to see how much she was enjoying teaching me. We went to corn dances in the pueblos. I said I had a confession. My confession is this: that even though I knew Rita and Sutter were estranged, or at least were having trouble, and although I knew exactly what effect our own friendship was having, I knew how to make Rita like me and I did it. Finally when Jamie and Sutter came back there was a scene between Val and Rita and everything blew up. At the time Val was fretting about whether to go into this religious order and she was not very stable. But everybody was unstable. Anyhow Val accused Rita of destroying Carlos’s faith—

Carlos?

A Zuñi boy who was Rita’s servant and protégé. (I beat him too. Rita liked him but she soon liked me better.) He was her prize pupil and she’d got him into Harvard on a scholarship. She was having Carlos and me dance the Ahaiyute myths. Carlos was the Beast God and I was the Corn Woman. Val told Carlos he was trading his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rita asked her what mess of pottage she meant, the Ahaiyute myths or Harvard? Thus — this idolatry, said Val. But Val dear, said Rita, this is his birthright, the Zuñis had the Ahaiyute myths for hundreds of years before the Spanish priests came. Val stormed out. She never liked Rita.

What did Sutter say?

Nothing. Or rather he laughed. But it was then that Val made up her mind too. She came back the same night and apologized. She told Rita: “It is you who are doing the work and I who am being hateful and doing nothing. Is it possible to come to believe in Christ and the whole thing and afterwards to be more hateful than before? But at least now I know what to do, and I thank you for it, Rita.” And so around she goes to each of us, kissing us and asking us to forgive her (it was that kind of summer).

What did Sutter say to that?

Oh, he said something about: now I don’t know, Val, maybe there is something to be said nowadays for a theology of hatred — you know Sutter. No, you don’t. But then I came on to New York with Rita. The poems in the park? They’re just that. She likes to show me her favorites — she knows I can see them as she sees them. I have to get up earlier than she does and we have different lunch hours. So if she reads something the night before — she reads at all hours — she’ll put it in the bench for me to read during my lunch. I owe her a great deal. Now she wants me to go to Europe with her. I owe her the pleasure she will take in showing it to me. But first I have to make sure of my own motives. I wrote Sutter that. I conceal nothing from him.

What did he say?

Nothing. He’s entirely too selfish to write a letter. If Rita is the most unselfish person I know, Sutter is the most selfish. That was the real trouble all along, that Rita did all the giving and Sutter did all the taking. Do you know what he said to me? “Blankety-blank on unselfishness,” said he. “I agree with Val and the Christers, it’s a fornication of spirit.” But that’s not right either. That’s not what Christ said.

Blankety-blank?

Crap.

Don’t talk like that.

I’m sick. Take me home.

The next morning he called Kitty from Macy’s. “Today,” he told her, “I’ve got to get this business settled one way or the other.”

“Don’t speak to me,” she said, her voice faint and cold.

“Eh?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t.” But he thought he did — though, as it turned out, he was wrong.

“You took advantage of me.”

“Ah, dearest—” he began. His heart sank: she was right.

But she broke in quickly (he was not right). “I have been out of my mind with worry the last few days, about this whole business, Jamie and Europe and everything. Then on top of everything I was allergic to the paint fumes and it was too much.”

“Paint fumes,” said the engineer. He looked up in time to see his old friends the Ohioans punching in at the time clock, bound for sportswear and lingerie, a lusty clear-eyed crew who had no trouble understanding each other.

“We painted Rita’s attic yesterday and I turned out to be allergic to the benzene or whatever it was. I went completely out of my head. What did I say?”

“Nothing much.”

“But I remember enough to know that you took advantage of me, barging in like that.”

“Barging in?”

“Rita tells me that you didn’t call her, you just showed up.”

“Yes,” he said contritely, willing, anxious to be convicted of a lesser crime. What foulness had he committed? It was not enough to lie with Kitty in Central Park like a common sailor: he must also take his pleasure, or almost take his pleasure, with a nice girl rendered defenseless by paint fumes.

“I really think it put me in a terrible position for you to come to Rita’s like that. You know better than that! And then to leave without so much as a fare-you-well to Rita and walking me clear to New Jersey or wherever it was.”

“Yes.”

“What do you want?”

“What?”

“You called me, remember?”

“Oh yes,” said the engineer, shaking hishead to clear the cobwebs. “I’ve got to, ah, get this business settled.” But he had lost his resolution.

“What business?” said Kitty coldly.

“Whether I am working for Rita or your father. But in either case—”

“Working for Rita?” she asked sharply.

“Rita wants me and Jamie to take the camper while you all go to Europe.”

“I see.”

“The point is,” he said, gathering strength, collecting his wits at last, “I don’t want you to go.”

“Oh, you don’t want me to go.”

“No, I want you to stay here and either go south with Jamie and me or—”

“You’ve got your nerve.”

“Kitty.”

“What?”

“Do you remember that I asked you to marry me last night?”

“Oh Lord,” said the girl nervously and hung up, not so much he thought, on him as on herself.

Later, after shower and breakfast, he called Jamie from the Y.M.C.A. It was time to settle things one way or another.

Jamie surprised him by answering the phone himself.

“Why didn’t you keep the telescope?” the engineer asked him.

“We’re leaving, aren’t we? Thanks, by the way.”

“Rita spoke to me today. Do you know what she wants us to do?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Again he heard the slight break in breathing, the little risible and incredulous sound he seemed to call forth from people.

“What would you do?” asked Jamie after a silence.

“I’d do what the doctor said.”

“Me too. But in any case you’re going to bum around with me for a while?”

“Sure.”

“Then call Poppy and see what’s what. After all, he’s the boss.”

“You’re right. I will. Where is he?”

“At the Astor.”

“How extraordinary.”

“It was the only hotel they knew.”

“Yello, yello.” Mr. Vaught answered the telephone as eccentrically and routinely as a priest reciting the rosary.

“Sir, this is BillyBarrett.”

“Who? Billy boy!”

“Yes sir. Sir—”

“Yayo.”

“I would like to know exactly where we stand.”

“You ain’t the only one.”

“Sir?”

“What is it you want to know, Bill?”

“I would like to know, sir, whether I am working for you or working for Rita or for both or for neither.”

“You want to know something, Bill.”

“Yes sir.”

“It would be a crying shame if you didn’t turn out to be a lawyer. You sound just like your daddy.”

“Yes sir. But—”

“Listen to me, Bill.”

“I will,” said the engineer, who had learned to tell when the old man was not fooling.

“You got your driver’s license?”

“Yes sir.”

“All right. You be standing outside on the sidewalk at nine o’clock in the morning. We’ll pick you up. Then we’ll see who’s going where.”

“Yes sir.”

“All yall be ready,” he said, like Kitty, somewhat aside from the telephone, to the world around.

It was not a good sign, thought the engineer as he hung up slowly, that Mr. Vaught spoke both broadly and irritably.

The next morning he resigned his position at Macy’s — the chief engineer, who had heard this before and was something of a psychologist himself, nodded gravely and promised the job would be waiting for him when he felt better — checked out of the Y.M.C.A. and sat on his telescope at the curb for three hours. No one came to pick him up. Once he went inside to call the hospital, the hotel, and Kitty. Had he got the directions wrong? Jamie had been discharged, the Vaughts had left the hotel, and Kitty’s telephone did not answer.

Only then, three hours later, did it occur to him that there must be a message for him. He climbed the steps again. Already the Y reentered was like a place he had lived in long ago with its special smell of earnestness and breathed air and soaped tile, the smell, as he had always taken it but only just now realized, of Spanish Protestantism. Two yellow slips were handed him across the desk. Superstitiously, he took pains to return to his perch on the street corner before reading either. The first was a garbled note, evidently from Mr. Vaught. “If plans are not finalized and you change your mind a job is always waiting. S. Vote.” “Vote” could only be Vaught.

The second was from Kitty and he couldn’t see for looking. “Europe out,” he finally made out. “Jamie more important.Please change your mind and catch up with us at Coach-and-Four Motel, Williamsburg. Know you had cause to lose patience but please change your mind. Did you mean what you said? Kitty.”

Change my mind? Mean what I said? What did I say, asked the engineer aloud. He blinked into the weak sunlight. Screwing up an eye, he tried mightily to get the straight of it. It follows, said he, diagramming a syllogism in the air, that they think I changed my mind about going with them. But I told them no such thing. Then it follows someone else did.

Another twenty minutes of squatting and musing on the telescope, not so much addled as distracted by the curiousness of sitting in the street and having no address, and he jumped suddenly to his feet.

Why, they have all left, thought he, socking himself with amazement: the whole lot of them have pulled out.

Early afternoon found him on a southbound bus counting his money. He bought a ticket as far as Metuchen. The bus was a local, a stained old Greyhound with high portholes. The passengers sat deep in her hold, which smelled of the 1940’s and many a trip to Fort Dix. Under the Hudson River she roared, swaying like a schooner, and out onto old US 1 with its ancient overpasses and prehistoric Sinclair stations. The green sky filtered through the high windows. In Elizabeth, when the door opened, he fancied he heard a twittering, ravening noise high in the green sky.

When the bus got clear of the factories and overpasses, he pulled the cord and alighted on the littered highway. On the corner stood a blackened stucco dollhouse with a pagoda roof, evidently a subdivision field office left over from the period between the great wars.

It began to rain, a fine dirty Jersey drizzle, and he took refuge in the pagoda, which was empty but for scraps of ancient newspapers, a sepia rotogravure section depicting Lucky Lindy’s visit to Lakehurst in 1928.

The drizzle stopped but it was a bad place to catch a ride. There were few cars. The concrete underfoot trembled like an earthquake as the great tankers and tractors rolled by. Yet prudence had not failed him. Against such an occasion he had obtained certain materials in Penn Station, and, returning to the pagoda, he lettered a sign which he propped against his telescope: PRINCETON STUDENT SEEKS RIDE SOUTH.

And now once again, not entirely aware that he did so, he stuck his hands in his pockets a certain way and carried his chin in his throat. In the end he even took off his Macy’s jacket (which looked more like Ohio State than Princeton), uncovering his shirt with the tuck in back and no pocket in front.