Americana

6

Men on small islands would do well to avoid the pursuit of philosophy. The island illusion, that solitude and wisdom invented each other, is a very convincing one. Day by day I seem to grow more profound. Often I feel I am on the verge of some great philosophical discovery. Man. War. Truth. Time. Fortunately I always return to myself. I look beyond the white lace of the surf to my own unassembled past and I decide to let others stitch together the systems. I enjoy the triteness of the situation, man and island, exile in the ultimate suburb. The surf is massing and rolling, uneven now, page after page of terrible wild words. All the colors borrow, sea from beach from sky, and after a while I follow my own footprints back to the house.

(The film is projected.)

There were many visions in the land, all fragments of the exploded dream, and some of the darkest of these visions were those processed in triplicate by our generals and industrialists-the manganese empires, the super-sophisticated gunnery, the consortiums and privileges. Something else was left over for the rest of us, or some of the rest of us, and it was the dream of the good life, innocent enough, simple enough on the surface, beginning for me as soon as I could read and continuing through the era of the early astronauts, the red carpet welcome on the aircraft carrier as the band played on. It encompassed all those things which all people are said to want, materials and objects and the shadows they cast, and yet the dream had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence almost totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village. And so purity of intention, simplicity and all its harvests, these were with the mightiest of the visionaries, those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one's awareness. This was difficult at times. But as a boy, and even later, quite a bit later, I believed all of it, the institutional messages, the psalms and placards, the pictures, the words. Better living through chemistry. The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Aunt Jemima. All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.

Old Holly was a suburb of New York only in the strict geographical sense; unlike the surrounding communities it was not an extension of the city's monoxide spirit, a point of mere arrival and departure. The town did not have the sheen of a manicurist's artistry about it. The houses were very old, most of them, and agreeably shabby, two or three stories with small shuttered windows, high ceilings, gabled roofs, porches which in some cases went entirely around the houses, repeating the eccentric angles sketched by the roof-edges. Through all the houses drifted some thin plasm of identity, stirring the senses of the casual visitor. One enters here and tastes clove or mellow tobacco in the air; the next house smells faintly of mint, varnish somewhere, the soft thick snuff of an old rug; one hears music elsewhere, no more than intimations from the keys of a lidded piano, no more than cutlery and voices, the indolent sermon of a saw on wood, no more than silence or the stagnant inner sound which silence contains in all old rooms deep in sunlight. In certain rooms in some of the houses, the floors were slightly tilted, moldings loose, ceiling beams off-center, and when you got out of bed at night for a glass of water and there was wind and rain the sensation was not unlike that of being at sea in a storm. If you were a boy it was a simple matter to pretend your house was a ship, for the stairs creaked and there were small dark corners where you could put your hand to the wall and feel the house sigh in the wild currents of the wind. The dim persuasions of sameness, the low clean lines which imply neither victory nor defeat but only stalemate, equation, the century's dry science, were nowhere present among these houses. Only two pieces of property included swimming pools. The country club was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Physically, then, Old Holly might have been set in the middle of Connecticut or in some Pennsylvania valley which owed the fact of its livelihood to no large city. In spirit, the town was even less suburban. It had not been built with the automobile in mind; the streets were somewhat less than broad and people could be seen walking at all hours of the day and evening to the stores on Ridge Street. There were no parking lots in the middle of town, no need for them, and no shopping center or aluminum custard stand flanked by a miniature golf course and a driving range. There were many small hills, nagging little curves instead of neat intersections, and the sight of headlights picking out trees through low fog was, to a boy, something beautiful and rare, for the car was alien to this environment, its passage difficult and bizarre. Most of the people who lived in Old Holly worked there as well, tradesmen, factory hands, professional men, and the train depot was never crowded at the regular commuter hours. We were a town then, American in our outlook, plain and meat-eating, relatively unhurried, willing to die for our country, or for photographs of our country.

Harkavy Clinton Bell, my father's father, spent the last seven years of his life in Old Holly. Before retiring he had been one of advertising's early legends, the second man to use a coupon in a newspaper ad. It was he who left the house to my father. I was six when we moved from West End Avenue; Jane was nine and Mary ten. I was happy there as a child. It was a house of dubious architectural parentage, a bastard house, a stray, to be loved as mongrels are. Harkavy's portrait was over the mantelpiece, misty hills behind his head, and he looked like Mona Lisa's corrupt uncle. I filled my room with fishing rods, college pennants, baseballs and model planes.

Winter of my twelfth year.

The boys vanished in the heavy snow. I ran inside and took off my boots, coat and hat. I was always running then and I was always leaving on my hat till last. I stood by the window and watched the snow pile up. It was the first snowfall of the year, filling the evening with silence and falling heaviest inside the light of the streetlamps. A parked car was covered, humped in white, and nothing moved but soft light across sleeves of snow on the branches of every tree. It was warm inside the house and I could hear my mother and older sister preparing dinner. Soon my father came home and I ran to greet him. He stood in the hallway, big and pink, shaking off snow, clapping his gloves together, breathing smoke. After dinner I went back to the window and chewed on homemade cookies. Mary washed the dishes; Jane drew a picture of my mother with chalk on a slate; my father turned the pages of a magazine; the radiator whistled. All these sounds in the warm house, of water running and steam, of shrill chalk and the rustling of paper, of voices known and of time moving down the grandfather clock, all these, inflections of the house itself, all-comforting and essential, told me that I was safe.

And then the first sound of men with shovels was heard.

I could not see them but I knew they were out there, bulky men folded behind their shovels. The shovels chipped at ice, scraped on concrete, and my father began to get interested. He stirred and put down the magazine. My mother quoted something she had read the day before, grim statistics about shoveling snow and heart attacks, about pneumonia, sprained backs, broken hips. My father said he had a long way to go before he started worrying about such things and in a little while he got up and put on his coat. There is no denying a man who wants to shovel snow.

Outside a car went by, slowly, wipers working, and then my father emerged from the basement with the shovel. I could see three streetlamps from the window and each beam of light brimmed with snow. Soon it would be Christmas and there would be visitors and gifts and too much food. And if we were lucky enough to have snow then it was that much better because there was nothing ahead but school and the bleak dark months before the first true day of spring. But it was too early to look forward to spring because there was still Christmas ahead. The worst stretch was after Christmas. It was a long time to spring and there was nothing but school. My mother began to cry.

I went outside and stood by the gate. My father was shoveling snow and didn't see me and all up and down the street other men were shoveling and not talking and they were all breathing smoke and in the quiet and unfaltering tenor of the snow they Looked like ancient men engaged in timeless professions, shepherds in a field or patient fishermen whose lines sprawl in the water of a winter lake. The night air was keen and thin. No cars passed and it was too cold now for walking your dog or for boys testing the snow for its snowball qualities. I wanted to do some shoveling myself but there was only one shovel and it was something I knew my father enjoyed so I let it go. I thought of all the people in town I liked and all those I didn't like. I imagined myself crawling through the woods, a commando, with a knife between my teeth. It was hot and the jungle birds were screaming. I moved up to the house on my belly through the trees. It was the doctor's house, Weber's, and I climbed through the window. He came downstairs and I stood behind the kitchen door. He walked in and reached for the light-switch and then quickly, hand over mouth, knife to throat, softly, softly, whispering my vengeance to his warm ear, I killed him.

In the snow now the joyous men shoveled. I went up the stairs and felt something hit me in the back. I turned and saw my father shaking the snow from his hands and smiling. I waited until he returned the shovel to the basement. Then we went into the house together.

My best friend was Tommy Valerio. Whenever I went to his house, his mother would squeeze my cheeks and rub her knuckles on my head. It used to embarrass me and soon I found excuses to stay away. When Tommy was sixteen his father died of a heart attack and Tommy took possession of the family car, a '46 Chevy. We kept a bayonet under the front seat. We didn't have licenses and Tommy used to sit on a pillow when he was driving so that he would look taller and therefore older. One day he told me that the police chief's youngest daughter, Kathy, was available for experiments of all kinds. We drove her over to the yacht club and took turns in the back seat. She chewed gum throughout. The police chief's name was Brandon Lovell. He and my father used to shoot skeet together. I was going to prep school in New Hampshire but I was home about six weekends that winter and there would always be one afternoon in the yacht club parking lot. One Saturday I borrowed the car and drove over to the drugstore on Ridge Street. Kathy was there and I took her to the lot. She told me that her father used to walk around the house naked. That was why her two older sisters had left home. Once he wore his gunbelt and holster and nothing else and fired six bullets into the sofa. I asked her who she liked better and she said Tommy. I took the bayonet out from under the seat and asked her again. I didn't know whether I was kidding or not. She said Tommy. I hit her in the jaw with the blunt end of the bayonet and threw her out of the car.

That summer, with my father's consent, I got a junior driver's license. He owned an MG at the time and we went driving almost every weekend. One night he agreed to lend me the car even though I wasn't supposed to drive after dark. I told him that a friend of mine from Larchmont, a classmate, had just died of amnesia, and this was the last night of the wake. I had spent a long time working out the minor details of the lie but he gave me the keys without asking questions. There was a movie I had to see.

I sat through it twice. During the intermission an usher came around with a tin can for the heart fund. It was even better the second time. There was an immensity to Burt which transcended plot, action, characterization. In my mind he would be forever caught in that peculiar gray silveriness of the movie screen, his body radiating a slight visual static. I saw him in person once at Yankee Stadium and even then, before he left in the fourth inning because the autograph hunters would not leave him alone, even then, in civvies and dark shades, Burt was the supreme topkick, inseparable from the noisy destinies of 1941. I was glad I had not asked anyone to come to the movies with me. This was religion and it needed privacy. I drove home slowly. My father followed me up to my room. I was sitting on the bed, one shoe just off, still in my hand, when he entered.

"How could anybody die of amnesia?" he said.

"Amnesia? I thought I said anemia."

"You said amnesia, sport. I didn't realize it till you left. But even granting you meant anemia, the question still goes. Who dies of anemia today? Didn't this friend of yours get enough to eat?"

"It's a blood thing, dad. It has nothing to do with malnutrition. The red corpuscles don't get enough hemoglobin. Something like that."

"You were out with that little piece of tail, weren't you? Lovell's daughter. If you don't get the clap off her, you'll never get it. That's dynamite you're fooling around with, pally. Lovell's a friend of mine but he's got some kind of maniac inside him. Some big mean redneck waving a shotgun. If he finds out you're fooling around with his daughter, he'll blow your head off. What I'm giving you is sound advice based on a pragmatic interpretation of the facts as I see them. I'm not moralizing, Dave. That's your mother's department. Listen to your old man. Have I ever given you a bum steer?"

"I went to the movies," I said.

"Yeah."

"It's the truth this time."

"Let's forget it."

"Can I drink beer at the dinner table from now on?"

"Can you drink beer?" he said. "I don't give a rat's ass if you drink double bourbons. Do you good. But that's also your mother's department. Maybe if you sipped it from a sherry glass she'd give you the okay."

I laughed and took off the other shoe.

"Is she still making preparations for the big party?"

"She's moving into second gear. A full month in advance. She's a honey all right, your mother is. Nobody like her."

"Will you let Arondella come to the party?"

"Don't mention his name in this house," my father said.

At the table my mother usually talked about food. When she was riding in a car, her conversation centered around cars and driving. Knitting, she talked about clothes; sweeping, about the virtues of cleanliness; watching television, about watching television.

When she was feeling well, we became absorbed in her, grateful for every simple moment. But she was rarely well. There was no pattern to her illness, none that we could discern anyway. Each break in the bad weather gave us hope and my father would put off until another time the necessary task of seeking professional help. He understood nothing and therefore did nothing. She was not a photograph that could be retouched. The maimed child could not be cropped out of the picture. She was not an advertising campaign and so he did not know what to do about her. When she was well, he lived within latitudes defined by her intelligence and grace, as we all did, lovingly. The rest of the time we did our best to pretend she was not there.

She was blond, blessed with smooth lovely skin, with almost musical hands. She was quite small. In her simplest actions was a delicacy so theatrical and self-aware that one often felt witness to some lonely child's performance. Virginia born, the only daughter of a minister and a minister's daughter, she met my father when he was visiting relatives in Alexandria. Two months later they were married. It embarrassed me to hear stories of their courtship, such as it was, and the early years of their marriage. She was seventeen when they were married and I was born five years later. She told me the story of those years dozens of times. She seemed to consider my birth the culmination of a series of preparatory events almost ceremonial in meaning and scope.

The Episcopal church in Old Holly was called Calvary. My mother spent a lot of time there. The church had organized a permanent fund-raising drive for the orphans of Asia. My mother was in charge of Burma and South Korea. Although she was genuinely devout, I think she was uneasy about the whole idea of the passion of Christ. Perhaps he sweated too much for her taste. I say that without facetiousness. She used to tell me charming little fables about Jesus. It wasn't until much later that I realized she made them up. In her fables Jesus was a blond energetic lad who helped his mother around the house and occasionally performed a nifty miracle. "And after Jesus cured the blind man," she would say, "he went home to the farm and helped his daddy milk the cows."

As a child I was devoted to her. But we had our differences. Most of our arguments were pedantic flurries and whoever lost would usually try to even things up with a senseless display of spitefulness. I was playing baseball one day, or hardball as we called it, standing out in center field, when I saw her coming across the grass toward me.

"Good little boys do not pick their nose," she said.

"Do not pick their noses. Boys is plural so noses has to be plural."

"Boys are plural," she said. "I was quite a brilliant little grammarian as a girl. I also played the harpsichord."

She turned and left before I could say anything. The game resumed and when the inning was over I trotted in and sat on the grass behind the first-base line. Tommy came over and sat next to me. He asked me what she had wanted. I told him.

"If that was my mother," he said, "I'd have told her to go take a flying fuck at the moon."

Her bedroom was full of childhood things. Several cloth dolls sat on the dresser, slumped over in their dull colors, limbs woefully bent. There was a set of toy dinnerware in the closet as well as a small dollhouse, a teddy bear and bunny, six or seven coloring books. Jane and Mary were not allowed to play with any of these things. Music boxes were everywhere.

At times her presence in the house seemed accidental. She was one of those people who turn up now and then only to fade into some parenthesis of the middle distance; one catches glimpses of such people in parks and museums. Walking down the hallway I would see her move from room to room, a quick white daze of cloth, hair, bare arms; turning the bend in the staircase I would see first her feet, then knees, hands, face, a tired light in the eyes. She liked to sit on the top step. There was an apparitional quality about my mother. She seemed almost translucent and no expectation of eye or mind could ever fully prepare me for the sudden glimmers of her comings and goings.

When we were alone in the house I sometimes sat on the steps with her. That's where she first told me about Dr. Weber. It was a summer afternoon. The house was full of sunlight. A bear's great warm slumber was spread over everything. The girls were playing tennis.

"The minister and the doctor are the heart of every community," she said. "Your great-grandfather on my mother's side, Philip Thatcher, was a fine country doctor. We've had doctors and ministers in our family practically all the way back to Jamestown. I've always had the greatest respect for doctors. In my family the doctor was second only to the minister. It was the tradition. And that's why Dr. Weber surprised me so. Dr. Weber is part of no tradition I know of, and if he's second to anyone it's probably a field hand. If I'm going to tell this story-and I am because one day you'll realize that true education is made up of shocks and rude surprises, so I am going to tell it-but first I have to tell you what an internal examination is. It's an examination of a woman's most intimate parts. Don't ask me why, but these things are necessary from time to time. Dr. Weber told me to take off my clothing and put on a white gown. It was like the gown you wore when you had your tonsils taken out. Then he asked me to recline on a big funny table and he put my legs in a pair of stirrups. Then he put a pillow on my stomach so I couldn't see what he was doing down there. I can tell you there wasn't much dignity to any of this. Then he began to do things. He asked me if I liked it. Naturally I said no. He said of course you do, everybody does, it's only natural, and what a pretty young thing you are to have three children; what a pretty young woman and already three times a mother; so young and pretty, he kept saying, and do you like it and of course you do and you're the prettiest woman I've ever seen, Ann, and no one will ever know. He called me by my first name."

Whenever I saw my mother go through the house with the can of air-freshener I knew the Reverend Potter was expected. They had informal discussions every few weeks. She had known him since she was a girl in Alexandria. She talked of him often. She would run through the litany of his credits as if he were a make of automobile that had competed successfully in the various economy runs and endurance trials. The Boston Latin School. Harvard. The Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria. Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia. St. Bartholomew's in New York. Rector of Calvary Church in Old Holly. Added to the resonance of the man was his full name, William Stockbridge Potter; that Stockbridge was perfect, implying great girth and distinction, and it did not disappoint, for he was big, hearty and companionable. So I would see her spraying all the rooms with lavender sachet and I would find an inconspicuous chair in the living room and duck my head behind a copy of Treasure Island or the favorite sports stories of Bill Stern.

"Ann, this tea is delightful. You know how carefully I choose my words and I say this tea is delightful."

"What about the Judeo-Christian ethic?" she said.

"What about it, Ann?"

"I came across it in a magazine. I said to Clinton I must ask William Potter about this."

"Correct."

"Well, what about it?"

"I suppose it refers to certain common elements in our heritage and theirs. I suppose it distinguishes these elements from those of the Moslem ethic, if there is such a thing."

Reverend Potter sat in titanic splendor, slouched elegantly in the armchair, legs high and crossed at the knees, hands joined just beneath his lower lip, fingers barely touching. I was fascinated by the length of his fingers and by the small gray hair-fields above and below the joints of each finger. I had never seen such long fingers, nor fingers with so much hair growing on them. His black shoes gleamed. His hair was long and gray. He had harsh blue eyes and his voice seemed like steel struck on rock in a deep cave. The sight and sound of him filled me with fright and pleasure. To me, he could not have been more striking if he were an Abyssinian chieftain. But despite the beauty of his voice, there was something odd about the way he spoke. He often inserted long pauses between sentences and even words. Sometimes he would not respond to my mother's simplest question without a full minute's pause. Listening to him had its own measure of suspense. I used to imagine words tangled up in his throat and I would silently encourage them to spring out. There were times, the longest pauses, the slow hinging and unhinging of his jaw, the tentative sound echoing up his larynx, when he appeared to be on the verge of a torrential belch. It was part of his fascination. When he did speak finally, there seemed to be a curious disparity between the sounds he made and the movement of his lips; somehow they did not quite mesh. Perhaps the long pauses, the expectation, created an illusion of imbalance, but it seemed real enough then. It wasn't until years later, when I joined the network, that I found a term which perfectly described the way his words issued from an unrelated mouth. William Stockbridge Potter was out of sync.

"What about death?" she said.

"Ah."

"I don't think I could bear it. What can people do who are afraid to die? I saw my father die. It was slow and agonizing."

"This is one of the basic questions of our time," he said. "If we knew how to make a good job of death, it wouldn't be so frightful, would it? The famous prizefighter Joe Louis has been quoted as saying that everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. I've used that in many of my sermons. Laughter, ah, is a great catalyst. It eases tension and helps clear the atmosphere. I'm a great believer in the power of laughter. People think High Church is drab and humorless. This is nonsense."

"But what are we to do?" she said.

"We must draw up a blueprint for dying."

"I think it's all so stupid, this high-low business."

"Will I see you at evensong? And the boy?"

"By all means."

"I must be going."

"Next time I want to hear about the Oxford Tracts."

"I have plenty of ammunition on that subject. I've just been reading up on the great Alonzo Potter; no relation incidentally, although I admit to you in confidence that I cherish the happy coincidence of our names, the serpent of vanity notwithstanding."

"You haven't touched your cookies."

"I really must be going."

"And I want to hear more about death."

"I'll be ready," he said. "Now then, shall we stroll out through the garden?"

"There is no garden."

"Ah."

"Say goodbye, David."

"Your mother is a smart little gal, young man. She was one of the great young beauties of Virginia. And her generosity to the church knows no bounds. You're a very fortunate boy to be so tall and straight. He has your eyes, Ann. What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"A soldier," I said.

"He speaks out directly. I like that. Not a hint of equivocation in his voice. He's a fine-looking boy."

"We share each other's secrets," she said.

"Well done."

"Goodbye," I said.

"A soldier," he said. "I like that. No nonsense about this boy. If I had not become a minister of Christ, I would have become a soldier myself. They're not so very different, you know."

At Leighton Gage College I wanted to be known as Kinch. This is Stephen Dedalus' nickname in Ulysses, which I was reading at the time. But I soon learned that nobody at Leighton Gage had a nickname, except of the most disparaging kind. There were no athletic teams there either. There were no grades or formal examinations. There were no traditions. The faculty was good but somewhat lazy and I suppose the reverse could be said of the students.

At the beginning I became friendly with a boy named Leonard Zajac, who was known to the wits in the poetry society as Young Man Carbuncular. We had several classes together and I was impressed by his nervous high-speed humor, his iconoclasm, the way he turned familiar ideas around and gave fresh meaning to them without necessarily believing his own version more than the original. Leonard was a fat and lonely boy with furious purple inflammations all over the back of his neck. People spoke to him only when necessary and even the faculty tried to ignore him. His obesity, his poor complexion, his heavy ghetto clothing seemed tragically out of place in the sleek setting of southern California. Leonard spent a good deal of time in the library. He and I got along well. With his help I felt I could develop my mind into a fine cutting instrument. Kinch. The knife-blade. Leonard was generous with his time and ideas. It wasn't long before I began to imagine him as a brilliant satirist and social critic, a personage of Swiftian eminence, a post-Renaissance phenomenon, a bonfire around which we would all huddle for lessons and warmth. To me, at eighteen, there was a certain attraction to Leonard's kind of life. Chronic boils and obesity eliminate all possible illusions; snuggle up to loneliness and make the library your womb-home and chapel. Then it all crumbled. Leonard told me he was in love with Page Talbot. She was a Kansas girl with long blond hair, the kind of woman who looks absolutely stunning at a distance of ten feet; within closer range, however, Page's green eyes seemed washed out, her skin sallow, and the lack of expression on her face suggested lifelong bereavement over the death of a pet rabbit. But coming toward you or moving along in front with a barely manageable sway, in salt-bleached blue jeans and faded blue farmgirl shirt, Page could make you feel she was worth following, on foot, all the way back to Kansas City. In the library one day Leonard told me about his fantasies. He imagined making love to her underwater, on horseback, on top of professors' desks, inside phone booths. Then he said he wanted to be like me; he would give anything, he said, to be like me, trim, good-looking, popular. His confession forced some strange shift in the sheer balances of my mind. That night I visited Page Talbot in her room. I wore tan chinos, the closest I could come to the fresh creased suntans of the United States Army. I stood in the doorway and thought of Burt Lancaster standing in the rain waiting for Deborah Kerr to open the door. My career as an intellectual was over.

In junior year I met Ken Wild. I left my room one morning, late for class, and was going down the stairs, past the second floor, when I heard music, the deep bounce of a tenor saxophone. I stood there a moment, listening, then went down the corridor. The sound was coming from a record player turned up to what seemed full volume. A husky young man was sitting on the edge of the bed, forearms on knees, head faintly nodding. He was wearing red and black boxer's trunks, an Everlast trademark across the elastic band. He looked up briefly, cracking open a big grin, and waved me to a chair. About ten minutes later the record ended and the tone arm swung back.

"Coltrane," he said.

Wild was from Chicago, an ex-marine. We spent the rest of the morning listening to his records. I felt this music had been in me all along, the smoky blue smell of it, mornings in Paris and cat intestines spilled on Lenox Avenue. I pleased myself by thinking, as white men will do, that some Afro-instinct burned in an early part of my being.

Wild and I were friends from the beginning. We argued, kidded, sparred with open hands, and committed the usual collegiate blasphemies of word and deed, using as our text the gleeful God-baiting of Buck Mulligan in the first few pages of Ulysses. That was our sacred scroll and we regretted that there had been no gray Jesuits to darken our childhoods and none now to swoop down on us with deathmask and Summa.

Both of us wrote poetry. I enjoyed strangling the words and trying to get them on paper still living but when I failed to finish what I had planned to do, or even to begin it, I was less than seriously troubled. After all I had my camera. But Wild went at it with total commitment, all or nothing, sending no envoys out to treaty with failure. We joined the school's poetry society so that we could stay away from their meetings and have our memberships revoked and then found a rival society. But we never bothered.

We used to go through anthologies, loving and hating all fierce gigantic talent. It was the loose image we picked out and petted, little boys in a lion kennel. Wild would go into a fine frenzy at these sessions, turning pages, jumping from book to book, shouting out the beatific phrases, and we would spin off into storms of laughter at the joy and wonder and misery of those lines. We tried to write with jazz and wine. But I guess I would have been better off in bed with Wendy Judd.

People dream of money and love. It was Wendy's ambition to be hired as an extra in a big-budget Technicolor movie. She had no illusions of stardom. Fragmentation, the settling of a myth into the realism of its component parts, had come to the West quite early, and Wendy was a native Californian. She would have been satisfied to get the back of her head in a movie, her revolutionary fist raised in a Bastille crowd scene. She spent a lot of time with Simmons St. Jean, who taught film theory and criticism at Leighton Gage. Simmons was only thirty or so but he tried to come on like the post-accident Montgomery Clift, a hollow echoing man. He worked on his pallor the way the rest of us teased our suntans. At the same time he tried to let his male students know that for an old man he was doing all right with the girlies. Since I majored in film and since Simmons considered me the man to beat for stud honors, we had a certain wary interest in each other. Our discussions were full of small-arms fire. Wendy Judd and I had coffee with him one day.

"I'm just fascinated by you kids," Simmons said. "I was with one of my students the other night, the other evening I should say, girl named Pamela something, and I was virtually in awe of her unselfconsciousness and total lack of provincialism. Her quiet command of her own feelings. You kids are so wonderfully free and open. You have none of the hangups I had in college. It's a beautiful thing to see."

"How come you look so tired and beat-up all the time?" Wendy said. "Not that it's not attractive."

"I'd just as soon not talk about myself. I've exhausted all hope of defining who or what I am. Perhaps some time, Wendy, if Dave permits, I'll tell you the story of my life. But for the time being I'd much rather listen to you two talk about yourselves. One of the many pleasures of teaching at a place like this is the uninhibited exchange between students and faculty. There's really nothing like it anywhere in the country. Dave, what kind of thesis are you planning this year?"

"I'm shooting it in the desert, Simmons. It'll be almost pure imagery. A small shade of meaning for those who crave it."

"I thrive on imagery. It seems to have a laxative effect."

"David showed me the thing he made last year," Wendy said. "Wasn't it wild, Simmons-all those reflections and shadows?"

"He didn't like it," I said.

"I wouldn't say that, Dave. It had its moments."

"He said it was meekly derivative. He mentioned, I believe, the early Kurosawa."

"The prenatal Kurosawa would have been more like it," Simmons said. "I'd dearly love to pursue this further but I've got a class in ten minutes. My freshmen tend to get anxious if I don't show up on time. Father figure and all that."

"I'm going that way," Wendy said.

"I thought you and I might drive over to the lake," I said. "Why don't you come along, Simmons? We never see you at the lake. We look for you, Wendy and I, but we never see you."

"I've got a class to get to. Which way are you heading, Wendy?"

"We're going to the lake," I said. "If you don't have a bathing suit, Simmons, you can borrow one of mine."

"I'm sure you have enough swimwear for a brigade of lifeguards, Dave, but I'm afraid I'll have to take a rain check on that."

"It's not raining."

"You can use some sun," Wendy said.

"You have to get out there and cop those rays, Simmons. You're spending too much time in the dark."

"I console myself with the thought that nothing very interesting happens in well-lighted places."

"Pow," Wendy said.

Having secured the more essential of victories, I did not dispute the loser's right to get in the last word. Everybody knows how much solace the older generation takes in saving face.

Although there were no athletic teams at Leighton Gage, we were probably more serious about sports than the average student body. But we played games of a different kind-non-team, swift, dangerous. One of the important things money buys is speed. Speed and a glimpse of death. We drove sports cars and motorcycles in informal competition, rode beach buggies over the desert, raced motorboats on the artificial lake near the campus. Several students owned planes and if you were friendly with one of them you could go up to L.A for party weekends and on the return flight test your desire for an early poetic death. The force behind these activities was essentially spiritual. There were many injuries, several fatalities, and we reacted to these with professional dispassion. That's something money can't buy. But either you learn it or you go back to baseball.

Page Talbot's father bought her a fiberglass runabout for her birthday and had it sent out to the anti-lake about a mile north of the campus. She painted it lilac and yellow and planned to install a bedroom canopy until somebody talked her out of it. The first time she asked me to go sailing, as she called it, the outboard fell off and while we waited for someone to tow us in we sat there drinking beer, drifting in small circles, relatively content, pretending we were on an Arab dhow lazing through the papyrus slogs of the Sudanese Nile.

"I made it with Ken Wild last night," she said.

"I didn't know you knew each other."

"We didn't."

"Well I don't want to hear about it."

"He's nice really."

"Did I tell you I'm thinking of getting married? I met this girl back home last summer and we've been corresponding. She's in London now touring the epitaphs. I've been thinking of popping the old question."

"Frankly I don't know why anybody our age would want to get married," Page said. "Frankly it sounds to me like the end of the road."

"Don't you have an urge to play house?"

"If it's a triplex on Montego Bay."

"Tell me about Wild," I said. "Is he good in bed? Is he better than I am? I don't have to know any details. Just say yes or no. It's important."

The Young Man Carbuncular vanished from the campus three months before graduation. Nobody knew where he went. I thought his disappearance might arouse some guilt in those who had ignored and ridiculed him. Instead it became a joke. People said he had gone to Tibet to find a holy man who might cure his boils; or was wandering in the desert, delirious, singing hit songs of the late forties; or had barricaded himself in the men's room of the library with a submachine gun, several hundred rounds of ammo and a can of spray-on deodorant. I went to Leonard's room one night hoping to find some indication of his whereabouts, a passage underlined in a book, a road map, a letter from his parents. All I found was a piece of paper on which was written:

Something tells me that I shall dream tonight of newspapers wrapped in fish

Leonard Zajac had been four years with us, a man for all his waddling pity, and the mystery of his flight, perhaps in overwhelming dread, was met with nothing more than mild relief. He returned the day after commencement. Some of us were still on campus, loading up cars, completing plans for vacations in the Andes, on the Balearic Islands, aboard schooners bound for the East Indies. In three months we would all have to start earning a living and there was a pitch of hysteria to the dialogue of that last day. Merry and I, who would be starting east in an hour or so, were talking with some friends on the quadrangle when Leonard touched me on the shoulder to whisper hello and goodbye. He said he had come to pick up his books. He had been living with the Havasupai Indians in Arizona, he said, and he planned to return immediately and to remain forever. When he asked me what my own plans were, I could only shrug. His inflammations were gone. He appeared to have lost about forty pounds. I did not introduce him to the others because, for the moment, I had forgotten his name.

Everything begins in California. It is like the hip lexicon of the ghetto; as soon as Madison Avenue breaks the code, Harlem devises a new one. So with California and New York. When surfing and nudity moved east, California got all decked out in flowing madras and went indoors to discover the commune. I liked it out there and might have stayed. But my father was back east, living alone in the music-box house, insistent on remaining. We all have something we are trying to forget. If we're smart we take off for parts unknown. But my father could not leave the house and I didn't have enough sense to remain at the shallow end of the continent. So I began to swim.

Big Bob Davidson first showed up in Old Holly when I was eighteen; that would make Jane twenty-one. Bob was working in New York at the time and he came out one weekend to meet the family. I was home for the summer, working on my golf and tennis, doing a bit of sailing. Jane suggested I might spend a few hours with Bob. Play some tennis and have a few beers. Make him feel welcome. So he and I drove over to the club, trying not to be too polite with each other, sparring easily, probing for sensibilities. Bob seemed a nice enough guy. He was tall and heavy. His face was an odd wet pink color, as if a dog had been licking it, and his blond hair was very straight. He wore his sport shirt outside his pants, a faded checked shirt with a pencil clipped to the breast pocket. As it turned out, Bob always had a pencil clipped to the breast pocket of his shirt or suit jacket and whenever I saw him I had the feeling he was going to take out an invoice pad and start writing an order for three dozen lawn mowers.

We changed and began playing. My game was better than ever and I thought I'd take it easy at the outset and see what kind of pace Bob had in mind. It soon became clear that he was out to destroy me. He ranged all over the court, grim and dusty, playing in a low cloud of clay, tersely announcing the score before every serve. The harder he tried, the worse he got. His serve was erratic and he had no backhand to speak of. I was just beginning to get bored when I saw my father sitting on one of the benches that lined the courts. After the first set he called me over.

"I just got here," he said. "Who's winning?"

"I took the first set."

"What to what?"

"I think it was six-one. Bob's keeping score. Tell you the truth, I'm not very involved in this particular match."

"Well, get involved," he said. "I want you to whip his ass. I want you to beat him in straight sets. I want to walk into that house later and tell them it was no contest. Straight sets. That's what I want to say. The kid beat him in straight sets."

"Don't you like him, dad?"

"It's not a question of whether or not I like him. I don't even know the guy. It's a family thing. It's a question of him coming into our house and Christ only knows what goes on between him and Jane. Jesus, look at him. He's so goddamn big. He could hurt her or something. For all I know he's the sweetest guy in the world. But that's not the point. It's a family thing, kid. Now go get him. Go run his ass ragged."

"Right," I said.

I beat him in straight sets, easily, embarrassing him, taunting him with soft raindrop shots which sent him from one end of the net to the other, then drilling a hummer past his ear. When it was over my father clapped me on the back, rubbed my neck, congratulated me on what he called a truly historic blitz, a glorious rout. All at the expense of the interloper, it was one of those strange bursts of bloodlove which are both puzzling and overpowering in the dimensions of their joy. I told my father I had barely worked up a sweat and he laughed at that as if it were quite the funniest thing he had ever heard. Then we walked to the locker room with our arms around each other's shoulders. Big Bob preceded us like a snowplow.

My father drank Irish stout. He bought most of his suits in England. He liked Dutch cigars and drove Italian and British automobiles. Most of the books in his library were about London before the Great Fire and the American West before the Little Bighorn. His shoes were handcrafted in London by a firm which had cast impressions of his feet the day after they first stepped on British soil. Although he didn't ride much he had several Western saddles in his den as well as a small collection of Winchester 73s and one Sharps. 50 caliber rifle which he liked to call his buffalo gun. He favored German cameras and smoked Danish pipes that cost almost two hundred dollars each.

He used to have lunch at the Playboy Club about twice a week. Later he began accompanying friends or clients to their clubs for lunch-the Harvard or Princeton Club, the New York A.C., the Yale, the New York Yacht Club. My father was a graduate of Long Island University. He used a brand of men's cologne that was aged in oak casks and blended with over three hundred ingredients. The cars he owned at one time or another included an MG, a Jaguar, a Ferrari, an Aston-Martin and a Maserati. I don't know whether or not all that horsepower was supposed to take the curse off LIU.

"A man works hard to get two hundred thousand dollars," he said to me once as we drove through the outskirts of town in the Mark IX Jag. "You save, you finagle, you invest. You work yourself up to x-amount of dollars and if you plan well and get lucky in the market you can begin to build something for your family. That's what makes a democracy worth all the sweat and corruption. Security for your wife and children after you're gone. What if something happens to me? Your mother hates to hear me talk like that but you have to prepare for such contingencies. That's your job as head of a family in a free republic. I've got about nine different kinds of policies that'll provide for you and your mother and your sisters if anything should happen to me. It could happen any time, you know. Right now a dog could walk across the road, I swerve the car, and bang. Understand what I'm talking about? The turning point was the money my father left me. That put us over the top. But if you're not careful, all you get is stomach trouble. I'll tell you a true story right out of one of the country's most distinguished scientific journals. They pulled an experiment on these two monkeys. They gave them electric shocks every sixty seconds. Now the first monkey had a button and all he had to do was press it and he wouldn't get any shock. The second monkey also had a button but it was completely useless. Eventually monkey-A caught on to the gimmick and started pressing the button like mad to avoid that juice. Whereas monkey-B realized his button wasn't worth shit and he just squatted in the corner, scratching himself and getting jolted every minute. So what happens? The first monkey gets stomach ulcers and kicks off in two weeks. The second monkey, who had resigned himself to the shocks, lives happily ever after. That little experiment is a moral for our time. It shows the price you have to pay for working yourself up to a decision-making post. I'll have to show you around the office sometime. You'll see sixty-five executive monkeys weeping into their telephones and pissing blood. That's the kind of business your old man is in. But don't worry about me, kid. I've got cast iron in my gut and I'm an odds-on favorite to pull through. In my heart I'm deeply conservative. I come from a long line of secret Presbyterian drinkers. My grandfather was a blacksmith in Sag Harbor. What was the point I was trying to make?"

One summer evening my father came home from work and told the family what had happened on the 6:17 out of Grand Central. There was blood all over his suit and shirt.

"We were all reading our newspapers. All up and down the car you saw nothing but newspapers. The conductor came around and started punching tickets. At this point we were still underground and I remember I was just finishing up the stock page when the train boomed out of the tunnel and started going through Harlem. That's when the first rock hit. It hit a window across the aisle from me and glass went flying in every direction. Strange thing is nobody said a word. The next rock hit on my side of the train and the window two windows in front of me shattered and then I realized we were being bombarded by more than one or two wise guys and I looked out my window and then out the window across the aisle and there they were, standing up above us behind the fence, Puerto Rican kids, and they were flinging rocks like crazy, dozens of kids, a whole row of them on each side of the train, laughing and heaving rocks at us. Nobody was reading newspapers now. We were all scrambling under the seats and again it was strange but nobody said anything. It was as though we knew it was coming sooner or later. And today was the day. Rocks were bouncing off the side of the train and smashing through the windows. Little kids. Twelve, thirteen years old. Anyway it stopped then. It stopped for about ten seconds and we started coming up when the next barrage hit. These weíe Negro kids and they really busted up that train. Negro kids on rooftops. More windows went and there was somebody moaning at the back of the car, some guy either hit by a rock or who cut himself on the glass that was all over the floor. We thought it was over when we got out of Harlem and we started pushing the glass off our seats and a few guys even came out with some funny remarks that had us all laughing even though they weren't really funny. It was shock-laughter if you know what I mean. But the rocks started flying again in the south Bronx. All through the Bronx we got hit in flurries. It wasn't as concentrated there for some reason. But that's where some little spic sharpshooter hit my window and a piece of glass caught me on the hand. It finally stopped up around Woodlawn. The inside of that train looked like a tornado hit it. Glass, rocks, newspapers were all over the place. Nobody seemed outraged or bitter. Just mildly upset. And when I got off the train there were three or four other men getting off with me and we walked to our cars and nobody even mentioned that we had nearly been killed back there. Those little bastards. What did we ever do to them?"

"You moved to the suburbs," my sister Mary said. "Have a nice day at the office tomorrow, daddy. And if you decide to work late and stay in the city overnight, we'll all understand."

St. Dymphna's was located in southwestern New Hampshire and it was a nice place to be educated. It was quiet and picturesque. The leaves turned color in autumn and there was plenty of snow in winter. Everybody dressed neatly. Here and there a building was showing signs of falling apart but this didn't bother anybody; it was one of the traditions of the well-bred Northeast. The staff, wholly Episcopalian clergy at one time, now included many laymen, a few Unitarian ministers, a Duck River Baptist, and a lovable Irish janitor named Petey who was always challenging freshmen to identify the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. The student body was composed almost wholly of cynical little anti-religious boys. My guidance counselor was a layman and on Reciprocity Day he introduced himself to my mother and father.

"My name is Thomas Fearing. My clubs are the Millbrook Golf and Tennis, the Rhinebeck Tennis and Saddle, the Players of New York, the Nassau of Princeton, the Princeton of New York, and the Church Street Social of Millbrook."

"Most impressive," my father said.

During my third year a controversy developed. There was a boy on the basketball team named Brad Dennis who used to make the sign of the cross before taking foul shots. Brad's mother was a very militant Roman Catholic and apparently she had not only ordered him to bless himself before taking foul shots but had also told him that St. Dymphna was an exclusively Catholic saint and that the Episcopalians, as nice and neat as they were, had no claim to her patronage and absolutely no right to use her name in connection with one of their prep schools, as fine and proper as that school might be. Brad spread the word and for his trouble got himself black-belted on the ass by the dean of discipline. This only aroused him to greater fervor and to an early-Christian lust for martyrdom. I began to get interested. Brad was like an anarchist running loose in the Pentagon. He distributed literature published by the Knights of Columbus and he offered to debate anyone his age on the relative merits of the world's great religions. Some of us would meet illegally in his room after lights-out to hear him discourse on the transubstantiation and papal infallibility. It was evident that some of his zeal was being transmitted to the small circle of disciples which had gathered about him. The student body began to take sides and the subjects of free speech and the right to proselytize soon became the main topics of conversation. Since the faculty knew little or nothing of Brad's post-flogging activities, there was an exciting underground feeling to those days. Many sided with Brad simply because of his run-in with the dean of discipline, who was known as the Son of Dracula and was universally feared and despised. Others seemed genuinely interested in the doctrines he promulgated. Those who were against him called him a papist, a crossback, an anti-intellectual and a pissyhole. I decided it was time for me to get to the root of the controversy and that was St. Dymphna herself. I asked Brad for one of his leaflets. It was put out by the Franciscan Missions and it had these words on the front page:

ST. DYMPHNA

(pronounced dimf-nah)

PATRONESS OF THOSE AFFLICTED

WITH NERVOUS DISORDERS

AND MENTAL ILLNESS

"The Nervous Breakdown Saint"

It turned out that St. Dymphna had been born in Ireland, the only child of the pagan king of Oriel. When her mother died, Dymphna's father decided to seek a second wife. Ultimately he concluded there was only one female worthy enough-his own daughter. Dymphna, who had been baptized by a priest of the church, was fourteen years old. With all the persuasiveness he could muster, the king outlined his scheme to his trembling daughter. Dymphna sought safety in flight, settling finally in Belgium along with her confessor. Spies, however, traced the exiles' route and it all ended when the king drew his sword and struck off the head of his only child. In time, many people with mental problems were cured due to the intercession of St. Dymphna, whose fame as the nervous breakdown saint gradually spread from Belgium to Ireland and thence to almost every corner of the globe.

The story fascinated me. I felt much the same way I would months later when Jane would read her YWCA notes on the primitive religions of the world. All those magnificently demented people made me feel small and well-dressed. I even liked St. Dymphna's father. I pictured him with a red beard, drinking mead from a ram's horn and secretly worrying about his masculinity. I went to Brad Dennis' room to return the leaflet and hopefully to engage in a fiery conversation about science, religion and eternity. Miles Warren was in there with Brad. Miles, fresh from two weeks of atheism, was the most brilliant student at St. Dymphna's. When I gave Brad the leaflet and told him how much I had liked the story of St. Dymphna, he said he had given me the wrong material. This is a childish piece of whimsy, he said. With that, he handed me a booklet titled Some Preliminary Concepts of Metaphysical Psychology.

"The Little Sisters of the Poor are the only people who believe that kid stuff about virgin saints," he said. "The modern Catholic is a hard-nosed kind of guy who asks piercing questions. The whole thing can be brought down to a question of metaphysics and first principles. Whatever is, is."

"What about the Inquisition?" Miles said.

"The modern Catholic isn't afraid of that question anymore."

"What about all those popes who had wives and mistresses?" Miles said.

"Speaking retroactively, we can say they weren't truly part of the mystical body of Christ in the doctrinal sense. It's like the lying and cheating General Motors does. You still need cars."

"If a tree falls in the forest," Miles said, "and there's no one around to hear it fall, does that tree in fact make a sound when it hits earth or is the phenomenon of sound contingent on the presence of someone or something which possesses the faculty of hearing? Is the absolute dependent on an agent who can interpret it? Or is the absolute what the word itself implies? The question is as old as Plato."

"Whatever is, is," Brad said.

The best part of prep school was suiting up for a baseball or basketball game. I loved that phrase-suiting up. We would sit around the locker room mentally preparing ourselves for the game. We had all read about pro football players who become so tense prior to kickoff that they get sick to the stomach. There was a kid on our basketball team named Rich Higgins who would always go into the small toilet just off the locker room and try to throw up. He never got any further than the dry heaves but it made us feel good to know that one of our teammates was so affected by the impending contest that he was in the toilet with his finger down his throat. As soon as Rich Higgins returned, drained of emotion if nothing else, Coach Emery would say: "This is it! Let's suit up!" And we would all suit up. It was more fun to suit up for baseball games because there was more to wear. Brad Dennis was the shortstop on the baseball team. He never blessed himself, as he did in basketball, but with his bat he used to make the sign of the cross in the dirt just outside the batter's box before he stepped in to hit. He batted eighth in the order, which brought about a mild complaint from his mother.

America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them. We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count.

Numbers matter less now that the adding machines, the super-calculators, the numerical systems and sub-systems have been uninvented. However, thinking back, I recall how important it was for me, personally, to define a situation, or a period of time, with as many numbers as I could assemble. They seemed the very valets of clarity. If I were on my deathbed today, and did not know the date, my cells would probably refuse to surrender. Without a calendar, a stopwatch, a measuring cup on the night table, I couldn't possibly know how to die.

It was in the winter of my fifteenth year that Mary met Arondella. This means that Mary was nineteen at the time. It also means that Jane was eighteen, that my best friend Tommy was sixteen, that Kathy Lovell was fourteen, that my father was forty-two and my mother thirty-seven. That was the winter in which Tommy and I first took Kathy to the yacht club and it was the winter before the summer in which, age sixteen, I sat through two showings of From Here to Eternity starring Burt Lancaster. That same summer was the summer of the party.

Excepting Mary, no one in the family ever referred to Arondella by anything but his last name, and that only rarely. The second time they saw each other was on Christmas Eve. After she'd left to meet him somewhere, the rest of us sat in the living room looking at the tree.

"I wonder how old he is," Jane said. "She won't tell me a thing so I wouldn't be surprised if he's a lot older than she is."

"It's not his age I'm worried about as much as what he does for a living," my father said.

"Mary says he's in the rackets," I said.

"Yeah, well, you never know when Mary's telling the truth and when she's playing games. If he is in the rackets, all hell is going to break loose around here. No daughter of mine is going to be seen dead with any two-bit racky. I'll break both his arms for him. Wait and see if I don't."

"Clinton, your bark has always been worse than your bite. Now tell the truth, dear, hasn't it? You're forever threatening to dismember someone. But when the time comes I look around and where's Clinton? Oh, he's in the den, mother, polishing his saddles. Jane, I swear to you if fire ever breaks out in this house, you just head straight for the den and there will be your daddy, polishing his saddles. Fire, plague or famine, there you'll be, Clinton, far from the madding crowd."

"Let's unwrap the presents and get it over with," Jane said.

"I think we should wait for Mary to come home. That's always been the tradition in this house and I don't see why we should alter it now simply because she's taken leave of her senses temporarily. We'll wait for Mary."

"What if he comes back with her?" I said.

"Your father will suggest that he leave. There are diplomatic ways of handling such things. I see no reason to hurt the man's feelings."

"What if he won't go? If he's in the rackets, he's probably not used to getting pushed around. Did you see Cry of the City, Jane? Victor Mature and Richard Conte. Richard Conte plays a gangster and Victor Mature is his old buddy from the same neighborhood who became a detective instead."

"Is that what you do up in New Hampshire?" my father said. "Go to the movies every night? It's costing me a small fortune to send you to that school."

Mary was not a pretty girl. But there was an animation to her face, an intelligence, which nullified her plainness. She read her favorite authors in curiously appropriate ways- Proust supinely, Faulkner with bourbon, O'Casey wearing my father's turtleneck. She was a fine swimmer and tennis player, although at times there seemed a touch of condescension in her attitude toward sport; it was all so easy, so predictable in outcome. She treated the family almost the same way she might treat her tennis racket, with rough affection and a charming lighthearted contempt. The latter did not extend to me, however. Her kid brother. I think she loved me very much. Almost everything my father said was received by Mary in a spirit of high delight. "Daddy," she used to say, "you're almost as funny as Eisenhower." But he was not delighted by her as much as bewildered. I think she made my father question the structure of his own nature, for to him it was surely apparent that only the rebel mischief of his seed could have produced this stray comedienne.

Mary and I were playing checkers in the attic. A cold rain was falling. She was drinking rum, neat, from a beer glass, and smoking a cigarette like Lauren Bacall, the cool appeal of those sleepy rhythms. Although it was late afternoon she was still in pajamas.

"How did you meet him?" I said.

"Thereby hangs a tale, brother. But I may as well let you in on it, if only to forestall another trouncing by the checker king of Westchester. After I made my controversial decision to leave school, one little thing kept nagging at me. What would I do next? I didn't want to come back here, as we all know by now, but I wasn't very anxious to get an apartment in the city and pursue a career in stenography either. The thought alone made my knees buckle. All I knew was that I had to get out of college. Massachusetts is no place to get educated, despite all the raving about intellectual ferment. My most vivid memory is of earnest young men banging their pipes into ashtrays, a sight that depresses me more than I can say. I was sick of the whole thing. I was sick of hearing the same expressions over and over. Just constantly. The same phrases, sentences, paragraphs. I'm hypersensitive, I know, but I was under the impression that up there, if nowhere else, my petty talent for finding fault might be allowed to dwindle and die. It was a false impression. The whole place was too inbred for me. The whole educational complex and the particular lollipop factory I was privileged to attend. The passion for ritual was overpowering. And of course nobody learned anything. One nice and bitchy memory I'll keep. Our democratic little sorority had a sort of informal initiation process. About one-fifth of us were in on it. The others thought it much too unladylike. It was simple. Whenever a new girl sat down to her first dinner in the house, one of us would say to another: Pass the motherfucking carrots, please. Or words to that effect. The response would be in a similar vein and we'd usually keep it up all through the meal, tossing off the worst obscenities imaginable and doing it with a certain politesse, as if we were discussing sisal-growing in the Bahamas. By the time dessert arrived, the newcomer was in an advanced state of shock. I'm getting way off the mark, aren't I?"

"Arondella," I said.

"Want a sip of rum?"

"Okay."

"I finally packed it in," Mary said. "I took a cab to town and got on the first bus to Boston. Then I took another cab to the railroad station. I paid the driver, stepped onto the sidewalk and there he was. Sitting in that blue whale of his. Combing his hair. It was forty degrees but he had the top down. He was wearing a light windbreaker with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He was sitting on the passenger's side of the front seat. He put the comb away and placed his right arm out over the top of the door. The arm was flexed and his bicep was pressing against the door so that it would look enormous. I was trying to carry two heavy suitcases, an overnight bag and a purse. And I knew he was watching me. He said hey. I stopped and looked at him-he obviously thought he was God's gift to the virgins of Boston-and he said I'll take you wherever you want to go. Anywhere in the continental United States. I said New York. He said hey, that was the one place I really meant. And we both smiled. Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman. Later I found out he had been sent to Boston to kill a man."

"Did he do it?"

"The man had been arrested the night before. Some kind of narcotics charge. Eventually he was killed in prison."

"Last week daddy said if Arondella's in the rackets you won't be allowed to see him anymore."

"David, I won't be living here much longer."

"Are you going away with him?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"I don't know," she said. "He's got a wife and three children. It's a delicate situation to say the least. All sorts of relatives are applying all sorts of pressures."

"What exactly does he do in the rackets?"

"He goes places. He's in Syracuse now. He makes business trips. That's what he calls them. His territory seems to be upstate and New England."

"Does he kill people?"

"I imagine so. He as much as told me. I don't think the Boston trip was an isolated instance. But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I've been fighting all my life."

"Give me some more rum," I said.

"Don't you love it when it rains like this? So gray and dark. I love dark chill days. We're doing just the right thing for a day like this. Sitting in the attic drinking rum. It's nice up here, isn't it? Those skinny gray trees outside and the sound of the rain. We should have some music. Organ music would be perfect."

"I'll go get the radio."

"Leave this house," she said. "As soon as you can, get out of here. Run like hell, David. This place is haunted and everybody in it is haunted. Mother is terribly ill. And if she goes, if she slides all the way out, she'll try to take you with her. I know her, David. I'm the only one who knows her."

Meredith and I were married between my junior and senior years at Leighton Gage. A week before the event, I got a letter from Ken Wild.

I'm writing because I want somebody to tell me whether I am alive or dead. I have been asked that question recently and I couldn't think of an answer. So if you get this letter, write back as soon as you can. This way I'll know I'm alive. Are you really going to marry Miss Dairy Products USA?

I'm in the Michigan woods photosynthesizing. My big problem this summer, aside from life and death, is that I don't have any classes to stay away from. A man should never be left without a class to cut. I flew up here in my father's company's plane, which was full of territorial managers on their way to hunting lodge for business meeting and ribald chortling. Two thousand pounds of condemned pork. Just before we were due to land, an engine, flamed out. First thing I did was put out my cigarette. I believe this is called coolness under fire. But a second later I found myself on the edge of panic. Nobody else seemed even slightly upset. Were they really a planeload of Zen masters? Then we were landing, no trouble at all, and I was filled with disappointment. Because it had not been enough. I wanted to land in flames with crash-wagons screaming down the runway. Perhaps you understand this sort of pathos.

Dostoyevsky sat next to me barbering his humorous fingernails

I fish, I hunt, I write my wounded lines. My father wants me to join the firm after graduation. For the moment all I have to do is assure him I'll think about it seriously. Everybody craves assurance. It's the coin they insert in reality. It doesn't matter whether anything comes out of the machine as long as they get their money back. What a pity it is that you're reading this with such lack of compassion. Saying poor dumb Wild he's like everybody else, pissing all over his own toes. I am writing a mock-epic poem-you won't believe this-I am writing a mock-epic poem about a boy who grows up among wolves somewhere in Siberia. Several distinguished publishers have indicated a wary interest.

Write to me with news of the archduke. Jesus I hate this kind of letter. If only I were less sane. I could write poems the size of cathedrals!

I had taken Wild's letter, along with paper and pen and three cans of beer, to my favorite spot in Old Holly. This was the slope behind the firehouse, a green and treeless place, always private, facing west so that the grass turned slowly golden green as the sun circled toward the far hills. The slope dropped a hundred feet or so to a sort of lesser valley, a barren area of boulders, stunted trees and the scratched earth of a dried-out creekbed. Across the valley was a small hill, and on top of it, at the eastern limit of a large estate, was a pasture; and from the slope you could see the horses moving slowly, heads down, the lovely mild curves of their necks, grazing, moving against the more distant hills; or standing, where the hills dropped away as if to graze also on some low meadow, standing against the sky and the rich citrus setting of the sun.

Wild, of course, had yet to meet Meredith. Miss Dairy Products USA was a name of my own making and Wild was merely repeating my own bad joke. I had known, as junior year drew to a close, that I would ask her to marry me. I also knew, pending her acceptance, that we would return together to Leighton Gage for my final year. My classmates in their evolving worldliness would consider Merry too pure, too naive, too inexperienced to be let loose outside of Disneyland. So I tried to prepare them-a joke here, an anecdote there, an occasional nervous quip. And as I said these things I would often think of her, in a London park or square, on a bench beneath some granite admiral, and she'd be so pretty, nodding as the pigeons nodded, pouting at the pouting children in their prams, so pretty and white, those thrifty breasts, salvation of Western man, furling a yellow umbrella. Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred. I was trying to prepare them, that's all; take the glint off their eager scalpels. I punished myself by going for long underwater swims in the artificial lake, coming up gasping, the sky regarding me through misty spectacles, quite curiously. And still I tried to prepare them. These are the things men do when they have orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion. Merry arrived with me on campus the following autumn. They all said she was a nice girl and seven of us took a mass touchless shower.

Writing to Wild on the slope I did not mention her. I made no reference to the flaming engine and his soul's need for crisis. I said nothing of his mock-epic poem, which was obviously just another scenic dream. In fact I wrote just one line: I didn't get your letter. Then I sipped beer for an hour. I thought of adding something about his desire for less sanity. Wild truly believed that he would never be a great poet because he was not sufficiently insane. I tended to agree with him but I didn't bother getting into it. I was on the third can of beer by this time and it tasted warm and flat. The sun had set and it was time to be getting home.

Even from this long way off, in the magnet-grip of an impending century, it is painful to write about her. It has taken me this long just to organize my thoughts. And although I think I have come to terms with everything, it will be interesting to see whether I can put it on paper clearly and openly. Or whether I must blow some smoke into this or that passage-some smoke to hide the fire.

One summer she bought two dolls, one for Jane and one for Mary. Jane put both dolls on her dresser. But my mother objected and so Mary's doll was put into Mary's abandoned room. Jane was always trying to discuss these things with me. In her confusion she was comforted by the sound of voices. It was an article of her faith that tragedy could be averted, or at least detained in the sweep of its tidal and incomprehensible darkness, by two reasoning people sitting in a familiar room and discussing the matter. I didn't want to talk about it. I feared silence less than the involvement of words. Distance, silence, darkness. In the vastness of these things I hoped to evade all need to understand and to cancel all possibility of explaining. Jane came into my room with a pot of tea and closed the door behind her.

"What are we going to do?" she said.

"About what?"

"You know what."

"There's nothing to do," I said. "We should see about a doctor. Some shrink on Park Avenue. But that's up to daddy, isn't it? I'd like to finish this book and get it back to the library before they close."

"What are we going to do about the dolls?"

"Leave them where they are and forget it."

"What do you think it means, David?"

"How the hell do I know? Now let me finish this book in peace."

"You can finish the book tomorrow."

"It'll be overdue."

"It must have something to do with our childhoods," Jane said. "She must be trying to make up for something."

"Sure. Childhood. Absolutely."

"I'm trying to remember whether I had any dolls like this when I was little. Maybe we wanted this particular kind of doll and she didn't buy them because they were very expensive. They look expensive. I wish Mary was here."

"Look, she bought a couple of dolls. I don't understand what all the fuss is about. All I can say is I'm hurt that she didn't get anything for me. I wanted a fire engine. No fire gingin for Dabid. Dabid want big wed fire gingin. Dabid want to play with Jane and Mary. But mommy no buy him pwetty toys. Jane go way now so Dabid can wead his wíttle book. Go way, Jane. Bye-bye. Jane go way. See Jane go. Jane is mad. See how mad Jane is. Jane slam Dabid's door. What a bad wittle girl. Jane all gone. Bye-bye, Jane."

The following April, at school, I was summoned to the telephone. It was my father. I remember what I was wearing. I was wearing white Top-Siders, white sweatsocks, a pair of olive chinos, and an old basketball jersey, white with blue trim and lettering, bearing the number nine. While we spoke I studied these articles of clothing intensely, as if keeping a mescaline vigil, my eyes seeking those immense explosions of beauty which are known to occur in the swirl of a grain of cloth.

"Bad news," he said.

"What is it?"

"Your mother's come down with something bad."

"She's sick? What is it?"

"I think she's dying, kid. They found it too late."

"What?" I said.

"What?"

"What did they find?"

"It looks like cancer. She doesn't want to go to the hospital."

"Cancer where? What part?"

"Take the first plane you can get. Wire and I'll meet you at the airport. You need money, I'll send it right out. But, look, hurry it up if you can. I should have called you weeks ago but I couldn't get myself to believe it. Everything's caving in. How the hell am I going to get in touch with Mary?"

"Where's the cancer?" I said.

"It's inside. It's in the female region. Look, can't we talk about it later? The doctor can tell you these things better than I can."

"Who's the doctor?"

"I got Weber."

"Get him the fuck out of there," I said. "I don't want Weber in there with her. Get another doctor. Anybody. Just get Weber out."

"It's all my fault," he said. "I've done everything wrong. I should have had her examined years ago. I should have had her examined for the other thing. Now there's this thing and it's too late. It's funny, kid, but she said the same thing you did. She said to get Weber out."

The plane, smelling vaguely of a child's vomit, ranged through stormclouds over the mountains and then broke clear into a calm blue afternoon. When I came out of the toilet a man stopped me to introduce himself. He said his wife would like to have my autograph. He said she had recognized me and he wondered if I would say hello to her on the way back to my seat. I told him she had mistaken me for someone else. He said it didn't matter; sign any name. And I did, I signed Buster Keaton, and when I stopped at her seat she took my hand and told me how very nice it was to meet me, how kind I was to interrupt my busy flying schedule in order to say hello to an admirer. An hour before we landed, the man came to my seat and offered me a twenty-dollar bill. Throughout the flight I kept getting mental pictures, against my will, of a growth inside my mother's womb.

The vase held seven wizened zinnias. My father whispered to me as she slept. It was the cervix. It had been discovered at an advanced stage. The doctor had wanted to take everything out. She had refused. She told my father that she had known about it for a long time. There had been unexplained bleeding and she told him she had felt the thing spreading, a radial plague, spreading like medieval death. Only her collapse had told him that something was wrong. And she had refused to let them take anything out. God has been defeated, she said. And nothing anybody could do with their knives and clamps could ever change the fact of this defeat. He was in my body and I let Him out. He was the light of my body and I blew Him out. I believe in the Middle Ages. Fire for witches and plague for the sins of the world. I believe in ancient Egypt. These things were read to me in a garden full of sunlight by a beautiful and shining woman.

I opened the window. All the sweet reek of April filled the room and when I sighed it was almost possible to believe that something out there returned the sigh, something raving in the wind as it stirred those groping trees, something terrible on the grass, an instant in which nature gave in to rape, birdshaped and muddied in blood.

Jane touched me on the shoulder. The Reverend Potter was standing in the doorway like a ship in an upright bottle. My father leaned over to tie his shoe. I heard the bells of the ice-cream truck.

And in the morning I cut myself shaving. The bleeding stopped seven minutes later and I knew it was safe to go out.

"She was a different breed of cat," my father said. "She knew things nobody else knew. There was something magic about that woman. I don't believe in devils or saints or evil spirits. If you can't see it, is my theory, then it isn't there. But when your mother talked about these things it wasn't so easy to be a skeptic. Her mother drowned when she was a little girl. Maybe it did something to her. She remembered things that happened to her when she was only two years old. Maybe she just dreamed them but if they were just dreams she could make them sound deadly real. When she was carrying Mary, the minute she knew she was carrying Mary, she said it was a girl. She said it was the kite-soul of her mother. The kite-soul. It sounds Oriental, doesn't it? Something Buddhists or Hindus might believe in. Something to do with reincarnation. I've never come across that phrase before or since. But to get back to Mary. Mary when she was born resembled me more than anyone. And when Jane was born it seemed a sure bet that the blond side of the family had been lost somewhere, your mother's side, and her mother's side. Ann felt desolate. I think she felt a whole race had faded away in some genetic catastrophe. Then you were born. She looked at you and said there he is, up out of the Irish seas like Lycidas. I loved her like I'll never love anything in this world again. When you were born she was happy and I didn't care what she said or how little I understood. She was happy and that was all that mattered. I have that much to thank you for anyway."

As she edged closer to death, he said, he began drinking heavily. Then one day he stopped drinking. He cut it out completely. He stopped drinking and got into his Maserati and took the first of a series of strange drives over the dark narrow roads around town. He would go out shortly after midnight and begin driving. He would take it up to 110, corner at 75, slam it way out to the fringe, the delicate pressure of his foot on the accelerator becoming part of a game of tender balances, and his hands on the wheel daring him closer to the bright splashing eyes in the adjacent lane. In the rain one night he went into a spin and ended up in a ditch. He got out of the car, bleeding around the head, and walked back to town. He went about a mile out of his way to pass through the Negro section of Old Holly, past the bars and old frame houses. He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her. And on that last night a man leaned out of a bar and began following him. My father turned a corner, clenched his fists and waited. It was still raining and he could taste the rain mixed with blood running into his mouth. The man came around the corner and walked up to him and began to tapdance. My father stood there and the man danced around him, shuffling slowly and mumbling some old scat lyric. When he started to walk away, the man followed at a distance of several yards, gliding and tapping with the loose elegance of the indomitably drunk. My father walked backwards for almost half a block, watching the man come closer. Then he turned quickly and began to run, and he could hear the feet still tapping behind him, diminishing now, and the voice growing dimmer, a weary moan from swamps or cotton, words of an unknown language.

For several years I had thought of my father as the witness. Now, at her death, he became more than that. Our bond tightened and he closed in on me. We stood on the grass with scores of people. The splendor of her coffin was a comfort to everyone. I watched them and knew they were proud of her. To be buried in such luxury. Surely her life must have been something of a grand episode. For a moment I thought of those fabled khans and their nymphomaniacs who are always crashing into trees somewhere between Paris and Nice. There is substance to most cliches and we admire these men and women for having the wit to die as they have lived. The thought passed quickly and then down went mother in her silver Ferrari, a single rose clinging to the lid.

"She's watching us," my father said. "You think she's down there but she's not. Not her. She's watching us. She's watching to see what we're going to do to each other."

When Meredith returned from England she got a secretarial job in Manhattan. I went into the city one day to buy some shoes and we met later for lunch.

"How's the job coming along?"

"I love it," she said.

"Back in the swing of things yet? I guess it takes a while. That was quite a vacation."

"New York is the most exciting place in the world to work. London is fun to walk around in and New York is fun to work in."

"I missed you," I said. "I guess you could tell that from my letters."

"They were nice letters. They were very creative. I can't tell you how sorry I was to hear about your mother."

"I'm asking you to marry me."

"I'm not the one you need," she said.

"Two daiquiris on the rocks."

"You need someone who's much more mature than I am."

"Will you marry me?"

"No."'

"Will you at least think about it? I'd feel much better if you'd at least think about it. You can promise me that much. That you'll think about it for a week or so. Then we can discuss it again. I can drive over to your house and we'll go somewhere, some quiet place, and have a quiet dinner and talk about it. I know just the place. It's just outside Westport. It's a nice ride over there at this time of year. You'll like this place. The top of the bar is plated with ha'pennies. Real English ha'pennies. Well have a quiet dinner and talk about it and then I'll take you right back home."

Mary was delighted by the fact that Arondella wore taps on his shoes.

The study of dead Englishmen flourished in the afternoon. We looked forward to them, sons of Bread Street and Aid-winkle Rectory. It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon. It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn't the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die. Afternoon was for political science or dead Englishmen. That's why Monday afternoons were so terrible. Monday meant Zen.

Hiroshi Oh was an alarmingly fragile man. In the lecture hall he would ease into his chair in careful stages, always on the verge of blowing away, and then he'd smile desolately at his children. Tall blond milwaukees-prepare for Zen! I always enjoyed that opening smile. It was the smile of the bored Orient, tired of truth, bound in inland stillness, indifferent to westernization. The lecturer's chair and desk were on a platform in front of the huge sanitized hall, which resembled a cafeteria in the second-best pavilion at some international exposition. There were enough seats for two hundred students but only thirty of us were enrolled with Dr. Oh. We were well spread out, a half dozen or so at the very back of the room, the rest scattered here and there, presenting a difficult target, some of us seeking camouflage in the depth of our suntans, which matched the burnt sienna of the desks. The walls were glass, as was the low ceiling; the floor was something that made me think of crushed beetles, a whole civilization of black beetles smashed, baked and tiled in the Kitchens of Sara Lee. It was a perfect place for Zen.

Sunlight and viscid insect juice were the colors of those Monday afternoons. Zen had little in common with dead Englishmen and no one dared to drowse. It was total sleep or total awareness. All chose sleep, yet it seemed to elude us; it seemed always seconds away, a magical sleep filled with the soft tempera of spring, with new green trees standing alert to the wind, with the odors of earth pulsing and the riddle of a petaled woman crossing a footbridge. It was the perfect sleep but it never quite descended. It filled the hall above us and waited at the frontier of every mind. We desired this sleep because we were twenty years old and already beginning to learn there was no such thing as invincibility. We wished to take what was left of our courage and hope, and retire it to a dream. Beauty was too difficult and truth in the West had died with Chief Crazy Horse; a lifetime of small defeats was waiting. We knew this, and we knew that sleep was the only industry in life that did not diminish one's possibilities. But the perfect sleep never came. The sun held at the window and we listened, on those long afternoons, to Hiroshi Oh speaking of the need to cleanse our mouths of the word Buddha; speaking of drawing water and gathering fuel, how marvelous, how miraculous; speaking of the stillness in movement, the need for becoming a bamboo; humming tirelessly of these delicate things, his voice a tiny motor propelling a butterfly, while we all turned toward the sun at the window and dreamed of the sleep that would shine like awakening. Oh sieged us with tons of sparrow feathers; it was indeed marvelous and miraculous, smelling so of the unattainable and the old that in some dark part of our souls we instinctively revolted. It was in Oh's class that a student named Humbro ate his copy of D. T. Suzuki's introduction to Zen. Humbro sat three seats away from me but there was nobody between us. One day I saw him tear a page out of the book and eat it. He seemed to enjoy it. At every class he'd eat a few more pages. By the beginning of May he had eaten the whole book. Humbro was revered as an existential hero. In the course of eating the book he made no attempt to conceal his actions from Dr. Oh but the professor didn't seem to mind; at least he never mentioned it and we all thought he secretly approved. One must become a book before one can know what is inside it. We came into the last Monday of May, the last week of that last year, with cries of career opportunity sounding through campus, flutter and caw of mortality, General Dynamics and IBM, rumors loose in the land, huge shingled wings beating above the dorms, true love and baseball, vernal equinox, the moon and the scoop of tides, a horn-rimmed diplomat from Boeing pointing to the sky. Only four of us showed up for Zen, four out of thirty. Dr. Oh treated us to a smile even more desolate than usual and led us outside to a remote grove where he would conduct class, medieval fashion, in the dubious shade of a palm tree. He sat at the base of the tree and we drew around him, sitting cross-legged in a final bid for his approval. Oh spoke of Emptiness. The mind is an empty box within an empty box. With his index finger he made a sign in the air, one motion, name-shape, the circle's single fulfilling line. I lay flat on my back and watched the sky move through the blue openings of the tree. Then I closed my eyes and thought of sleep. Emptiness is Fullness. Become the book. Become the bamboo. The darkness ran shallow green. Then it was black, welcoming as deep space, and I sighed audibly and advanced into a fresh galaxy. What did I understand of all this? Episcopalian with chapped lips. Oh hummed and chanted. Note the paradox. Empty box within empty box. He went into more paradox, more gentle conflict, more questions of interpretation in which ancient masters nodded their disagreement. It was Oh's practice to reveal some deep Zen principle, carefully planting evidence of its undeniable truth, and then to confront us with a totally different theory of equally undeniable truth. He seemed to enjoy trying to break our minds, crush us with centuries of confusion, as if to say: If the great teachers and enlightened ones of history cannot find a common interpretation, how will you ever know what to believe, you poor white gullible bastards? In the speckled dark, flat on my back, I listened to the water of his voice and tried to hear the silences he so expertly inserted between words. Remove your eyelids. Empty your minds. See the stone as other stones see it. Here, outside, on the warm female grass, the promise of an immortal sleep was never more strong. I felt myself leaving the universe. But the doctor's words, sounding centuries away, brought me back every time. I tried again and again and each time returned. Then I opened my eyes and sat up and they were all on their backs, my fellow students, eyes closed and bellies softly throbbing, trying to leave this plane of existence. Oh looked at me and motioned me down again, a whisper of his eyes, down, my child, this is your last chance, tomorrow the corporations come calling, never again will you come close to this moment, the chance to capture the sleep of awakening. I lay back and closed my eyes again. I wondered if any of the others had found it. Humbro was here, the eater of Zen, five feet away. Wild was not here. Wild was in the sun lounge, grinning, no doubt, tracing the history of third stream jazz for some little girl from a cold climate. The darkness spread wide open and I knew there was room for me way inside but I could not escape. Remember the Arizona. I opened my eyes and saw Dr. Oh get to his feet and then I heard him say: "Rise, little children."

And we rose. We gathered in the sun lounge and took a poll. No one had slept, not one of us. Wild told us to get ready. The corporations were indeed coming, with charts and natural shoulders. He stood and gave us a simple nonde-nominational blessing, not knowing the formal procedure for last rites.

"We spring from a humane tradition," my mother said. "One of my forebears interceded with President Lincoln himself on behalf of the poor misguided Indians of Minnesota."

"Ann, what's that got to do with the college we send him to?"

"The University of Virginia was good enough for my forebears."

"He wants to go to this place out West. Let him go where he wants."

"I've made up my mind," I said. "That's definitely where I want to go."

"Your father and I have been arguing over Princeton and Virginia for three years now. Suddenly you come waltzing into the house and announce that you plan to attend some unheard-of school in California. Mary is behind this, isn't she? She's told you to make tracks away from this house. Well, goddamn it, I won't allow you to be running loose three thousand miles from home."

"Ann, relax. We'll talk about it tomorrow."

"Shut up. All of you shut up. That little slut is behind this. That ugly little bitch. Whose is she? She's not mine. She doesn't resemble me. She doesn't think like me. He's mine. That boy. He is mine. To whom does Mary belong, Clinton? If not to me, then to whom? By simple process of elimination, we arrive at you, do we not? I was a brilliant little grammarian as a girl. I can tell you that. God. Dear God. Do whatever you like, David. In the end, who cares? Who cares what happens to anyone?"

Summer in a small town can be deadly, even worse in a way than slum summers or the deep wet summers of gulf ports. It isn't the deadliness of filth or despair and it doesn't afflict everyone. But there are days when a terrible message seems to be passing from sunlight to shadow at the edge of a striped afternoon in the returning fathoms of time. Summer unfolds slowly, a carpeted silence rolling out across expanding steel, and the days begin to rhyme, distance swelling with the bridges, heat bending the air, small breaks in the pavement, those days when nothing seems to live on the earth but butterflies, the tranquilized mantis, the spider scaling the length of the mudcaked broken rake inside the dark garage. A scream seems imminent at every window. The menace of the history of quiet lives is that when the moment comes, the slow opened motion of the mouth, the sound which erupts will shatter everything that moves for miles around. The threat is at its worst in summer, in the wide rows of sunlight, as old people cross the lawns, humming like insects, as they sit in the painted gray stillness of spare rooms, breezing themselves with magazines about Siam and bare-breasted Zanzibar, as they stand on porches trying to gather in the shade, as they eat ice cream in the drugstore, two spinsters revolving on their stools beneath the halted fans, and all will come apart when the moment arrives. It is not felt every day and only some people can feel it. It may not be as violent as slums, tar melting on rooftops and boys wailing their hate at white helmets, but in the very silence and craft of its rhyming days summer in a small town can invert one's emotions with the speed of insanity.

One feels it most of all on Sundays. The neat white churches stand in groves of sunlight. Grandfather cops, absurd gunbelts over their paunches, direct whatever traffic is coming out of the church parking lots after services. The worshippers come down the steps blinking and damp, moving slowly and with the extreme caution which a new and vaster environment always exacts, heading across lawns or toward the parking lots where their cars seem to be swimming in the bluesteel incandescence of the gravel. Metal hot to the touch and hell-stench inside. On Sundays, in the wide rows of light, it's as though all the torpor of Christianity itself is spread over the land. In the blaze of those moments, men in tight collars and the neat white shoes of little girls on the steps of churches, one feels all the silence of Luther, of Baptist picnics, divinity students playing Softball, popes on their chamber pots, scary Methodists driving jalopies over cliffs; of teen-age Jehovah girls handing out leaflets, of Greek archbishops, revivalists fondling snakes in the Great Smokies, Calvinists blowing bagpipes, Gideon bibles turning yellow all over Missouri. All these, in a river of silence, remember to rest on the seventh day.

My mother, Jane and I walked home from church. People nodded to each other, faces tight in the glare, and went toward their separate streets. A few cars moved past, lakebound, filled with rubber floats and children in swimsuits. We turned into our street and I began to run. I ran upstairs and changed into old clothes. Then my father came in with a white bag full of buns. This happened every Sunday. I opened the bag and took out the buns and small bits of sugar frosting stuck to my fingers. Soon coffee was ready. Jane didn't want bacon and eggs because it was already too hot to eat a real breakfast. My mother would not have air conditioning in the house. We all sat down and ate the buns. We ate in silence. Then my mother said something about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. In Virginia they used to have hot cereal, strawberries, eggs, ham, and real farm bread. They used to put butter and marmalade on the bread. Everyone drank fresh milk instead of coffee. After this we were all silent again. It was ten o'clock in the morning.

I went out on the porch. It was only ten o'clock but it was already as hot as three in the afternoon. Jane came out and remembered that when we were younger we used to sit on the porch together and try to guess what kind of automobile would pass the house next. She remembered that she had once guessed three Buicks in a row and had been right every time. But it was Mary who had guessed the three Buicks in a row. I didn't mention this to Jane.

I walked down to the lake. There were swings and sliding ponds beneath the trees. I sat at the edge of one of the sliding ponds and watched little kids splashing in the shallow water and older boys and girls pushing each other off the white raft. The boys had white lotion on their noses and two girls sat on the raft with their backs to the sun and the straps of their bathing suits untied and hanging over their breasts. I turned and saw a small girl standing on the top step of the sliding pond. I moved out of the way and she bounced down the metal ramp slowly and clumsily. I didn't feel like swimming or watching other people swim so I walked over to Ridge Street and bought a magazine in the drugstore. The store had a wooden floor and a soda fountain. I was in one of those lonely moods which come over sixteen-year-olds when it occurs to them that in other parts of the world young men are hunting condors on high white crags and making love to whispering women who were born in Singapore. In its lonely way this is the most romantic of moods. You go for long walks that are like episodes in French novels. You feel that some great encounter is about to take place, something that will change the course of your life. Some old gardener will take you into an attic room, play the violin as it has never been played before and tell you the secret of existence. A dark woman will draw alongside in a new convertible and then lean over, without a word, and open the door for you; she will drive you to Mexico and undress you very slowly. It was a baseball magazine. I went home to read it on the porch. Some people waved at me from a car. It was very hot and nothing moved now. My father came out.

"What time's the party?" I said.

"Starts at eight."

"Do you think I'll have to get dressed?"

"Definitely."

"I hope it cools off tonight."

He went back in. In a little while my mother came out.

"You'll have to get dressed," she said. "Make no mistake about that."

She went inside and I read another article in the magazine. Then I went inside. My mother was in the kitchen looking at a tray of French pastries. I sat in the living room. There was a feeling of density in the air. Tides of light came through the windows, pulsing with dust. I was sitting in my mother's chair, a big green rocker. At my feet was a sewing basket. Is this how people die, I thought. My right arm was extended along the armrest, on the tight floral fabric, hand curled over the ornamental woodwork, a rounded section of rich mahogany in the shape of a lion's paw. My left arm hung loosely over the side of the chair. My feet were crossed at the ankles. I was wearing brown loafers, white socks, dungarees and an old navy-blue sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off about four-fifths of the way up the arm. I was not rocking. My mood had changed from lonely wanderlust to an odd European species of nothingness. I felt I could sit there forever, suffering. It seemed a valuable thing to do. Sit still for years on end and eventually things will begin to revolve around you, ideas and people and wars, depending for their folly and brilliance on that source of light which is human inertia. If you stay in one spot long enough, generals and statesmen will come to you and ask for your opinion. Maybe it wasn't European as much as Asian or North African. But it seemed European too, Russian at any rate, sitting in exile through long wolf-lean winters as governments fell and men made fools of themselves. Then finally a knock on the door. Word has reached us that you have been sitting here doing nothing. You must be a very wise man. Come to the capital and help us sort things out.

I sat in my mother's chair thinking of these things, more or less, and testing myself by trying not to blink. Then I heard a sound and when it grew louder I could guess what it was, motorcycles, a low throttling growl from that distance but coming closer now, rumbling and cracking, and I knew there would be more than two or three. I went to the window and then they came down the street with a sound that seemed to rip and sunder beneath the tires themselves, cracking off into smaller sounds which were then snapped apart by the next set of wheels and the next, and I counted ten, now twelve bikes, the riders screaming something as they went, eighteen now, an even twenty, dressed in silver and black, the colors of their bikes, and they went past screaming into the sounds of their machines, shouting a curse or warning over the empty lawns. They were gone in seconds and it was as though a hurricane or plague had struck the town. We were all in one piece. But now, as silence began to fill in the holes left by those marauding bikes, I could almost feel every man and woman in town looking from windows down that street and experiencing a strange mixture of longing and terror. We were all in one piece. But we were not quite the same people we had been ten seconds before.

We had cold cuts for lunch. On the radio Mel Allen was describing a nip and tuck ball game, the first of two, and he was saying there's plenty of room out here, folks; you can see the remainder of this game and all of the next; so why don't you come on out and bring the family. Then Jane began to talk about a course she was taking in the primitive religions of the world. It was given two nights a week at the YWCA in a nearby community. The Algonquin Indians heard dead men chirp like crickets. Fijian priests used to stare endlessly at a whale's tooth and then have convulsions. In funeral services in Fiji, the major part of the ceremony was to strangle the dead man's wives, friends and slaves. Jane went upstairs then to get her notebook. We ate in silence. She returned a minute later. Eisenhower was on the radio now with a brief recorded announcement in which he urged people to support their local community chest. The Chinese make a hole in the roof to let out the soul at death. When a Watchandi warrior slew his first victim, the spirit of the dead man entered the warrior's body and became his woorie, or warning spirit; it resided near his liver and warned him of danger by scratching or tickling. It was the custom of the Aztecs to pour the blood of slaughtered victims into the mouths of idols. A Mandingo priest would hold a newborn child in his arms, whisper in its ear and spit three times in its face. The Ojibwas believed that hatchets and kettles Lave souls. A saying of the Zulus was that the stuffed body cannot see secret things. The Zulu doctor prepared himself for dialogue with the spirits by fasting, suffering and long quiet walks. The Yakuts of Siberia worshipped the bear, their beloved uncle. According to the Dayaks, the human soul enters the trunks of trees. Evil spirits had sexual congress with Samoan women at night, causing supernatural conceptions. The Nicaraguans offered human sacrifices to Popogatepec by tossing bodies into volcanic craters. The Ahts of Vancouver's Island considered the moon as husband and the sun as wife. The Mintira people feared a water-demon which had a dog's head and an alligator's mouth. It sucked blood from men's thumbs and big toes until they died. To the Assyrians, insanity was possession by demons. When a Kayan of Borneo died, his slaves were killed so that they could follow him to the next world and obey all his behests. First the female relatives of the deceased master wounded the slaves slightly with spears. Then the male relatives took up these same spears and killed the victims. The human soul weighs three to four ounces.

"All that cruelty and superstition," my mother said.

"Life was cheap in those days, Ann."

"Who were all those people?" she said. "Think of them all, living in caves and huts. Back to the dawn of time. Worshipping bears and monkeys. Millions of souls. How insignificant they seem."

"I know what you mean," my father said. "It's almost impossible to conceive of all those people killing each other and praying to the sun. It makes you think that what you do in your life doesn't make a whole lot of difference. Why should we be any more significant than those primitives?"

"But we are, Clinton."

"Those are good notes, Jane," I said.

"I take them down in shorthand and then copy them out later," she said. "It's the best way to do it."

"It's incredible," my father said. "The way they disregarded human life. But still they were men and women. We're sitting here on a Sunday afternoon eating lunch and listening to the ball game. Those people couldn't be more remote. And yet they were men and women. They believed in something."

"The more magical a race is," my mother said, "the less significant the individual is. Magic overwhelms everything. We in the West value human life almost desperately because we have no magic."

"God is magic," Jane said.

"No. God is the opposite of magic. I've talked to William Potter about this. The subject is foreign to him. We all have magic in us, some more than others, but everything we've been taught tends to bury the magic. Consider what we're eating, Clinton. The body of an animal. What could be more primitive?"

"But we don't worship the animal," I said.

"Only because God took human form. What if He had decided to visit earth in the guise of a lion? The primitives seem insignificant to us because they're so remote in time and creed, as your father says, but also because they were so insignificant to each other. That was magic. Magic made them less important than the animals or planets they worshipped. They were not so far from the mark really. I hold with magic. I'm not sure whether it's good or evil. But I know it's there."

"That's good, Ann," my father said. "That's extremely interesting. "

There was nothing to do. All afternoon I sat on the porch, motionless, thinking of the wet bodies of women. It was getting hotter. The stillness was almost absolute. There was a taste of water in the air, warm salt biting the lips. I felt heavy. I wished it would rain. Is this how people die, watching along the street for some sign that will tell them the moment is here, at last, rise up and act, the time is upon us, quickly, into the streets, now, grenades and motorcycles, a warning word, salt on the wet bodies of women. Dr. Weber walked down the street. He was a short man with a mustache. The machete is a most effective weapon, doctor. You are surprised that I speak your language? Harvard. Class of '34. He was carrying his bag. He wore a dark suit. There was a gravy stain on his shirtfront. I waited for him to look toward the porch and give me that yellow smile which doctors and dentists employ so often, a clenched wry smile as the money changes hands, and when he did I turned away and yawned. Practitioner. Oath-taker. I rode out the afternoon on that yawn.

Later, from the window of my room, I watched them arrive for the party. The Old Holly people came mostly on foot. Those from nearby suburbs or from the city, my father's crowd, arrived in cars or took the cab from the station. There was no particular reason for the party but in a way it was something of a debut for me. It was judged that I was old enough now to partake in adult games, presumably on the fringe of things, nursing a tall cool rum collins (or something to that effect) while everyone admired my preppy manners and told me how much I had grown. Between forty and fifty people would be coming. It had been arranged-this I learned from Jane-that a couple named Loomis would be bringing along their daughter Amy, who was my age. Jane herself had invited her current boyfriend, John Retley Tucker, who was Big Bob Davidson's immediate predecessor in virtually every sense of the word. I called him Sweatley Retley. Mary had not been told about the party because nobody knew where she was.

They arrived with the setting of the sun-the Smiths, Bradshaws, Morgans, Hills, Rayburns, Gossages, Peppers, Stevensons, Halidays, Torgesons, Bakers, Hunters, Taylors, Colliers, Barbers and Fishers. Andrew Alexander drove up in his claret-colored Packard, a vintage model which was said to have been owned at one time by Al Capone or F. Scott Fitzgerald, depending on who was telling the story. William Judge and his wife looked up and saw me. I returned their wave and snapped into a midshipman smile, properly wholesome and humble. August Riddle strolled across the lawn. He was the town's crusty old lawyer, reputed to know more about deeds and mortgages than any man in the county. He was a bachelor. His office was suitably cluttered and he was always drinking black coffee and smoking long thin cigars. Mary and I had decided some time ago that Lee J. Cobb or Paul Muni would star in his film biography. He poked his cigar in my direction. The evening was warm and still. I saw a hawk. No sign of rain.

I put on a suit, white shirt and tie. I went downstairs and into the kitchen. The maid, Justina Simpson, who came in four days a week, had been joined for the party by her daughter Mae and her son-in-law Buford Long, who would be serving as bartender. I watched Buford set things up and I decided that tending bar might be a pretty good way to spend one's life. Spanking down big foaming steins of beer to be encircled by the huge skeet-shooting hands of virile novelists. Rattling the cocktail shaker and doing a little samba step for the amusement of the ladies. To be an expert at something. I asked Buford how he liked tending bar and he said the ice made his knuckles cold and sent weird shooting pains up to his head. My mother looked in then and urged me to make an appearance. I stayed for a moment longer and watched Mae carving turkey. She wore a white uniform. She wasn't wearing a slip and I could see the shadow of the inside of her thighs through the sheer white cotton. I went into the living room.

"Why, you're taller than Clyde," Mrs. Hunter said.

The Gossages felt me up, Henry and Lucy, and I spoke with Justin Hill about the Southeast Conference versus the Big Ten. My father had his arm around me for a few minutes. We were talking with Claire Collier, a tall good-looking woman. We were all talking simultaneously. I went over to the Rayburns and Taylors and said all the same things I had just said to Mrs. Collier. My mother usually referred to Mrs. Collier as "the Collier woman." This seemed to imply some distant scandal. I was aware that Amy Loomis and I, who had been at opposite ends of the room, were slowly approaching a confrontation. It was as though all the energies broadcast from the bodies of those forty adults were impelling us toward each other. Amy was tiny. She was talking with Andrew Alexander, who kept patting his own head. My mother had my elbow in her hand and then she was introducing me to Amy, pinching my elbow during the brief silences and letting up as soon as I said something. Amy and I were alone.

"Do you know Jim Gibson?" she said.

"No, I don't think so."

"He's got a green catamaran called Belleweather?"

"What's his name again?"

"Jim Gibson."

"I don't know him."

"That cat really flies."

"I'd like to get one myself. They really go."

"Do you know Marty Hammer?" she said.

"It sounds familiar."

"His father's got a yawl? He gave Marty carte blanche with the yawl for his sixteenth birthday? It's something like fifty-five feet?"

"No, that's not the one I'm thinking of. Does he have a brother named Frank?"

"No."

"Then that's not the one," I said.

"Do you know Tim Lerner?"

"Didn't he drown in Peconic Bay last summer?"

"That's the one."

"Do you know Billy Shaw?"

"I know two Billy Shaws," she said.

People were filling plates with sliced ham and turkey and trying to eat standing up. It was very warm in the room. The Gossages joined us. Henry rubbed my shoulder. Lucy Gossage held my hand as she talked to Amy. Mrs. Loomis came over with Tod Morgan and asked how we were doing. Lucy Gossage held my hand up near her breast and kept caressing it with her other hand. Ray Smith came over and went into the boxing routine he always used when we met. Head tucked down on his left shoulder, he threw some mock lefts and rights at my belly, snorting with each punch. Then there was a brief lull and we heard Mrs. Loomis telling Amy to smile once in a while. Then we all started talking. Jane stopped by and introduced her boyfriend to everyone. Tod Morgan handed me what he called a real drink. It was scotch and water. It made me very warm and I didn't like the taste much. But I seemed to be having a good time. They were nice people.

They had no scars or broken noses. They dressed more or less the same. They talked the same way and said the same things and I didn't know how dull they were or that they were more or less interchangeable. I was one of them, after all. I was not a stranger among them and I liked their hands on my body.

"Did anyone see those motorcycles today?" Tod Morgan said.

The Collier woman and I stood by the fireplace drinking. I assumed a clubby slouch. Then Lucy Gossage had her arm around me and her husband, Henry, was whispering a dirty joke in my ear. I had trouble picking up his words. Soon he started laughing and I knew the joke was over. We both stood there laughing. Henry looked right into my face, searching for genuine appreciation, wanting to be sure I understood the point of the story. I kept nodding and laughing. When he was satisfied he went away.

August Riddle had a teardrop of flesh on each sagging jowl. I watched him. Amy was talking to me about somebody named Bobby Springer's Austin Healey. Mr. Riddle was talking with the Stevensons. He lit his cigar and then waved out the match with a circular flourish. He dropped the match on the floor. Mae carried a platter of pineapple rings into the room. I tried to catch her eye so I could smile at her. Amy was talking into my chest. It was all settled as far as she was concerned. It was between Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. She had red hair and big green eyes. I imagined being in bed with her and her mother. Amy was drinking the champagne punch. Nobody seemed drunk yet. I asked her if she wanted to go out on the porch where it would be cooler and she said no. Just plain no. There was a terrible silence then which made me nervous and I found myself asking her if she knew by any chance how the Yankees had made out in the second game. My father came over and shook my hand for some reason. Then he was gone. Andrew Alexander was talking to Amy. You young people, he kept saying. You young people. He patted his own head. He couldn't have been trying to keep his hair in place, for it was cut short and it was thick and firm. Every time he patted, his eyeballs rolled up. He and Amy were discussing the color beige. I watched his eyeballs slide up and down. He asked if Amy and I were engaged. I excused myself then and went into the kitchen to watch Buford Long mix drinks. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Pouring club soda with his right hand, he took a matchbook out of his breast pocket with the other hand, flipped up the cover with his thumb and, using his index finger and his thumb again, bent a match at its middle and struck it. I liked the way he did that. I had never seen anyone do that before. I also liked the fact that he was left-handed. Left-handed people seem to do things with more style. I've always envied them. Warren Spahn the stylish southpaw.

"Where do you normally work, Buford? Tend bar in some bar or something?"

"I'm a maintenance man. Mae and I, we live down Manhattan in the West Twenties. I maintain six buildings. I collect garbage from outside their doors and bring it downstairs. I fix things need fixing. I shine things up."

"What's it like? Hard work, I bet."

"It's not hard so much as menial. But at least it's got some intrinsics to it. It gives you clues to human nature. Garbage tells you more than living with a person."

"You don't mind it too much then."

"Oh, I love it," he said.

"Is the garbage different in different buildings?"

"Sure it's different. There's clues that tell you that. You don't even have to see the garbage. Anytime you see a cracked mirror in the hallway you know the garbage isn't going to be any good."

"I guess it's satisfying to help keep the city clean."

"It overjoys me," Buford said.

"They say pound for pound Sugar Ray Robinson is the best fighter ever."

My mother was in the doorway telling me that Amy was all alone. I went out there and stood next to her. John Retley Tucker came by. I asked him if he had ever met my other sister and he said Jane had never mentioned any sister. He stood there talking to us and the index finger of his right hand was stuck between his shirt collar and the back of his neck. This meant his elbow was up around ear level. I saw Amy staring at the patch of sweat under his arm. John Retley was about six-four and two-twenty and he looked like a cop directing traffic on a Sunday afternoon and not minding it at all. The Collier woman approached again and I disengaged myself to talk to her. She was wearing beige.

"I want to tell you something," she said. "You're a young man now and there's no reason why you shouldn't know this. You've grown to almost your full stature. You have a man's body and a man's appetites. This is what I want to say. Women love to be loved."

"Yes."

"Who is that man behind you?"

"John Retley Tucker. My sister Jane's boyfriend."

"There's something indecent about a man with thumbs that large."

I needed some air. I told Amy I was going out for a while. She said she'd come with me. I left her there on the porch for a moment and went back inside for two drinks and brought them out. I didn't turn on the porch light.

"Do you drink a lot?" she said.

"I drink quite a bit. I drink quite a bit, yes."

"Do you know a boy named David Bell? He drinks incredible amounts of liquor. He does it on a dare. He can really hold it."

"I'm David Bell," I said.

"I got confused. I meant Dick Davis."

"Freudian slip," I said. "They say if you use somebody's name like that by mistake it means you like that person very much."

"Don't get ideas, mister."

"I was only kidding."

"Your parents are very nice."

"So are yours. Do you think I'm handsome, Amy?"

"What a question."

"I know it's an ambivalent thing to ask but I heard you discussing colors with old Andy Alexander and you seem to have good taste and I was just wondering what you thought. I'm sure you wonder if people think you're pretty. Do you think I'm handsome?"

"Yes," she said.

"Do you want to know if I think you're pretty?"

"Okay."

"I think you just miss," I said. "What's your opinion of Burt Lancaster? I think he's the all-time greatest."

Henry Gossage came out on the porch. He took a deep breath and clubbed himself on the chest with both his baby fists. Then he saw us standing by the rail and pretended to be startled, drawing his body back and raising his arms in self-defense. "Two purple shadows in the snow," he sang. I hoped he wouldn't tell another joke.

"Our kids are away at camp," he said. "Oldest is a counselor. Middle waits on tables but he'll be a counselor next year. Youngest is only twelve so he's got a ways to go yet before he gets out of the camper category."

"How's Hank?" I said.

"He's the oldest. Henry Jr. He's fine. Appreciate your asking."

"Give him my best."

"Will do. Damn good of you, lad. Damn nice of you, Dave boy. Damn sweet thing to say. Where can I throw up?"

"In the hedge," I said.

"It's all right. I don't think I have to anymore."

Amy said she thought it would be a good idea to get back inside. Everybody stood talking and eating. At the far end of the room Tod Morgan and Peter Fisher's wife were talking.

I was watching his face when he laughed. His features stretched and quivered. He looked extraordinarily ugly. I imagined a small explosion in his head. He was laughing in an exaggerated manner, overdoing it, creating the laugh as if with ceramics, and I watched his head come apart in slow motion, different sections tumbling through the air, nose-part, ear-part, jaw with lower teeth. I went through the kitchen and out the back door.

The small porch out there was full of empty bottles. I walked along the edge of the woods past Harris, Torgeson and Weber. The Harris and Weber houses were lit. I cut across a lawn and walked the five blocks to Ridge Street. The drugstore was closed. There were four or five people in the ice cream parlor. I had a soda and waited for Kathy Lovell to turn up but she didn't. I almost went to the movie theater to look for her. Then I started walking toward her house. Finally I went back to the ice cream parlor and called her from there. Her father answered and I hung up. Ten minutes later I was on Green Street. It was dark and quiet. There was the beginning of a breeze. I stood beneath an elm and watched a woman in a shingled house ironing clothes. No one passed on the street. It was a Sunday night in early September and my body beat with sorrow at the beauty and mockery of all bodies.

There were only about fifteen people left when I returned to the house. They seemed to have too much room to move around in. Unfinished drinks were everywhere and the chairs and sofas were occupied now. On the floor was a white slice of turkey with a shoeprint on it. Most of the women were sitting together at one end of the room. The men were drifting in and out of the kitchen. They all seemed to be drinking beer now. I walked across the room smiling. I went upstairs and took off my jacket and tie. I could hear voices from Jane's room. I stood very still. Jane was apparently showing her boyfriend a family photo album.

"This is mother as a little girl," she said. "That's her father and that's her uncle Jess who wrote poems and killed himself.

This is me as a little girl. This was taken on West End Avenue, where we used to live. This was taken in Central Park. This is Old Holly and that's daddy. This is Aunt Grace in Alexandria. This is mother again. So's this. So's this. This is David when he was two years old. This is daddy in his office."

"Jane," he said. "Jane."

I went downstairs to the kitchen and got a beer out of the refrigerator. Harold Torgeson was standing in the corner. He was drinking a glass of milk. We were alone.

"I've always wanted to be a writer," he said. "Right out there in that room tonight there were forty or fifty good stories. I tried to write when I was a young man but I had no staying power. I'd get started in a burst of energy and goodwill and then I'd just fade out and die. Let's face it, I was born to be an insurance agent. But the thing gnaws at me even now, lad. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping and I get out of bed and light a cigarette and sit by the open window. And I get this bittersweet feeling about my life and what I've done and what I haven't done. You're too young to understand that. But there's something poetic about sitting by an open window at midnight smoking a cigarette. The cigarette is part of it. There are memories in the smoking of a cigarette. I just sit there thinking about my life. I killed three Japanese in the war that I know of. I'm telling you these things because they'll be useful to you someday."

Ray Smith had come in halfway through Torgeson's monologue. He went over and shook Torgeson's hand. Then he got a beer from the refrigerator.

"My own story begins in wartime London," he said. "There was a nurse named Celia Archer."

Three other men were standing in the kitchen entrance, listening. I slipped past them into the living room. The ladies didn't seem to have very much to say to each other. Through the window I saw my father out on the porch. William Judge and I were the only men in the room. Nobody said anything. My mother looked strange. Then Jane and her boyfriend came down the stairs. Someone asked what they had been doing up there and everyone laughed. The laughter was a signal. They had all been waiting for it. They got up now and began to leave. My father came inside and stood by the door, trying not to look delighted. My mother was standing in the middle of the room. Her hands whisked back and forth as if she were trying to sweep everyone out the door. People kept leaving and then returning seconds later for things they had forgotten. Finally they were gone for good. My father began turning out lights and locking doors. Jane was already upstairs. Soon I was alone in the living room. Someone had left almost a full glass of something on the buffet table. I took a sip, closed my eyes, concentrated, could not determine what it was, and slowly finished it off. I realized my father had not said goodnight to anyone. I turned off the hall lamp and the house was dark except for the kitchen. I started in and then stopped at the doorway. My mother was in there. The refrigerator door was open. She was wearing just one shoe. The other was on the floor, a black shoe, upright, near the wall. She held a tray of ice cubes in her hands and she was spitting on the cubes. She disappeared behind the refrigerator door and I could hear her open the freezer compartment and slide the tray back in. I moved away as the freezer slammed shut. I went upstairs and into my room. I closed the door behind me as quietly as I could. I took off my shirt and my shoes and lay on the bed, knowing it was too hot to sleep. I thought of Harold Torgeson sitting by his open window smoking a cigarette. I wondered how many novels he had dictated to himself that way. After a long time I passed into a thin dreamless sleep, less a state of mind than a dislocation of the senses. Coming up out of it for only seconds at a time, I did not know where I was or whether it was morning or the middle of the night. It disturbed me not to know where I was and yet I was content to slip off again into the river, the not at all deep or treacherous river, the river which is language without thought, and in seconds, what seemed like seconds, I would come up again and wonder where I was but somehow never who; that much did not escape me. Then I was wide awake. My hand was on my belt buckle and I realized I hadn't taken off my pants. I lay there without moving, aware that sleep was impossible now. I listened for trains or cars but there was nothing. Trains are lovely things to hear when you are waiting for sleep. I imagined that the novel Torgeson was dictating to himself at that moment was the kind of novel in which young lovers hear a train in the distance or in which somewhere a dog is barking or in which laughter is always floating across the lawn. I felt tense and restless. It was my body that was awake but not my mind. I would think of something and then try to come back to it and it would be gone. I could not keep a thought going. Nothing connected. I got up and looked out the window. Then I went downstairs. The kitchen light was still on but she was in the pantry. I could barely see her. She was sitting on a stool against the bare wall that faced the door. On either side the high shelves were stocked with bottles, jars and cartons.

"It was only a matter of time," she said.

"I'd better turn on the light."

It was a low-watt bulb and the light seemed almost brown in that narrow room full of dark jars. She was standing now.

"There is nothing but time. Time is the only thing that happens of itself. We should learn to let it take us along. The Collier woman is a fool."

I did not move. I felt close to some overwhelming moment. In the dim light her shadow behind her consumed my own. I knew what was happening and I did not care to argue with the doctors of that knowledge. Let it be. Inside her was something splintered and bright, something that might have been left by the spiral passage of my own body. She was before me now, looking up, her hands on my shoulders. The sense of tightness I had felt in my room was beginning to yield to a promise of fantastic release. It was going to happen. Whatever would happen. The cage would open, the mad bird soar, and I would cry in epic joy and pain at the freeing of a single moment, the beginning of time. Then I heard my father's bare feet on the stairs. That was all.

We sat in the Aston-Martin inside the garage. There were still some traces of snow on the windshield.

"My father's name was Harkavy Clinton Bell. They named me Clinton Harkavy Bell. He made his money late in life. Not that we weren't comfortable early on. But it was his reputation that came first, before he started earning top dollar. He told me the story dozens of times. He was on a Union Pacific train somewhere between Omaha and Cheyenne. He was sitting next to a man named McHenry who owned a pajama company named McHenry Woolens. McHenry took out a bottle and he and my father got good and soused. He told my father he was on the verge of bankruptcy. So old Harkavy tells him what he needs is a catchy advertising campaign. You've got a good American name and you're not using it to advantage. McHenry. Fort McHenry. Where Francis Scott Key wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' And with that my father takes out a pencil and starts making a layout on the back of a big manila envelope. He draws a battle scene, get it, ships, rockets, a fort, hundreds of troops and a big flag flying on the battlements. Then he writes a single line at the bottom of the layout. McHenry-the Star-Spangled Pajamas. Then-this is the crusher-he tells McHenry that what he has to do to nail it down solid is to sew forty-eight stars on every pair of pajamas he manufactures. That did it. It was the greatest merchandising gimmick of the decade. It made McHenry rich and my father famous. That's how they wrote ads in the old days, kid-sloshed to the eyeballs on the Union Pacific Railroad. He told me that story dozens of times. I think it has a fine innocence to it. I mean the whole idea of getting plastered with a stranger. And the campaign itself. The star-spangled pajamas. It has a lovely innocence to it. You could afford to be innocent in the old days."

About a week after the party Tommy Valerio and I went over to a deserted ballfield on the edge of town. The field was surrounded by woods. Only the bare outlines of basepaths and a pitcher's mound remained, and what should have been the skin part of the infield was covered with weeds. Tommy had a long thin fungo bat and we took turns hitting fly balls to each other. It was a cool day for September, generously blue, football weather really, and I ranged across the outfield making casual basket catches, hunching my shoulder and pounding the glove twice like Willie Mays, and trying to adjust to the sudden change of season; not sorry to see summer go because autumn was all gold and wine in the New Hampshire fields and I would be going into senior year at St. Dymphna's, where I would amble along the gray lanes in my tweed sport-coat. And yet something was coming to an end, not just summer but something like the idea of what I was, the time I occupied like space, that private time in which one moves and thinks and knows the questions. Time had been warped and I looked back to the week before and could not find myself. It wasn't until years later, in the period of the affairs, that I began to struggle against this disappearance; to give nothing to Jennifer Fine for fear there would be nothing left for myself. I drifted back to the edge of the trees and caught a long high drive.

"Let's switch," Tommy shouted.

"Keep on hitting," I said. "I want to shag a few more."

I stayed out there for a long time. Tommy got tired of swinging the bat but I kept telling him to hit a few more, just a few more. I didn't want to stop. The ball would rise from the bat and then I would hear the light crack of contact and it would go up into the cloudless sky, almost vanishing, black at its apogee, coming down white and bruised, an old ball bruised green from the grass. I began to get serious. I would crouch as Tommy went into his swing, meat-hand on my right knee, glove-hand dangling straight down. Ball in the air, I would break quickly, watching just the first second of its flight, and then run head-down to the spot where I knew it would land, the spot dictated by the memory of that first second and a knowledge of the wind and Tommy's power and the sound of ball on bat. Ball caught, I would fire it back as hard and straight as I could, as if a runner had been tagging from third. Tommy would let my throw bounce into the sagging backstop. It went on like this. I was nobody. I was instinct and speed and a memory that extended back for no more than seconds. That was all. I could have gone on all day. But Tommy got exhausted and finally called it quits. I went home, oiled my glove and put it away for the winter.

That night I left my room and headed toward the stairs. I passed Mary's room and saw my mother in there, small and blue, a question mark curled on the bed. I went downstairs. I sat on the rocker for a while. Then my father called me and I descended the steps into the basement.

Jane sat on a folding chair eating an apple. My father stood by the projector. He nodded to me and I switched off the light and then sat next to Jane. The first commercial lasted twenty seconds. A house stood on a quiet suburban street at night. Inside, a man and a woman were having an argument. A teen-age girl leaned against the TV set listening to them. She was very homely. Then she disappeared, returning seconds later with a small bottle of something. The man and woman looked at the bottle, embraced and began to sing. The next commercial was one minute long. A boy wearing thick glasses was practicing the piano. A hockey stick was propped against the wall behind him. In the distance could be heard the shouts and laughter of children his own age. The boy got to his feet, picked up the hockey stick and raced toward the door. A woman emerged from the next room. She was holding a toothbrush. She ran after the boy, waving the toothbrush and screaming. The boy opened the door and tripped. He fell down the steps and lay on the stone path, motionless. His glasses had been broken. Blood was flowing from a severe gash at a point directly above the bridge of his nose. He appeared to be unconscious. It was a beautiful night, a cool and clear and almost autumn night. The wind rushed across the grass outside the high basement window. The sky was howling with stars. I thought of old men playing violins and of women in white convertibles driving me to Mexico.