Buddwing

10

The park outside New York University was a miniature of the large park in which he had awakened this morning, and he entered it now with a pleased feeling of correctness. His life, he felt, was somehow starting anew, and there was something unexplainably fitting about this repetition, as though the fresh beginning were not really totally unexpected, but rather an extension of what was already there. He found a bench in the sun, and he sat on it with the rather complacent air of a man who knows exactly what is going to happen next and is prepared for it.

Grace was going to happen next.

He spread his arms along the back of the bench and faced the college. The Washington Arch and Fifth Avenue were behind him and to his left. He could feel the strong afternoon rays touching his head and shoulders, and he wished he could turn his face to them, but he knew that Grace would come down the front steps of the school soon, and he wanted to see her when she did. In his mind, he acted out a little pantomime, Grace appearing suddenly with her books on her arms, wearing sweater and skirt and going to a bench at the other end of the park; he rising and going to sit beside her. He smiled in anticipation, and listened to the sounds of life around him.

Somewhere behind him, two men were playing chess; they were old men, judging from the sounds of their voices. “J’adoube,” one of them said, and the other answered, “You’re always adoube-ing. Keep your goddamn hands off the pieces!” A folk singer with a guitar — he sounded colored but Buddwing wasn’t sure — began singing “Greensleeves” in a gently keening voice, and overhead an airplane droned a noisy counterpoint. Students with Saturday classes sat on the benches chatting, filling the air with a pleasant buzz. He could feel the city behind him and around him, pulsing with life. He sat in sun-stained brilliance, the nucleus of a city teeming with millions, and for a moment he was completely alone and private, sitting in sun-enclosed secrecy as the city went its busy way, unaware. In secret silence, he could feel a sense of true identity slowly and tentatively seeping into muscle and bone, with the same penetrating force as the sun that touched his shoulders, spreading, warming, lulling.

His grandfather had died in the dead of winter; he had often thought of the old man as being lowered into a cruelly cold and stubborn, unreceptive earth.

As he sat in the sun, two overlapping memories seemed to enter his mind in swift succession, each rushing in its haste for recognition, one more frightening than the other, and yet neither as frightening as he knew they should be. The first concerned the death of his grandfather and the second

He frowned because the second memory seemed to concern the death of his grandfather as well, and yet he knew it was impossible for his grandfather to have died twice. His grandfather had died once and forever on January twelfth; the date was firmly fixed in his memory because it had been two days after his sixteenth birthday. The wake had been held in Harlem on a bleak and dreary day, the sky a uniform unbroken metallic gray across the tops of the Second Avenue tenements. The funeral parlor was on the ground floor of one of those tenements.

Well, that day, he thought. There was something wrong about that day.

The thing that was wrong about that day was the fact that his grandfather was dead and lying in a coffin — that was what was wrong; that was all that was wrong. But that in itself was not frightening — why had he thought it was frightening? He could, in fact, visualize the old man with his white hair against the white satin of the coffin, his eyes closed, his waxen hands clasped gently over the prayer beads on his chest. He could remember the funeral parlor in vivid detail, the banks of flowers heaped around the coffin and on the floor, the permeating perfume, the rows of folding wooden chairs. Grandma sat on one of the chairs in a black dress with a dazed expression on her face, accepting the condolences of the mourners. His grandfather did not look at all like himself; there was something strange and different about his face. But there was nothing frightening about this memory of the funeral parlor; there was instead a gentle tender whispering aura about the scene as he pictured it in his mind.

Yet the day had been frightening.

He shuddered with the memory even now, but at the same time he felt his fear did not concern anything that had happened on the day of the wake, but instead something that had happened much later on, when it was warm, yes, the summer, yes, Di Palermo’s grocery store, Apartment 4A, 2117 Riverside Drive, no!

His mind clamped shut.

He retreated gracelessly, backing away from the second memory because there was horror implicit in it. Deliberately, he sought the comparative safety of the first memory, even though he knew the two were linked and that one owed its existence to the other. And then, like a faintly rattling warning wind, came the chilling knowledge that memory upon memory upon memory were inextricably linked, horror upon horror were waiting to emerge from the shadowed corners of his mind to force a confrontation, and the knowledge routed him completely.

Where’s Grace? he wondered, and he looked again toward the steps of the school, not seeing her, but focusing his attention steadily on the steps anyway, knowing she would arrive soon. The delaying tactic did not work. His mind drifted back again to that day of his grandfather’s wake in Harlem, but now the memory seemed less frightening than before, so that he concluded it was an absolutely safe memory; it was only the other memories he had to watch out for. He sought the memory of the wake almost eagerly now, nudging it into his mind, while all the time the warning continued to rattle, the warning that told him once he opened the floodgates there would be no stopping the rush of memory — he would be trapped in a thundering cascade; he would drown.

He had walked from the funeral home with his cousin Mandy. She was three months older than he, and she was not wearing her stupid cheerleader’s sweater for a change, but was wearing instead a simple black dress. They walked the streets of Harlem with a total ease, because they had both been born into its poverty and its filth, and even though they were now clean-washed residents of the Bronx, the residue stuck to their bones like part of their flesh. The flowershop was on Third Avenue and 116th Street, across the way from the Cosmo Theater, which his mother had often taken him to when he was a boy. They went into the shop to price a floral wreath for their dead grandfather because they both felt they were old enough now to express their own sympathy, even though Mandy had told him in utmost secrecy that she had never been overly fond of the old man, a confession Buddwing accepted with a feeling of resentful anger.

He had never made a large purchase in his life before, and he knew that he would have to borrow money from his mother in order to meet his half of the obligation. There were a great many floral wreaths in the shop. The woman who waited on them wore a green apron with pins stuck all along the straps, and she was very patient in helping them to decide. They eliminated wreath after wreath, until finally there were only two wreaths to choose from. One of them cost seventy-five dollars. The other cost fifty.

“I think we should take the fifty-dollar one,” Mandy said.

Buddwing shook his head. “No. Let’s take the seventy-five-dollar one.”

“It’s too expensive,” Mandy said.

“It’s for Grandpa,” Buddwing answered.

“It’s still too expensive.”

The woman with the green apron said, “The fifty-dollar wreath is very nice.”

“Yes, but this is for our grandfather, you see,” Buddwing said.

“Yes, I understand,” the woman said. “But the fifty-dollar wreath is very nice.”

“I think we should take the more expensive one,” he said to Mandy.

“That would cost us thirty-seven-fifty apiece,” Mandy said. “That’s really too much money.”

“I think the fifty-dollar wreath would make a nice remembrance,” the woman in the green apron said.

“It’s, you see, he’s our grandfather,” Buddwing said lamely, and the shop went still.

“Would there be a ribbon on the fifty-dollar one?” Mandy asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“Could it say ‘In Loving Memory’?”

“Yes, if you like.”

“That would be nice,” Mandy said, turning to Buddwing. “I think that would be nice, don’t you?”

“The same kind of ribbon that’s on the other one?” Buddwing asked.

“Yes, the same ribbon,” the woman said. “It’s really a very nice wreath, you know.”

“It’s just that fifty dollars seems so... cheap,” Buddwing said.

“Oh, no,” the woman said, looking offended. “Fifty dollars is a nice price to spend for a wreath. Oh, no, it’s not cheap at all.”

“He used to make all my clothes, you see,” he said, and the woman looked at him blankly. “My grandfather.”

“Come on, we have to decide,” Mandy said.

“It’ll look very lovely with the ribbon on it,” the woman said.

“The red ribbon? Is that what you’ll use?” Buddwing asked.

“Yes, if you like.”

“I think the red is good, don’t you, Mandy?”

“Yes. Yes, I think it’ll look nice with the red.”

“And would you deliver it to the funeral parlor?” Buddwing asked.

“Yes, we certainly will,” the woman replied.

“Fifty dollars, you know, it seems...”

“We’ll take the fifty-dollar one,” Mandy said. “With the red ribbon saying ‘In Loving Memory.’” She paused and looked at Buddwing. “Okay?” she asked.

“Well, okay,” Buddwing said.

“Sure, it’s good enough,” Mandy said.

They told the woman in the green apron they would be back in a few minutes with the money, and that meanwhile she should attach the red ribbon to the fifty-dollar wreath. Then they walked out of the flowershop and back to the funeral parlor. His mother wanted to give him the twenty-five dollars as a gift, but Buddwing insisted that it be a loan, and he told her he would take a job that summer to earn the money to pay her back. When the wreath arrived later that afternoon, all the relatives clucked their tongues and wagged their heads in appreciation, and said, “Ahh, look, the kids bought him flowers.” Buddwing felt oddly guilty.

He continued to wonder about that day long after they had buried his grandfather in the hard winter earth, long after spring had come and summer was near. In idle moments, he would reconstruct the conversation in that flowershop, and the words that resounded most clearly in his mind were the ones Mandy had delivered just before they had left: “Sure, it’s good enough.”

Good enough for what? he wondered. Good enough for the old man who inconsiderately died when I loved him so much? Good enough for the old man who welcomed me to his shop every afternoon, “Come in, you must be frozen. Annie, make him some nice hot chocolate”? Good enough for what, Mandy? Oh God, why hadn’t he argued more vehemently, why hadn’t he convinced her that fifty dollars wasn’t enough, that the extra twenty-five dollars was only a way of saying, “Grandpa, I really loved you, not fifty dollars’ worth, not even seventy-five dollars’ worth, but the world, Grandpa, I loved you the world”? Why hadn’t he convinced her?

The job he took that summer was a constant reminder of his grandfather, even before

No, he thought.

No, there’s no sense going over all this; there really isn’t. I took the job, I paid her back the lousy twenty-five dollars!

He tried to make his mind go blank, the way Jesse had taught him to do aboard the Fancher during the war, a prerequisite for self-hypnotism. Before you could learn to hypnotize others, Jesse had said, you had to learn how to hypnotize yourself. He thought of snow, of whiteness, emptiness, open space, nothing, and then wondered what was keeping Grace, and then forced Grace out of his mind; the trick was to make the mind entirely blank, to push out any thought, even a random thought, to sit in unblinking blankness, to think of nothing but peace, nothing but emptiness, nothing, nothing at all.

Into the white blank nothingness of his serene mind, into the clear empty space surrounded by air transparent and pure, into this carefully controlled empty blankness came the single image of a boy pushing a grocery cart, and he obliterated this image at once, forcing it out and away, leaving the clean open space again and the blankness which nothing could invade the apartment building in red brick facing the water and the service elevator with the colored operator who always offered him cigarettes he suspected they were marijuana he told him his father was a cop and he wasn’t allowed to smoke ha his father wasn’t even a cop, he closed his mind down again. If whiteness didn’t work, you went to black; you closed the mind in tight like the diaphragm of a camera, tighter and tighter, the shutter closing and blotting out everything in contracting blackness, the straight-edged circle in the center coming down smaller and smaller, showing less and less light, until there was only a pinpoint, and then you forgot the allusion of a camera’s shutter entirely, a camera was a thought, you obliterated the camera image, and with it the pinpoint of light in the center of your mind, you closed down to total darkness, you swam, not swam, you floated, not floated, you allowed the blackness, dark and darker.

Nothing.

He looked like Grandpa.

No, he did not look at all like Grandpa; he was an old Jewish man, and he sat with his shawl wrapped around him, and his yarmulka on the back of his head, and his hands shook, and he coughed all the time, I did not want to go near him at first, I was afraid I would catch his disease, whatever it was.

Into the blackness now, he knew it would not work, into the blackness, you taught me a trick that doesn’t work, you son of a bitch, into the blackness came memory, pushing back the blackness, seeping into the center of the dark plane, and shoving the blackness back like a parting curtain, pushing its edges out of the mind until only the memory was there, vague and badly defined, the first time he delivered groceries to Apartment 4A, 2117 Riverside Drive, and the colored girl opened the door, and the old man with the shawl and the yarmulka was sitting by the window in sunshine.

Into the memory, a side theme of the memory, came the image of his grandfather lying in his coffin, and he knew now why his grandfather did not look the same. They had taken off his glasses. He had never seen his grandfather without glasses before, and this man in the coffin looked particularly vulnerable, as though expecting a blow in the face, I told her fifty dollars wasn’t enough. And then the second memory, the memory of the apartment, expanded and grew, brighter now, its edges more clearly defined with a sharpness that was painful, and he knew that terror lurked just beyond the pain, and he tried again to shut out the memory, but it would not go. It came instead in flashing vignettes, seconds long, the first time he had explained to the old man about the Zwieback in the order the day before, the time the old man asked him to stay a while and talk to him, the time the old man

A shudder ran up Buddwing’s spine.

There had been a gentleness about that old Jewish man, a blue-veined, translucent gentleness as he sat in the sun and chatted with Buddwing each time he delivered an order. The shawl he wore on his shoulders was made of silk, blue and white, with white tassels, and he wore the black yarmulka perched precariously, almost rakishly, on the back of his skull. They never talked for more than ten minutes at a time, sitting by the window overlooking the Hudson River, the sunlight streaming in past the lace curtains, the colored girl humming around the house as she did her work, and the old man’s voice gently asking questions, wanting to know all about the job, wanting to know what Buddwing’s future plans were, wanting to know all about Buddwing’s friends, all about Buddwing’s dreams. He told the old man that his closest friends were L.J. and Beethoven and Red Vest, and he explained how Beethoven was an excellent artist and hoped to go to Pratt Institute after he got out of high school. He told the old man about Doris, and how he had given her his silver scholarship pin — “You gave her a medal?” the old man asked. “You’re serious with this girl?” — and sitting there in the warm sunshine with the old man was somehow reminiscent of coming to the tailorshop and going into the back room where Uncle Freddie had the pressing machine going, and Grandma was making hot chocolate, and then coming out to join Grandpa at the counter, leaning on the counter and sipping his chocolate and telling Grandpa everything that had happened. Ten minutes at a time, perhaps once or twice a week, until Buddwing began to look forward to his visits, and then the end of the summer grew near.

The woman who answered the door that day was not the colored girl. He had never seen this woman before in his life, but she was wearing black, and the apartment behind her was ominously still, and then he saw the other people, strangers, and he froze on the sill of the apartment.

His eyes opened wide. The strange woman standing in the doorway looked at him curiously.

He saw the coffin.

He saw the old man in the coffin.

He must have asked, “Is he dead?” because the woman was saying, “Yes. Yes, he is dead.” He dropped the package of groceries and turned and ran and almost collided with the wall. The colored elevator operator asked him why he was crying, and he said, “My grandfather is dead,” and then went down to where the grocery cart was waiting. He did not deliver any of the other orders in the cart. He went back to the store and told Di Palermo he was feeling sick, and then he took the subway home and thought all the while that if he had only insisted, if he had only convinced Mandy to spend seventy-five dollars instead of fifty, if only they hadn’t given him such a lousy cheap crumby wreath, Sure, it’s good enough, the old man would still be alive.

Now, sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, tears came into his eyes again, and he tried to blink them away, looking across at the steps of the school again, and desperately willing Grace to appear.

Oh, Jesus, why did you have to die? he thought, and he rubbed his fists against his eyes, and blinked at the building, and knew suddenly that Grace would not come, there was no Grace. He rose from the bench. His feet were unsteady beneath him. He stumbled, regained his footing, and looked about him curiously, as if uncertain where he was. Who... who was I waiting for? he wondered. Grace? But there is no Grace, you see. There is no grace for a cheap son of a bitch who defiled his grandfather’s memory, God, God, even the ribbon was shabby, “In Loving Memory,” you piano-legged bitch, you hated the old man, you said so, there is no grace, you will find no grace in this secret park.

Where is she? he thought, and suddenly all reason seemed to leave him, the hope of finding Grace mingling with the despair of never finding her again until he wanted to shriek aloud, and then did shriek the single word, “Grace!” and knew he was insane.

He stopped in the middle of the footpath and stared at the ground helplessly. He suddenly felt robbed of all volition, void of any sense of direction, powerless to move. He had come here to find a girl named Grace, G.V., the initials in his ring, and now those twin memories had caused him to realize she would not be here, had caused him to know with terrifying certainty he would not find her at N.Y.U., though this was where he had found her, why wasn’t she here now? Why? he asked, and suddenly he did not want to know more, he did not want memory. Jesse, teach me, he thought, teach me to make my mind a blank, I do not want to know the rest, there is no Grace.

I know who I am, he thought.

“I’m Edward Voegler,” he said aloud, and nodded.

Bellevue Hospital was on 26th Street and First Avenue.

They would put him in a padded cell and he would forget the whole damn world.

Quickly, he began walking out of the park. He had almost reached the sidewalk when the policeman stopped him.

The silence, which had surely been there all along, suddenly registered on his ears as a total absence of sound. The cop materialized soundlessly, stepping into his path with a nightstick stretched between two hands, held horizontally somewhere between his waist and his knees, as if he were ready to use it momentarily. The chess players were silent, the folk singer was silent, the chattering students were mute; he knew now they all must have looked up in surprise at his first outburst and then grown ominously still when he announced to the world at large that he was Edward Voegler. Again, a crosscurrent of thought entered his mind; he was Edward Voegler and this kind policeman would only help him to get to Bellevue immediately; but he was not Edward Voegler and this goddamn Keystone caricature was only going to complicate things.

“What seems to be the trouble, mister?” the cop asked, his hands still at the ready on the nightstick.

“No trouble at all,” Buddwing answered curtly, and moved to walk around the cop, but the cop took a quick sideward gliding step into his path again, and the nightstick moved up just a trifle higher toward his waist. The cop was redheaded and freckled, with a sour expression on his face. Buddwing hated him instantly, partially as a conditioned response of all New Yorkers to cops, and partially as recognition of a very personal obstacle in his path. The cop knew he was hated as a symbol and suspected he was hated as a person because he happened to have halitosis, but he stood before Buddwing in placid immovability with an expression on his face that silently imparted menace to the nightstick. Behind him, the chess players had turned from their game and were giving the encounter their undivided attention. The folk singer, surrounded by a group of teen-age boys in dungarees and a scattering of girls with smoky Cleopatra eyes, had shoved his guitar onto his hip and was staring at the cop.

“Well, it looks to me like you’re yelling all over the place,” the cop said.

Buddwing backed down with a pacifying, cop-fearing grin on his face. He was carrying no identification, and whereas he would not have minded being taken to Bellevue, he did not particularly want to be taken to jail first. As a matter of fact, the more he thought about it, the more he began to realize he did not want to be taken to Bellevue either. So he grinned mealymouthed and said apologetically, “I’m sorry if I was noisy, officer. I guess I didn’t realize I was being loud.”

“Yeah, well, there’s such a thing as disturbing the peace, you know,” the cop said, unmoved, and all at once Buddwing knew this was going to be bad.

“I’m sorry, officer,” he said.

“I could pull you in for disorderly conduct, you know that, don’t you?” the cop asked.

“I didn’t realize I was creating a disturbance,” Buddwing said.

“Mmm,” the cop said, studying him. The Negro folk singer had moved closer with his assorted collection of beatniks and music lovers, and the chess players had managed to gather around themselves a group of Saturday students who were asking what all the fuss was about. The cop, aware of the audience behind him, and seeming to feel his authority was being openly challenged if not severely threatened, stepped a little closer to Buddwing and said, “What are you doing here outside the school in the first place?”

“I was just sitting on a bench taking the sun,” Buddwing said.

“Yeah, well, why’d you pick here to do it?”

“Isn’t this a public park?” Buddwing asked.

“Never mind what it is, just answer what I told you.”

“It seemed quiet and peaceful and sunny, so I decided to sit here, that’s all,” Buddwing said. “I didn’t realize there was a law against that.”

“There ain’t,” the cop said in a placid, line-of-duty, not-about-to-take-any-crap voice, and then added imperturbably, “How about showing me some identification, mister?”

There followed an ominous silence during which the cop surmised he had accidentally struck pay dirt and Buddwing instantly knew he was trapped. The crowd, which had moved in from the benches and the walks to form a loose curious circle around Buddwing and the cop, was part of the silence in a patient, tentative way, as though undecided which of the pair to choose as its champion. The cop was staring at Buddwing calmly and impersonally, and Buddwing stared back at him in fear and anger, and weighed the silence and the temper of the crowd, and knew that lynch parties sometimes started with just such a silence.

“I’m not a vagrant,” he said.

“Who said you were?”

“I was simply sitting here in the sun.”

“Doing what? Watching the college girls?”

“No, but...”

“Watching the young college girls?” the cop said, certain he had hooked onto something big now, maybe the Boston strangler in town for the weekend. His nostrils dilated with the smell of blood; his hands tightened on the nightstick. The absurdity of the situation almost caused Buddwing to smile, but he recognized that even a trace of humor now would be his undoing. Mention of college girls and all the sneakered tweedy virginal images they conjured had caused a noticeable stir in the crowd surrounding Buddwing and the cop. He heard the buzz that swept through the onlookers and he was tempted to tell them he had been to bed with a college girl only this morning, how about that, huh? Where was our fat minion of the law and protector of the people then, huh?

In his most dignified voice, he said, “I wasn’t watching the college girls, officer, although I don’t believe there’s any law against that, either, is there?”

“No, none at all,” the cop said calmly. “Let me see your identification.”

“I told you I am not a vagrant.”

“You seem to know all about vagrancy, don’t you?”

Buddwing smiled at the policeman while inside his head the thought of flight took visual shape in the form of a blinking Broadway sign: RUN, run, RUN, run, RUN! He heard himself telling the officer they were making a mountain out of a molehill, weren’t they, or some such stalling nonsense, while the sign kept blinking on and off in his head. Smiling, talking, stalling, he laid his careful heroic plan: he would kick the cop in the groin, grab the guitar from the Negro folk singer, and bat the cop over the head with it. He would then leap over the bench and run into the Village where he would lose himself. “After all, officer, there’s really nothing so unusual about a respectable citizen sitting on a park bench taking a little sunshine, now, is there?”

“That’s right, so let me see your identification,” the cop said.

He was ready to lift his knee in a sharp crotch-splitting piston kick when one of the chess players, an old man with white hair and thin-fingered hands, said, “He was only sitting in the sun, officer.”

“Nobody asked you,” the cop said.

“I’m simply offering my observation.”

“Nobody asked you for your observation,” the cop said.

“I can back up his testimony,” the other chess player said, a short bald man wearing a large, faded blue cardigan.

“This ain’t a trial,” the cop said, “and mind your own business.”

“I thought this was a free country,” one of the smoky-eyed girls said.

“Who asked you?” the cop asked.

“What are you going to do next?” the Negro folk singer said. “Stop us from singing here in this park?” thereby opening a few old wounds and causing the cop to turn to him with a sour, pained expression.

“Well, well, another county heard from,” the cop said. “Why don’t you all go home and mind your own business?”

The Negro did not wish to go home to mind his own business, because he had been one of those protesting folk singers many months back, and he considered civil rights his one and only proper business, and besides he did not like fuzz of any kind or shape. He also did not particularly like white men, although he was shacking up with a redheaded white girl on Delancey Street, but of course that was not a white man. The smoky-eyed girls and the dungaree-clad boys did not wish to go home to mind their own business because they had no business to mind except protecting the artist in a free society, and so they pressed closer to the Negro in support since he was an artist and colored to boot. One of them said, “Why don’t you go play in traffic, officer?” and the rest chimed in with other clever taunts like “Come arrest my mother, she’s a pusher,” and “What’s the matter? Graft a little slow today?” while the cop’s sour, pained expression began to change to a patiently suffering martyred look. He had a sudden vision of a riot starting on his beat, which would not be his beat very much longer if a riot started on it, especially a riot led by a nigger. Staten Island took on very large and very real dimensions in his mind.

The colored folk singer, encouraged by his supporters, began playing and singing “Freedom,” which sounded very Communistic to the cop, and which he needed like a hole in the head, a Communist nigger-led riot on his beat! The two aged chess players were maneuvering around the edges of the crowd as though trying to determine which was the most vulnerable spot on the board and then, apparently having discovered it, ran off in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, some of the Saturday students had managed to get hold of a huge piece of cardboard and were lettering a crude sign reading STOP POLICE BRUTALITY! A few Bowery winos who were really vagrants, and who had really come here to ogle the tweedy sneakered college girls, were beginning to sing “Peg o’ My Heart,” and some curious college instructors had come out of the school to stand on the front steps or drift toward the crowd, puffing their pipes and smiling, and thinking how nice it was to be young in New York in April.

The cop took off his hat and wiped the sweatband, which was an old New York fuzz trick of stalling, and which the Negro folk singer recognized at once. He began singing louder, trying to drown out the winos. The cop had never known the words to “Freedom,” and he had forgotten the words to “Peg o’ My Heart,” so he put his hat back on his head and wondered how all this had started. He had the strangest feeling all at once that things like this always seemed to start on his beat, and he wondered if he should transfer to the Fire Department. While he was wondering this, a pickpocket began plying his trade on the edge of the crowd, and one of the winos goosed a pretty virginal college girl who had taken on half of Fordham’s football team the season before but who now shrieked in outraged surprise nonetheless. The cop was too busy to notice these petty infringements of the law because in his mind he had already mushroomed this minor demonstration into a forced march on City Hall. “Freedom” segued into “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “Peg o’ My Heart” into “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” The Saturday students raised a second crudely lettered sign, BAN THE BOMB! and tried to march in tempo to both songs simultaneously. The two aged chess players had run around the park enlisting an army of octogenarians from the other benches, and they descended on the crowd now like a frail wedge of pawns aimed straight at the king’s heart.

The cop said, “Now, look, let’s talk this over peaceably,” but one of the smoky-eyed girls was beginning to take off her blouse in misguided protest while the winos sang “We Shall Overcome” and the Negro folk singer modulated into “Did Your Mother Come From Ireland?” The goosed college girl slapped the man standing behind her, and apologized when she recognized him as her seventh-hour Anthropology instructor. “J’adoube, j’adoube!” one of the chess players was shouting, and the cop was shouting, “Now, calm down, everybody!” and the marching Saturday students were shouting “Viva Bertrand Russell!” and just then one of the winos, a secret wood-alcohol drinker, dropped dead in the middle of the crowd while the smoky-eyed girl twirled her brassière triumphantly in the air.

By that time, Buddwing was deep in Greenwich Village, six blocks away.