Bullet Park

XI

My first knowledge of Nailles (Hammer wrote) was in a dentist's anteroom in Ashburnham. There was a photograph and a brief article about his promotion to head of the Mouthwash Division at Saffron. The article mentioned his years in Rome and that he was a member of the Bullet Park Volunteer Fire Department and the Gorey Brook Country Club. I didn't know then and I don't know now why I singled him out for my attentions. There was the coincidence of our names and I liked his looks. It wasn't until some months later that I made my decision. I was sitting on a beach. I had been swimming and was reading a book.

I was alone and it was at a time when the regard for domesticity had gotten so intense that the natural condition of singleness had become a sore point of suspicion. One appeared on the beach perforce with one's wife, one's children, sometimes one's parents or a brace of house guests. One seldom saw a lonely man. It was a beautiful beach and I remember it clearly. We traditionally associate nakedness with judgments and eternity and so on those beaches where we are mostly naked the scene seems apocalyptic. Standing at the surf line we seem, quite innocently, to have strayed into a timeless moral vortex. The judgment that afternoon seemed to have been evangelical and the only sound of sadness was the wailing of some child who was afraid of the waves. Presently a faggot came along the strand and stopped about ten feet from where I lay. This was a direct consequence of my being alone. His walk was not incriminating but it was definitely smug. His body was comely and tanned and his trunks were exceedingly scant. He gave me an amorous and slightly cross-eyed gaze and then hooked his thumbs into his trunks and lowered them to show an inch or two of backside. At the same time another man appeared on the scene. He was a good deal older than the faggot-forty perhaps-and had the bright sunburn of someone whose days or hours on the beach were numbered. He was in no way muscular or comely- a conscientious desk worker with a natural stoop and a backside broadened by years of honest toil. With him were his wife and two children and he was trying to fly a kite. He was standing leeward on the dunes, the kite wouldn't rise and the line was snarled. The faggot threw me another sidelong glance, gazed out to sea and gave another absent-minded pull at his trunks. I got to my feet and joined the man with the kite. I explained that if he stood on the crown of the beach the kite would likely fly and I helped him to unsnarl the line. At this the faggot sighed, hitched up his trunks and wandered off as I had intended that he should, but the filament of kite line in my fingers, both tough and fine, that had quite succinctly declared my intentions to the faggot seemed for a moment to possess some extraordinary moral force as if the world I had declared to live in was bound together by just such a length of string-cheap, durable and colorless. When the line was cleared I carried the kite to the crown of the beach and, holding it up, watched the wind lift it straight into the blue sky. The children were delighted. The stranger and his wife thanked me for my assistance. I returned to my book. The faggot had vanished but I longed then for a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of kite string.

I was born out of wedlock-the son of Franklin Pierce Taylor and Gretchen Shurz Oxencroft, his one-time secretary. I have not met my mother for several years but I can see her now-her gray hair flying and her fierce blue eyes set plainly in her face like the waterholes in a prairie. She was born in an Indiana quarry town, the fourth and by far the plainest of four daughters. Neither of her parents had more than a high-school education. The hardships and boredom of the provincial Middle West forced them into an uncompromising and nearly liturgical regard for the escape routes of learning. They kept a volume of the complete works of Shakespeare on their parlor table like a sort of mace. Her father was a Yorkshireman with thick light-brown hair and large features. He was slender and wiry and was discovered, in his forties, to have tuberculosis. He began as a quarry worker, was promoted to quarry foreman and then, during a drop in the limestone market, was unemployed.

In the house where she was raised there was a gilt mirror, a horsehair sofa and some china and silver that her mother had brought from Philadelphia. None of this was claimed to prove lost grandeur or even lost comfort, but Philadelphia! Philadelphia!- how like a city of light it must have seemed in the limestone flats. Gretchen detested her name and claimed at one time or another to be named Grace, Gladys, Gwendolyn, Gertrude, Gabriella, Giselle and Gloria. In her adolescence a public library was opened in the village where she lived and through some accident or misdirection she absorbed the complete works of John Galsworthy. This left her with a slight English accent and an immutable clash between the world of her reveries and the limestone country. Going home from the library one winter afternoon on a trolley car she saw her father standing under a street lamp with his lunch pail. The driver did not stop for him and Gretchen turned to a woman beside her and exclaimed: "Did you see that poor creature! He signaled for the tram to stop but the driver quite overlooked him." These were the accents of Galsworthy in which she had been immersed all afternoon, and how could she fit her father into this landscape? He would have failed as a servant or gardener. He might have passed as a groom although the only horses he knew were the wheel horses at the quarry. She knew what a decent, courageous and cleanly man he was and it was the intolerable sense of his aloneness that had forced her, in a contemptible way, to disclaim him. Gretchen-or Gwendolyn as she then called herself-graduated from high school with honors and was given a scholarship at the university in Bloomington. A week or so after her graduation from the university she left the limestone country to make her fortune in New York. Her parents came down to the station to see her off. Her father was wasted. Her mother's coat was threadbare. As they waved goodbye another traveler asked if they were her parents. It was still in her to explain in the accents of Galsworthy that they were merely some poor people she had visited but instead she exclaimed: "Oh yes, yes, they are my mother and father."

There is some mysterious, genetic principality where the children of anarchy and change are raised and Gretchen (now Gloria) carried this passport. She had become a socialist in her last year at the university and the ills, injustices, imperfections, inequities and indecencies of the world made her smart. She more or less hurled herself at the city of New York and was hired shortly as a secretary for Franklin Pierce Taylor. He was a wealthy and visionary young man and a member of the Socialist Party. Gretchen became his secretary and presently his lover. They were by all accounts very happy together. What came between them-or so my father claimed-was that at this point her revolutionary ardor took the form of theft or kleptomania. They traveled a great deal and whenever they checked out of a hotel she always packed the towels, the table silver, the dish covers and the pillow cases. The idea was that she would distribute them among the poor although he never saw this happen. "Someone needs these things," she would exclaim, stuffing their suitcases with what did not belong to her. Coming into the Hay-Adams in Washington one afternoon he found her standing on a chair, removing the crystals from the chandelier. "Someone can use these," she said. At the Commodore Perry in Toledo she packed the bathroom scales but he refused to close the suitcase until she returned them. She stole a radio in Cleveland and a painting from the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This incurable habit of thieving-or so he claimed-led them to bitter quarrels and they parted in New York. In the use of any utensils-toasters, irons and automobiles-Gretchen had been dogged by bad luck, and while she had been well equipped with birth-control material her bad luck overtook her again. She discovered soon after the separation that she was pregnant.

Taylor did not mean to marry her. He paid the costs of her accouchement and gave her an income and she took a small apartment on the West Side. She always introduced herself as Miss Oxencroft. She meant to be disconcerting. I suppose she saw some originality in our mutual illegitimacy. When I was three years old I was visited by my father's mother. She was delighted by the fact that I had a head of yellow curls. She offered to adopt me. After a month's deliberation my mother-who was never very consistent-agreed to this. She felt that it was her privilege, practically her vocation, to travel around the world and improve her mind. A nursemaid was gotten for me and I went to live in the country with Grandmother. My hair began to turn brown. By the time I was eight my hair was quite dark. My grandmother was neither bitter nor eccentric and she never actually reproached me for this but she often said that it had come to her as a surprise. I was called Paul Oxencroft on my birth certificate but this was thought unsatisfactory and a lawyer came to the house one afternoon to settle it. While they were discussing what to call me a gardener passed the window, carrying a hammer, and so I was named. A trust had been established to provide Gretchen with a decent income and she took off for Europe. This ended her imposture as Gloria. Her checks, endorsements and travel papers insisted that she be Gretchen and so she was.

When my father was a young man he summered in Munich. He had worked out all his life with barbells, dumbbells, etc. and had a peculiar physique that is developed by no other form of exercise. Even as an old man he was well set up and looked like one of those aging gymnasts who endorse calisthenics courses and blackstrap molasses. In Munich he posed, out of vanity or pleasure, for the architectural sculptor Fledspar who ornamented the facade of the Prinz-Regenten Hotel. He posed as one of those male caryatids who hold on their shoulders the lintels of so many opera houses, railroad stations, apartment building and palaces of justice. The Prinz-Regenten was bombed in the forties but long before this I saw my father's recognizable features and overdeveloped arms and shoulders supporting the facade of what was then one of the most elegant hotels in Europe. Fledspar was popular at the turn of the century and I saw my father again, this time in full figure holding up the three top floors of the Hotel Mercedes in Frankfurt-am-Main. I saw him in Yalta, Berlin and upper Broadway and I saw him lose caste, face and position as this sort of monumental facade went out of vogue. I saw him lying in a field of weeds in West Berlin. But all of this came much later and any ill feeling about my illegitimacy and the fact that he was always known as my uncle was overcome by my feeling that he held on his shoulders the Prinz-Regenten, the better suites of the Mercedes and the Opera House in Malsburg that was also bombed. He seemed very responsible and I loved him.

I once had a girl who kept saying that she knew what my mother must be like. I don't know why an affair that centered on carnal roughhouse should have summoned memories of my old mother, but it did. The girl had it all wrong, although I never bothered to correct her. "Oh, I can imagine your mother," the girl would sigh. "I can see her in her garden, cutting roses. I know she wears chiffon and big hats." If my mother was in the garden at all she was very likely on her hands and knees, flinging up weeds as a dog flings up dirt. She was not the frail and graceful creature that my friend imagined. Since I have no legitimate father I may have expected more from her than she could give me but I always found her disappointing and sometimes disconcerting. She now lives in Kitzbühel until the middle of December-whenever the snow begins to fall-and then moves to a pension in the Estoril. She returns to Kitzbühel when the snow melts. These moves are determined more by economic reasons than by any fondness she has for the sun. She still writes to me at least twice a month. I can't throw the letters away unopened because they might contain some important news. I enclose the letter I most recently received to give you some idea of what her correspondence is like.

"I dreamed an entire movie last night," she wrote, "not a scenario but a movie in full color about a Japanese painter named Chardin. And then I dreamed I went back to the garden of the old house in Indiana and found everything the way I'd left it. Even the flowers I'd cut so many years ago were on the back porch, quite fresh. There it was, not as I might remember it, for my memory is failing these days and I couldn't recall anything in such detail, but as a gift to me from some part of my spirit more profound than my memory. And after that I dreamed that I took a train. Out of the window I could see blue water and blue sky. I wasn't quite sure of where I was going but looking through my handbag I found an invitation to spend a weekend with Robert Frost. Of course he's dead and buried and I don't suppose we would have gotten along for more than five minutes but it seemed like some dispensation or bounty of my imagination to have invented such a visit.

"My memory is failing in some quarters but in others it seems quite tenacious and even tiresome. It seems to perform music continuously. I seem to hear music all the time. There is music running through my mind when I wake and it plays all day long. What mystifies me is the variety in quality. Sometimes I wake to the slow movement of the first Razumovsky. You know how I love that. I may have a Vivaldi concerto for breakfast and some Mozart a little later. But sometimes I wake to a frightful Sousa march followed by a chewing gum commercial and a theme from Chopin. I loathe Chopin. Why should my memory torment me by playing music that I loathe? At times my memory seems to reward me; at times it seems vindictive and, while I'm speaking of memory, I must mention little Jamsie. [Jamsie is her Border terrier.] I was waked one night last week at about three by a curious sound. As you know Jamsie sleeps beside my bed and Jamsie was making the noise. She was counting. I distinctly heard her counting. She counted from one to twelve. After this she did the alphabet. She had trouble with her s's of course but I clearly heard her go through the alphabet. I know you'll think I'm mad but if porpoises can talk why not Jamsie? When she finished the alphabet I woke her. She seemed a little embarrassed at having been caught at her lessons but then she smiled at me and we both went back to sleep.

"I suppose you think all of this foolish but at least I don't go in for Tarot cards or astrology and I do not, as my friend Elizabeth Howland does, feel that my windshield wiper gives me sage and coherent advice on my stock market investments. She claimed only last month that her windshield wiper urged her to invest in Merck Chemicals which she did, making a profit of several thousand. I suppose she lies about her losses as gamblers always do. As I say, windshield wipers don't speak to me but I do hear music in the. most unlikely places-especially in the motors of airplanes. Accustomed as I am to the faint drone of transoceanic jets it has made me keenly aware of the complicated music played by the old DC-7s and Constellations that I take to Portugal and Geneva. Once these planes are airborne the harmonics of their engines sound to my ears like some universal music as random and free of reference and time as the makings of a dream. It is far from jubilant music but one would be making a mistake to call it sad. The sounds of a Constellation seem to me more contrapuntal-and in a way less universal than a DC-7. I can trace, as clearly as anything I ever heard in a concert hall, the shift from a major to a diminished seventh, the ascent to an eighth, the reduction to a minor and the resolution of the chord. The sounds have the driving and processional sense of baroque music but they will never, I know from experience, reach a climax and a resolution. The church I attended as a girl in Indiana employed an organist who had never completed his musical education because of financial difficulties or a wayward inability to persevere. He played the organ with some natural brilliance and dexterity but since his musical education had never reached the end of things, what had started out as a forthright and vigorous fugue would collapse into formlessness and vulgarity. The Constellations seem to suffer from the same musical irresolution, the same wayward inability to persevere. The first, second and third voices of the fugue are sounded clearly but then, as with the organist, the force of invention collapses into a series of harmonic meanderings. The engines of a DC-7 seem both more comprehensive and more limited. One night on a flight to Frankfurt I distinctly heard the props get halfway through Gounod's vulgar variations of Bach. I have also heard Handel's Water Music, the death theme from Tosca, the opening of the Messiah, etc. But boarding a DC-7 one night in Innsbruck-the intense cold may have made the difference-I distinctly heard the engines produce some exalting synthesis of all life's sounds-boats and train whistles and the creaking of iron gates and bedsprings and drums and rainwinds and thunder and footsteps and the sounds of singing all seemed woven into a rope or cord of air that ended when the stewardess asked us to observe the No Smoking sign (Nicht Rauchen), an announcement that has come to mean to me that if I am not at home I am at least at my destination.

"Of course I know that you think all of this unimportant. It is no secret to me that you would have preferred a more conventional mother- someone who sent you baked goods and remembered your birthday-but it seems to me that in our knowledge and study of one another we are circumspect and timid to an impractical degree. In our struggle to glimpse the soul of a man-and have we ever desired anything more-we claim to have the honesty of desperation whereas in fact we set up whole artificial structures of acceptable reality and stubbornly refuse to admit the terms by which we live. I will, before I end my letter, bore you with one more observation of fact. What I have to say must be well known to most travelers and yet I would not dare confide my knowledge to an intimate friend, lest I be thought mad. Since you already think me mad I suppose no harm can be done.

"I have noticed, in my travels, that the strange beds I occupy in hotels and pensions have a considerable variance in atmosphere and a profound influence on my dreams. It is a simple fact that we impress something of ourselves-our spirits and our desires-on the mattresses where we lie and I have more than ample evidence to prove my point. One night in Naples last winter I dreamed of washing a drip-dry wardrobe which is, as you well know, something I would never do. The dream was quite explicit-I could see the articles of clothing hanging in the shower and smell the wet cloth although this is no part of ray memories. When I woke I seemed surrounded by an atmosphere unlike my own-shy, earnest and chaste. There was definitely some presence in the room. In the morning I asked the desk clerk who had last occupied my bed. He checked his records and said that it had last been occupied by an American tourist-a Miss Harriet Lowell-who had moved to a smaller room but who could then be seen coming out of the dining room. I then turned to see Miss Lowell, whose white drip-dry dress I had already seen in my dreams and whose shy, chaste and earnest spirit still lingered in the room she had left. You will put this down to coincidence, I know, but let me go on. Sometime later, in Geneva, I found myself in a bed that seemed to exhale so unsavory and venereal an atmosphere that my dreams were quite disgusting. In them I saw two naked men, mounted like a horse and rider. In the morning I asked the desk clerk who the earlier tenants had been and he said: "Oui, oui, deux tapettes." They had made so much noise they had been asked to leave. After this I made a practice of deciding who the previous occupant of my bed had been and then checking with the clerk in the morning. In every case I was correct-in every case, that is, where the clerk was willing to cooperate. In cases involving prostitutes they were sometimes unwilling to help. If I found no presence in my bed I would judge that the bed had been vacant for a week or ten days. I was always correct. Traveling that year I shared the dreams of businessmen, tourists, married couples, chaste and orderly people as well as whores. My most remarkable experience came in Munich in the spring.

"I stayed, as I always do, at the Bristol, and I dreamed about a sable coat. As you know I detest furs but I saw this coat in great detail-the cut of the collar, the honey-colored skins, the yellow silk with which it was lined and in one of the silk pockets a pair of ticket stubs for the opera. In the morning I asked the maid who brought me coffee if the previous occupant of the room had owned a fur coat. The maid clasped her hands together, rolled her eyes and said yes, yes, it was a Russian sable coat and the most beautiful coat that she, the maid, had ever seen. The woman had loved her coat. It was like a lover to her. And did the woman who owned the coat, I asked, stirring my coffee and trying to seem unexceptional, ever go to the opera? Oh yes, yes, said the maid, she came for the Mozart festival and went to the opera every night for two weeks, wearing her sable coat.

"I was not deeply perplexed-I have always known life to be overwhelmingly mysterious-but wouldn't you say that I possess indisputable proof of the fact that we leave fragments of ourselves, our dreams and our spirits in the rooms where we sleep? But what could I do with this information. If I confided my discovery to a friend I would likely be thought mad and was there, after all, any usefulness in my ability to divine that my bed had been occupied by a spinster or a prostitute or by no one at all? Was I gifted or were these facts known to all travelers and wouldn't giftedness be a misnomer for a faculty that could not be exploited? I have finally concluded that the universality of our dreams includes everything-articles of clothing and theater ticket stubs-and if we truly know one another so intimately mightn't we be closer than we imagine to a peaceable world?"

XII

I grew up in Grandmother's house in Ashburnham and went to a country day school. I took my meals in the pantry until I was ten or eleven, when I was elevated to the big dinner table. There were usually guests. It was a time of life when the conversation of adults seemed painfully tiresome. I guess I was sulky. Anyhow Grandmother lectured me. "Now that you're old enough to dine at my table," she said, "I expect you to make some contribution to the conversation. When people gather in the evening they gather to dine but they also gather to exchange opinions, experiences and information. We learn something every day, don't we? We see something interesting every day. Surely during your day you learn or observe something that will be interesting to me and my guests and I want you to take a more active part in the conversation." I asked to be returned to the pantry but Grandmother didn't seem to hear me and I was nervous when I went to the table that night. The talk rattled on and then Grandmother smiled at me to signify that my turn had come. All I could remember was that walking home from school I saw a lady in the public park stealing marigolds. When she heard my footstep she hid the marigolds under her coat. As soon as I passed she went on picking flowers.

"I saw a lady in the park," I said, "stealing marigolds."

"Is that all you saw," asked Grandmother. "I saw the basketball game." The adults picked up the talk again but I knew I had failed and would have to prepare myself. I was taking a course in ancient history and I began each night to memorize the gist of two pages from my textbook. "Of all the Greek states," I said, "that stretched from the Black Sea to the western shores of the Mediterranean, none approached Athens, and the man responsible for this achievement was Pericles…" The next night we had Solon in Sardis and the night after that we had the Athenian constitution. At the end of the week Grandmother said kindly: "I guess perhaps it would be better if you listened to the conversation."

Grandmother was rich, and I won't go into this. She was a stout woman with a plain face but the fact that she happened never to have worried about money had left her, even as an old woman, with an uncommon freshness. She seemed through luck and money to have missed one of the principal sources of anxiety. We were great friends although I sometimes teased her. When I was about twelve-I hadn't gone away to school-she was expecting for dinner an English earl named Penwright. Titles excited her and for some reason her excitement about the arrival of Lord Penwright put me in a bad humor. I was expected to attend the dinner. I learned that we were going to have oysters and I walked into the village and bought a large phony pearl at Woolworth's. I had Olga, the waitress, put this into one of the oysters on Lord Penwright's plate. There were maybe twelve people at the table and we were all chatting when Lord Penwright exclaimed, "Oh, my word," or "I say," and held up his pearl. It was the biggest pearl that Woolworth's had and it looked, in the candlelight, priceless. "What a charming favor," said his lordship.

"Hmmm," said Grandmother. Her face, usually quite bright, was troubled.

"I shall have it set and give it to my wife," said the lord.

"But it's my pearl," Grandmother said. "This is my house. These are my oysters. The pearl is mine."

"I hadn't quite thought of it that way," said the lord. He sighed and gave the pearl to Grandmother.

As soon as she had it in her hands she saw that it was Woolworth's and, turning to me at the end of the table, she said, "Go to your room." I went to the kitchen, had dinner and then went to my room. She never mentioned the pearl again but things between us were never the same. I was sent away to school in September.

XIII

Grandmother died in my last year at school nd I had no place to go for Christmas. I had plenty of friends, as I recall, but I either didn't receive any Christmas invitations or I didn't accept any. I was left alone in the dormitory when school closed for the holidays. I was terribly lonely in the empty building and felt that my illegitimacy was a cruel injustice. Everyone else in school had at least one parent while I had none. It seemed that my father could at least buy me a beer on the Christmas holidays. That's all I wanted from him. I knew that he was married and living in Boston and I flew to Boston that night. I found his name in one of the suburban telephone directories and drove out to Dedham, where he lived. I was just going to ask him to buy me a beer. That's really all I had in mind. I rang the bell and when his wife opened the door I was surprised to see a very homely white-haired woman. Her face was sallow and her teeth were long but having so little or nothing at all to do with physical charm she seemed to have mustered another kind of charm. She seemed kindly and intelligent. Her mouth was large and thin-lipped but her smile was beautiful. I said that I was Paul Hammer and that I wanted to see Mr.

Taylor. I think she knew who I was. She said he was in the city.

"He went in for a party on Wednesday," she said, "and when he goes to a party it's usually several days before he returns. He stays at the Ritz."

There was nothing long-suffering in her tone. Maybe she was happy to have him out of the house. I thanked her and drove to the Ritz. He was registered but he didn't answer the house phone and I took the elevator up to his floor. He didn't answer the doorbell either, but the door was unlocked and I went in.

There had been a party all right. The living room was full of the usual empty bottles and dirty glasses without which you can't, after all, have a party. He was in the bedroom. There were two unmade beds, both of which had seen some venereal mileage. He lay on one in a poleaxed, drunken sleep, naked. Around his neck he wore a chain of champagne corks-seventeen-which I guessed some friend had put there after he had stoned out. He was over fifty then but weight-lifting had paid off and if you couldn't see very well you might think he was a much younger man. He was lithe, really lithe, but this unseasonable litheness seemed to be obscene. He looked, hurled onto his bed by liquor, like the faded figure of some Icarus or Ganymede that you might find painted on the wall of some old-fashioned, second-rate Italian restaurant, flyspecked and badly drawn. I don't think he would have waked if I'd shouted in his ears, and anyhow he needed the sleep. I was that charitable.

I was even more charitable. He was my father, the author with some collaboration of my heart, vitals, lights and mind, and how far could a man go with such a creator? I could kill him, I could abuse him and I could forgive him but I had to do something so I settled on an uneasy brand of forgiveness and went away. My next stop was Kitzbühel. If my father wouldn't buy me a beer maybe I could get a cup of tea out of Mother.

We speak of travel-world travel-as if it were the most natural human condition. "Mr. X," we read, "then traveled from Boston to Kitzbühel." How far this is from the truth! I got an evening plane for London at Logan Airport. The plane was delayed and I drank five martinis at the airport bar and crossed the Atlantic in a drunken stupor. We got to London at daybreak, where I discovered that my bag had been lost. I wandered around the airport until three that afternoon when my bag was found and took a cab to the Dorchester. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get some sleep and then went out to a movie and got stoned at a pub. I had tickets for an early-morning flight to Frankfurt-am-Main but there was a thick fog over London that morning and when I got to the airport everything was grounded. It was announced at half-hour intervals that the fog was expected to lift. I ate my complimentary breakfast. Then I ate my complimentary lunch. At three o'clock the airport was declared closed for the day. I went back to the Dorchester but there were no rooms and after trying four other hotels I ended up in a rooming house in Parkman Square where I was kept awake most of the night by noises that I do not choose to describe. In the morning it was still foggy but it seemed to be lifting and I returned to the airport. I drank a cup of abominable coffee and a glass of orange-colored water. The effect of this on my digestion was galvanic and I quick-stepped to the men's room. I had been there about fifteen minutes when I heard my flight announced. I pulled up my pants, ran the length of the airport and just caught the Frankfurt plane. My digestive troubles were not over and I spent the flight from London to Frankfurt in the toilet. Lighted signs in three languages commanded me to return to my seat but how could I? In Frankfurt, where I got a plane for Innsbruck, it was very cold. In Innsbruck I got the Transalpini to Kitzbühel, arriving at my destination at four in the afternoon, but I did not, in fact, seem to have arrived anywhere. I seemed merely to have scattered my guts and vitals a third of the way around the world.

Mother's address was the Pension Bellevue. The facade of the wooden building was decked with horns and I wondered if the Tyrolese had failed to make the connection with cuckoldry or was it that kind of a pension? When I asked to see my mother they seemed astonished. She was a Fraulein. A maid went upstairs and brought Mother down. She cried with delight when she saw me and I took her in my arms. Her hair had begun to turn gray but she was not heavy. The color of her eyes remained a brilliant blue.

"Have you come for Christmas, Paul," she asked. "Have you come to spend Christmas with your mother? I usually go to the Estoril long before this but there hasn't been any snow this year and so I'm simply hanging on until the first flakes fall."

They gave me a room next to hers and we went upstairs together. She made some tea on a spirit lamp and poured me a cup. Then the door flew open and a bony woman flew in, exclaiming: "You've taken our sugarbowl! You borrowed our sugarbowl yesterday at teatime and you neglected to return it."

"But I did return your sugarbowl," my mother said politely. "I put it on your bookshelf. You'll find it there." When the stranger had left Mother turned to me and asked: "How is your horrid country?"

"It's not horrid, Mother," I said, "and it's your country."

"It's true that I travel on an American passport," she said, "but that's merely the sort of compromise one has to strike in dealing with a bureaucracy. It is, however, a horrid place. When I was in the Socialist Party with your father I said again and again that if American capitalism continued to exalt mercenary and dishonest men the economy would degenerate into the manufacture of drugs and ways of life that would make reflection-any sort of thoughtfulness or emotional depth-impossible. I was right." She poked a finger at me. "I see American magazines in the cafe and the bulk of their text is advertising for tobacco, alcohol and absurd motor cars that promise-quite literally promise-to enable you to forget the squalor, spiritual poverty and monotony of selfishness. Never, in the history of civilization, has one seen a great nation singlemindedly bent on drugging itself. I went out to California last year…"

"I didn't know you'd been home," I said.

"Well I was," she said. "I didn't call you."

"It doesn't matter," I said.

"I knew it wouldn't," she said harshly. "Well, to make a long story short, I went out to see some friends in Los Angeles and they took me for a ride on the freeway and here I saw another example of forgetfulness, suicide, municipal corruption and the debauchery of natural resources. I won't go back again because if I did do you know what I'd do?"

"No, Mother."

"I would settle in some place like Bullet Park. I would buy a house. I would be very inconspicuous. I would play bridge. I would engage in charities. I would entertain in order to conceal my purpose."

"What would that be?"

"I would single out as an example some young man, preferably an advertising executive, married with two or three children, a good example of a life lived without any genuine emotion or value."

"What would you do to him?"

"I would crucify him on the door of Christ's Church," she said passionately. "Nothing less than a crucifixion will wake that world."

"How would you crucify him," I asked.

"Oh, I haven't worked out the details," she said. Suddenly she was a gentle, gray-haired old lady again. I suppose I'd drug him or poison him at some cocktail party. I wouldn't want him to suffer."

I went into my room to unpack. The plaster wall was thin and I could hear my mother talking through the partition. At first I thought someone had joined her after I'd left but then I could tell by the level of her voice that she was talking to herself. I could hear her clearly. "My father was a common quarry worker, often unemployed. I had read somewhere that the trajectory of a person's career could be plotted from their beginnings and given such humble beginnings I thought that if I accepted them I would end up as a waitress in a diner or at best a small-town librarian. I kept trying to tamper with my origins so that I would have more latitude for a career. Having been raised in a small town I was terrified of being confined to one…"

I went down the hall and opened her door. She had taken off her shoes and was lying on her bed, fully dressed, talking to the ceiling or the air.

"What in the world are you doing, Mother?"

"Oh, I'm analyzing myself," she said cheerfully. "I thought I might benefit from psychoanalysis. I went to a doctor in the village. He charged a hundred schillings an hour. I simply couldn't afford this and when I said so he suggested that I get rid of my car and cut down on my meals. Imagine. Then I decided to analyze myself. Now, three times a week, I lie down on my bed and talk to myself for an hour. Tm very frank. I don't spare myself any unpleasantness. The therapy seems to be quite effective and, of course, it doesn't cost me a cent. I still have three quarters of an hour to go and if you don't mind leaving me alone…"

I went out and closed the door but I stood in the hall long enough to hear her say: "When I sleep flat on my back my dreams are very linear, composed and seemly. I often dream, on my back, of a Palladian villa. I mean an English house built along the lines of Palladio. When I sleep in a prenatal position my dreams are orotund, unsavory and sometimes erotic. When I sleep on my abdomen…"

I went back to my room and packed, the only son of a male caryatid holding up the three top floors of the Mercedes Hotel and a crazy old woman. I left her a note saying that I had suddenly gotten restless. To appear and disappear did not seem to me a dirty trick. I had the feeling that she was so wrapped up in her own eccentricities that she would hardly notice my going. I got a cab to the station and began my travels again. I was back in London that night in time for dinner. That was the twenty-third of December. After dinner I took a walk. It was snowing. I passed a theater or movie house where an evangelist, whose name I can't remember, was holding a meeting. I went in out of curiosity. The hall was about half full.

The evangelist was a plain man dressed plainly in gray-not ugly-but possessing one of those disconcerting faces that have no harmony. His nose was bulbous and red. His lips were delicate and thin. His hair and his ears seemed to have been slapped on as an afterthought. The house lights were on and I looked around at the congregation. There were plenty of rooming-house types-lonely old men and lonely old women whose devotions would be rooted in stupidity and boredom-but there were also clear faces, young faces, the faces of men and women putting up some creditable struggle for peace of mind. The ardor with which they bowed their heads in prayer and the sense of shared humanity moved me deeply. It seemed to me then that the cruel burdens of insularity, suspicion, loneliness, fear and worry had been lifted. Life was natural and we, together, were natural men and women. A man beside me seemed to plunge into the attitudes of prayer. At the end of the exhortation we were asked to come to the front of the theater, confess our sins and be forgiven. The congregation then, in small groups, went to the front of the theater and were blessed.

As they turned away, after the blessing, many of their faces were radiant, and what point would there be in my asking how long their exaltation would last? They must return, many of them, to empty rooms, the care of invalids, bankrupt marriages, contumely, ridicule and despair, but some promise had been made. I went down the aisle myself with one of the last groups. Oh Father I have sinned. I ate more than my share of sandwiches at the picnic. I have performed every known form of carnal indecency. I left my new bicycle out in the rain. I do not love my parents. I have admired myself in a looking glass. Cleanse and forgive me most merciful Father.

Then, standing there with my head bowed, I felt completely cleansed and forgiven. Life was simple, natural, a privilege. My life had a purpose although it was not revealed to me until later. I walked happily back to the hotel.

XIV

In my sophomore year at Yale I petitioned the New Haven court to have my name changed from Paul Hammer to Robert Levy. I'm not quite sure why. Hammer, of course, was no name at all. Levy had for me a pure and simple sound and, belonging really to no community, I suppose I hoped to insinuate myself into the Jewish community. My lawyer spoke eloquently of the fact that I had been born out of wedlock and had been named for a humble and rudimentary tool that had been seen passing a window. The judge, whose name was Weinstock, refused my petition. The New Haven paper carried the story, including the origin of my name, and as a result I was dropped from the social register and lost at least a dozen friends. I have always been astonished to find that bastardy remains a threat to organized society.

I'll skip school and college. When I was twenty-four and living in Cleveland I invested fifty thousand dollars of the money Grandmother left me in a publishing house run by a man I'd known in college. We were both inexperienced and the business went poorly. At the end of a year we mortgaged our firm to a larger publishing house who, six months later, foreclosed the mortgage and copped my investment. I don't think there was any connection-I still had an adequate income-but at about this time I began to suffer from melancholy-a cafard-a form of despair that sometimes seemed to have a tangible approach. Once or twice, I think, I seemed to glimpse some of its physical attributes. It was covered with hair-it was the classical bête noire-but it was as a rule no more visible than a moving column of thin air. I decided then to move to New York and translate the poetry of Eugenio Montale. I took a furnished apartment, but I seemed to know almost no one in the city and this left me alone much of the time and much of the time with my cafard.

It overtook me on trains and planes. I would wake feeling healthy and full of plans, to be crushed by the cafard while I shaved or drank my first cup of coffee. It was most powerful and I was most vulnerable when the noise of traffic woke me at dawn. My best defense, my only defense, was to cover my head with a pillow and summon up those images mat represented for me the excellence and beauty I had lost. The first of these was a mountain-it was obviously Kilimanjaro. The summit was a perfect, snow-covered cone, lighted by a passing glow. I saw the mountain a thousand times -I begged to see it-and as I grew more familiar with it I saw the fire of a primitive village at its base. The vision dated, I guess, from the bronze or the iron age. Next in frequency I saw a fortified medieval town. It could have been Mont-St-Michel or Orvieto or the grand lamasery in Tibet but the image of the walled town, like the snow-covered mountain, seemed to represent beauty, enthusiasm and love. I also saw less frequently and less successfully a river with grassy banks. I guessed these were the Elysian Fields although I found them difficult to arrive at and at one point it seemed to me that a railroad track or a thruway had destroyed the beauty of the place.

I had begun to drink heavily to lick the cafard and one morning-I had been in New York for about a month-I took a hooker of gin while I shaved. I then went back to bed again, covered my head with a pillow and tried to evoke the mountain, the fortified town or the green fields, but I saw instead a pale woman wearing a shirt with light-blue stripes. I seemed to feel for her deeply and clearly during the moment or two that I saw her but then she vanished.

I stayed in bed that day until eleven or later, when I went out to the corner drugstore and ordered some breakfast. The place had begun to fill up with the lunch-hour crowd and the noise and the smells nauseated me. I drank some coffee and orange juice and went back to my apartment and had another drink. I was drinking straight gin. This made me feel better and I had a third drink and went out once more to see if I couldn't eat something. This time I went to a French restaurant where my alcoholic fastidiousness would not be offended. I ordered a martini, some pâte and a plate of scrambled eggs and was able to get this down. Then I returned to my apartment, undressed and got back into bed again, pulling the covers over my face. I hated the light of day, it seemed to be the essence of my cafard, as if darkness would lessen my frustrations, as if the night were a guise of forgetfulness. I stayed in bed, neither sleeping nor waking. When I dressed again and went out onto the street it was beginning to get dark. I went back to the French restaurant, where I had some snails and a beef filet, and then went to a movie. It was a spy movie and seemed so old-fashioned that it undermined my already feeble sense of time and reality. I left halfway through the movie and went back to bed again. It must have been about ten. I took a couple of sleeping pills and stayed in bed until two the next afternoon, when I dressed and went out to the restaurant and had another plate of scrambled eggs. I then returned to bed and stayed there until ten the next morning. What I wanted then was a long, long, long sleep and I had enough pills to accomplish this. I flushed the pills down the toilet and called one of my few friends and asked for the name of his doctor. I then called the doctor and asked him for the name of a psychiatrist. He recommended a man named Doheny.

Doheny saw me that afternoon. His waiting room had a large collection of magazines but the ashtrays were clean, the cushions were unrumpled and I had the feeling that perhaps I was his first customer in a long time. Was he, I wondered, an unemployed psychiatrist, an unsuccessful psychiatrist, an unpopular psychiatrist, did he while away the time in an empty office like an idle lawyer, barber or antique dealer? He presently appeared and led me into a consultation room that was furnished with antiques. I wondered then if some part of a psychiatrist's education was the furnishing of his consultation room. Did they do it themselves? Did their wives do it? Was it done by a professional? Doheny had large brown eyes in a long face. When I sat in the patient's chair he turned the beam of his brown eye onto me exactly as a dentist turns on the light above his drills and for the next fifty minutes I basked in his gaze and returned his looks earnestly to prove that I was truthful and manly. He seemed, like some illusion of drunkenness, to have two faces and I found it fascinating to watch one swallow up the other. He charged a dollar a minute.

After our fourth or fifth consultation he asked me to masturbate when I got home and report my reactions to him. I did as he asked and reported that I had felt ashamed of myself. He was delighted with this news and said that it proved that sexual guilt was the source of my cafard. I was a repressed.transvestite homosexual. I had told him about Daddy posing for Fledspar and he told me that this image of a naked man supporting hotels, palaces of justice and opera houses had intimidated me and forced me into an unnatural way of life. I told him to go to hell and said that I was through. I said that he was a charlatan and that I was going to report him to the American Psychiatric Society. If he wasn't a charlatan why didn't he have diplomas hung on his wall like other doctors? He got very angry at this, threw open his desk drawer and pulled out a pile of diplomas. He had diplomas from Yale, Columbia and the Neurological Hospital. Then I noticed that all these documents were made out to a man named Howard Shitz and I asked if he hadn't picked them up in a secondhand bookstore. He said he had changed his name when he went into practice for reasons that any dunce would understand. I left.

I was no better after Doheny-I was worse-and I began to wonder seriously if the ubiquity of my father's head and shoulders carved in limestone had not been crippling; but if it had been what could I do? The opera house in Malsburg and the Prinz-Regenten had been demolished but I couldn't remove him from his position on upper Broadway and he was still holding up the Mercedes in Frankfurt. I went on drinking-more than a quart a day-and my hands had begun to shake terribly. When I went into a bar I would wait until the bartender turned his back before I tried to get the glass up to my mouth. I sometimes spilled gin all over the bar. This amused the other customers. I went out to Pennsylvania one weekend with some heavy-drinking friends and came back on a social train that got me into Penn Station at about eleven Sunday night. The station was then being razed and reconstructed and it was such a complex of ruins that it seemed like a frightening projection of my own confusions and I stepped out into the street, looking for a bar. The bars around the station were too brightly lighted for a man whose hands were shaking and I started walking east, looking for some dark saloon where my infirmity would not be so noticeable. Walking down a side street I saw two lighted windows and a room with yellow walls. The windows were uncurtained. All I could see were the yellow walls. I put down my suitcase to stare at the windows. I was convinced that whoever lived there lived a useful and illustrious life. It would be a single man like myself but a man with a continent nature, a ruling intelligence, an efficient disposition. The pair of windows filled me with shame. I wanted my life to be not merely decent but exemplary. I wanted to be useful, continent and at peace. If I could not change my habits I could at least change my environment and I thought that if I found such a room with yellow walls I would cure my cafard and my drunkenness.

The next afternoon I packed a bag and took a cab across town to the Hotel Milton, looking for that room where I could begin my illustrious life. They gave me a room on the second floor, looking out onto an airshaft. The room had not been made up. There was an empty whiskey bottle and two glasses on the bureau and only one of the two beds had been used. I called the desk to complain and they said the only other vacancy they had was a suite on the tenth floor. I then moved to this. I found a parlor, a double bedroom and a large collection of flower pictures. I ordered some gin, vermouth and a bucket of ice and got stoned. This was not what I intended to do and in the morning I moved to the Hotel Madison.

My room at the Madison was furnished with the kind of antiques Doheny had had in his consultation room. It only lacked the colored photographs of his three children. The desk, or some part of it, had once been a spinet. The coffee table was covered with leather that had been tooled, gilded and burned by many cigarettes. There were mirrors on all the walls so that I could not escape my own image. I saw myself smoking, drinking, dressing and undressing and when I woke in the morning the first thing I saw was myself. I left the next day for the Waldorf, where I was given a pleasant, high-ceilinged room. There was a broad view. I could see the dome of St. Bartholomew's, the Seagram Building and one of those yellow bifurcated buildings that has a terraced and windowed front and a flat, yellow-brick backside with no sign of life but a rain gutter. It seemed to have been sliced with a knife. Almost anywhere in New York above the fifteenth floor your view includes a few caryatids, naiads, homely water tanks and Florentine arches and I was admiring these when it occurred to me how easy it would be to escape the cafard by jumping into the street and I checked out of the Waldorf and took a plane to Chicago.

In Chicago I took a room at the Palmer House. This was on the sixteenth floor. The furniture seemed to be of some discernible period but the more I examined it the more it seemed to be an inoffensive improvisation and then I realized that it was the same furniture I had seen in my room at the Waldorf. I flipped open the Venetian blinds. My window looked out into an enclosure where I could see upwards, downwards and sidewise, a hundred, hundred windows exactly like mine. The fact that my room had no uniqueness seemed seriously to threaten my own uniqueness. I suffered an intense emotional vertigo. The fear was not of falling but of vanishing. If there was nothing in my room to distinguish it from a hundred, hundred others there might be nothing about me to set me apart from other men, and I snapped the Venetian blinds shut and went out of the room. Waiting for the elevator a man gave me that bland, hopeful gaze of a faggot on the make and I thought that he might have been driven by the sameness of the hotel windows to authenticate his identity by unnatural sexual practices. I lowered my eyes chastely to the floor. Downstairs I drank three martinis and went to a movie. I stayed in Chicago two days and took the Zephyr to San Francisco. I thought a train compartment might be the environment where I could begin my new life but it was not. In San Francisco I stayed two nights at the Palace and two nights at the St. Francis and then flew down the coast and checked in at the Los Angeles Biltmore. This was the furthest from what I wanted and I moved from there to the Chateau Marmont. I moved from there to the Beverly Hills and a day later took a plane to London on the northerly route. I tried to get a room at the Con-naught but they were full and so I went instead to the Dorchester where I lasted two days. I then flew to Rome and checked in at the Eden. My cafard had followed me around the world and I was still drinking heavily. Lying in bed in the Eden one morning with a pillow over my face I summoned up Kilimanjaro and its ancient village, the Elysian Fields and the fortified town. It occurred to me then that I had thought the town might be Orvieto. I rented a Fiat from the concierge and started north.

It was after lunch when I got into Umbria and I stopped in a walled town and had some pasta and wine. The country was wheat country, more heavily forested than most of Italy and very green. Like most travelers I kept stupidly observing the sameness of things, kept telling myself that on the evidence of what I saw I might be in New Hampshire or the outskirts of Heidelberg. What for? It was nearly seven o'clock when I came down the winding road into the broad valley that surrounds Orvieto.

I had been wrong about the towers but everything else seemed right. The city was high, its buildings seemed to be a variation of the stone butte and it looked like the place I had seen in fending off the cafard. It seemed to correspond to my vision. I was excited. My life, my sanity were involved. The papal cathedral, in its commanding position, excited, as it was meant to do, awe, admiration and something like dread as if some part of my memory was that of a heretic on my way to be questioned by the bishops. I drove through the lower town up to the city on the butte and checked in at the Hotel Nazionale where I was given a large, deluxe European room with a massive armoire and a glass chandelier. It was not the room I was looking for. I wandered around the streets and just before dark, in a building not far from the cathedral, I saw the lighted windows and the yellow walls.

I seemed, looking up at them from the sidewalk, to be standing at the threshold of a new life. This was not a sanctuary, this was the vortex of things, but this was a place where the cafard could not enter. The door of the building was open and I climbed some stairs. The pair of yellow rooms was on the second floor. They were unfurnished, as I knew they would be, and freshly painted. Everything was ready for my occupancy. There was a man putting up shelves for my books. I spoke to the man and asked him who the rooms belonged to. He said they were his. I asked if they were for sale or for rent and he smiled and said no. Then I said I wanted them and would pay whatever he asked for them but he went on smiling and saying no. Then I heard some men in the hallway, carrying something heavy. I could hear their strained voices, their breathing, and the object, whatever it was, bumping against the wall. It was a large bed, which they carried into the second of the yellow rooms. The owner explained to me then that this was his marriage bed. He was going to be married next day in the chapel of the cathedral and begin his married life here. I was still so convinced that the rooms were, spiritually at least, my property that I asked him if he wouldn't prefer to live in one of the new apartments in the lower town. I would pay the difference in the rent and was prepared to give him a large present for the wedding. He was impervious, of course. Like any groom, he had imagined so many hundreds of times the hour when he would bring his bride back to the yellow rooms that no amount of money would dislodge the memory from its place in his mind. I wished him well anyhow and went down the stairs. I had found my yellow rooms and I had lost them. I left Orvieto in the morning for Rome and left Rome the next day for New York.

I spent one night in my apartment during which I drank a quart of whiskey. The next afternoon I drove out to Pennsylvania to visit a classmate of mine-Charlie Masterson-and his wife. They were heavy drinkers and we ran out of gin before dinner. I drove into the little village of Blenville and bought a fresh supply at the liquor store and started back. I made a wrong turn and found myself on a narrow red dirt lane that seemed to lead nowhere. Then on my left, set back from the road and a little above it, I saw the yellow walls for the third time.

I turned off the motor and the lights and got out of the car. There was a brook between the road and the house and I crossed this on a wooden bridge. A lawn or a field-the grass needed cutting-sloped up to a terrace. The house was stone-rectangular-an old Pennsylvania farmhouse, and the yellow room was the only room lighted. The walls were the same color I had seen in Orvieto. I went up onto the terrace, as absorbed as any thief. A woman sat in the yellow room, reading a book. She wore a black dress and high-heeled shoes and had a glass of whiskey on a table at her side. Her face was pale and handsome. I guessed she was in her twenties. The black dress and the high-heeled shoes seemed out of place in the country and I wondered if she had just arrived from town or were just about to leave, although the size of the whiskey glass made this seem unlikely. But it was not the woman but the room I wanted-square, its lemon-yellow walls simply lighted-and I felt that if I could only possess this I would be myself again, industrious and decent. She looked up suddenly as if she sensed my presence and I stepped away from the window. I was very happy. Walking back to the car I saw the name Emmison painted on a mailbox at the end of the driveway. I found my way back to the Mastersons' and asked Mrs. Masterson if she knew anyone named Emmison. "Sure," she said. "Dora Emmison. I think she's in Reno."

"Her house was lighted," I said.

"What in the world were you doing at her house?"

"I got lost."

"Well she was in Reno. I suppose she's just come back. Do you know her?" she asked.

"No," I said, "but I'd like to."

"Well if she's back I'll ask her for a drink tomorrow."

She came the next afternoon, wearing the black dress and the same high heels. She was a little reserved but I found her fascinating, not because of her physical and intellectual charms but because she owned the yellow rooms. She stayed for supper and I asked about her house. I presently asked if she wouldn't like to sell it. She was not at all interested. Then I asked if I could see the house and she agreed indifferently. She was leaving early and if I wanted to see the place I could come back with her and so I did.

As soon as I stepped into the yellow room I felt that peace of mind I had coveted when I first saw the walls in a walkup near Pennsylvania Station. Sometimes you step into a tackroom, a carpenter's shop or a country post office and find yourself unexpectedly at peace with the world. It is usually late in the day. The place has a fine smell (I must include bakeries). The groom, carpenter, postmaster or baker has a face so clear, so free of trouble that you feel that nothing bad has ever or will ever happen here, a sense of fitness and sanctity never achieved, in my experience, by any church.

She gave me a drink and I asked again if she would sell the place. "Why should I sell my house," she asked. "I like my house. It's the only house I have. If you want a place in the neighborhood the Barkham place is on the market and it's really much more attractive than this."

"This is the house I want."

"I don't see why you're so crazy about this place. If I had a choice I'd rather have the Barkham place."

"Well I'll buy the Barkham place and exchange it for this."

"I simply don't want to move," she said. She looked at her watch.

"Could I sleep here," I asked.

"Where."

"Here, here in this room."

"But what do you want to sleep here for? The sofa's hard as a rock."

"I'd just like to."

"Well I guess you can if you want to. No monkey business."

"No monkey business." "I'll get some bedding."

She went upstairs and came down with some sheets and a blanket and made my bed. "I think I'll turn in myself," she said, going towards the stairs. "I guess you know where everything is. If you want another drink there's some ice in the bucket. I think my husband left a razor in the medicine cabinet. Good night." Her smile was courteous and no more. She climbed the stairs.

I didn't make a drink. I didn't, as they say, need one. I sat in a chair by the window feeling the calm of the yellow walls restore me. Outside I could hear the brook, some night bird, moving leaves, and all the sounds of the night world seemed endearing as if I quite literally loved the night as one loves a woman, loved the stars, the trees, the weeds in the grass as one can love with the same ardor a woman's breasts and the apple core she has left in an ashtray. I loved it all and everyone who lived. My life had begun again and I could see, from this beginning, how far I had gone from any natural course. Here was the sense of reality-a congenial, blessed and useful construction to which I belonged. I stepped out onto the terrace. It was cloudy but some stars could still be seen. The wind was shifting and smelled of rain. I walked down to the bridge, undressed and dove into a pool there. The water was buoyant and a little brackish from the bogs in which it rose, but it had, so unlike the disinfected sapphire of a pool, a strong and unmistakably erotic emphasis. I dried myself on my shirttails and walked naked back to the house, feeling as if the earth were paved for my contentment. I brushed my teeth, turned out the light, and as I got into my bed it began to rain.

For a year or more the sound of the rain had meant merely umbrellas, raincoats, rubbers, the wet seats of convertibles, but now it seemed like some enlargement of my happiness, some additional bounty. It seemed to increase my feeling of limberness and innocence and I fended off sleep to listen to it with the attention and curiosity with which we follow music. When I did sleep I dreamed in this order of the mountain, the walled town and the banks of the river and when I woke at dawn there was no trace of the cafard. I dove into the pool again and dressed. In the kitchen I found a melon, made some coffee and fried some bacon. The smell of coffee and bacon seemed like a smell of newness and I ate with a good appetite. She came down later in a bathrobe and thanked me for having made the coffee. When she raised the cup to her lips her hand shook so that the coffee spilled. She went into the pantry, returned with a bottle of whiskey and spiked her coffee. She neither apologized or explained this but the spike steadied her hand. I asked her if she wouldn't like me to cut the grass. "Well I would frankly," she said, "if you don't have anything better to do. It's terribly hard to find anyone around here to do anything. All the young men leave home and all the old ones die. The mower's in the toolshed and I think there's some gasoline."

I found the mower and gasoline and cut the grass. It was a big lawn and this took me until noon or later. She was sitting on the terrace reading and drinking something-icewater or gin. I joined her, wondering how I could build my usefulness into indispensability. I could have made a pass at her but if we became lovers this would have meant sharing the yellow room and that was not what I wanted. "If you want a sandwich before you go there's some ham and cheese in the refrigerator," she said. "A friend of mine is coming out on the four-o'clock but I suppose you'll want to go back before then."

I was frightened. Go back, go back, go back to the greasy green waters of the Lethe, back to my contemptible cowardice, back to the sanctuary of my bed where I cowered before thin air, back to anesthetizing myself with gin in order to eat a plate of scrambled eggs. I wondered about the sex of her visitor. If it was a woman mightn't I stay on as a sort of handyman, eating my supper in the kitchen and sleeping in the yellow room? "If there's anything else you'd like me to do," I said. "Firewood?"

"I buy my firewood in Blenville."

"Would you like me to split some kindling?"

"Not really," she said.

"The screen door in the kitchen is loose," I said. "I could repair that."

She didn't seem to hear me. She went into the house and returned a little later with two sandwiches. "Would you like mustard?" she asked.

"No thank you," I said.

I took the sandwich as a kind of sacrament since it would be the last thing I could approach with any appetite until I returned to the yellow room and when would that be? I was desperate. "Is your visitor a man or a woman," I asked.

"I really don't think that concerns you," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"Thank you for cutting the grass," she said. "That needed to be done but you must understand that I can't have a strange man sleeping on my sofa without a certain amount of damage to my reputation and my reputation isn't absolutely invincible."

"I'll go," I said.

I drove back to New York then, condemned to exile and genuinely afraid of my inclination to self-destruction. As soon as I closed the door of my apartment I fell into the old routine of gin, Kilimanjaro, scrambled eggs, Orvieto and the Elysian Fields. I stayed in bed until late the next morning. I drank some gin while I shaved and went out onto the street to get some coffee. In front of my apartment house I ran into Dora Emmison. She wore black-I never saw her in anything else-and said that she had come in town for a few days to do some shopping and go to the theater. I asked if she'd have lunch with me but she said she was busy. As soon as we parted I got my car and drove back to Blenville.

The house was locked but I broke a pane of glass in the kitchen window and let myself in. To be alone in the yellow room was everything I had expected. I felt happy, peaceful and strong. I had brought the Montale with me and I spent the afternoon reading and making notes. The time passed lightly and the sense that the hands of my watch were procrustean had vanished. At six o'clock I went for a swim, had a drink and made some supper. She had a large store of provisions and I made a note of what I was stealing so that I would replace it before I left. After dinner I went on reading, taking a chance that the lighted windows would not arouse anyone's curiosity. At nine o'clock I undressed, wrapped myself in a blanket and lay down on the sofa to sleep. A few minutes later I saw the lights of a car come up the drive.

I got up and went into the kitchen and shut the door. I was, of course, undressed. If it was she I supposed I could escape out the back door. If it was not she, if it was some friend or neighbor, they would likely go away. Whoever it was began to knock on the door, which I had left unlocked. Then a man opened the door and asked softly, "Doree, Doree, you sleeping? Wake up baby, wake up, it's Tony, the old loverboy." Climbing the stairs he kept asking "Doree, Doree, Doree," and when he went into her bedroom and found the bed empty he said, "Aw shit." He then came down the stairs and left the house and I stayed, shivering in the kitchen, until I heard his car go down the road.

I got back onto the sofa and had been there for perhaps a half hour when another car came up the drive. I retired again to the kitchen and a man named Mitch went through more or less the same performance. He climbed the stairs, calling her name, made some exclamation of disappointment and went away. All of this left me uneasy and in the morning I cleaned up the place, emptied the ashtrays and drove back to New York.

Dora had said that she would be in the city for a few days. Four is what is usually meant by a few and two of these had already passed. On the day that I thought she would return to the country I bought a case of the most expensive bourbon and started back to Blenville, late in the afternoon. It was after dark when I turned up the red dirt road. Her lights were on. I first looked in at the window and saw that she was alone and reading as she had been when I first found the place. I knocked on the door and when she opened it and saw me she seemed puzzled and irritated. "Yes?" she asked. "Yes? What in the world do you want now?"

"I have a present for you," I said. "I wanted to give you a present to thank you for your kindness in letting me spend the night in your house."

"That hardly calls for a present," she said, "but I do happen to have a weakness for good bourbon. Won't you come in?"

I brought the case into the hall, tore it open and took out a bottle. "Shouldn't we taste it," I asked.

"Well, I'm going out," she said, "but I guess there's time for a drink. You're very generous. Come in, come in and I'll get some ice."

She was, I saw, one of those serious drinkers who prepare their utensils as a dentist prepares his utensils for an extraction. She arranged neatly on the table near her chair the glasses, ice bucket and water pitcher as well as a box of cigarettes, an ashtray and a lighter. With all of this within her reach she settled down and I poured the drinks.

"Chin, chin," she said.

"Cheers," I said.

"Did you just drive out from New York," she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"How is the driving," she asked.

'It's foggy on the turnpike," I said. "It's quite foggy."

"Damn," she said. "I have to drive up to a party in Havenswood and I hate the turnpike when it's foggy. I do wish I didn't have to go out but the Helmsleys are giving a party for a girl I knew in school and I've promised to show up."

"Where did you go to school?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"Yes."

"Well I went to Brearley for two years. Then I went to Finch for a year. Then I went to a country day school called Fountain Valley for two years. Then I went to a public school in Cleveland for a year. Then I went to the International School in Geneva for two years, the Parioli School in Rome for a year, and when we came back to the United States I went to Putney for a year and then to Masters for three years. I graduated from Masters."

"Your parents traveled a lot?" "Yes. Dad was in the State Department. What do you do?" "I'm translating Montale."

"Are you a professional translator?"

"No."

"You just do it to amuse yourself?"

"To occupy myself."

"You must have some money," she said.

"I do."

"So do I, thank God," she said. "I'd hate to be without it."

"Tell me about your marriage," I said. This might have seemed importunate but I have never known a divorced man or woman unwilling to discuss their marriage.

"Well it was a mess," she said, "an eight-year mess. He drank and accused me of having affairs with other men and wrote anonymous letters to most of my friends, claiming that I had the principles of a whore. I bought him off, I had to, I paid him a shirtful and went out to Reno. I came back last month. I think I'll have another little drink," she said, "but first I'm going to the john."

I filled her glass again. We were nearly through the first bottle. When she returned from the toilet she was not staggering, not at all, but she was walking much more lithely, with a much more self-confident grace. I got up and took her in my arms but she pushed me away-not angrily-and said: "Please don't, please don't. I don't feel like that tonight. I've been feeling terribly all day and the bourbon has picked me up but I still don't feel like that. Tell me all about yourself."

"I'm a bastard," I said.

"Oh, really. I've never known any bastards. What does it feel like?"

"Mostly lousy, I guess. I mean I would have enjoyed a set of parents."

"Well parents can be dreadful, of course, but I suppose dreadful parents are better than none at all. Mine were dreadful." She dropped a lighted cigarette into her lap but retrieved it before it burned the cloth of her skirt.

"Are your parents still living?"

"Yes, they're in Washington, they're very old." She sighed and stood. "Well if I'm going to Havenswood," she said, "I guess I'd better go." Now she was unsteady. She splashed a little whiskey into her glass and drank it without ice or water.

"Why do you go to Havenswood," I asked. "Why don't you telephone and say there's a fog on the turnpike or that you've got a cold or something."

"You don't understand," she said hoarsely. "It's one of those parties you have to go to like birthdays and weddings."

"I think it would be better if you didn't go."

"Why?" Now she was bellicose.

"I just think it would be, that's all."

"You think I'm drunk," she asked.

"No."

"You do, don't you. You think I'm drunk, you nosy sonofabitch. What are you doing here anyhow? I don't know you. I never asked you to come here and you don't know me. You don't know anything about me excepting where I went to school. You don't even know my maiden name, do you?"

"No."

"You don't know anything about me, you don't even know my maiden name and yet you have the cheek to sit there and tell me I'm drunk. I've been drinking, that's true, and I'll tell you why. I can't drive safely on the goddam Jersey Turnpike sober. That road and all the rest of the freeways and thruways were engineered for clowns and drunks. If you're not a nerveless clown then you have to get drunk. No sensitive or intelligent man or woman can drive on those roads. Why I have a friend in California who smokes pot before he goes on the freeway. He's a great driver, a marvelous driver, and if the traffic's bad he uses heroin. They ought to sell pot and bourbon at the gas stations. Then there wouldn't be so many accidents."

"Well let's have another drink then," I said.

"Get out," she said.

"All right."

I went out of the yellow room onto the terrace. I watched her from the window. She was reeling. She stuffed some things into a bag, tied a scarf around her hair, turned out the lights and locked the door. I followed her at a safe distance. When she got to her car she dropped the keys in the grass. She turned on the lights and I watched her grope in the grass until she recovered the keys. Then she slammed the car down the driveway and clipped the mailbox post with her right headlight. I heard her swear and a moment later I heard the noise of falling glass, and why is this sound so portentous, so like a doomcrack bell? I was happy to think that she would not continue up to Havenswood but I was mistaken. She backed the car away from the mailbox post and off she went. I spent the night at a motel in Blenville and telephoned the turnpike police in the morning. She had lasted about fifteen minutes.

XV

My lawyer arranged for the purchase of the house. I was able to get the place and eight acres of land for thirty-five thousand dollars. Her mother came down from Washington and removed her personal effects and I moved into the " house three weeks later, and began my orderly Me. I woke early, swam in the pool, ate a large breakfast and settled down to work at a table in the yellow room. I worked happily until one or sometimes later and then ate a bowl of soup. I bought some tools and spent the afternoons clearing the woods around the house and cutting and stacking wood for the fireplace. At five I took another swim and drank the first of three daily whiskeys. After supper I studied German until half past ten when I went to bed feeling limber, clean and weary. If I dreamed at all my dreams were of an exceptional innocence and purity. I had no longer any need for the mountain, the valley and the fortified city.

I kept a cat named Schwartz, not because I like cats but to keep the mice and shrews from overrunning the old house. The man in the drug store in Blenville gave me Schwartz and I knew nothing about his past. I guessed he was a middle-aged cat and he seemed to have a cranky disposition if such a thing is possible in an animal. I fed him canned cat food twice a day. There was a brand of cat food he disliked and if I forgot and gave him this he would go into the yellow room and shit in the middle of the floor. He made his point and so long as I fed him what he liked he behaved himself. We worked out a practical and unaffectionate relationship. I don't like having cats in my lap but now and then I would dutifully pick him up and pat him to prove that I was a good scout. With the early frosts the field mice began to besiege the place and Schwartz bagged a victim nearly every night. I was proud of Schwartz. At the height of his efficiency as a mouser Schwartz vanished. I let him out one night and in the morning he failed to return. I don't know much about cats but I guessed they were loyal to their homes and I supposed that a dog or a fox had killed my friend. One morning a week later (a light snow had fallen) Schwartz returned. I fed him a can of his favorite brand and gave him a few dutiful caresses. He smelled powerfully of French perfume. He had either been sitting in the lap of someone who used perfume or had been sprayed with it. It was an astringent and musky scent. The nearest house to mine was owned by some Polish farmers and the woman, I happened to know, smelled powerfully of the barnyard and nothing else. The next nearest house was shut for the winter and I couldn't think of anyone in Blenville who would use French perfume. Schwartz stayed with me that time for a week or ten days and then vanished again for a week.

When he returned he smelled like the street floor of Bergdorf Goodman during the Christmas rush. I buried my nose in his coat and felt a moment's nostalgia for the city and its women. That afternoon I got into my car and drove over the back roads between my place and Blenville, looking for someplace that might house a bewitching woman. I felt that she must be bewitching and that she was deliberately tempting me by dousing my cat with perfume. All the houses I saw were either farms or places owned by acquaintances and I stopped at the drug store and told my story. "Schwartz," I said, "that cat, that mouser you gave me, he goes off every other week and comes home smelling like a whorehouse on Sunday morning."

"No whorehouses around here," said the druggist.

"I know," I said, "but where do you suppose he gets the perfume?"

"Cats roam," said the druggist.

"I suppose so," I said, "but do you sell French perfume? I mean if I can find who buys the stuff

"I don't remember selling a bottle since last Christmas," the druggist said. "The Avery boy bought a bottle for his girl friend."

"Thank you," I said.

That night after dinner Schwartz went to the door and signaled to be let out. I put on a coat and went out with him. He went directly through the garden and into the woods at the right of the house with me following. I was as excited as any lover on his way. The smell of the woods, heightened by the dampness of the brook, the stars overhead, especially Venus, seemed to be extensions of my love affair. I thought she would be raven-haired with a marbly pallor and a single blue vein at the side of her brow. I thought she would be about thirty. (I was twenty-three.) Now and then Schwartz let out a meow so that it wasn't too difficult to follow him. I went happily through the woods, across Marshman's pasture and into Marsh-man's woods. These had not been cleared for some years and the saplings lashed at my trousers and my face. Then I lost Schwartz. I called and called. Schwartz, Schwartz, here Schwartz. Would anyone, hearing my voice in the dark woods, recognize it as the voice of a lover? I wandered through the woods calling my cat until a tall sapling dealt me a blinding blow across the eyes and I gave up. I made my way home feeling frustrated and lonely.

Schwartz returned at the end of the week and I seized him and smelled his coat to make sure that she was still setting out her lures. She was. He stayed with me that time ten days. A snow had fallen on the night he vanished and in the morning I saw that his tracks were clear enough to follow. I got through Marshman's woods and came, at the edge of them, on a small frame house, painted gray. It was utilitarian and graceless and might have been built by some hard-working amateur carpenter on Saturdays and Sundays and those summer nights when the dark comes late. I had seriously begun to doubt that it was the lair of a raven-haired beauty. The cat's tracks went around the house to a back door. When I knocked an old man opened the door.

He was small, smaller than I, anyhow, with thin gray hair, pomaded and combed. There was a white button in his right ear, connected to a cord. From the lines and the colorlessness of his face I would guess that he was close to seventy. Some clash between the immutable facts of vanity and time seemed to animate him. He was old but he wore a flashy diamond ring, his shoes were polished and there was all that pomade. He looked a little like one of those dapper men who manage movie theaters in the badlands.

"Good morning," I said. "I'm looking for my cat."

"Ah," he said, "then you must be the master of dear Henry. I've often wondered where Henry was domiciled when he was not with me. Henry, Henry, your second master has come to pay us a call." Schwartz was asleep on a chair. He did not stir. The room was a combination kitchen and chemistry laboratory. There was the usual kitchen furniture and on a long bench an assortment of test tubes and retorts. The air was heavy with scent. "I don't know anything about the olfactory capacities of cats but Henry does seem to enjoy perfumes, don't you Henry. May I introduce myself. I'm Gilbert Hansen, formerly head chemist for Beaure-garde et Cie."

"Hammer," I said, "Paul Hammer." "

How do you do. Won't you sit down."

"Thank you," I said. "You manufacture perfume here?"

"I experiment with scents," he said. "I'm no longer in the manufacturing end of things but if I hit on something I like I'll sell the patent, of course. Not to Beauregarde et Cie, however. After forty-two years with them I was dismissed without cause or warning. However this seems to be a common practice in industry these days. I do have an income from my patents. I am the inventor of Étoile de Neige, Chous-Chous, Muguet de Nuit and Naissance de Jour."

"Really," I said. "How did you happen to pick a place like this-way off in the woods-for your experiments?'

"Well it isn't as out of the way as it seems. I have a garden and I grow my own thyme, lavender, iris, roses, mint, wintergreen, celery and parsley. I buy my lemons and oranges in Blenville and Charlie Hubber, who lives at the four corners, traps beaver and muskrat for me. I find their castors as lasting as civet and I get them for a fraction of the market price. I buy gum resin, methyl salicylate and benz-aldehyde. Flower perfumes are not my forte since they have very limited aphrodisiac powers. The principal ingredient of Chous-Chous is cedar bark, and parsley and celery go into Naissance de Jour."

"Did you study chemistry?"

"No. I learned my profession as an apprentice. I think of it more as alchemy than chemistry. Alchemy is, of course, the transmutation of base metals into noble ones and when an extract of beaver musk, cedar bark, heliotrope, celery and gum resin can arouse immortal longings in a male we are close to alchemy, wouldn't you say?"

"I know what you mean," I said.

"The concept of man as a microcosm, containing within himself all the parts of the universe, is Babylonian. The elements are constant. The distillations and transmutations release their innate power. This not only works in the manufacture of perfume; I think these transmutations can work in the development of character."

I heard a woman's heels in the next room-light, swift, the step of someone young. Marietta came into the kitchen. "This is my granddaughter," he said, "Marietta Drum."

"Paul Hammer," I said.

"Oh, hello," she said. She lighted a cigarette. "Eight," she said.

"How many yesterday," he asked.

"Sixteen," she said, "but it was only twelve the day before."

She wore a cloth coat with a white thread on one shoulder. Her hair was dark blond. She was not beautiful-not yet. Something, some form of loneliness or unhappiness, seemed to mask or darken her looks. It would be a lie to say that there was always a white thread on her clothing-that even if I bought her a mink coat there would be a white thread on it-but the white thread had some mysterious power as if it were a catalyst that clarified my susceptibilities. It seemed like magic and when she picked the thread off her coat and dropped it onto the floor, the magic remained.

"Where are you going now," he asked.

"Oh, I thought I'd drive into New York," she said.

"Why? What do you want to go to New York for? You don't have anything to do in New York."

"I'll find something to do," she said. "I'll go to the Museum of Natural History."

"What about the groceries."

"I'll buy them later. I'll be back before the stores close." She was gone.

"Well, goodbye Schwartz," I said. "Come home whenever you feel like it. I always have plenty of mice. It was nice to have met you," I said to the old man. "You and your granddaughter must come over for a drink someday. I have the Emmison place."

I walked and ran through the snowy woods back to my house, changed my clothes and headed for the city. I was in love with Marietta and I recognized all the symptoms. My life was boundless- my knees were weak. This had nothing to do with the fact that I had been inhaling the aphrodisiac fumes of Étoile de Neige, Chous-Chous, Muguet de Nuit and Naissance de Jour. My sudden infatuation could be put down as immature, but the truth of the matter is that I frequently fall suddenly in love with men, women, children and dogs. These attachments are unpredictable, ardent and numerous.

For example, when I was still in the publishing business I had an appointment to meet a printer in New York. I telephoned from the hotel lobby and he asked me to come up to his room. When he opened the door and introduced himself I saw past him to where his wife stood in the middle of the room. She was not a beauty but she had a prettiness, a brightness, that was stunning. I talked with her only long enough for him to get his hat and coat, but during this time I seemed to fall in love. I urged her to join us for lunch but she said she had to go to Bloomingdale's and look for furniture. We said goodbye and the printer and I went out to lunch. The business conversation bored me and I had trouble keeping my mind on the contracts we were meant to discuss. All I could think of was her blondness, her trimness, the radiance with which, it seemed, she had been standing in the middle of that hotel room when he opened the door. I hurried through lunch, said that I had another appointment, and looped over to the furniture department at Bloomingdale's, where I found her reading a price tag on a chest of drawers.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," she said, "I somehow thought you might come…" Then she took my arm and we left Bloomingdale's, walking on air, and went to some restaurant where she had tea and I had a drink. We seemed immersed in one another-she seemed to generate a heat and light that I needed. I don't remember much of what we said but I do remember being terribly happy and that everyone around us-the waiters and the barmen-seemed to share our happiness. They lived in Connecticut and she asked me to come out for the weekend. I walked her back to the hotel, kissed her goodbye in the lobby, and walked around the streets for an hour, so high that my ears were ringing. On Friday I went out to Connecticut and she met me at the station. There was a lot of kissing in the car. I said that I loved her. She said she loved me. That night after dinner when her husband went upstairs to the toilet we had a serious discussion about her children-they had three children-and she said that her husband had been in analysis for seven years. At this point any disruption in his affairs would be catastrophic. The pleasure his wife and I took in one another's company must have been apparent because on Saturday he began to sulk. On Sunday he was downright mean and glum. He said that he detested above all things maladjusted men who preyed on the happiness of others. He used the word parasite five times. I said I was leaving for Cleveland in the morning and she said she would drive me to the airport. He said she would not. They had a quarrel and she cried. When I left in the morning they were still sleeping and there was no one to say goodbye to but the cat.

It took me a month or so to forget her but in the meantime I had to go to London. The man with whom I shared a seat on the plane was pleasant and we began to talk. Nothing important was said but we were very sympathetic and at one point he asked if I would like to go to sleep or should we go on talking. I said that I would like to go on talking and we talked all the way across the Atlantic. We shared a cab into London. I was going to the Connaught and he was staying at the Army-Navy. When we said goodbye he suggested that we have lunch together. I had no other engagement and he met me at the Connaught for lunch. After lunch we started walking and we walked all over London-walked to Westminster and the Embankment -and when the bars reopened we went to a pub and had some drinks. He said that he knew of a good restaurant near Grosvenor Square and we went there for dinner and stayed there until about midnight when we said goodbye. We exchanged cards and promised to call one another in New. York but we never did and I've never seen him

again.

There was, so far as I could discern, nothing unnatural in this encounter but things are not always this simple. In the late winter I went south to Wentworth to play some golf. An amiable man in the bar the night I arrived suggested that we pair off since our scores seemed to be about the same. In the morning, at about the third or fourth hole, I noticed that he was praising my form and praising it extravagantly. There is nothing about my form that deserves praise and I began to feel that his flattery-which is what it amounted to-had in it a hint of amorousness. I then began to feel that he was losing the game to me-that his golf was better than mine but that he was chipping his shots to give me a slight advantage. We played nineteen holes and his manner grew-or so I thought- increasingly sentimental and protective. I kept my distance in the shower and when we went to the bar I definitely got the feeling that something was going on. He kept bumping into me and touching me. I was not repelled but I did not want to invest my sexuality in a one-night stand with a stranger at Wentworth and I left in the morning.

As for children I will give only one example. I went out to Maggie Fowler's for a weekend in the Hamptons. Her son-a boy of about eight or nine-was with her. He was the child of her first marriage and evidently spent most of his time with his father or away at school. He seemed a little strange with Maggie. He had that extraordinary air of privacy that some children enjoy. This may have been produced by the rigors of a divorce but I've seen it in all sorts of children. I got up early on Saturday morning and, finding him downstairs, walked with him to the beach for a swim. He held my hand on the walk-an unusual attention for a boy his age- and I guessed that he was lonely, but if I explained his conduct by this I must have been lonely myself because I enjoyed his company. He may have reminded me of my own childhood. The resonance of deep affection, some part of which is surely memory, was what I experienced. We had a good swim and had breakfast together and then he asked, very shyly, if I would like to play catch. We spent perhaps an hour on the back lawn, throwing a ball back and forth. Then the others came down and we started drinking Bloody Marys and there were the usual activities of a weekend, most of which excluded a boy his age. When we were dressing that evening to go out Maggie knocked on my door and said that her son wanted me to say good night to him. I did. When I got up on Sunday morning he was sitting on a chair outside my bedroom door and we walked again to the beach. I didn't see much of him on Sunday but I seemed

aware of him-his footstep, his voice, his presence in the house. I drove back on Sunday afternoon and I've never seen or heard of him but I definitely felt something like love for him during the few hours we spent together.

As for dogs I will also confine myself to a single example. In the spring I went out to Connecticut for a weekend with, the Powerses. After lunch on Saturday we decided to climb what they called a mountain. It was, in fact, a hill. They had a dirty old collie named Francey who came along. Near the summit there was a steep rock face that was too much for Francey and I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the top. She stayed at my side for the rest of the climb or walk and when we returned I carried her down the steep stretch. While we had cocktails Francey stayed at my side and I roughed the fur on her neck. I was just as pleased with her company, I think, as she was with mine. When I went upstairs to change Francey came along and lay on the floor. I went to bed at about midnight and just as I was about to close the bedroom door Francey came along the hall and joined me. She slept on my bed. Francey and I were inseparable on Sunday. She followed me wherever I went and I talked with her, fed her crackers and roughed and caressed her neck. When it was time for me to leave on Sunday, Francey, while I was saying goodbye, streaked across the driveway and got into my car. I was flattered, of course, but flattery is some part of susceptibility and all the way home I thought tenderly of the old dog as if I had left a love.

It took me an hour and a half to drive to New York and another twenty minutes to find a parking place near the museum. The odds against finding her in that labyrinth were unequal, I knew, but that it was a labyrinth, winding, twilit and cavernous, gave some fitness to my errand and I stepped into the museum at a basement entrance with a very light heart. It was a place I had visited once or twice a year for as long as I could remember and while there had been changes there had been fewer-far fewer-than there had been outside the walls. In fifteen years the Alaskan war canoe had traveled perhaps twenty-five yards, leaving a gallery of totem poles for a vestibule. Eskimo women in glass cases were performing the same humble tasks they had been performing when I was a child, clutching Gretchen Oxencroft's hand. I decided to start at the top of the building and work my way down. I took the elevator and began my search in a gallery that contained jewels and glass constructions of molecular particles. Lighting was a problem since if the galleries had been well lighted I would, by standing in any door, have been able to see whether or not she was there; but many of the galleries were nocturnal and I had to go from exhibit to exhibit, looking for her face in the half-lights. I was able to take in the Pleistocene room in a glance-that soaring construction of prehistoric bone and the intensely human odor of wet clothing-and the room that contains the stuffed copperheads was also well lighted. I passed the Blue Whale and the stuffed Aardvark and then stepped into another dusky gallery where the only illumination came from cases of magnified Protozoa. I descended from there to the even deeper twilight of the African gallery and from there to the North American habitat groups. Here in the stale and cavernous dark was a thrilling sense of permanence. Here were landscapes, seasons, moments in time that had not changed by a leaf or a flake of snow during my life. The flamingoes flew exactly as they had flown when I was a child. The rutting mooses were still locked, antler to antler, the timber wolves still slinked through the blue snow towards the pane of glass that separated them from chaos and change, and not a leaf of the brilliant autumn foliage had fallen. The Alaska bear still reared at the end of a corridor that seemed to be his demesne and it was here that I found her, admiring the bear.

"Hello," I said.

"Oh, hello," she said.

That was quick. Then she took my arm and said: "I have the most marvelous idea. Why don't you take me to the Plaza for lunch."

We walked across the park towards the Plaza. "I don't think I have enough money for lunch," I said, "and there's no place around here where I can cash a check." I counted the money in my wallet. I had seventeen dollars. "But seventeen is enough to take me to lunch," she said. "I mean you could miss lunch for once in your life, couldn't you?" That's what we did. She ordered a full lunch and a bottle of wine. I explained to the waiter that I had already lunched but I did drink a glass of wine. She said goodbye to me in front of the hotel. "I have to get back to Blenville in time to buy Grandfather's groceries," she said. "Back to my prison, back to my jail…" I had a hamburger and an orange drink at the corner and drove back to Blenville myself.

I was over there the next afternoon at around four. She answered the door. She was wearing a gray dress with a white thread on the shoulder. "Did you get anything to eat?" she asked.

"I had a hamburger."

"I'm sorry I spent all your money."

That's all right. I've got more. Why don't you come over to my house?"

"Where do you live?"

"I bought Dora Emmison's place."

"I'll get a coat. I feel like a prisoner here."

Back at my house I lighted a fire, made some drinks and we sat in the yellow room while she told me her story. She was twenty-three and had never married. She had lived in France until she was twelve when her parents were killed in an accident and her grandfather became her guardian. She had gone to Bennington. When her grandfather moved to the country she took an apartment and got a job as a receptionist at Macy's. She was bored and lonely in the city and had come out to Blenville in the autumn with the hope of finding a job, but the only industry in Blenville was the motel and she didn't want to be either a prostitute or a chambermaid.

While she was talking there was a loud crack of thunder. Thunder was unusual at that time of year-the late winter-and at the first explosion I thought a plane had broken the sound barrier. The second peal-rolling and percussive-was unmistakably thunder. "Dammit," she said.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm afraid of thunder. I know it's absurd but that doesn't make any difference. When I was working at Macy's and living alone I used to hide in the closet when there was a thunderstorm. I finally went to a psychiatrist to see if he could do anything and he said the reason I was afraid of thunder was because I was a terrible egocentric. He said I thought I was so important that the thunder would seek me out for extermination. All of this may be true but it doesn't keep me from trembling." She was trembling then and I took her in my arms and we became lovers before the storm had passed over my land. "That felt good," she said, "that felt very good. That was a nice thing to do."

"I've never had it better," I said. "Let's get married."

Six weeks later we were married in the church in Blenville. Marietta wore a gray suit with a white thread on the lapel. (Where did all those threads come from? Later, when we traveled in Europe, she would sometimes appear with a white thread on her shoulder.) After the wedding we flew to Curacao and spent two weeks at St. Martha's Bay. It was lovely and when we returned to Blenville I seemed to possess everything in the world that I wanted. When I finished the Montale and took it into New York I discovered that the poetry had already been translated but for some reason this didn't disappoint me. It seemed then that nothing could. I don't know when the honeymoon ended… I'll settle for a night in Blenville. Eleven o'clock. Groping, I found Marietta 's side of the bed empty. There was a light on in the kitchen. The shape of the lighted window stretched over the lawn. Was Marietta sick? I sleep naked and I went down the stairs into the kitchen naked. Marietta stood in the center of the floor wearing her wedding ring and nothing else. She was eating, with a bent fork, from a can of salmon. When I embraced her she pushed me away angrily and said: "Can't you see that I'm eating." The salmon gave off a sea smell, fresh and cheerful. I felt like taking a swim. When I touched her again she said: "Leave me alone, leave me alone! Can't a person get something to eat without being molested?" After that night-if that was the night-I saw more of distemper than tenderness and often slept alone; but while Marietta 's distempers were strenuous they had no more permanence than the wind. They seemed at times to be influenced by the wind. Spring and its uncertain zephyrs-any sort of clemency-seemed to create a barometric disturbance in her nature that provoked her deepest discontents. Violence, on the other hand-hurricanes, thunderstorms and buzzards-sweetened her nature. In the autumn when tempests with girls' names lashed the Bermudas and moved up past Hatteras into the northeast, she could be gentle, yielding and wifely. When snows closed the roads and stopped the trains she was angelic, and once, at the height of an epochal blizzard, she said she loved me. She seemed to think of love as a universal dilemma, produced by convulsions of nature and history. I will never forget how tender she was the day we went off the gold standard and her passion was boundless when they shot the King of Parthia. (He was saying his prayers in the basilica.) When our only mutuality was a roof tree and some furnishings she looked at me as if I was a repulsive brute to whom she had been sold by some cruel slavemaster; but when the carts of thunder rolled, when the assassin's knife struck home, when governments fell and earthquakes blasted the city walls she was my glory and my child.

A clinician like Shitz would have said that I had been warned but he was wrong all along. My fault was that I had thought of love as a heady distillate of nostalgia-a force of memory that had resisted analysis by cybernetics. We do not fall in love-I thought-we re-enter love, and I had fallen in love with a memory-a piece of white thread and a thunderstorm. My own true love was a piece of white thread and that was so.

Sleeping alone then, as I often did, I found myself forced into the reveries of an adolescent, a soldier, or a prisoner. To sublimate my physical needs and cure my insomnia I fell into the habit of inventing dream girls. I know the vastness that separates revery from the realities of a robust and a sweaty fuck on a thundery Sunday afternoon, but like some prisoner in solitary confinement I had nothing to go on but my memories and my imagination. I began with my memory and pretended to be sleeping with a girl I had known in Ashburnham. I remembered her dark blondness in detail and seemed to feel her pubic hair against my naked hip. Night after night I summoned up all the girls I had ever romanced. Night after night they came singly and sometimes in pairs so that I lay happily on my stomach with a naked woman on either side. I began by summoning them but after a while they seemed to come of their own volition. Like all lonely men, I fell in love-hopelessly-with the girls on magazine covers and the models who advertise girdles. I did not go so far as to carry their photographs around in my wallet, but I was tempted to, and having fallen in love with these strangers I found that they willingly joined me in bed. Surrounded then by the women I remembered and the women I had seen photographed I was joined by a third group of comforters produced, I suppose, by some chamber in my nature. These were women I had never seen. I woke one midnight to find myself lying beside an imaginary Chinese who had very small breasts and a voluptuous backside. She was followed by a vivacious Negress and she by an amiable but very fat woman with red hair. I had never romanced a fat woman that I could recall. But they came, they solaced me, they let me sleep, and when I woke in the morning I was moderately hopeful.

I envied men like Nailles who might, I suppose, looking at Nellie, recall the number and variety of places where he had covered her. On the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Tyrrhenian and the Mediterranean, in catboats, in motorboats, in outboards, cabin cruisers and ocean liners; in hotels, motels, in castles, in tentsj on beds, on sofas, on floors, on grassy hummocks, on pine needles, on stony mountain ledges warm from the sun; at every hour of the day and night; in England, in France, in Germany, Italy and Spain; while I, looking at Marietta, would remember the number of places where I had been rebuffed. In the motel in Stockbridge she had locked herself in the bathroom until I fell asleep. When I took her for a two-week cruise she forgot to pack her contraceptives and the ship's doctor had none for sale. In Chicago she kicked me in the groin. In Easthampton she defended herself with a carving knife. Her menstrual periods seemed frequent and prolonged and on most nights she would hurry into bed and cover her face with a blanket before I could get undressed. I am too tired, she would say, I am too sleepy. I have a head cold. I have a toothache. I have indigestion. I have the flu. On the beach at Nantucket she ran away from me and when I thought I had her cornered in the sailboat she dove overboard and swam to shore.

After a year or two the yellow paint on the walls had begun to crack and discolor, and Marietta called the painter in Blenville and had him bring out some samples. I had never told her about the importance of the yellow walls and so her choice of pink was not malicious but pink was the color she chose. I could have protested but my obsession with yellow had begun to seem absurd. Surely I had enough character to live with a normal spectrum and I let the painter go ahead. Two or three weeks after the painters had finished I woke with the cafard. I suffered, on getting out of bed, all the symptoms of panic. My lips were swollen. I had difficulty breathing and my hands were shaking. I dressed and had two scoops of gin before breakfast, I was drunk most of that day. I had, I knew, to change the pace of my Me and on Friday we flew to Rome.

The cafard followed me throughout that trip but it followed me without much guile either because it was lazy or because it was an assassin so confident of its prey that it had no need to exert itself. On Saturday morning I woke, feeling cheerful and randy. I was just as cheerful on Sunday but on Monday I woke in a melancholy so profound that I had to drag myself out of bed and stumble, step by Step, into the shower. On Tuesday we took a train to Fondi and a cab through the mountains to Sperlonga, where we stayed with friends. I had two good days there but the bête noire caught up with me on the third and we took the train for Naples at Formia. I had four good days in Naples. Had the bête noire lost track of its victim or was it simply moving in the leisurely way of a practiced murderer? My fifth day in Naples was crushing and we took the afternoon train back to Rome. Here again I had three good days but I woke on the fourth in danger of my life and went out to take a walk, putting one foot in front of the other. On some broad and curving street, the name of which I can't remember, I saw coming towards me a line of motorcycle policemen, moving at such a slow pace that they had to keep putting their feet on the paving to keep the engines upright. Behind them were a few hundred men and women carrying signs that said PACE, SPEBANZA and AMORE. It was, I realized, a memorial procession for the communist delegate Mazzacone, who had been shot in his bathtub. All I knew about him was that he had been described as saintly in L'Unitd… I did not know his opinions and had read none of his speeches but I began to cry. There was no question of drying my tears. They splashed down my face and wet my jacket, they were torrential. I joined the procession and as soon as I began to march I felt the cafard take off. There were marshals with armbands to keep the parade in order and we were told not to speak so that as we moved through Rome there was no sound but the shuffle and hiss of shoe leather, much of it worn, and because of our numbers, a loud, weird and organic sound, a sighing that someone with his back to the parade might have mistaken for the sea.

We marched through the Venezia to the Colosseum. We walked proudly, men, women and children, in spite of the shuffling sound. This grief which, in my case, we accidentally shared reminded me of how little else there was that we had in common. I felt the strongest love for these strangers for the space of three city blocks. There was a memorial service in the Colosseum-nothing as moving as the procession but when I went back to the hotel I felt well. We flew back to New York soon afterwards and it was sitting on a beach that following summer (I had already seen the picture in the dental journal) that I decided, on the strength of a kite string, that my crazy old mother's plan to crucify a man was sound and that I would settle in Bullet Park and murder Nailles. Sometime later I changed my victim to Tony.