Freddy's Book

I. FREDDY

I WAS IN Madison, Wisconsin, on a lecture tour, when I first met Professor Agaard and his son. I was there to read a paper, brand new at the time (since then, as you may know, widely anthologized), “The Psycho-politics of the Late Welsh Fairytale: Fee, Fie, Foe — Revolution!” The lecture was behind me, a thoroughly pleasant event, as usual, at least for me — a responsive audience that had laughed at the right places, perhaps here and there shed a tear or two, asked the kinds of questions that let a speaker show his wide-ranging knowledge and wit, and applauded with generous gusto when it was over. Now I was deep into one of those long, intense celebrations that put the cap on such affairs, making the guest feel gloriously welcome and the audience (those who make the party) seem a host of old friends. The whole first floor of the house was crowded; a few may have drifted to the second floor as well; and from the sound of things, there was another party roaring in the basement I think I never knew whose house it was; probably the elderly professor of antiquities who’d met me at the door, one of those bright-faced, bearded fellows with a great, hearty handshake, a thundering laugh, and a pretty, younger wife. I don’t mean I was indifferent to who my host was; not at all. I have been, from childhood upward, a gregarious, infinitely curious being, quick to strike up friendships wherever I travel, always more than willing to hear the other person’s side. It was no doubt those qualities that led me to my profession, history — or more precisely, psycho-history. In any event, as I was saying, the night was hectic, as these things always are, and the party was already under way when, trailing associate professors and graduate students — my face bright red, I imagine, from my long climb up the icy flagstone steps (I’m a heavy person, I ought to mention, both tall and generous of girth) — I arrived, divested myself of hat and coat, and began my usual fumbling with my pipe. Crowded as the house was, I couldn’t catch more than a smattering of the hurried introductions.

Whomever it belonged to, I remember thinking it a splendid house, elegant and fashionable: vaguely Tudor but exceptionally airy and, with its wide arches, its crystal chandeliers — a thousand reflections in the walnut panelling — a place wonderfully aglitter with cheerful light. Except for the kitchen and numerous brick islands of thriving plants, the whole first floor was carpeted in oystery light gray. Talk rumbled, oceanic; silverware clinked around the white buffet tables. I’d moved to my usual theater of action, backed against the drainboard in the large, bright kitchen, where I could be close to the ice in its plastic bag and, thanks to my height, could command every corner of the room. On every side of me, guests with their glasses were packed in so tightly that only by daring and ingenuity could one raise one’s own and drink. There were the usual smiling students, heads tilted with interest, eyes slightly glazed, possibly from drink but more likely from mid-term pressure and lack of sleep. Heaven knows it’s not easy for our graduate students — the competition, the scarcity of jobs; one’s heart goes out to them!

So I was holding forth, enjoying myself. It may be true, as occasionally someone will point out to me, treating the thing as an established fact, that for the most part the students and professors pressed around me are interested only as one is in, say, lions at the zoo; but I would stubbornly insist that there are always exceptions, even the possibility of some signal exception: some young Gibbon or Macaulay not yet conscious of how good he is, who hangs on every word of the sparkling-eyed, silver-haired visitor from Olympus (the lower slopes), hunting with ferocious concentration for what, in time, he’ll find he has inside him. One is always a little checked by that not-too-remote possibility — one tries not to speak too rashly, give bad advice — but I, at least, am never utterly checked. One plays the game, follows wherever drink and inspiration lead; what harm? I was the guest celebrity, every word worth gold; but I was only one in, excuse the expression, a galaxy of stars. Everything I said was sure to be contradicted next week when some other famous scholar zoomed in; and everything I said — no question about it — I emphatically believed for that moment. “You have such confidence, Mr. Winesap!” people tell me. Shamelessly I reveal to them my secret. On paper I say anything that enters my head, then revise till I believe it; but in conversation I count on others for revision. I rather enjoy being proved — conclusively and cleanly — to be mistaken. It’s Nature’s way, I like to think: the Devonian fish corrected little by little through the ages into the milkcow, the gazelle, the princess with golden tresses who refills my glass. Young professors poke my chest with their index fingers, their faces pocked and sweating, their bright eyes bulging. “Nonsense!” I sing out, or “Interesting! Good point!” Behind them, men my own age, with trim gray moustaches, smile knowingly at the floor. I can guess what they’re thinking. They’d like to know how I, a mere poet of a historian, have become what I’ve become, while they, so responsible and reasonable, so well-armed with evidence and fit to be trusted to the last jot, tittle, iota, and scintilla, are only what they are. I could tell them the answer: “You inspire no confidence, my learned friends! You don’t eat enough! You’re skinny!” No doubt in their heart of hearts they know it. “Never mind,” I could tell them in a gentler mood, “in a thousand years we’ll all be suppressed events in a Chinese history book.”

We were discussing monsters. I’d written a trifling, amusing little piece on the roots and rise of the American big-foot legend, and the people around me were asking me now, though it had nothing much to do with the article I’d written, to explain my ideas on the popular appeal of monstrosity (“from monstrum: a showing forth,” as a wiry little graduate student pointed out — a young man worth watching, as I mentioned at the time). I was carrying on in the highest spirits — needless to say, I’d had a good deal to drink — and just as I was making a particularly interesting point (I felt), a bespectacled, doll-like professor at my left broke in loudly, peering with fierce attention at the sherry in his glass, the corners of his mouth twitching nervously outward, “I have a son who’s a monster.”

I smiled, quite thrown, glancing at the faces around me to see what response I ought to make. The man was either mad or in deadly earnest, and in his presence my casual spinning of theories seemed indelicate to say the least. No doubt those around me felt the same embarrassment, but from their looks one would have thought they hadn’t heard him. I stroked my moustache and looked back at the professor just in time to see him roll up his large, glinting eyes at me — fierce blue pupils trapped in red and white webbing — then look back as if in terror at his sherry. He raised his hand, not looking up, timidly inviting a handshake. “We haven’t met,” he said. He had, like so many university people, the queer habit of making his words just a touch ironic, and sometimes, as now, he would close off his phrase with a curious little baa of a laugh, a sort of vocal tic. “I’m Professor Agaard,” he said. “Baa.”

It was an odd introduction. Among other things, one rarely hears anyone at these gatherings call himself “Professor.” I studied the top of his head with admiration: a large, pale, liverspotted dome; frail wisps of hair. He was older than most of us, surely past retirement; probably professor emeritus, I thought.

“How do you do?” I said, grasping his small, rigid hand. Awkwardly, hardly knowing what else to do — smiling and bending my head to show interest — I said, “Your son, did you say—?”

He glanced at me in horror, as if only now did he realize that he’d spoken it aloud. The others were all studiously gazing at their drinks.

I smiled harder, throwing him help. “I imagine all our sons can seem monstrous at times.” I laughed heartily and gave his small fingers another earnest squeeze.

“Oh no,” he said, looking at me sternly, almost indignantly, focusing hard through his thick, tinted glasses, “I mean it literally.” Then he glanced at those around us — blank faces, frozen winces. It was clear that even he, for all his singularity, was aware that he’d broken the polite conventions, darkened the tone of things. No wonder if he was flustered; he must have been as painfully aware as I was that his colleagues did not like him. Perhaps he scorned his students and graded too fiercely, with the result that his classes were smaller than other people’s, stirring his colleagues’ resentment. Perhaps he was believed to give out a crushing excess of information — he looked like that type — or shirked committee work, or consistently took the wrong side in things. Whatever the reason, he was clearly unpopular, and now, as often happens to people in that plight, having made a small mistake — perhaps not even knowing what mistake it was he’d made, he was evidently thrown into a panic. Unable to think of a way to back down, and having missed my invitation to make light of it, he looked to left and right, his expression grim, then back at me, his eyebrows lifted, eyes wild, and made his radical decision. “Ah!” he said, and then, loudly: “Excuse me!” Without another word, he snatched back his hand, ducking and turning at the same time, found a small opening in the crowd, and fled. I stared after him, no doubt with my mouth open.

“You must’ve got to him,” a fat, bearded red-head beside me said. He was laughing, his two plump, small-fingered hands closed fondly around what looked like a glass of straight bourbon. His hair was parted in the middle and curled up sharply on each side; if we hadn’t been so crowded, I’d have glanced down to see if he had satyr’s hooves. He let go of his glass with one dainty hand and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Never mind old Agaard,” he said, laughing again. If I’d been startled by Agaard’s look of woe, I was even more startled by the red-head’s look of merriment.

Before my friend the red-head could carry the matter further, one of the people I’d been talking with earlier broke in again, poking between us with his nose like a chicken, and, like it or not, I was caught up once more in the scholiast’s game, paring popular notions of the “queer” and “unearthly” from notions of the “monstrous.” Time slipped out from under me; I forgot all about Professor Agaard and his son, and at last, when there were only a few of us left, the clean-shaven, neatly combed graduate student who’d been assigned to my service made signs that, really, we ought to be on our way, if I was willing. I hated to leave such a sociable haven, even now that most of the others had gone home; but reluctantly I finished off my drink, found my hat and coat, and followed him down the steps and the icy, buckling sidewalk to where his car sat, alone under a streetlight at the corner. It was a foreign car, trim and new, the kind that makes a person of my size hug his knees. But I was in a mood to hug myself. Wonderful creatures, all of them! A splendid occasion!

It was just as we were pulling in at my motel — one dim light in the office, the sign turned off — that I remembered the brief, peculiar conversation with the doll-like old man and asked, “What is this business about Professor Agaard’s son?”

“Agaard?” the young man echoed, ducking his head, peering past the steering wheel, making sure he was approaching the motel in exactly the right way — that is, approaching where the sign said ENTER, not EXIT, and driving very slowly to outwit the malevolent ice.

“I believe he said his son is a ‘monster,’” I said.

The young man glanced at me as he’d have done if he believed my revealing the truth about the Agaards would bring ruin on the Department — throw him, with his degree now made worthless, to the wolves. It was nothing of the kind, I knew; nothing but the alarm of a young man uncomfortable where the rules turn vague, drawn against his will toward the fogbound marchland where honest concern and the gossip’s ingress merge. Surely the personal affairs of his professors were not his business, his eyes said, though his lips remained thoughtfully pursed. I knew him then; should have known him all along by the stiffness of his elbows as he drove: he was one of those good second brothers in the fairytales, the one you could almost but in the end not quite put your money on. Out of virtue, he believed, come success and security; turn aside for an instant, and the abyss will leap around you with a shout. Poor devil, I thought, trying to put on charity—“third and mightiest of the three magic rings,” as I like to say at meetings. (No one is amused.) Nevertheless, his look somewhat chilled me. I remembered the look of distaste all around me, those cobra glances, when the old man had spoken about his son. I half wished now that I’d made Professor Agaard stay longer and tell me what he meant. The young man stopped the car; wed arrived at the door. “I don’t think I know a Professor Agaard,” he said, and gave me a cool little smile. “I’m in American.” With two fingers he adjusted his glasses.

“I see,” I said. It was an interesting solution. My young friend would go far in this icy-hearted, ethical age. But then, of course, the poor fellow wanted to get home to his wife, be able to get up for his classes in the morning. It’s easy to be harsh; take the bolder way! I nodded, smiled again. Overhead, the stars shone like tiny bits of frost. I was depressed a little by that sudden reminder of the immensity of things, universe on universe, if the Hindus are right — giant after sprawling giant, each pore on each body a universe like ours. I opened the door. “I’m sorry to have kept you so late,” I said.

Gratefully, mindful of his manners, he stuck out his hand. I shook it. “Good-night, Jack,” he said.

“Good-night,” I said, and, after an instant, “Good luck to you, my boy!” I got out and carefully shut the door. He waved as he pulled away; I waved back. I went up to my dim, comfortable room, staggering just a little — increasing instability of the planet, no doubt; also too much gin — drew the covers back, undressed, went to bed and, at once, slept like a bear.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, rising late, I found a letter awaiting me at the desk. I opened it on my way to breakfast in the sun-filled café-restaurant, puzzled for a moment over the wobbly, old-man handwriting, awkward and full of starts as a minnow’s trail, dropped down to the signature, and felt a shock of something like morning-after guilt. The letter was from Professor Sven Agaard. With the full name before me, I realized at once that the queer old man I’d met last night was the well-known Scandinavianist, easily one of the most respectable historians of our time, though only for one fat book, published some thirty-five years ago. In fact, I’d assumed he was dead.

It was a long letter, and at first I could do nothing but stare at it in distress, though technically, of course, I’d done nothing wrong. Try as I might, I could make no sense of this guilt I was feeling, but there was no mistaking that it was guilt. It did not seem to me, though perhaps I was mistaken, that it was anything so simple as my not having recognized his name.

At last, seated with my tea, awaiting my toast and scrambled eggs — small groups of chattering diners all around me, having mid-morning coffee or perhaps early lunch — I flattened out the somewhat wrinkled letter on my placemat, glanced around me once, then hastily read through it. The first two pages were a long, serpentine, and, it seemed to me, quite mad apology for the way Professor Agaard had intruded with his personal affairs. He was a silly old fool, he assured me. (I mused over that one. False modesty? Some old-world politeness I was not understanding? Something about it made my skin crawl, to tell the truth; I set it down, tentatively, to my sense that I’d wronged him. I read on.) He would not blame it on the wine he’d drunk, though the wine had no doubt had its part in the business. Nevertheless, having intruded so far, he could see that it was only right that he invite me to his house, if I was interested, since it was wrong to introduce some teasing suggestion and then refuse to say more. He was not, like me, a traveller, he said, a man who could be comfortable in any world he entered. (That too seemed over-modest. I knew for a fact that he’d been born in Sweden and had at one time travelled widely; but this too I let pass.) If he’d erred in life, he continued — winding cautiously in toward his point — it was probably in giving in too easily to this weakness, keeping himself too aloof from things. Indeed, it was entirely possible that, concerning certain matters, he’d made grave mistakes; perhaps I could advise him. Needless to say, he said again, he was profoundly sorry for having troubled me, and if he was wrong to write this letter, as some would undoubtedly say he was—“rude heads that stare asquint at the sun,” as Sir Thomas Browne so aptly put it …

My breakfast arrived. I ate without noticing, reading through the whole thing again more slowly, and then yet again, wondering what under the sun I’d stumbled into. It was a pitiful letter, there was no mistaking that, but there was also something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, an elusive hint of anger, at very least an edge of nastiness.

The letter had a repeatedly-copied-over look. Considering its length, the professor must have worked at it half the night. On the final page there was a telephone number and the word unlisted, underlined twice, then directions to his house, somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

I had at first no intention of accepting the invitation. I was scheduled to fly down to Chicago that afternoon — I had a lecture in two days, and a number of old friends I was hoping to visit, former colleagues at Northwestern — and even if I were free, it was clear that the invitation had caused Sven Agaard such distress, such a torture of close reasoning on morality and social responsibility, that to accept might well be the act of (there it was again, that ridiculous, empty word) a monster. On the other hand, I thought — frowning and pressing my fingertips together — the letter had something like an anguished plea in it. Perhaps, for all his apology and hesitation, and in spite of the hint of ridded wrath that escaped him, the old man was urgently hoping I’d visit. He was not an immediately likeable person, but distress is distress.

These last few words I spoke aloud, a thing I sometimes do when I’m reasoning with myself, and, realizing that I’d done so, I glanced around at my fellow diners. Only a head or two had turned; otherwise, no one had heard or cared, all happily occupied with their own affairs. I stoked up and lit my pipe to ponder the matter further, think it out properly, fair-mindedly. After all, my lecture had in some way touched the old man, I thought, or he’d never have written such a letter. For my conscience’s sake, if nothing else, I must decide this matter on some basis more solid than whim.

I sat for several minutes, smoking and drinking tea, weighing the matter on this side and that. If Professor Agaard really was in need of advice, as he’d suggested — if he really had made, as he’d said, “grave mistakes”—it seemed unlikely that he’d get help from the colleagues who’d responded to him with such indifference, if not hostility, at the party. Considering all the trouble I’d put him through — his embarrassment last night, his labor over the letter — perhaps refusing him would be the worst thing I could do. I could hardly deny that I was curious, in a way; not wildly curious, but curious enough to take some risks, no question about it.

Then another thought struck me: Had the old man approached me and spoken to me, and then afterward written, because in fact — or partly — he disliked me, despised, as some people do, my rather hopeful view of things? Was he one of those too numerous so-called “hard” historians who seethe at the very mention of psycho-history? In my irrational bones I had a feeling it was so. The idea, naturally, made me cross for an instant. I have always tried to be, so far as I know how, a just man, not needlessly unkind. Life itself may be unfair — I’ve never denied it — but how odd that I, a stranger just passing through, as the folk songs say, should be held responsible! Very well, I thought, no reason to go see him. Sorry, Iago, I’m dining with my wife.

On the other hand, of course, he was, or had been once, a superb historian in the high, thin-aired field I myself did my earliest work in, thirty-some years ago — a man I’d have been honored to serve, if I could. … Abruptly, rising to pay my check, I decided to postpone my trip to Chicago and go see him, possibly meet his son.

I made some phone calls — one to my wife, one to Jack Jr. (who teaches English at Whittier), one to the airport, several to friends, and one, finally, to Agaard to say that I was happy to accept. He suggested — a certain odd distance in his voice, a sound like sea-roar or wind behind him — that I come at about three.

Around noon, a heavy snowfall began, so heavy that by eight that evening, though of course I didn’t know it at the time, the whole country would be transformed, the Madison airport socked in. At 2:15 I checked out of my room and, carrying the only bag I had with me — a small, old-fashioned one, the kind one associates with the visits of country doctors — hailed a cab. All through the city and out into the suburbs the driver grumbled about the weather, the inefficiency of the snow-removal people, the self-interest and stupidity of politicians. “One of these days,” he said again and again, hunched like a wrestler over the steeringwheel, speaking so grimly you’d have thought he was referring to some definite group and plan; then he’d clamp his mouth shut, letting the matter drop. The motor pinged and clattered, the fenders rattled, the broken shock absorbers banged with every bump as we flew up toward Agaard’s. I sat forward, smiling and nodding with interest, elbows on my knees, straining to hear above the noise of the cab as if the driver’s anger might give me some clue to what awaited me at the professor’s. Absurd, of course. The driver was a thoroughly socialized, perfectly normal human being. Every word he spoke he’d said hundreds of times before to his hard-up, slow-witted family and friends, who agreed with him completely.

We came to a sparsely wooded area, a section with which the driver was unfamiliar. Every few blocks — or rather, every few crossroads — he would pull off the road, roll down his window, and lean out, squinting, trying to see what the sign said. It was clear that he resented being out here in the country. Every vehicle we passed was a Jeep or a pickup truck, and in every driveway, or so it seemed, some dog raged, mad-eyed and snarling, feinting at our tires. At last he found the road sign he was after and, since he’d slightly passed it, angrily hit the steeringwheel, then backed up, spinning as if punishing the car for its stupidity, and we made our turn. We ascended a knoll — the woods were thicker here; dark, still pines, all strangely tall — and made out, on our right, a few lighted windows pale as fog, and a huge, vague outline like the prow of a ship — Professor Agaard’s house.

The driver stopped the cab. “What is it,” he said, “insane asylum?”

“It belongs to a university professor,” I told him.

The driver scowled up at it, taking a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard. “I thought so,” he said. He glanced at me, appraising, then back at the house. “Damn if I’m going up the driveway. No way.”

“Why not?” I asked a little sharply.

“Ice. Never make it.”

I studied him, perhaps making sure he wasn’t hiding some darker reason, and just that instant his match flared, lighting up the stripped-down, shabby interior of the cab. He leaned close, cocking the cigarette toward the flame with his stubbly lips and squinting like a man with one eye. “Eight dollars,” he said.

It was an outrage, heaven knew; but the driver so obviously knew it himself, even giving me a squint-eyed, stub-toothed smile, that I accepted my luck as if Providence had sent it — I was on expenses anyway — paid him, got out (there were no dogs in sight, though those we’d passed on the road were still barking), and, carrying my bag, made my way through the needle-fine, blowing snow up the hill. Behind and below me, I heard the cab pull away, heading back down toward the lights of the city, leaving me in heavier darkness.

It was a gloomy old place, chilling as a barrow — not at all my kind of thing — and the closer I got to it, the gloomier it became, also the quieter. I arrived at a kind of graveyard gate, writing over the top, formed of rusty iron letters, too many of them missing for the name of the place to be readable. I thought, inevitably, of creaky old allegories, demented gothic tales — a thought that began in amused detachment but ended somewhere else, so that a shiver went up my spine. The place really did give off the smell, or rather the idea, of death.Who would have chosen such a house, coming to Madison as a young professor, except for the reason that once it had been a splendid residence — wide porches, sunken gardens — and even now might be brought back, as he must have thought, might be made a grand place in which to raise a large family, give parties? It hardly took second sight to make out that the young woman who’d dreamed of playing hostess here was no longer among the living, or that the young professor who had proudly, somewhat fearfully taken the deed and mortgage had been changed, by various accidents, to another man entirely.

The gate stood partway open, just a narrow gap. I held my bag in front of me and, pushing against wind, went through. I was in among the pines now. It was as if I’d all at once lost my hearing.

Before I had my glove off to grope for and ring the bell, Professor Agaard was at the door. “Come in!” he shouted. His voice cracked out like a trumpet, belligerent and fearful. The door he held open, just a foot or so, was huge; he clutched the edge with both hands. It had heavy locks on it. He was smiling as if in panic, dressed as he’d been last night, rumpled suit, dark, frayed silk tie. “Terrible out,” he said loudly, somewhat accusingly, “I’m surprised you bothered.”

“It’s not as bad, down in the city,” I said.

“No, I don’t suppose so. It never is.”

After I’d stepped in, slipping my hat off and stamping to knock off snow, he pushed the door shut, leaning against it with his back like a child — and no wonder: the man was even smaller, more doll-like than I’d remembered; the top of his head came no higher than the middle of my chest. He drew off his spectacles to wipe away steam and grinned, looking at me up-from-under like a ram, his pupils almost hidden by his eyebrows. His dentures were overlarge and gray.

“Come in and have a nice cup of tea,” he said. He half turned, then turned back for a moment and shot me a look, his eyes frankly boring into me like a child’s, then put the glasses back on; also the grin. “I see you came by taxi.” He seemed to disapprove, maybe thinking it would be hard to get rid of me.

I shrugged, apologetic. It wasn’t easy to tell what emotion I ought to feel. The old man was at once deferential and, it seemed to me, crabby; perhaps he himself wasn’t certain what he felt. He was avoiding my eyes now, that much was clear; but whether from shyness or from a wish to hide his dislike for me I couldn’t make out.

“I hope you weren’t too badly cheated,” he said. His expression suddenly became prissy, struggling to be a smile. It was a look I’d see on him again and again, as if, though he tried to see the humor in things, all this world were distasteful to him, sadly disappointing to a spirit of his antique refinement and sensibility. He shot me another little look, eyebrows sharply draw inward, at once stern and baffled. What I’d wrung my fingers over now seemed obvious: he’d been hoping I’d turn him down.

Since I’d come, however, he decided to make the best of it. He seized my elbow and began to steer me through the gloom of the hallway toward the tall, closed door at the farther end. The hallway was like an ice-box, the air was cold in here as outside and not much less drafty, stirred as if by cave winds. When he opened the inner door, heat poured over us as from a furnace. “These old houses!” he said, with a bark-like laugh, waving me through the door, wincing as if the house were a punishment he’d been sent — unjustly — for the crimes of someone else.

We were in a cavernous livingroom with a threadbare Persian rug, an unlighted chandelier, here and there a lamp among the frail, spindly pieces of furniture. Most of the light in the room was thrown by a great, rolling fire in the fireplace. It glowed dully on the wainscoting, the backs of books. (Surely he’d made the fire for my visit, I thought, and for the same reason moved the two chairs up close to it, between them a low antique table with brass-ball clawfeet and a black-glass top. Perhaps the old man was even now of two minds.) His books were everywhere, shelved crammed, stacked on all sides of us, some in English, others in foreign languages, mainly German and Scandinavian. Here and there one could make out dark paintings, framed documents. I’d been looking around for several seconds, giving up my hat, coat, scarf, and gloves, and nodding absently to his stream of complaints — irritable little shouts — when I noticed, with a start, an enormous black cat sitting prim and motionless near the fireplace, watching me with round yellow eyes. I must have jumped.

“Oh,” said the professor, his face falling as if the day were now spoiled, “that’s Posey.”

I bowed to the cat, then after an instants hesitation — still carrying my bag, which the professor had neglected to take from me — moved nearer, rather formally, as if to show them both that I’m a lover of cats, as usually I am. (My wife keeps four of them.) The cat remained motionless; not a whisker stirred. The odd thought struck me — strictly a passing fancy, but for a split-second one that made my neck hairs tingle — that perhaps this was the professor’s son. The ridiculous thought came and went almost too fast to register. One knew by her name and could see by the grace of her neck and shoulders that the cat was female; and anyway, of course … I glanced at the professor. He stood bent forward, as still as the cat, his fingertips together, just touching his chin, his loose, webbed eyes looking up at me through slightly fogged lenses.

“What a beautiful cat!” I said. She was, in fact, with firelight edging her like a halo.

He seemed to consider it, his white lips stretched toward a tentative smile, as if he’d like to think it true; then he jerked his head, clenching his jaw so that his dentures clicked. “Eats us out of house and home,” he said, and, turning to the cat, pretending to speak fondly but in fact showing something more like hatred, I thought, or anyway fiercely controlled impatience—“Isn’t that true now, Posey?”

The cat looked coolly from the professor to me, then stirred, stretching, and moved away, over toward the side of the fireplace.

While the old man polished and inspected his glasses, stiffly holding them up and looking through them at the fire, then giving them another clumsy wipe with his hankie, I listened to the creaks and groans of the house, the crackling of firelogs and ticking of distant clocks, wondering where — above me or in some grim chamber farther in — Professor Agaard kept his son.

“Well, well,” the professor said when his ritual was over, the glasses back in place, “let’s see about that tea!” He bowed from the waist, turning as he did so, then scooted toward another door, perhaps one that led into the kitchen. His head, I noticed for the first time now, had at some time been mashed deep into his shoulders, possibly by arthritis, so that it would no longer turn from side to side. When he paused at the door, it was his whole upper body that cocked around to say, “Make yourself at home, Winesap! Posey, won’t you show our nice visitor a chair?” He made his baa-ing noise, laughing at the joke, then left.

I looked at the cat as if inviting conversation — she seemed at least as ordinarily human as the professor — but the cat had lain down on her side, half closing her eyes, dismissing me. I set down my bag and rubbed my hands together, as if for warmth “What a wonderful house!” I called, loudly enough to be heard in the kitchen.

The cat shrank as if she thought I meant to harm her, then relaxed, not quite forgiving. From the kitchen came no answer, silence like a judgment of Brahma. I sighed, picked up my bag, and drifted to the nearest of the bookshelves to look at the tides.

So I occupied myself for a good ten minutes. It was pleasant enough business, since I’d written my dissertation on medieval Scandinavia — a subject I’ve rarely thought about since — virtually the only subject in Agaard’s library. He had all the books I knew, which was hardly surprising, and a great many more I’d never heard of. Other than those he had only a few old novels, Tolstoy and the like, and an occasional book of verse. Outside the tall, round-topped windows I could see nothing but blowing snow and darkness, though it was still mid-afternoon. There were vertical shadows, puzzling for a moment, until at last I realized they were bars to keep out burglars — or to hold something in. Finally the old man returned, pushing an elegant teacart, dark walnut — perhaps I was seeing here the hand of the long-vanished mistress of the house. On top of the teacart he had a tarnished silver tray. The cat raised her head, alert.

“Ah!” I said, “wonderful!”

“The tea’s old and stale, I’m afraid,” he said loudly. “I’m sure you’re used to better.”

I recognized or imagined something snide in his tone, but having no idea what it meant or what to do with it, I said with a broad wave, “I’m not fussy. I wouldn’t know stale from fresh.”

Though his mouth smiled, I saw when he rolled up his eyes that I’d said the wrong thing. It was the duty of a man of my good fortune to know the difference, he seemed to say. He, if he’d been blessed with opportunities like mine … I was beginning to see my situation here with Agaard as hopeless.

As the old man poured the tea his thin hands shook and he muttered to himself, a habit I was glad to see in him, since I share it. Yet if he hadn’t been muttering — cursing, perhaps or expressing astonishment at some remembered or legendary outrage — I would of course have mentioned my admiration for his work. I couldn’t help but wonder if he blocked me on purpose, not that the performance wasn’t convincing. When he’d filled my cup, over on the cart, he started toward me, walking carefully, looking hard at the cup and saucer, still muttering, now and then crunching his dentures. A few feet from me he stopped, turned at the waist to look around to his left, then looked back at me over his spectacles, raising his eyebrows.

“Don’t you want to sit down?” he asked

“Thank you,” I said, blushing no doubt, and stepped over, still carrying my bag, to the chair nearest the fire. He followed with the tea, muttering again and when I’d put my bag down and carefully lowered my bulk onto the seat, mindful of the bowed-out, fragile legs, the plush-covered arms held upright by a charm — the chair so narrow that the arms lightly brushed my body on each side — he placed the cup and saucer not on the table between the two chairs but in my hands, as carefully as he’d have done for a child, steadying them a moment, making sure I had them balanced, then raising his hands from them slowly. Though there was sugar on the teacart, he did not think to offer it or place the dim cut-glass sugar bowl on the table. I decided to do without. He returned to the cart and poured a saucer of milk; stiffly, carefully carried it around behind the farther chair over toward the fireplace to set it on the scuffed black tiles for the cat, who came over to it at once, then finally poured tea for himself. When he too was seated with his cup, the three of us forming a little circle in the light — high, flitting shadows on the bindings of books and the lumpy, dark wallpaper — Professor Agaard said, “Well now.”

I waited. He said nothing more, only stared into his lap. Perhaps half a minute passed. I sipped my tea.

At last I said, “I must say, Professor Agaard, you’re a great hero of mine. One of the most important books—”

“That was a long time ago,” he said. He spoke with finality, like a man clapping a box shut.

“All the same,” I began.

“It’s a painful subject,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

We drank our tea in silence. He sat with his toes pointed inward, his face turned away from me.

An agonizing two or three minutes passed. The cat watched us with the innocent malevolence of her carnivore nature; indistinct shadows craftily began inching across the ceiling and floor. The silence stretched on, acutely embarrassing for both of us, surely; I must think of a way to break it, I kept thinking. I cleared my throat, a time or two, little half-involuntary growls like a sleeping dog’s, but nothing came. I hadn’t felt so self-conscious and uncomfortable since the days old Slash Potter, my thesis director, would require me to sit waiting in his high marble office while he thumbed through my latest revisions. Not that it was all Agaard’s fault, it struck me. It was I who, hoping to flatter him, had demoted myself. As I suspect may be clear already, I did not actually like old Agaard’s book, though I’d been vastly impressed when I was younger. I still respected it, of course. It was, and is, the work of a mind I do not hesitate to call far superior to my own. His gift for languages, his absolute originality, his uncanny intuition, all these were awesome; indeed, I wouldn’t be disposed to quarrel with the widespread though hardly universal opinion that the fellow is without parallel. Nevertheless, I don’t care much for the book.

Be all that as it may, the fact was, I could see now, that I had lied to him, in effect. Perhaps it was from the falsehood itself that he cringed, verbally slapping my hand away, refusing a charity that had in it no true caritas. Time grew heavier second by second. Then by lucky chance I thought of Jack Jr. — how we, two intellectuals (perhaps not in the sense that Sven Agaard was, but by no means fools), could sit smiling with affection, serenely silent in one another’s company for hours at a time. At once, as if the thought of my son had released me, I found myself saying — leaning forward, trying to sound at once concerned and hearty—“It must be difficult, living here alone, having to take care of your son. He does live here with you, I presume?”

“Oh yes, he lives with me,” the professor snapped, raising his head, then lowering it, pointing his nose at his knees again. Though I watched him closely, his eyes gave me not the slightest clue to where the son was kept.

After another little pause I remarked, smiling, tilting my head to show interest (any slightest movement, I was finding, made the chair creak), “I imagine it must all be rather painful.”

He nodded, smiling grimly, raising his cup to drink. “Yes, it would be natural to imagine that.” Above the rim of the teacup he gave me a look of what might have been fury.

I looked down, once again shrinking a little, struggling to sort out my confusion. Was it possible, I wondered, that it had been someone else, some malicious prankster, who’d written that letter inviting me up? But I’d mentioned the letter on the phone; it was Agaard who’d written it, all right. Had he changed his mind, then? gotten cold feet? Perhaps one couldn’t blame him; I’d have to know more about his son to judge. Certainly if he wanted me to leave, I’d leave at once. I should let him know that. I glanced at my watch, then at Agaard. “Good heavens, it’s after four,” I said. “I have a plane to catch at eight.” Only as I said it did I hear how ridiculous it sounded. Trying to save myself, I said, “Does it take long to get to the airport?”

“Twenty minutes,” I thought he’d say with a murderous sneer and a baa; but again he surprised me completely. He leaped up and went to the window, then blanched. With a voice and expression that might have been extreme alarm, he said, “Look! It’s snowing! You have a plane out tonight?”

“It’s at eight,” I repeated uncertainly, guardedly.

Professor Agaard stood perfectly still for an instant, hands clasped tightly, torso cocked forward, staring as if in growing surprise at the storm. At last he shook his head and turned back to me, eyes narrowed, stepping grimly toward his chair. “It will never take off,” he said. “Right to the last minute they’ll say the planes are flying, and then, with apologies, they’ll post a one-hour delay, and then another, and then another; what do they care?” He gave a laugh, waving one arm. “The airport can be packed like a can of sardines, people can be sleeping all over the floors, little children can be bawling, they’ll go right on lying — company policy, not to mention human nature! Baa! Take my word for it, Winesap.” He closed his right hand on the back of his chair. “They’ll never take off. I know these storms out of Canada. I’ve lived here for fifteen years.” He seemed to consider sitting down, eyebrows driven inward toward the bridge of his nose, eyeballs slightly bulging, then decided to remain standing.

Again I was baffled. It sounded for all the world as if, despite the sneer, the misanthropic snarl, he was asking — almost begging — that I stay over, keep him company. The thought, I must confess, made me shudder. “Well—” I began. I sat motionless in my spindly little chair, or rather hovered just above it, my elbows rigid, weightless on the arms.

“No, no,” he said emphatically, clicking his dentures and bending stiffly toward the teapot, “it will never take off. I doubt that you could even get a taxi in weather like this.” He shot an angry or maybe terrified look at the window.

I too looked. It was like night out; a gloomy, shifting marchland beyond which lay heaven knew what.

“Of course we have beds here — no shortage of beds, such as they are!” He gave his sharp little baa, his expression triumphant. “Here, have more tea,” he said, and hurriedly came at me with the pot.

HE WAS A difficult man — never in my life had I met a man more difficult, now snivelling, now snarling, now cackling with glee, always with his mind somewhere else, I had a feeling, turning over and over that secret or guilty confession he couldn’t quite find it in his heart to let loose of, much as he might wish to — stroking it with his fingers, clutching it greedily to his bosom, watching me, his chosen antagonist, with unrelenting vigilance in his dim, crafty little eyes. It was not just his son, I was by now persuaded; he’d made graver mistakes than by chance giving life to a “monster,” as he’d called him. I gave the old man time, sitting there opposite him, our shoes almost touching. It was surely true that no planes would be flying from Madison that night. If Agaard was a mystery, both generally speaking and from moment to moment, I needn’t be in any great hurry to get to the bottom of it. I’d figure him out. And of course the old man was hoping I’d catch him; or a part of him was. I had nothing to lose, nothing except the chance, back in the city, of finding more congenial company — if nothing else, the tinny cheer of some motel TV. I began to enjoy myself. En garde, Agaard! It was you who threw the glove!

At the moment Professor Agaard was busy bringing it to my attention that, like most members of the human race, I am a scoundrel. “‘Pseudo-history,’” he said, with a scornful little head-shake. I blinked, not sure whether it was a joke or a slip of the tongue, and tentatively corrected him, my tone ironic: “Psycho-history.” He nodded, accepting the revision without interest, giving the air a little bat with the back of his hand. He made a face as if, either way, the term repelled him, as no doubt it did. I couldn’t really blame him. I’d felt that way myself when it first became popular, mostly in connection with fanciful, unfriendly biographies. We’d shifted to wine now, the old man trying to trick himself, perhaps. He was drinking rather quickly, as if his throat were parched and the wine had no more taste than water. In point of fact, I might mention, the wine was excellent. It surprised me a little that, disliking me as he did, the professor hadn’t brought out Gallo. The fire beside us had burned down to a few glowing embers. The cat was asleep. Old Agaard had resisted my every effort to turn the conversation to his son, ducking in distress from every faintest hint, willing to chatter like a magpie on any and every subject but the one that, we both knew, had brought me to his house. “What a curious thing for an intelligent man to spend his life on!” he said. “‘Pseudo-history’! I take it you call yourself a ‘pseudo-historian’? Baa!” His face had grown whiter as the room grew more murky; it was as if he had on powder.

I thought of correcting him again. Was he deaf, or was it simply that once Agaard got an idea in his head it was there, firm as bedrock, to the end? I decided to let it pass. I smiled, in fact. Pseudo-history. Why not? It had a ring to it. Anyway, our point of disagreement was substantive — never mind the name!

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think one could spend one’s life in worse ways.” The backs of my legs ached from the strain of keeping part of my weight off the chair. My gestures were constricted — a thing I never like — by my wish to do no harm to his miserable antique. “It’s true,” I said, “that psycho-history is not always a terribly serious pursuit. It’s sometimes trivial, nothing more than a pleasant entertainment — not that that’s all bad.” I flashed him a smile. “I mean of course studies of the ‘deeper implications’ of Lyndon Johnson’s bathroom jokes, or the social attitudes secreted away in castration imagery in the tales of Paul Bunyan. Yet we learn things, here and there. Any way of looking at the past is still looking at the past.” I glanced at him, carefully waving my wine glass. Again his eyebrows were rammed inward against his nose. “We’re after the same things you are, you know. The twists of human pride, humanity’s age-old survival tricks.”

“Pah!” he said, then laughed. “Baa!”

It annoyed me, of course. No one likes his life’s work dismissed quite so lightly, not even a man who, like myself, holds all effort to be at least partly vanity, a heroic, death-defying labor of bees making honey that will rot in a season. To cover my annoyance — and perhaps nervousness (he did, of course, make one conscious of limitations) — I put my wine glass on the floor beside my foot, got my pipe and tobacco out, and began to load the bowl. I prudently stopped myself from asking if he’d mind if I smoked. “As I’m sure you know,” I said, soberly catching and holding his eye, “our work is no more fanciful than the next man’s, in the end. All history at least from the days of Thucydides is in a way ‘pseudo-history,’ as you call it — the tale of human struggle as it’s told by the side that won.”

“I know all that,” he snapped. (I had it coming, I’ll admit. I’d gone just a little sentimental there; downright self-righteous.) He got up to put another log on the fire. The cat came awake and shrank back, then fled at his approach. “All history as fiction,” he said, “psychological projection, ‘a distant mirror’—et cetera, et cetera.” As he was about to bend toward the log he paused and turned his whole torso to look at me, rolling his eyes to the corners like a horse. “It’s extremely useful stuff, you’ll tell me.” He waved toward the ceiling, bitterly ironic, and put on, again, his prissy look. “What’s heaven itself but pseudo-history? Yet we all die the happier for it, eh?”

“Some do,” I said cautiously, lighting my pipe.

He barked — literally barked like a dog — then bent down, picked up a log, carried it to the fire, and dumped it in. Sparks flew wildly. One fell on his trousers. He slapped at it. “I’m not against religion,” he said angrily, as if at the spark. “I’m not against fairytales either, for what they are. What I mind is historians that say anything they please. That’s what your discipline encourages, Winesap! Why do people choose it? Why is it the rage in every supposedly respectable university from Harvard to Berkeley? Baa. Because it’s easy, that’s why! No grubbing around in Latin or Old Slavonic, no sorting through dirty old books in the basements of libraries! Just hunt down sexual metaphors and allusions to ‘dusk’ in the papers of Thomas Jefferson! (You’ve read Garry Wills’ piece demolishing that, I hope.) So these eager intellectuals of the Now Generation come flooding to your courses — their courses, I mean; I don’t mean you personally, necessarily; you’ve done serious work from time to time. I mean those others, my busy little colleagues, the ones who were ‘Marxist revisionists’ five, ten years ago, and before that cracker-barrel Toynbees.” He stopped, panting a little; he’d lost his thread. Then abruptly, remembering, he raised his arm like a general, plunging on: “They flood into your courses, which helps the F.T.E., brings in money to the department; and they pour out their fairytale histories of ‘Blacks’ and ‘Chicanos’—baa—the history of people who have no history, which brings them federal grants, research assistants, free trips to the Bahamas to lie in the sun and write Freudian reconstructions of the Great White Sugar-dance!” He stood trembling, whistling like a bat.

My hand slightly shaking, I reached for the wine bottle and held it toward him. “Have more wine,” I said, and smiled. Angry as he made me, I had to give the old man an A for rhetoric.

He laughed, a kind of snort, eyes widening behind the thick, tinted lenses. “I admit it, Winesap, I’m not very civilized. I’m rigid and inflexible, and I’ve never learned to put the truth nicely.” He came a step nearer and held his glass out. I poured. When he’d swallowed a little, standing there in front of my chair like a student, his head only inches above the level of mine, he held out the glass again, this time pointing at my chin with it. “I’ll tell you the trouble with trying to learn history from fairytales,” he said, strong emotion in his voice. He came toward me a step, crowding me, still pointing. “They’re mindless — even the best of them! — all bullying, no intelligence, no moral profluence, ergo no real history! Static! They’re exactly true to life, those dreary flats between historical upheavals. The handsome prince comes; he finds his beloved and they live happily ever after; and no one any longer speaks or sends cards to the stepsisters.” He leered.

I nodded, reserving judgment, half inviting him to continue. Though he clung to his image, his argument had made a sudden, uncharacteristic skip of theme and logic — had leaped, arms and legs flailing, toward chaos. Perhaps we were about to get somewhere.

His voice became still more emotional, barely in control. “People like you, Professor Winesap,” he said, “may pity the stepsisters, the wicked old stepmother. You may try to understand them by some theory of dream-analysis. You may even work it out that the cruel old witch who’s behind it all is of use in the world, provoking those she injures toward greater benevolence.” He turned around jerkily, preparing to step to his chair again, but remained where he stood, bent forward, pointing back at me with his glass. “It never occurs to you that the beautiful princess and the wicked old witch believe exactly the same thing. Anything at all, including cunning and lies, will work for the beautiful; nothing helps the ugly.”

“That’s true,” I said lightly, “that never occurs to me.”

He baa’d, then went to his chair and abruptly sat down. “Well, it’s a fact, Winesap. Take my word for it.”

I nodded, pushing my tongue into my cheek. I could see why they felt as they did about him, those people at the party — why Agaard, in his troubles, could turn only to a stranger.

He was saying, almost a shout, “I’ve had experience with the happy, blessed people of the palace, if you follow my metaphor.”

“The lucky ones.”

“Exactly.” He looked at me fiercely, as if I were the cruellest, most unfeeling of the lucky, then glanced away. Yellow flames leaped up around the log he’d put on, though I’d have sworn, a moment earlier, that the fire was dead.

He swallowed a little wine, then said, feeling he’d gone too far, no doubt, relaxing a little by an act of will, bringing his foot out from under his chair, “Well you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I prefer the old-fashioned ideal of history. Hard-won facts, incontrovertible proofs.”

I nodded. The trouble with incontrovertible proofs I might have told him, is that they shut down conversation, inspire not mutual exploration through debate but scorn and attack. You prove that your man in his castle of logic and hard-won facts got some trivial detail wrong (I might mention the term psycho-history), and as his knights come fleeing in dismay to your side — blushing, stammering, hitting themselves for shame — you blast his elegant fortress to Kingdom Come.

“If history were done properly,” he said, “it would make us better men.”

I avoided his eyes.

“Men and women,” he said, clumsily correcting himself.

“We’re not in disagreement about that,” I said. I decided to let it rest there, a truce agreed upon by mutual misinterpretation. If he was trying to think of some new way to attack me, nothing came to him. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, I thought. I no longer cared; his opinion was no longer of interest. Let him tyrannize his students, his son. It wasn’t my sport.

He stared for a long time, unmoving, into the fire, his eyebrows jammed inward, eyes darting here and there. He too could see that we’d come to an impasse, a classic stalemate; let him break it if he could. Then it seemed to me that I heard something move, somewhere above us. When I glanced at him I saw that Agaard had heard it too, though he was careful not to turn or look up. I continued to listen and heard it again, perhaps the sound of a chair being dragged across a floor upstairs. In embarrassment I drew back my foot, noticing that I’d been tromping rhythmically not on the claw of the table leg but Agaard’s shoe. He cleared his throat and glanced at me — we both looked down — then turned his toe inward, out of my way.

Now we both sat motionless, the whole house utterly still, like the hush between heartbeats. The sound came again.

All at once Agaard said, “You haven’t asked about Freddy.”

“I thought I had,” I said. Our glances met and dropped again, two rams backing off. Quickly, I said, “I meant to. I’d be interested to hear.”

He put on a pained smile for a moment, then let it twist to unabashed woe and turned his face away to stare at the high, dark windows, no neighbor’s light anywhere, so far as I could see; then he whispered something and, snatching off his glasses, covered his eyes with one hand. I sat more erect, startled by his sudden emotion; I was half out of my chair. He sat rigid, regaining self-control, then lowered his hand and said sternly to the table between us — his hands relaxed, as if his body weren’t involved, his eyes squinting for sharper concentration—“He’s a sensitive boy. He writes poetry, in fact.” His laugh barked out: then instantly his face was serious again. “I don’t know if it’s poetry. Long things in prose, vaguely historical. He used to let me read it. Lately … I suppose I must have said the wrong things.”

“This writing he does,” I began, groping.

He shied away. “We used to send him to school, or have tutors in. He’s extremely bright. You might not think it, to look at him. Most people, one glance … Freddy’s problem, when it’s endocrinological, goes along with slow-wittedness. You see a boy like Freddy, you naturally assume … But in Freddy’s case it’s genetic. He’s smart as a whip and painfully sensitive. That’s why we keep him home.” He shook his head crossly, and his voice, when he spoke, was close to breaking. “You’ve no idea what it’s like out there, for a boy like mine — the nastiness, the torment not to mention the danger. Not that it’s so wonderful here, you understand.” He shot me a look. “I don’t fool myself. I was fifty when he was born. His mother was younger, of course. She was killed when he was nine — a highway accident.” He raised his hand abruptly, as if saluting the Führer. What the gesture meant I have no idea.

When he drew back his hand I leaned forward slightly, forehead lowered. “I don’t think you mentioned what’s wrong with him,” I said.

“No.” His pale lips jerked back. “No, not yet. I’m sure you’re curious!” He pressed his hands to his knees and leaned forward, about to stand up.

I looked down, puzzled at his suddenly turning on me again. “Remember, I came because you asked me, Professor.” Now both of us were rising — stiffly, formally.

“Yes, I know. Also for other reasons.”

I kept silent a moment. “The world’s not perfect,” I said at last.

“Yes. Not perfect,” he said. He pushed up his glasses and touched his eyelids with the index finger and thumb of one hand. He whispered something, wincing, arguing with his demons, then moved ahead of me, turning back to see that I followed, toward the door he’d gone through for the tea and then later the wine. It did lead, as I’d supposed, to the kitchen, a large, gray-walled room like the kitchen in a home for the aged or some hospital in the slums. The appliances — refrigerator, stove, washer-dryer — were thirty years old if a day. The pots on the stove were large, the kind used by restaurants.

He took me through another door that led to a pantry, scented with rat-poison and general decay, white discoloration like lichen on the walls, then down a high, narrow hallway leading to what had once been, apparently, the servants’ quarters, a section of small rooms that he now kept locked off — a nightlatch on the door, which he opened with a key from his small, cluttered ring. The ceilings were lower here, the rooms sparsely furnished, the wallpaper less gloomy — cheap and plain — a sitting room, bedrooms, a bathroom, a doorway that led, as I was soon to learn, to the narrow back stairs. At the first of the servants’ rooms I stopped in my tracks. Pieces of wallpaper hung down like stalactites, the windows were partly boarded up with plywood, and in the walls there were holes, as if someone had stood in the center of the room firing cannonballs. Bits of lath showed like dry, broken ribs; in one place even the flooring had been broken. I went to the window — a few of the windowpanes were intact, barred but not boarded — and I stood for a moment fingering my cooling pipe and looking out. Snow and desolation, dark trees, then nothing, a shifting wall of gray.

Professor Agaard stood with his head thrown forward, lips clamped together, his small hands clasped behind him. “Freddy was ten,” he said. “He’d been naughty, and to punish him we locked him in his room.” He gestured. “This room. He has another room now, upstairs. They’d told us at school he had terrible tantrums, but of course we had no idea; this was the first we ever saw of it. Not that we hadn’t seen signs, of course. … It was a hard time for him. Needless to say, they tried to force me to institutionalize him. He was at that time still a child. Not a ‘small child’—baa. But the teachers he’d have had there, and the creatures he’d have been locked up with, day after day! Idiots, crazy people …” He closed his eyes. “But the teachers above all. Those fools you talked with at the party last night, they’re risen saints by comparison!”

“Surely you’re just a little hard on them,” I said. I reached out, without thinking, and touched his arm. He stiffened as if in fear of me. “You should try to get to know them,” I said, drawing my hand back, “talk with them a little.”

“Talk with them!” he exploded. “Look there, Mr. Winesap!” He pointed to the window where I’d just stood looking out, and after a moment I realized that he meant me to notice the bars. I suppose, having noticed them earlier, I was not as impressed as he’d hoped I’d be. He turned toward the door to the back stairs and pointed. “And look there!” On the door there were three heavy locks. I remembered the big iron locks I’d seen on the front door and nodded, suspending judgment. “Talk with them, you say?” he yelped. “Shall I leave that poor odd child in the care of the cleaning girl — supposing I could get a cleaning girl? Is that what you suggest? You look at me harshly!” His scornful smile twitched briefly, then failed, sagged toward panic. “You’ve misunderstood. It was Freddy who put those bars on the windows and locks on the doors, not I!” He jerked his head back and woefully laughed.

I squinted, fingering my pipe, trying to understand. “Are they frequent, these tantrums?”

He looked puzzled, then annoyed, as he would at a dull, persistent student. “He hasn’t had a tantrum in years.” He peered into my face as if wondering at the depth of my stupidity. “Come,” he said at last, “come up and meet him.”

To my surprise, the latches on the door to the stairway were not locked. As Agaard started up the steep narrow steps ahead of me, I asked, “Are you saying he locks people out, that is, locks himself in?”

“That’s what he does all right!”

I hesitated, feeling duped, trifled with. But I said, still moving cautiously, “I can see that would be worrisome. Do you know what sets him off?”

He glanced back guiltily. “Anything! Everything! A knock at the door, a truck in the driveway — my telling him to turn off his light—”

“You mean if no one bothers him—”

“Exactly!” he exclaimed. He’d reached the top of the stairs now. He stood catching his breath, his fist clenching the railing. “Leave him to his miserable little paradise of books, his cave of old maps and print”—he gestured with his left hand, strangely childlike, exactly as if the spirit of a child had taken possession of him—“leave him alone and he’s happy as a clam! But rouse him out of it — even let him imagine you’re about to rouse him out of it — he begins to lock things. Seals himself off. Not in bad humor! All very quiet and methodical. And he’ll open them again if you insist — though Lord knows he doesn’t like it! You’ll say I’ve spoiled him, but believe me, it’s more complex than that. I don’t mean I’m not to blame — how could any child grow up normal, living with an odd duck like me? In any case—” He put his hand on the top of his head, apparently hunting for the thread he’d lost. He said, “You see, Professor Winesap, he’s made a world for himself — and why not? The outside world frightens him — not that he shows it much: simply gets his locks out, maybe prays a little, or buries himself in his books.”

“Prays?” I said.

Agaard sighed, looking down at the old worn carpet between us. “When he was small we had a woman who took care of him, a Mrs. Knudsen, one of those hellfire fundamentalists. I’m afraid she put the fear of the Lord into him. The hellfire part’s behind him now — we’re Presbyterians. But he still gets down on his knees sometimes and …” He gestured vaguely. “He was very fond of her — for good reason. She was as kind as she knew how to be, a far cry better than the people who got him later — the school he went to, the hospitals—”

“Surely the university hospital—” I suggested.

“Worse than the snakepits!” He laughed angrily and began again to make his way down the hallway. It was long and windowless, lit by three bare bulbs. He touched the wall with the fingertips of his right hand as he walked. “He was happy there at first, but then he began to break things. They took a dislike to him — understandably, I suppose. He was difficult at the time, didn’t speak much English. …”

“You’ve tried private psychiatrists?”

“Psychiatrists,” he hissed, half turning. “You use the plural, Mr. Winesap. I see you know about psychiatrists.”

“Just the same—” I began. With a part of my mind I was musing on his various uses of my name: “Winesap,” as to a student; “Mr. Winesap,” as to an underling; “Professor,” never without a sneer.

“It’s gotten out of hand,” he was saying when I returned my attention to him. “Utterly out of hand.”

“I can see that,” I said — not so much a lie as a stalling action.

He raised his left arm, a gesture again oddly child-like, or puppet-like, pointing nowhere. He spoke more softly now, hurriedly; we were apparently close to Freddy’s room. “As I’ve said, I think, he reads day and night. There are very few books in this house he hasn’t read, and of course I bring him whatever he wants from the library. I act as his teacher — it’s been a great pleasure, in many ways. I don’t mean to sound like a boastful father, but …” He scowled, then changed direction. “As I mentioned, I think, for some time now — more than a year, close to two years — he’s been working on a book of his own.”

“Interesting,” I said, glancing down the hallway in the direction we’d been heading. “A book about—”

“As I told you, I haven’t seen it.”

I nodded, apologetic and baffled. Something rubbed against my leg and I looked down. The cat, Posey, had found the open stairway door and come up. I looked again at Agaard. “He’s told you nothing about it?” I asked. “That is, he sees no one in the world but you, and for two years he’s been working on a book, and in all that time—”

“Not a word,” the professor said. He crinkled up his lips, his eyebrows jammed together again.

“When you take him his supper,” I said, “or sit in the same room reading, does he—”

“Never,” he snapped. “Not a word, not a hint!”

I nodded, then started down the hall again as if I knew where I was going — perhaps I did, in fact, following the cat — but again the professor caught my arm.

“One other thing,” he said, “he’s read your books.” He tipped his head up, as well as he could, given the stiffness. “He’s a kind of ‘fan.’”

I took my pipe from my pocket, tamped the tobacco, and lit it. When I’d taken a few puffs, I stepped forward abruptly, reached down, and picked up Posey. I held her against my chest with one hand. Professor Agaard looked at me; then we continued along the hall. At the end he bent forward to knock on a door, waited a moment, then called, “Freddy? Unlock your door, Freddy!”

The boy pretended not to hear, though we knew he had to.

“Freddy?” Agaard called. “We’ve got company, son!”

My heart jerked, hearing him say “son.” I’d never used that word on Jack Jr.; it hadn’t been the way we, as they say, “reached out.” The way Agaard used it, it was like a blind man casting a net over the side of what might or might not be a ship. The boy, I was sure, couldn’t help but hear it as I did. How could he not answer?

There was a sound then; some heavy movement. The cat craned her neck. A lock on the door clicked, a dead-bolt slid open, a chain-latch scraped, and at last a startling voice said, “Wait a minute, Dad. I’m not dressed.” The voice was sweet, like a young singers. Agaard saw my surprise but made no comment.

We stood listening and heard him move away across the room; then, softly, the professor pushed open the door, stepped in, and gestured for me to follow. I obeyed, stroking the cat as I did so, the pipe clenched hard between my teeth.

“Freddy?” the professor called again.

The cat tried to jump. I held onto her. It was a large room, plain and clean-swept as a forest floor, bookshelves in rigorous order on every side; against one wall, half blocking the window, an oversized, specially made desk, very plain, with two neat locks on it, and a great sturdy chair to match. Around the chairlegs there were smooth iron bands. The giant furniture threw everything else in the room awry, what little there was — a few pictures on the white walls, framed pen and ink drawings of viking ships, carefully and elegantly done in a slightly old-mannish hand, rendered as if for an expensive picture book. They were signed “F.A.” It came to me only somewhat later — perhaps because they seemed professional and seemed to have been professionally framed — that the pictures were by Agaard’s son. On the prow of one of the viking ships a king in a horn-helmet stood looking thoughtfully at a hawk on his wrist. Agaard, when he saw me looking at it, looked away.

The room was so spare one could see everything at a glance: a closet door with a lock on it, a long table with five perfect constructions — three ships, two dragons — nothing else on the table but a neat stack of stainless-steel razor blades. What defined all the rest, of course, was that immense desk and chair. They made it seem that the room itself was from a picture book, or better yet, a stage-set, for across one end hung a dark green curtain. Beyond that, presumably, the professor’s son crouched, hiding. My gaze stopped and froze on an enormous bare foot that protruded, unbeknownst to its owner, no doubt, from behind the curtain. It was the largest human foot I’d ever seen or imagined; if the rest of the body was proportionate, the creature must stand eight feet tall or more. But it wasn’t just the size of the foot that made my heart race. The thing was visibly unhealthy, bluish gray with red blush-spots; bad circulation, lack of exercise. How the poor creature had gotten to this state God only knew, or God and Agaard. “Out of hand,” the old man had said. I accidentally mumbled the words aloud, causing the professor to glance at me, then look away.

“Freddy,” he called, “remember I told you Mr. Winesap might visit us? Well, he’s here. I’ve brought him to see you.” There was a pause. “Freddy?” Agaard glanced at me, then moved over to the curtain to poke his head in and talk with his son. Though he talked as loudly as ever, the heavy curtain muffled the sound; I caught only one phrase from Agaard: “I want you to.” Freddy answered with only a polite syllable or two, his voice low, so that I couldn’t catch the words. I continued to look around. There was a typewriter on the desk, spotlessly clean, a very old electric with a thick gray cord, a cord heavy enough, one would have thought, for a welding machine. Beside the desk stood a large wooden box, no doubt a wastepaper basket, with a wooden cover, locked.

The professor drew his head back outside the curtain now and, whether or not with his son’s permission, reached up and snatched the curtain open. The look on the professor’s face was like mingled anger, fear, and triumph. There before us, half-turned away, sat a monstrous fat blushing baby of a youth, his monkish robe unbuttoned, his lower parts carefully covered with a blanket. All around him, neatly stacked, lay papers and innumerable books, some closed, some open, arranged about him in a perfect fan. The skin of his face and arms and chest was pink-splotched, shiny. He was as big as some farmer’s prize bull at the fair, big as a rhinoceros, a small elephant. I exaggerate grossly, but such was my impression that first instant.

The brute effect of encountering him there — suddenly shown forth as the curtain gasped on its old metal rings — was, if anything, greater than my images suggest. His eyes, when he turned to glance at me, just perceptibly nodding, were red-rimmed, huge behind the gold-rimmed glasses, his childish pink lips were drawn back from his teeth in what I recognized only after an instant as a sheepish smile. His expression was pitifully eager, yet at the same time distrustful, alarmed, not unlike his father’s when he’d met me at the door.

One side of the giant’s upper lip was slightly lifted, delicately trembling with what might have been disgust — perhaps disgust aimed at himself. He pretty well knew, no doubt, what a strange sight he was, there in his cell. His pallet was a king-sized mattress with a steel-gray blanket over it, behind it a stern brass lamp on a low wooden table buried in carefully stacked books. From a string tacked to the ceiling above his head hung a red paper-and-balsawood dragon with extended wings and a queer thick belly.

“Freddy doesn’t make paper dragons anymore,” Agaard said proudly, as if Freddy weren’t there.

The giants blue eyes stared straight at me for a moment, the lashes blond, like his frail beginning of a moustache; then he began to move — all of him at once, it seemed — his arms rising as if lifted by some external force, the fat, dainty hands clenching a book as if to hurl the thing in rage. But he didn’t hurl it — had never intended to, I saw — only drew the heavy white arms and the book up nearer, as if to dismiss us, free us to go back to our presumably more interesting adult pursuits, and bent closer to the page. The cat, clamped against my chest, struggled.

“I’ve brought you a friend,” Professor Agaard said, moving closer to the boy, pretending he thought Freddy hadn’t heard. “Mr. Winesap, this is Freddy.”

With a jerk of my free hand I snatched my pipe from my mouth. “How do you do?”

Freddy sat motionless, not breathing, it seemed, his face and neck red, his eyes still eager, the rest of his face guarded. Fat bulged everywhere, blue-shadowed. The whole rounded body was as sickly as the foot, surely too heavy and weak to stand up, I thought; he couldn’t have stood anyway in this low-ceilinged room. I felt a flash of anger at the professor beside me — the idea that a father could allow this to happen to his son! — but I struggled to quell it. I knew, I told myself, nothing whatever of how it had happened, for all the father’s talk.

I remembered the cat I’d been clutching all this time, and carefully lifted her from my bosom and set her down on the mattress like an offering. She ran around beside him and stood there, back humped, just out of Freddy’s reach.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to Mr. Winesap, Freddy?” Agaard asked.

“Good afternoon,” Freddy brought out, looking down, almost a bow.

“I’m glad to meet you,” I said heartily, and thought of reaching out for his hand, but then — from cowardice or fear of embarrassing him further — did nothing.

“Well, so how are things, son?” Agaard said.

The giant boy glanced at his book as if eager to get back to it, then shrugged, slightly smiling.

“Did you notice it’s snowing out?” Agaard said.

I stood puffing at my pipe, studying the bulging red dragon above Freddy’s head until he glanced up at me; then I pointed with my pipestem. “Interesting dragon.’” I said. “Is it Chinese?”

He half nodded. “French.” He briefly grinned.

Agaard laughed, a loud bark that nearly blew his nose. “It looks French!” he said. “It looks like it ate too much!”

The giant half grinned again, uncertain whether to be insulted. He looked at the back of his left hand discovering and inspecting a scab. “That’s the way the pictures were,” he said.

For a moment after that it seemed that none of us could think of anything to say. Then, bending forward — I think I saw it coming an instant before it came — Professor Agaard said sociably, his voice too loud, “I’ve told Professor Winesap about your writing Freddy.” He turned his head to me, a queerly mechanical movement, and urgently smiled.

I stared, nonplussed. Freddy briefly raised his eyes to mine, more alarmed than before.

Any fool could see that he’d heard and understood, that he was going through twenty emotions at once — trying to hide his confusion by turning his head and shoulders slowly and reaching out to touch the cat between the ears with two fingers, the faintest suggestion of a petting motion — but Agaard said, “Did you hear what I said, Freddy? I told him about your book!”

He gave me no choice. I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I said, “yes, your father tells me you’ve been writing for some time now, Freddy!” I clenched my pipe in my right fist and poked at the dottle busily with various fingers, first one then another, of my left hand. “It’s interesting — very interesting — that you’re writing a book, Freddy! Fascinating!” He sat with his head bowed, looking intently at the scab on his hand. It unnerved me not to be able to see his expression. I was tempted to squat, get down level with his eyes, but I stayed as I was and continued heartily, trying to make it all sound friendly and normal, though my voice in my own ears rang false, theatrical, someone else’s voice entirely: “It’s not easy writing books! You know, that’s the one place where all human beings are equal, I’ve often thought. It’s an amazing thing when you think about it, Freddy! Whatever we may seem to be — humpbacked, tall or short, pale or ruddy, never mind”—I briefly interrupted myself, puffing at my pipe, lighting it—“whatever we may be in other ways, when we pick up that pencil we’re all in the same boat.” I looked for a place to throw the extinguished match, then put it in my pocket. “If there’s one human nature, that’s where we find it and take part in it,” I said, “in carefully written books. Not just any books, mind you. Careful books! Books we’ve taken time on! You’ve been working on yours for quite a while, I understand.” I glanced at his father, who was nodding, encouraging me, profoundly agreeing. Freddy said nothing. “You must excuse me if I sound as if I’m lecturing you, Freddy. I don’t mean to, not at all!” I laughed, turning away a little, looking again at his pictures. “You must think of it from my side, Freddy — think of my astonishment, meeting your father here and hearing what you’ve done. It’s a very interesting solution, that’s what I mean. Here you are, locked off from the world, in a way. …” I glanced at him; he was still looking down. “I mean, well, the message-in-the-bottle kind of thing, some such business — but the finest kind of message a mortal man can send. A man may say anything when he’s just talking, you know, but when he’s writing he has time to think it over and re-do it until it’s right, send a message worth hearing! In a thousand years …” I moved to the pictures on the farther wall, hoping to seem to him less threatening. “When your father mentioned that you were writing a book, I was interested — fascinated — as a fellow writer. It’s a lonely occupation, as everyone knows — which may be why we writers have such a feeling of, you know, community. I’m sure you understand! What I mean, mm, Freddy—” I turned to look at him, self-conscious by now as he was. “Freddy, if you should ever want to show me what you’ve written, don’t hesitate!” I said. “You can be sure I’ll be interested! We’ll all be!” I searched my wits for something more to say. I felt vile, weak in the knees, though every word I’d said was, in intent at least, true. I puffed at my pipe, clinging to it with both hands.

Freddy went on looking at the scab. Mentally, he backed away from us, securely locked some door.

“You hear that, Freddy?” Professor Agaard piped. “Jack Winesap would like to read your book!” When the boy said nothing, Agaard said, “Wouldn’t you like that? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

After a moment Freddy said, almost too quietly us to hear, “You don’t know I’ve got a book.”

Agaard said nothing — stiffened a little, possibly; slightly paled.

I looked from one of them to the other. “Come, come, Freddy,” I cajoled, “your father’s proud of you! I know how he feels; I’ve got a son myself”

Freddy did not look up. He said very softly, “He doesn’t know if I’ve written a book or not.” He glanced at me and smiled, faintly apologetic but standing his ground. His face for the first time struck me not really a child’s face after all, more adult than his fathers. He slid his eyes toward Agaard. “It’s not that I want to hurt your feelings.”

“Ha!” Agaard said. He spoke loudly, but perhaps only to some voice inside his head.

I lit the pipe and half turned away from the boy as if to leave. He looked back at me for an instant, as I’d known he would. “You’re right,” I said, “your own business is your own business. But isn’t it odd not letting anyone see it?” Somewhat mechanically, like a bad actor, I held my hand out toward him, as if to show him, as you would a dog, that I was friendly. The gesture embarrassed me as soon as I saw it for what it was; but I had no power to take it back.

“It’s just a book,” the giant said.

“There!” Agaard said, turning to me gleefully. “It exists! He’s admitted it!”

I stared at him, then turned and crossed stiffly to the door. Before stepping out into the hall I turned again and said, “I’m glad to have met you, Freddy. Good luck to you — all the luck in the world!”

“Yes sir,” he said. “Thank you.” It surprised me that he spoke so serenely, accepting it so easily — made me wonder if perhaps I’d gotten closer than I’d imagined. I left, however, having committed myself. After a moment Professor Agaard popped out behind me.

“Well, what do you think?” he said earnestly, much too soon to be out of earshot.

“Very sharp boy,” I said at once, slightly slowing my step. “Those constructions he makes are magnificent.”

“Oh yes, those,” Agaard said.

“And so are the drawings. If his talent as a writer comes anywhere near those other talents—”

Agaard glanced at me, puzzled, perhaps impatient. “I could show you some of the things he wrote when he was younger,” he said.

“Oh no — no thank you!” I said rather loudly. “I wouldn’t want to look at them without Freddy’s permission!”

Poor Agaard was puzzled to speechlessness. We descended the back stairs in silence.

I MOVED AROUND the kitchen restlessly as the old man, scooting back and forth, bending and straightening, put on supper. At one point, abruptly pausing with my back to him, I slipped my pipe into my pocket, thinking of claiming I’d left it upstairs in Freddy’s room, giving myself a chance to go back up and talk with him alone. But what would I say? That he ought to get out more, take better care of himself, guard against his father’s distrustfulness?The stress of the situation made the pipe trick impossible. To think the thing through, get up my nerve to try it if it seemed right, I needed the pipe in my mouth. I got it out again loaded it, and lit it.

Agaard was peeling the plastic wrap off a great package of chicken legs. “I hope you like chicken, Winesap,” he said crossly. He’d been thinking, had perhaps figured out at last what I’d done to him upstairs.

I nodded and gestured absently. “Yes, fine,” I said.

“That’s about all we eat around here, chicken and fish and vast quantities of spaghetti. Giants are expensive.” He laughed.

“I imagine,” I said. I remembered suddenly that I had my paper on Jack and the Beanstalk in my bag in the living-room. I knew intuitively the instant I thought of it that it was the perfect gift for the boy upstairs, though it took me a minute or two to convince myself that I was right. It was true that it had a giant in it, but it had nothing to do with giantism, only with the fear of the small and weak in relation to the large and powerful, first in the family, then in the Welsh-English political situation; it had to do with comedy and tyranny, how the joking Welsh Jack-tales made it possible to slip around the mighty political parent unharmed. In a word, it reversed the situation of Agaard and his son — made Agaard the flesh-eating giant, if you will. Perhaps it would make me a villainous guest, at very least ungrateful, giving that paper to Agaard’s son; but it was Agaard who’d invited me, presumably to help in whatever way I could, and presumably the decision as to what would be best was mine. I excused myself and went to the front room for the paper. I hesitated for a moment, drawing it out of my bag. It was the paper I’d been intending to read in Chicago but never mind, I would figure something out — maybe stand there telling jokes, or have a dialogue with the audience. Never mind.

Back in the kitchen, now filled with the smells of squash, potato, and chicken cooking, I said, “I’ve got a present here for Freddy. You don’t suppose there’d be any harm in my taking it up to him?”

“I’ll take it,” Agaard said. “I’ve got to take him his supper.”

“I’d just as soon take it myself, actually,” I said, “though of course if you think—”

“What is it?” Agaard said. He spoke into the oven, where he was bent over, stiffly and awkwardly spooning something onto the chicken.

“Oh, something I wrote,” I said, “a little trifle.”

Agaard thought about it. Perhaps he guessed what it was that I meant to do. But he said nothing. I took his silence for consent and stepped through the back rooms — he’d left them unlocked — and up the back stairs, moving along grimly, left-foot, right-foot, like a man on a mission he does not entirely approve of. At Freddy’s door I paused, listening for a moment, then knocked.

“Yes?” the boy said. He spoke from not far beyond the door.

“Freddy,” I said to the doorknob, “it’s Professor Winesap. I’ve brought you something.”

There was a silence while — frantically, I imagine — he tried to make out what to do. At last he said, “Just a minute,” and I heard him coming nearer. One by one, slowly, as if reluctantly, he undid the locks. There was another brief pause; then the doorknob turned and the door swung inward. There he stood, bent over, too tall for the room by a foot or more. He was wearing pressed trousers and a clean white shirt. It crossed my mind that he’d been thinking of coming downstairs; but no, I decided, he’d merely prepared himself in case we should come at him again.

I held out my sheaf of Xeroxed pages. “I brought you this,” I said. “It’s the paper I read the other night at the university. Since you weren’t able to be there—” I smiled and tipped my head, trying to show him I was harmless.

He stared at me intently, then abruptly looked down at the paper I held out, and blushed.

“It’s for you,” I said, and gave the paper a little shake.

“Thank you,” he said after a moment, and slowly raised his hand to take it.

“When your father mentioned that you’ve read some of my work,” I said, widening my smile, “it occurred to me that maybe this would interest you. As I said before, we writers have to stick together!” I gave a laugh.

“Thank you,” he said cautiously. Then, after a moment: “Did you want to come in?”

Given the way he asked it, I had no choice but to decline, “I’m helping your father with supper,” I said, “but thank you for the kind invitation.”

He nodded, apparently deciding against pointing out that he had not, in fact, invited me in.

“Well, so long,” I said. I cocked my head like a bluejay and gave a foolish little wave.

He seemed to study the gesture, then glanced at my face as if to see if I’d intended the wave to be the childish, self-conscious thing it was. When he saw that I hadn’t, he smiled, then tried to hide it, nodding, looking at the paper, then closing the door.

You meddling fool, Winesap! I thought. With a prickling of the scalp I realized that I’d spoken it aloud. Blood stung my cheeks, embarrassment like a child’s. I calmed myself. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

NEVER MIND,” the professor said testily as we poked at our meal, sitting at the kitchen table. It seemed to please him that I’d failed. He seemed to have shrunk, and grown ten years older, but also he seemed downright delighted with himself, as if he’d discharged some painful responsibility — justified himself and in the same gesture put the guilt on me. We were neither of us ourselves by now, hardly human in fact, prickly and tyrannic as those shadowy powers of the most primitive religions. So much for the noble evolution of the mind!

“That boy needs medical help — immediately,” I said — petulant, vindictive. “At the very least get him a physical checkup. It’s not good, letting him withdraw like that. He’ll get peculiar.”

“Doctors!” Agaard said scornfully, but he was thinking about it. “You’re saying it’s too late — is that it?”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” I said. “It’s true, he doesn’t care to have his privacy invaded. Sooner or later he’s got to get out into the world, you know. You know what Plato says—”

Agaard snorted. “Like his father, you mean. If I don’t act soon, he’ll be as bad as his father.”

I said nothing.

After we’d eaten, he put bread, squash, potatoes, and four large pieces of chicken on an aluminum-foil cooking pan and, holding it in both hands, carried it upstairs. When he came down again, we finished the wine, practically in silence, each of us angry and embarrassed in his own way. He snarled from time to time about this or that, his vituperation striking out in all directions as he tried to make peace by thinking up enemies we both might hate; but it was a paltry effort, the comic bad temper of a Punch and Judy show, and I refused to go along.

At last he took me upstairs, to the front of the house, some distance from where Freddy was, and showed me to my room. The bed had clean sheets and blankets, and someone had dusted, not well. I realized that Agaard had planned from the beginning that I should stay the night. I smiled, rueful, remembering he’d invited me to come around three. The old man had given himself plenty of time to work up his nerve. I had to admire him for the care with which he’d cornered himself — and ultimately saved himself, since now it was all my fault. No question about it, he had an eye for strategy. All those old-fashioned hard-evidence histories of war and intrigue.

Outside the room, wind was howling through the pines.

As he was about to go out the door I said, giving the line one last little tug, “Nobody can live without some kind of contact with the world, Professor.”

He raised one hand, meaning to interrupt, then changed his mind, too weary of me to argue.

I said, “If you keep trying to manage this alone, there’s no telling where it will end. Surely you’ve considered that yourself. Surely it’s the reason you spoke to me last night. You wanted me to come here and judge.” I looked at his forehead, not his eyes, my hands in my pockets.

He stood very still, a bent, black-suited old crow, looking at his claw on the doorknob. At last he said “It’s a wonderful feeling, righteousness. I envy you.”

I stiffened. “That’s hardly fair, I think.”

He thought about it, crunching his dentures. “At any rate, as you’ve said yourself, it was I that lured you here. I get part of the credit.” He turned his torso rolling his magnified eyes in my direction.

“He still needs a doctor,” I said sharply.

“Yes, yes.” He gave an impatient little wave. “You win, Professor agree.”

“It’s surely not a matter—” I began, but he cut me off.

“You’ve persuaded me, Professor!”

We both stood motionless, in stalemate again. He looked down at the hand on the doorknob, staring at it hard. His voice was cool and level: “You say he must be brought out into the world. Let me tell you what that means. When he was a boy of six he was already unusual. Every single day, week in, week out, he’d come home crying. One forgets what merciless creatures people are. Teachers spanked him to prove they weren’t afraid of him. I saw it; they didn’t fool me! And don’t think a child doesn’t notice such things! In the end he hurt someone — not badly, as luck would have it. A terrible little man. A gym instructor.” His tone became ironic. “I suppose that’s when I myself began to be afraid of him.”

I nodded, not certain what was expected. As a kind of stall, I loosened my tie and undid the top button of my shirt. Then I stood once more with my hands in my pockets. I must try not to see it as a fight with Sven Agaard, even if, in a way, it was — historian against historian contending for control of the past. Perhaps I could talk to the boy tomorrow. I should sleep, get it all in perspective, quiet my nerves. I knew how Freddy felt, that absolute safety of books. Living all alone with a man like his father … I said, pretending to soften a little, “It may not be as bad as it seems, Professor. We’re too close to it right now. A good psychiatrist might settle the whole thing in no time. The boy loves books, paper dragons. … All right, why not? He needs to adjust to a few simple chores — proper eating, exercise—,” I held out my hands like a lawyer to a sympathetic jury. My voice, against my wish, became as ironic as Agaard’s. “He can still have ‘the sweet, solitary life’ he’s gotten used to. A good psychiatrist will convince him.”

“Yes, no doubt,” Agaard said.

Perhaps that instant we were closer to agreement than he imagined. I was thinking of the glittering lights and the roar of the party last night, the blazing faces as we talked nonsense about the big-foot, honing definitions like childish medieval philosophers, slapping each other’s shoulders, laughing at jokes only an ape would think, in the privacy of his tree, to be amusing. We were happy as children, nymphs and satyrs of the Golden Age; yet if it was joy — and it was — it was a fraudulent and ultimately brutal joy: witness the hostility of all those free spirits to an authentic though uncivil intellectual like Agaard; witness the pandering and falsehood of the young man who’d driven me home. In the end, who’d trade a golden imaginary world, Freddy’s sad paradise, for such foolishness as that?

For an instant a picture came into my mind. I imagined Freddy Agaard at the same glittering party of university historians — or pseudo-historians — his head brushing sparks off the ceiling, his huge face enraged, his wide hands reaching out to seize people, smash them against walls. I blinked, driving it away. It was vivid, but it was nonsense. I saw Freddy Agaard as I’d seen him an hour ago, flushed and sweating in his walled, locked garden of books, and I winced, shaking my head. No wonder he locked doors. Even if he were strong, he’d be right to hide. Why leave that “green shade,” as the poet calls it, for the common, mindless glare? Again, involuntarily, I winced and shook my head. I was sickened by the injustice of things, the doom snapped on him by no one, for no reason, a pairing of genes carried down from the days when, as we read in the Bible, giants walked the earth. But there was nothing I could do. He had cause enough to dislike us, I was ready to admit; cause enough to shrink from us, shudder with rage at our invasions of his sacred grove or sunless cave.

“Well,” Agaard said, “good-night, Professor.”

I nodded, my head still adrift in mournful images. Then, rousing myself, I said, “Yes. Good-night.”

He left.

Knowing there was nothing I could do, no way to alter what I’d already done — much less what Agaard had done before me — no recourse or higher appeal for any of us — I undressed, folded my suit, shirt, socks, and underwear over the chair beside the bed, glanced one last time around the large, dusty room, turned off the light, and crawled under the covers. Still furious at Agaard and conscious of his fury at my failure to help, I closed my eyes. Almost immediately, the house creaked softly, weighed anchor, and began to drift.

WHAT IT WAS that wakened me I had no idea, but suddenly I found myself wide awake, listening. The room was freezing cold, my breath made steam. Moonlight fell over the bedroom door, slanting from corner to corner across the room from the window to my left — pale, living light, moving on the panelling as if projected through water flecked with fish. Perhaps snow was still falling — I couldn’t see from where I sat — but falling softly now, spiraling downward untouched by wind. I could hear it, that unearthly silence of a world deep in white. Every line on the wallpaper — gold and white flowers and birds on a field of blue, I believed, though at the moment everything was a dull, mystic gray — every line of the wallpaper, every crack and flame-image of grain on the door, every hint of a bruise on the glass-knobbed dresser, stood out distinctly. I reached for the chain on the bedside lamp and pulled it. Nothing happened. The lines were down, no doubt. It wasn’t surprising, but the fact that the lamp wouldn’t work made my fear leap more brightly. I pressed one fist to my chest and held my breath. It seemed not to help.

Still there was no sound. I sat rigid, breathing carefully in and out, waiting.

Then I did hear something, a kind of creaking or scraping noise, that might have risen from under the ground or inside me, a sound I strained to identify — the swing of a shutter on some window in the servants’ quarters, the sag of a beam under the weight of snow — anything and everything but what I knew it was: the sound of heavy, quiet footsteps. “Nonsense,” I whispered. I remembered how my father would look up smiling in the haylot when he saw me coming cautiously through the twilight with his supper — I was five or six — and how he’d cry out “Applejack!” his name for me then, then and later in fact: to the finish the old man never changed his mind about anything; and he’d open his arms to me, huge, thick farmer-arms, power itself. He’d been dead for ten years now. I heard another sound, the sigh of another floorboard as the giants foot weighed on it. It’s only Freddy, I thought, struggling to conjure life’s plainness back, the intoxicating rough-hewn serenity of childhood apple crates, cellar doors. But if the boy wasn’t dangerous, why was he coming now, in darkness and stealth, in the middle of the night?

It seemed to me that I was thinking as clearly as old Agaard when he plotted out a book, thinking both quickly and with masterful control and precision; I was intellect itself, weighing the possibility of blocking the door with the dresser and bed, surveying the room for weapons — the elegant old hat-rack, the slipper chairs. I had no inkling that my mind was adrift until I found myself whispering, “Concentrate! Wake up!” I could hear him outside the door now, breathing heavily and slowly.

The doorknob turned; the door cracked open a few inches and quietly swung wide. After a moment his head came down under the lintel, his eyes closed to slits, his cheeks as pale as alabaster, glistening. He was wearing vast, striped pajamas under the monkish robe I’d seen before. He struggled with the door, too low and narrow for him, and at last, silently, he bent down on one knee, and I made out that he was pushing something toward me through the moonlight, some inert gift or offering, the object wobbling in the frail, flecked light, moving in at me as far as his enormous arm would reach. He lowered the object and dropped it on the floor. It struck the carpet with a thump. Slowly, he drew back his hand. After that he rose, stood motionless a moment, then, without a sound, drew the door shut. I heard floorboards creak. He seemed to move more lightly now, as if it had been a great weight he’d carried, that gift he’d brought, the object lying there solemn in the moonlight, mysteriously still and sufficient on the dusty gray carpet — Freddy’s book.