Letting Go

1

He had uncles who had failed. He had a father who had failed too, but that was in the world of commerce. Mr. Herz bought and sold with little talent and saved where interest amounted to pennies; when he finally emerged from his fourth failure — this last in frozen foods — he had nothing to show for himself save a sinus condition and holy dread of heart failure. He took to melting Vicks in a spoon under his nose and arranged for a small bank loan so as to purchase, for his heart’s ease, a BarcaLounger; and then he settled down to wait for the end. Still, there is a hierarchy of failures; better bankruptcy than tension in the kitchen and in the bed. There was a man’s home life to judge him by. Uncle Asher might have clear nasal passages but he had a ruined life: he had never married. Up close you could see and smell his single condition — suits swollen at the knee, heels a disgrace, and as far as anyone could tell, only one tie to his name. His sister, who was Paul Herz’s mother, said that from Asher’s smell alone she didn’t even have to guess what shape his linens were in. One foul snowy evening she had seen her baby brother emerge from Riker’s with a toothpick in his mouth. Riker’s! For an Asher! She had cried herself to sleep for a week.

Asher had begun life a genius, having begun to play Mozart at just about the same age Mozart had begun to play Mozart. At sixteen he had received free tuition to pose life models at the Art Students League; he was allowed to touch and arrange their bare limbs, so advanced for his years was his sense of grace. When he brought home his charcoal drawings they were tacked up in the living room. “You don’t even think dirty when you look at such pictures,” Asher’s mother had reassured the neighbors. “Look how artistic he makes those fat girls.” A piano was brought into the house for Asher; later a violin and a cello. He spent a summer in the Louvre, copying; he did his first commissioned portrait at eighteen — the captain of the Mauritania! But that captain was long dead, and other captains had come and gone, and in the meantime no girl had married Asher. Didn’t he know girls were soft? asked Paul’s father. Didn’t he know they were nice to hold? Had he never kissed one? Was he a— Absolutely not! He wasn’t a good mixer, that’s all. He was just a little scholarly.

What his sister and brother-in-law decided was that it was necessary to put a young lady in Asher’s path. They invited him to dinner, and they invited a secretary from Mr. Herz’s office; they invited school teachers, colleagues of Mrs. Herz. Once they tried a distant cousin who was in town, and once even — for who knows what goes on in the head of an artist — once they even tried (all the dead should rest in peace!) a shikse, but a girl who hung around with Jews. They turned on the radio but Asher wouldn’t dance. They brought out the cards but Asher wouldn’t play. How could you put a girl in this fellow’s path — he had no path! Though it brought tears to his sister’s eyes and even a kind of tsk-tsk compassion to his brother-in-law’s tongue, Asher’s ruination was nevertheless of his own doing.

The other flop was Uncle Jerry. He had married, but only for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century with a woman and then he divorces her. So who could feel sorry for him? A beautiful twelve-room house in Mt. Kisco with grass all around and a pine-paneled basement; four beautiful daughters with beautiful builds — one married, two in college, and the fourth, Claire, the little shaifele, still in high school; and for a wife, a wonderful woman, a princess, a queen. What if she weighed 180 pounds? Did he expect that to change? Could he roll her out twenty-five years after the wedding night because she was still making the same dent in the mattress now as then? Who could feel any sorrow for him! Why, why did he do it? Did he have some tootsie on the side? No, no — it was his what-do-you-call-it, his psychonanalysis! His psychoanalyst made him do it. That son of a bitch. What did that guy think life was, easy? A bowl of cherries? You love your wife, you don’t love her; you fondle her, you can’t stand to touch her — that happens! Does that mean you destroy a family? When a father dies it’s a catastrophe. Here’s a man who walks out!

Two years after he had walked out, Jerry married a twenty-seven-year-old, just the type everybody had been looking for for Asher for years. “What’s he doing? Another big woman — what’s the matter with him? A twenty-seven-year-old — what’s he thinking about? When she’s forty, when she’s thirty-five even … What kind of business is this!”

“Then call him, Leonard. Stop getting upset and call him. Talk to him. He’s your brother.”

“It’s his life. Let him ruin it. Would he call me? If I had a seizure tomorrow, would he so much as lift the phone off the hook?”

“Your heart is perfectly all right. The doctor listened to it. He checked everything. They have graphs, Leonard, that show. You’ve got a nice even line. Don’t get overexcited because you’ll give yourself trouble.”

“I’m not overexcited. I’m practically lying down. He could marry a ten-year-old and I wouldn’t turn a pinky. I told him when he married Selma, didn’t I? Jerry, you’re wet behind the ears. Jerry, you never even had a woman yet. Jerry, give yourself a chance. Jerry this, Jerry that, Jerry, she’s a very big girl, Jerry — is that what you want? And now this one, also a horse. Why doesn’t he at least call me, ask my advice. Say to me, Lenny, what do you think — Lenny, does this seem to you like I’m doing a sensible thing? No, him, he’s smarter than the rest of the world.”

Three weeks later (“to the day” as it later came to be reported) the girl telephoned. “He left! Your brother left! He walked out! What did I do? What will I do? All this new silverware,” she cried. “Please come somebody. Help me!”

“Leonard, where are you going in your slippers?”

“I’m going! What — is he crazy? Is he a crackpot?”

“Leonard, don’t get involved now.”

“I am involved. The telephone rings, this girl is hysterical, I’m involved. She’s a baby — she’ll do something insane. How do I know?”

When Mr. Herz went out the door his wife grew hysterical herself. She knelt beside the BarcaLounger and wept into the still-warm leather. Who knew best whether a man’s heart is weak, the doctor or the man himself? How could a machine tell a man he didn’t have pains? In the night he couldn’t even roll over, his ribs were so sore. And one morning she would wake up and he wouldn’t. Oh God! God! He would get overexcited, involved, wrought up — and die! She wept and wept and finally she pulled herself to the telephone and looked up the analyst’s name. She dialed, and when she had him on the phone, she cried, “You son of a bitch! My sister-in-law, you ruined her life, you son of a bitch! She had everything and you ruined it! What kind of ideas do you put in people’s heads? What is he — a boy? A man fifty-two years old and he marries girls, children! You quack, you fraud—”

Yet when their son came down one Christmas from Cornell to drop the name Libby DeWitt into their lap, it was to Asher and Jerry that they referred him. Tears flowed from his parents for two reasons: there was grief over his marital decision, and grief too at their own impotence. They had somehow reared a boy whom they could not bludgeon or make hysterical. By way of ruination, selfishness and stupidity, Jerry and Asher seemed better equipped than themselves to deal with the disaster. There even seemed to the parents to be some affinity between the boy and his uncles, which was yet a third reason for tears. “I let him down,” wept the father in bed, both hands over his ribs. “He won’t listen to me. In my own house my voice don’t carry from the kitchen to the toilet. All his life the boy has been filling in applications. You lift up a piece of paper in this house and underneath’s an application. When did I ever see him? When did he learn to listen to a father? He was always running out to get somebody to recommend him for something. A waiter in the mountains, a stock boy, a scholarship student. Once he should listen to me. Just once.”

Paul’s mother was crying too, but at least — to her credit — she tried to change the subject. “A scholarship is an honor,” she sobbed, touching her husband’s wet face. “We should be proud—”

“It’s an honor for the son, not for me. Just once, once … Five years later and frozen foods was already a craze. This man Birdseye is coining it, and my son, my son … A Catholic the girl is, practically an invalid, nineteen years old and she ain’t had a healthy day in her life—”

“My baby,” his mother wept. “He could read the mileage off the speedometer before other kids could even talk. What’s happening to my baby?”

When Asher called to invite Paul for a walk, Paul saw no need to be rude to someone essentially an outsider in the whole affair. He went with Asher because he knew his parents had asked Asher to phone; he went to make it easier on Asher, who like himself must have felt obliged to comply with whatever sad maneuverings these two helpless people could devise; he went for the sake of everybody’s dignity. It happened also that he knew that Asher would be sympathetic, or at the least noncommittal. The values of a man who had studied art in New York, in Chicago, in Europe, who had composed music, who chose to live in a loft over a Third Avenue bar — these were not the values of a washed-out bourgeois and his wife. Asher was a free man; an eccentric perhaps, but free.

The day they met was windless and cold. They walked side by side, two scrawny bareheaded men, one bald, the other with kinky black ridges beginning only two fingers above his eyebrows. One rounded his shoulders to stay warm; the other had had round shoulders for years. Though this posture gave Asher a thoughtful mien, the drop that formed and reformed at the end of his spiritless nose was not nearly so pensive-looking; it had the air of an oversight, as had his clothes and his features. His misshapen lobes, for example, made his ears look like accidents; on top of that, hair grew out of them. Asher did not seem to believe that outside the skin there were things to be taken care of. A full day of barbers, tailors, shoemakers, cleaners, and opticians would just about begin to put him in order. His spectacles were a little storage bin of paper clips and Scotch tape.

None of this run-downness depressed Paul, however. He leaned closer to catch the soft, whispery words his uncle spoke, while overhead the El trains broke metallically through the cold steely air. He managed to hear “… oh … not … people … parents — yes?” Asher turned his head in the raised collar of his overcoat and peered questioningly at his nephew.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I didn’t—”

“Not bad people, do you think?” Asher swung his head, freeing his nose of its burden.

“No. I know, Asher.”

“They have your interests in mind. That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Their interests.” What with the noise overhead, Asher must not have understood what he’d been saying. “It would be in my interest to make me happy. It would be in my interest to give me a blessing.”

“They’d love to give you a blessing. They’re dying to give you a blessing,” said Asher, raising his ungloved hands from his pockets.

“Let them go ahead then,” Paul said.

Asher was peeling paint from under his nails. “They’d like to give me a blessing, they’d like to give everybody a blessing. How old are you, Paulie?”

“Twenty-one.”

Asher made a face, as though he’d eaten something unpalatable. “So what’s your hurry?”

“What hurry? Hurry for what?”

“You have a nice sweet life ahead of you, isn’t that a fact?”

Where was this conversation drifting? “But I’m in love,” said Paul, shrugging.

“Let’s get out from this noise, and talk,” Asher said, taking Paul by the elbow. As they crossed the street, he pulled his nephew close to him and with a sleepy closing of his swollen lids back of the tortured glasses, said, “I’m in love myself.”

“Yes?”

“Absolutely.”

“I didn’t know that,” Paul said, trying to remain composed.

“Sure. She comes to my studio every Wednesday afternoon. Today, this afternoon. It gets dark and she goes home. A girl twenty-five.” He spoke as if each fact had to be remembered from the dim past. Though he did not want to, Paul suspected his uncle of lying.

“Is she married?” Paul asked.

“I know her four years, and every Wednesday … the most valuable thing in my life … She’s married, sure. She has a baby.” Asher took a frayed billfold from his coat and handed Paul a picture of a little girl. “A darling,” Asher said.

“She’s very nice.”

“A darling child,” Asher said. He stuffed the billfold back inside his coat. “Look, Paulie, I’ve loved a lot of women. Six years I lived with a Chinese woman, for example. Many different types and personalities. I’ve screwed all kinds, every imaginable variety of cunt, I’ve had it. I’m no amateur at this business.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“What? What didn’t you know?”

“For instance, the Chinese.”

“Oh sure — well, I didn’t make a point of it with your mother. I think she has a prejudice against non-Occidentals.”

“That’s giving her a break, but that’s true.”

“Is she pregnant?” Asher suddenly asked. “This girl? I’m trying to get to your motivation.”

“Are we talking about me now?”

“About your girl friends,” Asher said. “What’s the story, Paulie?”

“My father told you she must be pregnant, is that it? Don’t you think that shows how he doesn’t begin to understand?”

“Don’t worry about his understanding. Of course he’s a dope. You didn’t knock her up?”

He felt moved to deny even sleeping with Libby; the conversation had turned in a way he could not have imagined. But he had reasons stronger than pride for not wanting Asher to confuse himself about his experience. He had not come out on a below-freezing day for bad advice. “She’s not intact, but she’s not pregnant either.”

“She’s not intact by you or before you?”

“By me.”

“Oh it clears up. And for that you’re throwing out all your opportunities? For that small puncture you’ll tie yourself down? How will you support this girl you ruined?”

“Asher, what are you talking about?”

“Money. Life.”

“You sound like my old man.”

“You haven’t got good ears — I’m at the other end of the globe. I understand she’s a little sickly.”

“She gets colds, Asher. They met her twice and both times she had colds. It’s winter. She’s human—”

“Even nose drops cost money,” Asher was explaining. “Kleenex can run you into a fortune, I mean paupers like you and me. You want to tie a stone around your neck?” Asher asked. “You’ll fall in love all your life, in and out all your life. You can even find a lady with a wooden leg, I don’t care. It isn’t the colds, Paulie, it’s the principle. You’re twenty-one, you drew a little blood from her, so you think there’s only one girl in the world for you. But you’ve got no obligations according to the date of entry, you understand me? If it wasn’t you, it would be another smart fellow. Don’t bind yourself round for having a little fun. Is it you who wants to marry or is it this girl?”

“We both want to. We arrived at the decision mutually.” He made no effort to hide his anger.

“Which more mutually than the other?”

“Mutually mutually!”

“And how old is she that she’s so in tune with you and life?”

“Nineteen.”

“Nineteen and a Catholic. Splendid.”

“Asher, I didn’t expect this from you.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Tell lies? You only take walks with right-minded people?”

“You can disagree, but why on this level?” Paul demanded.

“What level? You tell me you like shikse pussy, you’re telling me something I don’t know? I’m you, Paulie, I’m you. Jewish girls devour you. Haven’t I seen my friends go under? The wives can’t walk upstairs. They need maids. They need vacations — once in August, then in January all over again. They’re sorry they laid anybody before they married you. They stop sanctioning looseness, bang, all of a sudden. One Friday you come in the door and they got the candles going, and then you’re really home. I’m not saying I blame you, Paul. I’m only trying to get to the bottom.”

“Getting to the bottom doesn’t mean digging into sewers. How can you talk like this? You don’t even know the girl. You never even saw her.”

“I never even saw that baby I carry a picture of either. But I know what a baby is, so I can appreciate this one. This girl’s got a background on her you don’t even begin to understand. She’s got a family that probably this minute is churning gall over you. True?”

“Like mine over her. Just as smart and sensible.”

“You think happiness comes out of gall? You think that’ll be nice, earning all those enemies? You think it’s enough to squirm around in bed with her, to wake up with her hand on your vitals? What do you think that solves, Paulie, after the wad is popped?”

“Christ, Asher, you’re a dunghole, a toilet!”

“We’re talking man to man, right? Don’t start crying. I’m not a charming man.”

“All right, Asher, man to man. If you’re a man, a human being, then why don’t you talk about love? I love Libby. I’m giving it to you straight now, though not so flowery as you. I love Libby. She’s alive, she’s sweet, she has deep and generous instincts. She has feelings. She, unlike you, is charming.”

“You like that?”

“Yes.”

“Charm is shit.”

“She’s a woman, Asher, listen to me! She behaves like a woman. I want to stick with her, to live with her.”

“Go ahead.”

“I am. I’m marrying her.”

“You’re a circular reasoner,” said Asher, “and I’m a cynic, but you’re worse. Marriage kills love. Do me a favor, look around at all the loving happy couples. You count them for me, all right? I’ll close my eyes, you tell me how many you come up with.” He took off his glasses, blew into them, then wiped away the steam on a piece of cloth he extracted from his coat pocket. His lower lids were jeweled with tears from the cold. Hooking the rims back over his elaborate ears, he said, “How many? Once you get past the Duke and Duchess of Windsor it’s slim pickings, no? Paulie, kiss the girl, caress her, stick it right up in her, but for Christ’s sake do me a favor and wait a year. You’re an artistic type, a serious observer of life, why kill your talent? You’ll sap yourself with worry, you’ll die of a hard-on in the streets. Other women will tantalize you some day and you and your conscience will wrestle till you choke. Artists and artistic types must go it alone. If a year elapses and the urge remains, then go ahead, hang yourself, there’s nothing anybody can do. Is a year too much to ask?”

“I’m graduating, Asher,” Paul said, speaking with the patience of a wronged man. “She has a year to go, this girl you have so little regard for. When I leave Ithaca she’ll stay. Because I am so hard up, you see, so controlled by my hot pants and this guilt I feel at having deflowered her, I feel I want to marry her. It’s as simple as that.”

“Precisely.”

“Asher! Asher! When I leave, you shmuck, I lose her. That’ll be that.”

“I wouldn’t myself, if I were you, stand in the way of an ending.”

“But the plain and simple fact is, Asher, I don’t want it to end! Does that mean nothing?”

“Don’t you read history in your school? Don’t you study anything?” Asher demanded. He ran his sleeve roughly under his nose so that the whole ungristled last inch of it moved back toward his face. The amazing thing was that Asher Buckner seemed to be angry. He swallowed; he looked as though he’d been weeping and wailing for an hour. “Listen to Uncle Shmuck, will you? Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle, let them pass right through. Otherwise death will be a misery for you, boy; I’d hate to see it. What are you going to grow up to be, a canner of experience? You going to stick plugs in at either end of your life? Let it flow, let it go. Wait and accept and learn to pull the hand away. Don’t clutch! What is marriage, what is it but a pissy form of greed, a terrible, disgusting ambitiousness. Do you know what I do now, Paulie, for a living? I paint gangsters, petty thieves, the lousiest of rats, way way up there in the unions and the garment trade. They come in with their henchmen and they spit tangerine pits on my floor and they make fun of me while I paint the boss. They’re rich and lord it over whole precincts, and I’m a sloppy-ass bohemian. They’re the big shots and I’m the nothing. All right, I take it. I accept. The boss’s got warts, I lop them off. He’s got murder in his eyes, I put doves instead. He sends his wife, and I fill up her brassiere for her. I take out scowls, boils, wrinkles, bags, pores — everything goes. I give out only peaches and cream. Please, I don’t want to be the greatest painter in the world. I don’t want to be a maker of beauty, a religious personage. I don’t bottle experience. I’m interested in the flow. I’ll take the shape the world gives me. Fuck the rest. Let me buy you a drink. It’s a hell of a day for a walk. You could freeze.”

In the bar, a no man’s land where Madison Avenue and the Bowery met and embraced, a drunken youngster in a tight suit and tight hair had his arm draped around a seventy-year-old alcoholic — somebody’s mother. “Nothing in the world is irretrievable,” said the young man to the old woman, his head lolling down on his shirt front. “Nothing. If you’d just go back to County Cork and start all over again you’d be amazed—”

The woman was shaking her head. “Ah, you just don’t know what it’s like, having to take all that crap day in and day out …”

The uncle and the nephew sipped whiskey and said nothing; Asher looked at his watch, then began to whistle to himself between his teeth. He didn’t look much less ravaged to Paul than the old lady next to him. So was this girl friend of his a dream? Asher had bad breath — wouldn’t a twenty-five-year-old girl mind? Had there ever really been a Chinese who had drawn with her lips at that skin of his, wrinkly like a dying old flower? Asher was a total surprise, not at all the kind of monk Paul had imagined. All his renunciations — family, children, food, clothes — hadn’t been for his art at all. He had no art left. He was a tube with no plugs at either end. A receptacle. And that was what — courage or cowardice?

Paul was serious beyond his twenty-one years, and once an idea had been planted he could not easily discard it. He could not help asking himself if it made any sense at all to let Libby go. He was too purposive a young man — applying always in January for scholarships in September had given him a strong sense of consequence — to be casual about his decisions. However, his plan to marry was, he knew, no simple revolt against family, no simple sexual bite. As an adolescent busing tables in mountain resorts, he had been well enough tipped by vacationing housewives and lonely widows; from beneath him they had stroked his hair: “Oh, how nice and serious. You’ll be something in life. I’m not worried about your future.” As for the family, there was no sense talking about revolutions at this point; he had revolted at birth and lived a separate life under his own flag from infancy on. His kind of independence had not even allowed for the usual complaints; nobody had to stand and shout at him to get into his bedroom and study — he had always gotten A’s and never once in his life had he been in trouble. If his father was prickled by his own failures, it was not because his son had insulted him by bringing them up. Something had tipped off the boy early not to expect anything of the man, and he had gone ahead to respect his father, if only on the strength of his office. When he had not known the spelling of a word, he had taken down the dictionary — this at age seven. His mother claimed it made her proud, though secretly it gave her the shivers. She was a normal-school graduate, a major in arithmetic, and she could have helped him with his long division. But he did everything himself, even fractions. When he was between the years one and four his father had failed in haberdashery; four to six it was hardware; six to eleven real estate; and then eleven to twelve — the blinding, total crash — he lost his shirt in quick-frozen foods. One day, creditors calling at every door, he got into the cab of a truckful of his frozen rhubarb and took a ride out to Long Island to think; the refrigeration failed just beyond Mineola, and by the time he got home his life was a zero, a ruined man. Now, in his reclining years, he got up once in a while to collect rents for an old friend.

And during all this, through all the bank notes and bewilderment, Paul had learned to read and write and reason, and above all to use his will. He had even willed Libby Herz herself into a seriousness she had not possessed when he had first met her. So complete a job had he done, in fact, that it had been she who had first suggested marriage. Though it was none of Asher’s business, it was nevertheless so. How could she go back to the other boys after Paul?

His own decision was not, however, out of anything so simple, so unemotional, as obligation. If there was a sense of obligation it was to himself; he would unite with her not to make Libby a better woman, but to make himself a better man. He would place a constant demand upon his spirit, solidify his finest intentions by keeping beside him this mixture of frailty, gravity, spontaneity, and passion. He would serve another with the same sense of worthiness he served himself. Surely that was love, where duty and passion (and lust too, to swallow Asher’s argument) mingled.

“Paulie, I have to leave,” said Asher. “First let me go to the toilet.” In a few minutes he came out of the men’s room wiping his hands on his coat. “Look, how about you come back with me? I want Patricia Ann and you to meet. She’ll make some tea. I won’t say anything more. You’re too smart for me to flood you with my personal philosophy. Just come back for an hour or two. I’m past fifty, nearing the end. Every emotion you’ve felt, multiply it by a thousand and that’s how often I felt it. It gives me a little edge, don’t it, Paulie? Till forty you think you’ve got bad emotions, you know, real killers — and then you find out they’re only little flowers compared with what’s coming. I’m not going to bombard you with any more wisdom of the aged. I only say you shouldn’t consider yourself a special case. Look at the hag next to you — her mistakes,” he said, not lowering his voice, “crawling over her like bugs. I’m not selling you my life, Paulie. Just maybe you should wait.”

Asher paid for the both of them on the bus they took downtown. He dropped thirty pennies into the driver’s hand. “What’s your problem, buddy, a wise guy?” the driver said. “Pennies are money,” Asher said. “Shut your ass and drive.” He seemed in a very depressed state.

After Asher’s mother had died, her son had taken all of her potted plants to live with him in Manhattan. For the two years she was ill he had gone over to Brooklyn every other day to water them; the old lady claimed that the day nurse was an anti-Semite and would either drown her plants, or leave them to dry up and crack. Some of them were now higher than Asher himself, and the pots, spread around three of his walls, weighed up to seventy-five pounds. What furniture there was in the room was beyond description. Before a row of tall windows at the front of the studio stood Asher’s easel, and outside was the El. They had walked up to the building past a row of bars, all of them full of bums.

When Paul and his uncle entered the room, Patricia Ann was wiping the leaves of the plants with an old piece of her lover’s undershorts; she immediately stuffed the dustrag under a pillow on the sofa.

“It’s all right,” Asher told her. “Patricia Ann Keller — my nephew, Paul Herz.”

She shook Paul’s hand. “I never think of Asher having relatives. What do you call him? Uncle Asher?” The laugh this produced in her seemed to have directly to do with her very small bones — as though a wind had blown through them. She was not really very much taller or heavier than Libby. Her gold ballet slippers had an inward, tomboyish turn, and her skirt and sweater left no doubt as to how high and how round were her various parts. Where run-of-the-mill people have the small of their back, she carried a little cannonball of a behind. Her breasts too, packed up nearly on a line with her shoulders, had the suggestion of small metallic spheres. Her face was a not very arresting, meager thing, pretty on the style of high school baton twirlers: the mouth a bow, the chin a point, the eyes blue beads, the nose hardly big enough to support its freckles. Her hair fell onto her shoulders in ringlets, naturally curly.

Asher ran a finger over a philodendron leaf and then dropped into a ratty leather club chair, where he proceeded to kick off his shoes. He dropped his glasses into his left shoe and rolled his thumb and forefinger deep into his closed eyes. His mouth was open and Paul could see his tongue. “Make a little tea, dearie,” he said, very weary.

What a sloppy man, thought Paul. What an unattractive played-out old lecher. How many dearies over the years had dusted his leaves, carried him his tea? Why did they come, what enticed them — the greenery? When they left on Wednesday evenings, what feelings washed up from Asher’s chest into his throat and mouth?

Patricia Ann brought Paul his cup. “You go to college?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I have a stepbrother—Virgil,” she called over to Asher. Then to Paul, “Virgil Cooper — he used to play basketball for City.”

“Yes?”

“Yeah, but that’s about ten years ago already. Even more.” She carried a cup to Asher. He directed her to put it at his feet and leave him be. “You have a headache, Puss?” she asked him.

“Uh-uh.”

“The plants really got all dusty,” she told him.

“Okay.”

“It’s from the windows being open,” she said to Paul.

“I gotta breathe,” Asher said, more sleepy than rude, and the girl left his side.

A long silence followed.

“Excuse me for being informal.” She pointed to her slippers. “It’s for comfort around the house.” She sat down on a stool beside Asher’s easel and lifted a pair of pumps from the floor. “Would you care for me to put these on?”

“No,” Paul said. “That’s fine.”

“Well,” she said, sighing.

Asher mumbled. Then he mumbled again, in sleep. The day grew darker and darker, and across the room the man’s outline became less distinct.

“It’s cold out,” Patricia Ann said. “You can feel it right through the window. Is it still cold out?”

“Very,” Paul said.

“What college?” she asked.

“Cornell.”

“Oh. In California.”

“No. New York,” Paul said.

“Really?”

“New York State.”

“Oh.” She broke out laughing again, high, anxious, joyless.

Paul couldn’t believe it. He was nervous for himself and ashamed for his uncle and overcome with pathos for the girl. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, she examined and re-examined her nails, and finally she shrugged, as though resigning herself to some tragedy having to do with her cuticles. The El train made five trips down below the window, and in that time nobody spoke. Paul’s curiosity finally went dead under his disbelief. What—what had Asher wanted him to see? Was he missing something? Was this happiness, saintliness, the serenity of which men dream? Was he witnessing a rejection of the baser things, the ambitions, the quests, the greeds? Look, was this or was this not human waste?

It was. And, curiously, the sight of his uncle’s condition brought palpitations to Paul’s heart. The messiness surrounding him, the indignity of it all, suddenly shook his own faith in himself. He experienced dread at the thought of his own life going wrong. He actually allowed himself to wonder if there might not be a less stern path he might take … for just a little while longer. Could he not chase butterflies again in Prospect Park, catch them fluttering in his cheesecloth and coat hanger? Couldn’t he wait outside the showers at Ebbets Field for a glimpse of Pee Wee Reese? Couldn’t he rise and fall, just for a while again, over those sun-tanned ladies in South Fallsburg, New York? Diligent Paul, hopeful Paul, penniless Paul — couldn’t he sit alone in his room composing one thousand heartfelt words for the scholarship committee, promising that he would be a good boy, that he would study if awarded the eight hundred dollars? No! Absolutely not! He was fed up with being a boy. That’s why Asher looked so pathetic; fifty and bald and still wearing his Eton suit. Asher could not confront the world a full-sized man; he could never take a wife, accept the burden. He mistook the gifts for the penalties, the penalties for the gifts, and backed away from life — so life backed away from him. And now look: a receptacle all right, a garbage can, full of dirty talk and volcanic regrets. Paul could not believe in Asher not having regrets; to do so upset his picture of the world.

A light went on. Patricia Ann looked at her watch and then at her Asher, and gave out a soft moan. She tried to turn a smile on the nephew but only revealed impatience and loss. Her Wednesday afternoon was going, going—

“Do you have the time?” she asked.

His kindness went out to her. “I think I’ll leave,” Paul said.

Almost instantly she was at the door.

“It was nice meeting you,” Paul said. “Don’t wake him.”

“I never met a person from Asher’s family before,” she whispered, and then gave the crumpled-up, sleeping figure across the room a loving glance. “It’s very nice,” she said, and took Paul’s hand to shake it. “Asher’s a terrific painter. He’s the most wonderful person I ever met. He’s not like anybody.”

“I know,” Paul said. “I’m very fond of Asher.”

“Me too,” she said. “Are you interested in art very much?”

“Yes.”

“He’s doing me. You know? For — our anniversary. Do you really appreciate art?”

“Well, yes.”

“If you appreciate art, you wouldn’t be embarrassed …”

“I don’t understand.”

“Would you like to see it? Me. Our fifth anniversary.”

“If you think I should—”

On her toes she walked slowly to the corner behind the stool. “Here,” she said, motioning for him to follow. She flipped through several canvases piled against the wall and then reached in to take one out. First she only looked at it herself; then, somewhat uncertainly, she put it on the easel and twisted a bulb on above them.

“It’s not done,” she said immediately. Then she laughed. Then she shrugged. Then she was dead serious. “Like it?”

The idea was not original with Asher. The figure in the painting was reclining unclothed on a sofa, one arm back of her hair, the other down beside her. But, unlike other women who had been posed in the position, Patricia Ann was not a particularly languorous specimen. She looked as though she’d just heard a knock at the door and was about to fly up after her clothes. The hand at her side was rolled into a fist, and her knees were together, discouraging entrance. The Woman Who Gets and Gives No Pleasure.

“Is it finished?” These were the only words that seemed available to him.

“I think he has to do more coloring,” she said. But he had her shade already; Asher knew exactly the depth and tone of his mistress. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” the girl asked the college boy, and then did not wait for an answer. “My girl friends and me once made a record — singing? — and when we heard it, we were hysterical. I mean laughing. But after a while, you know, we started to think it was kind of good and we were even going to send it to some disc jockey, with a photograph of us. But at first it seemed just real funny.”

“I know,” Paul said, hearing his uncle behind him release a desperate, froggy snore. “I’ve heard myself on a tape recorder. It’s a surprise.”

“It’s a surprise, all right … And,” she added gravely, “my husband Charlie, you know, don’t know anything about this. I had a whole picture painted, and Charlie don’t know. I even have a daughter, a little darling child.”

They both looked at the painting. At the door she smiled at him. “Good luck at Cordell.”

“Thank you.”

Pushing the door shut, she said, “Have a nice time at college.”

The stairs were unlit and he did not descend for a moment. He groped for a handrail, but there wasn’t any. Behind the door Paul heard, “Asher, Asher, oh wake up, pussy cat, it’s after five already.”

Uncle Jerry sent a note. If Paul felt inclined to, he could call Jerry at his office. If he chose to ignore the note, that was his prerogative as well.

“How are you holding up?” Jerry inquired when Paul telephoned.

“I think I’m all right. I’ve lost two pounds but I’ve got all my faculties.”

“How are things at home?”

“Just as you can imagine,” Paul said. “My mother keeps breaking down and my father keeps wanting to talk to me, but he gets all filled up too. I’ve explained several times, Jerry, but I’ve stopped. I’m not going to make a dent. They just say, Please don’t marry that girl. At least not now. At least put it off. And so forth, on and on and on. Honest to God, they’re going to make me hate them!”

He had not realized how menacing he had sounded until he heard Jerry protecting himself. “Paul, I feel obliged, you know — your father called me, he was in tears. I told him I would contact you. That’s why I dropped you the note. I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t want to advise you. I don’t believe in interfering.”

The intervention of Paul’s family in Jerry’s affairs lent a particular weightiness, a certain melancholy strain, to this remark. Paul felt a strong kinship with his uncle then — but it did not make him especially happy. It had not been his plan or his hope to line up, finally, against his family. He had decided to tell them about Libby in December so that their protests might wither with the months and they would come around to the idea of a wedding just after graduation. He had a sense of propriety about his parents, a realization of their responsibilities that perhaps they themselves had not. He had never given in, he thought, to any impulse to be cruel to them, and even if he had worked hard independently of them, it had been in part so as not to increase in any way their disappointments. He felt it now a filial duty to give them every chance; it humbled him not to, in the great world beyond the family to which he aspired, a world of order and decency, which, if he had not as yet experienced, he had fully imagined. Nevertheless, it began to appear that perhaps he had called Jerry for reasons no more elevated than those which had sent him on his walk with Asher: to be reassured.

“I told your father I would contact you,” Jerry said. “But of course I can’t say anything. I don’t even know the girl. Paul, we hardly know each other. I didn’t complicate matters explaining any of this to Leonard. It wouldn’t have interested him. I understand,” he said to Paul, softly, intimately. “Paul, you tell me, all right. What do you think?”

The young man’s voice was sharp when he answered. “What do I think? I think I’ll marry Libby! I don’t think any of this hysteria has anything to do with us. They hardly know her. In fact, they don’t know her.” Then his own chagrin swallowed him up; he had no reason whatsoever to be short-tempered with this particular uncle.

“Your father says they met her?” Jerry inquired, still delicate.

“I brought her here Thanksgiving. I wanted to please them.” Those words, like the rest of his familial generosity, suddenly turned a little sour on him. If his family wouldn’t please him, why must he be trying so hard to please them? “They knew I was going with a girl — I let them see her. She came for half an hour last week too, before I told them our plans.”

“Your father said something about her being a sickly girl. I’m only repeating him, believe me.”

“Jerry, she gets colds,” he answered wearily. “Jerry, let’s even say she’s a frail girl. But she’s not going to be a farmer. She’s going to be my wife. This is all very silly. Jerry, you know what they object to?”

“She’s Catholic.”

“She’s Catholic.” He himself knew that to be, however, only a strand in the whole tapestry of rejection. It was not just one crime they wanted to hang the girl on — there was her faith, plus her health, her youth, their son’s youth, and a dozen things more. If they had known the word they would have claimed that their sense of Paul’s error was intuitive; it was the word with which he had begun to argue with himself in favor of his decision. “Jerry, she’s a Catholic like I’m a Jew. It’s not the kind of thing that’ll have much to do with our lives. It hasn’t to do with us. It’s another ruse.”

“Paul, I’m put in a position where I’m asking questions I don’t even want to ask. How could I hope to reason with you, anyway, one way or the other? Even if I had the foolish impulse to. We’re not dealing with the mind, with the practical senses anyway. This is the mysterious, spontaneous choice — the choice of the heart. The unencumbered heart,” Jerry said.

“Yes,” Paul answered, unhinged slightly by his uncle’s reverent tones.

“The heart, Paul, knows. It cost me half a lifetime to learn such a simple fact. I had such neuroses pressing in upon me, they were the size of mountains. Tremendous pathetic pressures building and building, cutting me off from what you think of as your inside self. Paul, I didn’t do a spontaneous thing in twenty-seven years. Because the heart was under this terrific pressure. But what the heart decides, Paul, must be. I’m telling you, it won’t give you peace if it’s defied Love!” Jerry cried.

And Paul cried back, “Jerry, I love her.”

And his uncle replied sweetly, “That’s all then. That’s all that counts.”

Then, for having provoked such wholesale approval, Paul felt wave upon wave of indecency wash over him. True as they may have been, his words had been spoken out of nothing less than design. And why had he to convince Jerry? So Jerry could turn around and convince him? It was an unavoidable fact that, ever since his afternoon on Third Avenue, certainty had somehow been seeping away. He could not believe that Asher and his bird-brained mistress had demonstrated anything other than what everybody knew about squandered lives, yet he had begun to think of himself as being not so courageous as fearful. Fear began to seem the springboard of much that he had done in his short life. He was a scholarship holder all right, a planner, a young man investing emotions one day to accumulate love and admiration the next. He had come to see his marrying Libby in two distinct ways, both of which, unfortunately, cast doubt on his manliness and dignity.

On the one hand, it all seemed so safe. Husband, wage-earner, father — right on down the line, all the duties and offices laid out for him. From home to college to a wife, no chances taken. Without much effort, he could recall from his past more than a few risks he had worked a little hard at avoiding. Even recently with his parents: he knocked against the walls of their house in December, hoping that somehow by May they would find a way to prevent the roof from falling in. He wanted to remain the good son. Even to himself he seemed to be working strenuously at being upright.

Otherwise he would tell them to go to hell. Run off, marry the girl and leave them to drip tears till their eyes fell out. It was what Asher would have done, he thought. And because he saw it as being a choice that Asher might have made, it too caused him discomfort. If marrying Libby was taking no risks, it was also taking every risk. Asher’s life had unnerved him deeply; with a little twisting and turning he could think of it as his own. Way down, he had begun to bend an ear toward his parents’ objections. He was no longer so sure that he was seeing Libby as clearly as his uncle saw Patricia Ann, at least as he saw her in paint, if not in life. He did not know that he wanted to see that clearly. He only knew that he did not want merely to stick it right up in Libby; he wanted to love her.

Feeling something less than a daredevil, he listened to Uncle Jerry on the other end comforting him. “Paul, good luck then. I think that’s the only proper thing for any of us to say.”

“Thank you.”

“Tell Libby good luck too.” Jerry pronounced her name easily, and Paul knew they would like each other right off. “When will you be married?”

“Not till May. Around graduation.”

“Will I get to see you before you go back? I’d like to take you to dinner. I’ll invite Claire and her husband. She’d love to see you.”

“That’s very kind, Jerry. I’ll call Libby. I think tomorrow night, if you could, would be best for us. We were going to meet with news from both fronts.”

“How is she bearing up?”

“Fine,” Paul said, lying, as if he had to spare that two-time loser from any further knowledge of the hardships of loving.

“I know I’ve got character in my face, but won’t someone say I’m pretty?” Well, on the steps of the Plaza, with all that swank hurrying by, she had her wish. Character had been bled from her for the evening, and in its place was prettiness. She had made up her eyes heavily, and managed even to reduce the proud leap of her nose — its sailing proportions were lost beneath the great mast of her black hair, which was piled atop her head, revealing a slender boyish back of the head. The doorman bowed and opened the door for both the lady and her escort, who even in dark suit and tie made a slightly seedy appearance — seedy perhaps only by comparison to the glitter and chic of the slender girl beside him.

At the sight of Libby, Paul had been visited with a definite burst of pleasure. Gradually, however, he became irritated because she had decked herself out. Why? Actually she was wearing only a simple black suit with a tight jacket and a full skirt, but its fetchingness — acknowledged by its owner in her very gait — was in the way it made so apparent the delicacy of her shoulders and neck. Despite her dripping nose and the weather, she had worn no blouse, so that one was of course touched by the wistful fragility revealed in the wide neck of the jacket. The wad of Kleenex in her white glove (there to inform his parents of sanitoriums and hospital bills) only made more glamorous her tiny garnet earrings and bracelet. They proceeded through the lobby to the entrance of the Oak Room, and when Paul looked at her again, he looked deeply, intently, for some sign of the college girl he had planned to marry: the straight shoulder-length black hair, the pale lips, the over-used eyes, the winterized, libraryized, studentized Libby. What he found instead was something that bothered him, something that he could only think of as aspiration.

Yet as they spotted Uncle Jerry, and moved into the dining room, Paul put his mouth to her hair. He explained her little display of prosperity and polish to himself as an attempt to impress some Herz. That his mother and father dreaded her so for their son, led her, he knew, to begin to wonder what kind of ogre she might actually be. He knew this, and he knew how much protection his intended needed. He said into her ear, “My wife,” feeling a little ripple of well-being as the word passed from his lips.

“Husband,” Libby whispered, and that thrilled him too. Oh Libby had come a long long way from being a sorority sister to being a woman. He, Paul, had lifted her up from childhood with him. Now — the thought had a peculiar forcefulness as Libby swished up to Uncle Jerry — now she was all his!

Uncle Jerry’s daughter Claire was Paul’s age. It had always been expected in the family that because they had been born within a month of each other they should like each other. But even during the flirtation they had carried on in the closing months of their seventeenth year, there had been little affection between them. Following an evening when they had taken off their clothes and stood glaring, breathlessly, at one another, Paul had gone on to college and high literature, and Claire to a promiscuity at Syracuse, stories of which had reached Paul’s ears every Monday morning, sixty miles away at Cornell. But with dinner at the Plaza — snow fell on the carriages out the window, beyond Libby’s hair — all was changed. Claire seemed to be taking a special delight in showing Paul how matronly she had become, and how human. With her whole being she listened to the remarks of her husband, an average crew-cut sort of I.B.M. machine, who had taken away from Syracuse an M.A. in Business Administration, and hot Claire Herz. The firm he was with was splitting stock or changing hands, or something that Paul was not following; whatever, Claire responded as though he was singing exquisite tenor. Once Paul thought he saw her eyes shut when her husband spoke about a large loan a Mr. Richmond was floating. She might have been visualizing it aloft. Finally she discovered Libby and her clothes; and Libby, it seemed, discovered herself.

“I never usually go to Carita,” Libby said, measuring Claire’s response, “because you have to wait so long.”

“They do do a wonderful job,” Claire said. “It’s so lovely.”

“It’s only the second time I’ve been there.”

Claire lifted a finger as though to touch Libby’s crown, and Paul realized that they were not talking about Libby’s clothes; Carita was where she had had her hair set. He had imagined that she had fixed it herself before the bathroom mirror in Queens. His astonishment led him into a grave contemplation of the future. All his thinking of the last few days had been grave in tone, and large in scope. He was no longer thinking ahead strictly in terms of semesters and summers.

In the meantime the young women had proceeded into a discussion of Delman’s shoes. Finally, Libby excused herself and went off to the powder room — doubtless, thought Paul, to work her eyes up a little more.

Claire put her hand on her cousin’s. “She’s wonderful, Paul. I think she’s the most wonderful thing that could have happened to you. She’s so charming, and so alive, and so pretty. Her skin, her hair …”

“We wish you all the luck,” Claire’s husband said, and he snapped his head at Paul, meaning it. “I think we have to go home, hon,” he said to his stout, good-looking young wife.

“Baby-sitters,” Claire said. She spoke wearily, but it was an affect; she was obviously charmed by her own maternal obligations. She rose, a matron at twenty-one. She went around to her father, who pushed back his chair and rose too. At fifty-five Uncle Jerry might have been her beau; he stood straight and was dressed like his son-in-law in a narrow suit and a narrow tie. All that marred his crisp good looks was a distressing willingness in the eyes.

When Claire and her husband had left, he said, “Harold is a fine boy. A very solid boy.”

“He seems very nice.” Paul tried to concentrate on his uncle instead of himself; he was divided in his feelings about Libby’s return to the table. When she had gotten up to leave he had actually felt relief, so uncertain was he about what she might say next. And he seemed to have become uncertain on the basis of her not setting her hair at home! He waited for her to return with a conscious ambivalence.

“He’s especially fine for Claire,” Jerry said. “He holds her in check. You may not have known it, but she had an exuberant streak in her in college.”

“Yes?”

“Paul, she was a very promiscuous girl at Syracuse. She could have made a mess of herself. When I left Selma,” Jerry said, “she lost a father image, there’s no doubt about that. But had I stayed longer, she would have lost it anyway. Worse things might have happened.” Paul wondered, until Jerry told him. “None of us,” his uncle said, “are without incestuous feelings. And it isn’t the feelings, you see — it’s how you act them out.”

Jerry seemed to feel that he had explained something; Paul only felt the desperate sordid decency of admitting to such motives. “This young man,” Jerry was saying, “he’s no whiz, no spectacular ball of fire. But he’s steady and he’s a mensch, and he’s done wonders for Claire. You ought to see her with that baby. She relates so beautifully it could make you cry.”

“I’ll bet she’s fine.”

“She’s become an outstanding mother.”

“Yes,” Paul said, “I’m glad we all had a chance to be together.”

“I’m glad we all had a chance to meet Libby. I think you’ve got a fine girl.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank yourself. It’s not often young people know what they want. It’s not often you find a young person who’s discovered the essentials. They run around and play around — like Claire — trying each other out. It’s not a healthy thing, what’s happening with this generation. They ‘get laid,’ they ‘screw,’ ” he said, “and those expressions express just about what they do. A lot of grabbing and pawing, Paul, but very little touching. But I see your Libby and I see Claire now, and they look like two girls who know what that means, to touch.” Uncle Jerry’s eyes were wet suddenly. In the cultivated atmosphere of the dining room, with a steak sizzling at the next table and the candlelight shimmering on the long curtains, and outside the white flakes falling on the park, Jerry was not able to prevent the tears from sliding down his face. After he dried them, Paul expected he might see a pale spot where his uncle’s coloring had been rubbed off by the napkin. Uncle Jerry, forever struggling up for air in the dark sea of maladjustment and poor mental health, had shed two tears for Love. Love was the name painted on the ship that would come along and pull him safely to shore. It had rescued his daughter, and now he was telling Paul it had rescued him, and one sunny day perhaps it would come along and rescue Jerry too. He would find a woman who was not a mother-figure, like the oversized Selma, nor a daughter-figure, like the short-lived twenty-seven-year-old; just a woman who could touch him.

Paul realized that since dinner had begun he had been looking at his uncle through Asher’s eyes. Now he tried looking at himself through Asher’s eyes. Just then Libby came back to the table, and so she was seen through Asher’s eyes too. When Paul tried to look at her through Jerry’s eyes, it occurred to him that that may have been how he had been looking all along. It was no longer clear in his mind whether he could consider himself a realist or a romantic.

“Are you all right?” Paul whispered, as he pulled her chair out for her.

“I just put some nose drops in to get some air,” she said, but he smelled a perfume on her that he had never smelled before. “I was talking to Claire and Jack in the lobby,” she said to Jerry.

“All this time?” asked Paul.

“Yes. They’re awfully nice,” she said to Jerry.

“They’re all a father could hope for,” Jerry answered, and from there he and Libby proceeded, for the rest of the evening, to discuss the theater. Jerry sat there, awed and charmed and won, while Libby’s fingers waved above her water glass, and her eyes in turn grew grave and puzzled and gay. In the hour that followed, Paul heard her say art, and he heard her say beauty, and he heard her say truth three times. Twice she said objective correlative. But, of course, it did not matter that she echoed him; of course she was still learning. She had come a long way already from the Pi Phi house, on whose steps he had found her a little less than a year ago. In courting her he had changed her, he had worked at changing her; but now he wondered if she would ever be the genuine article. Was she bright? Was she true? Would she grow? Trying to improve her had he only made a monkey of her? What a time to be asking himself such questions!

He tried to admire her for winning so completely the affection of his uncle, but he was not able to.

*

On the subway back to Queens he asked her how much it cost to have one’s hair set at the Carita Salon.

“Eight dollars.”

“Just to heap it up like that?”

“They wash it and they set it — and then there’s the tip. They have to tease my hair, it’s so straight.”

“Is the teasing figured into the bill, or is that free?”

“Did I behave badly?” Libby demanded. “Did I talk too much? I realized I was talking a lot. Oh Paul, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not happy with me.”

“Don’t you think eight dollars is a lot to spend on hair?”

“… Yes.”

“Do you really, or is that to please me?”

“Both.”

“And don’t charm me, will you? I’m not Jerry.”

“Paul, what’s the matter? I did talk too much.”

“No.”

“Then what? Because I went to Carita? Because I talked about it with Claire? Please tell me.” She was a self-improver, and that strain in her character (which once he had loved and now suddenly it seemed he loathed) showed through her request. “Please, Paul, tell me,” she said.

“I didn’t know you had such extravagant tastes. My haircuts cost me a buck.”

“It was a special occasion.” She began to cry. “I’m sorry I did it. I am …”

“I can’t afford stuff like that, Libby. We’re going to have to live a frugal life. A sensible life. I’m beginning to wonder if we’re in agreement. I begin to wonder if you understand—”

“Oh honey,” she said, and put her head into his shoulder. “I’m stupid.” And she reached up for her mound of hair and pulled it down.

His heart lurched, but he kept his mouth shut; some pins clattered to the floor of the subway car, and she became the old Libby, hair to her shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Paul. Oh truly — I was putting on a performance to please everybody,” she moaned. “I feel like a windmill. I feel running and pursued and just like I’m bouncing all over the place. I’m just exhausted, and this cold won’t go away, and all I tasted all night were nose drops. Everybody said the wine was excellent and so I said so too.” She had buried her head in his chest and he was stroking her hair. He did it to comfort her; he got no pleasure from the spongy resilient quality of that black hair whose crowy smoothness had always expressed something to him about the simple desires, the solid yearnings of the girl he had discovered, and who had so quickly and so passionately become dedicated to him.

After a while she took his hand and held it in her lap. “Paul?”

“Yes.”

“—I don’t think I can wait until May, or June. If I’m going to marry you I think it better be now. We’ll move into your room and we’ll be married and all this will be over. I can’t stand it any more. Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry about my hair.” She kissed his five fingers to prove it. “I knew you were upset about it. I knew it was that.”

A Puerto Rican at the end of the car was reading a newspaper. He had looked up to watch the girl cry; now that she had pulled herself together he looked back into the paper again.

“Your uncle,” she was saying, “is so nice and everybody else is so awful, and he’s so unhappy.”

“And so are you.”

“And so am I, and so are you, and we’re perfectly nice people too. He hasn’t got anybody—”

“He’s got Claire.”

“Oh she’s a phoney!” Libby cried, softly. “And so am I,” she said. “I saw it in your eyes. Oh, you phoney, you were saying, why don’t you cut it out. And I couldn’t, Paul. I tried but I couldn’t. I hate your Uncle Asher!” she announced. “I hate him! He’s a disgusting man!”

“All right, Lib, calm down. Nobody’s paying any attention to him at all.”

She might have been hesitating, or she might have been calculating, but finally she whispered into his scarf, “You are.”

“I am what?” he demanded.

“I can’t talk without you getting some sour little look on your face. You’re not you.”

“You’re imagining it.” He sat up very straight, so that it became necessary for her to pull her face away. “You’re just upset.”

She was willing to be convinced. “Am I?”

“I think so.”

“Because he doesn’t even know me! Paul, Paul — what’s wrong with me? What does everybody have against me!”

“I shouldn’t have told you about him. Everything is all right.”

“Paul, let’s get married and go back to school tomorrow … Let’s go back married. Please.”

His immediate vision was of the two of them trying to live in his tiny room. Libby’s father would cut off next semester’s tuition; his own family would refuse to be present at graduation … But more pleasant visions followed. For it would only continue to be as it had been before: they would study together in the library and sleep together in his room. Only now Libby could move in the rest of her clothes and stay clear through till morning. They wouldn’t have to meet for breakfast; they would already be there, together. As for the families, they had obligations that they would finally admit to. And next year he would get some sort of graduate fellowship for himself; he had already sent off applications to Columbia, Penn, Michigan, and Chicago, well in advance of the closing date. Probably Libby’s father would continue to pay her tuition through her senior year—

Or would he?

It was not the first time the question had occurred to him. To whom would the registrar address Mrs. Herz’s bills? But even if it was to himself, they had already figured out on a blank page at the back of Libby’s American Literature notebook that, what with summer jobs, fellowships, and part-time work, they would have enough to pay their bills, and maybe even some left over to buy an old car. They had worked out a budget in the library one idyllic night before the vacation, when the gorges and the trees were heavy with snow, and the moon was nearly full. Now on the empty subway, the overhead bulbs went black a moment, and he wondered if their estimates could have been right. They had figured up food, rent, tuition, laundry, amusements … He could think of no item they had overlooked; there was actually no reason he could think of not to marry tomorrow instead of in May. But it was with a distinct sensation of being torn apart that he agreed.

“Oh Paul …” She wept now in a different key.

“We’ll get a license tomorrow and the blood business, and then we’ll get married at City Hall. Only a few days.” He kissed her hand. “Cheer up,” he instructed them both.

But she didn’t cheer up. By the time they left the subway there was a scattering of Kleenex around her shoes; she gave an especially heartrending sob as they emerged into the raw, slushy night. He steered her across the street into a coffee shop, and not until she had drunk half a cup did he attempt conversation; he waited until her chest and throat noises had subsided, and only an occasional tear made an appearance beneath her murky eyes.

“What is it?” he asked. “What now?”

“Paul … I don’t think — this may sound silly … I don’t think I could survive City Hall.” She even amused herself by the sheer torpor of the remark. But her smile, curling around two fresh tears, lifted him little.

“It takes five minutes,” he said, closing his eyes.

“But I’m no orphan! I’m no culprit!” she said vehemently. “People get married at City Hall when they want to hide something. When they’re running somewhere. When girls are pregnant they get married at City Hall. I’m not pregnant — I was spared that particular tragedy — why must I act like I wasn’t! I’m not pregnant, damn it!” She dragged some grains of mascara across her nose with her Kleenex. Moral outrage was now sweeping hysteria away: she expelled a powerful breath, having thought probably of five more things she wasn’t and wouldn’t be compromised into being. “I’m not letting people—parents—force me to — to act as though I’m ashamed. To take away my dignity,” she said, his student — his own words. “I’m not, Paul. You know we shouldn’t allow them …”

He heard the conviction rush out of her like wind; she had looked up to see that he was holding his forehead in his hands.

“Paul? What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” He did not show her his eyes. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know …”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “I’ve run out of suggestions.”

“How about,” Libby said, after a moment, “what do you think — of a rabbi?”

“Why?”

“Oh Paul, wouldn’t he be more official, more everything we want? Wouldn’t it show them something if we decided to be married by a rabbi? I’m not being defiant, I just won’t cower in some corner when I get married! What kind of thing is that? You get married once. I think it should have some weight to it.”

When he looked up it was because he had regained his control. “It should have weight. We give it the weight. You’re not Jewish, Libby.”

“But you are!”

He said nothing.

She blew her nose. “But … but we are basically religious people. Our values — oh stop giving me that sour look!”

“Well stop talking like that. I’m not Jerry.”

“Why do you think I’m so stupid!”

“Libby, I don’t. Don’t cry, please. Lib, I’m sorry. It’s just”—he tried it slowly—“we’re not, honey, basically Jewish people.”

“Paul, they’re not going to make me into a nothing. I refuse to let them force me to be married in City Hall! I’ll go to a priest then. Anything!”

“I couldn’t go to a priest. I couldn’t be married by a priest, that’s all there is to it.”

“Because you are Jewish finally! Sweetie, just be a little Jewish, will you? Just till we’re married? After that — oh I don’t want to sound so silly. I only want this one thing—”

And then never my own way again.

He heard these last words like an echo. At nineteen she had already given him whatever she had; now she would promise him the rest forever. All she wanted satisfied was her sense of decency, which was what he had cared for and nurtured in her. She had a knowledge, this frail girl, of what her rights were in love, and for that too he was thankful and proud. They need not crawl along the ground because others wanted them to.

But they were married in Yonkers by a Justice of the Peace they found in the Yellow Pages. No rabbi would handle their case, which came as a surprise to both of them. Their astonishment did not, however, keep them above having dirty feelings about themselves for very long. In the study of the third rabbi they visited, Paul rose up out of his seat and cursed him.

“Isn’t there a hot rabbi who performs marriages on kitchen tables? In all of this city is there no man low enough to unite two people who want to be united?”

“Try City Hall,” the rabbi said, a heavy dark-jowled man who hadn’t liked him from the start. “Get united civilly.”

“We can try City Hall without your advice!”

“Paul,” Libby pleaded, stretching out a hand to him. But he didn’t even want to see her face. Was he to compromise himself forever, honoring this girl’s weaknesses? Attending to her wishes, did he not dissolve into a spineless ass! A hypocrite! A softie!

“I marry Jew and Jew,” scowled Lichtman, the rabbi. “That’s all.”

“We’re Jew and Gentile.”

“The ceremony doesn’t fit such occasions.”

“God damn you!” Paul shouted.

“Don’t raise your voice in this office! This isn’t the street! Next, you don’t know anything! A twenty-year-old snotnose! You should be as wise as you are loud, then come around here! If you believe, believe; if no, turn your back! Otherwise look other places! Go be religious your own way! Don’t run here to make it all right with Mama! I’m no moral out for you. I’m not here to be amiable. That’s a disgusting thought!”

“I’m not asking for my mama, Lichtman, I’m asking for my wife.”

“Some improvement! You should be ashamed! Are you Catholic?” he demanded of Libby, a kind of agony suddenly in his face.

“Yes.”

“So why not ask a priest? Why not ask him to unite you and this Jew? They have City Hall for mixtures like this.”

“You don’t have to be so nasty to her!”

“Shut up! You’re a secular, be secular! Don’t come tramping your muddy feet in my synagogue for sentimental reasons! I wouldn’t marry you if you were two Jews! Now get out! You’re stupid and you curse and you’re a coward! Get out!”

The Justice of the Peace displayed no such force; for one thing, he had the gout. It was necessary for him to remain seated while he married them, though he compensated for his posture with a clear, loud, nondenominational voice. It was a Sunday afternoon and when Paul and Libby entered, they found the JP pulled up close to an old cabinet-model radio, a large scrolly piece with WEAF WJZ WOR WABC marked on the yellowed station selector. The JP’s wife turned off the radio during the ceremony. She was an elderly lady who wore glasses and a print dress that was a little longer in back than in front; below were nurse’s white oxfords. She touched the bride ten times at least, then removed some artificial flowers from the closet and put them in a blue vase behind her husband, whose bandage was in need of a change. She called him “the Judge,” and she called his gout “the Judge’s difficulty.” “I hope you won’t mind the Judge’s difficulty,” she whispered, and then raised his bandaged foot up onto a cushioned chair. It stared at them throughout the proceedings.

When it was all over the Judge’s wife put the flowers back in the closet and turned on the radio. The couple from next door, who had been called in to serve as witnesses, hugged the newlyweds; the woman hugged Paul, the man Libby. The Judge’s wife looked from Libby’s ring to Paul’s ring and said all there actually was to say about them; she managed more excitement than one really even had the right to expect from the wife of an old sick Yonkers JP. “They match,” she said. The Judge said, “Elizabeth, Paul, will you step up here, please?” After a quick glance at each other, they approached and stood on either side of his difficulty, expecting his blessing. He said, “Now you know how to get back into the city, don’t you?”

“Yes,” they said.

“That’ll be ten,” said the Judge.

He preferred not to take a check on Paul’s Ithaca bank. “We’re dealing with strangers all the time,” the Judge’s wife reminded the young couple. Libby had to give them the cash.

Two buses and a subway carried them back to New York in an hour and a half; Libby got out before Paul in order to change trains for Queens — husband and wife would meet at Grand Central with their suitcases at six that night. When they parted, so preoccupied were they, that they forgot to embrace. Paul traveled the rest of the way alone, back to Brooklyn to tell his family what he had done.

He got off the subway at Atlantic Avenue, where he was struck with how familiar he was with every trash can, every last signpost and pillar. On the way up the street to his family’s apartment he slipped the ring off his finger and into his coat pocket. He would begin his accounting slowly, give them a chance to … But then he saw before him the grave, ironic, savage face of Lichtman; he remembered the insults and the pain, and he put the ring that matched his wife’s back on his finger and entered with his news.

And his father threw him out of the house. Mr. Herz had not summoned up so much courage since he had invested his life’s savings in frozen foods and gone under for the fourth time. But he wouldn’t go under again! In one life, how many times can a man fail?

On the train back to Ithaca, Paul wept.

“We don’t need them,” Libby said, cradling his head in the dark car. “We don’t need anybody.”

“That isn’t it,” her husband replied. “That isn’t it …” And it was and it wasn’t.

2

“How?”

“Paul, I don’t know how. Maybe it’s not even so.”

“Well, it is so, isn’t it? If it’s not, what are we getting upset about?”

“Well — I think it is so, then.”

“You haven’t gone to a doctor, have you? By yourself?”

“Paul, I’m just always very regular — you could set your watch by me.”

“Maybe you’re upset. Maybe it’s working at that place, all the running around you have to do. Maybe you should take a day off.”

“I practically just started.”

“That’s all right. That’s why you’re upset.”

“I’ve been upset before. I get a tight colon or a runny nose — but never this.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know how.”

“You don’t use that thing right.”

“I do use it right.”

“On the little booklet that comes with the grease it shows how you should lie down when you put it in. I’ve told you a hundred times, lie down the way it shows in the booklet. No — you’ve got to stand up. You’ve got to do it like you’re putting on your shoes!”

“Either way—”

“Why can’t you do it the way it says to do it? Why do we have to take chances?”

“Paul, that’s not a chance. A doctor showed me how, standing up. It’s perfectly all right.”

“If it’s so all right why are you ten days late?”

“That hasn’t anything to do with it.”

“What does?”

“I don’t know what does. Please, let’s not fight about it.”

“What are we going to do if you’re pregnant, Libby? What are we going to do with a baby now?”

“I’ll menstruate. I’ve had pains — I had some this morning.”

“I thought you didn’t get pains.”

“Maybe I will this time. Maybe that’s why I’m irregular.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know! Leave me alone. I’ll menstruate for you. Just leave me be!”

“Don’t menstruate for me, Libby. Oh, don’t start any crap like that. You came running to me, didn’t you? ‘Paul, I think I’m pregnant — oh what’ll we do!’ ”

“I was upset. We quit school, we came here to make money, we got jobs, and now suddenly this!”

“All right, Libby, all right.”

“All right what?”

“Arguing is stupid.”

“Honey, I’ll go to the bathroom. I’ll check.”

“You know how? That first day, right after your last period—”

“But it’s safe then.”

“No time is safe. I said use the damn thing. Take a minute out and use it.”

“It’s so unaesthetic — it’s such a pain in the neck. It’s so unspontaneous.”

“And she romanticized them into a family of ten.”

“Maybe I’m not pregnant. People miss whole months sometimes. If we can’t figure out how, then I’m probably just missing a whole month. Maybe it’s from working at a new job—”

“We can figure out how. I can figure out how.”

“It’s safe then! Four days at the beginning, four at the end. We always did that.”

“We were lucky.”

“It’s biologically impossible—”

“They swim, Libby. They hide in nooks and crannies, waiting.”

“I just know I’m not. I can’t be. We are careful.”

“Libby, you’re careful when you use that thing the way it’s supposed to be used, when you don’t skimp on the goddam jelly.”

“The jelly’s expensive. The jelly costs two dollars a tube!”

“So what! Did I ever say anything? Did I ever say don’t buy more jelly? Buy it! Use it! Squander it! That’s what it’s for!”

“But the diaphragm does all the work.”

“Oh Libby.”

“Well, I can’t stand it! I have to put it in me! Right in the midst of everything and I have to stop and fill that plunger! I hate it!”

“And what do you prefer — this?”

“They don’t have anything to do with one another. I mean I do use the goo and I do use the thing and we are careful.”

“Go in the bathroom. Go take a look. Let’s not argue.”

“I just looked.”

“Anything?”

“Not really.”

“What’s not really mean?”

“Well — nothing. But I’m sure tomorrow. I have a pimple on my forehead and one starting under my chin. I break out—”

“Do you?”

“Well, I used to.”

“Libby, what are we going to do?”

“I’ll be all right. I know I will.”

“It was that first day, Libby.”

“But it’s so wonderful when I don’t have to worry about anything, when we just do it whenever we want, without all that crap.”

“How are we going to afford you pregnant? How are we going to afford a baby?”

“But people miss whole months—”

“I don’t see what good it’ll do.”

“The good is we’ll know, one way or another.”

“We’ll know anyway, if I miss another month. I don’t see what’s to be gained.”

“What’s to be gained is we’ll know. Am I making myself clear, Lib, or do I have to say it again? We’ll know.”

“The test costs ten dollars.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s not all right. This room costs that much a week. I may menstruate tomorrow and then it would just be ten bucks out the window.”

“So let it be out the window.”

“But, Paul, suppose I am pregnant. For ten dollars you can probably buy diapers — we’ll need the ten dollars. Can’t we wait? Can’t we forget it for a while? We come home from work and that’s all we talk about. I don’t see you all day and that’s all we ever talk about.”

“We’ll have the test and well know and then we can talk about other things.”

“So we’ll know. Then what! When we know it’ll be worse!”

“It’ll be better.”

“It’ll be worse, Paul. It’ll be much worse.”

“Paul, that’s not so. You misunderstood.”

“Don’t please be a blockhead. We’ve got other things to think about.”

“Honey, look up at me. Honey, positive means the rabbits responded positively. That I’m not pregnant.”

“Libby, the guy on the phone said positive.”

“And that’s what I mean. Positive. Negative would mean I’m pregnant. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“Negative means no.”

“No I’m pregnant, or no I’m not pregnant?”

“No you’re pregnant.”

“That’s right. No would mean I was pregnant. The test is to see whether you’re not pregnant. No means you are. Yes you’re not. The result is positive, though. Positive is good.”

“Libby, you’re getting things hopelessly confused.”

“You are. Paul, I’m sure. It’s negative you don’t want. I knew I wasn’t pregnant, honey. I just knew I couldn’t be.”

“But you are. You’re negative—”

“No, no, Paul, positive. You see, you’re confused.”

“Well, stop jabbering a minute! You’re positive, right? They take your urine, they shoot it in the rabbit—”

“Rabbits.”

“Rabbits! All right. Then they wait for some kind of reaction. If the reaction is positive, you’re pregnant. If it’s negative, you’re not. You were positive.”

“Paul, they give the shot to the rabbits. If I’m all right, normal, then they react positively. Doesn’t that make sense to you? If I want to see if you’re all right, and I give you a shot and get a negative reaction, well, that’s bad.”

“Libby, you can’t even add a column of figures. You’re being illogical.”

“You are. You’re not thinking. Positive is good.”

“Lib … Lib, I’ll call the guy again. If you want me to I’ll call him and ask.”

“I just know it’s so.”

“I’ll call him.”

His job on the assembly line was to unite the half of the hinge on the trunk with the half of the hinge on the body. He had dreaded it all beforehand; whenever he had had to contemplate the change coming up in his life, he had to breathe deeply to keep control. During the week before he had dropped out of graduate school — while he and Libby were preparing to leave Ann Arbor — he had had claustrophobic dreams about being locked in small rooms, about submarines and strangulation. Beside him, Libby had moaned in deep dreams of her own. But now during the eight endless hours on the line, he was visited with an unexpected solemnity and calm. The submarine quality was there all right, the underwater lifeless feeling, as though none of this was happening in time; nevertheless the actual experience worked on him like a tonic. In place of dread came a sense of righteousness. He had at last raised a hand to the cruel world. Hinging a trunk to a car was not much, but it was something; he was earning a living. It did not even upset him — as he had been sure it would — to have Libby waiting on tables over in the executive dining room of the Chevrolet plant. At first she had been dumbstruck at having had to leave school in the middle of her senior year; but now each night when she came home from work she soaked her feet with a very gallant smile on her face. Truly, she inspired him — which did not necessarily mean that he had developed a sentimental attachment to their circumstances. Out of his hatred for their clammy basement room on West Grand Street, he had developed a hatred for all Detroit.

In the room itself, the lights had to be turned on even during the day. The yellow from the bulbs penetrated their furniture and curtains so as to bring out every inch of ugliness. Only old people moved about in the other rooms of the three-story house, and when they hawked up mucus into the sinks, the sounds carried through the thin walls. Ancient men urinated in the bathroom down the hall, leaving the door open, leaning on their canes; often they were sick in the night, and those noises carried too. Surely if Paul had had a rich uncle and that uncle had died leaving him a fortune, he would have quit on the spot and moved the two of them back to Ann Arbor, where he had left two term papers half-written. But since no such uncle was alive even to expire, since even his possessionless father had dispossessed him, he accepted his fate, and seemed to derive from it a feeling of resiliency. If such lousy circumstances as these couldn’t humble him, what could? For all the beans they prepared on the hot plate, and for all the movies they decided they couldn’t afford to see, he felt his love for Libby flowering again. They did not argue as often as they had in Ann Arbor when they had begun to feel the financial squeeze. Perhaps they were only too exhausted now at night to sink their teeth in one another — but even the exhaustion proved something.

But when Paul called him back, the pharmacist assured him that positive meant only one thing: Libby was positively pregnant. Immediately Paul’s trunk-hinging stopped soothing him because it stopped engaging him. Cars fled past him as he added and subtracted in his head. The doctor plus the hospital plus the circumcision plus diapers, powders, formulas …

In how many months would she have to stop work?

How much are maternity clothes? Are they necessary?

How much would an apartment cost? Could they possibly stay on in the room? Instead of two years servitude in Detroit as planned, would they now be stuck here forever? A baby carriage plus a bassinet—

In the midst of his calculations, a passing auto frame nearly chopped off his left hand. He was spurting blood from the wrist when they rushed him to the infirmary. The doctor there, a curly-haired dark Italian, gave him the name of the abortionist.

He was home by noon. He had wanted to stay on for the afternoon, but the doctor said that considering everything (they had discussed everything for some fifteen minutes) he should go home, if only to pull himself together. With the light off he lay in bed and turned over and over in his hands the small slip of paper upon which the doctor had written a very few words. Paul studied the name: Dr. Thomas Smith. An alias? With his picture in the Post Office? He fell asleep finally, having first imagined various unsavory faces over Dr. Smith’s blood-stained white jacket.

Levy awakened him. Mr. Levy never smiled but was very friendly; it was only out of Libby’s softness for all those with canes and crutches that he had become an acquaintance of theirs. Paul had to admit that being able to say hello to somebody in the corridors did make the place less depressing. However, Levy — sunburned, bald, hawk-nosed — did not strike Paul as someone to particularly feel sorry for; he was too peppy, and furthermore they suspected that he tried to peek at Libby in the toilet.

Now Levy’s face was in the doorway. “How come you’re home? I thought something was up.”

“I cut my hand. They gave me the afternoon off.”

“Whew! What a cut!” said Levy, advancing. “You got a bandage like a mummy.”

“I’m all right.” He sat up, shaking the grogginess out of his head; the doctor had given him some numbing drug. “I’ll be fine.”

“Want me to make you a little Lipton’s tea?”

“No, thanks.”

“It don’t cost extra to boil water,” Levy said, spreading his fingers across the chest of his oversized, monogrammed shirt. “The tea-bag is a treat from me. You got a pretty wife.”

The remark irritated him. Levy was forever dropping his cane outside the bathroom keyhole in the morning, while Libby was brushing her teeth; sometimes it took him up to five minutes to retrieve it. So far they had been willing to believe the old man the victim of stiff knees and an arthritic back; if they did not jump to accuse him, it was because they felt sorely how unused they were to the inconveniences of rooming house living, of which Levy was only one. When Levy complimented him, Paul tried to smile — and the old man went off for the tea.

It seemed for a while that he would not return; when he did, carrying a tray with cups and kettle, he was accompanied by a pal.

“This is Korngold. Lives next door.”

Korngold shook his head as though he were not Korngold and lived in India. But his hands shook too; everything shook, poor man. Where he wasn’t brownish liver spots he was white as ashes. And his weight was not in keeping with his height; he was underfed, and leaning on his cane (not gold-headed like Levy’s) he looked stretched and dried. It was truly pathetic to hear him get out, “Don’t rise, please. It’s a pleasure, my deep pleasure,”

Paul moved off the bed, feeling invaded. There was a typewriter on the little oilcloth-covered table, and a pile of papers; recently he had begun to try writing stories. Levy lifted typewriter and papers and set them on the floor In their place he set down his afternoon tea.

“Let’s pull ourselves up here,” he said. “Korngold, take off your coat. No wonder you cough up phlegm left and right.”

“I cough up phlegm ’cause that Nazi hands out heat in a teaspoon. My chest kills me night and day.”

“Then move. This room is a gem, was empty a whole month. I told you, Move in, Korngold.”

“I was thinking. It’s a ten-dollar place. I don’t have to live fancy. Next door is seven fifty.”

“You was thinking, all right. Now these lovely people moved in and you still live by that son of a bitch.” Levy turned and almost bowed to Paul. “Sugar?”

Still groggy, with the feeling that he had mislaid something — that he was, in fact, the thing mislaid — Paul said yes, please.

“I take plain,” Korngold said.

Levy said, “I know how you take.”

“Lemon sticks in my heart,” explained Korngold.

They each pulled a chair up to the table. It was too late to remove a slip of Libby’s that was draped on the back of Levy’s chair; Levy sank heavily down onto the white silky cloth. Korngold in the meantime was lifting his cup to his mouth. Three sips, and his shirt front and chin were soaked.

Levy said, “Mr. Herz, Korngold would like a word with you.”

“It’s a long story,” Korngold said slowly. “It involves a lot of son of a bitches, a lot of crooks and bastards. Let me finish my tea.”

“He had a wife,” said Levy, “was nobody’s business.”

“Only half of it,” Korngold murmured. “A son, tell him about my son.”

“And a son to boot.” Levy caught a glimpse of the slip over his shoulder.

“And,” said Korngold, swallowing hard, “a daughter-in-law. A bastard like that you shouldn’t leave out.”

“Three such people picking at one man’s insides,” Levy said. “The son is on the inside with the Nike missile, coining it, we understand. Lives like a pagan, everything fancy. Korngold freezes by that Heinie son of a bitch, counting pennies, and the son has houses, we understand, all over Florida. Plus a daughter in Smith College.”

“Europe he’s been to twice.”

“Europe twice,” Levy repeated. “I’m coming to Europe under waste.” He opened and closed his palms. “Korngold’s life has been ruined by the serpent’s tongue. Disappreciation from all sides. Seventy years in January.”

“Aaach,” said Korngold, “and its worse than that. Even going to the toilet is a terrible production.”

“Korngold’s plan is a letter.”

“Two letters,” said Korngold softly, “is the plan …”

“A letter first to the son,” said Levy, very businesslike. “What kind of son are you and so forth.”

“Maybe a photograph,” Korngold said, his empty cup in his gaunt hand rattling in the saucer. “Let him see my condition,” he said, a little proudly.

Levy considered the suggestion for hardly a moment. “That depends,” he said. “But a sharp note, you know?”

“Then the other letter …” Korngold reminded him, touching Levy’s sleeve.

“Then a letter to the Senate. What kind of man is this who we put secrets in his hands, should guide and steer our country, and has no respect for his father.”

“Let them do an investigation,” said Korngold, “he thinks he’s such a foolproof big shot.”

“Give him the works where it hurts,” Levy said, and rose halfway out of the chair, his hands on Libby’s slip. “But the second letter we don’t send right off now. Give him a chance to make an offer.”

“He don’t deserve it.”

“Korngold, turn the other cheek to the son of a bitch. I’m telling you what’s practical. I’m talking about keeping a hot iron for striking over his head!” He sat back down and leaned toward Paul. “Korngold is a sick man in need of help. Has got one suit this fellow, and for a dry cleaning sits around for a week in his bathrobe, which also ain’t particularly brand new. What kind of son is that when Russia has a smash head-on program in science?” He did not even wait to be understood; self-righteously he said, “I think us and the Senate may see eye to eye!”

“Exactly right,” said Korngold, almost weeping.

“Korngold is in need of a companion.”

The needy man looked at Paul for some word. When none came, he smiled. “A man like Levy can run two lives. A first-rate business head. A sharp wonderful man.”

Levy hooked his fingers into his belt buckle, monogrammed ALL. “So you’ll write the letter?” he asked.

“To whom?” Paul said. “What?”

“The son. I brought paper what’s got my name on it. Typed,” said Levy, “would be very impressive.”

“I don’t get exactly what you want,” Paul said.

Levy extracted a folded paper from his coat pocket. “Here’s a facsimile. Just fix my contractions is probably all that’s needed.” Though addressing Paul, he had spoken his last words toward Korngold, who seemed to brighten.

“He was some attorney in his day,” Korngold told Paul. “Got gangsters off the hook. How can we miss?”

The letter in his hand — Levy over his shoulder — Korngold begging solace directly in his eyes — how could he protect himself? He read.

Dear Mr. Korngold:

Mr. Max Korngold, your father, has asked for me to contact you on the subject: his condition. What kind of son could leave a man seventy in January to live so? For twenty-five a week life would improve for him by way of a companion. He needs looking after for such simple incidents as toilets and meals even bed sheets are a problem. I am active with the Senator from Michigan and could pull strings by a full scale investigation of what you are up to in your private life — your spending for one thing. My secretary has ready in her hands a letter that the Senate will see eye to eye with me on when I send it special delivery. Why not be a good son and spare us all a mess? If not you will pull down your world out of selfishness and greed. Gone will be your homes up and down Florida. What is twenty-five a week to a man like you? Answer right now or my secretary will call the Senate in the morning long distance no expense spared.

“Do I make myself clear?” asked Levy. “Needs polishing?”

Korngold plucked at Levy’s sleeve. “Maybe we should enclose a snapshot. Let him see what condition I live in.”

“Why plead?” Levy reasoned, making a fist. “He should know I mean business. A wrong move and he’s through. You could type it up, adding here and there a comma?” he asked Paul.

Paul had heard most, but not all, of what the old men had been saying since they had come into his room. He did not have enough strength — given what had happened that day — to attend totally to these two characters. However, as much as they confused him, they touched him, and he was ready to say something helpful when he saw Levy’s hand come to rest again on the lace of Libby’s slip. “I’m not feeling well, Mr. Levy. Maybe you and Mr. Korngold better go out.” Then he smiled, for by choice and breeding he was not rude to elderly people.

“What?” asked Korngold. “A youngster like you with failing health?”

“Dummy, he’s got a bad cut.”

Levy pointed, and Korngold cringed at the sight of the bandage. Levy proceeded to assemble on the tray his cups and saucers. “I’ll leave you a facsimile, Mr. Herz, for when you have the time. That’s all right, not an intrusion?”

“No,” Paul said, wearily.

“So I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Don’t feel you gotta rush. The afternoon is fine. You could slip it under the door. I’d appreciate you wouldn’t knock — of an afternoon I take a little siesta.”

“Me, I can’t even sleep at night,” Korngold put in, holding his forehead. “Up with the birds. Awake all the time with that Nazi. For a radio he’s got a public address hookup. I wouldn’t tell you what he does in the sink — I should turn him in to the public health commission. In his room he’s got shortwave, direct to Berlin.” Korngold pushed back his chair; long and spineless as a sagging candle, he limped from the room. Levy moved after him, and, gesturing with his tray at Korngold’s back, he whispered over his shoulder to Paul, “Senility, a simple case. When the arteries go, you can call it quits.”

Libby’s face was over his. He heard her asking about his wrist before he was fully alive to the hour and the circumstance. Coming out of sleep was like climbing up a ladder. And for a moment he did not want to climb.

“I’m home,” Libby said. “What happened?”

He saw her pale-blue waitress uniform, then her. “I cut my hand at work.”

“Baby, are you all right?” She moved down beside him on the bed. “The bandage is so big.” She held him, careful of the wrist, and he did not know whether she was on the edge of passion or panic. He was hoping for neither.

“I’m all right. I was home for the afternoon, that’s all.” He sat up. “I’m fine.”

She turned on the bedside lamp. “How did it happen?”

“I don’t know. I was daydreaming.”

She touched the fingers of his bandaged arm. “Will it be all right? Can you work?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Did you lose this afternoon’s pay?”

He controlled his temper and said he didn’t know.

“Didn’t you ask?”

“No, Libby. I was bleeding. I could have bled to death.” Not happy over his histrionics, he got up and went to the sink to wash his face.

“I only wanted to know,” she said. “Your typewriter is on the floor.” She rose from the bed. “Mail?”

“What?”

She was unfolding the letter Levy had left behind.

“No,” he said.

Disappointed, she asked, “What is this?”

“Mr. Levy wants me to type a letter for him.”

She let the paper float out of her hands onto the floor. “He dropped his cane again this morning.”

“Look, Libby, do you want me to say something to him or don’t you?”

“He’s such a poor old man—” Libby began.

“Crap, Libby. We’re poorer than he is.”

“What kind of letter is it?” she asked.

“He brought a friend over with him. The man with the shakes next door. With the limp. Korngold. Korngold’s son has ruined Korngold’s life. Disappreciation—”

“Who’s Dr. Smith?”

“Who?”

She was holding up the little white piece of paper. “Dr. Thomas Smith. BA 3-3349.”

“Where was that?”

“On the table. Who is he?”

“He bandaged my hand. I have to call him.”

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” she asked. “Are you very upset?”

“It’s nothing.”

“I mean the other thing. Me.”

“You are,” he said. “You’re depressed.”

“I’m not depressed, I’m just nauseous. Is that possible? So soon? I couldn’t eat my lunch.”

“Maybe you should go to a doctor.”

“It’s not necessary.”

“If you’re feeling nauseous you ought to go to a doctor. You’ve got to eat.”

“We don’t have to start with doctors already,” she said. “I’m not going to pay anybody five dollars to tell me I should be nauseous.”

“Then go to a clinic. Go to the City Hospital.”

The suggestion visibly shocked her. “It’s not necessary.”

“Lib, you’re going to have to see a doctor eventually. Not doing anything isn’t going to make it not so.”

“Don’t lecture me, please. I’m quite aware of my condition and what to do about it.”

Her words confused him — though within the confusion was a strain of relief. “What do you mean?”

“That you don’t have to run to doctors in the second month. Please, Paul.” She picked up Levy’s letter from the floor; after looking at it for only a second, she buried her head in her arms on the table.

“Put something over your shoulders, Libby.”

“I’m all right,” she mumbled.

“Libby …”

She answered only with a tired sound.

“Dr. Smith is an abortionist,” he said.

Her arms remained crossed on the table, and she raised her head very slowly. She had nothing to say.

“He does abortions,” Paul said.

“I see.”

He got up from the edge of the bed and moved toward her. “You don’t see anything.”

“I don’t see anything,” she repeated. “You just made me numb, saying that.”

“I made myself numb.”

“He bandages hands too?”

“The doctor at the plant bandaged my hand. I just said that. The plant doctor gave me Smith’s name.”

She hammered on the table. “I don’t understand.”

“What?”

“I don’t understand how people give out names like that! I don’t think I understand what you’re talking about!”

He decided to say no more; he sat back down on the bed.

“I said I don’t think I understand everything,” Libby shouted. “Would you please tell me? I’d be interested to know how my condition was bandied about in some doctor’s office.”

“Nobody bandied anything.”

“Then what happened?”

“Let’s forget it. I’ve been stupid. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s not forget it till I know what I’m supposed to forget!”

“Libby, let’s do forget it.” He did not give in to his impulse to pretend that his wrist was hurting. But Libby fierce, Libby pounding on tables and shouting, made him very uncertain; this was the girl he had married to take care of. Sternly he said, “Forget it.”

“Maybe I’m interested!” she said, pointing a finger at him. “Maybe I’m interested! All right?”

“Maybe I’m not.”

He did not realize that she still had the piece of paper in her hand until he saw it being waved in his face. “Then why did you bring this home? Why did you bring it up in the first place?”

“The doctor did.”

“But you brought it home, you wrote it down—”

“He wrote it down. Calm yourself. He asked me why I was so preoccupied. I told him. He took out a piece of paper and wrote this name down. He gave it to me, and I was in a daze, and I took it — and that’s all.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing. It was all very … decent.”

“So then how do you know it’s an abortionist? Why do you come home and even say that?”

“Because I know. Because it is. He was trying to be kind.”

At last she sat down beside him, helpless. “Do you think it was kind?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled her head down into his lap, and ran a finger along the hard bone of her nose. “Stop shouting abortionist around here,” he said. “Levy’s behind every door.”

“All right.”

After a few silent minutes, he asked, “What do you think?”

“How …” She held his hand over her mouth as she spoke. “How much is it? Is it too much?”

Around the corner from them was a little delicatessen with a neon Star of David in the window, and tile floors, and the usual smells. They ate dinner there often because it was cheap and the counterman was kind, especially to Libby. Jewish store owners were always taking her for a nice Jewish girl and giving her extra portions to fatten her up.

“What kind of dinner is that?” Solly called from behind the cold-cut slicer. “Consommé and tea, you’ll dwindle away to nothing. We’ll have to give you an anchor for outside in the wind.” He had a concentration camp number on his forearm and had bought the store with Nazi reparation money; the Herzes respected him fiercely.

“I’m not hungry,” Libby called back to him.

“You’re not hungry, what’s wrong with a piece of boiled chicken?”

“No thank you, Solly.”

“Are you still nauseous?” Paul asked her.

She nodded and broke a slice of rye bread into small pieces; she touched a crust to her lips, but couldn’t push it any further.

“Lib, I’m going to call him.”

“From here?”

“From the booth. I’ll just call. I’ll inquire.”

He waited, but she gave him no answer. A couple of teen-age boys came into the store and ordered knishes.

“Does that seem all right?” Paul asked.

“… I think so.”

“That doesn’t sound like conviction, Lib. Should I or shouldn’t I? What do you want me to do?”

“Whatever you want …” She collected all the little pieces of bread and put them in the ash tray.

He sat a moment longer and then got up and went to the phone booth. Solly passed him, carrying two bowls of soup. “It’ll get cold,” Solly said. Paul smiled and shut the door of the booth behind him. He looked at the piece of paper but could not read the number. I drank tea with Levy … I kibitz with Solly … At the plant I eat my lunch with Harry Black, LeRoy Holmes …

If no one knew my face or name—

“Hurry up,” Solly called as he passed the booth again. Paul turned his back to the store; hunched on a corner of the seat, he dialed. The underwater feeling he had lately experienced returned. He waited until he heard a hello from the other end.

“Is Dr. Smith in?”

“He’s eating—” a woman replied. “I said he’s eating.”

He did not know where to go from there.

“Hello — is this an emergency?” the woman shouted. “Is this Mr. Motta?”

“No.”

“Well, the doctor is eating his dinner. You want him to call you back? Is this Mr. Motta?”

“No, no. I’m in a booth.”

“Look, you call when he’s finished eating. You hear me?”

When he got back to the table, the steam still rose off their bowls of soup. Libby had not disturbed the oily surface with her spoon.

“Are you sick again?” he asked.

“Still.”

“Do you want a soft-boiled egg or something?”

“What did he say?”

“He was eating. I didn’t talk to him. Lib, this is a mistake. I think we should go ahead and let what happens happen.”

She picked up her spoon and stirred the soup at the edge of the dish.

“Does that make you feel better?” He covered one of her hands with his own.

“I think so,” she said.

“All right. Let’s just eat. It’ll get cold.”

Solly was trying to get their attention from behind the counter. “Go ahead,” he said, pointing to their food, “give it a try.”

Libby took two spoonfuls. “Who did you talk to, then?” she asked.

“A woman.”

“His secretary?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did she sound like?”

“She sounded all right. She sounded fine. She just said he was eating.”

“Are you going to call him back?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I said I wouldn’t, and you said it made you feel better.”

She dropped her spoon — deliberately, he thought — to the table. “I don’t know what makes me feel better.”

He looked quickly around: Solly was back in the kitchen joking with the cook. “Don’t raise your voice, will you? Stop clanging your silverware. It’s nobody’s business. How do you feel now? Why don’t you eat your soup?”

“I don’t want it.”

“You’ve got to eat something. You can’t work all day and not eat anything. You’ll get sick. Do you want some toast?”

“Paul, maybe we ought to …”

“What?”

“Maybe we ought to talk to somebody.”

“You want me to call again? I don’t want to pressure you. I don’t want to decide without you.”

“Well, you have to make up your mind, though, whether you want it or not.”

“Want the baby or the other?”

“Want the other … A baby,” she said, “a baby might be a pleasure.”

“You want it then?”

“Don’t you? Don’t you think a little baby might be a pleasure for us?”

“Lib, it’s just now. It’s just how long can we keep being the victims of everything. I’m starting to think there’s some conspiracy going.”

“A lot of people look forward to having a baby.”

“I look forward to it too. Don’t accuse me, sweetheart. It’s just not now … Why aren’t you eating?”

“I told you a hundred times already. I’m nauseous! Don’t you believe me?”

“You want a baby, Libby, we’ll have a baby.”

“I don’t want anything you don’t want.”

“I’m not saying I don’t want it. I’m only saying now. I feel like a snowball being pushed downhill. Things are getting out of hand.”

“Every day somebody has a baby they hadn’t planned on.”

“All right then. We’ll just let it ride.”

“I mean what kind of way is that to have a family? To just let it ride.”

“Don’t raise your voice, I said.”

“Well, what kind of way is it?”

“It’s no way.”

“Then you want to call him back?”

“I think maybe we ought to think about it.”

“We can’t think about it forever,” Libby whined. “If you have a thing like that done it has to be soon.”

“What are you talking about having it done? I just thought you didn’t want to have it done. I thought now you wanted to have a baby.”

“But you don’t.”

“It isn’t that I don’t—”

Solly rapped with a knuckle on the counter. “What’s a matter, you kids can’t decide what movie? See Ten Commandments—it’s got a beautiful message.”

“Thanks, Solly, no,” Paul said. “Libby’s got a cold.”

“How about a piece of boiled chicken?” Solly asked.

“No, thank you,” Libby said.

“Lib,” Paul said, “let’s save this conversation. Let’s talk at home.”

She agreed. But while eating his stuffed peppers, he couldn’t prevent his mind from working. “If I call, Libby, I’ve got to call from here. I can’t talk from the hall.”

“Then you’re going to call.”

“Drink your tea at least.”

As he pulled back his chair once again, Solly addressed the salami he was slicing: “There’s a kid likes cold food.”

This time his control was much better; he had no trouble making out the number, and his mouth moved into the mouthpiece at just the moment he wanted it to. His voice was his own when he asked for the doctor.

“He’s eating,” the woman said. “Didn’t you call before?”

“This is an emergency. You better let me talk to him.”

There was no response. Was he supposed to say he was Mr. Motta? “Hello — hello?” he said.

The voice from the other end was now a man’s. “Doctor Tom speaking.”

“Dr. Smith?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Doctor, I’m calling about my wife. She’s been having some menstrual trouble. I wondered if you might have a look at her.”

“Think it’s a matter of structural derangement, do you? Has she been to an osteopath before? Someone suggest to you that the fundamental condition was a lesion?”

“I don’t understand, Doctor.” The mumbo jumbo was making him perspire. “She’s not menstruating properly. She’s not menstruating on time. We’re a little concerned.”

“I see.”

“Dr. Esposito gave me your name.”

“Maybe you’d better bring her over for a checkup. Give her a once-over.”

“Do you understand me, Doctor?”

“Why don’t you get her over here in half an hour, all right?”

“Just for a checkup though …”

“I’ll take care of her. What’s your name, son?”

After he told him — his name and his wife’s too — he could have cut out his tongue.

On the bus they sat in the last two seats in the back. Paul did all the talking. “We’re not obliged to do anything, Lib. Don’t be glum, please. We’ll let him look at you. The worst it’ll be is a checkup. I want you to make up your own mind. We don’t have to tell him anything, we’re not involved in any way. There’s no reason, though, why we shouldn’t investigate all the possibilities. If it sounds complicated, if there’s anything you don’t like about it, then we forget it. I’m sure it’s a very simple procedure. People go back to work the next day. You could stay at home a week, though — that isn’t what I mean. What I mean is you don’t have to worry, you don’t have to feel that we’re helplessly entangled in anything. You say no and it’s no. We have the name, we have the address — we’ll just go. Most people who want to do it and don’t, don’t because they can’t even find out who to go to. It goes on all the time, Lib. There are probably I don’t know how many every day of the year. People like us, in our circumstances, unprepared for a child. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t at least inquire about a way out. I don’t see why every rotten thing that falls our way has to be accepted. Don’t you agree? You don’t have to say a word, Lib. You don’t have to say a thing. When we come out, you say yes or no, and that’s that. You say no, that’s fine with me. All right? Is that all right?”

“This is the stop,” she said.

The office was in a ten-story apartment building near Grand Circus Park. In the entryway downstairs there was a brass plate:

THOMAS SMITH

DOCTOR OF OSTEOPATHY

ROOM 307

Passing the plate, Paul thought for the first time about the police.

The nurse said, “Herz?” when they walked into the waiting room, and then disappeared into the doctor’s office; she wore glasses and had fat red peasant cheeks. Libby picked up a copy of Look and held it in her lap. Paul flipped sightlessly through an osteopathic journal. A close-shaven, gray-at-the-temples corporation executive came out of the doctor’s office. “Hello there. I’m Doctor Tom,” he said. “Come on in.”

In the examination room both Herzes stood at attention before his desk. When he motioned for them to sit down, only Libby obliged. The doctor himself — chiseled features, leathery skin, a large brown mustache — placed himself on the edge of his desk, one leg swinging athletically. Paul noticed his hands: large and sculpted.

“Well,” the doctor said, “what’s the fundamental condition here?”

“We think my wife is pregnant. We want an abortion.”

The only noise in the room was made by Libby — a small sound, neither of denial or agreement. Following a moment of blinding fatigue, Paul took command. “We had a rabbit test,” he said. “The result was positive.”

“Uh-huh.” The doctor stood up, cracked his knuckles and furrowed his brow, thoroughly professional. “When was your last period?” he asked Libby.

They had themselves been over and over this ground; she answered instantly. “January sixth to January eleventh.”

“Young man,” said Dr. Smith, “why don’t you step out of the room?”

He hung back for only a second, then did not look at Libby as he left. The nurse was stretched out on a leather chair in the waiting room. Above her hung a painting of two men duck hunting. One of her shoes dangled from either hand, and from her feet rose an appalling but universal odor. Not the doctor, but the nurse, was along the lines of what he had been expecting. In all her pores, all he saw was dirt, dirt and germs. He began to read in one of the osteopathic magazines about Dr. Selwyn Sales of Des Moines, the Osteopath of the Month.

“Don’t be nervous,” the nurse said. “Doctor Tom does beautiful work.”

“I’m sure.”

“His whole life is osteopathy. No family, no outside clubs, don’t even pick up a book unless it’s osteopathy. He wouldn’t tell you himself, but he’s a power in the field. People come to him from all over the world. He’s already been asked to talk in Missouri twice.”

“What’s in Missouri?”

All at once, he had an enemy. She narrowed her eyes at him — or brought her great cheeks up to cover the bottom lids. “What do you think, it’s a picnic for a doctor like Doctor Tom? This here is a dedicated man. Women tumble at his feet — but his whole life is osteopathy. He has a rotten foe in that AMA. Think they own everything. You know an osteopath is better trained than a medical doctor, you know that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know much about osteopathy,” he said apologetically, but too late.

“You know who controls the AMA, don’t you? A man comes along like Doctor Tom, a man with an American background like his, six generations of Smith Smith Smith, and then you see them putting their noses together, turning the pressure on.”

He flipped through the osteopathic magazine to the editorial page. Somewhere down the column he spotted the name: Dr. Thomas Smith.

“We have a woman comes in here with an allergy condition. MDs have been taking her for a ride for years. Dr. Goldberg’s wife got six minks already, and this poor lady still can’t breathe. She can’t sleep, can’t eat, and I’ll tell you, she was growing poor from the way those country-club doctors was bleeding her. She finally saw Doctor Tom, and what was it but a problem of manipulation. A lesion in the joints of the neck. Right here. And this is the kind of thing the AMA is against, this is the kind of battle Doctor Tom has on his hands. You don’t make a mistake when you come to an osteopath. I’ll tell you where medicine comes from — it comes from Europe! Osteopathy is American, through and through. Someday, you wait, the osteopath will have his day. It’s a damn shame — all that training, and they make our boys go into the service as privates. You know who’s pulling the strings down in Washington, don’t you? You know who’s got the influence—”

Doctor Tom’s head came through the door. “Mr. Herz?”

Libby was sitting up on the examination table, fully dressed except for her shoes. Doctor Tom was standing by the calendar on the wall. “When’s best for you?” he asked. “Tomorrow night all right? About eight?”

“She’s definitely pregnant?” Paul asked, for he had stepped back into the office hoping for a miracle.

“Uterus is enlarged, breasts tender, a little swollen — the morning sickness, the rabbit test …” He smiled, cracking his knuckles. He looked over at Libby; she said nothing.

“Doctor—” Paul asked, “how much?”

“For a D and C, four hundred dollars. For the anesthetic, fifty more. We do it right here in the office, Mrs. Kuzmyak assists me. You’ll be in and out in an hour.” The time element seemed to fill him with pride.

“Who administers the anesthetic?”

“Mrs. Kuzmyak.”

“She’s—” But he left off, and fortunately the doctor seemed not to have guessed what he was going to say.

“She’s fine right away,” Doctor Tom said. “You go home from here, and she can go back to work next day.”

At last, Paul looked directly at his wife. Immediately she directed her attention to the calendar pinned to the wall. “It’s safe?” he asked.

The doctor smiled. “Two hundred percent.”

“The police—”

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Doctor Tom, bringing a giant fist down into his palm, “a D and C is not illegal. What the AMA and that crowd thinks is their business.”

“I meant about the law.”

“You come in here at eight, Mr. Herz, I’ll have you out by nine. You go home, your wife here gets a good night’s sleep — if you want, let her stay off her feet the next day, and that’s it. You have nothing to worry about.” He crossed his arms and raised his chin. His lower lip came out, reaching up for his mustache. Was he nervous? Hadn’t he ever done this before? Why didn’t he answer the questions?

All Paul said was, “Four fifty is a little high.”

“Listen, young man”—the voice was gentle and chastising—“you can find somebody for a hundred and fifty if you want to look down dark alleys. But this is your wife we’re dealing with. I should think you would want the best.”

“Yes, yes, absolutely.”

“Tomorrow night at eight?”

“Lib?” Paul asked.

But Libby said nothing. While he waited for her to speak, his mind traveled all the way back — to Lichtman, to Uncle Asher, to his own parents. In a fit of defiance he shook the doctor’s hand.

“Have a light lunch,” said Doctor Tom, coming over and putting just a finger on Libby’s clenched hand. “No dinner, an enema at five, and I’ll see you at eight.”

The anesthetist, Mrs. Kuzmyak, was gone from the waiting room when they left. Either it was Paul’s strong imagination or the odor of Kuzmyak’s feet, but something of her managed to cling to the place even in her absence. He found himself cursing her. The smelly pig! The fat frustrated bitch!

Oh God!

From the street, through the leafless hedge, they could see that a light was on behind the stained shade in their room.

“I turned them all off,” Paul said. “Did you turn them on?”

“No.”

“You must have, Lib—”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Oh Paul …”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Everything.”

“I probably left it on. It’s all right.” But he was suddenly so full of his own thoughts that he did not even take her hand. He opened the outside door with his key, and they walked down the narrow stairway to the basement. Outside their door he could not find his other key on his chain; as in the phone booth, his eyes blurred over. He remembered having seen a squad car on the corner when they had alighted from the bus. Earlier there had been a man in a hat outside Dr. Smith’s apartment building — and he had looked too long at Libby, hadn’t he? Had they been followed? Caught? He saw the life which he had so earnestly and diligently constructed falling away to nothing. He should have known … all the crumbling that had been going on over the months. He should have been stronger, wiser! Now the scandal, jail, poor poor pale Libby—

When he pushed open the door, Korngold made an effort to rise from the edge of the bed, but gave in to his arteries and only sat there, half raising his cane. “You was open …” the old man said, pointing at the door. “The hallways gets chilly. I was getting a pain in the lungs.”

“Jesus, Korngold!” Paul said. “You frightened us.”

Korngold made a joke, which did not for a moment transform the skeletal look of his face. “Consider it an honor. First one in thirty years. How do you do?” he said, feebly, to Libby. “Oh, you’re pretty as Levy says. A yiddishe maydele.” For a moment the old man sat there loving her with his eyes.

Libby sat down at the table and looked kindly across at Korngold. “Thank you.”

“What is it, Mr. Korngold?” Paul asked. “We’re both very tired.”

“I only need a minute.”

“What is it?”

“I want to ask a little advice. You’re a young man. You know about modern times. I ain’t got all my perspectives. Please sit down too, would you? I get dizzy looking up.”

Paul took off his coat but held it in a bundle on his lap when he sat. He could not hate this feeble old man, but still there was a momentum in his life that Korngold’s presence was interrupting. He knew, of course, that this police business was only in his imagination. If he could just drive forward without stopping, without thinking, and get this done, then everything — he thought vaguely — would be all right.

“Does this seem like cheating to you?” Korngold was asking. “If my son gives me twenty a week, why do I need a Levy? This is a scheme — what do you think? Do you get the feeling Levy is a real friend? Or do you get another feeling? What does he care, a man was once a topnotch criminal lawyer, with little fish like me. First off I think he is strictly interested in my underwear. I got twenty-six cases, tops and bottoms, a nice close-knit cotton like you can’t get no more. Levy comes in my room, sees all this goods, and he’s my friend. So I tell him about that son of a bitch, my son, and all of a sudden Levy is a first-class chum, an old school-tie buddy. I’m asking you, Mr. Herz, as a young fellow, is this a genuine interest in my life, or is this a crook I got myself involved in?”

“Mr. Korngold, I can’t give you any advice. I’m going to type the letter tonight.”

“Yes?” Korngold paled, if such were possible. “So soon?”

“Look, why don’t I type it, and you and Levy can decide what to do with it. Does that sound reasonable?”

Korngold was forced to admit that it was not; he shook his head, making his mouth a round black hole. “You type, then next thing it’s in the U.S. mail, and I’m married to Levy. Somebody does you a favor, you can’t suddenly take a walk across the street.”

“What do you want me to do, then? I’ve had a very rough day. My wife and I are very tired.”

“Oh, excuse me,” the old man said; he bowed his head to the tired girl, then with his eyes drank her in again, unLevylike, fatherly.

“What is it you want, Mr. Korngold?” Libby asked. Her voice surprised Paul. She sounded confident that she could give whatever Korngold might want. She was probably so much stronger than her husband ever allowed her to be … Here again, hadn’t he bossed her into something? Hadn’t her silence in the doctor’s office been a negative vote, one he had not even bothered to count?

“A direct appeal,” Korngold said. “I’m not proud, believe me. A plea. Tell the boy for Christ sake to send money. I don’t need no Levy. I need a simple letter somebody should write for me. I can’t even tie my shoes with these shakes.”

“Then,” Libby said, “maybe Mr. Levy would be a help.”

“This is a crook, lebele, something tells me. He’ll tie the laces and steal the shoes. He’s got an eye already on an easy dollar via my underwear.”

“Why don’t you sell it?” Libby asked, coming over to him on the bed. “Is it all in your room?”

“You don’t sell to robbers. I drag a box of briefs all over Detroit, they wouldn’t give me enough to pay my bus fare. I don’t sell nothing when the market stinks. If you don’t speculate, you don’t accumulate — always my motto. Now is a buyer’s market. Let them come begging, that’s when Max Korngold does business!” he shouted.

“How did you come by all this underwear?” Paul asked.

“A three-way split with two partners, they should both go live in hell.”

“When was that?”

“Seven years already. That kind of underwear they don’t knit no more. Don’t think Levy don’t know that either …” But his mind suddenly was elsewhere. “Here,” he said. He took a wallet from his inside coat pocket; the photograph he finally coaxed out of one of the folds was of himself, from a Take Your Own Photo booth. There was Korngold, and there was his right hand, raised up beside his ear — and in it he was gripping his cane. He might have been shaking the cane at the camera; he might merely have been showing that he had one. At the bottom of the picture were written some words that Paul could just about decipher: Your Old Father, Feb. 3, 1951.

“You could enclose this with the letter?” he wanted to know.

Paul looked to Libby to speak for them both, but she seemed near tears. Korngold waited, then spoke again. “You see, just a few facts of my health I’m sure could make an impression. Here, take a look, please.” He pulled up his trouser legs to show a pair of knees that were not wholly unexpected but were nevertheless shocking. “Undernourishment. Bad ventilation. Improper rest. Worry. Aloneliness. Let me tell you about a wife, gets a spurt of energy one day, aged sixty-one years old, hides my cane, steals my checkbook, runs off to Florida with an eighty-year-old shmekele, can’t even pee straight cause he can’t see what’s doing under his belly. Excuse me. The facts are dirty and disgusting so I can’t talk clean if I want”—this last to Libby, with a tender plea in his lips and eyes. “I got myself a lawyer, a young fellow with short hair, and he takes me for a ride — three times he’s got to fly to Miami — and I got cleaned out. Now Levy keeps one eye on my underwear, another on my son, and what do you think I feel? Contented? Foolproof? Please, you write a simple note — here, I got the postage even.” He removed some crumpled three-cent stamps from his watch pocket and counted them into Libby’s hand. “One, two, three — go all-out. Don’t worry about weight. I’m a desperate man.” He patted Libby’s arm. She helped him off the bed. “And how are you?” he asked Paul. “The wrist’s improved?”

“Much better.”

“You two kiddies look tired.” He turned back once again, unable to keep his eyes from Libby’s face. “My son, my own son, why couldn’t he find a nice yiddishe maydele, a little dark darling. That girl — she poisoned his opinions of me!” He dragged his bad legs to the door.

“Help him,” Libby whispered tearfully to Paul.

“Here,” Paul said, and he was up from his chair at last and reaching after the old man’s elbow. So immune had he been feeling to anyone’s suffering but his own, so lacking in tenderness and interest, that he wondered if he had left his heart for good in that doctor’s office. “Here.” He took hold of Korngold and led him out the door and up the stairs to the front entryway. As they emerged into the hall, the bathroom door slammed shut.

In bed, neither one touching the other, Libby said, “You decided. You said yes. You never so much as asked me.”

“We can change our minds.”

“We made an appointment already. We discussed money.”

“That doesn’t bind me to a thing.”

“Where are we going to get all that money?”

“It’s in the bank.”

“Paul, that’s all we’ve got. Everything!”

“Money,” he said firmly, as though it were a truth he had known for more than a few hours, “is to get you out of trouble with.”

“You’ve decided.”

“I’ve decided.” Quickly he added. “So did you.”

“I didn’t decide anything!”

“All afternoon you were on a seesaw, Libby. If you said no, it would have been no. I wouldn’t have gone against you.”

Limply, she held out for herself. “I did say no.”

“No, then yes, then no. When you went to the doctor’s office—”

“You tricked me!”

“Lower your voice!”

“It’s my body! It’s my body he’s going to operate on!”

At last they touched: he clamped a hand over her mouth. “Libby, Libby,” he said through his teeth, “it’s been a difficult day. These old men, my hand, everything.” When he removed his hand, allowing her to breathe again, she rolled away from him. “You want to think the decision is mine,” he said, “then it’s mine.”

“It is yours.”

“All right, you think that.”

“Stop trying to get the upper hand!” she said. “I’m thinking it because it’s so.”

“Libby, you’re twenty years old. We came down here to make some money. We want to go back to school. We’re married a year, we’re broke—”

“We’re not broke if we’ve got four hundred and fifty dollars in the bank to throw out!”

“In the end, a baby will cost more, much, much more. It’ll change our lives altogether. Honey, I’m only trying to protect us from even more crap. If there’s a baby, we have to move out of this room, you have to stop working. And we’ll never get caught up, Libby. I know it, we’ll just flounder along.”

She turned back toward him, covering her face with her hands. “You think you shouldn’t even have married me. I made you marry me.”

“Don’t talk stupidly, please.”

“When I think of all the stuff I said I’m just so ashamed. You’ve changed me, now you’ve got to marry me — how can I ever go out with other boys—”

“Lib,” Paul said, not sure that he wasn’t lying, “you never said any of that.”

“I thought it.”

“I wanted to marry you. I went out of my way to marry you.”

“I made you want to.”

“Go to sleep. Nobody’s talking sense at this hour.”

“I can’t go to sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool … What does an osteopath know about uteruses?”

“Osteopaths are like doctors. Smith is very well known.”

“They’re bone-crackers.”

“The man’s been doing this for years.”

“What about infection?”

“This is a doctor, Libby, not just anybody. Would he do it if it was risky?”

“Paul?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your hand. Feel my breasts. Do they feel bigger?”

“I think so, honey.”

She brought his hand up to her mouth and kissed it; she tried to be funny. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” Then, as he knew she would, she wept. “And it’s going to last one day. Oh Paul …” She lay still, holding his hand to her, and then because she was exhausted she soon fell asleep.

He himself had no such luck. His own whirlpool went round and round and round … Infection was Libby’s worry; his own mind turned and turned now on a single word: jail. Korngold had been showing his pathetic photograph, and all he had been thinking was jail! Suppose the police should come in before Libby was in the operating room. Couldn’t he simply say she was there for an examination? Couldn’t they deny everything? Unless she were already on the table — then what? Whom do they put in jail? After all, he was her husband, not just a man who had got a girl into trouble. But what weight, if any, did that carry? Did that not make it seem worse? He tried to remember accounts of eases reported in the newspapers. Was the boy friend or husband an accomplice? The girl? Surely they didn’t throw her in jail! But in the headlines she was always dead.

Through the hectic night, at the center of his imaginings, stood the police. You’re an accomplice to an abortion. No, my wife said she had to come here to have a cyst removed. All right, says the Captain, ask the wife … Libby, if anything should happen, if anybody should question you, say I didn’t know, say you told me it was a cyst—

In the morning neither of them heard the alarm clock. They dressed in a frenzy, couldn’t get into the bathroom, and had no time for coffee on the hot plate. They parted at the bus stop without even a kiss. Only a few hours earlier, Paul had tried to force his way into sleep by telling himself that all this preoccupation with the police was only his super-ego asserting itself. But that had in no way been able to increase his self-respect; he felt lucky then to have avoided a morning conversation with his wife, for he might have confessed to her the nature of his fears and so shaken her even further. He was aware of his momentum again, carrying him forward.

The bus started away from the corner, then stopped; someone was hammering on the side. The driver swung back the doors and Mr. Levy charged up the stairs, eyebrows floating and sinking, cane swinging disastrously near the driver’s head. “Don’t be disrespectful! I’ll take your number!” He started up the aisle, a little eager old man, sun-tanned from the ultraviolet bulb in his room. He snapped a sharp look into each seat until he spotted Paul. “Ah, nice morning,” he said; refining himself down into an oily friendliness, he slid in beside the young man. “A little chilly, but bracing.”

“Good morning,” Paul said. He had to free his coat from Levy’s backside.

“Heigh ho, heigh ho, off to work you go?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Yourself?”

“Enterprises, enterprises. I’m moving some gloves for a friend. You wrote the letter?”

He found himself looking out the window as he said, “I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“I thought maybe Korngold picked it up last night.”

“No.”

“I thought maybe it was his limp I heard dragging down the hall. Must be some mistake.”

Paul’s eyes fixed on the dull two-storied rooming houses along the street.

“You look a little underneath the weather,” commented Levy. “Up too late at night, no?”

“No.”

“Funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“Over sixty-five you can’t trust your senses. My hearing is a tricky item where I’m concerned.” Levy made a quick survey of the ads posted in the bus, checking the competition. He said, “Korngold, of course, is an old old friend, but senility will rob him of his sense of fair play, I’m afraid.”

Paul at last forced himself to engage Levy’s excited glittery eyes. “He doesn’t seem senile. Maybe a little fatigued. He seems to have had a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, nobody’s taking his troubles away from him. A sad case, that man. Fleeced all his life, then health goes, whew! No wonder he’s such a suspicious specimen. It’s pathetic how he doesn’t know the best road no longer. Needs help. Good thing you and me are around, because drowning would be his end. Starvation probably.”

They rode on a little further. Paul’s growing discomfort with Levy arose in part from a sense of incongruity; it was not simply that he did not like the fellow — it was that here was a crisis in his life, the crisis perhaps, and these two old men had somehow gotten tied up in it. It was all he could do not to get up and change his seat.

“So,” said Levy, with a flourish of his cane, “you’ll have it typed up this afternoon, righto?”

“I’ve got to work all day.”

“So tonight?”

“Tonight I’m busy.”

“More doctors?”

“What?”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“What is it, Mr. Levy? What are you following me around this morning for?”

“My boy, my boy, don’t be paranoyal. I got kid gloves I’m moving for a friend.”

But when Paul rose to leave, Levy followed. The bus pulled away and the two of them were alone on the corner, within sight of the gate to the plant. “What is it, Levy? What do you want to tell me?”

Levy only sniffed in some of the bracing air. “We’re going the same way,” he said. “Smells like pine trees in the vicinity.”

“What are you getting at? What’s on your mind?”

“That question I’m saving for you.” With Paul on his heels, Levy started to cross the street. A car came roaring down on them, and Paul couldn’t believe his impulse: he wanted to push the old bastard in front of it.

“Look,” he began, helping the elderly man up the opposite curb, “Korngold—”

“Korngold is senile. Korngold shouldn’t go in the dark streets at night. He’ll lose his footing and crack a hip. Then death. Korngold shouldn’t be encouraged along foolish lines.”

Paul was no longer helping Levy up the curb; nevertheless, he kept his fingers wrapped around the stringy arm. “Korngold asked me to write to his son for him,” Paul said, spinning the old man around. “All right? So he came in our room. He spilled his old sick heart out. I listened, my wife listened. I don’t have to hide anything from you, Mr. Levy. What the hell is going on here? Korngold has some rights in this thing.”

“For rights,” said Levy, shaking free his coat and smoothing out the cloth, “a legal mind is called for. Which I got, not you.”

“Mr. Levy, this whole thing,” said Paul, calming himself as best he could, “is very foolish. None of it is my business.”

Levy suddenly took a strangle hold on that admission; in anger he said, “Leave it to the parties of the first and second part to judge the wisdom of Mr. Korngold’s family problem. You just type neat the letter I gave you. Or”—he shook his cane—“give it back and go your way. Understand? Clear? This is in the shape of a warning, my young Mr. Herz. Keep your nose poked out of my professional life—”

But Paul could not bear for another moment to be in the company of meanness, his own or anybody else’s. “Look, I don’t care about your professional life, Levy. I don’t care about your letter—” And then, because Levy had the nerve to give him a menacing glance, he added, “you presumptuous little bastard!” It felt so good to say it — he had taken too much already, from everybody. “What kind of Senate investigation! What kind of petty thief are you, screwing poor Korngold!”

Levy’s eyes became tiny coin slots, big enough for dimes. “You want to pay for the label bastard, or you want to pay for that disgusting word screw? Which?”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“Dr. Thomas Smith. BA three dash three three four nine.” For the first time Paul could remember, Levy proceeded to smile. He walked on then, Paul grabbing after his coat.

“What business is that of yours!”

“Don’t hit an old man on the streets. Let go.”

In absolute confusion, Paul dropped his hands to his sides.

“I’m interested in the law,” said Levy. “When it gets busted, I feel a pain.”

“You little thief! You eavesdropping little son of a bitch! You sneak looks at my wife in the john, you disgusting old fart!”

“Libel is a crime, Mr. Herz, even if only the other party is a witness. It’s a crime against my feelings. Also illegal medical proceeding is a crime in a great state like Michigan, Watch your step!” With that, Levy turned back the way they had come, smashing at the pavement with his cane.

Late in the afternoon Paul complained to the foreman that his left wrist was throbbing, and managed to see the doctor. In the infirmary Dr. Esposito undid the bandage. “You called and took care of your business?”

“Everything is all right,” Paul said.

The doctor smeared a cool ointment onto the wrist. “Well. Good. It’s your business.”

“You see, it worked out. She menstruated this morning.”

“Is that so?” Esposito asked, smiling.

“No,” Paul said. “No — look, is he all right, this Smith? Is he a quack?”

“Topnotch for what he does,” Esposito said softly.

“I didn’t like the looks of the nurse.”

“You’re overnervous. Who does the scraping, the nurse or Smitty?”

“Look, I appreciate everything. Please, call the foreman, will you? Tell him I’m sick. I’ve got to get home.”

Esposito continued to be the most decent person around. He made the call, adding that Herz might not be able to come in for work the next day either.

From the bus Paul raced past his own house, flung open the little iron gate next door, and two at a time took the stairs of Korngold’s red-sided rooming house. A rotund man was eating potato chips out of a bag and listening to the radio in the sitting room, a dark place where everything, floor, tables, chairs, seemed knee-deep in rugs and coverlets. “What!” the man boomed, before anything was said.

“Korngold.”

“Next to the sink,” said the man in a heavy accent. “Upstairs. What are you to him?” As Paul moved away, he shouted after him, “He owes his rent!”

Paul mounted the stairs. He knocked at the door to which a business card was thumbtacked:

MAX KORNGOLD

Haberdashery Kiddies Wear

Waiting for some word from the other side, he looked in the sink. There was a Bab-o can on the ledge and he shook it and shook it over the filth; nothing, unfortunately, sprinkled forth.

“Who?” Korngold moaned.

“Paul Herz. From next door. Open up, please.”

Minutes passed before Korngold — long underwear beneath his robe, his stained fedora back on his head — appeared in the doorway. “All right. Come in.”

The tiny room was squeezed into an angle of the house, and so had five cracking walls. Around three of the walls cartons were piled; beside the bed, under whose covers Korngold had been laid out, was an end table with a flashlight, a glass, a paper-covered book, and a milk bottle half full of urine. In the grip of sadness and disgust, Paul looked away from Korngold’s possessions. The old man, with some oow-ing and ahh-ing, had taken his place back in the bed.

“I got the shivers,” Korngold explained. “Sit, why don’t you.”

“I’m in a hurry. I want to say to you that I had a talk with your friend Mr. Levy this morning. I think he has your interests at heart. What good would money be to you without a helper, somebody to give you a hand going up and down stairs, to sit across from you at meals? He has your interests at heart.” He had gotten through it on just one breath.

“This,” Korngold asked, “is something he told you?”

“I observed him. I listened to him, yes. Why don’t you let him go through with his plan? See what happens.”

Korngold stretched his neck up on his pillows, crossing his arms for protection. “You told him I came talking to you?”

“He knew it. He heard you.”

“Oy, he’s got six ears that guy! I thought he was asleep by eight. He says that, see, for propaganda. See how he tricks you out on things?” He seemed ready for tears.

“No, no. It’s all right. I said you just wanted to give me your son’s address.”

Korngold put his head in his hands, and he let out some air with a high flutey sound. “Oh, nice thinking,” he said.

“So you’ll just go along, all right?”

“You saved my life, believe me.”

“Your life’s not in jeopardy, Mr. Korngold. What’s the matter with you?”

“It’s no good crossing Levy, I’m sure. Not when a fellow offers you so much.”

“Don’t be so nervous, please. I’m only saying that this is to your advantage.”

“Of course it is. Sure. You’re right. See what a wreck I turned into? Someone offers a helping hand, I give him for a reward suspicion. I could have made a bad mistake.”

“You’ll just go along then?”

Korngold raised a hand and waved it. “Of course. Lucky break,” he said, as though to himself. Then: “What size?”

“What?”

Korngold considered Paul’s physique. “What size in a jockey brief?”

“I don’t wear jockeys.”

“Foolish. Plus comfort, it protects from strains and hazards. Go take yourself a pair for a present. What — a thirty-two?”

“In the waist I’m thirty.”

“Three boxes down, to the left by the window. Go ahead, take a pair. A pair,” he added a little shyly, “is one. Two days wearing will change your whole attitude toward underwear. Please, for saving my life.”

When Paul had removed the shorts from a box, Korngold said, “Give me a look, would you?” The old haberdasher and outfitter of kiddies fingered the briefs in his hand. “Once I thought, I’ll build myself an empire. Now the gonifs want for nothing. Levy — sure, Levy — of course — you’re right. With him is my last hopes. What good are cartons sitting in my room, huh? Wear it, enjoy it. And how is that little maydele, your wife? I could see right away all the sweetness in that face.”

First the bathroom was occupied. Paul had to go out and hammer on the door.

“Please don’t disturb,” came Levy’s voice from within.

“Somebody else wants to get in there,” Paul shouted.

“Please don’t disturb please,” Levy sang out.

Back in the room Libby gnawed on her fingers. “The doctor said to do it by five. It’s almost six,” she said.

“He’ll be right out.”

“You’re nervous now.”

“Just be patient, please.”

He went out into the hall and knocked again on the bathroom door.

“Please, Mr. Levy — my wife has to use the bathroom.”

“I don’t like carrying on conversations in such circumstances. Will you, please?”

“I’m giving you five minutes.”

“The doctor will wait,” whispered Levy.

“Shut up! Shut your mouth!”

“Please, this is not my cup of tea. Move away, all right?”

Paul pressed himself against the door, his body, his mouth. “I spoke to Korngold. He wants you to represent him. To write the letter, to be his companion.”

“This is fact or fiction?”

“A fact. An hour ago. All right?”

“If true, all right.”

“You understand me …?”

“Please, I’m finishing up now.”

“You understand me, don’t you?”

“Understood,” answered Levy, rattling paper.

While in the bathroom Libby readied herself for Dr. Smith, Paul collapsed onto the bed. All at once he remembered what he had forgotten. He jumped up, tied his shoelaces in knots, and without a coat — though it was the worst of winter in Detroit — ran all the way to the corner delicatessen. He dialed the doctor’s number so fast he got no connection. Woozy, he dialed again. Solly kept wanting to kibitz through the phone-booth door.

“Dr. Smith, this is Paul Herz.”

“This is Mrs. Kuzmyak, for Christ’s sake.”

“I want to speak to the doctor.”

“He’s not in. What is it?”

“Mrs. Kuzmyak, look, today was very hectic for me. I couldn’t get to the bank. I don’t have the money.”

“What do you expect, something for nothing?” She seemed to be trying to talk in some sort of dialect.

“Can’t I pay you tomorrow?”

She found now what it was she had wanted to say. “What do you think, my name is Fink, I do your clothes for nothing?”

“But, Mrs. Kuzmyak, we’re both ready. It’s been one hell of a day. My wife’s taking an enema. I forgot all about the bank. She hasn’t eaten — look, let me talk to the doctor, will you?”

“We’ve got books to keep straight,” she said, sternly. “The doctor’s got expenses to meet.”

“Well,” he said hopelessly, “what’ll we do?”

“Hang on there, Herzie.” She left the phone; then was back. “Doctor says tomorrow’s no good. Make it Thursday. Same time. Bring cash.”

Lunch hour the next day was spent waiting in line at the bank. After the withdrawal — a red stain on the left side of the little friendly green booklet — the balance was eleven dollars and some pennies. To brighten matters, the clerk warned him that he would lose out on his interest for the quarter.

It was not until Paul walked past the toothless, smiling guard at the bank door that he saw his error. He should have taken the money in bits and pieces over a period of time, rather than in five large unforgettable bills. Now the clerk would … But right in his hands was enough evidence to put him in jail for life: the bank book. How could he claim innocence with some histrionic D.A. waving withdrawal slips in the jury’s angry face? His moment of fantasy drew out of him all his strength, and he was left with only a fear, a silly dreamlike overblown fear of little Levy. Had Levy understood? Had Korngold emerged from his sleepless night willing to stick by his new decision? He slapped all his pockets and turned them inside out — this, right in front of the guard! — searching for the slip of paper with Dr. Smith’s name and number. Panic seized him — the paper was nowhere. It was not in the wallet with the five crisp bills. Had Libby—?

Levy!

His watch showed that twenty minutes of lunch hour remained. He signaled a cab, and with a sick stomach — for sometimes nickels eat away one’s insides more than hundreds of dollars — watched every turn of the meter until the taxi deposited him in front of his house. Up the stairs, through the hallway, down to the basement, and along the corridor to Levy’s door. He heard murmurs from inside and boldly knocked. No response; the whispers within were shushed. He hammered on the door till the molding creaked.

“Levy, I heard you talking. I want to speak with you. This is Herz, Levy, open up!”

Something — a shoe? — scraped along the floor. Hot-water pipes sizzled over his head; perspiring and furious, he slammed his shoulder into the door. It gave way and a piece of plaster floated down. Inside the room was no one. He moved down the hall to their own room; under their door he found a letter addressed to Libby. It did not even astonish him to think that something new was about to happen to him. He had never opened another’s mail, but now he felt nothing initiating about the act. The return address affected him as would the stabbing of a knife: surprise — then nothing — then pain. He read:

DEAR MRS. HERZ:

You possess, indeed, a phenomenal and singular sense of obligation. I do not know from whence it springs, your studies, your fancies, your greed, or perhaps from the man with whom you are cohabiting, and from whom you had drawn, I recall, other ideas, opinions, and manners of equal merit. I had thought that along with defiance you might at least have developed fortitude; in fact, however, you prove yourself in possession of more energy than character, which is of course the signature of the devil. Surely to one with an inspiration so inhuman, I can only reiterate that neither aid nor good wishes can be expected, now or in the days to come, from this quarter. Obligations are reciprocal, and when one party has failed another, the cessation of obligatory feelings from the injured can be designated with no word other than Justice; certainly with none of the words you suggest. My obligations, Mrs. Herz, are to sons and daughters, family and Church, Christ and country, and not to Jewish housewives in Detroit. On close examination you shall find this last statement not altogether villainous; the villainy you attribute to it may well arise from an excess in yourself. You have defied your father, your faith, and every law of decency, from the most sacred to the most ordinary. I should imagine that those who defy are subject to interesting feelings when they must beg. It remains to be seen whether you shall ever have the character to defy what all good people have always had to defy — their own sinfulness — and seek an annulment through the offices of the Church. The obligation of the sinner is to rectify his sins; and since that path which leads to rectification and glory is one of humiliation and pain, I shall have no choice but to continue myself with a course of action that shall render the life you have chosen unrelieved of privation. For it is privation that shall lead you to The Shining Light.

He sat on the bed, then floated, fell, died on the pillow. At first he did not ask himself why or how or when she had written; there was only the fact: she had. The letter rested on his chest, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps now he could rest. But even with the wind knocked out of him, it seemed he could not; breathless, he was up off the mattress suddenly, hunting. He poured out the contents of the trash can, sorting through wads of Kleenex; on the damp floor he crawled halfway under the bed; he looked through his wallet again. But he could not find the paper with Smith’s name. Then, with nothing better to do, he counted out the money — he ruffled and snapped each of the bills like a businessman, but they gave him none of what they gave the businessman. It seemed that he did not so much hate giving away this money as he hated himself for having it to give in the first place. Confusion. Terrible confusion. He returned to the bed and lay there face down, clutching the money in his hand. How easy, how soft and easy, he thought, was the solution: let go, give up, have a baby …

Okay then: consequences …

But for the first time he was not afflicted with visions of dancing dollar signs. His visions were not of loss and chaos. His family, for instance. Would not a baby’s coo soften their hearts? How could they resist a little dark-eyed child? This would be different from Libby’s conversion; this was nature, not design. The conversion, which he had masterminded, he knew now to have been a mistake, the real low point in his life. He was almost glad that his parents had not been fooled by it. Nobody else had, not even (most wretched of all) the convert herself. Yet he had still been dazed enough at the time to figure that something dramatic would knock them all back to their senses. After all, he was Paul, their son … it would forever remain a painful mystery to him that those parents whom he had never needed could shake him so by deserting him and his young wife.

It was easier understanding Libby and her parents. The protected child, the sheltered little girl, the baby sister. He could almost bring himself to forgive her for writing that father of hers. A girl with a past full of Gloriful Heaven and Sweet Jesus could not believe that anything as innocent as their marriage could provoke in others such monstrousness. The values from which their union had grown were the values the world had smiled upon for centuries. Not for a moment was either of them irresponsible; they had not been able to sleep with one another for more than a night without serious and profound feelings. And once they had rushed to confess these feelings to each other, how could they ever part? Oh love — was that the seed from which dragons grew? It was disbelief not greed, wonder not stupidity, that had led Mr. DeWitt’s loyal little girl to write to him.

But why had she to plead with him? Why ask for, of all things, money? How that sanctimonious bastard must have licked his chops! Privation, debts, hunger, fear! And up ahead, ah yes, there she glows, The Shining Light. The miserable sadist! The heartless Christ-kissing son of a bitch! Why should either of them have to plead with him, or anybody? Why must he suck around a dog like Levy? Suddenly he, Paul Herz, was a partner in the screwing of Korngold! And what, what was the best, the honorable, the manly course? He could put the four fifty back in the bank. He could give in to nature, let life — his, his wife’s, his child’s, roll on …

At work in the afternoon he knew he had changed his mind out of nothing noble. His decision not to go ahead with the abortion had little to do with any discovery of his own manliness. It was simple. How to avoid going to jail? Have the baby. How to get out from under Levy? Have the baby. How to win back his parents’ love? How to make DeWitt eat his words? Simple — have the baby, but deprive that pious louse of any rights to it. If they threw out the daughter, he could give them the heave-ho too! But what machinations—what cowardice! The hand he had lifted against the cruel world was now a fist striking against his own heart.

Libby arrived home that night before he did. He heard her singing inside, and hesitated with his key; he still did not know what to do with the letter from her father. With no plan at all, he opened the door.

Matters were further confused by the kiss. “I’ve got control of myself,” she said, brushing the side of his head with her lips. “I want to tell you that. I want you to know. I’m glad we had this extra day. I’ve got control of myself now.”

“Good.”

“I want to go to bed with you.”

“Lib, my wrist—”

“Right now. Let’s take advantage, Paul—” She still held him so that he could only feel her body and hear her voice. “We don’t have to use anything. Nothing — just the two of us—”

“I’m just a little tired …”

“What is it? What’s the matter now?”

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t you go to the bank again?”

“Everything’s taken care of.”

“What’s the matter? I’ve gotten myself all ready for it. I’ve changed my attitude. I decided to be a woman about this thing. What’s wrong now?”

Taking a deep breath, aware of how impossible he was being, he said, “Let’s go to bed, Lib. Let’s get in bed.”

“Don’t oblige me.”

“I’m not obliging you. Don’t you oblige me.”

“I wasn’t obliging you. I changed my mind.”

“From what? I didn’t know it needed changing. I thought you had agreed—”

“I can’t stand any more of this!” she shouted. “Everything I do is wrong!”

He was shaking the letter at her. “Writing your father was wrong, damn it!”

She snatched it from him, crying, “Do I open your mail!”

“That isn’t the point! The point is that you can’t go crying back to your family!”

“I wasn’t crying to him — as a matter of fact I was bawling him out. I was telling him what I thought of him!”

“How much did you say we needed?”

At the last moment, on the point of breaking down and sobbing an apology, she shouted, “Plenty! I said we needed plenty! What’s wrong with that? Do you know when I wrote that letter?” She was crying, but not with any loss of force. “The day we moved in here. That night, that terrible awful night. I wanted him to know, God damn him — I wanted him to know what his selfish mean stupid Catholic crap had driven us to—”

“He didn’t drive us here, Libby. We chose to come here.”

“I didn’t choose it.”

“You agreed, damn it! Don’t start that. In Ann Arbor—”

“But I didn’t choose it! I’m agreeing to this abortion, but I didn’t choose to get pregnant. Oh Paul, I didn’t choose any of this.”

“Are you blaming me for dragging you down in the mud?”

“I’m blaming him! That’s why I wrote the letter!”

“But he has nothing to do with it, Libby.”

She wept. “Then who does?”

There was only one thing that remained to be said. His impulses were all confessional; he almost came to his knees when he admitted, “I do.”

She misunderstood; or perhaps she would not allow herself to hear of his weakness. He heard her say, “Are you telling me you’re sorry you married me again?”

“For Christ sake, stop that! Nobody said anything like that. My blood is like water from all this squabbling. Let’s stop it!” But the moment to which he felt he had every right had been denied him. Caring for Libby, he could not be what perhaps he really was. They were — the word came at him with every ounce of its meaning—married.

And Libby was whining. “I don’t know what to decide any more. Every time I decide to get that thing done to me, you decide I shouldn’t.”

“I didn’t decide anything. I got the money out of the bank, didn’t I? I called the doctor last night, didn’t I?”

“But your heart isn’t in it.”

“Oh Libby, Libby, what a dopey statement …” He flopped onto the bed.

She kneeled on the floor, holding his legs. “I’m not anything you thought I’d be, am I? I turned out to be really dumb, didn’t I?”

“No, Libby.” She would confess and confess, and when would there ever be time for his confessions? Couldn’t he just relax and be a rat?

“I’m not good enough for you,” his wife said. “I know it. I’m just a goddam dope.”

“Shhh,” he told her. “Get off the floor, Lib. Get off your knees, please. Come up here.”

“Paul,” she said, beside him, “do it to me. Just the two of us. Nothing in between. Oh,” she wept, “at least let’s get pleasure out of this. Something—”

Later, curled in the arc between his knees and shoulders, she said, “I looked up osteopathy in the Britannica. I went to the library for lunch.”

For the first time in the whole affair, Paul shed tears.

“The American Osteopathic Association,” she said, “was organized in 1897. Did you ever hear of Still? He founded osteopathy. Discovered it.”

“Never.”

“They believe the body heals itself so long as it’s mechanically adjusted. There are lesions, and they correct them by manipulation. It’s not at all like chiropractors. It’s sort of Eastern, in a certain way — Oriental. They study everything, just like MDs. Obstetrics — everything. The American Osteopathic Association was organized—”

“In 1897.”

“It sticks in my mind …”

He thought she had fallen asleep, but a few minutes later she spoke again. “I looked up abortion.”

“Libby—”

“Abortions contributed to sixteen percent of maternal deaths in America in 1943. Or ’44.”

“Look, Lib—”

“That’s nothing, sweetie. When you sit down and figure it out it’s a misleading fact. How many maternal deaths are there? Say it’s as much as three percent. Well, sixteen percent of that. That makes it probably one in a hundred thousand. It’s safer,” she said, reaching back to touch him, “than crossing the street.”

“Are you laughing?” he asked, burying his head in her hair.

“I’m smiling, baby. I’m trying to—”

“Shhh—” Paul said. He moved quickly to the edge of the bed, tiptoed to the door and put his ear to it; after a minute he threw it open. All that fell into the bedroom was the dim light from the corridor.

So that each minute would not be an hour, he had brought a book with him to read. He carried it in his hand while he paced, just like the expectant fathers in the movies. He sat down and opened an osteopathic magazine. Again he came upon the picture of Dr. Selwyn Sales of Des Moines. His hobbies were reading and his family. His wife was a Canadian. He had taught at Kirksville, Missouri. Missouri! Paul began to search, with no success, for the editorial in which he had seen Dr. Tom Smith’s name. He flipped through magazine after magazine until he was nearly frantic. Finally he forced himself to put down the magazines, and started pacing again. The elevator door opened in the hallway. It slammed shut. A figure moved in the pebbled glass of Dr. Smith’s outer doorway. Thank God — it moved on. He heard Mrs. Kuzmyak say something. He heard metallic clinking. Had Kuzmyak administered the pentothal? With those oversized brutish pumpkin hands, had she pushed too deep, too hard? He did not even know how many minutes the whole thing should take. Shouldn’t it be over soon? When she hemorrhaged, what would they do? If there is a body to dispose of—

The door opened and Kuzmyak appeared. “Over,” she said, yanking off her gloves. She hadn’t even worn a mask! She had breathed her fat greasy germs right into Libby! Over? What’s over?

“What?”

Kuzmyak did not like his tone or volume. “Just let Doctor Tom cover her up,” she said abruptly.

“For Christ sake!” Paul rushed through the door just as the doctor’s hands were pulling Libby’s skirt down around her knees. She had worn the old skirt with the oversized girlish safety pin in front, to make it easier; twice before they had left the apartment she had put on fresh underwear. Her eyes were closed now, but she was breathing.

“It takes a few minutes,” Dr. Tom said. But he would not look at Paul. Was he worried? What was going on? “Mrs. Kuzmyak will make some coffee.”

Paul took his wife’s hand — her blouse was unbuttoned. What had her blouse to do with anything? Asleep, anesthetized, what exactly had happened to her? All those women dropping at Smith’s feet—

“Honey? Libby?”

“It takes a while,” said Dr. Tom, washing his hands.

“She’s all right?”

“Like new.”

“Look — is she all right?” He only wanted the doctor to turn and talk to him. “Did you get it all out? Is she bleeding—”

“Control yourself.”

“Just yes or no!”

“Just you don’t be too snippy!” Kuzmyak was standing in the doorway with a kettle. “Poor Doctor Tom,” she said, shaking her head.

“Libby?” Paul rubbed her hand. “C’mon, Lib.”

“That one like Nescafé?” asked Kuzmyak.

“Anything.” He was rubbing and rubbing her hand, to no avail. “Come on, honey, you’re fine, just fine—”

Kuzmyak was standing beside him. “Come on there, Libby.” With one hand she rolled Libby’s head around, the girl’s cheeks jelly between her thumb and forefinger. “Come on, Libbele — wake up, dahling, breakfast is ready.”

“Her name is Libby.”

“Just trying out my accent,” Kuzmyak said, and she went over and poured hot water in the doctor’s cup.

“Prop her up a little,” said Doctor Tom, sitting in his leather chair.

Kuzmyak came back and pulled the girl up by her armpits. “Okay, let’s snap out of it now, huh?”

Libby opened her eyes. She made some sounds. It took her three minutes before she said her husband’s name, another three before she began to cry. She drank her coffee through white lips and took an unsteady practice walk around the office.

Downstairs a taxi was waiting that drove them home. “Are you all right? Did it go all right? Nothing hurts, does it?”

The cab turned through the dark streets. “I’m still sleepy,” she answered. “Very sleepy.”

“I love you, Libby. I love you. I do love you.”

“I’m very tired. My arms are just sleepy.”

“I love you. I want you to know I love you. I do love you, Libby. I love you. I’ll do anything for you. Everything for you, Lib. I love you. Don’t ever forget, Libby, that I love you. Please, please, that I love you.”

At home he put her to bed, and then with all the lights out he sat beside her. “Was it all right? Did you feel anything? Did you go right to sleep?”

“Yes …”

“Don’t you want to talk? Do you want to go to sleep?”

“I think so.”

“All right. Just go to sleep.”

“Paul?” She spoke with hardly any strength.

“What is it, honey? Yes?”

“When I walked in,” she said, crying very softly now, “she took off my skirt and slip. I had to stand around in my stockings and blouse—”

He waited for more, but that was it; he heard her weeping, and then after a while he heard her asleep.

Thirty minutes must have passed before the scuffling began in the hall. In that time he had not moved.

First he heard a voice cry out, “Son of a bitch! No good rat! Louse!”

“Caaaaalm yourself,” Levy was intoning in the meantime. “Caaaalm yourself down.”

“Let go, cock sucker! Let me be! I’m going where I’m going!”

There was an unearthly banging on the door, a sound larger than he could have imagined two, three, or four old men making. “Herz! I’m Korngold!” Then: “Hands off, you bastard!”

Paul knocked over a chair running to the door; behind him, Libby stirred and mumbled.

The door opened, and before Paul could slam it shut, Korngold fell like a sack in his arms — simply toppled in. Levy was left standing in the hallway in furry slippers and a red satin robe initialed in gold ALL. All what! Wheedlingly he said, “Korngold, straighten up, act a man. Step back over here.”

“Shush you cock sucker you! Herz, help me from him.” Korngold struggled up straight in Paul’s arms, then freed himself and turned on Levy. “Go! Wait! The authorities will drag you screaming away! Close the door on him!” he said to Paul.

“Uh-uh,” said Levy, and his cane came poking through the door. “You wait up a second—”

“Paul …?” All three men turned and looked at her. Libby had flipped on the reading lamp. Her cheeks were drawn; her eyes were clouds of black. “Paul — Paul, what?”

“Sick?” asked Levy. “Or recovering?”

“Quiet!” Paul whispered. “Both of you! Now, please, let’s all of us step outside—”

“This son of a bitch—” began Korngold in a trembling voice.

“Korngold.” Paul grabbed the man’s arm. “Korngold, please, be still — now come on—”

Almost crying, Korngold raised his arms and said, “He stole my underwear. Seven years,” he moaned, “and along comes this cock sucker—”

“Korngold!” Paul shouted, and shook him.

“That’s the story …” the man said. Released by Paul, he fell, in tears, into a chair.

“Look, gentlemen,” said Paul. “My wife is sick. She has to sleep. This is an outright invasion—”

“You hear him?” said Levy to Korngold. “Come along.”

“Oh-oh,” Korngold wailed, “thief, mamza, rat!”

“He’s in hysterics, almost a fit,” Levy explained, for now Libby was propped up in bed, and her bewilderment seemed to demand a reason, a word.

Paul went to Korngold and laid a hand, a friendly hand, on his arm. Korngold instantly put out both of his hands, sandwiching Paul’s. “Help,” he whispered. “I’m fleeced still again.”

“Mr. Korngold …” Paul knelt beside him, aware that now Levy had moved all the way into the room and was circling behind them. “Mr. Korngold, tonight you have to pull yourself together. We’re going to go out into the hall now. My wife is very sick—”

“Recovering …” he heard, and saw the rubber tip of Levy’s cane near his foot. In the bed, Libby was reddening, not with health but with helplessness. She kept saying, “Paul,” while he went on convincing Korngold.

“You’ve got to go home now,” Paul said. “Get some sleep.”

“What a life,” exclaimed Korngold, bringing the three-hand sandwich up to rest his cheek upon. “I can’t go to the toilet, I ain’t stolen blind.”

“What?” Paul said.

But Levy’s cane was as good as in his ear. “We split — is that robbery?” asked Levy. “I moved them jockeys for him before they rot and mildew. A wet spring and he was finished. Is that a thing to throw a fit on? You understand?”

“Twenty dollars is a split?” cried Korngold. “On first-rate shorts? On a quality T-shirt? Die, you bastard, die you son of a bitch—”

“Control, Korngold. Control. You’re in the room of a convalescent. Right, Paul?”

Still squatting at Korngold’s knees, he looked up at Levy. The lawyer held his caneless hand to his chest, protecting his respiratory system with the plushy satin robe. “Paul,” Levy said again — and saying that little word, it was as though he owned the world. “Senile,” he whispered. “Don’t be foolish, Paul. They would sit in that room till he passes on. Twenty dollars is not nothing. For him almost a month’s rent.”

“How much did you get, Levy?”

“Add twenty and twenty, what else? A split.” He looked over at Libby as though perhaps she was the member of the family with the mathematical head.

“Paul,” Libby said, “what happened?”

“Please,” Paul said. “Please”—he controlled himself so, that tears were squeezed from his eyes—“let’s go out into the hall. Let’s go into Levy’s room.” But he could not drag Korngold from his chair.

He said please again, and then he said it one final time. In the moment that followed all sense fled, all plans; all the rules of his life deserted him, and he expelled a confused, immense groan.

Korngold looked at him in fright and awe. “What—” he cried.

Before it even happened Levy began backing away. But Paul had already grabbed him by the throat with two aching hands.

“Stop pinching!” screamed Levy.

“How much! How much was it! How much!” He was foaming, actually foaming at the mouth.

“I’m suffocating to death,” Levy cried. He wheeled his cane, striking out at the madman who was whirling him into a corner. “Let go, abortionist! Let go — I’m having you incarcerated—”

Korngold was at last out of his chair, on Paul’s heels. “Don’t hurt him — just ask—”

“Give him the money!” Paul cried. “Give it up, you son of a bitch!”

“Aaaaaaacchhh …” went Levy, his eyes showing a sudden belief that the end was really at hand.

“Hey, Herz—” yelled Korngold. “Herz, you’ll strangle him dead! Herz!”

“I give, I give—” Levy was screaming, his arms collapsing as though broken. “All right, I give!”

“He admits it!” Korngold triumphantly addressed the ceiling.

And then Paul felt Libby’s arms pulling him back. Under his fingers he still had Levy’s quaking chicken neck, still felt the disgusting bristly hairs. “Paul” came Libby’s voice. “Paul, oh honey, you’re going crazy—”

“Get in bed!” He turned and took her by the hair. “Get in bed! Are you crazy? Get in bed!”

Her expression was incredulous, as though having leapt from a window, she had her first acute premonition of the pavement below. She winced, she wilted, and then she took two steps backwards and gave herself up, sobbing, to the bed.

But Levy was now in the doorway, slicing the air with his cane. Everyone jumped back as he made a vicious X with his weapon. “Disgusting! Killer!” he cried, slashing away. “Scraping life down sewers! I only make my way in the world, an old shit-on old man. I only want to live, but a murderer, never! This is your friend, Korngold,” announced Levy. “This is your friend and accomplice, takes a seventeen-year-old girl and cuts her life out! Risks her life! Commits abortions! Commits horrors!” He gagged, clutched his heart, and ran from the room.

Breathless, Paul approached Korngold and took his arm. “Now you get out too—”

“The money—”

“That’s your business.”

“But I need—”

“Just get out!”

Libby still sobbed on the bed. Korngold, a man with all chances gone but one, looked wildly about him and, in a crazy imitation of his attorney, suddenly rose up and waved his cane at Paul’s head. Paul only snarled, and Korngold dropped it; he fled then, not to the door, but to the girl on the bed. He took her head in his arms. “Oh a darling yiddishe maydele, a frail fish. Come, darling, tell me who I should call. I’ll dial your good family, let them come take you—”

“I have no family,” Libby sobbed.

“Libby! What is this! What’s going on here! Korngold, get out! Get out!”

“Paul …” Libby begged. “Paul—”

“Shut up!”

“A monster,” said Korngold, and he hid his face when Paul raised his hand.

“I give you three, Korngold!” And Korngold, looking once at the girl — his heart, his soul, his very being, in his eyes — Korngold disappeared.

“God damn you, Libby! God damn you!”

“This is the most horrible night of my life,” his young wife cried.

He sat up all night in the chair. Near four — or perhaps later, for the buses were running — he walked into the hall. He hammered twice on Levy’s door.

“Levy!”

No answer.

“Levy, do you hear me?” He kicked five distinct times on the door. He started to turn the knob but, at the last moment, decided not to. From the darkness behind the door might not Levy bring down a cane on his head?

“Levy — listen to me, Levy. You never open your mouth. You never in your life say one word to anybody. Never! I’ll kill you, Levy. I’ll strangle you to death! Never — understand, you filthy son of a bitch! I’ll kill you and leave you for the rats! You filth!”

And that last word did not leave him; it hung suspended within the hollow of his being through the rest of the night, until at last it was white cold daylight.

Had everything worked out? Wife all right? Satisfied? Fine — he did not mean to pry. Only one had to check on Smitty. He fed the osteopath patients — almost one a month — but still it was wise to keep an eye on the fellow. Every once in a while Doctor Tom seemed to forget about slipping Dr. Esposito his few bucks. You know what I mean? Not an entirely professional group, osteopaths. And how’s the wrist?

3

The rottenest moment of all. All the lies and errors, but now these thoughts. Get up and go—he wrote, snow piling on his office window, on Iowa City, the river, the prairie, on all his brave plans and principles. Stay here. Stay. Give them what times it takes. He’ll crawl into our bed and free poor Libby. Am I crazy? No, let her go, let Wallach be the answer, this soft rich boyish boy, not-a-care-in-the-world boy. I only envy him all that free-and-easy business, not the money. But it’s not my nature. Anything can be your nature. Make it your nature! Impossible. I should just write everything out. 1,2,3, et cetera. An outline, what I want and don’t. What I’m not and am.

1. (Face it.) Let them kiss in our bed, let him devour her, caress her, absolutely drive a wedge right through her loyalty to me. Take her loyalty away! Wheedle her, urge her, greet me at the door (fly unzipped, why not), say: Your wife spread everything for me mouth legs heart. Now we leave you. We leave you! Then leave! Wallach will make her happy. But what couldn’t? The normal progression of life, a fearless approach, an honest unselfish open loving, and the girl would blossom, come back to life again. Squabbling, bickering, fighting is all we do. Honey forgive me baby I’m sorry. Squirm. Beg. Grovel. Where was my mistake? The first mistake. This is devious and I know it. Something is simply missing in me. All that has happened doesn’t just happen. Go ahead, progress. Wallach carries her away. Now 2. Face 2.

2. Marge. A stranger. A different face, is that all? How long can I hold to the story that I was seduced? Not long. Plaintive and moping, sad, inviting, she knew what she was up to. But I knew what she was up to. Crying. Calling Wallach names. Her calling Wallach heartless perked me up! Is that seduction by any stretch of the imagination? Who tore whose clothes? How different — not since the beginning, with virginal Libby. My wife. I did the tearing. Me. Endlessly me. When she phoned, when we were just drinking coffee, didn’t I already know? All her loneliness talk, all the talk of betrayal and subterfuge, and on my face what splendid concern. What sympathy. All the time I shook my head yes yes, poor girl.

3. Marge. Write it again. Margie. Margie. Marjorie. Say my name, she said — and I said it. Now say what we’re doing — and I obliged. Screwing games. I could have carried those boxes and suitcases down the stairs and put her in a taxi for the station and then gone home. I knew the minute we began to talk. And did I need it? For ten minutes thrashing on Wallach’s bed? But there was nothing to worry over. Just plain sweet coming, without Libby underneath. Libby underneath! Libby. My wife Libby. Libby and Paul Herz. What next? Next is this. Urging on another to fuck my wife. Say what we’re doing. Say it, Paul. Libby. My Libby. Fuck my Libby. Take Libby. Take Libby away!

4. She leaned; I did not deliver. I could never stop organizing anything. I couldn’t leave well enough — bad enough — alone. Pay my way, take my lumps, have my baby. Circumstances. No, me. No! I married her with ideals, all right. Hopes. Love. Caring. I cared for her into the ground. To elevate our lives. To be happy. To be good. What causes pain is that I still want the same. Nothing I do gets it. I fuck Marge, you fuck my wife. All right. Stop saying it.

5. What else? Biding time? Taking my time while Wallach is making his pass. Waiting for Libby to throw off her dedication. She will. He will. Unless I discouraged him. Take your car and shove it! I probably frightened him away. I frighten her. They all think what I am is what I’m not. I said to him stay out of my life when I meant come in. Make the girl a decent offer — an indecent offer. Relieve us, please. Everything is out of hand. Though not entirely — until one week ago. No, out of hand with the abortion. No, just one week ago with Marge Howells. A silly stupid girl, and that was more ruinous than what happened in Detroit. This very minute feeling has run out of me. More ruinous and so on. Do I mean a word of this? When I feel pain am I really even feeling pain? What am I doing here, Iowa? This writing business. Who am I trying to emulate? Asher? No. I’ll come to understand my mess. Keep writing.

6. Why not have a baby now?

7. Start over. Make love to her. Be kind. Be soft-spoken. But it’s she who bitches all the time. Don’t let her. Take control again. But I have no force left.

8. Get force. Pull yourself together. Get force.

9. Suppose Marge tells Wallach. He tells Libby. Then tell her myself. Confess. Admit. Start over. We’re young. I had guts turning down Wallach’s car. But sense? I was trying to muster strength. I knew what I was. Not going to tempt Libby, because I saw her being tempted. I even made up my mind: make perfect love to her. Touch her. I cannot touch her. Do. it! Reach out a finger and do it! Once, then twice, and then life will come rushing back again. I know this is not insane. Perfectly natural, a mountain slide in my life. Only start up the other side. But I ruined it.

10. Tenth commandment. Nothing. It’s up to them. I have stayed away. Gabe and Libby. Libby and Gabe. Paul Herz. Do they know? Does Libby? Can she see that I want for her only the best? Do believe me, Lib! Right from the beginning. The first day, and still. Am I only stupid?

Midnight. Libby confessed. Wallach kissed her. She sobbed for an hour. Nothing more happened. Nothing. A precious girl. A precious girl. I’m ripping all this up. Every word. Start over. Try!