Letting Go

1

“Is it still baseball season?” frail Mrs. Norton was saying, trying — despite the inclinations of her frame to gaunt melancholy — to be jolly. With an unconvincing display of liveliness, she threw some jeweled fingers toward the bellowing TV set. Everybody around her turned for a moment to show a mouthful of toothy kindness. All her recent tragedies had made the rounds.

Dr. Gruber, sensitive as a bag of oats (which he resembled), wrapped an arm around her waist, and she whitened. “That’s football, my dear girl,” he cried, lipping his spiky mustache. “This is my alma mater, preparing to knock the tar out of that Cornell bunch. Anybody here for Cornell be prepared to shed tears!” he shouted, almost directly into her small ear.

Unspinning herself from the doctor, Mrs. Norton explained to anyone who would listen, “My goodness, it’s as loud as baseball. I only know the world of sport through my husband. He had a box at Sportsman’s Park—” She was all filled up but no one seemed to know she was speaking. She crept off to have her tomato juice iced by the silent, appreciative colored man who was tending bar in the dining room.

I went over to the set and turned down the volume knob. Settled into the two velvet-covered love seats that had been dragged in front of the machine were several of the paunchier, more afflicted men present. For the moment I only recognized and greeted Dr. Strauss, who had arthritis, and Sam Kirsch, my father’s diabetic accountant. My father himself was gliding about on black patent-leather shoes he’d bought in Germany; he was endearing himself to J.F. and Hannah Golden, but soon he slipped away from them and released his high spirits on poker-faced Henny Sokoloff, widower and diamond king. When he finally came around to the TV screen, Dr. Strauss raised the toe of his shoe toward my father’s seat. I heard my old man cackle, and, in his exuberant mood, he turned the sound up again. “Any score?” he asked. “Nothing nothing, it hasn’t started — get the hell out of the way,” Strauss scolded him. In the meantime, Mrs. Norton was standing beside the orange sofa, stirring her cube around. With the set blaring away again, carrying to all ears the measurements of the Penn linemen, she raced in tears for the nearest bathroom. Two startled people spilled drinks, and a silence drifted for a moment over the rest of the widows, widowers, and aging couples.

Later I saw my father stroking Cecilia Norton’s hand, while she tried several gallant, coughy little smiles. Mrs. Norton had been a college friend of my mother’s; after her marriage she had moved to St. Louis, where her husband was in the beer business. There he had made millions, suffered four heart attacks, and then died of pneumonia brought on by a case of the mumps. A week later she had had a breast removed. When she came on home to New York, having finished up in St. Louis by paying three doctors, two hospitals, and a funeral home, she telephoned my father. It is an indication of all his thoughtfulness and all his blindness that he tried to interest Gruber in her. But if anybody should have wooed Cecilia Norton, if anybody should have unfurled a soft palm for that small lame bird to rest in, it should have been himself. He didn’t, however, and it probably did not even occur to him; all that had happened to him was drawing him now in another direction. He went off to Europe … But let me take things up in order, at least the order of that day.

A buffet dinner was laid out during the third quarter of the game. There were bottles and bottles of liquor (aside from Mrs. Norton’s juice, and club soda for Sam Kirsch) and much of it had already been consumed when the appetizer was carried in. By the fourth quarter what appeared to be mouselike portions of turkey, candied sweets, and salad decorated my mother’s Moroccan rug. Its dull green was bleeding a little red with cranberries, and ice cubes melted at a slow pace under chairs. Millie went starchily to and fro — for she had memories of other Thanksgivings too — and knelt between people with her dust pan and a damp cloth. “They should know better,” she informed me, and then carried our slops back to her kitchen.

The purpose of the party was to celebrate not only the national holiday, but the triumphant return to these shores of my father and Dr. Gruber. This accounted for much of the levity and a good deal of the whiskey; imbibing had never been important in our family Thanksgivings in the past. But for four months the two widowers had been gone from us, and now all the strays and waifs in New York had been gathered together to see that they were alive, kicking, and full of information as a consequence of their lengthy educational experience. They had drunk the water from Oslo to Tel Aviv, they had slept in forty-eight different beds, traveled in twelve countries, and snapped several thousand pictures — and now they were ours once again.

The air of celebration hung on for a good long time, and even when the holiday spirit waned, the semihysteria of several of the women kept a decidedly Dionysian mood about the place. Then around half-past three came the first dying of spirits. Women stared for brief, deep moments over the shoulders of their companions; well-dressed, not too faded, sparkling women drifted away from us for seconds at a time, as though having visions of the past, of Thanksgivings clear back to Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts. Photographs began to appear; mince pie was balanced on laps, while little boys and girls growing up in distant corners of the world made their debut. “My daughter Sheila’s little girl in Los Angeles …” “Mark’s son in Albany …” “My Howard’s twins in Boulder, Colorado …” “Geraldine in Baltimore, Adam in Tennessee, Susanna and Debby in Ontario.” “Canada?” “Yes, Canada.” “That’s nothing,” said Dr. Strauss; he extended one arm back over the love seat and handed around a snapshot of Michael Strauss, age six months, in a baby carriage in Juneau, Alaska. Alaska! Sure, My son’s a metallurgist. But Alaska — how far is it by plane? Far, says Strauss, turning back to the football game.

Suddenly there was traffic, most of it to the two bathrooms. Women repaired their eyes in all the mirrors of the house. Men blew their noses into expensive handkerchiefs. One’s son, one’s grandchild, one’s own flesh and blood, miles and miles away … For a short while well-fleshed backs were all one could see in the room. But through some miracle — the miracle of alcohol, companionship, of everybody feeling his obligation to the Pilgrim fathers — the party did not dissolve into old people collapsing on the floor and beating their hearts with their fists. For a suspenseful few minutes it hung just above that — Mrs. Norton almost turned purple with sadness right in the center of the emptying room — but then feet began to ache, stomachs became gassy, and a little heartburn had to be taken care of. Groans and sighs took precedence over the deeper pains, and full bellies rose and fell in exhaustion. The women sat with heads back and arms folded; the men slept. A general mellowing took place, and the knowledge spread — silent, but electric — that there were thousands and thousands in the world in exactly the same fix as those aged gathered here. With the food moving through the system, the blood thickening, there came the hour of philosophy; outside the window the day turned purple and gold. This was the way of life — separation and loss. To be eating, drinking, to be warm, to be left, that was something. At least those who remained, remained.

I saw my father’s iron-gray hair dart down to a woman’s hand. This happened in the corner of the room near the spindly little Jane Austen desk, where the gas-and-electric bills had always been filed by my mother. The hand was not Cecilia Norton’s; she had departed fifteen minutes earlier, a slice of pie — for her maid — clutched in wax paper to her mink. Goodbye, goodbye, Mordecai. Goodbye, Cecilia, poor Cecilia …

No, the hand to which my father had placed his lips had arrived draped on the arm of Dr. Gruber’s vicuña coat. At first I had taken her for a visiting relative of Gruber’s. Her name was Silberman, but Fay was the little word, the only word, that left my father’s lips after he had raised his head to speak. Fay was obviously tight, and tight a shade beyond the others. Every hair of her bluish-gray coiffure, piled and elegant, was in place, but she was not so lucky with her eyes, whose lids obscured half the bleary pupils, nor with her mouth, nor with her jaw which, set off by a splended pearl necklace, hung down just a little.

Dr. Gruber had already plugged in the slide projector. Millie was pulling shut the curtains, a little wearily, like a seaman running up the sail for the twentieth time that day. Shut out gradually was the grapy, wistful, end-of-holiday sky. The bartender was unrolling the white screen, and Millie heaved to the last inch of curtain, and I was left with a last inch of sky, streaky and somber and unforgettable. I had then one of those moments that one feels he will possess till death, but are somehow gone by morning. My most poetic emotions took hold of me — as a result, I think, of a general giving in, an uncomplicated and unconditional surrender I allowed myself after all the genial, good-natured crap I had been handing out through the day, since the previous night, in fact, when I had stepped off the plane. I caught that last inch of sky, and if skies have messages that one did; it told me lives go on.

A slide flashed; color, various and make-believe, came back into the living room.

“This is Venice,” Dr. Gruber announced.

“Florence!” cried a woman behind him.

“Listen, Fay, all you saw was the vino.”

“It’s Florence, lover-boy,” came Fay’s voice, “nevertheless.”

Dr. Gruber cleared his throat. “This is Florence,” he said. “The water got me confused. That’s the Arnold. It’s very beautiful at night. And that’s their old bridge. The Germans blew up the other ones. The Italians hate the Germans.”

Next slide. The bartender peered around at the screen, while running a dishtowel over some glasses.

“The Bubbly Gardens,” Dr. Gruber said. He raised his hand, making a shadow across the picture. “Also Florence. It was too hot to walk around there, though. Very famous gardens. Right in the center of Florence there.” He changed the slide.

“What’s that?” Everyone was laughing.

“Ah, that’s cannelloni! Good old cannelloni! I ate it morning, noon, night, every day. That’s my hand, see, with the fork in it? Cannelloni! Mother’s milk!”

He turned to show everyone his mouth, curled up, raising the ends of his mustache. He changed to the next slide and we were back in the Boboli.”

“We saw that,” called Fay. “Get to the ones with me in it—”

“That’s only a thousand, sweetie-pie,” answered Dr. Gruber.

“Ah, there I am,” explained Mrs. Silberman. And there she was, in her orange life jacket, one elbow resting on the ship railing, the whole great gorgeous Atlantic sky a backdrop for her blue rinse.

“This is Madame Pompadour in her evening gown,” Dr. Gruber informed us. “This is where the lovers met — our first life drill there on the Queen Elizabeth. Terrific service. And that’s her, you see, Queen Elizabeth herself, caught by Mordecai in an unguarded moment. We had to wait ten minutes for her to comb out her eyelashes.”

“Not funny,” moaned Mrs. Silberman, Greta Garbo now in the dark reaches of the room. “Next slide, Dr. Gillespie.”

“Mordecai in the market. He bargained that fellow there down to fifteen dollars for a straw hat for our companion. Mordecai’s the guy with all his teeth. Ah — there’s Queen Liz in her straw hat. Behind her is the Official Gallery there in Florence, which we didn’t get a chance to get inside. Queen Elizabeth was shopping.”

“Where’s Queen Elizabeth?” asked some confused man, coming up out of a nap.

“What?” I heard the Queen herself whispering; and then she broke into laughter, laughter that for a moment shocked me, so much did it sound like tears.

“Rome!” a voice shouted.

“That’s all of us”—Gruber threw a shadow again across the picture—“in the Roman Forum.”

“Get your hand out of the way.”

“That’s all of us in the Roman Forum,” he said. “Ain’t a helluva lot of it left, you see, but that’s where it all happened thousands of years ago. Caesar’s buried there—”

“That’s Venice!” Mrs. Silberman announced.

“Shhhhh.” My father was trying to quiet her giggling.

“That’s Vienna, Stanley,” she called to Dr. Gruber. “Right outside Cannelloni—”

“Quiet in the rear,” Dr. Gruber said over his shoulder. “That’s the Forum.” The slide flipped on.

“That’s — oh, that’s that little town right outside Florence. That’s where we ate lunch. You see, there I’ve got it again, that’s me eating my cannelloni.” Gayly, Gruber moved ahead. “That’s … oh, Christ, that’s Oslo. Turn the lights on, will you? Mordecai, you got these all mixed up.”

“That’s Australia,” Fay was saying. “That’s Cannelloni, Australia.” But now the lamps on two end tables were aglow, and everyone was sitting up and blinking.

As I rose to leave the room, I looked back to see my father glaring down at his companion. She was sleeping — or pretending to — with her mouth open and her cheek resting on his shoulder. He did not see me look, but he must have seen me leave, for in a moment he was standing next to me in the hall.

He said, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Your face looks different. Where are you off to?”

“Nowhere. I have to run an errand later.” I had made certain to keep the errand — which I wasn’t even certain I would run — out of my mind all day. Now it came to my lips spontaneously, as unnecessary excuses are apt to. Adding mistake to mistake I said, “I was going to use the phone.”

“Go right ahead.”

“You don’t mind—”

“Not at all—”

“—if I call Chicago.”

“Call Cannelloni, Australia,” he said, giving me a smile brimming with uncertainty. More soberly he said, “Just don’t run off there on the next plane.”

I touched his shoulder. “What are you talking about? I’m here for the whole weekend. I just want to say Happy Thanksgiving to a friend.”

“A woman,” he said, taking my hand.

“A woman who invited me for Thanksgiving dinner. What do you think of that? I gave her up for you.”

“That’s my boy,” he said, rapping me on the arm with soft knuckles. “That’s fine. That’s terrific.” Then he moved so close that he stepped on my toes. In a conspiratorial voice he said, “Fay Silberman, Gabe, is a very nice woman. A very fine person. She’s had a lot of tragedy in her life. One sunny day she goes outside their place in South Orange and her husband is being driven all over the lawn in their power mower. He’s dead in his seat. It was a horrible thing. He crashed into a tree with that damn machine. She’s had a hell of a time. She’s a good companion. You didn’t think I could get around a whole continent with just Gruber, did you?”

“She seems very nice.”

“Give her a chance, Gabe.”

“I didn’t say anything, honestly.”

“You don’t seem to be having a good time all of a sudden.”

“I ate too much,” I said, trying to smile. “I’m fine.”

“Thanksgiving is a very hard day for all of us. She just drank too much. This was a great shock to her. It’s not even a year. What do you think, Penn whipped Cornell like that?”

“Knew it all the time.”

“Ah, the hell you did,” he said. Then he hugged me; and he hung on. He rubbed his bristly cheek against mine and started to say something, but had to stop and deal with a little trouble in his throat. At last he said, “Everything’s going to be all right. I’m a young man, I’m going to be all right. Knock on wood, I’ve got my health. I’m not going to be a burden to you any more.”

“You’re no burden,” I said, but already he was moving back into the dark living room, where I heard Gruber holding forth. “That’s Lady Godiva and a bottle of Chianti wine in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I wouldn’t go up in that thing for a million dollars. I’ve got news for you, if they’re not careful—”

The phone in Chicago was answered by a small girl with a mouthful of food. The operator said that New York was calling for Mrs. Reganhart; would the little girl please stop clicking the receiver and call her mother to the phone. The phone dropped and the child screamed, “Oh, Mommy! It’s Daddy!”

My confusion did not really become full-scale until the mother answered with a timid and uncharacteristic “Yes? … Operator? This is Martha Reganhart.”

“It’s not Daddy, however,” I said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“Shall I hang up?”

“Certainly not — my child’s drunk on Mott’s apple juice. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Where are you?”

“Daddyland. New York.”

“Oh, do excuse her. She gets overexcited when she’s not in school. I think she’s reacting to the company,” she whispered.

“Who’s there?”

“An old friend. He stimulates the children.”

“And you?”

“No, no. No — that’s true. Listen, I’m sounding tragic.” But she wasn’t; only forlorn. “How’s Thanksgiving? How’s your father’s party? Is there really a father and a party or is some tootsie nestled beside you in her underwear?”

“I call in the absence of the latter.”

“It’s very sweet of you to call. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“I’m having a nice unhappy one.”

“Just a minute, will you?” She left the phone, but nevertheless I could hear her voice. “No, it is not Daddy! I am telling you the truth, Cynthia! Go talk to Sid, he’s all alone. Cynthia!” She sighed into my ear. “I’m back.”

“Good.”

Why it was good I couldn’t say; neither of us spoke.

“Well,” she admitted finally. “What else is there to say?”

She was right, of course, for we hardly knew each other; I had not realized how strange it was for me to be calling her long distance until I was in the middle of the call. I had taken her to dinner some weeks back, and we had laughed and joked until the waiters stared, but that had not increased our knowledge of each other very much. Then she had called to ask me — and a nervous little exchange it had been — to come to Thanksgiving dinner. And now this. Strangely, I found myself wanting to believe that I had some rights to her total concern and attention.

I said, “I just wanted to say Merry Thanksgiving to you.”

“Thank you.”

I was preparing to hang up when she asked, “Shall I go ahead and invite you to another meal? Will you eat leftovers when you come back?”

“I’ll be back Monday.”

“Come then for dinner.”

“Thank you, I will.” Then I said, “Who’s Sid?”

“He’s a man who just asked me to marry him.”

“I see.”

“You’ll come Monday night.”

“As long as you’re still single, I suppose so.”

“Single as ever,” she said.

“Does that upset you?”

“Specifically no; generally I’m not sure. This is some long-distance conversation.”

“Long distance should be outlawed anyway. Were you expecting a call from your husband?”

“My ex-husband — from whom I have no expectations whatsoever.” I heard a loud noise rise up behind her. “Oh God, my son just hit my daughter with a chair or something. Give my love to the girl in her underwear.”

“You give my love to Sidney.”

“We can’t possibly be jealous over anything,” she said, “so we shouldn’t really play at it. Should we?”

“I’m a little deranged today, Martha. I wonder if we’ll ever manage to be level with one another.”

“You come Monday, Gabe. I’ll be single.” Then, all at once, she did level with me. “They shouldn’t outlaw long distance. I feel you’ve saved my life.” It was the sort of statement I had come to expect her to qualify with an irony; she didn’t, however, and so neither did I.

Instead I said, as though it were some revelation of character, “There is a father and a party, you know. And I look forward to seeing you.”

But even while I spoke, she was explaining, “Sid is Sid Jaffe — he was my lawyer. He got me my divorce half-price, and I’m very indebted to him, Gabe, and the children are crazy about him, as crazy as they can be about anybody, anyway. And I have to stop talking on your money. Forgive me, please.”

I remained seated at the phone table. There were some eight hundred miles between us, and yet our acquaintanceship had taken a sharp and serious turn. And when I had come out into the hallway I hadn’t even been intending to call her! She had been the escape hatch, to put it crudely, through which I could crawl from that new and startling image of my father. During the previous spring he had gone to see a psychotherapist; he had been advised to travel; he had been advised to spend large quantities of money, to enjoy the company of women, and if possible to give up all mystical activities for a period of six months. He had even asked me to take his long trip with him, and when I offered my job as an excuse, he had settled upon Gruber. And now, face to face with the results of that trip, I had called Chicago.

I reached down and brought out the big Brooklyn telephone directory, mostly out of a feeling that if there was any call I should have made, it was the one I had been asked to make. Millie was charging past me, still starchy and angry and efficient. “You call this an American Thanksgiving?” she asked. “Smells to me like New Year’s Eve. Your father’s become ultra-European, you know,” she said, turning up her nose.

“Times change, Millie.”

“Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving, young man!”

Light fell into the hallway from the living room, dull, apricot light, very comforting to find creeping along the rug and up your toes. The conversations I could hear from the lighted room sounded revitalized; aside from Mrs. Norton, nobody had made a move for the exit, though it was nearly four thirty. All their houses were empty; they stayed on.

I opened the Brooklyn directory and found the name I was after. I marked it, realizing that if I had turned to Martha Reganhart to escape my father, I had also called her so as to escape an old friend as well. Libby Herz had asked me to call — to call upon — her husband’s parents. I have found in my life that I often phone one person when I expect myself, or others expect me, to be phoning someone else; it is what the telephone company calls displacement.

Libby and I had managed well enough, respectably enough, since her arrival in Chicago. Though I had discovered that the feeling we had for one another had not changed after three years and one letter, I nevertheless got through the early fall without doing anything I can think of to make the feeling concrete. Then, just before leaving Chicago for Thanksgiving, I had run into her quite accidentally on Madison Street. I was going into Brooks Brothers, and she was headed for Goldblatt’s and then the Downtown College, where she was taking a course. My shopping expedition happened to have been of no little significance, for I was after a hat. A real man’s hat, you know — brim, crown, the works. It was to be my first; I was full with the knowledge that my father was waiting for me in New York, fresh from his world travels (“with a surprise” he had guaranteed me on the phone), and I had somehow reasoned that it would be to my advantage to confront him behatted. I felt at once gay and doubtful about the venture, and when I ran into Libby I asked her to come in with me to give her opinion. Even to myself I do not think of it as an invitation innocent of charm, nor do I think of her acceptance as so innocent either.

My taste in personal effects is conventional, running to a kind of quiet fussiness, and marked by a decided Anglomania, common enough to my profession, I think, as well as my class and generation. That afternoon, however, I indulged my cabinet-minister inclinations with the wantonness of a Turk. Actually it was only of late that I had begun appreciating the pleasures to be derived from spending money on myself; as a child and youth, others for the most part had spent it on me. But with Libby, during those two solid hours of accumulation in Brooks, I unearthed new possibilities in capitalism, I saw that things are not going to be so easy for the Russians as they may think. There is something life-giving and religious in outfitting yourself.

Back on the street we surrendered ourselves to shame. The Balboic, the Columbian emotions I had first experienced upon discovering myself in the full-length mirror, now washed right by me. And that absolute delight and sparkle in Libby’s eyes — for it was she who had egged me on, past the fedora to the homburg, and on then to the puce gloves, the tight-rolled umbrella, the long lisle stockings, the garters, the ties, and finally to the glowing, noble scarlet smoking jacket — the sparkle that had given to Libby’s face such incredible life, that had won envy for me from every man in the store, ran out of her eyes now in two barely visible tears. I knew I should never again be able to kid myself, even if I returned the smoking jacket the following day, into feeling lofty or virginal about our relationship.

“I have to run off — I have a class at six — I have to have a bite. I’m going, Gabe.”

“I don’t feel very splendid, Libby, about this whole silly indulgence.”

“You …” She almost laughed, crying. “You look splendid. You look terribly splendid.”

“I’m walking toward the train,” I said.

“I’m going to have one of those dollar-seven steaks.” She went off in the opposite direction, toward State Street.

And so there I was, under sunny skies, tapping the pavement with the tip of my umbrella. I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window. What a dandy! How weak and feeble! Some match for my father and his surprise! And then hurtling at me from behind, practically flying, came Libby’s reflection. I turned to catch her, and she reached out with her hands to my new — our new — gloves. There on Madison Street, just within earshot of Michigan Boulevard, we came the closest we had come to each other in Chicago.

“In New York,” she said, breathless from running, “go see Paul’s family, will you? Oh, Gabe, just tell them, will you, about his job, that I’m working, that I’m going to school, that everything is working out? Will you, please?”

“Yes, sure, Lib—”

“Just tell them.”

On the train back to the South Side I could not work out in my head exactly how the lines and angles of our triangle had altered; nor could I begin to see what my visiting the elder Herzes would do for everybody’s well-being that it might not do to their detriment. I did not care either for the tone the mission had of a soldier paying a call on the family of a dead buddy. Despite definite feelings of obligation, I had a very imprecise sense of who I was feeling obliged to. In Chicago that day (and once again, sitting at the little phone table in my father’s apartment), Martha Regenhart began to loom in my head — and subsequently in my heart too — as a green, watery spot in a dry land; I felt in her something solid to which I could anchor my wandering and strained affections.

Why I had called her now seemed perfectly clear. I slipped the Brooklyn directory back into the table and went into the kitchen, ostensibly because my mouth had gone dry, but actually, I think, to come close as I could to the pure, unspoiled realities of the holiday — the greasy turkey pan, the dirty dishes, the still-warm oven, the aromas of a happy and spontaneous American family life.

Fay Silberman was there, her head over a coffee cup.

Since I couldn’t simply turn and walk out, I went to the sink and ran some cold water into a glass. Mrs. Silberman rose and smoothed her shaky hands over her smart velvet suit. My admiration for the fight she was trying to put up against her condition did not particularly alter my attitude toward the condition itself. She had made a silly fool of herself in the living room.

“We haven’t had a chance to talk,” she said. “You resemble your father remarkably.”

The father, I realized, was about to be courted through the son. All the desperation I had been witness to during the long afternoon suddenly centered for me on this hungover, handsome, game, miserable woman, who had been beauty-parlored nearly to death. Her hair floated and glowed like a sky, and her face had been lifted and was too tight; her nails, ten roses, were long enough to sink deep, to hang on, tenaciously. She was heartbreaking, finally, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“I look a little like my mother too.”

“I haven’t seen any pictures of her,” she said.

“There are several in the living room.”

She smiled hard, the end of round one. I summoned up whatever good sense I had accumulated over the years and came out like a small, affectionate dog for round two. “My father looks fine — he hasn’t looked this well in years. The trip seems to have done him a lot of good.”

“All he did was laugh. He laughed all the way through Europe.”

“He can be a very happy man,” I said.

Her answer confused me a moment. “Thank you,” she said. “Nobody …” She swayed, tilting in some private breeze, but found strength against the sink. “Nobody should miss it. Europe. It’s just another culture.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I feel fine!” Then, focusing her eyes on the wall clock, she added, “I had too much to eat.”

“So did I—”

“Don’t hate me, young man. You have no right to hate me!” She slumped down into a kitchen chair and covered her eyes. I did not know now what to say or do, and only prayed that no one would come into the kitchen. “I have children of my own in California,” she said, as though that were some threat against our house.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Silberman. I have to be going.”

“Your father said you were here for the weekend.” She spoke almost with alarm.

“I have to go to Brooklyn.”

“I’ve never been to Brooklyn in my life.” I wondered if that was supposed to have been a gay remark. Was she soused, or stupid, or both? “You better stay,” said Mrs. Silberman, turning regal before my eyes. “After coffee, your father is going to announce our engagement.” She stood up, quite steady now — the weather in the kitchen having calmed for her purposes — and turned to face me. I took a sip of water, waiting for my own responses (which were slow, very slow), and when I looked up again what I saw was that her face had gone all to pieces. “This is a wonderful thing in everybody’s life. Don’t you go throw a monkey wrench,” she begged. “You’re supposed to be an educated person!” Her whole body stiffened with that last plea.

“Maybe you better calm yourself.”

“I’m not an invalid. I’m a very young woman. I’m fifty-four. What’s wrong with that? I’ve had a shock in my life. I chose your father, after all, not Dr. Gruber.”

I had to admit that her choice was meritorious, and whatever she might have thought, I had no intention of being caustic, nor anything to gain thereby; in fact, I wanted for personal reasons to give her all the credit her selection deserved. Unfortunately for all our futures, I chose the wrong words. “You did well for yourself.”

“I make him laugh. It’s more than anybody else in his family ever did! I make him feel important!”

“You don’t know a great deal about what’s happened, Mrs. Silberman. Lives are complicated and private.”

“I know more than you think,” she answered; and then with the wildness, the unbuttonedness of someone who has lost most of his perspective and a few of his faculties, she added irrelevantly, “Don’t you worry about that!”

Fifteen minutes later we all stood at attention in the living room and drank a toast to the affianced. Mrs. Silberman’s champagne ran down her chin, cutting a trail through her powder.

As soon as I pushed the buzzer to Paul Herz’s parents’ apartment, I knew I should have called in advance — perhaps simply called and left it at that. I pulled myself up to my full height, dropped my gloves into my hat and rang again, this time with a premonition that when I left this building, in fifteen or twenty minutes, I would not be the same man I had been when I entered. The boundaries of my own personality seemed as blurry and indefinite, as hazy, as the damp blowy mist above the river I had crossed from Manhattan.

A wide blubbery man with a jovial, self-pitying face answered the door; I had never seen a man so young so fat. Drifting between his voluminous trouser legs, sweeping past his thinning brown hair, came the sounds of television and talk. Friendly enough, he said, “This is four-C.”

“Do the Herzes live here?”

“Sure, sure, come on in. I’m sorry—” He raised his arms to signal some mix-up and smiled helpfully over nothing.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“No-no-no.” He was a very helpful person.

“Who is it, Maury?” a voice called.

“Come on in,” Maury said to me. “We’re just leaving. We live in the building.”

I followed him down a long narrow corridor that was lit by three little bulbs meant to resemble candles; along the hallway at waist level hung a row of tiny framed documents. Before entering the living room, I bent over and took a close look at one of them: it was a grammar school report card made out to Paul Herz.

A woman in her early twenties was standing before a logless fireplace, one hand on her hip and the other out in front of her, making a point to a bathrobed man in a BarcaLounger. A shiny black pump stood beside each of her feet; the lines of her cocktail dress, a close-fitting black crepe number yoked daringly in front and fitted tightly at the knee, were the lines of her almost lovely figure — unfortunately her posture and the lines were not in exact accord. All she needed, however, was to suck in her little paunch and heave backwards with her shoulders to make perfect the whole works. But it was almost as though she didn’t care to be perfect; tall and erect and exquisite, she might not have known what to make of herself. “So my sister-in-law said,” the girl was explaining, the borough of her birth winding down through the faint arch of her nose, “this is my sister-in-law Ruthie from Roslyn. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if the child is not happy there, what’s the sense? All that money, it’s ridiculous. The child’s happiness is what’s uppermost, certainly, but if the child is not happy, if the child is not having herself a good time,’ she said, ‘then the money is money wasted.’ And personally, Ruthie, to my way of thinking, is right!” The final dentalized t in right buzzed once around the room and then flew up the chimney. “I don’t believe in that kind of money being wasted on a child. My brother-in-law Harvey doesn’t find it growing on trees, believe me. The child can be perfectly happy at home.”

The bathrobed man she was addressing glanced across the room at a tired-looking woman seated in an armchair, who I took to be his wife, and Paul’s mother. “Absolutely,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion that everyone was better off at home. “What’s wrong with Brooklyn College?”

“Absolutely …” And then my presence was all at once recorded. Maury had been blocking me out, and now I was past him, into the living room, where despite the animated conversation, the TV set was on. The screen showed three men dressed as Pilgrims, scanning the horizon from the railing of a ship. “It looks to be land, sir,” said one of them in an Anglo-Irish accent — while I said, “How do you do, my name is Gabe Wallach.”

“Yes?” replied the man in the BarcaLounger.

“I’m a friend of your son’s,” I said. “Of Paul’s. How do you do?” I looked away from the astonished face of Mr. Herz to the face of the young woman; it had not actually collapsed into horror, but considering the stiff, pretty, frozen face it was, it did display, all at once, some marked change.

“Maury,” the girl said, stepping into her shoes, “I really think we have to run, doll.” The heels gave her legs their final touch of beauty. “I keep tasting turkey,” she said, half-smiling at me. I smiled back, with understanding; it was not that I had brought the plague into the room, it was simply that she had eaten too much.

Maury came up now to Mr. Herz, and smoothing for him the collar of his white terry cloth robe, said, “Look, take it easy, kiddo. Give yourself a couple more days rest. Stay off your feet, you’ll wear the carpet out, huh?”

“Don’t run on my account—” I said to Maury, who seemed a kind of bulwark to me against the worst. “Please don’t,” I said, and my eyes settled at last on Mrs. Herz, whose own eyes had been settled on me since I had come in and announced whose friend I was.

“No-no-no.” Maury’s meaty comforting hands moved away from Mr. Herz and onto my shoulders. “We had Thanksgiving out in Great Neck, and I’m telling you, kid, we’re exhausted. We left the kids out there with their grandparents, and now we’re going to enjoy a little peace and quiet. Look, take it easy, Leonard,” he said, turning back to Mr. Herz, “stay off the carpet, will you, for a few days—”

“Leonard, I’ll lend you Marjorie Morningstar.”

“Look, Doris, I’ll be all right.”

I heard a sigh of hope rise from Mrs. Herz. Her husband went on. “It was indigestion. Something stuck in my chest, overexcitement. I’m fine.” But he became vague even while he spoke.

“Just don’t rush back,” Maury said. “I’ve got everything under control, Leonard. Harry is taking care of yours.” Now he strode to the club chair where Mrs. Herz was sitting and he placed one hand on either of the plastic coverlets that protected the arms. I could see only his back, but I heard lips smack together, and Mrs. Herz’s hand came up onto his neck. “God bless you, Maury,” she said.

Maury stood up and ran his thumb across her cheek. “How are you? Are you all right, sweetheart?”

“Look,” said Mrs. Herz. “I’m all right if he’s all right.” And the voice of the martyr was heard in the land.

Just then Doris approached me. My heart went out to something in her that was simple and bored and satisfied; I actually had an impulse to take her hand as she went past me, and felt a personal sense of loss when she and her husband slammed the door of the Herzes’ apartment behind them.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted,” I said. “I should have called.” But behind me — a sound sweet as a rescue plane buzzing a life raft — a key turned in the lock and a hinge squeaked. There was a whispered exchange, then Maury’s voice. “Mr. Wallach,” he called, “I think you dropped something out here in the hall.”

Dutifully, unthinkingly, Mrs. Herz rose from her chair to serve my needs.

“No, please, I’ll get it,” I said. “Excuse me.”

In the doorway, Maury’s tiny hooked nose, droopy cheeks, fleshy lips, and round little gray eyes all tried to come together in a smile, but mostly worry was written on his face. Doris took my hand and whispered, “Stop on the way out, please. Six-D. Horvitz.”

“Okay.”

“Be careful, kid, will you?” Maury said. Doris still held one of my hands; Maury took the other. “I’m Paul’s oldest friend,” he told me, and then the two of them turned down the hallway, past everybody’s milk bottles. They went the first few feet on their toes.

When I came back into the living room I was met by the image of a united front. Mrs. Herz, with something of the pioneer woman about her, was standing beside her husband. I smiled at her, making believe that I was returning to my pocket something that I had dropped outside. But the woman had a bitter, drawn face that would not respond. She was tall, like Paul, but not skinny; rather she was hefty, large in the hips and feet and shoulders. Her hair had thinned on either side of the part and it bushed out from her head around the ears and neck — the genetic source of Paul’s black kinks. Her coloring was spiritless, a brownish-gray. Mr. Herz was also old and worn. Coming directly from scenes of middle-age rejuvenation, the sight of them was uncomfortably shocking; I had almost forgotten that most of those within earshot of eternity look as if they hear just what they hear. Not everyone can afford a mask, or wants one.

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Herz, for I was the soul of politeness, and that finally got to him. “Would you like a glass of soda?”

“No, thank you. I only dropped in.”

“Darling,” he addressed his wife, “get me a little seltzer.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure, sure, I’m fine. I’m excellent. Only my mouth tastes bad.”

No sooner had Mrs. Herz left the room than her husband shot straight up in the BarcaLounger, almost as though he’d been ripped down the center with the electric pains of a stroke. His face like a piece of crumpled white paper against the ruddy leather of the chair, he turned his palms down and supplicated with them, up and down — the motion of the umpire when the runner has slid in under the tag. “Please, please,” he whispered, “she’s having a very bad day. Please.” A fizzing sound approached from the kitchen, and he settled back into a posture that struck me as an open invitation to death. In that one moment he appeared to have used up a week’s energy.

His wife handed him a little glass on a coaster. “The glass is warm,” he said. “It’s practically hot.”

“I put it in a warm glass. Cold is a shock to the system.”

“Who likes warm seltzer, for God’s sake.”

“Drink it, please.” It was as though now that he didn’t like it, it would do him some good. While he drank, his hand went up to his chest and he performed various stretching gestures with his neck. Having thus coped successfully with the carbonation, he turned back to cope with me. Mrs. Herz returned to her chair — the edge of it — and her husband cupped his glass on his belly and took a businesslike but civil approach.

“Very nice to meet a friend of Paul’s.”

“I’m pleased to meet you. Paul asked that I stop in to say hello.”

Nobody responded; was it so blatantly a lie?

“You live here?” Mrs. Herz demanded, putting the question not so much to me as to the puce gloves. “In Brooklyn?”

“My father lives in Manhattan,” I said.

“What are you, a lawyer?” I was numbed by her particular brand of naïveté: it seemed a cross between xenophobia and plain old hate.

“I teach English at the University of Chicago. Paul is a colleague of mine.”

“A colleague already.” She made a face of mock awe toward her husband. “Next thing we know he’ll be president of the college.”

“He’s doing very well. It’s a very good university.”

She put me quickly in my place. “Schools are wonderful things wherever they are,” she said. “I was a teacher myself.”

“He teaches English?” Mr. Herz asked. “What is that, spelling, grammar, that business?”

“One course is Freshman Composition. Then he also teaches Humanities.”

“I see,” they both said. Mrs. Herz seemed pressed to add something knowledgeable about the humanities but gave up and only grunted general disapproval of whatever that title encompassed.

“Libby works for the Dean of the College, you know.”

No one knew; no one cared. “She’s one of my favorite people,” I said, and was rewarded for that complicated extravagance with a flush that took minutes to subside. Fortunately, the Herzes were now immune to anyone’s feelings but their own. “She also takes courses in the evenings. She’s a very hard-working girl.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” mumbled Mr. Herz, but the object of his certainty did not seem to be the subject of my conversation.

“I was visiting in Manhattan for the holiday, and so I came-over here. I hope I haven’t interrupted anything,” I said, limp with my own repetitiveness.

“Mr. Herz has been sick,” his wife informed me, having actually stared me into silence. “We decided to stay home for the day. Who wants to get tied up in all that traffic?”

“Yeah, we decided to stay home,” Mr. Herz said. “We were going to go to Rio de Janeiro for the weekend, but we decided to stay home. Look, I think maybe I can move my bowels,” he told his wife, and instantly she was out of her chair and freeing him from the languorous curves of the BarcaLounger. He insisted on walking under his own steam to the bathroom.

“Leave the door open a little,” she said to him.

“All right, all right.” Newspapers covered the floor at the entrance to the kitchen, and he crossed over them as though they were ice. Some seconds later the bathroom door shut. Mrs. Herz left the room hastily; I heard her call, “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“Don’t strain,” she said. “Leave the door open.”

Back in the living room those eyes that had so examined my habit and person now were kept carefully averted; she fussed about, straightening things.

“Is he very sick?” I asked.

“He has a terrible heart.” She folded and refolded the afghan that had lain across her husband’s feet.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“What kind of courses—” she asked suddenly though her back was all she would show me. “She’s going to school forever?”

“Who? What?”

“Her.”

“Libby,” I said, and waited for Mrs. Herz herself to repeat the name. I waited; then I said that Libby had not yet finished with her A.B.

“Sure — she was in a big rush.” She came back to her chair, acting as though we hadn’t been conversing at all. “You all right?” she called into the other room.

We both hung now on the reply, which was not forthcoming.

“Leonard, is everything all right in there?” And again she was up and off to the bathroom.

“I’m all right,” her husband called. “I’m all right.”

“Don’t strain. If nothing happens, nothing happens. You’re not engaged in some contest, Leonard.” When she returned to the living room, she said, “He’s having the worst day he’s had in years.”

“That’s too bad. I’m sorry.” I was sure that now I was in for some lecture from her. But I did not depart; I felt bound to wait for Mr. Herz’s ascension back into his easeful chair.

“You teach what — law?” she asked.

My garb, my prosperity, my Harvard tones — and Mrs. Herz’s colossal disappointment. I had not suspected that what she had always wanted her little Paul to be was an attorney. “No. I teach English, too.”

“And what’s humanities? What does Paul know about humanities?”

There was an intention in her words that I did not understand immediately. “It’s a kind of literature course,” I explained. “It’s an introduction to literature. Paul teaches it very well. He’s a very good critic, very sharp.”

“He was always critical.” She acknowledged the painful truth with a slow wagging of her head. “Suddenly nobody was good enough for him. In his whole life we never asked him to do one thing, one favor. He came home and told us he was going to Cornell — that was good enough for us. He was going to work in South Fallsburg, we wouldn’t see him for a whole summer — we never said a word. We gave him all the independence he wanted. Maury Horvitz — his mother was always running his life. Maury drink this, Maury drink that — she used to run to school with his rubbers if it was only a little sun shower. Paul never had to put up with that. We always recognized his independence.” She was picking threads from her apron while she spoke and depositing them in the pocket of her house dress. “But he wounded his father in such a way,” she said, coming down with a fist on her knee, “you can never imagine it. He made that man an old man. One thing we asked him in his whole life. One thing.” She held up a finger to convince me of the tininess of their request in the face of the vast universe. “He gave his father a wound that man will never forget. His father worked like a slave for him all his life, took every chance, and all he got was bad luck and a terrible slap in the face. Some Thanksgiving,” she said, and with her hp trembling, she removed herself from the room.

Minutes went by, and then I heard her ask, “You finished?”

“I’m finished.”

“You feel all right?”

“A little tired.”

“I told you don’t strain. The doctor told you—”

“I didn’t!”

“You just let Mother Nature do the job.”

I rose and waited for them to enter the living room. In my mind I ran over what had happened and what had been said. Had I done less than I believed Libby had intended for me to do? What more was it possible to do? I was no magician; her marriage to Paul was going to have to heal itself or finally rot away without my intervention. As I heard the forlorn sound of Mr. Herz’s slippers cautiously crossing into the living room, I was moved to sorrow for him — and then to suspicion toward his adversary. At that moment, in fact, Libby seemed to be my adversary; I recognized how much craftiness there was in her behavior toward me. What craftiness there happened to be in my behavior toward her, seemed to me a craftiness of reservation and restraint, a decorousness on the side of virtue. If I was at fault, it was because I had actually permitted myself to be a good deal less crafty at times than it was my obligation to be. I felt a little abused by her, a little made a convenience of, and I shared momentarily in that suspiciousness toward her that this heart victim and his wife had allowed to ruin the last years of their lives. There must be some weakness in men, I thought, (in Paul and myself, I later thought) that Libby wormed her way into. Of course I had no business distrusting her because of my weakness — and yet women have a certain historical advantage (all those years of being downtrodden and innocent and sexually compromised) which at times can turn even the most faithful of us against them. I turned slightly at that moment myself, and was repelled by the sex toward which at bottom I have a considerable attachment.

I took my leave with soft words; I did not feel the shame of the intruder so much as his misguidedness and self-deception.

“Good luck in your new career,” Mr. Herz called after me.

Though I could not locate the inspiration for his congratulatory remark, I thanked him. He lifted one hand as though to wave, then only rubbed it softly, with a sense of surrender, across his delicate chest.

I was halfway down the street when I remembered Doris and Maury Horvitz waiting for me in 6D. I turned and came back along the treeless block and entered the red-brick Tudorized apartment building where only one thing had been asked of Paul Herz in his entire life. The building was called “The Liverpool Arms.”

When Doris whisked open her door and whisked me in, I felt as though I’d been followed. Once I was safely over the apartment threshold, she relaxed inside her toreador pants and white blouse and directed me to the living room with a copy of Harper’s which she was holding in her hand. We were surrounded on all sides by pale blue carpeting and very low furniture. The room appeared to have been decorated with a special eye out for the comfort of aerial creatures. There was a lot of flying space over our heads, but if you happened to be a simple biped you had to chance it with your ankles through a Scandinavian jungle of coffee tables, throw cushions, and potted avocados. Maury’s figure hogged a blond Swedish chair that cradled his behind no more than three inches off the carpet; like Doris, he had changed into home attire, and was now sporting a pair of trousers the watery pastel color of some fruit-flavored Popsicle. They were cotton and baggy, and in place of a belt they had a three-inch band of elastic that could be stretched to accommodate the wearer. In the spectrum I would place them at cherry-raspberry. He had tiny, multicolored slippers on, and I noticed how thin his calves and ankles were; there was a kind of buoyancy about him, in fact, as though once out of the low chair, he would rise to the ceiling and bump helplessly along it. Tapering down as he did, he reminded me of a Daumier barrister. He greeted me with a tremendously appreciative smile, and I realized that all that fat made him think of himself as a good guy. His lithe and sexy wife begged me to settle down on a cushion, and offered me a cup of Medaglio d’Oro. I accepted, and her black toreadored behind moved westward into the kitchen.

“Talk loud,” she called, “so I can hear.”

“We’ll wait for you, Dor,” her husband answered. While we waited, I noticed a photograph on the hi-fi cabinet; Maury noticed me noticing it. It was a large framed picture of Doris in a bathing suit. Maury said, “We’ll be going down there again in a few weeks. Right after Christmas. It’s terrific. It’s fabulous.”

“I’ll bet,” I said affably.

“You get a terrific sense of a good time down there. Everything they’ve got there is to make you comfortable and to give you a good time. Even the lobbies. After all, what do you do in a lobby? You wait for somebody, you kill time. But even there they’ve got your sense of beauty, of restfulness, in mind. Doris is crazy about it. All she talks about before we go to Miami is Miami, and all she talks about when we come back from Miami is Miami.”

It left one with the impression that Miami was all Doris ever talked about, but I only showed her husband my admiration for his good luck. He did not, however, need my admiration; Maury seemed to be convinced that he had some moral edge over the rest of his generation simply by way of having taken his wife to spend their winter vacations in Miami Beach. I wondered what kind of advice Maury was going to give me to take back to Paul. What word was I to carry to Chicago from the world of heavy food and unbroken family relations? Maury’s flashy up-to-date possessions crowed their master’s satisfaction and contentment. How did he do it? What was the solution? I was asking not just for Paul, but for myself as well. How do you love girls like Doris? How do you keep life going exactly as it was when you were ten years old? That day I wouldn’t have minded arranging such a life for myself. I began — or perhaps continued — in Maury’s living room, to miss my mother and to miss the past.

“Just a minute,” Maury suddenly said. “I want to show you something …”

When he returned he was holding a baseball in his right hand. He gave the ball to me and I turned it slowly around so as to read the inscription.

To that Great Battery

Much Horvitz and

Paul Herz—

Your pal

Kirby Higbe

“Mush was my nickname,” Maury said. “Higbe spelled it wrong. Everybody was screaming at him anyway.” He placed before me next a photograph that he’d been holding in his other hand. I took it just as Doris came back into the room, carrying a tray. I felt Maury’s fingers on my shoulder. “That’s Paul, there. That’s me, with my arm around him. Christ,” he said, “we were like this,” and he showed me with two fingers, one twisted around the other.

In the picture Paul looked at twelve or thirteen pretty much what he was now, except that his kinky hair came down in an even line almost to his eyebrows. Maury was a round-faced bar mitzvah boy, all cream sodas and smiles and surprises. “That’s Heshy Lerner,” Maury said. “He was killed in Korea, and the rest of the guys are everywhere. A lot of the guys have moved to the suburbs, but I don’t know, I love this block. To me there’s nothing like the city. Does Paul ever mention Heshy?” he asked, making the ball roll up his forearm and bounce off his elbow. “I wonder if he even knows he’s dead.”

“Heshy dead is just impossible to believe. Just thinking about it,” Doris said, setting out some frozen strudel she had heated for us, “is something. He was a terrific dancer, remember, Maur?”

“Heshy was a terrific everything. He was going to be a commercial artist. He used to draw caricatures of everybody, and Paul used to write little captions for them. They were the two talented guys, all right. Boy, I’m telling you …” He shook his head — a man of eighty walking through his small-town graveyard.

Now all three of us were on cushions around the coffee table; I was the only one still wearing shoes. We all drank out of demitasse cups that the Horvitzes had picked up on a cruise to St. Thomas, and every time Maury finished one of the tiny portions, Doris — with one hand on his leg — poured him another. I envied him his wife, nearly to the point of covetousness; and curiously, the envy did not diminish, the muscles in my chest only tightened another notch when Doris said, in the purest Brooklynese I’d ever heard, “Oy am I really tired. I mean I’m really beat, Maur.”

But Maury brooded, even while he ate his strudel; he seemed occupied with the disappearance of the past. Then back in the present, he asked, “How did it go?”

“Mr. Herz seems sick,” I said. “They both seemed very tired.”

“He looked awful today, Maur.” Doris was resting her head on her husband’s knee and she tipped her throat back so as to look up at him when she spoke. “They both make me feel sad. They both have no life at all. Maury tried to get them interested at least in books, you know? We get Book of the Month, we get Harper’s and Look, we belong to Play of the Month—” She threw an arm toward the wall behind me, to which I turned to find half a dozen framed Playbills. “We go to the Temple lectures, and we volunteer, we’ll drive them there, right to the door. Last week we heard Dore Schary, and they wouldn’t even go. They won’t do anything! They sit, they mope, they worry, they live in the dead past. Personally, to my way of thinking, I don’t know what the end is going to be for them.”

“How come Paul didn’t come himself?” Maury asked.

“What?”

“How come Paul asked you to come?” He reminded me of father’s accountant trying to get to the bottom of some tax problem.

“Paul didn’t ask me,” I said. “Libby did.”

“We never met her. Neither did the folks, you know.”

“The Herzes?”

“Never met her,” Doris said.

“They did, though,” I said. “They met her twice.”

“I mean Paul never had her for dinner or anything,” Maury said.

I agreed, though I knew I had been taken advantage of — rather, Paul had.

“What is she like?” The question was Doris’s.

“I’m very fond of her,” I said. “She’s sweet and fragile and a very loving girl.”

I had the feeling that not one word I had spoken had sunk in.

“I used to go out with Paul myself,” Doris informed me. “Then he went away, you know, and I don’t know, he came back, and we just didn’t have the same interests. He was very gloomy to talk to. Remember, Maur?”

“He became an intellectual,” Maury explained.

“I see,” I said, and I suppose that at that moment I began really to tire of them and that damn leaning over the coffee table. Maury, however, was not nearly so insensitive as I thought; he caught whatever small flicker of boredom and resentment had crossed my face.

He said, “Paul just carried it too far there for a while, that was all. I mean he was all right,” he added, cuing his wife, “he was always Paul.”

“Oh he was a terrific fella,” Doris chimed in. “Nobody ever said anything about that. You know, my interests must have changed too. I’m not saying it was strictly one-sided.”

Here Maury decided to direct us all to the heart of the matter. “But the tragedy,” he said, “is his folks. That’s what you’ve got to face.”

“They seemed very unhappy,” I said.

“They’re losing out on a lot of fun in their late years. This could be a terrific time for them, but they’ve just given up. They live like hermits.”

“Hermits is right,” Doris said. “It’s terrible.” She offered me more coffee.

“No thanks,” I said.

“I’ll just have to throw it out,” she said. “I can’t reheat espresso, it loses something.” To pour she had to lean her face very close to mine; meanwhile, Maury did some serious thinking. It was clear that there was a good deal of satisfaction for these two in caring for Paul Herz’s parents, if not his memory. But the way I had heard it, the tragedy the elder Herzes were suffering was a tragedy they had themselves constructed.

I said, “Don’t you think, somehow, his parents might call Paul?”

I went no further; Maury looked at Doris, Doris at Maury. “Please,” Doris said.

What seemed a solution to me was a cut-and-dried impossibility to those in the know. No, no, absolutely not! However, if there was something that Paul wanted to do at long last, if there was any humanity left in him (the humanities!), then perhaps what he should begin to think about was getting to work — that was Maury’s phrase, getting to work — and bringing into the world a child for his mother and father to cherish as once they had cherished him.

“When they have a baby,” said Doris, the last word on the struggle of the generations, “then that’ll be that. What else?” she asked, showing me her palms. “We have two, and my parents, believe me, are having a whole new life through the grandchildren.”

“Gabe,” Maury said, frank and serious, “you know Paul probably better now than I do.” But with his practical business head, I knew he did not believe I knew anything better than he did, except perhaps how to parse a sentence. “Gabe, would you do me a favor, do us all a favor? When you go back there to the University, when you see Paul and his wife, would you tell them that Maury Horvitz, Mushie, sends his regards? As far as I’m concerned, personally, I mean, whatever Paul did was all right with me—”

“Look, nobody’s objecting to that,” Doris announced. “Whatever he thought he wanted to do, he should have done. Nobody’s denying him that.”

“But his father is a sick man, we see how sick he is every day. This is something Paul doesn’t see. And his mother is giving herself up to that man, she waits on him hand and foot. Just like she always waited on Paul. That woman has aged in three years in a most terrific way. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one thing that can keep those two from just drying up and dying—”

“Maury—” said Doris.

“A baby!” declared Maury. “A baby would heal that rift, I know it. Gabe, I would write to Paul myself, I would tell him my feelings on this whole thing — but to Paul I’m probably just an old friend he doesn’t even remember. But you could tell him. Somebody has to tell him. You can’t be selfish all your life. Paul was my best friend, but he always had a tendency to be a little selfish. Not to think of the other guy. Just a tendency, but still …”

“I’ll tell him,” I said, as the phone rang.

“Thanks, kiddo,” Maury said, taking my arm. Then he was on his sprightly elfin feet and had picked up the phone, which was pale blue to go with the carpet. I really couldn’t stand him.

“Hello? What … No-no-no. Just chatting …”

“Who?” Doris whispered, and for an answer Maury merely had to close his eyes.

Doris nodded. She said, sotto voce, “They call three times a day.”

When Maury hung up, he said, “I have to go down for a few minutes. Leonard says she’s hysterical. She keeps crying about Thanksgiving.”

“I hope I didn’t do it,” I said. “I probably shouldn’t have come.”

“How could you know?” Doris demanded in her singsong voice. “She’s been like this for a week already.”

“I’ll be right back,” Maury said.

“Take Marjorie Morningstar,” Doris said. “Maybe they’ll read it. If he’ll just start it,” she explained to me, “I’m sure he’ll be gripped. Have you read it?”

“Not yet,” I said, and began to get up.

“Wait a minute,” Maury said to me. “I’ll be right back.”

“I have to run on home myself.”

“Why don’t you wait until I talk to the folks? I’d appreciate that.”

“Sure. Okay.” I sat down on the cushions.

When we were alone, Doris lost a little of her composure, or whatever you may choose to call it, and began to hum. She said finally, “You don’t look Jewish, you know?”

“No?”

“You look Irish.”

“Not really. Not Irish.”

“Well, you know what I mean. Paul always looked very Jewish.”

“I suppose so.”

“You ought to read Marjorie Morningstar,” she said. “It’s about a girl who one of her problems is, I don’t think she wants to be Jewish. I think maybe Paul ought to read it.”

“You think I ought to recommend it to him?”

She did not know what to make of my response. She said, “Look, it’s just funny when a boy you went out with marries a Gentile girl. I mean I always thought of Paul as a very Jewish fella. He worked in the mountains, he never got in any trouble, he went to college, he had a good sense of humor—and then he turns around and does a thing like that. I don’t think those things generally work out, do you? Most divorces are intermarried, you know. Maybe Paul’s will work out, I’m not saying that. I’m sure if Paul picked her she’s a very nice girl. Certainly I have nothing against her. I don’t even know her. It’s just, I don’t know, none of us expected it. Do you get what I’m talking about?”

“I think so. Yes, I do.”

“Let me give you an example. Maury — now Maury, I mean you just know Maury wouldn’t do it. Maury is a very Jewish fella. He’s a very haymishe fella. To him a family is very important, a nice place to live is very important, he has a good sense of humor—” She got up off the floor and went to the piano, where there was another framed photograph. “This is Maury,” she said, carrying it back to me, “with Ted Mack. Ted Mack from the Amateur Hour. You know Ted Mack, don’t you?”

When I told her I did, she seemed somewhat relieved about my chances in the world.

“Now, Maury could have been a singer. Maury could have been a terrific singer on the style of Frankie Laine. Maury is a very interpretive fella with a song. He won two weeks in a row on Ted Mack, and when he lost, it was only to that little Rhonda whatever her name; you know, the one who had polio and overcame it. I mean that’s very nice, but it certainly didn’t have very much to do with talent. Maury was very unfortunate with that whole thing. Still, two weeks is definitely not nothing, and Arthur Godfrey was very interested in Maury, and the phone calls were coming in from agents for a week. In fact, we had a friend whose cousin was Ed Sullivan, so I mean anything could have happened. I mean Eddie Fisher just happened to meet Eddie Cantor and that was the whole thing. What I’m getting at is that Maury is a very different fella from Paul.” Her point — some point — made, she took the picture back to the piano. I stood up to stretch my legs.

“When I met Maury,” Doris was saying, “I had only really stopped seeing Paul because he went away to Cornell. Otherwise I don’t know, I probably would still have been dating Paul. I was in NYU and I personally did not even know Maury was a friend of Paul’s, can you imagine? And I was in this psychology class, and the first day in walks this very attractive fella, and it was Maury. And I knew how he had been on Ted Mack already, and what a terrific showman he was, and Maury asked me out, and then we just saw each other right on through, and then we got married. And that’s it.”

“And that’s it,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said mousily, and shrugged her shoulders. “That was all really. We met each other and we liked each other and that was all.” She put one hand on her hip; she seemed almost to have become angry with me. “I mean I never put out for Paul, you know. I mean I knew I would marry Maury very early.”

“In life?”

“You remind me of a guy in Marjorie Morningstar,” she said. “Noel Airman. He’s an intellectual, you know, and also a wise guy. When I was reading the book, in fact, I was thinking of Paul. I’ll bet he turned out a little bit that way too.”

At this point I kissed her. I closed my eyes, dreaming of the simplest, the very simplest of lives.

For a second she looked nothing more than irritated, as though out on a picnic the weather had taken an unexpected turn. But then she bit her lip, and life became, even for Doris, a very threatening affair. Then that passed, too. She turned her back to me. I took my place on the cushion, and for the next five minutes neither of us said anything. She broke down at last and began to file her nails.

Maury came back shortly after. “I calmed her down,” he said. “I told them Paul was thinking of having a baby. Even the old man got some blood in his face.”

On that note I left.

The lights were out at home and I took it that everything had been cleared away and all were asleep. It was after midnight — I had come back from Brooklyn by way of the Village, where I had stopped off at several bars I used to habituate as a young man (a younger man) down from Cambridge. But the girls were the same and the boys were the same and so were the jazz musicians. I had enough beer to make me feel exactly as uncomfortable as the same amount had made me feel years ago, and then, whistling “Linda,” the hit song of 1947, I had taken the Eighth Avenue subway home, the end of an atavistic day. I had spent much of the day looking for some door that would lead me back into the simple life, but I had not found one. On the subway I had a vision of dopey Doris Horvitz in bed snuggling up to Maury; then I had a vision of myself, spinning further and further from my youth, and kissing as I went all the women who had ever entered Paul Herz’s life.

I sobered quickly at the entrance to the apartment. Though the lights were out not everyone was asleep. Gruber was in the living room showing himself slides, while in a posture of abandon — or rather in the posture of one abandoned — Mrs. Silberman was flung across a love seat. Her head lolled over one end, and one arm hung to the floor, dripping fingers. Over the further end, her hooked knees were weighted in place by two exhausted, earthbound legs. My father was rolled up on the sofa, his big jaw cradled on his knees. I stood in the doorway unnoticed as all the world flicked by. I watched them ride a gondola in Venice and mount the Acropolis in Greece; in the doorways of cathedrals in Paris, Chartres, and Milan, they all stood grinning. Beside the river Seine, my father took a woman’s hand.

Gruber, thinking himself unobserved, made various noises; some were necessary to the maintenance of his body, the rest were appreciative, recollective. I came into the room and whispered hello, though it would have taken a cannon to awaken the two sleepers.

“Sit down. Want to see Europe? Want to see how the other half lives?” he asked. “Ten countries in fifteen minutes. England, Scotland, Belgium, Holland, France, Andorra—”

I plunged down into the deepest chair I could find and groaned like a man twice my age. “I’ve been to Europe,” I said.

“Not in style, boy,” the doctor said. “Bet you’ve never seen little Andorra. Look at that, that’s me eating cannelloni in Sorrento.”

“I think I saw you eating cannelloni in Fiesole.”

“I ate it everywhere. Do you know the three smallest countries in Europe?”

“Andorra,” I said, “and two others.”

The wind leaving his sails came whistling by my ears. “Okay,” he said, “a wise guy like your old man,” and clicked off the machine. And then the room was dark, except for what light came up from the street below. We both burrowed into our chairs, witnesses only to our own thoughts and the deep sleep of the others.

“Look …” Dr. Gruber began.

Well, at least I would not have to bring it up myself; he too knew a mistake when he saw one.

“Yes?” I said, inviting him not to be shy.

“Look, who’s this E. E. Cunningham? What’s he trying to do, put something over on the public?”

“What? Who?”

“E. E. Cunningham. He writes poems. Does he think he’s going to put something over on the public?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“What is that stuff supposed to be anyway? A poem?”

I had been willing to raise my mind out of grogginess for a discussion of the crisis in my home, but I could not manage to drag it higher, to manage Gruberian literary criticism. I remembered that when he had read Hemingway in Life, it had been me to whom he had come directly with his complaint: “What is this guy supposed to be, great?” Now, I supposed, Cummings had been quoted in Time, or, who knows, the ADA Journal. Culture is everywhere.

“I don’t think the guy’s going to put anything over on anybody. People,” Gruber said, “have got a lot of native sense.”

At that moment I couldn’t think of anybody I knew who had a drop, but I only nodded my head. I said, “Dr. Gruber, I hate to change the subject, but don’t you think she drinks a good deal?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. S.”

“Fay? She’s a good-time Charley! She’s a terrific gal!”

“But she drinks a lot. Is my father drunk?”

“He had the time of his life — he’s a new man. Christ, he was a melancholy specimen. Now he’s topnotch.”

“Do you think he’s going to be happy, Doc?”

“What’s the matter with you, boy? He is happy. Look at him now — he’s smiling, for God’s sake, in his sleep. We had the time of our lives.” He suddenly leaped up. “Here,” he said, “I want you to see some happy faces.”

He flipped on the machine. “Switzerland! Just before we left. Skating in November, can you imagine?”

Alas, we were on a lake, cupped between two white peaks. Dr. Gruber was holding up Mrs. Silberman under the arms; the two of them were laughing, their heads thrown back, their mouths open. Over at the left-hand edge of the picture, stood my father, wearing a feathered Alpine hat and his gray pin-striped suit. Like the others, he was on skates, but his attention didn’t seem to be on the sport.

“Look at her ankles!” Dr. Gruber said, but I was looking at those two eyes that were the color of my own. They were directed toward the distant mountains, fastened forever on the impossible.

In the morning, of course, neither Millie nor I, nor either of the lovers, commented on the fact that once again at our breakfast table sat three.

2

Sarah Vaughan awakened Martha Reganhart. She twisted around until she had plugged “Tenderly” out of her ears with her sheet and pillow — but then Markie was in bed beside her.

“Where’s the turkey?”

“Honey, it’s too early. Go color, go back to bed—”

“Sissy’s playing records.”

“Go tell Sissy to turn them off.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Tell Cynthia to. Markie baby, Mother’s beat. Will you just give her five more minutes? Tell Cynthia to tell Sissy to turn down the volume.”

“What?”

“The volume. Tell her …” She caught sight of the whole family’s dirty laundry heaped up in a corner of the gray room, and she almost went under. “Tell her to turn down the phonograph.” A bleary eye fell on the electric clock. “It’s seven, honey — it’s a holiday. Tell Cynthia—”

“Cynthia’s talking on the phone.”

“What phone?”

“She called the weather.”

“Oh Christ, Mark, tell your sister to hang up! Tell Sissy to lower the phonograph. Oh baby, your pants are wet—”

“It’s going to be clouds all day,” Mark said.

“Markie—”

You took my lips,

You took my love,

Soooooooo—

“Sissy! Lower that thing!”

“I can’t hear you,” Sissy shouted back; and a good forty minutes before it was supposed to, Mrs. Reganhart’s day began.

Sissy was in her room, wearing a gossamer shorty nightgown and painting her toenails.

“Sissy, where are the oranges? How do you expect my kids to have breakfast without orange juice?”

“I thought they were my oranges.”

“How could your oranges be on the top shelf, Sister? Where’s your head?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sissy, yesterday I found a bunch of bananas in the refrigerator. My bananas. Ten million dollars’ worth of advertising, and it goes right over your head. I’m at the edge with you, Sissy, I really am. Can’t you keep that box off in the morning?”

“Jesus, you just got up. What are you coming on so salty for?”

“Please, do me a favor. Let’s make a rule. No Sarah Vaughan until ten. There are two kids here, plus me, right? Either let’s make this place a house, keep it a house, or else — I don’t know. Can’t you even close the door when you take a bath?”

“What’s eating you, for God’s sake? What are you so prissy about all of a sudden? The kid’s four years old—”

“Just do me a favor,” Martha Reganhart said, “and close the door.”

“I’m claustrophobic.”

“You’re a goddam exhibitionist.”

“For four-year-olds?”

“I’m not even talking about Mark. I’m talking about Cynthia. She’s a big girl.”

“Christ, we’re all one sex.”

“There’s something about the sight of you shaving your legs in the bathtub that I think has a deleterious effect on her. All right?”

“You think she tends to be a little dykey?”

“That’s a bad joke—” Martha Reganhart said. “Why don’t you take it back?”

“I will. I’m sorry, Martha. I am.”

Martha looked out past the window sill full of cigarette butts into the holiday sky: clouds all day. Oh God. In the room, Sissy’s underwear was hanging over chair backs, on doorknobs, and on the two end posts of the bed; one brassiere was hooked over an andiron in the unused fireplace. Sissy herself sat on Martha’s Mexican rug (the one she had moved into this back bedroom as a come-on for prospective roomers) painting her toenails. Martha decided not to express the whole new rush of irritation she felt toward the girl. The only roomer Martha could put up with anyway was no roomer at all; besides, Sissy’s forty a month helped pay the rent. So she smiled at Sissy — who had, after all, behind those pendulous boobs, a big pendulous heart — and slingshotted a brassiere off the bedstead into Sissy’s curly brown hair. It collapsed around her ears.

“It loves you,” Martha said.

“You know, I think you’re a little dykey too.”

“Oh you’re a hard girl to fool, Sis.” She left the room wondering not how to dispossess Sissy, but simply how to get the Mexican rug back into the children’s bedroom.

In the kitchen, she slid the turkey from the refrigerator and found that it had only just begun to unfreeze; she had been so tired when she got home last night that she had gone directly to bed, forgetting to leave the turkey out. “Why do they let these birds get so hard?” she said.

“Who?” Mark said.

“Markie, don’t you have anything to do? Do you have to walk directly under my feet?”

“Why does that thing have a big hole in it like that?” he demanded.

“Get your arm out of there. Come on, Markie, take your arm out of there, will you?”

“Why does that turkey have a big hole in it?”

She carried it to the sink and turned the cold water on. She rapped on the breast with her knuckle, asking herself why November couldn’t have sneaked by without causing a fuss. Holidays were even worse than work days. Couldn’t everything, birthdays, Fourth of July, be celebrated at Christmas?

“Why does that turkey have a big—”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s for the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

“Drink your prune juice.”

“I don’t like prune juice,” Cynthia answered. “I like oranges.”

“Sissy drank the oranges this morning.”

“They weren’t hers anyway.”

“Yes they were,” Martha said.

“You said so yourself,” Cynthia replied.

“I made a mistake. I jumped to conclusions.” Since her daughter’s normal response to people seemed to be distrust, she saw no need to feed her inclinations; perhaps if everybody ignored the trait she would grow out of it. Martha told herself to be more motherly. “Cynthia, are you going to help me with dinner? You want to help stuff the turkey?”

“What’s stuff it?” Markie asked.

“Stuffing,” Cynthia said.

“How?” he pleaded.

“In the sexual organs.”

“Cynthia, what’s this sexual organs business?” Martha looked almost instinctively to Sissy’s door, which closed (when Martha could convince Sissy to keep it closed) onto the kitchen. Behind it Sissy was singing a duet with Sarah Vaughan and dressing; that is, heavy objects were bouncing off the floor, so if she was not dressing she was bowling.

“That,” Cynthia was saying, pointing toward the opening in the turkey.

“No it’s not, honey.”

“Yes it is, Mother.”

“It’s where they removed the insides of the turkey. This is a Tom, sweetie,” Martha began to explain.

“It’s the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

Markie looked from one to the other, with intermittent glances at the bird’s posterior, and waited for the outcome; he seemed to be rooting for his mother.

“It was the sexual organs,” Martha said. “It’s where they remove the intestines—”

“Who?” Mark asked.

“Dears, it’s very involved and mysterious and not terribly crucial. It’s one of those things that one day is very complicated and the next day is very simple. Why don’t you wait?”

“Okay,” Mark said, but Cynthia complained again about her prune juice.

“Cynthia, why don’t you run down to Wilson’s and buy the paper for me?”

“Can I stop in the playground to see if Stephanie’s there?”

“Stephanie’s mother is sick.”

“—sexual organs,” Mark was saying.

“Markie, forget that, all right? Why don’t you go color? Go with Cynthia—”

“I don’t want him along!”

“Who cares!” Mark said, and left the kitchen.

“Please don’t fight, will you, Cynthia? It’s a holiday. Go get the Times.”

“Can I stop at Hildreth’s?”

“For what? For candy, no.”

“To talk to Blair.”

“Blair isn’t there.”

“Blair’s always there,” said Cynthia, and Sissy laughed behind the door.

“Isn’t it enough, honey, to take a walk? Cyn, I’d love to take a walk. I’d just love to take a nice leisurely walk and get the newspaper and bring it home and sit down for about six hours and read it. Can’t you do that?”

“No!”

“Then go get the paper and keep quiet.”

“Christ!”

“And enough of that,” Martha said.

“You say it.”

“I also work as a waitress — does that interest you?”

“I can’t do anything.”

Martha took the dime for the paper out of her slacks pocket with wet hands. “Do you know what day this is?” she asked, wrapping her daughter’s fingers around the coin.

Cynthia made a bored admission. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving is a very terrific holiday. How about we have a pleasurable day, all right? We’re going to have a guest. Well, don’t you want to know who?”

“Who?”

She mustered up an air of excitement, a good deal more than she felt. “Sidney Jaffe!”

And all at once the child, thank God, became a child, a little seven-year-old girl. “Goodie! Terrific!” She skipped out of the house after the paper.

There was one wall of the kids’ room — before Sissy’s arrival it had been Cynthia’s alone — that Martha had given up on and come to consider the coloring wall. Now Mark was laying purple on it with considerable force and violence.

“Markie, what is it you want to do?”

“Yes,” the boy said, and continued hammering the crayons against the wall.

“What’s the trouble?”

He looked up. “Nothing.”

“Are you happy?”

“Uh-huh.”

She made Cynthia’s bed and changed Mark’s wet sheets. Crumpling them into a sour wad, she bit her tongue and said nothing. Finally, as though it was simple curiosity that moved her to ask, she said, “Did you have any bad dreams, my friend?”

He looked up at her again. “Who?”

Why did he always say who to everything? All the frustrations of the morning — the missing oranges, the frozen bird, Sarah Vaughan — nearly came out on poor defenseless Mark. Everything: Sissy’s stupidity and Cynthia’s indefatigable opposition and Markie’s bed-wetting and her own unconquerable tiredness … She was twenty-six and tired right down to the bone. And she was putting on weight. Twenty-six and becoming a cow! Somehow the whole general situation would improve, she thought hazily, if she could only get Sissy to pick up her underwear and put it in a drawer. Or move out. Or shut up. But the truth was that she had been dying for a little companionship. When she dragged in from the Hawaiian House at one in the morning, it gave her a small warm rush of pleasure to find Sissy in the kitchen, drinking hot milk — more than likely laced with Martha’s brandy — and listening to Gerry Mulligan. Sissy was silly and gossipy and she did not bother to vote, but it seemed better coming home to her than coming home to nothing. Still, why did she have to be a nut? Martha seemed always to be latching onto people just as they were going through some treacherous maturing period in their lives. Her next roomer, she told herself, would not be under eighty — better they should die in her spare room than grow up in it.

She planted a kiss on her son’s neck and he drew a purple line across the bridge of her nose. “Bang! Bang!” he shouted into her ear, and she left him to his drawing.

“What’s the matter with your nose?” Sissy asked. “You look like you’ve just been shat upon?”

“Could you control your language in my house?”

“What are you coming on so salty again for?”

“I don’t want my children saying shat, do you mind? And put on a bathrobe. My son’s earliest memory is going to be of your ass.”

“Now who’s filthy?”

“I happen to be their mother. I support them. Please, Sissy, don’t walk around here half-naked, will you?”

“Well, you don’t have to be so defensive about it.” Sissy went into her room, and came out again, robed, and dribbling ashes off her cigarette. Martha turned to the wall above the sink where the wallpaper was trying to crawl down; she gave it a swat, with the result that it unpeeled a little further. And for this, she thought, they raise the rent. During the last six months — since everybody had had the mumps — life had just been zipping along; then they raised the rent, she brought in Sissy, and things were down to normal again. She turned to her roomer and said, “Sissy, I want to ask you a question?”

“What?”

“Stop plucking your face and listen to me.”

Sissy lowered her mirror and tweezers. “All right, crab, what is it?”

“Do you smoke pot in there?”

The girl crossed her arms over her chest. “Never.”

“Because don’t. I don’t ever want Blair sleeping over here again, ever—and I don’t want any pot-smoking within ten feet of the kitchen table, where my children happen to eat their breakfast.”

“It was Blair, Martha. He won’t do it again.”

“You’re damn right he won’t do it again. Why did I rent that room to you, Sister? I keep forgetting.”

“I applied, you know, like everybody else. I answered the ad. Don’t start shifting blame on me.”

Martha returned to the turkey; she had popped a seam in the left side of her slacks, and when she bent over the sink it popped open further. “They’re going to put me in a circus,” she said. “Five nine and six hundred pounds.”

“You eat too much. You could knock people’s eyes out. You just eat too much.”

“I don’t eat too much,” she said, running scalding water over the leaden turkey, “I’m just turning into a cow. A horse.”

“You know what your trouble is?”

“What? What news do you bring from the far-out world? I’m dying to hear a capsule analysis of my character this morning.”

“You’re horny.”

“You sound about as far out as McCall’s, Sissy.”

“Well, when I’m horny I’m a bitch.”

“Your needs are more complicated than mine. I’m just tired.”

“When I was married to old Curtis, I was practically flippy. You say boo, and I was halfway out the window. He was the creepiest, gentlest guy, and I was snapping at him all the time.”

The tragedy in Sissy’s young life was that she had been married for eleven months to a man who was impotent; she had married him, she said, because he struck her right off as being different. Now — in her continuing search for the exotic — she was involved with Blair Stott, who was a Negro about one and a half neuroses away from heroin, but coming up strong; and if he wasn’t impotent, he was a flagellator or something in that general area.

“What about that Ivy League guy?” Sissy asked. “Joe Brummel.”

“Beau Brummel, Sissy — what about him?”

“Don’t you dig him or what?”

“He’s in New York,” Martha said.

“I thought he was coming for dinner.”

“Sid is.”

“Oh Jesus. That very buttoned-down guy, I mean he’s not bad. He could be turned on with a little work. But old Sidney, I mean like what he digs is law.”

“Sissy, how do you talk at the hospital? How do you address people when you’re not at home?”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“I hate that God damn hospital. Blair says—” And she proceeded to repeat Blair’s words in Blair’s dialect, “I’m going to get desexized from the X-ray rays.”

“Blair’s a genius.”

“Martha—” Sissy said, leaning forward and setting down her mirror.

“What?”

“I almost did the most far out thing of my life last night. I was like close.”

“To what?”

“Turning tricks.”

Martha felt the homey familiar enamel of the sink under her hands, and took a good grip on it. “Here?” she demanded. “You were going to be a prostitute in my house? Are you crazy?”

“No! No — what do you think I am!”

With relief — though by no means total relief — Martha said, “At Suey’s.”

“At Suey’s,” Sissy admitted. “Isn’t that something? Suey was out getting her hair set, and this guy called to come over for a fast one. I told him Suey was out, and so he said what about you, sweetheart? And I said okay, come on over, you jerk. I told him to come over.”

In a vague way, Suey O’Day was tied up with Martha’s own past, but that was not sufficient explanation for the emotions — shame, fear, vulnerability — that Martha felt while Sissy was speaking. Martha and Suey had been freshmen together at the University. Suey had run off one day with a jockey from Washington Park, and Martha had run off and married Dick, and they had gone to Mexico and then she had come back from Mexico with the kids, and Suey was twenty-four and back in town too — as a call girl. Now Suey’s future was said to be very bright; at one A.M., with background music by Gerry Mulligan, Sissy had informed Martha that there was a LaSalle Street broker whom Suey was tempted to marry for loot, and there was an instructor in math at the University who was crazy about her and whom she was tempted to marry for love. (The problem here was whether Suey should tell him The Truth About Herself, which the LaSalle Street broker already knew.) Of course Suey was worlds away from Martha, but Sissy wasn’t: Sissy was in her house, Sissy was sleeping on her muslin sheets, and it was Sissy’s dumb wildness, her endless temptations, that struck in Martha a painful remembered chord.

“What happened?” Martha said.

“I took off. I came home. I got in bed. That’s how I was up so early — I was in bed at nine-thirty.”

Martha sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette; she caught sight of her hair in Sissy’s mirror — another mess to be cleaned up before one o’clock. “Sissy, you’re really going to screw up everything. Why don’t you wise up? Dump Blair and dump all this hipster crap and do something with yourself. Honey, you can still dig Gerry Mulligan, but you don’t have to kill yourself.”

“Look, I was just going to turn a lousy trick to see what it was like. I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge.”

“But, Sissy, you don’t want to be a call girl. Do you know what’s very square, Sis? To want to be a call girl. Honestly, it’s like wanting to be an airline stewardness or a nurse.”

“Do you think I love being a stinking X-ray technician? Is that a noble calling? Sixty-five bucks a week?”

“Ah-ha, it’s a matter of honor. I didn’t know. The culture’s crowding you in. We ought to set up an interview for you, Sissy, with Erich Fromm.”

“Don’t come on so motherly with me, Martha. You’re about two years older—”

“True—”

“—and your life isn’t exactly a model of order.”

“You’re going to get kicked in the teeth, Sister, so why don’t you shut up.” Martha pressed out her cigarette just as the janitor came up the back porch, waved at her, tried to catch a peek of some bare corner of Sissy’s anatomy, and emptied — very, very slowly — the garbage.

At the sink she held the turkey submerged in hot water. Behind her Sissy began to apologize. “I just thought about it, Martha—”

“Who cares what you thought or what you did! Maybe what you ought to think about is moving out.”

“I only just moved in.”

“That’ll make packing easier. Just roll up all your brassieres, scatter those cigarette butts to the wind, and move the hell out.”

“You going to throw me out on a morals charge? Because I don’t happen to be compulsively neat?”

“I don’t want my kids lifting up the phone when your clients start to call—” Yet even as she spoke the whole business tired her. Everything tired her — even thinking about what she would have to do now. Take another ad, answer phone calls, arrange appointments, show the place to dozens of girls and ladies … Just the knowledge that after Sissy left she would have to scrub the place again from top to bottom weakened her resolve. Why hadn’t she rented to some eager little physics major in the first place? What insanity it had been to think that this jerk was going to be sweet, fun, laughs! All she wanted now, really, was for Sissy to crawl back into her grubby room and close the door and ruin her life however she wanted. She said nothing, but there must have been some sagging in her posture that inspired Sissy to be nasty.

“Just because you have sex problems, Martha, don’t call somebody who doesn’t a nymphomaniac, all right? If you’re frigid, or whatever the hell is bugging you, I don’t say I’m not going to live in your house because of it. You, you’re a regular sexual Senator McCarthy, honest to God you are.”

“I’m trying to fix a traditional Thanksgiving Day turkey. Why don’t you go play records.”

“Actually, I think what it is that bugs you is that like Blair’s a dinge.”

“As far as I’m concerned, friend, you can go down for the whole Nigerian Army and the Belgian Congo Marines. Just leave me alone, all right?”

Sissy picked up her mirror and tweezers and left the room. And Martha Reganhart was sure that never before had she been so compromised and shat upon; never had she been so soft and expedient and unprincipled. Worst of all, never could it have bothered her less. If she had had the energy to be disgusted with herself, the object of her disgust would have been her inability to care any more. For nearly four years now she had been pretending to be two parents, and not half a set. Even the strict observance of national holidays had been a conscious noble decision, something she felt the divorced owed their offspring. Three and a half years ago she had made a whole potful of conscious noble decisions: if Cynthia had long legs, she would have ballet lessons; if she had a good head, she would go to the very best schools; Markie was going to learn to be as crazy over the White Sox as any Chicago kid with a full-time father … and so on and so on. Today, however, the whole fatuous lie, all that she had not done, screamed at her from every wall, door, and closet. With that granite turkey to roast and cranberries to boil and silverware to polish, she felt as though she had run her course. If she had been allowed one more hour of sleep she could doubtless have faced the next four years with an upper lip as stiff as ever. Now, everything foretold her doom — even the popped seam in her slacks, through which anyone who cared to look could see that Martha Reganhart was wearing no underwear.

But what was she supposed to have done? The dilemma she had had to face at seven A.M., before brushing her teeth or drinking her coffee, was whether or not she would be less of a slob, or more of a hundred-percent-American mother, with no pants under her slacks, or dirty ones — for it turned out there were none clean. She had made her choice in a stupor, and was now suffering dismal emotions as a result. Feeling bedraggled made her feel unworthy, and over her sink she closed her eyes to the near and distant future. She thought it might give ber some little solace if she could squeeze her hands around the neck of whoever it was who had raised her rent. But it wasn’t a person — it was an agency. There wasn’t even anybody to shout at really — they only worked here, lady — when you called up to complain.

Shortly thereafter, her daughter came racing through the front door, impervious to the scab on her right knee that was leaking blood down her shin.

“Mommy! Daddy’s picture!”

“Daddy’s what? Cynthia, look at your knee—”

“Daddy’s picture. A painting!”

“Cynthia, what happened to your knee?”

“Nothing. I slipped. Look!” Cynthia had the paper folded to the art column. She jerked it back and forth in front of Martha’s face, but did not relinquish it.

“Calm down,” Martha said. “I can’t see it if you keep moving it, can I? Go wash your knee. Please — do you want to get an infection and turn blue?”

“Daddy’s picture—”

“Go wash your knee!”

Cynthia threw the paper to the floor and, crestfallen, went hobbling off to the bathroom; if the knee was going to use her, she would use the knee. “Christ!” she howled, limping down the hallway. “Christ and Jesus!”

With Cynthia gone, it was easier to take a look; she had not wanted a child around to witness whatever shock there might be. She picked up the paper from the floor and sat down with it at the kitchen table. Her heart slowly resumed its normal beat, though it was true, as Cynthia said, that a painting of her father’s was actually printed in the Times. She recognized it immediately; only the title had been changed. What had once been “Ripe Wife” was now labeled “Mexico.” The bastard. She allowed herself the pleasure of a few spiteful moments. Juvenilia. A steal from de Staël. Punk. Derivative. Corny. Literal. Indulgent. She repeated to herself all the words she would like to repeat to him, but all the incantation served to do was to bring back so vividly all that had been: all the awful quarrels, all the breakfasts he had thrown against the kitchen wall, all the times he had walked out, all the times he had come back, the times he had smacked her, the times he had wept, saying he was really a good and decent man … All of it lived at the unanesthetized edge of her memory. Mexico! Couldn’t he have changed it to Yugoslavia? Bowl of Fruit? Anything but rotten Mexico!

Her eye ran up and down the column; she was unable to read it in any orderly way. It was captioned, Tenth St. Show Uninspired; Reganhart Exception.

… except for Richard Reganhart. A resident of Arizona and Mexico, Reganhart, in his four paintings, reveals a talent …

… manages a rigidity of space, a kind of compulsion to order, that makes one think of a fretful housekeeper …

… especially “Mexico.” The dull gold rectangles are played off against a lust and violence of savage purples, blacks, and scarlets that continually break in through the rigid …

… will alone emerge of the seven young people

Crap! Fretful housekeeper, crap! Housebreaker! Weakling! Selfish! Destroyer of her life! She hated him — she would never forgive him. Some day when it suited her purpose, she would get that son of a bitch. It was nearly three years since he had sent a penny to support their children. Three very long years.

She read the article over again from beginning to end.

When Cynthia came out of the bathroom, a bandage over half her leg, the child asked, “Remember when we were in Mexico?”

“Yes,” Martha said.

“Can I remember it?”

“I think you were too small.”

“I think I can remember it,” Cynthia said. “Wasn’t it very warm there?”

“Cyn, you know it’s warm there. You learned that in school.”

Cynthia reached out and Martha handed her back the paper. “See Daddy’s name?” Cynthia asked.

“Uh-huh. I didn’t mean to take it away from you, sweetie. I only wanted you to wash your knee—”

“I like that picture, don’t you?” Cynthia asked.

“I think it’s terrific,” Martha said. “I think it’s very beautiful.”

“Can I cut it out and keep it?”

“Sure.”

“Can I hang it up?”

“Absolutely.”

“Oh boy! Hey Markie — look what Mommy gave me!”

“Oh Cynthia, don’t start that, will you? Cynthia—” But the little girl was skipping off toward the living room; she met her brother halfway.

“Look what Mommy gave me. I’m going to hang it up!”

“I want it!” he shouted. “What is it?”

“Daddy’s picture. Here. Don’t touch. Don’t touch.”

“I want it. Where — where’s Daddy’s picture?”

“Here, dope. Can’t you see?”

“Cynthia—” Martha said, from the doorway to the living room. “Cynthia …” But she found herself unable to attach a command, an instruction, a warning, to her child’s name. Cynthia, Cynthia, born of sin.

“Who—?” Markie was asking.

“This—” Cynthia said. “It’s Daddy’s picture!”

Mark didn’t get it; his jaw only hung lower and lower. Would he ever learn to read? Lately she had begun to wonder if he might not be retarded. Should she take him in for tests?

“And it’s mine. I’m hanging it over my bed!” Cynthia cried.

“My bed—” howled Mark, but his sister had already fled on one bare, one bandaged leg — both willowy, both more perfect every day — carrying her prize to some private corner of the house.

It might have been Christmas, and Sid, Saint Nick. He arrived with bottles of Pouilly Fuissé, Beefeater’s, Noilly Prat dry vermouth, and a fifth of Courvoisier. “That’s for the kids,” he said, placing a row of liquor cartons at Markie’s feet. “And now for you,” and he unwrapped a doll almost three feet tall and a portable basketball set, both of which he deposited in Martha’s arms.

“What’s for us?” Cynthia demanded.

The sandpapery voice in which Cynthia had addressed him nearly flattened the man on the spot, but, hanging on courageously to what he had doubtless been planning for the last half hour, he said, “Whiskey.”

“It’s sour!” Markie cried. “It’s beer!”

“Oh Mommy,” cried Cynthia, “Mommy we didn’t get anything—”

And then, just as Sid’s good intentions and his bad judgment threatened to plunge all present into despair, Martha swooped into the center of the room, gathered her children in with the armful of presents, and went spinning around in a circle. “Dummies, dummies, this is for you!” Spinning, they fell onto the rug, and the two children came up clutching their rightful gifts to their chests. And Sid was down on the floor with them too, clutching Martha’s wrist with his hand — and all the laughter and noise seemed to her only a mockery of a real and natural domesticity. Nevertheless, propelled by a seething desire to make the afternoon work, she kissed the faces of her two children and the brow of her gentleman caller. The skirt of her purple suit — an extravagance of her first winter back in Chicago — was above her knees. Sid Jaffe’s weighty brown eyes, those pleading, generous orbs, turned liquidy and hot; he tried to engage her in a significant glance, but she quickly began to explain to Markie the rules of basketball, as she understood them.

There had been a scene with Sid the last time, which neither of them could have forgotten. Martha had rushed away from the sofa, trembling, but acting tough: “Stop persevering, will you! What are you — a schoolboy?” “Just the opposite, Martha!” he had said. “I want to sleep with you!” “I don’t care what you want—stop trying to cop feels!” And he had left, she knew, feeling more abusive than abused, an unfair state to have produced in a man forty-one years old. But then Sid could never think of himself as having been in the right for very long anyway. Forceful as he may have been in court, out of it he defended himself with only the rawness of his needs — he seemed so baldly willing to protect others and not himself. Much as this willingness of his sometimes discomfited her, in the end it was for sexual reasons that Martha had sworn she would let him drift out of her life, just as five or six men had had to drift out previously.

It was almost immediately after Sid had left last time that she had called Gabe Wallach and asked him—whom she hardly knew — to join her and hers for Thanksgiving dinner. He was a smoothy, though, and had given some excuse about a party for his father in New York. She, whose parents were of an entirely different chapter of her life, had accepted his refusal graciously, if disbelievingly. Since she suspected Wallach of a kind of polished lechery anway, she almost felt relieved afterward — she might only have been throwing herself back into the struggle from which she had been trying to extricate herself. Yet she knew that Thanksgiving alone with the kids would be a hollow day. You might as well spend Thanksgiving in China if there wasn’t a man around to carve. So some days later she had called Sid’s office. And the first thing he said to her was that he was sorry, which only re-enforced a belief she had in her ability to emasculate when she put her mind to it. He said he had missed her; he said he had thought about her; he said he had thought about the kids; he said of course that he would come.

In a way Martha had missed him too, or missed the chance he had given her; she almost regretted now not having submitted to his passion and her own stifled, immeasurable itch. Sid was a vigorous man with a bald head and a broken nose, both of which gave him a kind of athletic, trampled-on good looks. His body was exercised and a little thick, like a weight-lifter’s, though he was two inches taller than Martha. He was a little too prissy about not running to seed, but that was a minor quibble and hardly the sort that soured lust. Which was fortunate, for it was lust (plus a natural instinct for sharing pleasure, an inability even to see a movie alone) that she would finally have to rely on with Sid. Well of decency that he was, she did not love him and never could. The affection he did inspire made her feel sorry for him, and sorrow had never for a moment produced a single quiver in her loins. Early in life she had allowed herself the luxury of many men, but she had never been swept backwards into bed out of feelings of pity or pathos. For all her genuine humanity the plight that touched her most was her own. She looked up fiercely and demandingly into men’s faces, and some of them — those with more staying power than perception — had circulated stories of nymphomania, when what they had witnessed was only simple selfishness, the grinding out of one’s own daily bread.

Sid gazed once again into her eyes; thinking to herself, why not? what’s lost? she gazed back. Then she saw him soften, saw his eyes saying to her that he demanded no more than he deserved. Ah, he was too just, too kind. It seemed that almost as great as his desire to sleep with her was his desire to pay her bills and get her a steady maid; something he had once said led her to believe that he had already talked over the possibility with his own cleaning lady.

But despite the feelings which washed over and over her through the afternoon, she carried on with the festivities. After Markie had broken the hoop on the basketball set, and Cynthia had spilled Sid’s martini — burrowing into his lap whenever he conversed with her mother — they had their dinner.

Martha Reganhart was sure you could tell something about a man’s character from the way he carved a turkey. If he twittered and made excuses and finally hacked the bird to bits, he was Oedipal, wilted under responsibility, and considered himself a kind of aristocrat in the first place—voilà, Dick Reganhart. If he made a big production out of it, clanging armor and sharpening knives, performing the ritual and commenting on it at the same time, he was either egomaniacal or alcoholic, or in certain spectacular cases — her father’s, for instance — both. Of course if the man just answered the need, if he stood up, executed his historical function, and then sat down and ate, chances were he was dutiful, steady, and boring. That was her grandfather, who had had to carve through many bleak Oregon Thanksgivings, after her father had packed his valise, looted the liquor cabinet, and left that eloquent, fateful note: “I am going to California or some God damned place where they make the stuff and you can at least sit in the sun and drink it with nobody looking out for your health.” He had bequeathed his office and utensils to his father-in-law, a hard-working railroad engineer, and he had left forever.

Grandpa had filled the gap all right — and so too did Sid Jaffe, who freed both drumsticks from their sockets and laid them, one each, on the children’s plates. Martha tried not to take any notice of the sinking in her stomach, which she knew to be a sure signal that self-deception is rampant in the body. She tried to ignore the fact that she had not her grandmother’s taste: she tried with all her heart to look over at Sid Jaffe, carving away so efficiently there, and melt with love for him. She imagined all the good it would do them if she could only fall for him. She considered the $54 owed these many months to Marshall Fields, and the $300 loan from the co-op; she thought of the $36 bled from her by that thief, Dr. Slimmer. (Those she hated in this world and would never forgive were Dick Reganhart, her father, and Dr. Slimmer, the last for knowing nothing and charging double.) She thought of Sissy and the messy room — she heard Sissy, in fact, singing in the bathtub — and she knew that the only sensible thing was to close her eyes, tip forward, and dive down into an easy love. So she went under three times, but each time came bobbing back up to the surface.

“But what’s a lawyer do?” Markie was asking. “I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

“There are laws,” Sid was explaining, “like not crossing the street when the light is red. That’s a law, right?”

“Of course,” Cynthia said.

Mark nodded in agreement. He was hoisting a candied sweet potato to his mouth, not with his fork, but wrapped in the center of his fist. Martha waited for the inevitable to happen: sure as hell he would stick it in his eye. But through luck, or instinct, he managed to locate his lips; he had, however, borne down too heavily on the frail potato, and just as it was to slide safely within, most of it made an appearance along the edges of his fingers. Totally absorbed, and confused, by Sid’s explanation—“and the lawyer is the person, Markie, who explains to the judge why he thinks the other person, the person who crossed against the light, say”—floundering in the labyrinths of jurisprudence, Markie cleaned his hand on the front of his white shirt.

“Mark!”

Sid stopped short with his lecture; Markie looked up. “Who?”

“Don’t you have a napkin?” Martha asked.

He showed her that he did. Sid said, “Markie, when you want to wipe your hands off, use your napkin.”

“It’s no use. I think he’s part Eskimo,” Martha said. “I think he’s going to grow up and just head north and find a nice Eskimo girl and the two of them are going to sit around for the rest of their lives asking each other Who? and ripping blubber apart with their hands. Markie, my baby-love, pay attention to your food, all right?”

After speaking her last words she saw how she had hurt the feelings of her guest. He was being educational — his way of being fatherly — and she had directed the pupil away from his lessons and back to his plate and napkin. She tried to add some joke, but it was limp, and suddenly she felt unable to bear up much longer under Sid Jaffe’s good intentions. Why must he feel obliged to try so hard with her children? It made her angry that, as much as he wanted to visit with her, he seemed to want to visit with Cynthia and Mark.

Sissy now traipsed through in her sheer robe. “Excuse me,” she said, leaving water prints across the fringe of the floor. “What do you say, counselor? Comment ça va?”

Sid, who still could not understand Sissy’s presence in the house, mumbled a greeting. Martha had not told him that her rent had gone up for fear he would volunteer to take the case to the Rent Control Board. She felt pre-defeated in the face of administrative bodies, which seemed to her to work in mad ways of their own; and besides, she owed Sid too much that was not money already. She wanted really to work herself free of this lawyer and of those legal maneuverings which she had once believed might get her more just treatment in the world. At a very early point in her misery she had believed in a kind of parliamentarian approach to confusion; now she understood things better.

“Sissy’s feet are wet,” Cynthia pointed out. “She’s leaving a mess again.”

“It’s only dew, baby,” said Martha. After Sissy had departed, she said, “She’s part girl, part stripper—” But Sid was wiping his mouth and saying, “Sometimes I don’t understand you, honey.”

Cynthia leaned over to whisper into Mark’s ear, “He called her honey again.”

“Who?”

Since Martha had to be at work by five, they had begun dinner early. Now it was not quite three, but with the meal finished and the dishes stacked, though not washed, it seemed to Martha as though it were time for dusk to settle in. In Oregon at this time — or later, at the real dusk — they would be coming back from their tramp in the woods. She would have pebbles in her girl scout shoes, and the dust from the red leaves would have caked around her ankles, to be discovered later when she took off her socks for sleep. Her grandfather would be whistling, her grandmother clearing her throat (forever clearing her throat), and her father would be pinching the behind of her mother — poor baffled beautiful woman — and tripping over every rock on the path. “It’s hot toddy time!” “Oh Floyd, you’ve had—” “For God’s sake, where’s your American spirit, Belle? Your old lady here is a matron of the DAR, and where is your American spirit residing, anyway?” “Why don’t you go in and nibble on some turkey; why don’t you—” “I’ll tell you what I want to nibble on, old sweetheart!” “Floyd, the child—” “Martha Lee, who wants a hot toddy, my baby-love? Who’s my baby-love? Who’s got a collection of women around him could make a sheik’s eyes pop? Is that right, Belle, isn’t a sheik one of those fellas with the harems? Baby-love, you’re in the sixth grade — haven’t they mentioned harems?” It was that Thanksgiving, some long, long-gone holiday, when for the first time she had become dreadfully and unexplainably nervous in his presence.

Mark was taking his nap, Sissy had glided out in flat Capezios and black tights, and Cynthia’s voice caroled up from the back yard, where she was jumping rope with Barbara, the janitor’s daughter.

Sid kissed her. Following the old saw, she leaned back and tried, at least, to enjoy it. His hands were a great comfort, a regular joy — there was a nice easy stirring in her breasts that moved inward through her, picking up speed and power, until it produced at last a kind of groan in her bones down in the lowest regions of her torso. Then she was off the sofa.

“No,” she said.

“Martha,” Sid said calmly, “this is getting ridiculous. I’m a grown man, you’re a grown woman—”

“It’s one of those things that’s ridiculous and is going to have to be, Sidney.”

Sid swam an hour a day at the Chicago Athletic Club; he had been a Marine Corps officer in two wars; at forty-one he wore the same size belt he had at twenty-one — and now he asked, with a nervous display of bravado, if perhaps it was simply that she found him physically repellent.

“I find you nothing of the sort,” she said, touched, but not of course impassioned, by the question. “A lot of traffic has moved across this sofa, Sid. I’ve been living here going on four years, and a lot of men have come through, you know, on their way home from work. I think there’s a bus stops in front of our steps, I don’t know. Anyway, if I let everybody’s hands go traveling down my blouse, what kind of mother would I be?”

“I’d appreciate it, Martha, if you could just be serious for a minute.”

He was dead serious, which caused her to feel all the strain of being a joker. She felt dumb and inconsequential and foolish. Here was a man with a hard-on (and all the seriousness that implied) and she wouldn’t give him a straight answer. But there she went again! She just couldn’t sneak out of things by turning phrases all the time. She addressed herself in a stern voice: Be serious … But if she were to become serious about old Sidney, she knew — why not face it — that she would marry him. Once they had stripped down together, and she had realized that aside from being a father to her children, he could also give her about as much bedroom excitement as any other girl she knew was getting — once she let him prove this, wouldn’t she be a goner? Wed once more for wrong and expedient reasons … No, there was only one bag to put your marbles in, one basket for your eggs, and that was love. Nobody was going to marry her again out of necessity; nobody was going to marry her for her breasts, her troubles, or her kids. Nor was she going to miss the mark herself. This time she would do it for love.

At bottom, her demands were no more complicated or original than any other girl’s.

Sid walked to where she stood running her hand over the bindings of her small and eclectic collection of paperbacks. He said, “I didn’t mean that, Martha,” whereupon she thought: What! What are you apologizing for now! “I understand,” he said. “You’re in a tricky position. I’m not trying to make things more difficult for you at all. I care for you so much, Martha. You’ve got a lot of guts, and you’ve been remarkable, really, in a very awkward situation. I do appreciate just how complicated it’s been for you. But, honey, there’s such a simple solution. It doesn’t have to go on like this at all. I’m going to get you down on the sofa, and you’re going to jump up, and there’s such a simple and obvious solution.”

“And what’s that?”

He took her hand, as was appropriate. “Marry me.”

Since her return to Chicago, two other proposals had come Martha’s way. One was from Andy Ratten, a Rush Street musician much admired by co-eds and their dates, who pretended to be Paul Hindemith to one set of friends and Dizzy Gillespie to another; when Martha turned him down, he had sent in the mail — the measure of his crew-cutted wit and marijuanaed charm — a Sammy Kaye LP. “Your fate, baby,” was all the enclosed card had said. The second proposal had come from Billy Parrino, who at the time was the husband of her best friend. On the playground, while soft-faced, bug-eyed exhausted Billy was watching his three kids — his wife was home cracking up, a phenomenon only recently completed — and Martha was watching her two, he had come right out with it. “Martha, let’s just take off.” “I think you have a wife named Beverley.” “She’s so wacked-up it’s driving me crazy.” “Well, I’d love to, Billy, but the kids—” “We’ll take them; we’ll take them all, and we’ll just go somewhere. Paris.” “It all sounds too glamorous — you, me, five kids, Paris.” “Oh,” wailed Billy, “how this life does stink,” and he went home.

So a full-hearted, unqualified, sensible proposal from a man as substantial as Sid Jaffe — which now that it was here melted the cartilage in her knees — was a considerable achievement. Sid made $15,000 a year, was neat and clean, and, God knew, his heart was in the right place. Just three weeks before, they had sat by her TV set, and while poor Adlai Stevenson had conceded defeat in measured eighteenth-century sentences, tears had rolled from Sid’s eyes. Sid Jaffe was for all the right things; he was decent and just and kind (she would always have her way; she would be in a marriage, imagine it, where she would always have her way) and he was good to children, if somewhat plodding. And even that was mostly eagerness, and would surely have disappeared by the time of their first anniversary — to be celebrated, no doubt, with ten days in the Bahamas …

She had really to search for some switch to throw, something to divert the current that was building up to carry her toward an affirmative reply. “My kids, you know, are little Protestant kids. Markie’s circumcision was strictly pragmatic, I don’t want you to be tricked by that. He’s a slow learner, Sid, and it may take him fifteen years to figure out what a Jew is. And Cynthia may turn out to be an anti-Semite; she comes home with something new every day. My grandmother, you know, is a flying buttress still of the DAR—” Yet even as her mouth released all this feeble chatter, she remembered her old grandmother’s balanced judgment on the men of Zion: “They’re tight-fisted ugly little fellas, Martha Lee, but they’re good to their wives and children.”

“Martha, you don’t have to give me an answer in the next sixty seconds.”

When it came to honoring the other person’s surface emotions, Sid Jaffe was a very sweet considerate man. “Let me think about it, Sid — all right?”

But he had suggested she wait, apparently, not expecting she would choose to; he had to turn away to hide the fact that he was crushed. Suddenly Martha had a vision of Sid proposing to girls ever since high school.

And then he was pressing her to him. She was wearing her one other extravagance, her white silk V-neck blouse, and Sid had buried his head in the V. His mouth sent through her an arc, a spasm of passion, and if Markie was not sleeping in the other room, if Cynthia’s jump-rope song had not ceased, if the phone had not all at once begun to ring, Martha Reganhart might have had a far different future.

“Martha, we can just have the most wonderful—” His mouth went down and down and she closed her eyes.

“Wonderful wonderful—”

“—The phone.”

“Let it ring.”

But it stopped ringing.

“Mommy! It’s Daddy!”

“What!” She was racing for the kitchen — racing away, not toward. “What is it, Cynthia? What?”

“It’s Daddy from New York! For Mrs. Reganhart! You, Mommy! The operator!”

She took the receiver from Cynthia’s hands, wondering — among other things — how long the child had been in the kitchen. Couldn’t she even get felt up in private? And now this — Dick Reganhart! From where! “Yes? … Operator? This is Martha Reganhart.”

“It’s not Daddy, however,” said the voice at the other end.

She sank down in a chair. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Shall I hang up?”

“Certainly not — my child’s drunk on Mott’s apple juice. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Where are you?”

“Daddyland,” Gabe Wallach answered. “New York.”

“Oh do excuse her. She gets overexcited when she’s not in school. I think she’s reacting to the company.” She lowered her voice, for she saw the company pacing back and forth in the living room. Was he trying to overhear, or was he walking off lust? How unnatural everything was.

Gabe Wallach asked, “Who’s there?” He sounded a little demanding, but Thanksgiving was doubtless a strain on everybody.

“An old friend,” Martha said. “He stimulates the children.”

“And you?”

More demanding yet. She would have been annoyed were it not as though some hand had reached down to pull her out of the fire. “No, no. No — that’s true. Listen, I’m sounding tragic. How’s your father’s party? Is there really a father and a party, or is some tootsie nestled beside you in her underwear?”

“I call in the absence of the latter.”

“It’s very sweet of you to call. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“I’m having a nice unhappy one.”

“Mommy!” Cynthia said. “I want to talk to him — I want to—”

“Just a minute, will you?” Martha said into the phone. Then, away from it, “Cynthia, it is not Daddy!”

“It is!”

“It is not! I’m telling you the truth, Cynthia. Go talk to Sid, he’s all alone. Cynthia!” The child was threatening to throw a lollipop at her. “Cynthia!”

In tears, the little girl went toward the room where Markie was napping.

“I’m back,” Martha said.

“Good,” Wallach said.

Good for what? What kind of weak-kneed out was she going to make this into? Surely she couldn’t reject a man who had been so good to her through all these rotten years for another with whom she’d eaten one lousy dinner two weeks before? What right had she to use this flukey phone call against Sid — in fact, to use Sid?

She could tell instantly from the voice on the other end that she had hurt the feelings of still another gentleman. “I just wanted to say Merry Thanksgiving to you.”

“Thank you …” Then she realized that he was about to hang up. “Shall I go ahead,” she asked, “and invite you to another meal? Will you eat leftovers when you come back?”

“I’ll be back Monday.”

“Come then,” Martha Reganhart said, “for dinner.”

“Yes, I will … Who’s Sid?”

“He’s a man who just asked me to marry him.”

“I see.”

“You’ll come Monday night.”

“As long as you’re still single,” he answered, “I suppose so.”

“Single as ever,” she said.

“Does that upset you?” Wallach asked.

“Specifically, no; generally, I’m not sure. This is some longdistance conversation.”

“Long distance should be outlawed anyway,” he said. “Were you expecting a phone call from your husband?”

“My ex-husband — from whom I have no expectations whatsoever.” A cry went up from Markie’s room. “Oh God, my son just hit my daughter with a chair or something. Give my love to the girl in her underwear.”

“You give my love to Sidney.”

She felt, when he said that, all the strangeness of their conversation; she wouldn’t have minded being angry with him. “We can’t possibly be jealous over anything,” she said, “so we shouldn’t really play at it. Should we?”

“I’m a little deranged today, Martha. I’m wondering,” he said, in a very forlorn voice, “if well ever manage to level with one another.”

And then she wanted really only to be level — she wanted to be serious, to be normal; she wanted to be soft and feminine; she wanted a love affair that was no jokes, just intensity; and because the man on the other end was practically a stranger, she led herself into thinking that he could service her in just that way. She wanted to be out of what she was inextricably a part of — her own life. “You come Monday, Gabe. I’ll be single. They shouldn’t outlaw long distance,” she said, holding the phone very close to her. “I feel you’ve saved my life.”

And on the other end he was saying, “There is a father and a party, you know. And I look forward to seeing you.”

And she was explaining, “Sid is Sid Jaffe — he was my lawyer. He got me my divorce half-price, and I’m very indebted to him, Gabe, and the children are crazy about him, as crazy as they can be about anybody, anyway. And I have to stop talking on your money. Forgive me, please.” She hung up, thinking herself her own woman.

But while she changed into her waitress uniform, she heard laughing and chatter from the kitchen. The uproar in the kid’s room had been a false alarm, and Markie had gone back to sleep; the two people having such a good time were her daughter and her lawyer. When she emerged in her starchy blue waitress uniform — her Renoir proportions having taken on the angles of a coffin — she saw that Sid had his sleeves rolled up and was washing the dishes. And Cynthia — complainer, beggar, favor-monger, liar, fatherless baby — Cynthia wiped, and wore upon her face the very sweetest of smiles.

Martha leaned against the door to her bedroom and let the tears come.

“My father painted a picture of me that was in the paper,” Cynthia was saying.

“Did he?” Sid asked.

“We used to live in Mexico and he drew it down there. It’s very hot down there, even in the winters.”

“Can I see the picture? Did he make you as pretty as you are? Did he get those blue eyes in it?”

Cynthia, after a quick look around the kitchen, said, “Well, it’s not exactly me. It’s really all of us in Mexico.”

“Martha too, you mean?”

“Everything. All of us.”

“I certainly would like to see it,” Sid said

“Would you?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Just a minute!” she dropped her dishtowel where she stood, and took off for the bedroom, which was beside her mother’s. “Hi, Mommy!” she said, and skipped into her own room. Instantly, all hell broke loose.

“Christ, Markie,” roared Cynthia, “what’s the matter with you? Are you nuts?”

“Whaaa? Whooo? Mommy!”

“Markie,” Cynthia howled. She rushed back into the hall and began to stamp her feet. “That damn kid,” she told her mother, “was sleeping with my picture! He wrinkled my whole picture!”

“It’s not just your picture, sweetheart,” Martha began.

“If he wants a paper,” Cynthia shouted, “let him buy one!”

At this point the childless couple who lived above them began to hammer on the floor.

“Oh—” Martha cried, grabbing her hair. “What the fuck do they expect! It’s a holiday!”

She screamed her words in Sid’s direction, as though she wanted to frighten him; he paled, and dove back into the dishes. While she calmed herself and calmed the children, he finished the silverware — and then, in plain sight of her, he reached up into a cabinet and took down the Bon Ami. Oh the Bon Ami — the Bon Ami was just too much. What right had he to twist her arm so? What right had he to be so perfect? She would have sold her soul to the devil, were he able to make her love the man who stood in an apron in her kitchen, shaking the beautiful white cleanser down into the dirty sink.

It is difficult to be casual about the power of Thanksgiving; it produces expectations, and starts ordering around our emotions, and, above all, it takes unfair advantage of our memories. Though Martha Reganhart did not consider herself particularly reverent about celebrations, she nevertheless could not become accustomed to having to earn a living on Thanksgiving Day by waiting on tables. She could work without too much pain on Sundays, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and even the days of Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and ascension; but that she had to spend eight hours on the next-to-last Thursday in November taking orders for fried jumbo shrimp was proof that her life had not turned out as she had hoped. She attempted to pay no attention to the direction in which they were headed. Instead of proceeding directly to the Hawaiian House, she suggested they stop first at the playground and let the kids run around.

Mark and Cynthia — and here was one of the mysteries that held their mother’s world together — were strolling twenty feet in front, holding hands. Mark was wearing long pants and his blue coat, and Cynthia her red jacket with the hood; above them the sun was a dull light behind the clouds. Cynthia was helping Markie across the street and seeing to it that he did not toss his cap up into the branches of the bare trees. For twenty minutes she had been as well-behaved a child as one could ask for; outside the apartment building she had taken her brother aside and silently buttoned his fly.

“It comes over her,” Martha said, “every once in a while. I think she’s going to take flight and join God’s angels. Maybe it’s fresh air that does it.”

“She’s going to be a knockout,” Sid said. “She has those blue eyes, and then she rolls them …”

“She’s a sweet child,” Martha said. “She’s just a little frantic.”

“She’ll be all right. They’re perfectly decent, lively, charming kids,” Sid told her. “Stop worrying.”

They were inspiring words, upon which she was willing to lean. Sid himself was looking like something to lean upon — husky in his raglan coat, jaunty in his tweed hat with the green feather. She would have kissed him for his dependability, except that she was supposed to be deciding, even while they walked, whether to marry him for it; she had thought she had already made up her mind, but it appeared — to her own surprise — that she hadn’t.

“It looks,” Sid said, “as though Dick is coming up in the world.” It looked, too, as though he were changing the subject, though he wasn’t.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” She took his arm as they crossed the street. Memory carried her all the way back to Oregon. “It’s a lovely time of day,” she said.

“What do you think he’s going to do? Will he start sending money?”

She breathed in a good supply of the autumn air. “I don’t think he could have made an awful lot from four or five pictures.”

“I don’t think that’s our business. How much is he behind?”

She shrugged.

“Martha, I’ve asked you to simply keep a record—”

“He’s probably going back to Arizona. He’s probably as broke as ever.”

“Then maybe he ought to stay in New York and get a job.”

All she wanted to do now was to point out a house that reminded her of her family’s big frame house back in Oregon; she did not care to dilute the day’s pleasure any further with talk of her former husband. In 1953, when he had disappeared into the canyons of the Southwest, she had given up on chasing after him for the support payments. It was not only because she could not find him that she chose not to have any papers served. Dick’s running off had told her what she had always wanted to know: paying all the bills, every nickel, dime, and quarter, had permitted her to stop condemning herself. She was not mean, bitchy, immoral, selfish, stupid and dishonest — all the words he had hurled at her when she had fled finally from Mexico with the children; it could not be she who was the betrayer of their children — not so long as she was as harried and unhappy as she was.

Martha said, “He has a job. He’s a painter.”

“I meant a real job, to meet his obligations.”

All she knew about painting was what Dick had taught her; still, it was no pleasure to see the Philistine in Sid oozing out. “It’s not important,” she said. “Please.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, that painting looked like hell to me, I’ll tell you that.”

“In black and white it’s hard to know.”

“Oh yes? Did you like it? Would you like to tell me what it was supposed to be?”

“… Cynthia had it — it’s all of us in Mexico, I suppose. Look, it’s a kind of painting I guess you’re not in sympathy with. You’ve got to see a lot of it”—and the voice she heard was not her own, but her ex-instructor’s—“before you start to get it.”

“What am I supposed to get? That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“Oh Sid, are you asking me to defend that whole God damn bunch of phonies? The guy doesn’t have any money — what am I supposed to do, bleed him? He’s a pathetic neurotic whom we should really all pity, except that he happens to be a son of a bitch. Sid, he couldn’t get a regular job. If he worked in a factory or had to pump gas, well, he just couldn’t. He’s a painter — that’s actually what he is, for some unfathomable reason, and there’s nothing we can do to make him not one. So let’s forget it for today, please.”

“What are you so pigheaded for, Martha?”

“I’m not pigheaded. I don’t need him.” Sharply she added, “They’re my children.”

But Sid went right on, not figuring her anger to be directed in any way at him. “He’s having a success, right? He’s obviously made a little money, isn’t that so? Then now is the time to open up correspondence. Honestly, honey, now is the time to slap him in court—”

“Why don’t we wait? Why don’t we just wait and see what he does, all right?” But when she squeezed his hand, it made it even more obvious that she had trampled once again on his concern for her. “Sid, I appreciate everything you’ve done—”

He stopped her. “Do you?”

There was no further conversation until they reached the playground, where Stephanie Parrino and her two little brothers were playing on the seesaw while their grandmother, Mrs. Baker, watched over them.

“My father sent me a picture,” Cynthia told Stephanie’s grandmother, and then went off with Mark to the swings.

Stephanie’s grandmother had once been the mother-in-law of Billy Parrino, the man who had sat in this very playground and asked Martha to run off to Paris with five children and himself. Billy had finally divorced Bev, and Bev had tried to drown herself in the toilet. She was now on the ninth floor of Billings receiving shock treatment, though all discussion of her condition was carried on as though she were down with a bad cold.

“How is she feeling?” Martha asked.

“Oh not perfect yet, of course, but coming right along,” said Mrs. Baker.

“That’s fine.”

“She’s responding beautifully,” Mrs. Baker said, and they all looked off at the children, rising on swings into the gray rough sky, a sky aching to plunge them directly from November to January. On the apartment-house wall directly behind them, some waggish University student had scrawled:

John Keats

1/2 loves

Easeful Death

The words were enclosed in a heart. It did not strike her (as it might have on a day when there was a little sun in the sky) as witty at all. Keats had been dropped into his grave at the age of twenty-six. Thinking of the death of Keats, she thought of her own: for three years she had been meaning to scrape together enough to take out $10,000 worth of insurance on her life … She suddenly plunged headlong into gloom. Twenty-six.

Mrs. Baker, meanwhile, was saying that every day another kind mother invited Bev’s children for lunch. A friend of Mrs. Baker’s had sent a basket of fruit from Florida directly to the hospital, and though Bev wasn’t quite up to peeling things yet, her mother had brought the oranges home and marked them with nail polish and put them in the refrigerator so Bev could have them when she got out. Tomorrow, Mrs. Baker said, she was taking all the youngsters bright and early down to see Don McNeill’s “Breakfast Club.”

Martha reached out for Sid’s hand. She sat stone still, wondering how much worse off Bev Parrino would be if some doctor up in Billings shot too much juice through her one day and sent her from this impossible life. As they left the little park, silent but for the creaking of the swings, she managed to put down a strange noise that wanted to make itself heard in her throat. Then Markie began to cry that all he had done was push.

Her watch showed twenty-five minutes of holiday remaining; she tried to think of what they could do until five. The kids were moving — had moved — into their late-afternoon crabbiness, and Sid, she knew, was still waiting for her reply to his proposal. Patient, ever-ready, faithful, waiting. Only ten minutes had elapsed since he had thrown his most solid punch of the day. Do you? Do you appreciate me, Martha, your situation — do you see what I can do for you …? And yes, she saw — she had reached out for his hand, and he had been there to give it to her, even if he did not understand for a moment the panic she had found herself enclosed in.

“I didn’t swing! I always push!” Mark was crying. “I want something!”

“You’ll swing next time, Markie—”

“I want a Coca-Cola! I want to go to Hildreth’s! I want—”

For reasons of her own Martha did not want to go to Hildreth’s; but she could not go back to the playground either, to confront Mrs. Baker’s stiff inhuman smile and consider further Beverly Parrino’s condition. So she stood in the middle of Fifty-seventh Street, while Markie screamed and Cynthia joined in with him, and she might have stood there for the full twenty-five minutes she had coming to her had not Sid taken her hand once again and led the three of them to Hildreth’s for a Coke. And fortunately the place was empty; all the students had gone home for the holiday, and the hangers-on — the strays, the outcasts, all the purposeless people she had come to know during the last few years, who could only have put the final depressing touch to her afternoon — were either sleeping or hiding, or, in private and questionable ways, paying homage somewhere to the day.

The four of them sat at one of the booths along the window, Martha and Sid drinking coffee, and the children over their Cokes, stifling and giving in to gaseous burpings. Behind the lunch counter the Negro girl who ladled out the food was preparing an elaborate turkey sandwich for herself; inside the store dreamy dance music came from a radio, and outside a pleasant, gray, Sunday deadness hung over the street. Everything combined to lull Martha backwards — the music, the coffee, the plasticized smell of the booth itself, and of course the street. Aside from Pacific Avenue in Salem, where she had been born and raised, Chicago’s Fifty-seventh Street, was the thoroughfare of her life. Looking at it, blowy and deserted, touched now by dusk, was like seeing the set of a familiar play without seeing the performers or hearing the lines. But in the dark theater of memory all the old scenes could easily be recollected, all the old heroes and heroines. She could remember this one long store-lined, tree-lined, University-lined street, and so very many Marthas. There, plain as day, was Martha Lee Kraft, buying her Modern Library books in Woodworth’s. And there was Martha Kraft taking the I.C. train to the Loop, and having absolutely the most perfect and adult day in Carson’s — a solid hour trying on dark cloche hats, and narrowing her eyes at herself in the mirror when the saleslady wasn’t around. And there was Martha Kraft, saying to herself Why can’t I do anything? and taking her first lover. And Martha Kraft carrying a placard: VOTE FOR HENRY WALLACE. It weaved above her head as she marched clear from Cottage to the Lake, and beside her, carrying his own sign — who was that anyway? Who was that sweet boy with the social consciousness and practically no hips at all? What was his name, the one into whose basement room she moved her guitar and her Greek sandals and her brilliant full skirts and her uncombed extravagant hair? And there was Martha being wooed and won, right in Hildreth’s. Richard M. Reganhart of Cleveland, blue-eyed, dark-haired, fierce, wild, a painter, an ex-G.I. — he had not even to cajole her … And there was one morning when Martha was sitting in a booth opposite him, the two of them eating that skimpy, sufficient lover’s breakfast of juice and coffee and jelly doughnuts, one morning when at the tip of Martha’s uterus, Cynthia Reganhart was the size of a pinhead, when Cynthia (who is presently dredging at the bottom of her glass through a straw) was hardly bigger than nothing at all.

But — all those prayers and tears to the contrary — she was not nothing at all, and everything that had then to begin, began, and everything that had to end, ended. For five months Fifty-seventh Street was hardly seen, it was only walked upon, blindly; and then there was sunny Mexico, and Dick Reganhart was ripping the shirt off his own back — his fried eggs, lately heaved against the white stucco wall, sliding relentlessly toward the floor.

“I didn’t marry you, you gutless bitch—you married me!”

“I thought you loved me—”

“You thought! You were hot, baby, and you itched for it and you got it! And you made me marry you, don’t you forget that, ever! Four years in the Army, four years — and now this! I’m in prison! I can’t paint! I have nightmares—”

“Then why can’t you just love me—”

“You are a sly bitch, Martha Lee. You don’t love me — you know you don’t! Oh someday I’ll find your ass down in Our Holy Mother of Guadalupe and you’ll be crying out to Jesus for help — why did you get such a sonofabitching husband, why-yyy are you afflicted with such a sinful man! Well, you tell Our Holy Mother, the only sin, you conniving bitch, is this fucking prison of a marriage! Why don’t you listen to me! Leave that God damn egg alone!”

“You miserable coward — don’t tell me what to do! Everybody in the world loves each other! Every rotten secretary loves her boss! Guys fell off our front porch just from loving me, you bastard—what’s the matter with you!”

“Let’s keep it straight, America’s Sweetheart — you used my cock! That’s the why and wherefore, Martha—”

“Shut up! We have a baby, you filthy beast!”

“I told you, didn’t I? I said get a God damn abortion—”

“I’d like to cut your tongue out, you mean pricky bastard! I’ll ruin your life like you’ve ruined—”

“You hooked me is what happened, Martha — you hooked me and now you ought to be happy, you selfish, stupid—”

The train moved north, taking almost two whole days to get through Texas, five impossible meals in the State of Texas and innumerable voyages down the car to the toilet; tiny Mark cried and little Cynthia gloomed out at the never-ending brush, and then there was Oklahoma City, there was St. Louis and then Peoria, and now we are back in Chicago, we are back on Fifty-seventh Street, we are in Hildreth’s once again, perhaps in that same historic booth. Dick Reganhart is destined to make a fortune painting rectangles, for he is a child of our times, but for Martha Reganhart life is a circle. And if it ends where it begins, where is that? What’s next? Where was she going? This was not what she had envisioned for herself while she tweeked her brand new little nipples and stared up at the ceiling on those rainy, windy, winter nights in Salem, Oregon.

“Blair!” Cynthia screamed. “Hi!”

“My ofay baby! Honey chile! Cynthiapia!”

Cynthia dissolved, not entirely spontaneously, into laughter, and Mark, always a willing victim, doubled up in ecstasy, and hit his head on the table top.

Blair reached into the booth and plucked Markie out of his seat. “Hey, Daddy,” he said, jiggling Markie in the air, “you will have dehydration of the ductual glands which corroborate the factation of the tears. Is this the reactionary reaction cogetary to the stimuli, or is you pulling our leg?”

Mark squelched his tears instantly and stared into the mysterious continent of Blair’s skin; the man was brown and rangy and undernourished, with Caucasian lips and nose, dark glasses, and a manic potential that could turn Martha’s mouth dry. Cynthia went flying out of her seat toward the visitor, and her Coke wobbled across the table; her mother, years of practice behind her, caught it just before it tipped over into Sid’s lap. She looked at her companion and found him trying to throw a smile into this big pot of merriment. But then she heard him groan when Blair slid into the seat opposite them, a child in each of his arms.

“Where’s your friend?” Martha asked, conversationally.

“She’s buying her mayonnaise.”

Several seconds passed before either man publicly acknowledged the presence of the other; then Blair peered over the top rim of his sunglasses. “How’s the crime business, Your Honor? What’s swinging in the underworld?”

“How are you?” Sid asked.

“Oh me, I’m toeing the ethical norm.”

“That’s fine.”

“Man, I make nothin’ but the super-ego scene.”

Mark found the remark very funny; Cynthia curled up in Blair’s arms. Sid sat upright in his chair. There was no question about his being a hundred times the man Blair Stott was, and yet Martha discovered she could not stand him at that moment for being so proper and protective; it seemed a crushing limitation on her life.

Partly out of pique with Sid, she cued Blair. “And how’s the hipster movement in North America? What’s new?” The children looked at her with wide eyes — she was drawing out the funny man for their enjoyment.

“Well, Mrs. Reganhart,” said Blair, whose father was a highway commissioner in Pennsylvania, whose mother was a big shot in the NAACP, and whose masks were two: Alabama Nigger and Uppity Nigger, “well, to tell you the facts, we is all of us taking a deserved rest, for we expended a prodigious, a fantastic, a burdensomely amount of laboriousness and energy, as you might have been reading in the various organs, in placing in the White House that Supreme Hipster of them all, the Grand Potentate and Paragon of What Have You, the good general, DDE. It was a uphill battle and a mighty venture, and mightily did we deliver unto it. We are pushing presently for a hipster for Secretary of the State, and, of course, for Secretary of the Bread. What we are anxious to see primarily is one of our lad’s names on all them dollar bills. You know, This here bill is legal tender, signed, Baudelaire. Of course, in our moment of spiritual need and necessitation — which we is regularly having biweekly, you know — we are also turning our fond and prodigious efforts and attentions to the Holy Roman Church, and praying on our bended knees, with much whooping and wailing, that it is from amongst our ranks that the next Pontiff-to-be will be selectified. As may be within the ken of your knowledge, sugar, up till the present hour there has been an unquestioning dearth of hipster Popes — one must go a considerable way back down the road to find hisself one. Like since Peter, nothin’. The Pope we got now, the thin fella with the glasses — now in my opinion this is a very square Pope, though on the other hand I learn from our sources in Vatican that this same cat was very hip as a cardinal. What we is looking for with fervor and prodigiosity, not to mention piety and love, is someone we can call ‘Daddy’ and look up to. How many years has it been now since Rutherford B. Hayes?”

“Coolidge,” Martha suggested, fearing for the dryness of her children’s underwear; both of them were slithering about in fits of laughter.

“Hip, my dear blond bombshell, but no hipster. Markie, do you agree here with the predilections of my predigitation, or what? You sit so silent, man”—Mark was nearly on the floor—“have you no thriving interest in the life political and the heavenly bodies, or is you numb, Dad, with Coca-Colorama?”

“Coke!” Mark erupted, as Sissy made her entrance, swinging within her clinging black tights her healthy behind, and unscrewing the cap on a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. She sat down at the booth and offered the jar around; then she dug in while Mark, awe-struck, watched every trip the spoon made from the jar to her mouth. For Martha, his absorption opened up a whole new world of agonies. Sid looked at her. Pleadingly he said, “It’s getting late.”

She heard herself answer, “It’s only five to.”

And Cynthia was shouting, “Blair! Blair!”

Oh father-starved child, modulate your voice! But Martha said not a word. Let them enjoy every last Thanksgiving minute.

“Blair! Tell an army story!”

“A story!” Mark joined in.

“Well, there I was—” Blair said, and the children hushed. “Up to here — no, higher — with dirty dishes and pots and pans laden and encrustated with an umbilicus of grease and various and sundry remnants and remains. I’m speaking of garbage, Markie — do you get the picture?”

“Picture.”

“All right, you got it. I don’t want no faking now. All right, up to here in muck. It was my duty, you understand, not only to native land, but to the ethical norm and the powers that am and was, to alleviate these crockeries of the burdensome load under which they was yoked by virtue of this delirious scum and dirt which so hid their splendor. Well, cheerily then, I am approaching the task when, coming from another part of the edifice, I smell upon my nostril’s entrance there, some sort of conflagration, and I think unto myself, I think: Slime, Scum, Private Lowlife, where there is conflagration there is smoke. Erstwhile, says I, this here mess hall is perhaps out to be victimized by the dreadness of fire. Alors! I am alarmed when into my area I behold a white-glove inspection is moving itself. Great Scott, says I to myself in my characteristic manner, it is a full colonel, a veritable bastion of democracy and he is headed my way, seeking out signs of filth and dirt and thereby disrespectability and so forth. He is followed up upon, lapped up after, in a manner of speaking, by two captains and a major, and several noncommissioned bastions, patriotic and knowledgeable men one and all. Well, I snap to, heave forth, I take the extreme attitude of attention, sucking in even on my hair, while I continue preparing my hot sudsy water — and yet, in the meantime, this distinct aroma of a conflagration is sweeping up into my olfactory system and presenting to me the idea that we is all in a pericolous state of danger. This idea mushrooms in my head, and at last — for I am myself a kind of bastion of our way of life; I always eat Dolly Madison ice cream whenever there is the choice — and so I say, ‘Your Colonelhood, pardon my humble ass—’ ”

“Blair!” Sissy said.

“ ‘Pardon my humble bones, suh, my low condition, my dribbilafaction—’ you seem puzzled, Cynthia honey — you ain’t heard of that?”

“Yes. Oh yes.”

“ ‘Well, pardon all that then, Colonel, my de facto status and all, but I smell—’ But I am cut off in the prime of life — from my larynx and general voice box region my warning is untimely ripped — and all the bastions is shouting at me at once and in unison. What we call A Capella. ‘Shut your bones, man. Do not address till you is yourself addressed, sealed, and dropped down the slot there.’ Me, I suspect them of high wisdom right off, so I sluk off, and cleave unto myself, and oh yes rightly so, for his name’s sake. And they too, in a huff, dealt me a parting glance not deficient in informing me of just who I was and why and what for, yes sir, and they were off to the sagitary, a very snappy group could make your eyes water just the sparkle alone. I was left alone — hang on now, Markie, we is edging up on the end — and all alone it was I who had the glorious and untrammeled experience, the delirious and delectafacatory happiness, the supreme and pleasurable moment — I had for myself, young ‘uns, a little life-arama and the last laugh, when that there edifice, all that government wood, and all them government nails and shingles, all them dishes and greasy-faced pots and pans, the whole works, my children, came burning right on down and into the good earth. Thanks go to the Wise Old Lord, too, for I fortunately escaped with my life, and I stood out there on that little ol’ company street, and I watched that there mess hall expire and groan and puff itself right out. It burned right on down to the ground, children, and into it, Amen.”

“What did?” Cynthia asked.

“Who?”

“The edifice. Don’t you listen when I’m talking here?”

It had been a long tiring day, and Cynthia’s bafflement brought her right to the edge of tears, with Mark only a step behind.

“It’s a joke, sweethearts!” Martha cried. “A funny story!” And the little girl and her brother, relieved of their confusion, were swept away on waves of laughter, far away from the cares and conditions of their lives.

Necessity aside, it took an effort of the will for Martha to leave Hildreth’s. She was having a good time; she was liking Blair Stott; by extension, she was even liking Sissy. She remembered now how much she had liked her on that quiet afternoon she had come to look at the room — carefree and silly and, for all her experience, innocent. Now, both Blair and Sissy seemed to her very happy people. From the doorway, Martha turned back to them and waved a fluttery and uncharacteristic farewell. Sissy threw a kiss and Blair called after her, “Au revoir, blondie.”

Outside Sid was already at the curb, crossing the children. He had warned and warned her about being late, until finally he had stopped whispering his warnings and gotten up and gone ahead. She watched him now as he looked both ways up the street. She started to follow him, but she couldn’t. At first it was only that she wanted to turn back into Hildreth’s and have one last cup of coffee. But then she wanted more; she wanted him to take her children not just across the street, but as far as he liked. She wanted all three of them to continue walking, right out of her life. She wanted to be as mindless as a high school sophomore. She wanted to be taken on a date in somebody’s father’s car. What she wanted were all those years back. She had never had the simple pleasure of being able to think of herself as a girl in her twenties. One day she had been nineteen; tomorrow she would be thirty. For a moment, she wanted time to stop. I want to paint my toenails and worry about my hair. I want—

She looked back over her shoulder into Hildreth’s window and saw Sissy eating her mayonnaise. Suddenly it was as though her old old Fifty-seventh Street had been pulled from beneath her: she was floating, nothing above or below. All her life seemed an emptiness, a loss.

At the door to the Hawaiian House, Sid stood holding Markie’s hand. Cynthia was asking him, “Were you in the Army?”

“The Marines,” he told her.

“Were you in a war?”

“Two.” And he looked at Martha with his most open appeal of the day: Two. All those years. I have no wife, no child. Don’t deny me.

“Tell us a story,” Mark said.

“Children,” Martha said, “Sid has to go home. He has some work to do.”

“That’s okay.” His annoyance with her had disappeared. He spoke softly, setting the scene. It was here and now that she was supposed to say yes, kiss him, fall into his arms. He stood waiting in his big raglan coat, a solid and decent man. “I’ll stay with them,” he said.

“They can stay alone. It’s all right, really.”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

“As long as I’m in by one, Cynthia likes to stay alone.” She touched her first baby’s cheek. “Don’t you, lovey? She’s the best baby-sitter in Chicago. Barbie’s mother looks in every hour or so.”

“I can dial the police,” Cynthia said, “the fire, the ambulance, Doctor Slimmer, I can dial Mother, I can dial Aunt Bev, I can find out the weather, the time—”

Martha bent down to kiss the children good night; it was four minutes after five. Kissing Cynthia, she said, “You’re a very good brave girl. But, baby-love, don’t call the weather any more, will you? It’s tragically expensive. If you want to know how it is just look out the window. Good night, Markie. Are you happy, honeybunch?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, yawning.

“Good night, Sid. Thank you for a merry Thanksgiving.”

“Martha, if you want me to sit with them—”

“You have work to do.”

“I can work at your place, honey.”

Cynthia looked at Markie: honey. Martha put her cheek to Sid’s and, for a second, kept it there.

“Martha—” he began. However, she chose to misunderstand him; no, no, they could stay alone; it was good for them, it developed character; it destroyed silly fears. But Cynthia, don’t forget, you don’t open the door for anybody. Then, feeling no compulsion to say any more, she left the three of them — it was dusk — and went into the Hawaiian House to feed a bunch of strangers their Thanksgiving dinner.

3

I suppose I have certain advantages over my colleagues (and 99 percent of the world’s population) in not needing my job. I am alone in the world, and self-sufficient — economically, that is — while they, on pay checks that are slipped bimonthly into their boxes at Faculty Exchange, must buy provisions for wives, children, and in a few instances, psychoanalysts. Worse, they have aspirations, visions of tenure and professorships, and all of this combines to make them jittery on other scores as well. I teach out of neither spiritual nor financial urgency. Perhaps I could receive my share of satisfaction from some other job, but at present I prefer not to. I have never had any pressing interest in buying or selling, and I possess neither the demonic genius nor the duodenum necessary for mass persuasion. There are occupations outside the University that have interested me, but they are, to be frank, tasks that play footsy with the arts; whenever I think of them, I think of all those girls I used to know in Cambridge who, the day after graduation from Radcliffe, zoomed down to New York to be copyreaders in the text-book departments of vast publishing houses, or script girls for Elia Kazan, or secretaries at twenty a week for perennially collapsing, perenially sprouting, little magazines. Perhaps the other sex can afford such lapses into fetishism, but the rest of us are wise to take our places as men in the world as early as we can possibly make arrangements to.

So, for myself, I taught classes as diligently as I could, straining daily at being Socratic and serious; I marked all those weekly compositions with the wrath of the Old Testament God and the mercy of the New; I emerged bored but uncomplaining from endless, fruitless staff meetings; and every six months or so, I plunged into my grimy dissertation and mined from it another Jamesian nugget to be exhibited, for the sake of the bosses and their system, in some scholarly journal. But in the end I knew it was not from my students or my colleagues or my publications, but from my private life, my secret life, that I would extract whatever joy — or whatever misery — was going to be mine.

I reached Chicago so late on Sunday night, feeling so broken and foggy, that it was not until I awakened the following day that I realized that the taxi I had taken from the airport had skidded me home to my apartment through a snowstorm. My limbs and mind had been fatigued from both my journey and my visit, and that distant corner where consciousness still burned was fed with recollections of the weekend — of my father, his fiancée, the Horvitzes, the old Herzes, Martha Reganhart, and of myself, what I had and had not done. When I am about to die the last sound you hear will be that of conscience cracking its whip. I am not claiming that this makes me a better man or a worse man; it is merely what happens with me.

At seven-thirty the next morning, the alarm sang out one stiff brassy note. Beyond my frosted window, it was a lithographer’s dream of winter; such Decembers they have in the Holland of children’s books. The snow covered the ground, and the sun the snow. With a happiness so intense that I saw no reason to question it, I rose from my blankets. Just living, sheer delightful breathing, had, in earlier periods of my life, convinced me that a man, like a dog, is most himself wagging his tail. This truth now asserted itself again, and it was with genuine pleasure that I shaved my face, selected my clothes, and prepared my breakfast. Four inches of snow, and life had changed back to what it once had been, what it should be forever.

I walked to the University through the crackling weather and the virgin snows, and arrived at Cobb Hall feeling as righteous, as American, as inner-directed as a young Abe Lincoln. Ears tingling, I taught two consecutive classes with such passion and good spirits that one of my students — a kittenish girl who never read the assignments but had a strong desire to please — carried her pouty lips down the corridor after me and, before my office door, allowed them to part. “Mr. Wallach, I think that was the most important hour of my life. It opened up whole new worlds.” We did not touch, but I went into my office thinking we had. My spirits remained untrammeled. I decided that before I began to mark papers I would call Martha Reganhart and verify our dinner date. By mistake I dialed the Herzes’ number. Paul answered; following a moment of dumb silence, I hung up.

The moral: Don’t be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on.

Later, because it was four o’clock and because it was Monday, there was the usual meeting of the staff; so life is ordered in academe. I arrived early, chose a seat near the window, and made myself comfortable at the round meeting table. I had with me mimeographed copies of four student essays which had been handed out to us the Monday before; they were to have been graded and mulled over preparatory to today’s meeting. A quarterly examination was coming up, and the object of evaluating these essays was to make sure that we were all in agreement about standards of judgment. We lived forever on the edge of a deep abyss: there was a chance that one of us might give an A to an essay to which another of us had given a B. And, intoned our more pious members, it was the student who paid the penalty. But it was we who paid the penalty, these grading sessions being nothing less than the student’s last revenge on his teacher. If the phenomenon we all engaged in that afternoon were ever to be staged in the theater, I would suggest that a chorus of freshman be placed behind a gauze screen, visible to the audience but not to those playing the part of teachers; rhythmically, while the meeting progresses, the chorus is to chant ha ha ha.

My colleagues drifted in, alone and in pairs. First — always first, with a clean pad of lined yellow paper and a cartridge-belt arrangement of sharpened pencils around his middle — Sam McDougall, a man whose dedication to the principles of grammar could actually cover you with sorrow. Sam had written a long work on the history of punctuation, and though he looked to be the world’s foremost authority on hayseed, he was in fact one of its foremost authorities on the semicolon and the dash. A year ago he had unearthed two comma faults in an article of mine in American Studies, and ever since had chosen to sit next to me at staff meetings to show me the light.

After Sam came our young ladies: Peggy Moberly, everybody’s friend, plain and oval-faced, a girl who in certain sections of our land would probably be considered the prettiest in town; and Charleen Carlisle, with whom — a year and a half before — I had fallen in love for five minutes. She was tall, purple-eyed, and stunning in a haughty way, and the day the Dean had introduced the two of us I had thought he had said her first name was Carlisle. Flustered by her complacent beauty, I melted in the romance of her appellation. But she turned out to be called Charleen and was engaged to an intern at Billings, with whom she bowled twice a week.

Then entered Frank Tozier, about whose sexual persuasion I am to this day in doubt; and Walker Friedland, our glamour boy, who jumped up on desks in the classroom whenever he taught Moby Dick. Walker had made honest men of us all by marrying a student with a spectacular pair of legs. We had all hung around, yawning, waiting for her to swell up with Walker Jr., but a year had passed and now she was a slender sophomore, still locomoting herself with those legs, and Walker was probably swinging out over his class from the light fixture: he had gotten away with it. He was a peppy and amusing fellow, rumored to be our most popular member — though it was rumored that I was myself a little in contention, having been invited the previous year to partake of lunch once a week in the dining hall of one of the girls’ dormitories—“Mr. Wallach, do you really believe Thomas Wolfe is overwritten?” “Mr. Wallach, don’t you think Frannie is pregnant?” “Mr. Wallach, someone said that you said in class—” “Could you give a little talk to the girls, Mr. Wallach?”

There were two other bachelors engaged in this baleful competition: Larry Morgan, a petulant young fellow who sported a beret and a cane, and our madman, Bill Lake. Bill had been connected with the University of Chicago since before puberty; rumor had it that one day he had been seen slipping a note to Enrico Fermi — and from that it all began. In fact, Bill had been a Quiz Kid; I remember him from my own youth as the one with the noseful, who was always converting a hundred and sixty-four dollars and thirty-two cents into its equivalent in francs, marks, lire, and what have you. Now, wrapped in his red wool scarf, he stormed through the hallways leaking freshman compositions after him, bound for the sloppy smoky hell of his office, where it was his pleasure to reduce coeds to tears because of their lifeless prose styles. Next came Bill’s buddy, Mona Meyerling, a bull-dyke, I’m afraid, but awfully sweet, though always a little too anxious, I thought, to give other people’s cars a push with her Morris Minor. She had been an officer in the WACs and still wore the shoes. In a way, she always struck me as our most solid member, which may reveal some secret as to my own sexuality, or lack thereof.

Trotting on the heels of Mona was Cyril Houghton, who had confided to me once that he had invented most of the footnotes in his dissertation, which nevertheless was reputed, by Cyril, to be the last word on the poet, Barnaby Googe. Also our New Critic, Victor Honingfeld, forever off to Breadloaf or the Indiana School of Letters, forever flashing at me rejection slips signed in John Crowe Ransom’s own hand. And our Old Critic — our tired critic — the victim (willing, I believe) of two opinionated wives and college politics, gentle Ben Harnap. Next was Swanson, a blond, wide-faced boy from Minnesota who had a blond, wide-faced wife from Minnesota. He had been hired at the same time as I, and obviously some kind of scale-balancing was supposed to be going on. Prior to her retirement, Edna Auerbach had referred to me as “a playboy in academic clothing,” and perhaps that helps to explain the presence of our silent, serious Lutheran.

Lastly, there was John Spigliano and my contribution to the staff, Paul Herz.

I do not see that there is much to be gained by chronicling all that was said that afternoon. Since it is already clear that I have neither great love nor admiration for certain of my colleagues, it might seem that I was taking the opportunity of recording their words to make them appear silly. Teaching is a noble profession with a noble history, and it may simply be that we are living through a slack time.

I was not really giving the meeting all my attention anyway. No sooner had I sat down at the table than Paul Herz sat down across from me. The sight of him stimulated my memory; I was reminded of my recent encounter with his family, and with his wife … And an idea came to me then that seemed the most daring and spectacular of my life. All through the afternoon (Paul across from me) I tried to dismiss it, and yet it hung on — and not at all because it made sense. Perhaps it hung on because I wanted something to hang on — to hang on to—that didn’t make sense. What I’d like to call my spirit, what I’d like to consider the most human part of me, was like some vapor that I couldn’t get my hands on; it evaded all expression, it wouldn’t leap out and shape my life. I wished I could just push it a little, and perhaps it was in an attempt to push it that I deliberately thought to myself all through the long afternoon: Run off with Libby. Run off and marry Libby.

Sense … nonsense — how one judges it is unimportant. It simply seemed like the next step. At least, I began to think, the next step someone else might have taken.

When I came out of the meeting, I stood in the doorway of Cobb Hall a moment, expelling from my lungs the stale fumes of the afternoon. I watched the last few windows blacken, one by one, in the laboratories and classrooms that faced out onto the quadrangle. It was nearly six, and the white tennis courts had a simple geometric grace under the dark sky. The Gothic archways attested to the serious purpose of the place and made me want to believe that we were all better people than one would suppose from the argument we had just had. Just before our session had ended, there had been a short, fierce combat between two of our members. Paul Herz had given an A-minus to a paper John Spigliano had marked D. It was the first time since his arrival that Paul had spoken up, and, provoked by John, he had unfortunately lost his temper. On the way out, Ben Harnap had said to me, shaking his head, “Well, your friend’s one of those angry young men, all right,” while Paul had simply charged by all of us, not saying good night. Earlier John had referred with little reverence to Paul as “a creative writer,” and Paul finally had hit the table and said that John Spigliano must hate literature — otherwise why would he want to strangle it so? “At least there’s a little life in this essay,” Paul had said, his fury riding out of him at last, leaving him a little crumpled-looking in his chair. “The presence of life, or liveliness,” John had replied, “by which I take it you mean a few turned phrases, may be a winning quality in the daily newspaper, but I don’t know if it’s what we’re trying to teach students in this course.” “What are we trying to teach them?” “We’re not educating their souls,” said John; to which Paul replied, loudly, “Why not?” Just before the end of the meeting — just before I had spoken my piece — John had said to all of us, charmingly almost, “We take up style in the last quarter, and perhaps Paul could lead the discussion for us then. If we have a creative writer on the staff, I certainly hope we’ll be able to take advantage of his specialty.” Paul Herz had mumbled as an answer, “I wasn’t talking about style.”

There had been nothing elevated about the exchange, and during it the rest of us had remained silent. Two opposite natures had met and collided before us, and so quickly had it happened that I did not even know what to think or to do. In fact, at the very moment it broke out, my mind had been spinning and spinning in its own direction. I was hearing Libby speak. She was telling me again what she had told me that afternoon a week before, just prior to our entering Brooks. She was saying that Paul was happier, and so she was happier too. Her husband was able to write through the afternoon (when staff meetings didn’t intervene), and when she got in from work at five-fifteen, she found that he had set the water to boil for the vegetables and seasoned the meat. Eyes swelling with tears, she had told me that a change had taken place in Paul; ever since Reading and her stay in the hospital, he had been both a doctor and a servant to her. In the mornings he rose and squeezed orange juice and brought it to her bed. He walked with her to the I. C. station, and home again on the evenings when she had a class downtown. Order, said Libby, method, plan, accomplishment — all this gave meaning now to their days. There was this and there was that, but whether there was passion, whether there was pleasure and love, she had not made entirely clear. What was clear was simply that after our visit to Brooks, what had once existed between us seemed to exist again. As for the impassioned plea that I visit Paul’s parents, and my decision to do so, what else was that but a last-ditch effort at hiding from the truth?

Marry Libby? I asked myself, while across the table it seemed as though her husband had just launched a campaign to lose his job. It was at this point that Peggy Moberly had nervously raised her hand and said that perhaps Paul and John were both right; she proposed that the student be given two grades, one for content, another for form. Victor Honingfeld instantly rose in his chair to say that he did not see how anybody could fail to understand that content-and-form, like good-and-evil, were one. Mona Meyerling, mother and father to us all, said that she for one did value liveliness, and felt it should influence the grade, but that she was not really certain that this particular paper was that lively — to give the student an A would perhaps only encourage him in his grammatical abuses. Most everyone had a go at the paper by then — as the tension in the room decreased — except Bill Lake, whose temperament and history made him a kind of open city in our midst, someone who need enter no battles. And except for me.

Sam McDougall, who had come out strongly for Spigliano — and had that personal interest in my grammatical education — now turned in his seat and looked in my direction. Paul was looking at me too; so was John. I opened my mouth, and after making a rather long-winded and dull introductory statement, I wound up hearing myself say that though I had originally given the paper a C, I thought that what Paul had said made a good deal of sense. I said I didn’t mind a dozen misspellings (“Thirteen,” Sam whispered to me, as he watched my ship drift out to sea) or that the dash was overused. I reminded everyone of Tristram Shandy. I said I disagreed with John in not finding the structure quite so primitive as he had argued it to be. I wanted to change my mark, I added, pointing to the board where the grades were tallied; I would come up to a B or a B-plus. “Actually,” I heard Charleen Carlisle say, a moment later, “I’d come up to a B.” And Swanson, with a look of great seriousness on his face, said he might see his way clear to a B-minus. At this point John stepped in to quiet the revolt, while beside me, his face drained of blood, Sam McDougall was suffering one of the crises of his life. Shortly thereafter — John having made his final reference to Paul as a creative writer — the meeting disbanded.

In my office, a few minutes later, while snow fell outside the window, I sat down at the desk with my coat on and removed the paper from my briefcase. Mona Meyerling poked her head into my cubicle to ask if my car was stuck. I said no, and she went off, leaving me to read the essay a second time. When I had finished it I knew it was no better than a C, just as I had known it at the meeting.

As I moved off the steps of Cobb and onto the snow-covered walk, I saw a man, bareheaded and bundled up, sitting on a wooden bench some twenty feet along the path. I was feeling limp — as a result of feeling misguided once again — and I was anxious now to get home and change and be off to Martha Reganhart’s; then I saw that it was Paul Herz. I wondered if he had been watching me as I stood, thinking, on the steps of Cobb Hall. It made me feel vulnerable, as though just from seeing me there without my knowing, he could have divined the secrets of my life. I could not convince myself that he did not somehow know it was I who had called in the morning and hung up. Nor could I logically explain why I had not at least answered him after he had picked up the phone and said hello.

“How are you?” I asked, walking up to him. “Enjoying the night air? It’s a relief, isn’t it — after that?”

Paul removed one hand from his pocket and looked at his watch. “It’s a relief,” he said.

“Spigliano’s mission in life is to burn out the guts of better people than himself. Don’t take him to heart. I once overheard him say to someone on the phone, ‘Gabe is probably a nice fellow, but I wouldn’t say he has too many ideas.’ ” Snowflakes fell onto Paul’s thinning hair, and I had the urge — the kind of silly urge one can so easily give in to — to brush them loose. “You made perfect sense,” I said. “But he’s unbeatable. He doesn’t believe he can rise in the world unless everyone else falls.”

He nodded his head, then checked the time again.

“Well, I won’t keep you …” I said, though he hadn’t moved.

“I shouldn’t have lost my temper.” He looked up at me, speaking in a very soft voice. “It was a bad outburst to show those pricks.” The light from a nearby lamp revealed the creases in his thin face; at that moment he looked nothing at all like the boy in the picture with Maury Horvitz. “Don’t you think so?”

I sat down next to him. “I don’t think much of some of them,” I said. “Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve got a few minutes before dinner.”

“You liked that paper — it had a little something, didn’t it?”

“I thought it was pretty good,” I said. “It was lively, you were right.”

A girl emerged from Goodspeed Hall, and Paul leaned forward and looked her way; then he leaned back again, saying nothing.

“Do you know the student who wrote the paper?” I asked.

“No. But that’s the point …” he said.

I wondered if perhaps he had planned some elaborate hoax; I really didn’t know very much about Paul Herz, and so it was possible to think any number of things. “You didn’t write it, did you?” I asked, kiddingly.

“Who do you think — a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been thinking a boy. A kid I’ve seen in the halls.”

“A student of yours?”

“No,” he said, “I just picked him out. I saw him whining one day in the halls to a friend of his. He’s got an awful face. He was making a terrible scene. Bad posture. Picking at his shorts all the time. He probably has some nasty habit like not flushing after himself.”

The clock in Mitchell Tower struck six gongs, and I realized that I might be late for dinner. Still, across from me Paul Herz had smiled. He was talking, no small thing.

“Why this paper?” I asked. “Why this kid?”

“Just a joke. I’m reasoning after the fact,” he said gloomily. “I don’t know who wrote it.”

“Oh,” I said, mystified.

“Look, what is Spigliano?”

“What?”

“Spigliano. Harvard too?”

“Harvard too,” I said.

“Who fires people around here?” he asked, after a moment.

“There’s a committee. Spigliano’s one. So is Sam, and the Dean — I don’t know, three or four others. It’s depressing, I know. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t go downtown and get a job pushing toothpaste for five times the salary.” I hadn’t meant, of course, to indicate that I was in any need of cash; nevertheless, Paul sensed an irony I didn’t intend, and gave me a fishy look. “But in the end,” I said, meaning it, “it’s a healthier life, this one. You go into class and you can do as you please. It’s not a bad life.”

Solemnly, suddenly, he said to me, “I appreciate, of course, what you were able to do …”

“Look,” I jumped in, as his voice trailed off, “why do you think this kid who doesn’t flush after himself wrote this paper? You may have developed a whole new technique of psychological testing.”

He smiled. “Oh — here’s this disgusting unimportant kid being a first-rate bastard to his roommate in public. And here’s this sweet very excited little essay. That’s all. It’s nice to think it happens. I’d like to kick Spigliano right in the ass for filling their heads with all that form crap.”

Hating the same people usually turns out to be a weak basis for friendship; nevertheless, I allowed myself to feel considerable fondness for Paul Herz. He seemed to me nothing less than a genuine and capable man. At any rate, I was willing to believe this as the snow fell and we sat together in the dignified environs of the University. I was even willing to believe that he was not Libby’s misfortune, but that she was his. Perhaps the truth was that Libby was a girl with desires nobody could satisfy; perhaps they weren’t even “desires” but the manifestation of some cellular disorder, some physiochemical imbalance that fated her to a life of agonized yearning in our particular world of flora and fauna, amongst our breed of humanity. I was willing to believe that Libby either did not need to be rescued, or was impossible to rescue. The more involved I became in her life, I told myself — repeating a lesson learned several times already — the more anguish we would all have. No one had to marry Libby; she was already married!

“Why don’t you come over to the club with me?” I suggested. “We’ll have a drink. Warm up—”

He checked his watch again and told me he was waiting for his wife.

“She’s still working?” I asked.

“… I suppose so.”

“Well,” I said, “we can all three have a drink.”

“I’m afraid she’ll be too tired. It’s better not to tire her. The weather …” His mood had changed, and so had his voice. Leaving his sentence unfinished, he huddled in his coat.

“What is it?” I asked. “Is she ill?”

“No,” he said. “She only gave it up because the doctors don’t think she should be out at night. Not in this kind of climate.”

“Gave what up? I’m sorry.”

He peered over at me. “School. Classes.”

“I haven’t seen Libby, so I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“She said, I think, she met you in the Loop.”

“I meant I haven’t seen her to talk with. I was shopping.”

He chose not to reply. Instantly I imagined scenes in his home where my name was introduced as evidence of duplicity and crime. The little trust that had seemed to have sprung up between us disappeared, and I began to wonder just how disloyal Libby was to me. It was clearly time for me to be moving off, by myself.

I said, “Well, I’m sorry about that.”

“She can go back in the spring and summer, you see,” Paul was telling me. “It’ll be all right. When it’s warm again, she can start in again.” I felt as though I were a parent being given an explanation by a child; there was suddenly that in Paul Herz’s tone. “Right now, getting to the train, getting off the train, walking to the Downtown College—” he said. “The doctors—” he began, and the plural of the noun seemed to depress both of us. “The doctors think she should build up resistance first.”

“Yes. That sounds like a sensible solution.”

However there was an even better one. Doubtless it came to me as quickly as it did because it had been hiding all these years only a little way under the surface. It made me feel both old and giddy: they could borrow my car. Warmed by my heater, Libby could drive back and forth to her classes; I could park it near Goodspeed on the days she would be needing it; an extra key could easily—

“Well,” I said to Paul, “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Okay,” he said.

The formal nature of our relationship immediately reasserted itself; more often than not, when Paul Herz and I came together or parted, we shook hands. It seemed to me always to combine a measure of distrust and a measure of hope. Now when we shook hands I felt a rush of words move up, and what I finally said had to stand for all that I had decided to keep to myself. “By the way, I was in a funk this morning. I dialed your number by mistake. I didn’t realize it until I hung up. I hope it didn’t ruin your day, the mystery of it.”

Though I am twenty pounds heavier than Paul, we are the same height, and when he rose, suddenly, holding onto my hand, I found myself looking into his worried eyes. I couldn’t imagine precisely what it was he was going to say — though I thought for a moment that we had at last reached our particular crisis. I was instantly unnerved, and also, melancholy. Though I tell myself I value passion, I must admit that I do not value scenes of it; though I try to live an honest life, I do not like to see honesty stripped of civility and care. I was prepared, all at once, to be humiliated. But all Paul said, with a pained look of determination, was, “Why don’t we have that drink?”

“Why don’t we,” I said.

“We’ll go. Libby too,” he added.

“If she’s tired, Paul—”

“Libby would like to see the club,” he said. “Libby needs …” But that sentence was not finished either; just the simple subject and that simple verb. With gravity, with tenderness — all this in his dark eyes — he said, “It would be good for Libby.”

I don’t think it would have shocked either of us then if we had embraced. It was the kind of emotional moment that one knows is being shared.

We tramped together through the snow to Goodspeed, and we did not speak. I believed it was crucial for me to stay with him, even though my watch showed that I was going to be late for Martha Reganhart. I believed something was being settled.

Paul stopped some fifteen feet from the entryway. A light from a second floor window spread around us where we stood in the snow. My companion made a megaphone of his hands and whistled two notes up toward the window. Then, softly, he called, “Lib-by … Lib-byyy.”

He actually sang her name. As though he loved her. “Lib-byyyy.…” After a moment passed and no one had appeared, he called through his hands, “Hey, arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon!” But when nothing happened, he turned to me and said, “We better go in.”

I walked behind him thinking only one thought. She is this man’s wife. I followed him up the stairs to the second floor and we turned down the corridor, by the water fountain, and then we stepped into the open doorway of Libby’s office. And there she was, smashing away at the typewriter. Neither Paul nor I moved any further, and neither of us could speak.

Libby was hunched over the machine, wearing — for all that the radiator was bubbling and steaming away across the room — her polo coat and her red earmuffs; her face was scarlet and her hair was limp, and moving in and out of her mouth was the end of her kerchief, upon which she was chewing. Stencils were strewn over the desk and wadded on the floor, and from her throat came a noise so strange and eerie that it struck me as prehistoric, the noise of an adult who knows no words. Yearning and misery and impotence … She was like something in a cage or a cell — that was my first impression. It did not seem as though her own will or her own strength would be enough to remove her from this desk. I watched her fist come down upon the spacer — clump! A stencil was torn free of the carriage with a loud whining that could have come either from the typist or the machine. She threw it onto the floor and then looked up and saw the two of us.

She gasped, she brushed her kerchief over her cheeks, she touched her fingers to her hair, and from behind a mass of clouds, she pretended to be that fair sun her husband had sung out to from beneath the window.

“I’m”—she drew in through her nostrils—“just finishing.” She picked up a fresh stencil. “I’ll only be a minute … Hello,” she finally said.

Paul moved into the office. “Libby—”

But Libby was bending over now, sorting through the papers on the floor. Then, giving up, she raised her body, centered herself on her chair, centered the stencil, lifted her fingers, and her mouth began to widen across her face. Her eyes swam out of focus for a moment, as she turned to say, “I’m just having a little trouble. The typewriter”—she brought herself under control—“sticks.” She looked down and made the smallest of sounds: she whimpered. “Another minute.”

I remained in the doorway, while Paul’s long figure inclined toward his wife. “Are you feeling all right? Are you feeling sick, you’re so flushed—”

She picked her ratty, lifeless kerchief out of her lap, where it had dropped, and blew her nose into it. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m not used to stencils, that’s all …”

“Libby, we’re going to have a drink at the Quadrangle Club. Why don’t you save the stencil for tomorrow?”

“I have to finish.”

“You can finish tomorrow. You can’t sit in here with your coat on. Take off your earmuffs, Libby, and we’ll get the place in order and we’ll all go have—”

She was shaking her head. “The Dean needs it. Paul, please, just sit down.”

“Why do you have your coat on? Are you cold? It’s hot in here. Libby, come on now, please.”

“I’m fine — one more—”

“The Dean can wait,” he said. “You’re letting yourself get upset — it’s not important.”

But she was shifting herself around in her chair until she was in the posture prescribed for efficient typists.

“Please, Libby. It’s after six. You’re weak. You’ve been here since eight-thirty.”

“I’m fine! I’m perfectly fine!” She looked over at me, and she exclaimed, as though I doubted the fact too: “I am!”

“Yes,” I said, though not very forcefully.

“Now.” She centered the stencil in the carriage once again, turned to the manuscript she was copying, and struck the first key. “Ooohhh,” she moaned.

“What, honey? What is it?” Paul asked.

“Why do I keep hitting the half? I keep wanting the p and getting the half! Oh Paulie—” she bawled, ripping the stencil violently from the machine, “I can’t even type!”

He kneeled beside her and tried to quiet her the way a conductor quiets a symphony orchestra; raising and lowering his palms, he said, “Okay now, okay. You can type, you can type just as well as anybody. Come on now — try to hang on. You can hang on now.”

“I am hanging on.”

“I know. Just keep it up—”

“Paul, I’ve made about — honestly, about thirty-five stencils. I just can’t do it! What’s the trouble with me? Haven’t I got any coordination either? Can’t I do anything?”

“Did the Dean make you stay? Doesn’t he know you’ve been sick?”

“I want to stay.” Her voice now was without passion. “I wanted to stay and finish. But I can’t even do a paragraph. I can’t type one lousy sentence through to the end.”

“You can type,” he said. “You can type perfectly well.” Slowly he began to gather all the discarded papers and deposit them in the waste basket. “The machine sticks. It’s not your fault.”

“It just sticks a little.”

“All right, calm down now.” He rose and offered her his hands to help her from the chair. But Libby crossed her arms over the typewriter, lowered her head onto it, and wept.

Till then I had remained because I knew it would only doubly embarrass Herz if I were to disappear; I was sure that he was as determined as I that we should go ahead with our plans — he too, I thought, had felt that something was being settled. Now I stepped out of the doorway and around into the corridor. I did not even consider how late I was going to be for my engagement. I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes, and I remember saying to myself: I don’t understand.

“You don’t have to work in any office,” Paul was saying. “You just stay at home and rest.”

“I don’t want to rest. I’m only twenty-five. I don’t want to rest all the time.”

“Maybe you could take some classes during the day—”

“It’s one horrible mess after another, isn’t it?” Her hysteria was almost completely run down now; she had simply asked a question. “I think”—I heard her taking deep breaths—“I think I need a glass of water, Paul, and a pill.”

Without moving, I called into the room, “You stay, Paul. I’ll get it.” For when Libby had spoken, I had had the vision of Paul leaving the room, and Libby stepping to the window, and then Libby sailing, sweeping down through the air. I filled a cup at the water fountain and brought it back to the Dean’s office.

Libby was by the window, it turned out, but she was using it as a mirror in which to comb her hair. Paul was twirling her earmuffs slowly around his fingers; he signaled for me to put the cup down on the desk.

“Libby says she’d like to have that drink at the club,” he said.

“Fine,” I answered.

Libby turned from the window, her face no longer tinged scarlet, but a chalky white. She sighed and blinked ruefully. I was surprised to see that she had a reserve of strength in her, and grateful that the incident was over.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I’ve been so damn silly. I’d like to go to the club, if you still want me. I’ve never been there before.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Anybody who’s after the p and keeps getting the half …” I smiled.

She pointed at the machine. “It’s a ridiculous business, but I felt like one of those old movies — tied to the railroad tracks with the train coming.”

“I understand.”

“It sticks,” Paul explained, picking up his briefcase. “It could frustrate anybody.”

“Sure,” I put in. “You ought to have them fix it.”

“I will,” Libby said. She blew her nose again into the kerchief and took a last look around the office.

“Now,” Paul asked, “what are you going to put on your head?”

She pointed to the earmuffs.

“Your head,” he said. “Not your ears. Didn’t you have a handkerchief — did you have to use your kerchief?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“It’s snowing out, Libby. It’s freezing out.”

“Wait a minute,” Libby said, ignoring him, and turned back to the typewriter to put the plastic cover over it.

“Libby,” Herz said, practically begging, “don’t you have anything to put on your head?”

Standing over the typewriter she began to cry. “You’d think,” she sobbed, “a snowflake would kill me.”

Paul moved toward her, offering the handkerchief from his own pocket. “Here,” he whispered, “just till we get there. Just put this on your head, please. Look, Libby, if you don’t like office work, if it’s agony, do me a favor. Quit. We don’t need this job—”

“Oh, I like office work. I love office work,” she said, weeping. “The Dean is a very sweet man.” She raised Paul’s handkerchief to her nose.

“Please” he said, “blow it in the kerchief, will you, honey? Libby, don’t we have enough doctor bills? Please leave something to cover your head—”

“Well, don’t be exasperated with me!”

“Libby, maybe if you stayed home this winter you could shake—”

“I don’t want to stay home.” She pulled the kerchief from her coat and ran it under her nose.

“Maybe if you take that paper-marking job,” Paul said. “If you want to work, you can mark papers at home.”

She bent over to buckle her galoshes. “I don’t want to stay at home. I’m too damn dumb to mark papers. I don’t even have a degree.”

“Then just read. Cook. Keep house.”

“I don’t want to stay at home! What’s at home? What’s at home but a lot of crappy furniture!”

There was no answer to that. And after a second, Libby was clearly humiliated with herself. She tilted her head, and put her hands on her hips, and tears slid from her eyes. She was saying, “Oh but I don’t want to stay home though. I really don’t. Oh sweetheart, there’s nothing at home—”

“Then,” said Paul in a flat voice, “do whatever you want, Libby. Whatever will make you happy.”

“Whatever will make me happy.”

She repeated his words with such utter hopelessness that Paul and I both moved toward her, as though she were on the very edge of collapse. He said, “Libby, what is it? What?”

“Oh I want a baby or something,” she moaned. “I want a dog or a TV. Paulie, I can’t do anything.”

“Yes you can. You can do anything.” His back was to me, and he was rocking her. “Yes you can, Libby.” Her chin hung on his shoulder. Her eyes were closed and she shook and shook her head — saying to herself no no no, even as Paul crooned to her yes yes yes. Then her dark eyes were open and I almost believed she was going to smile. She said, looking my way, “Oh Gabe …”

“Yes,” I said, raising a hand as though to wave to her. “You’re all right, Lib.”

“Oh yes, yes I am I know—” For a moment she seemed between laughter and tears. “I think I want a baby or something. I don’t want to be at home, just me. I think maybe I should have a baby—” She began to weep again.

“Libby, Libby,” Paul was whispering into her ear.

She rocked in her husband’s arms. “A baby or a dog or a TV,” she said. “Oh Paulie, what a mess, what a weary mess—”

But he went on repeating her name, over and over, as though the sound of it would remove some of her woe. She babbled and he chanted and I watched — and then I was shaking. My hands were shaking. I could not control them, or myself.

“Then give her a child! Have a child!”

It was only when both their heads jerked up to look at me that I knew for sure that I had spoken. The savage voice, the fierce demand, had been mine. And my hands were motionless.

Paul Herz turned and went to the window.

When I spoke again it was in hardly more than a whisper. “Perhaps if there was a baby …” I stopped. I had the illusion that the two figures only a few feet away were actually way off in the distance. In miniature I saw Libby’s dark face and Paul’s hair and their two bodies. I said no more.

But Libby did. “What are you talking about?” she demanded of me. “What are you even saying? Why don’t you just not say anything for a change? What are you even saying?” she shouted hysterically. “Do you even know?”

I leaned forward to apologize. “I forgot myself,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“Well, why don’t you not say anything! Why don’t you just shut up!”

“Libby—” Paul said, but he was facing me, so that I could not even tell which one of us he was going to address.

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Libby interrupted him, looking right into my eyes.

I did not reply.

“Why don’t you leave him alone for a change?” she cried in a broken voice. “He can make babies! He can make any amount of babies he wants!”

“I said I was sorry I had said anything.”

“My lousy kidneys!” she cried. “I hate those kidneys. It’s my kidneys, you stupid dope!”

I looked away; after a moment’s confusion I turned to her husband. “I didn’t know. I didn’t guess.”

Libby was hammering her fists on her thighs. “Then why don’t you go away! Shut up, why don’t you! Mind your own business!”

“I will,” I said. “Okay,” and I turned and went out the door.

But weeping, she followed me into the corridor; I heard her voice moving after me as I headed down the stairs. “How much do you expect to be told, you dope! You dope, Gabe, you tease! Oh you terrible terrible tease—”