Letting Go

1

Of course he had been miserable. Between the pretension and the fact, what’s invented and what’s given, stands one’s own tortured soul. Paul Herz had been pretending all these awful years that he was of another order of men. It occurred to him now — as an icicle occurs to a branch, after a cold hard night of endless dripping — that, no, he was not a man of feeling; it occurred to him that if he was anything at all it was a man of duty. And that when his two selves had become confused — one self, one invention — when he had felt it his duty to be feeling, that then his heart had been a stone, and his will, instead of turning out toward action, had remained a presence in his body, a concrete setting for the rock of his heart. It all led to a very heavy sense of self — an actual sensation of these last years — to a weird textual consciousness of what stood between him and others, a weighted-down feeling under the burden of underwear, tie, shirt, jacket, and coat; a sense of the volume of air itself.

Nowhere was it worse than in bed with his wife; paradoxically, undressed was worse than dressed, by a long shot. Beneath the sheets he was made particularly aware of the heaviness, the brutal materiality of his own body; his little fingers and toes, all the hard extremities of his body, were like little steel caps. The dancer has a sense of flow into the world — he felt blunt. The only hard extremity in which he felt soft was his penis. Though it rose on occasion to duty’s call, and on rarer occasion to feeling’s provocation, for the most part it seemed to have retired from active life. He might almost have forgotten about it had he not had reason (getting in and out of bed each day with a woman) to think about it so much. In adolescence, of course, one of his burdens had been his erection; it had seemed to him his cross to bear. Getting off buses he had tried slouching; along the corridors at school he had covered himself with his three-ring notebook; at the urinal, one out of two times he was peeing up in the air. But now at twenty-seven, in a state apparently of hormonal balance, or loss, he was in need of some stimulant. For a moment in his seat in the dark coach, he thought about getting up and going into the rocking bathroom at the end of the car and stimulating himself. It was not simply the movement of the train that suggested the idea; he had entertained it, and succumbed to it, in the past, at home when Libby was out; there had even been times with Libby sleeping in the other room. It was not so much an act of defiance, or spite, or even perversion, as of conviction: I am a man yet. But afterwards it was not usually that of which he was convinced; afterwards it was as though the milk of life itself had drained out of him, and he slumped onto the toilet seat a hollow thing, as though if he were to crack a bone upon the bathroom tile, the dull ringing of his body would reverberate through the house, even to the ears of his wife.

The train was dragging to a stop. Outside it was black and beginning to rain; they were somewhere in Ohio. Please Do Not Masturbate While Train Is In Station. He responded to neither duty nor feeling, just common sense. There was nothing to be gained by making a bad thing worse. No? Then why was he headed East?

The telegram had come to him at the University. He had put it in his pocket and gone about his business, which, that afternoon, was to journey down to LaSalle Street and talk to the lawyer. He had given Jaffe a check for thirty-six dollars, covering three visits that the girl had made to the obstetrician. Of course, had it been Libby’s own pregnancy there would have been Blue Cross and Blue Shield to cover expenses; now, following their uninsured crisis in Pennsylvania, he was insured to the teeth — but now it was not his wife’s hospital bills he was going to have to pay. None of their dealings with doctors had ever come under normal headings anyway, items the insurance companies recognized. But then little in his life had come under normal headings: abortion, adoption, familial excommunication … Still, he had only recently been introduced to Jaffe and he did not want to appear unappreciative, or self-pitying. He had handed over the money, smiling, and Jaffe had assured him that the obstetrician had assured Jaffe that it was a perfectly normal pregnancy. But if it’s a normal pregnancy keep smiling, this is for free why must she go to see him so often? She’s nervous, Jaffe answered impatient with me? Well, it’s my money, it’ll be my baby she needs reassuring, that’s all. Excuse me, Paul, I’ve got a client waiting I’m a client, I came all the way down here, I’m nervous, I need reassuring — hey, how much more is this going to cost—Thank you, Sid, thanks for everything something for nothing, be nice, you pauper, we appreciate, we appreciate, I’m deeply appreciative get out, he’s got a client waiting, smile and go home.

The next day he had showed the telegram to Libby. She had begun to make a scene over something (oh yes, he never listened to her any more — which he didn’t), and he had only pulled it from his pocket and tossed it on the table so as to alter the course of events. “Here! This is why I’m preoccupied. Sure, I’m preoccupied — here, read this!” “Oh Paul,” said Libby, reading, “what are we going to do?” “We’ll do what we have to do — what I have to—”

Duty! Screw duty! Feeling! Aren’t you a student of letters? A teacher of Dostoevsky? Puller of long faces, booster of The Brothers K? Enemy of Spigliano and the legions of reason? Are you not a writer of prose fiction, all heartfelt? No! Are you not the high priest of love? No! Were you ever? No! No! What an idea of himself he had constructed! What an impossible idea!

“Let me tell you what I’m going to do, Libby—nothing! I’m under no obligation, absolutely none. Well, what do you think? What are you crying about now?”

“Oh,” she wept, “you have no—”

From time to time he had to do what he did then. “I’ve got feelings!” he roared, having smacked her. “I’ve got feelings that tell me he could live without me, so he can die without me too!”

With the red mark on her pale cheek, she cried less, not more, which was why, having hit her that first time some years back, he had come to do it again: it worked. In their six years he had not indulged himself on more than four or five occasions. He did not quite know what to make of this set of facts — divide five into six and compare to the national average? To get what? How was he to measure her assault upon him? Didn’t he get a handicap because she had turned out to be a weakling? What about her handicap?

As had happened on the four or five previous occasions, he was now filled with remorse. Libby was sitting with her coffee cup, leafing through her Jewish homemaker’s book; she wasn’t crying, just deadly silent. “What are you looking up?” he asked softly, “a name? Does it give a list of names?” She nodded; three fingers still showed on her cheek; now two; now one.

“Well, which do you like?” Now, thank God, none. “What do you like, Lib?”

“What about Nahum?”

“For a boy,” he asked, “or a girl?”

“A boy.” She did more than answer — she smiled. Oh I’m coming back into her good graces. I need your good graces, oh yes I do, Libby. “It means comfort,” she said.

“Well, sure, Lib, if you like it. Nahum Herz? Does that sound, I don’t know, perfect to you?”

“I think so.”

“Well it’s nice, honey,” he said skeptically. “I suppose it’s a nice old name—”

“If your father dies, do we have to name it after your father?”

“We don’t have to do anything, Libby.”

“I thought you might want to.”

There! How many points does she get for that? He rose from the table; she was incurably — what, stupid or destructive, naïve or mean? “Libby, I want him to die! He should die, if there’s any justice in this world. He’s ruined our life!” But shame came in, like a rolling of waves, and carried with it the truth: I ruined it. Me.

The following day he went to see Spigliano and told him he had to go East for a few days. He waited for Spigliano to ask why. “My father’s dying,” answered Paul gravely. Oh gravity! What a lie. I am a man of feeling, Spigliano, and you are not. I am at one with old Fyodor and you are — Bullshit. I am you.

And that evening, at the end of the third day, he had boarded the overnight coach to New York; why, he was not certain, though the blackness of Ohio — they were moving again, heads lolling on the seats around him — and the rushing of the train, the telegram in his pocket, the knowledge of what he had left behind, the uncertainty of what he was moving into, all produced in him now a sense of the profundity of the moment. But what? How? Why was he allowing himself to be borne through space at a rapid rate on a dark night? To where?

In the morning the dawn began to lift just outside of Philadelphia. He made his way down the car to the washroom, and when he came back to his seat it was becoming day. It was as though the sky and sun held fast while the earth spun out of its darkness into light. And then he realized that this was exactly what happened. All and everything. The thought made his eyes swell. All that was natural and simple in life reduced him to tears. The dawn … Love … Libby …

Only when he stepped off the train in New York, dragging his bag after him, did he understand his journey. He had left his wife.

In the station he went into the coffee bar. It was nine o’clock in New York, eight in Chicago. Was she up? Sleeping? Dead? He rejected the idea, not only that Libby might be dead (wish fulfillment? no, just the old business, just guilt) but that he had left her. But the two seemed somehow to fit together: if he had not left her, then she couldn’t be anything but living and breathing. Christ, was he trapped! It didn’t even give him comfort to realize he was being irrational. He took his change in dimes and went to the phone booth; inside he sat fingering the coins. If he hadn’t left Libby, it must be that he really had come East to see his father, to soothe his mother. So he made up his mind and called Brooklyn. (As he dialed he saw Libby stirring in their bed — yes, alive and breathing.) He allowed the phone to ring ten times, then an eleventh, and then — breathless — a twelfth. Then he hung up — bang! Twelve long rings because he was a dutiful man, a good son.

Good son? Dope! Jerk! Weakling! Where’s your courage?

He remained seated in the phone booth and found some serenity in thinking that no one except Libby knew he was in New York. He might as well be anywhere. It was the first time in six years that he had been separated from his wife. This morning he had awakened — or met the day, at any rate — without first having to feel, accidentally or on purpose, anybody’s hands, feet, or hair, without having to worry first thing in the morning about somebody else’s feelings. Five and a half years of it. Outside the booth, at nine A.M., there was no one he knew; nobody who passed paid him any attention. Every few minutes he heard announced the departure of another train for another part of the East. He had only to climb aboard and get off in Wilmington, Baltimore, or Miami Beach. Washington … get a little room somewhere, get a job in some government office, and disappear. Start making a life not on the basis of what he dreamed he was, or thought he was supposed to be, or what literature, philosophy, friends, enemies, wife, parents told him he must be, but simply in terms of his own possibilities.

Picking up his suitcase (the new life would be begun simply: one suit, one sport jacket, two shirts, and three pairs of underwear) he left the booth. But in the midst of the crowds pushing toward the tracks, he seemed not to be gaining anonymity but losing it; and so the only train he took that morning was the BMT, and where it carried him was back to the place where he had been born.

There is no need to chronicle Paul Herz’s feelings as he left the subway and walked the three blocks to the Liverpool Arms. He was anybody returning home. It was June in Brooklyn, and he had lived seventeen Junes in Brooklyn before he had gone off to college and a wife. Nothing was unfamiliar to his eyes. The elevator smelled like the inside of a tin can, and the corridors smelled milky — no change there either. Upstairs the same door was hinged on their apartment; under his feet was the same doormat. At the age of eleven Paul had cut a sliver from one of his father’s business cards with an old razor blade and Scotch-taped it above the doorbell: his father’s name. He had imagined at the time that it would give his saddened old man a little lift, for Mr. Herz had just gone under for the third time — real estate. That little sliver was still there above the bell, and considering what the sight of it did to Paul’s insides, he knew the apartment itself would be too much. She would make unfair claims. Paul, look at this photo — remember the picnics? Remember Uncle Nathan who died, such a young man and the only one on your father’s side with the benefits of a college education? Paulie, Sheepshead Bay, look. You ate shrimps till they came out of your ears, you and Maury, remember? And your stamps, no one has touched a single page, and your rocks and your butterflies and your baseball glove and your report cards, still framed — oh Paul, how could you do this to your parents, a boy who got such perfect grades in Conduct—

He rang the bell for two reasons. First, if it was not for his parents’ sake that he had come East, then it was for something else, and he did not want to think about that right now. (Though he could not help himself really: if he had actually left Libby, then she must be dead. Ridiculous. She was awake now in Chicago — then he had not left her. This was ridiculous reasoning!) Secondly, he rang because, having telephoned earlier, he was pretty sure no one was home. He rang again and again. Then there was only one more thing to do. He turned the door handle; to his relief he found that it was locked. He began to breathe again. Imagine having to sit in that club chair in the living room, one hand on either doily, waiting for his mother to come home. So what now? Where? Suitcase in hand, he moved past all the empty milk and sour-cream bottles to the elevator. Where? Anywhere. Start again. Last chance. Once there’s a baby it’s all over. To go back and become not just a husband but a father too — well, that would be that. If it had taken five and a half years to walk out on his Libby, it would take forever with some little Nahum sleeping in the other room. He got in the elevator and traveled down to the main floor. His body actually shook at the thought that if he wanted to he need no longer have any connection to anybody. Consequently he did not even leave the elevator but pushed the button marked 6 and rose once again.

“My God — Paul!”

Doris had on a gay floral apron over her slacks. Inside, instead of old lady Horvitz’s oriental rugs, there was blue carpeting as far as the eye could see; instead of the meaty odor that used to waft out from the kitchen when Maury’s parents were fattening their son up in this same apartment, there now floated out the pungent, domestic smell of coffee. Things had changed — everything but Doris, who seemed as stunned at seeing him as he was upon seeing her. Everyone has someone upon whose flesh and bones his first discoveries were made. Paul had had Doris; Doris, Paul. Yes, all the inconsequentiality and fervor of their passion came back to him … Doris still slouched in the shoulders and he had the old impulse to tell her to straighten up and be beautiful. But she was Maury’s wife now, ten years older, and the mistress of all that carpeting. “Hello, Doris. I wondered — I was looking for my mother.”

“Oh Paul. She’s at the hospital. Maury just drove her over a few minutes ago. Paul, it’s you.”

“I called downstairs and she wasn’t home.”

“She’s been living here since it happened.”

Ah, it. Not the heart attack. Never the plane crash or the cancer or the bankruptcy. The it. The tsura one couldn’t even mention.

He was home.

He looked at Doris’s familiar face, and suddenly he remembered distinctly her father’s voice calling out from the bedroom into the darkened living room, where the two of them had sat panting: “Doris, is that you, dolly? Is somebody with you? Tell him thank you, dolly, and tell him it’s the next day already, your father has to get up and go to work soon, tell him thank you and good night, dolly—”

“How is he?” Paul asked, and waited to hear that it had killed his own father, that the old man’s last failure was history.

“I guess,” said Doris, shrugging, “I guess he’s coming along. What can we expect? He’s in a terrific coma. You got Maurie’s telegram?”

He stood in the old hallway (waiting for Maury to finish his malted milk, waiting for Maury to finish his clarinet lesson) and was aware that somebody now knew he was in New York. All his circumstances, past and present, settled down over him. He saw Libby in the bathroom in Chicago squeezing toothpaste onto her brush. “I got the telegram,” he said, and followed Doris into the apartment. “I can only stay a minute,” he added.

“Just a cup of coffee. Just sit down. Paul,” she said, “it’s good to see you.”

They came into the living room, which was nothing like the old days when every object had its coverlet, the sofa its antimacassars, the piano its Spanish shawl, the satin lamp shades their little plastic dustproof wrappings. The room now was airy and modern, all pastel shades; with no heavy drapings falling across the windows, light blazed into every corner. Avocados and gardenias flourished as though they were outdoors. There was a playpen near the window, toys all around, and in conspicuous places photographs of Maury, Doris, and a baby.

“You have a child?” Paul asked.

“Two. Jeff is in nursery school. Michael’s in his crib having his bottle. Two boys—”

Before she could ask if he wanted to see Michael in his crib having his bottle, he said, “I better not stay too long, Doris.”

“You look so tired.”

“Traveling.” He remained standing. “How’s Maury?”

“He’s doing wonderful — and he talks about you, Paul. He really does. We have whole conversations about you.” The tinge that rose on her neck and cheeks revealed a little of the nature and spirit of those conversations. “Why don’t you put down your luggage?” she suggested.

“You’re looking fine, Doris, too—”

“Do I look the same?”

“Except for your hair. You wear that differently.”

“Sure, well, I cut it. Not just me, everybody’s wearing it short. Sit down, all right? Put down your suitcase, you make me tired standing there holding it. You like espresso? We even drink it for breakfast. You ought to see your mother drowning it with cream and sugar. You want that or you want instant?”

He decided — her silly talkativeness decided for him — to stay for a little coffee. “Either is all right.”

“Sit down.”

He released his suitcase with an unconscious sigh, and they smiled at one another.

“Oh Paul,” she called from the kitchen, “it’s so wonda-ful to see you.”

Could it be? He had taken off his coat and had sat down in a chair with beautiful wooden arms; he stretched out his legs. Oh, it felt good. He even closed his eyes, even had a pure moment of thoughtlessness — his mind ceased searching out the next five minutes. Was it possible that he was happy? Had his crisis passed? Without even knowing it, had he come to some decision? Or was it only Doris and the sweet familiarity of her vowels and diphthongs? Wonda-ful, mahvelous, you could caay faaaw me — she was humming in the kitchen. What a good-natured girl. What a pliable simple girl. Dolly, tell him thank you and tell him good night — Wonda-ful …

So was Elizabeth DeWitt Herz pliable. So was Libby simple — oh yes, simple! And there went his happiness and his thoughtless moment. He sat straight up, taking in the facts of Maury’s prosperity and success. Actually it didn’t seem to have been happiness he had been experiencing anyway — just relief at Doris’s not hating him. As if what Doris Horvitz did or did not feel made any significant difference in his life. He looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen. She is having breakfast alone. Isn’t she better off? He wanted to shout right through to where he saw her sitting bent over the table, in that blue flannel bathrobe with the white piping, buttering her toast. And — oh, no, no, not crying? Libby, baby, what are you crying over now? Oh dumbbell, look, get up, get dressed, put on that new yellow jumper and get out. Take a nice long walk, the Midway is green, the lake is blue, it’s spring, Libby, take a train to the Loop, have lunch, go to Stouffer’s with all the ladies, go to Field’s, shop, live. Libby, you’re alone, you see, without worries, without cares — see how wonda-ful it can be? Free, Libby! Free, young, still pretty, and in Field’s ten men will smile at that face of yours — maybe, who knows, Wallach himself—

No. In Marshall Field’s she will have eyes for baby clothes and bassinets. She will bring home with her (written in her little spiral pad purchased for just this purpose) a list of what they will have to buy (page one); what they might have to buy (page two); and (pages three and four) what it would be oh so nice to have, Paul, if and when we can afford it. One short month, darling, and we’ll have our little Nahum. Our comfort.

Doris set a tray down on the coffee table in front of the couch; Paul noticed that she had applied lipstick and eye shadow in the kitchen. The tray settled, Doris reached behind her and lowered the pulley lamp that extended from the wall. She tugged at it without even looking, and the carelessness, the at-homeness, of her movement had its effect upon him. It led him to believe that she was very happy. She was wearing little black sequined house slippers and they too somehow encouraged him to believe that she was happy. “Do you like French crescents?” she asked. “You get them ready-made and you just warm them. In the oven, and that’s it.”

“They look very good.”

“Maury likes anything European.”

“Maury was always a bon vivant,” he mumbled.

“Are you being sarcastic?” she asked. “Cause you were always sarcastic, Paul. I mean you could always cut somebody if you made up your mind to. The intellectual,” she said. “You even look the same, really.”

“That’s very nice of you, Doris. Except I’ve lost half my hair.”

“Oh,” she said kindly, “not half.” Yes, the same cuddly Doris. All right, dolly, let the young man open the door for himself and let us hear his footsteps lightly down the hallway, what do you say, young man—

“I’ll bet Maury’s got every strand.”

“Maury”—she knocked on wood; that is, she looked for wood and found formica—“Maury always had a nice head of hair. With him it’s in the family.” She flushed again; even while she spoke, Mr. Herz lay in the hospital, a bald spot the size of a half dollar at the back of his skull. “You’d recognize him right off, Paul. You really would. Paul”—she turned serious all at once—“you know Heshy Lerner got killed in Korea. You know that?”

“I knew that,” he said.

“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? He was such a good dancer, remember? And he was always, you know — you remember the type of fella Heshy was. He was very much the life of the party.”

“He was a very funny guy.”

“Look,” she said, as though he had just disparaged himself, “so were you. You could really make very funny comments, Paul, when you wanted to. Paul, you were a very popular fella, and then you went away. For that matter,” she rushed to say, “everybody’s moving away and it’s just not the same. If you don’t live in the suburbs today, you don’t live anywhere. Maury and I believe, however, in being individualists.”

“How’s my mother, Doris?”

She closed her eyes to answer. “She had to get a shot to calm her, that’s how your mother is.” A grave statement, intended to have a humbling effect upon the prodigal son. “Now it’s a little better, but not much.”

“When did it happen?” It! “His heart attack,” he added.

“What’s today, Saturday? Tuesday night. We were at the show and when we got back there was an ambulance and a whole crowd, and they were carrying him out on a stretcher. Maury went in the ambulance with him, and then he came back, I think it was three in the morning, maybe later, and we put your mother to sleep in Jeffrey’s room, and we talked whether we should send you the telegram, and we sent it. I guess you got it, when — yesterday?”

“I got it Wednesday morning. Three days ago.”

Apparently she had been expecting him to lie, or wanting him to. All she could finally do was pour coffee into his cup, from which he had as yet taken only a small sip.

“He’s going to die, is that right, Doris?”

“Look, I don’t think so …” It was as though she wanted, by minimizing the crisis, to excuse Paul’s not running to his father’s bedside.

“What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t know.”

“He’s in a coma?”

“Since Tuesday night.”

“Did he have any attacks before, recently?”

“Well, he always had heart trouble; he was never a well man, Paul, let’s not kid ourselves.”

“He never had heart trouble.”

“He certainly did have heart trouble, I beg your pardon.”

“He thought he had heart trouble, Doris.”

“What do you call what he had then, a belly-ache?”

“I don’t know.”

She jumped up from the couch and began picking up toys from around the room and throwing them into the playpen. “You don’t have to hate him, Paul,” she said, “when he’s in the hospital!”

“I don’t hate him.” And those few words seemed to render him helpless.

Doris apparently sensed his condition, for she rose on her toes now when she spoke. “If a man had a heart attack, and three of the biggest heart men say he had a heart attack, then I don’t see how you can get here about a week later and say he didn’t have one.”

“I was talking about six years ago, Doris, seven, eight years back.”

“You can have premonitions, can’t you? You can have terrible troubles, believe me, that can bring things on.”

“I suppose you can. I suppose you can sit around having premonitions all your life.”

“You always had to believe different from everybody else. The whole world is wrong and you’re right!”

It was the proper moment to get up and go. But the colorful airy apartment, Doris’s bad posture and pretty face, the playpen, the scattered toys, the pulley lamp, the French crescents that you warm and serve — all of them together took most of the starch out of their argument. Even Doris’s chastisements didn’t seem original. The simple truth was — and it was a simple truth both must have understood, for both calmed down at the same speed — that some nice affection still lived between these two old playmates. What did any of this have to do with all that heavy breathing back when they were seventeen? On this day particularly, he was not anxious to dismiss whatever little kindnesses came his way.

Doris must have had a soft spot for kindness, for remembered affection, herself. She asked, “Another crescent?”

They ate and drank, and then they heard the baby turn in his crib and the bottle clunk onto the floor. Doris put her finger to her mouth and they were both absolutely quiet; when the crisis was over, she smiled in a motherly way.

“You’re still teaching?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“English?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, you used to read all the time, so I guess we should have guessed then … Oh it’s really funny, Paul, talking to you. It gives me the gooseflesh. Eleven o’clock in the morning, I’m dusting my house, and I’m married, and I’ve just given my little boy his bottle, and my husband’s just left, and I’m trying to think of shopping and a thousand things, and in walks Paul Herz. I’m sorry if I’m babbling, but that’s what happens to me. Maury and I were down in Miami in January and who should we run into on Lincoln Road, just window-shopping, but Peanuts Ackerman, from Ocean Avenue, who I used to go out with for a couple months in high school. And I’m telling you, he’s married, and he has this wife with him, a really terrific blonde — and three kids, and I don’t know, it just gives me such a feeling whenever I see a guy I used to date, and now I’m married and he’s married, and we got furniture and cars and kids. I just get this feeling—”

Paul said, “I get it too.”

“Are you being sarcastic again?”

He shook his head. He was no longer the sharp-tongued backseat Don Juan. Hardly. He slumped a little in his chair, for he felt there was something in this room that he had expected for himself. Never — not in Detroit, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, not even in Brooklyn as a boy — had he felt very permanent about himself. And that was sad and ironic, for he had married early for reasons that were not really so out of the ordinary.

“I get it seeing you, Paul,” Doris was telling him. “I got it seeing Peanuts and those kids, and his wife, such a terrific-looking girl. And what makes it something is that some accident, something here or there, and you might even have married the other person. I don’t mean that kind of accident — I mean some quirk, anything. You think that’s dumb, don’t you?”

“No — I’m just not sure about the last part.” He wasn’t very sure about any of it, but he was not unwilling to let the girl go on and on; it was nice having a little respite from life. He had married at twenty as though to bully his way into manhood; now a little vacation from manhood was a pleasure. Everybody deserves a few minutes off now and then anyway. One deep breath, then off to the hospital …

“What last part?” Doris asked.

He had to think. “Marrying people by accident.”

“Paul, if you want to say that you couldn’t have married me because I’m not smaaht enough, look, go right ahead. I’ll admit I don’t read every book that comes out, and I’m not a bohemian or a beatnik, so if that’s what you think, you’re perfectly justified.”

“You want to fight with me, Doris?”

“You’re the one who’s fighting.”

“All I meant was that there probably is some real chemistry between two people who decide to marry.”

“Boy, you read too many novels,” she said. “It’s not all sex.”

“All right.” If he could only think of a place to go, he would leave. Suddenly she filled him with the same weariness and boredom that she had in 1948. What was the name of the hospital? Where would he leave his suitcase? Where would he sleep? Why, downstairs, in his old bed, where else?

“Well, that’s what you meant,” she said.

“I only meant some necessary connection. Some serious service one does for the other.”

“How—” she asked, pouring him another cup of coffee. “How,” she asked very offhandedly, “would you explain that in terms of me and Maur?”

“I don’t know you and Maury.”

“You remember us.”

“Hell, Doris”—his irritation was less with the conversation than with his own willingness to stay for yet another cup—“we’ve all changed.”

“Well, so have you!”

“That’s what I meant.”

“You were a very excitable guy then, and now, I don’t know, I just don’t think you look so excitable any more. I suppose you matured.”

“I struck you, did I, as young?”

“Well, you think it’s a joke and that I’m stupid, but as a matter of fact, if you want to know the truth, at twenty Maury was much more of a man, I thought, than you. A much more settled fella, with real goals.”

“Well,” Paul said, raising his hands, “he seems to have reached them.”

“He’s doing very nicely, thank you. I can’t make out if you’re sarcastic or not.”

“Not! Come on, Doris, ten years have gone by, what’s this sarcastic business!”

“Well, I’m not ashamed of how Maury’s doing. He may not be a”—at the last second she seemed to swap one word for another—“Rockefeller, but he’s a very good husband to a girl. He makes a girl very happy. It’s very nice, believe me, to have somebody who’s very proud of you. I know plenty of girls whose husbands never really admire them dressed up, or don’t take pride in the way their wives fix their hair or in their wives’ taste — which is very important to a woman — and I’m not one of them.”

“You look very happy.”

“Well, you do too!”

“I didn’t accuse you of anything, Doris.”

“Well,” she rushed to say, blushing now, “you must love your wife very much to have given up everything for her.”

Having stayed this long, having chosen to be unrealistic and indulgent, he should have expected it. “What did I give up?” he asked.

“I’m not criticizing.”

“I only wanted to know what you thought I had to give up.”

“I only meant to say that you must love your wife very much.”

He had no choice. “I do,” he said.

“Well … then …” But she couldn’t lay off, this girl whom he had caressed and caressed. “That must make it all worth it.”

“It does,” he heard himself saying.

“I suppose she’s an intellectual too.”

“Look, Doris, it’s hard to tell what you have in your mind when you say ‘intellectual.’ ”

“Like you.”

“Well, she is like me.”

“Very serious,” Doris suggested.

“She’s quite serious. That’s right.”

“Well, maybe she is.”

“What does that mean? She is. She’s a serious girl. She’s a very valuable person.”

“Well,” Doris said, “it’s up to the individual. Personally I just don’t think you happen to have liked Jewish girls. I don’t think you respected them, to be frank, if you want the truth.”

“My wife is Jewish.”

“I meant,” said Doris, not flinching, “by birth.”

“I don’t think that has much to do with it.” Get up! Go! Why punish yourself!

“You might not think so,” Doris said, “but a lot of it is in your subconscious. It’s a reaction. It happens to a lot of Jewish guys. Especially smart ones.” After a second, she added, “The ones who think they’re smart.”

“It’s possible, Doris,” he said, “that people choose mates for other reasons.” She didn’t seem to believe it; she closed her eyes once again. “Complicated reasons,” he said.

“That’s complicated to me, all right. You take a fella, a normal fella, and you expect he’s going to first off be attracted to a girl of his own particular faith, right? Then he turns around and does the opposite. You couldn’t want anything more complicated if you wrote away for it.”

“As a matter of fact, you could.”

Defiantly, as though she had him chained to his chair, she asked, “For instance?”

“Oh, for instance why did you marry Maury?”

“Well,” she said, losing breath and coloring, “he’s Jewish at least.”

“Never mind, Doris. Let’s forget all this.”

“Why did you marry her?” Doris demanded. “I mean if it wasn’t just a reaction, why did you?”

“Love.” After he had spoken he experienced a terrible moment of confusion. But he said again, “Love.”

“So then why don’t you have any children?”

The question startled him further. “We don’t want any children.”

“I don’t believe it, a Jewish fella.”

“You’ve got too much faith, Doris, in us poor Jewish fellas.”

“You’re not the same fella, Paul, that’s the truth. If a man and his wife have a solid relationship then they have children.”

He did not wish to tell anybody in Brooklyn of Libby’s kidney trouble; besides it did not seem to him that this was actually why they had no children. “Doris, that may not be so in all cases. Isn’t that a possibility?”

“Listen, you make love to a girl different, if you want to know, when there are children involved. And I think I’ve had more experience than you! You’re just not the same fella, and that’s all I’m trying to say.”

At last he pulled his weakened self up out of his chair. He felt he had heard just about everything that had been thought and said about him in the last five years. He set down his cup.

“You were always a lively, affectionate fella, Paul, and you know it. You were the kind of fella who you could just see someday playing with his own kids, tossing them up in the air and taking them to Ebbets Field and the whole works. You were a very affectionate fella, Paul.”

“Well,” he said, unable to remember where he had put his suitcase, and growing more furious by the moment, “maybe it turns out I’m a cold fish. Maybe that’s my story.”

But Doris was shaking her head. “You were always kissing me, Paul,” she said. “That’s something that if you do it, you have it all your life. I’m still a very affectionate person, I can tell you that. Maury says I’m sometimes too demonstrative even.”

Where was the suitcase? “Doris, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And you,” she said, heartbroken, her hands on her hips, “you were the smartest of any of us.”

It was time to go. Go, you coward. Your suitcase is right at your feet. Go.

Where?

“Where are you going — where?” she called after him as he started down the hall. “Paul?” she called, but he had no answer. As he opened the door to the elevator she shouted to him “Paul, you’re a fool. Oh Paul, you ruined your life!” It was only another voice in the chorus.

At home, whenever eggs were served for breakfast, he served them. It was not that Libby couldn’t crack an egg properly, or even that she was unwilling to; it was simply that the way they had worked out their life together, he usually slipped from his side of the bed in the morning while she was asleep — at any rate, while her eyes were closed. Only occasionally, out of exhaustion or a lingering sense of the fitness of things, they lay side by side in bed, wide awake; and then he was compelled — still out of a fingering sense of the fitness of things, of what was only just and right — to make the ultimate expression of that connection which husbands and wives are said to have, and which he and his wife no longer had — perhaps never had — and which therefore made the expression of it a hypocrisy beyond any hypocrisy he could ever have imagined. It was not very pleasant to start the day caught somewhere between the betrayal of your marriage — the very convention of marriage itself — and the betrayal of your own flesh. Nor to end it that way; as a result they did not often go to bed at the same hour either.

The butter melting, the eggshell splitting, the plop, the sizzle, all brought back to him (as though they ever left him) the realities of his home life.

From the far end of the room, Asher called, “Up — over? Which?”

“Up.”

No longer was the El outside Asher’s window, and the sun, allowed access, cast a glow on the stiff curved leaves of the potted plants that circled the room. The floors, walls, and furniture, however, hadn’t gained much from the alteration in the city’s landscape. As for Asher, El or no El, light or half-light, he looked the same; nose, pores, hair, belly, aroma, everything was just six years older.

“How is that weather in Chicago?” he called.

“Now it’s spring,” Paul answered.

“Hot, huh?”

“Yes, hot.”

“There’s a city that’s got a climate for you. Takes all that crap from Canada, all that ice and wind, and then whshsh, those summers. My hair dropped out of my head there, Paulie, from humidity alone.”

“I forget you were a Chicagoan.”

“All that clamminess and police corruption,” Asher called from the kitchen, “produces baldness early. Either you’re perspiring into your hatband or worrying to death.” He was crossing the room, the pan in one hand, the other hand drawing a bead on his nephew’s hairline. “Ah, but you’re not doing so bad yet yourself. In fact, you look nice, Paul. You got a nice grave expression in your face. Second violinist for the Krakow Philharmonic.” He slid the egg onto the plate Paul held out to him, then sat down, the pan dangling from his hand.

Paul was feeling now the kind of relief he had felt at first at Doris’s. He was willing to accept the fact that he had made one false start this morning already. Now he understood things better; on the subway back from Brooklyn he had come to grips with the meaning of his trip. “Thanks,” he said to Asher. Asher smiled; even he was a help. He had opened the door, shaken hands, and when Paul asked if there was a bed he might use for a night or two, Asher had pointed over to the sofa, no questions asked — at least not right then.

“You look in the eyes,” Asher said, “like you’ve been having some of life’s more classical experiences.”

Having brought a bite of egg to his mouth, Paul set it down; he waited out the nausea that reached up from his stomach. “I didn’t get much sleep on the train,” he said.

“Oh, sure, well”—Asher moved out of his chair and pulled up on the high stool beside his drawing board—“that explains everything.”

“But you’re the same, Asher,” said Paul wryly, and tried once again to eat. He told himself he had nothing to worry about. He had found a neutral bed in which to sleep; he could proceed as planned.

“Oh I manage to maintain a nice lofty attitude,” said Asher.

“You’ve seen my father?”

Those wrinkled lids of Asher’s, magnified behind his glasses, came down over his eyes, telling all. “From the hallway.”

“And my mother?”

“You want me to give you a little chronicle of hysteria, or you want to go on past performances?”

“She mentions me?”

“Paul, there’s nothing she won’t mention. She’s a dredger of polluted waters. She was never too sharp at sorting out forests from trees.”

But he might as well hear it all; that too could give strength. “What does she say about me?”

“I thought you had an imaginative spirit.”

He took another mouthful, and saw no reason not to confide in his uncle, not when the man wanted to be helpful. “I’m not going to see him, Asher. I can’t do it. It doesn’t make sense, given my life. I came all the way here to New York because … I don’t know precisely.” That much he could keep to himself. “I went over to Brooklyn this morning.”

“I figured.”

“It cost me a round trip from Chicago that I can’t even afford. Asher, I ask you, do I owe them anything?”

Asher wasn’t even willing to take the question seriously. “Nobody owes nobody nothing.”

“Not when they ate my guts out,” Paul said, and found appetite for his breakfast.

Asher was tapping his forehead with his fingers. “You think too much in conditions. Same old story, you miss the point.”

“And I’m leaving my wife,” said Paul, because he had to finally, because that was the corollary: He would not see his father. He would leave Libby. Though two sentences were needed to convey the information, he saw it as only one act, arising out of some new direction of the will. He was moving instinctively toward an unburdening. Even deciding — instinctively again — to come to Asher’s seemed somehow a part of it. “It’s beyond choice,” he said, and felt better than at any moment in the last twenty-four hours.

Asher blinked several times, as though watching Paul’s words fall into the proper slots. “No kidding,” he said.

Nausea reached up a quick hand for the freshly ingested egg. Paul swallowed. “That’s what it looks like,” he said.

“She sleeps around?” Asher asked. “She doesn’t keep the place straightened up nice?”

“You’re just the same, Asher.”

“You went away a few years, you think everybody went all over the place taking courses in tact, awaiting your homecoming?”

“Well, I’m not after sympathy, Asher. So never mind. I just ran into several bad breaks. The marriage hasn’t worked out. Let’s leave it at that.”

“But the girl is still ideal, huh?”

“I’m getting out, Asher, but I’m not kidding myself where the blame lies. I was young. Things came up. I made some terrible errors of judgment that threw a pall on the thing. I didn’t know a hell of a lot. And then there’s the matter of one’s constitution. I mean what you are; the facts about oneself.”

“I don’t like to tell a man over his breakfast coffee, Paul, but it’s your whole philosophy that stinks bad.”

“Please do me a favor, don’t feel you have to spend time cheering me up. I’ve arrived at my decision and I’ll take the consequence. This is the consequence,” he said, with a slight sense of discovery. “It hasn’t been very pleasant, believe me it hasn’t.”

Asher was no longer giving him all his attention; he had picked up Paul’s plate and was walking toward the kitchen, a frazzled outline in the sunlight. His hair needed cutting, his trousers a good pressing. “Love,” he said over his shoulder, “is unnatural. Most of the guilt in the world is from cockeyed thinking.” He disappeared around the flowered screen that cut off the sink from Paul’s sight.

“Asher, we see life as two different things. As I remember”—and he did, which compromised his position, and smothered him in gloom—“we went over this ground a long time ago. We disagree.”

“Paulie,” came back a voice, “I’m going to save you a couple thousand dollars and give you a fast college education, plus a psychoanalysis thrown in.” He stepped back into the light and began flicking a dish towel at the leaves of his plants.

There was the same old lack of seriousness in his uncle. He did not know if he was up to it. “You gave it to me already.”

“What can I do?” Asher asked. “You don’t listen.”

Paul rose from the couch, which was to have been his bed. What was there left for him to do but sweat it out in some cheap hotel? But in some cheap hotel, under a bare bulb, would he survive? Better to take all the money they had left in the bank, the money they would no longer be needing for a baby, and go uptown and get a nice room that looked out on Central Park. A little class, a little comfort, might get him through. However, one does not learn to spend money overnight … And suppose Libby should want the baby anyway? He sat down again, as though he had only been taking a stretch to aid digestion. “Is that a condition of staying here?” he asked with a smile on his face. “Paying attention?”

“Kiddo,” said Asher, “no conditions. That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t go in for conditions. I’m at one with life. Only guy I know.”

Paul couldn’t understand his uncle now any better than he had years ago. “And that little girl you had here, years and years ago—”

Asher looked up from across the room where he was watering his plants. Wasn’t there water shining in his eyes as well? “My little Patricia Ann?”

“She made you happy? That’s an example of oneness with life? Please, Asher, let’s not make light of each other’s problems.”

“Ah you, you don’t understand loss.”

“I thought you’ve been telling me you’re happy?”

“Putz, I’m miserable. What kind of issue is that? I thought we’re going to have a little talk about first principles.”

His suitcase wasn’t far from the door. Right downstairs, Third Avenue was lined with hotels — but none of them, he knew, would be too pleasant. Then spend a dollar, he told himself, you deserve it … However, on that last point there must have been some inner debate; immediately he was back to thinking of himself holed up in some sleazy hotel. It seemed appropriate, yet he knew he didn’t have the strength. He could get through, though, with just an ounce of companionship, someone to take a meal with and sit next to in a movie. Then, free! “Maybe later, Asher.”

Asher was unhooking his sports jacket from the back of the door. “Paul, I got a new girl friend who is right up your alley. A very nifty little number with a nice pair of sloe-eyes — Washington Park is stocked with them — but gradually I’m draining out of her head all the cotton candy. See, this is a new thing for me. I don’t go in for education. I prefer the thing in the pure state. You know what I’ve been up to for years, Paulie?” He had taken a tie from his inside pocket and was working it around his neck. “Can you take a guess? Getting the thing in its pure state. You follow me? I want to feel the precise quality of the shit against my skin. Do you get the picture? Your Uncle Asher is the child of the age. Ecce Asher!” His tie in place, he raised his arms. Behold! His shirt inched up out of his trousers. Realizing he was beltless, he went off toward the kitchen.

He likes being a slob, he prefers life outside the ordered world, Paul thought. One more attitude he did not share with his uncle. When he was sloppy it was because his mind was elsewhere. Then what did the two of them share? It was Asher he had chosen to seek out, after all; he had not even thought of Uncle Jerry and his big air-conditioned apartment. “Anyway,” Asher called back, “what troubles her is her interpersonal relationships. These are actual quotations I’m giving you: she is incapable of love. She is a destructive personality. She has never really communicated with another human being. I ask her, whatsa matter, you never lift up the phone when it rings? But she doesn’t get the truth in what I’m saying. She tells me nobody can love anybody because we are all of us living in the shadow of The Bomb, and also God is dead. I want you to meet this girl, Paulie, she’s got a very involved case of what you got, only you’re smarter.”

“I never worry about The Bomb, Asher.”

“I’m talking about the disgusting load you’re placing on the heart. Overworked. Misunderstood. Terrible.”

He was fully dressed now, standing over Paul. “I take it, Asher, that you’re in favor of emotional anarchy, separation, a withdrawal of people from people. A kind of moral isolationism.”

“Very inventive,” said Asher. “But what I’m in favor of is getting back in tune a little bit with nature. All this emphasis on charity and fucking. Disgusting.”

“But you’ve always had women, Asher. You told me that too, remember? A Chinese woman and so on. That’s all you talked about last time we met. You made it sound as though I was leaving a harem for marriage. Let’s be serious, if we’re going to have discussions.”

“You misunderstood. Ass is no panacea. Not even the highest quality.”

“Then why do you pursue it?”

“One, I got needs and prefer ladies to queers. Number two, I told you, I’m the child of the age. I want to understand what all the movies and billboards are about. Three, you still haven’t got what I’m talking about. I’m talking about taking a nice Oriental attitude for yourself. Pre-Chiang Kai-shek. Ungrasping. Undesperate. Tragic. Private. Proportioned. So on down the line. I only want to leave you with one thought, Paulie, because I’ve got to get out of here and I don’t want to find you dead when I get back. Nobody owes nobody nothing. That’s the slogan over the Garden of Eden. That’s what’s stamped on all our cells. Body cells, what makes us. There’s your nature of man. The first principle you should never forget.”

“To be irresponsible.”

“Don’t hand me that crap. I’m talking about rocks, about flowers—” He pointed across the room. “Potted plants.”

“Flowers are flowers, Asher. Men are men.”

“What you need is a real high enema to knock all that stuff out of you. You are the victim, my friend, of circumstantial thinking. Look at life, please, in universals. Try it. And don’t commit suicide, Paul. I have to see some teamster who wants me to paint him into a beautiful picture. You think its hypocritical? It’s no difference, either way. You won’t commit any suicide now, okay? That also is against nature. We’re on earth to take it. Hang around, you’re only in your twenties. You just got your first shock from yourself. Hang around, Paulie, and I’ll come back this afternoon and give you a definition of man.” He whisked a canvas from beside the door. “You want to sleep here a couple months,” he said, “that’s okay too.”

After Asher left, it was unclear to Paul exactly what he should do. He was where he wanted to be; he was, at any rate, in none of those places that he did not want to be. Therefore, he told himself, he should relax. But questions arose, forbidding ease. Was Asher’s place to be his hideout indefinitely? Could he stand the conversation? The surroundings? He was used to less than luxury, of course, but something about Asher’s kind of squalor — even sunlight couldn’t elevate it out of the genus warehouse into the genus home — something in Asher’s embracing of it, made him uneasy. His uncle lived with two metal chairs, a luncheonette stool, a drawing board, and various professional pieces of equipment; there was his sofa for comfort, a mattress and spring across the way for rest, a discouraging toilet, an assortment of pots and pans, and Asher’s mother’s old potted plants, which threw shadows all the way up the dingy walls. And around such objects Asher had built a life. What was unnerving to his nephew was the amount of self-understanding there seemed to be in the decor. Even the portion of serenity: the domicile of a man who knew what he was and was not after.

In surroundings not dissimilar, Paul was himself less at home. For all the bravado he remembered displaying at Catholic Salvage, all the plunking down on musty mattresses in order to brace up Libby, he could not say that he had ever noticed any particular metaphysical flow between himself and his furniture. Neither his home nor his condition was an expression of his self. But even if pushed, he did not think he could really tell what it was he might begin to feel at one with. And could that be, a man without satisfactions? Without serious and conscious goals? Surely there must be for him, as for others, an end in life — but if so, he could no longer with any certainty put his finger on it. Once it had been simple and clear: to lead a good life. Good in the highest sense, the oldest sense. However, it did not always seem that he had had opportunities for goodness, in the old sense — perhaps he hadn’t always recognized them as they went whizzing by. Circumstances had not only been unusual, they had been fast. You went to sleep one night, woke up the next morning, and, lo and behold, you had a past. There had been circumstances, and there had been the business of maturation, the successive shock of coming face to face with one’s own fallibilities. But whether it was strength he lacked, or imagination, or patience or wisdom or heart, at twenty-seven it almost looked as though the force and unexpectedness of circumstance had done him in.

Not that he had been inflexible and bullheaded. He had tried. Sometimes he had made up his mind to fight; other times he had let himself be dragged along with the tide. He had tried courage and he had tried reason; to Libby (the circumstance) he had been everything at different times — submissive, tyrannical, gentle, harsh, dutiful, detached, and so on. If he was no longer passionate, if that had been the first real force of his to desert him, it was because immediately following the abortion and its incumbent horrors, when the time had come to express in bed again their feeling for one another, a certain solemnity had seized them both. And though Libby, at the top of her pleasure, seemed able to fall backwards into innocence, to sever herself from their disappointments and mistakes, he found his own pleasure somewhat limited by the facts. The playfulness wasn’t there any more, the agility, the carelessness — there was something didactic about the whole thing. And there was also the fear that Libby would turn up pregnant again.

If any sense at all was to be made out of the anguish they had gone through in Detroit, it was that they had been able to stave off what they had not been ready for. In the face of another pregnancy (and if there’d been one, what was to stop a second?) he did not know what they would do. So he had found himself less willing, even with all their precautions, to ejaculate. In fact, the care and attention lavished upon the precaution itself, the emotional intensity surrounding the ritual of its insertion, soon began to render the subsequent act anticlimactic. That he did, despite all his fears, continue to have orgasms, could be credited in part to the fact that Libby wanted him to; he also thought he had them coming to him. More than most young men, Paul had had some acquaintance with sacrifice, and even some power to deal with it; still, it had not really occurred to him that along with the giving up of money, security, family, and ease, he might also be called upon to give up that which was so universally awarded first place in the contest of pleasures.

Nevertheless, though he continued to believe in his rights — unable yet to relinquish the idea that there is some foundation of justice upon which this world is built — he looked forward to his own pleasure less and less. At last, even that moment toward which they both aimed (Libby particularly, with a kind of holy obsession, a marriage counselor’s faith in “coming together”), that moment in which Libby showed her teeth and whimpered — her sound of ecstasy — became for him the most disheartening of all. He was afflicted with a deeper and deeper sense of consequence; at any time their life might be swallowed up by disaster and chaos.

Then, of course, Libby became sick, and out of what seemed on the surface a sheer lack of energy, her own ecstatic moments were less frequent; she seemed to pin all her hopes on him, and so he had on more than one occasion to reach a climax for two. And it was just then that his body had chosen to go into partnership with his will; what he had earlier tried to hold off, or thought to try to hold off, he no longer had to try so hard at. He had, in fact, to work and work and work until his belly ached and his wrists were locked in pain, while Libby, pale and motionless, and tiring too, would ask if he was almost there, if he would soon be there, if now he was there … And when at long long last, his pulses knocking, his body flooded with despair, he was able to tell her yes, yes, as misery itself seemed to be running through him and out of him, he would find her eyes riveted to the muscles of his face, measuring the joy and comfort she was able to give to her husband despite her incapacity. It was as though she had relinquished her own pleasure out of choice, so as to add hers to his and thereby overwhelm his mind’s preoccupation with his body’s joy. With the feverish girl already disappointed enough, he would begin the posturing: the ecstatic groan, the passionate sigh, the final collapse (I am sated!) onto her bosom, which was covered generally with a flannel nightdress to prevent her catching a chill and collapsing still further into illness.

It is a short journey from posturing to total unhappiness, shorter than one might imagine when the posturing begins, as it often does, as a stop-gap measure. And from there to a change in character — or in appearance — is not so very long either. A silence came over Paul Herz, a desire not to speak. Rather, at first, not to be heard. He found himself in the presence of others with nothing whatsoever to say. In the beginning the change troubled him — that is, when he noticed it as a change. After all, he was only a few years out of college, where he had always had a sense of himself as an energetic and frank conversationalist — hadn’t he virtually talked Libby into a new girl? Perhaps so, but soon enough it was in silence that he began to find his only relief; eventually he even began to derive a kind of strength from thinking of himself as a silent person. It was his only power … until Chicago, where some of Libby’s unconquerable belief in change (and who had inspired that in her?) rubbed off on him.

There it began to appear that perhaps in his new job lay his salvation. His students were generous and responsive — they knew nothing about him — and in the classroom he found pleasure once again in his own voice, in instruction; he could be intelligent, he could be frank, he could even be witty. He had gone off to staff meetings with a genuine desire to open up communication again with the outside world. He had thrown something off — new faces made him feel less ashamed. But one of the new faces turned into John Spigliano’s. And that bastard right off threatened him more than he should have. So what if he lost his job? So plenty! He should have forced himself to stop arguing with the stupid ass — only the dispute was not simply with Spigliano. All that talk about humanity. Feeling! Who but himself was he arguing with?

Across the table from him there was not only Spigliano but Wallach too, whose new face resolved very quickly into that old and familiar face. A man who by all rights he should like, old or new; who by all rights should be his friend! Who was his friend! That evening they had sat in the light snowfall outside of Cobb, joking with one another, he had felt inside him a kind of unloosening. Relaxation. Remembering friendship, remembering in fact his old pal, Mush Horvitz, he had remembered that there were still the pleasures of social contact. If he and Libby could turn out to others — stop turning in to pick at one another’s guts — they might rebuild marriage on a new foundation; they might not have to lean so heavily on each other. After all why was he so unhappy? When one considered unhappiness from all angles, it was ridiculous. Didn’t he have a will? Couldn’t he make up his mind and cease being dissatisfied? Used properly the will could set just about anything right; this he still believed. An intelligent man, certainly a young, intelligent man, could most assuredly alter the pattern of his life; the mistake was to think of it as a pattern. He had walked with Gabe Wallach down to Goodspeed, and he had even been conscious of the sympathy flowing between them; he had felt that Wallach had respect for him, and to that he could not help but respond. If Wallach had kissed Libby long ago, it was because Libby was a kissable girl. Besides, he knew that it was he himself whom Libby loved. So beneath his wife’s office window he had called out to her, as years before he had called out from beneath her window in Clara Dickson Hall. In part he was trying to impress his companion: they were going to be all right, they were okay on their own now, and no longer in need of help. His singing to Libby was a kind of present to Wallach. But it was a gift to himself too, a gift of nostalgia and sentimentality. Many years had passed since he had made his girl passionate about Shakespeare, about anything. And after all they had been through together … “Arise fair sun, and kill the envious moon—”

And following the sentimental moment, the bottom had fallen out. His wife had informed his friend, his brand new friend, that her husband could give her plenty of babies, thank you, and like a man whose lawyer bends the truth to get him off the hook, he felt weakness, confusion, and then contempt, first for himself and then for the lawyer. From that moment on he was more willing to admit that all control over his life had gone out of his hands; perhaps he was more willing for it to be so.

Now there was a baby coming his way, and out of no real decision on his part. Events and others had decided for him: Wallach’s suggestion, and Jaffe’s assistance, and Libby’s pounding need — and so he went along from day to day, making phone calls, paying bills, and soon would come little Nahum. Tomorrow or the next day he would have to pack his bag and go down Asher’s dank stairway and step back onto the moving platform that he saw that moment as his own particular emblem. He would have to go back to what awaited him in Chicago; at the very least he had a job to return to. But why? There, in fact, was one more thing he did not have to go back to. He did not have to go to his father’s sickbed; he did not have to comfort his mother; he did not have to return to Libby; he did not have to go back to his job. Anything else?

“What else is there?” he asked aloud.

Ah yes. Himself. He could take off his wedding ring (which he had not yet been quite able to do); he could leave the University. But how to divest himself of himself … Stretched out on Asher’s sofa, fatigue helped to direct his thoughts to the precise issue at hand, self-divestment. In his drowsy state he was able to think of himself as something to be peeled back, layer after layer, until what gleamed through was some primary substance. Peeling, peeling, until what was locked up inside was out in the open. What? His Paulness. His Herzness. What he was! Or perhaps nothing. To unpeel all day and all night and wind up empty-handed. To find that all he had rid himself of was all there was. And that? Here his body trembled, as bodies will, overcome with grief or revelation — that he was Libby, was his job, was his mother and father, that all that had happened was all there was. Or? At the very moment that he plunged down into sleep, he soared too above all the demands and concerns he had known, beyond what he had taken for expectation, beyond what he had interpreted as need and understood as pity and love. He nearly glimpsed for himself a new and glorious possibility. But whether there was no glorious possibility, or whether sleep separated him at that moment from some truth about life’s giving and taking, was impossible to say. He felt himself hovering at the edge of something; since it was sleep he next experienced, perhaps it was only that.

He did not know how long the phone had been ringing. In that first uninsulated moment his only knowledge was that they had thrown the El back up. The room was half in darkness; the other half was neither dark nor light. But outside he saw the sky; when he had got his bearings he rose and answered the phone.

“What?”

“Maury.”

“No—”

“This is Maury. It’s Mush, Paul.”

“Maury. Maury, I saw Doris—”

“We called everywhere — your uncle — Paul, what’s happened to you?”

“I’m at my uncle’s.”

“When are you getting down here?”

“Right down—”

“You spoke to Doris, you got my telegram. Paul, are you still there?”

“I don’t have the address, Maury. I walked off without the address.”

“Take it down! Will you? Beth David. Ninth Floor. On Prospect — Paul, your father’s going. You better get down here — your mother’s in no shape to be alone.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Your father’s dying—”

“Mush, all right—”

“I’m in the lobby. I’ll wait in the lobby.”

“All right, please—”

Please. Let me alone. Let me be. He turned back toward the sofa; he seemed to have just discovered the pleasure of being out of it. Neither fat Maury nor hot Doris existed as much of a force in his life. Neither could hold a candle to dear old sleep, which, if it was not the glorious possibility he had failed to catch a glimpse of earlier, was doing nicely as a substitute. He had powers of his own; he could remove himself from the scene. You cannot frustrate or overwhelm a man who isn’t around. If he could drowse away the next few days … But, alas, this time he had the misfortune to dream, and to wake from the dream so suddenly as to believe that his symbols had been of some significance. Secrets! What’s the secret? He pulled Asher’s stool up to the drawing board and tacked on a clean white sheet. In thick black pencil strokes he wrote as fast as he could, not even bothering to snap on a bulb, afraid he would emerge from the dreamy spell and miss out on the truth.

DREAM MY MOTHER TELLS ME TO PUT CHICKEN IN REFRIGERATOR. CHICKEN IS IN PIECES AND HOLEY (WHOLLY HOLY). THERE IS COMPANY. I SHOUT THAT I AM TIRED OF TAKING DIRECTIONS. MANY MEMBERS OF FAMILY IN AUDIENCE (COMPANY — MY LIFE A SPECTACLE — BEING WATCHED). MY MOTHER HURT, WOUNDED, FLABBERGASTED, BUT I WAS HAVING A GOOD TIME. WHY SHOULD SHE INTERRUPT ME AGAIN. I GO OFF TO OTHER ROOM, MY FATHER POLISHING HIS SHOES IN BED. THEN WE GO AWAY TO SCHOOL, WHERE AS RETURNING GRADUATE I TRY TO DRESS UP LIKE GYM CLASS BUT LOOK AWKWARD, CLOWNISH AND AM TOLD BY GYM TEACHER (SPIGLIANO) WHY DON’T I GO SWIMMING IN POOL OR BOX. BEFORE OR AFTER THIS I HAVE A BROTHER (ME) AND HE AND I SEPARATE FROM COMPANY AND WE GO INTO GARAGE WHERE HE IS UPSET ABOUT WAY I HANDLED MY MOTHER. I TRY TO EXPLAIN WITH AID OF THIRD PARTY (WALLACE? WALLACH) THAT I MUST BE FREE OF HER. I AM TOO OLD. MY BROTHER CRIES. I READ (PLEAD) WITH HIM. THEN I GO UPSTAIRS WHERE I SEE MAURY AND SOME WOMAN AND MAURY’S WIFE, WHO IS LIBBY. SOME STRONG DUMB GUY STARTS TOSSING ABOUT GASOLINE (SPERM?) AND TRIES TO SET ME ON FIRE (SEX?). WHY AM I PRINTING? CHILD-EXPLAINING. DO I WANT À GOOD MARK FOR DREAM TOO? I RUN ACROSS ROOM TO PROTECT MYSELF. HE FINALLY (I THINK) DOES START FIRE. IN NEWSPAPER IT SAID HE HAD HISTORY OF POTENTIALITY FOR THIS. THIS KNOWLEDGE SOMEHOW COMFORTS ME.

CHICKEN — TO BE PUT IN REFRIG. TO BE TURNED OFF SEXUALLY. CHICKEN=SHIKSE.

1ST. WHERE MOMMAS HAVE POWER. FOOD.

2ND. WET SLIMY COLD SEXUAL, LIKE A CUNT.

SHOULDN’T CUNT BE WARM? TIRED OF BEING TOLD WHAT TO DO SO WON’T PUT CHICKEN IN REFRIG. BUT NOBODY EVER TOLD ME WHAT TO DO. ALWAYS ON OWN. RE-ENACTMENT OF EVERYBODY TELLING ME DON’T MARRY LIBBY. EVERYBODY RIGHT. EVERYBODY WRONG. THIS IS

all beside the point. He put down Asher’s drawing pencil; his head dropped forward on the board. But now he was wide awake. Chicken equals shikse — so what? Someone is throwing gasoline around, so what? If he were to understand it all, right down to his father polishing his shoes in bed — what then? The problem, Libby, is not psychological. The problem is something else. Why did you have to go to that doctor? “Because I couldn’t take it any more.” “Why didn’t you at least talk it over with me? What about this bill?” He was shaking the day’s mail in her face. “Because we don’t talk anything over.” “We usually talk twenty-five dollars over.” “I didn’t know it was twenty-five dollars when I went. I didn’t do it again, did I?” “I don’t know, did you?” “No!” “What did you think an analyst was going to tell you?” “There’s something wrong with me, Paul.” “You’ve been sick—” “What makes me sick?” “Germs! Bugs! Viruses!” “You!” she cried. “Then divorce me! Let’s get it over with—” Five and a half years, and it was the first time that word had been uttered in their house. Libby’s face fell, and his own sense of failure was complete. They had all been right, Asher, his mother, his—Impossible! But he had said the word at last; it hurt very little to say it again. “Let’s get a divorce then.” “But you’re my husband,” Libby cried. “Maybe then that’s the trouble—” “It’s me!” She wept. “Stop crying, damn it, it’s not you.” “I don’t want a divorce, I want a regular normal life—” “Libby, it’s hopeless, it’s awful—” “That’s why I went to the doctor—”

The phone rang, not back in Chicago, but in New York, three feet from where he sat. Even before he had raised it to his ear, he heard the voice starting in. He set it down. It started to ring again, and he did not bother to lift it this time, only pressed it down in its cradle. And that was how it went throughout the afternoon: what little light there was in the room slipped away, and the phone rang, and at Asher’s drawing board he held down the receiver as though it were a lid beneath which all the premises of his life were melting away.

The next morning Asher had to empty an entire closet to get to an ironing board and an iron. He set up the board by the windows and pressed away at his suit; then he unearthed a clean white shirt and tied his black tie while looking in a mirror over the kitchen sink. Paul slid the breakfast dishes into a pan of water. Asher’s reflection showed a grave turn to the mouth, but Paul made no comment; he had been able to induce in himself something that resembled serenity, which would carry him the rest of the way. Perhaps it was a good thing that the turmoil of the day before had worn him down. He had made his decisions in bed with his last ounce of energy; now, so long as he kept his mouth shut and accepted the decisions without airing them to Asher, he could coast on through.

But Asher asked, “What do you have on the agenda?”

Now that his uncle had spoken, Paul realized all the irritation he had been feeling toward the man ever since he had opened his eyes that morning and looked across the room to see Asher sleeping in his bed. He felt the emotion, however, without fully understanding it. “I’ll read,” he said.

“Maybe you ought to take in a movie. Keep your mind occupied.”

“Reading occupies me.”

“Go to the museums.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You don’t like museums?”

“Asher, you don’t have to be nervous about me.”

Asher was back by the closet; he tugged and pulled and finally dove all the way in. Some tubes of paint rolled out across the floor, and Asher emerged beneath a dark hat, an honest-to-God mourner. Old man Herz was dead.

“You feel all right?” he asked, snapping the brim.

“I feel fine.”

“You want to walk me to the subway? Get some fresh air? Why don’t you put on a jacket and stroll over?”

“Asher, I’m not going to jump out any windows.”

“That,” said Asher, all dressed up and looking sinister and pathetic, “that would be a gross misunderstanding of what I’ve been saying.”

“You didn’t influence me. You don’t have to worry.”

“I got the feeling I talked you into something. You walk around here like a young fellow up to no good. Look, it all comes out of the nineteenth century, Paul. It starts in the eighteenth, in fact, way back when. Reason, social progress, reform, right up to the New Deal and Point Four — it all boils down to inordinate guilt about the other fellow—”

“Please.”

Asher gave up and started for the door. When he turned to face Paul again, he looked a hundred years old. “Do me a favor, will you? Stroll over with me to Astor Place, that’s all. Walk me to the subway. I don’t really feel all my strength this morning.” It did not seem like a ploy either.

They walked north on Third Avenue toward the subway. There was a City Welfare Shelter on one of the cross streets, a brick building with barred windows; just as they passed, all the bums and cripples who had breakfasted there began to make their way out into the sunshine. It was such a brilliant day that some of the unfortunates seemed a little cowed by all the light. But the merciless sun also gave off merciful heat, and after squinting at it, they limped, shuffled, staggered, or trudged out the doorway; one way or another, they all headed uptown, where the money was, and the wine.

In his dark hat and creased trousers Asher must have resembled a wage-earner, for two small men approached. While one assumed a variety of postures which he must have felt to be the attitudes of humility, the other, in a soft voice, made the pitch. “Sir, Mr. Burns and me have just got out of jail, and we’re a little nervous.” He smiled at Paul but bore down on Asher. “Could you give us a little something, sir, for a starter?”

“Fuck off,” Asher told him.

“Thank you, sir, thank you very much, sir.”

“Let’s cross over,” Asher told Paul. Before they could reach the curb, they were accosted twice more. Mr. Burns himself, sagging in the knees, watering in the eyes, stepped forward and made a short speech dealing with his needs. Asher was filled with neither patience nor brotherly love. “Go jerk off. Get out of here you, before I get a cop.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.”

But as Asher stepped off the curb, Mr. Burns followed and — accidentally or on purpose — caught the heel of Asher’s shoe under the toe of his own. Asher turned on the bum, and pointed him wickedly down with one hand. “Where’s your self-respect, you dog? You’re a disgrace to the poor.” He tried to jam his foot back into his shoe. “Why don’t you take a bath? Why don’t you hide your face?”

“Up your Jewish ass,” said Mr. Burns.

Paul was instantly beside Asher, but his uncle pulled away before he could be reached or reasoned with. He had the bum by the collar, shaking him. And then there was a cop and a crowd. Asher’s fingers had to be pried loose from the bum by the policeman. The cop stepped on the bum’s foot, while Asher straightened his tie. Paul saw tears in his uncle’s eyes, as though he were already at the funeral.

“It’s nothing, officer,” Paul said, forcing his way forward. “It’s all right, thank you. Come on, Asher.”

“I ought to press charges,” said Asher, breathing like a work horse.

“No, no — come on—”

Paul, Asher, the bum, and the cop were all standing inside a circle of rheumy eyes and miserable mouths. Mr. Burns’ colleagues seemed torn between staying to see what would happen and getting away before they all wound up in the police wagon. It was as it had been in Paul’s dream: he was surrounded by eyes. But he had to get out of this; he had to get started in doing what he was going to do, and in not doing what he wasn’t going to do.

“Let’s go, Asher. It doesn’t matter—”

“What happened?” the cop asked.

“He was panhandling,” Asher said. “Begging in the streets without a license.”

The bum took issue. “Since when can’t you ask for a light?”

“He called me a dirty Jew,” Asher said. “The little son of a bitch. The filthy bastard.”

“Sir,” the bum said, pleading for a little dignity out here under the broad blue sky. It got a rise from the crowd, and even the cop’s face relaxed.

“Why don’t you apologize to the man?” the cop said.

“I apologize, sir.”

“Okay,” Paul said. “That’s fine, officer. That’s okay. Isn’t that all right, Asher?”

“Oh yeah.” Asher slid his hat down so that Paul couldn’t see his face; he turned and the crowd made room. Just then a young bum with a bowl haircut came rushing up and asked, “What are they making, a movie?”

“Some old bastard—” a shaky voice started to explain, but Paul, yanking his uncle’s arm, finally maneuvered him across the street. Neither spoke for a few minutes.

“Nobody,” said Asher, “usually bothers me.”

“Sure.”

“Usually”—there was no keeping the depression out of his voice; were the hat to be pulled down over his ears, it couldn’t hide the truth—“usually I’m not so dolled up.” They were passing a little concrete stoop in front of a church; Asher stopped. “I’m not used to that kind of excitement. Wait a minute.” He still breathed heavily and noisily, as though he were sucking up liquid through a straw. “How about you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, I got to sit down,” Asher said, holding his side.

Paul remained standing, waiting for his uncle to regain strength. Asher looked up from where he had dropped on the church steps. “You want to hear a long story?”

“Aren’t you going to be late?”

“I never told this to a soul. You want to hear it or not?”

Traffic had slowed on the street; across the way the bums they had left a block behind were passing before them. Asher dismissed them with a dirty gesture. Then he said, “This is all about how I got married and had my only child. Sit down a minute. I have to catch my wind.”

Why had he not camped with his Uncle Jerry? His sympathy for Asher, worn to a frazzle, now disappeared completely. “What is this, Asher, another fairy tale?”

“What happened. Exactly as it happened. Fact.”

“Well, I didn’t know you’d been married.”

“In Chicago, your wonderful Chicago. Long ago, Paulie.” Asher tilted his hat so that he could see his nephew. “Sit down. This is when I was a student—”

“Asher, I’ve got business today.”

But he got such a curious look for that remark that he did sit down. What right, Asher’s eyes said, do you have to give me the rush act? “When I was a student, Paulie, at the Art Institute, remember? And there was a dark bushy-haired woman taking a course there. She hadn’t a grain of talent in her, this babe, and she was one of the dumbest persons I have ever met, before or since. But you know the way certain vulgar women are very stirring? Do you appreciate this?”

“I suppose so.”

“So I got interested in her, and got her nice and pregnant — and I forgot to mention she was already a married lady. And to a full-scale Chicago gangster, wanted all over, and carrying dangerous weapons, and the works, believe me. This is 1926. Every afternoon outside the Institute, hiding behind the lions, he placed killers, honest to God, to wipe me out. In those days it was nothing to wipe somebody out, of course. Just wipe them right out and nobody raised a peep. I used to walk out with Annette in front of me for protection. What else could I do? This is a fact, Paul. Let’s see how brave somebody else would have been in those circumstances. I changed my place of residence six different times, till finally she tells her husband that she wants to marry me. That’s the only way I could figure to save my life — I proposed. And what happens then is that he agrees, but with a couple of nice conditions thrown in. It turns out he didn’t like her any more than he liked me, so for him it was perfect. I forgot to say, Annette, whose large foibles I was rapidly becoming more and more aware of — this happens in a crisis — was already the mother of four children, all under six years of age. One of the conditions was that we take up residence in Cicero, quite a place as you know, so he can come visit with his kiddies there every Sunday. For him it was ideal. One day a week he fills up the tank, slaps on a couple handfuls of after-shave lotion, and takes them for a nice ride in the country. I took over the running of all the errands. He gave a check for his kids, and I did the shopping, the sizing, the wiping up after, and so on. I moved to Cicero—”

“Asher, you’re making this up. I’m not in the mood. Please,” he said, standing up, “not today.”

“Fact!” Asher reprimanded him. “Hard fact. My life for a change!” He slammed his foot on the concrete. “Please yourself! I gave up my schooling, Paulie, and I moved into this brute’s bed — you listening? He even left me an old frayed dressing gown, all gold and shoulder pads, to slip into at bedtime. And soon we had a little son of our own. Annette gave up her painting, but not much of a loss to the arts, my friend, not like me giving it up, believe me. So this brought the grand total in the house to seven, four of us with stool in our diaper regular. And Annette always in her nightie, with ashes dribbling down, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Under a lamppost outside was posted a fellow with a sour expression to keep me strictly in line, just like in the movies. Every time I spend a penny he records it in his little notebook. How do you like that? Jot, jot, with his tongue between his teeth — he could hardly write, the dumb ox. The idea was that I shouldn’t have any pocket change for myself at the end of the week. This hoodlum used to drive alongside me in his car to the A&P, Paul. He used to wait outside the shoemaker and the candy store, till we got to nod hello, how do you do, to each other. But one night I sneaked out, Paul — you want to stand there, you stand there, I’m telling you the facts of my life. One night out I sneaked, under cover of darkness, and I went to live awhile in various Western towns, and then finally I moved a little bit east at a time, by way of the south, and finally New York. A harrowing experience. But tout passe, you follow me? Even if we have to help it along. Out of such experiences I welded a vision of life, I came to understand the highest law of them all, that even the little animals in the forest don’t even have to be told. Self-preservation!”

He stood up, shaking out his legs. “The son-of-a-bitch little bum,” he mumbled, and then he and his nephew exchanged a glance. Afterwards their gaze dropped to the pavement. Any embarrassment they felt had not to do with the truth or falsity of Asher’s story, but with some plot that the two of them seemed to share.

From the church steps to Astor Place they said nothing. There was a crowd around the subway entrance; businessmen hurried into banks on two corners, and Village housewives swarmed around the supermarket. The rushing and scurrying made Paul even more certain that he and Asher were somehow accomplices. They might have been about to rob the Chemical Corn Bank across the street. Asher said, “The movies on Forty-second Street are open all day.”

“I told you I wouldn’t jump out of any windows.”

“Then what then?”

It was not out of trust or love for Asher that once again he told him a secret; it was simply that he was thrown in with him. “I’m going to look for a job.”

“Is that the plan you woke up with? Does that explain the silence?”

“I suppose so.”

“Because,” his uncle said, reaching into his jacket, “I don’t want to influence you unduly. This decision is yours.” From his pocket he took a dark tie like the one he himself was wearing. “There’s a little thief downstairs from me that sells everything. I bought two. You want to come?”

Paul’s hand was smacking his forehead. “Asher, what are you trying to do? Tempt? Tease? What, test me? Haven’t things been difficult enough without this? Do you consider this a helpful suggestion?”

“I only think,” said Asher, not so definite about himself, “you should do what you want to do.”

“What do you think—” Several shoppers turned to look at him; he lowered his voice. “What do you think I’ve been sweating my insides out about since I got here? Put that tie away, will you? Get it away! What’s the matter with you!”

“I don’t know,” Asher said. “A funeral … I might have talked too much.” He rolled the tie up into a ball. “I don’t want to be responsible for your flying in the face of your real nature.”

“My real nature,” Paul said, exercising immense control, “is just what I’m expressing. Put the tie away, please!”

“It’s away. Calm yourself.” When he moved into the mouth of the stairway leading down to the subway, Paul didn’t follow. Asher asked, “What kind of job are you getting?”

“A high-paying one.”

“That’s your real nature?”

“Let me map it out for you,” Paul said. “You and I are different types. Let’s keep that straight.”

“Granted—”

“I can’t preserve only myself. That’s not what I want to do. I’m going to have to preserve my wife too. She’s a helpless girl without a lot of strength, you understand? I took away her youth from her — don’t stop me, don’t interrupt. My leaving is going to be a big blow despite all the horror we have had together. She’s going to need psychoanalysis — don’t stop me, please.” But Asher had only been showing him a pair of skeptical eyes. “Whatever you think is beside the point anyway. If she thinks she needs one, then I’ll give her one, and put her on her feet, and then maybe someday I’ll be through and free and get some peace. I’ll get a high-paying job and I’ll send money every week, and we’ll live separate lives, and that’s my way of working things out. You work your life out one way—”

“What could I do with five kids?”

“I’m not questioning anything!” In talking they had moved down the stairs and stood now in the grim half-light. Trains rushing through the station beneath them whisked candy wrappers up against their cuffs. Paul was all but pleading. “You work your life out one way, I work mine out another. I’ve figured this all out, Asher, and maybe I’ll be a better man for it. A happier one.” But he could not help sighing. Was Asher a happy man for what he had worked out? He swallowed and tried to harden his insides. “Today is the day for acting things out. It’s a crucial day and it’s not gotten off to a good start. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why you had to taunt that bum, for one thing—”

“I don’t approve of begging,” said Asher sharply. There was another rush beneath them, and until the noise passed they had to stand silently facing each other. And Paul realized that he despised this uncle of his — as much as Asher had despised that bum. An equation began to work itself out while that interminable train roared north: he was to Asher as Asher to the bum—

“—public nuisance. Shouldn’t be allowed—”

“Nobody likes begging,” Paul said. “I didn’t think that was the point.”

“We don’t share the same attitude about human needs. I, for instance, wouldn’t worry about my ex-wife’s psychoanalysis. I wouldn’t consider that cutting the bonds.”

Asher tried to move down a step, but Paul was holding on to his sleeve. Now they could both see into the change booth, where a Negro was reading a book. “It’s not easy, Asher, giving birth to yourself all over again at twenty-seven. I’m cutting plenty of bonds, don’t kid yourself. Plenty. Look at you,” he said, holding his uncle. “Even you feel obliged still to go to my father’s funeral. Isn’t that right? If you were all you claim you were, or are, why bother?” That off his chest, he felt in the right; since he had watched Asher ironing his suit at eight in the morning, he had wanted to say it. “Why bother with ceremonies or institutions or anything?”

“Funerals give a sharper edge to myself. In a funeral yard I often arrive at further refinements in my quest for self-understanding.”

“That isn’t where people usually go to get a better grip on the objective facts.”

“Another thing that separates me from people.” A train had pulled into the station, and Asher was waving an arm at it and running.

Paul charged after him, and, despite the people nearby, he called, “What about your mother’s plants, Asher — what about — Asher, you’re going because nobody cuts all—” But Asher had slid safely behind the subway doors.

The crumb! The saboteur! The sloppy—

But he left off with condemnations, experience having taught him that what he chose to curse in others was sometimes what he was not much at home with in himself. He raced up the stairs and, in the sunlight again, headed for Cooper Union. He made another effort at hardening himself in the area between his neck and his groin. Alas, he succeeded. Jesus! He was getting better at it. What a thing — he thought, having a light philosophical moment while boarding the Madison Avenue bus — is a man.

In the Fifties, one could not see the sidewalk for the shoppers. While lights changed, he stood beneath a clock and tried to figure out exactly what to do. He crossed in the next swarm forward and made his way into a luncheonette, where he had a cup of coffee. When he was finished, the empty cup gave him something to stare into. There were two sets of events to contemplate: Libby waking alone in Chicago, and what was happening in Brooklyn. Absent from both he nevertheless saw both unraveling at the bottom of his cup. The counter girl came along with the Silex pot and poured, wiping out his imaginings. He rose and made his way to the telephone booth at the end of the counter.

In the Yellow Pages he found a longer list under “Employment Agencies” than he had expected. The length of the list set him back for at least two minutes. Finally he settled on writing down the names of all the agencies beginning with A and B. He also wrote down a name beginning with S, so as not to narrow his chances, then closed the book and left the store.

Neither his gait nor his expression revealed anything other than sternness and decision. As he walked he leaned forward at a sharper angle than the men around him; everybody seemed younger than himself — though that, of course, was illusion. What hair he had left, it was true, he wore longer than the others, and his suit did not come up to theirs for style and newness. He felt out of his element.

Yet within an hour he apparently had a job. It was amazing, for he had not really envisioned success. He had imagined that it was all going to be demoralizing and enervating, just as at first he had imagined himself sweating out his decision in some fetid hotel rather than on Asher’s uncomfortable but unfetid sofa. He had seen the weeks ahead given over not to work but to the searching after it. But here he was back out in the reception room, while inside his office the man who had interviewed him was on the phone with a trade-magazine editor in need of somebody to write copy about the paint and wallpaper industries. He would be an associate editor. Sixty-eight hundred a year; thirty-four hundred for Libby, an equal amount for himself. All right, four thousand for Libby. There would be raises; he would manage somehow; he could live in one room. Will!

Quickly he made some plans. He would get a cheap room. He would keep a budget. Before being interviewed by the editor, he would make a quick stop at the Fifth Avenue library and look up paint and wallpaper in the encyclopedia, just to be on the ball. He would continue to lie — he was not married, he had been in Europe for the last year—

Sitting, waiting, in the reception room of the employment office, he asked himself a question: Where am I?

What am I doing here, now?

At first he was only going down to the men’s room to get a grip on himself. Passing the water cooler he wished he had a pill to pop into his mouth. He was suffering from a momentary feeling of displacement — the new-job jitters, a pheno barb could handle it. But he had no pills with him, having no faith in solutions of that kind. It was his wife who would try anything. He drank some water, but all he felt of it was what slid down the pipe to his stomach; there was no draining off, no sudden flowering of his sense of reality.

When he turned, wiping his mouth, he found that there was a smile waiting for him from the receptionist. Are you single? Are you romantically inclined? Do you like me? That was all included in the smile, which he now returned. A stunning healthy girl with a wonderful chest. What skin … But for all its smoothness, the skin of the receptionist was no more solace to him than the water. Instead of walking right up and starting a conversation, he walked by her and into the Down elevator. On the main floor he stepped out into the street. Fresh air. But all it did was move over his skin. Between where the water slid and what could be touched by a pleasant June day, he was still in a state of disequilibrium. He was in the wrong place. He began pacing up and down in the shadow of the office building, exercising his legs as though they were the props of his will. Will! Force yourself back! He summoned up all his strength, once, twice, but it didn’t work. Perhaps what he should do was walk to a Western Union office and send a telegram. What would Libby do when he didn’t come home? What had she done already? He had better telephone. Hear her voice and hang up. So long as she was not dead.

A taxi passed just then, and he waved an arm at it. His impulse had been to do something — telegram, telephone — and what he did was get into the cab. If there had been a phone hanging in the middle of the street he would doubtless have lifted it, asked for Chicago, and then waited for the voice of his wife. But instead of a phone there was the cab. He held his head in his hands all the way to Brooklyn.

Three blocks from the cemetery he asked the driver to let him out. When he paid and tipped the fellow, the feel of the change in his palm gave him a start. He would return to the agency in the afternoon, he would say he had suddenly been taken ill. Further, he would try to make a date with the receptionist. He would even buy some pills to help him through the next week or so. What did it hurt? This was no time to be stolid. He would get a new suit with a conservative cut to it. He would wind up looking like Wallach himself. He would change over, why not? He would send Libby a telegram. A letter.

He thought and thought, short, crisp, forward-looking thoughts, while he walked toward the cemetery. After all, he did not even have to go inside the place. He wanted only to catch a glimpse of the proceedings to be convinced that it had really happened.

Yes, this was a necessary, a symbolic trip for him. He was bringing (he phrased it carefully in his mind as he slid furtively along the fence surrounding the graveyard), he was bringing the first part of his life to a formal conclusion. He would see his father lowered into the ground, covered up, and that would be that. A man’s father dies only once, and regardless of their misunderstandings … no, that wasn’t precisely what had drawn him here, though that was in it. Actually it didn’t really make any difference to him, or to anybody, whether he was present or not. Staying away would, in fact, give to the event more weight than it deserved, make of his father a martyr — no, no, that wasn’t precisely so. If his coming to the cemetery meant anything — he let his lids close over his eyes, for he was exhausted — it was that he wanted to go back to Libby and give it one last try … No! He did not want to go back to Libby! As solutions went that was the most unrealistic. The trouble was that she had already picked out a name for the baby, the trouble was a father dies only—

Cramped in the bushes, peering between the iron pickets, he heard the word trouble thumping away in his head. In the distance, midway between the fence and the railroad tracks that bound the cemetery at the far side, he saw the mourners standing in the sunlight. The day kept getting bluer and bluer, and the sun rose and rose, and around him the gravestones glittered. Behind was a long line of automobiles, none of which he recognized. Wasn’t it his father being buried? Was he hiding needlessly? But time had passed — of course, everyone owned a new car. He looked back into the light. Where was the coffin? Was it over — the old man covered up? Then chapter one was history.

He tried to feel relief. He rose on stiffened legs, telling himself he would now start fresh. But inside the cemetery men were taking the arms of the women and helping them along. He couldn’t be sure; were these his relatives? He edged along the fence, holding branches down so they would not flick back at him. He had to see just one pair of familiar eyes, and then he’d make a break for it, off and away into his new life. However, all the men were wearing hats and all the women holding handkerchiefs to their faces, and what made recognition even more difficult was the brightness, the luminosity of the day—

He was out in the open. Where was the fence? Gone! Weaving along the paths, swaying around swollen burial plots, they were headed his way. And he was in the gateway. Almost at his back — the whiff first, then the sad sight — was a hearse full of flowers. A death had taken place. The thought penetrated into him all the way.

There were several choices open to Paul that moment; it was not because all the paths of escape were blocked that, instead of moving out, he moved in. He could have run away, or simply walked away, but he moved in because in was the direction of his life. In and in and in, past all kinds of tombstones, fancy ones, plain ones, old ones, past memorials to cherished mothers and beloved fathers, faithful husbands and dutiful wives, and even little children, whose dates told the whole miserable story. Levine’s youngster, 1900–1907. Rappaport’s child, 1926–1931. Abraham’s child, 1929–1940. Born the same year as Paul. Drowned? Run over? Meningitis?

Dates. Names. Flowers. Above, the sun. All came at him with sharpness and clarity. He saw now where he had misread. Not Abrahams. Abrams. Abraham’s child was Isaac. Here were interred the bones of Abrams, his contemporary. The thought seized him. He moved in and in, and then up ahead he saw a figure moving out and out, toward him. But his mind was occupied with the mystery of Abrams’ death and his own survival. Little Abrams catching spinal meningitis or diphtheria, himself skinning through on only German measles. Lucky him. Unlucky Abrams. Isaac, he thought … Every gravestone that he saw had a date on the right to go with the date on the left. That fact caused his knees to shake. Justice, will, order, change — the words whistled by him, windless as the day was, like spirits moving off in the opposite direction. Dates. Names. Flowers. Sky. Only facts of history and of nature had meaning. The rest was invention.

So in he moved, in, and then he saw the faces. Yes, there that wicked mouth on his father’s sister, his. Aunt Gertie’s mouth. There a pair of sad blue eyes, more blue than sad: his simpleton cousin, the all-Brooklyn basketball star Harvey. The black hair of his beautiful cousin Clare. The soft hands of his Uncle Jerry. There in circles of fat, Maury; in black beside him, Doris. They were all clear to him; but at the center, a trick of the atmosphere, or of his senses, there was a haze, just a haze rushing toward him. He heard a cry — his name! Oh, and Asher. There was Asher. And what did Asher understand of anything? What had he understood himself? Who was the fellow in the black coat? Lichtman, who would not marry him to Libby? Who was—

No one moved, just himself, and what rushed to meet him: a figure in black. And now at last he saw who that was too, yes, and now he closed his eyes and opened his arms and what he saw next was his life — he saw it for the sacrifice that it was. Isaac under the knife, Abraham wielding it. Both! While his mother kissed his neck and moaned his name, he saw his place in the world. Yes. And the world itself — without admiration, without pity. Yes! Oh yes! What he saw filled him for a moment with strength. Not that in a sweep of forgiving he could kiss that face that now kissed him; it was not that which he had seen. He kissed nothing — only held out his arms, open, and stood still at last, momentarily at rest in the center of the storm through which he had been traveling all these years. For his truth was revealed to him, his final premise melted away. What he had taken for order was chaos. Justice was illusion. Abraham and Isaac were one. His eyes opened, and in the midst of those faces — the faces of his dream, the faces of the bums, all the faces that had forever encircled him — he felt no humiliation and no shame. Their eyes no longer overpowered him. He felt himself under a wider beam.

2

Usually that summer we swam off the rocks at Fifty-fifth Street. We became friendly with other couples — some married, some like ourselves — and spent long Saturdays and Sundays on the tiers of rock that led down to cool Lake Michigan, talking and sunning and offering around sandwiches and white wine out of our straw hamper. I had bought the picnic hamper at Abercrombie’s as a gift for Martha, a commemoration of the Fourth of July, our first time in bathing suits together, and certainly a milestone for any American boy and his American girl.

Martha was employed now at the University as secretary to Claude Delsey, the director of the summer quarter, and, at last, had weekends off and nights free. Some months earlier she had wrapped her two waitress uniforms in brown paper, tied the package with a string and given it to her cleaning lady, Annie LaSmith. Then, with her first University pay check in her purse, she had gone off to Marshall Fields and bought three summer dresses to wear to the office: one lavender, one pale blue, and the third, my favorite, an apricot color, with a wide square neck and a pleated skirt. The following week she bought shoes, two strands of pearls, and a pair of white gloves; and then one day when Delsey was out of town, she took a few hours off in the afternoon and went up to the Near North Side, from which she returned with her hair whirled up in an intricate and elegant coiffure. She looked quite stunning, even if not entirely like herself, but in bed that night she had to wear a silk stocking over her head for protection. I complained that her headpiece had a debilitating effect upon my passions, but she said that passion was out of the question anyway — she had to lie perfectly still. Fortunately, the hairdo was beginning to sag the next day at breakfast, by lunch-time was lopsided, and by dinner beyond repair; a little after midnight she crawled in close beside me again, bareheaded.

I suppose there were times when she was really very happy, and when our life together would have seemed, to someone strolling beneath our open window on a summer night, peaceful and comfortable and serene: Martha, in shorts and a sleeveless blouse, stretched out on the sofa drinking iced coffee and reading a book; I in the chair across from her, with a yellow pad on my knee, scribbling notes for an American literature course I was to teach in the fall … It was a pleasant July, especially for Chicago. Whenever it threatened to turn muggy and hot, the clouds would pile up at dinnertime and a thunderstorm would clear the air and leave the city smelling like the country, and the streets perfect for a long walk over to the campus. There, with the trees damp and full and glittering in the early moonlight, the only sound was the comforting one of the night watchman going around and shaking the handles on the doors of the empty buildings. “In the fall I think I’m going to take a course,” Martha told me. “Delsey said it’s okay with him.” “What course?” I asked. “I’m not sure yet. I went over to the Administration Building and checked — if I take one course a quarter for the next two years I can get my B.A.” “Then what?” I asked. “Then,” she said, “I’ll have it.”

On some nights the electrical storm did not come until very late, sometimes not till the early hours of the morning. Then the thunder, rumbling in and breaking over the city, would awaken the two of us, and we would lie under our thin sheet, silent but quite awake. Martha would reach over and flick the radio on, and then light a cigarette, while in the dark we listened to the dance music which crackled from time to time with the storm. When the cigarette had been smoked all the way down and the thunder had moved from over our heads, we would roll our different ways and go back to sleep.

The weekends, however, were all blue skies and sunshine, and out on the rocks we must surely have looked as cheery as the next couple. We never missed a Saturday or a Sunday; we were there by eleven in the morning, and even at sundown, with half our newspapers blown away and our books still unopened, with a hamper full of cookie crumbs and wax paper and banana skins, we generally stayed on, after the others had drifted home, to watch the rosy dusk move in over the lake. Martha was particular during these months never to allow herself to feel rushed about anything; she stayed where she felt like staying just as long as she felt like staying there — except, of course, on those Sunday nights when we packed up early and were home and by the telephone promptly at six. For it was at six, twice a month, that she placed her call to Long Island, where Cynthia and Markie were spending their summer. And late on those Sunday afternoons there would invariably be a moment — I am pulling Martha by the hand up out of the water, I am just about to pour wine into her cup — when by the lake front it would become for us as it was in bed on those nights we were awakened by the thunder: What I feel Martha feeling toward me, what I know myself to be feeling toward her, is hate.

On the last Saturday of July I received a letter from my father telling me that he and Fay Silberman had set a date for their wedding. It was not to be until Christmas, but Mrs. Silberman was going off in September to visit her children in California, and both the affianced had agreed that she should give some definite word to her sons and daughters-in-law out on the west coast, for they would have to begin to make plans about what to do with their children when they came East in December for the wedding. I read the letter several times that morning, and carried it in my trouser pocket when Martha and I went down to the lake. That evening, when I slipped my trousers on over my bathing suit, I took the letter out and read it again. This time I could not manage to be merely resigned; resignation became gloom.

“Will it be large and fancy?” Martha asked.

“I suppose just the family. Her children and me. He doesn’t really say.”

“Well, Christmas is a long way off.”

“Still, it sounds definite.” I looked back to the letter for some reason my father might have given to explain having decided now for Christmas — a reason, that is, other than Mrs. Silberman’s wanting to give her family plenty of time to ready baby-sitters. But there were no reasons, only more news. “He’s going to spend August out at her summer place, he says.”

“You think that’s what he’s after — summer vacations?”

“I think he’s marrying her because, one, she’s pressing him, and two, he’s lonely and doesn’t know what else he can do. But I know he’s been putting it off. They’ve been engaged since last Thanksgiving. He’s not sure himself.”

“Where’s her summer place?”

I turned to the letter again. For all my readings of it, it was amazing how few of the words written in that large open hand I could manage to keep in mind. “East Hampton. He says I’m invited too. To get to know her.”

Martha was putting on her shorts over her white suit. It was not until she had zipped up the side and fastened the button that she turned back to me. “Why don’t you go?”

I answered as casually as she had asked. “Because I’m here.”

“I thought you might want to get away for a while, that’s all.”

Earlier in the afternoon, Martha’s lightheartedness had amused both Bill Lake and Frank Tozier, who, having stopped to visit for a few minutes, had wound up camped on our blanket for several hours, eating out of our basket. Now what could be seen of the lightheartedness was only the residue — the irritating part of the frivolity, the unconvincing part of the offhandedness. What with still trying to comprehend my father’s decision, I myself had no reserves of patience and sense, and I said, “Now what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She put a towel over her shoulders and sat down and looked out across the lake where a last water-skier was flying over the surface. “I just thought that if you wanted to see your father, you should certainly feel that you can.”

“Well, I feel that I can, if I want to.”

“What about Theresa’s baby?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you have to wait for it to come?”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with anything, Martha. Did I seem to you to express a desire to go East and have a talk with my father? I didn’t mean to. What would I say? What is there to say? Last November he bought her a nice big ring and now they’ve set the date, and now he’s going out to the seashore with her. He’s entitled to his pleasures, if those are what he thinks they are.”

She took her watch from her pocket and when she put it on her wrist, I saw her look at the time.

“Would you like to leave?” I asked.

“… No. It’s lovely now.”

“Martha, are you asking me why I don’t go East, why I don’t do something about him?”

“No.”

“Because there’s nothing to do.”

“All I meant to say,” she said, smiling, “is that if you want to see your father, or, I don’t know, visit anybody, I don’t want you to think that you’re tied down here. That’s all. If something were to come up—”

“You want me to go somewhere?”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“Then what’s depressing you?”

“Your father’s setting the date, I suppose. I suppose I’m only sharing your feelings.”

“Yes,” I said, “and what more?”

“Nothing.” She smiled again, then shrugged. “1 just felt like calling the kids. I don’t any more.”

“Don’t be silly. We’ll go home, you can call them.” The idea gave me my first real lift in hours.

“It’s not Sunday.”

“What’s the difference? It’s getting chilly here anyway.”

“I think I’d rather stay.”

“All right. We’ll stay.” I put the letter back into my pocket; tonight or tomorrow I would have to write some sort of answer — send my congratulations, my approval, my blessings. The hell with it.

A few seconds passed before I realized that I had spoken those last few words out loud. Martha leaned her head back on the rocks so that her loose hair was spread around her. I saw her mouth move and barely restrained myself from reaching out and placing my hand across it. I did not care to be told again that I had her permission to go East if I so desired.

She said, “Is East Hampton on Long Island?”

“Yes.”

“Near Springs?”

“Springs is out there too, I think.” Springs was the name of the town to which she placed her phone calls twice a month. “I don’t know exactly where. Do you have any idea how far out it is?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I think I have a New York map in the car.”

“It’s not important,” she said.

“Martha, if you want to call tonight, why don’t you?”

She answered sharply. “Because I don’t want to!”

“It was simply a suggestion,” I said.

She rose then, picked up the comb that was on the blanket, and started off down along the rocks. She was pulling the comb absent-mindedly through her hair as she disappeared around the edge of the cove. A little time passed, and then she was back.

She dropped the comb onto my toes. “I’m not going to give in to myself. Okay?”

“At the risk of your getting angry again, I don’t think you should think of it as giving in to yourself.”

“Don’t you?” she asked dubiously.

“Forget it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, kneeling beside me, “I’m just suddenly having a bad day.” She took my hand.

“I shouldn’t have brought out that letter half a dozen times either. I depressed everybody.”

“You have a right to your troubles.”

“They’re not even new troubles — they’re old ones. Whatever could have been done had to have been done a long time ago. And I don’t even know what that was. The hell with it.”

“You said that already.”

“What is it, Martha? I thought you were happy today. You told all those jokes, you were even nice and loud, sweetheart—”

“I was. Happy, I mean. I am happy. I just thought before that today was Sunday, and then I realized it’s only Saturday.”

“There’s no law that says you can only dial New York on Sundays.”

“There is,” she said. “I made it.”

If that was the way she wanted it, that’s the way it would have to be. But I could not escape feeling that if she did call her children, we might have a more pleasant evening in store for us. Though that was to reason directly in the face of past experience — whenever Martha put the phone back down on the hook, it took us some time before we could look each other in the eye. “Well,” I said, feeling nagged at and naggy, “Sunday’s tomorrow anyway.”

“Right. I’ll call then.”

But she became bluer and bluer. “Should I get the map?” I asked. “Do you want just to see how far Springs is from East Hampton—?”

“Let’s sit here and enjoy the view.”

“Because you could come East with me. How does that sound? We’ll stay with my father and Mrs. Silberman. I’m sure they’d like it. I’d like it.”

“I just started work.”

“Delsey wouldn’t mind. Tell him you’re going to visit your children.”

“You don’t even know whether or not Springs is close.”

“The whole stretch of island is only a hundred miles.”

“I’ll be all right. I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you call tonight if you want to.”

“Why don’t you let me decide for myself!” She got up and jumped down two levels of rocks until she was standing at the water’s edge, her back to me.

“Whatever you decided,” I called down after her, “you decided for yourself!”

She turned only her head. “Oh did I?”

That was the exchange, brief but to the point.

She made her way back to the blanket later and said, “I’m just having a few bad hours.” She put her hand on mine again. “It’s simply a matter of keeping control.”

“Would you like to have a drink?” I touched her arm, and when she moved toward me willingly, I touched her face. “Would you like to go home and take a shower and get dressed? We’ll go out to dinner someplace where it’s cool—”

“It’s too beautiful now. I want to stay.”

“Whatever you want,” I said.

“Gabe, really, though,” she said in a moment, “if you want to take a little trip … Nobody who doesn’t have to stay in Chicago for a whole summer should be allowed to feel that he must.”

“I don’t want to take a trip!”

“Okay then, it’s just an academic discussion. They’re nice to have too,” she said, but I wasn’t charmed.

Or softened, or forgiving. “Though sometimes you’re able to convince me that a trip wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Then—”

“Then what?” I demanded.

“Nothing … I didn’t say it, see? The better part of wisdom is to be short on suggestions,” she said, with a cold look on her face.

“Is that directed against me by any chance, that remark? I don’t know that I’ve made any suggestions to you.”

“You’re a suggestion,” she said, flatly.

“I’m terribly sorry about that.”

“You’re not.”

“No, I’m not. I never made any promises.”

“I said you were a suggestion, not a promise.”

“Oh Christ, let’s stop this. Why don’t you come East with me? We’ll go together — that’s right, this is an outright suggestion — and you can see the kids—”

“Right now,” she said, standing and patently ignoring my remarks, “you know what I’d like to do? First, I too would like us to stop being accusative — imperative, whatever it is we are. Two, I’d like to get home and take that shower; and three, I’d like to go out to dinner, some place where we can eat outside.”

“We could drive East in a day.”

“Delsey needs me now.”

“Delsey has a big heart. Tell him why you’re going.”

“I don’t think it would really be a good idea.”

I got up too and put on my shirt. “If that’s what you want.”

As we started toward the car, she said, “But don’t think you can’t go—”

“I don’t.”

At home Martha said she wanted to pin up her hair, and she asked would I take the first shower. When I was finished I stepped onto the bath mat and opened the door an inch to let the steam out. Martha was on the phone, saying to the operator that she had been cut off again. She hung up and the phone rang; she picked it immediately off the receiver. I pushed open the door another few inches.

“Hello — hello, Dick? It’s Martha again. We were cut off. I said we were cut off — we still have a lousy connection.… How are the kids doing? … And Markie? … Are they in, can I talk to them? … I know it’s Saturday … What! … Well, can’t you wake them up? … For Christ’s sake, Dick, I’m their mother — what? … I said I’m their mother, I’m calling long distance.… I know it’s an hour later — will you please wake them up! … Then let them sleep late in the morning—please, this is costing money.… Okay, okay, yes.…” Silence. Then, “Hello — hello, Cynthia? Honey, it’s Mother … Mother—what’s wrong with this connection! Cynthia, baby, can you hear me? Come on, try to wake up. Rub your eyes or something — Mark, is that you? … Speak louder, darling. Speak into the phone … Cynthia, Cynthia, are you still there? Speak into the phone, darlings. Look, how are you? … Did you go swimming today? … I said, Did you go swimming today? Cynthia, let him talk — what? … Cynthia, sweetie, why don’t you write? … Well, ask him for paper.… Of course he’ll give you paper.… Where are all your envelopes I gave you with the address on them? … What? … Who left them where? I can’t hear you if you both talk.… Oh children, stop arguing, please, this is long — what? … Of course, darling, you send it, I’d love to see it.… Stephanie is fine, uh-huh.… Cynthia, please, it doesn’t matter if he hasn’t finished it. You send it anyway. Okay, operator, fine … Cynthia, you write, do you hear me? And watch your brother in the water.… Are you both all right? Do you need anything? … That’s fine.… He’s here, honey. No, dear, no, no.… Goodbye, honey — look, let me talk to your daddy — Mark? Markie? Let me — hello? Is anybody there …?”

She put the phone back on the hook, I turned the knob on the bathroom door and closed it.

While Martha was taking her shower the phone rang again. Later, when she came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, I said nothing to her about my phone call, just as she had said nothing to me about hers. At first I was secretive out of a feeling that enough had happened for one day. But then sitting in the living room, waiting for her to dress, I wondered if I was not trying to spare Martha the possibility of feeling an ugly, an inappropriate emotion. Given our conversation at the lake and the phone call to Long Island, her response to my news might not be tonight what it would doubtless be in the morning.

It had become warmer all at once, and I sat without my jacket, my feet up on the window sill, watching the storm clouds begin to fill the sky over Fifty-fifth Street. Soon it started to rain and thunder, and grow darker. I sat in the dark with no light until a small lamp was flipped on behind me. I turned; Martha had come into the room, ready for dinner. The light was soft and fell in a flattering way upon the dress she was wearing; I could not remember having seen it before.

“You’re looking beautiful,” I said to her.

She remained standing where she was. “Thank you.”

“A blond girl,” I said, “with a suntan and her hair up—”

“And in a new white sharkskin dress.”

“It’s very lovely.”

“See my shoes?”

“They’re nice. It’s all very lovely.”

“I’ve never worn them before.”

“Maybe we should wait until it stops raining.”

“All right.” She sat down across from me and put her gloves on the little end table.

After a moment I asked, “Would you like a drink?”

But she didn’t seem to have heard. “This is what I wanted,” she said softly.

“Yes,” I said.

“And I like it — do you know that?”

“I thought you did.”

“All that sun and the water and the peace, and then a man in a fresh batiste shirt and a silk tie waiting for me in the living room so we can go to dinner. Even the rain, even the thunder.”

“We’ll go as soon as it lets up.”

After a while there was a jagged lightning streak across the sky, and a crash, and our one little lamp went out; in the kitchen the refrigerator stopped humming.

“It’ll go on in a minute,” I said.

“I called the kids,” Martha told me.

“Did you?”

I could see only her white dress in the dark and her white shoes. “When you were in the shower,” she said.

“How are they?”

“Markie left all his envelopes in the rest room of a Texaco station. But they sounded fine … Gabe?”

“Yes.”

“I think if you go East you better go alone.”

“You want me to go though?”

“A little time apart,” she said, after a moment, “might not hurt.”

“Will it help?”

“What’s to be helped?”

“You’re the one, I thought, who’d been indicating that we’re at some sort of crisis.”

“I don’t think we are,” she said.

“I didn’t think so either.”

“I told you I liked it. It was an agreeable day. I did laugh.”

The light went on, and Martha stopped speaking; and I was moved, even made lustful in a curious self-contained way, by the cold beauty she radiated.

“You look very voluptuous and healthy in that dress,” I said, “and in control.”

“When we come home we’ll make love. Not now.”

“You’re being very gallant, Martha, and very self-possessed tonight.”

“Oh I know.”

Suddenly she wearied me. “I think the storm’s rather laid a pall on me.”

“Let’s go then,” she said. “I’ll cheer you up. Plus my suntan and my blond hair and my self-possession, I am also a lot of laughs.”

“Theresa Haug had her baby,” I said.

“What?”

“Libby called. Sid called her. She had a baby girl.”

“When did she call?”

“While you were in the shower.”

“And you weren’t going to tell?”

“I thought I’d save it.”

“It sounds as though the news depresses you.”

“It leaves me feeling peculiarly washed-out, Martha.” Which was true; I found myself having something like the reaction I had feared for Martha. I couldn’t understand it.

“Aren’t you happy?” she asked.

“I suppose I am. Libby was very excited. I just feel played out. That’s all.”

“We can sit here a while longer, if you want.”

So we sat there, while outside the storm slowly rolled away. “I suppose,” I said, “I should have a feeling of accomplishment.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Of being unnecessary.”

She did not say anything, and I could not tell if it was clear to her that the strange feeling I had was envy, envy for the Herzes.

“Just old fleeting depression,” I said.

“I understand.”

“This comes,” I hurried to say, “on top of my father’s letter—”

“Yes?”

“—and,” I said, “my overhearing your conversation with the kids.” So my two secrets were out. Why not?

“Oh,” she said. And then, “Well, what was the difference? You were taking a shower. It was as good a time as any.”

“The difference is obviously that you didn’t want me to know that you wanted to call, that you had called. That you had broken down, given in, or however it is you choose to put it.”

“You didn’t want me to know the Herzes had a baby. So we’re even.”

Even, we sat back in our chairs. Until I asked, “How long do you think we’re going to be able to keep this kind of business up?”

“I suppose something will happen some day.”

“I don’t know what.”

She understood. “I don’t care, really, if I never get married, Gabe. I’ve had that. I told you — I like this. Marriage is really quite beside the point. You know that.”

“Do you?”

“I knew it a long time ago. I knew it the day they got on that plane. I probably knew it before then, but that was a very forceful event. I supposed that you knew it too.”

“I suppose I did.”

“I don’t think we should worry about it then,” she said. “It’s still raining a little. Do you still want to make love to me?”

“Not exactly. Not now.” It wasn’t intentionally that I had repeated her words.

“But why don’t you do it anyway?” she said. “I think we should do whatever suits our needs. My needs, all right? I would like to be seduced right now. Undressed slightly against my will, my nice new dress thrown on the floor, and bango. That’ll put a little glow around dinner later.”

“You want me to service you?”

“I wasn’t being cynical. I meant it.”

“That doesn’t make it a hell of a lot less cynical, I shouldn’t think.”

“So I want it all,” she said, musing. “If you’re bothering about yourself, then the best thing is go ahead and really bother. All the way. I walked past the big shoe-bazaar place on Fifty-third yesterday and I bought another pair of sandals. They were nice and they were inexpensive, but that’s not the point. The point is I have a perfectly good pair in the closet and bought these anyway.”

“That doesn’t seem too terribly indulgent.”

“Everything adds up. I’ve still got my debts to pay,” she said. “I am the girl who wants to be serviced. What are you?”

“He who wants to service — at least that’s what I’m left with.”

“Who wants to?”

I did not answer.

“Are you being duplicitous?” she asked. “Do you want to leave me?”

“I want the same things I’ve always wanted, Martha. They just get more and more illusive. I don’t feel myself quite able to pull anything off.”

“You got the Herzes their baby finally. Though that doesn’t satisfy you either, you told me.”

“I didn’t make my feelings clear. It satisfied me, it’s good news. Except,” I confessed, “it left me feeling a little envious.”

That was the truth, and it left me defenseless.

“You’re just a family man at heart,” she said.

“Please don’t be too smart.”

“How can I help it? I could have serviced you, you see, with a ready-made unit.”

“That isn’t quite what I meant, Martha. You didn’t even want that yourself.”

“Nor did you,” she said quickly.

“We influenced one another. Can we leave it at that?”

“Would you like to leave me, Gabe?”

“If I wanted to I would. At least I’d make a stab at it.”

“Would you? I’m a tough cookie, you know.”

“But so am I.”

“I suppose that’s what we’re up against. Two tough cookies like us, each getting his way. The end result will be that one of us will invite the other to take a look out the window, and then give a nice shove forward.”

“Or go nuts. Or hate one another’s guts. There are lots of possibilities.”

“Surely we can just work out some simple way of humiliating one another,” she said. “I’ll screw the janitor or something.”

“I’m not crazy about the turn the conversation is taking.”

“I’m not either.”

“It’s stopped raining.”

“You look very handsome,” she said to me, standing up. “Did I tell you that? Put on your jacket, let me see.”

“Maybe,” I said, while I smoothed out my trousers and buttoned my coat, “if I do get away for a week—”

“Yes.” She opened her purse and looked to see if she had the keys; she always did this, even though I had keys of my own. “Yes, and maybe you’ll come back and everybody will love everybody again.”

“You’re much more direct than I am, Martha. And maybe smarter—”

“You just don’t have to be so direct, that’s all.”

“No?”

“You’re stronger than I am, Gabe — and it’s clear what you hold against me anyway.”

“It’s not all that clear to me. But whatever you think it is, why don’t you save it?”

We walked down the stairs, and while I held the car door open, she said to me, “Is it clear, however, the few little things I have against you?”

“I think so.”

“Am I being reasonable?”

After a moment I said, “I don’t think so. No.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Then is it reasonable for you to detest me for letting them go?”

“I don’t detest you for letting them go.”

“For involving you in letting them go.”

“That’s not true either—”

“Well, you don’t feel the same, Gabe. I think you liked me noble better. But then,” she said, giving me no time to reply, “I would have preferred you that way too. We have to be satisfied with what we get.”

“True.”

I closed the door and came around to the street side of the car. “I won’t say anything,” Martha told me, as I got in, “and you don’t say anything, and when we get to the restaurant we’ll start in fresh. Let’s not ruin the night. Just look up there, how lovely it is.”

“Martha’s looking marvelous,” Sid Jaffe was saying to me five days later as we drove together to pick up the Herzes.

“Yes, she is.”

“She likes her job?”

“I think so. Delsey is very nice, a very amiable fellow.”

“How are the kids doing, do you know?” he asked.

“She called only a few nights ago. They’re out at the seashore.”

“So they’re all right?”

“It sounds as though they’re fine.”

At a red light Sid settled back into his seat, taking his hands from the wheel a moment. “Another beautiful day,” he said.

“It’s been a nice summer.”

“I haven’t been out of the office enough to find out.” His smile indicated that that was generally the way things went with him.

“You ought to take a vacation,” I suggested.

He sighed then, comically, but he clearly liked the picture of himself as a hard-working, industrious man. Though our meetings had been few and inconsequential, I rather admired Jaffe, admired, in fact, what he seemed to admire about himself. Generally I saw him down by the lake on Sundays; it was there that we had been introduced by Martha. He had a long striped towel that he stretched out on when sunning, and a portable radio in a little leather case on which he listened to the ball game; every hour or so, he would tuck his papers under the radio, walk down to the water, dive in, and swim long, even laps by himself, going clear out of sight for a time. Coming up from the water, his bald head dripping and shining, he would take a trip past our blanket at least once during the day to stop and say hello. He never allowed himself the pleasure of a visit, however, never once sat down — though there were occasions during the afternoon when I would happen to look up and see him, fifty yards off on his striped towel, glancing our way; that is, Martha’s way. Late in the afternoon, he would do a round of sit-ups, take a last swim, and then unobtrusively leave for home.

I came to respect Jaffe on those Sundays because he seemed to be a lonely man who had come to grips with his condition. Watching him, I wondered what my own particular style would be were I to wind up forty and single. There was something orderly and methodical about him that he managed to make attractive, though Martha had already indicated to me that it was that same orderliness that rendered him less than exciting, that finally — at least she had believed this in the past — made of Sid an uninspirited, unoriginal man.

“It’s amazing,” Sid was saying, as the car was moving again, “how much she looks like Cynthia.”

“Who?”

“Martha. Or Cynthia like her, I suppose I should say. Now that she’s rested and suntanned …”

I said, “They both have the same eyes.”

Sid looked sternly ahead now. “That’s right.”

After a long silence I asked, “You’ve seen Theresa?”

“I stopped by the other day.”

“Did you see the baby too?”

“I did.”

“And it’s all right …?” I asked.

“Oh sure,” he said. “Has Libby been calling you too?”

I shook my head.

“I thought you meant she’d been calling. She’s called my office three times in the last day or two. Making sure the baby’s got the proper number of appendages. Actually, the thing turns out to look a little like her. As much as it can look like anything yet.”

“Did you tell Libby? I’m sure it would excite her. At least I think it would,” I said.

“It did. She’s a very charming girl, in her excited way.”

“I’m sure this is going to make her very happy.”

“It’s terrific,” Sid said.

“I haven’t spoken to Paul, have you?”

“I spoke to him once.”

“I suppose he’s excited too.”

“I suppose so.”

“Paul’s a much calmer person than Libby,” I said.

“Of course, Libby tells me that his father just died. I guess that’s muted his pleasure some.”

I nodded. “Though,” I said, a few moments later, “I don’t believe they were very attached, Paul and his father.”

“Apparently Paul goes to synagogue for him every day.”

“He does?”

“Every morning, Libby told me. To say Kaddish.”

“I didn’t know that … I never really thought of Paul as a religious person.”

“However, a death—” he began.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right.” There had been something in his voice that I did not like — the tone of a man who considers himself a little more upright than his neighbor.

Heading up Maryland, his mood changed, and the tone, if it had ever been present, changed too. “Well,” he said, “I know someone who’s going to be glad to see you.”

“Who’s that?”

“I take it you’re Theresa’s Mr. Wallace.”

“Oh. Yes. She never got it right and I gave up trying.”

“Well, she asked for Mr. Wallace. I think it’ll help, your being there. I’m glad you could stay in town.”

I did not quite understand — or rather, I thought I understood, but was a little blinded by surprise, and then by irritation. “I planned to be in town anyway,” I said.

When we were within a block of the Herz apartment, he said. “So we’re all straight on procedure then.”

“I think so. The Herzes will wait in your car, and you’ll get out with me and get a taxi.”

“I’ll have a taxi right by the hospital entrance.”

“And I’ll get Theresa, then I pay the bill—”

“You’d better pay the bill first,” Sid suggested. “I think it’ll be less complicated. Paul will give you the check — I called up and got the total on the bill—”

“Then I bring her downstairs,” I said, “and get into the cab with her.”

“I’ll park the car around the corner. That way the Herzes won’t have to see her. And she won’t have to see them.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Anything else?” he asked.

“That seems about everything. I take it she hasn’t seen the baby.”

“That’s all been taken care of.”

He was not really officious, and not actually self-laudatory, and his managerial qualities were certainly to be valued, especially at this time, and yet I found myself feeling a tinge of resentment for all the little things he had thought to do. Even on the previous night, when I had told him on the phone that he could use my car, he had countered by suggesting that it might actually be better to use his — it had four doors and would make it easier getting in and out with the baby. Probably that was so, and I had acceded; but after hanging up, I had a picture of him in his bachelor apartment thinking about the number of doors my car had as compared to the number of doors his car had, and I appreciated how, after all, a certain kind of woman might find him a little dull. “I suppose that’s the most sensible way,” I agreed.

“Otherwise they get attached, and it could cause trouble later. With the adoption. It’s better for everybody this way, the girl included.”

“Absolutely.”

He parked, and just as we were stepping out of the car, a window above us opened and Paul stuck his head out. “We’ll be right down,” he called.

Sid and I sat down on the front steps of the brick building to wait. Across the street some kids were playing in a small weedy lot; next door to us several Negro women with shopping bags in their arms were chatting on the porch; a tall thin elderly man, apparently related to one of the women, was standing down below polishing his car and occasionally tossing a remark back up toward the porch conversation. It was a restful moment, a pleasant summer moment, and there was even the smell of honeysuckle from a bush in the little scrubby yard to our left. But most pleasant of all was a pleasure I began to take in my companion’s organizational abilities. As we sat there waiting for the Herzes, I looked out toward the street and counted one, two, three, four — all Sid’s doors — and I told myself that everything was going to come off smoothly and easily. Why shouldn’t it?

Jaffe had said something to me that I did not hear.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“—says that you’re going East?”

“Martha does?”

“Yes.”

It had only been at dinner the night before that I had definitely decided to go; it must have been after dinner then, between the time Martha had picked up the phone and handed it to me, that she had passed on the information to Jaffe. It was like having your decisions go out over the wire services.

“My father,” I explained, “is getting married. That is, he’s just set the date, and he wants me to come spend some time with him and his fiancée. My mother died a few years back, you see.”

“Well, that’s quite an interesting thing, for an older man like that to remarry.”

“He’s sixty. I imagine it is.”

“How does it feel for you?” he asked pleasantly.

“Oh,” I said — and wondered, as I paused, how much he really did know about my private life beyond the fact that I owned a two-door automobile—“I’m very happy for him.”

“It should be pleasant.”

“Yes.”

“I mean your trip.”

“I don’t think I’ll be gone more than a week.”

He took that fact in. “New York?”

“They’re out on Long Island. East Hampton.”

“Isn’t that where Dick Reganhart lives, Long Island?”

“He’s in Springs.”

“Oh,” said Sid, “is that far?”

“As a matter of fact, it turns out to be about ten miles east.”

Just then someone called down, “Hey, hi!” It was Libby. “You two — one more minute!” Her hair was hanging loose on either side of her face, and she was waving at us with her lipstick.

“Hello,” I said, looking up.

“How are you?” Jaffe called.

“Terrified,” she answered. “I can’t get my lipstick on anything but my nose. I’m shaking all over.” She ducked inside.

Jaffe turned to me. “She’s really quite a spunky girl. They’ve had a lot of troubles apparently.”

I wondered if he was trying to needle me. But his manner was agreeable, and I decided that all he had been trying to do, now as earlier, was to make conversation.

Next he said: “I suppose you’ll get over to see Cynthia and Mark then.”

“I’m sorry—”

“I suppose in the East you’ll get over to see the kids.”

“I don’t really know.”

“If you should, send them my love.”

“Certainly.”

“If they even remember me.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sure they will.”

“I hope so,” he said. Maybe he didn’t recognize the irony; maybe he did. “I was very fond of them,” he added, as though they had not departed merely from the Midwest but from this life.

A second later the door behind us opened and Libby and Paul appeared. We all greeted one another. Shaking Paul’s hand, I said, “Congratulations.”

By contrast to the rest of us who were suntanned — Libby included — Paul looked more haggard then ever. Of course it was only two weeks since his return from Brooklyn and his father’s funeral; looking at his hair that needed cutting, and his eyes that needed sleep, I was struck again by the news of his going each day to synagogue to say the mourner’s prayer. “The best of luck,” I said to him.

“Thank you,” he answered.

We continued to grip each other’s hand. It was warming for me to believe that despite the confusions between us — even the coldness, the hostility — we could confront each other on this special day with a decent amount of respect. Suddenly I sensed Paul’s helplessness in a way I never had before — that is, without even the thinnest overlay of suspicion or doubt. I thought I understood what he had felt and been made to feel toward the woman he had chosen, and by choosing, altered. I have been searching for a Libby, and I have found myself one. I have made myself one — Martha. A lacerating idea, but it hung on, and however it worked against me, it led me to my fullest understanding of what had happened between Paul and myself, of what his feelings had been for me. I now had an experience to go by; where Paul Herz had once had Gabriel Wallach, Gabriel Wallach now had Sid Jaffe.

“What are you going to call her?” I asked him.

“Rachel,” he said.

“Because we had to wait so long.” The explanation came from Libby.

“Congratulations, Lib,” I said, dropping her husband’s hand.

She gave me a smile, but neither extended her hand nor took a step toward me. And that was all right too, so long as everything was under control and we all coasted through the morning under the guidance of Jaffe. Sid was standing now with his hands on his hips, a soldierly posture; whenever she looked his way, Libby grinned. She held a hand out straight before her and showed him how it was shaking.

Sid said to Paul, “Well, how does it feel being a father? Have you got the shakes too?”

He had spoken just as I was about to turn back to Paul to say I was sorry to have heard of his father’s death; consequently, I said nothing, for it would have been a most inappropriate comment at that moment. The best thing for me was silence. Not leading, but following. In an hour or two (I told myself this at the very same time that I simply could not believe it) the Herzes would have their baby. Getting into the front seat alongside Jaffe, I found myself remembering a day back in Iowa, the day I had driven Libby out to pick up Paul, whose old Dodge had blown a piston. I remembered having asked Libby if she had any children, and her reply, her Oh goodness, thank God, no. It was our first exchange face to face.

“I’m sorry we kept you waiting,” Libby said, as we started off.

“That’s okay,” Sid said.

“We were just putting up the crib,” she explained. I turned around to look at her while she spoke. “We didn’t want to put it up until today,” she said to me, “not until everything was sure as sure could be. It would have been awful to come home to that crib …”

“Well,” I said, “it’s only a matter now of going down and picking up the baby.”

Libby became quite excited when I said that. She turned to her husband. “Isn’t that something?” He took her hand in his. “Is your heart thumping?” she asked him.

He smiled. “Oh no.”

“Oh I’ll bet,” she said.

Every time we had to stop at a traffic light, Sid turned around in his seat and teased Libby. “Well, are you still with us, Lib?”

“Still here,” she sang.

“Just wanted to check. You look like you’re really ready to take flight.”

“Run away? Oh no—”

“I meant fly. Sprout wings.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I am.”

The hospital had not yet been landscaped. It was a huge new concrete building, one wing of which was still unfinished. The grassless, treeless ground that sloped down to the street revealed the gutted markings of trucks and tractors; the light, reflecting off the packed-in earth and the flush cement walls of the hospital, had a powdery quality, as though it were not substanceless but a film of particles that upon contact would settle over one’s clothing and leave a coating on the teeth. At the sight of the hospital, the little jokes and pleasantries we had all of us been making — even Paul at the last — stopped abruptly.

The only ornament the gaunt hospital showed was a narrow-armed gold cross that hung over the central glass doorway and rose three stories high. Four nuns in flowing black habits happened to be standing under the cross as we drove by, and the cross, the flat, gray, sunlit walls and the four sisters all came together to make time seem at a standstill, nonexistent even, the illusion one is troubled by in certain anxious dreams. The surrealistic arrangement of the objects appeared to be the outward sign of a world static and impersonal, a world into which one moved with an overpowering consciousness of the sound of one’s shoes, and of the slight tremulous noise of the breath, the life, in one’s nostrils; where every human gesture, once made, seemed either an exaggeration or a diminution of the gesture intended; where words spoken into the boundless landscape were either inaudible or too loud — a place where one found oneself with little control over the image one wished to convey, or the effects one hoped to produce.

If no one in the car shared my several chilling illusions, they all seemed to share the solemnity that those illusions produced in me. None of us spoke as Sid continued right on past the crescent-shaped drive that led up to the hospital entrance; no one asked any questions when he turned left at the corner. Passing the unfinished wing of the hospital, on whose gently swaying scaffolds overalled workmen appeared carrying buckets and leaning into wheelbarrows, Sid proceeded halfway down the block before he pulled over to the curb and parked. We were in the shade now, and though neither nuns, nor cross, nor hard glary walls were before our eyes, my sense of imminence did not diminish. I had never been in this section of Chicago before and I had never been in a situation quite like this one either, and yet I had a very deep sense of repeating an old event. I had been through all this, precisely this, in another life.

But of course that is a feeling we all experience on occasion, and it too is illusion. If and when we allow ourselves to be convinced of other lives and other incarnations, it is to be spared the necessity of facing up to futility, of confronting the boredom and the limitation of our own predicament; for no one is particularly happy about those endless repetitions that make us predictable and contained and therefore sane — and therefore fallible, the subjects and objects of pain. Thus this event for me, this adoption we were about to set in motion, this rearrangement of people, was really not the repetition of an act in any other life; it was only a crystallization of several acts in this one. I felt the impact then of all the shufflings of parents and offspring that I had witnessed and been a part of in the last few years — the rearranging and the rearranging, as though we could administrate anguish out of our lives. I leave my father; the Brooklyn Herzes throw out their son; Martha cuts loose from her children; now Libby opens her arms to Theresa Haug’s bastard child …

After Sid Jaffe pulled up the hand brake, no one in the car moved, no one said a word. It lasted but a second, our collective inaction, but the uncertainty, the fear, the humility — whatever had caused us all to take in our breath and delay for a moment more that which we were about to do — seemed to me a recognition by the four of us of the powers outside ourselves, a tribute to a presence, or a lack of presence, so solid, so monumental, so stark and immeasurable, that it rendered quite inconsequential the blankness of those hospital walls we were about to enter. But then Sid turned a little in his seat and said, “Well …” and I felt a flow of energy in me, and for all that had failed to come out of the shufflings and separations we had each of us been party to in the past, for all the confusion that had grown out of the rejections and the yearnings, the demands and the hesitations and the betrayals, I put my hand to the door and half opened it.

In the back seat Paul was leaning forward.

“I think it’ll be best,” Sid was saying, “if you two wait here. It shouldn’t take us too long — okay?”

“We just wait here?” Paul asked.

“That’s right. And we’ll bring the baby to the car, and”—he smiled—“that’ll be that.”

“And the girl?” Paul asked; it seemed suddenly very important to him to hear all the details.

“She’s fine,” Jaffe said. “She’ll just go home.”

But Paul was still listening, apparently to hear what he had to do; it did not quite satisfy him, it seemed, that he had to do nothing.

Jaffe said again, almost helplessly, “And that’ll be that.”

A silence began to develop once more, and I rushed to fill it. “I’ll take care of her, Paul. Everything will be all right.”

“Oh,” he said, looking up at me. He slid his hand down into his trouser pocket, in a gesture almost of panic, and withdrew his wallet. He removed a check from the billfold section, examined it, and then handed it to me. I did not look at the figures as I put it in my pocket.

“Don’t lose it,” Libby said, pointing at my pocket.

I shook my head. “I won’t.”

Jaffe tried to laugh. “I guess we’ve all got Libby’s shakes.”

“I guess so,” Paul said. “Libby included.” He took one of his wife’s hands, and he too worked up a smile.

“Oh, my hands are just freezing though,” she said.

“Baloney,” Sid said.

Libby extended one hand over the seat. “Feel.”

Sid took it. “What are you talking about? They’re warm as toast. Here,” and he put Libby’s hand in mine.

“As cold toast,” I said, and everyone volunteered a little laugh, while Libby’s hands were held, one by her husband, one by me. Until I let the hand go, she was not very relaxed, but sat stiffly as though a Current were being conducted through her.

“Let’s go,” Sid said, and though his words were those of the gallant soldier leading his men over the top, he seemed, like the rest of us, to have been overcome by this last strong wave of confusion.

In front of the hospital was a row of yellow and black taxis in which drivers sat, reading newspapers. Sid said, “I’ll meet you right down here,” and went off to get a cab.

At the reception desk inside the lobby I asked for a pass to go up to the maternity ward. Then I went to the cashier’s counter and paid Theresa’s bill with the check that Paul had given to me.

The sister behind the desk asked, “Is this you, sir?”

“No.”

“Who is Mr. Paul Herz?”

“He’s a friend of the patient’s.” I did not know whether to refer to her as Miss Haug or Mrs. Haug. I could have simply said Theresa Haug, but that did not occur to me.

“And you are?” she asked.

Had Jaffe told me how to identify myself? Had I not been listening, or hadn’t we really talked everything over — or didn’t it matter, one way or the other? He had probably imagined that I could figure some things out for myself. What I did remember, of course, was Sid telling all of us that it was best for the hospital to know nothing of the adoption; should they find out the exact circumstances, they would most certainly bring pressure upon Theresa to give up the child to a Catholic family, or even to an orphanage. Jaffe had instructed Theresa herself not to discuss the future of the child with anyone in the hospital. If asked, she was simply to say that the infant would be raised by her own mother and father in Kentucky.

For a moment I stood silently before the nun, knowing that if there was one thing I didn’t want to do, it was to go out to the car and bring in Paul to verify his check.

“You see,” I said to the sister, as graciously as I could, “it’s not my check.”

“I understand. I wanted to know your relationship to Miss Haug.”

“I’m her brother,” I said.

After a second she said, “Thank you, sir.” She handed me the receipt. Theresa’s stay at the hospital had cost Paul $327.60. That did not include the money he had already given her to cover the prenatal checkups and her expenses during the last two months when she had been unable to work; nor did it include the money she was to get for the next two weeks while she recuperated. As I left the cashier’s counter, the only person I could think to hate was John Spigliano, who, though he had finally agreed in the Executive Committee to hire Paul for another year, had vetoed a raise for him on the grounds that Paul still had not finished his Ph.D. Walking to the elevator, I felt a disgust for him such as one feels for a scapegoat, or surrogate. One knows better but keeps hating anyway.

I took the Up elevator in the company of two young priests and a doctor who was wearing a blue surgery uniform. In soft voices they exchanged some words about a patient who was either dying or dead. When I stepped off into the corridor that led to the maternity ward, one of the priests looked up at me and smiled.

The sister behind the desk at the entrance to the ward took my pass card and led me down the aisle, between rows of beds, all white and fresh-looking. We stopped a few beds short of a large window through which the sunlight flowed. Theresa was sitting on her bed, wearing a bright-colored print dress which was decorated with pictures of burros and musical instruments and palm trees and the maps of certain South American countries. A little brown suitcase with a circular sticker that said “Carlsbad Caverns” was on the floor. When she saw me, she opened her mouth very wide, and then jumped off the bed. There was a comb in her hand, and even as she threw her arms around me, I caught the glint of a curler in her orange hair.

“You’re early—” I felt Theresa’s palms against my back, not her fingers themselves; then I smelled her nail polish. I proceeded to place my arms around her, for I realized we were being watched — which was what Theresa realized too.

“Hi. Hello,” I said. In the bed just beyond Theresa’s, a little woman with a big jaw and heavy bags under her eyes was giving me a friendly grin. I smiled back.

“Well …” I said, and finally Theresa stepped away. Now I smiled at her too. “You look fine,” I said, and even while I spoke I felt the presence of the nun who had accompanied me down the corridor; Theresa’s glance kept darting over my shoulder, and finally I turned to the sister. Since I had gotten by with smiles so far, I smiled at her too. She did not take to it, however. She was a woman with striking blue eyes, who was made less than handsome by a skin eruption that ran around the edge of her cowl and fringed her face. It was clear that she disapproved, but it was not clear as yet of what. I could not tell how old or young she was.

“I’ll bring the baby,” the sister said to me. “I’ll wait by the elevator.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We’d appreciate it.”

“Thank you,” said Theresa, with both fear and devotion.

I picked up Theresa’s suitcase. The woman with the baggy eyes turned on her elbow and said to me, “How was your trip?”

“Oh,” I said, “fine.”

“I’ll bet you were surprised,” she said.

“This is Mrs. Butterworth,” Theresa said. “This is her seventh.”

“Eighth,” said Mrs. Butterworth.

“Imagine,” Theresa said.

I offered my congratulations.

“Oh I’m used to it,” Mrs. Butterworth told me. “It’s you two needs congratulating.”

Theresa took my hand, and I felt some of her nail polish rubbing off on me. The hand was just about as cold as Libby’s had been in the car. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

“We live out here on the west side, right off Archer,” Mrs. Butterworth said. “You know where that is?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Well, you want to take a ride out on Sunday, why you just drive right out. I gave her the address. You got it, don’t you, honey?”

“Uh-huh,” Theresa said; she picked up her purse from the bed and waved it at her friend, indicating, I suppose, that the Butterworth address was safely locked away. It was the same plastic bag she’d been carrying that night I had met her, back in the winter.

“I think we’d better be going,” I said.

“You kids take it easy now,” Mrs. Butterworth called.

We started down the aisle of the ward, Theresa still with one metal curler in her hair which she must have forgotten about in the tension and excitement of leaving. Some of the women who were awake sat up in their beds and said goodbye. Theresa took hold of my arm and moved between the beds, saying goodbye and so long and see ya. At the end of the corridor I saw the nun holding a bundle in her arms. She pushed the elevator buzzer and we all stepped in. The sister did not offer to show me the baby’s face within the blankets, and I did not ask to see it.

On the way down Theresa looked up at me. I tried to smile again, but she didn’t have it in her to smile back.

At the main floor the nun accompanied us to the front door. A taxi immediately swung up the crescent drive; I saw first the face of the driver, a Negro, and then Sid in the back seat.

We stood out in front of the new building, where the four nuns had been standing when Sid had driven by earlier. As yet Theresa had looked neither at the sister nor at the child; either she looked at me or at no one.

I turned to the nun. “Fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

She only stared with her very severe eyes.

“May I have it, please?” I asked. Theresa looked straight ahead, as though she were not with us. Down below, the back door of the taxi opened.

I could see that the nun was holding her teeth together; finally she gave me the baby, then turned and went back into the hospital. I did not know how much, or what, Theresa had told her.

“Right down there,” I said to Theresa. “Mr. Jaffe’s in the taxi.”

She preceded me down the stairs, and I realized how strange it must look for me to be carrying the baby and Theresa to be carrying her little suitcase. But she was well ahead of me — I was making my way down like an old man, one step at a time — and there was nothing to be done about it. I looked into the blankets now, to be sure there really was a baby there, and of course there really was. All of a sudden I found myself grinning euphorically; everything was going as it should. It even seemed more sensible that it was me who was carrying the baby, not Theresa.

Down below, Sid stepped out of the cab and Theresa got in. Then he ran around the back of the cab and went in the other door. On my side the door remained ajar, and I stepped into the cab at last, easing myself and the baby through, and then I was seated beside Theresa. When I looked back to where I had begun my journey, I saw a nun standing on the top step. Suddenly she threw us a kiss — she must have thought we were another party. I smiled at her through the window. Within the blanket I felt the baby stir.

“All right,” Sid said to the driver. As we started down the entryway, Theresa sighed. It was over.

“Well, how are you feeling?” Sid said to her. I saw that he had taken her hand and was patting it. Nail polish was sticking to everyone’s hand now; that alone seemed to be preventing things from being absolutely perfect. I knew the thought to be an irrational one even as it passed through my mind, and yet it rather set me on edge again. After all, the girl had put the polish on for me.

“I feel fine, Mr. Jaffe. I—”

The taxi stopped, swaying us all forward. Without turning, the driver reached around with his left arm and opened the door on Sid’s side; we were almost directly across the street from Sid’s four-door automobile. As planned, I handed the baby to Sid; I wondered why we had not arranged for the two of us to sit side by side, so that we would not have to pass the bundle over Theresa. Jaffe stepped out of the car and then the driver reached around again and closed the door. It all happened very quickly.

“What …” Theresa said feebly. She looked at me and then out the window to follow Sid crossing the street. He stepped into the car across the way and Theresa leaned even further across me; evidently she wanted to see whom he was handing the baby to. Then she turned back to me, stunned, but not crying.

“Do you feel all right?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” Looking down, she saw the nail polish on my jacket and on both our hands.

“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s nothing at all.”

The driver sat with his large hands on the wheel, while the motor ran and the meter ticked.

“But you feel all right?” I asked.

She dropped her fingers limply into her lap. “Sister Mary Frances is very strict,” she said.

“That’s all over.”

“I don’t think she liked that I said I was married.”

“Well, that was silly of her.”

“I said the baby was in the incubator. I said you were away on business—”

“That’s all right, Theresa.”

“Otherwise,” the girl said, looking down still at her hands, “who would I have had to talk to?”

The driver was looking at us now in the rear-view mirror. I didn’t know what more to say. “Do you have any pains? Anything at all?”

After considering an answer for a while, she said, “Uh-uh. No.”

I reached into my wallet and took out a five-dollar bill which I handed across to the driver. On the other side of the street I heard Jaffe’s car start up.

“Mr. Jaffe gave you the money, didn’t he? For the next couple of weeks?”

She whispered so the driver would not hear. “Yes.”

“Okay then.”

“… Mr. Wallace?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to take me home?”

“The driver will take you home, Theresa. Right to the door. Everything’s going to be all right.”

She never gave me an answer.

I said to the driver, hesitating. “Would you help her into the house?”

“Yes, sir.”

For lack of anything more I could think to do, I reached into my wallet and handed the fellow another dollar.

Just before I left the cab I said, “You’ve been very brave, Theresa. Good luck to you,” and then I was headed across the street. I saw that in the other car Jaffe’s head was turned and he was speaking to the Herzes. On the street, I turned back; there was Theresa’s face in the taxi window. She was saying something — she seemed to be shouting something. I thought the worst: she is going to push the door open, she is going to come running across the street to demand her child back. In fact, her window did begin to roll down, and I heard, or imagined I heard her calling my name. My first name. I did not remain on the street to find out. I moved around the back of Jaffe’s car, opened the door and slid in beside him just as the automobile was beginning to move. When Jaffe looked over at me I saw that he was startled. I wondered if I had nail polish on my face, if I looked as though I were bleeding — if he thought that there had been some violence between Theresa and myself. Then I realized that he had not been waiting for me. But he said nothing, and we drove away.

In the back seat Libby had begun to talk softly to the baby. It sounded as though she were doing what she thought she was supposed to be doing, and it added a final pathetic note to the day’s dealings. And yet, despite Libby’s theatrics, despite the misunderstanding between Jaffe and myself, I knew that a series of events in which I had taken a hand had at last come to a happy ending. I turned to the back seat to appreciate the tableau of baby, mother, and father, but what I saw was out beyond the rear window: Theresa’s taxi moving off in the opposite direction. I thought of the girl going back to Gary alone, and 1 knew that nothing had really ended. In not staying with her I had made another mistake.

No, yes, yes, no, no, yes … on to infinity. Had I remained in the cab, would she not have wanted me to accompany her into her little room? And once in the room, would that have been enough? Would that have been anything? If I was not to tease, or to make false promises, or to dangle before her the hope of a better or a different future, what else could I do about Theresa Haug’s suffering except turn my back on it?

At the Herzes we all went upstairs and watched as Libby gently laid Rachel in her crib, which had been set up in the room that had been Paul’s study. Watching Libby bend across the brand new crib, Paul was near tears. Finally he went off to the bathroom, so that I did not get a chance to say goodbye to him. When we left, his tear-filled wife kissed both Sid and me.

Jaffe drove me back to Martha’s. After some three or four minutes of silence, he glanced over, and without much of an attempt at hiding his opinion of me, said, “I thought you were going to stay with her.”

When I answered him, I tried to find some comfort in the fact that I had learned something; I tried to engage Jaffe’s eye and let him know that I believed I meant what I was saying, but he was only waiting for me to get out of the car. “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t see that it made much sense.”

3

It was easier than it should have been for Dr. Wallach to imagine an old age other than this one. He set an elbow onto the sand, leaned back, and little by little he was able to bring his breathing under control. He felt encouraged by the sun’s ability to dry the water on his skin, and soon his chest was moving up and down at its normal speed. He slapped his belly where it was still flat and hard; he made a fist, one hand, then the other. He had taken care of this small body of his, he had exercised it daily and fed it upon foods rich in protein and vitamins; he may have been the victim of a fad or two, but at least he had gotten through life on a minimum of fried foods. Looking down at himself in a bathing suit, he did not experience the repugnance or shame that another man sixty years of age might have felt. He looked as he had always hoped and expected he would; it was not the appearance that he could imagine to be different, it was the circumstances.

Fifty feet out from the beach, his only child continued to swim back and forth through the surf. Now and then a wave rolled in to cover the moving form, but then an arm glistened, that shock of brown hair broke the surface, and he could follow again the progress of his son, cutting effortlessly through the water. Yes, he could imagine it all to have turned out another way. He could imagine that when Gabe had returned from the Army, he had moved back into his old room in the Central Park West apartment; he could imagine that the two of them had taken up a calm and amiable life together. Gabe could have done graduate work at Columbia, and then there would have been someone with whom Dr. Wallach could have eaten his dinner in the evening and discussed the Times in the morning, someone with whom he could have played tennis at the club and with whom he might have gone for pleasant walks in the park when the weather was right. Someone he loved.

He had not for a moment expected that his son would live with him forever. A year, two, three, and Gabe would have found the right girl in New York — well-bred, intelligent, kind — whom Dr. Wallach would have accepted without question as a daughter, and subsequently loved like his own child. The young couple would have been married and would have settled down in the city, Gabe teaching at Columbia, or NYU, or Hunter, or any of a dozen places. Dr. Wallach could imagine his son and his son’s young wife — he could even see her, a slender girl with brown hair and a soft voice — living just across the way from him on the East Side. On Sunday afternoons he would bundle up and take an invigorating walk through the park to visit them, to stay for a light supper, and then take a taxi home. And in the summers there would have been morning swims just like this one — the son and the father (perhaps even a grandchild) coming down to the beach before breakfast and diving together into the cold blue sea, while back in the sunny white house they had all rented for the season, his daughter-in-law, a pink pegnoir over her nightgown, was pouring orange juice into sparkling cut-glass goblets.

Of course at that very moment Fay was at her house preparing a nice breakfast for the three of them; and since one could by no means expect life to conform to one’s fantasies — even to one’s plans — he told himself that what had happened was not just to be endured, but to be accepted and valued. There was no reason for him not to consider himself a very lucky man for having met Fay Silberman. Without her, his last year would have been the most morbid of all. There had been Gruber in Europe with him, of course, and though the fellow was a satisfactory enough companion if one was oneself in a giddy mood, if one was not, then Gruber with his smiling and joking was worse than no one at all. In Europe Dr. Wallach had seen numerous widows and widowers traveling with friends they did not particularly care for, people to whom they had connected themselves only because they had lost those to whom they had always been connected before. He had seen them sitting opposite one another at the restaurant Tre Scalini in Rome, amidst all the old beauty of that piazza, picking at their food; he had seen them reading separate sections of the Herald Tribune in the lobbies of the Lotti in Paris and the Grand in Florence, waiting for the sightseeing buses to pick them up and take them away; and he did not really know who was more miserable, those who traveled with acquaintances they couldn’t stand, or those who traveled, literally, by themselves. On the Queen Mary, sailing home, there had been a bosomy, bejeweled woman from Virginia, a widow of fifty-five or so, who had told him that she had gone to bed at eight o’clock every night she had been in Paris. She had pretty blue eyes behind her glasses, and powder in the creases of her neck, and she brought tears to his eyes; under the table — they were all in the lounge waiting for the horse racing to begin — he had taken Fay’s hand.

Oh yes it was luck, it was good fortune indeed that had thrown him together with Fay only two days out of New York. With Fay along, so many funny little things had happened; and one warm night in Venice he had taken her for a ride in a gondola and she had lifted his hands and held them against her breasts. Imagine if he had had to go out with Gruber in a gondola! Yes, Fay had given him pleasure, and that despite all the drinking she had done — all the champagne, all the red wines and white wines and rosé wines, all the Scotch and Irish whiskies, whose consumption had added to the festive spirit, but had also helped to blur for her the image of her husband being driven, dead, around his lawn on a power mower. It had helped to erase the memory of the eight-room house in New Jersey, and of that same husband whose heart had failed him, and who — said Fay to whomever she happened to be speaking — had been very very good to her.

So Fay drank, and Dr. Wallach drank, and Gruber drank too, but then one morning they were back in America. They took a taxi from the pier to his apartment, and when he came out of the bedroom where he had changed his shoes, there she was standing in front of the fireplace with a glass in her hand. On native ground it apparently took even more alcohol than it had abroad to blur the past; at last it seemed he would have to say something before some accident, some tragedy, occurred. On Thanksgiving Day particularly he had been conscious of how much her drinking had prejudiced his son, whose approval he had been counting on (knowing all the while that he would not get it — that Fay in no way resembled the boy’s mother). Eventually he had cautioned Fay, had asked her to make him a promise, and the miracle that had happened was that she had stopped. At first cut down, then actually stopped.

It was at about this time too that they had begun to talk seriously of marriage. She had acceded to a wish of his, and apparently that had soldered them one to the other. The engagement that they had announced at Thanksgiving had not actually had a great deal to do with any impending marriage; it was mostly a convenience, a way they had come upon to deal with their revitalized passions. It had been one thing, they discovered, to lie together in strange hotels in foreign lands; it was another to be back home, with Millie in the kitchen clanging pots and pans, and the bedroom door double-locked. Slowly they had come to feel a little like a pair of teen-agers, and so he had made her his fiancée.

But in only a little while, when the first excitement had faded — no one was whispering French in the hallway beyond the keyhole any more — the engagement itself seemed to matter less. There had even begun to grow in him a feeling, half sadness, half relief, that in a month or two he would be back to his single life, to the lonely meals and the smoky pinochle games with Strauss and Kirsch and Gruber.

Then one evening around Christmas time, having gone out by himself for a Chinese dinner, he returned home to find Fay, in her silver fox, collapsed on the living-room rug. In her left hand she was holding onto a gold menorah, which — she later told him — she had brought in with her from New Jersey. She had come all the way from South Orange in a cab, the nine-branched candelabra in one hand, a bottle of Scotch in the other. The taxi driver had helped her along beneath the canopy, and the doorman had supported her up to the doctor’s apartment, and inside she had passed out. On the floor she hugged the candelabra to her and wept over her children in California who wrote only a post card once a month. He helped her up and brought a cold cloth for her sad eyes, and it was then that he had made her promise that she would not drink again. Later, though it was in conflict with his atheistic principles, he allowed her to light the Chanukah candles and set them up on the fireplace mantle. A few days later they went up to Grossinger’s and stayed through the New Year. And now they were to be married. When they went out to dine, Mrs. Silberman would not even have a cocktail before her meal.

And the future? Well, why wouldn’t it be pleasant? There was a trip to the Bahamas planned for their honeymoon, and for the following spring they were talking about six weeks in South America; Fay had even called Cooks to inquire about arrangements. Nevertheless, there is no one who does not have the right to imagine what might have been — there are always the ifs. If, for instance, his son had come home to New York and given him a year or two—

He looked out to where a wave was driving in toward the shore, and he hoped that Gabe would not see it — that it would wash over him, drown him. Filled with rage, he wished that Gabe were dead. He wished that the boy had never been born. He was just like his mother — cold. He hated them both for leaving him.

But when the wave came rolling down and flowed up to the beach, he felt only remorse. His heart sank and did not rise again until he caught sight once more of his son’s head. How could he hate what had been everything to him? His wife, after all, had not willed leukemia upon herself. Yet in those black months after her death, with Gabe stationed halfway across the country in Oklahoma, Dr. Wallach would sometimes think that Anna had waited until he was all alone to die to see if he had learned anything from having lived a life with her. And had he? She had been a strong-willed, polished woman; for two generations in America, and in Hamburg for generations before that, the Seligs had been professional people, lawyers and physicians, and Anna Selig Wallach had been a true enough daughter of her class. There had been a certain wisdom about her, a contemplativeness, and — for all the precious goods that had always been hers — an understanding on her part of what it was not-to-have; she knew how you were to act when everything was taken from you, without cause or warning.

It had been an education for him, watching her die. It was as though her whole life had been a training for those last three months. Not once, from fear or pain, had she cried out; not once, for all the fatigue that weighed upon her, another pound a day, had she been mean or cross. She had not lost her temper — this impressed him greatly — and even her tears, which curiously were more frequent in the early weeks of the disease than in the last, had seemed more for him than for herself. And then one evening around dinnertime she left him, and it did not really seem that he had learned very much. He cried from fear and pain for a week. One night when Millie came in with his hot milk, which he hoped would be an aid to him in falling asleep, he had had to ask her, the maid, to sit down in the chair beside his bed for a few moments. It was several months before he could sleep with the light off; she died in the early fall and not until winter did there come a morning when he awoke to find the room lit by the gray sun and not by his bed lamp.

Then Gabe had been discharged, and when he had come home, what had his father done but driven him away? He had moaned and leaned, leaned and moaned, and there was Gabe flying off to Iowa, to Chicago! God in Heaven, why had he been so clutchy? If only he had learned a little from her, if only he had been able to remain calm … But that would have been unnatural! At his age he was entitled to his feelings — why should he act happy when he was sad? Why smile each time the boy went out the front door, when each time he wanted to cry? What kind of son was it, anyway, who left his aging father!

All sons. All sons leave their fathers. Of course. He considered himself a student of psychology and he was not naïve about certain facts of life. Just the other day on the beach he had had an interesting discussion about paternal problems with Abe Cole, one of New York’s leading psychoanalysts, who happened to have the house next door to Fay’s. He had told Abe, and four or five others sitting and chatting under their umbrella, that unhappy as he had been when his son had gone off for good, he had known in his heart that a boy does not become a man living in his father’s house. In part it had been to impress Abe with his objectivity and intelligence that he had spoken so, and to impress the others too, Fay’s summer friends, whom he suspected of not thinking so highly of dentists as they did of psychoanalysts. Also he had been trying to impress Fay, which he found himself doing fairly regularly of late. His desire to impress, however, had not led him to be hypocritical; he believed what he said — children grow up and go away. That was one of life’s laws to which he and his son could not expect to be made exceptions. Nevertheless (and this he had not been able to say to Abe, though it was what he had hoped they might get to talk about), there are certain circumstances, are there not? Special predicaments people wind up in that are not of their own choosing and that both child and parent have to recognize and make accommodations for? If only his son, for instance, had had an ounce of patience with him; if only he himself had displayed an ounce of control …

However, what was was. Be philosophic. He would have to work with what he had … Gabe had driven straight through from Chicago in one day and had arrived at eleven-thirty the night before. They had all sat down to have a cup of coffee and a sandwich together, and no real strains had been apparent. Gabe had even said good night to her as he went off to bed, and when they were alone again, Fay had commented on what nice posture the young man had. Well, there was a certain willingness in that remark, wasn’t there? And as for Gabe, he was an intelligent boy, a decent boy — so why then should there be strains? They were three grown people; if they all worked at it a little, they could have a week together that would be a foundation for their future happiness.

He reasoned and he reasoned, and still, when Gabe swam to shore, and Dr. Wallach handed a towel up to him, he found himself unable to relax. He was stiff and ill at ease, fearful of saying the wrong thing, all this in front of his own flesh and blood.

Gabe sat down beside him and they looked out at the sea. He asked if his father had gotten over his chill and Dr. Wallach assured him that he had. This enabled them to look out at the water again. The doctor checked his watch, but they were not due back for breakfast for another half hour. The beach was empty of people as far off as he could see.

“So how’s teaching this year?” Dr. Wallach asked. “Still crazy about it?”

“Oh, I like it all right.”

“Still like the Windy City?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Gabe, rubbing his towel across his shoulders, “I’m getting a little tired of it.”

He could hardly believe his ears. His heart took a long stride forward and met, head-on, the wall of his chest. Through some miracle of the will, he managed not to cry out, “Then come, come, my darling son — come back with me!”

He said instead, “Oh? No kidding.” He was so proud of his self-control that he could have shaken his own hand. He looked — casually — over at his son, and saw upon his face what seemed to be depression. “So,” he began again, “I suppose you won’t be hanging around Chicago very much from now on.”

“I don’t know. I’ve even been thinking of leaving teaching.”

“Something happen?”

“It’s just not quite as satisfying as it was. Maybe I’ll try something else for a while.”

“I see.” He attempted to let more than a second elapse, but couldn’t. “For instance, what? Just speaking off the cuff, you know.”

“Traveling. Maybe living in Europe for a while.”

“Oh. Uh-huh. Interesting …”

They had been speaking with their eyes toward the horizon, but now Gabe turned to the doctor and smiled. The boy had the height and carriage of his mother, but he had the doctor’s long head and stern good looks. There was no doubt that he was the doctor’s son. “But I’m not sure, you see, about anything,” he said.

Dr. Wallach wondered if his own stern eyes looked stern enough; they were not teary, and he most assuredly did not want them to look as though they were. “When would this be?” he asked. “You know, a year, two years—”

“I don’t know … I’m even thinking of resigning. Of not going back, except to get my belongings.”

“Well, this is a surprise.”

“For me too. It only occurred to me about halfway through Pennsylvania yesterday. As I said, I’m not even sure.”

“Well,” the doctor said — casual still — letting some sand drift slowly off his hands, “it just shows — your heart is in the East after all.”

“I didn’t mean to indicate that I’d decided anything—”

“Who said you decided anything? I was just making an observation.” They were silent. Until Dr. Wallach said, “I mean your business is certainly your business. Europe is a beautiful and educational place, there’s no doubt about that. It’s too bad you didn’t feel this way last year”—he was desperate with the desire to sound simply chatty—“when I was going.”

“Yes — well — I thought I’d stay a little longer. I’m not so much thinking of touring as settling down there awhile.”

“Well, sure, you’re single. Live it up. You still like the bachelor life, huh?”

Gabe shrugged. “I’m not planning to marry anybody just yet.”

“Certainly, take your time, look around. Take a walk down Fifth Avenue for yourself. The most beautiful women in the world. Let me put it this way: the Italian girl is a beautiful girl, I’ll grant that, and the French girl is certainly a girl of fine qualities too. And even the English girl has got something about her, very soft skin and so forth, but for nice wholesome all-around good looks, give me an American girl, any day. If I were a young man looking for a wife, I’d look right around here. You don’t even have to go very far from Central Park to find the kind of girl I’m talking about.”

Gabe only nodded his head. The doctor felt his face go incandescent — how obvious he was! His son said, “Shall we go back for breakfast? I’m getting hungry.”

They both got up. “No,” the doctor said, “I didn’t think Chicago was going to be your city forever. New York gets in a man’s blood — speaking for myself, I mean. You know that song, “Autumn in New York”—well, popular as it is, there’s some truth in it.”

“Of course my plans aren’t definite …” They started off.

“Look,” said Dr. Wallach, a finger on his son’s arm, “nobody’s plans are definite.”

“I suppose that’s so.”

He was afraid to say more. How could he tell him he was uncertain about Mrs. Silberman when he was actually uncertain whether or not he was uncertain? Suppose he confessed to doubt and married her later anyway? Could he possibly allow himself to appear even more weak, more needy, than he had already? To his own son?

Why not! Damn it, what was a family for, if not to be weak in front of?

“Would that be a breach of contract?” he heard himself asking. “Suddenly resigning like that?”

“No, no — I don’t even imagine I’ll do it. It was just something impractical, really, that I thought of in a groggy state.”

“After all, though, if you’re not happy out there, there’s no reason you should stay. You have a right to make your own decisions.”

“Dad, look …”

“What? What’s the matter now?”

“Nothing. You know, though, that when you and Mrs. Silberman marry — is this what you’re getting at?”

“What?”

“Well … let’s do get things out in the open. You know I couldn’t move in with you two. I mean if I were to leave Chicago. That would be very unrealistic for you to bank on. Surely you know that as well as I do.”

“Absolutely,” he shot back.

“Well, okay then. I’m sorry. I just began to feel that this conversation …”

“Absolutely not. I was thinking about your own welfare. Now you didn’t get anybody out there in trouble, did you?”

Gabe shook his head. “Just a change, that’s all.”

“Because if we’re going to be open with one another—”

“Yes?”

But he owed it to everybody not to whine, not to beg. He was a sixty-year-old man earning $35,000 a year; he could not act like a child. Instead of talking about his own ambivalence, he found himself talking about his son’s.

“I understand, of course, that this isn’t your mother. So, believe me, I understand your feelings.”

“Which feelings?”

“That you’re a little skeptical where Fay is concerned.”

“If I’ve been skeptical, it’s not been my business to be. Above all I want you to be happy. If this is going to bring you contentment—”

He heard the real emotion in his son’s voice, and now did indeed feel tears in his eyes. “It will,” he said, interrupting. “I’m absolutely sure of that.” He felt at once proud and ashamed of the strength he had displayed. Then his eyes were dry.

“Fine,” Gabe said. He was even smiling. “I’m not skeptical.”

“Of course. It’s a psychological thing, and I understand how that is, how that comes about.”

“Fine.”

“Though I don’t mean you’re not entitled to express your opinion. We’re both grown men, and you’re an intelligent person, obviously, and of course I’m always interested in your opinion on that ground alone. If you want to express an opinion to me about Fay, there’s no reason for me not to hear it.”

“I don’t have an opinion. I only wanted to know that you wanted this.”

“Well, why should you have any doubts?”

Gabe’s answer was some time in coming. “I don’t want to interfere. It’s not my business to tell anybody how to run his life.”

“No, no, go right ahead. I’m not a fragile icicle. I’d like to hear your objection. Why shouldn’t I be open-minded to all points of view?”

“It’s no objection.”

“What is it?”

“It’s only her drinking. It seemed to me — I might be wrong — a little excessive.”

“Well, it isn’t any more.” The doctor stopped and waited. Would there be some further objection — one he had no answer to?

“You don’t believe me?” the doctor asked.

“I believe you.”

“Because it’s a fact. She has given it up. It was only a temporary thing to begin with, a way for her to forget her husband. That’s the way I analyze it.”

“And now she’s forgotten him?”

“You see, you’re just acting psychological again. That’s not a fair remark. You hardly know the woman.”

“I’m sorry then. I didn’t mean to sound so hard.”

“Giving up something like drinking, even when it’s only been a temporary relief, shows a certain strength of character.”

“I agree. Maybe we ought to stop with this conversation. I only wanted to be sure, that’s all.”

“Sure of what?”

“That this was what you wanted.”

And what more could he say? After all, Fay had given up drinking, and that was proof of some real fiber in her. What other objection could Gabe have that would carry any weight — that she was not as smart as his own mother? Well, at age sixty you come to realize that intelligence isn’t everything. There are other qualities one looks for in a person. To go around expecting that he would meet in one lifetime another woman as fine and intelligent as his first wife was to go around expecting the impossible. Besides, he did not even know if that was what he wanted. Being more intelligent than Fay had turned out to be a pleasure for him — it made him feel like somebody. On the beach, for instance, he could hold his own now with a fellow like Abe Cole, rather than feeling it necessary to sit back and listen while Anna, say, conversed with the psychoanalyst.

Of course, there were moments when he was nettled slightly by the things Fay did not know or care about. Particularly since she had given up drinking, he had found her not so quick and lively a woman as he had been thinking she was. When they discussed the news events of the day, for instance, there was a certain vagueness on her part, and he had discovered that she was weak on geography. But surely that was to be preferred to a zeal and vivaciousness that had been inspired by drunkenness — which itself had been inspired by sorrow and loss. So what objection did he have? That she was not Anna? One, she couldn’t be expected to be somebody else; and two, in certain ways she was a much more natural woman than Anna had ever been. When she was unhappy at least she let you know it — she got drunk. The trouble with his wife had been that she had never needed anyone. Even in dying she had been a perfect lady. But how he had wished that she would break down, how he had wished that she would ask him to close his office and stick by her bed day and night. Surely it was what he would have done had it been he who was dying of leukemia. And still, how he had revered her! How lucky to have been her husband. Her taste, her ideas, her gentility, the way she had of expressing herself … But then that grace and charm had been her power. He had gone through life thinking of himself as not having ideas and preferences of his own. And that was against nature; he knew now it had helped to make him, for all his wisecracking and fitfulness, a very melancholy man. With Fay he positively shone in conversation; he felt an honest-to-goodness surge within him as she sat there nodding her head and listening. If only Anna could hear him now … But it was Fay’s ears that listened, and Fay’s eyes which, though they may not have comprehended all the fine points, at any rate revered him for speaking in their direction.

It was all too confusing; how could a man of his years and station admit to his own child that he did not know what he wanted — especially when the child was a man with whom he could no longer express his love in ways that had been available to him twenty years earlier? You could not toss a man of one hundred and seventy-five pounds up in the air and catch him in your arms. Hardly. And that too served to confuse matters — for even if the son could be persuaded, it might not be as satisfying living with him as Dr. Wallach had once imagined. The young man was occupied with his own affairs; all that brooding about leaving Chicago must have to do with people and happenings of which his father was ignorant, in which his father had no place. There was really no choice about Fay then; she was all he could hope for.

When next he spoke he was in the grips of a vertigo worse than the one that had seized him earlier when he had dived into the ocean with his son. Dizzy, numb, trembling, he had complained of a chill, and come back to the shore, sending the boy off to swim by himself. He had managed then to walk back to his towel without giving a sign of his condition, but now he actually feared that he would stagger in the middle of what he was saying.

What was he saying? He heard his voice but the experience of utterance did not seem to be his. “Look, this reaction isn’t a reasoned one. I don’t want you to feel I hold you entirely responsible.” He found he was not even sure of his subject. Oh, yes — his son and Fay. “After all, it’s Hamlet. Oedipus.”

They were turning up through a ridge that the wind had cut in the dunes; they moved toward the street where the car was parked. “After all,” the doctor said, “this is an ancient thing, very deep and imbedded in the human race, this business between children and men.” His hand was on his son’s shoulder, as if it were the boy he was steadying. “If I were you, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Now this is quite a case we’re dealing with. This is strictly a case of morality …” The dining room, situated in a turret that extended off the old house, was alive with sunlight. The house itself had belonged, years ago, to a Sag Harbor whaling captain; it still was filled with objects from all parts of the world, many of them worn and chipped and frazzled, but as the doctor had told his fiancée, full of warmth and feeling. The pictures on the walls, old fishing scenes and nautical maps of the Sound, could hardly be seen for the strong light that bounced off the glass that encased them. Fay was holding a match to a cigarette that she had placed in her ivory holder. She looked nothing less than aristocratic in the surroundings, especially with the holder, which the doctor had bought for her because he believed it gave her substance. Gabe, in white trousers and a blue polo shirt, was settled back in his chair sipping coffee.

Breakfast had been a success — except that Dr. Wallach still had to do most of the talking. Fay, of course, had been busy serving, and Gabe had been busy eating. But now, with second cups of coffee on the table, the doctor felt the time had come to draw them out. The sparkle of the brass coffee pot, the light on the rosewood dining chairs, Fay’s ivory holder between her lips, Gabe’s crisp summery good looks, even the simple fact that his son’s hair was still damp, made Dr. Wallach feel more optimistic about his family situation than he had in a long while. When he reached up to scratch his nose, he could smell the salt from the sea on the back of his hand; this too produced hope and excitement in him.

“Here,” Dr. Wallach said, “is a man of no little education—” He was laying out his silverware as though each piece were the term in a syllogism. Hopeful as he was, he couldn’t keep his hands still. “A physician, a man of the community, a respected person — no doubt a man of means. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, not rich, but comfortable. He has what he wants, and then a little bit more. All that, and yet he takes his life and jeopardizes it. Now what will this poor fellow’s fate be? What was he up to? Was he right or was he wrong?”

Fay nodded; he supposed she thought he would now proceed to answer his own question. She continued with her smoking.

“Fay?” he said.

“Yes?”

“What do you think about this?”

“Well … it’s a very interesting predicament.”

It did not please him to hear her use a phrase that was a favorite of his own. But agreeably he said, “It certainly is.” He smoothed the edge of the white tablecloth. Then to be dramatic, to shake them up a little, he slapped the table so hard that the silverware jumped. Of late he was getting rather a kick out of thinking of himself as someone who was an unpredictable conversationalist. “What do you think, Professor?” He looked over at his son, who, thank goodness, was smiling. He could not say that the boy was not trying to be amiable. “Place yourself in the fellow’s circumstances. The child is brought to you near death. I won’t go into the medical nomenclature — the child simply needs a transfusion, that’s the gist of it. The parents are Seventh Day Adventists. They tell you they cannot allow the child a transfusion. You tell them the child will die without it. They say they do not believe in eating blood.”

There was a flicker of his son’s eyes toward the window. Bored? Did he want to go already? Or was he just back to his own problems? Well, what kind of problems could they be? Young, in good health, a respected position — what kind of problem was it to be at the very brink of everything?

“But, Mordecai”—Fay was shaking her head—“excuse me, but the child would take the blood in the veins. That’s not the same thing at all.”

“Ah-ha,” said Dr. Wallach. Irritation with his son faded as he felt a fish at the end of his line. Real interest had at last come swimming up out of a sea of silence — as expected. The little news item in the second section of the Times had caught his imagination, and he knew it could not help but do the same with the others. Though he had read it while Gabe was showering and Fay was beating the eggs, he had saved it until breakfast was over, so that they could converse without the distraction of food. Now for a good old-fashioned family discussion … “Ah-ha,” he said, “but we are enlightened, we are students of the eighteenth century.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Silberman said.

“You’re talking about reason, Fay, intelligence. But to them,” the doctor pointed out, “a transfusion is eating blood. Now, once again, what’s the answer?”

He tapped his fork on his plate. “Gabe? Fay?”

Gabe only shrugged and smiled. Something distressing moved across the doctor’s consciousness: was he being patronized?

“Education,” Fay announced. “There’s an area where we could certainly learn something from the Russians.”

Disappointed, the doctor could nevertheless not help but be braced by her good will. She was going to flatter his son. All right. At least her interest had moved beyond the question of his posture.

“Well, perhaps,” Dr. Wallach said. “But I don’t know that you’re quite on the point. You’re not a teacher, you see, you’re a doctor. What do you do? Does he respect what the people want, or does he give them what they don’t want, what he thinks is best for them? Gabe, go ahead. You’re an intellectual person — this is an exercise of the intellect, I’d say. I’m interested in differing opinions on this subject.”

“Yes, I’d like to hear his thinking on this too,” Fay said. “The academic approach.”

“Well,” Gabe said.

“Your honest opinion,” said the doctor, excited.

“Well, I think it could probably be explained to them—”

“You see, Mordecai,” Fay said, “education—”

“Shhh …” he said.

Gabe started again. “I think it could probably be explained to the parents. That is, the doctor could make a distinction for them—”

“Go ahead, go ahead,” Dr. Wallach said, “very interesting this distinction business.”

“That there are rules on the one hand, but that there’s the essence of the religion too. That the rules can be suspended sometimes in the name of what’s most essential. The child’s life, living, is more crucial than the breaking of the commandment, or the law, not to eat blood.”

Dr. Wallach saw Mrs. Silberman clicking her tongue. He did not know whether to interrupt before she said something not quite worthy of herself, or to let the conversation he had worked so to initiate, go its own way. He tried relaxing as she said, “Well, I just can’t see it. I mean they are not eating blood. I can’t agree to that. A transfusion just isn’t eating blood, not to my way of thinking.”

Gabe mumbled something and turned his attention back to his coffee cup.

“Wait a minute, just a minute,” the doctor rushed in. “This isn’t a dispute. Actually I don’t think that’s quite the point Gabe was making, Fay. If I have it right, Gabe, what you’re saying—”

“We just disagree, I suppose,” she said with a tinkly laugh. “Because to me, you see, you can’t even begin to call a blood transfusion eating blood. Our veins are one thing, and our mouths another.”

Gabe simply sighed.

“Please,” said Fay, waving a hand and turning to face him, “I’m not asking you to give in. Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion.”

“True,” the young man said.

Oh no — was Fay going to carry a grudge? The boy no longer objected to her; he had made that clear on the beach. Couldn’t she let by-gones be by-gones? But then she didn’t know they were … He could not decide whether to give up on the conversation or to try to smooth things over.

“Well,” he said, “I think that threw some light. I think, however, Gabriel, I think I might agree you were side-stepping a little. These, after all, aren’t people who can be reasoned with.”

“Of course they aren’t. They’re ignorant,” Fay said.

She spoke so forcefully that the doctor nearly became frantic. “See, that’s his approach, Fay. That’s just one approach — this is an intellectual exercise, we’re simply working out the kinks in our minds.”

“Still—”

But he raised his palm at her, a policeman halting traffic; he could feel his eyes hardening. And it worked — she shut up. What they should do now, he thought, was get into their swim suits, take the umbrella and chairs, and go down to the beach for the rest of the day. Surely, however, the three of them could conduct an adult conversation; he was not suggesting that they should all learn to live forever in the same house. To ask for a little respect and understanding was not, to his way of thinking, to ask for too much.

Gabe had set down his empty cup on the table; he seemed waiting for permission to leave. Well, he could just stay where he was! The father was still the father, and the son the son! “So what would you do?” Dr. Wallach asked.

“I—” Gabe rubbed his hands along his trousers. “I’d give the child the transfusion.”

“You realize the law now,” said the doctor, instantly impassioned again. “You realize the law says no minor can be operated on, given a transfusion or whatever, without permission of the parents. You understand that now?”

“I’d give the child the transfusion.” Gabe had spoken in a very soft voice.

“All right, all right.” Dr. Wallach took his spoon and crossed it over his knife. He leaned back in his chair and tilted his head so that all the loose skin of his throat was drawn upwards. He addressed the fancy chandelier. “I wouldn’t,” he said.

“Mordecai!” Fay said.

He spread two hands on the tablecloth — the hands of a murderer, he thought, feeling a strange excitement — and left them there, palms down. “That’s right. I wouldn’t give the child a drop of blood.”

“That’s not a bit like you,” Fay said.

How did she know? Perhaps Anna had known what he was like … but then having known, she had dealt with him. At least Fay didn’t simply deal with him; she admired him. Worse — she sentimentalized him, she misunderstood and overvalued him. All of which he had encouraged. He had chosen this house for her with a taste he pretended was his own; but he knew he really had no taste. The furnishings were of a kind that his dead wife would have liked for a summer place, and so he had said to Fay, “Take it.” And she had.

He kept two strong hands on the table anyway. “It’s a matter of respect,” he said, “that we’re dealing with. You see? The parent is the father to the child.’ Wordsworth?” he asked, turning to Gabe. Then he realized his mistake. But it was only one of several misquotations and malapropisms that had lately passed his lips. And though inaccuracy — pretension — was one thing when the audience was Fay, it was another when it was his son — or Abe Cole. It was not, he suddenly recalled, Recollections of Things Past, but Remembrance! And Oedipus was not by Socrates — it was by Sophocles! Christ! Under the umbrella yesterday, what an ass he must have seemed. What was he up to, passing himself off as something he wasn’t? Was this his fate at the age of sixty, to be a fool?

Gabe was saying, “I think it’s ‘The child is the father of the man ’—but I know what you mean.”

It did not help the doctor’s condition any to know that his son now felt the need to be kind to him. “I believe in the depth of belief,” Dr. Wallach said, raising his voice. “If the other fellow’s got a belief, I honor that belief. We have to have more respect for the other fellow’s wish; he wants what he believes in. Who am I to tell him differently?”

“You’d let the child die?” Gabe asked.

“Absolutely!” He had not felt so sure before as he did now.

“Well,” Gabe said, “I don’t know …”

“Don’t know what?”

“I don’t know if you really would do it, faced with the situation.”

“Then you don’t know me.”

Apparently no one could think of what to say next. Dr. Wallach piled some silverware on his plate; then he turned and asked Fay her opinion. “Go ahead,” he said, “this is still a discussion as far as I’m concerned, not a dispute.”

She put out her cigarette in the ash tray. The grainy look around her dark eyes gave her an air of knowingness — until she spoke. “This is certainly a case of morals,” she said, and the doctor heard his own words once again. “Morals certainly enters into it …”

“Exactly,” he said, and quickly he turned to his son. “What do I seem to you here, Gabe, too — too Nietzschean?”

“No, no, I don’t think that.”

“I’m telling you, if the chips were down, if I had been this poor fellow in Texas, that’s what I would have done.”

Gabe seemed at last to have run out of patience. “Why? So you wouldn’t lose your license?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Then it’s still a mystery to me.”

“You believe I’d do it though?”

“Yes, yes, I suppose I do.”

“All right, all right. The why, I’ll grant you, is the crux all right.”

Mrs. Silberman flicked open the initialed gold case that had been her engagement present, and put a new cigarette into her holder. Since she had stopped drinking, she smoked all the time. Did that serve to blur the image of her first husband too? If it was such a difficult image to blur, if it wouldn’t just stay blurred, then why was she even thinking of another man? Was he simply to be a convenience?

“All right, why then?” Gabe asked.

“Because,” said Dr. Wallach, his thoughts turning with difficulty back to the issue at hand, “I respect people.”

Mrs. Silberman momentarily withdrew the match from the end of the cigarette. “Mordecai loves people,” she said, then she held very steady while she lit her cigarette.

“And I don’t?”

Dr. Wallach did not know to whom Gabe had directed the question. Immediately he said, “Well, you don’t respect the parents to disobey their wish that way.”

“I respect the child,” Gabe said.

The doctor moved one finger around in a circle just in front of his chin; he circled, he circled, then he saw the light. “Ah that’s something, that’s curious.” He turned to his fiancée. “You see that? That’s identification that I was telling you about. You see, he’s never been a parent, so he can’t understand the parent’s position. But what has he been? What?”

Either she did not know, or out of respect was waiting for him to say it.

“A child,” he announced. “So he takes the child’s side in this thing.”

“I see,” Fay said.

“Wait a minute,” Gabe said, “things are getting confused here. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I meant I respect the child’s right to live, and not the parent’s desire to kill it. I can’t have any respect for that. If you want to go ahead and be Freudian and pursue this thing all the way down—”

“Sure, sure, what? — go ahead—” Dr. Wallach said. “What?”

“Well, I don’t know. You might say that the parents are using what they see as moral and religious reasons for doing away with the child. You see, I don’t know anything about the case”—he motioned toward the floor, where the newspaper was—“the specifics of it, but it’s even possible that for some strange reason they want to kill the child. Look, we can’t begin to—”

“Now that’s an awful thing to say,” Fay told him, “even in jest. Parents give themselves up for their children. Look at all your father has done for you. Harvard, nice clothes, a car—”

“No, no,” said Dr. Wallach, silencing her, “let’s hear him. A theory is a theory. I’m very interested in his theories.”

“It’s not a theory,” Gabe said. “I just want to rule out this identification business. You’re not arguing on the issue then. You’re wanting to argue with me.”

Dr. Wallach pointed a finger at the boy, as though sharp thinking on his son’s part had caught him out, as though his lapse had been a deliberate point of strategy, a test of the young man’s alertness. “The old ad hominem — right,” he said. “Well, okay, I’ll give him that,” he told Fay.

“Fine,” Gabe said, and took a deep breath.

“Then you were saying?” Dr. Wallach asked.

“I was only asking,” Gabe said, “what right, as a physician, you would have to allow the death of a child, a patient, whose life you could easily save. That’s all, really.”

“And I told you. People have a firm religious belief, a way of life they cherish, then I leave them alone. I myself am an atheist—”

Mrs. Silberman bestowed upon him a motherly look.

“I am, Fay, please, and I have a perfect right to be. The same with these parents. Each man knows what’s best for himself. You’ll get older,” he told Gabe, “you’ll see you can’t rule the world.”

“Don’t people trick themselves ever?”

“That’s their business. What looks like a trick to you may not be a trick to them.”

“Well …” Gabe said, and he stood up.

“Well what?”

“Nothing. I just believe you’re talking theoretically. If you pulled a tooth, and the patient was bleeding unduly and a transfusion was necessary — well, you’d give it. At least I think you would.”

“I would not,” Dr. Wallach said in a loud voice. “I absolutely would not.”

“Well,” said Gabe, closing his hands slowly, “okay.”

“You see, this is a perfect example of an inability on your part to recognize somebody’s beliefs. You don’t know why people do what they do, believe me.”

“True. I simply said that if one were to let somebody die needlessly, that would be wrong.”

“To you what I do is wrong. Not to me!”

“I didn’t say you were wrong. I said I felt the position was wrong!”

“I’m the positon.” Dr. Wallach was trembling. “I have my set of beliefs, you have yours—”

His son was leaning toward him, his hands on the back of a chair. “Please, I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I guess we just don’t agree about the transfusion. I’m willing to accept that.”

Fay was trying to absorb herself in smoking, but it wasn’t working. She had gone pale. “Sure, it’s only a game,” she said. “I know people who scream at each other over Scrabble.”

“It’s not a game.” Dr. Wallach lifted his napkin and threw it on the table. His eyes were burning and he looked at neither of them. “This actually happened … in … in …” He picked a section of the paper off the rug. He cleared his throat; he found it necessary to clear it again. “In Texas. Here.” He handed the paper across to Mrs. Silberman. “There, in black and white, what could happen to any of us. This man is going to lose his license, he can go to jail. It’s a historical fact — go ahead, read it. I didn’t make it up.”

Mrs. Silberman looked at the paper, then handed it to Gabe.

Dr. Wallach began stacking the breakfast dishes. “People’s lives, you don’t go fooling in them. You let people be themselves — you can ruin a life like that. Your own mother, on her last night, that’s what she talked about. That’s what she regretted above anything else. Don’t interfere—”

He set the dishes down and left the room.

In a few minutes the door opened and someone walked over to the bed. He did not open his eyes.

“Mordecai?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“I just became overexcited.”

He felt her sit lightly down beside him. He could sense that she was afraid. She had reason to be. He wanted to open his eyes and tell her that he could not marry her. Youthful and trim as he had tried to keep himself, abreast as he had tried to stay of current affairs, he was an old man and he had had his life. Anna had been more than he could handle or understand, but he had asked her to marry him; maybe that was why he had asked her. He did not know. He had thought at the time and he thought still that he had loved Anna. He could no longer tell; he had never really been good at figuring people out. All he knew now was what he felt, and what he felt was no love for Fay. And no love for his son either. What was the use of loving him any more? He had sat there like a stranger, never once saying the right thing.

Fay was speaking. “Let him think what he wants, Mordecai.”

“I’m not telling him what to think.”

“Everybody’s entitled to his own opinion,” she said. “The individuals involved know what’s best.”

“Absolutely,” he said.

There was a knock on the door. Fay got up from the bed and opened it a little. Dr. Wallach heard his son ask if everything was all right.

“He’s resting,” Fay answered. “I think his swim tired him out.”

“Tell him I’m sorry.”

“Look, young man, you’re entitled to your opinions.”

“Please, just tell him that I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”

She closed the door and came back to the bed. “When they grow up,” she said, “they think they know more than their parents. He says that he’s sorry. Now he says it.”

“Fay,” Dr. Wallach said, “take my hand.”

“Of course, darling. He had no right, Mordecai, it was only a game—”

“Just take my hand,” he said. “Please, don’t say anything.”

4

That morning, when Cynthia rolled over, she found that her brother had climbed the ladder of the double-decker bed and crawled into the upper bunk beside her. Barely awake, she felt she must be floating in the hollow of a bad bad dream, and suddenly, furious, confused, she pushed with violence at the sleeping little boy. He rolled only once and fell from the bed. There was the thud of his head against the wooden floor, then no further sound. It appeared that Markie was going to sleep right through it; he did not even cry.

But when Cynthia leaned out over the top bunk, she noticed something more. At first it seemed to be a red string wedged in the crack between the floor boards — only it was moving toward the wall. Trembling, she waited for her father or June to come through the door and see what she had done. When time passed and no one had entered, she thought she had just better try to fall back to sleep again. And then it became clear to her that it could not be a bad dream she was having, for if it were, she would be trying to wake herself up rather than fall asleep. She rolled toward the wall anyway and closed her eyes. It was then that she began to scream.

Later in the morning her father telephoned from Southampton Hospital. Cynthia sat in the sunny living room turning the pages of a large picture book of statues, while in the hallway June whispered into the mouthpiece. Her stepmother hung up the phone and came in to tell her to put on her bathing suit. They would go to the beach; was that all right? The child turned another page, and then June was kneeling down and holding Cynthia to her. She allowed herself to be held. Her stepmother’s hair, a sunnier shade than her real mother’s hair, was swept up at the back of her head; Cynthia could imagine the way it looked from the way it felt against her cheek. Soft, fine, whirled up — Markie said it was candy. She could see her brother stiffen with pleasure when he drew in his breath and lowered his face right down into the swell of June’s hair. June was very thin, and when she wore a bathing suit or a summer dress, all silky and flower-smelling, Cynthia could see that she had no breasts; there was just skin over bone, like a man. All a child could really push his face into was her hair; and though Markie might amuse himself in this way, Cynthia did not think that it was suitable for her. Not that June had ever favored Markie; it was only that her hair had somehow seemed his property from the start. Certainly June had never scolded her when she spilled her milk — and she had spilled it often during the first month she had come to live in New York City. Nor had June ever once been as cross as her real mother had been to her so many times. Even now June’s first impulse was not to blame Cynthia for what had happened, which was surely what her old mother would have done. No one, in fact, had had a chance to ask questions or make accusations. Only minutes after she had begun screaming, her father had carried Markie down to the car wrapped in a big towel, and driven him away in the station wagon. Though it had looked comical for a grownup to be backing a car out of a driveway wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, she had managed not to laugh. When the car swerved down into the road, there had been a flash of blood on the front side door, and then any hint of a smile had vanished completely from her face. She had walked back to the house, taken a sculpture book she liked from the shelf, and settled into a chair by the window; she pretended to be absorbed in the book, while above all she was absorbing herself in being quiet. A blind person could not have heard her turn the pages, and her respiration was as silent as the shifting of the tides of her blood — a shifting that seemed to be taking place in the hollow of her throat.

The house was quieter than it had ever been during the daytime. No child was scooting up the stairs, no friend was slamming through the front screen door, no one was arguing with anyone — and that was a change. Lately her father and June seemed always to be bickering at one another at breakfasttime. Ever since they had come out to Springs, there was something that June kept saying to her father in the mornings that made him angry. One morning he had become so angry that he had picked up his plate and thrown it clear across the breakfast nook to the kitchen. Markie had begun to giggle and point to where the yolk was slipping down the wallpaper onto the enamel of the sink, but she knew enough to keep her eyes on her bowl and continue spooning cereal into her dry mouth. Only June had gotten up to leave the table.

And yet that evening, when the two of them were sitting out in the white garden chairs after dinner, she had seen her father lean over and kiss June’s hands and then her hair and her neck — all while Mark went circling around the house on his tricycle, pretending to be a fire engine, until it was time for him to go to bed. Earlier in the summer there had been an evening when she had been asked to go into the house for some ice from the refrigerator; when she had come onto the back steps holding the cold tray, she had seen her father open a button of June’s blouse and put a hand to where her breasts should have been. June was thin, but beautiful too, and she had those perfect white teeth that Cynthia saw at that moment, as her stepmother’s head went back and her father pulled her to him with his other hand. When her father hugged and kissed June, she knew it was because June was beautiful, and had been a debutante, and was rich, and had gone to Bryn Mawr College. She would be going there too now that she was rich; Martha had not gone there because she had not been rich at all. Markie was to go to Harvard College, June said, which seemed to Cynthia a ridiculous statement — Markie could not read yet, or even count successfully beyond twelve. But June and her father said ridiculous things quite often, her father particularly. In Springs he was thought of as a very funny man, though everyone agreed that Cynthia was his toughest audience. “Come on, Ed Sullivan,” he would finally have to say to her, “how about just a giggle, just a little snort — just raise a lip even—” Whenever there were people around he would amuse them, unless, of course, he was unhappy, as he had been when June had made him throw his egg.

At night June and her father slept together in their own room in only one bed. Consequently, she knew that June would be having a baby soon. No one had spoken about it yet, but she was aware that there were happenings of which she was not warned in advance. She had figured out that the baby was coming, for she had been able to discover it was the right month. Some time earlier she had found out that a woman could only have a baby if it was the right month. She knew it was the right month because Mrs. Griffin had simply come right out and said so. She had leaned back onto her beach towel and put two wet little pieces of cotton over her eyes, and she had remarked what a perfect month it had been—it had been just right.

So she knew — and she did not like it either. She was not anxious to have still another brother or sister around the house. The smaller the child the more adults seemed to like it. At least the bigger she became the less people cared about her. She knew for a fact that all her father’s friends in Springs liked Markie better than her. They were always picking him up and putting him down, though she herself did not really weigh that much more. She had even heard her father say to June that though Markie was the same jolly boy he had always been, Cynthia had turned into a very grave child. And whatever that meant, it was not so. She would have told June — if she had thought that June would not have been predisposed in another direction — that it was her father who had changed. Of course he called her his “special baby,” and of course he swung her over his head, and whenever June kissed Markie he would march right over and kiss her. Yet whatever he did displeased her; every time she suspected he was about to do something that would make her happy, he did it, and it made her sad. Surely when he kissed her she should be happy — but she knew that June did not particularly like him to do it, and so even that finally caused discomfort.

Actually June didn’t like him to kiss girls at all. That was what they had been arguing over when her father had thrown his egg. He had said that June didn’t even want him to talk to them, to stand within ten feet of them; June said that wasn’t so, he said it was, she said it wasn’t — and then the two halves of his plate were rattling on the floor and Markie was pointing at the egg sliding into the sink. Looking steadily into her cereal bowl, Cynthia had been able to imagine how it all had happened: on the Griffin’s lawn, where the party had been the night before, her father must have gone up to a girl who was there and kissed her. Cynthia was even able to imagine the girl, in a billowy dress and patent leather sandals like her own new Papagallos … Now whenever her father kissed her, she believed that partly it was to spite June, and she knew that would make June angry at her, make her cross the way her old mother used to be.

So in the Reganhart household, matters of affectionate display became complicated for a while: first June would kiss Markie, then her father would come over to kiss Cynthia, and Cynthia would have to run out of the room, or up the beach, or to the far end of the garden to get away from him. Which made her father angry with her. For the time being she did not want to be kissed by anyone. She had not, however, pushed Markie from her bunk because June preferred to kiss him, or because she had thought her little brother had himself wanted to kiss her. She had pushed him out because he did not belong there in the first place. He was going to do something to her. She had not had to explain to anybody why she had pushed him, because nobody as yet had asked what had happened. Nobody had scolded her and nobody so far had said what the punishment was to be.

When she was being driven to the beach in June’s convertible, her stepmother asked her, “Did you see it, Cynthia?”

“See what?”

After a moment June said, “See Markie fall.”

And Cynthia replied, “I was sleeping.” And then she knew that what she had begun to suspect was not — as usually happened — simply what she was beginning to hope for. She knew that she was not to be punished at all. June had taken one hand from the steering wheel and put it on top of Cynthia’s head, gently.

No one knew what had happened. Only Markie, and he didn’t know either. He couldn’t, for the same reason that he couldn’t have been going to do something to her — he had been sleeping. But of course she didn’t know that anything really had to be done. If it was the right month and a man got into bed with a lady, that was that. Her father had a penis like Markie’s, and she, June, her mother, and Mrs. Griffin all had vaginas. All men had penises. They were what gave you the babies.

At Barnes Hole, where the beach was touched by an endless silver bay, she decided that she did not even want to get out of the car.

“Don’t you feel well, dear?” June was asking.

“I don’t want to go here.” She had a sense of some new power that was hers; but now that she was at the bay, at the brink of a regular day, the familiarity of the landscape and the routine was not the comfort she had been expecting it would be.

“Where would you prefer to go?” June removed her sunglasses. While she rubbed her eyes Cynthia had to turn away — their redness embarrassed her. “Would you like to visit somebody?”

“I just don’t want to go here, I’ll tell you that.”

“Well, how about the ocean beach?”

“I suppose so.”

“Honey, where would you like to go?”

“Oh, the ocean beach is okay.”

She did not look up to see what the effect had been of the little snarl in her voice. But looking down she saw that June’s slender suntanned hand, the one with the pretty blue ring, had curled over hers again. In a moment the car had turned and they were headed for the ocean. The wind blew her hair — a delightful cool feminine feeling — and she could not help herself: she was smiling. It was because she had had to look straight into Markie’s blood that she was receiving so much care and attention; she knew this, but she continued smiling anyway. The truth was that she deserved special attention; the sight of the red blood creeping down the floor boards had nearly turned her stomach. She had cried and become hysterical, and she had screamed and screamed. She remembered now what it was she had screamed: “Markie fell! Markie fell out!”

And hadn’t he? Well, hadn’t he? If not, then June would be punishing her now instead of rewarding her with kindnesses. If anyone at all had pushed Markie it was God, who had seen that it was a sin for her stupid little brother to get in bed with her when they weren’t married.

They were driving along the road that led between the trees to Amagansett. “Don’t you like Barnes any more?” June asked.

“The water’s dirty.”

“I thought it was so clean—”

“I don’t like it there! I’m not going there!”

“Nobody’s making you,” June said, and that, she thought happily, was the case. At the edge of Springs they approached the small grocery store with the gas pump out in front. June pulled the car over and parked by the steps that led up to the store. She went inside to make a phone call, while Cynthia waited in the car and spelled out the sign over the doorway.

H. Savage — Groceries and Gas

Barnes Hole Rd, Springs

It had turned out, of course, that there was no hole at Barnes at all. She had looked for it during the first week of her stay. By herself she had walked the long stretch of beach, and then she had even enlisted Markie, but he was no help because he kept seeing holes, virtual abysses, that weren’t even there. At low tide she went off alone, dragging her legs through the receding waters, but with no luck; at last she had to come back up to the blanket, her nose wet and the ends of her hair damp, and ask June where the hole was. June explained to her that it was only a name given to the place — officially it was called Barnes Landing. But all the ladies continued to smile and she realized that it was something a child wasn’t supposed to know. And she was right — that same afternoon a boy with large ears had let her hang onto his tube with him, and he seemed so helpful she had decided to ask him where the hole was. He had pointed between her legs and then ducked her under the water.

She looked up the steps. Nobody in the dark store was near enough to see her; all she could make out were June’s white sandals and one hand holding a Kleenex. She slid down into the crevice of the front seat of the convertible. Pushing her bathing suit aside, she put her finger a little way inside herself. So far, no baby.

Soon June emerged into the sunlight, but her expression was impossible to figure out. She had on dark glasses and was wearing her big straw coolie hat — the one Markie used to like to parade around in — and a blue jumper over the top of her bathing suit. Cynthia thought she looked like a man, but then she came down off the little porch swinging herself like a lady, and got into the car.

“May I turn the radio on?”

June nodded and they started away.

“Is it okay if I listen to music?”

“That’s fine,” June said.

Turning all the knobs, she asked, “Did you call the hospital?”

“I spoke to your father. Markie’s resting — Cynthia, could you tune it down just a little?”

“Is he unconscious?” She had heard earlier that he was.

“That just means he’s getting a good rest, Cynthia. It’s the body’s way of making sure we get a good rest.”

“Will he be all right then?”

“Of course—” June said. “Cynthia, please lower the radio—”

“But then I won’t be able to hear it—”

June did not answer. Cynthia listened to the music, her concentration not so intense that she did not notice the tears moving down June’s cheeks. “Well, when he comes home,” Cynthia said, her hair blowing wonderfully out behind her again, “we’ll have to teach him not to fall out like that any more. He was never very careful. Even my mother will tell you that.”

Only four other cars were parked at the end of the street leading down to the ocean beach; it was not yet noon. Cynthia raced around to help June take the blanket and folding chair out of the trunk. From the trough in which the spare tire sat, she un-wedged her pail and shovel, which she had hardly played with all summer. She grabbed Markie’s pail and shovel too, and dragged both pails along the pebbles of the parking area. Then she waited for June to tell her to put Markie’s pail back where it belonged. Instead, her stepmother reached out and smoothed the top of the child’s hair.

They spread the blanket out where the beach began its slope toward the water. A wave had rolled in a moment before, and the four or five people floundering in the sudsy wake were all laughing and calling to one another. To Cynthia the waves looked large and unfriendly. She carried her pails down to where the sand was wet and started to dig, turning regularly to see what June was doing behind her. A book was open on her stepmother’s lap, though she did not seem to be reading it. She did not seem really to be doing anything.

When her sand castle had been washed away, she looked back to see that her stepmother was talking with Mr. Siegel. Pretending to hunt for seashells, she cut a zigzag path up toward the blanket. By the time she was close enough to hear, they had stopped saying anything.

“Hi, Cindy Lou,” Mr. Siegel said.

She ran to where he knelt in the sand beside June. “We saw your television program the other night, Mr. Siegel,” she said.

“Well, let’s hear the dark news,” he said. “What’s my rating, friend?” She knew that he was one of the people who liked to pick up Markie all the time. Markie, however, was in the hospital this particular morning.

“Oh I loved it!”

“Come on,” he said, “you’re kidding me.” He tossed a handful of sand at her feet. “I understand you’re a skeptic about TV. Your father tells me you’re an intellectual, that you spend your mornings looking through books on Brancusi.”

“I like TV though,” she said. She had not quite gotten the sense of all he had said to her. “It was really funny when that old grandfather started slicing up that turkey and then it fell right in his lap. Boy, did I begin to laugh — didn’t I, June?”

June smiled, barely.

“Hey, does anybody want to go in the water?” Cynthia asked.

“Water?” said Mr. Siegel. “What water?”

Cynthia’s laughter was uproarious.

“Not right now, honey,” June said.

She knew that Mr. Siegel and June were anxious to resume their conversation, and she knew what they had been talking about. “When are you going to write another program, Mr. Siegel?”

“Now I know you’re on my side, I’m going to get right home and start one this afternoon.”

“For me?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wow!”

“This time two grandfathers and two turkeys!”

“That’s great!” she said, and she went skipping down to the water. She heard June calling after her, “Be careful—” with the result that she skipped right on down to the edge, as though she hadn’t heard at all. A wave was rising a little way out, and the sight of it unnerved her. But she took a step directly forward, into the sea — and waited. She did not have to wait very long.

“Cynthia—please—”

The child turned. She had been able to get June up off the blanket; she had even been able to move her some five or six feet toward the water.

“Okay,” Cynthia said, and she hopped on one leg up to where her pails lay, and flopped down in the sand beside them.

“Please, be careful, Cyn, please,” June called, and just at that moment she heard Markie’s head hitting the floor. A little sound came out of her mouth, but then she saw that it hadn’t been Markie’s head at all, only a wave collapsing onto the flat blue surf. It made her think, however. When Markie came out of the hospital he would have to wear a bandage. She decided she would be very generous to him then. She would tie his shoelaces for him and put his toys away without anybody asking.

Though the hit on the head would probably knock some sense into that kid.

She spoke these words out loud; when she tried them a second time, they made her giggle. The hit on the head will probably knock some sense into that kid. Boy, that little kid didn’t know anything … What she knew for sure and didn’t need anyone to tell her, was that she was much smarter than her brother. She was an exceptional child — that was what the teachers at her new school said. She had the mentality of a ten-year-old, which made her five years older than Markie. She had reason to be proud of herself. When she was an adult she would be more intelligent than others. They would all have to come to her to ask what the best thing was for them to do.

Cynthia suddenly felt herself so full of pep, so convinced that life was made for pleasure, her pleasure, that she jumped up and went racing toward her stepmother. Because she had seen Markie’s blood she knew she could finally get June to agree to take her in the water. She wanted to walk right into the ocean holding June’s hand. She left Markie’s pail and shovel where it was and went flying to the blanket — but there was a man walking down the beach in her direction. She was momentarily stilled by the familiarity of his gait. Everything about him was so familiar, though at first she could not think what his name was. It did not take her very long, however, to remember, or to stop being able to forget. But where was Mommy? Mommy had come with him to see Markie in the hospital! Mommy would find out that she had pushed him! Well, she hadn’t — he fell! That’s what he got for committing a sin.

“June,” she called, “can we go—”

But Gabe had already seen her. He had come to catch her for her mother. All she could do now was scream and run into her room, but they were not even in the house. They were on the wide beach, under the bright sun, and he was so big that wherever she fled he would find her and bring her back.

In the second before he removed his sunglasses, she wondered if she might not be mistaken. Then his hand reached out — and yes, oh yes, oh what would happen—

“Hi, Cynthia. Hello.”

June looked to see who it was. Cynthia thought of making believe that he was a strange man, for she was not supposed to speak to strange men. But when her mother appeared, it would be evident to everyone that she had been lying — and then they would know for sure that she had pushed her brother.

“Hello,” Cynthia said.

“You remember me?”

“Uh-huh. Gabe.”

“Well, how are you? You look brown as a berry — you look healthy and grown-up and—”

“I’m fine.”

“Where’s your little brother?”

Cynthia shrugged.

June was standing. “I’m Mrs. Reganhart.”

Gabe extended his hand. “I’m Gabe Wallach. How do you do? I’m a friend of Martha Reganhart’s. From Chicago.”

Now Cynthia looked up to where the cars were parked. She recognized Gabe’s car as soon as she saw it — and inside she could make out the figure of her mother; she was crouching in the back, spying on her. This was not the first time that the child had had occasion to suspect her mother of spying. When she had first arrived at her new school in New York, she had been certain that her teacher, Mrs. Koplin, was actually her mother in disguise. Then one rainy afternoon Mrs. Koplin’s husband had come to pick her up; he had been carrying an umbrella, and Mrs. Koplin had called him Herb, and she had said that before they went home they must stop first at the A&P on Twelfth Street. And when she said that, Cynthia had known that Mrs. Koplin wasn’t her mother after all. Yet she had been so certain … Now, however, she could actually see who the woman was, crouched in the back of the car. Cynthia started to whistle and to look up at the sky and to kick her toes into the sand. She was being watched and she did not intend to do a single thing wrong. If she could manage, she wanted it to seem as though she were having a very good time.

“—in the hospital—”

“—how long?”

“—he’ll be all right, of course—”

Cynthia turned so that her mother could see only her back. Turning, she saw Markie’s pail bobbling up and down at the water’s edge. It was just about to be washed away, and if it was washed away who would they blame but her! They would blame her, and then they would start asking questions — Fast as she could, she started down the beach, her arms outstretched toward the pail.

“Cynthia—”

“Cynthia, what—”

“Cyn—” Just as she got hold of the handle, somebody grabbed her arm. It was Gabe; behind him stood June, her mouth open, her hand up to her pale cheek.

“Cynthia — oh Cynthia,” June said, “what are you doing? Never—”

“Getting Markie’s pail.” She did not know whether it would help any to cry.

“Oh … Oh, Cynthia, that’s a good girl, that’s fine — oh honey, don’t go near the water alone — not today.” It was June who seemed as though she were about to weep.

“I won’t,” she said, and she hoped her mother had seen just how much June worried about her and took care of her. They all started up the beach, and while June moved off ahead, Cynthia asked Gabe, “Why doesn’t Mommy come out of the car?”

He smiled. “Martha’s not in the car, Cynthia. She’s in Chicago.”

“What’s that?” she said.

“You mean that, in the back seat? That’s a beach umbrella. That’s my father’s beach umbrella.”

“Yes?” She took another look. She felt as she had when Mrs. Koplin had called her husband Herb.

“Martha’s in Chicago,” he said. “She has to work. I’m visiting with my own father in East Hampton. I thought I’d come over and say hello. Your mother wanted me to.”

“How did you find me?”

“Oh I just asked anybody on the streets, you know, where Cynthia Reganhart was, and they said you were down here by the ocean.”

“We don’t even usually come here.”

“Then I suppose I was very lucky. I expected to see Mark too.”

“Well, he’s in the hospital.”

“When you see him will you tell him I was here to visit?”

“Okay. He has to learn not to fall out of his bed, that’s all.”

June was standing by the blanket; she had closed her book. “Mr. Wallach,” she said, “could I ask you a favor? Will you be here awhile?”

“A little while, yes—”

“Could you stay a few minutes with Cynthia? Do you mind?”

“No, no, I’d like to—”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Cynthia said.

“No, dear. You stay with Mr. Wallach. All right? I just have to phone.”

But it wasn’t all right! He would start to ask questions, just as her father had. When she answered, he would become angry. Her father, she remembered, had turned red in the face; she had heard him tell June that Martha was irresponsible beyond imagining, that she just had hot pans. Cynthia had wanted to say that hot pans weren’t dangerous so long as you kept the handle in toward the pilot light, but she had not dared say anything. She had, in fact, liked his being angry with Martha, only it frightened her, and that made her think that perhaps she didn’t like it. Finally she had asked June if she had done something to anger her father too; and June had explained. Usually, she said, you slept in bed with somebody after you were married and not before, though different people did, certainly, have different beliefs. June said she wanted it clear to Cynthia that her father was angry with her mother and not for a moment with Cynthia herself. Then she had gone on to say that this was natural too; divorced people often had differing opinions — it was what generally decided them to be divorced and live separately.

Now that Gabe had her alone, she knew that he would ask her questions too. He would ask if she had told. She wanted to go off in the car with June, but June was running up the beach, and Gabe was sitting on the blanket as though he belonged there.

“Well,” he was saying, looking up at her, “how do you like New York, Cynthia? It’s a big city, isn’t it?”

“It’s okay.”

“Are you having a pleasant summer?”

“It’s okay.”

“Well, you really take things in your stride. Just okay?”

She took a quick look down at him. “Uh-huh.” Maybe he wasn’t going to ask if she had told about him and Martha sleeping in the same bed — but then she knew from experience that adults did not always ask what they wanted to know right off.

Gabe was leaning back on his elbows, and he did not say anything more. He seemed to be thinking about himself. He was wearing a blue shirt and white trousers and his feet were bare. She kept wanting to look at his feet, but she was afraid he would catch her.

“Is your father still a dentist?” she asked.

“He still is,” he said. “You remember?”

“You know,” she said, “my mother didn’t take very good care of my teeth.”

“Didn’t she?”

“I had four cavities when I got here.”

“All kids have cavities,” Gabe said. “I used to have cavities, and my father was a dentist, with an office right in our house.”

“Markie didn’t have any,” she said.

“Mark’s too small probably. Little children his age just naturally don’t get cavities. I think Martha took care of your teeth, Cynthia. Didn’t she take you to Dr. Welker?”

She chose not to answer. He would take Martha’s side in anything; they had slept in bed together, so he had to. “Well, it wasn’t funny when they had to start drilling,” she said.

“I’ll bet it wasn’t. Are you all right now? Let me see?”

“I suppose so,” she said. She wouldn’t let him look in her mouth; it was none of his business. “Except where I hurt myself this morning.”

“Where?”

“My elbow. Right here.”

When he leaned over to look, she knew he would see that she hadn’t hurt herself at all; it was Markie who had fallen. He tried to touch her and she jumped. “Oww! Watch it.”

He looked at first as though he was going to be mad at her; then he was bending his own arm up and down from the elbow. “Just move it like this,” he said. “That should make it feel better.”

She bent it up and down once. It did feel better; she felt better.

“Does that help any?” Gabe asked.

“Yes, I think so.” She bent it twice more. “Oh yes,” she said. “Would you like to make a sand castle?”

He looked at his watch. “I don’t think so, Cynthia.”

“Would you like to watch me make one?”

He smiled.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Do you have to go home?”

To this he shrugged. “Cynthia, I really don’t know.”

She did not understand him. Did he or didn’t he? He leaned back again and was no fun. No one was. Except sometimes Markie. She would tickle her brother until he couldn’t hold it in any longer, and then, with that funny look on his face, he would give in and wet his pants — and then he’d start to cry. But he didn’t even get punished for it. June would come in and pick him up and hug him, even though his legs were all wet. Cynthia would sit on the lower bunk and watch until little Mark was promised something or other that would make him stop crying. He liked to be tickled, but when it was over and his pants were changed, he would say that she had made him do it. She wondered if he had come up into her bunk this morning just to be tickled. Well, it wasn’t her fault — he wasn’t supposed to climb that ladder to her bed anyway. If he fell it was his own fault. She didn’t want anybody in her bed with her at all. It was irresponsible. Probably Markie thought he was going to give her a baby because she wasn’t married. That’s what could happen, of course. June said that one of the most important reasons for getting into bed with somebody was to have a baby; that was why her father felt it was only for married people. Otherwise, her father said, it was a damnshame. And a damnshame, she knew, was the same as a sin — and a sin, for example, was leaving hot pans around on which children could burn themselves. It showed no regard for your children, that was for sure.

She turned on her belly and looked up at the parking lot. Yes, it was still a beach umbrella in the back seat. She found herself wondering if June was going to come back — not in a few minutes, but at all. It might be that all the adults were going to make a switch; maybe that was why Gabe was here. Maybe it had all been arranged beforehand, even Markie’s falling out of the bed. June and Markie and her father would go one way, and then she and Gabe would have to move back to Chicago and live with her real mother once again. Then she could get to see Stephanie. And Barbie. That might even be fun. And she wouldn’t have to sleep in a double-decker bed any more, so there’d be no accidents to worry about. She could sleep in her old bed and her mother could read to her from that Charlotte’s Web book. They would get to have dinner at the Hawaiian House, and her mother would bring extra-thick milk shakes to their table because she worked there and knew the cook personally. She could see Blair and Sissy in Hildreth’s. She knew that Sissy was probably going to have a baby from sleeping in bed with Blair; she knew they slept in bed together because one night she had seen them, before her mother had made Sissy move out. If they were all in Chicago then Markie wouldn’t be in the hospital right now. She wondered if Markie would ever stop being unconscious.

“Markie’s unconscious,” she said.

“Is he?” She could not tell whether or not he had known.

“He just lay there, and then I screamed and my dad came. I didn’t see him fall. I was sleeping.”

“Well,” said Gabe, “he’ll be all right, Cyn. I don’t think you have to worry.”

“I’m not. I think he was sleeping anyway. I don’t think he was unconscious. He’s not even supposed to be in my bed anyway, you know.”

He looked down at the blanket. Didn’t he believe her? “Well, he’s not! Ask anybody!” she said. He would always take her mother’s side against her father, so how could he know anything!

“I want to go in the water!” She could not think of anything else to say.

“Yes?”

“But,” she said wearily, “somebody has to take me, and nobody ever will.” That was a lie; her father took her — but Gabe couldn’t know that either. She waited, but he did not even answer; he always seemed to be thinking about himself.

Finally he asked, “Would you like me to?”

“To what?”

“Take you into the water.”

“You can’t. You have pants on.”

“Want to see a trick?” he said, standing.

“What?”

He began to unzip his trousers. She couldn’t bear to watch; she wanted to close her eyes, to bury her head in the sand. Oh she didn’t want to see! He was so big and he would have one just like Markie’s, and it would look so awful. But she could not bring herself to close her eyes; she could not even move them away, let alone cover them with sand.

What she saw was a tan bathing suit. “And now I’m ready to go swimming,” Gabe said. He threw his trousers onto the blanket and reached down and offered her a hand. His legs were all covered with hair, she got a good look at them as he pulled her to her feet.

“Aren’t you going to take your shirt off?” she asked.

“Don’t you want to just play at the edge?”

When he said that, there was a wild pounding in her chest, a surging, something akin to happiness, but more violent and sudden. “Uh-uh,” she said. “I want to go all the way in — if you hold me.”

“Do you usually do that? It’s getting a little rough.”

“I do, though. If there’s a grownup.”

She waited for him to take off his shirt. “Okay,” he said, and when he took her hand and they started down the beach, the sea was so sparkling and blue that there seemed to be no boundary between the affection she felt for those waters and for the companion who walked beside her. Both filled her with delight. She began to wish that Gabe was her father and June was her mother — she especially wanted June to be her mother if she was going to keep touching her hair the way she had all day. Her real mother and father could have Markie, and then everything would be even; no one would be gypped.

By the time she reached the water’s edge, she was not sure that she wanted to go through with it. Under the waves, which rushed toward her, it would be black and cold. But there were the people, ten or fifteen of them now, being knocked down and swept backwards, and all of them laughing and having a good time. The sunlight on all the wet heads made them look polished.

“Let’s go out there,” she said. “Okay?” She pointed to where the bathers were.

“Well, okay—”

“Can you carry me in? I don’t like the shock.”

“Of what?”

“The cold water shock. Carry me?”

Gabe put his hands under her arms. “Here we go—” and he lifted her up. “Now hold on,” and he began to wade out.

When he stopped the first time, she said, “Hey, further.”

“Wow, what a brave girl you are, Cynthia Reganhart.”

“Come on, further—”

“Hang on tight.”

“Okay.”

“Hang on now—”

“Oh oh oh—” she yelped into his ear. “Oh — keep going — oh oh look—”

“Hang on — hang on—” Gabe called.

“Whooo!” she yelled.

“Ready, get set—”

“Heeeeere—”

“Wheee—”

She was looking straight up as it came curling over their heads. Gabe squeezed her to him, and she pressed her arms around his neck, and the wave was hanging over them, as though it would never break. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and crash! It came flowing down all over them, and she felt the two of them floating, and then their heads rose above the water, and Gabe’s hair was hanging into his eyes.

“You look funny!” she shouted.

“So do you!” They were in water only as high as Gabe’s knees, and the other bathers were rubbing their eyes and some were blowing their noses right into the ocean.

“I wasn’t even scared,” she said into his ear.

“Fine. Hang on. There’s another one coming.”

“This is fun—”

“Close your mouth, you dope!”

“Then I can’t taaaalk—” she screamed, and the wave rolled in and over. Gabe held her tight and they came up right through the foam.

“Whew!” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Uh-huh.” Gabe was wiping her nose off with a handful of water. Oh she didn’t just like him — she loved him! She wondered when he was going to kiss her.

“Do you have to go back to Chicago?” she asked.

“I think so, Cynthia.”

“Today?”

“No, not today—”

“Will you come play with me?”

“Well, we’ll see — here comes one!”

“Oh it’s a big—”

“Hang on tight!”

“Ooohhh—”

Oh she was glad Markie was unconscious! Oh what a good time! What a tall tall wave! It teetered over their heads and she pushed her face into Gabe’s neck, and she waited — and then something collided with them. She felt herself and Gabe tumbling, and then Gabe was gone and she was still tumbling, but alone. Her feet were up and her head was down, and the water wouldn’t let her rise. She tried to stand but there was no bottom for her feet. She was rolling, away across the sea, and she swore, oh she swore that she loved everybody. She swore it, but no hand reached down to pick her up. I love Markie Mommy Daddy June Gabe everybody—Please, Markie, I’m sorry—

Her head was in the sunlight. She had thought that she was way out beyond the buoys, but when she looked up she saw she was almost up on the dry beach. Sand was beneath her hands, and a big fat man was sitting in the water next to her. He was breathing very loud, and when he saw her sitting there, he said, “Some wave, kid, huh?” His belly hung over the top of his suit, and all the time he was getting up he kept saying, “Whew! Whew!” He started up the beach, and then Cynthia saw Gabe running toward her through the low water.

“Are you all right?” he called. “Cynthia, hey, come here — give me your hand. What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“You let me go,” she said.

“We got knocked into, honey. Come on, give me your hand. Are you all right? What is it—?”

She allowed herself to be helped up. But she refused to cry. She knew that he had let her go. She started up toward the blanket by herself.

Then it was dark again and she was in bed. Downstairs Mrs. Griffin was reading a book. Cynthia had not seen her father all day, and a little while ago June had gone off to the hospital too. She had left directly after dinner, when Mrs. Griffin had come to sit with Cynthia. June had said she was only going to kiss Markie good night and then would be back. The drive to the hospital was fourteen miles; for herself Cynthia did not believe that kissing anybody good night was that essential. It was mostly for babies. Gabe had used to kiss her good night in Chicago, and that was because he thought of her as some sort of baby who could be tricked by a kiss; she had never liked that. She had never liked him; now she remembered. He had made her mother unhappy. If it hadn’t been for him, her mother would have married her father again. But he took her mother into the bedroom and closed the door and made her get into bed with him and say she wouldn’t marry Cynthia’s father. Whenever Gabe was nice it was only a trick. Today was a perfect example — he had wanted to get back at her for what she had told her father. He would probably try to get his hands on Markie too, and drown him; she had better warn her little brother about that.

She leaned her head over the side of the bunk so that it would be upside-down and make Markie laugh. “Hey, Markie — look at me, booo-aaaa!”

His pillow was puffed up, but he wasn’t there. He was still in the hospital — how could she forget that? His bed had been made for him and the floor had been mopped up too. The sight of his pillow, all ready for his bleeding head, gave her the shivers; it almost made her cry, but she wouldn’t allow it to. It wasn’t her fault that he had fallen. He had no right to get in bed with her. She did not want to marry him. She did not want to marry anybody. When she had a baby she didn’t want to have a strange baby that she didn’t even know; she wanted the baby to be her. Little Cynthia. She would have a lot of regard for her baby. When the baby wanted to cry she would hold it so that it could put its head on her breasts. By then she would have them … She picked up her pillow, doubled it over, and sank her own head down into it. The pillow was a mother … And then she couldn’t help it, she was crying. She was all in a jumble. She missed her mother. She really did. She wanted to see her, to put her head right into her mother’s breasts — and yet two days later, when all the adults had returned to the house from the funeral, Cynthia had her chance and did not even use it. She sat beside June all through the afternoon, and it pleased her that her mother saw when June reached out and smoothed her hair back for her.