Love, Dad

1

Jamie was still working at midnight, hanging the matted enlargements on every available inch of wall space, using double-faced Scotch tape for the plaster surfaces and pushpins for the old wooden beams. His daughter had gone to bed at ten-thirty, serene in the knowledge that the birthday tradition would be honored yet another time — but he alone knew that this year the shared secret would carry with it a true surprise.

He had started putting up his photographs of her when she was a year old and couldn’t possibly have understood that all those black-and-white enlargements on the walls were pictures of herself, taken over the past year. See the baby, Lissie? Who’s the pretty baby? Holding her in his arms, her chubby little hand reaching out, one stubby forefinger touching the nose of the baby on the wall. Yes, darling, that’s you, darling. But not understanding at all. The pictures hadn’t even been matted that first year; there simply hadn’t been enough extra cash to buy mats for the four dozen enlargements he’d hung all over the living room. That was in 1952, a year before he’d broken through with the photographic essay for Life.

On December 18,1953, the night before Lissie’s second birthday, he hung the enlargements he’d been working on all that week. Tradition — it had become tradition in the short space of two years — demanded that he perform the task alone, without assistance from Connie, unlike their annual Christmas Eve efforts. That year, the enlargements were matted. He had trimmed off the white margins left by the enlarger easel, and then had mounted the pictures with rubber cement — he’d ordered a hot mounting press, but it had not yet been delivered — cutting the mats himself from a lightweight but pure rag stock of Bristol board. He cut most of the mats to accommodate eight-by-tens, but there were several larger pictures as well — at least a dozen eleven-by-fourteens, and one poster-size picture he’d had blown up and printed commercially, the best picture he’d taken of Lissie that year. It showed her looking down in consternation at a sand-covered lollipop, her blue eyes squinted, her blond hair catching the sun for a dazzling halo effect. He’d taken it with the Leica on a bright August day at Jones Beach using Kodak Plus-X and shooting with an f:8 opening at 1/250 of a second.

That year, she knew who she was. She stood puzzled in the center of the living room, wearing damp Dr. Denton’s — she still wasn’t toilet-trained and Connie’s constant joke was that one day she’d have a college-girl daughter who still wet her pants — and then she waddled from picture to picture, beginning to get the message, her eyes sparking with intelligence; these were pictures Daddy had taken; this was her birthday, and on her birthday, Daddy put up pictures of her. When she saw the poster-size shot of her squinting at the lollipop, she squealed with glee, remembering, and ran to him and hugged his knees. He lifted her into his arms and kissed her plump little cheeks and whispered into her hair, “Daddy loves you.”

This year, Lissie would be seventeen — and Jamie was breaking with tradition. The unspoken codicil dictated that the pictures he hung were to be only those taken of her in the previous year. But tomorrow she would be seventeen, and surely seventeen demanded something a bit more earthshaking. He should have done this last year, in fact, when she’d turned sixteen; sixteen was a milestone year. But they had just moved into the Rutledge house then, and the place was in total chaos, and there was no time for something as grandiose as what he was doing tonight. He had over the past several weeks gone back through his files for the last sixteen years, selecting three representative photographs for each year, and had added to them a dozen new pictures taken since the beginning of 1968, for a total of sixty pictures of various sizes, five of them the same poster size as the one of Lissie when she was twenty months old and squinting askance at a sandy lollipop. The problem now was where to hang them all.

The living room in the Connecticut house was nowhere near as large as the one on Central Park West had been. They’d discovered the converted sawmill completely by chance a little more than a year ago, on a visit to Rutledge to see a television producer named Lester Blair. This was in October, and fifteen-year-old Lissie — almost sixteen, in fact — was away at school suffering through what was officially called an academic weekend, but which she and her roommate referred to as an “anemic weekend.” The suffering had, in fact, been more imaginary than real. Jamie and Connie had driven up from New York on Saturday to take her to dinner, had spent the night in a motel outside New Haven, and had taken her to lunch that afternoon before driving down to Rutledge. The Henderson School was in a Connecticut town called Shottsville (which all the kids at school called Shitsville, naturally) only some twenty minutes beyond New Haven on the Merritt Parkway, but Lissie nonetheless complained constantly that she never got to come home except on so-called long weekends, which official terminology she maintained was a prime example of hyperbole, a figure of speech she’d picked up in her sophomore English class.

The initial choice had been to send her to a public middle school in the city — dread thought — or to any one of several good private schools within busing distance. But the two schools they were seriously considering had long waiting lists, and they learned from a friend that the third contender was really mediocre. They were suddenly confronted with the previously unthinkable possibility of having to send Lissie away from home in order to guarantee the education they felt she should have. They made their decision premised on a map of New York City and its environs, drawing on it a circle with a 150-mile radius, and finally settling on the Henderson School, which was little more than two hours away by car, and which had an excellent record of college placement and a reputedly fine speech and dramatics department. Lissie had till then shown neither the talent nor the inclination to pursue a theatrical career, but Connie — admittedly biased — insisted that good speech was the hallmark of a good education. Not for nothing had she herself been a speech and dramatics major at Vassar; neither for nothing had she finally obtained her master’s degree in speech pathology at Columbia University.

They arrived in Rutledge after lunch that fall Sunday to discuss the possibility of doing a half-hour Christmas special utilizing a portfolio of stills Jamie had shot on Fifth Avenue the Christmas before. A dozen of these had appeared in Life under the title “White Christmas in a Gray City,” and his agent, Lew Barker, had sold another four to Ladies’ Home Journal, but Jamie had shot eight full rolls of film, which he felt, immodestly, captured the very essence of the city at the peak of the holiday season. It was Lester Blair’s opinion that the pictures wouldn’t need an accompanying story: a simple connecting monologue would suffice. Of the 288 pictures Jamie had developed and printed — he still did all his own developing, though he knew many professional photographers who preferred leaving the donkey work to labs like Modern Age and Compo — half of them were superb (in his own estimation), a quarter of them were excellent, and the rest were junk. Blair wanted to pace the pictures some ten seconds apart, six shots to a minute, for a total of 180 pictures in the half-hour. He told Jamie he would try to get somebody like Gregory Peck or Charlton Heston to do the connecting monologue, which he himself wanted to take a shot at writing, but that they’d probably end up with some very good New York actor instead, since there wasn’t much money involved in public television. But he felt this was something well worth doing, and he ended his pitch by saying he thought the prestige value to Jamie would be enormous.

They took a stroll through the town of Rutledge late that afternoon. Diana Blair was a good deal younger than her husband (“Younger by at least twenty years,” Connie later suggested), an attractive, shapely brunette who prattled on brainlessly about how much she envied their living in the city, where a person could step out of his front door and drop into a Broadway show, or a concert, or an opera, or a gallery opening, or a first-run movie — the usual suburban-dweller’s plaint. Jamie was surprised to hear Connie, his wife of almost seventeen years at the time, his wife whom he thought he knew better than anyone else on earth, saying she would much prefer living out here in the country, with all these glorious fall leaves overhead and underfoot, and the joy of a snow-clad winter (her actual words), the promise of daffodils in the spring, the subsequent sounds of summer insects chirping in the tall grass — the usual city-rat’s plaint, delivered in what Jamie secretly called Connie’s “Vassar Asshole” voice, somewhat nasal and entirely unmodulated, except that this time it was accompanied by a flash of green eyes as brilliant as a jungle glade: she actually meant what she was saying.

“If you’re serious about this...” Lester said.

“Oh, I am. I would adore living in this town,” Connie said. “Adore” was one of her favorite words. She rolled it off her tongue lovingly, kissed it breathily onto the air like the promise of those spring daffodils she’d been anticipating three minutes earlier.

“There’s a great old house for sale here,” Lester said.

“Right on the river,” Diana said.

“Would you like to take a look at it? I know the owner, I’m sure he...”

“Thanks,” Jamie said, “but I think...”

“I’d like to see it,” Connie said.

The house was owned and occupied by a surgeon and his wife who, now that all their children were grown and married, were planning retirement in Arizona. The surgeon’s hands shook as he showed them around; perhaps a better reason for retirement, Jamie thought, than all those grown and married children. The house had been a working sawmill during the Revolution (“Our Revolution, not the one in Russia,” the surgeon said) and had been converted into a residence in 1910 by a portrait painter who’d also renovated the old barn into a studio for himself, complete with a skylight streaming good northern light.

Connie kept marveling at everything. She loved the old beams and posts, the kitchen with its brick countertops and pegged floors, the attic bedroom with its peaked ceiling supported by beams actually sawn at the old mill, the huge living-room fireplace with its barn-siding façade, the large deck overhanging the river, the spacious lawn rolling away to a rock garden the painter’s wife had designed herself and planted away back in 1923 (a small bas-relief raven was set as a plaque into the rocks, bearing the chiseled legend MARTHA’S ROCK GARDEN, and the date, and the painter’s chiseled signature below it), the stepping-stones across the river, the stand of pines bordering the rock wall that defined the property, and far on the horizon the graceful steeple of the First Presbyterian Church.

“I adore it,” Connie said.

In the car on the way back to the city, she first asked how old Jamie thought Diana Blair was, offered her own opinion about the twenty-year gap between her and her husband, and then asked Jamie if he was seriously thinking of letting Blair do a special based on his photographs; from what she’d been able to gather by asking a few discreet questions before they drove up here, Blair had produced nothing but utter crap on television for the last six years, ever since he’d left his job at NBC in 1961.

“Where’d you ask all these discreet questions?” Jamie said.

“I asked Annie Baumgarten, whose husband is in programming at ABC, and I asked Sylvia Janus, who works for William Morris, and they both said—”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before we came all the way up here?”

“It’s not that far up, and besides I wanted to see for myself. Are you going to let him do it?”

“Let’s see what he comes up with.”

“He certainly came up with a good house,” Connie said. “Maybe he should go into real estate.”

“I didn’t think it was all that great,” Jamie said.

“Come on, it was only magnificent.”

She got off the subject almost at once, asking him what he’d thought of Blair’s comment about “prestige,” as if Jamie needed prestige, asking him what he thought of the idea of Blair writing the monologue, did he have any writing credits at all, and then suddenly — with another flash of these glade-green eyes — saying, “How much do you think they want?”

“How much do I think who wants?”

“Old Dr. Gillespie and his wife.”

“For the house, do you mean?”

“No, for the fucking rock garden. Of course for the house.”

“Fucking” was a word Connie had first picked up from her older sister Janet, who was now married to a film editor at Universal and living in Brentwood, and had later heard used with some regularity by her Vassar roommate, a girl who’d grown up on exclusive Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Connie used the word frequently, but never when she was actually doing what it defined. She called that “screwing.”

“So?” she said. “What do you think?”

“Who cares how much they want for it?” Jamie said.

“It would be closer to Lissie’s school.”

They moved into the house on the sixth day of December in 1967, and for Lissie’s sixteenth birthday Jamie festooned the living room with pictures he’d taken of her that year, forty-eight of them in all, some of them tacked to the old posts, the rest Scotch-taped to the walls between the paintings he and Connie had collected since 1953, when Life had been good enough to launch his career. But forty-eight pictures weren’t sixty pictures, and tonight he’d run out of wall and post space before he’d hung little more than half of them.

He got his brilliant idea along about midnight, went down to the basement for a spool of fishing line he’d never used, fifteen-pound clear test, and strong enough to land a battling swordfish, or so Kirk Harkins at the hardware store in town had told him. He then cut himself snippets of line which he threaded through the holes he made in the two top corners of each mat. Standing on a ladder, he tacked the steepled lines to the ceiling beams, spacing the pictures some six inches apart, twisting the separate hanging lines around each pushpin till he got a level dangle. The job was going to be painstaking and time-consuming; he began to understand how Michelangelo must have felt in the Sistine Chapel.

When next he looked at his watch, it was twenty minutes to two, and there were still three pictures to hang. One of them was a terrific shot he’d caught of six-year-old Lissie in Central Park one bright spring day, kneeling to pluck a dandelion from the ragged lawn. Another was of her in a flaking and rusting rowboat, the first (and last) summer they’d spent at Martha’s Vineyard, back in 1965 when she was almost fourteen, long slender arms tugging at the oars, tiny buds of breasts in the tanktop bathing suit. Her breasts, at seventeen — yes, she was already seventeen; she’d been born at 1:27 A.M. on the morning of December 19, 1951 — were still somewhat less than spectacular. At school, she and her similarly unendowed roommate had formed a club they called the Itty-Bitty Titty Committee, clandestinely referred to by its dozen or more titless members as the I.B.T.C., lest the Establishment close them down in a wink.

It was close to 2:00 A.M. when he started to hang the final picture: a candid shot of Lissie in a murderous blue funk at the age of eleven. Straining up over his head to hammer the pushpin into one of the ceiling beams, he heard footsteps on the stairs leading down to the entrance hall, and turned, his arms still stretched up over his head, and saw her standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking tentatively into the living room. He thought at first it was Connie — the same long blond hair, the same light eyes, the same lithe slender look. When he realized it was his daughter, he was at first surprised and then annoyed. She knew what he was doing down here, she should have realized—

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said.

“Honey, what...?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I’m sorry,” she said again, and burst into tears.

He came down off the ladder and went to her at once, still foolishly holding the hammer in his right hand. She stood in the center of the hallway, her long white flannel nightgown rumpled, her bare feet planted slightly apart on the riotous blues and reds of the Bokhara rug, her arms dangling forlornly at her side, the tears streaming down her face. Still holding the hammer, he took her in his arms, and held her close, stroking her hair with his free hand.

“What is it, Lissie?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said, sobbing.

“Well, it must be some—”

“I’m so happy to be home,” she said, sobbing.

“Well, that’s nothing to cry—”

“I miss being home so much. I hate that school,” she said.

“Darling girl...”

“I hate it, Dad,” she said, and suddenly it all came out in a rush, breathlessly mingled with the tears. “They work us too hard, all the kids say so, we never get time to do anything we want to do, I’m up till midnight, sometimes one o’clock, doing homework, two o’clock sometimes, and my first class is at eight, and I had kitchen last week, I fell asleep in biology, scraping off all the trays, I know I failed my math test, I just know it, and Jenny’s always playing her damn radio when I’m trying to study, and none of the boys like me ’cause I’m too tall, five nine is too tall, it’s supposed to be study time after ten o’clock, and Miss Fitch in English says I’m not concentrating when I’m concentrating all the time, I didn’t even make the soccer team, I hate it, Daddy, I hate it!”

“Wow,” he said.

“Yeah, wow,” she said, and a smile tried hopelessly to break through the tears.

“Come on, let’s sit down,” he said. “Stop crying, you’ll wake Mom. Here,” he said, and handed her his handkerchief.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Come on, no more crying.”

“All right,” she said, sniffling, and looked at the handkerchief, and then blew her nose, and belatedly asked, “Is it all right to use this?” and laughed at her own absurdity, and began crying again.

“Darling, please...”

“Okay,” she said, “I’m sorry, Dad, forgive me,” and blew her nose again. Drying her eyes, she looked into the living room, and saw the photographs for the first time. “Aw shit,” she said, “I blew it.”

“Your nose, do you mean?”

“Yeah, sure, my nose. Aw shit, look at all this! Dad, you’ve... oh, gee, Dad. And I blew it.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said, and spread his arms wide, like a gallery owner welcoming his patrons to an opening. “But try to ignore the ladder.”

“Spoils the effect, yeah,” she said, and grinned. “Look at all this, willya? Dad, you’re only supposed to do the ones from... this is all of them. God, I think I’m going to cry again.”

“You’d better not, I’ll take them all down.”

“Oh, my God, there’s the one of me hating the whole world! Dad, how could you? And, oh... oh, Jesus, look at this one in the snowsuit! And this, oh, I love this one in the rowboat. What was I? Thirteen?”

“Almost fourteen.”

“Great big bazooms even then,” she said. “Oh, wow, look at this one! All tangled up in my skis. Is this Bromley? How old was I?”

“Stratton. You were twelve.”

“I love it! And this one! Dad, this is terrific! I don’t remember you taking this. When was it?”

“In July. At the Jacobsons’ Fourth...”

“Right, right. Oh, look, isn’t this sweet? Oh, look at this little cutie-pie. What was I? Three?”

“Three.”

“Yeah, wow. Oh, my God!” she said, and burst out laughing. “Here’s the one with the lollipop! I must’ve been some dumb kid, all right. What’d I think was on that lollipop?”

“You weren’t even two yet, honey, you were still learning.”

“Oh, Dad,” she said, her voice suddenly lowering. “Oh, God, look at... Dad, this is gorgeous. Where’d you...?”

“Down by the river, in August.”

“Where were you shooting from?”

“The deck.”

“You make me look...” She hesitated, and then said, almost in a whisper, shyly, “You make me look beautiful.”

“You are beautiful,” he said.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Do you like them, Liss? Are you pleased?”

“I love them, Dad,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

“Happy birthday, darling,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her on the cheek.

“Seventeen,” she said.

“Seventeen,” he said.

There were supposed to be twenty-eight kids at Lissie’s party that Saturday night — two days after her actual birthday — but Scarlett Kreuger got grounded for breaking curfew the night before, and Kimmie Randolph had to go down to North Carolina with her parents for Christmas, so that made it only twenty-six. Jamie told his daughter he would miss Scarlett; each and every time she came to the house, he would greet her at the door with, “Oh, lookee heah, it’s Missy Scah-lutt, home fum Atlanta!” to which Scarlett only blinked in response, but then again nobody ever claimed Scarlett Kreuger had an ounce of brain tissue in her skull. Lissie had invited her, in fact, only because she was a very close friend of Linda Moore’s; everybody in town was saying Linda had gone down to Puerto Rico for an abortion just before Thanksgiving, and Lissie was eager to pump Scarlett about the details.

Without Scarlett and Kimmie, the party divided itself more evenly into fourteen girls and twelve boys, still a bit lopsided, but Lissie didn’t know too many boys in Rutledge. It was Rusty Klein, Lissie’s closest friend in the whole world, who’d helped her compile the “boy” side of the party list, which included only two jocks — the McGruder twins — but only because they were excellent students as well. When Lissie suggested inviting a boy named Owen Clarke, whom she’d met at the Jacobsons’ Fourth of July picnic this past summer, and who she’d thought was kind of cute, Rusty told her that Owen was smoking pot these days, and a party with him around always turned into a sleep-in, with half the boys drifting outside to light up, and then coming back in to sit around grinning like dopes.

At the Henderson School, there were very tough rules against alcohol, marijuana, or any other kind of drug. For smoking pot, shooting dope, or popping pills, you could get kicked out in a minute. The school tended to look the other way when it came to whiskey or beer, but you could still be put on Intermediate Discipline for as long as two whole months if some dance proctor happened to smell booze on your breath, or if — God forbid — you came back to the dorm one night after pizza in town and couldn’t pronounce the house mother’s demanded “Presbyterian Episcopalian,” a test devised by the Dean of Women, who taught romance languages. When Lissie mentioned the test to her father, he told her that during World War II, the G.I. password in the South Pacific had been “Lallapalooza,” which the Japs apparently couldn’t pronounce. But every kid at Henderson could say “Presbyterian Episcopalian” backward and forward, and Lissie knew at least two girls who’d gone back to their dorm pissed to the ears one night, barely able to walk a straight line, but able to repeat “Presbyterian Episcopalian” flawlessly till dawn.

Like most of the other kids in Rutledge, Rusty went to school at Lafayette in nearby Clayton, an industrial city of some 60,000 people, most of whom were Irish, Italian, black or Puerto Rican — what all the Rutledge kids called greasers. Rusty was a straight-A student (“It doesn’t take much to be an A-student at Lafayette High,” Lissie’s mother often proclaimed in her Vassar Speech and Dramatics Major voice) and, despite her aversion to jocks, was the best cheerleader on the high school’s squad. During Lissie’s long (long, ha!) Thanksgiving Day weekend this year, she’d gone to watch the football game between Lafayette and Norwalk High, and Rusty had been the cutest thing imaginable in her white pleated skirt and sweater, the school’s orange L plastered on her chest (God, how Lissie envied girls who had breasts!), the letter echoing her curly red-orange hair, her bright blue eyes sparkling as she led the “Lafayette, we are here!” cheer. After the game, she’d introduced Lissie to the McGruder twins, two gigantic boys with black hair and brown eyes and teeth Rusty swore had been capped, her father being an orthodontist and all.

The McGruder twins provided the surprise for Lissie’s party that night. David McGruder played electric piano, and his brother Danny played bass guitar, and together with a drummer and a lead guitarist they had formed a group called Turtle Bay, so-named for no reason other than that the twins lived on Turtle Pond which was really no reason at all. Turtle Bay, all four of them, arrived at ten minutes past nine, some forty minutes after the scheduled start of the party, the drummer and lead guitarist bracketed by the bookend twins, and promptly began setting up what Jamie later described as $75,000 worth of electronic equipment, another of his wild rock-and-roll estimates. Lissie was totally surprised; Rusty hadn’t given her the slightest clue that the twins were in a group, or that the group would be performing here tonight — live.

Live, they certainly were.

They turned the volume on their speakers up full, and shook the house to the attic rafters as they bellowed songs of their own composition. Jamie, in the sanctuary of the master bedroom, shouted to Connie that the difference between his generation and the present one was that when he was a kid they danced to music, whereas nowadays they listened to music, though he couldn’t understand how they could possibly hear anything with the volume turned up so loud. The band played nonstop for almost an hour, and then — miraculously — the house went still.

“What do you suppose they’re doing down there?” Jamie asked suspiciously.

What they were doing down there was talking.

Of the fourteen girls at the party — all of them ranging in age from seventeen to nineteen — only two of them were no longer virgins, and they’d been going steady with the same boys since the eighth grade. Both Sally Landers and Carolyn Pierce considered themselves as good as engaged; their boyfriends were both graduating seniors who expected to be drafted early in 1969, perhaps to have their asses blown away in Vietnam; their rationale, if any was needed, was as old as time: Kiss me, my sweet, for tomorrow I die. But despite the virginal reality of the remaining dozen girls (and at least seven of the boys gathered there in the photograph-hung living room), the conversation centered largely on young Linda Moore, who had committed the unimaginable error of getting herself pregnant.

Linda wasn’t what anyone there would have even remotely considered a slut. She was, in fact, the only daughter of a man named Alex Moore, an actor who played a physician on a continuing daytime soap. Linda was fifteen years old, a bright-eyed little thing who’d scarcely outgrown her baby fat. The culprit who’d knocked her up was a boy named Ralph Yancy, son of the town’s postmaster, and the kids were speculating now on whether or not they’d been stoned when they’d slipped. “Slipped” was a euphemism Lissie had never heard used in this context before. She listened wide-eyed as Beth Jackson painstakingly tried to reconstruct the events leading to Linda’s abortion in Puerto Rico.

“It must’ve been right after the Soph Hop,” she said. “She went with Yancy, didn’t she? And that was in September, the first big dance of the year, and she ran down to Puerto Rico in November, right, so that...”

“Just before Thanksgiving,” Judy Lipscombe said.

“Right, so that makes it... September, October, November,” Beth said, ticking the months off on her fingers, “that’s three months, that’d be about right. It had to be after the Soph Hop.”

“Yancy was stoned that night,” David McGruder said, nodding. “I saw Owen Clarke handing him a joint in the toilet.”

“And they disappeared right after the dance, didn’t they?” Roger Bridges said. His father was an attorney in nearby Talmadge, a man named Matthew Bridges. Roger was the drummer in Turtle Bay and — at nineteen — the oldest person in the room. Lissie thought he played loud and lousy, but she wasn’t an expert on drummers. Whenever her father played his scratchy recording of “Sing, Sing, Sing” for her, she was at a loss to comprehend what was so spectacular about Gene Trooper’s drumming.

“Driving his old man’s Benz,” Jimmy Lewis said.

“Have to be a contortionist to do it on the front seat of a 280 SL,” Danny McGruder said, and all the boys laughed, and some of the girls giggled.

“Who paid for the abortion?” Rusty asked.

“Well, that’s just it,” Beth said. “Apparently, Yancy went to his father...”

“His father!” David said.

“Yeah, and Mr. Yancy called Mr. Moore to explain the situation to him, and to tell him he thought it inadvisable for the pair of them to get married so early in their—”

“Inadvisable! Jesus!” Roger said.

“Yeah, inadvisable,” Beth said, grinning, “and offered to pay for an abortion if Linda’d go down to Puerto Rico for it.”

“So did he pay?” Rusty asked.

“No, they split the bill and the air fare.”

“Her parents split the bill with Yancy’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Now that’s what I call exceedingly generous,” Jimmy said. “Well, why?” Danny said. “It takes two to tango.”

“I never even guessed she was pregnant,” Judy said. “Did she look pregnant to you?”

“No,” Rusty said.

“The irony of it,” David said, “is that her father plays this family doctor, you know...”

“Yeah.”

“... who’s always handing out advice to everybody...”

“Yeah.”

“... but he couldn’t find the right advice to give his own daughter.”

“Oh, come on, David,” Rusty said. “What’d you want him to tell her?”

“Keep your legs crossed, dearie,” Jimmy said, and burst out laughing.

“Hey, come on, guys,” Lissie said, and glanced upward toward the ceiling.

“How much do you suppose it cost?” Sally asked.

“Why? Are you thinking of getting one?” Roger asked.

“Knock it off,” Sally’s boyfriend said, but he was smiling.

“Two, three thousand bucks, I’ll bet,” David said.

“You think so?”

“Depending on whether she flew first class or tourist,” Judy said, and burst out laughing. This time, all the girls laughed with her.

“I think it costs less than that,” Danny said.

“How would you know?” Carolyn Pierce’s boyfriend said, and grinned across the room at him.

“I’m guessing, that’s all. I’d say four or five hundred.”

“That sounds low.”

“Well, not more than six hundred, anyway. There are guys in New York who’ll do it for five, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, on the kitchen table,” Rusty said.

“Wherever,” Danny said. “My aunt had one done in New York for five hundred. My father’s sister.”

“That’s without anesthesia,” Beth said. “And that’s with some kind of butcher. I’ll bet Linda’s cost a lot more than that. Scarlett told me it was in a regular hospital and everything.”

“With anesthesia?” Judy asked.

“Sure, with anesthesia.”

“I’d rather have the baby,” Sally said.

“Me, too,” Rusty said.

“At fifteen?” David said. “Come on.”

“I would, I mean it.”

“Me, too.”

“That’s like trying to decide whether to burn your draft card or go fight the friggin’ war,” Roger said.

“I’m gonna burn mine,” Jimmy said. “In fact, I may not even go register when I’m eighteen. Hell with ’em.”

“They’ll throw you in jail,” Sally’s boyfriend said.

“That’s better than getting killed,” Danny said.

“Or wounded,” Jimmy said. “I think I’d rather get killed than wounded.”

“Me, too,” David said.

“Can you imagine coming back without legs or something?”

“Or blind?” Roger said. “Jesus, can you imagine coming back blind?”

“I’m not even gonna register,” Jimmy said.

“Well,” Sally said, mindful of the fact that her boyfriend had already registered and was certain to be called up within the next few months, “somebody’s gotta go over there.”

“Why?” Danny said.

“Well... to keep us free,” Sally said.

“Free to go to Puerto Rico for abortions,” Beth said, and everyone burst out laughing.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Jamie heard the sudden laughter and said, “I wonder what they’re talking about.”

The party at the Blairs’ that New Year’s Eve was scheduled to begin at nine-thirty, but Jamie and Connie did not arrive till almost an hour later. Lester Blair, whose proposed television special never had got off the ground, despite all his extravagant promises, had asked Jamie to bring along his camera, but Jamie flatly told him he did not take pictures on New Year’s Eve. Dressing that night before the party, he’d gotten miffed all over again, and began ranting out loud to Connie about the goddamn amateur photographers of the world who thought all there was to taking pictures was putting the camera to your eye and clicking the shutter release. Connie had heard all this before. “Yes, darling,” she said, over and over again as he fumed about the stupidity of someone asking a professional to bring along his Brownie, take a few candid snapshots, huh, Jamie, what do you say? I say go fuck yourself, Lester, that’s what I say. “Yes, darling,” Connie said.

Ever since 1954, a year after Jamie sold the Bowery essay to Life and was able to afford his own tuxedo, he’d been dressing for New Year’s Eve, putting on the enameled Schlumberger cuff links and studs Connie had bought him for his twenty-eighth birthday, tying his own bow tie, passing a cloth over his black patent-leather Gucci slippers, admiring himself in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom closet door, preening, making imaginary acceptance speeches for the A.S.M.P.’s Magazine Photographer of the Year award, and generally considering himself to be the handsomest cat who’d ever come down the pike.

At forty-two, he did in fact look extremely youthful, his somewhat angular face dominated by brown eyes almost as dark as his hair, his six feet two inches neatly contained in a body he kept compact and spare via weekly visits to the New York Athletic Club whenever he was in the city to see his agent. He supposed there wasn’t a man on earth who didn’t think of himself as devastatingly handsome — he had learned early in his career that it was much more difficult to photograph men than it was women, the male of the species being inordinately vain — but he nonetheless felt that his subjective view of himself was entirely objective, and there was rarely an occasion when he looked into the mirror and was not pleased with the image looking back at him.

He felt enormously attractive tonight, Connie on his arm in a shimmering green gown slit to her navel, a lynx jacket thrown over her shoulders as they negotiated the slippery path to the Blair front door, he himself resplendent in his formal duds, his sense of wellbeing fortified by the two glasses of champagne he’d drunk in a New Year’s Eve toast with Lissie when he and Connie were ready to leave the house, and a quickie shot of Dewar’s neat at the wet-sink bar while Connie ran upstairs for a last-minute change of earrings. She was wearing her blond hair loose to the shoulders tonight, her green eyes emphasized by a paler green shadow, the eyes somewhat slanted and lending a faintly Oriental look to her lupine face with its aristocratic Vassar nose and generous mouth, dangling emerald earrings echoing the green of the dress and the brighter green of her eyes.

The oval driveway was crowded with the status symbol of the men and women who used the town as their bedroom community — no flashy Cadillacs here in Rutledge, where the foreign car reigned supreme. Like Jamie himself, many of the men who’d settled here had been raised during the Depression, when the secret vow was to rise triumphant from the ashes of poverty that had diminished and almost destroyed their parents. Self-made men each and every one of them, with the exception of Reynolds McGruder, father of the McGruder twins, whose own father had sold bootleg whiskey in Chicago during the thirties, and who was now chairman of the board and chief stockholder of one of the nation’s largest distilleries. Self-made men and proud of the fact that they had clawed their way — or so they remembered it — up America’s mythical ladder of success to achieve the comfort and in fact luxury (though somehow they never thought of it as such) of the lives they lived here in woodsy, exclusive Rutledge, Connecticut.

Diana Blair herself opened the front door for them, allowing a flood of music to escape onto the brittle night air, Nelson Riddle’s intro to Frank Sinatra’s “It Happened in Monterey.”

“Oooo, come in quick,” she said, “I’ll freeze to death.”

The prophecy, Jamie decided at once, was not without foundation; Diana stood in the doorway virtually naked, wearing a strapless, braless, flimsy white nylon sheath that recklessly revealed breasts rather more cushiony than his wife’s, a creamy white soft expanse against the cooler white of the gown, one pink nipple briefly exposed as she knelt to move aside the bristle doormat that prevented her from fully opening the door. The mat out of the way, the door standing wide, Diana stepped aside to allow them entrance, embracing Connie and kissing her on the cheek, kissing Jamie on the cheek as well (“Ooooo, I can feel the cold on you”) and then rubbing off the lipstick smear with her thumb. One of the Blair children, a twelve-year-old son from Lester’s previous marriage, materialized soundlessly and spectrally beside his stepmother, waited patiently while Jamie took off his overcoat and Connie shrugged out of the lynx jacket, and then vanished with the garments as ephemerally as he’d appeared.

The party was in full swing.

Jamie estimated there were at least sixty or seventy people in the Blairs’ massive stone-and-glass living room, dancing or drinking, standing in familiar clusters near the bar, chatting amiably on the sofas ranged in a lush semicircle around the walk-in fireplace, the fire blazing blues, reds, greens and oranges generated by chemicals sprinkled onto the six-foot-long logs, a magic dust obtainable at Harkins’ Hardware. They picked their way casually toward the bar, dispensing the customary handshakes and cheek pecks, “Hello, how are you, nice to see you,” the litany repeated over and again, even though most of these people had seen each other half a dozen times at various parties since the holiday season began.

Connie asked the bartender — one of Rutledge’s moonlighting policemen — for a vodka martini on the rocks, with a twist, please. Jamie asked for a Dewar’s and soda, figuring he’d stay with what he’d been drinking before he left the house, and fully intending to pace his alcoholic consumption. Someone lifted the arm from the record player, and several of the couples on the floor booed and hissed in mock outrage, but only until the rhythms of Herb Alpert’s “A Taste of Honey” oozed from the speakers. Men pulled women close. Cheeks caressed cheeks. Someone discreetly dimmed the rheostated lights.

The talk at most Rutledge parties usually centered on the latest Broadway hit, Hollywood extravaganza or best-selling novel (John Updike’s Couples had dominated the conversation all through May and part of June, presumably because it dealt with the sexual acrobatics of a band of exurbanites not unlike those who lived in Rutledge) with every now and then a question of deep philosophical concern surfacing to be discussed in the most sophomoric terms, despite the fact that many of Rutledge’s residents were accomplished and educated men and women. Tonight, though, as Jamie and Connie wandered drinks in hand through the crowd of celebrants waiting for the countdown that would take them into the bright new year, he thought he detected a somewhat reflective note to the chatter that wafted on the air in competition with the music. It was, after all, New Year’s Eve, and a certain amount of ruminating over the past year was to be expected; but as he drifted through the crowd, catching snatches of conversations here and there, he felt as though he were awkwardly trapped in an updated John Dos Passos novel, the headline stories of 1968 threading through the talk like an insistent leitmotif.

It had, everyone seemed to agree, been one hell of a year.

Frank Lipscombe, who was Judy Lipscombe’s father and a psychiatrist of some note in Manhattan’s Shrink City along Ninety-sixth Street, maintained while stroking his gray Freudian beard that the year had truly started in April with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., an event that could be bracketed in terms of proximity with the subsequent June murder of Robert Kennedy. Frank was generally full of shit, Jamie thought, constantly handing out unsolicited psychiatric advice on the care and feeding of adolescents, and once telling him that a father should never hug or kiss his own daughter lest Electra run wild and incest stain the family sheets. The end result of such a restrictive paternal policy had been Judy Lipscombe, whom Lissie succinctly described as “a bit slutty.” But he seemed to be making sense about the tone of violence set by the twin murders so soon after the traumatic death of President John Kennedy less than five years earlier, and it was his belief that the Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention in August were merely reacting in a way that had somehow become as American as apple pie, flailing out with billy clubs at antiwar demonstrators in much the same way that James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan had exploded against their innocent victims.

In a largely Republican town, the guests tonight were for the most part Democrats, and their dismay over the election of Richard Nixon in November was still keenly felt a month and more after the event. There were those who insisted that if Humphrey had simply walked out of the convention, refusing to conduct business as usual while kids were having their heads broken in the streets and the relentless television cameras kept cutting back and forth from the convention-hall floor to the blue-shirted, blue-helmeted cops firing Mace and tear gas, he might have swung the election. There were others who felt nothing would have worked for the Democrats, not with a nation believing, perhaps rightly, that the Vietnam war was Lyndon Johnson’s toy, and despite his having bowed out of the presidential race in April with the famous lines, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party...”

“He waited too damn long to stop the bombing,” Jeff Landers said. He was Sally Landers’s father, an advertising man who specialized in Broadway shows, his agency handling the ads for perhaps 60 percent of all the plays and musicals that opened in New York. His daughter’s boyfriend had already registered for the draft, and he was certain the boy would be called up early next year, a prospect he anticipated with mixed feelings, some of which might have provided the fodder for another Electral discourse from Dr. Frank Lipscombe, the noted psychiatrist and nonhugger. “A week before the damn election! Everybody in America recognized the timing for just what it was — a ploy to swing the vote to his pal Hubert.”

Alistair York, the town’s network sportscaster, bored with all this hard-news shit, asked Connie to dance, much to the annoyance of his mistress, a dark-eyed redhead who’d earlier been talking to Reynolds McGruder, and who was now drinking a Scotch and soda almost as dark as her loamish eyes. As Alistair led Connie onto the floor, Jamie noticed that his hand was resting on the naked small of her back, the fingers widespread somewhat familiarly close to the base of her spine and the rounded buttocks beneath the shimmering gown. Jamie looked at his watch. It was close to eleven o’clock. He was about to ask the redhead to dance when Marvin Klein, Rusty’s father and one of a dozen or more Jews in Rutledge’s tight inner circle, beat him to it. The redhead melted into Marvin’s arms, flashing a dark look at her sportscaster lover, who was dancing cheek-to-cheek with Connie across the room, near the Blairs’ glass-encased collection of antique medals.

“I’d have done the same thing Bucher did,” Mike Randolph said. He was Kimmie Randolph’s father, a Wall Street stockbroker with perhaps the longest commute of anyone in Rutledge; his daughter had inherited from him her blue eyes and blond hair and an unfortunate eagle’s beak. “What was he supposed to do? Open fire and start another damn war in Korea?”

“Ah’m talking about the confession,” Melanie Kreuger said. She was Scarlett’s mother, a woman of forty-two who, presumably because of her Atlanta upbringing, affected all the cutsie-poo mannerisms of a southern belle; she was wearing tonight a lavender confection that might have been more appropriate at a Homecoming Queen Cotillion than at a party here in Rutledge, where the women generally looked sleek and sophisticated. Her mother had named her ten years before reading Gone With the Wind. Melanie, later delighted to learn that her name had been used for one of the major characters in a best seller, paid homage to the author by naming her own daughter Scarlett. Her husband, Larry, worked as a translator at the U.N. He rarely said very much at parties, apparently too burdened was he with all the woes of the world. “Bucher said he had no excuse whatever fuh his crim’nal act,” Melanie said. “He told the whole world he was spyin’ on the No’th Koreans.”

“Come dance with me,” Diana Blair whispered behind him, and Jamie put his drink down on the coffee table, leaning over the back of the sofa and incidentally the back of a man named Byron Lewis, who was Jimmy Lewis’s father. Byron published photographic books under his own imprint and a distribution setup; he had approached Jamie only last month about getting together on a project. He now said, “Hey, hi, Jamie, nice to see you,” and then turned back to Alistair York’s redhead, who had abandoned Marvin Klein after their first dance, and who now denounced — with an intensity as flaming as her hair, and with a surprising Middle-European accent — the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia that August. Someone liked the Herb Alpert record; as Jamie led Diana onto the floor, “A Taste of Honey” started again.

Diana was wearing her dark hair tonight in a feather cut that framed a narrow oval face with high cheekbones, a nose for which any New York model would have killed and pillaged, and a wide mouth with a bee-stung lower lip. She was long-legged and slender, and whereas Connie found her truly spectacular breasts “exaggerated,” most of the men in Rutledge appreciated them with an openness bordering on stupefaction. Diana always danced extremely close, as if attempting to flatten and nullify nature’s splendid achievement against any partner’s cooperative chest.

The moment she was in his arms, she put her cheek against his and whispered, “Walk right into me, baby,” an invitation she presumably extended to any man with whom she was dancing. Immediately pressing herself against him, she began pumping at his obliging thigh purposefully and methodically, pulling away once abruptly and only for an instant, to roll her smoky eyes in mock surprise and to register girlish shock, and then slitheringly adjusting the long length of her body to his again.

In the seconds-long interval between “Green Peppers” and “Tangerine,” she held him protectively close, her crotch nestled snugly into him, waiting for the music to start again. The moment it did, she began a rhythmic, excruciatingly slow tease, grinding steadily against him, their vertical quasi-fornication hidden by their own paper-thin proximity and the press of other dancers around them. Jamie glanced nervously toward the bar where Connie was now chatting with Perry Lane, a New York literary agent who had a weekend place in Rutledge, and whom Lissie called “Penny Lane” after the Beatles’ song. Gently moving Diana away from him, he said, “Let’s sit the rest out, okay?” and led her off the floor, and went to join Connie at the bar.

“You okay?” he asked, putting his arm around her.

“Yes, sure,” she said, “why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“Jamie?”

“Mmm?”

“Are you asleep?”

“Mmm.”

“What did you think of the party?”

“Nice. Nice party, hon.”

“The people from New York added a lot, don’t you think?”

“Mm-huh.”

“That redhead with Alistair was very pretty.”

“Mm-huh.”

“Didn’t you think so?”

“Yes, very.”

“How old do you guess she was?”

“Thirty? I don’t know.”

“Twenty-three, I’d say.”

“Mm-huh. Maybe.”

“He picks them very young, doesn’t he?”

“Always has.”

“You danced with her often enough.”

“Three times.”

“That’s a lot in Rutledge.”

“Well, she’s a foreigner.”

“I didn’t know she was a foreigner.”

“Didn’t you hear her accent?”

“I thought she was putting it on.”

“No, she’s from someplace in the Balkans.”

“You learned a lot about her.”

“Well, when you dance with someone, you naturally talk to her.”

“Do you talk to Diana when you’re dancing with her?”

“Not very much.”

“You were dancing very close. With Diana, I mean.”

“Diana dances very close.”

“Do you get a hard-on when you’re dancing with Diana?”

“I only get a hard-on with you,” he said.

“Oh, sure.”

“That’s the truth,” he said, and put his hand on her thigh.

“Well, don’t get any ideas,” she said, and moved away from him.

“Why not?”

“My parents are coming tomorrow...”

“It’s today already.”

“Whatever it is, it’s late.”

“Never too late,” he said, and rolled in against her.

“Jamie, I want to get some sleep. Really. Not now, okay?”

“Give me your hand,” he whispered.

“They’ll be here at noon,” she said.

“Put your hand here on my...”

“Will you please cut it out?” she said. “Jesus!”

The room went silent.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me again how I never want to make love.”

“You said it, not me.”

“I do want to make love. But not now.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Fine, we’ll make love tomorrow.”

“Save it for tomorrow night, okay? After they’re gone.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll take a bath after dinner, and then we can make love. I’ll check the calendar in the morning, but I think tomorrow’ll be fine.”

“Fine, you check the calendar.”

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

“Don’t be angry. It’s just that I have to get up early to start the turkey and...”

“Fine.”

“Do you want me to... you know?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” he said. “Happy New Year.”