Love, Dad

2

The letter was dated February 10. It was typewritten on Henderson School stationery, with its embossed seal proclaiming EDUCATIO SUPER OMNIA. It read:

Jamie stopped at her dorm first, not expecting to find her there so early in the afternoon, and not surprised when he didn’t. At the registrar’s office, he looked up her program, and then walked across campus toward Radley Hall, where she had an English class. It was just 2:00 P.M., and the old clock in the chapel steeple was chiming the hour. The day was clear and crisp, the campus — except for its shoveled walks — still snow-covered from Sunday’s blizzard. He saw her coming out of Radley with two other students, a boy and a girl. Lissie was wearing blue jeans, boots and a pea jacket. The jacket was open, a striped blue-and-orange muffler, the school’s colors, hanging loose over her blue crew-neck sweater. She spotted him when he was still some distance away from her, and came running down the walk toward him, her books clutched to her chest.

“Hi, Dad!” she said, and hugged him, and then kissed him on the cheek. He returned the embrace, but he did not kiss her. He hadn’t yet decided whether to play the stern father or the understanding pal, but he felt he ought to appear somewhat distant until he had all the facts.

“I got a letter from Mr. Holtzer today,” he said.

“Yeah, there was a copy in my box,” Lissie said. “Is that why you’re here?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You could’ve called, you know. This isn’t such a big deal.”

“I think it’s a big deal,” Jamie said.

“Yeah? Well, maybe we ought to talk about it then.”

“That’s exactly what I’d like to do.”

“Okay, you want to go have some coffee?”

“Sure,” he said.

They walked in silence to the student dining room on the boys’ end of the campus. The classes at Henderson were co-ed, but the dorms were discreetly separated by a stand of pines through which a single path wound through a deliberate maze. There were two student dining rooms; most of the girls preferred eating in the one near the boys’ dorms. The dining room was sparsely populated at a little after two, a handful of students scattered at the long oaken tables, coats and parkas slung over the backs of chairs, sunlight streaming through the leaded windows, books strewn on tabletops. Lissie went to the coffee machine and came back to the table where he was waiting. She put his cup down before him and said, “Okay, let’s talk.”

“What happened?” he said.

“I hope you know I wasn’t smoking pot,” she said.

“I would hope not.”

“Well, I wasn’t. And neither was Rita Cordova, I don’t think you know her.”

“How about Jenny?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah, she was smoking.”

“Holtzer’s letter...”

“I know. She lied to him.”

“What happened to the ones who were smoking?”

“They all got expelled.”

“Where was this?”

“At Ulla’s house. Her parents got stuck in Hartford, because of the storm.”

“Who’s Ulla?”

“Captain of the soccer team, Ulla Oftedahl, I think I introduced her to you once.”

“Big Brunhilde type?”

“Yeah, that’s Ulla.”

“So you were lucky,” Jamie said.

“How do you figure that? I wasn’t smoking any damn pot, how do you figure I was lucky? I’m restricted to campus for a month, and I wasn’t even...”

“What about this problem in the dorm?”

“I don’t know about any problem in the dorm.”

“Holtzer’s letter...”

“Holtzer is full of it,” Lissie said angrily. “There’s no problem in the dorm.”

“Then why have the prefects and the dorm teachers been giving you guidance?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Yeah, what?” Jamie said.

“Dad, there isn’t any problem, believe me. It’s just that Jenny and I get bored out of our minds every now and then, and we try to create a little fun for ourselves, that’s all.”

“What kind of fun?”

“Though I don’t respect her for lying the way she did. She almost got me and Rita in serious trouble. Because Mr. Holtzer suspected Jenny was lying, and he thought maybe we were lying, too. It’s just that Miss Larkin saw the other kids smoking, you know, the ones who got expelled, and Jenny had the joint in an ashtray when Miss Larkin walked in, so...”

“Who’s Miss Larkin?”

“Head of the phys ed department. And coach of the soccer team. If you want my opinion, nobody would have got kicked out if Miss Larkin hadn’t been so pissed. Because Ulla was captain of the team, you know, and she didn’t expect her to be smoking pot. So everybody suffered because the party was at Ulla’s house. One of the guy’s fathers — Bobby Brecht’s father — donated five thousand dollars to Greenleaf last year...”

“Greenleaf?”

“The new arts center. And he got kicked out, too, can you imagine? After giving the school five thousand dollars? Boy,” Lissie said, and shook her head.

“What about this fun in the dorm?”

“Well, it was Jenny and I who named all the dorms.”

“What do you mean, named them?”

“Well... Abbott Dorm is Attica, and Ogden Dorm is Ossining, and Allister is Alcatraz, and our own dorm... those are all prisons, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And our own dorm — Lorimer — is Leavenworth, and Sutton is San Quentin... can you think of anything for Riker Dorm?”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Huh?”

“There’s a jail on Rikers Island.”

“Where’s that?”

“Just off Bruckner Boulevard, in the Bronx.”

“Really? Jesus! Rikers Island! Wait’ll I tell Jenny! Anyway, that’s what it was all about.”

“Your naming the dorms after prisons.”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s all.”

“Yeah. Because it sort of caught on, you know.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s why the prefects and dorm teachers were giving you guidance.”

“Well... yeah. I guess.”

“What else, Lissie?”

“Nothing. That’s all.”

“Holtzer’s letter said...”

“Well, you know him, he’s an asshole.”

“Lissie... what else?”

“You’re gonna get mad.”

“Why? What’d you do?”

“Nothing. But you’ll think it was terrible.”

“What was it?”

“We poured hot tea all over Hillary Frankel’s bed.”

“You what?” Jamie said.

“See?” Lissie said. “I told you you’d get mad.”

“Poured hot tea...”

“Well, Hillary wasn’t in the bed when we did it.”

“But why’d you...?”

“She’s a creep, Dad. She’s always writing things on our door slate, wrong things, like pretending she’s Jenny and writing that I should meet her in the library after eight, or sometimes using boys’ names and leaving a dorm number we should call, like that. And whenever we have the extreme unction sign out...”

“The what?”

“The extreme unction sign. That’s if we’re studying, we tack this little red sign to the door, and it means you’re not supposed to knock or anything under penalty of extreme unction. But she always knocks anyway, she’s a terrifying creep, believe me.”

“So you poured tea in her bed.”

“Yeah, hot tea,” Lissie said, and grinned.

He was tempted to grin with her. Instead, he kept a stern look on his face, and said, “When was this?”

“Just after the Thanksgiving long weekend.”

“Was that the end of the episode?”

“Well, no, not exactly.”

“How, exactly, did it end?”

“We told all the kids on the dorm that Hillary was a marine — you know, a bed-wetter. We told them the tea stains were piss.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So naturally, Hillary figured it was us who’d done it.”

“Naturally.”

“And she went to the house mother, and she gave us a little talk.”

“Was that the only incident?”

“Well, no.”

“What were the other incidents?”

“One other incident.”

“What was it, Lissie?”

“Well... remember when we had that light snow last month?”

“Yes?”

“Well, what we did, me and Jenny, we went on a sort of panty raid, taking panties from all the rooms on our floor, and then carrying them over to Baxter House — that’s on the boys’ side — and arranging them in the snow so they, you know, spelled out a word.”

“Don’t tell me what the word was,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, that was the word.”

“Are we thinking of the same word?”

“If you’re thinking of ‘fuck,’ that’s the word,” Lissie said.

“I didn’t realize that word was in your vocabulary.”

“Oh, come on, Dad.”

“I’m serious. When did you start using words like...?”

“Dad, all the kids say fuck.”

“Please lower your voice, Lissie.”

“Well, they do. In fact, ‘fuck, shit, piss, cunt’ is the favorite dormitory expletive.”

“Expletive, huh?”

“Yeah,” Lissie said, and grinned. “Cool word, huh?”

“Cooler than the others, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, well, mmm.”

“So what happened?”

“After we put out the panties? Well, all the panties had name tags in them, we have to sew name tags in all our clothes so when we send them to the laundry—”

“Get to it, Liss.”

“Well, the boys in Baxter House considered it a sort of... invitation, I guess. They kept the phone ringing off the hook all afternoon, asking for the girls whose names were in the panties.” Lissie shrugged. “That’s all.”

“And did this lead to another little talk with the house mother?”

“A bigger talk this time. Mrs. Frawley and all the prefects. Because me and Jenny were the only two girls who didn’t get phone calls that afternoon — we hadn’t put out our own panties, naturally — so all the other girls in the dorm figured we were the ones who did it.”

“Elementary,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, we should’ve thought of that.” Lissie hesitated. She lifted her coffee cup to her lips, took a sip, and then said, “So what do you think?”

“I think I’d better talk to Mr. Holtzer,” Jamie said.

His talk with Holtzer had no effect on the sentence the headmaster had meted. For whereas Jamie argued that both incidents might be considered normal preparatory school pranks, especially prevalent during the long winter months, Holtzer maintained that the smoking of marijuana could hardly be considered a preparatory school prank (“But she wasn’t smoking mari—”) and neither did he consider the antisocial activities of Melissa and her roommate the sort of community-oriented behavior the Henderson School expected from its students, and especially its graduating seniors. Like a Philadelphia lawyer begging leniency for a client in a heinous ax-murder case, Jamie argued that the punishment did not fit the crime and that the hardship it entailed—

“It will not be a tremendous hardship,” Holtzer said.

“My wife and I both work hard during the week, Mr. Holtzer. I’m a photographer, as you may know, and my assignments—”

“Yes, I’m familiar with your work,” Holtzer said.

“Thank you,” Jamie said, although he wasn’t sure he’d been complimented. “The point is that my assignments frequently require working at night, which would mean that we’d have to visit Lissie only on weekends. My wife works with handicapped children three days a week, teaching speech, and by the weekend she’s as exhausted as I am. We live in a small town, our weekends are precious to us; they’re the only time we have to see our friends, to socialize, to take part in community activities that—”

“I don’t see what your weekends have to do with Melissa’s.”

“I’m suggesting that were she allowed to come home as usual on her nonacademic weekends, we could all pursue a more normal—”

“But that’s quite impossible, don’t you see?” Holtzer said.

“I’m suggesting that your punishment, though intended for Lissie alone, is including her parents as well.”

“Mr. Croft,” Holtzer said, “we have students here who come from places as far away as Hawaii. They never get to see their parents except during school recesses. The disciplinary action we’re taking against Melissa might, in fact, prove more salutary were you to plan on limiting your visits to her during the month of restriction to campus. She might otherwise consider this a lark rather than the very serious matter it in reality is.”

“I can’t agree with you that it’s quite as serious as you consider it,” Jamie said tightly.

“I’m sorry,” Holtzer said, “but neither is it you who are responsible for the welfare of the eight hundred and thirty-seven students here at Henderson. Your daughter among them, I might add.”

“Thank you then,” Jamie said, and rose.

“Thank you for stopping by,” Holtzer said.

On the first weekend of what Lissie termed her “solitary confinement,” both Jamie and Connie drove up to Shottsville on Friday night, ate dinner with her in the girls’ dining room, attended a student production of I Remember Mama in the new Merrill Greenleaf Arts Center (toward the construction of which Bobby Brecht’s father had contributed five thousand bucks, only to be rewarded with his son’s expulsion) and then went back to the town’s only hotel, where they watched Johnny Carson till midnight. Jamie said he wanted to make love. Connie told him she’d left her diaphragm at home, and this was a bad time of the month. On Saturday, they watched an ice hockey game between Henderson and Choate (Henderson lost) and then ate dinner again in the girls’ dining room, during which second meal on campus Jamie began to appreciate Lissie’s constant complaints about the “swill” the students were expected to eat. From the hotel room that night, he called the headmaster at home, apologized for breaking in on his privacy this way, and asked if it might not be possible for him and his wife to take Lissie out to lunch tomorrow.

“Out?” Holtzer said.

“Off campus,” Jamie said.

“No,” Holtzer said at once, “I’m afraid that would be quite impossible.”

“Because you see,” Jamie said, “my wife and I have had some meaningful discussions with Lissie in the last two days...”

“Ah, have you?”

“Yes, and we thought our... constructive therapy, one might call it... would stand a much greater chance of success if we were able to see Lissie in surroundings that weren’t at such odds with what we’re—”

“No,” Holtzer said, “I’m sorry.”

“I recognize that my suggestion isn’t entirely in keeping with the letter of the disciplinary action...”

“Indeed not,” Holtzer said.

“But certainly if the spirit can be served...”

“How would taking her off campus...?”

“I feel her mother and I could better bring about an understanding of the school’s aims and hopes by seeing Lissie in an atmosphere more conducive to acceptance.”

Holtzer said nothing.

“Acceptance of the nature of the discipline,” Jamie said. “And a firm commitment to seeing that such behavior isn’t repeated.”

“Well... perhaps just for lunch,” Holtzer said.

“Thank you, sir,” Jamie said. “I’ll report back to you, and if tomorrow’s experiment works, perhaps we can extend it over next weekend’s visit.”

“Yes, good luck,” Holtzer said, sounding somewhat puzzled.

“Thank you again, sir,” Jamie said, and hung up.

“You are the world’s biggest bullshit artist,” Connie said, shaking her head.

For lunch that Sunday, they took her off campus to a place called Dominick’s which had been highly recommended by Lissie’s French teacher, but which proved to be the worst Italian restaurant Jamie had ever eaten in. They left her at four-thirty, and were back in Rutledge in time to catch the tail end of a party at the Kreugers’. Young Scarlett Kreuger, dressed for the party in a rather daringly low-cut blouse and a skintight black skirt — daring for a seventeen-year-old, at any rate — asked Jamie how Lissie was coming along, and he told her she was doing just fine.

The second weekend posed some problems.

The Crofts had made plans as long ago as the beginning of January, when the show opened, to go see Hadrian VII with Jeff and Junie Landers. They’d bought the sell-out tickets from a scalper, paying through the nose for them, and the seats were for this Friday night, February 21. Moreover, there was a big Washington’s Birthday party scheduled at the McGruders’ for Saturday night, and a Rutledge painter named Mark Hopwell was opening a one-man exhibit at the Silvermine Guild that Sunday afternoon.

Connie was willing to forsake the New Canaan opening — although she really was interested in Hopwell’s work — but she damn well wasn’t ready to give up either the Broadway tickets or the big Saturday night bash. Their argument about Lissie’s detention and Jamie’s determination to “make it easier for her” took place on the Monday after their initial visit to school. Junie Landers had just called, asking where they wanted to eat in the city that Friday night, and Connie had told her she’d discuss it with Jamie and get back to her. Jamie, who had completely forgotten about the theater tickets, immediately said, “Well, what about Lissie?”

“What about her?” Connie said.

“We promised we’d go up there this weekend.”

“Well, we can’t,” Connie said simply. “We have theater tickets.”

“Then what’s she supposed to do up there all by herself?”

“Stop it, Jamie, she won’t be ‘all by herself.’ And besides, if she’s been acting up, she deserves the damn punishment.”

“You sound like Holtzer.”

“Are you so sure she wasn’t smoking pot?”

“I’m positive.”

“Because I’m not.”

“She told me she wasn’t, and I believe her.”

“But she was causing a lot of trouble in the dorm.”

“Kid stuff. Pranks.”

“Pranks, fine. You go see her this weekend. I’m going to see Hadrian VII, and I’m going to the McGruder party on Saturday night.”

“Where maybe Alistair York can dance with his hand on your ass.”

“Yes, maybe. Better his hand than nobody’s.”

“Maybe you can even ask him to join you and the Landerses at the theater this Friday.”

“Good idea. And maybe he’d like to take me to Silvermine on Sunday, while you’re up there in Shitsville holding your daughter’s hand.”

“I thought she was your daughter, too.”

“Jamie, you’re being utterly ridiculous about this,” Connie said. “If you want my opinion, the restriction...”

“I’m only trying to...”

“... will do her a lot of...”

“... make it easier for...”

They stopped talking simultaneously. They looked at each other. “So?” Connie said.

“So I’m going up to see her.”

“Without me,” she said flatly.

“Fine, without you,” he said.

He drove up to the school on Friday at six, an hour after Connie was picked up by the Landerses and not Alistair York but a woman named Alice Keyes, whose dentist husband had abandoned her for his nineteen-year-old receptionist two weeks before Christmas. As the Landerses’ Jaguar pulled out of their driveway, Jamie could see Connie and Alice sitting stiffly beside each other on the back seat, looking for all the world like a pair of bereaved widows. With Holtzer’s blessing, he took Lissie to dinner that night in a restaurant called the Yankee Stonecutter, and later fell asleep watching the eleven o’clock news on New Haven’s Channel 8. The headline story was about the explosion of a terrorist bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket. He awakened at 2:00 A.M., surprised to find himself in bed alone, the television still on, a vampire movie unreeling in black and white. He went to the bathroom to pee, got back into bed, watched the movie for another ten minutes, and then switched off the set and the bedlamp.

On Saturday, he ate breakfast alone at the motel, and then picked Lissie up at ten-fifteen. They spent the morning together antiquing, and had a truly superb lunch at a seafood restaurant just outside Wallingford. He was, he admitted to himself, beginning to enjoy Lissie’s Intermediate Discipline. Moreover, he suspected she was enjoying it as much as he. And whereas he knew his excursions to Shottsville weren’t accomplishing what Jonathan Holtzer and the Henderson School expected them to accomplish, he doubted the school’s trustees would have frowned upon the strengthening of ties between a father and his daughter. Electra aside (you insidious bastard, Lipscombe), he discovered his daughter as a young lady that weekend, a discovery tantamount in importance to his first glimpse of her at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York on the morning of December 19, 1951.

There was, in Lissie at seventeen, something comfortably reminiscent of Connie at eighteen — which was when he’d met her and fallen in love with her. The same good looks were there, of course, transmitted by those strong Harding genes, her mother’s nose and cheeks, her mother’s flaxen hair, the same lithe slender body, the physical twinship almost complete save for Lissie’s poverty-stricken bust and the fact that her eyes were blue whereas Connie’s were green. But there was more of Connie there as well: Lissie’s outspoken frankness, her obstinate refusal to accept sham of any kind, her fierce pride, her sense of justice, and an innocence he found spookily like her mother’s had been.

She had come into his life in October of 1949, a long-legged, full-breasted eighteen-year-old Vassar girl whose reputation as a Snow Queen had preceded her via the Yale grapevine. It was this about her that had attracted him most, perhaps, her reputed inaccessibility, an aloof manner his mother would have called “stuck-up,” the knowledge that any of the boys who’d dated her (the Yalies, at least) hadn’t got to first base. Jamie had just turned twenty-three that July, and he considered himself a man of the world. He had been discharged from the United States Army in June of 1946, and had bummed around all summer long, going to the beach on good days and the movies on bad ones, and finally entering Yale in the fall. In 1949, when he first spotted Connie at the Vassar mixer, he was a graduating senior and although his roommate — a boy named Maury Atkins — had told him to stay away from Constance Hard-On, also known in the trade as C. T. Harding, Jamie felt he himself might just possibly be the man to crack her icy façade.

“I warned you,” Maury said, and shook his head in sympathy as he watched Jamie cross the floor to where Connie was sitting and talking to a girlfriend. Rock-and-roll had still not exploded on the scene; the song the record player was oozing as Jamie crossed the floor was a sweet little number titled “Mona Lisa”; the man singing it was a relatively new recording star named Nat “King” Cole. Fashion that year had just about outgrown the folly of the New Look; it was now possible to see whether a girl had good legs, or in fact any legs at all. As Jamie approached the couch where Connie was sitting with her friend and amiably chatting, he was pleased to notice that she had splendid legs indeed and what one might have termed exuberant boobs protruding perkily in the swooping neck of the green dress she was wearing. Green dress, green shoes, and green eyes, too; she acknowledged his approach with a jungle-glade glance and then turned her attention and her chatter back to her girlfriend, a good-looking brunette who seemed utterly bored with the entire universe.

“Hi,” Jamie said, “would you care to dance?”

“I’d adore it,” Connie said at once, surprising him, and getting to her feet and moving into his arms. He thought surely Maury Atkins had been wrong. She seemed warm and receptive as he asked her all the questions students ask of each other the world over: How do you like Yale, Harvard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Oxford, University of Michigan, Le Sorbonne, C.C.N.Y., the Citadel, all or none of the above; are you a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior or grad student; how do you like your roommate; what is your major, what is your minor, does your mother come from Ireland, and who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?

He listened to her, enchanted as she supplied the answers to all his questions, fascinated by the lilt of her voice, and its cadence, and the somewhat breathy rush of it, surely not her own voice but something acquired here at Vassar, and remembering the old line attributed to Dorothy Parker: “If you laid every Vassar girl end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“I adore Vassar,” Connie said. “I’m in my freshman year, I room with a girl who lives on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, I’m majoring in speech and dramatics and minoring in psychology, and I, uh, don’t really enjoy dancing this close.” He backed away from her at once and told her he himself was a graduating senior at Yale (“Well, sure, Yale,” she said, and he realized how dumb he’d just been; there were only Yalies at the mixer) and that he was majoring in political science and minoring in history, but that he had recently and pretty much by accident become interested in photography and had joined—

“By accident?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I found a camera.”

“Found a camera?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where? What kind of camera?”

“On the Commons. In New Haven. On a bench in the park there.”

“Well... well, whose camera is it? I mean, is it an expensive camera?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I checked it out, it’s worth about three hundred bucks. It’s a Leica. Do you know anything about cameras?”

“Nothing.”

“Neither did I, until I joined the Photography Club. I figured if I owned a good camera...”

“Well, it’s not really your camera.”

“Yes, I think it is. Now it is. I put an ad in the paper, you see, the New Haven Register, and I asked whoever’d lost a camera to give me a call, and nobody did.”

“Did you describe it?”

“No, of course not. Then anyone in the world could’ve claimed it.”

“Well, that’s right. Mmm. Yeah.”

“I even developed the roll of film that was in it, figuring there’d be pictures of people, you know, somebody recognizable, but the whole roll was of buildings. Not the whole roll because he’d only taken six or seven pictures, but all of buildings.”

“Maybe he was an architect.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I figure the camera’s mine now, and since I’ve got it, I’ve been making use of it. Want me to take your picture sometime?” he said, and grinned.

“Sure,” she said. “When?”

He looked at her.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“Why would I be?”

“I don’t know, I just... I mean, we’ve hardly said a dozen words to each other.”

“Well, don’t you want to?”

“Sure,” he said. “Hey, cool.”

Connie’s reputation, he discovered on their first date (“I told you so,” Maury Atkins said), was firmly rooted in fact. Try as hard as he might, Jamie could not convince her to engage in anything more intimate or spirited than the rather expert kissing she’d learned from one of her older sister’s boyfriends one night while Janet was at the ballet with a visiting junior from Harvard. “He was some kisser,” Connie disclosed after she and Jamie had been kissing for something close to two hours in the front seat (they had not yet graduated to the back seat) of the used Dodge he’d bought three years earlier with the back pay he’d accumulated overseas. Jamie recalled the story told by one of the stand-up comics about the ugly man walking down the street and thinking he had an extremely beautiful mouth because he overheard one girl saying to another, “Did you see the kisser on that guy?” He did not tell the joke to Connie that night because she was, in fact, a very good kisser; he was tempted instead to ask her for the name of her sister’s long-ago boyfriend so that he might send him a dozen roses and a letter of recommendation. It was a pity, Jamie thought after their fifth date, when he was already hopelessly in Connie’s thrall, that Janet’s boyfriend (whose name had been Archie Halpern, a hell of a name for such a good kisser) hadn’t taught Connie the joys of petting as well.

For this oversight, Jamie was obliged to devote much of his energy during the harsh winter of 1950 attempting entry into Connie’s laden blouse, the buttons on which were guarded as jealously as had been the gates of Stalingrad during World War II. By spring, he did manage to steal one or the other of his sneaky hot hands onto her sweatered, shirted, bloused or blanketed (this one day when he popped into her unlocked hotel room in New Haven and surprised her naked in bed with nothing but a blanket over her) mounds, but never would she allow him to touch those prized beauties in the flesh. He heard with some surprise, therefore, that Fodderwing Foley had put in his hand, so to speak, during the torrid summer of 1950.

Fodderwing’s true name was Frederick; he was only later rebaptized, cruelly and in anger, by Jamie. He was the son of one of Peter Harding’s oldest friends, and he was to be here in New York City for two weeks only, visiting from someplace in Iowa (was there such a place as Pomeroy, Iowa?) and enjoying the Hardings’ hospitality, and the use of their guest room, and — as it later turned out — the ample use of their daughter’s until-then sacrosanct bosom. Fodderwing was Jamie’s identical age — twenty-four in that summer of 1950 — and he had been with the infantry in Europe and had suffered frostbite on all the toes of his left foot, which toes were later amputated at an Army field hospital, leaving him with a discernible limp that did much to encourage excessive sympathy for a young man who was exceedingly handsome anyway. Jamie distrusted him from the moment he took his hand and felt its warm, dry clasp, looked into those limpid brown eyes and glimpsed the soul of a seducer within, studied that almost feminine mouth with its pouting lower lip and Cupid’s bow upper, and thought at once of Janet’s former boyfriend who’d taught Connie to kiss.

As Foley limped his way to the bedroom down the hall, the one next door to Connie’s, the one that had been Janet’s when she’d been living here in New York before her marriage, Jamie felt a distinct tremor of foreboding. He and Connie had as yet exchanged no formal declarations of enduring love, but it was tacitly understood that they were “going steady” and that one day, perhaps after Connie’s graduation in June of 1953, by which time Jamie hoped to have established himself as a working photographer here in the Big Apple, one day they might consider getting engaged and then, maybe, sometime in the distant future, think about getting married. Or at least that was the way Connie seemed to consider their relationship. If Jamie had had his way, they’d have been married already. But she was, after all, only nineteen years old in that summer of 1950, and whereas she was a very good kisser, she seemed so terribly — young. Certainly too young to even consider marriage at this early stage of her womanhood. Marriage? She had just completed her freshman year, she would only be entering her sophomore year in the fall. Marriage? She was, for Christ’s sake, only nineteen years old!

Fodderwing Foley, the prick, thought it might be nice to seduce young Constance Tate Harding. Jamie could forgive him this; he had, after all, begun his relationship with Connie with the same rapierlike thought in mind, nor had its edge been dulled over the intervening nine months. What he could not forgive was the fact that the son of a bitch damn near succeeded! Whereas Jamie had been toying with Connie’s buttons like a safecracker all through the winter, spring and part of the summer, searching for the combination to the vault wherein the treasures lay; whereas Jamie had had his wrists caught and firmly held more times than a trapeze artist doing a double somersault without a net; whereas Jamie had pleaded and persuaded only to be scolded and excoriated; whereas Jamie had exhausted every male wile at his command in an attempt to weaken the resolve of Constance C. T. Hard-On Snow Queen Harding, that son-of-a-bitch son of her father’s best friend, that son-of-a-bitch guest in the third bedroom down the hall, the one next door to Connie’s, had to do nothing more than march in there one night while she was asleep and naked, and fondle her to his heart’s content, claiming the twin turrets of her femaleness as though they were cherished hills overlooking some disputed valley to be taken by an invading American army.

That he did not capture the tinier bastion below had been a miracle of self-restraint: Connie’s. In August — long after Fodderwing had once again departed for the more tranquil pastures of Pomeroy, Iowa, or Ohio, or wherever the hell he lived — she told Jamie all about that simmering steamy night in July, Freddie sneaking into her room and playing with her breasts all night long, kissing them and sucking them and stroking them and probing them and patting them, all of which had been excruciatingly nerve-racking for her, even though terribly exciting, the whole strenuous battle all night long, you know, to keep from doing what he really wanted her to do, and which of course she could not allow herself to do. (“I shouldn’t even be lying here on the couch with you,” Jamie thought as she told him her perfidious tale.)

He asked her, as well he might have, why she’d allowed Fodderwing into her bed to begin with. She explained that she hadn’t allowed him in, he’d simply come in, the same way Jamie had come into her hotel room that morning in New Haven when she’d accidentally left the door unlocked, and had found her naked in bed with just a blanket over her, which was the way she slept and which was the way Freddie had found her, too. When Jamie pointed out that in New Haven she hadn’t allowed him to climb between the sheets with her, had in fact raised a fuss that could have been heard in Paris, France, she explained that she hadn’t allowed Freddie to climb between the sheets, either, he had just done it, and she hadn’t been able to yell the way she had in New Haven because Mommy and Daddy were sleeping right next door, and this was Daddy’s best friend’s son, so what could she possibly do? It had all been just too impossible, and so she had suffered his advances and had got herself very, well, wet and, well, excited all night, but had nonetheless managed to save herself (except for her breasts) for whoever, you know, she might, you know, one day marry.

“So why the fuck are you telling this to me?” Jamie shouted in a rage. “What makes you think I want to know about your sordid little... your... your breast job with that... that toeless wonder... that that that Fodderwing—” and this was where Jamie baptized him after the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings character — “why tell me, go tell your Daddy whose best friend’s son that fucking cocksucker...”

“Jamie, I don’t like that kind of language,” Connie said. “I told you because if we ever do get married...”

“No!” he shouted. “No, we’re not going to get married, Connie! No, we are—”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course we are.”

It was Jamie’s guess (and he was almost right) that his daughter, at seventeen, had never even been kissed, and he found the contradiction of her sophisticated demeanor and her true inexperience completely enchanting. He took her to see a sneak preview of a movie titled Last Summer that night, and was appalled by the behavior of the three teenage kids in it, all of them presumably Lissie’s age, but none of them even remotely like her. He did not once regret having missed the McGruder party, did not in fact even remember it until he was already in bed at eleven-thirty. From his motel room, he asked the information operator for the McGruder number in Rutledge, and then dialed it. Betty McGruder answered the phone on the fourth ring. There was the sound of music, laughter and voices behind her. He visualized her standing at the phone with one finger in her ear.

“Betty,” he said, “this is Jamie. Can I talk to Connie, please?”

“Where are you, you dirty dog?” Betty said.

“Up here in Shottsville.”

“Where the hell is Shottsville?”

“Up here someplace,” he said. “Sounds like a good party.”

“It’s a magnificent party, I may never speak to you again for missing it. Let me see if I can find her.”

He heard the receiver clattering onto the tabletop, heard Betty yelling, “Connie! Jamie’s on the phone! Has anyone seen Connie?” He listened to the background din.

“Hello?” Connie said.

“Hi, honey, how’s the party?”

“Terrific,” she said flatly. “Parties are always marvelous when your husband’s in Nome, Alaska.”

“Where were you?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Took you a long time to get to the phone.”

“Oh. Some of us are in the den playing Dictionary. How’s Lissie?”

“Fine. We went to a movie.”

“When are you coming home?”

“After lunch tomorrow.”

“Then you’ll be able to come to the Guild with me.”

“What time is the opening?”

“Three o’clock, I think.”

“Yes, sure.”

“Where are you now?”

“In bed,” Jamie said.

“Alone?”

“No, with two black girls.”

“I believe it,” Connie said.

“Want to talk to them? Lula Belle, my wife wants to say hello.”

“Take pictures,” Connie said. “I want to see if I approve of your taste.”

“Haven’t got my camera with me. Edna Mae, my wife wants to know how I taste.”

Connie laughed.

“See you tomorrow, honey,” he said, smiling. “How long are you going to be at that party?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How would you define ‘peculate’?”

“Peculate?” He thought for a moment, and then said, “To rummage aimlessly.”

“Good, I’ll use it. Give Lissie my love.”

“I will. Good night, darling,” he said, and hung up.

He recognized at lunch the next day that he and Lissie were collaborators of a sort, recklessly conspiring to nullify the punishment meted by the school. He felt, along with her, that the punishment was absurd, and he firmly believed that it was essential to reduce absurdity of any kind to its lowest level of idiocy. Lissie had not been smoking pot, and the rest was utter nonsense. The rest, in fact, had been behavior he considered somewhat creative. Lissie sensed his approval and plundered it like a pirate, teasingly asking him to come up on the following weekend, even though it was an academic weekend when normally she would not have been allowed home. He drew the line there, telling her he’d end up in a divorce court if he left her mother alone at home on yet another weekend. Lissie’s face went suddenly sober.

“You’d never even consider divorcing Mom, would you?” she asked.

“Never in a million years,” he said.

He was lying.

Lissie’s academic weekend officially started after her fourth-period class on Friday, February 28. Jamie, as he’d promised, did not go up to see her; neither was she allowed to go home, since that would have amounted to a total revocation of the Intermediate Discipline she was allegedly suffering. On Saturday afternoon, she and her roommate Jenny played a vigorous if amateurish game of squash, showered and washed their hair afterward, and were sitting in bras and panties on one of the locker-room benches, waiting for their hair to dry more completely before venturing out into the cold.

Jenny lived in New York City with her mother and her stepfather, and she went to thousands of Broadway shows each year, and had the albums for all of them, not to mention the albums for another thousand she’d never seen. She was almost eighteen, six months older than Lissie, and she still used the name Groat, even though her stepfather wanted to adopt her and give her his name. She liked her stepfather a lot, but his name was Fenner, and Jenny could just feature calling herself Jenny Fenner! She’d never met her real father, who’d abandoned Jenny’s mother the minute he learned she was pregnant; but according to what her mother had told her, she resembled him a lot, with the same black hair and brown eyes, and the same upturned little Irish nose. Groat, she proudly informed Lissie, was an Irish name going all the way back to the days of the widcairns.

Except for the two of them, the locker room was empty. A shower dripped interminably in one of the stalls. They talked ramblingly about their game — Lissie felt that Jenny’s backhand was improving — and then about the guest violinist who was scheduled to play that night at the arts center, and then, as it invariably did, the conversation switched to the injustice of their punishment; by then, Jenny had convinced herself she was truly innocent, and that the sentence levied upon the three nonsmoking girls was enormously extravagant. Lissie, who had seen her father more often during the three weeks of restriction than she had in any previous three weeks of the school term, nonetheless agreed that these were hard times, and began toweling her hair again. When she took the towel away from her head, the first thing she saw was the joint in Jenny’s hand.

“What the hell is that?” she said, knowing full well what it was. “Come on, put that away, are you crazy? Where’d you get that?”

“From a boy at Rogers House,” Jenny said, the joint bobbing between her lips, her dark head bent over her open handbag.

“Hey, come on,” Lissie said. “For Christ’s sake, we’ll get kicked out! If somebody walks in here...”

“Everybody’s over at the rink, watching the Taft game,” Jenny said, and found the matchbook she was looking for.

“Then wait till I’m gone, okay?” Lissie said. “I’m getting the fuck out of here, you just wait till—”

“Why?” Jenny said. “You chicken?”

“That’s right, I’m chicken, right, that’s it,” Lissie said, pulling on her jeans.

“You ever try it?”

“Nope, and I don’t intend to,” Lissie said. She reached for her sweater, pulled it on over her wet hair, and then sat on the bench again to put on her socks and shoes. She left the laces untied, grabbed her squash racket, and was starting for the door when Jenny’s voice stopped her.

“Who are you running to tell?” she said.

“What?” Lissie said, turning to her.

“You heard me.”

“Nobody. Why would I...?”

“Then stay here with me.”

“No.”

“You don’t have to smoke, if you don’t want to. Just stay with me and—”

“No. Jenny, you’ve got to be out of your—”

“Some friend,” Jenny said, and struck the match.

“Jesus, are you going to smoke it right here in the locker room?” Lissie said.

“The john then, okay?”

“Jenny...”

“Come with me, okay? Just to stand watch, okay?”

“Jenny, I’m scared shitless.”

“Just to stand watch.”

“Okay, but...”

“Thanks,” Jenny said, and blew out the match, and picked up her handbag.

The toilets were on the other side of the shower room. Jenny went into one of the stalls and closed the door. Lissie heard her striking another match, and then smelled the burning marijuana. If somebody walks in here, she thought, they’ll know in a minute...

“Hurry up, will you?” she said.

“It’s not something you can hurry,” Jenny said. “You want a drag?”

“No.”

“Little goody two-shoes,” Jenny said from behind the closed door.

“I’m not,” Lissie said. “You know I’m not.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“I don’t want to become a fucking goddamn drug addict, okay?” Lissie said. “Will you please...?”

Behind the closed door, Jenny began laughing. A cloud of smoke was swirling up toward the ceiling. Lissie listened to the gentle laughter and thought again, She’s crazy, and suddenly the door to the stall opened.

“Here,” Jenny said, extending the joint to her. “Have a little toke.”

“No.”

“For me,” Jenny said.

“For you? What?”

“For our friendship.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“No!”

“Fucking little goody two-shoes,” Jenny said. She was still wearing only her bra and panties, and Lissie suddenly remembered that the rest of her clothes were out there on the locker-room bench. If somebody came in and saw the clothes, they’d wonder...

“Come on, are you finished?” she said.

“Not till you try it,” Jenny said, and again extended the joint.

“Let’s just get out of here, okay?”

“Try it,” Jenny said.

“Why?”

“It won’t kill you.”

“Shit, all I...”

“Try it,” Jenny said.

“Shit, all right, give it to me. Let’s just... Jesus,” she said, and took the joint.

“Draw in deep on it,” Jenny said.

“I know how to do it.”

“Keep the smoke in.”

Lissie coughed.

“Take another hit.”

Lissie sucked on the joint again, swallowing the smoke, holding it back deep in her throat.

“One more toke,” Jenny said.

“I’m burning my fingers.”

“It’s down to the roach,” Jenny said. “Let’s light a fresh one.” She grinned suddenly. “Is it getting to you?”

“I feel...”

“Yeah?”

“A little woozy.”

“Mm, yeah, baby,” Jenny said, and reached for her handbag where it rested on the tiled floor near the toilet bowl.

When they came out onto the campus again at 4:00 P.M., a crowd of students was working its way over the hill from the hockey rink. They all seemed very tiny to Lissie, like little mechanical boy-and-girl dolls dressed in brightly colored teeny-weeny clothes, waving itty-bitty Henderson School pennants. One of the kids said, “We won, Liss!” and Lissie grinned at her foolishly and said, “Terrif,” and then floated beside Jenny through the labyrinthine path that separated the girls’ side of the campus from the boys’, noticing for the first time the thousands upon thousands of pine needles carpeting the forest floor, each separate pine needle clearly etched, noticing too the sculpted beauty of the rocks edging the path, each glistening facet of each rock, the pines standing in sharp silhouette against a sky more vibrantly blue than any she had ever seen. It took them forever to float through the forest, the path winding endlessly toward an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole opening at the farthest end of the forest... the world... the universe. When at last they got back to their room in Leavenworth Dorm, they closed and locked the door, and collapsed on their separate beds and repeated “Presbyterian Episcopalian” over and over again, giggling furiously all the while.

It was raining on Friday, March 14, the last day of their detention period. Their senior workload was light, they were both through with classes by midmorning, but they could not leave the campus till noon, at which time the Intermediate Discipline officially ended. They played a listless game of squash, dropped in on a choir practice to hear Francie Bowles — a friend of theirs from Ossining Dorm — and then began counting the hours. For reasons neither of them quite understood, and despite the fact that they’d been somewhat reckless about it during their disciplinary period, each of them felt it would be enormously dangerous to smoke anywhere on campus during this last day of their long incarceration.

The hours dragged.

They wandered over to the library to see if there were any boys they knew there, but Pee Wee Rawles was the only one who paid them any attention, and he was a terrifying creep who asked every girl he danced with if she’d like to have oral sex with him. At a little before twelve, they went back to the dorm to dress, both of them putting on blouses, skirts and heels, Jenny sweeping her long black hair up on top of her head in a sophisticated coiffe, and then putting on a pair of dangling gold earrings that had been a birthday present last year. They spent a goodly amount of time putting on eye liner and shadow, touched their lips with gloss and their cheeks with a faint blush of rouge, and were finally ready to go out on the town. Jenny was carrying four joints in her handbag. They signed out on the first-floor hall, did a little jig together out onto the sidewalk, and walked to the main gate where the taxi they’d called was waiting for them.

When the cabdriver saw them lighting up on the back seat, he asked, “Your parents allow you to smoke?”

“Oh, sure,” Jenny said, dragging on the joint.

“You sure?” the cabbie said.

“Positive,” Lissie said.

“Cigarettes are bad for you,” the cabbie said.

Mildly aglow after the grassy ride to the town’s only decent restaurant, giggling over the driver’s assumption that they’d been smoking cigarettes, they took a corner table in the almost deserted room, and each ordered a glass of white wine before lunch. The legal drinking age in Connecticut was twenty-one that year, but the law was rarely enforced except in package stores. Even there, a phony I.D. card was never looked at askance, and most of the Henderson kids had learned that restaurants in Shottsville wouldn’t ask for identification if you simply ordered a glass of wine and not any hard liquor. Drinking wasn’t a problem at Henderson, anyway. In fact, from what Lissie could gather — dancing at school mixers with boys from Choate or Kent or Taft — drinking wasn’t a problem anywhere. Marijuana was the big menace, marijuana was the Brown Gold Peril, marijuana was the evil weed the authorities everywhere were trying to stamp out before it polluted the young, which, of course, she knew was a lot of bullshit. If Lissie had to take a guess, she’d have said that 40 percent of the kids at Henderson were regularly smoking pot, with another 10 percent trying it every now and again. The only thing that amazed her was why she herself had waited so long.

Sipping at their wine, enjoying the supposition that they’d both looked old enough to be served without challenge, toasting their release from bondage, they looked over the menu, gave the waitress their order, and then began commiserating over the fact that they’d be separated from each other for eighteen whole days during the spring break.

“Be great if we could spend some time together,” Jenny said.

“Maybe I could come into New York for a few days,” Lissie said.

“No, I mean, you know, more than just a few days.”

“What do you mean?”

“Get in a car, just go drive someplace,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Lissie said. “Like where?”

“California,” Jenny said.

“Never make it to California and back in eighteen days,” Lissie said.

“Sure, we could.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Denver then. How about Denver? Catch some spring skiing out there.”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

“Are you a good skier?”

“So-so,” Lissie said. “My parents used to take me a lot when I was little.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Bromley, Stratton, Mount Snow. Like that.”

“But never out west.”

“No.”

“Me, neither,” Jenny said. “Be great to do some skiing out there, wouldn’t it?”

“Be terrific.”

“You think your parents would let you go?”

“Oh, sure,” Lissie said.

“Trouble is, we’d need a car.”

“My parents have two cars.”

“And somebody to drive it.”

“Why couldn’t I drive?”

“You mean you have a license?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What kind of cars?”

“My dad has a Corvette. Mom drives a station wagon.”

“Think she’d let us use it?”

“You mean to go to Denver?”

“Yeah. Well, to Aspen. If we’re gonna ski, we should go to Aspen.”

The waitress came back to the table with their meals.

“Plates are very hot,” she said, “be careful. Would you care for more wine?”

“Yes, please,” Jenny said.

“Uh-huh,” Lissie said, and nodded.

“What we could do,” Jenny said, “is you could pick me up in New York, and then we’d take the tunnel to Jersey, and head across through Pennsylvania and Ohio...”

“Then Indiana,” Lissie said, “and Illinois...”

“Like the fuckin’ pioneers,” Jenny said, and laughed.

“Across Iowa to Nebraska...”

“And then into Colorado...”

“And on to Denver!”

“We’d have to check out all those states,” Jenny said, “make sure your license is good there.”

“Oh, sure,” Lissie said. “How many miles you think it’ll be?”

“Maybe two thousand, something like that.”

“How long do you figure? To Aspen, I mean.”

“Let’s say we average sixty miles an hour, okay?” Jenny said. “You’d need, say, six, seven hours’ sleep a night...”

“So what does that come to?”

“Seventeen hours of driving every day...”

“We’d better make it six teen,” Lissie said, “just in case I need eight hours a night.”

“No, you can do it on seven,” Jenny said.

“Well, just in case.”

“Okay, sateen hours a day times sixty miles an hour...”

“Better make it fifty,” Lissie said. “Let’s say we’ll average fifty.”

“Okay, sixteen times fifty is eight hundred miles a day. Divide that into two thousand miles, and we get... let’s see... about two and a half days to Colorado. Let’s say three days to play it safe.”

“Three days, right,” Lissie said. “So we’d leave when?”

“The twentieth.”

“Right, which would get us to Aspen on the twenty-third.”

“Jesus, it sounds terrific! You think your mom’ll let us have the car?” Jenny asked.

“Oh, sure.”

“When will you ask her?”

“When I get home Wednesday.”

“The day before we leave?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“That’s too late, Liss.”

“It’s just I wanted to ask her face to face.”

“Yeah, but we can’t wait till the day before...”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t we call her right now?”

“Now?” Lissie said.

“Sure, what’s wrong with now?”

“Well...”

“Let’s,” Jenny said.

There were three eight-year-olds in Connie’s last class at the rehab center. All three were stutterers (“Experiencing dysfluency problems,” as Connie might have put it to a colleague), all of them exhibiting only primary characteristics, none of them having yet been submitted to the terrible advice of teachers or parents to “stop and think so it comes out right.” She had tested each of the three individually for diagnosis using the Goldman-Fristoe articulation test, and then had asked the center’s audiologist to run an audiometer test on each of them. None of the three had any hearing problems.

Today, she was playing with the children a card game in which she’d dealt four picture cards to each of them and herself, the idea — premised on Go Fish — being to call for a card in another player’s hand, and if the player could not match that card, to keep drawing cards from the deck until the correct matching card appeared. She was using the So Sorry deck for the game, the cards showing pictures only of words beginning with the S sound — sun, saw, seal, sack, soap, sink, sign, socks, suitcase, sailboat, scissors and saddle. She had deliberately chosen this deck from the many Go-Mo speech materials available because both Mercy and Mark sometimes experienced difficulty getting the S sound out without a stutter, but primarily because she wanted to encourage Sean to forget the difficulties he was having with his “th” for “s” substitution.

“D-d-d-do you h-h-h-have a soap?” Mercy asked Mark, stumbling on the “d” and the “h” but getting out the “s” without a trace of hesitation.

“So... s-s-s-sorry,” Mark said.

Mercy fished in the deck until she found the card picturing a bar of soap. It was Mark’s turn.

“Do you have a... s-s-s-sink?” he asked Sean.

Sean shook his head.

Connie did not press him for an answer. He was avoiding the N sound, with which he’d been having surprising difficulty during the last several sessions. Mark fished in the deck until he found a “sink” card. It was now Sean’s turn. He looked at Connie.

“Do you have a thailboat?” he asked.

“It’s... s-s-s-sailboat,” Mark said.

“I know what it is,” Sean said.

“Then say it right,” Mark said.

“He’s trying to say it, aren’t you?” Connie said.

“Yeth,” Sean said.

“You mean yes,” Mercy said.

“In fact, I do have a sailboat,” Connie said, and handed Sean the card.

“Thee?” Sean said. “She d-d-did have one.”

“She had a sail b-b-b-boat,” Mercy said, “n-n-not a thail b-b-boat.”

“Do you h-h-have a thissors, too?” Sean asked.

“I have a scissors, too,” Connie said, handing him the card. “Would you like to try saying it again for me?”

“Thissors,” Sean said.

“Scissors,” Connie said.

“Thissors.”

“Well, we’ll try it again later, okay? What card would you like next?”

“Why c-c-can’t he say s-s-scissors?” Mercy said.

“It’s just a word that gives him trouble,” Connie said. “We all have words that give us trouble. I can never say antidisestab... see what I mean? I always trip on it.”

“That’s not even a word!” Mark said, laughing.

“If Mrs. C–C-Croft said it, then it’s a w-w-w-word,” Mercy said.

“She d-d-didn’t say it. She only t-t-tried to say it.”

“Antidisestablishmentarianism,” Connie said in a rush. “There, I got it!”

“See?” Mercy said. “She g-g-got it.”

“That’s some... w-w-word, all right,” Mark said, shaking his head.

At the end of the session, little Sean came to her and said, “Mrs. Cwoft, I f-f-feel so b-b-bad I can’t get it,” and she hugged him close and said, “No, darling, it’ll come in time. I promise you.”

At Columbia, where she’d studied for her master’s all those years ago, there’d been a professor who’d once remarked that the prime requisite of a speech pathologist was patience. He had written the word on the blackboard in huge block letters: P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E. She thought about him on the drive back to Rutledge. It was going to take somewhere between two and three years to successfully conclude treatment with her three eight-year-olds. She wasn’t there to treat symptoms, no, there were too many therapists who successfully treated a stuttering problem only to discover that the client had “voluntarily-involuntarily” replaced the earlier symptom with a far more serious physical symptom like hysterical aphonia — the loss of speech entirely. One therapist (not a pathologist like Connie; in the speech rehab game, a therapist qualified for certification with a B.A., a pathologist with an M.A.) had come to her in total astonishment when one of her clients lost his stutter only to become hysterically blind. Symptom migration was a common result of impatience. Patience, Connie remembered. P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E.

It would take two years at best with these kids. She sometimes felt only despair, the end result of immediate gratification constantly postponed. With Jamie’s work, it was different. He took a picture, he developed it and printed it, he realized his goal within days, sometimes within—

She stepped on the thought before it ballooned into the anger it normally triggered. It had been too many years. You couldn’t get angry over something that had happened — or failed to happen — all those years ago. Not if you wanted to preserve whatever it was you already possessed. What do I already possess? she wondered.

They were married in February of 1951. Jamie was almost twenty-five, Connie was not yet twenty. She was still a virgin on their wedding night, and she wept the first time they made love. Jamie held her in his arms and comforted her, and told her he would love her till the day he died. Connie wept into his shoulder, the sexy white silk nightgown she’d bought expressly for their honeymoon bunched above her waist and stained with blood.

She was still only nineteen when she got pregnant in March, a month after their wedding. Jamie had by then taken a job with a commercial photographer in Peekskill, some eighty miles from Poughkeepsie and a long commute back and forth every weekday, but the plan was for Connie to finish her sophomore year at Vassar before they moved into the city. She could not understand how she’d become pregnant. She had used the diaphragm religiously and according to the instructions given her at the Margaret Sanger Clinic in New York, and she simply could not understand how it had failed her. In April 1951, when she learned definitely that she was going to have a baby, abortions were illegal in the United States; moreover, they were dangerous and expensive. In the small garden apartment they were renting near the school, they discussed their plans.

It had been understood between them that they would have no children until they were both established in their separate careers. Connie wanted to be an actress; she had, in fact, already applied to both the Actors Studio and the Vodorin Workshop for possible enrollment in the fall. That was before she got pregnant.

“You can still finish out the term,” Jamie said.

“You don’t think I’ll be showing?”

“No, no, this is what? April, right? You’re still only a month pregnant...”

“Pregnant, Jesus,” she said, and shook her head.

“So June’ll be three months, that’s all. You won’t be showing at all.”

“I hope not. Because I’d feel like an idiot, you know.”

“I know.”

“In class, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Doing Voice of the Turtle or whatever, and having this big belly sticking out.”

“You won’t be showing yet, hon.”

“So I’ll finish the term, and then what?”

“Well... I don’t think you’d be able to start anyplace else in the fall, do you?”

“No.”

“I mean...”

“No, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“The baby’s coming...”

“December.”

“Yeah, so.”

“Yeah, I’d be in my sixth month by the time classes started, I don’t think Igor Vodorin would particularly appreciate...”

“But, you know, once the baby’s born...”

“Yeah, then what?”

“You could, you know...”

“Yeah, what?”

“Well...”

“I think I can kiss it goodbye, Jamie.”

“No, not necess—”

“Yeah, I think so. I don’t think they mix, Jamie. Acting and babies.”

“You know, by then I may be earning good money as a photographer, we could get someone in to take care of him — or her — and you could...”

“I find it difficult to believe there’ll really be a him or a her, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, there’s a baby growing inside me, Jamie, do you realize that?” she said, and suddenly clutched her belly with both hands. “But I... you know... I really don’t feel anything about it, or for it, or... I just feel annoyed, I guess. It’s just an annoyance, Jamie. I don’t want a fucking baby, do you want a baby?”

“No, but... honey, this doesn’t... it doesn’t have to mean the end of all our plans, you know. You can still go to acting school once the baby’s old enough to...”

“Sure.”

“A year or so, I guess would...”

“Sure, leave an infant with a stranger.”

“Lots of women...”

“Sure.”

“Honey, I’m sorry. I wish I...”

“Aw, shit,” she said, “it’s not your fault.”

But it was. In bed that night, she wept. She turned her back to him and wept silently into her pillow. She was only nineteen years old and about to have a baby. In December, she thought, I’ll be a mother. It was April already, and there were crocuses blooming on the patchy lawn outside the apartment complex. But the wind was still strong, and it rattled the windowpanes, and she thought of all those movies where a train was roaring through the night, and the wheels were going clickety-click-clack and the lights were flashing by the window and a girl was looking outside and remembering the past, the past all came back to the girl. The windows in their tiny bedroom rattled with the wind, and Connie lay beside her husband weeping quietly, but no past came back to her, she was almost too young to have had a significant past. A baby coming in December. To Connie, it seemed as if a baby would be the end of her life.

They moved to the city in June, several weeks after Connie had taken her final exams for the semester. Lissie was born six months later, on the nineteenth of December. She weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces. Jamie watched while Connie breast-fed her for the first time. She held the baby in her arms, cradling baby and breast, looking down at the infant’s head.

“What does that feel like?” he asked.

“The baby, do you mean? Here?”

“Yes.”

“Just a... I don’t know... a little tugging feeling.”

“Is it exciting?”

“A little. I don’t know. It’s not sexual, it’s... I don’t know. It’s just very strange.”

“I wonder if she likes it.”

“My milk?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure she does.”

“Can I taste it?”

“Well, not here. When we get home maybe.”

“I want to take some pictures of you nursing her.”

“All right.”

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, and lowered her eyes again, and studied the baby’s face as she drank.

She did not later allow him to taste her milk.

She did not later allow him to take pictures of her nursing their daughter.

As she pulled into the driveway of the Rutledge house, she put all of this out of her mind again. Anger was a luxury she could no longer afford. She was thirty-seven years old, she would be thirty-eight next month. Her husband was a successful photographer now, and she was an underpaid pathologist at an understaffed rehabilitation center. So be it, she thought. Fuck it, she thought.

She parked her car in the garage, noted that there was still a light burning in the barn, slung her shoulder bag, keys in her hand, and went to the mailbox. The usual — junk mail and bills. Carrying the mail to the kitchen entrance, she twisted the burglar alarm key (the one marked with red tape) in the system plate to the left of the door, unlocked the kitchen door itself, dumped the mail and her bag on the counter just inside the door, and then went to the wet-sink to mix herself a Scotch and water. Jamie had taped a note to the refrigerator door. There was a movie in Westport he wanted to see, could she be ready to go out for dinner by seven? She looked up at the clock. It was already six-fifteen. Sighing, she sat at the kitchen table, sipping her Scotch and listening to the rush of the river below her. In this house, it always sounded as if it were raining outside. She finished her drink, phoned over to the barn to remind Jamie of the time, and then ran a tub of very hot water.

She was still in the tub when the telephone rang. She yelled “Jamie!” thinking he might be back in the house by now, and then muttered “Shit,” and got out of the water and ran naked and dripping to the phone in the upstairs hallway.

“I have a collect call for anyone from Melissa Croft,” the operator said, “will you accept charges?”

“Yes,” Connie said, “sure.”

“Mom?” Lissie said. “Hi.”

“Just a second, Liss, let me get a towel,” Connie said.

In the third floor corridor of Lorimer Dorm, Lissie and Jenny were standing at the wall telephone. “What is it?” Jenny whispered.

“She’s getting a towel,” Lissie said, her hand covering the mouthpiece.

“Hi, honey,” Connie said. “I was in the tub.”

“Where’s Dad?”

“Over at the barn.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon.”

“I was at the center. Is something wrong?”

“No, no,” Lissie said.

“Ask her,” Jenny whispered.

“We’re looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday,” Connie said. “Do you know what time your train’ll be in?”

“I thought you were coming up to get me,” Lissie said.

“No, I teach on Wednesdays, you know that.”

“Well, how about Dad?”

“Wednesday is his day in the city.”

“Then how...?”

“I thought you’d take a taxi. You have your key, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, but I’ll be carrying a lot of crap home.”

“Jesus, don’t argue with her!” Jenny whispered.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Connie said, “but I don’t see any other way.”

“Yeah, well, okay,” Lissie said. “I guess.”

“Is everything all right up there?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Discipline all over and done with?”

“Yeah. Jenny and I went out to lunch. To celebrate.”

“Good, darling.”

There was a long silence. As often when she spoke to her mother on the telephone, the conversation seemed to drift off into nothingness after they’d exchanged a few pleasantries. She much preferred talking to her father, and she wondered now whether he wasn’t the one she should ask about the Colorado trip. But Jenny was rolling her eyes and flapping her hands, silently urging her to get on with it. She took a deep breath.

“Mom,” she said, “Jenny and I had an idea about what we might like to do on our break.”

“Yes, honey, what’s that?” Connie asked. She sounded distracted. Lissie guessed she was toweling herself with her free hand.

“We thought we might go to Colorado,” Lissie said. “To do some skiing.”

“Where?” Connie said.

“Aspen,” Lissie said. “Colorado.”

There was another silence on the line.

“Mom?” Lissie said.

“Yes,” Connie said, “I heard you. But Lissie... Colorado’s a long way off. And you haven’t been on skis since you were thirteen. I’m really not sure I’d want you to...”

“Jenny already has permission,” Lissie said, and hesitated. “We thought we might drive out.”

Sighing, Connie said, “You’ve only been driving since December, Liss. Colorado’s...”

“But I had Driver’s Ed,” Lissie said, and again hesitated. “We thought you might let us use the Ford.”

“What do you mean? The station wagon?”

“Well, yeah.”

“My car?”

“Yeah.”

“To drive to Colorado?”

“Well... yeah.”

“What am I supposed to drive while you’re gone?”

“You could use Dad’s car. You could share...”

“Lissie, you can’t be serious,” Connie said.

“I don’t see what’s so wrong with...”

“How could I possibly get to work without... how long did you plan on being away?”

“Well... we’d be leaving next Thursday.”

“The day after you get home?”

“And we’d be back on Easter Sunday. Or maybe the day before. The day before, actually.”

“That’s your entire vacation.”

“Not really.”

“Yes, really. I thought you were looking forward to spending...”

“It’s just that we’ve made all these plans, Mom.”

“What plans have you made?”

“Figuring it all out, I mean.”

“Whose idea was it to use my car?”

“It’s just that Jenny’s mother doesn’t have a car, they live in the city, you know. So I thought since we’ve got two cars...”

“Yes, because we need two cars. The answer is no.”

“Well, gee, Mom...”

“It’s no. I’m sorry.”

“Let me talk to Dad, may I please?”

“Dad’s working. And when he gets back here — which should be any minute now — we’re going to dinner and a movie.”

“Can you ask him to call me when you get home?”

“We won’t be home till after midnight.”

“Tomorrow, then? First thing in the morning?”

“Lissie, we’re talking about my car here. What ever your father may say, the answer is no.”

“Will you ask Dad to call me?”

“Yes.”

“Mom?”

“I said yes.”

“I’m a very good driver, and anyway we’ve got insurance on the car, haven’t we?”

“Lissie, let’s end this conversation,” Connie said. “The answer is no, and that’s that.”

“I think you’re being unreasonable,” Lissie said.

“Do you? Well, when you have a seventeen-year-old daughter who wants to drive to Colorado on her school vacation, you give her your car, okay? Meanwhile, mine stays right here,” Connie said, and hung up.

Lissie looked at the phone.

“She hung up,” she said.

“Boy,” Jenny said.

“She actually hung up,” Lissie said, still amazed, and put the receiver back on the hook.

“I think you were absolutely right,” Jenny said. “She was being unreasonable.”

“I’ll talk to Dad tomorrow,” Lissie said, nodding.

“You think he’ll let you?”

“Oh, sure,” Lissie said.

On Saturday morning, she called home at seven-thirty, while Connie was eating breakfast and Jamie was still in bed. He padded to the phone, listened to his daughter’s plea, and said he would discuss it with her mother. She called again on Sunday night at eight, and he told her they were still discussing it, even though Connie had already given an emphatic “No!” On Monday morning, again at seven-thirty, Lissie called and began crying on the phone, saying she was never allowed to do anything all the other girls were allowed to do, and how could they be so mean, all she was asking for was the use of a car that was anyhow insured, and didn’t he care about the fact that this was her vacation and that she might like to spend it doing something she wanted to do for a change, especially after having been cooped up at Henderson for the past month because of a dumb episode she hadn’t even been a part of? And what about all the money he’d spent on ski lessons and liftline tickets when she was just a kid, didn’t he want to see something beneficial come of all that?

He told her again he would discuss it with her mother, but there was no discussing it further with Connie. Connie left for work in high dudgeon, telling him if she heard one more word about that fucking station wagon and Lissie’s trip to Aspen, she would herself take the car and disappear from the face of the earth. Ten minutes later, he called Lissie back and told her she could neither borrow her mother’s car nor go to Colorado in anybody else’s car.

When she began to plead again, he hung up.

3

As far as Lissie was concerned, her father’s refusal to come to her rescue was an act of rank betrayal. She had always been able to depend on him in her frequent arguments with her mother, but this time he had failed her, and she felt it necessary to let her disappointment and her displeasure be known.

Throughout the entire length of her school vacation, she moved listlessly about the house or sulked silently in her room. She refused to accompany her parents to the opening of 1776 on the ground that the title had been stolen from Lafayette High School’s literary-art magazine, for which Scarlett Kreuger was art editor, an accusation patently ridiculous, but one Lissie stubbornly maintained. She refused to go with them to a “First Day of Spring” party at the Lipscombes, even though the invitation had clearly stated “Bring along the kids,” on the ground that the first day of spring was Friday, March 21, and not Saturday, March 22, and she didn’t like to celebrate an occasion after the opportunity had passed. She expressed neither joy nor interest in the daffodils and crocuses tentatively blooming on the riverbank behind the house, refused to attend church with her parents on Palm Sunday, and generally behaved like a prisoner in her own home. In the privacy of their bedroom, Connie expressed to Jamie the wish that their daughter would hurry the hell back to school.

The situation was exacerbated in the week before Easter when Lissie received letters from both Vassar and Wellesley, her first and second choice colleges. She had been rejected by both. She blamed this, in ascending order, on Miss Eloise Larkin, head of the phys ed department, coach of the soccer team, and the tight-assed lady who’d blown the whistle after Ulla’s little pot party; and Jonathan Holtzer, headmaster of Henderson State Penitentiary, who had written the letter announcing Lissie’s Intermediate Discipline, a carbon of which had undoubtedly found its way into the school files and subsequently into the Admissions offices of both Vassar and Wellesley. There was no other explanation. Her grades were good, she had done well on her S. A.T.s, her personal interviews had gone smoothly, she had in fact been virtually certain of admission to both schools.

On Good Friday, Rusty Klein called to say she’d been accepted by Bennington, her first choice college. In that same day’s mail, Lissie got letters from both Radcliffe and Sarah Lawrence, her third and fourth choice schools, each of them rejecting her. She had been positive of Sarah Lawrence as a safety school, but Holtzer’s damn letter had done her in there as well. She had applied to only four colleges. She would be graduating in June. She was all dressed up for a party — with no place to go. When her vacation ended on Easter Sunday, she insisted on taking the train back to school, refusing even to allow her parents to drive her to the Stamford station, preferring instead to take a taxi. In her room that night, she commiserated with Jenny — who had been turned down by her three first choice colleges and was still awaiting word from her safety school — and together that night they strolled the campus and smoked some very good stuff Jenny had bought from a boy in New York.

It was not until close to the end of May that Lissie found a college. She had fired off a dozen hasty applications to schools all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, had visited eight of them for personal interviews, and had finally been accepted by three: Boston University, Simmons, and Brenner. She rejected B.U. because it was too big, Simmons because it was too small, and finally settled for Brenner, which was also in Boston — where there were more kids between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two than any place else in the nation.

At graduation that year, she sat listening to Jonathan Holtzer’s uninspired speech about the challenges awaiting the youth of America, cursed him silently for the scurrilous action that had caused her to be rejected by the only schools she really wanted to go to, and vowed never to forgive him. She had, by then, forgiven her father for his dastardly behavior — he was, after all, her father — but she couldn’t shake the persistent feeling that if only he’d acted... well... just differently, things might have worked out better for her.

In her mind, the whole damn fiasco was inextricably linked, an opera in five acts: if Miss Larkin hadn’t walked in on a party where Lissie hadn’t even been smoking, if Horseface Holtzer hadn’t taken such a hard-line stand, if her father had more strenuously argued on her behalf and gotten Holtzer to revoke the Intermediate Discipline and then expunge that damning letter from the record, and, finally, if he’d allowed her to go to Colorado like the mature and responsible young lady she was, why then Vassar would have accepted her for registration in the fall, and she’d be going to Poughkeepsie instead of to Brenner, which she supposed was okay but only because it was in Boston.

She wasn’t quite able to explain to herself how the Colorado trip had anything at all to do with the inexorable chain of events that had led to her sitting here in the sun, somewhat disconsolate and totally unexcited in cap and gown, “on the brink of life’s great adventure,” as Holtzer was now putting it, bound for a school that truly didn’t interest her. But the Colorado trip was somehow a part of it, the culminating example of her father’s inability to come to her defense when his strength was most needed.

“It is,” Holtzer said, “perhaps the greatest adventure you will ever undertake. I wish you godspeed and fare thee well, I wish you a safe voyage over life’s perilous waters, and a snug harbor on the opposite shore. To this graduating class of June, 1969, I extend my heartiest congratulations, my sincere good wishes, and my hopes for a bountiful future.”

She waited till her name was called; “Miss Melissa Abigail Croft” — she detested her middle name — and rose from the folding chair, and walked in the sunshine to the platform where Holtzer was handing out the graduation certificates and shaking hands. She could feel the eyes of her family upon her — her mother, her father, her grandparents. She walked with her head erect, somewhat fearful she would lose the precariously perched mortarboard, her shoulders back, wondering if the strong sunlight would stream through the gown to outline her legs as she climbed the steps; she was wearing only panties under the gown, no bra or slip. As she approached Holtzer, she thought only I hate you, you bastard. The headmaster was smiling. He said her name softly, “Melissa,” and handed her the rolled and ribboned certificate. She did not return the smile. She crossed the platform, came down the steps on the opposite side, and quickly returned to her chair.

The graduating boys and girls were seated alphabetically to facilitate an orderly march to and from the platform. Jenny was sitting some two rows behind her; she turned briefly to look at her before taking her seat again. With her hands folded in her lap over her precious certificate, she listened to the graduates’ names being called, grinning when she heard “Jennifer Eileen Groat,” watching her as she walked to the platform and accepted her certificate — unsmilingly — from old Horseface; Jenny had ended up at Miami U. In the hot sunshine, Lissie sat inside her black gown, sweltering, until the last name was called, the last certificate dispensed. She got up at once then, and ran to meet Jenny, who was rushing down the aisle toward her. The two girls embraced. “Hey, roomie, how about that?” Lissie said, and Jenny whispered, “Paroled at last,” and the two girls giggled.

Her parents and grandparents were crossing the lawn toward her now, beaming proudly, her father in his “blue confirmation suit” as he called it, but which she knew had been hand-tailored for him at Chipp in New York, camera around his neck, hands extended. Her mother was just beside him, wearing a white dress and white French-heeled pumps, looking more like a bride than the mother of a June graduate, smiling, even white teeth gleaming against her tanned face, all those spring days of sitting on the deck above the river with a reflector under her chin. Behind them were Grandmother and Grandfather Harding, flanking Grandmother Croft, who clung to their arms for support; Grandmother Croft had arthritis, she walked slowly and painfully. Of all her grandparents, Lissie liked her best, but somehow, today, they all looked strange to her. Those faces approaching, those extended hands. Strange somehow.

Her father was the first to reach her.

“Lissie,” he said softly, and took her in his arms.

“Well, I guess I made it,” Lissie said, grinning.

“Congratulations,” he said, and stepped back to take her picture.

Nodding, beaming, she looked into his face while he focused and set, expecting more, waiting for something more. Something clever perhaps, he was always so clever, even something like Jenny’s “Paroled at last,” not just an embrace and a brief “Congratulations,” as if he were shaking hands with Scarlett Kreuger instead of... instead of... well, shit, she was his daughter, there should have been something more. She didn’t know what, just... something more. Something more intimate. She was his daughter, damn it! The camera shutter clicked. He lowered the camera from his face and stood there looking somewhat embarrassed, she couldn’t fathom why, and entirely awkward, his eyes squinted against the sun, his head tilted, nodding. She broke away from him to greet her mother.

Her mother was still smiling, but there was something contradictory in her eyes. Censure? Disappointment? Annoyance over the fact that her only daughter would be going to Brenner in the fall, and not to Vassar where she could learn to talk like Mommy? Something. The eyes and mouth in conflict, the eyes winning. Her mother hugged her close. “Congratulations, darling,” she said. “I’m so very proud of you.” Her V.S. and D.M. voice. That and the eyes, Lissie thought. Her voice and her eyes are telling me, never mind the words, I’m so very proud of you, bullshit! I’m graduating with a straight-B average from a tough school like Henderson, isn’t that enough for you? What did I have to do, Mom? Become president of the senior class? Deliver the valedictory? What, Mom? Straight-A’s? Would you have let me use your goddamn station wagon then?

“Thanks, Mom,” she said, and broke away from her.

Grandmother Croft was crying.

“Oh, Melissa,” she said, and released her grip on the Hardings’ supporting arms, and opened her own arms wide to Lissie. She was the only one of the grandparents who still called her Melissa, and Lissie found this touching somehow, as though to Grandmother Croft she was still a little blond baby with identifying beads on her chubby wrist, MELISSA CROFT in blue letters, all caps, she still had the beads in her jewelry box, one of her gifts when she’d turned sixteen. Grandmother Croft was a frail, tiny woman but she clasped Lissie surprisingly tightly, almost squeezing the breath out of her, and whispered in her ear almost the identical words her mother had spoken a few moments before, but with a slight difference. “You make me so damn proud,” she said, and the word “proud” was itself bursting with pride. For the first time that day, Lissie felt something she knew she was supposed to be feeling: a sense of accomplishment and reward, a sense of familial approval and acceptance, and now — from this dear old woman who used to babysit her when she was little and her parents couldn’t afford to pay anyone, cooing to her as she changed her diapers and wiped her little behind, now from dear sweet Grandmother Croft — love.

Grandfather Harding took her hand, pompously formal as always, never any kisses from him, oh, no, not from this staid pillar of the community, chairman of the board of directors, president of the Chamber of Commerce, wearing his gray flannel suit even on a day when the temperature was in the eighties, white hair combed sideways to hide his baldness, even more suntanned than mother was, just home from a Caribbean cruise.

“Well, well,” he said, “it seems I’ll have a college-girl granddaughter in the fall.” The word “granddaughter” reverberated, underscoring her father’s earlier lapse. “You look beautiful, Liss,” he said, further compounding her father’s felony. Couldn’t her own father have called her “daughter”? Couldn’t he have told her how beautiful she looked, the way Granddaddy had just done? No, just the quick embrace — and “Congratulations.” Thank you, sir, she’d felt like answering, I’ll try to live up to the expectations of the company.

Grandmother Harding, all blue hair and blue eyes, wearing a pastel blue suit — she always wore blue, never any other color — crowded her husband aside with a “Stop monopolizing her, Peter,” and hugged Lissie to her ample bosom, the Harding legacy except for Lissie herself, and said, “We bought you something lovely, Liss,” good old Grandma, never able to express affection except in terms of gifts, sometimes “accidentally” leaving the price tags on them so you could better appreciate the magnitude of her love. Standing there in her grandmother’s embrace, looking over her shoulder to where her mother was still smiling that false, forced smile, Lissie was astonished to realize how closely the three of them resembled each other, three generations in the bright June sunshine, grandmother, mother and daughter, the youngest of whom was about to begin a hopefully safe voyage across life’s perilous waters, with a godspeed and a fare thee well.

She felt suddenly frightened in her grandmother’s arms; she did not want to grow up to be her mother, did not want to further age into this blue-haired woman who now whispered in her ear, “A beautiful Longines wristwatch,” yet the evidence was plain to see and understand, grandmother unto mother unto daughter, the trinity realized. Unless she was very careful, she herself would one day be standing in the sunshine at the age of seventy-five, all dressed in blue perhaps, whispering in her own granddaughter’s ear about the lovely graduation gift she’d bought her. She did not want that to happen. She wanted instead...

She suddenly wondered what she wanted.

Standing there on the brink of life’s greatest adventure, she had no answer.

There had been family vacations galore when Lissie was growing up: weekend skiing trips to Bromley, Stratton, Sugarbush and Stowe, and once even to Mont Tremblant in Canada, where she’d been terrified by the trails and frozen stiff besides; cultural excursions to Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Charlestown and Annapolis; strictly fun stuff like the full week they’d spent in Los Angeles, most of it at Disneyland. On her school breaks, her parents usually took her to someplace in the Caribbean, Jamaica one time (where the natives were surly and one man spit at her), Puerto Rico another time, and the Bahamas, and Caneel Bay when she was eight (which she didn’t like because there were no kids there) and Haiti and St.Vincent, which was close to South America, and, well, all of them — she was willing to bet she’d been to more Caribbean islands than any kid her age.

In the summers, they usually took a house at the beach someplace. One summer it was Fire Island — well, wait, that was two summers. Once in Saltair and the second time in the Pines, right, two years. And one summer they took a house on Martha’s Vineyard, and another time on Shelter Island and once on Nantucket, always a beach house someplace. The most glorious summer of all was when Lissie was thirteen and the family went to Paris and the Dordogne, where she fell in love for the first time in her life with a French busboy in the town of Les Eyzies, a romance unfortunately short-lived in that they were moving on to Périgueux in the morning. So there’d been plenty of family vacations, and no cause to complain of neglect or abandonment. Even her parents’ vacations alone together (“To recharge our batteries,” as her father put it) were infrequent and usually of short duration — a week, ten days, two weeks at the most — and so, really, there’d never been any reason to raise a fuss.

But this summer, perhaps because she’d just graduated, perhaps because she was looking forward with some trepidation to beginning college in the fall, she resented enormously the trip her parents planned to take without her, especially since she was expected to spend the time they were gone with her grandparents on the Cape. Her father’s shopworn remark about recharging batteries consoled her not in the least. She found her mother’s familiar “But we always come back, darling” less than reassuring. They were going to Italy for two weeks, and she was going to the goddamn Cape. The imbalance, the injustice of such an arrangement infuriated her. She spent an hour on the phone complaining to Rusty Klein about it, and another hour in a long-distance conversation with Jenny in New York. Jenny offered the greater solace. “They wouldn’t let you go to Colorado,” she said, “but they’re ready to traipse God knows how many miles to Italy!”

The “God knows how many miles” turned out to be four thousand, as her parents informed her, but they assured her there was very good telephone communication from Italy, even from the island of Sardinia, where they planned to be spending most of their time, and they promised they would call her as often as they had when she was at school. Besides, they would only be gone for two weeks, after which they would spend the rest of the summer together doing whatever Lissie wanted to do. Lissie wanted to go to Italy, that’s what Lissie wanted to do. By the last week in June, which was when they broke the news to her — sneaky, oh, how sneaky — she was bored silly with the town of Rutledge, Connecticut, and ready to climb the walls. There were only so many trout she could pull from the river behind the house, only so many bicycle rides she could take on the town’s tree-shaded lanes, only so many picnics she could go on with kids as bored as she herself was.

Even so, the prospect of spending July and August in Rutledge was positively brilliant when compared to spending two weeks with Grandmother and Grandfather Harding in the creaky old house they rented on the Cape each summer. Her parents told her, nonetheless, that their plans had been made a long time ago (she doubted this; if it was true, why had they held off telling her till almost the end of June, when they were scheduled to leave on July 12?) and they couldn’t at this late date hope to get another room for Lissie, especially at the Cala di Volpe, which was the hotel the Aga Khan had built with his triumvirate or his consortium or whatever the hell they told her it was called, a hotel impossible to get into at the last minute, and even difficult to book if you made your plans far in advance, as they had done (and which she still doubted), so that was that.

On the eleventh day of July, while her parents were still packing for their trip abroad the next day, Lissie was shipped off to the Cape. The man who drove her up ran the town’s so-called limousine service which, translated from the English, meant a fleet of two, count ’em, two Cadillacs. He was not a man noted for generosity of speech. Lissie spent four hours in utter silence with him, he hunched over the wheel, she sprawled on the back seat of his best car (the blue one), watching the landscape roll by, and dreaming of Tuscany, where her parents planned to spend a few days before taking the Civitavecchia ferry to Sardinia. It happened to be raining, which did nothing to alleviate her dark mood.

The house her grandparents had been renting for the past seven summers, ever since Lissie was ten, was a gray-shingled structure perched on the edge of the beach, gabled and turreted, with a genuine widow’s walk on the uppermost story and a reputed ghost in the basement. Lissie would have welcomed the ghost. She kept looking for the goddamn ghost. It rained for the first four days of her stay, the weather denying her even a tentative dip in the frigid ocean, which she wouldn’t have relished much anyway. Granddaddy kept asking if she’d seen the poltergeist yet. “Seen the poltergeist yet, Liss?” Grandmother kept saying there was a difference between a poltergeist and a ghost, but she never seemed able to explain the difference satisfactorily. Poltergeist or ghost, Grandmother never went down to the basement alone.

Lissie read, or almost read, four books in the first four days of a confinement worse than her Intermediate Discipline had been. On the first day, she started a paperback edition of Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, put it aside as utter trash after the second chapter, and that same day started and finished reading Philip Roth’s latest novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, which she found in a spanking clean dust jacket on Grandmother’s bookshelf, and which she was later certain Grandmother had not read. Thus inspired, she masturbated herself to sleep that night, and continued to masturbate on and off for the next two days, between finishing a paperback edition of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (which she found less compelling than her own restless fingers) and a clothbound, unjacketed edition of an old novel titled Magnificent Obsession by someone named Lloyd C. Douglas, whose name sounded familiar, but only because she later realized there’d been a kid named Lloyd Rogers in her French class at Henderson. She spent all of the fourth rainy day in her room, refusing to budge from her bed, making a long-distance call to Jenny to tell her she’d read the grooviest dirty book, and then, remembering, masturbating for the better part of the afternoon and evening, her fingers frantically willing away the time. On the fifth day, the sun came out.

“Feeling better, darling?” her grandmother asked when she came down for breakfast.

“Uh-huh,” Lissie said. She had eaten only a sandwich for lunch yesterday afternoon, her grandmother carrying it on a tray, together with a glass of milk, to her room. She was ravenously hungry now and she devoured her eggs, bacon and toast with scarcely a word, and then went upstairs to dress, eager to get out of the house. Her parents had still not called from Italy, though they’d left on the twelfth, and this was already the sixteenth. She dressed swiftly, putting on a peasant blouse, a green mini, and a pair of beat-up sandals. She liked miniskirts because they showed her long legs to good advantage. God knew she had little else worth showing... well, her behind maybe, her behind wasn’t too bad. But her legs were terrific, she thought, and she firmly believed that someone somewhere should one day erect a monument to Mary Quant. She did not feel the same way about whoever had invented the bikini. As president and co-founder of the Itty-Bitty Titty Committee, she would not have been caught dead on a beach with nothing but a strip of cloth covering her nonexistent breasts. She favored tanksuits or maillots instead, cut rather high on the thigh to emphasize her legginess and hopefully to detract from whatever she was lacking elsewhere, giving her a long coltish look she considered somewhat sexy.

She left the house at about eleven, telling her grandmother she’d be back sometime that afternoon, and not to worry about lunch, she’d get something to eat in town. She was familiar with the town, knew all the teenage haunts, and headed for the nearest one now, a lobster-roll joint called Marty’s, on the beach a mile or so from her grandparents’ house. The town was crowded with its usual share of tourists: fat red-faced men in Hawaiian print shirts; women in halters, shorts and high-heeled wedgies; runny-nosed little kids eating ice cream cones or chocolate bars; all of them thronging the boardwalk and the shops selling silver, scrimshaw, leather goods and touristy crap like ashtrays in the shape of lobsters. She was walking past one of the new art galleries, had in fact stopped to look in the window at a painting of an old house, obviously derivative of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World — which she adored because somehow it reminded her so much of herself — when she saw Pee Wee Rawles standing alongside a bicycle outside the five and ten.

Pee Wee was a Henderson student like herself — or like what she had been before this June — a red-headed feisty-looking kid with freckles all over his face and his arms, a good foot and a half shorter than Lissie and not particularly liked by any of Henderson’s girl students because his sexual preferences, as he frequently proclaimed, were entirely oral. He’d been a junior this past trimester, which would make him a graduating senior when he went back to school in the fall.

Lissie guessed he was sixteen going on seventeen. He was wearing cut-offs and a T-shirt stenciled with the words KISS ME, I’M IRISH. He was barefooted, and his feet were dirty. He had not seen her yet, he was in fact fiddling with something on the rack behind the bicycle seat when she first spotted him. Normally, she’d have avoided him like the plague he was. But just seeing a Hendy like herself up here in the boondocks filled her with a sense of camaraderie, the old school tie, all that shit, that completely negated the awful fact of Pee Wee himself. Pee Wee was first a Hendy and only next a terrifying creep.

“Hey!” she yelled. “Pee Wee!”

He looked up sharply, squinting into the sun, frowning, and finally recognizing her. He had settled to his satisfaction whatever had been troubling him on the rack, and he swung one leg up over the bicycle seat as she walked over to him. The first thing he said was, “It’s Warren.”

“What?” she said.

“My name is Warren.”

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”

He nodded curtly, driving the point home, and then immediately said, “What are you doing here?” and grinned broadly.

“I’m visiting my grandparents,” she said.

“Yeah, no kidding?” he said. “How long’ll you be here.”

“Till the twenty-sixth. How about you?”

“My folks have a place for the summer,” he said.

His voice seemed a bit deeper than when she’d last talked to him, and he also seemed somewhat taller, but maybe that was because he was sitting on a bicycle. In any event, she could understand why he no longer chose to be called Pee Wee. For the longest time — and only because one of her playmates in the building they’d lived in on Central Park West couldn’t pronounce the name Melissa — she herself had been called Missie, a nickname she’d detested. Pondering all this, wondering if Pee Wee had changed his personality along with his name, she realized they had both fallen silent, end of conversation, nothing more to say, nice to’ve seen you.

“Where you headed?” he said.

“Marty’s,” she said.

“Out of business,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Silence again.

“Why?” he said. “You want something to eat?”

Well, here we go, she thought, some things never change. Call me Warren, call me Ishmael, I’m still good old Sixty-nine Rawles.

“Because there’s a new place near the lighthouse, makes better lobster rolls than Marty’s used to,” he said.

“I’m not really hungry,” she said. “I just had breakfast. I thought some of the kids might be there.”

“Most of the kids hang out on the beach behind the Dunes,” he said. “You ever been up there?”

“I thought that was a private beach.”

“Yeah,” Warren said, grinning, “but we’ve sort of requisitioned a corner of it. You want a ride up there?”

“You going there?”

“In a minute. I’ve got to drop this off at the house first,” he said, “indicating the package he’d fastened to the rack. If you want a ride...”

“Sure,” she said.

“Well, hop on,” he said.

The house his parents were renting was several blocks from town, not on the beach itself, as her grandparents’ house was, but on a tree-shaded side street called Sea Grape Lane. Riding through town on the crossbar of the bike, Lissie found it difficult to keep her skirt down, and found herself frowning back at the men trying to see up under it. Never kids. Kids just didn’t seem to give a damn about such things, it was all so free and easy with kids. Only men. Men her father’s age or older, all of them trying to catch a glimpse of her panties.

She couldn’t possibly imagine what was so fascinating about her panties. Or anybody’s panties, for that matter. Walk down the main street, you could see as many panties as you cared to in any of the lingerie shops. But here were grown men, some of them ancient, in fact, craning for a look up her skirt, and it bothered her. Even some of her parents’ friends, whose own daughters wore minis, for Christ’s sake, would sometimes openly stare at her legs whenever she sat down, hoping for a glimpse of those cherished panties of hers. She was sometimes tempted to put on a mini with nothing at all under it, surprise hell out of them.

She laughed aloud, and when Warren asked her what was so funny, she said, “Nothing.”

“Is it me?” he asked. “Did I do something?”

“No, no,” she said, and wondered if Warren had changed more than his name, after all. “Nothing you did or said.”

“Well, good,” he said, sounding tremendously relieved.

He dropped off the package at his house, and then pedaled the bike a mile or so out of town, along a road crawling with automobiles, the men glancing covertly at her legs as they rode past, annoying her, damn it. She was relieved when she spotted the hotel ahead, a huge Victorian monster squatting in shingled bygone splendor on the ocean’s edge. Warren pedaled the bike past it and onto an access road that rapidly deteriorated into nothing more than a sandy lane. When he could pedal no further, Lissie climbed down onto the sand and immediately took off her sandals. Warren pushed the bike, with some difficulty, to a patch of swaying beach grass, laid it on its side, and then padlocked the front wheel to the crossbar. “They’re usually over this way,” he said, and began climbing the dune.

They had not, as Warren had indicated, requisitioned a corner of the private beach for themselves, but rather had set up an enclave just beyond the PRIVATE BEACH — HOTEL PATRONS ONLY sign. There were, Lissie estimated at first glance, close to forty kids sprawled there on the sand, or standing in tight little clusters, or sitting around a dark-haired girl who was wearing a minuscule bikini that threatened her huge breasts and earth-mother hips, strumming a guitar and singing the song Joan Baez had dedicated to her husband on a CBS show this past March, a ballad praising draft-resisters. Lissie had caught the show during her detention period, had heard the dedication to Baez’s husband, and the words, “He is going to prison for three years.” She later read in the New York Times that CBS had cut the rest of her speech: “The reason is that he resisted Selective Service and the draft and militarism in general.”

The kids, Lissie guessed, ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-two; one of the boys was wearing a Princeton sweatshirt; another had on a T-shirt almost certainly hand-lettered: the front of the shirt read FUCK VIETNAM! Warren seemed a little young for this crowd, but he did appear taller even now that he was off his bicycle, and at least three of the kids greeted him by name (Warren and not Pee Wee) as they approached. He introduced Lissie to the boy in the Princeton sweatshirt, whose name was Pete Turner, and who seemed to lose interest in her the moment he scanned the peasant blouse and the scant treasures it held, preferring instead to turn his gaze back to the folksinger’s more obvious charms. She finished the Baez tune, and then began singing Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” A quarter of the kids were listening to her, the rest were talking or clowning around in the sand, or tossing Frisbees. Along about noon, somebody suggested they all wander up to Sam’s — which was the name of the new place near the lighthouse — for lobster rolls. A dozen kids went, the rest of them stayed behind, drinking beer.

At three in the afternoon, the kid with the FUCK VIETNAM! T-shirt broke out some pot, and some of the other kids followed suit, and they all sat smoking openly on the beach, even though they could see Massachusetts State Police cars cruising the road above. Lissie hadn’t smoked since her graduation; it was almost impossible to find anything either in Rutledge or in Talmadge, and Rusty Klein, who had begun smoking shortly after the Christmas vacation, said that buying grass from the greasers in Clayton was dangerous. Sitting beside Warren, sharing a joint with him, she felt at peace with herself for the first time in a long time. When he asked if she’d like to go to a cookout with him that Sunday night, the twentieth, she said yes.

The woman was about Connie’s age, a redheaded American wearing a Pucci bikini she’d bought in the hotel boutique the day before at a scandalously low price, or so she claimed, because the new line was coming in any day now and the shop was eager to clear its shelves. The woman made her home in Florence, so Jamie figured she qualified as a Pucci comparison shopper. Her name was Lynda, with a y, and she’d been running an art gallery on the Arno for the last fifteen years. She was from Philadelphia originally; Jamie suspected there was old money in her family. Her cadences were oddly European; she spoke her native English without a trace of accent, and yet her intonation was peculiarly foreign. She had lowered the straps of the bra top and was spreading suntan lotion on the sloping tops of her breasts. She smelled of coconut.

The man’s name was Ernesto. He was from Argentina, the owner of a cattle ranch down there, and he visited Italy only sporadically though he claimed to be married to Lynda. He spoke Italian fluently, however, and he told Jamie that the proper way to summon a waiter in Italian was to say “senta” which meant “listen,” and not “cameriere,” which meant “waiter,” a word seldom used by sophisticated Italians, and a word he was sure Jamie, as an American, found enormously difficult to pronounce. Jamie felt that summoning a waiter with the word “listen” was tantamount to snapping your fingers at him. But he watched as Ernesto called to the waiter, the word issuing softly from his lips, “senta,” watched as the waiter turned immediately and scurried to where they were sitting by the pool. Ernesto ordered another round of Costa Smeraldas, warning that for all its minty, confectionary taste, the drink could hit you very hard here in the strong Sardinian sun. Lynda lay face down on the lounge and untied the straps of the bra top.

Ernesto’s Spanish and Italian were better than his English, but Lynda willingly served as prone translator. Ernesto wanted to know how much you tipped a cabdriver in New York City, and whether or not prostitution was as open there as it was in Hamburg. Lynda was eager to hear all the latest slang, she’d been away from America for such a long time. Did people still say something was a “drag”? Jamie told her the expression was now “a bummer” (“Come?” Ernesto asked. “Bomber?”), which he guessed had filtered into the vernacular from the jargon of drug-users, a “bum trip” signifying a bad experience with LSD. Ernesto asked if the use of drugs was as widespread in America as all the magazines seemed to claim, and Connie said she guessed maybe 10 percent of the kids smoked marijuana, certainly no more than that. Lynda said she’d read in the overseas edition of Time that something like eight million Americans had at least sampled marijuana, and Connie said, “Oh, no, nothing nearly like that,” and then said, “Am I the only one who’s suffocating?” and headed for the pool. Ernesto followed her.

“Was it difficult to become a photographer?” Lynda asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Because I have a nephew back home who’s considering it. How did you start?”

“Well, you don’t really want to hear that, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “Truly.” She shifted her position on the lounge. He glimpsed, but only for an instant, a flash of whiter flesh where her tan ended, the briefest glimpse of a pink, erect nipple. In the pool, he heard Connie laughing at something Ernesto had just said.

He found himself telling her easily and unself-consciously about how difficult it had been for him and Connie after the birth of their daughter, both of them so very young and living in a roach-infested rathole on West Seventy-eighth Street, Connie riding the subway each day to Columbia University uptown...

“Yes, my brother went to Columbia,” Lynda said, nodding.

... he himself running all over the city, trying to get newspaper or magazine assignments, the Leica hanging on a battered strap around his neck just in case lightning struck and a Fifth Avenue bus careened onto the sidewalk and into Bonwit’s plate-glass window. Developed and printed his film in a bathroom the size of a coat closet. The enlarger he’d used in those days was an old diffusion job without condensers; it sometimes got so hot the negatives would buckle, but it was the only one the school had. He taught photography three nights a week to little old ladies who wanted to become Dorothea Lange, fat chance. Whenever they asked him where they might find samples of his current work, he never knew what the hell to say. Showed them his portfolio instead, the same way he showed it all over town.

By the time he took the breakthrough pictures on the Bowery, he was more or less convinced they would be his last attempt at getting into the big time. He was, after all, a graduate of Yale, and he was certain he could get an honest job someplace that would pay more than he was earning with his “snapshots,” as Connie’s father used to call them. The Bowery pictures turned out so well, Jamie later realized, only because he so thoroughly identified with the men who’d been his subjects. The derelicts down there were men who had already given up; Jamie was on the verge of giving up. He had, in fact, not come to the Bowery specifically to take pictures, but was there instead to buy a badly needed desk lamp at one of the wholesale electrical houses lining Third Avenue.

As usual, though, his Leica was hanging around his neck, and he had a roll of black-and-white film in the camera and another two, unopened, in his pocket. As he walked from store to store, searching for the bargain he’d come all the way by subway to find, he found instead a shaft of brilliant August sunshine slanting downward from the tracks of the elevated structure overhead to form a ladder pattern on the old cobblestones. He snapped the picture moments before a train rushed past above him, obliterating the light and the image that had been there an instant before.

“I sometimes think all the good things that’ve happened in my life were a matter of accident,” he said now. “Like that shaft of sunlight slanting down from above and reminding me I had a camera around my neck, I was still a photographer. I took the picture. The train went by, the moment was gone. But I began looking around a bit more carefully.”

They slumped in doorways or sat on the low stoops of closed shops, these men who had long ago decided there was no sense pursuing or striving or competing. They scarcely acknowledged Jamie’s presence as he took their pictures, continuing whatever conversations they’d been having, their talk the real talk of drunks, and not the comic dialogue one read in novels or saw in motion pictures. There was nothing amusing about these men.

He did not develop and print the pictures until the following Tuesday — his teaching evenings were Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and the only darkroom he had was the one at the school. He knew even before he’d made any enlargements that he had done some very good work that day on the Bowery. He spent the next several hours working with the old diffusion-job enlarger, blowing up a dozen of the best shots to eight-by-tens, and almost missing his first class. That Friday, he went up to the old Time-Life building at 9 Rockefeller Plaza, carrying his photographs under his arm in a black portfolio, and asked to see the picture editor. The man he talked to was an assistant editor. In his gentle voice he kept saying over and over again, “These are very good,” and then picked up the phone and buzzed someone and said, “Charlie, could you come in here a minute? There’s some stuff you ought to see.”

They offered him $1,600 for the lot. He would have accepted $60. He signed the necessary releases, asked when the pictures would be used, and then asked when he could have his check. They told him the spread (God, it was going to be a spread!) would probably appear sometime in late September, early October, and that his check would be vouchered that day and probably mailed by the end of the week. He did not tell Connie he’d sold the pictures until the check arrived. Then he went out to buy a dozen red roses and a bottle of very expensive twelve-year-old Scotch. He had sent the sitter on her way and was waiting in the living room with Lissie on his lap when Connie got home from her summer school classes that day. He had put the flowers in a vase, and had opened the bottle of Scotch — but he had not yet begun drinking it. It sat untouched in the center of the coffee table, the vase of roses and two sparkling clean glasses beside it. When he heard Connie’s key in the lock, he whispered, “Here’s Mommy.”

The moment she opened the door, Connie saw the roses, and the good bottle of Scotch, and the two clean glasses. As she knelt to hug her daughter close, her eyes met Jamie’s. Something in them caused her to grin. She knew already. She knew that something marvelous had happened.

“What?” she said.

“I sold some pictures to Life,” he said.

“Oh, Jamie,” she said, and burst into tears and ran to him and hugged him close as he came out of the battered easy chair to meet her embrace. Lissie, bewildered, went to where they were standing, and hugged their knees, and began crying along with her mother.

That was the year everything began happening for the Crofts. The calls from the photographers’ agents the moment the pictures appeared in Life — eight full pages! — Christ, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing, Black Star, and Globe, and Pix — all the best agencies in New York — calling to ask if they might represent James Croft, the Photographer. He was, at last and suddenly, James Croft the Photographer. He sat alone that night in the tiny living room of the Seventy-eighth Street apartment, Connie feeding the baby in a highchair in the kitchen, and drank a martini, very dry and straight up, and wondered what he had been before he became James Croft the Photographer. Had he been any less a photographer before the exposure in Life?

“Oh, but of course you were,” Lynda said.

He told her now, in more detail than he had anticipated (but her gray eyes were fastened to his, and she seemed to be hanging on his every word) how the agent he’d finally settled on was a man named Lewis Barker, of Barker Associates, Inc., on Fifth Avenue. Lew had himself worked for Time-Life, as long ago as the struggle for power between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung, and had barely escaped house arrest in Nanking when, in April of 1949, he watched the People’s Liberation Army crossing the flooded Yangtze, and fled with the Kuomintang government to Canton, leaving most of his clothes and two valuable cameras behind, taking with him only a single bag packed with a change of clothing and his model IIc Leica with its 50-mm Summitar lens. He got to Hong Kong by junk, and from there caught a plane to San Francisco via Manila. The pictures he took of the Communist shelling of the British gunboat Amethyst appeared in Life’s May 20, 1949, issue.

Lew had quit Time-Life in 1950 to start his own agency. The Associates in the agency title were a onetime fashion photographer named Jerry Singer, and a portrait photographer named Abner Pettit, but Lew was the agency’s backbone and its drawing power; there wasn’t a photographer anywhere in the world who was unaware of his China Portfolio — as the collected pictures he’d taken between 1947 and 1949 were titled in the later book version — or his previous coverage of the fighting in Europe during World War II. One picture alone, instantly recognizable everywhere by photographers and laymen alike, would have made his reputation: the infantryman drawing on a cigarette during the Battle of the Bulge, his war-weary eyes scanning the leaden sky in hope of a parachute drop.

“Oh, of course, I know this picture,” Lynda said.

Lew was fifty-five in that fall of 1953, when Jamie joined the agency. By December of that year, he’d earned for Jamie five times as much as he’d realized in the ten months preceding the appearance of the Bowery essay in Life. Six days before Lissie’s second birthday, the Crofts moved to a new apartment on Eighty-ninth and Central Park West. Seven rooms! A darkroom the size of their previous bedroom on Seventy-eighth! A master bedroom overlooking the park, and a room of her own for Lissie, with pale pink wallpaper covered with blooming bluebells, and a new crib with a mobile hanging over it — Donald Duck and his three nephews, Dewey, Dopey, and Doc, or whatever they were called. Seven rooms! A brand new Omega enlarger, with which he blew up all the best shots he’d taken of Lissie in her second year. The huge living room, with its southern exposure, was still largely unfurnished a week before Christmas; they’d moved into it the sofa, floor lamp and single easy chair from the Seventy-eighth Street dump, and the pieces floated there on the new blue broadloom like rafts adrift on a vast uncharted sea.

“And so you have lived happily ever after,” Lynda said, and reached behind her to tie the bra straps, rising as she did. Again, he saw the full breasts, naked for an instant before the riotous Pucci fabric covered them.

“Yes,” he said.

She was smiling thinly. “And do you still love your wife very much?” she asked, and tossed her long red hair, and looked away from him, toward the pool where Ernesto and Connie were swimming back toward the diving board.

“Yes,” Jamie said. “I love her very much.”

“How lucky for you,” Lynda said, and smiled again. Idly, almost remorsefully, she said, “I’ve never been made love to in English. I’ve known only European men.”

He said nothing.

Her eyes met his.

She studied him solemnly for a moment, and then said, “I think I’ll take a swim. Would you like to swim with me?”

He hesitated. “Connie mentioned something about a nap,” he said.

“Ah, yes, then, you must take your nap with Connie,” Lynda said, and rose from the lounge and ran to the edge of the pool. He watched as she dove cleanly into the water.

She had been in the bathroom for a very long time.

He lay on the bed in the shuttered room, the voices of waiters calling to each other in Italian below, and far out on the lagoon the sound of a speedboat. He lay with his hands behind his head, waiting for his wife to come to him. The erection tenting the sheet that covered him was a joint enterprise, sponsored by the hot sun (which always made him horny), the promise inherent in Connie’s whispered lunchtime suggestion that “a nap later” might be a good idea, and the coconut-scented proximity of a gray-eyed woman who, he admitted, had done much to inspire unbridled passion. Hands behind his head, he lay staring up at the ceiling. Connie had been wearing only her bikini panties and her high-heeled sandals when she’d gone into the bathroom. The bra top to the red bikini lay on the dresser top, where she’d thrown it beside the calendar she normally carried in her cosmetics case. He envisioned taking off the bikini panties and fucking her with just the high-heeled sandals on. He envisioned fucking her tirelessly, all afternoon long. He imagined taking pictures of her with his cock in her mouth, a drop of semen glistening on her lower lip.

He could remember once — this was when they were first married, before she’d got pregnant — when he’d shot four rolls of color film with the camera relentlessly focused on Connie’s pert, snub-nosed breasts. Touch them, honey, make the nipples pop, Connie turning this way and that, cupping her breasts, stroking the rubescent nipples till they were hard and pouting, basking in the admiration of the camera eye. He had developed an erection of heroic proportions and had finally all but raped her where she lay spread for him on the white shag rug, her hands still clutching her breasts, the nipples bursting through her spread fingers. When he told her later he wanted to try selling the portfolio somewhere, she said, “No way. To you it’s a portfolio, to me it’s dirty pictures.”

When finally she came out of the bathroom, he took one look at her face and knew the afternoon was shot. He didn’t even have to ask her. He knew exactly what had happened. The calendar should have been his clue. She must have taken a look at the calendar before going into the bathroom to examine herself.

“What is it?” he asked.

“What do you think it is?” she said.

She was naked. She had taken off the bikini panties and the high-heeled sandals, and now she went angrily to the dresser and picked up a hairbrush and began brushing her hair.

“I thought we were going to take a nap,” he said.

“That’s just what we’re going to do,” she said.

He longed to touch her. He longed for her to steal a sidelong glance at the erection still threatening the white sheet. He longed for her to come to the bed, and pull back the sheet. She kept brushing her hair.

“Why don’t you come over here?” he said.

“No.”

“I thought we were...”

“Shut up,” she said, “I’m counting.”

“I don’t hear you counting.”

“In my head.”

“Well, stop counting and come over here.”

“It’s been thirty-two days,” she said. “The calendar’s right.”

“What?”

“I got my period thirty-two days ago.”

“Is that what you were counting?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were counting your goddamn brush strokes.”

“No, I was counting the days. I should have got it four days ago. The calendar’s right.”

“You’ve been late before,” he said.

“Never four days late. Except when...”

“You’ve been four days late. You’ve been five days late, in fact. In fact, you’ve been a week late, in fact.”

“Four days is very late,” she said.

“In that case, let’s take advantage of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re pregnant, let’s fuck our brains out,” he said, and threw back the sheet.

“Terrific,” she said. “Go stick it up your ass.”

“How about your ass?” he said.

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“Or your mouth. Is your mouth four days late, too?”

“I don’t feel like sex right now,” she said.

“At lunch, you sounded as if you felt like sex.”

“At lunch, I did feel like sex. I don’t feel like it now.”

“Connie... it’s only four fucking days,” he said.

“Yes, but we did it at a bad time last month.”

“You were wearing your diaphragm,” he said.

“Yes, but you came inside me before I went to put it on.”

“I did not come inside you, damn it! You got up almost the minute we...”

“I meant you put it in me.”

“So what? If I didn’t come...”

“Men dribble.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

“They do.”

“Okay. Okay, fine.”

“It takes only one sperm to...”

“Forget it.”

“It does. And four days is very late.”

“Okay. I said okay, so okay, the hell with it.”

“It’s not you who’d have to march around with a big fucking belly for nine months.”

“You don’t know you’re pregnant, it’s only been...”

“It’s not you who’d have to give up everything to take care of a goddamn runny-nosed...”

“Oh, shit, here we go again.”

“Yes, here we go again, you bastard. If you made me pregnant...”

“Yes, what? What if I made you pregnant?”

“I’d hate you,” she said.

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You already do, don’t you?”

She did not answer him. She went into the bathroom instead, and in a little while he heard the shower running. He took his cock in his hand.

In his fantasy, Lynda was wearing black panties, black garter belt, black nylon stockings and black patent-leather, high-heeled shoes. She refused to take off the panties, refused even to allow his caressing hand inside them until the thin fabric covering her crotch was wet with her own juices. Only then did she permit him to ease the panties down over her rounded belly and the flat reddish-brown triangle of her pubic hair, her hips raised to accommodate him, past her thighs and knees, the nylon crackling over the nylon of her stockings, she herself finally pedaling the panties over her shins and kicking them off her ankles and her feet.

In his fantasy, she positioned herself so that her mouth was just above him, and then relentlessly sucked him till he was begging her to make him come. She smiled knowingly and took her questing mouth from him, her unmoving fingers tight around his cock, a ring of flesh that refused either retreat or release, the erection stubbornly maintained, the orgasm denied. She straddled him then and rode him furiously, her breasts bobbing wildly, and then uncannily stopped just as he was about to come, leaning forward to kiss him on the mouth, her breasts flattening against his chest, her cunt as motionless as death, his cock still impaling her, pulsing inside her, his little death denied, the juices subsiding inside his shaft like a thin line of mercury in a thermometer. She started again almost at once, bringing him again to the edge of orgasm, her witch’s instinct telling her when to stop, and start again, and stop again, each time just as he was almost there, almost, almost, not a word spoken, knowing each time, achieving the effect if not the reality of orgasm with each aborted rush of semen to the base of his shaft.

And then, in his fantasy, she whispered, “Tell me what to say in English,” and he said, “Say fuck me,” and she repeated the words, “Fuck me,” softly at first, whispering them, “Fuck me,” and then more loudly, “Fuck me,” and finally allowed him to burst inside her, “Fuck me, oh, fuck me,” her own screaming orgasm drowning the roar of his blood, his cock mindlessly spurting.

In the bathroom, the shower was still running.

The boys had built a huge bonfire on the sand, digging a hole first and leaving the displaced sand around it in a circle, to facilitate smothering the embers later on. At 3:00 P.M., the day was still suffocatingly hot, and so the kids stayed in the water for at least another half-hour, and then came out onto the sand and briskly toweled themselves by the fire. One of the girls had been swimming without a top; Lissie found this daring and in fact a bit sluttish, and was happy to see her putting on a T-shirt now.

The boys had brought along the hot dogs and the beer, and the girls had contributed all the rest of the food, the way the girls in Rutledge did whenever there was a picnic. Lissie herself had made the potato salad, using a recipe her grandmother had provided, and she was pleased to see that it disappeared almost at once. The girl who’d been swimming topless had made a jelly mold that lost the vote, but the girl folksinger had baked a carrot cake that was positively the most delicious thing Lissie had ever tasted. Everybody kept saying she should go into business. The girl’s name was Patty, and when Warren suggested that she call her enterprise “Patty Cakes,” he actually got a round of applause.

They sat around the fire on blankets afterward, drinking beer and smoking pot. Warren put his arm around her. She hoped he wouldn’t try to kiss her or anything, especially in broad daylight. In all her seventeen years, she’d kissed only four boys, the last of whom had been a kid named Alex Bowles, who’d kissed her openmouthed behind the ice-hockey rink at Henderson State Penitentiary and then immediately began fumbling inside her blouse for her minuscule breasts, scaring her half out of her wits. Her mother kept telling her she was very young for her age. Lissie supposed she was — maybe — but she didn’t like being told she was immature, which was what her mother was saying despite the euphemism.

It was Pete Turner, the boy from Princeton, who started talking about what had happened at Chappaquiddick, over on the Vineyard, the day before. Well, actually, it had happened two nights ago, but yesterday was when all the papers printed the story, and everybody on the Cape seemed to be talking about nothing else. In fact, Lissie had been surprised last night, when her parents finally called from Sardinia, to discover they knew nothing at all about it. She’d read them the story from the Boston Globe, at transatlantic telephone rates, and her father said only, “Something, huh?” There had been the sound of music in the background, and both her parents had sounded very, very distant.

Pete wanted to know what everybody else in America wanted to know: Why the hell had Kennedy driven over that bridge to begin with? “Let’s say it’s true he was taking her to catch the ferry to Edgartown, okay?” he said. “Then why...?”

“What was her name, anyway?” one of the girls said.

“Mary something.”

“Mary Jo.”

“A Polish name.”

“Kapachnik or something.”

“Kopechne,” Warren said.

“Never mind why he drove over the bridge,” one of the other boys said. “What I want to know is what they were doing at that party.”

“Well, what do you think they were doing?” Pete said.

“He was probably stoned,” one of the girls ventured.

“No question,” Patty said.

“The road to the ferry was a main road,” Pete said.

“Black-topped,” another boy said.

“So why’d he make a right turn toward the bridge?”

“He was probably taking her to the beach,” Patty said.

“Give her a little Kennedy shtup,” one of the boys said.

“They’re famous for that, the Kennedys.”

“Who says?” Lissie asked.

“Oh, come on, John Kennedy was fucking around all the while he was in the White House.”

“You don’t know that for a fact,” Warren said.

“They all do,” somebody else said, “all the presidents. That’s the part of history they never tell us about.”

“Well, they told us about Harding. Harding had a mistress, didn’t he?”

“Oh, sure. But only after he was long dead.”

“How can you have a mistress after you’re long dead?” someone asked, and everyone laughed.

“My mother’s maiden name was Harding,” Lissie said, and realized at once how inappropriate her comment had been.

“Kennedy was the worst of them all,” Pete said, ignoring her. “He used to send a limo to pick up this actress who was working Off Broadway.”

“Who told you that?” the girl who’d been swimming topless said.

“I know people in the theater,” Pete said mysteriously. “She used to come out the stage door, and a Secret Service man would drive her straight to where Kennedy was waiting.”

“Where was he waiting?”

“Who the hell knows?” Pete said, and shrugged. “The point is it runs in the family. They probably had a few drinks at the party, maybe smoked a little grass...”

“You think politicians smoke grass?” Patty asked.

“Sure,” one of the boys said. “Everybody smokes grass. They just dump on us kids because we’re easy targets.”

“I’ll bet Nixon doesn’t smoke any fuckin’ grass.”

“Nixon doesn’t even fuck,” the topless swimmer said.

“Nixon’s a fag, you want my opinion,” Patty said.

“Waited a full nine hours to report it,” Pete said, getting back to the subject. “Why’d he do that?”

“Because he was taking her to the beach to shtup her, and he was stoned, and he drove the fucking car in the water...”

“And could only think of saving his own ass.”

“He’s still trying to save his ass,” the topless swimmer said. “When’s he going to make some kind of public statement?”

“They say he’ll be going on TV soon,” somebody said.

“Another Checkers speech,” Pete said sourly.

“What’s that?”

“A speech Nixon made one time. His dog. His dog was named Checkers.”

“What?” Patty said, and burst out laughing.

“Well, what’s so funny about that?”

“What’s his dog got to do with anything?”

“You’re the big protest singer, you never heard of Nixon’s Checkers speech?”

“Never.”

“It’s only famous, that’s all,” one of the boys said.

“Who here ever heard of the Checkers speech?” Patty said, and looked around the fire. Pete and the other boy were the only ones who raised their hands. “Very famous,” Patty said.

“He’s a crook like all the rest of them,” somebody said.

“Who, Nixon?”

“No, his fucking dog,” somebody said, and they all burst out laughing.

“I’ll bet he gets away with it, though,” Warren said.

“Kennedy? Sure, he will.”

“They all get away with it,” the topless swimmer said.

“This fucking country,” Pete said, and shook his head. “They keep telling us what to do, they keep hassling us about everything, but meanwhile they’re cheating on their income tax, and killing off their business competitors, and fucking around outside their marriages, chasing the buck day and night, running in their gray flannel suits to catch their commuter trains, briefcases flying, drinking themselves silly in the bar car on the way home.” His voice lowered, he sat staring into the flames. “You sometimes have to pour my father off the train,” he said.

The fire crackled and spit into the sudden silence.

“I hate this fucking country,” he said.

In Italy, it was a little after 10:00 P.M.

They had taken their meal in the main dining room, and now they sat on the stone terrace overlooking the lagoon and the spindly dock jutting out jaggedly over the water. Jamie was drinking cognac, Connie was idly sipping an Amaretto. When the bartender wheeled a television set out onto the terrace, neither of them noticed him at first. He spent the next five minutes searching for an extension cord and an outlet, and another five manipulating the rabbit ears on top of the set. None of the people on the terrace knew quite what he was up to. There was still the pleasant hum of conversation as the black-and-white picture came on, the clink of ice in late-night drinks. A woman laughed far too loudly, and someone said “Shhh!” and she answered him in French which Jamie took to be insulting; French always sounded insulting to him. A man across the terrace said, in English, “Oh, look, it’s the moon thing,” and Jamie looked up over his head and indeed saw a bright crescent moon in a sky laden with brilliant stars, and somebody else said, in Italian, “Attenzione!” and the woman who’d insulted (he guessed) the man in French suddenly turned her attention to the picture on the television screen and said, “Les astronautes,” which even Jamie understood.

He had not read a newspaper since he’d left the States on the twelfth, but he’d heard other Americans talking about the Apollo-11 blast-off for the moon several days ago. This was the twentieth, he guessed — he had virtually lost all track of time — and he supposed the spaceship was approaching the moon, else why all the elaborate fuss with the television set? The picture was a very bad one, flaked with snow and streaked with vertical lines, but he recognized Houston Control from previous space shots he’d watched on television, and as he turned his attention fully to the set, he heard a voice clearly saying, “Thirty seconds,” and another static-ridden voice replied, “... drifting right... contact light... okay, engine stop... ACA out of... modes control both auto... engine arm, off... four-thirteen is in.” The first voice said, “We copy you down, Eagle.”

Jamie caught his breath.

The distant voice, clearly and sharply this time, said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The voice from Houston said, “Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot,” and suddenly everyone on the terrace was on his feet, Americans and foreigners alike, all of them applauding the television set as the voice from outer space said, “A very smooth touchdown,” and Houston replied, “Eagle, you are stay for T-l.” Something garbled from up there on the moon in the sky overhead, and then Houston said, “Roger, and we see you venting the ox,” and suddenly the foreigners on the terrace turned to those who were obvious Americans and began applauding them — Jamie and Connie, and a dentist and his wife from Michigan, and a pair of newlyweds from upstate New York, and an eighty-year-old woman from San Francisco. The Frenchwoman summoned the waiter with a sharp “Garçon!” and then shouted, “Champagne pour tout le monde!” and everyone applauded again, first the generous Frenchwoman, and then the Americans once more, and finally the screen where Houston was saying, “We have an unofficial time for that touchdown of one hundred and two hours, forty-five minutes, forty-two seconds and we will update that.”

As the champagne corks popped, Jamie was surprised to find tears rolling down his cheeks. He guessed it was because he was so goddamn proud of his country’s achievement.

4

No sooner were they home than they were off again. This time in August. This time for a long weekend with Penny Lane and his wife on the Vineyard, though in all fairness the Lanes had invited her along as well, an invitation Lissie had politely declined, thank you. On Friday afternoon, she phoned the Vineyard to say that she and Rusty had decided to drive up to Woodstock. Her father asked, “Where’s Woodstock?” and she told him it was upstate New York someplace, they were only going up there to listen to some rock. Her mother had wanted assurance that Mrs. Klein knew Rusty was taking the car, and had asked only that Lissie call the Vineyard again when she got home that night.

It became apparent almost at once that there’d be no getting home that night, and maybe even no getting to the festival. They had taken Route 84 west to the Newburgh Bridge, and had crossed that onto 87 north, heading in the general direction of the Catskills. There was no index listing for a town called Woodstock on their Mobil map, nor was there one for either Bethel or White Lake. But as they got closer to their destination — or at least assumed they were getting closer — they began to see kids. Kids wearing feathers and cut-offs and open vests and ponchos and T-shirts and minis and capes, kids waving to them from VW buses and campers and cars painted with psychedelic designs, pickup trucks with license plates from California, a dusty Benz with a plate from Colorado, kids on motorcycles and motorbikes, kids crammed into beat-up campus Fords or sleek family Cadillacs, a Chrysler flapping a banner with the words KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL — STAY STONED lettered on it, kids leaning out the windows, waving, kids holding placards that read HEAD POWER, kids clutching guitars, girls with flowers twined in their long flowing hair, boys with beards and beads, a massive army of kids in cars and on foot, thronging the approach road to the festival site.

Overheated cars lined the side of the road, their hoods up, their owners smiling and waving as the line of traffic inched past. A grinning boy flashed a placard lettered THIS IS WHERE IT’S AT, BABY! A tall blond girl, naked from the waist up, a garland of wild flowers around her neck, sat on the fender of a green Chevy and strummed a guitar while her boyfriend fiddled with the cap on the water reservoir. A geyser of steam went up behind her, and she leaped off the fender, grinning, and then sat by the side of the road and serenely resumed her strumming. More and more of the kids were abandoning their cars by the side of the road, cars that were overheated, cars that simply couldn’t budge in the traffic jam. They rolled up the windows in defense against the threatening rain clouds overhead, but they left the cars unlocked, heaving knapsacks, sleeping bags and guitars onto their backs, slinging water canteens from their belts as they began walking up the road, threading their way through the stalled cars and the masses of other kids on foot. Rusty swung the car up onto the shoulder in a space between a camper painted with sunbursts and a Dodge with a Michigan license plate. Together, she and Lissie began walking toward where everybody else was going.

It was beginning to rain, gently, but both girls were grinning from ear to ear.

The welcoming party on the Vineyard that Friday night was to have started at six-thirty, in anticipation of the six-fifty-seven sunset, Perry and Laura Lane apparently having come to their vacation paradise fully equipped with an almanac and a stopwatch. The rain began shortly after five, though, and the Vineyard summer people, used to the vagaries of the weather and the uncertainties of promised sunsets, did not begin arriving until almost seven-thirty, by which time the tentative drizzle had turned into a raging downpour. All notions of cocktails on the deck had been abandoned by then, and the score or more invited guests crowded into a living room the size of the one the Crofts had endured on West Seventy-eighth Street before fame and fortune had smiled upon them more beneficently than the weather tonight.

The guests were the usual Martha’s Vineyard summer residents (or denizens, as Jamie preferred to call them) with one exception: a dazzling young blonde wearing a gold-link halter top over nothing but skintight black velvet pants and gold slippers that added a good three inches to her already substantial height. She came in on the arm of a frail septuagenarian who seemed bewildered by the noise and the crowd. Immediately behind the mismatched couple was a writer who, for the last twenty years, had been grinding out dull potboilers, but who (on the basis of a single well-received book this year) had landed foursquare in the center of the Literary Establishment. But so it goes, Jamie thought, and studied the blonde’s ample naked chest under the gold-link top.

The top had been acquired in Rome, the girl promptly informed her hosts, during the filming of Cleopatra seven years before when she was just eighteen and an on-the-spot observer of one of the most publicized romances in the past decade. Jamie politely and dutifully told the literary mafioso how much he’d enjoyed his new novel, and then — being a photographer, after all — said, “You’re much taller than I guessed you were from the jacket photo.” The writer unblinkingly answered, “I write short,” and then immediately turned his back to Jamie and greeted another writer who had written a best seller ten years ago, but nothing since.

There was, Jamie had learned from past experience, something distantly chilling about these “authors,” never any plain and simple “writers” in this tight clique of scribblers who had earned the mantle of immortality during their lifetimes. He listened now as the two lionized scribes began comparing notes about how much one of the hand-tooled leatherbound book clubs was offering them for their priceless autographs on their respective novels. The newly elected capo had been offered two dollars a signature, the unheard-from-since soldier only a buck and a half. But both had been informed that they could actually sign the books anywhere in the world they chose, at the club’s expense, and the one who wrote short, and talked the same way, was saying he thought he’d opt for Hong Kong. No one had yet mentioned Jamie’s photographs in the current issue of New York.

Someone began playing the piano; on the Vineyard, someone always began playing the piano. The someone in this case was the composer of a current Off Broadway hit, and he sang without perfection the show’s eleven o’clock number, which was presently flooding the airwaves day and night. A woman photographer, who’d been introduced to Jamie as Bertha Somebody-or-other, began playing the bongos along with the composer, and another woman who — ages ago, judging from her appearance — had danced with Martha Graham, took off her shoes and began free-expressing herself all over the small, cramped, tightly packed living room. Two or three hardy souls wandered out onto the deck to watch the gray water, oblivious to the pouring rain. A young girl whose father owned one of New York’s biggest imported-wine outlets told the Lanes she’d just signed a singing contract with Capitol Records, and Perry Lane asked her if she wouldn’t do some of her own songs for them. The composer of the Off Broadway hit, who had by then run out of his own repertoire of tunes, happily agreed to accompany her. The first song she sang was something titled “Blue Roses,” a title which immediately brought to Jamie’s mind Tennessee Williams’s famous “pleurosis” malapropism, an association apparently lost on the song’s nubile creator. Jamie wandered out to the kitchen to mix himself another drink.

The actress in the gold-link top (was she an actress? If not, what had she been doing on the Cleopatra set?) was standing at the sink, engaged in earnest conversation with Laura Lane. Neither of them even looked at Jamie as he came into the room. He quietly poured two fingers of Scotch into a washed jelly glass, added three ice cubes to it, and was leaving the kitchen when he heard Laura say, somewhat heatedly, “Well, it’s your business, but I’d advise against it.” She stormed past Jamie without saying a word to him, and shoved through the swinging door to the living room, where the strains of “Blue Roses” flooded the salt-laden air. The girl in the gold-link top kept staring into the sink.

“You okay?” Jamie asked.

“Fine,” she said.

“I’m Jamie Croft,” he said.

“Mm,” she said, and nodded briefly and walked out of the kitchen past him.

In the living room, the newly signed Capitol Records recording artist had finished “Blue Roses” to a standing ovation, and was resisting the pleas of the crowd for another song. The crowd prevailed. She told the Off Broadway composer which chart to play for the next song, told him what key she sang it in, and hummed a few bars so he’d get the gist of it. Apparently he’d heard her singing the song at another Vineyard party long before she’d got her recording contract; he launched into it familiarly. The title, Jamie gathered from the first few bars, was “Antelope City.”

He wandered over to a battered Victorian couch on the far side of the room, away from the piano, and sat next to a man who introduced himself as Alex Namath, “no relation to Joe.” Alex was with the New York Times, and he immediately began lamenting Nixon’s plea to Congress the month before, urging passage of a bill that would stop the flow of drugs at their foreign sources (“Antelope City,” the girl sang, “slow-pokey pretty”), provide stringent penalties for violations of federal drug laws (“Dusky-dawn ditty”), and permit federal narcotics agents with search warrants to enter private dwellings unannounced.

In Woodstock, New York, 400,000 kids were openly smoking marijuana in the rain, and listening to the rock star Richie Havens exclaiming into a microphone, “Wow! Phew! I mean like wow! Phew!”

She could not have got to a telephone even if she wanted to, but she was so overwhelmed by the sheer excitement of it all that long before dusk, she’d completely forgotten the promise to her mother. The festival site had been leased from a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur who by now must have been entertaining second thoughts about the whole idea. He certainly could not have had any notion that his six hundred acres would be turned overnight into the third largest city in New York State, a city without adequate food, shelter, water or sanitation facilities. Nor could he have surmised that a modestly proposed “music and art fair” would become a tribal gathering of such enormous proportions. Then again, neither could anyone else in the United States have reckoned that so many damn kids could convene at the drop of a hat to express the ideas and feelings of an entire generation.

The rain had stopped — but who cared about rain? The field was a quagmire — but who gave a damn about mud? On the loudspeaker system, one of the festival’s twenty-four-year-old promoters was warning that somebody in the crowd was selling bad acid, but Lissie hadn’t seen anyone shooting dope, and the Sullivan County cops weren’t even making any marijuana busts. How could they? This was one gigantic smoke-in, one coming together of the Age of Aquarius, one enormous reaffirmation of the love people as opposed to the hate people. In Vietnam tonight, the airplanes were maybe defoliating the jungles with napalm, and the soldiers were maybe on vill sweeps in the boonies. But here in America, the heart of America, the future of America, the kids were offering each other food and pot and water and solace and sympathy and Lissie had never in her life felt more a part of something truly important.

At eleven that night, while the party was still in full swing, Jamie learned from the television set in the Lanes’ bedroom that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair had mushroomed beyond the wildest expectations of its promoters and that half the kids in the nation (or so it seemed) were crammed onto the upstate New York site, sleeping in the open or in tents, and passing around marijuana as if it were salted peanuts. He had come upstairs to escape a rendition of “Falling in Love Again” by a sixty-year-old lady who began her impression of Marlene Dietrich by straddling a chair and inadvertently showing her lacy black panties to a somewhat startled audience. When she showed her panties a second time, Jamie decided the exhibition was something less than accidental, and he eased his way through the crowd, found the steps leading to the second story of the house, and — drink in hand — climbed stealthily upstairs.

He had nothing more in mind than flopping onto the paisley-covered bed in the guest room, but he’d had a little more to drink than was normally good for him, and as he came down the narrow hallway he felt the familiar buzz that told him he was on the thin edge of inebriation. When he looked into the Lanes’ bedroom, he thought it was his own, his own for the weekend at any rate, except that he couldn’t remember a television set in his room. He went into the room, sat on the floor in front of the set, searched for the on-off volume control, found it, and then scanned the channels for a news report, finally getting one originating in Boston.

In near-intoxicated wonder, he listened while the commentator told all about the appalling lack of toilet facilities at the Woodstock festival, the drenching rain that had turned the festival site into a semblance of a World War I battlefield, the lines of automobiles still backed up for fifteen miles in any direction from White Lake, the half-naked boys and girls romping in the mud. He was calmed somewhat, but only somewhat, when the commentator mentioned that there had been only one short-tempered incident thus far, an argument between two boys, which was promptly squelched when all the kids around them began chanting, “Peace, peace.” The festival-goers, in fact, seemed to be in exceptionally high spirits despite the rain (Small wonder, Jamie thought, with all that dope around), helping each other to cope with the elements and inadequate facilities.

“There hasn’t been a single fistfight,” the commentator said, “and it’s impossible to believe that anything like a rape or a stabbing could occur here at Woodstock this weekend. The message here is love. Soggy, but loud and clear nonetheless.” The commentator paused, looked at his notes, and then said, “An Australian-American board of inquiry into the June third collision between...”

“That’s what the message should be all the time,” a voice behind Jamie said.

He turned from where he was sitting cross-legged before the television set. The blonde in the gold-link top was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, leaning against the jamb, a drink in her hand.

“Love,” she said.

“... and the Australian carrier Melbourne in the South China...”

“Why don’t you turn that off?” she said.

“... concluded that the American ship...”

He snapped off the television set.

“I was rude to you,” she said. “I’m Joanna Berkowitz. I should have introduced myself when we talked in the kitchen.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” he said.

“You’re the photographer, aren’t you?”

“A photographer.”

“With the marvelous pictures in New York this week.”

“Thank you.”

“When did you take them?”

“In March.”

“The kids all looked cold.”

“They were cold,” Jamie said, and nodded. “Very cold night.”

“I loved that one of the old men playing checkers.”

“I liked that one, too.” He drank from his glass, and looked up at her. “What did you think of Marlene downstairs?”

“Sort of sad. Harrison told me she was a beauty when she was young.”

“Who’s Harrison?”

“The man I came with.”

“Ah, yes, Harrison. Knew her when she was younger, did he?”

“Harrison knew everybody when they were younger,” she said, and smiled.

“Was younger,” Jamie said. “When he was younger.”

“Yes, Harrison.”

“No, everybody,” Jamie said.

“I’m not following you.”

“Everybody. Singular. Everybody was younger.”

“Oh.”

“Right.” He nodded, swallowed what was left in his glass, and said, “Pain in the ass, right? People who correct your grammar.”

“People who correct one’s grammar,” she said.

“Touché,” he said, and nodded again. “What are you drinking there, Joanna?”

“Scotch.”

“May I have a sip of it? My glass seems to be empty.”

She walked into the room and extended her own glass to him. He took it, turned it so that the lipstick stain was away from his lips, and drank from it.

He studied her face, the good cheekbones and generous mouth, the large brown eyes fringed with thick dark lashes, her nose a bit too long for her face, and rather thin and finely sculpted, a Mediterranean nose, he supposed one could say, yes, it could have been Greek or Italian, but of course it was Jewish, a spate of freckles across its bridge and splashing subtly onto one cheek—

“Something?” she asked.

“No, no,” he said, and immediately and idiotically added, “I like your top.”

She looked at him and said nothing. Turning, she walked out of the room, leaving him with the remainder of her Scotch and little else.

The rain started again shortly after midnight, a downpour that turned the already inundated festival site into a pockmarked morass of shallow pools. Running through the rain, giggling, holding sodden newspapers over their heads, Rusty and Lissie finally found dubious shelter under a huge maple. A girl poked her head out of a tent pitched nearby, glanced briefly and disconsolately at the rain, and then spotted them where they were standing under the tree.

“Hey! Come in out of the rain!” she called.

They hesitated.

“Well, come on!” she called again, and disappeared inside the tent.

“You want to?” Rusty asked.

“Sure,” Lissie said, “why not?” and both girls ran to the tent and scrambled in under the flap.

“Really coming down again,” the girl said. She was wearing only red panties under a blanket that was draped over her shoulders and hanging unevenly to just above her knees. She was a rather plump girl, with marvelous blue eyes and dark hair, the planes of her square face catching light from a kerosene lamp resting on a blanket in the center of the tent. Sitting on the blanket was a bearded boy wearing a Harvard T-shirt and blue jeans, struggling to open a can of sardines with the can-opener blade of a Swiss army knife.

“Lost the key,” he said, looking up and grinning, and then getting back to work with the can opener.

“I’m Suzie,” the girl said.

“Hi, I’m Rusty.”

“Lissie.”

“Judd,” the boy said.

“You look drowned,” Suzie said. “You want a towel?”

“We sure could use one,” Rusty said.

Suzie knelt beside one of the knapsacks, the blanket hanging loose over her naked breasts. She rummaged for a towel, found one, and handed it to Rusty, who — immediately and to Lissie’s enormous surprise — promptly peeled off her wet T-shirt, and began briskly toweling her back, her shoulders and her breasts.

“That’s the only dry one,” Suzie said.

“I think there’s another one in my knapsack,” Judd said, not looking up from the stubborn can of sardines.

“I can use this one,” Lissie said, “that’s okay.”

“Might as well take the dry one,” Judd said, and put down the can of sardines and the knife, and rose from his cross-legged position on the blanket to walk to the other side of the tent. She was surprised to see how tall he was, six one, six two, she guessed, a gangly boy with long stringy blond hair and a shaggy beard, all knobby elbows and long legs as he bent over his knapsack and began digging into it.

“I’m sure there’s one in here,” he said, and began tossing rolled clothing onto another blanket partially soaked through from the wet ground under it.

“It’s okay, really,” Lissie said. “I can use the one Rusty’s—”

“No trouble,” Judd said, and kept tossing clothes onto the blanket. “Here we go,” he said, and rose again, and carried the towel to where Lissie was standing.

“Thanks,” she said, and began drying her hair. Rusty was standing some three feet away from her, the other towel draped around her neck now, hanging loosely over her breasts.

“Sure glad we brought the tent,” Suzie said.

“Oh, yeah,” Judd said, and went to work again on the sardine can. “Where’s that cheese?” he asked. “Give these guys some cheese. You had anything to eat today?”

“We grabbed some hot dogs before they ran out,” Rusty said.

“Something, huh?” Judd said. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Where you guys from?”

“Connecticut,” Lissie said.

“We’re up in Boston,” Suzie said. “You’d better take off that wet shirt.”

“Well,” Lissie said.

“Catch a cold otherwise,” Suzie said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Lissie said. She hesitated a moment, and then pulled the wet T-shirt over her head. Embarrassed, she turned her back at once, and began drying herself.

Suzie was passing around the wedge of cheddar cheese on a paper plate. “What’d you do with the good knife?” she asked Judd.

“Over there someplace,” he said, and then — triumphantly as he opened the sardine can — “Ah-ha!” He dipped his forefinger into the oil, brought it to his lips, licked at it and said, “Good. Want some sardines, anybody?”

“Mm, thanks, I’m starved,” Rusty said.

Lissie still had her back to the others. She hung the towel around her neck, the way Rusty had, and then — before she turned — arranged it so that the folds were covering her breasts.

“There’s some bread, too,” Suzie said. “Where’s the bread, Judd?”

“Right there.”

“Listen to that rain.”

They sat cross-legged around the kerosene lamp, passing around the cheese and sardines.

“We could use some beer,” Judd said.

“All gone,” Suzie said.

“Where do you guys go to school?” Judd asked.

“I’ll be starting Bennington in the fall,” Rusty said.

“How about you?”

“Brenner,” Lissie said. “Also in the fall.”

“That’s near us,” Suzie said. “I’m at B.U.”

“Boston’s a great city,” Judd said. “You’ll really dig it.”

“Brenner’s a nice school,” Suzie said. “We know lots of kids at Brenner.”

“What are you majoring in?” Rusty asked.

“Pot,” Judd said.

“Speaking of which,” Suzie said, and got to her feet, almost tripping over the tails of the blanket.

“Let’s finish off the food first,” Judd said.

“Where’d you put it?” Suzie asked.

“Never can find anything,” Judd said, smiling. “The pocket on my knapsack.”

“You guys smoke?” Suzie said.

“Oh, sure,” Rusty said.

“Who doesn’t?” Judd said.

Lissie hadn’t realized until now just how hungry she was. She cut herself another huge wedge of cheese, dipped a sardine out of the oil, put both on a slice of white bread, and unashamedly devoured the open-faced sandwich in what seemed to her like thirty seconds.

“Have some more,” Judd said.

“Thanks,” she said, and cut herself another wedge of cheese.

“Bread, too,” he said. “Plenty of bread. Damn, I wish we hadn’t run out of beer.”

“Maybe we can get some tomorrow,” Suzie said, coming back to the blanket with a small plastic bag of marijuana.

“Yeah, but I’d like it now,” Judd said.

“Everything has to be now with him,” Suzie said, smiling and shaking her head.

“Better than later, right?” Judd said.

The sand was still wet from the earlier downpour. Behind him, coming from the Lanes’ rented house on the dunes, Jamie could hear the muted sound of someone playing a guitar and someone else singing along. He had requisitioned a half-empty bottle of Scotch from the kitchen counter, and a plastic cup from one of the cabinets, and had wandered down the rickety steps leading to the beach, eager for a breath of fresh air and a respite from the noise. He had left his shoes at the foot of the steps, and rolled his trousers midway to his shins. The sand was cool underfoot. The water gently nudged the shore.

He saw, at first, only the gold of her top and the blond of her hair catching whatever faint light filtered to the beach from the house above. She was sitting alone on a black raincoat spread on the sand, smoking, looking out over the water. She seemed engrossed in thought; he almost turned to walk up the beach in the opposite direction — but she had already seen him. He hesitated, and then went to where she was sitting.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she answered, and sucked on the cigarette. He realized all at once that it was marijuana.

“Think it’s going to clear up?” he asked.

“Who cares?” she said, and shrugged.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked, and extended the plastic cup.

She shook her head. “Would you like a toke?” she asked, and extended the joint.

“I don’t smoke,” he said, and sat on the raincoat beside her. “Okay to sit?” he asked belatedly.

She nodded, inhaled on the joint again, extended it to him again, and said, “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Generation gap,” she said, and shrugged again.

“Tell me all about the generation gap,” he said, and smiled. “I have a seventeen-year-old daughter.”

“Seventeen isn’t twenty-five, my generation isn’t your daughter’s. Anyway, it really doesn’t matter, does it?”

“I don’t think my daughter smokes pot, either,” he said. “Doesn’t she? Well, well.”

“You think she does.”

“I don’t know what she does.”

“But you suspect she does.”

“Well, really, who gives a shit?”

They fell silent. He sipped at his Scotch. She dropped the stub of the joint, and then brushed sand over it with her hand. He had the feeling he should leave. He was intruding on her privacy; she obviously wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

“Are you an actress?” he asked.

“An actress? No. What makes you think that?”

“You were talking about being in Rome for Cleopatra...”

“Oh, that. I was there with my father, he was trying to get a job scoring the film. He’s a musician.” She paused. “So am I.”

“Oh? What do you play?”

“The flute.”

“The flute,” he said, nodding.

“I’m a flutician, as my teacher would put it.” She paused. “Julie Baker.”

“Am I supposed to know her?”

“Him. And yes. Well, I mean, most people who know music know who Julius Baker is.”

“Who is he?”

“I gather you don’t know music.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just say he’s a very good flutist.”

“Do you play professionally?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where?”

“I’m with the New York City Opera Orchestra. We start rehearsing next week for the new season.”

“I never thought of music as being seasonal.”

“Well, of course it is. Come on, you know that. Don’t you ever... I mean, haven’t you ever been to the Philharmonic? Or a ballet? I mean... well, of course it’s seasonal. All of it’s seasonal. Well, wait, I take that back. I guess if you’re in the pit at Fiddler, that isn’t seasonal. But most orchestras, sure, they’re seasonal.”

“And the season starts next week.”

“Rehearsals for the season, yes.”

“When does it end?”

“Sometime in November.”

“Then what?”

“I go to Los Angeles for four weeks.”

“With the orchestra?”

“Yes. Well, the whole company actually.” She paused. “So,” she said, “Now you know where I am every minute of the day and night.”

“Forgive me,” he said, “but...”

She looked at him, puzzled.

“I’ve forgotten your name.”

“You’re joking,” she said. “It’s Joanna.”

“Your last name, I mean.”

“Berkowitz.”

“Right. Berkowitz. Right.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some of this?”

“Well... all right. I really shouldn’t, though, I’ve really had enough tonight.” She shook her head, and then suddenly laughed. “Last season, one of the fiddlers in the first section got drunk before a performance... we were doing Traviata... not drunk, actually, but a bit high. And he began singing from the pit, I mean actually singing out loud along with the coloratura. Do you know the ‘fors’è lui’ aria in the first...?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Well, that one. Singing right along with it.” She laughed again, and again shook her head. “But I will have a sip, thank you.”

He poured Scotch into the plastic cup and handed it to her.

“That’s yours, isn’t it?” she said.

“I’ll drink from the bottle.”

“Cheers,” she said.

“Cheers.”

“I can use this, actually. Rough night tonight.”

“How so?”

“Endings. I find endings difficult, don’t you?”

“Beginnings, too,” he said, and smiled.

“How about middles?” she asked, and returned the smile. She sipped again at the Scotch, dug into her handbag for a package of cigarettes, shook one free, and then offered the package to him. “This isn’t grass,” she said, “you’re absolutely safe.” He took one of the cigarettes, and struck a match for both of them. She blew out a stream of smoke, and said, “Harrison’s married, you see.”

“Harrison. The man you came with.”

“He’s a poet, he teaches a workshop out in Indiana. He wants to divorce his wife and marry me, take me to Indiana with him. There are two children involved, both of them older than I am. Daughters. There must be something about me, all these men working out their oedipal...”

“All these men?”

“Well... Harrison primarily. But I’ve known other men besides Harrison. I mean... well... I guess you realize that. I was on my own in Rome when I was just eighteen, I guess I had to have known at least a few men.”

“Yes,” he said.

“So,” she said and shrugged.

“All of them married?”

“You make it sound like an army. There were only three. Two of them were married.”

“With daughters?”

“One of them had a daughter, yes,” she said, and drained the cup.

“More?” he asked, and extended the bottle.

“I really shouldn’t,” she said. “I’m really beginning to feel it. The booze, the dope... fuck it, let me have some.” She held out the cup, and he poured for her. “I told him no. Harrison. I told him I didn’t want to go to Indiana. Half an hour ago. Just before I came down here. Told him no.” She shook her head. “I guess I did the right thing, who the fuck knows? Fuck it,” she said, and drank. “My shrink said it was what I should do. He said...”

“You’re in analysis, huh?”

“Isn’t everyone?” she said. “Ninety-sixth Street is practically my home away from home.”

“Is that where he’s located?”

“That’s where everybody’s shrink is located. Ninety-sixth, between Madison and Park.”

“His name wouldn’t be Frank Lipscombe, would it?”

“No. Who’s Frank Lipscombe?”

“An analyst I know.”

“There must be ten thousand shrinks in New York, maybe on Ninety-sixth alone. Why would my shrink be Frank whatever-his-name-is.”

“Lipscombe.”

“No,” she said, and ground her cigarette out in the sand, and sipped at the Scotch again.

“How long have you been seeing him?” he asked.

“Too damn long.”

“How long is that?”

“Since I met Harrison.”

“And when was that?”

“April.”

“That’s not so long ago.”

“It’s pretty damn long when you’re twenty-five and he’s seventy-three. How old are you?”

“Forty-two. Well, wait, I just turned forty-three.”

“Eighteen years older than I am.”

“More or less.”

“No, not more or less. Eighteen years is what it is. Which I suppose is an improvement,” she said, and shrugged. “How tall are you?”

“Six two. And you?”

“Five ten.”

“That’s big.”

“Yes, I’m a big girl. Tall, anyway. As for mature...” She shook her head. “Mandelbaum says I’ve got to grow up one day.”

“Mandelbaum?”

“My shrink. He thinks I’m immature, and a little bit crazy besides.”

Suddenly, without realizing he was about to do it, he kissed her. The kiss was brief, it took her as much by surprise as it did him. She looked into his face.

“What was that for?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, forgive me.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“Really, I’m sorry.”

She turned away from him and looked out over the sea. They were silent for several moments. Then she said, “Do you do this all the time?”

“No. As a matter of fact...” He shook his head.

“Yes, what?”

“Never.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry. Really. I am.”

“Never, huh? How long have you been married?”

“Eighteen years.”

“And never been tempted.”

“Tempted, yes.”

“You sound like Jesus in the wilderness.”

“Not quite.”

“Sorely tempted, but never compromised. Until tonight. Must be my ripe young bod, huh?”

“Joanna... I’m sorry. I mean it. Would you like to...?”

“Stop being so sorry. It was kind of nice, as a matter of fact. Sort of. Would I like to what?”

“Go back up to the house.”

“No. Why? Would you?”

“Not particularly.”

“Neither would I.” She looked out over the sea again. “I thought you were a jerk, you know. When you said you liked my top. A middle-aged jerk talking euphemistically about my breasts. Well, I do have good breasts, I suppose,” she said, and glanced idly down at them. “How’d we get on my breasts, anyway? Maybe we’d better go inside.”

“If you like.”

“Because I hate rushing things, and I get the feeling we’re rushing at a headlong pace.” She shook her head. “I barely said goodbye to Harrison thirty seconds ago. Are you happily married?”

“Yes.”

“Then why’d you kiss me?”

“I guess I wanted to.”

“Do you still want to.”

“Yes.”

“Then kiss me,” she said.

He kissed her. The kiss was longer this time. Their lips lingered. When she drew away from him at last, she said, “But that’s enough. I’ve got to be out of my mind. Wait’ll Mandelbaum hears this, he’ll take a fit.”

“Why do you have to tell him?”

“It’s costing me fifty dollars an hour, I suppose I ought to tell him, don’t you? I mean instead of just lying on his couch and looking up at the ceiling. Though he does have a marvelous ceiling. One of those old tin things with curlicues all over it. I can just see Monday. Hey, guess what, doctor? I broke off with Harrison and ten minutes later I was kissing a married stranger on the beach. I’ve got to be crazy.”

He looked at her, studying her face, his eyes accustomed to the semidarkness now, seeing again the freckles he had noticed in the bedroom upstairs, a light dusting on the bridge of her nose and on only one cheek, the high cheekbones and generous mouth—

“Does it meet with your approval?” she asked.

“Yes, it does.”

“Nose and all?”

“Especially the nose,” he said, and smiled.

“Oh, sure. I hate my nose. You don’t know how many times I’ve thought of getting it bobbed.”

“Don’t.”

“Just here,” she said, and brought her hand up, exerting the smallest amount of pressure with her forefinger, lifting the tip.

“You’re beautiful just the way you are,” he said.

“Well... thank you,” she said, and dropped her hand into her lap again, and looked away shyly.

“Very beautiful,” he whispered.

“Thank you.” She hesitated and then said, “I find you very attractive, too. But that’s just me, I guess. I mean, the older-man thing. And married, of course,” she said, and rolled her eyes.

“I guess you’ve discussed all this with...”

“Oh, sure.”

“What does he think?”

“He thinks my liaisons, his word, are quote dangerous unquote. Do you know you’re staring at me?”

“Yes.”

“Must be the gorgeous nose.”

“Must be.”

“If you didn’t have a wife inside there... you do have a wife inside there, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Worse luck, I thought you might have left her home for the weekend. What does she look like?”

“Blond, green eyes, good figure.”

“Oh, yes. Pretty.”

“If I didn’t have a wife inside there...” he prompted.

“I’d disgrace myself in the eyes of God and Mandelbaum,” she said, and hesitated. “Do you work in the city?”

“Sometimes.”

“How often do you come in? God,” she said, “I sound like an advertising executive on the make!”

“Once a week, sometimes more often.”

“Would you like to call me? I’m in the book, J. Berkowitz on East Sixty-fifth.”

“Would you like me to call you?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her.

“Call me,” she said.

The rain had tapered off, and they stood outside the tent — Judd and Lissie — looking out over the festival site and the myriad small fires that had been started on the sodden ground, glowing against the blackness of the night like blazing galaxies in a distant sky. From where they stood, the ground sloped gently away and they could see across the entire site, could hear the gentle strumming of guitars, the sound of floating laughter, and behind them the patter of leaves dripping raindrops on the forest floor.

“I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” Judd said.

“Neither will I,” Lissie said.

“Want to take a walk down there?”

“Sure.”

He lifted the flap of the tent and said, “We’re going for a walk, anybody want to come?”

“I’m totaled,” Suzie said.

“How about you, Rusty?”

“She’s already asleep.”

“Okay, see you later,” Judd said.

They went down the slope and onto the muddier ground. They were both barefoot, their jeans rolled to their shins. Lissie was wearing a B.U. sweatshirt Suzie had loaned her; Judd had changed from his T-shirt to a plaid flannel shirt as protection against the cool night air.

“Watch out for broken glass,” he said.

They walked through the camp, stopping here and there to talk with other kids, all of them still excited from the day’s events, all of them eager to trade stories about what for them had been the most thrilling experience in their lives. Scarcely any of them mentioned the performers: the performers were only secondary to this event. Judd and Lissie sat with kids they didn’t know, and shared their pot, and warmed themselves by the fires of strangers made friends through a common bond.

They could not have fully explained the bond if they’d tried. It had something to do with being young and being here where they were able to express themselves without restraint. It wasn’t just being able to smoke pot in the open without fear of arrest or imprisonment, it wasn’t just seeing all these hundreds of thousands of other kids who looked the way they did, and dressed the way they did, and talked the way they did, all together in one place, stretching from horizon to horizon, some of them acres away from the stage where they could not have seen or even heard the performers clearly despite the amplifiers that had blared from eighty-foot-high scaffolds, it wasn’t any of that separately, but all of it together. They had got it together at last, they had come from everywhere to do this thing, to be this thing. They were the event, a conglomerate entity with a single voice. Us.

As they wandered back leisurely toward the slope upon which the tent was pitched, Judd said, “ ‘A little touch of Harry in the night.’ ” He saw the puzzled look on her face, and said, “Do you know it?”

“No,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Careful,” he said, and extended his hand to help her over a rock ledge. She took his hand. He did not release it when they were on firm ground again.

“Henry the Fifth,” he said. “The scene before the battle. When he’s walking through the camp, talking to the soldiers. He’s in disguise, you know... don’t you know Henry the Fifth?”

She shook her head. She was very much aware of his hand, the fingers gently clasped around her own. The glowing fires were behind them now, they climbed steadily toward where the tent was pitched.

“ ‘Now entertain conjecture of a time,’ ” Judd said, almost in a whisper, and it took her a moment to realize he was quoting, “ ‘When creeping murmur and the poring dark fills the wide vessel of the universe.’ Reminds me of this, I don’t know why.”

“Don’t stop,” she said.

“Well...”

“Please.”

“ ‘From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night, the hum of either army stilly sounds, that the fix’d sentinels almost receive the secret whispers of each other’s watch. Fire answers fire; and through their paly flames’... well, that’s enough,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

“Armies?” she said, “This reminds you of armies?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But... why?”

“I don’t know. It just seems like an army to me.”

“And the other army?”

“The other army?” He turned to her, and grinned, and again squeezed her hand. “Why, them, Lissie,” he said. “Them.”

When they got back to the tent, the others were asleep, the kerosene lamp was out. He prepared a place for her near where Rusty was sleeping, a blanket on the ground, another to cover her. They undressed silently in the darkness. She took off the B.U. sweatshirt and her jeans, but she left on her panties. He went to the sleeping bag, and she went to the blankets on the other side of the tent.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” she answered, and crawled between the blankets. She lay in the darkness, listening to the breathing, Suzie’s and Rusty’s, trying to isolate Judd’s. Her heart was pounding. She lay very still for what seemed like a long time.

“Lissie?” he whispered.

“Yes?”

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you come over here?”

“Well...”

“Well what?”

“Well... I don’t know.”

“Come on over.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Isn’t it cold over there, all alone under that blanket?”

“Well...”

“Isn’t it?”

“Well... I guess so.”

“Then come on over here.”

“Well...”

“Come on.”

“Well... just for a minute.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay, just for a minute.”

Wearing only her panties, pulling the blanket around her, she moved to his sleeping bag. He had already unzipped it; he opened the flap wide for her, and she crawled in beside him.

“So,” he whispered, “hello.”

“Hello,” she whispered.

They fell silent. Across the tent, she could hear Rusty’s gentle breathing and Suzie’s light snoring. She was suddenly trembling beside him.

“Still cold?” he whispered.

“Yes, I... guess so.”

“Here,” he said, and put his arms around her.

“Listen, don’t get any...”

“You’re very pretty,” he said.

“Sure.”

“You are.”

“Sure.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” she said. She was still trembling. She wished she could stop trembling. “How... how old are you?” she asked.

“Nineteen,” he said.

“I thought you were older... no, don’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Well...”

“Well what?”

“Well, why would you want to?”

“Want to?”

“I’m so... small,” she said.

“So?” he said.

“So...”

“Well...”

“Be still,” he said, and kissed her.

She thought for a moment, Hey, watch out, Liss, she thought, Oh, wow, as his tongue parted her lips, and moved into her mouth, caressing her own tongue, his hand gently kneading her breast, the nipple rising, she thought Hey! and pulled her mouth from his and said, “Hey, come on.”

“You said a minute.”

“Well...”

“It hasn’t been thirty seconds.”

“Well...”

“Be still,” he said again.

His lips touched hers, gently, but the hand kneading her breast was insistent.

“You have terrific nipples,” he said.

“Sure. Listen...”

“Yes?”

“We’d better cut this out.”

“Why?”

“Because... well, listen, let’s just cut it out, okay?”

“No,” he said.

“Judd...”

“Yes?”

“Listen... I...”

His hand moved from her breast. She felt it suddenly on her panties, between her legs, touching her there where no one had ever...

“Listen,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Cut it out, okay?”

“No.”

“Listen, take your hand away, okay?” she said, and reached for his wrist, and caught it and said, “Come on now.”

“No,” he said.

“Well, I’m not about to...” she started to say, and he shook her hand loose, and began lowering her panties over her belly, “Hey, listen,” she whispered, pulling them down over her nakedness, “Listen, Judd really, this,” and suddenly he moved in against her, and she felt his hardness and said, started to say, “Hey, come on...” but he took her hand in his own and brought it to him, brought it gently to him, and she said, “Judd, listen” and he opened her hand and then closed her fingers around him.

“Judd,” she said.

“Yes?” he said.

“I don’t know you.”

“You know me.”

“No, really, listen,” she said, but her hand, her hand was unbiddenly touching him, gliding along his shaft, she could feel him pulsing under her fingers, she thought Jesus and she said, “Judd, listen,” and his mouth found hers again. She thought Jesus, this is crazy while his mouth, while his hand, her mouth, her hand...

“Judd...”

“Shhh,” he said.

“Listen, I’m, you know...”

“Shhh,” he said, and rolled on top of her.

She felt him inside her, enormous inside her, felt a sharp momentary pain, and gasped, and urgently whispered, “Listen, I’m a virgin,” recognizing the lie at once, whatever she’d been she no longer was, the hugeness of him swelling inside her own swollen, her own, “Listen,” she said, “I wish you’d,” his mouth stopping the words, sealing her lips while below he began a steady fierce rhythm. “Listen,” she said, pulling her mouth from his, incessantly probing, Oh, Jesus, she thought, “Listen,” she said, “Shhh,” he said, and shoved himself deeper inside her, “They’ll hear us,” she said, “Shhh,” he said, his massive, his, Jesus, she thought and his lips found hers again, his mouth more demanding now, biting her lips, thrusting his tongue into her, searching the walls of her mouth while below she began moving with a fierce rhythm of her own, searching for, rubbing against, moving it against him, getting it there against him, pushing it there against him, swollen and wet, Jesus, she thought, Jesus, I, “That’s the girl,” he whispered, “that’s it, Lissie, that’s it, honey,” impaled beneath him, her body moving without conscious will, the roof of the tent, the ground beneath her, My father’ll kill me, she thought, and said aloud, sharply, “Oh! Oh, Jesus!” and felt his hand clamping onto her mouth, and suddenly lost all sense of time or place or being or self or anything but, anything else, anything.

5

He called her the next time he was in the city.

“Hello?” she said.

“Joanna?”

“Yes?”

“Jamie,” he said. “Jamie Croft.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“I said I might call.” He hesitated. “I’m in the city.”

“How are you?” she said.

“Fine, thanks.” He hesitated again. “I thought you might like to have lunch.”

He waited.

“Why don’t you come here instead?” she said.

“Well... sure,” he said.

“It’s on East Sixty-fifth,” she said, and gave him the address.

When she opened the door, she was wearing blue jeans and a man’s shirt, the tails hanging loose. Her hair was pulled into a pony tail; Jamie thought it looked rather too young for her. She was wearing no makeup; she looked a bit wan, he thought.

“Well, hello,” she said.

“Sorry it took so long,” he said. “I had trouble getting a cab.”

“Wednesday,” she said. “Matinee day.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Come in,” she said.

The apartment was a three-story brownstone, the living room on the first floor, the kitchen, dining room and guest room on the second floor, the master bedroom and a library on the third floor. The living room — Jamie had not yet seen the rest of the house — was furnished with antiques she told him she had purchased at a shop in Brewster. He figured they must have cost her a fortune, but she told him at once that the prices there were very good, he should drop in sometime. She asked him if he would like a drink. He said he thought not. They sat opposite each other in easy chairs covered in red plush velvet. It was close to noon. The light was flat.

“No rehearsal today?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you have a performance tonight?”

“Yes?” There was a slight inflection at the tail end of the single word, as if she still could not believe he was really interested in what she did or when she did it.

“Which opera?”

“Roberto d’Evereux,” she said. “Donizetti.” She looked at him and smiled. “You don’t know it.”

“No.”

“So,” she said. “What are you working on?”

“An architectural thing for the Times Magazine section.”

“New York architecture?”

“Yes. Landmark buildings.”

“Are you enjoying it?”

“I haven’t begun shooting yet. I only got the list yesterday.”

“Of buildings?”

“Yes, the buildings they want me to photograph. Twelve in all.”

“Sounds exhausting,” she said.

“It may turn out to be,” he said, and smiled.

There was a long silence.

“Must be twenty to,” Joanna said.

“What?”

“Or twenty after.”

“I’m sorry, I...”

“Long pause in the conversation.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what they say, isn’t it?”

“I thought it was ten to and ten after.”

“No, twenty to.” She crossed her legs. “You seem nervous,” she said. “Have you changed your mind?”

“About what?”

“About making love to me. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure why I’m here.”

“That’s why you’re here,” she said. “Shall we go upstairs?”

“If you want to.”

“Yes, I want to.”

“All right then,” he said.

Her third-floor bedroom was entered through a library that served as a sort of cloistered anteroom lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves of leatherbound books. A tiled Franklin stove was set into one wall, under the bookshelves. There were two wingback chairs, each upholstered in red leather, flanking the fireplace. A brass coal scuttle rested on the slate hearth. There were brass andirons, a brass-handled poker, brass-handled fire tongs. An antique bellows, in faded green and red leather, hung just to the left of the fireplace opening.

A metal music stand with an open manuscript on it was standing near the hearth. On the dark, richly stained floor, a flute lay nestled in its open leather case, silvery bright against the green plush lining. The floor was scattered with Oriental rugs: a Bokhara like the one in the Rutledge living room, an Abadeh, and a smaller Isfahan. He could imagine her sitting in this room practicing her flute, or perhaps reading before she went to bed, the coals of a dwindling fire glowing in the grate, a brandy snifter on the inlaid table beside one of the wingback chairs. The door leading to her bedroom was made of heavy oak, with a massive brass doorknob. He followed her into the room.

She undressed without ceremony or artifice, as if she had taken off her clothes for him a hundred times before. Naked, she was more spectacularly beautiful than he imagined she could possibly be; he caught his breath as she came toward him, her long blond hair falling loosely over her shoulders to mantle the sloping tops of her young breasts, so young, the erect pink nipples circled with wider roseate aureoles. Her waist was narrower than it appeared when she was clothed, her hips flaring below it, the triangle of her pubic hair arrowing downward toward her rounded thighs and long legs.

He was still fully dressed when they kissed. Their kiss was long and passionate. When at last she took her mouth from his, she helped him to disrobe, loosening his tie, unbuttoning his shirt, unfastening the belt around his waist, and at last lowering his zipper and pulling him free of his shorts. She held him only for a moment, tightly, her fist clenched around him, and then she released him, and turned from him abruptly, and went to the bed. She lay on her back watching as he undressed, one leg bent, the other extended, propped against the pillows, her hands behind her head, a faint smile on her lips. He put most of his clothing on the seat of a chair, and hung his jacket over the back of it. Then he went to where she was waiting for him.

He discovered during that first afternoon in bed with her that there were several separate and distinct personalities which, like those of schizophrenic Eve in the Joanne Woodward movie, formed in the conglomerate the single person who was Joanna Berkowitz. The first and foremost of these was someone he labeled Joanna La Flute, who could talk tirelessly and with unbridled passion about the instrument she played and its role in the orchestra. She had grown up in a musical family; her father had been only a so-so pianist but a marvelous arranger who had worked for many of the big bands in the thirties and forties before moving on to score several motion pictures; her uncle played the cello, and it was he, she guessed, certainly not her father, who stimulated her first real response to music.

“I fell in love with the cello the first time I heard it,” she told Jamie. “I must have been seven or eight years old. My father took me to hear my Uncle Izzy playing — his name is Israel Berkowitz, he used to play first desk with the Philharmonic, but to me he was Uncle Izzy — and I heard the music he was making, and I simply fell in love with the instrument. It had such a masculine sound, do you know? I mean, I was only eight years old, but Jesus, I felt it right down here, I mean it, so robust, and gutsy, like a man, do you know? If I had to assign a color to the sound a cello makes, I guess it would be Army green.”

But despite her immediate infatuation with the instrument her Uncle Izzy played, her mother decided that Joanna should begin taking piano lessons, which she did indifferently all through her prepubescent years. In 1955, when the motion picture Blackboard Jungle exploded onto the screen with an under-the-titles background rendition of “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets, Joanna (like millions of other eleven-year-old girls) discovered rock-and-roll and immediately began fooling around with the guitar.

“No lessons, you understand, just picking it up and strumming it, you know, like if a friend brought one over. Mostly folksongs, like that. But the important thing was that it got me away from the piano and into strings. So when I went to a music camp the summer I turned twelve — my birthday is June 6, 1944, does that date mean anything to you? Of course it does, it’s D-Day, I was born on D-Day. Anyway, that summer I went to camp, this was 1956, it was to study cello, not piano. Cello, mind you.

“But whereas I still loved the sound of it, I still do as a matter of fact, I really wasn’t devoting too much time to practicing or anything, I was more interested in boys, I guess. I’d just turned twelve, but I was pretty well developed for my age, and extremely horny. So that deep rumbling sound coming up from between my legs — the sound the cello was making, not me — was very sexual to me, and it just aggravated my horniness, and instead of practicing I went chasing around after all the boys. That’s neither here nor there, right? I mean, nothing happened to me that summer, musically or sexually. Sexually, I’d have to wait till I was seventeen. Musically, it happened two years later.”

She was a student at Fieldston-Riverdale and still taking cello lessons — this was now the fall of 1958; she was fourteen years old — when her grandmother took her to the Metropolitan Opera one night to hear Lucia di Lammermoor, which turned out to be the musical experience that changed Joanna’s entire life. When she mentioned the opera, she familiarly called it Lucia, and then saw the blank look on Jamie’s face (he truly was a musical ignoramus) and expanded it to its full, honorable and only world-famous title, drawing another blank, shrugging, and saying, “Anyway, I’d never really dug opera, and I didn’t that night, either. I mean, I frankly found it very boring until they got to the Mad Scene, do you know the opera at all? Not at all? Well, it’s really too complicated to explain, I mean the plot is really very complicated, even for an opera.

“But there’s the scene following the murder of Sir Arthur, she kills him, you see, she kills Sir Arthur whom she’s just married, and then she goes mad, and there’s this marvelous aria for coloratura soprano accompanied by flute, and when I heard that flute — oh, my God! I can’t tell you what it felt like, just hearing that sound. I took my grandmother’s glasses — I had to find out where that sound was coming from, who in the orchestra was making that sound — and I zeroed in on the flute. A lovely woman was playing it, I loved the look of her, and I loved the look of the instrument in her hands, and the way she was holding it, the way you have to hold the flute, but most of all, I loved the sound, so very different from the cello.

“It was sexy the way a dream is sexy, smooth and turning, like a dream, everything white, like daytime, like a mirror, smooth, like glass, turning, like a dream, like beach glass, do you know? Smooth and swift, like a cat, rainbow soft, like glass, like beach glass, pastels, smooth, God, I loved that sound! And I just knew, I knew right that minute, as I focused those glasses on that beautiful woman making that rapturous sound, I knew right then that what I wanted to play was the flute. I mean, I’d always known I wanted to play something, play it well, you know, not just fool around with it, but now I knew my instrument would be the flute. That was it. No further debate. The flute. Period.

“I borrowed a C-footed flute from the band room at school, and took it home to assemble the three pieces. There are three pieces, you know, it comes apart. The head-joint with the blow-hole on it — it sounds obscene, I know, but remember I was only fourteen and I didn’t know from things like giving head, dollink, or blowjobs, or other such disgusting tings, nu? The head-joint, and the middle-joint and then the tail, or the foot-joint, voilà, you got a whole fecockteh flute, am I right? Anyway, I put it all together, and I put my mouth over the blow-hole, covering about a quarter of it, and holding the flute horizontally, the way I’d seen that lady doing at the Met, and I blew down into the hole, and Jesus Christ, I made a sound!

“I was so surprised I almost wet my pants! My father was sitting in the living room, and he looked up at me, and saw the startled look on my face, and misinterpreted it for something else, because it certainly wasn’t what I was feeling — all I was feeling was shock at having produced any sound at all. My father said, ‘Such joy!’ and I looked at him, and realized he was looking at my face, studying it with a fondness and an appreciation I’d never seen before, not when I was playing piano, not when I was playing cello, but now, making a dumb ooonk sound on the flute, he gives me a look of approval like I’ve never seen before from him in my life, and he says, ‘Such joy’ again, softer this time, and that does it. Now I know that not only am I going to play the flute, I am going to be the best fucking flute player who ever lived.”

She wasn’t quite that (“I’m still not that,” she told Jamie), but she discovered in the first few months of private lessons with a teacher recommended by her Uncle Izzy that she had, well (and she told this to Jamie reluctantly and with a modesty he found both touching and endearing), well, she had what she supposed was a natural affinity for the instrument, what you might call a talent, she supposed. And she was surprised when, after having taken lessons for little more than a year, her teacher arranged a recital at Town Hall for five flutists, two men and three women, and Joanna was chosen to be one of the women. (“I was fifteen years old, not exactly what you’d call a woman, but the others really were women.”) In such fast company, Joanna was not far enough advanced to play first, but she did play third flute, and she did have several solos in a twenty-minute piece the name of which she could still recall, Boismortier’s Quintet No. 1 for five flutes. There at Town Hall, she made her next important musical decision: not only was it enough to play the flute and to play it well, it was important for her to perform before people who would hear her play and derive from her playing the same enjoyment she herself did. In short, she decided on that thrilling night that she wanted to become a professional musician.

In the summer of 1962, when Joanna was just eighteen, and shortly after she’d graduated from Fieldston-Riverdale, she went with her father to Rome. She had already applied to the Juilliard School, and had been accepted, and was looking forward to beginning her studies there in the fall. “In New York City,” she said, “anyone truly interested in becoming a professional musician — a classical musician, that is — goes either to Juilliard or Mannes. The Mannes College of Music, do you know? Both very good, but maybe Juilliard’s a bit more competitive. Anyway, that’s where I went. Juilliard, I mean. This was 1962, the fall of 1962, the school hadn’t yet moved to Lincoln Center, it was still uptown on 122nd Street, near Riverside Drive. I used to love that old building. I mean, it doesn’t compare with the facilities at Lincoln Center, I’m right there at the State Theater, you know, I drop in every now and then to say hello to Julie, he’s still teaching flute at Juilliard, he’s marvelous. I told you about him, do you remember? Julie Baker? He’s the first flutist with the Philharmonic.

“Anyway, he was teaching up there at the old Juilliard, and what I did for four years was play flute. Well, not only flute. You have to take piano as your second instrument, all students in the music department do. But flute was my major, and there was L and M, that’s literature and materials, and then orchestra — there were only two orchestras then, the Concert Orchestra and the Repertory Orchestra, but now there are four — and music history, and chamber music, if you were assigned to it, though that was mostly for string musicians, still I played a lot of chamber music at Juilliard.

“What it was, if you were a student there, you were supposed to be serious about music, so it was music, music, music all day long every day of the week. Either lessons, or else practicing, or else performing with this or that school orchestra or, you know, a friend might be giving a little recital, and he’d ask you to play with him, or you’d get together with some other musicians and just play things you loved, you know, like, oh, God, you know, the Mozart flute concertos or, God, there was a girl there, she was just a lovely harpist, do you know Mozart’s Concerto in C Major for Flute and Harp? God, I used to love playing that with her, we’d spend hours on that, I absolutely adored it.

“But you see, I loved all of it. I mean, even the dumb exercises. All of it. Taffanel and Gaubert, or the Andersen exercises, or the Marcel Moyse stuff, all the exercises I use now when I’m warming up before a performance, but which then, meant a lot to me, when I was developing technique. I’d go to the hearing room, the school had this room with record players and earphones, it still has one at Lincoln Center, with the same person behind the desk, and I’d listen to, oh, God, I don’t know, tons of stuff — do you know the fourth movement of the Brahms four symphony? There’s some beautiful flute stuff in it. Or Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony? The third movement? There’s some very hard stuff there for two flutes, I mean, it’s hard for me even now, but then it was impossible. Or, you know, the flute solo in Daphnis and Chloé, or Strauss, well, Strauss, yes, everything in Till Eulenspiegel. And there’s L’aprèsmidi, I’m sure you know that one, the flute solo at the beginning, Debussy? No? You don’t know Debussy? Oh, well.

“I don’t want you to get the impression that all I did was play music all the time, or think about it all the time. I was twenty-two when I got out of Juilliard, and by then, well, you know, I’d, uh, picked up a little experience along the way with this or that man, I’ll tell you about that sometime, but not right now. The thing was trying to get a job when I got out. You see, if you’re a fiddler, I mean a good fiddler, you’ve got a shot at something like thirty, thirty-five chairs in the orchestra — sure, there are what? eighteen fiddles in the first section, another fifteen in the second? That’s thirty-three, am I right? Thirty-three chances for a job in any given orchestra. In New York, we haven’t got that many orchestras, you know. Cultural center of the world, sure, thank you, Mayor Lindsay, but all we’ve got is the Philharmonic and the American Symphony, which is only so-so, and the National Symphony, which doesn’t really count because that’s semi-pro, and then the Met and the City Opera, and that’s about it.

“Well, wait, you’ve got your ballet orchestras, but those are mostly pick-up jobs, the Joffrey, you know, and the Harkness, and the New York City Ballet company. There’s nothing that says you can’t leave New York and get a job with the Chicago Symphony, which, by the way, is the best orchestra in America, or the Cleveland, or wherever, but if you live here then you want to stay here and work here, even if it means subbing in a Broadway musical when a musician gets sick. My point is, there are only three flutes in an orchestra. Count ’em. Three. So, if you’ve got four or five true orchestras here in New York, that’s fifteen jobs. And you’re not going to get one of those jobs unless a flutist dies or moves to London.

“So there I am in 1966 with my B.M. from Juilliard, and all I want to do is perform, and there’s not a job anywhere on the horizon. Julie suggested that I call Arthur Aaron, he was contractor for the American Symphony, and Dino Proto who contracts for the State Theater, and he was nice enough to prepare the way for me so that when I called and told them I was a flutist looking for a job they didn’t just say, ‘Oh, really, how nice, what a surprise!’ I auditioned for both of them, and they were very complimentary, but they really didn’t have anything at all, and they told me to get back to them in six months or so. Well, Dino said that. Arthur Aaron didn’t have anything, and he wasn’t expecting anything, either. You have to understand that when a musician lands a chair in an orchestra, he stays with it. He doesn’t go job hopping, the way you do in advertising or publishing. Jobs are hard to get. So I called Dino back in six months — this was now getting to be 1967 — I didn’t call him Dino in those days, it was still Mr. Proto. His name is Secondo, anyway, his first name, but everybody who knows him calls him Dino — and he still didn’t have anything for me.

“I was a trained musician, out of Juilliard since June of 1966, and it was now the spring of 1967, the Beatles had just come out with ‘Strawberry Fields,’ I remember, and I thought they’d written that one line just for me, do you know the line I mean? The one about how hard it was getting to be someone? That one. There were a lot of musicals running that year on Broadway, but I couldn’t get a job with any of them. I mean, really a lot. My Fair Lady and Oklahoma! and South Pacific and Dolly and Sound of Music, I mean it, the list just went on and on, How to Succeed, Fiddler, Kiss Me Kate, Pajama Game, some really terrific stuff, when you think of it, Damn Yankees, Guys and Dolls, wow! But I could not get a job.

“So I found a couple of students who thought they might like to play flute, I charged them ten dollars an hour, but they didn’t really love the flute, and you’ve either got to love it or forget it. And then I began working at a drugstore near Carnegie Hall, the proximity had nothing to do with it, I mean I wasn’t hoping to get discovered or anything, it was just a job. Then I sold music for a while, at Schirmer’s on Forty-ninth, and then a friend of mine, a girl with the Radio City orchestra, she’d gone to Juilliard with me and had landed a job in the second fiddle section, called to say they needed a sub there for a week or so, the third flute was out sick, so I played that for a while. And I did two nights in King and I, there’s a lot of nice flute stuff in it, but that was just dumb luck, I just stumbled into that one.

“And then I got a call from a friend — you make a lot of friends who are in the music business, you know, music becomes your life, can you understand that? — anyway, this friend called, he was a percussionist, and he’d been auditioning for something, I forget what now, and he’d run into a bassoonist who said he’d heard the first chair in the City Opera Orchestra — this is flute, did I say flute? the first chair in the flute section — was desperately ill, he was dying of cancer or something, and they were going to be auditioning flutists all the next week!

“Bang! Like a shot I called Dino, hello, Mr. Proto, do you remember me, this is Joanna Berkowitz, I’m the flutist, I auditioned for you a while back, when I got out of Juilliard, I was recommended by Julie Baker, he suggested that I call you, do you remember me? Not only did he remember me, thank God, but he confirmed the rumor that they’d be hearing flutists at open auditions all the next week, and he set up an audition for me on the following Wednesday at ten A.M. Okay. I get there. This is the State Theater at Lincoln Center. It’s been built by then, this is 1967, August of 1967. They’ve already begun rehearsing the season, in fact, and here’s this flutist who’s about to drop dead on them.

“I have to tell you something you may not know, Jamie, despite your vast knowledge of matters musical and orchestral, and that’s if a first chair ever becomes vacant, it’s rare that the second or third chairs are promoted. The conductor usually brings in somebody from outside to fill the spot. Okay? Unfair, but who cares when you’re twenty-three years old, and a first flutist is about to die, and not only are you a remarkable flutician, as your teacher had told you ten thousand times, but you are also young, and fairly attractive, and most important of all — an outsider. The attractiveness, maybe it couldn’t matter less, dollink. The young, yes, it matters. But the outsider, it matters most — provided you’re good in the bargain.

“I get there a little before ten, and the people who are holding the audition include the concertmaster — do you know who the concertmaster is? He’s the first desk in the first fiddle section. First desk, dollink. The same as first chair. Desk, chair, the same thing. Just like in real life, no, dollink? Sit on your desk and start writing on your chair. Anyway. Concertmaster, plus first chair in the oboe section, plus first chair in the bassoon section — this is a woodwind audition, you follow, the flute is what is known as a woodwind instrument, dollink. And also the conductor, who in that year of 1967 happened to be Julius Rudel. There they are, and there I am.

“They ask me to do a little bit of Syrinx — that’s the Debussy piece, which of course I know you’re familiar with, but I thought I’d clarify anyway — and then I thought they’d ask me to do what a flute player might be expected to do at an audition, maybe something from the Bach D Minor, or a little bit of the fourth movement from the Eroica or maybe the Mozart G Major, but this is an opera company orchestra, don’t forget, this is people singing, my dear. So what they ask me to do, and by now I’m beginning to realize that the Debussy was just a warmup, what they now put in front of me is — vot else? — the Mad Scene from Lucia. And when I’m finished fumbling my way through that, they give me something from Daughter of the Regiment and then that old standby, if you’ve been playing opera for fifty years, the prelude to the third act of Carmen, the flute-over-harp section, except there is no harp there at the audition, just frightened little Joanna Berkowitz playing her heart out for a lot of old men who are probably tone deaf.

“I played for — I don’t even remember now — it must’ve been twenty minutes, a half-hour, something like that. This wasn’t steady playing, you understand. I’d do the Mad Scene, and then there’d be a little powwow out there, and then they’d ask me to do the next one, and somebody would bring the music up, this was all sight-reading, you understand, and then there’d be another little powwow and so on. When I finished the bit from Carmen, they thanked me and told me they’d call me in a day or two. There must’ve been another twenty flutists waiting outside when I left, all of them looking desperate.

“But, surprise of all surprises, I did get a call on Friday, and they told me the job was mine and could I start right away with tomorrow’s rehearsal, they’re doing Seraglio, I think it was, and was I familiar with it? I wasn’t familiar with it, I wasn’t familiar with too many operas at the time. In those days, this wasn’t too very long ago, actually, but back then if the musicians were familiar with a score, I mean if they’d been playing it over and over again for years, they might not even bother rehearsing it before the singers came in. Nowadays, the idea is to have at least one rehearsal, even if you know the thing upside down and backward, before your singers start. Anyway, the rehearsal was for two-fifteen that Saturday, and he wanted me there at two, and I said, ‘How much are you paying?’

“Now remember, I’ve been looking for a job with an orchestra for God knows how long, and now I’ve got one, and I want to know how much they’re paying. He explains to me that the orchestra has contracted to play for X numbers of dollars, and the scale for first chair in the flute section is blah, blah, blah — I forget what it was, something like nine thousand dollars, I really don’t remember. But what he neglected to mention was that the first-chair men are usually guaranteed ten percent more than scale — Julie Baker told me this, good old Julie. So I said, ‘Well, that’s fine, but I want fifteen percent over scale, and he said, ‘No, that’s impossible,’ and I said ‘Well, then, make it twelve and I’ll take the job,’ and he gave it to me! Can you imagine such chutzpa? Twenty-three years old, and I get a job with the New York City Opera Orchestra, and I’m haggling over salary! Wow!”

The second of her multiple personalities was Joanna Jewish (originally Joanna Jewess until she informed him, at once and somewhat heatedly, that the word “Jewess” was derogatory), a combination of Henny Youngman and Barbra Streisand being Brooklyn when she wasn’t singing. Joanna told him that there was only one similarity between Streisand and herself, and then turned her face in profile, and said in her Joanna Jewish voice, “The beak, dollink, vot den?” She used this voice and this personality to snap off one-liners and to tell long stories about what had happened to her at rehearsal or while wandering the city (she was a dedicated walker, and spent hours roaming the streets, looking and listening), delivering her shtik with all the elan of a stand-up comic, frequently interrupting herself with bursts of self-appreciative laughter. She suddenly became Joanna Jewish after they had made love the first time — “Well, well, vot haff we here, dollink? Where’d this come from again, all of a sudden, hah?” — but he suspected, and said aloud, that this aspect of her personality was normally reserved for whenever she needed reinforcement from whatever ethnic roots lay deeply buried and half-forgotten in her psyche. “You tink you’re Dr. Mandelbaum maybe?” she said.

Joanna Jewish had never eaten pork in her life; the very thought of it turned her stomach. Joanna Jewish still put newspapers on the wet kitchen floor every Friday night, a Shabbes habit picked up from her mother. She celebrated Chanukah, and not Christmas. She peppered her speech with Yiddish expressions like vontz, which meant bedbug, and which she used to describe the orchestra’s first bassoonist, or aleha ha-shalom, which Jamie gathered meant “rest in peace” and which she used whenever she mentioned her mother, who had died in 1962, shortly after Joanna’s Cleopatra summer. She defined for him the difference between shmuck and putz — “A shmuck is a dope, a putz is what’s sticking up there between your legs again” — and she told him what kvelling meant (“That’s what I did when I told Mandelbaum about you”). But contradictorily, Joanna Jewish considered the state of Israel a foreign country, and whereas she had contributed money to plant trees there, she railed unexpectedly against American Jews who seemed to put the well-being of “the homeland” (“That’s their homeland? Then what the fuck is this?”) above that of America. “If there were German-Americans who felt about Germany the way some Jews feel about Israel,” she said, “we’d call them subversives and throw them in jail.” Jamie disagreed, but he knew better than to argue with her on her own turf.

Professor J. D. Berkowitz was the last of the triumvirate, a learned scholar whom one would not dare call by her first name, no less her hated middle name, Doris. Professor Berkowitz was a pontificator who pronounced her theories and dictums in a voice reminiscent of his own Connie’s V.S. and D.M. voice, although the professor was quick to point out that she’d never been to a “genuine” college, in that the Juilliard School paid scant attention to anything but music and, as a result, sometimes turned out people who were virtual illiterates in any other field. She had felt this most keenly in her freshman year there, after the more catholic education at Fieldston-Riverdale. The voice she assumed for Professor J. D., in fact, was the result of that private school education, or so Jamie surmised, a bit nasal, a bit New Canaan corporation wife-ish, culturally affected, totally phony, her teeth clenched, her Gothic nose tilted as though she smelled something recently dead in the room.

She used this voice when she quoted, with presumed accuracy, any psychological premise picked up from the redoubtable Dr. Mandelbaum, the Tweedledee to Frank Lipscombe’s Tweedledum. She used it when she told him what her politics were: she voted Democrat and considered herself a liberal, but many of the views she held (about welfare giveaways, for example, or bilingual public notices in New York) seemed conservative if not downright reactionary. She used it when she told him about her father’s work or her Uncle Izzy’s, but never when she discussed her own; the instrument she played was the secure domain of Joanna La Flute, its borders sealed to either Joanna Jewish or the professor.

At 4:00 P.M., reluctantly, he went into the bathroom to shower. Joanna was leaning nude against the sink, smoking marijuana, watching him as he lathered himself, the outline of his naked body blurred behind the mottled glass door of the shower stall.

“What time is your train?” she asked.

“I can catch an express at five-oh-five.”

“To where?”

“Stamford. My car’s at Stamford.”

“What kind of car do you drive?”

“A Corvette,” he said. “Why?”

“Just want to know.”

He came out of the shower stall, took a towel from the rack, and began drying himself.

“Look at it,” she said. “All sweet and clean and soft. Let me dry your back.” She took a last drag, threw the roach into the toilet bowl, and then flushed it down. Taking the towel from him, she said, “Turn,” and began briskly drying his back. “Will I see you next week?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Same as today? Eleven-thirty, twelve?”

“I’ll have to look at my book,” she said. “I know we’ve got Figaro next Wednesday night, but I’m not sure whether there’s a rehearsal of anything.”

“Well, I’ll call you.”

“No, I’ll check it before you leave.”

Her hand reached around him.

“Hey,” he said. “Train to catch.”

“When’s the next one?” she asked.

“I really have to get home,” he said.

“When’s the next train?” she said, and her hand tightened on him.

He turned to her. He took her in his arms. He looked into her face. “Next time,” he said. “Okay?”

“No, this time,” she said, “okay?” and fell to her knees before him, and wrapped her arms around his legs, and took him savagely in her mouth. He placed his hands on top of her head. He closed his eyes. Her mouth was relentless. And suddenly, she pulled away from his erection, her lips sliding free, her hand cradling him rigid and pulsing against her cheek. Looking up at him, she whispered, “When’s the next train, Jamie?”

“Six-oh-five,” he said.

“An express?”

“Yes.”

“You have time,” she said, and took his hand and led him back into the bedroom.

He was in New York again that Saturday, scouting the landmark buildings with the Times people, and was through with his work by eleven o’clock. On the offchance that Joanna might be home, he called, surprised when she answered the phone. She told him they were performing Turn of the Screw that afternoon at two-fifteen, which meant she had to be in her chair at about two or a little after, which further meant she’d have to leave the apartment no later than twenty to. She apologized profusely, explaining that the Britten opera was scored for a sort of miniature orchestra, but that as first flutist she had to be there to play alto and piccolo. Could he... would he be willing... did he think he might be able to come over for just a little while? He caught a taxi from the Flatiron Building and was uptown in her apartment twenty minutes later.

In bed with her again, the blinds drawn, the blankets hastily thrown back, Jamie learned that she had yet another personality in her multilingual fold, outdoing the schizophrenic Eve by at least one — so far. (Had Mandelbaum discovered over the course of the past several months what Jamie was discovering in a scant four days? He doubted it.) This personality, and the voice accompanying it, emerged only when she was totally relaxed and unguarded, as she seemed to be now. If any of the voices was authentic, if any of the personalities truly reflected the real Joanna (whoever that might have been, lost in the facelessness of the crowd she was), Jamie considered this to be the one. He dared not label her. She was, simply enough, Joanna.

It was this Joanna who emerged when she told him about the untimely death of her mother, so soon after her return from Rome. It was this Joanna who told him about her first sexual experience, terrifying in that her bedmate (or more appropriately her carmate, since the seduction had taken place in the back seat of a Pontiac convertible) had been a member of the enemy camp, a goy from the tips of his toes to the very ends of his flaming red tresses, worn long in that year of 1961, when Joanna was seventeen and a senior at Fieldston-Riverdale. “My mother, aleha ha-shalom, would have died right then if she’d known,” Joanna said. “Thank God, she never found out.”

David Boyle, for such was the young seducer’s name, had fumbled below her waist for almost an hour and a half before achieving penetration. By that time, Joanna was sore in both senses of the word, feeling pain whenever he thrust his less-than-massive (she later realized) penis against her, and angry as hell besides, her ardor diminishing with each new rigorous assault. Her initiation into the mysteries of poke and probe was not helped a whit by the fact that young David (“How’d an Irish mick get a nize Jush name like David?” she asked, reverting to her Joanna Jewish voice) wasn’t wearing a condom and came all over her the moment he succeeded in parting her reluctant portals. She had him drive her posthaste to the nearest open grocery store, where she purchased a bottle of Coca-Cola and improvised an on-the-spot Pontiac douche, but she worried for the better part of a month that she would have to tell her mother she’d gotten pregnant by a goy. Boyle was almost as worried as she was. On Christmas Day, when Joanna got her period at last, she called him at home and — because both her parents were within earshot of her end of the conversation — asked, “What goes with green for a merry Christmas?”

Boyle didn’t know what the hell she meant. “Huh?” he said.

“Red,” she said.

“Does that mean...?”

“Yes, I got it,” she said.

“Phew,” he said.

When she hung up, her mother asked, “Who was that?”

“A boy named David Fein,” Joanna said.

“What is it you got?” her father asked.

“He sent me a little Chanukah gift.”

Her father went back to reading his copy of Variety. Her mother glanced at her a moment longer, and then continued knitting a sweater she’d been working on since July.

Technically no longer a virgin, Joanna nonetheless had to wait till the summer after her graduation for her first true sexual experience. She had accompanied her father to Rome for his conferences on the Cleopatra score (a job he’d never got), and then had prevailed upon him to let her stay behind for a few weeks after he went back home. She was, after all, eighteen years old now, and her father had many friends there who would take good care of her. One friend who took extremely good care of her was a man named Emmanuel Epstein who, after a champagne dinner in his room at the Hassler, humped her royally and later spanked her “little bottom,” as he’d called it, for betraying the trust of her father — “my very best friend in the whole world.” Epstein was five inches shorter than she was, a man of fifty-eight, going slightly bald, with a wife and two children in Scarsdale; he was doing publicity work for Fox in Rome. He was, as Joanna recalled, somewhat better hung than young Boyle had been, but she was nonetheless turned off the moment he achieved a second, almost immediate orgasm while spanking her.

It was Epstein who introduced her to the other two men with whom she spent a profligate month — she had promised her father only two weeks — in various bedrooms around the city. One of the men was married; the other was a young Italian auto worker from Turin, who was employed as a spear-carrying extra on the film. His thirty-second scene was later cut from the final print, much to Joanna’s dismay; she had gone to the movie when it was released, hoping to see what Antonio would look like on the screen. It was Antonio who’d given her the gold-link top she’d been wearing when Jamie met her on the Vineyard. Her other gentleman friend, the married one, gave her a variety of other things: an elephant-hair bracelet he had purchased on the Via Condotti, a hand-tooled, leatherbound edition of Dante’s Inferno — and gonorrhea.

She did not realize she was carrying this (“Ahem, social disease,” Professor Berkowitz said in a sudden excursion from Joanna’s genuine voice) until she had already enrolled at Juilliard that fall. Her ailment, once discovered and properly diagnosed, was treated promptly and effectively but not before, she was certain, she had unwittingly infected a piano student named Vladimir Potemkin (Vlad the Impaler, as she familiarly called him) who was devoted to practicing twelve hours a day and who, she was equally certain had strayed from his piano bench only once that fall, and then only to pick up a dose. She sent him one of her doctor’s cards, unsigned, but with the inscription, “Dear Vlad, please have a checkup!” He was now doing quite well on the concert circuit, making guest appearances with both the Boston and the Cleveland symphonies. He did not look particularly disease-ridden in his press photos, so Joanna guessed he’d taken her advice.

It was her genuine self who began talking about love that Saturday afternoon.

The only man she’d ever loved, she said, had been Harrison Masters, the aging poet from Indiana. She had met him at an April party given for the composer of a piece for string quartet which had been premiered at the Y on Ninety-second Street. She’d been invited to the event and the party following it by one of the fiddlers, who also played with her at the State Theater. Harrison had met the composer the summer before at Spoleto, where Menotti had arranged to have one of his poems set to harpsichord and lute, an experiment that failed because Harrison had insisted on reading the poem himself, and his rather frail voice had been drowned out by even such delicate instruments. There was a young girl on his arm when he arrived at the private party shortly after midnight. Joanna noticed them both the moment they came in.

He was a man with the gangling height of a giraffe, an eagle-like beak that was due to his part-Siouan heritage, and a leonine head of flowing white hair. “A walking menagerie,” Joanna said, “but I couldn’t take my eyes off him.” Hoping against hope that the girl on his arm was his daughter, dismayed to learn that she was instead one of his students, Joanna nonetheless sashayed across the room in the black wool knit dress she was wearing (“Basic black, dollink, mit pearls,” Joanna Jewish interjected), boldly intruded upon the conversation Harrison was having with the young composer of the work, and promptly and to the bewilderment of the hayseed student from Elephant Breath, Indiana, gained Harrison’s complete and rapt attention as she told him about her own side excursion to Spoleto during the summer of her Roman adventure. The student later went home with the cello player who’d performed brilliantly that night, playing Landscapes or Interiors or whatever the hell it was called as though it were the Haydn String Quartet in G. Joanna took Harrison home with her — to this house, to this bedroom, and on this bed they made love together for the first time.

Hearing this, Jamie felt only anger at first, and was tempted to ask whether she’d changed the sheets since. And then he suddenly realized she wasn’t going to give a detailed report on what had transpired in this bed with the poet from Indiana, but was instead only trying to understand why, for the first time in her life, she had felt unsparingly and selflessly devoted to a man who, by all reasonable standards, had been so completely wrong for her. Her voice was soft, scarcely more than a whisper. She lay beside him naked, one arm behind her head, staring up at the ceiling, wondering aloud, searching for clues to her own behavior; he suddenly felt as useless as Mandelbaum. But oddly, the feeling that he was neither necessary nor particularly vital to Joanna’s rambling monologue dissipated as swiftly as had his anger. Holding her in his arms, he listened without rancor or discomfort.

“He was,” she said, “the gentlest man I’d ever known. I’m not talking about when we made love, we did that rarely, in fact. Anyway, no man is really gentle in bed, is he? I mean, the very act demands that he perform aggressively — I hate the word ‘performance,’ don’t you? But it’s what we do actually, isn’t it? In bed, I mean. In a sense, I mean. Perform? Utilize our skills to give pleasure it’s a performance, really, similar to a concert, but not as carefully orchestrated or rehearsed.”

She took a deep breath, and turned into his arms.

“So gentle... in so many different ways,” she said. “I think his age had something to do with it, the very fact that we were eons apart, light-years apart, seventy-three and twenty-four, well, almost twenty-five, and earning a living as a musician — first chair with the City Opera, not bad, huh? — and having the time of my life before I met Harrison. So why him? The gentleness, yes, as though he were dealing with a child. So delicate with me. So careful of my feelings. So tolerant of my moods.”

Abruptly, she stopped. She was silent for what seemed like a long time. Then she said, “I think what I’m trying to say is I never thought I’d ever fall in love with anybody else ever again, not after Harrison. But now, you see, I have.” She smiled wanly, and touched his mouth with her fingertips. “I love you, Jamie,” she said.

He had heard these words before, had spoken them himself to countless teenage girls when he was growing up, had even whispered them into the ear of a Yokohama whore after the war, knowing she couldn’t possibly understand them, and actually believing he did love her, or the comfort of her body, or the safety she represented after months of slogging through the jungle dodging snipers’ bullets. He had heard these words before, he had used these words as easy currency in a free market — except with Connie. With Connie he had meant them, he guessed. With Connie he had always been impeccably honest when saying the three cheapest words in the English language.

As he held Joanna in his arms now, he recognized that “I love you” was only another meaningless bit of pillow talk, the puritanical way of softening the sordidness of sex, sanding down the splintery edges of lust, ridding the basic act of its raw physicality. “I love you” was the unguent of American morality, the salve which when gingerly applied beforehand or immediately afterward eased the shock of animal recognition, and thereby separated all those fornicating beasts of the field from their human counterparts. He knew she didn’t love him; she hardly even knew him.

But then he realized that in the space of — how the hell long had it been since he’d met her on the Vineyard, and who the hell cared how long it was? — in the space of that short a time, that infinitesimally brief moment in the millennium that had been his life till now, he had come to know her — all of her, Joanna La Flute, the professor, Joanna Jewish, each and every one another glittering facet of her unique and singular self — better than he’d known any woman before. Recognizing this, realizing he could never hope to pretend she was merely inconsequential, he made his decision in the form of a fervent wish: I want this to last.

But it was a decision nonetheless, conclusive and unalterable. Without surprise, and this was surprising in itself, he said, “I love you, too,” and believed (Connie notwithstanding) that this was the first time in his life he’d ever really meant the words.

6

Brenner University would have been a bummer except for Judd’s proximity. She called him the minute she got to school that September, at the number he’d given her for Briggs Hall, but he’d moved since and she wasn’t able to make contact till early in October. His new apartment was on Commonwealth Avenue, where he was living with another boy, who, like Judd, had just dropped out of Harvard, the school that kept you till you were eighty once they accepted you, on the assumption that the Harvard Admissions Office never made errors in judgment. The other boy’s name was Joshua Steinberg. He and Judd had lasted through two full semesters of Harvard undergraduate bullshit before deciding they were the ones who’d made the error in judgment. The boys wanted to be rock stars instead of lawyers. Judd played bass guitar and Joshua played lead. Together, they were going to set the musical world on fire.

When Lissie heard this, she immediately thought of her father, who hated rock with a passion. There were, by his exaggerated estimate, no fewer than 15,000 teenage rock groups in the town of Rutledge, Connecticut, an amazing count considering the town’s modest 17,000 population. Moreover, and still according to her father, each of these groups, like the McGruder twins, possessed $75,000 worth of electronic equipment purchased by parents who were being rendered totally deaf by the sheer decibels at any living room rehearsal. Judd and Joshua rehearsed in the living room of the Commonwealth Avenue apartment. The first time Lissie and Judd made love in Boston was during a break in rehearsals. The Beatles had just released Abbey Road and the boys were trying to learn all the songs on the album. Steinberg kept yelling through the closed bedroom door for Judd to hurry it up in there, meanwhile picking out the chords to “Come Together.”

Judd’s last name was Gordon, and the boys billed themselves as Gordon and Steinberg. He told Lissie he was of French-English extraction, the pale blue eyes and blond hair comprising the British half of his heritage, he guessed. His parents, a Dr. and Mrs. James Gordon who lived in—

“That’s my father’s name, too,” Lissie said.

“James Gordon? No kidding! We’re siblings!” Judd said, and kissed her fleetingly on the cheek.

— a Dr. and Mrs. James Gordon who lived in Sarasota, Florida, learned in November that Judd was no longer attending classes at Harvard but was pursuing instead a musical dream of glory with a lead guitarist whose name was Joshua Steinberg. They immediately cut off all funds to him (“A total injustice,” Judd said) and told him they would not send him another penny until he began studying again at a qualified institute of higher education. Guitar lessons, they told Judd, did not in their book or on their block constitute higher education. Gordon and Steinberg were currently playing gigs in this or that Boston bar, usually for sandwiches and beer, but sometimes for three or four bucks each a night. They still had their Harvard meal tickets, which would not expire till June, and ate most of their meals at Radcliffe, where the table manners were better and the scenery more pleasant. It was Lissie who suggested that they change the name of the group—

“Do two people even qualify as a group?” she asked.

“Oh, sure. A group, sure,” Judd said.

— to Joshua and Judd, because Gordon and Steinberg sounded like a law firm. Judd thought maybe she was right, not because he thought it sounded like a law firm, but only because it was too close to Simon and Garfunkel, whom they were frankly imitating. Lissie didn’t think Gordon and Steinberg sounded the slightest bit like Simon and Garfunkel—

“You mean the way we play?”

“Well, no.”

“Then what?”

“The name.”

— but if they were considering a name change, anyway, then why not use Joshua and Judd which she thought had a nice ring to it. Judd said he would consider it, and maybe mention it to Steinberg. He told her later that he’d never considered it for more than ten seconds, and certainly had never mentioned it to Steinberg, simply because the name Joshua and Judd gave his partner top billing. When Lissie mentioned that the lead guitarist should get top billing, Judd said, “But I write all the songs.” All the songs, as it turned out, were half a dozen Judd had composed since leaving Harvard.

Safe from the draft because of a slight heart murmur, Judd had felt no qualms about dropping out of school and losing his student classification. But he identified completely with other kids his own age who were being called up every day to get themselves shot to death in some stupid fucking rice paddy. It was Judd who insisted that Lissie accompany him to Washington for the November 15 Moratorium on Vietnam. She simply went with him, not even telephoning her parents to say she’d be out of Boston that weekend. The following week, when the My Lai stories began getting full-scale treatment in all the Boston papers, Judd organized a protest outside the Mugar Memorial Library, and although only 150 students showed up to march, he felt he had focused something more than media attention on a situation of pressing moral concern to all Americans.

Most of the time, Lissie and Judd had the Commonwealth Avenue apartment to themselves because Steinberg was dating a twenty-one-year-old Catholic girl from Simmons who steadfastly refused to consummate their relationship until they got married, an unlikely prospect in that his widowed mother was an Orthodox Jew and Eileen’s parents were practicing Catholics who still refused to eat meat on Fridays, although it was now permitted by the church. Steinberg and Eileen spent a lot of time walking along the Charles together, torturing each other with a great deal of hand play.

Judd was rather a marathon lover, quick to climax (“They don’t call me Flash Gordon for nothing, lady”), but equally quick to regenerate and begin again after a bottle of beer or a cream cheese sandwich. He loved to eat in bed, and the sheets were littered with cracker crumbs and bits of cheese and salami. Since the apartment was virtually theirs to roam at will, they made love not only in the delicatessen bed, but also on the battered living room couch, and in the old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub, and once on the enamel-topped kitchen table.

She told her parents nothing at all about Judd. One thing she had learned since Woodstock was that you didn’t ask your parents beforehand and you didn’t tell them afterward. When she’d called the Vineyard from Rutledge that August day almost three months earlier, she hadn’t asked if she could go up to Woodstock with Rusty, she’d simply said she was going, knowing damn well there wasn’t any way they could stop her. And even though her mother had made some feeble noises about making sure Rusty had permission to use the family car, Lissie knew she’d won a major victory that day, and had gained as well an important insight into what was to be her future relationship with her parents.

Besides, she wasn’t too sure how long this thing with Judd would last, and she saw no reason for bringing her parents into her personal life if this turned out to be a romance of short duration. She had, by early December, heard Gordon and Steinberg in concert at a bar in West Newton, and had calculated that the odds against their ever achieving success as rock musicians were, generously, about ten million to one; she suspected that before long Judd would pack his guitar case and head home to Sarasota, perhaps to attend the University of South Florida where he could major in basket weaving at his father’s expense.

She hadn’t even known where Sarasota was at first. She’d thought Judd had said Saratoga. “One of these days,” Judd told her, “I’m going to write a novel, and there are going to be two hookers in it, a Greek hooker and a Japanese hooker. I’ll call the Greek hooker Sara Toga, and the Japanese hooker Sara Sota.” Lissie still didn’t know which was which until she studied an atlas at the school library, and pinpointed each town, and decided she’d never care to live in either, thanks. “One of these days” was one of Judd’s favorite expressions. “One of these days, when Steinberg and I get a recording contract...” or “One of these days, when I get that little Porsche I’ve got my eye on...” or “One of these days, I’m going to paint this whole apartment red, the floors, the ceiling, the toilet bowl...”

One of these days, Lissie thought, you’re going to get tired of playing one-night stands in sleazy bars for crackers and beer, and you’re going to head south where Mommy and Daddy will welcome you with open arms. I’ll press you in my memory book, Judd, together with my senior prom corsage and my autographed picture of Elvis. Had she ever swooned over Elvis? Had she truly been to Henderson’s senior prom with a pimply-faced boy whose name she couldn’t even remember now? David? Daniel? Had she ever really been that young?

In just a few weeks, she would be eighteen.

Oddly, the promise of the Christmas break — the return to Rutledge and what she supposed was still her home, the living room hung with her photographs, the lighted tree in the far corner of the room, the familiar rush of the river beyond — left her feeling only indifferent. She imagined herself going back to school again on the fifth of January, and settling once more into a now familiar and, yes, dull routine. The year would have gone by like a whisper, leaving not an echo of itself, and, more depressingly, causing very little real change in the person who was Lissie Croft, a person she no longer thought of as a kid, but could not yet truly consider a woman.

As she packed her duffel to head for home, she wondered bleakly if anything as exciting as Woodstock would ever in her entire life happen to her again.