Love, Dad

7

The name and return address on the envelope were unfamiliar to Jamie. Someone named Carol Steinberg in Chicago, Illinois. He tore open the envelope flap. The handwritten letter read:

Puzzled, he read the letter again, and then went back into the barn, past the darkroom door he’d left open when he’d heard the mail truck outside, closing the door as he passed it, and walking directly to his desk. The telephone was surrounded by a clutter of contact sheets, grease pencils, bills from photo suppliers and custom labs, an illuminated magnifier, a stamp pad, a rubber stamp reading PHOTO CREDIT: JAMES CROFT, another reading PHOTOS, DO NOT BEND OR FOLD, several letters from Lew Barker, and half a dozen uncashed checks. He pulled the phone toward him, through the besieging debris, picked up the receiver, dialed the operator, and asked for Chicago information. When he got a listing for Carol Steinberg at the address on her stationery, he dialed the 312 area code and then the number, and waited while the phone rang on the other end.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

“Mrs. Steinberg?”

“Yes.”

“This is James Croft.”

“Yes, Mr. Croft, I’ve been trying to...”

“I have your letter.”

“Good, I was hoping...”

“What’s this about, Mrs. Steinberg?”

“About?” she said. “It’s about the rent.”

“Yes, I gathered that. But what makes you think I’m responsible for any rent due on an apartment your son is sharing with some other boy?”

“What?” she said.

“I said...”

“Yes, I heard you. But I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean I don’t know any of these people you’re talking about.”

“Joshua, do you mean? Judd?”

“Yes, Joshua and Judd, this is the first I’m hearing of them.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Steinberg said.

“So would you mind...”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“I thought your daughter had permission.”

“My daughter? Permission for what?”

“Well, to... to share the apartment.”

“My daughter’s sharing an apartment with a girl named Judy Gordon, now perhaps you can explain...”

“Is that what she told you?”

“That’s not only what she told me, that’s what happens to be the fact of the matter.”

“Judy Gordon,” Mrs. Steinberg said.

“Yes, Judy Gordon.”

“It’s Judd Gordon. Not Judy.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Croft, I... so many young people are living together these days, I thought... I really thought you knew. The reason I wrote is they’ve left for California now, you see. Lissie and Judd. Without paying the February rent. And now the March rent is also coming due...”

“Lissie will be home before Easter, I’m sure the March rent...”

“Well, that’s not the impression Joshua got. My son.”

“What do you mean? What impression did he get?”

“That it was indefinite.”

“What was indefinite? I’m sorry, Mrs. Steinberg, but I find this entire situation...”

“I can understand...”

“What did he find indefinite?”

“Whether or not they planned to come back.”

“From California, do you mean?”

“Well... yes. That’s where they went, didn’t she tell you she was going to California?”

“Yes, she told me, of course she told me.”

“Then... well, I don’t know what to say. My son had the distinct impression they planned to... well... stay there.”

“Your son is mistaken,” Jamie said flatly. “My daughter has every intention of returning to Boston after the spring break.”

“Well, if that’s what she told you.”

“That’s what she told me, and I have no reason to doubt her.”

“Well,” Mrs. Steinberg said, and the single word said all there was to say. Lissie had lied to him about the apartment, she had told him her roommate was a girl named Judy Gordon; how in hell could he believe anything else she’d told him! The silence lengthened.

At last, he said, “I’ll send you my check for... what is it?”

“Her share is sixty-five for February, and sixty-five for March. But if she plans to come back, maybe...”

“She plans to come back, but she won’t be living in that apartment anymore,” Jamie said.

“Then I’d want the sixty-five for March, too.”

“I’ll send you my check for a hundred and thirty.”

“You understand that Joshua will refund the March rent the minute...”

“Yes, I understand that.”

“Mr. Croft, please forgive me, I had no intention of...”

“That’s quite all right.”

“The way things are nowadays, a parent doesn’t know what to do. If I’ve caused any trouble...”

“No, that’s all right.”

“I worry about Joshua day and night. I don’t know where it’ll end, Mr. Croft, I just don’t. And I realize how you, with a daughter...”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Steinberg,” he said.

“I’m sorry if I’ve caused any problem between you.”

“No, no problem at all,” he said.

They had known, of course, that Lissie was headed for California, had in fact argued fruitlessly against the plan from the moment she’d proposed it, astonished when they realized she wasn’t asking permission to go, but was simply filling them in as a matter of courtesy. It was Connie’s contention now that nothing so terribly drastic had happened; their daughter had simply lost her virginity, something that had to happen, anyway, sooner or—

“She’s been living with this guy!” Jamie shouted.

“Yes, so I understand,” Connie said.

“How can you take this so calmly?”

“I don’t think she’s committed a crime of heinous proportions. She’s...”

“When you were eighteen...”

“When I was eighteen, you seemed singularly intent on doing to me exactly what this boy has done to her.”

“And never got to first base!”

“The times they are a-changin’, dear.”

“I don’t want you transmitting that attitude to Lissie,” Jamie said. “When she calls...”

“If she calls...”

“She’d damn well better call.”

“My God, you sound positively Victorian,” Connie said.

“Oh? Really? My daughter’s...”

“Our daughter.”

“Our daughter’s fucking around with some pimply-faced...”

“Jamie, what the hell’s the matter with you?” Connie asked flatly. “Would you please tell me?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing’s the matter with me.”

And then, as she found him doing more and more often these days, he turned away from her, ending the conversation, ending whatever brief moment of intimacy had been inspired by his daughter’s malfeasance and the revelation of it by the woman in Chicago.

Lissie did not call until that Sunday night, the twenty-second. Jamie picked up the phone in the kitchen, and the moment the operator told him it was a collect call from a Melissa Croft in San Francisco, he yelled to Connie to pick up the extension in the upstairs bedroom. They had barely exchanged hellos when he heard the small click telling him Connie was on the line.

“Lissie,” she said, “are you all right?”

“Yes, fine, Mom,” Lissie said. “Exhausted, but fine.”

“Where are you staying?”

“We crashed with a friend out here. A girl Judy knows.”

“Give me the number there,” Jamie said at once, “and let’s cut the Judy crap.”

“Jamie...”

“Stay out of this, Connie. What’s the number there?”

“Dad?”

“Give me the number.”

“It’s... just a second,” she said. “It’s 824-7996.”

“What’s the area code?”

“415.”

“Thank you. Why’d you lie to us, Lissie?”

“About what?”

“Lissie...” he warned.

“Okay, there’s no Judy, okay?”

“No, there’s a Judd.”

“Yes.”

“And a Joshua, and Christ knows how many...”

“Just Judd and Joshua.”

“Are you sleeping with both of them?”

“Jamie!”

“Or just Judd?”

“Come on, Dad.”

“Jamie, you’re being...”

“Answer me, Liss?”

“Dad,” she said, slowly and carefully, “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“It isn’t huh? I get a letter from a woman in Chicago, there’s a goddamn court order in the letter, she wants to know why my daughter ran off without paying the rent...”

“I didn’t run off! We forgot, that’s all. Jesus, that fucking Steinberg! He knows we...”

“I don’t appreciate that kind of language,” Connie said.

“I’m sorry, Mom, but he knew we planned to pay the rent, Jesus! Do you know what this is? It’s he’s a lousy guitar player, and he knows Judd’s about to break up with him...”

“He’s a musician, is he?” Jamie said. “This Judd Gordon.”

“Yes, he’s a musician.”

“Marvelous,” Jamie said.

“He went to Harvard,” Lissie said defensively.

“How old is he?”

“Nineteen. Well, he’ll be twenty soon.”

“And he’s already graduated from Harvard?” Connie said.

“No, he didn’t graduate.”

“What did he do?” Jamie asked.

“He left.”

“He dropped out, you mean.”

“Well, yes, if you want to put it that way.”

“And now he’s a musician.”

“Yes.”

“What does he play?”

“Guitar.”

“Naturally,” Jamie said.

“Dad, the harpsichord went out of style in—”

“Lissie, I’m not in the mood for any of your smart-ass—”

“Jamie, calm down,” Connie said.

“I want you to come home right this minute,” Jamie said, “do you hear me? I want you to get on a plane...”

“I haven’t got enough money for a plane ticket,” Lissie said.

“I’ll prepay it on this end.”

“Anyway, I don’t want to come home yet. Jesus, I just got here!”

“Lissie, this isn’t a question of what you want. The minute you started lying to us, you lost the right to...”

“Dad, I’m eighteen years old, I don’t have to do everything you want me to do.”

“Would you like me to call the police? I’d hate...”

“The police? Jesus! You’ve got to be kidding! What’d I do, would you mind telling me?”

“You ran off to California with a boy we don’t even...”

“You’ll meet him when we get back, okay? I’ll bring him home the minute we get back. Calm down, Dad, willya?”

“I want you to come home,” Jamie said.

“No.”

“Lissie, I...”

“No,” she said, and hung up.

“Lissie?”

“She hung up,” Connie said.

Jamie immediately began jiggling the receiver rest.

“Operator,” a voice said.

“Operator, could you please get me 824-7996 in San Francisco?”

“You can dial that direct, sir, the area code is...”

“I know I can dial it direct, this is an emergency.”

“Well... all right, sir, I’ll try it for you.”

He waited as she dialed. On the extension, Connie said, “Now calm down, Jamie. Getting excited isn’t going to help.”

“What number are you calling from?” the operator asked as the phone began ringing on the other end.

“Rutledge 4-8072,” Jamie said.

“Hello?” a voice on the other end said. A boy’s voice this time. “Let me speak to Lissie Croft, please.”

“Who’s this?”

“Her father.”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Croft. This is Judd.”

“Get my daughter, please,” Jamie said.

“Sure, just a sec,” Judd said. The phone clattered as he put it down. Jamie heard voices. He waited.

“‘Oh, hi, Mr. Croft,’” he mimicked, “ ‘this is Judd.’ ”

“Calm down,” Connie warned on the extension.

“Hello?” a voice said.

“Who’s this?”

“Barbara.”

“Barbara who?”

“Barbara Duggan.”

“Barbara, may I please speak to my daughter?”

“Well... she can’t come to the phone just now,” Barbara said.

“Why not? I just spoke to her a minute—”

“She’ll have to call you back later, Mr. Croft.”

“I want to talk to her now.”

“Well, yeah, but the thing of it—”

“Would you please get her for me?”

“Mr. Croft... she doesn’t want to talk to you just now.”

“What’s the address there?” Jamie said. “Is this your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the address?”

“Well, Mr. Croft...”

“Young lady...”

“I’m not sure Lissie wants you to have the address.”

“Let me talk to Judd.”

“Sure, just a second.”

Jamie waited.

“Hello?”

“Judd?”

“Yes, Mr. Croft?”

“Listen to me, you little son of a bitch. If my daughter doesn’t come to the phone in three seconds flat, I’m calling the F.B.I. to tell them she’s been kidnapped. Now do you want to get her to the phone, or do you want more trouble than you’ve ever—”

“Hey, take it easy,” Judd said.

“Don’t you tell me to take it—”

“I mean, she’s not hanging by her thumbs here, okay? Just take it easy.”

“I’m counting, Judd. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

“Jesus,” Judd said, and again put the phone down. “Lissie!” he shouted. “You’d better come take this.”

Jamie and Connie waited.

“Hello?” Lissie said wearily.

“Don’t hang up again,” Jamie warned. “Don’t you ever dare...”

“Dad, I just don’t want to talk to you when you’re in this kind of mood.”

“Mood? If you think this is just—”

“Let me talk to her alone,” Connie said.

“Why? Why can’t I...?”

“Jamie, please. Get off the phone.”

“I want you home, miss,” Jamie said, and slammed the kitchen receiver down on the cradle rest.

“Boy,” Lissie said.

“All right, let me hear it,” Connie said.

“Is he gone?”

“He’s gone.”

“I’ve never heard him sound like that in my—”

“I think you can understand why he’s upset,” Connie said levelly. “How long have you known this boy?”

“Mom...”

“Lissie, I don’t think you realize how furious your father is. I suggest...”

“All right, all right. It’s been eight months now.”

“You’ve been living with him for eight months?”

“Well, no, only since January when I... Mom, I really don’t want to discuss this. Not with Dad, and not with you, either.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to discuss it,” Connie said. “This woman Dad spoke to, this Mrs. Steinberg, said that you had no intention of returning to school. Is that true?”

“That is total and absolute bullshit.”

“Lissie, I would appreciate...”

“Okay, okay.”

“Do you plan to stay in California?”

“No. I told you no. But I’m not turning around tomorrow morning if that’s what Dad thinks.”

“When will you be home?”

“For Easter.”

“Why did Mrs. Steinberg’s son think you and Judd...”

“Because he’s crazy.”

“You didn’t tell him you planned to stay in California?”

“Why would we tell him anything like that? Mom, I’m really very tired. We were hassled halfway across the country, and we’re exhausted. So if you don’t mind...”

“What do you mean, hassled?”

“Hassled. The usual.”

“Tell me what you mean.”

“Could we please continue this tomorrow? I’d like to get some sleep. Really, we’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? And tell Dad not to worry, I’ll be home for Easter.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“I’m positive.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“I’ll call tomorrow, okay?”

“When tomorrow?”

“When I get up. It’ll be afternoon your time.”

“We’ll be waiting for your call.”

“I promise.”

“Is this Steinberg boy Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“And Judd? Is he Jewish, too?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Is he?”

“No. Since when did you...?”

“I was merely curious.”

“It sounded like more than curiosity.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Well, he isn’t Jewish, you can relax.”

“Lissie...”

“I’m sorry, Mom, but I really don’t appreciate that sort of question.”

“I think we have a right to know who or what this boy you’ve been living with...”

“I’m not sure you do have that right, but I don’t want to discuss it now, okay? Mom, I’ll call you tomorrow, we’ll have a nice long talk, okay? Is it okay if I go now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then. And Mom? Don’t worry, okay?”

“All right.”

“Good night, Mom.”

“Good night, Lissie.”

Connie put the receiver gently back on the cradle. She stood by the bedroom phone for several moments, staring at it, and then went downstairs to the kitchen. Jamie had poured himself a drink. He was pacing back and forth between the pantry bar and the table against the kitchen window.

“What’d she say?”

“Will you make me one, please?”

“Yes, what’d she say?”

“She’s coming home, you needn’t worry.”

“When?”

“She’ll be here for Easter.”

“I want her...”

“It doesn’t matter what you want, Jamie.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Connie said, and took the drink from his hand.

Barbara Duggan was leaving for Europe, and her apartment — in its present barren state — was furnished only with a single mattress in one of the bedrooms, a half-dozen throw-pillows on the living-room floor, and an ancient battered floor lamp, none of which Barbara had been able to sell to the steady stream of bargain hunters who’d traipsed up the stairs to the third floor all through the past month. Her duffel bag was already packed, and she had $3,000 in traveler’s checks tucked into a sock in her shoulder bag, but her final destination was still a question mark. The two boys who were crashing with her were Carnegie Tech dropouts who’d come west in search of acting careers, but who were leery about making the big move to L.A. and were using San Francisco as a sort of decompression chamber.

The five of them were sitting on the living-room floor, propped on the throw-pillows, smoking pot and drinking hot chocolate. The apartment was on a street lined with factories, and fumes from their chimneys seeped through the cracks in the old sash windows to mingle with the headier aroma of marijuana. Now and again on the street outside — this was now close to midnight, California time — a horn honked, but for the most part the night was still except for the sound of machinery in the nearby factories. Barbara had sold her record player; otherwise there might have been music. Jerry, the better looking of the two Carnegie dropouts, and therefore presumably the one with the brighter theatrical future, was telling about the cops who’d stopped them in Kansas.

“Middle of a big fucking wheatfield,” he said, “not another car in sight, we were doing — what, Michael? — fifty miles an hour?”

“Maybe sixty,” the other boy said. “Point is, we were observing the speed limit.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to them,” Barbara said.

She was wearing a brightly printed caftan, her thick black hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head, gold hoop earrings on her ears, sandals on her feet, a string of Indian beads around her neck. She was perhaps Lissie’s age, a girl with a flawless, pale, almost porcelain complexion, and slanted brown eyes that gave her a composed and somewhat inscrutable Oriental appearance. She spoke in a very low, well-modulated voice (Mom would adore her, Lissie thought), her A’s broadened by her Bostonian upbringing, her cadences soft and lilting. Sitting beside her barefooted, in jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, Lissie felt bedraggled by contrast. She wanted nothing more than a hot bath and a good night’s sleep. She did not want to hear about the dropouts’ trials and tribulations on the road; she and Judd had suffered through enough of their own. But she stifled a yawn and listened.

“Pulled us over to the side of the road,” Jerry said.

“Siren blaring, like we’d just held up a bank,” Michael said.

“Checked out the driver’s license and the registration, then asked us to get out of the car.”

“Went over it top to bottom, looking for grass.”

“Didn’t find any, of course, we’re not that fucking dumb.”

“But they kept us at least an hour, pulled the seats out, looked through the trunk, the glove compartment, the pockets...”

“Even looked under the car, figuring we had a hundred pounds of heroin taped under...”

She’d never heard her father sound the way he had tonight. Never. You’d think she was selling herself on the street, for Christ’s sake! Well, she should have told them about Judd long before this, she guessed, but judging from tonight’s performance maybe she’d been right in delaying a confrontation. At least this had been on the phone, and it had been bad enough. Awful, in fact. She could just imagine what a face-to-face in the Rutledge living room would have been like. You’re living with a what? A boy? A boy you’re sleeping with? And then the heart attack, whammo, flat on the living room Bokhara, her mother standing by weeping.

“... even serve us in Utah,” Judd was saying. “We went into this greasy spoon, cowboys on the front porch, you know...”

“Yeah, cowboys,” Michael said.

“Judd, I’m sleepy,” Lissie said.

“Bull Durham in their shirt pockets, that little tag hanging, you know...”

“Yeah, cowboys,” Michael said again.

“Looked Lissie over head to toe, raped her with their eyes.”

“No, they didn’t,” Lissie said.

“You didn’t see them.”

“Well,” she said, and shrugged.

“We went inside to the counter,” Judd said, “and this big beefy bastard ambles over and says, ‘We don’t serve hippies.’ ”

“What’d you do?” Jerry asked.

“I told him that was against the law. He said I should first go get a haircut, and then we could discuss legalities. I told him what I was going to get was a goddamn lawyer.”

“Did you?”

“In Brindleshit, Utah? We just kept driving till we got to Nevada. In Nevada, they served us.”

“That’s ’cause the Mafia runs Nevada,” Michael said.

“Barbara, do you think I could take a bath?” Lissie said.

“Sure, honey,” Barbara said, “provided you’ve got your own towel. I sold all mine except the one in the bathroom.”

“I’ve got one,” Lissie said.

She went to her duffel, took a towel and a bottle of shampoo from it, and followed Barbara into the bathroom, across the hall from the largest bedroom. The tub was an old-fashioned monster that reminded her of the one in the Commonwealth Avenue apartment.

“How long will you be in Frisco?” Barbara asked, turning on both water taps.

“I have to be back before Easter,” Lissie said, and yawned. “Forgive me, I’m really exhausted.”

“Well, it was a long trip,” Barbara said, nodding. “So you’ll be leaving when?”

“I don’t know the exact date, you’ll have to ask Judd.”

“When are you due back at school?”

“Not till the thirtieth.”

“Nice long break.”

“Yes, but I have to be home the day before. For Easter.”

“That doesn’t give you much time here. Easter’s only a week away.”

“We figure we can make it back in four days.”

“That’d be pushing it.”

“Judd’s a fast driver. Anyway, I promised my father.”

“He sounded apoplectic on the phone.”

“Yeah, I guess he was a little excited.”

“A little, huh? I’d hate to hear him in a rage.”

“He’s all right, though. Usually.”

“Mm,” Barbara said. “How old are you, Liss?”

“Eighteen. You?”

“I was nineteen last month. Where’d you say you were going to school?”

“Brenner. How about you?”

“I dropped out of William and Mary a year ago, in my first semester. Came west on the back seat of a motorcycle with a twerp named Percy. You should never ride a motorcycle with anyone named Percy. You should never, in fact, do anything with anyone named Percy. The Percys of the world are superior only to the Bruces of the world. Avoid both, my child, and may God bless you.” She made the sign of the cross in the air, much as the Pope might have.

“Are you Catholic?” Lissie asked.

“Used to be.”

“When did you stop being?”

“Rode to church on my bicycle — must have been eight years ago — the day before Easter, full of holy emanations. Got in the confessional, crossed myself, said ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned, this is one year since my last confession.’ I was eleven years old, the biggest sin I had to confess was having seen myself naked in the mirror, horrors! Silence in the booth. Blackness. The priest finally said, ‘And you pick the busiest time of the year to come?’ I left the confessional, left the church, got on my bike and rode home. How about you?”

“Presbyterian.”

“Religious?”

“Hardly.”

“We’d make a fine pair,” Barbara said and smiled.

After breakfast on Monday morning, they took a bus across the Mission to Castro Street. Barbara was wearing the same brightly colored caftan she’d been wearing the night before, her hair loose now, falling in a black cascade to the middle of her back. The fog had burned off, but the day was gray and chilly.

“The reason I’m going to Europe is I’m fed up with all the bullshit in this country,” she said. “You know, like your father giving you all that stuff on the phone last night.”

“That was unusual,” Lissie said.

“But representative of an attitude. In this country, it’s a crime to be young right now. It pisses them off, our being young. The great contradiction, of course, is that they spend half their time trying to look young, dieting or sunbathing or exercising or having their faces lifted or whatever. But they resent us because we are young, that’s what we really are, and that’s what they can’t ever be again. Every time I come face to face with one of them, in the street, on a cable car, wherever, every time one of them approaches me from the opposite direction, I see it in their eyes. How dare you dress this way, how dare you smile your fucking flower-child smile, how dare you run around without a bra, how dare you wear your hair so long, how dare you be so young? A constant challenge. I remember once when I was in L.A., I went to meet this guy in MacArthur Park, he had an ounce of good pot I wanted to buy. And this pregnant lady was walking toward me in the park, giving me that same look, you know, and I remember thinking, ‘Excuse me for being alive, lady, but this is the way I am. Young. So go fuck yourself.’ Don’t you ever feel that way? You must feel that way.”

“Yes, sometimes,” Lissie said, and thought again of the conversation with her father the night before, and began feeling rotten about it all over again. The thing was, you had to keep fighting them all the time, you had to keep reminding them you weren’t a kid in pigtails anymore, you were eighteen now! Well, she supposed she should have told them about Judd the minute she’d moved in with him. Instead, because of Steinberg and his dumb mother, she’d found herself in a defensive position, trying to explain, and having to apologize for — what? For doing what every other girl in the world — with the possible exception of Steinberg’s Irish sweetheart — was doing? Had her father really thought she was still a virgin? At eighteen? Who on earth would even want a daughter like that?

“... in Europe,” Barbara was saying. “They’ve had more practice there, they know how to deal with anything that comes along. Hippies are nothing compared to invading Turks. C’est la vie, ma cherie,” she said, and gave what was supposed to be a Gallic shrug. “I can’t wait to get there. Only thing that bothers me is I’m going alone.”

They ate lunch in a Japanese restaurant, bought ice cream cones afterward, and walked toward the park on Dolores and Eighteenth. Behind them were the Twin Peaks. Ahead, the Mission spread below them, the sky above it dull and threatening.

“Have you ever been to Europe?” Barbara asked.

“Once,” Lissie said. “With my parents.”

“Where?” Barbara asked.

“France.”

“Paris?”

“Just for a few days. Mostly the Dordogne.”

“But you do know Paris.”

“I was just a kid.”

“’Cause I’d sure like somebody with me who knew Paris,” Barbara said. “I’ll be flying straight to London, but I’ll be going from there to Paris.”

“When are you leaving?” Lissie asked.

“Soon as I can sell the rest of the junk in the apartment. You think anybody’ll want a calendar with nine months left on it?”

“When do you suppose that’ll be?”

“I’m planning on the seventeenth. That’s a Friday.” Barbara paused. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Oh, sure,” Lissie said. “Just like that.”

The rain drummed against the soot-stained windows. Up the street, they could hear the factory machinery thrumming through the steady beat of the storm. The room was thick with marijuana smoke. The boys had bought three bottles of wine, but only one of them had any left in it.

“Why don’t I go with you?” Michael said.

“You don’t know Paris,” Barbara said.

“I’ll learn Paris. I’ll learn every fucking sewer in Paris. Take me with you, Barb.”

“Ho-ho,” Barbara said.

“Listen to that fucking rain,” Jerry said.

“Paris in the Spring!” Barbara said. “Think of it! Café filtre on the Champs Élysées! Broiled fish for lunch on the Left Bank! All those cute adorable Frenchmen with their funny mustaches and their...”

“Lissie can do without all those cute adorable Frenchmen,” Judd said.

“Anyway, I couldn’t possibly,” Lissie said, but she was thinking, Why not?

“She has to stay home so she can take shit from her father,” Jerry said.

“That was some phone call, all right,” Lissie said, shaking her head.

“Your father’s very good at long-distance shit,” Jerry said.

“You wouldn’t have to stay any longer than you wanted to,” Barbara said. “I’ll be there till my money runs out, but you can come back whenever you like. A week, two weeks, whatever you like.”

“It wouldn’t be worth going all the way to Europe for just a few weeks,” Jerry said. “The fare alone would kill her.”

“You’d be better off taking me,” Michael said. “I’ve already memorized the entire fifth arrondissement.”

“How much is the fare?” Lissie asked.

“One-way to London is a hun’ ninety-eight dollars and ten cents,” Barbara said. “I’m flying Icelandic.”

“You could always ask Daddy for the bread,” Jerry said, grinning.

“Oh, sure.”

“It wouldn’t cost much, Liss, really,” Barbara said. “I’ve got three thousand bucks and I expect that to last a long time, believe me.”

“Well, even if I did go, it wouldn’t be for more than a few weeks. Just to get away for a while, you know.”

“Sure.”

“That wouldn’t bother you, would it, Judd?” Lissie asked.

“There’s this redhead I’ve got my eye on anyway.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Two, three weeks, something like that,” Barbara said. “Maybe a month. Something like that.”

“Well, not a month.”

“However long you felt like. We’d play it loose, Lissie, that’s the whole idea.”

“It sounds terrific,” Lissie said. “But I couldn’t possibly.”

She knew she wasn’t going to Europe; she hardly even knew Barbara and besides she wasn’t sure she could manage the financial end of it, even if she did decide to go, which of course she wouldn’t. And yet, the concept of absolute freedom for even just a little while — freedom from her parents, freedom from the grind of school work, freedom (yes, she admitted this to herself) from Judd as well — was enormously appealing. She had close to $500 in her savings account in Boston, the end result of Grandmother Croft’s yearly birthday gifts of $50 U.S. Savings Bonds, held in trust for her by her father, but which he’d turned over to her when she’d reached eighteen. She also had some jewelry she could sell, Grandmother Harding’s legacy over the years, and she supposed that if push came to shove she could sell her stereo equipment which was still in very good condition and which maybe would bring half what her father had paid for it. So she figured she could raise maybe $1,500 tops, which was just half of what Barbara planned to take with her, but of course Barbara planned to stay much longer. And anyway, if she decided to go, she’d have to sell all her stuff in a hell of a hurry, go back to Boston, put up some signs at school, she didn’t know quite how she’d be able to manage it all before April 17. All she could count on, actually, was the $500 in cash, from which she’d have to buy a plane ticket — no, it was impossible.

Late that night, she and Barbara had their first really serious talk about the trip. The girls were lying in nightgowns on the mattress in Barbara’s bedroom, smoking. Barbara was saying she wouldn’t dare take her stash to London with her, the customs officials there were supposed to be murderous, and besides you could get marijuana any place in Europe, even in tight-assed London, where they called it cannabis, “which is a much more civilized word for it, don’t you think?” she asked. They were silent for several moments, passing the toke between them.

“Liss,” Barbara said, “do you think there’s any chance at all you might come with me?”

“I’d love to, but...”

“Is it the money?”

“Yes, that. But mostly... well... my parents, mostly.”

“Why would you have to tell them?”

“That I’m going all the way to Europe? Of course I’d have to tell them.”

“Why?”

“Well... don’t your parents know?”

“My mother does. She and Dad are divorced.”

“Well, how does she feel about it?”

“She couldn’t care less,” Barbara said, and shrugged. “She’s been living with a real estate broker in Providence, they’ve got their own thing, they’re not worried about mine.”

“My parents would take a fit,” Lissie said.

“So fuck ’em,” Barbara said cheerfully.

“Well, it’s... you know... Europe.”

“Can I say something?”

“Sure, what?”

“You won’t get offended?”

“No, no.”

“You sometimes seem very young for eighteen.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You still haven’t got any idea what it’s like to be on your own, have you?”

“I guess not.”

“Just don’t give them a chance to say no, Liss. Given the opportunity, there isn’t a parent on God’s green earth who’ll say yes when he can just as easily say no.”

“Oh, sure, I know that.”

“What you do is you tell them after you get there.”

“Oh, yeah, I wouldn’t tell them before.”

“How much money do you think you can raise?”

“Maybe fifteen hundred dollars. That’s if I can sell some...”

“God, that would last you forever! You’d never have to go home, if you didn’t want to.”

“I’d have to go back to Boston for it, though. Five hundred is in my savings account there.”

“What have you got in checking?”

“Just another hundred or so.”

“How’s your passport?”

“How is it? What do you mean?”

“Well, first of all, where is it?”

“In Boston. I use it when I’m cashing checks. Saves a lot of hassle.”

“It hasn’t expired, has it?”

“It did last year, but I had it renewed. It’s good till 1974. That’s what they’re good for, isn’t it? Five years?”

“That’s right. So what’s bothering you?”

“Nothing. It’s just...”

“Here’s how you work it,” Barbara said. “You leave early tomorrow morning, you get home before Easter, you understand? That’s because you’re so fucking contrite. You square it all away with your father, tell him how sorry you are about the hassle on the phone, and then you go back to school. But back to the dorm. That’s what all the shit was about, your living with Judd. So, okay, you go back to the dorm, and you call them every night and tell them how glad you are they saved you from that fucking den of iniquity on Commonwealth Avenue. Meanwhile, you’re getting your cash together and packing your things. On April seventeenth, you meet me at Kennedy, and off we go.”

“You think I should, huh?”

“I think you should.”

“Leave early tomorrow morning, huh?”

“Get home by Saturday, maybe sooner.”

“Mm.”

“Liss, please come with me, okay?”

Lissie was silent for a moment.

“Liss?”

“Yes,” she said.

“What?”

“I said yes.”

“What?”

“Yes,” Lissie said, grinning. “Yes!”

“Jesus!” Barbara said. “Oh, Jesus! Oh, dear God, thank you so much, oh, Jesus, Lissie!” she said, and suddenly hugged her.

8

They spent their first night in London sleeping in Trafalgar Square, together with what appeared to be a thousand other kids from nations all over the world — Americans, of course, but kids from Germany, France, the Netherlands, and even India and Japan as well. The sense of open camaraderie was akin to what Lissie had felt at Woodstock the summer before. Here was a massive congregation of kids united by their dress, their casual use of drugs, their musical preferences, their seeming poverty, and an attitude that was clearly anti-Establishment and therefore threatening to adults, despite the kids’ wide smiles and cheerful greetings.

They found lodgings the next day at a rooming house off Bayswater Road (thirty-five shillings for bed and breakfast) convenient to Soho and the theater district, a short walk to Kensington Gardens, and a twenty-minute bus ride to Chelsea. In their exploration of the city that day — they had arrived late the night before, too exhausted to do anything but find a spot to flop in Trafalgar Square — they scrupulously avoided anything they considered to be tourist attractions. The “tourists” were all those Americans who sauntered out of Claridge’s or the Ritz on their way to visit the Tower of London or the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey or the British Museum. The tourists were all those faceless American businessmen in gray flannel suits — gabardine, actually, now that the promise of spring sunshine tantalized a populace peering expectantly at the broken cloud cover overhead. The tourists were all those overly madeup American women (to Lissie and Barbara, the tourists were always Americans) flaunting precious gems on their fingers and around their throats, emerging on wafting scents of expensive perfume from the Mirabelle or Le Gavroche, their laughter bright but somehow forced.

In the girls’ minds, Mr. and Mrs. America Abroad were awakened at eight to be served continental breakfast in their balconied room overlooking a Mayfair square; at nine, they left the hotel for a scheduled outing to the Portobello Road Market (provided it was Saturday); lunch afterward at that quaint little cheese restaurant in an alley off Fleet Street, recommended by Fielding, and Fodor, and perhaps Aunt Martha as well; a brief walk to Dr. Johnson’s house in Gough Square, and from there by taxi to the Tate Museum or Madame Tussaud’s; drinks at The Bunch of Grapes in Shepherd Market, and then back to the hotel to change out of the low-heeled walking shoes and tweedy skirt, the unmatching slacks and rowdy sports jacket, into something elegant for the theater and dinner-dancing later at the Savoy; home (the hotel was “home,” the Americans referred to it as such in Barbara and Lissie’s fantasy) before eleven to order cognac from the hall waiter and to sip it while watching the late-night news on BBC-2; and then at last to bed—

“Another big day tomorrow, darling.”

“Night-night, sweets.”

Tourists.

The London Barbara and Lissie created for themselves was as much a figment of their imagination as the limited, prejudiced (though partially valid) tour-guide fantasy they had created for their adult counterparts. It never occurred to either of the girls that by forsaking St. Paul’s Cathedral for a shopping spree in the jeans shops mushrooming along Oxford Street, by preferring a trip to the new Lord Kitchener’s Valet rather than to the magnificent Middle Temple Hall where Shakespeare himself first produced Twelfth Night in 1601, by fashionably opting for the “in” head shops along King’s Road rather than the serene and timeless Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, they were in effect reducing the foreign city that surrounded them to something as familiar as New York or New Haven, and thereby nullifying its very existence.

Their quest was to meet other kids like themselves. Toward this end, they accidentally, but only accidentally, stumbled upon some of the city’s treasures: a glimpse of a trio of street troubadours wending their way around Piccadilly Circus toward Haymarket, caught on the periphery of their vision as they discussed the availability of pot with a girl from Scranton and two boys from Denver who were heading for Greece; an unexpected afternoon concert in the band shell at Hyde Park, where for one and threepence apiece they rented striped deck chairs on the lawn, but only because two “cute guys” were sitting nearby; the argument Barbara got into with one of the speakers at Hyde Park Corner, a lofty debate on world Communism (about which she knew next to nothing), solely to impress a pair of British sailors who stood nearby with their Winston Churchill pudding faces and their stained teeth bared in flirtatious grins.

They later strolled with the sailors along the docks by the Thames, the air redolent with the aromas of tobacco, spices, fruit and timber, but the bustle of activity did little to conjure for them the vast world beyond, from which these various commercial vessels had transported bananas and ginger, teak and madras, wheat and tea, and they preferred instead to ooh-and-ahh over the warship the boys proudly pointed out as their own. Before joining the navy, they had worked in the mills outside Manchester, young men Barbara and Lissie might instantly have told to bug off back in America, but the girls were inordinately fascinated by their droll Lancashire accents and accepted an invitation to tea at Queen Mary’s Rose Garden in Regent’s Park. The boys took them afterward to a place they thought their visitors from abroad might enjoy, a glorified hamburger joint called The Great American Disaster (It is, Lissie thought), and then strolled them through Soho, where they snickeringly pointed out the prostitutes lounging in shadowed doorways. Lissie was suddenly reminded of her father’s favorite Eliot poem, which he’d read to her in place of a bedtime story when she was only ten, and the lines “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels” — and simultaneously and guiltily remembered that she had not yet called home.

At a tobacconist’s shop in Dean Street, the boys showed them the jamb around the entrance door, where typed or handwritten notices in a widely understood (to Londoners) code advertised the sexual specialties of the various “ladies of the night,” as Jem, the older of the two sailors, knowingly called them, STRICT TEACHER LOOKING FOR OBEDIENT STUDENT or GOLDEN SHOWERS or FRENCH LESSONS, TEACHER FLUENT or the like, all of them gleefully deciphered by these worldly nineteen-year-old mill-workers from Oldham, who seemed singularly intent on confirming the adage that American “gels” fucked like “rebbits.” Their tactical approach was not lost on Lissie and Barbara, who declined a walk through St. James’s Park (“But it shuts down in an hour,” Horace, the other of the sailors urgently protested) and insisted instead that they get back to their lodgings by eleven because Lissie was expecting a call from home. Eleven in London was six in New York, and so the lie was a reasonable one, lost nonetheless on the Lancashire dolts, who were totally unaware of the intricacies of time zones.

They walked the girls back to the rooming house on Leinster Terrace, where, on the front doorstep, they kissed them lingeringly, ever hopeful of finding purchase in foreign waters. Horace, who kissed Lissie, tasted of very strong tobacco, undoubtedly distributed to her loyal seamen through the largess of Her Majesty the Queen. As the sailors wandered off into the crisp April night, Lissie found herself wondering where all that yellow fog was, the stuff that rubbed its back upon the windowpanes.

This was Sunday night, the nineteenth. She had last spoken to her parents on Thursday, from the Brenner dorm, telling them she was going to a Yale mixer for the weekend (she had deliberately chosen Yale, as her father’s alma mater) and would call them when she got back to Boston. She assumed she would be safe until tomorrow morning at least, but she knew she could not postpone the call indefinitely. Barbara’s alibi to the sailors now provided ample opportunity for her to pick up the phone in the hall downstairs and place a collect, transatlantic call to Connecticut (it was now only 6:30 P.M. there) but she delayed yet another time.

When she fell asleep that night, she was thinking of the World War II, fleece-lined, fighter-pilot’s jacket she’d bought at Railway Lost in Piccadilly, and wondering whether she’d ever get to wear it in Europe this summer.

As spring burst ingloriously on the British countryside in a torrent of rain distantly related to a monsoon in the long-lost colonial empire, Barbara and Lissie, wearing her fighter-pilot jacket over a T-shirt and blue jeans, morosely decided upon a hasty exodus from these dewy sceptered isles, and visited a travel agent in Berkeley Street to inquire about the cheapest fare to Spain.

They chose Spain only because the weather in Paris was as shitty as it was here in London, and they had heard it would be sunny and mild on the Costa del Sol. But as they made their inquiries of a pretty little blond girl with a marked Cockney accent and a miniskirt showing lace-edged panties above its precipitous hem, three boys standing at the counter with them quickly disabused them of any notion they’d had of spending a carefree and inexpensive, suntanned two weeks on a beach.

“The weather is fine there,” one of the boys told them, “but the Spanish attitude toward hippies absolutely sucks. I know guys who’ve been kicked off beaches on the Costa Brava only because their hair’s too long, would you believe it? And if those Fascist bastards catch you smoking pot, you’ll languish in a Spanish prison for the rest of your life. Whatever you do,” he said, “stay away from that fucking Spain.”

The British girl behind the counter, unused to such language in public places, partial to Spain because she’d spent a £50 all-inclusive two-week holiday there the summer before, snippily asked, “Did you wish to book then, or what?”

“We do not wish to book then,” Barbara said, and, together with the three boys, she and Lissie walked out into the pouring rain toward the nearest pub.

The boys were Americans, one of them a dropout from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, another the son of a Philadelphia restaurant owner, the third a somewhat mysterious and taciturn young man with a scrubby, red, growing-in beard, a patchy uneven crewcut, and brooding brown eyes, who remained rather vague about where he came from or whither he was bound. His first name was Paul, and he offered his last name only when Lissie asked him what it was. Even then he hesitated before answering. “Gillis,” he said, “Paul Gillis.” He was wearing a rubberized, camouflaged poncho like the ones she’d seen at Railway Lost the week before, blue jeans, and sandals totally unsuitable to the rain outside. The rain oozed serpentinely along the pub’s front plate-glass window. On the jukebox, the Beatles were singing “Let It Be.”

The U.N.C. dropout spoke with a thick southern accent modified only when he was using hippie expressions like “far out” or “getting off,” national in flavor and therefore impervious to his drawl; he was the one who’d given them the initial information on Spain. His name was Robert Alston Chadwick, and his two friends called him Robby. Tall, blond and blue-eyed, sporting no beard but instead a mustache like a Hussar cavalryman’s, wearing a yellow rain slicker and a peaked baseball cap, he advised the girls that they should change their minds and head for Greece instead, via Amsterdam.

“That’s where we’re heading,” he said.

“Cool city,” the third boy said.

His name was Tony Giglio and he was here, at his father’s insistence, for a pilgrimage to a town northwest of Naples, a hilltop village called Ruvo del Monte from which his grandfather had emigrated in the year 1900, shortly after la fillossera struck that country’s vineyards and reduced to insignificance its thriving wine industry. Tony was clean-shaven, albeit with shadowy jowls, and he wore his black hair in a slicked-back greaser’s style. He told the girls he would be accompanying Robby and Paul only as far as Amsterdam, after which he would board a plane to Naples, and then take a bus to Ruvo del Monte, so he could “hug all the wop paisans there and contribute five hundred dollars to the fucking village parish, in honor of the fucking local saint.”

Paul Gillis listened to all this without saying a word.

“How long will you be in Amsterdam?” Barbara asked.

“Till it gets boring,” Robby said, and grinned.

His smile gave to his already handsome face a widescreen, movie-star radiance. Lissie suspected, from the way Barbara flutteringly batted her lashes in that instant, that she’d fallen madly in love with him at once, a dismaying insight in that she herself had always been partial to blond boys; hadn’t her only experience been with blond Judd Gordon?

“So what do you say?” Robby asked.

“Is it expensive there?” Barbara said.

“Cheap as donkey shit,” Robby said. “Anyway, we’ll be crashing with some girls I know, more the merrier.”

“American girls?”

“Dutch.”

“Well, how would they feel about...?”

“I told you. More the merrier. The pot flows like wine in Holland, not like that fuckin’ Spain... or even here, for that matter. You find any choice stuff in little old London Town?”

“We’ve been grubbing from other Americans,” Barbara said.

“Different in Holland,” Robby said. “Nobody cares what you do there. The Dutch love hippies. Isn’t that right, Paul?”

“Mm,” Paul said.

“So what do you say?”

“Liss?”

“Sure,” Lissie said.

They had made love twice that afternoon. After the first time, Joanna La Flute recounted to him with surprising anger, considering the fact that she hadn’t been the recipient of the concertmaster’s tirade, what had happened at rehearsal that morning when the first fiddler in the second section was accused of playing over the finger board instead of near the bridge as the rest of the section was doing.

Fillipa, for such was the first fiddler’s name, promptly informed the concertmaster that the words “sur la touche” were clearly printed on the score beside the suspect passage, and that she knew what those words meant even if nobody else in the section seemed to know, and even if the concertmaster himself didn’t seem to know. If he wanted her to play it closer to the bridge, she would most certainly do that, contrary to the composer’s wish for a covered, less piercing, more pastellike sound. But if the concertmaster wanted a suggestion (and here Joanna did a fine imitation of sixty-two-year-old Fillipa who had been playing in orchestras since she was nineteen) perhaps he might prefer them not to bow the passage at all, but to pluck it instead, in which case the concertmaster could go pluck himself.

Joanna La Flute laughed when she repeated Fillipa’s bon mot, but otherwise she’d told the story with a kind of contained professional fury. It was after they’d made love the second time that Joanna Jewish stole into bed and snuggled up close to Jamie and began telling him in detail of what had been her final session with the redoubtable Marvin Mandelbaum.

“It was surprising to both of us,” Joanna said. “I was lying on the couch, studying his tin ceiling and not saying anything as usual, and behind me I could hear the heavy breathing that meant either he was about to make an obscene phone call or else fall asleep, and all at once I said, ‘I’d like to quit, Dr. Mandelbaum,’ and like a shot, he answered, ‘I think you should!’

“I was so surprised by what I’d said, and so surprised by the answer I got, that I sat up and turned to look at him, and he was sitting there with a surprised look on his face, too, everybody in the whole room was surprised. So I said, ‘I mean it, Doctor,’ and now he wipes the glee — Jamie, he looked absolutely gleeful after the initial shock wore off — he wipes the glee off his face, the pisher, and very solemnly says, ‘Do you feel you are now able to cope successfully with your various problems, Joanna?’ Since I was already sitting up, and since I was quitting anyway, I dug in my handbag for a cigarette, and I lit it, and got off the couch and began pacing the room while he sat there in his chair watching me and listening to me. I had the feeling this was the first time anything like this had ever happened in his office. I was making medical history there in his office.

“I told him I didn’t think I had a problem with married men anymore, not if he thought the problem was that I chose married men because I didn’t want to get married. I told him I’d been talking about nothing else hut marrying you for the past eight months now, ever since we met on the Vineyard, so if he figured that talking about someone all the time was a problem, then he was wrong because I figured it was love. I figured if somebody’s in your mind day and night, and you can’t get him out, and you can’t wait till you see him the next time, can’t wait to touch him and kiss him, touch his hair, I love touching your hair, then — what’s that?” she said, and sat bolt upright.

“What?”

“Listen!”

He listened. The room was silent, the house was silent.

“I don’t—”

“Shhh!”

He could hear only the various sounds of the house itself, the ticking of the clock on the dresser (it was precisely 4:00 P.M.), a click someplace downstairs and then the hum of the refrigerator as it began its cycle, the whoosh of the oil burner as it went on. But nothing else. Joanna was virtually bristling, eyes and nostrils wide, nipples puckered, hands opened like radar antennas hovering on the air before her breasts as though hoping to absorb sound through the palms. She knew the noises in this house, knew which were normal and which were not, and now she listened and tried to sift one from the other, tried to separate the sound that had startled her in the first place. There was suddenly the thin sharp glittery crack of breaking glass.

She grabbed his hand.

He felt the bristles go up at the back of his neck, felt his heart suddenly begin pounding in his chest, felt a rush of adrenaline that propelled him over to the dresser where he picked up Joanna’s silver hairbrush and held it by the handle like a hammer. There was the sound of more glass breaking now, but it was a methodical, even sound, the sound of someone chipping away shards before attempting entry, slivers falling to the floor and shattering there. And then silence. He caught his breath. Across the room, Joanna was picking up the bedside phone.

“No!” he whispered.

She looked at him, puzzled for an instant, and then she understood. They could not call the police because when they got here they would discover not only a burglar coming in through the third-floor window where there was a fire escape outside, but also a naked man holding a silver hairbrush in his trembling hand, a man named James Croft who was married to Constance Croft in Rutledge, Connecticut, and who had no more right than the burglar to be here in the apartment of naked, twenty-five-year-old Joanna Berkowitz. She let her hand fall limply from the receiver.

Jamie stood just inside the doorjamb. The door was open, and he could see past the library with its Oriental rugs and Joanna’s music stand and her flute case open on one of the wingback chairs, silver against green velvet — he was probably after the flutes. She had three flutes, she had told Jamie how insurance costs were devastating for musicians who owned expensive instruments; Fillipa owned a Strad that was insured for half a million dollars. He was here for the instruments. He had heard her playing one day, figured he’d come in just before dark, before she got home from wherever she worked, grab whatever instrument it was he’d heard up there on the third floor.

Past the study, Jamie could see the flat even light of late afternoon streaming in the hallway, and then he heard footfalls crunching on the broken glass beneath the hall window, and then more footfalls, and something blocked the streaming light for just a moment, caused it to waver for just a moment before the man obviously flattened himself against the corridor wall, and began inching his way down the corridor soundlessly, perhaps sensing someone else in the house, perhaps merely exercising a caution any burglar might, Jamie neither knew nor cared. He was trapped in a nightmare realized.

He had often in the Rutledge house, lying awake at night and listening to the creak of a staircase or the clatter of a raccoon, wondered what he would do if someone entered the house. He always slept naked; he imagined himself at an immediate disadvantage against a fully clothed and possibly armed intruder, a man facing however many years in prison for breaking-and-entering or armed robbery, or whatever the hell the police called it. He had imagined someone creeping up the steps from below, hearing the creak of the treads under a stranger’s heavy footfalls, hearing him padding down the hallway toward the bedroom where Jamie stood just inside the doorway, a brass candlestick in his right hand, one of a pair that were a wedding present from Connie’s mother, both normally sitting on the ledge of the upstream bedroom windows. Had imagined this scene. And had known he would kill to protect either Lissie or Connie, and had hoped no one ever forced him to do that, no one ever got as far into his house as that bedroom hallway outside, where he would have to swing the heavy brass candlestick hoping merely to stun but knowing he might perhaps kill.

The hall outside was silent now.

The afternoon light filled the open doorframe at the far end of the study, unbroken. On the bed behind him, Joanna sat still and tense, listening. This was not Jamie’s house, he did not know what to do here. If he struck this man as he entered the bedroom, if he knocked him unconscious with the hairbrush or God forbid killed him — no, he didn’t think the hairbrush would kill him, he wasn’t even certain it was heavy enough to knock him out — but then what? What did they do then? If he had warned Joanna against calling the police before the man posed the threat he now posed, how would the situation have changed after he was bleeding and unconscious on the Bokhara outside the bedroom door?

“Anybody here?” a voice called.

Joanna gasped. Jamie felt a shock of electric fear run up his spine and into his skull.

“Hey?” the voice called again. “Anybody here?”

Black. A black man.

“You hear me?” the voice called.

Jamie looked at Joanna. He took a deep breath, and very quietly said, “I’m waiting for you with a shotgun.” The lie hung on the suddenly stifling air. He waited for an answer. Nothing came.

“You hear me, you little prick?” he yelled. “I’ve got a shotgun in my hands, you come one step closer and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“Hey, cool it,” the voice said.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Jamie shouted.

“Shoot him, shoot him!” Joanna screamed, as if she really believed there was a shotgun.

There was another moment of silence in the hall outside, and the frantic beat of footsteps toward the broken window, and the crunch of glass underfoot when he reached the window, and then more glass as he went through, and the sound of his feet on the iron railings of the fire escape and the iron rungs of the ladder, retreating, fading. Jamie went out into the library, still holding the hairbrush in his hand, and peeked around the doorjamb. The hallway was empty.

“He’s gone,” he whispered.

“I have to pee,” Joanna said.

He sat naked in the red leather wingback chair near the tiled Franklin stove, and he heard the sound of Joanna urinating, and he thought, If I don’t tell Connie soon, the whole fucking world will know before she does. All the black burglars in Harlem will know, only next time we might not be so lucky, next time the guy out there in the hall may have a shotgun himself, a real shotgun and not a hairbrush posing as one. And he’ll come in here blasting, ask the questions later, kill the fucking honkies first, grab the silver flute and all the silver shit on the dresser, fence the stuff uptown, leave it for the cops to later discover that the honkie with his brains on the rug ain’t married to the honkie with the big tits and the open windpipe.

He heard the toilet flushing and then heard the sink tap being turned on, Joanna splashing water onto her hands and perhaps her face as well, cold water to wash away the stale sweat caused by that fucking bastard who’d had the nerve to break in here, to intrude, to violate, smashing the window and stealing down the hallway, here to steal the silver, here to steal the family jewels, the family, the... what do we do now? Today was dangerous, today could have been disastrous. Too damn close today. No cigar, but very goddamn close. So what do we do? What do the big lovers do. The red-hot lovers. The red-hot burglars, what do we do? Burglars breaking into that fucking Rutledge house, stealing through its hallways, intruding, violating the way that cocksucker violated this house today, violating! What do we do?

“Don’t go out in the hall without your shoes on,” Joanna called.

The airmail letter was waiting in the mailbox when he got home from the city that afternoon. It read:

He called his agent the moment he read the letter (oddly, the fact that she could not spell the word “subsequent” annoyed him almost as much as her defection) to tell Lew he was sorry as hell to be bothering him with something like this, but he was wondering nonetheless if he could help with a matter that had nothing to do with marketing pictures. Lew listened patiently as Jamie explained that his daughter was presumably in Amsterdam someplace — her letter had been dated the twentieth, and this was now the twenty-fifth — and that he was very worried about her because he knew what the drug scene was like in Holland, and she was an eighteen-year-old girl traveling alone with another girl her age and he wondered if Lew could help by putting him in touch with the Dutch agent he’d met just before Christmas in Lew’s office, Evert somebody, who he knew handled work for Lew in Amsterdam, and who had presumably earned commissions selling some of Jamie’s pictures there.

He said all of this in a breathless rush, and Lew, on the other end of the line, immediately grasping the urgency of the situation, told him to hold a minute while he got his book, and was back on the phone thirty seconds later to reel off the Dutch agent’s name, address and telephone number. He spelled out the last name, G-o-e-d-k-o-o-p, and similarly spelled out the Witte de Withstraat address, and then repeated his office and home numbers twice to make certain Jamie had them. Now, at a quarter to eight in the evening in Connecticut, Jamie listened to the phone ringing in Noordwijk aan Zee, wherever the hell that was, a peculiarly urgent sound as compared to the more leisurely American ring, and then the ringing stopped abruptly, and there was the sound of the receiver clattering to a hard surface, and then someone muttering something in Dutch, and then silence, and then “Hallo?”

“Mr. Goedkoop?” Jamie said. He wasn’t sure of the pronunciation, and he hoped the man wouldn’t hang up on him, thinking he was trying to reach someone else entirely.

“Yes?”

“Evert, this is Jamie Croft, we met once in Lew Barker’s...”

“Yes?”

“I’m calling from America.”

Goedkoop was slowly coming awake. “Yes, Jamie,” he said, “how are you?”

“Fine, thanks, I’m sorry to be waking you at this hour...”

“No, no, graag gedaan,” Goedkoop said.

“... but my daughter is in Amsterdam, she left suddenly to go to Europe...”

“Your daughter?” Goedkoop said.

“Yes, my eighteen-year-old daughter.”

“Ah, is here in Amsterdam! Ah, of course,” Goedkoop said, misunderstanding, and wondering why such a call had to be made at two in the morning. “Where is she staying? I’ll be certain to ring her up and...”

“That’s just it. I don’t know where she is. She’s traveling alone with another girl her age, and we’d very much appreciate it if you could — Amsterdam isn’t a very large city — if you could ask around and try to get a line on her.”

“A line?”

“Try to find out where she’s staying. So we can make contact with her.”

“Ah,” Goedkoop said. He was wide-awake now. “Yes, I will check the various hotels, of course,” he said. “But, do you know, not many young people are staying at hotels. Well, I will call on various underground people here...”

“Underground?” Jamie said, alarmed.

“Pardon?”

“You said...”

“Yes, people who are having knowledge of the places these youngsters frequent. Do not worry, Jamie, I quite understand, and will do all I can. What is your daughter’s name?”

“Melissa. Melissa Croft. And she’s traveling with a girl named Barbara Duggan.”

“Would you spell that for me, please?”

Jamie spelled both names for him. On the other end of the line, he heard Goedkoop’s labored breathing and remembered him as a man who was exceedingly overweight.

“I have two boys myself,” Goedkoop said, “of eighteen and twenty-three, and so I can feel for you and your wife, believe me. Amsterdam seems to be the middlepunt for young people from everywhere, do you know, the epicenter? Even Dutch boys and girls. They are coming from all over the Netherlands to Amsterdam. I know Dutch parents who are combing the city for weeks on end. Do you perhaps have a photograph? If you could send me one, it might facilitate...”

“Yes, I’ll put one in the mail immediately.”

“Goed, okay, that will be good. But in the meanwhile, what does she look like, your daughter?”

“She’s five nine, and weighs about... Connie, what does she weigh?”

“Pardon?” Goedkoop said.

“I’m checking with my wife. Connie?” he said, and impatiently snapped his fingers at her, something he’d never done in his life. “A hundred and twenty,” he said into the phone when she’d given him the information. “She has long blond hair, and blue eyes and... uh... let me see what else might help you. A birthmark on her left shoulder, sort of like a crescent moon.”

“Ah, yes,” Goedkoop said, “a crescent moon. And you said her height was...?”

“Five nine.”

“Yes, what would that be in centimeters?”

“I’m not sure. Do you want me to check? Connie, could you get the dictionary or something? He wants to know what five nine would be in...”

“That is five feet nine inches, yes?” Goedkoop said.

“Yes, five...”

“I can convert it here, do not worry. And one hundred and twenty pounds? That is pounds you are saying.”

“Yes, pounds.”

“Blond hair, blue eyes,” Goedkoop muttered, obviously writing down the information. “And the other girl?”

“I have no idea what she looks like.”

“No matter, I will try to find them both for you. In the meanwhile, don’t worry, please. I am sure you will hear from your daughter soon. My older son is studying in London, and if he isn’t writing for some weeks his mother becomes so upset, not to mention his father,” Goedkoop said, and chuckled. “I will do what I can, and I will call you with my results. But as I say, do not worry. I am sure she is fine.”

“Thank you, Evert,” Jamie said, relieved. “When you call, please make it collect, I don’t want you to...”

“Nonsense, no, no,” Goedkoop said. “I have a long time been an admirer of your work, and it is a pleasure when Lewis sends me your photographs to sell. I saw in a recent issue of Time magazine here, the photographs you took of the downtown fire in New York. They are splendid. Has Time bought all rights, or would they be free for the Dutch market?”

“You’d have to ask Lew about that.”

“Ah? Yes, of course, I will. And I will call you when I have the good news I expect I will soon have.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said. “And please forgive me for calling at this hour, but...”

“No, no, it is quite all right,” Goedkoop said, and hung up abruptly, the way Jamie had discovered most foreigners did, without the conversational pas de deux Americans used as a terminating shorthand.

Goedkoop did in fact fastidiously explore what he referred to, in his call to Jamie two days later, as “the darkness of Amsterdam,” inquiring after the tall blond girl with blue eyes, phoning all the hotels, visiting in person the myriad rooming houses and the several youth hostels, spending a considerable amount of time at Delaurier, the largest of the hostels which — appropriately enough, he felt — had recently opened an annex as a rehabilitation center for drug addicts, and then taking to the streets themselves, roaming through the parks and along the canals during the daytime hours and frequenting at night those dimly lighted boîtes off the Rembrandtsplein, wandering into the Seaman’s Quarter, searching through the sleazy bars on the Oude Zijds Voorburgwal and around the Oudekerksplein where prostitutes beckoned from cribs over which red lights actually were hanging. He even walked onto the Oude Zijds Achterburgwal, knowing this was dangerous, and hoping against hope he would not find James Croft’s daughter here.

He found no trace of her anywhere, but he assured Jamie on the telephone that he would try yet another time when the photograph of her was in hand. He told Jamie, again, that he was not to worry; he was certain “young Matilda” (his faulty memory of the name caused Jamie a sudden lurch of despair) would be writing or calling home sooner than he expected. “In the meanwhile,” he had also talked to Lewis about those pictures in Time, and had learned that only North American rights had been purchased, and that he was free to sell the photographs elsewhere. Lewis was sending him prints forthwith. Again, he hung up abruptly.

Jamie had no way of knowing that Lissie had left Amsterdam on the very day Evert Goedkoop had begun his fruitless search.

9

Robby’s Dutch girlfriends were twenty-two-year-old twins named Elisabeth and Ida Verschoor, who made their home in an apartment off Jan Eversten Straat, within walking distance of Erasmus Park. Both girls spoke fluent English and were, in fact, employed as translators at the American Consulate near the Concertgebouw, to which they took the tram each morning, leaving their guests to enjoy the exuberant hospitality of the city before rejoining them at the apartment along about six each evening.

There were three bedrooms in the apartment. Barbara shared one of them with Robby the very first night they were there. The blond twins, pretty and rather tall by Dutch standards, slept in their own bedroom, side by side in a king-sized bed. Tony Giglio and Paul Gillis slept in the third bedroom at the end of the hall. Lissie slept on a couch in the small but neatly furnished living room; a tiled clock on the mantelpiece chimed the hour and the half-hour, keeping her awake half the night.

The Amsterdam equivalent of the statue of Eros in London was the white stone memorial on the east side of Dam Square, across from the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky with its orange awnings and fluttering rooftop flags. There, close by a smaller but much fiercer lion than the ones guarding Trafalgar Square, the hippies gathered on the cobblestoned curbs circling the memorial. But here, perhaps because the girls had never before been a part of such a concentrated congregation of similarly minded young people (except, as Lissie recalled and pointed out to Barbara, at Woodstock last year), the girls found themselves more attracted to what they called “the heavy culture” the city had to offer, which many young people like themselves were actively seeking out. The Anne Frank House was especially appealing to many of the visiting American youths, who wrongheadedly equated the young Dutch girl’s ordeal during the German occupation with the totally incomparable “hassling” they suffered at the hands of law enforcement officials everywhere, the Dutch cops forming a part of the international brotherhood where it came to loitering or disorderly conduct, but remarkably benign where it concerned the free and easy transfer and open use of drugs of every stripe and color.

In Amsterdam that spring, the visiting kids were of the general opinion that the grass here in Europe was greener than it had been back in the States. Most of the marijuana that found its way into the American market came from Mexico; the stuff in Amsterdam came from Asia, Africa or the Near East, and was stronger than what the Americans were used to smoking. There was a great deal of hashish in Amsterdam. The kids called it hash as though it were as innocuous as a dish of chopped meat and potatoes served over the counter of a greasy spoon restaurant.

And perhaps it was. Marijuana or its various derivatives was the least concern of anyone in Amsterdam. The kids, repeatedly warned by every rock-and-roll disk jockey in the States that “Speed Kills,” further warned by insistent wall posters wherever young people gathered, nonetheless seemed to be turning to amphetamines with an avidity that was bewildering and frightening to Lissie. Even Barbara, slightly older and presumably more sophisticated, found sickening the druggies draped around the Dam Memorial.

The streets were littered with dog shit and broken glass, two rather unrelated commodities, but they were also strewn with human debris, the instantly recognizable speed freaks who jabbered like monkeys, their bodies running on a hyperactive double-time, their pupils dilated, their sweat soaking through T-shirts or tent dresses. Pale, invariably thin to the point of emaciation, they raved like lunatics when they were high, and then became enormously depressed when they crashed. A confirmed speed freak could get off for hours on a single shot of Dexedrine or Methedrine, mainlined by syringe, like heroin, which was also prevalent and easily obtainable in Amsterdam that spring. Even before the twins suggested that they might enjoy going to Elysium that night, a place they described as “Woodstock playing in Amsterdam,” even before Lissie caught the scene there, she had firmly decided that the one thing she would never in her life do was poke a needle into her body.

Elysium was perhaps as large as the Fillmore East in New York, but unlike its American rock counterpart, there was no extravagant psychedelic light-show accompanying the music here. Instead, the cavernous two-storied hall was dimly lighted and dingy, thronged — when they entered it at midnight — with what Lissie estimated to be 5,000 kids between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, all of them stoned. There was no furniture in the place, not a chair, a table or a bench anywhere in sight. The kids milled about the big stage at the front of the hall, or sat on the floor below it, listening to a badly amplified, four-piece rock group that billed itself, in American fashion, as The Rocketeers, singing American tunes in a European accent of uncertain origin, the words “Plizz riliss me... lat me go” blaring from the speakers as the twins-guided party paid their admission fees and pushed their way through into what Lissie immediately equated with a Chinese opium den.

Marijuana smoke hung thickly on the air, its sweet aroma almost sickening in such concentration. (“Just take a deep breath,” Barbara said, “and you’re high.”) To the right of the entrance door, a young blonde wearing a miniskirt with nothing under it, her eyes glazed, her jaw hanging lax, was sitting on the floor in a noxiously fluid pile of her own excrement. Lissie hurried past her, frightened, taking Tony’s arm in reflexive defense, watching as Paul Gillis glanced at the girl and turned away. He had said nothing when the twins suggested Elysium; he said nothing now.

On the stage, a gangly young man moved swiftly and erratically toward the lead guitarist, his arms waving jerkily, demanding in a rush that he be allowed to sing. The guitarist began arguing with him, and the kids sitting on the floor or milling around the perimeter of the stage began hissing and booing till the guitarist relinquished the microphone and the spotlight. The new possessor of both said a few words to the kid behind the electric piano, presumably establishing a key, and then launched into a spaced-out, amphetamine-high imitation of Alvin Lee’s “I’m Comin’ Home,” taking particular joy in simulating the dog barks that had been an integral part of that hit record, losing the pianist completely, the lyrics trailing into an a cappella symphony of manic barking, a veritable dog pound unleashed at the microphone, yelping and screeching from the amplified speakers.

The kids crowding the stage began booing and hissing again, and the would-be rock star raised his arms like President Nixon, the index and middle finger of both hands spread in V’s for Victory, and grinned appreciatively, mistaking the roar of disapproval for gratified applause and cries of encouragement. He pulled the belt he was wearing free of the loops on his blue jeans, held it up like a prize boa constrictor, and boomed into the microphone, “See this belt? That’s one beautiful belt, all right. Does anybody want to buy this gorgeous belt? Do I hear ten guilders? Okay, do I hear five guilders? How about two? I’ll settle for a single solitary guilder” (the boos louder and more insistent now), “the thinnest part of a dollar, the equivalent” (and here he fell into an imitation of W. C. Fields), “m’friends, of thirty cents American, ah, yes, do I have any takers? No takers? Go fuck yourselves, you fuckin’ freaks.”

When they left the place at two-thirty in the morning, the kid who’d tried to sell his belt had crashed, and was standing on the sidewalk outside, leaning against a lamppost, muttering morosely to himself. They heard his unintelligible words behind them all the way up the street, and Lissie thought she could still hear them after they had turned the corner onto the Leidseplein.

They did not get back to the apartment until almost three. Tony and the twins, apparently having discovered one another over some good Turkish hash purchased at Elysium from a British kid just back from Algiers, retired to the middle bedroom with the kingsized bed, all thoughts of his pilgrimage to Ruvo del Monte obscured by the prospects of a sexual playground unimagined in his wildest fantasies. Lissie, exhausted and unwilling even to think of spending another night trying to maneuver, however craftily, her five feet nine inches into the confines of a couch that was seven inches shorter than her body, readily accepted Barbara’s suggestion that she take the now-vacant bed in the third bedroom. Changing into a nightgown in the hall bathroom, she tiptoed past the twins’ already acrobatically reverberating room and opened the door onto the utter darkness of the end room. Paul Gillis was already asleep.

Not daring to put on a light, she stumbled across the room, banging her shins against an ottoman, muttering “Shit!” in the inky blackness, turning swiftly to see whether or not she’d awakened him, and then finally finding her bed, and spending another three minutes trying to figure out how these damn Dutch sheets could possibly be tucked in so tight that a person couldn’t find where they began or ended. At last yanking back the resistant sheets and blanket, she climbed under the covers on a sigh, pulled the bedclothes to her throat, and heard the toot of a solitary tugboat somewhere on one of the canals. The horn bleated again, echoed, faded. The city, so vibrantly alive in the daylight hours, was still and silent. She fell asleep almost at once.

He came to her bed sometime during the night.

He did not say a word.

She thought of it later as a silent, consensual rape.

She had barely said three sentences to this boy since meeting him in London, and she awoke now to find him beside her. Wordlessly, he spread his right hand on her thigh, the wrist resting lightly on the patch of pubic hair between her legs. His face loomed above hers for an instant, and then he kissed her. She loved beards, she found them a turn-on, perhaps because her one and only experience had been with bearded Judd Gordon, perhaps because they represented to her a statement of male youthfulness, defiant and brave — This is what I want to look like, take it or leave it.

As Paul kissed her now, as this boy she didn’t know kissed her, she thought instantly of that first night in Woodstock, perhaps mistaking him in that murky instant between sleep and wakefulness for Judd, opening her mouth in automatic response to his kiss, feeling the stiff bristles of his nascent mustache against her upper lip, his hand still grasping her thigh, the wrist lightly resting on her mound below. She knew instantly and instantaneously that she was not dreaming, and that this was not Judd.

Oddly, she felt neither outrage nor indignation over his violation of her turf, but instead a sense of appropriateness. In an apartment where Tony and the twins were fucking their brains out next door, and Barbara and Robby were similarly if not numerically interlocked farther down the hall, there seemed something fitting, almost preordained, about Paul’s silent nocturnal passage across the six feet that separated their beds, his body beside hers, his lips covering hers, his hand on her thigh, the wrist motionless on the bronze triangular shield that protected, she now realized, an entrance cleft already vulnerable to entreaty. Had she been dreaming erotically before he’d slipped into bed beside her? Or was her reaction prompted solely by his sudden wordless presence and lingering kiss, the hand that refused to budge a scant four inches to the right where it would have found her straining toward his questing fingers, still spread and motionless on her thigh?

A single tinny note sounded in the blackness, the small tiled clock on the living room mantel striking the half-hour. The widespread fingers on her thigh, their subtle weight, their warmth, their utter immobility; the insistent urging of his mouth upon hers, his tongue thrusting and exploring now, her own tongue responding; the wrist suspended a millimeter above her crotch, all combined to arouse her more completely than would have a more deliberate assault.

She spread her legs, silently indicating acquiescence, but his mouth remained the sole adventurer, the widespread hand burning its imprint into her thigh, the reluctant wrist motionless even when she lifted herself slightly to engage it flesh to flesh, and felt its strong beating pulse. For the first time in her life — never with Judd — she found herself in the role of active aggressor, reaching over him to find his rigid penis, clutching it in her hand, urging it with bold, hard strokes cunningly calculated to elicit a response that would rocket into his brain and trigger his recalcitrant hand, causing that hand to move from her thigh (where now she felt his fingers trembling) and onto her seething vagina.

When at last the hand moved, with a suddenness as startling as his appearance beside her in bed had been, when at last his fingers parted the seeping folds of her flesh to locate with pinpoint accuracy her throbbing clitoris, when at last he began fondling her there with a touch as wispily tantalizing as his stubborn wrist had been, she felt at once a familiar melting inside, a recognized dissolving of her interior walls, a rush of blood to her head, an unbearable mounting pressure that promised imminent inundation, and tightened her hand on him, pumping him now with an urgency dictated by her dangerously impending tidal wave, pulling him toward her in fitful jerks, crushing him stiff against her belly where he spilled his juices just as she felt herself crumbling helplessly before the torrential, crashing, blindly raging ecstasy of her own orgasm.

And still, they did not speak.

With surprising alacrity, they began again at once, more familiarly this time. His fingers parted and probed, his hands roamed over her belly and her thighs, caressed her minuscule breasts with their all-consuming nipples, her backside, searched out her anal cavity (she had never permitted Judd to do this), again returned to her persistently moist and stubbornly aching vagina, labored her clitoris more forcefully now, abandoned it to reach for her face in the darkness, touching her nose and her lips like a blind man seeking, cupping her cheeks and her chin in both hands, his mouth claiming hers again. Her own hands moved lingeringly over the smooth almost hairless skin on his chest, the flat belly (her finger poking gently into his navel) then down to where his pubic hair began silkenly above his groin and then savagely transformed itself into the coarser red hair that surrounded his tumescent penis, smooth in the circle of her gliding fist, enlarging as she stroked it gently and lowered her mouth to it, insinuating the tip of her tongue into its single blind eye, moistening the engorged shaft and taking it pulsing between her lips.

When he entered her for the first time, she was astonished to find herself coming again at once, gasping in surprise as much as in passion, hearing herself muttering (never before with Judd), “Yes, fuck me, do it,” her nails digging into his backside, her trembling legs widespread, the ankles locked somewhere around the small of his muscular back as he pounded at her with a steady, controlled rhythm that brought her to orgasm twice again before at last he shuddered in her embrace and with a fierce final thrust spent himself inside her.

Now they talked — or at least he did.

As the first gray light of day broke timidly against the drawn shade on the single window in the room, as the sounds of morning traffic began on the street outside, peculiarly foreign in tone, the horns high and piping as compared to the deeper throated basses of American automobiles, they lay side by side, fingers entwined like those of children idly watching drifting clouds above a sloping summer hillside — and he talked.

Paul was almost nineteen, six months older than Lissie, a New Yorker born and bred who, upon his graduation from high school in June of 1969, had taken a job working as a common laborer for a construction company named Jenkins Contracting, Inc., run by a besotted old Irishman who’d taken to calling him “Gillie” for Gillis, a nickname he’d despised almost as much as he’d hated hauling bricks. He’d never planned on going to college — in high school he’d maintained a risky C-average that sometimes dipped into a C-minus and on occasion a D — and whereas he’d debated joining the Peace Corps, he’d somehow procrastinated, enjoying the lucrative bread he was earning and reasoning that his minor knee injury, a torn cartilage suffered while playing football for Cardinal Hayes High, would keep him forever safe from the draft.

The joke in 1969, however, prevalent among young men all over the United States, was that the Army was drafting even blind men, so long as their seeing-eye dogs could read the chart on the wall. Paul remained blithely unaware until the first of December, when the Selective Service System held its lottery for men who would be drafted in 1970. The newspapers the next day all published charts listing numbers and dates under headlines such as YOUR DRAFT CHANCES or YOUR DRAFT PROSPECTS. The newspapers all agreed that any man whose lottery number, premised on his date of birth, fell between 1 and 120 could be fairly certain he would be drafted in 1970. Men with numbers between 121 and 240 had a fifty-fifty chance of being drafted. Men with numbers higher than that could consider themselves reasonably safe. Paul’s birthday was June 10, 1951. His lottery number was 206. He weighed his fifty-fifty chances against the torn cartilage, and began reading the newspapers with an interest bordering on obsession, studying the daily body counts of North Vietnamese soldiers, and wondering what the count on American soldiers looked like in the Hanoi papers.

He was certain he would be killed in Vietnam.

Born into a Catholic family (the Gillis was as Irish as the red hair and scratchy beard), he’d been dutifully impressed during the early days of his youth and the attendant thrice-weekly catechism classes in the basement of the church, with the sacrifices Jesus had made for an unrepentant, self-indulging mankind, and became convinced at the age of twelve that his masturbatory expertise would damn him forever in Hell, no matter how many Hail Marys or Our Fathers he said in penance. He had recognized in some of his Italian friends, and in the few Jews who did construction work with him, an inordinate sense of guilt that indicated a kinship in spirit if not in any other discernible way. Irish, and therefore presumably immune to the pains of self-flagellation, his own feeling of guilt — exacerbated by the fact that he no longer went to confession or even to church — seemed almost as extravagant as those shared by his ethnic co-workers. He was certain that an ever-watchful God up there someplace had His eye on Paul Michael Gillis, and that a Vietnamese bullet, or perhaps a bayonet, would serve as the instrument of His vengeance. In short, he had decided to run before he got his fucking “Greeting!” notice and they sent him to some fucking jungle where he would step on an excrement-dipped punji stick that was razor-sharp enough to penetrate the sole of a combat boot, provided some Gook didn’t shoot him first.

He told her he had considered running from the moment he’d read those fifty-fifty figures on the morning after the lottery, but what had firmly convinced him that this was the nobler course of action was a book he’d read and subsequently stolen from the New York Public Library — “I still have it in my duffel, in fact, just a second,” he said, and rose from the bed with a swift, angular motion, padding across the room as though dodging one of the murderous linebackers who’d injured his knee, pulling the tassle on the shade to flood the room with surprising Amsterdam sunshine, and then stooping over his duffel and rummaging through it, his back to her, the light mantling his shoulders and setting aflame his red hair. When he came back to the bed, he was carrying not one book, but two.

The first was the book he’d just mentioned, a novel, which title he refused to reveal just yet, placing the book face down on the end table near the bed. The second was a black notebook some five inches wide by eight inches long. He explained to her that he had begun keeping a sort of diary after he got out of Cardinal Hayes, in which he recorded everyday events and his reactions to them. He had also begun reading voraciously, a habit he’d never developed in high school, being at the time more interested in football and girls than in literature.

Browsing the shelves of the public library, he borrowed whichever books appealed to him by title or through a scanning of the first few paragraphs. He was, he told her, an expert on first lines and could quote accurately and from memory the first line of any book he’d ever read. It was his opinion that a writer spent a lot of time polishing that first line because this was the initial impression, you know, like meeting somebody for the very first time, and noticing her eyes, or her hair (“You have beautiful eyes and hair, by the way”) and deciding right then and there that you either like or dislike what you’re seeing.

He had, perhaps because this was in effect his first true encounter with that vast world illuminated between the covers of a book, kept a record of everything he’d read since getting out of Cardinal Hayes last June. The list wasn’t quite staggering, but it was prodigious nonetheless. In ten months he had read 141 books, a rather high total for anyone who had not been trained in speed reading. In a small, precise (and proud, it seemed to her) hand, he had listed the titles one below the other. Many of them were unfamiliar to Lissie.

She recognized The Sun Also Rises, of course, and The Good Earth (“It was Wang Lung’s marriage day,” Paul said, as her finger traveled down the lined page) and Freedom Road and, with a short trill of surprise, Magnificent Obsession, which she’d read during those two weeks she’d spent with Grandmother and Grandfather Harding on the Cape. But titles like Soap Behind the Ears by Cornelia Otis Skinner, or Random Harvest by James Hilton, or Saratoga Trunk by Edna Ferber were totally unknown to her. Well, here was another one she’d read — Black Boy by Richard Wright — but what on earth was Low Man on a Totem Pole by some man named H. Allen Smith, or Dragonwyck by Anya Seton? She knew Ngaio Marsh was a mystery writer, but had never read any of his books (Was he Japanese? Was he even a he, or was Ngaio a woman’s name?) and she’d certainly never heard of Artists in Crime. Ah, here were some recent titles: Slaughterhouse-Five, which she’d read and liked, and The Andromeda Strain, and Love Story, which she positively adored.

“Didn’t you just love it?” she said.

“Yeah, it was good,” Paul said briefly, and then immediately quoted the first line, which even Lissie knew by heart, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?”

But what on earth was This Above All, and who was Eric Knight to have so boldly plundered Polonius’s speech to his son Laertes?

This Above All, as it turned out, was the novel that had finally convinced Paul to run. “This book,” he said now, turning it face side up on the bedside table so that Lissie could read the title, and then moving it onto his lap so it rested on his thigh, somewhere between his flaccid, soft, utterly vulnerable and sweet penis, and the minisectomy scar on his left leg, equally vulnerable looking.

“Well, actually this one and two others. All Quiet on the Western Front, do you see it listed there? It’s by a German writer, and it’s about World War I — ‘We are at rest five miles behind the front,’ that’s the first line — and Johnny Got His Gun by this man named Dalton Trumbo, which is about a guy — it’s listed there, do you see it? — who gets his arms and his legs and his face blown away in the war, and he’s just this trunk now, just this piece of meat lying on the bed with a little bit of gauze over his missing face. Jesus, what a book!

“But This Above All is about a British soldier who’s in the rearguard action at Dunkirk during World War II and who later deserts because he’s trying to be true to himself, you know, to his own values, I mean. When I read it, I was already worried about those figures in the paper, but then I suddenly began worrying about my values, you know? Did I really want to fight a war that was a bunch of bullshit? I mean, never mind getting killed or coming home a basket case like that guy in Johnny Got His Gun. What about the morality, do you understand me? What about killing some poor bastard Gook who maybe didn’t want to fight this war the same way I didn’t want to? So I split. Simple as that. And here I am.”

There was in Paul Gillis much of the streetwise urchin, the cunning New York City waif (a true waif now that he was a draft dodger) forced to live by his wits in a hostile world, a city-honed attitude that had caused him first to consider and then actively to pursue running as an expedient solution to what, in her reasoning mind, was far from a foregone conclusion but still only an even possibility — his number coming up before the year was out. Herself born and raised in the city, Lissie had nonetheless led the sheltered life of a suburban small-town preppie ever since she was twelve, when her parents shipped her off to Henderson, and she now found this combination of tough urban resiliency and childlike helplessness irresistibly attractive.

She loved the brisk way he moved, as though dodging taxi cabs or pushing his way into a subway train. She loved the clipped cadences of his Bronx speech with its frequently interjected “you know” or “I mean,” verbal tics she supposed ran rampant among young people everywhere but which she associated exclusively with New York and, by extension, Paul Gillis. She loved his silly scratchy beard and his dark brooding eyes, and his long, angular body. She loved the swiftness about him, the pace of him, the sheer momentum of him. She loved his hard-edged assertiveness and his surprising vulnerability. But most of all, she loved the way he made love to her.

That spring in Amsterdam, as she succumbed to a passion she had never before experienced, she recognized at once and without question that she would follow Paul Gillis wherever he went, wherever he chose to lead her.

The call from Venice did not come until April 28, the Tuesday before Jamie was scheduled to leave for Louisville on assignment for Sports Illustrated. He was nervous about going down there. The job was a plum of sorts; Sports Illustrated rarely doled out freelance assignments, preferring instead to use staff photographers for coverage of this sort. But it wasn’t this singular recognition that caused his anxiety; he knew the assignment couldn’t possibly present any insurmountable professional problems. He was nervous because he and Joanna, after considerable discussion, had decided to risk going down there together.

They had made their decision cautiously and soberly, weighing the opportunity for being alone together against the virtually impossible odds of running into anyone they knew at the Derby. He had wondered aloud, at the time, whether or not his eagerness to get away had anything to do with whatever he was feeling about his daughter. He had not heard from her since her London letter of the twentieth, and Evert Goedkoop’s telephone call had done little to reassure him. Not knowing what to do next, Jamie had phoned his lawyer, who repeated essentially what Goedkoop had said: American kids traveling in Europe were safer than they would be in Central Park, and he was sure Lissie would be contacting them soon. She had, after all, been gone for only a few weeks.

When the darkroom phone rang, he half-expected it would be Joanna, calling to finalize their plans.

“Hello?” he said.

“Dad?” the voice on the other end asked.

He was speechless for a moment. Recognizing her voice at once, astonished and relieved, suspecting from the crackling static on the line that she was calling from thousands of miles away, where a collect call would have been difficult if not impossible to place, he stammered, “Hey, hi, Lissie, hi, how are you?” as though she were calling from Boston instead, as though he’d seen her only a few days earlier.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t called or written sooner, but things have been sort of hectic here. Barbara and I...”

“Hectic how?” he asked at once. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

“Well, I was getting to that. I don’t mean there’s been any problem, you don’t have to worry, I’m fine. I just meant getting to see everything over here, and trying to figure out...”

“Where? Where’s here?”

“Well, right now I’m in Venice.”

“Venice?” he said. “What are you doing in Venice? I thought...”

“Well, that’s why I’m calling, Dad. How’s Mom?”

“Fine,” he said. “What are you doing in Venice? It seems to me you’re moving farther away from...”

“Yeah, but I’ll be heading home in a few days.”

“Good. You have no idea...”

“In fact, I’m calling because...”

“... how worried Mom and I have been. This is the best news I’ve...”

“The thing is, I’ll need some money, Dad.”

“Sure,” he said, “certainly.”

“To buy a plane ticket back.”

“Right, fine.”

“I was hoping you could wire me five hundred dollars care of American Express here in Venice, I have the address if you’d like to take it down. It’s Melissa Croft — well, you still know my name, I guess,” she said, and giggled, “care of American Express, 1261 Bocca de...”

“Why do you need five hundred, Liss? I’ll send you whatever it takes to get you home, of course, but five hundred sounds...”

“Well, just in case,” she said.

“In case of what? How much is the fare?”

“Two-seventy-seven. That’s one-way tourist from Venice to Kennedy. I’d have to connect either at Heathrow, or else Malpensa in Milan, or Orly in Paris. But the fare is the same either way.”

“If it’s two-seventy-seven, why do you need five hundred?”

“In case there’s a delay or anything. Frankly, Dad, I’m running short of cash. So in case we can’t get reservations and have to stay a day or two longer...”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and Barbara.”

“Even so, wouldn’t it be easier if I bought a prepaid ticket on this end?”

“No, I don’t think so. Anyway, I don’t want you to go to that kind of trouble. If you’d just send me five hundred care of American Express...”

“It wouldn’t be any trouble at all,” Jamie said. “In fact, it’d save you running around all over Venice trying to...”

“American Express is right in the Piazza, I can easily...”

“Let me prepay the ticket on this end, okay?”

“Why? Don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you, Lissie.”

“Then just send me the five hundred, okay?”

He hesitated, and then said, “I’d rather prepay it here. I’ll call Andrews Travel right away. I’m sure they can arrange to have a ticket waiting for you in Venice tomorrow morning. Maybe even sooner.”

“Well... where would that be? The ticket, I mean.”

“Let’s say the main office of Alitalia. I’m sure they have...”

“I don’t even know where that is. You see, Dad, that’s the point. If you sent me the cash, I could just drop by American Express, which is right here on the...”

“I’m sure you could find Alitalia’s main ticket office.”

“I guess so, but it’d be simpler...”

“I prefer doing it this way,” Jamie said.

There was a silence on the line.

“Okay?” he said.

“Sure,” Lissie said.

There was another silence, longer this time.

“I certainly don’t want to argue with you,” she said.

“Where are you staying?” he asked. “In case I need to reach you.”

“Why would you need to reach me? If you’re arranging for the ticket...”

“Just in case there’s any problem.”

“What kind of problem could there be?”

“Lissie... where are you staying?”

“Well... we haven’t found a place yet. We just got off the train a little while ago. We had something to eat at a little trattoria, and I called you right afterward.”

“What time is it there?”

“Six-thirty.”

“Will you find a place for the night?”

“Yes, sure, we’re both exhausted.”

“Be sure to go to Alitalia first thing tomorrow morning...”

“I will.”

“The main ticket office.”

“Right.”

“Find out where it is.”

“I will.”

“And when you’ve got the ticket, I’d appreciate it if you called home collect to let us know.”

“Collect is a hassle, Dad, but I’ll get through to you one way or another.”

“We love you, Lissie, and can’t wait to see you.”

“I love you, too,” she said.

“Call us in the morning.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Right after you’ve picked up the ticket.”

“I will.”

“I love you, Liss.”

“I love you, too.”

He put the phone back on the wall cradle, and stood standing by the darkroom sink for several moments. Then he shoved open the door to the outer room, blinked against the sunlight, blinding after the amber-light blackness, and crossed at once to the telephone on his desk. He dialed Andrews Travel in White Plains and spoke to a woman named Miss Kirsch there, who told him Alitalia had a flight leaving Venice at 10:30 A.M. every morning — that was flight 189 — arriving in Milan at 11:40, and connecting with their flight 626 leaving Malpensa at 1:00 P.M. and arriving at Kennedy at 3:45 local time.

She told him a prepaid ticket could most likely be waiting for his daughter tomorrow morning at Alitalia’s main office on the Campo San Moise, but just to play it safe, he might instead consider booking a few days ahead, say Thursday, April 30, just in case any problem arose. Jamie told her to go ahead and book the Thursday morning flight in Melissa Croft’s name, and when asked for her local address, had to say he didn’t know where she was staying as yet. Miss Kirsch told him that the one-way ticket to Kennedy would cost $277 plus tax, and asked if he would like to put this on a credit card. He charged it to American Express, and after several more assurances from Miss Kirsch that the ticket would be there and waiting for Lissie, he hung up. His heart was pounding. He remembered all at once that he would be in Louisville on the thirtieth, and debated calling Lew Barker to beg off the assignment, get him to contact Sports Illustrated, see if they wouldn’t settle for another photographer. He didn’t know quite what to do. He was picking up the phone to call Joanna when he heard Connie’s car turning into the driveway. He went out of the studio, and reached her just as she was opening the door of the station wagon.

Grinning, he said, “Lissie just called from Venice. She’s fine, she’ll be coming home Thursday.”

“Thank God,” Connie said.

“I’ve already arranged for a prepaid ticket.”

“Thank God,” she said again.

He helped her with the grocery bags in the back of the wagon, carrying them to the house for her, and then — as he put the bags on the kitchen table, his back to her — he said, “What should I do about Louisville?”

“What do you mean?” Connie asked.

He turned to face her.

“I’m supposed to leave tomorrow,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” she said, and her eyes met his.

“Well... what should I do?”

“Do you want to go?”

“It’s a good assignment.”

Her gaze refused to waver. He felt suddenly that she knew he would not be going to Louisville alone, she had learned somehow about him and Joanna, or perhaps only sensed it, but she knew, she knew.

“Are you asking me whether you should go?” Connie said.

“Well... yes, I suppose so.”

“That’s a decision you have to make for yourself, isn’t it?”

“It’s just that... Lissie has to be picked up, you know. At the airport, you know.”

Her eyes were locked into his, her gaze was steady, searching. “Yes, I know,” she said.

“And I’d like to be here when she arrives.”

“Well, I could pick her up.”

“Yes, but...”

“It’s not such a big deal.”

“Still...”

“Can you get out of the assignment at this late date?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Or is it something...?” Connie hesitated. “Something you’re already deeply committed to?”

“I’d have to check with Lew.”

“Yes, check with him,” Connie said, and sighed. “I’d like to take a bath, I’m exhausted.” She hesitated again. “Would you... do you think you might want to come upstairs later? When I’m out of the tub?”

“Yes, sure,” he said.

“If you want to,” she said. “And you think about Louisville, okay? About whether you really feel you should go, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

Her eyes lingered a moment longer, and then she turned away from him.

In the downstairs bar of the Louisville hotel, Jamie and Joanna struck up a conversation with a sloe-eyed brunette from Mississippi who told him she came up to the Derby each year with her daddy, not because she enjoyed the race itself (“It’s aftuh awl, onleh two minutes long”) but because she enjoyed all the excitement before the race.

They sat beside her listening. They were holding hands. This was the first time they’d been away together. Tonight would be the first time they’d ever made love in any bed but Joanna’s.

“When did y’all get here?” the brunette asked.

“Just a little while ago,” Jamie said.

“Way-ell, y’just about missed out on all the good fun,” she said.

It seemed that a Knights of Columbus dinner had taken place on Monday night, to which she’d been invited with her daddy, not because he was a Catholic (“We’ah both Methodists”) but only because he knew a man in Louisville who belonged to that order, and they’d also missed the bicycle and tricycle races out at the Fairgrounds Speedway, and the Pegasus Parade along Broadway (“With all those yew-mon-gous, goh-geous floats”), and the Great Steamboat Race between the Belle of Louisiana and Cincinnati’s Delta Queen, “and, oh, just scads of other excitin’ thangs.”

When Jamie mentioned that he was a photographer on assignment for Sports Illustrated and regretted having missed these eminently photographable events, she told him he should have been here last night, when the Thoroughbred Breeders of Kentucky gave their big dinner, because lots of sportswriters were invited to it each year, and whereas her daddy didn’t breed horses (“Though he sure can bet ’em”), she was certain he could have arranged for Jamie to have been invited because he knew the Louisville newspaperman who moderated the panel. She said all this in a boozy drawl that was sometimes unintelligible, her meaning sifting through a mist of alcohol fumes and a layer of treacle, and then ordered another martini.

Her daddy, she told them, owned a thousand acres of choice land in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, if they were familiar with that part of the state, upon which he planted cotton and soybeans. The property had been inherited from his mother, and he gentleman-farmed it together with his three brothers for an annual income she guessed was in the “hah six figgers.” Bonnie Ellen herself (“Mah name’s Scotch-Irish, but whose isn’t in the South?”) expected to be graduated this June from the University of Mississippi, where she was majoring in business administration, after which she planned to join the family enterprise at its headquarters in Monroe at a beginning salary of $34,000 a year (“Give or take a few pennehs”).

Listening to her, Jamie found himself wondering if Lissie was at this moment sitting in a bar someplace in Venice, talking to a pair of strangers, telling them why she had suddenly left home, telling them (perhaps) how much she missed her parents, confiding how eager she was to be flying back to the States again tomorrow. Listening to Bonnie Ellen, contrasting her seeming maturity with his daughter’s still childish (to him) behavior — but after all, Bonnie Ellen was several years older — he wondered whether Lissie would one day be graduating from a university in June, wondered if she would one day enter a vast and sprawling business enterprise at a salary of $34,000 a year, give or take a few pennies.

Wondering all this, he found himself unburdening to Bonnie Ellen all his fears and doubts, telling her that his eighteen-year-old daughter (“You surely don’t have an eighteen-year-old daughter!”) had been traveling all over Europe for what seemed like forever, even though it had only been since the middle of the month sometime, telling her how they’d heard from her only twice in all that time, once in a letter she’d written from London, and the next time only yesterday, from Venice, a phone call this time, to tell him she’d be coming home. He told Bonnie Ellen he’d arranged for a prepaid ticket to be waiting for his daughter in Venice, and told her too how eager he was to see her again. Bonnie Ellen spread her hand on his thigh and said, “You’re really a very genuinely deep nice man, aren’t you?”

In the elevator on the way up to their room, Joanna said, “How’d you like her hand?”

“Whose hand?” Jamie said, surprised.

“Bonnie Ellen Cornpone’s.”

“What hand?”

“The one on your thigh.”

“Come on, she didn’t have her hand on my thigh.”

“Another inch, and it would’ve been on your cock,” Joanna said.

“I didn’t even feel it.”

“Maybe you’re paralyzed, dollink?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Kidding? I wanted to kill her. ‘Y’all are really a very genuinely deep nahss man, ahn’t you?’ ” Joanna mimicked.

Jamie laughed. “I wasn’t even aware, I mean it,” he said.

She was silent all the way up to the third floor, silent as he unlocked the door to their room, silent as they undressed for bed. Then, lying beside him, she said, “You know what bothered me more than her fucking restless fingers?”

“Joanna, I really didn’t even feel...”

“Feel, shmeel. Why’d you spill out your life story to her?”

“Well, she... she made me think of Lissie somehow.”

“Who do I make you think of somehow?”

“Not Lissie, that’s for sure.”

“How come you never talk to me about Lissie?”

“I didn’t think you were interested.”

“I’m interested in everything about you.”

“I just thought...”

“Everything,” Joanna said, and reached for him. “The next time any woman puts her hand anywhere close to this thing,” she said, her hand tightening on him, “I’ll cut it off.”

“Her hand?”

“You’d better hope it’s only her hand,” Joanna said, and rolled on top of him, and looked directly into his face. “I want to share with you, Jamie,” she said.

“All right,” he said softly.

“Everything.”

“All right,” he said, and smiled.

He fell asleep content later, thinking his daughter would be home sometime tomorrow night.

He had told Connie where he’d be staying in Louisville, and had cautioned Joanna against answering the phone when the expected call came. It came at 4:30 P.M. the next day. He snatched the phone from the receiver at once.

“Hello?” he said.

“Jamie?”

“Yes, hi, Connie.”

“She’s not on the plane.”

“What?”

“She’s not on it. Everyone’s been through customs already, she’s not on the plane.”

“Well, what... what?”

“Jamie, she’s not on the fucking plane!”

“Where is she then?” he asked idiotically.

“What?” Connie said. “What do you mean, where?”

“Jesus,” he said. “Are you sure you...?”

“I’m trying to get a manifest now. But, Jamie, they’ve all come through customs already, I’m sure she...”

“Jesus,” he said again. “All right, look, I... let me call Andrews Travel. Where are you, give me the number there, I’ll get right back to—”

“What’s the good of calling Andrews? If she’s not on the plane...”

“Well, maybe there was some mixup. Give me the number there, will you?”

“No, let me call you back. I’ve got Alitalia checking, they may...”

“Okay, fine. Give me half an hour or so.”

“Jamie... what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s hope...” He let the sentence trail.

“I’ll call you back,” she said.

“Yes, okay. Half an hour,” he said, and hung up.

“What is it?” Joanna asked.

“My daughter wasn’t on the plane,” he said, jiggling the receiver rest. “Come on,” he said impatiently.

When the telephone operator came on the line, he told her he needed information for White Plains, New York. She told him he could dial that directly, first a one, and then the area code, and then 555 and then — “All right, thanks,” he said abruptly. When he got the information operator, he asked for the number of Andrews Travel in White Plains, and then hastily dialed it. Lionel Andrews himself answered the phone.

Jamie filled him in on what had happened, and Andrews promised to get back to him as soon as he had checked. He did not call back until fifteen minutes later, when he informed Jamie that his daughter’s ticket had been exchanged in Venice for a “further transportation” ticket. Jamie wanted to know what that meant. Andrews explained that it meant further transportation in the amount of the face value of the ticket. “Further transportation to where?” Jamie asked. Andrews said he had no way of knowing that just yet, but he would continue checking. Maybe Alitalia would have some additional information. Or perhaps one of the other airlines—

“Yes, please keep after it,” Jamie said.

He said nothing to Joanna while he waited for Connie to call back. She called at a little past five. She told him Alitalia had checked their manifest, and no one named Melissa Croft had been aboard the airplane. They were now checking to see whether she had been on the connecting flight from Venice. If so, there was a chance she might have decided to stop over in Milan for a few days. Perhaps she was still on the way home, perhaps she—

“No,” Jamie said softly. “I don’t think so.”

Connie was silent for a long time. Then she said, “What now, Jamie?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“When will you be home?”

“After the race tomorrow.”

“Be careful,” she said, and hung up.

Joanna didn’t know quite what was happening.

Jamie was there to cover the running of the ninety-sixth annual Derby, and so he took his obligatory shots of the blooming tulips at Churchill Downs, the families picnicking on the infield, the college students tossing footballs, the vendors selling mint juleps at a buck and a quarter a throw, the stylishly dressed men and women in the clubhouse, the bettors at the windows, the trainers and owners in the paddock area. He was wearing two cameras around his neck, both Nikons, one with a wide-angle lens and the other with a 200-millimeter. Each time he took a roll of film from a camera to replace it with a fresh one, he marked it with a piece of adhesive tape upon which he inked a number and then jotted into a small notebook the identical number and a few words describing what was on the exposed roll, “So I can later identify the pictures for captioning,” he explained to her.

Those were virtually the only words he’d said to her all day long; she might just as well have been back in New York, sitting alone in her apartment. She had made a two-dollar win bet on one of the losers. She tore up her ticket as Jamie took a picture of the victorious jockey holding up his left hand in a V for Victory sign. He took a picture of the winner’s trainer, and yet another — a mood shot — of a balding old man staring disconsolately out at the trampled track, clutching a pair of losing tickets in his fist. Joanna kept wishing he would take a picture of her. Joanna kept wishing he would in some way indicate he was aware of her presence, squeeze her hand or throw her a smile, something, anything. But he went about his work methodically and efficiently (if a bit bloodlessly, she thought) and seemed glad when it was all over.

“I want to get back home,” he said, and she felt her first sense of foreboding, a sudden, secret terror that she was about to lose him. This was the first day of May. They had made love for the first time nine months ago, and now, for reasons she could not fathom, he seemed ready to vanish into that great beyond that swallowed married men once they felt they’d had enough and were in imminent danger of threatening the blissful, loveless arrangements they shared with their wives.

They were in the room packing when at last she said, “What is it, Jamie? What have I suddenly contracted? Halitosis? Leprosy? What?”

He looked up from his valise. He seemed on the edge of tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’ve hardly said a word to me all day.”

“I’m sorry. Really.”

“I know you’re upset about your daughter,” she said, “but I’m not aware that I did anything or said anything to turn you off this way. If there is something, I wish you’d...”

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I should’ve been at the airport to meet her.”

“Well... what difference would that have made? If she wasn’t on the plane...”

“She’d have been on the plane.”

“Come on, Jamie. You surely don’t believe...?”

“I should’ve been there, that’s all.”

“But how would that have changed anything? And anyway, forgive me, Jamie, but what have I got to do with your daughter’s whereabouts? What possible connection...?”

“Joanna... please. I’d rather not talk about it. Really.”

“Well, I would, damn it! She decides not to come home, and suddenly I’m the one getting punished. What kind of crazy compensatory substitution...?”

“You sound like Mandelbaum,” Jamie said.

“And you sound like—”

She cut herself short.

She shook her head.

“Jamie,” she said, “let’s not do this to each other, please.”

“Right, let’s not,” he said. “I certainly don’t want to end it with—”

“End it?” she said.

“The trip, I mean.”

She was staring at him now, a stunned look on her face.

“Let’s finish packing,” he said.

On the plane back to New York, he busied himself first with sorting out his little containers of exposed film and checking the numbers on them against the shabby little notebook he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket, next with reading Time magazine from cover to cover and pointing out in a friendly stranger-on-a-plane way the work of various photographers he knew, and then paying excessive gourmand attention to the virtually inedible “snack” the airline served, and finally — she was sure — flirting with the flight attendant, a bosomy southern belle who looked more like an Eighth Avenue hooker than the real-life ones prancing that stretch of sordid turf.

In the taxi on the way back to the city, he commented on how good it was to be home again in the Big Apple, and then repeated to her a joke he told her he’d overheard at the track, something about a dog learning to talk, something about a dog getting shot, she really wasn’t following it, her mind was on the looming possibility that this might be the last time in her life she’d ever see him. When he finished the joke, she laughed politely.

She was certain that she herself had little or nothing to do with his decision to end the relationship. She was being evicted by a person she’d never met, an eighteen-year-old twerp “finding herself,” or whatever the fuck she was doing, someplace in Europe, a daughter who, by her irresponsible mindlessness, her adolescent inability to get her immature ass on a goddamn airplane, was somehow causing this. She wished she could explore this further with him, probe whatever promises he had made to himself or to God — “Bring my daughter home safely, and I’ll never, never fuck around again” — investigate the possibility that he was linking his daughter’s profligacy to his own, perhaps even accepting as his own the guilt that silly teenage twit should have been feeling. But the taxi meter was ticking, the watch on Joanna’s wrist was ticking, the minutes were flying past, the opportunities were vanishing second by second.

“Here we are,” Jamie said.

He carried her suitcase up to the front door, and waited while she searched for her key, and then unlocked the door. She debated asking him to come in for a drink.

“I’ll call you,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

She watched as he went down the steps to the waiting taxi, watched as the taxi pulled away from the curb, knowing he would not call, knowing he was gone forever, and blaming it on his dumb wandering cunt of a daughter.

10

Secretly, Connie blamed it all on Jamie, tracing it back to that Sunday night in March when he’d delivered his long-distance telephone harangue to Lissie in San Francisco. His violent reaction that night had bewildered her at first, his anger seeming out of all proportion to what had actually happened. But then she’d begun wondering, Oedipus and Frank Lipscombe aside, just what had really triggered his rage. Had it truly been the knowledge that Lissie had lied to him, that Lissie was no longer a virgin, that Lissie was living with a boy he didn’t know? She wondered.

She had read somewhere — or perhaps Frank had revealed this during one of his learned Rutledge-party discourses — that unusual or unexpected behavior, deviation from set routines or schedules, unexplained absences, long meditative silences and deep sighs, sudden outbursts of anger, excessive apologies or remorseful breast-beating, all added up to trouble right here in River City, sure indicators that the male or female partner in a marriage was philandering. Jamie had over the past several months, certainly — and perhaps longer before she’d detected it — exhibited all of these symptoms, plus what she might have termed a lingering absence, a perpetual removal from the circumstances of their life together. She was, she came to realize, living with an empty cipher these days, and she thought she knew why: Jamie was involved with another woman.

The abiding suspicion that there was certainly someone else, the accompanying anger and indecision led to a helpless sort of despair in which Connie asked herself the same questions over and again: What should I do once I know for certain? Call his hand? End the marriage? Turn the other cheek? Do I even want to stay married to a man who needs other women? Is Diana Blair the other woman? Diana, who had once confided, “The way I look at it, Connie, there are the Titters and the Twatters. The girls who press their, you know, breasts against their partner’s chest, and the ones who use the, well, lower parts of their anatomies to achieve this... uh... closeness that makes it easier to dance well together. It becomes a problem for me, since I’ve been... uh... unfortunately and... uh... overabundantly endowed... well, Jesus, you know how big my tits are” — and here she’d giggled — “which of course makes it almost impossible for me to dance without some sort of frontal contact” — and she’d giggled again. Could he have possibly taken up with Diana Blair, the U.S. Open?

Maybe I should call her, Connie thought, pick up the phone, lay it right on the line: “Diana, are you having an affair with my husband?” An affair! The nice little words we’ve invented to accommodate the most despicable human behavior. Maybe the kids are right, maybe our values do reek, maybe our system is rotten and rotting further, maybe they’ve got the right idea, go out there and live with someone, live with a dozen someones on a commune, forget about marriage, forget about nineteen years of marriage — oh, dear God, what should I do?

She could not call Diana, nor could she flatly accuse Jamie of infidelity simply on the grounds that he’d been behaving strangely for the past God knew how many months. Without evidence that he was actually “philandering” (another one of our nice little words; fucking around was more like it) she would risk placing herself in an impossibly weak position if she happened to be wrong, become the abject, sniveling wife, “I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry — you rotten bastard!”

The anger.

This was the second week of May, they had at last heard from their daughter, who was living with someone named Paul on a Greek island named Mykonos. (“Are you someone?” an autograph hound once asked Connie outside the Helen Hayes Theater on an opening night. When was the last time she and Jamie had attended an opening together? Where had her husband gone? “Are you someone?”) Sometimes when she called the studio from work, the phone rang and rang with no one there to answer it. And when she discreetly (she hoped) questioned him later about where he’d been on those particular days, he always had a ready reason for his absence: he’d been in the city ordering supplies (But can’t you order supplies on the phone? she thought) or having some prints made (Isn’t there a darkroom at the studio, darling?) or interviewing a model or seeing Lew Barker or etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It was all the etceteras that bothered Connie. She wondered now if he went into the city at all on those days when he was away from the studio. Was he spending the time up here in the country instead, frolicking with Diana Blair?

Connie sometimes fantasized that she had a father who was kindly and understanding, generous to a fault, capable of discoursing on lofty subjects beyond her own ken or intelligence, warm and loving, offering advice untainted by prejudice, supportive and wise, entirely objective and uncensoring, a Judge Hardy (Harding?) who would call her into his study for a little chat before the fireplace. But Peter Harding, for all his nominal similarity to the character acted by Lewis Stone, whom she’d adored on the screens of countless movie theaters when she was a young girl (in those days, she had also loved Mickey Rooney with a passion beyond belief) was not the man to help her in the solution of anything more important than the pressing problem of the front doorbell: “You should have had them put a little light on it,” he’d once said, “so your company can see it in the dark.”

She had longed in these past several months to be able to spill out to him her innumerable fears about Lissie traveling alone through God knew which foreign countries, the dark and forbidding prospect that her daughter might never again return home, the confusion she’d felt about Lissie’s inconsiderateness, the unthinkable possibility that she might be injured or even killed while she was thousands of miles away. But no. “She’ll call, don’t worry,” and then dismissal of his granddaughter, as though the offspring of offspring were of absolutely no earthly concern to a man who ran his life with all the stopwatch precision of a time-analyst.

Oh, how she longed to open her heart to him, reveal to him everything that was troubling her about her daughter — and her husband. Who else was there to tell? Her mother was more a child than Lissie was, and her sister in Los Angeles had never truly been a confidante. It seemed ironic to her that the one person she had always trusted completely, the one person with whom she had always felt safe in confiding anything at all, was now the one person she could not ask for advice. Had Jamie gone alone to Louisville last week, or had he taken a woman with him? Oh, God, she thought. Help me, she thought. Help me, Daddy. What should I do?

Sometimes she found herself trembling with impotent rage, feeling in those moments utterly female, helpless in the grip of a centuries-old conspiracy of bondage and servitude, realizing in a flash as terrifying as an ozone-stinking bolt of lightning just how dependent she was on this man to whom she was married. Perhaps her father was correct in never deigning to honor her own silly occupation, her fiddling with the handicapped, the exalted $16,000-a-year job that would, should Jamie ever leave her, pay for almost none of the things she now shared with him.

Shamed by a glimpse of this selfish person who was herself, revolted by her own lack of courage, disgusted by this quaking fragile view of herself as the end product of a civilization that asked its females to drink sperm and enjoy it besides, knowing she should say something, storm at Jamie, insist on knowing, demand apologies, exact penance, force him to kiss her ass and lick her shoes, reduce this... this... rotten son of a bitch — and the rage would rise again, overwhelming her with its force.

Holding back her tears, refusing to cry, afraid to challenge him, hating him and loving him at the same time, bewildered and helpless in her confusion, she thought I have to do something, I have to save it, and wished with all her heart that her daughter was here by her side, to help remind Jamie that there was something important here they had all shared together and lived together — instead of on Mykonos where the green hills were flecked with flowers and the air blew in fresh over the Aegean.

He had spent almost the entire day with a fashion editor named Lucy Katz, a bright New York Jewish girl who’d graduated with a B.A. from Brooklyn College and who was working her way up to Vogue via McCall’s. She was twenty-four years old, a virtually hipless, titless blonde with Joanna’s blue eyes and a voice not unlike hers, distinctly New York-sounding, with an added flavor of Bensonhurst. They’d spent ten hours together working with a model who’d learned to walk in Skokie, Illinois, shooting take after take of her in a fall wardrobe, and finally quitting at 9:00 P.M., with the promise, or threat, of an 8:00 A.M. shoot ahead of them tomorrow. He’d called home to tell Connie he’d have to stay in the city that night, and then had accepted Lucy’s contrite (“It’s the least McCall’s can do for you”) invitation to dinner. Sitting side by side in the restaurant booth, commiserating about the shlock model who was getting seventy-five an hour, he startled himself by calling Lucy Lissie, and then — because the wine was good and the hour was late — he told her all about his daughter’s phone call from Venice, and the way he’d mishandled it, sending her a prepaid ticket instead of the money she’d wanted, which was maybe why she’d cashed the ticket in, after all, because he simply hadn’t trusted her enough with the cash.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “this was in September of 1939 — I was thirteen years old, my father was still alive — these three older kids and I cooked up a great idea on how to spend our last weekend before going back to school. We wanted to go fishing. We were all city kids, and none of us knew one end of a fishing pole from the other, but this was the end of summer, the Labor Day weekend, and we decided we’d ride our bikes up to City Island, and go fishing from the dock there...”

His father had been sitting in the kitchen washtub, taking his nightly bath, when Jamie came home to tell him about the plan. He was a giant of a man, and his knobby knees came to just under his chin as he soaped himself in the narrow boxlike tub and sang at the top of his lungs. He was singing “Now’s the Time to Fall in Love,” a Depression song about potatoes and tomatoes being cheaper; Jamie could to this day remember the song his father was singing on that September night in 1939. Before the Depression, his father had been a typesetter on the old New York World, had lost his job when the paper was purchased by Scripps-McRae in 1931, and had since held a series of odd jobs, doing whatever kind of work he could get. He’d started working that summer for the ice and coal station on Second Avenue, making deliveries for them all over Manhattan. When he got home each night, filthy with coal dust, he’d strip naked in the middle of the kitchen and climb into the washtub alongside the sink. He was in the tub that night, singing about the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, when Jamie excitedly unfolded the plan to him.

His father said no.

He had a lot of good reasons. It would take them forever to get to City Island by bicycle. The roads would be packed with traffic on the Labor Day weekend, and therefore dangerous. Where would they get fishing poles, did they have money to rent poles, did Jamie think money grew on trees? And how could they fish from the dock there, where seven hundred other people would be trying to do the same thing, seven thousand other people. They would have to rent a rowboat, did they have money for a rowboat, did Jamie think money grew on trees? And what did they plan to use for bait, and what ungodly hour of the night did they expect to get home, and on and on his father went, the wet coal dust streaking down his face, the washtub filling with blackening suds, his knobby knees poking islandlike out of the water. “The answer is no,” he said, and went back to singing about this being the time to fall in love.

“I keep thinking,” Jamie said now, “that maybe I’ve said no too often to her, that if maybe I’d said yes once in a while, she wouldn’t be in Greece today, and planning to move on to India. If I could relive that phone call from her, I’d do it in a minute.”

“You really do love her a lot, don’t you?” Lucy said, and gently put her hand on his arm, and suddenly he recalled the woman in Louisville who’d said, “You’re really a very genuinely deep nice man, aren’t you?” and the way Joanna had later mimicked those words.

“But you mustn’t blame yourself, really,” Lucy said, her voice very much like Joanna’s, higher-pitched but with the same cadences and lilt. “I wish I had a nickel for every time I gave my father a heart attack. It’s part of growing up,” she said, seemingly unmindful of the fact that she herself was only twenty-four, “something we all go through,” her hand touching his arm again, resting there, “but we all get over it.” She smiled, withdrew her hand to lift her wineglass, smiled over the glass as she sipped at the wine, put the glass back on the table again, and then rested her hand on his arm again, the fingers widespread.

After dinner she walked him to the Plaza, where he’d booked a room for the night, and asked if he’d like to have a nightcap in the Oak Bar. When he said he thought he’d better get some sleep before having to cope with the Skokie Marvel again, she said, “Or maybe you’d like to come to my place instead. For the nightcap, I mean. I’m right on Thirty-eighth.” He thanked her, but said no again, and they shook hands and said their good nights. Narrow hips swaying, she went down the steps opposite the fountain, and hailed a taxi.

It was close to midnight. Alone in his room, he almost called Joanna.

And then he thought, No, she’s forgotten me by now, she won’t even remember what I look like. Lew Barker, who was the biggest swordsman Jamie knew, once told him he was constantly shocked by the infidelity of women. “Not the playing-around of married women,” Lew had said, “that’s not the infidelity I’m talking about. Perhaps I mean inconstancy. Yes, that’s a better word, however Shakespearean. Inconstancy. I am constantly shocked by their inconstancy. I’ll enjoy an affair of several months’ duration with this or that delectable young thing, and then for one reason or another will not see her for a while. And then, if I call again to announce myself and my renewed intentions, why this young lady will say she’s no longer interested! When I remind her of the joys we shared together, the ecstatic heights to which we’d been transported, the fun and the laughter, the gay madcap adventure of it all, the romance of wading in the Seagram Building’s pool or waltzing with a blind man on Fifth Avenue — why, Jamie, she’ll have forgotten it all, she’ll have put it out of her mind, she’ll have dismissed me as if I’d never existed. It’s enough to break an old man’s heart, I tell you. The inconstancy of women. Enough to break an old man’s heart.”

He lifted the bedside telephone receiver.

He knew her number by heart, still knew it, started to dial it, and then hung up. I should have taken her up on it, he thought, Lucy, I should have said, “Sure, why not, let’s go to your place for a nightcap, what the hell?” Same blond hair and blue eyes, same young good looks, exactly the same, what the hell. But not the same at all. Not Joanna. Whom he loved.

He turned out the light.

It took him a long time to fall asleep.

They had still not heard from her by the night of Jamie’s birthday party. He was born on July 23, but that fell on a Thursday this year, and so Connie had planned the party for the following night. He knew there was going to be a gala celebration for his forty-fourth birthday; no one could have kept as a surprise the workmen hanging Japanese lanterns in the trees bordering the river, the caterers arriving to set up tables and chairs, the three-piece band (not rock, thank God!) who arrived looking bewildered at a little past seven, the leader complaining they’d been up and down the street twenty times already, searching for the mailbox. What Jamie hadn’t realized was that Connie had planned a party of such magnitude.

Taking her cue from Jamie’s own hanging of Lissie’s pictures each year in December, she had festooned the living room with pictures of him taken at various stages of his life, pictures of him as a somewhat scrawny little boy, and later as a tall and slender teenager; pictures of him in his Army uniform and on the Yale campus; pictures of him on their honeymoon, pictures of him holding the infant Lissie in his arms, even poster-size blowups of the pictures he’d taken for the first Life essay, so that the living room was a visual history of Jamie Croft from the first shot of him as a baby lying on a furry robe in a commercial photographer’s studio to a picture Connie herself had taken only two weeks earlier, a candid shot of Jamie at his desk, typing a letter to Lissie in Greece.

But she had also (and here she acknowledged her debt to Ralph Edwards) invited not only half the town of Rutledge and most of the people Jamie worked with in New York, but also many people Jamie thought he would never in his life see again. There was his closest friend from when he was a kid on Eighty-sixth Street (Jamie’s mother, who had helped Connie with the selection, stood by beaming as Jamie embraced the man), now a bit pudgy and going bald, an accountant in New Jersey. There was his old Army buddy, a rangy kid from Maine who’d trudged through the jungle by his side, and who’d once saved Jamie from an exploding grenade by tackling him and knocking him headlong off the machete-hewn trail; he was now a farmer, still living in Maine, married to a shy woman in her late thirties, who stood by uncertainly as Jamie and her husband reminisced about sudden death. There was Maury Atkins, his roommate from Yale, who had first warned him to stay away from Constance Harding, and who admitted jovially now that he’d almost made the biggest mistake of his life, embracing Connie, and surprising Jamie (Maury was now a banker in Bridgeport) by kissing him on both cheeks. There was Connie’s roommate from Lake Shore Drive, the bored-looking brunette who’d been sitting with her the first time he asked her to dance at that Yale mixer, the one who’d taught Connie to swear like a sailor. There was the couple who’d lived across the hall from them when they were renting their grubby little apartment on West Seventy-eighth; he’d been a dental student at the time, and his wife had worked for an insurance company; each night, as he’d pored over his textbooks and made his drawings of molars and bicuspids, she’d listened to the radio, wearing a headset and shaking her hips in time to the music as she washed and dried the dishes. There was the man who’d been the department head at the school where Jamie had taught photography three nights a week while waiting for his big break. There was the young, soft-spoken blond (now no longer young, his blond hair sifted with gray) assistant editor at Life, who’d murmured over and over again, “These are very good, these are very good,” before picking up the phone and asking someone named Charlie to come in and have a look. There was, under the Japanese lanterns on a surprisingly cool, clear night (it had been raining a lot this July), a steady parade of people from the past and the memories they evoked, and Jamie realized all at once just how long and how hard Connie had worked to reconstruct for him not only his own history, but the history they had shared together for so many years now.

In bed later that night, the partygoers gone, the Japanese lanterns extinguished and swaying in the treetops on a faint breeze that blew in over the river, the water trickling below their bedroom window, always a faint whisper in July, never the rushing torrent it became in March, she snuggled close to him and asked, “Did it make you happy, Jamie?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very happy.”

He did not mention that two people had been missing from his party. Two people missing from his life. His daughter Lissie. And his...

Joanna.

11

This is Asia.

It begins, really and truly begins, not ten miles outside the city. They have taken the ferry from the Galata Bridge to Uskudar, and have hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck piled high with ears of corn and driven by a Turkish farmer who does not speak a word of English. He drops them off at Izmit, before making a right turn onto a secondary road leading to Eskisehir, waving at them from the cab of the truck as it disappears in a cloud of dust. They walk almost half the distance from Izmit to Adapazari, at least twenty kilometers by their map. As dusk stains the western sky and a setting sun tinges the waters of the Black Sea to the north, they sit on their duffel bags by the side of the road, wearily waving their thumbs at passing automobiles and trucks. The huge trailer truck that finally stops is painted green, the legend LABERRIGUE & CIE, MARSEILLES painted in white on its side. The driver leans over toward the open window on his right. “Où allez-vous?” he asks.

“Nous allons à Delhi,” Lissie answers in hesitant French.

“Eh bien, montez-vous et soyez à l’aise. Je peux vous conduire jusqu’à Teheran.”

The driver’s name is Jean-François Bertaut, and he is transporting a load of heavy farm machinery from Marseilles to Teheran. He tells them this, after realizing how sparse Lissie’s French is (three years of it at the Henderson School, another semester of it at Brenner), in a heavily accented English that could provoke laughter were he not their benefactor on an alien road that is already succumbing to the long shadows of night.

In the roadside gloom beyond the window, Lissie sees a baggy-pantsed woman drawing water from a well, sees an ox-cart loaded with earthen jugs and driven by a man wearing a fur hat and a long mustache, sees terraced cornfields, and sunflowers growing in wild profusion and then — she thinks surely it is a mirage — a camel caravan! The laden beasts plod along in the dusk, men in turbans and flowing robes walking beside them, the dust rising to cause a further diffusion of the rapidly waning light. “Look, Paul!” she says, and he turns from where he is sitting beside her as the truck rumbles past the caravan, a dozen camels in all, she guesses. “Yeah,” he says, “wow,” and she thinks, I’m in Asia.

The driver wants to know what is happening in the United States, particularly among the young people. He is himself in his fifties, Lissie guesses, a rotund little man wearing a peaked woolen cap, a gray jacket over a green V-necked sweater, and a tan shirt. His eyes are a pale, faded blue, his nose bulbous and interlaced with thin red veins, the mark of a heavy drinker. He has a thick, blondish mustache. When he takes off his cap to mop a red handkerchief over the top of his head, Lissie is surprised to discover that he is almost entirely bald.

His frame of reference as it pertains to the young people of France is what he calls the “minirevolution” that occurred in Paris during the spring of 1968, when students took over the Sorbonne, openly smoking marijuana in the courtyard and demanding constitutional reform, chanting “De Gaulle, adieu! De Gaulle, adieu!” and precipitating a pitched battle with the French riot police in the Latin Quarter. Jean-François was there at the time, visiting his sister; he saw the armored trucks and water cannons, he personally observed the police firing tear-gas grenades at the students and workers, who in retaliation hurled Molotov cocktails and cobblestones they had torn up from the streets. He can understand the attitude of the workers — eight million of them went on strike, demanding higher wages and shorter hours — but why the students? What was their complaint? Paul and Lissie (he pronounces her name in the French manner — “Leez”) are both young people, perhaps they can explain to him what is troubling today’s youth, including his own son who is somewhere in Holland right this moment, “Peut-être qu’il fume l’herbe ou pire, eh, as I have coming to expect.”

They would have sounded inarticulate at best even to Englishspeaking adults back home as they, or more accurately Paul — Lissie has already begun to doze as the blackness of night surrounds the lumbering truck — tries to tell about the war in Vietnam, and the way kids all over America are being dumped on, and about the stupid laws regarding something harmless like marijuana, and about the corruption of the American government, and the nine-to-five mentality of the American male, and the corporate structure that is stifling individuality, and the oppression of women back in the States, and the emphasis on materialism, and the—

“Ah, oui, oui,” Jean-François says, not understanding at all.

It is, perhaps, not the best of all possible ways to be seeing a foreign country, especially one as exotic as this one. The road is a route traveled by caravans centuries before Christ was born, skirting the Black Sea until it angles off toward Ankara, and then never veering more than a hundred miles inland as it skewers Yozgat, Sivas, Erzincan and Erzurum, coming within fifty miles of the Russian border as it swoops down toward Diyadin and then Gürbulak, the last town on the Turkish side before entering Iran. Lissie must content herself with only glimpses of the countryside as the truck rumbles along on the relatively good road at a steady fifty-mile-an-hour clip except where there are excavations or detours (and there are many), at which times Jean-François slows down to a snail’s pace that enables her to appreciate more fully the strangeness of the nation through which they are traveling.

Summer is full upon the land here in the north of Turkey. In the apricot and apple orchards, the trees are already bearing fruit. Oxen and mules, horses, and here and there a straining man, pull ancient plows as they furrow the earth. Behind them, swarthy women wrapped in long scarves knotted over the forehead, draped about the throat, hanging down the back, squat to pick their potatoes or onions. Everywhere, the voices of the muezzin summon the faithful to their prayers. She learns to tell time by the chanting voices that float mellifluously from the minarets at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and the beginning of night, a darkness that falls with a sudden hush as the voices echo and die.

The lilting voices of children rising and falling on a sloping green field as they herd cattle homeward at dusk. The Kurdish voices of the men in the coffee house at a truck stop outside Imranli, rumbling out through the open arched doorway, not a woman in the room, the men mustached and bearded, two of them smoking water pipes, their dark eyes studying blond Lissie as she pauses in the doorway, all conversation stopping; she quickly takes Paul’s arm and follows Jean-François to a stand selling hot sausages and a drink that tastes like warm lemonade. The voices of shepherds calling to each other, leather smocks over cotton trousers, skullcaps and beards, a single star gleaming in the summertime sky.

The sheep are wearing blue beads around their necks — what are they for, she wonders. They pass farmhouses without electricity, the feeble glow of candles shining behind paneless windows. They pass fields of plants Jean-François identifies as poppies — “Coquelicots, vous savez,” — and vineyards bursting with young grape. As they come closer to the Iranian border, she can see in the distance the snow-covered peak of Mount Ararat, and she wonders all at once if Noah’s Ark is really up there someplace, as promised by the guidebook she purchased in Ankara.

The distance from Istanbul to the border is some 1,200 kilometers, which she figures at six-tenths of a mile for an approximate distance of 720 miles. Jean-François picked them up outside Izmit on the evening of the fifth. By his reckoning, they will reach the border early on the morning of the eighth; he is averaging thirty-five, forty miles an hour, and sleeping only when he is utterly exhausted, pulling the huge truck over to the side of the road whenever his eyelids begin to droop, catching an hour’s sleep here, two hours there, pushing on again as soon as he is refreshed.

It is four-thirty in the morning when they pass through the sleeping Turkish town of Gürbulak. Turkish customs at the border gives them no trouble at all. Jean-François knows some of the men on duty, one of whom speaks a bastard French, and they pay scant attention to his passport, his visa and his various other papers. The one who speaks French glances cursorily at Lissie’s passport and visa, and then studies Paul’s. Nodding, he hands the papers back and says a few words to Jean-François in French Lissie cannot understand but which she takes to be a comment about herself since the words are accompanied by a leer and a laugh she thinks is lewd. Waving, the man passes them through.

The Iranian customs barrier is a mile or so down the road.

A single light burns outside a ramshackle wooden hut painted white. The countryside around the hut is still black, the sky overcast and moonless, not a single star glowing in the somnolent night. Inside the hut, a radio is playing softly. Music. Odd-sounding stringed instruments. As the truck slows to a stop, she hears two men laughing inside the hut. Jean-François climbs down from the cab. A man in an olive-green uniform comes out of the hut. He is short and swarthy, and he is wearing a peaked cap tilted low on his forehead. He has a thick nose with a pencil-line mustache under it. Jean-François begins talking to the man in French. The man replies in a language Lissie imagines to be Persian, and then shakes his head impatiently, and goes back into the hut. A hooded light flicks on over the entrance door. When he emerges again, he is trailed by a slightly taller man wearing the same olive-green uniform but with different markings on his epaulets; his superior officer, Lissie guesses.

In English, the second man says to Jean-François, “Papers,” and holds out his hand. His attention is caught by the glint of Lissie’s blond hair in the cab of the truck, illuminated by the light the other man turned on. He squints his eyes, cranes his neck for a look into the cab, and still looking at Lissie, accepts the papers Jean-François extends to him. He has a cold; he keeps sniffing as he studies the papers, runs his forefinger under his dripping nose, and finally reaches for a handkerchief in his back pocket and blows his nose noisily before returning to the papers. In English, Jean-François explains that this is his passport, and this is his visa (“Yes, yes,” the officer says), and this his bill of lading, and this his authority to transport farm machinery into Iran, and this his carnet — “Yes, yes,” the officer says, “open the truck for me.”

Jean-François goes around to the back of the trailer, unlocks the padlock there, and opens the doors wide. Farm machinery, just as he’d explained. A tractor and a cultivator. That is all.

“You are going where?” the officer asks.

“Teheran.”

“And returning when?”

“Aussitôt que je... when I make délivrance.”

“When is that?”

“J’attends arriver... I expect arrive Teheran tomorrow.”

“And will leave Iran when?”

“Après-demain. The day next.”

“Close the doors,” the officer says, and comes around the rear of the truck to the cab again. From the driver’s side, he points up into the cab at Paul and says, “You. Papers.”

Paul slides over on the seat and is handing down his passport and visa when the officer says, “Here. Where I can see. The woman, too. You,” he says, pointing to her. “Blondie. Out of the truck.”

The word “Blondie” sends a shiver of unreasoning fear up her spine. She opens the door on her side of the cab, and then starts around the front of the truck to where the officer is waiting under the light. The engine is still running; Jean-François has not turned off the ignition, expecting this stop to be as brief as the one on the Turkish side had been. The headlights pierce the darkness ahead, illuminating the lowered black-and-white-striped border barrier. She feels the heat of the engine as she passes through the headlight beams to the other side of the cab where the officer is now looking at Paul’s passport.

“You have been where?” he says.

“Traveling directly here. Through Europe and then Turkey.”

“Where do you go now?”

“Delhi.”

“To return when?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Visa,” the officer says, and extends his hand. Paul gives him the visa they obtained at the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul. He looks at it, nods, says, “Fifteen-day transit.”

“Yes, sir.”

He hands the visa back. “How many cigarettes you have?” he asks.

“I don’t smoke,” Paul says.

“How many cigarettes?”

“None.”

“Whiskey?”

“None.”

“You have narcotics?” the officer asks.

“No, sir.”

“Marijuana?”

“No, sir.”

“Cocaine?”

“No, sir. Nothing.”

“You are American, and no marijuana?” the officer says, and laughs. “Blondie?” he says, and turns sharply to where Lissie is standing near the cab fender. “You have marijuana?”

“No,” she says. “No, sir.”

“Papers,” he says, and holds out his hand.

She puts her passport and her visa on his outstretched palm. He studies both, checks Lissie’s picture against her face, and then says, “Where do you go now?”

“To Delhi.”

“With boyfriend here?”

“Yes.”

“How many cigarettes you have?”

“None.”

“Whiskey?”

“None.”

“Where is your luggage?”

“In the truck. In the... back of the truck.”

“Open the door again,” he says to Jean-François over his shoulder. He looks at Lissie’s passport. “You were born... what is this?”

“December 19, 1951.”

“So you are how old?”

“Eighteen,” she says.

“Eighteen,” he repeats. “Nice, Blondie. Eighteen. Get your luggage.”

She walks around to the back of the truck, where Jean-François has again unlocked and opened the big doors. She pulls out her duffel and carries it to where the officer is now pacing under the overhead light.

“That is all?” he says.

“Yes.”

“One piece?”

“Yes.”

“Open it.”

She unzips the bag for him. He kneels beside it, pokes at it tentatively, and then reaches into it with both hands, feeling, rummaging. She watches silently as he riffles through her several pairs of blue jeans, her dozen or more bikini panties, her blouses and sweaters, her sandals and shoes. He unzips her cosmetics kit and seems fascinated by the array of lipsticks and eye liners. He studies her plastic container of birth-control pills.

“What is this?” he asks.

“Pills,” she says.

“Narcotics?”

“No, no. Birth control.”

“What is that, birth control?”

“You take them so you won’t have babies.”

“This?”

“One every day,” she says, and nods.

He looks at her skeptically, and then studies the manufacturer’s name on the circular container, and then the numbers for the days of the month, and then pops one of the pills out and studies the manufacturer’s colophon stamped onto the face of the pill itself. She thinks, He’s going to fuck up my cycle, the dope. The night air is chill. She shivers again, and zips up the front of her leather fighter-pilot’s jacket. He is trying now to put the pill back into the hole from which he popped it. He gives up, and drops the container and the loose pill back into the cosmetics kit. He zips it closed. He stands up.

“Inside,” he says.

“What for?” she says.

“Search,” he says. “Inside.”

“Search? For what?”

“Narcotics.”

“I have no narcotics.”

“We shall see. Inside.”

“Paul,” she says, turning to him.

“Listen,” Paul says, “she’s not carrying any dope, there’s no sense...”

“Shut up,” the man says. “Inside,” he says to Lissie.

“I’m an American citizen,” she says, immediately thinking she has said exactly the wrong thing. The man’s eyebrows arch. A smile crosses his face.

“Ah,” he says, “American citizen.”

“Yes,” she says. She is trembling now. She wishes she could stop trembling.

“Does America not have customs?”

“What?”

“La douane,” Jean-François says.

“What?” Lissie says.

“Do they not search?” the man asks.

“You... you already looked through my bag.”

“Inside,” he says.

“What for?”

“A more complete search. Inside.”

“No,” she says.

A more complete search means a body search. She’ll be damned if she’ll allow this officious little bastard to probe her cavities with his germy little fingers.

The unlikeliest hero steps forward. Fat little Jean-François Bertaut, his peaked woolen cap covering his bald head, his shaggy mustache bristling, his jacket open over his sweatered potbelly, says calmly and with only the faintest trace of a French accent, “I will be her witness.”

“What?” the officer says.

“À Teheran, je vais raconter aux officiers tout ce que est passé ici.”

“I do not speak French,” the officer says.

“I will say all what I see and hear. To les officiers in Teheran.” The officer turns away from him. “Inside,” he says to Lissie.

“Pas sans moi,” Jean-François says, moving into his path. “I will stay with the young girl.”

The officer hesitates. Hands on his hips, he stares at Jean-François, their eyes locked in silent combat. Lissie, terrified now, watches them. Is the officer wondering how the officials in Teheran will react to his demand for a body search when nothing in her bag seems to warrant one? Who are these officials in Teheran, anyway? Does Jean-François even know if there is anyone in that city to whom he can report unseemly conduct at the border? He has traveled this road many times before, so maybe he knows what he’s talking about. But what if he doesn’t? The officer keeps staring at him. Paul, standing by, says nothing. She will remember later that he did nothing, said nothing.

“Alors,” Jean-François says, “allons,” and takes Lissie’s arm, and jerks her toward the cab of the truck.

“The search will be made,” the officer says, and then to Jean-François, almost under his breath, “You may attend.”

She cannot at first comprehend how a body search in the presence of a courageous little Frenchman will differ in any way from one conducted in private. Reluctantly, she follows them both into the hut. Jean-François insists that the second officer go outside. His superior says something in Persian, and the man goes out to stand by the fender of the truck. He is lighting a cigarette when the senior officer closes the door.

The search, much to her surprise, is circumspect in every way. She realizes, as the officer delicately, gingerly, and cautiously pats her clothing and then looks through the shoes he has asked her to remove, that he is going through the search now only as a matter of face-saving routine. Whatever he had earlier planned or expected has been headed off by Jean-François’s intervention and his threats of reporting the entire incident to some nameless officials in the capital. The search takes no longer than three minutes. She remembers having looked up at the clock on the wall when she sat down to take off her loafers; she looks up at it again when the officer says, “That is all, you may go.” He turns to Jean-François then, and — with the faintest trace of a smile on his mouth — says, “Do you see, then, there was nothing to fear.”

Jean-François returns the smile. “Merci, mon capitain,” he says, “vous êtes très gentil.”

“I am not a captain,” the man replies, suddenly understanding French, and then abruptly turns away to light a cigarette. Dragging on it, he pulls open the door and calls something in Persian to his colleague. The other man immediately raises the striped border. They are both still standing outside the hut as Jean-François eases the big truck away from the border station. The senior officer has his hands on his hips, the cigarette dangling from his mouth. It is a quarter past five, and the sky in the east is already becoming light.

The seemingly endless, intermittent diatribe Paul delivers all the way to Teheran, some eight hundred kilometers and a bit more than ten hours from the border, is wasted on Lissie; she keeps thinking that he did nothing to stop what was about to happen to her. Aside from his early, feeble attempt to dissuade the officer, abruptly aborted when the man ordered him to shut up, he stood by helplessly while all those veiled threats fluttered ominously on the still predawn air, a Persian song-and-dance designed to frighten her into submission. And then what? Disrobe for them? Had they really expected her to suffer the indignity of an internal examination she might have denied even to a female customs official?

Rape had been in the air last night, she is certain of that, as chilling as the cold wind that blew in over the mountains to the north. A cozy hut-enclosed rape, to be sure, complete with radioed musical accompaniment — finger cymbals tinkling perhaps, tambourines jingling, the rhythmic strumming of a sitar, the lyric frenzy of a flute — but rape nonetheless. The fifty-dollar rape. Two gorillas with their olive-green trousers and undershorts down around their ankles, Lissie spread and struggling, Islamically invaded while outside Paul Michael Gillis shufflingly kicked shit and mumbled something about how long it was taking them to get to India.

She can understand (oh, sure, she can) how frightened he must have been by the officer’s inspection of his spanking-clean, brand-new passport. He is, after all, a draft dodger; he could not have called any further attention to himself once he was in the clear, even if it meant throwing Lissie to the wolves instead. But, Jesus Christ, couldn’t he have made at least a show of support, puffed out his manly chest, said, “Now see here, my good fellow,” clenched his fists, maybe even — if worse had come to worst — thrown both those little bastards over his shoulder in a sudden judo move?

No, not Paul. Stood by. Watched. Said nothing after he’d been told to shut up. True, those words had snapped on the dank morning air like the crack of a whip, sending a flutter of new fear through Lissie, causing her mouth to go suddenly dry. But she had been the one expecting imminent violation; she’d had every right to be frightened by that threatening little bastard with his snotty little fingers, plump fat sausages like the ones she’d seen hanging from trees in the Turkish countryside, the thought of those fingers touching her, poking at her, probing her — Jesus!

And now it is Paul who, in retrospect, is highly insulted. She pays scant attention to the Iranian landscape unfolding beyond the dust-streaked window on her right; she wants only to get through this fucking country as quickly as possible, hitch another ride the minute Jean-François drops them off in Teheran, get out of here, cross the border into Afghanistan and then Pakistan, keep on going till they reach a civilized place like India, where the people speak English they learned at Cambridge or Oxford. She pays even less attention to Paul’s rambling tirade, enormously pissed off by his behavior at the frontier and determined to make him pay for it somehow, if only by denying him the conjugal rights he has already accepted as his proper masculine due. Her mind wanders as he rides his high horse to the limits of his righteous anger.

He is using the border incident as a means of clarifying for Jean-François the indignities young people everywhere are forced to suffer at the hands of ignorant, uncaring adults who consider today’s youth a menace to the smug, self-satisfied, fat existences they enjoy at the expense of the poor, downtrodden masses who bear the brunt of taxation without true representation. On and on, he goes. The jails are full of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and draft dodgers, he says, all of them hippies in their own right, all of them fighting in their own way for a dignity denied them by the fucking Establishment, all of them chasing the fake American promise of freedom and equality for all regardless of race, creed, color, sex—

She doubts that Jean-François understands a fifth of what Paul is saying. As he keeps up his rambling monologue, she remembers the scorn with which the boy in the Princeton sweatshirt denounced America on that Cape Cod beach last year; remembers Judd at Woodstock, and the way he called grownups “the enemy”; remembers the atrocity stories the two Carnegie Tech dropouts told in San Francisco, and Barbara Duggan’s later speculation about the envy young people aroused by their mere existence. Half-listening to Paul, she wonders for the first time in months whether young people are as full of shit as adults are.

The road outside Teheran angles sharply northward at Asalak where they catch a ride in another truck, this one carrying fertilizer from a plant in Germany. The driver speaks only German. Hunched over the wheel, he carefully watches the asphalt ribbon that winds through the pass to Babol and the sea. They drive eastward along the Caspian for the better part of the day, coming at last to the town of Gorgãn, where the driver indicates to them in sign language that he will be spending the night here. It is only late afternoon, but a look at their map tells them that the nearest town of any size is Meshed, which they estimate to be some five hundred kilometers away — at least a ten-hour journey over twisting mountain roads. They eat mutton and boiled rice in a roadside teahouse, and then rent a small room there for the night. The room costs them twenty cents, and is furnished with a straw mat and a small silk prayer rug that would cost $600 back in the States. As Paul rolls over toward her, Lissie — for the first time in her life — claims she has a headache.

In the morning, and quite by chance since they had made no previous arrangement with him, they are picked up by the same German driver who seems happy to see them again, and who chatters on in German as though they understand him completely. They are in the mountains now, and traveling eastward along the Russian border, never more than seventy kilometers from it, and at one point — near Shirvan — less than fifty, the equivalent of thirty miles.

The road is tortuous and difficult. The German driver stops talking and concentrates on steering. They do not reach the bustling city of Meshed until long after dark. The German driver says his farewells, and they begin hitching again at once, catching first a small Iranian van carrying a mysterious cargo that rattles and clanks in the back, and then a larger truck en route from Istanbul and driven by a man who speaks only Greek. At midnight, they pass through the Iranian town of Taybad, cross the border without incident, and come into Islam Qala on the Afghan side. It is 12:20 on the morning of August 12. They are at this moment eighteen hours away from their rendezvous with the dogs of Shahnur.

Where earlier the truck route ran through the Elburz Mountains hugging the Caspian Sea and the Russian border, here in Afghanistan it avoids the loftier impassable peaks of the Hindu Kush range, and swings far to the south to enter the pass at Herat. Their Greek driver is following the route traveled by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.; he will emerge from the pass at Qala Adras, and then continue on south in a wide loop that will take them to Kandahar and then through Jaldak and Shahnur (where they will meet the wild dogs) and finally through Ghazni and Kabul and eastward through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan.

The roads are narrow; the posted speed limit is fifty kilometers, and everywhere the headlights pick out the small triangular, red-bordered signs that stand in warning on the rock-strewn edge of the road: S-curve ahead. And ahead. And ahead. And ahead. The mountain range lies upon the land like a giant twisted paw, its curved talons digging into the sandy wastes to the southwest. Lulled by the motion of the truck, Lissie dozes most of the night and awakens sometime after dawn to discover a sandswept vastness on her right, just outside the open window.

The deserts in this part of the world are linked by a topography that respects no artificially created geographical borders. On Lissie’s map, the Dasht-i-Margo here in Afghanistan seems only an extension of the Dasht-i-Lut in Iran. As she squints her eyes against the eastern sun into which the truck is driving head-on, she spots upon the horizon a band of nomads riding mules, not camels, and herding before them a dozen or more beasts that look like long-horned cattle. The men are wearing turbans and smocks over baggy pants and sandals, all a dusty white, men and animals blending with the furrowed, windblown sand behind them. The small caravan shimmers like a mirage in the morning sun, and then is gone as the truck rounds a hilly curve. The shade is merciful but brief, the shadow of the hill embracing the truck for only an instant before it emerges again into full sunlight. There is only the desert now — and the unblinking sky.

The Greek driver stinks of garlic. He is prone to farting as well, and his effusive, effluvial stenches — combined with the heat and the desert dust that assail the open windows — are making Lissie a trifle ill. Ahead, she sees in the distance what appears to be a roadside bazaar, and as they approach it, another smell joins the pervasive mix in the cab of the truck: the unmistakable aroma of mutton cooking in oil. She has been sniffing this same scent halfway across Asia now. It is usually accompanied, as it is now, by the sweeter smell of rice frying with raisins and nuts, and this heady combination wafts back toward the truck now to comingle with the stench of the Greek’s flatus, the Greek’s halitosis, the stifling desert heat, the choking desert dust — she will vomit.

But the Greek slows the truck to avoid running down the jabbering crowd of people clustered about the jerry-built bazaar, and finally stops the vehicle altogether. Announcing in Greek, with appropriate, unmistakable, hand-to-mouth gestures, that he is going to have some breakfast, he climbs down from the truck, accompanied by the miasma of his body odors, trailing his various stenches behind him, wrapping them around him like the vaporous clinging veils on the women who crowd the meat vendor’s stand.

Lissie buys herself a piece of the ubiquitous thin bread (here in Afghanistan it is called nan) and a cup of hot green tea. Paul, sitting cross-legged beside the Greek driver, is eating mutton and rice. He complains the mutton is stringy. They leave the bazaar at seven-thirty that morning. The wind blowing in off the desert is hot and dry. Lissie tilts onto her face the straw hat she bought at the Covered Bazaar in Istanbul. She closes her eyes. She hears the Greek driver trying some English on Paul. He gives up after a few sentences. The desert is still again. She dozes.

Shahnur is only eleven hours away.

It must be close to noon when they approach Yakchal. Ahead, she can hear the muezzin calling as the truck slows down outside the village. She can see a dozen men touching their foreheads to the ground before a gray wall with an arched niche in it. Their feet are bare, their exposed soles dirty against the white humps of their massed backs bent in supplication to Mohammed. At a turn in the road a bit farther on, a group of silent barefooted children stand beside a peeling wooden gate in an ancient stone wall. One of the girls — Lissie guesses she is eleven or twelve — is wearing a beaded necklace around her throat; it reminds Lissie of a necklace Grandmother Harding gave her when she was nine. The driver shifts gears after rounding the curve, and the truck gains speed again. Lissie yawns. In a little while she is dozing again.

She does not catch the name of the next town; she awakens someplace in the center of it when the driver begins honking his horn. The cause of his impatience is a flock of sheep being led by a turbaned boy carrying a stick. The highway here has become a narrow dirt road pressed on either side by gray-walled buildings, and the sheep are crowding the road from curb to curb, leisurely bleating as the boy indolently flicks his stick at them and the Greek driver angrily honks his horn. Several men at the curb gesture for him to shut up.

The flock of sheep parts to let the truck through. The boy with the stick makes a gesture remarkably like that of throwing a finger back home — has he met many Americans? — and the truck eases through amid a cacophony of its own honking horn, the bleating sheep, and the shouting street merchants. Whatever the name of the town (she misses it again, craning for a look at the sign on their way out) they are through it and on the highway again by 2:00 P.M.

In just four hours, they will meet the dogs of Shahnur.

The driver and Paul both want to push on for Kabul, which is the capital and which they are both sure they can reach before midnight. The roads will be less crowded after dark, they will make better time, and so on. But Lissie is exhausted, and she tells Paul she cannot spend another moment in the cramped cab of the truck; they have been driving steadily since early yesterday morning; her legs are stiff; this seems like a nice little village where she’s sure they can find a room for the night. She thanks the driver in English, and climbs down from the cab, almost stumbling. Paul, behind her, is clearly annoyed that they will be spending the night here. She tells him that she’s just about to get her period, which is one of the reasons she has chosen not to spend the next five or six hours in a truck with a flatulating Greek.

The village is situated in the valley through which the Arghandab River runs. As they stand on the dusty road, watching the truck rumble off northward and westward toward Kabul, she hears the first echoing chant of the muezzin calling worshippers to their sunset prayers, and sees the jagged edges of the mountaintops turning molten as though in religious response. She is desperately hungry, she realizes; she has had nothing to eat since the nan and tea early this morning. She is exhausted as well, and a bit irritable, and she wants only to find a place to eat, a place to stay before it gets dark. In the fields beyond, she can see the black felt tents of the nomad shepherds, glowing now in the rays of the setting sun. On the bank of the river, several women wearing black chadris — as the tentlike veils are called here in Afghanistan — pause in the washing of clothes and kneel to Mecca, their heads bowed, their hands clasped, behind a turbaned old man who similarly kneels and offers his prayers on the grassy bank. Lissie and Paul walk on the dirt road above the river. The shadows are lengthening.

She has not seen many dogs since they crossed the Bosphorus into Asia proper. She does not know if this has anything to do with religious belief (she knows, for example, that Islamic law does not permit the depiction of human beings or animals) or if it has only to do with exotic appetites; do they eat dogs in Muslim nations? Or is it possible that these people simply cannot afford to keep pets? She does not at first associate the skinny mongrel who comes around the side of the building with the black felt tents she sees just beyond, nor with the nomads’ sheep grazing on the greensward. She and Paul have been following the familiar aroma of broiling mutton, and are entering a walled courtyard which, they realize as soon as they see the stacked garbage, is on the kitchen side, at the rear of the low flat building. They are about to turn and retrace their steps when they see the dog entering the courtyard from the opposite end.

He is a spotted animal standing some two feet high, brown and white, with a pointed snout and glittering black eyes, a mongrel who seems to be a cross between a Doberman and a Dalmatian. “Hey there, boy,” Paul says, and is smiling and hefting his duffel onto his shoulder again when the dog’s ears go back and he bares his teeth. A low growl starts somewhere deep in his throat. He stands rooted to the spot near the cans of garbage stacked outside the kitchen, and Lissie realizes that he is only protecting his discovered turf, this treasure trove of inedible shit he has stumbled upon, and she whispers to Paul, “Let’s get out of here,” and they are backing away from the dog when suddenly he multiplies himself by two, and then by four, and there are eight dogs in that cloistered courtyard where only the spotted mongrel speaks in his low growl and in the distance the chant of the muezzin echoes and fades.

The dogs are poised and trembling.

As taut as drawn springs, they await only the hair-trigger release that will send them hurtling across the courtyard in attack. As yet, there is no barking. Only the spotted one speaks in his low growl, and the others wait and listen to the leader of the pack, their ears twitching to the modulated notes that rise and fall like the earlier chanting of the muezzin. As the sunlight fades, there are eight pairs of glittering eyes in that courtyard, fastened on these intruders who look different and sound different (she shouldn’t have spoken to Paul) and smell different from any human being they have ever known. She does not want to do anything to inspire the attack she is certain will come anyway, no sudden move, no shrill warning, especially no aroma of fear, which she is positive is seeping from every pore to pollute the air as surely as had the Greek’s farts. The leader of the pack is still growling. Perhaps he is as frightened as she is. Perhaps the growl is only his macho-dog act, perhaps he is only strutting his stuff for the seven mutts behind him, all of them watching with those glittering little eyes and those twitching ears, waiting. Cautiously, she places her hand on Paul’s arm. Watching the dogs, they begin backing out of the courtyard — and just then, the leader springs.

He seems propelled by the force of his own growl. He is airborne an instant after he begins his charge, his fangs bared as he lunges unerringly for the jugular. Lissie brings up her right arm and his jaws clamp on it, his fangs biting into naked flesh. She remembers something about hitting for the nose, and instinctively clenches her left hand and smashes the fist at the dog’s nose, remembering an instant later that it’s a shark you’re supposed to hit on the nose, a fucking shark, and wincing in pain as the weight of the animal knocks her flat on her back to the ground. His teeth are still clamped onto her forearm. The pain is excruciating. She smells the dog stink on him, and the putrid aroma of the garbage now scattered on the courtyard floor from the open can she knocked over when she fell. She does not know where Paul is, she prays with every religious remnant in her body that he hasn’t deserted her. She will pray in Islamic if that will help; just let him be there, just let him not have turned and deserted her.

The dog is gnawing on her arm as if it is the sundown meal he’d been searching for here in the courtyard. The other dogs are yapping in random frenzy, and she realizes as her eyes frantically graze the courtyard walls that Paul has fled through the gate, Paul has left her behind, Paul has run again. It is then that the truly terrifying thought comes to her: are these dogs starving? It is one thing to be bitten by an angry or a frightened animal; it is another to be eaten by a hungry one. Someone bursts into the courtyard from the kitchen door at the rear of the building. He is wearing baggy pants and a turban and an apron, and there is an ancient musket in his hands. There is another man behind him, waving a cleaver. The gun goes off. There is another shot, and the dogs begin barking now in unison against these new intruders, these shouting saviors, these nice Afghans who make such pretty rugs, these dear lovely people. She thinks But where the hell are you, Paul — and then faints from loss of blood, or hunger, or fear, or exhaustion, or everything.

12

He called his attorney. His attorney said there was no need for alarm but that it might be wise to call the State Department in Washington to see if they might be able to help him in locating Lissie. The man he spoke to there was named Mr. Brothers. Mr. Brothers told him there was virtually nothing the State Department could do. Unless they knew his daughter’s address, there was no way their various consuls in Asia could even begin making inquiries. He suggested that Jamie contact him again the moment he knew where his daughter could be reached. Jamie thanked him, and then hung up. He had called the State Department because he’d wanted help in locating his daughter; he had just been told to call back after he’d located his daughter.

He was a stranger to the part of the world in which his daughter was traveling. He telephoned the India Government Tourist Office and asked for a map to supplement the one in his 1967 Rand McNally Atlas, and then bought a half-dozen more maps in the Doubleday near Fifty-seventh. Some of them proved worthless while others were so detailed and sophisticated that they listed currency rates, time changes, temperatures and rainfalls at various times of the year, and even unlighted tollgates one might expect to encounter at night. The roadmaps gave him a sense of security. The countries through which she had passed, the country in which she was now traveling (presumably) seemed more civilized than he’d imagined them to be; there were primary roads and secondary roads and even little back roads, just as there were in Connecticut.

Like an armchair general planning a fall campaign, Jamie spread his roadmaps on the long table in the barn and tried to second-guess Lissie’s route.

Had she entered India at Lahore, which seemed likely, and then continued on to Delhi and eastward to Calcutta? Or had she gone up to Nepal instead? It was supposed to be beautiful there in Nepal, maybe they went right out of Delhi into Nepal, looks like maybe, what can this be, maybe nine hundred miles to Katmandu, that’s where they may have headed, supposed to be terrific there in Katmandu, temples and everything, monks, whatever, would have taken them maybe, well, how many miles a day would they be averaging, oh, figure thirty miles an hour, maybe a bit more, but say thirty and play it safe. So figure two hundred, two hundred and fifty miles a day, no more than that, they’d have been in Katmandu — well, let’s say they spent at least a few days in Delhi, let’s say they left Delhi on the twenty-first, they’d be in Katmandu by, where’s the calendar, well, I don’t need a calendar, just divide nine hundred by two-fifty, that’s close to four days, they’d have been in Katmandu by the twenty-fourth of August.

He made this calculation on Sunday, August 30, sixteen days after Lissie had written her last letter home. At a dinner party that night, he learned that both Reynolds McGruder here in Rutledge, and Matthew Bridges in nearby Talmadge, had a month ago received telegrams from the Defense Department stating that their respective sons had been killed in action. Apparently both young men (their lieutenants’ letters to each family read like carbon copies of each other) had been engaged in dropping supplies to a beleaguered South Vietnamese rifle company when the Vietcong opened fire and blasted the hovering helicopter out of the sky. It seemed as though Charlie hadn’t heard that the Americans might be pulling out. Or perhaps Charlie had simply decided that dropping ammunition and food could be considered aiding and abetting the enemy. Either way, Roger Bridges (who would have been twenty-one this month) and David McGruder (whose twentieth birthday would have come in December) would never again or respectively play drums and lead guitar in the group they had formed two years ago.

Dr. Frank Lipscombe warned Reynolds McGruder to keep a careful eye on his surviving son, lest he wrongly begin to feel that his brother had been killed in his stead, and then react hysterically to the unfortunate tragedy. This was not an uncommon wartime experience, Lipscombe explained to McGruder, witness the remarkable insights of the play Home of the Brave, where the hero suffered hysterical paralysis because of guilt feelings exacerbated on the battlefield. “The guilt in the case of your son Danny,” he said, “may be caused by an erroneous belief that only a stroke of luck sent him to college and David to Vietnam. In which case, he could easily...”

“Yes, I understand,” McGruder said. Tears were forming in his eyes. He turned away and went to sit quietly on the deck outside.

“How’s your daughter doing?” Lipscombe asked.

“Fine,” Jamie said. He never knew what to say when they asked.

“Where is she now? Home for the summer?”

“No,” Jamie said, and hesitated. “She’s in India.”

“India?”

“Yes.”

“Ah,” Lipscombe said.

Jamie waited. He knew what the next question would be. It had been asked of him a dozen times or more since that last letter from Lissie. It had been asked at Rutledge parties, and outside the Rutledge post office, and in the Rutledge hardware store, and once during a shoot in New York, and once in the steam room at the New York Athletic Club — the same question each and every time. Lipscombe asked the question now.

“Where in India?”

And Jamie, as always, hesitated. He didn’t know where in India. He had not heard from his daughter since the fourteenth of August.

“I don’t know where,” he said at last.

Lipscombe’s eyebrows went up onto his forehead. “Haven’t you heard from her?” he said.

“Not recently,” Jamie said.

“Well, I’m sure she’s all right,” Lipscombe said.

They all said that. You told them you didn’t know where your daughter was, and they all said, “Well, I’m sure she’s all right.”

Jamie was not at all sure she was all right.

He could not later remember exactly when he began to believe she was dead. It was certainly sometime in September. With a son, he thought, they draft him and the authorities know where he is at all times and if he gets killed in a rice paddy they send you a telegram like the one Reynolds got, or the one Matthew Bridges got, they send you a telegram. But with a daughter, there’s no one to keep track of where she’s been or where she’s going, no one but herself, and if she doesn’t choose to let you in on the secret, why then you are in the dark, man, you are sitting here in the autumn dark in the town of Rutledge, Connecticut, drinking strong whiskey neat on a cold September afternoon, the trees rattling, the wind wanting to know where the summer had gone? Where’d my golden girl of summer go, he wondered, where’s my darling Lissie?

He would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, and lie staring at the ceiling, wondering whether Connie was awake beside him, wondering (if she was asleep instead) whether he should awaken her to discuss the only thing that seemed to be on his mind these days, the possibility that his daughter was dead. He would lie there, certain now that Connie was awake beside him and possibly thinking the exact same thoughts, but he would say nothing to her, would lie there silently instead in the stillness of the night, and then become suddenly angry, trembling with an overriding fury that made him want to get up and knock the radio-clock off the dresser, or pick up the chair with his clothes draped over it, hurl it through the window, push his fist through plaster and lath, kick things, smash things — how could she be so fucking inconsiderate, didn’t she know they were back here waiting helplessly for some word from her, hoping against hope that she wasn’t—

Dead, he thought.

And the anger would vanish, and he would lie in the darkness as the grief enveloped him, the sadness touching his eyes, sitting behind his eyes but refusing him the mercy of tears, wrapping him as completely as a shroud, his face, his throat, suffocating him, constricting his chest, making it impossible for him to breathe in the dark, his daughter dead in the dark, she had abandoned his life and forfeited her own, in the dark, dead someplace in India. He mourned for her, but the tears would not come. His eyes burned with tears scalding from within and behind, but they would not come. He could not cry for the daughter he knew was dead but prayed was not.

Once, in the middle of the night at the beginning of October, he dared to cross the line he and Connie tacitly respected, dared to open the casket of horrors stored in the darkest corner of his dread, dared to whisper in the dark, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Connie sighed.

And said nothing.

Larry Kreuger called the very next day.

It was Lester Blair who found her.

He had come down from the house up on the ridge to walk his two Irish terriers through the woods near the reservoir. She was lying in the underbrush alongside the old logging road that paralleled the Blair driveway. The dogs stopped dead in their tracks. He thought at first they’d smelled a raccoon, or maybe a snake; there were lots of copperheads here near the water. One of the dogs began whimpering. Lester said, “Shh, boy,” and squinted through the foliage, and saw her lying on her side with the back of her head blown away.

She was wearing what looked to be a party dress, pink and silky and spattered with blood, the hem pulled back over pantyhose she must have torn coming through the woods, ladders up the sleek shiny sides of both legs, blood on the legs, too, blood all over the ground around her, shining on the fallen russet leaves. One of her high-heeled shoes had dropped from her foot. The foot looked particularly vulnerable without the shoe on it. More than anything else, that foot without a shoe on it seemed to sum up for Lester the utter vulnerability of the young girl who lay on the ground on the shiny red leaves. The weight of a twenty-gauge shotgun crushed the wet red leaves.

The call to Jamie came at 10:00 A.M. that Sunday morning, the eleventh day of October. He was sitting at the breakfast table with Connie, sipping at his coffee as he leafed through the Times Magazine section, studying the photographs, commenting every now and again on the particular ineptitude of this or that photographer; he had begun to notice about himself that he rarely commented on skill anymore, but only on the lack of it. When the phone rang, he took another sip of coffee before answering.

“Hello?” he said.

“Jamie, it’s Larry Kreuger. I’m sorry to be breaking in on your Sunday this way.”

His voice sounded odd. Jamie knew at once that something was wrong. He had no idea yet of the magnitude of the wrongness.

“What is it?” he asked at once.

“I wonder can you come on over.” Larry’s voice, southern, gentle, polite, was still underscored with an ominous note.

“What’s the matter?” Jamie asked.

“It’s Scarlett.”

“What about her?”

“She’s gone and killed herself,” Larry said, and his voice broke.

Two state troopers — both of them tall and strapping — were in the Kreuger living room when Jamie got there. The local police had just left, Lester told Jamie, shaking his hand at the front door, and then went on to relate how he had discovered the body in the woods while he was walking his dogs, and how he hadn’t known who she was, knew she was a local kid he’d seen around, but didn’t know her name. He’d run back up the hill to his house, and called the cops from the phone in the den, and then went back down to the logging road with them. In a little pink evening bag attached to a belt around her waist, they found a driver’s license identifying her as Scarlett Kreuger. “The thing that got me,” he said, “was her shoe was off, on the left foot, the shoe was off. That would have been the definitive shot. Bring the camera in tight on the foot and the shotgun lying beside it on the wet leaves. That would have defined it, Jamie. If we were doing it for television, I mean, where we can’t show the actual violence.”

Across the room, Jamie could hear the droning voice of one of the troopers. Larry looked up from where he was sitting on the couch, and signaled to him. Jamie walked across to him, aware of the whisper of his loafers on the thick carpet. Larry took his hand. “Glad you could come,” he said. “Sit down, these gentlemen were just asking some questions.”

“Melanie all right?”

“Yes, fine,” Larry said, nodding.

“Connie’s on her way over.”

“Fine,” Larry said. He’d been crying. His eyes were red, the lids puffed and swollen. But there were no tears on his face now; only a numbed and bewildered look. In the kitchen, Jamie could hear the hushed voices of consoling women.

“You were saying she went to this party at the country club last night,” one of the troopers prompted. Blue eyes. Blond hair at the sideburns. Pad open. Big gun holstered at his side; Jamie had heard that in some states the troopers used .357 Magnums, put a hole in a man the size of a sewer lid. He did not yet know that the jagged exit wound at the back of Scarlett’s head measured some six inches in diameter.

“Yes,” Larry said. “An engagement party. At the country club.”

“Which country club would that be, sir? The one here in Rutledge, or the...”

“The Talmadge Club.”

“Over near the university?”

“Yes.”

“Did she go alone, sir?”

“No.”

“Went with someone?”

“Yes.”

“A boy?”

“Yes, but not...”

“Would you know his name, sir?”

“Scotty Klein. Dr. Klein’s son.”

“Live here in Rutledge?”

“Yes. The Kleins are good friends of ours.”

“Came here to pick her up, did he? This... uh...” The trooper consulted his pad. “Scotty Klein, was it?”

“Yes, Scotty.”

“What time was that?”

“When he picked her up?”

“Yes.”

“About seven-thirty. But...”

“This her steady boyfriend or something?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Rusty Klein, that’s the...”

“Thought you said it was Scotty.”

“Yes, but this is the daughter. Rusty. She and my... daughter were in the same graduating class. The class of ’69. They all went together, you see. Rusty and... Scarlett, my daughter... and the Klein boy.”

“Oh, I see. So it wasn’t just the two of them.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“It was the two Klein kids and your daughter.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“How old is she, sir, your daughter?”

“Eighteen. She’ll be nineteen in...” He hesitated. He looked helplessly at Jamie. “She would have been... would have been nineteen next month.”

“And the Klein kids?”

“Rusty is my daughter’s age. I don’t know how old Scotty is. Younger, I know. I think he’s a senior at Lafayette.”

“Was it the Klein boy who was driving?”

“Yes.”

“Would you know what kind of car, sir?”

“What difference does any of this make?” Larry asked in his mild southern voice. “My daughter killed herself. You saw her lying on the ground there, you know she put that shotgun in her mouth and blew the back of her head off. The shotgun is mine, it was in the garage, on pegs there in the garage, wall pegs, she took the gun and shot herself with it, so why do you want to know what kind of car Scotty Klein was driving, what possible difference in the world can it make now what kind of car Scotty was driving?”

“Well, in case he... you see, sir, in something like this...”

“They dropped her off here at the house,” Larry said wearily. “At two in the morning. I heard the car in the driveway, I heard Scarlett calling good night to them, I heard the car leaving, I heard her coming in the house.”

“Then the Klein kids couldn’t have had anything to...”

“No, nothing at all.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We have to...”

“I understand.”

“After your daughter got home, did you hear her go out again?”

“No.”

“Did you see her or talk to her?”

“She put on the radio in the living room...”

“This was at two in the morning?”

“Yes. A rock-and-roll station. I called down for her to cut it down a bit. She said, ‘Okay, Dad,’ and lowered the volume and... and... we... we didn’t say anything else after that.”

“Didn’t hear her leave the house or anything?”

“No.”

“Did you know she was gone? I mean, this morning when you got up, did you...?”

“Not until the police came here. The Rutledge police. To... to ask if I’d come down to the... the old logging road near the reservoir... and... and... identify the body.”

“I’m sorry about all this, sir.”

“Yes.”

“Real sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll leave you now, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m sorry.”

The state troopers filed out of the room. Lester Blair closed the front door behind them, and then asked Jamie if he wanted a drink or anything. As discoverer of the body, he had obviously taken a proprietary interest. Jamie looked at his watch. It was still only ten-thirty in the morning; the call from Larry seemed to have come hours ago. He declined the drink, and Lester went out to the kitchen.

“I’m sorry I had to interrupt your weekend this way,” Larry said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jamie said, and found himself putting his arm awkwardly around Larry’s shoulders.

“You were the only one I could think of,” Larry said. “Because of the way Scarlett felt about you. How close you were.”

Jamie looked at him, not understanding.

“Your joking with her all the time, she got such a boot out of that, Jamie. Your asking her if she was just home from Atlanta, she always repeated that to me. And if we were having a party or anything, she always asked me was Mr. Croft coming. Made me envious sometimes, the way she admired you. Do you remember the story you had in one of those magazines last year, I forget which magazine it was, Jamie, you’ll have to forgive me, but it was about these runaway kids in the Village, do you remember it?”

“Yes, I remember it,” Jamie said.

“Read that story cover to cover, pointed out each and every picture to me. She was art editor of the school’s magazine you know, and later president of the Photography Club, which was when she became so deeply interested in your work. But it was as a man and a father she admired you most, and that was because Lissie was such a fine person and Scarlett loved her to death. Wanted to be just like Lissie in everything she did. Tried to dress like Lissie, combed her hair like Lissie’s, would’ve changed places with Lissie in a minute if a way could’ve been devised. I guess that’s why I called you first, Jamie. I guess I figured that as a father you... you might understand what I was feeling, what I’m feeling now for... for my little girl.”

“Yes, Larry, I do.”

“These times... I don’t know about these times. The kids... I think she was taking some kind of pills, Jamie, I’m pretty sure she was, she seemed so... I don’t know... out of it all the time. I kept wishing she’d go back to school again... she was at Risdee, you know, up in Providence for a while, studying photography there, she was always interested in photography, I guess I told you that, you’ve got to forgive me, I’m sort of, this happening today, all of it so... so sudden, you know. The cops appearing on my doorstep, Jimmy who works in the post office during the week, all dressed up like a proper cop on Sunday and ringing the doorbell to tell me there’s somebody in the woods over near the reservoir, little bag on her belt has my daughter’s driver’s license in it, would I come have a look to identify her? Identify her? I said. Because, Jamie, you don’t have to identify somebody unless she’s dead; if she’s alive she can identify herself, am I right? So if some girl was there in the woods with my daughter’s driver’s license in her bag, and they’re asking me to identify her, then this has got to be her and she’s got to be dead. Melanie was still asleep, I didn’t wake her up. As I was leaving the house, she called to me, asked me what it was. I told her it was nothing, I’d be back in a minute, go back to sleep, honey, I’ll pick up the Times in town.

“She was lying on her side in the leaves, Jamie. The leaves were all covered with blood. That was the first thing I saw, the blood. And the first thing I thought was somebody did this to her, somebody killed my daughter, all that blood shining on the leaves, the sunlight coming in over the reservoir and setting all those leaves on fire with her blood. And then I saw the shotgun on the ground beside her, and I recognized the gun, it’s the gun I keep in the garage, right outside there, right on the wall in the garage, keep the cartridges in a box on a shelf beside it, that was my shotgun, the initials L.H.K. on it — Lawrence Harold Kreuger — burned into the stock, my gun, and my daughter lying dead beside it with chunks of her skull and her hair and her... oh, Jesus, Jamie, oh, God, oh, Jesus, oh, God...”

Jamie held him close, his arm tight around his shoulders. He did not truly know this man, he still could not believe this man had come to him for comfort, nor could he understand why he was offering it so freely. Had that tired routine with Scarlett really registered over the years, “Oh, lookee heah, it’s Missy Scah-lutt home fum Atlanta!” and the blank, unblinking stare on Scarlett’s face each and every time, her green eyes wide, and on that freckled face the certain knowledge that poor Lissie Croft’s father was certifiably nuts. And yet... she’d admired him. As a man and as a father. Admired him most as a man and a father. Those had been Larry’s words. Jamie felt tears beginning to brim in his eyes, and he blinked them back guiltily; he was not on the edge of crying for Larry’s daughter who’d blown off the back of her head with a shotgun, but instead for his own silent daughter in India, who seemed not to admire him at all as a man and as a father.

“I told them yes,” Larry said, “that’s my daughter, that’s my Scarlett. But, you know, Jamie, I’m not so sure that was Scarlett lying there in the forest. Oh, yes, that was Scarlett’s pink party dress that girl was wearing, and her face was Scarlett’s sure enough, the face hadn’t been harmed, you see, she’d put the gun in her mouth and what it did was take off the back of her head, but the face was still Scarlett’s, the green eyes open and looking up at the sun, wide open, way she used to stare at me when she was a little girl asking me all sorts of questions. People said she wasn’t too bright, Jamie, I heard people saying that about her, but she was the most inquisitive little girl I ever knew. There... there were... she was lying there with her eyes open and her mouth open and there... there were flies buzzing in the... in the bl—”

And he began weeping.

He was a southern male, born and bred in the sovereign state of Georgia, and was not expected to break down in a time of crisis, but he turned his face into Jamie’s shoulder, and wept unashamedly, clinging to him like a son in his father’s arms. Jamie kept patting him, muttering sounds of reassurance, nonverbal, simply little umms and ahhs and uhhs, his hand constantly patting while Larry wept out his despair against his shoulder.

Melanie Kreuger came out of the kitchen not five minutes later, looking clear-eyed and crisp in a pale blue robe that fell to her ankles. She saw her husband cradled in Jamie’s arms, and then came immediately to where they were both sitting on the sofa, and extended her hand to Jamie and said, “Jamie, how good of you. Have you had coffee? Would you like coffee? Les-tuh, bring Jamie a cup of coffee.”

“Melanie,” he said, “I’m so sorry for you.”

“Yes, darlin’,” she said, “but be sorry for my daughter. Jamie, dear, whut are we to do?”

He didn’t understand her at first. He blinked at her in much the same way Scarlett had blinked each time he recited his “home fum Atlanta” line.

“We’ah both Methodists, Larry and mahself, but Scah-lutt was never one to go to church, and I know it would offend her, Jamie, if we had any soht of r’ligious service for her. So whut are we to do?”

“Well, the church here in town...”

“Is nondenominational, I know. But Jamie, the emphasis is on Jesus, and I know Scah-lutt would not want anythin’ like that, I know it for a fact. Jamie, this has nothin to do with Larry and me, this has only to do with Scah-lutt. It would pain me to have a service that isn’t the soht I grew up with, but I know it would pain Scah-lutt more to have anythin r’ligious. You probably knew her better than anyone on earth, includin’ her own parents, so I’m sure you know that’s true.”

There it was again. The indication that Scarlett and Jamie had shared a deep understanding of each other, that she had looked upon him as something of a surrogate father, information that was startling and unbelievable to him. Of all Lissie’s friends, he had perhaps been least close to Scarlett. Had it been Rusty Klein who’d blown her brains out in those deserted woods, he might have understood a supposition of friendship. He had enjoyed many long and mature conversations with Rusty, and had in fact written a letter of recommendation for her when she’d applied to Bennington. But Scarlett? He scarcely knew her.

“Do you think you could talk to the minister?” Melanie asked.

“Yes, surely, I’d be happy to. About... what did you want me to talk to him a...”

“A memorial service. But not at the church, Jamie. I thought someone might contact the town supervisor to see if we couldn’t use the Town Hall...”

“I’ll take care of that. When did you want...?”

“Tomorrow.”

“All right, I’ll talk to Andy.”

“And the minister, too. I’d want him to say a few words, Jamie, but I don’t think Scah-lutt would appreciate a lot of Bible-thumping. If you could just explore that with him...”

“I will.”

“And, Jamie, I’d want you to say something, too. Because she loved you so much, my dear,” Melanie said, and put her hand over his.

“I’ll go see Andy, and then I’ll run over to the church.”

“Thank you,” Melanie said, patting his hand. “Jamie, why do you think she did this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did your daughter ever mention anythin’ about her usin’ drugs?”

“Scarlett?”

“Yes. Did Lissuh ever say she was usin’ drugs?”

“No, never.”

“Theah’s so much I didn’t know about her,” Melanie said, and shook her head. “I have the feelin’ sometimes, Jamie, that we raised a generation of strangers. But I guess there’s no lookin’ back on what we did or didn’t do, is there? It’s just... your daughter kills herself on a lonely road in the woods, you’ve got to wunduh...” She shook her head again. “I guess I’ll always try to imagine that last moment when she made her final decision, Jamie, when she put the barrel of that gun in her mouth and decided none of it was wuth a damn anymore. An’ pulled the trigger. I’ll always wonduh whut went through her mind in that very last second. But I guess theah’s no lookin’ back, is there? I guess things just happen, an’we deal with ’em, an’... an’ try t’manage. That’s it, isn’t it, Jamie? We look ahead an’... an’ try to rescue the future.”

“Yes,” Jamie said. “I guess so.”

“But it’ll seem so forlorn without her,” Melanie said, and shook her head again, but did not weep.

The minister’s name was Llewelyn Harris, and he had been leading the congregation of the town’s nondenominational church for the last six years. His wife, Bridget, had caused a minor scandal only last year by accepting the role of Blanche Dubois in the Rutledge Players’ production of A Streetcar Named Desire, appearing on stage in a half-slip and bra that revealed (among other things) her unshaven armpits. It had been the opinion of the congregation that she’d brought rather too much ardor to the scene in which she was raped by the brute Stanley, and Harris had been living since in constant terror of being transferred to some grubby little mining town in Pennsylvania. When Jamie came to him that Sunday afternoon, he had already heard about the suicide on the old logging road and frankly wanted no part of it. But he said nothing as yet, and simply listened as Jamie told him he was there to arrange a memorial service for young Scarlett Kreuger.

Harris cleared his throat. “But this was,” he said, and cleared his throat again, “a suicide, am I correct?”

“Yes,” Jamie said.

“Mm,” Harris said. “That may be difficult.”

“What may be difficult?” Jamie asked.

“The various aspects,” Harris said.

“What aspects?” Jamie insisted.

“Well... primarily, the suicide.”

“I’m afraid that’s one aspect we can’t ignore.”

“Precisely what I’m saying. The church, as you know, does not condone the taking of one’s own...”

“No one’s asking for condonement.”

“You’re asking for God’s blessing, are you not? You’re asking me to conduct a memorial service for the dead...”

“No, I’m not asking for God’s blessing,” Jamie said. “The girl wouldn’t have wanted God’s blessing, she wasn’t a religious person. Her parents are both devout, but...”

“Yes, but the victim was not. Moreover...”

“You’ve hit on the exact word,” Jamie said.

“Pardon?”

“Victim.”

“Of herself, yes.”

“No. Of something quite outside herself. Reverend Harris, I came here to ask only one thing, but now it seems I have to deal with two.”

“Shall we take them in order then?” Harris asked, and smiled thinly.

“First... a service that doesn’t overly stress doctrine.”

“By doctrine...”

“Church doctrine.”

“Do you mean a service that doesn’t stress our belief in the Lord Jesus Christ?”

“The dead girl didn’t believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Then perhaps you’ve come to the wrong church. Perhaps you should find a religious group that...”

“The Kreugers are part of your congregation,” Jamie said flatly. Harris blinked, and then cleared his throat again. “What is your second request?” he asked.

“I don’t expect you to ignore the fact that young Scarlett killed herself...”

“I could not ignore it, no.”

“Nor can anyone else who’ll be at that service tomorrow. I think to ignore it would be to ignore the horror of what she did to herself. But I don’t want you to condemn it, either, Reverend Harris.”

“I cannot give God’s blessing to a suicide,” Harris said.

“Then we’re back to square one,” Jamie said, rising. “I’ll try the church in Talmadge. Thank you for your time, Rever—”

“Mr. Croft, you’re placing me in an impossible position. How can I with any conscience deliver a memorial service that ignores any mention of God, and further ignores...”

“No one’s asking you to ignore your beliefs, Reverend. I’m asking only that you don’t pretend they were Scarlett’s.”

“Well... maybe that can be managed. But how can I give blessing in a house of worship to an act specifically...”

“You won’t be in a house of worship.”

“Pardon?”

“The family doesn’t want it in a church.”

“Then what... I’m afraid I don’t... why are you here if...?”

“I’ve already talked to Andy Wilkins, and he’s letting us use the Town Hall tomorrow, after the funeral. The parents are religious people, Reverend Harris. Your presence would be a comfort to them. I don’t think anyone would be truly served — not the Kreugers, not Scarlett, not anyone — if we pretend she didn’t kill herself. We’ll all be sitting there tomorrow with the knowledge of how she died, the terrible knowledge that she couldn’t find another way out. Don’t ignore it, Reverend Harris. Don’t condone it or bless it, but for God’s sake don’t add to her parents’ misery by condemning it as a violation of God’s law.”

The rectory fell silent. Outside in the church parking lot, Jamie could hear the minister’s two young daughters jumping rope in the bright October sunshine, chanting “Double-ee-Dutch, double-ee-Dutch.” A trapped fly buzzed against the leaded windowpane. Harris shook his head.

“I would have to say it was wrong,” he said.

“That would be condemning it.”

“Mr. Croft, please, can’t you see...?”

“Reverend Harris, Scarlett Kreuger was out there alone in those woods with the barrel of a shotgun in her mouth. Something was wrong, yes, but it wasn’t her putting that gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger. It was whatever caused her to go out there in the first place, whatever caused her to even consider such a thing. That’s what was wrong. That’s what was so horribly, shockingly wrong.”

Harris was silent for what seemed a very long time. Outside, one of his daughters laughed. The fly kept buzzing in the sunlight, trapped. Harris nodded. He sighed. “Yes,” he said, “of course.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said, and let out his breath.

“The waste,” Harris said, “the utter wastefulness of it,” and nodded again.

The custodian had rearranged the folding wooden chairs in the Town Hall so that they formed a semicircle around a long wooden table upon which were arranged three baskets of white lilies. The funeral was over at nine-thirty that Monday morning, and it was close to eleven when the hall began filling for the scheduled memorial service at eleven-thirty. The adults took seats on the wooden chairs; the young people wandered toward the back of the hall, and ranged themselves against the wall there. There were a great many young people. Jamie had expected there would be, but their presence unsettled him nonetheless and caused him to wonder whether what he planned to say would appeal to them. He had not written out a formal speech, had thought he would just say what was in his heart, basing an impromptu eulogy on what Melanie, dry-eyed, had said in the invaded sanctity of her home yesterday morning, and what he himself, outraged, had said in the fly-buzzing stillness of the rectory yesterday afternoon.

A tall, blond, bearded boy stood leaning against the wall at the rear of the room, his arms folded across his chest, his pale blue eyes watching Jamie as he sat behind the long table. He seemed to be taking Jamie’s measure, silently anticipating what would be said about Scarlett. The boy looked familiar. Was he Scarlett’s boyfriend? Someone Jamie had seen her with in town? But Larry Kreuger had said she didn’t have a boyfriend. Or had he simply said Scotty Klein wasn’t her boyfriend? Jamie couldn’t remember. Yesterday’s events seemed to have occurred in an airless, soundless vacuum that now defied true recall. The bearded, blue-eyed boy was still watching him. Their eyes met for an instant, held until Jamie turned his gaze away. More people were coming through the open oaken doors. Outside on Route 16, Jamie could see one of the town cops waving his arms at drivers wanting to park their cars. There would not be enough chairs for everyone. He wished suddenly that he had not agreed to speak today. He hadn’t known the girl, damn it!

But that was the point.

He waited while the hall filled. Connie, who with some of the other women had made coffee and sandwiches for after the service, came up front to sit beside red-eyed Larry Kreuger and his wife. The minister went to them, whispered some comforting words as he held Melanie’s hand briefly between both his own, and then came around the long table to take the chair beside Jamie’s. A hush fell over the room. The minister nodded to Jamie. Jamie got to his feet and looked out over the room. From the back of the hall, the boy with the beard and the pale blue eyes looked back at him.

“I didn’t know Scarlett too well,” he began. The truth, he thought. Start with the truth, and stay with it. “I wish I had. Her parents think I knew her well, shared with her a philosophy, or a view, or at least a common understanding of life that somehow transcended the difference in our ages. I wish that were true, too, but it simply isn’t. Scarlett was one of my daughter’s friends, but not a very close one at that, just a casual acquaintance really, someone who dropped by the house every now and then, another face in this town where there were, and are, so many teenage faces. I see some of them at the back of the room today, lining the wall, adults now, or almost adults, the way Scarlett was an adult or almost one. But not a person I knew, not really.

“I came late to this town. We didn’t move here, my family and I, until December of 1967. That was less than three years ago, a very short time in the history of a town that can recall Hessian soldiers in the streets. So I was denied the privilege so many of you others enjoyed. I didn’t know Scarlett in kindergarten, I didn’t know any of these kids when they were still very young, I didn’t see them performing in elementary school pageants, I didn’t watch them at Little League practice, I didn’t have to call parents in the middle of the night to say little Sally, who I see standing there at the back of the room, tall and beautiful, little Sally, or Annie, or Nancy, or indeed Scarlett if I’d known her then, had decided she didn’t really want to sleep over and was crying to be taken home. I missed all that, I came to these kids late. My own daughter was almost sixteen when we moved here. I caught all these kids who were her friends just as they were moving into their teens, just as they were on the verge of — forgive me, I must say this — leaving. Leaving us. Before they got here.”

He paused.

He looked out over the faces.

Connie sitting beside the Kreugers in the first row; behind them Reynolds and Betty McGruder whose boy had been killed in Vietnam; just behind them Frank and M. J. Lipscombe whose daughter had joined a commune out in Arizona only last week; and there was George Yancy, the postmaster, a widower whose only son Ralph had been in an automobile accident this past June, three months after he’d got home from Vietnam. And all the other townspeople, watching him, waiting for what he had to say next, the vast expanse of faces stretching toward the back wall where the young people stood, and there — the pale-eyed, bearded boy, his arms still folded across his chest, his eyes demanding to know why Scarlett Kreuger had killed herself in the woods early yesterday morning.

“We all know Scarlett shot herself,” Jamie said, and saw Junie Landers in the third row open her mouth in surprise, and looked directly into her face and said, “Yes, that’s the truth, we can’t deny it.” He looked to where the Kreugers were sitting, Larry’s hand between Melanie’s hands, and he said, “Nor do I think Larry and Melanie would want us to deny it. It’s a shocking horror they’re going to have to live with for a long, long time, and we can only help them live with it by recognizing it ourselves, and not pretending it didn’t happen. Because if we say to ourselves that this was just something with Scarlett, you know, a problem unique to Scarlett, something she couldn’t work out and had to deal with in the only way that seemed possible to her — by going out onto a deserted logging road in the middle of a lonely wood, alone with herself, alone with whatever final thoughts consumed her, and shooting herself, killing herself — well, if we can think this was Scarlett’s problem alone, and allow ourselves to believe that Scarlett was only an accidental casualty and not a victim of something that has been happening for a very long time now, why then we will have done her the final disservice, we will have committed the final obscenity.”

The pale-eyed, bearded boy was watching him. His arms were still folded across his chest. He leaned against the back wall, his head slightly tilted, light streaming through the long windows to burnish the beard and mustache. Long hair and skeptical eyes. Faint look of derision. A look he had seen often enough on the face of — well, his own daughter. Well, all right, I’m saying all the wrong things, he thought, they shouldn’t have asked me to make this speech, anyway, I’m not a public speaker, I don’t now how to do such things. The Kreugers shouldn’t have asked me to talk about Scarlett as though she were my... own daughter. He looked again at the pale, blue-eyed bearded boy at the back of the room. My own daughter, he thought. Arms folded, cold dead eyes, watching, challenging.

“There was a little thing I used to do whenever Scarlett came to the house,” Jamie said. “Not recently. My daughter and Scarlett haven’t seen too much of each other in recent months. I mean when Scarlett was younger, sixteen, seventeen. Whenever she came to the house, I used to say ‘Oh, lookee heah, it’s Missy Scah-lutt home fum Atlanta!’ and she’d look at me and blink — I don’t know what she was thinking, her parents tell me now she used to get a kick out of it, but maybe she was thinking, Well, here’s this baffling little joke again from Lissie’s dumb father, I just don’t know. But the point, the thing I’m trying to say is, is... that was it, that was the extent of our communication. ‘Hello, Mr. Croft’ and ‘Oh, lookee heah, it’s Missy Scah-lutt home fum Atlanta!’ That was it, do you see? That was all of it. And I wish now just once I’d have said, ‘Hey, Scarlett, what’s new in your life, what’s important to you, what would you like to talk about?’ Just once. And I wish that just once Scarlett would have asked me why I had a worried look on my face, or why I, why I... you see, I think we could have talked. I think we could have prevented what happened. It’s too late now, I guess.”

The bearded boy against the wall was still watching him, his blue eyes unwavering, his arms still folded across his chest. It seemed to Jamie that he wanted something more from him.

“But maybe it isn’t too late for the rest of us,” Jamie said, and then nodded, and gave a small, embarrassed shrug, and turned to the minister where he was sitting with his prepared notes in his lap.

There was silence in the room.

Jamie sat down and the minister took his place behind the long table with the lilies on it. Jamie scarcely listened to what he was saying, but he knew the man was keeping his promise, toning down the Jesus stuff and expressing no official church condemnation of suicide. Jamie was thinking he’d made a complete fool of himself. He hadn’t even known the girl, they shouldn’t have asked him to say anything. In retrospect, Melanie had said it better anyway, had said in a single sentence everything he’d hoped to say today: We look ahead and try to rescue the future.

The bearded boy with the blue eyes was still standing at the back of the room when the Crofts left. He said nothing to Jamie as they passed him on their way out. In the car, when Jamie asked Connie whether it had been all right, she said, “Yes, fine, darling,” but he knew she was thinking he should have prepared a talk, the way the minister had.

13

He could never understand why he thought of New York City in medieval terms, as if it were cobblestoned and turreted when it was neither — well, yes, a vestigial cobble here and there. But Jamie saw it always as one of those magnificent old towns perched high above the Rhine or the Loire, commanding the surrounding countryside, a fortification to which the peasants could scurry whenever barbarian hordes threatened. The metaphor became strongest during the winter months, when grim gray armies attacked, crouching beyond the river-moats, laying icy siege.

In November, the faces became pinched and withdrawn. Men walked briskly, their unaccustomed overcoats bulky and cumbersome, one gloved hand clutching a dispatch case, the other thrust deep in a pocket. The Hare Krishna kids in their saffron robes and topknots walked Fifth Avenue indifferent to the wind, shaking their tambourines and chanting. Loonies of every persuasion bundled themselves in sweaters or shabby overcoats, carrying signs that promised doom or redemption. The bag ladies searched assiduously through the experimental concrete garbage bins on every corner, hampered by the intransparency of the new containers, wishing perhaps for the old wire-mesh types that had been too easy to steal in a city where stealing was almost an honest profession diligently pursued. The ladies were cold and unsmiling. They wore woolen gloves cut off at each of the fingers and thumbs.

Despite the cold, the three-card-monte sharks were busy at work, cruising the avenue with their folding stands, setting up shop on the windswept sidewalk, the shill watching the actor as he manipulated the cards on the table top, “Follow the red ace, man, just tell me wheah the red ace is, watch it now,” or swiftly moving the three whiskey bottle caps, “Where’s the pea, thass all you got to tell me, man. Pea’s under one of these heah caps, you see it now?”

The street musicians were out, too, discreetly plying their trade, their hand-lettered cardboard signs beseeching STRUGGLING THROUGH JUILLIARD or HELP ME MAKE BEAUTIFUL MUSIC, while behind the signs sat the supposedly embryo violinists or accordionists or — on the corner of Fifth and Fifty-sixth, outside the Hallmark store — a young blond girl playing a flute.

His heart stopped.

Her face came into his mind.

Everywhere around him, while the girl sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk played her flute and the silvery notes splintered on the brittle air, the beautiful women of this city rushed past, gorgeous New York faces unlike any others in the world, gloved hands clutching the collars of cloth coats, mufflers trailing, long hair blowing in the wind, fast, moving fast, high heels clicking on the sidewalk, chin and nose and breasts and flashing instep cleaving the crystalline air, lovely — but none of them Joanna.

There was a telephone booth on the corner.

He realized with a start that he had forgotten her number.

The opera company had begun its fall season, he had seen their full-page ad in the New York Times several months back. But would she be rehearsing today? From past experience, he knew that her rehearsal schedule was erratic. She probably wouldn’t even remember him.

He looked up her number and dialed it.

He let it ring four times and was about to hang up when he heard her voice.

“Hello?”

She sounded as if she’d been sleeping. Jesus, he thought, I’ve woken her up.

“Joanna?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Jamie,” he said.

“Yes, Jamie, how are you?” she said.

“Jamie Croft,” he said, as though certain she had mistaken him for someone else.

“Yes, I know.”

“I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Wake me? It’s almost twelve o’clock.”

“I know, but I thought... you sounded...”

“No, I was practicing. What is it, Jamie?”

“I... uh... was wondering how you’re doing.”

“Ah. Were you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m doing fine. How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

Silence. There hadn’t been anger in her voice, not quite, just an edge of... wariness? Distance? Indifference? The silence lengthened.

“What is it you want, Jamie?” she said.

“I thought... I thought I might like to see you.”

“Ah.”

“If you were free.”

“Ah.”

“I’m right here on...”

“Just like that, huh?” she said.

“I know it’s been a long...”

“Six months on the first of November.”

“Yes, I...”

“But who’s counting?”

Another silence.

“Joanna,” he said, “I’m...”

“After six months, you call out of the blue and tell me you want to come over. What do you expect me to...?”

“I said I’d like to see you. I didn’t say anything about...”

“What you said, in fact, was you might like to see me. Didn’t you hear the word might in there, Jamie? I’m sure I heard the word might in there.”

“I guess I said might.”

“I know you said might.”

“I guess I was afraid you’d...”

“What? Hang up?”

“Well... yes.”

“Gee, why would I hang up?” Joanna said. “Man drops a person off on her doorstep six months ago, says he’ll call her, and is never heard from since, why should a person hang up? A person should instead go dancing in the streets with delirium, nu? You’ve got some fucking chutzpa, mister. You know what means chutzpa? You’ve got it. In spades.”

“I guess so.”

“Take it as a fact.”

“Okay.”

“He admits it.”

“I admit it.”

There was another silence. He thought surely she would hang up this time. He felt he should say something before she hung up, but he could not find any words. It was she who broke the silence.

“Are you very old now?” she asked.

“What?”

“Have you gotten very old?”

“No. Old? What do you...?”

“Is your hair all white? I keep thinking your hair is all white now. I don’t know why. I keep thinking it all the time.”

“It’s still brown, Joanna.”

“You hurt me badly,” she said. “Do you realize that?”

“I’m sorry.”

Silence.

“I’m truly sorry.”

Silence.

“May I come there?” he said.

Silence.

“Joanna?”

“Come,” she said, and hung up.

“Sit down,” she said.

His heart was pounding. He took a chair near the fireplace. A log was smoldering on the hearth. The room smelled faintly of smoke, more faintly of Joanna’s perfume.

“I want to say something to you,” she said. “Would you like a drink or anything?”

“No, nothing, thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Jamie,” she said, “I love you. I’ve loved you from the moment I met you, I’ve loved you since then.” She took a deep breath and then said, “You hurt me very badly.”

“I know that. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you ever to hurt me again, Jamie. I love you very much, but if you plan to walk out of here again in another month or so...”

“No, I—”

“... then please do it now, walk out now and spare me the pain later.”

She was wearing much the same clothing she had worn the first time he came to this apartment, a man’s tailored shirt with the tails hanging loose over a pair of blue jeans. Her hair was caught in a pony tail at the back of her head. There was lipstick on her mouth, but she wore no other makeup. Her eyes looked somewhat faded. She was barefooted. On the grate, the log continued to smoke.

“I’ve been seeing Mandelbaum again,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I told him all about what happened. He said he thinks I’m a daughter substitute. He said you go to bed with me because you really want to go to bed with your daughter, and I’m the one who takes the curse off it.” She paused. She studied his face. “He said you would have hung onto me if your daughter really had been coming home because then you’d be safe, you see, you’d have me and you wouldn’t have to worry about jumping in bed with your daughter one night... Jamie, please don’t make that face, this is Mandelbaum talking, not me. He said that the minute you knew your daughter wasn’t coming home, you threw me out because you didn’t need me anymore, you didn’t need an insurance policy against incest. Those were his words. An insurance policy against incest. That’s supposed to be me, Jamie. The insurance policy.”

“Joanna, with all due respect for Mandelbaum...”

“Well, I think maybe he’s right this time, Jamie. For once in his entire life, maybe he’s right.”

“I never thought of you as—”

“The point, Jamie, is I don’t want to be an insurance policy. I don’t want our relationship to depend on whether your daughter’s here or there or wherever the fuck she is. I’m really not all that interested in your daughter, Jamie. I don’t even know your daughter, Jamie, and I’m not sure I ever do want to know her. All I—”

“Joanna...”

“No, don’t ‘Joanna’ me, okay? Just listen to me. This is what I’m saying. I’m saying I love you, and I want you very much, I’m aching for you just sitting here opposite you and remembering what it was like. But, Jamie, if you called me today because your daughter’s back home again and your insurance has lapsed...”

“My daughter isn’t home, Joanna. My calling you today had nothing to do with my daughter.”

“Then, Jamie, why did you call?”

“I guess because I missed you,” he said. “I guess because I love you.”

“Ah. Guess. Don’t guess, Jamie. Love me or don’t love me, but please don’t guess.”

“I love you,” he said.

“And when your daughter comes home? What happens then? Do you still love me?”

“I don’t think she’s coming home,” he said. “I think she’s dead, Joanna. Joanna, I think she’s dead,” he said, and began weeping. She went to him. She cradled his head against her breast. She sighed heavily.

She took his hand then, and led him up the remembered steps to the third floor of the house, and then down the corridor to the small library with the Persian rugs and the Franklin stove and the red leather chairs and the music stand and the open flute case, silver against green velvet, and through the library into her bedroom, where she undressed again without artifice or guile, revealing herself to him as once she had. Holding her, he felt a gladness he thought he would never know again, a sheer soaring joy that had nothing whatever to do with the sexual act they were about to perform, nothing to do with her flesh warm against his, her lips soft against his, but only with the happiness of being with her again, and knowing that she loved him, and knowing that this time he would never let go of her again. He said to her later, clear-eyed this time, holding her in his arms, “I really do think she’s dead, Joanna. I don’t think I’ll ever see her again.”

But then, early in December, he opened the mailbox one day and found in it an undated letter from India. It began:

In Delhi, what she thought at first was just a case of la turista turned out to be dysentery (she spelled it “dysenterry” in her letter) requiring medication and hospitalization for the better part of a week. She had arrived in that city on August 18, after a 750-mile journey from Kabul.

She mentioned nothing about Paul in her letter home. She went into detail she might have spared about the dysentery and her subsequent stay in the hospital, and she wrote a nice little haiku about having seen the Taj Mahal by moonlight the day after she was discharged (that would have been August 25), the little poem set apart from the rest of the letter and adorned with a tiny sketch Lissie made of that imposing structure.

Mumtaz Mahal died

To inspire Shahjahan

To glorious heights.

They were relieved to learn that she’d rid herself of the dysentery that had assailed her and was feeling well enough to visit the memorial on the day after she’d got out of the hospital. She seemed happy enough at this point (they had only come partly through the first page of her two-page letter, standing side by side near the mailbox where it had magically appeared, Jamie holding the letter in both trembling hands, both of them reading it in the waning December light) and they were delighted to learn that she was in a part of India called Goa, which seemed to be warm and sunny now that the monsoon season had ended, the temperatures hovering in the high eighties, with lovely palm-lined rivers leading to the Arabian Sea and the magnificent beaches on its eighty-two miles of coastline. I have $10 left, and am living on a beach. It’s fairly cheap here and very warm, but I want to go to the U.S.A. very soon. Those words were the last ones at the bottom of the page. Jamie turned the letter over:

The thoughts she had solicited were somewhat confused. Jamie and Connie were, first and foremost, grateful that she was alive, delighted at long last to have an address for her, a true and proper address, even if it was only a General Delivery address, a bona fide address (not to mention a Telex code) to which they could write or cable! Jesus! He could write to her again! He could actually write “Dear Lissie” and “Love, Dad.” He had an address! But there were some disturbing things in her letter that caused them to wonder, once again, what was happening to her, and whether or not they could trust her. The letter-from-camp syndrome was immediately apparent, although this time she had treated them gratuitously to each of the bowel movements caused by the dysentery infection, forsaking not even the attendant mucus and blood. Okay. At least they knew she’d been sick, and was now all right again.

But what was this about “Many, many incredible things” happening, and then no elucidation of just what those incredible things might have been? Was one of those incredible things “walking in the Himalayas (20,000 feet high) and living in caves and whatnot”? Were more of those incredible things her visits to “many very primitive” villages like Chundigargh and Mundi, if indeed those were the villages she’d had in mind when writing her letter, the syntax seemed sometimes rather odd and disjointed.

Why, for example, had she told them she needed money for an adventure into the world of commerce, something new, something they had never before heard from her either in person or in her infrequent letters, and then idly reported that she’d read Lord of the Rings and was reading Siddhartha, before continuing with the details of how they could get the money to her? Why, all of a sudden, was she so intent on paying for her own “school, housing, etc.”? And could she be trusted with “$450 to $500” ostensibly needed to purchase the merchandise and then to come home? Or would she use that money (as she had used the money she’d received for the Venice — New York ticket) for travel further into the unknown? Would her next letter come from Outer Mongolia? Siberia? The moon?

They had no way of knowing that Lissie had been stoned out of her mind on the day she wrote her letter from Calangute.

It’s like Woodstock all over again, Lissie thought. No, it’s better than Woodstock. Woodstock was vague at first, indecisive, kids not realizing there’d be no busts, sneaking their joints, cupping their hands around roaches, eyes cocked for troopers. No troopers here. Everything cool here. Even opium is legal here. It’s Woodstock in Europe, Portuguese influence, churches, Catholics, it’s Europe in Asia, Woodstock in Europe. What were their names? she wondered. The twins who took us to Elysium, Robby’s friends, the Dutch girls, come on, what were their names? Elisabeth and Ida, yes, Verschoor, yes, Robby’s friends, where was Robby now, and whatever has happened to Barbara Duggan, so long ago my goodness.

Voices drifted everywhere around her, shards of sunlight splintered on the water, naked bodies, laughter, she drifted, she splintered like sunlight, she giggled and heard her own giggle. Woodstock playing in Amsterdam. Ida said it, yes, the prettier of the two girls, Ida, but Woodstock my ass some Woodstock, what a place that was, girl sitting in her own shit, some Woodstock all right, Jesus! Never in my life poke a needle in my body, never, voices drifting someone splashing out of the water cock dangling swaying cute like a pendulum running up the beach to where the palm trees fringed Paul lying beside her. Woodstock playing in Asia, more like the tropics though, islands Mom and Dad used to take me to when I was small, silver sunshine hot summer sun whitewashed buildings, ocean sparkling hot summer sun higher than a fucking kite listen to Paul listen to the dope, she giggled.

“... split for Katmandu the minute I get the money,” always talking about what he was going to do when the bread got here, Daddy’s hard-earned loot. Daddy, you are on the wrong train, she thought, here is where you should be, Daddy, taking pictures of marvelous hippie bodies naked unashamed in the sun Portuguese Catholics frowning under parasols trouble in Paradise too much skin for the locals brown like the natives brown all over tiny tits all brown Paul’s cock brown everything brown in the sun like the good brown hash we smoke smoke smoke, she giggled again.

“... then bring the hash back over the border, shouldn’t be any trouble doing that, do you think?” talking to a boy with a heavy black beard and a minuscule cock. She checked out the cock, heard more laughter up the beach, glanced away into the splintering silvery sun, girl with melon breasts approaching, Lissie shaded her eyes, suck his sweet cock here on the beach, raise some Portuguese eyebrows, always makes me horny this fucking hash too fucking good this fucking hash makes me want to do things suck his crazy tiny cock the stranger’s black beard, “and then to Turkey for the hard shit.”

The hard shit Paul was talking about had to be heroin or opium or morphine or something you shot in your arm, never poke a needle in my body, she thought. The hard shit had to be something Paul was going to buy in Turkey when he came back from Nepal with the hash he would sell, “profit on the hash has got to be something like five, six hundred bucks, don’t you think?” he was saying, his voice drifting like the clouds overhead blue-bellied the sun blinking out for a moment. “Take that plus the original five to Turkey and spend it on the hard shit. I can get it raw for twenty-five a kee, that means I can buy me forty kees. Then all I’ll need is a connection to get the shit to Marseilles,” talk talk talk, shit shit shit, the cloud drifted like the talk, the sun blinked on again, pop! She giggled. She was so happy she was so high she was so fucking loose and free and high and happy she would never go home. All she wanted was the five hundred from Daddy, all she wanted to do was spend the rest of her life here on the profit Paul would make on the hash he bought in Katmandu — but he’d just said, hadn’t he just said he wanted to go to Turkey for the hard shit tough shit it’s my money, she thought, it’s my daddy’s money he’s sending here to his darling little girl so high so happy so fuck you.

“What’s this about Turkey?” she asked.

“Yeah, for the hard shit,” Paul said.

“What do you mean? You mean heroin?”

“No, no. Opium. Raw opium.”

“That’s heroin.”

“Well, it’s opium, is what it is. I mean, opium’s opium, and heroin’s heroin. You can’t call oranges apples and...”

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “Are you telling me you’re going to push heroin?”

“No, I’m going to buy the raw stuff and sell it at a profit, that’s all.”

“That’s pushing heroin,” she said. All she could think of was the girl at Elysium sitting in her own shit. Paul was saying he wanted to buy and sell heroin, that’s what he was telling her, he wanted to buy and sell hard drugs to kids who sat on the floor in their own shit. No way, she thought. “No way,” she said aloud, shaking her head. “Not with my money.”

“Why the fuck not?” he said.

She blinked at him. Up the beach, someone began strumming a guitar and the words to “Blowin’ in the Wind” drifted languidly on the air, the voice almost a whisper. The naked boy with the black beard and the tiny cock rolled over onto his side and propped his cheek on his hand, elbow bent, a faint smile on his face, as if he was enjoying a two-character, one-set play starring a pair of extremely good actors.

“You told me,” she said, started to say, but Paul waved this away impatiently as if what he’d once told her was of absolutely no consequence now that there was the possibility of a very large deal involving the purchase and resale of Nepalese hash and then the further purchase of some forty kees of opium which, for Christ’s sake, would bring two hundred grand in Marseilles, that’s exactly what he said to the bearded boy now, “two hundred grand,” sounding like a New York gangster.

She stopped listening to him. She didn’t really care anymore. She knew only that he was a stranger who planned to make money selling raw opium to someone in Marseilles who would convert it to heroin which might or might not be sold later to young kids in America — she didn’t know and she didn’t care, she wanted only to be rid of this fucking little pusher who’d done nothing to help her in Iran or with the dogs, the fucking dogs.

“I’m going home,” she said.

It was a decision made as easily as that.

Silence.

New Year’s Eve.

He was sitting in the living room adorned with the matted pictures of Lissie he’d hung when he’d still expected her home for her birthday. It was three hours to midnight, three hours to 1971, and his daughter was not here, and he was beginning to believe again that she was dead. He sat in his new tuxedo, sat in his new ruffled blue shirt and his blue velvet tie and cummerbund to match the blue velvet on the tuxedo lapels and cuffs, sat in tuxedo and ruffled shirt, and the Schlumberger cuff links Connie had bought for him on his twenty-eighth birthday, too many years ago and he wondered where his daughter was, and he thought again that she was dead.

He had not felt this since receiving the undated letter she’d written from Goa, but now he was beginning to believe it again. The State Department didn’t know where she was, Mr. Brothers had called to say they’d had no luck contacting her on the beach at Goa, so Jamie could only believe that somehow the $500 he’d sent hadn’t reached her, or possibly she’d been slain on some Iranian road, or was being tortured in some Turkish prison, he didn’t know where she was, or if she was, if she still even existed. She was his daughter, and she’d been gone since April, and this was now the thirty-first of December, and he didn’t know, he simply didn’t know, and he wanted to weep. He brought the glass of Scotch to his lips and then hesitated. He had taken to drinking it stronger these days, a lot of Scotch and just a few ice cubes.

The toast did not come immediately to his mind or to his lips. He looked around at the pictures of Lissie, not too many taken this year, not too many at all, the tradition somewhat strained, but plenty of others from the years before. The one of Lissie kneeling to pluck the dandelion in Central Park, and the one of her in the rowboat at Martha’s Vineyard when she was almost fourteen, five years ago, Jesus. And there, near the post, the picture of her tangled in her skis at Stratton, and there, his favorite, the lollipop shot, Lissie in the second year of her life, looking down in consternation at the sand-covered lollipop, blue eyes squinted, her blond hair catching the sun for a dazzling halo effect. He lifted the glass in a toast.

“Fuck it,” he said.

When he heard the car outside, he thought at first it was the booze he’d ordered from Ritchie’s Wine & Liquor in Talmadge. He’d discovered earlier, when he’d come downstairs to pour himself a solitary drink while Connie was still dressing, that he’d run out of Courvoisier and Grand Marnier both, and he’d been worried that someone might want to come back tonight after the party at the Blairs’, and he’d seem ill-appointed — though who gave a fuck? Really, who gave a fuck? He glanced at his watch, and realized that he’d placed the order only fifteen minutes ago. Still, he’d asked them to deliver as soon as possible as he and his wife would be leaving the house at nine-thirty, ten. Though it seemed too early for Ritchie’s to be making delivery, he thought it might just possibly be them after all, and he went to the drape in the living room, and pulled it back, and looked out to the curb.

It had been snowing on and off for the past week, and the snow was piled high in the front yard, creating a wall of white that protected the house from the street. Above the banked snow, he could see the yellow roof of a taxi cab, its exhaust fumes puffing on the brittle silent air. He heard the door of the cab slamming shut. A guest arriving for the big party across the street, he thought. He knew the Sammelsons were having a big party, but in Rutledge, Connecticut, neighbors never invited neighbors who lived just across the street. He let the drape fall. He walked into the kitchen and was pouring himself a fresh drink when the doorbell rang.

His heart stopped.

He knew, he knew before he took the twenty steps, thirty steps from the wet-sink in the kitchen to the entry hall, he knew, his heart was pounding, he knew this was his daughter. He fumbled with the lock, he tried to twist the old brass key in the lock that had been here when the mill was converted to a house in the year 1910, his hands were trembling on the key, he could not twist the fucking key, he knew this was his daughter standing outside the door, and he could not open the door, he could not, “Just a minute,” he said, and at last twisted the key, and threw the door wide.

He did not recognize her at first.

This could not be... this was not his daughter.

The snow was falling behind her. She stood just outside the door with a tentative smile on her face, illuminated by the globe to the right of the door, slanting down onto cheekbones that were higher than he remembered them, deeper hollows beneath them than he remembered, her face altogether thinner than he remembered, her hair stringy and oily, plastered to her skull, an Indian band, American Indian, across her forehead — she looked sallow and dirty, this was not his daughter. She was barefooted. There was snow banked eighteen inches high in the front yard, but she was barefooted. The temperature outside was thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, but her feet were naked and dirty below the hem of the tent dress patterned with lilies of the valley. She was wearing a leather fleece-lined jacket. The jacket was unzipped and open. Beneath it, he could see a black velvet vest.

“Dad?” she said.

He took her into his arms. He was too crushed by the weight of the moment to find the strength to call to his wife upstairs, too overwhelmed by the sudden tears in his eyes to call up to her where she was applying her lipstick at the bathroom mirror, too suddenly relieved and grateful and tremblingly weak to inform his wife that their daughter was home, their daughter was at long last home. He held Lissie close, he kissed her hair, he kissed her face, her nose, her cheeks, he said, “Lissie, Lissie,” and only then did he find the voice to shout, exuberantly, “Connie! She’s home!”