On Wings of Song

5

The clouds over Switzerland were pink puffy lobes of brain with, at intervals, great splintered bones of granite thrusting up through them. She loved the Alps, but only when she was above them. She loved France too, all purposeful and rectilinear in solemn shades of dun and olive-tinged viridian. She loved the whole round world, which seemed, at this moment, to be present to view in all its revolving glory, as the Concorde rose still higher.

On the console before her she jabbed the numbers of her wish, and in an instant the beneficient mechanism beside her seat ejected yet another pink lady, her third. Apparently it made no difference, at this altitude, that she was only seventeen. It was all so lawless and lovely, and she loved it all, the pink ladies, the almonds, the off-blue Atlantic whizzing by below. She loved most of all to be returning home at long, long last and to be saying farewell and fuck you to the grey walls, grey skies, and grey smocks of Ste. Ursule.

Boadicea Whiting was an enthusiast. She could, with the same heartfelt if fleeting passion of appreciation, applaud the world’s least raindrop or its most lavish hurricane. But she was no scatterbrain. She had other passions more abiding, and the chief of these was for her father, Mr. Grandison Whiting. She had not seen him for nearly two years, not even on cassettes, since he was fastidious about his personal correspondence and would send only hand-written letters. Though he’d written quite regularly, and though he was quite right (in matters of taste he was infallible), she had missed him terribly, missed the warmth and light of his presence, like a planet kept from the sun, like a nun. What a life it is, the life of repentence — or rather, what a life it isn’t! But (as he’d written in one of his weekly letters) the only way to learn the price of something is to pay it. And (she’d replied, though the letter was never sent) pay it and pay it.

The seatbelt sign winked off, and Boadicea unstrapped herself and climbed the short windy staircase to the lounge. One other passenger had beat her to the bar, a heavy, red-faced man in a really ugly red blazer. Synthetic, she thought — a judgement against which there could be no appeal. A sin (Grandison was wont to say) may be forgiven, but not a synthetic. The man in the blazer was complaining, nasally, to the steward at the bar that every time he’d ordered a drink during takeoff the god-damn idiot machine had flashed a god-damn sign at him to say sorry, he wasn’t old enough, and god-damn it, he was thirty-two! With each god-damn, he would glance at Boadicea to see if she were scandalized. She couldn’t keep from beaming at the steward’s explanation — that the computer had got the man’s passport or seat number mixed up with someone else’s. The man mistook the meaning of her smile. With the miraculous self-regard of his kind, he came over and offered her a drink. She said she would like a pink lady.

Would four be a mistake, she wondered? Would it prevent her, when she arrived, from shining? It would scarcely do to leave in disgrace and return, two years later, drunk. So far, however, she felt in command of herself, if maybe slightly more susceptible than usual.

“Aren’t the clouds beautiful?” she said, when he’d returned with the drink and they had settled down before their first class view of heaven.

Dismissing the question with a sociable smile, he asked if this were her first trip to America. Evidently, Ste. Ursule had done its work. She said no, it had been her first trip to Europe and now she was coming back.

He asked her what she had seen. She said she’d seen art museums and churches mostly. “And you?” she asked.

“Oh, I didn’t have time to go in for that kind of thing. It was a business trip.”

“Oh. What business are you in?” She felt a guttersnipe delight in asking that most American of questions.

“I’m a representative for Consolidated Food Systems.”

“Really? My uncle is a representative too, though not for CFS. He has some connection with them, though.”

“Well, CFS is the biggest company in Des Moines, so it’s not surprising.”

“Is that where you live?”

“I live just about anywhere CFS cares to send me, and at this point they’ve sent me just about anywhere.” He had that down pat. She wondered if it were something he’d made up himself at one time, or if all the CFS salesmen learned it when they were being trained. Then he took her by surprise. “Do you know,” he said in a tone of completely believable regret, and even thoughtfulness, “I do have an apartment in Omaha, but I haven’t seen the inside of it for over a year.”

At once she felt guilty for baiting him. And why? Because he had a paunch and didn’t know how to dress? Because his voice was the whining, forlorn voice of the prairie? Because he had wanted the few minutes of their passage across the ocean to bear the stamp of an actual human encounter? Didn’t she, after all?

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I think I may be drunk,” she said. “I’m not used to airplanes.”

The clouds were now so far below they looked like a formica tabletop, opaque white whorled with a dismal greyish blue. In fact, the ledge on which she’d placed her drink was made of just such lamentable formica.

“But I like,” she added, a little desperately, as he continued simply staring, “to fly. I think I could spend my whole life on the wing, just whizzing about like this. Whiz, whiz.”

He looked at his watch so as not to have to look before him at the blue beyond the glass. Even here, she realized, even at twenty-five thousand feet, it was bad form to praise the act and power of flight. America!

“And where do you live?” he asked.

“In Iowa, on a farm.”

“Is that so? A farmer’s daughter.” He fairly underlined his innuendo with a grin of masculine condescension.

She could not keep hold of a sense of fairness. Everything about the man was an offense to decency — his flat, uninflected speech, his complacence, his stupidity. He seemed thoroughly to deserve his wretched life, and she wanted, meanly, to make him see the actual squalid shape of it.

“Yes, that’s me. Though if one has to be any particular kind of daughter these days, that’s the kind to be. Don’t you agree?”

He agreed, with a sufficient sense of having been deflated. He knew what she meant. She meant she had money and he did not, and that this was a superior advantage to being of the advantaged sex.

“My name is Boadicea,” she informed him, seeming to offer, briefly, her hand, but then, before he could respond, reaching for her drink.

“Boadicea,” he repeated, changing every vowel.

“My friends call me Bo, or sometimes Boa.”

Among a certain class this would have been enough. But he was certainly not of that class, nor ever would be, though it was clear from the way his eyes were fixed on her now, that the wish lingered on.

“And my father calls me Bobo.” She sighed theatrically. “It is hard to go through life with such a peculiar name, but my father is a fanatical Anglophile, as was his father before him. Both Rhodes scholars! I’m fairly sure my brother won’t be though. His name is Serjeant, and my sister’s is Alethea. I’m lucky, I suppose, that I wasn’t christened Brittania. Though as to nicknames, then I’d have had a choice between Brit and Tania. Do you like England?”

“I’ve been there, but only on business.”

“Does business lift you up so far, then, that liking simply doesn’t enter in?”

“Well, it rained most of the time I was there, and the hotel I stayed in was so cold I had to wear my clothes to bed, and there was food rationing then, which is why I was sent there to begin with. But aside from that I guess I liked it well enough. The people were friendly, the ones I had to deal with.”

She looked at him with a blank smile, and sipped the pink lady, which had begun to seem cloying. From marveling at the elegance and bitchery of what she’d just said she hadn’t taken in a word of his.

“I find,” he said resolutely, “that people usually are, if you let ’em.”

“Oh, people… yes. I think so too. People are wonderful. You’re wonderful, I’m wonderful, and the steward has wonderful red hair, though not as wonderful by half as my father’s. I have a theory about red hair.”

“What’s that?”

“I believe it’s a sign of spiritual distinction. Swinburne had intensely red hair.”

“Who was Swinburne?”

“The greatest poet of Victorian England.”

He nodded. “There’s Dolly Parsons too. Her hair’s pretty red.”

“Who’s Dolly Parsons?”

“The faith-healer. On tv.”

“Oh. Well, it’s only a theory.”

“Some of the things she does are pretty incredible too. A lot of people really believe in her. I’ve never heard anyone else say it was her hair though. I’ve got a cousin out in Arizona — he’s got red hair and says he hates it. He says people are always ribbing him about it, give him funny looks.”

She felt, as she was listening to the steady unreeling of his witless well-meaning speech, as if she had mounted a carousel, which was now revolving too fast for her to get off. The plane had canted several degrees to the left. The sun had moved noticeably higher in the west, so that its light made vast semaphores on the heaving waves, from which the clouds had all been wiped away.

“You must excuse me,” she said, and hastily left the lounge.

In the washroom a dim green light seemed to spill from the mirrors in a manner at once weird and reassuring. It would have been a wholly habitable refuge if only there hadn’t been, in each of the mirrors, the self-reproach of her own image.

Lord knows, she tried. How many weeks of her life had she wasted trying to subdue and civilize this other Boadicea, dressing her in overpriced designer clothes that ceased to be soigné the moment she removed them from their splendid boxes, dieting to the verge of anorexia, and fussing with creams, lotions, lashes, pots of rouge, copying on the oval canvas of her face the faces of Rubens, of Modigliani, of Reni and Ingres. But always behind these viscid masks was the same too full, too lively face, framed by the same abundant, intractable mid-brown hair, which was her mother’s hair. Indeed, she was her mother’s daughter through and through, except her mind, which was her own. But who is solaced by a sense of having perspicuous intellectual gifts? No one, certainly, who is drunk and surrounded by mirrors and wants, more than anything else in the world, to be loved by the likes of Grandison Whiting, a man who has declared that the first duty of an aristocrat is to his own wardrobe.

Wealth, Grandison Whiting had told his children, is the foundation of a good character, and though he might say some things, like the remark about the wardrobe, only for effect, he was sincere about this. Wealth was also, he would allow, the root of evil, but that was just the reverse of the coin, a logical necessity. Money was freedom, as simple as that, and people who had none, or little, could not be judged by the same standards as those who had some, or much, for they were not free agents. Virtue, therefore, was an aristocratic prerogative, and vice as well.

This was just the beginning of Grandison Whiting’s system of political economy, which went, in all its corollaries and workings-out, much farther and deeper than Boadicea had ever been allowed to follow, for at certain crucial moments in the unfolding of his system she had been required to go off to bed, or the gentlemen would remove themselves from the table to have their ideas and their cigars in masculine seclusion. Always, it seemed, that moment would come just when she thought she had begun to see him as he truly was — not the kindly, careless Santa Claus of a father indulging her in her girlish adorations, but the real Grandison Whiting whose renaissance energies seemed a more potent argument for the existence of God than any of the feeble notions of apologetics that she’d been required to learn by heart at Ste. Ursule. Ste. Ursule itself had been the most drastic of these exiles from his presence. Though she had come to understand the need for it (with her analyst’s help), though she had even wrung a consent from her own heart at the last, the two years’ exile from her father had been bitter bread indeed — all the more bitter because she had so clearly brought it on herself.

It had begun, as all her sorrows did, with an enthusiasm. She’d received a video camera for her fourteenth birthday, the latest model Editronic. Within three weeks she had so completely mastered the programs of which the camera was capable, and their various combinations, that she was able to construct a documentary about the operations and daily life of Worry (as the Whiting estate, and the film, was called) that was at once so smooth, so lively, and so professionally innocuous that it was shown in prime time on the state educational channel. This, in addition to what she called her “real movies,” which, if less suited to public broadcast, were no less prodigious. Her father gave his approval and encouragement — what else could he have done? — and Boadicea, exalted, exultant, was swept up by a passion of creativity as by a tornado.

In the three months following her freshman year of high school she mastered a range of equipment and programming techniques that would have required as many years of study at a technical college. Only when, with her father’s help, she had obtained her mail order diploma and a union license did she put forth the proposal that she had along been working toward. Would he, she asked, let her make an in-depth study of his own life? It would be a companion piece to Worry, but on a much loftier scale both as to length and to intensity.

At first he refused. She pleaded. She promised it would be a tribute, a monument, an apotheosis. He temporized, declaring that while he believed in her genius, he also believed in the sanctity of private life. Why should he spend a million dollars on the security of his house and grounds and then allow his own Bobo to expose that dear-bought privacy to the common gaze? She promised that no sanctums would be violated, that her film would do for him what Eisenstein had done for Stalin, what Riefenstahl had done for Hitler. She adored him, and she wanted the world to kneel beside her. It would, she knew it would, if only he would let her have the chance. At last — what else could he have done? — he consented, with the proviso that if he did not approve the finished product, it would be shown to no one else.

She went to work at once, with that fresh and resistless energy that only adolescence can command, and skill very nearly equal to her energy. The first rushes were in the promised hieratic manner and made Grandison Whiting seem even more Grandisonian than he did off-screen. He moved through the sceneries of his life with the ponderous, hypnotic grace of a Sun-King, his bright red hair forming a kind of aureole about his palely perfect Celtic face. Even his clothes seemed to allegorize some inner, unfailing nobility.

The film’s fascination for Grandison himself must have been as irresistible as it was embarrassing. It was so patently an act of worship. But it might, for all that, have its use. The resources of art are not often devoted so unstintingly, after all, to celebrating the values of the very rich; or when they were, there is liable to be a perceptible sense of a commodity being bought and paid for, a smell, as of banks of cut flowers, that is sweet but not wholly natural. Boadicea’s film had none of the high gloss of captive art, and yet it was, possibly, in its headlong way, a real achievement.

The work went on. Boadicea was allowed to resume her school attendance at the Amesville High School on a reduced schedule so as to have advantage of the daylight hours. As she felt more secure in the possession of her skills, she permitted herself liberties, little lyric departures from the early grand manner of the film. She caught her father, quite unawares, rough-housing with Dow Jones, his spaniel bitch. She recorded minutes, and soon whole cassettes, of his authentic, and delectable, table-talk, and one of these occasions was when her uncle Charles was on hand. Uncle Charles was the head of the House Ways and Means Committee. She followed her father about on a business trip to Omaha and Dallas, and there was some satisfactory footage of what seemed bonafide wheeling and dealing.

She knew, though, that it was not, and she became obsessed (both as artist and as daughter) with penetrating to those shadowed recesses of his life where (she believed) he was most fully himself. She knew that what he ventured to say before her cameras differed essentially from what he would have said in candor, among friends; differed still from what, in his soul, he held to be truth. Or rather she suspected this; for with his children Grandison Whiting would only throw out the most equivocal hints as to his own opinions on any matters more serious than questions of taste and comportment. Instead, he had a donnish knack for showing how, on the one hand, one might think this, or, on the other hand, that, leaving it quite up in the air which of the twain, if either, represented the convictions of Grandison Whiting.

As the film progressed, and then, as it did not progress, Boadicea found herself running up against this equivocalness in everything her father said, in his very smiles. The more she considered, the less she understood, though she continued, still, to adore. It could not be that her father simply lacked a coherent view of the world and his place in it, that he did whatever had to be done to advance his interests on the basis of mere everyday expedience. This may have been the case with her Uncle Charles (who was, in the way of much younger brothers, as devoted to Grandison as Boadicea herself); it may be the case with many men who inhabit the corridors of power by birthright rather than by conquest; but it was not the case with him, not conceivably.

She began to pry. Left alone in his office, she would read the papers lying on his desk; she searched the drawers. She eavesdropped on phone calls, on his conversations with the staff and operations personnel, on their conversations about him. She learned nothing. She began to spy. With the equipment and competence she’d acquired in order to make her films she was able to bug his office, his private sitting room, and the smoking room. Grandison knew this, for his million-dollar security system was proof against much more formidable assaults than this, but he allowed it to go on. He simply refrained from saying anything in these rooms that he would not have said before a delegation from the Iowa Council of Churches. Indeed, Boadicea was audience to just such a delegation, who had come to enlist her father’s support (and through him, her uncle’s) for legislation that would withhold federal funds from all states and cities that directly or indirectly allowed tax dollars to be spent on cheap Argentine grain. Grandison was never more eloquent, though the delegation received no more, in the end, than his signature — and not on a check at that, but on a petition.

She could not turn back. It was no longer for the movie’s sake, or for the sake of any rational need. She surrendered, as to a long-resisted vice. With shame and with a trembling foreboding that there must be bitter consequences to so unseemly an act, yet with a maenad’s reckless pleasure in the very enormity of the risk, she placed a microphone behind the headboard of the bed in their best guest room. His father’s mistress, Mrs. Reade, was expected to be visiting Worry soon. She was also a friend of long-standing, and the wife of the director of an Iowa insurance company in which Grandison held a controlling interest. Surely in these circumstances her father would reveal something.

Her father did not go to Mrs. Reade’s room till late in the evening, and Boadicea had to sit in the sweaty embrace of her earphones, listening to the interminable sound track of Toora-Loora Turandot, a weary old Irish musical that Mrs. Reade had taken upstairs from the library. The minutes crept by, and the music poked along, and then at last Grandison knocked, and could be heard to enter, and to say: “Enough is enough, Bobo, and this, surely, is too much.”

“Darling?” said the voice of Mrs. Reade.

“A moment, my love. I have one thing more to say to my daughter, who is eavesdropping on us at this moment, while pretending to study her French. You are to be finished, Bobo. In Switzerland, at a very highly recommended finishing school in Vilars. I’ve already informed the principal at Amesville that you’ll be going abroad. To learn, I sincerely hope, better manners than you’ve shown evidence of these last few months. You’re to leave at six in the morning, so let me say now, by way of parting, shame on you, Bobo, and bon voyage!”

“Good-bye, Miss Whiting,” said Mrs. Reade. “When you’re in Switzerland you must look up my niece Patricia. I’ll send you her address.” At that point the microphone was disconnected.

All during the drive from Des Moines — and they were now, a sign announced, only twenty-two miles from Amesville — Boadicea had been too upset to talk. She hadn’t meant to be rude to Carl Mueller, though it must have seemed like rudeness. It was anger, raw white anger that would return in surges of never-diminishing intensity and then, for a while, recede, leaving behind, like the wastes of oil and tar on a seaport’s beach, the blackest of black depressions, a horror-stricken sorrow during which she would be assaulted by images of violent self-immolation — of the Saab crashing into a power pylon and bursting into flames, of opened veins, shotgun blasts, and other spectacular annihilations, images she rather entertained than resisted, since to have such monstrous thoughts was in itself a kind of revenge. And then, suddenly irresistibly, the anger would return, so that she would have to press her eyes closed and clench her fists to keep from being overcome.

Yet she knew all the while that such transports were ridiculous and uncalled-for and that she was, in some sense, indulging herself. Her father, in sending Carl Mueller to the airport, had meant no slight, still less a chastisement. He had planned to come for her himself, his note had said, until this very morning when a business crisis had required him to go to Chicago. Similar crises had brought similar disappointments before, though never so passionate nor so unremitting as this. She really must calm down. If she returned to Worry in this state, she was certain to betray herself before Serjeant or Alethea. Just the thought of them, the mention of their names in her mind, could start her off again. Two years she’d been away, and they had sent a stranger to welcome her home. It was not to be believed, it could never be forgiven.

“Carl?”

“Miss Whiting?” He did not take his eyes from the road.

“I expect you’ll think this is silly, but I wonder if you could take me anywhere else but to Worry. The nearer we get, and we’re so near now, the more unable I feel to cope.”

“I’ll go where you like, Miss Whiting, but there aren’t all that many places to go.”

“A restaurant, somewhere away from Amesville? You haven’t had dinner, have you?”

“No, Miss Whiting. But your folks will be expecting you.”

“My father’s in Chicago, and as to my brother and sister, I doubt that either of them has gone to any personal expense of energy on account of my arrival. I’ll simply phone and say that I stopped in Des Moines to do some shopping — it’s what Alethea would do — and that I’m not equal to driving on to Amesville till I’ve had dinner. Do you mind?”

“Whatever you say, Miss Whiting. I could do with a bite to eat, I guess.”

She studied his blunt profile in silence, marvelling at his impassivity, the quiet fixity of his driving, which could not, on these monotonous roads, require such unwavering attention.

As they were approaching a cloverleaf, he slowed, and asked, still without looking at her, “Somewhere quiet? There’s a pretty good Vietnamese restaurant over in Bewley. At least, that’s what they say.”

“I think, actually, I’d prefer somewhere noisy. And a steak. I’m starved for the taste of rare midwestern beef.”

He did, then, turn to look at her. His cheek dimpled with the inception of a smile, but whether it was a friendly smile, or only ironic, she couldn’t tell, for his sunglasses masked his eyes. In any case, they were not, she would have supposed, especially candid eyes.

“Aren’t there places people go,” she insisted, “up by the border? Especially on Saturday nights. This is Saturday night.”

“You’d need ID,” he said.

She took out a plastic packet of cards and handed them to Carl Mueller. There was a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a Reader’s Digest Subscription Library card, an Iowa Women’s Defense League Registration card, a card declaring her to be a tithing member of the Holy Blood Pentecostal Mission Church (with a laminated photo), and assorted charge cards, all of them identifying her as Beverley Whittaker, age 22, of 512 Willow Street, Mason City, Iowa.

The Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse combined wholesomeness and elegance in a manner archetypally midwestern. Under a glowing greenhouse ceiling lattices of pipes supported an aerial meadow of herbs and houseplants in hanging pots and tiers of terracotta planters. Beneath the greenery a great many antique kitchen tables of oak and pine (all tagged for sale, as were the plants) were grouped about an implausibly large dance floor. It really had been, long ago, a roller rink. Two couples were out on the floor dancing, with lively unspectacular competence, to the Chocolate Doughnut Polka. It was only seven o’clock: everyone else was eating dinner.

The food was wonderful. Boadicea had explained the exact nature of its superiority to anything they might have eaten in Switzerland, had explained it into the ground. Now, with dessert still to be chosen, she had to think of something else for them to talk about, since Carl seemed perfectly prepared to sit there and say nothing. Even with his sunglasses off, his face was unreadable, though handsome enough, considered simple as sculpture: the broad brow and blunt nose, the massive muscles of the neck tapering into the simple geometries of his crew cut, the emphatic carving of the lips, nostrils, and eyes, which yet, for all their distinctness, yielded no meanings of a psychological order. If he smiled, it was that mechanical sort of smile that suggested gears and pulleys. Clank, screek, snik, and then a little card emerges from the metal slot with the word SMILE on it. Sitting there, facing him across the little spray of bachelor buttons and petunias, she tried it herself — tightening the corner of her lips, and lifting them, notch by notch. But then, before he’d noticed, the pendulum swung back and she felt the sting of guilt. What right had she to expect Carl Mueller to be forthcoming with her? She was nothing to him but the boss’s daughter, and she’d taken every mean advantage of that position, commandeering his company as though he had no life or feelings of his own. And then blaming him!

“I’m sorry,” she said, with an utter sincerity of contrition.

Carl crinkled his brow. “For what?”

“For dragging you off like this. For taking up your time. I mean—” She pressed her fingers to the sides of her head just above the cheekbones, where the flux of various miseries was beginning to take the form of a monster headache. “I mean, I didn’t ask, did I, whether you had other plans for this evening?”

He produced one of his clockwork smiles. “That’s okay, Miss Whiting. I didn’t exactly plan on coming here to Elmore tonight, but what the hell. Like you say, the food’s great. You worried about your folks?”

“My feelings are pretty much the opposite of worry. I’m thoroughly pissed off with all of them.”

“That’s what I’d gathered. Of course, it’s none of my business, but I can say for a fact that your father didn’t have much choice whether or not to go to Chicago.”

“Oh yes, I learned long ago that business is business. And I don’t — I can’t — blame him. But Serjeant could have come. He is my brother.”

“I didn’t mention it before, Miss Whiting—”

“Beverley,” she corrected. Earlier she’d made a game of making him call her by the name on her false ID.

“I didn’t mention it before, Miss Whiting, because it didn’t seem my place to, but the reason your brother couldn’t come for you is that two weeks ago he got his license suspended for drunk driving. He was driving home from Elmore, as a matter of fact.”

“He could have come along with you then. So could Alethea.”

“Maybe they could. But I don’t think either of them cares that much for my company. Not that they’ve got any kind of grudge against me. But after all, I’m just one of the operations managers, not a friend of the family.” With which — and with, it seemed, no sense at all of its being a questionable act — he poured the last of the wine in the carafe into his own glass.

“If you want to take me home now, that’s all right.”

“Just relax, Miss Whiting.”

“Beverley.”

“Okay, Beverley.”

“There actually is a real Beverley Whittaker. She was in Switzerland, hiking. We met in a hospice about halfway up Mont Blanc. There was the most incredible lightning storm. Once you’ve seen lightning in the mountains, you can understand why the Greeks put their most important god in charge of it.”

Carl nodded gloomily.

She had to stop chattering, but the long silences, when they developed, panicked her equally.

Another couple had gone out on the dance floor, but just as they started dancing the music stopped. The silence enlarged.

She had a rule of thumb for such situations, and it was to take an interest in other people, since that was what they were interested in.

“And, uh, what are you in charge of?” she asked.

“Pardon?” But his eyes connected just long enough to let her see that he’d understood — and resented — the question.

Which, nevertheless, she must repeat. “You said you were an operations manager. Which operation do you manage?”

“Whatever has to do with the work crews. Recruitment and housing primarily. Transport, payroll, supervision.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a job that has to be done.”

“Of course. My father says it’s the most important operation on the farm.”

“That’s a way of saying it’s the dirtiest. Which it is.”

“Well, it’s not what I meant. In fact, I wouldn’t say that.”

“You would if you had to deal with some of the types we end up with. In another month or so, at the height of it, we’ll have something like twelve hundred on the payroll, and of that twelve hundred I’d say a good half of them are no better than animals.”

“I’m sorry, Carl, but I just can’t accept that.”

“Well, there’s no reason you should have to, Miss Whiting.” He smiled. “Beverley, that is. Anyway, it’s a good job, and a hell of a lot of responsibility for someone my age, so it would be crazy to complain, if that’s what it seems like I’m doing. It’s not.”

They were rescued by the waitress who came and asked them what they wanted for dessert. Carl asked for Bavarian cream. Boadicea, because it was her first meal back in America, ordered apple pie.

A new polka had started up, and Boadicea, admitting defeat, turned her chair sideways to watch the dancers. There was a couple out on the floor now who actually could dance, whose bodies moved with the motions of life. They made the other dancers look like the simulacra you paid to see inside a tent at a county fair. The girl was especially good. She wore a wide, whirling, gypsyish skirt with a flounce at the hem, and the sway and flare and swirl of the skirt seemed to infuse the bland music with energies of an altogether higher order. The boy danced with equal energy but less panache. His limbs moved too abruptly, while his torso seemed never quite to unlock from its innate crouch. It was the body of a Brueghel peasant. Even so, the delight in his face was so lively, and it was such a handsome face (not in the least a Brueghel), that you couldn’t keep from feeling an answering delight. The girl (Boadicea was sure) wouldn’t have danced nearly so well with someone else, would not have been so set-on-fire. Together, for as long as the polka lasted, they brought time to a stop at the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse.

6

Among the traditions and institutions of Amesville High School Mrs. Norberg of Room 113 was one of the most awful — in, as Boadicea liked to say, the original sense of the word. Some years before, in a tight three-way contest, she had been elected to the House of Representatives on the ticket of the American Spiritual Renewal Party. In its heyday the A.S.R.P. had been the rallying point of the Farm Belt’s most diehard undergoders, but as their first fine vision of a spiritually awakened America faded, and especially when the party’s leaders were proven to be as venal as run-of-the-mill Republicans and Democrats, its members returned to the G.O.P. or became, like Mrs. Norberg, lone voices crying in a wilderness of political error.

Mrs. Norberg had taught American History and Senior Social Studies at the time of her election, and when she returned to Iowa after her single term in Washington she taught the same subjects, and she was teaching them still, though recently she had added to the stature of her legend by having spent a two year so-called sabbatical in a rest home in Dubuque, where she was taken (much against her will) after having been inspired one day to cut off a student’s hair in the school lunchroom. Her students referred to this as the Iceberg’s second term of office. They knew she was crazy, but no one seemed to mind all that much. Since Dubuque her frenzies against gum chewers and note passers were much abated, and she limited herself to a teacher’s conventional weapon, the report card. On an average, twenty percent of each year’s graduating class failed Social Studies and had to take a make-up class to get their diplomas. All her known enemies were failed, of course, but so might be, it seemed, anyone else. Her F’s fell, like the rain, on the just and unjust alike. Some even claimed that Mrs. Norberg drew names out of a hat.

This would have been alarming enough with regard only to its gross injustice, but Boadicea had a special reason to dread the Iceberg’s class, in that it had been her Uncle Charles who had taken away Mrs. Norberg’s seat in the house. When she had expressed her misgivings to her father, he was dismissive. A majority of the people one had to deal with, Grandison declared, were lunatics. One of the chief reasons for Boadicea’s attending a public high school was precisely that she might come to terms with this unpleasant truth. As to the possibility of failing, she need not worry: Grandison had already arranged with the principal to correct any grade she received that was less than a B. All she had to do, therefore, was go to Room 113 for one hour every day and sit. She might be as reticent or as outspoken as she chose — it wouldn’t matter. But as to getting rid of Mrs. Norberg, that was not to be thought of. Incompetent she might be, or even bananas, but she was also the last certified undergoder on the high school’s faculty, and any attempt to dislodge her would have raised a major stink throughout the county and possibly across the state. In three years she would retire: till then she had to be endured.

Given such guarantees — a virtual suit of armor — Boadicea soon became the official gadfly of her class. Mrs. Norberg seemed rather more grateful than not to be supplied with a combatant who could be relied on to hold — and express — opinions that she would otherwise have been obliged to set forth herself before she could trounce them, never a very satisfactory arrangement for someone who delights in controversy. That these aberrant ideas possessed much more force and cogency as expressed by Boadicea than by the Iceberg’s usual straw-men seemed not to trouble her. Like most people of strong convictions, any contradiction registered on her consciousness as so much nonsense. Faith is a selective kind of blindness.

So it was that whenever Boadicea would be holding forth on any subject, from the reasonableness of a graduated income tax to the unreasonableness of her Uncle Charles’s recent demagogic vendetta against the A.C.L.U., a fixed smile would settle on the Iceberg’s colorless lips, her eyes would glaze, and she would knit her fingers together in a thorny little clump of self-restraint, as who would say: “Though my duty be painful, I shall perform it to the last drop of my blood.” When Boadicea wound down, Mrs. Norberg would unclasp her hands, give a little sigh, and thank Boadicea ironically for what she was sure was a “very interesting” or “very unusual” point-of-view. If this seemed insufficiently withering, she would ask others in the class what their thoughts on the matter were, calling first on anyone she suspected to be a fellow-traveller. Most students, prudently, refused to be trapped into any opinion, pro or con, but there was a small contingent, eight of the thirty-two, who could be relied on to parrot Mrs. Norberg’s established prejudices, however silly, however blatantly contrary to fact. It was always one of these who was allowed to have the last word, a strategy that had the desired effect of making Boadicea seem, even to herself, a minority of one. Also, it tended to diffuse her animosity and deflect it toward the eight reliables, whose names became a kind of baleful litany for her: Cheryl and Mitch and Reuben and Sloan, and Sandra and Susan and Judy and Joan. All the girls, except Sandra Wolf, were cheerleaders, and all, without exception, were mindless. Three of the eight — Joan Small and Cheryl and Mitch Severson — came from the wealthier farm families of the area. The Seversons and Smalls were scarcely comparable to the Whitings, but they did qualify as “gentry” and were invited as a matter of course to all the larger functions at Worry. It distressed Boadicea to find herself at odds with three of the people she was expected to be on friendly, or at least neighborly, terms with, but she couldn’t help herself. There was no need for them to suck up to Mrs. Norberg so egregiously. Their parents weren’t undergoders, not in the benighted way they were. Fanaticism on the scale of the A.S.R.P. was a relic of the past. So why did they do it? Assuming they weren’t just boot-licking. And for that matter, how did you explain someone like the Iceberg herself? Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts? For that’s all the old undergoder dread of music (etc.) amounted to. They couldn’t bear for other people to have experiences they were incapable of. Resentment. Resentment and jealousy — it was as simple as that, though no one (not even Boadicea) dared to come right out and say so. Things were a little looser lately, but not as loose as all that.

Like most well-seasoned teachers, Mrs. Norberg was a confirmed monologuist, and so Boadicea was not called upon every day to speak up for reason and sanity. Penance enough to have to be an audience to the Iceberg’s rambling reminiscences of her term in Congress (it was her special pride and unique distinction to have been present at every vote taken in those two years). These would shift, by the freest of associations, into (for instance) a cutesy-poo anecdote about the dear sweet squirrels in her back yard — Silverface, Tom-Boy, and Mittens, each of them a little philosopher-in-the-rough — and these whimseys would metamorphose, by imperceptible degrees, into diatribes against the F.D.A., the bête noir of the Farm Belt. All this — the memorabilia, the whimseys, the denunciations — would be set forth with an air of winking complicity, for it was the Iceberg’s underlying assumption that her students were sensible to their good fortune in having been assigned to her Social Studies class and not that of the wishy-washy liberal Mr. Cox.

Listening to these monologues and battering her wits against the woman’s impassive, impervious authority, Boadicea came to hate Mrs. Norberg with a hatred that would leave her, by the hour’s end, trembling with impotent fury. Literally trembling. Sheerly from a sense of self-preservation, she took to cutting classes, even though there was no way, with the bus drivers posted at the doors, to leave the building. She would lock herself inside a toilet and sit cross-legged on the stool, working calculus problems. She became openly sarcastic in class, and sneered when she was sneered at. She made a point, whenever a soliloquy commenced, of turning away from the Iceberg and staring out the window, though there was nothing to be seen but sky and clouds and the slow curve of three suspended wires. Mrs. Norberg made no other response to these provocations than to move Boadicea to the front row, where, if Boadicea chose to divert her gaze, she would simply interpose herself between the viewer and the view.

It was there, in the front row seat next to his, that Boadicea recognized Daniel Weinreb. They had been together in the class for two months without her making the connection. Not that the back of his head (which was mostly all she’d seen of him till the move to the front) was so very distinctive. Also, he’d changed his appearance since she’d fallen, briefly and platonically, in love with him at the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse: shorter hair, the moustache gone, the high spirits folded away, and an inert, affectless fortitude in their place. Except to answer the roll-call or shuffle his feet at a question directly addressed to him, he never spoke in class, and just as his words never betrayed his thoughts, his face never betrayed his feelings.

Boadicea was certain, however, that they were not greatly unlike her own. He hated the Iceberg as fervently as she did; he must — or how could he dance so well? Perhaps as a syllogism this left something to be desired, and Boadicea didn’t rest content with an a priori conviction. She began to collect evidences — glints and flashes of the suspected smoldering fires.

The first thing she discovered was that she was not alone in studying Daniel so closely. Mrs. Norberg herself demonstrated a curiosity altogether out of proportion to Daniel’s classroom contributions. Often when another student would be speaking her eyes would turn to Daniel, and at the militant moment when she would cut loose from classroom protocols and really testify for the gospel of the A.S.R.P., it was toward Daniel these goads were directed, despite the fact that it would be Boadicea, if anyone, who would rise to the bait and argue.

At last, however, toward the end of the second six-week period, Mrs. Norberg threw out a challenge that Daniel did not turn away from. There had been a story in the news, recently, that had very much exercised the indignation of undergoders. Bud Scully, a farm manger for the Northrup Corp. farm outside LuVerne, had undertaken, on his own initiative, to do what it was no longer permitted the State of Iowa to do: he’d been jamming radio broadcasts originating in Minnesota. The stations had brought suit against him, and he was enjoined to desist. When he refused, on grounds of conscience and continued his private crusade, he was sent to prison. Undergoders were up in arms. Mrs. Norberg, who, to do her credit, tried to resist the passions of the passing hour (she never, for instance, went beyond Watergate in her American History class) was swept away. She devoted a week of the class’s time to an in-depth consideration of John Brown. She read aloud Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. She played a recording of the hymn of “John Brown’s Body,” standing over the tape recorder warily and jerking her head up and down in time to the music. When the hymn was over, with tears in her eyes (a quite inadvertent testimony to the power of music), she told how she had visited the park right here in Iowa where John Brown had drilled his volunteer army for the attack on Harpers Ferry. Then, shouldering her blackboard pointer like a rifle, she showed the class how the soldiers in that army would have drilled, marching back and forth across the shining maple floorboards — right face, left face, Ten-SHUN! to the rear MARCH, a perfect spectacle. At such moments, truly, you’d have had to have a heart of stone not to be grateful to be in the Iceberg’s class.

All this while she had resisted mentioning Bud Scully by name, though none of them could have been unaware of the intended parallel. Now, after a formal salute to the flag in the corner, Mrs. Norberg abandoned all pretense of objectivity. She went to the blackboard and wrote out, in gigantic letters, the martyr’s name. BUD SCULLY. Then she went to her desk, secured herself behind her folded hands, and, glowering, defied the world to do its worst.

Boadicea raised her hand.

Mrs. Norberg called on her.

“Do you mean,” Boadicea asked, with a disingenuous smile, “that Bud Scully is another John Brown? And that what he did was right?”

“Did I say that?” the Iceberg demanded. “Let me ask you, Miss Whiting: is that your opinion? Is Bud Scully’s case analagous to that of John Brown?”

“In the sense that he’s gone to jail for his convictions you might say so. But otherwise? One man tried to stop slavery, and the other is trying to stop popular music radio stations. At least that’s what I understand from the newspaper.”

“Which newspaper would that be? I ask, you see, because I gave up reading the papers some time ago. My experiences (especially when I was on the Hill) have shown me that they’re not at all reliable.”

“It was the Star-Tribune.”

“The Star-Tribune,” the Iceberg repeated, turning to Daniel with a knowing look.

“And what it said,” Boadicea continued, “in its editorial, was that everyone must obey the law just because it is the law, and the only way we’re ever going to live together peacefully is to respect the law. Even when it grates against us.”

“That seems quite sound on the face of it. The question John Brown poses, though, remains to be answered. Are we required to obey an unjust law?” The Iceberg threw back her head, glittering with righteousness.

Boadicea persisted. “According to the polls, most people thought the old law was unjust, the law that kept them from reading out-of-state newspapers and from listening to out-of-state broadcasts.”

“According,” Mrs. Norberg said scornfully, “to the polls in those same newspapers.”

“Well, the Supreme Court felt it was unjust too, or they wouldn’t have overturned it. And as I understand it, short of a constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court has the last word on the rightness or the wrongness of laws.”

Mrs. Norberg’s views on the Supreme Court were well known, and accordingly there was a tacit understanding among her students to steer clear of the reefs of this subject. But Boadicea was beyond compassion or prudence. She wanted to demolish the woman’s mind and send her back to Dubuque in a strait-jacket. She deserved nothing else.

It wasn’t going to be that easy, however. Mrs. Norberg had a paranoid’s instinct for knowing when she was being persecuted. She stepped aside and Boadicea’s missile passed by harmlessly.

“It is a knotty question, I agree. And highly complex. Everyone will be affected by it in a different way, and that is bound to color our attitudes. Right here in this room we have someone whose life was touched very directly by the decision Miss Whiting speaks of. Daniel, what is your opinion?”

“About what?” Daniel asked.

“Does the State of Iowa have the right, the sovereign right, to bar potentially harmful and disruptive material from being publicly available, or does that represent an interference with our constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech?”

“I can’t say I ever thought much about it.”

“Surely, Daniel, having gone to prison for breaking the state’s law…” She paused for the benefit of anyone in the class who might not have known this. Of course there was no one who hadn’t heard Daniel’s legend by now. It was nearly of the magnitude of Mrs. Norberg’s, which probably, more than the principles involved, accounted for her relentless, attentive dislike. “Surely, when you’re then released because the Supreme Court—” She lifted her eybrows sardonically, “—rules, that, after all, the law is not the law and never has been… surely, you must have some opinion on such a subject.”

“I guess my opinion is that it doesn’t make much difference one way or the other.”

“Not make much difference! A change that big?”

“I got out two weeks earlier, and that’s about it.”

“Really, Daniel, I don’t know what you can mean.”

“I mean I still don’t think it’s safe to express an honest opinion anywhere in the state of Iowa. And so far as I know, there’s no law that says I have to. And I’m not about to.”

First there was a silence. Then, led by Boadicea, a smattering of applause. Even with that unprecedented provocation, Mrs. Norberg did not take her eyes from Daniel. You could almost see the calculations going on behind that fixed stare: was his insolence defensible, in theory, as candor? Or might he be made to pay for it? Nothing less than expulsion would be worth a head-on contest, and at last, with evident reluctance, she decided not to risk it. There would always be another time.

After the class Boadicea lay in wait for Daniel at the entrance to the lunchroom.

“That was terrific,” she told him in a stage-whisper, as she slipped into place behind him in the cafeteria line. “A regular adventure movie.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Oh no! You were completely, universally right. The only way to deal with the Iceberg is silence. Let her talk to her eight echoes.”

He just smiled. Not the fleshy, unforgettable smile of the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse, but a smile that was all mind and meaning. She felt abashed, as though, by making no reply, he meant to show that he considered her one of the people it wasn’t safe to talk to. The smile faltered.

“Hey,” he said, “this is a dumb argument — you telling me I’m right, and me saying I’m wrong.”

“Well, you are right.”

“Maybe, but what’s right for me isn’t necessarily what’s right for you. If you stop sniping at her, what’ll there be for the rest of us to listen to?”

“You mean I can afford to be brave because I’m safe.”

“And I can’t afford it. Which wasn’t something I should have spelled out. That’s the mistake. One of the first things you learn in prison is that the guards like to think that you like them. Norberg’s no different.”

Boadicea wanted to wrap her arms around him, to leap up and cheer for him like some silly cheerleader, to buy him something terrifically expensive and appropriate, such was the enormity of her agreement and of her gratitude at having anyone to be agreeing with.

“School is a prison,” she agreed earnestly. “You know, I used to think I was the only person in the world who understood that. I was in Switzerland at this awful so-called finishing school, and I wrote a letter home, to my father, explaining all the ways it was a prison, and he wrote back saying, ‘Of course, my dear Bobo — school is a prison for the very good reason that all children are criminals.’”

“Uh-huh.”

They’d reached the food. Daniel took a dish of cole slaw onto his tray and pointed at the fishsticks.

“Actually,” she went on, “that isn’t exactly what he said. What he said was that teenagers aren’t fully civilized yet, and so they’re dangerous. Not here in Iowa, perhaps, but in the cities certainly. But one of the differences between here and the cities… oh, just soup for me, please… is the degree to which people here do live by the official code. That’s what my father says anyhow.”

Daniel gave his school credit card to the check-out girl. The machine fizzed with the prices of his lunch, and the girl handed him back his card. He picked up his tray.

“Daniel?”

He stopped and she asked, with her eyes, for him to wait till they were out of earshot of the check-out girl. When they were, she asked him, “Are you having lunch with anyone else today?”

“No.”

“Why not have lunch with me then? I know it’s not for me to ask, and you probably prefer to have the time to yourself, to think.” She paused to allow him to contradict her, but he just stood there with his devastating superior smile. His handsomeness was so dark, so exotic, almost as though he belonged to another race. “But me,” she persisted, “I’m different. I like to talk before I think.”

He laughed. “Say, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you have lunch with me?”

“Why how nice of you to ask, Daniel,” she minced, her parody of pert insouciance. Or possibly it was the genuine article, pert insouciance itself. “Or should I call you Mr. Weinreb?”

“Maybe something in between.”

“Very funny.” Making her voice comically deep.

“That’s what Susan McCarthy always says when she’s at a loss for words.”

“I know. I’m a close observer. Too.” But for all that it had stung — to be compared (and accurately) with the likes of a Susan McCarthy.

They’d found bench-space at a relatively quiet table. Instead of starting to eat, he just looked at her. Started to say something, and stopped. She felt tingly with excitement. She had caught his attention. It stopped short of liking or even, in any committed way, of interest, but the worst was over, and suddenly, incredibly, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She blushed. She smiled. And shook her head, with pert insouciance.

7

After the argument with her hateful — literally hateful — sister, Boadicea wrapped herself in her old school cape of green loden and went up to the roof, where the wind whipped her hair and walloped the cape with satisfying emphasis. The twit, she thought, concerning Alethea, the prig, the bitch; the sneak, the spy, the snob; the sly, mindless, soulless, self-regarding slut. The worst of it was that Boadicea could never, when it came to a showdown, translate her scorn into language that Alethea would admit to understanding, whereas Alethea had a monolithic confidence in her snobberies that gave even the most banal a kind of authority.

Even the roof wasn’t far enough. With grim elation Boadicea mounted the west wind pylon, pausing in the lee of the first vane to marvel, dispassionately, that there could be enough heat left in these wintry blasts to be converted into the steady whirling of the metal blades. Was it heat? or just the momentum of the molecules of gas? or was there any difference? In any case, science was wonderful.

So forget Alethea, she told herself. Rise above her. Consider the clouds, and determine the actual colors incorporated in their mottled, luminous, numinous gray. Arrange the world so that her intolerable sneering profile was not in the foreground, and then it would become, perhaps, a satisfactory sort of world, large and bright and full of admirable processes that a clear mind could learn to deal with, the way the pylons dealt with the wind, the way her father dealt with people, even such otherwise intractable people as Alethea and, occasionally, herself.

Higher she mounted, above the highest vanes, to the small eyrie of steel hoops at the top of the pylon. The winds buffeted. The platform swayed. But she felt no vertigo, only the steadying satisfaction of seeing the world spread out in so orderly a way. The great jumble of Worry became, from this height, as comprehensible as a set of blueprints: the fallow flowerbeds and quincunxes of small trees in the Whitings’ private gardens on the roof below; then, stepwise in terraces below these, on the more extensive rooftops of the wings, were the pools and playgrounds of the other residents of the complex; farthest down, bounded by a broad defensive crescent of garages, stables, and silos, were the kitchen gardens, poultry yards, and tennis courts. The few people in sight all seemed to be engaged in emblematic tasks, like figures in a Brueghel: children skating, a woman scattering corn for chickens, two blue-jacketed mechanics bent over the idling engine of a limousine, a man walking a dog toward the trees that screened the western gate-house. To one who stood on the roof those trees would mark the limit of the horizon, but from this higher vantage one could see over them as far as the blue-gray zigzag of housetops that had once been — and not so long ago that Boadicea couldn’t remember it herself — the village of Unity. Most of the village’s former residents lived in Worry now. Their clapboard houses stood empty through most of the year, as many as still stood at all. It was saddening to think that a whole way of life, a century of traditions, had to come to an end for the new way to begin. But what was the alternative? To keep it going artificially, an instant Williamsburg? In effect that was what the summer people were doing now, at least with the better homes. The rest had been scavenged for their meat — siding, plumbing, curious bits of carpentry — and the bones left to weather into a more picturesque condition, at which point, doubtless, they would go to the auction block too. It was sad to see, but it was necessary — the result of forces too large to be withstood, though they might be channeled and shaped with more or less love and imagination. Worry, with its neo-Norman castellations, its out-lying parks and commons, and its innovative social engineering, surely represented the process of feudalization at its most humane and, so to speak, democratic. A Utopia of sorts. Whether, finally, it were a Utopia for the likes of Boadicea she could never decide. Ownership of so much land and wealth was problematical enough, but beyond this was the moral question of one’s relation with one’s tenants. There were over five hundred at last count. Though they would all have denied it — and could in fact be seen denying it in the movie Boadicea had made way back when — their condition was uncomfortably close to serfdom. But uncomfortable, it seemed, only for Boadicea, since the waiting list of qualified applicants who wanted to sign on and move in was ridiculously in excess of the foreseeable openings. Kids at school were always sounding her out about their chances of being moved to the top of the list; some had offered outright bribes if she would put in a word with her father. Once poor Serjeant had got into hot water for accepting such a bribe.

But to suppose that Daniel Weinreb had so venal a purpose in cultivating her acquaintance was a patent absurdity. The accusation revealed the limits of Alethea’s imagination, for it couldn’t begin to do justice to the scale of Daniel’s ambitions. Daniel meant to be an artist, as great an artist as he could become. Boadicea doubted whether he’d given so much as a moment’s thought to the long-term possibilities of their friendship. Aside from the opportunity (which he was finally to take up today) of paying a visit to Worry and trying his hand at the Whitings’ various instruments, it was unlikely that he considered the acquaintance especially advantageous. Except for the chance (the glorious chance) to talk with someone else who also meant to become a great artist. So really he didn’t seem to have, in a word, designs.

Boadicea, by contrast, lived most of her life in an endless design. Every moment she wasn’t entirely focused on the task in hand she was planning, rehearsing, imagining, daydreaming. What she had planned, vis-a-vis Daniel, was that they would be lovers. She had not drawn up a detailed scenario of how it would come about. She wasn’t even entirely sure of the details of their love’s consummation, since such pornography as she’d looked into had seemed rather ishy, but she was certain that once they’d actually got involved erotically it would be very nice, not to say ecstatic. Daniel, she’d heard tell from various independent sources, had been “intimate” with a number of women (one of them six years older than him and engaged to another man), though no one was prepared to say whether he’d definitely gone all the way. Sex, therefore, could be trusted to take care of itself (at least in her daydreams), and Boadicea was free to elaborate the associated drama: how, quite suddenly, on a whim or a dare or after a fight with her sister, she would run off with Daniel to some sinister far-away capital — Paris or Rome or Toronto — there to lead a life that would be thrilling, elegant, virtuous, simple, and entirely devoted to art in its highest manifestations. Not, however, till they’d graduated, for even in her wildest dreams Boadicea proceeded with caution.

A mile beyond Unity the road climbed a short rise and you could see, for the first time, the gray ferro-concrete tower of Worry. Then the road dipped and the tower sank back into featureless fields.

He was short of breath and his legs were aching from pedaling too fast, but being so near it was psychologically impossible to slow down. Even the wind, gusting from the west, and puffing up his windbreaker before him like a small red sail, seemed to be trying to speed him on his way. He turned right at the unmarked turn-off that everyone knew was the road to Worry, zipped past a man out walking a German shepherd, and arrived out-of-breath at the gatehouse.

A metal gate sprang up from the road in front of him, a hooter began hooting, stopped just long enough for a recorded voice to tell him to get out of his car, and started up again. A uniformed guard came out of the gatehouse holding a sub-machine gun. It would have been disconcerting anywhere else, but Daniel, never having been to Worry before, supposed this was the standard reception that unannounced visitors received.

He reached into his jacket pocket for the invitation disc that Boadicea had given him, but the guard shouted that he should put his hands above his head.

He put his hands above his head.

“Where do you think you’re going, son?” the guard asked.

“I’m visiting Miss Whiting. At her invitation. The disc she gave me is in my pocket.”

The guard reached into Daniel’s pocket and took out the disc.

Daniel lowered his hands. The guard seemed to consider whether to take offense. Instead he went into the gatehouse with the disc, and for five minutes Daniel saw no more of him. Finally he set his bike on its kickstand and went to the door of the gatehouse. Through the glass he could see the guard talking on the phone. The guard gestured for him to go back to his bike.

“Is something wrong?” Daniel shouted through the glass.

The guard opened the door and handed the phone to Daniel with a peculiar kind of smile. “Here, he wants to talk to you.”

“Hello,” Daniel said into the grill of the mouthpiece.

“Hello,” replied a pleasant, purring baritone. “There seems to be a problem. I assume this is Daniel Weinreb that I’m speaking to.”

“This is Daniel Weinreb, yes.”

“The problem is this, Daniel. Our security system insists on identifying you as, probably, an escaped prisoner. The guard is understandably reluctant to admit you. In fact, under the circumstances, he hasn’t the authority to do so.”

“Well, I’m not an escaped prisoner, so that should solve your problem.”

“But it doesn’t explain why the security system, which is preternaturally sensitive, should continue to declare that you are carrying a Pole-Williams lozenge of the type used by the state’s prison system.”

“Not the lozenge. Just the housing for it.”

“Ah-ha. Our system isn’t up to making such nice distinctions, apparently. It’s none of my business, of course, but don’t you think it would be wiser — or at least more convenient — to have it taken out? Then this sort of confusion wouldn’t happen.”

“You’re right — it is none of your business. Now, would you please buzz me in, or do I have to have surgery first?”

“By all means. Let me speak to the guard again, would you.”

Daniel handed the phone to the guard and went back to his bicycle. As soon as he came nearer the gatehouse, the hooter started in again, but this time it was switched off.

The guard came out of the gatehouse and said, “Okay. Just go down the road. The Whitings’ entrance is the one with the wrought iron gates. There’s another guard there, but he’s expecting you.”

Daniel nodded, smug with small triumph.

Alethea, at the base of the wind pylon, signaled with her scarf to Boadicea on the summit. Since their quarrel Alethea had put on a riding habit and looked more than ever the belle dame sans merci.

Boadicea waved back. She didn’t want to come down, but Alethea must have had some reason for being so persistent, and anyway she did want to come down since her face and her fingers were numb with cold. The wind and the view had served the simultaneous purpose of calming her down and lifting her up. She could return to earth and talk to Alethea in a spirit of no more than sisterly combativeness.

“I thought,” said Alethea, disdaining to shout but waiting until Boadicea was quite close by, “that your story of having invited that boy here was a complete fabrication. But he’s come, on his bicycle, and there seems to be some question whether he’s to be allowed through the gate. I thought you should know.”

Boadicea was taken aback. Alethea’s action too much resembled ordinary courtesy for her to take exception to it. “Thank you,” she had to say, and Alethea smiled.

“I gave him a disc,” Boadicea fretted.

“They must have thought he looked suspicious. He does to me.”

Inside the stairwell, on the next landing down, was a phone. Boadicea dialled the gatehouse. The guard said that Daniel had already gone through, on her father’s say-so.

Alethea was waiting for her by the elevator. “Seriously, Bobo…”

“Didn’t you say, less than an hour ago, that my biggest problem was that I was always too serious?”

“Yes, of course, but seriously: what can you see in this Weinreb boy? Is it because he was in prison? Do you think that’s glamorous?”

“That has precisely nothing to do with it.”

“I’ll allow he has tolerable good looks—”

Boadicea raised her eyebrows challengingly. Daniel’s looks deserved more than a five on anyone’s scale of ten.

“—but, after all, he does represent the lower depths, doesn’t he?”

“His father’s a dentist.”

“And from what I’ve heard not even a particularly good one.”

“From whom did you hear that?”

“I forget. In any case, good or bad: a dentist! Isn’t that enough? Didn’t you learn anything in Switzerland?”

“Indeed I did. I learned to value intelligence, taste, and breeding — the qualities I admire in Daniel.”

“Breeding!”

“Yes, breeding. Don’t provoke me to comparisons.”

The elevator arrived. They had captured one of the maids, who’d been trying to go down to the kitchen on 2. They rode down in silence until she got off. Boadicea pressed G.

Alethea sighed. “I think you’re being very foolish. And, come the day that you finally do drop him, very cruel.”

“Who is to say, Alethea, that that day will ever come?”

She’d said it only to be provoking, but hearing the words spoken, she wondered if they might conceivably be true. Was this the beginning of her real life? (As against the provisional life she’d been leading up to now.)

“Oh, Bobo. Really!”

“Why not?” Boadicea demanded, a trifle too emphatically. “If we’re in love.”

Alethea giggled, with complete sincerity. And shook her head, by way of saying good-bye, and set off down the hall in the other direction, toward the stables.

It was, Boadicea had to admit, an enormous “if.” She loved talking with Daniel, she loved looking at him, for he had the sort of features that bear contemplation. But love? Love, in the sense commemorated by centuries of books and operas and films?

Once, when she’d followed him about on his paper route, they had sat snuggling together in a broken-down car in a dark garage. It had seemed, for those fifteen minutes, the supreme happiness of her life. To be warm. To relax in that utter anonymity. To savor the silences and smells of a stranger’s garage — rust, dry leaves, the ghosts of ancient motor oils. They’d talked in a dreamy way of going back to the golden age of V-8 engines and superhighways and being two totally average teenagers in a movie about growing up. A lovely pastoral moment, certainly, but scarcely proof of their being in love.

She wondered if Daniel ever wondered whether they were in love; or whether they would be, some day. She wondered if she could get up the nerve to ask him, and what he would say if she did, for he could hardly come right out and say no, the thought had never crossed his mind. While she was still in the midst of her wonderings, there he was, with his bicycle, on the raked gravel of the crescent. The first snowflakes of the year were alighting on his beautiful black hair. His nose and forehead, his cheekbones and his chin were straight out of the most arrogantly lovely Ghirlandaio in all the museums of the world.

“Daniel!” she called out, bounding down the steps, and from the way he smiled at her in reply she thought that maybe it was possible that they were already in love. But she understood, as well, that it would be wrong to ask, or even to wonder.

Grandison Whiting was a tall, spare-limbed, thin-faced, pilgrimish man who stood in violent contradiction to his own flamboyantly bushy beard, a beard of the brightest carrot-orange, a beard that any pirate could have gloried in. His suit was puritanically plain, but across the muted check of the waistcoat hung a swag of gold chain so heavy as to seem actually serviceable in conjunction, say, with manacles or fetters. And glinting within the cuffs of his coat were cufflinks blazoned with diamonds larger than any that Daniel had ever seen, even in the windows of the Des Moines branch of Tiffany’s, so that he seemed to wear, not his heart, but his checkbook on his sleeve.

His manners and accent were uniquely, unnaturally his own; neither English nor Iowan, but a peculiar hybrid of both that preserved the purr of the former and the twang of the latter. You would have felt almost guilty to say that you liked such a person as Grandison Whiting, but for all that Daniel didn’t positively dislike him. His strangeness was fascinating, like the strangeness of some exotic bird illustrated in a book of color plates, a heron or an ibis or a cockatoo.

As to the nest that this rare bird inhabited, Daniel was in no such state of equivocation. All of Worry made Daniel uncomfortable. You couldn’t walk on the carpets or sit on the chairs without thinking you’d do them some damage. And of all the rooms that Daniel had been taken through, Grandison Whiting’s drawing room, where they’d come at five for tea, was, if not the grandest, surely the most elegantly perishable. Not that Daniel, by this time, was still making sharp distinctions among the degrees of bon ton. It was all equally unthinkable, and hours ago he’d closed his mind to any but the simplest sense of having to resist the various intimidations of so much money. If you once allowed yourself to admire any of it — the spoons, the cups, the sugar bowl, the exquisite creamer filled with cream as thick and gloppy as mucilage — where would you stop? So he shut it out: he took his tea without sugar or cream and passed up all the cakes for one dry curl of unbuttered toast.

No one urged him to change his mind.

After they’d been introduced all round and the weather had been deplored, Grandison Whiting asked Daniel what he had thought of the harpsichord. Daniel (who’d been expecting a genuine antique, not a modern reconstruction built in Boston forty years ago) replied, guardedly, that it was nothing like a piano, that the touch, and the two manuals, would take some getting used to. What he’d said at the time, to Boa, was “Weird”; what he hadn’t said, even to her, was that the Steinway grand was as far beyond his ken as the harpsichord (or as the harp, for that matter), just as weird, in the sense of being wholly and unsettlingly beautiful.

Then Boa’s sister Alethea (in a white dress as stiff and resplendent as the table napkins) asked him how, in the wilderness of Amesville, he had managed to take piano lessons. He said he was self-taught, which she must have suspected was less than the whole truth, for she insisted: “Entirely?” He nodded, but with a smile meant to be teasing. She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks. Daniel wondered if she weren’t actually the more interesting of the two sisters: interesting as an object, like some dainty cup with flowers painted on it in microscopic details, or like an armchair with golden legs carved into watery shapes, with that same eggshell elegance, the same intrinsic, unhesitating disdain for boors, bears, clods, and paupers like himself, which Daniel found (somewhat guiltily) arousing. Boa, by contrast, seemed just another person, a contender in the sweepstakes of growth and change, who sometimes would pull ahead of him, sometimes fall behind. No doubt the family money was in her blood as much as it was in Alethea’s, but its effect on her was problematical, whereas with Alethea it was as though the money had blotted out everything else: as though she were the form that money took translated into flesh and blood — no longer a problem, just a fact.

Alethea went on, with wonderful aplomb considering that no one seemed interested, about horses and riding. Her father listened abstractedly, his manicured fingers patting the tangles of his fantastic beard.

Alethea fell silent.

No one took the initiative.

“Mr. Whiting,” said Daniel, “was it you I spoke to earlier, when I was at the gatehouse?”

“I’m sorry to have to say it was. Candidly, Daniel, I hoped I might just wriggle out of that one. Did you recognize my voice? Everyone does, it seems.”

“I only meant to apologize.”

“Apologize? Nonsense! I was in the wrong, and you called me down for it quite properly. Indeed, it was then, hanging up the phone and blushing for my sins, that I decided I must have you come to tea. Wasn’t it, Alethea? She was with me, you see, when the alarm went off.”

“The alarms go off a dozen times a day,” Boa said. “And they’re always false alarms. Father says it’s the price we have to pay.”

“Does it seem an excess of caution?” Grandison Whiting asked rhetorically. “No doubt it is. But it’s probably best to err on that side, don’t you think? In future when you visit you must let us know in advance, so that we may shut off the scanner, or whatever they call it. And I sincerely hope you will return, if only for Bobo’s sake. I’m afraid she’s been feeling rather… cut-off?… since she came back from the greater world beyond Iowa.” He raised his hand, as though to forestall Boa’s protests. “I know it’s not for me to say that. But one of the few advantages of being a parent is that one may take liberties with one’s children.”

“Or so he claims,” said Boa. “But in fact he takes all the liberties he can, with whoever allows it.”

“It’s nice of you to say so, Bobo, since that gives me leave to ask Daniel — you will allow me to call you Daniel, won’t you? And you must call me Grandison.”

Serjeant snickered.

Grandison Whiting nodded toward his son, by way of acknowledgement, and continued: “To ask you, Daniel (as I know I have no right to), Why have you never had that terrible apparatus removed from your stomach? You’re quite entitled to, aren’t you? As I understand it — and I’ve had to give the matter some consideration, since officially I’m on the governing board of the state prison system — only convicts who are paroled, or who’ve committed much more… heinous crimes than yours—”

“Which isn’t,” Boa hastened to remind her father, “any crime at all, since the court’s decision.”

“Thank you, dear — that’s exactly my point. Why, Daniel, having been wholly exonerated, do you submit to the inconvenience and, I daresay, the embarrassment of the sort of thing that happened today?”

“Oh, you learn where the alarms are. And you don’t go back.”

“Pardon me, um, Daniel,” said Serjeant, with vague good will, “but I’m not quite following. How is it that you go about setting off alarms?”

“When I was in prison,” Daniel explained, “I had a P-W lozenge embedded in my stomach. The lozenge is gone, so there’s no chance of my blowing us all up accidentally, but the housing for it is still there, and that, or the traces of metal in it, is what sets off alarms.”

“But why is it still there?”

“I could have it taken out if I wanted, but I’m squeamish about surgery. If they could get it out as easily as they got it in, I’d have no objections.”

“Is it a big operation?” Alethea asked, wrinkling her nose in pretty revulsion.

“Not according to the doctors. But—” He lifted his shoulders: “One man’s meat…”

Alethea laughed.

He was feeling more and more sure of himself, even cocky. This was a routine he’d often gone through, and it always made him feel like Joan of Arc or Galileo, a modern martyr of the Inquisition. He also felt something of a hypocrite, since the reason he’d kept the P-W housing in his stomach (as anyone who thought about it would have known) was that as long as he was still wired for prison he couldn’t be drafted into the National Guard. Not that he minded being or feeling hypocritical. Hadn’t he read, in Reverend Van Dyke’s book, that we’re all hypocrites and liars in the eyes of God? To deny that was only to be self-deluded besides.

However, some molecular switch inside must have responded to this tremor of guilt, for much to his own surprise Daniel started to tell Grandison Whiting of the corruption and abuses he’d witnessed at Spirit Lake. This, on the grounds that Whiting, being on the governing board of the state’s prisons, might be able to do something. He developed quite a head of steam about the system of food vouchers you had to buy just to keep alive, but even at the height of it he could see he was making a tactical error. Grandison Whiting listened to the exposé with a glistening attentiveness behind which Daniel could sense not indignation but the meshing of various cogs and gears of a logical rebuttal. Clearly, Whiting had known already of the evils Daniel was denouncing.

Boa, at the close of Daniel’s tale, expressed a hearty sense of the wrong being done, which would have been more gratifying if he hadn’t seen her through so many other tirades in the Iceberg’s classroom. More surprising was Serjeant’s response. Though it amounted to no more than his saying that it didn’t seem fair, he must have known that he would be flying in the face of his father’s as-yet-unexpressed opinion.

After a long and dour look at his son, Grandison Whiting brightened to a formal smile, and said, quietly: “Justice isn’t always fair.”

“You must excuse me,” said Alethea, putting aside her cup and rising, “but I see that Father means to have a serious discussion, and that is a pastime, like bridge, that I’ve never learned how to enjoy.”

“As you please, my dear,” said her father. “And indeed, if the rest of you would prefer… ?”

“Nonsense,” said Boa. “We’re just beginning to enjoy ourselves.” She took hold of Daniel’s hand and squeezed. “Aren’t we?”

Daniel went, “Mm.”

Serjeant took another pastry from the plate, his fourth.

“Let us say, for the sake of argument,” said Boa pouring tea, and then cream, into Daniel’s cup, “that justice is always fair.”

Grandison Whiting folded his hands across his waistcoat, just above his watchchain. “Justice is always just, certainly. But fairness is to justice as common sense is to logic. That is to say, justice may (and often does) transcend fairness. Fairness usually boils down to a simple, heartfelt conviction that the world should be ordered with one’s own convenience in mind. Fairness is a child’s view of justice. Or a bum’s.”

“Oh, Father, don’t go off on bums.” She turned to Daniel. “I don’t know how many times we’ve had the same argument. Always about bums. It’s Father’s hobbyhorse.”

“Bums,” he went on imperturbably, “as opposed to beggars. Men who have chosen abjection as a way of life, without the extenuating circumstances of blindness, amputation, or imbecility.”

“Men,” Boa contradicted, “who simply can’t take responsibility for themselves. Men who are helpless before a world that is, after all, a pretty rough place.”

“Helpless? So they would have us believe. But all men are responsible for themselves, by definition. All adults, that is. Bums, however, insist on remaining children, in a state of absolute dependency. Think of the most incorrigible such wretch you’ve seen, and imagine him at the age of five instead of five-and-fifty. What change might you observe? There he is, smaller no doubt, but in moral terms the same spoiled child, whining over his miseries, wheedling to have his way, with no plans except for the next immediate gratification, which he will either bully us into giving him or, failing that, will attempt to seduce from us by the grandeur and mystery of his abasement.”

“As you may have gathered, Daniel, we’re not speaking of a completely hypothetical bum. There was a real man, one summer when we were in Minneapolis, with a shoe missing and a cut over one eye, and this man had the temerity to ask Father for a quarter. Father told him: ‘There’s the gutter. Be my guest.’ ”

“She misquotes me, Daniel. I said: I would prefer, really, to contribute directly. And dropped what change I had in my pocket down the nearest drain.”

“Jesus,” said Daniel, despite himself.

“Perhaps the moral was too astringent to be improving. I confess to having had more than my sufficiency of brandy after dinner. But was it an unjust observation? It was he who had chosen to go down the drain, and he’d achieved his desire. Why should I be called on to subsidize his more extensive self-destruction? There are better causes.”

“You may be just, Father, but you aren’t at all fair. That poor man had simply been defeated by life. Is he to be blamed for that?”

“Who but the defeated are to be blamed for a defeat?” Grandison Whiting asked in turn.

“The victors?” Daniel suggested.

Grandison Whiting laughed, somewhat in the manner of his beard. Even so, it didn’t register as wholly genuine: its warmth was the warmth of an electric coil, not of a flame. “That was very good, Daniel. I quite liked that.”

“Though you’ll note he doesn’t go so far as to say that you’re right,” Boa pointed out. “Nor has he said anything about all the horrors you’ve told us about Spirit Lake.”

“Oh, I’m slippery.”

“But really, Father, something ought to be done. What Daniel described is more than unfair — it’s illegal.”

“In fact, my dear, the question of its legality has been argued before several courts, and it’s always been decided that prisoners have a right to buy such food as they can to supplement what the prison provides. As to its fairness, or justice, I believe myself that the voucher system performs a valuable social function: it reinforces that most precious and tenuous of ties, which connects the prisoner to the outside world, to which he must one day return. It’s much better than getting letters from home. Anyone can understand a hamburger; not everyone can read.”

Daniel’s indignation had escalated from being politely scandalized to full rankling outrage. “Mr. Whiting, that is a sinful thing to say! That is brutal!”

“As you said yourself, Daniel — one man’s meat…”

He gathered his wits. “Aside from the fact that it creates a situation where guards profit from the prisoners’ misery, which you have to admit is not a healthy situation…”

“Prison is not a healthy situation, Daniel.”

“Aside from that, what about the people who just don’t have any ties to be ‘reinforced’? And no money. There were lots of those. And they were slowly starving to death. I saw them.”

“That’s why they were there, Daniel — for you to see. They were an example, for any who might suppose, mistakenly, that it is possible to get through life alone, without what the sociologists call primary ties. Such an example is a powerful socializing influence. You might say it’s a cure for alienation.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Ah, but I am. I’ll admit that I wouldn’t put the matter quite so plainly in a public forum, but I do believe what I’ve been saying. It is not, as Boa would have it, ‘just for effect.’ Indeed, as to whether the system works, recidivism rates show that it does. If prisons are to act as a deterrent to crime, then they must be significantly more unpleasant than the environments available outside of prison. The so-called humane prisons bred career criminals by the millions. Since we began, some twenty years ago, to make the prisons in Iowa distinctly less congenial places to pass the time, the number of released convicts who return on a second offense has been enormously reduced.”

“They don’t return to prison because they leave Iowa the minute they’re released.”

“Splendid. Their behavior outside Iowa is not our concern as members of the state board. If they’ve reformed, so much the better. If not, we’re well rid of them.”

Daniel felt stymied. He considered further objections, but he began to see how each of them might be stood on its head. He found himself admiring Whiting, in a sneaky way. Perhaps ‘admire’ was too strong. There was a fascination, certainly.

But did it (this fascination) derive from the man’s ideas (which were not, after all, so original as to be beyond comparison) or rather from knowing that this was the actual and unique Grandison Whiting, celebrated and vilified in newspapers and on tv? A man, therefore, more real than other men, more vivid, composed of some lordlier substance so that even his hair seemed more red than all other red hair, the lines of his face more crisply expressive, and the inflections of his speech full of larger significances.

There was more talk, along less divisive lines, and even some laughter. Serjeant so far overcame his shyness (not of Daniel but of his father) as to tell a droll and fairly scathing story about his analyst’s extra-marital difficulties. Boa insisted on telling about Daniel’s moment of glory in Mrs. Norberg’s class, and made it sound a much larger moment than it had been. Then, as the talk began noticeably to flag, a servant came in to tell Mr. Whiting that he was wanted on the telephone, urgently, by Miss Marspan.

Grandison Whiting excused himself.

A moment later Serjeant took his leave.

“Well,” said Boa eagerly, “what do you think?”

“About your father?”

“He’s incredible, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He is incredible.” That was all he said, nor did she seem to require more.

The snow had continued steadily through the afternoon. It was arranged that Daniel would ride home in the next car going in to town. He had only a twenty-minute wait at the gatehouse (with a different and much friendlier guard on duty), and there was the further good luck that his ride was in a pick-up in the back of which he could put his bicycle.

At first Daniel couldn’t understand why the driver of the truck was glaring at him with such a degree of unprovoked ill will. Then he recognized him: Carl Mueller, Eugene’s brother, but more to the point, Roy Mueller’s oldest son. It was common knowledge that Carl worked at Worry, but in all his daydreams since he’d started being a friend of Boa Whiting Daniel had never indulged in this one.

“Carl!” he said, slipping off a mitten, holding out his hand.

Carl glowered and kept both gloved hands on the steering wheel.

“Carl,” Daniel insisted. “Hey, it’s been a long time.”

The guard was standing by the open gate, above which a lighted sign commanded them still to WAIT. He seemed to be watching them, though against the dazzle of the truck’s headlights this small contest must have passed unwitnessed. Even so, Carl appeared to have been unnerved, for he conceded Daniel the acknowledgement of grimace.

WAIT changed to PASS.

“Christ, this is some snowstorm, isn’t it?” Daniel said, as they moved ahead in second gear along the path that Worry’s own plows had cleared not long before.

Carl said nothing.

“The first real blizzard of the year,” he went on, twisting sideways in his seat so as to look directly at Carl’s stony profile. “Will you look at it come down.”

Carl said nothing.

“He’s incredible, isn’t he?”

Carl said nothing. He shifted to third. The truck’s rear end swayed on the packed snow.

“That Whiting is incredible. A real character.”

With a slow unsymmetrical rhythm the wipers pushed the wet snow off to the sides of the windshield.

“Friendly, though, once he puts aside his company manners. Not that he ever lets it all hang out, I suppose. You’d know that better than I. But he does like to talk. And theories? More theories than a physics textbook. And one or two of them would set a few people I know back on their fat asses. I mean, he’s not your average run-of-the-mill fiscal conservative. Not a Republican in the grand old tradition of Iowa’s own Herbert Hoover.”

“I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about, Weinreb, and I’m not interested. So why not just shut the fuck up, unless you want to ride that bicycle the rest of the way to town.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’d do that, Carl. Risk a swell managerial position like yours? Risk your exemption?”

“Listen, you god-damn draft-dodger, don’t talk to me about exemptions.”

“Draft-dodger?”

“And you fucking well know it.”

“As I see it, Carl, I performed my service to God and country at Spirit Lake. And while I’ll admit I’m not exactly anxious to go off to Detroit and protect the good people of Iowa from dangerous teen-agers, the government knows where I am. If they want me, all they have to do is write and ask.”

“Yeah. Well, they probably know what they’re up to, not drafting shits like you. You’re a fucking murderer, Weinreb. And you know it.”

“Up yours, Carl. And up your fucking father’s too.”

Carl stopped, too suddenly, on the brake. The truck’s back wheels sloughed to the right. For a moment it looked like they’d do a complete spin, but Carl managed to ease them back on course.

“You put me out here,” Daniel said shrilly, “and you’ll lose that fat job tomorrow. You do anything but take me to my front door, and I’ll have your ass for it. And if you think I can’t, just wait. Just wait anyhow.”

“Chickenshit,” Carl replied softly. “Chickenshit Jewish cocksucker.” But he took his foot off the brake.

Neither said any more till the truck pulled up in front of the Weinreb house on Chickasaw Avenue.

Before getting out of the cab Daniel said, “Don’t pull away till I’ve got my bike out of the back. Right?”

Carl nodded, avoiding Daniel’s eyes.

“Well, then, good-night, and thanks for the lift.” Once more he held out his hand.

Carl took the offered hand and grasped it firmly. “So long, murderer.”

His eyes locked with Daniel’s and it became a contest. There was something implacable in Carl’s face, a force of belief beyond anything that Daniel could ever have mustered.

He looked away.

And yet it wasn’t true. Daniel was not a murderer, though he knew there were people who thought he was, or who said they thought it. In a way Daniel rather liked the idea, and would make little jokes to encourage it, offering his services (in jest) as a hit man. There has always been a kind of glamor in the mark of Cain.

The murder had taken place shortly after Daniel’s release from prison. The father and older brother of his friend Bob Lundgren had been forced off the road on their way back from a co-op meeting, made to lie flat in a ditch, and shot. Both bodies had been mutilated. The stolen car was found the same day in a parking lot in Council Bluffs. The assumption was that the two murders were the work of terrorists. There had been a rash of similar killings all through that winter and spring, and indeed for many years. Farmers, especially undergod farmers, had many enemies. This was the main reason, behind the proliferation of fortress-villages like Worry, for despite their sponsors’ claims they were not provably more efficient. Only safer.

The murders had taken place in April, three weeks before Bob Lundgren was scheduled to be paroled from Spirit Lake. Considering the repeated threats he’d made against both victims, it had been fortunate for Bob that the murders had preceded his release. As it was, people assumed that he’d hired someone to do the work for him — some fellow prisoner who’d been let out ahead of him.

The reason that Daniel in particular had come under suspicion was that the following summer he’d gone to work for Bob, supervising large work-crews of convicts from Spirit Lake. It was a fantastic summer — fraught with tension, filled with pleasure, and highly profitable. He’d lived in the main farmhouse with Bob and what was left of his family. His mother stayed upstairs, locked in her bedroom, except for sporadic forays into the other rooms, late at night, when she would break up the furniture and call down the wrath of God. Bob finally had her sent off to a rest-home in Dubuque (the same one Mrs. Norberg had gone to). That left his brother’s widow and her twelve-year-old daughter to take care of household matters, which they did with a kind of zombie-like zeal.

Every weekend Bob and Daniel would drive up to Elmore or one of the other border towns and get thoroughly sloshed. Daniel got laid for the first time in his life, and for many times besides. As an ex-convict (and possibly a killer) he was generally left to himself by men who would otherwise have gladly kicked shit out of him.

He enjoyed himself (and earned a lot of money), but at the same time he didn’t believe in what was happening. A part of him was always backing off from these events and thinking that all these people were insane — Bob, the Lundgren women, the farmers and whores boozing in Elmore. No one in his right mind would want to live a life like this.

Even so, when Bob asked him to come back the next summer, he’d gone back. The money was irresistable, as was the chance for three months to be a grown-up instead of a high school student, than which no form of life is more downtrodden, disenfranchised, and depressed.

Bob was married now, to a girl he’d met in Elmore, and his brother’s widow and her daughter had moved out. Now instead of boozing only on the weekends they were boozing every night. The house had never quite recovered from the elder Mrs. Lundgren’s jihad, and Julie, Bob’s twenty-two-year-old bride did not exert herself in its rehabilitation beyond the point of getting almost all of one bedroom wallpapered. She spent most of the daylight hours in a daze of boredom in front of the tv.

Once, sitting on the back porch on a rainy August night and reminiscing about the good old days at Spirit Lake, Daniel said, “I wonder what ever happened to old Gus.”

“Who?” Bob asked. The tone of his voice had altered strangely. Daniel looked up to see an expression on his friend’s face that hadn’t been there since those times in prison when the subject of his family would get into his bloodstream and bring out the Mr. Hyde in him. There it was again, that same occluded gleam of malice.

“Gus,” Daniel said carefully. “Don’t you remember him? The guy who sang that song the night that Barbara Steiner let go.”

“I know who you mean. What made you think of him just now.”

“What makes a person think of anything. I was daydreaming, thinking about music, I guess — and that started me thinking about him.”

Bob seemed to consider the adequacy of this explanation. The look on his face slowly faded to mild irritation. “What about him?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering what ever became of him. Wondering if I’d ever see him again.”

“I didn’t think he was a particular friend of yours.”

“He wasn’t. But the way he sang made a big impression on me.”

“Yeah, he was an all-right singer.” Bob uncapped another Grain Belt and took a long gurgling swallow.

They both fell silent and listened to the rain.

Daniel understood from this exchange that it was Gus who must have murdered Bob’s father and brother. He was amazed how little difference the knowledge seemed to make in the way he felt about either Bob or Gus. His only concern was to defuse Bob’s suspicions.

“I’d like to be able to sing like that,” he said. “You know?”

“Yeah, you’ve told me on the average of I would estimate once a day. So what I’d like to know, Dan, is why don’t you ever sing? All you have to do is open your mouth and yell.”

“I will. When I’m ready.”

“Dan, you’re a nice guy, but you’re as bad as I am for putting things off to tomorrow. You’re worse — you’re as bad as Julie.”

Daniel grinned, uncapped another Grain Belt, and held it up in a salute. “Here’s to tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Bob agreed, “and may it take its own sweet time in coming.”

The subject of Gus had never rearisen.

When Daniel had left Worry it was six-thirty, but already it had seemed the dead of night. By the time he was home, after the slow drive through the snowstorm, he had expected no more than left-overs heated up. But in fact his mother had waited dinner. The table was set and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers in the living room. They had not waited, the twins in particular, with much good grace, and before Daniel was out of his windbreaker and had given his hands a symbolic splash in the wash basin (saving the water for the toilet tank), they were all of them sitting down and his mother was spooning out servings of tuna fish casserole. Aurelia passed the plate of sliced bread with a look of malevolence. Cecelia giggled.

“You didn’t have to wait dinner for me, you know. I said I’d be home late.”

“Fifteen after seven is not an unthinkable hour for dinner,” Milly said, more for the sake of the twins than for him. “In New York City, for instance, people often don’t have anything to eat before nine, even ten o’clock.”

“Uh-huh,” said Cecelia sarcastically.

“Did you have a nice time?” his father asked. It was rare nowadays that his father asked even so much as that, for Daniel had become protective of his privacy.

Daniel tapped a finger to his mouth, full of the tuna and noodles. The casserole had cooked too long, and the noodles were dry and hard to swallow. “Terrific,” he finally brought out. “You wouldn’t believe their piano. It’s as big as a pingpong table practically.”

“That’s all you did, all afternoon?” Cecelia asked. “Played a piano?”

“And a harpsichord. And an electric organ. There was even a cello, but I couldn’t really do anything with that. Except touch it.”

“Didn’t you even look at the horses?” Aurelia asked. She turned to Milly plaintively. “The horses out there are so famous.”

“Perhaps Daniel isn’t interested in horses,” Milly suggested.

“I didn’t see the horses, but I did see Grandison Whiting.”

“Did you,” said Milly.

Daniel took a meditative sip of milky tea.

“Well?” said Cecelia.

“Was he nice to you?” Aurelia asked, coming right to the point.

“I wouldn’t say nice exactly. He was friendly. He has a big bushy red beard, and a ring on his finger with a diamond on it as big as a strawberry.” He measured the approximate size of the strawberry between finger and thumb. “A small strawberry,” he conceded.

“I knew he had a beard,” said Cecelia. “I saw that on tv.”

“What did you say to him?” Aurelia asked.

“Oh, we talked about a lot of things. Mostly politics, I guess you’d say.”

Milly set down her fork judgementally. “Oh, Daniel — don’t you have a grain of sense?”

“It was an interesting conversation,” he said defensively. “I think he enjoyed it. Anyhow he did most of the talking, and Boa got her licks in, as usual. I was what you’re always saying I should be — an intelligent listener.”

“I’d like to know what’s wrong with talking about politics,” his father demanded. It was Mr. Weinreb’s stated conviction that Daniel’s friendship with the daughter of the richest man in Iowa was not to be regarded as an exceptional occurrence and did not require special handling.

“Nothing,” said Milly, “nothing at all.” She didn’t agree with her husband about this but wasn’t prepared, yet, to make an issue of it. “Cecelia, you eat the peas too.”

“Peas have vitamins,” said Aurelia smugly. She was already on her second helping.

“How’d you get home?” his father asked.

“There was a pick-up coming in to town. They stopped it at the gate. If that hadn’t come along, they were going to send me back in a limousine.”

“Are you going back next Saturday?” Aurelia asked.

“Probably.”

“You shouldn’t overdo it, Daniel,” Milly said.

“She’s my girlfriend, Mom. She can come here. I can go there. It’s that simple. Right?”

“Nothing’s that simple.”

“Why don’t you ask her to dinner with us?” Aurelia suggested.

“Don’t be silly, Aurelia,” Milly scolded. “You’re all acting like Daniel’s never been out of the house before. And by the way, Daniel, there was a phone call for you.”

“I answered,” said Cecelia. “It was a girl.” She turned Daniel’s own ploy against him and waited to be asked.

“So? Who?”

“She wouldn’t say what her name was. But it sounded like Old Wiremouth to me.”

“Don’t make fun of people with braces,” said her father sharply. “Someday you’ll probably have them too.”

“And eat your peas,” Milly added.

“They’re burnt.”

“They’re not burnt. Eat them.”

“They’ll make me throw up.”

“I don’t care. Eat them.”

“What did she want, the girl who called?”

Cecelia stared balefully at a teaspoon-size mound of peas sticky with white sauce. “She wanted to know where you were. I said you were out, but I didn’t know where. Now I wish I’d told her.”

Daniel reached over with his spoon and scooped up all but three of the peas. Before Milly could say a word he’d eaten them.

Cecelia gave him a grateful smile.

Down in his own room he had to decide whether his futzing around with the instruments at Worry counted as practice and whether, therefore, he was at liberty to omit his hour of Hanon’s Virtuoso Pianist. He decided it didn’t count and he wasn’t at liberty.

With the first fifteen exercises behind him, which was as much as he could get through in an hour, the next decision was easier. He wouldn’t do his homework for chemistry, and he wouldn’t read the Willa Cather novel for Eng. Lit. He would read the paperback that Boa had given him. It was really more of a pamphlet then a paperback, printed on pulp so recycled it was a wonder that it had got through the presses intact.

The white letters of the title shone through a ground of ink, so:

No author’s name appeared on the cover or the title page. The publisher was The Develop-Mental Corporation of Portland, Oregon.

Boa had got the book from her brother Serjeant, who had got it in turn from a college roommate. The book had convinced Serjeant to drop out of college and take (briefly) boxing lessons. It had convinced Boa to have her hair cut short (it had since grown out again) and to get up every morning at six to study Italian (which to her own and everyone’s amazement she was still doing). Daniel thought that he was already doing approximately his utmost by way of advancing slowly and steadily toward his major life goals, but he wasn’t so sure that his personality couldn’t bear improvement. In any case Boa had been insistent that he should read it.

Daniel was a naturally fast reader. He’d finished the book by ten o’clock. Generally he didn’t think that much of it. It was self-help at a pretty simple-minded level, with lots of mottoes you were supposed to whisper to yourself in order to get motivated. But he understood why Boa had wanted him to read it. It was for the sake of the Second Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics, which appeared first on page 12 (where it was heavily underscored by a ballpoint pen), and was then repeated many times throughout.

The Second Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics is as follows: “If you want something you’ve got to take it. If you want it badly enough you will.”

8

The Second Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics notwithstanding, it was some time before this tacit promise was to be fulfilled. Boa herself was not at once persuaded that her virginity should be numbered among the somethings that get taken by those who want them badly enough. Then, by the time she’d been brought round, early in April, Daniel found himself unaccustomedly beset by technical difficulties. But a way was found, and they became, just as Boa had imagined they would, and just as Daniel had imagined too, lovers.

In June Daniel was faced with an awkward choice; which is to say, a real one. All through the school year he had been confidently expecting to fail Mrs. Norberg’s Social Studies class, but when the grades were posted he came off with an almost mirraculous B (the same grade Boa got). All at once it became possible to take up Bob Lundgren’s standing offer to work again that summer at his farm. Eighteen weeks at $230 a week meant more than four thousand dollars. Even taking into account the expense of weekend carousals in Elmore and a further outlay for some sort of motorbike in order to keep on visiting Worry, the job would still have meant a bigger chunk of money that he could hope to put aside by any other means. The fact remained, however, that he didn’t really need so much money. In his overweening pride he had only applied to one college, Boston Conservatory. He hadn’t expected to get in (except in the idiot way he half-expected all his wishes to come true), and he hadn’t. His tapes were returned with a letter saying very bluntly that his playing in no way measured up to the Conservatory’s minimum requirements.

Boa, meanwhile, had been accepted at all but one of the eight schools she’d applied to. Accordingly, their plan for next year was for Daniel to find a room and a job of some sort near the college of Boa’s choice. Harvard seemed the likeliest, since maybe Daniel would get into the Conservatory on his next try, and meanwhile he’d be able to start taking voice lessons, Boston being so musical.

As to the summer just ahead, Daniel had been expecting to stay in Amesville to repair his inevitable F in Social Studies, the bright side of which was that he’d have been able to see Boa just about any day he liked. Also, Boa’s favorite aunt from London was going to pay a long visit to Worry, and this aunt, Miss Harriet Marspan, was a musical amateur in the old sense of doing and caring for nothing else — and for its own sake, never thinking where it might lead nor what profit it might yield. Boa thought she performed with unusual capacity and immense good taste. The three of them would form the Marspan Iowa Consort, to which end Boa had already sewn together a sort of banner of welcome and hung it across the whole width of the music room.

However if Daniel went off to work for Bob Lundgren, the Marspan Iowa Consort would amount to no more than an old pink sheet with assorted scraps of cotton stitched to it. Yet if he stayed, what would he be accomplishing? For all her excellences Miss Harriet Marspan didn’t sound like a natural ally. Even her devotion to music made him uneasy when he thought about it, for how was Daniel to measure up to standards of accomplishment formed in one of the music capitals of the world? She would flay him, like another Marsyas.

But then again, some time or other he’d have to take the plunge; he’d have to leave the audience and join the chorus on the stage. However: and yet: but then again — the questions and qualifications multiplied endlessly. And yet it ought to have been a simple choice. But then again.

On the night before he had to give a final yes or no to Bob Lundgren, Milly came down to his room with a pot of coffee and two cups. With a minimum of beating around the bush (without even pouring the coffee) she asked what he was going to do.

“I wish I knew,” he said.

“You’ll have to make up your mind soon.”

“I know. And that’s about all I know.”

“I’d be the last person in the world to tell you to pass up a chance to earn the kind of money you earned last summer. It’s twice what you’re worth.”

“And then some,” he agreed.

“Besides which, there’s the experience.”

“For sure, it’s a good experience.”

“I meant it could lead to more of the same, numbskull. If you want to do that kind of work for a living, and God knows, in this day and age it’s about the only kind of work that has a guaranteed future.”

“Mm. But it isn’t what I want. Not for ever.”

“I didn’t suppose it was. So what it boils down to — pardon me for putting it so bluntly — is whether you want to take a big gamble.”

“Gamble?”

“Don’t make me spell it out, Danny. I am not a fool. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“I still don’t know what you mean.”

“For heaven’s sake, I know that you and Miss Whiting aren’t performing duets down here all the time. You can hear that piano all over the house — when someone’s playing it.”

“Are you complaining?”

“Would it do any good? No, in fact, I think it’s wonderful that you two young people should have strong interests in common.” She grinned accusingly. “And what you choose to do down here is none of my business.”

“Thanks.”

“So I’ll say only this: nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“You think I should stay in town this summer.”

“Let’s say I won’t reproach you for enjoying yourself a bit, if that’s what you want to do. And I’ll see that Abe doesn’t either.”

He shook his head. “It’s not what you think, Mom. I mean, I like Boa and all, but we neither of us believe in… um…”

“Matrimony?”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

“Well, candidly, neither did I at your age. But anyone who crosses the street can be hit by a truck.”

Daniel laughed. “Really, Mom, you’ve got it all turned round backwards. The way I see it, the real choice is whether I can afford to turn down the money Bob is offering for the sake of having a bit of fun.”

“Money is a consideration, that’s so. No matter how nice they are, or how considerate, rich people will involve you in spending more than you can possibly afford. I sometimes think it’s their way of weeding the rest of us out. I say that from bitter experience.”

“Mom, that’s not the case. I mean, there’s no way to spend that kind of money in Amesville. Much less, at Worry.”

“Well, well. I’d love to be proven wrong. But if you should need a few dollars sometime, to tide you over, I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s very sweet of you. I think.”

Milly looked pleased. “One more word of advice, and I’ll leave you to the horns of your dilemma. Which is — I trust that one of you is taking suitable precautions.”

“Um, yes. Usually.”

“Always. With the rich, you know, things don’t work the same. If a girl finds herself pregnant, she can go off for a holiday and get rid of her embarrassment.”

“Jesus, Mom, I hope you don’t think I’ve been planning to get Boa knocked up. I’m not stupid.”

“A word to the wise. But if my back should ever be turned, you’ll find what you need in the upper left drawer of the chest-of-drawers. Lately, though this is strictly between us, I haven’t had much use for them.”

“Mom, you’re too much.”

“I do what I can.” She held up the coffee pot. “You want any?”

He shook his head, then reconsidered and nodded, and finally decided against it and said no.

Though she had been three times married, Miss Harriet Marspan seemed, at the age of thirty-seven the incarnation of Spinsterhood, its deity or patron saint, but at the huntress rather than the virgin-martyr end of the scale. She was a tall, sturdy-looking woman with prematurely gray hair and sharp, appraising gray eyes. She knew all her own good points and the basic skills of enhancing them, but nothing she could do could counteract the basic chill emanating from her as from the entrance to a food locker. Miss Marspan was oblivious to this, and acted on the assumption that she was rather a lot of fun. She had a silvery, if not contagious, laugh, a shrewd wit, perfect pitch, and unremitting powers of concentration.

Boa had become her favorite neice during the term of her exile to Vilars, to which Miss Marspan, though not a skier, had made several visits at the height of the season. Additionally, Boa had twice spent the holidays with Miss Marspan at her Chelsea flat, being taken about to operas, concerts, and private musicals every night of her visit. At the dinner table of Lord and Lady Bromley (Bromley was an important television producer) Boa had sat between the composer Lucia Johnstone and the great castrato Ernesto Rey. And through it all they had pursued with endless patience, with infinite caution, with delectable subtlety, the one subject in which Miss Marspan chose to interest herself — musical taste.

As to music per se, Boa thought that for a woman of such definite opinions Miss Marspan was oddly lacking in preferences. She could (for instance) make the finest discriminations among the various interpretations of a Duparc song but seemed to have little interest in the song itself, except as an arrangement of vowels and consonants to be produced in accordance with the rules of French phonetics. “Music,” she liked to say, “doesn’t mean a thing.” Yet the music she enjoyed most was Wagner’s, and she was a mine of information about the associated stage business she’d witnessed during different performances of the Ring. Daniel found this more disconcerting than Boa, who was used to similar equivocations from her father. Boa insisted that it must be simply a matter of age: after a while one took the basic amazement of art for granted, much as one might take for granted the rising of the sun in the morning, its setting in the evening. As a theory Daniel couldn’t fault this, but he wasn’t convinced either. He disliked and distrusted Miss Marspan, all the while he strained to make a good impression on her. In her presence he behaved as he would have behaved in a church, moving slowly, speaking deliberately, saying nothing that might contradict her established doctrines. Never, for instance, did he declare his deep-felt conviction that Raynor Taylor’s music was dust from the tomb; he deferred as well in the matter of Moravian hymns of Colonial America. He even started enjoying the hymn after a while. The Marspan Iowa Consort never did undertake anything Daniel thought of as serious music, which was both a disappointment and a relief. For all his practice and preparations in the past two years (more than two years now!) he knew he wasn’t ready for much more than the catches, ditties, jingles, and rounds that Miss Marspan, with the help of the library’s data-links, was so ingenious in unearthing from assorted music libraries around the country.

Though he didn’t say so to Boa, not even after Miss Marspan had left, Daniel felt ashamed of himself. He knew that somehow he had cooperated in the subversion of his own principles. The excuse he’d offered himself at the time — that the hours of chit-chat with Miss Marspan had been so vacuous as to amount to no more than the silence he’d maintained in Mrs. Norberg’s classroom — was a crock of shit. What he’d done, plain and simply, was to suck up to her. It was true, then, about money: if you so much as rubbed shoulders with it, it began to corrupt you.

One night, in disgust with himself, and wanting nothing more than to go back to being the person he’d been a year ago, he phoned Bob Lundgren to see if he could get his old job back, but of course it had long since been taken. Bob was drunk, as usual these days, and insisted on hanging on talking even though Daniel told him he couldn’t afford it. Bob made some digs, first about Daniel’s supposed deficits, then about Boa directly. You were supposed to suppose that he was trying to be good-humored in a locker-room way, but his jokes got more and more overtly malicious. Daniel didn’t know what to say. He just sat there, on the edge of his parents’ bed (that was where the phone was), holding the sweaty receiver, feeling worse and worse. A resentful silence grew between them, as Daniel finally refused to pretend to be amused.

“Well, Dan old boy, we’ll be seeing you,” Bob said at last.

“Right.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Oh, for sure,” said, Daniel, in a tone intended to be wounding.

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It was supposed to mean that that would give me lots of latitude. It was a joke. I laughed at all your jokes. You should laugh at some of mine.”

“I didn’t think it was a very funny joke.”

“Then we’re even.”

“Fuck off, Weinreb!”

“Have you heard the one about the nympho who married an alcoholic?”

Before Bob could answer that one he hung up. Which was the end, pretty definitely, of that friendship. Such as it had been.

One day, during the most ruthless part of August, and just after the twins had been packed off with a dozen other Brownies for their first taste of summer camp, Milly announced that she was being taken to Minneapolis for a full week of movies, shopping, and sybaritic sloth. “I’m tired,” she declared, “of swatting mosquitoes in a rented cabin while Abe goes off to stare at the ripples in the pond. It’s not my idea of a vacation. It never has been.” Daniel’s father, who had in fact been planning another fishing trip, gave in without even trying to negotiate a compromise. Unless, as seemed likely, the negotiations had already been handled off-stage and the official supper-time capitulation had been put on entirely for Daniel’s benefit. The upshot of his parents’ departure was that Daniel, who had often been a guest for lunch and dinner, was asked to stay at Worry for the whole week they were to be gone.

He’d thought that by now he couldn’t be fazed, that he’d confronted enough of the place’s pomps and splendors, had touched and tasted them often enough that a more steady view would have no power over him. But he was fazed, and it did have considerable power. He was given the room next to Boa’s, which was still provided, from the era of Miss Marspan’s visit, with a prodigious sound system, including a horseshoe organ he could play (using earphones) at any hour of the day or night. The height of the ceiling as he sprawled in his bed, the more formidable height of the windows that rose to within inches of the mouldings, the view from these windows across a small forest of unblighted elms (the largest concentration of elm trees left in Iowa), the waxed glow of rosewood and cherry furnishings, the hypnotic intricacies of the carpets (there were three), the silence, the coolness, the sense of wishes endlessly, effortlessly gratified: it was hard to keep any psychological distance from such things, hard not to covet them. You were always being stroked, carressed, seduced — by the scent and slither of the soap, by the sheets on the bed, by the colors of the paintings on the walls, the same enamel-like colors that appeared, fizzing in his head, when he squeezed his eyes closed during orgasm: pinks that deepened to a rose, deliquescent blues, mauves and lavenders, celadon greens and lemon yellows. Like courtesans pretending to be no more than matrons of a certain elegance, these paintings, in their carved and gilded frames, hung on demask walls quite as though they were, as they declared, mere innocent bowls of fruit and swirls of paint. In fact, they were all incitements to rape.

Everywhere you looked: sex. He could think of nothing else. He’d sit at the dinner table, talking about whatever (or, more likely, listening), and the taste of the sauce on his tongue became one with the taste of Boa an hour before when they’d made love, a taste that might be overwhelmed, all at once, by a spasm of total pleasure right there at the dinner table that would stiffen his spine and immobilize his mind. He would look at Boa (or, just as often, at Alethea) and his imagination would begin to rev until it had gone out of control, until there was nothing in his head but the image, immense and undifferentiated, of their copulation. Not even theirs, really, but a cosmic abstraction, a disembodied, blissful rhythm that even the flames of the candles obeyed.

It was the same when they would listen to music. He had read, in some book of advice lent him by Mrs. Boismortier, that it was a bad idea to listen to too many records. The way to discover what any piece of music was about was to perform it yourself, or lacking that, to hear it performed live. The habit of listening to records was a form of self-abuse. But, ah, there is something to be said for the habit. Lord God, such music as they listened to that week! Such pleasures as they shared! Such flurries of fingers, such cadences and cadenzas, such amazing transitions to such sighs and smiles and secret sympathies suddenly made plain as in the most brilliant and luminous of mirrors!

It dawned on him that this is what being in love was all about. This was why people made such a fuss over it. Why they said it made the world go round. It did! He stood with Boa on the roof of Worry’s tower and watched the sun rise above the green body of the earth and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy. He could not have explained how this was so, nor could he hold on for more than a moment to his highest sense of that enveloping Love, the moment when he had felt needles of light piercing his and Boa’s separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer’s profusions. It was only a single moment, and it went.

But every time they made love it was as though they were moving toward that moment again, slowly at first, then suddenly it would be there again in its immense, arisen majesty within them, and still the delirium swelled as they moved from height to effortless height, exalted, exulting, exiles from earth, set free from gravity and the laws of motion. It was heaven, and they had the keys. How could they have kept themselves from returning, even supposing they had wanted to?

9

Late on the last night of his sojourn at Worry, returning from Boa’s room to his own, Daniel was met in the hallway by Roberts, Mr. Whiting’s valet. In a confidential whisper Roberts said that Mr. Whiting would like to have a word with Daniel in his office. Would he come this way? It seemed useless to plead that he wasn’t properly dressed to visit Mr. Whiting, so off he went, in his bathrobe and slippers, to the drawing room in which he’d first taken tea with the family, then through a kind of lock connecting that room to the inner keep, a sealed corridor of whirling motors, winking lights, and eccentric clockwork contraptions. He wondered, walking through this fairy-trap, if it had ever actually served the purpose for which it had been built. Were there, lost in the perpetual rotary motion of these various whirligigs, or caught in the repeating decimal of some data-bank underfoot, snared souls forever unable to return to their flesh? To which question there could be no answer for anyone who entered, as he did now, corporeally.

Grandison Whiting’s office was not like other rooms at Worry. It did not astonish. It was furnished with only ordinary office furniture of the better sort: glass bookcases, two wooden desks, some leather chairs. Papers littered every surface. A swivel lamp, the only one burning, was aimed at the door by which he’d come in (Roberts had not followed him through the fairy-trap), but even with the light in his eyes he knew that the man who sat behind the desk could not be Grandison Whiting.

“Good evening, Daniel,” the man said, in what was unmistakably Grandison Whiting’s voice.

“You’ve shaved off your beard!”

Grandison Whiting smiled. His teeth, agleam in the subdued light, seemed the exposed roots of his skeleton. His entire face, without his beard, had the stark character of a memento mori.

“No, Daniel, you see me now as I am. My beard, like Santa’s, is assumed. When I’m here quite by myself, it is a great relief to be able to take it off.”

“It isn’t real?”

“It’s quite real. See for yourself. It’s there in the corner, by the globe.”

“I mean…” He blushed. He felt he was making a complete fool of himself, but he couldn’t help it. “I mean — why?”

“That’s what I so much admire in you, Daniel — your directness. Do sit down — over here, out of the glare — and I’ll tell you the story of my beard. That is, if you’re interested.”

“Of course,” Daniel said, taking the proffered chair cautiously, so that his bathrobe wouldn’t part.

“When I was a young man, a little older than yourself, and about to leave Oxford and return to the States, I had the good fortune to come across a novel in which the hero changes his character by buying and wearing a false beard. I knew that I would have to change my character shortly, for I would never be a credit to my position, as they say, until I’d learned to assert myself much more strenuously than I was accustomed to doing. I had tended to be reclusive in my college days, and while I’d learned a good deal concerning economic history, mostly forgotten since, I’d failed utterly to master the essential lesson that my father had sent me to Oxford to learn (and which he had learned there); namely, how to be a gentleman.

“You smile, and you do well to smile. Most people, here, suppose that one becomes a gentleman by adopting what is called ‘good manners.’ Good manners, as you must know (for you’ve picked them up very quickly), are mainly an encumbrance. In fact, a gentleman is something else entirely. To be a gentleman is to get what you want with only an implicit threat of violence. America, by and large, has no gentlemen — only managers and criminals. Managers never assert themselves sufficiently, and are content to surrender their autonomy and most of the money they help to generate to us. In return they’re allowed the illusion of a guiltless life. Criminals, on the other hand, assert themselves too much and are killed by other criminals, or by us. As always, the middle way is best.” Whiting folded his hands with a consciousness of completion.

“Pardon me, Mr. Whiting, but I still don’t quite see how wearing a, uh…”

“How a false beard helped me be a gentleman? Quite simply. I had to act as though I weren’t embarrassed by my appearance. That meant, at first, I had to overact. I had to become, somehow, the sort of person who would actually have such a big bushy red beard. When I did act in that manner I found that people behaved much differently toward me. They listened more closely, laughed louder at my jokes, and in general deferred to my authority.”

Daniel nodded. In effect, Grandison Whiting was stating the Third Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics, which is: “Always pretend that you’re your favorite movie star — and you will be.”

“Have I satisfied your curiosity?”

Daniel was flustered. “I didn’t mean to give the impression that, uh—”

“Please, Daniel.” Whiting held up his hand, which glowed with a pale roseate translucence in the beam of the lamp. “No false protests. Of course you’re curious. I should be dismayed if you were not. I’m curious about you, as well. In fact, the reason I called you from your bed — or rather, from Boa’s — was to say that I’ve taken the liberty of gratifying my curiosity. And also to ask you if your intentions are honest.”

“My intentions?”

“Concerning my daughter, with whom you were having, not half an hour ago, intimate relations. Of, if I may say so, the highest quality.”

“You were watching us!”

“I was returning a compliment, so to speak. Or has Bobo never mentioned the incident that sent her packing to Vilars?”

“She did but… Jesus, Mr. Whiting.”

“It isn’t like you to flounder, Daniel.”

“It’s hard not to, Mr. Whiting. All I can think to say, once again, is why? We supposed you knew what was going on pretty much. Boa even got the impression that you approved. More or less.”

“I suppose I do approve. Whether more or less is what I’m trying to determine now. As to why, it was not (I hope) merely the gratification of a father’s natural curiosity. It was so that I’d have the goods on you. It’s all down on videotape, you see.”

“All?” He was aghast.

“Not all, possibly, but enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“To prosecute you, if need be. Bobo is still a minor. You’re guilty of statutory rape.”

“Oh Jesus Christ, Mr. Whiting, you wouldn’t!”

“No, I don’t expect it will be necessary. For one thing, that might force Bobo to marry you against her own wishes, or against yours, for that matter. Since, my lawyer tells me, you could not, in that event, be prosecuted. No, my intention is much simpler, I want to force the issue before you’ve wasted each other’s time in hesitations. Time is too precious for that.”

“You’re asking me if I’ll marry your daughter?”

“Well, you didn’t seem about to ask me. And I can understand that. People generally wait for me to take the initiative. It’s the beard, I suppose.”

“Have you asked Boa about this?”

“As I see it, Daniel, my daughter’s made her choice, and declared it. Rather openly, I should say.”

“Not to me.”

“The surrender of virginity is unequivocal. It needs no codicil.”

“I’m not sure Boa sees it that way.”

“She would, I’ve no doubt, if you asked her to. No one with any sensitivity wants to appear to be haggling over matters of the heart. But in our civilization (as you may have read) certain things go without saying.”

“That was my impression too, Mr. Whiting. Until tonight.”

Whiting laughed. His new, beardless face modified the usual Falstaffian impression of his laughter.

“If I have forced the issue, Daniel, it was in the hope of preventing your making a needless mistake. This plan of yours to precede Boa to Boston is almost certain to lead to unhappiness for both of you. Here the inequality in your circumstances only lends a piquancy to your relations. There it will become your nemesis. Believe me — I speak as one who has been through it, albeit on the other side of the fence. You may have your pastoral fantasies now, but the good life cannot be led for less than ten thousand a year, and that requires both the right connections and a monastic frugality. Boa, of course, has never known the pinch of poverty. But you have, briefly. But long enough to have learned, surely, that it is to be avoided at all costs.”

“I’m not planning to go back to prison, Mr. Whiting, if that’s your meaning.”

“God forbid you should, Daniel. And please, don’t we know each other well enough for you to dispense with ‘Mister Whiting’?”

“Then how about ‘Your Lordship’? Or ‘Excellency’? That wouldn’t seem quite as formal as Grandison.”

Whiting hesitated, then seemed to decide to be amused. His laugh, if abrupt, had the ring of sincerity.

“Good for you. No one’s ever said that to my face. And of course it’s perfectly true. Would you like to call me ‘Father’ then? To return to the original question.”

“I still don’t see what’s so terrible about our going to Boston. What simpler way of finding out if it works?”

“Not terrible, only foolish. Because it won’t work. And Boa will have wasted a year of her life trying to make it work. Meanwhile she’ll have failed to meet the people she’s going to college to meet (for that’s the reason one goes to college; one can study far better in solitude). Worse than that, she may have done irreparable harm to her reputation. Sadly, not everyone shares our enlightened attitude toward these arrangements.”

“You don’t think she’d be even more compromised by marrying me?”

“If I did, I would scarcely go out of my way to suggest it, would I? You’re bright, resilient, ambitious, and — allowing for the fact that you’re a lovesick teenager — quite level-headed. From my point of view, an ideal son-in-law. Bobo doubtless sees you in a different light, but I think, all in all, that she’s made a wise, even a prudent, choice.”

“What about the, quote, inequality of our circumstances, unquote? Isn’t that even more a consideration in the case of getting married?”

“No, for you’d be equals. My son-in-law could never be other than well-to-do. The marriage might not work, of course, but that risk exists in all marriages. And the odds for its working are, I should think, much better than the odds for the Boston trial balloon. You can’t dip your toes into marriage; you must plunge. What do you say?”

“What can I say? I’m flabbergasted.”

Whiting opened a silver cigarette case standing on his desk and turned it round to Daniel with a gesture of invitation.

“No thank you, I don’t smoke.”

“Nor do I, but this is grass. I always find that a bit of a buzz makes the decision-making process more interesting. Almost any process, really.” By way of further endorsement he took one of the cigarettes from the case, lit it, inhaled, and, still holding his breath, offered it to Daniel.

He shook his head, not believing it was marijuana.

Whiting shrugged, let out his breath, and sagged back in his leather chair.

“Let me tell you about pleasure, Daniel. It’s something young people have no understanding of.”

He took another toke, held it in, and offered the cigarette (coming from Grandison Whiting, you could not think of it as a joint) again to Daniel. Who, this time, accepted it.

Daniel had been stoned only three times in his life — once at Bob Lundgren’s farm with some of the work-crew from Spirit Lake, and twice with Boa. It wasn’t that he disapproved, or didn’t enjoy it, or that the stuff was so impossible to get hold of. He was afraid, simply that. Afraid he’d be busted and sent back to Spirit Lake.

“Pleasure,” said Grandison Whiting, lighting another cigarette for himself, “is the great good. It requires no explanations, no apologies. It is what is — the reason for continuing. One must arrange one’s life so that all pleasures are available. Not that there’s time to have them all. Everyone’s budget is limited in the end. But at your age, Daniel, you should be sampling the major varieties. In moderation. Sex, above all. Sex (perhaps after mystic transports, which come without our choosing) is always the most considerable, and cloys the least. But there is also something to be said for drugs, so long as you can hold on to your sanity, your health, and your own considered purpose in life. I gather, from the efforts you’re making to learn to be a musician, despite an evident inaptitude, that you wish to fly.”

“I… uh…”

Whiting waved away Daniel’s stillborn denial with the hand that held the cigarette. Its smoke, in the beam of the lamp, formed a delta of delicate curves.

“I do not fly myself. I’ve tried, but lack the gift, and have small patience with effort in that direction. But I have many good friends who do fly, even here in Iowa. One of them did not return, but every delight has its martyrs. I say this because it’s clear to me that you’ve made it your purpose in life to fly. I think, in your circumstances, that has been both ambitious and brave. But there are larger purposes, as I think you have begun to discover.”

“What is your purpose, Mr. Whiting? If you care to say.”

“I believe it is what you would call power. Not in the crude sense that one experiences power at Spirit Lake, not as brute coercion — but in a larger (and, I would hope, finer) sense. How to explain? Perhaps if I told you of my own mystical experience, the single such I’ve been gifted to have. If, that is, you can tolerate so long a detour from the business in hand?”

“So long as it’s scenic,” said Daniel, in a burst of what seemed to him show-stopping repartee. It was very direct grass.

“It happened when I was thirty-eight. I had just arrived in London. The euphoria of arrival was still in my blood. I had been meaning to go to an auction of carpets, but had spent the afternoon, instead, wandering eastward to the City, stopping in at various churches of Wren’s. But it was not in any of those that the lightning struck. It was as I was returning to my hotel room. I had placed the key in the lock, and turned it. I could feel, in the mechanical movement of the tumblers, the movements, it seemed, of the entire solar system: the earth turning on its axis, moving in its orbit, the forces exerted on its oceans, and on its body too, by the sun and moon. I’ve said ‘it seemed,’ but it was no seeming. I felt it, as God must feel it. I’d never believed in God before that moment, nor ever doubted Him since.”

“Power is turning a key in a lock?” Daniel asked, fuddled and fascinated in equal measure.

“It is to feel the consequences of one’s actions spread through the world. There is a picture downstairs — you may have noted it: Napoleon Musing at St. Helena, by Benjamin Haydon. He stands on a cliff, facing a garish sunset, and his shadow is thrown behind him, a huge shadow. Two seabirds circle in the void before him. And that is all. But it says everything, to me.” He fell into a considering silence, and then resumed: “It is an illusion, I suppose. All pleasures are, in the end, and all visions too. But it’s a powerful illusion, and it is what I offer you.”

“Thank you,” said Daniel.

Grandison Whiting lifted a questioning eyebrow.

Daniel smiled, by way of explanation. “Thank you. I can’t see any reason to go on being coy. I’m grateful: I accept. That is, if Boa will have me.”

“Done,” said Whiting, and held out his hand.

“Assuming,” he was careful to add, even as they shook on it, “that there are no strings attached.”

“I can’t promise that. But where there is agreement as to principle, a contract can always be negotiated. Shall we invite Bobo to join us now?”

“Sure. Though she can be a bit grouchy when she just wakes up.”

“Oh, I doubt she would have gone to sleep. After he’d accompanied you here, Roberts brought Bobo to my secretary’s office, where she has been able to observe our entire tête-a-tête over the closed circuit tv.” He looked over his shoulder and addressed the hidden camera (which must have been trained on Daniel all this while): “Your ordeal is over now, Bobo dear, so why don’t you join us?”

Daniel thought back over what he’d said to Whiting and decided that none of it was incriminating.

“I hope you don’t mind?” Whiting added, turning back to Daniel.

“Mind? It’s Boa who’ll mind. Me, I’m past being shocked. After all I’ve lived at Spirit Lake. The walls have ears there too. You haven’t bugged my room at home, have you?”

“No. Though my security officer advised me to.”

“I don’t suppose you’d tell me if you had.”

“Of course not.” He smiled, and there were those bony teeth again. “But you can take my word for it.”

When Boa arrived upon the scene, she was, as Daniel had predicted, in a temper over her father’s meddling (over, at least, the manner of it), but she was also pleased to be all at once engaged with a whole new set of destinies and decisions. Planning was Boa’s forte. Even as the champagne bubbled in her glass, she’d begun to consider the question of a date, and before the bottle was empty they’d settled on October 31. They both loved Halloween, and a Halloween wedding it was to be, with jack-o-lanterns everywhere, and the bride and groom in black and orange, and the wedding cake itself an orange cake, which was her favorite kind anyhow. Also (this was Grandison’s contribution) the wedding guests would be able to stay on for a fox hunt. It had been years since there had been a proper hunt at Worry, and nothing was so sure to bring Alethea round to a cheerful sense of the occasion.

“And then, after the wedding?” Grandison Whiting asked, as he untwisted the wire fixed to the cork of the second bottle.

“After the wedding Daniel shall carry me off whithersoever he will for our honeymoon. Isn’t that lovely: whithersoever?”

“And then?” he insisted, thumbing the cork.

“Then, after a suitable interval, we shall be fruitful and multiply. Starting off this early, we should be able to produce litters and litters of little Weinrebs. But you mean, don’t you, what will we do?”

The cork popped, and Whiting refilled the three glasses.

“It does occur to me that you’ll have rather a gap to fill before the next academic year begins.”

“That assumes, Father, that our years will continue to be of the academic variety.”

“Oh, you must both get your degrees. That goes without saying. You’ve already settled on Harvard — wisely — and I’m sure room can be found there for Daniel too. So you needn’t alter your plans in that respect. Only defer them.”

“Have you asked Daniel if he wants to go to Harvard?”

“Daniel, do you want to go to Harvard?”

“I know I ought to. But where I really did want to go was the Boston Conservatory of Music. But they turned me down.”

“Fairly, do you think?”

“Sure, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. I just wasn’t ‘accomplished’ enough.”

“Yes, that was my sister-in-law’s opinion, too. She said you’d done wonders for the short time you’d studied, and in view of the fact that you evidenced no innate talent for music.”

“Oof,” said Daniel.

“Did you think we never spoke of you?”

“No. But that’s a pretty deflating opinion. The more so because it’s very close to what someone else once said, someone who was also… knowledgeable.”

“On the whole, Harriet thought very highly of you. But she didn’t think you were cut out for a career in music. Not a very satisfying career at any rate.”

“She never said that to me,” Boa objected.

“Surely because she knew you’d have passed it on to Daniel. She had no wish to wound his feelings gratuitously.”

“Then why are you telling him, Father?”

“To persuade him to make other plans. Don’t suppose, Daniel, that I’d have you give up music. You couldn’t, I’m sure. It is a passion, perhaps a ruling passion. But you needn’t become a professional musician to be serious about music. Witness Miss Marspan. Or if she seems too dessicated to serve as a model to you, consider Moussorgsky, who was a civil servant, or Charles Ives, an insurance executive. The music of the nineteenth century, which remains our greatest music, was written for the discerning delectation of a vast audience of musical amateurs.”

“Mr. Whiting, you don’t need to go on. I’ve said the same thing to myself many times. I wasn’t suggesting that it’s the Boston Conservatory or nothing. Or that I have to go to a music school at all. I would like to take some private lessons with someone good—”

“Naturally,” said Whiting.

“As for the rest of what I ought to do, you seem to have it all laid out. Why not just say what you have in mind, and I’ll tell you how it strikes me?”

“Fair enough. To begin with the immediate future, I’d like you to go to work for me here at Worry. At a salary, shall we say, of forty thousand a year, paid quarterly, in advance. That should be enough to set you up. You’ll have to spend it, you know, as fast as it comes in. It will be expected that you flaunt your conquest. To do less would show a lack of appreciation. You’ll become, for a time, the hero of Amesville.”

“Our picture will be in all the papers,” Boa put in. “And the wedding will probably be on the tv news.”

“Necessarily,” Whiting agreed. “We can’t afford to neglect such an opportunity for public relations. Daniel will be another Horatio Alger.”

“Tell me more.” Daniel was grinning. “What do I have to do to earn my preposterous salary.”

“You’ll work for it, believe me. Essentially it will be the same job you did for Robert Lundgren. You’ll manage the crews of seasonal workers.”

“That’s Carl Mueller’s job.”

“Carl Mueller is getting the sack. That is another aspect of your triumph. I hope you have nothing against revenge?”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“Well, I have something against revenge, Father, though I won’t enter into an argument on theoretical grounds. But won’t other people whom Daniel has to work with resent him if he takes Carl’s job away?”

“They’ll resent him in any case. But they’ll know (they already do know, I’m sure) that there are objective reasons for firing Carl. He’s rather systematically taken kickbacks from the hiring agencies he works through. His predecessor did as well, and it may almost be thought to be one of the fringe benefits of his job. But I hope that you, Daniel, will resist the temptation. For one thing, you’ll be earning something over double Carl’s salary.”

“You realize,” Daniel said in as neutral a tone as he could manage, “that Carl will lose his draft classification along with his job.”

“That’s Carl’s lookout, isn’t it? By the same token, you stand to inherit his exemption. So I suggest that you do have that P-W housing removed from your stomach. Harvard’s security network is probably a few degrees tighter than mine. You wouldn’t want to be setting off alarms every time you went to class.”

“I’ll be only too happy to be rid of it. As soon as I start the job. When would you like me to report?”

“Tomorrow. Drama requires despatch. The more sudden your rise, the more complete your triumph.”

“Mr. Whiting—”

“Still not ‘Father’?”

“Father.” But it did seem to stick in his mouth. He shook his head, and said it again. “Father, the one thing I still don’t understand is why. Why are you doing all this for me?”

“I’ve never tried to resist what I regarded as inevitable. That is the secret of any very prolonged success. Then too, I like you, which sweetens the pill considerably. But it wasn’t my decision, ultimately. It was Bobo’s. And it was, I think, the right one.” He exchanged a nod of acknowledgement with his daughter. “Old families need an infusion of new blood from time to time. Any other questions?”

“Mm. Yes, one.”

“Which is?”

“No, I realize now it’s something I shouldn’t ask. Sorry.”

Grandison Whiting didn’t press the point, and the conversation moved back towards the laying of plans, which (since they were not to be carried out) need not be reported here.

The question Daniel didn’t ask was why Whiting had never grown his own beard. It would have been so much easier in the long run, and he’d never have run the risk of being accidentally unmasked. But since the answer was probably that he’d tried to grow one and it hadn’t come in to his liking, it hadn’t seemed diplomatic to ask.

Daniel decided (among the many other plans that were formed that night) to grow a beard himself. His own was naturally thick and wiry. But after the wedding, not before.

He wondered if this were the fate he’d foreseen for himself so long ago, when he was pedalling along the road to Unity. Every time he’d gone to Worry, he’d had to pass the same spot on the road where he’d stopped and had his revelation. He could remember little of that vision now, only a general sense that something terrific was in store for him. This was certainly terrific. But it wasn’t (he finally decided) the particular benediction that his vision had foretold. That was still up ahead, lost in the glare of all his other glories.

10

It seemed ironic to Daniel, and a bit of a defeat, that he should be having his first flight in an airplane. He had sworn to himself, in the not-so-long-ago heyday of his idealistic youth, that he would never fly except on his own two transubstantial wings. Now look at him — strapped into his seat, his nose pressed against the postage-stamp of a window, with four hundred pounds of excess baggage, and a track record of absolute zero. For all his brave talk and big ambitions, he never tried — never tried trying — once Grandison Whiting had laid down the law. It was Daniel’s own fault for mentioning that he meant to smuggle in a flight apparatus from out-of-state, his fault for believing Whiting’s stories about friends of his right here in Iowa who flew. Pure bullshit, all of it. Not that it mattered, awfully. It only meant he’d had to postpone the big day for a while longer, but he knew that time would fly even if he didn’t.

Now the waiting was behind him, all but a few hours. He and Boa were on their way. To New York first, where they would change for a jet to Rome. Then Athens, Cairo, Tehran, and the Seychelles for a winter tan. Economy was the official reason for changing at Kennedy rather than going direct from Des Moines, since everything, including travel bookings, was cheaper in New York. Daniel, despite his every extravagance, had established a reputation as a pennypincher. In Des Moines he’d wasted one whole day fleeing from one tailor to another, horrified by their prices. He understood, in theory, that he was supposed to be above such things now that he was nouveau riche, that the difference between the prices of two equivalent commodities was supposed to be invisible to him. He ought not to itemize bills, nor count his change, nor remember the amounts, or even the existence, of sums that old friends asked to borrow. But it was amazing, and dismaying, what the smell of money did to otherwise reasonable people, the way they came sniffing and snuffling around you, and he couldn’t stop resenting them for it. His character rejected the aristocratic attitude that money, at least on the level of “friendly” transactions, was no more to be taken account of than the water you showered with, much as his body would have rejected a transfusion of the wrong blood-type.

But economy was only an excuse for booking the honeymoon through New York. The real reason was what they’d be able to do during the twelve hours between planes. That, however, was a secret. Not a very dark secret, since Boa had managed for a week now not to guess despite the broadest hints. Surely she knew and wasn’t letting on from sheer love of feigning surprise. (No one could equal Boa at the art of unwrapping presents.) What could it be, after all, but a visit to First National Flightpaths? At last, sweet Jesus: at long, sweet last!

The plane took off, and the stewardesses performed a kind of pantomine with the oxygen masks, then brought round trays of drinks and generally made an agreeable fuss. Clouds rolled by, revealing checkerboards of farmland, squiggles of river, plumblines of highway. All very disappointing compared to the way he’d imagined it. But after all, this wasn’t the real thing.

First National Flightpaths was the real thing. First National Flightpaths specialized in getting beginning flyers off the ground. “All you need,” the brochure had said, “is a sincere feeling for the song you sing. We just provide the atmosphere — and leave the flying to you.”

He had been drinking steadily all day during the wedding and the reception, without (he was pretty certain) letting it show, even to Boa. He continued drinking on the plane. He lit a cigar, which the stewardess immediately made him put out. Left feeling abashed and cantankerous, he started — or rather, restarted — an argument he’d had earlier that day with Boa. About her Uncle Charles, the Representative. He had given them a sterling service for twelve as a wedding present, which Boa had insisted on cooing over privately, as they were driving to the airport. Finally he’d exploded and said what he thought about Charles Whiting — and his brother Grandison. What he thought was that Grandison had arranged their marriage for the benefit of Charles, and of the family name, knowing that Charles was shortly to be involved in something approaching a scandal. Or so it had been presented in some of the more outspoken newspapers on the East Coast. The scandal concerned a lawyer hired by a sub-committee of Ways and Means (the committee that Charles chaired), who had caused a stink, no one knew precisely what about, since the government had managed to clamp the lid on before the actual details became public. Somehow it concerned the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization concerning which Charles had made several intemperate and highly publicized remarks. Now the sub-committee lawyer had vanished, and Uncle Charles was spending all his time telling reporters he had no comment. From the first inklings in the Star-Tribune it was obvious to Daniel that the wedding had been arranged as a kind of media counterweight to the scandal — weddings being irreproachable P.R. It was not obvious to Boa. Neither of them knew more about it than could be gleaned from papers, since Grandison Whiting refused, categorically, to discuss it. When, only days before the wedding, he realized the depth of Daniel’s suspicions, he became quite incensed, though Boa had managed to smooth both their tempers. Daniel had apologized, but his doubts remained. From those entanglements had issued their quarrel in the Whiting limousine (a quarrel further complicated by Boa’s panicky concern that the chauffeur should not overhear them); this was again the subject of their quarrel en route to Kennedy; it promised to be their quarrel for ever, since Boa would not allow any doubts about her father to go unchallenged. She became Jesuitical in his defense, and then strident. Other passengers made reproving glances at them. Daniel wouldn’t give up. Soon he’d driven Boa to making excuses for Uncle Charles. Daniel reacted by upping the level of his sarcasm (a form of combat he’d learned from his mother, who could be scathing). Only after Boa had burst into tears, would he lay off.

The plane landed in Cleveland, and took off again. The stewardess brought more drinks. Though he’d managed to stop arguing, he felt rotten. Balked. Resentful. His anger turned everything good that had happened into something equally bad. He felt cheated, corrupted, betrayed. All the glamor of the past nine weeks evaporated. All his posturings before his friends were wormwood now — for he knew they’d be making the same calculations and seeing his marriage in this new, less rosy light.

And yet, wasn’t it possible that Boa was right in a way? If her father hadn’t dealt with him in a manner wholly truthful, he may at least have limited himself to half-truths. Then too, whatever motives Grandison Whiting may have concealed, the result was still this happy ending here and now. He should, as Boa suggested, put the rest out of mind, relax, lie back and enjoy the beginning of what looked to be the endless banquet ahead.

Besides, it wouldn’t do to arrive at First National Flightpaths feeling any otherwise than mellow.

So, by way of thinking of something else, he read, in the airline’s own magazine, an article about trout fishing written by one of the country’s top novelists. When he’d finished it, he was convinced that trout fishing would be a delightful pastime to take up. Would there be trout, he wondered, in the Seychelles? Probably not.

The nicest thing about New York, Daniel decided, after being there five minutes, was that you were invisible. Nobody noticed anyone else. In fact, it was Daniel who wasn’t noticing, as he found out when someone almost got away with his carryon suitcase, which Boa rescued by a last-minute grab. So much for patriotic feelings about his old home town (For he was, as he’d many times pointed out to Boa, a New Yorker by birth).

The taxi ride from the airport to First National Flightpaths took a maddening forty minutes (The brochure had promised: “Just ten, minutes from Kennedy”). It took another fifteen minutes to register as Ben and Beverley Bosola (The brochure had also pointed out that New York law did not hold it criminal to adopt or use an alias, so long as fraud was not involved). And to be shown to their suite on the twenty-fourth floor. There were three rooms: a regular hotel room (with double-bed, kitchenette, and a sound system to equal the best at Worry) and two small studios adjoining. When the attendant asked Daniel if he knew how to work the apparatus, he took a deep breath and admitted that he didn’t. The explanation, together with a demonstration, took another five minutes. You smeared a little stickum on your forehead and over that snugged on a headband to which the wires connected. Then you had to lay back in what Daniel would have sworn was a dentist’s chair. And sing. Daniel tipped the attendant ten dollars, and finally they were alone.

“We’ve got eleven hours,” he said. “Ten, really, if we don’t want to miss the plane. Though it’s silly, isn’t it, talking about planes when here we are, ready to take off ourselves. Jesus, I’m so nervous.”

Boa threw back her head and whirled one small whirl on the mustard yellow carpet, making the pumpkin-orange of her wedding dress billow out about her. “So am I,” she said quietly. “But in the nicest way.”

“Do you want to make love first? They say that helps sometimes. To put you in the right frame of mind.”

“I’d rather do that afterwards, I think. It may seem terribly presumptuous to say so, but I feel the most complete confidence. I don’t know why.”

“I do too. But, you know, for all that, it might not work. You can never tell in advance. They say only about thirty percent make it the first time.”

“Well, if not tonight, another time.”

“But if tonight, oh boy!” He grinned.

“Oh boy,” she agreed.

They kissed and then each of them went into a separate sound studio. Daniel, following the attendant’s advice, sang through his song once before wiring himself in. He had chosen Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” From the first moment he’d heard the song on a recording, a year ago, he’d known that that was the song for his first flight. It’s three short stanzas read like an instruction manual for takeoff, and the music… Nothing could be said about such music: it was perfection.

He sang, wired in, to his own accompaniment, recorded on a cassette, and at the end of the second stanza — “For really, I am dead to the world” — he thought he had lifted off. But he hadn’t. A second time, as the song went on — “Lost in death to the world’s riot, I rest in a realm of perfect quiet” — he felt the music propelling his mind right out of his flesh.

But at the end of the song he was still there, in that pink padded chair, in his starched shirt and black tux, in his own obdurate flesh.

He sang the song again, but without the same conviction, and without results.

Not to panic. The brochure said that very often the most effective song, in terms of reaching escape velocity, isn’t one for which we have the highest regard or greatest love. Probably his problem with the Mahler song was technical, despite the trouble he’d taken to transpose it down to his own range. All the authorities agreed that it was useless to tackle music beyond your capabilities.

His next offering was “I Am the Captain of the Pinafore,” to which he gave all the extra faith and oomph he could muster. That was the way he still remembered it, almost like a hymn, from the dream he’d dreamt the night before he got out of Spirit Lake. But he couldn’t stop feeling silly about it and worrying what someone listening would have thought. Never mind that the studio was sound-proof. Naturally, with that kind of self-consciousness, his score was another big zero.

He sang his two favorite songs from Die Winterreise, to which he could usually bring a sincere, droopy Weltschmerz. But in the middle of the second song he broke off. There was no use even trying, feeling the way he felt.

It was less an emotion than a physical sensation. As though some huge black hand had gripped his chest and squeezed. A steady pressure on his heart and lungs, and a taste of metal on his tongue.

He got down on the mustard carpet and did pushups rapidly, till he was out of breath. That helped some. Then he went out into the bedroom to pour himself a drink.

At red light glowed above the door to Boa’s studio: she was flying.

His instant reaction was to be happy for her. Then came the envy. He was glad, thinking about it, that it hadn’t happened the other way round. He wanted to go in and look at her, but that seemed somehow like admitting defeat: you look at people do the things you’d like to do yourself — and can’t.

The only booze in the icebox was three bottles of champagne. He’d been drinking it all day long and was sick of it, but he didn’t want to phone room service for beer, so he guzzled a bottle of it as quickly as he could.

He kept looking up at the light above the door, wondering if she’d taken off on her first try, and what song she’d used, and where she was now. She might have been anywhere in the city, since all the First National’s studios had direct access to the outside. Finally, unable to stand it any more, he went in and looked at her. Or rather, at the body she’d left behind.

Her arm had fallen from the armrest and hung limply in a filmy envelope of orange crepe de chine. He lifted it, so limp, and placed it on the padded rest.

Her eyes were open, but blank. A bead of saliva drooled down from her parted lips. He closed her eyes and wiped away the spittle. She seemed colder than a living body ought to be; she seemed dead.

He went back to his own room and tried again. Doggedly, he went through everything twice. He sang songs by Elgar and Ives; they weren’t as great as Mahler’s but they were in Daniel’s own language, and that was a consideration. He sang arias from Bach cantatas, choruses from Verdi operas. He sang songs he’d never heard before (the studio was well-equipped with both scores and accompaniment cassettes) and old love songs he remembered from the radio, years and years before. Three hours he sang, until there was nothing left of his voice but a rasp and an ache deep in his throat.

When he returned to the outer room, the light was still on over Boa’s door.

He went to bed and stared at that baleful red eye glowing in the darkness. For a while he cried, but he made himself stop. He couldn’t believe that she could just go off like this, knowing (as she surely must) that he’d been left behind. It was their wedding night, after all. Their honeymoon. Was she still angry with him for what he’d said about her father? Or didn’t anything else matter, once you could fly?

But the worst of it wasn’t that she had gone; the worst of it was that he was here. And might be, forever.

He started crying again, a slow steady drip of tears, and this time he let them come, for he remembered the brochure’s advice not to let your feelings get bottled up inside. Eventually, with a bottle of tears and of champagne both emptied, he managed to fall asleep.

He woke an hour after the plane had departed for Rome. The light was still burning above the studio door.

Once, when he was learning to drive, he’d backed Bob Lundgren’s pickup off the side of a dirt road and couldn’t get the back wheels up out of the ditch. The bed of the truck was full of bags of seed, so he couldn’t just go off to look for help, since Bob had few neighbors who would have been above helping themselves. He’d honked the horn and blinked the lights till the battery was dead — to no avail. Eventually he’d exhausted his impatience and started to see the situation as a joke. By the time Bob found him, at two a.m., he was completely unruffled and calm.

He’d reached that point again. If he had to wait for Boa, then he’d wait. Waiting was something he was good at.

He phoned down to the desk to say he’d be keeping the suite for another day and to order breakfast. Then he turned on the tv, which was showing what must have been the oldest cowboy movie ever made. Gratefully he let his mind sink into the story. The heroine explained to the hero that her parents had been killed in the massacre on Superstition Mountain, which seemed a truth as inexplicable as it was universal. His breakfast came, a gargantuan breakfast fit for the last hours of a man condemned to the gallows. Only after he’d finished his fourth fried egg did he realize that it was meant to be breakfast for two. Feeling replete, he went up to the roof and swam, all by himself, in the heated pool. He did slow weightless somersaults in the water, parodies of flight. When he returned to the room, Boa’s light was still glowing. She was spread out on the reclining seat exactly as he’d left her the night before. With half a thought that she might, if she were in the room and watching him, decide to be a dutiful wife and return to her body (and her husband), he bent down to kiss her forehead. In doing so, he knocked her arm from the armrest. It dangled from her shoulder like a puppet’s limb. He left it so, and returned to the outer room, where someone had used his few minutes away to make the bed and take away the tray of dishes.

Still feeling oddly lucid and dégagé, he looked through a catalogue of cassettes available (at ridiculous prices, but what the hell) from the shop in the lobby. He phoned down an order, more or less at random, for Haydn’s The Seasons.

At first he followed the text, hastening back and forth between the German and the English, but that required a more focused attention than he could muster. He didn’t want to assimilate but just, lazily, to enjoy. He went on listening with half an ear. The drapes were drawn and the lights turned off. Every so often the music would take hold, and he’d start being able to see little explosions of color in the darkness of the room, quick arabesques of light that echoed the emphatic patterns of the music. It was something he remembered doing ages ago, before his mother had run away, when they had all lived here in New York. He would lie in his bed and listen to the radio playing in the next room and see, on the ceiling, as on a black movie screen, movies of his mind’s own making, lovely semi-abstract flickerings and long zooming swoops through space, compared to which these little bips and flashes were weak tea indeed.

From the first, it would seem, music had been a visual art for him. Or rather, a spacial art. Just as it must be for dancers (and confess it: didn’t he enjoy himself more when he danced than when he sang? and didn’t he do it better?). Or for a conductor even, when he stands at the core of the music’s possibility and calls it into being by the motions of his baton. Perhaps that explained why Daniel couldn’t fly — because in some essential way that he would never understand music was forever alien to him, a foreign language that he must always be translating, word by word, into the language he knew. But how could that be, when music could mean so much to him? Even now, at a moment like this!

For Spring and Summer were fled, and the bass was singing of Autumn and the hunt, and Daniel was lifted outside himself by the music’s gathering momentum. Then, with a ferocity unmatched by anything else in Haydn, the hunt itself began. Horns sounded. A double chorus replied. The fanfare swelled, and formed… a landscape. Indeed, the tones that rolled and rollicked from the bells of the horns were that landscape, a broad expanse of wooded hills through which the hunters careened, resistless as the wind. Each “Tally-ho!” they cried was a declaration of possessing pride, a human signature slashed across the rolling fields, the very ecstasy of ownership. He’d never understood before the fascination of hunting, not on the scale on which it was conducted at Worry. He’d supposed it was something rich people felt obliged to do, as they were obliged to use silver and china and crystal. For what intrinsic interest could there be in killing one small fox? But the fox, he saw now, was only a pretext, an excuse for the hunters to go galloping off across their demesne, leaping walls and hedges, indifferent to boundaries of every kind, because the land belonged to them so far as they could ride and sing out “Tally-ho!”

It was splendid, undeniably — splendid as music and as idea. Grandison Whiting would have been gratified to hear it set forth so plainly. But the fox takes a different view of the hunt, necessarily. And Daniel knew, from the look he had seen so often in his father-in-law’s eyes, that he was the fox. He, Daniel Weinreb. He knew, what’s more, that the whole of wisdom, for any fox, may be written in a single word. Fear.

Once they put you in prison, you’re never entirely out of it again. It enters you and builds its walls within your heart. And once the hunt begins it doesn’t stop till the fox has been run to earth, till the hounds have torn it and the huntsman has held it up, a bleeding proof that the rulers and owners of the world will have no pity on the likes of fox.

Even then, even in the grip of this fear, things might have happened otherwise, for it was a pellucid, not a panicky, fear. But then, in the afternoon (Boa had yet to return), it was announced, as the third item on the tv news, that a plane on its way to Rome had exploded over the Atlantic, and that among the passengers (all of whom had perished) was the daughter of Grandison Whiting and her newlywed husband. There was a picture, from the wedding, of the official kiss. Daniel, in his tux, had his back turned to the camera.

The explosion was said to be the work of unidentified terrorists. No mention was made of the A.C.L.U. but the implication was there.

Daniel was sure that he knew better.