Rich Man, Poor Man

I

Mr. Donnelly, the track coach, ended the day’s practice early because Henry Fuller’s father came down to the high-school field to tell Henry that they had just got a telegram from Washington announcing that Henry’s brother had been killed in action in Germany. Henry was the team’s best shot-putter. Mr. Donnelly gave Henry a chance to go in and change his clothes alone and go home with his father, then whistled to gather the whole squad in a group and said they could all go home, as a gesture of respect.

The baseball team was practicing on the diamond, but nobody on the baseball team had lost a brother that afternoon, so they kept on practicing.

Rudolph Jordache (two-twenty low hurdles) went into the locker room and took a shower, although he hadn’t run enough to work up a sweat. There never was enough hot water at home and when he could he showered at the gym. The high school had been built in 1927, when everybody had money, and the showers were roomy and with plenty of hot water. There was even a swimming pool. Usually, Rudolph took a swim too, after practice, but he didn’t today, out of respect.

The boys in the locker room spoke in low tones and there was none of the usual horsing around. Smiley, the captain of the team, got up on a bench and said he thought that if there was a funeral service for Henry’s brother, they all ought to chip in and buy a wreath. Fifty cents a man would do it, he thought. You could tell by the looks on the boys’ faces who could spare the fifty cents and who couldn’t. Rudolph coudn’t spare it, but he made a conscious effort to look as though he could. The boys who agreed most readily were the ones whose parents took them down to New York City before the school term to buy the year’s clothes for them. Rudolph bought his clothes in town, in Port Philip, at Bernstein’s Department Store.

He was dressed neatly, though, with a collar and tie and a sweater under a leather windbreaker, and brown pants, from an old suit whose jacket had gone through at the elbows. Henry Fuller was one of the boys who got his clothes in New York, but Rudolph was sure Henry wasn’t getting any pleasure from the fact this afternoon.

Rudolph got out of the locker room quickly because he didn’t want to walk home with any of the other fellows and talk about Henry Fuller’s brother. He wasn’t particularly friendly with Henry, who was rather stupid, as the weight men were likely to be, and he preferred not to pretend to any excessive sympathy.

The school was in a residential part of the town, to the north and east of the business center, and was surrounded by semi-detached one-family houses that had been built at about the same time as the school, when the town was expanding. They were all the same originally, but through the years their owners had painted the trim and doors in different colors and here and there had added a bay window or a balcony in forlorn attempts at variety.

Carrying his books, Rudolph strode along the cracked sidewalks of the neighborhood. It was a windy early spring day, although not very cold, and he had a sense of well-being and holiday because of the light workout and the short practice. Most of the trees had already put out their leaves and there were buds everywhere.

The school was built on a hill and he could see the Hudson River below him, still looking cold and wintry, and the spires of the churches of the town, and in the distance to the south, the chimney of the Boylan Brick and Tile Works, where his sister Gretchen worked, and the tracks of the New York Central, along the river. Port Philip was not a pretty town, although once it had been, with big white Colonial houses mingled with solid Victorian stone. But the boom in the 1920s had brought a lot of new people into town, working people whose homes were narrow and dark, spreading out into all neighborhoods. Then the Depression had thrown almost everybody out of work and the jerry-built houses had been neglected, and as Rudolph’s mother complained, the entire town had become a single slum. This wasn’t absolutely true. The northern part of the town still had many fine big houses and wide streets and the houses had been kept up through everything. And even in the neighborhoods that were run down there were big houses that families had refused to leave and were still presentable behind generous lawns and old trees.

The war had brought prosperity once again to Port Philip and the Brick and Tile Works and the cement plant were going full blast and even the tannery and the Bye-field Shoe Factory had started up again with Army orders. But with the war on, people had other things to do than worry about keeping up appearances and, if possible, the city looked more dilapidated than ever.

With the town spread before him like that, planless and jumbled in the windy afternoon sun, Rudolph wondered if anybody would give his life to defend it or to take it, as Henry Fuller’s brother had given his life to take some nameless town in Germany.

Secretly, he hoped that the war would last another two years, although it didn’t look now as though it would. He was going to be seventeen years old soon and another year after that he could enlist. He saw himself with a lieutenant’s silver bars, taking an enlisted man’s salute, waving a platoon to follow him under machine-gun fire. It was the sort of experience a man ought to have. He was sorry there was no more cavalry. That must have been something—waving a saber, at a full gallop, charging the despicable foe.

He didn’t dare mention anything like this around the house. His mother became hysterical when anybody as much as suggested that perhaps the war would last and her Rudolph would be taken. He knew that some boys lied about their age to enlist—there were stories about fifteen-year-old boys, even fourteen-year-olds, who were in the Marines and who had won medals—but he couldn’t do anything like that to his mother.

As usual, he made a detour to pass the house where Miss Lenaut lived. Miss Lenaut was his French teacher. She was nowhere in sight.

Then he walked down to Broadway, the main street of the town, which ran parallel to the river and which was also the through highway from New York to Albany. He dreamed of having a car, like the ones he saw speeding through town. Once he had a car he would go down to New York every weekend. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do in New York, but he would go there.

Broadway was a nondescript thoroughfare, with shops of all kinds mixed together, butcher shops and markets next to quite large stores that sold women’s clothes and cheap jewelry and sporting goods. He stopped, as he often did, before the window of the Army and Navy Store, which had fishing equipment displayed along with work shoes and chino pants and shirts and flashlights and penknives. He stared at the fishing rods, thin and elegant, with their expensive reels. He fished in the river and, when the season was on, in the trout streams that were open to the public, but his equipment was primitive.

He went down another short street and turned to his left on Vanderhoff Street, where he lived. Vanderhoff Street ran parallel to Broadway and seemed to be trying to emulate it, but doing it badly, like a poor man in a baggy suit and scuffed shoes pretending he had arrived in a Cadillac. The shops were small and the wares in their windows were dusty, as though the owners knew there really was no use. Quite a few of the shop fronts were still boarded up, having closed down in 1930 or 1931. When new sewer lines were laid down before the war the WPA had felled all the trees which had shaded the sidewalks and nobody had bothered to plant new ones. Vanderhoff was a long street and as he approached his own house the street became shabbier and shabbier, as though just the mere act of going south was somehow spiritually a decline.

His mother was in the bakery, behind the counter, with a shawl around her shoulders, because she was always cold. The building was on a corner, so there were two big windows and his mother kept complaining that with all that glass there was no way of keeping the shop warm. She was putting a dozen hard rolls in a brown paper bag for a little girl. There were cakes and tarts displayed in the front window, but they were no longer baked in the cellar. At the start of the war, his father, who did the baking, had decided that it was more trouble than it was worth and now a truck from a big commercial bakery stopped every morning to deliver the cakes and pastries and Axel confined himself to baking the bread and rolls. When pastries had remained in the window three days, his father would bring them upstairs for the family to eat.

Rudolph went in and kissed his mother and she patted his cheek. She always looked tired and was always squinting a little, because she was a chain smoker and the smoke got into her eyes.

“Why so early?” she asked.

“Short practice today,” he said. He didn’t say why. “I’ll take over here. You can go upstairs now.”

“Thank you,” she said. “My Rudy.” She kissed him again. She was very affectionate with him. He wished she would kiss his brother or his sister once in a while, but she never did. He had never seen his mother kiss his father.

“I’ll go up and make dinner,” she said. She was the only one in the family who called supper dinner. Rudolph’s father did the shopping, because he said his wife was extravagant and didn’t know good food from bad, but most of the time she did the cooking.

She went out the front door. There was no door that opened directly from the bakery to the hallway and the staircase that led up to the two floors above, where they lived, and he saw his mother pass the show window, framed in pastry and shivering as the wind hit her. It was hard for him to remember that she was only a little over forty years old. Her hair was graying and she shuffled like an old lady.

He got out a book and read. It would be slow in the shop for another hour. The book he was reading was Burke’s speech On Conciliation With the Colonies, for his English class. It was so convincing that you wondered how all those supposedly smart men in Parliament hadn’t agreed with him. What would America have been like if they had listened to Burke? Would there have been earls and dukes and castles? He would have liked that. Sir Rudolph Jordache, Colonel in the Port Philip Household Guards.

An Italian laborer came in and asked for a loaf of white bread. Rudolph put down Burke and served him.

The family ate in the kitchen. The evening meal was the only one they all ate together because of the father’s hours of work. They had lamb stew tonight. Despite rationing, they always had plenty of meat because Rudolph’s father was friendly with the butcher, Mr. Haas, who didn’t ask for ration tickets because he was German, too. Rudolph felt uneasy about eating black market lamb on the same day that Henry Fuller had found out his brother had been killed, but all he did about it was ask for a small portion, mostly potatoes and carrots, because he couldn’t talk to his father about fine points like that.

His brother, Thomas, the only blond in the family, besides the mother, who really couldn’t be called blonde anymore, certainly didn’t seem to be worried about anything as he wolfed down his food. Thomas was just a year younger than Rudolph, but was already as tall and much stockier than his brother. Gretchen, Rudolph’s older sister, never ate much, because she worried about her weight. His mother just picked at her food. His father, a massive man in shirt-sleeves, ate enormously, wiping his thick, black moustache with the back of his hand from time to time.

Gretchen didn’t wait for the three-day-old cherry pie that they had for dessert, because she was due at the Army hospital just outside town where she worked as a volunteer nurse’s aide five nights a week. When she stood up, the father made his usual joke. “Be careful,” he said. “Don’t let those soldiers grab you. We don’t have enough rooms in this house to set up a nursery.”

“Pa,” Gretchen said reproachfully.

“I know soldiers,” Axel Jordache said. “Just be careful.”

Gretchen was a neat, proper, beautiful girl, Rudolph thought, and it pained him that his father talked like that to her. After all, she was the only one in the family who was contributing to the war effort.

When the meal was over, Thomas went out, too, as he did every night. He never did any homework and he got terrible marks in school. He was still a freshman in the high school, although he was nearly sixteen. He never listened to anybody.

Axel Jordache went into the living room up front to read the evening newspaper before going down to the cellar for the night’s work. Rudolph stayed in the kitchen to dry the dishes after his mother had washed them. If I ever get married, Rudolph thought, my wife will not have to wash dishes.

When the dishes were done, the mother got out the ironing board and Rudolph went upstairs to the room he shared with his brother, to do his homework. He knew that if ever he was going to escape from eating in a kitchen and listening to his father and wiping dishes it was going to be through books, so he was always the best prepared student in the class for all examinations.

II

Maybe, Axel Jordache thought, at work in the cellar, I ought to put poison in one of them. For laughs. For anything. Serve them right. Just once, just one night. See who gets it.

He drank the blend straight out of the bottle. By the end of the night the bottle would be almost gone. There was flour all the way up to his elbows and flour on his face, where he had wiped away the sweat. I’m a goddamn clown, he thought, without a circus.

The window was open to the March night and the weedy Rhenish smell of the river soaked into the room, but the oven was cooking the air in the basement. I am in hell, he thought, I stoke the fires of hell to earn my bread, to make my bread. I am in hell making Parker House rolls.

He went to the window and took a deep breath, the big chest muscles, age-ridged, tightening against his sweaty skivvy shirt. The river a few hundred yards away, freed now of ice, carried the presence of North with it like the rumor of passing troops, a last cold marching threat of winter, spreading on each side of its banks. The Rhine was four thousand miles away. Tanks and cannon were crossing it on improvised bridges. A lieutenant had run across it when a bridge had failed to blow up. Another lieutenant on the other side had been court-martialed and shot because he had failed to blow the bridge as ordered. Armies. Die Wacht am Rhein. Churchill had pissed in it recently. Fabled river. Jordache’s native water. Vineyards and sirens. Schloss Whatever. The cathedral in Cologne was still standing. Nothing much else. Jordache had seen the photographs in the newspapers. Home sweet home in old Cologne. Bulldozed ruins with the ever-remembered stink of the dead buried under collapsed walls. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer city. Jordache thought dimly of his youth and spat up and out of the window in the direction of the other river. The invincible German Army. How many dead? Jordache spat again and licked his black moustache that drooped down at the corners of his mouth. God bless America. He had killed to get there. He took one last breath of the river’s presence and limped back to work.

His name was on view on the window of the shop above the basement. BAKERY, A. Jordache, Pro. Twenty years ago, when the sign had been put up, it had read A. Jordache, Prop., but one winter the p had fallen off and he hadn’t bothered to have it put back on. He sold just as many Parker House rolls without the p.

The cat lay close to the oven, staring at him. They had never bothered to give the cat a name. The cat was there to keep the mice and rats out of the flour. When Jordache had to address it, he said, “Cat.” The cat probably thought its name was Cat. The cat watched him steadily all night, every night. She lived on one bowl of milk a day and all the mice and rats she could catch. The way the cat looked at him, Jordache was sure the cat wished she was ten times bigger than she was, as big as a tiger, so she could spring on him one night and have one real meal.

The oven was hot enough now and he limped over and put in the first tray of the night. He grimaced when he opened the oven door and the heat hit him.

III

Upstairs, in the narrow room he shared with his brother, Rudolph was looking up a word in an English-French dictionary. He had finished his homework. The word he was looking for was longing. He had already looked up hints and visions. He was writing a love letter in French to his French teacher, Miss Lenaut. He had read The Magic Mountain, and while most of the book had bored him, with the exception of the chapter about the seance, he had been impressed by the fact that the love scenes were in French and had painfully translated them for himself. To make love in French seemed to him to be distinguished. One sure thing, there was no other sixteen-year-old boy writing a love letter in French that night anywhere in the whole Hudson Valley.

“Enfin”—he wrote, in a carefully fashioned, almost printed script that he had developed over the last two years—“enfin, je dois vous dire, chère Madame, quand je vous vois par hasard dans les couloirs de l’école ou se promenant dans votre manteau bleuclair dans les rues, j’ai l’envie”—that was the closest he could get to longing—“très profond de voyager dans le monde d’où vous êtes sortie et des visions délicieuses de flâner avec vous à mes côtés sur les boulevards de Paris, qui vient d’être libéré par les braves soldats de votre pays et le mien. Votre cavalier servant, Rudolph Jordache (French 32b).”

He reread the letter, then read it in the English in which he had first written it. He had tried to make the English as much like French as possible. “Finally, I must tell you, Dear Madame, that when I see you by accident in the hallways of the school or walking along in your light-blue coat on the street, I have a deep longing to travel in the world you came from and wonderful visions of strolling arm in arm with you along the boulevards of Paris, which has just been liberated by the brave soldiers of your country and mine.”

He read the French version again with satisfaction. There was no doubt about it. If you wanted to be elegant, French was the language for it. He liked the way Miss Lenaut pronounced his name, correctly, Jordahsh, making it soft and musical, not Jawdake, as some people said it, or Jordash.

Then, regretfully, he tore both letters into small pieces. He knew he was never going to send Miss Lenaut any letters. He had already written her six letters and torn them up because she would think he was crazy and would probably tell the principal. And he certainly didn’t want his father or mother or Gretchen or Tom to find any love letters in any language in his room.

Still, the satisfaction was there. Sitting in the bare little room above the bakery, with the Hudson flowing a few hundred yards away, writing the letters was like a promise to himself. One day he would make long voyages, one day he would sail the river and write in new languages to beautiful women of high character, and the letters would actually be mailed.

He got up and looked at himself in the wavy little mirror above the battered oak dresser. He looked at himself often, searching his face for the man he wanted to be. He was very careful with his looks. His straight, black hair was always perfectly brushed; occasionally he plucked two or three bits of dark fuzz from the space between his eyebrows; he avoided candy so that he would have a minimum of pimples; he remembered to smile, not laugh aloud, and even that not frequently. He was very conservative with the colors he chose to wear and had worked on the way he walked, so that he never seemed hurried or exuberant, but walked in an easy gliding motion with his shoulders squared. He kept his nails filed and his sister gave him a manicure once a month and he kept out of fights because he didn’t want to have his face marred by a broken nose or his long, thin hands twisted by swollen knuckles. To keep in shape, there was the track team. For the pleasures of nature and solitude he fished, using a dry fly when somebody was watching, worms at other times.

“Votre cavalier servant,” he said into the mirror. He wanted his face to look French when he spoke the language, the way Miss Lenaut’s face suddenly looked French when she addressed the class.

He sat down at the little yellow oak table he used for a desk and pulled a piece of paper toward him. He tried to remember exactly what Miss Lenaut looked like. She was quite tall, with flat hips and full breasts always prominently propped up, and thin, straight legs. She wore high heels and ribbons and a great deal of lipstick. First he drew her with her clothes on, not achieving much of a likeness but getting the two curls in front of her ears and making the mouth convincingly prominent and dark. Then he tried to imagine what she might look like without any clothes. He drew her naked, sitting on a stool looking at herself in a hand-mirror. He stared at his handiwork. O, God, if ever! He tore up the naked drawing. He was ashamed of himself. He deserved to live over a bakery. If they ever found out downstairs what he thought and did upstairs …

He began to undress for bed. He was in his socks, because he didn’t want his mother, who slept in the room below, to know that he was still awake. He had to get up at five o’clock every morning to deliver the bread in the cart attached to a bicycle and his mother kept after him for not getting enough sleep.

Later on, when he was rich and successful, he would say, I got up at five o’clock in the morning, rain or shine, to deliver rolls to the Depot Hotel and the Ace Diner and Sinowski’s Bar and Grill. He wished his name wasn’t Rudolph.

IV

At the Casino Theater Errol Flynn was killing a lot of Japs. Thomas Jordache was sitting in the dark at the rear of the theater eating caramels from a package that he had taken from the slot machine in the lobby with a lead slug. He was expert at making lead slugs.

“Slip me one, Buddy,” Claude said, making it sound tough, like a movie gangster asking for another clip of 45 cartridges for his rod. Claude Tinker had an uncle who was a priest and to overcome the damaging implications of the relationship he tried to sound tough at all times. Tom flipped a caramel in the air and Claude caught it and started chewing on it loudly. The boys were sitting low on their spines, their feet draped over the empty seats in front of them. They had sneaked in as usual, through a grating that they had pried loose last year. The grating protected a window in the men’s room in the cellar. Every once in a while, one or the other of them would come up into the auditorium with his fly open, to make it look for real.

Tom was bored with the picture. He watched Errol Flynn dispose of a platoon of Japs with various weapons. “Phonus bolonus,” he said.

“What language you speaking, Professor?” Claude said, playing their game.

“That’s Latin,” Tom said, “for bullshit.”

“What a command of tongues,” Claude said.

“Look,” Tom said, “down there to the right. That GI with his girl.”

A few rows in front of them a soldier and a girl were sitting, entwined. The theater was half-empty and there was nobody in the row they were in or in the rows behind them. Claude frowned. “He looks awful big,” Claude said. “Look at that neck on him.”

“General,” Tom said, “we attack at dawn.”

“You’ll wind up in the hospital,” Claude said.

“Wanna bet?” Tom swung his legs back from the chair in front of him and stood up and started toward the aisle. He moved silently, his sneakered feet light on the worn carpet of the Casino floor. He always wore sneakers. You had to be sure-footed and ready to make the fast break at all times. He hunched his shoulders, bulky and easy under his sweater, and tucked in his gut, enjoying the hard, flat feeling under the tight belt. Ready for anything. He smiled in the darkness, the excitement beginning to get him, as it always did at these preliminary choosing moments.

Claude followed him, uneasily. Claude was a lanky, thin-armed boy, with a long-nosed squirrely wedge of a face and loose, wet lips. He was nearsighted and wore glasses and that didn’t make him look any better. He was a manipulator and behind-the-scenes man and slid out of trouble like a corporation lawyer and conned teachers into giving him good marks although he almost never opened a school book. He wore dark suits and neckties and had a kind of literary stoop and shambled apologetically when he walked and looked insignificant, humble, and placating. He was imaginative, his imagination concentrating on outrages against society. His father ran the bookkeeping department of the Boylan Brick and Tile Works and his mother, who had a degree from St. Anne’s College for Women, was the president of the draft board, and what with all that and the priest-uncle besides, and his harmless and slightly repulsive appearance, Claude maneuvered with impunity through his plot-filled world.

The two boys moved down the empty row and sat directly behind the GI and his girl. The GI had his hand in the girl’s blouse and was methodically squeezing her breast. The GI hadn’t removed his overseas cap and it peaked down steeply over his forehead. The girl had her hand somewhere down in the shadows between the soldier’s legs. Both the. GI and the girl were watching the picture intently. Neither of them paid any attention to the arrival of the boys.

Tom sat behind the girl, who smelled good. She was liberally doused with a flowery perfume which mingled with the buttery, cowlike aroma from a bag of popcorn they had been eating. Claude sat behind the soldier. The soldier had a small head, but he was tall, with broad shoulders, and his cap obscured most of the screen from Claude, who had to squirm from side to side to glimpse the film.

“Listen,” Claude whispered, “I tell you he’s too big. I bet he weighs one seventy, at least.”

“Don’t worry,” Tom whispered back. “Start in.” He spoke confidently, but he could feel little shivers of doubt in his fingertips and under his armpits. That hint of doubt, of fear, was familiar to him and it added to his expectation and the beauty of the final violence. “Go ahead,” he whispered harshly to Claude. “We ain’t got all night.”

“You’re the boss,” Claude said. Then he leaned forward and tapped the soldier on the shoulder. “Pardon me, Sergeant,” he said. “I wonder if you’d be so kind as to remove your cap. It’s difficult for me to see the screen.”

“I ain’t no sergeant,” the soldier said, without turning. He kept his cap on and continued watching the picture, squeezing the girl’s breast.

The two boys sat quietly for more than a minute. They had practiced the tactic of provocation so often together that there was no need for signals. Then Tom leaned forward and tapped the soldier heavily on the shoulder. “My friend made a polite request,” he said. “You are interfering with his enjoyment of the picture. We will have to call the management if you don’t take your cap off.”

The soldier swiveled a little in his seat, annoyedly. “There’s two hundred empty seats,” he said. “If your friend wants to see the picture let him sit someplace else.” He turned back to his two preoccupations, sex and art.

“He’s on the way,” Tom whispered to Claude. “Keep him going.”

Claude tapped the soldier on the shoulder again. “I suffer from a rare eye disease,” Claude said. “I can only see from this seat. Everywhere else it’s a blur. I can’t tell whether it’s Errol Flynn or Loretta Young up there.”

“Go to an eye doctor,” the soldier said. The girl laughed at his wit. She sounded as though she had drunk some water the wrong way when she laughed. The soldier laughed, too, to show that he appreciated himself.

“I don’t think it’s nice to laugh at people’s disabilities,” Tom said.

“Especially with a war on,” Claude said, “with all those crippled heroes.”

“What sort of an American are you?” Tom asked, his voice rising patriotically. “That’s the question I would like to ask, what sort of an American are you?”

The girl turned. “Get lost, kids,” she said.

“I want to remind you, sir,” Tom said, “that I hold you personally responsible for anything your lady friend says.”

“Don’t pay them no mind, Angela,” the soldier said. He had a high, tenor voice.

The boys sat in silence again for a moment.

“Marine, tonight you die,” Tom said in a high falsetto, in his Japanese imitation. “Yankee dog, tonight I cut off your balls.”

“Watch your goddamn language,” the soldier said, turning his head.

“I bet he’s braver than Errol Flynn,” Tom said. “I bet he’s got a drawer full of medals back home but he’s too modest to wear them.”

The soldier was getting angry now. “Why don’t you kids shut up? We came here to see a movie.”

“We came to make love,” Tom said. He caressed Claude’s cheek elaborately. “Didn’t we, hotpants?”

“Squeeze me harder, darrrling,” Claude said. “My nipples’re palpitating.”

“I am in ecstasy,” Tom said. “Your skin is like a baby’s ass.”

“Put your tongue in my ear, honey,” Claude said. “Ooooh—I’m coming.”

“That’s enough,” the soldier said. Finally he had taken his hand out of the girl’s blouse. “Get the hell out of here.”

He had spoken loudly and angrily and a few people were turning around up front and making shushing noises.

“We paid good money for these seats,” Tom said, “and we’re not moving.”

“We’ll see about that.” The soldier stood up. He was about six feet tall. “I’m going to get the usher.”

“Don’t let the little bastards get your goat, Sidney,” the girl said. “Sit down.”

“Sidney, remember I told you I hold you personally responsible for your lady friend’s language,” Tom said. “This is a last warning.”

“Usher!” the soldier called across the auditorium, to where the lone attendant, dressed in frayed gold braid, was sitting in the last row, dozing under an exit light.

“Ssh, sssh!” came from spots all over the theater.

“He’s a real soldier,” Claude said. “He’s calling for reinforcements.”

“Sit down, Sidney.” The girl tugged at the soldier’s sleeve. “They’re just snotty kids.”

“Button your shirt, Angela,” Tom said. “Your titty’s showing.” He stood up, in case the soldier swung.

“Sit down, please,” Claude said politely, as the usher came down the aisle toward them, “this is the best part of the picture and I don’t want to miss it.”

“What’s going on here?” the usher asked. He was a big weary-looking man of about forty who worked in a furniture factory during the day.

“Get these kids out of here,” the soldier said. “They’re using dirty language in front of this lady.”

“All I said was, please take your hat off,” Claude said. “Am I right, Tom?”

“That’s what he said, sir,” Tom said, sitting down again. “A simple polite request. He has a rare eye disease.”

“What?” the usher asked, puzzled.

“If you don’t throw them out,” the soldier said, “there’s going to be trouble.”

“Why don’t you boys sit someplace else?” the usher said.

“He explained,” Claude said. “I have a rare eye disease.”

“This is a free country,” Tom said. “You pay your money and you sit where you want to sit. Who does he think he is—Adolf Hitler? Big shot. Just because he’s wearing a soldier suit. I bet he never got any nearer to the Japs than Kansas City, Missouri. Coming here, giving a bad example to the youth of the country, screwing girls in public. In uniform.”

“If you don’t throw them out, I’m going to clout them,” the soldier said thickly. He was clenching and unclenching his fists.

“You used bad language,” the usher said to Tom. “I heard it with my own ears. Not in this theater. Out you go.”

By now most of the audience was booing. The usher leaned over and grabbed Tom by his sweater. By the feel of the big hand on him Tom knew there was no chance with the man. He stood up. “Come on, Claude,” he said. “All right, Mister,” he said to the usher. “We don’t want to cause any disturbance. Just give us our money back and we’ll leave.”

“Fat chance,” the usher said.

Tom sat down again. “I know my rights,” he said. Then very loudly, so that his voice rang through the entire auditorium over the sound of the gunfire from the screen, “Go ahead and hit me, you big brute.”

The usher sighed. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll give you your money back. Just get the hell out of here.”

The boys stood up. Tom smiled up at the soldier. “I warned you,” he said. “I’ll be waiting for you outside.”

“Go get your ma to change your diapers,” the soldier said. He sat down heavily.

In the lobby, the usher gave them each thirty-five cents out of his own pocket, making them sign receipts to show to the owner of the theater. Tom signed the name of his algebra teacher and Claude signed the name of the president of his father’s bank. “And I don’t want to see you ever trying to get in here again,” the usher said.

“It’s a public place,” Claude said. “You try anything like that and my father’ll hear about it.

“Who’s your father?” the usher said, disturbed.

“You’ll find out,” Claude said menacingly. “In due time.”

The boys stalked deliberately out of the lobby. On the street they clapped each other on the back and roared with laughter. It was early and the picture wouldn’t end for another half hour, so they went into the diner across the street and had a piece of pie and some coffee with the usher’s money. The radio was on behind the counter and a newscaster was talking about the gains the American Army had made that day in Germany and about the possibility of the German high command falling back into a redoubt in the Bavarian Alps for a last stand.

Tom listened with a grimace twisting his round baby face. The war bored him. He didn’t mind the fighting, it was the crap about sacrifice and ideals and our brave boys all the time that made him sick. It was a cinch they’d never get him in any army.

“Hey, lady,” he said to the waitress, who was buffing her nails behind the counter, “can’t we have some music?” He got enough patriotism at home, from his sister and brother.

The waitress looked up languidly. “Ain’t you boys interested in who’s winning the war?”

“We’re Four F,” Tom said. “We have a rare eye disease.”

“Oh, my rare eye disease,” Claude said, over his coffee. They burst into laughter again.

They were standing in front of the Casino when the doors opened and the audience began to stream out. Tom had given Claude his wristwatch to hold so that it wouldn’t get broken. He stood absolutely still, purposely controlling himself, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, hoping that the soldier hadn’t left before the end of the picture. Claude was pacing up and down nervously, his face sweating and pale from excitement. “You’re sure now?” he kept saying. “You’re absolutely sure? He’s an awful big sonofabitch. I want you to be sure.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” Tom said. “Just keep the crowd back so I have room to move. I don’t want him grappling me.” His eyes narrowed. “Here he comes.”

The soldier and his girl came out onto the sidewalk. The soldier looked about twenty-two or twenty-three. He was a little pudgy, with a heavy, sullen face. His tunic bulged over a premature paunch, but he looked strong. He had no hash marks on his sleeve and no ribbons. He had his hand possessively on the girl’s arm, steering her through the stream of people. “I’m thirsty,” he was saying. “Let’s go get ourselves a coupla beers.” Tom went over to him and stood in front of him, barring his way.

“You here again?” the soldier said, annoyed. He stopped for a moment. Then he started moving again, pushing Tom with his chest.

“You better stop pushing,” Tom said. He grabbed the soldier’s sleeve. “You’re not going anywhere.”

The soldier stopped in surprise. He looked down at Tom, who was at least three inches shorter than he, blond and cherubic looking in his old blue sweater and basketball sneakers. “You sure are perky for a kid your size,” the soldier said. “Now get out of my way.” He pushed Tom to one side with his forearm.

“Who do you think you’re pushing, Sidney?” Tom said and jabbed sharply at the soldier’s chest with the heel of his hand. By now people were stopping around them and looking on curiously. The soldier’s face reddened in slow anger. “Keep your hands to yourself, kid, or you’ll get hurt.”

“What’s the matter with you, boy?” the girl said. She had redone her mouth before coming out of the theater but there were still lipstick smears on her chin and she was uncomfortable at all the attention they were getting. “If this is some kind of joke, it’s not funny.”

“It’s not a joke, Angela,” Tom said.

“Stop that Angela crap,” the soldier said.

“I want an apology,” Tom said.

“That’s the least,” Claude said.

“Apology? Apology for what?” The soldier appealed to the small crowd that by now had collected around them. “These kids must be nuts.”

“Either you apologize for the language your lady friend used to us in there,” Tom said, “or you take the consequences.”

“Come on, Angela,” the soldier said, “let’s go get that beer.” He started to take a step, but Tom grabbed his sleeve and pulled. There was a tearing noise and a seam broke open at the shoulder.

The soldier twisted around to view the damage. “Hey, you little sonofabitch, you tore my coat.”

“I told you you weren’t going nowhere,” Tom said. He backed away a little, his arms crooked, his fingers outspread.

“Nobody gets away with tearing my coat,” the soldier said. “I don’t care who he is.” He swung with his open hand. Tom moved in and let the blow fall on his left shoulder. “Ow!” he screamed, putting his right hand to his shoulder and bending over as though he were in terrible pain.

“Did you see that?” Claude demanded of the spectators. “Did you see that man hit my friend?”

“Listen, soldier,” a gray-haired man in a raincoat said, “you can’t beat up on a little kid like that.”

“I just gave him a little slap,” the soldier turned to the man apologetically. “He’s been dogging me all …”

Suddenly Tom straightened up and hitting upward, with his closed fist, struck the soldier, not too hard, so as not to discourage him, along the side of the jaw.

There was no holding the soldier back now. “Okay, kid, you asked for it.” He began to move in on Tom.

Tom retreated and the crowd pushed back behind him.

“Give them room,” Claude called professionally. “Give the men room.”

“Sidney,” the girl called shrilly, “you’ll kill him.”

“Nah,” the soldier said, “I’ll just slap him around a little. Teach him a lesson.”

Tom snaked in and hit the soldier with a short left hook to the head and went in deep to the belly with his right. The soldier let the air out of his lungs with a large, dry sound, as Tom danced back.

“It’s disgusting,” a woman said. “A big oaf like that. Somebody ought to stop it.”

“It’s all right,” her husband said. “He said he’d only slap him a couple of times.”

The soldier swung a slow, heavy right hand at Tom. Tom ducked under it and dug both his fists into the soldier’s soft middle. The soldier bent almost double in pain and Tom hooked both hands to the face. The soldier began to spurt blood and he waved his hands feebly in front of him and tried to clinch. Contemptuously, Tom let the soldier grapple him, but kept his right hand free and clubbed at the soldier’s kidneys. The soldier slowly went down to one knee. He looked up blearily at Tom through the blood that was flowing from his cut forehead. Angela was crying. The crowd was silent. Tom stepped back. He wasn’t even breathing hard. There was a little glow under the light, blond fuzz on his cheeks.

“My God,” said the lady who had said that somebody ought to stop it, “he looks just like a baby.”

“You getting up?” Tom asked the soldier. The soldier just looked at him and swung his head wearily to get the blood out of his eyes. Angela knelt beside him and started using her handkerchief on the cuts. The whole thing hadn’t taken more than thirty seconds.

“That’s all for tonight, folks,” Claude said. He was wiping sweat off his face.

Tom strode out of the little circle of watching men and women. They were very quiet, as though they had seen something unnatural and dangerous that night, something they would like to be able to forget.

Claude caught up to Tom as they turned the corner. “Boy, oh boy,” Claude said, “you worked fast tonight. The combinations, boy, oh boy, the combinations.”

Tom was chuckling. “Sidney, you’ll kill him,” he said, trying to imitate the girl’s voice. He felt wonderful. He half-closed his eyes and remembered the shock of his fists against skin and bone and against the brass buttons of the uniform. “It was okay,” he said. “Only it didn’t last long enough. I should have carried him a while. He was just a pile of shit. Next time let’s pick somebody can fight.”

“Boy,” Claude said, “I really enjoyed that. I sure would like to see that fella’s face tomorrow. When you going to do it again?”

Tom shrugged. “When I’m in the mood. Good night.” He didn’t want Claude hanging around him anymore. He wanted to be alone and remember every move of the fight. Claude was used to these sudden rejections and treated them respectfully. Talent had its prerogatives. “Good night,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

Tom waved and turned off down the avenue for the long walk toward his house. They had to be careful to go to other parts of town when Tom wanted to fight. He was too well known in his own neighborhood. Everybody avoided him when they sensed one of his moods coming on.

He walked swiftly toward home down the dark street toward the smell of the river, dancing a little around a lamppost here and there. He’d shown them, he’d shown them. And he was going to show them a lot more. Them.

As he turned the last corner, he saw his sister Gretchen approaching the house from the other end of the street. She was hurrying and she had her head down and she didn’t see him. He slipped into a doorway across the street and waited. He didn’t want to have to talk to his sister. She hadn’t said anything that he wanted to hear since he was eight years old. He watched her almost run up to the door next to the bakery window and get her key out of her bag. Maybe once he would follow her and really find out what she did with her nights.

Gretchen opened the door and went in. Tom waited until he was sure that she was safely upstairs and in her room, then crossed the street and stood in front of the weathered gray frame building. Home. He had been born in that house. He had come unexpectedly, early, and there had been no time to get his mother to the hospital. How many times he had heard that story. Big deal, being born at home. The Queen did not leave the Palace. The Prince first saw the light of day in the royal bedchamber. The house looked desolate, ready to be torn down. Tom spat again. He stared at the building, all exhilaration gone. There was the usual light from the basement window, where his father was working. The boy’s face hardened. A whole life in a cellar. What do they know? he thought. Nothing.

He let himself in quietly with the key and climbed to the room he shared with Rudolph on the third floor. He was careful on the creaky stairs. Moving soundlessly was a point of honor with him. His exits and entrances were his own business. Especially on a night like this. There was some blood on the sleeve of his sweater and he didn’t want anybody coming in and howling about it.

He could hear Rudolph breathing steadily, asleep, as he closed the door quietly behind him. Nice, proper Rudolph, the perfect gentleman, smelling of toothpaste, right at the head of his class, everybody’s pet, never coming home with blood on him, getting a good night’s sleep, so he wouldn’t miss a good morning, Ma’am, or a trigonometry problem the next day. Tom undressed in the dark, throwing his clothes carelessly over a chair. He didn’t want to answer any questions from Rudolph, either. Rudolph was no ally. He was on the other side. Let him be on the other side. Who cared?

But when he got into the double bed, Rudolph awoke. “Where you been?” Rudolph asked sleepily.

“Just to the show.”

“How was it?”

“Lousy.”

The two brothers lay still in the darkness. Rudolph moved a bit toward the other side of the bed. He thought it was degrading to have to sleep in the same bed with his brother. It was cold in the room, with the window open and the wind coming off the river. Rudolph always opened the window wide at night. If there was a rule, you could bet Rudolph would obey it. He slept in pajamas. Tom just stripped to his shorts for sleeping. They had arguments about that twice a week.

Rudolph sniffed. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, “you smell like a wild animal. What’ve you been doing?”

“Nothing,” Tom said. “I can’t help the way I smell.” If he wasn’t my brother, he thought, I’d beat the shit out of him.

He wished he’d had the money to go to Alice’s behind the railroad station. He’d lost his virginity there for five dollars and he’d gone back several times after that. That was in the summer. He had had a job on a dredge in the river and he told his father he made ten dollars a week less than he actually did. That big dark woman, that Florence girl, up from Virginia, who had let him come twice for the same five dollars because he was only fourteen and he was cherry, that would have really finished the night off. He hadn’t told Rudolph about Alice’s either. Rudolph was still a virgin, that was for sure. He was above sex or he was waiting for a movie star or he was a fairy or something. One day, he, Tom, was going to tell Rudolph everything and then watch the expression on his face. Wild animal. Well, if that’s what they thought of him, that’s what he was going to be—a wild animal.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember what the soldier looked like, down on one knee on the pavement with the blood leaking all over his face. The image was clear, but there was no pleasure in it any more.

He started to tremble. The room was cold, but that wasn’t why he was trembling.

V

Gretchen sat in front of the little mirror which was propped up on the dressing table against the wall of her room. It was an old kitchen table she had bought at a junk sale for two dollars and painted pink. There were some cosmetic jars on it and a silver-backed brush she had gotten as a present on her eighteenth birthday and three small bottles of perfume and a manicure set all neatly laid out on a clean towel. She had on an old bathrobe. The worn flannel was warm against her skin and gave her some of the same feeling of coziness she used to have when she came in out of the cold and put it on before bedtime as a young girl. She needed what comfort she could find tonight.

She scrubbed the cold cream off her face with a piece of Kleenex. Her skin was very white, a heritage from her mother, like her blue, shading-to-violet eyes. Her straight, black hair was like her father’s. Gretchen was beautiful, her mother said, just as she had been when she was Gretchen’s age. Her mother was constantly imploring her not to allow herself to decay, as she had done. Decay was the word her mother used. With marriage, her mother intimated, decay set in immediately. Corruption lay in the touch of a man. Her mother did not lecture her about men; she was sure of what she called Gretchen’s virtue (that was another word she used freely), but she used her influence to get Gretchen to wear loose clothes that did not show off her figure. “There’s no sense in seeking out trouble,” her mother said. “It comes finding you out soon enough. You have an old-fashioned figure, but your troubles will be strictly up-to-date.”

Her mother had once confided to Gretchen that she had wanted to be a nun. There was a bluntness of sensibility there that disturbed Gretchen when she thought about it. Nuns had no daughters. She existed, aged nineteen, seated in front of a mirror on a March night in the middle of the century because her mother had failed to live up to her destiny.

After what had happened to her tonight, Gretchen thought bitterly, she herself would be tempted to enter a nunnery. If only she believed in God.

She had gone to the hospital as usual after work. The hospital was a military one on the outskirts of town, full of soldiers convalescing from wounds received in Europe. Gretchen was a volunteer worker five nights a week, distributing books and magazines and doughnuts, reading letters to soldiers with eye wounds and writing letters for soldiers with hand and arm injuries. She wasn’t paid anything, but she felt it was the least she could do. Actually, she enjoyed the work. The soldiers were grateful and docile, made almost childlike by their wounds, and there was none of the tense sexual parading and reconnoitering that she had to endure in the office all day. Of course, many of the nurses and some of the other volunteers slipped off with the doctors and the more active officer-wounded, but Gretchen had quickly shown that she wasn’t having any of that. So many girls were available and willing, that very few of the men persisted. To make it all easier, she had arranged to be assigned to the crowded enlisted men’s wards, where it was almost impossible for a soldier to be alone with her for more than a few seconds at a time. She was friendly and easy with men conversationally, but she couldn’t bear the thought of any man touching her. She had been kissed by boys from time to time, of course, at parties and in cars after dances, but their clumsy gropings had seemed meaningless to her, unsanitary and vaguely comic.

She never was interested in any of the boys who surrounded her in school and she scorned the girls who had crushes on football heroes or boys with cars. It all seemed so pointless. The only man she had ever speculated about in that way was Mr. Pollack, the English teacher, who was an old man, maybe fifty, with tousled gray hair, and who spoke in a low, gentlemanly voice and read Shakespeare aloud in class. “‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day …’” She could imagine herself in his arms, and his poetic and mournful caresses, but he was married and had daughters her age and never remembered anyone’s name. As for her dreams … She forgot her dreams.

Something enormous was going to happen to her, she was sure, but it wasn’t going to be this year or in this town.

As she went on her rounds in the loose, gray smock provided by the hospital, Gretchen felt motherly and useful, making up in a small way for what these courteous, uncomplaining young men had suffered for their country.

The lights were low in the wards and all the men were supposed to be in bed. Gretchen had made her usual special visit to the bedside of a soldier named Talbot Hughes, who had been wounded in the throat and couldn’t speak. He was the youngest soldier in the ward and the most pitiful and Gretchen liked to believe that the touch of her hand and her good-night smile made the long hours before dawn more bearable for the boy. She was tidying the common room, where the men read and wrote letters, played cards and checkers and listened to the phonograph. She stacked the magazines neatly on the center table, cleared off a chessboard and put the pieces in their box, dropped two empty Coca-Cola bottles into a waste-basket.

She liked the little housewifely end of the night, conscious of the hundreds of young men sleeping around this central, warm core of the hospital block, young men saved from death, acquitted of war, young men healing and forgetting fear and agony, young men one day nearer to peace and home.

She had lived in small, cramped quarters all her life and the spaciousness of the common room, with its pleasant light-green walls and deep upholstered chairs, made her feel almost like a hostess in her own elegant home, after a successful party. She was humming as she finished her work and was just about to turn out the light and start for the locker room to change her clothes when a tall young Negro in pajamas and the Medical Corps maroon bathrobe limped in.

“Evening, Miss Jordache,” the Negro said. His name was Arnold. He had been in the hospital a long time and she knew him fairly well. There were only two Negroes in the block and this was the first time Gretchen had seen one without the other. She always made a particular point of being agreeable to them. Arnold had had his leg smashed when a shell hit the truck he was driving in France. He came from St. Louis, he had told her, and had eleven brothers and sisters, and had finished high school.

He spent many hours reading and wore glasses while doing so. Although he seemed to read at random, comic books, magazines, the plays of Shakespeare, anything that happened to be lying around, Gretchen had decided that he was ripe for literature. He did look bookish, like a brilliant, lonely student from an African country, with his Army-issue glasses. From time to time Gretchen brought him books, either her own or her brother Rudolph’s, or sometimes from the public library in town. Arnold read them promptly and returned them conscientiously, in good condition, without ever offering any comment on them. Gretchen felt that he was silent out of embarrassment, not wanting to pretend to be an intellectual in front of the other men. She read a great deal herself, but omnivorously, her taste guided in the last two years by Mr. Pollack’s catholic enthusiasms. So she had through the months offered Arnold such disparate works as Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Rupert Brooke, and This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

She smiled as the boy came into the room. “Good evening, Arnold,” she said. “Looking for something?”

“Naw. Just wanderin’. Couldn’t get to sleep, somehow. Then I saw the light in here and I say to myself, ‘I’ll go in and visit with that pretty li’l Miss Jordache, pass the time of day.’” He smiled at her, his teeth white and perfect. Unlike the other men, who called her Gretchen, he always used her last name. His speech was somehow countrified, as though his family had carried the burden of their Alabama farm with them when they had migrated north. He was quite black, gaunt in the loose bathrobe. It had taken two or three operations to save his leg, Gretchen knew, and she was sure she could see the lines of suffering around his mouth.

“I was just going to put the light out,” Gretchen said. The next bus passed the hospital in about fifteen minutes and she didn’t want to miss it.

Pushing off his good leg, Arnold bounced up onto the table. He sat there swinging his legs. “You don’t know the pleasure a man can get,” Arnold said, “just looking down and seeing his own two feet. You just go on home, Miss Jordache, I imagine you got some fine young man Waiting outside for you and I wouldn’t like him to be upset your not coming on time.”

“Nobody’s waiting for me,” Gretchen said. Now she felt guilty that she had wanted to hustle the boy out of the room just to catch a bus. There’d be another bus along. “I’m in no hurry.”

He took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered her one. She shook her head. “No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”

He lit his cigarette, his hand very steady, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. His movements were all deliberate and slow. He had been a football player in high school in St. Louis before he was drafted, he had told her, and the athlete remained in the wounded soldier. He patted the table next to him. “Why don’t you set awhile, Miss Jordache?” he said. “You must be weary, on your feet all night, running around the way you do for us.”

“I don’t mind,” Gretchen said. “I sit most of the day in the office.” But she hoisted herself up to the table beside him, to show that she was not anxious to leave. They sat side by side, their legs hanging over the side of the table.

“You got pretty feet,” Arnold said.

Gretchen looked down at her sensible, low-heeled, brown shoes. “I suppose they’re all right,” she said. She thought she had pretty feet, too, narrow and not too long, and slender ankles.

“I became an expert on feet in this man’s army,” Arnold said. He said it without self-pity, as another man might have said, “I learned how to fix radios in the Army,” or, “The Army taught me how to read maps.” His absence of compassion for himself made her feel a rush of pity for the soft-spoken, slow-moving boy. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “The nurses tell me the doctors’ve done wonders for your leg.”

“Yeah.” Arnold chuckled. “Just don’t bet on old Arnold gaining a lot of ground from here on in.”

“How old are you, Arnold?”

“Twenty-two. You?”

“Nineteen.”

He grinned. “Good ages, huh?”

“I suppose so. If we didn’t have a war.”

“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Arnold said, pulling at his cigarette. “It got me out of St. Louis. Made a man of me.” There was the tone of mockery in his voice. “Ain’t a dumb kid no more. I know what the score is now and who adds up the numbers. Saw some interesting places, met some interesting folk. You ever been in Cornwall, Miss Jordache? That’s in England.”

“No.”

“Jordache,” Arnold said. “That a name from around these parts?”

“No,” Gretchen said. “It’s German. My father came over from Germany. He was wounded in the leg too. In the First War. He was in the German army.”

Arnold chuckled. “They get a man coming and going, don’t they?” he said. “He do much running, your pa?”

“He limps a little,” Gretchen spoke carefully. “It doesn’t seem to interfere too much.”

“Yeah, Cornwall.” Arnold rocked back and forth a little on the table. He seemed to have had enough of talk about wars and wounds. “They got palm trees, little old towns, make St. Louis look like it was built the day before yesterday. Big, wide beaches. Yeah. Yeah, England. Folk’re real nice. Hospitable. Invite you to their homes for Sunday dinner. They surprised me. Always felt the English were uppity. Anyway, that was the general impression about ’em in the circles in which I moved in St. Louis as a young man.”

Gretchen felt he was making fun of her, gently, with the ironic formal pronouncement. “People have to learn about each other,” she said stiffly, unhappy about how pompous she was sounding, but somehow put off, disturbed, forced on the defensive by the soft, lazy, country voice.

“They sure do,” he agreed. “They sure enough do.” He leaned on his hands and turned his face toward her. “What have I got to learn about you, Miss Jordache?”

“Me?” A forced little laugh was surprised out of her. “Nothing. I’m a small-town secretary who’s never been anyplace and who’ll never go anyplace.”

“I wouldn’t agree to that, Miss Jordache,” Arnold said seriously. “I wouldn’t agree to that at all. If ever I saw a girl that was due to rise, it’s you. You got a neat, promising style of handling yourself. Why, I bet half the boys in this building’d ask you to marry them on the spot, you gave them any encouragement.”

“I’m not marrying anyone yet,” Gretchen said.

“Of course not.” Arnold nodded soberly. “No sense in rushing, lock yourself in, a girl like you. With a wide choice.” He stubbed his cigarette out in an ash tray on the table, then reached automatically into the package in the pocket of the bathrobe for a fresh one, which he neglected to light. “I had a girl in Cornwall for three months,” he said. “The prettiest, most joyous, loving little girl a man could ever hope to see. She was married, but that made never no mind. Her husband was out in Africa somewhere since 1939 and I do believe she forgot what he looked like. We went to pubs together and she made me Sunday dinner when I got a pass and we made love like we was Adam and Eve in the Garden.”

He looked thoughtfully up at the white ceiling of the big empty room. “I became a human being in Cornwall,” he said. “Oh, yeah, the Army made a man out of little Arnold Simms from St. Louis. It was a sorrowful day in that town when the orders came to move to fight the foe.” He was silent, remembering the old town near the sea, the palm trees, the joyous, loving little girl with the forgotten husband in Africa.

Gretchen sat very still. She was embarrassed when anybody talked of making love. She wasn’t embarrassed by being a virgin, because that was a conscious choice on her part, but she was embarrassed by her shyness, her inability to take sex lightly and matter-of-factly, at least in conversation, like so many of the girls she had gone to high school with. When she was honest with herself, she recognized that a good deal of her feeling was because of her mother and father, their bedroom separated from hers by only a narrow hallway. Her father came clumping up at five in the morning, his slow footsteps heavy on the stairs, and then there would be the low sound of his voice, hoarsened by the whiskey of the long night, and her mother’s complaining twitterings and then the sounds of the assault and her mother’s tight, martyred expression in the morning.

And tonight, in the sleeping building, in the first really intimate conversation she had had alone with any of the men, she was being made a kind of witness, against her will, of an act, or the ghost and essence of an act, that she tried to reject from her consciousness. Adam and Eve in the Garden. The two bodies, one white, one black. She tried not to think about it in those terms, but she couldn’t help herself. And there was something meaningful and planned in the boy’s revelations—it was not the nostalgic, late-at-night reminiscences of a soldier home from the wars—there was a direction in the musical, flowing whispers, a target. Somehow, she knew the target was herself and she wanted to hide.

“I wrote her a letter after I was hit,” Arnold was saying, “but I never got no answer. Maybe her husband come home. And from that day, to this I never touched a woman. I got hit early on and I been in the hospital ever since. The first time I got out was last Saturday. We had an afternoon pass, Billy and me.” Billy was the other Negro in the ward. “Nothin’ much for two colored boys to do in this valley. It ain’t Cornwall, I’ll tell you that.” He laughed. “Not even any colored folk around. Imagine that, being sent to maybe the one hospital in the United States that’s in a town without any colored folk. We drank a couple of beers that we got in the market and we took the bus upriver a bit, because we heard there was a colored family up at the Landing. Turned out it was just an old man from South Carolina, living all by himself in an old house on the river, with all his family gone and forgotten. We gave him some beer and told him some lies about how brave we were in the war, and said we’d come back fishin’ on our next pass. Fishin’!”

“I’m sure,” Gretchen said, looking at her watch, “that when you get out of the hospital for good and go back home you’ll find a beautiful girl and be very happy again.” Her voice sounded prissy and false and nervous all at the same time and she was ashamed of herself, but she knew she had to get out of that room. “It’s awfully late, Arnold,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed our little talk, but now I’m afraid I …” She started to get off the table, but he held her arm in his hand, not hard, but firmly.

“It ain’t all that late, Miss Jordache,” Arnold said. “To tell you the truth, I been waiting for just such an occasion, all alone like this.”

“I have to catch a bus, Arnold. I …”

“Wilson and me, we’ve been discussing you.” Arnold didn’t let go of her arm. “And we decided on our next pass, that’s this Saturday, we would like to invite you to spend the day with us.”

“That’s very kind of you and Wilson,” Gretchen said. She had difficulty trying to keep her voice normal. “But I’m terribly busy on Saturdays.”

“We figured it wouldn’t do to be seen in the company of two black boys,” Arnold went on, his voice flat, neither menacing nor inviting, “being as how this is your town and they’re not used to seeing things like that around here, and we’re only enlisted men …”

“That really has nothing to do with …”

“You take the bus up to the Landing at twelve-thirty,” Arnold continued, as though there had been no interruption. “We’ll go earlier and give that old man five bucks to buy himself a bottle of whiskey and go to the show and we’ll fix up a nice meal for the three of us in his house. You turn left directly at the bus stop and walk on about a quarter of a mile down to the river and it’s the only house there, sitting real pretty on the bank, with nobody around to snoop or make a fuss, just the three of us, all folksy and friendly.”

“I’m going home now, Arnold,” Gretchen said loudly. She knew she would be ashamed to call out, but she tried to make him think she was ready to shout for help.

“A good meal, a couple of nice long drinks,” Arnold said, whispering, smiling, holding her. “We been away a long time, Miss Jordache.”

“I’m going to yell,” Gretchen said, finding it hard to speak. How could he do it—be so polite and friendly in one breath and then … She despised herself for her ignorance of the human race.

“We have a high opinion of you, Miss Jordache, Wilson and me. Ever since I first laid eyes on you I can’t think about anybody else. And Wilson says it’s the same with him …”

“You’re both crazy. If I tell the Colonel …” Gretchen wanted to pull her arm away, but if anybody happened to come in and saw them struggling, the explanations would be painful.

“As I said, our opinion is high,” Arnold said, “and we’re willing to pay for it. We got a lot of back pay accumulated, Wilson and me, and I been particularly lucky in the crap game in the ward. Listen careful, Miss Jordache. We got eight hundred dollars between us and you’re welcome to it. Just for one little afternoon on the river …” He took his hand off her arm and, unexpectedly, jumped down from the table, landing lightly on his good foot. He started limping out, his big body made clumsy by the floating maroon bathrobe. He turned at the door. “No need to say yes or no this minute, Miss Jordache,” he said politely. “Think on it. Saturday’s two days away. We’ll be there at the Landing, from eleven A.M. on. You just come anytime you get your chores done, Miss Jordache. We’ll be waiting on you.” He limped out of the room, standing very straight and not holding onto the walls for support.

For a moment, Gretchen sat still. The only sound she heard was the hum of a machine somewhere in the basement, a sound she didn’t remember ever having heard before. She touched her bare arm, where Arnold’s hand had held it, just below the elbow. She got off the table and turned off the lights, so that if anybody came in, they wouldn’t see what her face must look like. She leaned against the wall, her hands against her mouth, hiding it. Then she hurried to the locker room and changed into her street clothes and almost ran out of the hospital to the bus stop.

She sat at the dressing table wiping off the last of the cold cream from the delicately veined pale skin under her swollen eyes. On the table before her stood the jars and vials with the Woolworth names of beauty—Hazel Bishop, Coty. We made love like Adam and Eve in the Garden.

She mustn’t think about it, she mustn’t think about it. She would call the Colonel tomorrow and ask to be transferred to another block. She couldn’t go back there again.

She stood up and took off her bathrobe and for a moment she was naked in the soft light of the lamp over the dressing table. Reflected in the mirror, her high, full breasts were very white and the nipples stood disobediently erect. Below was the sinister, dark triangle, dangerously outlined against the pale swell of her thighs. What can I do about it, what can I do about it?

She put on her nightgown and put out the light and climbed into the cold bed. She hoped that this was not going to be one of the nights that her father picked to claim her mother. There was just so much that she could bear in one night.

The bus left every half hour on the way upriver toward Albany. On Saturday it would be full of soldiers on weekend passes. All the battalions of young men. She saw herself buying the ticket at the bus terminal, she saw herself seated at the window looking out at the distant, gray river, she saw herself getting off at the stop for the Landing, standing there alone, in front of the gas station; under her high-heeled shoes she felt the uneven surface of the gravel road, she smelled the perfume she couldn’t help but wear, she saw the dilapidated, unpainted frame house on the bank of the river, and the two dark men, glasses in their hands, waiting silently, knowing executioners, figures of fate, not rising, confident, her shameful pay in their pockets, waiting, knowing she was coming, watching her come to deliver herself in curiosity and lust, knowing what they were going to do together.

She took the pillow from beneath her head and put it between her legs and clamped it hard.

VI

The mother stands at the lace-curtained window of the bedroom staring out at the cindery back yard behind the bakery. There are two spindly trees there, with a board nailed between them, from which swings a scuffed, heavy, leather cylinder, stuffed with sand like the heavy bags prize fighters use to train on. In the dark enclosure, the bag looks like a hanged man. In other days in the back gardens on the same street, there were flowers and hammocks strung between the trees. Every afternoon, her husband puts on a pair of wool-lined gloves and goes out into the back yard and flails at the bag for twenty minutes. He goes at the bag with a wild, concentrated violence, as though he is fighting for his life. Sometimes, when she happens to see him at it, when Rudy takes over the store for her for awhile to let her rest, she has the feeling that it isn’t a dead bag of leather and sand her husband is punishing, but herself.

She stands at the window in a green sateen bathrobe, soiled at the collar and cuffs. She is smoking a cigarette and the ash drifts down unnoticed onto the robe. She used to be the neatest and most meticulous of girls, clean as a blossom in a glass vase. She was brought up in an orphanage and the Sisters knew how to inculcate strict habits of cleanliness. But she is a slattern now, loose-bodied and careless about her hair and skin and her clothes. The Sisters taught her a love of religion and affection for the ceremonies of the Church, but she has not been to Mass for almost twenty years. When her first child, her daughter, Gretchen, was born, she arranged with the Father for the christening, but her husband refused to appear at the font and forbade her then or ever again to give as much as a penny in contribution to the Church. And he a born Catholic.

Three unbaptized and unbelieving children and a blaspheming, Church-hating husband. Her burden to bear.

She had never known her father or mother. The orphanage in Buffalo had been her mother and father. She was assigned a name. Pease. It might have been her mother’s name. When she thought of herself it was always as Mary Pease, not Mary Jordache, or Mrs. Axel Jordache. The Mother Superior had told her when she left the orphanage that it might well have been that her mother was Irish, but nobody knew for sure. The Mother Superior had warned her to beware of her fallen mother’s blood in her body and to abstain from temptation. She was sixteen at the time, a rosy, frail girl with bright golden hair. When her daughter had been born she had wanted to name the baby Colleen, to memorialize her Irish descendance. But her husband didn’t like the Irish and said the girl’s name would be Gretchen. He had known a whore in Hamburg by that name, he said. It was only a year after the wedding, but he already hated her.

She had met him in the restaurant on the Buffalo lake front where she worked as a waitress. The orphanage had placed her there. The restaurant was run by an aging German-American couple named Mueller and the people at the orphanage had chosen them as employers because they were kindly and went to Mass and allowed Mary to stay with them in a spare room above their apartment. The Muellers were good to her and protected her and none of the customers dared to speak improperly to her in the restaurant. The Muellers let her off three times a week to continue her education at night school. She was not going to be a waitress in a restaurant all her life.

Axel Jordache was a huge, silent young man with a limp, who had emigrated from Germany in the early 1920s and who worked as a deckhand on the Lake. steamers. In the winter, when the Lakes were frozen over, he sometimes helped Mr. Mueller in the kitchen as a cook and baker. He hardly spoke English then and he frequented the Muellers’ restaurant so that he could have someone to talk to in his native tongue. When he had been wounded in the German army and couldn’t fight any more they had made him into a cook at the hospital in Frankfurt.

Because, during another war, a young man had come out of a hospital alienated and looking for exile, she was standing tonight in a shabby room, over a shop in a slum, where every day, twelve hours a day, she had given up her youth, her beauty, her hopes. And no end in sight.

He had been most polite. He never as much as tried to hold her hand and when he was in Buffalo between voyages he would walk her to night school and wait to accompany her home. He had asked her to correct his English. Her English was a source of pride to her. People told her they thought she came from Boston when they heard her talk and she took it as a great compliment. Sister Catherine, whom she admired above all the teachers in the orphanage, came from Boston, and spoke crisply and with great precision and had the vocabulary of an educated woman. “To speak slovenly English,” Sister Catherine had said, “is to live the life of a cripple. There are no aspirations denied a girl who speaks like a lady.” She had modeled herself on Sister Catherine and Sister Catherine had given her a book, a history of Irish heroes, when she had left the orphanage. “To Mary Pease, my most hopeful student,” was written in a bold, upright hand on the flyleaf. Mary had modeled her handwriting on Sister Catherine’s, too. Somehow, Sister Catherine’s teaching had made her believe that her father, whoever he was, must have been a gentleman.

With Mary Pease coaching him in the silvery Back Bay accents of Sister Catherine, Axel Jordache had learned how to speak proper English very quickly. Even before they were married, he spoke so well that people were surprised when he told them that he had been born in Germany. There was no denying it, he was an intelligent man. But he used his intelligence to torment her, torment himself, torment everyone around him.

He hadn’t even kissed her before he proposed to her. She was nineteen at the time, her daughter Gretchen’s age, and a virgin. He was unfailingly attentive, always cleanly bathed and shaved and he always brought her small gifts of candy and flowers when he returned from his trips.

He had known her for two years before he proposed.

He hadn’t dared to speak earlier, he said, because he was afraid she would reject him because he was a foreigner and because he limped. How he must have laughed to himself as he saw the tears come to her eyes at his modesty and his lack of confidence in himself. He was a diabolical man, weaving lifetime plots.

She said yes, conditionally. Perhaps she thought she loved him. He was a good-looking man, with that Indian head of black hair and a sober, industrious, thin face and clear, brown eyes that seemed soft and considerate when they looked at her. When he touched her it was with the utmost deceptive gentleness, as though she were made of china. When she told him she had been born out of wedlock (her phrase) he said he already knew it, from the Muellers, and that it didn’t make any difference, in fact, it was a good thing, there wouldn’t be any in-laws to disapprove of him. He himself was cut off from what remained of his family. His father had been killed on the Russian front in 1915 and his mother had remarried a year later and moved to Berlin from Cologne. There was a younger brother he had never liked, who had married a rich German-American girl who had come to Berlin after the war to visit relatives. The brother now lived in Ohio, but Axel never saw him. His loneliness was apparent and it matched her own.

Her conditions were stringent. He was to give up his job on the Lakes. She didn’t want a husband who was away most of the time and who had a job that was no better than a common laborer’s. And they were not to live in Buffalo, where everyone knew about her birth and the orphanage and where at every turn she would meet people who had seen her working as a waitress. And they were to be married in church.

He had agreed to everything. Oh, diabolical, diabolical. He had some money saved up and through Mr. Mueller he got in touch with a man who had a bakery in Port Philip whose lease was for sale. She made him buy a straw hat for the trip to Port Philip to conclude the deal. He was not to go wearing his usual cloth cap, that hangover from Europe. He was to look like a respectable American businessman.

Two weeks before the wedding, he took her to see the shop in which she was going to spend her life and the apartment above it in which she was going to conceive three children. It was a sunny day in May and the shop was freshly painted, with a large, green awning to protect the plate-glass window, with its array of cakes and cookies, from the sun. The street was a clean, bright one, with other little shops, a hardware store, a dry-goods store, a pharmacy on the corner. There was even a milliner’s shop, with hats wreathed in artificial flowers on stands in the window. It was the shopping street for a quiet residential section that lay between it and the river. Large, comfortable houses behind green lawns. There were sails on the river and a white excursion boat, up from New York, passed as they sat on a bench under a tree looking across the broad stretch of summer-blue water. They could hear the band on board playing waltzes. Of course, with his limp, they never danced.

Oh, the plans she had that sunny May waltzing rivery day. Once they were established, she would put in tables, redecorate the shop, put up curtains, set out candles, serve chocolate and tea, then, later, buy the shop next door (it was empty that first day she saw it) and start a little restaurant, not one like the Muellers’, for working men, but for traveling salesmen and the better class of people of the town. She saw her husband in a dark suit and bow tie showing diners to their table, saw waitresses in crisp muslin aprons hurrying with loaded platters out of the kitchen, saw herself seated behind the cash register, smiling as she rang up the checks, saying, “I hope you enjoyed your dinner,” sitting down with friends over coffee and cake when the day’s work was over.

How was she to know that the neighborhood was going to deteriorate, that the people she would have liked to befriend would consider her beneath them, that the people who would have liked to befriend her she would consider beneath her, that the building next door was to be torn down and a large, clanging garage put up beside the bakery, that the millinery shop was to vanish, that the houses facing the river would be turned into squalid apartments or demolished to make place for junkyards and metal-working shops?

There were never any little tables for chocolate and cakes, never any candles and curtains, never any waitresses, just herself, standing on her feet twelve hours a day summer and winter, selling coarse loaves of bread to grease-stained mechanics and slatternly housewives and filthy children whose parents fought drunkenly with each other in the street on Saturday nights.

Her torment began on her wedding night. In the second-class hotel in Niagara Falls (convenient to Buffalo). All the fragile hopes of the timid, rosy, frail young girl who had been photographed smiling in bridal white beside her unsmiling, handsome groom just eight hours before disappeared in the blood-stained, creaking Niagara bed. Speared helplessly under the huge, scarred, demonically tireless, dark, male body, she knew that she had entered upon her sentence of life imprisonment.

At the end of her week of honeymoon she wrote a suicide note. Then she tore it up. It was an act she was to repeat again and again through the years.

During the day, they were like other honeymooning couples. He was unfailingly considerate, he held her elbow when they crossed the street, he bought her trinkets and took her to the theater (the last week in which he ever showed any generosity to her. Very soon she discovered she had married a fanatical miser). He took her into ice cream parlors and ordered huge whipped cream sundaes (she had a child’s sweet tooth) and smiled indulgently at her like a favorite uncle as she spooned down the heaped confections. He took her for a ride on the river under the Falls and held her hand lovingly when they walked in the sunlight of the northern summer. They never discussed the nights. When he closed the door behind them after dinner it was as though two different and unconnected souls swooped down to inhabit their bodies. They had no vocabulary with which to discuss the grotesque combat in which they were engaged. The severe upbringing of the Sisters had left her inhibited and full of impossible illusions of gentility. Whores had educated him and perhaps he believed all women who were worthy of marriage lay still and terrified in the marriage bed. Or perhaps he thought all American women.

In the end, of course, after months had passed, he recognized that fatalistic, lifeless rejection for what it was, and it enraged him. It spurred him on, made his attacks wilder. He never went with other women. He never looked at another woman. His obsession slept in his bed. It was her misfortune that the one body he craved was hers and was at his disposal. For twenty years he besieged her, hopelessly, hating her, like the commander of a great army incredibly being held at bay before the walls of a flimsy little suburban cottage.

She wept when she discovered that she was pregnant.

When they fought it was not about this. They fought about money. She learned that she had a sharp and hurtful tongue. She became a shrew for small change. To get ten dollars for a new pair of shoes and, later on, for a decent dress for Gretchen to wear to school, took months of bitter campaigning. He begrudged her the bread she ate. She was never to know how much money he had in the bank. He saved like a lunatic squirrel for a new ice age. He had been in Germany when a whole population had been ruined and he knew it could happen in America, too. He had been shaped by defeat and understood that no continent was immune.

The paint was flaking off the walls of the shop for years before he bought five cans of whitewash and repainted. When his prosperous, garage-owning brother came from Ohio to visit him and offered him a share in a new automobile agency he was acquiring, for a few thousand dollars which he could borrow from his brother’s bank, Axel threw his brother out of the house as a thief and schemer. The brother was chubby and cheerful. He took a two-week holiday in Saratoga every summer and went to the theater in New York several times a year with his fat, garrulous wife. He was dressed in a good wool suit and smelled nicely of bay rum. If Axel had been willing to borrow money like his brother, they would have lived in comfort all their lives, could have been freed from the slavery of the bakery, escaped from the slum into which the neighborhood was sinking. But her husband would not draw a penny from the bank or put his name on a note. The paupers of his native country, with their tons of worthless money, watched with gaunt eyes over every dollar that passed through his hands.

When Gretchen graduated from high school, although, like her brother Rudolph, she was always at the head of her class, there was no question of her going to college. She had to go to work immediately and hand half her salary over to her father every Friday. College ruined women, turned them into whores. The Father has spoken. Gretchen would marry young, the mother knew, would marry the first man who asked her, to escape her father. Another life destroyed, in the endless chain.

Only with Rudolph was her husband generous. Rudolph was the hope of the family. He was handsome, well-mannered, well-spoken, admired by his teachers, affectionate. He was the only member of the family who kissed her when he left in the morning and returned in the evening. Both she and her husband saw the redemption of their separate failures in their older son. Rudolph had a talent for music and played the trumpet in the school band. At the end of the last school year Axel had bought a trumpet for him, a gleaming, golden instrument. It was the one gift to any of them that Axel had ever made. Everything else he had given to them had come as a result of ferocious bargaining. It was strange to hear the soaring, triumphant horn notes resounding through the gray, undusted apartment when Rudolph was practicing. Rudolph played club dates at dances and Axel had advanced him the money for a tuxedo, thirty-five dollars, an unheard-of outpouring. And he permitted Rudolph to hold onto the money he earned. “Save it,” he said. “You’ll be able to use it when you get to college.” It was understood from the beginning that Rudolph was going to go to college. Somehow.

She feels guilty about Rudolph. All her love is for him. She is too exhausted to love anybody but her chosen son. She touches him when she can, she goes into his room when he is sleeping and kisses his forehead, she washes and irons his clothes when she is dizzy from fatigue so that his splendor will be clear to all eyes at every moment. She cuts out items from the school newspaper when he wins a race and pastes his report cards neatly in a scrapbook that she keeps on her dresser next to her copy of Gone With the Wind.

Her younger son, Thomas, and her daughter are inhabitants of her house. Rudolph is her blood. When she looks at him she sees the image of her ghostly father.

She has no hopes for Thomas. With his blond, sly, derisive face. He is a ruffian, always brawling, always in trouble at school, insolent, mocking, going his own way, without standards, sliding in and out of the house on his own secret schedule, impervious to punishment. On some calendar, somewhere, disgrace is printed in blood red, like a dreadful holiday, for her son Thomas. There is nothing to be done about it. She does not love him and she cannot hold out a hand to him.

So, the mother, standing on swollen legs at the window, surrounded by her family in the sleeping house. Insomniac, unfastidious, overworked, ailing, shapeless, avoiding mirrors, a writer of suicide notes, graying at the age of forty-two, her bathrobe dusted with ash from her cigarette.

A train hoots far away, troops piled into the rattling coaches, on their way to distant ports, on their way to the sound of the guns. Thank God Rudolph is not yet seventeen. She would die if they took him for a soldier.

She lights a last cigarette, takes off her robe, the cigarette hanging carelessly from her lower lip, and gets into bed. She lies there smoking. She will sleep a few hours. But she knows she will wake when she hears her husband coming heavily up the steps, rank with the sweat of his night’s work and the whiskey he has drunk.

I

The gymnasium of the elementary school near the Jordache house was kept open until ten o’clock five nights a week. Tom Jordache went there two or three times a week, sometimes to play basketball, sometimes merely to shoot the breeze with the boys and young men who gathered there or to play in the mild game of craps that occasionally was held in the boys’ toilet, out of sight of the gym teacher refereeing the permanent game on the basketball court.

Tom was the only boy his age allowed in the crap game. He had gained entrance with his fists. He had found a place between two of the players in the ring and had kneeled on the floor one night and thrown a dollar into the pot and said, “You’re faded,” to Sonny Jackson, a boy of nineteen waiting to be drafted, and the guiding spirit of the group that congregated around the school. Sonny was a strong, stocky boy, pugnacious and quick to take offense. Tom had chosen Sonny purposely for his debut. Sonny had looked at Tom, annoyed, and pushed Tom’s dollar bill back along the floor toward him. “Go way, punk,” he said. “This game is for men.”

Without hesitation, Tom had leaned across the open space and backhanded Sonny, without moving from his knees. In the fight that followed, Tom made his reputation. He had cut Sonny’s eyes and lips and had finished by dragging Sonny into the showers and turning the cold water on him and keeping him there for five minutes before he turned the water off. Since then, whenever Tom joined the group in the gymnasium, they made room for him.

Tonight, there was no game in progress. A gangling twenty-year-old by the name of Pyle, who had enlisted early in the war, was displaying a samurai sword he said he had captured himself at Guadalcanal. He had been discharged from the Army after having malaria three times and nearly died. He was still alarmingly yellow.

Tom listened skeptically as Pyle described how he had thrown a hand grenade into-a cave just for luck. Pyle said he heard a yell inside and had crawled in with his lieutenant’s pistol in his hand to find a dead Jap captain, with the sword at his side. It sounded to Tom more like Errol Flynn in Hollywood than anybody from Port Philip in the South Pacific. But he didn’t say anything, because he was in a peaceful mood and you couldn’t beat up on a guy who looked that sick and yellow, anyway.

“Two weeks later,” Pyle said, “I cut off a Jap’s head with this sword.”

Tom felt a tug at his sleeve. It was Claude, dressed in a suit and tie, as usual, and bubbling a little at the lips. “Listen,” Claude whispered, “I got something to tell you. Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “I want to hear this.”

“The island was secured,” Pyle was saying, “but there were still Japs hiding out, coming out at night, and shooting up the area and knocking off guys. The C.O. got pissed off and he sent out patrols three times a day. He told us to clean every last one of the bastards out of the area.

“Well, I’m on one of those patrols and we see one of ’em trying to wade across a creek so we let him have it. He was hit but not bad and he’s sitting up, holding his hands over his head, saying something in Jap. There wasn’t no officers on the patrol, just a corporal and six other guys, and I says, ‘Hey, listen, you guys, just hold him here and I’ll go back to get my samurai sword and we’ll have a regular execution.’ The corporal was a little chicken about it, the orders were to bring in prisoners, but like I said, there were no officers present and after all, that’s what the bastards did all the time to our guys, cut off their heads, and we took a vote and they tied the fucker up and I went back and got my samurai sword. We made him kneel down in the regular way and he did it just like he was used to it. It was my sword so I got to do the job. I picked it up way over my head and clunk! there was his head rolling on the ground like a coconut, with his eyes wide open. The blood spurted out, it must have been close to ten feet. I tell you,” Pyle said, touching the edge of the weapon lovingly, “these swords are something.”

“Horseshit,” Claude said loudly.

“What’s that?” Pyle asked, blinking. “What’d you say?”

“I said horseshit,” Claude repeated. “You never cut off no Jap’s head. I bet you bought that sword in a souvenir shop in Honolulu. My brother Al knows you and he told me you haven’t got the guts to kill a rabbit.”

“Listen, kid,” Pyle said, “sick as I am, I’ll give you the beating of your life, if you don’t shut up and get out of here. Nobody says horseshit to me.”

“I’m waiting,” Claude said. He took off his glasses and put them in the breast pocket of his suit. He looked pathetically defenseless.

Tom sighed. He stepped in front of Claude. “Anybody wants to pick on my friend,” he said, “he has to go through me first.”

“I don’t mind,” Pyle began, handing the sword to one of the other boys. “You’re young, but you’re fresh.”

“Knock it off, Pyle,” said the boy who now was holding the sword. “He’ll murder you.”

Pyle looked uncertainly at the circling faces. There was something sobering that he saw there. “I didn’t come back from fighting in the Pacific,” he said loudly, “to get into arguments with little kids in my home town. Give me my sword, I’m due back at the house.”

He beat a retreat. The others drifted off without a word, leaving Tom and Claude in possession of the boys’ toilet.

“What’d you want to do that for?” Tom asked, irritated. “He didn’t mean no harm. And you know they wouldn’t let him take me on.”

“I just wanted to see the expression on their faces,” Claude said, sweating and grinning. “That’s all. Power. Raw power.”

“You’re going to get me killed one day with your raw power,” Tom said. “Now what the hell did you have to tell me?”

“I saw your sister,” Claude said.

“Hooray for you, you saw my sister. I see her every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

“I saw her in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. I was riding around on the bike and I went around the block again to make sure and she was getting into a big convertible Buick and a guy was holding the door open for her. She was waiting for him in front of Bernstein’s, that’s for sure.”

“So, big deal,” Tom said. “She got a ride in a Buick.”

“You want to know who was driving the Buick?” Behind his glasses, Claude’s eyes were joyous with information. “You’ll drop dead.”

“I won’t drop dead. Who?”

“Mr. Theodore Boylan, Esquire,” Claude said. “That’s who. How do you like that for moving up in class?”

“What time you see them?”

“An hour ago. I’ve been looking for you all over.”

“He probably drove her to the hospital. She works in the hospital on week nights.”

“She isn’t in any hospital tonight, Buddy,” Claude said. “I followed them part of the way on the bike. They took the road up the hill. Toward his place. You want to find your sister tonight, I advise you to look in on the Boylan estate.”

Tom hesitated. It would have been different if Gretchen was with one of the fellows around her own age, off in a car to the lover’s lane down near the river for a little simple necking. Tease her a little later on. Hideous boy. Get a little of his own back. But with an old man like Boylan, a big shot in the town … He would rather not have to get mixed up in it. You never knew where something like that could lead you.

“I’ll tell you something,” Claude said, “if it was my sister, I’d look into it. That Boylan has quite a reputation around town. You don’t know some of the things I hear around the house when my father and uncle are talking and they don’t know I’m listening. Your sister may be asking for a big load of trouble …”

“You got the bike outside?”

“Yeah. But we need some gas.” The motorcycle belonged to Claude’s brother Al, who had just been drafted two weeks before. Al had promised to break every bone in Claude’s body if he came back and found that Claude had used the machine, but whenever his parents went out at night, Claude pushed it out of the garage, after siphoning off a little gas from the family’s second car, and raced around town for an hour or so, avoiding the police, because he was too young to have a license.

“Okay,” Tom said. “Let’s see what’s happening up the hill.”

Claude had a length of rubber tubing slung on the motorcycle and they went behind the school, where it was dark, and opened the gas tank of a Chevy that was parked there and Claude put the tube in and sucked hard, then, as the gasoline came up, filled the tank of the motorcycle.

Tom got on behind and with Claude driving they spurted through back streets toward the outskirts of town and began to climb the long winding road that went up the hill to the Boylan estate.

When they got to the main gate, made of huge wrought-iron wings standing open and set into a stone wall that seemed to run for miles on each side, they parked the motorcycle behind some bushes. The rest of the way they’d have to go on foot, so as not to be heard. There was a gatekeeper’s cottage, but since the war nobody had lived in it. The boys knew the estate well. For years, they had been jumping over the wall and hunting for birds and rabbits with BB guns. The estate had been neglected for years and it was more like a jungle than the meadowed park it had been originally.

They walked through the woods toward the main house. When they got near it, they saw the Buick parked in front. There were no lights on outside, but there was a gleam from a big French window downstairs.

They moved cautiously toward the flower bed in front of the window. The window came down almost to the ground. One side of it was ajar. The curtains had been drawn carelessly and with Claude kneeling in the loam and Tom standing astride him, they both could look inside at the same time.

As far as they could see, the room was empty. It was big and square, with a grand piano; a long couch, and big easy chairs and tables with magazines on them. A fire was going in the fireplace. There were a lot of books on the shelves along the walls. A few lamps did for the lighting. The double doors facing the window were open and Tom could see a hallway and the lower steps of a staircase.

“That’s the way to live,” Claude whispered. “If I had a joint like this, I’d have every broad in town.”

“Shut up,” Tom said. “Well, there’s nothing doing here. Let’s move.”

“Come on, Tom,” Claude protested. “Take it easy. We just got here.”

“This isn’t my idea of a big night,” Tom said. “Just standing out in the cold looking at a room with nobody in it.”

“Give it a chance to develop, for Christ’s sake,” Claude said. “They’re probably upstairs. They can’t stay there all night.”

Tom knew that he didn’t want to see anybody come into that room. Anybody. He wanted to get away from that house. And stay away. But he didn’t want to look as though he was chickening out. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give it a couple of minutes.” He turned away from the window, leaving Claude on his knees peering in. “Call me if anything happens,” he said.

The night was very still. The mist rising from the wet ground was getting heavier and there were no stars. In the distance, below them, there was the faint glow of the lights of Port Philip. The Boylan grounds swept away from the house in all directions, a myriad of great old trees, the outline of the fence of a tennis court, some low buildings about fifty yards away that had once been used as stables. One man living in all that. Tom thought of the bed he shared with his brother. Well, Boylan was sharing a bed tonight, too. Tom spat.

“Hey!” Claude beckoned to him excitedly. “Come here, come here.”

Slowly, Tom went back to the window.

“He just come in, down the stairs,” Claude whispered. “Look at that. Just look at that, will you.”

Tom looked in. Boylan had his back to the window, on the far side of the room. He was at a table with bottles, glasses and a silver ice container on it. He was pouring whiskey into two glasses. He was naked.

“What a way to walk around a house,” Claude said.

“Shut up,” Tom said. He watched as Boylan carelessly dropped some ice into the glasses and splashed soda from a siphon into the glasses. Boylan didn’t pick up the glasses right away. He went over to the fireplace and threw another log on the fire, then went to a table near the window and opened a lacquered box and took out a cigarette. He lit it with a foot-long silver cigarette lighter. He was smiling a little.

Standing there, so close to the window, he was clearly outlined in the light of a lamp. Mussed, bright blond hair, skinny neck, pigeony chest, flabby arms, knobby knees, and slightly bowed legs. His dick hung down from the bush of hair, long, thick, reddened. A dumb rage, a sense of being violated, of being a witness to an unspeakable obscenity, seized Tom. If he had had a gun he would have killed the man. That puny stick, that strutting, smiling, satisfied weakling, that feeble, pale, hairy slug of a body so confidently displayed, that long, fat, rosy instrument. It was worse, infinitely worse, than if he and Claude had seen his sister come in naked.

Boylan walked across the thick carpet, the smoke from his cigarette trailing over his shoulder, out into the hall. He called up the stairs. “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?” He listened. Tom couldn’t hear the answer. Boylan nodded and came back into the room and picked up the two glasses. Then, carrying the whiskey, he went out of the room and up the stairs.

“Jesus, what a sight,” Claude said. “He’s built like a chicken. I guess if you’re rich you can be built like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the broads still come running.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said thickly.

“What the hell for?” Claude looked up at him in surprise, the light that came through the parted curtains reflecting damply on his eyeglasses. “The action is just beginning.”

Tom reached down and grabbed Claude by the hair and jerked him savagely to his feet.

“Hey, for Christ’s sake, watch what you’re doing,” Claude said.

“I said let’s get out of here.” Tom held Claude roughly by his necktie. “And you keep quiet about what you saw tonight.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Claude whined. “What the hell did I see! A skinny crock with a dick on him like an old rubber hose. What’s there to keep quiet about?”

“Just keep quiet, that’s all,” Tom said, his face close to Claude’s. “If I ever hear a word from anyone, you’ll get a beating you’ll never forget. Got it?”

“Jesus, Tom,” Claude said reproachfully, rubbing his sore scalp, “I’m your friend.”

“Got it?” Tom said fiercely.

“Sure, sure. Anything you say. I don’t know what there’s to get so excited about.”

Tom let him go and wheeled and strode across the lawn away from the house. Claude followed him, grumbling. “Guys tell me you’re crazy,” he said, as he caught up to Tom, “and I always tell them they’re nuts, but now I’m beginning to see what they mean, I swear to God I do. Boy, are you temperamental.”

Tom didn’t answer. He was almost running as they neared the gate house. Claude wheeled out the bike and Tom swung on behind him. They drove into town without talking to each other.

II

Replete and drowsy, Gretchen lay in the wide soft bed, her hands behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling reflected the fire that Boylan had lit before he had undressed her. The arrangements for seduction were planned meticulously and smoothly practiced up here on the hill. The house was hushed and luxurious, the servants were never in evidence, the telephone never rang, there was never any fumbling or hurrying. Nothing clumsy or unforeseen was allowed to intrude on their evening ritual.

Downstairs, a clock chimed softly. Ten o’clock. It was the hour the common room in the hospital emptied and the wounded men made their way, on crutches and in wheelchairs, back to the wards. These days Gretchen only went to the hospital two or three times a week. Her life was centered, with a single urgency, on the bed in which she lay. The days were passed in expectation of it, the nights away from it in its memory. She would make restitution to the wounded some other time.

Even when she had opened the envelope and seen the eight one-hundred-dollar bills, she had known she would return to this bed. If it was one of Boylan’s peculiarities that he had to humiliate her, she accepted it. She would make the man pay for it later.

Neither Boylan nor she had ever spoken of the envelope on her desk. On Tuesday, as she was coming out of the office after work, the Buick was there, with Boylan at the wheel. He had opened the car door without a word and she had gotten in and he had driven to his house. They had made love and after that gone to The Farmer’s Inn for dinner and after that had driven home and made love again. When he took her into town, toward midnight, he had dropped her off two blocks from her home and she had walked the rest of the way.

Teddy did everything perfectly. He was discreet—secrecy was to his taste; it was a necessity for her. Nobody knew anything about them. Knowledgeable, he had taken her to a doctor in New York to be fitted for a diaphragm, so that she didn’t have to worry about that. He had bought her the red dress, as promised, on the same trip to New York. The red dress hung in Teddy’s wardrobe. There would come a time when she would wear it.

Teddy did everything perfectly, but she had little affection for him and certainly didn’t love him. His body was flimsy and unprepossessing; only when he was dressed in his elegant clothes could he be considered in any way attractive. He was a man without enthusiasms, self-indulgent and cynical, a confessed failure, friendless and shunted off by a mighty family to a crumbling shipwreck of a Victorian castle in which most of the rooms were permanently closed off. An empty man in a half-empty house. It was easy to understand why the beautiful woman whose photograph still stood on the piano downstairs had divorced him and run away with another man.

He was not a lovable or admirable man, but he had other uses. Having renounced the ordinary activities of the men of his class, work, war, games, friendship, he dedicated himself to one thing: he copulated with all his hoarded force and cunning. He demanded nothing of her except to be there, the material of his craft. His triumph was in his own performance. The battles he had declined elsewhere, he won in the face below his on the pillow. The fanfares of victory were her sighs of pleasure. For her part, Gretchen was not concerned with Boylan’s profits and losses. She lay passively under him, not even putting her arms around the unimportant body, accepting, accepting. He was anonymous, nobody, the male principle, an abstract, unconnected priapus, for which she had been waiting, unknowing, all her life. He was a servant to her pleasures, holding a door open to a palace of marvels.

She was not even grateful.

The eight hundred dollars lay folded into the leaves of her copy of the works of Shakespeare, between Acts II and III of As You Like It.

A clock chimed somewhere and his voice floated into the room from downstairs. “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”

“Up here,” she called. Her voice was lower, huskier. She was conscious of new, subtler tonalities in it; if her mother’s ear for such things had not been deafened by her own disaster, she would have known with one sentence that her daughter was sunnily sailing that dangerous sea in which she herself had foundered and drowned.

Boylan came into the room, naked in the firelight, bearing the two glasses. Gretchen propped herself up and took the glass from his hand. He sat on the edge of the bed, flicking ashes from his cigarette into the ash tray on the bed table.

They drank. She was developing a liking for Scotch. He leaned over and kissed her breast. “I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it,” he said. He kissed the other breast. She took another sip from her glass.

“I don’t have you,” he said. “I don’t have you. There’s only one time when I can make myself believe I have you—when I’m in you and you’re coming. All the rest of the time, even when you’re lying right beside me naked and I have my hand on you, you’ve escaped. Do I have you?”

“No,” she said.

“Christ,” he said. “Nineteen years old. What are you going to be like at thirty?”

She smiled. He would be forgotten by that year. Perhaps before. Much before.

“What were you thinking about up here while I was down getting the drinks?” he asked.

“Fornication,” she-said.

“Do you have to talk like that?” His own language was strangely prissy, some hangover fear of a domineering nanny quick with the kitchen soap to wash out the mouths of little boys who used naughty words.

“I never talked like that until I met you.” She took a satisfying gulp of whiskey.

“I don’t talk like that,” he said.

“You’re a hypocrite,” she said. “What I can do, I can name.”

“You don’t do so damn much,” he said, stung.

“I’m a poor little, inexperienced, small-town girl,” she said. “If the nice man in the Buick hadn’t come along that day and got me drunk and taken advantage, I probably would have lived and died a withered, dried-up old maid.”

“I bet,” he said. “You’d have been down there with those two niggers.”

She smiled ambiguously. “We’ll never know, now, will we?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “You could stand some education,” he said. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, as though he had come to a decision. “Excuse me.” He stood up. “I have to make a telephone call.” He put on a robe this time and went downstairs.

Gretchen sat, propped against the pillows, slowly finishing her drink. She had paid him off. For the moment earlier in the evening when she had delivered herself so absolutely to him. She would pay him off every time.

He came back into the room. “Get dressed,” he said. She was surprised. Usually they stayed until midnight. But she said nothing. She got out of bed and put on her clothes. “Are we going somewhere?” she asked. “How should I look?”

“Look anyway you want,” he said. Dressed, he was important and privileged again, a man to whom other men deferred. She felt diminished in her clothes. He criticized the things she wore, not harshly, but knowingly, sure of himself. If she weren’t afraid of her mother’s questions, she would have taken the eight hundred dollars out from between Acts II and III of As You Like It and bought herself a new wardrobe.

They went through the silent house and into the car and drove off. She asked no more questions. They drove through Port Philip and sped on down south. They didn’t speak. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking where they were going. There was a scorecard in her head in which she kept track of the points they gained against each other.

They went all the way to New York. Even if they turned back promptly, she wouldn’t get home much before dawn. There probably would be hysterics from her mother. But she didn’t remonstrate. She refused to show him that she allowed herself to be worried by things like that.

They stopped in front of a darkened four-story house on a street lined with similar houses on both sides of it. Gretchen had only come down to New York a few times in her life, twice with Boylan in the last three weeks, and she had no idea of what neighborhood they were in. Boylan came over to her side of the car, as usual, and opened the door for her. They went down three steps into a little cement courtyard behind an iron fence and Boylan rang a doorbell. There was a long wait. She had the feeling that they were being inspected. The door opened. A big woman in a white evening gown stood there, her dyed red hair piled heavily on her head. “Good evening, honey,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. She closed the door behind them. The lights in the entrance hall were low and the house was hushed, as thought it was heavily carpeted throughout and its walls hung with muffling cloth. There was a sense of people moving about it softly and carefully.

“Good evening, Nellie,” Boylan said.

“I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age,” the woman said, as she led them up a flight of steps and into a small pinkly lit living room on the first floor.

“I’ve been busy,” Boylan said.

“So I see,” the woman said, looking at Gretchen, appraising, then admiring. “How old are you, darling?”

“A hundred and eight,” Boylan said.

He and the woman laughed. Gretchen stood soberly in the small, draped room hung with oil paintings of nudes. She was determined to show nothing, respond to nothing. She was frightened, but tried not to feel it or show it. In numbness there was safety. She noticed that all the lamps in the room were tasseled. The woman’s white dress had fringes at the bosom and at the hem of the skirt. Was there a connection there? Gretchen made herself speculate on these matters to keep from turning and fleeing from the hushed house with its malevolent sense of a hidden population moving stealthily between rooms on the floors above her head. She had no notion of what would be expected of her, what she might see, what would be done with her. Boylan looked debonair, at ease.

“Everything is just about ready, I think, honey,” the woman said. “Just a few more minutes. Would you like something to drink, while waiting?”

“Pet?” Boylan turned toward Gretchen.

“Whatever you say.” She spoke with difficulty.

“I think a glass of champagne might be in order,” Boylan said.

“I’ll send a bottle up to you,” the woman said. “It’s cold. I have it on ice. Just follow me.” She led the way out into the hall and Gretchen and Boylan climbed the carpeted stairs behind her up to a dim hallway on the second floor. The stiff rustling of the woman’s dress sounded alarmingly loud as she walked. Boylan was carrying his coat. Gretchen hadn’t taken off her coat.

The woman opened a door off the hallway and switched on a small lamp. They went into the room. There was a large bed with a silk canopy over it, an oversized maroon velvet easy chair, and three small gilt chairs. A large bouquet of tulips made a brilliant splash of yellow on a table in the center of the room. The curtains were drawn and the sound of a car passing on the street below was muffled. A wide mirror covered one wall. It was like a room in a slightly old-fashioned, once-luxurious hotel, now just a little bit déclassé.

“The maid will bring you your wine in a minute,” the woman said. She rustled out, closing the door softly but firmly behind her.

“Good old Nellie,” Boylan said, throwing his coat down on an upholstered bench near the door. “Always dependable. She’s famous.” He didn’t say what she was famous for. “Don’t you want to take your coat off, pet?”

“Am I supposed to?”

Boylan shrugged. “You’re not supposed to do anything.”

Gretchen kept her coat on, although it was warm in the room. She went over and sat on the edge of the bed and waited. Boylan lit a cigarette and sat comfortably in the easy chair, crossing his legs. He looked over at her, smiling slightly, amused. “This is a brothel,” he said matter-of-factly. “In case you haven’t guessed. Have you ever been in one before, pet?”

She knew he was teasing her. She didn’t answer. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

“No, I suppose not,” he said. “Every lady should visit one. At least once. See what the competition is doing.”

There was a low knock on the door. Boylan went over to it and opened it. A frail middle-aged maid in a white apron over a short, black dress came in carrying a silver tray. On the tray there was a bucket of ice with a champagne bottle sticking out of it. There were two champagne glasses on the tray. The maid set the tray down on the table next to the tulips without speaking. There was no expression on her face. Her function was to appear not to be present. She began to pry open the cork. She was wearing felt slippers, Gretchen noticed.

She struggled with the cork, her face becoming flushed with the effort, and a strand of graying hair fell over her eyes. It made her look like the aging, slow-moving women with varicose veins, to be seen at early Mass, before the working day begins.

“Here,” Boylan said, “I’ll do that.” He took the bottle from her hands.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the maid said. She had betrayed her function. She was there, made noticeable by her failure.

Boylan couldn’t get the bottle open, either. He pulled, he pushed at the cork with his thumbs, holding the bottle between his legs. He, too, began to get red in the face, as the maid watched him apologetically. Boylan’s hands were slender and soft, useful only for gentler work.

Gretchen stood up and took the bottle. “I’ll do it,” she said.

“Do you open many bottles of champagne at the brick works?” Boylan asked.

Gretchen paid no attention to him. She grasped the cork firmly. Her hands were quick and strong. She twisted the cork. It popped and flew out of her hands and hit the ceiling. The champagne bubbled out and soaked her hands. She handed the bottle to Boylan. One more mark on the scorecard. He laughed. “The working classes have their uses,” he said. He poured the champagne as the maid gave Gretchen a towel to dry her hands. The maid left in her felt slippers. Soft, mouselike traffic in the hallways.

Boylan gave Gretchen the glass of champagne. “The shipments are now steady from France, although they tell me the Germans made important inroads,” he said. “Last year, I understand, was a mediocre one for the vintage.” He was plainly angered by his fiasco with the bottle and Gretchen’s success.

They sipped the champagne. There was a diagonal red line on the label. Boylan made an approving face. “One can always be assured of the best in Nellie’s place,” he said. “She would be hurt if she knew that I called her establishment a brothel. I think she thinks of it as a kind of salon where she can exercise her limitless sense of hospitality for the benefit of her many gentlemen friends. Don’t think all whore houses are like this, pet. You’ll only be in for a disappointment.” He was still smarting from the tussle over the bottle and he was getting his own back. “Nellie’s is one of the last hangovers from a more gracious era, before the Century of the Common Man and Common Sex engulfed us all. If you develop a taste for bordellos ask me for the proper addresses, pet. You might find yourself in terribly sordid places otherwise, and we wouldn’t want that, would we? Do you like the champagne?”

“It’s all right,” Gretchen said. She seated herself once more on the bed, holding herself together rigidly.

Without warning, the mirror lit up. Somebody had turned on a switch in the next room. The mirror was revealed as a one-way window through which Boylan and Gretchen could see what was going on next door to them. The light in the next room came from a lamp hanging from the ceiling, its brightness subdued by a thick silk shade.

Boylan glanced at the mirror. “Ah,” he said, “the orchestra is tuning up.” He took the bottle of champagne from the bucket and came over and sat down on the bed beside Gretchen. He set the bottle on the floor next to him.

Through the mirror, they could see a tall young woman with long blonde hair. Her face was pretty enough, with the pouting, greedy, starlet expression of a spoiled child. But when she threw off the pink, frilly negligee she was wearing, she revealed a magnificent body with long, superb legs. She never even glanced toward the mirror, although the routine must have been familiar to her, and she knew she was being watched. She threw back the covers on the bed and let herself fall back on it, all her movements harmonious and unaffected. She lay there, waiting, content to let hours go past, days, lazily allowing herself to be admired. Everything passed in utter silence. No sound came through the mirror.

“Some more champagne, pet?” Boylan asked. He lifted the bottle.

“No, thank you.” Gretchen found it difficult to speak.

The door opened and a young Negro came into the other room.

Oh, the bastard, Gretchen thought, oh the sick, revengeful bastard. But she didn’t move.

The young Negro said something to the girl on the bed. She waved a little in greeting and smiled a baby-beauty-contest-winner’s smile. Everything happened on the other side of the mirror in pantomime and gave an air of remoteness, of unreality, to the two figures in the other room. It was falsely reassuring, as though nothing serious could happen there.

The Negro was dressed in a navy-blue suit and white shirt and a dotted red bow-tie. He had on sharply pointed light-brown shoes. He had a nice, young, smiling “Yes, suh” kind of face.

“Nellie has a lot of connections in night clubs up in Harlem,” Boylan said as the Negro began to undress, hanging his jacket neatly on the back of a chair. “He’s probably a trumpet player or something in one of the bands, not unwilling to make an extra buck of an evening, entertaining the white folk. A buck for a buck.” He chuckled briefly at his own mot. “You sure you don’t want some more to drink?”

Gretchen didn’t answer. The Negro started to unbutton his pants. She closed her eyes.

When she opened her eyes the man was naked. His body was the color of bronze, with gleaming skin, wide, sloping muscular shoulders, a tapering waist, like an athlete at the height of training. The comparison with the man beside her made her rage.

The Negro moved across the room. The girl opened her arms to receive him. Lightly as a cat, he dropped down onto the long white body. They kissed, and her hands clutched at his back. Then he rolled over and she began to kiss him, first on the throat, then his nipples, slowly and expertly, while her hand caressed his mounting penis. The blonde hair tangled over the coffee-colored gleaming skin, went down lower as the girl licked the tight skin over the flat muscles of the man’s belly and he tautened convulsively.

Gretchen watched, fascinated. She found it beautiful and fitting, a promise to herself that she could not formulate in words. But she could not watch it with Boylan at her side. It was too unjust, filthily unjust, that these two magnificent bodies could be bought by the hour, like animals in a stable, for the pleasure or perversity or vengeance of a man like Boylan.

She stood up, her back to the mirror. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” she said.

“It’s just beginning, pet,” Boylan said mildly. “Look what she’s doing now. After all, this is really for your instruction. You’ll be very popular with the …”

“I’ll see you in the car,” she said, and ran out of the room and down the stairs.

The woman in the white dress was standing near the hall doorway. She said nothing, although she smiled sardonically as she opened the door for Gretchen.

Gretchen went and sat in the car. Boylan came out fifteen minutes later, walking unhurriedly. He got into the car and started the motor. “It’s a pity you didn’t stay,” he said. “They earned their hundred dollars.”

They drove all the way back without a word. It was nearly light when he stopped the car in front of the bakery. “Well,” he said after the hours of silence, “did you learn anything tonight?”

“Yes,” she said. “I must find a younger man. Good night.”

She heard the car turn around as she unlocked the door. As she climbed the stairs, she saw the light streaming from the open door of her parents’ bedroom, across from hers. Her mother was sitting upright on a wooden chair, staring out at the hallway. Gretchen stopped and looked at her mother. Her mother’s eyes were those of a madwoman. It could not be helped. Mother and daughter stared at each other.

“Go to bed,” the mother said. “I’ll call the Works at nine o’clock to say you’re sick, you won’t be in today.”

She went into her room and closed the door. She didn’t lock it because there were no locks on any of the doors in the house. She took down her copy of Shakespeare. The eight one-hundred-dollar bills were no longer between Acts II and III of As You Like It. Still neatly folded in the envelope, they were in the middle of Act V of Macbeth.

I

There were no lights on in the Boylan house. Everybody was downtown celebrating. Thomas and Claude could see the rockets and roman candles that arched into the night sky over the river and could hear the booming of the little cannon that was used at the high-school football games when the home team scored a touchdown. It was a clear, warm night and from the vantage point on the hill, Port Philip shimmered brightly, with every light in town turned on.

The Germans had surrendered that morning.

Thomas and Claude had wandered around town with the crowds, watching girls kissing soldiers and sailors in the streets and people bringing out bottles of whiskey. Throughout the day Thomas grew more and more disgusted. Men who had dodged the draft for four years, clerks in uniform who had never been more than a hundred miles away from home, merchants who had made fortunes off the black market, all kissing and yelling and getting drunk as though they, personally, had killed Hitler.

“Slobs,” he had said to Claude, as he watched the celebrants. “I’d like to show ’em.”

“Yeah,” Claude said. “We ought to have a little celebration of our own. Our own private fireworks.” He had been thoughtful after that, not saying anything, as he watched his elders cavorting. He took off his glasses and chewed on an earpiece, a habit of his when he was preparing a coup. Thomas recognized the signs, but braced himself against anything rash. This was no time for picking on soldiers and any kind of fight, even with a civilian, would be a wrong move today.

Finally, Claude had come up with his VE Day plan and Thomas conceded that it was worthy of the occasion.

So there they were on the Boylan hill, with Thomas carrying the can of gasoline and Claude the bag of nails and the hammer and the bundle of rags, making their way cautiously through the underbrush toward a dilapidated greenhouse standing on a bare knoll about five hundred yards from the main house. They had not come the usual way, but had approached the estate on a small dirt road that was on the inland side, away from Port Philip, and led to the rear of the house. They had broken in through a gardener’s gate and left the bike hidden near an abandoned gravel pit outside the estate walls.

They reached the greenhouse on the knoll. Its glass panes were dusty and broken and a musty odor of rotten vegetation came from it. There were some long, dry planks along one side of the sagging structure, and a rusty shovel that they had noticed on other occasions when they had prowled the grounds. When Thomas began to dig, Claude selected two big planks and began to hammer them into a cross. They had perfected their plans during the day and there was no need for words.

When the cross was finished, Claude soaked the boards with gasoline. Then they both lifted it and jammed it into the hole that Thomas had dug. He put dirt around the base of the cross, and stamped it down hard with his feet and the back of the shovel, to keep everything firm. Claude soaked the rags he had been carrying with the rest of the gasoline. Everything was ready. The boom of the cannon floated up the hill from the high-school lawn and rockets glared briefly far off in the night sky.

Thomas was calm and deliberate in his movements. As far as he was concerned it wasn’t anything very important that they were doing. Once more, in his own way, he was thumbing his nose at all those grown-up phoneys down there. With the extra pleasure of doing it on that naked prick Boylan’s property. Give them all something to think about, between kisses and the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But Claude was all worked up. He was gasping, as though he couldn’t get any air in his lungs, and he was bubbling, almost drooling at the mouth, and he had to keep wiping his glasses off with his handkerchief because they kept clouding up. It was an act of huge significance for Claude, with an uncle who was a priest, and a father who made him go to Mass every Sunday and who lectured him daily on Mortal Sin, keeping away from loose Protestant women, and remaining pure in the eyes of Jesus.

“Okay,” Thomas said softly, stepping back.

Claude’s hands trembled as he struck a match and bent over and touched it to the gasoline-soaked rags at the base of the cross. Then he screamed and began to run, as the rags flared up. His arm was on fire and he ran blindly across the clearing, screaming. Thomas ran after him, yelling to him to stop, but Claude just kept running, crazily. Thomas caught up with him and tackled him, then rolled on Claude’s arm, using his chest, which was protected by his sweater, to smother the flames.

It was over in a moment. Claude lay on his back, moaning, holding his burnt arm, and whimpering, unable to say anything.

Thomas stood up and looked down at his friend. Every drop of sweat on Claude’s face could be clearly made out, in the light of the flaming cross. They had to get out of there fast. People were bound to arrive at any minute. “Get up,” Thomas said. But Claude didn’t move. He rolled a little from side to side, with his eyes staring, but that was all.

“Get up, you stupid son of a bitch.” Thomas shook Claude’s shoulder. Claude looked up at him, his face rigid with fear, dumb. Thomas bent over and picked Claude up and threw him over his shoulder and began to run down off the crown of the hill in the direction of the gardener’s gate, crashing through underbrush, trying not to listen to Claude saying, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, sweet Mother Mary.”

There was a smell Thomas recognized, as he stumbled down the hill under the weight of his friend. It was the smell of broiling meat.

The cannon was still booming down in the town.

II

Axel Jordache rowed slowly out toward the center of the river, feeling the pull of the current. He wasn’t rowing for exercise tonight. He was out on the river to get away from the human race. He had decided to take the night off, the first weekday night he had not worked since 1924. Let his customers eat factory bread tomorrow. After all, the German army only lost once every twenty-seven years.

It was cool on the river, but he was warm enough, in his heavy blue turtle-neck sweater, from his deckhand days on the Lakes. And he had a bottle with him to take the nip out of the air and to drink to the health of the idiots who had once more led Germany to ruin. Jordache was a patriot of no country, but he reserved his hatred for the land in which he was born. It had given him a life-long limp, had cut short his education, had exiled him, and had armed him with an utter contempt for all policies and all politicians, all generals, priests, ministers, presidents, kings, dictators, all conquests and all defeats, all candidates and all parties. He was pleased that Germany had lost the war, but he was not happy that America had won it. He hoped he’d be around twenty-seven years from now, when Germany would lose another war.

He thought of his father, a little, God-fearing, tyrannical man, a clerk in a factory office, who had gone marching off, singing, with a posy of flowers in his rifle barrel, a happy, militant sheep, to be killed at Tannenburg, proud to leave two sons who soon would be fighting for the Vaterland, too, and a wife who had remained a widow less than a year. Then at least she had had the wisdom to marry a lawyer who spent the war managing tenements behind the Alexander Platz in Berlin.

“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles,” Jordache sang mockingly, resting on his oars, letting the waters of the Hudson carry him south, as he lifted the bottle of bourbon to his lips. He toasted the youthful loathing with which he had regarded Germany when he had been demobilized, a cripple among cripples, and which had driven him across the ocean. America was a joke, too, but at least he was alive tonight as were his sons, and the house in which he lived was still standing.

The noise of the little cannon carried across the water and the reflections from the rockets twinkled in the river. Fools, Jordache thought, what’re they celebrating about? They never had it so good in their whole lives. They’d all be selling apples on street corners in five years, they’d be tearing each other to pieces on the lines outside factories waiting for jobs. If they had the brains they were born with they’d all be in the churches tonight praying that the Japanese would hold out for ten years.

Then he saw the fire flare up suddenly on the hill outside the town, a small, clear spurt of flame which quickly defined itself as a cross, burning on the rim of the horizon. He laughed. Business as usual and screw victory. Down with the Catholics, the Niggers, and the Jews, and don’t forget it. Dance tonight and burn tomorrow. America is America. We’re here and we’re telling you what the score really is.

Jordache took another drink, enjoying the spectacle of the flaming cross dominating the town, savoring in advance the mealy-mouthed lamentations that would appear tomorrow in the town’s two newspapers on the subject of the affront to the memory of the brave men of all races and creeds who had died defending the ideals on which America was founded. And the sermons on Sunday! It would almost be worthwhile to go to a church or two to listen to what the holy bastards would say.

If I ever find out who put up that cross, Jordache thought, I’m going to shake their hands.

As he watched, he saw the fire spread. There must have been a building right near the cross, down wind from it. It must have been good and dry, because in no time at all the whole sky was lit up.

In a little while, he heard the bells of the fire engines racing through the streets of the town and up the hill.

Not a bad night, Jordache thought, all things considered.

He took a last drink and then started to row leisurely toward the river bank.

III

Rudolph stood on the steps of the high school and waited for the boys at the cannon to shoot it off. There were hundreds of boys and girls milling around on the lawn, shouting, singing, kissing. Except for the kissing, it was very much like the Saturday nights after the team had won a big football game.

The cannon went off. A huge cheer went up.

Then Rudolph put his trumpet to his lips and began to play, “America.” First the crowd fell silent and the slow music rang out all alone, note by solemn note over their heads. Then they began to sing and in a moment all the voices joined in: “America, America, God shed His grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood, From sea to shining sea …”

There was a big cheer after the song was over and he began to play the “Stars and Stripes Forever.” He couldn’t stand still while playing the “Stars and Stripes Forever,” so he began to march around the lawn. People fell in behind him and soon he was leading a parade of boys and girls, first around the lawn and then into the street, marching to the rhythm of his horn. The boys serving the cannon trundled it along at the head of the procession just behind him and at every intersection they stopped and fired it and the boys and girls cheered and grownups along the route applauded and waved flags at them.

Striding at the head of his army, Rudolph played “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along,” and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” and the high-school hymn, and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” as the parade wound its jubilant way through the streets of the town. He led them down toward Vanderhoff Street and stopped in front of the bakery and played, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” for his mother’s sake. His mother opened the window upstairs and waved to him and he could see her dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. He ordered the boys at the cannon to give a salute to his mother and they fired the piece and the hundreds of boys and girls roared and his mother wept openly. He wished his mother had combed her hair before opening the window and it was too bad she never took the cigarette out of her mouth. There was no light from the cellar tonight, so he knew his father wasn’t there. He wouldn’t have known what to play for him. It would have been hard to choose the proper selection for a veteran of the German army on this particular night.

He would have liked to go out to the hospital and serenade his sister and her soldiers, but the hospital was too far away. With a last flourish for his mother, he led the parade toward the center of town, playing “Boola-Boola.” Perhaps he would go to Yale when he finished school next year. Nothing was impossible tonight.

He didn’t really decide to do it, but he found himself on the street on which Miss Lenaut lived. He had stood outside the house often enough, hidden in the shadow of a tree across the street, looking up at the lighted window on the second floor which he knew was hers. The light was on now.

He stopped boldly in the middle of the street in front of the house, looking up at the window. The narrow street with its modest two-family dwellings and tiny lawns was packed with his followers. He felt sorry for Miss Lenaut, alone, so far from home, thinking of her friends and relatives joyously flooding the streets of Paris at this moment. He wanted to make amends to the poor woman, show that he forgave her, demonstrate that there were depths to him she had never guessed, that he was more than a dirty little boy with a foul-mouthed German father, who specialized in pornographic drawings. He put the trumpet to his lips and began to play the “Marseillaise.” The complicated, triumphant music, with its memories of flags and battles, of desperation and heroism, rang in the shabby little street, and the boys and girls chanted along with it, without words, because they didn’t know the words. By God, Rudolph thought, no high-school teacher in Port Philip ever had anything like this happen to her before. He played it through straight once, but Miss Lenaut didn’t appear at the window. A girl with a blonde pigtail down her back came out of the house next door and stood near Rudolph, watching him play. Rudolph started all over again, but this time as a tricky solo, playing with the rhythm, improvising, now soft and slow, now brassy and loud. Finally, the window opened. Miss Lenaut stood there, in a dressing gown. She looked down. He couldn’t see the expression on her face. He took a step so that the light of a street-lamp illuminated him clearly and pointed his trumpet directly up at Miss Lenaut and played loud and clear. She had to recognize him. For another moment she listened, without moving. Then she slammed the window down and pulled the blind.

French cunt, he thought, and finished the “Marseillaise” with a mocking sour note. He took the trumpet from his lips. The girl who had come out of the house next door was standing next to him. She put her arm around his neck and kissed him. The boys and girls around him cheered and the cannon went off. He grinned. The kiss was delicious. He knew the girl’s address, too, now. He put the trumpet to his lips and began playing “Tiger Rag,” as he marched, swinging, down the street. The boys and girls danced behind him in a gigantic swirling mass as they headed toward Main Street.

Victory was everywhere.

IV

She lit another cigarette. Alone in an empty house, she thought. She had closed all the windows, to mute the sounds from the town, the cheering and the noise of the fireworks and the blares of music. What did she have to celebrate? It was a night on which husbands turned to wives, children to parents, friends to friends, when even strangers embraced on street corners. Nobody had turned to her, she had been taken in no embrace.

She went into her daughter’s room and turned on the light. The room was spotlessly clean, with the bedspread freshly ironed, a polished brass reading lamp, a brightly painted dressing table with jars and instruments of beauty. The tricks of the trade, Mary Jordache thought bitterly.

She went over to the small mahogany bookcase. The books were all neatly in place, carefully arranged. She took out the thick book of the works of Shakespeare. She opened it to where the envelope parted the pages of Macbeth. She peered into the envelope. The money was still there. Her daughter didn’t even have the grace to try to hide it somewhere else, even knowing now that her mother knew. She took the envelope out of the Shakespeare and stuffed the book back carelessly on the shelf. She took out another book at random, an anthology of English poetry Gretchen had used in her last year of high school. The fine food of her fine daughter’s mind. She opened the book and put the envelope between the pages. Let her daughter worry about her money. If her father ever discovered there was eight hundred dollars in the house, she wouldn’t find it just by going through her bookshelves.

She read a few lines.

Oh, fine, fine …

She put the book back in its place on the shelf. She didn’t bother to turn out the light when she went out of the room.

She went into the kitchen. The pots and dishes that she had used for the dinner she had eaten alone that night lay unwashed in the sink. She doused her cigarette in a frying pan, half-filled with greasy water. She had had a pork chop for her dinner. Coarse food. She looked at the stove, turned on the gas in the oven. She dragged a chair over to the oven and opened the oven door and sat down and put her head in. The smell was unpleasant. She sat like that for a little while. Sounds of cheering in the town filtered in through the closed kitchen window. She had read somewhere that there were more suicides on holidays than at any other time, Christmas, New Year’s. What better holiday would she ever find?

The smell of the gas grew stronger. She began to feel giddy. She took her head out of the oven and turned the gas off. There was no rush.

She went into the living room, mistress of the house. There was a faint smell of gas in the small room, with the four wooden chairs arranged geometrically around the square oak table in the center of the worn, reddish carpet. She sat down at the table, took a pencil out of her pocket and looked around for some paper, but there was only the student’s exercise book in which she kept her daily accounts in the bakery. She never wrote letters and never received any. She tore several sheets of paper out of the back of the book and began to write on the ruled paper.

“Dear Gretchen,” she wrote. “I have decided to kill myself. It is a mortal sin and I know it, but I can’t go on any more. I am writing from one sinner to another. There is no need for me to say more. You know what I mean.

“There is a curse on this family. On me, on you, on your father and your brother Tom. Only your brother Rudolph may have escaped it and perhaps in the end he too will feel it. I am happy that I will not live to see that day. It is the curse of sex. I will tell you now something I have hidden from you all your life. I was an illegitimate child. I never knew my father or my mother. I cannot bear to think what sort of life my mother must have led and the degradation she must have wallowed in. That you should be following in her footsteps and have gone to the gutter should not surprise me. Your father is an animal. You sleep in the room next to ours, so you must know what I mean. He has crucified me on his lust for twenty years. He is a raging beast and there have been times when I was sure he was going to kill me. I have seen him nearly beat a man to death with his fists over an eight-dollar bakery bill. Your brother Thomas inherits from his father and it would not surprise me if he winds up in jail or worse. I am living in a cage of tigers.

“I am guilty, I suppose. I have been weak and I have permitted your father to drive me from the Church and to make heathens of my children. I was too worn out and beaten down to love you and protect you from your father and his influence. And you always seemed so neat and clean and well-behaved that my fears were put to sleep. With the results that you know better than I do.”

She stopped writing and read what she had written with satisfaction. Finding her mother dead and this address from the grave on her pillow would poison the whore’s guilty pleasures. Each time she allowed a man to put a hand on her, Gretchen would remember her mother’s last words to her.

“Your blood is tainted,” she wrote, “and it is now plain to me that your character is tainted too. Your room is clean and dainty but your soul is a stable. Your father should have married someone like you. You would have been fitting partners for each other. My last wish is for you to leave the house and go far away so that your influence cannot corrupt your brother Rudolph. If only one decent human being comes out of this terrible family, perhaps it will make a balance in God’s eyes.”

There was a confused sound of music and cheering growing stronger outside. Then she heard the trumpet, and recognized it. Rudolph was playing beneath the window. She got up from the table and opened the window and looked out. There he was, at the head of what looked like a thousand boys and girls, playing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” up to her.

She waved down at him, feeling the tears start. Rudolph ordered the boys with the cannon to fire a salute for her and the boom echoed along the street. She was crying frankly now and had to take out her handkerchief. With a last wave, Rudolph led his army down the street, his trumpet playing them on.

She went in and sat down at the table, sobbing. He has saved my life, she thought, my beautiful son has saved my life.

She tore up the letter and went into the kitchen and burned the scripts in the soup pot.

V

A good many of the soldiers were drunk. Everybody who could walk and get into a uniform had fled the hospital without waiting for passes as soon as the news had come over the radio, but some of them had come back with bottles and the common room smelled like a saloon as men in wheel chairs and on crutches reeled around the room, shouting and singing. The celebration had degenerated into destruction after supper and men were breaking windows with canes, tearing posters down from the walls, ripping books and magazines into handfuls of confetti, with which they conducted Mardi-gras battles amid drunken whoops of laughter.

“I am General George S. Patton,” shouted a boy to no one in particular. He had a steel contraption around his shoulders that kept his shattered arm sticking out above his head. “Where’s your necktie, soldier? Thirty years KP.” Then he seized Gretchen with his good arm and insisted on dancing with her in the middle of the room to the tune of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” which the other soldiers obligingly sang for him. Gretchen had to hold the boy tight to keep him from falling. “I’m the greatest, highest-class, one-armed, 105-millimeter ballroom dancer in the world and I’m going to Hollywood tomorrow to waltz with Ginger Rogers. Marry me, baby, we’ll live like kings on my total disability pension. We won the war, baby. We made the world safe for total disability.” Then he had to sit down, because his knees wouldn’t support him anymore. He sat on the floor and put his head between his knees and sang a verse of “Lili Marlene.”

There was nothing Gretchen could do for any of them tonight. She kept a fixed smile on her face, trying to intervene when the confetti battles became too rough and looked as though they would become real fights. A nurse came to the door of the room and beckoned to Gretchen. Gretchen went over to her. “I think you’d better get out of here,” the nurse said in a low, worried voice. “It’s going to be wild in a little while.”

“I don’t really blame them,” Gretchen said. “Do you?”

“I don’t blame them,” the nurse said, “but I’m staying out of their way.”

There was a crash of glass from the room. A soldier had thrown an empty whiskey bottle through a window. “Fire for effect,” the soldier said. He picked up a metal waste basket and hurled it through another window. “Put the mortars on the bastards, Lieutenant. Take the high ground.”

“It’s a lucky thing they took their guns away from them before they came here,” said the nurse. “This is worse than Normandy.”

“Bring on the Japs,” someone shouted. “I’ll beat ’em to death with my first-aid kit. Banzai!”

The nurse tugged at Gretchen’s sleeve. “Go on home,” she said. “This is no place for a girl tonight. Come early tomorrow and help pick up the pieces.”

Gretchen nodded and started toward the locker room to change, as the nurse disappeared. Then she stopped and turned back and went down the corridor from which the wards angled off. She went into the ward where the bad head and chest wounds were cared for. It was dimly lit here, and quiet. Most of the beds were empty, but here and there she could see a figure lying still under blankets. She went to the last bed in the corner, where Talbot Hughes lay, with the glucose dripping into his arm from the bottle rigged on its stand next to the bed. He was lying there with his eyes open, enormous and feverishly clear in the emaciated head. He recognized her and smiled. The shouting and singing from the distant common room sounded like the confused roar from a football stadium. She smiled down at him and sat on the edge of his bed. Although she had seen him only the night before he seemed to have grown ominously thinner in the last twenty-four hours. The bandages around his throat were the only solid thing about him. The doctor in the ward had told her Talbot was going to die within the week. There really was no reason for him to die, the wound was healing the doctor said, although he would never be able to speak again, of course. But by this time, by any normal calculation, he should have been taking nourishment and even walking around a little. Instead, he was fading quietly away day by day, politely and irresistibly insisting upon dying, making no fuss, a trouble to no one.

“Would you like me to read to you tonight?” Gretchen asked.

He shook his head on the pillow. Then he put out his hand toward hers. He grasped her hand. She could feel all the fragile birdlike bones. He smiled again and closed his eyes. She sat there, motionless, holding his hand. She sat like that for more than fifteen minutes, not saying anything. Then she saw that he was sleeping. She disengaged her hand gently, stood up, and walked softly out of the room. Tomorrow she would ask the doctor to tell her when he thought Talbot Hughes, victorious, was about to go. She would come and hold his hand, representative of his country’s sorrow, so that he would not be alone when he died, twenty years old, everything unspoken.

She changed into her street clothes quickly and hurried out of the building.

As she went out the front door, she saw Arnold Simms leaning against the wall next to the door, smoking. This was the first time she had seen him since the night in the common room. She hesitated for a moment, then started toward the bus stop.

“Evenin’, Miss Jordache.” The remembered voice, polite, countrified.

Gretchen made herself stop. “Good evening, Arnold,” she said. His face was bland, memoryless.

“The boys finally got themselves something to yell about, didn’t they?” Arnold gestured with a little movement of his head toward the wing which contained the common room.

“They certainly did,” she said. She wanted to get away, but didn’t want to appear as if she were afraid of him.

“These little old Yoonited States went and did it,” Arnold said. “’Twas a mighty fine effort, wouldn’t you say?”

Now he was making fun of her. “We all should be very happy,” she said. He had the trick of making her pompous.

“I’m very happy,” he said. “Yes, indeed. Mighty happy. I got good news today, too. Special good news. That’s why I waited on you out here. I wanted to tell you.”

“What is it, Arnold?”

“I’m being discharged tomorrow,” he said.

“That is good news,” she said. “Congratulations.”

“Yup,” he said. “Officially, according to the Yoonited States Medical Corps, I can walk. Transportation orders to installation nearest point of induction and immediate processing of discharge from the service. This time next week I’ll be back in St. Louis. Arnold Simms, the immediate civilian.”

“I hope you’ll be …” She stopped. She had nearly said happy, but that would have been foolish. “Lucky,” she said. Even worse.

“Oh, I’m a lucky fella,” he said. “No one has to worry about l’il ole Arnold. Got some more good news this week. It was a big week for me, a giant of a week. I got a letter from Cornwall.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice.” Prissy. “That girl you told me about wrote you.” Palm trees. Adam and Eve in the Garden.

“Yep.” He flicked away his cigarette. “She just found out her husband got killed in Italy and she thought I’d like to know.”

There was nothing to say to this, so she kept quiet.

“Well, I won’t be seeing you any more, Miss Jordache,” he said, “unless you happen to be passin’ through St. Louis. You can find me in the telephone book. I’ll be in an exclusive residential district. I won’t keep you no longer. I’m sure you got a victory ball or a country club dance to go to. I just wanted to thank you for everything you done for the troops, Miss Jordache.”

“Good luck, Arnold,” she said coldly.

“Too bad you didn’t find the time to come on down to the Landing that Saturday,” he said, drawling it out flatly. “We got ourselves two fine chickens and roasted them and had ourselves quite a picnic. We missed you.”

“I’d hoped you weren’t going to talk about that, Arnold,” she said. Hypocrite, hypocrite.

“Oh, God,” he said, “you so beautiful I just want to sit down and cry.”

He turned and opened the door to the hospital and limped in.

She walked slowly toward the bus stop, feeling battered. Victory solved nothing.

She stood under the light, looking at her watch, wondering if the bus drivers were also celebrating tonight. There was a car parked down the street in the shadow of a tree. The motor started up and it drove slowly toward her. It was Boylan’s Buick. For a moment she thought of running back into the hospital.

Boylan stopped the car in front of her and opened the door. “Can I give you a lift, ma’am?”

“Thank you very much, no.” She hadn’t seen him for more than a month, not since the night they had driven to New York.

“I thought we might get together to offer fitting thanks to God for blessing our arms with victory,” he said.

“I’ll wait for the bus, thank you,” she said.

“You got my letters, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.” There had been two letters, on her desk at the office, asking her to meet him in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. She hadn’t met him and she hadn’t answered the letters.

“Your reply must have been lost in the mail,” he said. “The service these days is very hit and miss, isn’t it?”

She walked away from the car. He got out and came up to her and held her arm.

“Come up to the house with me,” he said harshly. “This minute.”

His touch unnerved her. She hated him but she knew she wanted to be in his bed. “Let go of me,” she said, and pulled her arm savagely out of his grasp. She walked back to the bus stop, with him following her.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll say what I came to say. I want to marry you.”

She laughed. She didn’t know why she laughed. Surprise.

“I said I want to marry you,” he repeated.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, “you go on down to Jamaica, as you planned, and I’ll write you there. Leave your address with my secretary. Excuse me, here’s my bus.”

The bus rolled to a stop and she jumped up through the door as soon as it opened. She gave the driver her ticket and went and sat in the back by herself. She was trembling. If the bus hadn’t come along, she would have said yes, she would marry him.

When the bus neared Port Philip she heard the fire engines and looked up the hill. There was a fire on the hill. She hoped it was the main building, burning to the ground.

VI

Claude hung on to him with his good arm, as Tom drove the bike down the narrow back road behind the Boylan estate. He hadn’t had much practice and he had to go slowly and Claude moaned in his ear every time they skidded or hit a bump. Tom didn’t know how bad the arm was, but he knew something had to be done about it. But if he took Claude to the hospital, they’d ask how he happened to get burned and it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the connection between the boy with the burned arm and the cross flaming on the Boylan hill. And Claude sure as hell wouldn’t take the blame alone. Claude was no hero. He’d never die under torture with his secret forever clamped between his lips, that was for sure.

“Listen,” Tom said, slowing the bike down so that they were hardly moving, “you got a family doctor?”

“Yeah,” Claude said. “My uncle.”

That was the kind of a family to have. Priests, doctors, there probably was a lawyer uncle, too, who would come in handy later on, after they were arrested.

“What’s the address?” Tom asked.

Claude mumbled the address. He was so frightened he found it almost impossible to speak. Tom speeded up and keeping on back roads, found his way to the big house on the outskirts of the town, with a sign on the lawn that said, “Dr. Robert Tinker, M.D.”

Tom stopped the bike and helped Claude off. “Listen,” he said, “you’re going in there alone, you understand, and no matter what you tell your uncle, you don’t mention my name. And you better get your father to send you out of town tonight. There’s going to be an awful mess in this town tomorrow and if anybody sees you walking around with a burned hand it’ll take them just about ten seconds to come down on you like a load of bricks.”

For answer, Claude moaned, and hung onto Tom’s shoulder. Tom pushed him away. “Stand on your own two feet, man,” Tom said. “Now get in there and make sure you see your uncle and nobody else. And if I ever find out that you gave me away I’ll kill you.”

“Tom,” Claude whimpered.

“You heard me,” Tom said. “I’ll kill you. And you know I mean it.” He pushed him toward the door of the house.

Claude staggered toward the door. He reached up his good hand and rang the bell. Tom didn’t wait to see him go in. He hurried off down the street. Above the town the fire was still blazing, lighting up the sky.

He went down to the river near the warehouse in which his father kept his shell. It was dark along the bank and there was the acid odor of rusting metal. He took off his sweater. It had the sick smell of burnt wool, like vomit. He found a stone and tied it into the sweater and heaved the bundle out into the river. There was a dull splash and he could see the little fountain of white water against the black of the current, as the sweater sank. He hated to lose the sweater. It was his lucky sweater. He had won a lot of fights while wearing it. But there were times when you had to get rid of things and this was one of them.

He walked away from the river toward home, feeling the chill of the night through his shirt. He wondered if he really was going to have to kill Claude Tinker.

I

With his German food, Mary Jordache thought, as Jordache came in from the kitchen, carrying the roast goose on a platter with red cabbage and dumplings. Immigrant.

She didn’t remember when she had seen her husband in such a high mood. The surrender of the Third Reich that week had made him jovial and expansive. He had devoured the newspapers, chuckling over the photographs of the German generals signing the papers at Rheims. Now, on Sunday, it was Rudolph’s seventeenth birthday, and Jordache had decreed a holiday. No other birthday in the family was celebrated by more than a grunt. He had bought Rudolph a fancy fishing rod, God knew how much it cost, and had told Gretchen that she could keep half her salary from now on instead of the usual quarter. He had even given Thomas the money for a new sweater to replace the one he said he lost. If the German army could be brought to surrender every week, life might be tolerable in the home of Axel Jordache.

“From now on,” Jordache had said, “we eat Sunday dinner together.” The bloody defeat of his race, it seemed, had given him a sentimental interest in the ties of blood.

So they were all seated at the table, Rudloph self-consciously the focus of the occasion, wearing a collar and tie, and sitting very erect, like a cadet at table at West Point; Gretchen in a lacy, white shirtwaist looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, the whore; and Thomas, with his gambler’s dodgy smile, all neatly washed and combed. Thomas had changed unaccountably since VE day, too, coming right home from school, studying all evening in his room, and even helping out in the shop for the first time in his life. The mother permitted herself the first glimmerings of timid hope. Perhaps by some unknown magic, the falling silent of the guns in Europe would make them a normal family.

Mary Jordache’s idea of a normal American family was largely formed by the lectures of the nuns in the orphanage and later on by glances at the advertisements in popular magazines. Normal American families were always well-washed and fragrant and smiled at each other constantly. They showered each other with gifts for Christmas, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and Mother’s Day. They had hale old parents who lived on farms in the country and at least one automobile. The sons called the father sir and the daughters played the piano and told their mothers about their dates and everybody used Listerine. They had breakfast, dinner, and Sunday lunch together and attended the church of their choice, and took holidays at the seashore en masse. The father commuted to business every day in a dark suit and had a great deal of life insurance. None of this was completely formulated in her mind, but it was the misty standard of reference against which she compared her own circumstances. Both too shy and too snobbish to mix with her own neighbors, the reality of the life of the other families who lived in the town was unknown to her. The rich were out of her reach and the poor were beneath her contempt. By her reckoning, hazy and unsystematic as it was, she, her husband, Thomas, and Gretchen, were not a family in any way that she could accept or that might give her pleasure. Rather they were an abrasive group collected almost at random for a voyage which none of them had chosen and during which the best that could be hoped for was that hostilities could be kept to a minimum.

Rudolph, of course, was excepted.

II

Axel Jordache put the goose down on the table with satisfaction. He had spent all morning preparing the meal, keeping his wife out of the kitchen, but without the usual insults about her cooking. He carved the bird roughly, but competently, and set out huge portions for all, serving the mother first, to her surprise. He had bought two bottles of California Riesling and he filled all their glasses ceremoniously. He raised his glass in a toast. “To my son Rudolph, on his birthday,” he said huskily. “May he justify our hopes and rise to the top and not forget us when he gets there.”

They all drank seriously, although the mother saw Thomas make a little grimace. Perhaps he thought the wine was sour.

Jordache did not specify just which top he expected his son to rise to. Specifications were unnecessary. The top existed, a place with boundaries, densities, privileges. When you got there you recognized it and your arrival was greeted with hosannahs and Cadillacs by earlier arrivals.

III

Rudolph ate the goose delicately. It was a little fatty to his taste and he knew that fact caused pimples. And he ate sparingly of the cabbage. He had a date later in the afternoon with the girl with the blonde pigtail who had kissed him outside Miss Lenaut’s house and he didn’t want to be smelling of cabbage when he met her. He only sipped at his wine. He had decided that he was never going to get drunk in his whole life. He was always going to be in full control of his mind and his body. He had also decided, because of the example of his mother and father, that he was never going to get married.

He had gone back to the house next to Miss Lenaut’s the following day and loitered obviously across the street from it. Sure enough, after about ten minutes the girl had come out wearing blue jeans and a sweater and waved to him. She was just about his age, with bright-blue eyes and the open and friendly smile of someone who has never had anything bad happen to her. They had walked down the street together and in half an hour Rudolph felt that he had known her for years. She’d just moved into the neighborhood from Connecticut. Her name was Julie and her father had something to do with the Power Company. She had an older brother who was in the Army in France and that was the reason she’d kissed him that night, to celebrate her brother’s being alive in France with the war over for him. Whatever the reason, Rudolph was glad that she had kissed him, although the memory of that first brush of the lips between strangers made him diffident and awkward for awhile.

Julie was crazy about music and liked to sing and thought he played a marvelous trumpet and he had half promised her that he would get his band to take her along with them to sing with them on their next club date.

She liked serious boys, Julie said, and there was no doubt about it, Rudolph was serious. He had already told Gretchen about Julie. He liked to keep saying her name. “Julie, Julie …” Gretchen had merely smiled, being a little bit too patronizingly grown-up for his taste. She had given him a blue-flannel blazer for his birthday.

He knew his mother would be disappointed that he wasn’t going to take her for a walk this afternoon, but the way his father was behaving all of a sudden, the miracle might happen and his father might actually take her for a walk himself.

He wished he was as confident about getting to the top as his father and mother were. He was intelligent, but intelligent enough to know that intelligence by itself carried no guarantees along with it. For the kind of success his mother and father expected of him you had to have something special—luck, birth, a gift. He did not know yet if he was lucky. He certainly could not count upon his birth to launch him on a career and he was doubtful of his gifts. He was a connoisseur of others’ gifts and an explorer of his own. Ralph Stevens, a boy in his class, could hardly make a B average overall, but he was a genius in mathematics and was doing problems in calculus and physics for fun while his classmates were laboring with elementary algebra. Ralph Stevens had a gift which directed his life like a magnet. He knew where he was going because it was the only way he could go.

Rudolph had many small talents and no definite direction. He wasn’t bad on the horn, but he didn’t fool himself that he was any Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong. Of the four other boys who played in the band with him, two were better than he and the other two were just about as good. He listened to the music he made with a cool appreciation of what it was worth and he knew it wasn’t worth much. And wouldn’t be worth much more, no matter how hard he worked on it. As an athlete, he was top man in one event, the two-twenty hurdles, but in a big city high school, he doubted if he could even make the team, as compared with Stan O’Brien, who played fullback for the football team, and had to depend upon the tolerance of his teachers to get marks just good enough to keep him eligible to play. But on a football field O’Brien was one of the smartest players anybody had ever seen in the state. He could feint and find split-second holes and make the right move every time, with that special sense of a great athlete that no mere intelligence could ever compete with. Stan O’Brien had offers of scholarships from colleges as far away as California and if he didn’t get hurt would probably make All-American and be set for life. In class, Rudolph did better on the English Literature tests than little Sandy Hopewood, who edited the school paper and who flunked all his science courses regularly, but all you had to do was read one article of his and you knew that nothing was going to stop Sandy from being a writer.

Rudolph had the gift of being liked. He knew that and knew that was why he had been elected president of his class three times in a row. But he felt it wasn’t a real gift. He had to plan to be liked, to be agreeable to people, and seem interested in them, and cheerfully take on thankless jobs like running school dances and heading the advertising board of the magazine and working hard at them to get people to appreciate him. His gift of being liked wasn’t a true gift, he thought, because he had no close friends and he didn’t really like people himself very much. Even his habit of kissing his mother morning and evening and taking her for walks on Sundays was planned for her gratitude, to maintain the notion he knew she had of him as a thoughtful and loving son. The Sunday walks bored him and he really couldn’t stand her pawing him when he kissed her, though, of course, he never showed it.

He felt that he was built in two layers, one that only he knew about and the other which was displayed to the world. He wanted to be what he seemed but he was doubtful that he could ever manage it. Although he knew that his mother and his sister and even some of his teachers thought he was handsome, he was uncertain about his looks. He felt he was too dark, that his nose was too long, his jaws too flat and hard, his pale eyes too light and too small for his olive skin, and his hair too lower-class dull black. He studied the photographs in the newspapers and the magazines to see how boys at good schools like Exeter and St. Paul’s dressed and what college men at places like Harvard and Princeton were wearing, and tried to copy their styles in his own clothes and on his own budget.

He had scuffed white-buckskin shoes with rubber soles and now he had a blazer but he had the uneasy feeling that if he were ever invited to a party with a group of preppies he would stand out immediately for what he was, a small-town hick, pretending to be something he wasn’t.

He was shy with girls and had never been in love, unless you could call that stupid thing for Miss Lenaut love. He made himself seem uninterested in girls, too busy with more important matters to bother with kid stuff like dating and flirting and necking. But in reality he avoided the company of girls because he was afraid that if he ever got really close to one, she would find out that behind his lofty manner he was inexperienced and clownish.

In a way he envied his brother. Thomas wasn’t living up to anyone’s estimate of him. His gift was ferocity. He was feared and even hated and certainly no one truly liked him, but he didn’t agonize over which tie to wear or what to say in an English class. He was all of one piece and when he did something he didn’t have to make a painful and hesitant selection of attitudes within himself before he did it.

As for his sister, she was beautiful, a lot more beautiful than most of the movie stars he saw on the screen, and that gift was enough for anybody.

“This goose is great, Pop,” Rudolph said, because he knew his father expected him to comment on the meal. “It really is something.” He had already eaten more than he wanted, but he held out his plate for a second portion. He tried not to wince when he saw the size of the piece that his father put on the plate.

IV

Gretchen ate quietly. When am I going to tell them, what’s the best moment? On Friday she had been given two weeks notice at the Works. Mr. Hutchens had called her into his office and after a little distracted preliminary speech about how efficient she was and conscientious and how her work was always excellent and how agreeable it was to have her in the office, he had come out with it. He had received orders that morning to give her notice, along with another girl in the office. He had gone to the manager to remonstrate, Mr. Hutchens said, his dry voice clicking with real distress, but the manager had said he was sorry, there was nothing he could do about it. With the end of the war in Europe there were going to be cutbacks on government contracts. A falling-off in business was expected and they had to economize on staff. Gretchen and the other girl were the last two clerks to be hired in Mr. Hutchens’ department and so they had to be the first to go. Mr. Hutchens had been so disturbed that he had taken out his handkerchief several times while talking to her and blown his nose aridly, to prove to her that it was none of his doing. Three decades of working with paper had left Mr. Hutchens rather papery himself, like a paid bill that has been tucked away for many years and is brittle and yellowed and flaking at the edges, when it is brought out to be examined. The emotion in his voice as he spoke to her was incongruous, like tears from a filing cabinet.

Gretchen had to console Mr. Hutchens. She had no intention of spending the rest of her life working for the Boylan Brick and Tile Works, she told him, and she understood why the last to be hired had to be the first to go. She did not tell Mr. Hutchens the real reason why she was being fired and she felt guilty about the other girl, who was being sacrificed as camouflage to Teddy Boylan’s act of vengeance.

She had not yet figured out what she was going to do and she hoped to be able to wait until her plans were set before telling her father about her dismissal. There was bound to be an ugly scene and she wanted to have her defenses ready. Today, though, her father was behaving like a human being for once, and perhaps at the end of the meal, ripened by wine and basking in his pleasure in the one child, he might prove to be lenient with another. With the dessert, she decided.

V

Jordache had baked a birthday cake and he came in from the kitchen carrying it, eighteen candles alight on the icing, seventeen and one to grow on, and they all actually were singing “Happy birthday to you, dear Rudolph,” when the doorbell rang. The sound stopped the song in mid-verse. The doorbell almost never rang in the Jordache house. No one ever came to visit them and the mailman dropped the letters through a slot.

“Who the hell is that?” Jordache asked. He reacted pugnaciously to all surprises, as though anything new could only be an attack of one kind or another.

“I’ll go,” Gretchen said. She had the instantaneous certainty that it must be Boylan downstairs at the door, with the Buick parked in front of the shop. It was just the sort of demented thing he was liable to do. She was running down the stairs as Rudolph blew out the candles. She was glad that she was all dressed up and had done her hair that morning for Rudolph’s party. Let Teddy Boylan mourn over what he was never going to get anymore.

When she opened the door, there were two men standing there. She knew them both, Mr. Tinker and his brother, the priest. She knew Mr. Tinker from the Works and everybody knew Father Tinker, a burly, red-faced man, who looked like a longshoreman who had made a mistake in his profession.

“Good afternoon, Miss Jordache,” Mr. Tinker said, taking off his hat. His voice was sober, and his long, flabby face looked as though he had just discovered a terrible error in the books.

“Hello, Mr. Tinker. Father,” Gretchen said.

“I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” Mr. Tinker said, his voice more ceremoniously churchly than that of his ordained brother. “But we have to speak to your father. Is he in?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “If you’ll come up … We’re just at dinner, but …”

“I wonder if you’d be good enough to ask him to come down, child,” said the priest. He had the round, assured voice of a man who inspired confidence in women. “We have a most important matter to discuss with him in private.”

“I’ll go get him,” Gretchen said. The men came into the dark little hallway and shut the door behind them, as though unwilling to be observed from the street. Gretchen put the light on. She felt peculiar about leaving the two men standing crowded together in the dark. She hurried up the steps, knowing that the Tinker brothers were looking at her legs as she mounted.

Rudolph was cutting the cake as she went into the living room. Everybody looked at her inquiringly.

“What the hell was that about?” Jordache asked.

“Mr. Tinker’s down there,” Gretchen said. “With his brother, the priest. They want to speak to you, Pa.”

“Well, why didn’t you ask them to come up?” Jordache accepted a slice of cake on a plate from Rudolph and took a huge bite.

“They didn’t want to. They said they had a most important matter to discuss with you in private.”

Thomas made a little sucking sound, pulling his tongue over his teeth, as though he had a morsel of food caught between one tooth and another.

Jordache pushed back his chair. “Christ,” he said, “a priest. You’d think the bastards would at least leave a man in peace on a Sunday afternoon.” But he stood up and went out of the room. They could hear his heavy limping tread as he descended the staircase.

Jordache didn’t greet the two men standing in the feeble light of the forty-watt bulb in the hallway. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “what the hell is so important that you’ve got to take a working man away from his Sunday dinner to talk about?”

“Mr. Jordache,” Tinker said, “could we talk to you in private?”

“What’s wrong with right here?” Jordache asked, standing above them on the last step, still chewing on his cake. The hallway smelled of the goose.

Tinker looked up the stairway. “I wouldn’t like to be overheard,” he said.

“As far as I can tell,” Jordache said, “we got nothing to say to each other that the whole goddamn town can’t hear. I don’t owe you any money and you don’t owe me none.” Still, he took the step down into the hallway and opened the door to the street and unlocked the front door of the bakery with the key he always carried in his pocket.

The three men went into the bakery, its big window covered from within by a canvas blind for Sunday.

VI

Upstairs, Mary Jordache was waiting for the coffee to boil. Rudolph kept looking at his watch, worried that he’d be late for his date with Julie. Thomas sat slumped in his chair, humming tunelessly and tapping an annoying rhythm on his glass with his fork.

“Stop that, please,” the mother said. “You’re giving me a headache.”

“Sorry,” Thomas said. “I’ll take up the trumpet for my next concert.”

Never a courteous moment, Mary Jordache thought. “What’s keeping them down there?” she asked querulously. “The one day we’re having a normal family meal.” She turned accusingly on Gretchen. “You work with Mr. Tinker,” she said. “Have you done something disgraceful downtown?”

“Maybe they discovered I stole a brick,” Gretchen said.

“Even one day,” her mother said, “is too much for this family to be polite.” She went into the kitchen to get the coffee, her back a drama of martyrdom.

There was the sound of Jordache coming up the staircase. He came into the living room, his face expressionless. “Tom,” he said flatly, “come on downstairs.”

“I got nothing to say to the Tinker family,” Thomas said.

“They got something to say to you.” Jordache turned and went out of the room and down the stairs again. Thomas shrugged. He pulled at his fingers, tugging with one hand against the other, the way he did before a fight, and followed his father.

Gretchen frowned. “Do you know what it’s all about?” she asked Rudolph.

“Trouble,” Rudolph said gloomily. He knew he was going to be late for Julie.

VII

In the bakery the two Tinkers, one in a navy-blue suit and the other in his shiny, black, priest’s suit, looked like two ravens against the bare shelves and the gray marble counter. Thomas came in and Jordache closed the door behind him.

I’m going to have to kill him, Thomas thought. “Good afternoon, Mr. Tinker,” he said, smiling boyishly. “Good afternoon, Father.”

“My son,” the priest said portentously.

“Tell him what you told me,” Jordache said.

“We know all about it, son,” the priest said. “Claude confessed everything to his uncle, as was only right and natural. From confession flows repentance and from repentance forgiveness.”

“Save that crap for Sunday school,” Jordache said. He was leaning with his back against the door, as though to make sure nobody was going to escape.

Thomas didn’t say anything. He was wearing his little prefight smile.

“The shameful burning of the cross,” the priest said. “On a day consecrated to the memory of the brave young men who have fallen in the struggle. On a day when I celebrated a holy mass for the repose of their souls at the altar of my own church. And with all the trials and intolerance we Catholics have undergone in this country and our bitter efforts to be accepted by our bigoted countrymen. And to have the deed perpetrated by two Catholic boys.” He shook his head sorrowfully.

“He’s no Catholic,” Jordache said.

“His mother and father were-born in the Church,” the priest said. “I have made inquiries.”

“Did you do it or didn’t you do it?” Jordache asked.

“I did it,” Thomas said. That yellow, gutless son of a bitch Claude.

“Can you imagine, my son,” the priest went on, “what would happen to your family and Claude’s family if it ever became know who raised that flaming cross?”

“We’d be driven out of town,” Mr. Tinker said excitedly. “That’s what would happen. Your father wouldn’t be able to give away a loaf of bread in this town. The people of this town remember you’re foreigners, Germans, even if you’d like to forget it.”

“Oh, Christ, now,” Jordache said. “The red, white, and blue.”

“Facts are facts,” Mr. Tinker said. “You might as well face it. I’ll give you another fact. If Boylan ever finds out who it was that set fire to his greenhouse he’ll sue us for our lives. He’ll get a smart lawyer that’ll make that old greenhouse seem like the most valuable property between here and New York.” He shook his fist at Thomas. “Your father won’t have two pennies to rub against each other in his pocket. You’re minors. We’re responsible, your father and me. The savings of a lifetime …”

Thomas could see his father’s hands working, as though he would like to put them around Thomas’s neck and strangle him.

“Keep calm, John,” the priest said to Tinker. “There’s no sense in getting the boy too upset. We have to depend upon his good sense to save us all.” He turned to Thomas. “I will not ask you what devilish impulse moved you to incite our Claude to do this awful deed …”

“He said it was my idea?” Thomas asked.

“A boy like Claude,” the priest said, “growing up in a Christian home, going to Mass every Sunday, would never dream up a desperate scheme like that on his own.”

“Okay,” Thomas said. He sure as hell was going to be out looking for Claude.

“Luckily,” the priest went on, in measured Gregorian tones, “when Claude visited his uncle, Dr. Robert Tinker, that awful night, with his cruelly wounded arm, Dr. Tinker was alone. He treated the boy and extracted the story from him and took him home in his own car. By the grace of God, he was not observed. But the burns are severe and Claude will be in bandages for at least three more weeks. It was not possible to keep him hidden at home safely until he was fully recovered. A maid might become suspicious, a delivery boy might get a glimpse of him, a school friend might pay a visit out of pity …”

“Oh, Christ, Anthony,” Mr. Tinker said, “get out of the pulpit!” His face pale and working convulsively, his eyes bloodshot, he strode over to Thomas. “We drove the little bastard down to New York last night and we put him on a plane to California this morning. He’s got an aunt in San Francisco and he’ll be stashed away until he can get the bandages off and then he’s going to military school and I don’t care if he doesn’t come back to this town before he’s ninety. And if he knows what’s good for him your father’d damn well better get you out of town, too. As far away as possible, where nobody knows you and nobody’ll ask any questions.”

“Don’t worry, Tinker,” Jordache said. “He’ll be out of town by nightfall.”

“He’d better be,” Tinker said threateningly.

“All right now.” Jordache opened the door. “I’ve had enough of the both of you. Get out.”

“I think we ought to go now, John,” the priest said. “I’m certain Mr. Jordache will do the proper thing.”

Tinker had to get in the last word. “You’re being let off easy,” he said. “All of you.” He marched out of the store.

“God forgive you, my son,” the priest said, and followed his brother.

Jordache locked the door and faced Thomas. “You’ve hung a sword over my head, you little shit,” he said. “You’ve got something coming to you.” He limped toward Thomas and swung his fist. It landed high on Thomas’s head. Thomas staggered and then, instinctively, hit back, going off the floor and catching his father flush on the temple with the hardest right hand he had ever thrown. Jordache didn’t fall, but swayed a little, his hands out in front of him. He stared disbelieving at his son, at the blue eyes icy with hatred. Then he saw Thomas smile and drop his hands to his side.

“Go ahead and get it over with,” Thomas said contemptuously. “Sonny boy won’t hit his brave daddy any more.”

Jordache swung once more. The left side of Thomas’s face began to swell immediately and became an angry wine red, but he merely stood there, smiling.

Jordache dropped his hands. The one blow had been a symbol, nothing more. Meaningless, he thought dazedly. Sons.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s over. Your brother’s going to take you on the bus to Grafton. From there you’ll take the first train to Albany. In Albany you’ll change for Ohio. Alone. My brother’ll have to take care of you. I’ll call him today and he’ll be expecting you. Don’t bother packing. I don’t want anybody to see you leaving town with a valise.” He unlocked the bakery door. Thomas went out, blinking in the Sunday afternoon sunlight.

“You wait here,” Jordache said. “I’ll send your brother down. I don’t fancy any farewell scenes with your mother.” He locked the bakery door and limped into the house.

Only after his father was gone did Thomas touch the tender, swollen side of his jaw.

VIII

Ten minutes later, Jordache and Rudolph came down. Thomas was leaning against the bakery window, staring calmly across the street. Rudolph was carrying the jacket of Thomas’s one suit, striped and greenish. It had been bought two years before and was too small for him. He couldn’t move his shoulders freely when he put it on and his hands dangled far out of the tight sleeves.

Rudolph looked dazed and his eyes widened when he saw the welt on Thomas’s cheek. Jordache had the appearance of a sick man. Under the naturally dark tint of his skin, there was a wash of pallid green and his eyes were puffy. One punch, Thomas thought, and look what happens to him.

“Rudolph knows what he has to do,” Jordache said. “I gave him some money. He’ll buy your ticket to Cleveland. Here’s your uncle’s address.” He handed Thomas a slip of paper.

I’m moving up in class, Thomas thought, I have uncles for emergencies, too. Call me Tinker.

“Now get moving,” Jordache said. “And keep your trap shut.”

The boys started down the street. Jordache watched, feeling the vein throb in his temple where Thomas had hit him and not seeing anything clearly. His sons moved off in a blur down the sunny empty slum street, the one tallish and slender and well dressed in the gray-flannel slacks and a blue blazer, the other almost as tall but wider and looking childish in the jacket that was too small for him. When the boys had disappeared around a corner, Jordache turned and walked in the opposite direction, toward the river. This was one afternoon he had to be alone. He would call his brother later. His brother and his wife were just slobs enough to take in the son of a man who had kicked them out of his house and hadn’t even said thank you for the yearly Christmas card that was the only evidence that two men who had been born long ago in the same house in Cologne and who were living in different parts of America were, in fact, brothers. He could just hear his brother saying to his fat wife, in that ineradicable German accent, “After all, vat can ve do? Blut is thicker than vater.”

“What in hell happened?” Rudolph asked as soon as they were out of their father’s sight.

“Nothing,” Thomas said.

“He hit you,” Rudolph said. “Your jaw’s a sight.”

“It was a terrible blow,” Thomas said mockingly. “He’s next in line for a shot at the title.”

“He came upstairs looking sick,” Rudolph said.

“I clipped him one.” Thomas grinned, remembering.

“You hit him?”

“Why not?” Thomas said. “What’s a father for?”

“Christ! And you’re still alive?”

“I’m alive,” said Thomas.

“No wonder he’s getting rid of you.” Rudolph shook his head. He couldn’t help being angry at Thomas. Because of Thomas he was missing his date with Julie. He would have liked to pass her house, it was only a few blocks out of the way to the bus station, but his father had said he wanted Thomas out of town immediately and with nobody knowing about it. “What the hell is the matter with you, anyway?”

“I’m a high-spirited, red-blooded, normal American boy,” Thomas said.

“It must be real trouble,” Rudolph said. “He gave me fifty bucks for the train fare. Anytime he shells out fifty bucks, it must be something enormous.”

“I was discovered spying for the Japs,” Thomas said placidly.

“Oh, boy, you’re smart,” Rudolph said, and they walked the rest of the way to the bus station in silence.

They got off the bus at Grafton near the railroad station and Thomas sat under a tree in a little park across the square from the station while Rudolph went in to see about Thomas’s ticket. The next train to Albany was in fifteen minutes and Rudolph bought the ticket from the wizened man with a green eyeshade behind the wicket. He didn’t buy the ticket for the connection to Cleveland. His father had told him he didn’t want anybody to know Thomas’s final destination, so Thomas was going to have to buy the ticket himself at the station in Albany.

As he took the change, Rudolph had an impulse to buy another ticket for himself. In the opposite direction. To New York. Why should Thomas be the first one to escape? But of course, he didn’t buy any ticket to New York. He went out of the station and past the dozing drivers waiting in their 1939 taxis for the arrival of the next train. Thomas was sitting on a bench under a tree, his legs sprawled out in a V, his heels dug into the scrubby lawn. He looked unhurried and peaceful, as though nothing was happening to him.

Rudolph glanced around to make sure nobody was watching them. “Here’s your ticket,” he said, handing it to Thomas, who looked at it lazily. “Put it away, put it away,” Rudolph said. “And here’s the change for the fifty dollars. Forty-two fifty. For your ticket from Albany. You’ll have a lot left over, the way I figure it.”

Thomas pocketed the money without counting it. “The old man must have shit blood,” Thomas said, “when he took it out from wherever he hides his dough. Did you see where he keeps it?”

“No.”

“Too bad. I could come back some dark night and lift it. Although I don’t suppose you’d tell me, even if you knew. Not my brother Rudolph.”

They watched a roadster drive up with a girl at the wheel and a lieutenant in the Air Force beside her. They got out of the car and went into the shade of the tiled overhang of the depot. Then they stopped and kissed. The girl was wearing a pale-blue dress and the summery wind twirled it around her legs. The lieutenant was tall and very tan, as though he had been in the desert. He had medals and wings on his green Eisenhower jacket and he was carrying a stuffed flight bag. Rudolph heard the roar of a thousand engines in foreign skies as he watched the couple. Again, he felt the pang because he had been born too late and missed the war.

“Kiss me, darling,” Thomas said, “I bombed Tokyo.”

“What the hell are you proving?” Rudolph said.

“You ever get laid?” Thomas asked.

The echo of his father’s question the day Jordache hit Miss Lenaut disturbed Rudolph. “What’s it to you?”

Thomas shrugged, watching the two people go through the open door of the station. “Nothing. I just thought I’m going to be away a long time, maybe we ought to have a heart-to-heart talk.”

“Well, if you must know, I haven’t,” Rudolph said stiffly.

“I was sure of it,” Thomas said. “There’s a place called Alice’s in town on McKinley, you can get a good piece of tail for five bucks. Tell them your brother sent you.”

“I’ll take care of myself my own way,” Rudolph said. Although he was a year older than Thomas, Thomas was making him feel like a kid.

“Our loving sister is getting hers regularly,” Thomas said. “Did you know that?”

“That’s her business.” But Rudolph was shocked. Gretchen was so clean and neat and politely spoken. He couldn’t imagine her in the sweaty tangle of sex.

“Do you want to know who with?”

“No.”

“Theodore Boylan,” Thomas said. “How do you like that for class?”

“How do you know?” Rudolph was sure that Thomas was lying.

“I went up and watched through the window,” Thomas said. “He came down into the living room bare-assed, with his thing hanging down to his knees, he’s a regular horse, and made two whiskies and called up the stairs, ‘Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?’” Thomas simpered as he imitated Bolyan.

“Did she come down?” Rudolph didn’t want to hear the rest of the story.

“No. I guess she was having too good a time where she was.”

“So you didn’t see whoever it was.” Rudolph fell back on logic to preserve his sister. “It might have been anybody up there.”

“How many Gretchens you know in Port Philip?” Thomas said. “Anyway, Claude Tinker saw them drive up the hill together in Boylan’s car. She meets him in front of Bernstein’s when she’s supposed to be at the hospital. Maybe Boylan got wounded in a war, too. The Spanish-American War.”

“Jesus,” Rudolph said. “With an ugly old man like Boylan.” If it had been with someone like the young lieutenant who had just gone into the station, she would still have remained his sister.

“She must be getting something out of it,” Thomas said carelessly. “Ask her.”

“You ever tell her you knew?”

“Nah. Let her screw in peace. It’s not my cock. I just went up there for laughs,” Thomas said. “She don’t mean anything to me. La-di-da, la-di-da, where do babies come from, Mummy?”

Rudolph wondered how his brother could have perfected his hatred so young.

“If we were Italians or something,” Thomas said, “or Southern gentlemen, we’d go up that hill and avenge the honor of the family. Cut off his balls or shoot him or something. I’m busy this year, but if you want to do it, I give you permission.”

“Maybe you’ll be surprised,” Rudolph said. “Maybe I will do something.”

“I bet,” Thomas said. “Anyway, just for your information, I’ve already done something.”

“What?”

Thomas looked consideringly at Rudolph. “Ask your father,” he said, “he knows.” He stood up. “Well, I better be getting along. The train’s due.”

They went out onto the platform. The lieutenant and the girl were kissing again. He might never come back, this might be the last kiss, Rudolph thought; after all, they were still fighting out in the Pacific, there were still the Japanese. The girl was weeping as she kissed the lieutenant and he was patting her back with one hand to comfort her. Rudolph wondered if there ever would be a girl who would cry on a station platform because he had to leave her.

The train came in with a whoosh of country dust. Thomas swung up onto the steps.

“Look,” Rudolph said, “if there’s anything you want from the house, write me. I’ll get it to you somehow.”

“There’s nothing I want from that house,” Thomas said. His rebellion was pure and complete. The undeveloped, childish face seemed merry, as if he were going to a circus.

“Well,” Rudolph said lamely. “Good luck.” After all, he was his brother and God knew when they would ever see each other again.

“Congratulations,” Thomas said. “Now you got the whole bed to yourself. You don’t have to worry about my smelling like a wild animal. Don’t forget to wear your pajamas.”

Giving nothing, right up to the last moment, he went into the vestibule and into the car without looking back. The train started and Rudolph could see the lieutenant standing at an open window waving to the girl, who was running along the platform.

The train gathered speed and the girl stopped running. She became conscious of Rudolph looking at her and her face closed down, erasing public sorrow, public love. She wheeled and hurried off, the wind whipping her dress about her body. Warrior’s woman.

Rudolph went back to the park and sat on the bench again and waited for the bus back to Port Philip.

What a goddamn birthday.

IX

Gretchen was packing a bag. It was a big, frayed, yellow-stippled, cardboardish rectangle, studded with brass knobs, that had held her mother’s bridal trousseau when she arrived in Port Philip. Gretchen had never spent a night away from home in her whole life so she had never had a valise of her own. When she had made her decision, after her father had come up from the conference with Thomas and the Tinkers, to announce that Thomas was going away for a long time, Gretchen had climbed to the narrow little attic where the few things that the Jordaches had collected and had no further use for were stored. She had found the bag and brought it down to her own room. Her mother had seen her with the bag and must have guessed what it meant, but had said nothing. Her mother hadn’t talked to her in weeks, ever since the night she had come in at dawn after the trip to New York with Boylan. It was as though she felt that conversation between them brought with it the contagion of Gretchen’s rank corruption.

The air of crisis, of hidden conflicts, the strange look in her father’s eyes when he had come back into the living room and told Rudolph to come with him, had finally pushed Gretchen to action. There would never be a better day to leave than this Sunday afternoon.

She packed carefully. The bag wasn’t big enough to take everything she might need and she had to choose deliberately, putting things in, then taking them out in favor of other things that might be more useful. She hoped that she could get out of the house before her father came back, but she was prepared to face him and tell him that she had lost her job and was going down to New York to look for another. There had been something in his face as he started downstairs with Rudolph that was passive and stunned and she guessed that today might be the one day she could walk past him without a struggle.

She had to turn almost every book upside down before she found the envelope with the money in it. That crazy game her mother played. There was a fifty-fifty chance that her mother would wind up in an asylum. Eventually, she hoped, she would be able to learn to pity her.

She was sorry that she was going without a chance to say good-bye to Rudolph but it was growing dark already and she didn’t want to reach New York after midnight. She had no notion of where she was going to go in New York. There must be a Y.W.C.A. somewhere. Girls had spent their first nights in New York in worse places.

She looked around her stripped room without emotion. Her good-bye to her room was flippant. She took the envelope, now empty of money, and laid it squarely in the middle of her narrow bed.

She lugged the suitcase out into the hallway. She could see her mother sitting at the table, smoking. The remains of the dinner, the goose carcass, the cold cabbage, the dumplings jellied in slime, the stained napkins, had remained untouched all these hours on the table, as her mother had sat there, wordless, staring at the wall. Gretchen went into the room. “Ma,” she said, “this is going-away day, I guess. I’m packed and I’m leaving.”

Her mother turned her head slowly and blearily toward her. “Go to your fancy man,” she said thickly. Her vocabulary of abuse dated from earlier in the century. She had finished all the wine and she was drunk. It was the first time Gretchen had seen her mother drunk and it made her want to laugh.

“I’m not going to anybody,” she said. “I lost my job and I’m going to New York to look for another one. When I’m settled, I’ll write you and let you know.”

“Harlot,” the mother said.

Gretchen grimaced. Who said harlot in 1945? It made her going unimportant, comic. But she forced herself to kiss her mother’s cheek. The skin was rough and seamed with broken capillaries.

“False kisses,” the mother said, staring. “The dagger in the rose.”

What books she must have read as a young girl!

The mother pushed back a wisp of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, in the gesture that had been weary since she was twenty-one years old. It occurred to Gretchen that her mother had been born worn out and that much should be forgiven her because of it. For a moment she hesitated, searching for some vestige of affection within her for the drunken woman sitting wreathed in smoke at the cluttered table.

“Goose,” her mother said disdainfully. “Who eats goose?”

Gretchen shook her head hopelessly and went out into the hallway and picked up the bag and struggled down the staircase with it. She unlocked the door below and pushed the suitcase out over the sill into the street. The sun was just setting and the shadows on the street were violet and indigo. As she picked up the bag, the streetlamps went on, lemony and pale, doing premature and useless service.

Then she saw Rudolph hurrying down the street toward the house. He was alone. She put down her bag and waited for him. As he approached she thought how well the blazer fit him, how neat he looked, and was glad she had spent the money.

When Rudolph saw her, he broke into a run. “Where’re you going?” he said as he came up to her.

“New York,” she said lightly. “Come along?”

“I wish I could,” he said.

“Help a lady to a taxi?”

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Not here,” she said, glancing at the bakery window. “I want to get away from here.”

“Yeah,” Rudolph said, picking up her bag. “This is for sure no place to talk.”

They started down the street together to look for a taxi. Good-bye, good-bye, Gretchen sang to herself, as she passed the familiar names, good-bye Clancy’s Garage, Body Work, good-bye Soriano’s Hand Laundry, good-bye Fenelli’s, Prime Beef, good-bye the A and P, good-bye Bolton’s Drug Store, good-bye Wharton’s Paints and Hardware, good-bye Bruno’s Barber Shop, good-bye Jardino’s Fruits and Vegetables. The song inside her head was lilting as she walked briskly beside her brother, but there was a minor undertone in it. You leave no place after nineteen years without regrets.

They found a taxi two blocks farther on and drove to the station. While Gretchen went over to the window to buy her ticket, Rudolph sat on the old-fashioned valise, thinking, I am spending my eighteenth year saying goodbye in every station of the New York Central railroad.

Rudolph couldn’t help but feeling a little bruised by the rippling lightness in his sister’s movements and the pinpoints of joy in her eyes. After all, she was not only leaving home, she was leaving him. He felt strange with her now, since he knew she had made love with a man. Let her screw in peace. He must find a more melodious vocabulary.

She touched him on the sleeve. “The train won’t be along for more than a half hour,” she said. “I feel like a drink. Celebrate. Put the valise in the baggage room and we’ll go across the street to the Port Philip House.”

Rudolph picked up the valise. “I’ll carry it,” he said. “It costs ten cents in the baggage room.”

“Let’s be big for once.” Gretchen laughed. “Squander our inheritance. Let the dimes flow.”

As he took a check for the valise, he wondered if she had been drinking all afternoon.

The bar of the Port Philip House was empty except for two soldiers who were moodily staring at glasses of wartime beer near the entrance. The bar was dark and cool and they could look out through the windows at the station, its lights now on in the dusk. They sat at a table near the back and when the bartender came over to them, wiping his hands on his apron, Gretchen said, firmly, “Two Black and White and soda, please.”

The barman didn’t ask whether or not they were over eighteen. Gretchen had ordered as if she had been drinking whiskey in bars all her life.

Actually, Rudolph would have preferred a Coke. The afternoon had been too full of occasions.

Gretchen poked at his cheek with two fingers. “Don’t look so glum,” she said. “It’s your birthday.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why did Pa send Tommy away?”

“I don’t know. Neither of them would tell me. Something happened with the Tinkers. Tommy hit Pa. I know that.”

“Wooh …” Gretchen said softly. “Quite a day, isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” Rudolph said. It was a bigger day than she realized, he thought, remembering what Tom had told him earlier about her. The barman came over with their drinks and a siphon bottle. “Not too much soda, please,” Gretchen said.

The barman splashed some soda in Gretchen’s glass. “How about you?” He held the siphon over Rudolph’s glass.

“The same,” Rudolph said, acting eighteen.

Gretchen raised her glass. “To that well-known ornament to Port Philip society,” she said, “the Jordache family.”

They drank. Rudolph had not yet developed a taste for Scotch. Gretchen drank thirstily, as though she wanted to finish the first one fast, so that there would be time for another one before the train came in.

“What a family.” She shook her head. “The famous Jordache collection of authentic mummies. Why don’t you get on the train with me and come live in New York?”

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

“I thought I couldn’t do it, too,” she said. “And I’m doing it.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’re you going? What happened?”

“A lot of things,” she said vaguely. She took a long swig of her whiskey. “A man mostly.” She looked at him defiantly. “A man wants to marry me.”

“Who? Boylan?”

Her eyes dilated, grew darker in the dim saloon. “How do you know?”

“Tommy told me.”

“How does he know?”

Well, why not, he thought, She asked for it. Jealousy and shame for her made him want to hurt her. “He went up to the hill and looked in through a window.”

“What did he see?” she asked coldly.

“Boylan. Naked.”

“He didn’t get much of a show, poor Tommy.” She laughed. The laugh was metallic. “He’s not much to look at, Teddy Boylan. Did he have the good luck to see me naked, too?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” she said. “It would have made his trip worthwhile.” There was something hard and self-wounding in his sister that Rudolph had never seen in her before. “How did he know I was there?”

“Boylan called upstairs to ask you if you wanted to have your drink there.”

“Oh,” she said. “That night. That was a big night. Some time I’ll tell you about it.” She studied his face. “Don’t look so stormy. Sisters have a habit of growing up and going out with fellas.”

“But Boylan,” he said bitterly. “That puny old man.”

“He’s not that old,” she said. “And not that puny.”

“You liked him,” he said accusingly.

“I liked it,” she said. Her face became very sober. “I liked it better than anything that ever happened to me.”

“Then why’re you running away?”

“Because if I stay here long enough, I’ll wind up marrying him. And Teddy Boylan’s not fit for your pure, beautiful little sister to marry. It’s complicated, isn’t it? Is your life complicated, too? Is there some dark, sinful passion you’re nursing in your bosom, too? An older woman you visit while her husband’s at the office, a …?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said.

“Sorry.” She touched his hand, then gestured toward the bartender. When he came over, she said, “One more, please.” As the bartender went back to fill the order, she said, “Ma was drunk when I left. She finished all your birthday wine. The blood of the lamb. That’s all that family needs—” She spoke as though they were discussing the idlosyncracies of strangers. “A drunken crazy old lady. She called me a harlot.” Gretchen chuckled. “A last loving farewell to the girl going to the big city. Get out,” she said harshly, “get out before they finish crippling you. Get out of that house where nobody has a friend, where the doorbell never rings.”

“I’m not crippled,” he said.

“You’re frozen in an act, Brother.” The hostility was out in the open now. “You don’t fool me. Everybody’s darling, and you don’t give a good goddamn if the whole world lives or dies. If that’s not being crippled, put me in a wheelchair any day.”

The bartender came over and put her drink down in front of her and half filled the glass with soda.

“What the hell,” Rudolph said, standing up, “if that’s what you think of me, there’s no sense in my hanging around any more. You don’t need me.”

“No, I don’t,” she said.

“Here’s the ticket for your bag.” He handed her the slip of paper.

“Thanks,” she said woodenly. “You’ve done your good deed for the day. And I’ve done mine.”

He left her sitting there in the bar, drinking her second whiskey, her lovely, oval face flushed at the cheek bones, her eyes shining, her wide mouth avid, beautiful, hungry, bitter, already a thousand miles removed from the dingy apartment above the bakery, removed from her father and mother, her brothers, her lover, on her way to a city that engulfed a million girls a year.

He walked slowly toward home, tears for himself in his eyes. They were right, they were right about him, his brother, his sister; their judgments on him were just. He had to change. How do you change, what do you change? Your genes, your chromosomes, your sign of the zodiac?

As he neared Vanderhoff Street, he stopped. He couldn’t bear the thought of going home yet. He didn’t want to see his mother drunk, he didn’t want to see that stunned, hating look, like a disease, in his father’s eyes. He walked on down toward the river. There was a faint afterglow from the sunset and the river slid by like wet steel, with a smell like a deep, cool cellar in chalky ground. He sat on the rotting wharf near the warehouse in which his father kept his shell and looked out toward the opposite shore.

Far out, he could see something moving. It was his father’s shell, the oars going in a fierce, even rhythm, biting the water, going upstream.

He remembered that his father had killed two men, one with a knife, one with a bayonet.

He felt empty and beaten. The whiskey he had drunk burned in his chest and there was a sour taste in his mouth.

I’ll remember this birthday, he thought.

X

Mary Pease Jordache sat in the living room, in darkness and in the fumes of smoke from the roast goose. She was oblivious to them and to the vinegary aroma of the cabbage that lay cold on the disordered platter. Two of them gone, she thought, the thug and the harlot. I have Rudolph alone now, she exulted drunkenly. If only a storm came up and swamped the shell, far, far out on the cold river, what a day it would be.

I

A horn blew outside the garage and Tom climbed out from under the Ford on which he was working in the grease pit, and wiping his hands on a rag, went out to where the Oldsmobile was standing next to one of the pumps.

“Fill’er up,” Mr. Herbert said. He was a steady customer, a real estate man who had taken options on outlying properties near the garage at low, wartime prices, lying in wait for the post-war boom. Now that the Japanese had surrendered, his car passed the garage frequently. He bought all his gas at the Jordache station, using the black-market ration stamps Harold Jordache sold him.

Thomas unscrewed the tank cap and ran the gasoline in, holding onto the trigger of the hose nozzle. It was a hot afternoon and the fumes from the flowing gasoline rose in visible waves from the tank. Thomas turned his head, trying to avoid breathing in the vapor. He had a headache every night from this job. The Germans are using chemical warfare on me, he thought, now that the war is over. He thought of his uncle as German in a way that he didn’t think of his father as German. There was the accent, of course, and the two pale-blonde daughters who were dressed in vaguely Bavarian fashion on holidays, and the heavy meals of sausage, smoked pork, and kraut, and the constant sound of people singing Wagner and Schubert lieder on the phonograph in the house, because Mrs. Jordache loved music. Tante Elsa, she asked Thomas to call her.

Thomas was alone in the garage. Coyne, the mechanic, was sick this week, and the second man was out on a call. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and Harold Jordache was still home at lunch. Sauerbraten mit spetzli and three bottles of Miller High Life and a nice snooze on the big bed upstairs with his fat wife to make sure they didn’t overwork and have premature heart attacks. Thomas was just as glad that the maid gave him two sandwiches and some fruit in a bag for his lunch to eat at the garage. The less he saw of his uncle and his family, the better he liked it. It was enough he had to live in the house, in the minuscule room in the attic, where he lay sweating all night in the heat that had collected there under the roof in the summer sun during the day. Fifteen dollars a week. His Uncle Harold had made a good thing out of that burning cross in Port Philip.

The tank overflowed a little and Thomas hung up the hose and put on the cap and wiped away the splash of gasoline on the rear fender. He washed the windshield down and collected four dollars and thirty cents from Mr. Herbert, who gave him a dime tip.

“Thanks,” Thomas said, with a good facsimile of gratitude, and watched the Oldsmobile drive off into town. The Jordache garage was on the outskirts of town, so they got a lot of transient traffic, too. Thomas went into the office and charged up the sale on the register and put the money into the till. He had finished the grease job on the Ford and for the moment he had nothing to do, although if his uncle were there, he would have no trouble finding work for him. Probably cleaning out the toilets or polishing the chrome of the shining hulks in the Used Car Lot. Thomas thought idly of cleaning out the cash register instead, and taking off somewhere. He rang the No Sale key and looked in. With Mr. Herbert’s four dollars and thirty cents, there was exactly ten dollars and thirty cents in the drawer. Uncle Harold had lifted the morning’s receipts when he went home for lunch, just leaving five one-dollar bills and a dollar in silver in case somebody had to have change. Uncle Harold hadn’t become the owner of a garage and a Used Car Lot and a filling station and an automobile agency in town by being careless with his money.

Thomas hadn’t eaten yet, so he picked up his lunch bag and went out of the office and sat tilted on the cracked wooden chair against the wall of the garage, in the shade, watching the traffic go by. The view was not unpleasant. There was something nautical about the cars in diagonal lines in the lot, with gaily colored banners overhead announcing bargains. Beyond the lumberyard diagonally across the road, there were the ochre and green of patches of the farmland all around. If you sat still, the heat wasn’t too bad and just the absence of Uncle Harold gave Thomas a sense of well-being.

Actually, he wasn’t unhappy in the town. Elysium, Ohio, was smaller than Port Philip, but much more prosperous, with no slums and none of the sense of decay that Thomas had taken as a natural part of his environment back home. There was a small lake nearby, with two hotels that were open for the summer, and holiday cottages owned by people who came there from Cleveland, so the town itself had some of the spruced-up air of a resort, with good shops, restaurants, and entertainments like horse shows and regattas for small sailboats on the lake. Everybody seemed to have money in Elysium and that was a real change from Port Philip.

Thomas dug into the bag and pulled out a sandwich. It was wrapped neatly in waxed paper. It was a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, with a lot of mayonnaise, on fresh, thinly cut rye bread. Recently, Clothilde, the Jordaches’ maid, had begun to give him fancy sandwiches, different ones every day, instead of the unrelieved diet of bologna on thick hunks of bread that he had had to make do with the first few weeks. Tom was a little ashamed, seeing his grease-stained hands with the black nails on the elaborate tea-shoppe sandwich. It was just as well that Clothilde couldn’t see him as he ate her offerings. She was nice, Clothilde, a quiet French-Canadian woman of about twenty-five who worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, with every other Sunday afternoon off. She had sad, dark eyes and black hair. Her uniform somberness of coloring set her off as being ineluctably lower in the social scale than the aggressively blonde Jordaches, as though she had been born and marked specifically to be their servant.

She had taken to leaving a piece of pie out on the kitchen table for him, too, at night, when he left the house after dinner, to wander around the town. Uncle Harold and Tante Elsa couldn’t keep him in the house at night any more than his own parents could. He had to wander. Nighttime made him restless. He didn’t do much—sometimes he’d play in a pickup softball game under the lights in the town park or he’d go to a movie and have a soda afterward, and he’d found some girls. He had made no friends who might ask embarrassing questions about Port Philip and he’d been careful to be civil to everyone and he hadn’t had a fight since he’d come to town. He’d had enough trouble for the time being. He wasn’t unhappy. Being out from under his mother and father was a blessing and not living in the same house and sharing the same bed with his brother, Rudolph, was soothing to the nerves. And not having to go to school was a big improvement. He didn’t mind the work at the garage, although Uncle Harold was a nuisance, always fussing and worrying. Tante Elsa clucked over him and kept giving him glasses of orange juice under the impression that his lean fitness was a sign of malnutrition. They meant well enough, even if they were slobs. The two little girls stayed out of his way.

Neither of the senior Jordaches knew why he had been sent away from home. Uncle Harold had pried, but Thomas had been vague and had merely said that he was doing badly at school, which was true enough, and that his father had thought it would be good for his character to get away from home and earn some money on his own. Uncle Harold was not one to underestimate the moral beauties of sending a boy out to earn money on his own. He was surprised, though, that Thomas never got any mail from his family and that after the first Sunday afternoon telephone call from Axel telling him that Thomas was on his way, there had been no further communication from Port Philip. Harold Jordache was a family man, himself, extravagantly affectionate with his two daughters and lavish with gifts for his wife, whose money it had been in the first place that had enabled him to take his comfortable place in Elysium. In talking about Axel Jordache to Tom, Uncle Harold had sighed over the differences in temperament between the brothers. “I think, Tom,” Uncle Harold had said, “it was because of the wound. He took it very hard, your father. It brought out the dark side in him. As though nobody ever was wounded before.”

He shared one conception with Axel Jordache. The German people, he believed, had a streak of childishness in them, which drove them into waging war. “Play a band and they march. What’s so attractive about it?” he said. “Clumping around in the rain with a sergeant yelling at you, sleeping in the mud instead of a nice, warm bed with your wife, being shot at by people you don’t know, and then, if you’re lucky, winding up in an old uniform without a pot to piss in. It’s all right for a big industrialist, the Krupps, making cannons and battleships, but for the small man—” He shrugged. “Stalingrad. Who needs it?” With all his Germanness, he had kept clear of all German-American movements. He liked where he was and what he was and he was not to be lured into any associations that might compromise him. “I got nothing against anybody,” was one of the foundations of his policy. “Not against the Poles, or the French, or the English, or the Jews or anybody. Not even the Russians. Anybody who wants can come in and buy a car or ten gallons of gas from me and if he pays in good American money, he’s my friend.”

Thomas lived placidly enough in Uncle Harold’s house, observing the rules, going his own way, occasionally annoyed at his uncle’s reluctance to see him sitting down for a few minutes during the working day, but by and large more grateful than not for the sanctuary that was being offered him. It was only temporary. Sooner or later, he knew he was going to break away. But there was no hurry.

He was just about to dig into the bag for the second sandwich, when he saw the twins’ 1938 Chevy approaching. It curved in toward the filling station and Tom saw that there was only one of the twins in it. He didn’t know which one it was, Ethel or Edna. He had laid them both, as had most of the boys in town, but he couldn’t tell them apart.

The Chevy stopped, gurgling and creaking. The twins’ parents were loaded with money, but they said the old Chevy was good enough for two sixteen-year-old girls who had never earned a cent in their lives.

“Hi, twin,” Tom said, to be on the safe side.

“Hi, Tom.” The twins were nice-looking girls, well tanned, with straight, brown hair and plump little, tight asses. They had skin that always looked as if they had just come out of a mountain spring. If you didn’t know that they had laid every boy in town, you’d be pleased to be seen with them anywhere.

“Tell me my name,” the twin said.

“Aw, come on,” Tom said.

“If you don’t tell me my name,” the twin said, “I’ll buy my gas somewhere else.”

“Go ahead,” Tom said. “It’s my uncle’s money.”

“I was going to invite you to a party,” the twin said. “We’re cooking some hot dogs down at the lake tonight and we have three cases of beer. I won’t invite you if you don’t tell me my name.”

Tom grinned at her, stalling for time. He looked into the open Chevy. The twin was going swimming. She had a white bathing suit on the seat beside her. “I was only kidding you, Ethel,” he said. Ethel had a white bathing suit and Edna had a blue one. “I knew it was you all the time.”

“Give me three gallons,” Ethel said. “For guessing right.”

“I wasn’t guessing,” he said, taking down the hose. “You’re printed on my memory.”

“I bet,” Ethel said. She looked around at the garage and wrinkled her nose. “This is a dumb old place to work. I bet a fellow like you could get something a lot better if he looked around. At least in an office.”

He had told her he was nineteen years old and graduated from high school when he had first met her. She had come over to talk to him after he had spent fifteen minutes one Saturday afternoon down at the lake, showing off on the diving board. “I like it here,” he said. “I’m an outdoor man.”

“Don’t I know,” she said, chuckling. They had screwed out in the woods on a blanket that she kept in the rumble seat of the car. He had screwed her sister Edna in the same place on the same blanket, although on different nights. The twins had an easygoing family spirit of share and share alike. The twins did a lot toward making Tom willing to stay in Elysium and work in his uncle’s garage. He didn’t know what he was going to do in the winter, though, when the woods were covered in snow.

He put the cap back on the tank and racked up the hose. Ethel gave him a dollar bill, but no ration coupons. “Hey,” he said, “where’s the tickets?”

“Surprise, surprise,” she said, smiling. “I’m all out.”

“You got to have ’em.”

She pouted. “After everything you and I are to each other. Do you think Antony asked Cleopatra for ration tickets?”

“She didn’t have to buy gas from him,” Tom said.

“What’s the difference?” Ethel asked. “My old man buys the coupons from your uncle. In one pocket and out the other. There’s a war on.”

“It’s over.”

“Only just.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Just because you’re beautiful.”

“Do you think I’m prettier than Edna?” she asked.

“One hundred per cent.”

“I’ll tell her you said that.”

“What for?” Tom said. “There’s no sense in making people unhappy.” He didn’t relish the idea of cutting his harem down by half by an unnecessary exchange of information.

Ethel peered into the empty garage. “Do you think people ever do it in a garage?”

“Save it for tonight, Cleopatra,” Tom said.

She giggled. “It’s nice to try everything once. Do you have the key?”

“I’ll get it sometime.” Now he knew what to do in the winter.

“Why don’t you just leave this dump and come on down to the lake with me? I know a place we can go skinny bathing.” She wriggled desirably on the cracked leather of the front seat. It was funny how two girls in the same family could be such hot numbers. Tom wondered what their father and mother thought when they started out to church with their daughters on Sunday morning.

“I’m a working man,” Tom said. “I’m essential to industry. That’s why I’m not in the Army.”

“I wish you were a captain,” Ethel said. “I’d love to undress a captain. One brass button after another. I’d unbuckle your sword.”

“Get out of here,” Tom said, “before my uncle comes back and asks me if I collected your ration tickets.”

“Where should I meet you tonight?” she asked, starting the motor.

“In front of the Library, Eight-thirty okay?”

“Eight-thirty, Lover Boy,” she said. “I’ll lay out in the sun and think about you all afternoon and pant.” She waved and went off.

Tom sat down in the shade on the broken chair. He wondered if his sister, Gretchen, talked like that to Theodore Boylan.

He reached into the lunch bag and took out the second sandwich and unwrapped it. There was a piece of paper, folded in two, on the sandwich. He opened up the paper. There was writing on it in pencil. “I love you,” in careful, schoolgirlish script. Tom squinted at the message. He recognized the handwriting. Clothilde wrote out the list of things she had to phone for in the market every day and the list was always in the same place on a shelf in the kitchen.

Tom whistled softly. He read aloud. “I love you.” He had just passed his sixteenth birthday but his voice was still adolescently high. A twenty-five-year-old woman to whom he’d hardly ever spoken more than two words. He folded the paper carefully and put it in his pocket and stared out at the traffic sweeping along the road toward Cleveland for a long time before he began eating the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, soaked in mayonnaise.

He knew he wasn’t going out to the lake tonight, for any old weeny roast.

II

The River Five played a chorus of “Your Time Is My Time,” and Rudolph took a solo on the trumpet, putting everything he had into it, because Julie was in the room tonight, sitting alone at a table, watching and listening to him. The River Five was the name of Rudolph’s band, himself on the trumpet, Kessler on the bass, Westerman on the saxophone, Dailey on the percussion, and Flannery on the clarinet. The River Five was Rudolph’s name for the band, because they all lived in Port Philip, on the Hudson, and because Rudolph thought it had an artistic and professional sound to it.

They had a three-week engagement, six nights a week, at a roadhouse outside Port Philip. The place, called Jack and Jill’s, was a huge clapboard shack that shook to the beat of the dancers’ feet. There was a long bar and a lot of small tables and most of the people just drank beer. The Saturday night standard of dress was relaxed. Boys wore T-shirts and many of the girls came in slacks. Groups of girls came unescorted and waited to be asked to dance or the girls danced with each other. It wasn’t like playing the Plaza or 52nd Street in New York, but the money wasn’t bad.

As he played, Rudolph was pleased to see Julie shake her head in refusal when a boy in a jacket and tie, obviously a preppie, came over and asked her to dance.

Julie’s parents allowed her to stay out late with him on Saturday nights because they trusted Rudolph. He was a born parent-pleaser. With good reason. But if she fell into the clutches of a hard-drinking preppie, smooching around the floor, with his superior Deerfield or Choate line of talk, there was no telling what sort of trouble she might get into. The shake of the head was a promise, a bond between them as solid as an engagement ring.

Rudolph played the three trick bars of the band’s signature for the fifteen-minute break, put his horn down, and signaled to Julie to come out with him for a breath of air. All the windows were open in the shack, but it was hot and wet inside, like the bottom of the Congo.

Julie held his hand as they walked out under the trees where the cars were parked. Her hand was dry and warm and soft and dear in his. It was hard to believe that you could have so many complicated sensations all through your body just holding a girl’s hand.

“When you played that solo,” Julie said, “I just sat there shivering. I curled up inside—like an oyster when you squirt lemon on it.”

He chuckled at the comparison. Julie laughed too. She had a whole list of oddball phrases to describe her various states of mind. “I feel like a PT boat,” when she raced him in the town swimming pool. “I feel like the dark side of the moon,” when she had to stay in and do the dishes at home and missed a date with him.

They went all the way to the end of the parking lot, as far away as possible from the porch outside the shack, where the dancers were coming out for air. There was a car parked there and he opened the door for her to slide in. He got in after her and closed the door behind them. In the darkness, they locked in a kiss. They kissed interminably, clutching each other. Her mouth was a peony, a kitten, a peppermint, the skin of her throat under his hand was a butterfly’s wing. They kissed all the time, whenever they could, but never did anything more.

Drowned, he was gliding and diving, through fountains, through smoke, through clouds. He was a trumpet, playing his own song. He was all of one piece, loving, loving … He took his mouth away from hers softly and kissed her throat as she put her head back against the seat. “I love you,” he said. He was shaken by the joy he had in saying the words for the first time. She pulled his head fiercely against her throat, her swimmer’s smooth summer arms wonderfully strong, and smelling of apricots.

Without warning the door opened and a man’s voice said, “What the hell are you two doing in here?”

Rudolph sat up, an arm tightening protectively around Julie’s shoulder. “We’re discussing the atom bomb,” he said coolly. “What do you think we’re doing?” He would die rather than let Julie see that he was embarrassed.

The man was on his side of the car. It was too dark for him to see who it was. Then, unexpectedly, the man laughed. “Ask a foolish question,” he said, “and get a foolish answer.” He moved a little and a pale beam from one of the lights strung under the trees hit him. Rudolph recognized him. The yellow tightly combed hair, the thick, double bushes of blond eyebrows.

“Excuse me, Jordache,” Boylan said. His voice was amused.

He knows me, Rudolph thought. How does he know me?

“This happens to be my car, but please make yourself at home,” Boylan said. “I do not want to interrupt the artist at his moments of leisure. I’ve always heard that ladies show a preference for trumpet players.” Rudolph would have preferred to hear this in other circumstances and from another source. “I didn’t want to leave anyway,” Boylan said. “I really need another drink. When you’ve finished, I’d be honored if you and the lady would join me for a nightcap at the bar.” He made a little bow and softly closed the door and strolled off through the parking lot.

Julie was sitting at the other side of the car, straight up, ashamed. “He knows us,” she said in a small voice.

“Me,” Rudolph said.

“Who is he?”

“A man called Boylan,” Rudolph said. “From the Holy Family.”

“Oh,” Julie said.

“That’s it,” said Rudolph. “Oh. Do you want to leave now? There’s a bus in a few minutes.” He wanted to protect her to the end, although he didn’t know exactly from what.

“No,” Julie said. Her tone was defiant. “I’ve got nothing to hide. Have you?”

“Never.”

“One more kiss.” She slid toward him and put out her arms.

But the kiss was wary. There was no more gliding through clouds.

They got out of the car and went back into the shack. As they passed through the door, they saw Boylan at the end of the bar, his back to it, leaning on it with his elbows behind him, watching them. He gave a little salute of recognition, touching the tips of his fingers to his forehead.

Rudolph took Julie to her table and ordered another ginger ale for her and then went back on the bandstand and began arranging the music sheets for the next set.

When the band played “Good Night Ladies” at two o’clock and the musicians began packing their instruments as the last dancers drifted off the floor, Boylan was still at the bar. A medium-sized, confident man, in gray-flannel slacks and a crisp linen jacket. Negligently out of place among the T-shirts and enlisted men’s suntans and the young workingmen’s Saturday night blue suits, he strolled leisurely away from the bar as Rudolph and Julie left the bandstand.

“Do you two children have transportation home?” he asked as they met.

“Well,” Rudolph said, not liking the children, “one of the fellows has a car. We usually all pile into that.” Buddy Westerman’s father loaned him the family car when they had a club date and they lashed the bass and the drums onto the top. If any of them had girls along, they dropped the girls off first and all went to the Ace All Night Diner for hamburgers, to wind down.

“You’ll be more comfortable with me,” Boylan said. He took Julie’s arm and guided her through the doorway. Buddy Westerman raised his eyebrows questioningly as he saw them leaving. “We’ve got a hitch into town,” Rudolph said to Buddy. “Your bus is overcrowded.” The fraction of betrayal.

Julie sat between them on the front seat of the Buick as Boylan swung out of the parking lot and onto the road toward Port Philip. Rudolph knew that Boylan’s leg was pressing against Julie’s. That same flesh had been pressed against his sister’s naked body. He felt peculiar about the whole thing, all of them clamped together in the same front seat on which he and Julie had kissed just a couple of hours before, but he was determined to be sophisticated.

He was relieved when Boylan asked for Julie’s address and said he’d drop her off first. He wasn’t going to have to make a scene about leaving her alone with Boylan. Julie seemed subdued, not like herself, as she sat between the two of them, watching the road rush at them in the Buick’s headlights.

Boylan drove fast and well, passing cars in racing-driver spurts, his hands calm on the wheel. Rudolph was disturbed because he had to admire the way the man drove. There was a disloyalty there somewhere.

“That’s a nice little combination you boys have there,” Boylan said.

“Thanks,” Rudolph said. “We could do with some more practice and some new arrangements.”

“You manage a smooth beat,” Boylan said. Amateur. “It made me regret that my dancing days are over.”

Rudolph couldn’t help but approve of this. He thought people over thirty dancing were ludicrous, obscene. Again he felt guilty about approving of anything about Theodore Boylan. But he was glad that at least Boylan hadn’t danced with Gretchen and made fools in public of both of them. Older men dancing with young girls were the worst.

“And you, Miss …?” Boylan waited for one or the other of them to supply the name.

“Julie,” she said.

“Julie what?”

“Julie Hornberg,” she said defensively. She was sensitive about her name.

“Hornberg?” Boylan said. “Do I know your father?”

“We just moved into town,” Julie said.

“Does he work for me?”

“No,” Julie said.

Moment of triumph. It would have been degrading if Mr. Hornberg was another vassal. The name was Boylan, but there were some things beyond his reach.

“Are you musical, too, Julie?” Boylan asked.

“No,” she said, surprisingly. She was making it as hard as she could for Boylan. He didn’t seem to notice it. “You’re a lovely girl, Julie,” he said. “You make me happy that my kissing days, unlike my dancing days, are not yet over.”

Dirty old lecher, Rudolph thought. He fingered his black trumpet case nervously and thought of asking Boylan to stop the car so that he and Julie could get out. But walking back to town, he wouldn’t get Julie to her door before four o’clock. He marked a sorrowful point against his character. He was practical at moments that demanded honor.

“Rudolph … It is Rudolph, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” His sister must have run off at the mouth like a faucet.

“Rudolph, do you intend to make a profession of the trumpet?” Kindly old vocational counselor, now.

“No. I’m not good enough,” Rudolph said.

“That’s wise,” Boylan said. “It’s a dog’s life. And you have to mix with scum.”

“I don’t know about that,” Rudolph said. He couldn’t let Boylan get away with everything. “I don’t think people like Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong are scum.”

“Who knows?” Boylan said.

“They’re artists,” Julie said tightly.

“One thing does not preclude the other, child.” Boylan laughed gently. “Rudolph,” he said, dismissing her, “what do you plan to do?”

“When? Tonight?” Rudolph knew that Boylan meant as a career, but he didn’t intend to let Boylan know too much about himself. He had a vague idea that all intelligence might one day be used against him.

“Tonight I hope you’re going to go home and get a good night’s sleep, which you eminently deserve after your hard evening’s work,” Boylan said. Rudolph bridled a little at Boylan’s elaborate language. The vocabulary of deceit. Trapped English. “No, I mean, later on, as a career,” Boylan said.

“I don’t know yet,” Rudolph said. “I have to go to college first.”

“Oh, you’re going to college?” The surprise in Boylan’s voice was clear, a pinprick of condescension.

“Why shouldn’t he go to college?” Julie said. “He’s a straight A student. He just made Arista.”

“Did he?” Boylan said. “Forgive my ignorance, but just what is Arista?”

“It’s a scholastic honor society,” Rudolph said, trying to extricate Julie. He didn’t want to be defended in the terms of adolescence. “It’s nothing much,” he said. “If you can just read and write, practically …”

“You know it’s a lot more than that,” Julie said, her mouth bunched in disappointment at his self-deprecation. “The smartest students in the whole school. If I was in the Arista, I wouldn’t poor-mouth it.”

Poor-mouth, Rudolph thought, she must have gone out with a Southern boy in Connecticut. The worm of doubt.

“I’m sure it’s a great distinction, Julie,” Boylan said soothingly.

“Well it is.” She was stubborn.

“Rudolph’s just being modest,” Boylan said. “It’s a commonplace male pretense.”

The atmosphere in the car was uncomfortable now, with Julie in the middle angry at both Boylan and Rudolph. Boylan reached over and turned on the radio. It warmed up and a radio announcer’s voice swam out of the rushing night, with the news. There had been an earthquake somewhere. They had tuned in too late to hear where. There were hundreds killed, thousands homeless, in the new whistling, 186,000-miles-per-second darkness which was the world of radio land.

“You’d think with the war just over,” Julie said, “God would lay off for awhile.”

Boylan looked at her in surprise and turned off the radio. “God never lays off,” he said.

Old faker, Rudolph thought. Talking about God. After what he’s done.

“What college do you intend to go to Rudolph?” Boylan talked across Julie’s plump, pointy, little chest.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“It’s a very grave decision,” Boylan said. “The people you meet there are likely to change your whole life. If you need any help, perhaps I can put in a good word at my Alma Mater. With all the heroes coming back, boys of your age are going to have difficulties.”

“Thank you.” The last thing in the world. “I don’t have to apply for months yet. What college did you go to?”

“Virginia,” Boylan said.

Virginia, Rudolph thought disdainfully. Anybody can go to Virginia. Why does he talk as though it’s Harvard or Princeton, or at least Amherst?

They drew up in front of Julie’s house. Automatically, Rudolph looked up at Miss Lenaut’s window, in the next building. It was dark.

“Well, here we are, child,” Boylan said, as Rudolph opened the door on his side and got out. “It’s been delightful talking to you.”

“Thank you for the ride,” Julie said. She got out and bounced past Rudolph toward her front door. Rudolph went after her. He could kiss her good night, at least, in the shadow of the porch. As she felt in her bag for her key, her head down, her pony tail swinging down over her face, he tried to pick up her chin so he could kiss her, but she pulled away fiercely. “Kowtower,” she said. She mimicked him savagely. “It’s nothing much. If you can just read and write, practically …”

“Julie …”

“Suck up to the rich.” He had never seen her face looking like that, pale and closed down. “Scaly old man. He bleaches his hair. And his eyebrows. Boy, some people’ll do anything for a ride in a car, won’t they?”

“Julie, you’re being unreasonable.” If she knew the whole truth about Boylan, he might understand her anger. But just because he was ordinarily polite …

“Take your hands off me.” She had the key out and was fumbling at the door, still smelling of apricot.

“I’ll come by tomorrow about four …”

“That’s what you think,” she said. “Wait until I have a Buick and then come around. That’s more your speed.” She had the door open now and was through it, a rustle of girl, a fragrant, snapping shadow, and was gone as the door slammed shut.

Rudolph went back to the car slowly. If this was love, the hell with it. He got into the car and closed the door. “That was a quick good night,” Boylan said as he started the car. “In my day, we used to linger.”

“Her folks like her to get in early.”

Boylan drove through the town in the direction of Vanderhoff Street. Of course he knows where I live, Rudolph thought. He doesn’t even bother to hide it.

“A charming girl, little Julie,” Boylan said.

“Yeah.”

“You do anything more than kiss her?”

“That’s my business, sir,” Rudolph said. Even in his anger at the man, he admired the way the words came out, clipped and cold. Nobody could treat Rudolph Jordache as though Rudolph Jordache was a cad.

“Of course it is,” Boylan said. He sighed. “The temptation must be great. When I was your age …” He left it unfinished, a suggestion of a procession of virgins, virginal no more.

“By the way,” he said in a flat conversational tone, “do you hear from your sister?”

“Sometimes,” Rudolph said guardedly. She wrote to him care of Buddy Westerman. She didn’t want her mother reading her letters. She was living in a Y.W.C.A. downtown in New York. She had been making the rounds of theatrical offices, looking for a job as an actress but producers weren’t falling all over themselves to hire girls who had played Rosalind in high school. She hadn’t found any work yet, but she loved New York. In her first letter she had apologized for being so mean to Rudolph the day she left, at the Port Philip House. She had been all churned up and not really responsible for what she was saying. But she still thought it was bad for him to stay on at home. The Jordache family was quicksand, she wrote. Nothing was going to change her opinion about that.

“Is she well?” Boylan asked.

“Okay.”

“You know I know her,” Boylan said, without emphasis.

“Yes.”

“She spoke to you about me?”

“Not that I remember,” Rudolph said.

“Ah-hah.” It was difficult to know what Boylan meant to convey by this. “Do you have her address? I sometimes go down to New York and I might find the time to buy the child a good dinner.”

“No, I don’t have her address,” Rudolph said. “She’s moving.”

“I see.” Boylan saw through him, of course, but didn’t press. “Well, if you do hear from her, let me know. I have something of hers she might like to have.”

“Yeah.”

Boylan turned into Vanderhoff and stopped in front of the bakery.

“Well, here we are,” he said. “The home of honest toil.” The sneer was plain. “I bid you good night, young man. It’s been a most agreeable evening.”

“Good night,” Rudolph said. He got out of the car. “Thanks.”

“Your sister told me you liked to fish,” Boylan said. “We have quite a good stream on the property. It’s stocked every year. I don’t know Why. Nobody goes near it anymore. If you’d like to give it a try, just come any time.”

“Thank you,” Rudolph said. Bribery. And he knew he would be bribed. The slippery innocence of trout. “I’ll be along.”

“Good,” Boylan said. “I’ll have my cook do up the fish for us and we can have dinner together. You’re an interesting boy and I enjoy talking to you. Maybe when you come up, you’ll have heard from your sister, with her new address.”

“Maybe. Thanks again.”

Boylan waved and drove off.

Rudolph went in and up to his room through the dark house. He could hear his father snoring. It was Saturday night and his father didn’t work on Saturday night. Rudolph walked past his parents’ door and up the steps to his room carefully. He didn’t want to wake his mother and have to talk to her.

III

“I’m going to sell my body, I do declare,” Mary Jane Hackett was saying. She came from Kentucky. “They don’t want talent anymore, just bare, fruity flesh. The next call anybody puts out for showgirls I’m going to say, Farewell Stanislavsky, and wiggle my little old Dixie behind for pay.”

Gretchen and Mary Jane Hackett were sitting in the cramped, poster-lined anteroom of the Nichols office on West 46th Street, waiting with a collection of other girls and young men to see Bayard Nichols. There were only three chairs behind the railing which divided the aspirants from the desk of Nichols’s secretary, who was typing with spiky malice, her fingers stabbing at the keys, as though the English language were her personal enemy, to be dispatched as swiftly as possible.

The third chair in the anteroom was occupied by a character actress who wore a fur stole, even though it was eighty-five degrees in the shade outside.

Without losing a syllable on her machine, the secretary said, “Hello, dear,” each time the door opened for another actor or actress. The word was that Nichols was casting a new play, six characters, four men, two women.

Mary Jane Hackett was a tall, slender, bosomless girl, who made her real money modeling. Gretchen was too curvy to model. Mary Jane Hackett had been in two flops on Broadway and had played a half-season of summer stock and already spoke like a veteran. She looked around her at the actors standing along the walls, lounging gracefully against the posters of Bayard Nichols’s past productions. “You’d think, with all those hits,” Mary Jane Hackett said, “going all the way back to the dark ages, 1935, for God’s sake, Nichols could afford something grander than this foul little rat trap. At least air conditioning, for heaven’s sake. He must have the first nickel he ever made. I don’t know what I’m doing here. He dies if he has to pay more than minimum and even then, he gives you a long lecture about how Franklin D. Roosevelt has ruined this country.”

Gretchen looked uneasily over at the secretary. The office was so small, there was no possibility that she hadn’t heard Mary Jane. But the secretary typed on, stolidly disloyal, defeating English.

“Look at the size of them.” Mary Jane gestured with a toss of her head at the young men. “They don’t come up to my shoulder. If they wrote women’s parts playing all three acts on their knees, I’d stand a chance of getting a job. The American theater, for God’s sake! The men’re midgets and if they’re over five feet tall they’re fairies.”

“Naughty, naughty, Mary Jane,” a tall boy said.

“When was the last time you kissed a girl?” Mary Jane demanded.

“Nineteen-twenty-eight,” the boy said. “To celebrate the election of Herbert Hoover.”

Everybody in the office laughed good-naturedly. Except the secretary. She kept on typing.

Even though she still had to get her first job, Gretchen enjoyed this new world into which she had been thrown. Everybody talked to everybody else, everybody called everybody by his first name; Alfred Lunt was Alfred to anyone who had ever been in a play with him, even if it was only for two lines at the beginning of the first act; everybody helped everybody else. If a girl heard of a part that was up for casting, she told all her friends and might even lend a particular dress for the interview. It was like being a member of a generous club, whose entrance requirements were not birth or money, but youth and ambition and belief in one another’s talent.

In the basement of Walgreen’s drugstore, where they all congregated over endless cups of coffee, to compare notes, to denigrate success, to mimic matinee idols and lament the death of the Group Theatre, Gretchen was now accepted, and talked as freely as anyone about how idiotic critics were, about how Trigorin should be played in The Sea Gull, about how nobody acted like Laurette Taylor any more, about how certain producers tried to lay every girl who came into their offices. In two months, in the flood of youthful voices, speaking with the accents of Georgia, Maine, Texas, and Oklahoma, the mean streets of Port Philip had almost disappeared, a dot on the curve of memory’s horizon.

She slept till ten in the morning, without feeling guilty. She went to young men’s apartments and stayed there till all hours, rehearsing scenes, without worrying what people would think. A Lesbian at the Y.W.C.A., where she was staying until she found a job, had made a pass at her, but they were still good friends and sometimes had dinner and went to the movies together. She worked out in a ballet class three hours a week, to learn how to move gracefully on a stage, and she had changed the way she walked completely, keeping her head so still that she could have balanced a glass of water on it, even when going up and down stairs … Primitive serenity, the exballerina who taught the class, called it.

She felt that when people looked at her they were sure she had been born in the city. She believed that she was no longer shy. She went out to dinners with some of the young actors and would-be directors whom she met at Walgreen’s and in producers’ offices and rehearsal classes and she paid for her own meals. She didn’t mind cigarette smoke any more. She had no lovers. She had decided she would wait for that until she had a job. One problem at a time.

She had almost made up her mind to write Teddy Boylan and ask him to send down the red dress he had bought for her. There was no telling when she would be invited to that kind of party.

The door to the inner office opened and Bayard Nichols came out with a short, thin man in the suntan uniform of a captain in the Air Force. “… if anything comes up, Willie,” Nichols was saying, “I’ll let you know.” He had a sad, resigned voice. He remembered only his failures. His eyes made a sweep of the people who were waiting to see him, like the beam of a lighthouse, sightless, casting shadows.

“I’ll come by next week sometime and mooch a meal off you,” the Captain said. He had a voice in the low tenor range, unexpected in a man who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds and wasn’t more than five feet, six inches, tall. He held himself very erect, as though he were still in Air Cadets’ school. But his face was unmilitary, and his hair was chestnut, unruly, long for a soldier, making you disbelieve the uniform. His forehead was high, a little bulgy, an unsettling hint of Beethoven, massive and brooding, and his eyes were Wedgwood blue.

“You’re still being paid by Uncle,” Nichols was saying to the Captain. “My taxes. I’ll mooch the meal off you.” He sounded like a man who would not cost much to feed. The theater was an Elizabethan tragedy being played nightly in his digestive tract. Murders stalked the duodenum. Ulcers lurked. He was always going on the wagon next Monday. A psychiatrist or a new wife might help.

“Mr. Nichols …” The tall young man who had had the exchange with Mary Jane took a step away from the wall.

“Next week, Bernie,” Mr. Nichols said. One more sweep of the beam. “Miss Saunders,” he said to the secretary, “can you come inside for a moment, please?” A languid, dyspeptic wave of the hand and he disappeared into his office. The secretary sprayed a last mortal burst out of the typewriter, enfilading the Dramatists’ Guild, then stood up and followed him, carrying a shorthand pad. The door closed behind her.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Captain said to the room at large, “we are all in the wrong business. I suggest Army surplus. The demand for used bazookas will be overwhelming. Hello, Tiny.” This was for Mary Jane, who stood up, towering over him, and leaning over, kissed his cheek.

“I’m glad to see you got home alive from that party, Willie,” Mary Jane said.

“I confess, it was a little drunk out,” the Captain said. “We were washing the somber memories of combat from our souls.”

“Drowning, I’d say,” Mary Jane said.

“Don’t begrudge us our poor little entertainments,” the Captain said. “Remember, you were modeling girdles while we were walking on flak in the terrible skies over Berlin.”

“Were you ever over Berlin, Willie?” Mary Jane asked.

“Of course not.” He grinned at Gretchen, disclaiming valor. “I am standing here patiently, Tiny,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Gretchen Jordache, Willie Abbott.”

“I am happy I walked down 46th Street this morning,” Abbott said.

“Hello,” said Gretchen. She nearly stood up. After all, he was a captain.

“I suppose you’re an actress,” he said.

“Trying.”

“Dreadful trade,” Abbott said. “To quote Shakespeare on samphire?”

“Don’t show off, Willie,” Mary Jane said.

“You will make some man a fine wife and mother, Miss Jordache,” Abbott said. “Mark my words. Why haven’t I seen you before?”

“She just came to town,” Mary Jane said, before Gretchen could answer. It was a warning, a go slow sign. Jealousy?

“Oh, the girls who have just come to town,” Abbott said. “May I sit in your lap?”

“Willie!” Mary Jane said.

Gretchen laughed and Abbott laughed with her. He had very white, even, small teeth. “I was not mothered sufficiently as a child.”

The door to the inner office opened and Miss Saunders came out. “Miss Jordache,” she said, “Mr. Nichols can see you now.”

Gretchen stood up, surprised that Miss Saunders remembered her name. This was only the third time she had been in the Nichols office. She hadn’t talked to Nichols at all, ever. She brushed out the wrinkles in her dress nervously, as Miss Saunders held open the little swinging gate in the partition.

“Ask for a thousand dollars a week and ten percent of the gross,” Abbott said.

Gretchen went through the gate and toward Nichols’s door. “Everybody else can go home,” Miss Saunders said. “Mr. Nichols has an appointment for lunch in fifteen minutes.”

“Beast,” said the character woman with the stole.

“I just work here,” Miss Saunders said.

Confusion of feelings. Pleasure and fright at the prospect of being tested for a job. Guilt because the others had been dismissed and she chosen. Loss, because now Mary Jane would leave with Willie Abbott. Flak above Berlin.

“See you later,” Mary Jane said. She didn’t say where. Abbott didn’t say anything.

Nichols’s office was a little larger than the anteroom. The walls were bare and his desk was piled with play-scripts in leatherette covers. There were three yellowish wooden armchairs and the windows were coated with dust. It looked like the office of a man whose business was somehow shady and who had trouble meeting the rent on the first of the month.

Nichols stood up as she came into the office and said, “It was good of you to wait, Miss Jordache.” He waved to a chair on one side of his desk and waited for her to sit down before he seated himself. He stared at her for a long time, without a word, studying her with the slightly sour expression of a man who is being offered a painting with a doubtful signature. She was so nervous that she was afraid her knees were shaking. “I suppose,” she said, “you want to know about my experience. I don’t have much to …”

“No,” he said. “For the moment we can dispense with experience. Miss Jordache, the part I’m considering you for is frankly absurd.” He shook his head sorrowfully, pitying himself for the grotesque deeds his profession forced him to perform. “Tell me, do you have any objections to playing in a bathing suit? In three bathing suits to be exact.”

“Well …” She laughed uncertainly. “I guess it all depends.” Idiot. Depends upon what? The size of the bathing suit? The size of the part? The size of her bosom? She thought of her mother. Her mother never went to the theater. Lucky.

“I’m afraid it isn’t a speaking role,” Nichols said. “The girl just walks across the stage three times, once in each act, in a different suit each time. The whole play takes place at a beach club.”

“I see,” Gretchen said. She was annoyed with Nichols. Because of him, she had let Mary Jane walk off with Willie Abbott, out into the city. Captain, Captain … Six million people. Get into an elevator and you are lost forever. For a walk-on. Practically naked.

“The girl is a symbol. Or so the playwright tells me,” Nichols said, long hours of struggle with the casuistry of artists tolling like a shipwreck’s bell under the phrase. “Youth. Sensual beauty. The Mystery of Woman. The heartbreaking ephemeralness of the flesh. I am quoting the author. Every man must feel as she walks across the stage, ‘My God, why am I married?’ Do you have a bathing suit?”

“I … I think so.” She shook her head, annoyed with herself now. “Of course.”

“Could you come to the Belasco at five with your bathing suit? The author and the director will be there.”

“At five.” She nodded. Farewell, Stanislavsky. She could feel the blush starting. Prig. A job was a job.

“That’s most kind of you, Miss Jordache.” Nichols stood, mournfully. She stood with him. He escorted her to the door and opened it for her. The anteroom was empty, except for Miss Saunders, blazing away.

“Forgive me,” Nichols murmured obscurely. He went back into his office.

“So long,” Gretchen said as she passed Miss Saunders.

“Good-bye, dear,” Miss Saunders said, without looking up. She smelled of sweat. Ephemeral flesh. I am quoting.

Gretchen went out into the corridor. She didn’t ring for the elevator until the blush had subsided.

When the elevator finally came, there was a young man in it carrying a Confederate officer’s uniform and a cavalry saber in a scabbard. He was wearing the hat that went with the uniform, a dashing wide-brimmed felt, plumed. Under it his beaked, hard-boiled 1945 New York face looked like a misprint. “Will the wars never end?” he said amiably to Gretchen as she got into the elevator.

It was steamy in the little grilled car and she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She dabbed at her forehead with a piece of Kleenex.

She went out into the street, geometric blocks of hot, glassy light and concrete shadow. Abbott and Mary Jane were standing in front of the building, waiting for her. She smiled. Six million people in the city. Let there be six million people. They had waited for her.

“What I thought,” Willie was saying, “was lunch.”

“I’m starving,” Gretchen said.

They walked off toward lunch on the shady side of the street, the two tall girls, with the slender, small soldier between them, jaunty, remembering that other warriors had also been short men, Napoleon, Trotsky, Caesar, probably Tamerlane.

Naked, she regarded herself in the dressing-room mirror. She had gone out to Jones Beach with Mary Jane and two boys the Sunday before and the skin of her shoulders and arms and legs was a faint rosy tan. She didn’t wear a girdle any more and in the summer heat she dispensed with stockings, so there were no prosaic ridges from clinging elastic on the smooth arch of her hips. She stared at her breasts. I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it. She had had two Bloody Marys at lunch, with Mary Jane and Willie, and they had shared a bottle of white wine. Willie liked to drink. She put on her one-piece, black bathing suit. There were grains of sand in the crotch, from Jones Beach. She walked away from the mirror, then toward it, studying herself critically. The Mystery of Woman. Her walk was too modest. Remember Primitive Serenity. Willie and Mary Jane were waiting for her at the bar of the Algonquin, to find out how it all came out. She walked less modestly. There was a knock on the door. “Miss Jordache,” the stage manager said, “we’re ready when you are.”

She began to blush as she opened the door. Luckily, in the harsh work light of the stage, nobody could tell.

She followed the stage manager. “Just walk across and back a couple of times,” he said. There were shadowy figures sitting toward the tenth row of the darkened auditorium. The stage floor was unswept and the bare bricks of the back wall looked like the ruins of Rome. She was sure her blush could be seen all the way out to the street. “Miss Gretchen Jordache,” the stage manager called out into the cavernous darkness. A message in a bottle over the night waves of seats. I am adrift. She wanted to run away.

She walked across the stage. She felt as though she were stumbling up a mountain. A zombie in a bathing suit.

There was no sound from the auditorium. She walked back. Still no sound. She walked back and forth twice more, worried about splinters in her bare feet.

“Thank you very much, Miss Jordache.” Nichols’s dejected voice, thin in the empty theater. “That’s fine. If you’ll stop in the office tomorrow we’ll arrange about the contract.”

It was as simple as that. Abruptly, she stopped blushing.

Willie was sitting alone at the small bar in the Algonquin, erect on a stool, nursing a whiskey in the greenish, submarine dusk that was the constant atmosphere of the room. He swiveled around to greet her as she came in carrying the little rubberized beach bag with her bathing suit in it. “The beautiful girl looks like a beautiful girl who has just landed herself a job as the Mystery of Woman at the Belasco Theatre,” he said. “I am quoting.” Over lunch, they had all laughed at Gretchen’s account of her interview with Nichols.

She sat down on the stool next to his. “You’re right,” she said. “Sarah Bernhardt is on her way.”

“She never could have handled it,” Willie said. “She had a wooden leg. Do we drink champagne?”

“Where’s Mary Jane?”

“Gone. She had a date.”

“We drink champagne.” They both laughed.

When the barman set their glasses in front of them, they drank to Mary Jane. Delicious absence. It was the second time in her life Gretchen had drunk champagne. The hushed, gaudy room in the four-story house on a side street, the one-way mirror, the magnificent whore with the baby face, stretched triumphantly on the wide bed.

“We have many choices,” Willie said. “We can stay here and drink wine all night. We can have dinner. We can make love. We can go to a party on Fifty-sixth Street. Are you a party girl?”

“I would like to be,” Gretchen said. She ignored the “make love.” Obviously it was a joke. Everything was a joke with Willie. She had the feeling that even in the war, at the worst times, he had made fun of the bursting shells, the planes diving in, the flaming wings. Images from news-reels, war movies. “Old Johnny bought it today, chaps. This is my round.” Was it like that? She would ask him later, when she knew him better.

“The party it is,” he said. “There’s no hurry. It’ll go on all night. Now, before we fling ourselves into the mad whirl of pleasure, are there things I should know about you?” Willie poured himself another glass of champagne. His hand was not quite steady and the bottle made a little clinking music against the rim of the glass.

“What kind of things?”

“Begin at the beginning,” he said. “Place of residence?”

“The Y.W.C.A. downtown,” she said.

“Oh, God.” He groaned. “If I dress in drag could I pass as a young Christian woman and rent a room next to yours? I’m petite and I have a light beard. I could borrow a wig. My father always wanted daughters.”

“I’m afraid not,” Gretchen said. “The old lady at the desk can tell a boy from a girl at a hundred yards.”

“Other facts. Fellas?”

“Not at the moment,” she said after a slight hesitation. “And you?”

“The Geneva Convention stipulates that when captured, a prisoner of war must only reveal his name, rank, and serial number.” He grinned at her and laid his hand on hers. “No,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything. I shall bare my soul. I shall tell you, in many installments, how I wished to murder my father when I was a babe in a crib and how I was not weaned from my mother’s breast until I was three and what us boys used to do behind the barn with the neighbor’s daughter in the good old summertime.” His face became serious, the forehead prominent, as he brushed back his hair with his hand. “You might as well know now as later,” he said. “I’m married.”

The champagne burned in her throat. “I liked you better when you were joking,” she said.

“Me, too,” he said soberly. “Still, there’s a brighter side to it. I’m working on a divorce. The lady found other divertissements while daddy was away playing soldier.”

“Where is she? Your wife?” The words came out leadenly. Absurd, she thought. I’ve only known him for a few hours.

“California,” he said. “Hollywood. I guess I have a thing for actresses.”

A continent away. Burning deserts, impassable peaks, the fruited-plain. Beautiful, wide America. “How long have you been married?”

“Five years.”

“How old are you anyway?” she asked.

“Will you promise not to discard me if I tell you the truth?”

“Don’t be silly. How old?”

“Twenty fucking nine,” he said. “Ah, God.”

“I’d have said twenty-three at the outside,” Gretchen shook her head wonderingly. “What’s the secret?”

“Drink and riotous living,” Willie said. “My face is my misfortune. I look like an ad for the boys’ clothing department of Saks. Women of twenty-two are ashamed to be seen with me in public places. When I made captain the Group Commander said, ‘Willie, here’s your gold star for being a good boy in school this month.’ Maybe I ought to grow a moustache.”

“Wee Willie Abbott,” Gretchen said. His false youthfulness was reassuring to her. She thought of the gross, dominating maturity of Teddy Boylan. “What did you do before the war?” she asked. She wanted to know everything about him. “How do you know Bayard Nichols?”

“I worked for him on a couple of shows. I’m a flak. I’m in the worst business in the world. I’m a publicity man. Do you want your picture in the paper, little girl?” The disgust was not put on. If he wanted to look older, there was no need to grow a moustache. All he had to do was talk about his profession. “When I went into the Army, I thought I’d finally get away from it. So they looked up my card and put me in public relations. I ought to be arrested for impersonating an officer. Have some more champagne.” He poured for them again, the bottle clinking an icy code of distress against the glasses, the nicotined fingers trembling minutely.

“But you were overseas. You did fly,” she said. During lunch, he had talked about England.

“A few missions. Just enough to get an Air Medal, so I wouldn’t feel naked in London. I was a passenger. I admired other men’s wars.”

“Still, you could’ve been killed.” His bitterness disturbed her and she would have liked to move him out of it.

“I’m too young to die, Colonel.” He grinned. “Finish your bubbly. They’re waiting for us all over town.”

“When do you get out of the Air Force?”

“I’m on terminal leave now,” he said. “I wear the uniform because I can get into shows free with it. I also have to go over to the hospital on Staten Island a couple of times a week for therapy for my back and nobody’d believe I was a Captain if I didn’t wear the suit.”

“Therapy? Were you wounded?”

“Not really. We made an aggressive landing and bounced. I had a little operation on my spine. Twenty years from now I’ll say the scar came from shrapnel. All drunk up, like a good little girl?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. The wounded were everywhere. Arnold Simms, in the maroon bathrobe, sitting on the table and looking down at the foot that no longer was any good for running. Talbot Hughes, with everything torn out of his throat, dying silently in his corner. Her own father, limping from another war.

Willie paid for the drinks and they left the bar. Gretchen wondered how he could walk so erectly with a bad back.

Twilight made a lavender puzzle out of New York as they came out of the bar onto the street. The stone heat of the day had gentled down to a meadowed balminess and they walked against a soft breeze, hand in hand. The air was like a drift of pollen. A three-quarter moon, pale as china in the fading sky, sailed over the towered office buildings.

“You know what I like about you?” Willie said.

“What?”

“You didn’t say you wanted to go home and change your dress when I said we were going to a party.”

She didn’t feel she had to tell him she was wearing her best dress and had nothing to change to. It was cornflower-blue linen, buttoned all the way down the front, with short sleeves and a tight red cloth belt. She had changed into it when she had gone down to the Y.W.C.A. after lunch to get her bathing suit. Six ninety-five at Ohrbach’s. The only piece of clothing she had bought since she came to New York. “Will I shame you in front of your fine friends?” she said.

“A dozen of my fine friends will come up to you tonight and ask for your telephone number,” he said.

“Shall I give it to them?”

“Upon pain of death,” Willie said.

They went slowly up Fifth Avenue, looking in all the windows. Finchley’s was displaying tweed sports jackets. “I fancy myself in one of those,” Willie said. “Give me bulk. Abbott, the tweedy Squire.”

“You’re not tweedy,” Gretchen said. “I fancy you smooth.”

“Smooth I shall be,” Willie said.

They stopped a long time in front of Brentano’s and looked at the books. There was an arrangement of recent plays in the window. Odets, Hellman, Sherwood, Kaufman and Hart. “The literary life,” Willie said. “I have a confession to make. I’m writing a play. Like every other flak.”

“It will be in the window,” she said.

“Please God, it will be in the window,” he said. “Can you act?”

“I’m a one-part actress. The Mystery of Woman.”

“I am quoting,” he said. They laughed. They knew the laughter was foolish, but it was dear because it was for their own private joke.

When they reached Fifty-fifth Street, they turned off Fifth Avenue. Under the St. Regis canopy, a wedding party was disembarking from taxis. The bride was very young, very slender, a white tulip. The groom was a young infantry lieutenant, no hashmarks, no campaign ribbons, razor-nicked, peach-cheeked, untouched.

“Bless you, my children,” Willie said as they passed.

The bride smiled, a whitecap of joy, blew a kiss to them. “Thank you, sir,” said the lieutenant, restraining himself from throwing a salute, by the book.

“It’s a good night for a wedding,” Willie said as they walked on. “Temperature in the low eighties, visibility unlimited, no war on at the moment.”

The party was between Park and Lexington. As they crossed Park, at Fifty-fifth Street, a taxi swung around the corner and down toward Lexington. Mary Jane was sitting alone in the taxi. The taxi stopped midway down the street and Mary Jane got out and ran into a five-story building.

“Mary Jane,” Willie said. “See her?”

“Uhuh.” They were walking more slowly now.

Willie looked across at Gretchen, studying her face. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s have our own party.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Gretchen said.

“Company, about face,” he barked out. He made a smart military turn, clicking his heels. They started walking back toward Fifth Avenue. “I don’t cotton to the idea of all those guys asking for your telephone number,” he said.

She squeezed his hand. She was almost sure now that Willie had slept with Mary Jane, but she squeezed his hand just the same.

They went to the Oak Room Bar of the Plaza and had mint julep in frosted pewter mugs. “For Kentucky’s sake,” Willie explained. He didn’t mind mixing his drinks. Scotch, champagne, bourbon. “I am an exploder of myths,” he said.

After the mint juleps they left the Plaza and got onto a Fifth Avenue bus heading downtown. They sat on the top deck, in the open air. Willie took off his overseas cap with the two silver bars and the officer’s braid. The wind of the bus’s passage tumbled his hair, making him look younger than ever. Gretchen wanted to take his head and put it down on her breast and kiss the top of his head, but there were people all around them so she took his cap and ran her fingers along the braid and the two bars instead.

They got off the bus at Eighth Street and found a table on the sidewalk at the Brevoort and Willie ordered a Martini. “To improve my appetite,” he said. “Give notice to the gastric juices. Red Alert.”

The Algonquin, the Plaza, the Brevoort, a job, a captain. All in one day. It was a cornucopia of firsts.

They had melon and a small roast chicken for dinner and a bottle of California red wine from the Napa Valley. “Patriotism,” Willie said. “And because we won the war.” He drank most of the bottle himself. Nothing of what he had drunk seemed to affect him. His eyes were clear, his speech the same.

They weren’t talking much any more, just looking at each other across the table. If she couldn’t kiss him soon, Gretchen thought, they would carry her off to Bellevue.

Willie ordered brandy for both of them after the coffee. What with paying for lunch and all the eating and drinking of the evening, Gretchen figured that it must have cost Willie at least fifty dollars since noon. “Are you a rich man?” she asked, as he was paying the bill.

“Rich in spirit only,” Willie said. He turned his wallet upside down and six bills floated down onto the table. Two were for a hundred apiece, the rest were fives. “The complete Abbott fortune,” he said. “Shall I mention you in my will?”

Two hundred and twenty dollars. She was shocked at how little it was. She still had more than that in the bank herself, from Boylan’s eight hundred, and she never paid more than ninety-five cents for a meal. Her father’s blood? The thought made her uneasy.

She watched Willie gather up the bills and stuff them carelessly into his pocket. “The war taught me the value of money,” he said.

“Did you grow up rich?” she asked.

“My father was a customs inspector, on the Canadian border,” he said. “And honest. And there were six children. We lived like kings. Meat three times a week.”

“I worry about money,” she confessed. “I saw what not having any did to my mother.”

“Drink hearty,” Willie said. “You will not be your mother’s daughter. I will turn to my golden typewriter in the very near future.”

They finished their brandies. Gretchen was beginning to feel a little lightheaded, but not drunk. Definitely not drunk.

“Is it the opinion of this meeting,” Willie said, as they stood up from the table and passed through the boxed hedges of the terrace onto the avenue, “that a drink is in order?”

“I’m not drinking any more tonight,” she said.

“Look to women for wisdom,” Willie said. “Earth mother. Priestesses of the oracle. Delphic pronouncements, truth cunningly hidden in enigmas. No more drink shall be drunk tonight. Taxi!” he called.

“We can walk to the Y.W.C.A. from here,” she said. “It’s only about fifteen minutes …”

The taxi braked to a halt and Willie opened the door and she got in.

“The Hotel Stanley,” Willie said to the driver as he got into the cab. “On Seventh Avenue.”

They kissed. Oasis of lips. Champagne, Scotch, Kentucky mint, red wine of Napa Valley in Spanish California, brandy, gift of France. She pushed his head down onto her breast and nuzzled into the thick silkiness of his hair. The hard bone of skull under it. “I’ve been wanting to do this all day,” she said. She held him against her, child soldier. He opened the top two buttons of her dress, his fingers swift, and kissed the cleft between her breasts. Over his cradled head, she could see the driver, his back toward her, busy with red lights, green lights, rash pedestrians, what the passengers do is the passengers’ business. His photograph stared at her from the lighted tag. A man of about forty with glaring, defiant eyes and kidney trouble, a man who had seen everything, who knew the whole city. Eli Lefkowitz, his name, prominently displayed by police order. She would remember his name forever. Eli Lefkowitz, unwatching charioteer of love.

There was little traffic at this hour and the cab swept uptown. Airman in the quick sky.

One last kiss for Eli Lefkowitz and she buttoned her dress, proper for the bridal suite.

The facade of the Hotel Stanley was imposing. The architect had been to Italy, or had seen a photograph. The Doges’ Palace, plus Walgreen’s. The Adriatic coast of Seventh Avenue.

She stood to one side of the lobby while Willie went to the desk for the key. Potted palms, Italianate dark wood chairs, glaring light. Traffic of women with the faces of police matrons and hair the frizzed blonde of cheap dolls. Horse-players in corners, G.I.’s on travel orders, two show girls, high-assed, long-lashed, an old lady in men’s work shoes, reading Seventeen, somebody’s mother, traveling salesmen after a bad day, detectives, alert for Vice.

She drifted toward the elevator shaft, as though she were alone, and did not look at Willie when he came up to her with the key. Deception easily learned. They didn’t speak in the elevator.

“Seventh floor,” Willie said to the operator.

There was no hint of Italy on the seventh floor. The architect’s inspiration had run out on the way up. Narrow corridors, peeling dark-brown metal doors, uncarpeted tile floors that must have once been white. Sorry, folks, we can’t kid you anymore, you might as well know the facts, you’re in America.

They walked down a narrow corridor, her heels making a noise like a pony trotting. Their shadows wavered on the dim walls, uncertain poltergeists left over from the 1925 boom. They stopped at a door like all the other doors. 777. On Seventh Avenue, on the seventh floor. The magic orderliness of numbers.

Willie worked the key and they went into Room 777 of the Stanley Hotel on Seventh Avenue. “You’ll be happier if I don’t put on a light,” Willie said. “It’s a hole. But it’s the only thing I could get. And even so, they’ll only let me stay five days. The town’s full up.”

But enough light filtered in from electric New York outside the chipped tin blinds, so that she could see what the room was like. A small cell, a slab of a single bed, one upright wooden chair, a basin, no bathroom, a shadowy pile of officer’s shirts on the bureau.

Deliberately, he began to undress her. The red cloth belt first, then the top button of her dress and then, going all the way, one button after another. She counted with his movements as he kneeled before her. “… seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …” What conferences, what soul searching in the workrooms farther down on Seventh Avenue to come to that supreme decision—not ten buttons, not twelve buttons, ELEVEN!

“It’s a full day’s work,” Willie said. He took the dress from her shoulders and put it neatly over the back of the chair. Officer and gentleman. She turned around so that he could undo her brassiere. Boylan’s training. The light coming in through the blinds cut her into a tiger’s stripes. Willie fumbled at the hooks on her back. “They must finally invent something better,” he said.

She laughed and helped him. The brassiere fell away. She turned to him again and he gently pulled her innocent white cotton panties down to her ankles. She kicked off her shoes. She went over to the bed and with a single movement ripped off the cover and the blanket and top sheet. The linen wasn’t fresh. Had Mary Jane slept there? No matter.

She stretched out on the bed, her legs straight, her ankles touching, her hands at her sides. He stood over her. He put his hand between her thighs. Clever fingers. “The Vale of Delight,” he said.

“Get undressed,” she said.

She watched him rip off his tie and unbutton his shirt. When he took his shirt off, she saw that he was wearing a medical corset with hooks and laces. The corset went almost up to his shoulders and down past the web belt of his trousers. That’s why he stands so erectly, the young Captain. We made an aggressive landing and bounced. The punished flesh of soldiers.

“Did you ever make love to a man with a corset before?” Willie asked, as he started pulling at the laces.

“Not that I remember,” she said.

“It’s only temporary,” he said. He was embarrassed by it. “A couple of months more. Or so they tell me at the hospital.” He was struggling with the laces.

“Should I turn the light on?” she asked.

“I couldn’t bear it.”

The telephone rang.

They looked at each other. Neither of them moved. If they didn’t move, perhaps it wouldn’t ring again.

The telephone rang again.

“I guess I’d better answer it,” he said.

He picked up the phone from the bedtable next to her head. “Yes?”

“Captain Abbott?” Willie held the phone loosely and she could hear clearly. It was a man’s voice, aggrieved.

“Yes,” Willie said.

“We believe there is a young lady in your room.” The royal We, from the Mediterranean throne room.

“I believe there is,” Willie said. “What of it?”

“You have a single room,” the voice said, “for the occupancy of one individual.”

“All right,” Willie said. “Give me a double room. What’s the number?”

“I’m sorry, every room is occupied,” the voice said. “We’re all booked until November.”

“Let’s you and I pretend this is a double room, Jack,” said Willie. “Put it on my bill.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the voice said. “Room number 777 is definitely a single room for a single occupancy. I’m afraid the young lady will have to leave.”

“The young lady isn’t living here, Jack,” Willie said. “She isn’t occupying anything. She’s visiting me. Anyway, she’s my wife.”

“Do you have your marriage certificate, Captain?”

“Dear,” Willie said loudly, holding the phone out over Gretchen’s head, “have you got our marriage certificate?”

“It’s home,” Gretchen said, close to the receiver.

“Didn’t I tell you never to travel without it?” Marital annoyance.

“I’m sorry, dear,” Gretchen said meekly.

“She left it home,” Willie said into the phone. “We’ll show it to you tomorrow. I’ll have it sent down by special delivery.”

“Captain, young ladies are against the rules of the establishment,” the voice said.

“Since when?” Willie was getting angry now. “This dive is famous from here to Bangkok as a haunt of pimps and bookies and hustlers and dope peddlers and receivers of stolen goods. One honest policeman could fill the Tombs from your guest list.”

“We are under new management,” the voice said. “A well-known chain of respectable hotels. We are creating a different image. If the young lady is not out of there in five minutes, Captain, I’m coming up.”

Gretchen was out of bed now and pulling on her panties.

“No,” Willie said beseechingly.

She smiled gently at him.

“Fuck you, Jack,” Willie said into the phone and slammed it down. He started to do up his corset, pulling fiercely at the laces. “Go fight a war for the bastards,” he said. “And you can’t find another room at this hour in the goddamn town for love or money.”

Gretchen laughed. Willie glared at her for a moment, then he burst into laughter too. “Next time,” he said, “remember for Christ’s sake to bring your marriage license.”

They walked grandly through the lobby, blatantly arm in arm, pretending they were not defeated. Half the people in the lobby looked like house detectives, so there was no way of knowing which one was the voice on the telephone.

They didn’t want to leave each other, so they went over to Broadway and had orangeades at a Nedick stand, faint taste of tropics in a Northern latitude, then continued on to 42nd Street and went into an all-night movie and sat among derelicts and insomniacs and perverts and soldiers waiting for a bus and watched Humphrey Bogart playing Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest.

When the picture ended, they still didn’t want to leave each other, so they saw The Petrified Forest over again.

When they got out of the movie house, they still didn’t want to leave each other, so he walked her all the way down to the Y.W.C.A., among silent, empty buildings which looked like fortresses that had fallen, no quarter shown.

Dawn was breaking as they kissed in front of the Y.W.C.A. Willie looked with loathing at the dark bulk of the building, one lamp on at the entrance, lighting proper young ladies out on the town to their proper beds. “Do you think that in the entire, glorious history of this structure,” he said, “that anybody got laid here?”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“It sends shivers down your spine, doesn’t it?” he said gloomily. He shook his head, “Don Juan,” he said. “The corseted lover. Call me schmuck.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” she said. “There’re other nights.”

“Like when?”

“Like tonight,” she said.

“Like tonight,” he repeated soberly. “I can live through the day. I suppose. I’ll spend the hours in good works. Like looking for a hotel room. It may be in Coney Island or Babylon or Pelham Bay, but I’ll find a room. For Captain and Mrs. Abbott. Bring along a valise, for Queen Victoria. Fill it with old copies of Time, in case we get bored and want something to read.”

A last kiss and he strode off, small and defeated in the fresh dawn light. It was a lucky thing he would still be in uniform tonight. In civilian clothes, she doubted that any desk clerk would believe he was old enough to be married.

When he had disappeared, she climbed the steps and went demurely into the Y.W.C.A. The old lady at the desk leered at her knowingly, but Gretchen took her key and said, “Good night,” as though the dawn coming in through the windows was merely a clever optical illusion.

I

As Clothilde washed his hair, he sat in Uncle Harold’s and Tante Elsa’s big bathtub, steaming in the hot water, his eyes closed, drowsing, like an animal sunning himself on a rock. Uncle Harold, Tante Elsa, and the two girls were at Saratoga for their annual two-week holiday and Tom and Clothilde had the house to themselves. It was Sunday and the garage was closed. In the distance a church bell was ringing.

The deft fingers massaged his scalp, caressed the back of his neck through foaming, perfumed suds. Clothilde had bought a special soap for him in the drugstore with her own money. Sandalwood. When Uncle Harold came back, he’d have to go back to good old Ivory, five cents a cake. Uncle Harold would suspect something was up if he smelled the sandalwood.

“Now, rinse, Tommy,” Clothilde said.

Tom lay back in the water and stayed under as her fingers worked vigorously through his hair, rinsing out the suds. He came up blowing.

“Now your nails,” Clothilde said. She kneeled beside the tub and scrubbed with the nail brush at the black grease ground into the skin of his hands and under his nails. Clothilde was naked and her dark hair was down, falling in a cascade over her low, full breasts. Even kneeling humbly, she didn’t look like anybody’s servant.

His hands were pink, his nails rosy, as Clothilde scrubbed away, her wedding ring glistening in foam. Clothilde put the brush on the rim of the tub, after a last meticulous examination. “Now the rest,” she said.

He stood up in the bath. She rose from her knees and began to soap him down. She had wide, firm hips and strong legs. Her skin was dark and with her flattish nose, wide cheek bones, and long straight hair she looked like pictures he had seen in history books of Indian girls greeting the first white settlers in the forest. There was a scar on her right arm, a jagged crescent of white. Her husband had hit her with a piece of kindling. Long ago, she said. In Canada. She didn’t want to talk about her husband. When he looked at her something funny happened in his throat and he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

Motherly hands touched him lightly, lovingly, doing unmotherly things. Between his buttocks, slipperiness of scented soap, between his thighs, promises. An orchestra in his balls. Woodwinds and flutes. Hearing Tante Elsa’s phonograph blaring all the time, he had come to love Wagner. “We are finally civilizing the little fox.” Tante Elsa had said, proud of her unexpected cultural influence.

“Now the feet,” Clothilde said.

He obediently put a foot up on the rim of the tub, like a horse being shod. Bending, careless of her hair, she soaped between his toes and used a washcloth devotedly, as though she were burnishing church silver. He learned that even his toes could give him pleasure.

She finished with his other foot and he stood there, glistening in the steam. She looked at him, studying him. “A boy’s body,” she said. “You look like Saint Sebastian. Without the arrows.” She wasn’t joking. She never joked. It was the first intimation of his life that his body might have a value beyond its functions. He knew that he was strong and quick and that his body was good for games and fighting, but it had never occurred to him that it would delight anybody just to look at it. He was a little ashamed that he had no hair yet on his chest and that it was so sparse down below.

With a quick motion of her hands, she did her hair up in a knot on top of her head. Then she stepped into the bathtub, too. She took the bar of soap and the suds began to glisten on her skin. She soaped herself all over methodically, without coquetry. Then they slid down into the tub together and lay quietly with their arms around each other.

If Uncle Harold and Tante Elsa and the two girls fell sick and died in Saratoga, he would stay in this house in Elysium forever.

When the water began to cool they got out of the tub and Clothilde took one of the big special towels of Tante Elsa and dried him off. While she was scrubbing out the tub, he went into the Jordaches’ bedroom and lay down on the freshly made crisp bed.

Bees buzzed outside the screened windows, green shades against the sun made a grotto of the bedroom, the bureau against the wall was a ship on a green sea. He would burn a thousand crosses for one such afternoon.

She came padding in, her hair down now, for another occasion. On her face the soft, distant, darkly concentrated expression he had come to look for, yearn for.

She lay down beside him. Wave of sandalwood. Her hand reached out for him, carefully. The touch of love, cherishing him, an act apart from all other acts, profoundly apart from the giggly high-school lust of the twins and the professional excitement of the woman on McKinley Street back in Port Philip. It was incredible to him that anyone could want to touch him like that.

Sweetly, gently, he took her while the bees foraged in the window boxes. He waited for her, adept now, taught, well and quickly taught, by that wide Indian body, and when it was over, they lay back side by side and he knew that he would do anything for her, anything, any time.

“Stay here.” A last kiss under the throat. “I will call you when I am ready.”

She slipped out of the bed and he heard her in the bathroom, dressing, then going softly down the stairs toward the kitchen. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling, all gratitude, and all bitterness. He hated being sixteen years old. He could no nothing for her. He could accept her rich offering of herself, he could sneak into her room at night, but he couldn’t even take her for a walk in the park or give her a scarf as a gift, because a tongue might wag, or Tante Elsa’s sharp eye might search out the new color in the warped bureau drawer in the room behind the kitchen. He couldn’t take her away from this grinding house in which she slaved. If only he were twenty …

Saint Sebastian.

She came silently into the room. “Come eat,” she said.

He spoke from the bed. “When I’m twenty,” he said, “I’m coming here and taking you away.”

She smiled. “My man,” she said. She fingered her wedding ring absently. “Don’t take long. The food is hot.”

He went into the bathroom and dressed and went on down to the kitchen.

There were flowers on the kitchen table, between the two places laid out there. Phlox. Deep blue. She did the gardening, too. She had a knowing hand with flowers. “She’s a pearl, my Clothilde,” he had heard Tante Elsa say. “The roses’re twice as big this year.”

“You should have your own garden,” Tom said as he sat before his place. What he could not give her in reality he offered in intention. He was barefooted and the linoleum felt cool and smooth against his soles. His hair, still damp, was neatly combed, the blond, tight curls glistening darkly. She liked everything neat and shining clean, pots and pans, mahogany, front halls, boys. It was the least he could do for her.

She put a bowl of fish chowder in front of him.

“I said you should have your own garden,” he repeated.

“Drink your soup,” she said, and sat down at her own place across from him.

A leg of lamb, small, tender and rare, came next, served with parsleyed new potatoes, roasted in the same pan with the lamb. There was a heaped bowl of buttered young string beans and a salad of crisp romaine and tomatoes. A plate of fresh, hot biscuits stood to one side, and a big slab of sweet butter, next to a frosted pitcher of milk.

Gravely, she watched him eat, smiled when he offered his plate again. During the family’s holiday, she got on the bus every morning to go to the next town to do her shopping, using her own money. The shopkeepers of Elysium would have been sure to report back to Mrs. Jordache about the fine meats and carefully chosen first fruits for the feasts prepared in her kitchen in her absence.

For dessert there was vanilla ice cream that Clothilde had made that morning, and hot chocolate sauce. She knew her lover’s appetites. She had announced her love with two bacon and tomato sandwiches. Its consummation demanded richer fare.

“Clothilde,” Tom said, “why do you work here?”

“Where should I work?” She was surprised. She spoke in a low voice, always without inflection. There was a hint of French Canada in her speech. She almost said v for w.

“Anyplace. In a store. In a factory. Not as a servant.”

“I like being in a house. Cooking meals,” she said. “It is not so bad. Your aunt is proper with me. She appreciates me. It was kind of her to take me in. I came here, two years ago, I didn’t know a soul, I didn’t have a penny. I like the little girls very much. They are always so clean. What could I do in a store or a factory? I am very slow at adding and subtracting and I’m frightened of machines. I like being in a house.”

“Somebody else’s house,” Tom said. It was intolerable that those two fat slobs could order Clothilde around.

“This week,” she said, touching his hand on the table, “it is our house.”

“We can never go out with each other.”

“So?” She shrugged. “What are we missing?”

“We have to sneak around,” he cried. He was growing angry with her.

“So?” She shrugged again. “There are many things worth sneaking around for. Not everything good is out in the open. Maybe I like secrets.” Her face gleamed with one of her rare soft smiles.

“This afternoon …” he said stubbornly, trying to plant the seed of revolt, arouse that placid peasant docility. “After a … a banquet like this …” He waved his hand over the table. “It’s not right. We should go out, do something, not just sit around.”

“What is there to do?” she asked seriously.

“There’s a band concert in the park,” he said. “A baseball game.”

“I get enough music from Tante Elsa’s phonograph,” she said. “You go to the baseball game for me and tell me who won. I will be very happy here, cleaning up and waiting for you to come home. As long as you come home, I do not want anything else, Tommy.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you today,” he said, giving up. He stood up. “I’ll wipe the dishes.”

“There’s no need,” she said.

“I’ll wipe the dishes,” he said, with great authority.

“My man,” she said. She smiled again, beyond ambition, confident in her simplicities.

The next evening after work, on his way home from the garage on his wobbly Iver Johnson he was passing the town library. On a sudden impulse, he stopped, leaned the bike against a railing, and went in. He hardly read anything at all, not even the sports pages of the newspapers, and he was not a frequenter of libraries. Perhaps in reaction to his brother and his sister, always with their noses in books, and full of fancy sneering ideas.

The hush of the library and the unwelcoming examination of his grease-stained clothes by the lady librarian made him ill at ease, and he wandered around among the shelves, not knowing which book of all these thousands held the information he was looking for. Finally, he had to go to the desk and ask the lady.

“Excuse me,” he said. She was stamping cards, making out prison sentences for books with a little mean snapping motion of her wrist.

“Yes?” She looked up, unfriendly. She could tell a non-book-lover at a glance.

“I want to find out something about Saint Sebastian, ma’am,” he said.

“What do you want to find out about him?”

“Just anything,” he said, sorry he had come in now.

“Try the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” the lady said. “In the Reference Room. SARS to SORC.” She knew her library, the lady.

“Thank you very much, ma’am.” He decided that from now on he would change his clothes at the garage and use Coyne’s sandsoap to get out the top layer of grease from his skin, at least. Clothilde would like that better, too. No use being treated like a dog when you could avoid it.

It took him ten minutes to find the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He pulled out SARS to SORC and took it over to a table and sat down with the book. SEA-URCHIN–SEA-WOLF, SEA-WRACK–SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO. The things that some people fooled with!

There it was, “SEBASTIAN, ST., a Christian martyr whose festival is celebrated on Jan. 20.” Just one paragraph. He couldn’t have been so damned important.

“After the archers had left him for dead,” Tom read, “a devout woman, Irene, came by night to take his body away for burial, but finding him still alive, carried him to her house, where his wounds were dressed. No sooner had he wholly recovered than he hastened to confront the emperor, who ordered him to be instantly carried off and beaten to death with rods.”

Twice, for Christ’s sake, Tom thought. Catholics were nuts. But he still didn’t know why Clothilde had said Saint Sebastian when she had looked at him naked in the bathtub.

He read on. “St. Sebastian is specially invoked against the plague. As a young and beautiful soldlier, he is a favorite subject of sacred art, being most generally represented undraped, and severely though not mortally wounded with arrows.”

Tom closed the book thoughtfully. “A young and beautiful soldier, being most generally represented undraped …” Now he knew. Clothilde. Wonderful Clothilde. Loving him without words, but saying it with her religion, with her food, her body, everything.

Until today he had thought he was kind of funny looking, a snotty kid with a flat face and a sassy expression. Saint Sebastian. The next time he saw those two beauties, Rudolph and Gretchen, he could look them straight in the eye. I have been compared by an older, experienced woman to Saint Sebastian, a young and beautiful soldier. For the first time since he had left home he was sorry he wasn’t going to see his brother and sister that night.

He got up and put the book away. He was about to leave the reference room when it occurred to him that Clothilde was a Saint’s name, too. He searched through the volumes and took out CASTIR to COLE.

Practiced now, he found what he was looking for quickly, although it wasn’t Clothilde, but “CLOTILDA, ST. (d. 544) daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.”

Tom thought of Clothilde sweating over the stove in the Jordache kitchen and washing Uncle Harold’s underwear and was saddened. Daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks. People didn’t think of the future when they named babies.

He read the rest of the paragraph, but Clotilda didn’t seem to have done all that much, converting her husband and building churches and stuff like that, and getting into trouble with her family. The book didn’t say what entrance requirements she had met to be made a saint.

Tom put the book away, eager to get home to Clothilde. But he stopped at the desk to say, “Thank you, ma’am,” to the lady. He was conscious of a sweet smell. There was a bowl of narcissus on the desk, spears of green, with white flowers, set in a bed of multi-colored pebbles. Then, speaking without thinking, he said, “Can I take out a card, please?”

The lady looked at him, surprised. “Have you ever had a card anywhere before?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. I never had the time to read before.”

The lady gave him a queer look, but pulled out a blank card and asked him his name, age, and address. She printed the information in a funny backward way on the card, stamped the date, and handed the card to him.

“Can I take out a book right away?” he asked.

“If you want,” she said.

He went back to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and took out SARS to SORC. He wanted to have a good look at that paragraph and try to memorize it. But when he stood at the desk to have it stamped, the lady shook her head impatiently. “Put that right back,” she said. “That’s not supposed to leave the Reference Room.”

He returned to the Reference Room and put the volume back. They keep yapping at you to read, he thought resentfully, and then when you finally say okay, I’ll read, they throw a rule in your face.

Still, walking out of the library, he patted his back pocket several times, to feel the nice stiffness of the card in there.

There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce for dinner and blueberry pie for dessert. He and Clothilde ate in the kitchen, not saying much.

When they had finished and Clothilde was clearing off the dishes, he went over to her and held her in his arms and said “Clotilda, daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.”

She looked at him, wide-eyed. “What’s that?”

“I wanted to find out where your name came from,” he said. “I went to the library. You’re a king’s daughter and a king’s wife.”

She looked at him a long time, her arms around his waist. Then she kissed him on the forehead, gratefully, as if he had brought home a present for her.

II

There were two fish in the straw creel already, speckled on the bed of wet fern. The stream was well stocked, as Boylan had said. There was a dam at one edge of the property where the stream entered the estate. From there the stream wound around the property to another dam with a wire fence to keep the fish in, at the other edge of the property. From there it fell in a series of cascades down toward the Hudson.

Rudolph wore old corduroys and a pair of fireman’s rubber boots, bought secondhand and too big for him, to make his way along the banks, with the thorns and the interlaced branches tearing at him. It was a long walk up the hill from the last stop on the local bus line, but it was worth it. His own private trout stream. He hadn’t seen Boylan or anybody else on the property any of the times he had come up there. The stream was never closer at any point to the main house than five hundred yards.

It had rained the night before and there was rain in the gray, late-afternoon air. The brook was a bit muddy and the trout were shy. But just slowly moving upstream, getting the fly lightly, lightly, where he wanted it, with nobody around, and the only sound the water tumbling over the rocks, was happiness enough. School began again in a week and he was making the most of the last days of the holiday.

He was near one of the stream’s two ornamental bridges, working the water, when he heard footsteps on gravel. A little path, overgrown with weeds, led to the bridge. He reeled in and waited. Boylan, hatless, dressed in a suede jacket, a paisley scarf, and jodhpur boots, came down the path and stopped on the bridge. “Hello, Mr. Boylan,” Rudolph said. He was a little uneasy, seeing the man, worried that perhaps Boylan hadn’t remembered inviting him to fish the stream, or had merely said it for politeness’ sake, not really meaning it.

“Any luck?” Boylan asked.

“There’re two in the basket.”

“Not bad for a day like this,” Boylan said, examining the muddied water. “With flies.”

“Do you fish?” Rudolph moved nearer the bridge, so that they wouldn’t have to talk so loud.

“I used to,” Boylan said. “Don’t let me interfere. I’m just taking a walk. I’ll be back this way. If you’re still here, perhaps you’ll do me the pleaseure of joining me in a drink up at the house.”

“Thank you,” Rudolph said. He didn’t say whether he’d wait or not.

With a wave, Boylan continued his walk.

Rudolph changed the fly, taking the new one from where it was stuck in the band of the battered old brown felt hat he used when it rained or when he went fishing. He made the knots precisely, losing no time. Perhaps one day he would be a surgeon, suturing incisions. “I think the patient will live, nurse.” How many years? Three in premed, four in medical school, two more as an intern. Who had that much money? Forget it.

On his third cast, the fly was taken. There was a thrash of water, dirty white against the brown current. It felt like a big one. He played it carefully, trying to keep the fish away from the rocks and brushwood anchored in the stream. He didn’t know how long it took him. Twice the fish was nearly his and twice it streaked away, taking line with it. The third time, he felt it tiring. He waded out with his net. The water rushed in over the top of his fireman’s boots, icy cold. It was only when he had the trout in the net that he was conscious that Boylan had come back and was on the bridge watching him.

“Bravo,” Boylan said, as Rudolph stepped back on shore, water squelching up from the top of his boots. “Very well done.”

Rudolph killed the trout and Boylan came around and watched him as he laid the fish with the two others in the creel. “I could never do that,” Boylan said. “Kill anything with my hands.” He was wearing gloves. “They look like miniature sharks,” he said, “don’t they?”

They looked like trout to Rudolph. “I’ve never seen a shark,” he said. He plucked some more fern and stuffed it in the creel, around the fish. His father would have trout for breakfast. His father liked trout. A return on his investment in the birthday rod and reel.

“Do you ever fish in the Hudson?” Boylan asked.

“Once in awhile. Sometimes, in season, a shad gets up this far.”

“When my father was a boy, he caught salmon in the Hudson,” Boylan said. “Can you imagine what the Hudson must have been like when the Indians were here? Before the Roosevelts. With bear and lynx on the shores and deer coming down to the banks.”

“I see a deer once in awhile,” Rudolph said. It had never occurred to him to wonder what the Hudson must have looked like with Iroquois canoes furrowing it.

“Bad for the crops, deer, bad for the crops,” Boylan said.

Rudolph would have liked to sit down and take his boots off and get the water out, but he knew his socks were darned, and he didn’t cherish the idea of displaying the thick patches of his mother’s handiwork to Boylan.

As though reading his mind, Boylan said, “I do believe you ought to empty the water out of those boots. That water must be cold.”

“It is.” Rudolph pulled off one boot, then another. Boylan didn’t seem to notice. He was looking around him at the overgrown woods that had been in his family’s possession since just after the Civil War. “You used to be able to see the house from here. There was no underbrush. Ten gardeners used to work this land, winter and summer. Now the only ones who come are the state fisheries people once a year. You can’t get anybody anymore. No sense to it, really, anyway.” He studied the massed foliage of the shrub oak and blossomless dogwood and alder. “Trash trees,” he said. “The forest primeval. Where only Man in vile. Who said that?”

“Longfellow,” Rudolph said. His socks were soaking wet, as he put his boots back on.

“You read a lot?” Boylan said.

“We had to learn it in school.” Rudolph refused to boast.

“I’m happy to see that our educational system does not neglect our native birds and their native wood-notes wild,” Boylan said.

Fancy talk again, Rudolph thought. Who’s he impressing? Rudolph didn’t much like Longfellow, himself, but who did Boylan think he was to be so superior? What poems have you written, brother?

“By the way, I believe there’s an old pair of hip-length waders up at the house. God knows when I bought them. If they fit you, you can have them. Why don’t you come up and try them on?”

Rudolph had planned to go right on home. It was a long walk to the bus and he had been invited for dinner at Julie’s house. After dinner they were to go to a movie. But waders … They cost over twenty dollars new. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

“Don’t call me sir,’” Boylan said. “I feel old enough as it is.”

They started toward the house, on the overgrown path. “Let me carry the creel,” Boylan said.

“It’s not heavy,” Rudolph said.

“Please,” said Boylan. “It will make me feel as though I’ve done something useful today.”

He’s sad, Rudolph thought with surprise. Why, he’s as sad as my mother. He handed the creel to Boylan, who slung it over his shoulder.

The house sat on the hill, huge, a useless fortress in Gothic stone, with ivy running wild all over it, defensive against knights in armor and dips in the Market.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Boylan murmured.

“Yes,” Rudolph said.

“You have a nice turn of phrase, my boy.” Boylan laughed. “Come on in.” He opened the massive oak front doors.

My sister has passed through here, Rudolph thought. I should turn back.

But he didn’t.

They went into a large, dark, marble-floored hall, with a big staircase winding up from it. An old man in a gray alpaca jacket and bow tie appeared immediately, as though merely by entering the house Boylan set up waves of pressure that drove servants into his presence.

“Good evening, Perkins,” Boylan said. “This is Mr. Jordache, a young friend of the family.”

Perkins nodded, the ghost of a bow. He looked English. He had a for King and Country face. He took Rudolph’s battered hat and laid it on a table along the wall, a wreath on a royal tomb.

“I wonder if you could be kind enough, Perkins, to go into the Armory,” Boylan said, “and hunt around a bit for my old pair of waders. Mr. Jordache is a fisherman.” He opened the creel. “As you can see.”

Perkins regarded the fish. “Very good size, sir.” Caterer to the Crown.

“Aren’t they?” The two men played an elaborate game with each other, the rules of which were unknown to Rudolph. “Take them into Cook,” Boylan said to Perkins. “Ask her if she can’t do something with them for dinner. You are staying to dinner, aren’t you, Rudolph?”

Rudolph hesitated. He’d miss his date with Julie. But he was fishing Boylan’s stream, and he was getting a pair of waders. “If I could make a telephone call,” he said.

“Of course,” Boylan said. Then to Perkins. “Tell Cook we’ll be two.” Axel Jordache would not eat trout for breakfast. “And while you’re at it,” Boylan said, “bring down a pair of nice, warm socks and a towel for Mr. Jordache. His feet are soaked. He doesn’t feel it now, being young, but as he creaks to the fireside forty years from now, he will feel the rheumatism in his joints, even as you and I, and will remember this afternoon.”

“Yes, sir,” Perkins said and went off to the kitchen or to the Armory, whatever that was.

“I think you’ll be more comfortable if you take your boots off here,” Boylan said. It was a polite way of hinting to Rudolph that he didn’t want him to leave a trail of wet footprints all over the house. Rudolph pulled off the boots. Silent reproach of darned socks.

“We’ll go in here,” Boylan pushed open two high carved wooden doors leading off the hallway. “I think Perkins has had the goodness to start a fire. This house is chilly on the best of days. At the very best it is always November in here. And on a day like this, when there’s rain in the air, one can ice-skate on one’s bones.”

One. One, Rudolph thought, as, bootless, he went through the door which Boylan held open for him. One can take a flying hump for oneself.

The room was the largest private room Rudolph had ever been in. It didn’t seem like November at all. Dark-red velvet curtains were drawn over the high windows, books were ranged on shelves on the walls, there were many paintings, portraits of highly colored ladies in nineteenth-century dresses and solid, oldish men with beards, and big cracked oils. Rudolph recognized the latter as views of the neighboring valley of the Hudson that must have been painted when it was all still farmland and forest. There was a grand piano with a lot of bound music albums strewn on it, and a table against a wall with bottles. There was a huge upholstered couch, some deep leather armchairs, and a library table heaped with magazines. An immense pale Persian carpet that looked hundreds of years old, was shabby and worn to Rudolph’s unknowing eye. Perkins had, indeed, started a fire in the wide fireplace. Three logs crackled on heavy andirons and six or seven lamps around the room gave forth a tempered evening light. Instantly, Rudolph decided that one day he would live in a room like this.

“It’s a wonderful room,” he said sincerely.

“Too big for a single man,” Boylan said. “One rattles around in it. I’m making us a whiskey.”

“Thank you,” Rudolph said. His sister ordering whiskey in the bar in the Port Philip House. She was in New York now, because of this man. Good or bad? She had a job, she had written. Acting. She would let him know when the play opened. She had a new address. She had moved from the Y.W.C.A. Don’t tell Ma or Pa. She was being paid sixty dollars a week.

“You wanted to phone,” Boylan said, pouring whiskey. “On the table near the window.”

Rudolph picked up the phone and waited for the operator. A beautiful blonde woman with an out-of-style hairdo smiled at him from a silver frame on the piano. “Number, please,” the operator said.

Rudolph gave her Julie’s number. He hoped that Julie wasn’t home, so that he could leave a message. Cowardice. Another mark against him in the Book of Himself.

But it was Julie’s voice that answered, after two rings.

“Julie …” he began.

“Rudy!” Her pleasure at hearing his voice was a rebuke. He wished Boylan were not in the room. “Julie,” he said, “about tonight. Something’s come up …”

“What’s come up?” Her voice was stony. It was amazing how a pretty young girl like that, who could sing like a lark, could also make her voice sound like a gate clanging, between one sentence and the next.

“I can’t explain at the moment, but …”

“Why can’t you explain at the moment?”

He looked across at Boylan’s back. “I just can’t,” he said. “Anyway, why can’t we make it for tomorrow night? The same picture’s playing and …”

“Go to hell.” She hung up.

He waited for a moment, shaken. How could a girl be so … so decisive? “That’s fine, Julie,” he said into the dead phone. “See you tomorrow. ’Bye.” It was not a bad performance. He hung up.

“Here’s your drink,” Boylan called to him across the room. He made no comment on the telephone call.

Rudolph went over to him and took the glass. “Cheers,” Boylan said as he drank.

Rudolph couldn’t bring himself to say Cheers, but the drink warmed him and even the taste wasn’t too bad.

“First one of the day,” Boylan said, rattling the ice in his glass. “Thank you for joining me. I’m not a solitary drinker and I needed it. I had a boring afternoon. Please do sit down.” He indicated one of the big armchairs near the fire. Rudolph sat in it and Boylan stood to one side of the hearth, leaning against the mantelpiece. There was a Chinese clay horse on the mantelpiece, stocky and warlike-looking. “I had insurance people here all afternoon,” Boylan went on. “About that silly fire I had here on VE Day. Night, rather. Did you see the cross burn?”

“I heard about it,” Rudolph said.

“Curious that they should have picked my place,” Boylan said. “I’m not Catholic and I’m certainly not black or Jewish. The Ku Klux Klan up in these parts must be singularly misinformed. The insurance people keep asking me if I have any particular enemies. Perhaps you’ve heard something in town?”

“No,” Rudolph said carefully.

“I’m sure I have. Enemies, I mean. But they don’t advertise,” Boylan said. “Too bad the cross wasn’t nearer the house. It would be a blessing if this mausoleum burnt down. You’re not drinking your drink.”

“I’m a slow drinker,” Rudolph said.

“My grandfather built for eternity,” Boylan said, “and I’m living through it.” He laughed. “Forgive me if I talk too much. There’re so few opportunities of talking to anybody who has the faintest notion of what you’re saying around here.”

“Why do you live here, then?” Rudolph asked, youthfully logical.

“I am doomed,” said Boylan, with mock melodrama. “I am tied to the rock and the bird is eating my liver. Do you know that, too?”

“Prometheus.”

“Imagine. Is that school, too?”

“Yes.” I know a lot of things, mister, Rudolph wanted to say.

“Beware families,” Boylan said. He had finished his drink fast and he left the mantelpiece to pour another for himself. “You pay for their hopes. Are you family-ridden, Rudolph? Are there ancestors you must not disappoint?”

“I have no ancestors,” Rudolph said.

“A true American,” said Boylan. “Ah, the waders.”

Perkins was in the room, carrying a hip-length pair of rubber boots and a towel, and a pair of light-blue wool socks. “Just put everything down, please, Perkins,” Boylan said.

“Very good, sir.” Perkins put the waders within Rudolph’s reach and draped the towel over the edge of the armchair. He put the socks on the end table next to the chair.

Rudolph stripped off his socks. Perkins took them from him, although Rudolph had intended to put them in his pocket. He had no idea what Perkins could do with a pair of soggy patched cotton socks in that house. He dried his feet with the towel. The towel smelled of lavender. Then he drew on the socks. They were of soft wool. He stood up and pulled on the waders. There was a triangular tear at the knee of one of them. Rudolph didn’t think it was polite to mention it. “They fit fine,” he said. Fifty dollars. At least fifty dollars, he thought. He felt like D’Artagnan in them.

“I think I bought them before the war,” Boylan said. “When my wife left me, I thought I’d take up fishing.”

Rudolph looked over quickly to see if Boylan was joking, but there was no glint of humor in the man’s eyes. “I tried a dog for company. A huge Irish wolfhound. Brutus. A lovely animal. I had him for five years. We were inordinately attached to each other. Then someone poisoned him. My surrogate.” Boylan laughed briefly. “Do you know what surrogate means, Rudolph?”

The school-teacherly questions were annoying. “Yes,” he said.

“Of course,” said Boylan. He didn’t ask Rudolph to define it. “Yes, I must have enemies. Or perhaps he was just chasing somebody’s chickens.”

Rudolph took off the boots and held them uncertainly. “Just leave them anywhere,” Boylan said. “Perkins will put them in the car when I take you home. Oh, dear.” He had seen the rip in the boot. “I’m afraid they’re torn.”

“It’s nothing. I’ll have it vulcanized,” Rudolph said.

“No. I’ll have Perkins attend to it. He loves mending things.” Boylan made it sound as though Rudolph would be depriving Perkins of one of his dearest pleasures if he insisted upon mending the boot himself. Boylan was back at the bar table. The drink wasn’t strong enough for him and he added whiskey to his glass. “Would you like to see the house, Rudolph?” He kept using the name.

“Yes,” Rudolph said. He was curious to find out what an armory was. The only armory he had ever seen was the one in Brooklyn where he had gone for a track meet.

“Good,” Boylan said. “It may help you when you become an ancestor yourself. You will have an idea of what to inflict upon your descendants. Take your drink along with you.”

In the hall there was a large bronze statue of a tigress clawing the back of a water buffalo. “Art,” Boylan said. “If I had been a patriot I would have had it melted down for cannon.” He opened two enormous doors, carved with cupids and garlands. “The ballroom,” he said. He pushed at a switch on the wall.

The room was almost as big as the high school gymnasium. A huge crystal chandelier, draped in sheets, hung from the two-story-high ceiling. Only a few of the bulbs in the chandelier were working and the light through the muffling sheets was dusty and feeble. There were dozens of sheet-draped chairs around the painted wooden walls. “My father said his mother once had seven hundred people here. The orchestra played waltzes. Twenty-five pieces. Quite a club date, eh, Rudolph? You still play at the Jack and Jill?”

“No,” Rudolph said, “our three weeks are finished.”

“Charming girl, that little … what’s her name?”

“Julie.”

“Oh, yes, Julie. She doesn’t like me, does she?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Tell her I think she’s charming, will you? For what it’s worth.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Seven hundred people,” Boylan said. He put his arms up as though he were holding a partner and made a surprising little swooping waltz step. The whiskey sloshed over from his glass onto his hand. “I was in great demand at debutantes’ parties.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at his hand. “Perhaps I’ll give a ball myself. On the eve of Waterloo. You know about that, too?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said. “Wellington’s officers. I saw Becky Sharp.” He had read Byron, too, but he refused to show off for Boylan.

“Have you read The Charterhouse of Parma?”

“No.”

“Try it, when you’re a little older,” Boylan said, with a last look around the dim ballroom. “Poor Stendhal, rotting in Civitavecchia, then dying unsung, with his mortgage on posterity.”

All right, Rudolph thought, so you’ve read a book. But he was flattered at the same time. It was a literary conversation.

“Port Philip is my Civitavecchia,” Boylan said. They were in the hall again and Boylan switched off the chandelier. He peered into the sheeted darkness. “The haunt of owls,” he said. He left the doors open and walked toward the rear of the house. “That’s the library,” he said. He opened a door briefly. It was an enormous room, lined with books. There was a smell of leather and dust; Boylan closed the door. “Bound sets. All of Voltaire. That sort of thing. Kipling.”

He opened another door. “The armory,” Boylan said, switching on the lights. “Everybody else would call it a gun room, but my grandfather was a large man.”

The room was in polished mahogany, with racks of shotguns and hunting rifles locked in behind glass. Trophies lined the walls, antlers, stuffed pheasants with long brilliant tails. The guns shone with oil. Everything was meticulously dusted. Mahogany cabinets with polished brass knobs made it look like a cabin on a ship.

“Do you shoot, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, sitting astride a leather chair, shaped like a saddle.

“No.” Rudolph’s hands itched to touch those beautiful guns.

“I’ll teach you, if you want,” Boylan said. “There’s an old skeet trap somewhere on the property. There’s nothing much left here, a rabbit or so, and once in a while a deer. During the season I hear the guns popping around the house. Poachers, but there’s nothing much to be done about it.” He gazed around the room. “Convenient for suicide,” he said. “Yes, this was game country. Quail, partridge, doves, deer. I haven’t fired a gun in years. Perhaps teaching you will reawaken my interest. A virile sport. Man, the hunter.” His tone showed what he thought of this description of himself. “When you’re making your way in the world it may help you one day to be known as a good gun. A boy I knew in college married into one of the biggest fortunes in North Carolina because of his keenness of eye and steadiness of hand. Cotton mills. The money, I mean. Reeves, his name was. A poor boy, but he had beautiful manners, and that helped. Would you like to be rich, Rudolph?”

“Yes.”

“What do you plan to do after college?”

“I don’t know,” Rudolph said. “It depends upon what comes along.”

“Let me suggest law,” Boylan said. “This is a lawyer’s country. And it’s becoming more so each year. Didn’t your sister tell me that you were the captain of the debating team at school?”

“I’m on the debating team.” The mention of his sister made him wary.

“Perhaps you and I will drive down to New York some afternoon and visit her,” Boylan said.

As they left the gun room, Boylan said, “I’ll have Perkins set up the skeet trap this week, and order some pigeons. I’ll give you a ring when it’s ready.”

“We don’t have a phone.”

“Oh, yes,” Boylan said. “I believe I once tried looking it up in the directory. I’ll drop you a line. I think I remember the address.” He looked vaguely up the marble staircase. “Nothing much up there to interest you,” he said. “Bedrooms. Mostly closed off. My mother’s upstairs sitting room. Nobody sits there anymore. If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll go up and change for dinner. Make yourself at home. Give yourself another drink.” He looked frail going up the sweeping staircase to the other floors, which would be of no interest to his young guest, except, of course, if his young guest were interested in seeing the bed upon which his sister had lost her virginity.

III

Rudolph went back into the living room and watched Perkins laying a table for dinner in front of the fire. Priestly hands on chalices and goblets. Westminster Abbey. Graves of the poets. A bottle of wine poked out of a silver ice bucket. A bottle of red wine, uncorked, was on a sideboard.

“I have made a telephone call, sir,” Perkins said. “The boots will be ready by Wednesday next.”

“Thank you, Mr. Perkins,” Rudolph said.

“Happy to be of service, sir.”

Two sirs in twenty seconds. Perkins returned to his sacraments.

Rudolph would have liked to pee, but he couldn’t mention anything like that to a man of Perkins’ stature. Perkins whispered out of the room, a Rolls-Royce of a man. Rudolph went to the window and parted the curtains a little and looked out. A fog swirled up from the valley in the darkness. He thought of his brother, Tom, at the window, peering in at a naked man with two glasses in his hands.

Rudolph sipped at his drink. Scotch got a grip on you. Maybe one day he would come back and buy this place, Perkins and all. This was America.

Boylan came back into the room. He had merely changed from the suede jacket to a corduroy one. He still was wearing the checked wool shirt and paisley scarf. “I didn’t take the time for a bath,” Boylan said. “I hope you don’t mind.” He went over to the bar. He had put some sort of cologne on himself. It gave a tang to the air around him.

“The dining room is chilling,” Boylan said, glancing at the table in front of the fire. He poured himself a fresh drink. “President Taft once ate there. A dinner for sixty notables.” Boylan walked over to the piano and sat down on the bench, putting his glass beside him. He played some random chords. “Do you play the violin, by any chance, Rudolph?”

“No.”

“Any other instrument besides the trumpet?”

“Not really. I can fake a tune on the piano.”

“Pity. We could have tried some duets. I don’t think I know of any duets for piano and trumpet.” Boylan began to play. Rudolph had to admit he played well. “Sometimes one gets tired of canned music,” he said. “Do you recognize this, Rudolph?” He continued playing.

“No.”

“Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat. Do you know how Schumann described Chopin’s music?”

“No.” Rudolph wished Boylan would just play and stop talking. He enjoyed the music.

“A cannon smothered in flowers,” Boylan said. “Something like that. I think it was Schumann. If you have to describe music, I suppose that’s as good a way as any.”

Perkins came in and said, “Dinner is served, sir.”

Boylan stopped playing and stood up. “Rudolph, do you went to pee or wash your hands or something?”

Finally. “Thank you, yes.”

“Perkins,” Boylan said, “show Mr. Jordache where it is.”

“This way, sir,” Perkins said.

As Perkins led him out of the room, Boylan sat down at the piano again and started playing from where he left off.

The bathroom near the front entrance was a large room with a stained-glass window, which gave the place a religious air. The toilet was like a throne. The faucets on the basin looked like gold. The strains of Chopin drifted in as Rudolph peed. He was sorry he had agreed to stay for dinner. He had the feeling that Boylan was trapping him. He was a complicated man, with his piano-playing, his waders and whiskey, his poetry and guns and his burning cross and poisoned dog. Rudolph didn’t feel equipped to handle him. He could understand now why Gretchen had felt she had to get away from him.

When he went out into the hall again, he had to fight down the impulse to sneak out through the front door. If he could have gotten his boots without anyone’s seeing him, he might have done it. But he couldn’t see himself walking down to the bus stop and getting on it in stockinged feet. Boylan’s socks.

He went back into the living room, enjoying Chopin. Boylan stopped playing and stood up and touched Rudolph’s elbow formally as he led him to the table, where Perkins was pouring the white wine. The trout lay in a deep copper dish, in a kind of broth. Rudolph was disappointed. He liked trout fried.

They sat down facing each other. There were three glasses in front of each place, and a lot of cutlery. Perkins transferred the trout to a silver platter, with small boiled potatoes on it. Perkins stood over Rudolph and Rudolph served himself cautiously, uneasy with all the implements and determined to seem at ease.

“Truit au bleu,” Boylan said. Rudolph was pleased to note that he had a bad accent, or at least different from Miss Lenaut’s. “Cook does it quite well.”

“Blue trout,” Rudolph said. “That’s the way they cook it in France.” He couldn’t help showing off on this one subject, after Boylan’s phoney accent.

“How do you know?” Boylan looked at him questioningly. “Have you ever been in France?”

“No. In school. We get a little French newspaper for students every week and there was an article about cooking.”

Boylan helped himself generously. He had a good appetite. “Tu parles français?”

Rudolph made a note of the tu. In an old French grammar he had once looked through, the student was instructed that the second-person singular was to be used for servants, children, non-commissioned soldiers, and social inferiors.

“Un petit peu.”

“Moi, j’étais en France quand j’étais jeune,” Boylan said, the accept rasping. “Avec mes parents. J’ai veçu mon premier amour à Paris. Quand c’était? Mille neuf cent vingt-huit, vingt-neuf. Comment s’appelait-elle? Anne? Annette? Elle était délicieuse.”

She might have been delicious, Boylan’s first love, Rudolph thought, tasting the profound joys of snobbery, but she sure didn’t work on his accent.

“Tu as l’envie d’y aller? En France?” Boylan asked, testing him. He had said he could speak a little French and Boylan wasn’t going to let him get away with it unchallenged.

“J’irai, je suis sûr,” Rudolph said, remembering just how Miss Lenaut would have said it. He was a good mimic. “Peut-être après l’Université. Quad le pays sera rétabli.”

“Good God,” Boylan said, “you speak like a Frenchman.”

“I had a good teacher.” Last bouquet for poor Miss Lenaut, French cunt.

“Maybe you ought to try for the Foreign Service,” Boylan said. “We could use some bright young men. But be careful to marry a rich wife first. The pay is dreadful.” He sipped at the wine. “I thought I wanted to live there. In Paris. My family thought differently. Is my accent rusty?”

“Awful,” Rudolph said.

Boylan laughed. “The honesty of youth.” He grew more serious. “Or maybe it’s a family characteristic. Your sister matches you.”

They ate in silence for awhile, Rudolph carefully watching how Boylan used his knife and fork. A good gun, with beautiful manners.

Perkins took away the fish dishes and served some chops and baked potatoes and green peas. Rudolph wished he could send his mother up for some lessons in the kitchen here. Perkins presided over the red wine, rather than poured it. Rudolph wondered what Perkins knew about Gretchen. Everything, probably. Who made the bed in the room upstairs?

“Has she found a job yet?” Boylan asked, as though there had been no interruption in the conversation. “She told me she intended to be an actress.”

“I don’t know,” Rudolph said, keeping all information to himself. “I haven’t heard from her recently.”

“Do you think she’ll be successful?” Boylan asked. “Have you ever seen her act?”

“Once. Only in a school play.” Shakespeare battered and reeling, in homemade costumes. The seven ages of man. The boy who played Jacques nervously pushing at his beard, to make sure it was still pasted on. Gretchen looking strange and beautiful and not at all like a young man in her tights, but saying the words clearly.

“Does she have talent?” Boylan asked.

“I think so. She has something. Whenever she came onto the stage everybody stopped coughing.”

Boylan laughed. Rudolph realized that he had sounded like a kid. “What I mean …” He tried to regain lost ground. “Is, well, you could feel the audience focusing on her, being for her, in a way that they weren’t for any of the other actors. I guess that’s talent.”

“It certainly is.” Boylan nodded. “She’s an extraordinarily beautiful girl. I don’t suppose a brother would notice that.”

“Oh, I noticed it,” Rudolph said.

“Did you?” Boylan said absently. He no longer seemed interested. He waved for Perkins to take the dishes away and got up and went over to a big phonograph and put on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, very loud, so that they didn’t talk for the rest of the meal. Five kinds of cheese on a wooden platter. Salad. A plum tart. No wonder Boylan had a paunch.

Rudolph looked surreptitiously at his watch. If he could get out of there early enough maybe he could catch Julie. It would be too late for the movies, but maybe he could make up to her, anyway, for standing her up.

After dinner, Boylan had a brandy with the demitasse, and put on a symphony. Rudolph was tired from the long afternoon’s fishing. The two glasses of wine he had drunk made him feel blurred and sleepy. The loud music was crushing him. Boylan was polite, but distant. Rudolph had the feeling the man was disappointed in him because he hadn’t opened up about Gretchen.

Boylan sat sunk in a deep chair, his eyes almost closed, concentrating on the music, occasionally taking a sip of the brandy. He might just as well have been alone, Rudolph thought resentfully, or with his Irish wolfhound. They probably had some lively evenings here together, before the neighbors put out the poison. Maybe he’s getting ready to offer me a position as his dog.

There was a scratch on the record now and Boylan made an irritated gesture as the clicking recurred. He stood up and turned off the machine. “I’m sorry about that,” he said to Rudolph. “The revenge of the machine age on Schumann. Shall I take you on down to town now?”

“Thank you.” Rudolph stood up, gratefully.

Boylan looked down at Rudolph’s feet. “Oh,” he said. “You can’t go like that, can you?”

“If you’ll give me my boots …”

“I’m sure they’re still soaking wet inside,” Boylan said. “Wait here a minute. I’ll find something for you.” He went out of the room and up the stairway.

Rudolph took a long look around the room. How good it was to be rich. He wondered if he ever was going to see the room again. Thomas had seen it once, although he had not been invited in. He came down into the living-room bare-assed, with his thing hanging down to his knees, he’s a regular horse, and made two whiskies and called up the stairs, “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”

Now that he had had a chance to listen to Boylan, Rudolph recognized that Tom’s caricature of the man’s voice had been an accurate one. He had caught the educated flattening out on the “there,” and the curious way he had of making questions not sound like questions.

Rudolph shook his head. What could Gretchen have been thinking of? “I liked it.” He heard her voice again in the Port Philip House bar. “I liked it better than anything that had ever happened to me.”

He walked restlessly around the room. He looked at the album of the symphony that Boylan had cut off. Schumann’s Third, the Rhenish Symphony. Well, at least he had learned something today. He would recognize it when he heard it again. He picked up a silver cigarette lighter a foot long and examined it. There was a monogram on it. T.B. Purposely expensive gadgets for doing things that cost nothing to the poor. He flicked it open. It spouted flame. The burning cross. Enemies. He heard Boylan’s footsteps on the marble floor in the hall and hurriedly doused the flame and put the lighter down.

Boylan came into the room. He was carrying a little overnight bag and a pair of mahogany-colored moccasins. “Try these on, Rudolph,” he said.

The moccasins were old but beautifully polished, with thick soles and leather tassels. They fit Rudolph perfectly. “Ah,” Boylan said, “you have narrow feet, too.” One aristocrat to another.

“I’ll bring them back in a day or two,” Rudolph said, as they started out.

“Don’t bother,” Boylan said. “They’re old as the hills. I never wear them.”

Rudolph’s rod, neatly folded, and the creel and net were on the back seat of the Buick. The fireman’s boots, still damp inside, were on the floor behind the front seat. Boylan swung the overnight bag onto the back seat and they got into the car. Rudolph had retrieved the old felt hat from the table in the hallway, but didn’t have the courage to put it on with Perkins watching him. Boylan turned on the radio in the car, jazz from New York, so they didn’t talk all the way to Vanderhoff Street. When Boylan stopped the Buick in front of the bakery, he turned the radio off.

“Here we are,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Rudolph said. “For everything.”

“Thank you, Rudolph,” Boylan said. “It’s been a refreshing day.” As Rudolph put his hand on the handle of the car door, Boylan reached out and held his arm lightly.

“Ah, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”

“Of course.”

“In that bag back there …” Boylan twisted a little, holding onto the wheel to indicate the presence of the leather overnight bag behind him. “… there’s something I’d particularly like your sister to have. Do you think you could get it to her?”

“Well,” Rudolph said, “I don’t know when I’ll be seeing her.”

“There’s no hurry,” Boylan said. “It’s something I know she wants, but it’s not pressing.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said. It wasn’t like giving away Gretchen’s address, or anything like that. “Sure. When I happen to see her.”

“That’s very good of you, Rudolph.” He looked at his watch. “It’s not very late. Would you like to come and have a drink with me someplace? I don’t fancy going back to that dreary house alone for the moment.”

“I have to get up awfully early in the morning,” Rudolph said. He wanted to be by himself now, to sort out his impressions of Boylan, to assess the dangers and the possible advantages in knowing the man. He didn’t want to be loaded with any new impressions, Boylan drunk, Boylan with strangers at a bar, Boylan perhaps flirting with a woman, or making a pass at a sailor. The idea was sudden. Boylan, the fairy? Making a pass at him. The delicate hands on the piano, the gifts, the clothes that were like costumes, the unobtrusive touching.

“What’s early?” Boylan asked.

“Five,” Rudolph said.

“Good God!” Boylan said. “What in the world does anyone do up at five o’clock in the morning?”

“I deliver rolls on a bicycle for my father,” Rudolph said.

“I see,” Boylan said. “I suppose somebody has to deliver rolls.” He laughed. “You just don’t seem like a roll-deliverer.”

“It’s not my main function in life,” Rudolph said.

“What is your main function in life, Rudolph?” Absently, Boylan switched off the headlights. It was dark in the car because they were directly under a lamppost. There was no light from the cellar. His father hadn’t begun his night’s work. If his father were asked, would he say that his main function in life was baking rolls?

“I don’t know yet,” Rudolph said. Then aggressively, “What’s yours?”

“I don’t know,” Boylan said. “Yet. Have you any idea?”

“No.” The man was split into a million different parts. Rudolph felt that if he were older he might be able to assemble Boylan into one coherent pattern.

“A pity,” Boylan said. “I thought perhaps the clear eyes of youth would see things in me I am incapable of seeing in myself.”

“How old are you, anyway?” Rudolph asked. Boylan spoke so much of the past that he seemed to stretch far, far back, to the Indians, to President Taft, to a greener geography. It occurred to Rudolph that Boylan was not old so much as old-fashioned.

“What would you guess, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, his tone light.

“I don’t know.” Rudolph hesitated. Everybody over thirty-five seemed almost the same age to Rudolph, except for real tottering graybeards, hunching along on canes. He was never surprised when he read in the papers that somebody thirty-five had died. “Fifty?”

Boylan laughed. “Your sister was kinder,” he said. “Much kinder.”

Everything comes back to Gretchen, Rudolph thought. He just can’t stop talking about her. “Well,” Rudolph said, “how old are you?”

“Forty,” Boylan said. “Just turned forty. With all my life still ahead of me, alas,” he said ironically.

You have to be damn sure of yourself, Rudolph thought, to use a word like “alas.”

“What do you think you’ll be like when you’re forty, Rudolph?” Boylan asked lightly. “Like me?”

“No,” Rudolph said.

“Wise young man. You wouldn’t want to be like me, I take it?”

“No.” He’d asked for it and he was going to get it.

“Why not? Do you disapprove of me?”

“A little,” Rudolph said. “But that’s not why.”

“What’s the reason you don’t want to be like me?”

“I’d like to have a room like yours,” Rudolph said. “I’d like to have money like you and books like you and a car like you. I’d like to be able to talk like you—some of the time, anyway—and know as much as you and go to Europe like you …”

“But …”

“You’re lonesome,” Rudolph said. “You’re sad.”

“And when you’re forty you do not intend to be lonesome and sad?”

“No.”

“You will have a loving, beautiful wife,” Boylan said, sounding like someone reciting a fairy story for children, “waiting at the station each evening to drive you home after your day’s work in the city, and handsome, bright children who will love you and whom you will see off to the next war, and …”

“I don’t expect to marry,” Rudolph said.

“Ah,” Boylan said. “You have studied the institution. I was different. I expected to marry. And I married. I expected to fill that echoing castle on the hill with the laughter of little children. As you may have noticed, I am not married and there is very little laughter of any kind in that house. Still, it isn’t too late …” He took out a cigarette from his gold case and used his lighter. In its light his hair looked gray, his face deeply lined with shadows. “Did your sister tell you I asked her to marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you why she wouldn’t?”

“No.”

“Did she tell you she was my mistress?”

The word seemed dirty to Rudolph. If Boylan had said, “Did she tell you that I fucked her?” it would have made him resent Boylan less. It would have made her seem less like another of Theodore Boylan’s possessions. “Yes,” he said. “She told me.”

“Do you disapprove?” Boylan’s tone was harsh.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You’re too old for her.”

“That’s my loss,” Boylan said. “Not hers. When you see her, will you tell her the offer still holds?”

“No.”

Boylan seemed not to have noticed the no. “Tell her,” he said, “that I cannot bear to lie in my bed without her. I’ll tell you a secret, Rudolph. I wasn’t at Jack and Jill’s that night by accident. I never go to places like that, as you can well imagine. I made it a point to find out where you were playing. I followed you out to my car. I was looking for Gretchen. Maybe I had some foolish notion I could find something of the sister in the brother.”

“I’d better go to sleep,” Rudolph said cruelly. He opened the car door and got out. He reached into the back for his rod and creel and net and the fireman’s boots. He put on the ridiculous felt hat. Boylan sat smoking, squinting through the smoke at the straight line of lights of Vanderhoff Street, like a lesson in drawing class in perspective. Parallel to infinity, where lines meet or do not meet, as the case may be.

“Don’t forget the bag, please,” Boylan said.

Rudolph took the bag. It was very light, as though there were nothing in it. Some new scientific infernal machine.

“Thank you for your delightful visit,” Boylan said. “I’m afraid I got all the best of it. Just for the price of an old pair of torn waders that I was never going to use anymore anyway. I’ll let you know when the skeet trap is up. Roll on, young unmarried roll-deliverer. I’ll think of you at five A.M.” He started the motor of the car and drove off abruptly.

Rudolph watched the red tail lights speeding off toward infinity, twin signals saying Stop! then unlocked the door next to the bakery and lugged all the stuff into the hall. He turned on the light and looked at the bag. The lock was open. The key, on a leather thong, hung from the handle. He opened the bag, hoping that his mother hadn’t heard him come in.

There was a bright-red dress lying in a careless heap in the bag. Rudolph picked it up and studied it. It was lacy and cut low in front, he could tell that. He tried to imagine his sister wearing it, showing practically everything.

“Rudolph?” It was his mother’s voice, from above, querulous.

“Yes, Ma.” He turned the light out hurriedly. “I’ll be right back. I forgot to get the evening papers.” He picked up the bag and got out of the hallway before his mother could come down. He didn’t know whom he was protecting, himself or Gretchen or his mother.

He hurried over to Buddy Westerman’s, on the next block. Luckily, there were still lights on. The Westerman house was big and old. Buddy’s mother let the River Five practice in the basement. Rudolph whistled. Buddy’s mother was a jolly, easy-going woman who liked boys and served them all milk and cake after the practice sessions, but he didn’t want to have to talk to her tonight. He took the key of the bag off the handle and locked the bag and put the key in his pocket.

After awhile, Buddy came out. “Hey,” he said, “what’s up? This time of night?”

“Listen, Buddy,” Rudolph said, “will you hold onto this for me for a couple of days?” He thrust the bag at Buddy. “It’s a present for Julie and I don’t want my old lady to see it.” Inspired lie. Everybody knew what misers the Jordaches were. Buddy also knew that Mrs. Jordache didn’t like the idea of Rudolph going around with girls.

“Okay,” Buddy said carelessly. He took the bag.

“I’ll do as much for you some day,” Rudolph said.

“Just don’t play flat on ‘Stardust.’” Buddy was the best musician in the band and that gave him the right to say things like that. “Any other little thing?”

“No.”

“By the way,” Buddy said, “I saw Julie tonight. I was passing the movie. She was going in. With a guy I didn’t know. An old guy. Twenty-two, at least. I asked her where you were and she said she didn’t know and didn’t care.”

“Pal,” Rudolph said.

“No use living your life in total ignorance,” Buddy said. “See you tomorrow.” He went in, carrying the bag.

Rudolph went down to the Ace Diner to buy the evening paper. He sat at the counter reading the sports page while drinking a glass of milk and eating two doughnuts. The Giants had won that afternoon. Other than that, Rudolph couldn’t decide whether it had been a good day or a bad day.

IV

Thomas kissed Clothilde good night. She was lying under the covers, with her hair spread on the pillow. She had turned on the lamp so that he could find his way out without bumping into anything. There was the soft glow of a smile as she touched his cheek. He opened the door without a sound and closed it behind him. The crack of light under the door disappeared as Clothilde switched off the lamp.

He went through the kitchen and out into the hallway and mounted the dark steps carefully, carrying his sweater. There was no sound from Uncle Harold’s and Tante Elsa’s bedroom. Usually, there was snoring that shook the house. Uncle Harold must be sleeping on his side tonight. Nobody had died in Saratoga. Uncle Harold had lost three pounds, drinking the waters.

Thomas climbed the narrow steps to the attic and opened the door to his room and put on the light. Uncle Harold was sitting there in striped pajamas, on the bed.

Uncle Harold smiled at him peculiarly, blinking in the light. Four of his front upper teeth were missing. He had a bridge that he took out at night.

“Good evening, Tommy,” Uncle Harold said. His speech was gappy, without the bridge.

“Hi, Uncle Harold,” Thomas said. He was conscious that his hair was mussed and that he smelled of Clothilde. He didn’t know what Uncle Harold was doing there. It was the first time he had come to the room. Thomas knew he had to be careful about what he said and how he said it.

“It is quite late, isn’t it, Tommy?” Uncle Harold said. He was keeping his voice down.

“Is it?” Thomas said. “I haven’t looked at a clock.” He stood near the door, away from Uncle Harold. The room was bare. He had few possessions. A book from the library lay on the dresser. Riders of the Purple Sage. The lady at the library had said he would like it. Uncle Harold filled the little room in his striped pajamas, making the bed sag in the middle, where he sat on it.

“It is nearly one o’clock,” Uncle Harold said. He sprayed because of the missing teeth. “For a growing boy who has to get up early and do a day’s work. A growing boy needs his sleep, Tommy.”

“I didn’t realize how late it was,” Thomas said.

“What amusements have you found to keep a young boy out till one o’clock in the morning, Tommy?”

“I was just wandering around town.”

“The bright lights,” Uncle Harold said. “The bright lights of Elysium, Ohio.”

Thomas faked a yawn and stretched. He threw his sweater over the one chair of the room. “I’m sleepy now,” he said. “I better get to bed fast.”

“Tommy,” Uncle Harold said, in that wet whisper, “you have a good home here, hey?”

“Sure.”

“You eat good here, just like the family, hey?”

“I eat all right.”

“You have a good home, a good roof over your head.” The “roof” came out “woof,” through the gap.

“I’m not complaining.” Thomas kept his voice low. No sense in waking Tante Elsa and getting her in on the conference.

“You live in a nice clean house,” Uncle Harold persisted. “Everybody treats you like a member of the family. You have your own personal bicycle.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“You have a good job. You are paid a man’s wages. You are learning a trade. There will be unemployment now, millions of men coming home, but for the mechanic, there is always a job. Am I mistaken?”

“I can take care of myself,” Thomas said.

“You can take care of yourself,” Uncle Harold said. “I hope so. You are my flesh and blood. I took you in without a question, didn’t I, when your father called? You were in trouble, Tommy, in Port Philip, weren’t you, and Uncle Harold asked no questions, he and Tante Elsa took you in.”

“There was a little fuss back home,” Thomas said. “Nothing serious.”

“I ask no questions.” Magnanimously, Uncle Harold waved away all thought of interrogation. His pajamas opened. There was a view of plump, pink rolls of beer-and-sausage belly over the drawstrings of the pajama pants. “In return for this, what do I ask? Impossibilities? Gratitude? No. A little thing. That a young boy should behave himself properly, that he should be in bed at a reasonable hour. His own bed, Tommy.”

Oh, that’s it, Thomas thought. The sonofabitch knows. He didn’t say anything.

“This is a clean house, Tommy,” Uncle Harold said. “The family is respected. Your aunt is received in the best homes. You would be surprised if I told you what my credit is at the bank. I have been approached to run for the State Legislature in Columbus on the Republican ticket, even though I have not been born in this country. My two daughters have clothes … I challenge any two young ladies to dress better. They are model students. Ask me one day to show you their report cards, what their teachers say about them. They go to Sunday school every Sunday. I drive them myself. Pure young souls, sleeping like angels, right under this very room, Tommy.”

“I get the picture,” Thomas said. Let the old idiot get it over with.

“You were not wandering around town tonight till one o’clock, Tommy,” Uncle Harold said sorrowfully. “I know where you were. I was thirsty. I wanted a bottle of beer from the Frigidaire. I heard noises. Tommy, I am ashamed even to mention it. A boy your age, in the same house with my two daughters.”

“So what?” Thomas said sullenly. The idea of Uncle Harold outside Clothilde’s door nauseated him.

“So what? Is that all you have to say, Tommy? So what?”

“What do you want me to say?” He would have liked to be able to say that he loved Clothilde, that it was the best thing that had ever happened to him in his whole rotten life, that she loved him, that if he were older he would take her away from Uncle Harold’s clean, goddamn house, from his respected family, from his model, pale-blonde daughters. But, of course, he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t say anything. His tongue strangled him.

“I want you to say that you are sorry for the filthy thing that ignorant, scheming peasant has done to you,” Uncle Harold whispered. “I want you to promise you will never touch her again. In this house or anywhere else.”

“I’m not promising anything,” Thomas said.

“I’m being kind,” Uncle Harold said. “I am being delicate. I am speaking quietly, like a reasonable and forgiving man, Tommy. I do not want to make a scandal. I don’t want your Aunt Elsa to know her house has been dirtied, that her children have been exposed to … Ach, I can’t find the words, Tommy.”

“I’m not promising anything,” Thomas said.

“Okay. You are not promising anything,” Uncle Harold said. “You don’t have to promise anything. When I leave this room, I am going down to the room behind the kitchen. She will promise plenty, I assure you.”

“That’s what you think.” Even to his own ears, it sounded hollow, childish.

“That’s what I know, Tommy,” Uncle Harold whispered. “She will promise anything. She’s in trouble. If I fire her, where will she go? Back to her drunken husband in Canada who’s been looking for her for two years so he can beat her to death?”

“There’re plenty of jobs. She doesn’t have to go to Canada.”

“You think so. The authority on International Law,” Uncle Harold said. “You think it’s as easy as that. You think I won’t go to the police.”

“What’ve the police got to do with it?”

“You are a child, Tommy,” Uncle Harold said. “You put it up in between a married woman’s legs like a grown man, but you have the mind of a child. She has corrupted the morals of a minor, Tommy. You are the minor. Sixteen years old. That is a crime, Tommy. A serious crime. This is a civilized country. Children are protected in this country. Even if they didn’t put her in jail, they would deport her, an undesirable alien who corrupts the morals of minors. She is not a citizen. Back to Canada she would go. It would be in the papers. Her husband would be waiting for her. Oh, yes,” Uncle Harold said. “She will promise.” He stood up. “I am sorry for you, Tommy. It is not your fault. It is in your blood. Your father was a whoremaster. I was ashamed to say hello to him in the street. And your mother, for your information, was a bastard. She was raised by the nuns. Ask her some day who her father was. Or even her mother. Get some sleep, Tommy.” He patted him comfortingly on the shoulder. “I like you. I would like to see you grow up into a good man. A credit to the family. I am doing what is best for you. Go—get some sleep.”

Uncle Harold padded out of the room, barefooted, beery mastodon in the shapeless striped pajamas, all weapons on his side.

Thomas put out the light. He lay face down on the bed. He punched the pillow, once, with all his strength.

The next morning, he went down early, to try to talk to Clothilde before breakfast. But Uncle Harold was there, at the dining-room table, reading the newspaper.

“Good morning, Tommy,” he said, looking up briefly. His teeth were back in. He sipped noisily at his coffee.

Clothilde came in with Thomas’s orange juice. She didn’t look at him. Her face was dark and closed. Uncle Harold didn’t look at Clothilde. “It is terrible what is happening in Germany,” he said. “They are raping women in Berlin. The Russians. They have been waiting for this for a hundred years. People are living in cellars. If I hadn’t met your Tante Elsa and come to this country when I was a young man, God knows where I would be now.”

Clothilde came in with Thomas’s bacon and eggs. He searched her face for a sign. There was no sign.

When he finished breakfast, Thomas stood up. He would have to get back later in the day, when the house was empty. Uncle Harold looked up from his paper. “Tell Coyne, I’ll be in at nine-thirty,” Uncle Harold said. “I have to go to the bank. And tell him I promised Mr. Duncan’s car by noon, washed.”

Thomas nodded and went out of the room as the two daughters came down, fat and pale. “My angels,” he heard Uncle Harold say as they went into the dining room and kissed him good morning.

He had his chance at four o’clock that afternoon. It was the daughters’ dentist day for their braces and Tante Elsa always took them, in the second car. Uncle Harold, he knew, was down at the showroom. Clothilde should be alone.

“I’ll be back in a half-hour,” he told Coyne. “I got to see somebody.”

Coyne wasn’t pleased, but screw him.

Clothilde was watering the lawn when he pedaled up. It was a sunny day and rainbows shimmered in the spray from the hose. The lawn wasn’t a big one and was shadowed by a linden tree. Clothilde was in a white uniform. Tante Elsa liked her maids to look like nurses. It was an advertisement of cleanliness. You could eat off the floor in my house.

Clothilde looked at Thomas once as he got off his bicycle, then continued watering the lawn.

“Clothilde,” Thomas said, “come inside. I have to talk to you.”

“I’m watering the lawn.” She turned the nozzle and the spray concentrated down to a stream, with which she soaked a bed of petunias along the front of the house.

“Look at me,” he said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” She kept turned away from him.

“Did he come down to your room last night?” Thomas said. “My uncle?”

“So?”

“Did you let him in?”

“It’s his house,” Clothilde said. Her voice was sullen.

“Did you promise him anything?” He knew he sounded shrill, but he couldn’t help himself.

“What difference does it make? Go back to work. People will see us.”

“Did you promise him anything?”

“I said I wouldn’t see you alone anymore,” she said flatly.

“You didn’t mean it, though,” Thomas pleaded.

“I meant it.” She fiddled with the nozzle again. The wedding ring on her finger gleamed. “We are over.”

“No, we’re not!” He wanted to grab her and shake her. “Get the hell out of this house. Get another job. I’ll move away and …”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” she said sharply. “He told you about my crime.” She mocked the word. “He will have me deported. We are not Romeo and Juliet. We are a schoolboy and a cook. Go back to work.”

“Couldn’t you say anything to him?” Thomas was desperate. He was afraid he was going to break down and cry, right there on the lawn, right in front of Clothilde.

“There is nothing to say. He is a wild man,” Clothilde said. “He is jealous. When a man is jealous you might as well talk to a wall, a tree.”

“Jealous?” Thomas said. “What do you mean?”

“He has been trying to get into my bed for two years,” Clothilde said calmly. “He comes down at night when his wife is asleep and scratches on the door like a kitten.”

“That fat bastard,” Thomas said. “I’ll be there waiting for him the next time.”

“No you won’t,” Clothilde said. “He is going to come in the next time. You might as well know.”

“You’re going to let him?”

“I’m a servant,” she said. “I lead the life of a servant. I do not want to lose my job or go to jail or go back to Canada. Forget it,” she said. “Alles kaput. It was nice for two weeks. You’re a nice boy. I’m sorry I got you into trouble.”

“All right, all right,” he shouted. “I’m never going to touch another woman again as long as—”

He was too choked to say anything more and ran over to his bicycle and rode blindly away, leaving Clothilde watering the roses. He didn’t turn around. So he didn’t see the tears on the dark, despairing face.

St. Sebastian, well supplied with arrows, he headed for the garage. The rods would come later.

I

When she came out of the Eighth Street subway station she stopped for six bottles of beer and then went into the cleaner’s for Willie’s suit. It was dusk, the early dusk of November, and the air was nippy. People were wearing coats and moving quickly. A girl in slacks and a trench coat slouched in front of her, her hair covered by a scarf. The girl looked as though she had just gotten out of bed, although it was after five o’clock in the afternoon. In Greenwich Village, people might get out of bed at any time of the day or night. It was one of the charms of the neighborhood, like the fact that most of the population was young. Sometimes, when she walked through the neighborhood, among the young, she thought, “I am in my native country.”

The girl in the trench coat went into Corcoran’s Bar and Grill. Gretchen knew it well. She was known in a dozen bars of the neighborhood. A good deal of her life was spent in bars now.

She hurried toward Eleventh Street, the beer bottles heavy in the big brown-paper sack and Willie’s suit carefully folded over her arm. She hoped Willie was home. You never could know when he’d be there. She had just come from an understudy rehearsal uptown and she had to go back for the eight o’clock call. Nichols and the director had her read for the understudy’s job and had told her that she had talent. The play was a moderate success. It would almost certainly last till June. She walked across the stage in a bathing suit three times a night. The audience laughed each time, but the laughter was nervous. The author had been furious the first time he had heard the laughter, at a preview, and had wanted to cut her out of the play, but Nichols and the director had persuaded him that the laughter was good for the play. She received some peculiar letters backstage and telegrams asking her if she wanted to go out to supper and twice there were roses. She never answered anybody. Willie was always there in her dressing room after the show to watch her wash off the body make-up and get into her street clothes. When he wanted to tease her, he said, “Oh, God, why did I ever get married? I am quoting.”

His divorce was dragging along, he said.

She went into the hallway of the walkup and looked to see if there was any mail in the box. Abbott–Jordache. She had printed the little card herself.

She opened the downstairs door with her key and ran up the three flights of stairs. She was always in a hurry, once she got into the house. She opened the door of the apartment, a little breathless from the stairs. The door opened directly on the living room. “Willie …” she was calling. There were only two small rooms, so there was no real reason to call out. She found excuses to say his name.

Rudolph was sitting on the tattered couch, a glass of beer in his hand.

“Oh,” Gretchen said.

Rudolph stood up. “Hello, Gretchen,” he said. He put down his glass and kissed her cheek, over the bag full of beer bottles and Willie’s suit.

“Rudy,” she said, getting rid of the bag and dropping the suit over the back of a chair, “what’re you doing here?”

“I rang the bell,” Rudolph said, “and your friend let me in.”

“Your friend is getting dressed,” Willie called from the next room. He often sat around in his bathrobe all day. The apartment was so small that you heard everything that was said in either of the rooms. A little kitchenette was concealed by a screen from the living room. “I’ll be right out,” Willie said from the bedroom. “I blow you a kiss.”

“I’m so glad to see you.” Gretchen took off her coat and hugged Rudolph hard. She stepped back to look at him. When she had been seeing him every day she hadn’t realized how handsome he was, dark, straight, a button-down blue shirt and the blazer she had given him for his birthday. Those sad, clear, greenish eyes.

“Is it possible you’ve grown? In just a couple of months?”

“Almost six months,” he said. Was there an accusation there?

“Come on,” she said. “Sit down.” She pulled him down on the couch next to her. There was a little leather overnight bag near the door. It didn’t belong to Willie or her, but she had a feeling that she had seen it someplace before.

“Tell me about everything,” she said. “What’s happening at home? Oh, God, it’s good to see you, Rudy.” Still, her voice didn’t sound completely natural to her. If she had known he was coming she’d have warned him about Willie. After all, he was only seventeen, Rudolph, and just to come barging in innocently and discover that his sister was living with a man … Abbott–Jordache.

“Nothing much is happening at home,” Rudolph said. If he was embarrassed, he didn’t show it. She could take lessons in control from Rudy. He sipped at his beer. “I am bearing the brunt of everybody’s love, now that I’m the only one left.”

Gretchen laughed. It was silly to worry. She hadn’t realized how grown-up he was.

“How’s Mom?” Gretchen asked.

“Still reading Gone With the Wind,” Rudolph said. “She’s been sick. She says the doctor says it’s phlebitis.”

Messages of cheer and comfort from the family hearth, Gretchen thought. “Who takes care of the store?” she asked.

“A Mrs. Cudahy,” Rudolph said. “A widow. She costs thirty dollars a week.”

“Pa must love that,” Gretchen said.

“He isn’t too happy.”

“How is he?”

“To tell the truth,” Rudolph said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s actually sicker than Ma. He hasn’t been out in the yard to hit the bag in months and I don’t think he’s been out on the river since you left.”

“What is it?” Gretchen was surprised to find out that she was really concerned.

“I don’t know,” Rudolph said. “He just moves that way. You know Pa. He never says anything.”

“Do they talk about me?” Gretchen asked carefully..

“Not a word.”

“And Thomas?”

“Gone and forgotten,” Rudolph said. “I never did find out what happened. He never writes, of course.”

“Our family,” Gretchen said. They sat in silence, honoring the clan Jordache for a moment. “Well …” Gretchen shook herself. “How do you like our place?” She gestured to indicate the apartment, which she and Willie had rented furnished. The furniture looked as though it had come out of somebody’s attic, but Gretchen had bought some plants and tacked some prints and travel posters on the walls. An Indian in a sombrero in front of a pueblo. Visit New Mexico.

“It’s very nice,” Rudolph said gravely.

“It’s awfully tacky,” Gretchen said. “But it has one supreme advantage. It’s not Port Philip.”

“I understand what you mean,” Rudolph said. She wished he didn’t look so serious. She wondered what had brought him down to see her.

“How’s that pretty girl,” she asked. Her voice was falsely bright. “Julie?”

“Julie,” Rudolph said. “We have our ups and downs.”

Willie came into the room combing his hair. He wasn’t wearing a jacket. She had seen him only some five hours earlier, but if they had been alone she would have enfolded him as if they were meeting again after an absence of years. Willie kissed Gretchen quickly, leaning over the couch. Rudolph stood up politely. “Sit down, sit down, Rudy,” Willie said. “I’m not your superior officer.”

Briefly, Gretchen regretted Willie was so short.

“Ah,” Willie said, seeing the beer and the pressed suit, “I told her the day I saw her for the first time that she would make some man a good wife and mother. Is it cold?”

“Uhuh.”

Willie busied himself opening a bottle. “Rudy?”

“This will do me for awhile,” Rudolph said, sitting down again.

Willie poured the beer in a glass that had been used and still had a rim of foam around it. He drank a lot of beer, Willie. “We can speak frankly,” Willie said, grinning. “I have explained everything to Rudy. I have told him that we are only technically living in sin. I’ve told him I have asked for your hand in marriage and that you’ve rejected me, although not for long.”

This was true. He had asked her to marry him again and again. Quite often she was sure that he meant it.

“Did you tell him you were married?” she asked. She was anxious to have Rudy leave with no questions unanswered.

“I did,” Willie said. “I hide nothing from brothers of women I love. My marriage was a whim of youth, a passing cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand. Rudy is an intelligent young man. He understands. He will go far. He will dance at our wedding. He will support us in our old age.”

For once, Willie’s jokes made her uneasy. Although she had told him about Rudolph and Thomas and her parents, this was the first time he had had to cope with the actual presence of her family and she was worried that it was setting his nerves on edge.

Rudolph said nothing.

“What’re you doing in New York, Rudy?” she said, to cover up for Willie.

“I got a ride down,” Rudolph said. Plainly, he had something to say to her and he didn’t feel like saying it in front of Willie. “It’s a half-holiday at school.”

“How’s it going at school?” After she had said it she was afraid it sounded condescending, the sort of thing you say to other people’s children because you don’t know what else to talk about.

“Okay.” Rudolph dismissed school.

“Rudy,” Willie said, “what would you think of me as a brother-in-law?”

Rudolph looked at him soberly. Considering green eyes. “I don’t know you,” he said.

“That’s it, Rudy, don’t give anything away. That’s my big trouble. I’m too open. I wear my heart on my tongue.” Willie poured himself some more beer. He couldn’t stay in one place. By contrast, Rudy seemed settled, sure of himself, judging. “I told Rudy I’d take him to see your show tonight,” Willie said. “The toast of New York.”

“It’s a silly show,” Gretchen said. She didn’t like the idea of her brother watching her practically nude in front of a thousand people. “Wait till I play Saint Joan.”

“I’m busy anyway,” Rudolph said.

“I invited him to supper after the show, too,” Willie said. “He pleads a prior engagement. See what you can do with him. I like him. I am tied to him by profound bonds.”

“Some other night, thank you,” Rudolph said. “Gretchen, there’s something for you in that bag.” He indicated the little overnight bag. “I was asked to deliver it to you.”

“What is it?” Gretchen asked. “Who’s it from?”

“Somebody called Boylan,” Rudolph said.

“Oh.” Gretchen touched Willie’s arm. “I think I’d like a beer, too, Willie.” She got up and went over to the bag. “A present. Isn’t that nice?” She picked the bag up and put it on a table and opened it. When she saw what was in the bag, she knew that she had known all along. She held the dress up against her. “I didn’t remember that it was so red,” she said calmly.

“Holy man,” Willie said.

Rudolph was watching them closely, first one, then the other.

“A memento of my depraved youth,” Gretchen said. She patted Rudolph’s arm. “That’s all right, Rudy,” she said. “Willie knows about Mr. Boylan. Everything.”

“I will shoot him down like a dog,” Willie said. “On sight. I’m sorry I turned in my B-17.”

“Should I keep it, Willie?” Gretchen asked doubtfully.

“Of course. Unless it fits Boylan better than it fits you.”

Gretchen put the dress down. “How come he got you to deliver it?” she asked Rudolph.

“I happened to meet him,” Rudolph said. “I see him from time to time. I didn’t give him your address, so he asked me …”

“Tell him I’m most grateful,” Gretchen said. “Tell him I’ll think of him when I wear it.”

“You can tell him yourself, if you want,” Rudolph said. “He drove me down. He’s in a bar on Eighth Street, waiting for me now.”

“Why don’t we all go and have a drink with the bugger?” Willie said.

“I don’t want to have a drink with him,” Gretchen said.

“Should I tell him that?” Rudolph asked.

“Yes.”

Rudolph stood up. “I’d better go,” he said. “I told him I’d be right back.”

Gretchen stood, too. “Don’t forget the bag,” she said.

“He said for you to keep it.”

“I don’t want it.” Gretchen handed the smart little leather bag to her brother. He seemed reluctant to take it. “Rudy,” she said curiously, “do you see much of Boylan?”

“A couple of times a week.”

“You like him?”

“I’m not sure,” Rudy said. “He’s teaching me a lot.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“Don’t worry.” Rudolph put out his hand to Willie. “Goodbye,” he said. “Thanks for the beer.”

Willie shook his hand warmly. “Now you know where we are,” he said, “come and see us. I mean it.”

“I will,” Rudolph said.

Gretchen kissed him. “I hate to see you run off like this.”

“I’ll come down to New York soon,” Rudolph said. “I promise.”

Gretchen opened the door for him. He seemed to want to say something more, but finally he just waved, a small troubled movement of his hand, and went down the stairs, carrying the bag. Gretchen closed the door slowly.

“He’s nice, your brother,” Willie said. “I wish I looked like that.”

“You look good enough,” Gretchen said. She kissed him. “I haven’t kissed you for ages.”

“Six long hours,” Willie said. They kissed again.

“Six long hours,” she said, smiling. “Please be home every time I come home.”

“I’ll make a point of it,” Willie said. He picked up the red dress and examined it critically. “Your brother’s awfully grownup for a kid that age.”

“Too, maybe.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know.” She took a sip of beer. “He figures things out too carefully.” She thought of her father’s unlikely generosity toward Rudolph, of her mother’s standing at night over an ironing board doing Rudolph’s shirts. “He collects on his intelligence.”

“Good for him,” Willie said. “I wish I could collect on mine.”

“What did you two talk about before I came?” she asked.

“We praised you.”

“Okay, okay, aside from that?”

“He asked me about my work. I guess he wondered what his sister’s feller was doing home in the middle of the afternoon while his sister was out earning her daily bread. I hope I put his fears to rest.”

Willie had a job on a new magazine that a friend of his had just started. It was a magazine devoted to radio and a lot of Willie’s work consisted of listening to daytime programs and he preferred listening to them at home rather than in the little cramped office of the magazine. He was making ninety dollars a week and with her sixty they got along well enough, although they usually found themselves broke by the end of the week, because Willie liked to eat out in restaurants and stay up late in bars.

“Did you tell him you were a playwright, too?” Gretchen said.

“No. I’ll leave him to find that out for himself. Some day.”

Willie hadn’t shown her his play yet. He only had an act and a half done and he was going to rewrite that completely.

Willie draped the dress against his front and walked like a model, with an exaggerated swing of the hips. “Sometimes I wonder what sort of a girl I would have made. What do you think?”

“No,” she said.

“Try it on. Let’s see what it looks like.” He gave her the dress. She took it and went into the bedroom because there was a full-length mirror there on the back of a closet door. She had made the bed neatly before leaving the house, but the bedcover was mussed. Willie had taken a nap after lunch. They had been living together only a little over two months but she had amassed a private treasury of Willie’s habits. His clothes were strewn all over the room. His corset was lying on the floor near the window. Gretchen smiled as she took off her sweater and skirt. She found Willie’s childish disorder endearing. She liked picking up after him.

She zipped up the dress with difficulty. She had only put it on twice before, once in the shop and once in Boylan’s bedroom, to model it for Boylan. She had never really worn it. She looked at herself critically in the mirror. She had the feeling that the lacy top exposed too much of her bosom. Her reflection in the red dress was that of an older woman, New Yorkish, certain of her attractions, a woman ready to enter any room, disdainful of all competition. She let her hair down so that it flowed darkly over her shoulders. It had been piled up in a practical knot on top of her head for the day’s work.

After a last look at herself she went back into the living room. Willie was opening another bottle of beer. He whistled when he saw her. “You scare me,” he said.

She pirouetted, making the skirt flare out. “Do you think I dare wear it?” she said. “Isn’t it a little naked?”

“Dee-vine,” Willie drawled. “It is the perfectly designed dress. It is designed to make every man want to take you out of it immediately.” He came over to her. “Suiting action to the thought,” he said, “the gentleman unzips the lady.” He pulled at the zipper and lifted the dress over her head. His hands were cold from the beer bottle and she shivered momentarily. “What are we doing in this room?” he said.

They went into the bedroom and undressed quickly. The one time she had put on the dress for Boylan they had done the same thing. There was no avoiding echoes.

Willie made love to her sweetly and gently, almost as though she were frail and breakable. Once, in the middle of love-making the word respectfully had crossed her consciousness and she chuckled. She didn’t tell Willie what had caused the chuckle. She was very different with Willie than with Boylan. Boylan had overcome her, obliterated her. It had been an intense and ferocious ceremony of destruction, a tournament, with winners and losers. After Boylan, she had come back into herself like someone returning from a long voyage, resentful of the rape of personality that had taken place. With Willie the act was tender and dear and sinless. It was a part of the flow of their lives together, everyday and natural. There was none of that sense of dislocation, abandonment, that Boylan had inflicted upon her and that she had hungered for so fiercely. Quite often she did not come with Willie, but it made no difference.

“Precious,” she murmured and they lay still.

After awhile Willie rolled carefully on his back and they lay side by side, not touching, only their hands entwined, childishly, between them.

“I’m so glad you were home,” she said.

“I will always be home,” he said.

She squeezed his hand.

He reached out with his other hand for the package of cigarettes on the bedside table and she disentangled her fingers, so that he could light up. He lay flat, his head on the thin pillow, smoking. The room was dark except for the light that was coming in through the open door from the living room. He looked like a small boy who would be punished if he were caught smoking. “Now,” he said, “that you have finally had your will of me, perhaps we can talk a bit. What sort of day did you have?”

Gretchen hesitated. Later, she thought. “The usual,” she said. “Gaspard made a pass at me again.” Gaspard was the leading man of the show and during a break in the re-hearsal he had asked her to come into his dressing room to run over some lines and had practically thrown her on the couch.

“He knows a good thing when he sees one, old Gaspard,” Willie said comfortably.

“Don’t you think you ought to talk to him and tell him he’d better leave your girl alone?” Gretchen said. “Or maybe hit him in the nose?”

“He’d kill me,” Willie said, without shame. “He’s twice my size.”

“I’m in love with a coward,” Gretchen said, kissing his ear.

“That’s what happens to simple young girls in from the country.” He puffed contentedly on his cigarette. “Anyway, in this department a girl’s on her own. If you’re old enough to go out at night in the Big City you’re old enough to defend yourself.”

“I’d beat up anybody who made a pass at you,” Gretchen said.

Willie laughed. “I bet you would, too.”

“Nichols was at the theater today. After the rehearsal he said he might have a part for me in a new play next year. A big part, he said.”

“You will be a star. Your name will be in lights,” Willie said. “You will discard me like an old shoe.”

Just as well now as any other time, she thought. “I may not be able to take a job next season,” she said.

“Why not?” He raised on one elbow and looked at her curiously.

“I went to the doctor this morning,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

He looked at her hard, studying her face. He sat up and stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m thirsty,” he said. He got out of bed stiffly. She saw the shadow of the long scar low on his spine. He put on an old cotton robe and went into the living room. She heard him pouring his beer. She lay back in the darkness, feeling deserted. I shouldn’t have told him, she thought. Everything is ruined. She remembered the night it must have happened. They had been out late, nearly four o’clock, there had been a long loud argument in somebody’s house. About Emperor Hirohito, of all things. Everybody had had a lot to drink. She had been fuzzy and hadn’t taken any precautions. Usually, they were too tired when they came home to make love. That one goddamn night, they hadn’t been too tired. One for the Emperor of Japan. If he says anything, she thought, I’m going to tell him I’ll have an abortion. She knew she could never have an abortion, but she’d tell him.

Willie came back into the bedroom. She turned on the bedside lamp. This conversation was going to be adequately lit. What Willie’s face told her was going to be more important than what he said. She pulled the sheet over herself. Willie’s old cotton robe flapped around his frail figure. It was faded with many washings.

“Listen,” Willie said, seating himself on the edge of the bed. “Listen carefully. I am going to get a divorce or I am going to kill the bitch. Then we are going to get married and I am going to take a course in the care and feeding of infants. Do you read me, Miss Jordache?”

She studied his face. It was all right. Better than all right.

“I read you,” she said softly.

He leaned over her and kissed her cheek. She clutched the sleeve of his robe. For Christmas, she would buy him a new robe. Silk.

II

Boylan was standing at the bar in his tweed topcoat, staring at his glass, when Rudolph came down the little flight of steps from Eighth Street, carrying the overnight bag. There were only men standing at the bar and most of them were probably fairies.

“I see you have the bag,” Boylan said.

“She didn’t want it.”

“And the dress?”

“She took the dress.”

“What are you drinking?”

“A beer, please.”

“One beer, please,” Boylan said to the bartender. “And I’ll continue with whiskey.”

Boylan looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. His eyebrows were blonder than they had been last week. His face was very tan, as though he had been lying on a southern beach for months. Two or three of the fairies at the bar were equally brown. Rudolph knew about the sun lamp by now. “I make it a point to look as healthy and attractive as I can at all times,” Boylan had explained to Rudolph. “Even if I don’t see anybody for weeks on end. It’s a form of self-respect.”

Rudolph was so dark, anyway, that he felt he could respect himself without a sun lamp.

The bartender put the drinks down in front of them. Boylan’s fingers trembled a little as he picked up his glass. Rudolph wondered how many whiskies he had had.

“Did you tell her I was here?” Boylan asked.

“Yes.”

“Is she coming?”

“No. The man she was with wanted to come and meet you, but she didn’t.” There was no point in not being honest.

“Ah,” Boylan said. “The man she was with.”

“She’s living with somebody.”

“I see,” Boylan said flatly. “It didn’t take long, did it?”

Rudolph drank his beer.

“Your sister is an extravagantly sensual woman,” Boylan said. “I fear for where it may lead her.”

Rudolph kept drinking his beer.

“They’re not married, by any chance?”

“No. He’s still married to somebody else.”

Boylan looked at himself in the mirror again for a while. A burly young man in a black turtle-neck sweater down the bar caught his eye in the glass and smiled. Boylan turned away slightly, toward Rudolph. “What sort of fellow is he? Did you like him?”

“Young,” Rudolph said. “He seemed nice enough. Full of jokes.”

“Full of jokes,” Boylan repeated. “Why shouldn’t he be full of jokes? What sort of place do they have?”

“Two furnished rooms in a walkup.”

“Your sister has a romantic disregard of the advantages of money,” Boylan said. “She will regret it later. Among the other things she will regret.”

“She seemed happy.” Rudolph found Boylan’s prophecies distasteful. He didn’t want Gretchen to regret anything.

“What does her young man do for a living? Did you find out?”

“He writes for some kind of radio magazine.”

“Oh,” Boylan said. “One of those.”

“Teddy,” Rudolph said, “if you want my advice I think you ought to forget her.”

“Out of the depths of your rich experience,” Boylan said, “you think I ought to forget her.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said, “I haven’t had any experience. But I saw her. I saw how she looked at the man.”

“Did you tell her I still was willing to marry her?”

“No. That’s something you’d better tell her yourself,” Rudolph said. “Anyway, you didn’t expect me to say it in front of her fellow, did you?”

“Why not?”

“Teddy, you’re drinking too much.”

“Am I?” Boylan said. “Probably. You wouldn’t want to walk back there with me and go up and pay your sister a visit, would you?”

“You know I can’t do that,” Rudolph said.

“No you can’t,” Boylan said. “You’re like the rest of your family. You can’t do a fucking thing.”

“Listen,” Rudolph said, “I can get on the train and go home. Right now.”

“Sorry, Rudolph.” Boylan put out his hand and touched Rudolph’s arm. “I was standing here, telling myself she was going to walk through that door with you and she didn’t walk through. Disappointment makes for bad manners. It’s a good reason never to put yourself in a position in which you can be disappointed. Forgive me. Of course, you’re not going home. We’re going to take advantage of our freedom to have a night on the town. There’s quite a good restaurant a few blocks from here and we’ll start with that. Barman, may I have the check, please?”

He put some bills on the bar. The young man in the turtleneck sweater came up to them. “May I invite you gentlemen for a drink?” He kept his eyes on Rudolph, smiling.

“You’re a fool,” Boylan said, without heat.

“Oh, come off it, dearie,” the man said.

Without warning, Boylan punched him, hard, on the nose. The man fell back against the bar, the blood beginning to seep from his nose.

“Let’s go, Rudolph,” Boylan said calmly.

They were out of the place before the barman or anyone else could make a move.

“I haven’t been there since before the war,” Boylan said, as they headed toward Sixth Avenue. “The clientele has changed.”

If Gretchen had walked through the door, Rudolph thought, there would have been one less nosebleed in New York City that night.

After dinner at a restaurant where the bill, Rudolph noted, was over twelve dollars, they went to a night club in a basement that was called Cafe Society. “You might get some ideas for the River Five,” Boylan said. “They have one of the best bands in the city. And there’s usually a new colored girl who can sing.”

The place was crowded, mostly with young people, many of whom were black, but Boylan got them a little table next to the small dance floor with an accurate tip. The music was deafening and wonderful. If the River Five was to learn anything from the band at Cafe Society it would be to throw their instruments into the river.

Rudolph leaned forward intently, gloriously battered by the music, his eyes glued on the Negro trumpeter. Boylan sat back smoking and drinking whiskies, in a small, private zone of silence. Rudolph had ordered a whiskey, too, because he had to order something, but it stood untouched on the table. With all the drinking Boylan had done that afternoon and evening, he would probably be in no condition to drive and Rudolph knew that he had to remain sober to take the wheel. Boylan had taught him to drive on the back roads around Port Philip.

“Teddy!” A woman in a short evening dress, with bare arms and shoulders, was standing in front of the table. “Teddy Boylan, I thought you were dead.”

Boylan stood up. “Hello, Cissy,” he said. “I’m not dead.”

The woman flung her arms around him and kissed him, on the mouth. Boylan looked annoyed and turned his head. Rudolph stood up uncertainly.

“Where on earth have you been hiding yourself?” The woman stepped back a little, but held onto Boylan’s sleeve. She was wearing a lot of jewelry that glittered in the reflection of the spotlight on the trumpet. Rudolph couldn’t tell whether the jewelry was real or not. She was startlingly made up, with colored eyeshadow and a brilliantly rouged mouth. She kept looking at Rudolph, smiling. Boylan didn’t make any move to introduce him and Rudolph didn’t know whether he ought to sit down or not. “It’s been centuries,” she went on, not waiting for any answers, continuing to look boldly at Rudolph. “There’ve been the wildest rumors. It’s just sinful, the way your nearest and dearest drop out of sight these days. Come on over to the table. The whole gang’s there. Susie, Jack, Karen … They’re just longing to see you. You’re looking absolutely marvelous, darling. Ageless. Imagine finding you in a place like this. Why, it’s an absolute resurrection.” She still kept smiling widely at Rudolph. “Do come over to the table. Bring your beautiful young friend with you. I don’t think I caught the name, darling.”

“May I present Mr. Rudolph Jordache,” Boylan said stiffly. “Mrs. Alfred Sykes.”

“Cissy to my friends,” the woman said. “He is ravishing. I don’t blame you for switching, darling.”

“Don’t be more idiotic than God originally made you, Cissy,” Boylan said.

The woman laughed. “I see you’re just as much of a shit as ever, Teddy,” she said. “Do come over to the table and say hello to the group.” With a fluttery wave of the hand, she turned and made her way through the jungle of tables toward the back of the room.

Boylan sat down and motioned to Rudolph to sit down, too. Rudolph could feel himself blushing. Luckily, it was too dark for anyone to tell.

Boylan drained his whiskey. “Silly woman,” he said. “I had an affair with her before the war. She wears badly.” Boylan didn’t look at Rudolph. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “It’s too damned noisy. And there are too many of our colored brethren on the premises. It’s like a slave ship after a successful mutiny.”

He waved to a waiter and got the check and paid it and they redeemed their coats from the hatcheck girl and went out. Mrs. Sykes, Cissy to her friends, was the first person Boylan had ever introduced Rudolph to, not counting Perkins, of course. If that’s what Boylan’s friends were like, you could understand why Boylan stayed up on his hill, alone. Rudolph was sorry the woman had come over to the table. The blush reminded him painfully that he was young and unworldly. Also, he would have liked to stay in there and listen to that trumpeter all night.

They walked east on Fourth Street, toward where the car was parked, past darkened shop fronts and bars which were little bursts of light and music and loud conversation on their way.

“New York is hysterical,” Boylan said. “Like an unsatisfied, neurotic woman. It’s an aging nymphomaniac of a city. God, the time I’ve wasted here.” The woman’s appearance had plainly disturbed him. “I’m sorry about that bitch,” he said.

“I didn’t mind,” Rudolph said. He did mind, but he didn’t want Boylan to think it bothered him.

“People’re filthy,” Boylan said. “The leer is the standard expression on the American face. Next time we come to town, bring your girl along. You’re too sensitive a boy to be exposed to rot like that.”

“I’ll ask her,” Rudolph said. He was almost sure Julie wouldn’t come. She didn’t like his being friendly with Boylan. Beast of prey, she called him, and the Peroxide Man.

“Maybe we’ll ask Gretchen and her young man and I’ll go through my old address books and see if any of the girls I used to know are still alive and we’ll make it a party.”

“It ought to be fun,” Rudolph said. “Like the sinking of the Titanic.”

Boylan laughed. “The clear vision of youth,” he said. “You’re a rewarding boy.” His tone was affectionate. “With any luck, you’ll be a rewarding man.”

They were at the car now. There was a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. Boylan tore it up without looking at it.

“I’ll drive, if you like,” Rudolph said.

“I’m not drunk,” Boylan said curtly and got behind the wheel.

III

Thomas sat in the cracked chair, tilted back against the garage wall, a grass-stalk between his teeth, looking across at the lumberyard. It was a sunny day and the light reflected metallically off the last blaze of autumn leaves on the trees along the highway. There was a car that was supposed to be greased before two o’clock, but Thomas was in no hurry. He had had a fight the night before at a high-school dance and he was sore all over and his hands were puffed. He had kept cutting in on a boy who played tackle for the high-school team because the tackle’s girl was giving him the eye all night. The tackle had warned him to lay off, but he’d kept cutting in just the same. He knew it was going to wind up in a fight and he’d felt the old mixture of sensations, pleasure, fear, power, cold excitement, as he saw the tackle’s heavy face getting darker and darker while Thomas danced with his girl. Finally the two of them, he and the tackle, had gone outside the gym where the dance was taking place. The tackle was a monster, with big, heavy fists, and fast. That sonofabitch Claude would have pissed in his pants with joy if he had been there. Thomas had put the tackle down in the end, but his ribs felt as though they were caving in. It was his fourth fight in Elysium since the summer.

He had a date with the tackle’s girl for tonight.

Uncle Harold came out of the little office behind the filling station. Thomas knew that people had complained to Uncle Harold about his fights, but Uncle Harold hadn’t said anything about them. Uncle Harold also knew that there was a car to be greased before two o’clock, but he didn’t say anything about that either, although Thomas could tell from the expression on Uncle Harold’s face that it pained him to see Thomas lounging like that against the wall, chewing lazily on a stalk of grass. Uncle Harold didn’t say anything about anything anymore. Uncle Harold looked bad these days—his plump pink face was now yellowish and sagging and he had the expression on his face of a man waiting for a bomb to go off. The bomb was Thomas. All he had to do was hint to Tante Elsa about what was going on between Uncle Harold and Clothilde and they wouldn’t be singing Tristan and Isolde for a long time to come in the Jordache household. Thomas had no intention of telling Tante Elsa, but he didn’t let Uncle Harold in on the news. Let him stew.

Thomas had stopped bringing his lunch from home. For three days running he had left the paper bag of sandwiches and fruit that Clothilde prepared for him lying on the kitchen table when he had gone off to work. Clothilde hadn’t said anything. After three days she had caught on, and there were no more sandwiches waiting for him. He ate at the diner down the highway. He could afford it. Uncle Harold had raised him ten dollars a week. Slob.

“If anybody wants me,” Uncle Harold said, “I’m down at the showroom.”

Thomas kept staring out across the highway, chewing on the stalk of grass. Uncle Harold sighed and got into his car and drove off.

From inside the garage there came the sound of Coyne working a lathe. Coyne had seen him in one of his fights on a Sunday down at the lake and now was very polite with him and if Thomas neglected a job, Coyne more often than not would do it himself. Thomas played with the idea of letting Coyne do the two o’clock grease job.

Mrs. Dornfeld drove up in her 1940 Ford, and stopped at a pump. Thomas got up and walked over to the car slowly, not rushing anything.

“Hello, Tommy,” Mrs. Dornfeld said.

“Hi.”

“Fill her up, please, Tommy,” Mrs. Dornfeld said. She was a plump blonde of about thirty with disappointed, childish, blue eyes. Her husband worked as a teller in the bank, which was convenient, as Mrs. Dornfeld always knew where he was during business hours.

Thomas hung up the hose and screwed the cap back on and started washing the windshield.

“It would be nice if you paid me a visit today, Tommy,” Mrs. Dornfeld said. That was always what she called it—a visit. She had a prissy way of talking, with little flutterings of her eyelids and lips and hands.

“Maybe I can break loose at two o’clock,” Thomas said. Mr. Dornfeld was settled behind the bars of his teller’s cage from one-thirty on.

“We can have a nice long visit,” Mrs. Dornfeld said.

“If I can break loose.” Thomas didn’t know how he would feel after lunch.

She gave him a five-dollar bill and clutched at his hand when he gave her change. Every once in awhile after one of his visits she slipped him a ten-dollar bill. Mr. Dornfeld must be giving her nothing, but nothing.

There was always lipstick on his collar when he came from visiting Mrs. Dornfeld and he left it on purposely so that when Clothilde collected his clothes for washing she’d be sure to see it. Clothilde never mentioned the lipstick. The shirt would be neatly washed and ironed and left on his bed the next day.

None of it really worked. Not Mrs. Dornfeld, nor Mrs. Berryman, nor the twins, nor any of the others. Pigs, all of them. None of them really helped him get over Clothilde. He was sure Clothilde knew—you couldn’t hide anything in this stinking little town—and he hoped it made her feel bad. At least as bad as he felt. But if she did feel bad, she didn’t show it.

“Two o’clock is happy time,” Mrs. Dornfeld said.

It was enough to make a man throw up.

Mrs. Dornfeld started the motor and fluttered off. He went back and sat down on the chair tilted against the wall. Coyne came out of the garage, wiping his hands. “When I was your age,” Coyne said, looking after the Ford disappearing down the highway, “I was sure it would fall off if I did it with a married woman.”

“It doesn’t fall off,” Thomas said.

“So I see,” Coyne said. He wasn’t a bad guy, Coyne. When Thomas had celebrated his seventeenth birthday Coyne had broken out a pint of bourbon and they’d finished it off together in one afternoon.

Thomas was wiping the gravy of the hamburger off his plate with a piece of bread when Joe Kuntz, the cop, came into the diner. It was ten to two and the diner was almost empty, just a couple of the hands from the lumberyard finishing up their lunch, and Elias, the counterman, swabbing off the grill. Thomas hadn’t decided yet whether or not he was going to visit Bertha Dornfeld.

Kuntz came up to where Thomas was sitting at the counter and said, “Thomas Jordache?”

“Hi, Joe,” Thomas said. Kuntz stopped in at the garage a couple of times a week to shoot the breeze. He was always threatening to leave the force because the pay was so bad.

“You acknowledge that you are Thomas Jordache?” Kuntz said in his cop voice.

“What’s going on, Joe?” Thomas asked.

“I asked you a question, son,” Kuntz said, bulging out of his uniform.

“You know my name,” Thomas said. “What’s the joke?”

“You better come with me, son,” Kuntz said. “I have a warrant for your arrest.” He grabbed Thomas’s arm above the elbow. Elias stopped scrubbing the grill and the guys from the lumberyard stopped eating and it was absolutely quiet in the diner.

“I ordered a piece of pie and a cup of coffee,” Thomas said. “Take your meathooks off me, Joe.”

“What’s he owe you, Elias?” Kuntz asked, his fingers tight on Thomas’s arm.

“With the coffee and pie or without the coffee and pie?” Elias said.

“Without.”

“Seventy-five cents,” Elias said.

“Pay up, son, and come along quiet,” Kuntz said. He didn’t make more than twenty arrests a year and he was getting mileage out of this one.

“Okay, okay,” Thomas said. He put down eighty-five cents. “Christ, Joe,” he said, “you’re breaking my arm.”

Kuntz walked him quickly out of the diner. Pete Spinelli, Joe’s partner, was sitting at the wheel of the prowl car, with the motor running.

“Pete,” Thomas said, “will you tell Joe to let go of me.”

“Shut up, kid,” Spinelli said.

Kuntz shoved him into the back seat and got in beside him and the prowl car started toward town.

“The charge is statutory rape,” Sergeant Horvath said. “There is a sworn complaint. I’ll notify your uncle and he can get a lawyer for you. Take him away, boys.”

Thomas was standing between Kuntz and Spinelli. They each had an arm now. They hustled him off and put him in the lockup. Thomas looked at his watch. It was twenty past two. Bertha Dornfeld would have to go without her visit today.

There was one other prisoner in the single cell of the jail, a ragged, skinny man of about fifty, with a week’s growth of beard on his face. He was in for poaching deer. This was the twenty-third time he had been booked for poaching deer, he told Thomas.

IV

Harold Jordache paced nervously up and down the platform. Just tonight the train had to be late. He had heartburn and he pushed anxiously at his stomach with his hand. When there was trouble, the trouble went right to his stomach. And ever since two-thirty yesterday afternoon, when Horvath had called him from the jail, it had been nothing but trouble. He hadn’t slept a wink, because Elsa had cried all night, in between bouts of telling him that they were disgraced for life, that she could never show her face in town again, and what a fool he had been to take a wild animal like that into the house. She was right, he had to admit it, he had been an idiot, his heart was too big. Family or no family, that afternoon when Axel called him from Port Philip, he should have said no.

He thought of Thomas down in the jail, talking his head off like a lunatic, admitting everything, not showing any shame or remorse, naming names. Who could tell what he would say, once he started talking like that? He knew the little monster hated him. What was to stop him from telling about the black-market ration tickets, the faked-up secondhand cars with gear boxes that wouldn’t last for more than a hundred miles, the under-the-counter markups on new cars to get around the Price Control, the valve and piston jobs on cars that had nothing more wrong with them than a clogged fuel line? Even about Clothilde? You let a boy like that into your house and you became his prisoner. The heartburn stabbed at Uncle Harold like a knife. He began to sweat, even though it was cold on the station, with the wind blowing.

He hoped Axel was bringing plenty of money along with him. And the birth certificate. He had sent Axel a telegram asking Axel to call him because Axel didn’t have a telephone. In this day and age! He had made the telegram sound as ominous as he could, to make sure Axel would call, but even so he was half-surprised when the phone rang in his house and he heard his brother’s voice on the wire.

He heard the train coming around the curve toward the station and stepped back nervously from the edge of the platform. In his state he wouldn’t be surprised if he had a heart attack and fell down right where he stood. The train slowed to a halt and a few people got off and hurried away in the wind. He had a moment of panic. He didn’t see Axel. It would be just like Axel to leave him alone with the problem. Axel was an unnatural father; he hadn’t written once to either Thomas or himself, all the time that Thomas had been in Elysium. Neither had the mother, that skinny hoity-toity whore’s daughter. Or the other two kids. What could you expect from a family like that?

Then he saw a big man in a workman’s cap and a mackinaw limping slowly toward him on the platform. What a way to dress. Harold was glad it was dark and there were so few people around. He must have been crazy that time in Port Philip when he’d invited Axel to come in with him.

“All right, I’m here,” Axel said. He didn’t shake hands.

“Hello, Axel,” Harold said. “I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t come. How much money you bring with you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” Axel said.

“I hope it’s enough,” Harold said.

“It better be enough,” Axel said flatly. “There isn’t any more.” He looked old, Harold thought, and sick. His limp was worse than Harold remembered.

They walked together through the station toward Harold’s car.

“If you want to see Tommy,” Harold said, “you’ll have to wait till tomorrow. They don’t let anybody in after six o’clock.”

“I don’t want to see the sonofabitch,” Axel said.

Harold couldn’t help feeling that it was wrong to call your own child a sonofabitch, even under the circumstances, but he didn’t say anything.

“You have your dinner, Axel?” he asked. “Elsa can find something in the icebox.”

“Let’s not waste time,” Axel said. “Who do I have to pay off?”

“The father, Abraham Chase. He’s one of the biggest men in town. Your son had to pick somebody like that,” Harold said aggrievedly. “A girl in a factory wasn’t good enough for him.”

“Is he Jewish?” Axel asked, as they got into the car.

“What?” Harold asked, irritatedly. That would be great, that would help a lot, if Axel turned out to be a Nazi, along with everything else.

“Why should he be Jewish?”

“Abraham,” Axel said.

“No. It’s one of the oldest families in town. They own practically everything. You’ll be lucky if he takes your money.”

“Yeah,” Axel said. “Lucky.”

Harold backed out of the parking lot and started toward the Chase house. It was in the good section of town, near the Jordache house. “I talked to him on the phone,” Harold said. “I told him you were coming. He sounded out of his mind. I don’t blame him. It’s bad enough to come home and find one daughter pregnant. But both of them! And they’re twins, besides.”

“They can get a wholesale rate on baby clothes.” Axel laughed. The laughter sounded like a tin pitcher rattling against a sink. “Twins. He had a busy season, didn’t he, Thomas?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Harold said. “He’s beat up a dozen people since he came here, besides.” The stories that had reached Harold’s ears had been exaggerated as they passed along the town’s chain of gossip. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t been in jail before this. Everybody’s scared of him. It’s the most natural thing in the world that something like this comes up, they pin it on him. But who suffers? Me. And Elsa.”

Axel ignored his brother’s suffering and the suffering of his brother’s wife. “How do they know it was my kid?”

“The twins told their father.” Harold slowed the car down. He was in no hurry to confront Abraham Chase. “They’ve done it with every boy in town, the twins, and plenty of the men too, everybody knows that, but when it comes to naming names, naturally the first name anybody’d pick would be your Tommy. They’re not going to say it was the nice boy next door or Joe Kuntz, the policeman, or the boy from Harvard whose parents play bridge with the Chases twice a week. They pick the black sheep. Those two little bitohes’re smart. And your son had to tell them he was nineteen years old. Big shot. Under eighteen, my lawyer says, you can’t be held for statutory rape.”

“So what’s the fuss?” Axel said. “I have his birth certificate.”

“Don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” Harold said. “Mr. Chase swears he can have him locked up until he’s twenty-one as a juvenile delinquent. And he can. That’s four years. And don’t think Tommy is making it any easier for himself telling the cops he knows twenty fellows personally who’ve been in there with those girls and giving a list of names. It just makes everybody sorer, that’s all. It gives the whole town a bad name and they’ll make him pay for it. And me and Elsa. That’s my shop,” he said automatically. They were passing the showroom. “I’ll be lucky if they don’t put a brick through the window.”

“You friendly with Abraham?”

“I do some business with Mr. Chase,” Harold said. “I sold him a Lincoln. I can’t say we move in the same circles. He’s on the waiting list for a new Mercury. I could sell a hundred cars tomorrow if I could get delivery. The goddamn war. You don’t know what I’ve been going through for four years, just to keep my head above water. And now, just when I begin to see a little daylight, this has to come along.”

“You don’t seem to be doing so bad,” Axel said.

“You have to keep up appearances.” One thing was sure. If Axel thought for a minute that he was going to borrow any money, he was barking up the wrong tree.

“How do I know Abraham won’t take my money and the kid’ll go to jail just the same?”

“Mr. Chase is a man of his word,” Harold said. He had a sudden horrible fear that Axel was going to call Mr. Chase Abraham in his own house. “He’s got this town in his pocket. The cops, the judge, the mayor, the party organization. If he tells you the case’ll be dropped, it’ll be dropped.”

“It better be,” Axel said. There was a threat in his voice and Harold remembered what a rough boy his brother had been when they had both been young back home in Germany. Axel had gone off to war and had killed people. He was not a civilized man, with that harsh, sick face and that hatred of everybody and everything, including his own flesh and blood. Harold wondered if maybe he hadn’t made a mistake calling his brother and telling him to come to Elysium. Maybe it would have been better if he had just tried to handle it himself. But he had known it was going to cost money and he’d panicked. The heartburn gripped him again as they drove up to the white house, with big pillars, where the Chase family lived.

The two men went up the walk to the front door and Harold rang the bell. He took off his hat and held it across his chest, almost as if he were saluting the flag. Axel kept his cap on.

The door opened and a maid stood there. Mr. Chase was expecting them, she said.

V

“They take millions of clean-limbed young boys.” The poacher was chewing on a wad of tobacco and spitting into a tin can on the floor beside him, as he talked. “Clean-limbed boys, and send them off to kill and maim each other with inhuman instruments of destruction and they congratulate themselves and hang their chests with medals and parade down the main thoroughfares of the city and they put me in jail and mark me as an enemy of society because every once in awhile I drift out into the woodlands of America and shoot myself a choice buck with an old 1910 Winchester 22.” The poacher originally had come from the Ozarks and he spoke like a country preacher.

There were four bunks in the cell, two on one side and two on the other. The poacher, whose name was Dave, was lying in his bunk and Thomas was lying in the lower bunk on the other side of the cell. Dave smelled rather ripe and Thomas preferred to keep some space between them. It was two days now that they had been in the cell together and Thomas knew quite a bit about Dave, who lived alone in a shack near the lake and appreciated a permanent audience. Dave had come down from the Ozarks to work in the automobile industry in Detroit and after fifteen years of it had had enough. “I was in there in the paint department,” Dave said, “in the stink of chemicals and the heat of a furnace, devoting my numbered days on this earth to spraying paint on cars for people who didn’t mean a fart in hell to me to ride around in and the spring came and the leaves burgeoned and the summer came and the crops were taken in and the autumn came and city folk in funny caps with hunting licenses and fancy guns were out in the woods shooting the deer and I might just as well have been down in the blackest pit, chained to a post, for all the difference the seasons meant to me. I’m a mountain man and I pined away and one day I saw where my path laid straight before me and I took to the woods. A man has to be careful with his numbered days on this earth, son. There is a conspiracy to chain every living child of man to an iron post in a black pit, and you mustn’t be fooled because they paint it all the bright colors of the rainbow and pull all sorts of devilish tricks to make you think that it isn’t a pit, it isn’t an iron post, it isn’t a chain. The president of General Motors, up high in his glorious office, was just as much chained, just as deep down in the pit as me coughing up violet in the paint shop.”

Dave spat tobacco juice into the tin can on the floor next to his bunk. The gob of juice made a musical sound against the side of the can.

“I don’t ask for much,” Dave said, “just an occasional buck and the smell of woodsy air in my nostrils. I don’t blame nobody for putting me in jail from time to time, that’s their profession just like hunting is my profession, and I don’t begrudge ’em the coupla months here and there I spend behind bars. Somehow, they always seem to catch me just as the winter months’re drawing on, so it’s really no hardship. But nothing they say can make me feel like a criminal, no sir. I’m an American out in the American forest livin’ off American deer. They want to make all sorts of rules and regulations for those city folk in the gun clubs, that’s all right by me. They don’t apply, they just don’t apply.”

He spat again. “There’s just one thing that makes me a mite forlorn—and that’s the hypocrisy. Why, once the very judge that condemned me had eaten venison I shot just the week before and ate it right at the dining-room table in his own house and it was bought with his own money by his own cook. The hypocrisy is the canker in the soul of the American people. Why, just look at your case, son. What did you do? You did what everybody knows he’d do if he got the chance—you were offered a nice bit of juicy tail and you took it. At your age, son, the loins’re raging, and all the rules in the book don’t make a never-no-mind. I bet that the very judge who is going to put you away for years of your young life, if he got the offer from those two little plump-assed young girls you told me about, if that same judge got the offer and he was certain sure nobody was around to see him, he’d go cavorting with those plump-assed young girls like a crazy goat. Like the judge who ate my venison. Statutory rape.” Dave spat in disgust. “Old man’s rules. What does a little twitching young tail know about statutory? It’s the hypocrisy, son, the hypocrisy, son, the hypocrisy everywhere.”

Joe Kuntz appeared at the cell door and opened it. “Come on out, Jordache,” Kuntz said. Ever since Thomas had told the lawyer Uncle Harold had got for him that Joe Kuntz had been in there with the twins, too, and Kuntz had heard the news, the policeman had not been markedly friendly. He was married, with three kids.

Axel Jordache was waiting in Horvath’s office with Uncle Harold and the lawyer. The lawyer was a worried-looking young man with a bad complexion and thick glasses. Thomas had never seen his father looking so bad, not even the day he hit him.

He waited for his father to say hello, but Axel kept quiet, so he kept quiet, too.

“Thomas,” the lawyer said, “I am happy to say that everything has been arranged to everybody’s satisfaction.”

“Yeah,” Horvath said behind the desk. He didn’t sound terribly satisfied.

“You’re a free man, Thomas,” the lawyer said.

Thomas looked doubtfully at the five men in the room. There were no signs of celebration on any of the faces. “You mean I can just walk out of this joint?” Thomas asked.

“Exactly,” the lawyer said.

“Let’s go,” Axel Jordache said. “I wasted enough time in this goddamn town as it is.” He turned abruptly and limped out.

Thomas had to make himself walk slowly after his father. He wanted to cut and run for it, before anybody changed his mind.

Outside it was sunny late afternoon. There were no windows in the cell and you couldn’t tell what the weather was from in there. Uncle Harold walked on one side of Thomas and his father on the other. It was another kind of arrest.

They got into Uncle Harold’s car. Axel sat up in front and Thomas had the back seat all to himself. He didn’t ask any questions.

“I bought your way out, in case you’re curious,” his father said. His father didn’t turn in the seat, but talked straight ahead, at the windshield. “Five thousand dollars to that Shylock for his pound of flesh. I guess you got the highest-priced lay in history. I hope it was worth it.”

Thomas wanted to say he was sorry, that somehow, some day, he’d make it up to his father. But the words wouldn’t come out.

“Don’t think I did it for you,” his father said, “or for Harold here …”

“Now, Axel,” Harold began.

“You could both die tonight and it wouldn’t spoil my appetite,” his father said. “I did it for the only member of the family that’s worth a damn—your brother Rudolph. I’m not going to have him start out in life with a convict brother hanging around his neck. But this is the last time I ever want to see you or hear from you. I’m taking the train home now and that’s the end of you and me. Do you get that?”

“I get it,” Thomas said flatly.

“You’re getting out of town, too,” Uncle Harold said to Thomas. His voice was quivering. “That’s the condition Mr. Chase made and I couldn’t agree with him more. I’ll take you home and you pack your things and you don’t sleep another night in my house. Do you get that too?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Thomas said. They could have the town. Who needed it?

There was no more talking. When Uncle Harold stopped the car at the station, his father got out without a word and limped away, leaving the door of the car open. Uncle Harold had to reach over and slam it shut.

In the bare room under the roof, there was a small, battered valise on his bed. Thomas recognized it. It belonged to Clothilde. The bed was stripped down and the mattress was rolled up, as though Tante Elsa were afraid that he might sneak in a few minutes’ sleep on it. Tante Elsa and the girls were not in the house. To avoid contamination, Tante Elsa had taken the girls to the movies for the afternoon.

Thomas threw his things into the bag quickly. There wasn’t much. A few shirts and underwear and socks, an extra pair of shoes and a sweater. He took off the garage uniform that he had been arrested in and put on the new gray suit Tante Elsa had bought for him on his birthday.

He looked around the room. The book from the library, the Riders of the Purple Sage, was lying on a table. They kept sending postcards saying he was overdue and they were charging him two cents a day. He must owe them a good ten bucks by now. He threw the book into the valise. Remember Elysium, Ohio.

He closed the valise and went downstairs and into the kitchen. He wanted to thank Clothilde for the valise. But she wasn’t in the kitchen.

He went out through the hallway. Uncle Harold was eating a big piece of apple pie in the dining room, standing up. His hands were trembling as he picked up the pie. Uncle Harold always ate when he was nervous. “If you’re looking for Clothilde,” Uncle Harold said, “save your energy. I sent her to the movies with Tante Elsa and the girls.”

Well, Thomas thought, at least she got a movie out of me. One good thing.

“You got any money?” Uncle Harold asked. “I don’t want you to be picked up for vagrancy and go through the whole thing again.” He wolfed at his apple pie.

“I have money,” Thomas said. He had twenty-one dollars and change.

“Good. Give me your key.”

Thomas took the key out of his pocket and put it on the table. He had an impulse to push the rest of the pie in Uncle Harold’s face, but what good would that do?

They stared at each other. A piece of pie dribbled down Uncle Harold’s chin.

“Kiss Clothilde for me,” Thomas said, and went out the door, carrying Clothilde’s valise.

He walked to the station and bought twenty dollars’ worth of transportation away from Elysium, Ohio.

I

The lights were down low in the Westerman basement. They had it fixed up as a sort of den and they gave parties there. There was a party on tonight, about twenty boys and girls, some of them dancing, some of them necking a little in the dark corners of the room, some of them just listening to Benny Goodman playing “Paper Doll” on a record.

The River Five didn’t practice much anymore there because some guys back from the Army had started a band, too, and were getting most of the dates. Rudolph didn’t blame people for hiring the other band. The guys were older and they played a lot better than the River Five.

Alex Dailey was dancing closely with Lila Belkamp in the middle of the room. They told everybody they were going to get married when they got out of school in June. Alex was nineteen and a little slow in school. Lila was all right, a little gushy and silly, but all right. Rudolph wondered if his mother had looked anything like Lila when she was nineteen. Rudolph wished he had a recording of his mother’s speech the night his father came home from Elysium, to play to Alex. It should be required listening for all prospective bridegrooms. Maybe there wouldn’t be such a rush to the church.

Julie was sitting on Rudolph’s lap in a broken-down old easy chair in a corner of the den. There were other girls sitting on boys’ laps around the room, but Rudolph wished she wouldn’t do it. He didn’t like the idea of people seeing him like that and guessing how he was feeling. There were some things that ought to be kept private. He couldn’t imagine Teddy Boylan letting any girl sit in his lap in public, at any age. But if he even hinted about it to Julie, she’d blow up.

Julie nuzzled her head around and kissed him. He kissed her back, of course, and enjoyed it, but wished she’d quit.

She had applied to Barnard for the fall and was pretty sure of getting in. She was smart in school. She wanted Rudolph to try to get into Columbia, so they would be right next to each other in New York. Rudolph pretended he was considering Harvard or Yale. He never could get himself to tell Julie that he wasn’t going to college.

Julie snuggled closer, her head under his chin. She made a purring sound that at other times made him chuckle. He looked over her head at the other people at the party. He was probably the only virgin among the boys in the room. He was sure about Buddy Westerman and Dailey and Kessler and most of the others, although maybe there were one or two who probably lied when the question came up. That wasn’t the only way he was different from the others. He wondered if they’d have invited him if they knew that his father had killed two men, that his brother had been in jail for rape, that his sister was pregnant (she had written him to tell him, so that it wouldn’t come as a horrid surprise, she said) and living with a married man, that his mother had demanded thirty thousand dollars from his father if he wanted to go to bed with her.

The Jordaches were special, there was no doubt about that.

Buddy Westerman came over and said, “Listen, kids, there’s punch upstairs and sandwiches and cake.”

“Thanks, Buddy,” Rudolph said. He wished Julie would get the hell off his lap.

Buddy went around passing the word along to the other couples. There was nothing wrong with Buddy. He was going to Cornell, and then to law school, because his father had a solid law practice in town. Buddy had been approached by the new group to play bass for them, but out of loyalty to the River Five had said no. Rudolph gave Buddy’s loyalty just about three weeks to wear out. Buddy was a born musician and as he said, “Those guys really make music,” and you couldn’t expect Buddy to hold out forever, especially as they didn’t get more than one date a month any more.

As he looked at the boys in the room, Rudolph realized that almost every one of them knew where he was going. Kessler’s father had a pharmacy and Kessler was going to go to pharmaceutical school after college and take over the old man’s business. Starrett’s father dealt in real estate and Starrett was going to Harvard and to the school of business there, to make sure he could tell his father how to use his money. Lawson’s family had an engineering concern and Lawson was going to study engineering. Even Dailey, who probably was too slow to get into college, was going into his father’s plumbing supply business.

There was a great opening for Rudolph in the ancestral oven. “I am going into grains.” Or perhaps, “I intend to join the German army. My father is an alumnus.”

Rudolph felt a sick surge of envy for all his friends. Benny Goodman was playing the clarinet like silver lace on the phonograph and Rudolph envied him. Maybe most of all.

On a night like this you could understand why people robbed banks.

He wasn’t going to come to any more parties. He didn’t belong there, even if he was the only one who knew it.

He wanted to go home. He was tired. He was always tired these days, somehow. Aside from the bicycle route in the morning, he had to tend the store every day from four to seven, after school closed. The widow had decided she couldn’t work the whole day, she had children at home to take care of. It had meant giving up the track and the debating teams and his marks were slipping, too, as he never seemed to find the energy to study. He’d been sick, too, with a cold that started after Christmas and seemed to be hanging on all winter.

“Julie,” he said, “let’s go home.”

She sat up straight on his lap, surprised.

“It’s early,” she said, “it’s a nice party.”

“I know, I know,” he said, sounding more impatient than he intended. “I just want to get out of here.”

“We can’t do anything in my house,” she said. “My folks have people over for bridge. It’s Friday.”

“I just want to go home,” he said.

“You go.” She got off his lap and stood over him angrily. “I’ll find somebody else to take me home.”

He was tempted to spill out everything he had been thinking. Maybe she’d understand then.

“Boy, oh boy,” Julie said. There were tears in her eyes. “This is the first party we’ve been to in months and you want to go home practically before we get here.”

“I just feel lousy,” he said. He stood up.

“It’s peculiar,” she said. “Just the nights you’re with me you feel lousy. I bet you feel just fine the nights you go out with Teddy Boylan.”

“Oh, lay off Boylan, will you, Julie?” Rudolph said, “I haven’t seen him for weeks.”

“What’s the matter—he run out of peroxide?”

“Joke,” Rudolph said wearily.

She turned on her heel, her pony tail swinging, and went over to the group around the phonograph. She was the prettiest girl in the room, snub-nosed, scrubbed, smart, slender, dear, and Rudolph wished she would go away someplace for six months, a year, and then come back, after he had gotten over being tired, and had a chance to figure everything out in peace and they could start all over again.

He went upstairs and put on his coat and left the house without saying good night to anyone. Judy Garland was on the phonograph now, singing “The Trolley Song.”

It was raining outside, a cold, drifting, February misty river rain, blowing at him in the wind. He coughed inside his coat, with the wet trickling down inside his turned-up collar. He walked slowly toward home, feeling like crying. He hated these spats with Julie, and they were becoming more and more frequent. If they made love to each other, really made love, not that frustrating, foolish necking that made them both ashamed after it, he was sure they wouldn’t be scratching at each other all the time. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would have to be hidden, they’d have to lie, they’d have to sneak off somewhere like criminals. He had long ago made up his mind. It was going to be perfect or it wasn’t going to happen.

The hotel manager threw open the door of the suite. There was a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. There was a smell of jasmine and thyme in the air. The two bronzed young people looked around the room coolly, glanced at the Mediterranean. Uniformed bellboys brought in many pieces of leather luggage and distributed them around the rooms.

“Ça vous plaît, Monsieur?” the manager asked.

“Çava,” the bronzed young man said.

“Merci, Monsieur.” The hotel manager backed out of the room.

The two bronzed young people went out onto the balcony and looked at the sea. They kissed against the blueness. The smell of jasmine and thyme became stronger.

Or …

It was only a small log cabin, with the snow piled high against its sides. The mountains reared behind it. The two bronzed young people came in shaking the snow from their clothes, laughing. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace. The snow was so high it covered the windows. They were all alone in the high world. The two bronzed young people sank down to the floor in front of the fire.

Or …

The two bronzed young people walked along the red carpet on the platform. The Twentieth Century to Chicago stood on the tracks, gleaming. The two young people went past the porter in his white coat, into the car. The stateroom was full of flowers. There was the smell of roses. The two bronzed young people smiled at each other and strolled through the train to the club car for a drink.

Or …

Rudolph coughed miserably in the rain as he turned into Vanderhoff Street. I’ve seen too goddamn many movies, he thought.

The light from the cellar was coming up through the grating in front of the bakery. The Eternal Flame. Axel Jordache, the Unknown Soldier. If his father died, Rudolph thought, would anyone remember to put out the light?

Rudolph hesitated, the keys to the house in his hand. Ever since the night his mother had made that crazy speech about thirty thousand dollars, he had felt sorry for his father. His father walked around the house slowly and quietly, like a man who has just come out of a hospital after a major operation, a man who had felt the warning tap of death on his shoulder. Axel Jordache had always seemed strong, terrifyingly strong, to Rudolph. His voice had been loud, his movements abrupt and careless. Now his long silences, his hesitant gestures, his slow, apologetic way of spreading a newspaper or fixing himself a pot of coffee, careful not to make any unnecessary noise, was somehow frightening. Suddenly, it seemed to Rudolph that his father was preparing himself for his grave. Standing in the dark hallway with his hand on the banister, for the first time since he was a little boy he asked himself whether he loved his father or not.

He went over to the door leading to the bakery, unlocked it and passed through it to the back room and descended into the cellar.

His father wasn’t doing anything, just sitting on his bench, staring ahead of him at the oven, the bottle of whiskey on the floor beside him. The cat lay crouched in the corner.

“Hello, Pa,” Rudolph said.

His father turned his head slowly toward him and nodded.

“I just came down to see if there was something I could do.”

“No,” his father said. He reached down and picked up the bottle and took a small swig. He offered the bottle to Rudolph. “Want some?”

“Thanks.” Rudolph didn’t want any whiskey, but he felt his father would like it if he took some. The bottle was slippery from his father’s sweat. He took a swig. It burned his mouth and throat.

“You’re soaking wet,” his father said.

“It’s raining out.”

“Take off your coat. You don’t want to sit there in a wet coat.”

Rudolph took off his coat and hung it on a hook on the wall. “How’re things, Pa?” he asked. It was a question he had never asked his father before.

His father chuckled quietly, but didn’t answer. He took another swig of the whiskey.

“What’d you do tonight?” Axel asked.

“I went to a party.”

“A party.” Axel nodded. “Did you play your horn?”

“No.”

“What do people do at a party these days?”

“I don’t know. Dance. Listen to music. Kid around.”

“Did I ever tell you I went to dancing school when I was a boy?” Axel said. “In Cologne. In white gloves. They taught me how to bow. Cologne was nice in the summertime. Maybe I ought to go back there. They’ll be starting everything up from scratch there now, maybe that’s the place for me. A ruin for the ruins.”

“Come on, Pa,” Rudolph said. “Don’t talk like that.”

Axel took another drink. “I had a visitor today,” he said. “Mr. Harrison.”

Mr. Harrison was the owner of the building. He came on the third of each month for the rent. He was at least eighty years old, but he never missed collecting. In person. It wasn’t the third of the month, so Rudolph knew that the visit must have been an important one. “What’d he want?” Rudolph said.

“They’re tearing down the building,” Axel said. “They’re going to put up a whole block of apartments with stores on the ground floor. Port Philip is expanding, Mr. Harrison says, progress is progress. He’s eighty years old, but he’s progressing. He’s investing a lot of money. In Cologne they knock the building down with bombs. In America they do it with money.”

“When do we have to get out?”

“Not till October. Mr. Harrison says he’s telling me early, so I’ll have a chance to find something else. He’s a considerate old man, Mr. Harrison.”

Rudolph looked around him at the familiar cracked walls, the iron doors of the ovens, the window open to the grating on the sidewalk. It was queer to think of all this, the house he had known all his life, no longer there, vanished. He had always thought he would leave the house. It had never occurred to him that the house would leave him.

“What’re you going to do?” he asked his father.

Axel shrugged. “Maybe they need a baker in Cologne. If I happen to find a drunken Englishman some rainy night along the river maybe I could buy passage back to Germany.”

“What’re you talking about, Pa?” Rudolph asked sharply.

“That’s how I came to America,” Axel said mildly. “I followed a drunken Englishman who’d been waving his money around in a bar in the Sankt Pauli district of Hamburg and I drew a knife on him. He put up a fight. The English don’t give up anything without a fight. I put the knife in him and took his wallet and I dropped him into the canal. I told you I killed a man with a knife that day with your French teacher, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said.

“I’ve always meant to tell you the story,” Axel said. “Anytime any of your friends says his ancestors came over on the Mayflower, you can say your ancestors came over on a wallet full of five-pound notes. It was a foggy night. He must’ve been crazy, that Englishman, going around a district like Sankt Pauli with all that money. Maybe he thought he was going to screw every whore in the district and he didn’t want to be caught short of cash. So that’s what I say, maybe if I can find an Englishman down by the river, maybe I’ll make the return trip.”

Christ, Rudolph thought bitterly, come on down and have a nice cosy little chat with old Dad in his office …

“If you ever happened to kill an Englishman,” his father went on, “you’d want to tell your son about it, now, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t think you ought to go around talking about it,” Rudolph said.

“Oh,” Axel said, “you planning to turn me over to the police? I forgot you were so high principled.”

“Pa, you ought to forget about it. It’s no good thinking about it after all these years. What good does it do?”

Axel didn’t answer. He drank reflectively from the bottle.

“Oh, I remember a lot of things,” he said. “I get a lot of remembering-time down here at night. I remember shitting my pants along the Meuse. I remember the way my leg smelled the second week in the hospital. I remember carrying two-hundred-pound sacks of cocoa on the docks in Hamburg, with my leg opening up and bleeding every day. I remember what the Englishman said before I pushed him into the canal. ‘I say there,’ he said, ‘you can’t do that.’ I remember the day of my marriage. I could tell you about that, but I think you’d be more interested in your mother’s report. I remember the look on the face of a man called Abraham Chase in Ohio when I laid five thousand dollars on the table in front of him to make him feel better for getting his daughters laid.” He drank again. “I worked twenty years of my life,” he went on, “to pay to keep your brother out of jail. Your mother has let it be known that she thinks I was wrong. Do you think I was wrong?”

“No,” Rudolph said.

“You’re going to have a rough time from now on, Rudy,” Axel said. “I’m sorry. I tried to do my best.”

“I’ll get by,” Rudolph said. He wasn’t at all sure he would.

“Go for the money,” Axel said. “Don’t let anybody fool you. Don’t go for anything else. Don’t listen to all the crap they write in the papers about Other Values. That’s what the rich preach to the poor so that they can keep raking it in, without getting their throats cut. Be Abraham Chase with that look on his face, picking up the bills. How much money you got in the bank?”

“A hundred and sixty dollars,” Rudolph said.

“Don’t part with it,” Axel said. “Not with a penny of it. Not even if I come dragging up to your door starving to death and ask you for the price of a meal. Don’t give me a dime.”

“Pa, you’re getting yourself all worked up. Why don’t you go upstairs and go to bed. I’ll put in the hours here.”

“You stay out of here. Or just come and talk to me, if you want. But stay away from the work. You got better things to do. Learn your lessons. All of them. Step careful. The sins of the fathers. Unto how many generations. My father used to read the Bible after dinner in the living room. I may not be leaving you much, but I sure as hell am leaving you well visited with sins. Two men killed. All my whores. And what I did to your mother. And letting Thomas grow up like wild grass. And who knows what Gretchen is doing. Your mother seems to have some information. You ever see her?”

“Yeah,” Rudolph said.

“What’s she’s up to?”

“You’d rather not hear,” Rudolph said.

“That figures,” his father said. “God watches. I don’t go to church, but I know God watches. Keeping the books on Axel Jordache and his generations.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Rudolph said. “God doesn’t watch anything.” His atheism was firm. “You’ve had some bad luck. That’s all. Everything can change tomorrow.”

“Pay up, God says.” Rudolph had the feeling his father wasn’t talking to him anymore, that he would be saying the same things, in the same dreamlike dead voice if he were alone in the cellar. “Pay up, Sinner, I will afflict you and your sons for your deeds.” He took a long drink, shook himself, as though a shiver had run coldly through his body. “Go to bed,” he said. “I got work to do.”

“Good night, Pa.” Rudolph took his coat off the hook on the wall. His father didn’t answer, just sat there, staring, holding the bottle.

Rudolph went upstairs. Christ, he thought, and I thought it was Ma who was the crazy one.

II

Axel took another drink from the bottle, then went back to work. He worked steadily all night. He found himself humming as he moved around the cellar. He didn’t recognize the tune for a while. It bothered him, not recognizing it. Then he remembered. It was a song his mother used to sing when she was in the kitchen.

He sang the words, low,

His native tongue. He had traveled too far. Or not far enough.

He had the last pan of rolls ready to go into the oven. He left it standing on the table and went over to a shelf and took down a can. There was a warning skull-and-bones on the label. He dug into the can and measured out a small spoonful of the powder. He carried it over to the table and picked up one of the raw rolls at random. He kneaded the poison into the roll thoroughly, then reshaped the roll and put it back into the pan. My message to the world, he thought.

The cat watched him. He put the pan of rolls into the oven and went over to the sink and stripped off his shirt and washed his hands and face and arms and torso. He dried himself on flour sacking and redressed. He sat down, facing the oven, and put the bottle, now nearly empty, to his lips.

He hummed the tune his mother had sung in her kitchen when he was a small boy.

When the rolls were baked, he pulled out the pan and left them to cool. All the rolls looked the same.

Then he turned off the gas in the ovens and put on his mackinaw and cap. He went up the steps into the bakery and went out. He let the cat follow him. It was dark and still raining. The wind had freshened. He kicked the cat and the cat ran off.

He limped toward the river.

He opened the rusty padlock of the warehouse and turned on a light. He picked up the shell and carried it to the rickety wharf. The river was rough, with whitecaps, and made a sucking, rushing sound as it swept past. The wharf was protected by a curling jetty and the water there was calm. He put the shell down on the wharf and went back and got the oars and turned out the light and snapped the padlock shut. He carried the oars back to the wharf and lay them down along the edge, then put the shell in the water. He stepped in lightly and put the oars into the outriggers.

He pushed off and guided the shell out toward open water. The current caught him and he began to row steadily out toward the river’s center. He went downstream, the waves washing over the sides of the shell, the rain beating in his face. In a little while the shell was low in the water. He continued to row steadily, as the river ran swiftly down toward New York, the bays, the open ocean.

The shell was almost completely awash as he reached the heart of the river.

The shell was found, overturned, the next day, near Bear Mountain. They didn’t ever find Axel Jordache.