Take Me Home

Chapter 5

In the following days of their chaste cohabitation, Henry became accustomed to having Ivy around the place and would have missed her if she had gone away. Most surprisingly of all, he discovered that he worked better when she was there, somehow supported and sustained in his efforts by the slight sounds of her movement, her breathing, the occasional remarks she made aloud to herself without any expectation of a response from him. When he came back in the evenings from his small job with a minor publisher of three obscure trade journals, he came with a sense of expectancy that was never quite sure of fulfillment, and he always discovered her presence with mixed feelings of relief and astonishment that she had not, while he was gone, packed her things and departed without a sign or word.

Now, on a night in December, he looked up and around from his work at the table and saw her lying on her belly on the sofa with a thick book propped against the sofa’s arm in front of her eyes. It was a childish and appealing position, her knees bent and her heels waving back and forth above her narrow stern. He got up suddenly and walked across the room to one of the windows overlooking the street. Christmas was coming on, and the street lamps spaced along the curb were decorated with large red-and-white striped candy canes. The windows of the shops across the street had been dressed for the season with monotonous similarity in bright tinsel and piper above cotton and glitter in the semblance of snow. It had snowed in reality for a day and a night, but the snow was now slush on the sidewalk and street. On the nearest corner, seen at a sharp angle from the window where Henry stood, a large black pot of the Salvation Army hung from a tripod to receive alms for the poor. A soldier of the Army stood beside the pot and rang his bell in largo tempo, calculated to survive the long hours of supplication. The sound of the bell did not reach Henry, but he imagined, each time the soldier’s arm rose and fell, that he could hear the clapper strike.

“We ought to have a tree,” Henry said.

“A Christmas tree?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“They’re very expensive. Do you think you can afford it?”

“Certainly I can afford it. I’m not so poor that I can’t buy a tree if I please.”

“Well, it would be nice to have a tree, but I don’t think you ought to buy one.”

“Nonsense. Go out and buy one tomorrow. You’ll have to get some lights and ornaments for it too.”

She closed her book, which was the third one of several that she had decided to read in a program of self-improvement in several areas. Rolling over and sitting up on the sofa, she glared at his back with a kind of sulky resentment.

“I was going to buy one Saturday as a surprise,” she said, “but I see that you’re bound to spoil it.”

“Why wait until Saturday?”

“Because I’m being paid Saturday, that’s why. I was going to buy the tree as a surprise with my own money.”

“What the devil do you mean? Are you actually working somewhere?”

“That follows, doesn’t it? If I’m being paid, I must be working. Sometimes I think you like to be purposely obtuse.”

“Never mind abusing me. I’m not in the mood for it. Where are you working, if you don’t mind saying?”

“I’m working downstairs in the bookshop.”

“For old Adolph Brennan?”

“Yes. I went down to talk with him and to explain our arrangement, that I’m staying with you for a while, because I thought he had a right to know, being the landlord and all, and after talking with him and explaining the arrangement, I asked him if he needed any help during the Christmas rush, and he said it happened that he did, though I can’t say I’ve noticed any particular rush. I guess there aren’t many people who give secondhand books as Christmas presents. Anyhow, what I intended, really, was to work for nothing in return for being allowed to stay here, but he insisted on paying me a little besides. He’s a very sweet old man.”

“You say you explained our arrangement?”

“Yes. I wanted it clearly understood, and I thought it was only fair.”

“Exactly how clear do you suppose his understanding is? It seems to me that the reasonable implications of the arrangement would seem to be very different from the truth.”

“Well, it’s not my fault if he jumps to wrong conclusions. The important thing is, he was kind and considerate and felt that it was our business entirely, just as the Greek did.”

“I’ll say one thing for you. You’re certainly building up quite a reputation for me in the neighborhood.”

“You shouldn’t be so egotistical. You imagine that everyone is paying attention to what you do, but it’s very doubtful, in my opinion, that anyone cares in the least. Besides, writers are supposed to be rather immoral. It’s expected of them.”

“Is that so? It’s interesting to know that you’ve suddenly become an authority on writers.”

“Are you beginning to feel quarrelsome? You sound like it. I only wanted to surprise you with a Christmas tree that I paid for with my own money, and now you’re behaving as if I’d done something wrong. I think it’s very small of you, if you want to know the truth. It’s rather depressing, you know, when everything you do turns out to be wrong.”

“I didn’t mean that at all, and you know it. I wouldn’t think of depriving you of the right to buy a Christmas tree with your own money. I suppose it’s only fair that you should contribute something now and then. We’ll decorate the tree together Saturday night.”

“I’d like that. Really I would. It’s been a long time since I’ve helped to decorate a Christmas tree. Perhaps it hasn’t been so long, actually, but it seems like a long time, so much has happened since, and so it comes to the same thing.”

“You’re right there. Something may seem a long time ago when it really hasn’t been so long at all. It’s a kind of perspective. When I was a boy, we had an evergreen tree in the front yard. Every year, a week before Christmas exactly, we strung colored bulbs in the tree and lit them every night until Christmas was past. It wasn’t too many years ago, but it seems forever.”

“Were you actually a boy once?”

“Of course I was a boy. Do you think I was born a man?”

“It’s crazy, I know, but it seems to me that you must surely have been born the instant we met. You must have been born in one instant and have walked instantly afterward into the Greek’s for a cup of coffee...”

He had often had, as a matter of fact, the same queer notion about himself. Not that he had, specifically, been born full-grown outside the Greek’s on the night of reference, but that he had been born suddenly in various places at various times, and that everything he remembered before that time and place, whenever and wherever it was in a particular instance, was somehow something that had happened to someone else. Now, standing at the window and watching the soldier’s bell rise and fall in largo tempo, he began to think of the past, the way from another time to this time, and it seemed to him, as it always did when he tried to review the pattern of his life, that the pattern had color and richness and variety and sense in two places at two times, and these places and times were signified by three people he had loved, of whom one was dead and the other two, so far as he was now concerned, might as well have been.

There was, in the first time and the first place, his Uncle Andy Harper. There was also an Aunt Edna, Uncle Andy’s wife, but she was never in Henry’s mind more than a kind of shadow of Uncle Andy, existing only because he did and having in recollection only the substance she borrowed from him.

Uncle Andy was a tall man, lean and tough as a wolf, with a long nose projecting downward from between a pair of the softest, most dream-obsessed eyes it was possible to imagine, and many folk thought that his eyes were his most remarkable feature, but these were the folk who had never become familiar with the touch of his hands. His hands were very large, with long thick fingers, padded on the palm side with the thick callus of hard work, and you would naturally have thought, looking at them, that their touch would be heavy, inadvertently brutal, but this was not so. The touch of the hands was as light and as gentle as the most delicate touch of the white hands of a fine lady, and it had the effect of a minor miracle, an impossible effect of its observable cause.

Henry first became aware of the light, miraculous touch of the heavy hands at the age of five when he was ill of influenza, and this was less than a year after the deaths of his father and mother in an accident on a highway six hundred miles away, when he had come to live with Uncle Andy and Aunt Edna on their farm about a hundred miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. He had wakened from a feverish sleep with the feeling that his fever was being drawn from his forehead by the soft magic of cool fingers, and he had thought at first that it was his mother who was sitting beside his bed, but it had turned out to be Uncle Andy. From that moment he had understood his uncle’s vast depth of gentleness, and he had always afterward loved his uncle completely and quietly, with unspoken devotion, which was the only kind of love Uncle Andy wanted or would accept.

Uncle Andy was a puzzle to his neighbors and the despair of his wife, and this was because he declared himself to be an agnostic and maintained his position against all persuasion and prophecies of divine retribution. Enlightenment had its limitations in the area in which they lived, in the time they lived there, and it was not understood how a man could be so good, as measured by his faithfulness to his wife and his attention to his proper affairs, and at once so contaminated by the devil, as measured by his adherence to the devil’s gospel. The truth of the matter was, Uncle Andy’s formal education had ended at the eighth grade, but he had continued to read widely in a random sort of way, taking what he could find anywhere he could find it, and after an early experience with Colonel Bob Ingersoll, he had come, in the twenties, under the influence of Clarence Darrow and H. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, and the greatest of these, because of a communication of gentle pessimism, was Darrow. One of the rare times Uncle Andy had become very angry, which was long before Henry’s time, was when a Baptist minister from Fort Scott had tried to argue that William Jennings Bryan, who had just died of gluttony, had been specifically spared by God just long enough to confound the greatest agnostic of his day at the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. Uncle Andy had pointed out that God had used damned poor judgment in his choice of counsel, since Darrow had made a bigger monkey of Bryan than Scopes had tried to make of man’s ancestor.

The years on the farm were good years for Henry, although they later became, in the recollection of them after he had gone away, obscured and unreal with incredible rapidity by events that came between him and them. One of the things Henry learned, which was knowledge that filled him with adolescent sadness, was that Uncle Andy, in spite of being a successful farmer with no problems at the bank, considered himself a failure. He was not a failure, of course, but he considered himself one because he had been unable to do what he wanted most to do, which was to set down on paper some of the things he had seen and thought and felt and done, and he would not even allow himself the consolation of thinking that he might have been able to do so if only he had a better chance.

“The test of a Milton is that he act like a Milton,” he said to Henry one summer night on the screened-in back porch off the kitchen. “I read that somewhere. I think it was Mencken wrote it. Anyhow, it’s true. If I had it in me to do what I want to do, I’d do it, but I haven’t got it. It’s a great sadness, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

So it was from Uncle Andy that Henry acquired his curiosity and his reading habits and, later, his need and hunger to express himself. He read voraciously, as Uncle Andy had, and for years without discrimination. Dickens and Charles Alden Seltzer were equally acceptable to him, and if he recognized the superiority of the one, it did not prevent him from enjoying the other, and when he eventually encountered the massive, indiscriminate hunger and thirst and bellowing of Thomas Wolfe, it was like a revelation of divine despair. By that time, he was wanting to write stories himself, and he began to try. It was much more difficult than he had imagined, and it seemed to him unbelievable that it could require so much time and effort to fill a single page of lined paper with words that had never before been set down in the sense and order he gave to them.

In spite of his wide reading and his hunger, which was more emotional than mental, he was no better than a mediocre student at the high school in town. This was not because of inability, but rather because of a stubborn resistance to any kind of direction that was contrary to his natural interests. He read, but he read mostly the things he wanted to read, conceding only enough attention to assignments to get him by without disgrace and without distinction. Literature he loved, and history he accepted, but mathematics and science were barely tolerated. Finally, in due time, he graduated and received his diploma, and in the summer following his graduation Uncle Andy died, and was gone from the earth, and the earth was changed.

The morning of the day of that summer, Henry was up early, and the hours ahead of him seemed bright and clear and filled with the certainty of quiet and rich experience. After breakfast, he was standing behind the bam, looking off beyond the fields and pasture to the stand of timber along the creek, when Uncle Andy drove around the barn on the tractor.

“Where you going, Uncle Andy?” Henry said.

“Down to the far field at the southwest corner of the property,” Uncle Andy said. “It’s been lying there fallow since plowing, and I intend to disc it.”

“Where’s the disc?”

“It’s already down there. I’ve only got to drive the tractor down and hook on. You like to come along?”

“Well, not unless you really need me.”

“I don’t need you, but you’re welcome to come along for the ride. You got a loafing day planned out?”

“I didn’t plan to do much. I thought I’d go down to the creek.”

“You want to take the car and go into town?”

“No. Just down to the creek.”

“You go ahead and do what you like. I’ll be back around noon for dinner.”

“Okay, Uncle Andy. See you later.”

This was almost exactly what was said, and the reason Henry remembered it so clearly, the small talk that didn’t amount to anything, was because it was the last conversation he and Uncle Andy ever had, and it came back to him word for word afterward with all the importance and enormous significance of being the last of something there would ever be. For quite a while he felt guilty, as if he had somehow deserted Uncle Andy just when he was needed most, but he knew, really, that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if he had gone, because he almost certainly wouldn’t have been in any position to prevent what happened, it surely happened so fast. Anyhow, that was later, and this summer Saturday morning he went on down across the fields and pasture to the creek, and he spent the morning down there, lying under the trees and watching the dark water and thinking about what he would do with the rest of his life and wondering if he could ever become a writer, as he wished, or if he would finally have to do something else instead.

He got back to the house a little before noon, and Uncle Andy wasn’t there, and he still wasn’t there by one o’clock. He and Aunt Edna had planned to go into town for the afternoon, and Aunt Edna was frantic with worry, because Uncle Andy wasn’t the kind of man to forget a plan or to go deliberately back on one. Finally, to satisfy Aunt Edna, Henry went all the way across the farm to the southwest corner, the fallow field, and he found the tractor stalled against a post at one end of the field, and Uncle Andy lying back in the field on the plowed earth. The disc had gone over him, and the only thing that later helped a little in the memory of it was the assurance of the doctor that Uncle Andy had clearly suffered a heart attack, which had caused him to fall off the seat of the tractor, and that it was probable he hadn’t ever felt what happened to him.

After Uncle Andy was buried and gone for good, except the little of him that could be remembered, Aunt Edna asked Henry if he was interested in working the farm for a livelihood, and he said he wasn’t, so Aunt Edna let it on shares to a good man with a wife and two sons. She moved into a cottage in town, and Henry went up to the state university on a shoestring in September, and it was there and then that he met the other two of the three people he had loved most. One was a boy, and the other was a girl, and he met the girl through the boy, whom he met first.

Going to the university on a shoestring the way he was, there wasn’t any question of social fraternities, anything that cost extra money, and he found a room in a widow’s house that was down the hill a few blocks from the campus. There were four rooms for men students on the second floor of the house, a community bath at the end of the hall, and Henry’s room was the smallest of the four, overlooking the shingled roof of the front porch. One night of the first week of his residence, he was lying on the bed in the room with his text on World Civilization spread open under his eyes, but he wasn’t having much luck in reading his assignment because he was feeing pretty low and wondering if, after all, he shouldn’t have chosen to work the farm. The door to the hall was open, and after a while someone stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb. Looking up, Henry saw a thin young man with a dark, ugly face under a thatch of unruly, brown hair.

“You Harper?” the young man said.

He asked the question as if there were no more than the slightest chance for an affirmative answer. At the same time he gave the impression of caring very little if the answer was affirmative or not.

“That’s right,” Henry said.

“Mine’s Brewster. Howie Brewster. I live down the hall.”

Howie Brewster came on into the room, and Henry got off the bed and shook hands. The hand that gripped his was surprisingly strong in spite of a suggestion of limpness in the way it was offered. Immediately afterward, without an invitation, Howie Brewster sat down on the bed and took a half-pint of whiskey out of the inside pocket of his coat.

“Have a drink,” he said.

Henry shook his head. “No, thanks.”

“What’s the matter? You one of old Bunsen’s goddamn heroes?”

“I don’t even know who old Bunsen is, and I’m no hero.”

“Honest to God? You don’t know who Bunsen is?”

“I said I don’t. Who is he?”

“Football coach. I thought you might be one of his hired hands. You look like it, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re big enough. You got good shoulders. I should have known you weren’t, though. If you were, you wouldn’t be living in Mrs. Murphy’s goddamn Poor House. They take better care of the heroes. How come you are living here, by the way? Can’t you afford anything better?”

“No. Can’t you?”

“I can, as a matter of fact. My old man would stand the tariff of one of the frats if I’d live there, but I wouldn’t live in one of those fancy flophouses with all those bastards for a thousand a month.”

“Why don’t you rent a better room or an apartment or something?”

“I know. You think I’m a goddamn liar. That’s all right, though. I don’t mind. You can think whatever you please and kiss my ass besides.”

“Look. What the hell’s the idea of coming in here and talking to me like that? I won’t kiss your ass, but I may kick it if you don’t look out.”

“Sure. You’re just the big corn-fed stupe who could do it, too, aren’t you? Well, go ahead. I had an idea you had some brains, just from the look of you, but I guess you’ve got them all in your hands and feet, if you’ve got any at all, just like all the other stupes around here. Go on. Kick my ass. Kick the shit out of me.”

“Oh, go to hell. I think I’ll have a drink out of that bottle after all.”

He took a swallow from the bottle and gagged. Howie Brewster watched him with open curiosity and an immediately resumed amiability.

“You ever had a drink of whiskey before?”

“No.”

“Honest to God?”

“What do you want me to do, apologize for never having a drink before? I’ve had beer, out with friends now and then, but I never drank any whiskey.”

“Never mind. You’ll learn. How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You’ve got plenty of time. I’m twenty myself. If I was a year older, I’d be contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“Balls. You’re a big talker, aren’t you? Your old man’s rich, and you’re a regular rounder.”

“It’s a defense mechanism. The truth is, I’m neurotic as hell. It’s a fact, though, that my old man’s well heeled. You can believe it or not.”

“How come you can’t afford anything better than Mrs. Murphy’s, then?”

“Because my old man’s a bastard. He’s a bastard, and so am I. We deserve each other. When I refused to join his goddamn frat, he put me on a subsistence allowance. He thinks it’s good for my soul.”

He tipped his bottle and took a long pull and did not gag. Standing, he walked to the door.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got to read my goddamn economics assignment. Not that it’ll do any good. I won’t remember the crap. This’ll probably be my last year here. Second and last. I’ll flunk out sure as hell.”

He left, swinging his little bottle openly by the neck with an air of bravado in defiance of Mrs. Murphy’s posted prohibition of liquor on the premises, but he was back a couple of nights later, and in the weeks that followed, accumulating to a couple of months, he and Henry became comfortable cronies with a developing taste for beer. By tacit understanding, after the first night, whiskey was dropped as an issue, and the beer was in the beginning a kind of compromise that became quickly a social lubricant, and at the same time the substance of a bond. They discovered a small place downtown near the river where the question of age was not raised against them, and it was here that they habitually spent the nights that they could afford to give to it. The compatibility was supported by a mutual interest in writing and a shared conviction that the novelists of the twenties and thirties, the giants of the middle age between two wars, had never been properly read or appreciated until the two of them came along to do it.

Beneath Howie’s pretentious rebellion, his excessive profanity and assumption of decadence, there was in truth, Henry learned, a genuine loneliness and uncertainty. And below these, now and then discernible, a depth of black despair. At first, as their sensitivity to each other increased, the real Howie was no more than a collection of suggestions, a personality merely inferred by some of the things he said and did, but then, one night in Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House, there occurred an incident that made him, in one rather terrible minute, perfectly clear.

Henry had been to the bathroom at the end of the hall. On his way back to his room, passing Howie’s closed door, he heard from behind the door a dry, rasping sound. Without pausing to think or trying to identify the sound, he stopped and turned the knob and stepped into the room. Just beyond the threshold he stopped abruptly, feeling within himself a rising tide of horror that was excessive in relation to its cause. Howie was lying face down across his bed, and he was crying. The sound of his crying was the arid sound of grief without tears.

“What’s wrong?” Henry said.

He knew immediately that he had made a mistake. He should not have opened the door to begin with, but having opened it, he should have backed silently out of the room and left without a word. Howie rolled over and sat up on the bed, and his voice, although quiet, had the brittle intensity of a scream.

“Get out of here, you son of a bitch! Who the hell do you think you are to come walking in here any goddamn time you please without knocking?”

Henry’s first reaction was one of simple shock at the violence of the attack. He backed out and closed the door, but when he was in his room again, he began to feel angry and was tempted to go back and give Howie a damn good beating. But this reaction was also short-lived, and shock and anger gave way together to genuine concern and an uneasy sense of shame for Howie’s brief emotional nakedness. He wondered what on earth could have happened to disturb Howie so deeply, but he was really aware, even then, that it was nothing specific, no one thing in particular, and that Howie had merely reached, as he had before and would again, a time of intolerable despair.

Thirty minutes later Howie was standing in the doorway.

“May I come in?” he said.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, you know. I thought I might not be welcome.”

“Oh, to hell with it. Come on in.”

Howie came in and sat down, and that was the only reference ever made to the incident by either of them. “I’ve written a long poem,” Howie said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Two hundred twenty lines.”

“That’s pretty long, all right. What’s it about?”

“Well, it’s pretty hard just to say in so many words what a poem is about. Would you like me to read it to you?”

“Go ahead.”

“I call it The Dance of the Gonococci.”

“What?”

“The Dance of the Gonococci. You know. Gap bugs”

“Oh, come off. You’re joking.”

“Certainly not. Why should you simply say that I’m joking?”

“You’ll have to admit that gonococci are pretty unusual subjects for a poem.”

“Nothing of the sort. If Burns could write a lousy poem to a louse, why can’t I write one about gonococci? In my opinion, gonococci are much more poetic than louse. At least, one can have a lot more fun acquiring them.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Look, sonny. Just because you’re a green and sappy virgin, don’t think everyone else is too. You’re just retarded, that’s all.”

“Talk, talk, talk. Talk big, talk loud.”

“Oh, God, you’re impossible. You don’t know anything about anything. A dose of clap would do you good.”

“It might do you good too. Then you might not think gonococci are so damn poetic.”

“I had a dose once. Didn’t I tell you about it?”

“No.”

“I was seventeen at the time. I caught it from a girl from one of the best families. Nothing but the best for Howie, you know.”

“One of the best families in shantytown?”

“Don’t be facetious, sonny. Catching the clap is not a minor matter. Not that it amounted to much, really. It’s no worse than a bad cold.”

“I’ve heard that before, too.”

“It’s the truth. You ought to try it.”

“Oh, balls. Go on and read the damn poem.”

“No. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why? Don’t think I’m going to beg you.”

“Please don’t. It’s just that I don’t think you’d appreciate it. You’re obviously not sufficiently cultivated. Besides, I’ve got another idea.”

“Do you think I’m sufficiently cultivated to hear it?”

“Maybe. Time will tell.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Let’s go see Mandy.”

“Who’s Mandy?”

“Jesus Christ! You mean I’ve never told you about Mandy either?”

“If you did, I don’t remember it.”

“Mandy Moran. Junior. She lives over in the dorm. Honest to God, Henry, I’ve actually never mentioned her?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“An egregious oversight, I assure you. You’ve got a treat in store, sonny. Last year Mandy and I did a lot of knocking around together, but this year we haven’t seen much of each other. I guess that’s why I haven’t thought to mention her. I don’t think she likes me much any more, to tell the truth, but I’m still madly in love with her, of course, in spite of being neglected. As a matter of fact, I have a standing project to go to bed with her. Come on. We’ll go over to the dorm and see if she’s in.”

“I don’t think so, Howie.”

“Why not?”

“Well, damn it, I don’t even know the girl, and besides that, you can’t go busting in on someone without an invitation or a date or anything at all.”

“Are you, for God’s sake, telling me what you can or can’t do with Mandy Moran? You don’t even know her yet, and already you’re telling me what you can and can’t do with her.”

“Oh, all right! I’ll go with you, just to get you off my back, but It’ll damn well serve us right if she has us thrown out on our asses.”

“That’s the spirit. Who knows? Maybe this will be the first step in despoiling you of your disgusting virginity. I’d consider it a rare privilege to be instrumental in your first tumble, sonny.”

“Oh, go to hell, Howie, will you, please?”

They walked up the hill to the girls’ dorm and were told by a superior female senior, the receptionist in the entrance hall, that Miss Moran was not in. Miss Moran was, the superior senior volunteered, working that night on the stage of the little auditorium in Fain Hall.

“We’ll go over there,” Howie said. “Come on, Henry.”

“Do you think we’d better?”

“Certainly I think we’d better. Why not?”

“If she’s working, she may not want to be bothered.”

“Oh, come on, Henry. You’re constantly making excuses. Are you afraid to meet a girl, for God’s sake?”

“Don’t be a damn fool. Some of us country boys might give a few lessons to a lot of guys with exaggerated opinions of themselves. Not to mention names, of course. What’s this Mandy doing in the little auditorium?”

“I’m not sure. Probably painting flats. She’s got an idea she wants to be a set designer.”

“For plays?”

“Hell, yes, for plays. What else do you design sets for? She’s a member of the Little Theater Group.”

“That sounds like a pretty good thing. Interesting, I mean. I might like to try something like that myself.”

“Well here’s your chance. You get on Mandy’s good side, she might be able to get you in.”

The little auditorium in Fain Hall was dark, but there was a line of light across the stage at the bottom of the drawn curtains. Howie led the way up a flight of shallow stairs to stage level and out of a small off-stage room onto the stage itself. It was a very small stage, really, but it gave the effect of echoing vastness, and there was no one on it, excluding Howie and Henry, but a slim girl in a sweat shirt and slacks. She was holding her chin with the fingers of her right hand and staring disconsolately at a flat on which she had, obviously, been daubing paint. There was paint on her clothes, paint on her hands, paint on her face, and even a little paint in her pale, short hair. Henry thought that she must surely be the loveliest girl in all the world, although she wasn’t that, and was a long way from it.

“Hello, Mandy,” Howie said. “Long time no see.”

She shifted the direction of her gaze from the flat to Howie. She did not change her disconsolate expression in the least. She had, apparently, merely shifted her attention from one unsatisfactory object to another.

“Has it been a long time?” she said. “I haven’t missed you.”

“Well, to hell with you.”

“To hell with you too, you crazy bastard.”

“I wanted you to meet my crony, but I can see I picked the wrong time for it.”

Her attention shifted again, from Howie to Henry. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Henry said.

“Don’t you even want to know his name, for God’s sake?” Howie said.

“What’s his name?” she said.

“It’s Henry Harper.”

“I’m glad to know you, Henry.”

“Henry, this is Mandy Moran.”

“I’m glad to know you, Mandy.”

“How about going somewhere for a beer?” Howie said.

“You drink beer, Henry?” she said.

“All the time,” Henry said.

“I’ve written a long poem,” Howie said. “I’ll recite it for you.”

“I can hardly wait,” she said.

“It’s better than anything Eliot ever did,” Howie said. “It’s called The Dance of the Gonococci.”

“A shocker,” Mandy said to Henry. “Howie’s a real shocker. He works at it. You don’t look old enough to drink beer.”

“Cut it out, Henry said. “You have to be a certain age to drink beer?”

“Legally, I mean. What class you in?”

“Freshman.”

“God, I envy you. I really do. I’m a junior myself.”

“That’s what Howie said.”

“I feel like your mother.”

“Ask her to nurse you, for God’s sake,” Howie said.

“Don’t be crude, Howie,” she said.

“A couple of virgins talking to each other like that,” Howie said. “It’s disgusting.”

“Just because you couldn’t get any, Howie,” she said, “It doesn’t signify.”

“For God’s sake,” Howie said, “are we going for a beer, or aren’t we?”

“Wait’ll I wash,” she said.

She walked off-stage to a lavatory. Waiting, they could hear water running and splashing and considerable blowing.

“She washes like a goddamn porpoise,” Howie said.

“She’s lovely,” Henry said.

“Mandy? Well, so she is, when you stop to think about it. She’s so damn irritating, it’s hard to realize it most of the time. Crazy too, of course. A real nut if I ever saw one. So am I, however, so it doesn’t make much difference to me. Something happened to her as a child.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“It must have, that’s all. Nothing’s happened to her since that I know of.”

“Damn it, Howie, you shouldn’t say things like that about her. It’s not right.”

“Well, kiss my ass! Listen to the virgin freshman leap to the defense of his junior mother.”

“All right, all right. Get off my back, Howie.”

At that moment Mandy returned, and she had got some of the paint and had missed some. Her short, pale hair looked as if she might have run a comb through it two or three times.

“Where we going?” she said.

“We know a place,” Howie said.

“I know the kind of places you know,” she said.

“Relax,” Howie said. “You must remember that we have your freshman child with us.”

She took Henry’s arm and pulled it up under hers and held it tight against her slim body. He could feel her small breast against his wrist. She kept his arm clamped under hers, and he kept feeling the breast.

“Never mind what Howie says,” she said.

“I don’t,” he said.

“Where is this place you know?”

“I guess he means the one down on the river. We go there sometimes.”

“It’s a long walk down to the river.”

“Quite a way, all right.”

“I have to be in by eleven.”

“We could have a couple of beers and come right back.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

“Well, by God, I’m glad you got it settled,” Howie said. “Am I included, by the way?”

“Suit yourself,” Mandy said. “You can come along if you want to.”

It took them almost half an hour to walk downhill from the campus and across town to the river, and it was about nine-thirty when they got there. They ordered three beers and drank them and ordered three more.

“Do you want me to recite my poem now?” Howie said.

“Not particularly,” Mandy said.

“Oh, let’s hear him recite it,” Henry said. “It’s better than anything Eliot ever wrote.”

“All right, Howie,” Mandy said. “Go ahead and recite it.”

“I’ll be damned if I will,” Howie said. “I know when I’m not appreciated.”

“Are you going to sulk about it?” Mandy said.

“To hell with it,” Howie said. “Nurse your child and leave me alone.”

They drank the second round of beers, and it got close to ten. Somehow or other Henry and Mandy got to holding hands under the table. When she drank from her schooner, she lifted it in both hands, and this made it necessary for her to release the one under the table temporarily, and during these times she would lay Henry’s hand on her knee and leave it there until she was ready to pick it up again.

“Maybe we’d better have another round of beers,” Henry said.

“I’m afraid it’s time to go,” Mandy said, “If I’m to be back by eleven.”

“It only took about half an hour coming,” Henry said.

“On the way back, we’ll be going uphill,” she said.

“That’s true,” Henry said. “We’d better go.”

They walked back across town and uphill. At a corner near Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House, Howie turned off by himself.

“Where you going, Howie?” Henry said.

“Home,” Howie said.

“Don’t you want to go with us?”

“To hell with it,” Howie said, and walked away.

“Do you suppose we hurt his feelings?” Mandy said.

“I hope not,” Henry said.

“So do I,” she said. “You never know what hell do when his feelings have been hurt.”

When they got to the dorm, they stopped in the deep shadow of a high hedge in front.

“Would you like to kiss me?” she said.

“I was just thinking how much I’d like to.”

“Go ahead and kiss me, then.”

He put his arms around her and kissed her, and she put her arms around him and kissed him, and after the first kiss they kissed twice more for a longer time each time. “I’d better go in now,” she said.

“I guess you’d better.”

“I liked you right away,” she said.

“Same here,” he said. “I liked you as soon as I saw you.”

“It doesn’t matter because you’re only a freshman.”

“I’m glad of it,” he said.

He went back to Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House and went to bed and thought about her. He didn’t see Howie again that night, or all the next day, but the next night Howie came into his room and talked for nearly an hour, and it looked like everything was going to be all right.

It wasn’t true, as Howie had said, that he was a virgin, but he had never felt for any girl the strange and disturbing mixture of lust and tenderness that he felt for Mandy. He had felt the former in numerous instances, satisfying it in two, and he had felt the latter for a particular girl in high school for six whole weeks on end, but he had not understood then that they could be compatible components of a single shattering emotional reaction. Mandy possessed, he learned in the weeks that followed, a fine capacity for passion, and it was only now and then that he wondered, for a moment at a time, if she had expressed before, or was even expressing now, the passion as freely with others as she did with him. He never asked, of course, because he was in no position to assume the right and did not, in any case, want to know. His major source of chagrin was that circumstances always prevented her free expression of passion from being quite so free as it might have been if circumstances had been more favorable.

In November, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday was to begin, he went over to the dorm in the afternoon to tell Mandy good-by. Most of the girls had already left, or were packing to leave, and the sitting room in which he waited was deserted except for himself. He felt very sad, as if he wanted to grieve for something unknown and to cry for no good reason. The holiday would be, after all, a very short one, only a few days, but it seemed to him to stretch ahead interminably. He waited and wallowed in his sadness for ten full minutes before Mandy came down from her room.

“Hello, Henry,” she said. “Have you come to say good-by?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I hoped you’d come, but I was afraid you’d gone without it.”

“I wouldn’t do that. You ought to know I wouldn’t.”

“Are you going to your aunt’s?”

“I guess so. There’s no place else.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I thought I’d go this evening. There’s a bus at six o’clock. When are you?”

“I? I’m not going anywhere. Did you think I was?”

“You mean you’re not going home?”

“No. It’s too far away for so short a time. I’ll wait until Christmas.”

“I’m not going either, then. I’ll stay here with you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want you to spoil your holiday.”

“I want to stay. Will you see me every day if I stay?”

“Isn’t your aunt expecting you?”

“I’ll write and tell her I couldn’t come. Wouldn’t you like me to stay?”

“Yes, I would, and if you do I promise to see you every day and every night.”

“It’s settled, then. I’ll stay.”

“We’ll have a marvelous time, won’t we?”

“Yes, we will. We’ll have the best time ever. I will, anyhow. I know that.”

“Is Howie going home?”

“He’s already gone. He cut his classes and went this morning. Everyone else at Mrs. Murphy’s has gone to 3.”

“Including Mrs. Murphy?”

“Well, no, not Mrs. Murphy, of course. She’s there.”

“Will you call for me tonight?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Come early. About seven-thirty. I’ve got to go back upstairs now. I’m helping my roommate pack.” They were still alone in the sitting room, and so she kissed him hard and held herself tightly against him.

“I’m so glad you’re staying,” she said.

“So am I,” he said.

When he returned at seven thirty, she was already downstairs waiting for him.

“What shall we do?” she said.

“I don’t know. What would you like to do?”

“Do you have much money?”

“About twenty dollars.”

“I thought we might go downtown and have dinner. Do you think that would be fun?”

“Yes. Let’s do that. While we’re having dinner we can decide what we want to do later.”

“I already know what I want to do.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

“Never mind why. You keep thinking about what it could be and then let me know if you guessed.”

They walked downtown to a good restaurant and sat knees to knees at a small table for two. It was the last time they’d had dinner together in a restaurant, and it made Henry feel special and very rich, as if he had a thousand dollars in his pocket instead of only twenty. It took quite a while to get served, and quite a while longer to finish eating, and by the time they’d finished and had coffee and a cigarette apiece, it was nine-thirty, or nearly.

“Have you been thinking about what I’d like to do?” she said.

“I’ve been trying,” he said, “but I can’t think of anything special.”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to buy a bottle of wine and go to your room.”

“At Mrs. Murphy’s?”

“Yes. It seems to me we ought to have a celebration to begin the holiday, and I’d like to go there and have it.”

“We’d have to be careful Mrs. Murphy didn’t see us. She’s deaf, though. We could probably slip in.”

“It would be fun. Don’t you think so? Will you take me?”

They went to a package store for the bottle of wine. Henry was afraid the clerk might embarrass him by asking him his age, and he was prepared to lie if necessary, of course, but the clerk apparently thought that he was old enough, or did not care if he was old enough or not. He was not familiar with wines, moreover, and hadn’t the least idea of what would be the best kind to buy.

“What kind would you like?” he said to Mandy.

“Dark port would be nice,” she said. “It’s not so dry as some of the others, and besides, it’s stronger than most of them.”

“You mean it has more alcohol in it?”

“Yes. Port has around twenty percent and most of the dry wines have only twelve or fourteen.”

“That’s a good thing to know. I’ll remember that.”

“Oh yes. Port is six or eight percent stronger.”

“A bottle of dark port, please,” Henry said to the clerk.

“I’d like to suggest a New York wine, if you don’t mind,” Mandy said. “It may be only imagination on my part, but it always seems to me that New York wines are better.”

“A bottle of dark port from New York,” Henry said to the clerk.

The clerk put a bottle of Taylor’s dark port in a brown paper sack, and Henry paid for it. He was surprised to discover that it was so cheap. He had somehow expected a bottle of wine from New York to be quite expensive. With the bottle under one arm and Mandy holding onto the other, he started uphill for Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House.

“Do you think Mrs. Murphy will be asleep?” Mandy said.

“Probably. She goes to bed early usually, but sometimes she sits up and watches television. It’s all right, though. Her sitting room is at the back of the house. If we’re careful we can get in without her seeing us.”

“What would she do if she saw?”

“Raise hell. Report me to the dean.”

“That would be too bad. I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

“In my opinion, it would be worth it.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I surely do.”

“Well, that was a very nice thing to say, and I promise that I’ll do something nice for you in return.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait and see. We must remember, after we get upstairs, not to get careless and make too much noise. Isn’t this the house?”

“Yes. You wait out here, and I’ll see if the hall’s clear.” He went up across the porch alone and into the hall. The hall was clear, with only a small light burning on one wall, and he signaled Mandy from the door to come on. She came up and into the hall without the slightest sound, except a soft giggle of excitement that was hardly more than a whisper, and they went upstairs together to his room. Henry drew the blinds and turned on a light.

“It’s very small, isn’t it?” Mandy said.

“Yes, but it’s handy. I can lie on the bed and reach damn near everything in the room.”

“It’s cozy, all right. I think it’s very cozy. Do you have some glasses?”—

“Dixie cups.”

“Dixie cups will do nicely. Will you please pour the wine?”

He opened the bottle and poured dark port into two Dixie cups. The wine was sweet and strong, and he could feel it almost immediately in his blood. By the time his cup was empty, his head was feeling strangely and pleasantly light, and he sat down on the edge of the bed. Mandy came over and stood in front of him between his knees, and he put his arms around her hips and leaned his head comfortably against her flat belly. After holding her so for a minute or two, he drew his hands slowly down over her hips and flanks and up again under her skirt.

“You’re sweet,” she said.

“You,” he said. “You’re the sweet one.”

“I promised I’d do something nice for you. Do you want me to?”

“Yes. Please.”

“It would be nicer if the lights were off. If you were to turn off the light and raise the blinds, we could still see each other, but no one could see in.”

He got up and turned off the light and raised the blinds. Turning, he stood with his back to the window until his eyes had adjusted to the shadows. She was standing in the precise place and position he had left her, and he could sense her excitement and expectancy as surely and as strongly as he could feel his own.

“Shall we have a little more wine first?” she said.

“If you wish.”

“I think a little more wine would be nice.”

He filled their cups again, and when they had drunk the sweet and heady wine, she turned around and said, “Please unbutton me,” and he did so with great difficulty, and then, when he had at last accomplished the unbuttoning, she turned back to face him and unfastened his jacket and the shirt under the jacket, throwing both to the floor. Then she came hard against him, clutching him close so that the hard nipples of her breasts rubbed teasingly across the flesh of his chest. Instinctively their mouths met and fused in a kiss that was filled with hunger and yearning. They remained locked together like that as if they could not get enough of each other.

Finally, Mandy drew away slightly and in the faint, uncertain light of the room he saw the svelte, exciting lines of her nude body. Her skin held a rich, pale glow, her breasts were high and firm, her waist narrow and flat, the hips having a wide flare, then narrowing into smooth, slender legs.

“Darling!” she whispered and drew his head to her bosom. He kissed the mounds of her breasts, his mouth lingering on the pink buds of her nipples, then coursing along her ribs, while desire mounted in a powerful tide in both of them.

Her own hands began a feverish stroking of Henry’s body while they kissed and kissed again. Finally, in blind impatience they stumbled toward the bed and fell upon it, their arms and legs intertwining, their hot, moist lips still joined. And afterward the lingering and deliberate revelation of each to the other was mounting and tempestuous excitement that grew to intolerable intensity and shattered at last to the crying of a voice that might have been his or hers or both.

“Was it nice?” she said afterward. “Did I please you?”

“Darling,” he said. “Darling Mandy.”

“Do you love me a little?”

“No. Not a little. I love you so much that it hurts and hurts and I can hardly bear it.”

“I’m so glad you love me, even if it’s only a little, and it makes me happy to know that I’ve been able to please you.”

She was then so quiet for so long that he thought she had gone to sleep, and time had passed from one day to another, to the day of Thanksgiving, when she spoke again and asked what time it was.

“After twelve,” he said. “About ten minutes.”

“Oh, God, I’ll have to go. I have to be in by one.”

“Even on a holiday?”

“Yes. Isn’t it depressing? School nights we have to be in by eleven, but weekends and holidays it’s one.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go.”

“So do I. I wish I could stay all night and wake up and please you in the morning.”

“Will you come back again?”

“Tomorrow night, if you like. We’ll have a wonderful holiday, won’t we?”

They barely beat the one o’clock deadline at the dorm, and the next night was wonderful and pleasing, as was the holiday altogether, but in the time that followed from Thanksgiving to Christmas they were sometimes almost in despair, partly because circumstances again made certain things difficult, if not impossible, and partly because it was a time leading inevitably to another period of time when they would be unable to see each other at all in any circumstances whatever. Henry’s despair increased as the dreaded Christmas holiday drew near, and then, a few days before it was to begin, something happened to Howie that reduced his own affairs to insignificance and made him feel that he had committed a hideous wrong in having been so excessively concerned with them.

The evening of the day it happened, Henry was in his room, trying to study but not being very successful at it, when Howie came in and sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor between his feet.

“I expect this will be my last semester here,” he said suddenly.

“Last semester?” Henry looked up from his book. “Why?”

“Well, I’m not doing so well. I’ve got behind in all my subjects. I’m sure to flunk at least three of my semester exams.”

“Exams aren’t until the middle of January. If you worked hard between now and then, you could catch up.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Anyhow, I won’t do it. I know that. For some reason or other, I can’t seem to get interested in anything. The old man will raise hell, but I guess it doesn’t make much difference. I’ve been thinking about not coming back after the holiday.”

“I hope you will.”

“Why? I’d only be dropped after exams.”

“Maybe not. Maybe you’re being too pessimistic about your chances.”

“No. There’s no chance at all of getting by unless I work like a dog between now and then, and there’s no use kidding myself that I’m going to do it. I just haven’t got it in me.”

“I don’t want you to leave school, Howie. I’d miss you if you did.”

“Oh, balls. You wouldn’t miss me as long as Mandy’s around.”

“Yes, I would. Mandy would miss you too.”

“Cut it out. She hardly ever sees me as it is, and she isn’t very happy about it when she does. You’ve heard the way she talks to me.”

“Well, you invite it, Howie. You know you do.”

“I suppose so. I’m an unpleasant son of a bitch. I don’t really want to be, though. It’s because I’m afraid of being disliked or something, and so I deliberately try to make everyone dislike me. It gives me a kind of excuse. You’ve probably figured out for yourself by this time that I’m a goddamn phony.”

“You’re nothing of the sort, and I’ve never thought so.”

“Well, thanks. I guess maybe you haven’t. You’ve been a good friend.”

Suddenly Howie made a fist with one hand and began to beat it with a slow and desperate cadence into the palm of the other. Standing, he walked out of the room without another word, and it was not more than fifteen minutes later when Henry heard him scream. The scream was repeated and repeated in almost the same cadence with which the fist had pounded the palm, and the screams were accompanied by the sounds of objects crashing and breaking and overturning in what seemed a systematic plan of demolition. After recovering from the first paralysis of shock, Henry hurried into the hall and down to Howie’s closed door. The student who lived in the room across the hall was already there, staring at the door with an expression of incredulous horror.

“What in God’s name’s the matter with him?” he said. “Why the hell don’t you open the door and find out?”

“I tried to, but it’s locked.”

“Help me break it down.”

They threw themselves against the door together, and the flimsy lock snapped at once. The room beyond was in shambles. Curtains and blinds had been ripped from the windows, mattress and covers torn from the bed, chairs and tables overturned, lamps smashed, books and papers scattered everywhere. In the middle of the shambles, facing the door, was Howie. His shirt was ripped, and his face was bleeding in several places where he had clawed himself. He looked at Henry and saw no one and continued his terrible, cadenced screaming.

“Jesus, Jesus,” the student said. “He’s gone completely crazy.”

“Go call the infirmary,” Henry said. “Tell them to send an ambulance.”

The student left, and Henry waited by the door. He spoke to Howie once, but he got no response, no slight sign of recognition, and with a kind of instinctive feeling for what was right, he made no effort to force himself upon his berserk friend. He only waited and watched to see that Howie inflicted no more damage on himself, and after a while the student returned, and a longer while after that the ambulance came with a doctor and two attendants from the infirmary. As soon as he was touched, Howie, who had become quiet, was immediately violent again, screaming and cursing and fighting with incredible strength. It required both attendants and the doctor to subdue him and administer an injection of some kind of sedative. When they had taken Howie away at last, Henry went into the bathroom and was sick.

He did not see Mandy again until the night before the day the Christmas holiday was to begin. They met in the sitting room of the dorm and walked from there across the campus to the Museum of Natural History and along a path behind the museum to a campanile on a high point of ground above a hollow with a small lake in it. A wind was blowing, and it was cold there, but they sat for a while in the cold wind on a stone bench, and the cold was like a punishment inflicted, a penance borne. He could feel her shivering and heard for a moment the chattering of her teeth, but when he lifted his arm to put it around her for warmth, she drew away from him a little on the bench.

“No,” she said. “Don’t touch me tonight.”

“All right. I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

“Please don’t be offended.”

“I’m not. I think I understand.”

“I should have been kinder to him. It wouldn’t have hurt me to be a little kinder, and it might have helped.”

“You musn’t blame yourself for anything. It was something more than you or I or anyone else ever said or did or failed to say or do.”

“You’re right, I suppose. It must have been something in himself that couldn’t be helped.”

“Maybe now it can be helped.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I only wish that I had been a little kinder. He was in love with me, you know. Last year, before you came, he wanted me to run away and marry him.”

“I didn’t know. He never said anything.”

“I couldn’t do it, of course. I never even liked him very well, to tell the truth, but it wouldn’t have hurt me to be a little kinder.”

“Don’t say that again. Please don’t say it. You couldn’t be expected to know how he was or what would eventually happen to him.”

“Do you think he will be all right?”

“After a while. Someone will help him now.”

“I hope he’s all right. I hope he will be helped by someone who is kinder than I.”

She stood up, shivering and drawing her coat around her. They walked back along the path to the museum and on to the dorm, stopping in the shadow of the leafless hedge.

“Good-by, Henry,” she said.

“Good-by,” he said. “Will I see you after Christmas?”

“Yes,” she said. “After Christmas...”