The Last Gentleman

Chapter Three

FOR AN HOUR and a half the great trucks rolled past, shaking the earth and exhaling clouds of blue headache smoke. Was it possible that his Princeton placard did more harm than good? He had in fact given up, counted his money for the third time, and resolved to ride the bus and waive eating; had even picked up telescope but not, fortunately, Val-Pak, which supported the placard, when a bottle-green Chevrolet, an old ’58 Junebug, passed and hesitated, the driver’s foot lifting and the carburetor sucking wind, speeded up and hesitated again. As the engineer watched politely lest he presume upon fortune, the Chevrolet pulled off the highway and sat interestingly on the shoulder a good hundred yards to the south. At last it came, the sign, a hand beckoned to him importunately and in a single swoop he caught up Val-Pak and telescope and left placard behind.

Already, even as he stooped, smiling, to stow his gear through the back door, which had been opened for him, he had registered his benefactor without quite looking at him. The driver was a light-colored high-stomached Negro dressed in a good brown suit, no doubt a preacher or a teacher. Now sitting beside him and taking note of the other’s civil bald bun-shaped head, of the sharp knees and thin ankles clad in socks-with-clocks, he was sure of it: here was the sort to hold converse at a lofty level with instant and prodigious agreement on all subjects. He would belong to a committee on Religion and Mental Health.

As it turned out, the driverspoke not of religion or mental health but of Princeton and Einstein. The placard had worked.

“There was a quality of simplicity about him,” said the driver, turning his head and not his eyes sociably toward his passenger, and launched at once into his own pet theory. It was his conviction that there was a balance in nature which was upset by man’s attempt to improve upon it.

The engineer agreed and, casting his eye about the ruinous New Jersey flats, cited an article he had read about rivers in this very neighborhood which fairly foamed with detergents and chemical wastes.

“No, no,” said the driver excitedly. He explained that he was not speaking of ordinary pollution but of a far more fundamental principle. Rather was it his conviction that man’s very best efforts to improve his environment, by air-conditioning and even by landscaping, upset a fundamental law which it took millions of years to evolve. “You take your modern office building, as tastefully done as you please. What does it do to a man to uproot him from the earth? There is the cause of your violence!”

“Yes,” said the sentient engineer, frowning thoughtfully. Something was amiss here. He couldn’t quite get hold of this bird. Something was out of kilter. It was his speech, for one thing. The driver did not speak as one might expect him to, with a certain relish and a hearkening to his own periods, as many educated Negroes speak. No, his speech was rapid and slurred, for all the world like a shaky white man’s.

Obligingly, however, the engineer, who had become giddy from hunger and his long wait, set forth his own ideas on the subject of good environments and bad environments — without mentioning the noxious particles.

“Yes!” cried the driver in his damped reedy voice. He was tiring and excited and driving badly. The passenger became nervous. If only he would ask me to drive, he groaned, as the Chevy nearly ran under a great Fruehauf trailer. “That’s your reaction to artificial environments in general! Wonderful! Don’t you see how it dovetails?”

The engineer nodded reluctantly. He did not see. Back-to-nature was the last thing he had in mind. “Except — ahem—” said he, feeling his own voice go a bit reedy. “Except I would suspect that even if one picked out the most natural surroundings he might carry his own deprivation with him.”

“Capital,” cried the driver and smote the steering wheel.

The engineer could all but feel the broad plastic knurls between his knuckles. I could make this old Junebug take off, he thought. But the driver was slowing down again, row-boating badly as he did so.

“Now isn’t this something,” he said. “Here we are, total strangers, talking like this—” He was fairly jumping out of his skin in his nervous elation.

They passed an abandoned miniature golf links, the ancient kind with asbestos greens and gutter pipes which squirt out the ball. But no sooner had they entered the countryside of middle Jersey than the driver pulled off the highway and stopped. The hitchhiker sat as pleasant as ever, hands on knees, nodding slightly, but inwardly dismayed.

“Do you mind if I ask a question?” said the driver, swinging over a sharp, well-clad knee.

“Why, no.”

“I like to know what a man’s philosophy is and I want to tell you mine.”

Uh-oh, thought the engineer gloomily. After five years of New York and Central Park and the Y.M.C.A., he had learned to be wary of philosophers.

With his Masonic ring winking fraternally, the dignified colored man leaned several degrees nearer. “I have a little confession to make to you.”

“Certainly,” said the courteous engineer, cocking a weather eye at his surroundings. All around them stretched a gloomy cattail swamp which smelled like a crankcase and from which arose singing clouds of mosquitoes. A steady stream of Fruehauf tractor-trailers rumbled past, each with a no-rider sign on the windshield.

“I’m not what you think I am,” the driver shouted above the uproar.

“You’re not,” said the pleasant, forward-facing engineer.

“What do you think I am? Tell me honestly.”

“Um. I’d guess you were a minister or perhaps a professor.”

“What race?”

“Why, um, colored.”

“Look at this.”

To the hitchhiker’s astonishment, the driver shucked off his coat and pushed a jeweled cuff up a skinny arm.

“Ah,” said the engineer, nodding politely, though he couldn’t see much in the gathering darkness.

“Well?”

“Sir?”

“Look at that patch.”

“Then you’re not—?”

“I’m not a Negro.”

“Is that right?”

“My name is not Isham Washington.”

“No?”

“It’s Forney Aiken.”

“Is that so,” said the interested engineer. He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.

“Does that name ring a bell?”

“It does sound familiar,” said the engineer truthfully, since his legions of déjà vus made everything sound familiar.

“Do you remember a picture story that appeared in July ’51 Redbook called ‘Death on the Expressway’?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It was reprinted by the National Safety Council, ten million copies.”

“As a matter of fact, I think I do—”

“Do you remember the fellow who interviewed Jafsie Condon in the cemetery?”

“Who?”

“Or the article in Liberty: ‘I Saw Vic Genovese’? For forty-eight hours I was the only man alive in contact with both the F.B.I. and Vic Genovese.”

“You’re Forney Aiken the—”

“The photographer.”

“Yes, I think I do,” said the engineer, nodding but still wary. This fellow could still be a philosopher. “Anyhow I certainly do appreciate the ride.” The singing hordes of mosquitoes were coming ever nearer. He wished Forney would getgoing.

“Forney,” cried the other, holding out a hand.

“Will. Will Barrett.”

The green Chevrolet resumed its journey, taking its place shakily among the Fruehauf tractors. Breathing a sigh of relief, the engineer spoke of his own small efforts in photography and took from his wallet a color snapshot of the peregrine falcon, his best.

“Tremendous,” cried the photographer, once again beside himself with delight at having fallen in with such a pleasant and ingenious young man. In return he showed his passenger a tiny candid camera concealed under his necktie whose lens looked like the jewel of a tie clasp.

It, the candid camera, was essential to his present assignment. The photographer, it turned out, was setting forth on an expedition this very afternoon, the first he had undertaken in quite awhile. It was something of a comeback, the engineer surmised. He had the shaky voice and the fitful enthusiasms of a man freshly sober.

The nature of his new project accounted for his extraordinary disguise. He wished to do a series on behind-the-scene life of the Negro. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night: why not be a Negro? To make a long story short, he had persuaded a dermatologist friend to administer an alkaloid which simulates the deposit of melanin in the skin, with the difference that the darkening effect could be neutralized by a topical cream. Therefore the white patch on his forearm. To complete the disguise, he had provided himself with the personal papers of one Isham Washington, an agent for a burial insurance firm in Pittsburgh.

This very afternoon he had left the office of his agent in New York, tonight would stop off at his house in Bucks County, and tomorrow would head south, under the “cotton curtain,” as he expressed it.

The pseudo-Negro was even more delighted to discover that his passenger was something of an expert on American speech. “You were my first test and I passed it, and you a Southerner.”

“Well, not quite,” replied the tactful engineer. He explained that for one thing you don’t say insur-ance but in-surance or rather in-shaunce.

“Oh, this is marvelous,” said the pseudo-Negro, nearly running under a Borden tanker.

You don’t say that either, mahvelous, thought the engineer, but let it go.

“What do you think of the title ‘No Man an Island’?”

“Very good.”

Tomorrow, the pseudo-Negro explained, he planned to stop in Philadelphia and pick up Mort Prince, the writer, who planned to come with him and do the text.

“But hold on,” exclaimed the driver, smacking the steering wheel again. “How stupid can you get.”

For the third time in a month the engineer was offered a job. “Why didn’t I think of it before! Why don’t you come with us? You know the country and you could do the driving. I’m a lousy driver.” He was. His driving was like his talking. He was alert and chipper and terrified. “Do you drive?”

“Yes sir.”

But the engineer declined. His services were already engaged, he explained, by a family who was employing him as tutor-companion to their son.

“Ten dollars a day plus keep.”

“No sir. I really can’t.”

“Plus a piece of the royalties.”

“I certainly appreciate it.”

“You know Mort?”

“Well, I’ve heard of him and read some of his books.”

“You know, it was Mort and I who first hit on the idea of the Writers’ and Actors’ League for Social Morality.”

The engineer nodded agreeably. “I can certainly understand it, considering the number of dirty books published nowadays. As for the personal lives of the actors and actresses—”

The pseudo-Negro looked at him twice. “Oh-ho. Very good! Very ironical! I like that. You’re quite a character, Barrett.”

“Yes sir.”

“Joking aside, though, it was our idea to form the first folk theater to travel through the South. Last summer it played in over a hundred towns. Where are you from — I bet it played there.”

The engineer told him.

“My God.” The pseudo-Negro ran off the road in his excitement. The hitchhiker put a discreet hand on the wheel until the Chevy was under control. “That’s where we’re having our festival this fall. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway are coming down. What it is, is like the old morality plays in the Middle Ages.”

“Yes sir.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you’ve got to come with us.”

The engineer managed to decline, but in the end he agreed to drive the other as far as Virginia and the “cotton curtain.” When they stopped the second time to change drivers, he was glad enough to add the two ten-dollar bills, which the pseudo-Negro made a great show of paying him in advance, to his flattened wallet and to sprint around and hop into the driver’s seat.

Under the engineer’s steady hand, the Chevrolet fairly sailed down US 1. In short order it turned onto a great new westering turnpike and swept like a bird across the Delaware River not far from the spot where General Washington crossed nearly two hundred years ago.

Forney Aiken’s stone cottage was also standing at the time of the crossing. Some years ago, he told the engineer, he and his wife had left New York and beat a more or less disorderly retreat to Bucks County. She was an actor’s agent and had to commute. He was trying to quit drinking and thought it might help to live in the country and do chores, perhaps even farm. When farming didn’t work, he took to making things, the sort of articles, firkins and sisal tote bags, which are advertised in home magazines. But this was not as simple as it looked either. There was more to it than designing an ad for a magazine. You have to have your wholesale outlet.

There were some people sitting around a lighted pool in an orchard when they arrived. The travelers skirted them in a somewhat ambiguous fashion, not quite ignoring them and not quite stopping to speak but catching a few introductions on the fly, so to speak. Mrs. Aiken looked after them with an expression which gave the engineer to understand that the photographer often showed up with strangers and skirted the pool. Even though it was dark, the photographer insisted on showing the engineer the orchard and barn. It was a pity because the engineer recognized one of the guests, a nameless but familiar actor who took the part of a gentle, wise doctor on the daytime serial which it was his habit to watch for a few minutes after lunch in the Y. But he must be shown on to the barn instead, which was stacked to the rafters with cedar firkins, thousands of them. For some eighteen months the barn had served as a firkin factory. But of the eight or nine thousand manufactured, only five hundred had been sold. “Take your pick,” his host urged him, and the engineer was glad enough to do so, having a liking for well-wrought wooden things. He chose a stout two-gallon firkin of red-and-white cedar bound in copper and fitted with a top. It would be a good thing to carry country butter in or well water or just to sit on between rides.

Later he did meet the poolside group. The actor was a cheerful fellow, not at all like the sad doctor he played, even though his face had fallen into a habitual careworn expression after years in the part. But he had a thick brown merry body and a good pelt on his chest, upon which he rested his highball. No one paid any attention to Forney’s disguise. They treated him with the tender apocalyptic cordiality and the many warm hugs of show-business people. Though he knew nothing about show biz, the sentient engineer had no trouble translating their tender regard for their host. It clearly signified: Forney, you’re dead, done for, that’s why we love you. Forney was as abrupt with them as they were tender with him. He had the manner of one going about his business. To the others, it seemed to the sentient engineer, the expedition was “something Forney was doing” and something therefore to be treated with a mournful and inattentive sympathy which already discounted failure. A rangy forty-five-year-old couple with muscular forty-five-year-old calves, burnt black as Indians, found the engineer and asked him who he was. When he told them he came with Forney, they went deaf and fond. “Forney’s got more talent in his little finger than anybody here,” cried the man both privately and loudly, like a proverb, and hurried away.

Though he had not eaten or slept since the day before, he drank two drinks and went swimming. Soon he was treading water in the deep dark end of the pool with Forney’s daughter, the only other young person present. Everyone called her Muzh or Moosh. She had the fitful and antic manner of one used to the company of her elders. In no time the two of them had their heads together, snuffling the water like seals. It was understood between them that they were being the young folk. Muzh had just returned from her college year abroad. Her shoulders were strong and sloping from bicycling around youth hostels. In the clear yellow water her strong legs bent like pants. She told him about the guests. Her way of speaking was rapid and confidential as if they had left off only a short time earlier. She rattled off some recent history. “Coop over there—” she spoke into the lambent water, nodding toward a distinguished silver-haired gent, “—is just out of the Doylestown jail, where he served six months for sodomy, though Fra says sodomy rates two to ten.” Who was Fra? (As usual, strangers expected him to know their, the strangers’, friends.) And had she, for a fact, said sodomy? He wrung out his ear. Unfortunately she was at that moment on his deaf side.

She dawdled toward him, working the water to and fro through the sluice of her shoulder. On she went about the guests in her rapid, cataloguing voice, bent toward him, the waterline at his mouth, while he grew ever fainter with hunger and more agitated. As her knees brushed against his and she spoke of having transcended Western values, he seized her through the thick parts, fell upon her as much from weakness as desire, fainted upon her, the fine brown berry of a girl she was. “Zut alors,” she cried softly, and now perfunctorily, unsurprised, keeping herself flexed and bent away from him, she asked him about the transvaluation of values. “I couldn’t say,” he replied, disappointed. He had heard enough about values from Dr. Gamow. “No, really,” she said. “I am in something of a value crisis and so I’m deeply concerned. What can we do?” “Let’s go over yonder,” he replied, fainting with hunger and desire, and nodded to the dark polygon of the barn. “Zut,” she cried, but idly, and swam away. As he stood slack in the water, both lustful and shrunken with cold, she made forays in the water around him, flexing like a porpoise, came under him in the shallows, put him astride and unhorsed him in bluff youth-hostel style. “See you later,” she said at last and went away, but how said she it?

Coming to himself all at once, he socked himself in the head. Swine, said he, staggering about in the shallows, white trash. Here you are in love with a certain person and bound south as a gentleman like Rooney Lee after a sojourn in the North, and at it again: pressing against girls like a horny dolphin and abusing your host besides. No more humbuggery! Leaping from the pool, he ran to the room Forney had shown him and, starved or not, threw a hundred combination punches and did thirty minutes of violent isomorphics until he dripped with sweat, took an ice-cold shower and read two pages of Living. Saints contemplated God to be rid of concupiscence; he turned to money. He returned to the pool, exhausted, ravenous, but in his right mind.

“I apologize,” he told Muzh formally as they stood in line for cold cuts. “As a matter of fact I’ve been, ahem, in something of a value crisis myself and have not eaten or slept in quite awhile. I apologize for being forward with you.”

“Good God,” said Muzh, brushing against him with several dorsal surfaces. “Don’t,” she whispered.

“Don’t what?”

She didn’t answer.

Damn, thought he, and had to thrust his hand through his pocket to keep his knee from leaping.

He ate three helpings of turkey and ham and rye bread and sat slack and heavy with his blood singing in his ears. Fortunately his host was brimming with plans for the morrow and put him to work after supper toting paraphernalia, cameras and insurance manuals, to the Chevrolet. Later he showed him the house.

“You’re going to like Mort Prince. He’s our kind of folks.” They had reached the cellar, which the engineer looked at and sniffed with interest because at home the ground was too low for cellars and he’d never seen one before. “He’s a sweet guy,” said Forney.

“Yes sir.”

“Have you read his stuff?”

“A couple of novels quite a while ago.”

“You haven’t read Love?”

“His latest? No.”

“I’ll get you a copy tonight.”

“Thank you, but I’m very sleepy. I think I’ll go to bed.”

Forney came closer. “You know what that guy told me with a straight face. I asked him what this book was going to be about and he said quite seriously: it was about — ing. And in a sense it is!” They were by now back at poolside and within earshot of others, including Muzh. It made the engineer nervous. “But it is a beautiful piece of work and about as pornographic as Chaucer. Indeed it is deeply religious. I’ll get you a copy.”

The engineer groaned. What the devil does he mean telling me it’s about — ing? Is — ing a joking matter? Am I to understand I am free to — his daughter? Or do we speak of — ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of — ing anyone in the vicinity? His radar boggled.

“It is essentially a religious book, in the sense of being a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying,” Forney went on. “Mort has one simple credo: saying Yes to Life wherever it is found.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer, rising unsteadily. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

But no sooner had he fallen into the four-poster than a knock came at the door. It was Muzh in a shorty nightgown delivering Love. “You talk about randy,” said she and smote her brow. “Sheesh!”

“Thank you,” said the engineer, laughing heartily, and when she had left went reeling about the room like Rooney Lee after the battle of Seven Days. What saved him in the end was not only Southern chivalry but Yankee good sense. Muzh he saw all at once and belatedly, as she might have been seen by her classmates, as a horsy, good-natured, sisterly sort. She was, as they say in the North, a good kid. And so it was permitted him to leave her alone and to excuse himself. What a relief. He wiped his brow.

Worse luck, though, sleep deserted him, left him half dead from lack of it and wide awake. There was nothing to do but read Love. He read it straight through, finishing at three o’clock.

Love was about orgasms, good and bad, some forty-six. But it ended, as Forney had said, on a religious note. “And so I humbly ask of life,” said the hero to his last partner with whose assistance he had managed to coincide with his best expectations, “that it grant us the only salvation, that of one human being discovering himself through another and through the miracle of love.”

The poor engineer arose, faint with fatigue, and threw a few final combination punches to clear his head. But when he got back in bed he found himself lying at attention, his feet sticking up, his left leg tending to rise of itself. There was nothing to do but swallow two of Dr. Gamow’s spansules, which induced sleep only indirectly by inhibiting the cortical influence on the midbrain — even though he knew that his sense of time and place would suffer in consequence. Though he might not know where he was tomorrow or what year it was, at least he’d feel better than this.

At any rate he went fast asleep and woke in midmorning, somewhat disoriented but feeling quite cheerful and well.

Early afternoon found him driving like a cat. The bottle-green Chevrolet went roaring and banking around the many ramps and interchanges of eastern Pennsylvania. The pseudo-Negro sat beside him as alert and jumpy as ever. Presently they left the expressway and went among the sooty little hill towns. Déjà vus stole alongside and beckoned at the corner of his eye. How familiar were these steep streets and old 1937 brick-and-limestone high schools and the sooty monkey Pullman smell. Surely I attended that very one, he told himself, where I recall taking mechanical drawing in the basement. Two girls in summer school sat on the school steps, dumb pretty Pennsylvania girls. He waved. They waved back. Oh girls I love you. Don’t let anybody mess with you till I get back because I’ve been here before. Where is this place? “Where is this?” he asked so abruptly that the pseudo-Negro jumped a good inch.

The pseudo-Negro kept harping on Mort Prince, whom they were presently to pick up. The writer, it seemed, had astonished his friends by moving to Levittown. He had inherited the house from an aunt and, instead of selling it, had sold his farm in Connecticut and moved in more or less, as the pseudo-Negro expressed it, for the simple heck of it. “Imagine going from Fiesole to Levittown,” he said, shaking his head. The engineer could very well imagine it.

He began to look forward to meeting Mort Prince. Some years ago he had read two of his novels and remembered them perfectly — he could remember perfectly every detail of a book he had read ten years ago or a conversation with his father fifteen years ago; it was the day before yesterday that gave him trouble. After a war novel which made him famous, Mort Prince wrote a novel about a young veteran who becomes disillusioned with the United States and goes to Italy in quest of his own identity. It is in Europe that he discovers he is an American after all. The book ended on a hopeful note. Mark comes home to visit his dying father, who is a judge in Vermont. The judge is a Yankee in the old style, a man of granite integrity. Now he too, Mark, knows who he is, what he must do, and that all men are his brothers. In the last chapter he climbs High Tor overlooking the valley. If a man does nothing else in life, said Mark to himself, he can at least tell one other man (that all men are brothers) and he another and he in turn another until at last amid the hatred and the dying all men shall one day hear and hearing understand and understanding believe. Mark had come home. Arising from High Tor, he picked up his coat and turned his face to the city.

After his first return to the United States, the pseudo-Negro was saying, Mort Prince had married a hometown girl and moved to Connecticut. It was at this time, as the engineer recalled it, that he had read The Farther Journey, a novel about a writer who lives in Connecticut and enters into a sexual relationship with a housewife next door, not as a conventional adultery, for he was not even attracted to her, but rather as the exercise of that last and inalienable possession of the individual in a sick society, freedom. In the words of one reviewer, it was “the most nearly absolutely gratuitous act since Lafcadio pushed Fleurissoire out of the railway carriage in Les Caves du Vatican.”

Following his divorce and his latest trip to Italy the writer, according to the pseudo-Negro, had felt the strongest compulsion to return to the United States, seek out the most commonplace environment, and there, like Descartes among the Burghers of Amsterdam, descend within himself and write the first real war novel, an absolutely unvarnished account of one day’s action of one infantry platoon. When his aunt died and left him a house, he took off for Fiesole by the first plane.

The attentive engineer, at this moment skillfully piloting the green Chevrolet into the pleasant maze of Levittown, understood perfectly. If his aunt had left him such a house, he’d have moved in too and settled down in perfect contentment.

They entered Levittown. The freshly sprinkled lawns sparkled in the sunlight, lawns as beautiful as Atlanta lawns but less spectral and Druidic. Chipper little Swiss swales they were and no Negroes to cut the grass but rather Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean cranking up their Toros and afterward wisecracking over the fence. Here, he reckoned, housewives ran into each other’s kitchens to borrow a cup of Duz. Not a bad life! Really he would like it very much. He could live here cheerfully as a Swiss with never a care for the morrow. But a certain someone was already in Old Virginny by now and his heart pressed south.

But even as they began to circle the blocks and search for house numbers, the sentient engineer began to detect unpleasant radiations. While the pseudo-Negro gabbled away and noticed nothing, it struck the engineer that more people than one might expect were standing about on their lawns and sidewalks. Indeed he could swear that some of them were shooting hostile glances in the direction of the Chevrolet! Recollecting Dr. Gamow’s strong hints about certain delusions of persecution, he tried to pay no attention. But they were at it again! One group of householders in particular he noticed and one man in particular, a burly fellow with a small mustache who wore a furry alpine hat which was too small for him.

“What number did you say it was?” he asked the pseudo-Negro.

“One forty-two.”

“Then here it is,” said the engineer, circling the block a second time and pulling up at the same group of householders. He followed the pseudo-Negro up the walk, the latter as garrulous and shaky as ever and noticing nothing, his nerve ends firing at the slightest breeze, even nodding to the householders on the next lawn, whom he fancied to be well-wishers of some sort. They were not well-wishers. They stood about silently, hands in pockets, and kicking the turf. Next to the burly alpiner the engineer spied trouble itself: a thin fierce-eyed damp-skinned woman whose hair was done up in plastic reels, a regular La Pasionaria of the suburbs. He ventured another look. Beyond a doubt, she was glaring straight at him, the engineer!

Mort Prince met them in the deep-set cathedral door, beer in, hand, a pleasant slightish fellow with twirling black hair which flew away in a banner of not absolutely serious rebellion. He wore a black leather wristlet and, as he talked, performed a few covert isometrics on the beer can. The engineer liked him at once, perceiving that he was not the mighty fornicator of his novels but a perky little bullshooter of a certain style, the sort who stands in the kitchen during parties, suspended from himself so-to-speak, beer can in hand and matter forming at the corner of his mouth, all the while spieling off some very good stuff and very funny. One would like to get him going (and the engineer was just the one).

One glance past him into the house and he knew also how it stood with the house and how the writer lived in it. Their voices echoed on bare parquet floors. There was no furniture except a plastic dinette and an isomorphic bar in a doorway. So that was how he did it, standing clear of walls suspended within himself and disdaining chairs because chairs were for sitting and therefore cancelled themselves.

He shook hands with the engineer with a strong wiry grip, pronating his elbow.

“This is the guy that’s going with us,” said the pseudo-Negro, linking arms with them. “He knows everybody down there and the ones he doesn’t know he’s kin to.”

“No,” said the engineer, frowning and blushing.

“You from down South?” asked Mort Prince, squeezing the beer can and not quite looking at him.

“Yes.” Though the pseudo-Negro had led him to believe that Mort Prince would welcome him with open arms, he couldn’t help noticing that the writer wore an indifferent, if not unfriendly, expression.

“Tell him where you’re from.”

The engineer told him.

But Mort Prince seemed abstracted and gloomy and did not respond. He said nothing and went back to pressing the beer can.

“That’s where the festival is,” said the pseudo-Negro, giving the writer several meaningful nudges.

“No, I’m sorry,” said the engineer, looking at his watch. He was anxious to be on his way. He didn’t like the look of things. Through the open doorway — Mort had not quite invited them in and they were standing barely beyond the sill — the engineer noticed that the householders were closer. Yes, beyond a doubt they were bearing down upon Mort Prince’s house.

“I really appreciate it but as I told Mr. Aiken—” began the engineer, already nodding to the new arrivals to prepare Mort Prince and the pseudo-Negro — but it was too late.

“Hey, you,” called the burly man in the alpine hat, pointing with his chin and resting his hands lightly on his hips.

The engineer looked at him twice. Beyond any question, the stranger was addressing him. His heart gave a single dread leap. Adrenalin erected his hair roots, could it have come at last, a simple fight, with the issue clear beyond peradventure? “Are you speaking to me?”

“You from Haddon Heights?”

“Sir?” The engineer cupped a hand to his ear. The burly man’s T-shirt had the legend Deep Six printed on it. No doubt he belonged to a bowling league. He reminded the engineer of the fellows he used to see around bowling alleys in Long Island City.

“You heard me.”

“Sir, I don’t believe I like your tone,” said the engineer, advancing a step with his good ear put forward. Perhaps the time had come again when you could be insulted, hear it aright, and have it out then and there as his grandfather used to have it out. But there must be no mistake. “You were speaking to me?” he asked again, straining every nerve to hear, for nothing is worse than being an honorable deaf man who can’t be certain he is insulted.

The alpiner turned to Mort Prince. “Mae here sawr him in Haddon Heights, Her brother-in-law lives in Haddonfield.”

“Haddon Heights? Haddonfield? I’ve never heard of either place,” said the bemused engineer. “In any case I don’t care for this fellow’s tone.” It had happened again, he knew, he had been mistaken for someone else.

The next thing he knew, another man came crowding in, a fair-skinned oldish man with a gray crew cut and tabs on his elbows like Jiggs.

“He’s a Jersey agent, Mr. Prince,” said the newcomer.

“What’s all this about?” asked the writer, feeling his wristlet uneasily. The engineer perceived that the other set great store by getting along with his neighbors — like Descartes — and so was in a quandary.

“That’s a fact, Mr. Prince,” said the burly man, who had decided to take a neighborly tone toward the writer. “That’s the way they do it, they come over here from Jersey like him and his friend were and they ride around the block slow like them, looking. You saw them! But we’re not worried about you, Mr. Prince. I was just telling Whitey here that Mr. Prince wasn’t about to sell his house.”

“I’m not a Jersey agent, whatever that is,” said the engineer, noticing that the pseudo-Negro was smiling a brilliant nervous rueful smile and was opening his hands first to one side and then the other.

“Fellows,” the pseudo-Negro appealed to all parties, calling heaven to witness the follies and misunderstandings of men. “This is ridiculous,” he cried, opening his hands, “believe me.”

The engineer flushed angrily. “And furthermore I’ve never heard of Haddon Heights,” he told them. Yet strive as he might to keep his anger pure and honorable, it was no use. The alpiner had detached himself somewhat and stood apart with an ironic expression like a man who has been in a wreck and is embarrassed by passers-by. And the engineer, up to his old tricks despite himself, began to tune him in to see how it stood with him. Damnation, he swore to himself. To make matters worse, his hay fever had returned, his nose swelled up and began to run, and he had left his handkerchiefs in the firkin. Rage leaked away.

But he had not reckoned with the woman.

“Faggot!” she cried, rushing past Jiggs and thrusting her face within inches of the engineer’s. She wore a black bolero jacket over her bowling-league skirt. Her bare arms were moist and muscular like a man’s.

“Faggot?” repeated the puzzled engineer, feeling his nose.

“You work for Oscar Fava, don’t you?” she asked, both malignant and triumphant.

“I do not.” He glanced at her uneasily. What to do with a maniac of a woman?

“As a matter of fact, I do have the place for sale,” said Mort Prince, who had decided to be irritated with his neighbors after all.

“Did you sign any papers?” asked the burly man, his good nature beginning to stick in his throat.

“What is it to you?”

“Could I see the papers, Mr. Prince?” He pronounced it päpers.

“They can’t break a block without you let them,” said Jiggs, his face beginning to mottle Irish red and white.

“Get the hell out of my house,” said Mort Prince, although the householders had not crossed the threshold. Everyone still stood in the cathedral doorway.

“Fink,” said the woman, who had not taken her eyes from the engineer’s face. As he watched incredulously, she balled up her fist like a man, thumb out of the way, and cocked it back.

“Hold on,” said the engineer — she could hit him! And at the same moment from the corner of his eye he saw the burly man advance upon the writer, hand outstretched, perhaps for the “papers,” perhaps to shake hands, but advancing nevertheless. Two other householders, he noticed for the first time, were standing in the background, speaking in low tones and swinging their arms briskly in the manner of bystanders.

“Excuse me,” said the engineer to the woman, squeezing past her as if she were an irate shopper in Macy’s basement. On the way he brushed against Jiggs, who immediately fell back and began to crouch and wave him in with his fingertips.

“Come on, come on,” said Jiggs.

But it was the pseudo-Negro who caught his attention. He had come between the engineer and Jiggs and shook his head sadly and good-naturedly. “Hold on, fellows,” he said, undoing his cuff link. “I’m afraid there’s been a rather pathetic misunderstanding here — a sad commentary in fact on the fraility of us all. Fellows—”

“No,” cried the engineer angrily. “Don’t roll up your sleeve.”

“Go ahead and roll up your sleeve,” cried Jiggs, misunderstanding, dancing ominously and now waving the pseudo-Negro into him.

The engineer groaned. “No. I—” he began, taking another step toward the grinning alpiner. Here was the villain!

But in that instant, even as he was passing the woman, whom he had forgotten, she drew back her fist clear to her earlobe and, unleashing a straight whistling blow, struck the engineer on the fleshy part of his nose, which was already swollen and tender from hay fever.

Oh, hideous exploding humiliating goddamnable nose pain, the thump-thud of woe itself. Oh, ye bastards all together. “Come here,” he thought he heard himself say as he struggled to get at the alpiner — did he hit him? — but the next thing he knew he was sitting on the front steps enveloped by the dreadful cordiality of misunderstandings cleared away, of debits to be balanced. The bastards, friends and foe, were all apologizing to each other. As he held his nose, he saw the pseudo-Negro rolling his sleeve down. He had shown them his white patch.

Only Mort Prince was still angry. “That’s not the point,” he was saying furiously to the householders, who, the engineer perceived instantly, were anxious for him to score his point. They were allowing him his anger. Everyone felt bad. The engineer groaned.

“I thought they were blockbusters, for Christ’s sake,” Jiggs was telling a newcomer. “They been here,” he assured Mort Prince. “And they come from Jersey.”

“I just want to make it damn clear I’m selling to anyone I please, regardless of race, creed, or national origin.”

“Me too! That’s just what I was telling Lou here.”

“And hear this,” said the writer, massaging his wristlet grimly. “If there is any one thing that pisses me off, its bigotry.”

“You’re right,” cried Jiggs. “Mr. Prince, if Mae and I didn’t have our savings in our house — listen, let me tell you!” But though everyone listened, he fell silent.

“We keep the lawr, Mr. Prince,” said the alpiner earnestly. Then, seeing a chance to put a good face on the whole affair, he laughed and pointed his chin toward the engineer. “Tiger over there though, he was coming for me. Did you see him? I’m telling you, he was coming and I was getting out of his way. Tiger.” Hand outstretched, he crossed to the engineer.

The engineer held his nose and looked at the hand. He had had enough of the whole crew.

“You not from Jersey, fella?” asked the alpiner, for some reason taking off his hat. “Mae here said — now isn’t that something!” He called upon the neighborhood to witness the human comedy.

The engineer did not answer.

“You don’t work for Oscar Fava?” cried the tall woman, meaning the question for the engineer, but not quite bringing herself to look at him. “You know Fava’s real estate over there, next to Pik-a-Pak,” she asked Jiggs and when he nodded she offered it to the engineer as a kind of confirmation, perhaps even an apology. “Over in Haddon Heights.”

“I thought it was in Haddonfield,” said Jiggs. They argued the point as another earnest of their good faith. “You never been over to Tammy Lanes in Haddonfield?” Jiggs asked him.

The engineer shook his head.

“Wasn’t that Oscar Fava come over last night?” Jiggs asked Mae.

“And he was with him,” said the woman. “Him or his twin brother.”

“You know what I wish he would do,” the alpiner told the other householders, presuming to speak of the engineer fondly — a true character was he, this engineer, another five minutes and they’d call him Rocky. “I wish he’d come on down to Tammy with us tonight, just to bug Oscar.” Again he held out a hand to the engineer. “Come on down just for laughs.”

“No, thank you,” said the latter gloomily. He rose. “I’ve got to be on my way.” He looked around for the pseudo-Negro, who had vanished. Most of all he wanted to get away from Mort Prince, who was still trying to hit upon some way to use his anger, a special delayed Hemingway writer’s sort of anger. It was embarrassing. This was the age of embarrassment, thought the engineer, of unspendable rage. Who to hit? No one. Mort Prince took the engineer by the arm and pulled him inside. The best Mort could do was slam the door on the householders, catching Jiggs in midsentence:

“Any time any of youse want to come down—”

Reviving now, the writer opened a fresh beer and hung suspended from himself, free and clear of the refrigerator, while he told them: “I’ve got it, by God. I’m going to call up this guy Oscar Fava and let him sell it Stick around for laughs,” he told the engineer.

“No, thanks,” said the engineer, who was sick of them and their laughs.

Fetching his firkin, in which he had packed his medicines, he took three Chlortrimeton tablets for his hay fever and rubbed his nose with an ice cube.

“Bill,” said the pseudo-Negro earnestly, “if I can’t persuade you to make the tour with us, at least promise me you’ll come as far as Virginia.”

“No, thanks,” said the engineer, politely now. “I’ve really got to be going. I’d be obliged if you’d take me to the bus station.”

“Very well,” said the pseudo-Negro, as formally as the other. Shaky as he was, he was as sentient as anyone. He knew there were times for staying and times for leaving, times for sitting and times for standing. He stood up.

“Perhaps it would be possible for us to meet you in your hometown later this summer, he said.

“Perhaps,” said the engineer and picked up his firkin.

A white misty morning in northern Virginia found a young man, pleasant of mien and moderately disoriented, dressed neatly and squatting on a stout cedar firkin beside a highway which ran between a white-oak swamp on one side and a foggy hill, flattened on top like a mesa, on the other. He sat on the firkin and counted his money several times, reviewed the contents of a notebook, and from time to time read a page or two from a small red volume. Then he unfolded an Esso map of Virginia and spread it out on an expensive case of blue leather. Opening the firkin, which was as cedarous and cool inside as a springhouse, he took out a round molding of sweet butter, a box of Ritz crackers, a plastic knife, and a quart of buttermilk. As he ate his breakfast he traced the red and blue lines on the map with his gold pencil.

Where could he have spent the night? Not even he was certain, but he must have spent it tolerably well because his Brooks Brothers shirt was still fresh, his Dacron suit unwrinkled, and his cheek smooth and fragrant with soap. Another fact may be pertinent. An hour or so earlier, a Mayflower van with two riders had turned off the highway onto the gravel road directly behind him and pulled up at a farmhouse nestled at the foot of the foggy hill. Mayflower vans, he had learned recently and already forgotten, are owned by their drivers, who usually drive them home after finishing a haul.

The sun came up and warmed his back. Sapsuckers began yammering in the swamp. He gazed at the network of red and blue lines and with his pencil circled a tiny pair of crossed swords marking a battlefield. As best he could determine, his present location lay somewhere near Malvern Hill and the James River. No doubt he was correct, because he was experiencing the interior dislocations which always afflicted him on old battlegrounds. His nose was better and he could smell. He sniffed the morning. It was white and dim and faraway as Brooklyn but it was a different sort of whiteness and dimness. Up yonder was a faraway Lapland sort of dimness, a public wheylike sunlight, where solitary youths carrying violin cases wait at bus stops. Here the dimness was private and one’s own. He may not have been here before but it seemed to him that he had. Perhaps it was the place of his father’s childhood and he had heard about it. From the corner of his eye he took note of the green confettilike plant which floated on the black water, of the fluted trunks and bald red knees of the cypress, of the first fall specklings of the tupelo gums.

He studied his map. He reckoned he could not be more than twenty miles from Richmond. Richmond. Yes, had he not passed through it last night? As he ate Ritz crackers and sweet butter, he imagined how Richmond might be today if the war had ended differently. Perhaps Main Street would be the Wall Street of the South, and Broad might vie with New Orleans for opera and theater. Here in the White Oak Swamp might be located the great Lee-Randolph complex, bigger than GM and making better cars (the Lee surpassing both Lincoln and Cadillac, the Lil’ Reb outselling even Volkswagens). Richmond would have five million souls by now, William and Mary be as good as Harvard and less subverted. In Chattanooga and Mobile there would be talk of the “tough cynical Richmonders,” the Berliners of the hemisphere.

When he finished his breakfast, he took a steel mirror from his Val-Pak and examined his nose in the morning sunlight. It was within bounds, though still lilac inside. His face reassured him. It was all of a piece, an equable lower-South Episcopal face. He began to feel better and, standing up, threw a few combinations at the rising sun. My name is Williston Bibb Barrett, he said aloud, consulting his wallet to make sure, and I am returning to the South to seek my fortune and restore the good name of my family, perhaps even recover Hampton plantation from the canebrakes and live out my days as a just man and little father to the faithful Negroes working in the fields. Moreover, I am in love with a certain someone. Or I shall marry me a wife and live me a life in the lovely green environs of Atlanta or Memphis or even Birmingham, which, despite its bad name, is known to have lovely people.

Hitchhiking in Virginia was better than New Jersey; within half an hour he had been picked up and now went roaring down historic old US 60 in a noble black Buick, a venerable four-holer. His father used to drive one and it summoned up many a déjà vu to hear once again the old loose-meshed roaring runaway sound of the Dynaflow transmission. It was a carful of ladies, so crowded that he had to put his Val-Pak and firkin in the trunk. Rejoicing, he climbed in and held his telescope on his lap: what good fortune to be picked up by a bevy of Virginia noblewomen. Nor did he mind when they turned out to be Texans, golfers from a Fort Worth club, fortyish and firm as India rubber and fairly bursting their seersuckers. They had just played in a tournament at Burning Tree and were out for a good time sightseeing. They laughed all the way to Williamsburg. He too. Once he caught sight of himself in the sunshade mirror grinning like a forty-pounder. They told stories on each other, on one in particular, the lady on his left, a good-looking younger one who was subject to blushing.

“Grace settin’ up there,” said one lady in the back seat, “acting like she’s crowded and can’t stand it.”

“She can stand it, hooo,” said another and they all hooted with laughter.

Another one said: “I peep out of my door last night and here comes Grace tippy-toeing down the hall with this little bitty man and I say what is this: look like Grace got a little blister, the way she walking.”

For some reason the word “blister” set them off again. It even seemed to the engineer to mean six different things. “Hooo, she got a little blister!” The most ordinary words and objects like zippers and golf tees brought on more hoots and jabs in the ribs. Although the engineer did not quite know what the joke was — it had something to do with the good-looking one sitting next to him — he couldn’t help being tickled and in fact laughed like a maniac. By the time the old howling Dynaflow Buick reached Williamsburg, his sides ached.

Though he had planned to go into town and there collect his thoughts and begin his sleuthing, it turned out not to be necessary. As the Buick sailed past the Coach-and-Four Motel on the outskirts, he spotted the two vehicles and recognized both, though he had seen neither before: the Trav-L-Aire, glittering and humped up and practical, yet somehow airy and light on its four brand-new Goodyear jumbo treads; cheek to jowl with a squirrel-gray Cadillac which was mean and low and twenty feet long. He hollered to the driver but she wouldn’t let him out. When at last she did stop and he asked them to wait until he could get his firkin from the trunk, they began to hoot again, positively rolling about on the seats. He had a six-block walk back to the motel.

There was nobody in sight but a pair of listless slothlike children worming over the playground equipment. He had time to take a good look at the Trav-L-Aire. She was all she might be, a nice balance of truck heaviness, steel and stout below and cabined aluminum lightness above. She had just the faintest and lightest quilted look, her metal skin tucked down by rivets like an airplane wing. Vents and sockets and knobs made discreet excrescences, some faired against the wind, others propped out to scoop the wind. The step was down and the back door ajar and he had a peep inside: the coziest little caboose imaginable, somehow larger inside than out, yet all compact of shelf, bunk, galley, and sink.

Now here surely is a good way to live nowadays, said he and sat down on the firkin: mobile yet at home, compacted and not linked up with the crumby carnival linkage of a trailer, in the world yet not of the world, sampling the particularities of place yet cabined off from the sadness of place, curtained away from the ghosts of Malvern Hill, peeping out at the doleful woods of Spotsylvania through the cheerful plexiglass of Sheboygan.

“Hullo!”

It was Mr. Vaught, He had come out of his motel room, scratched his seat, shot his cuff, and, spying the engineer, hailed him over as if he were just the man he was looking for.

“Got dog, man,” said the old man, cocking his head direfully. “So you thought better of it.”

“Thought better of what?”

“You decided to come after all.”

“Sir,” said the engineer, blinking. Was this the plan all along, that he was to meet them here?

“You want to see something fine?”

“Yes sir.”

Mr. Vaught unlocked the trunk of the Cadillac and showed him a vast cargo of food, Quaker jams, Shaker jellies, Virginia hams. He began to give an account of each package.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the engineer, interrupting him.

“Yace.”

“Excuse me but I can’t help but think that explanations are in order. For my part I can say—”

“That’s all right,” cried the old man hastily. He was actually blushing. “I’m just tickled to death to have you aboard!”

“Thank you, sir. But I think we’d better clear this up.” He heard himself speak without consulting his memory. His voice had a memory of its own. “My understanding was yall were going to pick me up. I waited for three hours.”

“No,” cried the old man and coming close seized him under the armpit and took him aside. “Take this apple jelly.”

“Thank you.”

“Son, look. If it was a question of money, why didn’t you say so? I’ll tell you this where I wouldn’t just as to say tell most folks: I got more damn money than I know what to do with and if I don’t give it to you the government’s going to get it anyway.”

“Money,” said the engineer, screwing up an eye.

“Rita said she asked you to come with us and you refused.”

“No sir,” he said, remembering. “What she asked was whether I wanted to be employed by her or—”

“Naturally, when I didn’t hear from you to the contrary, I assumed you didn’t want the job.”

“No sir!”

“Son, you know what we really thought? We thought you didn’t want to come with either one of us but that you would be nice enough tocome if we asked you, just to help us, and I wasn’t going to do that. Look,” cried the old man joyfully.

“What?”

“It’s better this way!”

“How is that, sir?”

“Now we know where we stand. Now I believe you want to come with us.”

“Yes sir, that is true,” said the engineer dryly. “I desire now only to have the same assurance from you.”

“What! Oh! By George,” said the other, shooting his cuff and calling on the high heavens. “If you’re not your daddy all over again.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer gloomily, wondering if the old man was slipping away again like the white rabbit. But this time Mr. Vaught took out his buckeye wallet arid counted out five $100 bills, like crisp suede, freshly pollinated from the mint, into the other’s hand. “One month’s salary in advance. Do we understand each other now?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Rita will drive us in the Cadillac. You and Jamie take that thing.” He nodded toward the camper.

“All right, sir.”

“Now you and Jamie get on down the road. We’ll see you at home.” He counted out two more bills. “Expenses.”

“Do you mean you want us to leave now and—”

But before he could finish, the rest of the family came swarming out half a dozen doors and bore down upon him. His natural shyness was almost made up for by the pleasant sensation of reunion. Perhaps he belonged here after all!

“Look who’s here!”—“What in the woerrld—!”—“Well I’ll be damned—!” they cried.

The side of his face was also being looked at by a pair of roguish eyes.

“Look at him blush,” cried Mrs. Vaught

For some reason his being there, hands in pockets and eyes rolled up to the eyebrows, began to be funny. They were all laughing at him. All but Kitty. She came close and touched him but at the same time it was as if she couldn’t stand the sight of him. She turned him roughly by the shoulder as if she was another boy.

“What happened to your nose?” she asked angrily. It was somehow shameful to her that a misfortune should have befallen his nose.

He waved a hand vaguely toward the north. “A white lady up in New Jersey—” he began.

“What,” Kitty cried incredulously, curling her lip and calling the others to witness. “What happened?”

“A lady from Haddon Heights hit me on the nose.”

The others laughed and the engineer too. Only Kitty went on curling her lip in the most sensual and angry way. Rita laughed but her eyes were wary. She was handsome!

Jamie stood a little above them, on the motel walk, grinning and shaking his head. He looked brown and fit but a bit sooty-eyed.

“Wait a minute, Kitty,” said the engineer as the girl turned away.

“What now?”

“Hold on! Don’t leave.”

“All right, what?”

“It seems I have not been able to make myself understood,” he told them all, “or at least to prevent misunderstandings. I want to be very certain that everybody understands me now.”

“I told you he wanted to come with us,” said Mrs. Vaught to her husband, her pince-nez flashing.

“In any case,” said the engineer, “let me state my intentions once and for all, particularly with regard to Jamie and, ah, Kitty.” He almost said Miss Kitty.

“My God,” said Kitty, turning red as a beet. “What is the man talking about?” She besought Rita, who in turn was watching the engineer like a hawk, her eyes wary and fine.

“I want to make clear what apparently I failed to make clear in New York, that from the beginning I accepted Mr. Vaught’s offer with great pleasure and that I shall be happy to go to school with Jamie or anywhere else he wants to go.”

Kitty seemed both relieved and irritated. “That’s why he was fixing to take off for Colorado,” she said loudly to Rita, and hollowed out her cheek with her tongue.

“What’s that?” asked the engineer quickly.

“He wants to know whose idea Colorado was,” she said, still addressing Rita. She actually jerked a thumb at him, angry as an umpire. What had happened to his love?

Rita shrugged.

“Have you already forgotten what you told Rita?” asked the girl, meeting his eye.

“That’s possible,” said the engineer slowly. The worst of it was that he could have forgotten. “Since it was Rita I told, maybe she could refresh my memory.”

“Glad to, Lance Corporal,” she said, shrugging and smiling. “Though it is nothing we all don’t already know. What you told me, if you recall, was that what you really wanted to do was attend the Colorado School of Mines.”

“Without Kitty,” said Kitty.

“No,” said the engineer.

“Yes,” said Rita. “Don’t you remember the day I returned the telescope?”

“Why yes,” said the engineer, remembering something, “but I certainly did not mean that I wasn’t ready and anxious to join the Vaughts. Besides that, I had already committed myself to Mr. Vaught and I always honor my obligations.”

“So now we’re an obligation,” said Kitty, addressing all Virginia. Her eyes flashed. It crossed his mind that she was what used to be called a noble high-spirited girl.

“No no, Kitty,” said the poor engineer.

“You may recall, Lance Corporal,” said Rita dryly, “that I asked you straight out which of us you wanted to work for, me or Poppy. You were unable to give a clear answer and spoke instead of Colorado. Knowing that you were a gentleman and did not like wrangling with women (I don’t blame you), I did not press the issue. Perhaps I was wrong.”

The trouble was he could not be sure and she knew it. And as he gazed at her he fancied he caught a gleam in her eye. She was skirting with him the abyss within himself and not doing it ill-naturedly: I know, said the gleam, and you know that I know and that you are not quite sure and that I might even be right.

“Anyhow Poppy is right,” said Rita, rubbing her hands briskly. “We are all here and that is what counts. Why don’t we hit the road?”

They were all leaving that very day, it turned out. Another two hours and he’d have missed them.

Mrs. Vaught and Kitty had one more room in the Governor’s Palace to see, one more pewter candle-snuffer to buy. The engineer stayed at the motel to help Jamie pack. But Jamie was tired and went to lie down; the engineer packed for him. Rita found him sitting on the back step of the camper counting his money.

“You can keep that,” she said. He had come to her post-dated check.

“No, thanks,” he said and handed it over. Now it was he who eyed her warily, but not disagreeably.

“Believe it or not, I’m very happy things worked out as they have.”

“You are?”

“I’m afraid I was the cause of the misunderstanding.”

He shrugged.

“Anyhow you passed your test by ordeal and here is your prize.” For the second time she handed him a little hexagonal General Motors key.

“Thank you.”

“You want to know why I’m glad you’re here? Because you’re the only one who can help Jamie. If only you will. You know sometimes I have the feeling, Lance Corporal, that you are onto all of us, onto our most private selves. Or perhaps it is rather that it is you and I who know, who really know; and perhaps it is the nature of our secret that we cannot tell our friends or even each other but must rather act for the good of our friends.”

The engineer was silent. From force of habit, he looked as if he knew what she was talking about, what their “secret” was, though in truth he had not the least idea.

“Bill.”

“Yes?”

“Take Jamie and get the hell out of here. Take Ulysses and go while the going is good. Go roam the byways and have a roistering good time of it. Find yourselves a couple of chicks. You’re two good-looking fellows, you know!”

“Thank you,” said the engineer politely.

“Drink and love and sing! Do you know what I thought as I was standing in the governor’s bedroom yesterday?”

“No.”

“Jamie was standing in front of me in the lovely, careless way he gets from you or from somebody, like young golden-haired Sir Tristram, leaning on his sword, and all at once the dreadful thought occurred to me: what must it be like to live and die without ever having waked in the morning and felt the warm mouth of one’s beloved on his?”

“I couldn’t say,” said the engineer, who had never waked in the morning and found anybody’s warm mouth on his.

“Bill, have you ever been to the Golden Isles of Georgia?”

“No.”

‘That’s where we’re headed. You can meet us there or not, as you like. And if you two bums want to detour through Norfolk, that’s all right too.”

“O.K.”

They didn’t, the engineer and Jamie, quite cut loose after all, or detour through Norfolk (did Rita mean he should take Jamie to a whorehouse?) or feel any beloveds’ warm mouths on theirs. But they had a good time and went their own way for a day or two at a time, wandering down the old Tidewater, sleeping in the piney woods or along the salt marshes and rendezvousing with the Cadillac in places like Wilmington and Charleston.

The camper was everything he had hoped for and more. Mornings on the road, the two young men sat together in the cab; afternoons the engineer usually drove alone. Well as he looked, Jamie tired easily and took to the bunk in the loft over the cab and either read or napped or watched the road unwind. They stopped early in the evening and went fishing or set up the telescope on a lonesome savanna and focused on the faraway hummocks where jewel-like warblers swarmed about the misty oaks.

Nights were best. Then as the thick singing darkness settled about the little caboose which shed its cheerful square of light on the dark soil of old Carolina, they might debark and, with the pleasantest sense of stepping down from the zone of the possible to the zone of the realized, stroll to a service station or fishing camp or grocery store, where they’d have a beer or fill the tank with spring water or lay in eggs and country butter and grits and slab bacon; then back to the camper, which they’d show off to the storekeeper, he ruminating a minute and: all I got to say is, don’t walk off and leave the keys in it — and so on in the complex Southern tactic of assaying a sort of running start, a joke before the joke, ten assumptions shared and a common stance of rhetoric and a whole shared set of special ironies and opposites. He was home. Even though he was hundreds of miles from home and had never been here and it was not even the same here — it was older and more decorous, more tended to and a dream with the past — he was home.

A déjà vu: so this is where it all started and which is not quite like home, what with this spooky stage-set moss and Glynn marshes but which is familiar nevertheless. It was familiar and droll and somehow small and curious like an old house revisited. How odd that it should have persisted so all this time and in one’s absence!

At night they read. Jamie read books of great abstractness, such as The Theory of Sets, whatever a set was. The engineer, on the other hand, read books of great particularity, such as English detective stories, especially the sort which, answering a need of the Anglo-Saxon soul, depict the hero as perfectly disguised or perfectly hidden, holed up maybe in the woods of Somerset, actually hiding for days at a time in a burrow of ingenious construction from which he could notice things, observe the farmhouse below. Englishmen like to see without being seen. They are by nature eavesdroppers. The engineer could understand this.

He unlimbered the telescope and watched a fifty-foot Chris-Craft beat up the windy Intercoastal. A man sat in the stern reading the Wall Street Journal. “Dow Jones, 894—” read the engineer. What about cotton futures, he wondered.

He called Jamie over. “Look how he pops his jaw and crosses his legs with the crease of his britches pulled out of the way.”

“Yes,” said Jamie, registering and savoring what the engineer registered and savored. Yes, you and I know something the man in the Chris-Craft will never know. “What are we going to do when we get home?”

He looked at Jamie. The youth sat at the picnic table where the telescope was mounted, stroking his acne lightly with his fingernails. His whorled police-dog eye did not quite look at the engineer but darted close in a gentle nystagmus of recognitions, now focusing upon a mote in the morning air just beside the other’s head, now turning inward to test what he saw and heard against his own private register. This was the game they played: the sentient tutor knowing quite well how to strike the dread unsounded chords of adolescence, the youth registering, his mouth parted slightly, fingernails brushing backward across his face. Yes, and that was the wonder of it, that what was private and unspeakable before is speakable now because you speak it. The difference between me and him, thought the engineer and noticed for the first time a slight translucence at the youth’s temple, is this: like me he lives in the sphere of the possible, all antenna, ear cocked and lips parted. But I am conscious of it, know what is up, and he is not and does not. He is pure aching primary awareness and does not even know that he doesn’t know it. Now and then he, the engineer, caught flashes of Kitty in the youth, but she had a woman’s knack of cutting loose from the ache, putting it out to graze. She knew how to moon away the time; she could doze.

“Why don’t we go to college?” he said at last.

“It’s forty miles away,” said Jamie, almost looking at him.

“We can go where we please, can’t we? I mean, do you want to live at home?”

“No, but—”

Ah, it’s Sutter he has in mind, thought the engineer. Sutter’s at home.

“We could commute,” said the engineer.

“Then you’ll go?”

“Sure. We’ll get up early in the morning.”

“What will you take?”

“I need some mathematics. What about you?”

“Yes, me too,” nodded the youth, eyes focused happily on the bright mote of agreement in the air between them.

It suited them to lie abed, in the Trav-L-Aire yet also in old Carolina, listening to baseball in Cleveland and reading about set theory and an Englishman holed up in Somerset. Could a certain someone be watching the same Carolina moon?

Or they joined the Vaughts, as they did in Charlestown, where they visited the gardens even though there was nothing in bloom but crape myrtle and day lilies. Evil-tempered mockingbirds sat watching them, atop tremendous oily camellias. Sprinklers whirled away in the sunlight, leaving drops sparkling in the hairy leaves of the azaleas. The water smelted bitter in the hot sun. The women liked to stand and talk and look at houses. They were built for standing, pelvises canted, and they more or less leaning on themselves. When the men stood still for thirty minutes, the blood ran to their feet. The sun made the engineer sick. He kept close to the women, closed his eyes, and took comfort in the lady smell of hot fragrant cotton. A few years from now and we’ll be dead, he thought, looking at tan frail Jamie and nutty old Mr. Vaught, and they, the women, will be back here looking at “places.”

It was like home here, but different too. At home we have J. C. Penney’s and old ugly houses and vacant lots and new ugly houses. Here were pretty, wooden things, old and all painted white, a thick-skinned decorous white, thick as ship’s paint, and presided over by the women. The women had a serious custodial air. They knew the place was theirs. The men were not serious. They all but wore costumes. They plied their trades, butcher, baker, lawyer, in period playhouses out in the yard.

Evenings the Vaughts sat around the green chloriniferous pools of the California motels, Rita and Kitty swimming and minding their bodies, Mr. Vaught getting up often to monkey with his Cadillac (he had installed a topoiler and claimed he got the same mileage as a Chevrolet), Mrs. Vaught always dressed to the nines and rocking vigorously in the springy pool chair and bathing her face with little paper pads soaked in cologne. When she was lucky, she found some lady from Moline who shared her views of fluoridation.

Kitty avoided him. He sought her out, but she damped him down. She must think badly of him, he decided, and quick as he was to see as others saw, was willing to believe she was right. Was it simply that she took the easy way: she was with Rita and not with him and that was that? At any rate, if she didn’t love him, he discovered he loved her less.

When they met by chance in motel passageways they angled their shoulders and sidled past like strangers. At Folly Beach they collided at the ice dispenser. He stood aside and said nothing. But when she filled her pitcher, she propped it on the rim of her pelvis and waited for him, a somewhat abstracted Rachel at the well.

“It’s a lovely night,” she said, stooping to see the full moon through the cloister of the Quality Court.

“Yes,” he said politely. He didn’t feel much like waiting upon her. But he said, “Would you like to take a walk?”

“Oh yes.”

They put their pitchers in the chest and walked on the beach. The moonlight curled along the wavelets. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. He squeezed back. They sat against a log. She took her hand away and began sifting sand; it was cool and dry and left not a grain on the skin.

He sat with his hands on his knees and the warm breeze flying up his pants leg and thought of nothing.

“What’s the matter, Bill?” Kitty leaned toward him and searched his face.

“Nothing. I feel good.”

Kitty shifted closer. The sand under her sheared against itself and made a musical sound. “Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

“You act mad.”

“I’m not.”

“Why are you different then?”

“Different from what?”

“From a certain nut who kissed a very surprised girl in the automat.”

“Hmm.”

“Well?”

“I’m different because you are different,” said the engineer, who always told the exact truth.

“Me!How?”

“I had looked forward to being with you on this trip. But it seems you prefer Rita’s company. I had wanted to be with you during the ordinary times of the day, for example after breakfast in the morning. I did not have any sisters,” he added thoughtfully. “So I never knew a girl in the morning. But instead we have become like strangers. Worse, we avoid each other.”

“Yes,” she said gravely, conscious, he could not help but notice, of saying it so: gravely. “Don’t you know why?” she said at last.

“No.”

She sifted the cool discrete sand into her palm, where it made a perfect pyramid, shedding itself. “You say you never had sisters. Well, I never had a date, boyfriends — except a few boys in my ballet class who had foreheads this low. Rita and I got used to living quietly.”

“And now?”

“I guess I’m clinging to the nest like a big old cuckoo. Isn’t that awful?”

He shrugged.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked him.

“What do I want you to do?”

“Tell me.”

“How do you feel?”

“How do you feel? Do you still love me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you? Oh, I love you too.”

Why did this not sound right, here on Folly Beach in old Carolina in the moonlight?

One thing I’m sure of, thought he as he held her charms in his arms: I shall court her henceforth in the old style. I shall press her hand. No more grubby epithelial embraces in dogbane thickets, followed by accusing phone calls. Never again! Not until we are in our honeymoon cottage in a cottage small by a waterfall.

But when he kissed her and there she was again looking at him from both sides at once, he had the first inkling of what might be wrong. She was too dutiful and athletic. She worked her mouth against his (is this right, she as good as asked).

“Wonderful,” she breathed, lying back. “A perfect setting.”

Why is it not wonderful, he wondered, and when he leaned over again and embraced her in the sand, he knowing without calculating the exact angle at which he might lie over against her — about twenty degrees past the vertical — she miscalculated, misread him and moved slightly, yet unmistakably to get plainly and simply under him, then feeling the surprise in him stopped almost before she began. It was like correcting a misstep in dancing.

“What is it?” she whispered presently.

“Nothing,” he said, kissing her tenderly and cursing himself. His heart sank. Was it not that she was right and that he made too much of it? What it was, though, was that this was the last thing he expected. It was part of his expectations of the life which lay before him that girls would be girls just as camellias were camellias. If he loved a girl and walked with her on Folly Beach by moonlight, kissed her sweet lips and held her charms in his arms, it should follow that he would be simply he and she she, she as complete as a camellia with her corolla of reticences and allurements. But she, Kitty, was no such thing. She didn’t know any better than he. Love, she, like him, was obliged to see as a naked garden of stamens and pistils. But what threw him off worst was that, sentient as always, he found himself catching onto how it was with her: he saw that she was out to be a proper girl and taking every care to do the right wrong thing. There were even echoes of a third person: what, you worry about the boys as good a figure as you have, etc. So he was the boy and she was doing her best to do what a girl does. He sighed.

“What?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” he said, kissing her eyes, which were, at any rate, like stars.

He sighed again. Very well, I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible.

They stirred in the musical sand. “We’d better go back,” said the gentlemanly engineer and kissed her somewhat lewdly so she wouldn’t feel she had failed. It seemed to be his duty now to protect her non-virtue as best he could. After all, he mused, as he reckoned girls must have mused in other ages, if worst comes to worst and all else fails I can let her under me — I shan’t begrudge her the sacrifice. What ailed her, him, them, he wondered. Holding her hand as they returned to the Quality Court, he flexed his wrist so that he could count his pulse against her bone.

Mainly their trouble — or good fortune, as the case might be — was that they were still out of phase, their fervors alternating and jostling each other like bad dancers. For now, back at the cooler and she then going ahead of him with her pitcher on the rim of her pelvis, desire like a mighty wind caught him from behind and nearly blew him down. He almost fainted with old motel lewd-longing. “Wait,” he whispered— oh, the piercing sorrow of it, this the mortal illness of youth like death to old age. “Wait.” He felt his way along the blotting-paper wall like a blind man. She took his outstretched hand.

“What is it, dearest?”

“Let’s go in here,” he said, opening the door to a closet which housed a giant pulsing Fedders.

“What for?” she asked. Her eyes were silvery and turned in.

“Let us go in the service room.” For it is here and not by moonlight — he sighed. Her willingness and nurse-tenderness were already setting him at naught again.

“There you are,” said Rita, opening the door opposite. “Where in the world was the ice machine?”

And off he went, bereft, careening down the abstract, decent, lewd Quality corridor.

The next day they went their separate ways as before, he mooning off with Jamie in the Trav-L-Aire, keeping the days empty and ears attuned to the secret sounds of summer. They met again in Beaufort. Kitty and Rita filled the day with small rites. They both took Metrecal and made a ceremony of it at every stop, lining up the wafers on a Sèvres dish, assembling a miniature stove from Lewis and Conger to heat the water for their special orange-flavored tea. Or if Kitty had a hangnail, the afternoon was spent rounding up Q-tips, alcohol, cuticle scissors.

One hot night they stopped at a raw red motel on a raw red hillside in Georgia. The women had got tired of the coast and took to the upcountry in search of hooked rugs and antiques. And the engineer had to admit that it was the pleasantest of prospects: to buy a five-dollar chiffonier and come down through six layers of paint to old ribby pine from the days of General Oglethorpe.

The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon. It was too hot to sleep. Jamie sat in the cab and read his Theory of Sets. The engineer strolled over to the cinder-block porch of the motel, propped his chair against the wall, and watched a construction gang flattening a hill across the valley. They were making a new expressway, he reckoned. The air throbbed with the machinery, and the floodlights over the hill spoiled the night like a cast in a black eye. He had noticed this about the South since he returned. Along the Tidewater everything was pickled and preserved and decorous. Backcountry everything was being torn down and built anew. The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel.

“—but here am I, Ree, twenty-one and never been to college!”

“Then go to a good one.”

He knew now why he had left the camper. It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.

Not ten feet behind him and through the open window, Rita and Kitty lay in their beds and talked. The Trav-L-Aire had crept up the hill with its lights out — had he planned it even then? He had come onto the porch as silently as an Englishman entering his burrow in Somerset.

“Have I told you what I want to be?”

“I’m afraid you have.”

“I want to be an ordinary silly girl who has dates and goes to dances.”

“You’re in a fair way to do it.”

“I love to dance.”

“Then work harder at it. You’re lazy.”

“You know what I mean. I mean dancing cheek to cheek. I want to be broken in on.”

“They don’t dance like that now.”

“I want to have beaus.”

“You can have beaus in Tesuque or in Salamanca and not ruin your mind while you do it”

“I want to be Tri Delt.”

“Good God!”

“I want to go to dances and get a tremendous rush. That’s what my grandmother used to say: I went to such and such a dance and got a tremendous rush. Did you know my grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer?”

“Yes, you told me.”

“I want to talk the foolishness the girls and boys at home talk.”

“You’re on your way.”

“I want to go to school. I want to buy new textbooks and a binder full of fresh paper and hold my books in my arms and walk across the campus. And wear a sweater.”

“Very well.”

“I want to go to the Sugar Bowl.”

“Christ.”

“But you’re going to stay with us. I need you!”

Rita was silent.

“Remember our bargain, Ree.”

“What bargain?” said Rita in a muffled voice. She had turned away from the window.

“That you stay till Christmas. By then I’ll know. I could easily have flunked out by then just as I flunked out before. But even if I don’t I’ll know. I’ll know whether to go with you or not.”

“We’ll see,” said Rita absently.

They reached the Golden Isles of Georgia in time for the first tropical storm of the year. The wind whipped over the gray ocean, out of kilter with the slow rhythm of the waves, tore up patches of spume, and raised a spindrift. Georgians had sense enough to go home and so the Vaughts had the hotel to themselves, an honorable old hacienda of wide glassed-in vestibules opening into conservatories and recreation rooms, and rows of brass pots planted with ferns, great cretaceous gymnosperms from the days of Henry Grady, dry and dusty as turkey wings. They looked at stuffed birds and group photographs of Southern governors and played mahjong.

A hundred servants waited on them, so black and respectful, so absolutely amiable and well-disposed that it was possible to believe that they really were. One or two of them were by way of being characters and allowed themselves to get on a footing with you. In a day’s time they had a standing joke going as if you had been there a month. One bold fellow noticed the engineer take out his red book and read a few maxims as he waited for the elevator. “Now he’s gon’ be the smart one!” he announced to the hotel and later meeting him in the hall would therefore holler: “You got your book with you?” with a special sort of boldness, even a recklessness, which he took to be his due by virtue of the very credential of his amiability. The engineer laughed politely and even cackled a bit in order to appear the proper damn fool they would have him be.

By four o’clock the afternoon had turned yellow and dark. The engineer and Jamie found some rook cards and played a game in the conservatory, which still had a magic lantern from the days when lectures were delivered to vacationers on birds and sea shells. When the wind picked up, the engineer decided to go see to the Trav-L-Aire. Jamie wouldn’t come. He went out of his way to tell the engineer he was going to telephone his sister Val.

“What for?” the engineer asked him, seeing that the other wanted him to ask.

“When I feel bad, I call her and she makes me feel better.”

“Is she the sister who joined the religious order?”

“Yes.”

“Are you religious?”

“No.”

“Then what good can she do you?” They had fallen into the abrupt mocking but not wholly unserious way of talking which people who spend a lot of time together get into.

“She is not religious either, at least not in the ordinary sense.”

“What is she doing in a religious order?”

“I don’t know. Anyhow that is not what I’m interested in.”

“What are you interested in?” asked the engineer, sniffing the old rook cards. They smelled like money.

“I thought she might give me a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Anything. Teaching, minor repairs. I am feeling very good physically.”

“I’m sure it’s a wonderful work she is doing.”

“I’m not interested in that either,” said Jamie irritably. “I’m not interested in the Negroes.”

“What are you interested in?”

“Anything she wants me to do. Her place is down in Tyree County in the piney woods, ten miles from nowhere. I thought it wouldn’t be bad to live there as we have been living, in the camper. We could teach, give her a hand. You may not want to. But I am feeling very strong. Feel my grip.”

“Very good.”

“I can put you down hand-wrestling.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Let’s see.”

The engineer, who never faked with Jamie, put him down quickly. But Jamie was surprisingly strong.

“Why don’t we work out together, Bill?”

“O.K.”

“What do you think of going down to Tyree County?” asked Jamie, hiding behind his rook cards.

“I thought you wanted to go to college.”

“What I don’t want is to go back home to the same thing, see Mother and Poppy every morning, watch the same golfers pass on number 6 fairway.”

“O.K.” Then he’s changed his mind about Sutter, thought the engineer.

“O.K. what? You mean you’ll go?”

“Sure,” said the engineer, who in truth saw how it stood with Jamie and did not think it such a bad idea himself, going to the end of nowhere, parking in the pines and doing a few humble tasks.

Jamie laughed. “You mean it, don’t you? You’re telling the truth, you’re ready to go.”

“Sure. Why shouldn’t I tell the truth?”

“I don’t know,” said Jamie, laughing at him.

Before he left the hotel, he picked up an old crime-club selection in the library, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a light pulpy book gnawed by silverflsh and smelling of the summer of 1927. Kitty saw him and wanted to go to the camper with him. He saw that she was exhilarated by the storm, and since she was, he was not. No more for him the old upside-down Manhattan monkey business of rejoicing in airplane crashes and staggering around museums half out of his head and falling upon girls in hurricanes. Henceforth, he resolved, he would do right, feel good when good was called for, bad when bad. He aimed to take Kitty to a proper dance, pay her court, not mess around.

Accordingly he proposed that they stay in the bird room and play mahjong with Poppy and Jamie and Rita but she wouldn’t hear of it.

Once they were outside in the storm, however, he felt better despite himself, though he had sworn not to feel good in bad environments. It was going to be a bad storm. Under the dirty low-flying clouds the air was as yellow as electric light. His spirits rose, he told himself, because it might be possible for them to enter here and now into a new life. If they were trapped by the storm in the Trav-L-Aire, they could sit at the dinette and play gin rummy, snug as children, very like many another young couple who came down here in the days of the great Bobby Jones and had a grand time. Sit face to face and deal the cards and watch the storm, like a chapter from Mary Roberts Rinehart entitled “Trapped in the Storm: Interesting Developments”; perhaps even steal a kiss or two.

The camper was hove to in a hollow of the dunes. He had snugged her down with a hundred feet of nylon rope which he wound around cabin and axle and lashed to iron rings set in some broken beachworks. Inside the cabin he pumped up the butane tank and lit the little ashen mantles. Soon the camper leapt against its tether; the wind sang like a harp in her rigging. She creaked in every joint like the good prairie schooner she was and wouldn’t leak a drop. The sand scoured the aluminum skin like birdshot.

He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he’d brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, a hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand — most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc. — instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.

“Oh me,” he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.

“Aren’t you picking up jacks?” he reminded her.

“Am I?” she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.

Look at her, he thought peevishly. She had worn leotards so many years she didn’t know how to wear a dress. As she sat, she straddled a bit. Once in a Charleston restaurant he had wanted to jump up and pull her dress down over her knees.

Abruptly she put her cards down and knocked up the little Pullman table between them. “Bill.”

“Yes.”

“Come here.”

“All right.”

“Am I nice?”

“Yes.”

“Am I pretty?”

“Sure.”

“I mean, how would I look to you if you saw me in a crowd of girls?”

“Fine. The best, in fact.”

“Why don’t I think so?”

“I don’t know.”

She stretched out her leg, clasping her dress above the knee; “Is that pretty?”

“Yes,” he said, blushing. It was as if somehow it was his leg she was being prodigal with.

“Not crippled?”

“No.”

“Not muscle-bound?”

“No.”

“I worry about myself.”

“You don’t have to.”

“What do you really think of me? Tell me the literal truth.”

“I love you.”

“Besides that.”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Oh darling, I didn’t mean that. I mean, do you also like me? As a person.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think other boys will like me?”

“I don’t know,” said the engineer, sweating in earnest. Great Scott, he thought in dismay. Suppose she does have a date with another “boy.”

“I mean like at a dance. If you saw me at a dance, would you like to dance with me?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know that I’ve danced all my life and yet I’ve never been to a regular dance?”

“You haven’t missed much,” said the engineer, thinking of the many times he had stood around picking his nose at Princeton dances.

“Do you realize that I’ve hardly ever danced with a boy?”

“Is that right?”

“What does it feel like?”

“Dancing with a boy?”

“Show me, stupid.”

He switched on the Hallicrafter and between storm reports they danced to disc-jockey music from Atlanta. There was room for three steps in the camper. Even though they were sheltered by the dunes, now and then a deflected gust sent them stumbling.

She was not very good. Her broad shoulders were shy and quick under his hand, but she didn’t know how close to hold herself and so managed to hold herself too close or too far. Her knees were both workaday and timid. He thought of the long hours she had spent in dusty gymlike studios standing easy, sister to the splintery wood. She was like a boy turned into a girl.

“Will I do all right?”

“Doing what?”

“Going to dances.”

“Sure.” It was this that threw him off, her having to aim to be what she was.

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“How to do right.”

“Do right?” How to tell the sweet Georgia air to be itself?

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The storm crashed around them. Kitty drew him down to the lower bunk, which was like the long couch in an old-style Pullman drawing room. “Hold me tight,” she whispered.

He held her tight.

“What is it?” she asked presently.

“I was thinking of something my father told me.”

“What?”

“When my father reached his sixteenth birthday, my grandfather said to him: now, Ed, I’m not going to have you worrying about certain things — and he took him to a whorehouse in Memphis. He asked the madame to call all the girls in and line them up. O.K., Ed, he told my father. Take your pick.”

“Did her

“I guess so.”

“Did your father do the same for you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t know until this minute that it was hore. I thought it was whore.”

“No.”

“My poor darling,” said Kitty, coming so close that her two eyes fused into one. “I think I understand what you mean. You’ve been brought up to think it is an ugly thing whereas it should be the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“Ah.”

“Rita says that anything two people do together is beautiful if the people themselves are beautiful and reverent and unself-conscious in what they do. Like the ancient Greeks who lived in the childhood of the race.”

“Is that right?”

“Rita believes in reverence for life.”

“She does?”

“She says—”

“What does Sutter say?”

“Oh, Sutter. Nothing I can repeat. Sutter is an immature person. In a way it is not his fault, but nevertheless he did something dreadful to her. He managed to kill something in her, maybe even her capacity to love.”

“Doesn’t she love you?”

“She is terrified if I get close to her. Last night I was cutting my fingernails and I gave her my right hand to cut because I can’t cut with my left. She gave me the most terrible look and went out. Can you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. I’ll be your whore.”

“Hore.”

“Hore.”

“I know,” said the engineer gloomily.

“Then you think I’m a whore?”

“No.” That was the trouble. She wasn’t. There was a lumpish playfulness, a sort of literary gap in her whorishness.

“Very well. I’ll be a lady.”

“All right.”

“No, truthfully. Love me like a lady.”

“Very well.”

He lay with her, more or less miserably, kissed her lips and eyes and uttered sweet love-murmurings into her ear, telling her what a lovely girl she was. But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I’ve never really got the straight of this lady-and-whore business. And that is all I want and it does not seem too much to ask: for once and all to get the straight of it.

“I love you, Kitty,” he told her. “I dream of loving you in the morning. When we have our house and you are in the kitchen in the morning, in a bright brand-new kitchen with the morning sun streaming in the window, I will come and love you then. I dream of loving you in the morning.”

“Why, that’s the sweetest thing I ever heard in my life,” she said, dropping a full octave to her old unbuttoned Tallulah-Alabama voice. “Tell me some more.”

He laughed dolefully and would have but at that moment, in the storm’s lull, a knock rattled the louvers of the rear door.

It was Rita, looking portentous and solemn and self-coinciding. She had a serious piece of news. “I’m afraid something has come up,” she said.

They sat at the dinette, caressing the Formica with their fingertips and gazing at the queer yellow light outside. The wind had died and the round leaves of the sea grapes hung still. Fiddler crabs ventured forth, fingered the yellow decompressed air, and scooted back to their burrows. The engineer made some coffee. Rita waited, her eyes dry and unblinking, until he came back and she had her first swallow. He watched as the muscles of her throat sent the liquid streaming along.

“I’m afraid we’re in for it, kids,” she told them.

“Why is that?” the engineer asked since Kitty sat silent and sullen.

“Jamie has telephoned Sutter,” Rita told Kitty.

Kitty shrugged.

The engineer screwed up an eye. “He told me he was going to call his sister Val.”

“He couldn’t reach Val,” said Rita flatly.

“Excuse me,” said the engineer, “but what is so alarming about Jamie calling his brother?”

“You don’t know his brother,” said Rita trying to exchange an ironic glance with Kitty. “Anyhow it was what was said and agreed upon that was alarming.”

“How do you know what was said?” asked Kitty, so disagreeably that the engineer frowned.

“Oh, Jamie makes no bones about it,” Rita cried. “He’s going to move in with Sutter.”

“You mean downtown?” Kitty asked quickly.

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand,” said the engineer.

“Let me explain, Bill,” said Rita. “Sutter, my ex, and Kitty and Jamie’s brother, lives in a dark little hole next to the hospital. The plan of course had been for you and Jamie to take the garage apartment out in the valley.”

The engineer shrugged. “I can’t see that it’s anybody’s loss but mine if Jamie would rather live with his brother. In fact, it sounds quite reasonable.”

Again Rita tried to enlist Kitty in some kind of exchange but the girl was hulkish and dull and sat gazing at the sea grapes.

“It’s like this, Lance Corporal,” said Rita heavily. “Kitty here can tell you how it was. I saved the man once. I loved him and pulled him out of the gutter and put him back together. And I still think he’s the greatest diagnostician since Libman. Do you know what I saw him do? Kitty was there. I saw him meet a man in Santa Fe, at a party, speak with him five minutes — a physicist — ask him two questions, then turn to me and say: that man will be dead of malignant hypertension inside a year.”

“Was he?” asked the engineer curiously. “Dead, I mean?”

“Yes, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“How did Sutter, Dr. Vaught, know that?”

“I have no idea, but that’s not what concerns us now.”

“What were the two questions?”

“Ask him yourself. What is important now is what’s in store for Jamie.”

“Yes.”

“Here again Kitty will bear me out. If not, I shall be glad to be corrected. It is not that Sutter is an alcoholic. It’s not that he is a pornographer. These traits, charming as they are, do not in themselves menace Jamie, or you or me — no matter what some people may say. I flatter myself that all of us are sufficiently mature. No, what concerns me is Sutter’s deep ambivalence toward Jamie himself.”

“What do you mean?” asked the engineer, straining his good ear. The storm had begun banging away again.

“He has every right to make away with himself but he can damn well leave Jamie alone.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Kitty. “I mean, I don’t believe he tried to harm Jamie.”

“It is not a question of belief,” said Rita. “It is a question of facts. Do you deny the facts?”

Kitty was silent.

“It was an experiment,” she said presently.

“Some experiment. What do you think of this as an experiment, Lance Corporal. Last summer, shortly after Sutter learned of Jamie’s illness, he took him camping in the desert. They were lost for four days. Even so, it was not serious because they had plenty of water. On the fourth day the canteens were found mysteriously emptied.”

“How did they get out?”

“By pure freakish chance. Some damn fool shooting coyotes from an airplane spotted them.”

“He meant no harm to Jamie,” said Kitty dully.

“What did he mean?” said Rita ironically.

“Val said it was a religious experience.”

“Thank you all the same, but if that is religion I’ll stick to my ordinary sinful ways.”

“What do you mean, he is a pornographer?” the engineer asked her.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Rita calmly. “He likes fun and games, picture books, and more than one girl at a time.”

“I don’t think it’s pornography,” said Kitty.

“This time, by God, I know whereof I speak. I was married to him. Don’t tell me.”

“My brother,” said Kitty solemnly to the engineer, “can only love a stranger.”

“Eh?”

“It is a little more than that,” said Rita dryly. “But have it any way you please. Meanwhile let us do what we can for Jamie.”

“You’re right, Ree,” said Kitty, looking at her for the first time.

“What do you want me to do?” the engineer asked Rita.

“Just this. When we get home, you grab Jamie, throw him in this thing and run for your life. He’ll go with you!”

“I see,” said the engineer, now falling away like Kitty and turning mindless and vacant-eyed. “Actually we have a place to go,” he added. “He wants either to go to school or visit his sister Val. He asked me to go with him.”

Rita looked at him. “Are you going?”

“If he wants me to.”

“Fair enough.”

Presently he came to himself and realized that the women had left in the storm. It was dark. The buffeting was worse. He made a plate of grits and bacon. After supper he climbed into the balcony bunk, turned up the hissing butane lamp, and read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from cover to cover.