The Last Gentleman

Chapter Four

THE SOUTH HE came home to was different from the South he had left. It was happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican.

The happiness and serenity of the South disconcerted him. He had felt good in the North because everyone else felt so bad. True, there was a happiness in the North. That is to say, nearly everyone would have denied that he was unhappy. And certainly the North was victorious. It had never lost a war. But Northerners had turned morose in their victory. They were solitary and shut-off to themselves and he, the engineer, had got used to living among them. Their cities, rich and busy as they were, nevertheless looked bombed out. And his own happiness had come from being onto the unhappiness beneath their happiness. It was possible for him to be at home in the North because the North was homeless. There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place — in fact, this is one condition of being at home, if you are yourself homeless. For example, it is much worse to be homeless and then to go home where everyone is at home and then still be homeless. The South was at home. Therefore his homelessness was much worse in the South because he had expected to find himself at home there.

The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was analmost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anythingelse. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautifuland charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. They had the best of victory and defeat. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible. He was determined to be as happy as anyone, even though his happiness before had come from Northern unhappiness. If folks down here are happy and at home, he told himself, then I shall be happy and at home too.

As he pressed ever farther south in the Trav-L-Aire, he passed more and more cars which had Confederate plates on the front bumper and plastic Christs on the dashboard. Radio programs became more patriotic and religious. More than once Dizzy Dean interrupted his sportscast to urge the listener to go to the church or synagogue of his choice. “You’ll find it a rich and rewarding experience,” said Diz. Several times a day he heard a patriotic program called “Lifelines” which praised God, attacked the United States government, and advertised beans and corn.

What was wrong with a Mr. and Mrs. Williston Bibb Barrett living in a brand-new house in a brand-new suburb with a proper address: 2041 Country Club Drive, Druid Hills, Atlanta, Georgia?

Nothing was wrong, but he got worse anyway. The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.

What was wrong with marrying him a wife and living a life, holding Kitty’s charms in his arms the livelong night?

Nothing, but his memory deteriorated and he was assaulted by ghostly legions of déjà vus and often woke not knowing where he was. His knee leapt like a fish. It became necessary to unravel the left pocket of his three pairs of pants in order to slip a hand down and keep his patella in place.

It was unsettling, too, coming among a people whose radars were as sensitive as his own. He had got used to good steady wistful post-Protestant Yankees (they were his meat, ex-Protestants, post-Protestants, para-Protestants, the wistful ones who wanted they knew not what; he was just the one to dance for them) and here all at once he found himself among as light-footed and as hawk-eyed and God-fearing a crew as one could imagine. Everyone went to church and was funny and clever and sensitive in the bargain. Oh, they were formidable, born winners (how did they lose?). Yet his radar was remarkable, even for the South. After standing around two or three days, as queer and nervous as a Hoosier, he quickly got the hang of it. Soon he was able to listen to funny stories and tell a few himself.

The Vaughts liked him fine of course and did not notice that he was worse. For he was as prudent and affable as ever and mostly silent, and that was what they expected of him. All but Sutter. He had not yet met Sutter. But one day he saw his car, as he and Jamie were sitting in the sunny quarter of the golf shelter just off number 6 fairway in front of the Vaughts’ house.

Jamie was still reading The Theory of Sets. The engineer was pondering, as usual, the mystery of the singularity of things. This was the very golf links, he had reason to believe, where his grandfather had played an exhibition round with the great Bobby Jones in 1925 or thereabouts. It was an ancient sort of links, dating from the golden age of country clubs, with sturdy rain shelters of green-stained wood and old-fashioned ball-washers on each tee and soft rolling bunkers as peaceful as an old battlefield. Deep paths were worn through the rough where caddies cut across from green to fairway. The engineer’s amnesia was now of this order: he forgot things he had seen before, but things he had heard of and not seen looked familiar. Old new things like fifty-year-old golf links where Bobby Jones played once were haunted by memory.

How bad off was he, he wondered. Which is better, to walk the streets of Memphis in one’s right mind remembering everything, what one has done yesterday and must do tomorrow — or to come to oneself in Memphis, remembering nothing?

Jamie had asked him what he was thinking about. When he told him, Jamie said: “You sound like Sutter.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I went to see him yesterday. Yonder he goes now.”

But he saw no more than the car, a faded green Edsel which swung out of the steep driveway and disappeared down the links road. Jamie told him that Sutter drove an Edsel to remind him of the debacle of the Ford Motor Company and to commemorate the last victory of the American people over marketing research and opinion polls. The engineer wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this. It had the sound of a quixotic type who admires his own gestures.

The Vaughts lived in a castle fronting on a golf links. It was an old suburb set down in a beautiful green valley across a ridge from the city. There were other ridges, the last wrinkles of the Appalachians, which formed other valleys between them, and newer suburbs and newer country clubs.

The houses of the valley were built in the 1920’s, a time when rich men still sought to recall heroic ages. Directly opposite the castle, atop the next ridge to the south, there stood a round, rosy temple. It was the dwelling of a millionaire who had admired a Roman structure erected by the Emperor Vespasian in honor of Juno and so had reproduced it in good Alabama red brick and Georgia marble. At night a battery of colored floodlights made it look redder still.

The Vaught castle was made of purplish bricks which had been broken in two and the jagged side turned out. It had beam-in-plaster gables and a fat Norman tower and casement windows with panes of bottle glass. Mr. Vaught, it turned out, was richer even than the engineer had supposed. He had made his first fortune by inventing and manufacturing a new type of journal box for coal cars. After the second war he branched out into insurance companies, real estate, and auto dealerships. Now he owned and operated the second largest Chevrolet agency in the world. His talent, as the engineer divined it, was the knack of getting onto the rhythm of things, of knowing when to buy and sell. So that was the meaning of his funny way of hopping around like a jaybird with his ear cocked but not really listening to anybody! Rather was he tuned in to the music and rhythm of ventures, himself poised and nodding, like a schoolboy waiting to go into a jump rope. The engineer soon learned to pay no attention to him either: his talk was not talk at all, one discovered, that is, a form of communication to be attended to, but rather a familiar hum such as Lugurtha the cook made when she was making beaten biscuits.

There were other persons living in the castle. The “Myra” of whom Mrs. Vaught often spoke to the engineer as if he knew her, turned out to be Myra Thigpen, Mr. Vaught’s stepdaughter by an earlier marriage. The Thigpens were staying in the Vaught castle while their own house was being built across the golf links. Lamar Thigpen worked for Mr. Vaught as personnel manager. Myra ran a real-estate agency. A handsome woman with strong white arms and a cloud of heavy brown hair, she reminded the engineer of the Business and Professional Women he had seen turning out for luncheons at Holiday Inns from Charleston to Chattanooga. If Mrs. Vaught had thrown him off earlier by acting as if he ought to know whom she was talking about, Myra dislocated him now by acting as if she had known him all along. Had she? “You remember that old boy Hoss Hart from Greenwood who went to Mississippi State and later moved to Ithaca?” she asked him. “You mean Mr. Horace Hart who used to sell for Checkerboard Feed?” asked the engineer, who did in fact perfectly remember such a person, having heard his name once or twice fifteen years ago. “I saw him the other day,” Myra went on, “selling fruitcake for Civitan over at Boys’ State. He told me about when you and he and your daddy went duck-hunting on a houseboat on the White River.” “The White River?” The engineer scratched his head. Had Hoss Hart remembered something he had forgotten? “When you see Hoss,” said Myra, giving him a sisterly jostle such as coeds at Mississippi State give you, “just ask him if he remembers Legs.” “Yes ma’am.” “Don’t say Miss Homecoming of 1950, just say Legs and see what he says.” “Yes ma’am, I will.”

Sutter was nowhere to be seen, but the engineer made sure he would see him when he did come — as he was told Sutter occasionally did to spend the night. Sutter’s old apartment was next to the quarters assigned to the two young men, on the second floor above the great four-car garage. Not two hours passed after his arrival before he explored the apartment and discovered two things. One was a bottle of three-dollar whiskey in the cupboard of the kitchenette between the two apartments. The other thing was a knothole in the wall of his closet which looked straight into Sutter’s bedroom. He hung his Val-Pak over the hole.

I’m not well, reflected the engineer, and therefore it is fitting that I should sit still, like an Englishman in his burrow, and see what can be seen.

It was a good place to live and collect one’s thoughts. In the daytime the valley echoed with the faint far-off cries of the golfers. At night a yellow harvest moon hung over the ridge and the floodlights played on the fat rosy temple of Juno. His duties were light. Indeed he had no duties. Nothing more was said after Sea Island about Jamie’s plans to go live with his sister in the pine barrens or with his brother in the city. The sick youth seemed content to move into the garage apartment. Within three weeks of their arrival the two young men and Kitty had registered at the university forty miles away and two weeks later the engineer and Jamie had pledged Phi Nu and learned the grip. Kitty realized her ambition and became not a Tri Delt but a Chi Omega.

On the morning of registration they had set out for the university, the three of them, the engineer driving, Kitty in the middle, in Mrs. Vaught’s Lincoln, and came home early enough to sit on the garden grass and leaf through their brand-new textbooks with the glazed glittering pages and fragrant fresh print. The engineer, who had just received his October check from Mr. Vaught, bought a $25 slide rule as thick and slick as a mahjong tile and fitted at the rear with a little window.

Later in the afternoon he played golf, borrowing Jamie’s clubs and making a foursome with Mr. Vaught and two pleasant fellows, Lamar Thigpen and a man from the agency. The engineer’s skill at golf stood him in good stead. (Golf he was good at, it was living that gave him trouble. He had caddied for his father and broke eighty when he was thirteen.) It was not that he was so much better than the others but rather that he was strong and had a good swing. So that when the old man, who somehow knew this, had mumbled something about “my potner” and got his bets down and waved him onto the last tee, after he and Justin and Lamar had driven, he had happened to hit a dandy. The driver sang in the air and the ball went chack, flattening, it seemed like, and took off low, then went high and overdrove the par four green. The two opponents exchanged great droll thunderstruck comical mid-South looks.

“Well now, what is this?” said Justin, the agency man, who was a big slow easy fellow, the sort referred to in these parts as a good old boy.

“Looka here now,” said Lamar.

“Sho,” said Mr. Vaught, already striking out down the fairway. “Come on, potner.”

He hit five more towering drives and scored a lucky-after-the-layoff 36.

“Well now goddamn,” said Lamar.

They called him Bombo, the son of Tarzan, and Mr. Clean. The engineer had to laugh. They were good fellows and funny.

The sixth hole fairway of the second nine ran in front of the castle. It had got to be the custom after teeing off to mark the balls and veer over to the patio, where David, the butler, had toddies ready. Custom also required that the talk, unlike other occasions, be serious, usually about politics but sometimes even about philosophical questions. The tone of the sixth-hole break was both pessimistic and pleasurable. The world outlook was bad, yes, but not so bad that it was not a pleasant thing to say so of a gold-green afternoon, with a fair sweat up and sugared bourbon that tasted as good as it smelled. Over yonder, a respectful twenty yards away, stood the caddies, four black ragamuffins who had walked over the ridge from the city and now swung the drivers they took from the great compartmented, zippered, pocketed, studded, bonneted, golf bags.

The golfers gazed philosophically into their whiskey and now and then came out with solemn Schadenfreude things, just like four prosperous gents might have done in old Virginny in 1774.

“The thing is, you just don’t get integrity where you need it most,” said Lamar Thigpen, a handsome fellow who sat slapping his bare brown arm and looking around. He was maybe forty-five and just going slack and he worried about it, pushing his sleeve up and hardening his biceps against his chest.

“I’m going to tell yall the truth,” Justin might say. “If they want the country all that bad, I’m not all that much against letting them have it”

But even these dire things were not said in ill humor.

“Ain’t nobody here but us niggers anyway,” somebody else would say finally. “Let’s play golf.”

They would get up a little creakily, their sweat having cooled and muscles stiffened, and walk to their lies. Mr. Vaught always took his second shot first because he seldom drove over a hundred yards but that always straight down the middle. And now he wound up with his brassie, drawing back slowly and swaying backward too and with a ferocious deliberation; then, for all the world as if he had been overtaken by some dread mishap, went into a kind of shiver and spasm and, like a toy wound too tight and shooting its springs, came down on the ball from all directions — Poppy drives, Lamar told Justin, like a man falling out of a tree — uttering at the end of it, as he always did, a little cry both apologetic and deprecating: “Voop!”, calculated to conjure away all that was untoward and out of the ordinary — and off he would march, hopping along like a jaybird.

Living as he did in the garage apartment and hanging out as he did in the pantry and not with Mrs. Vaught’s coterie of patriots and anti-fluoridationists who kept to the living room, the engineer met the servants first of all. Met, not got to know. The engineer was the only white man in the entire South who did not know all there was to know about Negroes. He knew very little about them, in fact nothing. Ever since he was a child and had a nurse, he had been wary of them and they of him. Like many others, he had had a little black boy for a friend, but unlike the others, who had enjoyed perfect love and understanding with their little black friends, he had been from the beginning somewhat fuddled and uneasy. At the age of thirteen he was avoiding Negroes like a queasy middle-aged liberal.

No doubt these peculiar attitudes were a consequence of his nervous condition. Anyhow it was the oddest encounter imaginable, that between him and the Vaught servants. He baffled the Negroes and they him. The Vaught servants were buffaloed by the engineer and steered clear of him. Imagine their feeling. They of course lived by their radars too. It was their special talent and it was how they got along: tuning in on the assorted signals about them and responding with a skill two hundred years in the learning. And not merely responding. Not merely answering the signals but providing home and sustenance to the transmitter, giving him, the transmitter, to believe that he dwelled in loving and familiar territory. He must be made to make sense, must the transmitter; must be answered with sense and good easy laughter: sho now, we understand each other. But here came this strange young man who transmitted no signal at all but who rather, like them, was all ears and eyes and antennae. He actually looked at them. A Southerner looks at a Negro twice: once when he is a child and sees his nurse for the first time; second, when he is dying and there is a Negro with him to change his bedclothes. But he does not look at him during the sixty years in between. And so he knows as little about Negroes as he knows about Martians, less, because he knows that he does not know about Martians.

But here comes this strange young man who acts like one of them but look at you out of the corner of his eye. What he waiting for? They became nervous and jumped out of the way. He was like a white child who does not grow up or rather who grows up in the kitchen. He liked to sit in the pantry and watch them and talk to them, but they, the Negroes, didn’t know what to do with him. They called him “he,” just as they used to call the madam of the house “she.” “Where he is?” one might say, peeping out of the kitchen door and as often as not look straight into his eyes. “Uh-oh.”

“He,” the engineer, usually sat in the pantry, a large irregular room with a single bay window. It was not properly a room at all but rather the space left over in the center of the house when the necessary rooms had been built. Mr. Vaught, who also did not know what he did not know, had been his own architect. The ceiling was at different levels; many doors and vestibules opened into the room. David usually sat at one end, polishing silver in the bay. The dark end of the room let into the “bar,” a dusty alcove of blue mirrors and buzzing fluorescent lights and chrome stools. It was one of the first of its kind, hailing from the 1920’s and copied from the swanky bars used by Richard Barthelmess and William Powell in the movies. But it had not been used as such for years and now its mirror shelves were lined with Windex bottles, cans of O-Cedar and Bab-O and jars of silver polish stuffed with a caked rag. It fell out somehow or other that both Negro and white could sit in the pantry, perhaps because it was an intermediate room between dining room and kitchen, or perhaps because it was not, properly speaking, a room at all.

David Ross was different from the other Negroes. It was as if he had not caught onto either the Negro way or the white way. A good-humored seventeen-year-old, he had grown too fast and was as raw as any raw youth. He was as tall as a basketball player and wore summer and winter the same pair of heavy damp tweeds whose cuffs were swollen as if they had a chronic infection. He was supposed to be a butler and he wore a butler’s jacket with little ivory fasten-on buttons but his arms stuck out a good foot from the sleeves. He was always polishing silver, smiling as he did so a great white smile, laughing at everything (when he did not laugh, his face looked naked and strange) a hissing laugh between his teeth, ts-ts-ts. Something about him irritated the engineer, though. He was not cunning enough. He, the engineer, was a thousand times more cunning and he didn’t have to be. He, David, was too raw. For example, he was always answering advertisements in magazines, such as Learn Electronics! Alert Young Men Needed! Earn Fifty Dollars a Day! Send for Selling Kit! And the selling kit would come and David would show it to everybody, but his long black-and-pink fingers could never quite work the connections and the soldering iron. He was like a rich man’s son! The engineer would never have dreamed of spending such money ($10 for a selling kit!). Hell no, David, the engineer told him, don’t send off for that. Damnation, why didn’t he have better sense? He should either be cunning with a white man’s cunning or cunning with a black man’s cunning. As it was, he had somehow managed to get the worst of each; he had both white sappiness and Negro sappiness. Why doesn’t somebody tell him? One day he did tell him. “Damnation, David,” said he as David showed him a selling kit for an ice-cube dispenser which was supposed to fit any kind of refrigerator. “Who do you think you’re going to sell that to?”

“All the folks around here,” cried David, laughing ts-ts-ts and waving a great limp hand in the direction of the golf links. “Folks out here got plenty money and ain’t one in ten got a dispenser-type box” (he’d been reading the brochure). “It only come with GE and Servel!”

“Well, what in the world do they want it for,” moaned the flabbergasted engineer.

“When the he’p gone in the evenings and folks want to fix they drinks! They ain’t going to want to fool with no old-fashioned knuckle-bruising trays” (more from the brochure). “It’s not S.E. on the other boxes.”

“S.E.?” asked the engineer.

“Standard Equipment.”

“Oh. Then you’re just going to walk up to some lady’s house at ten o’clock in the morning and ring the doorbell and when she comes to the door you’re going to ask her to let you show this ice dispenser.”

“Sho,” said David and began laughing at the sour-looking engineer, ts-ts-ts.

“Well, you’re not,” the engineer would groan. Damnation, David couldn’t even polish silver. There was always silver cream left in the grooves. Still, the engineer liked to watch him at work. The morning sunlight fell among the silver fish in the shallows. The metal was creamy and satiny. The open jar of silver cream, the clotted rag, the gritty astringent smell of it, put him in mind of something but he couldn’t say what.

But damn this awful vulnerability of theirs, he ranted, eyes fixed on the glittering silver. It’s going to ruin us all, this helplessness. Why, David acted as if everybody was going to treat him well! If I were a Negro, I’d be tougher than that. I’d be steadfast and tough as a Jew and I’d beat them. I’d never rest until I beat them and I could. I should have been born a Negro, for then my upside-downness would be right side up and I’d beat them and life would be simple.

But Oh Christ, David, this goddamn innocence, it’s going to ruin us all. You think they’re going to treat you well, you act like you’re baby brother at home. Christ, they’re not going to treat you well. They’re going to violate you and it’s going to ruin us all, you, them, us. And that’s a shame because they’re not that bad. They’re not bad. They’re better than most, in fact. But you’re going to ruin us all with your vulnerability. It’s God’s terrible vengeance upon us, Jamie said Val said, not to loose the seven plagues upon us or the Assyrian or even the Yankee, but just to leave you here among us with this fearful vulnerability to invite violation and to be violated twenty times a day, day in and day out, our lives long, like a young girl. Who would not? And so the best of us, Jamie said she said, is only good the way a rapist is good later, for a rapist can be good later and even especially good and especially happy.

But damn him, he thought, him and his crass black inept baby-brother vulnerability. Why should I, for Christ’s sake, sit here all asweat and solicitous of his vulnerability. Let him go sell his non-knuckle-bruising ice trays and if he gets hurt: well, I’m not well myself.

David’s mother, Lugurtha Ross, was cook. She was respectable and black as black, with a coppery highlight, and had a straight Indian nose. She wanted no trouble with anybody. All she wanted in the world was to find fervent areas of agreement. She spoke to you only of such things as juvenile delinquency. “Chirren don’t have any respect for their parents any more,” she would cry. “You cain’t even correck them!”— even though David was her only living child and it was impossible to imagine him as a delinquent. She made it sound as if everybody were in the same boat; if only children would have more respect, our troubles would be over. She often made beaten biscuits in the evening, and as she sifted flour on the marble and handled the mitt of dough, she sang in a high decorous deaconess voice, not spirituals but songs she made up.

Up in an airplane

Smoking her sweet cigarette

She went way up in an airplane

Smoking her sweet cigarette

John Houghton, the gardener, lived in a room under the engineer’s apartment. An ancient little Negro with dim muddy eyes and a face screwed up like a prune around a patch of bristling somewhere near the middle of which was his mustache, he was at least sixty-five and slim and quick as a boy. He had come from the deep country of south Georgia and worked on the railroad and once as a hod carrier forty years ago when they built the dam at Muscle Shoals. He had been night watchman for the construction company when Mr. Vaught built his castle. Mr. Vaught liked him and hired him. But he was still a country Negro and had country ways. Sometimes Jamie and David would get him in a card game just to see him play. The only game he knew was a strange south Georgia game called pitty-pat. You played your cards in turn and took tricks but there was not much rhyme or reason to it. When John Houghton’s turn came, he always stood up, drew back, and slapped the card down with a tremendous ha-a-a-a-umph! just as if he were swinging a sledge hammer, but pulling up at the last second and setting the card down soft as a feather. David couldn’t help laughing ts-ts-ts. “What game we gon’ play, John?” he would ask the gardener to get him to say pitty-pat. “Lessus have a game of pitty-pat,” John Houghton would say, standing up also to shuffle the cards, which he did by chocking them into each other, all the while making terrific feints and knee-bends like a boxer. “Pitty-pat,” cried David and fell out laughing. But John Houghton paid no attention and told them instead of his adventures in the city, where, if the police caught you playing cards, they would sandbag you and take you to jail.

“What do you mean, sandbag?” asked the puzzled engineer.

“That’s what I mean!” cried John Houghton. “I mean they sandbag you.”

Of an evening John Houghton would don his jacket, an oversize Marine drawstring jacket with deep patch pockets, turn the collar up around his ears so that just the top of his gnarled puckered head showed above it, thrust his hands deep into the patch pockets, and take a stroll down the service road which wound along the ridge behind the big houses. There he met the maids getting off work.

At night and sometimes all night long there arose from the room below the engineer’s the sounds of scuffling and, it seemed to him, of flight and pursuit; of a chair scraped back, a sudden scurry of feet and screams, he could have sworn more than one voice, several in fact, screams both outraged and risible as pursuer and quarry rounded the very walls, it seemed like.

They sat in the garden, the three students, on the last day of summer and leafed through their new textbooks. The whitethroat sparrows had come back early and were scratching in the sour leaves. The October sunlight was blinding on the white glazed pages, which smelled like acetate and the year ahead. The chemistry text seemed to exhale the delicate effluvium of new compounds. From the anthology there arose a subtler smell, both exotic and businesslike, of the poet’s disorder, his sweats and scribblings, and of the office order of the professor and the sweet ultimate ink. By contrast, everything else seemed untidy, the summer past, the ruined garden, one’s own life. Their best hope lay in the books themselves, the orderly march of chapter and subheading, the tables, the summaries, the index, the fine fat page of type.

The old spurious hope and elegance of school days came back to him. How strange it was that school had nothing whatever to do with life. The old talk of school as a preparation for life — what a bad joke. There was no relation at all. School made matters worse. The elegance and order of school had disarmed him for what came later.

Jamie had a queer-looking physical-chemical reference, as stubby and thick as a German handbook. Hefting it, you felt like a German: a whole body of knowledge, a Wissenschaft, here in your hand, a good chunky volume. Kitty had a great $15 atlas-size anthology of World Literature from Heraclitus to Robert Frost — the whole works. The engineer was content with a thin tight little volume, The Theory of Large Numbers, that and his slide rule, which he wore in a scabbard like a dagger. Sitting in the funky tannin smell of the fall garden, he slid the window of his rule and read off cube roots and cosigns. He for artifacts, bright pretty useful objects like slide rules, and you can have your funky gardens and jaybirds crying down October.

Each believed privately that he was taking the best course, had hit on the real thing, the meat of the university, and that the other two were deceiving themselves. Imagine what a chemistry student thinks of an anthology.

Son Junior, Lamar Thigpen’s son, came out to join them and stood around fiddling with his Thunderbird keys, but they didn’t like him much and nobody spoke to him and at last he went away. He was a pale glum sophomore who lived at the university and drove home to the castle on weekends. Yet strangely enough, glum as he was, he had many friends at the university who liked him despite his sullen ways. He brought them over to the castle before football games, and while everyone had a good time drinking in the pantry, he stood off and fiddled with his car keys.

The engineer, if the truth be told, was in a bad way, having been seriously dislocated by his first weeks at the university. Now feeling all at once knocked in the head, bumbly and sleepy, he excused himself and crept off to a sunny corner of the garden wall, where he curled up and went to sleep. The sparrows eyed him and hopped around in the dry crape myrtle leaves, which curled like orange peelings and seemed to burn with a clear flame in the sunlight.

What had happened was that the university had badly thrown him off with its huge pleasantness. Powerful friendship radiations came at him from all directions. It was enough to make one uneasy. By ten o’clock on the first morning he was fairly jumping with nervousness. He did believe that the campus was the pleasantest place he had ever seen. Everyone he met was happy and good-looking and victorious and kindly and at-one with themselves, and here he was, solitary and goofy and shut up in himself, eyeballs rolled up in his eyebrows. Perfect strangers in shirtsleeves spoke to him on the paths. Beautiful little flatfooted girls swinging along in fresh cotton skirts called out to him: hi! His knee leapt. The boys said: what say! and the girls said: hi! He had of course got into the Yankee way of not speaking to anyone at all. In New York it is gradually borne in upon one that you do not speak to strangers and that if you do, you are fairly taken for a homosexual. Indeed he had noticed that Northern college boys worry about being mistaken for homosexuals and take trouble to demonstrate that they are not. At Princeton one not only did not speak to strangers on the paths; one also took care which acquaintances one acknowledged. There were those, in fact, who measured their own worth by the number of people one could afford to cut in public. That was how he nearly got into a fistfight and came to take up boxing. Still used to Southern ways, he spoke to a fellow coming toward him on the path, a cool, pipe-smoking gent (it was raining and he smoked his pipe upside-down) he had been introduced to not thirty minutes earlier at an eating club. “What say,” said the engineer and the fellow looked straight through him, snuffled in his pipe, and cut him dead. Now the engineer was not nearly as tense and honorable as his father but was still fairly tense and honorable and unused to slights, and after all his grandfather had been a great one for face-to-face showdowns in the street (“I told you, you bed-sheeted Ku Klux cowardly son of a bitch, to be out of town by four o’clock,” etc.). Before he knew it or even thought what he was doing, he had turned back, grabbed the other by his elbow, and spun him around. “Excuse me,” said the courteous engineer, “but I was introduced to you not thirty minutes ago and just now I spoke to you and furthermore I saw that you saw me speak to you and that you chose not to acknowledge my greeting. I suggest now that you do so acknowledge it.” Or some such of the formal goofy language he used with strangers. “Pardon,” said the other, looking at him for the maniac that he was. “I s’pose I was completely lost in my thots.” And off he went, snuffling in his pipe. Later the engineer observed that he smoked the pipe upside-down even on clear days. He was a Choate man. Evidently he had discovered that the engineer graduated from Ithaca High School. Thought the latter to himself: if I’m going to be challenging these fellows on the paths, I’d better be in shape to do it. You can run into a tartar, a sure-enough thick-legged gent. And what a sad business that would be, to challenge some fellow and then get the living hell beat out of you. So he went out for boxing, became a demon middleweight and had no more trouble with Choate snobs or anyone else for that matter.

But now it was he who had learned Yankee ways. He took to eyeing people on the path to see when they would speak. He judged the distance badly and said his “hi” and “what say” too soon. His face ached from grinning. There was something to be said after all for the cool Yankee style of going your own way and paying no attention to anyone. Here for God’s sake the air fairly crackled with kinship radiations. That was it. These beautiful little flatfooted girls greeted you like your own sister! What do you do about that? He had forgotten. It made him blush to think of laying hands on them. Then he remembered: that was how you did lay hands on them! — through a kind of sisterly-brotherly joshing, messing around it was called. Everybody was wonderful and thought everybody else was. More than once he overheard one girl tell another: “She’s the most wonderful girl I ever knew!”

That was how they treated the courses too: they cancelled out the whole academic side by honorifics. “Professor so-and-so? He’s the second smartest professor in the United States!” “Ec 4? Universally recognized as the hardest course ever given on the subject!” Etc. And poof! out the window went the whole intellectual business, kit and caboodle, cancelled out, polished off, even when you made straight A’s. Especially when you made straight A’s.

Naturally in such an intersubjective paradise as this, he soon got the proper horrors. He began to skid a little and catch up with himself like a car on ice. His knee leapt so badly that he had to walk like a spastic, hand thrust through pocket and poking patella with each step. Spotting oncomers, fifty, sixty, seventy feet away, he began grinning and composing himself for the encounter. “Hi!” he hollered, Oh Lord, a good twenty feet too soon.

Under the crape myrtle in the garden the song sparrow scratched like a chicken, one foot at a time, and the yellow leaves curled in a clear flame. Close by, John Houghton trimmed the brick border with an old-fashioned spring blade. Snick, snick snee, went the blade scissoring along the bricks.

He was dreaming his old dream of being back in high school and running afoul of the curriculum, wandering up and down the corridors past busy classrooms. Where was his class? He couldn’t find it and he had to have the credit to graduate.

Someone kissed him on the mouth, maybe really kissed him as he lay asleep, for he dreamed a dream to account for the kiss, met Alice Bocock behind the library stacks and gave her a sweet ten-o’clock-in-the-morning kiss.

There was a step behind him and presently voices. He cracked an eyelid. The song sparrow was scratching, kicking leaves and looking around like a chicken. Fireballs danced on his lashes, broke into bows and sheaves of color.

“Very well, little Hebe. Be Betty coed and have your little fun on Flirtation Walk—”

“Flirtation Walk!”

“And all the warm dalliance you want to. Drain your cup, little Hebe, then let me know when you want to get down to business.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”—delivered in Kitty’s new ironclad coed style, for crying out loud, her head tilted at an angle signifying mock-incredulity, eyes inattentive and going away.

Englishman that he was, he woke in his burrow without a commotion. Though his cheek was pressed into the leaves and was stinging, he did not move. The sunlight fell upon a loose screen of sasanqua. He could not see them, but he heard Kitty and Rita talking a few feet away, where they must be sitting on the grass.

A movement caught his eye. Some thirty feet away and ten feet above him a balcony of the garage overhung the garden, not a proper balcony, but just enough ledge to break the ugly wall and give a pleasant cloistered effect to the garden; not for standing on, but there stood a man anyhow, with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the garden.

He was a Vaught, with the black brow and the high color and the whorled police-dog eye, but a very finely drawn Vaught. Motionless as he was, he gave the effect of restiveness and darting. He was both merry and haggard. Sutter, the engineer was to learn, always looked as if he had just waked up, with one side of his face flushed and creased and his hair brushed up against the grain by the pillow. There was something old-fashioned about him. Perhaps it was his clothes. He was in shirtsleeves, but his shirt and pants were the kind you wear with a suit. They could be the trousers of a $35 Curlee suit. One knew at once that he would never wear slacks and a sport shirt. He put one in mind of a bachelor of the 1940’s come home to his quarters and putting on a regular white shirt and regular suit pants and stepping out to take the air of an evening. Most notable was his thinness. He was thin as a child is thin, with a simple scanting of flesh on bones. The shirt, still starched and stuck together on one side, did not lay hold of his body. It was the sort of thinness a young man worries about. But this man did not. He was indifferent to his thinness. He did not hold himself in such a way as to minimize it.

Sutter’s hands moved in his pockets as he watched Rita and Kitty.

“What’s the story?” Rita was saying. “Why the headlong rush for anonymity?”

Kitty did not reply. The engineer could hear her hand moving against the nap of the freshly cut grass.

“Mmm?” said Rita, questioning softly.

“Nothing is changed, Ree,” caroled Kitty.

Sutter turned his head. There was something wrong with his cheek, a shadowing, a distinguished complication like a German saber scar.

“On your way, Minnie cat,” said Rita, and the women arose, laughing.

Before they could turn, Sutter, still fingering the change in his pocket, ducked through the open window. Rita looked up quickly, holding her hand against the sun.

“A pretty links, isn’t it? You know, I was one of the first people to be brought up in a suburb. Aren’t you Will Barrett?”

He had been watching the golfers from the patio and he turned around quickly, irritably, not liking to be surprised. There stood a woman he first took to be a Salvation Army lass and he was about to refuse her alms even more irritably. But then he noticed she was a Vaught. She must be Val.

“In the past,” she went on before he could answer, “people have usually remembered their childhood in old houses in town or on dirt farms back in the country. But what I remember is the golf links and the pool. I spent every warm day of my girlhood at the pool, all day every day, even eating meals there. Even now it doesn’t seem right to eat a hamburger without having wrinkled fingers and smelling chlorine.” She didn’t laugh but went on gazing past him at the golfers. Her musing absent-mindedness, he reckoned, was one of the little eccentricites nuns permitted themselves. He had never spoken to a nun. But perhaps she was not a proper nun after all, wearing as she did not a proper habit but a black skirt and blouse and a little cap-and-veil business. But beyond a doubt she was a Vaught, though a somewhat plumpish bad-complexioned potato-fed Vaught. Her wrist was broad and white as milk and simple: it was easy for him to imagine that if it was cut through it would show not tendon and bone but a homogenous nun-substance.

“I’ve been looking for you, Barrett. Once I heard your father make a speech to the D.A.R. on the subject of noblesse oblige and our duty to the Negro. A strange experience and a strange bunch of noblewomen. Not that I know much about noblesse oblige, but he gave them proper hell. He was right about one thing, of course, character. You don’t hear much about that either nowadays.”

“Is that why you became a nun?” he asked politely.

“Partly, I suppose. I drove up to see Jamie and now I want to see you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Jamie looks awful.”

“Yes.” He was about to enter with her onto the mournful ground of Jamie’s illness, but she fell away again. John Houghton’s scissors came snicker-sneeing along the brick walk behind her and flushed a towhee out of the azaleas, a dandy little cock in tuxedo-black and cinnamon vest She gazed down at the bird with the same mild distracted eye.

“Does John Houghton still run after school girls?”

“Ma’am? Oh. Well, yes.”

Now freed by her preoccupation with the forgotten trophies of her past, the sentient engineer swung full upon her. What to make of it, this queer casualness of hers? Was it Catholic, a species of professional unseriousness (death and sin are our affair, so we can make light of them), almost frivolity, like electricians who make a show of leaning on high-voltage wires? Or was it an elaborate Vaught dialectic, thus: Rita and the rest of you are going to be so serious about Jamie, therefore I am not, etc. His radar boggled and couldn’t get hold of her. He was obscurely scandalized. He didn’t like her much.

“How long does Jamie have?”

“Eh? To live— Oh, Rita said months, four months I think she said. But I think longer. Actually he is much better.”

“Jamie tells me you and he are good friends.” Her gaze was still fixed on the tiny amber eye of the towhee, which crouched with its head cocked, paralyzed.

“Yes.”

“He says that you and he may go somewhere together.”

“Jamie changes his mind about that. He was talking earlier about living with Sutter or going down to stay with you.”

“Well, now he wants to go somewhere with you.”

“Do you mean, leave school?”

“Yes.”

“He knows I’m ready to go any time.” Presently he added: “I can understand him wanting to go away.”

“Yes. That was what I want to speak to you about.”

He waited.

“Mr. Barrett—”

“Yes ma’am.”

“It may well happen that it will be you and not one of us who will be with Jamie during the last days of his life and even at his death.”

“I suppose that is true,” said the engineer, taking note of a warning tingle between his shoulder blades.

“Everyone thinks very highly of you — though for strangely diverse, even contradictory reasons. I can’t help noticing. You are evidently quite a fellow. That’s hardly surprising, considering whose son you are.”

“Ah—” began the engineer, frowning and scratching his head.

“Though I can’t say that I agree with your father on his reasons for treating Negroes well rather than beating them up, still I’d rather that he’d won over the current scoundrels even if he’d won for the wrong reasons.”

“Perhaps,” said the engineer uneasily, not wanting to discuss either his father’s “reasons” or her even more exotic reasons.

“But in any case I too can perceive that you are a complex and prescient young man.”

“I certainly appreciate—” began the engineer gloomily.

“Clearly you would do right by Jamie even if you had no affection for him, which I have reason to believe you do have.”

“Yes,” said the other warily. It was still impossible to get a fix on her. He had known very few Catholics and no nuns at all.

“Mr. Barrett, I don’t want Jamie to die an unprovided death.”

“Unprovided?”

“I don’t want him to die without knowing why he came here, what he is doing here, and why he is leaving.”

“Ma’am?” The engineer felt like wringing out his ear but he did not.

“It may fall to you to tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

“About the economy of salvation.”

“Why don’t you tell him?” He was watching her as intently as the towhee watched her. There was no telling what she might do.

She sighed and sat down. The towhee, released from its spell, flew away. “I have told him.”

The engineer, though standing erect, began to lean about five degrees away from her.

“It is curious, Mr. Barrett, but what I told him was absolutely the last thing on earth he would listen to. It was not simply one of a great number of things he might have listened to more or less indifferently. It was, of all things, absolutely the last thing. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

“I couldn’t say. But if you can’t tell him what you believe, you his sister, how do you expect me to tell him what I don’t believe?”

But she was at it again, her trick of engaging him then slipping away. “They didn’t ride in carts the last time I was here,” she said, gazing past him at the golfers. Do all nuns banter about salvation? “And yet, there he was, reading all that guff with relish.”

“What guff?”

“That book about radio noise from the galaxies, noise which might not be noise. Did you give it to him?”

“No.”

She ignored his irritation. “I’ve noticed,” she said gloomily and not especially to him, “that it is usually a bad sign when dying people become interested in communication with other worlds, and especially when they become spiritual in a certain sense.”

“Don’t you believe in other worlds and, ah, spirits?”

“It is strange, but I’ve always distrusted so-called spiritual people,” she muttered, mostly ruminating with herself. “You know how women talk about such and such a priest being spiritual?”

“No.” How could he know any such thing?

“I always steer clear of those birds. But no, actually I owe spiritual people, ladies, a great deal — they’re very generous with me when I beg from them. It’s a strange business, isn’t it? The most unlikely people are generous. Last week I persuaded the local Klonsul of the Klan to give us a Seven-Up machine. Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?”

“I couldn’t say,” said the sleepy engineer.

She brought herself up and looked at him for the first time. “Mr. Barrett, Jamie’s salvation may be up to you.”

“Eh? Excuse me, but apart from the circumstance that I do not know what the word ‘salvation’ means, I would refuse in any case to accept any such commission, Miss, ah—, that is, Sister—”

“Val.”

“Sister Val.”

“No,” she said laughing. “Just Val. I am Sister Johnette Mary Vianney.”

“Is that right?”

His refusal, he noticed, was delivered with a tingle of pleasure, both perverse and familiar. Familiar because — yes, he remembered his father refusing a priest and taking some satisfaction in it even though he, his father, took the Catholics’ side in their troubles with the Klan. “Mr. Barrett,” the priest asked him with the same jolly gall, “I don’t think you realized it but you just fired one of my parishioners, heh-heh, and I want to ask you if you will take her back. She has a family and no husband—” “And who could that be,” said his father, his voice ominously civil. “Souella Johnson.” Souella Johnson, who, being not merely a winehead but, failing to find Gallo sherry in the house, had polished off as a poor substitute some six cases of twenty-year-old bourbon over the years. “I will not, sir,” said his father and bang, down went the telephone.

“I will not,” he told Val with the same species of satisfaction. Perhaps we are true Protestants despite ourselves, he mused, or perhaps it is just that the protest is all that is left of it. For it is in stern protest against Catholic monkey business that we feel ourselves most ourselves. But was her request true Catholic gall, the real article, or was it something she had hit upon through a complicated Vaught dialectic? Or did she love her brother?

He read in her eyes that he looked odd. “What is it?” she asked him smiling. For a split second he saw in her his Kitty, saw it in her lip-curling bold-eyed expression. It was as if his Kitty, his golden girl of summertime and old Carolina, had come back from prison where she had got fat and white as white and bad-complexioned.

“What?” she asked again.

“I was wondering,” said the engineer, who always told the truth, “how you manage to come to the point where you feel free to make requests of people.”

She laughed again. “Jamie was right. You’re a good companion. Well, I can ask you, can’t I?”

“Sure.”

“It’s like the story about the boy who got slapped by quite a few girls but who — well. But it’s extraordinary how you can ask the most unlikely people — you can ask them straight out: say, look, I can see you’re unhappy; why don’t you stop stealing or abusing Negroes, go confess your sins and receive the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ — and how often they will just look startled and go ahead and do it. One reason is that people seldom ask other people to do anything.”

“I see.”

“Now I have to go see Sutter.”

“Yes ma’am.”

He began nodding in ancient Protestant fuddlement and irony, not knowing whether to bow, shake hands, or look down his nose. But it didn’t matter. She had left without noticing.

Jamie was not in the apartment. There were voices in the room next door. That would be Sutter and Val, he calculated, and perhaps Jamie. The old itch for omniscience came upon him — lost as he was in his own potentiality, having come home to the South only to discover that not even his own homelessness was at home here — but he resisted the impulse to eavesdrop. I will not overhear nor will I oversee, he said, and instead threw a dozen combination punches, for henceforth I shall be what I am no matter how potential I am. Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.

He lay on the bed, feet sticking straight up, and broke out in a cold sweat. What day is this, he wondered, what month, and he jumped up to get his Gulf calendar card from his wallet. The voices in the next room murmured away. A chair scraped back. The vacuum of his own potentiality howled about him and sucked him toward the closet. He began to lean. Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset, closet door closed behind him, Val-Pak on his back like a chasuble.

The hole commanded perhaps a 100 degree view of Sutter’s room. It was furnished in rancho style with a maple couch and chair with wagonwheel arms. There were pictures of famous moments of medical history: First Use of Anesthesia, Dr. Lister Vaccinates, Tapping Ascites. Mrs. Vaught, he remembered, had fixed up the room for Sutter when he was in school.

Sutter was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, idly brandishing an automatic pistol, aiming it here and there, laying the muzzle against his cheek. Val was leaving: he caught no more than a flurry of black skirt and a shoe of cracked leather. At close range Sutter did not look so youthful. His olive skin had a yellowish cast. The high color of his cheeks resolved into a network of venules. His fingertips were wrinkled and stained by chemicals.

“—found him in New York,” Val was saying. “He’s Ed Barrett’s son. Have you met him?”

“I saw him in the garden.” Sutter aimed the pistol at something over the engineer’s head.

“What did you think of him?”

Sutter shrugged. “You know. He is—” His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical.

“Yes,” said Val.

“—nice,” ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, “you know.”

“Yes.”

My God, thought the closeted Englishman, they already knew what he was, agreed on it, and communicated their complex agreement with hardly a word!

“Put that thing up,” said Val.

“Why?”

“Some day you’re going to blow your fool head off — by accident.”

“That would offend you more than if I did it deliberately, wouldn’t it?”

“And it would please you, wouldn’t it, to die absurdly?”

The engineer heard no more. He had become extremely agitated, whether by their reference to him or by the sight of the pistol, he could not have said, but he left the closet and paced up and down the bedroom. He took his pulse: 110. A door closed and the stairs creaked under a heavy step. For some minutes he stood listening. A car started below. He went to the window. It was a Volkswagen microbus painted a schoolbus yellow and stained with red dust.

He had already started for the door, blood pounding in his ears, when the shot rang out. It was less a noise than a heavy concussion. Lint flew off the wall like a rug whipped by a broom. His ears rang. Now, hardly knowing how he came here, he found himself standing, heart pounding in his throat, outside Sutter’s door on the tiny landing. Even now, half out of his mind, his first thought was of the proprieties. It had seemed better to go to Sutter’s outside door than directly through the kitchenette, which with the closet separated the apartments. And now, standing at the door, knuckles upraised, he hesitated. Does one knock after a shot. With a sob of dismay, dismay less for Sutter than himself, he burst into the room.

The wagonwheel chair was empty. He went lunging about.

“You must be Barrett.”

Sutter stood at a card table, almost behind the door, cleaning the pistol with a flannel disk soaked in gun oil.

“Excuse me,” said the reeling engineer. “I thought I heard a noise.”

“Yes.”

“It sounded like a shot.”

“Yes.”

He waited but Sutter said no more.

“Did the pistol go off accidentally?”

“No. I shot him.”

“Him?” The engineer suddenly feared to turn around.

Sutter was nodding to the wall. There hung yet another medical picture, this of The Old Arab Physician. The engineer had not seen it because his peephole was some four inches below the frame. Moving closer, he noticed that the Arab, who was ministering to some urchins with phials and flasks, was badly shot up. Only then did it come over him that his peephole was an outlying miss in the pattern of bullet holes.

“Why him?” asked the engineer, who characteristically, having narrowly escaped being shot, dispatched like Polonius behind the arras, had become quite calm.

“Don’t you know who that is?”

“No.”

‘That’s Abou Ben Adhem.”

The engineer shook his head impatiently. “Now that I’m here I’d like to ask you—”

“See the poem? There in a few short, badly written lines is compressed the sum and total of all the meretricious bullshit of the Western world. And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest Why did it lead all the rest?”

“I don’t know,” said the engineer. His eyes were fixed vacantly on the dismantled gun barrel. The fruity steel smell of Hoppe’s gun oil put him in mind of something, but he couldn’t think what.

“There it is,” said Sutter, loading the clip, “the entire melancholy procession of disasters. First God; then a man who is extremely pleased with himself for serving man for man’s sake and leaving God out of it; then in the end God himself turned into a capricious sentimental Jean Hersholt or perhaps Judge Lee Cobb who is at first outraged by Abou’s effrontery and then thinks better of it: by heaven, says he, here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news — the new gospel. Do you know who did the West in?”

“No.”

“It wasn’t Marx or immorality or the Communists or the atheists or any of those fellows. It was Leigh Hunt.”

“Who?” repeated the engineer absently, eyes glued forever to the Colt Woodsman.

“If I were a Christian, I shouldn’t hesitate to identify the Anti-Christ. Leigh Hunt.”

“Leigh Hunt,” said the engineer, rubbing his eyes.

“I’m glad you came down with Jimmy,” said Sutter. “Come sit over here.”

“Yes sir.” Still not quite able to rouse himself, he allowed Sutter to lead him to the wagonwheel chair. But before he could sit down, Sutter turned him into the light from the window.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I feel all right now. I was quite nervous a few minutes ago. I’ve had a nervous condition for some time.” He told Sutter about his amnesia.

“I know. Jimmy told me. Are you going into a fugue now?”

“I don’t know. I thought perhaps that you—”

“Me? Oh no. I haven’t practiced medicine for years. I’m a pathologist I study the lesions of the dead.”

“I know that,” said the engineer, sitting down wearily. “But I have reason to believe you can help me.”

“What reason?”

“I can tell when somebody knows something I don’t know.”

“You think I know something?”

“Yes.”

“How can you tell?”

“I don’t know how but I can. I had an analyst for five years and he was very good, but he didn’t know anything I didn’t know.”

Sutter laughed. “Did you tell him that?”

“No.”

“You should have. He could have done a better job.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I can’t practice. I’m not insured.”

“Insured?”

‘The insurance company cancelled my liability. You can’t practice without it.”

“I’m not asking you to practice. I only want to know what you know.”

But Sutter only shrugged and turned back to the Colt.

“Why did they cancel your insurance?” the engineer asked desperately. There was something he wanted to ask but he couldn’t hit on the right question.

“I got the idea of putting well people in the hospital and sending the truly sick home.”

“Why did you do that?” asked the engineer, smiling slightly. He was not yet certain when the other was joking.

Again Sutter shrugged.

The engineer was silent.

Sutter rammed a wad through the barrel. “I had a patient once who lived under the necessity of being happy. He almost succeeded but did not quite. Since he did not, he became depressed. He became very unhappy that he was not happy. I put him in the terminal ward of the hospital, where he was surrounded by the dying. There he soon recovered his wits and became quite cheerful. Unfortunately — and by the purest bad luck — he happened to suffer a serious coronary before I sent him home. As soon as it became apparent that he was going to die, I took it upon myself to remove him from his oxygen tent and send him home to his family and garden. There he died. The hospital didn’t like it much. His wife sued me for a half a million dollars. The insurance company had to pay.”

The engineer, still smiling faintly, was watching the other like a hawk. “Dr. Vaught, do you know what causes amnesia?”

“Causes it? Like a virus causes chicken pox?”

“Have you seen many cases?”

“Do you regard yourself as a case?”

“I would like to know.”

“You are a very persistent young man. You ask a great many questions.”

“And I notice you don’t answer them.”

The pistol was assembled. Sutter sat down, shoved in the clip, pulled back the breach and rang up a bullet. He clicked the safety and took aim at the Arab physician. The engineer screwed up one eye against the shot, but Sutter sighed and set the pistol down.

“All right, Barrett, what’s wrong?”

“Sir?”

“I’m listening. What’s wrong?”

Now, strangely, the engineer fell silent for a good twenty seconds.

Sutter sighed. “Very well. How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

Sutter was like an unwilling craftsman, the engineer perceived, a woodworker who has put on his coat and closed up shop. Now a last customer shows up. Very well, if you insist. He takes the wood from the customer, gives it a knock with his knuckles, runs a thumb along the grain.

“Are you a homosexual?”

“No.”

“Do you like girls much?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Very much.”

“Do you have intercourse with girls?”

The engineer fell silent.

“You don’t like to speak of that?”

He shook his head.

“Did you speak of it with your psychiatrist?”

“No.”

“Do you mean that for five years you never told him whether you had intercourse with girls?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It was none of his business.”

Sutter laughed. “And none of mine. Did you tell him that?”

“No.”

“You were not very generous with him.”

“Perhaps you are right.”

“Do you believe in God?”

The engineer frowned. “I suppose so. Why do you ask?”

“My sister was just here. She said God loves us. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know.” He stirred impatiently.

“Do you believe that God entered history?”

“I haven’t really thought about it.”

Sutter looked at him curiously. “Where are you from?”

“The Delta.”

“What sort of man was your father?”

“Sir? Well, he was a defender of the Negroes and—”

“I know that I mean what sort of man was he? Was he a gentleman?”

“Yes.”

“Did he live in hope or despair?”

“That is hard to say.”

“What is the date of the month?”

“The nineteenth.”

“What month is it?”

The engineer hesitated.

“What is the meaning of this proverb: a stitch in time saves nine?”

“I would have to think about it and tell you later,” said the engineer, a queer light in his eye.

“You can’t take time off to tell me now?”

“No.”

“You really can’t tell me, can you?”

“No.”

“Why can’t you?”

“You know why.”

“You mean it is like asking a man hanging from a cliff to conjugate an irregular verb?”

“No. I’m not hanging from a cliff. It’s not that bad. It’s not that I’m afraid.”

“What is it then?”

The engineer was silent

“Is it rather that answering riddles does not seem important to you? Not as important as—” Sutter paused.

“As what?” asked the engineer, smiling.

“Isn’t that for you to tell me?”

The engineer shook his head.

“Do you mean you don’t know or you won’t tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. Come here.”

Sutter took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and for the second time turned the other into the light. “You won’t feel this.” He twisted a corner of the handkerchief and touched the other’s cornea. “O.K.,” said Sutter and sitting down fell silent for a minute or two.

Presently the engineer spoke. “You seem to have satisfied yourself of something.”

Sutter rose abruptly and went into the kitchenette. He returned with half a glass of the dark brown bourbon the engineer had noticed earlier.

“What is it?” the latter asked him.

“What is what?”

“What did you satisfy yourself about?”

“Only that you were telling the truth.”

“About what?”

“About when you believe someone has something to tell you, you will then believe what he tells you. I told you you would not feel the handkerchief, so you didn’t. You inhibited your corneal reflex.”

“Do you mean that if you tell me to do something I will do it?”

“Yes.”

The engineer told him briefly of his déjà vus and of his theory about bad environments. The other listened with a lively expression, nodding occasionally. His lack of surprise and secret merriment irritated the engineer. He was even more irritated when, as he finished his account, the other gave a final nod as much as to say: well, that’s an old story between us — and spoke, not of him, the engineer, but of Val. Evidently her visit had made a strong impression on him. It was like going to a doctor, hurting, and getting harangued about politics. Sutter was more of a doctor than he knew.

“Do you know why Val came up here? This concerns you because it concerns Jimmy.”

“No, I don’t,” said the engineer gloomily. Damnation, if I am such an old story to him, why doesn’t he tell me how the story comes out?

“She wanted me to promise her something,” said Sutter, keeping a bright non-medical eye on the other. “Namely, that if she were not present I would see to it that Jimmy is baptized before he dies. What do you think of that?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“It happened in this fashion,” said Sutter, more lively than ever. “My father was a Baptist and my mother an Episcopalian. My father prevailed when Jamie was born and he wasn’t baptized. You know of course that Baptist children are not baptized until they are old enough to ask for it — usually around twelve or thirteen. Later my father became an Episcopalian and so by the time Jamie came of age there was no one to put the question to him — or he didn’t want it. To be honest, I think everybody was embarrassed. It is an embarrassing subject nowadays, even slightly ludicrous. Anyhow Jamie’s baptism got lost in the shuffle. You might say he is a casualty of my father’s ascent in status.”

“Is that right,” said the engineer, drumming his fingers on his knees. He was scandalized by Sutter’s perky, almost gossipy interest in such matters. It reminded him of something his father said on one of his nocturnal strolls. “Son,” he said through the thick autumnal web of Brahms and the heavy ham-rich smell of the cottonseed-oil mill. “Don’t ever be frightened by priests.” “No sir,” said the startled youth, shocked that his father might suppose that he could be frightened by priests.

“Well,” he said at last and arose to leave. Though he could not think what he wanted to ask, he was afraid now of overstaying his welcome. But when he reached the door it came to him. “Wait,” he said, as though it was Sutter and not he who might leave. “I know what I want to ask.”

“All right.” Sutter drained off the whiskey and looked out the window.

The engineer closed the door and, crossing the room, stood behind Sutter. “I want to know whether a nervous condition could be caused by not having sexual intercourse.”

“I see,” said the other and did not laugh as the engineer feared he might “What did your analyst say?” he asked, without turning around.

“I didn’t ask him. But he wrote in his book that one’s needs arise from a hunger for stroking and that the supreme experience is sexual intimacy.”

“Sexual intimacy,” said Sutter thoughtfully. He turned around suddenly. “Excuse me, but I still don’t quite see why you single me out. Why not ask Rita or Val, for example?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why, but I know that if you tell me I will believe you. And I think you know that.”

“Well, I will not tell you,” said Sutter after a moment

“Why not?”

Sutter flushed angrily. “Because for one thing I think you’ve come to me because you’ve heard something about me and you already know what I will say — or you think you know. And I think I know who told you.”

“No sir, that’s not true,” said the engineer calmly.

“I’ll be goddamned if I’ll be a party to any such humbug.”

“This is not humbug.”

“I will not tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Who do you think I am, for Christ’s sake? I am no guru and I want no disciples. You’ve come to the wrong man. Or did you expect that?” Sutter looked at him keenly. “I suspect you are a virtuoso at this game.”

“I was, but this time it is not a game.”

Sutter turned away. “I can’t help you. Fornicate if you want to and enjoy yourself but don’t come looking to me for a merit badge certifying you as a Christian or a gentleman or whatever it is you cleave by.”

“That’s not why I came to you.”

“Why then?”

“As a matter of fact, to ask what it is you cleave by.”

“Dear Jesus, Barrett, have a drink.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer thoughtfully, and he went into the kitchenette. Perhaps Kitty and Rita were right, he was thinking as he poured the horrendous bourbon. Perhaps Sutter is immature. He was still blushing from the word “fornicate.” In Sutter’s mouth it seemed somehow more shameful than the four-letter word.

“I’ve got to go,” said Jamie.

“O.K. When?”

After leaving Sutter, the engineer had read a chapter of Freeman’s R. E. Lee and was still moving his shoulders in the old body-English of correcting the horrific Confederate foul-ups, in this case the foul-up before Sharpsburg when Lee’s battle orders had been found by a Union sergeant, the paper wrapped around three cigars and lying in a ditch in Maryland. I’ll pick it up before he gets there, thought the engineer and stooped slightly.

“I mean leave town,” said Jamie.

“Very well. When?”

“Right now.”

“O.K. Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s go.”

From the pantry he could look into the kitchen, which was filled with a thick ticking silence; it was the silence which comes late in the evening after the cook leaves.

But at that moment David came over for the usual game of hearts. Rita had taken David aside for an earnest talk. In the last few days David had decided he wanted to be a sportscaster. The engineer groaned aloud. Sportscaster for Christ’s sake; six feet six, black as pitch, speech like molasses in the mouth, and he wanted to be a sportscaster.

“No,” he told David when he heard it. “Not a sportscaster.”

“What I’m going to do!” cried David.

“Do like me,” said the engineer seriously. “Watch and wait. Keep your eyes open. Meanwhile study how to make enough money so you don’t have to worry about it. In your case, for example, I think I’d consider being a mortician.”

“I don’t want to be no mortician.”

He was David sure enough, of royal lineage and spoiled rotten. He wouldn’t listen to you. Be a sportscaster then.

Now he couldn’t help overhearing Rita, who was telling David earnestly about so-and-so she knew at CBS, a sweet wonderful guy who might be able to help him, at least suggest a good sportscasting school. Strangest of all, the sentient engineer could actually see how David saw himself as a sportscaster: as a rangy chap (he admired Frank Gifford) covering the Augusta Masters (he had taken to wearing a little yellow Augusta golf cap Son Junior gave him).

Jamie wore his old string robe which made him look like a patient in the Veterans Hospital. While Rita spoke to David, Son Junior told the engineer and Kitty about rumors of a Negro student coming on campus next week. It was part of the peculiar dispensation of the pantry that Son Junior could speak about this “nigger” without intending an offense to David. Rita looked sternly at Son — who was in fact dull enough to tell David about the “nigger.”

Sutter sat alone at the blue bar. The engineer had come in late and missed whatever confrontation had occurred between Sutter and Rita. Now at any rate they sat thirty feet apart, and Rita’s back was turned. Sutter appeared to take no notice and sat propped back in a kitchen chair, whiskey in hand and face livid in the buzzing blue light. The family did not so much avoid Sutter as sequester him in an enclave of neutral space such as might be assigned an afflicted member. One stepped around him, though one might still be amiable. “What you say, Sutter,” said Lamar Thigpen as he stepped up to the bar to fix a drink.

Kitty got Son off the subject by asking him what band would play for the Pan-Hellenic dance. Later Kitty whispered to the engineer, “Are you going to take me?”

“Take you to what?”

“The Pan-Hellenic.”

“When is it?”

“Saturday night after the Tennessee game.”

“What day is this?”

“Thursday, stupid.”

“Jamie wants to go somewhere.” He was thinking gloomily of standing around at a dance for seven hours drinking himself cross-eyed while Kitty danced the night away. “Where do you want to go, Jamie?”

But Jamie wouldn’t tell Kitty.

“Son asked me to go with him,” said Kitty.

“Isn’t he your nephew?”

“Not really. Myra is no kin. She is Poppy’s stepdaughter by another marriage.”

“You still can’t go with Son.”

“Why not!” she cried, widening her eyes. Since she had become a coed, Kitty had given up her actress’s lilt for a little trite sorority cry which was made with her eyes going away. She wore a cashmere sweater with a tiny gold sorority dagger pinned over her breast.

“I’m telling you, you can’t.” It actually made him faint to think of Kitty going anywhere with Son Junior, who was a pale glum fornicator, the type who hangs around the men’s room at a dance, patting himself and talking about poontang.

“Why not?”—eyes going away again but not before peeping down for a glimpse of her pin.

“He’s a bastard.”

“Shh! He likes you.”

He did. Son had discovered through intricate Hellenistic channels that the engineer had been a collegiate middleweight and had not lost a fight. “We’re strong in everything but boxing,” he had told the engineer, speaking of the Phi Nu’s campus reputation. The engineer agreed to go out for boxing and golf. And during some hazing horseplay Son had told one of the brothers to take it easy with this one—“he can put your ass right on the Deke front porch with a six-inch punch.” And so he had attached himself to the engineer with a great glum Greek-letter friendship.

Now once again Son came close, sidling up and speaking at length while he twirled his Thunderbird keys. It was the engineer’s bad ear, but as best he could tell, Son was inviting him to represent the pledge class at a leadership conference next summer at the fraternity headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. “They always have outstanding speakers,” Son told him. “This year the theme is Christian Hellenism.”

“I really appreciate it, Son,” said the engineer.

“Look, Kitty,” he said when Son drifted off. He took off his own pledge pin. “Why don’t you wear mine?” It was a great idea. He had only recently discovered that being pinned was a serious business at the university, the next thing to an engagement ring. If she wore his pin, Son wouldn’t take her to the dance.

“Will you take me to the dance?”

“Yes. If Jamie doesn’t veto it. I promised to go with him.”

“Don’t worry about Jamie.”

As he watched, she pinned his gold shield to the same lovely soft blue mount, oh for wantonnesse and merrinesse, thought he tenderly and crossed his good knee over bad lest it leap through the card table.

Jamie punched him. He was angry because they were not paying attention to the game of hearts (here is my heart, thought the engineer sentimentally). “What do you say,” whispered the youth fiercely. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yes.”

“O.K. What do you think of this? We’ll drive to the coast and—”

But before Jamie could tell him, the engineer caught sight of Mrs. Vaught beckoning to him from the dark doorway of the dining room. The engineer excused himself.

Mrs. Vaught had a book for him. “I saw what you were reading this afternoon in the garden!” She waggled her finger at him.

“Ma’am. Oh.” He remembered the R. E. Lee and saw at once that the sight of it had set Mrs. Vaught off on some gambit or other.

“Here’s a book on the same subject that I’m sure you’ll find fascinating,” she said, laughing and making rueful fun of herself, which was a sure sign she was proselytizing.

“Yes ma’am. Thank you very much. Is it about the Civil War?”

“It’s the real story behind the so-called official version of General Kirby Smith’s surrender at Shreveport. It’s the story behind the story. We all think that General Kirby Smith wanted to surrender.”

“Yes ma’am. That is true.”

“No, it isn’t. He was holding out until he could make a deal with the Rothschilds and the international bankers in Mexico to turn over Texas and Louisiana to Maximilian’s Jewish republic.”

“Ma’am?” He wrung out his good ear.

“Here’s proof,” she said, taking back the book and thumbing through it, still laughing ruefully at herself. She read: “At a meeting of the Rothschilds in London in 1857, Disraeli jumped to his feet and announced: ‘We’ll divide the United States into two parts, one for you, James Rothschild, and the other for you, Lionel Rothschild. Napoleon III will do what I tell him to do.’”

The engineer rubbed his forehead and tried to concentrate. “But don’t I recall that Kirby Smith did in fact surrender at Shreveport?”

“He didn’t want to! His men surrendered, fortunately for us.”

She got off on the Bavarian Illuminati and he leaned down to her so he needn’t look at her, looking instead at his shoes, lined up carefully with the sill of the dining-room door.

“Excuse me, Mother,” said Jamie, plucking at the engineer’s sleeve. Evidently he was so used to his mother’s opinions that he paid no attention.

“You read this!” Again she thrust the book on him, shaking her head at her own zeal.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Bill,” said Jamie.

“What?”

“Let’s go.”

“All right. Where do you want to go?”

“Let’s take the camper down to the Gulf Coast and live on the beach. Just for the weekend.”

“You don’t want to see the Tennessee game?”

“No.”

“You mean leave after classes tomorrow?”

“No, I meant — well, all right.”

“O.K.”

They were headed back to the hearts game but Lamar Thigpen caught them. “Did you ever hear about this alligator who went into a restaurant?” He took them by the neck and drew them close as lovers.

“No, I didn’t,” said the courteous engineer, though he had. Jokes always made him nervous. He had to attend to the perilous needs of the joke-teller. Jamie dispensed himself and paid no attention: I’m sick and I don’t have to oblige anybody.

“The waitress came over and brought him a menu. So this alligator says to her: do yall serve niggers in here? She says yes, we do. So he says, O.K. I’ll take two.”

“What about leaving tonight, Bill?” said Jamie.

“That’s all right, Mr. Thigpen,” said the engineer while the other held him close as a lover and gazed hungrily at his cheek. Rita had been watching Jamie and she knew something was wrong. The engineer, diverted by Lamar’s terrible needs, only realized it when he heard Rita’s hearty no-nonsense tone.

“Come on over here, Tiger.” She took the youth’s arm. Jamie flung her off angrily. He looked dog-faced. He plucked his thumb and pretended to muse.

“Hold it, Tiger,” said Rita, now managing to draw him down in David’s chair but not looking at him because he was close to tears.

Jamie looked sternly about but his eyes shone and there was heat and vulnerability in the hollow of his neck. The engineer wished that Son Junior would go away. In every such situation, he had noticed, there is always one person who makes things worse.

David left quickly. Dull in some ways, he was as quick as any Negro to know when white people had white troubles. Rita drew Jamie down in David’s chair.

“I can’t wait for the game,” cried Kitty. “You coming to see me work, Jimbo?” In the past month she had metamorphosed from ballerina to cheerleader. “We’re number one! We’re number one!” she would chant and set her white skirt swirling about her legs so cunningly that the engineer almost fell out of the grandstand, overcome by pride and love.

“No, it’s not the game,” said Rita, gazing steadfastly away but patting Jamie’s arm with hard steady pats. Kitty’s gambit didn’t work, she was saying. But hers didn’t either.

“Jamie and I are planning to go down to the Coast this weekend,” said the engineer.

Everyone looked at Jamie, but he could not bring himself to say anything.

“You don’t mean this weekend,” cried Kitty.

“I’m going,” said Jamie in a loud voice, all squeaks and horns.

“I’m with you, Tiger,” said Rita, still patting.

Damn, don’t pat him, thought the engineer.

Rita ran a hand through Jamie’s hair (like my mother, thought the engineer in a sudden déjà vu, ruffling my hair for the photographer so it would look “English” and not slicked down). “Val was here today and she upset him with some of her — ideas.”

“It’s not that,” said Jamie, losing control of his voice again.

“I think he really wants to go down to Tyree County and clear things up and I don’t blame him.”

“I don’t.”

“You said you did.”

“That was before.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Rita, speaking for some reason to the engineer. “I think Val is doing a magnificent job down there. I happen to know a little about such things, having worked with Indian kids, who are just as bad off. No, my hat’s off to her. But to come up here cold, so to speak, after making herself scarce for the past year as far as Jamie is concerned and to seriously propose to this guy here who despite the fact that he is a wretch and a no-good-bum”—she ruffled Jamie’s hair—“nevertheless pulled down first place in the National Science competition — that a rather stupid Irishman in a black skirt pour water over his head while uttering words in a dead language (and uttering them in atrocious ecclesiastical Latin besides) — excuse me, but I think the whole affair is exceedingly curious. Though I’m frank to say I don’t know why it upsets you. But listen now: if you want to go down there, Tiger, I’ll drive the car for you and hold the ewer or whatever it is.”

“I am not going there,” said Jamie through his teeth. “And if I were, that would not be the reason.” The engineer sighed with relief. Jamie’s anger had got the better of his tears.

“I’m Baptist and DeMolay myself,” said Son Junior, twirling his keys glumly. He had not quite got the straight of it but did perceive that the subject of religion had come up.

“That’s not the point,” cried Jamie, in anguish again. “I’m not interested in either—”

Mr. Vaught, who couldn’t stay put anywhere for long and so made a regular tour of the house, shuttling back and forth between the pantry and the living room, where Mrs. Vaught and Myra Thigpen usually sat, happened at that moment to be circling the wall of the pantry.

“We all headed for the same place and I don’t think the good Lord cares how we get there,” he cried, shot his cuff, and went on his way.

“The Bible says call no man father,” said Lamar Thigpen sternly, looking around for the adversary.

Sutter, whom the engineer had not for one second lost sight of sighed and poured another glass of dark brown bourbon.

Jamie groaned and the engineer reflected that there were no clear issues any more. Arguments are spoiled. Clownishness always intervenes.

Rita waited until the Thigpens drifted away and then pulled the card players closer. “If you want to know what sets my teeth on edge and I strongly suspect Jamie here might be similarly affected”—she spoke in a low voice—“it is this infinitely dreary amalgam of Fundamentalism and racism.”

“No, no, no,” groaned Jamie loudly, actually holding his head. “What do I care about that. That’s not it.” He glared at Rita angrily, embarrassing the engineer, who was aware of Rita’s strong bid for low-pitched confidential talk and didn’t mind obliging her. “This is all irrelevant,” cried Jamie, looking behind him as if he was expecting someone. “I just don’t care about that.”

“What do you care about?” asked Rita after a moment

“It’s just that — I can’t explain.”

“Jamie wants to get away,” said the engineer. “He would like to spend some time in a new place and live a simple life without the old associations — such as, for example, parking the camper on a stretch of beach.”

“That is correct,” said Jamie instantly and soberly.

“Listen who’s telling me that,” said Rita. “What in the world have I been saying all summer?” She spoke to them earnestly. Why didn’t they finish the semester and join her in her house in Tesuque? Better still, she and Kitty could go now, since credit hours were more important to men than women — everyone made a fuss over Jamie’s credit hours — get the place ready and the two young men could join them later. “I’m calling your bluff, Tiger. You can kill two birds with one stone. You can have your new life and you can get out of the closed society at the same time.”

Jamie frowned irritably. He opened his mouth.

“Ah, that’s fine, Rita,” said the engineer. “That really sounds wonderful. But I think Jamie has in mind something right away, now, this minute.” He rose. “Jamie.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Kitty, smoothing down her sweater, taking a final peep at the two pins (to think she is mine! rejoiced the engineer, all her sweet cashmered self!). “Whoa now. Not so fast. I think yall are all crazy. I’m going to the game and I’m going to the dance and I’m going to school tomorrow morning.” She rose. “I’ll meet yall in the garage at six thirty.”

To the engineer’s surprise, Jamie made no protest. Something had mollified him. At any rate he said no more about leaving and presently rose wearily and invited the engineer to the apartment for a bedside game of gin rummy. It pleased him to play a single snug game, pull the beds together and direct a small disk of light upon the tray between them where the cards were stacked.

Son Junior and his father started their favorite argument about Big Ten versus Southeastern Conference football.

“The Big Ten on the whole is better,” said Son glumly. “You have your ten teams, one as good as any other.”

“Yes,” said Lamar, “but there are always two or three teams in the Southeast which could take any of them. And don’t you think the Big Ten doesn’t know it. I happen to know that both Alabama and Ole Miss have been trying for years to schedule Ohio State and Michigan. Nothing doing and I don’t blame them.”

At that moment Myra, Lamar’s wife, came into the pantry and the engineer was glad to have an excuse to leave. She would, he knew, do one of two things. Both were embarrassing. She would either quarrel with her husband or make up to Rita, whom she admired. It was a dread performance in either case, one from which, it is true, a certain amount of perverse skin-prickling pleasure could be taken, but not much.

Here she came toward Rita and as certain as certain could be she would make a fool of herself. Something about Rita made her lose her head. The night before, Kitty and Rita were talking, almost seriously, of going to Italy instead of New Mexico. Rita had lived once in Ferrara, she said, in a house where one of Lucrezia’s husbands was said to have been murdered. Oh yes, broke in Myra, she knew all about Lucrezia Bori, the woman who had started St. Bartholomew’s Massacre. And on and on she went with a mishmash about the Huguenots — her mother’s family were Huguenots from South Carolina, etc. She had not the means of stopping herself. The engineer lowered his eyes.

“Pardon me,” said Rita at last. “Who is it we are talking about? Lucrezia Bori, the opera singer, the Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia Borgia, or Catherine de’ Medici?”

“I too often get the two of them mixed up,” said the poor sweating engineer.

“But not the three,” said Rita.

Why did she have to be cruel, though? The engineer sat between the two, transfixed by a not altogether unpleasant horribleness. He couldn’t understand either woman: why one should so dutifully put her head on the block and why the other should so readily chop it off. And yet, could he be wrong or did he fancy that Rita despite her hostility felt an attraction for Myra? There was a voluptuousness about these nightly executions.

But tonight he wasn’t up to it and he left with Jamie. He was careful not to forget his book about General Kirby Smith’s surrender at Shreveport in 1865. He was tired of Lee’s sad fruitless victories and would as soon see the whole thing finished off for good.

The man walked up and down in the darkness of the water oaks, emerging now and then under the street light, which shed a weak yellow drizzle. The boy sat on the steps between the azaleas and watched. He always imagined he could see the individual quanta of light pulsing from the filament.

When the man came opposite the boy, the two might exchange a word; then the man would go his way, turn under the light, and come back and speak again.

“Father, you shouldn’t walk at night like this.”

“Why not, son?”

“Father, they said they were going to kill you.”

“They’re not going to kill me, son.”

The man walked. The youth listened to the music and the hum of the cottonseed-oil mill. A police car passed twice and stopped; the policeman talked briefly to the man under the street light. The man came back.

“Father, I know that the police said those people had sworn to kill you and that you should stay in the house.”

“They’re not going to kill me, son.”

“Father, I heard them on the phone. They said you loved niggers and helped the Jews and Catholics and betrayed your own people.”

“I haven’t betrayed anyone, son. And I don’t have much use for any of them, Negroes, Jews, Catholics, or Protestants.”

“They said if you spoke last night, you would be a dead man.”

“I spoke last night and I am not a dead man.”

Through an open window behind the boy there came the music of the phonograph. When he looked up, he could see the Pleiades, which seemed to swarm in the thick air like lightning bugs.

“Why do you walk at night, Father?”

“I like to hear the music outside.”

“Do you want them to kill you, Father?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“What is going to happen?”

“I’m going to run them out of town, son, every last miserable son of a bitch.”

“Let’s go around to the garden, Father. You can hear the music there.”

“Go change the record, son. The needle is stuck in the groove.”

“Yes sir.”

The engineer woke listening. Something had happened. There was not a sound, but the silence was not an ordinary silence. It was the silence of a time afterwards. It had been violated earlier. His heart beat a strong steady alarm. He opened his eyes. A square of moonlight lay across his knees.

A shot had been fired. Had he dreamed it? Yes. But why was the night portentous? The silence reverberated with insult. There was something abroad.

Nor had it come from Sutter’s room. He waited and listened twenty minutes without moving. Then he dressed and went outside into the moonlight.

The golf links was as pale as lake water. To the south Juno’s temple hung low in the sky like a great fiery star. The shrubbery, now grown tall as trees, cast inky shadows which seemed to walk in the moonlight.

For a long time he gazed at the temple. What was it? It alone was not refracted and transformed by the prism of dreams and memory. But now he remembered. It was fiery old Canopus, the great red star of the south which once a year reared up and hung low in the sky over the cottonfields and canebrakes.

Turning at last, he walked quickly to the Trav-L-Aire, got his flashlight from the glove compartment, cut directly across the courtyard and entered the back door of the castle; through the dark pantry and into the front hall, where he rounded the newel abruptly and went up the stairs. To the second and then the third floor as if he knew exactly where he was, though he had only once visited the second floor and not once been above it. Around again and up a final closeted flight of narrow wooden steps and into the attic. It was a vast unfinished place with walks of lumber laid over the joists. He prowled through the waists and caverns of the attic ribbed in the old heart pine of the 1920’s. The lumber was still warm and fragrant from the afternoon sun. He shone the flashlight into every nook and cranny.

When he heard the sound behind him, he slid the switch of the flashlight and stepped four feet to the side (out of the line of fire?) and waited.

“Bill?”

A wall switch snapped on, lighting a row of bulbs in the peak of the roof. The girl, hugging her wrap with both arms, moved close to him and peered into his face. Her lips, scrubbed clean of lipstick, were slightly puffed and showed the violet color of blood.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“I saw you outside.”

He didn’t answer.

“What are you looking for?”

“I heard something.”

“You heard something up here from the garage?”

“I didn’t know where it came from. I thought it might be from the attic.”

“Why?”

“Is there a room up here?”

“A room?”

“A room closed off from the rest of the attic?”

“No. This is all.”

He said nothing.

“You don’t know where you are, do you?”

“Where I am?”

“Where are you?”

“I know.” He did know now but he didn’t mind her thinking he didn’t. She was better, more herself, when he was afflicted.

“You were sleepwalking, I think.”

“It’s possible.”

“Come on. I’ll take you back.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t.”

He made her stay in the pantry. She was sweet and loving and not at all antic. It is strange, he thought as he stood in his own and Jamie’s room a few minutes later: we are well when we are afflicted and afflicted when we are well. I can lie with her only if she tends my wounds.

“Was there a shot?” he asked her as he left.

She had shaken her head but smiled, signifying she liked him better for being mistaken.

The square of moonlight had moved onto Jamie’s face. Arms folded, the engineer leaned against his bed and gazed down at the youth. The eye sockets were pools of darkness. Despite the strong black line of the brow, the nose and mouth were smudged and not wholly formed. He reminded the engineer of the graduates of Horace Mann, their faces quick and puddingish and acned, whose gift was the smart boy’s knack of catching on, of hearkening: yes, I see. If Jamie could live, it was easy to imagine him for the next forty years engrossed and therefore dispensed and so at the end of the forty years still quick and puddingish and childlike. They were the lucky ones. Yet in one sense it didn’t make much difference, even to Jamie, whether he lived or died — if one left out of it what he might “do” in the forty years, that is, add to “science.” The difference between me and him, he reflected, is that I could not permit myself to be so diverted (but diverted from what?). How can one take seriously the Theory of Large Numbers, living in this queer not-new not-old place haunted by the goddess Juno and the spirit of the great Bobby Jones? But it was more than that. Something is going to happen, he suddenly perceived that he knew all along. He shivered. It is for me to wait. Waiting is the thing. Wait and watch.

Jamie’s eyes seemed to open in their deep sockets. But they gazed back at him, not with their usual beamish expression, casting about for recondite areas of agreement in the space between them, but mockingly: ah, you deceive yourself, Jamie seemed to say. But when the engineer, smiling and puzzled, leaned closer, he saw that the eyes had not opened.

A bar of yellow light fell across the room. A figure was outlined in the doorway of the kitchenette. It beckoned to him.

It was Rita.

As soon as he was inside the tiny room, she closed the door and whispered: “Is Jamie asleep?”

“Yes.”

Sutter stood gazing into the sink. The sink was dusty and still had a paper sticker in the basin.

“We want you to settle a little point,” said Rita.

Sutter nodded. The engineer sniffed. The kitchenette had the close expired air of impasse. Now as if they were relieved by the diversion, its occupants turned toward him with a mild, unspecified interest.

“I want to know whether you are still prepared to go somewhere with Jamie,” Rita said.

The engineer rubbed his forehead. “What time is it?” he asked no one in particular. Was this the true flavor of hatred, he wondered, this used, almost comfortable malice sustained between them, with its faint sexual reek? They turned as fondly to him as spent lovers greeting a strange child.

“Two thirty,” said Sutter.

“What about it, Bill?” asked Rita crisply.

“What? Oh, Jamie,” he repeated, aware that Sutter watched him. “Why, yes. But you knew all along that I would go with him. Why do you ask?”

“I have reason to believe that Jamie is getting restless and that he may ask Sutter to go off somewhere with him. I think this is too much to ask of Sutter.”

He stole a glance at Sutter, but the latter’s expression was still fond and inattentive.

“You are very much in demand, Bill,” said he at last. “Jimmy wants you, not me.”

“Then what’s the difficulty?” asked the bemused engineer, feeling their apathy steal into his bones.

“The difficulty,” said Sutter, “is that Rita wants to make sure Jimmy doesn’t go anywhere with me.”

“Why not?”

“That’s a good question, isn’t it, Rita,” said Sutter, but still not quite looking at her (couldn’t they stand the sight of each other?). “Why don’t you want Jimmy to go with me?”

“Because of your deliberate cultivation of destructiveness, of your death-wish, not to mention your outhouse sexuality,” said Rita, still smiling, and addressing Sutter through the engineer. “Every man to his own taste but you can bloody well leave Jamie out of it.”

“What do you think I would do?” Sutter asked.

“I know what you have done.”

“Jamie also spoke of going down to Val’s,” said the engineer for reasons of his own. He could not quite make this pair out and wished to get another fix on them. Val was his triangulation point.

“Val,” said Rita nodding. “Yes, between the two of you, Sutter and Val, you could dispose of him very nicely. You’d kill him off in three weeks and Val would send his soul to heaven. If you don’t mind I shall continue to minister to the living.”

“Kill him off?” Sutter frowned but still could not tear his vacant eye from the engineer. “I understood he was in a remission.”

“He was.”

“What’s his white count?”

“Eighteen thousand.”

“How many immature forms?”

“Twenty percent.”

“What’s he on?”

“Prednisone.”

“Wasn’t he on Aminopterin?”

“That was a year ago.”

“What’s his red count?”

“Just under three million.”

“Is his spleen palpable?”

“That’s what I like about you and your sister,” said Rita.

“What’s that?”

“Your great concern for Jamie, one for his body, the other for his soul. The only trouble is your interest is somewhat periodic.”

“That’s what interests me,” said Sutter. “Your interest, I mean.”

“Put up your knife, you bastard. You no longer bother me.”

They quarreled with the skillful absent-minded malice of married couples. Instead of taking offense, they nodded sleepily and even smiled.

“What is it you want this young man to do?” Sutter asked, shaking his head to rouse himself.

“My house in Tesuque is open,” said Rita. “Teresita is there to cook. The Michelins are next door. I have even determined that they could transfer to the college in Santa Fe without loss of credit — at the end of this semester.”

“Who are the Michelins?” asked the engineer.

“A duo piano team,” said Sutter. “Why don’t you take him out yourself, Rita?”

“You persuade him to go and I will,” said Rita listlessly.

“Rita,” said Sutter in the same mild temper which the engineer had not yet put down to ordinary friendliness or pluperfect malice, “what do you really care what happens to Jimmy?”

“I care.”

“Tell me honestly what difference it makes to you whether Jimmy lives or dies.”

The engineer was shocked but Rita replied routinely. “You know very well there is no use in my answering you. Except to say that there is such a thing as concern and there is such a thing as preference for life over death. I do not desire death, mine, yours, or Jamie’s. I do not desire your version of fun and games. I desire for Jamie that he achieve as much self-fulfillment as he can in the little time he has. I desire for him beauty and joy, not death.”

“That is death,” said Sutter.

“You see, Bill,” said Rita, smiling but still unfocused.

“I’m not sure,” said the engineer, frowning. “But mainly what I don’t understand is what you are asking me to do since you already know I will go anywhere Jamie wants to go and any time.”

“I know, Bill,” said Rita mournfully. “But apparently my former husband thinks you have reasons for staying.”

“What reasons?” he asked Sutter.

“He cannot conceive that everyone is not as self-centered as he is,” Rita put in before Sutter could reply.

“No, I can’t, that’s true,” said Sutter. “But as to reasons, Bill, I know you are having some difficulties and it was my impression you wanted me to help you.” Sutter was opening and closing cabinet doors, searching for the bottle which was in plain sight on the counter. The engineer handed it to him.

“What’s number two?”

“Number two: I would not suppose that you were anxious to leave Kitty.”

“Kitty?” The engineer’s heart gave a queer extra thump.

“I could not help but observe her kissing you in the garden as you lay under a Governor Mouton.”

He stopped his hand, which had started up to touch his lips. Then someone had kissed him, not Alice Bocock in his dream,but Kitty herself, warm and flushed from the sun, tiny points of sweat glistening in the down of her lip. He shrugged. “I don’t see what that has to do—”

“The question is not whether you would stay but whether Kitty would go with you.”

“I don’t think so,” said the engineer, blushing with pleasure at the prospect. It had not occurred to him.

“The further question is, ahem, whether in case all three of you go, Rita might not go along with you after all.”

“You can’t reach me any more, you bastard,” said Rita, but not, it seemed, angrier than before.

“You’re right, of course,” said Sutter cheerfully and earnestly, facing her for the first time over his drink. “You were right before and I was wrong. I couldn’t stand prosperity. We were good, you and I, as good as you wanted us to be, and in the end I couldn’t stand it. You were productive and so, for the first time in years, was I, and thanks to you. As you say, we were self-actualizing people and altogether successful, though somewhat self-conscious, in our cultivation of joy, zest, awe, freshness, and the right balance of adult autonomous control and childlike playfulness, as you used to call it. Though I don’t mind telling you that I never really approved your using technical terms like ‘penis envy’ in ordinary conversation—”

“Excuse me,” said the engineer, setting a foot toward the door. But Rita was squarely in the way and gave no sign of seeing him.

“I confess,” Sutter went on, “that in the end it was I who collapsed. Being geniuses of the orgasm is the hardest of tasks, far more demanding than Calvinism. So I couldn’t stand prosperity and had to mess around with Teresita. I longed for old-fashioned humbug in the same way other men long for the dear sights of home. You never really forgave me. And yet, now at this moment I forgive you for—”

“Don’t you dare,” said Rita in a strangled whisper, advancing upon Sutter and at the same time, fortuitously, upon the engineer, who saw his chance and made his escape. As he left he heard Sutter say:

“You always said I knew you backwards. Well, I’m telling you now that you are wrong about yourself and wrong about what you think you want. There is nothing wrong with you beyond a certain spitefulness and pride and a penchant for a certain species of bullshit. You’re a fine girl, a fine Georgia girl — did you know Rita was from Georgia, Bill? — who got too far from home. Georgia girls have no business at Lake Chapala. Come on here—”

“Oh foul, foul, foul—” said Rita as he shut the door.

It is proof that the engineer was not in any ordinary sense an eavesdropper or a Peeping Tom that not only did he not head for the closet when he reached his room but instead closed the closet door and jumped into bed and pulled the pillow over his head so he could not hear a door close and so could not tell whether Rita stayed or left.

On the way to school Friday morning, Jamie leaned over and began to fiddle with the ashtray of the Lincoln. “I — ah—” said he, smiling a bit — they hardly ever spoke during this hour, the engineer drove, brother and sister watched the road as they would have from a schoolbus—”I’ve decided to quit school and go out west. Or rather transfer.”

“How soon would you like to go?” asked the engineer.

“I’m ready now.”

“Have you asked if it is all right with your parents?”

“Yes.”

It was a dewy bright haunted October morning. The silvery old Rock City barns leaned into the early sunlight. Killdeers went crying along the fallow fields where tough shallow spiderwebs were scattered like saucers. Now and then the Lincoln crossed deep railroad cuts filled with the violet light of ironweed.

“Then it would be in June,” said Kitty carelessly, putting her chin back to catch sight of the pledge pins on her cashmere sweater. “Could I go with you? Let’s open up Rancho Merced,” she cried, but in a standard coed cry, eyes going away.

But the engineer was already turning the Lincoln around. It was Mrs. Vaught’s car, a good solid old glossy black four-door, rounded fore and aft in the style of the fifties and smelling inside of wax like a ship’s saloon.

“What in the world,” cried Kitty. “Where are you going?”

“Back to get the camper.”

“The camper. What for?”

“Jamie said he wanted to go out west. The camper would be better than this car.”

“My God, he didn’t mean now!”

“I thought he did.”

They had gotten as far as Enfield. Even after the few weeks of their commuting, each inch of the way had become as familiar to them as their own back yard: this was the place where they always ran afoul of an unlucky traffic light which detained them at an empty crossing for an endless forty-five seconds. Always when they passed at this hour a line of sunlight and shade fell across the lettering of an abandoned storefront, SALOMON, whose middle o had fallen off, leaving its outline on the brick. Enfield was a defunct coal depot on the L & N Railroad.

“Jamie, tell him to turn around. I have an eight o’clock and so do you.”

But Jamie only went on with his smiling and his fiddling with the ashtray.

The engineer was smiling too, but from the pleasure of having her next to him and touching him at arm, hip, and calf. What a lovely fine fragrant Chi Omega she was in her skirt and sweater. A beautiful brown-kneed cheerleader and it was cheer to sit beside her. She saved them both from this decrepit mournful countryside. Without her he’d have jumped straight into one of these lonesome L & N gorges where old train whistles from the 1930’s still echoed.

“The Tennessee game is tomorrow,” she said laughing, truly shaken because now she believed them. Overnight she had turned into a fierce partisan for the Colonels, who were now ranked number two in the United States. “Tennessee is number four and if we beat them—”

“That’s right,” said Jamie, who, now that it was settled, sat back and took notice of the countryside. It was very different now, fifteen minutes later and what with them not going but returning with the sun in their faces. The hamlets seemed to be stirring with ordinary morning enterprise.

“How long will it take you to get ready?” Jamie asked him.

“I can have the camper stocked in thirty minutes!”

“O.K.”

“I have never in my life,” said Kitty, tapping her Scripto pencil on the world anthology.

He saw that she was angry. If Jamie had not been with them, he would have stopped then and there and kissed her pretty pouting lips and pressed her lovely cashmered person against him, Chi O pin and all. It was the sisterly aspect of her which excited him, big sister sweetheart at eight o’clock in the morning, her mouth not yet cleared of breakfast butter and molasses.

“Of course you’re going with us,” he said to her, sending the Lincoln swooping along on its limber old springs.

“Hah. Not me, boy,” she cried, casting about her huffy coed glances.

“I’m serious.”

“I’m serious too.”

“Is it all right with you, Jamie, if your sister goes?”

“I don’t care who goes. But I’m going.”

“Why for God’s sake?” For the first time she spoke directly to her brother.

“What do you mean, why?” he asked her irritably. “Does there have to be a why?”

When Kitty did not answer and in fact began to blink back tears Jamie said: “I am not interested in seeing the Tennessee game.”

“And I happened to know how much you like Chem 2. Bubba Ray Ross was telling me. I’ll bet you’ve heard too, haven’t you Billy?”

“No.”

“I am not interested in Chem 2,” Jamie said, “or 3 or 4.”

“Well, what in the world are you interested in?” Kitty was smiling angrily and busily tucking her skirt under her knee and squaring away the world anthology on her lap.

“I — ah. I just want to take this trip. No, to tell you the truth I’m going to transfer. I’ve already spoken to — it can be done.”

“Transfer! Where? Where’re yall going to live — in the camper?”

“I know this boy who goes to school in Albuquerque. In fact I heard from him yesterday. I correspond with him quite a bit. I could live with him, in fact.” After a moment he added: “His father has a shop of some sort. Out on the highway.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Tell him, Billy.”

“All I want Jamie to tell me is whether he has made arrangements to live with somebody or whether he wants me to go with him.”

“Well, I mean, if you want to.”

“O.K.”

“Do yall mean to tell me that you’re going to jump in that little truck and go out there and park it somewhere and just start going to school?”

Jamie smiled and leaning forward spoke to both of them in a different voice. “I remember reading this novel in school last year, by a Russian writer. I think his name was Goncharov, or something like that, but he is a wonderful writer. Do you know him?”

“No,” said the engineer. Kitty did not answer.

“He’s really a good writer,” said Jamie, going back to his ashtray. “At least in this novel. It was about this young man who was a refugee or a prisoner, I forget which. He was traveling the whole length of Russia in a cattle car, along with hundreds of others. He was sick with brain fever, whatever that is, I have only come across brain fever in Russian novels. It was summer and they were crossing Siberia, day after day, weeks even. The car was crowded and he had one tiny corner and a bit of straw and that was all. And though he was quite ill and even delirious at times, the strange thing about it was that it wasn’t so bad. Through the slats of the car he could see the fields, which were covered by a little blue flower. And of course the sky. The train stopped often and peasant women would bring him bowls of blueberries and fresh warm milk — that was the peculiar thing about it, that even though he knew no one and the train only stopped for a few minutes at a time, somehow news of this young man traveled ahead of the train and they expected him. And though everybody else on the train became exhausted by the hardships of the trip, he actually got better! It was really good. I think it’s the best novel I ever read.”

“That’s fine, Jamie, that’s fine and I agree with you,” said Kitty peevishly. “But I still don’t see why—”

The engineer interrupted her. “Are you coming?”

“Me? No, indeed.”

They were silent when the Lincoln turned up the links road. When Jamie got out into the garage, which smelled of wet concrete from David’s hosing, the engineer held Kitty.

“What?” she said, still turned away and not quite managing a look back at him.

“I want to tell you something.”

“What?”

“Or rather ask you something.”

“What?”

“I want you to come with us.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I want you to marry me.”

“In the next thirty minutes?”

“Look. Jamie wants to go and I think we ought to go with him.”

“Why does he want to go?” She was peevish still, but there was a settling under her peevishness. Though one foot was still out of the car and her books cradled in her arm, she had settled back half a millimeter.

“We can be married in Louisiana tomorrow.”

“Now I have heard it all. I don’t mind saying that I have heard it all.”

“Put your book down.”

“What?”

“Give me your book.”

“What for?”

But she gave it to him and he threw it into the back seat and took hold of her while the warm Lincoln ticked away in the resounding garage. Oh, damnable straight upstanding Lincoln seat. He was almost beside himself with tenderness at the eight o’clock splendor of her. “I’m in love,” he said, kissing her and taking hold of the warm pad back of her knee, which he loved best of all when she was leading cheers. But the angles were bad and contrived against him.

“Good God,” cried Kitty, breaking free. “What in the world has happened to you and Jamie this morning! You’re crazy!”

“Come here and let me hold you tight.”

“Hold me tight, my foot.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“Will you marry me?”

“Jeezum,” she said in a new expression of hers, something she got from the Chi O’s. And retrieving her world anthology from the back seat, she left him alone in the garage.

Jamie became cheerful and red-cheeked as they fitted out the Trav-L-Aire. While the engineer set about laying in his usual grits and buttermilk and slab bacon and filling the tank with the sweet artesian water of the valley against the day of the evil alkali water of the desert, Jamie staked out the upper forward bunk as his private domain. It was a broad bed lying athwart the trim ship, with a fine view forward over the top of the cab. There was a shelf for his radio, a recessed reading light something like the old Pullman upper berth. Jamie hit on the idea of replacing the mattress with a cot pad which not only gave him the narrow hard corner he wanted but left a gutter just wide enough to hold his books.

“Let’s take plenty of fresh milk with us,” said Jamie.

“O.K.”

“I’ve drunk a lot of milk lately. I’ve gained three pounds.”

“Good.”

Jamie stretched out on the hard bed and watched the engineer store away the staples Lugurtha had given him from the kitchen. “You know I truly believe that if I could live a simple life, I could actually conserve my energy and therefore gain strength. I honestly think it’s a question of living simply and conserving your energy. I’ll live right here, get up, go to class, come back, get up, eat, come back, etcetera. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes.” To tell the truth, it didn’t seem unreasonable.

“Are you really going to marry Kitty?”

“I asked her. But if I do and she does come along, it will be just the same for you. These are your quarters if we are married, yours and mine if we’re not.”

“What if she won’t, ah — go? Will you still come?”

“If you want me to.”

“O.K.,” said Jamie and began to arrange his books in alphabetical order. “Where do you keep your telescope?”

“Here.”

“Oh yes. I remember. Look. I’m bringing my Freylinghausen star charts along. I understand the atmosphere is a great deal clearer in New Mexico.”

“That’s right. Now, Jamie, I think you’d better go find your parents. It is not enough for you to tell me that you have their permission. They must tell me too.”

“O.K.”

“We’ll drive till we get tired and start out again when we feel like it.”

It turned out to be a morning for dealing with practical matters. Two letters awaited him on the refectory table in the castle hall. He never received mail from anywhere. They had been written more than two weeks earlier and addressed to the Y.M.C.A. in New York, forwarded to General Delivery in Williamsburg and thence to the Vaughts’ home address. Both had to do with money. One was from his Uncle Fannin, who lived in Shut Off, Louisiana. His uncle wrote to remind him that although the “place” had been sold many years ago, certain mineral rights had been retained, and that he had recently received a lease offer from Superior Oil Company of California. The rights, as he must know, were jointly owned by the two surviving male Barretts. Would he, the younger, signify his intention in this matter? He, the elder, would as soon accept the offer. The share of each would come to $8,300. The latter was written in neat pencil script on ruled paper which had been torn from a pad.

The other letter had also to do with money. The First National Bank of Ithaca wished to advise him of the existence of a savings account in his name, opened for him by his father in the year 1939. What with the compounding of interest, his balance now stood at $1,715.60. The occasion of this notice was the present reorganization of the bank. He pondered—1939. That was the year of his birth.

Jamie was delayed. His clothes still lay on the bed in the garage apartment. After waiting for him a good forty minutes, the engineer returned to the house. Lugurtha was making beaten biscuits for the football picnic tomorrow. On the marble slab sifted with flour, she rolled out a soft mitt of dough. Kitty met him in the pantry, in a secret glee, and hustled him into the “little” pantry, a dark cold closet where potatoes and onions were stored in bins. He peered at her.

“My darling,” she whispered, giving him a passionate kiss and making herself free of him in an entirely new way, all joyous legs and arms. He felt a vague unease. “Guess what?”

“What?” Through two doorways he could see Lugurtha handle the dough up into the air, fingers dancing under it, giving way, yet keeping it up, setting gravity at nought.

“Jamie has decided not to go until after Christmas.”

“Why?”

“Then he will have his semester credits and can transfer without losing a month’s work.”

“Where is he?”

“In the sun parlor. Darling, don’t you see what this means?”

“Yes, but—”

“What’s the matter?” Swaying, her hands clasped in the small of his back in a new conjugal way, like a French girl saying farewell to her poilu, she squeezed him close and leaned away from him.

“I am afraid he might be doing it for me. Us.”

“He wants to!”

“I’m afraid you talked him into it.”

“It was his idea!”

“Who talked to him?”

Her eyes sparkled triumphantly. “Rita!”

“Rita?” He pondered. “Did Rita know that you and I might be leaving with Jamie today?”

“Yes!” Swaying triumphantly.

“And she talked Jamie into staying?”

“She didn’t talk him into anything. It was his idea. In fact, he wants more time to plan the trip.” Her tongue hollowed out her cheek and made a roguish joke. “What a nut! Imagine the three of us wandering around Arkansas in the middle of the winter like a bunch of Okies.” She shook her head at him fondly, wifely. “I’ve got news for you, you big dope.”

“Eh?”

“You’re among friends here, you know.”

“Yes.” What he could not tell her was: if I can marry, then you can travel. I can even stand this new horsy conjugal way, this sad poilu love with you, if you will hit the road with me. Jamie is dying, so he needs to go. But I need to go too. Now the pantry’s got us, locked in, with a cold potato love, and you the chatelaine with the keys at your belt. “I’d better go see Jamie.”

“He’ll tell you. What’s the matter?” Her fingers touched his sweating forehead.

“I’m hot.”

“It’s freezing in here.”

His eyes were caught in a stare. Lugurtha’s working of the biscuit dough, the quick kneading gathering movement of her hands against the sifted marble, put him in mind of something She sang:

Up in an airplane

Smoking her sweet cigarette

Keeping his hand clasped in hers, Kitty led him to the sun parlor and showed, not him to them but them to him, as if they were trophies, the articles of her proof: Jamie stretched on the sofa with a wet handkerchief across his eyes; Mrs. Vaught waiting, hands outstretched to them: a new Mrs. Vaught, too, a genial little pony of a lady, head to one side, pince-nez flashing quick family love-flashes, Rita in a wide stance, back to the coal fire. Mrs. Vaught gave him a quick press of her hand and a kiss, a dismaying thing in itself. She said nothing, but there was an easement in the air, the tender settled sense of larger occasions. The sun parlor itself was an unused ceremonial sort of place. He had only been inside it once before, when Mr. Vaught showed him his old Philco, a tall console glistening with O-Cedar. It had a tilted sounding board and it still worked. Mr. Vaught turned it on and presently the tubes heated up and put out regular 1932 static and the smell of hot speaker-silk such as used to attend the broadcasts of Ben Bernie and Ruth Etting and the Chase & Sanborn hour.

The cold wind pressed against the old-style double-hung windows, leaked through and set dust devils whirling along the tile under the wicker. There were lacquered Chinese boxes and miniature chests of drawers, a mahjong set, and a large gonglike table; the brass coalbox was stamped with a scene of jolly Dutch burghers. The coal grate, which had not been used, gave off a smell of burnt varnish. In one corner stood a stork five feet tall with a hollow eye and a beak which cut off the ends of cigars.

Mrs. Vaught twined her arm in his and, rocking slightly, held the two of them by the fire. “Did I tell you that I knew your mother very well one summer?”

“No’m.”

“It was at the old Tate Springs Hotel. Lucy Hunicutt was the prettiest little thing I have ever seen — all dark hair and big violet eyes. And beaus! They swarmed around her like flies. She was a demon tennis player and wore a little cap like Helen Wills. In fact, everyone called her ‘Little Miss Poker Face.’ But there was one boy who was hopelessly in love with her — Boylston Fisk from Chattanooga (Boylston is now chairman of the board of Youngstown and Reading) — and he was the handsomest man I ever saw. But he could never dance more than three steps with her before somebody would break. So she told him if he could ever find out the name of her favorite piece she would dance it with him. Well, somehow he did. It was ‘Violets.’ And don’t you know, he asked the orchestra to play it, not during the dance but while everyone was still at dinner. And he came across the room to her table with every eye on him and bowed and said: Miss Hunicutt, I believe this is our dance. It was like a dare, don’t you see, but she got up! And they danced the whole piece out on the floor by themselves. I swear it was the most romantic thing I ever saw in my life!”

It was as if the memory of this gentler age had dispensed Mrs. Vaught from the terrible quarrels of the present. She softened. His radar sensed it without quite defining it: the connection between the past time and the present insane quarrel over fluoridation. For him it was the other way around! It was the olden time with its sweetness and its great occasions which struck a dread to his heart! It was past fathoming.

Jamie lay with the handkerchief across his eyes and said nothing. When Mrs. Vaught let him go, the engineer went over and sat on the sofa beside him.

“What happened?”

“What do you mean what happened?” said Jamie irritably.

“I thought we were leaving.”

“I don’t mind waiting a while. After all, what’s the big hurry?”

“But it was not your idea, the postponement.”

“Sure it was!”

“I’m packed and ready to go.”

“I know you are.”

“If you want to go, all you have to do is to get up and we’ll leave. And I think Kitty will go with us. But even if she doesn’t, I’m ready.”

“I know you are.” Jamie looked at him curiously. The engineer blushed.

“If you are staying on my account, then I don’t want it. I’d truly rather leave. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“So I am putting you on your honor to say whether it is on my account or anyone’s account that you are staying. If it is, then let’s go.”

Jamie took away the wet handkerchief and wiped his mouth but did not reply. As the engineer waited, the cold air seeped into his shoes. The jaybirds called in the ragged garden outside. Above the Philco hung a great gloomy etching of Rheims cathedral depicting 1901 tourists with parasols and wide hats and bustles strolling about its portal. The three women in the parlor, he suddenly became aware, had fallen silent. Turning his head a degree, he saw that they were watching the two of them. But when he arose, Kitty and her mother had put their heads together and were talking in the most animated way, Mrs. Vaught counting off items on her fingers as if she were compiling a list of some sort. Jamie put the handkerchief across his eyes.

Rita still stood in front of the fire, feet wide apart, hands locked behind her. She watched ironically as the shivering engineer came up to get warm.

“What’s the problem?”

“Ma’am?”

“You and Jamie don’t seem to be very happy about things.”

“Jamie told me this morning he wanted to take a trip out west — and leave immediately. I told him I would. Now I’m afraid he’s delaying the trip on my account. Don’t you think the trip would be a good idea?” He watched her closely.

She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. How could a delay of a few weeks matter one way or another? Perhaps it would be better to wait at least until everyone knows what he and she really wants to do. Right now I can’t help but detect a certain precipitousness in the air. I don’t think it’s a bad idea, once decisions are made, to live with them for a while, to see if perhaps they can be lived with.”

As he watched, she set her jaw askew, made her eyes fine, and moved her chin to and fro in the web of her thumb. It was a gesture that reminded him strangely of his own father. Suddenly a thrill of recognition and of a nameless sweet horribleness ran like electricity down his spine and out along the nerves between his ribs. She was daring him. Very well, said the fine-eyed expression and the quirky (yes, legal) eyebrow. Let us see what we shall see. Perhaps I know something about you, you don’t know. Let us see if you can do what you say you want to do, stay here and get married in the regular woman’s way of getting married, marry a wife and live a life. Let us see. I dare you.

But was he being flattered or condemned? Was she saying you know better than to stay here or you don’t have what it takes to stay? He cocked an eye at her and opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment Kitty plucked at his sleeve. “Let’s go, Tiger.”

“What?”

“I have a couple of calls to make. You want to come along?”

“Sure.”

There had occurred between the people in the room, in the very air itself, a falling upward of things and into queer new place, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. But it was his own Kitty who had been most mysteriously transformed. Her cheek was flushed and she swung her shoulders in her school blouse like a secretary sitting between three desks. She bustled. No longer was she the solitary girl on the park bench, as inward and watchful as he, who might wander with him through old green Louisiana, perch on the back step of the camper of an evening with the same shared sense of singularity of time and the excellence of place. No, she was Miss Katherine Gibbs Vaught and the next thing he knew she’d have her picture in the Commercial Appeal.

“Where’re we going?” he asked her, trying to keep up as she sailed through the pantry.

“I am to deliver you to someone who wishes a word with you.”

The next thing he knew, he was sitting in Kitty’s tiny Sprite, his knees about his ears as they went roaring up and over the mountain and down into the city.

“What is this place?” he asked when they stopped in an acre or so of brand-new automobiles.

“The shop, crazy. Poppy wants to talk to you!”

He sat blinking around him, hands on his knees. The “shop” was Mr. Vaught’s Confederate Chevrolet agency, the second largest in the world. Dozens of salesmen in Reb-colonel hats and red walking canes threaded their way between handsome Biscaynes and sporty Corvettes. By contrast with their jaunty headgear and the automobiles, which were as bright as tropical birds, the faces of the salesmen seemed heavy and anxious.

“Come on,” cried Kitty, already on her way.

They found Mr. Vaught in a vast showroom holding another acre of Chevrolets. He was standing in a fenced-off desk area talking to Mr. Ciocchio, his sales manager. Kitty introduced him and vanished.

“You see this sapsucker,” said Mr. Vaught to Mr. Ciocchio, taking the engineer by the armpit.

“Yes sir,” said the other, responding with a cordial but wary look. The sales manager was a big Lombard of an Italian with a fine head of thick curly hair. In his Reb-colonel hat he looked like Garibaldi.

“Do you know what he can do?”

“No sir.”

“He can hit a golf ball over three hundred yards and he is studying a book by the name of The Theory of Large Numbers. What do you think of a fellow like that?”

“That’s all right.” Mr. Ciocchio smiled and nodded as cordially as ever. The engineer noticed that his eyes did not converge but looked at him, one past each ear.

“He is evermore smart.”

The engineer nodded grimly. This old fellow, his employer, he had long since learned, had a good working blade of malice. Was this not in fact his secret: that he had it in for everybody? “Sir,” he said, politely disengaging himself from Mr. Vaught’s master grip. “Kitty said you wished to see me. As a matter of fact, I wanted to see you earlier. Jamie said he wanted to take a trip out west. I told him I would take him if it met with your approval.”

Mr. Ciocchio, seeing his chance, vanished as quickly as Kitty had.

“But now, it seems, plans have been changed. Jamie tells me he wishes to postpone the trip. I might add too that I asked Kitty to marry me. This seems as good a time as any to inform you of my intentions and to ask your approval. I am here, however, at your request. At least, that is my understanding.”

“Well now,” said the old man, turning away and looking back, eyeing him with his sliest gleam. Aha! At least he knows I’m taking none of his guff, the engineer thought. “Billy boy,” he said in a different voice and hobbled over to the rail with a brand-new limp — oh, what a rogue he was. “Take a look at this place. Do you want to know what’s wrong with it?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you see those fellows out there?” He nodded to a half dozen colonels weaving fretfully through the field of cars.

“Yes sir.”

“I’ll tell you a funny damn thing. Now there’s not a thing in the world wrong with those fellows except for one thing. They want to sell. They know everything in the book about selling. But there is one thing they can’t do. They can’t close.”

“Close?”

“Close out. They can’t get a man in here where those fellows are.” He pointed to more colonels sitting at desks in the fenced-off area. “That’s where we sign them up. But they can’t get them in here. They stand out there and talk and everybody is nice and agreeable as can be. And the man says all right, thanks a lot, I’ll be back. And he’s gone. Now you know, it’s a funny thing but that is something you can’t teach a fellow — when the time has come to close. We need a coordinator.”

“Sir?”

“We need a liaison man to cruise the floor, watch all the pots, see which one is coming to a boil. Do you understand me?”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer gloomily.

“I’m going to tell you the plain truth, Billy,” said the old man in a tone of absolute sincerity. “You can’t hire a good man for love or money. I’d pay twenty thousand a year for just an ordinary good man.”

“Yes sir.”

“I can’t understand it.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“What makes those fellows so mis’able? Look at them. They are the most mis’able bunch of folks I ever saw.”

“You mean they’re unhappy?”

“Look at them.”

They were. “What makes them miserable?”

“You figure that out and I’ll pay you twenty-five.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer absently; he had caught sight of Kitty waiting for him in her Sprite.

“Listen son,” said the old man, drawing him close again. “I’m going to tell you the truth. I don’t know what the hell is going on out there with those women and Jamie and all. Whatever yall want to do is all right with me. And I’m tickled to death to hear about you and Kitty. More than delighted. I know that you and I understand each other and that I’m more than happy to have you with us here any time you feel like it.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer glumly.

By evening the engineer felt as uncommonly bad as he had felt good when he had set out for the university early in the morning of the same day. His knee leapt. Once he thought he heard the horrid ravening particles which used to sing in the pale sky over New York and Jersey. To make matters worse, everyone else in the pantry felt better than ever. It was the night before the Tennessee game. There was a grace and a dispensation in the air, an excitement and hope about the game on the morrow and a putting away of the old sad unaccomplished past. Tomorrow our own lads, the good smiling easy youths one met on the campus paths, but on the gridiron a ferocious black-helmeted wrecking crew, collide with the noble old single-wing of Tennessee. A big game is more than a game. It allows the kindling of hope and the expectation of great deeds. One liked to drink his drink the night before and muse over it: what will happen?

Ordinarily he too, the engineer, liked nothing better than the penultimate joys of a football weekend. But tonight he was badly unsettled. The two brothers, Jamie and Sutter, had been deep in talk at the blue bar for a good half hour. And Rita had Kitty off in the bay, Rita speaking earnestly with her new level-browed legal expression, Kitty blossoming by the minute: a lovely flushed bride. Every few seconds her eyes sought him out and sent him secret shy Mary Nestor signals. Now it was she who was sending the signals and he who was stove up and cranky. Only once had she spoken to him and then to whisper: “It may be possible to swing a sweetheart ceremony with the Chi O’s as maids. I’m working on it.” “Eh? What’s that?” cocking his good ear and holding down his knee. But she was off again before he had a chance to discover what she meant. It left him uneasy.

Something else disturbed him. Son Thigpen had brought over a carload of classmates from the university. Son, as morose as he was, and devoted exclusively to his Thunderbird and the fraternity (not the brothers themselves but the idea, Hellenism, as he called it), had nevertheless the knack of attracting large numbers of friends, lively youths and maids who liked him despite his sallowness and glumness. Now, having delivered this goodly company, he stood apart and fiddled with his Thunderbird keys. His guests were Deltans, from the engineer’s country, though he did not know them. But he knew their sort and it made him uneasy to see how little he was like them, how easy they were in their ways and how solitary and Yankeefied he was — though they seemed to take him immediately as one of them and easy too. The young men were Sewanee Episcopal types, good soft-spoken hard-drinking graceful youths, gentle with women and very much themselves with themselves, set, that is, for the next fifty years in the actuality of themselves and their own good names. They knew what they were, how things were and how things should be. As for the engineer, he didn’t know. I’m from the Delta too, thought he, sticking his hand down through his pocket, and I’m Episcopal; why ain’t I like them, easy and actual? Oh, to be like Rooney Lee. The girls were just as familiar to him, though he’d never met them either. Lovely little golden partridges they were, in fall field colors, green-feathered and pollen-dusted. Their voices were like low music and their upturned faces were like flowers. They were no different at all from the lovely little bitty steel-hearted women who sat at the end of the cotton rows and held the South together when their men came staggering home from Virginia all beaten up and knocked out of the war, who sat in their rocking chairs and made everybody do right; they were enough to scare you to death. But he for his Kitty, a little heavy-footed, yes, and with a tendency to shoulder a bit like a Wellesley girl and not absolutely certain of her own sex, a changeling (she was flushed and high-colored now just because she had found out what she was — a bride). For example, Kitty, who had worked at it for ten years, was still a bad dancer, where every last one of these Delta partridges was certain to be light and air in your arms.

They were talking about politics and the Negro, who was now rumored to be headed for the campus this weekend. “Do yall know the difference between a nigger and an ape?” said Lamar Thigpen, embracing all three Deltans. They’re good chaps, though, thought the engineer distractedly, and, spying Mr. Vaught circling the walls, thought of something he wanted to ask him and took out after him, pushing his kneecap in with each step like a polio victim. They’re good chaps and so very much at one with themselves and with the dear world around them as bright and sure as paradise. The game was tomorrow and they were happy about that; they knew what they wanted and who they hated. Oh, why ain’t I like them, thought the poor engineer, who was by no means a liberal — never in fact giving such matters a single thought — but who rather was so mystified by white and black alike that he could not allow himself the luxury of hatred. Oh, but they were lordly in theirs, he noticed, as he hobbled along. Then forgetting what he wanted to ask Mr. Vaught, he fetched up abruptly and took his pulse. “I’m not at all well,” he said to himself.

“What’s the matter,” asked Sutter, who had been watching him from his kitchen chair at the blue bar. Jamie, the engineer noticed, had left.

“I don’t feel well. Where’s Jamie?”

“He went to bed.”

“I wanted to ask him what his plans were.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s all right. What about you?”

“I think my nervous condition is worse. I feel my memory slipping.”

“What was that book you were reading earlier?”

“Freeman’s R. E. Lee.”

“Are you still strongly affected by the Civil War?”

“Not as strongly as I used to be.”

“How strongly was that?”

“When I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of trinitrotoluene in the chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank. Later, in New York, whenever there was a plane crash, I would scan the passenger list to see how many Southerners had been killed.”

“And yet you are not one of them.” Sutter nodded toward the Thigpens.

“No.”

“Are your nationalistic feelings strongest before the onset of your amnesia?”

“Perhaps they are,” said the engineer, gazing at himself in the buzzing blue light of the mirror. “But that’s not what I’m interested in.”

Sutter gazed at him. “What are you interested in?”

“I—” the engineer shrugged and fell silent.

“What is it?”

“Why do they feel so good,” he nodded toward the Deltans, “and I feel so bad?”

Sutter eyed him. “The question is whether they feel as good as you think, and if they do, then the question is whether it is necessarily worse to feel bad than good under the circumstances.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” said the engineer irritably.

“One morning,” said Sutter, “I got a call from a lady who said that her husband was having a nervous breakdown. I knew the fellow. As a matter of fact, they lived two doors down. He was a Deke from Vanderbilt, president of Fairfield Coke and a very good fellow, cheerful and healthy and open-handed. It was nine o’clock in the morning, so I walked over from here. His wife let me in. There he stands in the living room dressed for work in his Haspel suit, shaved, showered, and in the pink, in fact still holding his attaché case beside him. All in order except that he was screaming, his mouth forming a perfect O. His corgi was howling and his children were peeping out from behind the stereo. His wife asked me for an opinion. After quieting him down and having a word with him, I told her that his screaming was not necessarily a bad thing in itself, that in some cases a person is better off screaming than not screaming — except that he was frightening the children. I prescribed the terminal ward for him and in two weeks he was right as rain.”

The engineer leaned a degree closer. “I understand that. Now what I want to know is this: do you mean that in the terminal ward he discovered only that he was not so bad off, or is there more to it than that?”

Sutter looked at him curiously but did not reply.

“Did you get in trouble with him too?”

Sutter shrugged. “It was a near thing. His wife, who was a psychiatrically oriented type, put him into analysis with an old-timey hard-assed Freudian — they’re only to be found down here in the South now — and he went crazy. Of course I got the blame for not putting, him into treatment earlier. But she didn’t sue me.”

The engineer nodded toward the Deltans. “What about them?”

“What about them?”

“Would you put them in the terminal ward?”

“They’re not screaming.”

“Should they be screaming?”

“I should not presume to say. I only say that if they were screaming, I could have helped them once. I cannot do even that now. I am a pathologist.”

The engineer frowned. He felt a stirring of anger. There was something unpleasantly ironic about Sutter’s wry rapid way of talking. It was easy to imagine him ten years from now haunting a barroom somewhere and pattering on like this to any stranger. He began to understand why others made a detour around him, so to speak, and let him alone.

He couldn’t sleep. As he lay at attention listening to the frolic in John Houghton’s room below, he began to skid a little and not recollect exactly where he was, like a boy who wakes in a strange bed. In the next bed Jamie breathed regularly. By three o’clock in the morning he was worse off than at any time since Eisenhower was President when he had worked three months for a florist in Cincinnati, assaulted by the tremendous déjà vus of hot green growing things.

At last he went out to the landing and, seeing a light under Sutter’s door, knocked. Sutter answered immediately. He was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, dressed in the same clothes, feet flat on the floor, arms lying symmetrically on the rests. There was no drink or book beside him.

At last Sutter turned his head. “What can I do for you?” The naked ceiling bulb cast his eye sockets into bluish shadow. The engineer wondered if Sutter had taken a drug.

“I have reason to believe I am going into a fugue,” said the engineer matter-of-factly. He turned up the collar of his pajamas. It was cold in here. “I thought you might be able to help me.”

“Jimmy is in there dying. Don’t you think I should be more concerned with helping him?”

“Yes, but I am going to live, and according to you that is harder.”

Sutter didn’t smile. “Why do you ask me?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Why don’t you get married and live happily ever afterwards?”

“Why was that man screaming that you told me about? You never did say.”

“I didn’t ask him.”

“But you knew why.”

Sutter shrugged.

“Was it a psychological condition?” asked the engineer, cocking his good ear.

“A psychological condition,” Sutter repeated slowly.

“What was wrong with him, Dr. Vaught?” The pale engineer seemed to lean forward a good ten degrees, like the clown whose shoes are nailed to the floor.

Sutter got up slowly, scratching his hair vigorously with both hands.

“Come over here.”

Sutter led him to the card table, which had been cleared of dirty swabs but which still smelled of fruity Hoppe’s gun oil. He fetched two chrome dinette chairs and set them on opposite sides of the table.

“Sit down. Now. I think you should go to sleep.”

“All right.”

“Give me your hand.” Sutter took his hand in the cross-palm grip of Indian wrestling. “Look at me.”

“All right.”

“Does it embarrass you to hold hands with a man and look at him?”

“Yes.” Sutter’s hand felt as dry and tendinous as broomstraw.

“Count to thirty with me. When we finish counting, you will then be able to do what I tell you.”

“All right.”

When they had finished counting, Sutter said: “You say you believe I know something about you. Now you will also do what I tell you.”

“All right.”

“When you leave this room, you will go to your room and sleep soundly for nine hours. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Now when you do get up tomorrow, something is going to happen. As a consequence, you are going to be in a better position to decide what you want to do.”

“All right.”

“For the next few days you may have a difficult time. Now I shall not tell you what to do, but I will tell you now that you will be free to act. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“If you find yourself in too tight a spot, that is, in a situation where it is difficult to live from one minute to the next, come and see me and I’ll help you. I may not be here, but you can find me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Good night.” Sutter yawned, pushed back his chair, and began to scratch his head with both hands.

“Good night.”

In his cold bed, the engineer curled up like a child and fell at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.

He awoke to a cold diamond-bright morning. Jamie’s bed was empty. When he crossed the courtyard, the Thigpens were leaving for the game. Lamar gave John Houghton a drink, which he drained off in one gulp, little finger stuck out. In return John Houghton did a buck-and-wing, swooping down with tremendous swoops and fetching up light as a feather, clapping his hands not quite together but scuffing the horny parts past each other. The engineer, standing pale and blinking in the sunlight, was afraid Lamar was going to say “Get hot!” or something similar, but he didn’t. In fact, as the little caravan got underway and the three servants stood waving farewell on the back steps, Lugurtha fluttering her apron, Lamar shook his head fondly. “There’s nothing like the old-timey ways!” he said. The Vaught retainers seemed to remind Lamar of an earlier, more gracious time, even though the purple castle didn’t look much like an antebellum mansion and the golf links even less like a cotton plantation.

Kitty was eating batter cakes in the pantry. She eyed him somewhat nervously, he thought. But when later he kissed her mouth, not quite cleared of Br’er Rabbit syrup, she kissed him back with her new-found conjugal passion, though a bit absent-mindedly.

“Rita wants to see you,” she told him as she led him through the dark dining room. “Something has happened.”

“Where’s Jamie?”

“I’m afraid that’s what it’s about.”

“Come over here a minute,” he said, trying to pull her behind a screen of iridescent butterfly wings. He felt like a sleepy husband.

“Later, later,” said Kitty absently. For the first time he saw that the girl was badly upset.

As they entered Rita’s tower bedroom, Kitty, he noticed, became all at once pudding-faced and hangdog. She looked like Jamie. She hung back like a fourteen-year-old summoned to the principal’s office. Her noble matutinal curves seemed to turn to baby fat.

Rita, dressed in a heavy silk kimono, lay propped on a large bed strewn with magazines, cigarettes, eyeglasses, and opened mail. She was reading a book, which she set face down on the bed. From force of habit and by way of getting at someone, he set his head over to see the title. It was The Art of Loving. The engineer experienced a vague disappointment. He too had read the book and, though he had felt very good during the reading, it had not the slightest effect on his life.

Getting quickly out of bed and holding an unlit cigarette to her lip, Rita strode back and forth between them. So formidable was it, this way she had of setting the side of her face into a single ominous furrow (something was up all right), that he forgot all about the book.

“Well, they’ve done it up brown this time,” she said at last, stopping at the window and rubbing her chin in the web of her thumb. “Or rather he has.”

“Who?” asked the engineer.

“Sutter,” she said, turning to face him. Kitty stood beside him as flat-footed and button-eyed as Betty Jo Jones in Ithaca Junior High. “Sutter has left and taken Jamie with him,” said Rita quietly.

“Where, Ree?” Kitty cried, but somewhat rhetorically, her eyes in her eyebrows. The surprise was for his benefit.

Rita shrugged.

“I have an idea where they might be headed,” said the engineer.

Rita rolled her eyes. “Then for pity’s sake tell us.”

“Jamie was determined to go either out west or to Val’s.”

“Then I suggest that you jump in your little truck without further ado and go get him.”

“What I can’t understand,” said the engineer absently, putting his fist to his forehead as if to cudgel his poor wits, “is why Dr. Vaught left when he did. He told me— Well, I had no idea he was planning to make a change.”

“It seems a change was made for him,” said Rita dryly.

He became aware that Kitty was woolgathering. Something had happened and she knew about it

“What change is that?” he asked.

“Sutter has been discharged from the hospital staff.” Removing her glasses, she thrust them into the deep pocket of her kimono sleeve. Her pale rough face looked naked and serious and justified, like a surgeon who comes out of the operating room and removes his mask. “It was understood that if he left, he would not be prosecuted.”

“Prosecuted for what?” Up to his usual tricks, the engineer took her import not from the words she said but from the signals. That the import was serious indeed was to be judged from her offhandedness, the license she allowed herself in small things. She lit a cigarette and with a serious sort of free-and-easiness cupped it inward to her palm like a Marine and hunkered over an imaginary campfire between the three of them.

“What were they going to prosecute him for?” asked the engineer again. Within himself he was fighting against the voluptuousness of bad news. Would the time ever come when bad was bad and good good and a man was himself and knew straight up which was which?

“Sutter,” said Rita, warming her hands at the invisible embers and stamping her feet softly, “persuaded a ward nurse to leave her patients, some of whom were desperately ill, and accompany him to an unoccupied room, which I believe is called the terminal room. There they were discovered in bed by the night supervisor, and surrounded by pictures of a certain sort. Wynne Magahee called me last night — he’s chief of medicine. He told me, he said: ‘Look, we wouldn’t care less what Sutter does with or to the nurses on his own time, but hell, Rita, when it comes to leaving sick people — and to make matters worse, somebody on the ward found out about it and is suing the hospital.’ I had to tell Wynne, ‘Wynne it is not for you to make explanations to us but rather for us—’”

Beside him, Kitty had gone as lumpish and cheeky as a chipmunk. “They were not desperately ill, Ree,” she said wearily as if it were an old argument. “It was a chronic ward.”

“Very well, they were not desperately ill,” said Rita, eyeing the engineer ironically.

Kitty’s lower lip trembled. Poor Kitty, it remained to her, one of the last, to be afflicted. “Poor Sutter,” she whispered, shaking her head. “But why in the world did he—”

“However unfortunate the situation might be,” said Rita grimly, “Sutter’s being discovered was not purely and simply a misfortune, that is to say, bad luck. As it happens, Sutter set the time for his rendezvous a few minutes before the night supervisor made her rounds.”

“Do you mean Sutter wanted to get caught, Ree?” cried Kitty.

“There are needs, my dear,” said Rita dryly, “which take precedence over this or that value system. I suspect, moreover, that our friend here knows a good deal more about the situation than we do.”

But though Kitty turned to him, he felt fretful and sore and would not answer. Anyhow he didn’t know what Rita was talking about. Instead he asked her: “When did this happen?”

“Thursday night.”

“Then when I spoke to him last night, he already knew that he had been discharged?”

“Yes. And he also knew that he and Jamie were leaving this morning.”

“But he told me I could find him if—” The engineer broke off and fell silent. Presently he asked: “Do Mr. and Mrs. Vaught know?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“Poppy threw up his hands over his head, you know, and rushed out of the room, Dolly took to the bed.”

He was silent.

“I had supposed that your responsibilities as his tutor and companion might include a reasonable concern for his life. The last time he went off with Sutter he was nearly killed.”

The hearty thrust of her malice made him want to grin. He thought of his aunts. Malice was familiar ground. It was like finding oneself amid the furniture of one’s living room. He looked at his watch. “I can leave in ten minutes. If he’s in Tyree County, I’ll be back tomorrow. If they’ve gone to New Mexico, and I think they have, it’ll take longer. I’ll look in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Kitty?” He waited in the doorway without looking at her.

When she did not move, he looked up. The girl was stricken. She was wringing the fingers of one hand. He had never seen anyone wring his hands.

“Are you coming with me?”

“I can’t,” she said, open-mouthed and soundless like a fourteen-year-old talking past the teacher.

“Why not?”

“Bill,” said Rita, brow gone all quirky, “you can’t ask this child to travel with you. Suppose you do have to go to New Mexico.”

“We can be married in Louisiana tomorrow. My uncle lives there and can arrange it.”

She shook her head fondly. “Listen, kids. Here’s what you do. Bill, go find Jamie. Then stay with him or bring him home. In either case I guarantee this girl will come a-running as fast as her little legs will carry her. Kitty, I assure you he is coming back. Look at her, Lance Corporal.”

But he looked at Rita instead.

She was daring him! If you leave, said the fine gray eyes, you know that I know that you won’t come back. I dare you!

And Kitty: by some queer transformation the girl, his lordly lioness of a Kitty, had been turned into a twittering bird-girl with little bitty legs.

“Kitty, I have to go to my room for a minute. Then I’m leaving.”

“Wait.” Soundless as a little dove, she flew up to him, and still could not speak.

“What?” he said, smiling.

Rita linked arms with them and drew them together. “If it is of any interest to you, dearie,” she said to Kitty, “my money is on him. Lance Corporal?”

“What?” said the puzzled engineer.

“Idiot,” said Rita, giving him a dig in the ribs with her silken elbow. “The poor girl is wondering whether you are coming back.”

Then, registering as he did a fine glint of appraisal in Rita’s eye, he saw the two of them, Kitty and Billy, as doll-like figures tumbling before the magic wand of an enchantress. Nor, and here was the strangest part of it, did he really mind.

A note was clipped with a bobby pin to the ignition switch of the Trav-L-Aire.

Meet me in one hour. Go out81—

Did she mean north or south 81?

Turn right near top of ridge—

Lord, which ridge and which side of it?

Watch for For Sale sign and Mickle mailbox—

Before or after turning off?

Pull up out of sight of the highway and wait for me. K.

Who was she afraid of?

There was time then for a stop at Sutter’s apartment. For two reasons: to make sure Sutter had in fact left (for Rita was a liar), and if he had, maybe to find a clue or sign (Sutter might just leave one for him).

Straight up and over the mountain and down through deserted streets — what day was this, a holiday? No, the game! Everybody had gone to the game or in to their TVs, and the streets and cars and the occasional loiterer had the look of not going to the game — to the Kenilworth Arms, an ancient blackened stucco battlement, relic of the baronial years of the twenties. He went up in an elevator with a ruby glass in the door and down a narrow tile corridor hollow as a gutter. The silence and emptiness of Sutter’s apartment met him at the open door, which had also been fitted with a ruby window. The apartment had a sunken living room and looked like Thelma Todd’s apartment in the Hollywood Hills of 1931. There was open on the floor an old black friable Gladstone bag with a freshly ruptured handle and in the bathroom a green can of Mennen’s talc. In a bureau drawer he found enclosed in a steno pad an Esso map of the Southeastern United States. A light penciled line ran southwest to an X marked in the badlands just above the Gulf Coast, turned northwest, and ran off the map past Shreveport. He cranked open a casement window. The faint uproar of the city below filled the tiled room like a sea shell. He sat on the steps of the balcony foyer and looked down into the littered well of the living room. It had an unmistakably sexual flavor. The orange candle flame bulbs, the ruby glass, the very sconces on the walls were somehow emblems of sex but of a lapsed archaic monkey-business sort of sex. Here, he reckoned, one used to have parties with flappers and make whoopee. Why did Sutter pick such a place to live in, with its echoes of ancient spectral orgies? He was not, after all, of that generation. The engineer opened the steno pad. It seemed to be a casebook of some sort, with an autopsy protocol here and there and much scribbling in between.

Sutter wrote:

A w.d. and n. white male, circa 49.

Eyes, ears, nose, mouth: neg. (upper dentures).

Skin: 12 cm. contusion rt. occipital region

Pleura: Neg.

Lungs: Neg.

Pericardium: 10 cc. pink frothy fluid

Heart: infarcted anterior wall right ventricle; coronary artery: moderate narrowing, occasional plaque; recent occlusion anterior descending branch, right c.a.

Abdomen: neg. except moderate cirrhosis of L. with texture fibrous to slice; central areas of lobules visible macroscopically.

Police report: subject found rolled in room above Mamie’s on 16th St. behind old L & N depot. Traced to Jeff Davis hotel. Here from Little Rock on opticians’ convention. Traced from hotel to men’s smoker in warehouse (girl performer plus film, neither on opticians’ schedule), thence to Mamie’s, thence to room upstairs, wherein slugged or rolled; but head injury not cause of death. Mamie off hook.

Lewdness = sole concrete metaphysic of layman in age of science = sacrament of the dispossessed. Things, persons, relations emptied out, not by theory but by lay reading of theory. There remains only relation of skin to skin and hand under dress. Thus layman now believes that entire spectrum of relations between persons (e.g., a man and woman who seem to be connected by old complexus of relations, fondness, fidelity, and the like, understanding, the comic, etc.) is based on “real” substratum of genital sex. The latter is “real,” the former is not. (Cf. Whitehead’s displacement of the Real)

Scientist not himself pornographer in the practice of his science, but the price of the beauty and the elegance of the method of science = the dispossession of layman. Lewdness = climate of the anteroom of science. Pornography stands in a mutual relation to science and Christianity and is reinforced by both.

Science, which (in layman’s view) dissolves concrete things and relations, leaves intact touch of skin to skin. Relation of genital sexuality reinforced twice: once because it is touch, therefore physical, therefore “real”; again because it corresponds with theoretical (i.e., sexual) substrata of all other relations. Therefore genital sexuality = twice “real.”

Christianity is still viable enough to underwrite the naughtiness which is essential to pornography (e.g., the pornography of the East is desultory and perfunctory).

The perfect pornographer = a man who lives both in anteroom of science (not in research laboratory) and who also lives in twilight of Christianity, e.g., a technician. The perfect pornographer = lapsed Christian Southerner (who as such retains the memory not merely of Christianity but of a region immersed in place and time) who presently lives in Berkeley or Ann Arbor, which are not true places but sites of abstract activity which could take place anywhere else, a map coordinate; who is perhaps employed as psychological tester or opinion sampler or computer programmer or other para-scientific pursuit. Midwestern housewives, look out! Hand-under-dress of a total stranger is in the service both of the theoretical “real” and the physical “real.”

I do not deny, Val, that a revival of your sacramental system is an alternative to lewdness (the only other alternative is the forgetting of the old sacrament), for lewdness itself is a kind of sacrament (devilish, if you like). The difference is that my sacrament is operational and yours is not.

The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., we might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

But I am not a pornographer, Val, like the optician, now a corpse, i.e., an ostensible liver of a “decent” life, a family man, who fancies conventions with smokers and call girls. I accept the current genital condition of all human relations and try to go beyond it. I may sniff like a dog but then I try to be human rather than masquerade as human and sniff like a dog. I am a sincere, humble, and even moral pornographer. I cultivate pornography in order to set it at naught.

Women, of course, are the natural pornographers today, because they are not only dispossessed by science of the complexus of human relations (all but the orgasm) but are also kept idle in their suburban houses with nothing to do but read pseudo-science articles in the Reader’s Digest and dirty novels (one being the natural preamble of the other). U.S. culture is the strangest in history, a society of decent generous sex-ridden men and women who leave each other to their lusts, the men off to the city and conventions, abandoning their wives to the suburbs, which are the very home and habitation of lewd dreams. A dirty deal for women, if you ask me.

Don’t be too hard on Rita. She is peeved, not perverted. (The major discovery of my practice: that there are probably no such entities as “schizophrenia” and “homosexuality,” conceived as Platonic categories, but only peevishness, revenge, spitefulness, dishonesty, fear, loneliness, lust, and despair — which is not to say we don’t need psychiatrists. You people don’t seem to be doing too well, you know.)

The only difference between me and you is that you think that purity and life can only come from eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. I don’t know where it comes from.

The engineer rose unsteadily from the floor of the sunken living room, where he had been reading Sutter’s casebook, and went into the bathroom. As he urinated he gazed down at the maroon toilet seat and the black tile floor. Once, he remembered, his father had visited the home of a rich Syrian to draw up a will. “They had black sheets on the bed,” he confided to his son with a regular cackle. And in truth there seemed even now something Levantine and fancy about tampering with the decent white of bathrooms and bedsheets.

He folded the Esso map into the casebook and went down to the camper. Reading Sutter’s casebook had a strange effect upon him. His mind, instead of occupying itself with such subjects as “American women” and “science” and “sexuality,” turned with relief to the most practical matters. He drove into a filling station and while the motor was being serviced studied the Esso map, calculating almost instantly and clairvoyantly the distance to Jackson, New Orleans, and Shreveport. When the attendant brought over the dip stick, exhibiting its coating of good green Uniflow, slightly low, he savored the hot sane smell of the oil and felt in his own muscles the spring of the long sliver of steel.

Sure enough, just over the saddle of the farthest ridge, the last wrinkle of the Appalachians, which overlooked a raw new golf links and a snowfield of marble-chip rooftops of five hundred G.E. Gold Medallion Homes, he found the mailbox and driveway. Up the rocky slope swarmed the sturdy G.M.C., shouldering like a badger, and plunged into a thicket of rhododendron. Thick meaty leaves swept along the aluminum hull of his ship and slapped shut behind him. He took a turn in the woods but there was no sign of Kitty. While he waited for her, he lay in Jamie’s bunk and again studied the map he had found in Sutter’s apartment. Sutter’s casebook disturbed him; there were no clues here. But the map, with its intersecting lines and tiny airplanes and crossed daggers marking battlefields, was reassuring. It told him where to go.

The towhees whistled in the rhododendron and presently the branches thrashed. There stood Kitty in the doorway with light and air going round her arm.

“Oh, I’m glad to see you,” he cried, leaping up and grabbing her, hardly able to believe his good fortune. “You are here!” And here she was, big as life, smelling of dry goods and brand-new chemical blue jeans. They were not quite right, the jeans, too new and too tight in the thigh and too neatly rolled at the cuff, like a Macy’s girl bound for the Catskills, but it only made his heart leap all the more. He laughed and embraced her, held her charms in his arms.

“Whoa now,” she cried flushing.

“Eh?”

“Get the game on the radio.”

“Game?”

“Tennessee is ahead.”

“Right,” he said and turned the game on but instead of listening told her: “Now. I can tell you that I feel very good about the future. I see now that while I was living with your family I was trying too hard to adapt myself to my environment and to score on interpersonal relationships.”

“Darling,” said Kitty, once again her old rough-and-ready and good-looking Wellesley self.

“Anyhow, here’s what we’ll do,” said he, holding her on his lap and patting her. “We’ll strike out for Ithaca and pick up my money, then we’ll cross the mighty Mississippi and see my uncle, who lives near the town of Shut Off, Louisiana, transact another small piece of business, get married, and head west, locate Jamie in either Rita’s house in Tesuque or Sutter’s ranch near Santa Fe, and thereafter live in Albuquerque or perhaps Santa Fe, park the camper in an arroyo or dry wash and attend the University of New Mexico since there is bound to be such a place, and make ourselves available to Jamie in whatever way he likes. We might live at Sutter’s old ranch and in the evenings sit, the three of us, and watch the little yellow birds fly down from the mountains. I don’t mind telling you that I set great store by this move, for which I thank Jamie, and that I am happier than I can tell you to see that you are with me.”

Kitty, however, seemed abstracted and was trying to hear the radio. But no, she changed her mind, and grabbing him, took him by her warm heavy hand and yanked him out of the Trav-L-Aire. The next thing he knew, she was showing him a house and grounds in the bustling style of a real-estate agent. “Myra gave me the key. Do you know she told me she would let me work for her! She makes piles of money.” It was a regular rockhouse cantilevered out over the ridge and into the treetops. She unlocked the door.

“What is this place?” he asked, wringing out his ear. The red and blue lines of the Esso map were still glimmering on his retina and he was in no mood for houses. But they were already inside and she was showing him the waxed paving stones and the fireplace and the view of the doleful foothills and the snowfield of G.E. Gold Medallion Homes.

“This is the Mickle place. Myra has it listed for thirty-seven five but she’ll let it go to the family for thirty-two. Isn’t it lovely? Look at the stone of this fireplace.”

“Thirty-seven five,” said the engineer vaguely.

“Thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. In the summer you can’t see that subdivision at all.”

She took him outside to a ferny dell and a plashy little brook with a rustic bridge. When she walked with him, she slipped her hand behind him and inside his belt in a friendly conjugal style, as one sees the old folks do, John Anderson my jo John.

“Do you mean you want to come back here and live?” he asked her at last, looking around at the ferny Episcopal woods and the doleful view and thinking of feeding the chickadees for the next forty years.

“Not before we find Jamie,” she cried. “Come on.” She yanked him toward the Trav-L-Aire. “Wait till I get my hands on that sorry Jamie.” But again she changed her mind. “Oh. I forgot to show you the foc’sle, as Cap’n Mickle used to call it, which is built into the cliff under the ‘bridge.’ It is soundproof and womanproof, even the doorknob pulls out, the very place for an old growl bear like you — you can pull the hole in after you for all I care.”

“No, thanks. Let’s be on our way,” said the engineer, eyeing the Episcopal ivy which seemed to be twining itself around his ankles.

“Old Cap’n Andy,” said Kitty, shaking her head fondly. “He was a bit eccentric but a dear. He used to stroll up and down the bridge, as he called it, with his telescope under his arm and peer out at the horizon and cry ‘Ahoy there!’”

“Is that right,” said the engineer gloomily, already seeing himself as a crusty but lovable eccentric who spied through his telescope at the buzzards and crows which circled above this doleful plain. “Come on,” he said, now also eyeing her covertly. She was fond and ferocious and indulgent. It was as if they had been married five years. Ahoy there. He had to get out of here. But there would be the devil’s own time, he saw clearly, in hemming her up in a dry wash in New Mexico. She was house-minded.

But he did get her in the camper at last and down they roared, down the last slope of the Appalachians, which was tilted into the autumn sun, down through the sourwood and the three-fingered sassafras.

“How much money do you have?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Somewhere around fifteen thousand — after I transact my business.” A thought cheered him up. “Not nearly enough to buy Cap’n Andy’s house, as good a bargain as it is.”

“Will you take care of this for me?”

The Esso map was open on the dash. Squarely across old Arkansas it fell, the check, or cheque it looked more like, machine-printed, certified, punched, computed, red-inked, hatched up rough as a cheese grater. The engineer nearly ran off the mountain. A little army of red Gothic noughts marched clean to Oklahoma, leaning into the wind. It looked familiar. Had he seen it before?

“You have seen it before. Remember?”

“Yes,” said the engineer. “What’s it for?”

“My dowry, crazy. Turn it over.”

He pulled up at a G.E. model home — what’s wrong with one of these — they were much more cheerful than that buzzard’s roost up on the ridge, and read aloud the lavender script: “For deposit only, to the account of Williston Bibb Barrett.”

“Do you know how I got the Bibb?”

“No.”

“I got Jamie to peek in your wallet.”

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“Keep it. Hand me your wallet. I’ll put it in.”

“All right.”

“It’s really insurance.”

“What kind of insurance?”

“Against your running out on me. I know you wouldn’t steal a girl’s money. Would you?”

“No.”

Already the carnivorous ivy was stealing down the mountainside. Quickly he put the G.M.C. in gear and sent the Trav-L-Aire roaring down the gloomy Piedmont

“Do we go anywhere near school?”

“Yes.”

“Could we stop and pick up my books?”

“All right. But why do you want your books?”

“We have a test in Comp Lit Wednesday.”

“Wednesday.”

A half hour later, as dusk fell in a particularly gloomy wood, she clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh my Lord, we forgot about the game.”

“Yes.”

“Turn on the radio and see if you can get the score.”

“All right.”

Traffic was heavy in both directions and it was night before they reached the campus. The engineer stopped the Trav-L-Aire under a street light and cocked an ear.

Something was wrong. Whether there was something wrong with the town or inside his own head, he could not say. But beyond a doubt, a queer greenish light flickered over the treetops. There were flat popping noises, unchambered, not like a shotgun but two-syllabled, ba-rop, ba-rop. In the next block an old car stopped and three men got out carrying shotguns and dove straight into the woods. They were not students. They looked like the men who hang around service stations in south Jackson.

“I wonder if Tennessee won,” said Kitty. “Why are you stopping here?”

“I think I’ll leave the camper here.” His old British wariness woke in him. He backed the camper onto a vacant lot behind a billboard.

They separated at a fork in the campus walk, she bound for the Chi Omega house to fetch her books, he for his Theory of Large Numbers. “I’ll meet you here in ten minutes,” he told her uneasily.

Dark figures raced past him on the paths. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of running feet, the heavy direful sound of a grown man running as hard as he can. A girl, a total stranger, appeared from nowhere and taking him by the coat sleeves thrust her face within inches of his. “Hi,” he said.

“He’s here,” she sobbed and jerked at his clothes like a ten-year-old. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” she sobbed, jerking now at his lapels.

“Who?” he asked, looking around.

Searching his face and not finding what she wanted, she actually cast him from her and flew on her way.

“Who?” he asked again, but she was gone. Coming to a lamp, he took out his plastic Gulf Oil calendar card and held it up to see what day of the month it was. He had forgotten and it made him feel uneasy.

At the Confederate monument a group of students ran toward him in ragged single file. Then he saw why. They were carrying a long flagstaff. The flag was furled — he could not tell whether it was United States or Confederate. The youth in front was a sophomore named Bubba Joe Phillips. He was known as a “con,” that is, one who knows how to make money from such campus goings-on as decorating the gym for dances. Ordinarily a smiling crinkled-haired youth, he strained forward, his eyes bulging and unseeing. He was beside himself, besotted, with either fear or fury, and did not see the engineer, though he almost ran into him.

“What yall say,” said the engineer amiably and stepped nimbly to the side, thinking they meant to go past him and down the path whence he came. But when they came abreast of the Confederate monument they turned toward the lights and the noise. They cleared him easily but what he did not see and they did not care about was the dark flagstaff behind them, which as they turned swept out in a wider arc and yet which he nevertheless saw a split second before the brass butt caught him at the belt buckle. “Oof,” he grunted, not hurt much and even smiling. He would have sat down but for the wire fencelet, which took him by the heel and whipped him backward. He was felled, levered over, and would have killed himself if his head had struck the corner of the monument base but it struck instead the slanting face of the old pocked Vermont marble and he was sent spinning into the soft earth under an arborvitae.

The dawn of discovery, the imminent sense of coming at last upon those secrets closest to one and therefore most inaccessible, broke over him. “But why is it—?” he asked aloud, already knocked cold but raising a forefinger nevertheless, then lay down under the dark shrubbery.