The Moviegoer

Four

SAM YERGER IS WAITING for me on the sidewalk, bigger than life. Really his legs are as big and round as an elephant’s in their heavy cylindrical linens and great flaring brogues. Seeing him strikes a pang to the marrow; he has the urgent gentle manner of an emissary of bad news. Someone has died.

Beyond a doubt he is waiting for me. At the sight of my MG, he makes an occult sign and comes quickly to the curb.

“Meet me in the basement,” he actually whispers and turns and goes immediately up the wooden steps, his footsteps echoing like pistol shots.

Sam looks very good. Though he is rumpled and red-eyed, he is, as always, of a piece, from his bearish-big head and shoulders and his soft collar riding up like a ruff into the spade of hair at the back of his neck to his elephant legs and black brogues. It would be a pleasure to be red-eyed and rumpled if one could do it with Sam’s style. His hair makes two waves over his forehead in the Nelson Eddy style of a generation ago.

Sam Yerger’s mother, Aunt Mady, was married to Judge Anse’s law partner, old man Ben Yerger. After college in the East, Sam left Feliciana Parish for good and worked on the old New Orleans Item. In the nineteen thirties he wrote a humorous book about the French-speaking Negroes called Yambilaya Ya-Ya which was made into a stage show and later a movie. During the war Sam was chief of the Paris bureau of a wire service. I remember hearing a CBS news analyst call him “an able and well-informed reporter.” For a while he was married to Joel Craig, a New Orleans beauty (Joel’s voice, a throaty society voice richened, it always seemed to me, cured, by good whisky — took on for me the same larger-than-life plenitude as Sam himself). They lived first in the Quarter and then in the Mexican state of Chiapas, where I visited them in 1954. There he wrote a novel called The Honored and the Dishonored which dealt, according to the dust jacket, with “the problem of evil and the essential loneliness of man.” Sam broke his leg in search of some ruins in a remote district and nearly died before some Indians found the two of them. He and Joel were very fond of each other and liked to joke in a way that at first seemed easy-going. For example, Sam liked to say that Joel was just the least little bit pregnant, and before they were married Joel liked to say that she was sick and tired of being Sam’s bawd; I liked hearing her say bawd in that big caramel voice. She liked to call me Leftenant: “Leftenant, it has at long last dawned on me what it is about you that attracts me.” “What?” I asked, shifting around uneasily. “You’ve got dignidad, Leftenant.” It was not a good thing to say because thereafter I could never say or do anything without a consciousness of my dignity. When I visited them in Mexico, each spoke highly of the other and in the other’s presence, which was slightly embarrassing. “He’s quite a guy,” Joel told me. “Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out? He said: Queenie, I think I’m going to pass out and before I do, I’m going to give you a piece of advice — God, I thought he was going to die and knew and was telling me what to do with his book — and he said quite solemnly: Queenie, always stick to Bach and the early Italians — and passed out cold as a mackerel. And by God, it’s not bad advice.” Sam would say of Joel: “She’s a fine girl. Always cherish your woman, Binx.” I told him I would. That summer I had much to thank him for. At the City College of Mexico I had met this girl from U.C.L.A. named Pat Pabst and she had come down with me to Chiapas. “Always cherish your woman,” Sam told me and stomped around in very good style with his cane. I looked over at Pat Pabst who, I knew, was in Mexico looking for the Real Right Thing. And here it was: old Sam, a regular bear of a writer with his black Beethoven face, pushing himself around with a stoic sort of gracefulness; and I in my rucksack and with just the hint of an old Virginian voice. It was all her little California heart desired. She clave to me for dear life. After leaving Mexico — he had been overtaken by nostalgia, the characteristic mood of repetition — Sam returned to Feliciana where he wrote a nostalgic book called Happy Land which was commended in the reviews as a nice blend of a moderate attitude toward the race question and a conservative affection for the values of the agrarian South. An earlier book, called Curse upon the Land, which the dust jacket described as “an impassioned plea for tolerance and understanding,” had not been well received in Feliciana. Now and then Sam turns up in New Orleans on a lecture tour and visits my aunt and horses around with Kate and me. We enjoy seeing him. He calls me Brother Andy and Kate Miss Ruby.

“We’ve got to get Kate out of here and to do it, I need your help.”

Sam comes bursting through Kate’s new shutters and starts pacing up and down the tiny courtyard where I sit hunched over and bemused by the malaise. I notice that Kate has begun peeling plaster from the wall of the basement, exposing more plantation brick. “Here’s the story. She’s going to New York and you’re going to take her there. Take her there today and wait for me — I’ll be back in ten days. She is to see Etienne Suë—you know who he is: one of those fabulous continental geniuses who is as well known for his work in Knossan antiquities as his clinical researches. The man is chronically ill himself and sees no more than a handful of patients, but he’ll see Kate. I’ve already called him. But here is the master stroke. I’ve already made arrangements for her to stay with the Princess.”

“The Princess?”

There is a noise above us. I blink up into the thin sunlight. Bessie Coe — so called to distinguish her from Bessie Baham the laundress — a speckle-faced Negress with a white lip, leans out from the servants’ walk to shake a mop. Since she is kitchen help, she can allow herself to greet me in the old style. “Mist Binx,” she declares hoarsely, hollering it out over my head to the neighborhood in a burlesque of a greeting yet good-naturedly and even inviting me to join in the burlesque.

“She is seventy five years old, a little bitty dried-up old thing and next to Em the most charming, the wittiest and the wisest woman I ever knew. She has been of more service to us in the U.N. than the entire American delegation. Her place is always electric with excitement. Kate — who in my opinion is already a great lady — would find herself for the first time. The long and the short of it is she needs a companion. The very night I left New York she said to me: now you listen here — while you are in your American South, you make it your business to find me a nice Southern girl — you know the kind I have in mind. Of course the kind she had in mind is the Southerner who is so curiously like the old-style Russian gentry. I thought no more about it until last night as I watched Kate go up the steps. My God, I said, there goes Natasha Rostov. Have you ever noticed it?”

“Natasha?” I say blinking. “What has happened? Has something happened to Kate?”

“I am not sure what happened.” Sam places heel to toe and, holding his elbow in his hand and his arm straight up and down in front of him — himself gathered to a point, aimed — puffs a cigarette. “Certainly there was nothing wrong when Kate went to bed at two o’clock this morning. On the contrary. She was exalted. We had had, she and I and Em, four hours of the best talk I ever had anywhere. She was the most fascinating woman in New Orleans and she damn well knew it.”

(Aye, sweet Kate, and I know too. I know your old upside-down trick: when all is lost, when they despair of you, then it is, at this darkest hour, that you emerge as the gorgeous one.)

“Emily and I talked for a little while longer and went up to bed. It was not later than two thirty. At four o’clock something woke me. What it was I can’t for the life of me recall but I awoke with the most importunate sense of something wrong. I went into the hall. There was a light under Kate’s door but I heard nothing. So I went back to bed and slept until eight.” Sam speaks in a perfunctory voice, listing items rapidly and accurately in a professional style. “When Kate had not appeared for breakfast by ten o’clock, Emily sent Mercer up with a tray. Meanwhile Jules had left for church. Mercer knocked at Kate’s door and called out loudly enough to be heard downstairs and received no answer. Now Emily was visibly alarmed and asked me to come up with her. For ten minutes we knocked and called (do you know how very long ten minutes is?). So what the hell, I kicked the door down. Kate was in bed and deeply asleep, it seemed to me. But her breathing was quite shallow and there was a bottle of capsules open on the table. But it was by no means empty — I judge that it was just over one third filled. Anyhow, Emily could not wake her up. Whereupon she, Emily, became extremely agitated and asked me to call Dr Mink. By the time he arrived, of course, Kate had waked up and was lashing out with a particularly malevolent and drunken sort of violence. Toward Emily she exhibited a cold fury which was actually frightening. When she told us to get the hell out, I can assure you that I obeyed at once. Dr Mink lavaged her stomach and gave her a stimulant—” Sam looks at his watch, “—that was an hour ago. Now that fellow has pretty good nerve. He wouldn’t put her in the hospital which would have been the cagey thing to do. Emily asked him what he proposed to do. He said Kate had promised to see him Monday and that was good enough for him — and as for the pentobarbital, no one could really keep anybody else from swallowing any number any time he wanted to. He’s a great admirer of Suë, by the way. We did manage to get the bottle, however—”

“Sam!” My aunt’s voice, low and rich in overtones of meaning, comes down to us.

Sam looks down past his arm to see that his heel is aligned properly. I start up nervously, uneasy that Sam might have missed the warning in my aunt’s voice.

“One more thing. Oscar and Edna are here. Now wouldn’t you know they’d be? But perhaps it is just as well. For it is an awkward moment for Kate. The trick is for her to show herself. Here’s what we hit upon: you show up, knowing nothing, come looking for her and fetch her down to dinner.”

My aunt catches my eye from the dining room and I go in to kiss her and speak to the Oscar Bollings. Things seem calm enough. Uncle Jules is laughing with Aunt Edna about something. Though Aunt Emily is abstracted, temple propped on three fingers, she speaks cheerfully, and I can’t help but wonder if Sam’s story is not exaggerated. Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna have come down from Feliciana Parish for Carnival and the Spring Pilgrimage, an annual tour of old houses and patios. Aunt Edna is a handsome stoutish woman with snapping black eyes and a near-mustache. Though she is at least sixty five, her hair is still black and loops back over her ears in a way that makes me think of “raven tresses.” Uncle Oscar is all dressed up, but you can tell he is countrified. The fourth of the elder Bolling brothers, he elected to be neither soldier nor lawyer nor doctor but storekeeper — that is, until his recent success in exhibiting Lynwood to tourists at a dollar a head. In certain quirks of expression and waggings of head, he is startlingly like Judge Anse, but there is a flattening of the nosebridge and a softening of the forehead and a giddy light-blue amiability about the eyes. Upon the death of the brothers and the emigration of the girls, Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna fell heir to the old place. It is not much of a showplace, to be honest (it never occurred to anyone to give it a name until Aunt Edna thought of Lynwood), being a big old rambling pile and having no special virtue save only its deep verandas and its avenue of oaks. But Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna managed to fix it up wonderfully well and even win a permanent place on the Azalea Trail. Strangely enough, it was not Uncle Oscar, the old settler, who restored the house in the best Natchez style — adding a covered walk to the outkitchen, serving mint juleps where the Bollings had never drunk anything but toddies, and even dressing up poor old Shad in a Seagram’s butler suit and putting him out on the highway with a dinner bell — it was not Uncle Oscar but Aunt Edna, the druggist’s daughter from upstate New York whom Uncle Oscar met and married while she was training at Plattsburg in the first world war.

When I bend to kiss her, my aunt gives me no sign whatever, beyond her usual gray look and the usual two quick pats on the cheek — no sign, unless it is a certain depth of irony, a gray under gray.

There comes to me in the ascent a brief annunciatory syllable in the throat stopped in the scrape of a chair as if, having signaled me and repenting of it, it had then to pass itself off as but one of the small day noises of the house. Off the landing is a dark little mezzanine arranged as a room of furniture. It is a place one passes twenty times a day and no more thinks of entering than of entering a picture, nor even of looking at, but having entered, enters with all the oddness of entering a picture, a tableau in depth wherein space is untenanted and wherefrom the view of the house, the hall and dining room below, seems at once privileged and strange. Kate is there in the shadows. She sits beside the porcelain fireplace with its glassed-in cases of medals and tufted Bohemian slippers and gold-encrusted crystal and the ambrotype of Captain Alex Bolling of the 2nd Louisiana Infantry not merely locked in but sealed in forever by glass set into the wall, an immurement which used to provoke in me the liveliest speculation by virtue of its very permanence — to think of the little objects closeted away forever in the same sequestered air of 1938—Kate sits, herself exempt from the needs and necessaries of all passers-by, and holds her arms in her hands and cheerfully makes room for me in the love seat. Not until later do I think why it is she looks so well: she is all dressed up, for the first time since Christmas. It is the scent of her perfume, her nylon-whispering legs, the white dress against her dark skin, a proper dress fluted and flounced and now gathered by her and folded away from me.

The angle is such that we can see the dining room and its company, except my aunt. There is only her right wrist and hand curving out and under the chair arm to rub the lion’s face with its cloven leprous nose.

“Tell Mother that I am fine and that I will be down later. I am not hungry.” Then I will indeed be fine, Kate as good as says. It is her sense of their waiting upon her and that alone that intrudes itself into her mezzanine.

When I return (my aunt received me with a single grave nod), Kate is smoking, inhaling deeply and blowing plumes of lung smoke into the air. Her knees are crossed and she swings her leg and holds her Zippo and pack in her lap.

“Have you seen Sam?” she asks me.

“Yes.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That you had a bad night and that Merle had been here.” I tell her the truth because I have not the wit to tell her anything else. Kate knows it: I am the not-quite-bright one whom grown-ups take aside to question.

“Hm. Do you want to know the truth? I had a very good night. Possibly the best night of my life.”

Sam touches knife to goblet. As is his custom, he speaks down the table to my aunt but with a consciousness of the others as listeners-in. At his right, Uncle Jules is content to listen in and look on with an expression of almost besotted amiability. This is one of Em’s “dinners,” Sam is speaking at the Forum, Em is president. Long ago he, Uncle Jules, and with the same shrewdness with which he recognizes signs of corporate illness and corporate health, made out a certain pattern in Emily’s lectures. Persons of the most advanced views on every subject and of the most exquisite sensitivity to minorities (except Catholics, but this did not bother Uncle Jules), they were nevertheless observed by him to observe the same taboos and celebrate the same rites. Not so Uncle Oscar. Sitting there rared back and gazing up at the chandelier, he too is aware that he has fallen in with pretty high-flown company, but he will discover no such thing; any moment now he will violate a taboo and blaspheme a rite by getting off on niggers, Mrs Roosevelt, dagos and Jews, and all in the same breath. But Uncle Jules will neither trespass nor be trespassed upon. His armor is his unseriousness. It would never occur to him to take their, Aunt Emily’s lecturers’, irreverent sallies as an assault upon his own deep dumb convictions. The worst they can do is live up to themselves, behave just as he has come to expect “Em’s people” to behave.

Sam tolls his goblet. “Last Thursday, Em, Eric got back from Geneva and I met him at the airport. His face was white as chalk—”

Kate, who has been sitting back and peering down her cheek at Sam like a theatergoer in the balcony, begins smoothing out the cellophane of her cigarette pack.

“We talked like that last night. I was very happy—”

Aunt Edna leans out to intercept Sam’s monologue. She has not yet caught on to Sam’s way of talking, so she is upset. “But what can a person do?”—and she actually wrings her hands. Aunt Edna is as nice as can be, but she is one of our kinfolks I avoid. Her soul is in her eyes and when we meet, she shoots me deep theosophical soul-glances, and though I shoot them back and am quite sympathetic on the whole, it is an uneasy business.

“Sam is a very gentle person and a very kind person,” says Kate.

“I know.”

“He is very fond of you. Are you going to hear his lecture?”

“I would like to, but I have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to Chicago.”

“What for?”

“Business.”

“We had a wonderful evening, but when I went to bed, I was somewhat apprehensive. You know how you have to guard against Sam’s flights?”

“Yes.”

“Whatever goes up must come down and I was ten miles high.”

“I know.”

“But I was on guard and I did not fall. I went straight to bed and to sleep. Then some hours later I awoke suddenly. There was nothing wrong. I was wide awake and completely alert. I thought about your proposal and it seemed to me that it might be possible after all. If only I did not ruin everything.”

Mercer passes a dish of sweet potatoes. At each place he stops breathing, head thrown back and eyes popping out, then lets out his breath with a strangling sound.

Uncle Oscar has hiked an arm back over his chair and says something to Sam. I can’t make it out but I recognize the voice, the easy garrulity wheezing off into a laughter which solicits your agreement and threatens reprisal if you withhold it. Yet I used to like Uncle Oscar’s store in Feliciana — to hear his voice now is almost to smell the floorboards soured by wet Growena. But even then, to be there and to be solicited by him was a perilous thing. It was a perilous thing to see him do battle in the deadly arena of a country store, see him gird himself to annihilate his opponent and, to insure himself against counterattack, go wheezing off into easy laughter and so claim the victory.

“Oscar!” cries Aunt Edna, pretending to be in a buzzing good humor. Already she can hear Sam in Dallas: “I heard a delightful commentary on the mind of the South last week—” Leaning over, she gives Uncle Oscar a furious affectionate pat which signifies that he is a good fellow and we all love him. It also signifies that he can shut up.

“There was no question of sleep,” says Kate. “I came downstairs and found one of Father’s mysteries and went back to bed and read the whole thing. It was about some people in Los Angeles. The house was dark and still and once in a while a boat whistle blew on the river. I saw how my life could be — living as a neat little person like Delia Street, doing my stockings every night. But then I remembered what happened in Memphis. Did you know I lived in Memphis once?”

My aunt pays as little attention to Uncle Oscar as to Sam. Her thumbnail methodically combs the grooves which represent the lion’s mane.

“It was in 1951—you were in the army. Father and I were warring over politics. Come to think of it, I might actually have been kicked out of the house. Anyhow Mother suggested it might be a good thing if I went to visit an old classmate of hers in Memphis, a lady named Mrs Boykin Lamar. She was really quite a person, had sung in the Civic Opera in New York and wrote quite a funny book about her travels in Europe as a girl. They were as kind to me as anyone could be. But no one could think of anything to say. Night after night we sat there playing operas on the phonograph and dreading the moment when the end came and someone had to say something. I became so nervous that one night I slipped on the hearth and fell into the fire. Can you believe it was a relief to suffer extreme physical pain? Hell couldn’t be fire — there are worse things than fire. I moved to a hotel and for a while I was all right. I had a job doing case work and I had plenty of dates. But after a while the room began to reproach me. When I came home from work every afternoon, the sun would be setting across the river in Arkansas and every day the yellow light became sadder and sadder. And Arkansas over there in the yellow West — O my God, you have no idea how sad it looked. One afternoon I packed my suitcase and caught the Illinois Central for home.”

Sam is spieling in pretty good style, all the while ironing out the tablecloth into shallow gutters with the blade of his knife. A new prefatory note creeps into his voice. It is like a symphony when the “good” part is coming, and I know that Sam is working up to one of his stories. These stories of Sam used to arouse in me an appreciation so keen and pleasurable that it bordered on the irritable. On the dark porch in Feliciana he told us once of the time when he made a journey up the headwaters of the Orinoco and caught a fever and lay ill for weeks. One night he heard an incredibly beautiful voice sing the whole of Winterreise. He was sure it was delirium until the next morning when he met the singer, an Austrian engineer who sang lieder better than Lotte Lehmann, etc. When he finished I was practically beside myself with irritable pleasure and became angry with the others because they were not sufficiently moved by the experience.

“Emily, do you remember the night we saw There Shall Be No Night and you were so moved that you insisted on walking all the way back to the Carlyle?”

But Kate pays no attention. She holds her feathered thumb to the light and inspects it minutely. “Last night everything was fine until I finished the book. Then it became a matter of waiting. What next, I thought. I began to get a little scared — for the first time I had the feeling of coming to the end of my rope. I became aware of my own breathing. Things began to slip a little. I fixed myself a little drink and took two nembutals and waited for the lift.”

It is the first time she has spoken of her capsules. My simplemindedness serves her well.

“You know what happened then? What did Sam say? Never mind. Did you see Merle? No? Hm. What happened was the most trivial thing imaginable, nothing grand at all, though I would like to think it was. I took six or eight capsules altogether. I knew that wouldn’t kill me. My Lord, I didn’t want to die — not at that moment. I only wanted to — break out, or off, off dead center — Listen. Isn’t it true that the only happy men are wounded men? Admit it! Isn’t that the truth?” She breaks off and goes off into a fit of yawning. “I felt so queer. Everything seemed so — no ’count somehow, you know?” She swings her foot and hums a little tune. “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember too well. How strange. I’ve always remembered every little thing.”

“—and you spoke to me for the first time of your messianic hopes?” Sam smiles at my aunt. In Feliciana we used to speculate on the new messiah, the scientist-philosopher-mystic who would come striding through the ruins with the Gita in one hand and a Geiger counter in the other. But today Sam miscalculates. My aunt says nothing. The thumbnail goes on combing the lion’s mane.

Dinner over, Uncle Oscar waits in the dining room until the others have left, then seizes his scrotum and gives his leg a good shake.

I rise unsteadily, sleepy all at once to the point of drunkenness.

“Wait.” Kate takes my arm urgently in both hands. “I am going with you.”

“All right. But first I think I’ll take a little nap on the porch.”

“I mean to Chicago.”

“Chicago?”

“Yes. Do you mind if I go?”

“No.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Could you change it to tonight and get two tickets on the train?”

“Why the train?” I begin to realize how little I have slept during the past week.

“I’ll tell you what. You go lie down and I’ll take care of it.”

“All right.”

“After Chicago do you think there is a possibility we might take a trip out west and stay for a while in some little town like Modesto or Fresno?”

“It is possible.”

“I’ll fix everything.” She sounds very happy. “Do you have any money?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me.”

It is a matter for astonishment, I think drowsily in the hammock, that Kate should act with such dispatch — out she came, heels popping, arm in arm with her stepmother, snapped her purse and with Sam looking on, somewhat gloomily it struck me, off she went in her stiff little Plymouth — and then I think why. It is trains. When it comes to a trip, to the plain business of going, just stepping up into the Pullman and gliding out of town of an evening, she is as swift and remorseless as Delia Street.

Now later, on Prytania, Uncle Oscar hands Aunt Edna into the station wagon — they are bound for their Patio-by-Candlelight tour — and goes huffing around to his door, rared back and with one hand pressed into his side. Sam tiptoes to the screen. “Well now look ahere, Brother Andy. Ain’t that the Kingfish and Madame Queen? Sho ’tis.”

In this vertigo of exhaustion, laughter must be guarded against like retching.

“Brother Andy, is you getting much?”

“No.” My stomach further obliges Sam with a last despairing heave. Oh Lord.

Later there seems to come into my hand — and with it some instructions from Sam of which there is no more to be remembered than that they were delivered in the tone of one of my aunt’s grand therapeutic schemes — a squarish bottle, warmed by Sam’s body and known to my fingers through the ridge of glass left by the mold and the apothecary symbol oz or

SURE ENOUGH, THREE hours later we are rocking along an uneven roadbed through the heart of the Ponchitoula swamp.

No sooner do we open the heavy door of Sieur Iberville and enter the steel corridor with its gelid hush and the stray voices from open compartments and the dark smell of going high in the nostrils — than the last ten years of my life take on the shadowy aspect of a sojourn between train rides. It was ten years ago that I last rode a train, from San Francisco to New Orleans, and so ten years since I last enjoyed the peculiar gnosis of trains, stood on the eminence from which there is revealed both the sorry litter of the past and the future bright and simple as can be, and the going itself, one’s privileged progress through the world. But trains have changed. Gone are the uppers and lowers, partitions and cranks, and the green velour; only the porter remains, the same man, I think, a black man with palms the color of shrimp and a neck swollen with dislike. Our roomettes turn out to be little coffins for a single person. From time to time, I notice, people in roomettes stick their heads out into the corridor for some sight of human kind.

Kate is affected by the peculiar dispensation of trains. Her gray jacket comes just short of her wide hips and the tight skirt curves under her in a nice play on vulgarity. On the way to the observation car she pulls me into the platform of the vestibule and gives me a kiss, grabbing me under the coat like a waitress. In celebration of Mardi Gras, she has made up her eyes with a sparkle of mascara and now she looks up at me with a black spiky look.

“Are we going to live in Modesto?”

“Sure,” I say, uneasy at her playfulness. She is not as well as she makes out. She is not safe on a train after all; it is rather that by a kind of bravado she can skim along in the very face of the danger.

The observation car is crowded, but we find seats together on a sofa where I am jammed against a fellow reading a newspaper. We glide through the cottages of Carrollton cutting off back yards in odd trapezoids, then through the country clubs and cemeteries of Metaire. In the gathering dusk the cemeteries look at first like cities, with their rows of white vaults, some two- and three-storied and forming flats and tenements, and the tiny streets and corners and curbs and even plots of lawn, all of such a proportion that in the very instant of being mistaken and from the eye’s own necessity, they set themselves off into the distance like a city seen from far away. Now in the suburbs we ride at a witch’s level above the gravelly roofs.

It gradually forces itself upon me that a man across the aisle is looking at me with a strange insistence. Kate nudges me. It is Sidney Gross and his wife, beyond a doubt bound also for the convention. The son of Sidney Gross of Danziger and Gross, Sidney is a short fresh-faced crinkle-haired boy with the bright beamish look Southern Jews sometimes have. There has always been a special cordiality between us. He married a pretty Mississippi girl; she, unlike Sidney, is wary of such encounters — she would know which of us spoke first at out last encounter — so she casts sleepy looks right past us, pausing, despite herself on Kate’s white face and black spiky eyes. But Sidney hunches over toward us, beaming, a stalwart little pony back with his head well set on his shoulders and his small ears lying flat.

“Well well well. Trader Jack. So you slipped up on your plane reservations too.”

“Hello, Sidney, Margot. This is Kate Cutrer.”

Margot becomes very friendly, in the gossipy style of the Mississippi Delta.

“So you forgot about it being Mardi Gras and couldn’t get a plane.”

“No, we like the train.”

Sidney is excited, not by the trip as I am, but by the convention. Leaning across the aisle with a program rolled up in his hand, he explains that he is scheduled for a panel on tax relief for bond funds. “What about you?”

“I think I am taking part in something called a Cracker Barrel Session.”

“You’ll like it. Everybody talks right off the top of their head. You can take your coat off, get up and stretch. Anything. Last year we had this comical character from Georgia.” Sidney casts about for some way of conveying just how comical and failing, passes on without minding. “What a character. Extremely comical. What’s the topic?”

“Competing with the variable endowments.”

“Oh yass,” says Sidney with a wry look of our trade. “I don’t worry about it.” He slides the cylinder of paper to and fro. “Do you?”

“No.”

Sidney suggests a bridge game, but Kate begs off. The Grosses move to a table in the corner and start playing gin rummy.

Kate, who has been fumbling in her purse, becomes still. I feel her eyes on my face.

“Do you have my capsules?”

“What?”

“My capsules.”

“Why yes, I do. I forgot that I had them.”

Not taking her eyes from my face, she receives the bottle, puts it in her purse, snaps it.

“That’s not like you.”

“I didn’t take them.”

“Who did?”

“Sam gave them to me. It was while I was in the hammock. I hardly remember it.”

“He took them from my purse?”

“I don’t know.”

For a long moment she sits, hands in her lap, fingers curling up and stirring a little. Then abruptly she rises and leaves. When she returns, her face is scrubbed and pale, the moisture still dark at the roots of her hair. What has upset her is not the incident of the capsules but meeting the Grosses. It spoils everything, this prospect of making pleasant talk, of having a delightful time, as Sidney would put it (“There we were moping over missing the plane, when Jack Bolling shows up and we have ourselves a ball”) — when we might have gone rocking up through dark old Mississippi alone together in the midst of strangers. Still she is better. Perhaps it is her reviving hope of losing the Grosses to gin rummy or perhaps it is the first secret promise of the chemicals entering her blood.

Now, picking up speed, we gain the swamp. Kate and I sway against each other and watch the headlights of the cars on the swamp road, winking through the moss like big yellow lightning bugs.

The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes.

The man next to me is getting off in St Louis. When the conductor comes to collect our tickets, he surrenders a stub: he is going home. His suit is good. He sits with his legs crossed, one well-clad haunch riding up like a ham, his top leg held out at an obtuse angle by the muscle of his calf. His brown hair is youthful (he himself is thirty-eight or forty) and makes a cowlick in front. With the cowlick and the black eyeglasses he looks quite a bit like the actor Gary Merrill and has the same certified permission to occupy pleasant space with his pleasant self. In ruddy good health, he muffles a hearty belch in a handkerchief. This very evening, no doubt, he has had an excellent meal at Galatoire’s, and the blood of his portal vein bears away a golden harvest of nutrient globules. When he first goes through his paper, he opens it like a book and I have no choice but to read the left page with him. We pause at an advertisement of a Bourbon Street nightclub which is a picture of a dancer with an oiled body. Her triceps arch forward like a mare’s. For a second we gaze heavy-lidded and pass on. Now he finds what he wants and folds his paper once, twice and again, into a neat packet exactly two columns wide, like a subway rider in New York. Propping it against his knee, he takes out a slender gold pencil, makes a deft one-handed adjustment, and underlines several sentences with straight black lines (he is used to underlining). Dreaming at his shoulder, I can make out no more than

In order to deepen and enrich the marital—

It is a counseling column which I too read faithfully.

The train sways through the swamp. The St Louisan, breathing powerfully through the stiff hairs of his nose, succeeds in sitting in such a manner, tilted over on his right hip and propped against himself, that his thigh forms a secure writing platform for the packet.

The voices in the car become fretful. It begins to seem that the passengers have ridden together for a long time and have developed secret understandings and old grudges. They speak crossly and elliptically to each other.

Staying awake is a kind of sickness and sleep is forever guarded against by a dizzy dutiful alertness. Waking wide-eyed dreams come as fitfully as swampfire.

Dr and Mrs Bob Dean autograph copies of their book Technique in Marriage in a Canal Street department store. A pair of beauties. I must have come in all the way from Gentilly, for I stand jammed against a table which supports a pyramid of books. I cannot take my eyes from the Deans: an oldish couple but still handsome and both, rather strangely, heavily freckled. As they wait for the starting time, they are jolly with each other and swap banter in the professional style of show people (I believe these preliminaries are called the warm-up). “No, we never argue,” says Bob Dean. “Because whenever an argument starts, we consult the chapter I wrote on arguments.” “No, dear,” says Jackie Dean. “It was I who wrote the chapter—” etc. Everyone laughs. I notice that nearly all the crowd jamming against me are women, firm middle-aged one-fifty pounders. Under drooping lids I watch the Deans, peculiarly affected by their routine which is staged so effortlessly that during the exchange of quips, they are free to cast business-like looks about them as if no one were present. But when they get down to business, they become as sober as Doukhobors and effuse an air of dedicated almost evangelical helpfulness. A copy of the book lies open on the table. I read: “Now with a tender regard for your partner remove your hand from the nipple and gently manipulate—” It is impossible not to imagine them at their researches, as solemn as a pair of brontosauruses, their heavy old freckled limbs about each other, hands probing skillfully for sensitive zones, pigmented areolas, out-of-the-way mucous glands, dormant vascular nexuses. A wave of prickling passes over me such as I have never experienced before.

My head, nodding like a daffodil, falls a good three inches toward the St Louisan before it jerks itself up. Kate sits shivering against me, but the St Louisan is as warm and solid as roast beef. As the train rocks along on its unique voyage through space-time, thousands of tiny thing-events bombard us like cosmic particles. Lying in a ditch outside is a scrap of newspaper with the date May 3, 1954. My Geiger counter clicks away like a teletype. But no one else seems to notice. Everyone is buried in his magazine. Kate is shaking like a leaf because she longs to be an anyone who is anywhere and she cannot.

The St Louisan reads a headline

SCIENTIST PREDICTS FUTURE IF

NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT MISUSED

Out comes the gold pencil to make a neat black box. After reading for a moment he comes back to the beginning and is about to make a second concentric box, thinks better of it, takes from his pocket a silver knife, undoes the scissors and clips the whole article, folds it and places it in his wallet. It is impossible to make out any of the underlined passages except the phrase: “the gradual convergence of physical science and social science.”

A very good phrase. I have to admire the St Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed. I no longer eat and sleep regularly or write philosophical notes in my notebook and my fingernails are dirty. The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly. As late as a week ago, such a phrase as “hopefully awaiting the gradual convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences” would have provoked no more than an ironic tingle or two at the back of my neck. Now it howls through the Ponchitoula Swamp, the very sound and soul of despair.

Kate has stopped shivering and when she lights up and starts smoking, I am certain she is better. But I am mistaken. “Oooh,” she says in a perfunctory workaday voice and starts forward again. The car lurches and throws her against Sidney’s chair; there the train holds her fast: for three seconds she might be taken for a rapt onlooker of the gin-rummy game. Sidney rocks the deck against the polished wood until the cards are perfectly aligned. The gold ring on his little finger seems to serve as a device, a neat little fastening by means of which his hand movements are harnessed and made trim.

Half an hour passes and Kate does not return. I find her in her roomette, arms folded and face turned to the dark glass. We sit knee to knee.

“Are you all right?”

She nods slowly to the window, but her cheek is against me. Outside a square of yellow light flees along an embankment, falls away to the woods and fields, comes roaring back good as new. Suddenly a perky head pops up. Kate is leaning forward hugging herself.

“I am all right. I am never too bad with you.”

“Why?”

“No thanks to you. On the contrary. The others are much more sympathetic than you, especially Mother and Sam.”

“What about Merle?”

“Merle! Listen, with Merle I could break wind and he would give me that same quick congratulatory look. But you. You’re nuttier than I am. One look at you and I have to laugh. Do you think that is sufficient ground for marriage?”

“As good as any. Better than love.”

“Love! What do you know about love?”

“I didn’t say I knew anything about it.”

She is back at her window, moving her hand to see it move in the flying yellow square. We hunch up knee to knee and nose to nose like the two devils on the Rorschach card. Something glitters in the corner of her eye. Surely not a tear.

“Quite a Carnival. Two proposals in one Mardi Gras.”

“Who else?”

“Sam.”

“No kidding.”

“No kidding. And I’ll tell you something else. Sam is quite a person behind that façade. An essentially lonely person.”

“I know.”

“You’re worse than Sam.” She is angry.

“How?”

“Sam is a schemer. He also likes me. He knows that someday I will be quite rich. But he also likes me. That isn’t so bad. Scheming is human. You have to be human to be a schemer. Whenever I see through one of Sam’s little schemes, I feel a sensation of warmth. Ah ha, think I to myself, so it must have been in the world once — men and women wanting something badly and scheming away like beavers. But you—”

“Yes?”

“You’re like me. So let us not deceive one another.”

Her voice is steadier. Perhaps it is the gentle motion of the train with which we nod ever so slightly, yes, yes, yes.

She says: “Can’t you see that for us it is much too late for such ingenious little schemes?”

“As marrying?”

“The only way you could carry it off is as another one of your ingenious little researches. Admit it.”

“Then why not do it?”

“You remind me of a prisoner in the death house who takes a wry pleasure in doing things like registering to vote. Come to think of it, all your gaiety and good spirits have the same death house quality. No thanks. I’ve had enough of your death house pranks.”

“What is there to lose?”

“Can’t you see that after what happened last night, it is no use. I can’t play games now. But don’t you worry. I’m not going to swallow all the pills at once. Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”

“Very well. Lose hope or not. Be afraid or not. But marry me anyhow, and we can still walk abroad on a summer night, hope or no hope, shivering or not, and see a show and eat some oysters down on Magazine.”

“No no.”

“I don’t understand—”

“You’re right. You don’t understand. It is not some one thing, as you think. It is everything. It is all so monstrous.”

“What is monstrous?”

“I told you,” she says irritably. “Everything. I’m not up to it. Having a little hubby — you would be hubby, dearest Binx, and that is ridiculous — did I hurt your feelings? Seeing hubby off in the morning, having lunch with the girls, getting tight at Eddie’s and Nell’s house and having a little humbug with somebody else’s hubby, wearing my little diaphragm and raising my two lovely boys and worrying for the next twenty years about whether they will make Princeton.”

“I told you we would live in Gentilly. Or Modesto.”

“I was being ingenious like you.”

“Do you want to live like Sam and Joel?”

“Binx Binx. You’re just like your aunt. When I told her how I felt, she said to me: Katherine, you’re perfectly right. Don’t ever lose your ideals and your enthusiasm for ideas — she thought I was talking about something literary or political or Great Books, for God’s sake. I thought to myself: is that what I’m doing? — and ran out and took four pills. Incidentally they’re all wrong about that. They all think any minute I’m going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself — ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide. And that reminds me.” And off she goes down the steel corridor, one hand held palm out to the wall.

None of this is new, of course. I do not, to tell the truth, pay too much attention to what she says. It is her voice that tells me how she is. Now she speaks in her “bold” tone and since she appears more composed, to the point of being cheerful, than her words might indicate, I am not seriously concerned about her.

But the roomette soon becomes suffocating and, not feeling up to talking business with Sidney Gross, I head in the opposite direction, stop in the first vestibule and have a long drink from my Mardi Gras bottle. We must be pulling into Jackson. The train screeches slowly around a curve and through the back of town. Kate comes out and stands beside me without a word. She smells of soap and seems in vaulting good spirits.

“Have a drink?”

“Do you remember going up to Baton Rouge on the train to see the football games?”

“Sure.” Balancing there, her oval face aglow in the dark vestibule, hair combed flat on her head and down into the collar of her suit, she looks like a college girl. She drinks, pressing fingers to her throat. “Lord, how beautiful.”

The train has stopped and our car stands high in the air, squarely above a city street. The nearly full moon swims through streaming ragtags of cloud and sheds a brilliant light on the Capitol dome and the spanking new glass-and-steel office buildings and the empty street with its glittering streetcar track. Not a soul is in sight. Far away, beyond the wings of the Capitol building stretch the dark tree-covered hills and the twinkling lights of the town. By some trick of moonlight the city seems white as snow and never-tenanted; it sleeps away on its hilltop like the holy city of Zion.

Kate shakes her head slowly in the rapt way she got from her stepmother. I try to steer her away from beauty. Beauty is a whore.

“You see that building yonder? That’s Southern Life & Accident. If you had invested a hundred dollars in 1942, you’d now be worth twenty five thousand. Your father bought a good deal of the original stock.” Money is a better god than beauty.

“You don’t know what I mean,” she cries in the same soft rapture.

I know what she means all right. But I know something she doesn’t know. Money is a good counterpoise to beauty. Beauty, the quest of beauty alone, is a whoredom. Ten years ago I pursued beauty and gave no thought to money. I listened to the lovely tunes of Mahler and felt a sickness in my very soul. Now I pursue money and on the whole feel better.

“I see how I could live in a city!” Kate cries. She turns to face me and clasps her hands behind my waist.

“How?”

“Only one way. By your telling me what to do. It is as simple as that. Why didn’t I see it before?”

“That I should tell you what to do?”

“Yes. It may not be the noblest way of living, but it is one way. It is my way! Oh dear sweet old Binx, what a joy it is to discover at last what one is. It doesn’t matter what you are as long as you know!”

“What are you?”

“I’ll gladly tell you because I just found out and I never want to forget. Please don’t let me forget. I am a religious person.”

“How is that?”

“Don’t you see? What I want is to believe in someone completely and then do what he wants me to do. If God were to tell me: Kate, here is what I want you to do; you get off this train right now and go over there to that corner by the Southern Life and Accident Insurance Company and stand there for the rest of your life and speak kindly to people — you think I would not do it? You think I would not be the happiest girl in Jackson, Mississippi? I would.”

I have a drink and look at her corner. The moonlight seems palpable, a dense pure matrix in which is embedded curbstone and building alike.

She takes the bottle. “Will you tell me what to do?”

“Sure.”

“You can do it because you are not religious. God is not religious. You are the unmoved mover. You don’t need God or anyone else — no credit to you, unless it is a credit to be the most self-centered person alive. I don’t know whether I love you, but I believe in you and I will do what you tell me. Now if I marry you, will you tell me: Kate, this morning do such and such, and if we have to go to a party, will you tell me: Kate, stand right there and have three drinks and talk to so and so? Will you?”

“Sure.”

Kate locks her arms around my chest, wrist in hand, and gives me a passionate kiss.

Later, just as I knew it would, her precious beauty leaves her flat and she is frightened. Another trip to the washroom and now she stands swaying against me as Sieur Iberville rocks along through north Mississippi. We leave spring behind. The moon hangs westering and yellow over winter fields as blackened and ancient and haunted as battlegrounds.

“Oh oh oh,” Kate moans and clings to me. “I feel awful. Let’s go to your roomette.”

“It’s been made up.”

“Then we’ll lie down.”

We have to lie down: the door opens onto the bed. Feeling tender toward her, I embrace her and tell her that I love her.

“Oh no,” says Kate and takes hold of me coarsely. “None of that, bucko.”

“None of what?”

“No love, please.”

I misunderstand her and pull away.

“No no. Don’t leave either,” she says, holding me and watching me still.

“All right.”

“Just don’t speak to me of love, bucko.”

“All right, but don’t call me bucko.”

Her black spiky eyes fall full upon me, but not quite seeing, I think. Propped on one hand, she bites her lip and lets the other fall on me heavily, as if I were an old buddy. “I’ll tell you something.”

“What?”

“The other day I said to Merle.” Again the hand falls heavily and takes hold of me. “What would you say to me having a little fling? He misunderstood me and gave me the business about a mature and tender relation between adults etcetera etcetera — you know. I said, no no, Merle, you got it wrong. I’m talking about some plain old monkey business—” she gives me a shake, “—like a comic book one of your aunt’s maids showed me last week in which Tillie the Toiler and Mac — not the real Tillie, you understand, but a Frenchy version of Tillie — go to an office party and Tillie has a little set-to with Mac in the stockroom and gets caught by Whipple. I told Merle about it and said: that’s what I mean, Merle, how about that?”

“What did Merle say?”

Kate doesn’t seem to hear. She drums her fingers on the sill and gazes out at the rushing treetops.

“So — when all is said and done, that is the real thing, isn’t it? Admit it. You and the little Hondurian on the second floor with her little book, in the morning, in the mid-morning, and there in the linen closet with the mops and pails—”

“It is your Hondurian and your comic book—”

“Now I’ll tell you what you can do, Whipple. You get out of here and come back in exactly five minutes. Oh you’re a big nasty Whipple and you’re only fit for one thing.”

I’ll have to tell you the truth, Rory, painful though it is. Nothing would please me more than to say that I had done one of two things. Either that I did what you do: tuck Debbie in your bed and, with a show of virtue so victorious as to be ferocious, grab pillow and blanket and take to the living-room sofa, there to lie in the dark, hands clasped behind head, gaze at the ceiling and talk through the open door of your hopes and dreams. Or — do what a hero in a novel would do: he too is a seeker and a pilgrim of sorts and he is just in from Guanajuato or Sambuco where he has found the Real Right Thing or from the East where he apprenticed himself to a wise man and became proficient in the seventh path to the seventh happiness. Yet he does not disdain this world either and when it happens that a maid comes to his bed with a heart full of longing for him, he puts down his book in a good and cheerful spirit and gives her as merry a time as she could possibly wish for. Whereupon, with her dispatched into as sweet a sleep as ever Scarlett enjoyed the morning of Rhett’s return, he takes up his book again and is in an instant ten miles high and on the Way.

No, Rory, I did neither. We did neither. We did very badly and almost did not do at all. Flesh poor flesh failed us. The burden was too great and flesh poor flesh, neither hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit (for despising is not the worst fate to overtake the flesh), but until this moment seen through and canceled, rendered null by the cold and fishy eye of the malaise — flesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hope — quails and fails. The truth is I was frightened half to death by her bold (not really bold, not whorish bold but theorish bold) carrying on. I reckon I am used to my blushing little Lindas from Gentilly. Kate too was scared. We shook like leaves. Kate was scared because it seemed now that even Tillie the Toiler must fail her. I never worked so hard in my life, Rory. I had no choice: the alternative was unspeakable. Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we’re sinning! We’re succeeding! We’re human after all!).

“Good night, sweet Whipple. Now you tuck Kate in. Poor Kate.” She turns the pillow over for the cool of the underside. “Good night, sweet Whipple, good night, good night, good night.”

IT TURNS OUT THAT my misgivings about Chicago were justified. No sooner do we step down from the train than the genie-soul of Chicago flaps down like a buzzard and perches on my shoulder. During the whole of our brief sojourn I am ridden by it — brief sojourn, I say, briefer even than it was planned to be, since it was cut abruptly short by the catastrophe Monday night, the very night of our arrival. All day long before the catastrophe I stand sunk in thought, blinking and bemused, on street corners. Kate looks after me. She is strangely at home in the city, wholly impervious to the five million personal rays of Chicagoans and the peculiar smell of existence here, which must be sniffed and gotten hold of before taking a single step away from the station (if only somebody could tell me who built the damn station, the circumstances of the building, details of the wrangling between city officials and the railroad, so that I would not fall victim to it, the station, the very first crack off the bat. Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff — tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets — in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone). Oh son of a bitch but I am in a sweat. Kate takes charge with many a cluck and much fuss, as if she had caught sight in me of a howling void and meant to conceal it from the world. All of a sudden she is a regular city girl not distinguishable from any other little low-browed olive-skinned big-butted Mediterranean such as populates the streets and subways of the North.

I am consoled only to see that I was not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once later to the World Series. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been nothing of the sort, not the memory of a place but the memory of being a child. But one step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. Until now, one genie-soul and only one ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco — up and down the hills I pursued him, missed him and was pursued, by a presence, a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.

Here is Chicago. Now, exactly as twenty five years ago, the buildings are heavy and squarish and set down far apart and at random like monuments on a great windy plain. And the Lake. The Lake in New Orleans is a backwater glimmering away in a pleasant lowland. Not here. Here the Lake is the North itself: a perilous place from which the spirit winds come pouring forth all roused up and crying out alarm.

The wind and the space — they are the genie-soul. Son of a bitch, how can I think about variable endowments, feeling the genie-soul of Chicago perched on my shoulder?

But the wind and the space, they are the genie-soul. The wind blows in steady from the Lake and claims the space for its own, scouring every inch of the pavements and the cold stony fronts of the buildings. It presses down between buildings, shouldering them apart in skyey fields of light and air. The air is windpressed into a lens, magnifying and. sharpening and silencing — everything is silenced in the uproar of the wind that comes ransacking down out of the North. This is a city where no one dares dispute the claim of the wind and the skyey space to the out-of-doors. This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground. One other thing I remember: my father took me down into one of these monuments to see the pool where Tarzan-Johnnie-Weissmuller used to swim — an echoing underground place where a cold gray light filtered down from a three-story skylight and muscular men wearing metal discs swam and shouted, their voices ringing against the wet tile walls.

Some years later, after Scott’s death, we came my father and I to the Field Museum, a long dismal peristyle dwindling away into the howling distance, and inside stood before a tableau of Stone Age Man, father mother and child crouched around an artificial ember in postures of minatory quiet — until, feeling my father’s eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me — very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship — and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child’s cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give.

Prepared then for the genie-soul of Chicago, we take the city in stride at first and never suffer two seconds of malaise. Kate is jolly. Straight to the Stevens to register for rooms and the Cracker Barrel — there is Sidney standing by the reception table, princely-looking in his way of standing not like the others in friendly head-down-to-listen attitudes, but rared back in his five and a half feet, hand in pocket and coat hiked open at the vent, forehead faceted and flashing light.

Sidney fastens a plastic name card to my lapel and, before I know it, has hustled me off upstairs to a blue ballroom, leaving Kate and Margot to trail along, somewhat stony-faced, behind us.

“What is this, Sidney?” I say dismayed and hanging back. I begin to sweat and can only think of hitting the street and having three drinks in the first bar. Trapped in this blue cave, the genie-soul of Chicago will surely catch up with us. “I didn’t think there were any doings till tomorrow.”

“That’s right. This is only the Hot Stove League.”

“Oh Lord, what is that?” I say sweating.

“We get acquainted, talk over last year’s business, kick around the boners of the funds. You’ll like it.”

Sure enough, there in the middle of the floor is a ten-foot potbellied stove made of red cellophane. Waiters pass by with trays of martinis and a salon orchestra plays “Getting to Know You.”

The delegates are very decent fellows. I find myself talking to half a dozen young men from the West Coast and liking them very much — one in particular, a big shy fellow from Spokane named Stanley Kinchen, and his wife, a fine-looking woman, yellow-haired and bigger than Sharon, lips curling like a rose petal, head thrown back like a queen and a tremendous sparkle in the eye. What good people they are. It is not at all bad being a businessman. There is a spirit of trust and cooperation here. Everyone jokes about such things, but if businessmen were not trusting of each other and could not set their great projects going on credit, the country would collapse tomorrow and be no better off than Saudi Arabia. It strikes me that Stanley Kinchen would actually do anything for me. I know I would for him. I introduce Kate as my fiancée and she pulls down her mouth. I can’t tell whether it is me she is disgusted with or my business colleagues. But these fellows: so friendly and—? What, dejected? I can’t be sure.

Kinchen asks me if I am going to be in the Cracker Barrel. He is very nervous: it seems he is program chairman and somebody defected on him. He takes me aside.

“Would you do me a favor? Would you kick off with a ten minute talk on Selling Aids?”

“Sure.”

We shake hands and part good comrades.

But I have to get out of here, good fellows or no good fellows. Too much fellow feeling makes me nervous, to tell the truth. Another minute and the ballroom will itself grow uneasy. Already the cellophane stove has begun to glow ominously.

“I have to find Harold Graebner,” I tell Kate.

I grab her hand and slip out and away into the perilous out-of-doors, find the tiniest bar in the busiest block of the Loop. There I see her plain, see plain for the first time since I lay wounded in a ditch and watched an Oriental finch scratching around in the leaves — a quiet little body she is, a tough little city Celt; no, more of a Rachel really, a dark little Rachel bound home to Brooklyn on the IRT. I give her a pat on the leg.

“What?” she says, hardly paying attention — she is busy finding Harold’s address on the map and adding up the bar bill. I never noticed how shrewd and parsimonious she is — a true Creole.

“Sweet Kate,” say I patting her.

“All right, let’s go.” But she does not leave immediately. We have six drinks in two bars, catch buses, cross a hundred miles of city blocks, pass in the neighborhood of millions of souls, and come at last to a place called Wilmette which turns out not to be a place at all since it has no genie, where lives Harold Graebner the only soul known to me in the entire Midwest. Him, one soul in five million, we must meet and greet, wish good luck and bid farewell — else we cannot be sure we are here at all — before hopping off again into the maze of a city set down so unaccountably under the great thundering-lonesome Midwestern sky.

Off the bus and hopping along Wilmette happy as jaybirds, pass within a few feet of noble Midwestern girls with their clear eyes and their splendid butts and never a thought for them. What an experience, Rory, to be free of it for once. Rassled out. What a sickness it is, Rory, this latter-day post-Christian sex. To be pagan it would be one thing, an easement taken easily in a rosy old pagan world; to be Christian it would be another thing, fornication forbidden and not even to be thought of in the new life, and I can see that it need not be thought of if there were such a life. But to be neither pagan nor Christian but this: oh this is a sickness, Rory. For it to be longed after and dreamed of the first twenty years of one’s life, not practiced but not quite prohibited; simply longed after, longed after as a fruit not really forbidden but mock-forbidden and therefore secretly prized, prized first last and always by the cult of the naughty nice wherein everyone is nicer than Christians and naughtier than pagans, wherein there are dreamed not one but two American dreams: of Ozzie and Harriet, nicer-than-Christian folks, and of Tillie and Mac and belly to back.

We skip on by like jaybirds in July.

Harold lives in a handsome house in a new suburb back of Wilmette. His father left him a glass business in South Chicago and Harold has actually gotten rich. Every Christmas he sends a card with a picture of his wife and children and a note something like: “Netted better than thirty five thou this year — now ain’t that something?” You would have to know Harold to understand that this is not exactly a boast. It is a piece of cheerful news from a cheerful and simple sort of a fellow who can’t get over his good fortune and who therefore has to tell you about it. “Now ain’t that something, Rollo?” he would say and put up his hands in his baby-claw gesture. I know what he means. Every time American Motors jumps two dollars, I feel the same cheerful and expanding benevolence.

Since Kate and I can hardly wait to be back on our rambles, we visit with Harold about twenty minutes. As I said before, Harold loves me because he saved my life. I love him because he is a hero. I have a boundless admiration for heroes and Harold is the real thing. He got the DSC for a patrol action in the Chongchon Valley. Another lieutenant leading the fix patrol — I, you may as well know — got himself hung up; Lieutenant Graebner, who had the support patrol, came roaring up through the mortar fire like old Pete Longstreet himself and, using his three five rocket launcher like a carbine, shot a hole through the concertina (we were hung up on a limestone knob encircled by the concertina) and set fire to an acre or so of Orientals. When I say he is an unlikely hero, I don’t mean he is a modest little fellow like Audie Murphy — Audie Murphy is a hero and he looks like a hero. Harold is really unheroic — to such a degree that you can’t help but feel he squanders his heroism. Not at all reticent about the war, he speaks of it in such a flat unlovely way that his own experiences sound disappointing. With his somewhat snoutish nose and his wavy hair starting half way back on his head and his singsongy way of talking, he reminds me of a TV contestant:

M.C: Lieutenant, I bet you were glad to see the fog roll in that particular night.

HAROLD (unaccountably prissy and singsongy): Mr Marx, I think I can truthfully say that was one time I didn’t mind being in a fog about something (looking around at the audience).

M.C: Hey! I’m supposed to make the jokes around here!

Harold’s wife is a thin hump-shouldered girl with a beautiful face. She stands a ways off from us holding her baby, my godson, and hesitates between a sort of living room and a peninsula bar; she seems on the point of asking us to sit down in one place or the other but she never does. I keep thinking she is going to get tired herself, holding the big baby. Looking at her, I know just how Harold sees her: as beeyoutiful. He used to say that so-and-so, Veronica Lake maybe, was beeyoutiful — Harold is originally from Indiana and he called me peculiar Midwestern names like “heller” and “turkey”—and his wife is beautiful in just the same way: blond hair waving down her cheeks like a madonna, heavenly blue eyes, but stooped so that her shoulder-blades flare out in back like wings.

Harold walks up and down with both hands lifted up in the baby-claw gesture he uses when he talks, and there stands his little madonna-wife sort of betwixt and between us and the kids around the TV. But Harold is glad to see me. “Old Rollo,” he says, looking at the middle of my chest. “This is great, Rollo,” and he is restless with an emotion he can’t identify. Rollo is a nickname he gave me in the Orient — it evidently signifies something in the Midwest which is not current in Louisiana. “Old Rollo”—and he would be beside himself with delight at the aptness of it. Now it comes over him in the strongest way: what a good thing it is to see a comrade with whom one has suffered much and endured much, but also what a wrenching thing. Up and down he goes, arms upraised, restless with it and not knowing what it is.

“Harold, about the baby’s baptism—”

“He was baptized yesterday,” says Harold absently.

“I’m sorry.”

“You were godfather-by-proxy.”

“Oh.”

The trouble is there is no place to come to rest. We stand off the peninsula like ships becalmed — unable to move.

Turning my back on Harold, I tell Kate and Veronica how Harold saved my life, telling it jokingly with only one or two looks around at him. It is too much for Harold, not my gratitude, not the beauty of his own heroism, but the sudden confrontation of a time past, a time so terrible and splendid in its arch-reality; and so lost — cut adrift like a great ship in the flood of years. Harold tries to parse it out, that time and the time after, the strange ten years intervening, and it is too much for him. He shakes his head like a fighter.

We stand formally in the informal living area.

“Harold, how long have you been here?”

“Three years. Look at this, Rollo.” Harold shoves along the bar-peninsula a modernistic horsehead carved out of white wood, all flowing mane and arching neck. “Who do you think made it?”

“It’s very good.”

“Old Rollo,” says Harold, eying the middle of my chest. Harold can’t parse it out, so he has to do something. “Rollo, how tough are you? I bet I can take you.” Harold wrestled at Northwestern. “I could put you down right now.” Harold is actually getting mad at me.

“Listen, Harold,” I say, laughing. “Do you go into the city every day?”

Harold nods but does not raise his eyes.

“How did you decide to live here?”

“Sylvia’s family live in Glencoe. Rollo, how do you like it way down yonder in New Orleans?”

Harold would really like to wrestle and not so playfully either. I walked in and brought it with me, the wrenching in the chest. It would be better for him to be rid of it and me.

Ten minutes later he lets us out at the commuter station and tears off into the night.

“What a peculiar family,” says Kate, gazing after the red turrets of Harold’s Cadillac.

Back to the Loop where we dive into the mother and Urwomb of all moviehouses — an Aztec mortuary of funeral urns and glyphs, thronged with the spirit-presences of another day, William Powell and George Brent and Patsy Kelly and Charley Chase, the best friends of my childhood — and see a movie called The Young Philadelphians. Kate holds my hand tightly in the dark.

Paul Newman is an idealistic young fellow who is disillusioned and becomes cynical and calculating. But in the end he recovers his ideals.

Outside, a new note has crept into the wind, a black williwaw sound straight from the terrible wastes to the north. “Oh oh oh,” wails Kate as we creep home to the hotel, sunk into ourselves and with no stomach even for hand-holding. “Something is going to happen.”

Something does. A yellow slip handed across the hotel desk commands me to call operator three in New Orleans.

This I accordingly do, and my aunt’s voice speaks to the operator, then to me, and does not change its tone. She does not bother to add a single overtone of warmth or cold, love or hate, to the monotone of her notification — and this is more ominous than ten thousand williwaws.

“Is Kate with you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Would you like to know how we found you?”

“Yes.”

“The police found Kate’s car at the terminal.”

“The police?”

“Kate did not tell anyone she was leaving. However, her behavior is not unexplainable and therefore not inexcusable. Yours is.”

I am silent.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I think. “I can’t remember.”

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to find a seat on a flight to New Orleans the night before Mardi Gras. No trains are scheduled until Tuesday morning. But buses leave every hour or so. I send my aunt a telegram and call Stanley Kinchen and excuse myself from the talk on Selling Aids — it is all right: the original speaker had recovered. Stanley and I part even more cordially than we met. It is a stratospheric cordiality such as can only make further meetings uneasy. But I do not mind. At midnight we are bound for New Orleans on a Scenicruiser which takes a more easterly course than the Illinois Central, down along the Wabash to Memphis by way of Evansville and Cairo.

It is good to be leaving; Chicago is fit for no more than a short rotation. Kate is well. The summons from her stepmother has left her neither glum nor fearful. She speaks at length to her stepmother and, with her sure instinct for such matters, gets her talking about canceling reservations and return tickets, wins her way, decides we’ll stay, then changes her mind and insists on coming home to ease their minds. Now she gazes curiously about the bus station, giving way every few seconds to tremendous face-splitting yawns. Once on the bus she collapses into a slack-jawed oblivion and sleeps all the way to the Ohio River. I doze fitfully and wake for good when the dawn breaks on the outskirts of Terre Haute. When it is light enough, I take out my paper-back Arabia Deserta and read until we stop for breakfast in Evansville. Kate eats heartily, creeps back to the bus, takes one look at the black water of the Ohio River and the naked woods of the bottom lands where winter still clings like a violet mist, and falls heavily to sleep, mouth mashed open against my shoulder.

Today is Mardi Gras, fat Tuesday, but our bus has left Chicago much too late to accommodate Carnival visitors. The passengers are an everyday assortment of mothers-in-law visiting sons-in-law in Memphis, school teachers and telephone operators bound for vacations in quaint old Vieux Carré. Our upper deck is a green bubble where, it turns out, people feel themselves dispensed from the conventional silence below as if, in mounting with others to see the wide world and the green sky, they had already established a kind of freemasonry and spoken the first word among themselves. I surrender my seat to Kate’s stretchings out against me and double up her legs for her and for the rest of the long day’s journey down through Indiana and Illinois and Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi hold converse with two passengers — the first, a romantic from Wisconsin; the second, a salesman from a small manufacturing firm in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who wrecked his car in Gary.

Now in the fore seat of the bubble and down we go plunging along the Illinois bank of the Mississippi through a region of sooty glens falling steeply away to the west and against the slope of which are propped tall frame houses with colored windows and the spires of Polish churches. I read:

We mounted in the morrow twilight; but long after daybreak the heavens seemed shut over us, as a tomb, with gloomy clouds. We were engaged in horrid lava beds.

The romantic sits across the aisle, slumped gracefully, one foot propped on the metal ledge. He is reading The Charterhouse of Parma. His face is extraordinarily well-modeled and handsome but his head is too small and, arising as it does from the great collar of his car coat, it makes him look a bit dandy and dudish. Two things I am curious about. How does he sit? Immediately graceful and not aware of it or mediately graceful and aware of it? How does he read The Charterhouse of Parma? Immediately as a man who is in the world and who has an appetite for the book as he might have an appetite for peaches, or mediately as one who finds himself under the necessity of sticking himself into the world in a certain fashion, of slumping in an acceptable slump, of reading an acceptable book on an acceptable bus? Is he a romantic?

He is a romantic. His posture is the first clue: it is too good to be true, this distillation of all graceful slumps. To clinch matters, he catches sight of me and my book and goes into a spasm of recognition and shyness. To put him out of his misery, I go over and ask him how he likes his book. For a tenth of a second he eyes me to make sure I am not a homosexual; but he has already seen Kate with me and sees her now, lying asleep and marvelously high in the hip. (I have observed that it is no longer possible for one young man to speak unwarily to another not known to him, except in certain sections of the South and West, and certainly not with a book in his hand.) As for me, I have already identified him through his shyness. It is pure heterosexual shyness. He is no homosexual, but merely a romantic. Now he closes his book and stares hard at it as if he would, by dint of staring alone, tear from it its soul in a word. “It’s — very good,” he says at last and blushes. The poor fellow. He has just begun to suffer from it, this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes. For he prizes just such a meeting, the chance meeting with a chance friend on a chance bus, a friend he can talk to, unburden himself of some of his terrible longings. Now having encountered such a one, me, the rare bus friend, of course he strikes himself dumb. It is a case for direct questioning.

He is a senior at a small college in northern Wisconsin where his father is bursar. His family is extremely proud of the educational progress of their children. Three sisters have assorted PhDs and MAs, piling up degrees on into the middle of life (he speaks in a rapid rehearsed way, a way he deems appropriate for our rare encounter, and when he is forced to use an ordinary word like “bus”—having no other way of conferring upon it a vintage flavor, he says it in quotes and with a wry expression). Upon completion of his second trimester and having enough credits to graduate, he has lit out for New Orleans to load bananas for a while and perhaps join the merchant marine. Smiling tensely, he strains forward and strikes himself dumb. For a while, he says. He means that he hopes to find himself a girl, the rarest of rare pieces, and live the life of Rudolfo on the balcony, sitting around on the floor and experiencing soul-communions. I have my doubts. In the first place, he will defeat himself, jump ten miles ahead of himself, scare the wits out of some girl with his great choking silences, want her so desperately that by his own peculiar logic he can’t have her; or having her, jump another ten miles beyond both of them and end by fleeing to the islands where, propped at the rail of his ship in some rancid port, he will ponder his own loneliness.

In fact, there is nothing more to say to him. The best one can do is deflate the pressure a bit, the terrible romantic pressure, and leave him alone. He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.

The salesman has no such trouble. Like many businessmen, he is a better metaphysician than the romantic. For example, he gives me a sample of his product, a simple ell of tempered and blued steel honed to a two-edged blade. Balancing it in his hand, he tests its heft and temper. The hand knows the blade, practices its own metaphysic of the goodness of the steel.

“Thank you very much,” I say, accepting the warm blade.

“You know all in the world you have to do?”

“No.”

“Walk into the office—” (He sells this attachment to farm implement stores) “—and ask the man how much is his bush hog blade. He’ll tell you about nine and a half a pair. Then all you do is drop this on his desk and say thirty five cents and you can’t break it.”

“What does it do?”

“Anything. Clears, mulches, peas, beans, saplings so big, anything. That little sombitch will go now.” He strikes one hand straight out past the other, and I have a sense of the storied and even legendary properties of the blade, attested in the peculiar Southern esteem of the excellence of machinery: the hot-damn beat-all risible accolade conferred when some new engine sallies forth in its outlandish scissoring side-winding foray.

We sit on the rear seat, the salesman with his knee cocked up, heel under him, arm levered out over his knee. He wears black shoes and white socks for his athlete’s foot and now and then sends down a finger to appease the itching. It pleases him to speak of his cutter and of his family down in Murfreesboro and speak all the way to Union City and not once to inquire of me and this pleases me since I would not know what to say. Businessmen are our only metaphysicians, but the trouble is, they are one-track metaphysicians. By the time the salesman gets off in Union City, my head is spinning with facts about the thirty five cent cutter. It is as if I had lived in Murfreesboro all my life.

Canal Street is dark and almost empty. The last parade, the Krewe of Comus, has long since disappeared down Royal Street with its shuddering floats and its blazing flambeau. Street cleaners sweep confetti and finery into soggy heaps in the gutters. The cold mizzling rain smells of sour paper pulp. Only a few maskers remain abroad, tottering apes clad in Spanish moss, Frankenstein monsters with bolts through their necks, and a neighborhood gang or two making their way arm in arm, wheeling and whip-popping, back to their trucks.

Kate is dry-eyed and abstracted. She stands gazing about as if she had landed in a strange city. We decide to walk up Loyola Avenue to get our cars. The romantic is ahead of us, at the window of a lingerie shop, the gay sort where black net panties invest legless torsos. Becoming aware of us before we pass and thinking to avoid the embarrassment of a greeting (what are we to say, after all, and suppose the right word fails us?), he hurries away, hands thrust deep in his pockets, his small well-modeled head tricking to and fro above the great collar of his car coat.