The Paper Dragon

1

He felt giddy and foolish and awkward, and he also felt like a thief. He was fearful and elated and apprehensive and uncertain, but beneath it all he felt like a thief and this was confusing because it was he who had been wronged. And yet, he felt much the same as he had that day when he was eight years old and stole a box of crayons from the school supply closet.

Just that way, with the same sort of trembling nervousness, the same heady swiftness of triumph — he had stolen the crayons, he had got away without anyone having seen him, he had tucked them under his sweater with no one the wiser — coupled with guilt, the overriding shamefaced embarrassment sitting just behind his eyes, the sickly somewhat pale smile on his mouth, he could not understand this feeling of guilt. It was almost as if he were identifying fully with the real thief, experiencing the thief's own reaction to capture and exposure, that's the goddamn trouble with me, he thought, I empathize too easily.

He was a man of medium build, with black hair and brows, brown eyes darting nervously as he climbed the courthouse steps. There was an awesome scale to the architecture of the building, ten monstrous, white, Corinthian columns rising to support a windowed entablature, wide white steps flowing in a long horizontal swell toward brass revolving entrance doors, more windows ornately decorated with curvilinear bars. The solemn majesty of the law's trappings added to his nervousness, and yet he wanted to yell aloud as he entered the building, wanted to shatter the serenity of these hallowed marbled halls, but the nervousness persisted, the feeling that he, and not James Driscoll, was the thief.

He walked into one of the waiting elevators, and then stood in the far corner of the car, worrying his lower lip, staring at the floor indicator as the car climbed, come on, come on. It was December, and the car was briskly cool, but he could feel the sweat trickling from under his arms in a slow, sliding descent over his ribs. The car doors opened at last. He stepped uncertainly into the seventh-floor corridor. A bank of gray elevator doors, six in all, were ranged on either side of the windowless corridor, interspersed with wooden doors along its length and on either end. The corridor was rather like a badly designed room, too long for its width, dimly lighted, divided at its halfway point by the double doors to 705 and 706, which were the courtrooms. The doors were constructed of what seemed like heavy oak, panels repeating the low paneled ceiling, bronze studs shaped like daisies punctuating the wood, a brass knob set on each right-hand door. He saw the numerals 705 in bronze on the door opposite him, and was walking across the corridor toward it when Sidney Brackman looked up from the water fountain. He was forty-eight years old, a short undistinguished-looking person wearing a brown suit and shoes, a striped brown tie on his white shirt. His hair was prematurely gray, as was his closely cropped mustache. He turned as Arthur approached, and then extended his hand quickly and said, "Good morning, Arthur, how do you feel?"

"I'm worried," Arthur said.

"You have nothing to worry about. You'll make a good witness. Do you remember all the points we covered?"

"Yes, I remember."

"Good. We'll go over those points in court, you'll tell everything in your own words. It's the truth that will win this case for us."

"I hope so."

"I know so. I have no doubt. It's been a long road, Arthur, but the end is in sight, and the end will be victorious."

"How long will the trial last?"

"I imagine it will be over by Wednesday. Thursday at the very latest."

"That's what I thought. It seems like such a short time."

"A short time? For what?"

"To present everything. I mean, so the judge'll understand."

"McIntyre's a smart judge, Arthur. And a fair one. I know him from when he was first out of law school. He was a brilliant lawyer even then. Brilliant. He'll give you a fair hearing, and he'll make a fair decision."

"I hope so."

"Try to appear a little more confident on the stand, eh?" Brackman said, and smiled.

"I'll try," Arthur said. "But I'd be much happier with a jury."

"Juries are unpredictable. Besides, you'll remember that I did ask for a jury. But Willow made a motion to strike the demand because we were asking for an accounting of every dollar. Willow's point was that historically…"

"You know all this law talk goes completely over my head."

"Yes, I know that, but I wouldn't want you to think I'd made a mistake. I haven't made any mistakes so far, Arthur, not that I know of. We did ask for a jury. But it was ruled that an equity action, such as this is, has always been tried in a chancery court rather than a law court. The historical precedent goes all the way back to England."

"I don't know anything about historical precedent," Arthur said. "It just seems to me that our chances would have been better with a jury."

"Our chances are excellent just the way they are, Arthur. Now please don't start getting despondent. I know you get into these despondent moods every now and then that are difficult to—"

"I'm not despondent."

"Good. Leave everything to me. Please. Just answer the questions I "put to you as truthfully as you can, and everything will be all right."

"Is that a guarantee?"

Brackman smiled again. "No, Arthur. Nothing in the law is a guarantee, justice is not infallible. That's what makes practicing law so interesting. Let's go inside, shall we?"

The courtroom seemed too large for the scant handful of people it contained. Wood-paneled walls endlessly echoed themselves, like flecked mirrors repeating the same dull theme, a pattern broken only by the windowed wall facing the entrance. The windows were open just a crack to the winter street below. The sounds of traffic rose indolently, entering the courtroom in muted tones. A fierce December wind eddied in the right angle of wall-against-wall just outside the windows, and then fanned over the sills to riffle the papers on the long leather-topped tables. Jonah Willow and his assistant were at one of those tables, talking in normal speaking voices that somehow seemed like whispers. At the other end of the same table, Samuel Genitori, the attorney for API, leaned over to say something to his associate. As Arthur followed Brackman to the plaintiff's table, he heard Willow's assistant burst into laughter, and the sound infuriated him.

Seated in the otherwise empty jury box to the right of the judge's bench were James Driscoll and his wife. Arthur studiously avoided looking at either of them. The lone spectator, on one of the six benches at the rear of the room, was a thin boy carrying a spiral notebook imprinted with Columbia University's seal. There was an air of quiet displacement in the room, as though everyone were waiting for an event that would most certainly be canceled. When Judge McIntyre entered from his chambers at ten o'clock sharp, and the clerk called "All rise!" Arthur felt a new rush of panic, an urgent need to bolt from this arena with its alien trappings and its professional cold-eyed combatants. Quickly, he glanced toward Brackman to see if his fear had communicated itself, and then immediately dried the palms of his hands on his trouser legs.

"The United States District Court, Southern District of New York, is now in session," the clerk intoned, "the Honorable Frank H. McIntyre presiding. Take your seats, please. Arthur Nelson Constantine versus James Driscoll et al. Are all sides ready?"

Almost in a chorus, Brackman and the defense attorneys said, "Ready, your Honor."

"All ready, your Honor," the clerk repeated.

"Are you representing the plaintiff, Mr. Brackman?" McIntyre asked.

"Yes, your Honor."

"Are you ready to proceed?"

"Yes, your Honor."

"Then let's proceed."

"I would like Mr. Constantine to take the stand, please," Brackman said.

Arthur rose and walked toward the witness chair. He was having difficulty breathing, and he was certain he would stumble and fall before he reached the front of the courtroom. The clerk held out the Bible. Arthur put his left hand on it, and then raised his right hand.

"Arthur Nelson Constantine, you do solemnly swear that the testimony you shall give to the Court in this issue shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"

"I do," Arthur said.

The clerk nodded briefly and then moved to a small table adjacent to and below the judge's bench. He put the Bible on one corner of the table and then moved his stenotab into place, fingers poised over the keys. Arthur climbed the two steps to the witness chair, glanced up briefly at the judge, whose swivel chair was parallel to his and a step higher, and then looked away. Sidney Brackman walked slowly toward Arthur, smiled encouragingly, and then said, "Mr. Constantine, what do you do for a living?"

"I'm a writer," Arthur answered. His voice was too low, he knew he could not be heard. "A writer," he repeated more loudly.

"Do you write under your own name?"

"Yes, sir. Yes."

"How long have you been employed as a writer?"

"Since 1946?"

"Can you tell us what works you've written, Mr. Constantine?"

"Since 1946?"

"Yes, since 1946," Brackman said.

"Yes, well…" He hesitated. For a moment, he had forgotten the question. He looked hopefully at Brackman who seemed completely unaware of his discomfort. They had been talking about 1946, hadn't they? Should he ask what the question was, something about, oh yes, "Yes," he said, "the first thing I wrote after my release from the United States Army was a play called Catchpole."

"Mr. Constantine, are you familiar with this manuscript?"

"Yes, I'm familiar with it," he said, scarcely looking at it.

"Is this your name on the title page of the manuscript?"

"It is."

"Are you the sole author of this manuscript?"

"I am."

"Is this the play titled Catchpole which you wrote after your release from the United States Army in 1946?"

"Yes," he said, and wondered if he were supposed to say anything more about it at this point.

"I offer the manuscript in evidence," Brackman said, and handed it to the clerk.

"No objection," Willow said.

"No objection," Genitori repeated.

"I also offer in evidence the copyright registration certificate of the play."

Willow rose from his chair behind the defense table. "Your Honor," he said, "before trial, we conceded that the play was registered with the Copyright Office and a certificate granted in August of 1947. In fact, we conceded that it wouldn't be necessary to do anything more than offer the manuscript in evidence."

"Mr. Genitori, do you so concede for API?" McIntyre asked.

"I do."

Brackman nodded and approached the witness chair again. "Mr. Constantine," he said, "you have testified that you've been a writer since 1946. What else have you written besides this play?"

"Well," Arthur said, "I've been involved mostly with motion pictures and television."

"What films or television plays have you written?"

"Do you want me to go all the way back?"

"Please."

"Well, in 1948 I worked for Columbia under contract — Columbia Pictures. I wrote two films for them. Do you want the titles?"

"Please."

He was beginning to feel a bit more at ease. This wasn't going too badly after all. They were simply restating for the judge all the points they had gone over time and again in Brackman's office. He found himself relaxing. He crossed his legs and glanced at the judge, and then turned to Brackman and said, "The first was an adaptation of a Collier's story, a Western. I don't remember the title of the original story, but the movie was called Brother to the Sun, and was a very successful film. I then worked on an adaptation — or really a translation, I suppose you might say — of King Lear. I worked for several months with another writer on this, trying to get it into suitable form for the screen, and then the project was abandoned." He felt more and more relaxed. He looked at the judge once again, tempted to smile but restraining the urge, and then said, conversationally, "Olivier had already done Hamlet, you see, and I think Orson Welles was getting ready to release his Macbeth, and the feeling was that the trend had already peaked. Besides, it was proving very difficult to get a good screenplay from something as complex as Lear."

"Now this film Brother to the Sun for which you wrote the screenplay…"

"Yes," he said.

"… you mentioned that it was a very successful film. Just what does that mean?"

"It grossed nine million dollars."

"I see. Go on, Mr. Constantine. What did you do after you worked on King Lear?"

"I left Columbia early in 1949, and did several films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The first of these was—"

"Excuse me," Willow said, rising. "Your Honor, I hesitate to interrupt the witness's testimony, but it seems to me that his career subsequent to the writing of Catchpole is not relevant at this point."

"I'd like to see where counsel is heading," McIntyre answered. "I hope this won't go on forever, though, Mr. Brackman."

"No, your Honor, it won't. As a matter of fact, Mr. Constantine, in order to save time, perhaps you could simply tell us how long you were employed by Metro as a writer?"

"From March of 1949 to February of 1952."

"For three years, is that correct?"

"Yes, almost three years to the day."

"And how many films did you write for them during that period of employment?"

"Eight films. A total of eight films."

"And you left Metro in February of 1952, is that correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"What did you do then?"

"In March of 1952, I was employed by API under contract to write and direct four films for them."

"By API, are you referring to one of the defendants in this action, Artists-Producers-International, also referred to as Kessler, Inc.?"

"I am."

"And you have testified that in 1952 you were hired to write and direct four motion pictures for API, other wise known as Kessler, Inc.?"

"I was. I did so testify."

Genitori rose suddenly and said, "Your Honor, may the record show that the title of the defendant, Kessler, Inc., was changed by court order to Artists-Producers-International in January of this year?"

"Let the record show it."

Brackman seemed annoyed by the interruption. He looked at Arthur sympathetically, cleared his throat, and asked, "Did you, in fact, write and direct those four films for API?"

"I worked on one of them which was later produced and directed by someone else," Arthur said.

"What was the title of that film?"

"Area Seven."

"And you say it was produced?"

"Yes, sir."

"When was it shown?"

"Released, do you mean?"

"Yes, released."

"In May of 1953. It was nominated for an Academy Award that year."

"Did it receive the Academy Award?"

"No, sir. From Here to Eternity did."

"Your Honor," Willow said, "I must repeat my objection to the plaintiff's going*into what happened after the writing of Catchpole."

"If your Honor please," Brackman answered, "I think this is relevant in two respects: one, principally, is to indicate that Mr. Constantine was actively employed by API from March of 1952 until April of—"

"Your Honor, witness has not yet testified as to the length of his employment."

"Nevertheless, Mr. Willow," McIntyre said, "the witness's employment by API would certainly seem to be relevant."

"And also, your Honor," Brackman said, "defendants might wish to create the impression that Catchpole, which was admittedly a failure, was Mr. Constantine's one and only creative endeavor. I want to indicate that Mr. Constantine is a man of recognized talents. I will certainly afford Mr. Willow the same opportunity to enumerate James Driscoll's writing credits when—"

"Objection overruled, Mr. Willow."

Brackman smiled thinly. "Mr. Constantine," he said, "can you tell me when your employment at API terminated?"

"I was there for more than two years. I left in April of 1954."

"After having worked on the screenplay for Area Seven which—"

"Yes, that's right."

"— was later nominated for an Academy Award."

"Correct."

"Why did you leave API?"

"There was a difference of opinion about the movies I was being asked to write and direct."

"To make this brief then, Mr. Constantine, would it be accurate to say that from 1946 to 1954 your sole employment was as a writer and/or director?"

"That is entirely accurate."

"And without going into laborious detail, would it be equally accurate to state that since you left API in April of 1954, you have continued to work as a writer and/or director of screenplays and television plays, sometimes under contract and sometimes on a freelance basis?"

"That is equally true, yes."

"Are you actively engaged on a project now, Mr. Constantine?"

"Yes, I am."

"Could you tell us—"

"Your Honor, haven't we already indicated that Mr. Constantine is a man of recognized talents?" Willow asked.

"Let's try to make this brief, Mr. Brackman," McIntyre said.

Brackman nodded. To Arthur he said, "Can you tell us what that project is?"

"We are currently casting my new play for Broadway production," Arthur answered.

"Who is producing the play?"

"Stuart Selig and Oscar Stern."

"And are you the sole author of the play?"

"I am."

"Mr. Constantine, I would now like to take you back to your other play, the play called Catchpole, which you testified you wrote in 1946."

"That's correct," Arthur said.

"Was this play Catchpole ever produced?"

"Yes, sir, it was."

"Where was is produced?"

"It opened at the Fulton Theatre here in New York and it ran for twelve days."

"When was that?"

"In October of 1947. October 14th, I believe the date was. And it ran until the 25th, through the 25th."

"Had it been seen anywhere else prior to its Broadway opening?"

"Yes, sir. There were a series of previews held while we were still rehearsing the play in a loft on Second Avenue."

"Previews? For whom?"

"For college students."

"Of which colleges?"

"C.C.N.Y., Hunter, Brooklyn College, L.I.U., Pratt Institute, and several others."

"Was there a charge for these performances?"

"No, sir. We were still in rehearsal and we wanted the reaction of college students, since this was a play about young men in a time of intense personal strife."

Brackman paused, moved away from the witness stand, glanced at Willow, and then slowly walked back to confront Arthur again. His voice lowering to a solemn pitch, he asked, "Have you read the novel The Paper Dragon?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you seen the movie The Paper Dragon?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you tell us when you read the book?"

"I saw the movie in September of 1964, and I read the book shortly after that. A week or so afterwards."

"What course of action did you pursue after seing the movie?"

"Well, I had been out of town working on a television pilot for MCA, Music Corporation of America. The pilot dealt with a team of construction workers who move around from one part of the country to the other—"

"Your Honor," Willow said, "the answer is not responsive."

"Please answer the question," McIntyre said.

"What was the question?"

The clerk consulted his notes. "What course of action did you pursue after seeing the movie?" he repeated.

Arthur nodded. "I was trying to explain that I had been out of town for several months because we were visiting the site of a dam in construction…"

"Yes, what did you do when you came back?" Brackman prodded.

"… which is why I missed the opening of the movie, and all the hullabaloo around New York at that time. In any case, when I got back to the city, I went out with a young lady one night, and she said, 'Have you seen The Paper Dragon?' I didn't know what The Paper Dragon was, and I said so. She then told me that it was a direct steal from my play, and that I had better make sure I saw it."

"And did you then go to see it?"

"Yes, I did."

"And after seeing it, did you take the matter to an attorney?"

"Yes, I did."

Brackman nodded, walked back to the plaintiff's table, and returned with his hands full. "I would like to offer in evidence," he said, "this book which is the hard-cover edition of The Paper Dragon, as written by James Driscoll and published by Mitchell-Campbell Books, Inc."

"Any objection?"

"No."

"Mr. Genitori, any objection?"

"None."

"I also offer in evidence the reprint edition of The Paper Dragon, published by Camelot Books, Inc., New York, a subsidiary of Mitchell-Campbell, Inc."

"No objection."

"No objection."

"I offer in evidence the shooting script of the film The Paper Dragon, as written by Ralph Knowles, and produced by Kessler, Inc."

"Is this being offered as against the defendant API only?" Willow asked. "Or is it offered as against the defendant Mitchell-Campbell?"

"It is being offered against API."

"No objection."

"No objection."

"Your Honor, the defendants have previously conceded publication of The Paper Dragon" Brackman said, "and also of the motion picture."

"Conceded."

"Conceded."

Brackman returned to the witness stand. "Mr. Constantine," he said, "you have stated that between March of 1952 and April of 1954 you were employed by API as a writer-director, and that you worked on one film while you were so employed, a motion picture titled Area Seven, which was later nominated for an Academy Award."

"Yes, sir."

"Did you at any time during your period of employment at API have opportunity to submit. I'll rephrase that, your Honor. Did you ever submit the manuscript of Catchpole to anyone at API while you were employed there?"

"I did."

"To whom did you submit the manuscript? Can you remember the names?"

"I can."

"Would you tell us, please?"

"I first showed the manuscript to a man named Matthew Jackson, with whom I was working on Area Seven."

"What were Mr. Jackson's duties?"

"He was under contract as a writer at API, and was sort of overseeing the Area Seven project, since I was a new writer there and had never directed anything before. He was working very closely with me on the screenplay. We got to know each other rather well, and I thought I would show him a copy of Catchpole in the hope he could see movie possibilities in it."

"Did he indeed see movie possibilities in it?"

"No."

"Did you not, in fact, later have a conversation with Mr. Jackson wherein he definitely stated that Kessler's did not wish…"

"That's right."

"… to buy the motion picture rights to Catchpole?"

"We had a conversation about it, yes."

"Your Honor, that was a leading question," Willow said.

"I am refreshing his memory on a point that is already in the record," Brackman replied.

"You were leading the witness, Mr. Brackman," McIntyre said, and Brackman shrugged in resignation.

"Did you have a conversation with Mr. Jackson?" he asked.

"I did," Arthur answered.

"Would you repeat the content of that conversation?"

"Jackson said, 'This is tremendous, but you know as well as I that this company is still back in the thirties with its musicals and silly romances. I think they'd be leery of an Army theme that tries to show the stupidity and foolish waste of war, especially since we've had this Korean thing since World War II. But I'd like to hold onto it, because I really like it immensely and if I can do anything for it, I will.' "

"Did Mr. Jackson ever return the manuscript to you?"

"No."

"To whom else at API did you show the manuscript?"

"Well, there was Joe Edelson, who was at that time head of API's story department. And Rudy Herdt, who was a producer, and Iris Blake, who was also in the story department."

"Were there any others?"

"Yes, I also showed it to Betty Alweiss, who was Mr. Kessler's personal secretary."

"What were the reactions of these various people to whom you showed the manuscript?"

"Their reactions — their collective reaction, I should say — was basically the same. They all liked the play, they thought it had some important things to say about a situation that needed comment. But they felt API wasn't ready to do anything as strong as this was, not right then, anyway. The collective reaction, I would say, was that the play was too outspoken, that the United States wasn't ready to take criticism of its armed forces, not when we had just come through a major conflict and also a minor one in Korea, which happens to be the setting of The Paper Dragon. To my mind, there was no question that everyone who read the script thought—"

"Your Honor, I regret having to interrupt the witness again," Willow said, "but he has just now made a statement as to the operation of his mind, and I think you'll agree that is clearly inadmissible."

"Sustained."

"Mr. Constantine," Brackman said, with a sigh directed at Willow, "would you please tell us what was said about the script, and not what you surmised or thought?"

"That's all that was said about it. They all liked the script, but they felt it was too strong for API to do."

"Were any of these scripts ever returned to you?"

"No."

"As I understand it then, Mr. Constantine — and please correct me if I'm wrong — during the period of time between March 1952 and April 1954, you showed a copy of your previously produced play Catchpole to five people at API?"

"Five people, that's correct."

"Were these five people all executives?"

"Not all of them. But they all had the power to recommend a story for purchase."

"And your story was not recommended."

"My play."

"Your play."

"No, it was not recommended for purchase."

"Nor were any of the copies returned."

"No, they were not returned."

"Mr. Constantine, have you examined your work Catchpole and also the book and movie versions of The Paper Dragon?"

"I have."

"What did your examination reveal?"

"That there are close similarities between Catchpole and The Paper Dragon."

"Similarities to both the book and the film?"

"Both the book and the film, yes."

The courtroom was silent. Brackman took a deep breath. "What similarities did your examination reveal?" he asked.

"Your Honor, if I may…"

"Yes, Mr. Willow?"

"I think we might be able to save a little time here, if the plaintiff is willing."

"How might we do that, Mr. Willow?"

"The plaintiff and his attorneys were good enough to prepare — for the pretrial examinations — several charts containing the alleged similarities between the works in question. These are rather detailed as to specific language, plot structure, and character. I would have no objection to the offer of these charts at this point."

Brackman shook his head. "I wish the witness to testify to the similarities in his own words."

"His own words are already on the record," Willow said.

"Your Honor," Genitori said, rising, "we have reams and reams of charts prepared by the witness and his attorneys. The entire matter is before us ad infinitum."

"If his Honor will allow," Brackman answered, "I would like to bring the matter before us once again — from the witness, in person, before this Court."

"I will allow it. Let him proceed."

Arthur looked at the judge, and then at Brackman. Brackman nodded.

"I would like to start with the thematic similarity of my play and the other works," Arthur said.

"Go ahead, Mr. Constantine."

As Arthur began speaking, he could feel the alert presence of James Driscoll sitting in the jury box on his left, patiently watching with the cold blue guileless eyes of a thief. He could feel the judge erect and attentive beside him at the raised bench on his right, someone only vaguely defined, someone who had the power to rule on what could and could not be said, someone who would in the final analysis make the sole decision as to whether he, Arthur Constantine, had been wronged. He could feel, too, and it added to his sense of security, the enormous paneled dignity of the courtroom, a federal court, copyright offenses were tried in federal courts, the American flag to the right of the bench, the wan December sunlight outside. He was completely at ease now, confident that the truth would be heard and justice would be done. His earlier panic, in fact, now seemed inexplicable, like the terror of a very young child waking in the dark.

"In my play," he said, "I was attempting to illustrate—"

"Your Honor," Willow said at once, "I move to strike that from the record. Whatever Mr. Constantine attempted to illustrate is not relevant to the issue before this Court."

"He is trying to be responsive," McIntyre said. "I will allow it."

"I maintain, your Honor, that any similarities must be solely between the works in question."

"I would agree to that."

"And that therefore the author's intent is irrelevant."

"I believe I will allow him to tell it in his own words, Mr. Willow. I think this will take us where we want to go."

"Does your Honor mean the end of the trial?"

"No, I'm referring to the testimony relating to similarities. The end of the trial, however, is another consummation devoutly to be wished. Please go on, Mr. Constantine."

"Thematically, my play deals with the lunacy of war," Arthur said. "My hero is a new lieutenant who feels that human life is more important than the quarrels of nations, and this theme is stated in Act I, Scene 4, pages 21 and 22 of Catchpole. This is also the theme of The Paper Dragon, where the hero is the same new lieutenant who feels exactly the same way, and who voices his feelings on pages 121, 122, 123, and 124 of the book."

"Do you consider this theme unique?" Brackman asked.

"I do not, sir."

"Do you consider it original?"

"I do not, sir."

"Do you consider it your exclusive property?"

"No sir. But this suit is not based on a similarity of theme alone. In fact, if my play had developed its theme along certain lines and the novel had developed the very same theme along different lines, I would never have brought suit at all."

"How are these themes developed?"

"They are developed along identical lines," Arthur said. "To begin with, the hero of my play is shipped to the Pacific to wage war against the Japanese on Eniwetok. The hero of The Paper Dragon is also shipped to the Pacific to wage war, this time against the enemy forces in Korea. Now the men in the platoon to which the lieutenant is assigned, and specifically the men who are in one squad of that platoon—"

"Excuse me," Brackman said, "but are we discussing plot or character?"

"This is plot," Arthur said.

"Very well, go on."

"The men in the squad are described in Act I, Scene 1, page 3 of my play as 'battle-weary and battle-hardened.' In the book, the men in the squad are described with the words — may I have a copy of the book, please?"

"Certainly," Brackman said. The clerk handed him the exhibit copy, which he in turn handed to Arthur. Arthur quickly found the page.

"These are the words Driscoll uses to describe his squad. This is on page 42. 'Weary-eyed and cynical, they studied their new lieutenant in his college boy crewcut and freshly issued fatigues, and wondered how he could possibly lead them into hell.' In short, the men in both combat squads are hardened veterans in juxtaposition to inexperienced commanding officers — and the word 'weary' is used to describe them in both works."

"Go on, please."

"The first time Lieutenant Mason — who is the hero of my play — leads his platoon into battle, this particular squad is ambushed and a young private is killed by a sniper. In the book, this basic situation has been altered only slightly. The lieutenant's name has been changed, of course — to Cooper — and the incident of the sniper takes place before his arrival in Korea. It is a major this time who is killed by a sniper who has infiltrated the lines. That's on page 18. But the plot development is essentially the same, and it continues along parallel lines.

"In my play, for example, the men come to resent Mason enormously because they hold him responsible for the private's death. This is stated in Act I, Scene 3, pages 14 and 15. And whereas Mason tries to reach them in various ways, they remain resentful. In the book, the men resent Cooper because he is taking the dead major's place. That's page 51. The same attempts to reach the men are present, and the same continuing resentment is there. Moreover, the biggest troublemaker in Cooper's platoon is a man named Private Colman, and it is implied on page 56 that he has had homosexual relations with the dead major."

"You mean when he was alive, of course," Brackman said, and McIntyre burst into laughter. "I was trying to clarify," Brackman said quickly, "the relationship between—"

"Yes, of course," McIntyre said, still laughing. "Go ahead, Mr. Constantine."

"I mention this homosexual attachment," Arthur said, "only because in my play, a senior officer is also suspected of homosexuality and is sent back from the front to a hospital unit. This is in Act II, Scene 2, pages 6 and 7. It is there that he becomes the patient of an Army nurse who later falls in love with my hero. I think it is significant that an Army nurse appears in The Paper Dragon on page 124, and that a love affair between her and Lieutenant Cooper develops along lines parallel to my play."

"Your Honor," Willow said, rising, "I wonder if I might interrupt to ask Mr. Brackman how long this will take. I think we all agree that the final test in a case of this sort is a comparison of the works themselves. Mr. Constantine's opinion as to similarities is not in my judgment competent testimony. Couldn't we shorten this by putting in a paper calling your Honor's attention to the alleged similarities? I would certainly have no objection to that. But if Mr. Constantine intends to go on interminably, I must raise an objection."

"Mr. Brackman?" McIntyre asked. "What do you say to that?"

"I quite agree with Mr. Willow that a comparison of the works themselves is the heart of the issue involved here. But that is exactly what we are doing, your Honor, comparing the works themselves. As for the second objection, Mr. Constantine's testimony is definitely competent, and I believe precedent will so indicate."

"How much longer do you suppose he will be testifying, Mr. Brackman? Concerning these similarities?"

"The similarities of plot, do you mean?"

"I mean all the similarities."

"There are several more similarities of plot, your Honor, and then we had hoped to go into character and specific language."

"Won't there be an overlap between plot and character?"

"Only to a limited extent."

"How long will it take to outline the plot similarities?"

"Mr. Constantine?"

"Only five or ten minutes, your Honor," Arthur answered.

"And the others?"

"At least forty-five minutes, your Honor," Brackman said. "Perhaps longer."

"Well, I notice that Mr. Constantine has been making frequent reference to the prepared charts. Couldn't we simply submit those, as Mr. Willow suggested? I know you want the Court to form an impression of your witness, but I feel we've already done that sufficiently. I do think any means of saving time would be appreciated."

"Your Honor, I would prefer to do it this way," Brackman said. "It it will help, perhaps the witness can leave out the specific page references wherever possible."

"I stand on my objection," Willow said. "I do not see why Mr. Constantine cannot testify that he prepared these charts, and then offer them in evidence as an aid to the Court. Solely as an aid to the Court, your Honor, and not as expert testimony. To that, I would have no objection."

"Mr. Willow, I don't like to limit an attorney's latitude," McIntyre said. "If Mr. Brackman wishes to present his case in this manner, I think it only fair to allow him to proceed. But if he can think of another way to shorten the testimony, in addition to eliminating page numbers, I think we would all be enormously grateful."

"If he's going to eliminate page references," Willow said, "can he supply a list of them so—"

"I assumed…"

"Yes, of course."

"… that he planned to do that, Mr. Willow."

"So that we may have them for reference during the cross, your Honor."

"Certainly. Please proceed, Mr. Constantine."

"In order to save time," Arthur said, "it might be possible to combine plot and character in explaining these three soldiers. Would you want me to do that?"

"Which three soldiers?" McIntyre asked.

"Private Colman in the novel, and Corporal Janus and Colonel Peterson in my play."

"Yes, please do," McIntyre said. "We would appreciate any means of saving time."

"Just so we can keep this straight," Arthur said, "let me again say that Private Colman is the prime troublemaker in the novel, and is also suspected of having had homosexual relations with the major. In fact, there is a stream-of-consciousness passage beginning on page 212—"

"We want to leave out the page references," Brackman reminded.

"Yes, I'm sorry. I was going to say that this interior monologue clearly indicates, beyond mere suspicion, that Private Colman did have homosexual relations with the major. In my play, the prime troublemaker is a man named Corporal Janus, but in addition there is the homosexual colonel who is sent up for observation — he later goes psycho, but that's beside the point. The point is the two characters in my play, Corporal Janus and Colonel Peterson, are combined in Driscoll's book to form the single character named Private Colman. In other words, Driscoll has taken a troublemaker and a homosexual and put them together to form a homosexual troublemaker."

"Did you find any other evidence of this merger?"

"Yes. The private's first name in Driscoll's book is Peter. His full name is Peter Colman. If we put this alongside the name of the character in my play, Colonel Peterson, we see that one name is an anagram of the other."

"Your Honor," Willow said, rising, "an anagram transposes the exact letters of a word or sentence to form a new word or sentence. There is no such transposition here, and I object to the misleading use of the word."

"May I amend that?" Arthur asked.

"Please do," McIntyre said.

"May I simply say that the names, when reversed, are very similar?"

"Shall I strike the anagram reference?" the clerk asked.

"Strike it," McIntyre replied.

"Please go on," Brackman said.

"Where was I?" Arthur asked.

"You were explaining…"

"Oh, yes, the combining of two characters to form a single character. The final evidence of this is what happened in the film based on the novel. For some unex-plainable reason, the character named Peter Colman in the book has once more become two separate characters in the film. One of them is still Colman the troublemaker, but he is no longer homosexual. The other is a corporal who does not appear in the book, and who is very definitely homosexual. In other words, the screenwriter reversed Driscoll's copying process, and went back to the original play to recreate a character who was in the play but not in the book."

"Are these characters important to the play?"

"They are important to the play, the book, and the movie. Without them, the plot would stand still. In fact, it is Janus in my play and Colman in the book who suggest that the lieutenant be murdered."

"How do they plan to murder him?"

"In my play, a Sergeant D'Agostino volunteers to shoot the lieutenant from ambush. In the book, the men plan to lead the lieutenant into a Chinese stronghold where he will be killed. The motive is identical in both works, only the means differ slightly."

"Does the lieutenant actually get killed?" Brackman asked.

"Again, there is only a very slight difference in story line," Arthur said. "In my play, the psychopathic colonel steals a bayonet and escapes his guard on the night of the planned murder. He accidentally stumbles on Sergeant D'Agostino where he is waiting to ambush Lieutenant Mason. There is a struggle during which D'Agostino is stabbed and killed by the ranting colonel. And there is speculation later as to whether D'Agostino actually sacrificed himself in order to avoid having to murder the lieutenant."

"And how has this been changed in the book?"

"Your Honor," Willow said, "I have let one such allegation pass, but I must object to…"

"Sustained. Please rephrase the question, Mr. Brackman."

"Can you tell us the plot sequence in the book?" Brackman said.

"In the book, Lieutenant Cooper realizes at the last moment that the men are leading him into a death trap. But he also recognizes that his scout, Sergeant Morley, is in danger of losing his life as well. He takes the point from Morley, and sacrifices himself to the Chinese guns."

"How does your play end, Mr. Constantine?"

"It ends when the men in the squad, shaken by the turn of events, come to realize the idiocy of war, and gain a new respect for their lieutenant. The troublemaker, Corporal Janus, is exposed and court-martialed."

"And how does the book end?"

"The book ends when the men in the squad, touched by the lieutenant's sacrifice, come to realize the idiocy of war, and gain a new respect for him. The troublemaker, Private Colman, is exposed and court-martialed."

The courtroom was silent. Brackman looked up at the judge, and then turned away from him, nodding his head as though in silent agreement with an evident truth.

"Does that conclude your testimony concerning similarities of plot?" he asked Arthur.

"Yes, sir, it does."

"Would you tell us now—"

"Forgive me for interrupting, Mr. Brackman," McIntyre said, "but as I indicated earlier in chambers, I have an appointment this afternoon which necessitates my leaving at two-thirty. I was hoping we could take a very short recess now — aren't you tired, Mr. Constantine?"

"Thank you, your Honor, I'm fine," Arthur said.

"Well, I thought we might take a ten-minute recess now, and then perhaps continue without a lunch recess, adjourning at two, or a little after if we have to. Would anyone have any objection to that?"

"We would have no objection," Willow said. "But Mr. Constantine and his attorney may be exceedingly hungry."

"We would have no objection to continuing through the lunch recess," Brackman said dryly. "And we will try to conclude the direct by two o'clock, your Honor."

"I have no objection," Genitori said.

2

He had received what he supposed were stock words of encouragement from Brackman — You're doing fine, Arthur, you're coming across very well, I think the judge is considerably impressed — and then had left him in the courtroom with his partner. Now, standing near a door marked stairway at one end of the gray corridor, he lighted a second cigarette and glanced briefly at the closed courtroom doors. He honestly did not know how he was coming across, he had never been very sure of himself as a speaker. He felt that Willow was objecting too much and too energetically, and he suspected that Brackman was losing more points than he was winning, but he was completely ignorant of his own performance, grateful only that his earlier nervousness had miraculously dissipated.

Willow and his assistant came out of the courtroom and walked toward Arthur, heading for the men's room, he supposed. Willow was a tall ungainly man, and he moved with the uncertain awkwardness of a large water bird, neck craned forward, head bobbing, hair uncombed and hanging on his forehead, black-rimmed spectacles reflecting the pale light of the ceiling fixtures. Arthur supposed he was in his late thirties, but there was about him a boyish vitality that made him seem even younger. Neither he nor his assistant, a squat, very dark Negro wearing a gray tweed suit, even glanced at Arthur in passing. They were in animated discussion as they walked by, but all Arthur could hear was a reference to "the evidentiary question." He watched as they pushed open the door to the men's room, and then he looked at his watch.

It was twenty minutes past twelve.

He felt alone, utterly and completely alone, he had never felt so isolated in his entire life. He thought it odd that he should have come through thirty-nine years of family togetherness, surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins and compares to find himself here and now, at what was possibly the most important juncture of his life, entirely alone. How do you come through it all, he wondered, and suddenly find yourself standing on the edge of the universe waiting for the waves to crash in, maybe to get washed out to sea, without Aunt Louise telling you every other week that you were "her baby," meaning she had served as midwife when you were delivered to your mother in a coldwater flat on East 118th Street? I could use Aunt Louise now, he thought, silly Aunt Louise who accompanied Italian immigrants when they went for their first papers, who was an active member of the Republican Club, who wrote songs in her spare time and claimed that they were all later stolen by the big band leaders — a family trait? — and who sent Queen Elizabeth a hand-tatted bonnet for young Prince Charles when he was born. "Look, Sonny," she had said, "I got a thank-you note from the Queen's secretary, a personal thank-you note," and Arthur had thought to himself it was probably a mimeographed note sent to all the Aunt Louises of the world who tatted bonnets for infant princes. And yet he could use Aunt Louise now, he could use her quiet strength and penetrating eye, God but that woman was a dynamo of energy, what the hell was it she concocted — Aunt Louise's Ointment, did she call it? And wasn't it really and truly sold in drugstores all over Harlem, the indefatigable Louise running around selling her product the way she plugged her terrible songs, she'd have made a great rumrunner, or in recent times an excellent dope pusher.

They called him Sonny when he lived in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem, he always told people, and they looked at him as if wondering whether or not he had traces of Negro blood flowing in his veins, whereupon he always felt compelled to explain that there were three Harlems. You see, there is Negro Harlem and there is Italian Harlem and there is Puerto Rican Harlem. They are all very different and they are all identical, they are all bug-ridden and rat-infested, those are the three Harlems. But that of course was a mature judgment, a qualified appraisal by a man who was now thirty-nine years old, and not the way he had seen it as a boy. There were no rats in Harlem for Sonny Constantine — he still did not know why they had called him Sonny, he supposed there was a Sonny in every Italian-American family that ever existed. Or perhaps Al Jolson was hot at the time of his boyhood, perhaps any kid became a Sonny Boy and then a Sonny all because of Al Jolson singing through his goddamn nose like a Harvard man, perhaps that was it. But there were no rats in Harlem — well, once a mouse was in the toilet bowl, but only a mouse. It scared hell out of his mother, she came running, out of the bathroom with her dress raised and her bloomers down, her behind showing, he wanted to look, but didn't dare, yelling to his father that there was a mouse in the bowl. So his father just flushed the toilet, naturally, goodbye mouse, out to sea where all good mice eventually go. His sister was terrified. He had called her a baby and a dope and a silly jerk, and then had listened to her crying in her room, really in his parents' bedroom because that was where she slept on a little cot against the wall near the window that looked down on 118th Street four stories below.

There were no rats in Harlem for him, there were no street gangs, there were no rumbles, there was only a placid ghetto — terrible word — a neighborhood, a haven surrounded by relatives, you could not throw a stone without hitting a relative. If your mother wasn't home, you dropped in on Aunt Tessie, and she gave you cookies and milk, or you went around to see Grandpa in the grocery store where he worked for a man he had known in Naples, or maybe you ran into Uncle Mike driving his truck for the furniture company. It was said that Uncle Mike knew gangsters, and that the time the social club was held up and they stole Uncle Danny's ring and Uncle Sal's watch, it was Mike who got on his Neapolitan high horse and went off some place into the mysterious underworld where they talked of Petie Red Shirt and Legs Diamond and got the goddamn jewelry back the very next morning; he was a tough guy Uncle Mike, he could break your head with a glance. His sister loved Uncle Mike, she would almost wet her pants every time he stopped by. There was an argument once, Arthur couldn't even remember what it was all about, Mike taking out some girl from the bakery, and Tessie getting all upset and coming to see her sister, Arthur's mother, and her having a big argument with Mike and calling him everything under the sun while his father stood by and listened patiently and Arthur remembered how simply he had flushed the mouse down the toilet, so very simply, pull, flush, and out to sea without a whimper.

Christmases, they all got together, Christmases then, but not anymore, blame it on urban renewal, blame it on the decentralization of the family, the speedier means of communication and transportation, there were no more Christmases once his grandparents died. The family died when they died, it shriveled outward from the center, everybody just disappeared, where the hell were they all now? Dead or living in California, which is the same as being dead. He had dropped in to see Aunt Tessie and Uncle Mike when he was out in Hollywood, and Mike who had known gangsters, Mike who had threatened to break heads unless his brothers'-in-law jewelry was returned at once, immediately if not sooner, Mike was a tired old man, bald, his muscles turned to flab, this was the man who used to move furniture and mountains and fearsome gangs. They sat in the living room of the Tarzana development house and had nothing much to say to each other, how is your mother, tell her to write, did you go to Aunt Louise's funeral, and Arthur had wanted to say, "Don't you remember Christmas at Grandpa's house, don't you remember?" But Uncle Mike was an old man, you see, and Aunt Tessie limped, and there was nothing to say to either of them, there was only strong Italian coffee to sip and Italian pastry to nibble, he had not remembered it as being so sweet. Boy, what his grandfather used to buy for Christmas, boy the way that house sang, that crumby apartment on First Avenue, it must have been a crumby apartment and there probably were rats in the walls. He certainly could remember cockroaches in his own house whenever they turned on the kitchen light, an army in hurried retreat. "Step on them, Sonny," his mother would yell, "get them, get them!" a game each night, the scurrying mob, and then they would all disappear into cracks and crannies, gone like the mouse flushed out to sea, except they would return again. "Where do they go?" he once asked his father, and his father replied, "Home."

Home.

There was everybody there on Christmas and his grandfather welcomed one and all, not only the family but also everybody he knew from the grocery store, the nice old man who wore thick glasses, Alonzo, Alfonso, something like that, who had the idiot son who would come in alongside his father like a ghost and sit there quietly and perhaps sip a little red wine his grandfather poured. And the men would talk about the old country and about Mussolini and about how beautiful Rome was at Christmastime, and Arthur would listen, standing between his grandfather's knees, with his grandfather's strong hands on his shoulders, and the women would be bustling about in the kitchen, Grandma fretting and fussing, and the girls — her two daughters and later Danny's wife, and then Sal's wife — all would be busy with the preparations in the kitchen, and the Christmas gifts would be piled to the ceiling under the Christmas tree, and Grandpa would keep pouring wine for all the relatives and friends who kept dropping in from all over Harlem, all over the world it seemed, Buon Natale, Buon Natale, the wine being poured and the smell of tomato sauce in the kitchen. God, there were things to eat, things Grandpa used to get in the grocery store, all imported, great provolone and salami, and fresh macaroni and bread, and Aunt Louise would make the pimientos, she would roast the peppers over the gas jet until they turned black, he always thought she was burning them, but no then she would scrap off all the black part and reveal the sweet orange-red meat, and then she fixed them with oil and garlic, oh God. She sent him pimientos in a jar every month, once a month like clockwork, the last day of the month, until she finally died, always the pimientos in a jar because once he helped her with the grammar in one of her song lyrics, just helped her put it in order, that was all, pimientos for life, a great title.

The meal went on for hours, they would sit at the table and dip cling peaches in wine, allowing the thick golden fruit to soak there for a bit, and then bringing it dripping red to the mouth on a toothpick. His grandfather would say "Sonny, here, have some," and hold out the red-stained toothpick with the rich juicy slice of fruit on its end, tart, strong, sweet, everything. The kids would run through the length of the railroad flat, chasing each other, and his grandmother would yell for them to stop before the people downstairs banged on the ceiling with a broom handle, and they would stop for a little while, collapsing on the big bed in the front room, his head close to his sister's, all of them sweating, all the kids in the family, more kids all the time, all of them giggling and sweating on the bed with the picture of Jesus Christ over it holding his hand above his exposed heart and sunshine spikes radiating from his head. "That's God," his cousin Joey once said. "The Jews killed him," He asked his grandmother about it one time, and she said, "That's right, Sonny, the Jews killed him," and then she told a story about a Jew who went to church one day and received holy communion and then ran out of the church and took the wafer out of his mouth immediately and went home and nailed it to the wall. "And do you know what happened to that holy bread, Sonny? It began to bleed. And it never stopped bleeding. It just kept bleeding all over that Jew's floor."

"What did he do?" Arthur asked.

"What did who do?" his grandmother said.

"The Jew. What did he do about all that blood?"

His grandmother had shrugged and gone back to cooking something on the big wood stove in the kitchen, black and monstrous, always pouring heat and steam. "Wiped it up, I guess," she said. "How do I know what he did?"

But every time he looked at that picture of Jesus with the heart stuck on his chest as if he had just had surgery and they were showing how easy it was to expose a human heart these days, the drops of blood dripping down from it, and Jesus' hand just a little above it, and his head tilted back with his eyes sort of rolled up in his head like a character in an Eisenstein movie, he always thought of the Jew who nailed the communion wafer to the wall, and he always wondered first why the Jew would want to nail the thing to the wall to begin with, and second what he had done about all the blood. In high school, after he had moved to the Bronx and met Rubin, he realized his grandmother was full of shit, and he never trusted her very much after that, her and her communion nailed to the wall.

His sister Julia broke his head one time, this was about the time he fell in love with Virginia Kelly. Irish girls after that were all premised on Virginia, the sixth grade Virginia with long black hair and green eyes fringed with black lashes and budding little breasts — he hadn't been too aware of those at the time — and a way of tilting her head back to laugh, at him most of the time, which was the unfortunate part of it all. But oh how he loved that girl! He would watch her and watch her and notice everything she did or said, and then come home and tell his sister about it, which is why she broke his head one day. She broke his head with a stupid little kid's pocketbook by swinging it at him on its chain and clobbering him with the clasp, and all because he told her she would never be as beautiful as Virginia Kelly, no one in the world would ever be as beautiful as Virginia Kelly, she had clobbered him, wham! Even then she had a lot of spunk, you had to have spunk to live in the same house with a man like his father, boy, what a battle that had turned out to be years later. Where the hell are you now, Julie, living with your engineer husband and your two Norwegian kids in where the hell, Minnesota? There's no such place as Minnesota, don't kid me, sis. Do you remember breaking my head, and then crying when Mama took me to the druggist, and he examined it — who went to doctors in those days? — and wiped the blood away and said, "You've broken his head, young lady," and then put a strip of plaster on it? It was okay in a week or so, but boy did you cry, I really loved you Julie. You were a really nice sister to have, I hope your Norwegian loves you half as much as I did.

He met Virginia Kelly in the hall one day, he was coming back from the boys' room and he had the wooden pass in his hand, and Virginia stopped him. He was nine years old, and she was ten and big for her age, and she stopped him and said, "Don't look at me anymore, Stupid."

"Who's looking at you?" he said, but his heart was pounding, and he wanted to kiss her, wanted to kiss this quintessence of everything alien to him, the sparkling green eyes and the wild Irish way of tossing her head, all, everything. Years later, when he read Ulysses, he knew every barmaid in the book because they were all Virginia Kelly who told him once to stop looking at her, Stupid, and whom he never looked at again from that day forward though it broke his heart.

When he moved to the Bronx, the only person he thought he missed was Virginia Kelly. He would lie awake in bed at night and think of Virginia, and when he learned how to masturbate, he would conjure visions of this laughing Irish girl and ravage her repeatedly until one morning Julie said to him, "Hey, I have to make the beds around here, you know," and he pretended he didn't know what she meant, but after that he masturbated secretly in the bathroom and carefully wiped up after him with toilet paper. Somewhere along the line, he switched from raping Virginia Kelly to raping Hedy Lamarr, and he never thought of her again except once or twice when he remembered that there were people in this world who drove in red convertibles with their long black hair blowing in the wind, laughing, wearing silk stockings and loafers, the idealization of everything that seemed to him American, everything that seemed to him non-Harlem and non-Italian. Once, in high school, Rubin said to him in the boys' room, jokingly, "Where else but in America could an Italian and a Jew piss side by side in the same bowl?" and he had laughed because he laughed at everything Rubin said, Rubin was so much smarter and better informed than he, but he didn't really get the joke. He did not by that time see anything funny about being Italian, nor could he understand what Rubin thought was so funny about being Jewish. It never once occurred to him, not then, and not later when he was hobnobbing it around Hollywood with stars and starlets and all that crap, nor even when he laid a famous movie queen who kept calling him Artie, for which he almost busted her in the mouth, except she really was as passionate as she came over on the screen, not in all those years, not ever in his life until perhaps this moment when he felt so terribly alone enmeshed in a law system created by Englishmen, not once did he ever realize how dearly he had loved Harlem, or how much it had meant to him to be Italian.

There was in his world a cluttered brimming external existence, and an interior solitude that balanced each other perfectly and resulted in, he realized, a serene childhood, even in the midst of a depression, even though his father was a mysterious government employee known as "a substitute" instead of "a regular," which he gathered was highly more desirable. There was an immutable pattern in his household, the same foods were eaten on the identical night each week, Monday was soup which his mother made herself, he hated soup meat, it was stringy and tasteless. Tuesday night was spaghetti with either meatballs or braciòla, Wednesday night was breaded veal cutlets with spinach and mashed potatoes, his mother once dumped a whole bowl of mashed potatoes on his head because he was trying to catch a fly as a specimen for the microscope he had got for Christmas. He threw a dissecting needle at the fly on the wall and, uncanny luck, pierced the fly, even Errol Flynn couldn't have done better. ("You got 'im, Sonny!" Julie shrieked in delight.) But a lot of gooey white glop came out of the fly and he refused to eat his mashed potatoes after that. So his mother, naturally, having inherited a few Neapolitan traits from Grandpa, even though she herself had been born and raised in the garden spot called Harlem, picked up the bowl of potatoes and dumped the whole thing on his head. His father laughed. He hated his father for two months after that. Couldn't he have at least said it wasn't nice to dump a bowl of mashed potatoes all over a kid who was maybe a budding scientist and certainly the best dissecting needle thrower in the United States?

Thursday night was some kind of macaroni, either rigatoni or mostaccioli or fusilli, again with meatballs, or maybe sausage, and Friday night was fish, of course. Oh, how he hated fish. There were three kinds of fish his mother made, and he hated each and every one of them. The first was breaded filet of flounder, dry and white and tasteless. The second was breaded shrimp, she sure had a mania for breading stuff, equally as tasteless, except they seemed to come in bite size. The third was a white halibut which she made with a tomato sauce, fresh tomatoes he remembered because the sauce was always pulpy and sometimes had seeds. This was the best of the lot because it was a little juicier than the two breaded concoctions, but he hated each with a passion and deplored the approach of Friday each week. He did not learn how to eat lobster until he went to Maine with a girl from Barnard one weekend, and had not discovered until just recently that his mother hated fish as much as he did and had only made it every Friday because she was a sort of half-ass Catholic who never went to church or confession, but who nonetheless made fish every Friday night. Breaded.

Saturday was either lambchops or steak. Sunday was Grandpa's house, the biggest feast of the week, the family represented in smaller groups except on the holidays, antipasto, spaghetti, meatballs, roast beef or chicken or turkey, fruit, nuts, pastry — his grandfather always went out to buy cannoli and cassatini, sfogliatelli and baba on his name day, a sort of pilgrimage every year. He would come back flushed with the cold (his name day was in November) carrying two white cartons of Italian pastry, tied with white string, "Did you get them, Papa?" his mother would ask. And Grandpa would nod and smile and then grab Arthur playfully and say, "Sonny, help me cut the string, the string is too strong for me."

Structured, everything structured and ordered, the activity in the streets as patterned as the regularity of meals and holidays, each season bringing its own pursuit, its own hysterical joy to the slum. (Slum? What's that? What's a slum?) Roller skates, and stickball, and pea shooters, and pushos, and hi-li paddles, and baseball cards, and roasting mickeys, and black leather aviator hats with goggles, and rubberband guns, one kid had six of them mounted in tandem like a machine gun, and pigeons on the roof, and stoopball, and boxball, and Skullies (I love you, Virginia Kelly) and Statues, and Johnny-on-a-Pony and Ring-a-Leavio, and little girls skipping rope, or playing that game where they lift their leg over a bouncing ball, skirts flying, "One-two-three-a-nation, I received my confirmation," Virginia Kelly had a plaid skirt, blue plaid, she wore white socks, she once beat up Concetta Esposito for calling her a lousy Irish mick, which after all she was. Patterned, structured, safe, secure, there were no rats in Harlem, there was only a street that was a city, a dozen playmates who populated the world, a million relatives who hugged and kissed and teased and loved him and called him Sonny, a busy universe for a small boy.

And juxtaposed to this, the inner reality of Arthur Constantine, the quiet, thoughtful, solitary child who played with his soldiers on the dining room floor, the big oaken table serving as suicide cliff or soaring skyscraper, the intricacy of its hidden structure becoming a bridge to be blown or a gangplank to be walked, each separate lead soldier — the heads were always breaking off, when that happened, you fixed them with a matchstick, but they never lasted long — each separate soldier or cowboy or Indian assuming an identity of its own. Shorty was the one with the bow legs, he had a lariat in his hand when Arthur bought him for a nickel at the Woolworth's on Third Avenue, but later the lariat got lost. Magua was the Indian, he was made of cast iron rather than lead, and he never broke, he outlasted all the others. Naked to the waist, wearing a breechclout, he was Arthur's favorite, and Arthur always put words of wisdom into his mouth, carefully thought-out Indian sayings that helped the white man in his plight. Magua never turned on anybody, Magua was a good Indian. Red Dance was the bad Indian, he had a bonnet full of feathers. When his head finally broke off because Arthur caused Magua to give him a good punch one day, Arthur never bothered to repair him. Instead, he bought an identical piece and named him Blue Dance, who he supposed was Son of Red Dance, and when Magua knocked his head off, too, Arthur switched to a villain named El Mustachio who was a soldier carrying a pack, and who didn't have a mustache at all. He would talk aloud to himself while he played with the tiny metal men, he would construct elaborate conflicts and then put everything to rights with either a wise word from Magua or a sweep of his hand, scattering the pieces all over the floor. If his sister ever tried to enter one of these games, he shrieked at her in fury, and once he shoved her against the wall and made her cry and then went to her afterwards and hugged her and kissed her and said he was very sorry, but he still would not let her into any of the solitary games he played with the metal men. He wondered once, alone in his bed and listening to the sounds of sleep in the room next door, whether he would even have allowed Virginia Kelly to play soldiers with him — and he decided not.

Where do they go, he wondered, all those black-haired girls with the green eyes and the wonderful laugh, when the hell have I ever loved anyone as deeply or as hopelessly as I loved Virginia Kelly? Where does it all go, and how does it happen that I'm alone on this day, with Christmas coming and no Grandpa to ask me to help him break the string on the white carton of pastries, this day, when God knows I could at least use Aunt Louise to tell me she has a friend who knows a magistrate, "Don't worry, Sonny, I'll speak to them at the Club," the Republican Club would set it all straight, or if not, then certainly a dab of Aunt Louise's Ointment would. Where? he thought. Where? I've been invited to orgies in Hollywood (and refused) — "The ideah is to have a few drinks ontil ever'-one get on-in-hib-ited, you know whut I mean?" — I've seen my name on motion picture screens and television screens and once on a theater program, Arthur Nelson Constantine, the "Nelson" added by yours truly as a bow to our cousins across the big water, an acknowledgment of my veddy British heritage, Arthur Nelson Constantine ("What?" Aunt Louise would have said. "Don't worry, I know somebody in the Republican Club.") I have gone to bed with young girls, and some not so young, and once I went to bed with two girls, and another time I went to bed with a girl and another guy and I think we sent that poor little girl straight from there to an insane asylum, but that was in Malibu where such things happen often, I am told. I have sat at the same table with John Wayne, who offered to buy me a drink and then told a story about shooting The Quiet Man in Ireland, and I have been blasted across the sky at five hundred miles an hour while drinking martinis and watching a movie written and directed by a man I knew. And it seems to me now, it seems to me alone in this cold corridor that the most important thing I've ever done in my life was skewer a fly with a dissecting needle from a distance of five feet, shooting from the hip, did I ever tell you that story, Duke? And my mother rewarded me by dumping a bowl of lukewarm mashed potatoes on my head. And my father laughed. And the fly dripped its white glop all over the wall.

Where else but in America could a little Italian boy from the slums of Harlem (Well, you see, there are three Harlems) sit at the same table with John Wayne and listen to a very inside story about the shooting of The Quiet Man in Ireland? Where else, I ask you, indeed. Oh man, I played the Slum Kid bit to the hilt, everybody likes to hear how you can make it in the face of adversity. The mouse that almost bit my mother became over the years a foraging bloodthirsty sea monster with matted hair dripping seaweed and coming up out of the water with its jaws wide ready to swallow her bottom and everything else besides. The apartment on 118th Street became the Black Hole of Calcutta, it's a wonder the swarms of flies did not eat the eyes out of my head as I lay helpless and squirming in the squalor of my pitiful crib, it's a wonder the rats did not tear the flesh from my bones and leave me whimpering helplessly for an undernourished mother to hobble into the room and flail at them ineffectually. I was born and raised in Harlem, you hear that, Duke? Not only was I born and raised in Harlem, but I managed to get out of Harlem, which is no small feat in itself. Moreover, I was educated at Columbia University, which is a pretty snazzy school you will admit, and I managed to become an officer in the Army, came out as a captain don't forget, and then went on to become a very highly paid screen and television writer who this very minute is negotiating, or at least hoping to negotiate, with one Hester Miers, you've got it, mister, the very same, for the starring role in my new play which will be coming to Broadway shortly. (I'll stand in that lobby on opening night, Virginia Kelly, and when you walk in and recognize me and come over to wish me luck, I'll tell you to go bounce a ball on the sidewalk, one-two-three-a-nation. I'll tell you I've got an apartment of my own now in a very fancy building on East 54th Street, with a doorman and an elevator operator, and I'll tell you I date the prettiest girls in New York almost every night of the week and I've been sucked off by more black-haired Irish girls than there are in your entire family or perhaps in the entire city of Dublin. And then I'll ask the usher or perhaps the porter to please show you out of the goddamn theater as you are disturbing my equilibrium.) I was born and raised in Harlem, so look at me. Something, huh? You don't have to be colored to be underprivileged, you know. Look at me, and have pity on the poor skinny slum kid, man, did I play that into the ground.

So here stands the poor skinny slum kid (not so poor, not so skinny, never having come from a slum anyway because it sure as hell wasn't a slum to me, it was the happiest place I've ever known in my life) standing alone in an Anglo-Saxon world being represented by a Jew (Where else but in America can a wop, etc.) and going up against a man named Jonah Willow, who sounds like a Eurasian philosopher, and I'm scared. I'm scared not because there were rats in Harlem, I'm scared not because there were pushers lurking on every street corner, I'm scared not because teenage hoods came at me with tire chains and switch blades, I'm scared because I'm alone.

"I'm scared because I've been making it alone ever since I was eighteen and got drafted into the United States Army, I'm scared and I'm tired, and I would like to rest.

He took a last drag on his cigarette, searched for an ash tray in the corridor, and found four of them fastened to the wall. He glanced over his shoulder to see if Willow and his assistant were coming back — the hell with them, let them be late — and then walked swiftly toward the courtroom. He pulled open one of the bronze-flowered doors and immediately saw Brackman and his partner at one of the long tables, Genitori and his assistant at the other. He saw Driscoll and his wife sitting in the empty jury box, just as before. He saw the court clerk hovering near the door to the judge's chamber, waiting to call, "All rise!" No one seemed to realize that beyond that paneled door the judge might be reading his newspaper or blowing his nose or laughing on the telephone or tying his shoelaces — or perhaps pondering the decision that would mean the difference between a sweet, staggering success and… what?

What you have now, Arthur thought.

Exactly what you have now.

Unnoticed, he took his seat at the plaintiff's table, and waited for the trial to resume.

"Mr. Constantine, would you please continue where you left off before the recess?" Brackman said.

"I was just about to begin with specific character similarities," Arthur said. "I was going to start with the character of Lieutenant Roger Mason in my play Catchpole and the character called Alex Cooper in The Paper Dragon. There are similarities there that go beyond the realm of coincidence, and I'd like to enumerate them."

"Please do."

"To begin with, the hero of my play is twenty-one years old, and fresh out of college. He goes into the Army as a private, is sent to O.C.S., and is shipped to the Pacific to fight the enemy. The man who played him on the New York stage was at least six feet tall, and he had dark hair and blue eyes — did I say he was a second lieutenant?"

"Your Honor, could the clerk—"

"Yes, certainly."

"Witness has referred to him only as 'a new lieutenant,' " the clerk said.

"Would you like to amend that in some way?" McIntyre asked.

"Yes, your Honor, if I may. I'd like to say that he was a second lieutenant. That's very important. Especially since the hero of The Paper Dragon is a second lieutenant, too. He is described in the book, in fact, as being twenty-one years old, fresh out of Pratt Institute, and drafted into the Army. He goes to O.C.S. and then is shipped off to the Pacific to fight the enemy. The enemy is a different one this time, admittedly, and the setting is Korea, not Eniwetok — but the similarity stands. In addition, the hero of the book is described as being six feet tall, and having dark hair and blue eyes. Physically, these two different men in two so-called separate works look exactly alike. You could almost say they were twins.

"Now the second similarity of character is the fact that there is a nurse in my play, and also a nurse in the book. In my play she is called Diane Foster, and in the book she is called Jan Reardon. Both girls are blond, both are young, both are from New York City. In fairness, I must say that the girl in the book is not a native New Yorker, whereas the girl in my play is. But in both the play and the book, there's a romantic attachment formed between the hero and the nurse."

"You're getting into plot again, aren't you?" Brackman asked.

"Only as it illuminates character."

"Go on, please."

"There is in my play a sergeant who is a member of a minority group, his name is Sergeant D'Agostino and he is an Italian. In the book there is also a sergeant who is a member of a minority group. His name is Sergeant Morley, and he is a Negro. Both these men play important parts in plot development, as I explained earlier."

"Yes, let's just stick to character similarities right now."

"There is a man killed in my play, right at the outset. His name is Private Hapsberg. There is also a man killed in The Paper Dragon, even before the hero arrives on the scene. His name is Major Randolph. I don't think the rank makes much difference, it's the idea of a sniper killing each of these men that—"

"Your Honor," Willow said, "it would appear to me that we are simply going over ground already covered. Unless this testimony regarding character similarities can demonstrably add to what we earlier heard, I must object to the witness continuing along these lines."

"It would seem, Mr. Brackman," McIntyre said, "that there is an overlap here."

"May I explain, your Honor?" Arthur asked.

"Yes, please."

"In developing a work of fiction," Arthur said, "the interplay between plot and character—"

"Your Honor," Willow said, "I do not believe this Court is interested in fiction techniques. We are here to determine whether or not an act of plagiarism took place. It is hardly to the point—"

"Please let him finish, Mr. Willow," McIntyre said.

"I was going to say," Arthur said, with a sharp glance at Willow, *"that character and plot are inseparable in a good work of fiction. Character determines plot, and in turn plot shapes character. In other words, it would be practically impossible to discuss either without referring to the other."

"Yes, I understand that," McIntyre said. "But it would seem that the character similarities you are now listing were adequately covered when you testified about plot. In that respect, I would agree with Mr. Willow."

"This is merely an amplification, your Honor," Brackman said.

"Well, I will allow the witness to continue," McIntyre said, "but I think we would all appreciate the elimination of material already covered."

"This is simply backing and filling, your Honor," Willow said.

"Whatever it may be, Mr. Willow, the witness may continue — with the reservation I have already mentioned."

"Well," Arthur said, and hesitated. "I'm not sure I understand, but…"

"We would like you to continue with character similarities," McIntyre said, "but we ask you to limit—"

"I understand that," Arthur said, "but it seems to me…"

"Yes?"

"I don't know if I'm allowed to say this," Arthur said, and looked at Brackman.

"Allowed to say what, Mr. Constantine?" McIntyre asked.

"Well, it seems to me that the only opportunity I'll get to present my case…"

"The Court has asked you to continue with your testimony," Brackman said, a note of warning in his voice. "If you have a question concerning—"

"I will hear the witness," McIntyre said.

"No, nothing," Arthur said, and shook his head.

"We're not trying to give you a fast shuffle here, if that's what you think," McIntyre said, and Arthur turned to look at him, and saw him as a person for the first time. He was close to fifty years of age, Arthur supposed, partially bald, with mild blue eyes and a pink face. He was frowning now, and his hands, delicate and small, were folded on the bench before him as he looked down at Arthur and waited for an answer.

"I didn't mean to imply that, your Honor," Arthur said.

"We have, I believe, allowed you every opportunity thus far to present your case fairly and adequately. I assure you that we have already studied the play and the novel and that we saw a screening of the film on Friday. We have read the pretrial examination transcripts, and we have carefully studied the charts prepared by you and your counsel. You will remember that we yielded to your counsel's request to have you elaborate on these similarities in your own words, despite defendants' objection. We are now asking, in the hope of saving time, only that you limit your testimony to similarities not already covered by your previous testimony. We believe this is a reasonable request, Mr. Constantine."

"Yes, it's reasonable," Arthur said.

"Very well, then."

"But…"

"Mr. Constantine," Brackman said sharply, "are you ready to continue?"

"Is something still troubling you?" McIntyre asked.

"Yes, your Honor."

"Then please say what's on your mind."

"Your Honor, this case is very important to me."

"I realize that. I'm sure it's equally important to Mr. Driscoll."

"I'm sure it is, sir, but… well, Mr. Driscoll doesn't happen to be on the stand right now, and I am."

"Your Honor," Willow said, "I must object to the witness engaging this Court in argument. We are trying—"

"I will hear the witness," McIntyre said flatly. "Go on, Mr. Constantine."

"Your Honor, tomorrow morning Mr. Willow will begin his cross-examination and that, I'm afraid, is that. If there's anything I left out or forgot today, it'll be just too bad. I know the charts are a help, but…"

"That, I'm afraid, is not that," McIntyre said, "nor will it be just too bad, either. Your attorney will have ample opportunity to conduct a redirect. I'm sorry, Mr. Constantine, but I must now agree with Mr. Willow. This is a court of law and not a first semester course on evidence or tactics. You will please continue with your testimony, and you will limit it to similarities not previously covered."

"I apologize for the witness, your Honor," Brackman said. "Please continue, Mr. Constantine."

"Yes, sir," Arthur said, and swallowed. He was embarrassed and angry. Alone on the witness chair, feeling abandoned even by his own lawyer, he searched in his mind for character similarities, every eye in the room upon him, foolish and stupid, struck dumb by the judge's reprimand, his anger building, eyes smarting, hands trembling in his lap.

"If the witness would care to examine the charts to refresh his memory. " Willow said.

"I don't need the charts, thank you," Arthur snapped, and looked at Willow in anger, and then at Brackman in anger, and then glanced up at the judge in anger, the son of a bitch, shutting him up that way, humiliating him, Brackman allowing the humiliation and adding to the indignity by apologizing. The anger and embarrassment were identical to what he had felt the night the critics killed his play, those rotten egotistical bastards sitting in exalted judgment on something about which they possessed no real knowledge. How could McIntyre or Willow or even Brackman hope to understand the intricacies of a work of fiction? Oh yes, they would nod their heads in accord as they had this morning. Willow and McIntyre, two legal masterminds agreeing that an author's intent had no place in a court of law, no place in the judgment of a plagiarism suit, casually eliminating the inexplicable beginning of creation, snuffing out the spark of idea, eliminating conscious direction from the work — "I maintain, your Honor, that any similarities must be solely between the works in question."

"I would agree to that."

"And that therefore the author's intent is irrelevant." Oh yes, irrelevant, and why hadn't Brackman objected, or had he secretly agreed with his colleagues? Perhaps he had only wanted to apologize at that point, perhaps that was it, apologize for Arthur ever having conceived and written Catchpole at all. How could one possibly hope to explain anything to them if they had already ruled out intent, already decided that only words were on trial here, words and nothing more? Never mind the act itself, the intent or its realization, hadn't he been a little bit insane when he created the psychopathic colonel, hadn't he hated with Janus and suffered with the lieutenant, loved the nurse and died with D'Agostino, never mind, never mind, it is all cut and dried. There are only one hundred and twenty mimeographed pages of a play called Catchpole, there are only four hundred and twelve pages of a pirated novel called The Paper Dragon, there is only an hour and fifty minutes of a film supposedly based on the novel, that is our concern here, the comparison of the works. The author's intent is irrelevant, the author is irrelevant, the self is irrelevant, the man is irrelevant. That almighty God son of a bitch McIntyre will sit there with his watery blue eyes and his pink puffed face and humiliate him the way the critics had humiliated him in October of 1947, the shame and embarrassment of meeting people you knew, the goddamn solicitous smiles as though a stranger had passed away, but not a stranger, something very real and intimate called Catchpole which had taken four months to write and five months to sell, and two months to rehearse, not a stranger at all. The guarded knives, the secret delight behind the words of condolence. You have dared, my friend, you have dared to expose yourself, and they have killed you, and I am glad, I am secretly and enormously delighted, how sorry to hear that your play closed last night, but after all what do the critics know? Yes, after all, what do the critics know, or the lawyers or the judges, Arthur thought. He had tried to explain how important this trial was to him, and McIntyre had countered by saying it was important to Driscoll as well, yes. Yes, assuredly, oh certainly but not in the same way. There was more on trial here than words, more than the comparison of two similar works of fiction, more even than the enormous amount of money that would go to the victor. There was an identity on trial, there was this very self McIntyre refused to allow, there was a man. And if Arthur allowed Driscoll to steal the work of fiction, then he also allowed him to steal the intent and the realization, the self and the person, the man. And then there would be nothing left, nothing at all.

"We are waiting," Brackman said.

"I'm thinking," Arthur answered.

"Take your time," McIntyre said.

"Thank you," Arthur answered, and he hoped the sarcasm was evident in his voice. "There are," he said, "in addition to those character similarities already mentioned, just a few others. In both my play and in the book, for example, there is a soldier who comes from Brooklyn, a soldier who comes from the South, and a soldier who is Jewish. They are all in the squad that becomes the focus of both the play and the book, the one the lieutenant has all the trouble with in the platoon he commands. Also, in the play and in the book, there is an elderly nurse who is a sort of friend and mother-confessor to the heroine. In the play, she has recently lost her husband — which is why she joins the Medical Corps. In the book, she has also lost her husband and become a nurse." Arthur paused. "I think those are the rest of the specific character similarities, those not already mentioned."

"Your Honor," Brackman said, "should any others occur to the witness…"

"Yes, of course, you may bring them out in the redirect."

"Thank you, your Honor. Would you now tell us please what specific similarities of language you found in the play and the novel, Mr. Constantine?"

"Yes, certainly," Arthur said. He turned to McIntyre. "I thought I might quote from the respective works, if that wouldn't take up too much time, your Honor."

"We have time," McIntyre said. "If you don't finish before two o'clock, there's always tomorrow."

"I'd like to quote then."

"Go right ahead, please."

"In my play, when Lieutenant Mason first arrives on Eniwetok, I have Corporal Janus, the troublemaker, say, 'Another ninety-day wonder. I wonder how long he'll last.' In The Paper Dragon, Private Colman looks at the lieutenant right after he first addresses the men, watches him as he's walking away and says, 'Straight out of college. They sent him here for his master's degree,' and Sergeant Morley says, "Cheer up, Pete, maybe he'll flunk out.' That's his first name, Pete. Peter Colman."

"Mr. Constantine, we're all interested in saving time, but it's not necessary to speak this rapidly," Brackman said.

"I didn't realize I was."

"Just take as much time as you need."

"All right. I guess we are all familiar by now with what has been called the 'female rifle' scene in The Paper Dragon, where the men are disassembling their rifles. The lieutenant is going through the authorized method, straight from the book, and every time he comes to a word like 'rod' or 'butt' or 'trigger,' it breaks the men up. They're handling pieces, you see, which is Army terminology for a gun, and they keep making sexual allusions, and getting hysterical when the lieutenant says things like 'now twist the rod toward your body with your right hand and then exert a slight pull to the right,' I'm not quoting exactly, but the scene is intended sexually, and the men are doing all this to infuriate the lieutenant, who is running the session according to the book and trying to get a little order into what is a pretty bedraggled band of fighting men."

"This is in The Paper Dragon?"

"Yes, but its counterpart is in Catchpole. In my play I have the men discussing, within earshot of the lieutenant, the attempt of one of the men to capture a wild pig. Their references to the pig are purely sexual, and they are engaging in this kind of talk because the lieutenant had warned them he was going to try to 'clean up' the outfit before the final assault on Parry Island, those are his exact words. The pig is referred to as 'a juicy morsel,' and 'something to sink your teeth into,' and also at one point one of the men says, 'We almost had that sweet little piece of meat.' A piece of meat, of course, is a girl. I see there's a lady in the courtroom, and I hate to talk this way, but I'm referring to actual words in the works that are being questioned."

"You may say what you want to say, Mr. Constantine."

"In the motion picture, of course, this entire so-called 'female rifle' scene was eliminated. Now, in Catchpole, there are a great many references to Glenn Miller who was, as you know, a well-known bandleader during the thirties and forties and who was reported missing at about the time of the Eniwetok campaign, and I have the men speculating on what might have happened to him. In The Paper Dragon, which takes place in Korea in 1950, the Army men begin discussing Glenn Miller and how he could play trombone, whereas this is a new generation of men who actually would have very little knowledge of Glenn Miller or how he played trombone. The same references apply to the movie, and are mostly given to Sergeant Morley, the Negro."

"The same references to Glenn Miller, do you mean?"

"Yes. Now regarding the love story, the nurse in my play is a first lieutenant and of course the hero is a second lieutenant. There is a great deal of playful love-making where she constantly kids him about rank, and about reporting him to the company commander if he doesn't kiss her right that minute, all jokingly of course, but very important to the development of their affair. In the book, there is an extremely erotic sex scene where the couple are alone together for the first time, and she suddenly says, 'You'd better kiss me now,' and he says, 'Do you think it's safe?' and she replies, 'Do as I say, Coop. I outrank you.' The identical line is used in the motion picture. I'd like to say something here about the names of these characters, by the way."

"Go right ahead."

"This has to do again with specific language. My lieutenant's name is Roger Mason, and he is familiarly called 'Mase' by the nurse and by his fellow officers. The lieutenant's name in The Paper Dragon is Alex Cooper, and he is called 'Coop' by the nurse and by his friends. Which leads me to another startling similarity between—"

"Your Honor," Jonah said, "might we not do without the editorializing adjectives?"

"If you will simply state the similarities, Mr. Constantine," McIntyre said, "that will be sufficient."

"Yes, sir, I was only going to say that in my play the men keep calling the lieutenant 'Loot,' that's all. At one point in my play, the lieutenant says, 'How about lengthening that to Lieutenant Mason?' and Janus replies, 'Isn't that what I said, Loot?' stressing the word. Well, in The Paper Dragon, there's a scene where the lieutenant says to the men, 'A lieutenant is an officer in the United States Army. A lute is a Chinese stringed instrument.' And Colman, the troublemaker, answers, 'Maybe those Mongolian bastards would prefer lutes to bugles, Loot.' This same line is used in the motion picture, though of course the word 'bastards' is deleted. But the reference is the same in all three versions of my play."

"Objection, your Honor," Willow said. "There is only one version of the play, as I understand it."

"Sustained. Strike that."

"From where, your Honor?" the clerk asked.

"The reference to all three versions. There has been, as Mr. Willow pointed out, only one version of Catchpole submitted to this Court."

Brackman glanced at Willow ruefully, and then turned again to Arthur. "Would you tell us what other specific similarities of language you found?" he said.

Arthur cleared his throat. "In the stage play," he said, "we obviously could not use profanity in the New York theater, or at least the kind of profanity a combat squad would be apt to use in the midst of one of the bitterest campaigns in the Pacific war. But I had one man in the squad addicted to the use of a word which was easily understood by the audience as a substitute — an acceptable substitute, I should say — for a more obscene word. I had this one character, one of the minor characters in the squad constantly using variations of the word 'bug,' so that he would be saying 'This bugging Army food,' or 'This bugging war,' or 'Bug off, Mac,' expressions like that, which made it absolutely clear which word I really meant. In The Paper Dragon, because such language is allowed in novels, one of the characters in the squad is addicted to the use of the actual word, I think we all know the word I mean, in all of its various forms, the same way my character uses the word 'bug.' I don't remember this character's name. I think—"

"Is it Kenworthy?"

"That's right, his name in the book is Kenworthy. And every other word out of his mouth is an obscenity, identical to the character in my play."

"Go on, Mr. Constantine."

Arthur paused. Brackman studied him for a moment and then said, "Yes?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You seemed to be hesitating."

"Oh. I was only trying to remember if I'd left anything out, before I come to the most amazing similarity of all."

"Your Honor. " Willow started, rising.

"I do think we might get along better without the descriptive adjectives, Mr. Constantine," McIntyre said.

"I'm sorry, your Honor. To my mind, this next similarity is amazing, and—"

"Objection, your Honor."

"Please, Mr. Constantine."

"I'm sorry. May I tell this last specific similarity of language?"

"Yes, certainly," McIntyre said.

"Well, in the actual campaign for Eniwetok, the 106th was the United States Infantry Regiment that made the assault, and the other forces involved were the 22nd Marine Regimental Combat Team, and a temporary command echelon called Tactical Group One — this was all in February of 1944 when I was there on the island. I was attached to C Company, and I guess you know that Army companies are broken down into platoons and then squads, as was the Army company in my play. A squad consists of twelve men, and that's the number of soldiers I focus attention on in my play — this was done because of technical reasons, I wanted to get a microcosm of the Army into this relatively small group of men. When I started writing the play, however, I thought it would be best to use a fictitious infantry division, so I—"

"Why did you want to do that, Mr. Consantine?"

"I didn't want to run into any possible trouble with the Army, or with the inadvertent use of names that might possibly belong to real men who had been in the 106th Regiment during the Eniwetok campaign."

"You were afraid of possible lawsuits, is that it?"

"Yes, I didn't want to libel anyone who might be an actual living person. So I invented a division, and I called it the 105th, the digits one-oh-five, and I almost changed the name of the atoll to a fictitious one. That is, I almost changed it from Eniwetok, but I decided that would be taking too much historic license. So I didn't, after all. But I would like to say that there were only sixty-seven infantry divisions in the United States Army at that time, and that there was not then during 1944, nor was there during the Korean conflict, nor is there today at present an Army infantry division called the 105th. That's important when we come to compare this with The Paper Dragon."

"Would you explain that, please?"

"Well, the actual Army divisions involved in the battle for Korea when the Chinese began their Ch'ongch'on River offensive were the 2nd, the 24th, and the 25th. There was no 105th Division involved because there is no such division in the United States Army. The novel The Paper Dragon is set in Korea during October and November of 1950, prior to and during the Chinese offensive across the Ch'ongch'on. It is significant to me that James Driscoll chose to call his division in his novel the 105th, the identical number I chose for the division in my play. I think it's safe to say that the possibility of coincidence involving those three digits, one-oh-five — the odds against hitting on those same three digits accidentally and in sequence would be staggering. Yet those same three digits are used to label a division in my play and in the novel." Arthur paused, and then looked up at the judge. "That's all I have to say about the similarities between the two works, the three works when we include the movie."

"Your Honor, may I now offer copies of the various charts?" Brackman asked.

"Does anyone object?"

"No objection," Willow said, "if Mr. Brackman will tell us which chart is which."

"I offer this chart titled Plot Similarities."

"Do we understand that these charts represent Mr. Constantine's complete list of similarities?" Willow asked

"These three charts include each and every similarity Mr. Constantine found between the works in question. We have one additional chart listing the similarities between the play and the movie, and I would like to offer that as well."

"I would like to have it understood that these charts were prepared by Mr. Constantine, and are being offered to show James Driscoll's access to the play The Catchpole," Willow said.

"It's Catchpole" Arthur said.

"What?"

"It's Catchpole. There's no article. It's not 'The' Catchpole."

"Oh. I'm sorry," Willow said. "But are we clear as to their offer?"

"We are clear, Mr. Willow," McIntyre said.

"The second chart is labeled Character Similarities."

"Mr. Brackman, we did not get the number designation of the first chart."

"Plot Similarities is — do you have the number?"

The clerk consulted his notes. "Plaintiff's Exhibit 5 is Plot Similarities," he said. "Character Similarities is Plaintiff's Exhibit 6."

"Then this chart," Brackman said, "Language Similarities, would be number 7. The last chart, Play and Movie Similarities, is number 8."

"That's correct."

"No objection."

"No objection."

"Does that conclude the direct, Mr. Brackman?" McIntyre asked.

"It does. Defendants may examine."

"In that case, I would like to recess until ten a.m. tomorrow morning, at which time you may begin the cross-examination, Mr. Willow."

"This court is recessed until ten tomorrow morning," the clerk said.

"I don't know why you let him do that to me," Arthur said outside the courthouse. He was watching the oncoming traffic for a taxicab, his eyes squinted against the strong wind, his back to Brackman, who stood with his gloved hands in his coat pockets, homburg tilted down, muffler tight about his throat, heavy briefcase resting beside him on the sidewalk.

"You let him do it," Brackman said. "You walked right into it."

"You should have stopped him. You're my attorney."

"You were your own attorney at that point."

"I was getting angry."

"Yes. So you attempted to argue your own case. That was a brilliant move, Arthur, absolutely brilliant."

"Someone had to argue it. You certainly weren't."

"Thank you, Arthur."

"Don't get petulant, Sidney. Petulance is unbecoming on a middle-aged man."

"Yes, and ingratitude is unbecoming on a man of any age."

"If we win this case…"

"If we win this case, I'll be amply rewarded, yes. If we win it. In the meantime, it's cost me a considerable amount of time and money, and I would appreciate your letting me handle it from now on."

"I didn't think McIntyre was being fair. He can't—"

"He can do whatever he wants in his own courtroom."

"But he has to be fair."

"No, he only has to be judicious."

"I still think he was rushing us," Arthur said, and raised his hand to signal an empty cab.

"Let it go by," Brackman said. "I want to talk to you."

"I have to get to the theater."

"The theater can wait. Let it go by."

Arthur waved the taxi away and turned wearily to Brackman. "What is it?" he asked.

"Arthur, do you want to lose this case?"

"You know I don't."

"You can lose it if you're not careful."

"I thought you said…"

"Yes, that we had an airtight case. But believe me, Arthur, you can lose it. And one sure way of losing it is to antagonize the man who'll be making the decision. That's one sure way of slitting your own throat."

"I'm sorry."

"Tomorrow's going to be a rough day, Arthur. Willow—"

"I said I was sorry."

"Willow is not on our side, you know, and he'll do everything he can to rattle you and confuse you and make you lose your temper. I want your promise that under no circumstances will you again address the judge personally, not to ask him any questions, not to offer any explanations, not for any conceivable reason. I don't even want you to look at him, Arthur, I want your promise on that."

"I promise," Arthur said. "I have to get to the theater."

"Can you be here at nine-thirty tomorrow?"

"I guess so. Why?"

"There are a few matters I want to discuss when you're not in such a hurry."

"All right, I'll be here."

"Nine-thirty," Brackman said. "There's another empty one, grab him."

"Can I drop you off?"

"No, I'm going east."

The taxicab pulled to the curb. Arthur opened the door, and then said, "Judicious is fair."

"Look it up," Brackman said, and Arthur climbed in and closed the door behind him. "The Helen Hayes Theatre," he said to the cabbie, "Forty-sixth and Broadway."

It had turned into a bleak, forbidding day, the sun all but gone, dank heavy clouds hanging low in the sky and threatening snow. Through the taxi windows, he could see pedestrians rushing past on the sidewalks, hurrying to cross the streets, their heads ducked, their hands clutching coat collars. Behind them and beyond them, the store windows beckoned warmly with holiday tinsel and mistletoe, colored lights and ornaments, wreaths and sprigs of holly. This was only the twelfth of December, with Christmas still almost two weeks away, but the stores have begun preparing for the season long before Thanksgiving, and the city wore a festive look that unified it now as it did each year. He could remember the long walks to the library from his home on 217th Street, the store windows decorated as they were here but with a shabby Bronx look. They had moved to the Bronx when he was twelve years old, the decentralization, was beginning, the second generation was starting its exodus to what then passed for the suburbs. The trip to Grandpa's house each Sunday would be longer and more difficult to make, discouraging frequency, trickling away at last to family gatherings only on holidays or occasional Sundays, disappearing entirely when his grandfather died. The street they moved into was another ghetto, smaller, cleaner, with a rustic country look (or so it seemed after Harlem) trees planted in small rectangular plots of earth dug out of the sidewalk, mostly two-family brick houses, Olinville Junior High School across the street, its fence stretching halfway up the block from Barnes Avenue, they used to play handball in the schoolyard. He tried out for the handball team when he entered high school, but did not make it. He was a good student, though, his marks always up in the eighties and nineties, and an omnivorous reader. He would go to the library on 229th Street and Lowerre Place maybe two or three times a week, even before it got to be a gathering place for the high school crowd.

There was a feeling of prosperity to the new apartment (he recognized now that it was hardly less shabby than the four rooms they'd had in Harlem) with its new furniture and its new linoleum, the three-piece maple set his mother bought for him, with the dresser that had a hidden dropleaf desk full of cubbyholes, and the pink curtains in Julie's room. She was nine at the time, and had already begun to hang all kinds of crazy signs on her door, genius at work and BEWARE VICIOUS DOG, he got such a kick out of her, she was really a great kid. His father had become a "regular" by then, and was working out of the Williamsbridge Post Office on Gun Hill Road. He would set the alarm for four-thirty every morning, waking up the whole damn house, and clamoring for his breakfast, a real ginzo with ginzo ideas about the woman's place and so on. He could have let Mama sleep, instead of making such a big deal about breakfast, racing around the apartment in his long Johns. "There he goes," Julie would yell, "they're off and running at Jamaica," and Arthur would lie in his bed under the quilt Aunt Louise had made for him, and quietly snicker, he sure was a nut, that old man of his.

There was, too, the same feeling of belonging in this new ghetto, though now there weren't aunts and uncles to meet on the street or to drop in on during the afternoon. But there were Italians all up and down he block, half of them barely able to speak English, and there was a funny kind of intimacy, a feeling of safety, an instant understanding that was not present out there in the White Protestant world, though at the time he was not aware such a world even existed. He knew only that he felt comfortable on his own block, with people who were easily recognizable, like the business with all the women named Anna, for example. His mother's name was Anna, but there were also four other women named Anna on the block. So instead of using their last names, which is what any decent New Canaan lady would have done, instead of referring to them as Anna Constantine or Anna Ruggiero or Anna Di Nobili, the women had a shorthand all their own, Naples-inspired he was sure, instant ginzo communication. His mother was Anna the Postman, and the other women were respectively Anna the Plumber, and Anna the Butcher, and Anna the Bricklayer, and also Anna From Wall Street, he smiled even now, thinking of it. But he was comfortable then, comfortable in his growing body, and comfortable in his new home, where in the silence of his bedroom (unless Julie was practicing her flute in her own room next door) he would take the little maple lamp from the dresser top, the lamp shaped like a candlestick with a little shade on it, and he would put the lamp on the floor and play with his soldiers in the circle of light it cast. The dining room table had been sold before they left Harlem, they now had a three-piece living room suite and a big floor radio that looked like a juke box, but there were worlds to discover on his bedroom floor and he searched them out with his faithful Magua and his intrepid Shorty, his imagination looser now, fed by the books he withdrew from the library each week.

Every now and then he would take Julie to the library with him, leaving her in the children's section while he roamed in his mature twelve-year-old masculinity through the adult section, taking a book from a shelf, scanning it, deciding whether or not he wanted to read it. He never bought any books then, and he did not know there was such a thing as the bestseller list of the New York Times Book Review. He had not ever, in fact, even read the New York Times, although kids used to come around to the classrooms selling the Times and also the Trib. He grew up with the News and the Mirror and the Journal-American (he later felt betrayed when even these friendly and well-known newspapers killed his play). He wondered now when he had last gone to see a play that had not received rave notices, when he had last read a book that was not on the bestseller list. It had been much simpler then, the long walk to the library along White Plains Avenue, the library snug and warm, the aroma of books, the feel of them in his hands. And at Christmas, the tree opposite the main desk, decorated with popcorn, the Dickens novels bound in burnished red leather, tooled in gold, spread on the floor beneath the tree, more appropriate at Christmas than at any other time. The librarian was a nice German lady named Miss Goldschmidt. "Merry Christmas, Arthur," she would say. "What are you reading this week?" — the cherished copy of The Talisman with the jacket picture of the knight on horseback, he slid the book across the desk and Miss Goldschmidt beamed approval.

"You sure that's on Forty-sixth?" the cabbie asked.

"I'm sure," Arthur said. There were not too many things he was sure of, but he was dead certain that the Helen Hayes was on Forty-sixth Street because Catchpole had opened at that identical theater when it was still known as the Fulton in 1947, to be mercilessly clobbered by all ten gentlemen of the press the next day — back then, PM, the Mirror, the Sun, and the Brooklyn Eagle also had a say about what would be permitted to survive. He thought it supremely ironic that his new play was holding readings at the same theater, but he fervently wished it would open someplace else, anyplace else, where he would be safe from the evil eye. Evil eye, my ass, he thought, but hadn't his grandfather come to America from an impoverished mountain village called Ruvo del Monte, and wasn't there still enough to this heritage in Arthur to cause suspicion and doubt? In fact, hadn't his Aunt Filomena been hit by the iceman's runaway horse on First Avenue the very night after his mother had dreamt it? Any place but the Fulton, he thought. You can change the name, but the jinx remains. And yet he knew his fears were idiotic, God, look at what the wind was doing out there, papers blowing in the gutter, hats skimming off heads, look at that woman trying to control her skirts, God this was a city, what a city this was.

He wanted to own this city.

But more than that, or perhaps a part of it, an extension of it, he wanted to know that this was where he belonged, this city into which he had been born, this city whose streets and gutters he knew from the time he had felt for immies in deep puddles along the curb, this city whose rooftops held secret fluttering pigeons to watch, hot, sticky tar to mold into huge, strange shapes, chimney pots behind which you could pee, this city that had grown to include the Bronx and a two-family house opposite the junior high school, hide and seek behind hydrangea bushes, fig trees wrapped in tarpaper against the winter's cold, a two-cent Hooton with nuts every afternoon on the walk home from Evander, Bronx Park and the winding river path, Laura in the woods behind the Botanical Gardens, they'd been eaten alive by mosquitoes, this city, this.

He wanted to claim it, but more than that he wished to be claimed by it.

Those solitary walks to the library alone, when alone his thoughts would spiral and somersault, when alone he would build magic castles bright with minarets and floating golden banners, when alone he was master of a world in which he walked proud and unafraid and people knew his name and dreaded it, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his mackinaw, the library books dangling at the end of a long leather strap except when it was raining and his mother made him put them in a shopping bag from the A&P, those solitary walks when he knew without question who he was and what he would become.

He wanted the city to tell him who he was again.

He paid the driver and got out of the taxi, walking directly to the stage entrance and opening the door onto the long alley that led to the rear of the theater. Selig and Stern were standing at the end of the alley, in whispered consultation just outside the metal stage door. Selig was wearing a black overcoat with black velveteen collar and cuffs, puffing on a cigar and standing alongside the iron steps that ran to the upper stories of the theater. The alleyway was gray, capped by an ominous piece of gray sky that hung high above it like a canopy. Selig stood in black against the rusting iron steps, surrounded by gray walls and gray smoke. His face appeared gray, too, as though someone very close had passed away during the night.

Stern was wearing a blue plaid sports jacket with a navy blue sweater under it. He was rubbing his big hands together as though chiding himself for having anticipated spring in December, his shoulders hunched, shivering with every swirling gust of alley wind. He looked up in surprise as Arthur approached, and then said, "Is the trial finished already?"

"No, we broke early," Arthur replied. "Is Kent here?"

"Not yet," Selig said.

Kent Mercer was their director, a faggot whose nocturnal revels ("I'm a night person," he would protest, "that's why I'm in the theater, really") often terminated along about dawn when less talented citizens were rising and banging on the radiators for heat. No one expected him to be on time because he never was, and no one ever mentioned his tardy appearances — except Selig, who would invariably remark, each time Mercer arrived late and pantingly out of breath, "Have a good night's sleep, Kent?"

"Where is it?" Stern asked, shivering. "The trial, I mean."

"All the way downtown. Foley Square."

"Is that near the traffic court down there?" Stern asked.

"I think so."

"I was down there once on a speeding ticket," Stern said.

"Mmm," Arthur said, and wondered how Stern could possibly equate a traffic ticket with something as important as a plagiarism suit. Of the two men, he liked Stern least, which in itself was no recommendation for Selig. "Have you heard from Mitzi?" he asked.

"Not yet," Selig said.

"Well, what's happening with Hester's contract?"

"You know as much about it as we do," Selig said mildly, and then puffed on his cigar and looked at the wet end as though suddenly displeased with its taste.

"Last Wednesday—"

"That's right," Stern said. Stern had an annoying habit of agreeing with a statement before it was finished. Arthur was tempted to say, "Last Wednesday someone told me you were a son of a bitch." Instead, he glanced at Stern in brief anger, and then said, "Last Wednesday you told me Hester liked the play."

"That's right," Stern said.

"That's what her agent told us," Selig agreed.

"Aren't you fellows cold out here?" Stern asked.

"No," Arthur said. "And on Friday, you told me she wanted to do it, and it was now a matter of negotiation."

"That's right."

"This is Monday," Arthur said.

"You know Hester."

"No, I don't know Hester."

"She's not sure now."

"If she was sure Friday…"

"We don't even know if she was sure Friday. We only know what her agent told us."

"Her agent said she wanted to do the play, isn't that right?"

"And that she was ready to negotiate."

"That's right."

"Well, has an offer been made?"

"She's getting a thousand a week at Lincoln Center, that's whether she's in any of the plays or not. If we even hope to spring her, we've got to offer at least fifteen hundred."

"Well, how much did you offer?"

"It hasn't come to that yet."

"Look, would someone please talk straight?" Arthur said.

"We've always talked straight with you, Arthur," Selig answered.

"Was an offer made?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because she still has to talk to the people at Lincoln Center about getting sprung."

"Won't they let her go?"

"We think they will, but it's a matter of sitting down with these people and discussing it."

"Well, when is she going to do that?"

"As soon as she's sure she wants to do your play."

"That's right," Stern said.

"Let me try to get this straight," Arthur said. "Does she want to do my play?"

"It would seem so."

"When will we know?"

"I'll call her agent again, if you want me to," Selig said. "Is that what you'd like?"

"Yes."

"I don't think we should push this," Stern said.

"Why not?"

"Because if we can get Hester Miers to take this part, we'll raise all the money for the play immediately. That's why."

"I thought we had all the money already," Arthur said.

"This show will cost eighty thousand dollars," Stern said.

"Have we got all the money, or haven't we?"

"No, Arthur," Selig said. "We have not got all the money."

"You told me…"

"That's right," Stern said.

"You told me all the money was in. You said…"

"That's right, but a few of our people have dropped out."

"Well, even if a few of them have dropped out, that doesn't mean…"

"One of our people was a man who'd promised us a very large sum of money. He's decided to put it into a musical instead."

"How much do we still need?"

"We still need sixty thousand dollars," Selig said flatly.

"That means we've hardly got any of it," Arthur said.

"If we sign Hester, we'll get all of it," Stern said.

"Then for God's sake sign her!"

"She's not sure she wants to do it."

"Call her agent. I want to know."

"Mitzi will say what she said over the weekend," Stern said. "Hester's not sure."

"If you want me to call her, I will," Selig said. "I'll do whatever you want me to do, Arthur. After all, this is your play."

"That's right," Stern said, "but calling Mitzi won't do a bit of good."

"If Arthur wants me to call her, I will."

"Is that what you want, Arthur?"

"I want this play to go on," Arthur said fiercely.

"We all do."

"That's right. But calling Mitzi isn't going to help. She'll say she hasn't been able to reach Hester."

"Look…"

"This is the theater, Arthur. These people are sensitive individuals who—"

"Sensitive, my ass!" Arthur said. "My play is in danger of collapsing, and you're telling me some twenty-two-year-old kid has the power…"

"She's twenty-five, and she's very talented, and your play is not in danger of collapsing."

"I won't let this happen," Arthur said, and there was such an ominous note in his voice that the alley went immediately still. "Call Mitzi. Tell her we have to know, and we have to know right away."

"Don't push this," Stern warned.

"Oscar, if I don't push this, perhaps you'd like to tell me just who will."

"We all want the play to go on. We love this play."

"You've loved it for eleven months now, your option expires in January.

"That's right."

"Yes, that's right, and January is next month."

"We can always talk about an extension," Stern said. "If we get Hester."

"If we get Hester," Arthur repeated.

"That's right, if we get Hester. If we get Hester, we get the money, it's as simple as that. Once we get the money, we can talk extension. If you're willing to grant it, we can go into rehearsal as soon as we finish casting these minor parts. Probably in time for a spring opening."

Arthur nodded. "And if we don't get Hester?"

"Let's see what she has to say, okay?"

"Okay, call Mitzi," Arthur said.

"It'll have to wait till tomorrow."

"Why?"

"Because she's in Philadelphia," Selig said. "One of her clients, Boris Whatsisname, opens in Philadelphia tonight. She's got to be there to hold his hand."

"Well, why can't you call her there? Philadelphia's only—"

"I don't want to bother her with something like this when she's got an opening. Be sensible, Arthur. It's not going to pay to get impatient here."

"All right."

"All right, Arthur?"

"I said all right."

"I'll call her in the morning, first thing."

"All right."

"And then I'll get to you."

"I'll be in court. The cross starts tomorrow."

"You call me when you're free then, all right?"

"All right," Arthur said.

3

Sidney looked at his watch the moment he entered the vestibule of her building. It was a quarter to four, and she had promised to wait until at least five, but he was afraid now that she had grown impatient and left earlier. The nameplate over her bell was lettered in delicate black script, Charlotte Brown, and it annoyed him just as it always did. He knew her as Chickie Brown, and the formal black script — especially since it had been clipped from her business card — conjured an image of a person about whom he knew very little, Charlotte Brown, who was part owner of a travel agency on Madison Avenue, where she arranged vacations to Haiti or Istanbul for fat matrons. Scowling at the nameplate, he pressed the button below it, and hoped there would be an answering buzz. He gripped the knob on the inner vestibule door with his right hand, put his briefcase down on the floor, patted his hair into place with his free left hand, and waited. Sighing, he walked back to the row of mailboxes, rang the bell a second time, returned to grip the doorknob again, waited, went back to the bell a third time, waited again, and had to ring yet another time before she answered. Her buzz sparked an intense and immediate anger within him, how dare she keep him waiting so long? The anger mounted as he pushed open the frosted-glass door and stepped into the hallway. Did a man have to ring a bell four times before he was admitted to a building? An attorney? Angrily, he climbed the steps to her third-floor apartment. Angrily, he knocked on the door.

"Sidney?" she called.

"Yes," he said. "It's me." For a moment, he thought his anger had caused him to forget his briefcase in the vestibule below, and then he realized that he was holding it tightly in his sweating left hand. The door opened.

"Hello," he said brusquely.

"Hello, luv," she answered warmly.

She was wearing dark green slacks and a white silk blouse. A string of green beads circled her throat. Her long hair was piled carelessly on top of her head, held there haphazardly with a green ribbon, bright russet strands falling onto her cheek and forehead, trailing down the back of her neck.

"Come in," she said, "come in," and walked barefooted toward the plush-covered chair near the window, where her cat lap supine on the arm, his tail switching nervously. She passed her extended forefinger along the length of the cat's back, and then lowered the shade against the gathering dusk. The cat's name was Shah, and Sidney despised him.

Chickie turned from the window with a pleased smile on her face, as though she had been contemplating his arrival all day, and was now enormously satisfied by his presence. She touched the cat again in passing. He lifted his head to accept her hand, and then the tail switched again, and he turned to look at Sidney with a malevolent jungle stare.

One day, you little son of a bitch, Sidney thought, I will be in this apartment alone with you, and I will drown you in the tub.

"What kind of a cat is he?" he asked Chickie.

"A nice cat," she answered.

"I meant the breed."

"Persian."

"Is that why you call him Shah?"

"No."

"Then why?"

"Because he's a nice cat. Aren't you a nice cat, Shah sweetie?" she asked, and she dropped to her knees before the chair and put her face close to the animal's. "Aren't you a lovey-cat, Shah honey?"

"Please, you'll make me vomit," Sidney said.

"I think Sidney has had a hard day in the mines," she said to the cat, and then rose and grinned and said, "Would you like a drink, Sidney? Would that help?"

"I had a very easy day," Sidney said, glaring at the cat. "I just don't happen to like your cat."

"Sidney!" she said. "I thought you loved Shah."

"No, I don't love Shah."

"I thought you did."

"No, I do not. Point of fact, I do not love any cat in the world, least of all Shah. Don't ever leave me alone in the apartment with him, or I'll drown him in the tub."

"Do you hear that, Shah?" she said playfully. "Watch out for Sidney because he'll drown you in the tub."

The cat made an ominous sound from somewhere back in his throat. "That's right, you heard her," Sidney said, and Shah made the same ominous sound again.

"He understands you," Chickie said.

"I hope he does. Why do you keep him around?"

"He was a gift."

"From whom?"

"A man."

"Who?"

"Before I knew you."

"I didn't ask you when, I asked you who."

"An Indian."

"From India?"

"Yes, of course. Did you think I meant a Mohican or something?"

"I never know what you mean, exactly," he said, and sighed.

"Don't you want to know why he gave me the cat?"

"No."

"All right, then I won't tell you."

"Why did he give you the cat?" Sidney asked.

"Why do you think he gave me the cat?"

"Because he knew you loved cats."

"No. That is, he knew I loved cats, yes, but that's not why he gave me a present. The cat was a present, Sidney."

"Why did he give you a present?" Sidney asked, and sighed again.

"You think it's because I went to bed with him, don't you?" Chickie said.

"Did you go to bed with him?" he asked wearily.

"Sidney, what a question to ask!"

"Well, then why did he give you the filthy little animal?"

"You're angry now."

"No, I'm not angry now. But sometimes I get awfully goddamn tired of these Burns and Allen routines."

"I didn't mean to make you angry," she said. "I'm sorry." She rose quickly, lowered her eyes, and padded to the bar. "I'll make you that drink," she said.

"Thank you."

The room was silent. It could have been a shuttered room in Panama, there was that kind of afternoon hush to it, the waning light against a drawn shade, the silk-tasseled lower edge, a contained lushness, the green plush chair with the gray cat purring on its arm, the moss green of the velvet curtains and the burnt sienna walls, the scent of snuffed-out candles and perfume.

He had felt in Panama, a centuries-old decadence that clung to every archway and twisted street, a miasma of evil, a certain knowledge that anything ever devised by humans had been done in this city, and he had been excited by it. Now, watching Chickie as she moved barefooted over the rug, the drink in one hand, he felt the beginning of that same kind of excitement, a welcome loss of control that he experienced whenever he was near her, a heady confusion that threatened to submerge him.

She handed him the drink. "What is it?" she asked.

"I had to ring four times," he said.

"What?"

"Downstairs."

"Is that what's bothering you?"

"Yes," he said, and accepted the drink.

"I'm sorry, Sidney, but you'll remember—"

"It's all right."

"You'll remember that I advised you not to come in the first place. I have to leave in a very few minutes…"

"Where are you going?"

"To the agency. I told you that on the phone, Sidney, and I told you I'd be very rushed."

"Why are you going to the agency?"

"I have work to do."

"I thought…"

"I have work to do, Sidney."

"All right, I'll pick you up later for dinner," he said.

"No, I can't have dinner with you tonight."

"Why not?"

"I'm having dinner with Ruth. We have a trip to work out. I told you all about it."

"No, you didn't."

"A very important trip that may materialize," she said, nodding.

"That may materialize?" he said. "I don't understand."

"Ruth and I have to work out this trip together," she explained very slowly, "that may be materializing."

"A trip to where?"

"Europe."

"For whom?"

"For a client, of course."

"But what do you mean it may be materializing?"

"Well, it isn't certain yet."

"When will it be certain?"

"Very soon, I would imagine. Your hair sticks up in the back, did you know that?"

"Yes. Can't Ruth handle it alone? There's something I wanted to—"

"No, she can't. Do you want a refill, Sidney?"

"No. Why can't she?"

"Because it would be a very long trip, Sidney. If it materializes. It would be for the entire winter, you see."

"I see."

"Until the fifteenth of June."

"I see."

"Which is why it's so terribly complicated. Are you sure you don't want a refill?"

"No, thanks. Maybe I can see you later then. There's something—"

"I'll be busy all night."

He stared at her for a moment, and then said, "Chickie, are you lying to me?"

"What?"

"Are you lying?"

"About what, for God's sake?"

"About this trip, about tonight, about…"

"Sidney, I'm a very bad liar. I wouldn't even attempt lying to you."

"I think you're lying to me right this minute," he said.

"Now stop it, Sidney," she warned. "You may have had a difficult day, but let's not start hurling silly accusations around, shall we not?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "I h-h-have had a d-d-difficult day, I'm sorry."

"That's all right, Sidney, and don't start stammering."

"I'm sorry."

"What you need is another drink," she said, and took his glass. "And then I've got to get dressed." She put two ice cubes into his glass and poured more bourbon over them. She handed the glass to Sidney and then said, "Shall I take Shah out of the room? Would you like me to do that?"

"Yes, I'd appreciate it."

"I will then. Come, Shah," she said, "come, pussycat. Sidney doesn't like you because of the Indian, isn't that true, Sidney? Come, Shah, sweetie."

She lifted the cat into her arms, cradling him against her breasts. "Drink," she said to Sidney, and then suddenly stopped alongside his chair. "Drink," she repeated in a whisper. A strange little smile twisted her mouth. She stared at him another moment, smiling, and then turned her back to him abruptly and went down the hall to her bedroom.

He sat alone in the darkening room, sipping his drink.

He supposed he would ask her when she returned, though he would have much preferred doing it over dinner. He did not relish the thought of postponing it again, however. He had been on the verge of asking her for the past week, and each time he had lost his courage, or become angry with her, and each time he had postponed it. He had the feeling he could put it off indefinitely if he allowed himself to, and he did not want that to happen. No, he would ask her when she returned, even though he was still a little angry with her.

He had to watch the anger, that was the important thing. Oh yes, there were other things as well — he talked with his hands a lot, he had got that from his father; and the stammering, of course, but that was only when he go excited; and his inability to extricate himself sometimes from a very complicated sentence, three years of Latin at Harvard, a lot of good it had done him. But the anger was the most important thing, that was the thing he had to control most of all because he knew that if he ever really let loose the way his mother… well.

Well, she was dead, poor soul, nor had it been very pleasant the way she went, lingering, lingering, he had gone to that hospital room every day of the week for six months, at a time when he had just begun the partnership with Carl and really should have been devoting all of his energies to building the practice. Well, what are you supposed to do when your mother is dying of cancer, not visit her? leave her to the vultures? God forbid. And the anger, her immense and enormous anger persisting to the very end, the imperious gestures to the special nurses day and night, oh the drain on his father, the shouted epithets, thank God most of them were in Yiddish and the nurses didn't understand them, except that one Miss Leventhal who said to him in all seriousness and with an injured look on her very Jewish face, "Your mother is a nasty old lady, Mr. Brackman" — with the poor woman ready to die any minute, ahhh.

The anger.

He had never understood the anger. He only knew that it terrified him whenever it exploded, and he suspected it terrified his father as well, who always seemed equally as helpless to cope with it. His mother had been a tall slender woman with a straight back and wide shoulders, dark green eyes, masses of brown hair piled onto the top of her head, a pretty woman he supposed in retrospect, though he had never considered her such as a child. They lived on East Houston Street, and his father sold shoes for a living, shoes that were either factory seconds or returns to retail stores. He did a lot of business with Bowery bums when they were sober enough to worry about winter coming and bare feet instead of their next drink or smoke. He had always admired the way his father handled the bums, with a sort of gentleness that did not deny their humanity, the one and only thing left to them. Except once when a drunken wino came into the store and insulted Sidney's mother, and his father took the man out onto the sidewalk and punched him twice in the face, very quickly, sock, sock, and the man fell down bleeding from his nose, Sidney remembered how strong his father had been that day. The wino came back with a breadknife later, God knows where he had got it, probably from the soup kitchen near Delancey, and his father met him in the doorway of the store, holding a length of lead pipe in his right hand and saying, "All right, so come on, brave one, use your knife." His mother called the police, and it all ended pretty routinely, except for his mother's later anger.

The anger exploded suddenly, the way it always did, they were sitting in the kitchen upstairs, the second floor over the store, and his mother began berating Sidney's father for what Sidney thought had been his really courageous behavior and suddenly she went off, click, it was always like that, click, as though a switch were thrown somewhere inside her head, short-circuiting all the machinery, click, and the anger exploded. She got very red in the face, she looked Irish when she did, and her green eyes got darker, and she would bunch her slender hands into tight compact fists and stalk the kitchen, back and forth, the torrent of words spilling from her mouth in steady fury, not even making sense sometimes, repeating over and over again events long past, building a paranoid case, well, no not paranoid, building a case against the world, reliving each injustice she had ever suffered at the hands of the goyim, at the hands of childhood friends, at the hands of his father's family, at the hands of her ungrateful whelp of a son, nothing whatever to do with the drunken wino (or whoever or whatever it happened to be), the supposed original cause of her anger. "No justice," she would scream, "there's no justice," and the flow of words would continue as she paced the kitchen before the old washtub, and Sidney's father would go to her and try to console her, "Come, Sarah, come, darling," and she would throw off his imploring hands while Sidney sat at the oilcloth-covered table in terror, thinking his mother was crazy or worse, well not crazy, "She's excited," his father would say, "she's just excited."

Those were not happy times. The war had ended long ago, but the Depression was on its way, and there would come a day when even Bowery bums no longer cared whether or not they were wearing almost-new shoes, or any shoes for that matter, when the best defense against a nation sliding steadily downhill was indeed a bottle of hair tonic in a dim hallway stinking of piss. He came to look upon those Bowery ghosts as a symbol of what America had become, and he dreaded growing up, becoming a man in a world where there were no jobs, and no justice, especially for Jews. He was very conscious of his Jewishness, not because anyone called him Jewboy — hardly anyone ever did since he hung around mostly with other Jewish kids, and since all of his relatives were Jews, and every function he attended was either a Jewish wedding or a bar mitzvah or a funeral, well, yes, there was that one incident, but even that was not so terribly bad, his mother's anger afterwards had been worse than the actual attack — he was conscious of his Jewishness mostly in a religious way, strange for a young boy, almost a holy way, everybody in the family said that Sidney would grow up to be a rabbi; In fact, his Uncle Heshie from Red Bank used to jokingly call him Red Shiloach, and this always pleased him enormously because he thought of the town rabbi, the old rabbi in the Polish town from which his mother and father had come, as a very learned man who dispensed justice, who read from the Holy Book and dispensed justice to Jews, the one thing that had somehow been denied his mother only because she was Jewish. He sometimes visualized himself in the role of the Talmudic scholar, searching for the holy word that would put an end to his mother's anger, "Look, Mama," he would say, "it is written here thus and so, so do not be angry." And all the while, he feared the anger was buried deep within himself as well. He had seen murder in his mother's eyes, he had heard hatred in her voice, had the seed really fallen too terribly far from the tree? Was it not possible that he too could explode, click, the switch would be thrown in his head, click, and being a man he would kill someone? Later, when it happened with the Irish kids, when they surrounded him that day and pulled down his pants and beat him with Hallowe'en sticks and he did not fight back, he wondered whether he was really a person in whom there lay this secret terrible wrath, or whether he was simply a coward. He only knew for certain there had been no justice for him that day, that he had done nothing to warrant such terrible punishment, such embarrassment, the girls standing around and looking at his naked smarting behind, and later crossing their fingers as he walked home, "Shame, shame, we saw Sidney's tushe, shame, shame," chanting it all the way home like a litany, there was no justice that day, but neither had they called him Jewboy. Maybe they just wanted to take down my pants, Sidney reasoned later, who the hell knows?

The wrath exploded that night, he was certain it would, and it did. He did not at the time connect any of his mother's explosions with sex — if you had asked anyone on the Lower East Side who Sigmund Freud was, they'd have recalled the man who peddled used china from a pushcart on Hester Street and whose name was Siggie Freid — but in later years it seemed to him that the justice she so avidly sought was somehow connected with events that invariably concerned sex, and he began wondering what could possibly have happened to his mother back in Europe. But no, he never really consciously thought that, no one ever consciously thinks that about his own mother, it only came to him on the gray folds of semirecognition — the wino had said, "You've got some tits there, lady," the Irish boys had taken down Sidney's pants, the sewing machine salesman had asked if he could step into the parlor for a moment, the argument with Hannah Berkowitz had involved the use of too much rouge, the girl his mother found him with on the roof was Adele Rosenberg who was sixteen years old and wore no bloomers in the summer, but everybody knew that, not only Sidney, and besides they weren't even doing anything. All these events returned to him grayly, darkly, as though on a swelling ocean crest that dissipated and dissolved before it quite reached the shore, leaving behind only vanishing bubbles of foam absorbed by the sand. The black and towering fact remained his mother's anger, which was to him inexplicable at the time. It was simply there. Uncontrollable, raging, murderous. He would dream of bureau drawers full of women's hair, brown and tangled. He would dream of hags sitting next to him in movie theaters, opening their mouths to expose rotten teeth and foul breath. He would dream of running through castles where dead bodies were stacked end upon end, decomposing as he raced through them, filling his nostrils with suffocating dust.

He feared his mother, and he pitied his mother, and he despised his mother. And he loved her as well.

Because of her, he never lied about being a Jew. A lot of the kids in the neighborhood and on the block were lying in order to get jobs, this was 1934, 1935, the NRA had already come in, the blue eagles clutching lightning were showing in all the shop windows all over the city, things were a little better, but it was still difficult to get a job, especially a part-time job, and especially if you were a Jew. He never lied about being a Jew, and he never told himself that the reason he didn't get the job was because he was Jewish. He blamed his inability to find work on a lot of things — his looks, his height, the stammer he had somehow developed and which always seemed to crop up when he was being interviewed for a position, the somewhat high whininess of his adolescent voice, all of these things — but never his Jewishness. His Jewishness was something separate and apart, something of which he could be uncommonly proud, the old rabbi quietly studying the Holy Book in the sunset of his mother's town, the townspeople standing apart and waiting for him to dispense justice.

He was able to enter Harvard only because Uncle Heshie from Red Bank died and left his favorite nephew a small sum of money, sizable enough in those days, certainly enough to pay for Sidney's undergraduate education. He left for Boston in the fall of 1936. He was eighteen years old, and five feet eight inches tall (he assumed he had grown to his full height, and he was correct). He had black hair parted close to the middle and combed into a flamboyant pompadour that scarcely compensated for the cowlick at the back of his head. He came directly from Townsend Harris High School, where his grades had averaged 91 per cent, and from which he had graduated with honors.

At Harvard, in his freshman year, they called him Lard Ass, and he once drank fourteen bottles of beer and passed out cold. At Harvard, in his sophomore year, he joined the Dramatic Club and became reasonably famous for his clubhouse imitation of Eddie Cantor singing "If You Knew Susie." At Harvard, in September of 1939, when the Germans were overrunning the Polish town where his mother had been born and perhaps putting to death forever the image of the village rabbi studying the Holy Book by the light of the setting sun, Sidney met a student nurse named Rebecca Strauss — "Watch out for those nurses, Sid," his roommate told him. "They can give it a flick with their finger, and whap! it'll go right down, quick as that" — and began dating her regularly. Rebecca lived in West Newton and worked at Massachusetts General where her father was a resident surgeon. She had dark green eyes and masses of brown hair, and she was the most beautiful girl Sidney had ever met in his life, prettier even than Adele Rosenberg who wore no bloomers in the summer. He grew a mustache for Rebecca because he always felt he looked silly and immature beside her, even though he was two months her senior. She said she loved the mustache and that it didn't tickle at all when they kissed. When he finally told her in confidence about his mother's raging fits — he had by that time begun to think of them as "fits," similar to epileptic seizures or paranoid delusions — she said they did seem very much like hysterical symptoms, collaborating his own feelings that something dreadful had happened to his mother when she was still a girl in Poland.

"She may have been raped or something," Rebecca said.

"Do you think so?"

They were lying in the grass bordering the Charles, she was in his arms. It was the spring of 1940, he could hear crickets chirping in the night, and the gentle flow of the river, and in the distance the highway traffic.

"Yes," Rebecca said. "Sometimes a man can't control himself, you know. And he'll do things. To a girl."

"Maybe," Sidney said, thinking of the time with the sewing machine salesman, had the man been unable to control himself?

"And sometimes a girl can even want a man to. Do things, you know."

"I g-g-guess you're right," Sidney said. Had his mother wanted the salesman to do things?

"Do you ever feel…" Rebecca moved closer in his arms. He could smell her hair, the crickets seemed suddenly louder.

"What?" he said.

"That you can't control yourself?"

"I'm always afraid of that," he said.

"Of not being able to control yourself?"

"Of losing my temper. Of g-g-getting angry the way my m-m-mother does."

"I meant…"

She was silent again. Her hand resting on the side of his face, she was curled in his arms, he could feel the swell of her breasts against him, the crisp starched white of her nurse's uniform.

"What I meant," Rebecca said, and again fell silent.

"I know, you mean people sometimes…"

"Yes," she said, nodding.

"Sure, which is…"

"That it's understandable," she said, nodding. "If a man and a woman."

"Yes, it's possible," nodding.

"Yes."

"If they're close to each other."

"Yes."

She moved. Her starched skirt edged back over one knee and she took her hand from his face to lower the skirt again, long legs sheathed in white stockings, she moved closer.

"I myself, I know," Rebecca said.

"Sure," Sidney said.

"Get hot sometimes," she said, and quickly added, "I've never told this to anyone in my life."

"Reb-b-becca…"

"So hot I can't stand it," Rebecca said. "I've never talked this way to anyone in my life."

"You… you ought to be careful," he said, "t-t-talk-ing that way."

"I know, I know," she said, moaning the words. In the silence, she moved again. The stretched uniform made tiny crisp sounds as she adjusted her body to the length of his, moving minutely in against him, her arms tight around his neck, trembling.

"Do you get hot?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"So hot you can't stand it?"

"Yes."

"Are you now?" Her voice so small.

"Yes."

"I can feel you." A whisper.

"Are… you?" he asked.

"Yes, oh yes."

It all happened, it was too, he didn't plan, hands under starched, and her white thighs, she turned, white stockings, and it happened and he, she moved beneath him, silk, all opening, the slip and, in a tangle of, and white garters, hands under, wet, and she said, oh she said, oh she said, wide, and was all, he didn't, held and clawed and, legs spread, and he was, she moaned, wet and garters, wet and, oh she said, oh love she moaned, oh, her head was, she was, he could feel, tossing, it happened, it was happening, he was, baby, he was, honey, lips and wet and hard and hard, I love you, I love you, I love you.

Ahhh me, he thought back with a sigh, it has never been like that again, not the way it was with Rebecca in Boston, two dumb young kids discovering what humping was all about, and going at it with a secret eagerness that, God we couldn't wait to see each other each time. Three, four times a week, sometimes more, going at it with a secret soaring joy that shouted to the world, we knew what it was all about, we had discovered it, we had patented it, we were the only two people humping in Boston — by the river, and in the back seat of the '36 Plymouth I bought, and in a Providence hotel one weekend, and once in Dr. Strauss's Oldsmobile parked behind the hospital, and then day and night in the apartment I took on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, when I entered law school. Day and night, it's a wonder I learned any law at all, the only law I knew was whatever sweetly called to me from between Rebecca's legs. And then, I don't know, I don't know what happens, war happens, I guess. You get put into 1-A when you're in your second year of law school, and I guess you figure you'd better get into the Navy where the beds are always clean, so the legend goes, and there're always three square meals a day, so the legend goes, before they draft you into the infantry and you get your ass blown off invading the fortress of Europe. And besides, by that time Rebecca had met a young captain who was stationed at the Air Corps base on Jeffries Point. It was wartime — I saw him once, he was very tall and blond, he had blue eyes, he looked a little like Terry in Terry and the Pirates which Papa brought home every Sunday when he bought bagels on Rivington Street — it was wartime, so who could blame anyone? Who could blame the captain for succumbing to Rebecca's Law, and who could blame Rebecca, blossoming wild and willful Rebecca, young, sweet Rebecca, for wanting to go to bed with Terry, or even Pat Ryan, for that matter? I'd certainly have done it with the Dragon Lady if she had come along. Or Burma.

My ship was commissioned in Boston, I guess it was 1943, and I called Rebecca Strauss, or at least I called her number in West Newton, and her father got on the phone. Dr. Strauss, and he said, "Hello, there, Sidney, how have you been, fellow?" sounding like a goy, I could visualize him in Bermuda shorts, holding a five iron. I told him I'd been down to fire control school in Fort Lauderdale — "Oh, learning how to put out fires, huh, Sidney?" — (I didn't bother to correct him) — and that I'd been assigned to a destroyer and we were here in Boston before heading down to Gitmo (I used the Navy slang for Guantanamo just to show him how salty I was, and also to imply to him somehow that I had been humping his daughter for three years, put that in your scalpel case, Dr. Strauss) on shakedown cruise and I was wondering if I could talk to Rebecca, say hello and all that. Well, gee, Sidney, Dr. Strauss said, sounding more and more like the president of the local Grange, I'd be very happy to let you talk to Rebecca, but she doesn't live here anymore. You see, Sidney, she was married in October, perhaps you know the fellow (fellow again), perhaps you know him, a very nice fellow from Detroit, Michigan, his name is Lonnie Scott, S-C-O-T-T-. No, I said, I'm sorry, Dr. Strauss, I don't think I ever met any friend of Rebecca's named Lonnie Scott, S-C-O-T-T. Oh, he's a very nice fellow, Dr. Strauss said, very very nice, they're living in California now, he's stationed out there, he's a major in the Air Corps, a very nice fellow, Sidney. Well, Dr. Strauss, I said, if you should have the opportempt to write to Becks (I used this pet name in an attempt once more to inform Dr. Strauss that his daughter Becks and I had been intimate for three years, get it, Dr. Strauss? Intimate. I-N-T-I-M-A-T-E) if you should happen to write to old Becks, why you just tell her Sidney called on his way through Boston to say hello and remind her of old times (in your Oldsmobile behind the hospital, for instance, Dr. Strauss, which I thought but didn't say). Why, sure, Sidney, Dr. Strauss said, sounding more and more like an Ohio preacher every minute, sure, fellow, I'll tell her you called — and say, good luck with that fire fighting, it's a dangerous business especially aboard ship. It sure is, I told him (do you get hot, Sidney, so hot you can't stand it?). Goodbye, Dr. Strauss.

Goodbye, fellow.

The war meant nothing to Sidney. He never saw any action, and the only danger to which he was exposed was that of tedium, even though he was aboard a destroyer. (Once they shot at a floating Japanese mine, and exploded it. Everyone cheered.) He was honorably discharged in September of 1946, and spent the summer with his parents who had moved from Houston Street to Walton Avenue near Yankee Stadium. His mother had one of her "fits" in August, shortly before he left for school again, it had to do with the doctor she had begun visiting, something about his nurse, Sidney couldn't follow it, nor did he try. He simply sat in terrified patience while the raving and ranting ran its course, his father fluttering about her like a broken butterfly, trying to calm her, Sarah's green eyes flashing, brown hair streaked with gray now, back straight and stiff, pacing, pacing (he remembered the soft embraces of Rebecca Strauss, they do sound to me like hysterical symptoms, she may have been raped or something, Rebecca's Law. Only once did they ever exchange harsh words, the time she was ten days late and they were frantic, no, twice actually, because she was also late after that long weekend in Providence, she almost climbed the ceiling that time, Rebecca, Becks, my love).

His mother died in 1953, after he had been practicing law for five years and had already started the partnership with Carl. He was so enormously relieved by her passing that for several weeks afterward he walked around in a gloomy cloud of guilt, questioning his love for her, had he wanted her dead? blaming himself for not having insisted on chest X-rays earlier, and yet delighted, but had it been his fault? had he wished it once too often? and yet deliriously happy that she was dead and finally in the ground where nothing but the worms could tremble if she took a supernatural fit. He began to question, too, his own monumental anger, was it really such? Or had he simply built an elaborate defense against his own fear, constructing an image of a violently dangerous human being (inside every skinny Jew there is a fat Nazi) whom you had better not fool around with, Mama, because he is as equally capable of murderous rage as you are. He didn't know. Even now, he still thought of himself as a person with a low boiling point, a violent man who easily lost his temper — and yet he knew he hardly ever raised his voice to anyone.

Well, Chickie made him angry, yes, but that was different because with her it was a teasing sort of thing, and more like, well — when he was with her, and she began to tease him that way, began to coax him into anger almost, he would feel an odd quaking inside him, something like what he had known on Houston Street, sitting at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, which was odd because he certainly wasn't afraid of Chickie. And yet, the way she came at him, the way she approached everything they did together, the sex so different from what it had been with Rebecca, she created a, a turmoil in him, yes, that was both exciting and confusing and, he supposed, well, yes, he supposed so, yes, frightening sometimes. He could never understand, for example, why she constantly made oblique references, and sometimes not such oblique ones, to the men she had known. Surely she knew the habit infuriated him — or was that why she persisted? He could not understand. Point of fact, there were a great many things that baffled him about Chickie Brown, nor was his confusion something recent. It had been present six months ago when she first walked into his Wall Street office, and if anything it had assumed greater dimensions since.

"Mr. Brackman," she had said, "I'm Charlotte Brown," and he took her extended hand. He had known a great many women since Rebecca Strauss, both casually and intimately, but he had never felt for any of them an iota of what he had felt in Boston. And now, shaking hands with this tall and magnificently proportioned young lady, his heart began to pound foolishly and he found himself staring into her eyes, offering her a seat, barely knowing what he was saying to her. There was a fullness to her palm, a moistness to her flesh that he found intensely exciting, as though her handshake had inadvertently revealed a guarded secret and become a shared intimacy.

She sat opposite his desk, and he found he could not take his eyes from her, found that he was openly coveting her, and wondered that she was not embarrassed by his lavish attention. There was about her, he supposed, a look of easy availability that brought her youthful beauty dangerously close to the edge of cheapness, a look he found wildly stimulating. Her hands were in constant motion, now moving to touch her throat, now absently toying with a button on her blouse, now drifting toward her thigh to rest there a moment, now brushing at her cheek or her eye. She crossed and uncrossed her legs constantly and a shade too carelessly, but completely without guile. She kept jiggling her foot, and she had a habit of giggling unexpectedly. As she related her legal problems to him — she was part owner of a travel agency, and they were having trouble collecting from a client the monies advanced for airline tickets, hotel deposits, and so on — he barely heard a word of what she said, so intense were the lewd fantasies he built around this innocent young girl. It was not until toward the end of their interview, after he had agreed to take her case, that he began to suspect she was enjoying his insistent scrutiny, if not actively encouraging it. Surprising himself, he asked if she would like to discuss the case more extensively over a drink, and she surprised him even further by accepting his invitation.

He had not understood her then, six months ago, and he did not understand her now. He was proud of her beauty, flattered by her youth, but embarrassed by the tawdry look she narrowly escaped. He was wildly excited by her readiness and her intense passion, but frightened sometimes by her sexual knowledge. He was amazed by her shrewdness and appalled by her stupidity. She could doggedly argue a subject until he flew into a rage, and then instantly calm him with a subjugating kiss. She could bring him to the very edge of climax and then infuriatingly declare she was not in the mood for sex. She could cause him to roar with laughter, or weep in supplication. The first time they had gone to bed together, she had whispered, "Come, Sidney, I am going to take you where you've never been," and she had kept her promise.

He heard the bedroom door closing. To the closed door, she said, "Now you be a good pussycat, you be a good little Shah, do you hear me?" Her heels clattered along the corridor. She came into the living room buttoning her suit jacket. She smoothed her skirt over her hips, turned a small pirouette, and asked, "Do I look all right? I feel as though I dressed in a hurricane. I hate to rush."

"You look beautiful," he said.

"You dear man," she answered, "how can you even see without the light on?" She turned on a table lamp, and then stooped to kiss him on the cheek. "I really have to run, Sidney. You can sit here and finish your drink, if you like. Just pull the door shut behind you when you leave, it'll lock automatically."

"When will you be back?" he asked.

"Not until late."

"Maybe I'll stay here and wait for you."

"No, I'd rather you didn't."

"Why not?"

"Because I'll be exhausted, Sidney dear."

"All right." He paused. "Have you got at least a minute?"

"Yes, but barely."

"There's something I want to ask you."

"Not about the Indian."

"No, not about the Indian."

"Good." She smiled and sat on the arm of his chair. "What is it?"

"I don't know if I've ever explained my situation to you."

"What situation?"

"With the firm."

"No, I don't think you have. But Sidney…"

"It's not a very big firm, Chickie, not a very big firm at all. There's myself and my partner, and we each earn somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand dollars a year, I want you to know that."

"Sidney, I never asked you what—"

"I know, and I appreciate it, but I want you to understand the full picture. I'm not what you would call a very successful lawyer."

"Sidney, you're a very good lawyer."

"Well, I hope so, but I'm not a very successful one. There are lawyers in this city who can count on a hundred thousand dollars even in a bad year. I'm not one of them, Chickie."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I want you to know."

She looked at him curiously, and then frowned. "You're not going to cry or anything, are you, Sidney?"

"No."

"Because I really haven't got time for that"

"No, I'm not going to cry," he said.

"Good. What is it then?"

"If I win this case, Chickie, I will be a very big lawyer."

"Will you?"

"We're suing for an accounting of profits, Chickie. It's our estimate that the movie earned in the vicinity of ten million dollars. We can't tell for certain because API isn't required to produce its books unless we win, or unless they're necessary to show we are entitled to an accounting. But ten million dollars is our guess."

"Sidney. " she started, and frowned, and glanced at her watch.

"I'll tell you the truth, neither Carl nor I wanted to take it on at first, my partner. We weren't sure there was a case, we knew very little about plagiarism. But you'd be surprised, Chickie, you'd really be surprised at how many plagiarism cases have been won on evidence that seems silly at first, similarities that seem ridiculous. The ones Constantine pointed out seemed just that way to us in the beginning, until we had a chance to examine them in the light of other cases. There was copying, Chickie, I sincerely believe that now. Driscoll was clever, yes, he altered, yes, disguised, yes, but he copied. I believe that, Chickie, I'd better believe it — the case has already cost the firm close to ten thousand dollars, not to mention time, but it'll be worth it if we win." Sidney paused. "The fee we agreed to is forty per cent of whatever we recover. Do you understand me, Chickie?"

"I think so," she said. She was still frowning, but she was listening intently now.

"Forty per cent of ten million dollars is four millon dollars, Chickie. If we win this case, my partner will get two million dollars and I will get two million dollars. I will be a very r-r-rich man, Chickie, and v-v-very well-known." Sidney paused. "I will be a successful lawyer, Chickie."

"You're a successful lawyer now," she said.

"Not like J-J-Jonah Willow."

"You're every bit as smart as Willow," she said. "Don't stammer."

"Yes, but not as successful." He paused. "Maybe not as s-s-smart, either, I don't know."

"You're just as smart, Sidney."

"Maybe," he said. He paused again. "Chickie, as you know, I have a widower father to support, he has a garden apartment in Queens, he's a very old man, and no trouble at all. I pay the rent each month, and I give him money to live on, that's about the extent of it."

"Yes, Sidney."

"Chickie, I've been wanting to ask you this for a long time now, but I never felt I had the right. I'm forty-eight years old, going on forty-nine, and I know you're only twenty-seven and, to be quite truthful, I've never been able to understand what you see in me."

"Let me worry about that," she said, and began stroking the back of his neck.

"B-b-but, I feel certain I'm going to win this case and that would ch-change things considerably. That's why I f-f-feel I now have the right."

"What right, Sidney?"

"I guess you know I 1-1-love you, Chickie. I suppose that's been made abundantly apparent to you over the past several months. I am very much in love with you, Chickie, and I would consider it an honor if you-were to accept my p-p-proposal of matrimony."

Chickie was silent.

"Will you marry me, Chickie?"

"This is pretty unexpected," she said. Her voice was very low. He could barely hear her.

"I figured it would come as a surprise to you."

"I'll have to think about it, Sidney. This isn't something a girl can rush into."

"I realize that."

"I'll have to think about it."

"I'll be a very rich man when I win this c-c-case," Sidney said.

"You dear man, do you think that matters to me?" Chickie asked.

He lay full length on the bed opposite the window, his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. He had been lying that way for close to an hour now, ever since their return to the hotel room. He had not closed his eyes in all that time, nor could Ebie fool herself into believing he was actually resting. There was a tautness in his very posture, an unseen nervous vibration that she could feel across the length of the room. His silence was magnified by the rush-hour babble from below. In the echoing midst of headlong life, he lay as still as a dead man and stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I'm fine," he said.

"Dris?" '

"Yes?"

"I'm afraid."

"Don't be afraid, Edna Belle."

"Can't we talk?" she asked.

"What would you like to talk about?"

"Can't… can't you reassure me? Can't you tell me we're not going to lose?"

"I'm not sure of that, Edna Belle."

"Please don't call me Edna Belle."

"That's your name isn't it?"

"My name's been Ebie for the past God knows how long, please don't call me Edna Belle. I hate the name Edna Belle. You know I hate the name."

"Ebie is an affectation," he said.

"It's not an affectation, it's my name. It's an important part of me."

"Yes, I'm sure it is."

"Yes, it is."

"I said yes."

"Then please don't call me Edna Belle."

"I won't."

"And if you feel like getting angry, please…"

"I'm not getting angry."

"… don't get angry with me. You have no reason to get angry with me."

"That's true. No reason at all."

"Get angry with Constantine, if you want to get angry. Or his lawyer. They're the ones who are trying to ruin us."

"If you ask me," he said, "you're the one who's getting angry, not me."

"Because you're not giving me the assurance I need."

"False assurance is a beggar's—"

"Don't try to get literary," Ebie said.

"Was I getting literary?"

"You were trying to, there's a difference. I can't stand it when you try to sound like a goddamn novelist."

"Have no fear. I am not a goddamn novelist."

"What are you then?"

"A Vermont farmer."

"You were a novelist before you were a farmer."

"I have never been a novelist," he said.

"No? What do you call The Paper Dragon?"

"Luck," he said, and closed his eyes.

The room was silent. From the street below, she could hear someone shouting directions to a truck driver at the Times depot. In the distance, Sardi's neon sign stained the dusk a luminous green, and the surrounding gray and shadowy buildings began to show lights in isolated window slits. She stared at him without speaking, and then pressed her face to the glass and watched the truck as it backed into the depot. How simple it is, she thought. How simple they make everything. When she turned to him again, her voice was very low. "They can take it all away from us," she said. "We can lose everything, Dris."

"We lost everything a long time ago," he answered. His eyes were sill closed.

"No."

"Ebie. We lost everything."

"Thank you," she said, and sighed. "That's the reassurance I wanted, thank you." She glanced through the window. "That's the encouraging word I wanted, all right," she said, and pressed her forehead to the glass.

At home they called her Edna Belle, and they called her brother George Benjamin, always using their full Christian names. In the center of the town, there was an enormous statue of Andrew Jackson, said to have been razed by the Yankees during the War between the States and left there as a grim reminder to the people of the South, never repaired or rebuilt, standing in ruinous splendor. She and George Benjamin would go down to the monument and play at its base with the other children. Once she cut herself falling on a piece of broken glass there she still had a crescent-shaped scar on her thigh as a reminder of the accident. Sometimes she would wander down to the center of town alone, and she would sit and sketch the monument in charcoal, the way the general's broken sword ended abruptly against the sky, with the bell tower of the church beyond, and down the street the white clapboard courthouse. She loved to work in charcoal, smearing the black onto the page with her index and middle fingers, rubbing it, shading it, smoothing it into the paper. It was very hard to draw niggers, even in charcoal.

She found the bird one day at the base of the monument, a sparrow who had broken his leg, probably by flying into the general's broad bronzed back or the shell-torn rim of his campaign hat. The bird lay on his back with his beak open, his throat pulsing, no sound coming from him, but his tongue or whatever it was leaping into his throat, beating there, as though he were mutely begging for assistance. She reached down for the bird, and he tried to regain his feet, the broken leg hanging crookedly and, still dazed, flopped over onto his side. No eyes were showing, his eyes were rolled back into his head, only an opaque white showed. She cradled him in her hands, and then couldn't pick up her sketching pad or her box of charcoals, so she left them at the base of the monument and walked slowly home holding the bird gently in her hands, his throat working. She was terrified lest he try again to fly away and fall from her hands to the pavement — she knew that would kill him. They all said the bird would die, anyway, even George Benjamin said so. But she took care of him until he got better, just as she knew he would, and one day he flew off before she had a chance to take him back to the monument where she had found him. She used to look for him at the monument after that, thinking he would maybe come back, like in picture books, but he never did.

Her father owned the dairy in town, the name of it was Clover Crest Farms, which she had helped him pick. He had wanted to call it Dearborn Farms, but even George Benjamin thought that was pretty corny, and a bit egotistical, naming the thing after yourself. Her father was a very tall man, with blond hair like her own. Her mother had blond hair, too, well everybody in the family did, except George Benjamin. His was a sort of reddish color, like Aunt Serena's and Grandmother Winkler's. Edna Belle looked a lot like her mother, leastwise that's what everybody was always telling her, and she was proud to believe it because her mother was a very beautiful and elegant woman. They had two niggers working for them, Lucy who was the kitchen help, and Aurora who did the cleaning, and who was always pregnant. They both adored Mother, you could just see they thought she was beautiful and very elegant, which she was. But it was surprising the two niggers thought, so, there never was no love lost in that town.

Edna Belle especially loved the way her mother talked, she could sit and listen to her talk all day. She had a voice, well, there was just nothing like it, that was all, deep and warm, and breaking into a marvelous laugh when you least expected it. She always made Edna Belle feel very grown up, because she talked to her about real things and not the usual dopey stuff grownups say to children. Whenever they talked together, Edna Belle felt as though she were talking to an older and much smarter friend who was beautiful and wise and very elegant besides; well, she was a wonderful person, the niggers were right. And her father, he was simply the happiest person she knew, always joking, always making mother and everybody laugh. One time he filled the refrigerator with milk for her, just filled it from top to bottom with milk, and when Mother came home from marketing that afternoon and opened the refrigerator door, why there they were! maybe thirty or forty bottles of milk! "Oh, that nut!" she said, laughing, she used to laugh a lot, Mother.

George Benjamin was the least talented person she had ever met in her life, he couldn't even draw a straight line. He would always come up to her and say, "Edna Belle, show me how to draw a damn horse," or "Edna Belle, how do you make it look like it's getting smaller in the distance?" but he was just hopeless, no talent at all, she sometimes used to feel sorry for him. He had a chemistry set, and once he burned his hand, and she took care of him the way she had the bird. Well, not exactly the same because it was Aurora who changed his bandages and all, but she made sure there were always fresh-picked flowers in his room, and she would leave little drawings on his pillow for him to find when he woke up in the morning. The hand business only lasted maybe two weeks, but she took very good care of him in those weeks, she really loved him a lot, even though he begrudged Daddy a few laughs at his jokes. He kept one of her pictures, the one she made of the pond on the old Barrow place near the mill. He said he liked that one best because it reminded him of fishing there. She knew, of course, that he fished there when she'd made the drawing, of course, that's why she'd made it in the first place.

Her best friend was a girl named Cissie Butterfoster, whose name broke her up, but who was a nice girl, anyway. Cissie wore pigtails, and Daddy used to kid with her, saying, "Why do you wear your hair like the niggers, Cissie?" and Cissie always would blush. Until much later, when she was in high school, and then one day she just said to Daddy, almost making him blush, "You sure do take a deep concern over my hair, Mr. Dearborn," which was sort of snippy even though she had developed a very good pair of boobs by then, but to imply Daddy was flirting with her or something! But when they were small together, they did have some very good times together, Edna Belle and Cissie, even when they teased about her last name, Butterfoster, what a last name. Edna Belle once said to her father that they ought to start a division of the dairy called Butterfoster Farms, and that broke him up, with George Benjamin sitting there smiling and watching Daddy, and Cissie laughing, too — she was a pretty good sport. She was the first girl in the crowd to start menstruating, and she always bled a fearful lot, and had the most dire cramps. She made Edna Belle cry in pity one day, writhing the way she was on her bed and saying, "Oh, Edna Belle, you don't know how lucky you are! You don't know what it is to be a grown woman," which Edna Belle learned soon enough, and without half as much hysterics. But still and all she had felt genuine pity for Cissie that day, and she had no doubt the cramps were real. Cissie told her Tampax could break your cherry, what a lie. She also said horseback riding could break it, and doing pushups could break it. According to Cissie anything could break it, a girl had to be careful just getting out of bed in the morning, otherwise Goodbye, Charlie. She stopped hanging around with Cissie in their sophomore year at high school because everybody was saying things about her by then, and besides Daddy warned Edna Belle about her reputation in a small town, and about chumming with Cissie who had taken to wearing such tight sweaters. Edna Belle figured if Cissie had them, why not? though she never said this to anyone, least of all Daddy, and anyway her own were so small, like Mother's.

Besides, she was very much interested in art by this time, and was being encouraged to undertake all sorts of school art projects by Miss Benson, who was her teacher. It was Miss Benson who helped her to overcome her fear of working in pen and ink, which she had always had trouble with before, being left-handed and smearing the ink every time her hand moved across the page. Miss Benson also taught her there was a freedom to art, that once you knew what you were about, why then you were entitled to this freedom, but that first you had to earn the right to it by learning what you were about. That until you knew how to draw something in its right proportions, why then you had to draw it correctly and properly each and every time, and then, only then could you afford to go off and make an arm longer or a leg shorter or give a face three eyes or whatever. Well, she had Picasso in mind, you see, or someone like that, though Edna Belle never thought of herself as having that kind of talent, still Miss Benson was terribly encouraging.

There was no question that most of the two hundred students who attended the high school liked to hear Miss Benson's stories about Rembrandt (Charles Laughton) and Gauguin (George Sanders). Miss Benson made these men come to life somehow, as though she were adding personal information even Hollywood had missed. Besides, for students like George Benjamin anything was better than having to draw. True, it got to be something of a drag when Miss Benson went on and on about sculpture in Mesopotamia during the fourth and third millennia before the Christian era (like, man, who gave a damn?) or when she showed slides of all those broken Greek statues, but for the most part, the kids thought she was less painful than many of the biddies around. None of them, however, thought quite as highly of her as did Edna Belle.

She was, Clotilde Benson, a fluttery old woman who indeed spoke of Van Gogh as if she had personally been the recipient of his severed ear, an uncompromising, old-fashioned instructor who insisted on certain artistic verities and some artistic conceits, an unkempt and sometimes slovenly person who habitually wore a loose paint-smeared smock and who stuck colored pencils haphazardly into her gray and frizzled hair, a vain and foolish woman whose students laughed behind her back each time she sneaked a look at herself in the reflecting windows of the supply cabinet, an inadequately trained art teacher working in a scholastically poor high school in a town that had gone dead a hundred years ago. It was rumored, too, and this only by Cissie Butterfoster who was given to lurid sexual fantasies, that Clotilde Benson had once conducted a scandalous love affair with a nigger lawyer in Atlanta. The romance had supposedly begun when she was twenty years old and going to art school there, and it had ended when six righteous Georgians rode the attorney off the highway one night and proceeded to educate him (they were all carrying knives) as to why it was highly improper for a colored man to pluck a Southern flower, you dig, boy? They then casually dropped in on Clotilde that same night at about three a.m., and while she stood shivering in a flannel robe over girlish cotton pajamas with delicate primrose pattern, told her she had better get the hell out of Atlanta before somebody cut her similar to how they had cut that nigger lawyer, or hadn't she heard about that yet? Clotilde admitted as to how she hadn't heard a word, trembling in the night and holding her flannel robe closed at the neck over her primrose-patterned girlish cotton pajamas. The six gentlemen all took off their hats and murmured good night to her in the dark, and she heard one of them laugh softly as they went out of the driveway and into the waiting car and — according to Cissie — that very same morning Miss Benson caught an early train out of Atlanta and back home, apparently having decided she'd had enough of all this Gauguin-type reveling, and convinced that such living only led to shame and degradation. That was Cissie's story, and it sounded good, and there were plenty of kids who were willing to believe it, although none of them ever had the courage to repeat it. The only one who neither repeated it nor believed it was Edna Belle. Oh yes, she believed that maybe Miss Benson might have possibly been in love with a nigger (although the idea was pretty repulsive) but she would never in a million years believe Miss Benson had turned tail and run like that, even if the man had've been a nigger like Cissie said, though Cissie was a big liar, anyway.

One afternoon — autumn came late to Edna Belle's town that year, the leaves were just beginning to fall, they trickled past the long high school windows in the waning afternoon light — Edna Belle stayed behind to work with Miss Benson on the layout for the school magazine which was called Whispers, and which Edna Belle hoped to serve as art editor next term. The art editor this term was a senior named Phillip Armstrong Tillis, who was very talented and who had drawn both the cover of the magazine as well as the end papers, and who Edna Belle had dated once or twice and who, frankly, she was really crazy about. He was not a very good-looking boy, his nose was too large for his face, and he wore eyeglasses, but he had a wonderful sense of humor and a crazy way of looking at things, very offbeat and cool ("I used to have this little turned-up button nose," he once said, "but I had an operation done to make it long and ugly") and she loved being with him because he was always thinking up nutty things to do, like pulling into Mr. Overmeyer's driveway to neck one night, instead of going over to the hill near the old burned Baptist church that had been struck by lightning. When Mr. Overmeyer came out to see what was going on, Phillip Armstrong got out of the car and bowed from the waist and said, "Good evening, sir, we were wondering if we might park here for a few moments to discuss a matter that's of great importance."

"With me, do you mean?" Mr. Overmeyer asked.

"No, sir, the young lady and I wished to discuss it privately."

Mr. Overmeyer looked so relieved that (A) it wasn't some hoods from Connors who were looking for trouble, that (B) it wasn't some crippled war veterans selling magazine subscriptions, and that (C) he personally would not have to get involved in this discussion, whatever it was, that he mumbled, "Sure, certainly, go right ahead," and then went back into the house and drew the blinds to assure Phillip Armstrong of the privacy he wanted. They had necked up a storm that night, and she had let Phillip Armstrong touch her breast right there in the driveway, but only twice.

The reason Phillip Armstrong wasn't there that November afternoon to help with the layout was that he had come down with the mumps, of all things ("You know what that does to a grown boy, I suppose," Cissie said) and was home in bed. It was just as well because if Phillip Armstrong had've been there, then Edna Belle and Miss Benson wouldn't have talked, and Edna Belle's whole life wouldn't have changed. In looking back on the conversation, Edna Belle couldn't remember exactly what they'd said that was so terribly important, what they had discussed in such personal terms, this woman and her sixteen-year-old student there in the gathering gloom of a high school classroom, the light fading against the long windows, the empty desks stretching behind them, and the smell of paste on their fingers, and snippets of shining proofs clinging to their hands, the drawn pencil lines on the blank pulp pages, the long galleys from the editorial staff, and the careful selection of a rooster drawn by Annabelle Currier Farr and something called Monsoon by a freshman named Hiram Horn, the proofs spread out on Miss Benson's desk top, "There, Edna Belle," and "There," and "How's that?" completely absorbed in the work they were doing, Miss Benson finally snapping on the desk lamp, and the warm circle of light flooding the dummy as the magazine began to take shape and form, the colored pencils sticking out of Miss Benson's hair and reflecting light. Whispers, they whispered now, the school was empty, but what did they say, after all, that had not been said a thousand times before? What was there in Miss Benson's impromptu and heartfelt talk that was not cliched and hackneyed and shopworn and, yes, even trivial? It had all been said before, there was the tinny ring of half-truth to it, and whatever importance it seemed to possess at the time surely came only from the dramatic setting, the classroom succumbing to dusk, the desk lamp being turned on, the young girl listening while the older woman earnestly and sympathetically talked to her about life and living, about pity and understanding, about art, and about love. All of it said before. And better, surely, so very much better than old Miss Benson could ever have said it even if she were skilled with words, which she was not, even if she were half the gifted artist Edna Belle supposed she was, which she was not. All of it said before.

But never before to Edna Belle.

And so she listened, nodding her head as they worked at the desk, fingers thick with paste, and she smiled, and once she giggled and covered her mouth, and tilted her head again in fascination, and brushed a golden spray of hair from her cheek and said, "Yes, oh yes, I know, I know."

They walked as far as the monument together, Edna Belle watched Miss Benson as she turned left at the corner near the courthouse, walking with the peculiar waddle that made the other kids laugh, but walking with her head very high, and she suddenly knew it had been true about the nigger.

She sat at the base of the monument.

She could remember only snatches of what Miss Benson had said, something about honesty, about always being true to whatever it was she believed, and of not being afraid, something about talent and its use, and something about a larger talent which she called, Edna Belle was not sure, a capacity for giving, yes, for loving, "Yes, oh yes," Edna Belle had said, thinking of Phillip Armstrong. And then Miss Benson said how it was important to get out of this town, go to New York or Chicago, study there, or Rhode Island, there was a fine art school in Rhode Island, but get out of this town, Edna Belle, get out of the South before they cut a piece out of your life and leave you to shrivel and die. It is not shameful to love, she said earnestly, it is never shameful to love, almost on the verge of tears.

The leaves swirled about Edna Belle's feet, the lights were on in the square, a sharp wind swept from the north around the corner of the church. She nodded quietly and to herself because she had made up her mind that she was a woman now, and then she rose and walked home, occasionally nodding, and then tilting her head in wonder because everything seemed so suddenly clear. And yet she knew Miss Benson had not told her anything she did not already know.

In September of 1946, when she was eighteen years old, she followed Miss Benson's advice and left for Pratt Institute in New York City. She rarely thought of the old woman anymore, except to wonder if she was still alive, still living in the South. But whenever she remembered her, as she was remembering her now in a seventh-floor room at the Hotel Astor, staring through a window at the traffic below, the lingering image was always of Miss Benson turning the corner near the courthouse, her head held high.

Without moving from the window, Ebie said to her husband, "In Alabama, when I was a little girl…"

"Spare us the magnolia blossoms and white linen suits," he said.

"… before I even knew there were such things as witty novelists who…"

"I'm not a novelist."

"… who could make clever remarks about magnolia blossoms and linen suits, when I was still a little girl in Alabama…"

Her voice trailed. She kept staring through the window.

"They loved me," she said at last.

4

The car pulled in ahead unexpectedly, entering the highway after barely braking at the full stop sign on the approach ramp. Sally Kirsch had opened her eyes not a moment before, seeing the other car, hearing the squeal of tires as Jonah applied his brakes, and bracing herself for what she knew would be an accident. Across the river on the New Jersey shore, she could see the Spry sign blinking idiotically as the automobile swerved, parkway lights ahead in a winding curve downtown, the glare of northbound traffic on the left, and then a splash of sudden brighter yellow as Jonah's headlights illuminated the other car.

"You dumb bastard!" Jonah shouted, and these seemed to Sally the first human words he had uttered all day long. He yanked sharply on the wheel, trying to avoid the crash, braking desperately, tires whining. The other car was a yellow Buick, vintage 1953, and the man driving it glanced to his left an instant before the cars collided, noticing Jonah's car for the first time, it seemed, and opening his eyes wide and then wrenching the wheel over to the right too late. Left fender hit right fender with terrible crunching impact. The cars ricocheted one from the other like billiard balls veering in opposite directions. Sally felt herself being hurled forward, perversely grateful for the break in the monotony, pushed her hands out in front of her, and then pulled them back instantly when she remembered she could fracture both wrists that way. Her head collided with the padded dash, there was a further squeal of tires behind them, and then silence. She shook her head. She could taste blood in her mouth. One of her teeth felt loose.

"Are you all right?" Jonah asked, and she nodded, and he got out of the car. She heard other car doors slamming, and she sat up tentatively, surprised that nothing was broken. "Didn't you see that stop sign?" Jonah was yelling.

She glanced through the windshield which was miraculously intact, she was certain everything would have been shattered by the collision, including herself. The man getting out of the other car was a short dark man in a short green coat and baggy slacks, a black fedora pushed onto the back of his head. He had apparently cut himself when the cars collided, and a thin line of blood was trickling down the right side of his face. Jonah was holding his left hand in his right and Sally wondered whether he had broken any bones. Dazed, she watched the two men as they approached each other.

"Are you talking to me?" the little man said. "To me, are you calling a bastard?"

"What's your name?" Jonah said. "Damn you, I'm going to…"

"To me, are you asking the name?" the little man said. "I will throw you in the river, you stringbean! I will pick you up and throw you in the river."

"I'd like to see you try that," Jonah said, and took off his glasses and moved closer to the little man, as though he would step on him and squash him flat into the pavement.

"You hit me, and I die," the little man warned. "I bleed from the head now, you murderer. Hit me, and I die. Get away from me!"

"You're a maniac," Jonah said. "How dare you drive a car without looking where—"

"To me, are you calling a maniac? A fink is what you are, to call a decent man a maniac. Get away, get away, do you see him?" he asked the gathering crowd. "He is making obscene and threatening gestures!"

"Let me see your license," Jonah said.

"Let me see your license, fink!" the little man answered. "Do you hear?" he said to the crowd. "Do you hear his threatening?"

"There's the police," someone said, and Sally heard the sound of a siren and turned her head to see a police car approaching in the distance, its red dome light revolving and blinking.

"Good," the little man said. "The police, you hear, fink? Now we'll see who threatens, fink."

"Did anyone here see this accident?" Jonah asked.

"I, the maniac," the little man said. "I, the maniac saw it! I saw all of it, a hundred miles an hour this fink comes swooping down a public highway!"

"You're a lying little bastard," Jonah said, "and you're making me very angry."

"You, I am making angry, you?" the little man asked incredulously. "I am here bleeding in a hundred places, and you are standing angry? Where are the police, those finks? Where are they, I ask!"

"All right, what's the trouble here?" the patrolman said, coming out of the squad car. His partner stepped into the highway and began waving traffic around the wrecked autos.

Sally, dazed and certain she was in shock, began giggling. She had not, until the moment the two cars struck, enjoyed either the drive to Poughkeepsie, their brief stay at the college, or any part of their return trip. Jonah had left her to wander the campus that afternoon while he chatted with his World History professor, and she had been unexpectedly depressed by the sight of all those young girls in candy-striped stockings and short suede skirts, God, had it really all been that long ago? Nor could she honestly say that Jonah Willow was exactly an exciting conversationalist. There was a tenseness about him that made her want to scream aloud, a social unease that seemed to translate itself into a physical deformity as he drove the convertible, knuckles white, body hunched, long legs cramped. All the way up to the college, his conversation had consisted of a series of ominous grunts designed to stifle discussion. Not once did he mention the trial, and this puzzled her. She was a lawyer, certainly not as experienced or as well known as he, but a lawyer nonetheless; she had thought he would welcome her opinions, or at least her thoughts. But even on the return trip, when she tentatively asked whether his meeting with the professor had been profitable, he replied only, "Not very," and once again fell silent. Weary and discouraged, she retreated to her corner of the car, closing her eyes and listening to the lulling hum of the tires against the road.

"Are you asleep?" he asked at last.

"What?" she said, startled.

"Are you asleep?"

"No. Where are we?"

"On the West Side Highway. We just went through the Spuyten Duyvil toll booths."

"No, I'm not asleep," she said, suspecting she had been. "I just have to close my eyes every now and then. Otherwise, I read everything."

"Oh," he said, and she looked at him a moment, expecting more, and then closed her eyes again when she realized nothing was forthcoming. He did not speak again until shortly before the accident. She must have dozed off a second time because she sat up in alarm when she heard his voice.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"What?"

"About reading everything."

"I'm a compulsive reader," she said.

"Oh," he answered.

End of conversation, Sally thought.

"Yes," she said, persisting in spite of better judgment, "I can reel off word for word every sign and billboard we passed on the road today. My mind's like a hall closet."

She waited for him to make some comment, hardly expecting that he would. When he did not, she sighed, and closed her eyes again. The accident occurred not two minutes later. Now, watching the police officer as he examined both men's licenses, watching him turn solicitous and then obsequious as Jonah casually mentioned the name of a circuit judge, watching the little man go pale and almost faint when he realized he had rammed into someone with high legal connections, Sally still felt giddy and numb, and her front tooth hurt like hell, what a damn silly thing to get involved in, an accident when she was so close to home.

Still, Jonah's profanity had exploded into that dreary automobile ride like a mortar shell, and she was grateful for the careless little man who was now explaining to Jonah and the policeman and anyone who would listen that he was a poor but honest bricklayer coming home late from a job in Harlem, anxious to be reunited once more with his wife and six kids — she was.sure he had said five kids the first time around — and therefore perhaps a bit unheedful of traffic signs, but he had stopped at the sign, he had come to a full if brief stop. What was he, did the attorney think, some kind of maniac who would endanger the life and limb of innocent people on a public highway? Did the attorney, did these honorable law enforcement officers, did these good citizens believe for a moment that he would do a fink thing like that, crashing into innocent people — arguing his case right there on the highway without benefit of counsel while Jonah kept holding his left hand in his right, and Sally could see now that he was wincing in pain.

She got out of the car suddenly and walked to where the small man was still pleading his case, turning to a fat smiling bleached blonde now, and advising her that he had been a citizen for fifteen years, having come from Cairo, and that he had never been in any kind of trouble with the law before this, nor ever in an automobile accident though he had been driving since 1956, did he look like a fink, he asked the bleached blonde. The blonde smiled and then clucked her tongue sympathetically, but remained noncommittal as to whether he was or was not a fink.

"I think he's hurt his hand," Sally said to the nearest patrolman. "Are we going to be much longer here, or can we get him to a hospital?"

"You're bleeding, miss," the patrolman said.

"I'm all right," Sally said.

"Can you drive?" the patrolman asked Jonah.

"Yes, I can."

"Maybe we'd better do as the young lady suggests. We can run you right over to Harlem Hospital, right on Lenox."

"No, it's nothing," Jonah said. "I just wrenched it when we collided, that's all."

"Something might be broken in there," the patrolman said.

"Why is nobody here to worry about my head?" the man from Cairo asked. "I'm sorry, your worship, but my head is bleeding, too, don't forget."

"You'd better get him to the hospital," Jonah said.

"You come along, too, Mr. Willow. No offense meant, but I think we'd better take a look at that hand."

"It's beginning to swell," Sally said.

"Miss, do you know your lip is cut?"

"What?"

"Your lip, miss. It's bleeding pretty bad."

"I think we'd all better take a little ride over to the hospital," the other patrolman said.

"I don't see any need for that," Jonah said.

"Begging your pardon, Mr. Willow," the patrolman said, "but I don't think Judge Santesson would like it if we let a friend of his go home with a broken hand or something."

"All right," Jonah said, "let's get it over with,"

They did not get it over with until eleven o'clock that night. By that time Jonah was in a surly, cantankerous mood. He told the frightened little man from Cairo that he was going to do his damndest to have his driver's license revoked, and then got into an argument with the policemen about the advisability of doing any further driving that night.

"Let's take a taxi," Sally said.

"How can I lay bricks without the license to drive?" the Egyptian said.

"Why don't you take a taxi, Mr. Willow?" the cops said.

Jonah took Sally's arm and led her out of the hospital and then got into a further argument the moment they entered the automobile, simply because Sally suggested that she ought to do the driving, a swollen Up seeming to her less restricting than a sprained and taped wrist. Jonah testily informed her that he was in perfect physical condition, and then proceeded to prove his point by racing down to the Village (your license ought to be revoked, she thought, but did not say), scaring her half to death, and parking the car in a clearly marked No Parking zone in front of her building.

The hallway was silent. They climbed the steps to her fourth-floor apartment, Sally leading, Jonah following. He did not say a word to her as they walked up, radiating only what seemed to be sullen anger. Outside her apartment, she opened her bag and searched for her key in silence.

"I'm sorry about the accident," he said abruptly.

"It wasn't your fault."

"Your eyes were closed, I thought perhaps…"

"No, I saw what happened."

"In any case, I'm sorry." His manner was still brusque and scarcely civil. She found her key and inserted it in the lock. "And I'm also sorry you had such a terrible time," he said, "but you see…"

"I didn't, don't be silly."

"… I'm not very good at small talk."

The hallway was silent again.

"I have a great many things on my mind," Jonah said. "I'm sorry."

"That's all right," Sally said. She twisted the key. The tumblers fell with a small oiled click.

"I'm sorry about the profanity, too," he said.

"That's all right," she said again. She listened as he continued to apologize for his swearing in the car and on the highway, his voice lowering, listened as he told her how sorry he was for having argued with the policemen and for having threatened the little Egyptian, "I know this is the first time we've been alone together, without a lot of people chattering away, and I wish I could have been more entertaining. But you see…"

"That's all right, Jonah," she said.

"… I had hoped this friend of mine could help me, he's an expert on military engagements, that's his forte, Sally. He's written several really good books, and I thought he could help me. I thought he could come up with something more than he did."

"I know it was a disappointing day for you."

"Yes, it was."

"But I did enjoy the accident. The accident was fun," she said, and smiled.

"May I see you again?"

"Yes," she said.

"I'll call. The trial should be over by the end of the week, perhaps we can get together Friday or Saturday."

"Well, call," she said.

"I'd give anything to possess your trick," Jonah said suddenly.

"What trick?"

"Of closing your eyes to shut out the print, to shut out the noise of the world."

"I do it in defense," she said, watching his face.

"That's just it," he answered. "I have no defense."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing," he said, and smiled. "Good night, Sally. I'll call you soon."

"Good night, Jonah," she said, and went into the apartment.

He went down the steps rapidly, keeping his left hand off the banister because the wrist was throbbing and each time he tried to flex his fingers a sharp pain shot up the length of his arm, damn stupid little man. It was bitter cold in the street outside; he feared they would have sleet or hail rather than snow — nor gloom of night can stay these couriers from the swift completion, would they tear down the post office now that they had demolished Penn Station? There was nothing permanent in this city, it was a city determined to obliterate its past. If there is one thing all Americans share in common, he thought, it's this lack of an historical sense, a tendency to want to change the recent past as well as the nation's ancient heritage. Oh certainly, destroy the jail where they kept the accused in the Salem witchcraft trials, cover the shame of hysteria, but Penn Station? That noble structure razed to the ground to make way for a sports arena? Heinous crime, I sound like my father, he thought.

He walked quickly to the car, his ears tingling, and then fumbled with the key in the lock, it's foolish to lock a convertible, he thought, they only slit the canvas top. He closed the door behind him rapidly, started the car, and then sat in silence for several moments while the engine warmed and the heater began to operate. He took a pair of fur-lined gloves from his coat pocket, put them on, pulled the tails of his coat out from under him, twisted himself into a comfortable position, turned on the radio, and then eased the car away from the curb. There was an order to everything he did, he was certain he performed the same operations in sequence each time he entered his automobile. He was equally certain that his father, Zachary Willow, drove in an identical manner, and that his grandfather and his father before him had undoubtedly performed similarly in a horse and buggy on the cobbled streets of Danvers, Massachusetts. He had gone back there once to trace the heritage, a tribute to Zachary, who insisted that a man should know his roots, though Jonah had been born in Stamford, Connecticut, and could not have been less interested in a pilgrimage to the home of his forebears. But he had found there in the library records the history of a family, the cursive script difficult to read, embellished with curlicues and substituting f's for s's, words capitalized for no apparent reason, the ink brown and fading on yellowed brittle pages — Benjamin Willow married to Margaret, and before him Nathan married to Elizabeth Anne, and somewhere back in the almost illegible record, a Jonah Willow, apprentice seaman on a whaling ship out of New Bedford. He had made the drive back along the turnpike, the road markers showing peaked Pilgrim hats and witches on broomsticks, possessed if not with a sense of self, then at least with a better understanding of his father.

Zachary Willow was a lawyer, and his father and grandfather had been lawyers before him. There was in him a sense of order that was firmly rooted in a judicial system evolved from the English, and based in part on the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis, derived in turn from such early systems as the Code of Hammurabi and the Laws of Manu. In the law, there was stability and certainty, precedent and continuity. Zachary ran his Stamford house as though it were a courtroom, meting out justice to Jonah and his brother Lucas as though they were prisoners before the bar, firmly imbuing in them the knowledge that there was right and there was wrong and there was nothing in between. The law, to Zachary Willow, was inflexible and clearly defined: it described social behavior as surely as the Bible prescribed moral behavior. The law was the law, and you did not fiddle around with it, and you did not try for fancy interpretations because it had not been designed for that. It was simply and indestructibly created by men, to instruct them in, and to enforce for them, the rules of civilized behavior. "Where law ends there tyranny begins," read one of the inscriptions chiseled in marble on the Criminal Courts Building, and Zachary Willow might have chiseled it there himself.

That the behavior in the old Stamford house was sometimes less than civilized could not be blamed on Zachary. His eldest son, Lucas, must have been a trial to him from the very beginning, although Jonah only became aware of the conflict much later, when his brother entered high school and began playing football. Until that time, frightened of his father and simultaneously respecting him, almost venerating him, Jonah did not once suspect that his brother's opinion of the old man could be any different than his own. Surely there was serenity in the Shippan house, its green shutters facing Long Island Sound, the lawn sloping down to a seawall from which you could see sailing ships and pleasure boats, a view that never tired Jonah; there was, perhaps, still a trace of the original Jonah Willow in him, the man who'd sailed for whale out of New Bedford. "Call me Ishmael," he had once dreamily said to his brother while they sat side by side on white wooden lawn chairs on the green grass sloping to the Sound, and watched a double-masted sailboat cleaving the water. Lucas had replied, "Call me Shlemiel," but this, of course, was after he had joined the football team and was playing offensive back and feeling his oats. "I like physical contact," Lucas always said, "I like knocking guys around."

Jonah's mother was a slender woman with a flawless English complexion and magnificent brown eyes. Her family had come to Massachusetts in 1734, from a town in Wales — she always pronounced it quickly and melodically for him, slurring her l's and m's, but he could never pronounce it himself and had only seen it written out once. Watching her as she stepped surely and lightly over the sparkling grass to the seawall, he often visualized her ancestors walking in just such a manner, the hands delicately clasped, the head expectantly tilted as though listening for a hidden sound, before the splendid ruins of a castle overlooking the valley. She was softspoken and spoke rarely, but her silence could fall upon a room like a thunderclap in recrimination never voiced against one or another of his father's stern pronouncements. Her smile was sometimes like a knife; he had often "seen his father's bluster grow larger and therefore less meaningful as he rushed suicidally against that naked blade of a smile, her brown eyes solemn and unamused above it. His mother was not an affectionate woman, or at least not a demonstrative one. He could only remember her truly embracing him once, holding him close to her breast and frantically stroking his face, and that was the time Lucas pushed him off the seawall and he cut his hand on a sharp rock.

There was never any doubt that Jonah would one day become a lawyer like his father, nor ever any doubt that he would eventually marry Christine Dunseath. Looking back, he supposed now that the divorce was also inevitable. But he never had an inkling of that until it was fully upon him, and he certainly didn't anticipate it when he was courting her as a boy or when they were newly married and trying to make their way in New York. His courtship (the word was his father's and not his) was a natural development encouraged by proximity; the Dunseath family lived next door to them on Shippan Point. Albert Dunseath was Stamford's water commissioner, a ruddy-faced man with a hearty laugh, sparse blond hair covering his tanned pate, combed sideways to disguise the encroaching baldness. His wife was a dark-haired beauty from whom, fortunately, Christie had inherited her looks. She was an avid horsewoman, and was always stamping in and out of her house in jodhpurs and riding boots, flicking a riding crop against her legs, Lady Fitz-Ashton returning from an outing on the moors, Some tea, Lady Fitz? She scared hell out of Jonah with her imperious air and her startling beauty, the black hair cut in severe bangs across her forehead, the proud nose and generous mouth, blue eyes flashing, the riding crop flicking against her thigh, terrifying. Christie was hardly less terrifying as a child, a hellcat who gave Lucas a bloody nose once when he tried to take off her pants behind the tool shed near the big dying maple. Lucas was eleven at the time, and Jonah was ten, and Christie was perhaps eight, yes just eight. Lucas had got her pants halfway down over her knees when she suddenly decided she didn't like the game they were playing. She twisted away from him, her small white bottom flashing in the dappled shade, and hit him with her bunched fist. Jonah was terrified that she would tell her mother what had happened and cause her to descend upon their household like the mounted fury she most certainly was. But Christie was as frightened as he, and never said a word about it. She studiously avoided Lucas from that day on, though, and maintained a cool and barely polite attitude toward him to the end.

Jonah began seriously dating her when they were still in high school — boat rides up the Connecticut River, and long drives to New Haven where they went to see out-of-town tryouts of incoming Broadway plays, and into New York to see the stage shows at Radio City and the Roxy, or the big-name bands at the Paramount and Strand. He once waited in line with her for three hours outside the Paramount on a freezing day in February, to see Frank Sinatra, whom he hated the moment Christie began shrieking; he thought she would faint dead away right there in the balcony, many of the girls actually did. Or just being together, walking home together from school on a bright spring day, or sitting on the lawn at night, fingers barely touching, a farewell kiss behind the shed where Lucas had tried to take off her pants, the sight of her as she walked between the forsythia bushes that separated the two properties a curious walk, so unlike her mother's almost as though she were gliding, a model's walk, with pelvis thrust forward and head erect.

She wore a blue gown to his high school prom, she had taken to wearing her hair like her mother's by then, sharp bangs across the forehead, blue eyes twinkling beneath them in secret amusement (secret contempt, he later came to realize), the pale blue of the gown emphasizing her eyes and clinging to her childish body. She was almost seventeen, but her figure seemed to resist all womanly transformation. Narrow-hipped and small-breasted, slender and slouched, she achieved a look that only years later woud become fashionably chic. Her face was undeniably beautiful, though, her eyes sometimes flashed at older men who stopped dead in their tracks and then quickly surveyed the slender body and shook their heads in wonder, dazed by their obvious mistake. When he danced with her, he could feel every inch of her body pressed against him, the small budding breasts that would never really develop into an abundant bosom, the protruding bones of her hips, the mound of her pubis, the curve of her back where his hand rested, his fingers sometimes spread to touch the tight firm buttocks, he had seen her almost naked once, white and dappled with maple-shadow as she twisted away from his brother's hands, the blue eyes angry and not at all amused that day.

He asked her to marry him on that graduation night, resplendent in his white dinner jacket, holding her cool and slender in his arms. The senior class had rented the country club and hired the best young band in the area, a fourteen-piece orchestra with monogramed stands and identical blue jackets, white shirts, blue bow ties. The trumpet section rose to take their chorus of "Summertime," straight mutes protruding from the golden glowing bells of their horns, ceiling lights glistening with blues and reds and greens that shimmered in brass-bound reflection, he danced with Christine Dunseath and asked her to be his wife. He was eighteen years old, and a languid June breeze blew in fresh over the dew-misted golf course and through the open French doors of the ballroom. She nodded when he asked her, and he said, "You will?" in surprise, and when she answered, "Of course," he whispered a kiss into her hair.

He had thought at the time, being eighteen, the United States involved in another great war for democracy, that he would naturally be called into the Army, that he would naturally serve his country, become a hero perhaps, though not a dead one. When he registered for the draft, however, he was afraid he might be rejected because of his eyesight, and even debated memorizing an eyechart before going down for his physical. But he decided against it, sweated through the examination instead, and immediately afterwards asked the doctor how he had done. The doctor told him his eyes were okay as far as the Army was concerned, proving once again the old military adage about healthy seeing-eye dogs. The military, however, did not yet possess either an adage or a deterrent for poison gas seeping into a man's system through a hole in his eardrum. Jonah was surprised to discover that he possessed just such a punctured eardrum and that the Army did not want him, better luck next war, Mac. Poison gas at the time was the ultimate weapon, the dread weapon each nation hoped would never be used again. In later years, Jonah would come to appreciate the irony of having been rejected because of the fear of poison gas, only to have the war finally decided by the use of a weapon a million times more heinous. He would also come to appreciate (and this only very much later) the supreme irony of fighting wars under the guise of preventing them, and would come to the conclusion (never admitted to a soul) that all men, including Americans, were warlike and that the invention and use of "The Bomb" was restraining them from doing what they really loved doing most: killing each other. ("I like physical contact," Lucas had said, "I like knocking guys around.") Lucas himself had enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was just eighteen, against Zachary's wishes, but what could the old man do? He was a hero, his captain later wrote, who managed to kill sixteen Japanese soldiers before being killed himself by a mortar explosion. "I am sending you a small carton of his effects, please know that we respected your son highly and share your loss deeply," kind captain sitting out there in the Pacific with jungle rot on his balls and dead youngsters on his hands. The small carton of effects included the maroon-and-white letter Lucas had received in high school for being the team's star halfback, a hero even then. Jonah's keenest memories of his brother would always be of those crisp October days, the sky above the high school field, the handoff to Lucas and the plunge, God, how he could run! Even at Yale years later, even as a law student there (his father and grandfather had of course studied law at Yale) he would experience a strange, odd sensation whenever the team came out onto the field, a shudder would run up his spine, and he would once again see Lucas charging into the opposing line, would remember once when Lucas got up and limped away from a pile-on and then waved to Jonah where he was sitting in the stands, his grin cracking white and sharp across his mud-stained face. I like physical contact, I like knocking guys around. He had knocked around sixteen of them before they'd brought him down, you do not get up and wipe mud from your jersey after a mortar explosion, you do not smile into the stands at your kid brother.

He married Christine Dunseath in the First Presbyterian Church on Stamford's Bedford Street in the summer of 1952, after he received his law degree from Yale. The reception was held at her parents' home on Shippan Point, outdoors in the garden. The forsythias were still in bloom, spilling their petals onto the ground, he remembered fleetingly the image of a younger Christie threading her way through those bushes on too many nights too long ago. She had not changed that much perhaps, there was still the look of a very young and vulnerable creature about her, except for the snapping eyes that flicked as surely as a riding crop against a jodhpured thigh. At twenty-four, she was still wearing her hair in bangs, continued to wear it that way even to the time of the divorce when she was thirty-four and a mother, and when her eyes betrayed the fact that she was no longer a high school girl. Across the lawn, moving from guest to guest, her champagne glass in one delicately poised hand, while Jonah's mother sat unsmiling with a fan spread on her lap, dark eyes solemn as she watched her son's bride — did she ever think of Lucas in his jungle grave, or had there even been a grave? Christie Dunseath, radiant in white, black shoulder-length hair, swooping black brows over blue eyes, laughing. And water commissioner Dunseath, almost entirely bald now, ruddy-faced and a trifle drunk, embracing her as she came across the lawn, Mrs. Dunseath uncomfortable in a yellow diaphanous gown, no riding crop in her hand, no horse between her legs, older now, but her face still clinging to its girlish mold, the way Christie's would for years to come, except for the eyes.

Their first apartment was a three-room flat in a tenement on East 73rd Street, a street teeming with children during the summer, swarming with traffic that headed west from the East River Drive exit, noisy and smelly and wretchedly hot. Christie had never been able to stand heat, she ran from the sun the way albinos do, always seeking the comforting shade of an umbrella or a tree, her white skin turning lobster red if she were exposed for as long as five minutes. The apartment was an inferno, and the secondhand fan he bought on Canal Street did little to dispel the fetid air. He would come home from work each day to find her limp and haggard on the bed, her eyes silently accusing, and he would remember his mother's mute disapproval of Zachary, the cutting edge of her smile. He later wondered if their marriage did not really suffocate forever in those first terrible months in that grubby apartment. But at the time, he was too involved in coping with the profession he had chosen, hurling himself against an indifferent city swarming with talented young lawyers like himself, expecting Christie to cheer his efforts, applaud his small triumphs, urge him on to greater heights. She did this unfailingly until, almost a year to the day after her marriage, she became pregnant. Then, frightened by the changes in her body and the impending responsibility of motherhood, wishing for the Shippan house and the easy life she once had known, she turned to Jonah — childishly perhaps, unrealistically perhaps — wanting him to take care of her, wanting him to tell her everything would be all right, that there was nothing to worry about, that this was all a part of it, all a vital part of it. And he might have provided her with the assurance she desperately needed and sought, had not a very important change taken place in his own life at exactly the same time.

Raymond Gauthier was a bald-headed New Yorker of French descent who had lost his right eye in Italy, and who wore a black patch over the empty socket. He resembled a motion picture pirate, with powerful shoulders and chest, pepper-and-salt hair curling over the open collar of his shirt, the dangling arms of a gorilla, thick thighs and enormous hands. Jonah always visualized him with a belaying pin in his fist, following Burt Lancaster over the side of a burning Spanish vessel. His wife was a Brooklyn girl named Helen, whom he openly and frankly described as an ex-junkie who had married and later divorced a saxophone player. Jonah surmised that Raymond was kidding about this, at least about the junkie part, but he nonetheless watched Helen very carefully, and every time the poor girl scratched at an itch, he assumed she was overdue for her next fix. Helen had dark black curly hair which she wore cut very close to her head. She had slightly bucked teeth, and her eyes were green and faintly Oriental; sometimes when Jonah looked straight into them, he could believe she had once been an addict. He was tempted on several occasions to ask her about it directly, but then of course he knew it was just another of Raymond's jokes.

Raymond had been practicing law in New York since 1951, and felt it was time he took a partner, an idea Jonah clutched at immediately; Raymond had a going practice, Jonah was still chasing ambulances. Neither of them knew that the treason case would come their way so soon, or that it would catapult their newly formed partnership into that rarefied upper atmosphere of the legal profession, where clients were abundant and fees were outrageous, and fame was suddenly upon them like a sunburst. They knew only that they liked each other, and respected each other, and could possibly put their separate talents to fruitful use in a partnership. The treason case was still six months away. The plot itself was at that very moment, in fact, taking definite shape and form in a Jersey City basement, the plans being drawn, the bombs manufactured; the execution and subsequent capture were still in the offing. But the formation of the partnership meant that he and Christie could move instantly from their shabby East 73rd Street town-house (Mr. and Mrs. Jonah Willow of New York and Shippan Point) into a better apartment on Central Park West, large and airy, and not terribly expensive because the neighborhood was supposedly succumbing to the Puerto Rican influx.

The new apartment did little to lift Christie's spirits. She had begun to show in her second month, and she now tried to conceal the pregnancy as though she were the victim of a back-alley rape. She incessently blamed Jonah for what she called his "animal impetuosity," and one night delivered a five-minute kitchen diatribe on "the primitive and unreliable birth control methods available to American women." She then developed a theory relating her pregnancy to Jonah's work, claiming he was always too busy to do anything but make love, and further claiming they had used sex that summer as a substitute for other forms of entertainment ("What!" Jonah said) which would not have been necessary if he'd taken her to dinner or the theater every now and then ("What!" he said again). Besides, she said, this new partnership of his was all craparoo, and he knew it, the same as everything else in this stupid world, "craparoo" being one of Mrs. Dunseath's more choice expressions, passed on to her daughter the way some families pass on the Limoges or the Sheffield plate, an expression Jonah hated, and one which Christie used with increasing frequency to describe almost anything.

Stalin's succession by Malenkov that year was craparoo, as was Salk's development of a trial polio vaccine. Hillary's and Tenzing's conquest of Everest was likewise craparoo, and even the first test explosion of a hydrogen bomb by the Soviet Union was so classified by Christie. The exchange of ideas in those last few months of 1953 became virtually impossible. Coupled with Christie's craparoo concept was an almost biblical attitude that found voice in her second most favored expression, undoubtedly inherited from the water commissioner himself: This too shall pass. Why bother wondering whether Dag Hammarskjold would make a good secretary general of the UN? His term would only last five years anyway. Why concern oneself with Senator McCarthy's belief that a Communist Party cell was in operation at the Lynn, Massachusetts, plant of General Electric? Wouldn't this eventually blow over? The theory applied to everything, all human endeavor fell before it and was trampled: the latest world event, the newest novel, the most recent motion picture, the goddamn Pillsbury bakeoff. All was either trivial at worst or transient at best, and who really gave a damn?

I really give a damn, Jonah thought, and began wondering whether or not anything at all mattered to Christie. Well, she's pregnant, he thought, she's going through a difficult time, she's only twenty-five years old, been married a year and a little more, this is difficult for her. She's really a very sensitive and vulnerable person, it's easy to see how things in this neurotic world of ours can confuse her and force her to build defenses against involvement, she's only exhibiting the symptoms of our times, she's a sweet confused kid, and I've got to help her. But where do you start when someone doesn't even realize that "craparoo" is as phony as whatever it purports to define? Crap is crap, and shit is shit, and craparoo is neither, no matter what Mrs. Albert Dunseath astride her Arabian stallion may believe or have caused her daughter to believe. So where do you begin, and what do you say?

He said nothing, he did not begin. Instead, the marriage began to die in that second year while Amy grew inside her belly and Jonah fell into Christie's own trap: it was all trivial and inconsequential, the normal difficult adjustment newlyweds have to make, it would pass, it would pass. It did not pass, and eight years later he would wonder whether he could have said or done anything to change the situation, whether there was still time then before the treason trial began, before everything else became terribly more urgent and important than the woman who was his wife.

The treason case broke in July of 1954, two months after Amy was born. His daughter weighed nine pounds two ounces, huge for a girl, causing Christie to go into shock shortly after the delivery, throwing up all over the floor of her room while the night nurse ran to fetch a mop instead of a doctor. He cornered the nurse in the hospital corridor, a big red-faced mean bitch with gray hair and a nose like a cleaver, and he told her she had better get the doctor immediately before he strangled her. Her red face went very white, two glacial spots showing one on each cheek and then spreading to the rest of her features as she struggled with indignation and anger, and then swallowed both and went trotting off down the corridor, white skirts flying, crepe soles padding, you're goddamn right, Jonah thought. His daughter had the Dunseath look, passed directly from Lady Fitz to Christie, each lineal reproduction slightly less perfect, as though the mold were losing its firmness: Mrs. Dunseath had been breathtakingly lovely; Christie was merely beautiful; and Amy, his daughter, was only pretty. But oh what a true loveliness about her, something Mrs. Dunseath could not have acquired in a thousand years of breeding, the black hair and the light eyes, yes, the finely turned profile and the generous mouth, yes, all these though less classically stated, but her manner as well. Ahh, her gentle, shy, and inquiring manner, the delicate grace of her, this was the Willow legacy. This was his mother gently walking toward the seawall, her head tilted in anticipation, his Amy, his darling girl.

In July of 1954, a young man named Kaneji Yoro, accompanied by another young man named Peter Koenig, set a series of homemade bombs against the walls of Gracie Mansion, detonated them, and began running downtown in the direction of Wall Street, hoping to lose themselves in the lunch hour crowds. They were picked up before they had traveled three blocks, and were immediately charged with attempted murder, the mayor and the governor having been in executive conference within when the bombs went off. The charges were later expanded in the indictment to include arson (because the building caught fire), anarchy (because they found in a Jersey City basement several documents in the defendants' handwriting which outlined an escalating scheme of methodical destruction that would eventually lead to chaos and insurrection), conspiracy (because the two men had been out of state when they conspired to commit their act against the peace of New York), and, finally, treason. Treason, of course, was the most serious of all the charges and was a crime punishable by death. Since Article 212 of the New York State Penal Law defined treason as consisting of "a combination of two or more persons by force to usurp the government of the state, or to overturn the same, shown by a forcible attempt made within the state, to accomplish that purpose," Jonah could not see how the district attorney hoped to prove there had been an attempt at overthrowing the government, notwithstanding the timely presence in Grade Mansion of the state's highest executive. The documents in the Jersey City basement indeed supported a charge of anarchy, bolstered as they were by copies of books by Engels and Marx, issues of the Daily Worker, and even one or two party directives. Attempted murder was also well within the bounds of realistic possibility, and a conviction on that charge alone would have netted the perpetrators twenty-five years each in prison, a long enough span for any young bomber. The enormity of the crime, however, this attempt on the lives of two important officials (by Communist anarchists, no less) undoubtedly called for more severe punishment than the law allowed, so the district attorney had gratuitously tacked to his indictment the charges of arson, conspiracy, and treason. The arson charge amused Jonah. The conspiracy and treason charges incensed him. He could not believe that Yoro's and Koenig's respective Japanese and German ancestry had anything whatever to do with the indictment ("Of course not," Christie said. "The war's already forgotten. It's all craparoo") but he nonetheless detected in the public reaction an attitude of outraged piety and righteousness. Hadn't we been reconstructing and regenerating those dirty Nazi bastards and sneaky Jap finks ever since the war ended, a war we had won, mind you? So now two snotnosed red Communist Fascist punks try to blow up Gracie Mansion with our beloved mayor and governor inside, dirty red subversive Jap rat bastard Nazis — notwithstanding the fact that Yoro was born and raised in San Francisco or that Koenig's father was a respected employee of the Reader's Digest in Chappaqua, where he had been born and where he had sired his anarchist son.

Jonah wanted to take the case because he felt the treason charge was unjustified and unjustifiable. Raymond wanted to take the case because he was shrewd enough in his ancestral French way to realize that whoever defended these two young Communists would become famous overnight. Their initial separate motives were later ironically reversed: it was Raymond who wrote a paper explaining the principles involved in the case, which he read at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association; it was Jonah who conducted the court trial, Jonah whose name and picture appeared in all the newspapers, Jonah who came out of the proceedings a well-known legal figure and a champion of the rights of the individual in a free-society.

The district attorney eventually dropped the absurd arson charge, but Jonah permitted his clients to plead guilty only to attempted murder and anarchy, fighting the treason charge as well as the linked charge of conspiracy (if there had been no treason, how could anyone have conspired to commit an act against the peace?) on the grounds that whatever eventual overthrow may have been contemplated by the pair, its execution had certainly not begun with the bombing of the mayor's residence. Youthful ego and exuberance aside, even these misguided twenty-year-old boys could not possibly have intended their deed (he almost said "childish prank") as the beginning of a bona fide uprising. The jury was out for six hours. It convicted Yoro and Koenig of the first two crimes, and the judge sentenced them to consecutive prison terms of twenty-five years for attempted murder and ten years for anarchy. The case was won, and a style was set. The style was not immediately manifest, though. Like the dissolution of Jonah's marriage, it resisted definition until it was fully recognizable. By the time the tone of the partnership was realized, the tone of the marriage was also realized, and it was curious that both marriage and partnership dissolved in the same year, only several months apart, though neither had anything to do with the other. Or was that true?

He pulled the car to the curb outside his building. The doorman standing just inside the glass entrance doors immediately put on his gloves and came out to greet him.

"Put her away for the night, Mr. Willow?" he asked.

"Please, Dave."

"What happened to your fender here, Mr. Willow?"

"I had a little accident."

"Really got mangled, didn't it?"

"Mmm."

"There's a good body man over at the garage, if you want to…"

"I'll talk to him about it in the morning, Dave."

"Will you be using her tomorrow, or…"

"No, I'll need a taxi."

"Right, Mr. Willow, G'night now."

"Good night, Dave."

He walked quickly into the lobby, stopping at the long table with the mirror over it, picking up his mail. There was nothing from Amy. He scanned the envelopes rapidly, and then walked back to the elevator bank.

"Good evening, Fred," he said.

"Evening, Mr. Willow." The elevator doors closed. "Getting pretty cold out there, isn't it?"

"Bitter," Jonah said.

He got off on the sixth floor, and walked to his apartment at the end of the hall. Bessie had left a light burning for him in the entry alcove; the apartment was otherwise dark. He went into the kitchen, turning on lights ahead of him, and found a note from Bessie scotch-taped to the refrigerator door. Your daughter called, she had written in pencil, says you should called her back at school tonight or Wesday noon. He nodded briefly, took off his coat, and then went through the apartment to the master bedroom overlooking Park Avenue. He was about to place his call to Pennsylvania when he realized it was past midnight. He would have to call on Wednesday.

His wrist hurt like hell. He undressed slowly and carefully, cursing the Egyptian under his breath — that was another call he'd have to make, to Judge Santesson, see what he could do about that crazy son of a bitch.

The cross begins tomorrow, he thought.

Wearily, he pulled back the covers, the blue and violet flower-patterned sheets Christie had brought home from Lord & Taylor, traces of her lingering in the bedroom even though the divorce had become final in August of 1962, the painting they had bought in Rome, St. Peter's in sunlight, the crayoned drawing Amy had given them as a Christmas gift when she was only four, traces, traces.

The cross begins tomorrow, he thought.

In a little while, he fell asleep.