Where Three Roads Meet

~ ~ ~

If and when he ever gets his narrative shit together, Will Chase might tell the Story of the Three Freds more or less like this — freely changing names, roles, settings, and any other elements large or small as his by-then-more-seasoned muse sees fit, neither to protect the innocent nor to shield the blamable, but simply to make the tale more tellworthy:

1. THE CALL

Mid-spring mid-morning in mid-twentieth-century USA — in the mid-Atlantic-coast state of Maryland, to be exact, and even in mid-sentence, as our then young and recently interrupted narrator made to resume his anecdote-in-progress by saying to his apartment-mates, "As I was saying, guys" — their telephone rang again.

"Your turn," his friend Al said to their friend Winnie: a standing joke between that latter pair (although both were in fact seated, on their hand-me-down couch in their gradstudent apartment in the university's high-rise Briarwood Residences, just off campus), inasmuch as in those days before phone-answering machines, Winnie, Al's girlfriend, took all their calls, for reasons presently to be explained, and thus had taken the previously interruptive one (wrong number) a few minutes before. With a roll of her eyes she reached again for the phone — one of those black rotary-dial jobs, standard issue back then — on the hand-me-down end table next to which she customarily sat, when reading or chatting, for just that purpose.

"Hello?"

"If this were a story and you were its narrator," Alfred Baumann advised Wilfred Chase while Winifred Stark attended the caller, "you could stop the action right here and get some capital-E Exposition done: like who the Three Freds are and what they're doing here; what the capital-C Conflict is; what's At Stake for whichever of us is the Protagonist, and why Win takes all our calls in Briarwood Three-oh-four…"

Roger wilco, old buddy, as even callow nonveterans like themselves sometimes said in those postwar days: military radio-communications lingo for Got your message and will comply. Post — World War Two is the when of this story, although the nation's brief peaceful respite after V-J Day 1945 would end in 1950 with North Korea's invasion of South and the American-run UN "police action" to contain that invasion. Excuse Narrator if you knew all that, Reader: It matters because this story's where is the campus environs of a major university — a campus swarming, as were all such in the USA back then, with veterans of that previous war, their educations subsidized by the GI Bill of Rights. At all-male institutions such as this was in those days, the undergraduate student body was thus divided into somewhat older, more life-experienced, and now draft-exempt World War Two vets, many of them married, and younger, greener, soon-to-be-draft-vulnerable hands like the then Will Chase and his only slightly older best friend and mentor, Al Baumann.

Greener, yes, in that neither Al nor Will had shared their war-veteran classmates' transformative experience of military service, not to mention actual combat. But green comes in shades, and in every other respect Al was so much the savvier that as of this telling Narrator still shakes his head at that pair's friendship, wondering what on earth Al B. found interesting in Will C.; what he got from a connection so clearly beneficial to his protégé. Born and raised in one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods as the only child of well-to-do parents, his dad a professor of oncology at the university's medical school, Alfred Baumann had been educated K–12 (as they say nowadays but did not then) at private day schools whose graduates routinely matriculated in the Ivy League. At puberty he discovered in himself a passion for the arts and for academic scholarship; decided by his junior prep-school year that he'd be a poet, a professor of literature or maybe of art history, and on the side a jazz pianist, although he knew his way around classical guitar and string bass as well. Enrolled in the comparably prestigious but decidedly less classy VVLU instead of Harvard/ Yale/Princeton, because it offered an experimental program wherein selected students could on their adviser's recommendation become virtual Ph.D. candidates early in their undergraduate careers, commence supervised original research in their chosen disciplines, and complete their doctorates as early as five years after matriculation. Al was, moreover, no stranger to the capitals of Europe and elsewhere, the Baumanns having often vacationed abroad before and after the war as well as having gone with Doctor Dad to oncological conferences in sundry foreign venues — whence their son had acquired what to friend Will, at least, was an enviable familiarity with places and languages, wines and cuisines, and the ways of the world, including self-confidence with the opposite sex: a sophistication the more impressive because worn lightly, even self-deprecatingly.

"Trivia," Al liked to say about such casually imparted but attentively received life lessons as that slope-shouldered red-wine bottles contain Burgundies and round-shouldered ones Bordeaux, the former to be enjoyed promptly and the latter "laid down" some years to mature; that both kinds need to "breathe" awhile after opening before being drunk (except for Châteauneuf-du-Pape); that provolone has four syllables, not three; that making circles with one's thumbs and forefingers is a handy reminder that one's bread plate on a restaurant table is the one at one's left hand (small "b") and one's drinking glass the one at one's right (small "d"): "It's what's here, here, and here that matters," indicating in turn his or Will's (or Winnie's) head, heart, and crotch. But from whom if not gentle (slope-shouldered, indeed Chianti-bottle-shaped) Al Baumann did Will learn how to tie a full-Windsor necktie knot, navigate the city's bus and trolley lines, successfully hail a cruising taxicab and compute the driver's tip, play sambas and rhumbas and kazatskies and frailichs as the occasion warranted in addition to their new jazz trio's usual repertory? Not to mention what one learned from him in the classroom, as one's junior instructor in Literature & Philosophy I & II, about Homer and Virgil (and Sappho and Petronius and Catullus), Plato and Aristotle (and the Gnostics and the Kabbalists), Dante and Chaucer and Boccaccio (and Scheherazade and Somadeva, Poggio and Aretino and Rabelais), and other classics on (and off) one's freshman/sophomore syllabus, up to and including James Joyce's Ulysses (and Finnegans Wake)…

"And trivia, class, as you may have heard, comes from Latin trivium: literally, a place where three roads intersect — as in Sophocles? — but by extension any public square where people swap idle gossip." The Trivium was also (he went on) the medieval division of the seven liberal arts into Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric — not to be confused with Cambridge University's tripos, which was a different story altogether: "Okay?"

If you say so, Teach. And so indeed Al said, back then back there, in class and out — all which curricular and extracurricular input Will Chase eagerly "downloaded," as one might put it three decades later, his own background having been a different story indeed from Alfred Baumann's: Depression-era child of minimally schooled though by no means unintelligent small-town storekeepers in the state's least affluent county; graduate of a wartime local public school system so strapped for funds and faculty that its eleventh grade was perforce one's senior year, whence nearly none of the seventeen-year-old diplomates "went off" to college — especially if they'd been lucky enough to escape military service and thus unlucky enough to have no GI Bill to subsidize a higher education that, as a group, they weren't competitive for admission to anyhow. A few of the girls managed nursing school, secretarial school, or the nearby teachers college; most became store clerks, telephone operators, beauticians, or/and young housewives and mothers. Most of the boys found jobs in local offices and retail stores or became tradesmen, farmers, or crab-and-oyster watermen like their dads before them. A few enlisted in the peacetime military. And a handful shrug-shoulderedly took the application exam one spring afternoon for "senatorial" scholarships (whereof every Annapolis legislator was allotted a few to award and then to renew or redistribute annually) to various colleges and universities in the Old Line State. Having so done, the applicants proceeded to their summer employment fully expecting that at season's end it would become their real employment: their life's work.

Which, however, in Will Chase's case and that of a few others in his (all-white) graduating class, it did not. Since junior high school — or "upper elementary," as sixth and seventh grades were called in that abbreviated system — the lad had made an avid, if noisy, hobby of jazz percussion, and with comparably amateur-but-dedicated classmates on piano, trombone, and alto saxophone had formed a combo to play weekend dances at the local yacht and country club. In the spring of their "senior" year — thanks to the sax-man's father's business connection with a club member who had further connections up and down Maryland's Eastern Shore, they auditioned for and by golly won the best summer job any of them could imagine: At a fading old steamboat-era resort on the upper Chesapeake, still visited in season by daily excursion boats from Baltimore, the quartet would play two hours of dance music in the waterfront dance hall every afternoon while the boat was in and three hours more every evening for vacationers-in-residence, in return for a modest salary and free lodging in a storeroom-turned-bunkhouse at the end of the club's pier. Better yet, on Saturdays the oddly instrumented foursome was to expand to a small orchestra: three saxes (their alto plus two tenors or maybe even a baritone, if they could find one), three brass (the trombonist-leader plus two trumpets, if they could be found), and three rhythm (pianist and drummer plus a bassist, if et cetera). Swing-band-type lighted music stands; uniforms (broad-shouldered lapelless jackets and slightly pegged pants were "hep" just then, also black knit neckties and black-plastic-framed eyeglasses, whether one needed them or not); upgraded (secondhand) Zildjian cymbals and Slingerland drums! Instead of the combo's one-volume fake-book of the melody lines and chord progressions of all the standards, and their improvised "head arrangements" of whatever was current or recent on the Hit Parade, they would have a veritable library of store-bought stock arrangements with separately printed parts for every instrument — plus any "specials" that might be scored by whoever in the group had sufficient interest and ability in the orchestration way.

Which Whoever turned out, if mainly by default, to be Will Chase. Although he'd had no musical training beyond the half-dozen years of piano lessons that most youngsters took in those days, he had learned from them some basics of theory and harmony as well as how to read music, and from his combo-comrades something of the ranges and peculiarities of their instruments. All hands were, moreover, rapt listeners to the exciting new progressive-jazz recordings of Stan Kenton, arranged by Pete Rugolo; to Billy Strayhorn's sophisticated arrangements for Duke Ellington; and to Sy Oliver's for Tommy Dorsey. And so while his buddies expanded and numbered the library, acquired the dressy music stands and the group's first-ever sound system (as primitive by later, rock-era standards as a manual typewriter in the age of desktop computers), and scrambled for the weekend supplement of sidemen and for manageable rehearsal times and venues, Will set about earnestly trying his hand not at composition, for which he knew himself to have no gift, but at transforming by reorchestration some existing, preferably familiar melody into something new, an attention-getting showcase for the band. So enamored of and engrossed in this novel activity of arranging did he become in the spring of that year, and even more so when the expanded orchestra was actually recruited, rehearsed, and swinging on summer Saturday nights at the Bohemia Beach Club, that he dared to imagine — as he never would have about his at-best-adequate instrumental ability — that here might be his vocation: his true calling.

"But it wasn't, quite," Narrator hears the tutelary spirit of Al Baumann interrupt this extended interruption-of-an-interruption to declare, "and so when the Bohemia gig runs its course in late August and our webfoot Wilfred wonders what to do with himself next, he takes his bass player's advice and the scholarship he claims to've forgotten he'd applied for, and he climbs out of his down-county tidemarshes like a wide-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears amphibian and crosses the Bay to join me at VVLU — and there they-all sit at the present time of this so-called story, interrupted by that second phone call, but you've been nattering on so about the Hicksville school system et cet that you haven't even gotten yet to the Three Freds' ménage à deux et un peu, and Lou Levy's Cheatery, and why Winnie used to take all our phone calls at Briarwood Three-oh-four. Your Tutelary Spirit suggests you save all this Arranger stuff for a memoir somewhere down the road and get on with our made-up story: Win can't keep Levy on hold forever."

Roger wilco, old buddy — after establishing (a) that this six-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week band gig (Mondays off) taught Will Chase unequivocally that his orchestration, like his percussion, was after all no more than a better-than-average amateur flair, not a pre-professional talent; also (b) that the search for those additional Saturday-night side-men turned up a few college types from Baltimore who commuted to the job by excursion boat and stayed overnight in the club storeroom with the combo — among them the pianist-turned-bassist Alfred Baumann from what we're calling Veritas Vos Liberabit University, that being its motto, and his Goucher College girlfriend Winifred Stark, a Library Science major and Music minor (commuting downtown to her keyboard lessons at the Peabody Institute) every bit as able on piano as was her versatile boyfriend, or for that matter the group's regular ivory-tickler, who therefore happily took weekends off, as the other sidemen could not. And (c), as has been intimated, that it was Will Chase's fortuitous acquaintance with said bassist (the first he'd ever worked with, and what a difference in the band's beat, and how much one learned from him on the job, about everything from leaving the basic four-to-the-bar mainly to him and using one's bass drum more for accents, to pushing one's already-thinning hair into a fifties-style pompadour!) that persuaded him, not to abandon music, but to set aside career ambitions in that line and give college a try instead, at least for his scholarship year. He remains much obliged to this hour, long-gone Al-pal, for that suggestion.

"Well: My suggestion, as you call it, was that after that shall-we-say Bohemian summer, Will Chase would be a fucking idiot to go back to his dear damp Marshville instead of giving big-city academia a try. That he had a better shot at quote Finding Himself, whoever that might be, in a VVLU seminar room across the Bay than in his folks' ma-and-pa drugstore. Besides which, Win and I needed a drummer for the new club-style trio that we had in mind but hadn't named yet, and given our three first names, the choice was a no-brainer, as they say nowadays but didn't back then. So introduce us to the Reader already, okay? Something more than that résumé stuff a few pages ago?"

Narrator's pleasure, if Will Chase ever finds his voice. Meet Al Baumann, Reader: twenty-one years old at the time here told of, but already deep into Otto Rank's 1909 treatise Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden; also Lord Raglan's magisterial synthesis The Hero (1936), and his own interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation on the Ur-Myth's ubiquity in the literature of Western civilization—

"Not just Western, man! And not just the guy's birth, either: I was into the whole Heroic Cycle shtick already by the time Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces came out in 'forty-nine."

That you were — as one appreciates now but could scarcely then. If things had gone differently, it'd be Alfred Baumann instead of Joseph Campbell whom we'd be watching public-television documentaries about.

"So it goes."

So it went, alas, as shall be revealed if Narrator ever gets his act together. Meanwhile, meet Al Baumann, Reader: a gentle and wispy-haired but nonetheless commanding presence, lightly brown-goateed a dozen-plus years before the high sixties brought male face hair back into style, and figured not unlike the instrument he played so authoritatively at Will Chase's side on the bandstand of the Bohemia Beach Club and, subsequently, in what passed for a student hangout at super-serious VVLU — a hangout denominated, by that bass-shaped bassist himself, the Trivium…

"Because all three curricular roads there met, Reader: the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and what's now called Professional Studies but used to be Business and Education."

Plus all three campus castes: undergrads, grad students, and the odd junior instructor or assistant prof.

"Plus our dates, unless we were already-married war vets: the belles of Goucher and dear nearby CONDOM—"

Their sacrilegious acronym, Reader, for the all-female College of Notre Dame of Maryland: doubly titillating to horny VVLUers inasmuch as contraception in that precinct was an even bigger no-no than premarital sex.

"As for one's bearded, bass-shaped bassist-buddy: Granted, I was no skinny-assed redneck like some band-mates I could mention. Ate too much dreck, drank too much National Bohemian, smoked too many of the free cigarettes handed out in our student union by tobacco companies looking to get us hooked, and didn't exercise half enough, despite Doctor Dad's tongue-tsking. But 'twas chiefly a product of inherited metabolism — and anyhow none of the above is known to cause leukemia, which takes care of your why-no-PBS-documentaries question. On to Winnie?"

With pained pleasure, while that so-able and magnanimous rosy-cheeked lass remains freeze-framed back in academic 1948–49, telephone in hand, awaiting the end of this interrupted interruption of Section One, "The Call," of Part One, TELL ME, of our novella-triad Where Three Roads Meet…

"Your novella-triad, man. I just keep the beat."

Nope: Al and Will together kept the beat, with a little help from Winnie Stark's left hand, while her right both carried our tune and developed and resolved it. Win is the without-whom-not of this Three Freds combo.

"Of their combo, maybe; but their story's your baby, excuse the expression. On with it?"

Only children both; pals and playmates since early childhood; their parents near neighbors in upscale-but-laid-back Roland Park, not far from the campuses of their kids' respective day schools and subsequent colleges…

"Not that we didn't consider Harvard or Princeton and Radcliffe or Smith after finishing Gilman and Bryn Mawr, mind — just as we'd now and then considered other one-and-onlies besides each other. But as has been mentioned, only VVLU was offering that fast-track Ph.D…."

And Goucher was the best nondenominational women's college in the same town, and the girl- and boyfriend competition never measured up to what you K–12 sweethearts — K—sixth form? — had become for each other over the years.

"Reader might as well hear that Win and I were in each other's pants from our let's-play-doctor days through the look-what-I'm-sprouting-down-here and just-got-my-first-period period. Neither of us knows whether I technically deflowered her with my lower-school finger or my upper-school cock, but either way it was at least as much on her initiative as on mine. And we'd been so close already for so long in so many ways that if anything in that line felt naughty to us, it was because we were virtual sibs. Which is how your Chi-anti-bottle buddy managed to score such a doll. Why Win wasn't preggers by age fifteen used to be a mystery to both of us — but I'm getting ahead of your story: Tell."

So meet Winifred Stark, Reader: ample-figured, chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed strawberry blondie, her dad a mid-scale real estate developer thriving in the postwar housing boom from which many of the city's now-inner suburbs date; her mom a depressive alcoholic, alas, periodically drying out in nearby Sheppard Pratt Hospital between extended listless, even bedridden stretches at home — a woman driven to drink, as Al's dad diagnosed it, by her failures as a wife and mother because driven to drink — and Al's mom, faute de mieux, more a mother to our Win than was her own mother.

"Which benevolent circumstance, needless to add, made us feel more than ever like brother and sister — especially upon that unhappy woman's demise in Winnie's tenth year, whereafter a series of housekeepers attended her pa while Doc and Miz Baumann embraced his daughter as virtually their own."

An upbeat, firm-willed, independent-spirited lass, be it said, who welcomed their monitoring, took the loss of her not-much-of-a-mother in stride, comforted her not-all-that-bereft father as best a third- or fourth-grader can, and threw herself into her schoolwork, music lessons, team sports, and bosom-buddyhood with young Al Baumann. To whom she enjoyed mischievously displaying and even offering to his touch the not-yet-budding bosoms that anon would blossom into adolescent splendor.

"Squeezed and licked into full bloom, we half believed, in our let's-be-naughty sessions in the loft of the Starks' quote Carriage House, as was her playmate's uncircumcised shlong. Not quite your mythic hero's Summons to Adventure, but pretty exciting to us pre-teenies."

Who then as high-schoolers duly dated others, pour le sport; groped and were groped by same within modest limits, but always with relief came back from these amusing excursions to each other, with whom by then so much went without saying that they could get on with their joint story without forever having to rebegin it Once upon a time.

"And speaking of which — I mean getting on with one's story…?"

On with same they got: Went off to their respective college freshman years at campuses less than five miles apart. Promised their respective parents (Win had a stepmom by then, whom, contrary to stereotype, she liked better than she'd ever liked her late mother) that they'd not marry until they'd completed their degrees, nor "live together" in the meanwhile — that being a thing still Not Done, by and large, among people of their sort in those days, although the afore-noted presence on campus of so many married war vets was loosening the old conventions. Dwelt therefore in their respective college dorms for that first year, they did, it being agreed by all hands that Getting Out of the House was a significant part of one's higher education, and then in just-off-campus apartments with same-sex roommates through their second year — each often "sleeping over" in the other's flat. In that year too their growing interest in jazz, especially of the Progressive and then the Cool varieties (an interest that Narrator ought to've re-established two pages ago, but neglected to), led them to exchange their extracurricular hobby of playing chamber music with Win's Peabody pals for working dance gigs with a local non-union outfit.

"Because as scabs we earned less per job than the union guys in town, but scored more jobs."

While at the same time, in young Baumann's case, so impressing his VVLU Humanities profs and adviser that by the end of his second college year (one can't, strictly speaking, say "sophomore year," inasmuch as in the university's fast-track advanced-degree program he was already a "predoc," neither an undergraduate nor quite a graduate student) he was invited to enroll in graduate-level seminars the following year and perhaps to be a junior instructor in his department's two-year undergrad survey course called Literature & Philosophy.

"By which was meant representative classics of both disciplines in Western Civ, Reader, from Homer and the pre-Socratics up to maybe Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, and their arguably reciprocal influence: one major weekly lecture to the whole class by appropriate bigshots on the senior faculty, followed by twice-weekly small-section follow-ups led by us JIs. No better way to study that high-protein stuff than to have to teach it."

And teach it he did, young Alfred B., to the lucky dozen or so freshmen who happened to draw his section. The particular blank tablet named Wilfred Chase learned more from him in two semesters than he'd learned in two years at Back-Home High — and not just about Lit & Phil, nor only in class.

"W.C.'s tabula wasn't all that rasa, man — but you're ahead of our story, no?"

Not really, once Reader is reminded that between Al's and Winnie's second and third college years came that Bohemia Beach Club summer afore-rehearsed, their attendant connection with and befriendment of Adequate Drummer and Strictly Amateur Arranger Wilfred Chase, their persuading him to give college a try despite his less than impressive academic preparation therefor, and their case-clinching invitation to him to be the third Fred in the light-jazz trio they had in mind to play weekend gigs in the new student hangout that they were trying to get renamed the Trivium. All of which came to pass.

"And more."

More indeed — such as Will's barely hanging on, academically, through the overwhelmment of that freshman year. Democritus and Lucretius to Hume and Schopenhauer! Euripides and Plautus to Goethe and Molière! Renaissance, Reformation and Counter Reformation! Neoclas-sics and Romantics! Who knew?

"Well…"

Patient and bemused A. Baumann did, for one, and lively-friendly W. Stark, who were living together by then in Briarwood 304, but who for the sake of appearances listed that Murphy-bedded studio apartment as hers alone and the one below it, 204, as his and his same-sex roommate's: posh accommodation indeed for a webfoot redneck greenhorn out of his depth!

"Out of his depth, maybe, but paddling madly and not quite sinking after all, while downloading not only old Lit-Phil One and Two, and Burgundies versus Bordeaux—"

And trolley cars and taxicabs! Lacrosse and tennis and chess! Frat-house binges and East Baltimore Street burlesque! Also classmates Jewish and Catholic, Asian and Indian, European and Canadian and Latin American—

"But not yet African American, shame to say, in those still-segregated days. And our Wilfred downloaded not only these exotic marvels, one was saying…"

But also a much-improved acquaintance with the non-academic world of work — especially after his unimpressive freshman-year grade point average cost him his scholarship. With the best will in the world, excuse the poor pun, Chase père and mère could manage no more than half his VVLU tuition, they having aged parents to help provide for and their own elder years a-coming. The other half, plus room and board and books and spending money, their son had to scramble for, he being by then determined to hang on in that venue at whatever cost, to the end not only of imbibing more Lit & Phil—

"Not to mention History, Economics, Sciences both Natural and Social, a second language or two, and a few other items—"

But also in hopes of discovering the True Vocation that music had turned out not to be, nor scholarship either, QED: a calling more specific than the "Humanities" he'd chosen as his faute de mieux freshman-year major. In short, learning who and what he was and deciding who and what to be, in the way Al Baumann knew himself to be a Lit-Phil professor-in-the-works, and Winnie Stark knew she was some sort of librarian-to-be and Al's lifelong soulmate. That pair being, as afore-observed, the sole offspring of better-heeled families, their Three Freds dance gigs earned them spending money over and above their parents' generous provision and Al's junior-instructor stipend. Will, on the other hand, while still beat-keeping for the Freds on weekends, worked another job and a half that summer to support himself and make tuition payments: as a full-time night-shift timekeeper at a steel mill on the city's east side, and by day as a parttime roach-spray salesman in its bug-infested black ghettos, among sundry other pickup employments, all of which enriched his résumé of extracurricular real-world experience beyond high school clerking in his parents' store and musicianing in the (by-then-defunct) Bohemia Beach Club.

"And taught him, by the way, that the worlds of white-collar office work and product-peddling, like those of store-clerking and the blue-collar trades, were not for him, except as stopgaps. While to the more appealing calls of music and scholarship he found himself no more capable of professional-level response than to that of tennis, say, or chess. But tell me, man: Is this the Three Freds Story, or the one about How Will Chase Found His Voice?"

Those stories are one story, to which can now be added (what Reader may well have surmised) that for whatever mix of reasons — simple generosity and hospitality, amused fascination with a rustic innocent, reluctance to find and break in a brand-new replacement drummer if the incumbent flunked—

"All of the above, plus one thing more—"

Freds One and Two, who had befriended their country cousin on the Bohemia Beach bandstand and coached him (Al especially, but not exclusively) through his freshman-year survival struggles, had by that year's end virtually adopted him. Not as a son, mind, the kid they'd never have…

"Ouch."

Sorry there. But more as a not-unpromising but thitherto deprived kid brother, to be gently initiated into assorted mysteries large and small.

"Not unpromising indeed. The fact is, Reader, that just as Will Chase's first Great Ambition had been music, for which alas he simply hadn't the right stuff or anyhow enough thereof, so Fred One, as I seem to be being designated, had since boyhood more than anything aspired, not to teach Lit and Phil, honorable as that profession is, but to create same — especially the former. For which however alas et cetera? Granted, he might discern precociously the outlines of the Ur-Myth, say, and in order to trace its ubiquity in the literatures of the world he might take unto himself the vast corpus of those literatures, insofar as a brash twenty-one-year-old insomniac can—"

Which is to say, pretty fucking far.

"But he would eagerly have swapped all that for the gift of adding even a single small item to the inventory: not a learned commentary, but a capital-T Text! Not one more midrash, but a bit o' Scripture! In that line, however, as in at least one other…"

Never mind, please. Sufficient to say that said Fred now saw fit to see in his Bohemia gig-mate, later his eagerest student and then his protégé and official-though-not-actual apartment-mate — and moreover to persuade Fred Two that she saw as well — what said gig-mate/student/et cetera would scarcely have presumed to see in himself: the potential for doing, artfully, what his benevolent mentor had so aspired to.

"Which artfulness, shall we call it, extends to Narrator's keeping Our Winifred, shall we call her, on hold, let's say, for lo these many pages, phone in hand on hand-me-down couch in Briarwood Three-zero-four with Lou Levy on the line, the Triple-F story's Present Action frozen in interrupted mid-interruption while he takes his sweet time and ours filling in the blanks of Background. Far be it from a mere bass-shaped scholar-critic to criticize, but one wonders whether Narrator's artfulness mightn't extend further to wrapping up this extended Exposition and getting on with the effing story, at least Part One thereof, dot dot dot question mark? Tell Me, man!"

Roger maybeco, old buddy who never had the much-mixed blessing of growing old. The Effing Story is what's getting itself told, believe it or not, in its less-than-straight-forward fashion: a story one of whose apparent meanders fetched us to that spring '49 mid-morning in Briarwood 304 when nineteen-year-old Wilfred Chase, winding up his sophomore year at VVLU and hearing once again his mentor-friend's trademark imperative Tell Me, set about happily reminding all hands of that so-consequential mid-term day in Alfred Baumann's freshman Lit & Phil section when the young instructor had drawn on the blackboard an equiangular Y and said, "Okay, guys: In eight to ten pages' worth of sentences both articulate and legible, tell me before next Friday what this symbol says to you." Which recounting — prompted by Winnie Stark's observation that her gynecologist's wall chart of the Human Female Reproductive System (by her remarked on her recent annual visit to that office), with its bubblegum-pink fallopian tubes converging L & R upon the uterine cervix, was yet another pregnant analogue, so to speak, to the Place Where Three Roads Meet — had been interrupted and remained suspended by what we would learn presently but did not yet know just then to be a phone call from Louis Levy: proprietor, headmaster, and sole full-time employee of the Levy Preparatory School, a.k.a. the Cheatery.

The Important Thing, Will had been saying back then, was not that he'd happened in that mid-term essay to mention a number of associations that his so-savvy instructor hadn't thought of, like say the confluence of sperm and egg into embryo, or for that matter of father and mother into child — or, in the other direction, the forking of headwaters into river branches or tree trunks ditto, echoing the Primordial One's self-division, in sundry myths already mentioned in class, into Two and thence into Many; or (reversing Al's analogue of Hegelian dialectic, wherein Thesis versus Antithesis gives rise to Synthesis) the anti-Synthetic process of Analysis…

"What I had mentioned," put in Al here (back there back then, for Winnie's benefit), " — along with Siamese twins sharing a single lower body, like the mythical Melionides who fought Herakles, and the actual freaks illustrated in Aldrovandi's sixteenth-century Monstrorum Historia— was how at the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, where the green Moselle joins the mud-brown Rhine, one is reminded not only of Hegelian Synthesis but of why Moselle wines come in green bottles and Rhine wines in brown. What F-Three added was that his Chesapeake tidal rivers, like say the handsome Wye (but unlike its eponymous one-way English counterpart), switch from Synthesis to Analysis, or Fusion to Diffusion, every six and a half hours, changing the Place Where Three Roads Meet, or two become one, into the place where one becomes two. But that's not what mattered."

Yes it isn't. What mattered, as Will was saying to Al and Win (not for the first time) when the phone rang (ditto), was that he'd seen fit to cast these mid-term observations, whatever their merits, into the form of a gloss on Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," et cetera), which the Lit & Phillers had read earlier that semester: more specifically, into the firstperson monologue of a nonconformist spermatozoon swimming alone against the current up a different fork of some dark stream from the one that his countless ejaculation-mates have chosen, and speculating on the overall layout of wherever in the world he is and on the mystery of what it's all about…

"Poor shmuck," had commiserated Winnie — who, like Al but not yet like Will, had acquired a handy array of Yiddish disparagements from Jewish friends and classmates.

"Poor fucking shmuck," had added Al: From the veterans on campus all hands were picking up the liberal use of what they called "the word that won the war."

Yes, well. What mattered, Narrator had been gratefully reminding them when the telephone rang, was that upon reading said mid-term essay its author's instructor was even more pleased by the narrative conceit and prose style than by what it had to say about that equiangular Y: enough so that he not only A-plused it but declared to the Three Freds' drummer at their next Trivium session, "What we have on our hands here, my friend, is a capital-G fucking Gift: the one you wished you'd had for music but did not, and the one I wish I had for lit-making but do not. We're talking capital-V Vocation, man! The capital-C fucking mythic-heroical Call!"

Of the authenticity whereof he became so generously convinced — through the rest of that freshman semester and the next, and the summer following and the sophomore fall semester after that, as the Three Freds worked, played, and, increasingly, lived together — that at his urging, self-skeptical Will gave VVLU's Rudiments of Narrative course a try. And although he learned more from his mentor-friend's editorial comments on those primitive efforts (and from keen-eared Winnie's, and from the classic authors they bade him read) than from his classmates and course instructor, Fred-the-Mentee resolved, in the semester following (i.e., spring '49, the "now" of this section of this Three Freds story), to change his academic major from General Arts and Sciences to the university's recently established program in Creative Writing: not necessarily what Al Baumann thought the best curriculum for aspiring writers, inasmuch as literature had managed quite well for millennia without such programs, but he shrugged his (non-)shoulders at the news and agreed that further intensive practice, with feedback more various than his and Winnie's alone, wouldn't likely do harm and might well be of some benefit—if one were sufficiently alive to Literature's vastness and variety to counter every facile generalization about what constitutes Good Writing with an inarguably brilliant contradictory example.

This would by him get said, of course, only after Will got his say said: his declaration of major-changing intent, with which he meant to follow his grateful reminiscence-in-progress of that first-semester term paper on Analogues to the Y which had led him to what he was now entirely persuaded was his true Calling, however ably or otherwise he responded to that call. And it was in the midst of just that reminiscence that Briarwood 304's telephone rang, first with a wrong number and then — as Will was saying "As I was saying, guys" — with a mellifluous baritone response to Winifred Stark's "Hello?"

"Is there a Wilfred Chase there, please? Louis Levy calling."

Win arched her never-plucked eyebrows, puckered her ever-unpainted lips, beamed conspiratorially at Freds One and Three, held out the receiver to that latter, silently mouthed the name Lou Levy, and (not for the first or last time in this trio's history) said to same, "It's yours."

2. THE CHEATERY

In his Lit & Phil class discussions of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, Alfred Baumann was at pains to distinguish Truth from Fact: "We speak of the truths of great novels, or the truths of great myths, even though both involve made-up stories," et cetera. And he was fond of pointing out to his students how different were the meanings of Veritas vos liberabit to Jesus, for example (as quoted by his disciple John in the eponymous book, 8:32); to the research university whose motto, eighteen centuries later, those words became; and to the newly founded U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which had also seen fit to appropriate that "bit o' Scripture" as its motto. He enjoyed pointing out (the class was reading Sophocles) that while "the truth" might indeed be liberating — whether from soul-damning Error in the first instance, intellectual benightedness in the second, or perilous ignorance of what the nation's designated enemies were up to in the third — it could also be devastating, even fatal, as witness poor Oedipus and various other tragic heroes. "Gnothi seauton, the Delphic oracle advises," he would remind his more or less attentive freshmen. "Know thyself. Because, adds Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. So, then: Was Oedipus in better shape, was he more quote-unquote free, for learning that the old guy he'd knocked off at the Place Where Three Roads Meet was in fact his dad, who'd tried and failed to have him knocked off at birth? And that the widow-queen he'd then married and sired kids upon was his birth-mom? Remembering the King James Bible sense of 'to know' as 'to have carnal knowledge of,' one could fairly say that in Oedipus's case, to know himself was to screw himself altogether! So tell me: Given that for him the examined life was literally unlivable, would our Oed have been better off not knowing? One bluebook's or fifty minutes' worth of lucid commentary, s.v.p., whichever comes first."

Although never a varsity athlete, senior class officer, or other sort of high school bigshot, Wilfred Chase (wrestling determinedly there in the third row with Al's bluebook question) had been a not-unpopular teenager who'd quite enjoyed his small-town adolescence despite wartime deprivations and the county's junior-year senior year. He'd been a columnist for the school newspaper and had co-managed the boys' varsity basketball team, had co-organized that aforementioned rudimentary jazz combo, and had dated two or three girls over that foreshortened period. No extended romances, but when his buddies compared notes on their postprom exploits — typically a matter of who among them had managed, in the lingo of the time, to get to First or even to Second Base with his date — Will was not obliged either to lie or to remain silent at risk of being thought prudish or queer. Few of their age and kind back then could claim honestly to have reached Third Base (reciprocal manual masturbation, fellatio, or cunnilingus, for all which they knew only the vulgar terminology); and the few who not only had attained that much-coveted station but had actually "scored" were not inclined to boast of having done so, their partners typically being longtime sweethearts whom they meant to marry "when the time came," and of whose reputations they were therefore, for the most part, honorably protective. He had, had our Will, by his seventeenth birthday French-kissed Vicki Parker as the pair rocked on her front-porch glider; had playfully patted Helen Davis's behind several times while jitterbugging in her family's rec room and teasingly squeezed same while slow-dancing; had fondled Doris Travers's starboard breast through sweater and bra in Schine's Avalon Theatre during a Saturday matinee of Lady on a Train, starring Deanna Durbin and Ralph Bellamy; and had done both of the above plus actually getting hand under bra (Vicki again, junior/senior prom night, in back seat of Donnie McDougal's parents' brand-new DeSoto) and even up under skirt and panties, briefly, where he'd touched the pert blond's presumably-also-blond pubic fur (what did he know?), but had been by her firmly escorted off those premises before reaching its sacred precinct, moist heart of the mystery. Into penile masturbation he had been initiated in Boy Scout Camp at age almost-thirteen by pretending that he knew all about it already while an older Eagle Scout in his cabin explained the procedure to a wide-eyed fellow Tenderfoot; thereafter he availed himself of that solitary pleasure with a frequency that he assumed — correctly, as it happens — to be within normal parameters.

That-all said, however, Will himself readily acknowledged to his Fred-friends that as of his matriculation at VVLU, his innocence, of which he was more than ready to be divested, was of an extent whereof he'd been innocently ignorant, excuse all those ofs: It included not merely the difference between, e.g., Cabernet and Beaujolais, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, Windsor and four-in-hand, but also — unusual though by no means rare for late-teen small-town middle-class WASP males in those days, unless they were in the military — the ins and outs, so to speak, of intercourse, in both senses, with the opposite sex. Except for Donnie McDougal's older sister Karen — who'd walked bare-ass naked one moonlit July night through her brother's bedroom en route to the house's single toilet while wide-awake Will was sleeping over, and then en route back, as if suspecting that the boys might be only feigning sleep, had paused at their bed-foot and given her plump backside a mischievous twitch or two in their direction before returning to her own bedroom and closing the door — he had never seen a woman in the altogether.

"Whereas Freds One and Two, on the other hand, dot dot dot…"

Had been so intimately familiar through so many years and developmental stages that by the time they reached their twenties and commenced their unofficial cohabitation in Briarwood 304, while not at all bored with each other, they found it erotically interesting, shall we say, to admit the so-innocent Fred Three, gradually, into their intimacy.

"Erotically interesting, yes: We shall say that. Part of his tutelage in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, though more to do with life's facts than with its capital-T Truths."

Thus did it amuse and perhaps mildly titillate Will's teacher-pal to emerge grinning one January late afternoon from 304's bathroom (whereto he'd excused himself to take a leak while the threesome were playing hearts) brandishing Winnie's douche syringe, with its large red rubber squeeze-bulb and its penis-length curved black plastic nozzle, and to declare, "Pop-quiz time, Wilfredo: What is this instrument, and to what end, so to speak, is it applied?" And then — when the best his protégé could come up with (pretty sure he was mistaken) was "Enema?" — merrily demanded of eye-rolling Winifred that she enlighten their benighted combo-colleague, "with or without demonstration, as your pedagogical sense inclines." And enlighten him she did, plucky girl: In the I'll-show-you spirit of mock-indignant retaliation that she and Al not infrequently assumed for their own entertainment, she plunked down her cards, snatched the item from him, bade him sit and not dare peek while she led their much-discomfited tutee into the bathroom, closed the door halfway, and in a voice pitched to carry through the apartment, said, "So let's pretend that that charming chap and I have just fucked, okay? And even though his charming little pecker may be less formidable than this charming dildo here, it will have managed to unload a charming troop of little Al Baumanns into you-know-where. Or maybe you don't know where, right? So let me just step out of these step-ins and show you. Now, then: Our objective being for him and me to have our premarital fun without knocking up poor Winnie before we're official, either our bass player uses a rubber — but what fun is that? — or else our post-coital pianist fills this bulb with a spermicidal douche (from the French for 'shower,' mind, not the French for 'sweet,' and plain water will do for this demo). Lacking a proper bidet Français— did you know that un bidet means an old nag or a trestle as well as a certain hygienic fixture? — she then bestrideth this Yankee toilet like so, opens her pearly white thighs like so, and — watch closely, now, enfant… In fact, you can do this part yourself: Be my guest, and gently, please, in and out, au point d'orgasm. Entendu?"

Et cetera, not actually removing her underpants and sitting, much less permitting her awed attendant to insert the nozzle, but giving Al every reason, so it seemed to Will, to imagine otherwise. Grinning broadly, "So, dites-moi," that friend demanded of him when wondering student and triumphant teacher-demonstrator returned to the living room, "d'j'ever see such a pettable puss? But don't forget" — holding up a warning forefinger—"I'm the only one who really gets to see it, not to mention—hey!" For here the faux-indignant Winnie picked up her wineglass from the card table and dumped several ounces of Sauvignon Blanc onto her lover's head. Laughing with him then while still standing between the seated males, "I'll show you, Mister Wiseass!" she said, and yanked her panties down to her knees, then lifted her skirt front with one hand, seized hapless Will by the pompadour with the other, and in fact showed him, nose to bush, the dainty precinct under discussion. "Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: voilà!"

"All in one piece," wowed Wilfred managed to marvel, and for that double-entendre bon mot got his face pressed briefly but squarely into it. Lesson done then, Win pulled up her underpants, and the laughing trio resumed their card game. Reraising his forefinger, "Fifty years down the road," Al predicted — not altogether in jest, so it seemed to Will—"some academic hack like me will do a doctoral dissertation called Briarwood 304: The Moral/Aesthetic/Erotic Initiation of Wilfred Chase."

"Or," added Winnie, sorting her cards, "The Post-Joycean Novelist as Quasi-Mythic Wandering Hero. Dissertation subtitles have to have an as."

"You're no academic hack," loyally protested Will. "And I'm no Post-Joycean Quasi-Mythic Wandering Whatever."

"Not yet, for damn sure," his mentor agreed, then resumed his mock-solemn air: "But mark my words, comrades: Half a century down the road, this three-way-hearts-game afternoon when Stark first rubbed Chase's nose in Truth Goodness and Beauty will be seen to have been a literary-historical turning point. The Ur-Mythic Summons to Adventure! The fucking Call!"

Offered somewhat flustered though deeply flattered Will, "Another archetypal Y? The Stark Pudendum as Nowise-Trivial Trivium? But I forgot to notice whether it's equiangular."

"I'll let you know in the morning," Al promised. "Unless Win wants to continue your French lesson now?"

"Kiss my sweet as," growled she, "the pair of you. And let's play, okay?"

Play they did (after Al informed them that the above-alluded-to Irish Modernist émigré writer, responding to a critic's charge that the language-play of Finnegans Wake was "ultimately trivial," had declared, "I'm not trivial; I'm quadrivial"): played through that academic year, and not only at their card games, their verbal badinage, and their jazz sessions at the Trivium (where, they agreed, long musical comradeship had given them a nonverbal, nondiscursive, but subtle and eloquent medium of three-way communication rich in cues, signals, teasing or serious queries and responses, improvised joint statements, and trial-and-error experiments), but with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as well.

Know thyself…At this point in his story, what Will Chase understood of himself included that he was physically okay: tall, lean, healthy, free of disfigurement, and, though not particularly handsome, not physiognomically ill-favored either. Historically fortunate, too, having been born to comfortably middle-class American parents in just the right historical "window" to miss both world wars (not here for the first, too young to serve in the second) and to be scarcely aware of the Great Depression of the 1930s, which his parents had gamely scrimped through in their son's grade school years. That although no whiz kid like Al and Winnie, he was reasonably intelligent. Not well educated by their enviable standard, but learning fast and eagerly. Not remarkably brave, he supposed (never having been put to serious test in that department), but no coward either, he'd bet. No longer a believer in God (he had shrugged off in high school his parents' perfunctory Protestantism), but withal a morally inclined and ethically decent fellow by his own estimation despite some questionable, mainly experimental lapses, to be reviewed shortly. And finally, that in place of the professional-caliber musical talent that he had erst so craved but was reconciled to lacking, he had been endowed with (or was anyhow resolved to acquire and develop) a Way with Words.

As to those Mainly Experimental Lapses: "Intense, even impassioned moral/ethical concern," Alfred Baumann would remind his students when they were reading Plato and Dostoyevsky, "doth not in itself a moral person make." What ardent discussions he and his Lit & Phillers enjoyed, in class and in Briarwood 304, about Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, about the mischievously appealing Symposium-crasher Alcibiades, about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… Yet (or And) in the same spirit wherewith Will especially, as the least experienced of the Freds, calibrated his tolerance for alcohol by exceeding it, and the threesome shared occasional "reefers" back when few of their age and station had ever seen marijuana, much less used it, they found it mildly exciting — and not morally indefensible, they half-seriously opined, for low-budget students in a corporate-capitalist society — to shoplift groceries, say, from large chain supermarkets (though never, they piously agreed, from small independent merchants); to gain sales access to those potential black-ghetto insecticide customers by declaring, "We're the people who've been sent to spray your house," and then, once inside, pitching their product after spraying one room (a single week of this bait-and-switch scam sufficed to turn their moral stomachs; their ever more adventurous shoplifting, however, extended through a full semester and then some, before one of them — Winnie, most likely — asked, "What are we, guys, lunatics or hypocritical common thieves?" Whereupon they acknowledged their makeshift rationalizing and forswore further larceny, but made no attempt at restitution); and to misrepresent to the Baumann/Stark parents, "for their own peace of mind," Al and Winnie's Briarwood cohabitation.

"In short, Reader, we three played with dynamite the way macho schoolboys used to play with lighted firecrackers, seeing who'd hold on longest before tossing them away or losing a finger. And speaking of holding: Has Lou Levy been on hold back there in B Three-oh-four right through this Extended Narrative Digression? Did we even have telephonic holds in 'forty-nine?"

Not a digression, really, but an aside on the subject of self-knowledge acquired via Mainly Experimental Detours from what the trio knew very well to be the Straight and Narrow. Thou shalt not lie, we learned — about why thou'rt knocking on rowhouse doors, for example, with cockroach-spraygun at the ready. Nor shalt thou steal—not even packaged sliced bacon from the A & P…

"Win scored a six-pound turkey breast once, remember? Pretending she was preggers!"

And actually got away with that apt-though-painful-in-retrospect foreshadowing: our last major heist before both conscience and commonsense risk-benefit analysis set in.

"And Thou shalt not cheat— not even under the benignant cover of Louis Levy's soi-disant Preparatory School."

The Cheatery. It has been made clear, Narrator trusts, that the telephone in B 204, "Will's" studio apartment, was listed as Al's, and the one in Al and Winnie's 304 as hers, for reasons of decorum. When therefore Headmaster Levy desired to telephone prospective tutor Wilfred Chase, he rang up the number supplied him by former tutor Alfred Baumann as his own, understanding the pair to be roommates — which number, however, was the one where Al could be reached in fact: B 304's, routinely answered by Winnie. (Dr. and Mrs. Baumann, when phoning their son, soon learned to expect that it would be Wilfred, his official roomie, who took the call and promised to have said son call back "as soon as he comes in." The actual living arrangement must surely have soon been apparent to them, but for decorum's sake they went along with the fiction, as did M/M Stark — and refrained from visiting their children in situ, where the charade would have been immediately obvious.) All which explaineth why — when Will took the instrument from Win and said "Hello," and was asked resonantly "Is this Wilfred Chase?" and, instead of acknowledging that he sometimes asked himself the same question, said merely "Speaking" — the hearty reply was "Glad to catch you at home, Mr. Chase! I'm Louis Levy. Perhaps you've heard of me from Al Baumann?"

"I have, sir." To put it mildly.

"One of our best preceptors ever! We were sorry to lose him to the higher realms of academia, but so it goes! Now we're looking for another grad student of his caliber to fill a part-time preceptorship that just opened up here, and Alfred tells me you're our man!"

"Very kind of him," Will allowed, thinking, Preceptors? Preceptorship? He really calls them that? Not to mention, Grad student? Me? Of Al's caliber?

"You'll be tutoring a handful of high-schoolers in literature and composition, helping them with their essays and other homework assignments. Good kids, some from our private schools and some from the better public ones. Couple of hours every weekday afternoon — say, half past three to half past five? Two bucks an hour. What do you think?"

From across the room Pal Al smiled, as does his ghost when Narrator here recounts this benign surprise, this little joke of a setup. For in Will's scrabbling after part-time work to supplement the Three Freds' weekend wages from the Trivium — the same scrabbling that led him to peddling roach spray, tallying steel-mill timecards, reshelving library books, and various other jobs — he had envied Al the easy two dollars an hour (not bad money in those days) picked up on the side at Lou Levy's establishment one previous semester. "Best way to learn a book or a language is to teach it" was an oft-repeated Baumann article of faith, and while they'd shaken their collective heads at the nature of Levy's downtown-rowhouse "preparatory school" (dedicated mostly to doing rich kids' homework for them, Al had reported), he had found it possible to improve a bit not only the students' reading and writing skills in their native language, but his own appreciation of the poems and essays involved in their homework assignments. And without mentioning the matter to Will, he had recommended him to Levy as his replacement. "Lit and Phil One and Two it ain't," he would say after the phone conversation in progress. "But some of the brats are likable and even teachable, and some of their preceptors learn a bit about teaching and about the texts. So give it a shot: one more item in your résumé."

But to his caller Will confessed, "I'm not quite a graduate student, Mr. Levy. Actually, I'm just finishing my sophomore year." And would demand afterward of Al, "Why'd you tell him I was a grad student?"

Replied the mellifluous former with a knowing chuckle, "We quite understand that those distinctions get blurred in your university's new fast-track program. But okay by Al Baumann is okay by us." And the latter, with shrug of hands and eyebrows, "Graduate shmaduate: You're good enough for Levy's Prep, and you'll learn a thing or two. He needs to be able to tell the parents that their heirs are getting individual attention from VVLU grad students — which in effect they are, 'cause I'll be checking on you through the first week and as needed thereafter."

"I'll buy that," Winnie declared at this point — Will having accepted Levy's invitation to hop the bus down St. Paul Street next day for the mere formality of an interview. "Come to think of it, maybe I'll apply for a PTP myself: Part-Time Preceptorship? For my résumé."

Which she did, cutting half a day's senior-year classes at Goucher on a pleasant mid-April morning to ride the bus with Fred Three down past the marble-stepped, brick- and Formstone-fronted rowhouse corridor to Levy Prep, and introducing herself to that establishment's pudgy, black-curled, florid-faced, dark-suited but bright-necktied proprietor-cum-headmaster as "Al Baumann's part-time gradstudent fiancée — in case you need another preceptor in Literature, History, French, German, or Spanish?"

Replied the amused, unruffled Levy, "Two questions," and raised first his left forefinger: "Are you out to snatch this young man's job before I've even interviewed him?" Then the finger beside it: "And are you a part-time graduate student or Mr. Baumann's part-time fiancée?"

To Will's considerable surprise, as he'd never heard his Fred-friends speak of themselves as officially engaged to marry, she linked her arm with his, gave the two men an exaggerated vampish wink, and said, "No to the first and yes to the second and third of your two questions." Holding up her own left forefinger, "Al and I think of Wilfred as part of us, and you can't steal from yourself, right?" Then a second finger: "And my courses at Goucher and Peabody this year would be graduate courses if they had a graduate program — which they don't, quite, yet." And then a third: "Plus, Al and I don't regard affiancement as a full-time job."

"Lucky fellow," Levy said smoothly to Will, raising his massive eyebrows, stroking his chin, and gesturing us into his office-cum-classroom. To Winnie then (whose arm and Will's were still linked), "And when you say, quote, which they don't comma quite comma yet, unquote, do you mean that they don't have graduate programs quite yet, or that their present programs are as yet not quite graduate programs? Come in, please, and have a seat."

Unhesitatingly, "I quite agree that those propositions are quite different," Win responded. "Excuse the intensifying adverbs? But in this instance, both are quite true." Pointing then to a short list of long words on the blackboard behind the desk labeled HEADMASTER, "I also happen to know what every one of those sesquipedalia means," she declared. "And I'm sure Will does, too: He's the family wordsmith."

With a knowing smile at the papers he was moving about on his desktop, "All in the family, eh?" said Levy. "Now, then, Miss Stark: If you'll just step into the next room for a few minutes, your friend and I will get down to business. After which, maybe you and I can have a little chat."

Sesquipedalian was, in fact, one of the listed words, along with adjudicatory, misogynistic, eleemosynary, and our language's longest, antidisestablishmentarianism.

"Quite a gal," Levy remarked when Winnie closed the office door behind her. To cover his discomfort at the small smirk in the man's voice and manner, "Smart as a whip," Will agreed, "and plays fine jazz piano as well as classical. She and Al and I work weekends at the VVLU Trivium: piano, bass, and drums. Do you happen to know why people say 'Smart as a whip'?"

For the first time, Levy regarded him with what seemed genuine interest. "I don't, in fact. So tell me, Mister Wordsmith, why do we?"

"Beats me," Will admitted. "And I confess I don't know eleemosynary, either."

Turning up his palms, "So look it up!" Levy said. Confidingly then, with a nod at the board behind him, "We teach the kids a few fancy words to impress their teachers with, if they can work 'em into their papers." He stroked his chin. "You're hired, by the way. I see from your transcript," which, per Al's advice, Will had brought a copy of to the interview, "that you got off to a very rough start up there and then really hit your stride. That sets the right example for your tutees."

Will reminded him that he wasn't "quote quite a graduate student quote quite yet."

"Nor are we quite a preparatory school, strictly speaking." Complicitous smile. "More remedial, actually, though we really do prepare the kids' homework assignments. You'll do just fine. Starting tomorrow? And tell your winsome friend Miss Chutzpah that we might just have something for her, too, before the school term ends."

As the Freds made dinner à trois that evening back in Briarwood 304's tiny kitchenette, "Winsome," Al Baumann echoed, wincing, when that friend reported to him what their friend had reported to her of this conversation: "Our winsome Winnie."

"As in 'You win some and you lose some' " supposed the family wordsmith. "Anyhow, I learned a useful new word today: not winsome."

"Eleemosynary, I'll bet," Al teased. "I should've prepped you: Levy had that same list on his blackboard when he interviewed me last year."

Replied Will, "Fuck eleemosynary. On the bus ride home, your fiancée Miss Winsome preceptored me in chutzpah. We didn't hear much Yiddish back in Marshville."

"Part-time fiancée," Win reminded him, and perhaps reminded Al as well, for to Will's considerable surprise — after declaring that although she had indeed explained to him Levy's term for her, Fred Three remained in her estimation lamentably innocent of the quality thereby named — she turned from the stove, embraced that fellow from behind as he chopped onions at the sink, pressed her breasts firmly into his back, reached one hand around to cup his crotch, and declared her conviction that with just a dash of chutzpah their drummer-boy could be "a real stud instead of a sexual ree-tard." Regarding the pair benignly sidewise from the cutting board on which he was dicing Idaho potatoes, "Maybe the kid needs a part-time preceptor," Al ventured.

"Could be," she agreed. And giving her handful a playful squeeze and pat, she returned to her liver-and-bacon sauté-in-progress.

"Remedial or preparatory?" her prospective tutee pretended to wonder, and in the spirit of their three-way tease, made bold to squeeze in turn one plump-but-firm, beskirted Winnie-buttock. "And when's my first lesson, Teach?"

"Enough chutzpah already," declared her part-time fiancé. "Let's fry this stuff and feed our fucking faces."

They did that, bantering of other matters than the one now uppermost in Wilfred Chase's much-aroused narrative imagination; then withdrew to their separate quarters to prepare the next day's schoolwork.

Which in Will Chase's case included not only VVLU's Rudiments of Narrative course — in which he was endeavoring, without impressive success, to "find his own voice" amid the cacophony of his similarly struggling fellow novices and their innumerable full-throated predecessors— but also his maiden sessions on the other side of the pedagogical divide, "tutoring" Lou Levy's after-school enrollees in what was labeled, simply, English.

"How do I Part-Time Preceptor them?" he had wondered to his own preceptor-in-chief. "What part-time precepts do I have to offer?"

"All of our precepts are part-time," Al had replied, "whether in the sense of Inconsistent — like Thou shalt not shoplift except from large chain stores? — or in the sense of Provisional and/or Temporary, like Who were we kidding that it's okay to steal within limits? Anyhow, you won't be teaching TGB" — their shorthand for Lit & Phil's Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—"you'll be fixing their diction, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and improving your own in the process. Relax and enjoy it."

He did, rather, once he'd met the two or three tutees with whom for the next six weeks he worked at one of several tables set up in what was meant to have been the rowhouse's living room. While other PTP's did similar repair work in other subjects at neighboring tables, and Levy himself held forth in his open-doored office to a select few on antidisestablishmentarianism and other sesquipedalia, Will pointed out misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, subject-verb disagreements, superfluous or missing commas, objective-cased predicate nominatives, and other such lapses in his students' high school English compositions, learning as he went along the names of those errors and the principles by them embodied, and improving by the way his own copy-editing skills. "In this next paragraph," he would explain to Ann Stein, daughter of a prominent local department-store owner, "when you say 'The Indians only hunted and fought on foot until the Spanish brought horses to America,' you imply that they did nothing else on foot, like just walking, or maybe dancing around the campfire. What you mean to say is that the Indians hunted and fought only on foot until et cetera. Okay?" Whereupon that sultry black-haired beauty (at seventeen, only a year younger than her precociously part-time preceptor), who drove from her private school sixth-form English classes down to Levy's Prep in a new canary-yellow Ford convertible, would roll her lustrous eyes and make the correction — not without grumbling that only an idiot would misunderstand what she meant. Likewise when Stanley Fine — curly-headed, mischief-twinkling scion of the city's Fine Laundry and Dry Cleaning chain — wrote "Turning the corner, the Empire State Building came into view," and Will observed that skyscrapers don't normally turn corners: "So if everybody understands it, what's the problem?" Considering that not-unreasonable question for perhaps the first time, Will responded experimentally to the grinning pair that a mother's understanding her child's baby talk is no justification for letting the kid remain at that primitive level of communication. "Weak analogical reasoning," Al would object that evening (and Will would duly report to his preceptees next day), "since nobody except Mom understands the kid, whereas et cetera. What you should've said is that misplaced modifiers and such are like static on the radio: objectionable even if we can make out what number the band's playing. We shouldn't have to get the message despite its wording."

"Aiyiyi," groaned Stein to Fine. "They really dig this stuff! Can you believe it?"

And Will, unbothered, "You'd better believe it, friends. Sloppy language equals sloppy thinking. Honor thy mother tongue."

Cheerfully retorted Fine, "Never mind our mother tongue, man; let's finish our mothering homework and get our tushies out of here."

For that was, as Al had forewarned, what Levy's preceptors were chiefly paid for: not merely to correct errors in their charges' homework assignments with a bit of instruction in the process, but to do those assignments for them, more or less, under the guise of tutelage. Hence the Freds' name for the place: the Cheatery.

"But it's more than just us helping the kids cheat their teachers and themselves," Winnie observed a week or so later, when Levy hired her after all to replace a PTP in French who'd quit without notice: "The kids are cheating their classmates by getting professional help that the others don't have. The parents who know what we're really up to are cheating both their own kids and the school system. And the ones who believe we're actually tutoring instead of cheating are being cheated by us."

"Also, contrariwise," Will pointed out, "the ones who're paying us mainly to cheat get cheated when some of us try mainly to teach."

What was more, they agreed, Lou Levy was cheating the parents by representing his preceptors as graduate students, and cheating both by charging five dollars an hour, paying the PTPs two, and pocketing the other three himself — a tidy profit, by the Freds' estimation, even after allowing for building upkeep and other overhead expenses — all the while maintaining that the institution was pedagogically proper and beneficial, indeed all but eleemosynary. It could even be argued, they enjoyed supposing, that in at least some instances the kids' official teachers were cheating all hands with make-work assignments designed primarily to satisfy the Procrustean requirements of curriculum planners and to compensate for indifferent classroom teaching.

"So what are we doing here?" Win asked Will, taking his hand in hers on the uptown bus ride home a few days into their joint preceptorships. "Who the fuck do we think we are?"

As to the first of those questions, it was Al Baumann's subsequently delivered opinion that in time-honored 3F fashion they were exploring moral ambiguities, experimenting with ethical parameters, honing their language and editorial skills, and scoring two dollars apiece per hour, all to the end of clarifying, if not necessarily answering, Question Two. "More to the point," Will in turn asked Winnie as that pair sat hip to hip on his Murphy-bed edge in Briarwood 204 after their two-hour gig at the Trivium at the close of that same April Friday evening, about to consummate his sexual initiation and (he supposed with guilty excitement) her first sexual infidelity, and she reported her "part-time fiancé's" reply, above, to their bus ride questions, "What are we doing here? Who do we think we are?"

Same answer, no doubt, his naked friend and colleague supposed. What she'd like to know (picking up his hand again, placing it firmly between her legs, and declaring "It's yours") is why it was always she who had to take the lead with him, as she'd done once again by knocking on his door a short while ago and brisking past him into his apartment, announcing cheerily as she peeled off her robe and pajamas that it was class time for Fornication 101. "You're supposed to set the beat, not follow it."

As to that, dazzled Will would remind her presently, in their combo it was Al, ever their leader, who set the beat from his stance between them at his bass—"A-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-four" — and himself who then maintained it, kept it up.

"So keep it up!" she urged, implored, commanded from beneath him, her eyes winced shut, head whipping from side to side as if in happy pain. "It's yours, Will! Go to it!"

He duly went and shortly came, his instrument unsheathed except by hers in their duetto agitato ("Leave precautions to me," she had instructed him while demonstrating Insertion of Diaphragm: "I'm the one who gets the bill if things go wrong"), and did likewise repeatedly through that spring, deliciously by her preceptored in intercourse digital, oral, vaginal, and anal, in a repertoire of positions and with assorted refinements, usually but not always on post-Trivium Friday nights in his apartment. "Jesus, Win," he groaned into her not-quite-equiangular Y at one point during that first of them, as she was tutoring him in soixante-neuf: "Al's the best friend I ever had! Best teacher! Best coach!"

To his scrotum she responded, "Mine too, dummy — and has been for ten times longer."

"So…?"

Raising herself on one elbow, "D'you think he doesn't know I'm here, and what we're doing?"

"He does?"

Her sex-wet, fragrant thighs clamped shut. "Did you think I was cheating on him? Wait'll I tell him!" He had all but ordered her there, she declared — not that she objected to her assignment: the capital-P Protagonist's capital-I Initiation into the ditto-M Mysteries.

Lucky protagonist, to have so able an initiator. No beauty, Winifred Stark, with her too-plump cheeks and less-than-slender waist and legs; but she was high-spirited, amused and amusing in and out of bed, while also impassioned: an altogether admirable part-time preceptor. And Al clearly did know, at least in a general way, and evidently accepted, what his trio-mates were up to in their ménage á deux et un peu, as he himself came to call it on the infrequent occasions — over dinner or between sets at the Trivium — when the subject was lightly alluded to. Did he also know that as his protégé-protagonist's sexual self-confidence increased, Will would sometimes importune his initiator, en route home to Briarwood from the Cheatery, to detour into 204 for a quickie, perhaps even a not-so-quickie, before she continued upstairs? And that Winnie seemed pleased by these impromptu detours—"intromission times," she liked to call them — to the point of occasionally arching an expectant eyebrow himward as their elevator reached floor 2? That it was she who forbade him to sheathe his grand peu, as she saw fit to call it ("plus grand than some other peux in this ménage"), even when she was sans diaphragm, as was generally the case in these unscheduled come-togethers, bidding him instead to withdraw at the last pre-climactic moment and ejaculate instead into her navel or any other nonvaginal receptor? One imagined not, though with Al Baumann there was no telling.

Face-down in Will's pillow at a Wednesday afternoon's end, her pink butt elevated for their mutual pleasure, "Who knows what our Amazing Al knows and doesn't know?" Win would ask rhetorically. "The guy knows such a shitload!"

"He didn't know, Reader," those couplers' mentoring spirit here interjects. "At least not in any face-down-in-Will's-pillow detail, although he half suspected something of the sort, swallowed hard, and did his best to shrug his Burgundy-bottle shoulders thereat. While his part-time fiancée was presenting her plump pinkery to his protégé's plus grand peu, her PTF was ears-deep in the dissertation that he aimed to finish in time for their spring 1950 wedding: a thesis not on the Myth of the Birth of the Wandering Hero, but on the Birth of the Myth thereof. More precisely, on its rebirth for twentieth-century Modernists like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, et alii after Sir James Frazer's groundbreaking Golden Bough of 1890, and its culmination in such landmark studies as Lord Raglan's, Bronislaw Malinowski's, Joseph Campbell's, and, one had innocently hoped, Alfred Baumann Ph.D.'s, that erstwhile Friday-night wittol and subsequent impromptu cuckold. Pardon the footnote?"

Footnote pardoned, O best of mentors — whose culminative dissertation was fated never to see the publication it eminently deserved, nor its author his post-doctoral fulltime academic appointment and ensuing, assuredly brilliant professorial career.

"Aborted, like some other things. But before we get to that, permit said nipped-in-the-bud dissertator to remark aside that thus far into this Three Freds Story its narrator has neglected to mention, among other things, any of Will Chase's other VVLU classes, seminars, and workshops besides Lit-Phil and Yarnspinning One-oh-one, or any other-than-Fred friends, classmates, and professors, some of whom surely must have impacted, as they say, his vocation? Nor has he, for the sake of verisimilitude and capital-T Texture, gotten into the nitty-gritty of our weekend music-making at the Trivium, as might have been expected. Too busy choosing ejaculatory receptacles?"

Too busy crying Fuck Fate! which so roundly fucked good Al Baumann.

"Leave that ejaculation to Fate's fuckee, friend, and get on with Will and Winnie's getting it on. Tell Me."

Ro-ger, Teach: Brit slang, Narrator believes, for what that pair were energetically up to, more or less behind their best pal's back. Will rogered Win, Win Will, all over B 204, and B 304 as well when her One True Love was off in the library stacks comparative-mythologizing, as he often was. Even rogered her there one mid-summer Monday eve, he did, or she him, up against a carrel in the farthest alcoves of Sanskrit Lit — decoupling in the nick of time, or nearly, to spritz the gilt-lettered spines of the Panchatantra instead of Ms. Stark's unshielded privity.

"The Ryder translation, that would have been, one wagers: 1925."

If you say so, boss. Yet let it not be supposed that these goers-to-it loved each other, or that their busy erotic/moral experimentation was shame-free. Bonded they were, for sure — mainly by their joint esteem for Win's One True Et Cet — but what they felt for each other was friend-love, nowise lover-love. And while their shared appall at their infidelity was no doubt an added spice to those non-Friday clandestineries, it was nonetheless stingingly authentic shame, of the what-the-fuck-are-we-doing? variety. "Sexual errancy in general," Al Baumann liked to tell his Lit & Phillers when their syllabus reached Tolstoy and Flaubert, "and adultery in particular, are to the nineteenth-century social-realistic novel what Fate and hubris are to Greek tragedy: the mainspring of the action. Oedipus innocently but not unintentionally nails his dad at the Place Where Three Roads Meet, fulfilling the very prophecy that he was in flight from; Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary drop their extramarital drawers. In both genres, it's on with the story."

Which is to say, in the errant Freds' case, on to the next turn of the plot-screw, excuse the expression.

"Expression excused, friend. Likewise plot-screw, while I'm at it: unforgotten, mind, but truly long since forgiven, as it would be even if I hadn't brought it on myself with that Friday-night Share the Goodies routine—my bright idea, though Win didn't need much persuading. And it's time those horny young cheats forgave themselves. Maybe that's what's going on here?"

Not for Teller to presume.

"Anyhow, man, on with it: Eternity doesn't last forever; it only seems to. Turn that screw!"

Pause. Sigh. Screw that turn, Al: Can't do it.

"You fucking must; otherwise it'll be my turn to tell and our story's turn to get screwed. How through that spring and summer of 'forty-nine, the season of the Cheatery — while the new state of Israel celebrated its first anniversary, and Mao Tse-tung's Red Army drove Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists out of China, and the USSR maintained its Berlin blockade while preparing to test its first A-bomb, and North Korea made ready to invade South — all three Freds went at it like the variously gifted, high-energy young screw-ups they were, dot dot dot et cetera. Tell me."

…by no means merely rogering one another literally and figuratively, busy as they were at that. Much more busily, in fact, they were (in Winnie's case) pursuing mastery of both the pianoforte and the Science of Libraries; in Al's, taking unto himself the rest of the corpus of Comparative Mythology and related disciplines while also teaching Adult Ed classes in the university's night school, prodding Will through the long list of texts he'd better have under his belt if he aspired ever to add something of his own thereto, and also coaching him in the Proper Percussionist's paradiddles, flamadiddles, flamacues, and other such licks that Will used routinely in their Trivium sessions without knowing the terminology—

"The way Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, you're expected to say at this point, discovers he's been speaking Prose all his life without knowing it. Tell on."

And in said percussor's case, practicing likewise with Bassist Baumann's assistance the cues and diddles of narrative sentence-making, plot construction, character and scene rendition—

"Insofar as one without those knacks can aid one with."

Which is to say, considerably. And over and above all this cue-and-diddling, or in its interstices, Ann Stein and Stan Fine (and Jim Murphy, Jean Wallace, and half a dozen other Lou Levyites) not only got their homework assignments virtually done for them by their two-buck-an-hour virtual grad-student part-time preceptors, but were by them genuinely preceptored as well: some rather much, some only slightly, depending on their own receptiveness, but none not at all. Enough anyhow so that toward summer's end Headmaster Levy declared himself prepared to make it worth Will's and Winnie's while to stay on, "with a not-inconsiderable pay raise," come fall.

"But the fall came early that year, as I remember. July, was it? August?"

3. "TELL ME"

One early-June-'49 Friday evening in Briarwood 304, as she and Alfred Baumann were introducing Wilfred Chase to beef fondue, with which, like many another civilized item, he was unfamiliar, "Did you-all know," Winifred Stark asked her male colleagues/companions/lovers, "that the triangle — by which I mean the humble chrome-steel musical instrument, not the rusty old mainspring of Romantic fiction — despite its being the smallest and simplest bit of hardware in the orchestra, can make its ding-a-ling heard through the sound of all the other symphonic instruments combined? Just thought I'd mention that."

"Mm-hm," said their Near-Boy (the VVLU graduate-students' term for doctoral candidates otherwise classified as ABDs, they having completed All [of their degree requirements] But [their] Dissertation[s]) Baumann. "And apropos of what, exactly, does our winsome Win-Win offer her Fred-friends this musicological tidbit?" Which had been prompted by their Friday-evening pre-dinner custom, in lieu of either Christian table-grace or Jewish Sabbath-prayer, of rubbing wet index-fingertips in concert around the rims of their half-filled wineglasses to make them sing in ethereal near-unison before clinking same and commencing the meal.

"You tell me," the ruddy lass invited, then demonstrated to webfoot Will how one speared a cube of raw beefsteak with one's fondue fork and plunged it into the Sterno-fired cooking-oil pot before dipping it into one of the several garnis ranged palette-like around one's plate.

"To me," obliged her fascinated preceptee, "that penetrative ping sounds like a simile waiting for its other shoe to drop — pardon the mixed figure."

"Not mixed, actually, in this instance," corrected ABD Al. "Compounded, maybe?"

"Like a felony?" Win wondered, at the same time teaching Will by example that one's place setting was provided with two long-shafted fondue forks so that one's next beef bit could cook while its now-done predecessor was garnished and eaten.

"Simile upon simile!" that greenhorn marveled. "We're three-deep now, by my count; want to go for four?"

"In your resident Near-Boy's considered opinion," put in Al, "mixed-metaphoric triangles should be compounded no more than thrice. Let's quit while we're ahead."

There was upon this banter a palpable voltage — as if, so it felt to Will, his fondue-mates were on to something that he was not, of a character more mattersome than the timbre of chrome-steel triangles, the compounding of tropes, or the oil-boiling of beef. As if, moreover, each of those two knew something further that the other did not, at least for certain, yet. Unsophisticated as he was in many a department, young Narrator-Aspirant Wilfred Chase had some feel for interpersonal voltages.

"As to that," next declared Winnie—"I mean quitting while we're ahead? — I suspect it's too late already." Dinging then her fondue fork on the pot rim as if signaling the room's attention, "Bombshell time, everybody!" she announced, and went on to report that for the very first time since her menarche at age fourteen, she had, just a fortnight past, missed one of her regular-as-moonphase menstrual periods. Should she similarly, a fortnight hence, skip her next, one or the other of her fellow fonduers was an expectant father, the odds being by her estimate between three and five to one in the Three Freds' bassist's favor, "and what in God's name are our parents going to say when we tell them?" Teary-eyed now, "And what the damn hell are we going to do?"

When stunned Wilfred had regained his breath, if scarcely his composure, he inhaled deeply, closed and then opened his eyes, dinged one of his brace of fondue forks in like manner, declared "My turn now," and to Al (who'd seemed not at all startled by Winnie's announcement) confessed that, other things equal, the paternity odds were in fact shamefully closer to fifty-fifty than to five or even three to one, himself and Winnie having been at it over the past two months rather more often than on their Al-allotted, post-Trivium Friday nights. He, for one (but he was sure Win felt the same), was contrite at their having so abused the generosity and trust of the best, most valued friend he'd ever had. "I feel like absolute shit, man."

Too angry now for tears, "You are absolute shit!" affirmed Winnie. "Squealing on us without giving me a chance to come clean first!" For a moment she seemed ready to attack Will with her fondue fork; then she flung it down instead and buried her face in her paper dinner napkin. "You shit!"

"Ding-ding, guys," wearily here interjected Al, and rapped his fork now on the fondue pot like (Will could not help noting to himself) the aforefigured triangle sounding through the rest of the orchestra. "My turn in the bombardier's seat now?"

Before adding his tuppence to this dinner-table truth-telling session, he then calmly declared, he wanted to remind his tablemates once again that this Friday-night deux et un peu Al/Win/Will routine had been his questionable idea in the first place, in his self-assumed role of Hero's Helper; if it had gotten out of hand, as he'd lately been pretty much aware that it had, he supposed he deserved the consequences. In a parody of his classroom lectorial voice, he reminded all hands further that his use of the term hero in this context by no means implied a conviction on his part that young Willie Chase of Blue Crab County was destined to do Big Things. Among its other parallels, the Wandering Hero shtick was just Everyman's story writ large, or nearly every man's; the odds against any given Young Talent's grandly fulfilling its promise were in his opinion comparable to those against any given spermatozoon's thrashing successfully upstream through its swarming fellows and nailing the ovum, pardon his analogy. What he'd come to feel, and strongly — a preoccupational hazard, he supposed, given his dissertation topic — was merely that Comrade Chase, despite whatever shortcomings in the sophistication way, belonged distinctly in the category of Swimmer, and himself, just as distinctly, in that of Coach-Facilitator.

Shrieked Winnie, "Would you stop it already with the sperm and eggs? I'm pregnant, damn it! Knocked up!"

"Quite possibly." Taking her hand across the table corner, "And when we know for sure, we'll deal with it."

Steadier now despite her tears, What did he mean deal with it?? she wanted to know — as, very much indeed, did Will.

Their companion shrugged. "Either we move up our wedding date and make the kid more or less legit, or we consult Matson," Winnie's gynecologist, a colleague of Al's father, "about fixing it for us, if that's what we'd prefer. And if Matson declines," these being pre—Roe v. Wade days, when abortion was still officially prohibited in the US of A, "we fess up and ask Dad for suggestions."

"What's this if we'd prefer?" But she didn't snatch back her hand. "D'you think I want a kid that might even possibly not be yours? I'm not ready even if it is yours!"

Patting her his-held hand with his other, "So we have ourselves a chat with Doc Matson when the time comes. But—as I was saying?" He dinged the pot again for attention and resumed his mock-lectorial tone: "What we-all find ourselves presently approaching on the not-so-merry-go-round of the Heroic Cycle" — he indicated by fork each Fred in turn: "Hero-Aspirant malgré lui or anyhow Protagonist in potentia, Prematurely Pronged Princess, and Has-Been Helper — is the So Long, Sidekick scene, celebrated in song and story."

The first- and second-named of that triad froze in baffled apprehension, borderline alarm. Has-Been? So Long?

"Said Sidekick's addio aria," Al went on, "commences with his gently informing Miz Princess that the fruit of her womb, whether nipped in bud or nurtured to harvest, is almost certainly not of his planting, he having learned among other interesting things in a recent clinical workup (a) that his sperm count is low almost to the point of nonexistence, and (b) that roughly ninety percent of his paltry output are nonmotile. Ergo, guys, whether or not it's bye-bye baby this time next month — and I, for one, rather hope it won't be — the odds against its being Baumann's wee bastard in there are… what? About a quarter-million to one? Half a million?"

Too stricken to reply, Winnie pushed aside her plate and plopped her head face-down on the table before the bubbling pot. Soul-shaken Wilfred, suddenly more apprehensive than before, wondered, "So what else did the docs have to say, Al?"

Their bass-figured leader smiled at his questioner and then at Winnie (sitting upright again, face drained). Speaking as if to their clasped hands, "In a properly constructed story," he declared, "there'd've been a few strategically placed foreshadowings before now: I might've mentioned joint pains ten pages ago, for example, or you two could've remarked between fucks that old Near-Boy was looking weaker and paler in Part Two of this yarn than he looked in Part One…"

"Al?"

"At least we should've planted a little bleeding from mouth, nose, and asshole — or, as the Merck Manual elegantly puts it, quote thrombocytopenia giving rise to pete-chiae and ecchymoses unquote." To Will, "Don't you love that lingo, man? You could have the guy's girlfriend find him reading the seventh-edition Merck one night in bed when she comes up from downstairs, and sort of wondering, What the fuck? But she figures it's just another of his gotta-know-everything things, so she nods off worrying about her period instead…"

"Al!"

Returning his fork to its intended use, their ariast (more pallid indeed, they noted now, than his never-ruddy usual) speared and dunked a final beef bit into the pot, just barely bubbling above its waning blue Sterno flame.

"Not A-L Al anymore, friends. From here on out it's A-M-L Al: Acute Myeloblastic Leukemia." And "here on out," he explained to his listeners too shocked to speak, meant possibly the whole upcoming academic year, if the methotrexate with which he was currently being dosed effected the brief remission that he much hoped for in order to wind up his goddamned myth dissertation, see his PartTime Fiancée's Interesting Condition resolved one way or the other, and maybe goose his Ritual Wandering Whatchacallit-pal one step farther around the famous Cycle. "Otherwise, guys," which VVLU's oncological gurus, Dad Baumann included, had regretfully informed him meant Usually, "we're talking maybe four to six months. Sorry about that. But ain't Truth swell? I feel freer already."

Winifred Stark's entire hysteria; Wilfred Chase's groaning speechlessness; Alfred Baumann's calm consumption of the last of his beef cubes, washed down with the red jug-wine to which the Three Freds treated themselves on Friday evenings before repairing to the Trivium and thence et cetera: In time, perhaps, one would be up to rendering such things into language.

"One better fucking had be," now growls Al's ghost. "That's what you're fucking for!"

Well…

"Well, hell! Take it from the edge, as we musician types used to say: Tell the Three Freds Story over and over, damn it, till you get it right! Even after you get it right, if you ever do."

Yes, well, Al…

"Check our job descriptions, man: I did my thing, and then got my fat ass offstage on cue. Win did hers by spreading her legs for me and then for you and then for Doc Mat-son's D and C. So now you do yours: Tell me! Tell us!"

Narrator had aspired to do no less: the protracted though mercifully pain-dulled dying, which would have been expedited by suicide, friend-assisted or otherwise, but for Al's determination to press on to the end with the final-drafting of his Rebirth of the Ur-Myth thesis. Winnie's late-July dilation and curettage, assented to reluctantly by her fiancé but right readily by his contrite cuckolder, and performed discreetly by gynecologist Matson under the pretext, routine in those days, of removing a suspicious cervical lesion. ("That's taking the Imperiled Infancy thing a bit far, no?" Al joked wearily — all but bedridden then and about to be shifted, of necessity, from Briarwood 304 back to his boyhood bedroom in his parents' house, his hoped-for remission having proved only partial and his need of nursing care ever more pressing.) His quiet December expiration, with his dissertation's closing chapter—"Will He Return?" — still in revision. The Three Freds' subsequently going, like the arms of an equiangular Y, their separate ways: Al to the Baumann family grave plot in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Winnie to a season of prostrate guilty grief and halfhearted psychotherapy, but then on to her college graduation after all, followed by a restorative summer in France with two Goucher classmates and a new life thereafter on North America's other coast, having nothing to do either with music (so Will heard through the Briarwood grapevine) or with her erstwhile fellow Cheatery preceptor — himself by then involved with another lover. Their Trivium-trio was replaced by a nameless electric-guitar/-bass/-keyboard outfit playing an overamplified new pop music called rock-and-roll, which its devotees predicted (absurdly, in Fred Three's mistaken opinion) would be to the century's second half what jazz in its several forms — Dixieland, swing, progressive, bebop — had been to its first.

And the nowise heroical Wilfred Chase? Still not yet twenty at the time here told of, just entering his junior undergraduate year at VVLU, he'll find that quite as he'd been shocked speechless by his Sidekick's Friday-night-fondue announcement of fatal malignancy, that irreplaceable comrade's dying will shock him, as it were, into speech — anyhow into a redoubled conviction of his calling, whether or not he proved capable of adequate response: an impassioned resolve to tell, not only Al Baumann's story, the Three Freds Story (trifles in themselves, and yet, and yet…), but also, though he could not then have put it into these words, the story of those stories. Maybe even somehow (rest in peace, bass-shaped buddy, while your determined tutee does his damnedest to keep the beat!) the capital-S Story's story, whatever that might be.

"Chances are, of course, he won't manage it," comments the slope-shouldered spirit of his erstwhile Helper. "The odds against him are about the same as against any given motile spermatozoon, even. And he's got so fucking much yet to learn!"

Granted, Al. Nor is he one of your capital-H Heroes, for sure.

All the same (concludes the Three Freds Story), he's going to try.