Women and Men

Gordon’s Story: The Year He Skipped

Gordon met Mayn as they came out of the wind and rain into the lobby. The new man was on, although you wouldn’t know it; he hadn’t come out to open the taxi door for Mayn nor had he pulled open the lobby door but stood safely behind the glass panel on the other side and nodded and grinned as Gordon and Mayn came through and Gordon, who didn’t really know Mayn, held the door for him and Mayn had a word with the new doorman in Spanish. Gordon recognized tiempo, "weather," but not, he thought, the rest, though he heard mas temprano and knew he ought to know what Mayn was saying.

Mayn carried an old pale-leather valise which he did not set down as they waited for the elevator. It hung from Mayn’s hand and he might have been about to board a train. Gordon was a couple of inches taller than Mayn, a couple at most, but Mayn was broader than Gordon and stood with some final, strong balance that was power that came from patience.

The unusual dark shade of Mayn’s uniformly gray, thick hair didn’t look like a younger color mixed in, and his square, roughened face made you think he couldn’t be quite as old as he looked, which might be forty-five or fifty. The elevator floor indicator stayed at 5, and the new man came and pounded on the elevator door, put his nose against the diamond-shaped pane of reinforced glass, and tried to see up the shaftway. He shrugged and said that it was coming, and went away.

While waiting, Gordon and Mayn talked of security in the building, the boiler, and a general shift in weather patterns toward extreme warm and extreme cold winters in alternate years; also snow tires — in particular, radial snows. Gordon and Mayn re-introduced themselves. Gordon didn’t really know Mayn, but Gordon’s wife Norma, who had greeted Mayn once in Gordon’s presence, said Mayn was a nice man; he had lived in the building once upon a time, had left, had now come back to the same old apartment which he had somehow kept, and was often out of town. According to Norma, Mayn had bought an old white Cadillac for his young daughter who worked in Washington. She had not received it with quite the sense of humor her father had hoped for. Or so Norma had told Gordon.

Gordon at forty-four had taken a leave of absence from his law firm. He had to think, and think also how much this leave was costing. He kept thinking of himself as around forty. He had listened to Norma speaking of Jim Mayn.

She hardly knew him, but in his wife’s mentions of Mayn the rather lone new but old arrival, Gordon had found a tremor or shift that Norma might be unaware of.

What had Gordon missed? He had missed something — another life, no doubt — and that was why he was taking an expensive leave of absence which his firm did not understand. He had missed what? It was why he was where he was. He had almost forgotten how to think; or that was what it felt like in the morning and in the evening, and yet that wasn’t it. He noticed the year now when he read the Times in the morning, they were past the middle of the decade of the ‘70s.

The doorman came back and placed both palms on the elevator door, his nose against the diamond-shaped pane, trying to get into the shaft it looked like.

"She’s coming now," said Mayn. The doorman stepped back, giving the elevator door a single bang with his fist.

Gordon said he was glad his own daughters were too young to drive; he wouldn’t keep a car in the city. He listened to himself say that indoor parking cost as much a month as a room in an apartment, and what did the Motor Vehicle tax on a newly purchased car come to now? Mayn said that his daughter had a car in Washington. Gordon thought, A white Cadillac! Mayn said, The government takes so much, it’s almost too expensive to work. Still, thank God for withholding.

Gordon pointed out that they withheld too much, and he recalled that once he had prepared a speech on taxation.

Mayn asked who had delivered it, had Gordon been in politics?

No, it was for a contest at the rather traditional boys’ day school where Gordon attended grades nine through twelve. There were different categories and you could enter only one. Declamation was one category: you recited a poem. Public speaking was the other, but speech had two categories, prepared and extemporaneous. The extemporaneous speakers tended to be Jewish and kept up on their current events like sports fans; they were given topics fifteen minutes before they had to go on.

"That’s the way it ought to be," said Mayn.

Gordon had taken a load of information from an article in a magazine of his father’s, and when he went up to deliver his prepared speech from memory he looked left and right and didn’t know what in hell he was doing giving a speech on a subject like that. Where was the point of it for him?

Mayn wagged his head agreeably and said he couldn’t help him there.

In the elevator Gordon invited Mayn to come in for a drink. Mayn was saying, "Well…" when they arrived at his floor and the door opened, and he asked Gordon to have that drink in his place.

There was no mat outside Mayn’s door and there was a point of light in the peephole. In his foyer was a rolled-up rug with a tag attached to it by wire. Gordon listened for a sound. The light had been left on in the foyer, and the peephole’s metal flap was stuck to one side in the open position. Mayn said there was a hanger in the closet, and Gordon said it was O.K. and dropped his raincoat on an old white metal lawn chair, and Mayn draped his coat over Gordon’s.

A mild, astringent scent of paint carried faintly into the living room, where a window was a few inches open. Mayn excused himself and disappeared into the kitchen. Gordon heard water spluttering out of a faucet — into a metal sink certainly; it droned and bounced like tinny rain. Mayn left the water running in the kitchen and appeared at the far end of the living room, disappeared for a minute, came back to the sound of a toilet flushing, passed out of sight, made some metal-on-metal and metal-on-wood noises, turned off the water and reappeared with a small pitcher and an ice bucket; he seemed to have evolved from a life that was far from here. You can go home again if you have several homes.

Mayn had one of the few three-bedroom apartments in the old building — said he had lived here with his family. Gordon could see the suitcase where Mayn had left it in the foyer.

Mayn poured for the two of them. Gordon urged Mayn to have a Medeco lock installed in his front door. They sat in the living room. Mayn hadn’t mentioned Gordon’s wife Norma, not that he should have. There was not much furniture in the living room, and Gordon liked the effect, although his frankly erratic feelings lately gave this living space for a moment a curious play in his mind. Either the furniture was being moved in or it was being moved out; but Mayn had recently moved back in and so the furniture, what there was of it, was certainly not being moved out, but Gordon had the feeling, as an unemployed observer, of a living space that contained a lot of different times. There were three large, detached, tree-like plants in tubs, but also there was a long, trailing, ivy-like growth that looked familiar, in a pot on a shelf above eye level. It was distinctly more present here in this room than the three big plants. Later, Gordon noticed another large plant, and maybe there were still more.

How had Mayn kept this place so long when the landlord didn’t give sublet clauses? No problem, said Mayn; Gordon didn’t follow it up. Gordon said, Come to think of it, he didn’t know anyone on this floor. Mayn said he had had two sets of friends in the apartment over the last few years, and he had come back, and left, and come back again.

Gordon inquired what it felt like, coming back, and Mayn knew what Gordon meant and thought a moment and then shook his head — he didn’t know how to answer and he said "Like remembering about my family when they lived here…"

"What they didn’t know?"

"Or didn’t say."

Mayn lifted his glass as if to drink. Holding it before his mouth, he observed that he had never lived anything like this, never gone back. He had always done the opposite.

"You lived here with your family," said Gordon and the odd, slight cruelty he discovered in his remark seemed to contain what Norma knew about Mayn that Gordon didn’t know.

"There’s a man in this building who lived here for years with his parents," said Mayn; "and when he got married, he moved his parents out and moved his wife in; he moved his parents over to Brooklyn, as I remember, and now he lives here with his wife and daughter, she has a friend named Valerie and they’re always yelling at each other in the elevator" — "I know them," said Gordon— "and when his daughter gets married…"

"Imagine the dreams you get in that apartment," said Gordon, but then he felt he was really talking about his host living here in this apartment, in this three-bedroom pad. "I mean the vibes."

"I don’t remember dreams," said Mayn. "Never have."

"Well, this is the old homestead, for sure," said Gordon.

"I do get end-of-the-world daydreams after I’ve had a few drinks," said Mayn—"a few too many."

"How does it end? Or do you have to protect your sources?" said Gordon, and thought he shouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

"I can’t remember," said Mayn. "Probably someone forgetting to tell someone something." He sipped his drink and looked away toward the lighted foyer where Gordon could see the valise standing. Mayn seemed to speak, then, from a distance. The good thing, he said, was that in the end-of-the-world he was beyond it; that is, in the dream he skipped his own death.

An uninvolved observer, Gordon said, and Mayn, having sipped his drink, looked at it and said that to tell the truth he thought it was when he hadnt had much to drink that the dream came.

Gordon didn’t want to just agree, and he said that schizophrenics have end-of-the-world fantasies.

"Listen, there are lunatics out there that the doctors never dreamed of," said Mayn with tired authority.

"You’ve seen them in your travels," said Gordon, who knew there was nothing between Mayn and Norma but guessed she was quite taken with him.

"I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn.

"Yes, I know. My wife told me," said Gordon. "Fast-breaking history."

"Pretty slow-moving in my case," said Mayn. "Strip-mining leases in the West, disarmament contracts in the East."

Gordon said he had had a dream the other night, if Mayn was interested, of climatologists joining forces with nuclear "fissionaries" to explode the cloud cover that makes Venus a greenhouse.

"Nuclear what?" Mayn laughed.

"But with your dreams of the future," said Gordon realizing to his surprise that he was persisting, "isn’t history breaking so fast that you have to anticipate it?"

"What gave you the idea I was on intimate terms with the future," said Mayn.

"I didn’t say you were," said Gordon.

"In fact, I doubt if I’ll be there when it happens," said Mayn. "I mean the end of the world or the chain reaction when they set the atmosphere on fire by mistake."

"But I’m serious, I read the headlines just like you," said Gordon. "What’s going on? Why are things falling out the way they are? Is it greed? Corporations? Generals? Is it everybody’s death wish? Is it that we can’t remember our dreams in the morning?" Gordon felt smart and foolish.

"Greed and death wish for sure," said Mayn. "I don’t know about the other thing you mentioned. I do seem to recall that U.S. Grant couldn’t stand to watch the man — what was his name? — risking his life crossing Niagara on a high wire."

"Grant was better out in the field. He didn’t know what he was doing when he got to the White House," said Gordon, who knew what he was talking about.

"Grant was a vegetarian," said Mayn, shaking his head with friendly hopelessness at Gordon. "Wouldn’t eat a chicken, said he couldn’t eat anything that went on two legs, and he couldn’t stand rare meat, he’d seen so much blood when he visited his field hospitals and saw those kids — he had to have his beef done to a crisp."

"I thought he was a vegetarian," said Gordon. "That’s better as a story than as history."

"Oh, I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn. "I wouldn’t give you a dime for my view of history if I had one. History is words."

"That doesn’t sound like a newspaperman," said Gordon, who had again said more than he had meant to or than he’d known he would say.

"You’re welcome," said Mayn, as if Gordon had thanked him. But it had hit home, and Gordon, who could entertain himself, thought Mayn was sorry he’d asked him in, and he wondered how long Mayn had been away and if he left the light in the foyer burning. It was how Mayn uncrossed his legs and how his polished wingtip shoes, rich with wear like furniture wood, gripped the floor parallel and squarely. Also, there was the valise visible in the foyer. The man risked danger, Gordon felt.

Then Gordon saw Mayn stand up with a quick force that said that he was not going anywhere. What, asked Gordon, were the big things in the tubs, because Mayn didn’t seem like a plant man. Gordon thought someone strange might come in and threaten Mayn, but Gordon needed to talk.

Mayn took a look at the three great plants and pointed to another Gordon hadn’t noticed, a smaller one with dark, shiny, tight, strong leaves. "That one I happen to know is a jade tree, a young friend of mine named Barbara-Jean gave me that; said she thought I needed it to stand up to the three monsters. I don’t, to tell you the truth, know what their names are; my daughter and my son — well, really my daughter — had them sent here when I moved back in."

Gordon liked Mayn. It was too late to ask for wine, which hadn’t been offered. He said he wasn’t ready for a refill. Mayn came and sat down. He brought with him a long stretch of time, and Gordon felt less unemployed.

"If you’re away a lot," Gordon began but he didn’t go on, and with a shrug surveyed the room and the lighted foyer. Mayn looked at Gordon. Mayn’s hair was solidly but darkly gray and thick, the eyebrows not at all gray, face and chin very square; the eyes through largeness or the illusion of largeness, or through some lighter tint, were more a real color than Gordon had ever seen brown eyes. And he felt — yes — that the man would have felt downright alien had he paid any closer attention to what Gordon said. Or what Gordon was. For Gordon really wasn’t saying anything. He returned the wise or heavy look of his host. Gordon had ventured into this apartment for a casual drink.

Mayn didn’t know Gordon, and yet Gordon felt his life visited by Mayn like a whole way of looking at things, a friendly abstention, powerfully non-intrusive. It was the sensation of the drink and it was the sentiment of memory and it was another day away from work. Gordon had to like Mayn, and he now saw that his self-sought unemployment would end in a few weeks or months and he would go on living his life and it would change for the better. What had Mayn to do with it?

It came to Gordon — and came to him later as he then realized he’d known it would—that the one man, Gordon, knew he had taken the opposite view from how he usually saw his talk in all its intelligent volume, and so he thought he’d talked and said too much; and the other man, Mayn, who didn’t care what another thought of him, had known he was going to think he’d said too little, and had let this narrative go on from a man he didn’t know; which in turn wasn’t a matter of this fella Gordon subjecting him to something, much less mastering him — not at all, quite the reverse — but a drugged, sluggish (he had no right to be tired) feeling that he let his half-invited guest jumble his story, well lift one whole side of it from time to time so all Gordon said slid down toward one edge: a jumble Mayn let happen as if he were being a man to a man letting him talk — yet really offering an ear that was void. Oh Gordon was only guessing, but he felt sure of all this. Not that Norma really knew the man — she had only met him — but she had conveyed to Gordon some shadow that was now Gordon’s own intuition of this man in front of him.

"You would like another," said Mayn.

"Yes I would," said Gordon, and finished his bourbon.

"Knew it," said Mayn, taking Gordon’s glass, and the words stopped whatever spell had sent Mayn running through Gordon’s past a moment before to set out on Gordon’s future without Gordon having the chance to say goodbye.

Gordon spoke and did not stop for a long time. It might have been stupid. It was five-thirty when he began, and Mayn, this former tenant who had resumed residence in the building, asked a question or two and once got up to refill their drinks.

But Gordon talked straight through for what turned out to be an hour.

Why did he do that? Were they both wondering? Perhaps they both had the time. And when he stopped at last, he might in doing so have been anticipating the unexpected sound of a key in a lock that would have stopped him anyway if he had not already just come to the end.

It was more a school story, and after he was into it he would get uneasy telling it for the first time as if this was the hundredth (as it also was), but dismayed more because he’d thought it out so many times but now didn’t know how to end it. Gordon was taking an unpaid leave of absence from his law firm, but what he told Mayn was that he had taken a deep breath and had quit his job and was taking inventory; but Gordon didn’t need to hear himself tell anyone else, even a stranger, that if it was more than a vacation and less than real unemployment, he and Norma and their two children couldn’t live for too long without his working, and although his firm would take him back or he could always get a job — always, always — he also knew a college classmate who had lost his job as vice-president of an insurance company (or was it president) and seven months later shot himself.

Mayn asked a couple of questions that sounded like he was hearing things (or was it Gordon hearing things?). Gordon’s father? Gordon’s grandmother? Quakers? The height of a wall surrounding the roof of an apartment house in Brooklyn? Brooklyn Heights could seem a long way away from Manhattan on a cold, windy, rainy late afternoon.

This is what you do when you’re unemployed, said Gordon; you keep to yourself or you bend someone’s ear — someone who’s just come home from work. But when you begin you lose the beginning, as if maybe there never was a real beginning. You take up the piano. Not the violin, it’s too hard.

Mayn said he didn’t understand "when you begin you lose the beginning."

This particular business started with Gordon skipping fifth grade, but he had been in fifth grade for more than a month. But he had skipped just the same as if from fourth to sixth. And the event would be fully as important as his far-sighted father could foresee.

Mayn asked for enlightenment here and there, and Gordon saw the tolerant man Norma had seen, and this came into Gordon’s thoughts together with a magnetism that seized him as if all this stuff twenty-five years ago and more were easier and flowed better than the untenable future which was now. But he didn’t stop; he remembered that Mayn had covered arms-control talks and had a father in New Jersey and had recently returned, Norma said, from the Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and knew someone who’d been on the cover of a magazine — all this from Norma, who always remembered.

Not that Gordon didn’t; but here he had found himself unexpectedly in sixth grade and with a stranger. Gordon later didn’t know if he really had had in him at the time this suspicion that the event of his skipping a grade would be covered over and infiltrated by the years on either side of it and it would practically get skipped itself.

But an event when it happened: everything got drawn to it, and bounced back off it.

Understood later.

Mayn said he knew what Gordon meant. This seemed kind, for Gordon had been unclear.

As much too late as it was too late to know if the sixth-grade teacher with the rouge on her cheeks, and the quick movements, and the small, round face and dark eyes, Mrs. Hollander, had a view of life. Or what view may come and grow out of a time of horror into life again. The woman herself when she once or twice spoke of it, could speak of it so succinctly, though slowly, that her gathering distance from it could have been from the beginning a measure of time besides that first blindingly increasing space. It became overwhelmingly simple, a cause of understanding.

The roof of her apartment house had a comparatively low barrier-wall around it and one day her child, her little girl, not so little — which was why it happened — had tumbled over this barrier-wall where she was playing ball, and fallen six floors to the street where some boys were playing, and had been killed, though not instantly. And Mrs. Hollander was there on the roof and had called to the child to stop.

She said her child had been old enough to know better, and what she could not get over was that her girl’s last reaction to life had been — she didn’t know—"terror," she said, as if for a moment she were not the mother.

Gordon had known almost as soon as it happened. But some ten years later, after he had moved to another school, a boy’s school, and graduated and gone to college, this woman Mrs. Hollander said the very thing about death and terror to him that she had said to his parents, who had liked her for her strictness and humor and an awful bravery that was maybe a secret comprehension and control of what had happened to her in this incident of her nine-year-old daughter who could run so fast. Maybe the kid’s reaction feeling herself go over would have been simple shock. But Gordon wouldn’t have said so to Mrs. Hollander.

Gordon sometimes said too much. Mrs. Hollander had told him so. She’d known how to. She’d been good to him and he’d been a favorite of hers.

Mrs. Hollander was the sixth-grade teacher when Gordon skipped into sixth. He had lost a friend or two at the moment when she entered his life— or thought he had lost a friend or two. And somewhere in there he had almost learned to keep quiet.

Because at this time in his life some things unsaid hurt. But hadn’t hurt less when they got said.

One thing especially. Which Gordon had only thought he minded.

Thought? asked Mayn so quietly it might have been thought.

Well, he thought he minded, but later decided he didn’t.

Minded what? said Mayn.

It came out; it had to. You don’t say that kind of thing yourself. Which was why when Dickie said it as they bounced a ball between them walking down Montague Street, with the harbor in view out ahead of them, the thing Dickie said made Gordon feel like shrugging and saying, "I’ll see ya," and turning in at the paper store to see if a new Submariner comic was in — the sleek hero with the slanted eyes and the long, adept face.

He’d heard the words all day, that first day he’d skipped. Heard them in the boys’ washroom, in the playground where he was kidded about skipping and had good comebacks out in the open air. Heard them almost in the insect scratching of steel nibs and in the pauses when they were being dipped in the blue-stained volcanoes on each desk, and now and then a unanimous pause came as if the amplified insects had taken off.

"You thought that then?" Mayn said.

"I think it now," said Gordon. He’d heard the words also when he and his new sixth-grade classmates some of whom he’d already known had passed down the hall to the stairs and the floor below for Art at one-fifteen, passed the fifth-grade doorway and a couple of kids who were his classmates the day before looked up from their desks at this activity in the hall and saw him, they must have, and the change had been like nothing except in the greasy wood smell of the old, dark floors and the corn soup coming up sweet and humid from the cafeteria in the basement of the school, a decision had passed without his taking it — either sixth grade or fifth grade; not both.

But the actual words in the air hadn’t been said until Dickie said them coming home.

Dickie said, "So you must be smarter than me."

A heavy conclusion they had put together through shared thought.

Well, Dickie was a wise guy. What did you answer to a thing like that?

Gordon was a quieter wise guy. The right answer passed into his head, but he said, "There’s lots of ways of being dumb."

Yes, the right answer had passed into Gordon’s head and out.

Dickie swore at Gordon for the "dumb" remark, yet was kind of serious. "So you must be smarter than me."

Gordon said to Dickie, "Come on, that’s not what it means. I happen to read a lot—"

"— a lot of comics," said Dickie.

"— and I always was a good speller, and I work hard. And I read a lot," said Gordon.

Dickie said — and they laughed at this—"I mean, you must be smarter than I thought you were."

Mayn laughed. Gordon liked getting a laugh.

Gordon’s parents, really his father, had put the decision to Gordon the night before — definitely a Wednesday — and so what the hell, it was a decision already made. Yet then taken, he felt, by him behind his own back. His father said the teacher Miss Gore thought fifth grade wasn’t enough of a challenge for him (or was she fed up with his whispering?) and his father agreed, and sixth grade would not be too much for Gordon even with the year already begun; and skipping a grade, he’d be that much ahead.

They were into November already. His father pointed this out. Gordon had been thinking about the fifth-grade Christmas pageant. It had been cast and he had ended up an angel and not Joseph. It was by secret vote of the class but also by choice of the teacher. Parts had been announced by Miss Gore, and two girls had looked at each other and one girl who got what she wanted had put her hands over her face, and Gordon had thought Goddamn it he’d wanted to be Joseph and should have been, he was taller than all but one of the boys in the fifth grade, and he had wanted to be Joseph but was going to be an angel in the pageant instead. Or this was what he was still angry about when his father told him he was going to be skipped into sixth grade starting the next morning if it was O.K. with him. At the Christmas pageant the sixth grade would carry electric candles like the rest of the Lower School except for the fifth grade, who always played the parts and took turns reading out the Bible story at a lectern with one small shaded lamp up at the front of the auditorium, and those who had parts wore costumes and stood in a tableau of the stable and the manger, Mary and Joseph, shepherds, wise men, angels and two little kids from kindergarten to complete the picture. Gordon was out of it now. He didn’t mention this to his father and didn’t mention it to his mother.

So the next day happened, and so did the days after it. He was in sixth grade. Everything else was the same. Sixth grade was like new clothes, a new book. But seemed the same. It was like a privilege. One he deserved but now didn’t need to earn. Though he had to make up fifth-grade work he would now miss.

Mrs. Hollander helped him. He felt like her favorite for a while. His father corrected his answers and, checking Gordon’s scratch paper, showed him a trick for finding the larger denominator necessary for adding and subtracting fractions. It was pretty easy. His father said Gordon was careless, Gordon felt it was hard to argue that one, and yet it wasn’t fair, and there was one time when his father would not say what was wrong but sent him back to his room to figure it out. His father had stayed home in bed for a week in October and read the newspaper and said that we’d missed our chance with Willkie in ‘40, and Dewey was the next President, and when he got sick again in November he took to his bed again (and Gordon’s mother would talk for a long time on the phone to a friend of hers), and at school Mrs. Hollander thumb-tacked news clippings to the sixth-grade bulletin board every morning with pictures of Spitfires taking off against German fighter planes with crosses on them, and barrage balloons over England and maps of Europe, and on Monday she put up the Sunday Times "News of the Week" current-events quiz that Gordon’s father usually got twenty out of twenty on.

"Can I cut a picture out of the paper to put on the bulletin board at school?"

His father was in bed and said Gordon could wait till he was finished with the paper. Which meant the clipping would be a day late. But then his father asked what it was about and when he told his father it was current events and it was a picture of a tank and a map of Europe, his father said, Very well, if he cut it out neatly — and asked if they were studying regular history in the sixth grade.

No, Gordon said, social studies.

His father said Gordon’s school had always had a good reputation.

Gordon didn’t tell his father sixth grade was pretty much the same only more interesting.

Yet the girls, who were nice to him, were not the same. He liked them more. More than Sue in fifth grade, who smelled of banana one day and orange another; more than Margie, with little pigtails, who giggled a lot, giggled up and down the scale every time no matter what.

The sixth-grade girls giggled too. But had more to giggle about, he thought. He looked at them across the room when they went to get help. They helped him catch up on fractions, which were magical, and decimals, which seemed ominous and larger. The girls and he still compared handwriting scripts and when he read a story in class about a plane that crashed and the pilot walked through the steaming jungle for days and met up with a tribe that rode on crocodiles and ate flying fish that flew from vine to vine and had a medicine man that predicted the future when the jungle would be cleared for an airfield, the girls said it was the best anyone had written in the class, the natives would travel around the world to America, China, or Paris, and as for the pilots who flew into the new airfield, before landing they would have to learn the laws of the natives, especially if, as a new friend Bill Bussing pointed out, they were faking their own death to disappear and then collect the insurance.

Gordon’s father said it was good, and asked if he’d written his book report on Kipling’s Kim. The answer was Yes, and Gordon said Kim wasn’t interesting. Gordon really liked Penrod and Penrod and Sam, they were easy to get into, you wanted the book not to end. Gordon said he wouldn’t have minded living in a small town like Penrod’s.

Gordon remembered his drink. Mayn lighted a cigarette, inhaled, and said that he had grown up in a town in New Jersey and couldn’t wait to get out.

Gordon said one spring he and his mother and father went to a hotel in the country for a week where they had horses and a pool table, and Gordon who was always a ravenous eater hadn’t eaten for five days, more or less, while they were there and recalled no more about it except the place was nice and he couldn’t eat when he got to the table and the night they got home to Brooklyn his mother bought him a Virginia-ham-on-rye sandwich at the delicatessen the minute they got home to the city and he ate it as if he hadn’t tasted food in a week.

What was going on? Mayn wanted to know, but Gordon said he didn’t know — maybe something with his parents.

Penrod’s small town was a lot of fun, Gordon was saying, but the school Penrod went to wasn’t a good one, which reminded Gordon that his parents had proposed to him once that he go to boarding school. At boarding school you could smoke, but Gordon could smoke in Dickie’s backyard in Brooklyn Heights behind two old abandoned doors that leaned against two oil drums. Gordon went to Friends School. Mayn had known an ambulance man who was a Quaker, and his own father was thinking of buying into a very ritzy retirement home — actually he’d been retired for twenty-five years, in Mayn’s opinion — run by the Quakers near Wilmington. Gordon said that his school had had a Quaker meeting sometimes on one of the assembly days. A girl in seventh grade got up and recited a poem about humans that turned into deer and Miss Gore surprised Gordon and Dickie by standing up in the side aisle and, with a lot of emphasis, reciting a poem by Walt Whitman, who had used to live right there in Brooklyn Heights as Gordon’s father said when Gordon told him. And in between were the silences when you looked into space and tried not to catch the wrong eye and were supposed to be sitting silently and thinking. You were on your own, but that wasn’t what it felt like. Gordon learned years later that Quaker meeting was non-hierarchical — no leader.

All in all, the girls were different in sixth grade. Sixth grade was more interesting. He asked Mayn what he was doing telling him all this, and Mayn in a friendly way didn’t know. One day when he went home with the sixth-grade brain, Bill Bussing, who had the Erector Set that came with the motor, Gordon realized that Dickie hadn’t been in the downstairs hall when school let out because much later when he came down his street Dickie was playing football with the other guys including Chick. Chick went to public school and was Gordon’s best friend. Chick organized things but never said much. He was tall and rough but a peacemaker, and when they stopped for a car to come by, Chick nodded to the driver. The public school in the Heights was P.S. 8 and it was a joke in those days.

Gordon got onto Chick’s side; Straussie, who was small but murder on defense, went home; the game went from manhole to manhole, and once Dickie slammed Gordon like a hammer in the ribs when it was two-hand touch supposedly, and, a moment later, Gordon threw a bullet right at Dickie, who shied, and the football bounced off Dickie’s back and somebody else grabbed it and Chick, who was tall for his age, called for it before Dickie could do anything. A play or two later Dickie said he had to go, he was going to get killed when he got home.

When it was dark and Dickie had gone in and so had Jim and Chick’s sister Jennifer and Frankie, who could walk on his hands on the sidewalk, and two more cars had parked along this old street of brownstones where houses on one side backed onto the harbor, Gordon threw a pass too high that grazed the globe of the streetlamp — they were lower in those days — but Chick, who was gangly but could stop and go the other way in a second, managed to hold up and catch the ball, sensing where the parked car was.

Chick asked if Gordon would be home after school the next day and Gordon said yes, knowing if he wanted to he could stop over at Bill Bussing’s to look at two model planes that were suspended from the ceiling and actually were no longer of interest to Bill.

Chick started to pass and stopped. ‘‘Dickie said you skipped a grade."

Mayn said, "You mean you hadn’t told him?"

Chick never asked about Gordon’s school.

"Yeah. I’m in sixth now."

Chick aimed his left shoulder toward Gordon and threw a low bullet which Gordon caught at his knees, a perfect spiral.

"Is it hard?"

"Medium."

"Oh yeah?"

"I got to catch up on fractions."

"We’re starting on fractions."

Chick was adopted, and his father, who made a lot of money at the Squibb Company plant right down the hill next to the Brooklyn Bridge, believed in public schools.

"I think it’s just more of the same old stuff," Gordon told Chick.

Chick never had as much homework as Gordon. They did not discuss school. Chick got strapped by his mother once in a while and his mother gave him orange juice for supper instead of milk. (The Squibb Company made tooth powder, said Mayn. That’s right, said Gordon.) Chick was faster and stronger, but Gordon liked to think he could catch a fly ball better and pass a football more accurately, neither of which might be true he also realized. They hung around Chick’s basement, where there was a basketball basket just under the low ceiling. Chick was nice to his sister Jennifer and the three of them often went to the movies on Saturday at the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street where the matron in a white, nurse-like uniform didn’t give them any trouble if they sneaked into the center section and didn’t sit in the children’s section on the right. (Ah yes, said Mayn.) Chick and his sister were allowed to go on Sunday.

Gordon’s mother took him to buy a new pair of corduroy trousers because she said he needed them but really, Gordon thought, because he’d just gone into sixth grade. The Fox movie theater beyond their Heights neighborhood up near the Manhattan Bridge was around the corner from the department store, so they went to the movies and when they got home Gordon’s father who was sick wasn’t home in bed. But he could not have gone to the office because it was Saturday. When he did come home, it was just as the cream of spinach soup his mother made was beginning to smell sweet. His father had been to see Judge Hume, who was also sick, and he arrived home saying with a smile and a pat on the shoulder that they had decided that Gordon ought to study law. Gordon had never seen his father like this, alone and in a sport jacket, a gray-and-blue-checked soft cashmere he had bought when he and Gordon’s mother were in Bermuda.

Ah yes, said Mayn quietly, remembering something — or nothing.

Gordon’s father had had enough of lying in bed and he was going to church tomorrow and the office on Monday which was only one stop on the subway under the river and he had so much to catch up on he couldn’t waste time waiting to feel better. Gordon’s mother didn’t approve. His father kissed her. He asked Gordon how it was going. Gordon had a map to make for Monday. Sixth grade was O.K., he said.

There was a little kid named Arthur who had sat behind Gordon in fifth grade always doing something on his desk, scratching, tapping, and, when Gordon put up his hand, Arthur would start humming some song, and Gordon wanted to just shut him up. It was that sometimes he got terrifically mad at the red-headed kid Arthur — or at Dickie — but then in a moment he wouldn’t be mad. And in between nothing happened, but nothing.

Well, he had an answer to Dickie the first day in sixth grade when they’d walked home but it had gone right out of his head and they’d gone on home and Gordon had gotten busy on his new homework. That night at dinner the answer had come back to him when his father had said, "So you’re a sixth grader."

Gordon could only say, "Well…" and smirk.

At dinner a week later, his father said, "How’s sixth grade, pal? Shaking down O.K.?"

Like the maiden cruise of a naval ship, Mayn said (of "shaking down").

Gordon was simultaneously on the bridge of a brand-new heavy cruiser model he had just finished painting, and in the wardroom where the officers took their meals, and he could not decide if he had a dress hat on or a khaki battle cap, an overseas cap he thought it was called — and back into his head came the words that had come to him powerfully to say to Dickie the first day as they passed the paper store, but now to his father he really said them: "I’m the same person." They didn’t feel like his own words but they were words that had come to him all right. His father frowned and grinned at the same time.

"Just got to work harder," his father said. His father always took off his suit jacket for dinner unless there were guests. "That’s right," said Gordon’s mother to Gordon the way she would tell him he was tired.

As for the Christmas pageant, he forgot the matter. Or enough to be uninterested by the time the fifth-grade Joseph got sick and was replaced. The boy, Howard McClone—

Mayn laughed and Gordon insisted that that was the boy’s name.

— Howard McClone who was not a particular friend of Gordon’s had been sent home for two weeks having been exposed to measles at school and mumps and chicken pox at Sunday school; Dickie informed Gordon, complaining that he himself hadn’t been quarantined. On the fourteenth day McClone came down with such a case of measles the doctor said it was all three diseases. Gordon’s mother remembered diphtheria. McClone’s triple-header was like a record. McClone was confined to a darkened room. The new guy who had been given the part of Joseph did not especially attract Gordon’s attention. He had arrived right after Gordon had left fifth grade.

Gordon had mastered fractions; they were like writing his name in all different handwritings, like the daydreaming labyrinths he drew layer by layer outward, which seemed to make themselves up until the paper was filled and he swapped with Patti Oxford who could draw horses or Patti Galdston, who always needed a Band-Aid for a sore thumb. Gordon was made happy by anything printed on the page of a book; it was new, it was clear and opening up, it was problems you could begin fresh in order to get to the next assignment.

Mrs. Hollander came to school early and Gordon saw her water all those plants.

Gordon looked at James Mayn. "Do you ever go blank?"

"Story of my life," said Mayn. "Now, when did Mrs. Hollander’s daughter get killed?"

"Maurice Metz," said Gordon abruptly. "Maurice Metz."

"Maurice Metz," said Mayn.

When Gordon and his fellow sixth graders would pass the fifth-grade room, Gordon saw the new boy sitting up straight staring toward the front of the classroom as if, somewhere out of sight, Miss Gore was calling on him.

His name was Maurice Metz. He had arrived from Europe soon after Gordon had been skipped, and he was the most imposing of fifth graders with thick eyebrows and a long, narrow head. His pants were too short; he wore high shoes; his pants were of a dark, flecked cloth that looked part of a grownup suit, though not like the smooth, dark cloth that Gordon’s father had his suits made of, one or two every year probably quite cheaply at a tailor’s in the Wall Street area. Someone must have wondered how Metz got to be Joseph, but he was tall and was being made to feel at home, and even if he’d had to speak lines, which he did not have to, his foreign accent sounded strangely good. Joseph was foreign too, though you’d never know from how Gordon’s father’s cousin Rose who worked at the National City Bank talked about not the holy family really but Jesus, who was always "Him," as if everybody knew who she was talking about, which they did.

Metz was a grind, and when they all filed into assembly twice a week to the grand and final-sounding music Gordon didn’t know then was "Pomp and Circumstance," Maurice Metz would march. He didn’t so much lift his knees as lean into the cadence and shorten his step. But the thing about Metz was that he could really speak German and French, and at recess he would swear in German.

Gordon’s first report card in sixth grade said Gordon had a good accent in French. His father got him to say a few words at the dinner table and criticized Gordon’s r—he didn’t swallow it quite enough — and, inevitably, his u. His mother said he was only in sixth grade after all; Gordon knew what his father was about to say—"It doesn’t make any difference" (which was somehow right, Gordon thought) — but then his father didn’t say it after all and had a little discussion with Gordon’s mother as to whether he should have a cup of coffee, and it stuck in Gordon’s memory later that evening when his mother joined his father in their bedroom and shut the door and Gordon heard the sound of their talking. His father was a good father and had taken him to a Brooklyn Dodger baseball game in September when Gordon got home from camp.

"I lived fifty miles away, and I never saw a real Major League game in New York until I was probably twenty," said Mayn.

Gordon heard himself describing Ebbets Field and the folk on the apartment rooftops beyond the right-centerfield wall, his mother knitting half of one sleeve of a dark red sleeveless sweater for him during a Ladies Day game when her ticket was half-price and the visitors couldn’t touch the soft floaters of Freddie Fitzsimmons who was so round and plump-looking, fat in fact, that Gordon couldn’t see how he could be such a good pitcher and argued it with his mother, who seldom looked down at her knitting and thought Fitzsimmons was good the way some fat people swim well — she was a beautiful swimmer — and anyway it was his arm that counted — but he did not speak to Mayn of how he had felt funny, or was it helpless, that night when his parents’ door opened and shut — my father was a good talker, said Gordon, a good father, he added, and he felt his eyes water and wondered if Mayn noticed; and in the morning, dawdling at the window staring at the harbor, hearing his mother call to him, Gordon went on daydreaming and distinctly remembered thinking (he went on as if it was hard to explain) that he would always remember this moment staring through the window at a tugboat ploughing out of the East River around the Battery — maybe a liner was going out that morning — and he had remembered that moment of daydreaming — funny thing to remember.

"Well, that was the year you skipped," said Mayn. "So you went to college a year early," said Mayn, "or did you mess up somewhere along the line?" Talk slid apart from thought.

Gordon had been so busy. And the newspaper became important to him. The Herald Tribune with its easier print, bigger type, on weekdays; the Times and Trib on Sundays. He brought a sheaf of war clippings to school and he and Mrs. Hollander picked from them. Bill Bussing visited the bulletin board as soon as the latest clippings were up.

Bill never left his house except to go to school, but in his room at the top of his parents’ house he didn’t seem peculiar, he pursued his interests seemingly without interference. He gave things to Gordon, a World War One biplane just like one that Gordon and Chick had seen in a newsreel steeply circling the sky. Bill displayed a plane-spotter chart and an abbreviated version on a handy card above his workbench with silhouettes of bombers and fighters, British, German, and now American, and he knew what engines they had and the range of the bombers. Bill drank chocolate milk by the quart; out came the can of Hershey’s or the jar of Bosco and a bottle of milk, two Seven Dwarfs glasses, and then back to Bill’s room, and Gordon never saw Bill’s mother or father or a maid or anyone else. Bill would let himself and Gordon in the basement door that had the grating and climb to the top of the house.

The roof? Mayn murmured.

You can’t safely go out on the roof of most brownstones like the Bussings’—maybe they used it to sunbathe, who knows? no the top floor was mainly Bill’s room, with all his equipment, like a photo and chemistry lab and a workshop and the bed was a Murphy bed, it closed up into the wall so Bill had more space to walk, he did a lot of walking.

Inside, said Mayn. That’s right, Gordon said.

When Gordon would leave he would let himself out the first-floor not the basement door, and went down the steps of the high stoop; and one day when Bill had given him an old scout knife, Gordon stopped at the paper store and bought a copy of the Daily Mirror for the war pictures. His father saw the paper spread out on the piano and called it a scandal sheet. Gordon’s mother laughed, she said Gordon didn’t care a rap about scandal—

You remember that? said Mayn.

— and his father said Look at all Gordon had cut out of the paper, there was nothing left of the sports section even. Gordon’s mother said as she was wont, How good can a good boy be?

Gordon kept the sports statistics in his school loose-leaf notebook with the big light-blue cloth-covered binder. The current-events clippings he covered Mrs. Hollander’s bulletin board with until she said he should pick only the most interesting pictures and reports as if he were the editor of a newspaper and wanted to catch people’s attention. Then Gordon began to clip headlines, scissoring them slowly and keeping them flat in his notebook till he got to school and tacked them up above pictures and maps (white land, black sea), so whether his classmates read the articles or the maps or looked at an Associated Press photo, they couldn’t miss the headlines.

His mother, who had lots of plants like Mrs. Hollander, bought him a printing press with rubber letters of dark pink, and he and Chick did extras with headlines of the football games they played on their street and the roller-skate hockey they all ruined themselves playing over on Grace Court, which was a dead-end street overlooking the harbor. Straussie lived there and further up the block so did Bussing. Gordon rang Bussing’s bell, and suddenly wondered why he was doing it but when Bussing leaned out the top-floor window and Gordon clambered up out of the areaway and rolled off the curb into the street and turned around, he thought what the hell he might as well ask, and asked Bill if he wanted to play. But Bill was busy. He was leaning way out of his top-floor window and Gordon pushed down on his stick and slowly rolled backward. (As if you were in a boat, Mayn said. Exactly, said Gordon.) Bussing tossed something out the window which shook out into a parachute drifting in the direction that Gordon had started to roll. But Gordon had stopped and the chute went over his head past him. And the weight when it hit the street was a small red-and-silver horseshoe magnet and the material of the chute no ordinary handkerchief but a silky sail with eyeholes studded around the rim for the shrouds — a nice piece of work.

It looked real and Gordon bent way over and picked it up, and bunching it, caught Bussing’s eye and drew his arm back to throw it.

"Keep it," said Bill and withdrew his head and closed the window.

At the dinner table that night he shifted the magnet, which was uncomfortable, and his father, who was telling about a man in the office who was going to resign because he’d gotten into officers’ training school after all, asked Gordon what he was doing and Gordon pulled the whole parachute out of his pocket and held it up by the center and laid it beside his butter plate.

The magnet hit the shiny wood of the dinner table, and Gordon’s mother snapped her fingers and said, "Off the table" — why did Gordon remember that? — and in the same breath she looked at Gordon’s father and said, "But…" and in her pause, Gordon’s father said, "You mean they wouldn’t take me."

His mother said she hadn’t meant that; Gordon’s father said "on the contrary" he thought she had. There was a moment of silence. Gordon told his parents about the new boy who could speak German and French — Maurice Metz.

"Sixth grade?" Gordon’s father said.

He raised his eyebrows when Gordon said, "Fifth."

"They’re from Europe," said Gordon’s mother. "They’re refugees."

Gordon’s father said it was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, and Gordon now recalled that his father told a story of the former college classmate known as Baron who in the late 1920s on his first and distinctly shady flight in South America — had a pilot’s license at twenty-one — nephew of a big shot in Anaconda Copper — had to make an emergency landing. It was right about the time the Guggenheims sold Anaconda, that mine of theirs, so they could increase their investment in nitrates. It was an emergency landing because Baron’s companion on the flight, a former Minister of the Interior in the country they were over, had gone into convulsions. And the former minister had been acting as radioman, and this young American adventurer, Gordon’s father’s classmate Baron who had been quite a good friend at college, thought he didn’t know a word of Spanish. Until he realized he was getting some of what was coming over the radio, getting most of it— which was that. — beginning with, repeatedly, the name — at first notably the middle name Marmaduke — the former Minister of the Interior who had opposed a graduated income tax and inaugurated a new sewer system and made many enemies and was wanted, was thought to be in Baron’s plane. Gordon’s father pointed out that if, as Baron must have recalled, he had not been exposed to the Spanish lessons his aunt and uncle always had at mealtime the preceding summer when Baron was living with them for three weeks while combining pleasure with his dubious labors as a trainee with Anaconda, he would not have understood that he and the former Minister of the Interior who had once been next in line for the presidency were in danger — so he was in the plane, said Mayn — nor understood as well where the transmissions were originating from. As a result, Baron changed course at just the right moment to spot an upland meadow like a small, green cove — or, said Gordon now to Mayn, like one of those small countries with no coastline. The plane landed there and the former minister recovered himself though not his speech under the curious eye of an Indian sheepherder.

Mayn said he thought he had known how to drive a car — actually, a pick-up truck — without having ever learned.

Gordon waited a moment.

It was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, said Gordon’s father. Gordon’s father’s sister was a WAAC attached to the Eighth Air Force in England and she had picked up the language in no time (Gordon’s father’s joke) and would probably never have wanted to come home.

"Your father wasn’t in the War, then?" said Mayn.

"He had angina, he developed it in his thirties; he survived the War, but not by much," said Gordon.

"Some things take a while," said Mayn, mystifyingly.

Gordon said he hadn’t meant to go on like this.

Mayn laughed and thrust his open hand outward to raise his cuff and glanced at his wrist watch; Gordon laughed and added that there was a message to himself here someplace.

If they could get to the end, said Mayn; and by the way, the Crash in ‘29 and what happened afterward hit Chilean copper very hard — was it Chile the Baron had been aiming for?

Gordon said he supposed it must have been, and, he said, this is what you do if you give up your job; you go and talk to strangers.

Well, the need to change your life gets you through many a routine day, said Mayn.

Gordon said that his wife had a new job and she’d already changed. Actually her old volunteer job, but they were now paying her a salary. Amazing, eh?

It does seem to reverse the usual process, said Mayn as if he said it as an afterthought after paying such close attention to so much of what Gordon said, that Gordon felt Mayn wasn’t entirely there. But this was more of Gordon’s unemployed nonsense, probably. Newspaper people remembered everything and nothing. Everyone was eerie in Gordon’s present state of leisure, or about to ask him some question.

Mrs. Hollander and her daughter? said Mayn, rising with his glass. Such tremendous things happen when you’re a kid, and later on there they are, along with skipping a grade, said Gordon.

Well, you remember them, said Mayn.

Of his undeclared race with Maurice Metz there had been nothing to tell — not to his parents at the dinner table, and not to anyone else, probably. But there was. So was this why he remembered not telling? And it was funny, and he’d never told it even to Norma, his own wife.

Gordon crossed Livingston Street in mid-block by Brooklyn Polytechnic and crossed at an angle so that when he noticed the tall guy Metz with his lunch box and his briefcase with the strap around it, over on the side that Gordon was crossing to, he experienced a sensation of convergence, as he put it now, that was pleasing. He’d spoken to Metz at recess; Metz lived in a house several blocks from the river, on Clinton Street, which crossed one end of Livingston and where traffic from Atlantic Avenue made it next to impossible to play in the street, and Gordon’s mother had told his father that the Metzes were refugees. Metz played soccer at recess, and you could only get the ball away from him if you shoved him, and even then the ball would stick magnetized to his foot. Metz was smart and had shown how the German soldiers goose-stepped and had told how an entire division wrenched their necks when they turned their heads toward Hitler’s reviewing stand in a parade and for a month had to advance sideways in order to see what lay in front of them, and Gordon had said he was going to be a pilot and fly into Africa.

Mayn, standing in the kitchen doorway, said, Where did I hear about. . Brahmins was it?. . who look at heaven over their shoulder till they get fixed in that position and on account of their neck being twisted, nothing but liquids can get into their stomach.

Metz did not look at Gordon crossing the trolley tracks and converging on him, and Gordon reached that far side and turned onto the sidewalk a few steps ahead of Maurice Metz and Gordon heard Metz’s steps and quickened his, only to hear himself in step with Metz, who wore those high shoes. Gordon wanted to stop and say "Hi," but they turned into Boerum Place and speeded up.

Once inside the school building, they went up the stairs two at a time to the second floor: where they separated, Metz into fifth grade, Gordon into sixth. Gordon liked to be early, and sit in his desk with a library book. Or he would read a Street and Smith sports magazine, and Mrs. Hollander would come in and smile across the room at him and whoever else was early and say good morning quietly as if somebody was asleep.

And Gordon thought of this when he walked to school, whether he took the Clinton-Livingston route or Montague-Court Street-Livingston or sometimes went through the block-long corridor of the Courthouse to Livingston which felt like a shortcut because of the change to marble floors and revolving doors. As the days went on, he felt Maurice closer. They were out of step. At Schermerhorn they took their separate ways across the intersection, and Gordon had Metz in the corner of his eye when they got into the last half-block on the school side of Schermerhorn. In front of the school’s wrought-iron gateway was a seventh-grade girl named Elizabeth who recited poetry in assembly and had an extraordinarily narrow nose with a beautiful, knife-like keel. "Hi, Maurice," she called, and behind Gordon and Metz came a siege of running, panting steps, and as two little kids in corduroy long trousers sprinted between Gordon and Metz, Gordon heard a voice, Bill Bussing’s, call, "Hey, Gord, wait up," and Metz passed Gordon.

Bill Bussing was near-sighted. His glasses didn’t fall off when he ran relay races in the playground, but they didn’t fit the ridge of his nose right and in study period he was observed with glee by a few of his fellow sixth graders regularly contorting his face when his glasses slipped. He squinched up his nose, lifting his upper lip, curling out his lower. He would do it twice in succession, jamming his eyebrows high all in one violent motion as if he had a stuffed-up nose, and this unconscious, agony-like habit was quite fascinating for minutes at a stretch, partly because his powers of concentration were so great.

Gordon’s mother told Gordon he would end up wearing glasses if he read in a bad light. Gordon’s father said that he had developed longer and longer arms to read the Lunch Club menu in his office building and, reaching the limit of his development, he had had to acquire reading glasses or go hungry. Bill Bussing bought a container of chocolate milk in the cafeteria but brought his lunch, which he made himself. The breadless sandwich was what he said he’d invented which was stuck-together layers of liverwurst, salami, and baloney, but he would produce also a breaded pork chop in wax paper with a rubber band around it, a withered slab of fried fish, a typewriter-ribbon container of salted nuts, some stuffed olives, shrimps with toothpicks in them, some slick marinated raw carrot sticks — all of which he ate very fast in order to get out to the playground yard but would always offer to trade. Gordon brought some kind of meat sandwich on Thomas’s protein bread with lettuce and butter on it and a blue Thermos of milk, and his mother gave him money for a bowl of soup, but if it was vegetable, which was salty and peppery but basically tasteless, or if it was not tomato or corn, Gordon spent the money on Hershey bars after school. Bill Bussing always got out to the playground ahead of Gordon.

Maurice Metz was a different person in the playground. He held court against a brick wall and the little red-headed kid Arthur stood with him as if Dickie and others who engaged Metz in conversation to hear him curse in German and translate it and to consult him on whether for instance Hitler had a tank that could go over water were consulting Arthur as well. Arthur nodded as Metz made his predictions; Hitler, for example, Hitler would invent a new and totally secret weapon. Arthur spoke for Metz when he knew the answer, for instance that Metz’s aunt had committed suicide thinking that the Allied invasion of Europe would fail in the end. But Bill Bussing challenged Metz on this and other matters of fact and even went home with Metz after school.

So when Metz came into the sixth-grade room one dark November afternoon when Mrs. Hollander seemed to have given her desk lamp and the two ceiling lights a narrower, more glowing brightness, and Gordon had finished his homework and was reading a library book that he must have wanted to finish before the bell rang, he was aware of Metz and looked around at the clock above the blackboard and looked at Bill Bussing, who squinched up his face and was greeted by an outbreak of snickers.

It came back to Gordon. It was three of them. Dick Phillips, who made incredible maps and had a handshake buzzer attached to his middle finger and hidden in his palm so you got a tickly shock that bored right into your hand. And Phoebe McGinnis, who played the violin, was blonde even to her thick eyelashes and seemed not all there but would kiss and had also given Dickie a bloody nose. And Jim Gurley, who played quarterback on the Lower School football team with a tendency to hog the ball, and lived with his mother who was divorced.

Gordon stared at Dick Phillips. "He can’t help it if his glasses slip; you shouldn’t laugh at him, you shouldn’t do that, he can’t help it if he does that stuff with his face."

"What stuff?" Bill Bussing asked.

"You were laughing yourself," said Dick Phillips.

"Hell I was," said Gordon, looking away into Bill Bussing’s eyes. But Gordon was already hearing Mrs. Hollander call out that if they had something to say they should tell it to the rest of us — and study hall had fifteen minutes to go, and it could go on longer if "you people" couldn’t tell time — and if we couldn’t tell time maybe some of us shouldn’t be in sixth grade.

Mayn said, "This is the lady whose daughter…"

"Yes," said Gordon; "Mrs. Hollander." Who, hearing Gordon’s last words, said, "Gordon, what did I hear you say?" but so that Gordon knew that he wouldn’t have to repeat it. Furthermore, she was talking to Maurice Metz, who stood at gangly parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, and when she got up he was taller than she; she took Maurice Metz to the bulletin board and together they looked at the clippings tacked there — white land, black sea, cross-hatched no-man’s lands. Metz’s hands were still clasped behind his back. Bussing was still looking at Gordon and now went back to his book but looked up at Gordon once more and did a squinch with nose, mouth, cheeks, and forehead to end all squinches, simultaneously turning the page.

It’s the war movies I remember, Mayn said.

Gordon and Metz might speak in the playground, but they did not speak during their tacit race to school in the morning. Some mornings, that is. If Gordon happened to be with Patti Galdston or Dickie, it was no race; same if Gordon and Metz came in sight of each other beyond a point three-quarters of the way down the block of Livingston Street which Gordon entered from the Courthouse he used as a shortcut from Court Street rain or shine.

And like the rule of walking, they seemed to agree not to communicate, not to acknowledge what was going on. Which made the race more urgent but less official as if, being separate, they could not estimate each other’s position but raced nonetheless, increasing the pace, leaning forward, so Gordon might feel his feet quick and fast as hands, as though his feet were connected to his shoulders.

"Who won?" asked Mayn, interested.

Sometimes — well, Gordon and Maurice Metz wouldn’t have a dead heat, so what happened was that at some point in the home stretch one or the other would withdraw. That is, by doing the last thirty yards at a run — say, to greet a friend coming from the other direction. Or being hailed from behind or looking back to see a friend who had not hailed him — once, in Gordon’s case, Dickie; once, Straussie; and so on. But these endings were still victory or defeat, and there came a day when both boys went right to the gate of the school which was parallel to the sidewalk, and, being on the outer curbside, Gordon had to find an extra couple of steps turning right in order to tie Metz; but knew at that instant that he wanted to hit Metz with a right-arm sweeper, sweep him away with the longest arms ever seen. And, abreast at the gate, the two looked at each other and, once inside the gate and going up the stone steps, Metz said breathlessly to Gordon, "I have played chess with Bussing yesterday. He is pretty good."

"You remember that?" said Mayn.

Yes, Gordon thought he did. He’d played chess only a few times with his father, who spotted him a queen, and yet he at once without thinking offered to beat Metz.

"Spotted you a queen?" said Mayn.

"I’m afraid so," said Gordon.

By now it was December. Gordon and Chick still played touch in the street and blew on their fingers when they were going to pass. Gordon spent a lot of time in Chick’s basement practicing passing the basketball behind their backs. Gordon saw Dickie in the cafeteria and said he would meet him after school. It was one of the days they didn’t take the blue-and-gray bus out to the school athletic field in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday. Dickie said he had pageant rehearsal. Gordon forgot after school and gave Patti Galdston the slip and waited for Dickie.

Then Metz came out with little Margie who was eating something, a juicy pear, some cookies, and was not hunching up her shoulders and giggling; and when Gordon said, "They had pageant practice, didn’t they?" Margie said, "Who said?" and Metz remarked that there was no pageant practice today.

"All this—" said Gordon—"I want to think that the last event here was my father suddenly, or fairly suddenly, dying, you know? but that’s not true."

Maurice Metz had been invited by Mrs. Hollander to visit the sixth grade and give a talk on his home in Alsace-Lorraine. Dickie appeared with Metz one day at Chick’s house when Chick and Gordon were shooting baskets under the low ceiling of the basement playroom. Chick said, Let’s go outside, and Metz, who seemed to have met Chick already though Gordon didn’t ask, and who laughed at his own inability to throw a football without it wobbling all over the place, kicked it halfway down the block where it bounced with a sonorous, metal-bending blat off the top of a parked car. They played soccer in Europe. Metz had to go home to take care of his baby sister. Dickie said Maurice had told Miss Gore he was ready to bow out of the pageant if the first Joseph recovered. Chick and Gordon shot baskets and played Monopoly upstairs on the living-room rug with Chick’s sister until Gordon’s mother called up to say dinner was on the table and where was Gordon?

Gordon — could he have some more water? — did avoid his friends in order to intersect with Metz en route to school. (Was there any water in there the first time? said Mayn.)

But Gordon spent the night at Dickie’s and walked to school with Dickie the morning Metz was due to speak to the sixth grade on Europe where he had recently come from with his baby sister and his father who according to Gordon’s mother had been a lawyer and was starting all over, and his mother, who made Metz eat lots of apples and oranges which he put into his lunch box which was the heaviest in school.

That night Gordon’s mother called home from Manhattan and called Chick’s and reached Gordon at Dickie’s. She and Gordon’s father had been to the doctor and would be having dinner in Manhattan and might be a little late. Gordon said he’d stay overnight at Dickie’s. This was before the wholesale domestic use of sleeping bags, but Gordon distinctly recalled telling his mother before asking Dickie if it was O.K. — having at once decided he would stay — then putting it to Dickie’s mother.

So Gordon stayed there. So he didn’t hear the news until he got to school the next morning, when he and Dickie parted company in the hall outside the fifth- and sixth-grade rooms.

"What news?" said Mayn.

That Mrs. Hollander wouldn’t be in school that day because her daughter had been killed.

"What was her name?" Mayn asked abruptly.

"Helena."

"Did Metz come in and give his talk?" Mayn asked.

No, and no one at Dickie’s house complained that Gordon at the crack of dawn had scissored out of Dickie’s parents’ morning paper a Jap-prison-camp-atrocity story.

"Was Maurice Metz Jewish?" asked Mayn.

"Oh sure," said Gordon; "but. ." none of that got talked about; was it even in the newspapers? It wasn’t the type of thing that went up on the bulletin board; and when Metz in January did get to give his talk to the sixth grade, there was probably nothing about Jews.

"We didn’t see how it could have happened, the Hollander kid falling over like that like there was nothing holding her on that roof. I mean, you might get hit by a car. ."; and Gordon’s father when the subway train came in always looked behind him and stepped back; and you might drown, as Gordon’s grandmother nearly did of indigestion when she was swimming in the middle of a Cape Cod pond at eighty; or be in an air crash or be burned to a cinder in your sleep or breathe escaping gas in your sleep ("escaping," as they automatically always said, but it was going into you); or come down with spinal meningitis and die over the weekend. But tumbling over the barrier-wall of an apartment-house roof?

"Awful," said Mayn. "Almost embarrassing."

"Well I was embarrassed in my dreams," said Gordon.

The end of Mayn’s leather valise was visible through the doorway to his foyer.

"You remember a dream from 1944?" said Mayn.

Gordon guessed it was 1944. Remember? Why, by having it many times.

Mayn said he was as bad about dreams as he was about jokes.

A newspaperman?

‘Fraid so.

Newspapermen had endless stories, Gordon said.

Oh all right he had a million, Mayn said, but it was a nine-to-five job.

Gordon said Mayn was kidding him — newsmen were like private eyes.

Yeah, and like sailors, right?

Gordon had had about Mayn a "good feeling" — Gordon heard Norma say she had a "good feeling" about herself, or about Clara the wife of the Chilean economist who took books to inmates in a New York State prison, or Lucille — she picked it up from her group. But also Gordon had to get out of here. Away from Mayn’s waiting, his patient humor.

"But my brother was the one who dreamed," said Mayn, for a moment talking; "walked in his sleep. Came wandering into my room in the middle of the night just before I almost ran away from home."

"This is. .?" asked Gordon.

"— Jersey," said Mayn, "Monmouth County? and soon’s I went to bed, well there he was in my room. What — ten, eleven. He’s telling me this stuff and I thought he was awake standing there sound asleep. I thought he was cracking up. But you know, he was asleep; said he had this feeling I was going away."

"Your brother still visits you in his sleep?"

"I’m not home then," said Mayn.

"O.K., who else visits you?" said Gordon, laughing, but he had pulled himself forward to the edge of his armchair.

Mayn was looking at Gordon with sharp puzzlement, and Gordon through his own impatient uncertainty heard Mayn saying that that was spoken like a lawyer.

Unemployed lawyer, Gordon thought, and thought he hadn’t mentioned what he was, had he?

Mayn said that while he still felt he didn’t have regular dreams sleeping at night, that sort of thing, he was starting to think somewhere in his head he did have a recurrent think-dream if you want to call it that — full of surplus equipment (can you beat that?), but he traded in some of the details for others, he said; it was anybody’s guess what it all meant, but one thing he knew, the memory that kept showing now and then if you could catch it, split-screen, obscure movie tricks, was paying a visit to one’s one-time torturer: there was your title for this dream, a daydream, O.K.? and Mayn had it sometimes, he was pretty certain he didn’t dr^m-dream but he had those waking daydreams. It ought to be about vengeance, right? and he knew this during the dream; but he didn’t avenge himself on the torturer: either his tongue had been removed during that previous bout of torture so he couldn’t speak, or his arms were nowhere to be found having also disappeared during torture, which meant he fitted cleanly into the doorway of the now-unemployed torturer’s furnished room. The fellow lay on a cot smoking his last cigarette, and Mayn knew, armless, that the torturer, or former torturer, would try to bum one when this cigarette was finished, for Mayn was about to be shot out of a surplus cannon to where he would be different.

"There’s the circus," said Gordon.

"That’s Barnum and Bailey in New York City," said Mayn, "the space man in the white aviator’s helmet. I got taken to see it; but our own local circus had the one tent set up on ten acres that the town electrician rented to the town on special occasions down behind the water tower between the Catholic cemetery and an applejack distillery; my grandmother took me there to see an Indian bareback rider."

"But have you ever been tortured?" asked Gordon.

Mayn seemed to look off into some corner of the large, sparsely furnished room. "No," he said. "Of course not."

"But you’ve known those who have been?"

"I knew a man who did it for a living."

"Went through it, or administered it?"

"I’ve known both," said Mayn humorously.

"Where?" said Gordon.

"What about the sixth-grade bulletin board?" said Mayn.

"The bulletin board?" asked Gordon.

"You had turned away from the European theater," said Mayn, "and were concentrating on the Pacific, am I right?"

Indeed.

And at that time — in the days of Caesar Augustus, Gordon wanted to say — for he heard that name uttered again and again in memory by a fifth grader with a watery cold, whose face was secretly lighted by the lectern, for the boy whoever he was was reading his allotment of the Bible story that narrated the Christmas pageant the morning of the last school day before vacation. The whole school was present, parents in the back benches and side benches of the old meeting house — Quaker meeting house, pews really, and aisles dark with small electric candles moving beneath faces — lines from one of the Gospels—"There went out a decree," that was it, "from Caesar Augustus."

"I went to a public high school," said Mayn.

"Well, this was Quaker," said Gordon, "and I went there up through eighth grade, although they had a high school too. My father went to a public high school but he did six hours of homework a night."

"I was lucky if I did six a week," said Mayn.

"I worked about a sixteen-hour-a-week night shift," said Gordon.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus," said Mayn.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus."

"Well, you had to keep some time to yourself. You were having those dreams."

"It was a lulu," said Gordon. "I don’t know if it was the next night after Metz was supposed to speak to the sixth grade. Sometime in there."

Mayn put his drink down on the floor, sat back and looked very straight at Gordon.

"I keep feeling I’ve missed something," said Gordon, and then had to laugh and shake his head.

"I can’t think what it would be," said Mayn.

If Gordon could finish this dream he could get out of here; the emptiness of Mayn’s living room had begun to weigh on him. When he’d had the dream didn’t matter.

It had a lot to do with newsprint. Mayn raised his dark eyebrows. Gordon was coming out of the Courthouse and being chased by a familiar janitor in galoshes yelling to him that he could not use the courthouse ground-floor corridor as a shortcut from Court to Livingston; the familiar face was pressing him at the same time that the galoshes should have held this person back, and in the dream Gordon emerged into Livingston Street with the old brick of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute up to his right and Boerum Place crossing Livingston down to his left—

"I don’t know this geography," said Mayn, "but I got chased by a patrol car in high school without a license and drove across a wood bridge and it fell to pieces behind me—"

— but it was dark, the streetlamps were still bright, and Gordon had gotten up much too early.

At the school gate there was Metz waiting. At the last second Metz stepped inside ahead of Gordon and leapt up the steps into a glare coming off the glass doors; it was the sun, and the time was the normal time. In no time, Gordon reached his classroom and Metz had already begun addressing the class in German, harsh and speechifying, and two girls were giggling like children. Gordon was at the bulletin board untacking clippings as they were needed to illustrate Metz’s talk and the board flashed. But in the dream Metz didn’t know that with each new piece of newsprint untacked the accompanying explosion on the bulletin board was in the Pacific Ocean, not western Europe.

He was telling his daily life that he’d had in Alsace; they used wooden plates there—

"Was that what he actually did talk about?" Mayn asked.

"Yes," said Gordon, but in the dream his French and German were so easy to understand (like a story you don’t listen to the actual words of) that Gordon recognized his own mother’s slick-haired Italian cobbler in his basement shop on the south side of Montague Street and red decorated Flexible Flyers almost out of control on the ice and snow racing down the harbor end of Montague Street that led to Furman Street and the docks, down Montague’s cobblestone hill covered and quieted with the wintry white gravity of the air itself — or elsewhere, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta accompanied by an alternately loud and nearly inaudible piano coming out of a brick house on Garden Place with a brass knocker helping the piano keep time to "What a very very nice young man"—

"Dreams," said Mayn.

— and red clay tennis courts at Henry Street between Remsen and Jor-alemon and Gordon’s dad out of breath going for a drop shot and Gordon’s parents standing elbow to elbow sharing a hymnal by the light of Presbyterian stained glass while for some reason the shallow, carved-wood offering plate was reaching into their pew to get their attention, and Metz’s French and German were so easy to understand and Metz told how many planes while Gordon was trying to tell them none of this was true.

"All I want to know," said Mayn, "is who took your place as the fifth-grade angel?"

Gordon had been only one of the fifth-grade angels. It was lost in history. But the kid who had been Joseph and got sick, got well and came back and ended up an angel, whether substituting or not Gordon didn’t recall.

"You’ve taken a leave of absence," said Mayn, "you said you were unemployed?"

"I thought I was not living as I ought to," said Gordon.

"Oh is that all," said Mayn.

Gordon hadn’t said leave of absence. So how did Mayn know? "What have I missed?" Gordon said, standing up and looking around the room, looking for mementoes of Mayn’s adventures. "It’s a rambling memory."

"The Metzes didn’t get out of Europe till ‘44?" asked Mayn.

Gordon actually didn’t know. Perhaps if the Metzes had made a dramatic escape the kids at school would have heard the story.

"Had they been in hiding?"

Gordon didn’t know. He and Metz were friends for a few months. The Metzes moved to Manhattan the next year, he thought. Yes, Metz took violin lessons in Greenwich Village, someone had said.

Gordon said he had to go. "One other thing," he said. "The Christmas pageant, right?"

"Right," said Mayn, "but did Metz take lessons when you knew him?"

"Not in Greenwich Village. That was after he moved away. He visited school the next year and stood in the corridor, he had his violin case with him. He was quite a tough fellow."

"But the pageant," said Mayn.

"Metz’s parents came. So did my mother. She knew Mrs. Metz from Civitas it comes back to me — a women’s club that had speakers. It was Metz’s father who created the scene."

"What happened?" said Mayn.

Gordon and Mayn both laughed. "Maurice hadn’t told his parents he was playing Joseph. His father was offended. I’m sure they weren’t especially observant Jews; maybe that was the reason. Anyway, carrying a candle was one thing; playing Joseph was something else. Miss Gore kept saying, ‘He was really very good,’ meaning how Maurice had looked in the tableau. I remember him after the pageant standing there with everybody and his father talking to him and then to the principal who was a tall, handsome man with a black mustache. Maurice was standing there at attention. His father was upset. Mrs. Hollander was there, too, and I remember she and my mother talked like friends, like two women; and when Mrs. Hollander came up, taking it all in, I remember my mother turned away from the Metzes and the principal and Miss Gore to pay her respects to Mrs. Hollander; and Mrs. Hollander had a smile on her round face with all the rouge; she had a sense of humor, you know; she was little; and instead of answering what I imagine my mother must have said, Mrs. Hollander said into the group, ‘I think you’re expecting quite a lot of your son.’ And something in how she said it shut Mr. Metz up and next thing the principal was introducing Mrs. Hollander to Mr. and Mrs. Metz, and my mother and I were so conscious of what had happened to Mrs. Hollander…"

Gordon had finished. He had been standing, addressing Mayn who looked up at him from the couch but now swung his head around to look toward the front hall where the tentative sound of a key in a lock could be heard.

The door creaked, and Gordon heard the voice of his own wife Norma say, "Oh you’re home."

"So is someone else," said Mayn, hauling himself up, as Norma in the hall was heard to say, "Oh?"

"I got home earlier than I expected," said Mayn. Gordon wondered if Norma was to have been a welcoming committee.

She was in the doorway now, looking at Gordon, and she was wearing a pale brown cashmere sweater with a monogram, and she had that plain-boned prettiness and that strength of demeanor that Gordon knew he took for granted, and she was hanging on to the red rubber bulb of the plant sprayer.

Gordon remembered the trailing ivy-like plant he’d noticed. "Got yourself a job?" he said.

"What are you doing here?" said Norma, taking a few steps into the room and stopping.

"We’ve been talking," said Mayn.

"What about?" said Norma.

"Oh, what’s become of us," said Mayn.

"I’ll bet," said Norma, but with an irony of relief risen in her voice, yet Gordon still did not look from her to Mayn.

"Yeah, just reminiscing," said Mayn. "It’s that time of day. ."

"— when," Gordon added, "the Chacma baboons of southern Rhodesia get melancholy supposedly."

‘They have each other," said Norma.

Mayn said, "He was going to tell me about the day they exploded the cloud cover that makes Venus into a greenhouse."

"Extemporaneously," said Gordon, sitting down again, and understanding now what Mayn had said to the new doorman, the remark that had mas temprano in it — he’d said he had come home a day early. "No," Gordon said, "I don’t think I can manage any more history right now."

"I’ve been watering Jim’s plants while he’s away," said Norma.

Gordon wanted to make a bad joke, but couldn’t think of one.

She went out of the room. Gordon heard water running. Mayn did not say, "Hey wait a minute, didn’t you know?"

"So that was the year I skipped a grade," said Gordon.

"That year you skipped was pretty packed," said Mayn kindly.

"That was only three months of it," said Gordon.

The water stopped. For a few moments there wasn’t a sound from the kitchen.

"Thanks for the drink," said Gordon.